Love Among the Swells

Let’s take a moment to praise George Feltenstein for his work at the Warner Archive Collection. The imprint began as a burn-on-demand service that got obscure catalogue titles into the hands of the few collectors willing to buy them on DVD, and – once it moved up to pressing limited Blu-ray runs of cult titles like Peter Weir’s Fearless and the Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy - became a leading force in the restoration and resuscitation of movies that slipped through the cracks the first time around.

Last year, Warner Archive released its first 4K disc, a gorgeous restoration of John Ford’s The Searchers; last month it delivered its second, a new restoration of its VistaVision contemporary High Society … which also happens to be the first time that film has been revisited since the DVD came out in the early 2000s.

Hey, I’m as shocked as you are. Charles Martin’s all-star MGM musical remake of The Philadelphia Story was one of the biggest pictures of 1956, with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly – in what would be her final screen role before she married Prince Ranier of Monaco and left Hollywood behind – in the roles first played onscreen by Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn. But Cary, Jimmy and Kate didn’t wander around their mansions singing Cole Porter compositions with the occasional accompaniment of jazz hero Louis Armstrong and his enthusiastic band, making this version much more of a pop confection.

Surely there would have been demand from baby boomers who love to remind people “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” was a song before it was a game show. For whatever reason, High Society languished in standard definition while Warner brought plenty of other MGM catalogue musicals to Blu. Maybe the VistaVision elements were intimidating. Maybe the original audio stems were in a box somewhere. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, Feltenstein and the Warner Archive team picked up the ball and ran with it, and now we have an Ultra High Definition restoration of High Society that looks like it was shot last week. (A separate Blu-ray release is available, but even if you don’t have a 4K player I’d recommend future-proofing with the 4K/BD combo.) Mastered from a deep scan of the original camera negative, the image has never looked cleaner or brighter … and in terms of detail, this transfer is so sharp that Sinatra’s famous jawline scar reads clearly in some of the medium shots.

The plot is the usual screwball foolishness revolving around the impending marriage of Rhode Island socialite Tracy Lord (Kelly) to the staid George Kittredge – a wedding that just so happens to coincide with the Newport Jazz Festival, for which Tracey’s ex-husband, composer and jazzman C.K. Dexter Haven (Crosby), has come back to town. Or maybe he’s there to win her back. Possibly both, he's a jazz guy; it’s the motivations he doesn’t acknowledge, after all. And because Tracy’s father needs some good PR, the nuptials will be covered by two tabloid journalists from New York: Mike Connor (Sinatra) and Liz Imbrie (Celeste Holm). Mike will be attracted to Tracy, too, because it’s that kind of movie.

It's all just an excuse for the stars to croon and swing their way through a selection of Porter ditties, including the aforementioned millionaire number – tossed off by Sinatra and Holm as they scoff at the wedding gifts lined up in Tracy’s parlor – and the older “Well, Did You Evah?,” sung by Crosby and Sinatra as Dexter and Mike bond at a party. (I have to say, I much prefer Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop’s version.) The real surprise is that the song that’s the least memorable – the simplistic “True Love,” which features in a flashback to Dexter and Tracy in happier times – was the biggest hit, though I suppose that speaks to the state of American pop music in 1956.

The state of American movies at the time was something else: Facing the existential threat of television, the studios set out to wow the crowds into leaving their homes, developing new widescreen formats and turning every major production into a roadshow event. High Society – which even has an overture! – was shot in the aforementioned VistaVision process, which fed 35mm film sideways through the camera to capture more detail in a larger frame … and if you thought celluloid loved Grace Kelly before, well, it worships her in VistaVision. The whole movie looks great, but Kelly looks astonishing.

Weirdly enough, so does Louis Armstrong, who is easily the picture’s liveliest presence; I was worried his “Now You Has Jazz” number might feel awkward or even uncomfortable now, but Armstrong is so fully in command of his presence – and his band, for that matter – that his performance feels like something magical and joyful, not at all compromised by being stapled onto an otherwise lily-white Hollywood production. I couldn’t call High Society a fully integrated project, but it feels like a nod towards the future, not the past. That was a pleasant surprise.

As with most Warner Archive releases, no new supplements have been produced but everything from the earlier Warner DVD is here: A brief newsreel clip of the premiere, radio and theatrical promos (including a gloriously stiff chat between Crosby and Ed Sullivan), the contemporaneous animated short “Millionaire Droopy” and “Cole Porter in Hollywood,” a 2003 featurette in which Celeste Holm shares some anecdotes about the production.

Having mentioned that VistaVision loves Grace Kelly, I offer further proof in Paramount’s 4K release of To Catch a Thief, which made its UHD debut last fall but gets a 70^th anniversary steelbook this coming Tuesday. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s first film in the format and he used its qualities to lavish even more attention than usual on his leading lady; he’d framed Kelly like a vision in Rear Window, sure, but To Catch a Thief ups the ante further, placing the star in a series of stunning gowns against spectacular locations in France.

Kelly’s not even the lead – that’d be Cary Grant, as a charming cat burglar trying to prove he’s not responsible for a string of resort robberies – but she’s absolutely the main attraction, for both the director and the audience. And Paramount’s new restoration brings the film fully back to life, every detail of its costumes and environments feeling richer and more tactile than they have in decades.

Paradoxically, freshening up this particular Hitchcock movie makes it feel even more special; while Universal and Warner have been rolling out boxed sets and special editions of the Hitch films in their libraries since the VHS days, To Catch a Thief is the only one of the director’s films Paramount still holds, and the label never seemed to know quite what to do with it. Which is weird, because it’s a no-brainer: It’s fun.

Seventy years after its release, To Catch a Thief remains a complete delight: A splashy, star-driven affair of the sort they just don’t make any more. And it’s not for lack of trying, mind you; I think Hollywood would very much enjoy making these, and so would a number of today’s A-listers, but audiences don’t seem to respond to them. Romantic cinema isn’t exactly dead, but it’s been forced into hiding, wrapped in high-concept comedies like Knocked Up or Long Shot (Seth Rogen is 100% a closet romantic, by the way) or Trojan-horsed into genre stories like Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and the first two Ocean’s movies. Linklater’s Before movies, and their walk-and-talk progeny like Rye Lane and Boxcutter, tell great love stories, but they’re not exactly blockbusters.

But Hitchcock’s old-school approach in To Catch a Thief is exactly right, inviting audiences to watch charming, beautiful people live lives they themselves could not; it’s a walking, talking glamour magazine, with splendid restaurants and tailored clothes and exquisite linens on every bed. The fact that it also spins a fun yarn about a charming antihero falling for a whip-smart socialite is just icing on the cake. But Hitchcock being Hitchcock, the cake’s really good too.

The supplemental section offers an assortment of extras produced for earlier DVD and Blu-ray releases: A multi-part documentary produced for the 2002 DVD, three additional featurettes and audio commentary from historian Drew Casper from the 2009 Centennial Collection DVD set and a Leonard Maltin “Filmmaker Focus” segment produced for the 2020 Paramount Presents Blu-ray release. Audio is the same 5.1 Dolby TrueHD track that appears on the 2020 BD, remixed from the multichannel soundtrack released theatrically in 1955.

For a more modern take on the lives of idle rich – with old bones, mind you – Paramount also brought Amy Heckerling’s Clueless to UHD this month, honoring its 30^th anniversary with a long-overdue remastering upgrade and reminding us just how much of a treasure this movie was – and still is.

Because honestly, no one expected anything from Clueless in the summer of 1995. I know; I was on the press junket, watching the cast and crew gradually loosen up as they realized they had a pop-culture sensation on their hands – and one based on a Jane Austen novel, no less.

Everybody knows Clueless is an adaptation of Austen’s Emma, right? It was mildly shocking at the time, but these days it’s constantly turning up in listicles about the best Austen adaptations – and deservedly so. Heckerling effortlessly transposes Austen’s narrative (about a well-intentioned young woman of means whose determination to bring love and contentment to her entire social sphere has led her to neglect her own happiness) to Los Angeles during the Clinton boom years, with high school filling in nicely for the sitting rooms and shops of 19^th century English society.

Actual teenager Alicia Silverstone is perfectly cast as Cher Horowitz, quick-witted and beaming and impeccably put together – though of course she’s still a kid, and kids never know as much about the world as they think they do. Still, Cher can spar with her ferocious lawyer dad (Dan Hedaya) and make fun of her stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd) for his attempts to actually make the world a better place … but she’s also sharp enough to see the romantic potential between two of her more eccentric teachers (Wallace Shawn and Twink Caplan), and realize the awkward new student Tai (Brittany Murphy) could benefit from a makeover.

Hecklering makes her movie as sweet and sparkling as her protagonist, placing her within a bubblegum aesthetic that keeps pulling out new surprises for Bill Pope’s camera to celebrate. Pope came from Army of Darkness and Fire in the Sky, and I’m still not sure how he got this gig – but he was perfect for it. Three decades later, it’s clear the guy can simply do anything; if you squint, you can sort of see the vibrant colors of Clueless in his work on Spider-Man 2. Or maybe he just needed something brighter after the Matrix sequels. (Seriously, he’s had a great career.)

And you can see the full sweep of Pope’s work in Paramount’s new UHD master, which shakes off the slight digital glaze of the Blu-ray – which is also included in the set, if you want to revisit it – to bring the image back to organic life. Clueless was a studio comedy, shot on location in Los Angeles; it always looked good, but now it looks real again.

The distance of decades also lets us appreciate Heckerling’s instincts for casting new faces – not just Silverstone and Rudd and Murphy (who was such a sweetheart on the junket that her death feels like an obscenity all over again), but Breckin Meyer and Donald Faison and Jeremy Sisto and Justin Walker. Having Shawn and Caplan and Earth Girls Are Easy’s Julie Brown on the faculty are fun choices, too, and Hedaya – so often cast as a heavy or an idiot – played wonderfully against those expectations as Papa Horowitz. Stacey Dash has made her choices, but she’s pretty great as Cher’s bestie Dionne Davenport. So it goes.

Paramount is rolling out this edition of Clueless in your choice of standard packaging or a deluxe steelbook, pictured above. No new supplements have been produced for this release, which is a shame – Clueless has always cried out for an audio commentary, and I’d love to hear Heckerling and Silverstone’s perspective on it now. All of the extras produced for earlier DVD and Blu-ray releases are ported over, though, amounting to about an hour of 10^th-anniversary featurettes and a goofy pop-up trivia game. And that super-special steelbook does come with a whole bunch of silly stuff which is undeniably charming; it’s like opening Cher’s locker and going through her stuff. She’d understand, though. Kid’s got a good heart.

High Society is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment under the Warner Archive imprint. Paramount Home Entertainment’s new steelbook of To Catch a Thief is 4K only, while Clueless is packaged as a 4K/Blu-ray combo. My kingdom for standardization.

Up next: Criterion's Carnal Knowledge and You Can Count on Me. Trust me, they're worth the wait.