Screen Legend Collection

Universal Home Video has issued the first three volumes in what promises to be a rich new series, “The Screen Legend Collection.”  The idea is to find a marketable format for some of the lesser-known films of some of the studio’s better-known stars (both Universal’s own and those it took over from Paramount when Universal bought most of Paramount’s pre-1948 sound films). In these first entries, at least, it works quite well.

 

The first three volumes, which each consist of five features generously spread over three discs, are devoted to Bing Crosby, Cary Grant and Rock Hudson, though only hard-core fans will be familiar with many of the titles.

In the Crosby set are “Waikiki Wedding” (1937), “Double or Nothing” (1937), “East Side of Heaven” (1939), “If I Had My Way” (1940) and “Here Come the Waves” (1944). The Grant collection offers “Thirty Day Princess” (1934), “Kiss and Make Up” (1934), “Wings in the Dark” (1935), “Big Brown Eyes” (1936) and “Wedding Present” (1936). Only “Big Brown Eyes,” directed by Raoul Walsh, has a critical reputation, and a minor one at that; the others are largely bread-and-butter pictures of the sort the studios turned out by the dozens every year: light comedies and tear-jerkers intended to keep the stars working between more prestigious and expensive projects.

The Rock Hudson collection stands out, if only because Hudson is the only true Universal star of the lot. (Crosby was largely a lifetime Paramount man; the Grant films are from his early Paramount contract, from which he escaped as soon as he could to become one of Hollywood’s most successful freelancers.) The five films here — presented in excellent transfers, as are all of the films in the three sets I’ve seen — follow the course of Hudson’s career, from his humble contract player beginnings to his triumphs in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when he was one of the most reliable box-office draws in the business.

There are few better illustrations of that still useful distinction between actor and star than Hudson, who never claimed any particular acting talent and seldom strayed from the square-shouldered, straight-talking character he perfected in the early ’50s. The most frequently repeated story about Hudson is that he was never cast in a high school play because he was unable to remember his lines. (This was the famous New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., an institution that also produced Charlton Heston, Ann-Margret, Virginia Madsen and Lili Taylor.) The second-most-repeated story holds that in Hudson’s debut picture, Mr. Walsh’s 1948 Warner Brothers production “Fighter Squadron,” he required 38 takes to complete his one and only line of dialogue.

But with those looks and his 6-foot-4 physique, Hudson did not need to depend on verbal facility for success. According to legend, Hudson, then Roy Harold Scherer Jr., was driving a truck and hanging around studio gates when he was discovered by the Hollywood agent Henry Wilson, who renamed him after the Rock of Gibraltar and the Hudson River. After the “Fighter Squadron” experience, Mr. Wilson placed him at Universal, where he rose through the ranks of extras and bit players, occasionally working alongside a boy from the Bronx named Bernard Schwartz, whose career, once he became Tony Curtis, paralleled Hudson’s.

Among Hudson’s first major roles was “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?,” a 1952 musical comedy, directed by Douglas Sirk, included in the present set. The German-born Mr. Sirk was to become the most important filmmaker in Hudson’s career, guiding him through seven more films at Universal, including the now classic melodramas “All That Heaven Allows” (1955) and “Written on the Wind” (1956), as well as what may be Hudson’s most emotionally complex performance in one of the best of all screen adaptations of William Faulkner, “The Tarnished Angels” (1958, based on Faulkner’s “Pylon”).

More typical of Hudson’s early Universal career and included in the collection is “The Golden Blade” (1953), a back-lot Arabian Nights adventure that is now fraught with contemporary political echoes. Hudson is Harun, a prince of Basra who has come to Baghdad to avenge the murder of his father, only to fall in love with the caliph’s beautiful daughter (Piper Laurie, daringly doing without a chador). Hudson might have remained in this kind of entertaining fluff had not the Sirk melodramas raised his profile high enough for George Stevens to borrow him for “Giant” (1956). Suddenly Hudson the nonactor was surrounded by some of the leading proponents of Method acting, including his co-stars in the film, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo.

The mumbling interiority of the Method was the exact contradiction of Hudson’s ramrod straight presentational style. But instead of being blown off screen by the more modern technique of his cast mates, Hudson held his own with his reassuring squareness. He became, in a way, the anti-Dean, the anti-Brando: a firm upholder of the old stand-and-deliver style, of even enunciation and immaculate appearance. The contrast somehow made his star shine brighter.

Two of the post-“Giant” films included in Universal’s collection — “The Last Sunset” (1961), a western, and “The Spiral Road” (1962), a medical drama — feature Hudson at his most sober and patriarchal, a pillar of traditional masculinity in a movie landscape that had become peopled with fashionably conflicted neurotics, like those played by the fast-rising actor Paul Newman. (The last film in the set, “A Very Special Favor” from 1965, is a dim sex comedy with Leslie Caron standing in for Doris Day.) Hudson, like his friend John Wayne, had become a standard-bearer of a kind of strength and assurance that was leaking out of the movie hero business by the late 1960s and would soon find its last refuge on television — as did Rock Hudson.

We know now, of course, that Hudson was not a “natural” — that given the circumstances of his life as a gay man in Hollywood, he was performing, on screen and off, a role that was as demanding as it was necessary to the continuation of his career. The “Rock Hudson Screen Legend Collection” may not change anyone’s ideas about Hudson’s talent, but it is a record of a man who made an honest living at a time when honesty was perhaps the one luxury he could not afford. Universal Home Video, $29.98, not rated.