"How do you spell extenuating?" Michael Whiteacre (Dean Martin) asks Noah Ackerman (Montgomery Clift) as they sit filling out their draft cards.

Hey pallies, likes today we shares news of the most recent Blu-ray Dino-disc released!  From the Boston blog "EDGE MEDIA NETWORK" comes Mr. Jake Mulligan's remarkable review of the Blu-ray DVD release of "The Young Lions." Mulligan's superb scribin's note a number of extraordinary extras to this new release from Twilight Times.

These two extras standout as huge huge reasons to grabs a copy of this new Dino-release (which btw pallies I read elsewhere is limited to only 3000 copies):

(1) The "release offers an additional audio track that isolates the score music of Hugo Friedhofer."
(2) "The disc also features an audio commentary, where writer Lem Dobbs joins Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman to talk about the many angles of the 167-minute feature."

This is the flick that showed the world our most beloved Dino's depth of actin' ability and changed folks opinion of him as simply a comedian who could sing.  Likes while we indeed have a regular DVD copy of "Lions," we just knows that we needs to gets our hands on this Blu-ray version as well.

We thanks Mr. Jake Mulligan and all the pallies of "EDGE MEDIA NETWORK" for puttin' on to this newest addition to available Dino-treasure.  To checks this out in it's original source, simply clicks on the tag of this here Dino-message.   Dino-desirin', DMP

The Young Lions
by Jake Mulligan
Contributor
Friday Jul 17, 2015



 "How do you spell extenuating?" Michael Whiteacre (Dean Martin) asks Noah Ackerman (Montgomery Clift) as they sit filling out their draft cards. They're both 1-A-slated to report for training imminently -- but Whiteacre, a Martin-esque lounge singer and performer, has designs on staying stateside for the entirety of WWII. Ackerman, alternatively, is more than ready to accept the service. It's just that the service doesn't want him: when he and Whiteacre end up at the barracks together, Noah is tormented perpetually by the other soldiers for his Jewish heritage (the slurs are softened, for the film's sake, by using forms of the phrase "he's from New York" as a racial euphemism.) They're two sides of the American wartime experience, and they're two-thirds of "The Young Lions," Edward Dymytryk's 1957 black-and-white cinemascope war epic-a film marked by its focus on individual perspectives within mass chaos.

Marlon Brando provides the third arm of the triptych narrative as Christian Diestl, a young German naively dedicated to the rhetoric of the Nazi party. Or at least, he is when we meet him in 1938, as he trysts with Margaret Freemantle (Barbara Rush -- we'll later see the character with Dean Martin on her arms.) But by the time he's in Africa, fighting under a sociopathic commander, and seeing wounded troops massacred without pity on a regular basis by his so-called comrades, he's having second thoughts. But, this being wartime, those second thoughts don't count for a damn thing.

Twilight Time's Blu-ray release offers an additional audio track that isolates the score music of Hugo Friedhofer, whose compositions for "The Best Years of Our Lives" -- another three-character WWII epic told from individual perspectives rather than national ones. Like "Lives," "Young Lions" walks us through a series of episodes where the coincidental connections between the three men develop, percolate, and clash. Dmytryk capably fills the wide-ranging frame with the accumulated details of wartime memories (filled foot-lockers and ratty beds in a row,) but fails to find aesthetic connections among the narrative ones. "Best Years," under director William Wyler, often packs two or three different narrative developments into single shots, emphasizing the interplay between the ostensibly disconnected lives. Dmytryk hunts for a similar poetry -- but with his characters rarely in the same spaces, he only finds prose and line breaks.

The disc also features an audio commentary, where writer Lem Dobbs joins Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman to talk about the many angles of the 167-minute feature. The trio have done their homework: in addition to commenting on the psychological and social subtexts of the picture, they relate numerous production details (such as how Martin, coming off his films with Jerry Lewis, was anxious to establish himself as a forceful dramatic actor,) and compare the movie to the novel it was based on, as well as to the other films of its era. Kirgo also provides an essay, of comparable depth: she spins a wonderful appreciation of both the actors and the lesser-known members of the crew.

Among the forgotten artists who get a shout-out is editor Dorothy Spencer, who helped to cut great films by Raoul Walsh, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, among innumerable others. And her patient structuring of "Young Lions" --which lets the individual incidents occurring to each character play out uninterrupted, like chapters in a book, rather than "cross-cutting" from one story to another-affords the film a formal elegance that greatly accentuates the inevitable intersection of the three narrative threads. Dmytryk's inability to craft visual rhymes may hobble the film, especially in comparison to "The Best Years." But Spencer's masterfully-paced rhythm provides the film with another quality: the slowly-revealed expanse of a novel grand in scope.

"The Young Lions"
Blu-ray
Screenarchives.com
$29.95