It’s always fascinating to consider why some artists work for decades and others quickly fade away. Few would have predicted that Jane Seymour who first rose to stardom in her native England and played Solitaire, a psychic Bond girl opposite Roger Moore in ‘To Live and Let Die’ (’73), would be here today at 71 starring in the AcornTV murder mystery series as ‘Harry Wild.’ Harry being Harriet. Seymour is a fascinating interview, incredibly well-spoken and candid, minus any pretense. She has much to say on her longevity and the training that enabled her every step of the way in this excerpt from our recent interview.
Q: When you look at your career, do you say to yourself, How many people started as a Bond girl and manage to have gone on blazing for like, what is it? Nearly 50 years? You’re in a business where rejection never stops. People are always saying No. How have you managed this sunny disposition and this drive?
JANE SEYMOUR: First of all, I started especially young, when I was 13. Doing the math I think that’s way more than 50 years. So that’s a long time. Also I was trying to become a ballerina. I got injured and became an actress by default. While I was doing that, I was always an artist. I had to make money, so I used to create my own clothing and things, which I still do today. I do art and I do a lot of design things as well. I also produce. And I have been incredibly fortunate.
Certainly when I started out it helped that I had the classical features for the camera — it really helped there. I did all the classics in the theater. In England I did two weekly reps. I did Shakespeare, Ibsen, [Thomas] Middleton and [William] Rowley. You name it and I did it. So when I got to do a Bond film I was really trying to become a serious actress. I didn’t realize that this was a frivolous thing. And [on ‘To Live and Let Die’] you ran 3 paces behind a man with a gun and try to look as sexy as possible. I was playing, of course, a virgin so I wasn’t really required to be ‘sexy’ just to know how to do tarot cards. After that I came to America where I was given all these extraordinary characters to play. I was basically told that if I could lose my English accent I’d never stop working in America — and that’s what happened. America has been very good to me.
Then they realized they wanted to make period dramas in England and they needed an American star — and I now counted as one! So they’d have me actually go back to England (where they weren’t hiring me) to star in movies there in these costumes. I did a whole bunch of those. I’ve really been able to work all over the world. I speak languages, so I played Marie Antoinette in French and English. I do accents. I had a speech impediment when I was young, so I had a lot of vocal training when I first started.
I think having been a dancer enables me to understand the physicality of people. Whether I’m playing a little old lady who can’t move very well or can’t get up or down or whether I’m playing a dancer or an action thing. I think once you’ve had dance training you have that too. I’m also theater trained. I’ve had a weird career really because I decided I wanted to have it all. I wanted to be married, have children and have a career. Not many people of my age who are actresses did all of that.
NEW DVDS:
VIGGO, NAOMI, CRONENBERG A dazzling directorial authority propels the London-set Russian criminal caper ‘Eastern Promises’ (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, R). Viggo Mortensen had successfully teamed up with Canadian horror auteur David Cronenberg on ‘A History of Violence’ and they reunited for this 2007 thriller. Mortensen’s Oscar nominated turn has him an outsider among a notorious family of gangsters, its members recognizable by their remarkable prison body tattoos. Naomi Watts is a midwife who stumbles onto evidence that could get her killed. The violence is explicit and intentionally disturbing. The film’s most celebrated sequence finds Mortensen nude in a steam bath facing multiple Russian assassins with very long knives. Special Features: ‘Two Guys Walk into a Bathhouse,’ ‘Watts on Wheels’ and ‘Marked for Life,’ featurettes all.
AND SCREAM AGAIN Kevin Williamson created ‘Scream’ (4K Ultra HD + Digital Code, Paramount, R) in 1996 but this new reboot of the ‘90s franchise has moved on. But not too far. We’re still in Woodsboro and we still have the killer in the now iconic Ghostface mask. Yes, there are new suspects, new victims but happily, familiar faces: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette. As for the ‘Killer Bonus Content,’ it’s deleted scenes, behind the scenes, a featurette on original director Wes Craven’s legacy and an audio commentary with the directors and writers.
LOPEZ ROM-COM Jennifer Lopez’s romantic comedy ‘Marry Me’ (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code, Universal, PG-13) is a carefully crafted star vehicle designed to present its down to earth heroine as admirable, adorable and, perhaps, enviable. Who else has Lopez’s grit and grace to play a pop star who, humiliated on the eve of her public spectacle wedding, reacts by agreeing to marry a stranger in the stadium where the nuptials were to happen? It’s frothy, and it’s fun. Bonus: Deleted scenes, a gag reel, a Making of, an ‘On My Way’ lyric video and a feature commentary by the 2 women who made this happen: director Kat Coiro and Lopez’s business partner and producer Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas.
WONDROUS WILDER After ‘Double Indemnity” Billy Wilder’s best loved movie has to be the rueful, romantic 1960 ‘The Apartment’ (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) where Jack Lemmon’s CC ‘Bud’ Baxter quickly rises in this mammoth Manhattan company not thru outstanding work but by lending the key to his apartment to execs who want a few hours to be with office workers who are not their wives before they board the train back to the suburbs. Sadness follows when Bud falls for elevator operator Fran Kubilek (Shirley MacLaine) and discovers she’s among the women who visit his flat, accompanied by none other than top dog exec Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, again with Wilder post-‘Indemnity’). These are this trio’s definitive turns. MacMurray, a terrific last minute replacement for Paul Douglas, 52, who died of a heart attack just 2 days before filming, vowed never, ever to play another craven, lying scoundrel. And he didn’t. The film won 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay. Until ‘Schindler’s List,’ it was the last Black & White movie to win that top Oscar. Special Features: Audio commentary by Joe McBride, a Wilder authority; another audio commentary by film historian Bruce Block. A short doc on Making of and another on Lemmon, whose star ascended with this picture – and never descended.
TASHLIN’S TRIUMPH Frank Tashlin is famous, before Pop Art and before pop culture became a study, for making movies that played like live cartoons. If we look at the Fifties there’s evidence that these Eisenhower years of plenty really were ready to explode in the imminent cultural collisions of the Sixties. Tashlin’s movies, manic, rude, wild, are a clue to what’s coming. His 1956 ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ (Blu-ray, Criterion Collection, Not Rated) stars Jayne Mansfield, the busty blonde Marilyn Monroe wannabe who IS a cartoon before she steps in front of the camera. In her debut Jayne is a mobster’s gal who a washed-up agent (Tom Ewell from Monroe’s Billy Wilder comedy ‘The Seven Year Itch’) figures he can make a music sensation. That means the entry of rock n roll and a lineup of rock legends doing their brilliant thing, not in ‘B’ picture black and white but widescreen Cinemascope and Technicolor: Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochrn, The Platters. There is also the stunning Julie London, surreally offering her #1 hit ‘Cry Me a River.’ Fun fact: her husband Bobby Troup wrote the title song. This new digital transfer offers an audio commentary, a new video essay, a brand-new interview with ‘Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It’ author Eve Golden, and a ’57 interview with Mansfield herself.
EGYPTIAN HOMICIDE(S) Kenneth Branagh is back in Agatha Christie’s ‘Death on the Nile’ (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code, 20th Century Studios, PG-13) as both Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot and director. While no match for the all-star 1977 version which really went to Egypt and starred Peter Ustinov’s Poirot alongside Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury and Mia Farrow. For the Nile cruise’s passengers/suspects, Branagh’s handsome cast is led by Gal Gadot, Sophie Okonedo and Armie Hammer. He has recast certain roles, Salome Otterbourne is no longer a romance novelist but a jazz vocalist, and doesn’t muck up the vintage scenario. He also somehow manages to make this ‘Death’ all about Poirot. Extras: featurettes on the transition from novel to film, designing the glam 1937 period look, a glance at Christie’s love of travel in her murder mysteries and deleted scenes.
ROCK X 3 A clever, gay-focused analysis of the most recognizable ‘outed’ star of postwar Hollywood ‘Rock Hudson’s Home Movies’ (DVD, Kino Classics, Not Rated) arrives alongside a pair of the real Rock Hudson’s ‘60s sex comedies. This then is a perfect trio of Inside Hollywood awareness. The 1964 Howard Hawks comedy ‘Man’s Favorite Sport?’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) always seemed like a coded movie, ostensibly about a man posing as something he wasn’t, in this case an ‘expert’ on fly fishing who has never fished (shades of Barbara Stanwyck, the perfect cook in ‘Christmas in Connecticut’ who has never cooked!). Hawks is a legendary Golden Age director who famously has Cary Grant shouting, ‘I’ve suddenly gone gay!’ as he wears a woman’s fluffy bathrobe in the screwball classic “Bringing Up Baby.” The 1965 “Strange Bedfellows” (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) reteams Hudson not with Doris Day but his other perfectly calibrate co-star: Italy’s sex siren Gina Lollobrigida following their hit comedy “Come September.”
ULMER TIMES 3 The low-budget Hollywood director Edgar G. Ulmer is known – and revered — for his brilliant Poverty Row 1945 noir classic ‘Detour.’ The ‘Edgar G. Ulmer Sci-Fi Collection’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) offers 3 of this ow-budget auteur’s movies in one disc: ‘The Man From Planet X’ (‘51) and 2 from 1960: ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ and ‘The Amazing Transparent Man.’ The subjects range from a would-be world dominating alien who lands in Scotland to a time-bending traveler and a nuclear-poisoned safecracker. Bonus: Multiple audio commentaries on all 3 films.
DEUX FRENCH TITANS As the 1970s raced along, France’s 2 reigning superstars continued to cannily cement and continue their standing as producer-stars with smartly structured action vehicles. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s 1976 ‘The Body of My Enemy’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) is a class-conscious revenge drama with Belmondo ideally positioned as this man just released from prison and ready to rumble. The 1977 ‘Armageddon’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) finds Alain Delon in a scenario that has chilling echoes to today’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Delon’s a psychologist from INTERPOL, the international police organization, who must stop an increasingly unstable villain (Jean Yanne) from his reign of terror. Bonus audio commentaries on each film.
REAL LIFE SCANDALOUS TRAGEDY Fans of Emily Watson – and there are many – should not miss one of her definitive roles as Nottingham (UK) social worker Margaret Humphreys in ‘Oranges & Sunshine’ (Blu-ray, Cohen, Not Rated). Adapted from Humphreys’ book ‘Empty Cradles,’ the 2010 film chronicles the appalling-but-true scandal that saw, literally, thousands of poor children in the UK who, told their parents were dead, were shipped off to Australia. Promised, as the title goes, ‘Oranges & Sunshine,’ what they got was institutional imprisonment, hard labor and, in the case of the so-called Christian Brothers overseeing them, sexual and physical abuse. Humphreys all by herself exposed these horrors, reunited families and brought authorities to justice. Rousing and with Watson, a role equal to her Oscar-nominated women in ‘Breaking the Waves’ and ‘Hilary and Jackie.’
AN HONEST MAN? One of the Golden Age of Hollywood’s most distinctive – and beloved – curmudgeons, W.C. Fields (1880-1946) continues to fascinate – and make us laugh – with his ‘30s and ‘40s classics like ‘Great Expectations,’ ‘My Little Chickadee’ with Mae West and ‘The Bank Dick.’ The 1939 ‘You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated) is essential Fields. An absurdist masterwork with the man who ‘hated’ children and dogs starring opposite child star Gloria Jean! Also here ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (father of Candice) and Charlie McCarthy, his puppet, and Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson. 
MAMA HAS TROUBLES An heiress who walks away from family biz but is pulled back? No it’s not a distaff version of ‘Godfather,’ it’s ‘For the Love of Money’ (Blu-ray, Lionsgate, R), a dramatic thriller that serves as an ideal vehicle for Keri Hilson as troubled Gigi Davis. A single mom, Gigi didn’t want any part of the billion-dollar family enterprise but when her daughter’s life is threatened, well, there’s no stopping a Tiger Mom when poachers dare to pounce on her family.
KOREAN SON OF? Jamie Dornan has a terrific time as an amnesiac in the HBO Max ‘The Tourist,’ virtually an old-fashioned serial with a new adventure for our struggling anti-hero in each episode. The South Korean ‘Spiritwalker’ (Blu-ray, Well Go USA, Not Rated) might be a spiritual cousin, being as it is, about a man who, just like Dornan, wakes from a car crash to find his memory erased. Only here, every 12 hours he begins regaining consciousness. Inevitably, he finds himself fleeing killers, criminals and secret agents – while trying to stay alive as he keeps popping up again and again every 12 hours.
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