The King & I – 50th Anniversary
Edition (DVD-Video Set)
Picture: B Sound: B- Extras: B+ Film: B+
Of all
the Rodgers & Hammerstein Musical films, the very best and my personal
favorite is the 1956 version of The King & I, as directed by Walter Lang. It
is one of the greatest musicals of all time and one of the greatest Musical
films ever made. Now, Fox has gone to
great lengths to restore and clean up (even by manufacturing costly special
equipment) from the original camera materials and the results are excellent!
Yul
Brynner is The King Of Siam, the role he became best-known for despite a
stunning film career that yielded classic roles in The Magnificent Seven, The
Ten Commandments, Anastasia, The Brothers Karamazov and even
literally robotic revival of The
Magnificent Seven gunslinger in the Science Fiction classic Westworld and underrated sequel Futureworld (responsible for
influencing James Cameron’s Terminator). He can sing it, moves with the physicality of
the role and speaks with the confidence of a man who has been in power of a
great kingdom for a long, long time. He
is captured here in his prime having a peak cinematic year few actors have or
ever will achieve.
The
amazing Deborah Kerr is Anna, a teacher from England hired by the King to teach
his children and help advance Siam in the face of a new world on the rise. Unfortunately, his royal highness thinks he
can still be somewhat backwards while expecting advancement of his country and
power. He promises to especially build
Anna and her son a house, but has them live “temporarily” in his palace until
“then” and teach. Eventually, she
realizes how manipulative he is and the traces of conflict their first meeting
brings the differences to a boil as the brawn, manhood and power of the King
match wits in the great Classical Hollywood battle of the sexes tradition with
the educated, advanced, feminine, “scientific mind” and education of Anna.
The
chemistry between the actors is some of the greatest in film history, true big
screen magic rarely seen before or since.
Between the drama and amazing comic timing, these are remarkable
performances that actors and singers should be studying over and over again. The book the R&H team used as the basis
for this work was by Margaret Landon, but major Hollywood screenwriter Ernest
Lehman wrote the final screenplay and it lifts the grand production from merely
stagy to purely cinematic. That is not
easy and only rivaled (but not surpassed as far as this critic is concerned) by
The Sound of Music, this is the
most remarkably realized film version of an R&H work and just about any
Musical ever made in cinema history.
The story
flows remarkably well with a smooth, fluid, natural progression and pace. The balance between the proper music, orchestration,
dialogue and classic songs is exceptional.
There are more ingenious classics here than in any other R&H work,
including Getting To Know You, I Whistle A Happy Tune, A Puzzlement, Hello, Young Lovers, Shall We
Dance? and Something Wonderful
are all-time standards that show the team at the top of their game like never
before or since. Like the best R&H
songs, they show dreams, pain, love, power, disappointment and even mortality. Along with dichotomies of male/female, new
world/old world, proper civilized behavior/savage barbaric sexual power,
freedom/slavery and irony abounding, I think it is the smartest and most
enduring of all their works with little to date it overall.
Rita
Moreno plays the gift slave of Tuptim, Martin Benson is the thankless Kralahome,
Terry Saunders is good as Lady Chiang, Rex Thompson is barely in the film as
Anna’s son Louis, Patrick Adiarte is the likable Prince Chulalongkorn, Alan
Mowbray is the British Ambassador Sir John Hay and Geoffrey Toon is Anna’s old
friend Sir Edward Ramsay. This is an
underrated cast in an all-time classic and one of the few films ever made that
I could watch any time.
Irene
Sharaff deserves special mention here for her costumes. Most costuming prior to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) has not endured
very well and though the sets seem more obvious than the costumes and the
costumes show some age, her work in this film is still very impressive. Though she worked in black and white films,
her knack for color is amazing, as demonstrated by film like this, Meet Me In St. Louis, Guys & Dolls, Porgy & Bess, Can-Can,
West Side Story, Elizabeth Taylor’s
highly influential outfits for Cleopatra,
Funny Girl, Hello Dolly and Mommie
Dearest. They are among the most
important work in the field in all of world cinema. The work here is as great as she ever was and
will endure for decades to come.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.55 X 1 image is one of only two films shot in the
CinemaScope 55 format, which used a 1.33 X 1 block of special 55mm negative with
smaller sprocket holes, then used CinemaScope squeeze lenses to put the image
on the square frame, only to be unsqueezed later. This was Fox’s failed response to Paramount’s
VistaVision format, but the two films that were produced look good. A 1961 reissue offered 35mm dye-transfer
three-strip Technicolor prints, as well as 70mm prints under the Grandeur 70
name that never caught on. The Dolby
Digital 5.0 mix comes from both the 4-track magnetic original release print
master and 6-track magnetic Grandeur 70mm release print master for the 1961
re-release. The combination is very
pleasant and the traveling dialogue and even sound effects sometimes puts
dialogue squarely in the left or right channel when people are on the sides of
the screen. It has real character.
In this
restored version, you not only get an image that is sharp, clean, colorful and
with impressive lighting and depth for an in-studio work, but you can see the
money on the screen (hugely budgeted for its time) all there. The great Cinematographer Leon Shamroy,
A.S.C., was under the pressure of a higher fidelity format (like everyone else)
and shot the first-ever CinemaScope film The
Robe. His work too goes back to the
black and white era, including working for Fritz Lang on You Only Live Once and continued shooting classics into the late
1960s before retiring. His most famous
color works include There’s No Business
In Show Business, The Girl Can’t
Help It, Desk Set, South Pacific, Porky & Bess, Cleopatra,
The Agony & The Ecstasy, Caprice (the last CinemaScope film), Skidoo, Justine and the original Planet
Of The Apes. As impressive as that
list is, this is his best use of color and this DVDs is one of the best color
classics on the market on a visual level as a result. I see none of the six R&H titles now out
from Fox potentially having more to offer in the inevitable Blu-ray release at
a later date than this film.
Credit
should also go to Marni Nixon’s amazing dubbing of Kerr that is some of the
most seamless voicing of all time. She
is amazing and even though she dubbed other films, she was never better
here. A young Marilyn Horne also
supplies vocals for the always fascinating Small
House Of Uncle Thomas sequence that is as relevant as it has ever
been. Except for one mask, it is hardly
racist or stereotypical to its credit.
Extras
include a strong feature length audio commentary by Richard Barrios and Michael
Portantiere, Sing-A-Long Subtitles, another audio commentary by Samantha Egger
on the pilot included for the Anna and the King TV Series, Something Wonderful: The Story of The
King And I, The Kings of Broadway, The
King and I Stage Version, The King of the Big Screen, A Royal Production, the
amazing “Restoring Cinemascope 55” short, Vintage Stage Excerpts "Getting To Know You" & "A Puzzlement" performed by Patricia
Morison and Brynner, Additional Song "Shall
I Tell You What I Think Of You" performed by Anna, Movietone News: Charity
Premieres of The King And I Musical
Milestone + Ingrid Bergman and Brynner Oscar Winners and Australians from The Yul
Brynner Club.
This set is
also available in a nice new compact DVD collection with all six R&H titles
(eight films in all not including alternate cuts of the main film) in The
Rodgers and Hammerstein Collection Box Set. Like their Mel Brooks Collection
(reviewed elsewhere on this site), the DVDs is thicker regular cases are here
in slender cases (two each!) for The King & I, Oklahoma!, The
Sound of Music, South Pacific, Carousel and State Fair. Our page links to all six reviews at this
link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4547/The+Rodgers+and+Hammerstein+Collection+Box+Set+(The+King+&+I/Oklahoma!/The+Sound+of+Music/South+Pacific/Carousel/State+Fair)
- Nicholas Sheffo
