The Dick Van Dyke Show: The Complete Series Blu-ray Box Set (Image Entertainment, 11/13) combines all five seasons of the landmark ‘60s sit com along with an incredible array of extras. You want to pace yourself here and with this much material you can return to the glorious days of black and white for months on end. There are 158 episodes and yet that’s the tip of the iceberg as nearly every one of the 15 discs has awesome extras.
People who didn’t live through the golden era of television may be hard pressed to recall how solid the writing and jokes for this show were. The Dick Van Dyke Show won 15 Emmys, but more than that it created the sit com sub genre of the behind-the-scenes-at-a-television-show program. Think The Larry Sanders Show or even Curb Your Enthusiasm or maybe perhaps Seinfeld to get an idea of the landscape being mined. Van Dyke plays Rob Petrie a comedy writer on the Alan Brady Show (Carl Reiner) and the story goes back and forth between the office and his home life, including his adorable wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore). And anybody who thinks that contempo shows like Parks & Recreation can hold a candle to the comedy chops on display in TDVDS have just been brainwashed by too much television.
Immediately upon receiving this set I had to watch the following episodes: Ep #153 The Man From My Uncle, in which Godfrey Cambridge plays a G-Man who takes over a room in the Petrie household to stake out a house across the street; Ep #110 The Impractical Joke, where Rob is the butt of a phone prank instigated by co-worker Buddy ((Morey Amsterdam); Ep #50 It May Look Like A Walnut, a totally surreal dream episode where Rob and Laura are attacked by aliens who have no thumbs and subsist on walnuts, led by an alien Danny Thomas. And there are still 150 more shows to go. By the way, Thomas was one of the producers of TDVDS along with Sheldon Leonard. Thomas as you may or not know established the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for which no family ever has to pay money for medical care. Thomas was the Lebanese Ed Sullivan in a manner of terms.
Some of the many extras with this set include clips from Emmy ceremonies where the show won multiple times, commercials of the era, as well as stars of The Dick Van Dyke Show appearing on other sit coms like The Danny Thomas Show or the variety show The Danny Kaye Show. The blu-ray transfers are sharp with great contrast.
Suddenly (Image Entertainment, 12/4) has never been available in what you would call a decent transfer until now. This blu-ray transferred from a 35mm fine grain master print shows the glory of when film noir met the assassination genre film. Sterling Hayden and Frank Sinatra star, with support from Nancy Gates and James Gleason among others. The disc comes with two excellent commentary tracks, one scholastic from film professor Drew Casper and another from Frank Sinatra Jr. who was present on the set when the film was made in the early ‘50s.
Sinatra plays his only truly psychotic role, a bitter hit man hired to assassinate the then President for half a million clams. Sinatra may’ve later played baddies like in Assault On A Queen, but in Suddenly he’s really evil. Sinatra and a couple of his minions take over the house of local sheriff Hayden and holds various townspeople hostage while he sets up a sniper nest in a window in the house that overlooks a train station where the head of state will appear later that day.
Casper’s commentary documents how B-films of this era were upgrading to compete with television and also covers how the production code at the time prohibited films that dealt with killing the President. Nonetheless Suddenly was made as an independent production and distributed by United Artists. There are eerie parallels to certain Kennedy assassination myths such as Sinatra using a bolt-action rifle. The Sinatra Jr. commentary brings us up to date on Sinatra senior’s career. Sinatra had won a supporting Oscar® award the previous year for From Here To Eternity and when that was called a fluke in the press he wanted to prove he could really act by going full bore psycho criminal. An extra on the disc, the experimental short N.Y., N.Y.: A Day in New York (1957 d. Francis Thompson) is a bizarre companion piece to this disc, one that revels in late ’50 Gotham as seen through a kaleidoscope of imagery.
– Michael Bergeron
