January is becoming a month for Norman
Jewison films released on blu-ray, with his aforementioned In the Heat of the
Night
coming out on blu-ray Jan. 14 (HERE), and now Universal
Home Video has announced that his 1999 film, The Hurricane, with Denzel Washington,
for which he was nominated a Best Actor Oscar, will be coming out on
blu-ray for the first time a week earlier, on January 7th.
The film tells the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter – a former boxer who was wrongly convicted twice
of murdering three people in a New Jersey bar, and the three Canadians and young black man who read Carter’s book, who
worked to prove his innocence and the conspiracy behind his conviction.
I was going to say the true story of Hurricane Carter, but I can’t because that was a
large bone of contention regarding the film.
After the film was released, there was a huge outcry over
the inaccuracies in it.
Furthermore several people, who had previously worked on proving Carter’s innocence
for years, weren’t even mentioned in the film, which gave the impression that
the Canadian group did all the work, when, in reality, they came in
very late into the game, and used the work by those previous others to prove
Carter’s innocence. And being that Jewison himself is Canadian himself, one can
understand his favoritism.
In fact, it was speculated by some that the controversy may
have cost Washington winning the Oscar, and that his win for
Training Day in 2001 was partially a sort of “make
up” for The Hurricane loss.
But regardless, the film worked very solidly as a drama and
the Blu-ray will have a bunch of extras, including
feature length commentary by Jewison, a “making of” documentary and several deleted
scenes.
