COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA: Blu-ray re-issue (Paramount, 1952) Kino Lorber
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Shrewdly
released by Paramount Pictures just under the wire to qualify for the Oscar
race, 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 peeled 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 gutted 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.
Paramount first peddled
this older video master to Australian label, ViaVision, in a ‘region free’
release for its Imprint collector’s series. It’s now done the same for Kino
state’s side. And while not without its merits, the transfer quality here
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 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. Ported over from the ViaVision release, an
audio commentary from film historian, Scott Harrison that is comprehensive and
a joy to experience and theatrical trailer. Shorn from this release, a badly
weathered vintage documentary on the career of Burt Lancaster. Come Back
Little Sheba on Blu-ray, represents a 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. Highly recommended for
content. Marginally recommended for quality.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
4.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3
EXTRAS
1
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