Movie studios have utilized the compact size of the DVD format for all sorts of interesting multi-disc packages, but it’s hard to make much sense out of the Columbia Pictures “Martini Movies” series.
When I first heard about the new Columbia line, I assumed the movies would be kitschy, retro flicks from the late 1950s/early 1960s “Mad Men” era of guilt-free drinking, smoking and messing around.
The 1957 rag trade expose, “The Garment Jungle,” fits into the well-dressed, heavy-drinking Manhattan world we have all come to love on the hit AMC series, but what are “Dollars” (1971) and “The New Centurions” (1972) doing with “Martini Movies” tags on them?
“Dollars” is a forgettable Warren Beatty-Goldie Hawn heist comedy — set in wintry Germany and padded to 120 minutes — and “The New Centurions” is a rather grim Los Angeles police drama, starring George C. Scott, about the personal toll of law enforcement work.
The only common ground I could find in the series was the fact that the movies were all rather obscure Columbia Pictures releases that had not yet appeared on DVD.
Another picture in the set, “Affair in Trinidad,” has the campy elements that “Dollars” and “The New Centurions” are lacking, but is a pretty standard Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford melodrama from 1952.
Hayworth was never a great actress, but if you watch “Trinidad” you can see why she was such a big star. She’s luscious but likeable, taking the darker elements out of the bad girl roles she played so often.
In “Trinidad” Hayworth plays a nightclub singer-dancer whose husband appears to commit suicide in the opening scene.
We quickly learn the couple was estranged and that Hayworth’s hubby might have known too much about a spy ring on the island. Glenn Ford arrives in the role of Hayworth’s grieving brother-in-law, but it doesn’t take long for things to heat up between these two mourners.
The picture often plays like a bargain-basement “Casablanca” but the stars are fun to watch. Hayworth does two numbers in the movie — dubbed by another singer as was the case in most of her films — and oozes sex appeal.
The spy plot turns out to be more topical than you might expect — the bad guys are terrorist-gangsters with plans to build a missile launcher in Trinidad that could hit targets in the U.S.
The best of the “Martini Movies” bunch is “The Garment Jungle” which I had never seen before. Although the picture was made at a time when studios often faked New York City on Hollywood backlots, the drama has extensive location work that adds tremendous color to this tale of corruption in the garment business.
Lee J. Cobb stars as a business owner who has been paying a shady character played by Richard Boone to keep the union out of his shop. Cobb’s straight arrow son (Kerwin Matthews) comes home from his stint in the service, eager to go to work for dad.
Soon, the young man is embroiled in a labor-management dispute that escalates into extortion and murder. “The Garment Jungle” has a tough film noir feel — and some surprisingly shocking violence for the late 1950s — and is packed with wonderful character actors such as Robert Loggia and Joseph Wiseman.
