Some Came Running

Blu-Ray and 4K Consumer Guide, Summer 2024

This one almost killed me so the next will likely be an, um, Fall/Winter guide. Also it's getting well-nigh impossible to get usable jacket art off the web (either that or Typepad can't work with what you've got) so there's not a lot of that here either. Thanks as always for reading. 

Equipment: Sony UBP-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

Alphaville (Kino 4K Ultra)

The primary film texts of my childhood were this and Hitchcock’s Psycho, and I was able to see them more or less regularly on television in the 1960s. Psycho, oddly enough for a film that would come to carry an R rating, ran on WWOR Channel 9 in prime time. Alphaville was tougher — it ran about once a year on WABC 7 at two in the morning, in a highly truncated version to fit in a 90 minute time slot. My folks had a 13-inch Sony Black and White portable set I brought up to my room on those occasions and I could watch contentedly if I kept the sound low enough not to disturb my younger brother, with whom I shared a bedroom and was a sound and contented sleeper. How did I even know about the movie? My parents used to get the Sunday times and as a small child I’d pore over the movie ads and early on I had a particular eye for the once-yearly full page ad announcing the selections for the New York Film Festival. So maybe through there. Anyway, the point is that I’m really used to seeing this movie in less-than-optimum presentations. Can a film be shot in a style that’s high-end and lo-fi simultaneously? This film is proof that, hell yes. And this new transfer nails that gray scale whether Coutard’s shooting hard or soft. Inspirational dialogue: “Should I go through the North or South zone?” “What’s the difference?” There’s snow in the North. And sun in the South.” “I’m on a journey to the end of the night, so I really don’t care.” “Reflector Westinghouse 50 Watt” on the villain’s “face” is now very easy to read. — A+

Bad Company (Fun City Editions Blu-ray)

Robert Benton’s directorial debut is really bleak and violent — Benton did co-write Bonnie and Clyde let us not forget. But those who associate him mostly with Kramer Vs. Kramer might be a bit surprised. On his solid, engaged audio commentary Walter Chaw calls this an “acid Western,” a subcategory I have little sympathy with, and one I think Benton himself would raise an eyebrow at, but Walter didn’t just make it up. Which makes me a sad panda. It’s “revisionist,” to be sure, but hardly psychedelic. It’s whatever the opposite of psychedelic is. Maybe Hobbesian even.  It looks great and moves like a (bad) dream. Underrated and underseen essential American cinema.  — A +

The Bat Whispers (VCI Blu-ray)

This stagy and some might consider goofy thriller is a cinematic novelty on account of being shot in a wide-gauge film format — aspect ratio 2.0 to one, decades later to become the quizzical favorite of Vittorio Storaro if I’m not mistaken — called MAGNIFILM. 65 mm to be precise, later to make a more commercially successful comeback as VistaVision, sort of. The format was pioneered by this film’s own director, Roland West, bless him. This sweet VCI package includes that version — which couldn’t be shown everywhere — and the Academy ratio version, which could be shown everywhere. (This package actually includes three versions, as the U.S. and British Academy ratio versions were different.) It wasn’t shown everywhere, and while it was something of a sensation it wasn’t the kind of hit that confers conventional historical film immortality.  What can you say about a cast whose best-remembered members are Gustave von Seyffertitz and Una Merkel? (Pace Boston Blackie fans re ostensible male lead Chester Morris) Also Grayce Hampton giving Margaret Dumont. The ambitious Hitchcockian opening shot, shows a bell tower; the camera suddenly “drops” down to ground level and a fire house garage door. It’s all model work, of which the picture has a good deal of. Trick shots such as this ameliorate the overall stagy feel a bit. It is stagy because it’s an adaptation of a play of course, and as to how stagy it ultimately is, well there’s even a closing curtain at the end. But of course those were in movie theaters back in the day too…What am I yammering on about, fer chrissakes. This is a beautiful package with a clean image and a must for your Novelty Hit library. Inspirational dialogue: “There’s enough shrubbery around to hide a dozen assassins” — A+

Chinatown (Paramount 4K Ultra disc)

Actual WOW. The sweat on Burt Young’s brow in the opening scene; you can count the beads. Paramount’s track record has not been great but this is a definite upgrade from the Blu-ray. Really beautiful. I will quote the expert, Robert A. Harris, and seen on Home Theater Forum: “Paramount’s new 4k is a beautiful affair, rendering the film as it was originally seen in the first run of dye transfer prints, only struck for the original release, and just before the Technicolor lab went off the dye transfer standard, which occurred in December of 1974. From my memory, all additional prints struck were Eastman Color.”  The difference from prior home video version is indeed immediate. I can’t speak too specifically for my 14-year-old self, who actually did see the original release, but I do know that in subsequent viewings it never looked better than the first time. Now it does.  —A+

The Dreamers (Icon 4K Ultra disc)

Well before the story of Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando’s thoroughly unethical and exploitative behavior with respect to Maria Schneider on the set of Last Tango In Paris resurfaced and was iterated in various states of rage in “the media” (with Jessica Chastain going so far as to say that if you watch Tango you are witnessing an actual sexual assault), people were mad at Bertolucci. They were mad at him over the cricket at the end of The Last Emperor (“They can’t take poetic license?” the one-time poet protested to me in a phone interview a couple of days before he won an Oscar or two, which had to have taken the sting out of this issue). They were mad at him over Stealing Beauty for shooting Tuscany, a part of his home country, like a giddy tourist. Which he did. And they were mad at him for his “dirty old man gaze” in his penultimate film, made in 2003 when he was a little over 60. They were mad, too, that he, one of the ’68 generation, was seeming to celebrate a lack of political commitment framed against that backdrop. The guy couldn’t/can’t win! Yet he remains, among other things, the maker of The Conformist, a single movie that had almost as galvanic an impact on film form as had the entire French New Wave. This movie can’t touch that one, but it is still very visually energetic and kind of moving as an old man’s affectionate look at a tumultuous past. Based on Gilbert Adair’s puckish cinephile novel, the movie’s an enchanting lark with heavy TCM content. In his commentary here, Adair insists that BB’s approach is the opposite of voyeurism and I think he’s correct. Additionally his understanding of collaboration equaling transformation is spot on. Smart guy. The Jean-Pierre Leaud cameo, with bonus Kalfon content. A very good movie but of course it’s a movie and not one worth getting mad at. But some might still deplore BB’s ultimate commentary declaration: “The revolution didn’t happen, thank God” — A

 

Fear City (Shout Factory Blu-ray)

Bad Lieutenant (Kino 4K Ultra disc)

Dangerous Game (Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray)

Remember when Abel Ferrara was ALMOST a commercial filmmaker? No? You’re probably too young. By commercial I mean Grindhouse commercial, and he was, almost and Fear City is his most mainstream in that respect. A cop-and-serial-killer thriller set in the bad old days of Times Square peep shows and strip joints (they weren’t that bad; they could be kind of fun actually) it has the least subtext of any Ferrara movie, and seem the least personal, but it certainly shows off his facility, economy, and underground art film sensibility. Sweet cast, too: Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Maria Conchita Alonso, Ola Ray (remember the “Thriller” video?) and of course Melanie Griffith. Sweet dialogue from screenwriter Nicholas St. John includes zingers like “It’s a thin line these greaseballs tread.” But also, no real New Yorker says, “St. Vincent’s Hospital,” they just say, “St. Vincent’s,” that must have been a note from a suit. Great location shots, I said “YES” when I spied a Brew and Burger.  The climax is a hoot, with Berenger summoning THE KILLER BLOW. Inspirational credit: “And Rosanno Brazzi.”

 

Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game are different animals, tortured-soul chronicles starring Harvey Keitel. Lieutenant still suffers a little on account of Jimmy Page forbidding the use of its most powerful musical leitmotif, a Spoonie G rap that sampled “Kashmir” without clearing it. It’s still Bad Lieutenant, and hoo boy. The VS Cinematographe presentation of inside-filmmaking kitchen sink exploration Dangerous Game, featuring Madonna’s best film performance is definitive. And that package presents an Incredible, emotional Ferrara interview, shot two days after his cinematographer Ken Kelsch died in December of 2023. Suddenly Ferrara’s’ Blu-ray/4K presence has gone from sparse to substantial. Buy all three with confidence. Inspirational commentary line: “I tell you it’s the hardest part of directing. Doing this stuff,” says Ferrara on the Lieutenant commentary. All discs: A+ 

Invasion USA/Navy Seals (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra discs)

Back in the day I was a snob who only saw Cannon Films that were directed by Godard. Okay not that bad, but almost. And the charms of Chuck Norris absolutely eluded me. In the late ‘90s I dated a young woman whose Italian grandmother, speaking not a lick of English, never missed Walker: Texas Ranger because of her Norris enthusiasm. It didn’t really help me get the guy. Nor does 1985’s Invasion U.S.A. make me a convert, but the movie is a hoot. Joseph Zito’s vision of the titular event, instigated of course by the Soviets, is relatively small scale. It’s essentially Norris vs. Richard Lynch. The baddies blow up houses at Christmas — in Florida, so they don’t have to depict winter actually. Despite having no monsters the movie seems to teem with what Frank Zappa called “cheepnis,” his fave quality in B picture. The superb Vin Syn edition looks good, has proper grain, and. Norris keeps asking “Where’s Rostov” and sometimes it sounds like “where’s Roscoe” which is funny.  Inspirational dialogue: “Didn’t you bastards ever hear about the First Amendment?” “They don’t even understand the nature of their own freedom” Lewis Teague’s 1990 Navy Seals is of a somewhat higher grade. The soundtrack opens with a

Bon Jovi cover of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town” and that’s a perfect summation of the film’s ersatz gestalt. Joanna Whalley Kilmer’s defense of Islam is diverting; the movie could additionally be retitled S. Epatha Merkerson: The Early Years. While a 1990 picture it still has that bright ‘80s look.  Lovely presentation again. The animated underwater bullets in one action scene are very Fantasia. Both disc: A+

The Man I Love (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

This 1947 picture represents the apex of Raoul Walsh’s brand of masculinized melodrama. Ida Lupino is a nightclub singer torn between a heel and a conflicted good guy. Peg La Centra dubbed Ida’s voice here. Contrast with Negulesco’s “Road House,” in which Lupino did her own singing and made Nico sound like Maria Callas. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. The new Archive edition has a lovely image which complements the steady reliable feel of Walsh not missing because Walsh hardly ever missed. The family drama, featuring the ineffable Martha Vickers, is almost as foregrounded as the romantic one. It’s grand (and unusual) how everything works out without anybody firing a shot.  The supps include some fantastic Looney Tunes (“Rabbit Transit,” a latter Cecil Turtle bit, and the purposefully incredibly annoying Henery Hawk short “Crowing Pains”).  Inspirational dialogue: “I think it’s a pretty good idea to do ‘Why Was I Born,’ do the boys know it?” “They know everything.” — A

Man’s Castle (Sony Blu-ray)

The Shining Hour (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

If you ever had a hankering to see Loretta Young and Spencer Tracy go skinny-dipping, Borzage’s incredible 1933 picture (co-scenarist: Ogden Nash!) affords you the opportunity. It’s not explicit, of course, but the footage was excised for many years, and the salient feature of this incredibly bare-bones Sony issue — there’s not even a menu! — is a complete version of a romantic radical vision. The Shining Hour, made in 1938, is rather more down to earth. If one believes Renoir’s assertion that Leo McCarey was the Hollywood director who best understood people, one might wonder if Renoir was giving Borzage short shrift or if he just hadn’t seen enough of his picture. I shuddered when I saw Hattie McDaniel in the credits for Hour, hoping she’d be treated right, and she is, relatively, and relatively is the operative word. Her character gives the lead played by Joan Crawford some advice, and not in that cliched “wiser than us all manner;” she’s very human. (Her participation in the movie’s punchline is a bit much but it’s also genuinely funny and warm.) Once Faye Bainter turns up the hostility here the Borzage expertise in melodrama finds its wings. Extras include good cartoons (all 1938, two colors and one b&w) and radio shows. Castle: A+ for content at least; Shining Hour: A+ all around

 

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

This comedy tends to get shrugged off in Hitchcock Studies, and this lovely rendering from Warner Archive is a great opportunity to reassess as une vraie Hitchcock, rather than an anomaly he did to give himself the opportunity to work with his friend Carole Lombard. Accounts differ as to how enthusiastically Hitchcock pursued the project…and one should take his proclamations of indifference to Truffaut with a grain of salt. Only Chabrol and Rohmer, writing well before their friend François sat down with the Master of Suspense (and comedy!) bothered to give it a (brief) formal assessment within the context of his other work. But the very first shots, comprising the credit sequence, are quintessentially Hitchcockian (see Rope and Psycho and so on) in that they gradually approach the residence of the protagonists. For the remainder, things get a little harder to ID as Hitch; of course the cutting patterns are typically astute and seamless. There’s moving camera but nothing terribly elaborate. But late in the picture our title couple gets stuck in mid-air on an amusement park ride, and the suspense is, well, familiar and effective. Also effective: The Smiths’ standoff with the homeless kids at “their” transformed Italian restaurant is a crushing semi-throwaway. Chabrol and Rohmer’s account of a restaurant scene where Montgomery is stuck at a table with two “Incredible floozies” is astute but neglects the full dimension of the scene, with Montgomery faking a chat with the good looking woman at the other table. This was Hitchcock’s second-shortest U.S. film by one minute. Rope is shortest at 80, this is 94-ish, I Confess is 95. Extras include a Bogdanovich/Robert Osborne interview in old TCM supplement; Cinderella’s Fella a 20 minute narrative that’s one of those weird live-action shorts that, if you were not an expert on vintage studio output you would not believe it actually existed, had it not been included here. Inspirational dialogue: “That cat knows something.” — A

Never Open That Door (Flicker Alley Blu-ray)

Oooh, an Argentine ANTHOLOGY film based on two Cornell Woolrich stories. Fun.  Schrader has spoken of its extremes in noir effects, and there’s a startling lighting effect in opening nightclub scene which lets you know you’re in for a good time. The restored image, as George C. Scott says about Julie Christie’s hair in Petulia, GLEAMS. /Raul’s no good blonde sister the degenerate gambler Luisa is a treat. The movie has unbelievable levels of smoking. I woulda switched the order of the stories myself, the second one isn’t as strong as the first in this array. But whatever. A real treat.  —A

The Nude Vampire

Demoniacs (Powerhouse 4K Ultra discs)

Jean Rollin’s 1970 second feature, La Vampire Nue, absolutely delivers on its title. The tale of a man who follows an intriguing woman and comes to regret his choices looks terrific throughout but it’s absolutely sublime in its blowout final five minutes. There’s a very enthusiastic commentary from British mavens Kevin Lions and Jonathan Rigby, who kick off by noting “It’s a cliché to say Rollin’s films are bizarre, but they are.” At one point one of the duo invokes “the dread phrase ‘folk horror’” which made me think “ooh snap” and also made curious about internecine battles withing British genre circles, since, you know, the dread phrase “folk horror” is widely used in reputable corners these days.  1974’s Demoniacs eschews the supernatural for a, um, pirate tale, sort of. But it’s just as brutal and beautiful as anything in the Rollin canon, in part because female lead Joelle Couer is almost as potent an erotic presence as Rollin stalwart Brigitte Lahaie. Speaking of stalwart, Tim Lucas does the excellent commentary here. He sounds like he has a head cold, however. Get some rest, buddy! — A+ 

Off Balance (Cauldron Bly-ray)

I never much rated Ruggiero Deodato; while I am at least a semi-connoisseur of the crass, cannibal movies and stuff with actual animal cruelty falls on the wrong side of the line for me. Sure. Call me a wimp, I don’t care. But this picture from the auteur of Cannibal Holocaust, in which it appeared that Michael York went mad with some weird aging disease, looked intriguing enough, and Cauldron is definitely an up-and-comer in the good-presentation-of-anarchic-sticky-floor-cinema game. Also Edwidge Fenech is in it. That was the closer. So there we were. Ooh…he plays a concert pianist and the music is by Pino Donaggio. Better and better. Not the most ravishingly shot picture but the transfer is good and true and pure. There’s a gaping neck wound in the first anonymous murder that made me say “yikes!” People watch a live piano recital, and then watch it again as the recording is played back on a wall of video monitors. York’s character is the concert pianist (he plays a Bechstein, nice) who starts getting inexplicably old and not loving it. Crass about his romantic life, he ends a sexual encounter by sneering “We both got what we wanted, didn’t we?” He soon panics and goes to spend two months in Venice with his mom and one does.

A very sleepy Donald Pleasance’s face wanders out of frame and then there’s a cut and it wanders into frame in profile. The climactic reveal is rather fascinating in an inept way.

Once York’s character starts aging visibly it gets pretty gonzo; the makeup is moderately hilarious. The character adopts a dog. Discusses mortality with it. Oy.  By the end he looks like Brundlefly. Michael York himself apparently developed a condition not unlike that suffered by his character here, a grisly irony noted by commentators. It’s Fenech’s own voice on the soundtrack, they also tell us, not a common thing. Solid package best appreciated by, well connoisseurs of the crass. — B+

 Possession (Umbrella 4K Ultra disc)

I’ve not much to add to Zulawski discourse. Guy was a genius, that’s all. This is a fabulous package with actually very useful and attractive supplements, including Alexandra Heller-Nichols’ solid and new video essay on “The Failure of Language.”  Also a 51 minute making of. Daniel Bird observes “the so-called science-fiction form was a mask.” The incoherent U.S. cut is also included, as is a standalone earlier Zulawski interview, producer Christian Ferry chiming it. All you could ask for is a contemporary Adjani interview and no. The superb 4K image highlights the cold-as-ice image consistently and gorgeously contrived by cinematographer Bruno Nuytten could be quite sumptuous (he also shot those Claude Berri Pagnol adaptations, all sunny wheatfields and stuff) but here his light is cold as ice almost throughout, which is appropriate to the proceedings — A+

The Story of GI Joe (Ignite Blu-ray)

The 2000 Image standard-def DVD of this essential item has served me in good stead for, wow, almost a quarter-century. Wow. Well, this Blu-ray comes from a Film Foundation restoration. I worried that the cleanup work on it would make the rear-projection skies in the opening transport scenes look more phony. And no, that’s not really the case. What it does it clean up a lot of speckling and enhance detail. Still looks like a movie, and an old movie at that — and, as Robert A. Harris has pointed out, an old movie made in a kind of piecemeal way. It looks like what it is, but more like what the filmmakers wanted you to see when you saw it in its theatrical release. So: well done, Imprint. Director William Wellman’s lyricism of the masculine has never resonated more beautifully than in this picture. An excellent (former) critic of my acquaintance simply called it “a special film” when it came up one day long ago — maybe around the time of the DVD issue. It is. Alan Rode does his customary professional and informative job on the commentary. — A+

The McCarey Treatment: "An Affair to Remember," "Love Affair," And "Sleepless in Seattle"

Some time after my book Made Men: The Story of 'Goodfellas' was published, my editor at Hnover Square Press and I were discussing a followup, and I thought it would be fun to do something counterintuitive. The 30th anniversary of the release of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle was nigh. The movie interested me for a number of reasons, not least of them being its links to classical Hollywood. Specifically the way the whole plot hinges on that of two prior films directed by Leo McCarey. I also had a wonderful experience with Nick Pileggi, the patriarch of Goodfellas who had been Ephron's husband until her death in 2012. He thought the project a good idea, gave me a couple of contacts, and stepped aside. He insisted that his and Ephron's professional activities had almost no crossover. (This despite Ephron taking enthusiastic interest in Nick's mob-chronicling work, and crafting the script of My Blue Heaven around her own personal experience of Henry Hill.)

The project was fun for a little while, and then less fun, and then a bit nightmarish. I'm not inclined to detail it here. Well — one thing was that nobody in the cast would speak with me and every behind-the-scenes individual I did interview had an axe or two to grind with respect to Ephron. The best part of the process was interviewing Calvin Trillin, a hero of mine who has a small role in Sleepless, and who said to me, unprompted, about his friend, "Nora was bossy."

Anyway, At a certain point I gave it up and started work on what has recently been published as The World Is Yours: The Story of 'Scarface.' Fun! 

But I shouldn't let what work I did do on the Sleepless project go to waste, and I have been neglecting this poor blog for quite some time (although a new Blu-ray-4K Ultra Consumer Guide is in fact in the works and should be up before the end of August). So I give you my chapter on the McCarey films, keeping the bracketed source citations that would have gone in the back of the actual book intact just so you can see how scrupulous I am. 

 

            One of the most affectionately cited scenes in Sleepless in Seattle is the one on which it’s the guys’ turn to talk about An Affair to Remember. It may indeed have had an inordinate and not salutary effect on mainstream intragender movie discourse

            “It’s a chick movie” is how Sam describes it. That’s enough, in his mind, and the mind of his brother-in-law Greg, played by Victor Garber, to dismiss it entirely. Not in a malicious, shoot-it-into-the-sun way; they just would prefer it not sully their consciousnesses too much. They’ll sit through such an item if necessary — it’s a generous gesture on date night — but that’s it. After sister-in-law Suzy, played by Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife in real life, goes through an elaborate, emotional monologue on the heartbreaking qualities of Affair — one that we have been primed for by the conversations between Annie and Becky about the picture — Sam and Greg jokingly describe their emotional responses to mid-60s action blockbuster. “I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen,” Victor Garber’s Greg says of the Robert-Aldrich-directed World War II picture about a suicide squad of largely psychotic misfits, most of whom indeed do buy it by the picture’s end. Tom Hanks’ Sam invokes cast member Trini Lopez as having endured a particularly poignant end. Lopez, a pop star who rocketed to superstardom playing Latin-tinged fare, was one of two bits of stunt casting in Dozen; the other was record-breaking fullback Jim Brown, who of course was obliged to show off his remarkable running-with-something-in-his-hands skills (in this case a series of grenades rather than a football) for the movie’s thrilling climax.

            “Stop it you guys,“ Suzy says after a bit, still sniffling. The banter, however, is good natured; not the out-for-blood culture war stuff you see too frequently on social media nowadays.

            If you’ve read Nora Ephron’s essays, and seen the movies she made, the casual allusions they contain would incline you to believe that weaving An Affair to Remember into the narrative of Sleepless in Seattle was her idea. I myself was a little surprised to learn from Jeff Arch that the device was indeed his, and that it went back to an experience he had in his late teens, watching Affair on television with his girlfriend. The movie, he says, struck him as improbably sentimental drivel throughout. And yet at the end he found himself reduced to tears. And that’s the difference between Arch and the Sleepless guys: they do not melt at the end of Affair. (Nor, we can confidently infer, do they cry at the end of The Dirty Dozen.)

            Arch recalls: “I was watching on TV with a girlfriend in college, in 1974. At one point I was just so fed up and I thought this was so hokey. I was cynical and I turned to her – I'm a Sagittarius, and we’re known for not knowing when to shut up. I was about to make the biggest crack about what a crock of shit this thing is, and I saw she was crying like Niagara Falls. One of the few times in my life where I didn’t say the thing I was going to say because I saw the power of that. And then I got kind of into the device — you know, it is a very powerful structurally thing. And then we talked. While we were really close, I had the girlfriend out of town and she had the boyfriend out at a different college.   And I said to her, “Look, if our lives don't work out, we’ll meet at the top of the Empire State Building on New Years’ Day of 1980,” which seems — when you’re in 1974 and you’re 19 or 20 years old — like a really, really long time.

            “She said, ‘Sure.’ And we didn’t meet, because things…worked out differently. Then at some point, had an idea to write a play about two people who only speak to each other on the phone for business, and then eventually meet. I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I just had this visual of their desks on stage starting at extreme ends and as the play moved on, their debts were going to move closer. So I had an idea of people falling in love before they met each other, with that pretext.”

            An Affair to Remember, a lush, widescreen and color affair made for 20^th Century Fox, is arguably a swan song of American romantic cinema, or comedy, or tragicomedy. The 1957 movie and its original Love Affair, from 1939, were both conceived, co-written and directed by Leo McCarey, a director elevated to reassessment in the 1960s when Andrew Sarris pronounced him a “Far Side of Paradise” auteur in The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929 to 1968 and Peter Bogdanovich recorded an oral history with McCarey for the American Film Institute. McCarey’s movies ran the gamut; he began as a director of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts, gave the Marx Brothers their collective anarchic heads in Duck Soup, waved the flag in a heartwarming and funny fashion in Ruggles of Red Gap, made romantic comedy a little less screwball than Howard Hawks did with The Awful Truth.

            An Affair to Remember at least in part exists because of a regret that Cary Grant carried with him for a couple of decades. In 1937 Grant worked with director Leo McCarey on the classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth, co-starring with Irene Dunne. Grant’s experience was, from his perspective, less than ideal. McCarey had an improvisational approach that Grant wasn’t used to. He visited the set of the 1939 Love Affair and saw what wonders the McCarey touch achieved with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and pictured himself in the Boyer role.

            On an audio commentary recorded for a DVD edition of Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron says “film snobs think Love Affair is better than An Affair to Remember but nothing to me is as good as Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.” You can’t call Leo McCarey a film snob, but he too preferred Love Affair to Affair to Remember. Displaying what F. Scott Fitzgerald considered the hallmark of a first-rate intelligence (that is, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head and still retain the ability to function), McCarey also allowed, in his way, that Cary Grant was the ideal star to sell this tale. He had written the role of Nicky for Charles Boyer, yes. But, as he told Peter Bogdanovich: “Boyer came out much better than Cary. But Cary meant a lot more at the box office.” One could argue in the case of An Affair To Remember, that this wasn’t merely reflexive; watching Love Affair today, there’s a sense in which Boyer’s performance feels less than contemporary, while Grant (possibly in part because his persona is still considered and experienced as archetypal) has more enduring credibility. To be more specific, Boyer’s stateliness is particularly to pertinent to the religiosity of Love Affair which is largely absent in Affair to Remember and, let’s be frank, would have likely been a turn off to the characters in Sleepless.

            McCarey and Grant worked together again twice after Truth, on the Garson Kanin-directed My Favorite Wife (which McCarey developed, helped write, and was set to direct; an automobile accident put him, according to second female lead Gail Patrick, “at death’s door,” [James Bawden, Films in Review, 1981] but he remained as producer) and Once Upon A Honeymoon.  As much as McCarey and Grant had not gotten along on Truth, it’s been argued that McCarey, a dapper dresser who could be hilarious and insouciant before the film industry and alcoholism stressed him out of shape, helped shape what became known as the Grant persona. The confidence, the swings between understatement and manic comic indignation, the style, the walk — all these aspects of what we consider the quintessential Grant persona are honed to perfection in Grant’s performance in The Awful Truth. Director Alfred Hitchcock, whom McCarey is on the record as admiring, refined these aspects of Grant’s screen personality even further.

            And except for the clothes sense, apparently few if any of the personality traits we see in Grant on screen were manifested by Grant in real life. In his sometimes acid memoir, Dropped Names, Frank Langella recalls dining with Tony Curtis, who had idolized Grant growing up and eventually worked with him on Blake Edwards’ 1959 Operation Petticoat. Because it was a “huge hit” Curtis allowed that he would have worked with Grant again anytime, he was astonished at the gap between the man and his screen persona. “The guy turns out to be a fucking bore,” Langella quotes Curtis. “He knew better than all of us where to put the camera, how to say the line, how to play the scene. He had no humor and no charm. I would do anything to avoid having lunch with him.” Langella had heard similarly from Mel Brooks. “I thought I’d kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again.”  [Langella pg. 308]

            McCarey responded “Impossible” to Bogdanovich when asked what Grant was like to work with on The Awful Truth. By the same token, at this point in his career, Grant might have considered McCarey similarly. In the second volume of his biography of Bing Crosby — whose public persona was humongously enhanced by his portrayal of kindly but hip priest Father O’Malley in McCarey’s hit Going My Way and its sequel The Bells of Saint Mary’s — Gary Giddins writes: “McCarey’s method of shooting […] demanded more concentration than memorizing a script. Leo’s actors related similar anecdotes attesting to the mood on his sets. George Burns wrote of W.C. Fields sitting by himself in a corner, learning his lines during the filming of Six of a Kind; he had given up learning them at home the night before after he realized they changed every day. Ralph Bellamy groused that on The Awful Truth, nobody but McCarey knew what was going on. On The Milky Way, McCarey acted out for Adolph Menjou a long, illogical speech he wanted him to deliver for his big scene with Harold Lloyd. After he ‘did it for me with all the gestures,’ Menjou wrote, McCarey asked, ‘Why not adlib it,’ as it’s all ‘hocus pocus’ anyway? ‘Maybe,’ Leo joked, ‘we’ve discovered a new technique…. The McCarey system, the ultimate in the true are of making motion pictures.’ Menjou summed it up: ‘He was kidding about the new technique [but] he wasn’t kidding about adlibbing the scene.’” [pg 344, Giddins]

            The set of An Affair To Remember was not so confusing, in part because Grant and Kerr already had a template to work from: the original Love Affair. Both films hinge on two substantial plot components: the ocean cruise on which the lovers, separated from their land-based obligations, romantic and otherwise, and locked in a kind of romantic isolation that’s only enhanced by a visit to a venerated relation, and the proposed rendezvous at the Empire State Building.

            These were visions that occurred to McCarey while returning from a European vacation with his wife Stella. The time off — they departed from Hollywood in October of 1937 — was well-deserved and much needed. McCarey had not one but two masterpieces out that year, one being The Awful Truth and the other the heartbreaking tragedy of old age Make Way For Tomorrow, a still-devastating picture about the inverse of parental neglect of children that reportedly inspired the Yasuhiro Ozu classic Tokyo Story. McCarey was fond of both pictures but held Tomorrow closest to his heart — he was to remark, when accepting the Best Director award for Truth in March of 1938, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”

            As much as he needed, and got, some rest and relaxation his trip, on the cruise back to the States something was gnawing at him. And Stella noticed. McCarey recalled to Bogdanovich his wife saying, “You’re always at you lowest ebb when you’re trying to get a new idea.” [Bog pg 417] After a period of stewing, he got the new idea. Here’s how he put it to Stella: “Suppose you and I were talking to each other when the boat sailed from England and we got to know each other on the trip. We felt ourselves inseparable. By the time the trip was over, we were madly in love with each other but by the time the boat docked we have found out that each is obligated to somebody else.” [Bog.pg 417]

            The Empire State Building idea came later. At the end of the cruise, when McCarey looked at the Manhattan skyline (the same skyline, minus the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, that inspired Fritz Lang to concoct Metropolis; Lang’s first sight of it was in 1924). And from there he concocted the twist: Terri’s inability to make the rendezvous there because of being incapacitated in an auto accident. “I have a theory,” McCarey told Bogdanovich, “which I call the ineluctability of incidents. The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitable flows from it — like night follows day; events are linked together. I always develop my stories that way, in a series of events that succeed and provoke each other. I never really have intrigues.” [Bog., pg 416] Terri’s disappearance is certainly a provoking incident. But it’s one that Nicky takes to be an intrigue, freezing him — and her — up when they run into each other at a concert, before their painful and glorious rediscovery of each other and reconciliation.  

            With these ideas in place, McCarey fleshed out the story with Mildred Cram, then turned over screenwriting duties to Donald Ogden Stewart (who helped adapt Holiday, the Philip Barry play which George Cukor filmed with Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Delmar Daves. It would take almost a year for McCarey’s notions to hit a soundstage: The shooting of the film then titled Love Match commenced on October 3, 1938. While gossip columnists reported that the female lead was coveted by actresses ranging from Greta Garbo to Helen Hayes [Gehring, pg. 139] McCarey had,” hand-tailored” for Love Affair his Awful Truth star Irene Dunne, “which included making her a nightclub entertainer in order that Irene could sing during the picture.” [Bog pg 417] He did not tailor Nicky to Cary Grant. Indeed, the ebullience inherent in Dunne notwithstanding, McCarey biographer Wes D. Gehring sees in the creation of Love Affair McCarey steering to a more overtly and comprehensive sincerity: “Romantic comedy’s one-foot-in-reality-base suited McCarey better than the ludicrousness of screwball farce,” he avers.

            The resultant film was received rhapsodically, and not just by film snobs, either. Gehring cites a characteristic contemporary review from Clark Wales of the trade publication Screen and Radio Weekly: “Recommending a Leo McCarey production is something like recommending a million dollars or beauty or a long and happy life. Any of these is a very fine thing to have and the only trouble is that there are not enough of them.” While box-office figures are not readily available, the movie proved to be the second-most popular to be produced and distributed by RKO Pictures, the first having been George Stevens’ Kipling-inspired adventure picture Gunga Din, which starred…Cary Grant.

            McCarey’s 1940s were defined by the two blockbusters Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s, after which he made Good Sam, another fantasia of Catholic faith (“Sam,” besides being the name of the lead character played by Gary Cooper, stood for “Samaritan”). It was less well-received and indeed has not been subjected to any meaningful critical reassessment. One can picture McCarey at that low ebb, looking for ideas as the 1950s commenced. Gehring speculates about the reasons for McCarey’s reduced productivity. Alcoholism, and an increasing dependence on painkillers that he began using in the wake of the 1939 auto accident that had taken him out of the director’s chair on My Favorite Wife. McCarey also suffered a terrible personal loss in the months after the release of Good Sam: the suicide death of his younger brother, Ray, with whom he had been close. And of course there was what film historian Joseph McBride has called (with respect to McCarey’s friend and colleague Frank Capra) “the catastrophe of success.” Going My Way and Bells had been such monumental, zeitgeist-defining hits that McCarey was very possibly torn between the impulse to try to duplicate them and the desire to break free of them. Hence, as Gehring puts it, he pursued “some very odd unrealized film proposals.” One being a picture about Adam and Eve — he’d privately hatched the idea in the thirties — starring Bells female lead Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne. McCarey spent a lot of money on research, and on the talents of songwriter Harry Warren, developing a musical about Marco Polo. He also wanted his friend Alfred Hitchcock to act for him, in a picture in which the Master of Suspense would “get away with the perfect crime.” [Gehring, pg. 219].

            In any event, his first realized picture of the 1950s was 1952’s My Son John, a HUAC-boosting anti-Communist family melodrama whose production was highly inconvenienced by the death of leading man Robert Walker prior to the end of principal photography. McCarey was forced to cobble together his finale, in which John sees the error of his Red ways, from footage in his friend Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and to contemporary eyes the hedging and splicing is very plain to see, and somewhat cringe-inducing. Would the picture have been less so had Walker lived to complete his performance? Difficult to say. To these eyes, John is the movie in which the patriotism of Ruggles of Red Gap curdles into paranoia. Its my-country-right-or-wrong ethos is blunt to the point of bathos, and as the critic Robin Wood has pointed out, it’s almost completely contradicted in the late McCarey film Rally Round The Flag, Boys, which just underscores how impossible it is to expect coherent politics out of a lot of classical Hollywood filmmakers. John got a bit of a shellacking from the press but was placed in the top ten films of 1952 list by the ever-mysterious National Board of Review, and got an award from the Catholic Institute of the Press because of course it did. Its box office was low.

            1952 was also the year in which rumors of a Love Affair remake began circulating: in November of that year, syndicated columnist Joe Hyams reported that Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, who would marry in 1952 (and present the world with future prime time soap sensation Lorenzo Lamas four years later) were interested in starring in a new version of the picture. But it was Twentieth Century Fox and Cary Grant who were the motors for the 1957 movie. In his 1984 biography of Grant, Haunted Idol, Geoffrey Wansell writes that Grant “could still remember visiting the set of the original to talk with Irene Dunne and wishing he had been playing in it.”

            In McCarey’s estimation, Grant went from “impossible” to “terrific” in An Affair to Remember. The remake, as was customary from Twentieth Century Fox since its introduction of the format in 1953, was in breathtaking widescreen CinemaScope and glorious DeLuxe Color (this was a one-strip variant of Technicolor, which required three strips of film being exposed at once, in synch with each other). The sound was Westrex stereo, showcasing the sumptuous voice of Vic Damone singing the title song, music by Harry Warren and lyrics in part by McCarey himself. This was McCarey’s first time out with color and widescreen, and ace cinematographer Milton Krasner, who’d been working in the CinemaScope format since its beginnings — lensing the melodrama/romantic travelogue Three Coins in the Fountain and the sword-and-sandal Christianity epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (directed, as it happens, by Delmer Daves) practically back to back for 1954 releases — grounded the visuals beautifully. The technical “improvements” aside, McCarey saw the remake as an opportunity to reach a new audience. He told Bogdanovich, “A lot of people said it was the best love story they ever saw on screen — and it’s also my favorite love story. Two decades had passed; a lot of young people couldn’t have seen the first version, so I felt I should tell the story again — for them.” Prior to shooting the picture, he told the New York Times that contemporary Hollywood was “afraid of honest emotion. It’s considered old-fashioned if a fellow takes his hat off to kiss a girl. They all seem to be trying to find a trick way to say ‘I love you.’ What are they trying to prove? Love is the oldest and noblest emotion.” (Eventually, when asked to name his favorites among his pictures, McCarey would reflect, “Well, I guess Make Way For Tomorrow, Love Affair, An Affair to Remember, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s. There are moments I like in all the films. I’ve always said, if only I could make a picture out of just the favorite moments.”)

            If leading lady Deborah Kerr was hard-pressed to reproduce the ebullience of Irene Dunne (and indeed, while Terry remains a singer in the remake, she’s an altogether more subdued kind than Dunne — not quite lounge as opposed to nightclub, but certainly more of a natural balladeer in attitude; her singing voice was dubbed by the perennial Marni Nixon), she certainly could sell nobility without breaking a sweat.

            As for Cary Grant, he was, as he entered his early fifties, arguably at his apogee as a screen star. If we agree that Affair was his peak as a romantic lead, we can note that in North By Northwest, produced a few years after Affair, represented his apotheosis as a Hitchcock lead. These achievements help explain why, for Ephron, Affair was the Hollywood Romantic Film and a superior iteration of Love Affair. Affair to Remember starred an all-caps Cary Grant. As much as Boyer had been in vogue after Pepe Le Moko and Algiers, he never quite made it to all-caps status. (By 1957 Boyer had moved into supporting roles in film; see his work as a fatherly but not quite competent sanitarium administrator in Vincente Minnelli’s 1955 The Cobweb. He had also made himself a tidy sum in television production.)

Spring 2024 Blu-ray/4K Ultra disc Consumer Guide

Technically speaking, it IS still Spring. No?

Equipment: Sony UBP-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

Bloodmoon (Severin Blu-ray)

“What if we choose to apprehend the slasher film as a virus?” I thought while looking at this Australian 1990 item. Because despite being made in, well, 1990, it has most of the hallmarks of an American-made example of the genre from 1982 or so, when a thousand Friday the 13^th variants bloomed. So it’s like the contagion took about eight years to make its way around the world. In any event Bloodmoon nevertheless manages to impart to the tired tropes a guileless and crass Down Under charm. It offers a bumper crop of fresh female toplessness, usually revealed right before someone (it’s generally the topless girl, but sometimes a dude) gets strangled with a circle of barbed wire, thus firmly imprinting the sex-death connection on the hapless young viewer. The whole thing certainly LOOKS sharp (director Alec Mills was a onetime cinematographer of some distinction) (and he only just died in February, poor guy) and the scenario’s cheating-teacher bit is a stitch. The killer’s pathology is such that he gets really sloppy, and nobody notices, which is odd but leads to an unusually satisfying ending involving an activist nun, sort of. The “Frightbreak” at 1 hour and five minutes was possibly RIPPED OFF BY GASPAR NOE for I Stand Alone nine years later. Check it out. The supplements are entertaining but I was still left with questions, such as, “Did the terrible band Vice, who start off sounding like Hootie and then morph into a form of Creed, have a codicil in their soundtrack that allowed their terrible music to be heard with minimal dialogue interference for the first minutes of their appearance?” The rest of the score is by Brian May, and if you know your Australian film composers you know it’s not the Queen guy. Inspirational dialogue: “You shouldn’t be out here with a boy. You should know better than that.” Inspirational interview quote, from female lead Christine Amor: “I thought it was appalling” — B+

Burial Ground (Severin 4K Ultra disc)

One of the signal innovations of Lucio Fulci’s 1979 Zombi was to take the sickly-green appearance of the undead in Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead a step further and give the monsters skull-exposed heads with nests of worms squirming in the eye sockets and all that kinda thing. Ick. Andrea Bianchi continued the mode of representation in this 1981 grossout, which was in fact sometimes shown as Zombi 3. (I don’t have the space or inclination to explain where Zombi 2 fits into all this, but real heads know and all.) Here’s it’s not just worms but maggots that fester on the flesh-eaters, so do not have a TV dinner whilst consuming this if indeed you choose to consume it. The poor crypt-exploring scientists and friends who unleash the creatures have the usual hard time figuring out how to kill them. Some discover a green flammable material. Does setting them on fire work? Yes it seems it kind of does. Later another character avers “They can only be killed by blowing their heads off.” Uh huh. Very confusing. Remember in the Fulci movie where one of the undead wrestled a shark? In this movie there’s a few undead with seeming Spider-Man powers methodically making their way up a pillar. Cool, The Climbing Dead. The unexpected incest angle in the scenario is very unexpected. Michael, the “son” who’s really into getting back into nursing at his mother’s breast is played by an adult midget. Gnarly. 85 solid minutes of “what the fuck?” — A

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (Severin 4K Ultra disc)

Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film pretty much shrugs this movie off, but you should not. It’s bonkers. The salient facts of director William Asher’s life and career — that is, he directed a bunch of AIP “Beach” movies and he was married from 1963 to 1973 to Elizabeth Montgomery — cannot prepare you for the fevered reality of this serial-murder-motivated-by-incestuous-desire tale. As Susan Tyrell plays the aunt with the incestuous desire, you can easily infer a primary source of the mania — Tyrell, as is her wont embodies a desperate grotesque at a ragingly high volume without ever making her into a caricature. But then there’s the rest, which is almost equally delightfully confounding — Bo Svenson’s tetchy, homophobic homicide detective, Julia Duffy’s eye-openingly hot-to-trot teen girlfriend, Bill Paxton’s bully jock, and poor Jimmy McNichol looking very “what the hell have I gotten myself into?” And lots of blood. That the direction is entirely staid and straight adds to the unwitting potency. Essential. And looking like it should. ‑‑A

Cabin in the Sky (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Damn, look at that spotless gray scale in the opening credit graphics. That may be cleanest you are likely to feel watching this problematic Vincente Minnelli feature debut. The racial stereotyping applied throughout this all-Black musical is of the ostensibly benign variety, and good God, once the musical numbers get going that’s all forgotten and the spectacle of Black excellence is gorgeously enveloping, but one never quite escapes the “but still…” feeling about the whole thing. That said, Minnelli was about as enlightened as white studio directors at MGM got in this era, and as dicey as the musical’s book may be (pardon the pun), the camera treatment of the performers is never less than square and appreciative. This is a fancy way of saying Minnelli demonstrates a form of anti-racism by shooting this cast as beautifully as any other ensemble in his filmography (see for instance the beautiful crane from the dance floor to immaculate Duke Ellington at the piano at in the nightclub scene in the last third). “Bogus but rather entertaining” James Baldwin said of this and Stormy Weather — they had, he stated, the advantage over similarly pitched fare of allowing the Black viewer to “at least […] listen to the music.” Both Ethel Waters and Lena Horne are given Marlene-Dietrich-worthy lighting. And Waters just looks so infectiously happy throughout. That, apparently, is ACTING, because by most accounts Ethel could be rather mean and took many opportunities to do so during the making of this picture. Eddie Anderson’s really playing that guitar, you may notice. There aren’t too many VMs in need of upgrade left — I Dood It, Four Horsemen, Tea and Sympathy and ESPECIALLY The Cobweb are the ones I’m most eager to see — and problematic as it is I’m delighted to have this one checked off.  — A

Conan the Barbarian (Arrow 4K Ultra disc)

This looks fantastic. Arrow’s given us an immaculate 4K rendering of a magnificent-looking movie. Duke Callaghan was lowkey a great cinematographer (uncredited camera op on a lot of classic, or just great-looking, stuff including The Carpetbaggers and Zabriskie Point), and he shot this when he was pushing 70! The 2010 commentary by director John Milius and star Arnold Schwarzenegger has a nice share of “hoo boy” moments. The duo is pretty laconic, a couple of pally old pros sitting around talking and saying things like: “It’s fitting that he should be the father of Conan. William Smith.” They’re not wrong. Unlike everything else that passes for a comic book movie these days, this, in its own way this is as much a real comic book movie as Danger Diabolik and Modesty Blaise. The crucifixion scene in particular could have come right out of Savage Sword, obviously though it’s more Buscema than Barry Windsor Smith, of course, and do any of you have any idea of what I’m talking about at this point. But as we’re on the subject, casting Schwarzenegger as Conan is in its way the biggest and best source-material-to-movie correspondence since John Huston cast Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. Finally, mmm, that’s great animatronic snake — A+

A Day At The Races (Warner Archive)

The boys are starting to look tired here, especially as you can see them so very clearly in this beautiful rendition. While Night at the Opera did a relatively seamless job of threading the madcap Marx antics into an ostensibly sweet-natured romance narrative, here you get the feeling that the story’s just being put on pause for the boys to recycle an old vaudeville routine or two. Hence, the tension between the masks of the Marxes and the tropes of conventional comedy is especially pronounced here.  Also, cutesying up Chico is not a great look. That said, the closer it gets to vaudeville show and further from a movie, the better it is. The “All God’s Chillun” number is a real treat — until the boys themselves put on blackface and then holy shit. Quite a nice array of supplements here, too. — B+

Deathdream (Blue Underground 4K Ultra disc)

Real heads know this Bob Clark-Alan Ownsby variant on “The Monkey’s Paw” is one of the lowkey horror greats of the early ‘70s. The formula? Two Canadian filmmakers decamp to Florida, cast the lead actors of Cassavetes’ Faces as another tetchy couple, here mourning the death of their son in the war, and let rip when said son materializes at their door. With needs — most specifically and troublingly a need for fresh blood. It looks how it looks, which is plain, arguably crude — Rex Reed’s famous complaint about Willard having the appearance of having been shot through the bottom of a Coke bottle springs to mind — but it’s almost impossibly effective because of that, not in spite of it. The 4K captures that well. And the direction itself is never slack. The incredibly abrupt cut to the nerdy-looking little kid after the undead Vietnam vet Andy deals with a very annoying dog is a stitch. Ninety minutes of “I came back from the dead and all I got was this lousy suburban malaise.”­—A

The Devil’s Honey (Severin 4K Ultra disc)

What can you say about a movie whose first seven minutes, which I won’t describe, will make you lose whatever faith you may have left in humanity? Obviously that it’s permanent collection item. It takes a while for the 4K advantage of Severin’s reboot of its edition of this late Lucio Fulci “erotic thriller” to make itself felt, as cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa goes for a diffuse, vaguely soft-focus look much of the time. But the boost is there, and library items ought to be in the best editions available, so there you go. This was Brett Halsey’s inaugural feature in a four-picture run of Fulci collaborations, and here he gives the appearance of gritting his teeth for a long haul. Corinne Clery mostly wears a “what have I done to deserve this” pout, which fits her role as an unappreciated wife. ‑‑ A

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (Severin Blu-ray)

Lunatic stuff, with our best friend Jess Franco paying “tribute” to his favorite movie monsters by tossing off a feature shoot in what appears to be 72 hours. Animal lovers beware of the bit where they almost drown a bat in tomato juice. Fog filters, poor exposures, — all sorts of attempted effects combined with uncertain execution are what gives this curiosity its special look. It’s very…distinct (although not at all slick, of course). Poor Dennis Price as Dr. Frankenstein seems — as so many other distinguished actors late in their careers working in exploitation cinema — to be dissociating. Not a good “intro to Franco” piece. But a true monster mash, in which indeed “the guests included Wolfman.” Look for Jason Reitman’s mom Genevieve Robert as Amira, the Gypsy Woman. No really. — A

Faithless (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Not an inordinately distinguished pre-code MGM picture, but certainly noteworthy for providing a lead role to Tallulah Bankhead (here on loan from Paramount, where her pictures hadn’t been clicking commercially), who’s at her pert and insolent best as a poor little NYC rich girl who, while riding high, makes pronouncements such as” I don’t believe in delinquent girls. Silly weaklings.” This will of course bite her in the ass once she’s wiped out. This is from 1932, early enough in the sound that Hugh Herbert is actually able to credibly portray the heavy. Mourdant Hall called it “lumbering,” which is indicative of the general mien of the early talkie dramatic picture — it’s not even eighty minutes long, how much can it “lumber?” Bankhead would not play another dramatic lead in film for a dozen years, returning to the screen in ’44 for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. So she’s the clear attraction here, and worth it. The extras come in the form of a few nifty novelty Vitaphone shorts. The image quality of the feature is rather staggeringly good — it’s almost one hundred years old, for God’s sake. Look at this as Metro vin ordinaire (the extra-ordinaire presence of Bankhead notwithstanding) in a superb bottle. Inspirational dialogue, when Bankhead’s character learns someone is from Colorado: “Good heavens, what does one do there, take mud baths?”— A

Geronimo (Powerhouse)

Holy moley, it’s A WOKE WESTERN. A WOKE WESTERN starring a 12-year-old Matt Damon no less. Okay, he’s a little older than that in this criminally underseen 1993 Walter Hill picture. (He’s like, 22 or so.) Wes Studi plays the title warrior with customary gravitas. The action is coherent in the time-tested Hill way, and the movie itself is pertinent, intelligent, consistently engaging. The 2.35 frame is stunningly rendered throughout. A very nice array of extras, starting with a consistently interesting commentary from Western mavens C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke and good interviews with Studi, composer Ry Cooder, Hill. There’s also an archival doc in which Bertrand Tavernier demonstrates that, as always, he got it. Inspirational dialogue: “That was a great shot!” “Not so great, I aimed for his head.” Or should it be: “Must be a Texan. Lowest form of white man there is,” uttered by Robert Duvall? A primo example of a relatively recent Western that’s as vital as almost any classic from the genre’s golden age. —A+

The Golden Coach (Raro)

A quick note on a film — Renoir, you’ve heard of him, and Anna Magnani too — that needs to be in your library in whatever form available. This form is quite good, happily. The image here can be best described as refreshing, beautifully detailed, beautifully balanced in the color department. It’s a Canadian restoration and hence there is a Canadian commentary — my pal the critic Adam Nayman is genial and informative. — A

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (Criterion)

I am not completely won over by the songs, nor by the conspicuous pop psychology in the writing (“imperfect fathers,” yeesh). But the grafting of the story into the interstice between two 20^th century catastrophes works rather well, the sufferings of the Ewan McGregor-voiced cricket make for good and mordant slapstick, the imagery and staging and action is gorgeous, and the heart is genuine. And the 4K Ultra presentation here is spectacular. As distinctive a visionary as Del Toro is, it’s in a work such as this in which his magpie tendencies most productively adhere, and so the stuff he lovingly adopts from the likes of Miyazaki and Harryhausen and Svankmayer and the Quays sings out with love. The making-of supplements are informative and exhaustive, as befits such a project. Spending time in Del Toro’s imagination is always rewarding, and it’s almost equally rewarding to be immersed in the process as in the result. Of course I am especially partial to the 20-minute conversation between Del Toro and Farran Smith Nehme, my friend and a terribly astute-while-amiable interlocutor. — A+

The Horrible Doctor Hichcock (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

So how bad was he? Pretty bad! Vinegar Syndrome has put together a faultless presentation of this seminal bit of psychotronic cinema from 1962, all about a physician who can only function as long as his partner lies perfectly still. While Ricardo Freda never had the mojo of Mario Bava, he wasn’t without juice — as in the match cut from title medico Hichcock and syringe in the surgery to Hichcock and syringe in marital boudoir to anesthetize wifey into a corpse-like state. The number of candelabras here reminds one of Scorsese’s remarks about Italian horror movies being all about women carrying them down long corridors. This movie doesn’t quite represent the apotheosis of Barbara Steele (it’s still Black Sunday, people), she here rather amusingly plays a woman who goes to bed with her lipstick on. The extras are good; second AD Marcello Avallone recounts how he “learned to hang out on sets” and it is revealed that the cinephile gag of the title was not screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi’s. Steele, in a commentary, calls Freda “the epitome of Italian emotionalism.”  Incredible image quality. All that’s missing is Tim Lucas. —A+

King Kong (Universal 4K Ultra disc)

I remember seeing this when it first came out and thinking it godawful EXCEPT for Jessica Lange, who enchanted my 17-year-old self with great force. I don’t even think I cottoned much to Jeff Bridges in it. I didn’t think he played an ecology-concerned hippie academic all too well. Of course I saw it while completely in thrall to the Cooper-Schoedsack, as one should be, and my head’s still in that place. But now I can assess the picture with a calmer head capable of simulations of objectivity, so I can report that this is a pretty bouncy, energetic adventure film infused with a not-too-cheesy ‘70s irreverence, all the way up to the moment when the title character shows up. No matter how many effects masters worked on him (see the infamous final title card) he just looks goofy, is all. And the 4K Ultra rendition makes that rather too clear. Inspirational dialogue: “Who in the hell do you think went through there, a guy in an ape suit?” — A

The Mask of Fu Manchu (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

“A Chinaman beat me?” Never happen. So says here one Jean Hersholt, the guy for whom a humanitarian award is named. He sure played some unsavory characters, though. Remember him in Greed? Anyway. This is what you have to call an inescapably racist bit of cinematic pulp but it is also replete with a lot of evocative weirdness not related to the more objectionable components of its content, like lead actor Karloff’s visage distorted in reflective surfaces while something not unlike a Tesla coil crackles with illumination. Iconic. He also looks a little like late period Lou Reed in such shots.  Karen Morley, who we have also enjoyed as Poppy in the Hawks Scarface (but my book, The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, at your local or via various online emporiums!) is very whiny in a proto-Lisa Kudrow way. This disc boasts a beautiful transfer; never have I been more enthralled by Karloff’s insane intro, which also features the Vile Foaming Liquids treasured by Frank Zappa. This thing has more trap doors and secret passageways than any movie ever made, and good snake action too. It was with this film that I first started confusing Lewis Stone with C. Aubrey Smith, despite the lack of resemblance between the two.. — A

Peeping Tom (Criterion 4K Ultra disc)

The definitive edition of this queasy and compulsively watchable thriller highlighting, for my money, the most heartbreaking serial-killer in history, Karl Boehm’s Mark Lewis. This time around I latched on to scenarist Leo Marks’ and director Michael Powell’s sardonic attitude toward pornography and its consumers, exemplified in a sense by the remark of one of the “special” news-agent item models when Mark shows at the studio: “Why look who’s here — Cecil Beaton!”  Another bit of dialogue, “All this filming isn’t healthy,” sums up the theme. If the metaphor seems extreme to you, well. I watched this restoration (on the European Studio Canal edition, which shares some but not all of the extras on the Criterion) on the same day that I watched the Arrow Conan. On that film’s commentary, John Milius recalls Arnold Schwarzenegger’s treatment of the actress playing the slave girl dropped into Conan’s quarters, saying that it was great that Arnold did nothing to make her feel comfortable (she enters the scene topless). “This woman was really scared when she was put in here and you were great because…you never let her get relaxed. You never said a thing the whole day to her.” (Her name was Andrea Guzon.)  — A+

The Raid Redemption (Sony 4K Ultra disc)

If I’m not mistaken, this presents the action classic in something above its native definition — the thing was shot with a Panasonic camera that got a 1080 image. SO what’s the point of a 4K upgrade? Revisionism, as director Gareth Evans wanted not to alter the movie’s content but to tweak color correction and correct visual “errors” he considered a product of his own inexperience back in 2011 when he made the movie. Acceptable! This version’s color scheme and muted look is fitting for the docudrama style Evans was emulating to a certain extent. The standard-def BR in the package is old. How old? The trailers are for Looper (2012), Starship Troopers Invasion (also 2012) and, um, Resident Evil Invasion (also 2012, how many of these trailers am I gonna look at), and The Words (okay, I’m glad I kept looking, to be reminded of a movie that really stank and was also made in 2012), and, oh, Safety Not Guaranteed (no comment I guess). The rendering of the movie itself herein is useful and mildly instructive because it really does showcase how Evans went to town in retooling the look of the picture for 4K. Most noticeable is that the blueish tinge, which on old low-def home camcorders indicated that one had shot with the WRONG WHITE BALANCE, is gone. — A

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

The cover and slipcase reproduce (too small in both cases but what the hell) the immortal Jack Davis poster art, which conveys the madcap aspect of this movie a little too vividly — the Norman Jewison comedy is relatively lowkey throughout, although it builds up a proper head of tension eventually. And ends up surprisingly sweet natured, especially relative to other cinematic Cold War contemplations of the 1960s. My buddy Michael Schlesinger and his buddy Mark Evanier do the commentary, they are amiable and informative and they LOVE the Mirisch Corporation and Walter Mirisch of course. The image here is SUPER handsome (the picture was shot by the great Joseph Biroc) and our commentators highlight this by pointing out that this is the first time on home video that the lavender tint in the switchboard operator’s hair (she’s played by Tessie O’Shea) is rendered correctly. Inspirational commentary nugget: “There are people who see this film and think it’s Gary Burghoff” (Evanier on Michael J. Pollard) — A

Scarlet Street (Kino Lorber 4K Ultra disc)

Jeepers, as Joan Bennett is fond of saying in this touchstone picture, this is gorgeous. It’s been a long journey to 4K for Lang’s lurid remake of Renoir’s La Chienne, and for lovers of the picture (here I am going longish on it), it’s been worth it. My cordial acquaintance Imogen Smith’s commentary is typically detailed and cogent but she definitely disapproves of these characters in ways that I just can’t. Because truly, they are all me. Except for the murdering part. With the newfound clarity of image we can better appreciate how Bennett overdoes it in a very productive way — the faces she makes when Robinson embraces her and kisses her neck, her absolute repugnance at him is tragically vivid. Is there such a thing as too much detail? Well, Eddie G.’s toupee is more apparent than it has been, Otherwise, no notes. Inspirational dialogue: “He’s too dumb to be a phony”—A+

The Warriors (Arrow 4K Ultra disc)

This package arrived on a gloomy afternoon during which my outlook was especially glum and I have to say, the movie made my goddamn day, as did the superb Arrow transfer of 9this is important) the original theatrical version, with my town looking grimy as all get out. The scene with the prom kids still rips. The extras are great. Buy with confidence. —  A+

Witness for the Prosecution (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

As restoration maven Robert A. Harris has noted, Kino Lorber has been hiding its light under a bushel when reissuing titles already in their catalog. He wrote of this: “Yet another Kino ‘re-issue’ title that gives us an upgrade of 50%+ in data throughput, along with a requisite viewable difference in quality at close quarters.” I concur. Another asset newly added is a typically stalwart and astute Joseph McBride commentary in which he details director Billy Wilder’s demonic work ethic and dryly notes, “There’s always somebody complaining about something” with respect to Marlene Dietrich’s on set carping about Tyrone Power’s natty wardrobe.  — A

You’re a Big Boy Now/The Rain People (Warner Archive Blu-rays)

With our good friend Francis Ford Coppola back in the news, it’s an opportune time to check out his early work. He’s dismissive of 1966’s You’re A Big Boy Now but cannot and ought not deny 1969’s Rain People, which brought both James Caan and Robert Duvall, both of whom he’d work with more decisively in years following, into his fold. One can see why he might be a little sheepish about Big Boy, a coming-of-age comedy made under the extreme influence of Richard Lester. Although the New York location stuff feels more directly Godardian and of course it was Godard who was influencing Lester back in the day. And you can see how Coppola’s work here might have influenced De Palma for Greetings and Scorsese for Mean Streets. The film’s whimsy does show strain after a while (and some of it borders on lowkey misogyny) and lead Peter Kastner is no Richard Dreyfuss (bet you’d never hear anyone complain about somebody not being Richard Dreyfuss these days, huh?). But the dog, “Emily,” is great, as are the female leads Julie Harris, Karen Black and the tragic Elizabeth Hartman. The quasi-seduction scene scored to John Sebastian’s “Darling Be Home Soon” is bracingly original and intimate and comes closest to Coppola’s true voice. Rain People, on the other hand, feels “Coppola-esque” from the opening shot, as do the frequent frames shot through windows. Look for Eleanor Coppola in a flashback scene as Robert Duvall’s dying wife. A spectacularly bleak and heartbreaking movie — not a young man’s picture at all. Coppola was about 30 when he shot it. Both discs are without extras but look wonderful. — Both pictures: A

Winter 2024 Blu-ray/4K Ultra Disc Consumer Guide

Since I’m not yet getting rid of this blog I might as well use it. If you’ve been on Substack for a while, I can see why you’d stick with it, but it would feel weird for a non-Substack person such as myself to actually JOIN it now. Anyway. Happy New Year.

Equipment: Sony UBP-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

Anna Christie (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

While I’ve seen a few O’Neill plays on stage and of course several more-or-less distinguished film adaptations of his work I’m far from an expert on the work and hence have no real authority with respect to this piece in any edition. The life of the sea, the life of the drunk, the life of the fallen woman, here the ineffable Garbo is playing one and she’s quite good, putting her height to excellent use in making her title character gangly and awkward. The image quality of the main feature is superb given the circumstances. The package’s most crucial extra is the German-language version made by MGM, with Garbo playing against a different cast on the same sets. It’s directed by Jacques Feyder, and the conventional wisdom is that it’s more fluid than the English-language version directed by Clarence Brown but the difference between the two in terms pf both aesthetic and emotional impact is negligible. And unless you’re a Garbo devotee, to be honest, most of the movie’s salutary qualities might be obscure. I find it congenial but it’s also no Queen Christina. The presentation of Feyder’s version looks like a solid scan of a good looking print, but it doesn’t have a patch on the good (not startling, but solid, and yielding some of what you’ll at least take for nitrate gleam) image quality of the English language version. This was Garbo’s first sound film; it also represents the single solitary moment in Charles Bickford’s career in which he could credibly play anything even vaguely resembling a romantic lead. Inspirational dialogue: ”Lutherans, is it? Oh, then I’m damned entirely.”  — A

Barbarella (Arrow 4K Ultra)

I have no business — less than no business — reviewing and assigning a grade to a package in which I am featured in a supplement. And yet. This is such an exquisite rendering that I need to bang the drum for it. I’ve never seen this peculiar film look as good as it does here, and the way it looks good is very filmic — like a MOVIE. You know, the way you and I like it. It’s a wonderful thing to behold after years of seeing it not look all that much better than the TV promo spot included here. Is it a revelation? Yes! But does it improve the movie itself? A bit, yeah. Tim Lucas’ commentary is reliably spectacular, I’m a little embarrassed that there’s a bit of overlap between it and my own video “appreciation” of the movie (part of the supplements disc, separate from the 4K Ultra disc).  Overall though it’s given me only a mild case of imposter syndrome. The Lucas/Bissette Zoom discussion is very macro, there’s about a good twenty minutes about bandes desinee, a lot of fun reminiscing about the Evergreen Review, etc. There’s also Elizabeth Castaldo Lunden on the costumes, camera op Roberto Girometti on working with Vadim and Claude Renoir, amusing son Ricky Tognazzi on dad Ugo, Fabio Testi on being John Philip Law’s body double, a good video essay on Dino di Laurentiis. All one could ask for is a new interview with Jane Fonda and I don’t think that was ever going to be in the cards, the fact that she attended Vadim’s funeral notwithstanding.  — A+

The Carpetbaggers (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

The image here is awful pretty — really sumptuous in its color and clarity and super clean. And the 1964 movie itself is legendary in being pretty awful. It’s interesting to look at this in tandem with Minnelli’s Home From the Hill, which has story and characters that are very nearly as pulpy as this, but which Minnelli invests with some hard-fought gravity and dignity. And makes the most of the mise-en-scene furnished by Preston Amre. Edward Dmytryk, the director here, was generally competent and often better than competent, but couldn’t really be bothered here to invest in the material, and it shows. Hence, the fantastic production design of Hal Pereira notwithstanding, Dmytryk can’t make any of it signify beyond the lurid surfaces. There’s not really such a thing as “it’s so bad it’s good” but there is also the truth as articulated by Vladimir Nabokov that nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity, so you may split the difference between those two realities and come up grinning with this item. In terms of entertainment value, it helps that leads George Peppard and Carroll Baker both seem to be on angel dust, and that Baker is costumed throughout as if the movie has the alternate title Chick in Her Underwear. Incidentally, this was the second movie I watched in a single day in which the commentator used the phrase “roman a clef.” I don’t want to rat anyone out but I’ll say that Julie Kirgo here is the one who pronounces the phrase correctly. Her work is relatively discursive but two hours thirty is a lot to have to fill up. I have not yet listened to the David Del Valle/Dave DeCoteau commentary but those fellows are always entertaining. Inspirational dialogue: “How do you like my widow’s weeds?”  Spoken by Baker, in her underwear, or something like underwear at least.. — A

Cemetery Man (Severin 4K Ultra)

This exquisitely executed compendium of morbidities really hit my sweet spot when I saw it for the first time in its 1994 U.S. theatrical release. The Golden Age of Argento was definitely on the wane — 1993’s Trauma had its kicks, including location shooting in Newark, New Jersey, but was not 100 proof — and Lamberto Bava’s output at this point was spotty, and not well-distributed in the U.S. Fulci had reached a kind of apotheosis in 1990 with Cat in the Brain, but to be honest at that point in my life I was too much of a snob to have embraced Fulci anyway. So Michele Soavi was the guy, and this meta-movie just plain stomped. This turned out to be the end of an era rather than the beginning of a new one, alas.  Essentially the story of a man who keeps misplacing his gun, this resourceful low-budget wonder contains credible visual allusions that range from Magritte to Hitchcock to the Richard Corben cover of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell. Anyway, after its theatrical run it never had an even decent physical media release until now and the Severin edition is spectacular. No notes. In extras, it’s gratifying that star Rupert Everett holds the movie in such high esteem and fascinating to learn that the “Dylan Dog” comic book character was actually based on him (and that this movie, contrary to popular U.S. belief, isn’t really based on Dylan Dog but a different graphic novel by the same author). Overstated yet strangely enigmatic love interest Anna Falchi (there was a rumor when the pic first came out that she was a trans woman; she is not) still looks great and is quite interesting and frank in her self-assessment: “I have a very comic-book style physicality, truth be told.”  Inspirational dialogue: “You’ve got a real nice ossuary!”— A+

Clue (Shout Factory 4K Ultra)

Hey, kids, it’s an Intellectual Property movie! Had director Jonathan Lynn gotten an Oscar nomination for his screenplay (not likely but bear with me), would it be for Adapted or Original? Should we ask Judd Apatow? Moving on, it’s interesting that this moderately misbegotten cinematic board game adaptation has acquired a cult sufficient to warrant a 4K edition, but that’s the sort of thing that the release calendar of Shout Factory teaches us on the regular. (The corporate entity known as Sony Pictures Itself has issued a 30^th Anniversary 4K Ultra disc of 1993’s So I Married an Axe Murderer, which my wife and I watched and enjoyed the other night, while at the same time mildly bemused that a film so inconsequential should be so marketed. I think the answer is reasonably obvious; the big studios are digitizing EVERYTHING in their libraries [see below’s Imprint title] and there are licensors eager for product on the one hand and, in what’s probably the case with Axe Murderer itself, in-house enthusiasts who’ll pitch hard for a physical release of a fave.) Anyway — the reason for the cult, I think, has less to do with the IP and a lot to do with Madeline Kahn and the rest of the expertly amusing cast. The divine Madeline and Lesley Ann Warren are the most consistently funny of the ensemble, but Mull, McKean, Curry and the rest (as the first version of the Gilligan’s Island theme song would put it) all do their level best within a very constrained and labored story frame.  How the question of whether Colonel Mustard got sapped in the library with a length of pipe, or wherever and whatever and by whom, was for cinematic purposes yoked to a story premise focused on the 1950s Army McCarthy hearings comes down to Lynn. We learn in a supplement that he was approached, in a state not unlike desperation, by producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters to come up with something/anything in the script department, and drew on his acquaintance in Great Britain with the blacklisted screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart for his idea. Who, indeed, woulda thunk it. The other extra here is ten smart minutes on score composer and Mel Brooks stalwart John Morris. The camera’s leering plunges down faux-French-maid Colleen Camp’s cleavage is no doubt a Guber/Peters touch. — A

Count Dracula (Severin 4K Ultra)

Watching this, I worked up a theory, which was that this is Jess Franco’s most conventionally competent film and hence his least interesting film. Or, as Tim Lucas, who’s got way more mileage than myself with respect to Franco, put it in a lengthy and as far as I can glean un-linkable Facebook post, “one senses it was not to [Franco’s] taste to film a classic story in a classical sense.” (Tim then puts the movie’s weaknesses down to cinematographer Manuel Merino.)  Nevertheless, there are bits when Franco’s inspiration rises to the largely staid surface here. Soledad Miranda sleepwalking is good. As are the shots of her in Dracula’s embrace, followed by a shot of a bat shadow, and Miranda with her head thrown back in ecstasy and her shoulders slouching, like she’s suspended by invisible wires. That sort of thing is very startling and effective. The symphony of stuffed animals is rather good too. Christopher Lee seems into it; indeed, this 1970 production is the picture that inspired Lee to confide to me, in an unfortunately lost 1993 interview, that Franco was “a not untalented man, by the way.” Severin has also issued a Blu-ray of the spectacular Surrealist sort-of documentary Cuaducu (Vampir) which I already have in a good Second Run edition but which I recommend in any form you prefer. As for this package, it’s another spectacular Severin effort. I don’t know how they do it.  —A+

Danza Macabra 2 (Severin 4K Ultra & Blu-ray)

These are indeed the days of miracle and wonder. When I was a kid, I was completely freaked out by an early ‘60s black-and-white Italian horror called Castle of Blood when it screened on WOR 9’s weekly “Chiller” movie program. This was/is the Antonio Margheriti-directed picture on which a fictional Edgar Allan Poe and a rich creep pal of his bet a journalist that he can’t spend the night in this haunted castle without going nuts and/or dying. Barbara Steele plays one of the haunting elements. I can’t begin to imagine how washed out it looked on the 12-inch Sony portable TV I probably watched it on. And yet it dazzled young weird me. In no small part this had something to do with the ineffable Barbara Steele in a crucial role. In subsequent years I learned other folks had similar epiphanies. The title became an answer to one of the “Ask Glenn” questions that came my way at Premiere, just in time for the DVD release of the picture by the ever-great Don May at Synapse. And Don’s version looked…better than it had in the beat-up print indifferently telecined and then broadcast by WOR into my home back then. But now. Now. Castle is the centerpiece of a box set continuing Severin’s loving care of Italian horror masterpieces and oddities. This picture gets the 4K Ultra treatment, while the three remainders are Blu-rays. All good. Two versions are here, the Italian-language Danza Macabra and English-dubbed Castle, which I watched first, because nostalgia, right?. The opening credits of Castle are beat up but the feature itself is the restored version and it looks pretty incredible. It’s a testament to the film’s power that it came through in compromised presentations, but having an edition of this caliber is mind-blowing. The Italian Danza is about six minutes longer and has the nudity we’ve been missing, which doesn’t improve the movie as such — those anti-sex-scene prudes are RIGHT! (Actually it’s pretty righteous.)  And yes, the package has other pictures (although I presume down the road Severin will break this up into individual titles for sale.) 1971’s They Changed Their Face is… a very subtle critique of capitalism in which Adolfo Celi plays an Italian car magnate named Nosferatu. Yes, you read correctly. He announces himself a pioneer in “gastronomic socialism” as he feeds his latest prey a TV dinner that looks even less appetizing than what Heywood Floyd slurped down on his way to the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie is pretty drab visually, although the radical-cinema-pastiche fake TV ads proffered by a propagandist character are mildly amusing. The film will definitely ring chimes with anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the schizoid political currents of Italy in the late 60s/early 70s. 1972’s The Devil’s Lover is more overtly lurid, not that Faces isn’t lurid — a movie that more or less opens with a female hitchhiker topless under her fur-lined winter jacket can’t be called not lurid. But Lover features actress Rosalba Neri, who practically defines lurid, although the supplement called “The Feminism of Rosalba Neri” argues that her lurid qualities were for a righteous cause, and why not. I confess I haven’t given more than a cursory look at the mini-series Jekyll, a postmodern variant on Stevenson’s tale. But I can still confidently assign the whole box my highest grade. —A+

eXistenZ (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

Underappreciated at the time of its release, subsequently subjected to one measly and thoroughly indifferent home video release, this 4K edition was a “Secret Title” from Vin Syn and a really welcome surprise. Viewed today, it really synchs up nicely with the maestro’s 2022 Crimes of the Future. This brutally meta-textual work is both about and not about gaming, or maybe we can say it’s about gaming as life. It has affinities to both Borges and Nabokov — affinities that both authors might find the film itself to viscous to deign to recognize. (They’re also not alive, either, which would be a further impediment to their potential appreciation.)  It is also maybe the closest thing to an out-and-out comedy that Cronenberg has ever made. (All the performers get it, but Willem Dafoe and Ian Holm have the most fun with it.) The vast array of supplements includes a commentary by Jennifer Moorman; at one point she pronounces “And this is where the film starts to get…rapey. We might say.” We might, as physical violations of all kinds are the movie’s bread and butter, but I don’t know — Moorman’s analysis, use of colloquialisms notwithstanding, often struck me as labored and humorless in a typically academic way, although it does offer insights worth turning over. In the department of my own critical shortcomings, or whatever you want to call them: Is it weird that I think Jennifer Jason Leigh is the hottest she’s ever been in this movie? First rate image throughout. A real gift. Inspirational dialogue: “Death to realism!” — A+

French Revelations (Flicker Alley)

I wish that more labels had ideas like the one that led to this disc. This is a sort-of thematically-paired double feature of French-language films. There’s 1934’s Mauvaise Graine, co-written and co-directed by Billy Wilder, then freshly emigrated from Germany to France and soon to head to the States.  It’s a very mordant and cynical crime comedy that looks ahead to The Fortune Cookie, except it’s a lot more vicious. It’s fascinating in a more-than-historical way. (It incidentally features a black character who’s not depicted with absolutely horrific racism, which is kind of a novelty for its time.) Commentator Jan-Christopher Horak notes throughout that Wilder didn’t like directing. Which sort of kept being true (he only started doing it in Hollywood to protect his scripts).  The print here opens with the kind of degeneration you get so excited about in Bill Morrison movies. But the image straightens out quickly enough. The second feature is 1935’s Fanfare D’Amour, which Wilder had nothing to do with…. except that the spine of its plot fed the 1951 German picture Fanfaren der Liebe, which in turn led to Wilder’s own Some Like It Hot. And this film does feature a jaw-dropping racialist gag in which the two protagonists, in a montage depicting their various guises before joining an all-girl band, don blackface to infiltrate a Black jazz combo. This is a mercifully short sequence in an otherwise amiable film co-starring Julian Carette, who went on to play the poacher who blithely cuckolds Gaston Modot in Renoir’s Rules of the Game. Fanfare functions without the mob element or the frantic “I’m a girl I’m a girl I’m a girl” gender panic that gives Hot its incredible dimension. The very Deco art direction here make the amusing but in most other respects ordinary picture an almost Lubitschean pleasure to behold. Inspirational dialogue: “Are you sure you’re a man?” “I don’t know…” — A

The Fugitive (Warner 4K Ultra)

The 4K Ultra disc offers a handsome image to be sure. I do recollect that this was something to see in the summer of 1993 while we were all waiting for Jurassic Park…and I also recollect that In The Line of Fire was something better to see. Neither picture, for me, has aged into anything like a classic, but while Fire still has the edge, Fugitive is a sturdy action/thriller construction — and an IP movie, let us not forget! — with, as it happens, no real point of view about anything. That is, it’s kind of impersonal.  In a way not dissimilar to what Tommy Lee Jones’ U.S. Marshall character conveys here. It’s also a little predictable. “As soon as you see Joroen Krabbé’s name in the opening credits, you know who the bad guy is,” my pal Joseph Failla complained at the time. Speaking of the opening credits, boy are they cheesy: “Harrison […wait for it] Ford” “Tommy […wait for it] Lee…Jones” Except Jones himself, in the much-maligned commentary track, doesn’t think so, saying to journeyman director Andrew Davis over the phone, “These are really cool titles Andy.” A lot of the movie still holds up better than well, though, so reservations notwithstanding, this is the Davis that I’m keeping in my library. — B+

Gentleman Jim (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

It’s Raoul Walsh, it’s Errol Flynn, it’s Warner Archive, how much selling do you need here? Also featuring an adorable Alexis Smith and Jack Carson manifesting as the Frank McHugh of Ralph Bellamys. Dramatically fine image quality. The boxing sequences are tight despite containing plenty of 180 “rule” violations. Don’t wait, buy today. — A

Horrors of the Black Museum (VCI Blu-ray)

The restoration here is courtesy of Canal +, and it’s sufficiently vivid to really deliver the lurid goods of this glibly sicko 1959 tale of a dude who’s really into devices of torture and how to use them. The American distributor tacked on the ridiculous “Hypnovision” hook, via a short prologue that Canal + has NOT restored but is included here courtesy of the magpies at VCI. It is a nice thing, as the Red Riding Hood in the Bugs Bunny short would put it, “TO HAVE!” Via the short, you yourself, the viewer that is, are supposed to get hypnotized. Didn’t work on me. The picture doesn’t have a patch on the Ormonds’ Please Don’t Touch Me, which treats a similar theme. But back to Black Museum. Oh my. Kind of the apotheosis of Michael Gough in creepazoid mode; he really tears into his role as a true crime writer and murderer. It’s thin line, the movie implies. The movie looks as clear as a bell and the electrocution of the shrink is nothing short of amazing. Two commentaries, the one from co-writer and co-producer Herman Cohen archival, the one from Robert Kelly new. Essential Psychotronic cinema. — A

JFK (Shout Factor 4K Ultra Disc)

About ten minutes into this, when Jack Lemmon and Ed Asner are sitting at a bar, and Asner’s character is waxing racist/reactionary and Lemmon is doing a “for God’s sake you’re talking about the President” bit, you may have an inkling that you’re watching The Greatest Story Ever Told of conspiracy theory movies. Well, you know, I LIKE The Greatest Story Ever Told. And since Oliver Stone was really gracious and generous with me for my upcoming book, if you think I’m going to use this non-officially-remunerated exercise in order to dis one of his films, you are sorely mistaken. And I mean, let’s face it, like it or not it’s a fascinating artifact and it moves along like a panther in whatever cut you’re watching. Gary Oldman as Oswald does inspire poignant thoughts of “Boy wouldn’t he have been great in a film of Libra?” The 4K disc looks fantastic; by all means do luxuriate in the burnished bronze and brown tones of Jim Garrison’s office. (Another incidental pleasure here is witnessing Michael Rooker’s almost palpable relief at playing a normal dude in these settings.) As for the Stone commentary, which like the other extras dates back to Shout’s 2019 JFK Revisited The Complete Collection, if you think making the movie exhausted everything he has to say on this topic — and actually, why would anyone actually think such a thing — you are sorely mistaken. — A+

The Last Tycoon (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

This adaptation of unfinished Fitzgerald is a better and more interesting (the two descriptors aren’t always mutually exclusive) film than its tepid reputation suggests, featuring a truly fascinating Robert De Niro performance. As Irving Thalberg stand-in Monroe Stahr, De Niro is not playing a complete weirdo, but a kinda-sorta weirdo, that is, a film person. Lovely character bits abound, from Ray Milland, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson and others. Teresa Russell is the ideal Celia Brady, and Ingrid Boulting is alas the weak link in the performance chain. Gorgeous new transfer and a continuously sharp commentary from Joseph McBride, who pulls together a lot of tendrils especially relative to director Elia Kazan’s relationship to the studio heads portrayed in disguise here, HUAC stuff, and more. The tales of producer Sam Spiegel, a rather old-school piglet chasing both Teresa Russell and Ingrid Boulting, are distasteful. McBride also notes the clash in sensibilities between Kazan and screenwriter Harold Pinter. Inspirational commentary quote: “Kazan’s work got better after he informed.”— A

Madame Bovary (Warner Archive)

The book in question is condemned as “a disgrace to France and an insult to womanhood” in the opening of this 1948 Vincente-Minnelli-directed adaptation of Flaubert, which uses the book’s prosecution for obscenity as a framing device. (James Mason as the embattled author, narrating his heroine’s story, is heavenly albeit slightly ridiculous.) The structure is odd and has a hard time getting on its feet. Jennifer Jones is very wobbly as the teen Emma but there’s no way she wouldn’t be; as it happens, her performance gains strength as she resolves to rebel. Maybe she just thought of all the men in her life before each take. Van Heflin as Dr. B. is miscast — not so much in terms of type, but his performance is way too American — but his work has some small power. The blurb on the back cover of this beautiful Warner Archive edition is absolutely correct: the ballroom scene, nine minutes total, beginning about 24 minutes in (Chapter 10) is one of the best things ever, in Minnelli or in American cinema in general. Robert H. Planck is the cinematographer here. Gene Lockhart as Homais gets a big laugh telegraphing the actual punchline of the book: “perhaps…the Legion of Honor!” The soundtrack itself is pretty clever, with a background cry of “we demand manure” as Louis Jourdan is laying it on to Emma. The question of whether even Renoir or Chabrol, let alone Minnelli, could really capture the spirit of Flaubert on celluloid is not one I’m prepared to cogently address at this time but I will insist that this Item is two thirds (at least) a potentially great and often very good Hollywood melodrama. Depressing inspirational dialogue: “I hurt Charles. I hurt inside.”  — A

The Man In Half-Moon Street (Imprint Blu-ray)

A Paramount attempt to outdo Universal in the Gothic horror genre, this is a little more understated than what the House of Laemmle was putting out but pretty keen. The story of a guy who’s copped an elixir of immortality, but of course At What Cost, it’s all foggy streets and Helen Walker in skintight variations of Edwardian couture (it’s sufficiently atmospheric that until you see the occasional automobile you’re inclined to think the 1945 film is set in some indistinct turn-of-the-century period). Pretty pacey, too.. A cool kind of out-of-nowhere release that makes Australia’s Imprint a label worth keeping an eye on at all times. The extra is a typically thorough and informative Tim Lucas commentary with much kvelling over Miklos Rozsa’s lavish score, which Rozsa absolutely did not phone in despite the material almost giving him an excuse to. (Tim does make a forgivable error during the proceedings, confusing an actor who wasn’t in Vertigo with one who was.) — A

School Daze (Allied Vaughn) 4K Ultra)

This 35^th anniversary upgrade’s 4K boost gets it pleasingly close to theatrical quality. Spike Lee’s third picture and second feature (depends on whether you categorize the barbershop one as a feature) saw him putting Columbia’s (modest — $6 million) money into a relatively elaborate musical-comedy that was the first of his pictures to get critics agitated over his ostensible disinclination to apply a consistent tone to his work. We have since come to understand that it is this trait, if you want to call it that, which makes Lee Lee, and which makes Lee great. As for this movie, what’s inconsistent, and again, only if you want to call it that, isn’t tone but stylization; the dramatic scenes are relatively plain and straightforward, and then the mise-en-scene goes low-budget Earth Girls Are Easy for the musical numbers. But, follow along with me here, is this even a problem really? Have you seen Window Shopping/Golden Eighties? No, it’s not a problem. It’s freedom. So roll with it people. This is intriguing, troubling, engaging, and it’s a kick to watch the young cast. The extras are imported from 2018, including Spike’s sporadic commentary. “I went to school with a lot of motherfuckers like that too. Just ignorant.” The music video for “Da Butt” is NOT in 4K, alas — A

Spider Labyrinth (Severin 4K Ultra)

I decided to check this out on the word of the great genre enthusiast and Edwidge Fenech maven Sarah Jane, whose taste for the lurid is utterly unsurpassed. My trust in her is such that once the package arrived, I wasn’t at all put off by the fact that the first twenty minutes or so of this 1988 Gianfranco Giagni picture was over lit hot-air exposition absorbed and acted upon by one of the most mannequinesque male acting leads I’ve ever seen, Roland Wybenga, whose career did not get up to much after this. And sure enough, once it got into gear — with a pursuit and murder in a green-lit room turned into a maze via hanging bedsheets, the first and absolutely mildest of its set pieces — I knew I was in for some goods. Or rather, I did not know, because the thing just piled one bizarre, nonsensical, grotesque surprise on top of another until it established itself in a very high position in my pantheon of what-the-fuck horrors. I cannot recommend this sufficiently highly. Inspirational commentary tidbit: “We’re gonna talk about that hairstyle.” —A+

Tarzan the Ape Man (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

First things first, Warner now has a new “this stuff is racist” disclaimer, it’s a little tighter than the old one, a little less guilt-ridden, and it calls the issuing company “Warner Bros./Discovery.” So Mr. Zaslav has been dotting his Is and crossing his Ts. For what it’s worth. And if any movie needs a “this stuff is racist” disclaimer, Woody Van Dyke’s enthusiastic but nonchalant lensing of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ gonzo tale does. I mean, it’s HELLA RACIST, as they might say in Quincey, but probably wouldn’t. I was startled a lot of the time. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it — and in fact I’m not sure if I ever have watched it in its entirety to be honest. My own enthusiasm for jungle tales on film (or anywhere else, really, unless they’re war movies) opens and shuts with Cooper and Schoedsack and this ain’t Cooper and Schoedsack. No, for me the main attraction of the franchise has always been the promise of Maureen O’Sullivan in deshabille, which is to be honest not an attraction that beckons to me all that frequently. It’s funny about some old-school actresses though. Looking at O’Sullivan in this, you’d never guess she’d end her career working for Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Whereas looking at Gloria Stuart in The Old Dark House you have no problem imagining her throwing down for James Cameron. Interesting. Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yes, have you SEEN this movie lately? It’s insane. It’s mostly told from the perspective of Jane, Tarzan is only first heard 24 minutes in and only first seen 32 minutes in. And when C. Aubrey Smith’s character gets a look at him, he enthuses, “He’s white, too!” Jesus. Neil Hamilton (we know, we know, the future Commissioner Gordon on the original Batman TV series, we know) as Jane’s suitor, gets whinily jealous of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan before even setting his orbs on the ape-man’s loinclothed glory. He’s not wrong but still, what a feeb.  As Robert A. Harris has observed, both this film’s and Anna Christie’s original materials went up in smoke in the great Warner’s fire — not the one in 2023, but the one in 1934. And in terms of good dupes to work from, this picture came out in not so great shape, but that’s in part due to the nature of the movie itself, a huge cut-and-paste job in some respects. There’s lots of janky documentary wildlife-footage editing; who knows where the original camera negatives of that material were? The image quality is sometimes rough and ready but pretty impressive all things considered. Van Dyke does like to keep things moving along and doesn’t care about matters going completely bonkers; the Scott of the Antarctic-redolent man-and-beast wrestling is especially goofy. And honestly John Waters could have come up with some of this material. The climax, in which, among other things a crowd of African pygmies (I think they’re pygmies) cheer on a guy in an ape suit who’s going to violate Jane, is highly objectionable on grounds moral, aesthetic, racial, and spiritual.  Essential American semiotics studies, to be sure. —A

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Kino Lorber 4K Ultra)

Michael Cimino’s directorial debut is maybe his second-best film (first is Heaven’s Gate, natch) and this 4K rendering displays gorgeous imagery and tells a galvanizing story in which you’ve never hated George Kennedy more. Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges give career high performances here.  A spectacular commentary from my friend Nick Pinkerton commentary spotlights the pre-Mel-Gibson masochism of Eastwood in the shoulder-repair business early on, and quotes from both Richard Schickel and Peter Biskind from points in their careers when they both really knew what they were on about. Nick is a fantastic researcher.  — A+

Readings of 2023

Missionary Stew, Ross Thomas : More amusing than its title suggested to me. But of course Thomas always delivers in some measure. 

All About Me!, Mel Brooks: Funny and ingratiating. Brooks has never met a show-biz practitioner he didn't like, he doesn't even bother to take the opportunity to get back at Frank Langella here. (IYKYK.)

The Bloater, Rosemary Tonks: Did not hook me. 

Rent Boy, Gary Indiana: I remember the time...

The Snow Ball, Brigid Brophy: Not quite my jam.

Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet: A real one. This fuckin' guy was amazing.

The Plumed Serpent, D.H. Lawrence: Could not finish it. Lawrence really WAS a writer of extremes. 

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino: Whimsical, a bit strained.

Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley: Got an edition of this when I was ten, couldn't quite get into it at the time, this attempt it was fine, liked it quite a bit more than After Many A Summer, certainly get why others don't hold it in such high esteem.

White Bicycles, Joe Boyd: Should have gotten through this a long time ago, highly enjoyable. 

The Porkchoppers, Ross Thomas: Old Reliable.

Colonel Sun, Kingsley Amis writing as Robert Markham: Fine.

Gringos, Charles Portis: Not a great great one but certainly not without its pleasures.

Storm Lake, Art Cullen: The very definition of "decent."

Under the Net, Iris Murdoch: This came in handy when I was compelled by some students in my Language of Film class to formulate a detailed refutation of the work of Caveh Zahedi.

The Mordida Man, Ross Thomas: More Old Reliable.

The Strange, Nathan Ballingrud: A good contemporary sci-fi novel. 

Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, Jefferson Morley: Not as thrilling as the title suggests but more than interesting.

Other Men’s Daughters, Richard Stern: Funny, harrowing, beautifully crafted

The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, Cornell Woolrich: Read this while  preparing an audio commentary on the film version, was slightly put off by its labored prose style.

Traffic, Ben Smith: Another book that wanted to be galvanizing and was merely interesting instead.

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson: Fabulous

Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens: I was kind of put onto this by the Stern. Read it mostly with one eye as I susffered a torn retina in the middle of the year. I do not recommend this condition. For the first time I noticed the devices by which the serial-writer Dickens stretched out his story points. They are amusing. 

Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed: Fabulous.

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy: Unsettling. A trip.

Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connelly: Fabulous.

The Dutch House, Ann Patchett: Patchett does not write the kind of fiction to which I'm immediately drawn, but I tried this and found it quite congenial. 

Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, Adam Shatz: Wide ranging and fantastic in its insights, of course I ate up the Robbe-Grillet essay. 

Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy: Unsettling. A trip.

Easily Slip Into Another Reality, Henry Threadgill: Fabulous.

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, Lawrence Block: In which the venerable Mr. B. easily steps into a different genre and still delivers a fine entertainment. 

The Fruit Thief, Peter Handke: Little in the way of potentially controversial content. much in the way of detailed landscapes and existential meanderings. 

Jonathan Wild, Henry Fielding: I was put on to this by the Calvino; amusing. 

Going Down, David Markson: A Lowry-ite stages his own Mexican tragedy. Harrowing. 

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, Anne Enright: Not quite Aguirre As A Girl, but not always so far off from that.

Hold Fast Your Crown, Yanick Haenel: Not just a ripping tale but a provocative piece of film criticism. Second-favorite contemporary novel of the year for me. 

QED, Richard Feynman: I've had this forever, but seeing Oppenheimer finally nudged me to read it. I almost understood it, and was comforted by Feynman's assurance that the scientists who concocted the theory don't quite understand it themselves. Reading it on visits to the public pool helped me actually understand how light is both particle and wave. 

King Jesus, Robert Graves: A different brand of Old Reliable. 

Dead Man Inside, Vincent Starrett: Interesting and incredibly far-fetched vintage mystery.

Springer’s Progress, David Markson: After reading this I had coffee with a friend who is also a friend of Don De Lillo. I told him, "One of the many things I really admire about De Lillo is that he never wrote a fucking novel about being a literary white heterosexual married guy fucking around in the Village literary scene in the '50, 60s. 70s or whenever."

Tarr, Wyndham Lewis: Effin' mad aincha?

Arabian Nights of 1934, Geoffrey O'Brien: Would be my favorite contemporary novel of the year were in not actually a series of connected prose poems. Outstanding at any rate. 

The Money Harvest, Ross Thomas: Old Reliable. Featuring an implicit plea for the invention of the Squatty Potty. 

The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman: Fun.

The Man Without Qualities Vol 1, Robert Musil: Funner.

Lou Reed The King of New York, Will Hermes: The first Lou biography to take Lou's side, more or less. A rewarding approach. 

The Bullet That Missed, Richard Osman: Murder Club continues to be fun 

Strongmen From Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Useful.

The Last Devil To Die, Richard Osman: Continues to be fun. The Murder Club series is, I discovered, good to share with the wife and father-in-law.

Obelists at Sea, C. Daly King: Another whacked-out vintage myster.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, Translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller: Mr. Cranky At Work.

The MANIAC, Benjamin Labatut: DEFINITELY my favorite contemporary novel of the year and maybe the best book I read all year, I dunno man, it's real good.

The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner: Takes Pound's side by just refusing to contend with quite a lot, which spares the reader from potential rhetorical acrobatics. Stiff and protein-packed. Also a relic of a cultural world I don't think we actually inhabit any longer.  

Before the Poison, Peter Robinson: Not bad buy also a reminder that I don't really love murder mysteries that try too hard to be "real" novels. 

The Next Time I Die, Jason Starr: Such a good airplane read, and nothing but, that I left it in the seat pouch as I exited the plane. I hope whoever discovers it appreciates the gift.                                       

Judges of the Secret Court, David Stacton: Superb, terse historical novel on John Wilkes Booth and associates.                                                                                                                                                               

The New York Stories of Henry James, selected with an introduction by Colm Toibin: This James kid has potential, lemme tell ya. 

The Top Forty-five Films of 2023, and supplementary notes

John Ralston and Mia Goth in the number four film.

I thought that this year I would not half-ass it and just throw up a whole bunch of films but rather do a PROPERLY RANKED list, only long, because I wanna laud a lot of movies. I don't know if this was a great idea, only because I'm not sure how truly and well I executed it.  I mean, when it's forty-five films how important is the ranking anyway, or maybe I should say how potently does it signify? I mean, as far as I'm concerned the top seven are each in their own way equally great. And as it happens, the ranking of Poor Things plummeted after I saw it a second time but it still made the cut, in paart because it's forty-five films. The year began pretty much abysmally but it did pick up, so let's just get on with it, 

1) Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese)

In addition to my Ebert.com best-of-year capsule, I wrote about DiCaprio in the movie here. 

2) Asteroid City (Anderson)

3) Fallen Leaves (Kaurismäki)

4) Infinity Pool (Cronenberg)

A critic friend after the screening: "That was a very wet movie." 

5) Oppenheimer (Nolan)

6) The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)

Well don't you know/about the bird

7) Tori and Lokita (Dardennes)

I did not review, but Manohla Dargis did, and she speaks for me here. 

8) The Killer (Fincher)

My Venice notice is, on reflection, a trifle inadequate. In conversation a friend called it the "best film about the American business ethos" in recent memory, and that's apt. And as my wife observed about Fassbender's appearance about three-quarters of the way in, "So much for being inconspicuous." It's a film that truly understands the concept of the unreliable narrator. It's kind of scary that so many film critics do not. 

9) Priscilla (Coppola)

10) The Holdovers (Payne)

Ostensibly a comedy, but what won me over here was a consistent, near-blanketing melancholy.

11) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and three other Roald Dahl Films (Anderson)

12) Perfect Days (Wenders)

It's true that Wenders takes a pretty scrubbed and sanitized approach to toilet-cleaning. But given Kings of the Road, I don't think he owes us anything in the shit department. (N.b.: after I posted this it occured to me that some might misinterpret this comment, especially if they haven't seen Kings. Which is a great movie and if you've seen it you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it, do watch! It's fll of surprises!) But beyond what he does not show, there are a few critics I've seen who can't abide the concommitant attitude. Which I took to be "acceptance is the key." For some the distinction between acceptance and complacency is non-existent, and I get that. Nevertheless, I was rather moved by this picture and the serenity sought and often found by its protagonist. It's not without its darkness, but it instructs us to find it in the margins of the diegesis, as when the niece speaks of her admiration of the central character of Patricia Highsmith's story "The Terrapin." Look it up! And also remember that Wenders adapted Highsmith almost a lifetime ago. The movie reminded me of what Bogdanovich said of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: that it "is not a young man’s movie; it has the wisdom and poetic perceptions of an artist knowingly nearing the end of his life and career." One may counter that Valance reaches far dourer conclusions than this picture does, but there's more mixed in with those conclusions, to wit: "I sort of have a hankering to come back here to live; maybe open up a law office." "Rance...if you knew how often I dreamed of it. My roots are here. I guess my heart is here. Yes, let's come back."

13) Pacifiction (Serra)

Oh that Albert!

14) Passages (Sacks)

15) Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Soderbergh)

I have no business putting this on a best-of list, as I was pretty close to its production (it gave me the pretext to visit London for the first time!), but I have to stand up for my friend Steven Soderbergh's fascinating attempt to at least partially Losey-ize a "let's put on a show" musical. Owen Gleiberman complained, when naming this one of his five worst films of the year (yeah, he's no longer on this household's Christmas-card list) (okay we don't have one anyway), that he didn't recognize the Mike Lane of this movie relative to the Mike Lane of the prior two. I commend his investment in the character of Mike Lane, I guess, but for me the film is delightful because it's more or less as if Mike Lane went to Hollywood and got cast in the Gene Kelly role in this musical of the sort they don't make anymore and maybe never made in the first place. 

16) Poor Things (Lanthimos)

"I must go punch that baby." 

17) Barbie (Gerwig)

It's a real film, all right. And Gerwig is to be commended for a number of things, including fitting a shitload of conceits coherently under one umbrella. One the oter hand, while I'm sure it wasn't easy for Agnes Varda to get One Sings, The Other Doesn't made, at least she didn't have to shake hands with an IP to do it. 

18) Beau Is Afraid (Aster)

Whoa!

19) Master Gardener (Schrader)

20) Afire (Petzold) 

21) The Zone of Interest (Glazer)

Not perfect, but within its purview — which is phenomenological rather than philosophical/epistemological — largely impressive and unsettling. 

22) John Wick Chapter 4 (Stahelski)

Spoiler alert: the dog lives in this one. 

23) La Civil (Mihai)

24) It Ain’t Over (Mullin)

25) Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (Bogowa and Thorgeson)

26) Spider-Man: Across The SpiderVerse (Dos Santos, Powers, and Thompson)

The new best Spider-Man movie.

27) Ferrari (Mann)

28) A Thousand and One (Rockwell) 

Probably the most formally conventional movie in this grouping, but a vital story, well-told, brilliantly detailed. 

29) Anselm (Wenders)

30) The Sweet East (Williams)

My friend and occasional audio commentary partner Nick Pinkerton wrote the script, and he's a fan of Amos Vogel and his motto "be sand, not oil." So I don't get quite why he objects to Richard Brody's subjective summation of what makes this movie abrasive, except maybe it's that he's now in the position of a filmmaker involved in getting his movie marketed more than he is of a critic-turned-screenwriter. In any event, this movie actually irritated me no end on initial viewing. But once I settled down I remembered that it wanted to irritate me, and then appreciated that it irritated me in some potentially intellectually constructive ways. And it's never boring. (And I'm eager to read what I hope is a forthcoming review from a major critic who absolutely flipped for it at NYFF.) At one point Talia Rider's character is instructed that smoking is a filthy habit, and her response is Pure Pinkerton, and I appreciate that. 

31) Napoleon (Scott)

Well, I was entertained. 

32) Thanksgiving (Roth)

I am sorry I didn't have the stones to give this a Critics Pick designation, I really ought to have. 

33) Silent Night (Woo)

34) May/December (Haynes) 

Not camp. Not melodrama. Haynes. 

35) Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)

Not once is the phrase "It's Godzilla" uttered. 

36) Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 (McQuarrie)

Tom Cruise isn't Buster Keaton but he'll do. 

37) Raid on the Lethal Zone (Xiao Pang)

Car chases in avalanche and flood zones. Unique! 

38) A Haunting in Venice (Branagh)

Sir Kenneth gets his Bava on. 

39) Streetwise (Jiazuo Na)

40) Showing Up (Reichardt)

Johnny Boy: "I met them in the Village."

Tony: "Bohemians." — Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973)

41) Anatomy of a Fall (Triet)

Not a patch on Anatomy of a Murder but it's got some juice. The whip-pans and zooms are a dumb distraction. The political dimensions of its characterizations are actually non-existent. 

42) The Iron Claw (Durkin)

I don't trust Sean Durkin or any of his friends, so I was expecting this to be some kind of "check out these rubes" fest. Having maintained such distance from Durkin as I preferred, I therefore (my bad) had no idea he was a wrestling head, and his enthusiasm both enhances and compromises what he does here. But it's a better-than-decent picture, often wrenching, and the acting is consistently superb.

43) Mister Organ (Farrier)

44) Joyland (Saim Sadiq)

45) Return to Dust (Ruijun Li)

Potential contenders not seen due to time constraints

Wiseman, McQueen

Restorations

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)

Maybe the grimmest picture I've ever seen. Aiiiiieeee.

The World’s Greatest Sinner (Timoth Carey, 1962)

Magnificent eccentricity. 

Well-liked at NYFF and the Venice Biennale, and unreleased in the U.S. as yet

Kidnapped  (Bellochi0)

Martin Scorsese, take heart; this guy's a couple years your senior and still kicking out the jams. 

Evil Does Not Exist (Hamaguchi)

A bit more enigmatic than I might have liked

Coup de Chance (Allen)

It's good!

Hollywoodgate (Ibrahim Nash'at)

Yikes!

Hesitation Wound (Selman Nacar)

An engaging novella-like Turkish picture. 

Aggro Dr1ft (Korine)

Both fun to watch and fun to watch the walkouts. When they tell you something is shot in infrared, believe them. 

 The Beast (Bonello)

It's coming around and it's not entirely what you expect. 

75 or so new recordings I enjoyed in 2023

Number 71. Not a ringer, although you would not be blamed for thinking so. 

People sometimes ask me, "What music are you listening to?" or "What kind of music do you like to listen to?" and a lot of the time when I tell them they're like, "Wha?" So for some reason I thought if I made a list of what I got into this year it might....clear some things up? Anyway, via the below list, which is neither ranked nor alphabetical but in more or less te order I heard them, I unequivocally endorse all the following: 

• Oren Ambarchi, Shebang (Drag City): As self-advertised
• Arto Lindsay, Charivari (Corbett Vs. Dempsey): The man and his guitar can still get their freak on, and hotly, after all these years
• Tim Berne and Matt Mitchell, One More Please (Intakt): Bracing duets
• Ivo Perelman, Ray Anderson, Joe Morris, Reggie Nicholson, Molten Gold (Funacja Sluchaj): Spectacular ensemble improvisation
• John Cale, Mercy (Double Six): Not about tunes anymore
• Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World (Matador): As self-advertised
• The Necks, Travel (Northern Spy): Another apt title
• John Zorn/New Masada Quartet, Volume 2 (Tzadik): Incredible momentum and invention
• Avram Fefer Quartet, Juba Lee (Clean Feed): As self-advertised
• Marc Ducret, Palm Sweat: Marc Ducret Plays The Music of Tim Berne (Screwgun): Real blow-out-the carburetor sonics
• Paul Dunmall Ensemble, It’s A Matter of Fact (Discus): Britain's most prolific living blower wrangles a remarkable ensemble
• John Zorn, Multiplicities II (Tzadik): Acoustic (instruments) alchemy
• Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra, In The Dark (ESP-Disc): Three discs of prodigious feeling and invention
• Peter Brötzmann, Heather Leigh, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Naked Nudes (Insel): The dynamic duo invites a third player to the rumpus
• Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile (Verve): Transcendental materialism
• Henry Threadgill Ensemble, The Other One (Pi): It's Threadgill
• Nuria Andorra and Fred Frith, Dancing Like Dust (Klang): An unusually cogent and attractive dual improve
• Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra, America: The Rough Cut (ESP-Disk): A good primer for the triple set among other things
• Pere Ubu, Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red): Crocus' self-regard can be annoying but the guy does get the job done
• Dietrichs, Catch the Leaves (Relative Pitch): The damnedest father-daughter musical pairing ever
• Peter Brotzmann, Majid Bekkas, Hamid Drake, Catching Ghosts: Live At Jazzfest Berlin (The Act Company): Sublime
• Evan Parker, NYC 1978 (Relative Pitch): So fresh and inspired
• John Zorn, Quatrain (Tzadik): Julian Lage and Gyan Riley never miss
• Tyshawn Sorey Trio, Continuing (Pi): A friend writes: "Holy shit, the glory of this. Of this groove."
• Bill Lowe and the Signifyin’ Natives Ensemble, Sweet Cane: Suites and Other Pedagogical Prompts (Pi): A revelation
• Marc Ducret, Ici (Ayler): Acerbic in all the best ways
• PJ Harvey, I Inside The Old World Dying (Partisan): I always knew she had a grand folk-horror record in her
• Frank Zappa, Funky Nothingness (Zappa): Just wow.
• John Zorn, Bagatelles Vol. 4 (Tzadik): Just wow again.
• John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse!): Just wow with Elvin Jones at the front of the room. 
• Claire Chase, Density 2036 (New Focus): One more once with just wow.
• Alan Skidmore, A Supreme Love (Confront): A great compilation of the protean British sax man, chronicling his Trane love and his originalityy.
• Ceramic Dog, Connection (Knockwurst): My kind of protest music
• Los Toscos + Peter Brotzmann/Tony Malaby, La vigilia de las flores (Matik Matik): Adventurous Spanish blowers seek ace horn players
• Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response, Book of Stories (True Sound): A fusion trio with a gorgeously wide range
• Soft Machine, Other Doors (MoonJune): A more anodyne sound than they've evr had, and its' beter than fine, it's resplendent
• John Zorn, Full Fathom Five (Tzadik): I like a lot of Zorn
• Mat Maneri Quartet, Ash (Sunnyside): The violin of sloe unease
• Tu-ner, Contact Information (7D Media): Twenty First Century prog: It's good
• David Tamura and Toadal Package, Final Entrance (self-released): Great clamor with an Electric Miles feel
• Kresten Osgood, Bob Moses, Tisziji Muñoz, Spiritual Drum Kingship (Gotta Let It Out): Two drummers and Tiszij go profitably nuts
• Quinos, Lune de Miel, Heavy Single Jet Wash…,Live Au Lab_49 (CEM): French guitarist on a creative jag
• Evelyn Davis, Fred Frith, Phillip Greenlief (Lankstap Logic), Hidden Danger Lets Me In (Clean Feed): The Mills College trio reunites
• John Zorn, Homenaje A Remedios Varo (Tzadik)
• AMM, Last Calls (Matchless): Heartbreaking and heart-filling
• John Butcher, Marjolaine Charbin, Ute Kenngiesser, Eddie Prevost, The Art of Noticing (Matchless): Four players who know how to be free
•  Eddie Prevost et. al., A Company of Others (Matchless) A few more players
• London Workshop, Widdershins (Matchless) And more still
• Fowler, Cartwright, Parker, Hurt, Stewart, Hirsh, Amba, Miserere (Mahakala): A supersession that retains soulful coherence
• Matthew Shipp, The Intrinsic Nature of Shipp (Mahakala): Solo piano, highest order 
• The Feelies, Some Kinda Love (Bar/None): But of course
• Nevaris, Reverberations (M.O.D.): Groove and dub, heavy and brisk
• Live at Plus-Etage, Volume 1 (A New Wave of Jazz): Strong simple silences, and more
• François Carrier Ensemble featuring Mat Maneri, Tomasz Stanko, Gary Peacock, Michel Lambert, Openness (Fundacja Sluchaj): Just wow
• Emergency Group, Venal Twin (CF): A quartet featuring my friend Dave Mandl, "Emergency" as in Tony Williams 
• Diego Caicedo, Seis Amorfismos (Burning Ambulance): BA label head digs metal and avant garde, releases album exemplary in both respects
• Kate Gentile, Find Letter X (Pi): Jaw-dropping three-disc prog-fusion-glitch music of unflagging invention and energy
• Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio, Pith (S/R): Bracing lyricism
• Zoe Amba,Chris Corsano, Bill Orcutt, The Flower School (Palilaila): If you know any one of the players you'll love this
• Jimmy Agren, Scott Colby, Henry Kaiser, Trouble With The Treble (Fractal promo): A romp of covers
• Scott Amendola, Henry Kaiser,Michael Manring, Haunted By Eternity (Fractal): A wider-ranging romp of originals
• John Zorn, Nothing is as Real as Nothing (Tzadik): Beckett-inspired heads, you can almost tell without being told
• Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet, Hear the Light Singing (Rogue Art): Five women make the title idea come alive
• Elliott Sharp, The Collapsed Wave (S/R): Sharp's tribute to Jeff Beck. No really.
• Wilco, Cousins (D8Pm): First Wilco record to hook me in a while 
• Alan Courtis and David Grubbs, Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves (Husky Pants): Inspired guitar duets.
• Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids, Afro Futuristic Dreams (Strut): A truly magical record!
• Bill Laswell and Pete Namlook, Outland (Cold Spring): Chilly. 
• Univers Zero, Leuer (Sub Rosa): These cats still slap.
• Florian Arbenz, Conversations 10: Inland (Hammer): A terrific drummer with truly open ears and great taste in conversationalists.
• 100 Gecs, 10,000 Gecs (Atlantic/Dog Show): You've heard of this.
• Olivia Rodrigo, Guts (Geffen): Check the record check the record check the girl's rock record
• John Zorn, Parhesiastes (Tzadik): Fusion with Zorn heads, always a good idea
• Marjolaine Charbin and Eddie Prevost, The Cry of a Dove Announcing Rain (Two afternoon concerts at Cafe OTO) (Matchless)
• John Butcher and Eddie Prevost, Unearthed (Matchless) ARE YOU READY EDDIE (he's over 80 year's old for God's sake)
• Ivan Vukosavlievic, Slow Roads (elsewhere): Unique organ music recorded in rural Netherlands churches.
• Graham Lambkin and James Rushford, Gondolas (erstwhile): Not quite hypnotic soundscapes between the jazz club and the field recording.

Inadvertently Black Friday Adjacent Blu-ray/4K Ultra Disc Consumer Guide, Autumn 2023

These things do take time. I started collecting notes for this at the end of August and where are we now? Almost optimally placed for a pre-Black Friday Consumer Guide, although your shopping utility may vary. And in a couple of days the Severin Black Friday Sale stars, so for me, this process is, as Ruth Donnelly put it in Blessed Event, “like Tennyson’s brook — it never ends.”

N.b.: I did not get through the latest and last volume of Universal’s 4K rendering of The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection in time for a coherent assessment but I’ve looked at both Rope and Torn Curtain and they are as spectacular as the other reviews say. Very much looking forward to Topaz and Frenzy and of course the Vista Vision splendor of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Buy with confidence!

Equipment: Sony UBP-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

 American Pop (Sony)

The animator Ralph Bakshi is in many respects a heroic figure, as an American artist who tried to drag animation into some kind of Adult World even as the form, or at least the gatekeepers of the form, kicked and screamed resistance. While I hate to make this pronouncement while the man is still around to read it (not that I think he will, mind you), I have to say that in my direct experience of moviegoing, particularly as a teenager, Bakshi as consistently the source of my greatest disappointments. He had the best, most forward ideas (including, yep, an animated adaptation of Tolkien’s Ring series), and followed them up with execution that was either lackluster, crude, or spectacularly wrongheaded. His fondness for rotoscoping frequently brought his work up short, I felt. But there was also something in the quality of his defiance to the aesthetic forces that be, or were, as the case may be. American Pop, a scrappy fictionalized history of the evolution of popular music as essentially a multi-generational crime story, exemplifies the ultimately coarse nature of Bakshi’s vision and reaches an apotheosis of absurdity in its ultimate vision of the rock star as street pusher. Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” isn’t quite the song that can sell this conceit, to say the least. The colors are vivid, some of the vulgarity packs a genuine kick (particular in the turn-of-the-19^th-century stuff [and isn’t it weird to have to specify “19^th” when you bring up a century turning nowadays?] with its overstuffed women of the evening and manic pianists) but ultimately the movie, while constantly diverting in a way, is an encyclopedia of Ralph bringing you up short. —B+

Andrzej Zulawski: The Third Part of the Night/The Devil/On the Silver Globe (Eureka! Region B Blu-ray)

Watching the blood orgies and crucifixions at great heights that make up just some of the action of On The Silver Globe, a Zulawski novice might wonder whether the person who committed this imagery to celluloid isn’t confined in an institution of some sort. WE all like to talk a good “derangement of the senses” game but this stuff is…well, genuinely dangerous. Anyway, not only was Andrzej Zulawski allowed to walk free (after a fashion) on this earth, but he also actually narrates Silver Globe, providing a meta-narrative about the film he could never properly complete. And at the very end he appears as a reflection in a shop window, looking composed enough. The diegesis stuff — based on a sci-fi novel by Zulawski’s great uncle — was shot in the ‘70s, while Zulawski’s docenting accomplished in the 80s; the final form was released in 1988. While the home-media debut of this monumental and controversial It’s the main event of this spectacular box set, the other two pictures included are no slouches either. His 1971 feature debut, The Third Part of the Night, set in occupied Poland during the second World War, doesn’t have the story you might expect, and as such succeeds in presenting an unusually distinctive nightmare. 1972’s The Devil, set in the late 18^th century, posits, among other things, that the evil we associate with the Dark One is already inside of us; the devil, as he’s called, just hands us the knife. Silver Globe gets the bounty of supplements, including a documentary on its making and a commentary by Daniel Bird that sets the standard for such items as usual. Michael Brooke, in interviews, provides fresh insights on the other two films.  Spectacular restoration/presentation. Essential. — A+

Blood and Black Lace (Arrow 4K Ultra Disc)

GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY THIS LOOKS AMAZING. This is not super-big news, as the latest edition presents the 4K restoration on a 4K Ultra disc. We’ve seen its earlier iteration on Blu-ray, but now in native resolution it’s that much more more, and it’s magnificent. This round with Mario Bava’s, ahem, seminal but never equaled giallo was my first time with the commentary, which was on the prior Blu-ray. Tim Lucas bringing it as usual, and it’s pleasing to note that over the years Tim’s delivery of his splendidly detailed and informative scripts is getting less stiff. So in addition to being fascinating, here he’s genuinely a pleasure to listen to. And of course he wrote the book on the guy (Bava, that is), literally. This package seems like an unlikely source for information about the marital history of Rosemary Clooney, but just you wait.  —A+

Christopher Strong (Warner Archive)

A plot right out of Evelyn Waugh, if Evelyn Waugh wrote romantic melodramas: unlikely lovers brought together by vile bodies/bright young things indulging in the height of frivolity, that is, an unusually crass scavenger hunt. (The actual source material derives from the now-forgotten Gilbert Frankau.) Katharine Hepburn has never been quite so damn Hepburny as in her third movie debut, directed with admirable dispatch and an even more, perhaps, admirable straight face by Dorothy Arzner. Colin Clive is a little too Colin Clive to make an entirely credible romantic lead, but his off-kilter quality adds nice neurotic notes to the proceedings. Which are both brisk and, shall we say, wrought almost to the point of over. All shot in a luminous black and white that’s very handsomely presented here. One could say for Hepburn completists only but really, why aren’t you a Hepburn completist to begin with? — A

Contempt (Lionsgate 4K Ultra Disc)

A 4K Ultra disc of a recent and very fine restoration is a no-brainer. So give Lionsgate credit for transferring Godard’s remarkable 1963 poison-pen missive to producers, and valentine to Fritz Lang, on to slabs of plastic and metal. As for the menus, the absence of extras, and so on, they are a monument to “perfunctory.” “Cineastes de notre temps? Never heard of it!”  — A+ for image, B- for everything else

The Devil Doll (Warner Archive)

Physical media has yielded a bumper crop of Tod Browning recently, between this and the Criterion triple feature headed by Freaks, which naturally gets the highest recommendation possible. This 1936 oddity is his second-to-last picture, and its driving premise, believe it or not, was reiterated in Alexander Payne’s 2017 Downsizing. Lionel Barrymore takes the people-shrinking technology co-developed by his fellow Devil’s Island escapee and uses it for evil ends, or at least vengeful ends — the guys he’s taking revenge on were stinkers. The movie’s defining atmosphere is established with the daughter of the escapee scientist playing goth organ as her mother works in a lab full of vile foaming liquids. The mom’s got a Bride of Frankenstein white streak in her updo, natch. Erich Von Stroheim worked on the scenario, not that you’d guess. The image quality is lovely silvery stuff. The optical-printer effects showing miniaturized animals and people is not dissimilar to what we saw in Bride, now that we think of it. New supplements are rarities on Warner Archive releases but this has a solid, informative mint commentary by Dr. Steven Haberman and Constantine Nasr, who’ve produced a bunch of documentaries on genre cinema, including Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy. They know their stuff and have impeccable taste and of course can’t help but notice the similarity between Franz Waxman’s score here and what he did in the prior year’s, yup, Bride of Frankenstein. Bottom line, I guess: If you love Bride of Frankenstein (and if you don’t, why are you reading this?) you’ll need this.. — A+

The Exorcist (Warner 4K Ultra Disc)

As Robert Harris has pointed out on Home Theater Forum, there’s no “reference” version of this on home video so mere consumers with no access to original materials have a limited comparison perspective with respect to what many of us saw in theaters back in the 1970s.. What it boils down to for this high-high def edition, then, is how it looks to you while watching. I do not cotton to Friedkin’s director’s cut — while an undeniably great filmmaker, the man was prone to some poor decisions, and this was one of them — so I’m going by my impression of the theatrical version in this edition. And my impression is rather good. I like the surround mix. I like the colors in the Iraq sequence and especially the detail. I like the way the bedroom lamp makes Chris McNeil’s script pages look a little pink. One of the first things I did at Premiere was an article about the potential and the shortcomings of the then-new DVD format, which had its origins in MP4 video compression technology, and I used the approach-of-the subway shot about 17 minutes in as an example of a certain kind of picture distortion. Anyway, I like how that shot looks here too. I like the muted chilliness and the popping purples of the priest’s vestments in the exorcism scene. What else? Max Von Sydow is a great actor, Jason Miller is a great actor, Ellen Burstyn is a great actor, Linda Blair is a great actor, Mercedes McCambridge is a great actor, Jack MacGowran is a great actor.  Lee J. Cobb is Lee J. Cobb. Pretty great movie, and this is great version.   — A+

Night of the Hunted/Rape of the Vampire/Fascination/Lips of Blood (Powerhouse 4K Ultra Discs)

The Powerhouse 4K Rollin project continues apace and the results are rapture inducing. The threadbare maestro’s feature debut, 1968’s Rape of the Vampire, is in starkly beautiful black and white; Imagine a heterosexual, more compulsive Jean Cocteau working with a crew accustomed to making cheap “roughies.” 1980’s Night of the Hunted is moderately Cronenbergian, as commentator Tim Lucas notes. He also bemoans the film’s disjointedness and lack of resourceful use of film language, a byproduct of the rushed nature of the production and Rollin’s dissatisfaction with the conditions. All true, but star Brigitte Lahaie provides constructive distraction from such ostensible defects. And Tim is unabashed in his adoration of the film’s ending, and why not? It’s fantastic. I personally don’t mind the disjointedness, it gives the movie a peculiar collage feel. I also quite appreciated its kinship with The Crazies. Fascination features Lahaie with a scythe, life, and/or death, doesn’t get any better. Lips of Blood is bonkers and definitive. All are presented in restorations that can’t help but engulf the receptive viewer. — A+

Father’s Little Dividend (Warner Archive)

A few years back I waxed rhapsodic over 1950’s Father of the Bride, Minnelli and MGM’s celebration of the joys and sorrows of American upper-middle-class values. Against all class odds, it’s an ineffable, practically transcendent vision. Lightning did not strike twice for the 1951 sequel, in part because the imagery is not nearly as splendid. Of course Elizabeth Taylor still looks great but in the first film she was conceived and shot as the apple of both a father’s and a potential husband’s eye, and here she’s relegated to performing her wifely duty, for God and country and so on. The Blu-ray is fabulous, as is customary. The comedic stuff of the film is however a little less coherent than it might have been. The “losing the kid” episode is darker than this movie wants, as Minnelli doesn’t apply much melodramatic brio to it, and melodramatic brio could at times of course be his middle name. It’s both sharp and tolerant (it would of course have to be) in critiquing men and their sexism. The cast is of course uniformly lovable and splendid but Joan Bennett winds up as the MVP., and good for her. — A

The Giant Gila Monster/The Killer Shrews (Film Masters)

I fondly remember considering this 1959 masterpiece of forced perspective a little goofy even when I was ten. In any event, this small-label restoration gets the much-desired job done: Giant Gila Monster has NEVER LOOKED BETTER. The Kuleshov Effect shots (are they intentionally so? We will never know) of the Gila Monster doing the bit with its tongue while watching the “teen” lead characters make out are fantastic. Haven’t gotten to Killer Shrews yet, because frankly it skinks me out, even when given the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. But this package bears recommending on Gila Monster alone.  — A

Heroic Times (Deaf Crocodile)

Lest you presume that this 1983 Hungarian animated feature might be catnip for the likes of Viktor Orban, the title turns out to be ironic. This tale of medieval slaughter and concomitant personal betrayal) and rage, rage, rage), directed by József Gémes, features really unusual multiple graphic approaches including impressionist tableaux. Not life-changing fare but damn intriguing and illuminating.  Alternate Title: My Brother Was In Jethro Tull. — A 

It Came From Outer Space (Universal 4K Ultra Disc)

Jack Arnold’s beautiful 1953 sci-fi picture, was an anomaly at the time because the “It” that came from outer space wasn’t malevolent. Yes, it was menacing, or at least highly disquieting, in its cloning powers, but it meant no harm. Leave it to Ray Bradbury to come up with this particular narrative curveball. Richard Carlson plays the astronomer who has to convince his community over and over again, Barbara Rush is his BEAUTIFUL wife whose presence and costuming provide the movie with what I’ve always seen as very Cocteau-esque touches. It was produced by Thompson from Citizen Kane. A stone classic presented in very gorgeous 2D 4K Ultra — the image, although not without native grain, is arguably a little TOO pristine depending on your taste. But I found it dreamy, almost literally. — A+

The Last Horror Movie (Severin 4K Ultra Disc)

Taxi Driver showed Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle aimlessly sitting in porno theaters. This grindhouse oddity starring Joe Spinell (also in Taxi Driver, hey!) pointedly shows his character Vinny beating off in a porno theater. The camera setup is more or less identical to Scorsese’s. That’s the thing about exploitation cinema: it goes where the mainstream will not dare. You really gotta hand it to Spinell, as an actor he had exactly ZERO vanity. Here he plays a slob who travels to Cannes to enlist Caroline Munro, Spinell’s costar in the genuinely aberrant Maniac (and indeed this item was marketed as Maniac II in some provinces, and the slipcase artwork for this exemplary package is for that iteration) to star in his own incoherent vision. Along the way he cuts a murderous swath through the fest.  Confronting Stanley Kline, the fictional auteur of the fictional Caller In the Night, Vinny declaims,” It was disgusting, it made me sick it made everybody sick, you shouldn’t be ALLOWED to make films like this Stanley!” He then enacts activist criticism at its most extreme. The murder here are mostly of dudes, which is kind of refreshing. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d get with this but ended up enjoying myself quite a bit. — A

The Life of Emile Zola (Warner Archive)

People talk about the “great man” biopics of the late 30s as being stodgy and righteous but to be honest, I enjoyed this quite a bit more than Maestro even though it’s one of the most egregious copouts in U.S. studio history. In that — try to keep up — the whole reason that Dreyfus was persecuted — antisemitism in the French military, oh, and EVERYWHERE ELSE IN FRANCE — is not only not articulated in this movie but scarcely even implied, because the Warner brothers didn’t want to offend Germany, or something. This was 1937, and eventually the Warners would get with the damn program but still. So what’s in the asset side of the ledger? Great image quality, fevered Paul Muni performance, that great Warner biopic pacey-ness, overseen by the reliable William Dieterle. It’s staggeringly literal at times but maybe that’s the way to get your social justice message across after all —at least its approach has got clarity. With Grant Mitchell as Clemenceau. That guy had range. Also keep an eye out for out for l’il Dickie Moore as a Dreyfus kid. Funny, he doesn’t look… — A

Pandora’s Box (Eureka! Region B Bluray)

I have to confess that for reasons of mere personal slovenliness I’ve never paid G.W. Pabst much mind. I was underwhelmed on my first viewings, back in the ‘80s, of both Diary of a Lost Girl and The Threepenny Opera, and so I held Pandora’s Box at arm’s length for years. I figured I’d get as much from various stills of Louise Brooks in the picture as I might from actually sitting through the thing itself. Always been a big fan of Berg’s opera, though. Enjoyed the hell out of that production a couple of years ago at the Met. Yes, my explanation here is diffuse and incoherent, but it's prelude to telling all you people that I’ve SEEN THE LIGHT via this new Blu from Eureka, a 2K rendering of a restoration, and yes, this actually is a Great Film. Ado Kyrou said, “Louise Brooks is the only woman who had the ability to transfigure no matter what film into a masterpiece” and maybe he’s right (wonder if he ever saw her Three Mesquiteers picture, 1938’s Overland Stage Raiders, as unusual a retirement movie as has ever been). But Box has a truckload of legit goods beyond Brooks’ remarkable intuitive performance. This looks beautiful for the most part, but there is a problem and it’s not an insignificant one. It was pointed out on the NitrateVille site and subsequently mentioned by Ye Olde DVD Beaver. "The mistake: When Lulu stuffs some money into the meter reader's hand, he is so distracted that he lets two coins drop onto the carpet and doesn't even realize it. The digital clean-up software registered those two falling coins as defects and erased them. So we do not see anything fall out of his hand.” This is pretty early on: around 4:37 on the disc, 1:37 in the movie proper (there’s about three minutes of restoration explanation in the presentation before the movie itself gets underway). Once seen it’s impossible to unsee, because Brooks’ Lulu observes the coins falling from his hand (he picks them up from the carpet a little later) and you wonder why she’s observing literally nothing. Obviously for this viewer the subsequent enjoyment was not killed. Whether this will be fixed is not yet known. —A-

The Psychic (Severin 4K Ultra Disc)

The early shots of face-mutilation-as-a-byproduct-of-jumping-off-a-cliff-and-one’s-head-scraping-the-rock-face (which eventuality strikes me as at least a trifle implausible to be honest) notwithstanding, this 1977 goodie is one of Lucio Fulci’s more restrained efforts and this 4K edition is intoxicatingly beautiful. The movie also features shots of Jennifer O’Neill in a car looking worried, endless shots of gloved hands turning on and off recording devices, and an excellent cheesy/drippy score. Masterpiece, obviously. The supplemental array is incredible and features the shot-in-’93 interview film Fulci Talks, a typically candid session with the maestro —who, among other things, knew the highbrow Italian arts scene well enough that he refers to William Weaver as “Bill” — shot three years prior to his 1996 passing. Inspirational Fulci quote: “There was always a dwarf reciting Walt Whitman poems from a chair. I later found out he was Truman Capote.”  Definitive Fulci quote: “I regard myself as kind of an accumulation of incoherence.”—A+.

Queen Christina (Warner Archive)

Quite good lookin’, spectacular Mamoulian stylization, superb Garbo performance, this title has it all. The role capitalizes on Garbo’s androgynous appeal in a way that lets Mamoulian and the actor flex some comedic muscle, as when the iconoclastic title character disguises herself as a lad in order to be Among The People, and thus masqueraded, winds up bunking at an inn with Spanish envoy Antonio, Garbo’s frequent on-screen romantic partner John Gilbert, who’s quite good.  Haunted, romping, funny, ultimately stirring — the final shot is one for the ages and even if you’re not a fan you’ve probably seen it in a lot of Industry-Celebrating-Montages. Tom Milne’s Mamoulian book is required reading, and his chapter on this is breathtaking.  On a sequence prior to the disguise adventure he is at his bedazzled best: “[A] long, lingering, magnificent close-up as she stands at the window staring out over the endless, unchanging landscape of white: ‘Snow,’ mourns the voice of the greatest blues singer of all, ‘is like a wild sea. One could go out and get lost in it and forget the world.’” — A+

 The Sexual Story of O (Severin)

In a move that pays homage to the original marketing of the movie, Severin put some ooh-la-la shots of late-period Franco consort and muse and star Lina Romay on the slipcover — even though she is nowhere to be seen in this 1984 film. By this time Romay had dialed back on the frantic performative sexuality that remade her name (born in 1954, Franco rechristened Rosa Martinez with the handle of the Brooklyn-born [in 1919] Mexican-American big band singer who, among other things, cameos in Tex Avery’s Señor Droopy) and in this picture the erotic hijinks are enacted mostly by a trio of younger performers who are appositely somnambulant. This is one of Franco’s better “Camera looking in and out of hotel windows” movies. The shooting style is casual while never getting too lax, and while it takes its time getting seriously outré, when it gets there, get ready. —A

Spinout/Double Trouble (Warner Archive)

When considering the unfortunate aspects of Elvis Presley’s film output, and there are many, the cookie-cutter quality of his ‘60s musicals is often cited. How cookie-cutter were they? Check it out: 1966’s Spinout is 93 minutes long. And 1967’s (yes, 1967’s; it’s like Sgt. Pepper wasn’t happening, even though the movie is partially set in London) Double Trouble is 92 minutes long. Impressive! Trouble is, of course, now semi-legendary as having been initially developed for, who else, Julie Christie. Irwin Winkler’s producer credit here is a mutation of his then-status as, with Robert Chartoff, Christie’s U.S. manager. Both pictures are directed by then-nearly-blind Norman Taurog, Gore Vidal’s one-man refutation of the auteur theory. They are both amiable, goofy and corny as Kansas. As for Spinout, it has an unusually strong audio component. And looks great. Why, I asked myself, does the rear-projection driving stuff here look better than it does in Hitchcock pictures of the same period?. While there’s certainly a legitimate technical explanation, I’m just going to go with “life is unfair.” Presley plays a singing race car driver, because of course he does, and “Stop, Look and Listen” is not a terrible song. “Adam and Evil,” on the other hand, kind of is. Set design and costumes are very POPPY. The proceedings, involving Elvis dodging the affections of three beauties, are relatively narcotizing. For luthiers and gear nuts there are glimpses of Elvis and a bandmate playing one of the most bizarre Gibson SG double necks ever. It is, my guitar expert sources tell me, a six string guitar and a six string bass, or baritone guitar, and one of only two known to be in existence, special ordered for Elvis by the Colonel. One of the two is on exhibit at Graceland. The other is MIA. The features Donna Reed’s TV husband Carl Betz and Una Merkel of 42^nd Street, Destry Rides Again, and I Love Melvin fame. Double Trouble was written by Jo Heims, whose work here does nothing to hint that she’d later co-write the scenario for Dirty Harry and co-script Play Misty for Me. The Elvis/Julie Christie issue becomes easier to understand if you figure, while watching (and you might!) that the Christie part was not of the male lead but of this film’s female lead Annette Day, as a moderately ditzy heiress pursued by a variety of criminals. The vaudevillian Wiere Brothers provide ostensible screwball comedy accents. One wonders why, and then one detects, once again, The Colonel’s hand. One can see this, with Christie and a suitable male lead — and EVEN ELVIS PRESLEY, properly directed would have made a suitable male lead — working along similar lines to Gambit, made the same year as this, with Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine. In any event, this isn’t Gambit.  Both discs: —A

Touch of Evil (Eureka 4K Ultra Disc)

Damn this looks great Particularly in the grimy closeups of Welles and Tamiroff. One disquieting side effect of the excellent image quality is that you really notice how Charlton Heston’s brownface makeup, which is relatively “tastefully” or discreetly applied (or maybe at times not quite applied at all) to Heston in the Welles-shot stuff, is slathered on to an embarrassing and shameful degree in the reshoots Universal ordered for story clarity, such as it is, and which were overseen by Harry Keller, whose own credited directorial career doesn’t even reach journeyman level. The scene where it really popped for me, in a hotel lobby with Heston and Janet Leigh, is properly excised in the reconstructed version, one of three to choose from here. I got around to checking out the commentaries, one from the late and fast-talking F.X. Feeney (“small wonder there’s an explosion when these two kiss”) another from Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore, who also sound pretty caffeinated, and two from restoration honcho Rick Schmidlin, one solo and one with Leigh and Heston, who lived to see the Welles memo carried out as best possible. All are informative and companionable, but of course the one with the stars is the most to be cherished. — A +

Encounters with Great Recordings of the 20th Century, #5: A Tribe Called Quest, "Midnight Marauders"

Now that Rolling Stone magazine is in the news again, and again for a not-great reason, it seems an opportune time for me to own up to something in a more cohesive way than I've done in the past, which has been in dribs and drabs on social media. As most of you are aware, this week sees the publication of a literally jaw-dropping interview with RS founder or co-founder and longtime publisher and editor Jann Wenner. Ace interlocuter David Marchese did the honors for The New York Times Magazine, and it's clear in one of the exchanges, in which Wenner opines that Black and female musical artists of his era were simply not articulate enough for him to bother interviewing back in the day, that Wenner is blithely stepping straight into a trap that Marchese hadn't even set for him. 

Wenner's glib, smug, not-even-confession sits alongside other gobsmacking glib, smug shrugging-offs of various journalistic malpractices. This doesn't speak well of Rolling Stone's ostensible legacy, and here one is semi-obliged to mumble about how that's a shame becuase Rolling Stone did publish a lot of great writing and that is certainly true. But it's because of Wenner that the existence of RS will always have been at the very least a mixed blessing and if he wants to drag the rag's rep through the mud by freely admitting that he actually let his interview subjects edit their Q&As before they went to press, that's entirely on him.

I did a bit of writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1990s. When I visited the office, I always slumped, and tried to steer clear of the boss man, because I figured that having made his allowance for the great David Fricke, he didn't want to see any other unusually tall people in the office. (And indeed, aside from David, there weren't any on staff as far as I could tell.) A couple of great things about RS when Wenner ran the place: it paid well, and it paid on time. Always. For a freelancer, that's huge. 

I was a journeyman front-of-the-book writer who never broke into features despite the encouragement of editors like Barbara O'Dair and Bob Love. I did obits on the likes of Albert Goldman, Michael Clarke, and Harry Nilsson (who should have been memorialized by Dawn Eden, who did the last interview with the man and who I tapped as a source for the piece). I contributed capsules to packages like "The Hundred Greatest Rock Videos of All Time." I interviewed Yoko Ono for her Off-Broadway musical, New York Rock, a misbegotten project in which one might nevertheless see the seeds of Rent. And, for editor Anthony De Curtis, I did one record review. And here my tale of woe begins.

I haven't yet read Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, but I've dipped into it more than once for research purposes and it appears to be lively, dishy, entertaining, well-researched, comprehensive, and right-minded. Hip-hop is mentioned precisely once in the book, and early on, in the prologue. Like so: "Success would blunt Wenner's feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski-slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s." Oh that reminds me, another piece I did for Rolling Stone was based arounf the premise of Rock Stars Give You Advice on How To Buy A Computer, with Henry Rollins averring, "Even if you think the computer you're buying has plenty of memory, you're going to need MORE" and stuff like that.  One can infer, from the new Wenner interviw and also from a lot of other things, that Wenner had not just a blind spot as far as hip-hop went but was probably openly hostile to it. Nevertheless, the music editors at the magazine made good-faith efforts to cover it even when they themselves weren't entirely enthusiastic about it. Remember, these were the days before Tom Petty enlisted Rick Rubin as a producer, the days when Petty would vehemently drawl, when asked about sampling, "It's stealing." 

Long story short, record reviews editor De Curtis, a good critic (albeit one of old-school taste) and a kind, pleasant guy, assigned me to review Midnight Marauders, the third studio album by A Tribe Called Quest. I don't recollect the conversation, I can't remember if he offered me a choice of records to write up. I do remember having been enthusiastic about Peoples' Instinctive Travels and the thing that was getting called "Alternative Hip-Hop" in general (especially De La Soul's Three Feet High And Rising). I felt these records were encouraging in a larger cultural sense in a time when I, a Delicate White Person In His Early Thirties, was increasingly discomfited by what he saw as aberrant elements emerging in hip-hop, as in the anti-semitism expressed by Professor Griff of Public Enemy or the unapologetic misogyny of some of the raps on Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. Put another way, I took the whole "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" business far too much to heart. 

My really dumb two-star review of Midnight Marauders now sits behind a paywall, and I'm not going to pony up to read it in its entirety again. Nor am I going to go fetch my DVD-ROMs or whatever they are of "The Complete ," which probably don't even work on my current computer anymore anyway. All I need is to read the lede of the review to cringe: "'Can you envision/A brother who ain't dissin'?' asked A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip on the rap group's  1990 debut album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, a breakthrough in what became known as Afrocentric hip-hop. It was a refreshing idea then, and Quest pulled it off with panache; their raps were gently wry, while their jazzy jams proved that dope beats don't need sledgehammer impact to kick ass." You see where this is going: straight to hippieville, really. Which is putting it kindly. De Curtis might as well have asked David Van Driessen, the wet-noodle teacher on Beavis and Butthead, to write up the record. In my eagerness to tsk-tsk the group for what I took as untoward aggression, I failed to hear what the beats and rhymes were actually doing, which I won't try to describe here (I've done enough damage!) but will say I have come to understand as being legitimately great. Instead of appreciating that at the time, I instead wrote the thing that I have come to hate, as both a critic and a reader. That is, A Concern Troll Review.

As I mentioned, the review is behind a paywall now, but during the early days of Rolling Stone Digitizing Its Content, it was not behind a paywall, and about eight or nine years ago, every coupld of months or so a bunch of folks would find it on the RS site, just sitting there, and would find me on Twitter to tell me what an imbecile I was. It was a lot of work, composing individual apology tweets saying I Was Wrong and that Indeed Midnight Marauders Is A Great And Landmark Hip-Hop Album. From hereon in, this post will serve as my all-purpose mea culpa. In the words of maestro Lou Reed, "Shows just how wrong you can be."  

Summer 2023 Blu-ray/4K Ultra Consumer Guide

Equipment: Sony UBP-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

Angel Face (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Of all the amour fou film noirs out there, this one is absolutely the fou-est. Only Alain Corneau’s Serie Noire comes close, and that needed almost thirty years and being actually French to top this 1952 Otto Preminger lulu. If you’ve seen it you know what I’m talking about. If you ain’t seen it, grab this disc pronto. Very clean black and white image. The bags under poor beleaguered Herbert Marshall’s eyes have never spoken more eloquently. He plays the (spoiler alert) doomed dad of (not too much of a spoiler alert) psycho heiress Jean Simmons. Robert Mitchum, of course, is the ambulance-attendant sap who falls hard for her upon seeing her tickle the ivories and immediately throws over his Nice American Girlfriend for her after she, um, stalks him to his favorite diner. The cad. But anyway — TOGETHER THEY GO TO HELL. Preminger tells this hot tale with exemplary cool, the better to blow your mind at the finale. Beyond essential. As with Land of the Pharaohs (see below) the commentary from the standard def edition is included in…a standard def edition, as for some reason it couldn’t be imported on to the new transfer. It’s by Eddie Muller and it’s good. — A +

The Circus Tent (Second Run Blu-ray)

Second Run is almost unique among labels in that every single title it puts out is worth your time. Not just a cinephile’s time, not just a collector’s time; but your time as in you, a human being presumably invested in life on this earth. Taste doesn’t come into it. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I think a rhetorically useful one, as a challenge. Someone name me a title in the label’s catalog that doesn’t meet my exaggerated claim. Whether you’ve heard of the picture before or not, you’re going to get something good out of watching it. This 1978 Indian film, for instance, presented in the restored form in which it went to Cannes last year. It was not dreamt of in my philosophy prior to my acquiring a copy. And here it is, a singular and great film. And by singular I do mean a film unlike any other. It is a fiction composed of documentary components, or something like documentary components — there are professional actors in the mix. The premise is simple: director Aravindan Govindan hires an actual circus and brings that circus to a riverbank village that has never seen such a thing. First there’s mystery, wonderment. Then there’s hardship, dissatisfaction, boredom. Some people change their lives. Others bemoan that they’re incapable of changing theirs. The black and white imagery is poesy in a rich but narrow register. Startling. The extras stress the restoration work for the most part and are illuminating. — A+

Creepshow (Scream! Factory 4K Ultra)

This was, in a sense, George A. Romero’s first unimportant picture. That’s not a dismissal. But consider that the likes of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies and Martin were not just incredibly effective genre films but also significant statements, both aesthetic and social. As also was, I’ll insist, Season of the Witch. And Knightriders. Okay, maybe not There’s Always Vanilla. But don’t ruin my thesis. Let’s just iterate that this 1982 movie is focused on serving up not too much more than a nasty good time, and it does, propelled of course by Stephen King’s script. Critics who complained about the predictability of the scenarios in this EC--inspired omnibus kind of missed the point. A certain amount of predictability is built-in by convention. As it happens, I was a little surprised to be reminded that the opening scene, establishing the frame story, is pretty genuinely dark for an ostensibly “fun” movie, but then again, have you read an EC comic lately? Romero was a fan of Tales of Hoffmann and this film is the closest he got to making a picture akin to that Powell/Pressburger eye-popper. Not just the multiple stories, but the garish colors! And animation! And frames composed to look like comic book panels! Diopter shots! The shimmering water in the bathtub in the segment in which Stephen King acts in fact looks like a direct homage to Tales. This is a damn good looking 4K Ultra disc kitted out with customary Shout! Factory abbondanza. THREE soundtrack audio tracks (7.1, 5.1, 2-channel) Three commentaries (Horror people cannot get enough details) And more. — A+

DuBarry Was A Lady (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

People used to say, “Wait, was Red Skelton ever a thing” and now I guess they say, “What’s Red Skelton?” So, that’s either progress, or not. I say not, at the risk of sounding like a “square.” The silly stylings of the benevolent “little guy” comedian have certainly dated, we cannot deny. Nor can we do much of anything about it even were we inclined to. In any event, this curio from 1943 showcases Skelton at the relative height of his thingness, but wait, it also represents one of the biggest cinema vehicles for, um, Lucille Ball, who’s still a thing. So maybe I’m missing the lede here. In any event, this irrepressibly fluffy MGM musical is about ordinary Yankee doofus nightclub types who dream themselves into the reign of Louis XV. Singing Lucy is dubbed (mostly) by Marsha Mears. Relatively svelte but irrepressibly brash Zero Mostel doing a wacky Charles Boyer impersonation sets the overall comedic tone right out of the gate. Oh, it’s a Cole Porter musical too, or rather it’s based on one, and as it happens one of its standout numbers is “Salome,” which is an Edens and Harburg song and performed by Virginia O’Brien, who’s a pip. Keep your eyes peeled for an unusually pleasant-looking Buddy Rich, who’s the drummer in Tommy Dorsey’s band. Consider that an outfit called The Oxford Boys was once at least a minor thing. Jo Stafford sings “Katie Went To Haiti” as part of the Pied Pipers. I like the preceding sentence here, because anyone born after 1980 might think it’s in Esperanto. This Warner Archive disc boasts spectacular Technicolor; Karl Freund, later hired by Ball to pioneer sitcom filming for I Love Lucy, was the cinematographer. You’ll note that the focus puller is frequently challenged during the “I Love An Esquire Girl” number, which has a wonderful cameo punchline.  Delightful in all its particulars, a movie actually so insubstantial as to be kind of monumental — A+

East of Eden (Warner 4K Ultra)

For its 100^th Anniversary, the entity still known at least partially as Warner is putting out substantial upgrades of a good number of its classic titles. Their manifestations as physical consumer products are, we ought to remember, a side benefit to the fact that these digital versions are what’s going to be distributed to rep theaters from hereon in, replacing physical prints, which in a sense is a shame, but as the man said, you can’t stop what’s coming. This edition of Elia Kazan’s 1955 picture, James Dean’s debut in a lead role, is a real revision of the Blu-ray in the prior Dean box set, right down to the opening. The typeface designating the overture, for instance, here matches the type on the original opening credits, whereas on the box set disc it was just rendered in blocky orange letters.  And that rendition of the film kicks off with imagery that’s really brown and sunbaked. Yes, a title card speaks of the Santa Lucia mountains as being “dark and brooding” but… The new version gets some accurate green into the imagery. Not just in the opening shots, but check out eleven minutes in, when Dean jumps a train and walks across a green field; it’s properly lush. In that same shot there’s a dissolve to future Smiths cover star Richard Davalos walking with Julie Harris, and that transition is smoother than on the Blu-ray. The whole thing looks properly fantastic. Sound is also excellent. Boy oh boy is it a shame that Timothy Carey’s voice was dubbed by costar Albert Dekker, because Kazan didn’t like Carey’s own cadences, which the stubborn actor insisted represented “the way pimps talk” and Kazan decided no it wasn’t. The sole extra is Richard Schickel’s old commentary. — A

 

From Hollywood To Heaven (Powerhouse/Indicator Blu-ray)

I haven’t made it all the way through this eight-disc, thirteen film collection yet and who knows when I will. And I cannot tell a lie to sensitive souls out there: one of the films in it, 1968’s The Exotic Ones, features footage of rockabilly singer Sleepy LaBeef appearing to actually bite the head off of a chicken. So maybe don’t watch that one, although the movie is quite the thing otherwise so maybe you can just skip the scenes when you get close to it. Or not. Its whole gestalt kind of relies on that scene. So I don’t know what to tell you. Anyway. This set represents a substantial, one might say representative percentage of the film output of Ron, June, and later son Tim Ormond. Ron got off the ground at Monogram, formed an alliance with Western B star Lash Larue, branched out into making Southern-fried exploitation pictures showcasing, in some cases, a truckload of country music stars. And after a plane crash in 1966 experienced a Road To Damascus religious conversion and started making whacked out evangelical tracts on film. If you know that Negativeland album Escape From Noise, you’ve heard preacher Estus Pirkle intone “Christianity is stupid! Communism is good;” the source of this sample, the eye-opening satanic Cold War apocalypse now item If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971) is here. Many of the transfers here are upgraded standard def (a flood in Tim Ormond’s home messed up a great deal of original material) and they’re done well. ANYWAY. The main reason I’m listing this here is the set contains the 1959 sex-trauma-and-hypnotism picture Please Don’t Touch Me, which is just one of the most startling films I’ve ever seen and one that I’ll include in my Ten Greatest List if I’m invited to participate in the next Sight and Sound poll. To say it’s as if Straub and Huillet attempted a grindhouse picture doesn’t quite cover it. But it does make so many self-conscious attempts at surreality look limp as hell. It’s worth the price of the whole box. And the rest of the box is pretty extraordinary anyway.   — A+

Hugo (Arrow 4K Ultra)

Two things: Blu-ray and 4K discs have their shortcomings — which almost always stem from the quality of the restoration or transfer, rather than the formats themselves — and you may notice that the ones I’m reviewing are all getting high grades and it’s because they’re really good. Luck of the chosen draw — nothing I’ve been looking at in this batch has, to my eye, bad blacks or blown out whites. There is perhaps no better time to be a physical media person than right now. And another thing, I should admit that a lot of the labels I’m reviewing here are ones for which I’ve done supplemental work. Or that my friends have. As it happens my good friend Farran Smith Nehme wrote an essay for this new, 2D-only edition of this, one of the greatest in Martin Scorsese’s endless series of gangster films. (Ar ar ar.) So I’m ethically compromised. Which is why this feature goes on my blog and not on a paying website. (Actually I could PROBABLY get away with putting it, conflicts and all, on a paying website, but since no paying website wants it, that’s kind of putting the cart before the nonexistent horse.) Christopher Lee’s in it. Funny how the things you want to see in cinema work as time passes. At the time of this movie’s release I was so stoked for Christopher Lee that he got to work with Scorsese, and now that Christopher Lee is gone I’m still stoked that Scorsese got to work with Christopher Lee. The disc is gorgeous, beautiful pastel colors throughout. I’m still exploring the COPIOUS extras. I listened to and liked Méliès biographer Jon Spira’s commentary, which concentrates on what’s on screen, and not the hilarious process of the movie’s making, which cost producer Graham King so much money that he took some revenge for the overages when Scorsese was trying to make Silence. You can read about that in my book about Goodfellas. I know, it sounds confusing, but it isn’t. Also. People who complain that there’s not enough CGI in Scorsese movies really need to check this out. There’s plenty, and it’s really well done. — A+

 Invaders From Mars 4K (Ignite 4K Ultra)

So many components made this 1953 independent production such special nightmare fuel for children of all ages. The unique color, courtesy of a two-strip, standard camera process called SuperCinecolor. It’s obviously less rich in saturation than three-strip Technicolor was, and the ever-so-slight sense of muting contributes mightily to the movie’s eerie feeling. As does director William Cameron Menzie’s sense of cinematic space, derived of course from his unique, idiosyncratic set design aesthetic. The plot anticipates Invasion of the Body Snatchers but the hook is here applied to a kid, eager little Jimmy Hunt, who’s convinced that aliens have replaced his loving parents with mean sorta-zombies, because, well, that’s what’s happened. Leif Erickson in particular really digs deep for his Evil Dad side — he’s lowkey terrifying.  Extras include an interview with Menzies biographer James Curtis; it’s dry but informative. Child lead Jimmy Hunt, now an adorable old man, is delightful. The alternate scenes are weird: Euro distributors requested a different ending and more, and they were shot and edited most perfunctorily, and they appear here prefaced by a long text explaining how they’re so bad and why. And the standard stuff on restoration, which is a little more unusual than usual because of the materials themselves. Anyway, a must-own.  — A+

Joy House (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

One rarely hears the words “I need to bone up on my Rene Clement” in this household, although as of this writing I do rather look forward to Kino’s upcoming Blu-ray of Is Paris Burning? This title just happened fit the bill one random movie night, and one thing that Claire K. and I enjoy on a random movie night is getting kicked in the head by an unexpected whack job of a 1960s movie. Which this is. “This is kind of Losey-esque, isn’t it,” Claire observed midway through this sometimes goofily moody thriller in which an on-the-run Alain Delon finds himself cooped up in a French mansion with Lola Albright (!!!) and Jane Fonda and a cranky dude in a hidden room (André Oumansky). And a cat. Anyway, the image quality is solid — the 2K Gaumont restoration yields a nice, sharply detailed widescreen black-and-white frame —the soundtrack options slightly challenging (seems as if its native language is, indeed, International Coproduction English, with the actual voices of at least Fonda and Albright; and the lip movements sync up in the case of both lead actresses; it’s hard to tell who’s dubbing Fonda in French, but it often doesn’t really sound like her, despite the fact that she could have done a French dub rather credibly; overall I recommend the English version frankly), and the commentary from Howard Berger and Nathaniel Thompson a little more focused than these often discursive (but always engaging) gentlemen sometimes manage. Look for future Boss Hogg and Commandant Lassard (that’s Sorrell Booke and George Gaynes to noninitiates of The Dukes of Hazzard and Police Academy) as a couple of the tough guys pursuing Delon. — B+

Land of The Pharaohs (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Helen Of Troy (Warner Archive Blu-ray)

Ah, the mid-1950s, when widescreen color epics set in the ancient world were in Tribble-like profusion. John Ford didn’t succumb to the fad, but Howard Hawks did, and so produced what pretty much everyone acknowledges as a failure, Land of the Pharaohs. And when citing that failure, pretty much everyone repeats something that Hawks told Joseph McBride about starting the script with William Faulkner: “I don’t know how a Pharaoh talks,” Faulkner said to the director. But they don’t repeat the rest of the story, in which Faulkner asks, “Is it all right if I write him like a Kentucky colonel?” After which co-screenwriter Harry Kurnitz protest that he doesn’t know from Kentucky colonels, he wants to do it King Lear style, and Hawks tells them to go their own ways, he’ll rewrite what they come up with, and then Hawks admits that in so doing, “I messed it up.” And the final truth of the matter is that you can almost never win with this kind of period stuff, at least not with some people. Witness the ridicule Scorsese got in some quarters for making the Apostles talk and walk something like contemporary urban, um, mooks in The Last Temptation of Christ. Still. Watching the Hawks film, the first thing you might think is BOY DID THEY EVER NOT KNOW how a Pharaoh talks. But the problem isn’t so much the dialogue as it is it delivery, and the acting in general — it’s too stiff, too stately. Only a few times does Jack Hawkins show the spark of a, say, Jack Hawkins. As it happens the movie has a lot to recommend it.  A truly adventurous Dimitri TIomkin score. Spectacularly sensible compositions that don’t resemble the tableaus of De Mille. And unlike a lot of other films of this ilk, it really does move right along, and is pretty thoughtful on a few interesting topics: ritual and ceremony, slave labor. That kind of thing. The disc looks great too. Inspirational dialogue from Joan Collins: “Perhaps my Lord would PREFER it if I were OLD?” Her performance is a bit much but then again Dewey Martin’s no Montgomery Clift, let alone a Ricky Nelson. The only actor who appears comfortable is James Robertson Justice. None of the actors in 1956’s Helen of Troy, not even the at this time usually insouciant Brigitte Bardot, look particularly comfortable. (She does not play the title role, by the way; rather, she is servant to Helen, played by Continental Beauty [as they used to call such figures] Rossana Podestá.) Robert Wise’s picture opens with an overture, Max Steiner borrowing heavily from Ludwig van, and then dips into some narration delivered by a Paul Frees wannabe, intoning non-Homeric phrases like “Today known as the Dardenelles.” These components are generally never good signs. The movie winds up being a lot more watchable than you’d think, though, provided you’ve a high tolerance for Cinecitta-itis. Those who know, know. The battle scenes are better than competently directed, although they do succumb to cliché, as in a cutaway to a single wounded soldier staggering about with a fatal sword wound. The psychedelic-lighted orgy and of course the Trojan horse bits are other highlights.

Land — A-

Helen — B+

 

The Nutty Professor 4K (Paramount 4K Ultra)

Consider J. Hoberman on Robert Bresson: “Bluntly put, to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago.” Now consider Gilbert Adair on a particular image derived from Jerry Lewis’ astonishing 1963 picture: “For if it’s possible, even easy, to dislike Jerry Lewis, possible to dislike The Nutty Professor, possible, even, to judge the image opposite as kitschy, downright ugly, I would nevertheless submit that, if you cannot understand how such an image might ever be judged beautiful, even as it rejects, or insults, every virtue in the canon of high-art pictorialism, if you cannot understand how its garish color tonality, so very vulgar on the printed page, may be transfigured within the context of the medium to which it owes allegiance, then you do not understand the cinema.” Anyway so there. The transfer on this new edition is very…accurate. Which some might take for subdued, but as you get further into the film its candy-colored clowning becomes more vibrant. The gray-pink pastels of the gym walls…well they’re something else. The whole thing is really beautiful.  Frankly, all of Lewis’ films, at least all of those from his Paramount run, warrant this treatment. Fat chance. Extras include the commentary Lewis recorded around 2003 with his good buddy Steve Lawrence and is exactly what you’d hope/expect it to be. Lawrence singing “Stella By Starlight” over the instrumental version in the opening credits. “Victor Young!” Yes it was. “Unbelievable. This is before Eddie Murphy was born!” “Shelly Manne on drums!” Praise of Kathleen Freeman, good for those guys. And so on. A brand new extra is a 48 minute phone call between Lewis and Frank Tashlin in which Lewis hashes out the script and its gags with his mentor. Tashlin opens his remarks by saying ”I’m reading this like an idiot producer does.” Classic.  A masterpiece with a message: “You might as well like yourself. Just think about all the time you’re gonna have to spend with you.”— A+

One False Move (Criterion 4K Ultra)

Man, Carl Franklin shoulda made more movies. He’s still around, so maybe he will, but he really ought to have racked up a bigger filmography by now. He’s got the goods — sensitivity with actors, great attunement to mood via mise-en-scene and more, the whole package. If you’re looking for specific proof, check out the way this movie introduces Bill Paxton’s ingenuous lawman, a guy who’s about to get into a situation that’ll sink him way over his head. It’s an all-time great thematic/narrative dovetail that’s palpable in its power.  This is an unsparingly tense crime thriller, sociologically pertinent and emotionally wrenching, and yeah, I guess it IS something like a noir (I tend to be practically parochial in what I’ll term a noir or not), although Billy Bob Thornton emphasizes in a conversation with Franklin that’s a primo extra in this package, he and co-writer Tom Epperson that they never thought in terms of genre while concocting this.. The image quality is pretty much sublime. Inspirational dialogue: “Good to meet you, Chief Dixon.”  Poor schmuck. — A+

Rio Bravo 4K (Warner 4K Ultra)

As with East of Eden, this Howard Hawks Actual Classic (he made it right after the above Land of the Pharaohs! Robin Wood famously stated, “If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo!’ [Is “famously” still right? - who knows?]) was a pretty brown Blu-ray, and again, in this 4K rendering, the green of the fauna in its landscapes is more prominent right from the start. And again, one feels that the studio restoration people expended extra care on this upgrade because for better or worse THIS IS GOING TO BE THE MOVIE from now on. There’s more detail, individual colors are more properly differentiated. The brightness of the day when Ward Bond rides into town is very bright but doesn’t wash out; the impression you get is of, well, heat. The whole thing is as much of a pleasure to watch as it’s always been, and for many it will be more so. The Richard Schickel commentary is enhanced by the presence of John Carpenter. They don’t interact; it appears they were recorded separately, which must have been nice for Carpenter. Ar ar ar. In fairness to Schickel, with whom I had an unpleasant personal interaction once upon a time (and many share my experience), he doesn’t lay on the pomposity here, coming off as a relaxed and smooth pro, and is very informative. Essential. — A+

Rules of The Game (Criterion 4K Ultra)

How do we see this film now, in the historical continuum that has led us to this precise and rather awful moment? Taking place between two 20^th century disasters, what does it give us in the here and now which can be considered a farcical/horrific coda to that century. I’ll be damned if I know. Except I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or just be grateful when the title card reading “Restoration of this film was sponsored by CHANEL” came up. I’ve been following the home video releases since the laser disc, which I wrote up in Video Review in the late 1980s. Spine number 50 in that format. Spine number 216 in this. Anyway, I keep saying the same thing: it never looked better. And so it is with this 4K edition. The thing that always gets me about the movie and has been getting me well before spine number 50, is not just its profundity, whatever that may amount to nowadays (and I believe it amounts to a lot, but others, not so much, poor benighted souls as they might be) but its fluidity, its utter watchability. The staging and the camera movement always just perfect and the acting beyond perfect. It’s funny, it’s tragic, it’s hard to watch (the scene of the hunt, gawd), truly an Everything Movie. — A+

Showgirls (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

Is this a “Murican  Rules?  No, seriously. Just as Rules presciently closed the door on and rang a death knell for a certain idea of Europe, Showgirls can be perceived perhaps as a final and possibly defining-by-damnation gob of sputum from the coughed up by the expiring American Century. As Jerry Lee Lewis would say, “think about it.” This irradiated variant of All About Eve takes that film’s professional rivalry into a feral neon realm that’s much more “Made In U.S.A.” than the refined milieu of 1950s Broadway. The motif here is along the lines of what Iggy sang in our national anthem, “Death Trip” (see Raw Power): “I’ll rip you/you’ll rip me/baby we’re goin’ down in history.” Is the dialogue “awful?” Kinda. Did non-native-English speaker director Paul Verhoeven know it was awful? Hard to say. But it is also wrong to say that the movie is poorly acted, especially by its lead. If we can praise Crispin Glover’s baroque performance in River’s Edge, we can work up some admiration for Elizabeth Berkley’s stylized hyper-expressiveness here, as it’s entirely thematically apt. And on the level of, you know, mise-en-scene and that kinda thing, this is incredibly well -made. Great lighting, great shots, great cuts, incredible staging of everything. (By the way, looking over the contemporary reviews of the movie, I see that my own perspective lines up with that of, well, Stanley Kaufmann’s.) And it looks incredible in 4K Ultra. The backstage stuff with the strippers clearly inspired the much more well-liked (mistakenly, for sure) Hustlers, certainly, but the staging and shooting of the club material reveals Hustlers as the dead-ass piece of filmmaking it really is. Newly produced extras include an interview with bad dialogue scribe Joe Eszterhas, he’s hella old now, and mildly conciliatory relative to his prior complaints about the movie. Good interviews, too, with the cinematographer and one of the lighting guys, the editors, and Penny portrayer Rena Riffel. The ostensibly comedic commentary from David Schmader includes his belching up some Diet Coke. And then dripping sporadic and uninspired disdain for the picture. Judging from the ten minutes I listened to, the feature as a whole is pathetic and arrogantly stupid and unfunny, all in a particularly obnoxious Seattle-based-“liberal” way. The package’s grade is docked two whole notches for its inclusion. — A-

Something in the Dirt (XYZ Blu-ray)

Brothers-from-other-mothers filmmaking team Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead should be as celebrated and awarded as “Daniels,” and in fact a lot more so, but life is unfair. This 2022 grabber is not their best movie (for me that’s still the mind-blowing The Endless), but among other things it’s an inspiring demonstration of pandemic production resourcefulness — most of the film is just the two of them, freaking out their convoluted conspiracy plot in a safely restricted location. How do they make it sing cinematically? They’re very eloquent with insert shots, like our friend Martin Scorsese, for one thing.  The filmmakers take the lead acting chores (which they have done before) and make the most of constricted space — a house shared by the two that starts behaving oddly. It’s essentially the story of the world’s greatest self-cleaning ashtray.  It’s also a very funny quasi-allegory of ambition and the lure of “success;” as the characters chronicle the seemingly supernatural phenomenon, one of them asks, “How much do you think, um, Netflix pays for these kinda documentaries?” For all that, the outstanding tidbit of Inspirational Dialogue is “Stop being paranoid, it’s weird.” The extras include two commentaries and a “watch party” (which I guess means commentary-only-goofy) with social media something-or-other Henry Zebrowski. I don’t like “watch parties,” I just learned.  — A

There’s No Tomorrow (Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

Critic Adrian Martin, on his comprehensive commentary, recounts a late career interview with Ophuls conducted by Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, in which the maestro, when asked about this movie, pronounced it “Not bad.” Martin’s point being that for the painstaking Ophuls to be so kind to one of his own pictures meant it was something special. And this — a first time viewing for me — really is. This 1939 melodrama has story elements you’ll recognize from Blonde Venus and Stella Dallas and even Lady For A Day. And since it’s French, it’s a lot less coy than even Sternberg had to be about its milieus — the cabaret in which lead actress Edwidge Feuillère works is an actual topless joint, just like in Showgirls. Feuillère plays Evelyn, a down-at-heels single mom who, upon meeting a love from the past, concocts what is, to be honest, a truly hare-brained scheme to retrieve happiness. The cinematography by longtime Ophuls collaborator Eugen Schüfftan (he did Metropolis, too. And The Hustler!) is quite purposefully dark, and the Gaumont restoration looks good; there’s not too much visible in the way of digital cleanup artifact but the image is very clean overall. Ophuls’ style here is mature but not wholly advanced — that is, the moving camera is present but not dominant. He does make it count, as when dollying back from the paradisical auberge the lovers shared.. Or dollying in and out at the train station near the end. Immaculate overall, and the ending is remarkable. Inspirational dialogue: “I’d like to drift into the fog” — A+

To Live And Die In L.A. (Kino Lorber 4K Ultra)

It was quite critically drubbed upon it 1985 release (future screenwriter Paul Attanasio called is “overheated and recklessly violent” what a bunch whiny moralistic twaddle) but this late Friedkin is not only great but it really is an ideal companion piece to the early Friedkin masterpiece The French Connection. The filthy cold boredom of being a cop in NY versus the filthy hot squalor of being a cop in L.A. When the guys in this movie are doing undercover staking out, they’re hosted and fed by Jesuit friars, or something. That’s as close to normal like as they really see. The intensity of Friedkin’s direction, and of William Peterson’s A-1 performance as Secret Service loon Chance, really helps you forget how hackneyed the whole opening gambit of “my partner got killed three days before retirement and now I must avenge him” is. Other points of interest, aside from the almost relentless action, the overall atmosphere of sleaze and corruption — perdition, even — include great supporting bits from Robert Downey, Sr. AND Valentin Vargas (whom you may remember as “Pancho” in Touch of Evil) and the fact that Willem Dafoe’s definitely evil counterfeiter character is nevertheless on higher moral ground than the cops. This 4K Ultra presentation is without a doubt superior to the prior Blu-ray (which wasn’t bad) — definitely an upgrade in terms of sickly orange sunset moodiness, sharpness and detail, skin tones, all that. Just a compulsively watchable package. The extras are old and include Friedkin saying “I’m gonna do this commentary for the film without referencing the film itself.” Oh, the experimental commentary days. — A+

Trouble Every Day (The Film Desk Blu-ray)

“They are jealous,” Catherine Breillat said to me in February of 2002, when I brought up to her the negative reaction that had greeted this Claire Denis movie in Toronto the prior fall. “The film is too beautiful, they know they can never fathom a film so beautiful.” Okay, the last part I’m paraphrasing a bit, I presume, as my memory may not be entirely accurate. But you get the idea, and right on. And so this beautiful film’s long overdue beautiful Blu-ray presentation is finally here. Which is all you need know. The supplements are not copious but they’re intelligent and coherent. Commentary by Alexandra Heller Nicholas; she starts right off on the opening credit’s use of Comic Sans. She recalls that the boos began not in Toronto but in Cannes.

Melissa Anderson’s booklet essay is cogent and sharp. The video essay from director Zack Clark tells us “the pace is languid,” which you know upon actually watching the movie, but the visual cross references to Franco and Herzog and Kenton and Browning and all those guys are solid. But the movie’s the thing, and it’s essential. Inspirational commentary observation: “What level of absolutely insane pearl-clutching bullshit is that?” — A+

Undefeatable (Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra)

This Godfrey-Ho-directed Hong Kong film (made in English with almost entirely Occidental performers) is a weird unselfconscious hybrid. The Cynthia Rothrock vehicle is a little disinterested in its martial arts elements — the most impressive stuff in this respect is Rothrock doing solo sword exercises — and favors serving up queasy latter-day grindhouse luridness, what with its rapist serial killer villain who gouges the eyeballs out of his victims for his coup de grace. It’s only eight years after Rothrock’s big-splash debut with Yes Madam! and she seems kind of tired here to be honest I don’t know, maybe the real problem is that everyone’s very caky face makeup is prominently visible in this 4K transfer. (You can also see the knee pads under Rothrock’s jeans in the first fight sequence, but that’s not a 4K artifact, it’s just…you know.)  So much of this really doesn’t work, and yet I had something like fun. The eyeball gouging effects are rather amusingly sub-Fulci. Because I was amused in this way, I may need help. Anyway. The final fight scene is apparently on a lot of social media martial arts “worst” lists and on the commentary Rothrock is good-humored in response to the japes, and even throws some shade at director Ho’s idea “let’s have you do a cartwheel with your hand in a sling.” Also noteworthy is the really ludicrous mullet on bad guy Don Niam.  Inspirational dialogue: “You know the rules: no knives, guns, bricks…or anything else” For addicts, mostly.  I may be one. — A