One of the unexpected pleasures of watching it again is Tommy Tune’s strange, wide eyed performance as Ambrose Kemper. What reads today as camp mugging was very much in line with director Gene Kelly’s idea of a heightened, vaudeville inflected Yonkers. Tune’s elastic physicality plays beautifully against Walter Matthau’s granite deadpan and Barbra Streisand’s star presence. Kelly clearly encouraged this approach. He wanted bodies, rhythm and joy to carry the comedy rather than dry one liners.

The casting of Streisand is still the most debated aspect of the film. At 26 she was obviously far too young to be playing Dolly Levi, a character written as a worldly widow who has lived and schemed and lost. From the studio point of view, though, it was simple. After the success of The Sound of Music and West Side Story, Fox wanted another prestige musical with a bankable star at its centre, and Barbra Streisand was the hottest property in America. On paper it looks like a mistake. On screen it is more complicated. Her voice is astonishing, the charisma undeniable and by the time she descends the staircase in Harmonia Gardens the age mismatch matters less than the sheer force of the performance.

The real author of the film is arguably not Kelly at all but Ernest Lehman. The opening credit that reads “Ernest Lehman’s Production of…” is not a polite flourish. It is a statement of control. Lehman had adapted and produced West Side Story and The Sound of Music and was seen as the safe pair of hands who could turn a Broadway hit into a glossy roadshow event. He shaped the script, the scale and the overall tone. Kelly was brought in once that package was largely in place. What we end up with is an unusual blend of producer driven spectacle and choreographic wit, rather than a pure Kelly musical.

If the film has a genuine technical flaw it is in the lip syncing, particularly in the slower songs. Streisand sings with studio perfection and very little visible physical effort, which creates small mismatches in close up that are hard to unsee once you notice them. It is the one thing that occasionally pulls you out of the moment. The faster numbers, which Kelly edits and choreographs with a dancer’s sense of rhythm, hide the joins far better. In those sequences picture and sound feel completely in step.

What struck me most on this rewatch, though, was how pleasant the whole film is to sit with. Matthau provides just enough vinegar to keep the syrup from becoming cloying, Michael Crawford, Danny Lockin and Tommy Tune bring a springy innocence, and the ensemble scenes burst with colour and good humour. The sincerity that once seemed hopelessly old fashioned now feels almost radical. In an era that prizes irony, there is something refreshing about a film that believes so wholeheartedly in parades, staircases and romantic new beginnings.

The WALL·E connection has helped too. Pixar’s decision to weave “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” through the circuitry of that little robot effectively reframed Hello, Dolly! as a romantic artefact of lost humanism. For many younger viewers this is now the film that WALL·E loves, rather than a failed Fox roadshow. It makes Fox and now Disney’s reluctance to give it a full 4K restoration feel like a missed opportunity. The 65mm photography, the sets and the costumes are crying out for proper high resolution treatment, ideally at the hands of the Criterion Collection, who could encourage a more serious reassessment.

More than fifty years after its debut, Hello, Dolly! no longer feels like a lumbering dinosaur. It plays instead as the last great toast of old Hollywood exuberance. Whatever its flaws, it closes the roadshow era not with embarrassment but with a brass band, a staircase and a wink.

I was going to get around to reviewing Inland Empire on Blu-ray at some point but have been inspired to do so with a little more urgency by some surprisingly disparaging comments about it at, of all places, the Twin Peaks Gazette an online community dedicated to the seminal TV show and David Lynch’s oeuvre moreover.  The general opinion is that this is a dog’s dinner of a film and that it has single-handedly killed his cinematic career.

I couldn’t disagree with these sentiments more vehemently, in my opinion it could very well be the crowning glory to a body work of great distinction.  I admit it was never going to be to everybody’s taste, even those who have championed his more commercial efforts might well struggle with its epic running time and the fact it isn’t shot on celluloid but retrograde digital video cameras, operated entirely by Lynch himself.  The film is both a showcase for the acting talents of long-standing muse Laura Dern and her intense, multifaceted performance eats up the screen, as well as a serious attempt to push the envelope of the cinematic medium as art.

The film’s detractors argue that it has no coherent plot and that the characters aren’t defined well enough to want to spend so much time with them.  However, Dern’s stand out performance as Nikki Grace, a Hollywood starlet about to take on the female lead in drama steeped in adultery and murder only to find that it isn’t an original script, as she first thought, but a remake of an abandoned Polish movie that was believed to be ‘cursed’ according to the new film’s director, played with twinkling comic subtlety by Jeremy Irons.  The former movie’s romantic leads died in mysterious circumstances and it would appear that the folk tale on which the plot is derived also has a horrifying history; benefitting from a masterfully dark central performance from the marvelous Peter J. Lucas.

The director urges Nikki and her leading man, Devon (a welcome return of Mulholland Drive’s Justin Theroux) not to panic as they will be perfectly safe; but as they rehearse the scenes the lines between the film’s story, the folk lore and the fate of the original couple transgress their own reality.  Whilst this is familiar Lynch terrain it is in no way predictable, quite the opposite.  The menacing mood and exceedingly surreal imagery, most notably a corny sitcom starring actors with rabbit heads complete with canned laughter, is intercut adding to the mounting disquiet and tension as Nikki is drawn deeper into the mystery.

I agree that there are elements of commonality between Inland Empire and Lynch’s previous film Mulholland Drive but no more than there were with its own predecessor Lost Highway, which was equally criticised when it first came out for being too dark and confusing, yet is now widely acclaimed as a Lynch classic.  This is where the ‘art’ world vastly differs to the world of cinema where audiences expect a director’s new movie to be entirely different from their last.  However, with both painting and music it is quite common for an artist or composer to do ‘variations on a theme’ throughout their careers.

Whilst I recognise that Inland Empire is the least accessible film David Lynch has made to date I think it is all the better for that and emerges as a true ‘work of art’.  This is the type of expression we should expect from an artist who has been freed from the confines of budget, time and the interference of studio executives by embracing the digital medium.  To try and compare Inland Empire even to Mulholland Drive, the first two thirds of which initially formed the pilot for TV series and therefore comes from a commercially aware sensibility, is like comparing apples and oranges.  The only other film that comes close to it in Lynch’s canon would be Eraserhead and I’ve come to understand that when he said he was “done with film” he wasn’t simply meaning the medium in preference to digital; he was also referring to the limitations that commercial film distribution imposes on a creative artist and it’s a testament to the French, who have a true respect for ‘auteur’ cinema, that Canal+ continue to release David Lynch’s work.

It is probably wrong to even attempt to review Inland Empire, it is a film that should just be experienced with as little preconception as possible, perhaps it needs to be approached as one would a visit to an art gallery, wandering through it at a leisurely pace not quite expecting what will be around the corner or what surprise might be in the next room.

It’s surprisingly reassuring when a recent mainstream movie release based on source material from yesteryear actually transpires successfully to capture the original’s essence and intent without being reduced or reworked in order to pander to modern audiences.  Tim Burton’s screen version of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is boldly faithful to the 1979 Tony Award winning Broadway musical and will, no doubt, be largely responsible for capturing the ears of the next generation of Sondheim devotees.

Johnny Depp stars as Benjamin Barker, an accomplished barber whose life is destroyed by the lascivious, malfeasant Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) when he rapes his wife Lucy, has him falsely sentenced and deported to Australia and takes custody of his young daughter Johanna when her mother is committed to an asylum. On his eventual return 15 years later Barker assumes the alias of Sweeney Todd and takes a room above a ramshackle pie shop run by Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who misleads him to believe that his wife is dead.

Todd gets a chance to prove his prowess with the blade when he decries the ersatz Italian confidence trickster ‘Signor’ Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) of hawking fake hair tonic and they go head to head in a public shaving contest which is presided over by Judge Turpin’s sycophantic sidekick the Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall).  Todd is declared the winner and his skills are duly noted by the Beadle who later recommends that the unkempt Judge pay him a visit; providing Sweeney with a fleeting opportunity for retribution that’s interrupted by Anthony, a young man who is infatuated with Johanna and plans to free her from the clutches of the evil Judge.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a grotesque revenger’s tragedy in the Grand Guignol tradition, perfectly suited to the team of Burton and Depp whose previous movies Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow are equally steeped in this particular brand of goofy Gothicism.  When Todd fails to take vengeance on Turpin he goes on a maniacal killing spree, striking up an enterprising relationship with Mrs Lovett providing her with the much needed meat for her notorious ‘worst pies in London’.  The film manages to blend the operatic heights of Sondheim’s score with hair-raisingly stylised images of gore, as copious amounts of ruby red blood spurt from the slashed throats of the various victims whose fate brings them to an abrupt end in barber’s chair.

The Warner Bros. Blu-ray release features an exemplary 1080p/VC1 transfer maintaining the original theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Burton’s penchant for high contrast blacks and opulent scarlet tones is evident here, unlike the excessive picture crush that marred the Paramount hidef release of Sleepy Hollow.  It’s no surprise for a film that contains 85% songs and recitative that all the stops have been pulled out in presenting the soundtrack, a TrueHD 5.1 mix of exceptional clarity featuring a massive orchestra of 78 musicians, compared to the customary 27 used in theatrical productions, and an immersive use of the vocal channels.

Along with the usual ‘EPK type’ material are three standout extra features, the first is an historic look at the title character who started life in the Victorian ‘Penny Dreadful’ serial publications and grew into a legendary villain of stage and screen, the second an introduction to French Horror theatrics of the Grand Guignol and the third (and my personal favourite) is an all-too-brief but compact, contemporary interview with Stephen Sondheim; charting the genesis of the original musical and his close participation in realising Tim Burton’s movie treatment of it.

Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is an unexpected delight and I am now eagerly anticipating the film version of Sondheim’s Follies whose marvellous score is set to benefit from a fresh Aaron Sorkin screenplay.