Criterion Corner-DVD/Blu-ray Reviews
Entries from February 2014
TWO EUROPEAN GEMS
By Raymond Benson
February
is a good month for The Criterion Collection. Last week we reviewed the
company’s restored Blu-ray/DVD dual format release of Foreign Correspondent. Coming quickly on its heels are two more
excellent releases on this red carpet of home video labels.
First
up—Tess, directed by Roman Polanski.
This 1979 picture—released in the U.S. in 1980 and nominated for Academy Awards
(Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Score) and winner of three (Art
Direction, Cinematography, and Costumes) is a scrumptious, beautiful depiction
of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles. It is a very faithful adaptation, although several scenes
from the book are left out or shortened. Still, the film is nearly three hours
long—but don’t let that scare you, it’s never dull. I have to confess that I
fell in love with Nastassja Kinski when I first saw Tess in a Manhattan cinema. She remained my onscreen heartthrob for
over a decade as a result! Kinski is strikingly beautiful, and it is this
beauty that carries her extremely subtle performance through the character’s
difficult emotional upheavals. Kinski’s Tess is shy, vulnerable, introverted,
and naive—until she is the victim of sexual violence. Then the character is
forced to mature, and rather quickly. When it’s all over, on reflection, one
realizes the actress never relied solely on her looks. Superbly supporting
Kinski are Peter Firth as Angel, the man who at first rejects her but then
rescues her from the likes of Leigh Lawson, as the sexual predator Alec.
This
was Polanski’s first feature after fleeing from the U.S. under, ahem,
disturbing criminal charges. He made the film in France, where he took up residence.
His late wife, Sharon Tate, had given him the novel back in the Sixties, and
he’d promised that he would one day make the film for her. As we all know, Tate
didn’t survive that decade. Ten years later, Polanski kept his promise (the
film is dedicated “To Sharonâ€). It is certainly a love letter to her and his
cinematic audience. Since the story involves what the poster tag line read as
“She was born into a world where they called it seduction, not rape...†one
wonders if the picture might have also been Polanski’s way of apologizing for
his crime.
At
any rate, Tess can be listed among the
director’s best pictures. It is gorgeously rendered, exquisitely acted, and,
like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, is one
of the most visually-stunning films of its era.
The
new 4K digital restoration—supervised by Polanski himself—looks fantastic on
Blu-ray. Several extras document the making of the film, including Once Upon a Time...Tess (a piece from 2006),
three programs featuring interviews with Polanski, Kinski, Lawson, producer
Claude Berri, costumer Anthony Powell, and composer Philippe Sarde, and others.
A 1979 interview with Polanski on The
South Bank Show is revealing, and there is also a documentary shot on
location for French television during the film’s production. The package comes
with both Blu-ray and DVD disks.
Another
wonderful release from Criterion in February—Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Released in 1960, this is
simply one of the most important entries in modern film history. While it
wasn’t technically the first French New Wave film, it was the one that truly
ushered in this unique movement with significant critical and commercial impact.
It really is the quintessential French New Wave film, for it serves as a
checklist of stylistic traits:
low-budget, handheld camera, improvised dialogue, existential theme, and
radical editing. The French New Wave took the Neorealism of the forties and
made it arty. It’s the cinema equivalent of jazz.
The
story is paper thin: Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the studly petty criminal who has
a short-lived romance with a beautiful American girl working in Paris (Jean
Seberg) until he can’t hide from the authorities any longer. As the film
follows the couple over a course of a few days, Godard plummets deep into the
characters’ psyches as we follow them through a series of seemingly trivial
events, but which in fact are extremely intimate. It’s all very striking, and you
can still feel the revolutionary
punch the movie had in its day. In truth, Breathless
is perhaps Godard’s most accessible movie. Honest, it really is a love story—just a quirky, edgy
one.
Both
actors are marvelous. They are both frankly sexy individuals, and Godard makes
sure you get that. With Breathless, Belmondo
defined his image as the handsome cad, while it solidifed Seberg’s career as an
art-house darling; it’s tragic that her tenure in the motion picture business
was sadly cut short. She is simply radiant in the film.
Criterion’s
new release is a dual Blu-ray/DVD package. All of the extras from the label’s
previous DVD edition of the film are ported over to this one. The only
difference is the magnificently restored, high-definition digital
transfer—approved by director of photography Raoul Coutard—that makes Breathless a must-have in any serious
film collector’s library.
Hitchcock’s War
Face
By Raymond Benson
Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign
Correspondent is often underrated or forgotten when it comes to lists of
the director’s “best†films. In fact, it was nominated for an Oscar Best
Picture the same year as Rebecca (which
won), and, personally, I think it’s the better movie. It’s certainly more of a
“Hitchcock film†than Rebecca, as it
is one of those cross-country espionage adventure-thrillers along the lines of The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North by
Northwest.
It
was the director’s second Hollywood movie. Although Hitchcock was contracted to
David O. Selznick (who produced Rebecca),
Hitch’s deal allowed Selznick to “farm out†the director to other studios and
producers, for a piece of Hitchcock’s salary, of course. In this case, Foreign Correspondent was produced by
Walter Wanger (who had also produced John Ford’s Stagecoach). It’s interesting that during the seven-year period in
which Hitch worked for Selznick, the non-Selznick-produced pictures, in my
opinion, were arguably better (Shadow of
a Doubt, Lifeboat, and Notorious, are other examples).
The
story concerns an American journalist (Joel McCrea) who is sent to Europe,
prior to September 1939, to interview various personages in order to determine
if war is likely to break out. Predictably, McCrea immediately falls into a
plot involving assassination, the kidnapping of a diplomat, and devious Nazi
spies. Co-starring Laraine Day as the blonde love interest, Herbert Marshall as
her father, George Sanders as McCrea’s ally, and Albert Bassermann (nominated
for Best Supporting Actor) as a Dutch diplomat who is really the MacGuffin of
the story, the picture served as propaganda to persuade America to be more
sympathetic to what was occurring across the Atlantic. When Hitler invaded
Poland in 1939, America stayed neutral while Britain and France declared war on
Germany. The allies pleaded with the U.S. government to enter the war and come
to their aid, but there was significant anti-war sentiment in America at the
time.
Being
British to begin with, Hitchcock, instead of returning to his native England to
face the crisis with his kinsmen, chose to support the war effort in a more
subtle way—by making propaganda films thinly disguised as entertainment.
Actually, the picture itself is in no way subtle—its message hits you on the
head with a hammer. McCrea’s final monologue, in which he broadcasts to the
American people that they must join the fight in Europe, was at the time deemed
quite controversial. Like Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator (the same year), the language is strongly
proselytizing. The film includes several signature Hitchcock set pieces—the
black umbrellas in the rain, the windmills reversing direction, the plane crash
into the sea—all the while keeping the audience in a state of nail-biting
suspense. McCrea is splendid and serves as a fine Hitchcockian “everyman,†and
the visual effects, for 1940, are extraordinary. Foreign Correspondent, it’s been said, was also admired by Ian
Fleming, who at the time of the film’s release had once worked as a journalist
but was then serving as the personal assistant to Britain’s Director of Naval
Intelligence. It’s understandable why a spy story like Correspondent would appeal to the future creator of James Bond.
The
Criterion Collection once again graces us with a dual Blu-ray/DVD format
package (three disks), which makes sense marketing-wise, and the new 2K digital
film restoration looks marvelous. Extras include a new piece on the film’s
special effects; Hollywood Propaganda and
World War II, a fascinating look at cinema in that era; an excerpt from The Dick Cavett Show featuring guest
Hitchcock, who comes off as more of a comedian than a filmmaker; and a very
interesting photo essay about wartime rumors shot by Hitchcock himself that originally
appeared in a Life Magazine issue
from 1942—it tells a story in the form of photographic storyboards. Add the
booklet with an essay by film scholar James Naremore, and you have another
must-have gem from not only Criterion, but from the Master of Suspense.
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“Truffaut’s Giftâ€
By Raymond Benson
It’s
not only my favorite Francois Truffaut film, but it’s also my favorite French
New Wave picture. While Godard’s Breathless
is often cited as the quintessential French New Wave movie—and it is indeed
a hallmark of the movement—for me it’s Jules
and Jim that fully represents that important development in cinema history.
It contains all the recognizable stylistic and thematic qualities that those
French upstarts brought to their films (what?
French critics becoming filmmakers?
How dare they!), but it’s also a darned good story with wonderful
performances by its three leads. And while the movie ends on a bittersweet,
somewhat tragic note, Jules and Jim is
really a feel-good movie because of the way Truffaut chose to tell the tale.
The director has never shied away from pathos and sentimentality—something the
filmmaker was very good at—but in Jules
and Jim he keeps it from being maudlin or syrupy by infusing the picture
with whimsy. Perhaps the best way to describe Jules and Jim is that it’s a pure delight, a quirky joy from start
to finish.
Based
on a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché,
who fictionalized the menage a trois relationship
between him, his best friend, and his best friend’s wife (the true story of
which is recounted in the fascinating 1985 documentary, The Key to “Jules and Jim,†included as an extra). The source
material was perfect fodder for Truffaut, who was particularly adept at
exploring the mysterious topics of flawed love and romance (he would make
another menage a trois picture a
decade later entitled Two English Girls,
a sort-of flipside of Jules and Jim).
The storyline is relatively straight-forward: Jules (Oskar Werner), an
Austrian, and Jim (Henri Serre), a Frenchman, become bosom buddies in France in
the years before the First World War. They both fall in love with the same
bohemian and decidedly “free†woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, in a
career-defining performance). The war intervenes and separates the two friends,
for they must fight on opposite sides of the conflict. But they make it out
alive and reconnect during peacetime—and Catherine is still very much a part of
their lives. Catherine had married Jules before the war, but now, even though
she lives with Jules and their young daughter, Catherine begins a renewed
affair with Jim—in the same house. Jules’ friendship with Jim prevents him from
objecting, although it is clear that the pain is there, buried, inside both
men. Needless to say, the triangle ends badly; but, ironically, it’s presented
as if the situation is the most natural thing in the world.
Jules and Jim was released in
1962 to international critical acclaim and established Truffaut as one of
France’s great directors. He made many wonderful pictures during his brief
career (which was tragically cut short by a brain tumor), including the
magnificent Oscar-winner, Day for Night,
but none would reach the heights achieved by Jules and Jim. Its influence on future filmmakers is
undeniable—Martin Scorsese once claimed that GoodFellas was directed in the same style as Jules and Jim, with disjointed narrative, rapid-fire cutting, and
voice-over narration. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie
is practically a love letter to the French New Wave, especially the frivolous,
whimsical nature that was present in Jules
and Jim. The recent Frances Ha, by Noah Baumbauch, also owes a lot to
Truffaut’s masterpiece, especially to the significantly fanciful score by
Georges Delerue.
Criterion
has seen fit to re-issue their earlier DVD release as a Blu-ray, and the
results are astounding. The new 2K digital restoration is gorgeous. Beyond
that, the extras are exactly the same as the previous DVD edition, which includes
two separate audio commentaries (one by Jeanne Moreau herself), several video
interviews with Truffaut from different periods of his career, the
previously-mentioned documentary on the true story behind the film, video
interviews with cinematographer Raoul Coutard and co-writer Jean Grualt, and
much more. This new release is dual-format—you get the Blu-ray and two DVD
disks, all containing the same material.
If
you already own the previous release, the question for you is whether or not
you want to experience Jules and Jim in
the best possible visual and aural presentation. For me, the answer to that is
a no-brainer. Jules and Jim is
Francois Truffaut’s gift to cinema lovers.
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