MVD Entertainment Group is out with a long-lead announcement for the company’s next “Rewind Collection” release headed to Blu-ray, director Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours, the 1990 remake of the 1955 Humphrey Bogart classic, The Desperate Hours. The street date will be July 19.
Writer Joseph Hayes novel, “The Desperate Hours” was written way back in 1954, but didn’t make it to the screen right away, instead it was produced as a Broadway play by Hayes, with Karl Malden and Paul Newman starring. The 1955 film version of The Desperate Hours starred Fredric March and Humphrey Bogart, with William Wyler directing and Joseph Hayes provided the screenplay.
Skip ahead to the late 1980s and Dino De Laurentiis decides to do a remake. The film bounced around from Paramount to Columbia to Cannon Pictures with various directors coming and going. Mickey Rourke got anchored as the escaped criminal who ends up holding a family hostage, that much didn’t change.
At some point, according to the trade press of the period, Rourke got Dino De Laurentiis to bring Michael Cimino on board to direct. Of course, that name rings a bell and not in a good way. Sure, he won Best Picture (as producer) and Best Director for The Deer Hunter, but it was the disaster of Heaven’s Gate two years later that made him a Hollywood pariah.
A $15 million production budget ballooned to $44 million and sent United Artists over a cliff. He got hung with the disaster … and perhaps rightly so for that film, but his other films, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Deer Hunter and Year of the Dragon were all well-produced and entertaining.
Desperate Hours, teaming Mickey Rourke with Anthony Hopkins in the key roles, falls into the same category as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Year of the Dragon … well-produced and very entertaining.
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