Contest - "Doctor Zhivago" on DVD or Blu-ray

Another week, another contest for all fans of free stuff everywhere.

As mentioned on this post of May 3rd, we’re giving away a copy of director David Lean’s classic “Doctor Zhivago”, in your choice of either DVD or Blu-ray. A new restoration has been released for the 45th anniversary of the film, and this package has a lot of extra goodies.

First, to enter the contest, between now and Thursday noon, Eastern Time, when we pick the winner, just leave a comment below stating you want the movie. That’s all you have to do. The name is drawn out of a hat. Come back Thursday to see if you’ve won, and if you did, email me at:

JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com

...with the address to which you’d like your DVD or Blu-ray to be sent. Neither the address nor your name will be published. I’ll contact the folks who are donating the prize, and they’ll ship it to you directly.

This new release of the film by Warner Home Video is stunning. Of course, you’ll probably remember the film was stunning to begin with, and there are so many images from it we may recall long after we have digested the love story, the political angles, and the tempestuous backdrop of the Russian Revolution.

My gosh, the color. The time spent on images in this film is luxury to enjoy. Today we seem to be rushed by the director to hustle the plot along, like an irritable waiter who keeps showing up at your table to move you out of the restaurant as quickly as possible. This film is like an eight-course meal with servants standing silently in the background refilling your wine glass so discreetly that you barely notice. Despite the enormity of the events in the film, there is something relaxing about it.

Oh, yes, we have an Overture. We have an “Entr’acte”, with that haunting, lovely, refrain of “Lara’s Theme”, theme. The snowflakes on the windowpane, the distant snow-capped Ural Mountains burst upon us as we emerge from a dark train tunnel. The delight in observation (which in turn makes us observe) of the lead character, Dr. Zhivago, played soulfully by Omar Sharif. That eyes-filling-with-tears as he watches the street massacre below, and the horror is reflected in his face, but we are barely subjected to any graphic images of violence, only the meaning of it. His horror, and his joys, both are wordless. And the balalaika that follows him like a conscience.

A shaft of sunlight glowing through a dark forest, and a vase of immense sunflowers that drop their petals. A field of yellow daffodils. This is a beautiful, beautiful film.

And how interesting that something so ethereal about a bloody revolution whose consequences were felt by the entire world for decades afterwards could be filmed with such empathy during the Cold War. It wasn’t until the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that “Doctor Zhivago” was shown in Russia, and the novel by Boris Pasternak, who was awarded a Nobel Prize, was published there in 1988, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The special features of this 45th anniversary release alone are worth it. There is a documentary, “Doctor Zhivago: A Celebration Part 1 & 2” (all-new production). Also: commentary by Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger and Lady Sandra Lean, and “Doctor Zhivago: The Making of a Russian Epic” which has candid reminiscences by Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger and Geraldine Chaplin. This is the sort of nuts-and-bolts behind the scenes stuff I love, and it is fascinating. They even explain how they achieved the sunflowers dropping their petals moment.

Eleven vintage featurettes are included, among them New York press interviews with Omar Sharif and with Julie Christie, and Geraldine Chaplin’s screen test. This is really quite a comprehensive package on this film, and provides such terrific background and context for your viewing of a beautifully restored “Doctor Zhivago.”

Let the contest begin.


FTC Disclosure: a review copy of the CD, and the contest prize, are provided by Warner Home Video.

The RMS Berengaria and the Crash

We’re continuing our Halloween fright fest with something truly scary: the economy. This week marks the 80th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash whose repercussions changed this country and a good part of the world. The above famous headline in Variety, devoted to stage and film, put the matter succinctly and with typical panache. Other papers were grappling with 72-point type headlines that attempted to dramatize numbers of shares sold, points in decline, value lost. Variety summed up the whole nightmare in show-biz terms.

What makes this anniversary special is the similarities people, and pundits, may choose to draw between our current economic challenges and those of eight decades ago. It makes the anniversary more dramatic, to be sure, but perhaps it will give us something more than entertaining intrigue. Possibly, it might give us more understanding about the whole grisly matter, and more empathy for a generation that lost everything.

On Thursday we’ll mark the finale of the fiasco, the so-called “Black Tuesday” event (There was, you’ll remember, Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday) with a look at “The Roaring Twenties” (1939), a fascinating and well-made film that attempts to look back on the event with an objective if nostalgic eye. We may have even better perspective now.

Today, let’s have a brief look at one episode of the 1929 stock market crash that says something about the quirkiness of the Roaring Twenties, and maybe the inevitability of paying the piper, or judgment day, or just the party being over.

In the musical “Funny Girl” (1967), Barbra Streisand, playing the popular comedienne Fanny Brice, goes along with her lover, played by Omar Sharif, on a ship to Europe. He is a professional gambler and intends to ply his trade among the well-to-do on the ship. The ship they travel on is the grand Cunard ocean liner, the RMS Berengaria.

“You are going to Europe so you can play cards on the boat?!” Miss Streisand asks incredulously. A little card playing was the least of a life of excess at sea.

The Berengaria began its life a product of Imperial Germany as the Imperator, but was turned over to Great Britain after World War I for reparations, where it was renamed and reborn as a favorite among wealthy travelers taking the trans-Atlantic route between Britain and the U.S.

F. Scott Fitzgerald noted in the final pages of his 1922 novel “The Beautiful and the Damned”, where his dissipated Lost Generation poster children, Anthony and Gloria Patch, newly wealthy but their souls destroyed, wander the decks of the Berengaria, “That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria.”

Other passengers, like Vanderbilt, DuPont, Astor, and J. P. Morgan may not have wandered the decks in dissipation, but certainly had a reason for choosing the Berengaria over other ships. In August of 1929, a couple of months before the Crash, the Berengaria instituted a new service. A salon on the promenade deck would become a stock brokerage linked by wireless to Wall Street. No more would bored millionaires struggle to amuse themselves with shuffleboard on the crossing. Now, they could continue to trade stocks during the voyage.

I suppose it was a 1920s version of people who just cannot put down the cell phone or BlackBerry.

During the week of the Crash, the Berengaria had left Europe and was heading to New York. When news of the stocks falling spread across the ship, the brokerage room was barraged by the passengers, all trying to get more information, all trying to sell. Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics manufacturer, sat in a front row leather armchair to watch the prices continuously chalked on the board, and continuously falling. She lost a million dollars in a couple of hours.

Other millionaires on board that trip docked in New York penniless. A kind of voyage of the damned. They were no less helpless than the people who sweated it out in the nervous crowds gathering in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but they had a better view; if they bothered to leave the brokerage salon and take a stroll on the promenade deck.

It makes a dramatic allegory to the Crash of 1929, including the aftermath. The Berengaria’s fortunes faltered during the Great Depression, was referred to as “Bargain Area” and used for cheap cruises to the Caribbean and Bermuda, but failed to turn a profit. By the end of the 1930s, she was retired and eventually scrapped in the mid-1940s.

A poem parodying the outlandish idea of having a brokerage a ship was published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, and later the Literary Digest August 31, 1929. It is eerily prescient:

We were crowded in the cabin
Watching figures on the Board;
It was midnight on the ocean
And a tempest loudly roared.

We were watching the quotations
With a certain sad appeal:
Some were short in General Motors,
Some were long on U.S. Steel.

And, timidly a tourist
Took a chance on twenty shares --
"We are lost!" the Captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.

"I've got a tip," he faltered,
"Straight by wireless from the aunt
Of a fellow who's related
To a cousin of Durant."

At these awful words we shuddered,
And the stoutest bull grew sick
While the brokers cried, "More margin!"
And the ticker ceased to tick.

But the captain's little daughter
Said, "I do not understand --
Isn't Morgan on the ocean
Just the same as on the land?"

Even the film industry, which ironically did very well during the Depression and proved to be one of the few recession-proof industries (dimes stores was another), suffered a foreboding incident that frightening autumn.

In September 1929 “His Glorious Night” with John Gilbert was released to not only criticism, but howls. The silent-screen lover lost his macho mystique when the audience heard his high, thin voice for the first time. It was indeed an era of new beginnings, new technological marvels, and disastrous endings.

But Mr. Gilbert’s misfortune was Gene Kelly’s gain when the seed was planted for “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952).

By the time that parody was released, the stock market had mostly recovered. It took a couple of decades for those who lost money on their stocks but held onto them to break even. The stock market finally regained its pre-1929 Crash highest level in November 1954 amid a booming economy fueled by consumerism, where the 1929 Crash was starting to fade in memory and fear of it was replaced by either scornful amusement, or total ignorance, for another couple of generations.

“What’s past is prologue” Shakespeare said in “The Tempest.” Come back Thursday for “The Roaring Twenties”. Until then, have a look below at a montage of The Berengaria and the Crash.