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Golden Boy
Category: DVD |
List Price: $19.94
Our Price: $17.99 |
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As of: January 07th, 2009 02:46:59 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 May we PLEASE see more 30's Stanwyck films on dvd, Sony?
Stanwyck did approx 35 films during the 1930's, and many of the them are with Columbia, as she was shared with them and Warner Brothers. Sony, PLEASE get busy putting these films out on dvd, her fans deserve it and many other stars of the same period get much better treatment than she. I hope Amazon can pass the word onto the studios that not everyone wants to see the absolute dreck that is coming out of the studios today.
Golden Boy..Wherever you are?
This is a great movie made in a banner year for movies. 1939. Golden Boy introduced William Holden to millions of fans. It was Barbara Stanwyck who stood by him and convinced the producers to keep him in the movie. The results are evident. Holden plays the confused young man torn between his love of music and love for boxing, not to mention his love for the tough and complicated Stanwyck. The dialogue is good and the portrayal of an Italian -American family of the time and the father-son struggle and the romantic adventure all play as well today as they did in 1939. When Stanwyck received the Special Oscar in 1982 she paid tribute to Holden with the words "to my Golden Boy, wherever you are." Both William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck live on forever in film and in this great movie. Bravo to Golden Boy.
 No so golden gloves
Some films age badly, but Golden Boy practically decomposes before your eyes. Not the print, which is crisp and beautiful as new in Columbia's recent DVD, but in plot and dialogue it's beyond prehistoric. A-list production values it may have, but boy, is it bad.
Clifford Odets may have fashioned himself as a champion of the working man, but his patronising portrayal of violinist-boxer William Holden's immigrant family makes a Chico Marx routine look like Arthur Miller by comparison. No cliché is left unturned, be it Lee J. Cobb's Gepetto-like Ay-a-Tallyana papa, the loveable wife-beating brother-in-law (she loves it really: no, she really DOES) or Holden's Golden Boy playing Brahms' Cradle Song on the violin - you'll be rooting for him to bust his hand so he can never play the violin again. Ye gods, the man even names a black fighter - I'm not kidding - the Chocolate Drop. And the dialog! The cast should have been paid danger money for going anywhere near it.
Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou fare better, but Joseph Calleia's mobster is unintentionally funnier than Joe Piscopo's Danny Vermin in Johnny Dangerously, though he does at least flick a mean cigarette. Even William Holden, in his star-making role, is strikingly poor here. It's not just that, terrifying but true, he looks like a very young Tom Hanks but his acting is clumsy, his voice weak and he occasionally looks awkward and desperately unsure of how to act to camera: hard to believe that you're watching the first steps of a future screen great here - indeed, just about the only line to ring true is when Stanwyck tells him "I'll see you in 1966. By then, you may have become somebody." Do yourself a favor and see Body and Soul or The Set-Up instead.
Golden Boy(1939)
At last Sony have issued this title on DVD and the wait is worth it. I like pictures with boxing ring fights and this is a good one. The performances of Barbara Stanwyck, Wm Holden & Adolphe Menjou are excellent. So-called HD mastering is listed on the slick and this is a superb production both in picture & sound. Many Columbia features and serials from this period, generally, suffer from poor elements, much of which had been shipped to the Library of Congress long ago. Sound elements have been lost in part on some serial reels, for example, and have been replaced by new voices using original script dialogue but this is usually to noticeable in all respects. Golden Boy does not have this trouble.
Included on the disc are a trailer, a color cartoon, Kangaroo Kid, a 1930 Screen Snapshots with an appearance by Stanwyck and a half-hour western series introduced and performed by Stanwyck from the 1950s. A must buy DVD for Collectors. And I like Stanwyck films
 The Film that Made Holden a Star
The movie is excellent, but I have a problem with the cover because to me, it just don't look like Holden. One of the best parts of this film is when a man asked Stanwyck while sitting on top of a desk who she was, and she said, "my mother's daughter" I thought that was class and I never forgot it even after all these years. The story of a young man who has a gift of being a violinist and a boxer and the conflict and struggles to find out which one better suits him has long been an interesting film for me.
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