Criterion Corner-DVD/Blu-ray Reviews
Entries from June 2015
“HE SAID/SHE
SAID—REFLECTIONS ON LOVE, UNRELIABLE MEMORIES, AND THE ATOMIC BOMBâ€
By Raymond Benson
Director
Alain Resnais achieved worldwide acclaim with his documentary short, Night and Fog (1955), which revealed to
the world the true horrors of what went on in the Nazi concentration camps. For
his first feature film, Resnais turned to fiction; and yet, he maintained a
somewhat documentary approach in showing the world the true horrors of what
occurred in Hiroshima, Japan when the first atomic bomb was dropped. Beyond
that, Hiroshima mon amour (“Hiroshima,
My Loveâ€) is an art film that not only signaled the beginning of the French New
Wave (although many film historians do not count it as an example of that
movement), it also established Resnais’ singular, enigmatic and ambiguous style
as an auteur. The director would go on to make even more thematically-mysterious
pictures (namely Last Year at Marienbad)
and become something of a French equivalent of Terrence Malick. Sort of.
Hiroshima mon amour
is
quite accessible, though, and it will surely stay with and haunt the viewer
long after watching the film. Primarily it’s a love story between a French
woman (Emmanuelle Riva, who returned to the limelight in 2012 with her
Oscar-nominated leading role in Amour)
and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada). The man is married, but his wife is away. The
woman is “married†to the ghost of her first love, a German officer who died
just before France was liberated in World War II. For that forbidden love, she
was ostracized and punished by the population of her small town, complete with
head shaving and shaming. This so psychologically damaged her that now, in the
present (1959), she is willing to embark on a two-night stand with a stranger.
The leading characters’ names are never mentioned, although they end up calling
each other by the city from which they hail—“Hiroshima,†for the man, and “Neversâ€
(her home town in France), for the woman.
The
picture follows the short romance over the course of two nights and a day
in-between, juxtaposed with numerous flashbacks of the woman’s experience
during the war. Overlaid on all of this is visceral footage of the atomic bomb’s
aftermath in the city of Hiroshima, where the story takes place. Do the
characters tell the truth to each other? Are their memories real or imagined? She
might state something as fact, but then the man will say it isn’t true. And
vice versa. A facetious way to describe it the film is that it’s “He Said/She
Said in a Dreamscape.â€
Perhaps
this doesn’t sound like a good time at the cinema, but don’t be fooled—Hiroshima mon amour is a powerful,
deeply moving piece of filmmaking that still resonates today. It explores how
we remember traumatic experiences in our lives, what we censor, and what we
embellish. The black and white cinematography, by Michio Takahashi and Sacha
Vierney (the picture was a French-Japanese co-production), is stunningly
gorgeous. The performances, especially by Riva, are outstanding. The musical
score, by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, alternates between playful and
melodic accessibility to avant-garde Stravinsky-like dissonance. And the direction,
well, let’s just say that Alain Resnais went on to become one of the most
revered French filmmakers, and Hiroshima
mon amour could very well be his masterpiece.
The
Criterion Collection released the film on DVD over a decade ago and they have now
seen fit to provide us with a new 4K digital restoration on Blu-ray with an
uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Criterion will always be the Cadillac of
Blu-ray restoration of old classics, and their work on Hiroshima is outstanding. All of the extras from the previous DVD
release are ported over, and there are some new supplements as well, including:
a program on the film’s restoration; a new interview with film scholar Francois
Thomas, author of a book on Resnais; and a new interview with music scholar Tim
Page about the film’s score. The previous supplements include an excellent audio commentary by film
historian Peter Cowie; interviews with Resnais from 1961 and 1980; interviews
with Emmanuelle Riva from 1959 and 2003; and an essay by critic Ken Jones and
excerpts from a 1959 Cahiers du cinema discussion
about the film, both of which appear in the booklet.
Quite
simply, Hiroshima mon amour is a milestone
of important international cinema. You owe it to yourself to see it. Maybe you
already have. Do you really remember?
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"WE'RE GONNA KILL THE SWEDE"
By Raymond Benson
The
Criterion Collection gave us the DVD versions of these two excellent crime
thrillers twelve years ago. The company
has now seen fit to upgrade the release to Blu-ray.
Based
loosely on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, both versions of The Killers begin with the author's
premise and then take off from there in very different directions. It's
interesting to see how the respective screenwriters adapted the story and then
created two disparate feature-length tales out of it. In Hemingway's piece, two
hit men arrive in a small town looking for "The Swede". They terrorize the
owner, cook, and a customer in a diner in an attempt to find the guy. After the
killers leave in frustration, the customer runs to the Swede's boarding house
and finds him in bed with his clothes on. He warns the Swede about the men, but
the Swede says he's not going to do anything about it. The customer goes back
to the diner and, after realizing no one cares, leaves town. And that’s it.
The
1946 version faithfully captures the short story even down to the dialogue for
the first ten minutes. Where the short story ends, the movie goes on and we see
the hit men actually kill the Swede (played by Burt Lancaster in his first
starring role). Enter Jim Reardon (Edmond O'Brien, with third billing, but he's
really the protagonist of the film!) as an insurance inspector. It turns out the
Swede had a life insurance policy that benefits an old lady who helped him
once. Reardon is determined to uncover the story behind it all, and the rest of
the movie follows his investigation into the Swede's life in crime (told
entirely in flashbacks). The Swede was a boxer who got mixed up with Big Jim, a
racketeer (played by Albert Dekker), and falls in love with Big Jim's gal,
Kitty (played by smoking hot Ava Gardner, in one of her first starring roles;
Gardner had been kicking around Hollywood since the early 40s and this was her big
break). As we all know, it's not good to mess around with the crime boss's
dame.
Robert
Siodmak received an Oscar nomination for Best Director on the picture (it was
also nominated for adapted screenplay, editing, and music score). There's no
question that The Killers is a
seminal film noir, one of the best of
the bunch produced when Hollywood was churning out these types of gritty crime
pictures by the dozens. Siodmak's hand is assured as he brings in all the
trademark film noir elements: ”expressionistic
lighting, a femme fatale, stark
brutality, a cynical attitude, flashbacks, a man haunted by the past, and
more. The picture could serve as a Film
Noir 101 course. Lancaster is fine and Gardner is sexy and dangerous, but
it is O'Brien who holds the movie together.
The
1964 version is a different animal. It was produced to be the very first TV
movie, but NBC viewed the finished product and deemed it too violent for
television. Instead, the producers released it theatrically worldwide. Directed
by Don Siegel (billed as "Donald Siegel"), The
Killers Mach II stars Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager as the hitmen, who here become the focal point
of the new story. John Cassavetes plays the Swede character, only here he is a
racecar driver named Johnny. The femme
fatale, Sheila, is played by Angie Dickinson, and get this... the crime
boss is none other than Ronald Reagan in his last film role before he became a
politician.
The
film begins basically the same way, but the setting is different. The two
hitmen come looking for Johnny and they kill him. Marvin's hitman character then
takes over the dramatic action originally performed by O'Brien in the 1946
version. Marvin is the one who wants to find out why he and his partner were
hired to kill Johnny, as well as what happened to a load of stolen cash that
Johnny may have hidden.
While
not as important or engaging as the 1946 edition, The Killers Mach II is worth watching for Siegel's solid
craftsmanship. NBC was probably right not to broadcast the picture on
television in 1964, given the time period, the movie is pretty brutal. Marvin
and Gulager are creepy bad guys, Cassavetes delivers his usual fine work, and
Dickinson displays her charms with aplomb. As for Reaga, well, le's just say
it's not too difficult to buy him as a crook. In hindsight, given that this guy
became a two-term U.S. president, his performance lends a "must-see" element to
the picture.
Criterion
gives us new high-definition digital restorations of both films (the 1964
version is in color and in 4:3 aspect ratio, since it was shot for television).
They look terrific. The black and white contrasts in the 1946 version are
especially sharp and unsettlingly beautiful. Almost all of the original
supplements are here:Andrei Tarkovsky's student film adaptation of the short
story from 1956; a video interview with noir
expert/writer, the late Stuart M. Kaminsky; a video interview with Clu
Gulager; Stacy Keach reading Hemingway's short story on audio; the Screen Directors Playhouse radio
adaptation from 1949 featuring Lancaster and Shelley Winters; an audio excerpt
from director Don Siegel's autobiography read by Hampton Fancher; and trailers.
The booklets feature essays by novelist Jonathan Lethem and critic Geoffrey
O'Brien. Not sure why Criterion left off the production, publicity, and
behind-the-scenes stills, actor biographies, production correspondence, Paul
Schrader's essay, and music and effects tracks, all which were on the original
DVD release. If those things are important to you, then you may want to hold on
to it.
But
for the Blu-ray restorations alone, The
Killers double feature is an excellent buy, especially for fans of film noir and crime pictures in general.
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“I LOVE NEW YORK IN
JUNEâ€
By Raymond Benson
I
had seen Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King only
once, back in 1991 on its initial release, and I liked it very much. As years
went on, though, my memories of it were such that I considered it to be
atypical of Gilliam’s work. For me, he’s always been a hit-and-miss director;
some of his pictures are absolute classics and others not so much. There is a
certain beautiful sloppiness to his direction; to use a painting analogy, it’s
as if he throws a lot of paint on the canvas and maybe it’ll turn out to be
something coherent, funny, and meaningful. Gilliam, I think, is much more of a
visual designer than a people-director—his films always look great, usually very original and envelope-pushing in
their conception and the execution of the visuals. They are often big pictures on large canvases. They
contain lots of effects work, wild costuming, over-the-top performances, and a
frenetic energy that is exhaustive. And
a lot of fantasy.
On
viewing The Criterion Collection’s brand new Blu-ray release of the picture for
the first time since 1991, I now realize that The Fisher King is absolutely not
atypical of Gilliam’s work. I remembered it as being an intimate study of
two characters who go from despondency to finding meaning in their lives, with
not much “Gilliam-esque†aspects to the picture. Whoa, my memory was flawed.
Gilliam’s wildness, his visual extravagance, the over-the-top performances, the
crazy camera angles, fantasy, and the acerbic humor is all there. And it’s
terrific, easily one of Gilliam’s best movies (it’s certainly the one that
received the most Oscar nominations—five, including Best Actor (Robin
Williams), Supporting Actress (Mercedes Ruehl, who won), Original Screenplay (by Richard LaGravenese), Art
Direction/Set Design (of course!), and Original Score.
Jack
Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a “shock jock†DJ who burns out when one of his
listeners becomes a mass murderer based on something Lucas said on the air. Three
years later he has quit his job, become an alcohol and drug abuser, and hooked
up with video store owner Anne (Mercedes Ruehl in an outstanding performance).
Then he accidentally meets a homeless man named Parry (Robin Williams), whose
wife was killed by that mass murderer in the incident that also wrecked Lucas’
life. Lucas and Parry form an odd couple friendship and Lucas gets the bright
idea of playing matchmaker with Parry and the woman the homeless man dreamily
watches from afar, Lydia (Amanda Plummer).
Parry
suffers from hallucinations (he believes a horrific “Red Knightâ€â€”a fantastic
accomplishment in visual effects and costuming—is after him, and that he must
find the Holy Grail—shades of Monty Python!—in order to bring his sanity back
to earth). Williams delivers one of his wild, crazy-man, wacky performances,
and it’s a gem. Bridges, too, is no slouch and he matches his co-star’s antics
with a grounded portrayal that is the anchor of the piece. One must also
mention Michael Jeter, who almost steals the movie as another homeless man who
does a song and dance in drag that brings down the house.
In
short, The Fisher King may be
Gilliam’s most “humane†picture, for it takes a serious look at homelessness,
mental illness, and the trappings of life that contribute to these ills.
Perhaps that’s why I remembered the movie as being “atypical†of Gilliam... it
had a message of social responsibility and wasn’t some dystopian fantasy set in
another world, although the director’s presentation of New York City certainly places Manhattan in another world!
Criterion’s
new restored 2K digital transfer, approved by Gilliam, looks fabulous, of
course, and the 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is terrific.
There’s an enlightening audio commentary by Gilliam. Other extras include new
interviews with actors Bridges, Ruehl, and Plummer; as well as Gilliam,
producer Lynda Obst, and writer Richard LaGravenese. A new interview with
artists Keith Greco and Vincent Jefferds explores the creation of the Red
Knight. There’s a wonderful video essay of Bridge’s on-set photographs,
narrated by Bridges. Footage from 1991 of Bridges training as a radio
personality with acting coach Stephen Bridgewater is a lot of fun. There are
several deleted scenes with commentary by Gilliam, costume tests, and trailers.
But the most poignant—and absolutely the funniest—extra is a 2006 interview
with Williams discussing the film. An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri completes the
enclosed booklet.
If
you’ve never seen The Fisher King, it
should be high on your list of “to-be-watched†titles. And if you’re a Gilliam
fan, well, it’s a must-have for the collection.
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