COOL HAND LUKE (1967) (WBHE 4K ultra HD Review)

COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

Label: WBHE

Region Code: Region-Free

Rating: PG-13 

Duration: 126 Minutes 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Dual-Mono (UHD), DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono (BD) with Optional English Subtitles 

Video: (HDR10) 2160p UHD Widescreen (2.35:!) , 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

Cast: Paul Newman, George Kennedy, J.D. Canon, Robert Drivas, Lou Antonio, Strother Martin, Jo Van Fleet

In the prison classic Cool Hand Luke (1967) Paul Newman (Road To Perdition) stars Luke Jackson, a war hero who at the start of the film is arrested for disorderly conduct and destroying public property after the cops nab him walking an empty city street quite drunk and cutting off parking meters at the stem with a pipe cutter. Sentenced to two years of hard labor at a Florida prison run by a warden who goes by Captain (Strother Martin, The Brotherhood of Satan). Luke proves to be not a fan of being told what to do by the prison staff, especially the menacing prison guard Godfrey (Morgan Woodard, Battle Beyond the Stars), who always wears mirrored sunglasses, and sits watch over the work crew with a rifle. 

Inside he earns a reputation among his fellow incarcerated as someone who is cool under pressure, hence his titular nickname, and not one to easily fall into line when told do so. He earns the respect of the towering Dragline (George Kennedy, Creepshow 2) after taking him on in the weekly prison yard  boxing match, and despite being whupped by Dragline hands down he refuses to give up, even when he can barely stand up, he never stops swinging. 

Occasionally his ant-authority antics begin to rub Captain the wrong way, and after various infractions throws him in the sweat box overnight several times, but it never breaks him. However, when his dear momma Arletta (Jo Van Fleet, Satan's School for Girls) passes on it get's under the skin of Luke, and despite the Captain preemptively locking him away in the box so as he is not tempted to escape, he does just that. His escape makes him in instant hero among the convicted, he is re-captured and the Captain lays into pretty hard so as to set an example and discourage he and others from attempting escape again. He makes several more escapes, each time his punishment grows more extreme, and finally it seems to break him. The fellow inmates start to lose faith in their former hero, but Luke has more tricks up his sleeve, and eventually makes a final break-out with his bud Dragline in tow. 

Cool Hand Luke is a classic among prison film, Newman is in top physical form and the camera loves his glistening bare-chested body as he labors away in the son. He's just a cool cat and his character is charming as heck, his indomitable spirit even winning over a few of the prison guards along the way. He's capably supported by Kennedy who gives a terrific Oscar-winning supporting performance as the hulking Dragline, a felon with heart; and Strother Martin just about steals every scene he shows up in with his wicked and slightly effeminate Southern drawl, uttering perhaps the film's most iconic line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate...", made famous to my generation (Gen X if you're keeping track), after it was used on the Guns N' Roses tune "Civil War".  The film also feature turns from a lot of familiar faces including Joe Don Baker (Charley Varrick), Harry Dean Stanton (Repo Man) as a guitar strumming felon, Dennis Hopper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Clifton James (Experiment In Terror), and Anthony Zerbe (Omega Man).

Audio/Video: Cool Hand Luke (1967) gets a region-free 4K Ultra HD from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment in HDR10-enhanced 2160p UHD widescreen (2.35:1), and while there's no specific information about the source of this new scan it looks quite nice. There's an unobtrusive layer of fine film grain that exports pleasing depth, clarity and fine detail throughout, especially in close-ups of characters caked in mud and sweat while working outdoors under the noon day sun. Colors are a bit muted and dingy by design, enhanced slightly by some judicious HDR10 color-grading that subtley  enhances primaries and boosts contrast with deeper more layered blacks during the night scenes. Audio on the UHD comes by way of DTS-HD MA 2.0 Dual-Mono with optional English subtitles. Its a solid track that is clean and offers intelligible dialogue, and the terrific Lalo Schifrin score sounds great. Unfortunately, the accompanying Blu-ray is a recycle of the 2008 release, which has only lossy Dolby Digital 1.0 mono, so the UHD's dual-mono DTS-HD track is actually a nice upgrade 

No new extras are afforded the Oscar nominated film, we get the archival Audio Commentary by Eric Lax on the UHD, which is duplicated alongside all the other archival extras on the Blu-ray, again a recycle of the 2008  disc, which are a bit light for a classic film in my opinion, a real shame The 2-disc release arrives in a black dual-hubbed keepcase with a single sided sleeve of artwork. Inside there's a redemption code for a 4K digital copy of the film. The slipcover is adorned with the WB 100 anniversary logo in the upper right hand corner, the wrap does not. 

Special Features:

- Audio Commentary by Eric Lax

- “A Natural-Born World-Shaker: Making Cool Hand Luke” (featurette) (29 min) 

- Trailer (3 min) 

- Slipcover

- Digital Copy 

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1969) (Warner Archive Blu-ray Review)

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN  (1969)

Label: Warner Archive 
Region Code: Region-FREE
Rating: PG
Duration: 103 Minutes 
Audio: English DTS HD-Master Audio 2.0 Mono with Optional English Subtitles 
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1) 
Director: Jack Smight 
Cast: Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins, Jason Evers, Tim Weldon, Christie Matchett

Jack Smight's sci-fi anthology is a collection of three short stories and a wrap-around that are loosely adapted from Ray Bradbury's 1951 collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man. It opens during America's Great Depression in the 30s with a hitchhiker named Willie (Robert Drivas, Cool Hand Luke), who stops off at a scenic lake off the beaten path for a cool swim and to settle in around a fire for the night. He is startled by the arrival of a travelling carnie named Carl (Rod Steiger, The Amityville Horror), a burly man who shows up with his tiny pet dog Peke, which he keeps stuffed away in a burlap bag for some reason. 

The two make conversation around the fire, the talk becoming more ominous as Carl becomes increasingly agitated after showing Willie a picture of a house he's been looking for. Revealing that his entire body is covered in elaborate skin illustrations, which were done by a witchy woman named Felicia (Claire Bloom, The Haunting), who may or may not be a time-traveler, whom he says has lived in both the past and the future. 

Furthermore, Carl regales Willie with stories of his love affair with Felicia, how he let her tattoo his entire body in hopes of getting laid, and how she suddenly disappeared, along with the whole damn house she lived in, and how he's been searching for her ever since, intent on killing her for cursing him with the skin-illustrations - which he says if you stare too deeply into you will witness the future, including your own death. 

Carl and Willie's story is the wrap around story, eventually Willie gazes too deeply into the tattoos and three stories of sci-fi menace unfold before us, beginning with "The Veldt", in which parents (Steiger, Bloom) live in a futuristic house along with their two young and spoiled children, they have a virtual playground room for the kids which allows them to enjoy any environment they can imagine, but for some reason they are addicted to an African Savannah world where lions tear at the flesh of prey, the odd thing is that the African setting is not even programmed into the VR room. The parents along with a family psychologist (Drivas) think that the virtual reality room is not healthy for the children minds, when the parents address the issue with their children the kids go on to do something truly horrendous to ensure they get to keep their virtual world, much to the horror of the psychologist. Bradbury was not a fan of technology, as I recall he felt it was something that would bring a more disconnect to society, and this is right in that vein, a menacing killer kids story with a sci-fi bent, and a nice analog for violence in movies and TV and how that might affect impressionable minds. 

Up next we have "The Long Rain", the story of group of Earth astronauts stranded on the planet Venus, lead by the largely disliked commander (Steiger). On Venus it rains heavily and continually, the rhythmic rainfall driving each of the men insane as they seek the shelter of an artificial "sun dome" which offers protection from the environment and the warmth of an artificial sun. The rough and cold commander pushes the men on, almost inhumanly, as his men consider plotting against him, all the while pushing the men to survive, to not give up, even promising them "space whores"! One by one the men reach their breaking point, some driven to suicide by the constant rain while others fall victim to the harsh alien environment. The men's sanity begins to fray when they circle back and find their own crashed spaceship (the same rocket ship from The Planet of the Apes), and when they come upon the first sun dome thinking they've found salvation only to find it has been destroyed. 

This one is the most visually impressive of the trio of stories, with a weird alien Venus and a torrential downpour of rain, again we have Drivas as a character, one of the unhappy crew members, and Steiger is an awful, belligerent man, but he may not have been wrong in his survival tactics, as only one man makes it to the sun dome and the promised "space whores", which is rather silly when you think about it, it's supposed to be a shelter on an alien world, why are their whores there, but they had to squeeze in Bloom somehow I guess. I loved the alien flora and rocky landscape of it, it did manage to create a sense of alien foreboding for a bit, and the cast do an admirable job showing the mental breakdown as they each lose their sanity and will to survive, this was my favorite of the shorts. 

The last of the three main stories is "The Last Night of the World", the apocalyptic story of an agrarian family, the loving parents and their two young children. It seems that all the adults of Earth have universally experienced an end of the world in a dream, something that has happened before with dire consequences, and it is decided by a council that to lessen the trauma for the unaware children that a particularly drastic action must be taken, but are these loving parents willing to do the unthinkable? There's a very expected twist that did not surprise me, this one doesn't hold up particularly well, and seems more akin to a Night Gallery short than something that should have been adapted for this anthology. The theme is powerful but the execution is ham-fisted and abbreviated.

The strongest story in my opinion is the wrap-around which weaves in and around the three main stories, Steiger comes across as half-mad and mysterious, while Drivas' hitchhiker is naive and bewildered by Carl's tale of a witchy time traveller, eventually seeing his own doom within the skin-illustrations he attempts to desperately change course with an act of violence.      

I don't think that The Illustrated Man holds up as a great anthology or Bradbury adaptation, there are many better and deeper collections of sci-fi stories, but I do love the wrap-around story with the travelling carnie and the hitchhiker, and how it resolved. Steiger is great in every story, but the material is not. There's also a poignant sadness to Drivas' characters, brought out by his soulful eyes, it's just too bad that the script and the unimaginative director couldn't bring more substance to the whole affair, it lacks visual style and story punch, it's flat and too dire throughout. 

Audio/Video: The Illustrated Man (1969) arrives on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive with a new 2017 HD Master. The image of this film in particular has always been problematic on home video in my opinion, it has a soft and gauzy look, shot with a soft-focus lensing that doesn't make for the most crisp and detailed HD image on Blu-ray. Skin tones tend to look ruddy and fine detail is hampered by the soft cinematography, but this is the best the Bradbury anthology has ever looked on home video, and it probably look authentic to the source, with strong color reproduction, more pronounced details within the limits of the source elements, contrast is also improved. The English DTS-HD MA 2.0 audio sounds crisp, dialogue and effects are nicely balanced, the Jerry Goldsmith (Chinatown) score sounds phenomenal, optional english subtitles are provided.

The Blu-ray has the same extras as the Warner DVD, a 10-minute featurette about the extensive tattooing that Steiger went through and the painstaking process of applying them daily. There's also a 3-minute HD trailer for the film. 

Special Features:
- Vintage Featurette "Tattooed Steiger" (10 min) 
- Theatrical Trailer (3 min) HD 

The Illustrated Man (1969) is not a great science fiction anthology, the stories are a bit too dour and it lacks the imagination of Bradbury's written work, the segments seem more attuned to a TV anthology series (Twilight Zone, Night Gallery) than a truly cinematic endeavor. However, the stories are solid and decently wrought, they're just not astounding and feel like they could have been so much more in the hands of a more skilled director. That said, I do love the deep cuts that Warner Archive have been digging into this past year, I would not have expected The Illustrated Man to pop-up on Blu-ray, but it has and I am pleased to add it to the collection, it's not a stunner but it is an entertaining slice of sci-fi. 

This advance copy of the release was provided by Warner Archive for review, and will be released on September 19th 2017 at the usual retail outlets.