Blue Sky

Anyone who’s spent any time reading about the business of making movies (or, for that matter, music) will know all too well that however important artistic worth is in the film world, it all means nothing if the business that’s paying for that art falls apart. So it was with Orion Pictures, a company that was considered to be one of the major studios to watch during the 1980s. The company had a deal with Woody Allen and released many of his films, and they scored hits on a regular basis - Arthur, 10, Robocop, Silence Of The Lambs and The Addams Family amongst them. Dances With Wolves, distributed by Orion in 1990, won acclaim, Oscars and became a huge worldwide hit. And yet a year later, in December 1991, Orion filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US. Soon after that they were no more.

Blue Sky was one of the handful of Orion productions that was in progress when the company ran into financial difficulty. Without a distributor to release the completed film, it sat on the shelf as a company asset until 1994, when it was dusted off and sent to cinemas. And to everyone’s surprise, it won an Academy Award (Best Actress, for Jessica Lange).

“Surprise� is the key word because most of the Orion product that was held up during the company’s demise was not treated especially fairly by critics. Whatever artistic worth the films may have had was overridden by something approaching disdain - how could this film be any good, the argument seemed to go all too often, if it’s been sitting on the shelf unwanted for three or four years? Such cynicism was, of course, grossly unfair (though not all critics took the bait), and is best explained simply by the fact that many were looking for concrete reasons for the demise of such a vital and adventurous studio. The obvious age of some of the films by the time they got released didn’t help - often, the actors’ ages gave the game away, as is the case with the unexpectedly young Amy Locane in Blue Sky (by the time the film was released, a much older-looking Locane had already been and gone from the cast of TV’s Melrose Place!)

Blue Sky is, as it turns out, two movies in one feature. We start out by meeting Captain Hank Marshall (Jones), a nuclear scientist employed by the US Army whose life has always involved moving from place to place, as is the way of so many in that profession. For the past two years he’s been stationed in Hawaii with his wife Carly (Lange), whose dreams of being famous have been undone by her life as an army wife; she suffers from manic depression and frequently goes through difficult emotional states. Her husband is understanding and considerate of her condition, but for her two daughters it’s becoming too much to handle in the midst of growing up. As the film opens, the family is being moved once again, this time to Alabama, where Carly’s emotional openness and vulnerability gives Hank’s superior officer Vince Johnson (Powers Boothe) an idea - he will assign Hank to oversee underground nuclear testing in Nevada, and once he’s gone he’ll seduce Carly. It’s not the first time this has happened, but Hank is finding tolerance more difficult every day; meanwhile, an accident he witnesses during a nuclear test becomes the subject of a cover-up, one which has him questioning the integrity of everyone he works with.

The real core of the film is the relationship between Carly, her husband and her daughters, and it’s this aspect of Blue Sky that works well. Lange is astonishingly good in a very difficult and challenging role, and it’s fascinating to see Tommy Lee Jones playing a more sensitive part - his now renowned offhand delivery of dialogue is very much in evidence, but he plays Hank with a great deal more subtlety than we’re used to from the actor in his more recent films. More disappointing is the Nuclear Morality Drama part of the story, though - after the turbulent emotions that make the establishing scenes so compelling, the relationship between Hank and Carly is suddenly simplified and turned into a convenient foil for Hank’s growing disillusion with his work - and that’s a shame, because as simple human drama most of this film works extremely well. Ultimately, Blue Sky can’t quite live up to its opening half hour - but as an acting showcase, it’s still well worth seeing - most of the drama here is quite perfectly measured and is acted to perfection.

Filmed in 1990, Blue Sky was director Tony Richardson’s final movie (the director of the 1970 Ned Kelly film with Mick Jagger in the title role, his daughters Natasha and Joely are both still working and are highly respected actors) and sadly, it remained unreleased when he died in 1991. And while it’s by no means perfect, this is a film that manages to entertain on a basic level while offering some first-rate drama to those looking for more depth; it’s just a shame that, at the end of the day, the conspiracy storyline wins out over the (far more compelling) human one.

Captured on DVD at its theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and 16:9 enhanced, this new transfer of Blue Sky (done by Sony Pictures’ HD Center) is very good, though purists may object to the amount of film grain that’s evident throughout most of the movie (much of which appears to be the result of shooting in available light). While by no means coming close to the visual quality of today’s features, the image here is natural and well balanced, with spot-on rendering of shadow detail and colour saturation. True to Sony DVD Center form, there’s not a compression artefact to be found throughout the film. Given the age and history of this movie, it’s fair to say that this is a better home video representation than anyone could have expected.

Mixed in good old Dolby Stereo, Blue Sky had neither the budget nor the hindsight to take advantage of the then-novel digital sound formats that were appearing at the time. The audio master here has been taken from a very clean source, and while it shows its age in terms of top-end response on dialogue and general fidelity, it’s a perfectly fine rendering of a very dialogue-heavy soundtrack, with surround activity kept subtle in keeping with the intentions of Dolby’s matrixed surround format. The music score is by the late (and greatly missed) Jack Nitzsche, and it provides plenty of atmosphere when needed. One small quibble - this audio track is mastered at a very, very low level, one that is entirely inappropriate for two-channel sound, matrixed or not. This is a problem that seems to be a constant with two-channel tracks on Sony’s DVDs, and it’s something that really needs to be reconsidered. It’s worth noting that the Spanish and Italian audio tracks on this disc are mastered at a substantially higher level.

As you’d expect of a film with this history, there are no extras to speak of; obviously a director commentary is out of the question, and it’s unlikely that much else would be available apart from press-oriented hype material, which we can all live without. Included on this single-layer disc, aside from a very content-deprived cast bio section, is a set of TV ads for Blue Sky, a theatrical trailer for the film, and a set of seemingly randomly-chosen trailers for other Columbia Tristar films. While not directly related to the disc in question, the presence of other film trailers is always a welcome bonus when space allows, and it’s good to see them here.

Slightly confused about what type of film it wants to be, Blue Sky is nevertheless well worth taking the time to watch, if only for Jessica Lange’s amazing performance. An unlikely candidate for a local DVD release (the presence of Tommy Lee Jones probably had a lot to do with that), it’s a film that still works, though not as well as it could have with a bit more care taken on the script. Columbia Tristar’s DVD is up to their usual high standard, and those who have been looking forward to seeing Blue Sky on the format will be more than happy.