Let's get right to it.
Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver.
I can’t believe I actually carved out the time to do this, although if you check out the release date of the very first disc reviewed (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s August of last year) you’ll see it’s been indeed over a year in the making. Whew!
3 Bad Men (Kino Lorber)
This 1926 Western, not to be confused with 1919’s Marked Men, which was Ford’s first stab at the story that would become Three Godfathers, is a fleet and exciting film with a similar theme—the title fellows, en route to a gold stake, save the life of, and then look after, a fair waif. This disc presents a beautiful restoration terrifically augmented by a wonderful Joseph McBride audio commentary. Aside from its erudition (fun fact: this was Ford’s last Western for over a decade; he would not revisit the genre until, yup, 1939’s Stagecoach) it’s a master class in how to deal with, um, problematics. One of the movie’s most thrilling moment sees a baby lifted from the ground in the middle of what’s effectively a stampede (an antecedent to several stunts in Raising Arizona). The clear-eyed McBride, who loved Ford and Ford’s films, says “this is a famous shot, unfortunately in my opinion it’s reprehensible…I think it’s unconscionable to risk the life of a child for the sake of an effect.” And that’s that. —A
All the Colors of the Dark (Shameless UK Region B)
You never forget your first Edwidge Fenech movie. I picked up a German DVD of this lurid and nonsensical 1972 sort-of giallo in the mid’ 90s. It was a 4x3 image that was pictureboxed to honor its widescreen framing, and the image was sufficiently blah that you might have guessed the negative had been processed in dirty bathwater. And yet the power of La Fenech’s ultry-sultry screen presence somehow shone through. This U.K. Blu looks…okay. It’s 16x9, always a plus of course. The opening minutes, featuring the credits, are dingy enough to raise an eyebrow, but then you realize this was always a cheap film in every respect, not just content. Once you make peace with. that it’s completely watchable and sometimes a bit better. And the lead actor looks great. The package has satisfying extras, including casual but enthusiastic and informative commentary from Kat Ellinger (editor of Diabolique magazine) and Samm Deighan (contributor to that magazine; both do a podcast called Daughters of Darkness) and a 20-minute interview with director Sergio Martino. —A-
Battle Cry (Warner Archive)
Raoul Walsh conducts this nearly 150-minute adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel at a spanking pace, which is salutary not just for the usual reasons but also because the story is maybe 80 percent soap opera and 20 percent war movie. No extras here, but the widescreen color image is very nice. The WA release of Hell on Frisco Bay, while vivid, suffered during dissolve transitions in which color values were lost, a limitation of the material they had to work with. This is not the case here, for the most part, and in the rare occasions that it is, it’s so fleeting only the sharpest eye will catch it. Attractions include Tab Hunter trying to play drunk, Walsh using short fast pans as an accommodation to CinemaScope (see James Whitmore telling Perry Lopez to take off his fake medals, and Lopez then bragging about Guadalcanal to a group of strangers, all in the same shot). Aldo Ray playing a rapey character who is talked down from committing actual assault is a very, um, vivid portrayal. —B+
The Birthday Party (Kino Lorber)
Don’t know why I haven’t seen more Friedkin-heads celebrating the release of this 1968 picture, his follow-up to, um, Good Times, that Sonny and Cher movie. This, on the other hand, is an adaptation of the Haold Pinter play about a withdrawn boarding house tenant who receives a visit from some existential gangsters on what may or may not be his birthday. Their introduction is really special: the cut from Robert Shaw’s Stanley sneaking out the kitchen window to Patrick Magee and Sidney Tafler standing in the house’s sitting room is really one of the great edits in cinema. Friedkin shows remarkable sensitivity to Pinter’s text, and if you only know Magee and Shaw from A Clockwork Orange and Jaws respectively, you’ll be surprised at how good they are at underplaying. (I know Shaw does SOME underplaying in Jaws, but here he even underplays underplaying.) The image looks great relative to what Eastman Color in the late ‘60s generally yielded. Although I wish the responsible parties had cleaned up the soundtrack a little more. Extras include a Friedkin interview in which he relates material that readers of his Friedkin Connection book will remember, including how the movie irritated Joseph Losey. —A-
Casa De Lava (Grasshopper)
This 1994 picture was Pedro Costa’s second feature, and while it’s in some respects much more conventional than his stiffer future pictures, it’s still suffused, as they say, with a singular voice, achieved through formal mastery. And confidence. The much-cited influence of I Walked With A Zombie is evident but it’s more subterranean than many accounts would have you believe. The excellent Blu-ray image honors the work of cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel (who also shot, not insignificantly, Bresson’s L’Argent); aside from its characters and story, the movie is also about a volcanic island in the Cape Verde archipelago, and the movie’s color palette, its range of lights and darks, the often charcoal quality of the landscape, is well-represented. Machuel is interviewed in one of the discs’ supplements. The other notable extra is a 24-minute paging through Costa’s scrapbook for the movie, which features lots of shots of Edith Scob (one of the picture’s stars) in Les Yeux sans Visage; the famous photograph of Robert Johnson and guitar, which seems to inform the movie’s characterization of the role played by Isaac De Bankole; and pictures of Edgar Allan Poe and Edie Sedgwick. —A+
Chandu The Magician (Kino Lorber)
The dream team of William Cameron Menzies (direction) and James Wong Howe (cinematography) having some fun with pulpy radio-play characters, baroque villainy, in-camera effects and so on. The material used in the Blu-ray of this 1932 picture shows some damage (speckles and such), especially during transitions. Still great, sometimes dazzling, fun, not least due to Bela Lugosi’s scenery-chewing as a baddie named Roxor. (In future sequels he would play the hero Chandu, just to confuse people.) Commentator Greg Mank is super enthusiastic albeit possibly unavoidably stodgy in his praise of analog effects as opposed to these kids today with the CGI. Pretty much all the extras are taken from the 2008 Fox DVD, including a commentary by Richard Schickel that I’ve still not gotten around to listening to. —B+
Death Laid An Egg (Cult Epics)
What do you say about a 1968 giallo starring Jean-Louis Trintingant, Gina Lollobrigida, and Candy’s Ewa Aulin that climaxes with the introduction of a headless, all-breast-meat live chicken? Quite a few things, and I said some of them about eight years ago in a piece for MUBI, in which I categorized this picture as being one of the “genre films that embedded a Marxist critique of Western economic and/or social practices into the thrills of their particular subsets.” This transfer beats hell out of the Japanese standard def DVD that was my reference for the review, which like my first disc of All The Colors of the Dark, was letterboxed in a 4x3 format. The image here is pretty bright; in sequences when there’s a lot of white light pouring through windows you get the impression of tipping into overexposure. But everything holds nicely, making the viewing experience gratifying. I did not spring for the three-disc version that was part of the crowd funding campaign for the disc, which included a CD of Bruno Maderna’s striking modernist score. —B+
The Earth Dies Screaming (Kino Lorber)
This 1964 British sci-fi cheapie is one of those pictures that, seen at an early enough age, will lodge in one’s unconscious and forever resonate with the stiff, sniffy inverse-claustrophobia of its scenes depicting human survivors of an alien onslaught sniping at each other in empty pubs and hotel lobbies. The sense of desolate isolation created by director Terence Fisher and his cast (especially the ever-tetchy Dennis Price) is not upended by the ridiculous dome-headed killer robots roaming the empty streets, but enhanced by them. After years away from the picture, you’re not sure if it’s something you saw as a movie, or just dreamed. But it is real, as this Blu-ray attests. This peculiarly remarkable film is presented in a good-looking, smooth, 1.66 picture. The commentary from Richard Harland Smith is good and thorough (dig, for instance, how he identifies footage repurposed from Village of the Damned) and leavened by his dry sense of humor: “We begin…with stock footage.” —A-
Freebie and the Bean (Warner Archive)
Did Stanley Kubrick really call this the best movie of 1974? Because it’s not very good. This despite being shot by Laszlo Kovacs, having a theme song crooned by Bobby Hart , and featuring a glimpse of City Lights books early on. Other things that had me on its side included a terrifying scene on a building crane, a vehicle featuring the logo “Vertigo Trucking Company,” and, well, not much else. But as it happens, James Caan and Alan Arkin yelling at each other for almost two hours is not as entertaining as it sounds. (Yes, this is my first time seeing it. I couldn’t make it to the movie when it first opened, despite its poster tease "...and look who’s playing Consuelo.” [It’s Valerie Harper].) The image is vivid enough that it’s no trouble at all to see that during one shot in the rough-housing-around-the-fountain scene, Caan is replaced by a very indifferently disguised stunt double. The ending, when put up against The Color of Night, suggests that Richard Rush, the director of both pictures, has some issues with trans people. I guess the thing has curio value. Inspirational dialogue: “She’s on the pill.” —B-
Funeral Parade of Roses (Cinelicious Pics)
Speaking of Kubrick, it’s said that this 1969 quasi-underground picture by Toshio Matsumoto was screened by Kubrick as research for A Clockwork Orange. Lest that give you the wrong impression, this is hardly a picture about wayward/criminal youth, regardless of what Japan’s policy concerning trans people or cross-dressers. In any event, this is a remarkably striking picture in every particular, starting with lead performer Pita (a.k.a. Peter), whose portrayal of the beautiful night life queen Eddie makes everything else about the film possible. Pita’s own artifice of self-presentation constitutes an immutable truth that makes the movie’s diverse postmodern strategies not just unforced, but necessary. The movie’s black-and-white immediacy is beautifully captured in the transfer, and there’s a superb and informative commentary by Chris Desjardins, a.k.a. Chris D. of Flesheaters and fanzine fame (the prior DVD edition of this, from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, had liner notes from Jim O’Rourke—musicians looove this movie). The package is rounded out by a separate disc of eight shorts by Matsumoto, ranging from the early ‘60s to 1975, many featuring psychedelic music by Toshi Ichiyanagi, avant garde composer and ex-husband of Yoko Ono. —A+
Le Gai Savoir (Kino Lorber)
Released on Blu-ray in tandem with La Chinoise, this is arguably the more difficult of the two films that Godard made in the run up to May ’68. These prophetic pictures were of course irrevocably affected by the events they more or less predicted. Our world is still wracked by the concerns, philosophical and social, of the films; only the vocabulary has changed. Savoir, originally conceived for television, has no story as such; instead, it features Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliette Berto, as characters named Emile and Patrice (referencing Rousseau and Lumumba) but also as themselves, inhabiting the black expanse of a studio and talking education, overlaid frequently by montages that are, no surprise, quintessentially Godardian. The movie gets more visually “interesting” the more you watch it, actually, and the disc includes an informative and cogent commentary by Adrian Martin. Also, and this is not an insignificant detail, Léaud and Berto have the richest, most lustrous hair of anyone in motion pictures before and after this film. It’s not just the backlighting. It’s great hair. —A+
Gidget (Twilight Time)
The exceptional label Twilight Time’s always idiosyncratic releases suggest an alternate history of Hollywood. Not an anti-canon so much as an aesthetic animated by discrete pop cultural blips that were executed with notable technical panache. This 1959 picture, in CinemaScope and “Columbia Color” finds the studio, bereft of Harry Cohn (he died in February 1958) grappling to deal with the Youth Culture. Adapting a novel by Fredrick Kohner (Susan Kohner’s uncle, since you ask) that he based on his own teen daughter’s adventures with surfing, it came up with this oddity. Sandra Dee plays the title character, a “girl midget” who’s roundly sassed when she tries to ingratiate herself into a cadre of male surfers, including the snooty Moondog (James Darren) and the adult beachcomber “The Big Kahuna” (Cliff Robertson). Look for Tom Laughlin, Doug McClure, and Yvonne Craig in small roles. Cringe at dialogue like “Hey Moondoggie! You’re not going for that jailbait caper are you?” Thrill to the unexpected lyricism of Cliff Robertson looking out of the Kahuna’s shack at all the younger surfers. Directed by Paul Wendkos with an efficiency he would be disinclined to supply in his later films (trust me, I watched The Mephisto Waltz a few months ago), this is an often glum and tetchy film that gets downright weird when the moments of tension are broken by characters bursting into song, because while it may not be a full-fledged drama it sure ain’t a musical either. A fascinating artifact and of course it looks mighty good. Not much shaking in the extras department, save a typically astute Julie Kirgo essay. —B+
Innocent Blood (Warner Archive)
At the Venice Film Festival last fall, John Landis headed the jury, and so they showed a lot of his stuff, some newly restored. The video for “Thriller” isn’t that great, really. The making-of documentary is slightly more interesting, and creepy in part. 1985’s Into the Night, which screened in a restored version, is a remarkably indulgent movie in soooo many ways. Many of which sound cool. You’d think a picture in which David Bowie has a knife fight with Carl Perkins would be some kind of sure thing, but you’d be surprised. The whole thing is logy as hell, every scene a kind of non-sequitur. And the overall sadism had a self-serving AND self-loathing quality to in. It made me wonder: had Landis forgotten how to make a movie after that Twilight Zone business? Not that it wouldn’t have arguably served him right—but this isn’t the venue for such discussion. (Although, when you consider the entirety of the Landis Sage you may reasonably conclude that karma doesn't exist, or if it does exist, it is a weirdo rather than a bitch.) Anyway, I mention all this because part of my interest in this high-def version of was my curiosity as to whether, five films after Night, he had remembered how to make a movie. The answer is, kind of. This super-grisly horror comedy from 1992 sort of ups the ante on American Werewolf In London’s total disregard for human life. The hook here is a turned vampire victim who likes it, and can derive some advantage of if, that is, Pittsburgh mob maniac Sallie the Shark, played by Robert Loggia with chop-smacking ferocity. A kind of genre template for Loggia’s Mr. Eddie in Lost Highway. The Blu-ray gets the movie’s garish color schemes—lots of neon-lit nightclubs and stuff—very well. I said it back then (in Entertainment Weekly I think), and I'll say it now: any movie that puts Don Rickles and Dario Argento in the same frame has got something going for it. —B
Kill Baby Kill (Kino Lorber)
These are the times that try men’s souls, to be sure. On the other hand, think back to thirty years ago, when the only way we could watch movies such as All The Colors of the Dark, Death Laid an Egg, and this were via VHS tapes from Video Search of Miami or something. And now we have them on Blu-ray, complete, often restored, sometimes pristine. This 1966 Mario Bava picture is a key work in many respects, amping up the dreamlike qualities that would spin into a fantastic delirium in his subsequent Lisa and the Devil. It also features the Demonic Little Girl figure that would recur in Fellini’s greatest film, Toby Dammit. Which, Tim Lucas allows in his typically excellent commentary, could have its roots in Juliet of the Spirits. In any event, each director and each little girl is somehow distinctive in spite of the affinities. In the case of the one in this picture, Tim tells us, it’s in part because the child is a little boy in a wig, who was not happy to be in the role. —A
Letter From An Unknown Woman (Olive Signature)
This replaces the Olive Blu-ray from a few years back and it’s worth the double-dip I’m afraid. The 4K transfer appears to have been scanned from different source; there’s a Universal logo before the Dozier/Rampart card…but that’s hardly the only difference. The point is that differences are clear from the opening credits on. It’s a picture improvement of maybe 30 percent, possibly more. So, for this exquisite bit of canon you know what you have to do. The extras are almost all astonishing. Lutz Bocher’s commentary is unlike any I’ve heard before. His delivery is kind of abrupt (sounds as if English is not his first language). But his detailed formal analysis, and accounts of what the film could have included, how shots were constructed, and so on, all informed by production documentation and Ophuls’ own notes, consistently informs and fascinates. Tag Gallagher’s visual essay is a tour de force on the film’s very subjective POV. There’s a brief, moving interview with Marcel Ophuls, son of Max and a master of cinema his own self. Dana Polan on the origins of the production is very good. The only dud in the supplements (and not one worth docking a notch over) is cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ tiredly snide interview, in which he reveals that the first time he laid eyes on Letter star Louis Jourdan, it was in Swamp Thing. Wow, man. —A+
The Lost World (Flicker Alley)
This is hardly a conventional upgrade from standard-def to high. It’s a whole new construction of this 1925 granddaddy of giant monster movies, supplemented by a raft of scholarship and exciting related material. The movie itself, with giant reptile special effects work by Willis O’Brien, is an important precursor to King Kong but also a brisk and sometimes eccentric, other times repellent, adventure yarn, based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. The movie looks remarkable for the most part, and the commentary by Nicolas Ciccone consistently identifies the source materials for each part of the reconstruction. It does a lot more, too. Conan Doyle’s yarn was inspired, you will learn, by the real-life explorers who were the subjects of this years The Lost City of Z. Ciccone also frankly addresses the movie’s repellent racist aspects, particularly with respect to the character Zambo, a betrayal, as it happens of Conan Doyle’s more benign but still colonialist conception. The more pleasant stuff includes two Willis O’Brien shorts, test footage from his abortive Creation, deleted scenes. Serge Bromberg contributes a “Secrets of the Restoration” essay in the booklet—A+
Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (Kino Lorber)
Whose fault is it when critical reputations go down the tubes in a way that’s so ignominious that twenty years (or so) after the fact, a rep-series revision, motivated as much by sentimental regret as it is by critical curiosity, emerges to dole out praise and blame and woe? In other words, does every reassessment of William Wyler have to drag Andrew Sarris for his “Strained Seriousness” categorization of the director in The American Cinema? Why not accompany a celebration of Wyler with André Bazin’s celebration of The Little Foxes instead? Also, Ben-Hur is not that good. Come on. Anyway. This is a roundabout way of noting that this year saw the re-release of two 1950s policiers, based on popular novels by Georges Simenon about his classic detective Maigret. These pictures were directed by Jean Delannoy, one of François Truffaut’s favorite punching bags back when Truffaut was a critic. Invariably, when such pictures are revived, they are accompanied by complaints about how mean Truffaut was. Delannoy is not someone whose films I know a lot about, and when 1958’s Maigret Sets A Trap was revived for theatrical release in the fall, I checked it out. It’s not at all bad—Jean Gabin, while not exactly Simenon’s own vision of the detective, takes over the character with brio, and the story is a good juicy one. But in what should have been the film’s climax, I began to get what Truffaut was on about—the goods Delannoy delivers are talky, monochromatic, pedestrian, saved only by Gabin and the story itself. Not for nothing, but this 1959 follow-up, which did not play in any N.Y. theater in the fall, is rather a better picture. It’s got a more interesting story, the milieu is more intriguing, or at least intriguingly portrayed; the direction is better. And the 1.66 image on the disc is superb. Alas, that’s it for the Delannoy/Gabin Maigret films, so maybe I should be ticked at Truffaut—seems like Jean was hitting his stride with the material just as Cahiers was hammering him. —B+
Night School (Warner Archive)
I thought this 1981 picture would be fun to check out, as it was one of the remaining few entries in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film that I haven’t seen. About ten minutes into the movie I paused it to see what Michael Weldon said about it—he was a lot more dismissive than I remembered. And yet here I was, watching. Oops. No point in stopping now, though. The “Lorimar Presents” logo at the opening was a nice blast from the past…and the 1980s grain in the nighttime image was not displeasing. Nor was the news that the DP was Mark Irwin, who worked with David Cronenberg for many years. Sure, the director was also responsible for one-fifth of the second Casino Royale, as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Cromwell, and Sextette—not the credentials you are necessarily looking for in a Halloween derivative. Ken Hughes’ sense of restraint only takes him so far, though; while this decapitating-serial-killer tale is not inordinately gory, the vast array of red herrings the plot offers up include a mentally disabled busboy. Bad form. Also anachronistic is the half-milquetoast/half-smarm-king academic who, for all his thin-haired blandness, is catnip to the lady grad students. Drew Snyder, who portrays the simp, puts on a hilarious look of resignation when his character overhears the female dean telling a TA that she’s going to fire him. is going to fire him. So, yes, the main distinguishing characteristic of this movie is that it features Rachel Ward taking a shower. And she’s not killed therein. For very good reason. Anyway, the presentation is, some would say, better than the movie deserves. But my argument, as a general rule, is that all preserved films should be this well-preserved. Whatever. —B
The Old Dark House (Cohen Media)
As I wrote when I saw it in Venice in September: “This is the archetypal horror comedy, or would be, had it ever been equaled.” Or nearly equaled, even, I ought to have said. To continue: “Ernest Thesiger is genius incarnate as the house’s very nervous master Horace Fenn, while British stage actor Eva Moore is an exemplary crone as his religious fanatic sister. The movie brims with quotable dialogue, including the immortal line ‘Have a potato.’ The restoration, produced by U.S. outfit Cohen Media, looks dazzling.” Yes it sure does, and never more so that when Moore takes Gloria Stuart’s silk nightie between her fingers and says “That’s fine stuff—but it’ll rot.” You really get the fineness of the stuff. And the distorted mirror business that follows looks like it could have been shot yesterday. Extras are from the prior Kino disc. And are fine. —A+
Red Line 7000 (Kino Lorber)
One of the hardest Hawks films to see, generally, which has been frustrating for not just cinephiles as a general class but for Robin Wood devotees—his chapter on the 1965 picture is one of the hinges that hold his 1968 book-length study of Hawks together. So this disc is cause for much celebration. It presents the film well, with a solid image and clear soundtrack. The racing footage has some rawness to it, but that’s kind of an asset—there’s a resonance of period authenticity to it. At the start it feels like Only Angels Have Wings transposed to the world of stock car racing, but it mutates into a sort of All-American La Ronde, one in which the male characters—typical Americans!—suffer from sexual jealousy of practically maniacal proportions. Although the film, true to its era, looks at them as Normal Guys With A Few Problems. James Caan’s character is particularly truculent, and Caan portrays him with utter conviction. The whole thing’s kind of unsettling. On the other hand, George Takei has a small role, and the nightclub musical number is almost completely insane, and that’s fun, no? Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo, usually the highlights of the Twilight Time commentaries, are here, and Kirgo has a special insight—her dad wrote the screenplay. She is not as partial to the movie as the relation might imply, which makes for an even more interesting commentary than she usually delivers. —A
Suspiria (Synapse)
I know that Synapse head Don May, Jr., has been working on this labor of love for literally years. David Mackenzie, who did the compression and authoring on the project, is a friend and someone I’ve worked with on a lot of Blu-ray projects—he is the recordist on every Blu-ray commentary I’ve done in the 21st century. So I’m…partial? But I’m also a Suspiria nut, and a demanding one. If this were to disappoint, I might have just let it pass without comment. But honestly, I’d also be shocked, because I know the technical acumen and commitment to quality of the people making the product. Well, here we are, and here is a review of it, so you can guess what I think of the new version. Indeed, it is wonderful. Indeed, I’ve never seen it look better. Yes, all of the baroque lighting effects are incredibly vivid and fresh but there's more. The flesh tones are incredible. Jessica Harper’s “natural” healthiness versus the overly made-up overseers of the ballet school, or the ruddiness of the professor with whom she consults near the end—this contrast constitutes its own theme in the movie as presented here. There is none of the oversaturation that plagued the German version I wrote about in 2010. It’s beautiful. Perfect. Too perfect? Since the restoration has the enthusiastic approval of cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, I’m comfortable saying “not likely.” And the audio. There’s an amazing depth of detail that I’ve never heard before in this very loud but intricately “composed” movie. I’ll be honest, I haven’t even delved into the separate disc of supplements yet, and if I did things like declare “Blu-ray of the year” this would win in a walk, even if I never got around to those extras. The extras I did sample were the two audio commentaries. Troy Howarth is very informative with bios of the cast, stories of the movie’s development, and whether or not it’s a “giallo.” He says no and I agree. On the other commentary, David Del Valle and pal Derek Botelho kick around critical ideas, invoke Jung, and all that. They also speculate on a theoretical Suspiria expanded universe: “Are we to believe that some of these girls are part of the coven?” I got the collectible steelbook, which I pre-ordered for a mere $50; on Amazon it’s going for $90 as I write this. I pre-ordered not because I’m such a collectibles enthusiast, but because I wanted to SEE THIS THING, and man am I glad I did. $90 is a lot of money, and I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but knowing what I know now, I'd shell it out if I had to. If Synapse's pattern runs true to what it was with the Phenomena Blu-ray of a few years back, a less fancy version of the same restoration will come down the pike some time. But none such item has been announced at press time as they say. Inspirational commentary line, from Mr. Del Valle: “You can never use black magic to do anything good. Kenneth Anger told me that.”—A+
Witchhammer (Second Run)
To paraphrase John Belushi, I suggest you buy as many Eastern European period films from the '50s through the '70s as you can. I'm not sure I've ever been let down by one yet. This nightmarish 1970 Czech picture directed by Otakar Vávra—who began as an avant-garde filmmaker (his first short, 1931's The Light Penetrates The Dark, made when he was 20, is included here) and died in 2011 at the age of 100, with over 50 films to his credit—is a meticulous simulation of an ignorant procedural. Given the circumstances of its production, it is of course specifically allegorical. But it also speaks the universal truth that abuse of power should come as no surprise, and a few other universal truths as well. Its widescreen black-and-white imagery is dazzlingly precise, creating an unusually immersive atmosphere. Second Run, the British label responsible for this release, always does an amazing job with its releases and I'm here with good news: its Blu-ray discs tend to be region-free. That goes for last year's Horse Money and its new upgrade-from-standard-def disc of The Cremator, which I haven't been able to watch yet. So if you've been curious about this fare but lacking in what had been the necessary equipment, jump on all three of these. —A+
Young Mr. Lincoln (Criterion)
Beyond the high-def image, which is breathtaking, this Blu-ray reissue of a Criterion standard-def features a new, excellent supplement. Yes, I’m bookending Consumer Guide with Blu-rays of two John Ford films with audio commentaries by Joseph McBride. Here McBride considerately separates myth from fact and contributes deep-dish analysis of Henry Fonda’s performance. Frank as ever, he recalls some personal anecdotes about Fonda that reveal both commendable and less-than-delectable aspects of the actor’s character, but his storytelling never takes a punitive tone. He explains why Ford was usually anti-moving camera (in the context of one of this film’s few tracking shots, one which I reckon was suggested by a Murnau work) and takes apart the famous Cahiers du Cinema deconstruction of the movie. Geoffrey O’Brien’s booklet essay, featuring the line, “We are invited to indulge a naïve lyricism that always proves deceptive,” holds up, as of course it would. As for the movie, well, cinema doesn’t get more essential than this. As Orson Welles said (and of course this is cited by McBride): “John Ford knows what the earth is made of.” —A+
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