Tag Archives: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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Blu-ray Review Round-Up: Films by Bob Fosse, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karel Kachyňa & more!

The EarThe Ear (Ucho, 1970)
Second Run

The personal is political in Karel Kachyňa’s claustrophobic satire, in which the authoritarianism of the Czech Communists is filtered through a long night’s journey into day inside the home of a senior party official. The domestic space isn’t a respite for Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) and his wife, Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová). It’s a magnifying glass for the paranoia of living in a surveillance state and the fissures in their marriage, destined to erupt. Naturally, the film was banned as soon as it was completed.

After attending a party function, the couple returns home to find things awry. Their keys have disappeared and the power has gone out, despite neighboring homes remaining illuminated. Anna, drunk, and Ludvik, suspicious, can’t agree on what this means, initiating some cruel verbal sniping that has plenty of runway to escalate over the course of the evening. Eventually, both become convinced every odd occurrence is the result of party surveillance. They scour their home for listening devices and Ludvik begins burning documents that might have incriminating evidence in the toilet.

Kachyňa’s tight framing accompanies nimble camerawork as Ludvik and Anna circle each other like caged rats about to turn on their cellmate. Intercut with the domestic horror are Ludvik’s flashbacks to the party earlier that evening, as he attempts to remember any signal that his standing among his peers was in jeopardy. We feel Ludvik’s intense disorientation, an imbalance he seeks to remedy by returning to what seems like a familiar pattern: taking it out on Anna. Kachyňa lets the bitter taste linger, with a wry ending that doesn’t do anything to mitigate it.

Second Run’s Blu-ray upgrade features a 1.37:1, 1080p transfer, sourced from a new HD remaster by the Czech National Film Archive. Unlike many of Second Run’s recent Czech Blu-rays, this one does not get a 4K remaster, possibly due to the materials’ condition. One party scene features significant damage, and the film as a whole has more speckling and wear than most other films Second Run has given the high-def treatment to.

Still, the upgrade is appreciated in solid grayscale separation and fine detail. Damage rarely affects the overall clarity of the image. The 2.0 mono LPCM soundtrack has some hissing and clicking, but it’s not too obtrusive. It’s a testament to the consistently high quality of the label’s Blu-ray releases that this one ranks near the bottom technically.

Carried over from the 2005 DVD release is an introduction by Peter Hames. Newly added: a commentary track from the Projection Booth podcast, Vlastimil Venclík’s 1969 short The Uninvited Guest and an expanded booklet, with essays by Hames, Steven Jay Schneider and Graham Williamson.

BRDThe BRD Trilogy (1979-1982)
Criterion Collection

The tragedy of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s early death isn’t entirely ameliorated by his astonishingly vast output — imagine having dozens more of his films to savor — but it’s difficult to argue that his oeuvre feels unfinished. Given the elasticity and voracious appetite of any given Fassbinder film, a single work can feel like a worthy encapsulation of his mad genius.

And then you have The BRD Trilogy, which seems to contain histories of entire film genres within, to say nothing of its withering gaze at the fundamental rot of post-WWII West German society. These are towering films, stylistically bold and thematically blunt. They may represent the apotheosis of Fassbinder’s career — though he no doubt would have refuted that notion with further cinematic advances if he hadn’t died shortly after the trilogy’s completion.

The Marriage of Maria Braun begins with a literal explosion in the middle of the wedding of Maria (Hanna Schygulla) and Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), as the Allies bomb Germany. As she will throughout the film, Maria persists with a blind optimism often indistinguishable from delusion. When Hermann, a Nazi soldier, goes missing during the final months of the war, everyone presumes he’s dead but Maria.

Schygulla plays Maria with a fierce single-mindedness, and Maria’s cognitive dissonance is continually astonishing as she maintains her undying loyalty to Hermann and the bygone way of life he represents. This continues even as she pursues relationships with American soldier Bill (George Byrd) and rich entrepreneur Karl (Ivan Desny). Fassbinder’s well of sympathy for Maria is boundless even as he traces her self-destruction to its inevitable combustible bookend.

In Veronika Voss (1982), made last but positioned second in the post hoc trilogy, Fassbinder twists notions of what a pastiche can be, amping up the look and feel of Hollywood black-and-white melodrama to dizzying heights, even as the juicy plot devolves into a dour, dread-soaked mood piece. Rosel Zech stars as Veronika, a onetime star of German propaganda films whose career as an actress is barely hanging on. She meets sports reporter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), whose infatuation is immediate and unthinking — and covered by a thin veneer of supposed journalistic interest.

As Robert digs deeper into Veronika’s past, a number of troubling details emerge, but Fassbinder’s plotting, which is plenty lurid on paper, doesn’t leave a deeper impact than the film’s bone-deep bleakness.

Lola (1981) traverses a nearly opposite route stylistically and thematically. An acrid satire of the insatiable lust of capitalism, the film is unrepentantly garish, bathed in neon color and stupefying key lights.

A riff on von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, the film stars Barbara Sukowa as Lola, a singer at a brothel during the reconstruction period of West Germany in the 1950s. Everything is transactional in this world, a fact Fassbinder painstakingly underlines with scenes of overtly corrupt business dealings.

Lola attracts the attentions of sleazy developer Schukert (Mario Adorf) and principled building commissioner von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a three-way configuration full of using and being used. There’s something bracing about the film’s complete lack of restraint, the camerawork, the performances and the lighting all feeding off one another to push Lola into new heights of artificiality — a tool Fassbinder used to reveal the truth like almost no other filmmaker.

Criterion’s long-awaited Blu-ray upgrade of the DVD set, which languished for a while in OOP status, is a phenomenal release. The 1080p transfers, sourced from new 4K restorations for Maria Braun and Lola and an HD restoration for Veronika Voss, are across-the-board excellent. The earthy palette of Maria Braun looks rich and detailed, and the bold colors of Lola are consistent and true, with a transfer that features exceptional clarity. Despite not receiving a 4K restoration, Veronika Voss is a solid black-and-white transfer, with nice grain. Maria Braun and Lola now are presented in their original 1.66:1 aspect ratios, while Veronika Voss is still in 1.78:1. The uncompressed mono soundtracks are all in very good shape.

All extras from the loaded DVD set have been ported over, including commentaries for all three films; a host of interviews, including ones with each of the films’ three leads; a 1978 interview of Fassbinder; 1992 doc on Fassbinder, I Don’t Just Want You to Love Me; a featurette on Ufa film star Sybille Schmitz, the real-life inspiration for Veronika Voss; trailers; and a booklet with Kent Jones’ insightful essay and detailed production histories of all three films by Michael Töteberg.

Sweet CharitySweet Charity (1969)
Kino Lorber Studio Classics

Sweet Charity is a strange amalgam. Adapted from the Broadway show, the film smashes together Neil Simon’s corny self-deprecation, terrific set pieces built around Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’ songs and a visual sensibility somewhere between au courant singularity and quaint hippie excess — all wrapped together in an outsized two-and-a-half-hour musical package that was mostly out of fashion by the time it arrived.

It’s also a great film, thanks to the restless creative energy of Bob Fosse, who directed and choreographed the Broadway show, and made his film directorial debut here. Equally important: The staggering screen presence of Shirley MacLaine, whose sunny optimism and deeply rooted melancholy make her the perfect successor to Giulietta Masina, cinema’s sad clown supreme and star of Nights of Cabiria, the inspiration for Sweet Charity.

There are some superfluous moments in this tale of dance hall hostess Charity (MacLaine) who encounters disappointment after disappointment in her quest for love, but Fosse ensures most of the film’s episodes land — either as tightly choreographed musical numbers (the endlessly copied cool restraint of “Hey Big Spender,” the joyous kitsch of Sammy Davis Jr.-featuring “The Rhythm of Life”) or as showcases for MacLaine’s boundless charisma. (“If My Friends Could See Me Now” is a showstopper, but every tiny gesture and line reading in the sequence where Charity spends an evening with Ricardo Montalbán’s film star is sublime.)

Ever the showman, Fosse comes equipped with a bag of tricks — wild zooms, freeze-frames, images reversed to negative. But his fundamental skill as a film director already looks fully formed in his debut. Musical setpieces are visually cogent, the pacing can be languorous but individual scenes thrum with energy and the character’s relationships have real depth, especially Charity’s friendship with fellow dancers Nickie (Chita Rivera) and Helene (Paula Kelly). That the film’s third act focus — a budding romance with mild actuary Oscar (John McMartin) — is its weakest doesn’t undo this.

Kino’s Blu-ray release is excellent, featuring two cuts of the film on separate discs, both 1080p, 2.35:1 transfers sourced from a 4K restoration. Colors are vibrant and true, film grain is tight and stable, and fine detail is quite good. The “alternate” version is several minutes shorter than the primary roadshow edition, and the most significant change to the content is a happy ending tacked on to the alternate version, which also hacks off some of MacLaine’s most heartbreaking moments. 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and 2.0 tracks are offered, and they generally sound good, though there’s a slightly muffled quality to the dialogue not present in the crisp musical elements.

Kino adds a couple of new extras: Kat Ellinger’s commentary track for the alternate version of the film and a booklet essay by Julie Kirgo. Archival featurettes on Edith Head’s costume design and the transition from stage to screen are also included, along with a selection of trailers.

ClunyCluny Brown (1946)
Criterion Collection

Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed film (he died during the production of 1948’s That Lady in Ermine) is a slight but delightful class comedy, and its long unavailability on home video has finally been remedied by Criterion. Lubitsch’s lightness of touch is one of his hallmarks, of course, but Cluny Brown is probably a little too light to rank among his masterpieces. Still, if you can’t appreciate the interplay between a delightfully unconventional Jennifer Jones and an effortlessly charming Charles Boyer, why even watch movies?

Jones’ Cluny and Boyer’s Belinski meet-cute at a pre-WWII London party neither was invited to — her responding to a plumbing emergency, him looking for a previous owner. When Cluny’s uncle sends her to the countryside to work as a maid for aristocrats, she again crosses paths with Belinski, an author running from the Nazis and not averse to the generosity of strangers.

Cluny Brown skewers the uptightness of class-conscious types, but it’s not all comedy. There might not be a more devastating moment in Lubitsch’s films than when the owners of the manor mistake Cluny for someone else and afternoon tea in the parlor is suddenly doused in cold water when she’s identified as the new help. Jones, a great melodramatic actress, is used perfectly in a comedic context in Cluny Brown, but that scene is a stomach-dropper.

Fortunately, she’s irrepressible — and it’s clear a misguided romance with a town chemist and stern warnings from a stuffy household staff won’t prevent the Jones-Boyer repartee we’re all here to see.

Criterion’s Blu-ray features a 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer, sourced from a new 4K restoration. This is a solid, if unspectacular transfer, with a pervasive softness that prevents a truly clear or sharp image. Still, the image is quite clean and grayscale separation is decent. It’s an enjoyable watch. Uncompressed mono audio is clean and adequate.

There’s quite a nice selection of extras on this disc. Newly filmed: Critics Molly Haskell and Farran Smith Nehme discuss their appreciation of Lubitsch’s female characters and Kristin Thompson offers a video essay on Lubitsch’s visual comedy. A 2004 interview with Bernard Eisenschitz offers an overview of Lubitsch’s career. Also included: a 1950 radio adaptation of Cluny Brown, starring Boyer and Dorothy McGuire, and an insert with an essay by Siri Hustvedt.

CrosscurrentCrosscurrent (2016)
Cheng Cheng Films

Calling Yang Chao’s Berlinale Silver Bear winner Crosscurrent “mesmerizing” feels like a lazy way to sum up such a peculiar film, but the description couldn’t be more apt. To watch Crosscurrent is to fall into a trance as its images of the Yangtze River (captured by the inimitable eye of cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, a frequent collaborator with Wong Kar-Wai and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) slip past one another, the near-constant drone of ship noise as the foundation.

Crosscurrent is a film with its fair share of mysticism; nominal protagonist Gao Chun (Qin Hao) encounters the same woman, An Lu (Xin Zhilei), at every port as he guides a cargo ship up the river, and he becomes convinced she’s connected to a book of poetry by an unknown author he discovered. If the film’s overt mysticism and use of poetry can feel a bit overdetermined, it’s mainly because the images themselves don’t need the help. Lee captures the unknowable majesty of the river in a way that makes every shot feel enormous and full of portent.

The film begins with a ritual: After a father dies, his son expected to pull a fish from the river and keep it in an incense urn until it dies, thus releasing the departed father’s spirit. Gao Chun succeeds at capturing the fish, but the rest of the ritual does not go as planned. Similarly, his fleeting relationship with An Lu — who, if not a literal ghost, can’t be completely corporeal — follows an orderly, expected path until it suddenly doesn’t. The one constant is the Yangtze, a seemingly ceaseless path affected by the throes of modernity (the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station, has a cataclysmic effect on Gao Chun here), but fundamentally unchangeable and unknowable.

Cheng Cheng Films’ release of the film is pressed on BD-R. I noticed some stuttering while navigating the menus, but did not see any issues while playing the film. The disc features a 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer that showcases Lee’s 35mm photography pretty well. Colors are rich and saturated, even as the film has an overarching subdued look. Fine detail is strong. Long shots of the river and passing vessels have excellent clarity. Damage is nonexistent. The 2.0 stereo LPCM track is cut very loud and offers a solid presentation of the film’s soundscape of natural river noise and cello playing. English subtitles are available, but not turned on by default.

Extras include “Messenger’s Four Chapters,” which appear to be camcorder-shot outtakes of the trip down the river, along with a trailer and an insert with an essay by Bart Testa.

Women1

Blu-ray Review Round-up: Films by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ken Russell, Robert Altman and more!

WomenWomen in Love (1969)
The Criterion Collection 

Sex and death are an inextricable pair in Ken Russell’s film version of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, adapted by Larry Kramer. The imagery is striking but not subtle: Glenda Jackson reclining on a gravestone while discussing the merits of marriage, or two drowned lovers, entwined together and caked with river mud, their bodies melded like an ancient, discarded statue. But who wants subtlety? Russell, after a few minor entries, directing the first of many masterpieces, injects the film with sensual energy, the spryness of his camerawork working in concert with the physicality of his actors.

And what a cast. Jackson, who won her first Oscar for the role, exudes both free-spirited sanguinity and serious-minded practicality, her enigmatic outlook leavened by her sister’s (Jennie Linden) more straightforward approach. They fall in love with a pair of best friends (Oliver Reed, Alan Bates), whose own relationship is underpinned by significant homoerotic tones. (Again, not subtly; there’s an extended nude wrestling scene.) Everyone wants to fuck in Women in Love, but they also want emotional fulfillment and deep, lasting commitment — but not necessarily in the same way their companions want it, to sometimes tragic ends. Maybe it’s not sex that death is so closely linked to here.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.75:1 Blu-ray transfer, sourced from a new 4K restoration, is glorious. The verdant English countryside, dank underground mines and snow-covered peaks are rendered in exceptional detail in a deeply film-like transfer. Extras are a thorough combination of archival and new material, including audio commentaries from Russell and Kramer, Russell’s 1989 self-biopic, 1972 D.H. Lawrence short-film adaptation Second Best and interviews with Russell, Jackson, Linden, Bates, Kramer, alongside newly shot ones with cinematographer Billy Williams and editor Michael Bradsell. A trailer and an insert with an essay by scholar Linda Ruth Williams are also included.

Criterion Collection / 1969 / Color / 1.75:1 / 131 min / $39.95

DaughterDaughter of the Nile (1987)
Cohen Media Group

Not many filmmakers evoke the hazy romanticism of memory of like Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the most criminally underrepresented contemporary filmmakers on home video. Besides his most recent film, The AssassinDaughter of the Nile is the first Hou Blu-ray release in the US, and it one-ups the UK Masters of Cinema release with a slightly more robust slate of extras.

Though much of the milieu is a burgeoning crime underworld in Taipei, Daughter of the Nile skirts around the edges of gangster-film plotting, its screenplay by Chu T’ien-Wen based on personal experience and its most striking imagery reflecting impressions of urban life (neon-soaked streets, a massive KFC) and domestic life (recurring interior framings reinforce the familiarity of home).

Lin (Lin Hsiao-yang) finds purpose in caring for her family, including her increasingly reckless brother, but she finds herself drifting further and further into a fantasy life, facilitated by a manga series the title of the film refers to. The film itself straddles that line between reality and dreams, chronicling melancholy but mundane everyday living, but also hinting at something more nebulous and mysterious. An actual dream sequence threatens to upend the equilibrium Lin has developed between the disparate parts of her life. The realization that it’s only a dream may be only a small comfort; dreams have a lot of weight in this world.

Cohen’s 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer, sourced from the same 4K restoration as the MoC disc, is exceptional, offering a clear, sharp image that turns ecstatic whenever Hou pivots from naturalistic colors to the almost-unreality of Taipei’s neon. The uncompressed mono audio does have some unpleasant distortion that comes and goes, but is overall fine. An extensive Tony Rayns interview is duplicated from the MoC disc, while an audio commentary from scholar Richard Suchenski is new to this edition.

Cohen Media Group / 1987 / Color / 1.85:1 / 91 min / $30.99

SilenceSilence and Cry (1968)
Second Run

The high-definition upgrades of Miklós Jancsó’s films continue from Second Run, this time with earlier work Silence and Cry (Csend és kiáltás), a slow-burn drama about the poisoning effect of fascism on everyday lives. Consisting mostly of the long takes Jancsó was known for, the film punctuates stretches of uneasiness with sudden acts of horror, like an early murder, carried out perfunctorily. The matter-of-factness only deepens the chilling effect.

A former Communist soldier is trying to avoid that same fate, so he hides out from the Hungarian nationalists on a quiet farm. But this is hardly a refuge, as the farm owner has already drawn the attention of the casually cruel gendarmes, who force him to stand out in a field every day as punishment.

There’s a distancing effect to Jancsó’s approach, with the camerawork consistently more expressive than the performances, which feel boiled down to only the most elemental gestures. The overwhelming feeling here is not one of paranoia, but of resignation to an eventual terrible fate. As always, the virtuosity of Jancsó’s fluid camera movements makes this mostly riveting viewing.

Second Run’s 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer, sourced from a new HD remaster, is excellent, offering healthy levels of fine detail, beautiful grayscale separation and a mostly clean image, with only minor flecks here and there. There’s a clarity to the long shots here that’s essential to enjoying the film. Who wants to puzzle over a fuzzy speck in the distance? Extras are also worthwhile: A trilogy of Jancsó shorts (Presence I, II and III) are included in HD, along with a booklet essay from Tony Rayns, as perceptive about Hungarian cinema as he is about Asian filmmaking.

Second Run / 1968 / Black and white / 2.35:1 / 77 min / £19.99

OldestThe Oldest Profession (1967)
Kino Lorber

Like most Euro-anthologies, The Oldest Profession offers a highly variable collection of shorts, with the duds dragging down the experience enough that you find yourself wishing you were watching one of the better ideas expanded to a feature.

Consisting of takes on prostitution through the ages, most of these films rely heavily on gender stereotypes and corny humor. Mostly all of it is way too toothless to even approach offensiveness. Three of the shorts come from filmmakers whose most notable credits are in other omnibus films (Franco Indovina, Mauro Bognini, Michael Pfleghar), and maybe it’s not a coincidence that these are the weakest three, with Indovina’s prehistoric tale of men being fooled by makeup and Bolognini’s rather chaste idea of the Roman empire serving as two wrong steps right off the bat. Pfleghar at least has a charming Raquel Welch in his film about a prostitute mistaken for a socialite.

Philippe De Broca’s French Revolution tale would be more fun if it didn’t turn Jeanne Moreau’s character into an utter fool, though it’s idea is novel enough. Claude Autant-Lara’s “Paris Today” is the most obvious candidate for full-length treatment, as its story about two women using an ambulance to hide their prostitution business only starts getting ramped up before the film ends. Given that he’s easily the best filmmaker here, it’s no surprise that Jean-Luc Godard’s “Anticipation” is the film’s standout, even though it feels totally tossed off. For fans of Alphaville, it’s fun to see Godard working again in sci-fi mode, as Jacques Charrier attempts to understand love in a dystopian future, with the help (or maybe not so much) of Marilù Tolo and Anna Karina.

The Kino Blu-ray features a 1080p, 1.66:1 transfer that’s quite clean, detailed and stable, though some shots exhibit that teal-ish pallor that seems to afflict a number of recent Gaumont restorations. This is hardly the most overwhelming example though. Extras include the shorter English dub of the film and a trailer.

Kino Lorber / 1967 / Color and black and white / 1.66:1 / 115 min / $29.95

ImagesImages (1972)
Arrow Video

Though there are numerous films that might be cited as counterexamples, I think Robert Altman always brings something interesting to the table. And even if you want to outright dismiss, I don’t know, Dr. T and the Women (I like it), it’s harder to dispute the relevance of his 1970s output, which is jam-packed with masterpieces and endearing oddities.

Images, rescued by Arrow Video after the MGM DVD spent a long stretch in OOP-land, is probably more the latter, though it’s compelling enough I wouldn’t scoff at an assertion of the former.

While Altman would more thoroughly evoke an atmosphere of mental instability with 3 Women, Images is kind of a looser — much looser — take. There’s not a scene that can be definitively labeled as reality or hallucination, which ultimately works to blunt the film’s impact, but should we really be complaining about a great Susannah York performance, filmed by Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond in full-on roving camera excess mode?

York stars as a children’s book author whose shaky grasp on reality becomes shakier when she learns that her husband (Rene Auberjonois) is cheating on her. Or is he? A retreat to a cottage in Ireland should be just the thing to patch this all up, right?

Arrow’s 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer, sourced from a 4K restoration, includes some dupe shots, and the drop-off in quality can be noticeable, particularly in a film that tends toward the grainy side. But for the most part, this is an excellent transfer, with well-resolved grain and solid clarity despite the film’s intentionally hazy look. Extras include a new commentary track by Samm Deighan and Kat Ellinger along with an archival Altman selected-scene commentary. A making-of from the previous DVD release, an interview with supporting actress Cathryn Harrison and an appreciation by Stephen Thrower are also included.

Arrow Video / 1972 / Color / 2.35:1 / 104 min / $39.95

BaalBaal (1970) 
The Criterion Collection

Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play, largely unseen for decades since its release, isn’t exactly a diamond in the rough. It’s more like rough on top of rough. Abrasive, disjointed and shot in a variety of locations that seem to be competing amongst each other for an ugliness trophy, Schlöndorff’s 16mm primal scream isn’t Brechtian in the traditional sense, but it has its own aesthetic distancing effects that are a good fit with the material.

Just as his directing career was getting started, Rainer Werner Fassbinder stars as the titular poet, a monstrously egotistic artist who flouts polite society before they can reject him, bedding every woman he can along the way. Fassbinder is perfectly cast as the freewheeling degenerate — he has the right amount of grimy charm to earn both the loving and loathing he receives in his crusade against bourgeois society. (Which again, mostly involves copious amounts of drinking, sex and leaving the broken husks of the people he encounters in his wake.)

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer, sourced from a 2K restoration, isn’t as rough as Baal, but it’s close, with some ragged and/or Vaseline-smeared edges and some instances of dirt and debris that haven’t been cleaned up. Much of this is keeping with the aesthetic goals of the film, and the underlying image shows off some of the detail and depth one would expect from a 16mm-sourced image. Extras include two interviews with Schlöndorff, a newly filmed interview with co-star (and Schlöndorff’s collaborator and ex-wife) Margarethe von Trotta, an interview with historian Eric Rentschler and a conversation between Ethan Hawke and playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman, who recently collaborated on a Baal adaptation. Dennis Lim contributes an insert essay.

Criterion Collection / 1970 / Color / 1.37:1 / 84 min / $39.95

 

 

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.

1928: Buster Keaton in "Steamboat Bill, Jr."

Blu-ray Review Round-Up: Films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jess Franco, Ousmane Sembène & more!

FoxFox and His Friends (1975)
Criterion Collection

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends, made midway through his short but incredibly prolific career, unfolds like a brutal car crash in slow motion. It’s almost immediately evident what is going to happen to the naïve carnival worker Fox (played by Fassbinder himself with a startling lack of guile), but there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it, least of all the oblivious protagonist.

The cynicism runs bone-deep in this portrait of transactional bourgeoisie gay culture. A compulsive lotto-player, Fox finally sees his persistence pay off after he wins 500,000 marks. But Fassbinder completely elides the actual discovery of his win. It’s possibly the only moment of unsullied joy for Fox within the film’s borders, and it might as well not exist.

Shortly after his big win, Fox is introduced to a group of upper-class friends by Max (Karlheinz Böhm), an antiques dealer he’s picked up by at a public restroom, and soon he’s become enamored with Eugen (Peter Chatel). Sensing an opportunity, Eugen starts seeing Fox and then asks for money. He doesn’t wait long and he doesn’t start small, securing a 100,000-mark loan for his company before convincing Fox to buy an apartment and fill it with lavish furniture and décor from Max’s shop.

As usual, Fassbinder shoots interior spaces with an eye toward their oppressive and distancing effects, and Fox and Eugen’s apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with ornate accessories, is an especially overwhelming place. Fox never seems aware of his new friends’ capacity for manipulation, but his alienation is palpable, even if his carefree personality deflects it on the surface. Even one of his favorite spots — a dive bar that Eugen et al sneer at — is eventually transformed into a space where he no longer feels at home.

This is depressing, harrowing and emotionally penetrating stuff, and Fassbinder never lets up. The indignities persist for Fox up through the film’s final shot. He gets one final gut-punch, and so do we.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer is sourced from a new 4K digital restoration by the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, and it looks essentially identical to the Arrow Region B Blu-ray, sourced from the same restoration. Fine detail is excellent, grain is well-supported and colors are stable and vibrant, with a slight yellowish warm hue to them. The uncompressed mono soundtrack is limited by the dullness of the post-dubbed dialogue, but there are no major hiss or noise issues.

While Arrow’s disc included an informative commentary track from Hamish Ford, Criterion’s disc offers more quantity, including two newly filmed interviews. Filmmaker Ira Sachs offers an appreciation of the film and Fassbinder’s place within queer cinema, while actor Harry Baer, who played Eugen’s ex, reminisces about making the film and sadly notes that only three of the principals are still living. Two brief archival excerpts are offered: Fassbinder talks about the film’s politics and composer Peer Raben discusses the cabaret-influenced score. A trailer and an insert with an essay from former Criterion staff writer Michael Koresky round out the supplements.

Criterion Collection / 1975 / Color / 1.37:1 / 124 min / $39.95

OrloffDr. Orloff’s Monster (1964)
Redemption

Before he became notorious as an insanely prolific director of horror films of, let’s say, dubious quality, Jess Franco emerged with his breakthrough, The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962). Two years later, Orlof was back with an additional f in Dr. Orloff’s Monster, a film that references Orloff all of once. Cash-in implications of the title aside (it’s also known as the not-quite-accurate-either The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll), this not-sequel is certainly of interest.

A stock horror template is given some dimension via moody lighting and a pervasive sense of melancholy that seems to especially afflict the film’s murderous creature, Andros (Hugo Blanco, caked in crusty face makeup), a reanimated corpse who does the bidding of Dr. Jekyll (Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui). That bidding is mostly limited to strangling prostitutes and cabaret performers.

Meanwhile, Jekyll’s niece Melissa (Agnès Spaak) returns to the family castle, where she’s alternately puzzled and creeped out by her Aunt Inglud (Luisa Sala) and Uncle Jekyll. Melissa wants to know more about her family history, particularly her father who died when she was young, but there isn’t much information forthcoming.

Even at just 84 minutes long, Dr. Orloff’s Monster is relentlessly shaggy, luxuriating in lengthy nightclub scenes that are punctuated with brief bits of horror. The plot is mostly coherent, but that’s due more to its simplicity than any facility for visual storytelling. Franco seems to have no regard for spatial awareness, cutting haphazardly and mangling almost any sense of suspense. The murder scenes are miserably blocked.

That doesn’t mean Franco had no sense of visual style; it’s here in spades, from foggy graveyards to smoky clubs, often shot at unusual canted angles. Franco never had the polish or psychological depth of a Jacques Tourneur or Georges Franju, but Dr. Orloff’s Monster proved he could make a brand of atmospheric horror of his own.

Redemption/Kino’s Blu-ray presents Dr. Orloff’s Monster in a 1080p, 1.66:1 transfer that generally follows in the footsteps of their other releases of 1960s Franco films. The image is a little contrast-y, but is overall decently sharp and detailed. Tram lines, scuffs and scratches are all here, but nothing too egregious. Audio options are two DTS-HD Master Audio mono soundtracks, one in French and one in English. Both feature persistent low-level hiss, and the English dialogue is performed considerably more histrionically at points.

Extras include a typically studious audio commentary from Tim Lucas and 11 minutes of silent footage —almost exclusively of the nudie variety — that was excised from some cuts of the film. Theatrical trailers round out the disc.

Redemption / 1964 / Black and white / 1.66:1 / 84 min / $29.95

GeneralThe General (1926) and Three Ages (1923)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and College (1927)
Kino Lorber

Kino goes back to the Buster Keaton well with two new double-feature releases, sourced from 2K restorations by Lobster Films. Generally, these releases improve upon the previous Kino Blu-rays, but Region A Keaton fans may want to wait for the forthcoming releases from Cohen Media, who have restored some Keaton titles in 4K, and will be sourcing additional 4K restorations from Cineteca Bologna. (More info about that in this helpful NitrateVille thread.)

Undoubtedly, Kino wanted to get these new editions out there before they are likely to be superseded by the Cohen releases, but to their credit, they’ve made them relatively affordable ($29.95 for a two-disc Blu-ray set). With no firm release date yet for the Cohen Blu-rays, these refreshed releases could be worth a first-time purchase, though it probably doesn’t make much sense to upgrade from the old Kino Blu-rays until one gets a look at what Cohen has in store. (Eureka also has a Masters of Cinema Region B box set with The GeneralSherlock Jr. and Steamboat Bill, Jr. coming sometime this year.)

Each set pairs a Keaton masterwork with a lesser title, releasing these films in different configurations than previously available. The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and College were all released as standalones, while Three Ages was paired with Sherlock Jr. (another masterpiece Kino no longer has the rights to).

The General isn’t just one of the greatest comedies ever made; it’s one of the best Civil War films, and his final independent silent feature Steamboat Bill, Jr. features Keaton’s most astonishing collection of risky stunts, culminating in an incredible cyclone sequence. While the stale D.W. Griffith parody of Three Ages wears out its welcome in a repetitive triptych, the trend-chasing College maintains a lot of slapstick charm despite its derivative nature.

SteamboatTransfer-wise, these new 2K restorations offer some noticeable upgrades, although I have mixed feelings about The General. Kino’s old disc presents the film with a slight sepia tint, and there are some hefty scratches and blotches throughout. The new disc features a much cleaner image and gets rid of the tint. But while the new transfer is unquestionably more stable, it’s also quite a bit darker, with heavy contrast obscuring some details. Some might prefer the transfer with less damage, but Kino’s old disc is often a more pleasurable viewing experience.

With the other three films, the new transfers are clear winners. Three Ages gets the biggest boost, and is now presented in 1080p instead of 1080i. While nitrate deterioration still plagues the film, the image is often much sharper, with clearer detail visible beneath the damage. The elements limit how good this film can look, but this a significant step up over the cloudy old transfer.

Steamboat Bill features a more stable image, with better fine detail and a tighter grain structure. Whites that looked slightly blown out on the old disc are better here. College is still afflicted with a fairly persistent softness, but damage has been mitigated greatly.

Audio and extras-wise, these discs are significantly different. At least one new score has been made available for each film, while all but College have at least one removed. The General loses some featurettes, but gains an audio commentary by historians Michael Schlesinger and Stan Taffel. Thankfully, the Orson Welles and Gloria Swanson introductions have been retained.

Three Ages adds a Keaton-starring Alka-Seltzer commercial and Candid Camera segment and retains the excerpt of Griffith’s Man’s Genesis (1912), while dropping two featurettes.

Steamboat Bill feels the deepest cut, losing a complete alternate version of the film comprised of different angles and takes, as well as vintage song recordings, a making-of featurette and a montage of Keaton stunts. Added are a Schlesinger/Taffel commentary track, an introduction from Lobster Films’ Serge Bromberg and a different Alka-Seltzer commercial.

College fares the best, losing no extras (a Rob Farr commentary track, locations featurette and 1966 industrial film The Scribe — Keaton’s final film role) and adding several more: a Bromberg intro, a Lillian Gish intro and 1928 collegiate two-reeler Run, Girl, Run, starring Carole Lombard.

The General and Three Ages: Kino Lorber / 1926, 1923 / Black and white / 1.33:1 / 79 + 64 min / $29.95
Steamboat Bill, Jr. and College: Kino Lorber / 1928, 1927 / Black and white / 1.33:1 / 69 + 65 min / $29.95

Girl AsleepGirl Asleep (2016)
Oscilloscope Laboratories

Many reviews of cloying/charming Australian film Girl Asleep have focused on its influences, and the Variety pull-quote on the Blu-ray’s back cover sums up most of those observations, mentioning Wes Anderson, Napoleon Dynamite and Where the Wild Things Are. OK, fine. The hermetically framed opening shot certainly recalls some of Anderson’s, though the film’s formalist touches tend to diminish. And yes, there are aggressively weird family members and costumed creatures in the woods, so sure, those other two are represented.

This can be a lazy way to review movies, but Girl Asleep invites it with its pastiche of other, more original ideas. Before it was a film, Girl Asleep was a stage production at Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre, and the company’s artistic director Rosemary Myers directs the film adaptation. Like a lot of fringe theater, there’s more emphasis on the “imaginative” than the dramaturgically sound. There are fun costumes, kitschy production design and a winking disco dance number, but does that add up to much of a movie?

When the film does work, it’s mostly due to its appealing performances, particularly from Bethany Whitmore as shy protagonist Greta and Harrison Feldman as the gawky, kindhearted Elliott, who befriends her when she moves to a new school in a new town. Elliott and Greta become fast friends, but she doesn’t have much luck in her other relationships, enduring torment from a trio of mean girls and disinterest from older sister Genevieve (Imogen Archer).

When her well-meaning but clueless parents (Amber McMahon and screenwriter Matthew Whittet) throw her a 15th birthday party, Greta is forced to come out of her shell, but it’s not long before she’s been plunged into an allegorical dreamscape where she must confront her worst fears. Regular teenage awkwardness and discomfort probably doesn’t warrant such heavy-handed metaphorical inquiry.

Girl Asleep comes to Blu-ray from Oscilloscope, whose 1080p, 1.33:1 transfer faithfully reproduces the golden-amber tones of the film’s late-1970s setting. The image is sharp, and fine detail is excellent. Brightly colored costumes, especially yellows and blues, pop, while detail remains strong in shadowy scenes. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is crisp and dynamic.

The most enjoyable bonus feature is one unrelated to the film, except for having been packaged with Girl Asleep theatrically. Amy Nicholson’s documentary short Pickle (2016) details one couple’s indefatigable ability to care for a host of unusual pets, and the inevitable deaths that follow. Also included: a standard making-of doc, a separate interview with Myers that features some overlap, a promo video for Windmill Theatre Company and a trailer.

Oscilloscope Laboratories / 2016 / Color / 1.33:1 / 77 min / $32.99

RevengeRevenge of the Blood Beast (1966)
Raro Video

Gruesome occult horror and slapstick don’t really make for a logical pairing, but that doesn’t stop Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General) from trying to fuse the two in his feature debut Revenge of the Blood Beast, a tonal mishmash that mostly holds together thanks to Reeves’ steady directorial hand.

Barbara Steele is striking as always as Veronica, a woman honeymooning in Transylvania who becomes possessed by the spirit of an ancient witch after a car crash into the lake where she was drowned by the townspeople centuries ago. Unfortunately, this means Steele is largely absent for the majority of the film, replaced by a man in hideous hag makeup.

Her milquetoast husband Philip (Ian Ogilvy) must try to reverse the curse, aided by a descendant of Count von Helsing (John Karlsen, a perma-twinkle in his eye) who was previously just a bit of annoying local color as Philip and Veronica passed through town.

Revenge of the Blood Beast has everything you could want in a movie, provided your list consists only of leering, rapist hotel clerks (Mel Welles, playing the unsubtly named Groper), gags about Communists (there’s a visual hammer-and-sickle joked wedged into a brutal death scene) and car chases featuring bumbling cops (apparently shot by the second unit without Reeves’ knowledge or initial approval).

Still, even though the comedy (or attempts at it) never feels congruous with the mission to defeat a bulbous, bloodthirsty beast on a rampage, Revenge of the Blood Beast is an entertaining enough Euro-horror jaunt.

Raro’s 1080p, 2.35:1 transfer of Revenge of the Blood Beast is surprisingly strong, with stable color reproduction, healthy amounts of detail and a well-supported grain structure that isn’t afflicted with any obvious digital manipulation. Skin tones are natural, while colors like blood red and the yellow of von Helsing’s car are fairly vibrant. Audio is presented in a 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio English soundtrack that seems to betray the weakness of the source due to its low volume and low-level hiss. Despite a claim on the packaging, there is no Italian soundtrack included.

The major extra is a 30-minute audio interview with Steele about her career that plays over still images and is interspersed with clips from the film.  An included booklet features an essay by Nocturno that explores Reeves’ career, tragically cut short by his overdose death at age 25.

Raro Video / 1966 / Color / 2.35:1 / 79 min / $29.95

Black GirlBlack Girl (1966)
Criterion Collection

Ousmane Sembène’s seminal Black Girl, his debut feature and a watershed work of art for African cinema, makes its way to Region A Blu-ray from Criterion. In 2015, the BFI released the film in a fantastic dual-format set (reviewed here), but Criterion has improved on it with its Blu-ray release, including a transfer sourced from the same World Cinema Project 4K restoration and adding a number of valuable new bonus features.

Excerpted from my previous review of the BFI’s disc:

Mbissine Thérèse Diop stars as Diouana, a young woman who takes a job working for a rich French couple (Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine), moving from her home in Dakar to the Mediterranean resort city of Antibes. Diouana anticipates a life of caring for the couple’s children and exploring a brand new country. Instead, she’s saddled with additional cooking and cleaning responsibilities and her sightseeing is limited to the car ride from the boat to the house when she first arrives. As Diouana says in one of her flat, resigned voiceovers, France is merely a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom to her.

Sembène’s politically charged film runs on an engine of focused righteous anger, its characters emblematic of a poisonous symbiosis. The couple’s fundamental misunderstanding of Diouana’s humanity is ugly and patronizing — to them, she’s simply a task-oriented automaton or an exotic trinket to show off to “less-cultured” friends. Diouana is a woman isolated, stripped of any agency and relegated to an even more inconsequential position than her life back in Senegal, shown through flashbacks.

Her alienation is strikingly realized by Sembène, who frames her pinned against lily-white backgrounds. The couple’s living spaces are notably unadorned; one wall is home only to a tribal mask given to them as a gift from Diouana when they first met. Soon, it will become an object of struggle as she engages in a futile fight to reclaim at least a portion of her identity, cultural, personal or otherwise.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer is the equal of the BFI’s, displaying the same excellent levels of fine detail, clarity and grayscale separation, while the uncompressed mono French audio is clean and unaffected by damage.

Criterion’s disc emerges as the winner on the supplement front, particularly thanks to two new scholarly interviews packed with a wealth of information.

Samba Gadjigo puts Sembène’s work into the context of African cinema at the time, which was basically nonexistent outside of French-controlled film productions. There was no film infrastructure, and Gadjigo details how Sembène worked from scratch to create his early films that challenged dominant paradigms.

Manthia Diawara contributes a deep analysis of Black Girl, discussing Sembène’s approach to enlightening his viewership. Diawara argues that Sembène took a fundamentally intersectional approach, understanding that gender, race and class conventions would all have to be challenged to bring about change.

Also exclusive to Criterion’s release: a newly filmed interview with star Diop, who explains her serendipitous entry into the movies, and a brief excerpt of a 1966 interview with Sembène about his surprise Prix Jean Vigo win for Black Girl.

Overlapping with the BFI disc: Sembène’s debut short, Borom Sarret (1963), also sporting a new 4K restoration; a brief alternate color sequence that Sembène dropped (presented here as a standalone, not integrated into the film like on the BFI disc); and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Diawara’s 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema.

A trailer and an insert with an essay by critic Ashley Clark are also included.

Criterion Collection / 1966 / Black and white / 1.37:1 / 59 min / $39.95

 

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.

Man Hunt Featured

Blu-ray Review Round-up: “Man Hunt,” “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” and more!

Man Hunt (1941)

Man HuntIt’s doubtful there are many who would consider Man Hunt to be top-tier Fritz Lang, even if the parameters were narrowed to only his Hollywood films. Still, this noirish propaganda piece is bookended by a couple of harrowing sequences, and even in the saggy midsection, Lang’s expressive photography keeps the mood taut and tense. Isolating the pursued protagonist in shots that emphasize the impersonal blankness of urban and non-urban locales, Lang squeezes every last drop of intrigue out of a plot that only occasionally transcends its anti-Nazi polemic.

Walter Pidgeon stars as Alan Thorndike, a renowned British hunter on a German vacation just before the outset of World War II. He tracks down Adolf Hitler and has him in his rifle sight before being arrested by the Gestapo and placed in the custody of Major Quive-Smith (George Sanders, doing a kind of Erich von Stroheim urbanely sadistic thing). Thorndike insists he had just drawn a “sporting bead” on Hitler and wasn’t actually going to kill him, but Quive-Smith doesn’t buy it and makes the first attempt of what will be many on Thorndike’s life.

Pursued by German forces back to his home country, Thorndike must rely on a variety of sources to evade detection, including a quick-thinking cabin boy, Vaner (Roddy McDowall), and an infatuated young woman, Jerry (Joan Bennett). There’s a high potential for hokey plotting here, but the actors help sell the questionable material, as McDowall is an unusually perceptive child actor and Bennett taps into a place of unvarnished emotion, despite sporting a risible Cockney accent.

The film’s opening sequence is intriguing, and a later cat-and-mouse game in the shadows of the Underground has the elemental brilliance of the pursuits in M (1931), and taken with the generally engaging rest of the film, that makes for one solid piece of agit-entertainment.

Twilight Time has received a strong 1080p, 1.33:1 transfer from Fox for this high-contrast, shadowy film. Fine detail is abundant, blacks don’t suffer from any apparent crush and contrast levels are stable. A little bit of visible grain looks natural in this film-like presentation, which only displays minimal damage to the elements. The lossless mono track is similarly clean and clear.

Aside from the customary isolated score presentation, all the extras are ported over from Fox’s DVD release, including a decent making-of featurette, an audio commentary from Lang historian Patrick McGilligan and a trailer.

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

The Film (out of ****): **1/2

Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2

Video Transfer: ***

Audio: ***

New Extra Features: 1/2

Extra Features Overall: **

Twilight Time / 1941 / Black and white / 1.33:1 / 102 min / $29.95

 

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Ali: Fear Eats the SoulFollowing closely on the heels of its ecstatically beautiful Blu-ray upgrade of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), Criterion gives the upgrade treatment to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s surprisingly faithful remake/homage, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf).

Much has been written about Sirk’s subversive criticism of bourgeoisie values rippling beneath his melodramatic surfaces, but there’s a bit of an opposite dichotomy seen in Fassbinder’s take. He shoots the unlikely romance between a 30-some Moroccan immigrant (El Hedi ben Salem) and a 60-some German widow (Brigitte Mira) with a characteristic aloofness, his camera at a distance, peering at the action through narrow doorways and winding bannisters.

And yet, the melodrama creeps through, both through Fassbinder’s expressive use of color (those gorgeous yellows!) and his empathetic, lingering shots of his actors’ faces. Fassbinder and Salem were romantically involved at the time, which may have contributed to the film’s deeply felt looks of longing. Either way, this is one of the cinema’s most exquisite and most honest love stories.

Criterion’s 1080p, 1.37:1 transfer couldn’t be any better. Sourced from a new 4K digital restoration and supervised by DP Jürgen Jürges, the transfer features exceptional clarity and astounding levels of detail. Fassbinder’s somber color palette, punctuated with flashes of brightness, looks natural and stable, while film grain is rendered beautifully. The uncompressed monaural German audio sounds superb, free of any distractions or imperfections of any kind.

Extras are all carryovers from the 2003 DVD release, including an introduction from fellow Sirk-ophile Todd Haynes, interviews with Mira and editor Thea Eymèsz, a 1976 BBC program on the New German Cinema, a scene from Fassbinder’s The American Soldier and Shahbaz Noshir’s 2002 short Angst isst Seele auf, which has a prominent connection to Fassbinder’s film. A trailer and an insert with an essay by critic Chris Fujiwara are also included.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Criterion’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): ****

Film Elements Sourced: ****

Video Transfer: ****

Audio: ***1/2

New Extra Features: N/A

Extra Features Overall: ***1/2

The Criterion Collection / 1974 / Color / 1.37:1 / 93 min / $39.95

 

Sidewalk Stories (1989)

Sidewalk StoriesOn the included interview in Carlotta Films’ Blu-ray release of Sidewalk Stories, director and star Charles Lane plays down the obvious affinities between his film and Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), insisting instead that his film was primarily inspired by J. Lee Thompson’s low-budget thriller Tiger Bay (1959).

It’s probably to the film’s benefit to get away from the Chaplin comparison, despite the obvious narrative similarities between the films. For one thing, Lane is a reasonably expressive actor, but he doesn’t nearly possess the remarkable communicative abilities of a Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd, not to mention his relative lack of physical comedic chops.

For another thing, Sidewalk Stories is certainly a more faithful homage to the silent film than The Artist, but much of the time, this feels like a film that just happens not to have a synced soundtrack — it’s more of a polished version of cinema verité than anything.

Nonetheless, Sidewalk Stories is often very charming in its tale of a street artist (Lane) who begrudgingly adopts a little girl (Nicole Alysia) after her father is murdered in an alley. Living in an abandoned building, the artist barely has enough resources for himself, but he finds a way to provide for the child with the help of a young woman (Sandye Wilson) who falls for the mismatched pair.

The film’s silent-style comic sequences — a skirmish with a fellow, much larger artist over a customer and a playground squabble are both great moments — are a little too infrequent. Lane has an eye for capturing interesting perspectives on marginalized individuals, but the docu-style elements of this hybrid tend to become a little repetitive, especially considering the film’s obvious finale, in which Lane breaks the sound barrier to no great effect.

Despite the film’s shortcomings, it’s a treat to have it presented this beautifully by Carlotta Films, the French company who have recently expanded into the US, with Kino Lorber distributing their discs here. The 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer, sourced from a 2K restoration, is a clean, detailed snapshot of the past that feels like it was preserved perfectly intact. Black and white levels are stable and consistent, with a film-like appearance to the image that is highly pleasing. The 2.0 DTS-HD soundtrack presents a nice showcase for Marc Marder’s eclectic score, which combines traditional piano plinking, bluesy riffs and ambient droning.

Extras include a new interview with Lane and Marder, as well as a commentary track from the pair. A nice inclusion is Lane’s 1977 short A Place in Time, which serves as a kind of prototype for Sidewalk Stories. A trailer is also included.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Carlotta Films US’ Sidewalk Stories Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): **1/2

Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2

Video Transfer: ****

Audio: ***1/2

New Extra Features: ***

Extra Features Overall: ***

Carlotta Films US / 1989 / Black and white / 1.85:1 / 101 min / $29.95

 

Iguana (1988)

IguanaNo surprise, Monte Hellman delivers another fascinating genre subversion with Iguana, as idiosyncratic a take on the monster movie as Hellman’s versions of the road movie — Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) — and the western — The Shooting (1966), Ride in the Whirlwind (1966).

Iguana stars Everett McGill as Oberlus, a disfigured harpooner whose reptilian facial features has made him the object of ridicule among his fellow sailors on a 19th Century whaling ship. When he escapes the horrific conditions, he sets up his own empire on a remote island, paying back the cruelty done to him tenfold to anyone who dares step foot on land.

Hellman’s atmospheric, disorienting film interrogates both traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, in Oberlus’s absurdly grandiose proclamations and in the character of Maru Valdivielso’s Carmen, a woman whose free sexuality terrifies the men around her. Oberlus takes Carmen as his lover by force, leading to a tragic ending that simply underlines the horror that Hellman allows to unfold over the course of the film.

Raro Video’s Blu-ray release restores several minutes that were cut from the long out-of-print Anchor Bay DVD release, but that’s about the only nice thing to be said about this disappointing disc. While the Blu-ray boasts approval and new color correction from cinematographer Josep M. Civit and Hellman, it’s clear that something went very, very wrong in Raro’s transfer, which is riddled with obvious noise reduction, resulting in frozen grain and disturbingly smooth surfaces. This is an especially bad fit with the dim, raw look of the film, as blacks are frequently crushed and riddled with artifacts. Though I suspect they would look OK in a properly presented transfer, the colors just look sickly here. The 2.0 DTS-HD soundtrack isn’t great itself, but its slightly muddled sound is nothing compared to the onscreen travesty.

Extras include a new interview with Hellman, a trailer and a booklet with a brief essay and a Q&A with Hellman.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Raro Films’ Iguana Blu-ray rates:

The Film (out of ****): ***

Film Elements Sourced: ***

Video Transfer: *

Audio: **

New Extra Features: **

Extra Features Overall: **

Raro Video / 1988 / Color / 1.85:1 / 100 min / $29.95

 

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.

Upper 2

The Upper Crust (1981): Frank Gorshin Gives the Performance of His Career in a Forgotten Austrian Thriller

Imagine an unassuming policier directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and that will give you some idea of the atmosphere of Peter Patzak’s The Upper Crust (Den Tüchtigen gehört die Welt; literally, The Brave Own the World, 1981), an impressive and unjustly forgotten bilingual crime film. Although it appears never to have opened commercially in the United States, The Upper Crust screened in a retrospective of Austrian films at the now-defunct Carnegie Hall Cinema in May 1982, and returned to New York earlier this month as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Vienna Unveiled” series.

Very much a product of the post-1968 hangover era, in which thoughts of revolution gave way to dispirited cynicism, The Upper Crust concerns a murky political conspiracy in which a trio of well-connected government officials (Ernst Konarek, Bibiane Zeller, and Fred Schaffer) turn to murder to suppress a potentially ruinous scandal. Although it’s not entirely clear (at least via the English subtitles) what kind of corporate crimes these starched-collar villains are up to, they are also connected to a prostitution ring via their pimp-enforcer Kralicek (Pavel Landovsky). When a small-time con man, Haumer (Lukas Resatarits), learns that Kralicek got his teenaged girl addicted to heroin and turned her out, he puts his unorthodox professional skills to work in a scheme to exact revenge on the whole group. Not wishing to sully their own hands, the trio send away to America for a mob-connected hit man to dispatch Haumer.

Upper 1

Although it isn’t quite their equal, Patzak’s film more closely resembles the political thrillers of Costa-Gavras or Wim Wenders’s The American Friend than the exuberant, violent Italian poliziotteschi that remain the most-exported Eurocrime genre of the period. Patzak’s palette is all muted browns and grays, and The Upper Crust takes place in an overcast, rain-soaked Vienna of modern metal buildings and post-industrial blandnessa far cry from Johann Strauss’s Austria. The look of the film is of a piece with the central performance by Franz Buchrieser, who plays the police detective assigned to the case with a thick mustache and a shrug. Smarter than his superiors, Major Kottan is also burned-out and all too aware that bureaucracy will derail any meaningful police work, especially as he follows the misdeeds up the chain to the “upper crust.”  Kottan’s portly partner (Walter Davy, a World War II amputee) has only one leg—an inspired visual metaphor for the ineffectuality of the police.

The Upper Crust was a spin-off of an acclaimed Austrian television series, Kottan ermittelt, which depicted police corruption and incompetence with a darkly humorous tone. The main character’s name is itself a gag, a pun on the Jerry Cotton series of films, and in The Upper Crust Buchrieser glares balefully at a couple of suspects who bust out the George Nader jokes. The show is unknown in the United States but sounds a lot like Hill Street Blues, which Kottan predates by five years.

The chief element that distinguishes The Upper Crust from Kottan ermittelt is also the factor that should make the film ripe for an English-friendly home video release: the addition of American locations and actors to the mix. Patzak connected with Bay Area producer Richard Chase’s Baytide Films, in what Variety surmised was “the first true U.S.-Austrian co-production since World War II,” in order to shoot a prologue in some grungy San Francisco locations during the winter of 1980-81. (Primarily a director-producer of television commercials, Chase also worked as a journalist and a Dallas-based restaurateur before his early death at 46, in 1992.) Chase also recommended an American actor to play the villain: Frank Gorshin.

Best remembered as Batman’s The Riddler, Gorshin made most of his living as an impressionist and a nightclub entertainer. His career in front of the camera had sputtered after Batman; there were guest shots on crime shows like Ironside and Charlie’s Angels, but nothing more substantial, and Chase thought of him after reading one of many interviews in which Gorshin complained about the dearth of film roles on offer. The American non-release of The Upper Crust meant that nothing much changed for Gorshin -  while promoting the film’s sole appearance in New York City, Gorshin noted that he was about to get killed off after four months on the daytime soap Edge of Night. It’s a bit of a tragedy, because Gorshin gives a first-rate performance—maybe the best of his life—in The Upper Crust.

The prologue also features two other American actors: Broderick Crawford and stand-up comic Joey Forman, both of whom died not long after the film was made. Forman and Gorshin take Crawford to a sparsely-attended high school basketball game, buy him a couple of beers there, and then kill him during the drive back. They’re all connected to the mob, but Crawford’s character had been talking to the cops. As they leave the body in the passenger seat of a jeep parked under a freeway overpass, Gorshin puts the gun in Crawford’s hand.  Forman jokes that a shot to the back of the head is not a very convincing suicide. Gorshin says that’s the most popular way to do it in Germany, then strains a muscle reaching around behind his neck to demonstrate. “Ow!” he exclaims with a sheepish grin, and . . . cut to the opening credits.

The banal nature of this murder—a high school basketball game?!—sets the tone for Gorshin’s character, Harry Werner, who loves to gamble online at casinodames.com/live-casino.  He’s as at ease in his work as any paper-pusher who’s been working in the same cubicle for twenty years. Patzak shows him assembling his rifle (and adjusting a loose screw on the sight, which later seems to work itself loose every time he uses it; a nice detail), but spends just as much screen time on Harry’s progress in acquiring a rental car. Any macho posturing or moral agonizing would be out of place within this sketch of pragmatic evil. Gorshin gets that; he plays Harry with total nonchalance, his worn face usually devoid of expression but still captivatingly pregnant with uncertain intent. Every hired killer has to be a sociopath, one imagines, but Gorshin lifts the veil for only an occasional flash of menace. Near the end of the film, on the run from the cops and holed up in a lonely woman’s apartment, Harry kidnaps (catnaps?) his hostage’s beloved feline for leverage.  The woman picks up a pan, then hesitates. Gorshin never looks at her; he’s busy stroking the cat.  “What do you think?” Harry coos, addressing the pet. “Is she going to hit me with that pan?” It’s a satisfying irony that Gorshin, who became famous for mimicking a certain type of savagely ferocious actor (Richard Widmark, James Cagney, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster) should understand that he could be even more mesmerizing by channelling the somnolence of Robert Mitchum.

Upper 2

Gorshin’s only Riddler-esque indulgences in The Upper Crust are an occasional Nicholsonesque grin and the battered fisherman’s hat he keeps pushing down over his eyes. Both attract more attention than Harry might be expected to want, but it’s okay—they remind us that The Upper Crust is first and foremost a star turn. The film’s major flaw is its pulpy, at times nonsensical plotting, and the toughest part to swallow is Harry’s decision to stick around after the job is done—foolish behavior for a experienced lawbreaker. It’s as if Patzak couldn’t bear to let go of Gorshin, even at the expense of his story. Ultimately Harry sticks around until the end, becoming not so much the villain as a twinned, flawed protagonist, equal in stature and screen time to Buchrieser’s Kottan. The Upper Crust is Gorshin’s movie all the way. Every underutilized character actor should have one like it.