COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA: 'region free' Blu-ray (Paramount, 1952) ViaVision 'Imprint'
Shrewdly released by Paramount
Pictures, just under the wire to qualify for the 1953 Academy Awards, and, the
13th highest grossing movie of 1952, director, Daniel Mann’s Come
Back, Little Sheba illustrated the sort of highly professional, grand dame
of motion picture entertainment that Hollywood en masse commonly aspires to
whittle out of blind ambition, but so rarely achieves on such a monumental
level, even when its source material (William Inge’s 1950 play) is this good. Ketti
Fring’s literate screenplay, cribbing from Inge’s brilliance, knows exactly when
to ‘open up’ the play for the requirements of moving pictures. The rest of the
credit here belongs to co-stars, Burt Lancaster and Shirley Booth – the latter
who, in her movie debut, managed to snag every prestigious acting award,
including a Best Actress Academy Award. In
a year of such awesome ‘heavy hitters’ as Singin' in the Rain, The Bad and
the Beautiful, High Noon, The Quiet Man, My Cousin Rachel and Don't
Bother to Knock, with the AMPAS awarding its highest honor to Cecil B. DeMille’s
rambunctious fluff and nonsense, The Greatest Show on Earth, Come Back
Little Sheba nevertheless managed to excel at telling its darkly purposed
tale of a recovering alcoholic, Doc Delaney (Lancaster) and his dowdy wife,
Lola (Booth) whose already rocky marriage is shaken by Doc’s ever-increasing
desire for their newly arrived/fresh-faced border, Marie Buckholder
(Terry Moore), whose focus is her studies and an oversexed and otherwise sinfully
brutish ‘friend’, Turk Fisher (Richard Jaeckel).
Even today, Come Back, Little
Sheba packs a wallop, telescopically focused on Booth’s mesmerizing star
turn as the frump. It was a role magnificently honed to perfection during the
play’s Broadway run and, with seemingly effortless and understated aplomb, tweaked
herein with equal portions of quiet desperation, abject humiliation and a very
thin veneer between Lola’s nattering/bubbly exterior and bludgeoning sadness,
threatening to drown out her sanity. Fring’s script deserves high praise here, much
for its uncompromising truthfulness in what makes an utterly destroyed woman
remain with a man who has broken her spirits down to bedrock. Discriminating, adult
and unvarnished, Come Back, Little Sheba is precisely the sort of intelligent
picture craftsmanship one wishes was is greater supply in our popular
entertainments of yesteryear (and woefully absent from virtually all of them
today), with Lancaster dedicated to stripping away the accoutrements of a movie
star and Booth, rising to a level of poignantly powerful perfection. The most stirring
moments are owed Doc and Lola’s coming apart at the seams. Rarely, has a
Hollywood debut been more universally praised than Shirley Booth, so fittingly
described by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as “…the kind of a performance that
strikes a match to the screen, and endows the profession of acting with a
towering dignity.”
The attenuated tightrope of Lola’s interminable
burble and her resplendent affection for humanity at large never outlasts its
welcome. Even more incredibly, Booth’s performance does not fall back on affectation.
Fring’s words are as Booth’s own, and, with an authentic nobility. Superficially,
she first appears as the scattershot workhorse, a first impression pealed away
as Booth plums Lola’s delicate virtuosity. Arguably, Booth’s turn would be
nothing at all without Burt Lancaster’s exquisite and craftily complex
performance as the downtrodden Doc. As, in Lancaster there emerges the beaten,
yet brooding portrait of prematurely withered manhood, so grotesquely at odds
with such grand daydreams for his own potential left tragically unrealized. In
Doc’s sustained and nearly silent sustenance, Lancaster manages to emit a
starved craving for that life imagined over the one dealt and chained to
reality. Beneath this, Lancaster emotes the last vestiges of a dying sexual appetite,
quietly to acquiesce to the entrails and leftovers of this sadly stated decline
into abject acceptance.
To these counterpoints of ennui anchored
in personal regrets are Terry Moore’s vivacious college student and Jaeckel’s
reincarnation of the immaculately coiffed blonde Adonis, decidedly as hulking as
he is a very horny paramour. These ‘youngsters’
may lack the precision of their more mature co-stars, but they more than make
up for it with their infusion of youth and all the temptations fraught from and
by it. Come Back, Little Sheba also marks the first time Alcoholics
Anonymous (A.A.) appeared on the screen, with Philip Ober, as its team leader,
Ed Anderson, offering a quiet note of rectitude as a mantra for the
organization. In some ways, the disease of alcoholism is a stand-in for the lifeless
matrimonial abyss, with Lola exhibiting the trademarks of a recovering
alcoholic, yet without actually having succumbed to the drink herself. The movie’s
most devastating and intuitive moments revolve around Lola’s past – her strained
relationships with men (her father, and later, Doc), and her inability to
become liberated from that past in the present. Is it any wonder Booth won, not
only the Oscar, but Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Circle Awards for this
staggeringly original and generously disturbing recital? Interestingly, when it
appeared Booth might not be able to do the movie, owing to prior commitments,
Bette Davis was offered the lead, graciously, to decline it. Meanwhile,
Lancaster, barely 38 at the time, underwent his own metamorphoses in baggy
costuming, padding his waste and stooping to hollow his muscular features,
while shuffling his feet, transforming Doc from a once strong man, sacrificed
by allying his self-worth to less than his equal.
Plot wise: we meet the recovering
alcoholic, Doc Delaney and his wife, Lola, the former having sacrificed a
promising career in medicine after Lola became pregnant with his child. Alas,
the child died and Lola was unable to have any more. Wasting his inheritance,
Doc turned to the bottle for solace. Now, with barely a year’s sobriety behind
him, Doc is polite but remote toward Lola, haunted by the ‘what might have been’
of his own life, while disgusted by Lola’s inability to let go of Sheba, the
little dog that ran away from home and oddly, represents the promise of her own
unfulfilled daydreams. As money is tight, Lola rents to youthful college
student, Marie who brings home Turk, an all-American jock and model. While sketching
Turk’s physique in his form-fitted track suit, Marie is oblivious to either
Lola’s lusting after Turk’s body or Doc’s general disgust with what he
perceives to be a pornographic display going on in his living room. Doc’s
disapproval of Turk has far more to do with his own suppressed desire, even
after Lola explains Marie is engaged to another, Bruce (Walter Kelly), away, though
shortly to come home. Doc’s agitation reaches its critical breaking point when
he suspects Marie has taken Turk to bed. In reality, Turk’s demonstrative overtures
were thwarted by Marie who has gone to bed alone. Doc resorting to the bottle
to quash his suspicions. But Lola reminds him of the many similarities between
Marie and herself when she was also young and desirable.
Unable to reconcile his emotions,
Doc dives into a bottle of whiskey, returning hours later in a drunken rage to
nearly choke his wife in the kitchen before passing out. Marie calls A.A. and
men arrive to take Doc to hospital. The next day, Lola attempts to reconcile with
her estranged father and move out of Doc’s house. But her father will have none
of it. Marie sends a telegram, explaining she and Bruce have since wed. Doc is
released from the hospital and vows to become a better man and do right by his
wife. As the two reunite, Doc notices Lola has renovated the kitchen in his
absence, symbolizing her re-investment in their life together. Lola explains to
Doc she has finally found closure in the death of little Sheba.
Come back,
Little Sheba opened in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas 1952, and quickly
became an industry darling. Today, it remains a largely forgotten piece of
riveting American cinema, partly as Paramount has done so little to keep its
reputation alive in the interim on home video and cable platforms. I honestly do
not understand Paramount’s executive brain trust where the studio’s deep
catalog releases are concerned. For decades, the neglect of the studio, and
outright sell-off of its pre-50’s catalog has all but decimated the reputation
and legacy of one of Hollywood’s oldest picture-making empires. Today,
Paramount has the ability to rectify at least some of this blight. Alas, and
instead, they continue to farm out their catalog to third-party distribution in
remote markets, cribbing from older video masters that, by now, are antique and
deserving of far more TLC to spruce them up for future generations to admire.
No such luck, it seems for Come Back, Little Sheba.
The video master provided to
Australian label, ViaVision, in a ‘region free’ release for its Imprint
collector’s series is not without its merits. And yet, it continues to lag
behind what is ‘acceptable asset management’ for today’s market. While the
grayscale in this B&W feature is remarkably solid, save a few inserts, fade
outs and cut-aways, age-related artifacts are everywhere. At times, they attain
an almost ‘acceptable’ level of invisibility, while at others, they riddle the
image with distracting amounts of dirt, scratches, nicks and chips that could
have – and should have – been easily removed with some basic dust-busting
clean-up and a blue wash applied to the surviving elements. This is advertised
as a new 4K scan. But where’s the sense in 4K without the technical wizardry
applied to stabilize and correct the inherited flaws in these original
elements? The 2.0 mono DTS sounds solid.
We also get an audio commentary from film historian, Scott Harrison that
is comprehensive and a joy to experience, plus, a badly weathered vintage
documentary on the career of Burt Lancaster. Topped off with an even more
brutalized theatrical trailer, Come Back Little Sheba on Blu-ray,
represents this top-tier entertainment in an adequate – though just –
1080p transfer. Could’a, would’a, didn’t! Paramount needs to pick up the baton
here and do more consistent work with their deep catalog. Highly recommended
for content. Marginally recommended for quality.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
4.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
EXTRAS
2
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