“SEX, EYES, & MENTAL ILLNESS”

By Raymond Benson

What made the 1986 French picture, Betty Blue (also called 37° 2 le matin, aka 37.2°C in the Morning) so striking were three things—the explicit sex on display, the mesmerizing eyes of lead actress Béatrice Dalle, and the film’s frank depiction of mental illness and its devastating effect on a relationship.

Director Jean-Jacques Beineix had burst onto the scene with the superb, quirky, and new New Wave crime picture, Diva (1981) that embraced not only the French New Wave of the early 1960s, but the early 1980s pop New Wave of music and visuals that were exploding in all mediums at that time. Diva was a critical and commercial hit with Western audiences, although Beineix’s follow-up, Moon in the Gutter (1983), was not. The filmmaker bounced back, though, with Betty Blue, which received a deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.

Based on a popular French novel by Philippe Djian, the story concerns a writer named Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) who works various odd jobs to support himself while he struggles to pen a novel. He meets and falls in love with the fiery, unpredictable, and incredibly sexy Betty Blue (Dalle). Throughout the tale, we witness the ups and downs of their relationship through the couple’s nomadic moving around France, meeting and befriending colorful characters, getting into fights, and slowly spiraling toward tragedy. This is because Betty is seriously mentally ill (probably bi-polar, although that term was not much in use in the 1980s). Betty’s mood swings can be violent and shocking, and it’s a challenge for Philippe to continually cover for her, as well as care for the woman and keep her safe.

Both Anglade and Dalle deliver courageous and dynamic performances, and Jean-François Robin’s cinematography exhibits vibrant colors and painterly images. This is a gorgeous-looking picture, made even more attractive by the (often full-frontal nude) physicality of the two leads. While the picture is an exquisite examination of a passionate love affair, it’s also a disturbing scrutiny of a mental affliction that few people understood in those days.

When Betty Blue was first released, it was a two-hour movie. Beineix released a “director’s extended cut” in 2005 that runs three hours—and that is the version presented in the Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray release. It’s curious why Criterion did not also include the original shorter cut, for I’m not sure the extra hour of runtime added anything of special value.

The high-definition digital restoration, approved by Beineix, is terrific, though, and it comes with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack (and the quirky musical score by Gabriel Yared is a highlight). There is a new English subtitle translation.

Supplements include an hour-long documentary on the film from 2013 with Beineix, Dalle, Anglade, associate producer Claudie Ossard, DP Robin, and composer Yared; a vintage featurette on the making of the picture that includes an interview with original novelist Djian; Le chien de Monsieur Michel (“Mr. Michel’s Dog”), a short film by Beineix from 1977; a vintage TV interview with Beineix and Dalle; Dalle’s screen test; and trailers. The booklet contains an essay by critic Chelsea Phillips-Carr.

Betty Blue may not be the perfect date movie, but it does serve to illustrate in believable and visceral tones a passionate but volatile man/woman relationship that will fascinate any lover of cinema.

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EXISTENTIAL WEST

By Raymond Benson

I never had a chance to see these two legendary westerns that were made back-to-back in the mid-1960s, presented by Roger Corman, directed and co-produced by Monte Hellman, and starring a young Jack Nicholson (among others), for they were elusive. I’d heard they were quirky, moody, and very different takes on the western genre, so I was excited to hear that The Criterion Collection was releasing both pictures as a double-bill on one Blu-ray disc. Now you, too, can view these strange little movies in all of their high definition glory.

Hellman was one of the few directors that producer Corman would let helm pictures for his studio, which at that time was famous for low-budget horror films, youth-in-rebellion pictures, and, later, rock ‘n’ roll counterculture flicks. Jack Nicholson was also involved with Corman since the late fifties, doing much of his pre-Easy Rider work for the producer as an actor and sometimes writer. In this case, Nicholson served as co-producer (with Hellman) on both pictures and wrote the script for Ride in the Whirlwind. At first, Hellman presented Corman with the script for The Shooting, written by Carole Eastman (using the pseudonym “Adrien Joyce” and who would later write the screenplay for Five Easy Pieces). Corman suggested that Hellman shoot two westerns at the same time to get more bang for the buck, so to speak. Therefore, Nicholson came up with Whirlwind and both movies were shot together in the Utah desert with the same crew and most of the same cast. The two motion pictures were seen at several film festivals in 1966 and the distribution rights were bought by the Walter Reade Organization, which promptly sold them to television. They were broadcast sometime in 1968 and were then lost in limbo.

Both The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind could be called “existential westerns” because they are indeed philosophical, atmospheric, and, well, arty. Very arty. Corman had insisted that Hellman and Nicholson add more action to both scripts—which they did—but you still can’t say these are in any way typical westerns. At a time when Sergio Leone was tearing up the genre Italian-style, it’s no wonder that the two pictures slipped into obscurity.

On the one hand, both films are interesting simply because it’s fun to see the young actors that appear in them—Nicholson, Warren Oates, Millie Perkins (the original Anne Frank from the 1959 The Diary of Anne Frank, now a grown up and a babe), Harry Dean Stanton (billed as “Dean Stanton”), and a not-so-young Cameron Mitchell. No one in the films, except maybe Mitchell, looks particularly comfortable on a horse; it’s rather obvious that these actors are “playing at” being in a western. Other positive aspects include the cinematography—by Gregory Sandor, for both pictures—and the strange musical scores—by Richard Markowitz (The Shooting) and Robert Jackson Drasnin (Ride in the Whirlwind).

On the other hand, as narrative westerns, they don’t measure up. The acting is, for the most part, pretty bad. Nicholson is the heavy in The Shooting, and he spends most of the time sneering. The higher-pitched voice of the young Nicholson doesn’t really work for the character; he is much better in Whirlwind as one of the good guys. Oates is suitably ornery but not much else. Perkins seems like a fish out of water in both films. Will Hutchins, who plays Oates’ simple-minded sidekick, straddles a fine line between being quite effective and incredibly annoying. Mitchell is forgettable. Stanton is—well, Harry Dean Stanton.

“THE LONG HOT SUMMER”

By Raymond Benson

I was living in New York City in the summer of 1989, when Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened and caused a sensation. I recall finding the picture exhilarating at first, and then ultimately very disturbing. Racial tension in the city had been high following several incidents of police brutality against persons of color on one hand, and the Central Park jogger case, which had occurred a mere three months earlier, on the other. Was the film a cautionary tale or a call to action, or both?

Now, thirty years later, Do the Right Thing is more relevant than ever. Its message aside, the filmmaking warrants the accolades it has received over the years, and its reputation has grown considerably as one of the great American motion pictures. While Spike Lee has gone on to make many excellent movies, including last year’s Oscar-nominated BlacKkKlansman, he will likely be most remembered for his 1989 masterpiece.

The story takes place entirely on one neighborhood block in the section of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn over a very hot couple of days in the summer of ’88. People tend to do crazy things when the weather is that hot. While Mookie (Spike Lee) is probably considered the protagonist of the tale, the focus is more on the entire ensemble of characters who live and work on the street in equal weight. Mookie delivers pizzas for Sal (Oscar-nominated Danny Aiello), who with his two sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson), runs the only white business on the block. There is also a Korean market right across the street run by Sonny (Steve Park). Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) is an alcoholic who holds court with hazy words of wisdom, and he is constantly belittled by Mother Sister (Ruby Dee). Mookie’s pals Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), continually push people’s buttons. Buggin’ Out is an angry young man who resents the presence of Sal’s pizzeria and the fact that he puts no celebrities of color on his wall of fame. Raheem walks around with a huge boombox that blasts Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” annoying many, but mostly Sal. Mookie’s girlfriend Tina (Rosie Perez, in her debut film), has a young son with Mookie, but they don’t live as a couple. Instead, Mookie resides with his sister, Jade (Joie Lee). Acting as a sort of Greek chorus is the radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson, credited as “Sam Jackson” in these early days of his career), whose studio is right in the middle of the block.

Much of the picture is very funny—in fact, one could call the first 2/3 a comedy, a slice of life that shines a light on a marginalized community. This was revelatory in 1989. The final third, however, erupts into a shocking violence of racial conflict that leaves audiences truly jolted.

Many contemporary reviewers—white ones—misinterpreted the film. In a revealing “final word” video segment that is a supplement in this beautifully presented Criterion Collection 2-disk Blu-ray package, Lee calls out the critics who blasted him and the film for being a “lit fuse.” There was one critic who opined that the population should hope that the film better not play at a local theater, implying that it might incite a riot! Some more sensitive critics pointed to the moment when Mookie throws a trash can through a window, “doing the right thing” by directing the anger of the neighborhood residents to a building instead of against its white owners. Again, Lee questions that notion, for what Do the Right Thing is really about, what it really illustrates, is that white audiences were generally more upset about some property being burned down than they were about the murder of one of the black characters at the hands of the police.

And that’s the crux of the message. We’re to do the right thing by understanding where the injustice truly lies.

Criterion had released the movie on DVD in 2001 and has now upgraded it to a marvelous director-approved 4K digital restoration (also approved by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson), with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. There’s a 1995 audio commentary by Lee, Dickerson, production designer Wynn Thomas, and Joie Lee.

Supplements include several that are ported over from the 2001 DVD: video introductions and closings by Lee; a 60-minute documentary of the making of the picture in a new 2K digital transfer; a featurette of Lee revisiting the location in 2000; Public Enemy’s music video of “Fight the Power” (directed by Lee); a forty-minute press conference from the Cannes Film Festival with Lee and members of the cast and crew; behind the scenes footage of the first readthrough and wrap party; original storyboards for the riot sequence; an interview with editor Barry Brown; and the theatrical trailer and TV spots.

New supplements on this Blu-ray edition include interviews with costume designer Ruth E. Carter, New York City Council member Robert Cornegy Jr., writer Nelson George, and filmmaker Darnell Martin; and deleted and extended scenes. The thick booklet contains an essay by critic Vinson Cunningham and extensive excerpts from Lee’s journal kept during the making of the film.

This is an exceptional release from the always reliable Criterion Collection. Do the right thing…and buy it.

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“A PINT OF BRITISH NOIR”

By Raymond Benson

Film noir wasn’t just relegated to American Hollywood films of the forties and fifties. It was something of an international movement, albeit an unconscious one, for it wasn’t until the late fifties that some critics in France looked back at the past two decades of crime pictures and proclaimed, “Oui! Film noir!”

Britain was doing it, too. Carol Reed’s 1947 IRA-thriller-that-isn’t-an-IRA-thriller Odd Man Out is one of the best examples of the style. Robert Krasker’s black and white cinematography pulls in all the essential film noir elements—German expressionism, high contrasts between dark and light, and tons of shadows. Other noir trappings are present, such as stormy weather, night scenes, exterior locations, bars, shabby tenements, a lot of smoking, and a crime. And, for a movie to be “pure noir,” there must not be a happy ending. Odd Man Out fulfills that last requirement with shocking bravura.

James Mason stars as Johnny, the leader of “the organization” in an unnamed Northern Ireland city; it isn’t difficult to connect the dots and assume the organization is the IRA and the city is probably someplace like Belfast (where much of the second unit photography was done on the sly; the rest of the film was shot in studios and locations in England). Johnny escaped from prison a few months back and has been in hiding, secluded in a house with his girlfriend Kathleen (the beautiful Kathleen Ryan) for months. He has gathered a small gang to rob a mill for money to support their cause. The problem is that Johnny has gone a bit “soft,” and isn’t properly prepared for the job. Nevertheless, the four men pull off the caper, but of course it goes wrong. Johnny is shot in the shoulder, he unwittingly kills a man in self defense, and he is separated from the other gang members. The rest of the film is a D.O.A.-style story of the next twenty-four hours or so as Johnny eludes capture from the police on the streets, all the while losing blood and his life. So we know he’s probably not going to make it and we wait for the inevitable—but what happens until that fateful ending (which manages to surprise us anyway with an unexpected twist in how it’s done) is incredibly suspenseful.

Odd Man Out is one of the most engaging and thrilling British films of the 20th Century. Period. It certainly rivals Reed’s The Third Man, which is also an excellent model of British noir. Mason is terrific as he stumbles around the streets, delusional and suffering, practically bouncing from one obstacle to another with no safe haven in sight. Other familiar British and Irish faces crop up—Robert Newton, Cyril Cusack, Dan O’Herlihy, F. J. McCormick—and Kubrick fans might recognize a younger Paul Farrell (the tramp from A Clockwork Orange) as a bartender named Sam.

Criterion’s high-definition digital restoration looks marvelous, naturally. Once again, the company’s mastering for Blu-ray outdoes the competition. The image is sharp and without blemishes for the most part, and appears as if the film was made yesterday. Extras include a new interview with British cinema scholar John Hill on the picture; “Postwar Poetry,” a new short documentary; a new interview with music scholar Jeff Smith about composer William Alwyn and his gorgeous score; a nearly-hour-long 1972 documentary featuring James Mason revisiting his hometown in Ireland; and a radio adaptation of the film from 1952, starring Mason and O’Herlihy. The essay in the booklet is by critic Sara Smith.

All of these supplements are very good, but the reason to run out and buy this Blu-ray release is the film itself. Odd Man Out is a landmark crime picture with wonderfully eccentric Irish characters, lush atmosphere, and film noir traits galore. Highly recommended.

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A GHOST STORY FOR ADULTS

By Raymond Benson

Under appreciated upon its original release in 1961, The Innocents is today considered one of the great film ghost stories. After all, it’s based on Henry James’ creepy The Turn of the Screw, a truly scary masterwork published in 1898. In the capable hands of Jack Clayton (fresh off his success with Room at the Top, which had been nominated for Best Picture and Best Director in 1959), the picture delivers a classic Gothic punch that is strange, beautiful, and, ultimately, powerfully disturbing. Faithful to the source material, the story is set in the Victorian era. The gorgeous and inimitable Deborah Kerr stars as a naive and, as it turns out, sexually repressed governess who is hired by an eccentric and secretive man (“The Uncle,” played by Michael Redgrave). She is to be a governess to his orphaned niece and nephew at a lonely country estate, aided by only a couple of servants. He neglects to tell her the place is haunted as hell.

Noted film scholar Sir Christopher Frayling, in a video introduction on the background and production of The Innocents, says that a pivotal scene in the film might be more unsettling today than it was in 1961—and that is when the young nephew (Martin Stephens) plants a very adult kiss on his governess. Yikes! Frayling’s right! At this point the movie takes a sharp left turn into true darkness, the prickly kind that prompts you to turn to your neighbor and say, “Eww.” That’s right, this is a film more about sex than it is about ghosts, although it is certainly that, too. The ghosts happen to be the former governess and valet, who apparently had a steamy love affair in the house, not caring who witnessed it—not even the children. Both died in unnatural ways. The plot gets even more sick—the ghosts are attempting to possess the children so they can continue their love affair in new bodies. What? The bodies of siblings, the ages of whom are somewhere between ten and fourteen?

Eww.

So, right there we know that the giant multi-room house, inside of which the governess is losing her mind, is haunted by sex. Vile, evil sex. And Ms. Kerr’s Miss Giddens, the daughter of a conservative pastor, reacts appropriately. Thus, we are presented with the best kind of ghost story—an ambiguous one. Are there really ghosts? Or is Miss Giddens skyrocketing off her rocker? It’s up to us to decide. It’s not on a whim that the film was originally marketed as adult fare.

Clayton’s sensitive and assured direction, along with Kerr’s riveting performance, certainly bring to the film its winning qualities, but two elements of the production are essential to the picture’s success—the cinematography by Freddie Francis and art direction by Wilfred Shingleton. Francis’ work is specially showcased in this new Blu-ray disc from The Criterion Collection. Francis shot the movie in CinemaScope black and white, and yet he also shaded the corners to shape the image into a subtle, oblong, and more tunnel-like rectangle. The striking contrasts in lighting that occur throughout the interiors and exteriors are, oddly, almost characters themselves in this eerie story. Brilliant stuff.

And it all looks marvelous, for Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration is flawlessly executed—the images truly reach a high-water mark for black and white celluloid on Blu-ray. Sir Christopher Frayling also provides an informed audio commentary. Other extras include a video interview with cinematographer John Bailey about Francis and his work, and a new documentary featuring interviews with Francis himself, editor Jim Clark, and script supervisor Pamela Mann Francis. The essay in the glossy booklet is by Maitland McDonagh.

Without question, The Innocents is a classy and elegant release of a stylish and chilling motion picture. Highly recommended.

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“DON’T LOOK AT ME!”

By Raymond Benson

“Don’t look at me!” shouts Frank Booth, the sociopath played by Dennis Hopper, but that, of course, is exactly what David Lynch wants you to do.

Lynch was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for this singular, extraordinary film that shook audiences around the world in 1986, and it’s the picture that solidified the filmmaker as perhaps the heir to the surrealists of the 1920s. It’s a polarizing film that makes audiences uncomfortable and sometimes outraged, and yet it possesses signature stylistic and thematic aspects to which Lynch has returned many times in such fare as the more mainstream (but also surreal) television series Twin Peaks, and the dreamlike fugues of pictures like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

After the box-office and critical failure of the sci-fi extravaganza, Dune (1984), Lynch exercised his option with producer Dino De Laurentiis to make a smaller, personal movie of his choice (with a drastically reduced budget). It is a work of striking brilliance and power, despite the negative reactions from some viewers (including Roger Ebert) to the violence against women depicted in the story. But this is what the movie is about, and it is handled with frank and often shocking, but artfully drawn, imagery in a film noir framework. Lynch’s recurring themes of lost innocence, exploring the dark underbelly of a seemingly all-American small town, voyeurism, good versus evil, and the “mysteries of love” are on full display.

Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) is a college student who has come home to visit his hospitalized father in his small town of Lumberton, North Carolina. While walking through a field, he finds a severed human ear. He dutifully brings it to the police station, and then becomes friendly with the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern). While on a date, Sandy tells him that she overheard her father discussing the case, and it involves a lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey takes it upon himself to play detective on his own and break into Dorothy’s apartment. Suddenly, Jeffrey’s safe little world is turned upside down and he is sucked into a cabal of sadistic criminals led by Frank Booth (Hopper, in a truly scary, nightmare-inducing performance). Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance are among the gang members, and each of them are as eccentric and creepy as their boss.

It’s a tale of a Boy Scout who discovers hard truths about the world we live in, and of a woman who sacrifices her soul for the safety of her husband and son. At its heart it is a profound statement on love and what we as humans are willing to do, not for it, but because of it. Blue Velvet is an uncompromising work of art that will stand the test of time, the quintessential David Lynch film, the one that can be buried in a time capsule to represent his entire oeuvre.

Besides the excellent cast, the gorgeously dark cinematography (by Frederick Elmes), and the bravura direction, Blue Velvet also marked the beginning of Lynch’s relationship with composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose music has become identified with the filmmaker’s titles. Alternating between the dreamy and beautiful to the menacing and dark, Badalamenti’s score perfectly captures Lynch’s mise-en-scène as the director takes us from the bright, sunny cheeriness of Lumberton’s surface to the ugly, nefarious underground that most likely exists in all towns across America.

“DEADPAN ALLEY”

By Raymond Benson

The maverick independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch burst into art-house public consciousness in 1984 with his strikingly original slice-of-life comedy, Stranger Than Paradise, and we hadn’t really seen anything like it before. I remember going to see it at the little cinema across from Lincoln Center in New York City. As the guy interviewed in front of the theater in the supplemental documentary on this Criterion Collection doozy says, the queue of people to get inside was indeed full of “hipsters.” It was the picture to see if you were in tune to the downtown arts scene, avant-garde theatre/music/film/literature, and far-from-Hollywood-mainstream moviemaking.

For me, it was my favorite film of the year. Audience members who dug it found subtle humor in the three main characters’ seemingly aimless existences and motivations to live their lives in a spontaneous, who cares? fashion. Those viewers who had wandered in not knowing what to expect may have left the theater scratching their heads.

The story, such as it is, concerns Willie (musician-turned-actor John Lurie), a bachelor in Manhattan, who gets a visit from his Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint). The two hang out with Willie’s friend Eddie (Richard Edson), and they sometimes get along, sometimes not. Eventually, Eva goes to Cleveland, and a year later the two guys go to visit her. Cleveland is Nowheresville, so they decide to go back to New York—but on the spur of the moment change their minds and travel to Florida with Eva. There are some shenanigans with gambling, horse races, dumb drug dealers, and mistaken identity, after which the three characters go their separate ways—but not intentionally. To say more would give away the oddball sequence of events that is really the whole point of the picture.

Shot in a seriously deadpan, almost drab style, the comedy comes from the sheer dullness of the characters and their everyday lives. The black and white cinematography by future director Tom DiCillo captures an equally dreary and wintery New York, Cleveland, and Florida that emphasizes the dingy worlds in which these misfits inhabit. Overlay this with Lurie’s own unique unconventional chamber-music score and a blistering “theme song” of “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and you have an exercise in supreme existential irony.

Criterion has upgraded their original DVD to Blu-ray with a high-definition digital restoration, supervised and approved by Jarmusch. It looks great, and its graininess is perfect for the presentation’s thematic ideas. The movie comes with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack and an audio commentary from 1996 featuring Jarmusch and Richard Edson.

Supplements include Jarmusch’s first full-length feature film from 1980, Permanent Vacation, also in a high-definition digital restoration. It’s even wackier and more poker-faced than Stranger, about a young loner (played by Chris Parker), who wanders around New York in a similarly purposeless fashion as the characters in Stranger. Not as effective as the main feature on the disk, Vacation is a trial run “student film” that shows promise.

There’s also an interesting 1984 German television documentary about Jarmusch’s first two films, with interviews with the casts and crews of both. A short, silent behind-the-scenes documentary made by Jarmusch’s brother Tom during the making of Stranger reminds me of someone’s old Super 8 home movies that hold interest for everyone who is in them but not for the guests who are made to sit through them.

The thick accompanying booklet is jam-packed with illustrated material—Jarmusch’s 1984 “Some Notes on Stranger Than Paradise,” critics Geoff Andrew and J. Hoberman on the picture, and author/critic Luc Sante on Permanent Vacation.

Stranger Than Paradise is a timely artifact from the mid-80s, when independent filmmaking was booming and making waves. It’s a trail-blazer and an A+ experience for deadpan hipsters.

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“A SLAP HEARD AROUND THE WORLD”

By Raymond Benson

The year 1967 was a milestone for actor Sidney Poitier. First, To Sir, with Love garnered sizable box-office for this British picture, and then Hollywood produced In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, two back-to-back revolutionary movies that solidified Poitier’s position not only as Tinsel Town’s only black leading man at the time, but also as an icon of the civil rights movement and the representative—certainly not by choice—of his race in films to the rest of America. Throughout his career, Poitier maintained an intelligence and dignity that was tangible, and this is what made him such a charismatic star.

Both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were Oscar nominees for Best Picture. A winner of five awards, Heat took home the gold. Rod Steiger, Poitier’s dynamic co-star, won the Best Actor trophy. Hal Ashby and Stirling Silliphant were honored for, respectively, editing and the adapted screenplay (based on the novel by John Ball). It was a year of tough competition (The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde were also nominated).

While In the Heat of the Night is still a terrific movie today, one must place it in the context of the year it was released to fully understand its impact. The civil rights movement was at its height. The nation’s television sets were full of images of marches, riots, and violence. It seemed as if we were sitting on a powder keg, and Heat perfectly captured the tension of the moment by telling a story set in the South of a racist police chief and a black detective who unwittingly join forces to solve a murder.

Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) is a homicide detective from Philadelphia who happens to be passing through town on the night a prominent white businessman is found murdered. Arrested at the train station, Tibbs is brought to Chief Gillespie (Steiger) and the truth comes out that they have the wrong man. Before he can leave town, though, Tibbs finds himself embroiled in the investigation—and ends up leading it—while all around him is the threat of danger due to the color of his skin.

And then there’s the infamous scene which many critics and film historians called “the slap heard around the world.” Tibbs and Gillespie go to a cotton plantation to interview the deceased’s primary competitor, Endicott (Larry Gates), who is obviously put off by being questioned by a black man. At one point, he slaps Tibbs—but Tibbs immediately retaliates by slapping the man in return. In 1967, this was positively shocking. It’s the key moment in this powerfully-directed picture.

Warren Oates and Lee Grant also deliver strong performances as a police deputy and the widow of the murder victim, respectively. With the innovative blues score by Quincy Jones (and title theme sung by Ray Charles), Haskell Wexler’s gritty cinematography, and the perfect script by Silliphant, In the Heat of the Night is one of the classic American films.

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray contains a 4K digital restoration with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The visual quality is much improved over the MGM Blu-ray of a few years ago (but, unfortunately, does not include the audio commentary by Jewison, Grant, Steiger, and Wexler from the earlier disk). Still, there are some good supplements. Brand new interviews with Norman Jewison and Lee Grant are informative, especially Grant’s treatise on the blacklisting she had undergone. A new interview with Aram Goudsouzian, author of Sidney Pointer: Man, Actor, Icon, presents a capsule portrait of Poitier and his place in Hollywood through the years. A vintage interview of Poitier from a 2006 AFI piece illustrates the making of the picture. Ported over from the previous MGM disk is the 2008 documentary, Turning Up the Heat: Movie-Making in the 60s, which features Jewison, Wexler, and producer Walter Mirisch, plus contemporary filmmakers John Singleton and Reginal Hudlin on the making of the film. Quincy Jones: Breaking New Sound, also from 2008, explores the movie’s soundtrack and features Jones, lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and Herbie Hancock. The theatrical trailer is included, and the accompanying booklet features an essay by critic K. Austin Collins.

In the Heat of the Night is a landmark drama that broke new ground on several fronts… but also at its heart is a cracking good murder mystery! A must-see masterpiece.

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“BLOOD AND PRESTIGE”

By Raymond Benson

(Portions of this review are reprinted from the article “Playboy Goes to Hollywood,” by the same author, which appeared in Cinema Retro, Volume 2, Issue #5, 2006.)

The Criterion Collection has seen fit to release on Blu-ray and DVD (separate packaging) Roman Polanski’s striking film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, originally released in 1971. Not very well received at first, the picture’s reputation has grown over the years such that it is now arguably considered the definitive version of the “Scottish play” on celluloid (although Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood is certainly a contender). Gritty, realistic, and violent, Polanski’s vision is dark and troubling—as the story is meant to be.

It’s possible that some of the negative press it received in 1971 was due to the fact that it was the first major motion picture produced by Playboy Productions, with Hugh M. Hefner serving as executive producer, while Playboy executive Victor Lownes II served as assistant executive producer (Andrew Braunsberg, a close friend of Polanski’s, was credited as producer). The film came about as a result of the friendship between Polanski and Lownes. The director had been recovering from the tremendous amount of grief he had suffered after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family in 1969—he needed something that would help purge himself of the ugly and violent images in his head and heart. Shakespeare’s controversial and bloody play seemed to be the right vehicle. (Some say the play is unlucky—there are still theatre people who refuse to refer to it by name.)

Indeed, making the film was something of a catharsis for Polanski—there were a few occasions in which he unwittingly referred to the lead actress as “Sharon.” Adapted by renowned playwright and critic Kenneth Tynan, Polanski’s Macbeth became a poster child for the handful of ultra-violent pictures to be released in 1971—the same year as A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, and Straw Dogs. The blood flows freely in Macbeth—a decapitation is even presented most realistically—but to focus solely on the film’s violence does not do it justice. The film is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the play.

“Corporate was initially against the idea,” Hugh Hefner said in a 2006 interview for Cinema Retro. “It was not a very commercial undertaking, and I knew it wouldn’t make any money. Victor made a strong case to do it and I agreed with him. It was more of a prestige thing for Playboy. Playboy and Shakespeare? Who would have thought?”

The film was made in Scotland, of course, and featured mostly unknown but highly talented stage actors—Jon Finch as Macbeth, Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth, Nicholas Selby as Duncan, Stephen Chase as Malcolm, Martin Shaw as Banquo, and Terence Bayler as Macduff. At one point during production, Polanski ran over schedule and over budget, causing the insurance backers to drop the guarantee. Hefner had to fly to London, take stock of the situation, and personally guarantee the completion of the film with Playboy Productions’ money.

Back home in the States, Hefner viewed the dailies at the Playboy Mansion. Hefner remembered, “For my birthday that year, the cast—on film—suddenly stopped the action of a scene and began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.”

The film did receive a number of very positive reviews and a few awards, too—it won Best Picture from the National Board of Review and won a BAFTA for Costume Design. “Of course, as I predicted, it didn’t make any money,” Hefner said. “In fact, it lost money. But we didn’t really care. It was a good picture and I’m proud of it. I believe since its release the film has gone into the black.”

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration, approved by Polanski, with 3.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is assuredly the best possible presentation of this remarkable film. The dreary Scottish landscapes are gorgeous in their own way, and you can feel the mud and slop in every scene. Extras include a new documentary featuring interviews with Polanski, Braunsberg, Lownes, and actors Annis and Shaw; a 1971 documentary featuring rare footage of the cast and crew at work; an interview with Kenneth Tynan from a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show; and a segment from the 1972 British TV series Aquarius featuring Polanski and theatre director Peter Coe. Critic Terrence Rafferty’s essay in the booklet rounds out this exceptional package from The Criterion Collection.

Grab it! Just don’t ever pronounce the name of the play aloud!

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“THE CIRCUS OF HUMILIATION”

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection has upgraded to Blu-ray their earlier DVD release of Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 feature, Sawdust and Tinsel (titled The Naked Night when the picture was first released theatrically in the U.S.). The visual quality has improved with a new 2K digital restoration that looks razor sharp with gorgeous contrasting black and white imagery, and it comes with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.

Sawdust was a major step forward in the evolution of Bergman’s filmography, although it was not well-received by Swedish audiences at the time of release. It was most likely deemed too disturbing for what appeared to be a movie about a traveling circus. Note that this was before Bergman’s international breakthrough, which would occur a couple of years later with Smiles of a Summer Night. At the time of Sawdust and Tinsel, Bergman was mostly known just in his native country and at the various film festivals around the world where his work had been submitted.

The first several pictures in Bergman’s oeuvre, especially in the late 1940s, were often melodramatic tales of entanglement, lost love, betrayal, and working-class misfits struggling to enrich their lives. It wasn’t until Summer Interlude, in 1951, that a singular stylistic and thematic voice emerged that can now be identified as Bergman-esque. Earlier in 1953, Summer with Monika was released, and that caused something of a sensation with its frank portrayal of what the U.S. distributor called “The Story of a Bad Girl.” That one made a star out of Harriet Andersson, who would work on several other pictures with Bergman over the next four decades.

Sawdust and Tinsel was a very different picture from Monika. Taking place in the early 1900s, the story concerns a poor, shoddy traveling circus that barely supports itself. It is run by Albert (Åke Grönberg), a middle-aged man who left his wife and sons in a small town in order to be a ringmaster. His mistress, Anne (Harriet Andersson), is the bareback rider, younger and yearning for something better. Frost the Clown (Anders Ek) and his wife Alma (Gudrun Brost), who has an act with a sickly bear, are oddballs and constant thorns in Albert’s side. When the circus sets up near the town where Albert’s family lives, he decides to go for a visit. First, though, the troupe must borrow costumes from the local theater run by creepy manager Sjuberg (played by Bergman stalwart Gunnar Björnstrand). There, Anne meets the mysterious actor, Frans (Hasse Ekman), who seduces her away from Albert.

Doesn’t sound like a good time at the cinema? Hogwash. This is a fascinating and haunting battle of the sexes—a typical Bergman theme—but the carnival milieu is so unique to the director that Sawdust and Tinsel is immediately visually striking with its dreamlike photography (it was the first collaboration between Bergman and longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist), its colorful and eccentric characters, and its moody and often threatening ambiance.

At the story’s core is a treatise on how human beings react to humiliation. The opening scene, in which Frost must rescue his wife from the taunting of the Swedish military performing exercises near the beach, is a nightmarish, nearly silent mime show of anguish and terror (and the facial contortions that Ek’s Frost makes are worth a study in skin elasticity!). The meat of the picture is how the ultimate shattering of both Albert’s and Anne’s dreams force them to re-examine their lots in life.

It’s all powerful stuff.

Supplements on the disk include an audio commentary from 2007 by Bergman scholar Peter Cowie, a video introduction from 2003 by Bergman himself, and an essay in the booklet by critic John Simon.

NOTE: For those of you looking for the sold-out boxed set retrospective of Bergman’s career that was released in November, Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, new copies will be available February 26, 2019.

“A STOLEN MASTERPIECE”

By Raymond Benson

In a fascinating interview supplement contained on this amazing new release by The Criterion Collection, film historian Joseph McBride calls The Magnificent Ambersons one of the great Hollywood tragedies in that the film we got from writer/director Orson Welles was not the one he intended. It is widely known that RKO Radio, the studio behind the production, deleted forty-three minutes from Welles’ final cut, reshot the ending, and released the film their way—all against Welles’ wishes—and then promptly destroyed the cut footage so that the movie could never be reconstructed.

The Magnificent Ambersons is a stolen masterpiece.

That said, the film is still a great movie. In fact, it earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Agnes Moorehead), Best Cinematography (Black & White, by Stanley Cortez), and Best Art/Interior Set Decoration (Black & White).

Ambersons, based on Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel (Welles claims that Tarkington was a “friend” of his father’s), the picture was the director’s follow-up to Citizen Kane. Once again featuring some of the Mercury Players (Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, and Moorehead) and new casting choices (Dolores Costello, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter), the production of Ambersons went well, with the picture going only a little over budget. Welles delivered a 148-minute cut—and then Pearl Harbor happened. Welles was appointed by Nelson Rockefeller to be a goodwill ambassador to Latin America so that he could attempt to persuade South American countries from entering the war on the Axis side.

Welles dutifully went to Brazil and started shooting a film (It’s All True, another picture sabotaged by RKO) and was essentially unavailable to receive notes and requests from RKO regarding Ambersons. RKO, unhappy with the film, then took it upon themselves to change it to suit their needs, and there was nothing Welles could do about it. The picture released in July 1942 was 88-minutes in length.

Would a Magnificent Ambersons that is an hour longer be a better film than it already is? We can only assume. For one thing, the ending was drastically different. Welles’ version was cynical, dark, and ironic. Given the wartime climate, RKO wanted a more upbeat ending—never mind that it really doesn’t make sense that the characters suddenly change entire attitudes they have held throughout the film. Never mind that the final half-hour of the movie feels choppy, rushed, and out-of-rhythm from the first hour. The 88-minute version is what we have and must live with.

It should be stated again—The Magnificent Ambersons is still a great picture.

The story concerns the wealthy Amberson family in the early 1900s Indianapolis. Beautiful Isabel Amberson (Costello) marries Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway) instead of Eugene Morgan (Cotten), but she regrets it… and she and Morgan carry torches for each other for the remainder of their days. Enter Isabel and Wilbur’s bratty son, George (Holt), who terrorizes the town with his bad manners, arrogance, and boorishness. Things get complicated when he begins to woo Morgan’s daughter Lucy (Baxter) and at the same time insult and humiliate her father. All the while, Wilbur’s sister Fanny (Moorehead) also carries unrequited love for Morgan and inserts herself into the already-touchy situation.

Ultimately, Ambersons is about the downfall of a respected and wealthy family to that thing called Progress—namely, the invention and proliferation of the automobile and other industrial evolutions. Welles makes an ecological statement with the picture (back in 1942!) which is something else RKO was unhappy with, seeing that American industries had to ramp up to support the war effort.

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration looks marvelous, and it contains two separate audio commentaries with scholars Robert L. Carringer and James Naremore, and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.

The packaging is first-rate. The numerous and excellent supplements alone make the product a 5-star purchase. Especially interesting and informative are the new interviews with (previously mentioned) McBride and one with film historian Simon Callow. Both men relate different insights into the history of the production and the editing debacle. Director Welles appears on a 1970 segment of The Dick Cavett Show (along with second guest Jack Lemmon) for an often-hilarious and always-entertaining half-hour discussion. New video essays on the cinematography and Bernard Herrmann’s uncredited score (that was also chopped up with RKO’s editing), by Francois Thomas and Christopher Husted, respectively, are a welcome addition.

Also included is the silent version of Ambersons, originally called Pampered Youth (1925), and re-edited for the U.K. as Two to One (1927). If that wasn’t enough, we get two Mercury Theatre radio plays: the 1939 adaptation by Welles of Ambersons (with Welles playing the role of George), and a 1938 adaptation of Seventeen, another Booth Tarkington creation. There’s more, such as audio interviews with Welles by Peter Bogdanovich and at an AFI symposium, and the theatrical trailer. The booklet comes in a stapled “manuscript” that resembles a typed screenplay. It contains essays by authors and critics (Molly Haskell, Luc Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem), and excerpts from a Welles memoir.

The Magnificent Ambersons, even in its sadly truncated form, further illustrates the genius that was Orson Welles. This Criterion release is a must-have.

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BY BRIAN GREENE

Shampoo (1975) is a movie that can leave a viewer unsure as to what they just watched. Was it merely a vanity project for Producer/Co-Screenwriter/lead actor Warren Beatty, who plays a babe magnet L.A. hairdresser who juggles his three main girlfriends while haplessly attempting to go into business for himself? Beatty portrays George Roundy, a flashy dressing, motorcycle riding lothario who deftly manipulates the hearts and sexual appetites of the beautiful women who constantly want to throw themselves at him and his hair dryer. Or is it a social satire, a la The Graduate, that exposes the flaws in American life by showing us the sexual/romantic dysfunction in the homes of the upper crust? One of Beatty’s character’s love interests is the wife (Lee Grant) of the business tycoon (Jack Warden) he hopes will finance his would-be new spa. Is it a screwball sex comedy that aims for occasional emotional profundity? The second of the hairstylist’s two lady friends is the tycoon’s mistress (Julie Christie), and the third is that woman’s close friend (Goldie Hawn). Or is the movie primarily a commentary on the American political climate of the late 1960s, and its damaging impact on the citizenry? The story takes place over one 24-hour span, that happens to be the day Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election.

The answer is that Shampoo is a little of each of those things. Which leads to the question of whether it was successful in developing any or all of its themes. The feature’s overall quality has been a debatable point over the decades. Roger Ebert felt it came up short, summarizing that it “wasn’t confident enough to pull off its ambitious conception,” “wasn’t as funny as it could have been in the funny places,” and “it’s not as poignant as it could be in its moments of truth.” In the pages of The New York Times, meanwhile, critic Nora Sayre positively savaged the movie, charging that it ultimately sank into “a slough of sentimentality” while also calling it pretentious and dumb. Other reviews have been kinder. It’s been called “a sharp satire” by Time Out, and “one of the last true moments of personal expression in American cinema” by Elaine Lennon in Senses of Cinema, etc.

It can be hard to know what we’re supposed to make of the main characters. Roundy is shown to be a user, and his three girlfriends, while likeable-enough people, are hardly role models feminists of the day could have seen as on-screen heroes. So are we supposed to find all of them laughably shallow people, tragic figures victimized by their own egos and emotional needs, or are they simply authentic representations of a womanizing hairstylist and the kinds of people with whom he would be likely to consort? Director Hal Ashby, who struggled while working alongside the overbearing Beatty in Beatty’s open-to-interpretation role as Creative Producer, seems to have felt distantly sympathetic to the characters. Ashby said of them, “They’re not people I spend time with, but they’re people I’ve looked at and felt sorry for. So I spent a lot of time being very kind to those people. The other way’s easy. To make fun of people is easy. Life isn’t that easy.”

Something else with which Ashby had to tangle during the making of Shampoo was the often volatile artistic relationship between Beatty and Co-Screenwriter Robert Towne. Beatty and Towne were engaged in a creative power battle over the film’s content starting back from when it was only an idea being bounced around between the two of them. Once Ashby was brought in, he found himself often acting as referee between those two. Towne was actively involved on the set, to the point where Goldie Hawn came to feel like she was working under three different directors. Despite this circus atmosphere, though, and despite Ebert’s and Sayre’s critiques, and despite what some see as its foggy intentions, Shampoo took in a slew of nominations at both the Academy Awards and Golden Globes. Lee Grant won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

BY LEE PFEIFFER

Even astute fans of retro cinematic classics may be unfamiliar with Billy Wilder's 1951 gem "Ace in the Hole". The film was a boxoffice flop in its American release back in the day but over the decades it has become regarded as a genuine classic and one of the best movies of its era. Kirk Douglas, in one of the truly great performances of his career, is cast as Chuck Tatum, a once-lauded reporter for a major New York newspaper, who finds his career on the skids. His cynical nature, overbearing personality and weakness for liquor has resulted in him being displaced to New Mexico, where- out of desperation- he convinces the editor of an Albuquerque paper to give him a job. Within hours, Tatum is bored by the sleepy atmosphere and passive nature of his co-workers, most of whom have no ambition beyond reporting minor stories of local interest. Things change radically when Tatum stumbles onto a crisis in the desert that could make for a compelling story. Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is the owner of a cafe located on a remote road who finds himself trapped in a cave after venturing inside to look for ancient Indian artifacts. Tatum sees that rescue plans for the man are rather poorly staged by the local deputy sheriff (Gene Evans). He enters the cave at great danger to himself and makes a connection with Leo, whose legs and midsection are buried under debris. Tatum is able to communicate with him from a small opening in a dirt mound and he assures Leo that he will get food, water and cigars while he organizes a rescue team. Grateful, Leo looks upon Tatum as his guardian angel. However, it becomes clear that Tatum is using his relationship with Leo for his own selfish purposes. He sees the potential as one of those "child stuck in a well" scenarios that tends to galvanize the entire nation. By personally taking charge of the rescue effort, Tatum makes himself a national hero overnight, as hundreds of people stream to the remote location and erect a tent city in order to be on the scene when Leo is eventually saved. Tatum, fully aware of American's eagerness to embrace the bizarre elements of any story, also plays up the notion that Leo is the victim of an ancient Indian curse for prowling around sacred tribal grounds.

Tatum has some disturbing factors to contend with, however. The primary problem is dealing with Leo's bombshell, self-centered wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling in a terrific performance). She was already looking to get out of a boring marriage with a boring man and decides to leave town during Leo's moment of crisis. Tatum uses a combination of charm and threats to convince her that staying put and playing the role of loyal wife would be in everyone's benefit. His prediction comes true in the financial sense, as the Minosa's cash-starved cafe begins to burst at the seams with visitors due to its proximity to the cave. Ironically, Leo's life-threatening predicament is finally bringing him the financial success that has eluded him. While Tatum becomes obsessed with manipulating the crisis, he also finds that his dispatches from the scene and his exclusive access to Leo have put him back in demand as a writer. He bypasses his own employer to sell updates to his ex-boss in New York at extortionist rates. He also has a hot/cold relationship with Lorraine, who clearly has a submissive sexual aspect to her moody demeanor. She's excited when Tatum mistreats her, though it's never made clear if their relationship goes beyond the flirtation stage. Tatum gets some disturbing news when he learns that the rescue team can use an expedited method to rescue Leo. Not wanting to kill the goose who laid the golden egg, Tatum manipulates the corrupt local sheriff (Roy Teal) into ordering a more labored method of rescue, even though it will result in a delay of days before reaching the victim. The decision has startling consequences for all involved. To say any more would negate the surprising turn of events depicted in the film. Suffice it to say, the intensity of the story continues to build throughout, making "Ace in the Hole" a truly mesmerizing cinematic experience.  

Criterion has released "Ace in the Hole" as a dual format Blu-ray/DVD. The quality, as one might expect, is up to the company's superb standards. The package is loaded with fascinating extras including a rare extended interview with Billy Wilder at the American Film Institute in 1986. In it, Wilder talks about "Ace in the Hole" and other aspects of his career. The film was an early directorial effort for him and the first movie he produced, following his career as one of the industry's most in-demand filmmakers. By his own admission, "Ace in the Hole" was a major source of frustration for him. The movie was ignored by American critics and audiences and even re-titled "The Big Carnival". In the post-WWII era, it was probably deemed far too cynical for U.S. audiences. In fact, the "hero" of the film is a cad, the leading lady is a self-obsessed phony and the local law officials are corrupt. Except for a few minor characters, there is no one in the film with a truly moral center. Wilder says he took heart from the fact that the movie was quite successful in its European release. The set also contains a 1988 interview with Kirk Douglas, who discusses the film and his respect for Wilder in a very informative segment. Most impressive is the inclusion of "Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man", a 1980 documentary by French film critic Michel Clement in which Wilder gives extraordinary access to his private life. We see him at home and at the office with long-time collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond as they laze around trying to come up with ideas for future projects. Wilder comes across as a symbol of Hollywood's bygone Golden Age. Speaking in a thick Austrian accent with his ever-present stogie at hand, Wilder regales the viewer with insights about his family's escape from the Nazi occupation and his unlikely meteoric rise up the film industry's food chain. Almost from the beginning he was a hot property and would remain a revered director, producer and writer throughout his entire career. The set also includes a vintage audio interview with another Wilder collaborator, screenwriter Walter Newman and an insightful and creatively designed "newspaper" with essays by critic Molly Haskell and filmmaker Guy Maddin. Director Spike Lee provides a brief video "afterword" in which he extols the virtues of the film and also shows off a cool original lobby card that he treasures because it is signed by both Wilder and Douglas. Topping off the "extras" is a truly excellent audio commentary track by film scholar Neil Sinyard, who provides so many interesting background observations about the film that it will open any viewer's eyes to the latent meanings of certain sequences and images. Even if you consider audio commentaries to be dry and academic, I do urge you to give this one a listen. It's first rate throughout. 

In summary, this is a first rate presentation of one of the most unfairly neglected American film classics; one that in recent years is finally getting the acclaim that it should have received on its initial release. Criterion has surpassed even its usual high standards. 

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“EARTHLY AND IMPERFECT LOVE”

By Raymond Benson

Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated six-part mini-series, Scenes from a Marriage, premiered on Swedish television in 1973. For markets outside of his native country, Bergman cut the 297-minute TV version down to 169-minutes (not quite three hours) for a theatrical release in 1974—which is the version I first saw.

Having recently discovered Bergman in the early 1970s while attending college, I welcomed Scenes with enthusiasm and awe, as did most critics. The film received numerous accolades, although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deemed the picture ineligible for Oscars since it had previously been a television mini-series. The acclaim for the film, director/writer Bergman, and the movie’s two brilliant actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, was through the roof.

In a nutshell, it’s the intimate, often painful, sometimes joyful story of the twenty-year relationship of a married-then-divorced couple. The tale begins in 1965. Upper-middle-class Marianne and Johan have been married for ten years. They have two tween daughters (who are seen only very briefly in the first few seconds of the picture) and are seemingly happy. However, when Johan has an affair with “Paula” (who never appears), the inevitable separation ensues, followed by a divorce. But as ten more years elapse, Marianne and Johan continue to occasionally see each other—even when they’re dating or married to others—in an ongoing, never-ending tryst.

In fact, in 2003, Bergman made a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage. Saraband was a Swedish TV-movie that was also released theatrically worldwide, and it featured the now elderly Marianne and Johan, again played by Ullmann and Josephson. (Oddly, their daughters’ names in Scenes are Karin and Eva, whereas in Saraband their names are Martha and Sara! Go figure.) Saraband was Bergman’s final film.

What made Scenes so remarkable back in 1973/1974 was its frankness, realism, and the camera’s near-claustrophobic closeness to the actors—especially their faces and what they revealed through subtle expressions or glances. Bergman, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, used the landscape of the face to reveal the genuine subtext of a character’s thoughts. The intimacy achieved in the work was revelatory, and the film is said to have gone on to influence other filmmakers (most notably Woody Allen).

I had revisited Scenes from a Marriage a few times since its first release, but now having the chance to dive into The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray edition, I approached the picture with a fresh eye and mind, especially informed by the experience of age and a long marriage of my own.

I came away this time a bit puzzled. Who are these people, that they can be so matter-of-fact about adultery and mistresses and lovers? It’s as if it’s taken for granted that all married people will have affairs at some point. Back in the early 70s, I suppose we all thought that this was being “civilized” or “behaving like adults.” Or perhaps it was a Swedish or European thing!

It is more likely, however, that Scenes from a Marriage was written and directed to be a somewhat autobiographical treatise. Ingmar Bergman was married no less than five times, had numerous love affairs (and mistresses while married), including a five-year romance with Liv Ullmann (he was the father of her only child). Maybe in his world, or in the contemporary universe of artists and the literati in which Marianne and Johan reside, this kind of attitude existed.

“GRACE VS. NATURE”

By Raymond Benson

Not many filmmakers since the great Stanley Kubrick have had the same kind of mystique, but one who easily fits that bill is Terrence Malick, a writer/director who has endeavored to redefine the narrative form of cinema in visually poetic terms.

Malick doesn’t create movies, he makes cinema in verse. The story in a Malick film is not a priority, although there is often a profound tale at work. A Malick picture is all about the emotions, the visual beauty, the aural splendidness, and taking part in a cerebral, yet primally impressionistic experience.

The reclusive filmmaker disappeared from the public eye after his two acclaimed, more “accessible” works (Badlands, 1973, and Days of Heaven, 1978). He returned twenty years later and made The Thin Red Line (1998). Something was immediately different about his art. Malick’s storytelling was more oblique, nonlinear, and lyrical. This trend continued more intensely in The New World (2005). Never one to be labeled “prolific,” Malick brought out his fifth feature, The Tree of Life, in 2011, and it featured a radical progression in this elegiac, non-traditional way of spinning a yarn.

The Tree of Life received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography (by Emmanuel Lubezki), but there were many audience members who just didn’t get it or refused to meet the film halfway. I remember counting many walkouts from the theater in which I first saw it. Its comparison to the initial reaction to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is apt. This was a new kind of film, something that challenged the viewer into sitting back, opening the mind and the heart, and going with the flow.

And flow it does… the picture is much like a symphony of sight and sound. The imagery of the world in all its glory from the ground, sky, and sea to the plants, animals, and people is breathtakingly sensual. The music—mostly classical pieces and some original scoring by Alexandre Desplat—is practically continuous as the pace of the editing moves frenetically. How anyone could call this a boring movie is mind-boggling.

There is a story. The focus is on the O’Briens, a family in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, particularly utilizing the point of view of the oldest boy, Jack (played by newcomer Hunter McCracken). Brad Pitt is the stern, sometimes over-the-top disciplinarian father, and angelic Jessica Chastain is the loving mother. Jack’s two siblings are played by Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan. The entire family’s performances are superb. Scenes in the present day feature an adult Jack (Sean Penn), who is somberly “remembering” the events of the film. Something has triggered old Jack’s memory of when the middle brother died at the age of nineteen (we don’t know how… possibly Vietnam?).

And then there’s the creation sequence, something else that is comparable to the Star Gate section of 2001 (and that film’s co-visual effects supervisor, Douglas Trumbull, is a consultant on Tree). We see in a nearly twenty-minute segment how the earth was formed in the heavens, how life began in the waters, the rise of dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs!), the predatory disposition of certain species, and their eventual destruction to make way for man.

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST OF THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

"THE SON-OF- A -BITCH CAN ACT!"

By Raymond Benson

It’s well-known that when John Ford, who had worked with actor John Wayne on a number of films prior to seeing him in Howard Hawks’ Red River, proclaimed that he didn’t know that “the son-of- a- bitch could act!”

His words were apt. Prior to the release of Red River in 1948 (it was shot in 1946 but didn’t appear in theaters until ’48), Wayne had mostly played the likable, stalwart “John Wayne” character that had first appeared in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). But in Red River, Wayne plays a role that turned critical and public opinion of the actor’s thespian abilities. He pulls off a remarkable feat—Wayne’s character, Thomas Dunson, is a first-class S.O.B., a guy you really want someone to punch out throughout the movie; and yet, Wayne manages to make him likable. He carries an audience through over two hours of hardcore western, and he delivers one of his two or three best performances. It doesn’t hurt that Wayne is ably supported by Montgomery Clift, who plays Wayne’s adopted son. In many ways, it’s really Clift’s picture—he’s the protagonist, and the story is seen through his eyes. But wait—maybe it’s seen through Walter Brennan’s eyes in the original, rare theatrical cut, released here in a glorious 2K digital restoration on Blu-ray.

In fact, I had never seen the theatrical cut, the version preferred by director Hawks. A longer cut, by about six minutes, was the one that was shown on television and appeared on previous home video releases. The longer version was actually intended as a preview for studio execs; it utilizes on-screen textual transitions (as if the audience is reading from a book) and an extended final confrontation between Wayne and Clift. The theatrical cut dispenses with the textual transitions and instead substitutes sequences narrated by Walter Brennan, who then, arguably, becomes the character through whose eyes we see the story. Why this version, which originally played to audiences in 1948, didn’t become the standard edition after that is a mystery; in actuality, Hawks was quite right—the theatrical cut is the better one, except for the trimmed final fight between the two leads. As Hawks tells Peter Bogdanovich in an audio interview included as an extra in the Criterion Collection’s elaborate box set, the best way to watch Red River is to view the theatrical cut up until the last few minutes, and then change to the preview cut at the point when Wayne marches through the heads of cattle to confront Clift at the corral.

Another thing that is remarkable about Red River is that it was Hawks’ first western. He would go on to make a handful more (good ones, too!), and was known for making pictures in all genres, but the fact that he went out of the gate with one of the greatest westerns of all time is truly an achievement. Red River, without question, is one of the five best American films of the genre.

The story is a fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail, the hardships the men overcome, and the battle of wills between Wayne, the tyrannical leader and father, and Clift, the calmer, perhaps smarter right-hand cowpoke and adopted son. Hawks manages to capture the perilous trek with uncanny realism, assured composition and tempo, and drama. Hawks once said that the key to a good film was “three good scenes and no bad ones.” Well, Red River has far more than three good scenes. The stampede sequence is nothing short of astounding.

Criterion went all out on this one. It’s a four-disk set—two Blu-rays and two DVDs containing identical material. Both versions of the film are included, along with a couple of interviews with Bogdanovich, who explains the difference between the two cuts and presents his views on the picture. Critic Molly Haskell talks about Hawks in a new video interview, and film scholar Lee Clark Mitchell tells us all about the western genre in an interesting piece. There are audio excerpts from interviews with Hawks and novelist Borden Chase, as well as a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of Red River featuring Wayne, Joanne Dru, and Brennan. Besides the usual essay-filled booklet, the box comes with Chase’s original novel, Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail, from which the film was adapted.

Great stuff, and worth every penny.

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“THERAPY FOR SECRETS”

By Raymond Benson

The year 1989 brought us such Oscar-winning pictures as Driving Miss Daisy, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, and, of course, the blockbuster Batman. One picture, though, always stood out for me and was my personal favorite of the year—Steven Soderbergh’s remarkable feature film debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The Academy nominated it only for Original Screenplay. The Cannes Film Festival, however, awarded it the Palme d’Or and the Best Actor honor for James Spader. The movie put Soderbergh on the map, establishing him as an innovative, provocative filmmaker who was unafraid to take on challenging subjects.

The Criterion Collection has produced a new, restored 4K digital transfer and a new 5.1 surround mix (from the original sound elements), supervised by Soderbergh. The results, in the director’s own words that appear in an on-screen comment on the restoration, are such that one should “throw away” all previous home video (DVD, Blu-Ray) versions of the film—this is the definitive edition.

Made for only a little over a million dollars, the story is really a chamber drama of sorts that focuses on four characters. There is Ann (wonderfully played by Andie MacDowell), a sexually uptight and frigid housewife married to John (Peter Gallagher), a successful, go-getter lawyer who happens to be a lying philanderer. He’s having an affair with Ann’s precocious and definitely not sexually uptight sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), who works as a bartender. Enter Graham, an old college friend of John’s, who has returned to town after nine years—and he is one strange dude. James Spader delivers a nuanced, sensitive, but assuredly slightly perversely skewed performance—one that pretty much defined the kinds of roles he would play for years to come. Like Ann, he, too, is sexually inhibited due to something that happened with his college girlfriend.

These days the only way Graham “gets off” is by videotaping various female acquaintances and interviewing them about their sex lives—and then viewing them when he’s alone.

While Ann suspects her husband is betraying her, she finds Graham oddly fascinating and they become friends until she discovers Graham’s “habit.” This proclivity is not a problem for Cynthia, though—she happily makes a video for Graham.

How things turn out for the quartet of characters plays out like therapy. In fact, Ann is seeing a therapist throughout the picture. Soderbergh has subtly structured and presented the story such that, in many ways, we, the audience, are the therapists observing the characters as they reveal their secrets.

In 1989, the material was shocking. Without any nudity or explicit sex scenes, Sex, Lies, and Videotape manages to be extremely visceral, voyeuristic, and, yes, sexy. It explores how the most intimate desires of human beings might seem kinky or perverse to some, and yet be perfectly normal for others. The way the “therapy” of the film addresses these hang-ups in the final moments is revelatory. Soderbergh may have never written or directed a more perfect picture.

The new transfer looks and sounds remarkable. An audio commentary from 1998, featuring Soderbergh and filmmaker Neil LaBute, accompanies the film.

The supplements are up to Criterion’s usual high standards. There’s a new introduction to the film by Soderbergh, along with vintage interviews with the writer/director from 1992 and 1990. A new documentary on the making of the film, featuring actors MacDowell, Gallagher, and San Giacomo, is especially informative and insightful. James Spader makes an appearance in a vintage 1989 appearance on the Today Show. There’s a deleted scene with commentary by Soderbergh. A new conversation between sound editor/re-recording mixer Larry Blake and composer Cliff Martinez explores the challenges of the location shoot in Baton Rouge. Finally, Blake takes us on a journey through the evolution of sound restorations. The booklet features an essay by critic Amy Taubin and excerpts from Soderbergh’s 1990 book about the film.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape is still relevant and powerful. The picture reveals a young filmmaker who is exploding with talent, and four brave actors who dig deeply within to reveal all. It’s a masterpiece of independent filmmaking. Pick it up.

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“LIGHT, SHADOW, AND MARLENE”

By Raymond Benson

I love it when The Criterion Collection produces a lavish boxed set containing multiple features, an abundance of supplements, and a thick and illustrated booklet. What better collection is there than one featuring the six Hollywood films made between 1930 and 1935 by Josef von Sternberg and starring the exquisite Marlene Dietrich? Hats off to producer Issa Clubb for overseeing what could be one of Criterion’s better products.

These adventure-romances showcased a star who immediately defined the word “exotic”—a German-born, English-speaking, beautiful, sultry, seductress who could act, sing, and dance. Like Greta Garbo, who had arrived in Hollywood during the silent era, Marlene Dietrich exhibited a European mystery to American audiences of the early Depression years. Her self-styled (with the help of her trusted director, von Sternberg) gender-bending wardrobes and mannerisms, her sometimes ambiguous but often overt sexuality, and her allure of “knowing something we didn’t” made her an overnight star… for a while.

As documented in the various supplements that appear over the six Blu-ray disks in the set, Dietrich and von Sternberg enjoyed a successful and acclaimed period during the Pre-Code days. It seemed, though, that as soon as the Production Code went into effect in July 1934, the popularity of the star and the director’s films waned. For the second half of the 1930s, Dietrich, like several other leading ladies, became what was termed “box-office poison”—that is, until she made a booming come-back in 1939’s Destry Rides Again.

Dietrich and von Sternberg first worked together in the 1930 German-produced picture, The Blue Angel, which was filmed in both the German language and in English. The director, already an established filmmaker in Hollywood, convinced his studio, Paramount, to bring Dietrich over and sign her to a multi-picture contract. The young star left Germany on the night The Blue Angel premiered in her native country. Paramount held the U.S. release back until after the exhibition of her first official Hollywood production, Morocco (also 1930). This initial appearance in America proved to be a sensation. The English-language version of The Blue Angel was released a month later, and Marlene Dietrich had arrived.

The historical importance of the films in Criterion’s new collection can be broken down into three words—light, shadow, and Marlene. Josef von Sternberg was a master of visual imagery in motion pictures at a time when black and white cinematography was evolving as an art form. A cameraman himself, he was one of the few directors in Hollywood who knew how to light a set and photograph it (in fact, he is not only the director but also the cinematographer of the sixth title in this set, The Devil is a Woman). Von Sternberg’s use of German expressionism—heavy on the shadows, high contrast between light and dark—did wonders for Marlene Dietrich’s cheekbones. An actress was likely never photographed so beautifully as in those first few films—not even Garbo. The greatest pleasure of the Dietrich & von Sternberg boxed set is the gorgeousness of its images. While von Sternberg certainly had much to say about how his films were photographed, many kudos must be given to the other two cinematographers he worked with—Lee Garmes (three titles) and Bert Glennon (two titles).

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection has upgraded its 2006 DVD release of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Oscar-winning drama, The Virgin Spring, to Blu-ray, and the results are, naturally, spectacular.

The film won Bergman his first of three Best Foreign Language Film Academy Awards, and it can certainly be ranked among the Swedish filmmaker’s best works. Known as a “rape and revenge tale,” the picture was so influential that it was the inspiration for Wes Craven’s first horror-exploitation movie from 1972, The Last House on the Left. Craven took the basic plotline, updated it, and turned it into a gory (and some would say, sickening) fright fest.

Bergman’s film is easier to take, but one can imagine how harrowing it might have been in 1960. As a departure for the auteur, Bergman did not write the screenplay himself. The script was adapted by Ulla Isaksson from a Swedish medieval ballad/legend called “Töres döttrar I Wänge” (“Töre’s daughters in Vänge”). Like The Seventh Seal before it, the story is set during the Dark Ages. It’s the only other instance in which Bergman accurately and convincingly depicts this historical period on film. This time, his visual collaborator is the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who presents the stark, sharp black and white imagery with crystal clarity.

The story concerns Christian Töre (Max von Sydow) and his family—his wife, Märeta (Birgitta Välberg), his teenage daughter Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), the disturbed, unwed and pregnant servant Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), and other household helpers. One morning, the virginal, innocent, and naïve Karin sets off on horseback, accompanied by Ingeri, to deliver candles to a church some miles away. After a frightening, chance encounter with a one-eyed man, Ingeri separates from Karin, who soldiers on with the candles. She comes upon a motely trio of creepy herdsmen—all brothers—with whom she offers to share her lunch. The older two assault Karin, rape, and murder her. The younger brother, who appears to be around twelve, watches in horror. Ingeri, hidden in the forest, also witnesses the crime.

Later, the herdsmen encounter Christian and his family, who are naturally worried about Karin because she didn’t return home. To reveal what happens next would of course be a spoiler—just know that Christian must make a hard decision and summon a strength from within that he didn’t know he had.

It’s all powerful stuff, and Bergman handles it with harsh realism and surprising sensitivity. The assault scene is brief, breathtakingly shocking, and surely something that jolted audiences at the time. Pettersson delivers a particularly courageous performance, and the actress’ work is the heart of the movie. The rest of the cast, especially von Sydow, Lindblom, and Välberg, are also excellent.

Particularly interesting is that the film can be interpreted as either a deeply religious or an anti-religious one. Christianity is often a subject matter in Bergman’s oeuvre, and his disdain for organized religion is usually palpable. In this case, however, when the titular “virgin spring” appears in the picture, it just might represent an acknowledgment of a higher power. It’s up to the viewer to decide.

Once again, the filmmaker recreates on what was surely a very low budget a medieval world that is totally believable. The attention to detail is striking—P. A. Lundgren’s production design and Marik Vos’ costume designs bring The Virgin Spring to life (the latter was nominated for an Academy Award).

Criterion’s new 2K digital restoration looks gorgeous and is an improvement over the earlier DVD release. It comes with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack and an audio commentary from 2005 by Bergman scholar Birgitta Steene. The 2006 supplements are ported over: 2005 interviews with actors Lindblom and Pettersson, a terrific introduction by director Ang Lee (who claims it was the first art film he ever saw), and an interesting audio recording of a 1975 American Film Institute seminar by Bergman—in English! There is an alternate English-dubbed soundtrack, but for my money Bergman films should always be viewed in the original language. The booklet sports an essay by film scholar Peter Cowie, reflections on the film by screenwriter Isaksson, and the text of the original ballad upon which the picture is based.

Among the many masterpieces that Ingmar Bergman made, The Virgin Spring is a shining gem. Don’t miss it.

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“OR IS IT ABOUT MEN?”

By Raymond Benson

Ken Russell’s controversial but widely-acclaimed adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love, might have had a better and more appropriate title—Men in Love. While touted as being an examination of the nature of love and sexuality between two men and two women, in the end we are left with the more potent notion that there is a love that can exist between two males—as friends—that is more powerful and “eternal” than the love a man will have for a woman.

Released in 1969 in Britain and in 1970 in the U.S. (hence, its four Oscar nominations for the year 1970), Women in Love has not aged well in terms of its arty and borderline pretentious direction… but as I tell my Film History students, “judge a film within the context of when it was released.” In that regard, Women was a groundbreaking and daring motion picture of its time. In the U.S. it played only in the big city art house theaters, probably due to its frank nudity (both female and male—one of the first mainstream pictures to feature full frontal men in the raw) and subject matter.

It’s the early 1920s in the English countryside, where class standing is very much a thing; but a movement is afoot for the emancipation of women, free-thinking, avant-garde art, and the breaking of social taboos. While the story focuses on four characters—Rupert (Alan Bates), Gerald (Oliver Reed), Gudrun (Glenda Jackson), and Ursula (Jennie Linden)—the “protagonist,” as it were, is Rupert. In fact, it is how he approaches his relationships with his best friend Gerald and the woman he eventually marries, Ursula, that is the crux of the story.

Glenda Jackson, however, won the Best Actress Oscar as the free-spirited, take-no-prisoners Gudrun in what is honestly a supporting role in the story. This statement is not meant to take away from her engaging, charismatic performance—she’s terrific. There is no question that she steals the movie. But Linden has more screen time as her younger, more conservative sister.

What made the film a cause célèbre at the time was the much-talked-about nude wrestling scene between Bates and Reed—which, apparently, they had to talk Russell in to filming because they were keen to do it. Beautifully shot by Oscar-nominated Billy Williams, the rumble in an English manor study by firelight rightly is a remarkable piece of cinema.

Ken Russell received his only directing Oscar nomination for the film. Some might watch it today and think that his work—and the acting as well—is over-the-top. The truth is that Russell intentionally stylized the movie with a heightened realism that matches the passion and intensity of its subject matter. This is a picture in which style and substance are notched up to eleven. Russell, in his later career, would often be accused of extravagance and pretentiousness—but here, Women in Love is relatively tame in comparison.

This gorgeous period piece with heady dialogue, editing influenced by the French New Wave, lovely costumes, and beautiful scenery, is showcased by the Criterion Collection’s new restored 4K digital transfer with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.

Supplements include two different commentaries from 2003 (one by Russell, one by producer/screenwriter Larry Kramer); new interviews with DP Billy Williams and editor Michael Bradswell; vintage interviews with Russell and Jackson; an interesting on-location piece featuring Bates, Linden, and Kramer; and the theatrical trailer.

The most striking supplement is Russell’s own biopic autobiography, A British Picture—Portrait of an Enfant Terrible (1989), a bizarre but fun piece in which a little boy plays Russell throughout the years, even when Russell is an adult. Another interesting, but less successful, inclusion is a 1972 short film, Second Best, based on a D. H. Lawrence short story, produced by and starring Bates. The booklet features an essay by scholar Linda Ruth Williams.

Cinema, English, and literature buffs will certainly appreciate Women in Love. For those willing to position it in its appropriate historical place, it’s a scrumptious and sensual delight.

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BY JEREMY CARR

The works of William Shakespeare were ideally suited to the sensibilities of Orson Welles. More than once, on stage and in the cinema, The Bard’s scenarios supplied a prime source for Welles the auteur, and the dramatist’s distinct personalities manifest themselves in grandiose roles skillfully personified by Welles the actor, in his straightforward Shakespearian adaptations and in characters created to embody correspondingly epic types (Charles Foster Kane, as the most notable example). This artistic appreciation and cross-form application was most outstandingly realized in Chimes at Midnight, from 1965, but the same impassioned devotion—aesthetic and thematic—is likewise evident in the dynamic, striking Othello (1951), otherwise known as The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, an unsung Welles film now available on an exceptional Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Welles’ venerated love affair with Shakespeare began at a young age, when he published an annotated series of Shakespearean texts at the age of 12 and, later, at just 16, when he performed in assorted productions at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, an outing that would prove significant to Othello’s genesis. Fleeing the infamous blacklist business in America, Welles arrived in Rome to star in Gregory Ratoff’s Black Magic (1949), and it was around that time that he embarked on the disorderly path toward what would be his second consecutive cinematic rendering of a Shakespeare primer, following 1948’s Macbeth. What ensued was a convoluted lesson in haphazard, yet thoroughly determined independent filmmaking, with years of on-again, off-again shooting, different cinematographers and editors, several locations (Rome, Venice, Morocco, etc.), miscellaneous financial interruptions, and multiple casting changes—there were two Desdemonas before Welles settled on Suzanne Cloutier, whose voice he nevertheless had dubbed by Gudrun Ure. Othello was initially (finally) released in 1952, when it shared the Grand Prize with Two Cents Worth of Hope (1952) at the Cannes Film Festival. But that was not the end of its difficulties. The details of the whole process are recounted (and frequently repeated) on the Criterion disc, dispersed amongst a range of interviews and documentaries and in Geoffrey O’Brien’s accompanying essay. But what matters most, is that while a decent film managing to survive the turmoil would be remarkable enough, that a very good film was the ultimate result is even more impressive.

Beginning just after the death of Othello (Welles assumes audiences know how and why this happened and so spends little time worrying about exposition), Othello flashes back and delves into the intricate web of deception that led to the Venetian general’s demise. Prominent in this charade is Othello’s traitorous ensign, Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir), whose dubious, ambiguous motives are born not from some pure, abstract malevolence, but from an ordinary professional, personal resentfulness (or, so Welles would also interpret it, potential impotency). Driving a wedge between Othello and his radiant wife, Desdemona (Cloutier), the weaselly Iago takes advantage of Roderigo’s (Robert Coote) jealousy—he, too, has amorous eyes for Desdemona—and the two of them devise a ruse to drive Othello mad with suspicion and to concurrently sew discord between he and his favored lieutenant, Cassio (Michael Laurence). Cloutier is at her best in moments of unknowing bewilderment, her chaste beauty convincingly stunned by Othello’s rage and his distrust, while MacLiammóir, who co-founded the Gate and was fundamental to Welles’ early theatrical career, is the embodiment of deceit; hovering always on the periphery, scheming and biding his time, he is all vacillating slants and slithering movements. Welles, of course, is center stage, his performance descending from one of class, command, and charm (“I think this tale would win my daughter, too,” says one onlooker as Othello captivates the crowd—and the viewer), to one of deadening confusion and despair. And yet, even as the seeds of doubt produce an ensnaring crop of gradual torment, Welles loses none of his booming, prevailing presence, nor the magnitude of his theatrical inflection.

Welles had openly criticized Laurence Olivier’s approach to Shakespearean cinema, regarding his interpretations as little more than filmed theater. So, it stands to reason that Welles, already a visual mastermind, would render his Othello in extraordinary illustrative fashion. There may be less polish—a result of budgetary restrictions and the movie’s slapdash assembly—but there is a tangible increase in filmic vigor, as Welles treats the material not as something required for “serious” actors and directors to undertake, but as something to be passionately fulfilled. Translating this enthusiasm with requisite care and affection, Welles advances Othello as an artful mélange of stark, expressionistic designs and vivid, textured imagery, like engravings animated by the complex balance of light and shadow for which he was so renowned. Part of his innate, virtuoso style has to do with nearly shot-by-shot ingenuity, crafting (and Othello feels very much like an artisanal creation) a rich production design detailed in depth and accented by astonishing camera angles, reflective surfaces, and crossed shadows generated by tapestries, iron bars, and thatched roofs. Gloomy interiors portent the delirious, devastating downfall to come, while outside, the backdrop of bleak skies and raging waters induce a similarly imposing sensation.

“THE BEAUTY OF RAPTURE”

By Raymond Benson

Aside from some of the comedy classics of the silent era, it’s arguable that the one picture of the period you should make a point to see is Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, a film that has appeared on Sight and Sound’s top ten films poll five times and consistently cited as one of the most essential motion pictures in history.

That’s high praise, and it’s deserved.

For those of you who won’t watch silent movies because you think they’re boring or slow or whatever—forget it. The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most riveting pictures you’ll ever see. Its brevity (only 81 minutes at 24 frames per second) is a strength, but its power lies in the faces of its actors. Dreyer has focused the camera (with superb cinematography by future Hollywood director Rudolph Maté) on facial close-ups—the eyes, the mouths, the wrinkles in the skin… and it all masterfully reveals the inner turmoil of the characters.

Especially that of Joan. The performance by stage actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the title role is nothing short of miraculous. At the time she was an acclaimed performer in the theatre to such an extent that her name in the credits is simply listed as “Falconetti.” What eyes, what expressions, what pain… what passion! As she is overcome by the rapture that envelops her, Joan is transformed to a thing of otherworldly beauty.

Anyone familiar with Joan’s story knows what the film is about. Young Joan had led French armies against the English during the Hundred Years’ War, was captured, and, because she claimed to be able to speak with God, was put on trial for heresy by French clergy loyal to the English. The film depicts her trial and ultimate execution.

Dreyer adapted the actual handwritten court transcripts in writing the screenplay; thus, the intertitles are real testimony delivered in the proceedings. The piece begins dramatically, with crowds outside the court gathering to hear news of the trial. Sideshow performers and midway vendors turn the thing into a circus. Inside, Joan is led to confront a group of all-male judges who question her about her choice of clothing (she dresses as a “boy”), her sexual orientation, her alleged communication with the Lord, and if she’s really consorting with the Devil. Joan has an intelligent, reasonable answer for every question, but the judges have one goal in mind. They move on to a torture interrogation and finally the sad conclusion that would be the basis for Joan’s Sainthood.

“WHAT YOU DON’T SAY”

By Raymond Benson

It wasn’t what audiences expected from a “Martin Scorsese Picture.” A period “costume drama” with no violence, bloodshed, or curse words? And yet Scorsese himself described it as one of his most violent films.

This is true, perhaps, when one considers the emotional violence that occurs between the characters in this beautifully-rendered, but curiously lifeless adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel about New York high society and manners in the 1870s.

In many ways, The Age of Innocence is one side of a Scorsese coin that includes Gangs of New York on the other. They both take place in Manhattan in roughly the same time frame (Gangs is in the 1860s) and focus on two extremes of the social ladder—the upper crust in Age, and the lower class in Gangs.

The story is simple—Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a member of New York’s high society set. He’s a quiet, introverted, but good-looking man who could probably have any lady he wants. But he has settled on May Welland (Winona Ryder), a straight-laced younger woman who is practically his equal in temperance. Enter May’s cousin, Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who has come home from Europe after a bad marriage and—shocking!—is planning a divorce. In high society of the time, that was tantamount to marking a woman with a scarlet “A.” Newland becomes infatuated with her and almost calls off the marriage to May. The gossip mill begins, and lives roll into turmoil. Does Newland end up doing the right thing by dropping Ellen and keeping his promise to May? Do we care? In the interest of a no-spoiler review, I won’t answer either question.

Therein lies the main problem with The Age of Innocence. While Day-Lewis is easily one of our greatest modern actors, his role here does not give him much to do but to look forlornly at the two women in his life. Yes, there is torment in his soul, and the two female leads go through the same sentiments—but revealing those emotions was forbidden by society. It was what people did not say to each other that contained the weight of conflict. It was all kept inside. And, thus, it’s all kept inside the film, too.

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Raymond Benson

"Pray for Rosemary's Baby..."

That tag line for Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror classic is an example of brilliant marketing. Until it was created, Paramount’s head of the studio, Robert Evans, admits not knowing how to sell the picture. Yes, it’s a horror film, but not like anything we’ve seen. Yes, it’s produced by William Castle, the schlock-meister who was famous for B-movie scare flicks utilizing gimmicks such as the selling of insurance policies in the theater lobby for patrons who feared they’d be scared to death. But the film is also an ingenious thriller outside of the horror genre; a crime story, in many ways, about a cult that drugs and rapes a woman for fiendish purposes. The subject is taken seriously, despite an undercurrent of dark humor. It was also very adult and frank for its time, and it had the potential to offend some audiences. Indeed, how does one sell that in the late sixties? The tag line intrigued enough people that it worked, for Rosemary’s Baby was a hit and the picture still resonates today.

It was Polanski’s first American film, and it remains an essential entry in his oeuvre. His early trademark style was doing a Hitchcock but taking it a few steps farther into more bizarre, creepy-crawly, and supernatural territory. That’s on full display in Rosemary’s Baby. We’d had devil movies before, but nothing as realistically-portrayed as this one. It certainly held the reign of Satan movies until The Exorcist came along five years later. In my book, it’s the better of the two. AFI is well justified in naming Rosemary’s Baby in their “Top Thrills” top ten list.

While brilliantly directed and written, a good deal of credit for the success of the film goes to the excellent cast. Mia Farrow has never been better as Rosemary. John Cassavetes is dead-on as the frustrated actor/husband who literally makes a deal with the devil. Ruth Gordon, the multiple award winner for the picture, is a revelation. She brings much of the necessary comic relief to the proceedings, for the film is an exemplary model of tension-building to a near-unbearable level.

As usual, the Criterion Collection does a magnificent job. Polanski approved the new, restored digital transfer, and it looks marvelous. Extras include a new documentary featuring interviews with Polanski, Farrow, and Robert Evans. Original novel author Ira Levin is showcased in a 1997 radio interview and original drawings and other prose in the enclosed booklet. Also of interest is a feature-length documentary about the film’s talented jazz composer, Krzysztof Komeda.

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“UPGRADED GHOULS”

By Raymond Benson

For a film that’s been in public domain for decades and is available on dozens of different poor-quality DVD labels and free to download from Internet, it’s somewhat surprising that The Criterion Collection would pull out the stops to offer an undoubtedly pricier option to own the movie with this lavish 2-disk extravaganza of gore. (There is a precedent, however—Criterion did the same thing with the out-of-copyright Carnival of Souls.)

Don’t get me wrong… this is a very welcome roll-out. What’s unique about Criterion’s excellent package is that it features a new 4K digital restoration of the original theatrical release (not the previously go-to “30^th Anniversary Edition” released years ago and that had been recut a little), and it’s supervised by co-screenwriter John A. Russo, sound engineer Gary R. Streiner, and producer Russell W. Streiner (sadly, director George Romero is no longer with us, or there’s no doubt he would have been involved). There’s also a new restoration of the monaural soundtrack, that was supervised by Romero, and Gary Streiner, and presented uncompressed. There are also two separate audio commentaries from 1994 featuring Romero, Russo, actor Judith O’Dea, and others.

What this means is that you’ll be viewing the most pristine, best-sounding, razor-sharp edition of Night of the Living Dead that you’ve ever seen.

If you don’t know the film, where have you been? It’s one of the most iconic low-budget, independently-produced horror films ever made. The shoestring budget was $114,000, and Romero utilized unknown stage actors, as well as extras from nearby Evans City, Pennsylvania, where the exteriors were shot. It basically kick-started the “walking dead” genre, although that term and the word “zombie” is never used in the movie. They’re referred to as “ghouls.”

For 1968, the picture was ground-breaking, daring, and controversial. Many critics trashed it for being too gory, even though it’s in black-and-white. Some countries banned it. Released just prior to when the MPAA ratings were unveiled in the USA, it was exhibited unadulterated to kids at a Saturday matinee—which most likely provided a lifelong set of nightmares for these poor individuals. After the ratings were instituted, the film was rated “X” for some time, until eventually this was downgraded to “R.”

Another envelope-pushing aspect was the casting of African-American Duane Jones as the lead. This was unheard-of in those days unless it was a Sidney Poitier Hollywood movie. This gave the film a not-so-subtle subtext about racism, since Jones is battling all-white ghouls as well as his all-white fellow survivors trapped in an abandoned house. Romero always said he didn’t intend it that way—he cast Jones simply because he “gave the best audition.”

The story is simple—due to radioactive fallout from a satellite that exploded in space, the dead are rising and feasting on the living. It’s a national emergency. A small group of very frightened and often irrational men and women, and one young teenaged girl, are holed-up in a farmhouse while the ghouls spend the run-time of the movie trying to get at them.

And, yes, it’s scary, suspenseful, and contains many scenes daring you not to turn your head away.

Criterion’s release contains a treasure trove of supplements. The crown jewel of these is the early 16mm work print edit of the film, originally titled Night of Anubis. There are several new features, including interviews with directors Guillermo Del Toro, Robert Rodriguez, and Frank Darabont about the movie, of John Russo discussing the genesis of the picture at the industrial film company where the filmmakers were working, and pieces with Gary Streiner and Russell Streiner. Particularly interesting are the new interviews with some the ghoul-extras as they are today, a piece on the film’s style, and—particularly instructional for film students—a documentary on how Romero and team turned low-budget inadequacies into assets. There are archival interviews with Romero and actor Judith O’Dea, and others. An audio interview with the late Duane Jones is exceptionally poignant and enlightening. Then there are the trailers, the radio spots, the TV spots, and an essay in the booklet by critic Stuart Klawans.

Once again, The Criterion Collection has rolled out a red carpet, this time for living dead people, and the results are outstanding. Highly recommended.

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Criterion, which has released the ultimate special edition of Stanley Kramer's "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", provides this interesting look at the locations of the film, then and now. It's all part of the deluxe Blu-ray edition.

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By Hank Reineke

From 1963 through 1966 Murray Lerner would make the yearly trek from New York City to the tony seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island. Once there, the documentarian seemingly photographed every major and minor player of the 1960’s folk music craze for his resulting award-winning film Festival (1967). Depending on one’s personal taste in music, the celluloid snippets offered in the film’s final edit – several capturing folk and blues artists performing in the prime of their careers – are either frustratingly truncated or mercifully brief in length.

As a lifelong folk music enthusiast, I would find this film a treasure even if the film’s “star players” (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary) were not featured. Watching snippets of such legends as Son House or Mississippi John Hurt sing the blues, Tex Logan and the Lilly Bros. sing their brand of high, lonesome bluegrass or Minneapolis’ Spider John Koerner wail away on a racked harmonica and 12-string guitar would be enough to make me a fan. It would be too mammoth a task to list the expansive list of folk and blues and gospel and roots artists caught on film - no matter how briefly - in Lerner’s omnibus film Festival, but it’s safe to say that few important figures of Newport’s most consequential to pop-culture era festivals are not represented.

Photographed on a set of shoulder-supported 16mm “Sound-On-Film” Auricons, Lerner – augmented by a three member camera crew - seems to have made an earnest effort to faithfully capture the essential comradely spirit of the annual Newport event. This black and white documentary film offers no narration or even narrative line, and subsequently – as the New York Times noted dourly in their review of the film in October of 1967, it is occasionally “distressing and annoying” that “the more esoteric folk performers […] are not clearly identified.” This stunningly beautiful 2K digital Criterion release - featuring the original uncompressed monorail sound - has thoughtfully remedied this by offering the option of removable captions. These captions prominently identify both the artists and the songs being performed as they unspool before our eyes.

Festival is one of two documentaries released in 1967 that prominently (and perhaps) accidentally captured on film the unlikely but meteoric pop-music ascension of folk-rock icon Bob Dylan. The rightfully esteemed - but more diverse in scope - Festival has always been a bit more obscure than D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal and more celebrated Don’t Look Back. Some of the thunder of Mr. Lerner’s wonderful film was likely the result of having been released to theaters a mere month following Don’t Look Back in the autumn of 1967.

Though Festival is a “music” film, aside from Peter, Paul, and Mary’s warbling of “Come and Go with Me” that plays under the film’s opening credits, I don’t recall any other time when we’re treated to full performance of a song. The cameras tend to linger democratically on both the artists and the visitors to the festival – the latter being almost uniformly young, white, and well-scrubbed. These are kids who have chosen to abandon their schools and jobs for a long weekend of rebellious camping on the beaches and fens of Newport. Other sleep-deprived youngsters splay out uncomfortably on the backs of motorbikes and car hoods.

“THE BEAUTY OF IRONY”

By Raymond Benson

Leave it to The Criterion Collection to present a jaw-dropping, eye-popping Blu-ray release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 masterpiece that many critics have called one of the most beautiful films ever made. While the picture received many accolades upon its initial release, including Oscar nominations for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay—and wins for Cinematography, Production Design, Costumes, and Adapted Score—it was again one those Kubrick films that was controversial and misunderstood at first. It was not a financial success in the U.S., and yet today it’s considered one of the auteur’s greatest works.

After such titles as Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, it may have seemed to be an odd choice for Kubrick to make a picture such as Barry Lyndon. One must look back to the period between 2001 and Clockwork to understand it. Kubrick had wanted to make an epic movie about Napoleon and, in fact, spent two years in pre-production on it before MGM got cold feet and pulled the plug. The director changed studios (to Warner Brothers) and shot Clockwork cheaply and quickly to prove that he could make them some money—and he did. So what was he to do with all the previous research materials he had amassed for the Napoleon project? He satisfied his desire to study the past by adapting an 18^th Century novel by William Makepeace Thackeray (The Luck of Barry Lyndon) so that he could tell a tale about class dichotomy, ambition, greed, and hubris.

From the beginning, Kubrick wanted to take an audience back to late 1770s England and Ireland to demonstrate exactly what it was like to live then. The authenticity he strove to achieve consisted of commissioning a NASA lens so fast that it was capable of filming by candlelight (as well as utilizing only natural light throughout the production), employing real clothing from the period, and shooting at real locations where this past still existed. The results are breathtakingly gorgeous renditions of English and Irish countrysides and majestic, elegant manors. All of this surrounds the precise depiction of the manners of an aristocracy that hasn’t been seen on screen before or since.

Ryan O’Neal, who was at the time of production still a box-office star, was cast as Barry, at first a naïve Irish boy who allows heartbreak and jealousy to shape his future endeavors to elevate his social standing. He learns quickly that to get ahead in society he must be a bit of a rogue, a schemer, a liar, and a cad. The first half of the little-over-three-hour picture documents Barry’s rise to prominence. After the intermission, we witness his resounding fall from grace.

The story is told with Kubrick’s keen sense of irony—in fact, no other filmmaker has had such a firm ability to elicit this very difficult blend of satire, causticness, and paradox. You find it in all of his pictures, but Barry Lyndon literally exudes it. This is accomplished in no small part by the detached and slightly amused voice-over narration by Michael Hordern.

Yes, the movie is slowly paced—as it should be. Things moved slower in the 1700s. There is a stateliness and pageantry to the proceedings that is entirely appropriate to the setting, but also to the overall message of the film—that despite the airs one puts on to impress, underneath we’re all still human and pretty much the same.

Every aspect of the production is about as perfect as it can get. John Alcott’s cinematography, Ken Adam’s production design, Milena Canonero and Ulla-Britt Söderlund’s costumes, and the musical score, adapted by Leonard Rosenman and consisting of classical pieces and traditional folk material performed by the Chieftains, all combine to transport the viewer into an age of great beauty and yet cold, near-heartless humanity.

The Criterion Blu-ray is a 4K digital restoration that looks magnificent, and this is accompanied by an uncompressed monaural soundtrack as well as an alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack. The music, as well as every birdsong and musket shot, sounds clean, clear, and vibrant.

An entire second disk contains the plentiful supplements that will take a few hours to get through. The main attraction is “Making Barry Lyndon,” a new documentary that features audio excerpts from a 1976 interview with Kubrick about the movie, appearances by executive producer Jan Harlan, the director’s daughter Katharina Kubrick (who also appears as an extra in the film), and other members from the cast and crew (no Ryan O’Neal, though). There are separate featurettes on each of the technical aspects—cinematography; production design; costumes; editing; music; and the fine art of the period from which Kubrick and the designers drew inspiration. An interview with author/critic Michael Ciment focuses on the themes in the director’s works and how they relate to Lyndon. There are two theatrical trailers. The thick booklet enclosed in the package contains an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and vintage, illustrated pieces from American Cinematographer.

In short, Barry Lyndon is a remarkable piece of cinema that is unfortunately underrated by the general public. It deserves a spot alongside Stanley Kubrick’s other acknowledged “masterpieces.” The new Criterion edition is just the way to see it and perhaps rediscover this brilliant work of art.

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“PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG AND OLD MAN”

By Raymond Benson

David Lynch is today’s foremost surrealist. In many ways, he has taken up the mantle begun by those artists of the 1920s who attempted to present in tangible, visual forms the juxtapositions, bizarre logic, and beauty/horror of dreams. Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Germaine Dulac, René Magritte—to name a few.

Most people know Lynch from his films, but as this thoughtful and insightful documentary reveals, he is and has always been primarily a painter. Lynch began his career in the “art life” studying and practicing fine art… and he sort of fell into filmmaking along the way. Even today, despite his recent foray back into television with Twin Peaks—The Return on Showtime, Lynch spends most of his time in his home studio drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and painting.

The film is narrated by Lynch himself as he takes the audience through moments of his early life growing up first in the state of Montana, then Idaho, Washington, and finally Virginia. After high school, Lynch briefly attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but he dropped out because he wasn’t inspired. His friend Jack Fisk (future production designer on several of Lynch’s films and future wife of actress Sissy Spacek) got the artist to join him at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and that’s where things started to take off.

The documentary might be disappointing to Lynch fans in that it covers only his childhood and twenties…just up to the point where he makes Eraserhead (which took four years in the mid-seventies and was finally released in 1977). Other documentaries, such as 1997’s Pretty as a Picture, might delve into Lynch’s more well-known feature work. However, for this unique documentary, Lynch has provided never-before-seen home movies and photographs of his childhood, family, and artwork. As these biographical stories are related in chronological order, we see Lynch at work in his studio… drinking coffee, smoking, and painting. In fact, we get a very good look at a great deal of his artwork. And if you think Lynch’s movies are strange, wait until you see his paintings! Stylistically, they are three-dimensional multimedia pieces. A canvas might contain found objects, gobs of thick paint, wood and metal, odd figures and creatures, and lettering. Fascinating stuff.

Lynch explains how he got the idea for a “painting that moved,” which resulted in his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), and then moved on to make other surrealistic, avant-garde short films such as The Alphabet and The Grandmother. These efforts led to his moving his family in 1971 (he had gotten married in ’67 and had a child in ’68) to Los Angeles so that he could study at the AFI Conservatory. It was there that he began his first feature film, the iconic independent horror-comedy, Eraserhead.

The takeaway from the documentary is that Lynch evolved as an artist whenever there were obstacles to overcome. He developed a knack for taking a bad situation and turning it into something productive. We see this occurring repeatedly in his tales of journeying from childhood to becoming an adult.

The Criterion Collection presents the film in the company’s usual top-notch excellence. The video quality of the Blu-ray High Definition digital master is gorgeous—you can see every wrinkle of Lynch’s weathered face, as well as the fine lines of his silver-white hair. Sound—always important in a Lynch film and just as vital here—is a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio. The package is short on supplements, though. Along with the theatrical trailer, an interview with one of the directors, Jon Nguyen, illustrates the working process the filmmakers had with Lynch. An essay by critic Dennis Lim appears in the booklet.

At only 88 minutes, David Lynch—The Art Life is a short but worthwhile look into the mind—and dreams—of one of today’s most important visual artists.

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“GHOSTS OF MONUMENT VALLEY”

By Raymond Benson

The great John Ford made many outstanding westerns, and My Darling Clementine (1946) is certainly one of them. I would argue that not since Stagecoach (1939) had there been as good a picture in the genre, and it didn’t even star John Wayne.

Purportedly the story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, the Clanton Gang, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the film is hogwash as far as the truth is concerned. But as pure entertainment, it’s right up there with the best of the classic westerns that have given us stylistic and physical imagery that is today considered cliché. And in order to become cliché, whatever it is has to have been great to begin with. It must be a trend setter, a groundbreaker, an artistic decision that resulted in an iconic piece of celluloid. Much of what John Ford did accomplished just that. My Darling Clementine has it all—the dumpy saloon with the honky tonk piano player and free-roaming prostitutes, “Injuns,” cattle rustlers and thieves, stagecoaches and horses, ornery villains, and, most of all—the scenery of Monument Valley, Utah.

The landscape of Monument Valley is a character itself in Ford’s westerns. Even though we’ve seen the same buttes and rock formations dozens of times, we always buy that we’re somewhere in the “west,” in that mythical land of Hollywood archetypes. And what better archetype is there to play our hero, Wyatt Earp (the film was loosely adapted from Earp’s autobiography), than the inimitable Henry Fonda. Walter Brennan makes a surprisingly nasty villain as Old Man Clanton. Linda Darnell, as saloon girl Chihuahua is a stand out. More problematic is the casting of Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. While the actor displays the requisite angst in the character, he plays Holliday with no humor whatsoever, and it doesn’t quite work. After a while he just becomes annoying for being grumpy and moody all the time.

Nevertheless, this is one of the classics, folks. And, if you study it closely, there is a singular darkness in the hearts of the characters—even the “good” ones—that suggests these historical figures are now nothing but ghosts of a tall-tale-past where life is cheap and death comes unexpectedly. Monument Valley, for all its beauty, is fairly spooky at night—and much of Clementine is shot at night. Even the blowing dust during the climactic gun battle creates an eerie, ghost town effect. Clementine is one of Ford’s blackest, most cynical films, but it’s cleverly disguised as mainstream Hollywood entertainment. The picture has great atmosphere and action, gorgeous black and white cinematography by Joseph MacDonald, and that infectious song, “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” which I believe I first heard sung by Huckleberry Hound. And while it might offend nitpicky historians as to its accuracy... who cares? Legend is myth and vice versa. Clementine doesn’t possess the originality of Stagecoach nor the sucker punch that is The Searchers, but it definitely stands as one of Ford’s essential pictures.

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration of the theatrical release version looks terrific—I must say that I am very impressed with Criterion’s handling of black and white films made prior to the sixties. As with the earlier Fox release on DVD, the disk includes the early “pre-release” version of the film, a work-in-progress as producer and studio boss Daryl F. Zanuck re-cut Ford’s original submission. Further cutting ensued to create the theatrical release version, and it is most interesting to explore the differences in the two cuts. Another port over from the Fox disc is the excellent comparison of the two versions by film preservationist Robert Gitt.

New extras include a video essay by Ford scholar Tag Gallagher; a new interview with western historian Andrew C. Isenberg about the real Wyatt Earp; Bandit’s Wager—and early silent short directed by Ford’s brother Francis, and featuring John as an actor in a supporting role (!); television documentary excerpts about Monument Valley and Tombstone, Arizona; and a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation from 1947 featuring Fonda and Cathy Downs (who plays Clementine in the film).

Excellent stuff.

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By Lee Pfeiffer

Criterion has released a true oddity: a French horror film from 1960 by director Georges Franju titled Eyes Without a Face. The B&W film was notable in its day for being a rare excursion into a genre that most New Wave French filmmakers had studiously avoided. The intriguing plot centers on Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), a notable plastic surgeon who is pioneering breakthrough methods of reconstructing the faces of people who have suffered grievous injuries and disfigurements. On the surface, Genessier follows the norms of traditional medical research: publishing papers and giving lectures relating to his findings. However, the painstaking process of getting formal acceptance and  approval of new medical theories is not for him. He has an urgent need to pursue his theories outside of accepted medical practices. His daughter Christiana (Edit Scob) was severely injured in a car crash that he was responsible for. Wracked by guilt, Genessier has been practicing his controversial methods on his young female assistant Louise (Alida Valli), who had also required plastic surgery. The results have been successful and he has transformed her back into the beautiful woman she once was. The only fly in the ointment is that Genessier's methods require the kidnapping of other young, healthy women who he tortures brutally by literally removing their faces while they writhe in agony, awaiting certain death. Meanwhile, Christiana has been declared dead and no one- not even her fiancee who works as Genessier's protege- suspects otherwise. Genessier and Louise cater to Christina, who is kept in total isolation inside Genessier's country home that adjoins his clinic. Here, clad in a disturbing face mask that is devoid of any emotional features, she wanders the rooms and halls in loneliness and frustration, even as her doting father assures her that he will restore her natural beauty. To do so, he prepares for the operation by systematically planning more kidnappings so that he has a fresh supply of human flesh. When things go awry with one of his kidnapped victims, Genessier faces disaster at the very moment of his long-sought triumph. 

While Eyes Without a Face wouldn't meet the definition of a contemporary horror film (it is leisurely paced and caters to sophisticated viewers), the film is dripping with atmosphere and director Franju engages the audience from the very first disturbing frames of Genessier and Louise en route to dispose of the body of yet another innocent female victim. As with many  memorable movie villains, Genessier is a cultured man who is more misguided than evil. His crimes are committed only because of his overwhelming sense of guilt and they are a symptom of his obsession with righting a terrible wrong. Nevertheless, he gets carried away by his emotions and loses sight of the fact that, as a doctor committed to helping injured people, he is ensuring their demise.

Eyes Without a Face is a genuinely eerie cinematic experience and the fact that it was made in France gives the film an even more unique atmosphere. Still, this artfully crafted film was dumped on U.S. audiences in a dubbed version that was absurdly re-titled  The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, which also suffered severe edits. Criterion had released an impressive DVD version of the original French cut about ten years ago. The Blu-ray, which is up to the company's usual top-notch standards, carries over the original bonus extras and includes some new additions. They are:

• Archival interviews with Georges Franju.
• A new interview with actress Edith Scob.
• A 1985 French documentary about the making of the film
• Franju's controversial 1949 documentary Blood of the Beasts which was one of the first cinematic attempts to argue against animal cruelty. The still-powerful film depicts the horrendous conditions inside slaughterhouses and still packs an emotional wallop today.
• A gallery of trailers including the American release
• An informative illustrated booklet featuring essays by novelist Patrick McGrath and film historian David Kalat.

The movie is a mesmerizing experience with superb performances and direction and the Criterion Blu-ray finally does justice to this long-overlooked masterwork of the European horror genre.

“HITCH BEGINS”

By Raymond Benson

The British silent film period of director Alfred Hitchcock is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. It’s the former because it allows one to view a genius at the very beginning of his career—the kernels of motifs and themes, as well as stylistic choices, can be spotted and analyzed. It’s the latter because only one or two of the nine silent pictures he made are truly memorable and most are available today solely as poor quality public domain transfers.

The Criterion Collection has just released a bang-up, marvelous new edition of Hitchcock’s most celebrated silent work, The Lodger—A Story of the London Fog. The disk also contains one of the rarer silent titles, Downhill (also 1927), which might be reason enough for Hitchcock enthusiasts to purchase the package.

A bit of history: Hitchcock was working for Gainsborough Pictures under the auspices of Michael Balcon (one of the major studio heads of early British cinema). The young filmmaker was sent to Germany in 1925 to make his first two pictures so that he could “learn” the craft from the then-masters of expressionistic storytelling. He made The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, both of which were deemed not good enough to release in the UK (interestingly, they were both released in the US in 1926, making America the first English-speaking country to see a Hitchcock film!). Hitch’s third completed title, The Lodger, almost suffered the same fate. Balcon and others at the studio didn’t like it, and it was only after a film critic named Ivor Montagu came in and made suggestions for changing some title cards and reshooting some scenes, that The Lodger was finally released.

It was an immediate success, both critically and financially (prompting Gainsborough to release The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle in the UK, almost two years after they were made). The Lodger is also considered to be the first true “Hitchcock film” in that it’s a crime picture that presents many visual and thematic elements to which he would return (including but not limited to—the notion of the “wrong man,” blondes, handcuffs, sexual fetishism, and expressionistic lighting and camerawork). For a silent film, The Lodger is totally engrossing and fascinating, guaranteed to entertain even the most jaded viewers who can’t abide movies without talking.

The story is loosely based on the Jack the Ripper case (adapted from a novel by Marie Belloq Lowndes). A serial killer of blonde women known as “the Avenger” is loose in London. A mysterious stranger (Ivor Novello) rents the upstairs flat in the home of Daisy, a blonde fashion model and her parents. Daisy’s boyfriend is a cop, but she’s not really that interested in him—she’s more attracted to the stranger—the lodger who asks that all portraits of blonde women be removed from his room. Of course, it isn’t long before the lodger is suspected of being the Avenger.

Novello, who was a matinee idol at the time, is striking in the picture. Granted, in 1927, movies of this ilk were melodramatic, the acting exaggerated, and the pacing meticulous. Nevertheless, Novello’s good looks and pained expressions contribute to the building of suspense. The boarding house itself also becomes a character in the story, as outlined by art historian Steven Jacobs in an interesting supplement on the disk that discusses Hitchcock’s use of architecture in his pictures.

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Lee Pfeiffer

The 1964 sci-fi film Robinson Crusoe on Mars has always eluded me until the Blu-ray release from Criterion. The fact that a company as selective about its titles as Criterion would endorse a deluxe edition of a film that was written off as kid's matinee fodder back in its day gives testimony to the movie's many merits. Directed by Byron Haskin, an old hand at classic sci-fi (War of the Worlds, The Outer Limits), Robinson Crusoe on Mars owes more than its title to Daniel Dafoe's classic adventure novel. Despite its setting in the future, the movie adheres rather closely to the basic premise of the book. Paul Mantee and Adam West are astronauts orbiting near Mars when their attempt to avoid an astroid causes them to be drawn into the planet's gravitational pull. The two men eject separately in escape pods but West is killed in a crash landing. Mantee survival seems like an even worse fate: he has only a limited amount of water and the air is too thin to breathe. He is forced to watch his oxygen tanks deplete gradually, knowing it will lead to certain death. How he overcomes these obstacles provides an intriguing aspect to the movie. It becomes obvious that, although Mantee is accompanied by a surviving NASA chimp, the film's intelligent screenplay appeals as much to adults as it does to kiddees.

Mantee is a charismatic leading man who impressively carries off the more difficult aspects of the role such as trying to remain optimistic even when he suffers setback after setback in his attempts to use a radio to call earth for help. Then there is the chronic isolation. Although he solves the problem of food, air and water, he yearns for human companionship. He gets his wish through an unexpected development. An alien race frequently visits Mars to use slave labor as part of a mining endeavor. When one of the slaves (Victor Lundin) escapes, Mantee rescues him and names him Friday. Before long, the two men are valiantly trying to learn each other's language and customs. Soon, they're sitting around shirtless in their man cave indulging in some male bonding. Before the movie can become Brokeback Mountain on Mars, however, they find themselves under nearly constant assault by the alien spaceships who are relentlessly pursuing Friday. Forced underground, Mantee and Lundin are exposed to various climates and dangers on the red planet as they try to find isolation in the polar ice cap.

“GREETINGS AND FARTS”

By Raymond Benson

Master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu’s late-period picture, Good Morning (Ohayō), is a curious, but amusing, slice-of-life portrait of a suburban neighborhood in contemporary (circa 1959) Japan. Ozu, mostly known for the gendai-geki film genre, i.e., modern dramas about family life and social conditions, also made a few comedies. He was a genius at depicting relationships between parents and children (Tokyo Story, 1953, is arguably his most admirable work), and Good Morning presents something of a parable about how a couple of young schoolboys influence an entire community of suspicious and gossipy housewives and lackadaisical “salary men” husbands.

A Western audience will deem the comedy subtle; cultural differences between East and West, especially when it comes to bathroom humor, decidedly determine how funny someone will think Good Morning really is. There are a lot of fart jokes in the film. In fact, Ozu uses farting as a way that characters communicate, especially the children. The schoolboys assign status to how easily one can blow wind by pushing an imaginary button on a forehead. Inability to produce a toot results in minor ostracization. It must be said that the children’s farts don’t sound like the real thing—they are high-pitched and somewhat musical in tone.

The adults, on the other hand, produce lower-toned flatulence that is more realistic. In their case, the noises are often confused with real words. In one scene, a man is dressing for the day and pleasantly lets two or three bursts fly. Each time, his wife enters from the other room and asks, “Did you call?” He shakes his head no, and she leaves. It happens again and she returns. “Did you say something?”

The story, such as it is, concerns two brothers—probably about nine and six years of age—who decide to go on a speaking strike until their parents buy a new television set (all the rage, apparently, in those days). The boys are also rebelling against the grown-ups’ use of meaningless greetings to fill up air space—“Good morning,” “How are you,” “I’m fine,” “Nice day,” etc.

At the same time, the adult women in the block gossip and imagine faults in their neighbors, all based on misunderstandings and a lack of real communication—which is what Ozu’s film is really about. He seems to be saying that in order for everyone to get along in a modern society, we need to say what’s truthfully on our minds.

Shot in gorgeous Technicolor, Good Morning differs from Ozu’s more solemn works that have a restrained editorial pace and meditational camera work. This one is lively, is accompanied by a “funny” musical score, and features many scenes outdoors. The cast is fine, especially the two boys (played by Shitara Koji and Masahiko Shimazu).

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray features a 4K digital restoration (upgraded from the label’s previous DVD release) and an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. It looks terrific.

Perhaps more significant, though, is that Criterion has chosen to include as a supplement Ozu’s acclaimed silent film from 1932, I Was Born, But… Sound films came late to Japan because of the benshi—narrators who performed during screenings of silent pictures, commenting on the film’s narrative. They had a powerful hold on the industry. Criterion had previously released this title as part of an Eclipse box set of early Ozu titles, but here they’ve upgraded the movie as a Blu-ray. Also a comedy, Born deals with similar social mores. In this case, the boys influence how their father deals with his boss, and also how they relate to their school mate, the boss’ son. For my money, despite being a silent picture, I Was Born, But… is better than Good Morning!

Other supplements include a portion of a “lost” Ozu silent short from 1929, A Straightforward Boy; a new interview with film scholar David Bordwell about the films; and a fascinating video essay on Ozu’s use of humor by critic David Cairns. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s essay adorns the inner booklet.

Good Morning is a worthwhile release from Criterion, especially for aficionados of Japanese cinema. One viewing, and your perception of farting will be changed forever.

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“A MOD MURDER MYSTERY”

By Raymond Benson

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (it’s spelled this way in the film credits, but on theatrical posters and advertising it was called Blow-Up) was a landmark, envelope-pushing film that caused quite a stir. For one thing, it was one of the nails in the coffin of the U.S. Production Code, paving the way for the elimination of cinematic censorship and the eventual creation of the movie ratings. Its depiction of nudity, sexual attitudes, and recreational drugs crossed the line for late 1966. Nevertheless, newspaper ads got away with simply proclaiming that the picture was “Recommended for Mature Audiences,” since this was prior to the ratings themselves.

Blowup also stands as a cultural landmark in that it captures that moment of time called “Swinging London.” Everything was “mod”—music, fashion, art... even groups of youths were called “mods.” Antonioni’s film could serve as a time capsule for that period of artistic rebellion. It’s also a curiosity in that it was an Italian-British co-production, financed by Hollywood—but it definitely comes off as “English.” The filmmaker received his only Best Director Oscar nomination for the picture, and he shared a nomination for Original Screenplay with Tonino Guerra.

The story concerns Thomas, a professional photographer (charismatically portrayed by David Hemmings), who we follow as he goes about his daily routine of shooting gorgeous fashion models and whatever else strikes his fancy as he roams London. He’s estranged from his wife (Sarah Miles), and it’s apparent they have an open relationship (how very mod of them!). One day, while strolling through Maryon Park (which still looks practically the same today), Thomas spies a lovely young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) with an older man. He snaps pictures without the couple knowing it, but then the woman chases Thomas down and demands to have the film. He won’t give it up—the pictures are going into an art book he’s planning to publish. When he develops the roll, Thomas discovers that a murder may have occurred. Later on that night, he returns to the park and finds that, indeed, the older man’s body is lying in the grass. The mystery of the crime becomes Thomas’ obsession.

There isn’t much plot beyond that. Instead, Antonioni presents an existential treatise on the nature of seeing and not-seeing, or perhaps imagination vs. reality. Thomas seems to have everything a good-looking, talented man could want—his pick of “birds” (yes, that was the slang for “girls” then), money, a fancy car, and the freedom to chase the muse. And yet, there is something missing in his life and it soon becomes obvious that he’s not very happy. The uncovering of the mystery further shakes him out of party mode and forces him to face the real world. It’s a theme Antonioni explores in several of his works.

The film is a visual feast. The sets are filled with the modern art of the period and “Twiggy”-style clothing. The London locations are used to a great advantage, and many of these are revisited in the new documentary on the making of the film that is included as a supplement on the disk. The soundtrack is also “hip”—Herbie Hancock provides the jazz score, and the Yardbirds (which at the time included Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) appear as themselves and perform at an underground club. The ménage à trois scene that caused all the fuss with the Production Code and features Hemmings, Jane Birkin (who at the time was married to composer John Barry), and Gillian Hills, is wild and raucous and was probably pretty shocking at the time—but today it would barely classify for an “R” rating in the U.S.

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray release of Blowup exploits all of these assets in a gorgeous restored 4K digital transfer and an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The supplements are plentiful—the aforementioned 2016 documentary; new pieces on Antonioni’s artistic approach with photography curators Walter Moser and Philippe Garner and art historian David Alan Mellor; a 2016 conversation with Vanessa Redgrave; two archival interviews with David Hemmings; an archival interview with Jane Birkin; footage from the 1967 Cannes Film Festival at which Blowup won the Grand Prix (also with an interview with the director); and two trailers. The set comes with a fairly thick, lavishly illustrated booklet featuring an essay by film scholar David Forgacs, an updated 1966 account of the film’s shooting by Stig Björkman, the questionnaires distributed to photographers and painters while developing the film, and the 1959 Julio Cortázar short story on which the film is loosely based.

In short, Criterion has released an exemplary set for a milestone film. So take a trip back to the swinging sixties for some free love, pop music, and far-out modern art. It will turn you on.

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“CAIN, CURTIZ, AND CRAWFORD”

By Raymond Benson

Mildred Pierce is one curious piece of cinema. As film critics Molly Haskell and Robert Polito point out in their fascinating conversation that is a supplement on this beautifully-presented Blu-ray release from The Criterion Collection, Pierce is a movie that almost doesn’t know what it wants to be. In many ways it is a woman’s picture, that is, a melodrama, but it’s disguised inside a manufactured film noir.

This reasoning is sound, for in spite of novelist James M. Cain being known for terrific pulp crime fiction (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice), his 1941 novel Mildred Pierce is not a crime story, unless you want to say that a young woman having an affair with her stepfather is “criminal.” The book is indeed hardboiled and pulpy, but there is no murder in it.

On the other hand, Michael Curtiz’s film version of Mildred Pierce actually begins with a sensational murder—that of the stepfather—and the rest of the picture is something of a journey to reveal who the killer is. This retooling of the story must have been ordered by the studio to capitalize on the success of Billy Wilder’s 1944 film adaptation of Double Indemnity, and these types of crime pictures—what would later, in the 50s, be termed film noir—were starting to pour out of Hollywood. The noir trappings are all there—an Eastern European director, highly contrasting black and white photography, a look steeped in German expressionism, cynicism and angst, unstable alliances, and even a femme fatale—this time in the form of the daughter character.

Mildred (Joan Crawford) is a divorcee with two children. She still sees her ex-husband, but also his best friend, Wally (Jack Carson), who hits on her every chance he gets. Mildred struggles to make ends meet but eventually finds some success running a small chain of bakeries (“Mildred’s”). Her bratty oldest daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth), however, constantly complains about their social position in the class structure, and is determined to tear her mother down. Mildred soon marries somewhat-wealthy Monty (Zachary Scott), who is the man killed at the beginning of the picture. The story is told as a flashback, as many films noir are.

It all works, I suppose, although the more recent HBO adaptation of the novel starring Kate Winslet is a much more faithful rendition of the story. Still, the motion picture has top notch entertainment value, and it also contains several powerhouse performances. Crawford deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar for playing Mildred, and newcomer Blyth earned a Supporting Actress nomination as the truly evil Veda. Eve Arden, as Mildred’s spunky friend Ida, also scored a supporting nomination. Butterfly McQueen deserves mention as the family’s maid—her presence always lights up the screen. The men in the movie are fine but nothing special—this is definitely a film dominated by the women. Ranald MacDougall was nominated for his screenplay, and the picture itself was nominated for the top award. Curtiz, who won his Oscar for directing Casablanca, was left out this time around; but there is no question that his work is always exemplary. He was a consummate studio helmsman who could make any kind of picture.

As with most Criterion releases, the visual and sound quality are near-perfection. The new 4K digital restoration looks sharp, and the uncompressed monaural soundtrack is full-front. Supplements include the aforementioned new interview between Haskell and Polito; an excerpt from a 1970 episode of The David Frost Show with guest Joan Crawford; TCM’s 2002 feature-length documentary, Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Movie Star (which also appeared on the original DVD release); an entertaining Q&A with Ann Blyth at a 2002 screening of the film, conducted by film noir historian Eddie Muller; a worth-the-price-of-admission interview with author James M. Cain from a 1969 segment of The Today Show; and the theatrical trailer. The booklet contains an essay by critic Imogen Sara Smith.

There is much to recommend in this new Criterion Blu-ray release—a must-have for fans of Cain, Curtiz, and Crawford, although not necessarily in that order!

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RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Lee Pfeiffer 

Criterion has released a deluxe Blu-ray edition of director Peter Brook's 1963 screen adaptation of William Golding's landmark novel Lord of the Flies. As virtually anyone familiar with literature of the latter half of the twentieth century probably knows, the story involves a group of British schoolboys who are among the refugees deported from England out the outbreak of what is, presumably, a third world war. Their plane is shot down over the ocean but it crashes off shore from a remote island. All of the adults die but the boys miraculously survive and make their way to dry land. Realizing their survival is in their own hands, the boys (the age of whom ranges from pre-pubescent to early teens) set about the task of building shelters. They quickly master the essentials of staying alive and learn to start fires and to hunt and fish with reasonably effective hand-made tools. Inevitably, the fragments of a society begin to coalesce but there is stark contrast in philosophies. Jack (Tom Chapin) is an assertive, take-charge older boy who quickly learns he can use his aggressive personality traits to rise to a leadership position. Jack proves his worth by quickly going native and relishing the opportunity to play king. His skills are essential when it comes to providing food for the group. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Ralph (James Aubrey), a sensitive and thoughtful boy who rivals Jack as leader of the group based on his intellectual superiority. When the rivalry becomes heated, Jack and his numerically superior group of followers resort to violent methods to suppress Ralph and his friend Piggy (Hugh Edwards), a pudgy and harmless boy who must indulge many degrading insults and taunts. The resulting battle of wills leads to numerous tragedies and a conclusion that finds Ralph alone and being hunted down by his former schoolmates, who intend to kill him. 

It's clear that Golding intended to use this scenario as a microcosm for society in general. He initially regarded himself as an optimist regarding human nature but that changed during his service in WWII, when he witnessed behavior that he thought was so horrendous that he became convinced that evil is far more prevalent in the world than he had suspected. That cynicism is carried over into the film, which is such a literate version of the novel that no one is credited as a screenwriter. Director Brook would assemble his cast of young boys (none of whom had any acting experience) and read passages and dialogue from the novel prior to filming each scene. The technique worked remarkably well. Brook's shoestring budget of $300,000 was cut in half after his ill-fated, short-term alliance with famed producer Sam Spiegel, who began to make significant changes to the production in the hopes of making it more commercial. When he insisted on adding a group of young girls to the mix, Brook ended their partnership but had to pay Spiegel half of his meager budget to cover expenses he had never even authorized. Left with only $150,000 in the coffers, Brook (who is primarily known as an acclaimed director of avant-garde theatrical productions) managed to get everyone to the island of Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico, where most of the footage was shot. Brook could not afford a seasoned cinematographer so gambled on hiring a local still photographer, Tom Hollyman, whose work on the film is simply remarkable (though he would never make another motion picture). Hollyman's footage was supplemented by footage taken by Gerald Feil, who was given a hand-held camera and told to shoot anything he found interesting. The result is a superb compilation of both men's accomplishments. The movie was shot in B&W for budgetary reasons but it also worked beneficially in terms of the impact of this stark, bleak tale. Raymond Leppard's brilliant score combines British schoolboy songs with ominous jungle themes.  It must be pointed out that, despite the impressive performances of the young cast members, only one- James Aubrey- decided to gravitate into acting as a profession. The real hero, however, is Brook himself, whose exercise in the ultimate "guerrilla movie making" still stands the test of time as a powerful and fascinating film. 

Criterion's special Blu-ray release does justice to the movie on every level beginning with a superb transfer that emphasizes the glorious cinematography. The extras in the set are:

• Audio commentary track featuring Peter Brook, producer Lewis Allen, cinematographers Tom Hollyman and Gerald Feil
• Audio of William Golding reading excerpts from the book, accompanied by scenes from the film
• Deleted scene with optional commentary track
• Insightful interview with Brook from 2008 (in which he pointedly says he never made a commercial movie because he refused to compromise with the studios in terms of his artistic vision)
•  Wonderful home movies taken by the young cast members.
• 1980 British TV interview with William Golding (one of the few he ever gave)
• A new interview with cinematographer Gerald Feil
• The original trailer
• Feil's 1975 short film documenting Peter Brook rehearsing cast members in Brooklyn for one of his off-beat productions. For those of us who do not "tread the boards" for a living, the rehearsals seem bizarre and resemble an exercise class more than an acting rehearsal. Some of it is unintentionally funny: the kind of pretentious scenario that is often spoofed by Woody Allen, with actors chanting and seeming to run about without rhyme or reason. Yet, who are we to argue? Brook's reputation as a major theatrical director remains firmly intact.
• A collector's booklet featuring essays by Peter Brook and film critic Geoffrey Macnab 

 In summary, the Criterion release of Lord of the Flies is essential viewing for classic movie lovers. 

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“CARVER COUNTRY ON CELLULOID”

By Raymond Benson

Short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was known for pithy, honest tales of the human condition in modern settings, the literary equivalent of cinematic “neo-realism.” His critically-acclaimed work was published mostly in the seventies and eighties, and he died of lung cancer in 1988 at the age of fifty. Since Carver was known for his brevity of prose, it might seem curious that a three-hour film would be adapted from his material.

Only a director like Robert Altman could make it work.

Altman (and co-writer Frank Barhydt) took nine of Carver’s stories and one poem, mashed them together, re-located the settings to Los Angeles, and freely intersected them in order to create an ensemble piece that reflected “Carver Country” with a Southern California sensibility. While the stories in the movie might not be entirely faithful to the original tales, they capture Carver’s spirit. Nevertheless, make no mistake—Short Cuts is a Robert Altman film, and one of his very best.

In terms of his trademark “collage” storytelling that focuses on multiple principal characters, it’s as if the filmmaker wanted to out-do Nashville by broadening the canvas and extending the randomness of dramatic encounters. Short Cuts is certainly a movie about chance, if anything, although on the surface the picture follows the messy relationships between husbands and wives and various extramarital lovers, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. The way Altman moves smoothly from one set of characters to another is masterful—his direction received an Oscar nomination (but Steven Spielberg won that year for Schindler’s List).

The cast is simply amazing—the likes of Tim Robbins, Jack Lemmon, Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Madeleine Stowe, Matthew Modine, Robert Downey, Jr., Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Frances McDormand, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Penn, Lili Taylor, Peter Gallagher, Lori Singer, Annie Ross, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry—and more—populate this ambitious, sprawling, and extraordinary accomplishment. The other star is Los Angeles itself—in many ways, Short Cuts is the ultimate L.A. movie.

The Criterion Collection had previously issued the film on DVD in 2004 but now presents a new, restored 4K digital transfer on Blu-ray, approved by cinematographer Walt Lloyd, with a 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Alternatively, viewers can choose a 5.1 soundtrack mix presented in DTS-HD Master Audio. If that isn’t enough, one can watch with an isolated music track—and there’s plenty of great music by Mark Isham, and songs by Doc Pomus and Mac Rebennack (AKA Dr. John).

A second disk contains a wealth of supplements, all of which appeared on the original 2004 release (the only extra not ported over is a segment from BBC television’s Moving Pictures tracing the development of the screenplay). Otherwise, you get a video conversation from 2004 between Altman and Tim Robbins; a terrific 1993 feature-length documentary on the making of the film which includes plenty of footage showing Altman at work on the set; a 1992 PBS documentary on Raymond Carver; a rare 1983 one-hour audio interview with Carver (who rarely spoke about his work); original demo recordings of the songs, performed by Dr. John himself; a few deleted scenes; and a study of the difficulty in marketing such an unusual motion picture using examples of numerous poster and art designs and concepts, trailers, and teasers. The essay in the booklet is by film critic Michael Wilmington.

Short Cuts is one of the masterpieces of the 1990s and belongs on the shelf of any Robert Altman fan. 

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“ALTMAN’S NORTHWEST TERRITORY”

By Raymond Benson

Robert Altman’s self-proclaimed “anti-western,” based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton, is one peculiar piece of cinema that fits right in with the “New Hollywood” movement that began in the late 60s and continued through most of the next decade. At the time, McCabe & Mrs. Miller was considered extremely unconventional, not very audience-friendly, and quirky to boot. Cinema-goers expecting a traditional western were bewildered, but word-of-mouth and good reviews by younger, “hip” critics edged the picture along to more educated and receptive viewers. Today, McCabe is generally acclaimed to be one of Altman’s best movies.

We weren’t yet accustomed to the director’s methods of movie-making in 1971. M*A*S*H (1970), of course, was a huge and popular hit. His second effort, Brewster McCloud (also 1970), was less welcomed, although its charms are appreciated now by the faithful (I consider it one of Altman’s better pictures). McCabe followed these, so the director’s stylistic temperaments were still new: overlapping dialogue, improvisational acting, ensemble casting, murky—and yet beautiful—cinematography, an unusual musical soundtrack, anti-heroes for protagonists, and a “controlled sloppiness” of mise-en-scène. McCabe had all of these things, but it also had two strong performances by the leads, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and by the soon-to-be-familiar “Altman stock company” (Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, René Auberjonois, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Michael Murphy, among others).

McCabe (Beatty) drifts into a ne’er-do-well mining town in the U.S. northwest territory, circa turn of the last century—so it was still very much “western times”—and promptly decides to show the settlers he could be an alpha dog. The town is still in the process of being built—the only notable structures are the church and the saloon. Not bothering to refute a rumor that he’s a gunfighter who had killed men, McCabe sets up a brothel and begins to make serious money. Enter Mrs. Miller (Christie), a Cockney (and opium addict) who comes to town to start her own whorehouse. She and McCabe eventually team up and create a class-A establishment that is actually the cleanest and most comfortable place to hang out. Then the evil mining company arrives to buy out McCabe, and he’d better accept—or else. McCabe turns out to be not a gunslinger at all—but he attempts to fake it in order to save his own life, Mrs. Miller, and the town.

Christie was nominated for Best Actress for her role, and she is quite good as the strong woman who actually becomes the brains of the outfit. Beatty’s McCabe is actually not a very smart guy—he’s all bravado and no substance—a character he does well seeing that it’s out of the actor’s comfort zone. Keith Carradine made his big screen debut in the film at the age of nineteen—he’s wonderfully goofy and lanky as a cowboy who spends most of his time at the brothel.

Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography is indeed murky; its soft focus was apparently achieved with a pre-fogging technique on the film negative prior to exposure. On Criterion’s new Blu-ray, the imagery looks better than I remember it did when it was projected on a screen.

Probably the most impressive thing about the film is production designer Leon Ericksen’s “town” which is built before our eyes as the movie progresses. Altman employed the builders as actors (in costumes) and they are seen in the background, working away, as the action unfolds in front of them.

The disk sports a new 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. An audio commentary from 2002 featuring Altman and producer David Foster accompanies the film—and it’s always a pleasure to listen to the director talk about his films. There’s a fascinating new making-of documentary featuring the likes of Carradine, Auberjonois, frequent Altman collaborator Joan Tewkesbury, casting director Graeme Clifford, and others; an interesting new video conversation between film historians Cari Beauchamp and Rick Jewell; a vintage featurette about the production; footage from the Art Directors Guild Film Society Q&A from 1999 with Ericksen; an archival interview with Zsigmond; a gallery of stills from the set by photographer Steve Schapiro; and—perhaps the most fun—two excerpts from The Dick Cavett Show from 1971, one with Pauline Kael talking about the film, and the other with Altman. There’s the obligatory trailer, and an essay by novelist and critic Nathaniel Rich in the booklet.

Bottom line—the Criterion Collection’s latest addition to its Robert Altman line-up is impressive and belongs on the shelf of any true cinephile.

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“CLAWS, LUST, AND LEWTON”

By Raymond Benson

Sometimes brilliance in Hollywood comes in very modest packages. Who would have thought that a string of horror films made on shoestring budgets, with no star power, and little attention from the studio, would become classics in style and cinematic poetry?

That’s what happened when, in 1942, producer Val Lewton was put in charge of a division at RKO Radio Pictures with the directive to make a series of ridiculously inexpensive movies intended to be competition for Universal’s successful franchise of monster flicks. Lewton—a former novelist and poet—had previously worked for MGM and, in particular, David O. Selznick, before being hired by RKO. He brought this experience along with his literary background to the table when he was told he could do anything he wanted as long as the budget for each film did not exceed $150,000.

Thus, there wasn’t enough budget for special visual effects, elaborate monster makeup, or any of the other trappings for which Universal was known. Lewton had to tap into the imaginations of his audience members and find ways to suggest that what was on the screen was truly frightening. To do so, he put together an inventive creative team—director Jacques Tourneur, writer DeWitt Bodean, cinematographer Nicholas Musucara, and editor Mark Robson—to make the first iconic entry under the producer’s watch.

The result? Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur, was so successful that it put RKO, which had been struggling after the financial failures of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, back on the map. Box-office aside, the motion picture manages to be atmospheric, eerie, and psychologically disturbing without a single monster appearance. Everything frightening about it is all in the mind. Cat People unnerves viewers through the use of light and shadow, sound, and the mere suggestion of menace.

The story concerns Irena, an Eastern European woman in New York (exotically played by Simone Simon), who has a mysterious past and family tree. It seems she descended from a cult of Serbians who practiced witchcraft—and they had the ability (or curse?) of turning into panthers when sexually aroused. During the course of the story, Irena—as well as the men around her— must come to grips with who she really is. Okay, it’s a love story... sort of.

The sexuality at the heart of Cat People had to be played with a good deal of subtlety due to the Production Code, but it’s there. Much of the film’s power comes from the primal, sensual heat within the subtext of the visual poetry on display. Not only does the movie burn with suggestive tension, its German expressionistic beauty is seductive. The style is what gives Cat People its claws.

Criterion’s new 2K digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, certainly shows off the look of the film, and it appears better than ever. The black and white imagery is appropriately grainy and the contrasts are sharp. There’s an audio commentary from 2005 featuring film historian Gregory Mank, including excerpts from an audio interview with Simone Simon.

Among the supplements is a new interview with cinematographer John Bailey, who was DP of Paul Schrader’s more explicit 1982 remake of Cat People—this is a highlight, as Bailey compares the two pictures and talks about the work of his predecessor Musucara. Additionally, Jacques Tourneur is interviewed in a 1977 French television program. Most impressive is the inclusion of a feature-length documentary from TCM, narrated by Martin Scorsese, about the life and work of Val Lewton. The movie trailer and an essay in the booklet by critic Geoffrey O’Brien round out the extras.

Creepy, stylish, and mesmerizing, Cat People was the beginning of a remarkable four-year run of interesting, intelligent horror movies made by dedicated craftsmen who not only wanted to entertain an audience but also to create art. Let’s hope that The Criterion Collection presents more of the works of Val Lewton, but for now, Cat People is just in time for Halloween!

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“SOME SHORT FILMS ABOUT COMMANDMENTS”

By Raymond Benson

Much has been written and said about director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ten-hour mini-series originally broadcast on Polish television in 1988. The late Stanley Kubrick, who rarely commented on other filmmakers’ works, wrote in a foreword to the published screenplays of Dekalog that Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz had dramatized their ideas with “dazzling skill.” Many critics have called Dekalog one of the greatest television mini-series ever made.

Although Dekalog has been previously released on home video, The Criterion Collection has seen fit to present on DVD and Blu-ray a new, restored 4K digital transfer that has also been recently playing in select art house cinemas around the U.S. Even though all but two episodes are in an analog television aspect ratio (4:3), there is no question that this is cinematic material. Kieślowski’s mise-en-scene is subtle and beckons to be seen on the big screen—or a large high definition TV. The clarity of the new Criterion release does wonders for Dekalog, and as a result the package is one of the hallmarks of the company’s prestigious releases.

Dekalog is loosely based on the Ten Commandments. No, it’s not a Biblical drama. Each episode is a modern (i.e., the late 1980s, when the films were made) take on how the Ten Commandments relate—or not—to the contemporary world. The stories are set in and around a single apartment block in Warsaw, Poland, and mostly involve various tenants. Each episode is a separate tale, and yet characters from one part might appear in the background of another, illustrating that the “chapters” are connected. For example, a little girl who is at the focus of Dekalog: Seven can be seen playing outside a window in Dekalog: Nine. An old man who collects stamps is a minor character in Dekalog: Eight, and his two grown sons are the protagonists of Dekalog: Ten.

Kieślowski, who died too young (of heart failure) in 1996, apparently liked story cycles. Another of his acclaimed works is the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue; White; Red) from 1993 and 1994—interconnected but separate tales obliquely meditating on the meanings behind the colors of the French flag. Dekalog does the same thing with the Ten Commandments. Kieślowski and Piesiewicz wrote ten little dramas that have as starting points the Biblical moral tenets, but they are not handled literally. For example, in Dekalog: One, a man keeps his beloved computer in a prominent spot in his living room, but his reliance on what the computer tells him with its calculations eventually has tragic results. This is Kieślowski’s ironic way of commenting on the commandment “thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

And that’s the key to Dekalog—every episode is flush with irony. The episode dealing with “thou shalt not kill” is more about the capital punishment faced by the protagonist of the tale than it is the murder he committed that landed him on death row. The episode concerning “honor thy parents” concerns a young woman who has incestuous thoughts for the man she always thought was her father—but who, it turns out, is not. Sometimes a single episode relates to two—or even three—commandments, and there are cases in which one commandment is the subject of two or more chapters.

This is provocative, challenging stuff.

Dekalog stars some of the most talented Polish actors of the day—many of whom none of us outside the Iron Curtain knew at the time. And that’s another thing—one must keep in mind that Dekalog was made while Poland was still a Communist country. While this has some bearing on the stories, the underlying truths of the piece are still quite universal.

Interestingly, the cycle features nine different cinematographers (Three and Nine were shot by the same DP). There is indeed a different look to each episode—and yet Kieślowski managed to keep them all consistent in style to create a whole. The cumulative effect of the ten pieces—in content and visual craft—is what ultimately makes Dekalog such a powerful, meaningful work of art.

Two of the episodes, Five and Six, were expanded to feature length (and were shot in widescreen) to become A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, and were released theatrically, also in 1988. The longer pictures add more depth to the original TV versions. In the case of A Short Film About Love, the ending is remarkably different. Fortunately, Criterion has included these two feature films in the set along with the ten original one-hour episodes and trailers.

An entire extra disk is devoted to hours of supplements. Most welcome are archival interviews with Kieślowski, taken from 1987, 1990, and 1995. A very informative and illustrative new interview with film studies professor and author Annette Insdorf is a highlight of the set. Other archival and new material includes interviews with thirteen cast members, Piesiewicz, three cinematographers, editor Ewa Smal, and Kieślowski confidante Hanna Krall. The thick booklet contains an essay and capsules on the films by cinema scholar Paul Coates, along with excerpts from the book Kieślowski on Kieślowski.

The Criterion Collection has always been known for producing boxed sets of outstanding quality. Dekalog is one of their crown jewels.

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“DOWN HERE YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN”

By Raymond Benson

When a film has been previously issued on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, a Criterion upgrade is still always welcome because you’ll get stuff that further enhances the viewing experience. Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen were once notoriously camera-shy regarding interviews or “making of” documentaries of their work—but Criterion has managed to coax them into participating—and it’s a treat.

Blood Simple was the debut feature from the Coen Brothers, and it’s the second release by the Criterion Collection of the siblings’ work (Inside Llewyn Davis appeared in early 2016). Simple premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1984, had an acclaimed showing at the New York Film Festival later that same year, and then was picked up for theatrical distribution in early 1985. Although it was made on a shoestring budget (about $1.5 million after post-production), Blood Simple exhibited trademark stylistic and thematic elements that would appear in all of the Coen Brothers’ pictures—flashy cinematography, dark humor, literary influences, intelligent plotting, existentialism, and engaging stories made for smart audiences about stupid people.

I recall viewing the film in New York on its initial release and becoming very excited about it. I already couldn’t wait for the next feature from the brothers. I saw something so fresh and original—even though it had obvious nods to B-movie horror flicks and neo-noir crime thrillers—that I immediately anointed in my head the Coen Brothers as “the next big thing.” And that they indeed became.

The extensive supplements on the Criterion disk—worth the price of admission—detail the production from the genesis in the siblings’ heads to the ultimate, long-awaited release. From the very beginning, they envisioned actor M. Emmet Walsh as Visser, the sleazy private detective, even though the brothers had never met him. The script grew out of this concept—and luckily, Walsh accepted the meager offer to appear in the film, even though nearly everyone on the production had never made a feature film before. The money was raised through friends and other investors, the casting of the other roles was done in New York, and the picture was made in and around Austin, Texas because they didn’t have to use union crews there. “In Texas—down here, you’re on your own,” Visser says in a voice-over at the beginning of the story. The Coens were indeed “on their own” when they made Blood Simple.

Originally the Coens had wanted Holly Hunter in the lead role—they had seen her in a play in New York. She was unavailable, so she recommended her friend Frances McDormand, who got the lead part of Abby. It was her first film, too. John Getz was cast as her chump lover, Ray, and experienced actor Dan Hedaya came in as Marty, the cuckolded husband. While McDormand is absolutely wonderful in the film, it is indeed Walsh who owns it. If the actor was going to place only one of his many movie appearances in a time capsule of his career, Blood Simple should be it.

Barry Sonnenfeld, who had a little experience shooting documentaries, was hired as Director of Photography—so he was essentially a newbie as well. Even the composer of the score, Carter Burwell, had never done a film before. It was something of a miracle that Blood Simple turned out so remarkably good. Nearly all the personages involved would work together again on future pictures (and McDormand and Joel Coen would fall in love and marry!).

If you’ve never seen it—the film is a must. The story starts off in a straight-forward fashion—

Abby has left her husband, Marty, and is shacking up with Ray. Marty hires detective Visser at first to get evidence of the affair—and then Marty contracts the guy to kill the couple. Visser fakes the murders so he can still take the money, and then things go really wrong from there.

Suffice it to say that the nearly fifteen-minute segment of Ray attempting to murder Marty—illustrating to audiences how truly difficult it is to kill someone—is pure brilliance.

The feature is a new restored 4K digital transfer, approved by Sonnenfeld and the Coens, with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The image is gorgeous, clear, and vividly colorful. The masterful sound mixing by Skip Lievsay is also showcased in this Blu-ray edition. Supplements include outstanding and fascinating new interviews with the Coens, McDormand, Walsh, Burwell, and Lievsay about the making of the film, all told with humor and behind-the-scenes stories that will convince you that working on a Coen Brothers set is the ideal way to make a movie. For example, at one point we learn that in order to make a puny, burning dumpster look bigger, the Coens hired little people to play the men throwing garbage into it. By shooting from a distance, the actors appeared to be normal-size, and the dumpster looked huge.

The most valuable extra on the disk is the “conversation” between the Coens and Sonnenfeld about the film’s look as they comment on selected scenes while simultaneously using Telestrator video illustrations. This 75-minute piece is a master class in filmmaking. Three trailers are also on the disk, including the initial “investor trailer” that was shot early on during the fund-raising process. An essay by novelist and critic Nathaniel Rich adorns the booklet.

Moody, shocking, and funny, Blood Simple represents the Coen Brothers at their best—and they were only getting started! The new Criterion release is a 5-star gem. Let’s hope the company continues to explore the rest of the Coens’ oeuvre!

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“EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK”

By Raymond Benson

In the late 1950s, a film movement emerged in Britain known as “Free Cinema.” Some of the U.K.’s most celebrated filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s were among its practitioners—Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Lorenza Mazzetti, and Tony Richardson. The directors made low budget, short documentaries about the working class with an almost deliberate “non commercial” sensibility. It was radical and exciting, and it was a precursor to the British New Wave that dovetailed with the French New Wave that was so influential on filmmakers everywhere.

Many of the pictures of the British New Wave, released between 1959 and 1964, focused on characters described as “angry young men,” and the films themselves were referred to by critics and theorists as “kitchen sink dramas.” This was because the movies were presented in a harsh, realistic fashion and were indeed about the gritty, working class lives of “ordinary” (but actually, extraordinary) people. Some of the titles you’ll recognize—Look Back in Anger, Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, This Sporting Life, and others.

A Taste of Honey, released in 1961 and directed by Tony Richardson, was a product of the early Free Cinema Movement and the British New Wave. Based on a controversial but highly successful stage play by first-time dramatist (at age 19) Shelagh Delaney, Taste is remarkable for several reasons. For one, it is about an “angry young woman.” It is also shockingly frank for its time. The British Board of Censors approved the picture only for persons over the age of 16, for it deals with these then taboo subjects—female promiscuity, alcoholism, interracial sex, pregnancy out of wedlock, and homosexuality. There’s even a bit of nudity. (As a “kitchen sink drama,” it indeed has everything but!)

The story focuses on Jo (expertly played by newcomer Rita Tushingham), who lives with her tramp of a mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), in a Manchester ne’er-do-well working class environment. Helen seems to flit from man to man and doesn’t care all that much for her daughter, now 16. Jo, frustrated and dissatisfied with the status quo, has a relationship with a black sailor (Paul Danquah) who’s in town for a few days. Helen runs off with a new beau, Peter (Robert Stephens), and gets married, leaving Jo alone and pregnant. Jo then finds solace by befriending a gay man, Geoffrey (courageously portrayed by Murray Melvin), who moves in with her until Helen decides to leave her husband and return.

This was bold stuff in 1961. In fact, it was still against the law in England to be homosexual at the time. It is to Delaney’s credit to bring the Geoff character to life on the stage without saying he’s gay, but letting the audience know without a doubt that he is. The film version accomplishes the same thing (Melvin is the only cast member who was also in the original stage production), handling the subject matter with honesty, grace, and empathy.

Filmed entirely on location, the picture captures the grime and hardships of these people but also manages to be brilliantly entertaining. The acting is top-notch, and Richardson’s direction is flawless. The camerawork by Walter Lassally, often hand-held, provides a documentary feel to the proceedings that expound on the earlier stylistic traits of the Free Cinema Movement.

The Criterion Collection Blu-ray release features a new, restored 4K digital transfer with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, and it looks marvelous. Supplements include: new interviews with Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin (the latter’s is especially enlightening); an audio interview with Tony Richardson from 1962, accompanied by stills and clips; an excerpt from a 1960 television interview with Shelagh Delaney; a 1998 interview with DP Walter Lassally; a new piece with film scholar Kate Dorney about the film’s origins and the stage production’s director, Joan Littlewood; and Momma Don’t Allow, a 1956 Free Cinema documentary short co-directed by Richardson and Karel Reisz and shot by Lassally. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe.

While the storyline and subject matter might sound drab and dire, A Taste of Honey does have an under-flavor of sweetness that makes viewing the film a truly rewarding experience. Recommended.

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BY RAYMOND BENSON

“SAND IN YOUR...”

By Raymond Benson

One of the hallmarks of 1960s art house cinema was Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Japanese author/playwright Kōbō Abe from his own 1962 novel. The picture won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964 and was nominated that same year for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. The following year, Teshigahara was nominated for Best Director (but lost to Robert Wise for The Sound of Music).

This is avant-garde cinema at its finest—or perhaps its most tedious, depending on your taste.

The story is straight-forward. Niki (played by Eiji Okada, the male lead from Hiroshima mon amour), a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist (he studies bugs), has ventured to a desert-like area of Japan (does one exist?) near the sea to find specific species of insects. He is stranded and needs a place to stay overnight. The “villagers” (we never see a village) point to a dilapidated shack at the bottom of a deep sand pit where a young woman lives. They throw a rope ladder over the side of the pit so that he can meet the woman (Kyōko Kishida). She seems nice and welcoming enough, and she’s attractive, too. The next morning, the rope ladder is gone. Niki is stuck in the sand pit with the nameless woman, despite several attempts to leave.

It is the woman’s “job” to shovel sand from the pit, which is raised by the villagers to be used in concrete for sale. It also prevents the shack from sinking into the sand and being forever buried. Niki is forced to be her helper, whether he likes it or not. Weeks and months go by—eventually he becomes the woman’s lover. Even when Niki does manage to escape, he is caught and brought back to the pit. The sand becomes his lot in life (pun intended).

All this takes place over 2-1/2 hours. Is it entertaining? Yes and no.

The symbolism and metaphors may have been revelatory in 1964, and I always tell my film history students  to judge a film within the context of when it was released, not by whether it “holds up” today. In that perspective, Woman in the Dunes is fascinating. It’s obviously meant to be a modern-day take on the myth of Sisyphus, a Greek king who was punished by the gods to continually roll a heavy stone up a hill, only to have it roll down again. Niki and the woman toil with the sand, day after day, and yet there’s always more sand. The couple represent, of course, man and woman, the pit represents life, and the villagers are the “taskmasters” or perhaps the gods. It’s not a spoiler to say that Niki, in the end, accepts his fate.

As to whether or not a young audience today will find much to like about the picture is a matter of aesthetics. The film is beautifully shot in glorious black and white (but in the old Academy ratio, i.e. not widescreen, unusual for 1964) by Hiroshi Segawa. The shots of sand, in particular, are striking—sand slipping, sand falling, sand on skin, microscopic sand, sand everywhere. The arty love scenes (there is some nudity, but this was Japan, not America, in 1964) are notable because the sand coats the sweaty bodies, causing one to wonder where all that sand is going. Ouch.

The Criterion Collection released the film a few years ago on DVD as part of a set of Teshigahara’s pictures. Now comes a stand-alone Blu-ray edition with a new high-definition digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The images are suitably grainy (sorry, couldn’t resist). Supplements are ported over from the earlier release: a 2007 video essay on the film by film scholar James Quandt; four short films by the director—Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Tokyo 1958 (1958), and Ako (1965); Teshigahara and Abe, a 2007 documentary about the collaboration between the director and writer; and the trailer. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Audie Bock and a 1978 interview with Teshigahara.

Woman in the Dunes is an important work of international cinema from the 60s and will be appreciated by serious art house cinephiles; the rest of the audience might feel like taking a shower after a viewing.

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“BEAUTY, LOVE, MOTHER... AND AMERICA”

By Raymond Benson

Filmmaker Terrence Malick has perhaps out-mystique’d the great Stanley Kubrick in terms of his public perception. Famously reclusive, Malick never allows photographs of himself to be used, and he never appears in “making of” documentaries about his films. A Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard graduate, he is obviously a brilliant man. Once he got into the film business, he worked as a script doctor until he made his first feature, Badlands (1973). It was critically acclaimed and established Malick as a hot addition to the “New Hollywood” movement. Next came Days of Heaven in 1978, also critically lauded.

And then... he disappeared. For twenty years.

In 1998, he appeared on the scene again, and Hollywood was more than ready to open checkbooks and fund his third feature film, The Thin Red Line.

It takes a lot of mystique for that scenario to happen.

Malick’s fourth picture, The New World, continued the director’s journey in exploring what has become signature stylistic and thematic traits—to make movies in which the plot is secondary to image, sound, music, and emotion. Malick is more interested in inventing a different kind of cinema—one that is certainly not mainstream. Terrence Malick uses film to create visual and sonic poetry, expound philosophy and existentialism, and touch upon a very basic and primal chord in his audience. He wants us to feel as well as think, and to fill us with awe and wonder. But make no mistake—in a Malick film, the story is not essential to the journey.

The director’s work of late is even more elliptical, impressionistic, and free form. Beginning with The Tree of Life, the Oscar-nominated treatise on the creation of the world and how that spark is inside each and every human being, Malick threw down the gauntlet to audiences, asking, “Are you with me or not?” The believers will follow him wherever he goes. Most everyone else will scratch their heads and... walk out of the theater (which happened a lot when I first saw The Tree of Life!) For the record, I’m a follower.

The New World has more in common with The Thin Red Line than Malick’s more recent works. There is a story in The New World, it’s just told very unconventionally, the same way he freely adapted The Thin Red Line into a lyrical piece about war and nature. The New World is also about nature, and in fact, “Mother” is probably the central character.

The year is 1607, and English adventurers have just landed in Virginia. Among them is Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell). The “Naturals,” as Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) calls the Native Americans, at first cautiously welcomes them. Smith meets the free-spirited Pocahontas (astonishingly well-portrayed by 14-year-old Q’orianka Kilcher) and they fall in love. Then things go sour between the two peoples. A little later, another Englander, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), enters Pocahontas’ life, and she accompanies him back to meet the King and Queen of the United Kingdom. That’s the story in a nutshell.

What Malick does with this is extraordinary. With the aid of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (the first of a collaboration that would continue for the remainder of Malick’s work), the director presents a collage of spectacularly beautiful images that emphasizes how fresh and virginal the land of this “new world” is. In addition, the depiction of the Powhatan people is arguably the most realistic and accurate portrayal of Native Americans in a Hollywood film, compounding the notion that they knew how to live with nature, whereas the newcomers fight “Mother” the entire way. The film is a meditation, like most of Malick’s work, on man’s relationship with the earth.

The Criterion Collection has pulled out all the stops with this new, lavish box set of three disks containing three different cuts of the film. The main attraction is a new 4K digital restoration of the “extended cut” (172 minutes), supervised by Lubezki and Malick. Also included are high-definition transfers of the original “first cut” (150 minutes, released for the first time on home video), which was the version that premiered in L.A. and New York in December 2005 and ran for a week in order to be considered for Academy Awards, and the “theatrical cut” (135 minutes), which was the version most audiences saw during the film’s wide release in early 2006.

Which version is better? Difficult to say. The extended cut is probably Malick’s preferred assembly, and if you’re a fan of the director’s work, then this is definitely the one to watch. The theatrical cut is much leaner, thereby making the storyline stronger. But the first cut, while only fifteen minutes longer than the theatrical one, fills out the gaps of the shorter version quite well with Malick’s elegiac, stylistic choices—it’s a nice compromise between the extended and theatrical editions.

A 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack accompanies all three cuts, and you can hear every cricket and bird chirp as if they’re in your living room.

Supplements include new interviews with Farrell and Kilcher, producer Sarah Green, production designer Jack Fisk, and costume designer Jacqueline West. There’s an informative piece on the differences between the three versions as told by co-editor Mark Yoshikawa, as well as new interviews with editors Yoshikawa, Hank Corwin, and Saar Klein. Making “The New World” is an approximately 90-minute documentary directed and edited by Austin Jack Lynch (David’s son), detailing the production in Virginia and England. The theatrical and teaser trailers are also included. The thick booklet contains an essay by film scholar Tom Gunning, a 2006 interview with Lubezki from American Cinematographer, and a selection of research materials that inspired the production.

The Criterion Collection always produces quality material—their release of The New World stands as one of the company’s most impressive packages.

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RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Raymond Benson

The original 1954 Japanese Kaiju (it means “strange beast”) film, Gojira, is not only a classic monster movie, it’s one of those significant game-changers that is important to pop culture and cinema history. Gojira, known as “Godzilla” in the west, was the first of an onslaught of “strange beasts,” spawning a Kaiju franchise that is still popular today. In fact, Hollywood is remaking Gojira as a reboot at the time of this writing.

The ’54 film, directed by Ishiro Honda and produced by Toho Studios (it’s ironic that it was being made at the same time as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai from the same studio), was little seen in the West until recent DVD releases appeared. Instead, for over fifty years we’ve had Godzilla, King of the Monsters, an abominably bastardized, re-edited import of Gojira. Joseph E. Levine had bought the rights but had additional footage shot in Hollywood featuring Raymond Burr as an American reporter caught in the Tokyo chaos—and throwing out much of Honda’s film except the Godzilla sequences—thus, creating an entirely different storyline and movie. It was released in 1956.

Why was this an egregious thing to do? Honda’s artistic statement was jettisoned. Gojira was a Japanese reaction to and a social comment about the atomic bomb. It’s quite obvious, actually, that Godzilla is a metaphor for nuclear destruction. Part of the plot also involves a scientist who has unwittingly invented a new weapon of mass destruction and threatens to destroy his research so that no country can get its hands on it. Of course, it’s the only thing that can stop Godzilla, so he has to use it once. In the end, he sacrifices himself, and the weapon, to do his duty for Japan; but the message is clear—get rid of the bombs.

On the other hand, the American version, directed by Terry Morse (and using Honda’s footage), is seen in the West as just another giant monster romp in a decade when Hollywood was churning out giant monster romps by the dozens. The cliché of giant beasts destroying Tokyo arose from this release. The real message behind the Gojira is totally lost.

Criterion has done a terrific job with its new high-definition digital restoration of both versions of the picture in this wonderful two-disk set. The commentary on the two pictures is by film historian David Kalat. You also get interviews with Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima, two of the stars, and several of the special effects team. Film critic Tadao Sato provides an insightful interview, as does one with composer Akira Ifukube. The clever packaging contains a pop-up of the “strange beast” in question along with an informative collector's booklet.

If you’ve never seen the original, it’s time to check it out. Sure, the monster scenes are crude—it is a guy inside a suit—but that’s part of the appeal.

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BY RAYMOND BENSON

“WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE”

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection released Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult film classic, Carnival of Souls, sixteen years ago as a two-disk DVD set, but that edition has long been out of print. Now, a new Blu-ray restoration is available from the company, and it is worth upgrading even if you happen to own the original. Note that Carnival of Souls is a public domain film, so it is available on DVD from many inferior manufacturers in bad-to-okay quality versions, but the Criterion’s releases are the ones to grab.

Carnival is indeed an oddity. Harvey worked at Centron Corporation, a maker of educational and industrial short films based in Lawrence, Kansas. It was much like Calvin Films in Kansas City, where Robert Altman cut his teeth making shorts in the 1950s. Needless to say, Lawrence, Kansas is not Hollywood, and it was not a hotbed of feature filmmaking in 1961, when Carnival was shot.

Harvey had helmed many of Centron’s shorts and got the idea to make a horror feature when he was driving home from Salt Lake City, Utah. He noticed the ruins of the great Saltair, an entertainment complex that had been built by the Mormons on the edge of Salt Lake in 1893 as a family-oriented place for recreation. It was a sort of Coney Island for Utah residents. Designed in an incongruous Moorish style, the place looked like a palace for sultans. It was destroyed by fire in the 1920s and rebuilt, this time including a gigantic pavilion for dancing. Saltair burned down and was rebuilt again, but eventually by the 1950s it had become a derelict, spooky place due to the recession of the lake that left behind a dirty, polluted shore abutting the resort. After the film had been shot there, another attempt was made to restore the place, but that failed when the lake rose and demolished the resort for good. At any rate, in 1961, Herk Harvey thought Saltair would make a good location for a ghost story, and he was right.

Made for a final budget of only $33,000, Carnival of Souls looks and feels like it might have been a bad Ed Wood production—very cheap, with amateurish acting (all of the cast except the lead was pulled from local talent) and clumsy editing. But the black and white cinematography by Maurice Prather is actually quite striking, especially in Criterion’s new restored 4K digital transfer. The images are sharp and pristine, as if the movie had been shot yesterday. The all-organ score by Gene Moore adds another layer of originality to the proceedings, and it’s unsettling and eerie. Despite the cheesiness of the production, though, Harvey manages to evoke a genuinely creepy atmosphere throughout the picture. His multiple appearances as “The Man” (in ghoulish makeup) do provide some scares.

The story concerns Mary (played well enough by Candace Hilligoss, a newbie stage actress hired out of New York), who is in an automobile accident at the film’s beginning. She survives and is shell-shocked, but she manages to go on with her life as a church organist. However, she keeps seeing visions of “The Man,” a ghostly stalker who, of course, represents Death. At times she goes through mysterious fugues in which all sound drops out and no one around her can see or hear her. What’s going on? Well, it all becomes clear at the end, but most viewers should be able to figure out the Twilight Zone plot twist pretty quickly. In fact, the entire thing plays out like an extra long episode of that classic horror and science fiction television series.

Carnival of Dreams was not a success on its first release, but it gained a cult following in the 1980s and beyond, supposedly influencing the likes of David Lynch and George A. Romero. It is definitely an entertaining and somewhat scary picture, but personally I’m not convinced that it is the masterpiece some horror aficionados claim it to be.

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray contains only the theatrical cut at 78 minutes. It has an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, as well as selected-scene audio commentary with director Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford. The original Criterion release featured the original director’s cut (84 minutes) as well, but apparently the elements of the edited scenes weren’t good enough for the new restoration, so they appear separately as supplements.

Some of the extras from the first release are ported over—The Movie That Wouldn’t Die, a 1989 documentary about the cast and crew reunion; The Carnival Tour, a 2000 update on the film’s locations; a history of the Saltair Resort; the theatrical trailer; and a selection of excerpts from shorts made by the Centron Corporation. There is also a long selection of silent outtakes, cut to Gene Moore’s eerie organ score. New supplements include an interview with comedian and writer Dana Gould on the influence and merits of the film, and an interesting new video essay by film critic David Cairns. The booklet contains an essay by writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse.

While the absence of the director’s cut is disappointing, the new Criterion Blu-ray is a welcome release mainly for its superb video quality. Carnival of Souls is worth a late-night viewing for its historical significance and moments of disturbing imagery, but I doubt it will give you nightmares.

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“PURITY OF ESSENCE”

By Raymond Benson

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is such an iconic motion picture that most readers of Cinema Retro, I would bet, already own a copy of this brilliant keepsake of the 1960s on DVD or Blu-ray. The film has been released several times before, but now it gets the Criterion treatment. Believe me—fans of the movie and of director Stanley Kubrick will still want to get this edition. It is definitely an upgrade in quality and the disk also comes with a plethora of fascinating supplements and some terrific goodies in the packaging.

Unless you’ve haven’t been paying attention to the lists of Great Movies You Should See Before You Die, you know that Dr. Strangelove is the story of how an air force general (Sterling Hayden) goes “a little funny in the head... you know, just a little... funny...” and orders one of his bombers to attack Russia in order to preserve our “purity of essence.” To save the day it’s up to an RAF exchange officer (Peter Sellers), the President of the United States (also Sellers), a Hawk-ish general in the Pentagon (George C. Scott), the good-ol’-boy pilot of the bomber itself (Slim Pickens), and a bizarre German nuclear physicist in a wheelchair (Sellers again). Maybe they rescue our planet, maybe they don’t.

Strangelove was Kubrick’s first time out as sole producer, along with serving as director and co-writer. Prior to making the film, he had been partners with James B. Harris, who produced The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), and Lolita (1962). Kubrick had also done a work-for-hire job for executive producer Kirk Douglas on Spartacus (1960), which he vowed never to do again, but that project afforded him the clout to carve out a subsequent career of total creative freedom. Now as the producer of his own pictures, Kubrick got what he sought. He secured his home base in England, set up a unique and highly personal routine of making films, and proceeded to give us some examples of extraordinary cinema. Strangelove was the first masterpiece out of the gate, and, fortunately, was a critical and box office hit.

It was controversial, too, as are all of Kubrick’s films made since he began producing them himself. At the time, some attacked Strangelove as being a “sick joke.” Nevertheless, it captured the mood of early 1964 and, as Martin Scorsese has said about it, “the word on the street was that it’s terrific.” It was the hip movie to see. It pushed the envelope. It got people talking. It established Kubrick as the hot filmmaker of his day.

In the early 1960s, the director had become obsessed with the arms race, experiencing himself some of the Cold War paranoia that was prevalent in those years, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The British novel Red Alert by Peter George came to Kubrick’s attention and he thought it would make a fine basis for a political thriller. He brought in George to co-write, and at first the pair worked with James Harris on the script. At some point during the process, they all started to find funny things about the story. From then on, the screenplay morphed into a comedy—a very black one. In fact, Dr. Strangelove is arguably the definitive black comedy.

Harris eventually left the partnership and went off on his own, leaving Kubrick to produce by himself. That’s about the time Kubrick brought in satirist Terry Southern to polish the work and add some needed dialogue tweaking. The result is one of the most ingenious and original adaptations of a novel in movie history.

The acting and the direction are as perfect as one can get. Production Designer Ken Adam’s ultra-modern sets, especially that of the spectacular War Room, firmly situates the movie in its time and place. Gilbert Taylor’s stark black and white cinematography in the interior settings gives the picture its nightmare qualities, while the hand-held camerawork in the exteriors is effective in creating a documentary/newsreel effect. The editing (by future director Anthony Harvey, but certainly with Kubrick overseeing the work) is razor tight. The director apparently deleted a lot of footage to achieve the comic tension, including a now infamous pie fight in the War Room at the film’s climax because it apparently didn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the movie.

It all comes across with class and panache in Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition. The restored 4K digital transfer is the best I’ve seen. There’s an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, but also an alternate 5.1 Surround Soundtrack presented in DTS-HD Master Audio. The movie has never sounded better.

And then there are the supplements. Criterion provides several new pieces, and some of the best features from previous releases have been ported over as well.

The new supplements include: new interviews with Kubrick scholars Mick Broderick and Rodney Hill, archivist Richard Daniels, camera innovator Joe Dunton and camera operator Kelvin Pike, and Peter George’s son, David George. These all come with film footage and wonderful unseen stills. Previous extras include an excerpt from the tried and true 1966 audio interview with Kubrick by Jeremy Bernstein; four different documentaries about Kubrick, the making of the film, the sociopolitical climate of the period, and actor Sellers (two of which are co-produced by Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief Lee Pfeiffer). There are also 1963 interviews with Sellers and Scott, and an excerpt from a 1980 Gene Shalit interview with Sellers.

Two trailers are included as supplements—the quirky theatrical trailer, which we’ve all seen, and the “exhibitor’s trailer,” which we haven’t. The latter is a little over fifteen minutes long; demonstration reels of this kind were commonplace in those days in order to persuade theaters to book the picture. It’s pretty much a short capsulation of the movie’s story using unedited footage, but what makes it totally cool is that Kubrick himself narrates it. He even makes excuses for a couple of monologue sequences that do not yet include cut-aways to other characters. Fascinating stuff.

Another terrific bonus is the collection of “props” you get inside the packaging—everything comes in a “Plan R” folder like the one used in the film. Inside is a “Top Secret” Memorandum containing an essay by scholar David Bromwich, and a Playboy-style booklet called Strangelove. Tracy Reed, step-daughter of director Sir Carol Reed and the only female in the cast, is on the cover of the booklet and graces a centerfold. The latter is also seen in the movie in a fictional issue of Playboy itself. The booklet’s text is Terry Southern’s 1994 article on the film. Last but not least, you even get a “miniature combination Bible and Russian Phrase Book.”

“A fella could have a good time in Vegas” with this superb release from the Criterion Collection.

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“STONER MOVIE DELUXE”

By Raymond Benson

Ah, how many of us took advantage of those wonderful psychedelic cinematic discoveries of the late sixties and early seventies, the kind that beckoned many a youth to view them in an altered state of mind? You know the ones—Yellow Submarine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantasia (1969 re-release), Woodstock, El Topo, Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Allegro non troppo... and of course Fantastic Planet, a surprise European import that hit U.S. theaters in early 1974. It’s one of the stellar stoner movies that frequented the Midnight Movie houses around college campuses.

Directed by French animator René Laloux, with a production design by eccentric French illustrator Roland Topor, Fantastic Planet takes the audience to a very other-worldly place where humans are tiny vermin compared to the gigantic blue Draags (called Traags in previous translations), who are the superior race on the planet. In fact, Draag children often keep humans—known as “Oms”—as pets, teaching them tricks and keeping them imprisoned the way we might house a gerbil. Adult Draags, we learn, like to “meditate,” which is apparently a euphemism for participating in a cerebral, celestial orgy. While their bodies remain sedate, their consciousnesses are released inside floating colored bubbles that travel to a nearby “wild planet.” There, the bubbles attach to giant headless human-shaped statues, which then come to “life” and dance together. In other words, it’s how the Draags get off.

The story involves one human, Terr, who is captured in infancy by a young Draag and kept as a plaything. Terr grows up, escapes his master, and joins a band of feral humans to organize, rebel, and attempt to bring down the Draags.

It’s all very creepy and strange, but it’s also a brilliantly fascinating and entertaining film. The French-Czech co-production managed to win the Jury Prize at Cannes that year, the first time an animated feature had taken such an award. Certainly no other movie before or since looks like Fantastic Planet, for its eye candy exhibits a surrealism that echoes the work of Dalí, Ernst, or Magritte, but with a hallucinogenic science fiction sensibility. Add a mesmerizing electronic jazz score by Alain Gorageur, and you’ve got yourself one extremely trippy motion picture.

When first released in the U.S., the dialogue was dubbed in English. The new Criterion Collection disk features this optional soundtrack, but one must really watch and listen to the movie in the original French (with newly translated English subtitles) for the full alien effect.

The new 2K digital restoration is absolutely gorgeous. The colors are bright and vivid, bringing out the details of the drawn, “paper doll” animation. The audio is an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Supplements include two short animated films made by Leloux and Topor—Les temps morts (1965) and Les escargots (1966)—and if you think the feature film is bizarre, wait until you see these! The disk also contains a 2009 documentary on Laloux, an episode of a French television program from 1974 about Topor and his work, a short interview with Topor from 1973, and the trailer.

After experiencing Fantastic Planet, you may feel as if you’ve jumped back to the 70s and want to say things like, “Far out, man,” or “roll another one.” Just be sure to Blu-ray responsibly. (“Whoa, he used Blu-ray as a verb!”)

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By Todd Garbarini

Kudos to the Criterion Collection for releasing Whit Stillman’s charming trio of young adult angst: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998). The bookend films have both been previously released by Criterion on DVD and Blu-ray, but now the company bows Barcelona to complete the trilogy. Available as both a stand-alone disc as well as part of a set of the three films, Barcelona features the luminous Mira Sorvino in an early role.

The trilogy of films that Mr. Stillman made as the beginning of his career and for which he is most well-known are interesting in that they depict groups of people who fall out of the scope of most of the general population and probably appeal to even less. That is actually a welcome relief. Metropolitan was shot in January and February in 1989 and released in August 1990 (a curious choice for a film set at Christmas time) and the upscale characters live in a Manhattan that is far less hectic than today’s, light years before their lives were infiltrated and forever altered by personal computers, cell phones, electronic tablets and violent video games. The absence of these devices is noticeable in every frame of this film wherein the characters talk to each other rather than text. Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols are two of the actors who appear in all three of these films, playing different characters by name but are instantly recognizable by their attitudes and method of speak. In Metropolitan, they play Upper Eastsiders. In Barcelona, they are cousins who bicker about sex and politics in a Europe far less violent than today’s. In The Last Days of Disco, they are an employee of a disco and a disco dancer, respectively.

Barcelona, referred to as “…the funniest film ever made about the violent hatred of Americans…” by Michael Weiss, begins with a terrorist explosion at the American Library, an unlikely start for a film purporting to be a comedy. This imagery has become all-too familiar and far more brutal in present-day 2016 with the insurgence of groups like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, but when this film was shot, presumably sometime after the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, the world appeared to be a less frightening place. In Barcelona, the time period that the film is set in is difficult to pin down just from watching the film. There is talk in the film that Spain is getting ready to join NATO, and that historical event took place in 1982. The film does not look like it is attempting to take place during that time, however.

We are introduced to Ted Boyton (Nichols), a salesman originally from Chicago who has just come out of a relationship and bemoans his inclination to fall for overly attractive women in relationships that are ephemeral. He resigns himself to pursuing (in his words) “plain or even rather homely girls.” We can assume that the failure of his latest LTR is a result of falling for the former and so he tries to be philosophical about his future pursuits. He confides this to his cousin Fred (Eigeman), a naval officer who shows up out of the blue and wants to stay with Ted for a while, although his sudden appearance irks Ted. Fred’s attitude mirrors that of Nick Smith, the character that Mr. Eigeman portrayed in Metropolitan, which is to say that he is a tad angry about things. Fred occasionally dons his naval accoutrements while out and about with Ted and the female counterparts they have met accidentally (Tushka Bergen and Mira Sorvino as Montserrat and Marta, respectively) which causes a rise in inflammatory anti-American sentiment towards the group. While it is directed at Fred it is never anything truly awful…until near the end of the film when Fred is shot point blank by an assailant just outside the car he is riding in. Ted is shocked and holds vigil by Fred’s bedside, reading to him and wondering if he is even being heard. The women they have met also chip in and take turns and Ted wonders if his cousin will ever be the same. Fortunately, Fred comes out of it, although his attitude about life seems to be no different despite losing an eye.

Mr. Stillman’s dialogue most obviously mirrors that of Woody Allen who gave himself and his co-stars wildly funny and philosophical ruminations on male/female relationships, sex, politics, and the world at large. There are some truly funny moments, such as Ted’s dance to “Pennsylvania 6-5000” while he’s alone in the apartment, only to be interrupted by Fred and Marta who return unexpectedly. The film is a perfect slice of light entertainment in an atmosphere of films and television shows that is almost exclusively comprised of super heroes, scheming politicians, dysfunctional writers, and espionage.

The Blu-ray is a nice upgrade from the 2002 DVD. This edition features:

A new and restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by director Whit Stillman and cinematographer John Thomas, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray

The 2002 audio commentary featuring Stillman and actors Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols

New video essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme about the trilogy made up of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco

The Making of “Barcelona,” a short documentary from 1994 featuring behind-the-scenes footage and on-set interviews with Stillman and cast members

Deleted scenes and alternate ending, with commentary by Stillman, Eigeman, and Nichols

A segment from a 1994 episode of the Today show featuring Stillman

An episode of The Dick Cavett Show from 1991 with Stillman

Trailer

An essay by film scholar Haden Guest

Click here to order Barcelona on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Click here to order A Whit Stillman Trilogy on Blu-ray from Amazon.com