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Of Foxes and Hedgehogs: A Review of “Silent Ozu: Three Crime Dramas”

May 14, 2015 John David Baldwin Leave a comment

Which Animal Are You?

In the 1950s, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin published a very influential essay titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” in which he posited the existence of two opposing categories of human being, into one or the other of which he proceeded to divide many of the major figures of Western culture. Taking as his starting point a cryptic quote by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus – “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” – Berlin identified those Western writers and thinkers whom he considered hedgehogs (that is, those whose work can be defined by a single idea or conception of the world) and those whom he considered foxes (the ones who refused to champion a single point-of-view to the exclusion of others). Among poets, for example, he cited Dante as an example of the “hedgehog” type of artist and Shakespeare as an example of the “fox” type of artist. (Berlin’s essay is so famous that Woody Allen alluded to it with a very funny sex joke involving Judy Davis in his 1992 film Husbands and Wives.)

While pondering this concept, I recently realized that it could be used to explicate a major distinction between two great generations of Japanese filmmakers: the prewar directors, who started out in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the subsequent generation, whose careers kicked into high gear only after the Second World War. Although oversimplification can be dangerous, it does seem plausible to assert that for the younger masters, like Akira Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Kon Ichikawa – influenced as they were by Hollywood genre filmmakers and versatile European artists like Jean Renoir – range and breadth were as every bit as important as depth. In other words, they were foxes by temperament and aspiration. For them, the ideal director could execute successfully nearly any conceivable type of movie, and in a style uniquely appropriate to each.

The goals of the great masters of the prewar generation – particularly Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu – seem to me completely opposite. After an early period of experimentation, sometimes turning out half-a-dozen movies or more in a single year, each of the three gradually settled down to a unitary worldview and a single stylistic approach, and each spent the rest of his career refining these. Think Mizoguchi’s iconic female martyrs, ultra-long takes and floating camera. Think Naruse’s money-obsessed characters, judicious use of close-ups and devastating accumulation of tiny details. And of course, there is Ozu, with his families disturbed or destroyed by change, low camera angles, head-to-head dialogue shots and general absence of camera movement. If these directors, particularly Ozu, are not hedgehogs, who would be worthy of the name?

Yet here we are, confronted by the seemingly contradictory evidence, with this unusual Criterion Eclipse Series box set, of three silent Ozu crime melodramas. The set contains two movies from 1930 – Walk Cheerfully and That Night’s Wife – and one from 1933, Dragnet Girl. In these films, we glimpse, instead of bars full of mild-mannered salarymen, wild nightclubs; instead of virginal daughters, gun-toting gangster’s girls; instead of comfortable middle-class homes, mobster hangouts.

So was the young Ozu a kind of fox after all?

Walk Cheerfully (Hogaraka ni ayume)

This is the earliest and slightest of the three films, but it is still most charming. (It was one of seven Ozu films released in 1930.) Our anti-hero is a spiffily-dressed con man named (shades of Brecht) “Ken the Knife” (Minoru Takada). His right-hand man, Senko (Hisao Yoshitani), is a good-natured, fireplug-shaped ruffian (or yotomoto, to use the popular term of the day), and Ken’s moll, Chieko (Satoko Date), who wears a Louise Brooks-style bob, works as a typist by day.

Are those pennies from heaven? Hiroko Kawasaki, Nobuko Matsuzono and Minoru Takada in Yasujiro Ozu’s Walk Cheerfully (1930). Credit: Courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

None of these crooks appears remotely threatening – it’s almost as if crime is a pastime for them – and the impression of harmlessness is only enhanced by the gang’s ritualized greeting, which suggests a very funny musical-comedy routine. Senko seems to spend more time memorizing the lyrics to “A Gay Caballero” (by the American singer of novelty songs, Frank Crumit), which are written in English on a wall of the gang’s hangout, than planning or committing crimes. Chieko, for her part, seems much more comfortable scheming to break up Ken’s budding romance with a law-abiding young lady, Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki), than she is packing heat.

Yet the breakup of this gang when Ken decides to leave the criminal life is far more emotionally involving than Ken’s romance with Yasue. Senko even bursts into tears when Ken informs him of his decision. How dare he be so inconsiderate as to go straight without him? A criminal gang is, after all, a kind of family, and Ken’s decision to defect is as destructive to this family as, in Ozu’s much later Early Summer (1951), the heroine’s decision to marry is for her family.

At this point in his career, the director’s famous visual style had not quite jelled. We see surprising high-angle shots as well as the usual low-angled ones, and the objects competing with the actors for the camera’s attention – Senko’s hat, a broken doll, clothespins – seem almost fetishized, not as fully integrated into the narrative as such details would be in the later work of this filmmaker. But his smooth handling of narrative reveals the filmmaker’s increasing sophistication.

That Night’s Wife (Sono yo no tsuma)

The first big scene of That Night’s Wife (which was scripted by Ozu’s favorite co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda, based on a translated American crime story) depicts a nighttime office robbery. It is the most thrilling action sequence in all the director’s extant films. The details are worthy of Hitchcock: a cord being pulled out of a telephone, a tied-up clerk’s legs dangling over a desk, a single telltale handprint on the office door’s frosted glass window. Especially Hitchcockian is a later scene in which the robber, Shuji (played by Tokihiko Okada, father of future Ozu actress Mariko Okada), calls a doctor from a phone booth, while trying to crouch down low enough in the booth so as not to be caught by the neighborhood police, who are on his trail. At this point, one might easily think, “At last, here’s a real Ozu crime movie!”

Pistol-packin’ mama! Emiko Yagumo and Tokihiko Okada in Yasujiro Ozu’s That Night’s Wife (1930). Credit: Courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

But the filmmaker has something quite different in mind. Shuji, it turns out, is merely a pitiful, unemployed father who only steals to pay for medicine to cure his sick daughter, Michiko (Mitsuko Ichimura). He even heads straight home following the crime. But when an undercover policeman (Togo Yamamoto) follows Shuji home, determined to arrest him, the filmmaker throws a narrative curve ball at the viewer: Shuji’s loyal wife, Mayumi (Emiko Yagumo), turns the tables on the cop and holds him at double gunpoint, with Shuji’s gun and his own. He can arrest her husband, Mayumi tells him, but not until morning, when Michiko, who needs her father’s presence to recover, will be out of danger. The plot thus introduces a peculiar role-reversal: the wife becomes the outlaw, while her “criminal” husband plays the mothering parent.

Except for those very un-Ozu-like opening scenes, the narrative plays out almost entirely within the couple’s cluttered apartment, and the director presents a memorable and poignant vision of Depression-era poverty, Japanese-style. Shuji is an artist by profession, and there are paint cans everywhere, as well as brushes, empty bottles, and lots and lots of pottery. We see (as was typical of the décor of Ozu’s sets throughout his career) movie posters on the walls – including the 1929 musical Broadway Scandals and a Walter Huston talkie from the same year, Gentlemen of the Press – but these do not enliven the atmosphere, but only make the place look more depressing. (David Bordwell in his Ozu book accurately calls this apartment set “a cubistic assemblage out of the detritus of Western culture.”)

Without belaboring the Hitchcock parallel, one should note that Ozu tries something in these one-set scenes very similar to what the Hollywood master attempted in Rope (1948): to create drama in a confined space without succumbing to visual monotony. The apartment scenes contain more dissolves and tracking shots than any other Ozu movie I’ve ever seen, and tension is impressively built up, only to be resolved in a sentimental but satisfying ending.

Ozu’s success at this challenge so pleased his boss at Shochiku Studios, Shiro Kido, that the filmmaker was finally allowed to take a vacation at a hot spring… as long as he came back with yet another finished film.

Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna)

The giant leap in confidence and skill that Ozu displays in Dragnet Girl, only three years after That Night’s Wife, is truly impressive. Here he uses the full iconography of the gangster genre – the fedoras, the jazz bands, the shadowy interiors and eerily-lit nighttime streets – to stunning effect. (According to Bordwell, this movie is tied with I Was Born, But… (1932) as the director’s fastest film, with a shot-length average of only four seconds, as opposed to 10.2 average seconds per shot for Tokyo Story (1953).) This is a film that, in stylistic bravado, can stand comparison with anything Joseph von Sternberg (a major influence on Japanese film in general) made during the period, and it looks gorgeous, despite the many flaws in the unrestored print used for the DVD.

On the lam. Kinuyo Tanaka and Joji Oka in Yasujiro Ozu’s Dragnet Girl (1933). Credit: Courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

The antihero, Joji (Joji Oka), is a somewhat less pathetic figure than the protagonists of Walk Cheerfully and That Night’s Wife, but not by much. He’s a failed boxer, and goes out of his way to point out to the foolish young punk, Hiroshi (Hideo Mitsui, a.k.a. Koji Mitsui), who idolizes him, that he’s only a small-time hood, not one of the big bosses. Instead of falling for a tough, glamorous, Jean Harlowesque dame like his Hollywood counterparts, he develops a platonic crush on Hiroshi’s pretty, innocent sister Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo), while remaining involved in a turbulent relationship with his “delinquent” girlfriend Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka).

A major part of the appeal of this film is the opportunity to watch Tanaka, one of the major icons of the Japanese screen – she would later play Mizoguchi’s ultimate female martyrs and Naruse’s ideal self-sacrificing mother – portray a sexy, tough-talking gun moll. (It was the sixth of ten films she would make with Ozu.) Like Chieko in Walk Cheerfully, Tokiko works a day job as a typist. (Were underworld connections some kind of clerical qualification at that time?) Burning with jealousy because of Joji’s attraction to Kazuko, she seeks out her rival and threatens her, going so far as to hold her at gunpoint, only to suddenly develop her own quasi-lesbian attraction to the girl – a unique situation in my experience of Ozu. Overall, Tanaka in this film comes across as a charming but overly busy young actress; it would take some years before she would achieve her later gravitas.

In the end, Joji, under Tokiko’s influence, decides to go straight. But in order to fulfill his obligation to Hiroshi, he and Tokiko decide to carry out… ahem… one last job. (Once – just once – I would love to see the “one last job” that is a complete and glorious success and results in a happy ending for all, except the robbed party.) Since this crime is a singularly foolish one, the viewer may expect (or hope) that the plot will resolve itself with a Scarface-like end for Joji. But Ozu, once again, has other plans. However, it should be noted that the climax of Dragnet Girl contains the only gunshot – exactly one – in the director’s entire extant work.

Outlaw No More

If Tom Powers, the archetypical gangster played by Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy, viewed these films, he’d be driven to despair by the behavior of the protagonists. What a bunch of wimps, he would sneer, all these so-called thugs, dying to leave crime and go straight!

But that’s exactly the point. Hollywood gangster movies of the ‘Thirties were myths of rebellion and punishment, with the infamous Hays office guaranteeing the punishment and frustrated writers and directors, often chafing under the studio system, providing the (vicarious) rebelliousness. But Ozu’s crime melodramas are reintegration myths. In his world, there’s nothing romantic or even appealing about being a social rebel or outcast. To him, a man with any decency – which all three protagonists possess to varying degrees – would naturally yearn to reenter the social order, and all of them eventually yield to this impulse.

That they do so through the agency of the various women in their lives – good girl, spouse, delinquent girl – is, of course, a Hollywood cliché. But Ozu was never comfortable with the theme of romantic love. Family ties were always more important and vital to this director than erotic ones. This is why Ken’s relationship with his gangster “brother,” Senko, in Walk Cheerfully is so much more compelling than his love for Yasue, or why the sibling conflict between Hiroshi and Kazuko in Dragnet Girl is given nearly as much prominence as the main conflict between the lovers Joji and Tokiko. So even though stylistically these three films, with their snappy pacing and numerous American pop culture references – in Dragnet Girl, even Nipper, the RCA trademark dog, makes an appearance – may appear odd in the context of Ozu’s work as a whole, thematically they are not really dissonant with Tokyo Story or An Autumn Afternoon (1962). (Considered as a trilogy, this set might even be titled The Domestic Life of Thugs.)

In his humble way, Ozu liked to compare himself to a maker of tofu, as he insisted in later life on making the same kind of film (the intimate domestic drama) over and over, rather than the more extroverted movies of his peers, like Kurosawa. Speaking of Naruse, but in a way that suggests he could have been talking about himself, Ozu said, “You can’t tell a tofu maker to make meat sausage. It simply won’t work. A tofu maker can only make tofu. The only question is how tasty he can make tofu.” And, somewhat more testily, he also said, “I just want to make a tray of good tofu. If people want something different, they should go to the restaurants and department stores.” I believe this can be roughly translated to: “As an artist, I’m a hedgehog… and dammit, I’m proud of it!”

The three DVDs (Criterion Eclipse Series 42) are stored in separate plastic keep cases within the simple but attractive cardboard packaging. (As of now, the individual films are not being sold separately.) As Eclipse is Criterion’s “budget” line, there are no commentaries or other frills on the DVDs, just chapter divisions and the option of removing the very readable English subtitles. The only “extras” in this set are the lively liner notes for each film by Michael Koresky, which appear on the inside of each keep case. The prints used are presumably the best available, with no attempt made at restoration. Thus, all three films contain scratches, dirt, fading and other flaws. These are most distracting in the case of Walk Cheerfully. However, the prints for That Night’s Wife and (particularly) Dragnet Girl are surprisingly good, considering that each of these movies is now as old as a human lifetime. Overall, this set is very strongly recommended not only to admirers of Yasujiro Ozu and Japanese cinema, but to fans of the gangster genre and of 1930s cinema in general.

Reviews

Blu-ray and DVD Review Round-Up: Films by Les Blank, Chris Marker, Terry Gilliam and more!

January 26, 2015 Dusty Somers Leave a comment

Les Blank: Always for Pleasure
The Criterion Collection

I’m not sure I can think of a more apt descriptor of Les Blank’s films than “humanist.” The 14 short- to medium-length documentaries included in Criterion’s new box set are vivacious, warm and fascinating looks at some of life’s most sensual pleasures. Not to be trite, but these are works that make you feel grateful to be alive and able to experience the world around you.

Over and over, Blank shows himself to be a master of distilling down the essence of a subculture into a brief but substantial package. Blank resists explanation — his films are defiantly free form, roaming from moment to moment — in favor of immersion, and one can’t help but feel edified after living in one of his cinematic worlds.

Food and music are Blank’s two constants in this collection of work. Even films that have a broader focus tend to incorporate these elements as part of the basic building blocks of culture, whether he’s documenting Cajuns (Spend it All, 1971), a black Creole community (Dry Wood, 1973) or Los Angeles hippies (God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance, 1968).

The music films explore blues guitarists (Lightnin’ Hopkins in The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1968, and Mance Lipscomb in A Well Spent Life, 1971), Creole Zydeco (Clifton Chenier in Hot Pepper, 1973), polka culture (In Heaven There Is No Beer?, 1984) and African-Cuban rhythms (Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella, 1995), among others. The sheer joy of the performances captured on film would be enough to justify these films, but each one feels like meaningful time spent with the artist in his environment.

As for food, well, it’s rarely looked this good on screen before. Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980) and Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (1990) aren’t merely food porn (still, prepare to salivate); they’re contextualizing tributes to the surrounding cultures.

All 14 films in the three-disc Blu-ray set have been granted 2K digital restorations, and the 1080p, 1.33:1 transfers are beautifully film-like, superb reproductions of the 16mm photography. All of the films feature uncompressed mono soundtracks, save for Sworn to the Drum, which has a lossless stereo track. Clean-up work has left these soundtracks crisp and clean.

As if collecting all these films in one place wasn’t enough, Criterion has supplied at least one extra to accompany each film, including five additional short films, outtakes, an excerpt from forthcoming documentary Les Blank: A Quiet Revelation and extensive interviews with family and collaborators, including sons Harrod and Beau, editor Maureen Gosling and friend Werner Herzog. An extensive booklet contains film notes and an essay by Andrew Horton.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Criterion’s Les Blank: Always for Pleasure Blu-ray rates:

The Films (out of ****): ****
Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2
Video Transfer: ****
Audio: ***
New Extra Features: ****
Extra Features Overall: ****
The Criterion Collection/ 1968-1995 / Color / 1.33:1 / 563 min total / $124.95

Level Five (1996)
Icarus Films

Chris Marker returns to many of his favorite themes in Level Five, a characteristically dense and beautiful essay film that touches on the pain of loss and the role of memory in dealing with that loss. Can the past be changed if memories — both the intangible human memories and the tangible technological ones — are changed? In some ways, Level Five plays like a sequel to Sans Soleil (1983), with Marker again focusing on his beloved Japanese culture, this time looking closely at the tragedy of World War II’s Battle of Okinawa, a precursor to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Marker adds a technological wrinkle, as a woman called Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) seeks to carry on her late lover’s work by completing a video game about the conflict. She addresses him directly, peering into the camera in a series of monologues that dovetail with Marker’s own observations about technology and history. Images of primitive computer graphics mingle with newsreel footage, and Marker’s deft editing constantly creates fascinating juxtapositions between the future and the past that these images represent.

Though the film’s philosophical underpinnings aren’t easy to pin down, the dizzying imagery and the film’s elegiac tone ensure Level Five is anything but dry, academic pondering. Marker again returns to referencing Vertigo (1958) at one point, and it’s no stretch to say that his investigations into the ability to recreate, restructure and re-contextualize memories are every bit as moving and cinematically wondrous as Hitchcock’s film.

Fresh off a theatrical run in 2014 that saw Level Five finally receiving a release in the U.S., Icarus Films brings Marker’s masterpiece to home video in an essential DVD release. The variety of sources all look good in this nice transfer, and the DVD comes with a booklet with an extensive essay from Christophe Chazalon.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Icarus Films’ Level Five DVD rates:

The Film (out of ****): ****
Film Elements Sourced: ***
Video Transfer: ***
Audio: **1/2
New Extra Features: *
Extra Features Overall: *
Icarus Films/ 1996 / Color and black & white / 1.33:1 / 106 min / $29.98

Kinetta (2005)
Second Run DVD

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has established himself as a filmmaker with an eerily alienating style with his most recent works Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011). His debut feature as a solo director, Kinetta, now getting its worldwide home video debut from intrepid UK label Second Run, is clearly those films’ progenitor, examining similar themes in a less formally assured manner.

Like its successors, Kinetta deals with a close-knit community of people that’s developed a series of odd rituals in order to relate to one another. Here, a hotel maid (Evangelia Randou), a plainclothes detective (Costas Xikominos) and a photo clerk (Aris Servetalis) pass the time by filming awkward recreations of murder scenes. This uncomfortable role-playing fills the void in what seems to be mostly colorless existences for these people, playing out in a vacation town during the off-season that might as well be an actual ghost town.

Unlike Lanthimos’ later films, especially Dogtooth, which displays a Michael Haneke-like formal precision, Kinetta features mostly queasy handheld camerawork, fraying the nerves even more than the off-putting but inscrutable actions of the people on-screen, who are more types than actual characters. On its own, Kinetta might feel like a filmmaker valuing obliqueness for its own sake, but take in conjunction with his subsequent films, it fits into a discomfiting oeuvre of estrangement from reality.

Second Run’s 1.85:1 transfer is quite strong considering its standard-def limitations, with a crisp image and a detailed reproduction of Lanthimos’ almost colorless palette. Extras include a newly filmed conversation with the director and a booklet with an essay by critic Michael Ewins.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Second Run’s Kinetta DVD rates:

The Film (out of ****): **1/2
Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2
Video Transfer: ***1/2
Audio: **1/2
New Extra Features: **
Extra Features Overall: **
Second Run DVD / 2005 / Color / 1.85:1 / 94 min / £12.99 / Region 2 (PAL)

Slaughter Hotel (1971)
Raro Video

Fernando Di Leo is better known for his gritty, violent crime dramas, but with Slaughter Hotel (La bestia uccide a sangue freddo), he serves up a thick slice of giallo-sleaze. Veering between jarringly disjointed and laughably languid, hardly anything here makes a lick of goddamn sense, even by standards of the genre. Still, there’s something admirable about Di Leo’s willingness to abandon sense and style from scene to scene. Frenetic barrages of canted angles will give way to elegant, gliding takes, while scenes juggle varying combinations of sex and death.

Klaus Kinski nominally stars as Dr. Francis Clay, the head of a mental institution that caters to rich women, most of whom are being treated for having a sex drive. But Kinski’s presence is mostly a red herring, as he’s not even in the top 10 of weirdest things in the film. Like most of the performances, Kinski’s borders on medicated, as a series of brutal murders can barely arouse much of a reaction in anyone besides those being murdered (and sometimes, not even them).

The nudity, which approaches gynecological levels, is far more graphic than the violence — beheadings, impalements and slashes are more stolid than your average giallo. It’s hardly an exemplary entry in either the genre’s canon or Di Leo’s filmography, but worth a look for enthusiasts of either.

Raro Video presents the film in a 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer that will do little to dissuade critics of the company’s highly variable technical output. There are some things to like about this transfer, including the consistent color reproduction and strong levels of image clarity. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of digital manipulation visible, from over-sharpening to heavy-handed edge enhancement. One scene features significant telecine wobble. Elements seem to be in good shape, but the transfer is merely watchable rather than anything commendable.

Two audio options are included, both in 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. This disc defaults to an English dub, while an Italian dub is also offered. The original Italian track is far preferable, featuring sound that is much less tinny and harsh than the English track.

Extras include an interview with actress Rosalba Neri, a fairly in-depth archival making-of and a couple minutes of deleted scenes. The set also includes a booklet with film notes and essays.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Raro Video’s Slaughter Hotel Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): **
Film Elements Sourced: ***
Video Transfer: **
Audio: **1/2
New Extra Features: N/A
Extra Features Overall: ***
Raro Video/ 1971 / Color / 2.35:1 / 94 min / $29.95

Flaming Star (1960)
Twilight Time

Movies starring Elvis Presley don’t typically cause much excitement among cinephiles, but he proves himself to be a capably understated performer in Don Siegel’s lean western Flaming Star, which opens with a couple of songs before turning into something considerably more sober.

Tensions are rising between white settlers and a Kiowa tribe in post-Civil War Texas, and Presley’s Pacer Burton, a half-white, half-Indian man, finds himself torn as he’s forced to consider loyalties to heritage, family and community. While his white father, Sam (John McIntire), and his Kiowa mother, Neddy (Dolores del Rio), just want to live peacefully, spates of violence on both sides threaten to ignite all-out war.

Siegel’s film has a hair-trigger capability of turning suddenly violent, and he sustains that tension throughout. The film also manages a reasonably fair-minded portrayal of Native Americans, emphasizing the similar community aspects of both cultures while recognizing the vast gulf between them.

Presley communicates a sense of being rent in two with his sensitive, introverted performance. Any of his persona’s braggadocio has been replaced with the wandering, unsure eyes of a young man forced to make a decision he’s not sure he’s equipped to make.

Siegel shoots the action sequences with a tough-minded precision, while he allows more room for the complex interpersonal relationships to play out on screen. That means less of a perfunctory sort-of love interest in Barbara Eden and more of the alternating clashing and bonding between Pacer and white half-brother Clint (Steve Forrest).

Twilight Time presents Fox’s 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer of the film, which is an exceptionally clean and sometimes stunningly vivid high-def presentation. The image possesses excellent clarity and sharpness and the somewhat muted color scheme is still capable of displaying vibrant beauty. Audio options include a mostly useless 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track, which shunts some of the score to the surrounds and an uncompressed 2.0 track, which gets the job done fine in original mono.

Extras include Twilight Time’s signature isolated score track, a commentary by Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman and the theatrical trailer.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Twilight Time’s Flaming Star Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): ***
Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2
Video Transfer: ***1/2
Audio: ***
New Extra Features: *1/2
Extra Features Overall: *1/2
Twilight Time / 1960 / Color / 2.35:1 / 92 min / $29.95

The Zero Theorem (2014)
Well Go USA

Terry Gilliam is a filmmaker of boundless imagination, which can sometimes result in overstuffed cinematic worlds in his lesser works. There’s a fair amount of frenetically detailed production design in his latest film, The Zero Theorem, but it somehow feels cheap and insubstantial — a thinly realized knock-off of a Gilliam film instead of the real thing. The same goes for the ideas in Pat Rushin’s script, which shamelessly borrows from Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil (1985), reshaping story and character elements into a discount version that sort of gets the broad strokes right but haplessly botches the details.

Christoph Waltz stars as Qohen Leth, an office drone in a futuristic society tasked with unlocking the meaning of life. Qohen toils under the watchful eye of superiors both nosy (David Thewlis) and aloof (Matt Damon), but his work is merely a distraction in his obsessive patience for a phone call that he believes will unlock the key to his own destiny.

Miserable and neurotic, Qohen gets glimpses of a happy life courtesy of Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), a prostitute whose idyllic virtual reality experiences become a source of comfort. The artificial beach in these sequences brings to mind the fractured mental state of Jonathan Pryce’s Sam Lowry in the bitterly ironic conclusion of Brazil, but with a half-hearted effort at incisive commentary. Similar broadsides on pervasive advertising and Big Brother surveillance just don’t muster up much energy. Even the normally vibrant Waltz delivers a somnambulant performance that rarely brings any specificity to the character.

On the other hand, Tilda Swinton does appear as a rapping virtual psychiatrist, so it’s not like the film has nothing going for it.

Well Go’s Blu-ray presentation of the film features a roughly 1.75:1 transfer in 1080p. The image features rounded corners in an ostensible attempt to replicate vintage photography. Color reproduction of both garish and muted palettes is nice, and there are solid levels of fine detail to be seen throughout. The image is rarely super-sharp, but this seems to replicate the theatrical look. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack isn’t tested too often, but it offers a reasonably immersive experience when the material calls for it.

Extras include one big EPK chopped up into smaller chunks on the costuming, sets, visual effects and a general behind-the-scenes piece. The theatrical trailer is also included.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Well Go’s The Zero Theorem Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): *1/2
Film Elements Sourced: ***
Video Transfer: ***
Audio: ***
New Extra Features: *1/2
Extra Features Overall: *1/2
Well Go USA / 2014 / Color / 1.75:1 / 111 min / $29.98

Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray & DVD reviews and theater criticism. He’s a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.

Feature Articles

World Cinema Paradise’s Best of Blu – 2014

December 29, 2014 Stuart Galbraith IV Leave a comment

Despite nearly everyone’s insistence (so it seems) that physical media is dead as a doornail, 2014 has, truly, been a remarkable year for home video, Blu-ray particularly. From an agonizingly slow start when the format was new, the flow of classic titles really exploded in the last year. It’s been hard to keep up with all of the terrific catalog titles, even if most are being sublicensed by the majors to boutique labels like Olive Films, Kino, and Twilight Time.

Region-free Blu-ray players have become an essential piece of hardware, with so many of the best titles emanating from the damndest places. For instance, some of the best ‘50s Hollywood Westerns and sci-fi pictures, for instance, are currently exclusively available from German labels. Further, video transfers and better extras from non-U.S. labels (Britain’s Arrow Films, for instance) are often far superior to their American counterparts. Sporadically, many French, Spanish, German, Italian, Indian, and other countries occasionally offer domestic Blu-rays of their country’s classic films with English subtitles.

But perhaps most exciting developments in the Blu-ray realm have been the growing list of classic 3-D titles and the continuing reemergence of long-lost Cinerama releases. These movies were next to impossible to see anywhere in the world at all. Today one can enjoy a very good approximation of what it was like for paying audiences when these movies were new, in the comfort of one’s own home. And that, folks, is simply amazing.

Narrowing a Best of Blu-ray list to only ten titles proved a daunting task. This is not a list of the greatest movies released in 2014 or even necessarily the greatest video transfers. In large part, however, it does take into consideration the work that went into reconstructing/restoring/presenting it (as opposed to simply releasing a preexisting video transfer), the “bang for the buck,” particularly in terms of the results versus the funds available to the label to do the work, and the creativity and ingenuity involved in the creation of extra features.

And away we go…

1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1962)
This extremely smart and adult science fiction film seemed pretty good when for years it ran panned-and-scanned on commercial television, but the BFI’s outstanding Blu-ray offers a picture-perfect transfer of its extremely impressive ‘scope photography (and special tinting for its opening and closing reels), with audio far superior to Anchor Bay’s years-ago DVD release. All of the fine extras from that earlier release have been ported over, along with many fine new ones – look for Leo McKern, in one his last interviews, doing a hilarious imitation of star Edward Judd!

2. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963)
Fans of Stanley Kramer’s all-star epic comedy have for years been clamoring for a reconstruction of this film’s short-lived original roadshow version. Criterion’s release reinstates nearly all of the lost footage, which subtly but effectively improves the film’s pacing, even with its longer running time, adding fine little bits of comedy long thought lost. The many fine extra features include 2014’s Audio Commentary Track of the Year, a deeply affectionate yet densely informative track that’s a real joy to listen to.

3. The Werner Herzog Collection (Werner Herzog, 1967-1987)
I envy those who’ll “blind-buy” this amazing collection of shorts and features, viewers unprepared for Herzog’s uniquely hypnotic, visionary films. If this set, well under $100 had included only Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu, the Vampire (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) it would have been worth every penny, but this boxed set includes scads more films and shorts, and hours-upon-hours of extra features content.

4. Seven Wonders of the World (Tay Garnett & Paul Mantz & Andrew Marton & Ted Tetzlaff & Walter Thompson, 1956)
David Strohmaier and his plucky band of restoration artists rescued three Cinerama titles from oblivion in 2014, the other two being Search for Paradise (1957) and Holiday in Spain (1960). Seven Wonders of the World is the best of the three, a visually spectacular tour around the globe chockfull of natural and man-made sights from a fascinating, singularly 1950s “Free World” perspective. More than any other movies from its time, the Cinerama format is the movie’s equivalent of a time machine, an experience not to be missed. Crammed with great extras.

5. Pit Stop (Jack Hill, 1969)
Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider get all the praise, but Jack Hill’s movies of the 1960s and early ‘70s are in their own way just as revolutionary and innovative. Another gorgeous high-def transfer from Arrow Films, this is one of Jack Hill’s best (and frequently startling) films. Despite its ultra-low budget, this is a fascinating and smart little movie you’ll not want to pass up. As usual for Arrow, this is packed with creative extra features.

6. Planet of the Vampires (Mario Bava, 1965)
Mario Bava’s enormously influential sci-fi horror film (Ever see Alien?) is an eye-popping parade of surrealistic sets, costumes, and special effects, but even in Bava’s home country the best anyone could come up with until was a widescreen DVD. Scorpion’s new Blu-ray rectifies all that, with a gorgeously, richly-colored transfer that at long-last does Bava’s vastly-underrated work justice. Add to that a densely packed, fact-filled and observant audio commentary by Bava authority Tim Lucas and you’ve got one of the year’s best releases.

7. Inferno (Roy Ward Baker, 1953)
This classical era 3-D production was initially released Region B only by British label Panamint Cinema but, almost under the radar, they’ve reissued it region-free. If you’ve got a 3-D set-up at home, this is one you’re going to want to get. A terrific desert noir, Inferno stars Robert Ryan as a wealthy, urban company president whose mettle is tested when his trophy wife and her secret lover abandon him (and his broken leg) in the middle of the desert, miles from civilization. Filmed in Technicolor (and thus requiring no less than six strips of 35mm film for each shot!) this release is a thing of stereoscopic beauty, perhaps the best-looking 1950s 3-D release on Blu-ray so far.

8. 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963)
In this age of CGI excess, the gargantuan roadshows of producer Samuel Bronston seem downright tasteful and restrained now, and despite their occasional shortcomings remain intelligent, thoughtful, and undeniably awesome in their full-scale epicness. This one, set during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, features an incredible reproduction of turn of the century Beijing, all built full-scale on the plains of Spain. On big home theater screens (I watched this on a 90-inch screen), the film’s grandeur is truly a sight to behold, especially via the picture’s stunning restoration from its original Super Technirama 70 negative.

9. The Mack Sennett Collection (various, 1909-1933) Flicker Alley; ALL
A revelatory set of rescued silent short subjects (plus a couple of feature) that demonstrate the incredible range not just of producer Sennett but also his company of comics, gag writers, and directors. Those whose image of Mack Sennett is limited to the Keystone Kops will be enormously surprised – and delighted – by the range of these delightful comedies. Many fine extras, including a genuinely touching This Is Your Life.

10. The Vincent Price Collection, Volume 2 (various, 1958-1972)
A worthy follow-up to Shout! Factory’s Volume 1, this set – featuring House on Haunted Hill, Return of the Fly, The Raven, Comedy of Terrors, Tomb of Ligeia, The Last Man on Earth, and Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Most were licensed from MGM, but Shout! went the extra mile licensing and insuring good transfers of the Allied Artist Haunted Hill and Fox’s Return of the Fly, as well as locating and creating lots of good new supplements.

Some Honorable Mentions:

The Essential Jacques Demy, The Sicilian Clan, Gravity (3-D), Gulliver’s Travels, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, Tomorrow, Judex, Man Hunt, His and Hers, The Death Kiss, Dragonfly Squadron (3-D), The Bubble (3-D), Last of the Unjust, The Conformist, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Girl Hunters, The François Truffaut Collection.

Reviews

Savant Blu-ray Review: “Dead Kids” (1981)

February 24, 2014 Glenn Erickson Leave a comment

Michael S. Laughlin certainly earned his stripes for off-the-beaten-path filmmaking. As a producer his name is on the highly-regarded Bryan Forbes film The Whisperers, Michael Sarne’s Mod-gay disaster Joanna, Monte Hellman’s terrific road epic Two-Lane Blacktop, Floyd Mutrux’s eccentric account of heroin addicts Dusty and Sweets McGee and the failed neo-noir thriller Chandler. In the early ’80s Laughlin directed two fantastic genre exercises in New Zealand for the prolific Australian producer Antony I. Ginnane. Bringing his star connections with him, Laughlin hooked up with fledgling screenwriter (and later Oscar-winner) Bill Condon and gave his utmost to a freaky semi-throwback teen horror opus aiming to score big in the current wave of slasher flick success: Dead Kids (1981). Given the more palatable title Strange Behavior for America, Dead Kids established a solid reputation that was dulled only by twenty years of wretched pan-scanned video releases.

Dead Kids is a one-of–a-kind horror treat, a teen mayhem tale in which the small town ambience ambiance brings s fresh sense of innocence to what had for several years become an exceedingly ugly genre. A string of knife killings in tiny Galesburg, Illinois baffles both the coroner and Police Chief John Brady (frequent Woody Allen star Michael Murphy), as no two murders are alike. Encouraged by his friend Oliver Myerhoff (Marc McClure of the Reeve Superman movies), John’s teenage son Pete Brady (Dan Shor) volunteers for some paid psych experiments at Galeburg College, in the lab of the beautiful Gwen Parkinson (Fiona Lewis of The Fearless Vampire Killers), helped by her odd assistant Nagel (Arthur Dignam). Gwen offers little or no explanation of what she’s up to, but all Pete must do to earn his first $100 is take a pill. His spirits are so high that he invites the lab receptionist Caroline (Dey Young of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) out for dinner. Bucking other locals convinced that he’s harboring a personal grudge, Chief Brady is convinced that the killings have something to do with secret experiments in the college lab. Sixteen years ago his wife worked there, and died under mysterious circumstances related to bizarre experiments being conducted by the notorious Dr. Le Sange (Arthur Dignam), who died himself not soon after. Or did he?

Believe it or not, Auckland New Zealand of 1980 comes across as a perfect idealized U.S. Midwest, with tidy frame houses, pristine green grass and streets teeming with vintage American cars. Pete Brady drives a beat-up Ford Thunderbird. The American actors seem right at home and the Kiwi talent fits in beautifully. We have to assume that the producers purposely made Dead Kids look as if it were an American product. They certainly score better than the Italians did twenty years before, when they Anglicized all the names on their horror film credits to make them look like English productions.

Dead Kids works because between its horror material, it delivers a compelling, sympathetic image of family life. We see no rotten parents driving their children into trouble. A prospective teen girl victim sneaks out of her window to attend a forbidden party, but she’s very much concerned with returning before dawn, so as to not upset her folks. Pete Brady is very close to his father, and understands his continuing suspicions and ill temper. John Brady has a steady love interest in Barbara Moorehead (Louise Fletcher), an understanding woman who wishes John could let go of the unpleasant past. John’s suspicions are heightened when he realizes that all the victims so far are related to the four or five men who opposed La Sange so many years ago. But nobody will listen to him. There are also no pig-headed cops. Brady doesn’t even wear a uniform. His office clerk is played by the highly familiar American Charles Lane. Normally one would think a local actor would be given such a role, and Lane seemed to exclusively play obnoxious clerks and unfriendly bureaucrats. Here he’s good pal, competent worker and a thoughtful helper. The production also flew in character actor Scott Brady, of Johnny Guitar, among dozens of memorable films. Scott Brady’s Chicago detective isn’t much use in a case that makes no criminal sense. He tells some dirty jokes and orders in a “bunch of scientific stuff” that probably won’t help very much.

All of these characters are afforded an unusual degree of respect — none is present to be the butt of humor or a disposable victim. Typical of this concern in Dead Kids is a housekeeper played by Beryl Te Wiata. It’s a throwaway role until she witness a grisly killing in progress. Even after being stabbed herself, she manages to describe her attacker over the phone. The movie treats her as an unfortunate heroine, not killer bait.

In a lesson horror movies often forget, our concern for the characters makes the scary content all the scarier. At the core of the picture is a time-warp concept from a ’50s mad-doctor picture like The Unearthly or I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the kind of medico-fantasy that David Cronenberg was already exploiting. The alluring Gwen Parkinson is using drugs and who-knows-what to effect a remote control of her teenaged subjects, who are apparently programmed to do appalling crimes, and then experience complete memory loss.

Laughlin and Condon stage their killings with more finesse than is usual for slashers made in the wake of dreck like Friday the 13th. Some of the stabbings are explicit and others less so, but each is shocking. One dismemberment in a bathtub makes us fear for more atrocities, and a close-up sight of a boy trussed up as a scarecrow, with his eyes carved out, is strong stuff. But the film doesn’t revel in the individual killings and they don’t become exercises in one-up-manship: it’s not like lovers are skewered or eyes are pierced because the production feels the need to top the latest Argento or Fulci gorefest.

The most disturbing scene plays off our most simple medical nightmares. Pete Brady is strapped into a chair by the attractive but utterly un-reassuring Gwen, who reaches across for the largest, most wicked-looking syringe seen this side of The Amazing Colossal Man. Without so much as a “hold still’, She then plunges the needle into the corner of Pete’s eye socket and pumps in several ounces of green fluid. If this isn’t performed in one shot, it feels like it — and is effective enough to make an entire audience yelp and squirm.

Elsewhere Laughlin and Condon indulge what must have been some personal desires. One of the killers wears a rubber Tor Johnson mask, reminding us of the Captain Kirk mask worn by the mad killer in Halloween. Even better is an in-from-left-field musical number during a rather kitschy costume party. Pete shows up and meets a desirable girl just as Lou Christie’s Lightning Strikes causes all the kids to hop-dance in unison, with a handsome camera pullback making it all look like completely self-conscious, high spirited choreography. Some viewers think the stylized scene is just plain dumb, as what are kids from 1981 doing rocking out to a 1966 oldie? Actually, the song’s lyrics about an unstoppable compulsion seem fully appropriate.

Perhaps Dead Kids’ final scenes were meant to show Michael Laughlin’s higher ambitions. With the threat vanquished we’re treated to several images of happiness unexpected in a horror film by anybody, from anywhere. After all, these were the years where horror films were outdoing each other to generate nihilistic conclusions. The peace won by Michael Murphy’s character is hard-earned and much deserved. The movie in particular is very kind to the great (and sexy!) actress Louise Fletcher, who since her oppressive nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had difficulty obtaining sympathetic parts.

Michael Laughlin and Bill Condon would move on to the more ambitious retro- Sci-fi tale Strange Invaders, with even more imported Yank actors (Paul Le Mat, Nancy Allen, Diana Scarwid, Michael Lerner, Louise Fletcher, Wallace Shawn, Fiona Lewis, Kenneth Tobey, June Lockhart, Charles Lane, Dan Shor, Dey Young) making New Zealand become America of the 1950′s. The film has its fans but I always found it obvious and unconvincing. That’s a shame, as a retro- ’50s Sci-fi picture would seem a perfect fit for this fan of film fantasy.

Severin Films’ Blu-ray + DVD of Dead Kids is a great improvement over two earlier DVD releases, Elite’s from 2003 and Synapse’s better disc from 2008. The very widescreen image (Laughlin and cameraman Louis Horvath use every inch of the wide screen) seems enlarged in all four directions. The first scene looks terrible — out of focus, drab — but from then on the film’s images are sharper and more colorful than any copy we’ve seen before. The sight of Fiona Lewis stalking around the lab complex in her white smock, high heels and just-so hairstyle is quite arresting. It’s actually too bad that we don’t learn more about what makes the evil Gwen Parkinson tick — she’s worthy of a sequel all her own.

As reported at the very discerning Mondo Digital website, the movie here encoded is actually two minutes longer than its reported running time and has two brief scenes not seen before. As the sharp-eyed Nathaniel Thompson says, Severin’s disc contains an unheralded expanded cut!

The film contains some local New Zealand rock of the period, but soundtrack duties are handled by the estimable Tangerine Dream. The tracks are effective, if not nearly as expressive as those on Michael Mann’s Thief (which just came out from Criterion). Tangerine Dream’s eerie music is auditable on an Isolated Score track.

One commentary with writer Condon and actors Dey Young and Dan Shor hails from the earlier DVD and is still entertaining — all three talents have gone on to busy and rewarding careers. Severin adds a new commentary with Michael Laughlin, unfortunately not the best of recordings. We get some insights but not a full picture on this interesting filmmaker.

A special treat is a nicely-paced interview with special makeup effects artist Craig Reardon, the hand-picked protégé of Dick Smith. With candor and honesty, Reardon goes over the ups and downs of what was one of his first solo makeup jobs. Plunked onto an airplane with a few prepared latex appliances and a fake gelatin arm provided by Tom Burman, Craig had to come up with a difficult effects gag straight off a twenty-hour plane ride, and pulled it off with pure ingenuity. Craig’s ‘disguise’ makeup for Arthur Dignam, using techniques learned from Dick Smith, is a whopping success in the completed picture. We also see some rare photos of Reardon’s later, more universally celebrated work. And he’s still active, capable of terrific, cutting edge makeup concepts.

Severin’s package concludes with trailers for both International (“Dead Kids”) and U.S. (“Strange Behavior”) markets. Dead Kids is one of the few modern horror films that appeals to this reviewer. i respect quite a few, but this one I actually warm up to.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Reviews

Savant Blu-ray Review: “Foreign Correspondent” (1940)

February 15, 2014 Glenn Erickson Leave a comment

We’ve had our fill of tell-all biographies about Alfred Hitchcock’s alleged sexual obsessions with his leading actresses, a trend that came to a head a couple of seasons back with the shockingly fictitious movie Hitchcock. In the 1940s Hitch was being driven batty in a different way, putting up with David O. Selznick, the powerful producer and talent broker. Selznick brought England’s most entertaining director to Hollywood, where the creative possibilities within the massive studio factories seemed unlimited. Hitch had been on a roll with witty U.K. spy thrillers that put attractive amateurs into high jeopardy, fighting assassins on moving trains and fleeing enemy agents on the Scottish moors.

Selznick instead first assigned Hitchcock to help fashion a glamorous but overlong romantic thriller, Rebecca (1940). After a flaming finale the characters must continue talking for several minutes to clear away the story deadwood.

Selznick was so busy with his other films and with promoting Jennifer Jones that he loaned Hitchcock out several times during the run of his contract. Almost immediately came Foreign Correspondent (1940), a gutsy ‘spy’ chase given real bite by the international situation. England was already at war, and independent producer Walter Wanger was eager to strike a propaganda blow against Hitler. A committed leftist, Wanger had produced Fritz Lang’s critical crime picture You Only Live Once as well as the somewhat muddled anti-Franco drama Blockade, both starring Henry Fonda. In perhaps the most direct bit of revolutionary theater transferred to the screen, Fonda wails that the Great Democracies are doing nothing to stem the Fascist atrocities in Spain: “Where is the conscience of the World?!”

As it turned out, patriot Hitchcock was the tempering influence behind Foreign Correspondent. Wanger salted in dialogue lines referring to Hitler’s progress across Europe, but Hitch worked to keep the film’s tone as light and entertaining as possible. The movie turns to overt propaganda only at the end, in the brief but famous “The lights are going out all over Europe”.

Hitchcock critics are much better informed today, but there was a time when they debated the same rather narrow issue: is Hitch’s best work his clever ’30s spy chases The Secret Agent, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes? Or do his glossy, star-driven Hollywood thrillers show a maturity in his style: The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Topaz?

I’m of the opinion that Foreign Correspondent is the best of Alfred Hitchcock’s spy chase thrillers. While not blessed with top box office stars, its leading actors Joel McCrea and Laraine Day are intensely likeable, and Hitchcock puts them through a series of exciting, fresh adventures that never strain credibility, or go for cheap jokes. As with the earlier English classics, Hitchcock makes use of silent movie visual gags to involve the viewer in the action. The easiest of these is the bobbing forest of umbrellas in Holland, which both hide the assassin and reveal his escape path. Hitch also uses visual shorthand to add droll visual jokes, like the hotel sign that suddenly makes its own comment on anxious pre-war Europe. Some of these visual gags are so simple they remind us of the hand-drawn cartoons Hitch reportedly added to silent movie cards when he was just starting out.

Although filmed in Los Angeles, Foreign Correspondent is also the kind of fast moving travelogue that Hitchcock preferred. A few of his later VistaVision pictures take time out to observe flower markets, or just admire the countryside. After WW2, breaking countries down into simple references (like Switzerland = chocolate) would have been insulting. Hitch tried a ruthlessly unsentimental spy story in Topaz and nobody felt engaged in the story. The new lovers in Correspondent cuddle and kiss on the deck of a ship crossing the English Channel. He: “You see, I love you and I want to marry you.” She: “I love you and I want to marry you.” He: “Well, that cuts our love scene down quite a bit, doesn’t it?” For once every line of dialogue is a witty gem; there are no clunkers. That’s how it should be when talent like Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, James Hilton and Robert Benchley are properly applied to a script.

With the bigger, glossier ’50s films name stars take a much bigger role. James Stewart and Doris Day’s marital relationship in the Man Who Knew Too Much remake is terribly dated. Day’s traumatized mother is sedated before being told that her son has been kidnapped; it’s assumed she can’t handle the pressure. The frightened couple also break Hitchcock’s rule by going to the police early and often. So we have to listen to the cops in scene after scene.

Finally, career adapter Ernest Lehman turns North by NorthWest into a ‘best-of’ collection of Hitch’s Greatest Chase Hits. When not wowing us with extraordinary set-piece scenes like the Corn Field Crossroads, Lehman baldly repeats situations from earlier films. It’s a great movie with marvelous characters. As in most of the ’50s Hitchcocks, the bad guys are identified from the moment they’re introduced.

This by no means is a criticism of any of these Hitchcock pictures, almost all of which are superb entertainments. Foreign Correspondent quickly breaks free of thriller conventions. Its hero Johnny Jones is not a two-fisted adventurer but a crime reporter who loves his Mom, keeps losing his hat and punches out policemen. Half the time the tone is of a screwball comedy. Harry Davenport is Jones’ grinning, mischievous editor, and co-writer Robert Benchley is on hand as an alcoholic, slacker foreign correspondent that greets Johnny’s boat.

When the spy threat becomes more intense, the humor doesn’t depart, but instead morphs into proto- James Bond witticisms and caustic observations by George Sanders’ good-guy intelligence agent. Haughty and bored-looking in all but the most unpleasant situations, Sanders’ unflappable cool is highly entertaining — and impressively original.

Finally, Foreign Correspondent has several bravura set piece scenes that for my money top anything before or since in similarly themed Hitchcock pictures. Walter Wanger secured for his director the best technical wizardry in Hollywood, starting with William Cameron Menzies, whose distinctive designs gave shape to many a shaky production. Johnny Jones’ escape out a high hotel window is only a refinement on standard matte painting techniques. But Menzies’ genius is fully realized in the Holland windmill scene. When he enters the noisy, dust-filled windmill Johnny Jones is trying to determine if the shooting of the beloved Peace advocate Van Meer (Albert Basserman) has been faked. The noise and the turning gears allow Johnny to hide, even when it seems certain that his presence will be discovered. Hitchcock and Menzies use every trick they can think of — a villain changing his sweaters give Johnny a chance to shift position, for instance. But then Johnny’s raincoat gets caught in the gears and is dangled practically in the faces of the bad guys. Every shot in this swift sequence is a complex beauty. What dialogue we do hear is irrelevant – the pictures tell the story, compelling us to share Johnny’s experience at a gut level.

Before CGI was used for everything, some of the best special film effects were little more than clever slight-of-hand-gags. To escape from the fourth or fifth floor of building under renovation, one of the heroes leaps from a window, rips through an awning and gently alights at sidewalk level. The shot looks like one take, an amazing feat. But closer examination shows the stunt to be constructed in two halves — the man making the big drop is a dummy, and the actor takes over for the drop through the awning. It always gets applause in theatrical showings.

The sequence that really wows ‘em is the crash of a flying boat in mid-Atlantic. Here Menzies uses everything he knows to inject realism (1940-style) into the spectacle of a passenger plane shot down by a warship. The ship interior tilts and hand-held cameras reflect the passengers’ panic as the cabin floods with real water. The actual moment of crash impact was an expensive “this better work” gag involving large water dump tanks — it’s better seen than explained. When the survivors climb out on the few pieces of the plane still floating, we see real water, rear-screen projected waves and other effects working that are much harder to analyze. The important thing is that the Foreign Correspondent plane crash is still one of the most effective, audience-engaging disaster scenes ever filmed.

We’re told that Alfred Hitchcock resisted letting Foreign Correspondent become an outright attack on Hitler and the Nazis. One factor might have been that patriotic films being made in England were careful not to provoke the Germans too much, for fear of reprisals against Brits already in prison camps. Our Isolationist (read: pro- Bund) congress was censuring Hollywood to curb all propaganda movies. But Correspondent does mention Hitler by name. The epilogue in the BBC radio room as the air raid begins is a message for America to get active, now. It might be too late for England, leaving America as the world’s only hope. I think it’s one of the most stirring calls to battle ever made by a movie, and all the more effective because of Hitchcock’s breezy treatment.

The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray + DVD of Foreign Correspondent is quite a surprise. Remastered from its owner Westchester Film, the B&W HD image is gorgeous, far surpassing Warners’ earlier DVD and looking like something one might see on a screen in 1940. Alfred Newman’s great score (with an infectious little tune to represent the inexperienced Johnny Jones) comes through more strongly than ever. Shots that before were lost in darkness, leaving visual details difficult to assess, are now sharp as a tack. A photo-story Life magazine article arranged by Hitchcock shows how idle rumors hurt the war effort. Joseph Cotten appears in a 1946 radio adaptation, and the insert booklet carries an essay by James Naremore.

Effects spokesman Craig Barron provides a lengthy breakdown of the film’s wizardly camera tricks, while Mark Harris provides an absorbing visual opinion essay called Hollywood Propaganda and WWII. An episode of the Dick Cavett Show has Hitchcock as its coddled guest.

Criterion’s Dual-Edition release contains all extras on both Blu-ray and DVD. The In-House producer is Susan Arosteguy.

Reviews

Special Report: Criterion’s Reconstruction of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World”

January 24, 2014 Stuart Galbraith IV 4 Comments

One of the most eagerly-awaited titles of this or any other year, Criterion’s new Blu-ray of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World offers a long-desired reconstruction of the film’s original roadshow version, a cut of the film not seen by anyone a few months after the movie’s November 7, 1963 premiere.

An epic, all-star comedy directed by Stanley Kramer, it’s as divisive as Hillary Clinton: people tend to either love or hate it. Indeed, some of the more extreme haters harbor an inexplicable resentment toward those who don’t share their opinion. I’m squarely in the other camp. I’ve adored and have been endlessly mesmerized by Kramer’s film since childhood. For me it never gets old, but I can also understand why it might not click with everyone who sees it. It helps to be familiar with the dizzying array of stars, supporting actor-comedians, and even bit players who populate it. It also plays better viewed cold, without any awareness of what’s to come, with no promises or expectations of a “comedy to end all comedies.”

It is, unquestionably, misunderstood by many. Though dominated by broad, large-scale slapstick, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World works as much for other reasons. The movie has an unusual structure, introducing a group of characters which it then breaks up into, eventually, six major groupings, cleverly intercutting their various adventures before they all meet up again at the climax, with additional characters picked up and encountered along the way. This cutting among the various sub-plots as they converge on a potential $350,000 jackpot several hundred miles away is a big part of the film’s charm. Structurally, a comparison to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is not inapt. That silent epic doesn’t make much of an impact when its multiple stories are viewed separately (as they frequently were), but intercut as Griffith intended that picture, like IAMMMMW, it becomes an entirely different viewing experience.

Some reviewers have also mistaken the film as some sort of tribute to silent comedy. Certainly its Harold Lloyd-like climax has elements of that, but overall the film is its own animal. It’s not an attempt at an old-fashioned tribute the way The Great Race (1965) later was. Despite Kramer’s reputation for socially conscious drama and despite IAMMMMW’s greed-driven plot there’s no attempt at any social significance or a “message” of any kind. Despite the presence of comedians and comic actors drawn from silent films, Vaudeville, burlesque, nightclubs, radio, television, and other venues, William and Tania Rose’s screenplay brings these widely-varied performing styles into a solidly-plotted cohesive whole, though it does draw inspiration from various sources and gives each performer breathing room to ply their craft. (For me, parts of the film play like a more cynical Preston Sturges script, particularly in scenes featuring actor William Demarest, in all but name reprising his Officer Kockenlocker character from The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.)

Mainly, this review will explore the 197-minute reconstruction – not “restoration” – of the original 202-minute roadshow version, what was put back and in what form, and how these added elements play against the more familiar and subsequent 163-minute roadshow/general release version.

If you’re reading this review you already probably know It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World backwards. If somehow you’ve made your way through life without ever seeing it, like audio co-commentator Mark Evanier I recommend that you first watch the shorter version of the film, then the longer cut some time later, and then come back to read this review.

To summarize: Trying to elude detectives hot on his trail, career crook “Smiler” Grogan (Jimmy Durante) spectacularly crashes his car in the Mohave Desert many miles north of Los Angeles. Before expiring he tells the five motorists who’ve stopped to help – dentist Melville Crump (Sid Caesar); Vegas-bound pals “Ding” Bell (Buddy Hackett) and Benjy Benjamin (Mickey Rooney); milquetoast seaweed entrepreneur J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle); and simple-minded furniture mover Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters) about $350,000 buried several hundred miles away at Santa Rosita Beach State Park, under what he describes as “ a big ‘W.’” (In a nice touch, Durante repeats this important clue for the audience’s benefit, looking straight into the camera, ensuring that they will be on the lookout, too.)

Joined by Russell’s straight-laced wife, Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and domineering mother-in-law, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman), and Melville’s wife, Monica (Edie Adams), the group quickly abandons any thought of calmly driving down to Santa Rosita together as a group and dividing the stolen money equally. As Benjy says, “it’s every man, including the old bag (Merman), for himself.”

Meanwhile, Chief of Detectives Capt. T.G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy, top-billed) of the Santa Rosita Police Department closely monitors their actions. An honest cop four months away from retirement, Culpepper is equally anxious to close this 15-year-old case, believing that he can finagle its successful resolution into an upgraded pension so that he can “retire with honor.”

As the treasure hunters leave an awesome trail of destruction in their wake – “withholding information, causing accidents, failing to report accidents, reckless driving, theft, at least three cases of assault and battery…” – they pick up other strangers along the way, notably British army Lt. Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas), unscrupulous con-man Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), and Russell’s spaced-out brother-in-law, Sylvester Marcus (Dick Shawn)

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World was filmed in Ultra Panavision 70, an anamorphic 65mm process, and originally exhibited as a road show, meaning that instead of saturation bookings on hundreds or thousands of movie screens simultaneously, the film rolled out across the country (and around the world) slowly, methodically. It typically opened in just one big downtown movie palace in each of the country’s biggest cities, playing on a reserved-seats basis for an average run of one year, then after that went into general release and neighborhood theaters and, eventually, drive-ins.

The movie premiered at the Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood on November 3, 1963, and by mid-December had also opened in New York, Chicago, Boston, London, and Atlanta but few, if any, other theaters, partly because most Cinerama houses were still playing How the West Was Won to packed houses, and partly because theaters had to then be converted from the original three-strip Cinerama process to the more standard 70mm equipment needed to run IAMMMMW. By mid-December 1963 distributor United Artists, working with Kramer, decided to cut about 43 minutes of movie out of the long film which, taking into consideration its overture, intermission break, entr’acte, and exit music clocked in at nearly three-and-a-half hours.

And so it was the shorter, 163-minute version that played everywhere else, as a roadshow throughout 1964, in general release, during its 1970 rerelease, on network television, in syndication, and on home video. In 1991 MGM cobbled together its own 175-minute reconstruction, but that release was far from perfect: some of the footage was incorrectly integrated, and least one shot included in that release was apparently never part of any official version.

Criterion’s reconstructed Blu-ray version, supervised by Robert A. Harris, consists mostly of MGM’s HD transfer of the short version integrated with the same deleted footage included on the 1991 home video version, footage derived from 70mm theatrical print trims of the long version. For the 1991 laserdisc and VHS release, this footage retained the optical squeeze added to the extreme left and right sides of the frame so that, when projected onto Cinerama’s deeply-curved screen, the image would stretch back out to more or less normal. This has been optically corrected and properly integrated with the rest of the film. In the 22 years in-between these two home video releases, the color on the trims had faded so badly that the decision was made to layer the color from the 1991 transfer on top of the remastered-for-HD trims. Because the older transfer cropped the Ultra Panavision framing slightly, the area around the edges of the frame look almost monochrome. It’s noticeable, but not nearly as distracting as frame grabs of these scenes suggest. Because of where the magnetic soundtrack matching the action was placed on 70mm release prints, the audio drops out a second at the end of each cut. Harris has included these bits, using English subtitles so that viewers don’t miss any of the dialogue.

So, the vast majority of reinstated material consists of these trims, the same material integrated for that 1991 release. There is a bit of new material, though probably not as much as many were hoping for, and some of that has audio but no picture. The previously unreleased material with both picture and sound is easy to spot, as it’s the footage without the monochrome borders at the edges of the frame. There’s not a lot of this, but what’s there is worthwhile, most notably footage that expands the build-up to the intermission break, particularly at the Santa Rosita police station. The short version edits the build-up to the intermission extremely well, but the build-up in the long version is just as good, just a little different.

There are three short scenes in which there is sound but no picture: Sylvester’s theft of his girlfriend’s car, some more footage of the Crumps locked in the basement of a hardware store, and Culpepper’s telephone conversation with Jimmy the Crook (Buster Keaton, who in the short version has but one line and is onscreen for less than ten seconds).

Each of these three scenes offers a few surprises previously unknown to most Mad World fans: that Sylvester’s girlfriend is actually a married woman, for instance, and that it’s her car he steals. The telephone scene in one respect is almost heartbreaking: the audience hears Keaton’s voice but is denied the chance to actually see him and his reactions to Culpepper’s plotting.

But the sequence also completely changes one aspect of the film. In the short version it appears that Culpepper has suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. (“You know what I believe I’d like?” he asks his fellow cops. “A chocolate fudge sundae, with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”) In the short version, Culpepper’s decision to steal Smiler’s 350 Gs for himself isn’t made clear until very late in the film and comes as a genuine surprise, though there are clues earlier in the picture pointing to that.

In the reconstructed version all surprise is gone as made clear by that phone call to Keaton’s character. Further, Culpepper’s desire to have that chocolate fudge sundae is no longer the pathetic non sequitur of a broken man, but a ruse so that he can get out of the station and call Jimmy from a nearby drugstore. Nice as it would be to see and hear Keaton, the movie is better without that scene.

The brief audio-only footage of the Crumps in the basement is seriously damaged by one truly terrible decision. Unlike the other two audio-only scenes, which use publicity stills (possibly unreleased stills from contact sheets), this footage incorporates behind-the-scenes and set stills. In addition to Sid Caesar and Edie Adams, these stills make visible members of the film crew, including director Stanley Kramer himself, along with a massive Ultra Panavision camera in one shot. This has the effect of completely taking the viewer out of the movie. They’re interesting as photographs but they have no business in a reconstruction like this.

Likely no appropriate stills of the missing scene exist, but that was also true of some of the scenes missing from the 1954 A Star Is Born. In that Gold Standard of movie reconstruction, producer Ron Haver cleverly found ways around the problem, making those missing scenes play as seamlessly as possible. Clearly any evidence of the crew should have been cropped or matted out.

Overall, the long version has its advantages and disadvantages. Except for one early scene showing the mad motorists driving recklessly through a small desert community, with a few exceptions the cut footage mostly extends scenes from the short version and is no great loss without them. While some would argue the reinstated scenes merely make the long film even longer, in some ways it actually improves the pacing. In its short form the movie at times is a little schizophrenic and cuts too abruptly among the various subplots. The build-up in the longer version is more carefully and deliberately paced, in some respects making the payoffs that come later more satisfying. Interestingly, much of the cut scenes relate to the incredulous monitoring of the fortune-seekers by various law enforcement officers driving black-and-whites or riding in helicopters.

The cut footage also offers a short scene between Winters and Provine that provide Winters’s character with a selfless motive to want his share of the loot, a motive that’s completely absent in the short version. Moreover, there are a handful of great comedy bits the short version should have retained: Culpepper’s $5 bet with Police Chief Aloysius (William Demarest); Rancho Conejo air traffic controllers Carl Reiner and Eddie Ryder shaking hands, a last goodbye as Ding and Benjy’s out-of-control twin-engine plane is on a head-on collision course with their tower; a funny deleted line from cab driver Eddie “Rochester” Anderson near the climax.

The cut footage also make sense of continuity issues created by the short version, which had left viewers familiar only with that version baffled for years. They explain that the silver mine Otto Meyer speaks of is the place where the character played by Mike Mazurki lives. (I never realized this.) The long version also explains just why Hackett’s character is soaking wet in a couple of shots.

If ever there was a special edition prompted by consumer demand, it’s this. Though a popular catalog title, MGM was loathe to spend the vast sums of money a restoration/reconstructed would have required back in the ‘80s-through-early 2000s. Like David Strohmeier’s Cinerama restorations, IAMMMMW is only possible now because of cost-effective computer technologies that, combined with MGM’s preexisting HD master of the short version, now make such a release cost-effective.

The transfer of the extra-wide Ultra Panavision process (65mm, at 2.76:1) is impeccable, but then again it already was when the beleaguered MGM transferred the short version to HD a couple years ago. Excerpt for the new scenes, this is a same transfer as that, with only minor tweaking. The 5.1 surround, adapted from the original 6-track magnetic stereo, sounds great, a more noticeable improvement from MGM’s earlier Blu-ray of the short version. In addition to the original overture, entr’acte, and exit music, this release incorporates audio-only “police calls” heard sporadically throughout the intermission. All of this is over black, no title card, and there’s a lot of dead air between these calls but, apparently, that’s how they were spaced back in late 1963.

Criterion’s release offers both cuts of IAMMMMW on two Blu-ray discs and three DVDs, the third SD disc consisting of the same extra features spread across the two Blu-rays. The foldout packaging is nice, incorporating Jack Davis artwork commissioned for the 1970 rerelease. Inside there’s a booklet featuring an essay by Lou Lumenick and details about the film and sound elements sourced. Also included is a colorful but impractical map identifying some of the film’s shooting locations (Google Earth comes in very handy here).

Supplements are voluminous though curiously missing the “Something a Little Less Serious” documentary made for the 1991 home video version. That documentary featured Kramer and many more original cast members, all in better health and in greater number than they appear in the newer extras included here. “The Last 70mm Film Festival,” for instance, literally wheels-on Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney and Marvin Kaplan (one of the two gas station attendants whose business Winters’s character destroys), with Winters in good spirits but clearly not long for this world. Hosted by Billy Crystal and also featuring other cast and crewmembers, it’s a bit rambling, but enjoyable. (It’s a shame there’s no good video of the American Cinematheque screening I attended some years earlier, which had more of these folks and in far heartier shape.) Also included is a long excerpt from AFI’s 100 Years…100 Laughs focusing on IAMMMMW.

Other extras include original and reissue trailers; Stan Freberg’s TV and radio spots, which Freberg himself introduces; a two-part CBC program documenting the movie’s giant press junket and premiere; one-sided press interviews from 1963, featuring Kramer and his cast; an excerpt from a 1974 talk show hosted by Kramer and featuring Caesar, Hackett, and Winters; short but enlightening featurettes about the reconstruction process and another about the film’s visual and aural effects, including some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage.

And, best of all, there’s an informative and cozily personal audio commentary track on the long version by “Mad World aficionados” (they’re much more than that) Mark Evanier, Michael Schlesinger, and Paul Scrabo. It’s worth all 197 minutes.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World rates:

Movie: Excellent

Video: Excellent

Sound: Excellent

Supplements: Audio commentary, trailers, radio spots, press interviews, 1974 TV reunion, 2012 cast and crew reunion, Mad World locations map, AFI 100 Years…100 Laughs excerpt, featurettes on the reconstruction, sound and visual effects, booklet.

Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES (for the general release version).

Criterion 1963 / Color / 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision 70 / 197 and 163 min. / Street Date January 21, 2014 / $49.95

Starring Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Dorothy Provine and a Few Surprises.

Director of Photography Ernest Laszlo

Music Ernest Gold

Written by William and Tania Rose

Produced and Directed by Stanley Kramer

Feature Articles

No Love for Jacques Rivette

January 17, 2014 Stephen Bowie 2 Comments

Jacques Rivette is my favorite director, and Criterion hates him.

Actually, I have no idea how the folks at Criterion feel about Rivette. But the 85 year-old filmmaker may now be the only acknowledged master who remains completely unrepresented in the Criterion Collection as it inches toward 1,000 titles (counting the titles in its Eclipse offshoot). Of course, rights and consumer demand are the major factors behind what movies get released, even for a home video label that has cannily branded itself as a synonym for quality and staked a claim towards defining the canon. For much of the DVD era, a few other notable omissions kept pace. But after Criterion finally released its first selections by Satyajit Ray and Rivette’s French New Wave compatriot Claude Chabrol (both in 2011), it was Rivette who stood alone out in the cold.

Criterion’s lack of Rivette love has become a grumpy running joke at cinephile hangouts like the (unaffiliated) Criterion Forum – as well as an ongoing meme on Criterion’s Facebook page, where, in 2009, the label innocently asked whether anyone would be interested in a release of Rivette’s legendary, little-seen masterpiece Out 1: Spectre (1971). Criterion hasn’t spoken of it since, and it’s still unclear whether that post was meant to genuinely gauge interest, or tweak the noses of the Rivettean faithful. But in a way it’s appropriate that Rivette should remain a persistent outsider, both because he was one of the few French New Wave directors to gain little commercial traction in the U.S., and because secrecy and paranoia are one of the key themes in Rivette’s filmography. Of course, that’s little consolation to region-locked Americans, who must content themselves with adequate home video versions of only a half-dozen of Rivette’s more recent films.

But as for me, I’ve just imported what may be my most cherished disc release of last year: Masters of Cinema’s UK Blu-ray of Le Pont du Nord (1981). It marks the film’s English-language home video bow, and Rivette’s high-definition debut. Le Pont du Nord is one of Rivette’s most accomplished works, and also a good entry point for a director whom some find daunting. Like most of Rivette’s films, it combines several recurring obsessions: female relationships; games; the city of Paris; and (perhaps the motif that has the most resonance in post-September 11) the assumption of vast, barely-glimpsed conspiracies that operate underneath the events on-screen in a Lovecraftian way. The film’s two heroines, played by real-life mother and daughter Bulle and Pascale Ogier, are strangers who meet near the Lion de Delfort and spend a few days in each other’s company. Both are outsiders, exiled to the streets by circumstances that they gradually share with each other (and also by Rivette’s limited budget, and attraction to the simplicity of what he called a “reportage” style). Marie (Bulle) is just out of prison and, as a consequence, too claustrophobic to venture indoors; Baptiste (Pascale) is a sort of street punk who fancies herself as a modern-day knight, defending the city against unseen enemies. She appoints herself as a bemused Marie’s protector.

Although Baptiste remains something of a cipher until the very end, Rivette fills in Marie’s backstory fairly early in the film. She is a former revolutionary, alternately pursuing and pursued by a former lover, Julien (Pierre Clémenti), and a mysterious man in black (Jean-François Stévenin) who may be a cop or a secret agent. A plot, of sorts, involves a dossier and a map stolen from Julien’s briefcase. The documents are a Macguffin that connect the film explicitly to specific events during the Giscard government; the map, on the other hand, becomes a springboard for Marie and Baptiste’s quixotic journey across Paris (from the center to the outskirts), as Baptiste hatches the idea of deciphering its uncertain meaning by “playing” it as a chutes-and-ladders game.

The use of the adjective “quixotic” is no accident; Quixote and Sancho Panza provided the inspiration for Rivette’s heroines. Like Cervantes’s novel, Le Pont du Nord can be taken as either a tragedy or, if not quite a comedy, then a beguiling, fantastical adventure. The ominous, Langian scenario grounds the film in a harsh external reality. But it’s the magical realist touches, and the quick throwaway gags (reminiscent of early Truffaut and Godard, during a period of the New Wave that Rivette mostly sat out), more than the looming bummer, that provide Le Pont du Nord’s most thrilling moments. The tone is elastic enough to permit a moment in which Marie and Baptiste, who have slept outside due to Marie’s phobia, notice a movie marquee for Les Grands Espaces (The Great Outdoors); with a shrug, they spend the night contently inside the theater. (It ruins the pun to note that this is actually William Wyler’s The Big Country, under its French title.) There’s also the wonderful moment where Baptiste “kills” her damaged, loudly whirring motorbike by cutting a hose with her switchblade, like a cowboy shooting his wounded horse – one of many ways in which Rivette, a film buff’s film buff, inscribes Le Pont du Nord as a disguised western.

Rivette is careful to provide a realistic explanation for Baptiste’s mania, a moment at which the “normal” Marie realizes with horror that her companion is a genuine schizophrenic. Yet the film doesn’t insist upon dispelling of all its myths and ruining the fun of its games. Le Pont du Nord has two climaxes – one a tragedy, the other an absurd, adorable showdown between Baptiste and a modernist metal dragon (which some sources describe as a children’s slide, although if so it’s a rather steep and terrifying one; and it also breathes fire) – and an enigmatic epilogue, an impromptu karate lesson that corrupts any strictly literal interpretation of the preceding events. The symbolic and structural function of this, one of my favorite movie endings, reappears in a better-known film: it is reinscribed as the explosive breakdance that ends Beau travail (2000), directed by Claire Denis, who was an informal student of Rivette’s during the seventies.

I first viewed Le Pont du Nord on December 2, 2006, as part of an essential theatrical revival of Rivette’s films that toured the U.S. Also that day, I saw Love on the Ground (L’amour par terre, 1984), the director’s second-best film of the eighties – but in a shortened, two-hour version that is generally regarded as inferior to Rivette’s original, 176-minute cut. It was a pleasant surprise, then, when the bare-bones 2008 DVD of Love on the Ground, from a relatively minor UK label called Bluebell Films, turned out to contain the long version.

If Le Pont du Nord can function as Rivette for beginners, Love on the Ground is a post-graduate exercise. Like Le Pont du Nord, it centers upon a female duo: a pair of actresses, in this case linked not by blood relation but by a shared foreignness, thanks to Rivette’s ingenious casting of two of the most prominent English-speaking actresses in Europe, Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin. Love on the Ground’s other primary subject is the theater, a major Rivette trope that’s absent, in the literal sense, from Le Pont du Nord. Birkin and Chaplin first appear in an avant-garde (but terrible) performance of a play in a real flat, where the spectators follow the performers around from room to room. When the author (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) shows up he’s intrigued by both the approach and, more importantly, the actresses, whom he invites to rehearse in a new, unfinished play to be staged in his own country home. As the play develops, so do romances between the women, the playwright, and his friend Paul (André Dussolier), a magician and a key to the film’s relatively minor strand of overt fantasy. The amusing – or perhaps infuriating – result of the “theater at home” conceit, in which domestic and performance space overlap completely, is that it’s often impossible to be certain, at the beginning of each scene or at the end of any line, whether we’re witnessing a rehearsal or “real” life.

Unfortunately, as I watched the DVD, I couldn’t really remember what sections of the longer cut were missing from the print I saw seven years ago. The material of Love on the Ground feels a bit thin to fill three hours, although, as Rivette devotee Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, the short version perversely retains most of the play-within-a-movie material and excises the richer relationship subplots. The extended length struck me as lending a better sense of balance and pace to the disorienting, circular story, and it also led me to think of Love on the Ground as something of a companion piece to Rivette’s best-known film, Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline and Julie vont en bateau, 1974). Celine and Julie has a similar duration, and also positions its paired heroines within a cloistered mansion where the division between reality and fantasy is blurred.

Duration is one of the things for which Rivette is famed. Céline and Julie and Love on the Ground are both a tad on the short side, actually. Out 1, made for but rejected by French television, is thirteen hours long. Noli me tangere (1971), the alternate “short” version of Out 1, is four hours long; L’amour fou (1969), another early masterpiece, is four and a half. The length issue is part of a widespread characterization of Rivette as too difficult or obscure to succeed in the kind of mainstream spotlight that, say, a series of Criterion Blu-rays would throw. (Rosenbaum, as far back as 1983, described the phenomenon of encountering lonely Rivette fanatics all over the world – exactly the sort of secret society that you’d find in a Rivette film, of course.)

I always argue the point when it comes up, and I think I’m right: Nothing signed by Rivette is any more daunting than, for instance, any of the Godard films that have received U.S. distribution during the past thirty years. How could anyone not fall for Duelle and Noroît (both 1976), Rivette’s colorful, plucky diptych from the late seventies? Noroît stars Bernadette Lafont and Geraldine Chaplin as pirates, for heaven’s sake. Pirates! But I guess accessibility is relative. If you’re on a filmmaker’s wavelength, you can step into his universe with ease, and find it perplexing when others can’t. Rivette’s wry paranoia – just like the somber alienation of Antonioni, who also remains something of a hard sell even to serious movie fans – mirror the way that I look at the world. I lap up every minute.

For the same reason that I carefully qualify my enthusiasm for Love on the Ground, Rosenbaum frets about the particular perils of recommending a lesser entry in Rivette’s unusually insular body of work, and perhaps alienating a potential convert. Sadly, that’s almost unavoidable in the case of Rivette, where the ready availability of the films tends to operate in an inverse ratio to their quality. In the U.S., the rights to most of his films have accrued to cost-over-quality labels like Koch Lorber, Facets, and especially the financially challenged New Yorker, which spent a decade promising a Céline and Julie Go Boating DVD and never delivered. Brits have things a bit better, with worthy BFI editions of Céline and Julie and Rivette’s astounding first feature, Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous appartient, 1960), although I hesitate to recommend them since those two seem a bit likelier to get a Blu-ray upgrade than any of Rivette’s other films. But Le Pont du Nord is a must-have for any movie fan who’s multi-region capable (and it is, alas, one of Masters of Cinema’s few Region B-locked releases), and likely the most comprehensive edition of the film we’ll ever get. Except, maybe not, because it isn’t quite complete: the voluminous liner notes begin with an apology for MOC’s inability to license Paris s’en va (1981), a short film with the same actors that served as a sort of sketch for Le Pont du Nord. The curse of Rivette persists.

Feature Articles

Home Video: The Best of 2013

December 31, 2013 Stuart Galbraith IV Leave a comment

Despite continued dire assertions that “DVD is dead” and that Blu-ray is a fading niche market in an era of downloadable movies, from our vantage point we’re seeing more desirable titles premiering on DVD and Blu-ray than ever before, even if some of these best new releases require a region-free player to see them, or are titles increasingly farmed out to independents charging higher prices than we’ve gotten used to. This year we give a particular round of applause to labels like Olive Films, Inception Media Group, Cohen Film Collection, and Flicker Alley, places run but dedicated, film-savvy entrepreneurs who clearly love these movies as much as we do.

And so, in ascending order, here’s our list of the best of the best of 2013:

10. Paul Williams – Still Alive (DVD only; Virgil Films)
The past decade has been great for documentaries about singers and songwriters: Anvil: The Story of Anvil (2008), Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everyone Talkin’ About Him?), Ain’t In It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (both 2010). Paul Williams Still Alive (2011) is yet another funny, moving and ultimately revelatory portrait of the ubiquitous if diminutive songwriting superstar, who seemed to vanish into thin air after the early 1980s. Director Stephen Kessler’s unusual approach makes the show as much about his mostly awkward personal relationship with his reluctantly willing subject, who now seems much happier living in comparative obscurity than he did at the height of his celebrity. A profoundly entertaining film about a supremely talented artist whose intimate, confessional songs about loneliness and depression always seemed negated by the clownish, cocky media star far more complex than anyone imagined.

9. The Damned (Cohen Film Collection)
Submarine movies come in all shapes and sizes, but René Clément’s The Damned (1947) is the most authentic submarine movie we’ve ever seen, more so even than Wolfgang Petersen’s celebrated Das Boot (1981). And it is by far the most immediate. Told in flashback by a French doctor, Guilbert (Henri Vidal), the film follows a German U-boat loaded to the gills with VIPs: fervent Nazis, Nazi collaborators, and their lovers, all fleeing from Oslo hoping to reach South America in the last days of the war. Considering when it was made, the film is a technical marvel, accomplishing many of the same kinds of innovative claustrophobic camerawork usually credited to the much later Das Boot. It seamlessly blends new footage shot aboard a submarine with studio sets and wartime stock footage, while the jumble of fast-changing political (and economical and sexual) loyalties aboard this underwater bunker is equally fascinating, eventually becoming a microcosm of Europe during those chaotic last days of the Third Reich. This Gaumont title distributed by Cohen Media Group looks nearly perfect in high-def. Good extras include an audio commentary and hour-long Clément documentary.

8. The Right Stuff (Warner Home Video)
“They were called test pilots, and no one knew their names.” The Right Stuff (1983) is the best American movie of the 1980s. Based on Tom Wolfe’s book and adapted and directed by Philip Kaufman, the movie essentially tells two stories: Chuck Yeager’s exploits as a test pilot, in particular his attempt to break and go beyond the sound barrier; and the earliest days of NASA, as seen through the eyes of its seven Mercury Program astronauts (and their wives). The material is by itself compelling, but what makes The Right Stuff so special is in the telling. It tells its familiar story of heroic American pioneers in unusual and unexpected ways. Some see it as a modern variation of John Ford’s last masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), an apt comparison. In Ford’s film, a cowboy and gunfighter emblematic of the Old West, played by John Wayne, essentially steps aside so that an aspiring attorney, James Stewart, symbolizing a tamer, civilized West, can take his place. The lawyer becomes a celebrated political figure while the once-famous gunfighter dies in total anonymity, completely forgotten except by his closest friends. In The Right Stuff Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) is the Wayne character (even if Shepard plays him like Gary Cooper), while the seven Mercury astronauts are Stewart’s. In some ways it’s the last great movie epic with, among other things, the subsequent CGI revolution and Ron Howard’s obscenely overrated Apollo 13 making not the slightest dent in its lasting impact. It simultaneously satirizes Cold War politics and mass media hyperbole with its prefabricated American heroes yet, almost indescribably, this only serves to make each act of personal bravery all the more awe-inspiring. In a way, the Mercury astronauts are also Wayne’s character, outwardly enjoying the benefits and pitfalls of celebrity, with the public oblivious to or simply not interested in their genuine but mostly private and personal heroism. The Blu-ray has been among the most anticipated releases of the last few years, and from a technical standpoint it does not disappoint, offering a near-perfect video presentation supported by spectacularly good audio. There are numerous extra features, though nearly all are ported over from a 2003 DVD release.

7. Olive Films
More than any other home video label in recent years, Olive Films has been a movie-lover’s dream come true. Culling mainly from Paramount’s long-neglected library holdings, they plucked from obscurity movies never before released to home video and have presented them with dazzlingly good high-def transfers. Neglected films, particularly from Republic Pictures’ B-movies, previously available on VHS and DVD with awful, ancient video transfers, have been revelations as Olive Blu-rays. From Betty Boop to ‘50s sci-fi to classic and recent French thrillers, Olive Films is the home video label of the year.

6. The Vincent Price Collection (Shout! Factory)
American International Pictures releases licensed from MGM, this Halloween release containing House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Witchfinder General (1968), and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) brought back fond memories of the NuArt Theater’s glorious AIP film festival of 20 years ago, when these movies, available then only in the murkiest of panned-and-scanned video transfers, could be experienced as they were meant to be seen: good 35mm prints on a big, wide screen. These high-def transfers, with their rich color, gorgeous cinematography and extraordinarily good art direction, reveal riches lost when they were played to death on TV throughout the seventies and eighties. Shout! also went the extra mile combining MGM’s preexisting featurettes with some wonderful new material, including introductions to most of the films by Mr. Price himself, videotaped for Iowa Public Television back in the 1980s!

5. The Puppetoon Movie (Inception Media Group)
A contemporary and in many ways equal of Walt Disney but minus Walt’s business acumen, producer-director George Pal is best remembered today for his pioneering efforts in the sci-fi/fantasy genre: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), tom thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) among them. But before all that, Pal made his name with the Puppetoons, one-reel shorts mostly employing the rare form of three-dimensional replacement animation. Unlike stop-motion, in which a single model is articulated one frame at a time, Pal’s Puppetoons involved carving and painting dozens upon dozens of heads and legs for a single character, reportedly upwards of 9,000 separate carvings in all for a single short. Replacing various body parts for each frame of film, the result was uncannily smooth and expressive facial reactions and motion, something like “liquid wood.” The new 2-disc Blu-ray of The Puppetoon Movie, released independently and limited to 3,000 copies (available at www.b2mp.net), is really two feature films and bonus shorts all in high-def, plus The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal presented in standard-definition, along with myriad extra features. In addition to The Puppetoon Movie, featuring ten unabridged Puppetoons plus newer material, the set also includes the high-definition premiere of The Great Rupert (1950), Pal’s first live-action feature. Bonus Puppetoon shorts included on The Puppetoon Movie’s original DVD release are present, but the real treat are seven additional bonus shorts being released for the first time in any home video format, shorts in high-definition licensed from Paramount and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archives and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

4. Nashville (Criterion)
For once the tag lines were accurate: “Wild. Wonderful. Sinful. Laughing. Explosive.” Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), one of the best films of the 1970s, is a divisive, inarguably indulgent film, but also one uniquely experimental and prophetic, especially so when it was new. The epic, 160-minute has no single protagonist and instead is a tapestry cutting among 24 major characters and numerous minor ones. It has no plot to speak of, despite an undercurrent of political maneuvering and a vague exploration of professional ambition and fame set against Nashville’s country music scene. Altman had been evolving toward this kind of storytelling beginning with M*A*S*H (1970) and, after crystalizing the form in Nashville would return to it again in the underrated A Wedding (1978), the somewhat overrated The Player (1992) and a few others. But in 1975 Nashville was quite daring, the work of a supremely confident, in some ways self-destructive filmmaker to whom ordinary movie-making rules did not apply. Nashville had previous been released by owner Paramount as an okay if no-frills DVD in 2000. Criterion’s Blu-ray offers vastly improved picture and wonderfully immersive sound, the latter vitally important in fully appreciating the work’s complex sound design. The new Blu-ray-plus-DVD combo also includes scads of extra features, including an original making-of documentary featuring some of the film’s key participants.

3. Pierre Étaix (Criterion)
Though we like to think we’re well-versed in the art of film comedy, we confess we had never even heard of circus clown-turned-actor-director Pierre Étaix until Criterion’s revelatory boxed set of this delightful disciple of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Included are three charming short films and all five of his ‘60s/early ‘70s features: The Suitor, As Long As You’ve Got Your Health, Le grand amour, and Land of Milk and Honey. The transfers of these long-unavailable films (due to legal problems) all look and sound great and, happily, the 85-year-old Étaix is on-hand to introduce each film.

2. Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (Criterion)
One of Criterion’s best-ever home video releases, Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman is also an incredible value. Smart shoppers were able to purchase the set at one point for less than $100, but even at its suggested retail price of $224.95, for 25 feature films plus the many valuable extra features it’s still quite a bargain. Most readers are probably unaware that a near-simultaneous release in Japan, but covering only the first 18 movies, retails for a wallet-busting￥ 56,700, or about $550. That’s more than twice Criterion’s SRP yet minus the last seven films. The movies, all starring Shintaro Katsu as the eponymous wandering masseur and gambler, represent Japanese genre filmmaking at its finest. Though popular, the original films, released between 1962 and 1973, are a bit less highly regarded in Japan than in America, where Japanese film scholars have been quicker to acknowledge their visual and aural virtuosity, to say nothing of Katsu’s unforgettable characterization. Directed by such genre masters as Kenji Misumi, Kazuo (not Issei) Mori, Tokuzo Tanaka and, occasionally, offbeat outside talent like Satsuo Yamamoto and Kihachi Okamoto, and backed by outstanding cinematography and marrow-penetrating scores by composers as varied as Akira Ifukube and Isao Tomita, taken as a whole the Zatoichi series is one of the great epic stories of World Cinema. At the center of things, naturally, is Shintaro Katsu, a fascinating figure who gradually took full control of the film series and later continued it on Japanese network television when the domestic film market could no longer support it or much of anything else. The series began at Daiei Studios but as that company teetered toward bankruptcy Katsu began producing them himself, under the aegis of his Katsu Productions. When Daiei finally succumbed he move the series to Toho for its last handful of entries, so today ownership of the films is divided between Toho and Kadokawa Pictures, inheritors of the Daiei film library. That Criterion was able to negotiate a licensing agreement for all 25 films into a single boxed set is an achievement all by itself. That the films can now be enjoyed sequentially in consistently gorgeous transfers is yet another.

1. Cinerama Holiday/Cinerama South Seas Adventure (Flicker Alley)
Let me say this right up front: you’re going to want to get these. The original Cinerama travelogues were never exhibited in conventional movie theaters, never shown on television, and until now, never before released to home video. Indeed, after about 1963 they weren’t shown anywhere. Restoring these once hugely-popular but virtually lost films has been a personal crusade of many film buffs, historians, and preservationists, but it took the tenacity and ingenuity of Cinerama reconstructionist David Strohmaier to get the job done, aided by innumerable craftsmen and technicians. Via distributor Flicker Alley, the first two Cinerama Blu-ray releases, This Is Cinerama (1952) and Windjammer (1958) were issued last year to much-deserved acclaim. These discs were beautifully packaged, compromised only by the lesser elements available: 70mm film. These next two releases, Cinerama South Seas Adventure and Cinerama Holiday (1955) have gone back to the original three-strip, six-perf high original camera negatives, replacing unusable bits and pieces with three-strip material deposited with the Library of Congress. The results are, in a word, glorious, and Strohmaier’s exacting recreation of the original road show experience comes as close as possible to replicating the Cinerama experience. It’s still not quite true Cinerama: a large, deeply curved screen is essential in order to experience the “audience participation” effects of the process, but it’s darn close. Further, the Blu-ray (a DVD version of the film is also included, but you’ll definitely not want to watch the film in that format) comes with many invaluable extra features including, appropriately, a reproduction of the original theater programs.

An Oasis of Cinema Scholarship and Reviewing.