Search - New Faces on DVD

Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1954 DVD Release: 01/31/2006 Format: DVD - Black and White,Color SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 3 mins Studio: Critic's Choice Members Wishing: 1 Genres: Musical, Musical Comedy

Producer Leonard Sillman's 1952 edition of his popular Broadway revue New Faces was filmed just as it was staged, save for a wraparound fictional romantic story. The newly grafted plotline involves the efforts of director Ronny Graham to stave off an angry creditor long enough to open his show. We occasionally cut away to the backstage intrigues, but never long enough to take anything away from Sillman's talented cast of newcomers. The cast includes Eartha Kitt, singing such standards-to-be as "C'est Ci Bon" and "Monotonous"; Robert Clary, doing a medley of his hit "I'm in Love With Miss Logan"; Alice Ghostley, belting forth a brace of satirical torch songs; Paul Lynde (heavier than we're used to seeing him), offering his "safari" monologue and later participating in a screamingly funny Death of a Salesman takeoff; and Ronny Graham, performing an extended lampoon of either Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote (we aren't too sure; judge for yourself). Carol Lawrence also makes her first film appearance herein. The Broadway production's biggest song hit, "Love Is a Simple Thing," is sung and danced to the oversaturation point. Among the many writers was a young fellow by the name of Melvin Brooks (that's how he's billed). Its production flaws and budget shortcomings notwithstanding, the widescreen, full-color New Faces offers a rare opportunity for a 1990s audience to see what a '50s-style musical revue really looked like to the opening-night crowd. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Ronny Graham
Eartha Kitt
Robert Clary
Alice Ghostley

Harry Horner's New Faces (1954) arrives on DVD from Critics Choice in a letterboxed edition that captures the original release's anamorphic Cinemascope image, and in a decent transfer from an imperfect source. The color is somewhat washed out and biased toward green, but it also shows signs of some partially successful compensation in the transfer. The disc has a simple, single-layer menu, opening automatically on start-up and offering the choice of New Faces or the companion bonus feature, a kinescope of the 1955 television variety program Stage Show, hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. There is no list of the chapters, but the movie has been given 16 of them, coinciding with each song and sketch plus the end credits. The movie is a fascinating theatrical artifact of the early and mid-'50s, showcasing such future comedy and musical stars as Ronny Graham, Paul Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Eartha Kitt, Robert Clary, and Carol Lawrence, and has a built-in appeal to theater and comedy buffs -- but the Stage Show bonus shouldn't be ignored, either. In addition to a pair of excellent blues performances by Sarah Vaughan and a funny standup bit by Morey Amsterdam (who was hardly the "young" man that he was introduced as in 1955), the Dorsey brothers' orchestra performs a swinging version of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's "Manhattan" that includes Tommy playing with the trombone section and, best of all, Jimmy in a pair of extended clarinet solos, which show that, even a decade past his prime and less than two years before his death, he still had something to say in jazz. The quality of the video on the program is very good, with the audio quality -- with good volume and clarity on both the movie and the TV show -- is also very high. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide