Ryan Gallagher and his fellow cinephiles Travis George and Rudie Obias over at their The Criterion Cast report that Netflix has added at least 35 Criterion Collection titles to its streaming Watch Instantly feature.
Back in the early days of home video, when movie studios were dumping low-quality, pan-and-scan versions of their movies on the growing VHS marketplace, The Criterion Collection video company took the high road, leading the way in creating special editions of films.
Criterion took a great deal of pride and, more importantly, care in releasing movies with the correct aspect ratio preserved, filmmaker commentary tracks, missing scenes recovery and hours of film restoration to present definitive versions of cinema classics, all on laserdisc.
Eventually, Criterion migrated their library of titles to DVD and Blu-Ray. Two years ago, The Criterion Collection began offering video-on-demand downloading services for their films in association with The Auteurs.
Criterion has now teamed up with Netflix and whether you’re looking to experience Fritz Lang’s M, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien or Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters for the first of fiftieth time, they’re all just a click away with, we are told, more to come.
Sometime back, I did a piece here on television producer David L. Wolper and mentioned some of his crime shows, including an obscure one called Lady Blue, which had a 13-week run on ABC beginning in September of 1986. I did some work with the show and had a pleasant experience with everyone involved, but that doesn’t blind me to the show’s many faults.
Lady Blue starred Jamie Rose as Katy Mahoney, a tough Chicago homicide detective with a big gun and even bigger attitude. Katy was the daughter of a hard-hitting cop who had little use for the police rulebook. Once she’d earned her badge, Katy followed in Daddy’s footsteps as the second Mahoney to become famous for using excessive force in her detective work.
Katy and her boss, Lt. Terry Nichols (Danny Aiello), frequently butted heads over her aggressive and abusive method of fighting crime, but that didn’t stop the show from becoming the target of anti-TV violence watchdogs groups, one of which reported a whopping 50 acts of violence in a single Lady Blue episode.
Truth be told, the show needed its violent because it didn’t have much else going for it. If it weren’t for the energizing presence of Aiello (The Godfather Part II, Broadway Danny Rose, Fort Apache the Bronx) and the fact that Lady Blue was shot on location on the streets and El trains of Chicago, there’d be no reason to be writing about it now.
Except for the Main Title Sequence., which is a solid example of a bad Main Title Sequence.
It starts with that Lady Blue Theme. The music is dated in a very mid-80s, Miami Vice-influenced kind of way, but we’ll give that a pass. It’s the lyrics–sung by a woman who sounds every bit as angry as Katy Mahoney–that are truly bad (”…back to the blue, the power’s in you…”). John Cacavas was a talented composer with a solid track record for TV music work (he scored almost 90 episodes of Kojak), but Lady Blue is not his finest hour.
And then there’s the editing. I don’t know who cut the Lady Blue Main Title (maybe show editors Richard Bracken or Ronald LaVine?), but they seem to have put in zero creative effort. Granted, at the time the Main Title needed to made, there were probably only a few of episodes of the show in the can, so the cutter didn’t have a lot of material to draw upon.
That said, the Lady Blue Main Title looks like it was hacked together in a lunch hour, with time left over for lunch. Let’s start with shot selection. It seems completely random. There’s no story arc, no sequence build, no internal logic whatsoever. Some shots are short; some are interminably long, both without any discernible motivation. In terms of rhythm, the shots in the sequence are cut neither to the music nor to the lyrics. And, you’ll notice, the two stars of the show never appear together in the same shot.
Put it all together and the Lady Blue Main Title sequence stands as a textbook example of how not to construct a Main Title. Give it look and see what you think.
Back to the blue, you’re breaking through. Go back, lady. Back to the blue…
