There’s a vaguely bothersome echo in Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features, 9.24) that nobody in Hollywood journalist circles seems to want to talk about…but it’s there.
It doesn’t trouble me to any great degree, although it’s grown into a slight roadblock in terms of my core feelings about the lead character, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who is wonderfully played by Gael Garcia Bernal.
The echo I’m speaking of certainly has no place in Diaries itself, which is essentially a young man’s film about the growing of a heart. The story is about the socio-political awakening of Guevara over the course of a road trip he took across South America with a friend, Albert Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), in 1952.
Diaries isn’t about politics or dogma, but compassion. The invisible sub-heading is not “How I Became a Communist” but “How I Happened to See Beyond Myself and Realize How Badly People are Hurting.”

But Salles’ film tells only a little bit about who Guevara was in ’52, and nothing at all about what he would soon become.
Guevara’s Diaries adventure happened only two and a half years before he hooked up with Fidel Castro in Mexico, about three years before he sailed to Cuba to join the revolution, and only about seven years before Guevara was organizing hundreds of firing-squad executions in the wake of Castro’s Cuban takeover.
The Motorcycle Diaries is about a young man finding his humanity, but as Guevara got older and tougher his life seemed to be less about caring than anger, vengeance and a Marxist philosophical purity that seems fairly bizarre by today’s standards.
In the movie Guevara flirts with various women, shows kindness to strangers, and cares for lepers in a hospital along the Amazon. He’s an unequivocal sweetheart.
In real life Guevara was a hard-core cadre who apparently came to believe more and more in black and white moral extremes. Oppressors bad, revolutionaries good, etc. Hate, it seems, was as much of a driving force in his life as love, and perhaps a bit more so.
In a 1967 speech, he said the following: “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

A taste of this side of Guevara comes through in a DVD documentary called El Che: Investigating a Legend (White Star Video). Initially released in April 2003, it offers a standard account of Guevara’s life with lots of good newsreel footage, plus a bonus doc about some guy trying to relive Guevara’s 1952 adventure on a trek along the same path.
I’m not saying the primary doc is first-rate, but it’s passable. It’s got lots of footage of Guevara in all his incarnations. It has several friends and comrades talking about him at length. And it offers a reasonably intelligent understanding of what his life amounted to and how it all went down.
You can’t watch El Che without thinking two things.
One is that The Motorcycle Diaries, as sublime as it is on its own terms, deals with Che Guevara’s life and legend in the same way a doc about George Bush’s years as a boola-boola Yale student would probably explain why he decided to hang out with his father’s friends, decimate the surplus handed to him by the Clinton administration, and become a “war president.” Which is to say, a little but not much.
The second is that Steven Soderbergh’s Che, based on a script by Terrence Malick and focusing on Guevara’s revolutionary years, right up to his shooting death at the hands of Bolivian solders, is going to be a much darker piece.
This film will apparently follow Guevara from Mexico in the mid ’50s to Cuba to the Congo, and finally to Bolivia, where Guevara met his fate in late 1967.
I got one other thing from El Che. Revolutions are bloody affairs and a lot of Batista loyalists were put to death upon Guevara’s orders, but for better or worse the man was a serious revolutionary. He believed enough in his ideals to die for them.

Hablo Americano

Everyone spoke Spanish in the Mexican portions of Steve Soderbergh’s Traffic, and that seemed to most of us like the right and natural way to go. But a director friend has told me the plan with Soderbergh’s Che is to shoot it in English, and that sounds a bit strange. In fact, I’m having trouble accepting this.
Can you imagine a Soderbergh film about Che Guevara with everyone talking in Spanish-inflected English, like Jack Palance and Omar Sharif did in Richard Fleisher’s 1969 Che? No, no….can’t be right. Too surreal.

But then what U.S.-based producer is going to cough up a portion of $40 million (the alleged budget) for a film that’s almost entirely Spanish-speaking?
Don’t misunderstand — I’d be there in a second. I’m hoping Soderbergh does shoot it in Spanish. I’m just wondering about the Average Joes.
Focus Features is listed as the U.S. distributor. A small group of foreign-based investor-producers, including Brazil’s Morena Filmes and France’s Wild Bunch, are pooled on this thing.
If and when Che happens (it’s supposed to roll in August of ’05), Benicio del Toro will plays Che and Javier Bardem will play Fidel Castro. Benjamin Bratt, Ryan Gosling and Franka Potente will costar.

Looking for Girls

Too many guys read Hollywood Elsewhere…no, wrongly put. I’m saying I don’t have enough women readers. Only about 10%, when you get right down to it. This is partly my fault. Okay, mostly. My taste in movies is too Michael Mann-ish, I suppose, and I don’t have a knack for reaching into women’s souls with my prose.
I don’t want this state of affairs to continue. This would be a more interesting site if more women took part. It really would. So here’s the deal: I’m offering a regular weekly column on this site to any woman film critic or Hollywood columnist who wants to try for the gig. Really.
But (a) you have to be at least moderately on the young side (i.e., no 58 year olds), (b) you have to know how to write as well as Veronica Geng, Stephanie Zacharek or Pauline Kael, or an approximation thereof, (c) you have to know this town fairly well, and (d) you have to promise me you won’t quit after four or five months like Patricia Vidal did with David Poland after she met some guy, etc.
All you have to really be is good. Good enough, I mean, to get hired away from this site after a year or so by some employer whose terms I won’t be able to match.

Recants

Every film critic or regular moviegoer has gone through some kind of reappraisal about this or that film from time to time.
Some aren’t honest enough to admit to an occasional modification. But to change one’s mind (or to admit you weren’t paying enough attention the first time, or that you were having an off day) is totally allowable….as long as you’re generally resolute in your views. After all, there are a lot of Zelig’s out there.
When I first saw Eyes Wide Shut, I called it intriguing, stimulating, first-rate… and that I was particularly looking forward to subsequent viewings, as all Kubrick films get better and better the more times you see them. But it didn’t happen. EWS got a little bit worse every time I re-saw it.
(And yet, oddly, it’s an absorbing film. I’ve always been susceptible to the simple scene-to-scene experience of just “watching” it, even if it doesn’t add up to much.)
I feel nothing but shame for having written a qualified rave of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, which I did in this space. I was wrong, wrong…terribly wrong.

One of the most famous critical turnabouts happened in response to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was fairly heavily trashed by most mainstream critics when it opened in April 1968. But by the end of the summer, after the film had caught on with stoned audiences as a kind of new-wave mystical experience film, a few critics wrote mea culpas.
That same year, Andrew Sarris, the Jefferson of auteurism, put Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner on his ten-best list. He later apologized, saying that “I want only to forget.”
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther tore into Bonnie and Clyde when it first came out in the spring of ’67. He called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of [this] sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
Crowther would have done well to take another look with a fresh eye after Bonnie and Cluyde‘s re-release a few months later (pushed through by star-producer Warren Beatty)…but he didn’t. The film went on to become a bona fide classic.
I asked some critic friends about this syndrome on Monday. I understand why only a few of them wrote back. Nobody wants to show their soft white underbelly, especially to their editors.
Roger Ebert says he “recently upgraded Donnie Darko from 2.5 to 3 stars, and The Brown Bunny from worst ever to three stars, but both reviews were based on revised versions of the films.” (Nearly a half hour of dead air was removed from the version of Bunny that was shown at the ’03 Cannes Film Festival.) But these are fresh looks, not turnarounds.

Seattle Weekly and L.A. Weekly critic Tim Appelo admits to some regrets, among them a rave in The Oregonian for Jim Carrey’s Batman Forever performance as ‘the Riddler.’
“[A local exhibitor] told me that every star I awarded a film to represented $5,000 in revenue, because the O is a monopoly paper,” Appelo recalls. “And my $25,000 five-star review of Batman Forever almost got me lynched by maybe 10% of my readers. What can I say? I was new to the Alex-in-A-Clockwork-Orange-like plight of the daily newspaper reviewer, and so dazzled by the eerieness of Carrey’s talent that I saw what I wanted and what was not there.”
“And the fact is, if you don’t sometimes change your mind about a movie, you’re out of your mind. Pauline Kael, who refused to see movies twice and falsely claimed to remember them all entirely, was so confident in her stone-inscribed opinion that she would cut off a friendship for life if anybody dared disagree with her on a single film, even if she helped launch their careers (e.g., Owen Gleiberman).”
Los Angeles-based critic Luke Thompson says that “almost every critic will tell you they’ve since thought better of praising Forrest Gump. This partly has do with the [political] baggage it picked up. I didn’t especially think of Gump as a condemnation of the ’60s counterculture at first, but that became what a lot of people latched onto, and indeed, it’s there, and repellant.
“Kevin Smith is someone I’ve seriously had to rethink,” says Thompson. “His recent output is so feeble that it makes me question what came before. I’m pretty sure I’d still like Mallrats — which I related to because it resembled my own teen years spent in malls — but I have my doubts about Clerks, and I’ve definitely thought better of Chasing Amy.”
Variety critic Robert Koehler feels he was “much too harsh on Jean Luc Godard’s King Lear, in my analysis in the Los Angeles Times at the time of its very brief theatrical release. I misunderstood it as Godard’s analysis of ‘Lear,’ when it was actually a kind of meta-documentary on Godard’s filmmaking practice at that point in his home in Rolle, Switzerland.

“I think now that Godard’s Lear is not only one of the more valuable of his works from the ’80s, but one of the more original re-thinkings of Shakespeare on film –Shakespeare completely absorbed into the modern world, the way Heiner Muller did on the German stage.
“I also remember hating Antonioni’s L’Avventura on my first viewing as a teenager….but, of course, you would hate this film as a teen! Only when I was in college a couple of years later did I get it, and it was a major epiphany. Which is perhaps why it remains my favorite film.”
“A director who was once (and remains) hip to dismiss is Claude Lelouch, and I used to place him in the ‘ignore’ file. But Lelouch’s work is pretty glorious over time — silly, but divinely silly, rapturously silly. Giddy movies at their giddiest.”
All right, that’s it. I draw the line at anyone blowing kisses to Claude Lelouch. I just lost it for a minute there…sorry. Go for it, Bob. Whom else do you like? Mervyn LeRoy?
“It’s important to consider that films work on emotions and are therefore by nature offer different payoffs on multiple viewings,” says DVD Newsletter editor Doug Pratt. “There are times when the New Age optimism in Easy Rider seems laughably naive, and other times when that aspect of the film is less important than how well the film captures the spirit of the [late’60s counter-culture].
“In fact, Jack Nicholson’s ‘they’re afraid of what you represent’ speech gets to the heart of your red state vs. blue state quandary better than any analysis I’ve ever seen.”

The Outfit

“I totally agree about wanting to see a DVD of The Outfit, easily one of the finest B-movies ever made, in my humble opinion at least. The fact that some horrible films are getting the special-edition treatment when fantastic films like this are ignored is criminal. Even a bare-bones release would be something, just so long as I have the film in my collection.
“Ditto for Point Blank, which is John Boorman’s finest work and a brilliantly structured exercise. Surely somebody somewhere is working on a special edition? What does it say about industry priorities when that Mel Gibson atrocity Payback , a remake of Point Blank, is in circulation all over and this vastly superior original only gets an airing on Turner Classic Movies?
“Point Blank and The Outfit are both based on Richard Stark books, and in fact are both about the same character, who in the books is called Parker.” — Martin Stanley

Vistors Wanted

Joseph Kay’s piece in the current VISITORS column is tightly edited, nicely laid out and getting good play. If any of you want to be next week’s guest columnist, you know what to do. Send your submissions to me by Friday morning, please. Thanks.

I want to put this carefully so as not to be misinterpreted. I’m trying to formulate what I consider to be a modest and temperate industry initiative. The unmalicious goal is the total termination of acting jobs given to Rhys Ifans, the downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair who, in his movie roles, is often given to beatific expressions and saying lines in such a way as to produce vague mystifications.
It’s just that Ifans, a 36 year-old, six-foot-two Welshman, has been cast as more or less the same guy in film after film, and the cumulative effect has finally reached repulsion levels. Whatever the character, whatever the story or film title…Human Nature, Danny Deckchair, portions of Vanity Fair, Roger Michell’s Enduring Love…Ifans lumbers up to the plate and goes into his gangly, grungy, S.P.C.A. mode.

Did Ifans’ performances in The Shipping News, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Hotel deliver the same? Memory isn’t serving; I may have erased the hard drive out of some insuppressable instinct.
In Enduring Love, which I saw Thursday night, Ifans plays what struck me as hands-down the most profoundly icky and repulsive stalker character in the history of film. I didn’t want to see Ifans killed in some quick tidy way; I wanted to see a little torture thrown in first. The story, set in England and based on the Ian McEwan novel, is about the after-effects of a bizarre falling death upon two men (Ifans being one) who happen to witness it. It seemed only natural that Ifans character should be dealt with similarly. A plunge off a nice tall building, say. For symmetry’s sake.
Lamentably, Michell is too original a director to go for such a stock indulgence. This is a strong disciplined film with nothing so mundane as mere audience satisfaction on its agenda. It doesn’t compromise or indulge in half-measures.
I know I soundmuddled, but in its own way Enduring Love is a very commanding
work.
But I really, really don’t want to see Ifans playing a downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair given to beatific expressions and saying lines in such a way as to produce vague mystifications ever again. I don’t know anything or presume anything. As ship’s engineer Steve McQueen said to the first mate in The Sand Pebbles (and yes, I’ve referenced this line before), “I’m just tellin’ ya.”



I’m not trying to be cruel or cause pain. If I know this industry, Ifans will continue to work for years to come. (He’s apparently now making, or about to make, a new movie with Human Nature director Michael Gondry.) Casting directors generally have minds of their own and couldn’t give two shits.
Anyway, he’s got money. The IMDB says Ifans has “donated nearly a million pounds” to Welsh university called Ysgol Brynhyfryd, Ruthin, in order to provide a stage and better drama facilities.
Otherwise Engaged
Well, guess what? The new Hollywood Elsewhere site had a few too many loose ends to finesse as of Thursday morning, so after pacing back and forth a bit I made the decision to delay the debut until next Wednesday (9.8). A case of having bitten off more than I could chew, even with the help of a group of good-guy web designers, henceforth to be known as Team Elsewhere.
Everyone I know has left town for the Labor Day weekend or the Telluride Film Festival, so it’ll probably be better to launch it next week when everyone’s back (or at least at the Toronto Film Festival, which starts on Thursday, 9.9).
In fact, all these added concerns are the main reason why the column was late in going up today.



Some of the new columns will post on Wednesday; others may take a tiny bit longer. I’m not especially looking forward to all the extra work, to be honest, but slapping it together has been fun so far. The exhausted, frazzled kind, I mean.
Things are going great with the new columns and columnists. (Two have threatened to quit so far, although they’ve since reconsidered. This is fine. Creative people tend to be temperamental.) A friend has suggested posting an interview column devoted solely to a weekly q & a with industry types….okay. Another friend has advised that I don’t take on too many new burdens at once and take things a bit more slowly. Never! Brazilian critic Pablo Villaca has agreed to write a weekly column, and we’re trying to figure out a title. How does “Burden of Dreams” sound?
It’s been so much fun putting this thing together it’s nearly taken the sting out of my not going to Toronto or Telluride. I’ll be taking a half-assed stab at “covering” Toronto since I’ve been given a look at some of the films in advance L.A. screenings.
Thanks to everyone for sending in Visitor pitches and Best and Worst lists. Don’t stop, please.
Likeness



I wouldn’t want to suggest that U.S. Senator Zell Miller, the conservative Democrat who delivered that hellfire speech a few days ago at the Republican National Convention that tore into John Kerry (and which was followed by an orifice-ripping interview with “Hardball” host Chris Matthews) isn’t a swell, stand-up guy.

And I’m not suggesting his aura is anything close to that of Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor in the Star Wars films. Miller traffics in honest rage. McDiarmid’s malevolence is quiet and serpent-like. But the fury in Miller’s eyes is something
else. He’s more than a scrapper; he’s a born hater. That junkyard dog snarl, those threats of physical initimidation when he spoke to Matthews….whoa. You wouldn’t want to get into any kind of fight with him. He’s probably the kind that
bites.
Hitchcock Supreme
I sometimes get this feeling that I’m dawdling somehow when I write about DVDs. It’s a pretty lame attitude, of course. Today especially. We all share the same new-movie expectations that percolate every Friday, but when the big theatrical debuts are Wicker Park, The Cookout and Paparrazzi…well, pass. Give me the comforts of home, a little air conditioning and the new Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection (Warner Home Video, out 9.7).
This is easily the coolest, spiffiest, most treasure-stocked Hitchcock collection ever sent to home video. You get this kind of hyperbole from DVD reviewers all the time, but this one’s really exceptional. Hitchcock used to call his films “slices of cake,” and damned if these DVD’s aren’t equivalent to the most delectable dessert you’ve ever tasted.
It’s a collection of nine films, all but one newly remastered (the exception being North by Northwest, which was given a first-class makeover a few years ago), and each newie looking more handsomely detailed and finely tuned than ever before. Six are classics — Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, I Confess , North by Northwest, Suspicion and Foreign Correspondent . Three are intriguing so-so’s — The Wrong Man, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Stage Fright.

The great thing about these films looking so crisp and radiant is that they look almost “new,” in a way. The best theatrical screenings I’ve ever seen of each (at the Academy or MOMA or wherever) simply don’t compare. I’ve used this analogy before, but they look, scene by scene, like straight-from-the-lab “dailies.”
And they’re all knock-outs, extras-wise. They’ve all got appreciation or making-of docs produced by the great Laurent Bouzereau, who’s done a slew of Hitchcock docs for past Universal Home Video releases. The same Hitch authorities are interviewed for each — Peter Bogdanovich, Time critic Richard Shickel, TCM host Robert Osborne, film historian Bill Krohn, Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia — but others turn up here and there.
The most decked-out extras package accompanies Strangers, and is contained on a whole separate disc. The extra “heads” include star Farley Granger, Robert Walker Jr. (son of costar Robert Walker) and Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano.
There’s a serenity thing inside Walker, Jr., whose mom was actress Jennifer Jones. His descriptions of his father’s alcoholism, which he says his dad never imposed on him, and the story of his Walker’s accidental death (the injection of sedative by a psychiatrist when Walker was already stewed to the gills) are surprisingly touching. Walker died in August 1951, or about seven weeks after Strangers opened.
Strangers on a Train seems to get better every time I see it. It’s one delicious bite after another. It’s odd that Stage Fright, one of Hitchcock’s worst films, was made just before Strangers, as the differences couldn’t be more yin-yang. Strangers is assured and masterful; Stage Fright is a trifle and close to an irritation.
Strangers has one of my favorite all-time cuts (a fast fade, not a jump), with Granger’s “I said I could strangle her!” followed by that closeup of Walker’s hands. And has there ever been a more concise portrait of obsessive malice than that shot of Walker staring at the tennis-playing Granger from the stands, sphinx-like, while everyone else’s head is whipping back and forth?



Walker’s Bruno, portrayed with an effeteness that was fairly brazen for its time, is one of the dandiest bon vivant psychopaths in motion picture history.
Composer Dimitri Tiomkin (who also did the music for Dial M for Murder) is known for underlining and bombast. His Strangers score goes there at times, but it’s one of his fullest and most particular. That passage when Granger is seen walking up the stairs of Walker’s mansion in the darkness, with that big Great Dane growling at him from a landing, is, I believe, one of the creepiest pieces ever composed for a film, and at the same time one of the most thrillingly performed.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a soft spot for those brassy Tiomkin fanfares that play over the Warner Bros. logo. The one that heralds the beginning of Dial M for Murder is so emphatic it’s almost humorous, although yet there’s something oddly alluring about music that tries to wallop you into submission with such skill.
The fine detail and luminous tones in Dial M for Murder can’t be praised too highly. It makes it almost as much fun to study as the 3-D version, which I saw at New York’s 8th Street Playhouse around 1980. In that slightly oversaturated mid-1950s way this 1953 film looks wonderfully fake…and yet more precise than it’s ever seemed before. The black in Ray Milland’s tuxedo doesn’t, for the first time, seem to be shaded in a strange dark blue. The DVD is so exacting you can just about see everyone’s pancake makeup. You can see the difference in texture between Ray Milland’s real hair and his toupee.
DVD images give everything away, of course. The fine wires lifting up the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, holding up the spaceships in War of the Worlds, etc. Now they’ve exposed a couple of Foreign Correspondent tricks.
I’ve always enjoyed that scene in which George Sanders, portraying a good-guy British journalist, jumps out of a fourth-story hotel window to escape Nazi villains. He breaks his fall by punching feet-first through a street-level cloth awning. Now you can see it’s a crude dummy (barely human-looking, much less resembling Sanders) crashing through, quickly followed (of course) by a shot of Sanders himself hitting the street.



You can also “step” your way through the plane-crash-at-sea sequence and see the paper screen ripping apart. Back up…some of you haven’t read about this. To make the crash look convincing, Hitchcock projected footage of the sea getting closer and closer on to a thin paper screen, and then sent a vat of water crashing through right at the moment of “impact.”
The Wrong Man, a mistaken-identity police procedural with Henry Fonda in the lead role, is an expertly made thing. It’s also grim and flat-feeling. Hitchcock’s apparent intent was to convince viewers of its true-story origins (and to fortify the general tone of sadness and frustration) by shooting things in a low-key, non-flashy way. Anyway, he overdid this aspect by half.
But it has one near-great scene. Fonda’s troubles are about witnesses having identified him as a hold-up man. The real guilty man,who looks almost exactly like Fonda, is finally arrested near the end and brought to the same 110th Precinct where Fonda was first questioned and booked. Just as the guilty guy is being led in, one of the two detectives (Charles Cooper) on the Fonda case is walking out.
Cooper glances at the perp but doesn’t react. He steps outside and walks down the stoop and onto the sidewalk, the camera tracking with him. He takes twelve brisk steps before it hits him. He takes eight increasingly slower steps until stopping. The camera goes in for a closeup. For the first time Cooper isn’t wearing that steely smug-cop look he’s had all through the film. He looks bothered. Dealing with an unconventional thought seems to almost scare him, but he finally accepts it. He turns and walks back into the precinct, and we know Fonda’s troubles are over.

Suspicion, an intriguing parlor drama about a mousey wallflower type (Joan Fontaine) who marries a dishonest swindler and possible murderer (Cary Grant), is mainly known by connoisseurs as Hitchcock’s cop-out film. The initial plan was to
show Grant disposing of Fontaine with poison, and then unwittingly posting a letter that will convict him. But Hitchcock caved to studio pressure (Grant can’t play a killer, etc.) and filmed a sappy turnabout finale that nobody over the age of
five or six could accept. The DVD makes the film look better than ever, though, and the appreciation doc is first-rate.
I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the tube 15 or 20 years ago, and that was sufficient, I think.
Style Change
As I’m no longer an official Poop Shooter (although the column will stay on the site for another few weeks, courtesy of Kevin Smith), I’m no longer bound by Poop Shoot copy rules. So no more caps when it comes to movie titles, TV shows, books or anything else. Back to italics.
Right Things
The folks at Columbia TriStar Home Video pulled a boner when they released that pan-and-scan version of Castle Keep a couple of months ago, but they got right on the stick and decided to put out the proper widescreen (2.35 to 1) version as quickly as they could. It’ll hit the stands on 11.2.



A disc of George Stevens’ Gunga Din, another selection from my recent list of 20 most-wanted DVDs, will be released by Warner Home Video on 12.7 The special features will include a making-of doc, “On Location with Gunga Din,” with commentary by Rudy Behlmer. (The color footage comes from Stevens’ silent home movies. The Image laser disc version that came out in the mid ’90s had the same color footage, but with Stevens and, as I recall, his son George Jr. narrating.)
I’ve also been told that Paramount Home Video is putting out a High and the Mighty DVD with an appreciation/making-of doc. The 1954 film has been going through a restoral process at a post-production outfit located in Valencia. The DVD will be finished and released sometime in ’05.