Equipment: Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.
Alligator (Shout Factory 4K Ultra)
Back in the early 2000s, my colleagues at Premiere thought it would be a good idea to entrust a feature on the Ten Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema to me and me alone, and since at the time I was still addicted to my own cleverness, such as it was, I put the David Hemmings/Veruschka photo shoot scene from Blow-Up, in which no actual sex, simulated or not simulated, occurs, at the top spot. The magazine’s media booker put me on whatever show Anderson Cooper was hosting on CNN at the time to bang the drum for the piece and the magazine in general. I didn’t want to go on. I was feeling fat, and I couldn’t put together an outfit that would accommodate a tie, and I just didn’t want to go. On the plus side, the studio was just a short walk from the office. I got there, got made up, and went to the green room with a complimentary can of Diet Coke. Anderson’s guest before me was this big beefy dude who was talking about how conversion therapy changed his life. I stood there in the green room lounge watching the segment with a skeptically cocked eyebrow. On the couch sat a young woman with a blonde bouffant hairdo wearing something not unlike a prom dress. The guy on the screen was detailing the depredations of the homosexual lifestyle. “I was a homosexual…a violent homosexual…I had sex with strangers in public restrooms…I did drugs…” Impressed, I said to the screen, “Dude…” And the woman on the couch snapped, “That’s my husband.”
“How’s that working out for you?” I asked. Kind of rude, but it was the first thing that came into my head, and such was my mood anyway. A little later, when the Formerly Violent Homosexual was through, they corralled me upstairs. As the segment started, Cooper, in his amiable way, laid into me. “A lot of old movies on this list,” he said, citing Blow-Up as the main offender. While not a math whiz, I made some mental calculations and pointed out that Anderson and the Antonioni film were precisely the same age (OK, Blow-Up was maybe a year older). Ever since then I’ve pondered the question of how old a movie has to get before it can legitimately be considered old.
So: Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague, starring Robert Forster, written by John Sayles, released 1980. Here in a 4K Ultra form scanned from the original negative, which is how experts such as Robert A. Harris like it. An under-the-wire entry in the 1984 Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (as too, one infers, was 1981’s Dead And Buried.) My old friend Joseph F. (also known as “Laser Joe” by the clientele at Tower Video in Paramus) and I were not, as a rule, big fans of revisionism in genres. So we tended to mistrust comedic horror pictures. Unless they had a connection — by lineage or otherwise — with the Corman horror comedies of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s such as Little Shop of Horrors and A Bucket of Blood. While Alligator was not directly affiliated, both script writer John Sayles and director Lewis Teague were more or less straight out of the Corman dugout. And as Jaws rip-offs went it had a spiffy concept (adapted from the urban myth about toilet-flushed baby water beasts growing to giant proportions and roaming city sewers), and, as we would discover, a tidy, blood-soaked execution. And look at that cast! Robert Forster! Jack Carter! Michael Gazzo! Henry Silva!
The 4K Ultra disc looks great — flawless color and detail. The flavor of a well-crafted low-budget picture is entirely there. Cinematic innovations include a toilet’s eye view of a baby alligator (named Ramon!) being flushed. Indirectly the whole thing turns out to be the fault of the herpetologist/love interest played by Robin Riker. Forster is reliably himself while Silva is very funny as an effete Quint variant. This movie’s only 42, but it actually feels old to me in a way that Blow-Up, say, does not. But pleasantly so in any event, like a longtime pal. — A+
The Brain Eaters (Shout Factory)
Psychotronic catnip from the title down. This barely-a-feature from 1958 starts off ultra-strong with gorgeous gray scale semi-abstract paintings backing the opening credits. (The credits were by Paul Julian, a fact I gleaned from the invaluable Tim Lucas’ great review of this disc, of which you ought to avail yourself.) The transfer shows a lot of grain but I reckon accurately so. If authentic sadistic cinema, per Benayoun, steeps the viewer in an atmosphere of perdition, this strain of genre picture steeps one in an atmosphere of narcotized wooziness and clammy unease. Like the out-of-step-by-a-beat walking bass line of the Pere Ubu song “Chiller!” (featuring audio of a no-doubt-TV-derived soundtrack of a movie that could be, but is not, this one), The Brain Eaters stumbles about when not hitting on bizarre moments of slap-you-awake shock. As when the pronouncement “The mayor’s back!” motivates a quick cut to the mayor having a hand-shaking mental breakdown and trying to put a gun to his head. Essential. — A+
Escape From L.A. (Paramount 4K Ultra)
On its announcement — as a theatrical release, back in 1997, we did not understand the point of this movie’s existence. I mean, 1981’s Escape From New York was a pretty pointed and entirely self-contained piss-take. The Big Apple was still in its ostensibly scary and blighted graffiti-splattered iteration. Making it into a literal sci-fi dystopia was an amusing conceit even if you lived there for real at the time. (Which I didn’t, yet. But five days a week Joseph took the bus from Dumont to the Port Authority, and then the 6 train down to 23rd Street to attend SVA classes. That counted for something.) To come back 16 years later and say “Okay, Los Angeles sucks too” felt like a weak move, a dilution of the original “vision.” And it’s not as if any of the filmmakers were splitting from Hollywood, either.
Maybe I was/am overthinking this. John Carpenter’s 1996 picture, co-written with Debra Hill and star Kurt Russell, who I suspect was leaning ever so slightly left in his libertarianism at the time, is a bouncy and largely comedic near-sendup of the dystopia genre, with a fair amount of rewarding action/exploitation goods. An earthquake and authoritarian politics = L.A. as a prison island and Hollywood self-parody. (Plastic surgery disasters, free-throw competitions; they’re in here. One wonders how Russell’s Snake Plisken sinks his shots with no depth perception. Because the eyepatch. You know.) There’s also, to an even greater extent than Alligator, a truly (and delightfully) random-ass supporting cast: Peter Fonda! Valeria Golino! Steve Buscemi! Bruce Campbell! Cliff Robertson! Peter Jason! Leland Orser! Amusingly enough the movie’s “now” is 2013. It all boils down to being a comic book movie of the good sort. (Marvel indeed did a Snake comic book in 1997.) The production design is droll but cheap, as the detail on this handsome but hardly extras-laden 4K disc underscores. Not essential but fun. Inspirational dialogue: “What are you here for?” “I was a Muslim in South Dakota.” Also: “We’re going to Anaheim!” — A
Expresso Bongo (Cohen)
The movie that taught at least two generations how to mispronounce “espresso.” Also the origin of the band name Tom Tom Club (here an actual nightclub). Laser Joe was a longtime lowkey fan of director Val Guest, particularly the getting-scarier-every-day 1961 The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This 1959 Guest picture, possibly a British-inflected riff on Sweet Smell of Success, is deft and pacey and more eccentric than it initially looks. Right from the sharp opening credits, which print the talent names all over the attractions of an arcade, ending with one of the film’s co-writers, Wolf Mankowitz, displaying Guest’s credit on a sandwich board. Laurence Harvey, playing a nonchalantly sleazy wannabe talent agent, really commits to his louche look — that skinny bow tie and so on. While not big on the verisimilitude that was catching on courtesy of the French New Wave, the movie’s contrived milieu does give a coherent picture of the strivers of Soho in this era. As Harvey’s discovery, whom the agent names “Bongo,” Cliff Richard, oft disparaged by us Yanks, really does have some charisma. And Shadows fans (I’m one) will be gratified to recognize Hank Marvin as a member of Bongo’s backing band. It IS a little disconcerting when the movie turns into an actual musical; one rarely expects to see Laurence Harvey breaking out into song. But he does, as does Sylvia Sims and others. So yes, this is also an obvious precursor to Absolute Beginners. A faboo time capsule served up with a spotless 2K scan. Inspirational dialogue: “Look, definitely no jazz.” — A
The Godfather Trilogy (Paramount 4K Ultra)
This — meaning, to begin with, 1972’s The Godfather — was the movie that changed everything for us, really. As much if not more so than Mean Streets, because it was first. There is SO MUCH in it. The character dynamics — which we recognized in at least small part from our own Italian-American upbringings — are so intense and lively. The “don’t talk business at the table” bit happens in less than two minutes and it’s amazingly revealing and frightening. Fredo going in to look at his ailing dad and holding his knees together like that… It’s just immaculate filmmaking and by filmmaking I mean all of it, acting staging shooting direction, dialogue, it just kills. “Look how they massacred my boy.” Jesus. Watching it fifty years later I’m staggered that this movie was made in my lifetime. No wonder it haunts Coppola. Whose introduction is lovely, by the way; generous and soulful and truthful and he commemorates his daughter Sofia’s birthday as much as he commemorates the anniversary of the movie and you can see he’s so proud of her. Made me tear up a little. Yes, Part II is a remarkable film but the first is the miracle, the precedent-setter. As to Part II: Pretty crafty, on learning that Richard Castellano was out, to not just put Michael Gazzo in the cast but to remake the character; he’s not a proxy Clemenza and he’s also, at first, something of an annoying jackass. Also: Al Pacino looking at Troy Donahue in contempt is cinema semiotics gold. In the final analysis, yes, it really is very nearly as good as the first. The emotions are even more wrenching; what goes on between Pacino and Cazale is palpable. And Strasberg is great. Have you seen, here and there, people who’ve decided they don’t like Strasberg as an acting teacher, who go after him in this film, citing it as evidence that he couldn’t “actually” act? Christ. Are they watching a different movie? Why am I bitching at you about this? Maybe it’s just because I no longer have the friend I want to talk about these movies with, not to get maudlin. As for III, or Coda: Andy Garcia is often a great actor but his performance here is initially pitched between Joey Tribbiani and Cage at his most manic. (Inspirational line reading: “I say we hit back and take ZAZA OUT !!!”) He does settle in, but he was the first sore thumb I noticed in this picture, which is a lot more lumpy than the first two but hardly a disaster. It definitely has its moments, many of them not directly connected to the diegesis so to speak: the curtains of a castle bedroom moving in the wind as an Elvis Costello song blasts from the open window, for instance. And some that certainly are, like Michael’s confession. And how about that Raf Vallone, huh? I gotta give Puzo (and I presume it’s Puzo all the way down the line) credit: he comes up with the best gangster names ever: Luca Brassi, Al Neri, Johnny Ola, Joey Zaza. I think all the pictures in this set look remarkable. The reviewer at DoBlu.com pointed out a couple of instances of “frozen grain,” one being Diane Keaton’s face in the first picture, starting at around the 13 minute mark, when Kay is remarking on Luca Brassi. Honestly I think those are actually Keaton’s freckles. Which I’d never noticed before. If I’m incorrect I shall be very embarrassed. — A+
The Halfway House (Severin)
One of those things Joseph and I might have given a very skeptical look at while DVD-trawling at a Chiller Expo. The kind of movie in which a woman brings in a picture of her missing relative to a couple of detectives and one of them looks at the snapshot and says “Nice tits,” and this is supposed to be a laugh line. Later, another cop introduces himself as “Sergeant Sheen. Dick Sheen.” Soon follows a sex scene in which the woman with the missing relative displays her own nice, um, secondary sexual characteristics, and the thing that’s supposed to be funny is that she and Sergeant Sheen are delivering exposition all through their exertions. While this horror comedy has a 2004 release date, it is clearly happily situated in the mid-80s world of Dave De Coteau. Not surprising, as director Kenneth J. Hall is a friend and past collaborator with the man. Anyway. This was shot on high-def video and it looks it; not bad for 2004, but there are instances when the images seem to be struggling to hit 1280. Mary Woronov plays a crazed nun. Of course. IMDb user review from 2006, headlined “Campy Schlock Crap From The Writer Of ‘PUPPET MASTER:” “OH LORD this one sucks. Pseudo-Lovecraftian garbage with very little gore, a few tits (but NO full-frontal), horrible acting - oh Christ, I give up - the list of negatives about this film is just way too long and encompasses just about every aspect of this piece of trash.” The kids have really gotten very demanding in this century. On the plus side, the movie features a pre-Benedetta use of a religious sculpture as dildo. Extras are minimal (the not replicated director’s commentary from a prior edition notwithstanding, what is there really to say about the movie as such?) relative to say, Night of the Demon (see below) which has a whole separate disc of them. But they’re not THAT minimal — the Hall and cast and crew interview is over 30 minutes. There’s also a tribute to Hall’s departed brother Cleve, a close collaborator of the director. I sound pretty bitchy about this so I should add that I am not wholly unmoved by the schlock love that clearly motivated this production. — B
Labyrinth (Sony 4K Ultra)
Really pretty staggering in the looks department. A genuinely eccentric film too. Kid’s film trappings with YA literature themes making for an interesting balancing act for the creators. For folks like myself, the puppet monsters and Bowie are the draws. The picture detail shows the seams in the ambitious special effects, which just makes you admire the ambition all the more. From the maggot pit of Phenomena (1985, see below) to this movie’s Bog of Eternal Stench (1986), lead actress Jennifer Connelly (okay, okay, she too is one of the draws for folks like myself) could not catch a break. In the aggregate, there are more fart noises in this movie than in Blazing Saddles, I think. Most of the relatively generous extras in this package are on the second BR disc. The Arif Mardin produced Bowie songs are pretty much what you’d expect of such a collaboration. — A+
Last Night In Soho (Universal 4K Ultra)
I’ve praised this movie elsewhere, and I remember telling Joseph that I’d be interested in hearing what he thought of it — he could go either way with contemporary genre pictures, to be sure — but that won’t happen now. Phooey. The 4K presentation is just as one would both hope and expect with a new production, that is, spectacularly close to the theatrical version. Extras include two commentaries, one with Wright and editor Paul Machliss and composer Steven Price, another with Wright and Cairns. They are properly energetic and wonky. The other supps are EPK Goes To Film School, so to speak, showing off Wright’s astonishing technical command and resourcefulness. Deleted scenes are a little over 9 minutes total and not without interest. — A+
Mister Majestyk (Kino)
Nothing says gritty like an opening shot of the title character leaving a gas station rest room. It’s actually a plot point, setting up M. Majestyk as anti-racist, and good for him. A lovely young woman whom Charles Bronson’s title character assists in getting access to the sink (Linda Cristal) introduces herself as Nancy Chavez, “Not related to the other Chavez.” So Bronson’s got 160 acres of watermelon ready to be cut, and Bobby Kopas, evil labor exploiter, wants to tell him who he can or can’t hire. But this isn’t the main thrust of the plot, as it happens. (And if you think film critics today are snobs, back when this first came out nearly every review I read made snarky sport of the watermelon-farming angle, for real.) That happens when Majestyk goes to the pokey and gets thrown in with a highly volatile gangster played by Al Lettieri. The pretty spectacular shoot out about 20 minutes in is the convincer that this Dick Fleischer picture isn’t interested in wasting any time. This story is from an Elmore Leonard script that the author later novelized, and rather interestingly, here Leonard the screenwriter doesn’t invest in ultra-vivid-hood dialogue the way Leonard the novelist did. And it doesn’t really matter. I didn’t get Charles Bronson as a teen — I was about to turn fifteen when this came out, and almost as snobby as your average watermelon-farming-disparaging critic — but Joseph always waved the flag for the guy’s persona, which was so taciturn as to make Clint Eastwood look like William F. Buckley. Eventually I got it. And I dig this picture, and the new transfer, which really pops out those highly saturated 70s colors. (In an onscreen extra, cinematographer Richard Kline is still excited to discuss his work on the picture.) Bronson biographer Paul Talbot contributes an enthusiastic commentary too. “Bronson had piercing green eyes — that was part of his persona.” Well, Paul, that was actually part of his physical makeup. He also discusses the “no mustache, no Bronson” rule. And tells a filthy story about Lettieri, saying “He had two young hookers with him he had brought to service the crew.” (No wonder he died of a heart attack at age 47.) Lee Purcell, on the other hand, in an on-camera interview, remembers Lettieri as a devoted husband looking forward to the birth of his child. Oh well. He was a man, take him for all and all, we shall not look upon his like again, etc. Good Blu-ray. —A
Monster From Green Hell (Film Detective)
Whoa, those giant animated stop motion flying insects menacing rear-projected stock footage in this perky 1957 monster cheapie are something else. Also featured: colonialist racism, which is courtesy of stock footage as well, and also of King and Brower’s 1939 Stanley and Livingstone. Some of it — and by “it” I mean the non-effects material — looks really great in terms of detail and contrast. The better to enjoy some of the weirdest production design ever (the lab with the sloped windows looking out on the desert mountain, with a brand new car parked just outside). The monster comes in a stop motion miniature model and, like Kong in his debut film, a full size head. Also, here, full size pincers. Kong did not have pincers. The Kenneth Hall film saves the “best” effects work for over 50 minutes in. The whole thing ends with a fabulously ridiculous tinted sequence. Maven Steven Bissette’s commentary is engaging and pretty thorough. As home-grown restoration outfits go, Film Detective is an exemplary enterprise that has a pleasingly random catalog (their prior release was 1947’s The Fabulous Dorseys). Their digital cleanups aren’t likely to blow you away, but if you have any feel for the film collector aesthetic as it is expressed herein, they’ll make you happy. Inspirational dialogue: “Nature has a way of correcting its own mistakes.” — A-
Night of the Demon (Severin)
Another piece of rare schlock you’d find in a poor quasi-boot at a Chiller Expo, or so I like to imagine. (Much of its notoriety derives from its having been classified as a “video nasty” in Great Britain.) Hence, the fantastic image quality here comes off as more of a shock than is sometimes customary. I was never one for Bigfoot movies and this 1980 item did not convert me, but it certainly kept me engaged in a morbid curiosity kind of way. The special effects are really gross. The approach, it seemed, was for an actor to hold a package of offal to the “stump” of whatever limb the bigfoot had torn off, and let it droop and drip. Yuck. The score by Dennis McCarthy is very Manos to start — flute driven and such — but then the synths come in. (In end credits, one Stuart Hardy is credited with the score. I’m so confused.) Director James C. Wasson makes some genuinely odd shot choices, cutting to the ceiling of a van after Bigfoot snatches the dude having sex therein, and the van’s bloody windshield after. It’s also got a weird structure, juggling flashbacks and opportunistic dream sequences among a wide range of peculiar characters. The penis--tearing-off scene is very John Waters. And throughout, the blood looks like a kind of hot sauce. The picture often feels like a weird high/low point of regional filmmaking at a particular point in time. Except it was made in L.A. by a director who’d later get into gay porn. (“How do you know about that?” he asks the interviewer in a pretty entertaining supplement.) Inspirational dialogue: “Officials found this camera with the film in it. But no trace of the people.” — A
No Way To Treat A Lady (Shout Factory)
Like Wait Until Dark, this movie scared the bejesus out of my mother when I was a kid. 1967/68 was a good time for scaring the bejesus out of my mother I guess. I was sufficiently impressed that I still haven’t seen Dark and I only just watched this for the first time on the spiffy Shout Factory Bluray, which properly puts across how production design and cinematography in urban-set contemporary pictures was then starting to hew to a slightly drab realism. Anyway, sorry mom, but it did not scare the bejesus out of me. The conception of the killer hasn’t aged well — strangler as walking audition reel, but Rod Steiger makes a meal of it, including Ye Olde Homophobic Hairdresser Caricature. That’s another reason I didn’t see this movie at first — when I was a kid I really couldn’t stand Rod Steiger. I somehow got it into my head that he was a slob in real life, and I was very confused as to how he could be married to that nice, refined Claire Bloom. Boy did I have a lot to learn. Maybe if I’d seen this earlier my misconceptions would have been a little straightened out, as he really does act it up here. “You should hear my W.C. Fields some time, it’s absolutely uncanny,” he taunts cop George Segal. Prophetic words, as Steiger would play the man — Fields, not Segal — in 1976. As to the killer’s actual identity, wow, did William Goldman (on whose novel this is based) have a bad experience with a Broadway theater manager? And what about his relationship with his mother? Poor Eileen Heckart has to enact a Jewish mother that even Philip Roth might consider a bit much. The picture picks up as it becomes more procedural, the double female impersonator scene with Kim August (at Joe Allen’s) is a real eye-opener. As are scenes of the superfresh Lee Remick conducting tours around a still-under construction Lincoln Center. In the sole extra, dapper film critic Kim Newman provides a cogent and informative appreciation of the movie, pointing out a Theater of Blood analogy; my two cents are that Vincent Price’s gay hairdresser bit wasn’t nearly as pointedly nasty as what Steiger does here. — A-
Phenomena (Synapse 4K Ultra)
This has a 1.66 aspect ratio, so I guess it’s Dario Argento’s most art-film horror. It begins with a killing, of course, the lush greens of the ostensibly Swiss hills giving way to a grimy window’s view of a waterfall and a purposefully grainy gruesome slow motion shot. That deliberate effect aside, the 4K presentation here is spotless and beautiful. In Argento’s cut there’s a moody slowness that lets the more outré points of the storyline settle in. The movie frequently riffs on De Palma’s Carrie but unlike Brian, Dario here really believes in innocence, and makes Jennifer Connelly’s character a veritable angel. To these old eyes the FX shot of insects swarming around the girl’s school looks faboo. I haven’t explored this multi-disc set in its entirety yet but what I’ve already seen warrants the grade I’m giving it. I remember trying to see the U.S. release of this (mutilated from 106 minutes to 83 by New Line, who also retitled it Creepers) in Wayne with Joseph in the late summer of 1985, only to be turned away from the box office because we were the only ticket buyers and the theater manager didn’t think it was worth his while to run the projector for just two patrons. That’s bush league theater management for you. — A+
Repeat Performance (Flicker Alley)
“Is Repeat Performance really a film noir?” Eddie Mueller asks in a good intro to this restored 1947 rarity. A few months back (or a few years back, who can keep track in this economy) I got pedantic on Twitter and, using Out of the Past as my template, held forth on how a true noir needs implacable fate and a femme fatale, and that I was getting kind of fed up with every policier being called a noir these days. Anyway, Performance sure is not a policier, it’s a quasi-supernatural tale of “if I could do it all again” that has to pull the trick of making sure that likable Joan Leslie doesn’t have to go to jail like the Production Code would say she would otherwise. Directed by the workmanlike-and-often-better-than-that Alfred Werker, it’s pretty absorbing stuff. Albeit not a 100-percent noir, let’s say. The fatalist angle is damn strong, the redolence of noir is definitely there. The depiction of a theatrical-milieu quasi bohemia is kinda like The Seventh Victim with money, etc. all very commendable. And the restoration looks fabulous. Leslie’s character at one point encouraging Louis Hayward’s character to have a drink is a real good grief moment. Also fun: “It’s William Williams, the poet,” said of Richard Basehart by Natalie Schafer. (Interestingly — and I swear I’m not making this up — I was having lunch at the counter at Hiram’s in Fort Lee last Friday, after visiting my mother’s grave, and one of the other guys at the counter was waxing rhapsodic over Schafer. “A lot of guys go for Ginger or Mary Ann, but give me ‘Lovey’ any time,” he pronounced. He then averred that Schafer was a multi-millionaire at the mid-point of her career, due to real-estate investments, and didn’t need to act when she took the Gilligan’s Island gig. And that she donated a lot to the Lillian Booth Actor’s Home [this is confirmed by Wikipedia]. And that John Lennon wrote “Lovey Do” as a tribute to her [this is not confirmed by Wikipedia]. Again, I’m not making this up.) My friend Farran Smith Nehme, looking good and talking sense, contributes an appreciation of Leslie, and the commentary by Nora Fiore (aka The Nitrate Diva) is crisply delivered, offering astute analysis, interesting anecdotes, and wisecracks. Inspirational dialogue: ”I feel wonderful except for my legs!” — A+
Stage Fright (Warner Archive)
One of the most peculiar passages in Hitchcock/Truffaut is when Truffaut whales on Alastair Sim apropos this 1950 picture. “I objected to the actor as well as to the character,” Truffaut says, and Hitchcock just rolls over: “Here again is the trouble with shooting a film in England. They all tell you, “He’s one of our best actors; you’ve got to have him in your picture.’ It’s that old local and national feeling, that insular mentality again.” The dude was still alive (he died in 1976, about ten years after the book’s first edition). Of course the thing that’s most objected to in the conventional wisdom is the movie’s false flashback. Which is itself a pretty snappy fifteen minute mini-movie of death, pursuit, and escape. And, among other things, sees our maestro trying to get a diopter effect through rear-projection. Truffaut said to Hitchcock that this movie did nothing to add to the director’s “prestige” and he’s not wrong if you want to be that way about it, but if we learn anything in Today’s Hitchcock Studies it’s that not one of his films does not contain essential points of interest. This has some standard Hitchcock features in various stages of development, including an inchoate change-of-identity theme. In the absence of standard suspense we get a series of moral corkscrews, and challenges to affinity. For instance, although the ever-grand Marlene Dietrich is (spoiler alert) the murderer, the way Sim hounds her with the bloodied doll in the fair scene is genuinely abominable. As for whether the false flashback works, or is even permissible at all, Chabrol and Rohmer as usual were right the first time around: “The revelation of the lie is at the heart of the story. Far from being an artifice, the lying account is the very basis of the film. In this light the arabesques themselves lose their apparent gratuitousness, since they are variations on the theme of innocence.” The only extra on this Warner Archive presentation — the transfer is never less than fab — is a Laurent Bouzerau 2004 produced doc with Robert Osborne, Peter Bogdanovich, superfan Richard Franklin, cranky Richard Schickel trying to look agreeable, and more, and in which the clips from the movie look like absolute crap, which underscores how good the actual presentation here looks. Alternate title: How I Found A Better Boyfriend. Inspirational dialogue: “Double gin and lemon. Not too much lemon.” — A
A Star Is Born (Warner Archive)
The 1937 original, and this Warner Archive presentation will convince you that it’s still the greatest. Staggering. I’d forgotten it opens with a wolf howling. I quite dug the Hollywoodized Willa Cather stuff with grandma: “We burned in summer and we froze in winter!” This recreation of Technicolor is just magnificent. It is an amazing edition but it’s JUST TOO SAD TO WATCH! Definitely, to my mind, the saddest of the four (but Cukor’s is of course a very close second). Director William Wellman serves up Hollywood self-hatred at its most pointed, but still delivers an earnest no biz like show biz ending. Are this and Rebecca Selznick’s best movies? Discuss. Alternate title: More About Alcoholism. — A+
The Three Musketeers (Warner Archive)
Joseph and I and so many of our consort from the 1980s on were real fiends for Technicolor, which only started looking good on home video when laserdiscs came along. For some time the consensus was that a Japanese laser disc of Vincent Sherman’s 1948 The Adventures of Don Juan, starring Errol Flynn and Vivica Lindfors, was the best presentation of the format, so we all paid through the nose for that, and enjoyed the sumptuousness, while also wishing the thing had been directed by Michael Curtiz. Nowadays the Warner Archive and Criterion people do an absolute bang-up job with Technicolor, quite a bit more often than not. It’s a veritable golden age. With this disc, of a George Sidney picture also from 1948, you get the dose right away, and you also notice that in the opening credits those arms holding up swords for two minutes have poor actual humans attached to them. This looks incredible throughout. It’s a slightly goofy movie overall, sometimes more pratfall than action oriented. But in a pleasant enough way. Gene Kelly doesn’t so much play D’Artagnan as play Gene Kelly playing D’Artagnan. After a bit one may start chuckling at all those swordfights facing the Pacific Ocean. Kelly going all SuperWolf over June Allyson is about as MGM as any MGM film gets. George Sidney directs. June is a bit more hotsy totsy than is customary. She, Marie Windsor (in a single close-up), Patricia “Funky Cold” Medina, Angela Lansbury and Lana Turner make this a real (elaborately costumed) babefest. The storytelling is a model of Hollywood narrative dispatch. Good Tex Avery cartoon too. Inspirational dialogue: “It takes a good man to prevent a catastrophe, my lady. And a great man to make use of one.”— A+
The Vampire Lovers (Scream Factory)
Not much to say here, except to thank Shout!/Scream Factory for the conscientious update of a canonical release that is also the absolute quintessence of Ingrid Pitt. How awestruck were we by her back in 1970, and so we remain. The transfer here really pops, in all the ways it ought to. — A +
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Touchstone 4K Ultra)
This is another movie that seemed like a miracle upon its 1988 release. It’s still plenty engaging, and inventive, and it definitely trucks in mythology rather than IP grabbing…but seen from this vantage point, it certainly seems to contain the seeds of something that became pernicious. Also, the allegorical race angle the scenario trucks in feels weird and alienating, or maybe I should say more weird and alienating; I can’t honestly recall exactly what I thought about it back then, but I was uncomfortable. And I think that Bob Hoskins, who could generally do no wrong, was directed into a corner by Robert Zemeckis. So…I did not enjoy revisiting this as much as I’d anticipated, as it turns out. It’s still a landmark, and still very enjoyable in parts, and relatively tidy as superproductions go — not even 105 minutes. And of course it is a superb source of Richard Williams. Not to mention Mel Blanc and June Foray. And this disc looks beautiful. Inspirational Wikipedia sentence: “Michael Eisner, then-CEO, and Roy E. Disney, vice-chairman of The Walt Disney Company, felt the film was too risqué with sexual references.” — A
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (Warner Archive)
Boy, can you imagine trying to get away with a two-hour-and-20-minute CHILDREN’S MOVIE nowadays? I mean, I guess if you consider MCU pictures to be children’s movies, it happens all the time, but I mean this sort of thing — a full on fairy-story anthology cum pasteurized biopic. Come on. And it was a hit back in 1962. Maybe it was the Cinerama? Laurence Harvey as plays one bro, Karl Boehm is the other. Man, Boehm was lucky to get this part after Peeping Tom, huh? The biopic part depicts the bro grammarians being upbraided for their dry output and soon discovering the joys of entertainment for kids which is also folklore. This is a great presentation of the kind of movie they really do not make any more AT ALL. The color! The lighting! The steadfast avoidance of close-ups of even standard medium shots because of the Cinerama dimensions! It’s a really unusual mix of the cinematic and theatrical. One that reveals its co-director George Pal as one of the truest inheritors of Melies. This is a two-disc set, one presenting the Cinerama image in “Smilebox” format, and if you haven’t looked at such a thing in a while, it takes a little getting used to. And even the standard widescreen version presents the implication of a Cinerama curve, of course. Among its diverse components, the movie offers Terry Thomas AND Buddy Hackett in the same sequence. And they’re both excellent. And the dragon they battle is a cool dragon bro. A picture of considerable charm when you come down to it. And damn, those cobbler’s elves puppets. — A+
This was so fun to read - you must have had a blast writing it! I loved the hilarious introduction. Really good stuff - don't you review any shitty films these days? I was half-hoping for the Flesh For Frankenstein and Blood For Dracula 4K double-bill this time round, but the The Brain Eaters and Monster From Green Hell will have to go on the must-see list now.
Posted by: Titch | March 28, 2022 at 01:09 PM
"Ever since then I’ve pondered the question of how old a movie has to get before it can legitimately be considered old."
I've thought about that, too. When I was learning movie history, as a teenager in the '70s, an "old movie" meant a black-and-white movie from the '30s or '40s (and sometimes the '50s). Local TV stations were still airing them daily.
But young people today might regard movies of the '80s and '90s as old -- and pre-1980 movies as basically unknown, as pre-1930 (silent) movies were to most members of my generation. As for when a movie can "legitimately" be considered old -- I don't think that will ever be settled. Old seems to be in the eye of the beholder, based on his or her age.
P.S.: I also think Mr. Majestyk is terrific, and I remember the watermelon jokes in reviews.
Posted by: George | March 28, 2022 at 08:14 PM
Well, let us not forget that a year later, Terry-Thomas, Buddy Hackett and Cinerama reunited in the Greatest. Movie. Ever.
Posted by: Michael Schlesinger | April 07, 2022 at 02:06 AM