“PARALLEL LIVES AND VANISHING CHARACTERS”

By Raymond Benson

I was happy to finally catch up with Clouds of Sils Maria since I missed its theatrical run; the picture received many accolades, especially for Kristen Stewart, who apparently was the first American to win the César award for Supporting Actress, as well as several critics’ awards for the same category.

The film is a commentary on the state of Hollywood filmmaking, an examination of the psychological dynamics between women, and a philosophical—sometimes playful—dramatization of parallel lives/characters. It’s as if an Ingmar Bergman movie was crossed with one by Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Juliette Binoche stars as Maria, a popular, internationally-known actress who appears in European and Hollywood films, and on the stage. Stewart indeed gives a remarkable performance—the best I’ve ever seen her do—as Valentine, Maria’s personal assistant. Twenty-something years earlier, Maria had starred in a stage play and subsequent film adaptation about a lesbian relationship between an older business woman and a younger subordinate. Maria had played the latter role and this launched her career. Now, a respected Dutch director wants to remount the play with Maria playing the older role and casting the younger one with a hot, tabloid-fodder Hollywood actress named Jo-Ann, magnificently portrayed by Chloë Grace Moretz. Maria has her doubts about playing the older role but accepts the part anyway.

Most of the picture involves the interplay between Maria and Valentine, who run lines from the play together, with Valentine doing Jo-Ann’s part. At times, though, we begin to wonder if the dialogue is really from the play or if it’s the real-life dramatic action between Maria the actress and Valentine the assistant. This is where director Assayas starts to have fun with the actors—and the audience. The characters fight, they make up, they joke around, and they dissect Hollywood and its stars. Real actors are mentioned, and current trends (aka superhero movies) are lampooned. Things get heated when Valentine is more receptive to current Hollywood fare than Maria. Assayas’ ageism message here is not subtle.

What is understated and enigmatic is when a key character of the story inexplicably vanishes—and the film goes on as if that person never existed. Did she? Is that an observation about the movie business, or is it an interpretation of the friendship/conflict relationships that women sometimes have?

It’s heady stuff.

The title refers to a natural phenomenon that really exists near the village of Sils Maria in Switzerland, in which a “snake” of clouds rolls through the Maloja Pass valley when the weather conditions are just right. Most of the film is shot there, and Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous cinematography captures the event at the moment when the aforementioned vanishing occurs.

The Criterion Collection’s 2K digital transfer, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, is superb. Supplements include a new interview with director Assayas; new interviews with both Binoche and Stewart; a short 1924 silent documentary, Cloud Phenomena of Maloja, parts of which also feature in the movie; and the trailer. The enclosed booklet contains an essay by critic Molly Haskell.

Clouds of Sils Maria might require a couple of viewings to fully appreciate, but its rewards are full, fluffy, and cumulus.

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“A HEAVENLY BEGINNING”

By Raymond Benson

They must have done something right. Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) has proven to be a timeless and universal movie that keeps on giving, and the welcome new release from the Criterion Collection attests to it.

The premise of the film has been around for a while. Most of our generation know the remake better—Heaven Can Wait (1978, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie)—which is a superb Oscar-nominated romantic comedy in its own right. Another remake in 2001, Down to Earth, starred Chris Rock.

But that’s not all. It wasn’t until I’d viewed the supplements on the new disk that I appreciated the fact that Mr. Jordan was indeed the first of several Hollywood pictures dealing with “heavenly” concepts—angels, the afterlife, and second chances. In a video discussion, critic Michael Sragow and filmmaker/distributor Michael Schlesinger reveal how the picture’s popularity actually began a trend of similar movies throughout the 1940s—A Guy Named Joe, Angel on My Shoulder, A Matter of Life and Death, It’s a Wonderful Life, and even Mr. Jordan’s direct sequel, Down to Earth (1947, not to be confused with the Chris Rock remake), which features both James Gleason and Edward Everett Horton again playing their roles from the first movie.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan was a major release and surprise hit from Columbia Pictures, a studio that always struggled to be one of the majors despite having director Frank Capra on their team in the ‘30s. Critically and popularly acclaimed, the picture successfully blends fantasy, romance, comedy, and intrigue, creating a delightful, and sometimes thought-provoking, piece of entertainment. It was nominated for Best Picture of 1941, Best Director (Alexander Hall), Best Actor (Robert Montgomery), Best Supporting Actor (James Gleason, and he steals the movie!), and Best B&W Cinematography. The film deservedly won the Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story, for Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller.

The story concerns Joe Pendleton (enthusiastically played by Montgomery in a stretch from his usual sophisticated tuxedo-clad characters) as a prizefighter with a heavy New Jersey accent who crashes in his private plane. His soul is saved by the Messenger (Horton), an angel whose job is to escort to Heaven the departing souls from his “territory.” In the mist-filled outskirts of Heaven, Mr. Jordan (benevolently portrayed by Claude Rains), a sort of St. Peter in a three-piece suit, checks in the new souls as they board another plane to take them to their afterlife homes. But Joe’s soul was accidentally taken before his body actually died—and therefore Mr. Jordan grants Joe a second chance. However, his consciousness must be placed into a recently deceased person—so Joe winds up inside a rich, corrupt banker’s body. Joe, in his new persona, sets about turning the banker’s life around for good, and he also attempts to continue his prizefighting. For the latter, he calls in his former manager, Corkle (Gleason) to train him. First, though, he’s got to convince Corkle that he’s really Joe inside the new man’s form. To complicate things, Joe falls in love with the daughter (Evelyn Keyes) of a man the banker destroyed financially and sent to prison. Joe also doesn’t know it yet, but he will have to jump bodies one more time before the story plays out.

The comedy and romance work like a charm, and the fantasy elements of Mr. Jordan are surprisingly effective. The movie is intelligently written and treats its subject matter with respect; and yet it has fun with the mechanics of death and the philosophical discourse of what we think the afterlife really is. The audience is tricked, in a way, into pleasantly enjoying a movie about death. What happens to Joe Pendleton at the end isn’t the norm for a romantic comedy. Technically it’s not a happy ending—and yet, it is. It’s a feel-good movie with a bittersweet center. This is a testament to the quality of writing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

The new 2K digital restoration looks fabulous. It has an uncompressed, monaural soundtrack. Along with the aforementioned video conversation about the film, the supplements include a long audio interview with Elizabeth Montgomery (daughter of Robert Montgomery, and, yes, the star of Bewitched) about her father and the movie; the Lux Radio Theatre radio adaptation starring Cary Grant (who was originally approached to star in the film—one can only imagine what it would have been like with Grant), Rains, Keyes, and Gleason; and a trailer. An essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme adorns the booklet.

A little gem from Hollywood released just prior to America’s entrance into World War II, Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a genuine classic, arguably superior to its many remakes and imitations. You will believe...

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“THE STREETWALKER AND THE SUCKER”

By Raymond Benson

Fans of Fritz Lang’s film noir of 1945, Scarlet Street, may do well to take a look at this little French gem from 1931. Lang’s film was a Hollywood remake of La Chienne, which was based on a novel by Georges de La Fouchardière (it was also adapted into a stage play by André Mouëzy-Éon). More significantly, La Chienne was the second—and first feature length—sound film by the great Jean Renoir.

Renoir had done well in the silent era, but the invention of talkies presented the filmmaker with a larger palette of tools with which to craft some of his greatest works. Beginning with La Chienne, Renoir became France’s premiere director, a position he held for a decade.

La Chienne translates as “The Bitch,” and viewers may question which woman in the picture the title is referring to—the lead, Lulu, a beautiful blonde “street woman” (a con artist and often a prostitute), who serves as the femme fatale of the story (and wonderfully played by Janie Marèze)... or the wife of our protagonist, such a shrew of a woman that there’s no wonder why we sympathize with the poor schmuck, Maurice (portrayed by the brilliant Michel Simon), a banker and part-time painter who does everything he can to get away from his marriage and set up Lulu as his mistress. Of course, Lulu is really being played by her lover and pimp, the nasty Andre (played by real-life Parisian gangster Georges Flamant, who was also an amateur actor). Maurice is merely the mark, the sucker who is seduced by lust and led to his ruin.

Unlike Scarlet Street, La Chienne is more melodrama than film noir. Renoir handles the material well without making it overwrought, and he succeeds in developing fine character studies of the three leads. Those familiar with the director’s later masterpieces such as Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) will find this early work fascinating. Renoir’s signature mise-en-scène is easily identifiable, even in its baby steps. Also impressive are the street scenes shot on location—this was the real Paris of 1931, displayed in glorious black and white.

Michel Simon, like Renoir, was one of France’s biggest film artists. Originally Swiss, Simon made French silent films and later had a long run as an actor in talkies. He has a distinctive Bassett Hound face, perfect for betraying first the joy and then the pain Lulu puts him through. According to Renoir scholar Christopher Faulkner, who talks about the movie in one of the disk’s supplements, apparently Simon fell in love with the actress playing Lulu off-screen. But, like in the film, Janie Marèze was seeing Flamant, and this relationship was encouraged by Renoir. Not long after production was completed, Marèze was killed in an automobile accident with Flamant at the wheel. At the funeral, Simon allegedly threatened Renoir with a gun, but he must have calmed down, for Simon starred in a subsequent Renoir feature, the excellent Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932; incidentally, this was remade in Hollywood in 1986 as Down and Out in Beverly Hills).

The Criterion Collection’s release features a new, restored 4K digital transfer that looks so pristine and sharp you might think the film was made last week. There’s an uncompressed monaural soundtrack and a new English subtitles translation. Supplements include an introduction to the film by Renoir himself, shot in 1961; the aforementioned interview with Faulkner on the movie; a sparkling new restoration of Renoir’s first sound film, the short On purge bébé (also 1931), a comic bauble based on a one-act play by Georges Feydeau and also starring Michel Simon; and a ninety-five minute 1967 French TV program featuring a conversation between Renoir and Simon. An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau adorns the booklet.

A fine, notable release, and a must for lovers of European cinema.

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“MAYBE WE’VE GOT SOMETHING HERE...”

By Raymond Benson

When Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), an up-and-coming young Hollywood studio exec suggests in a meeting that writers could be eliminated and “any old news story” could be adapted to provide a movie idea—“it would write itself”—Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), the guy at the studio who usually takes story pitches from screenwriters, replies, “...what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”

Such is the satirical tone of The Player, which is easily my favorite film of 1992. It’s a mystery why it wasn’t nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but the Academy did honor the film with a Best Director nod for Robert Altman, Best Adapted Screenplay for Michael Tolkin (also co-producer), and Best Film Editing (Geraldine Peroni). Like 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, The Player takes potshots at the movie industry and skewers—fairly lightly—Hollywood.

Director Altman obviously had a good time with this one. He had spent the 1980s on the outs with Hollywood after the 1970s, the years in which Altman enjoyed some of his greatest acclaim (M*A*S*H, Nashville, among others). He had reason to exhibit a somewhat cynical attitude toward Tinsel Town, and probably could have gone further with the acerbic jabs The Player gives to its subject matter. Instead, Altman plays it cool and delivers a mildly critical treatise on the way movies are made, and provides a darned good noir-ish murder mystery as well.

The story involves Mill, superbly played by Robbins, who is receiving death threats from an unknown screenwriter. Mill thinks he knows who it is, and he goes to confront the guy (Vincent D’Onofrio). There’s a fight—and Mill accidentally kills the writer. Mill spends the rest of the movie covering up the crime, avoiding the police investigating the case (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett), and romancing the dead writer’s girlfriend, June (Greta Scacchi). In the meantime, Mill’s job is threatened by the previously-mentioned Levy, who has begun to attend meetings to which Mill isn’t invited. The Player is part satire-comedy, part 40’s-style noir (but in color), and all bravura filmmaking.

Altman directed a handful of masterpieces, and this is one of them. Although it’s not one of his signature “ensemble” films—there are really only six main characters—the picture arguably could be called his ultimate ensemble film because around sixty celebrities appear as themselves in cameos (Malcolm McDowell, Cher, Burt Reynolds, Buck Henry, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Lily Tomlin, Scott Glen, Jack Lemmon, Nick Nolte, Elliott Gould, Harry Belafonte, and many more). As a testament to the respect with which they held Altman, these people donated their time as a favor.

The movie is also known for its spectacular opening eight minutes, a crane shot that moves around the studio lot with no cuts, similar to what Orson Welles did at the beginning of Touch of Evil (1958). All through The Player, there are nods and winks to movie insider trivia. The posters on the walls of the studio offices where Mill works are only classics from the 1930s and 40s, mostly film noir titles, slyly suggesting to the audience what we’re watching. Altman is really saying, “You’re watching a movie, folks, and we’re going to play it up.” This is never more evident in the fact that the first thing we see is a clapboard, and we hear the voice of the director calling, “Action!”

The Criterion Blu-ray comes with a new 4K digital restoration that looks fantastic. It has a 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, and an audio commentary from 1992 featuring Altman, Tolkin, and cinematographer Jean Lépine.

There is a wealth of fascinating supplements. A new documentary on the making of the film features interviews with Robbins, Tolkin, associate producer David Levy, and production designer Stephen Altman (the director’s son). The original hour long press conference from the 1992 Cannes Film Festival is included. There’s a vintage interview with Altman, as well as a short documentary about the shooting of the film’s fund-raiser scene that contains many of the cameos. A helpful gallery of stills from the picture also helps to identify the many cameo appearances. There are a few deleted scenes and outtakes, and a deconstruction of the opening shot with alternate commentaries—one by Altman, and another by Tolkin and Lépine. Trailers and TV spots round up the extras, along with an essay in the booklet by author Sam Wasson.

The Player is one for the history books. As the original Blu-ray is out of print, the new Criterion edition is a must-have. The film represents Robert Altman’s masterful “comeback” to Hollywood, and it set him on an even course for the rest of his colorful career.

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BY TIM GREAVES

It's probably difficult for those residing in more liberated territories – where pornography was something of a matter of fact affair back in the 1970s – to appreciate just how uptight and repressed Great Britain was in its attitude to sex. There were, however, voices in the crowd that had the courage to speak out against the establishment's Draconian stance (though largely without changing very much at the time, it's sad to say). One of the most famous and outspoken of those voices was that of model- cum -actress Mary Millington. Hers is a name that may not mean much to anyone outside the United Kingdom, but few of those old enough to remember her rise to superstar status during the 70s would dispute that in the latter half of that decade she was nothing short of a sensation. Yet how could that possibly be so in a country where the authorities vehemently reviled and sought to crush the adult entertainment industry out of existence? Respectable: The Mary Millington Story, an enthralling new feature length documentary, provides the answer to that and many more questions.

The brainchild of writer/producer/director Simon Sheridan (whose lavish book "Come Play with Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington" is absolutely essential reading), over the course of some 110-minutes this definitive work documents Mary's meteoric rise from underground hard-core loops through celebrated softcore Brit sex comedies and on to a level of national celebrity which found her rubbing shoulders with some of the most prolific figures of the era.

Mary’s career in the adult entertainment industry had kicked off at the start of the decade with a clutch of hard-core loops shot in Europe, among them the famous German short Miss Bohrloch (for which she was paid the equivalent of almost £4000 by today's money). Few of them were easily obtainable in the UK at the time though, for distribution of such material was illegal. But if one knew where to go such things were available “under the counter”, or if one were prepared to chance it they could be acquired via the slew of mail order advertisements that appeared in adult magazines.

Mary liked to say that she was born respectable…but didn't let that spoil her life! Truer words were seldom spoken. However, that life certainly wasn't an easy one. Though no striking beauty, she exuded a provocative “attainable” girl next door appeal and even at the very height of her fame never shied away from making herself accessible to her admirers. However, said accessibility plus her unabashed, enthusiastic attitude to sex – moreover a willingness to pose for and perform explicit sexual acts in front of a camera – might have built her a huge fan base across the nation, but it also brought her to the attention of the country's moral guardians. At the time Mary's magazine spreads for publisher David Sullivan were helping him shift around a million copies a month, and made her an obvious target for the crusaders’ puritanical wrath. One of them was the infamous Mary Whitehouse whose ardent campaign to sanitise British television diversified when she set her beady sights on the porn industry. Sullivan delighted in tweaking the tiger’s tail, and among his raft of adults-only titles was the cheekily-monikered "Whitehouse".

From the mid-70s onwards Mary Millington shook the dust of hard-core films from her shoes, and while continuing to model for magazine photoshoots – many of the images in Sullivan’s titles pushing the limits of what UK laws would permit – she also edged towards the less controversial environs of the silver screen, popping up in softcore comedies such as Eskimo Nell (1975) and Keep It Up Downstairs (1976). It was Sullivan, when he moved into filmmaking, who really put Mary on the map, featuring her in what was (and still is) the highest grossing British sex film of all time, Come Play With Me (1977). Although she didn't have a huge amount to do – she shared the screen with a bevy of other models, who appear both in and out of their sexy nurses uniforms – the film was always intended as a vehicle for Mary and she was the focal point of its advertising campaign, which promised some the strongest viewing material ever seen on British screens. This was gilding the lily somewhat, to put it mildly. Although some fruitier footage had been shot for overseas versions (but never saw the light of day), the British cut of Come Play With Me was in fact little more than an amiable Carry On style farce decorated with copious (but inoffensive) nudity and populated by a collective of familiar British character actors, among them Irene Handl, Alfie Bass and Ronald Fraser. Nevertheless, the film was a huge success, and went on to run continuously at one of London's Soho cinemas for five years. Extensive promotion took Mary to major cities across the UK, her adventures paraded in the pages of Sullivan's magazines and increasing her popularity at a phenomenal rate.

Such was the box office success of Come Play With Me that for his next feature, The Playbirds (1978), Sullivan planted Mary firmly centre stage, cheekily having her play a police officer who goes undercover in the sex industry to expose a killer. The film again starred a bunch of Brit film and TV stalwarts, including Windsor Davies, Derren Nesbitt, Glynn Edwards and Kenny Lynch.

“AIRBORN HAWKS”

By Raymond Benson

Howard Hawks’ 1939 adventure/drama/comedy/musical (yes, it’s all of those) is firmly among the director’s best pictures, made at a time when aviation was glamorous, thrilling, and dangerous. As Hawks himself says in an interview supplement, when people heard a plane flying in the sky in those days, they’d rush outside to take a look at it. The job of an air mail carrier, at the time, was something for only the bravest—or the craziest—of men.

Geoff (Cary Grant, in one of his most memorable performances) runs an air mail operation in a remote corner of South America, and part of the flight routes traverse the Andes mountains. It’s an extremely hazardous occupation for pilots of single prop planes, for there are often rainstorms, fog, and other obstacles to prevent smooth flying. It’s no wonder that his team is a motley crew of ne’er-do-wells, alcoholics, and daredevils. When Bonnie (Jean Arthur), a touring entertainer, shows up en route to her next gig, she provides Geoff with another peril—love. That’s something Geoff doesn’t want any part of. This set up is classic Hawks, for, along with Frank Capra, he was a primary referee for the war between the sexes on screen. Only Angels demonstrates this in spades.

Things get even more complicated when Bat (Richard Barthelmess), a pilot with a dark reputation, shows up with his wife, Judy (Rita Hayworth, in one of her very first screen appearances). Judy happens to be Geoff’s old flame, and Bat was apparently responsible for once bailing out of a plane and leaving his mechanic to die in the crash. That mechanic was the brother of Geoff’s best friend and employee, Kid (Thomas Mitchell).

If that weren’t enough plot, Hawks throws in the exotic foreign setting of a small South American village and its occupants, late night saloon parties complete with pianist (a la Casablanca, three years prior to that film’s release), hair-raising flight sequences, and screwball comedy antics between the leads. It’s pure Hollywood, made in a year that is often called one of the best in the industry’s history.

The Criterion Collection’s new 4K digital restoration looks marvelous, and it has an uncompressed monaural soundtrack that brings the plane engines into your living room. Supplements include excerpts from an audio interview between Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich, in which the director talks about his aviation pictures, his mixed feelings about Jean Arthur, and other topics; a new interview with film critic David Thomson, who makes a strong case for subtle homosexual interpretations of the male camaraderie in the picture; a new documentary about Hawks’ aviation movies featuring film scholars Craig Barron and Ben Burtt; the Lux Radio Theatre adaptation from 1939, starring Grant, Arthur, Hayworth, Barthelmess, and Mitchell, hosted by Cecil B. DeMille; and the trailer. An essay by critic Michael Stragow appears in the booklet.

Only Angels Have Wings is an exhilarating look at an era long time gone, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. Don’t be late for the flight!

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“THE PRESIDENT’S REALITY SHOW”

By Raymond Benson

Robert Drew was a pioneer who changed the way we think about the documentary film. As first a writer/editor at Life Magazine in the 1950s, and then the head of a unit that produced short documentaries for Time Inc., Drew knew how to tell a story visually. When he formed his own company, Robert Drew & Associates, he was the guiding force for other talented (and later, more well-known) filmmakers such as D. A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop), Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter), and Richard Leacock, among others. Together they invented a novel way to present a documentary film, something historians coined “direct cinema.”

Documentaries had previously been scripted, usually shot to order, and more often than not, were textbook dull. Drew and his colleagues developed the you-are-there style of following subjects around as they did their business, capturing significant moments as they occurred. Like today’s reality television.

The team’s work featuring President John F. Kennedy in the early 60s was especially influential and lauded with international film and journalism awards, and much critical acclaim. The Criterion Collection’s new release features four of these short films and an abundance of supplements.

First up, the most well-known title, Primary (1960). This was made during the Wisconsin primary race between Kennedy and rival Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. Cameras follow both candidates around the state as they campaign in various halls and meeting places. Both Kennedy and Humphrey agreed to the project, of course, for they and their staff are exemplary at ignoring the cameras and pretending the filmmakers aren’t there. Surprisingly, there is no self-consciousness on the part of the subjects. Besides the historical significance of seeing a young presidential hopeful—whom we know will be dead within four years—it is striking to see how differently a primary race was handled in 1960 as opposed to today.

Adventures on the New Frontier (1961) captures a day in the life of the president, filmed around a month after Kennedy took office. We see how his day begins, who his close assistants in the White House are, how meetings are handled, and how he makes some tough decisions. The cameras also then follow the various men to whom the president has given orders, and we see how those missions are carried out. Most of the day’s concerns regard an airline strike and conflicts in Africa. At one point, JFK has to take a break in his busy schedule to sign a bunch of photographs—for his sister’s family.

Crisis (1963) is the most engaging film because it’s the most dramatic. There are cameras not only in the White House, but in Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s home and office, and the residence and office of Alabama Governor George Wallace... during a tense time in the history of the civil rights movement. Wallace is attempting to block two black students’ entry into the University of Alabama (even though the students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, had already been accepted by the school). A Federal court order has been issued to allow the students to attend, and Wallace is ready to stand fast. Will the National Guard be called out? Will the Feds have to arrest a standing governor? We now know, of course, who was on the right side, but watching the drama unfold in real time is fascinating. It’s also a kick to see that everyone is smoking—cigarettes, cigars, cigarillos... The clothing, furnishings, and automobiles truly capture those same years featured in Mad Men.

Faces of November (1963) is a very short montage of images from Kennedy’s state funeral, more of a poetic silent movie than a documentary. Again, recognizing the young faces of Jacqui, Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Peter Lawford, and even JFK’s children, is a remarkable experience.

The first three films are fifty-three minutes each, the fourth only twelve. There is also an alternate twenty-six minute cut of Primary, edited by Richard Leacock. No director is credited on any of the pictures—only cameramen, editors, and other technicians. The Blu-ray features new 2K digital restorations of all five documentaries.

Supplements include an audio commentary on Primary with excerpts from a 1961 conversation between Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker, and film critic Gideon Bachmann. Robert Drew in His Own Words is a new documentary with archival footage of the man at work; there’s a new conversation between Pennebaker and Jill Drew, Drew’s daughter-in-law and general manager of Drew & Associates today; Outtakes from Crisis is just that, discussed by historian Andrew Cohen, author of Two Days in June; particularly interesting is an interview/discussion with former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and Sharon Malone (Holder’s wife and sister of Vivian Malone, one of the students featured in Crisis); an interview with Richard Reeves, author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, in which he points out the disparities between the worlds of Washington D.C. then and today; and footage from a 1998 event at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, featuring Drew, Pennebaker, Leacock, and Albert Maysles. An essay by documentary film curator and writer Thom Powers appears in the booklet.

The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates is a spellbinding look into the past with a microscope on one of our country’s most charismatic and eloquent presidents. The films provoke a sobering speculation of what the world’s history might have been like had the events of November 22, 1963 not occurred.

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“THE CROWN JEWEL OF ITALIAN NEO-REALISM”

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection released the wonderful Bicycle Thieves on DVD in 2007 and now finally presents a marvelous new 4K digital restoration of the Academy Award-winning picture (1950, Honorary Award for Foreign Language Film) on Blu-ray. The movie was known in America for decades as The Bicycle Thief—but the literal translation of the Italian title is plural, and this also makes more sense in the context of the film’s story. There is more than one bicycle thief, and the revelation of the second one’s identity is what gives De Sica’s picture its emotional power.

Italian neorealism was a movement that lasted from 1945 to about 1952, and it was highly influential for filmmakers around the world. There would not have been a French New Wave in the early 60s had Italian neorealism not served as a stylistic and thematic launching pad. Film scholars generally acknowledge Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) as the first true Italian neorealist picture, for it presented a striking naturalistic depiction of life among the lower class and the poor in post-World War Two Italy. Strict realism had been attempted previously by other European filmmakers (e.g., Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante), but nothing had prepared the world for the harsh, yet affective, truthfulness of Italian neorealism.

Stylistic traits of the movement include working with extremely low budgets; shooting on-location in the streets of war-torn cities often with hand-held cameras, creating a documentary-like visual style; avoiding artifice in editing, camerawork, and lighting in favor of a simple “style-less” presentation; using non-professional actors in many cases; and adapting conversational, non-literary dialogue. Thematically, the films focused on the plight of the poor and lower class as they struggled to climb out of the horror that the world war had brought; a new democratic spirit with emphasis on the value of “ordinary” people; a compassionate point of view; humanism; and a focus on emotions rather than abstract ideas.

Bicycle Thieves is an exemplary entry of the movement; it is indeed the crown jewel. The story is simple—Antonio, a poor man, finally gets a job that will pull his family, which consists of his wife, his son Bruno (around eight or nine years old), and newborn baby, out of poverty. But the job requires a bicycle that would enable Antonio to move around Rome. All goes well for a day or so, until a thief steals the bike. For the rest of the film, a desperate Antonio and Bruno scour the streets of the city looking for the thief and the stolen bicycle, encountering a variety of characters who try to help (or hinder) him. Yes, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was an homage of sorts to Bicycle Thieves.

De Sica cast a shoe factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, as Antonio. For a non-actor, his performance is exceptional. However, the real find was Enzo Staiola as Bruno, who delivers arguably one of the greatest performances by a child actor in the history of cinema. In many ways, the story is seen through his eyes, and it is Bruno’s outlook of the world around him that defines the film.

The direction is masterful, as is the script, which was written primarily by De Sica and frequent collaborator Cesare Zavattini, who was responsible for the screenplays of several important Italian neorealism pictures. De Sica presents the characters’ poverty with a matter-of-factness that ultimately hits home when Antonio’s impulsive actions nearly result in tragedy. It may be a depressing film, and one that will cause the viewer to shed a tear or two, but in the end there is a statement of humanity that each of us will recognize.

The new Blu-ray looks terrific, as is the gold standard for Criterion. The film contains an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The disk supplements from the original DVD are ported over with nothing new added. They include: Working with De Sica, a fascinating collection of interviews, including one with Enzo Staiola, who is now an old man—and yet he still looks exactly like little Bruno!; Life As It Is, a piece on Italian neorealism with scholar Mark Shiel; and a documentary from 2003 on screenwriter Zavattini. There is an optional English-dubbed soundtrack. The booklet contains an essay by critic Godfrey Cheshire, plus reminiscences by De Sica and his collaborators.

Bicycle Thieves is truly one of the great motion pictures. I screen it every semester for my Film History class at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. The picture is required viewing for anyone interested in world cinema and the movements that shaped modern filmmaking.

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By Jeremy Carr

In light of his artsy, unaffected, at times entirely improvised trilogy of “road movies”—Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976)—Wim Wenders considered The American Friend (1977) to be his riskiest film to date. Fortunately, the gamble paid off and this picture, more than any of his prior efforts, placed him prominently on the world stage, garnering him international attention and critical acclaim. While Patricia Highsmith’s source novel, Ripley’s Game, was not his first choice of her work to bring to the big screen (it was, in fact, not yet published), the end result is a satisfying thriller enveloped in a morally ambiguous milieu of existential drama.

Stricken with a blood disease, workaday picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) encounters disreputable forged art dealer Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) at an auction, where the former is wise to the fakery being peddled by the latter. When Ripley extends a hand to Zimmermann, who ignores the gesture and rebukes the criminal with a dismissive, “I've heard of you,” the snub rubs Ripley the wrong way. Based on this seemingly innocuous slight, he and shady collaborator Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) scheme to get Zimmermann involved in a murderous plot. Playing off the threat that his ailment has grown increasingly terminal (thanks to some fraudulent documents), Ripley and Minot arrange for Zimmermann to take out a fellow gangster target. He would be an unassuming figure for a murder anyway, with no connection to Ripley, Minot, or the victim, and for his efforts, he would financially secure his wife and young son in the wake of his death.

The initial catalyst of the forged painting, as well as the ensuing personal deceitfulness, are indicative of the film’s primary theme, that of the complex nature of mistaken and/or assumed identity. Early in The American Friend, when Ripley ruminates, “I know less and less about who I am or who anybody else is,” it is an explicit expression of this thematic thread. As the film plays out, he and Zimmermann both embark on a profound journey building upon fluctuating ideals and actions, sometime out of necessity—to adapt and stay alive—and sometimes just for the pretense.

In any case, having done the deed, the oblivious yet earnestly considerate Zimmermann (considerate for his family, that is, if not the man he murders) evolves from an innocent amateur to an ethically problematic criminal in his own right. The full weight of the abrupt shift to unscrupulous behavior is made all the more disconcerting after he realizes no immediate consequences for the assassination. First he is surprised and obviously pleased by the lack of judicial punishment, then his joy borders on disturbing exultation. The man who is at one point described as “quiet and peaceful” has now become a cold blooded killer for hire. Just as with Highsmith’s most famous Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, appearances here can be deceiving and easily deceived. As the proliferation of illicit activity runs far and wide in The American Friend, the film frequently questions character authenticity and the uncertain true intentions of those involved. To therefore say the ensuing bond between Zimmermann and Ripley is an unlikely and unsteady one would be quite the understatement, and however much the two grow comfortable with one another, even trusting of each other, nothing about the collaboration ever settles enough to be solidified as a mutual partnership. Even if the characters let their guard down momentarily, the viewer is continually primed to expect a deadly turnabout.

Zimmermann’s potentially fatal flaw, then, is that he fails to realize that in this world of treachery and viciousness, where others are playing the same ruthless game he is, one has to assume they too are capable of violence. In a 2002 commentary track with Hopper, as well as in a more recent interview, both of which are included on the new Criterion Collection release of The American Friend, Wenders states his reluctance toward taking on an amoral character like Ripley. But what becomes clear is that Zimmermann is the one with whom the audience is more disappointed. Ripley and his cohorts are what they are and we expect nothing less; Zimmermann, on the other hand, should have been above such misdeeds. His desire to provide for his family is laudable enough, and the prospect of quick cash would be tantalizing, but his decision to ultimately go through with the murder makes him a most problematic protagonist.

“JESUS LOVES YOU MORE THAN YOU WILL KNOW”

By Raymond Benson

Although it has been released before on Blu-ray, the “Criterion treatment” is always welcome for a classic, well-known film such as The Graduate. Quite simply, it’s one of the most beloved pictures of the 60s, one that hit a nerve in the public consciousness. It helped define those wildly changing years at the end of the decade, illustrating how the country’s youth rebelled against an established society that they were expected to join. The Graduate is a landmark of the New Hollywood movement that took over the studios in those years and held reign through the 70s.

Director Mike Nichols, fresh from his success as a debut helmsman for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), gave us a romantic comedy unlike anything we’d seen previously—mainly because of the radically daring casting of an unknown actor named Dustin Hoffman. Highly influenced by French New Wave, Nichols brilliantly directed the entire picture, but his most important contribution to the film’s triumph was the re-imagining the story not to be about a tall, blonde, suntanned, southern California leading man type (i.e. “not Jewish”) that was the norm for Hollywood. No, Nichols saw that The Graduate would be so much better if it was about a schlemiel. An Everyman that the audience could perhaps recognize as one of them. Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock is okay-looking, he’s not un-attractive, he’s smart, and not a loser. Yet here he is, just out of college, not knowing what the hell he’s supposed to do now, and he allows himself to be pulled into an affair with an older, married woman who is one half of a couple that is close to his parents. The youth of America apparently could relate. The Graduate changed the casting philosophy in Hollywood overnight, opening the door for “unusual” actors to come to the forefront and play leads.

Another striking directorial choice Nichols made was the use of songs by Simon and Garfunkel as a soundtrack. Movies had previously contained pop music—but a specific artist’s work hadn’t been used in such a personal, meaningful way. It’s as if Paul and Art’s voices are our guides along Ben’s journey to find his elusive purpose in life. It’s a perfect fit. It’s interesting to note that the only original song in the picture, “Mrs. Robinson,” was an on-the-spot creation, only the bare bones of which is used in the film. It was later, after the movie’s release, that Simon fleshed out the song and the duo recorded the hit single that appeared on the LP Bookends in 1968. The hugely popular song was also a bit controversial, being that it was about an adulterous affair and the Lord’s name was mentioned as “loving Mrs. Robinson more than she will know.”

The three leads are marvelous. Anne Bancroft, who received top billing, plays against type as well. Robert Surtees’ carefully considered lighting and photography makes her appear much older than 35, which is what she was at the time. Ironically, Hoffman was 29—they were only six years apart in age. Bancroft performs the unhappy Mrs. Robinson with cold and cynical aggressiveness, but also with a vulnerability that is palpable. Katharine Ross became the heartthrob of many young men in 1967, including me. She’s wonderful in the role, but it is indeed her beauty that serves as yet another layer to the film’s theme that yes, even a schlemiel can end up with Katharine Ross. As for Hoffman, he plays Ben with just the right amount of realistic, nervous anxiety—he is so true to the dramatic action that some of the public accused him of not acting at all—he was “being himself.” He, of course, would prove them wrong with his next choice of roles—the radically different Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy—confirming just how good Hoffman had been in The Graduate.

While it was nominated for many of the major categories at the year’s Academy Awards—Picture, Actor (Hoffman), Actress (Bancroft), Supporting Actress (Ross), Adapted Screenplay (Calder Willingham/Buck Henry)—only Nichols walked away with the Director Oscar. For my money, The Graduate was robbed (In the Heat of the Night—granted, a wonderful picture—won).

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration looks tremendous, the colors are rich and solid, emphasizing the “modern” 1967 look and feel that distinctly identifies the period. The film comes with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack (and optional 5.1 surround remix, approved by Nichols, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio). You’ll be humming “Scarborough Fair” for days. There are two audio commentaries—one from 2007 with Nichols and Steven Soderbergh, and one from 1987 featuring film scholar Howard Suber.

The bountiful supplements include a new, long, fascinating interview with Dustin Hoffman (his interviews are always good, he comes off as such a personable guy); a new conversation between Buck Henry and producer Lawrence Turman that reveals some surprising tidbits about the making of the film (e.g., Willingham’s script was thrown out and only Henry’s re-write was used for shooting); and a new interview with film writer and historian Bobbie O’Steen about editor Sam O’Steen’s work with Nichols. Several pieces of vintage material appear on the disk—a documentary from 2007 on the film’s influence; a 1992 vignette on the making of the picture; a terrific interview with Nichols by Barbara Walters on NBC’s Today show in 1966; and an excerpt from The Dick Cavett Show featuring Paul Simon as a guest. Along with the trailer are some interesting casting screen tests—one with Hoffman and Ross, of course, but also other candidates for the roles such as Tony Bill and Jennifer Leak, and Robert Lipton and Cathy Carpenter. The booklet contains an essay by journalist and critic Frank Rich.

The Graduate was the most intelligent, witty, and surprising comedy-drama of its era. If you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to dive into Criterion’s superb new release.

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“COMING TO AMERICA—THE HARD WAY”

By Raymond Benson

Hats off to The Criterion Collection for releasing Blu-ray editions of these two remarkable motion pictures. They have not been available in the U.S. since the days of VHS.

The double feature is really one big movie divided into two, both of them epics, approximately six-and-a-half hours in total length, with built-in intermissions in each picture. It’s the monumental story of a group of Swedish emigrants who make their way to America in the 1840s and settle in the Minnesota wilderness. The tale covers roughly thirty years, but the story officially ends in 1890.

The Emigrants and The New Land were landmark Swedish imports that gained much acclaim and popularity at the time of their release. The Emigrants was the third foreign language film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (in 1972; the previous year it had been nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture). Jan Troell also received Directing and Screenwriting nominations (co-written with Bengt Forslund), and Liv Ullmann was given the nod for Best Actress (she lost to Liza Minnelli in Cabaret). The New Land was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film the same year The Emigrants was up for Best Picture.

Ullmann co-stars with her frequent Bergman collaborator, Max von Sydow, as Kristina and Karl-Oscar, a poor married couple with children who decide that their farm in Sweden is a loser and the government is corrupt and unhelpful. The dream of many Europeans was to go to America, the promised “new land” of opportunity. But in 1840, that wasn’t so easy. It took some money, certainly, but it also required near-superhuman fortitude, health, and bravery. People could die crossing the ocean. Oh, and they also had to know how to build their own house, toil the earth, grow and hunt their own food, and fully support and protect their families in a time when Native Americans (i.e., “savages”) were living amongst them. Karl-Oscar is up for the challenge; after the death of their young daughter from starvation in Sweden, Kristina finally agrees to emigrate. They join a straggly group of friends and extended family and make the journey together.

Based on classic Swedish novels by Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants begins in Sweden, covers the harrowing trip over the ocean and then the trek cross country from the east coast to the Midwest. The New Land follows their struggles to make lives for themselves in a hostile, but beautiful, environment. The story is presented with brutal realism and authenticity. After viewing the pictures, there will be no doubt in one’s mind what it was really like to be an early settler. The boat voyage alone is so powerfully realized that you won’t easily forget it. The journey takes ten weeks, during which the twenty or so emigrants, living in the cramped steerage of a relatively small packet ship, undergo serious seasickness, scurvy, starvation, conflict, and some deaths.

Our protagonist couple meets each new obstacle with tremendous strength, although the years and frequent childbirths begin to take a toll on Kristina. Both von Sydow and Ullmann are exceptionally good, especially in the scenes of intimacy between two people who obviously love each other very much and are willing to sacrifice everything for each other. Eddie Axberg, as Karl-Oscar’s younger brother, is also a standout with his own set of adventures that develop into a subplot as he leaves Minnesota with a friend and heads toward California and its siren call of gold everywhere.

Beautifully photographed, the new high-definition digital restorations, with new English subtitle translations, look fantastic. Troell’s pace might be considered slow by today’s standards, but like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, which also strived to recreate a time and place that no longer exists and succeeded, both The Emigrants and The New Land capture not only the harshness of the era, but also its grace, simplicity, and beauty.

The supplements in the two-disc set include a new introduction to the films by theatre and film critic John Simon; a new conversation between film scholar Peter Cowie and director Troell; a new interview with Liv Ullmann; an hour long documentary from 2005 on the making of the pictures with archival footage and interviews with key personnel; and trailers. An essay by critic Terrence Rafferty appears in the booklet.

This is impressive, exemplary filmmaking, something any devotee of quality European motion pictures needs to see. You may not want to get on a boat ever again.

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“TRAMPS AND ORPHANS”

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection continues its excellent re-issuing of Charles Chaplin’s major works with The Kid, the first full-length feature from the filmmaker. Released in 1921, Chaplin expanded on the two and three reelers he had been making (a “reel” at that time was approximately 10-15 minutes long) to the six-reels of The Kid (the original cut was just over an hour; Chaplin re-edited it in the early 70s to create the now standard 53-minute version). It’s still a short film, but longer than what were considered “shorts.”

The Kid received high acclaim on its release and was one of the writer/actor/director’s most popular pictures. This was in part due to the presence of young Jackie Coogan in the titular role. Coogan, who grew up to play Uncle Fester in The Addams Family television series of the 1960s, steals the movie from right under Chaplin’s little mustache. At age five, Coogan displays a mastery of acting, mime, and acrobatics that is still remarkable today. He is a natural in front of the camera, and he has loads of charisma to boot.

As for Chaplin, he, too, is marvelous in this story about how his famous Tramp character finds an abandoned baby on the street and takes it upon himself to raise the child. Only a few years later, after he and his illegally-adopted son have bonded and are “partners” in petty crime, does the kid’s mother re-enter the scene.

Another aspect that set The Kid apart from previous Chaplin entries was his reliance more on drama than comedy. There is no question that he infused his comedies with pathos from the very beginning, but his last several shorts for the First National Company (his distributor at the time) were “dramadies.” As the opening title of The Kid reads: “A picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear.” My father, who had seen the film in the 1920s, recalled how there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the authorities take Coogan away from Chaplin and the boy is crying and reaching out to his “dad.”

Criterion delivers another superb-looking 4K digital restoration of the 1972 re-release version, also featuring an original score by Chaplin on an uncompressed monaural soundtrack (the score is lush, melodic, and gorgeous, as are all of the artist’s compositions). There’s a new audio commentary featuring Chaplin historian Charles Maland that is informative and serves as a nice complement to the piece, since the movie is silent.

Supplements include Jackie Coogan: The First Child Star, a new video essay by another Chaplin historian, Lisa Haven; A Study in Undercranking, a new documentary featuring silent film specialist Ben Model on the tricks with speed used by filmmakers of the period; vintage interviews with Coogan, and Chaplin’s second wife Lita Grey Chaplin (who appears in the film as an angel); vintage audio interviews with cinematographer Rollie Totheroh and film distributor Mo Rothman; deleted scenes and titles from the original 1921 release; a 1921 newsreel documenting Chaplin’s first return trip to Europe; footage of Chaplin conducting his score in Hollywood in 1971; a 1922 silent short, Nice and Friendly, featuring Chaplin and Coogan, made with and for Lord and Lady Mountbatten for their wedding; and trailers. The booklet essay is by film scholar Tom Gunning.

Another terrific addition to the Criterion-Chaplin library. Here’s hoping that The Circus is next!

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“PUT THE BLAME ON MAME, BABE”

By Raymond Benson

Life Magazine called Rita Hayworth “The Love Goddess.” Make no mistake—she was primarily known as one of the sex symbols of the 1940s. Nevertheless, she was also a talented actress and a terrific dancer (she held her own with Fred Astaire in a couple of movies). Strikingly beautiful, Hayworth was the type of star who lit up the screen and oozed charisma. And her big breakthrough to that position in Hollywood was Gilda, the 1946 part-noir, part melodrama that contained many of the iconic images for which Hayworth is famous.

Film noir historian Eddie Muller, in a new interview included as one of the supplements, says Gilda is not film noir, although it’s got all the trappings. This is true. It’s certainly made in the style of a film noir—the contrasting black and white cinematography by Rudolph Maté (who later became a director in his own right) is clearly derived from German expressionism, the characters are untrustworthy and suspicious, and there’s a femme fatale.

But wait—is Gilda really a femme fatale? Not really. Sure, she’s manipulative and uses her sexuality to get the men in her life to do what she wants; but Gilda is not a bad person—she’s just caught in an uncomfortable situation and is acting out because she’s unhappy. A minor subplot dealing with Mundson’s business dealings—with former Nazis—doesn’t totally qualify Gilda as being a film noir, either. No, this is a movie soap opera, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an entertaining piece of Hollywood glamour that captures a cynical post-war mood prevalent in a lot of Hollywood fare of the late 40s.

The story takes place in Buenos Aires just as World War II is ending. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford, in one of his significant roles as well) is a gambler, drifter, and “tough guy” bumming around Argentina. There he meets a rich man, Ballin Mundson (George Macready), who offers Johnny a job being his right hand man at the casino. The two men work together well and become very chummy—until Mundson returns from a weekend away with a gorgeous wife. She is, of course, Gilda (Hayworth)—and it is immediately obvious she has a history with Johnny.

The rest of the film is a melodramatic clash of wills within this triangle, and it’s not a smooth ride. Much is made of the word “hate,” but in most cases in this picture, that word really means “love.”

Hayworth is quite good in the movie. She performs two song-and-dance numbers (for the casino audience), but her singing voice is dubbed by Anita Ellis. These are signature tunes—“Put the Blame on Mame” (done as a sultry striptease—almost), and “Amado Mio.” (One wonders how Gilda managed to rehearse with the band and lighting crew to do tight, theatrical show-stopping acts, seemingly on the fly.) At any rate, Hayworth smolders as Gilda, and she takes over every frame she’s in. Ford is fine, although he sure has a funny way of hitting people. Macready provides the requisite sinister authority over the other two characters, just as he would a decade later in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

Production aspects are top notch—the photography, music, editing, sets, and especially the costume design. Hayworth’s gowns are right out of the catalog of Hollywood dreams. Perhaps the only weak element is the writing. The story feels jumbled a bit, but the dialogue is rich with memorable one-liners. “If I was a ranch, I’d been named the Bar Nothing,” Gilda famously says. The screenwriters had challenges on their hands. The Production Code prevented the filmmakers from fully exploring the relationship that is really going on between Johnny and Mundson. It’s pretty muted, but it’s there, folks. Ford’s character is much more enamored of his boss than a regular employee would be. How that wrinkle plays into the stew once Hayworth arrives is the heart and soul of the picture. Read between the lines and you’ll fathom what the writers intended, but couldn’t quite get past the censors.

The Criterion Collection’s new high-definition digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, looks and sounds exemplary. A wonderful audio commentary by film critic Richard Schickel, made in 2010, accompanies the film.

Supplements include the previously mentioned interview with Muller; an interesting 2010 discussion with filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann about the film; “Hollywood and the Stars,” a 1964 television show about Hayworth’s career up to that point; and the trailer. The fold-out insert contains a poster of Gilda on one side and an essay by critic Sheila O’Malley.

The tag line on the movie poster read: “There never was a woman like... Gilda!” That’s probably true. Put the Blame on Mame, indeed!

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“BEFORE DYLAN... THERE WAS DAVIS”

By Raymond Benson

The first Coen Brothers feature to be given the “Criterion treatment” is, oddly, their most recent release—Inside Llewyn Davis, which received (mostly) critical praise upon its release in late 2013. Kudos were especially heaped upon the film’s relatively new star, Oscar Isaac. Sadly, while the picture recouped its investment and made a little money, it wasn’t as widely embraced by audiences as it should have been. This is probably because the Coen Brothers typically don’t make movies for the masses. The auteur siblings create art that appeals mostly to intelligent, hip audiences willing to enter a strange, sometimes disturbing, always surprising, universe that is distinctly Coen-land.

Inside Llewyn Davis is presented as a comedy, but in the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre, “comedy” can mean many things. It can be wild and wacky (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski) or it can be dark and foreboding (Barton Fink, A Serious Man). Llewyn Davis leans more toward the latter. In fact, it is a downright melancholy picture that will leave in a funk any viewers who happen to be musicians. But that doesn’t mean the film’s not funny, too.

Llewyn Davis (Isaac, in a brilliant performance worthy of an Oscar nomination he didn’t get) is a down on his luck but talented folk singer in 1961 Greenwich Village. The setting is pretty much a character, too, for this was the hotbed of the folk scene prior to the arrival of Bob Dylan, who changed everything. The Coens and Isaac based the Davis character on the very real folk musician Dave Van Ronk—but really only his musical material (adapted by musical producer T Bone Burnett). While Davis is on stage, he is magic. The songs are heartbreakingly beautiful. Off stage, though, unlike Van Ronk, Davis is a mess. He’s cranky, cynical, and not a very nice guy. He’s losing what friends he has and he’s his own worst enemy. The movie becomes his journey through a bleak New York winter as he tries to eke out a living, take care of a neighbor’s cat, and bring some sort of sense to the madness that is his life. Even though he’s a trainwreck happening before our eyes, poor Davis doesn’t realize he’s doomed until, at the end of the movie, he hits a career-ending brick wall in the form of a certain person.

And like most everything the Coen Brothers create, this revelation is exhibited brilliantly.

Like the Coens’ other musical feature, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, this one explores a very specific music steeped in Americana, and the movie is full of it. Justin Timberlake plays a supporting role as another folkie, along with lovely Carey Mulligan. Much of the material consists of wistful folk ballads, but the trio of Isaac, Timberlake, and Adam Driver perform a song called “Please Mr. Kennedy” that is a laugh riot—the funniest bit in the film—and why it wasn’t nominated for Best Song for that year’s Oscars is a mystery.

The Criterion Collection’s new special edition release of the film is very unique in how much the Coen Brothers participated in the supplements, of which there are an abundance. The brothers are usually unwilling to do interviews or support “making of” documentaries. This time, however, they did a lot, the least of which was approving the 4K digital transfer, which looks gorgeous. Director of photography Bruno Delbonnel chose to shoot the picture with a soft focus and muted colors that somehow evokes the black and white feel of the era. It works beautifully to amplify the melancholy. The feature has a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, plus an audio commentary by authors Robert Christgau, David Hajdu, and Sean Wilentz.

The running time of the supplements are more than three times as long as the feature film. “Inside Inside Llewyn Davis” is a forty-three minute documentary on the making of the film, revealing the Coen Brothers at work, especially in the casting and working with Burnett on the music adaptation. Additionally, the disk includes a long, fascinating interview with the brothers conducted by Guillermo del Toro; a conversation between Burnett and the Coens about folk music; a new piece about the Greenwich Village folk scene of the era featuring Van Ronk’s co-biographer, Elijah Wald; a short documentary by Dan Drasin about the 1961 clash between folk musicians and police in Washington Square Park; trailers; and, finally, the awesome full-length feature (originally aired on Showtime), Another Day, Another Time—a documentary by Christopher Wilcha that covered the special concert of folk music held at New York’s Town Hall in September 2013. Oscar Isaac performs along with the likes of the Punch Brothers, Joan Baez, Marcus Mumford, Jack White, Gillian Welch, Lake Street Dive, and many others. It’s worth the price of the disk. The booklet contains an essay by film critic Kent Jones and a poster illustration of Isaac as Llewyn Davis.

If you missed Inside Llewyn Davis during its theatrical run, here’s your chance to explore the film in depth. As with any Coen Brothers effort, it is a rewarding experience. Time will prove it to be one of their better ones.

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“WHITE SNOW, RED BLOOD”

By Raymond Benson

I’m not sure how, when, and where Quentin Tarantino actually saw these two Japanese films back in the day (they weren’t released in the U.S.), but the character of a vengeful female samurai assassin was a major inspiration for the director’s Kill Bill pictures; in fact, Lucy Liu’s character of O-Ren Ishii is so close to Lady Snowblood that it’s unclear if she’s an homage or a rip-off. At any rate, if you’re a fan of Kill Bill, then you will most likely appreciate these low budget cult action films.

Based on a Japanese manga by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura (Shurayuki-hime) published in 1972 and 1973, both features star the beautiful Meiko Kaji as Lady Snowblood, a kimono-dressed assassin who is active in the late 19th Century and wields a mean blade hidden in an umbrella. Kaji is a popular actress in her native country—she appeared in many B-movie action and martial arts pictures (i.e., the Japanese equivalent of exploitation movies) in the 70s, and then went into television in the 80s. She is also an accomplished musical artist and singer, having released many singles and a dozen LPs. She sings the main title song of Lady Snowblood (“Shuro No Hana”), and Tarantino used the same theme during a sequence in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. Meiko Kaji is perhaps the best reason to view this double feature.

The first film is an origin story in which we learn that Yuki, aka Lady Snowblood, is born to a mother who is in prison for killing one of a criminal foursome—three men and one woman—who murdered her husband and son, and raped her. She passes on the remainder of her vendetta to her daughter, who grows up to study martial arts and become a vigilante. As an adult, Yuki tracks down the other three to exact her revenge.

The second picture finds Yuki as something of a hired hand of the secret police. She must infiltrate the home of an anarchist in order to retrieve an item the government wants—but, of course, her prey turns out not to be the true bad guy. Lady Snowblood must switch allegiances and set things right with a lot of swordplay, blood-letting, and Eastern-style poise.

The movies are colorful and exotic in terms of photography, production design, and costumes—the imagery of white snow splashed with red blood, mixed with the period Japanese wardrobe and sets, exhibit a unique beauty that Tarantino recreated in Kill Bill. Otherwise, the two Snowblood movies are cheaply done. The blood effects are, for the most part, ridiculous. One slash of a throat and the blood laughably sprays like a fire hose. The storylines are predictable, but like the manga from which they are adapted, are pure comic book pulp.

The Criterion Collection presents both features on one disk. The new 2K digital restorations look very good in that glorious and vividly garish color that is indicative of the 70s. Each film has uncompressed monaural soundtracks, and there are new English subtitle translations. The disk is short on supplements, containing only new interviews with Kazuo Koike (the writer of the manga), and screenwriter Norio Osada. Trailers for both pictures are included. The booklet features an essay by critic Howard Hampton.

Recommended for aficionados of Japanese exploitation and martial arts fare, which, in the 1970s, was the equivalent of fast food. 

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“THE GLASSES IN MANHATTAN”

By Raymond Benson

This is the third excellent release of a Harold Lloyd film by The Criterion Collection and it’s a welcome addition to sit on the shelf along with the previous two (Safety Last! and The Freshman). I mentioned in a review of one of the previous releases how wonderful it was that Criterion was re-issuing Lloyd’s catalog. Most of his work had been unavailable for many years; I grew up with Chaplin and Keaton, of course, but with Lloyd, not so much. It’s a pleasure to discover him in this way.

Speedy was Lloyd’s final silent film, released in 1928. Although he usually made his pictures in Hollywood, this time he wanted to shoot in New York City. Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York’s Film Forum, explains in an interesting supplement, “In the Footsteps of Speedy,” that Lloyd took his leading lady Ann Christy and canine co-star King Tut on the railroad across country to make the movie. Quite a bit was shot there, but in the end, though, nearly half the picture was also made on the streets of Los Angeles, doubling for New York—and the matching up is sometimes not very convincing. Still, it’s revelatory to see New York as it was in 1928—Times Square, Washington Square, Sheridan Square, Brooklyn and Coney Island—it’s all here, exactly the way it was. The establishing shot for Manhattan was that of the Woolworth Building, because at the time that was the tallest and most famous structure! Fascinating stuff.

The story concerns Pop Dillon’s horse-drawn streetcar, the last one of its kind in the big city, the tracks of which the railroad baron wants to demolish to make way for progress. Pop’s daughter Jane (Christy) is engaged to Harold “Speedy” Swift (Lloyd), who takes it upon himself to make sure Pop’s livelihood isn’t taken away or at least insure that he’s fairly compensated. Why Harold is nicknamed “Speedy” is not really clear... he’s the usual “Glasses” character—naive, enthusiastic, positive—who works at one job and then another, happily trying to make ends meet so he can marry Jane.

Much of the movie is a sightseeing tour of New York—the Coney Island scenes are especially enjoyable, since Speedy and Jane ride many of the classic attractions that don’t exist anymore. King Tut, the stray dog who picks Speedy to be his master, is adept at many tricks and serves as a terrific little sidekick.

The biggest draw, though, at the time of the film’s release, was the appearance of Babe Ruth in a minor role as himself. Speedy is a baseball enthusiast—a plot point that never really amounts to much—and he has a chance to give the Babe a ride in his taxi (Speedy’s current job). The Babe invites Speedy to see the game at Yankee Stadium, where our hero is able to avoid the cops who are after him for traffic tickets. Babe Ruth had already appeared in a couple of films, in one as himself and in another, a work of fiction called Babe Comes Home, as a baseball player very much like himself. Speedy came at the right time—1928 was the second year in a row the Yankees won the World Series.

Speedy is certainly good fun, although for my money I think both Safety Last! and The Freshman are better pictures. There are plenty of chases and slapstick bits, but the “thrill” stunts Lloyd is known for are not in this one. Here’s hoping Criterion continues its releases of Harold Lloyd classics, especially Grandma’s Boy, Girl Shy, and The Kid Brother.

The movie looks terrific in a new 4K digital restoration from elements preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive; there’s a musical score by Carl Davis from 1992, synchronized and restored and presented in uncompressed stereo (and it sounds great!). A new audio commentary is by Goldstein (see above) and Turner Classic Movies director of program production Scott McGee. In addition to the Goldstein documentary mentioned earlier, there is a selection of rare archival footage of Babe Ruth, presented by David Filipi, director of film and video at the Wexner Center for the Arts. A new video essay featuring stills from deleted scenes is narrated by Goldstein. There’s also a cute collection of Harold Lloyd’s home movies, narrated by his granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, as well as a newly restored Lloyd short from 1919—Bumping Into Broadway, with a 2004 score by Robert Israel. The booklet contains an essay by critic Phillip Lopate.

A must-buy for fans of silent comedy and for those who want to enrich their lives with the genius of Harold Lloyd.

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“JAPAN’S UNSUNG ACTING GENIUS”

By Raymond Benson

The works of famed director Akira Kurosawa are mostly associated with the samurai film—pictures set in the time of feudal Japan, and usually starring the brilliant actor Toshiro Mifune (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, among others). However, Kurosawa made other kinds of movies that are probably not as well known in the West except to film historians and true cinephiles—and fans of the excellent DVD and Blu-ray label, The Criterion Collection. Some of Kurosawa’s early work was made up of film noir gangster and crime pictures (e.g., Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well), but also, surprisingly, heartfelt social dramas set in contemporary Japan—about ordinary people. Ikiru is one of the latter, and it’s a movie that Roger Ebert once called Kurosawa’s “greatest film.”

Ikiru is set in Tokyo in the early fifties. Kanji Watanabe (played by the wonderful Takashi Shimura) is a middle-aged bureaucrat in City Hall, the chief of “Public Works.” He has spent the last thirty years behind a desk, stamping endless pieces of paper with his little seal, never causing trouble, and pawning off problems to other departments, which, in turn, direct them to yet more departments. Bureaucracy at its dullest and most inefficient. At the beginning of the story, several women bring in a complaint about a mosquito-infested cesspool in the middle of their district that should be covered or turned into a park or whatever. But no one at City Hall wants to accept the responsibility of doing anything about it, including Watanabe, and even the egotistical mayor.

Contributing to Watanabe’s stagnation are the attitudes of his grown son and his wife, who live with him in the same house. All they’re waiting for is the inheritance that will one day come their way (Watanabe’s wife is long dead). Then the ultimate insult occurs—Watanabe discovers he has stomach cancer and has six months to live. After the initial shock and depression, the news inspires him to undergo a drastic change.

Watanabe suddenly wants to make something of his life while there’s still time. He befriends a young female subordinate and attempts to experience Tokyo’s nightlife, but that doesn’t satisfy him. Finally, he embarks on taking it upon himself to do something about that cesspool and turn it into a children’s playground before he dies.

But there is more going on in Kurosawa’s film—the director has something to say that is universal regarding a) government bureaucracy; b) working for years in a job that provides no pleasure; c) gossip among co-workers and family about things for which they don’t bother to learn the truth; d) the medical profession’s reluctance to tell a patient the hard facts; e) and, finally, how important it is to find something in one’s life that is fulfilling. Ikiru means “to live” in Japanese.

This brings me to the lead actor, Takashi Shimura. While Toshiro Mifune usually gets all the accolades of being “Japan’s greatest actor” etc. etc., and while I don’t begrudge Mifune-san this praise, I believe Shimura-san had a longer, deeper, and more varied career as an actor. If you’ve seen Rashomon or Seven Samurai, then you know who he is—Shimura played the leader of the seven samurai, and he was the woodcutter in Rashomon. In fact, Shimura, was in twenty-one of Kurosawa’s thirty films (Mifune was in sixteen). Shimura also appeared in Gojira (Godzilla, 1954, and its American cut, Godzilla—King of the Monsters, 1956) in a major role of a paleontologist. The actor appeared in several other Toho Studios monster movies released worldwide. In fact, Shimura was in over 200 films between 1934 and 1981 (he died in 1982 at the age of 76). Than man was a genius. One only has to compare the actor’s performances in both Ikiru and Seven Samurai to appreciate the diversity this talented actor possessed. Takashi Shimura is Japan’s greatest unsung cinema thespian.

Criterion has re-issued Ikiru with a new, very good-looking restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. There is an audio commentary from 2003 by Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Supplements include a 90-minute documentary from 2000 about Kurosawa that features interviews with the director; a lengthy documentary from 2003 on Ikiru featuring interviews with Kurosawa, one of the script writers, other members of the crew, and Takashi Shimura. There’s a new English subtitle translation, and the obligatory trailer. An essay by critic and travel writer Pico Iyer and a reprint from critic Donald Richie’s book The Films of Akira Kurosawa are included in the booklet.

Ikiru is a movie about humanity, life, and death, and it’s perhaps Kurosawa’s most personal film. That means it’s a must for connoisseurs of foreign cinema.

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“SONGS OF HUMANITY”

By Raymond Benson

I’ll bet many of you cinephiles out there have heard of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed trilogy of films from the 1950s (Pather Panchali, aka Song of the Little Road, 1955; Aparajito, aka The Unvanquished, 1956; and Apur Sansar, aka The World of Apu, 1959), but have never actually seen them. Here is your chance to rectify that egregious error. Quite simply put, anyone interested in film history needs to have this trio of motion pictures under the belt.

Satyajit Ray, who received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1992, began his career as an illustrator of books. One of these was Pather Panchali, a classic of Bengali literature (1928) written by Bibhutibushan Bandyopadhyay, and its sequel, Aparajito (1932). They comprise the story of the growth of a boy from infancy to adulthood over the course of twenty-five years or so (from the 1910s to the 1930s), and how he rises from the extreme rural poverty of his humble beginnings to becoming a writer and husband-then-father in the big city of Calcutta (now called Kolkata).

These two novels eventually became the basis for the trilogy of films Ray would make between 1952 and 1959, when he kick-started his work in cinema. A lover of movies—especially the Italian neo-realist works such as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (aka The Bicycle Thief)—Ray founded a film society in Calcutta in 1947 and became an assistant to Jean Renoir in 1949 when the French filmmaker was in India making his seminal The River (1951). With Renoir’s encouragement and inspiration, Ray set out to begin making his own films. He chose Pather Panchali to be his debut.

Because of continual problems with funding, the picture took nearly four years to make, and with an inexperienced crew to boot. Released to overwhelming critical praise and numerous prizes, including the “Best Human Document” award at the Cannes Film Festival, Song of the Little Road stands as one of the greatest debuts of any filmmaker.

Arguably the most striking of the three pictures, Song presents in neo-realist style what it was really like to live in the rural jungle of Bengal in the 1910s. Apu Roy is born the second child to very poor parents who live in a crumbling ancestral home. Harihar, the father (Kanu Banerjee), is something of a priest and writer, but he is always traveling, gone for months at a time, and never brings home enough money. While he seems to be a nice man, he is ineffectual as a husband and father. On the other hand, Apu’s mother, Sarbajaya (brilliantly played by Karuna Banerjee, no relation to Kanu), is the long-suffering, anxious, and stoic parent who provides for the children and fends off criticism from neighbors. It could be said that Apu’s older sister, Durga (played first as a younger child by Shampa “Runki” Banerjee, the real-life daughter of Karuna Banerjee, and portrayed later as a young teen by the wonderful Uma Das Gupta), is really the protagonist of the first film, and Ms. Gupta is especially good in the role. And then there is “Auntie” (amazingly characterized by 85-year-old Chunibala Devi, a veteran of Indian stage and silent films). The woman is half-disabled, wrinkled, toothless, and cross-eyed—and despite being addicted to opium during the shoot, her performance is quite remarkable. Apu (Subir Banerjee, no relation to the others) is around 5 or 6 years old in this picture and is mostly an observer of the hardships and tragedies that fall upon his family.

The picture is poetic, tender, and honest. Filmed by first-time cinematographer Subrata Mitra, who went on to become Ray’s go-to DP, and scored by a young Ravi Shankar (the sitar and bamboo flute music is fabulous!), Song of the Little Road is a one-of-a-kind film that will move you in unexpected ways.

When the picture became a hit, Ray was encouraged to continue the story from the novels and made The Unvanquished, in which a slightly older Apu and his parents move out of the jungle to the holy city of Benares (also known as Varanasi) on the Ganges. There, Harihar works as a priest and Sarbajaya is still the strong one in the family—until tragedy strikes again. Apu and his mother move back to the country, and there Apu decides he wants to go to school and not be a priest like his father. It takes money to attend school, so his mother does what she can to make it happen. An older, teenage Apu then goes to Calcutta to attend college. Karuna Banerjee is the focal point of this middle entry in the trilogy, and her performance is powerful and heartbreaking. Apu is played by two different actors throughout the course of the picture.

Finally, The World of Apu was made after Ray took a break from the trilogy and made a couple of other films in-between (e.g., the acclaimed The Music Room, 1958). In the third chapter, Apu (played by longtime Indian star Soumitra Chatterjee) is now in his twenties and living alone in Calcutta. He is a loner, a dreamer, and an artist. He is writing a novel in which he has little faith, he isn’t interested in working, and he has no money. And yet he is somewhat happy with his “freedom.” Then, by happenstance, he is talked into an arranged marriage to a young girl, Aparna (played by the beautiful Sharmila Tagore in her first film role—she went on to become a star in Indian cinema), and Apu’s life is changed once again. The World of Apu is primarily a love story, but it’s also about the assuming of responsibility for one’s actions.

It’s too bad that there was never a fourth chapter in the story. It would have been interesting to see what happened to Apu when he was in his forties or fifties. Like Truffaut’s Adventures of Antoine Doinel, which covers the life of a young man over the course of five films, The Apu Trilogy is a monumental epic—but an extremely personal and intimate one—that covers universal truths, emotions, and values recognizable in any culture and language. It stands as one of the most heartfelt statements on humanity ever put on celluloid.

The Criterion Collection’s new boxed-set contains all three films, gorgeously and meticulously restored in 4K digital, undertaken in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive at the AMPAS and L’Immagine Ritrovata from existing prints (the negatives were long ago destroyed in a fire). There are many supplements on each of the three discs that include new interviews with Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, and Shampa Banerjee (now Shampa Srivastava), as well as with film historian Gideon Bachmann, camera assistant Soumendu Roy, film writer Ujjal Chakraborty, Ray biographer Andrew Robinson, and film historian Mamoun Hassan. Vintage interviews include several with Ray, Ravi Shankar, members of the crew and cast, and more. A handful of vintage documentaries are included, along with footage from the 1992 Oscar ceremony, in which Ray received his honorary award in a bed in a Calcutta hospital. The booklet features a selection of Ray’s storyboards for Song of the Little Road, as well as essays by critics Terrence Rafferty and Girish Shambu.

The Apu Trilogy on Blu-ray is a landmark release from the Criterion Collection of milestones not only of Bengali cinema, but of motion picture history. Check it out—you will find it a profoundly rewarding experience.

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By Hank Reineke

In a relatively infamous review, a film critic from the Atlanta Journal dismissively sniffed that Dont Look Back (that’s not a typo, there is, mysteriously, no apostrophe in the title) was little more than “the neighborhood’s biggest brat blowing his nose for ninety minutes.” This harsh sentiment was echoed by a critic from the Cleveland Plains Dealer who added the film was “certainly not for moviegoers who bathe and/or shave.” Time, of course, has proven such histrionic appraisals of this very significant film to be entirely wide of the mark. Most film scholars now regard Donn Allen (D.A.) Pennebaker’s gritty and grainy opus as the first true masterwork of rock music documentary filmmaking.

Though some of the earliest reviews were clearly nonplussed with Pennebaker’s maverick “direct cinema” style of filmmaking, most of the critical scorn was reserved for the movie’s principal figure, Bob Dylan. Even such early believers as Israel G. “Izzy” Young, a folk-music enthusiast who took a chance in November of 1961 and chose to produce Dylan’s first New York City concert, thought Dont Look Back, “A sad event. Dylan surrounded by machinations, appearing wherever he is told to, and resenting it. He is abusive to interviewers. Why? He didn’t have to agree to it.”

In defense of his detractors, both friendly and antagonistic, it is true that few of Dylan’s Dont Look Back challengers are spared the artist’s stony silence or mocking ridicule. In the course of the film the strikingly young but already revered folksinger appears, at any given time, to be aloof, condescending, or downright rude to those who might dare touch the hem. The devoted pilgrims, uncomprehending journalists, and dullards who crowd and distract the musician in dressing rooms, hotel suites, press conferences or out on the street are ceremoniously – and sometimes painfully – put-on or put-off by this enfant terrible. Pennebaker’s shoulder-held 16mm newsreel camera is seemingly always at the ready to capture every glorious – and cringe-worthy - moment for posterity, all in a dispassionate and non-judgmental manner. Since his two-camera team rolled nearly continuously, Dylan himself opines on a supplement from this magnificent new Blu-ray issue from Criterion, “After awhile you didn’t notice [the cameras] anymore.”

What Dylan’s harshest critics totally miss is that the singer’s perceived boorishness is reflexively defensive; it’s his dilettantish but not too un-understandable coping mechanism to navigate the maelstrom encircling him. Throughout Dont Look Back, the camera establishes - in stark black and white imagery- that by 1965 Dylan was already caught uncomfortably in the cross-hairs of the emerging culture-war. Dylan’s gift at word-play and his brilliant, thoughtful songs brought him deserved attention; but they also managed, perhaps accidentally, to tap into the zeitgeist of the brimming ‘60’s revolution. The singer’s mysterious persona, his wounded singing-style, his elemental guitar-playing, and his haunting word-images were not simply embraced. They were soon imbedded into the psyches of those most deeply moved: academics, politicos, folk-music aficionados, devoted followers and gossipy news gatherers. Viewing this phenomenon through the prism of today’s prevalent cynicism is difficult; it’s not easily explainable why Dylan’s most ardent admirers expected that this skinny, twenty-four year old youngster – one with less than optimal social skills no less– had the ability to impart wisdom befitting that of an ancient, wizened sage. Throughout the film the singer is pressed to share the secrets of the universe that everyone presumes he’s holding close to his chest. Though Dylan makes several sincere attempts to explain, “I’m just a guitar player. That’s all…,” his protestations go unheeded.

There is one archival flashback near the film’s beginning that provides a window of context for such deification. Upon a BBC journalist’s query “How did it all begin for you, Bob?,” Pennebaker flashes to a civil rights rally where – in a strikingly invasive full screen and spit-flicking close-up – Dylan brays out the verses to one of his best “finger-pointing” songs, “Only a Pawn in their Game.” The song, which would see issue a half-year later on his seminal The Times They Are A-Changin’ album, brashly charges not only the genuine assassin of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, but a morally corrupt police force, government officials, and court justices as malleable co-conspirators to the murder. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only footage in Dont Look Back that is not the product of Pennebaker’s own set of voyeuristic cameras.

The rally footage came courtesy of Edmund Emshwiller, a celebrated visual artist and illustrator who would dabble in experimental filmmaking in the early 1960s. Carrying along a single 16mm wind-up Bolex camera, Emshwiller followed a troupe of Greenwich Village folk-singing activists (Dylan, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and the Freedom Singers) in July of 1963 to a Voter Registration Rally on the farm of Silas Magee in Greenwood, Mississippi. Emshwiller’s resulting short film, Streets of Greenwood, a reference to the small town that was, at the time, a hotbed of racial discrimination and KKK-vigilante violence, would, sadly, not see wide release. Pete Seeger would later suggest it was likely Dylan’s inclusion in the finished experimental-film that doomed Streets of Greenwood to near-oblivion. He was right.

An extremely limited release of this obscure agit-prop short film had, reportedly, been blocked by Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. Grossman was a major figure in the early 1960s folk-music revival, a tough and calculating business manager by reputation; his table stable of clients would eventually include Peter, Paul, and Mary, Janis Joplin, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia, Phil Ochs, and Richie Havens amongst others. In 1962, Dylan signed a ten-year exclusive contract with Grossman, an opportunistic move that in three years time would swiftly transform the scruffy singer from little-known folksinger to pop-music icon. It was also a temporary alliance of strong personalities predestined to end acrimoniously.

“WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF”

By Raymond Benson

Of all the talented filmmakers who have made a mark in the history of cinema, there is that handful who belong in a special category. Granted, many directors are auteurs, in that they have a recognizable style and thematic consistency to their work—a “signature” that identifies them as the “authors” of their pictures. But there is a rare sub-set of auteurs who are so strikingly original and iconoclastic that their work is singularly their own and unlike that of any other filmmaker. David Lynch is one of these. No one makes the kind of movies he does.

Mulholland Drive is easily one of Lynch’s best pictures (and he’s not very prolific, either—only ten feature films to date, not counting television productions). It was released in 2001 to massive critical acclaim (Lynch shared Best Director at Cannes with Joel Coen, and he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar), as well as a great deal of bafflement and mutterings from exiting audiences such as, “Well, that was weird.”

Yes, it’s a strange film—after all, it’s a David Lynch picture, and he is, perhaps, the foremost proponent of surrealism in cinema since the advent of Luis Buñuel. But Lynch is also a romanticist, and his blending of these two somewhat conflicting artistic movements result in a distinctly different kind of animal, something that has been coined “Lynchian.” There is a beauty to Mulholland Drive that is mesmerizing. The mystery and ambiguity of its narrative is almost secondary to the emotional punch the director delivers to the audience.

Much has been written about the movie in an attempt to analyze it and make sense of the non-linear plot, and it is, like all great art, open to interpretation. It takes more than one viewing to “get” it, although I don’t think anyone can fully get it. If this is your first encounter with Mulholland Drive—and the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray edition is an excellent medium with which to approach the film—it is highly suggested you watch the film in its entirety, and then view it again the following day after thinking about it.

Basically, the film is the sad, tragic story of a severely depressed and failed Hollywood actress named Diane (played by Naomi Watts, in a brilliant, breakout performance that shot her to “A” list status) who has been jilted by her lesbian lover, Camilla (Laura Elena Harring) for a film director (Justin Theroux). Diane hires a hit man to murder Camilla, and then kills herself out of remorse and guilt. Doesn’t sound too savory, does it? Never mind—Lynch tells this story in the form of a compelling quasi-neo-noir mystery, and in the process he creates a puzzle for the audience to solve in order to connect the dots. Out of the 146-minutes of running time, nearly the first two hours of it consist of a dream Diane is having which casts her as a wholesome, talented, optimistic and aspiring actress named Betty. She meets an amnesiac victim who adopts the name Rita (also Harring), and they set about attempting to find out how Rita came to be in her situation. At around the 1:57:00 mark in the picture, Diane wakes from her dream to her reality. What follows then are several non-linear flashbacks to events that happened prior to Diane having her dream.

Dream logic is usually nonsensical when analyzed upon waking, but during the actual dream, everything makes sense, right? When watching the first two hours, you’ll see several characters and objects that appear in relation to the “plot” of the dream... but later, in the wakeful reality, the actors who played the earlier characters and the same objects appear in different contexts—with a little thought you can decipher how the dream connects these elements with the real circumstances. The clues are all there on screen.

Another interesting aspect of Mulholland Drive is that it was originally a pilot for a possible television series a la Twin Peaks. Lynch had filmed the “dream” section of the picture, but the network rejected it. The director got financing elsewhere, re-tooled the existing footage, wrote the rest of the story, and brought the principles back for more shooting. This is why the detectives, played by Robert Forster and Brent Briscoe, simply disappear from the movie after the first half hour—they were originally intended to be regular characters in the TV series. One can’t help but wonder what if.

This fascinating film comes with a gorgeous new, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by Lynch and director of photography Peter Deming, with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray. Like most DVDs and Blu-rays that Lynch approves, there are no chapter stops. Supplements include some terrific new interviews with Lynch and Naomi Watts together (very funny and revealing); Theroux, Harring, and Deming; composer Angelo Badalamenti (wait until you hear how he got started writing film scores!); production designer Jack Fisk; and casting director Johanna Ray. There’s a deleted scene, the trailer, and a wonderful treat—on-set footage of Lynch directing several scenes from the film. The booklet contains a 2005 interview with Lynch from Chris Rodley’s book, Lynch on Lynch.

Mulholland Drive is a masterpiece in David Lynch’s canon and the new Criterion release certainly does it justice. This is a film that is haunting, beautiful, and full of secrets and surprises. It really is the stuff that dreams are made of.

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“SAMURAI GHOSTS”

By Raymond Benson

A new release from The Criterion Collection in time for Halloween is the classic Japanese ghost story anthology, Kwaidan, which, upon its appearance in the mid-sixties, generated a good deal of critical acclaim. After it premiered in Japan in late December 1964, the picture was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 (in a much shorter version) and won the Special Jury Prize. The film was also nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (1965). It was also, at the time, Japan’s most expensive production.

It’s a long movie. Criterion has released a new 2K digital restoration of the original 183 minute director’s cut (complete with an intermission intercard) that was shown at the picture’s premiere. Kobayashi was forced to edit it to just over two hours for Cannes, and, for its general and worldwide release, to 164 minutes. “Kwaidan” means “ghost stories,” and the movie consists of four non-related spooky tales from the country’s folklore. The Japanese have always been great tellers of ghost stories, especially ones that take place in feudal Japan—which these do. The individual stories are based on Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of folk tales written in the late 1800s (Hearn is Caucasian but was an expert in all things Japanese).

Visually, Kobayashi’s film is strikingly gorgeous. The high definition improves the quality of Criterion’s original release of several years ago—the colors are vivid and bold, the picture is clear and sharp, and the costumes and set designs are absolutely breathtaking. Kobayashi certainly draws from traditional Kabuki, for the mise-en-scene is more theatrical than cinematic. The settings look like they belong more on the stage than on film. And yet, the director and his designer manage to recreate an epic sea battle with samurai soldiers and wooden ships—in a studio. Impressive stuff.

Despite the visual excellence on display, the four stories are of varying quality. The first, “The Black Hair,” concerns a husband who leaves his wife to search for a better life. He marries the daughter of a nobleman, but is unhappy. When he finally goes back to the original wife, he doesn’t count on reckoning with her long, black hair, which, ahem, has a mind of its own. In “The Woman of the Snow,” a young man’s life is spared by a Yuki-onna (a wicked female spirit) as long as he never reveals that he encountered her. Well, ahem, guess what he does? The longest and slowest, and yet most complex and opulent tale, is “Hoichi the Earless,” in which a blind biwa player (it’s a sort of Japanese lute) is compelled to perform for an entire clan of samurai ghosts; they had long ago perished in that legendary sea battle mentioned above. “Hoichi” features actors Tetsuro Tamba (known to Western audiences for playing Tiger Tanaka in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice) and Takashi Shimura, one of Japan’s greatest actors, seen in many of Akira Kurosawa’s pictures (he was the leader of the Seven Samurai). The final story is a short one, “In a Cup of Tea,” in which a warlord’s bodyguard sees the face of a ghost in the tea he is drinking—and that spirit pays him an unwelcome visit.

It’s probably safe to say that many of the popular J-Horror flicks of the late 1990s (e.g., Ringu, Ju-on) owe a debt to Kwaidan. The earlier film isn’t gory, although for 1964 it was probably a little shocking with a brief shot of nudity and a few instances of bright red bloodletting. The film isn’t particularly scary, either, but it does have some creepy moments. The sound design is especially notable for its subtlety and occasional surprises that will make you jump. Modern audiences, however, will most likely find Kwaidan too meticulously measured to be a real fright fest. Perhaps it might be best enjoyed by viewing the film in two parts.

Supplements include a new audio commentary by film historian Stephen Prince; a new subtitle translation; an interview with Kobayashi from 1993, conducted by filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda; a new interview with assistant director Kiyoshi Ogasawara, which is interesting for the many revelations about Kobayashi’s working methods and the reasons there were several cuts of the film; a new piece about author Lafcadio Hearn; and vintage trailers. The booklet contains an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien.

Art film enthusiasts and devotees of Japanese folklore will certainly enjoy Kwaidan. I would especially recommend it for viewers interested in production and costume design. For those two elements alone, Kwaidan is a sumptuous dreamscape.

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“MOMMIE’S DEAREST”

By Raymond Benson

David Cronenberg’s horror films always seem to tackle subjects that involve an unpredictable human body and the terror of your consciousness residing inside of it. He explored parasites in his first mainstream picture, Shivers (aka They Came From Within, 1975), and viral “stingers” than grow in a woman’s armpit in his second, Rabid, 1977. The rest of his movies, leading up to the ultimate statement of being trapped in a horrible body, The Fly (1986), all dealt with some aspect of physical or mental transformation. The Brood, released in 1979, fits right in with Cronenberg’s thematic fascination with flesh and blood. And it’s a corker.

Oliver Reed plays Dr. Raglan, an unorthodox psychotherapist who uses controversial techniques that cause his patients to manifest their inner turmoil and anger into visible, bizarre growths on their bodies. One guy sprouts spots. Another man grows a weird gland on the outside of his neck. The most extreme result of Dr. Raglan’s methods occurs with a disturbed woman named Nola (Samantha Eggar), who was abused as a child and is in the throes of a divorce and custody battle with her husband Frank (Art Hindle). Nola is growing “wombs” on her body that eventually give birth to horrific dwarf “copies” of her and Frank’s five-year-old daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds)—except these siblings are murderous creatures unwittingly and psychically controlled by their mother. They have the faces of trolls, no navels, and are anatomically asexual, but otherwise they are somewhat identical to Candice. (Where they get the clothes that Candice wears is unexplained.)

As a horror film, The Brood brilliantly succeeds. The shocks are genuine, the gross-out factor is palpable, and the story—which is absurd on the surface—is intelligently well-written (by Cronenberg himself). Apparently the impetus for the film was the director’s harrowing experience in going through a divorce and rescuing his child from a cult.

Reed delivers one of his best campy performances, and Eggar is suitably deranged in her part. Of particular note is young Hinds, who manages to be simultaneously innocent and creepy—this was her first acting role. Perhaps the weakest link in the picture is Hindle, who somehow never reaches the emotional heights that his co-stars do.

It’s a fairly low-budget affair, made for a little less than two million dollars, but the visual effects and production values are top-notch. As noted in the new supplemental documentary on the film’s making, all the strange bodily terrors were accomplished with clever makeup applications—in particular, the use of various-sized condoms filled with movie blood and... other stuff. Eggar relates how hilarious this actually was on the set; she could hardly keep from laughing as the crew glued the ends of prophylactics onto her torso.

Criterion has released a new, restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by Cronenberg, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. As is usually the case with Criterion Blu-rays, the video is gorgeous and vividly colorful—and this is one of those movies in which the color is practically a character in the film! Supplements include: the new documentary featuring interviews with Eggar, executive producer Pierre David, cinematographer Mark Irwin, assistant director John Board, and special makeup effects artists Rick Baker and Joe Blasco (neither of whom worked on The Brood, but served on other Cronenberg pictures); a 2011 interview with Cronenberg covers his early career in the 70s; a 2013 interview with Hindle and a grown-up Hinds is conducted by the editor of Fangoria magazine; and—most fun of all—a segment from The Merv Griffin Show from 1980, featuring Reed verbally sparring with Orson Welles. There’s also a radio spot and an essay by critic Carrie Rickey in the booklet.

Another notable supplement is Cronenberg’s rare second feature film, Crimes of the Future (1970), made in color on a shoestring budget. This is a truly bizarre picture about a world in which all the women capable of reproducing are gone (killed by toxic cosmetics) and men are attempting to compensate without a feminine influence in their lives. A little too stilted for its own good, Crimes serves as a curiosity in the Cronenberg pantheon that is worth seeing... once.

But the main attraction is an excellent fright fest. The Brood has arrived in glorious high definition just in time for Halloween. Grab the popcorn, turn out the lights, and prepare yourself for some truly nightmarish material. The Brood is a keeper.

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“ODDBALLS AND YOUNG LOVE”

By Raymond Benson

Wes Anderson’s marvelous 2012 comedy, Moonrise Kingdom, was previously released on Blu-ray and DVD, but The Criterion Collection has seen fit to issue an edition that blows the old one away. With an abundance of fun, entertaining supplements and packaged ephemera—Criterion’s disc is in keeping with the other fine releases the company has done for the filmmaker.

Moonrise Kingdom is the first Wes Anderson movie I truly fell in love with. While I liked and appreciated his earlier pictures, Moonrise is a flawless masterpiece of style and wit—as is Anderson’s following film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. For my money, these are two slam-bang pieces of comic brilliance.

The setting is a small fictional New England island, during one summer in the Sixties. A Boy Scout troop camps out there. Some families live on the island, others visit for the season. Twelve-year-old Suzy (wonderfully played with a mature sense of irony by Kara Hayward) falls for one of the scouts, Sam (Jared Gilman, in another highly accomplished performance). They’re both intelligent, curious, and have wicked senses of humor. They make plans to run away together, and when they do, the adults (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are Suzy’s parents, Edward Norton is the scoutmaster, and Bruce Willis is the chief of police on the island) go nuts. The whole island gets involved in searching for the precocious lovebirds, including the entire scout troop. Add in an approaching hurricane and you’ve got a wacky romantic farce with suspense.

If you’re familiar with Anderson’s work, you’ll know to expect a good degree of quirkiness—every frame of this delightful picture oozes with eccentricity. Oddballs abound. The overall tone is light and whimsical, and yet the handling of the subject of young love is powerfully poignant and painfully real. How many of you remember what it was like?—that first, young love, the infatuation with another person at such a tender, yet blossoming, age. Anderson captures it all with a good deal of laughs and a lot of heart.

The director and his team also managed to build an entire universe around this little island—the detail is remarkable, all the way from hand-knitted decorations to the invented library books Suzy has stolen to read over the summer. The sense of community the picture conveys is palpable—and it’s no wonder, since the entire cast and crew (and, of course, others from Anderson’s stock company pop up—Bob Balaban, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, and Harvey Keitel) lived together for a couple of months while making the movie. As emphasized repeatedly in the supplemental documentaries, the cast and crew became a family.

Visually, the restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by Anderson, is the kind of picture one would use to demonstrate the joys of Blu-ray to a novice. It is a colorful, vibrant picture with an imaginative look and feel, thanks to the Production Design, Art Direction, and Set Decoration by, respectively, Adam Stockhausen, Gerald Sullivan, and Kris Moran. The new audio commentary features Anderson, Bill Murray, Edward Norton (who literally phones it in), Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola, and others—and it’s all entertaining stuff.

The supplements include special shorts that were used to promote the film, some of which were previously released, such as the Bob Balaban-narrated overview of the six library books Suzy is reading throughout the film, and Bill Murray’s guided tour of the set. There’s a new behind-the-scenes documentary, selected-scene storyboard “animatics,” audition footage of the child actors, and interviews with many of the cast and crew. Edward Norton presents a selection of short videos he shot with an iPhone, and there is a bit on miniatures and props used in the film.

Additionally, the packaging includes a few souvenir goodies—a “postcard” of the cast and a map of fictional New Penzance Island. The enclosed booklet contains pictures of merit badges, the library book covers and some illustrations, and an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien.

Looking back at 2012, it’s a shame that the picture’s only Oscar nomination was for its Original Screenplay (by Anderson and Roman Coppola). It was my favorite picture of the year, and Criterion did it proud.

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KIEŚLOWSKI’S ALTERNATE UNIVERSES

By Raymond Benson

The late Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski often dramatized the theme of one’s destiny—whether it be determined by fate or by random coincidences. His most well known work, the Three Colors trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), certainly deals with the subject of chance, as do several episodes of his celebrated television miniseries, The Decalogue.

Made in 1981 during the Solidarity movement and a time of political upheaval in Soviet-occupied Poland, Blind Chance explores the question of “what if?” If you did something as insignificant as bumping into another person, would that change the course of your life?

The film offers three alternate “lives” of a medical student named Witek (superbly played by Boguslaw Linda). The first five minutes provide us with brief glances of Witek as a child, a teenager, and then a young adult. After the death of his father, Witek decides to drop out of medical school and travel to Warsaw to visit his aunt. He is late to the station and must run through a crowd of people to catch the train. What happens on the platform is the pivotal catalyst for the rest of the story. He almost collides with a drunk—but doesn’t touch him—giving Witek that extra second or two that allows him to catch the train. While onboard, he meets an elderly Party-line Communist who takes a fancy to Witek and offers him a job in the city. So, in this lifeline, Witek becomes a Communist and works in opposition to the young people of his age group who are protesting the government.

In an alternate scenario, though, Witek actually collides with the drunk, but the man with the beer remains standing. This causes Witek enough of a delay that he misses the train. He then gets into a scuffle on the platform with a police officer and is arrested. Once Witek is back on the street, he is forever prejudiced against the Communist government. Thus, in this life he becomes an anti-Soviet activist and a practicing Catholic.

Finally, in a third possibility, which may be what really happened, Witek accidentally knocks down the drunk—delaying the young man a few seconds longer—so that Witek not only misses the train, but he avoids the policeman on the platform. Instead, he runs into a female medical student colleague. She persuades him to stay and return to his studies. Witek marries the girl, has children, becomes a successful doctor, and remains apolitical. Witek lives a happy life—until Kieślowski pulls the rug out from under us and delivers a knife wound of an ending.

The picture might remind viewers of Peter Howitt’s 1998 British film Sliding Doors, which also examined alternate life paths—but only two. Blind Chance does it with three, and the movie was made more than fifteen years earlier.

The task of editing such a story is, of course, challenging, and editor Elzbieta Kurkowska deserves special praise for keeping the complex narrative comprehensible. In a 2003 interview, filmmaker and Kieślowski associate Agnieszka Holland explains that she had seen the first cut of the film, which was initially too confusing and didn’t work. Kieślowski made a thorough assessment of what had gone wrong and completely recut the picture with Kurkowska—resulting in the brilliant piece of work presented here.

If you can get past the heavy political discourse that is an integral part of the story, you will find Blind Chance to be a fascinating and intelligent scrutiny of the way life rolls the dice for us all.

The film was banned by the Polish government prior to its release, due to inherent criticisms of the government. The picture was finally released in Poland in 1987 with some cuts dictated by the censor board. It wasn’t until the fall of Communism in Europe in 1989 that the complete works of Krzysztof Kieślowski (who had been making movies since the 70s) emerged from behind the Iron Curtain so that the rest of the world could discover him.

The Criterion Collection has reassembled Blind Chance to its 1981 version—with the exception of an audio-only portion of a few seconds of a police beating that, for some reason, “couldn’t be restored.” The 4K digital transfer, approved by cinematographer Krzysztof Pakulski, is clean and sharp, providing the viewer with the best possible edition of this important work. The soundtrack is in uncompressed stereo.

Supplements include the Holland interview; a new interview with Polish film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski; and demonstrations of the nine pieces of the film that were censored in 1987. The booklet contains an essay by film critic Dennis Lim and a 1993 interview with Kieslowski.

Blind Chance is recommended for discerning cinema enthusiasts looking for a little European history, intelligence, and artful filmmaking. A truly gifted auteur, Kieślowski departed this plane of existence way too early (in 1996 at the age of fifty-four). Perhaps he is now living his own alternate timeline.

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“THE MOVIE FOR MOVIE LOVERS”

By Raymond Benson

François Truffaut had an all too short but certainly brilliant career as a filmmaker. He began in the world of film criticism in France, but in the late 1950s he decided to make movies himself. Truffaut quickly shot to the forefront of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 60s, alongside the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and others. By the time the 70s rolled around, Truffaut was a national treasure in France and a mainstay in art house cinemas in the U.S. and Britain.

His 1973 masterpiece, Day for Night (in France La Nuit Américaine, or “American Night”), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of that year, the only time Truffaut picked up an Academy Award. Due to odd eligibility rules, the picture could be nominated for other categories the following year. For 1974, Truffaut was nominated for Best Director, the script by Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, and Jean-Louis Richard was up for Best Original Screenplay, and Valentina Cortese was nominated for Supporting Actress. Thus, Day for Night is perhaps one of the auteur’s best known works outside of France.

The title refers to a technique used in Hollywood pictures to create night scenes shot during the day by using a special filter. In France “day for night” was also known as “American night,” because it was an inexpensive and less complicated method to achieve the effect.

The title is entirely appropriate because the movie is about making a movie. Truffaut plays a director named Ferrand (the filmmaker often acted in his own pictures; most non-French audiences will remember his major role in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The film he is making is a trite melodrama about an older man falling in love with his soon-to-be daughter-in-law—which is a plot that might very well have been in a real Truffaut movie. In fact, several of the talking heads in the disc’s supplements suggest that Truffaut was slyly making fun of his own 1964 melodrama, The Soft Skin (reviewed here), which at the time of its release was a financial and critical disappointment for the filmmaker.

Bisset and Truffaut

The “plot,” as it were, of Day for Night is nothing more than a freeform documentation of the movie’s shoot, particularly focusing on the actors and crew and the on-screen and off-screen relationships they have while on location—who’s falling in love, who’s breaking up, who’s sleeping with or cheating on whom, and so on. In fact, mimicking the love triangle that’s in the film-within-the-film, two of the lead actors, Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud) have an affair, jeopardizing the actress’ marriage, especially when Alphonse becomes enraged with jealousy when Julie decides to reconcile with her husband when the man visits the set. There are other dalliances among crew members... at one point a wife visiting her henpecked production manager husband shouts at the entire production staff, “What is this movie business? Where everyone sleeps with everyone! Everyone lies! Do you think it's normal? Your movie world...I think it stinks. I despise it!”

Yes, it’s a romantic comedy, and there are quite a few laughs and whimsical moments. Truffaut was often guilty of injecting sentimentality into his films, and it’s here in abundance. This is not a bad thing, for the director did this thing well. Day for Night is indeed very light, its buoyancy aided by Georges Delerue’s sparkling score. It’s a quintessential Truffaut picture in that it hits his various auteur thematic signatures—love affairs, infidelity, reconciliation, pathos, and even cinema history. In fact, the picture is in itself an homage to the art of making motion pictures. A key recurring sequence is when Ferrand has fitful dreams at night, picturing himself as a young boy desperate to steal lobby cards and press photos from the local cinema. As the American movie posters claimed in the tag line, “it’s a movie for people who love movies.”

The cast is sensational. Besides Truffaut, Bisset, and Leaud, Jean-Pierre Aumont plays the older screen idol who is nearing retirement, Valentina Cortese is an Italian screen idol whose major earlier work was “with Fellini” (and this is true for Cortese herself!). Other Truffaut “regulars” such as Dani, Alexandra Stewart, and Nathalie Baye, make appearances.

The picture was shot at the legendary Victorine Studios in Nice, France (now called Riviera Studios), the site where many noted films were made, such as To Catch a Thief, Children of Paradise, Lola Montes, Mon Oncle, And God Created Woman, and more. These photos depict what the grounds looked like in 2000, when I visited the location while researching my James Bond novel, Never Dream of Dying (the studios were used as a model for a setting in the book). While I walked around the grounds, I mostly thought of Day for Night, for Truffaut’s movie had stayed with me for decades since I first saw it on its initial release.

Photos taken by Raymond Benson at the filming location in 2000.(Photos copyright Raymond Benson. All rights reserved.) 

The Criterion Collection presents a gorgeous new restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Pierre-William Glenn, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Most of the supplements that appeared on the Warner Brothers DVD of 2001 have been ported over, such as vintage “making of” documentaries; interviews with Truffaut, Bisset, and several other cast and crew members; a documentary on the film featuring film scholar Annette Insdorf; and vintage news clips such as Truffaut being interviewed at Cannes. New supplements include a fascinating video essay by the extraordinary filmmaker :: kogonada; new interviews with DOP Glenn and assistant editor Martine Barraqué; and a new engrossing interview with film scholar Dudley Andrew about the rift that occurred between Truffaut and Godard after the release of the film. An essay by critic David Cairns adorns the booklet.

Day for Night is easily one of François Truffaut’s best films. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to the movie lover inside you to pick up this one.

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“THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN”  (1981; Directed by Karel Reisz)

(The Criterion Collection)

“PARALLEL OBSESSIONS”

By Raymond Benson

John Fowles’ 1969 novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was a literary sensation, a best-seller, and a work deemed “impossible” to film because it broke conventions and played with narrative structure and point of view. And yet, there were several attempts in the 70s to adapt the difficult Victorian story to something cinematic. Apparently Dennis Potter took a shot at writing a screenplay at one point, but it was playwright Harold Pinter who cracked the problem and presented the tale of obsession, infidelity, and shame as two parallel stories—one in the Victorian past, as in the book, and one in the present, dealing with the actors making the film we’re watching. It was a unique and original approach to the material. With Karel Reisz at the helm, the film adaptation became a critically-acclaimed art house delight.

Reisz, a Czech director working in England, was at the forefront of the British New Wave of the 60s with such pictures as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Morgan!, and Isadora. He brilliantly realizes Pinter’s script with the help of the gorgeous cinematography by the great Freddie Francis and the superb performances by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. It was Streep’s first starring role (she had previously held supporting parts and won her first Oscar for Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer) and it earned the actress her first Oscar nomination in the Leading Actress category. For many, especially in the U.S., this was the first time Irons was seen on the big screen (he had previously done much work for British television and had a small part in one feature film). Narratively, it’s Irons’ movie—he plays the protagonist—but it is definitely Streep, with her hauntingly quiet portrayal of Sarah, the fallen woman, who leaves an indelible mark.

The parallel stories follow illicit love affairs. In the present, actors Mike (Irons) and Anna (Streep) are making a movie called The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Both are married to other people, but they have an on-location affair while filming in West Dorset, England. Coincidentally, the characters they play in the movie—Charles and Sarah—have a scandalous affair in the same setting, but in the Victorian era. The point of the picture seems to be that nothing has changed since the late 19th Century in terms of morality, social mores, and how misplaced passion can wreck a life. Sarah is a mysterious outcast in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, the subject of much gossip as being the “French Lieutenant’s Whore,” i.e., she had an adulterous relationship with a married, visiting French soldier. Charles is a paleontologist working in the village; he is engaged to marry a well-to-do local girl, but he unwittingly becomes obsessed with Sarah. This, of course, leads to the man’s ruin. In both cases, the aftermath of the affairs leave devastations... or do they?

In Fowles’ novel, the consequences of Charles’ and Sarah’s affair is played out in three different endings. It is up to the reader to decide which is the most plausible—or morally acceptable. For the film, Pinter has twisted this conceit into the two analogous storylines with dissimilar outcomes. Very clever indeed. Perhaps Pinter’s script—which was nominated for an Adapted Screenplay Oscar—is the real star of the picture.

Besides the Oscar nods for Streep and Pinter, the film was nominated for Art Direction, Costume Design, and Film Editing.

Thought-provoking, moody, beautifully shot, brilliantly written, and exquisitely acted, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is ripe for rediscovery as an important piece of British cinema from the early 80s.

The Criterion Collection does its usual bang-up job with a new 2K digital restoration and an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The images look marvelous. Reisz’s attention to detail in the period setting is a feast for the eyes.

Supplements include new interviews with Streep and Irons, editor John Bloom, and composer Carl Davis (whose score is evocative and sublime); a new interview with film scholar Ian Christie about the making and meaning of the film; an episode from The South Bank Show from 1981 featuring Reisz, Fowles, and Pinter; and the theatrical trailer. The essay in the booklet is by film scholar Lucy Bolton.

While Chariots of Fire may have taken the Oscar gold for 1981, for me the finest British picture that year was The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 

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“HE SAID/SHE SAID—REFLECTIONS ON LOVE, UNRELIABLE MEMORIES, AND THE ATOMIC BOMB”

By Raymond Benson

Director Alain Resnais achieved worldwide acclaim with his documentary short, Night and Fog (1955), which revealed to the world the true horrors of what went on in the Nazi concentration camps. For his first feature film, Resnais turned to fiction; and yet, he maintained a somewhat documentary approach in showing the world the true horrors of what occurred in Hiroshima, Japan when the first atomic bomb was dropped. Beyond that, Hiroshima mon amour (“Hiroshima, My Love”) is an art film that not only signaled the beginning of the French New Wave (although many film historians do not count it as an example of that movement), it also established Resnais’ singular, enigmatic and ambiguous style as an auteur. The director would go on to make even more thematically-mysterious pictures (namely Last Year at Marienbad) and become something of a French equivalent of Terrence Malick. Sort of.

Hiroshima mon amour is quite accessible, though, and it will surely stay with and haunt the viewer long after watching the film. Primarily it’s a love story between a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva, who returned to the limelight in 2012 with her Oscar-nominated leading role in Amour) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada). The man is married, but his wife is away. The woman is “married” to the ghost of her first love, a German officer who died just before France was liberated in World War II. For that forbidden love, she was ostracized and punished by the population of her small town, complete with head shaving and shaming. This so psychologically damaged her that now, in the present (1959), she is willing to embark on a two-night stand with a stranger. The leading characters’ names are never mentioned, although they end up calling each other by the city from which they hail—“Hiroshima,” for the man, and “Nevers” (her home town in France), for the woman.

The picture follows the short romance over the course of two nights and a day in-between, juxtaposed with numerous flashbacks of the woman’s experience during the war. Overlaid on all of this is visceral footage of the atomic bomb’s aftermath in the city of Hiroshima, where the story takes place. Do the characters tell the truth to each other? Are their memories real or imagined? She might state something as fact, but then the man will say it isn’t true. And vice versa. A facetious way to describe it the film is that it’s “He Said/She Said in a Dreamscape.”

Perhaps this doesn’t sound like a good time at the cinema, but don’t be fooled—Hiroshima mon amour is a powerful, deeply moving piece of filmmaking that still resonates today. It explores how we remember traumatic experiences in our lives, what we censor, and what we embellish. The black and white cinematography, by Michio Takahashi and Sacha Vierney (the picture was a French-Japanese co-production), is stunningly gorgeous. The performances, especially by Riva, are outstanding. The musical score, by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, alternates between playful and melodic accessibility to avant-garde Stravinsky-like dissonance. And the direction, well, let’s just say that Alain Resnais went on to become one of the most revered French filmmakers, and Hiroshima mon amour could very well be his masterpiece.

The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD over a decade ago and they have now seen fit to provide us with a new 4K digital restoration on Blu-ray with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Criterion will always be the Cadillac of Blu-ray restoration of old classics, and their work on Hiroshima is outstanding. All of the extras from the previous DVD release are ported over, and there are some new supplements as well, including: a program on the film’s restoration; a new interview with film scholar Francois Thomas, author of a book on Resnais; and a new interview with music scholar Tim Page about the film’s score. The previous supplements include an excellent audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie; interviews with Resnais from 1961 and 1980; interviews with Emmanuelle Riva from 1959 and 2003; and an essay by critic Ken Jones and excerpts from a 1959 Cahiers du cinema discussion about the film, both of which appear in the booklet.

Quite simply, Hiroshima mon amour is a milestone of important international cinema. You owe it to yourself to see it. Maybe you already have. Do you really remember?

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"WE'RE GONNA KILL THE SWEDE"

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection gave us the DVD versions of these two excellent crime thrillers twelve years ago. The company has now seen fit to upgrade the release to Blu-ray.

Based loosely on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, both versions of The Killers begin with the author's premise and then take off from there in very different directions. It's interesting to see how the respective screenwriters adapted the story and then created two disparate feature-length tales out of it. In Hemingway's piece, two hit men arrive in a small town looking for "The Swede". They terrorize the owner, cook, and a customer in a diner in an attempt to find the guy. After the killers leave in frustration, the customer runs to the Swede's boarding house and finds him in bed with his clothes on. He warns the Swede about the men, but the Swede says he's not going to do anything about it. The customer goes back to the diner and, after realizing no one cares, leaves town. And that’s it.

The 1946 version faithfully captures the short story even down to the dialogue for the first ten minutes. Where the short story ends, the movie goes on and we see the hit men actually kill the Swede (played by Burt Lancaster in his first starring role). Enter Jim Reardon (Edmond O'Brien, with third billing, but he's really the protagonist of the film!) as an insurance inspector. It turns out the Swede had a life insurance policy that benefits an old lady who helped him once. Reardon is determined to uncover the story behind it all, and the rest of the movie follows his investigation into the Swede's life in crime (told entirely in flashbacks). The Swede was a boxer who got mixed up with Big Jim, a racketeer (played by Albert Dekker), and falls in love with Big Jim's gal, Kitty (played by smoking hot Ava Gardner, in one of her first starring roles; Gardner had been kicking around Hollywood since the early 40s and this was her big break). As we all know, it's not good to mess around with the crime boss's dame.

Robert Siodmak received an Oscar nomination for Best Director on the picture (it was also nominated for adapted screenplay, editing, and music score). There's no question that The Killers is a seminal film noir, one of the best of the bunch produced when Hollywood was churning out these types of gritty crime pictures by the dozens. Siodmak's hand is assured as he brings in all the trademark film noir elements: ”expressionistic lighting, a femme fatale, stark brutality, a cynical attitude, flashbacks, a man haunted by the past, and more. The picture could serve as a Film Noir 101 course. Lancaster is fine and Gardner is sexy and dangerous, but it is O'Brien who holds the movie together.

The 1964 version is a different animal. It was produced to be the very first TV movie, but NBC viewed the finished product and deemed it too violent for television. Instead, the producers released it theatrically worldwide. Directed by Don Siegel (billed as "Donald Siegel"), The Killers Mach II stars Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager as the hitmen, who here become the focal point of the new story. John Cassavetes plays the Swede character, only here he is a racecar driver named Johnny. The femme fatale, Sheila, is played by Angie Dickinson, and get this... the crime boss is none other than Ronald Reagan in his last film role before he became a politician.

The film begins basically the same way, but the setting is different. The two hitmen come looking for Johnny and they kill him. Marvin's hitman character then takes over the dramatic action originally performed by O'Brien in the 1946 version. Marvin is the one who wants to find out why he and his partner were hired to kill Johnny, as well as what happened to a load of stolen cash that Johnny may have hidden.

While not as important or engaging as the 1946 edition, The Killers Mach II is worth watching for Siegel's solid craftsmanship. NBC was probably right not to broadcast the picture on television in 1964, given the time period, the movie is pretty brutal. Marvin and Gulager are creepy bad guys, Cassavetes delivers his usual fine work, and Dickinson displays her charms with aplomb. As for Reaga, well, le's just say it's not too difficult to buy him as a crook. In hindsight, given that this guy became a two-term U.S. president, his performance lends a "must-see" element to the picture.

Criterion gives us new high-definition digital restorations of both films (the 1964 version is in color and in 4:3 aspect ratio, since it was shot for television). They look terrific. The black and white contrasts in the 1946 version are especially sharp and unsettlingly beautiful. Almost all of the original supplements are here:Andrei Tarkovsky's student film adaptation of the short story from 1956; a video interview with noir expert/writer, the late Stuart M. Kaminsky; a video interview with Clu Gulager; Stacy Keach reading Hemingway's short story on audio; the Screen Directors Playhouse radio adaptation from 1949 featuring Lancaster and Shelley Winters; an audio excerpt from director Don Siegel's autobiography read by Hampton Fancher; and trailers. The booklets feature essays by novelist Jonathan Lethem and critic Geoffrey O'Brien. Not sure why Criterion left off the production, publicity, and behind-the-scenes stills, actor biographies, production correspondence, Paul Schrader's essay, and music and effects tracks, all which were on the original DVD release. If those things are important to you, then you may want to hold on to it.

But for the Blu-ray restorations alone, The Killers double feature is an excellent buy, especially for fans of film noir and crime pictures in general. 

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“I LOVE NEW YORK IN JUNE”

By Raymond Benson

I had seen Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King only once, back in 1991 on its initial release, and I liked it very much. As years went on, though, my memories of it were such that I considered it to be atypical of Gilliam’s work. For me, he’s always been a hit-and-miss director; some of his pictures are absolute classics and others not so much. There is a certain beautiful sloppiness to his direction; to use a painting analogy, it’s as if he throws a lot of paint on the canvas and maybe it’ll turn out to be something coherent, funny, and meaningful. Gilliam, I think, is much more of a visual designer than a people-director—his films always look great, usually very original and envelope-pushing in their conception and the execution of the visuals. They are often big pictures on large canvases. They contain lots of effects work, wild costuming, over-the-top performances, and a frenetic energy that is exhaustive. And a lot of fantasy.

On viewing The Criterion Collection’s brand new Blu-ray release of the picture for the first time since 1991, I now realize that The Fisher King is absolutely not atypical of Gilliam’s work. I remembered it as being an intimate study of two characters who go from despondency to finding meaning in their lives, with not much “Gilliam-esque” aspects to the picture. Whoa, my memory was flawed. Gilliam’s wildness, his visual extravagance, the over-the-top performances, the crazy camera angles, fantasy, and the acerbic humor is all there. And it’s terrific, easily one of Gilliam’s best movies (it’s certainly the one that received the most Oscar nominations—five, including Best Actor (Robin Williams), Supporting Actress (Mercedes Ruehl, who won), Original Screenplay (by Richard LaGravenese), Art Direction/Set Design (of course!), and Original Score.

Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a “shock jock” DJ who burns out when one of his listeners becomes a mass murderer based on something Lucas said on the air. Three years later he has quit his job, become an alcohol and drug abuser, and hooked up with video store owner Anne (Mercedes Ruehl in an outstanding performance). Then he accidentally meets a homeless man named Parry (Robin Williams), whose wife was killed by that mass murderer in the incident that also wrecked Lucas’ life. Lucas and Parry form an odd couple friendship and Lucas gets the bright idea of playing matchmaker with Parry and the woman the homeless man dreamily watches from afar, Lydia (Amanda Plummer).

Parry suffers from hallucinations (he believes a horrific “Red Knight”—a fantastic accomplishment in visual effects and costuming—is after him, and that he must find the Holy Grail—shades of Monty Python!—in order to bring his sanity back to earth). Williams delivers one of his wild, crazy-man, wacky performances, and it’s a gem. Bridges, too, is no slouch and he matches his co-star’s antics with a grounded portrayal that is the anchor of the piece. One must also mention Michael Jeter, who almost steals the movie as another homeless man who does a song and dance in drag that brings down the house.

In short, The Fisher King may be Gilliam’s most “humane” picture, for it takes a serious look at homelessness, mental illness, and the trappings of life that contribute to these ills. Perhaps that’s why I remembered the movie as being “atypical” of Gilliam... it had a message of social responsibility and wasn’t some dystopian fantasy set in another world, although the director’s presentation of New York City certainly places Manhattan in another world!

Criterion’s new restored 2K digital transfer, approved by Gilliam, looks fabulous, of course, and the 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is terrific. There’s an enlightening audio commentary by Gilliam. Other extras include new interviews with actors Bridges, Ruehl, and Plummer; as well as Gilliam, producer Lynda Obst, and writer Richard LaGravenese. A new interview with artists Keith Greco and Vincent Jefferds explores the creation of the Red Knight. There’s a wonderful video essay of Bridge’s on-set photographs, narrated by Bridges. Footage from 1991 of Bridges training as a radio personality with acting coach Stephen Bridgewater is a lot of fun. There are several deleted scenes with commentary by Gilliam, costume tests, and trailers. But the most poignant—and absolutely the funniest—extra is a 2006 interview with Williams discussing the film. An essay by critic Bilge Ebiri completes the enclosed booklet.

If you’ve never seen The Fisher King, it should be high on your list of “to-be-watched” titles. And if you’re a Gilliam fan, well, it’s a must-have for the collection.

“SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL”

By Raymond Benson

Mark Rydell’s 1979 rock ‘n’ roll drama, The Rose, made Bette Midler a star. While she had already done theatre, some television, and live musical acts, as well as uncredited or tiny bits in some films, Midler broke through to the mainstream with this picture and earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination. There were many who felt that Midler should have won the statue (Sally Field snagged the award for Norma Rae). The point is arguable, for Midler indeed displayed top-notch acting chops as well as singing prowess. She also proved she could rock out.

The project was originally intended to be a biopic about Janis Joplin, entitled Pearl. When Joplin’s family refused permission, the producers morphed the script to feature a Joplin-like character known as “The Rose”—but it wasn’t Joplin—and turned the story into fiction. That said, the movie is very truthful about rock ‘n’ roll divas, touring, and the heavy toll that this business takes on an artist.

Once the project was about a fictional character and not Joplin, director Rydell signed on, and he was able to convince Midler to star. This was inspired casting. Midler struts her stuff and oozes sexuality in the concert sequences in front of audiences, explodes with violence in the scenes of conflict with her manager or boyfriend, and she delivers vulnerability and insecurity in the quiet moments. Addicted to alcohol and other drugs, the Rose is on a fast path to self-destruction, and Midler brings the tragedy to life with aplomb.

Alan Bates plays her British manager with the appropriate adoration of and frustration with his talented, but flawed, client. Frederic Forrest turns in an Oscar-nominated performance for Best Supporting Actor as the somewhat clueless guy The Rose picks up after a disastrous meeting with a songwriter (Harry Dean Stanton) who refuses to give her any more of his tunes. Forrest is terrific as he takes a tremendous amount of shit from the stormy rock star, but then turns around and gives it back to her with the same intensity.

The music is dynamite—the end title song “The Rose” became a standard for not only Midler, but other torch singers. Rydell’s direction is assured as he stages both huge, arena-sized rock concerts with thousands of extras, along with small, intimate scenes between a couple of actors.

Midler and Bates: sheer perfection.

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, has a 5.1 surround DTS HD Master Audio soundtrack that will punch holes in your eardrums (that’s a good thing for a rock music movie). Rydell provides an audio commentary. Other extras are new, enlightening interviews with Midler, Rydell, and Zsigmond. There are also archival interviews with Midler and Rydell and footage from the set. The booklet contains an essay by critic Paula Mejia.

Ultimately, The Rose is a brilliant, but sad, look at the trials of rock ‘n’ roll stardom and the dark side of fame and fortune.

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“MAYBE IT’S THE TRAMP IN ME”

By Raymond Benson

Charles Chaplin’s Limelight was not quite the swan-song for the genius filmmaker (he would make two more pictures in his lifetime); but of these final three movies, Limelight is the one that feels like the true farewell. It is more of a drama than a comedy, and it is perhaps Chaplin’s most personal, introspective movie. The fact that it is flawed and warrants criticism shouldn’t matter—it’s worth viewing for a number of reasons.

For my money, the director/actor/screenwriter/composer made a much funnier film, A King in New York (1957), after Limelight, but King is not as accomplished or well-known. Chaplin’s disastrous final picture, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967, starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, with Chaplin appearing only in a cameo) is best forgotten. Thus, most film historians focus on Limelight as being the conclusive cinematic statement by the master.

Limelight presents a story that begins in London in 1914, when the music hall, where Chaplin got his start in show business, was the equivalent of America’s vaudeville. Chaplin’s own father had also performed in the music hall circuit, but alcohol eventually derailed the man’s career. Chaplin taps into this autobiographical history by creating the character of “Calvero” a once-popular clown, but now an alcoholic has-been. To be sure, though, there are within Calvero elements of the familiar silent icon Chaplin once portrayed (at one point Calvero delivers a potent line of ironic dialogue, “Perhaps it’s the tramp in me!”). Enter Terry, a young ballerina (played by a nineteen-year-old Claire Bloom in her film debut), whom Calvero saves from a suicide attempt. The couple forge an awkward friendship that develops into romance (on her part, not his—although Calvero’s attraction to her is painfully obvious), but of course throughout the course of the picture they separate, get back together, and, at the end, unwittingly and fatefully separate for good. The movie is an apparent discourse on how the elderly must retreat from the limelight and allow the young to step forward and carry on.

As Calvero, Chaplin is very good, if more than a little melodramatic in the non-comic scenes (of which there are many). Bloom is fine, if more than a little melodramatic in nearly every scene (a stand-in ballerina, Melissa Hayden, performs Terry’s dances). The supporting cast includes old pros like Nigel Bruce and Norman Lloyd, but also Chaplin’s son, Sydney Earl Chaplin, who delivers perhaps the most realistic and honest performance in the picture—it’s a shame that he made only a few more films before deciding that acting was not for him. Chaplin’s half-brother, Wheeler Dryden, plays a dual role, and, making the movie a full family affair, six-year-old Geraldine Chaplin has a bit part along with two of her younger siblings.

Keaton and Chaplin teamed on screen for their first and only time.

The highlight, though, and pretty much the biggest reason to take a look at Limelight, is the climactic sketch featuring Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the only time the comic masters ever appeared on screen together. Their sequence is classic.

That said, Limelight unfortunately comes off as being overly sentimental. Chaplin palpably tugs too hard at the audience’s heartstrings. The lush musical score, while beautiful, doesn’t help tone down the ultimately maudlin proceedings. The film is much too lengthy as well, clocking in at 137 minutes, making it Chaplin’s longest picture—and it feels interminable. Finally, the romance between the very young Terry and the very old Calvero is barely believable, but perhaps in 1914 such a May-December relationship might not have been so icky.

It must be noted that at the time the picture was made, Chaplin was practically Public Enemy Number One in America. He was a victim of the rabid and irrational Red Scare that was going on in the country; the Hollywood blacklist was a result of this insane paranoia, and Chaplin—while too powerful to blacklist—was certainly shunned for his “socialist” political views (hmm, sound familiar?). Chaplin premiered Limelight in London in 1952, so the government took that opportunity to deny the artist re-entry into the U.S. A fine way to treat someone who was arguably the cinema’s greatest innovator and pioneer! Chaplin, heartbroken and bitter, took up residence with his family in Switzerland, and didn’t return to America until 1972, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to forgive and forget and award him with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. And, since Limelight never got a proper release in the states in ’52, it was re-released in ’72 and was thus eligible for Oscars. Limelight won for Original Score; ironically, the only competitive Oscar that Chaplin ever won was for music. At least the audience at the ceremony made him feel welcome—Chaplin received the longest standing ovation ever at the Oscars.

The new 4K digital restoration looks gorgeous, of course, and Criterion’s treatment of the title is top-notch. Extras include a few that are ported over from the 2002 MK2 release—Chaplin Today: Limelight (a documentary on the film); archival recordings of Chaplin reading two excerpts from his own novella, Footlights; a deleted scene and two trailers; and the uncompleted short, The Professor (1919). New extras include Chaplin’s Limelight—Its Evolution and Intimacy (a new video essay by Chaplin biographer David Robinson); new enlightening interviews with Claire Bloom and Norman Lloyd (who is 100-years-old and sharp as a tack!); and a restored short, A Night at the Show (1915). The thick booklet contains an essay by critic Peter von Bagh, excerpts from an on-set piece by journalist Henry Gris, and lots of photos of ephemera.

When all is said and done, despite its shortcomings, this new release of Limelight does have much to offer. And suffice it to say that if you’re a Chaplin fan, then it’s essential.

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“O BROTHER, WHERE ART PRESTON STURGES?”

By Raymond Benson

As I mentioned in last month’s review of The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray release of The Palm Beach Story, Preston Sturges was a rare breed in Hollywood in the early 1940s. After Chaplin, he was the only working screenwriter/director in that he wrote original scripts alone and then directed them, and he put an auteur stamp on each picture in terms of style and themes. Naturally, the bigwigs in Hollywood resented the guy, and Sturges often had a tough time at Paramount, where his most prolific and productive five-year-reign took place. He was a flame that burned very brightly for a short time. This brief career arc of a genius filmmaker is aptly presented in one of the supplements on this new release—Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer, which originally appeared on television’s American Masters program.

Arguably Sturges’ best work, Sullivan’s Travels was released as a DVD from The Criterion Collection over a decade ago. The company has seen fit to upgrade the film to Blu-ray with a new high-definition digital restoration. Naturally, it looks magnificent, and I think by now we can take for granted that Criterion will do a bang-up job on any digital restorations they do.

Much has been written about Sullivan’s Travels and there is no question that it is a remarkable piece of work. It premiered in late 1941 but wasn’t released to the public until early 1942; nevertheless, it received no Oscar nominations and at the time wasn’t as popular as Sturges’ previous pictures. Why? Possibly because it made audiences think. Yes, it’s a comedy, but that’s really only the first half. After that, the picture becomes pretty serious, with a very sympathetic and almost-sentimental social commentary on poverty and the Great Depression. It’s true that the writer/director’s signature fast-and-witty dialogue is present throughout, but the belly laughs are few in this particular title. Maybe audiences in 1942 were wondering what happened to the Preston Sturges they knew. Ironically (and Sturges was very big on irony), the film is now considered a classic and Sturges’ masterpiece.

Joel McCrea plays Sullivan, a popular Hollywood movie director who specializes in comedies. What he really wants to do, however, is make a serious and responsible Capra-esque picture about human suffering, entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou? (And, yes, this is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie from 2000.) After much haggling with the studio bosses, Sullivan dresses as a “tramp” and hits the road in order to undergo first-hand what the American people have been experiencing during the Depression. Along the way, he meets beautiful Veronica Lake, and Sully unwittingly allows her to tag along. The movie is then made up of the couple’s various misadventures, including a hard left turn in which Sullivan is sent to a hard labor prison with a mistaken identity. One of the most striking scenes in the picture is when an African-American church opens its doors to the prisoners for a field trip to watch movies projected on the wall. It is there that Sullivan has an epiphany about his work and life—and it’s a very good lesson for us all.

“CRIES AND SISTERS”

By Raymond Benson

One of the late, great Ingmar Bergman’s skills as a filmmaker was to write and direct memorable roles for women. He was one of the few directors, such as Ford or Altman or Allen, who repeatedly relied on a “stock company” of actors throughout his career. While there were many wonderful male actors who worked for Bergman (Max von Sydow, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Björnstrand), we generally remember the women—Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson, among many—for baring their souls on screen in Bergman’s challenging, difficult works that always elevated the art of film to breathtaking levels.

Cries and Whispers is an excellent example of the power of the female actor. It’s essentially a four-woman chamber piece, taking place in the late 1800s in Sweden, about three sisters and a servant, their relationships to each other, to their pasts, and to their stance on mortality. It stars (in alphabetical order) Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann, and it is arguably Bergman’s most well-known picture in the U.S. It premiered in late 1972 but its general release was in 1973, thus qualifying it for the ’73 Oscars. It’s Bergman’s only film to be nominated for Best Picture (as opposed to Foreign Language Film), competing against the likes of The Sting (which won), The Exorcist, American Graffiti, and A Touch of Class (how did that one get in there?). Bergman was nominated for Director and his Original Screenplay. Despite all that, one could argue that the real star of the film is Sven Nykvist, whose cinematography did win the Oscar that year, and deservedly so.

As one of Bergman’s few films in color, one must recognize the difficulty Nykvist had in photographing rooms that were entirely red—red walls, red carpeting, red furniture, red bedspreads—with touches of white in the drapes, clothing, fine china, and sheets. Contrasting these intense shades with the flesh tones of human beings and making it all work, especially in the early 70s, is nothing short of remarkable. Thankfully, The Criterion Collection has seen fit to upgrade their original DVD release to Blu-ray, and the results are absolutely gorgeous. The new 2K digital restoration is superb.

On the surface, the story seems simple—Agnes (Andersson) is dying of cancer. Her two sisters, Karin and Maria (Thulin and Ullmann), are holding vigil and waiting for the inevitable to happen, but it is the servant, Anna (Sylwan, who made her extraordinary film debut with the picture) who does all the caretaking. The four performances are gut-wrenching. Ullmann actually plays a dual role as the sisters’ mother in flashbacks, and there are men on the periphery as well, including Bergman regulars Erland Josephson and Anders Ek.

In the movie’s 91 minutes, Bergman explores these women’s fears, loves, prejudices, and faiths through flashbacks, dreams, and conflict with each other and themselves. Never in Bergman’s work was the influence of playwright August Strindberg more palpable, but there is a great deal of Anton Chekhov at play here as well. This is serious, complex, soul-searching—and soul-shattering—stuff.

Sounds rather grueling, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining. The director’s use of the color red is fascinating—film scholars have interpreted it to represent the “inside of the womb,” or perhaps the “color of the soul.” For me it’s the interior of the heart, and it’s a simultaneously warm and cold one. For, ultimately, what the movie is about is the pain that we can cause our loved ones, the very people for whom we are supposed to provide solace.

The extras include a wonderful new and revealing interview with Harriet Andersson conducted by Bergman scholar Peter Cowie. There’s a 2001 introduction to the film by Bergman. “On Solace,” by the terrific video essayist ::kogonada, dissects the three acts of the film. There are thirty minutes of behind-the-scenes footage narrated by Cowie, the theatrical trailer, and the port-over from the original DVD release, Ingmar Bergman: Reflections on Life, Death, and Love with Erland Josephson, a fifty-two minute dialogue between the director and actor. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Emma Wilson.

If you’re debating whether or not to upgrade from Criterion’s original release, the answer is a resounding YES. If you’ve never seen Cries and Whispers, then you’re missing an essential piece of cinematic brilliance.

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THE EYE OF ERROL MORRIS

By Raymond Benson

Very few documentary filmmakers are able to break into the American mainstream (and abroad) and become both a critical and commercial success. The majority of documentaries made do not get seen in your average metroplex, but a lucky bucketful—Michael Moore’s films, for example—get wide releases.

This happened to Errol Morris in 1988 with the release of his excellent docu-drama, The Thin Blue Line. Critically acclaimed (but excluded from Oscar consideration because it contains recreated sequences), Morris’ tale of Randall Dale Adams, a convict sitting in a Texas penitentiary who may have been convicted, imprisoned, and sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit, struck a chord with the audience. It also became a cult hit and served as Morris’ gateway to becoming one of the best-known and respected documentarians of our day. After all, the film indirectly resulted in Adams’ exoneration and release. (Morris eventually did win the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2003 with The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.)

This month The Criterion Collection delivers a one-two punch from Errol Morris—The Thin Blue Line on one disc, and, packaged separately, a double-feature of Morris’ first two acclaimed documentaries—Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida. The two releases provide the viewer with a look at the evolution of a filmmaker over a ten-year, three-film period.

At the time, The Thin Blue Line explored new ground in documentary approach, presenting a crime story in a style akin to television’s America’s Most Wanted, which, coincidentally, debuted the same year. It was “reality cinema,” containing POV interviews with suspects, lawmen, attorneys, and witnesses, and footage of the “crime” staged and recreated by actors—all standard stuff of reality crime shows on TV today. It was new then.

It’s interesting to note that Morris didn’t set out to make a documentary about Randall Dale Adams. His original intent was to cover the psychiatrist known as “Dr. Death,” a man in Texas who testified at every capital sentencing as to the defendant’s likelihood of committing more crimes if he was not put to death. But in the course of researching his subject in Dallas, Morris came across Adams’ case and turned his attention to that.

The picture is as riveting and suspenseful as any fiction crime drama. The spoken evidence Morris presents is compelling, but it’s the visual testimony—the Rashomon-style different points of view of the crime reenactments—that supplies the picture with its engrossing neo-noir sensibility. Of particular note is Philip Glass’ haunting score, which perfectly captures the melancholy and paranoia of the world of crime and punishment.

Criterion’s new high-definition digital restoration, supervised by Morris and producer Mark Lipson, has a 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, and both are fabulous. Extras include a new interview with Morris, an interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on the picture, and a Today Show excerpt from 1989 covering Adams’ release from prison. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Charles Musser.

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Gates of Heaven put Morris on the map with this idiosyncratic look at the development of a pet cemetery in California. Featuring interviews with the personages involved, as well as a now-iconic clip of an old lady getting her dog to sing with her, Gates reveals the filmmaker’s quirkiness and his ability to capture the truly weird on film. Vernon, Florida was actually Morris’ first endeavor, but he’d left it unfinished. He went on to make Gates and then returned to complete the short. It’s about some truly eccentric individuals who live in a small whistle-stop town in the boondocks. Originally, Morris had planned to cover an insurance scam that was prevalent in the town—people were cutting off limbs and submitting accident claims, earning the community the name “Nub City.” Morris gave up that idea when he was beat up by some of the people he was interviewing!

Criterion’s disc features new 2K digital restorations of both films, supervised by Morris. Extras include two new interviews with the director about each picture, footage of director Werner Herzog talking about Gates at the 1980 Telluride Film Festival, and the gem of the entire collection—the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, a 1980 short, directed by Les Blank, that documents Herzog cooking and devouring his shoe in public—he had bet Morris that if the young documentarian would simply get out there and make his first feature (Gates), then Herzog would “eat his shoe.” While it’s great to have the two documentaries on Blu-ray, I’m not so sure the two films deserved a separate release of their own (they could have easily been extras on the Thin Blue Line disc).

But talk about the eye of a filmmaker! Errol Morris works with one eye at full strength and his other at a diminished capacity as a result of a childhood medical condition, but that doesn’t keep the director from possessing a wonderful sense of mise-en-scéne. He manages to depict the odd, the ironic, and the profound all in one take. Check out both releases.

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“BORDER TOWN NOIR”

By Raymond Benson

Most film noir pictures take place in urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles—where the big city is as much a character as the unhappy humans in these often bleak and brutal, sometimes brilliant, Hollywood crime films that spanned the early forties to the late fifties. Film noir peaked in the latter half of the forties, with an abundance of the classic titles released between 1946-1948.

One of the more unique things about Ride the Pink Horse is that the urban setting is gone. Instead, the action is set in a border town in New Mexico, where there is indeed danger, to be sure, but there’s also a little less pessimism among the inhabitants—unlike in the urban noirs in which everyone’s a cynic. Interestingly, one might say that the “border town noir” could be a sub-set of the broader category, for Ride the Pink Horse isn’t the only crime movie of the period set away from the big city. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is another good example.

Ride the Pink Horse, based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, became actor Robert Montgomery’s second noir in which he both starred and directed. His first directorial effort was Lady in the Lake (also 1947), in which the actor played detective Phillip Marlowe. Here, Montgomery plays Gagin, an ex-GI, with a take-no-guff attitude but also with a subtle sense of cluelessness—he is definitely a fish out of water in “San Pablo.” His mission there is to locate a crook named Hugo (Fred Clark) to avenge the murder of Gagin’s best friend. What he thought might be a simple task turns out to be a lot more complicated, for the FBI is in town in the form of amiable Retz (Art Smith), and the Feds want Hugo, too. On his first night in town, Gagin falls in with Pancho (Thomas Gomez), a Mexican who runs a cheap merry-go-round for the kids, and Pila (Wanda Hendrix), a young woman who speaks little, but seems to know a heck of a lot about the goings-on in town. As it turns out, Gagin isn’t really the tough guy he pretended to be at the beginning. He really is in over his head, and he needs the help of his newfound Mexican friends to simply survive.

The merry-go-round could be some kind of metaphor for the film’s message—possibly that we can go round and round and still wind up where we started. On the other hand, the ride might suggest that it is a source of innocence, something to which our hero can’t return. Even if you ride the pink horse; you get the same truth on a horse of any other color.

The setting’s flavor is pleasingly captured in the stark black and white cinematography by Russell Metty, especially during the “Fiesta” sequences. One striking sequence takes place with the camera on the merry-go-round—as it goes around we see two thugs giving Pancho a beating at the side of the ride; with every revolution our glimpse of the violence is increasingly upsetting. The production design by Bernard Herzbrun and Robert Boyle, is very impressive, seeing that, ironically, the picture was filmed on the Universal lot in Hollywood and not in New Mexico.

The story, adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, is engaging enough, although Ride the Pink Horse doesn’t seem to reach the climax that is promised by the opening half-hour. Nevertheless, the performances are very good, especially that of Gomez, who, with this picture, became the first Hispanic actor to be nominated for an Oscar—Best Supporting Actor (1947).

Criterion’s new 2K digital restoration looks sharp and clean. An audio commentary by film noir historians Alain Silver and James Ursini accompanies the film. The only two extras are a new interview about the film with Imogen Sara Smith, author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City; and a radio adaptation starring Montgomery, Hendrix, and Gomez. The booklet contains an essay by filmmaker and writer Michael Almereyda.

Ride the Pink Horse is for film noir enthusiasts looking to get out of the city and travel somewhere a little different.

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“CAUTION:  WRECKED LIFE AHEAD”

By Raymond Benson

There have been a lot of movies about adultery and the ultimate havoc it can cause. More recent titles would include the likes of Fatal Attraction or Unfaithful. Some of them have a happy ending, others not; however, there is always a moral to these tales: Don’t do it unless you want to wreck your life.

Still riding the crest of the French New Wave, François Truffaut followed his huge 1962 success, the delightful Jules and Jim, with his fourth feature, the unexpectedly somber drama, The Soft Skin. In fact, it shares elements with the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut presents us with the cautionary story of a successful and respected publisher and writer (Jean Desailly) who meets and begins an affair with a flight attendant (Françoise Dorléac). The man is also married with a young daughter. The development of the tale emphasizes the danger involved in embarking on such an act. How do you keep it a secret when you’re well known? How do you manage to live the double life and deceive your wife? Truffaut directs the piece as if it were indeed a crime drama. The suspense comes in watching Desailly dig a hole so deep that he can’t get out of it. And then the violent ending—well, let’s just say it’s a shocker.

During the period between Jules and Jim and the making of The Soft Skin, Truffaut had collaborated with Hitchcock on the landmark interview book Hitchcock/Truffaut, so it’s not surprising that the French director was influenced by the master of suspense. A video essay extra on the disc by filmmaker and critic Kent Jones examines these traits and the many ways filmmakers can be influenced in general ways by other artists. The Soft Skin could very well work with a Bernard Herrmann score, but instead Georges Delerue delivers an appropriately melancholic and tragic soundtrack that fits beautifully with the events unfolding before us.

Desailly is very good as a man blinded by lust but bound by social convention. Dorléac, who was the elder sister of Catherine Deneuve, is, of course, gorgeous, and Truffaut’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard allows the camera to lovingly dwell on her. Ironically, Truffaut left his own wife after the completion of The Soft Skin and began dating Dorléac. Dorléac was an actress on the same professional trajectory as her sister when her life was cut short in a disastrous automobile accident in France in 1967. One can only imagine how Dorléac’s career might have blossomed and how she would have aged along with Deneuve. Like her sister, Dorléac would have been a timeless beauty.

The Soft Skin may not be one of Truffaut’s masterworks, but it is one of his more solid efforts that was perhaps not sufficiently appreciated at the time of its release. It is, in fact, a sincere, atmospheric, and wistfully sad drama about the many ways that love can cause terrible pain. The picture’s warning to would-be adulterers is quite clear—don’t do it.

Criterion’s new high-definition digital restoration beautifully shows off Coutard’s sharp black and white imagery. Interestingly, a few New Wave traits—freeze frames and jump cuts—still linger in Truffaut’s work in ’64.

Other extras include the excellent 1999 documentary Monsieur Truffaut Meets Mr. Hitchcock, about the historic interviews conducted for Truffaut’s book; an interview with Truffaut from 1965 about the film; and an audio commentary by screenwriter Jean-Louis Richard and Truffaut scholar Serge Toubiana.

The Soft Skin reveals a different side of Truffaut than you may be accustomed to. Check it out.

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A STUDY IN SCARLET

By Raymond Benson

Red is the dominant force in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a magnificently rendered drama about psychic premonition, death, and grief. Some would say it’s a horror film, and indeed it is truly creepy and atmospheric in the way most good ghost stories are presented.

Those familiar with Roeg’s work will recognize his signature arty editing and striking eye for composition. He began his career in cinema as a cinematographer (he worked on Lawrence of Arabia, The Masque of the Red Death, Fahrenheit 451, Casino Royale (’67), Far from the Madding Crowd, among many others) before venturing into directing. After co-directing Performance (1970) and helming Walkabout (1971) solo, he delivered what could very well be his masterpiece in Don’t Look Now.

Starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as a married couple that loses a child in a drowning accident at the beginning of the story, Roeg’s picture examines how their grief is at first somewhat overcome by their own strong love for each other, but is then exploited by seemingly predestined tragedy. The setting of Venice is picturesque and beautiful, but at the same time dark and foreboding in its labyrinth of canals, narrow streets and alleys, and decaying architecture. When the couple begins to see a “child” wearing the same red slicker that their daughter was wearing when she drowned, things become very strange—especially after they meet a blind psychic woman who tells Christie that her daughter is still with them.

The editing screams of 1970s art house fare, but it still works. Of note is that sex scene, often called the most erotic sex scene in cinema history and one that has been plagued by rumors that Sutherland and Christie really “did it” in front of the camera (the rumors are NOT true). The editing cuts back and forth from the nude couple in bed to them getting dressed to go out, which is striking in its uniqueness and originality. Actually, it’s not a sex scene, but rather a real love scene—for I can’t think of another picture in which the love between a married man and woman is displayed so honestly. Kudos to both actors for the trust they obviously had in each other.

Pino Donaggio’s score adds a haunting poignancy to the proceedings, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond paints the imagery with a deft eye for color...and there’s that ever-sinister RED that keeps popping up with a multitude of meanings. Roeg’s direction is much more than an exercise in style, and the truthful performances by Christie and Sutherland elevate the film to greatness.

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration (approved by Roeg himself, now in his eighties) is first class. Extras include a new documentary featuring interviews with Christie, Sutherland, Richmond, and co-screenwriter Allan Scott; interviews with Steven Soderbergh and Danny Boyle on Roeg’s work; a Q&A with Roeg from 2003; a new conversation between editor Graeme Clifford and film historian Bobbie O’Steen; a 2002 documentary on the making of the film; and a 2006 interview with composer Donaggio.

Don’t Look Now is arguably not only one of the finest British films of the 70s—it’s one of the greatest British films ever. Don’t Miss It.

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CRITERION BONUS REVIEW:

“A DAY IN THE COUNTRY” (1936—but released 1946; Directed by Jean Renoir)

The Criterion Collection has released A Day in the Country, Jean Renoir’s short film (40 minutes) that was shot in 1936, abandoned as unfinished, and then edited and released by its producer ten years later without Renoir’s involvement. Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, the picture is a light tale about a Parisian family that decides to spend an afternoon in the country—only to have the wife and daughter wooed by two randy countrymen.

Renoir fans will certainly want to check this out, but in my opinion, when compared to Renoir’s great works such as Grand Illusion or The Rules of the Game, this is fluff. More interesting are the extras, which include a90-minute compilation of outtakes from the film and footage that shows Renoir at work. This is exceptional stuff and worth the price of admission.

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WACKY WEDDED BLISS

By Raymond Benson

Preston Sturges was a rare breed in Hollywood in the early 1940s—he was a writer/director auteur who penned original comedies and directed them himself. Perhaps Chaplin—and Keaton, to a degree—were the only other filmmakers up to that point who did the same, picture after picture. Sturges began as a screenwriter authoring some of Hollywood’s better comedies of the late ‘30s; finally, he told Paramount he would sell them his script for The Great McGinty only if they allowed him to direct it. The studio bosses relented when Sturges took a cut in salary to do both jobs. McGinty was a hit and went on to win a screenplay Oscar for Sturges. Then, during the war years, Sturges enjoyed his remarkable run before succumbing, in the later years of the decade, to the inevitable “falling out of fashion” that so often occurs in Tinsel Town.

Sturges’ comedy is sophisticated, intelligent, and witty; but it’s also wacky, off the wall, and spitfire fast. He specialized in screwball comedy—i.e., absurdly zany love stories between two likable but eccentric characters—and The Palm Beach Story, released in 1942, is a prime example. Following his masterpiece (but, at the time, misunderstood and not well received financially) Sullivan’s Travels, Palm Beach stars Joel McCrea (“Tom”) and Claudette Colbert (“Gerri”—Tom and Gerri, get it?) as an unhappily married couple who split up and ultimately get back together. Classic screwball comedy structure. What makes the film different from other screwball comedies is what happens in-between. And at the beginning.

Ah, the beginning. Over the main title credits, we see a series of strange clips that appear to be taken from later in the picture—but they’re not. In fact, they’re never really explained at all, which does cause some confusion with the audience. This opening has been debated by film scholars ever since the movie’s release. It’s actually exposition, but cut down to brief snippets of visuals, edited to the tune of a rollicking William Tell Overture. We see a maid frightened by an imposing figure—she faints. A concerned priest is at the altar, looking at his watch. We see Colbert, tied up and gagged in a closet. And then we see Colbert in a wedding dress, rushing to get ready? Is she the same Colbert as before? After that we discover McCrea in wedding garb rushing to get in a car—obviously late for the ceremony. But in the car he changed into another set of wedding clothes. The bridal Colbert runs by the maid, who screams and faints again. The tied and gagged Colbert breaks out of her binds and kicks her way out of the closet. The recovering maid sees her, screams, and faints. Then the parties rush to the chapel—where McCrea and Colbert (which one?) get married. The caption reads: “And they lived happily ever after... or did they?”

We don’t really find out what was going on in the credits until the end of the movie in a somewhat contrived but typically Sturges-style explanation of what’s been going on in the picture. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Colbert plays twin sisters, but McCrea also plays twin brothers. The two sisters are in love with one of the McCrea twins (not “Tom”), and he is about to marry the one who is not named Gerri. However, Gerri has tied up her sister and taken her place at the altar—but somehow “Tom” has taken his brother’s place at the chapel—and Tom and Gerri—the wrong couple—get married. At least that’s how I interpret it.

After five years of marriage, Tom and Gerri are at each other’s throats (but they really do love each other, they just don’t realize it yet). Gerri leaves for Palm Beach and Tom follows her. Gerri begins a relationship with billionaire Rudy Vallee, and Tom is snared by Vallee’s maneating sister, Mary Astor, and then things really get complicated.

Throw in Sturges’ standard stock company of character extras—William Demarest, Sig Arno, Robert Dudley, Franklin Pangborn, Arthur Hoyt, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, Robert Warwick, and several others (all faces you will recognize but won’t know their names) and you’ve got one crazy oddball of a movie. And it’s marvelous.

Criterion’s 4K digital restoration looks gorgeous, as always (how does Criterion manage to get the best-looking presentations of black and white classic films on Blu-ray?). There are two new video interviews with (a) writer and film historian James Harvey about Sturges and his works, and (b) comedian and actor Bill Hader, also about Sturges and the picture. A WW2 propaganda film, written by Sturges for the State Department, Safeguarding Military Information, is included (and features Sturges regular Eddie Bracken). A 1943 radio adaptation by Screen Guild Theater is also included, plus the informative essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek in the booklet.

It’s too bad that Preston Sturges’ flame burnt out by the end of the forties—he was a talent that was often miles ahead—and above—his peers. The Palm Beach Story, while perhaps not his best work, is certainly indicative of the man’s genius.

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"THAT IS ONE NUTTY HOSPITAL..."

By Raymond Benson

Comedy fans can now officially rejoice! The Criterion Collection has produced a fabulous Blu-ray edition of Sydney Pollack’s outstanding laugh riot, Tootsie, although one could safely say the picture not only belongs to Pollack, but to Dustin Hoffman, the movie’s star. It was his baby all the way, from its conception to its final, brilliantly written, acted, and directed finish. The American Film Institute voted Tootsie to be the Number 2 best comedy of all time (after Some Like it Hot, coincidentally another film in which men dress up as women!); whether or not you agree with that ranking, you have to admit it is a virtual lesson in how to make a good, funny movie.

The story is already well-known: struggling middle-aged actor Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) decides to dress up as a woman to audition for a soap opera, and he gets the part; thus he has to continue the charade in order to keep his job. Complications ensue when he falls in love with Julie (Jessica Lange), another actor on the soap. The story only gets more “nutty” (as uncredited but hilarious co-star Bill Murray calls it) from there.

But what the movie is really about—repeated by several of the picture’s creators in the several excellent extras on the disc—is how a man learns to become a better man by being a woman. This is not a “feminist” film. It’s indeed a movie about the sexes, but its message is for men on how they need to get their act together before they can successfully relate to women in a positive way.

Among the many displays of genius that Hoffman has brought us over the years, Tootsie is easily in the top handful. His performance, nominated for an Oscar, is the crux of the film’s success—if he hadn’t been believable, if the cross-dressing hadn’t been convincing, if he hadn’t gone for the absolute truth of the role, the picture would have fallen flat. Luckily, Hoffman IS Tootsie.

And that’s not to downplay the strength of all the other actors—Lange (who did win an Oscar for Supporting Actress), Teri Garr, Bill Murray, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, and even director Pollack, who is fabulous as Hoffman’s agent—are all great; I can’t imagine the movie with anyone else in their respective roles.

Tootsie had a long and difficult gestation period. As we learn from the documentary extras, Hoffman and playwright Murray Schisgal had been working on a story about a cross-dressing man who was a tennis pro, but they couldn’t get it to work. Then they came across Don McGuire’s play about an actor who cross-dresses to get a part, so the rights were purchased, they changed the protagonist’s profession, and voila—they had the workings of Tootsie. Hal Ashby was originally set to direct and had begun shooting tests of Hoffman in makeup, but the studio ultimately didn’t want him. Enter Sydney Pollack, who brought in Larry Gelbart to bring more humanity and drama to the script. Then Hoffman brought in Elaine May to work on the female roles (why May isn’t credited for the screenplay along with the other three writers is a mystery). The script took forever to get right, but once it was to everyone’s satisfaction, the production went ahead. The conflicts between Hoffman and Pollack are legendary, but in the end it was Hoffman who wanted Pollack to play Michael Dorsey’s agent because the characters’ relationship in the story reflected the real-life rapport between actor and director.

Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration looks gorgeous, but that’s what we expect from the Rolls-Royce of Blu-ray labels. The audio commentary is by the late Pollack. Included are new interviews with Hoffman (in an especially touching and revealing piece) and comedy writer Phil Rosenthal (who tells us exactly why Tootsie is a great comedy); a vintage interview between “Dorothy Michaels” and critic Gene Shalit that was deleted from the film; a vintage “making of” documentary and a longer, more detailed “making of” doc from 2007; deleted scenes; and screen and wardrobe test shoots shot by Hal Ashby. The booklet contains an impressive essay by critic Michael Sragow.

Tootsie is one of those pictures that stands the test of time and gets funnier with subsequent viewings. Get it now on Blu-ray—it’s a must for anyone who likes to smile.

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HITCHHIKING LESSONS

By Raymond Benson

The first time a comedy swept the Academy Awards was in 1934, when Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night took home the prizes for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), and Best Screenplay. (The next time all five major awards were snagged by one picture was in 1975 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

It was the beginning of the screwball comedy movement. It Happened One Night may not have been the first screwball comedy, and it may not even really be a screwball comedy (according to critics Molly Haskell and Phillip Lopate, in a video conversation supplement in which they discuss screwball comedies, Happened is lacking in the chaotic elements that one would find in, say, Twentieth Century, which came out the same year, or even Bringing Up Baby, perhaps the quintessential screwball comedy). But while Capra’s beloved film is often lumped into the category of screwballs, one thing is certain—it’s the archetype for the modern American romantic comedy. And Hollywood keeps remaking it, so to speak, over and over.

The picture came out in early 1934 when the movie business was still in the “pre-Code” era (the Hays Code didn’t kick in full-force until July 1 of that year), so Capra and company were able to get away with some rather risqué elements, such as two unmarried people bunking up in a motel together with only the “wall of Jericho” between them. Or Clark Gable demonstrating the fine art of how men remove their clothes. Or Claudette Colbert revealing her shapely gams in order to catch a ride on the road. Yes, that’s one thing we learn from It Happened One Night—how to hitchhike.

Frank Capra was hired by the poverty-row studio, Columbia, as the talkies began, and in a few short years the director elevated the company to the majors. He then began a hugely successful run, winning three Best Director Oscars in five years. His pictures later became known as “Capra-corn,” for their idealistic and sometimes sentimental look at Americana. But, as pointed out in the excellent supplemental documentary included on the disc, Capra’s films definitely had a dark side to them. Perhaps not so much in Happened, but the evil that men do is certainly present in, say, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or It’s a Wonderful Life.

It Happened One Night is an excellent lesson in screenwriting, structure, dialogue, and pacing. It’s a near-perfect picture, and it’s still funny today. Gable is at his most winning. Colbert is terrific, although it’s stated several times throughout the supplements how much of a snooty b*tch she was during filming—she didn’t want to make the picture, complained the entire time, insisted on twice her normal salary to do it, and told friends after its completion that she’d just made the worst movie in her career. She changed her tune after winning the Oscar, and then she had nothing but praise for Capra and the film. Those fickle movie stars.

Criterion does their usual bang-up job. The new 4K digital restoration is gorgeous. Extras include the previously mentioned Haskell/Lopate video; the feature-length documentary on Capra, Frank Capra’s American Dream; an interview with Frank Capra Jr. from 1999; a new digital transfer of Capra’s very first film, the silent 1921 Fultah Fisher’s Boarding House, with a new score by Donald Sosin; and—the most interesting—the hour-long televised AFI tribute to Capra from 1982 (it’s great fun playing spot the celebs!). An essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme fills the glossy booklet.

One for the history books.

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JACQUES TATI STILL STANDS TALL

By Raymond Benson

How many people in the general public of the USA today know who Jacques Tati is? Film buffs, certainly, but not many others. It’s a shame, for in the 1950s and 60s, Tati was world famous and well known for his on-screen persona, the bumbling but well-meaning Monsieur Hulot. After all, one of the Hulot pictures, Mon Oncle, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 1958. Jacques Tati was once a big deal. The Criterion Collection’s new release on Blu-ray of a boxed set containing Tati’s entire catalog should provide sufficient firepower to make Jacques Tati a big deal all over again.

In short, The Complete Jacques Tati is a magnificent package. The Frenchman’s genius is well documented, not only in the six feature films and seven shorts included in the set, but in the multitude of excellent extras—documentaries, vintage footage, and visual essays that Criterion has assembled. The collection could easily be one of the best Blu-ray releases the company—or any home video label—has ever done. It’s that good.

There are seven discs—one for each of the six features and one for the shorts. A 62-page booklet containing essays by critics James Quandt, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kristin Ross, and David Cairns completes the package.

For those unfamiliar with the artist, Jacques Tati (1907-1982) was a comedian and mime who drew his influences from the old school—Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd—and thus created a comic style highly dependent on visual sight gags. But what Tati did beyond the three silent film stars was incorporate the use of sound effects for humor. The features are full of odd and funny aural jokes—the thoink of a swinging door as it opens and closes, the ridiculous beeps and blurts of a machine, or the mumbling-style dialogue of eccentric characters (it doesn’t matter what they’re saying, it’s more about the sound of their speech). Tati made some shorts in the 1930s; after the war, he formed his own company with a fellow producer and began his journey into making movies. Tati, in his later works, liked to explore the theme of how “modern” technology is taking over a purer essence of life. Most of all, Tati himself, as an actor, is a wonderfully physical comedian. Just the way he appears as Mr. Hulot—with trademark hat, pipe, raincoat, and umbrella—is funny.

An entire book could be written about Tati’s work, herewith is a brief description of each of the films.

Jour de Fête (aka The Big Day), 1949. Tati’s first feature film is a disarming comedy in which the super-tall actor portrays a postman. Very different from the Mr. Hulot character, Tati’s postman is fussy, ornery, and prone to “lose it” when a traveling fair comes to town and messes up his route. It’s an affectionate look at French rural life. The 2K digital restoration is in black and white, as was the original theatrical release—however, Tati always meant for the picture to be in color. He therefore revisited the film later in order to make it so. Extras include two alternate versions of the film on the same disc—Tati’s own 1964 re-edit featuring hand-colored objects and newly incorporated footage, and a full-color 1995 re-release completed from Tati’s original color negatives. Stéphane Goudet, a Tati expert, presents a 2013 visual essay that tracks the evolution of Tati’s comedy. A 1988 documentary traces the restoration of the film to Tati’s color version.

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, 1953. Mr. Hulot is introduced in this charming look at how the French often took holidays at a seaside resort. Well-choreographed sight gags dominate the free-flowing, plotless narrative that features many odd characters, dogs, boats, and drooping taffy. The main version on the disk is a 2K digital restoration of Tati’s 1978 re-release. Extras include the original 1953 version; an introduction by Terry Jones; another visual essay by Stéphane Goudet about the debut of Hulot; an interview with Tati from 1978; a new interview with composer/critic Michel Chion on Tati’s use of sound design; and an optional English-language soundtrack for the re-release version.

Mon Oncle, 1958. Tati’s Oscar-winner could very well be his best work. This one, in color, is the story of how Mr. Hulot becomes the relative-of-choice for his young nephew, whose parents are too caught up in being “modern” (their house, car, automatic garage door, and that awful fish fountain) to properly pay attention to their son. The garden party sequence and the plastic hose factory scene are timeless. The new 2K digital restoration looks fabulous. Extras include another introduction by Terry Jones; My Uncle—the English language edit of the film; a documentary from 2008 on the making of the film; a 2005 program on the film’s fashion, architecture, and furniture; a Stéphane Goudet visual essay comparing the film to other Hulot pictures; and a 1977 French TV episode featuring Tati.

Playtime (also written as Play Time or PlayTime), 1967. What an amazing, highly original film! Francois Truffaut once said that Playtime is a movie that might have been made “on another planet where they don’t make films like we do here.” Hulot is one of many characters in this collage about the clash of modernity and humanity. At the time, it was France’s most expensive production—and all the money is there on the screen in the form of an entire downtown with streets, buildings, and traffic that Tati had built outside of Paris. “Tativille,” as it was known, is a remarkable accomplishment in set design. It forecasted the use of office cubicles at least ten years before they became a reality. Very funny stuff, but at the time audiences were confused by the lack of a story and the differences between it and previous Hulot features. Tati insisted on the film being released in 70mm; thus there is something going on in every corner and space on the frame. It’s a picture that demands to be viewed more than once. The new 4K digital restoration has a 3-0 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Extras include another introduction by Terry Jones; three selected-scene commentaries; another Goudet visual essay; a 1967 TV program on Tativille; a 2002 documentary featuring behind-the-scenes footage; an interview with script supervisor Sylvette Baudrot; an audio interview with Tati from 1972; and an optional English-language soundtrack.

Trafic, 1971. The final Hulot film features the character working for an auto manufacturer whose employees must get its latest creation—designed by Hulot—to an auto trade show in Amsterdam on time. As the title suggests, they run into some traffic. Terrific sight gags abound, as well as Tati’s ever present discourse on how technology is ruining our world. Along with the 2K digital restoration, the extras include a 1976 Omnibus episode from British TV featuring an interview with Tati.

Parade, 1974. Tati’s final film does not feature Hulot. It’s actually a performance piece in front of an audience, in which Tati teamed up with a circus of clowns, jugglers, acrobats, and contortionists—but the great thing about it is that we can see Tati perform mime acts. The picture was originally made for Swedish television (!) and is a delightful cap to Tati’s career. The disk sports a 2K digital restoration, along with extras such as a two-part 1989 documentary on Tati’s life and career, made by the director’s daughter, Sophie Tatischeff; another Goudet visual essay about Tati’s appreciation of the circus and clowns; and a 1982 French TV episode featuring a tribute to Tati by his friend and set designer Jacques Lagrange.

Tati Shorts. 2K digital restorations of the following shorts are presented: On demande une brute (1934); Gai dimanche (1935); Soigne ton gauche (1936); L’école des facteurs (1946)—which features the postman character Tati played in Jour de Fête; Cours de soir (1967); Dégustation maison (1977); and Forza Bastia (1978). Tati wrote and starred in the first three. He wrote, directed and starred in the next two. The sixth short is a César-winning piece by Tati’s daughter; and the seventh is a soccer documentary started by Tati and completed by his daughter after his death. Extras include a 2002 short film about Tati’s career; and a lecture program by Goudet on Tati’s cinema.

It will take many hours to get through this marvelous set. The Criterion Collection has outdone itself with The Complete Jacques Tati, and any of you out there who is interested in the history of cinema must purchase it immediately. It will be an education.

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THE LIFE NOT SO SWEET

By Raymond Benson

The title of Federico Fellini’s landmark, influential 1960 film La dolce vita (“The Sweet Life”) is ironic. Marcello (exquisitely played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a Rome journalist working in the tabloid trade, specializing in stories of the rich and famous. While Marcello’s day-to-day existence might indeed at first seem like the sweet life, he is, in fact, a lonely, unhappy soul. And that’s the point of Fellini’s comedy-drama that still manages to enlighten audiences today, fifty-four years later. Fellini seems to be saying that no matter how hard you pursue “the sweet life,” you will still be left with yourself—and if you don’t like yourself, then you’re in trouble.

La dolce vita was released just as the French New Wave was making a splash, when America’s Production Code was being chipped away at, and when Italy was making the painful transition from the post-war doldrums to the hipster avant-garde 60s. Fellini’s movie signaled his own creative evolution from his early Italian Neo-Realist beginnings to a more surreal, playful, and stylized sensibility that would grow more outrageous as the decade went on. La dolce vita is mostly in the neo-realist vein of Nights of Cabiria and La Strada, but Fellini always adds an extra touch of whimsy and peculiarity to his pictures that the hardcore neo-realists like De Sica or Rossellini didn’t do. And that’s what made him Fellini.

The nearly three-hour movie is a Homeric odyssey of sorts as Marcello spends seven days and nights on assignment for his tabloid, chasing down famous actress (Anita Ekberg in an iconic role as “herself”), the purported sighting of the Madonna, and other sensational stories—but mostly he’s chasing the nightlife, love, attention, and intellectual intercourse with Rome’s elite. And women, of course. Marcello is the ultimate playboy, a persona that would follow the actor Mastroianni his entire life. Through the episodic film, Marcello encounters sex, debauchery, pathos, and tragedy. But never happiness.

Fellini’s film was controversial at the time for revealing the underbelly of Rome’s “sweet life,” and mostly for offending the Catholic Church with the opening scene of a helicopter flying a suspended statue of Christ over ancient ruins in the city—perceived as parodying the “second coming.” But offending the Catholic Church with film in the early 60s was a badge of honor—nearly every important and innovative picture was guilty of it. The bravura opening sequence aside, the picture was still deemed scandalous for exposing Rome’s hypocrisies and decadence in a “docu-drama” that tackles sex, religion, and politics.

Even within its realism, Fellini’s touches of extravagance are everywhere. Characters become caricatures to be gawked at. The ever-present Fellini prostitutes are simultaneously human and grotesque. The costumes (Oscar winner) themselves are glorious and so utterly “modern.” The widescreen black and white cinematography by Otello Martelli is gorgeous with striking contrasts, especially on Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation. It looks even better than the Fox/Lorber restored special edition that came out on DVD a few years ago.

You might want to hold on to that Fox/Lorber edition, though, for The Criterion Collection’s version does not have the same extras—in fact, the earlier DVD edition has the better crop of goodies. That said, Criterion brings us a number of new extras that are well worth the purchase price of the Blu-ray. Among these are a new interview with director Lina Wertmuller, who was assistant director on the picture (whatever happened to her?); a new interview with scholar David Forgacs about the period in Italian history when the film was made; a vintage interview with Fellini from 1965; an audio interview with Mastroianni from the early 60s; Felliniana, a presentation of La dolce vita ephemera; an exceptional visual essay by filmmaker :: kogonada which reveals the clues that Fellini is moving away from neo-realism and into more fanciful territory; and more. Gary Giddens provides the essay in the booklet.

La dolce vita is one of the greats. If you don’t already own it, now’s the time to get it.

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THE LOTTERY OF DEATH

By Raymond Benson

Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer suddenly passed away quite recently—September 20—so it is a quite fitting, albeit unplanned, tribute that The Criterion Collection has re-issued a new 4K restoration on Blu-ray. The Vanishing (original Dutch title: Spoorloos) is Sluizer’s best known work. Not only was the 1988 original picture, presented here, an international success and now something of a cult film, Hollywood remade the movie in 1993 with American actors—but with Sluizer directing again. It was not a success; its chief sin was changing the ending to a happy one. It completely destroyed the message and power that the original picture had and still exhibits.

The Vanishing straddles a line between a crime thriller and a horror film. The shocking finale easily belongs in the latter category—it is horrific indeed. Sluizer plays a clever trick on the audience by giving us two POVs to follow—and the character we’re really meant to follow is not the one you’d expect. Is this the victim’s story or the perpetrator’s story? The movie starts with the former, but by the end it’s the latter’s. Does it matter? Perhaps.

This is a story of how we take our everyday lives for granted until it’s changed in an instant by chance. We’re all playing the lottery of life... and death. Saskia (Johanna der Steege in a small but significant role) didn’t count on running into Raymond Lemorne (frighteningly played by the late Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) at a highway rest stop crowded with travelers. She didn’t count on meeting a man who discovered he was a sociopath at a young age and relished that fact by spending his days rehearsing for the moment when he would kidnap a random woman. Lemorne displays true evil but hides it well, for he is a respectable middle-class employed man, married to a devoted wife (although she suspects her husband of having affairs) and two teenage daughters. After several trial runs and botched attempts, the sociopath succeeds at drugging and abducting a woman—who by accident happens to be Saskia. What he plans to do with his victim after the kidnapping is a secret kept from the audience until the picture’s final moments.

Saskia’s boyfriend, Rex (Gene Bervoets), is a bit of a jerk at first. Early in the film he leaves her alone in the car while it’s dangerously stuck inside a dark tunnel, the point being that this is a man who takes his life for granted and needs a firm kick in the arse. But when Saskia simply vanishes under the noses of dozens of people, Rex changes his tune and realizes what it truly is that’s important.

The Vanishing is also about unexpected, random violence. It can happen anywhere—even at a conspicuously “safe” convenience store and petrol station crowded with families in the middle of the day. This is scary stuff, folks, and Sluizer’s direction is of high caliber from the early tension of the tunnel sequence, through Rex’s cat-and-mouse game with Lemorne, to the final terrifying roll of the dice—for Rex must surely make a serious gamble to find out what really happened to Saskia.

The Dutch/French film is subtitled; the images look fabulous on Blu-ray. The disc is short on extras—only two recent interviews with the late director and actress der Steege. Critic Scott Foundas writes the booklet’s fine essay on the picture.

One of the best thrillers of the 80s, The Vanishing would make good Halloween night viewing. Grab it now!

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“ERASERHEAD” (Directed by David Lynch, 1977)

(The Criterion Collection)

EVERYTHING UGLY IS BEAUTIFUL

By Raymond Benson

One of the many excellent supplements that appear on this disc is a rare video interview from 1979 with David Lynch (and cinematographer Frederick Elmes). For those of us who have aged along with the director, it is a striking glimpse at a young artist at the beginning of his strange and wonderful career. In it, he explains that he is attracted to sometimes harsh, oppressive settings, such as the nightmarish industrial cityscape in Eraserhead. “What everyone else finds ugly, I find beautiful,” he says proudly. And the director has pretty much remained true to his word, hasn’t he?

Eraserhead is a landmark picture, but its original release in 1977 was slow to reach an audience. It gained its must-see reputation only after the film was picked up to run on the midnight movie circuit that was popular on college campuses and in the big cities at the time. The midnight movie fad had been around a while but it especially picked up steam in the early-to-mid-70s with titles like El Topo, The Harder They Come, Pink Flamingos, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. By 1980, Eraserhead had reached cult status, and Lynch was hired by Mel Brooks to direct The Elephant Man. “You’re a madman! You’re hired!” Brooks purportedly said.

If you’ve never viewed Eraserhead, there is no better introduction to it than diving into The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray release. The 4K digital restoration, supervised by Lynch, looks magnificent—the ugly is indeed quite beautiful. Yes, it’s a strange movie. I’ve heard some folks say it’s the weirdest movie they’ve ever seen. That could very well be true, for today Eraserhead is considered to be one of the classic surrealist films, sitting alongside Un Chien Andalou or Blood of a Poet.

Despite its intentional strangeness, the story is simple. Longtime Lynch collaborator Jack Nance (here credited as John Nance) plays Henry, a nervous man who is afraid of the responsibility of becoming a father. He marries his already-pregnant girlfriend anyway, and the child that is produced is, well, a monster. After a experiencing a nightmare in which he is decapitated and has his head sold to a company that somehow converts it into actual pencil eraserheads, Henry attempts to murder the child (to this day Lynch and his cast/crew have never revealed how the special effect of the baby was achieved), which causes the destruction of Henry’s world.

Okay, yeah, it sounds pretty strange—but it’s also very funny. It’s the blackest of comedies made with that quirky “Lynchian” (I suppose that’s a real cinematic term now) humor that audiences in the 70s weren’t quite ready for. And yet, Lynch also manages to balance the dark satire with menacing, creepy horror, thereby creating a one-of-a-kind, unique and personal art film.

The supplemental material from the DVD box set that Lynch’s company released in 2001 is included (“Eraserhead Stories,” a 90-minute documentary on the making of the film), along with a new piece featuring interviews with actors Charlotte Stewart and Judith Roberts, assistant to the director (and wife to Jack Nance at the time) Catherine Coulson, and DP Elmes. Additional archival interviews and trailers and the illustrated booklet containing an interview with Lynch rounds out the package.

But there’s more! Also included on the disk are all but one of Lynch’s works that were released on DVD in 2002 as The Short Films of David Lynch. The titles on the Criterion edition are: Six Men Getting Sick (67), The Alphabet (68), The Grandmother (70), two versions of The Amputee (74), and Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (95). Missing from the earlier set is The Cowboy and the Frenchman (88), and it’s a mystery as to why this is so.

Nevertheless, Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of Eraserhead is an essential purchase for Lynch fans. It is indeed the definitive presentation of this remarkable piece of celluloid—so settle in, turn out the lights, and prepare to have your mind blown.

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THE MEXICAN NEWER WAVE

By Raymond Benson

At the turn of the Millennium, several film directors from Mexico were gaining attention and acclaim—guys like Alfonso Arau, Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and this year’s Oscar-winner as Best Director, Alfonso Cuarón (for Gravity). Cuarón’s career trajectory has been, for me, the most interesting of the bunch. He broke into the international scene with the 2001 coming-of-age drama, Y Tu Mamá También, and followed that with, of all things, the megahit Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which, I argue, is the best of all eight Harry Potter movies. The terrific dystopian thriller Children of Men followed that, and then came Gravity.

Other than the superb handling of each specific film’s material, there isn’t much similarity between these pictures, and yet it’s apparent that Cuarón brings an auteur sensibility to his work. This is most evident in the more personal Y Tu Mamá También, a film Cuarón made in his native Mexico with no Hollywood studio in sight. The director and his brother Carlos Cuarón claim in the terrific new extra of recent interviews about the making of the film that the picture is not autobiographical. However, a much of the world in which our two high school-age protagonists exist is similar to the more middle-to-upper-class upbringing the Cuaróns experienced.

Tenoch and Julio (honestly played by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal), are typical, urban, horny hormone-raging teenagers ready to graduate from school and step out into adulthood. But for that to happen, a rite of passage must occur to shake the boys out of decidedly vulgar adolescence, mischief-making, and carefree attitudes.

Enter an older unhappy married woman, Luisa—Maribel Verdú, in a tour de force performance—whose tragic secrets motivate her to recklessly accompany the boys on a road trip to “the beach.” The journey is a rite of passage for her, too, but the teens don’t know this. What happens on that trip will change the two boys’ lives forever. In essence, the film is a frank and modern Summer of ’42 meets Jules and Jim. In fact, Y Tu Mamá También does seem to be inspired by the French New Wave—not only Jules and Jim but also, as revealed by the Cuarón brothers in the documentary, Godard’s Masculin Féminin. The detached, omniscient voice-over narration in Y Tu Mamá evokes these 1960s classics in a more contemporary context.

And, like Godard’s films, Y Tu Mamá contains commentary on the then-current political situation in Mexico, when the ruling party of 70-plus-years was voted out. The upheaval, while not directly affecting our three characters, is constantly in the background.

The film is also sexually explicit. The picture was released in the USA unrated, which means it otherwise would have received the problematic NC-17. The raw naturalism of the sex scenes is indeed shocking, but without it the movie would not have the impact that it does. As it is, Y Tu Mamá También packs a punch. The Big Reveal about Luisa at the end of the story can possibly change in an instant a viewer’s reaction to the film up to that point. Along the way, you will have laughed, cringed, laughed some more, and observed a loss of innocence as it often occurs—unexpectedly and with deeply emotional prices to pay.

All three leads are exceptional. Cuarón was fortunate to employ actors who courageously bared their souls—as well as their skins—to make this truly remarkable, highly recommended film.

Criterion’s new, restored 2K digital film transfer is gorgeous (the cinematography is by the great Emmanuel Lubezki). The Blu-ray features a 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Extras include vintage and new behind-the scenes documentaries featuring the director, cast, and others; Carlos Cuarón’s very funny short film You Owe Me One (2002), a new interview with philosopher Slavoj Žižek about the film’s social and political aspects, and deleted scenes.

This one’s a keeper.

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RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

“THE FOUR FEATHERS” (The Criterion Collection)

On DVD and Blu-Ray

By Raymond Benson

Based on A.E.W. Mason’s classic 1902 adventure novel, The Four Feathers had been made three times before this definitive version of a “British Empire Adventure Film” was released in 1939. Produced by Hungarian-born but UK-based Alexander Korda, one of the great filmmakers of British cinema, and directed by his brother Zoltan Korda, The Four Feathers represents the best of what England had to offer during its day, as well as the epitome of the kind of yarns spun by Kipling and his ilk.

In vivid Technicolor and sporting a cast of hundreds of ethnic extras, the picture captures the grand Victorian era of the British military and takes place mostly in Africa some ten years or so after the fall of Khartoum. The story is simple (albeit somewhat improbable): a young officer (John Clements) is accused of cowardice by his associates and fiancée after he resigns his post on the eve of a major deployment to take back the Sudan. Setting out to prove the opposite, he disguises himself as a mute Arab so that he can “make a difference” from the inside of the enemy camp and show his “friends” what he’s really made of. At one point, his rival in love, portrayed by the excellent Ralph Richardson, is struck blind by excessive exposure to the desert sun—and our hero must help him trek across the country to safety, all without saying a word or revealing to the man that he’s his old colleague.

This particular version of The Four Feathers would be an impressive film if made today, but for 1939, it’s a masterpiece (the recent 2002 version doesn’t compare). With its tremendous logistical challenges and extreme conditions on location, the picture is a marvel to behold. It also contains tons of what are now familiar clichés of British Empirical tales, mostly embodied by the humorous performance of overly stately C. Aubrey Smith—and this, too, is a testament of the film’s influence. The picture is also a timely (and embarrassingly hilarious) lesson in how racism was taken for granted during its day.

The new Criterion edition, of course, looks gorgeous in a high-definition restoration. At that time, Natalie Kalmus (the wife of Technicolor’s inventor, Herbert Kalmus), was forced upon filmmakers as “color coordinator” if one wanted to use the process, and she had total control over its application. Whether it was appropriate or not, Natalie went for bold, vivid colors; in this case the result is happily spectacular.

The audio commentary by Charles Drazin is interesting, but the true gem of the extra features is the interview with Zoltan Korda’s son, David. He sheds light on the lives of the amazing trio of brothers—Alexander, Zoltan, and Vincent—who became one of the most important British film families in its history. There is also a vintage documentary short about the Kordas’ studio, London Films, which features rare footage of Zoltan in action directing The Four Feathers.

Just about any Criterion Collection release is a must-have. This is one has that quality in spades.

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BY RAYMOND BENSON

“TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!” (1990; Directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

(The Criterion Collection)

FIFTY SHADES OF ALMODÓVAR

By Raymond Benson

Over twenty years prior to the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, acclaimed and eccentric Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar delivered to the world a kinky morsel of bondage-love—Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (original Spanish title: Átame!). The director had just come off the international success of his 1988 picture, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. While the filmmaker’s early ‘80s films are certainly of note, it was Women that thrust Almodóvar into the mainstream consciousness.

However, when it came to releasing his next film in the U.S. in 1990, Almodóvar was met with some resistance from the MPAA ratings board. The dreaded X rating was threatened, forcing Miramax, the film’s distributor, to sue. The film was eventually released “unrated”; however, it was this lawsuit that prompted the MPAA to change the stigmatized X to the more consumer-friendly NC-17. (Henry and June became the first U.S. film to be released with the new NC-17 rating. Ironically, the NC-17 rating wasn’t an improvement. The stigma remained and the media in many areas of the country continued the policy of refusing to advertise NC-17-rated movies.)

The picture does give you a pretty good barometer on judging the level of sexually-explicit scenes in the cinema. It’s pretty shocking—however, intelligent adults in the audience might recognize that Almodóvar is pulling a fast one on us—which is very much a stylistic signature trait of the director’s. We just didn’t know that in 1990.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a comedy, a dark one at that, but I’m sure many people might see it as offensive and misogynistic, especially in the wake of recent events such as the Cleveland, Ohio kidnappings, enslavement, and ultimate rescue of three women in 2013. That’s essentially the plot of the film, except it’s only one woman in the picture.

Antonio Banderas plays Ricki, an unbalanced, violent, but charming mental patient who is discharged from the institution. Why? Who knows—he should never have been let out. Anyway, he has a fixation on a Marina, a former porn actress now making B-movies (courageously played by Almodóvar favorite Victoria Abril). Like in William Wyler’s 1965 film, The Collector, Banderas kidnaps his prey—and isn’t very gentle in going about it—and keeps Marina a prisoner in her apartment. Ricki’s goal is to “get her to love him” so they can be married and have children. At first, she is naturally repulsed, terrified, and resistant. Until he can trust her, Ricki binds her to the bed whenever he has to go out. This goes on for some time until finally Stockholm Syndrome sets in and Marina actually does fall in love with her captor. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that things turn out in Almodóvar’s typically bizarre way.

Feminists hated it.

What they might have missed was the fact that Almodóvar intended the piece to be like the B-movie that Marina is making within the story. He wanted to make a “Roger Corman movie.” Thus, much of the picture has the trappings of a cheap horror film. Even Ennio Morricone’s score is sinister and nervy—and this is the clue that Almodóvar wants us to laugh at the situation. Banderas’ Ricki is so utterly likable (as well as handsome, hot, etc.) that we are fooled into ignoring the seriousness of his crimes. Marina’s reactions to him also become unbelievably tolerant, despite the fact that she is his captive. It is this heightened unrealism that is the key to not only Tie Me Up! but also much of Almodóvar’s work. In other words, this is theatre of the absurd. Go with the flow and you may come out of it enlightened by notions of human sexuality and relationships that you might not have considered before. Besides, the two central performances are so winning that you can’t help but stay riveted to the screen. Banderas, in particular, has never been better.

The restoration is gorgeous, colorful, and sharp, as it was supervised by both Almodóvar and his brother, executive producer Agustin Almodóvar. Extras include a brand new documentary on the making of the film, featuring current interviews with the director, Banderas, Abril, and others involved in the production. There is also a new interview with Almodóvar collaborator and Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker. A 2003 conversation between Almodóvar and Banderas is included, as well as footage from the film’s 1990 premiere party in Madrid. The included booklet contains a piece Almodóvar wrote about the picture, a 1989 interview with the director, and a dialogue about the film between filmmaker Wes Anderson and critic Kent Jones.

So get out the handcuffs and rope, settle down with your significant other, and have yourself a kinky old time with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Adults only please!

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THE ULTIMATE SLUMBER PARTY

By Raymond Benson

There are certain films that capture the zeitgeist of an era, and The Big Chill is definitely one of them. If a movie like, say, Annie Hall, hits the nail on the head of urban relationships in the late 70s, then Chill embraces the Baby Boomers’ angst of adulthood in the early 80s—a time when the partying and discoing Carter years were undoubtedly over and we, in the USA, were solidly entrenched in Reagan’s world of hippies-turned-yuppies. The Big Chill is a love letter to the Baby Boomers, as it explores themes of regret over wasted opportunities, friendship and camaraderie, nostalgia, and the eternal question of what-happens-next.

Director and co-writer Kasdan, in a recent video interview (included as an extra on the disk), states that one of his influences for the picture was Jean Renoir’s 1939 classic, The Rules of the Game, which also dealt with an ensemble of characters coming together for a reunion at a country house. While the former film is bigger, more populated, and infinitely more complex than The Big Chill, one can definitely see the similarities. So-and-so has a history with whozit, but whozit is now married to you-know-who; whereas, you-know-who is really in love with so-and-so... and, well, you get the idea.

In The Big Chill, a group of close-knit friends from college reunite for the funeral of one of their own. Alex (who was played by Kevin Costner in flashback sequences that were ultimately edited out of the picture), was staying in Harold (Kevin Kline) and Sarah’s (Glenn Close) country home in South Carolina and committed suicide there. Alex apparently had an affair with Sarah (who is married to Harold). Vietnam vet and druggie Nick (William Hurt) once had a thing with hot-stuff but now-married Karen (JoBeth Williams), but Karen was really in love with hunky, now-TV-star Sam (Tom Berenger). Nerdy-and-socially-inept Michael (Jeff Goldblum) and smart-but-bitter Meg (Mary Kay Place) got it on in the past, but today Meg just wants to have a baby as a single mom and Michael is just, well, horny. But really, none of these histories make much difference on the story or unfolding of events during the weekend at the house. Over the course of the film’s 105 minutes, the characters laugh, fight, dance, expound philosophy, laugh some more, reflect on their lives, have sex (some of them do), and bond again with their “family.” Anyone who has gone to college can most likely relate.

Kevin Kline and Glenn Close

The intelligent script by Kasdan and Barbara Benedek was nominated for an Original Screenplay Oscar, and the film was nominated for Best Picture of ’83. Oddly, Glenn Close received the only acting nomination (Supporting Actress), whereas Goldblum, Place, and especially Hurt probably deserved nods as well (Goldblum certainly has the best lines!).

Then there’s the soundtrack, which is the ultimate Baby Boomer collection of rock and soul gems from the late 60s and early 70s—the period in which the characters were in college in Michigan. Isn’t it true that our favorite music is still what we heard in high school and college? In this case, there’s a lot of Motown, sprinkled with some Rolling Stones, Three Dog Night, Procol Harum, and other iconic pieces from the era. The music is as much a part of the film as is the characters. Perhaps it is a character.

The new, restored 4K digital film transfer, supervised by DP John Bailey and approved by Kasdan, looks terrific on Blu-ray. There’s an alternate remastered 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray disc. Extras include the aforementioned interview with Kasdan, a reunion roundtable discussion with the cast and some crew in 2013 (it’s interesting to note that none of the women in the cast bought into the plotline in which Sarah lets her husband Harold sleep with Meg as a favor), a documentary from 1998 on the making of the picture, deleted scenes (unfortunately, though, none with Costner), and the usual excellent essays in the enclosed booklet (one by Lena Dunham).

If you’ve never seen The Big Chill, now’s the time to do it. And if you have, maybe it’s time for a reunion with old friends.

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CRIME, COSTUMES, AND MASKS

By Raymond Benson

Apparently the French had their own Batman-like character in the early days of silent film. Created by Louis Feuillade and Arthur Bernède, Judex (“judge” in Latin) was a crime-fighting avenger that appeared in silent serials in 1916-17. The character was resurrected once in 1934 in a sound feature, and once again in 1963 by celebrated director Georges Franju. The Criterion Collection has seen fit to release Judex, this later version, on Blu-ray and DVD in a dual format package. The results are splendid.

Judex doesn’t bother to disguise his face when he’s in character. He wears a black cape and a Zorro-like hat. You could say he’s kind of like The Shadow. By day, though, he applies old-age makeup and assumes the role of Vallieres, the right-hand man to an evil banker. Judex is in love with the banker’s daughter, Jacqueline, who is played by Franju regular Édith Scrob, the thin doe-eyed actress who was creepily effective in the director’s excellent horror film, Eyes Without a Face (also on Criterion). Judex himself is played by an American stage magician, Channing Pollock, who curiously has little screen presence but performs a lot of impressive sleight-of-hand in the picture.

The crime-fighter and his team (a group of guys all dressed in black) quickly disposes of the evil banker and locks him away, but Jacqueline is kidnapped by the family’s governess, Diana (superbly played by Francine Bergé), who in reality is a masked Catwoman-like criminal. She plans to hold Jacqueline for ransom, that is, until Judex comes to the rescue.

It sounds like an episode from the 1966 Batman television show, but in fact, Judex is stylish and in some spots very surreal. For example, the scene in which the banker is “poisoned” (actually drugged by Judex) is a masked ball. The attendees’ costumes—many of which are birds—are bizarre and unsettling. Franju turns the pulp material into something rather poetic, despite numerous holes and flights of fancy in the plot.

Also notable is that Franju seems to be more interested in his villain than in Judex. Bergé’s Diana is the most engaging character and has the most screen time in the film. In a 2012 video interview extra with the actress, Bergé reveals that she was told to simply play “evil”—and that’s what she does, with a capital “E.” It’s her performance that makes Judex a fascinating piece of celluloid.

The Blu-ray looks great with its new 2K digital restoration. Extras include a 2007 interview with co-writer Jacques Champreux and an excellent 50-minute documentary of Franju’s career. The best extras are two Franju shorts—one is a documentary about a Paris military complex; the second one, a film about filmmaker/magician Georges Méliès (who is played by Méliès’ son), is almost worth the price of the entire package. The enclosed booklet contains an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and an interview with Franju.

Cool stuff!

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