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+

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+

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 +

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

When the sausage DOESN'T get made: Notes from an unfinished BR/4K Consumer Guide

So. Here I present something of an Experiment in Blogging. (And it looks like blogging is going to make a comeback, thanks to, um, Elon Musk sorta? Or maybe not?) Back in late March of this year I started work on another one of my SCR high-def disc Consumer Guides, because I heard the call, or something. And I took notes on the discs I wanted to include and then...other things started happening. The header of the doc went through from changes until it was ultimately this: "Late Spring/Early Summer/Ok, Midsummer 2022 BR/4K Consumer Guide Notes." And now it's November. And the doc is still sitting on my desktop, wagging its finger at me, and I've got all sorts of other work to do and not enough time to whip the notes into a proper Consumer Guide AND there's also the issue that we're now dealing with far fewer spanking-new titles than I generally like to have in such pieces. So I thought: Why not just run the notes. So any of you who are actually interested might get a peek into my process and also  to flog the actual titles that are actually great at least somewhat? So here goes.  What's blogging without a little risk-taking?

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

Adventures of Don Juan (Warner Archive)

Technicolor/amazing/ —A

 

Alfred Hitchcock Collection 4K Volume 2 (Universal)

A+

 

Born to Win (Fun City)

Very clean also gritty

Actually LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING, which it did not on streaming when I watched it for the De Niro book

De Niro is very good as plainclothes cop

Beach scenes are really beautiful

The score is really excellent

—A+

 

Caligula & Messalina/Caligula: The Untold Story (Severin)

Ugh the horsefucking in the international cut of C&M

Untold: Virginity is a flower that must not be wasted

Hoo boy this is indulgently rank

Kills a counsel’s son/This is a bad move

Grotty but a bit pro forma in spots. But it’s just warming up

Old ladies diddling young concubines/orgiasts eating fried chicken and such/D’Amato’s patented anti-erotic touches

Some enchanted orgy: Spotting Laura Gemser

OH GOOD, Horse Masturbation “We must not avert our eyes” actually no, that’s a good idea. AVOID 1:00 to 1:07

Limpdick fellatio, always a cinematic treat/the dude finally manages, good for him

This is one long ass orgy scene

Torture “I want them to suffer more.”

Untold Story is so utterly depraved on every level that it makes makes Caligula and Messalina look like Quo Vadis. Okay not quite but

Supplements: “Girls like Laura Gemser who of course never did porn, but showed off their beautiful bodies,” great observation

 Couldn’t keep his per diem because of casinos: Mark Shannon

“He’d do anything for a good fuck” — screenwriter Luigi Montefiore “I know there’s a shot of a woman pleasuring a horse, and I have to say it was not in my script.”

How on earth should I grade this?

Captains of the Clouds (Warner Archive)

Canadians! Alan Hale! Technicolor! The goofiest misogynist plot point!

Curtiz’s OTHER “it’s good to be in World War II” movie of 1942

Some awkward optical effects in flying scenes but also some dynamic (second unit?) stuff   —A-

Death Wish II (Vinegar Syndrome)

Paul Talbott: “I’m obsessed with the Death Wish movies,” yikes

Thomas Del Ruth quit after the rape scene/This is just remarkably trashy

The appalling rape scene. Oh that Michael Winner

Oy vey or just…wow?

This must have been a real comedown for Laurence Fishburne after Apocalypse Now

Inspirational dialogue: “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong?”

59 was Bronson’s age at the time of the making of the movie

At about the hour mark you start thinking, you know, there hasn’t been a rape or an attempted rape in some time, so where is this movie GOING?

The three rapists dancing with each other: at least they aren’t uptight about that sort of thing.

Oh, okay, then the bad guys chase a nurse and pull up her skirt, I was worried for a minute/Gardenia’s opera glasses “Target practice”

Ah it’s Tony Franciosa, always welcome/ As police commish/“My wife goes to a mace class.”

So wait is THIS why they did Escape from LA after Escape from New York?

Hilarious ending/the aesthetic principles of James Page Esquire

 — Ungradeable

De Sade (Scorpion)

 Action packed! Fleeing on horseback! AN AIP picture! Dope (and goofily lascivious) animated titles! Anna Massey/Not super great image/some stutter/A potentially interesting frame device that in the hands of a more engaged director yada yada yada/

On the other hand, why insult Anna Massey? A marriage anti-comedy

Dullea making goofy faces while being drenched in wine shot through red gel

Tim Lucas commentary is the best thing about it “most ambitious production”  

6 million holy moley!

Salvador Dali was supposed to do the titles

Lots of “what might have been” stuff/Comparisons with…Somewhere in Time, whoa.

Hardy Kruger’s daughter/Lucas calls his commentary a “defense” but he doesn’t come off as passionate about its quality

— B+

The Devil’s Trap (Second Run)

Striking, of course. Director  Frantisek Vlacil achieves the ideal of Scorsese’s flying camera, rather like that of Andrei Rublev

The bee sounds in the under-soundtrack/

imperfect materials but looks great for the most part

Striking juxtapositions/the miller’s son and a romantic rival fighting intercut with the priest calmly sitting at a sort of picnic table

Not as overtly “far out” as the other pictures in the trilogy but a trip nevertheless. This is what a “visionary” director does, kids

— A+

Double Indemnity (Criterion 4K Ultra)

4K anklet boost: check

4K angora sweater boost: check

This really is a hella dark movie — A+

 

Edgar G. Ulmer Sci-FI Collection (Kino Lorber)

Planet X: Dark and fake backdrops, black “Let us concentrate on this remarkable object.”

Time Barrier: The light to X’s dark/the graphic beacons

Transparent Man: Holocaust scientist

Each picture becomes a little chamber melodrama to some extent

Essential cinema — A+

Farewell, Friend (Kino Lorber)

1.66/Bronson dubs in his own voice/Put this in knowing nothing about it, didn’t even read the box copy/Admires Delon’s gun

DP Darbes, competent enough/post Algiers Marseilles/Whoever’s dubbing Delon is atrocious/dumb coin in glass trick

Put bearer bonds BACK in a safe? It can’t be. The ostensible scheme is to put bearer bonds BACK in this company safe. I don’t care if you ARE Olga Georges-Picot, that’s not a scheme I’d tumble for.

Worst Xmas break ever.

Bronson shorts out the AC so they have to take off their shirts only it’s CHRISTMAS BREAK AND THEY’RE IN A BASEMENT

Figures in a Landscape, but indoors. And not as good —B-

Femme Fatale (Shout Factory) —A+

Flight of the Phoenix (Criterion)

 Good picture, fun paper airplane kit, great Gina T. essay

Weird how Aldrich gives his kid star billing pretty much right before killing his character — A

Grand Slam (Kino Lorber)

Shoddy, misogynist, image all over the place, nice Rio locations. Who said this was good? Klaus Kinski plays a creep, who’d have guessed?  There’s no suspense if the guys pulling off the heist are assholes who you’d actually LIKE to see get caught…but there’s a twist! — B-

 Heavy Metal 4K (Sony)

The new audio is amazing, the image is pretty…well, as sterling as it could get — A

Lancelot du Lac (Gaumont)

2018 restoration

Fast opening

Like Pickpocket

“merveilleux” aventures

Weird violence

“The Grail eludes us. There was only blood and death.”

Shutting down the round table. All is lost from the start.

“Give us a purpose” Pile of knights: a junkyard

Unsubtitled supplement: Hervé Gauville/I almost understand much of what he is saying— A+

 

Legend of the Lost (Kino Lorber)

Let me do the Hathaway math: only a few years after Niagara and Garden of Evil /Cardiff’s chapter in Magic Time/Ben Hecht script

The Kurt Kaszner stuff is Hecht taking up unused notes for To Have and Have Not

Cardiff: “I can’t imagine anyone less like an Arab prostitute than Sophia Loren”

looks good, not great, (dissolves are a little dupey) no extras

The Roman city discovery scene is rather striking

Brazzi is super horny (rapey in fact) “I made you…virtuous”

The drama is mostly Brazzi or Loren losing their shit and Wayne yelling at them. This wears thin in a 1 hr 50 minute movie — B

 Paris When It Sizzles (Paramount)

1964 Quine Holden Hepburn Axelrod

Bossa Nova score, it’s the hip thing.

Noel Coward impersonating a heterosexual/Alcoholism of screenwriter played by Holden

“for all practical purposes he’s on the wagon”

Clean image

Dissolves are good

Largely French support cast and crew

Astaire sings an original song

Axelrod takes the piss out of Bunuel E Angel

Rather delightful and sometimes dreary

Fun cameos

“little person”

Look at this and Casino Royale and you get why some people were completely shocked by Holden’s appearance in The Wild Bunch in 1969

 “That Face” both awkward and brilliant

The deus ex machina of sleeping it off.

Inspirational dialogue “Depravity can be terribly boring if you don’t smoke or drink” — A-

RoboCop  (Arrow 4K Ultra)

 THREE AUDIO COMMENTARIES/The fan threesome is light and fun and a little obsessive

How Ultimate Do You Like Your Ultimate Editions

Appropriately grainy

Gory as hell, and still rather upsetting in that respect

In several aspects it is profoundly depressing about the loss of self.

The “paste,” “Knock yourself out”

Really the only movie that got the 1980s in America on every level

Boy poor Leeza Gibbons just did not get it did she?

  — A+

Schizoid/X-Ray (Vinegar Syndrome 4K)

Christopher Lloyd, Craig Wasson, Blonde Kinski drooling over his teen daughter, guess he didn’t need to go full method for that

Racism in the elevator/underfed stripper

 “ludicrous” —Psychotronic

Wasson at one point wears a white jumpsuit like that of Townshend on “Who Came First” “Relax…I’m a maintenance man.”

What do women want? To sleep with their therapist after witnessing him make a bizarro quasi-incestuous scene at dinner with his daughter, apparently

Herrmann ripoff score

An excellent 4K rendering of an often dingy-looking film

“the concept came because I walked into a Mel’s Diner and I ran into Menachem Golan’s wife”  offer in January, “Shooting by March”

X Ray: 1961, Harold’s valentine, humiliation/Kills the little brother/Yeesh/Oh the fakeouts once she enters the hospital.

Is HAROLD the obsessive janitor? How come he grew up to be ten years older than Susan? Oh another fakeout

“Didn’t I see your name on a checkup result?” You can tell the screenwriter really did his homework

Weirdest x-ray ever

The camera dolly that whispers, “yes, you will see Barbi Benton topless, you will, just wait”

Cannon follies

Ungradeable

Singin’ In The Rain (Warner 4K)

Whenever I mention my favorite movies I’m always quick to bring up Psycho, Repulsion, Stalker, that kinda thing and I think this reflex gives people a skewed impression of me that I don’t really worry about too much these days — I’m 62, how many more CRUCIAL IMPRESSIONS am I gonna make on people? — but still. So let me state unequivocally and unambiguously that this too is one of my all-time favorite pictures and I have enjoyed it with nearly all of the people I’ve been close with in my life from my mom to my school friends to my roommates to my siblings to my wife. And my cats too. So this edition which is so utterly beautiful means and awful lot to me.

Green: "I was working with the best people in the world"

A sorta round robin commentary

Behlmer: Oscar Levant was supposed to get the Donald O’Connor part —A+

Stone (Severin Bluray)

That She-Devils on Wheels wire decapitation trick never gets old, does it.

Ye Olde Biker Funeral

This wastes no time with things blowing up and going off cliffs and such.

Lots of RIDING

Real saturated colors here. Dr. Death gives the benediction

Undercover scheme

One of the bikers is named Bad Max

The investigation in which ordinary working people complain about the bikers is priceless.

Ocean sunrise scene is incredible/A really unusual picture, not necessarily what you expect. A bit gross when it gets excessive but worth a view. — A

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Sony)

This is the feature length version of Peter Sellers hitting his arm in Dr. Strangelove

Is this the shortest MCU film ever? Is it even an MCU film? How do I find this out? Do I care?  

Wait I saw the first Venom and have no idea what is going on here.

De-aged Woody Harrelson looks like he did in…1996?

“I heard the written word hasn’t been working out so well…”

San Francisco location = motorcycle levitating over a hill

“We are wasting our talent!”

Woody Harrelson’s eccentric pronunciation of “origin”

I honestly don’t believe prison inmates would applaud this guy

I didn’t like any of this Natural Born Killers type stuff the first time around so, you know

Really a waste of Naomie Harris

More CLIMBING

Rather inconsequential, possible because of its need to dovetail into some Spider Man shit...

Blooper reel does not live up to whatever you imagined its potential to be — B

Blu-ray and 4K Consumer Guide, "Laser Joe" Memorial Edition

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 23^rd 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+

Blu-ray and 4K Consumer Guide, WInter 2021

So I’m still maintaining this blog, but obviously haven’t posted on it too much. Like Dick Cheney vis a vis Vietnam, I have other priorities. There’s also the fact (not that I pay too much heed to it) that blogs really aren’t a thing anymore; they feel almost archaic. Yet here we are.

Some of the aforementioned priorities have diminished recently. I’m not going to get into detail but some of my readers at other publications may have noticed my contributions becoming lesser in number. This eventuality sees with it a diminishment in personal revenue, which led me to consider starting a newsletter, a subscription one even. So, I started gathering materials for such an undertaking, including notes for the Consumer Guide I’m publishing below. I made notes for other things, too, most hilariously an essay about a recent Van Der Graaf Generator box set, which would surely have rocketed my subscription base past Andrew Sullivan’s and Bari Weiss’s combined. All the while, a feeling gnawed at me. That feeling being: I don’t want to do this. Obviously conducting a newsletter hustle requires the hustler to go into it absolutely wholeheartedly and (in some respects, not necessarily the most obvious ones) cheerfully. Resentful hesitancy signals half-heartedness, and half-heartedness is no way to run a Substack or whatever it would have been.

And again, without going into detail, my anxieties concerning revenue are not what they were a few months ago. So there’s not going to be a Substack, not yet. And there’s probably not going to be an essay about the Van Der Graaf Generator box set either. (Sorry!) But there is, here, a Consumer Guide, now with some 4K UHD titles. And it is dedicated, for reasons he’ll understand, to the great Tim Lucas. Thanks for reading, as ever.

EQUIPMENT
My prediction in the last Guide, which was, “between now and next March I’ll get a goddamn PlayStation 5 and will try and knock out a 4K Ultra Disc Consumer Guide for variety and perversity’s sake,” proved highly laughable in the PS 5 department. Have you gotten yours yet? I just recently got a notice from B&H saying, “WE WILL NEVER HAVE THIS.” But anyway. At a certain point, specifically upon remembering that I hadn’t used my PS 4 for game playing in eleven years, I packed the thing up, sent it to a nephew who has four young boys, and got a Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player and it’s pretty snazzy. Then there’s the Sony KD50X690E display and Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. Which doesn’t have Dolby Atmos. For now, I’ll live.

The Damned (Criterion)

I recollect this picture being quite a scandal on its initial U.S. release — the distinguished maestro Luchino Visconti done gone and made an “X” rated movie. About Nazis! A couple of years later it would turn up at two in the morning on Channel 7 and I never bothered to stay up and watch because I figured it’d been cut to ribbons. When I finally got around to seeing it the first time what I was most struck by wasn’t the content but by how crazy Visconti decided to go with the zoom lens. Makes Jess Franco look like Carl Dreyer. Okay, not quite. But thank the creator that he curbed this tendency when he made Death In Venice soon after. Then again, the style here is suited to the movie’s almost hysterical account of Third Reich decadence/degradation/depravity and such. Maurice Jarre’s opening music inspires similar “what’s got into you?” thoughts. Bearing down hard on the anti-Communism of its Nazi characters in its first thirty minutes or so, it then sets in motion a relatively nuance-free account of fascist interpersonal dynamics. It’s kinda like Succession, but with actual Nazis! And with zero, or hardly any, likable characters. In many instances of laying it on with a trowel, it offers the sight of a naked Ingrid Thulin languishing in a bed rhapsodizing about power. The movie is possibly best considered as crazier cousin to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero in its unrelenting depiction of not just Nazi, but German nihilism. In the end, Helmut Berger’s Martin wins out not because he’s wiliest in the batch, but because he’s the most depraved. The transfer of the sometimes handsome, sometimes Tinto-Brass-level-lurid imagery is terrific. — A

 

Dead and Buried (Blue Underground)

This 1981 oddity has a premise that would be acceptable in a fantastic black comedy, which apparently this was originally intended to be. But its New Direction, suggested in part by the excellent effects work by Stan Winston, casts it as a mostly intense, gritted-teeth grindhouse horror. In which the premise is pretty laughable. But never mind. The movie’s midsection is a series of compulsively watchable scare scenes set in the dark and fog and distinguished by go-for-broke sensational brutality. As it happened, Winston left the movie after the New Direction was determined, and wasn’t around for the shooting of one late-scenario death, and the crummy effects therein show. (You’ll definitely know it when you see it.) The 4K rendering has a subdued pallet, plenty of grain, and packs quite a punch, and Joe Renzetti’s score will give your subwoofer/woofers a bit of a workout. The voluminous extras feature four separate audio commentaries, to which I can only say “thanks, but come on.” Your mileage may vary of course.  —A-

Deep Blues (Film Movement)

Dave Stewart, or to be more precise, David A. Stewart, commissioned, co-produced, and appears in this 1991 documentary shot largely in North Mississippi, about blues music as a still-vital and everyday practice in those parts. And yes, it’s that Stewart, the Eurythmics fellow, who’s first seen in black t-shirt and wire-rimmed dark glasses looking at a couple of busking blues men in a Beale Street park on a hot sunny day. But don’t balk — further inspection reveals Stewart’s got both head and heart in the right place, and in the supplemental outtakes he jams pretty credibly with R.L. Burnside on “Big Boss Man.” On Beale, Stewart is soon joined by Robert Palmer — the music critic, not the “Addicted to Love” fellow — who acts as docent. Palmer was from the south and relocated there after doing time in New York City as, among other things, a music critic for the New York Times. He also made some pretty fantastic music, in part with the great boho band The Insect Trust. A little less than a decade older than Stewart, the friendly, scholarly Palmer here looks older than that still — he would die of liver disease in 1997. A bad loss in a lot of ways. The movie is simple: Palmer, sometimes with Stewart, sometimes without, travels to the homes of musicians whose roots go all the way back to Robert Johnson — among these figures Johnson is a lot less of a mystery than he is in the larger culture — and lets them talk. And play. And director Robert Mugge keeps his camera unobtrusive. Shot on 35 in a rough and ready style, the Blu-ray looks fantastic in its way, and the plain old stereo soundtrack is vivid and crisp. Along the way you’ll learn who or what “Johnny Cockaroo” is. You’ll also spend a lot of time with Big Jack Johnson, a helluva guitar player, whose nickname “The Oil Man” derives from the fact that he made his main living driving an oil delivery truck. An interesting oddity: the white rhythm section guys in these Black-led bands all look like George Costanza, or some variant thereof. Mugge’s commentary is a dry but informative production account, in which he relates, among other things, why the pre-cult-stardom Burnside is seen here playing a cherry Telecaster. Inspirational dialogue: “The musician, he’s usually down on his luck.” Inspirational commentary line: “One of the traditions when filming or recording rural blues artists is to bring along a fifth of whiskey as a show of respect, but in our experience many southern blues artists preferred Crown Royal.”  —A+

Deep Red 4K (Arrow)

The friend who introduced me to Argento way back in 1978 at a screening of Suspiria at the legendary Paterson Plaza Theater — where the projectionist omitted an entire reel of the picture, and it made no difference to the narrative coherence —long ago abjured the director’s work, repelled by its trucking in what he called “the pornography of violence.” Watching this 1975 landmark, wherein Argento shucked most of his Hitchcock influence in favor of something relatively new and entirely garish, I felt my pal’s point in a more pronounced way than I have in a long while. The bathtub-scalding murder, and the camera’s lingering on the victim’s awful burns, really squinched me out. The images seemed completely unnecessary, like that shot of the knife plunging into a beating organ in Suspiria. (On the commentary track from Troy Haworth and Nathaniel Thompson, one of them notes that in the aftermath of the breakup between Argento and Daria Nicolodi, the female lead here, Nicolodi actually accused Argento of being a notorious, at-large serial killer.)  By the same token, going too far is one of the perquisites of guignol, arguably. And while Argento’s image-making instincts take him, and you, places where no one ought to tread, it also inspires some truly fantastic, elegantly disturbing picture. The quick cut to Macha Meril’s mouth as she takes a drink of water and can’t keep it in is oddly beautiful, practically Magritte-worthy. This too is the sort of thing that wouldn’t occur to most filmmakers and shows why Argento was special in the first place. In any event: this magnificent 4K rendering doesn’t present anything like a subdued color pallet, nosirree Bob. The mono soundtrack acceptable, but man, the 5.1 is a kick in the head with the incredible Goblin score and such. Story still doesn’t make any damn sense though, and who cares. —A+

Dune 4K (Arrow)

Having sat through the Villeneuve Dune not once but twice (crazy, right? Second time was mainly a cousin date though, honest), and having long held a complicated admiration for this vexed Lynch effort, I approached a re-review of this movie in any format with some trepidation. What if it felt more cheesy than Lynchian? This splendid presentation assured me the unrealized vision here was more 60/40, or even 70/30 in favor of Lynch. A trifle overlit in the way of ‘80s Hollywood pictures at the time, it’s still packed with sinister weirdnesses (Robin Wood, a stalwart Lynch hater, came down hard on the homophobia of that Harkonnen scene, and I can’t say he didn’t have a point). The dialogue between Jose Ferrer and that “Navigator” is almost Eraserhead-worthy in its way, as is the sight of Alicia Witt with that dagger. As far as that pesky narrative is concerned, hell, this lays out the whole plot in the first ten minutes! Pas de problem! But as we get further in, the awkward condensation of scenes (dissolves and such, which are very Lynchian, but not entirely well-judged) becomes highly noticeable. The wonky Star Wars touches are a little blush worthy — “activate a fighter,” you betcha. In other news, Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul has an iPad, and in this version, they actually DO say “jihad.” So there. The disc is beautiful, and the only way you should ever watch this at home.  —A-

The Emperor Waltz (Kino Lorber)

Moderately fascinating Wilder. Released the same year (1948) as A Foreign Affair, this would have been a valentine to Old Europe, countering Affair’s poison-pen letter to post WW II Germany. The director envisioned a Lubitsch homage but felt he didn’t pull it off. Producer and co-writer Charles Brackett pronounced it “in no way outstanding” in his journal.  Still there’s Technicolor, which is reproduced handsomely here save for the odd out-of-register-looking shot. And there’s Bing Crosby. Where McCarey used Crosby’s insouciant, irreverent persona to buttress piety, here Wilder has him swing into Old Vienna like Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea rocked the academic hermitage in Ball of Fire. Here Crosby’s character extols the virtues of the newly-invented phonograph and its accompanying devil music.  Joseph McBride’s exemplary commentary touches on Wilder’s affinity for jazz, first articulated back when Wilder was a German journalist. It also explores Wilder’s reasons for enlisting Der Bingle, and the conflicts between leading lady Joan Fontaine and her costar. — B+

The Guns of Navarone 4K (Paramount)

At its best, this UHD disc makes you feel like you’re looking at a miniaturized version of seeing Real CinemaScope, and for the first time. Those Greek columns and varied geologic formations have a genuine tactile quality. When Quinn’s sniping at the white-clad Germans from the mountaintop, I was like, “Wow! Look at that ROCK!”  Nevertheless Robert Harris, in his post at Home Theater Forum, is right (well of course he is) about the weaknesses sporadically inherent in the image overall. The sometimes dupey look is built into the original camera negative. These are most glaringly noticeable almost right away, with the optical effects of newsreel insets over the static shot of the title guns.  My ultimate takeaway was: when it’s great, it’s great and when it’s not it makes you appreciate the great parts. As for the movie’s content, I was slightly surprised all over again by some of it. You gotta hand it to screenwriter/producer Carl Foreman for keeping the narrative in the mire of it’s-a-helluva-thing-to-kill-a-man pessimism, countering the standard Hollywood heroics. Not that those aren’t there, of course, and “fan service” is certainly evident in the final death tally of the characters. For all that, when Peck says “You’re up to your neck,” it really does register. And the movie most credibly demonstrates a venerable World War II picture truism: When you’ve got a really tough job, leave it to the partisans. — A

 Halloween 4K (Shout Factory)

Inspirational commentary line: “John Carpenter was so committed to realism, we actually killed that dog.” — A+

The Incredible Shrinking Man (Criterion)

Once you’ve sat through this 1957 classic in its entirety, you’ll have one question, that being “So just where did Scott Carey record the narration?” Possibly the same place where Toby Dammit recorded his, I reckon. Anyway. A Universal picture, directed by Jack Arnold and produced by Albert Zugsmith, it of course features William Schallert in a key supporting role, that of a doctor. The one who has to ponder the statement: “People don’t get shorter…they just don’t get shorter.” And yet Scott Carey does, and at each stage of his shrinkage deals with it in different ways, like almost having an affair with a carnival employee. Eventually he gets into a doll house and there has his first face off with the cat. As housecats go, it’s pretty mangy looking. And a real biter too. Lead actor Grant Williams looks a tad like Aaron Sorkin, really. The transfer shows off the movie’s admirable effects ingenuity. But also underscores the optical effects that tend to look dupey. It’s kind of staggering this hasn’t been remade — not that I’m recommending it — given what effects supervisors could do with LCD backdrops and such. In any event, the overall presentation of this Existential Nightmare Redeemed (remember, as Scott notes in his recorded-God-knows-where narration, his reduction to near-atom size is in fact the Beginning Of A Great Adventure, maybe) is exemplary Criterion — respectful and thorough. In supplements, Richard Matheson’s son talks Eisenhower era anxiety; there’s a pleasing, coherent effects breakdown; and comedian Dana Gould and cinematic maestro Joe Dante discuss the movie in amiable, diverting, often amusing style. — A

 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 4K (Paramount)

Good news! My post-teen misogyny seems to have substantially waned, because I did not bristle with loathing over Kate Capshaw’s performance the way I did when I first saw the picture at the not-all-that tender age of 24. For whatever reason her characterization of a character who’s supposed to be mostly endearingly exasperating in a screwball comedy way made me just plain exasperated. Watching the movie now I was more inclined to notice that the Willie Scott role is actually anti-screwball in its conception: while the exasperating females in Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth and what have you are almost uniformly smarter and more resourceful than their male counterparts/foils, the nightclub singer along for the ride with Indy and Short Round is just an imposition and burden, albeit a physically attractive one. Now, as to Short Round…oh never mind. This is one of four films included in Paramount’s 4K UHD set of Jones movies, and it’s the only one I’ve watched so far and I was very taken by its look and sound. And I was largely taken by the movie itself, in spite of all its very manifest flaws and objectionable bits (not mutually exclusive, these) because the action set pieces are such a kick. I lay blame for the faults (all of them) on screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Not to gang up on the team behind Howard the Duck — and hey, I think Messiah of Evil is a too-unheralded chef d’oeuvre of sorts — but the binding material they concoct is complete plaster compared to the story structure that held Raiders together. Of course it’s ultimately Spielberg’s mistake in accepting this flimsy contrivance but I surmise he was too excited about putting together the set pieces to really notice or care. Maybe. Anyway, the set pieces: great.— A

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 4K (Kino Lorber)

It’s kind of weird, and certainly against all odds, that (up until Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers, at least) this story has been made into a moving picture three times and all three of the moving pictures are in their way exceptional. (At the time I first posted this, I had forgotten that the 2007 The Invasion had broken the streak...and why wouldn't I forget that?) This one, directed by Phillip Kaufman in 1978 from a script by the too-undervalued W.D. Richter, is oft lauded for its satirical bent (the pods come to San Francisco, then the mecca of self-help and self-realization cult-like processes, get it?) and that factors into its effectiveness to be sure — Chicago-born Kaufman had been a Frisco resident since 1960, gets the environment with an offhanded mastery. But the movie is also steeped in an atmospheric unease that goes far beyond satire. It’s a film of genuinely eccentric, unnerving choices. From the opening in which the pods leave an alien planet and journey to earth with truly overbearing music (Denny Zeitlin) accompanying the action onward. Brooke Adams and Art Hindle are introduced by a voyeuristic camera, moving implacably down corridors to home in on the reflections of their characters rather than the characters themselves. The scenario makes an already unhappy marriage the fulcrum on which the discovery is first hinged. Cinematographer Michael Chapman, only a couple of pictures ahead of Taxi Driver, almost repeats the famed lateral dolly from the excruciating Bickle-on-the-pay-phone scene in a shot in which Adams and Donald Sutherland clinch by an elevator, about 24 minutes in. Dig, too, the distorted reflection of Jeff Goldblum in the bookstore mirror, and the fact that Sutherland never repairs the shattered windshield he suffers at the beginning of the movie. The 4K image on this edition is fabulous added value to the overall cinematic richness. —  A+

Jet Pilot (Kino Lorber)

Howard Hughes wanted a movie about aviation and hotness. Josef Von Sternberg wanted…work. The hijinks began in 1949, pairing a 22-year-old (but looking 18) Janet Leigh with a 42-year-old (but looking 55) John Wayne. The cast also features J.C. Flippen at his most suave. No really, he’s very polished here, as befits his ARMY BRASS role. The result, not unleashed on a drooling public until 1957) was one of the most exhilarating movies about nothing, or maybe about star charisma, ever made. Leigh, as a not-quite-defecting Soviet flyer (oh those egalitarian commies), doesn’t even try an accent, and I’d bet that Sternberg didn’t even ask her to. A typical Hughes touch is the obnoxious leering jet sound effects as Leigh removes each individual piece of her flight suit after landing. The Kino disc does not advertise as a new scan, but it looks plenty sharp and we’re offered a choice between 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios — given when its principal photography began, you know which one to watch. The movie’s depictions of American Plenty are properly vulgar, what with the half-foot-thick steaks, which actually trigger Leigh’s ultimate abandonment of the USSR. Where there are zero steaks and the barracks are in such a poor area they can’t even afford real scenery — the backdrops are remarkably obvious paintings. Its utter, blissful triviality is so scrupulously hewed to that it becomes transcendent, and hence Essential Cinema. There’s no commentary. Make up your own.  Andrew Sarris: “an ecstatic flight of speed, grace and color.” Jean-Luc Godard: “Chaplin said […] tragedy is life in close-up, and comedy, life in long shot. I said to myself, I’m going to make a comedy in close-up: the film will be tragi-comic. Sternberg’s Jet Pilot is also a close-up comedy. That’s why it didn’t go down well.” Inspirational dialogue, as Wayne shows Leigh some U.S.-made lingerie: “That’s one thing we have in common with the Soviets.” “What’s that?” “We both believe in uplifting the masses.” And from Leigh, solo: “The water is so hot.” — A

 John Carpenter’s The Thing 4K (Universal)

After watching this in 4K for the first time, I looked up the contemporary reviews of the movie and came to the conclusion that film critics, as a class, were then almost as dumb as film actors. Maybe dumber. And the situation is, revisionism on this particular movie notwithstanding, even worse today. I will not be taking any questions at this time. Anyhow. Image wise, I found this superb; what audiophiles call reference quality. The actual audio has elicited some dissatisfaction in certain corners but to my ears the lossless DTX soundtrack gets the job done. Carpenter’s mastery of film language is strongly present throughout, and it’s instructive to keep track of when he and cinematographer Dean Cundey keep their anamorphic frame in full focus and when and how they go shallow. In the latter instances they keep the backgrounds distinct but not too distinct. A nice kind of head-fake in the “don’t look behind you” suspense column. — A+

 The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster (Kino)

So this is neither a Blu-ray or a 4K release — indeed, with 4K especially you might say super-high-resolution would, given the nature of the material, “defeat its own purpose” — and it’s not brand spanking new and the filmmaker is an old friend which is a crucial reason I’ve not covered this disc. The friend is Michael Schlesinger, a venerable and passionate film scholar and enthusiast who did a lot of hard time managing rep for a mega-corporation that often didn’t know its assets from its elbow. You’ve likely heard his commentaries on fare such as It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Producers and other not-dissimilar titles, in which case you know the kind of madcap stuff he likes. The fictional comedy team of Biffle and Shooster is a concept that could only have sprung from his mind, and I do mean that as a compliment. The five picture collected here are made-in-the-21^st-century fake comedy shorts from the ‘30s, featuring the above-named and titular fictional comedy team. Played of course by real actors, Nick Santa Maria and Will Ryan, who shared Mike’s vision to the extent that they’re credited as co-creators of their characters.  Santa Maria’s Biffle is the goofy super-nervous one and Ryan is the dyspeptic and relatively straight-mannish Shooster. On this collection they Stooge and Niagara Falls their way through five “missions of mayhem” including a private-eye spoof guest-starring Robert Forster and an unapologetically Borscht-Belt Bride of Frankenstein send up. Much of the humor is as apt to elicit groans as laughs. I don’t think that’s accidental — the nudging is the point. I was sad to learn last month of the death of Will Ryan, half of the duo of amiable zanies. It reminded me that one thing about the Biffle and Shooster shorts that was wholly unmitigated was its absolute movie love. And that makes this object worth buying, and cherishing. —A

New York Ninja (Vinegar Syndrome)

Vinegar Syndrome’s devotion to the Grindhouse Dream in all its manifestations is 100 percent admirable even if not every title upon which it expends such exemplary care gives me the buzz I’m seeking. (Volume one of its Forgotten Giallo box had me muttering “there are reasons these were forgotten” more than once.)  I was at least mildly skeptical about this special project for the company, an unfinished 1984 picture with a self-explanatory title. Abandoned by director/star John Liu before any editing process began, with no dialogue or music nor any script to consult, it was assembled into a whole by Kurtis Spieler, who provides an informative commentary. A company of classic exploitation movie actors — Leon Isaac Kennedy, Linnea Quigley, Michael Berryman, Cynthia Rothrock, and Ginger Lynn Allen — dubbed in newly-written dialogue, some of it apparently extrapolated via lip-reading. I know what you might be thinking and I thought it too: “Uh-huh.” It was only after a recommendation from my buddy the writer and artist Bob Fingerman that I sought took the plunge, and I’m rather glad I did. Ninja really does approximate the True Grindhouse Experience in the Comfort Of Your Own Home (which is a big plus when you get to be my age). The likely wholly unlicensed NYC lensing is big on period interest (although a little on the narrow side — Liu never wastes a chance to get the Twin Towers in his lens), the plotline (initially concerned with a personal revenge story set in a milieu in which “drugged out scum” are roaming wild in the city doing horrible crimes) dips into some weird sci-fi shit about a half-hour in, the fake newspaper headlines are so bad they’re almost poignant (“Another Lady Vanishes Abductions Continue”) and so on. The music and dubbing are so apropos you’d swear this thing is a fully realized 1984 film. And the image quality is shockingly good, like straight-from-the-lab good. A unique entertainment. Inspirational dialogue: “Looks like we got ourselves a hero!” — A

 A Night at the Opera (Warner Archive)

As a Marxist sourpuss, I used to hew to the party line that Irving Thalberg ruined the brothers for film by imposing tighter structures and such on their anarchic antics. My memories of Allan Jones in this were particularly cringe. I don’t know if it’s age or Scott Walker who softened me up to the guy, but now I find him entirely tolerable and hell, if Zeppo wanted to retire why not. And I also very much enjoy the movie itself, and not just because Harpo doesn’t get to chase any gamines around. It’s a focused light comedy that goes down easy and has a lot of marvelous highlights. The musical interlude shipboard is awfully sweet too — Harpo and Chico Among The Children, acting like they should. Also: “Boogity boogity boogity.” The image here has a wonderful brisk clarity. Yes, the picture was/is at the top of a long downward slope for the fellas but nothing in the actual film necessarily indicates this. Give it a shot, you may be pleasantly surprised. — A

Operation Burma/Santa Fe Trail (Warner Archive)

I remember reading, way back in the day, in some Andrew Sarris volume or other, Sarris averring that the Raoul Walsh/Errol Flynn pictures were better than the Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn pictures, so when these came from the Warner Archives at roughly the same time I figured it might be fun to use them to put the idea to the test. Burma is one of the made-during-World-War-II movies (first screened January 1945) in which the Japanese forces are referred to in the racist terms they were likely referred to as by actual Allied soldiers in that was and is additionally one of the “Give America all the credit” WW II movies. This is the Walsh movie, with a Franz Waxman score, and both craftpersons are pulling out all the stops here. This transfer is from original materials so there’s no “Sorry, Great Britain for snubbing you” disclaimer in the opening — this was put on prints after Great Britain raised holy hell about it. Way after Great Britain raised holy hell about it — 1952. Despite all the fictionalization this is a very wonky picture that’s consistently confident in putting across the illusion that it’s giving you the real story fair and square. That of “Merrill’s Marauders,” such as they are, slicing through a “Jap-infested jungle,” yeow. Looks clean as a whistle, with lots of what you could call “good” grain. Contains many lingering shots of reconnaissance plane equipment and such. Featuring Samuel Beckett lookalike Erville Alderson and the future Doberman.  Now. As for Santa Fe Trail. Curtiz in 1940, on a pretty good run as you may recall. You know you’re in for some “fun” when an explanatory opening text speaks of West Point’s “brilliant commandant” Robert E. Lee. But it gets worse. This phantasmagorical slop bucket of racist rationalization and Confederate-coddling is objectionable from start to finish but you almost have to hand it to the ideologically blinkered Curtiz — he would have made a great used car salesman. Curtiz’s fluid, impassioned camera never misses a trick, the staging is masterful, Sol Polito cinematography has that good Expressionist redolence. The movie also, one has to say, underscores Curtiz’s weaknesses as a director — his people are a lot shallower than those of Hawks and Ford. But the leads are great eye candy — Flynn grows and keeps a mustache, Olivia de Havilland is absolutely charming. Reagan is Reagan, and he’s playing George Custer, so you can happily imagine his ultimate fate. Raymond Massey’s John Brown is introduced about 25 minutes in. The actor displays utter conviction playing an utter nutjob but he refuses to project villainy, a salutary choice. Must have chapped Ward Bond’s ass to play an abolitionist, you think? Anti-inspirational dialogue, from Flynn’s J.E.B. Stuart: “It isn’t our job to decide who’s right and who’s wrong about slavery. Any more than it is John Brown’s.” Oh get stuffed. — A- to both.

The Outsiders: The Complete Novel 4K (Warner)

S.E. Hinton’s novel was foisted upon me when I was in my early teens as something I “ought to” read (as opposed to A Clockwork Orange or Funeral Rites, both of which I’d perhaps too-enthusiastically consumed by this time) and it did nothing for me. Not just because its terse, plain prose style didn’t appeal to me at all, but because as a Jersey suburbanite I couldn’t get with these relentlessly sentimental post-greaser mid-Western kids. And despite my devotion to Coppola, my 23-year-old self couldn’t relate to them onscreen, either. (Rumble Fish is a wholly other story, for reasons I explored here.) Watching this new rendition of the film it still speaks to me loudest as a curio of high visual interest, especially with respect to the stuff homaging Gone With The Wind. I also dig those GIANT closeups of Ponyboy as he goes into his reverie. Helluva cast, too: Tom Waits! William Smith! Melanie Meyrink! Coppola’s new, and rather moving, ten-minute intro to the film reminds you that he is the only director in recorded history who made a film at the request of middle school student petition.  — A+

The Servant 4K (Canal)

Some movies reveal themselves to you more and more on repeated viewings, and why wouldn’t they. The uncanny thing about The Servant is that it just gets more naggingly mysterious and disturbing. This spotless presentation conveys the film’s frostiness almost too well. You can choose between watching in 1.66 and 1.77 aspect ratios. Given that the compositions are such you’d swear that the movie emerged from Zeus’s (Losey’s, that is) brow in 1.66, I can’t imagine why you’d watch in 1.77. Because you can, I guess. — A+  

 Sex World 4K (Vinegar Syndrome)

Certainly some of you out there must be wondering: what does porn look like in 4K? Specifically, what does vintage porn, which for a brief span of time was actually shot on 35mm film, look like in 4K? Well. Let me tell you. The colors in this 1978 quasi-futuristic yarn of the troubled souls looking for satisfaction/catharsis at the title resort are often remarkable vivid. So, too, are the pimples and ingrown hairs on the intimate body parts of several performers. While directed by Anthony Spinelli, the movie suffers from Gerard Damiano Disease, that is, a compulsion to get almost sick-makingly self-serious about the dysfunctions its motley characters suffer from. Also it really skimps on the Annette Haven content. I absolutely credit Vinegar Syndrome for being format pioneers here, while wishing they’d have given the 4K treatment to something more funsy, like Mary Mary. I’m sure they have their reasons.. — B

 Some Came Running (Warner Archive)

What can I say? I named this damn blog after the movie, which I went into some detail on here.  And a few years later, for Decider, I wrote on it some more. So hell yes, I have been wishing and hoping that this would make it to Blu-ray for some time. Now it has, and It looks remarkably fine, crisp and clear with excellent color values. Director Vincente Minnelli’s mise-en-scene is as on point as ever and his camera ever so slightly more noticeably mobile than usual. The proscenium is less prominent than in such other landmark melodramas as 1955’s The Cobweb or 1960’s Home From The Hill. The final shot, a graceful funeral scene that closes with the very significant gesture of Dean Martin’s Alabama taking his hat off to a character he had previously rather grossly disparaged, is an all time. And watching it, I was hit with the nauseating realization that the Russo brothers were likely paying their own form of homage to it in the ghastly closing shot of Endgame. Anyway, this shot is way better than the one in Endgame. — A+

A Salvage Edition of a Quarantine Blu-Ray Consumer Guide

I started this in late March 2020. And then I stopped work on it because I realized it (“it” meaning staying inside) WOULD NEVER END, maybe. Some time in summer I spruced up the notes. But not a whole lot. From March on, too, I had book stuff to do, I was teaching, and to be honest I was sufficiently dispirited in a particular way that I also did not feel much like doing any work that I did not have to do.  So this is kind of…dated? What IS dated nowadays? Who can really say?  I cleaned it up and am publishing it now because, well, I put in the initial work and also because sometime between now and next March I’ll get a goddamn Playstation 5 and will try and knock out a 4K Ultra Disc Consumer Guide for variety and perversity’s sake. As Your Favorite President used to like to tweet, Enjoy!

EQUIPMENT: PlayStation 4 player, OPPO BDP 83 player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

Action of the Tiger (Warner Archive)

Here’s a novelty: Van Johnson trying to do Humphrey Bogart. I like Van Johnson, but as shifters of personae go, he’s no Dick Powell. When in Greece, his free and easy “I own a boat” character drops mots like “Sorry boys it’s all Greek to me,” ar ar ar. The color picture is grainy but…colorful. Some interiors look like smoke filled rooms. Maybe they ARE smoke filled rooms. An early supporting role for Sean Connery as Johnson’s soused, rape obsessed mate. ”He gives me the creeps even when he’s sober” one character notes, except he’s never sober.  How did topless Martine Carol happen in a 1957 movie? Who knows, but you don’t have to be a leerer to appreciate it; the novelty is an attraction in and of itself. Although Carol looks swell. The chief creep of the scenario is played by Herbert Lom, and is even rapier than Connery’s character. Eventually you are asked to cry for him, and you do not, because he sucks. This mostly-shot-in-Spain thingamajig is very scenic and reminded me a bit of Hemingway’s descriptions of the country’s landscapes in Death in the Afternoon; looking them up might be a better use of your time. Unless if you’re really into Van Johnson. Or Martine Carol. Or Sean Connery. —B

Angel (Kino Lorber)

Oooh la la, a new 4K scan, and it looks lovely. The Ernst Lubitsch picture treats a scenario of Marlene Dietrich as a neglected wife who assumes another identity in a whack at adultery. It has the potential to go full comedy or full melodrama and instead falls between two stools. While it doesn’t quite flop around there, the 1937 movie doesn’t have the buoyancy of the best Lubitsch. But it does have some of his most quintessential sequences, and Joe McBride’s typically expert commentary walks you through them with aplomb. —A

Beau Geste/The General Died At Dawn/Lives of A Bengal Lancer (Kino Lorber)

Kino put out these three almost simultaneously and heaven knows they were useful in filling out my contemporary Gary Cooper knowledge, as it’s been literally decades since I saw these on local television in the ‘60s-‘70s. I was glad to catch up but none of them hit me with the force of revelation.. 1936’s General has a lot of speeches but also a lot of noteworthy individual shots. The faux-Hemingway scenario doesn’t draw on any anti-fascist spirit but manages to play super portentous nonetheless. Cooper is fine but Akim Tamiroff does a lot of good as the title villain. Director Lewis Milestone’s style here suggests a bridge between pure German Expressionism and noir. 1935’s Lives of A Bengal Lancer struck me as a little dull, antic Franchot Tone notwithstanding. Of the three it’s the least outstanding in appearance but is better than watchable.  1939’s Beau Geste has a good commentary from Frank Thompson and William Wellman, Jr., excellent image quality, crisp direction from William Wellman Jr.’s dad,  then-whelp Donald O’ Connor, a ridiculous story, and a super fresh Susan Hayward. Kind of walks all over Lancer, in my estimation. If you can only buy one of the three, this is it.  —A-/ B+/A

 

Blood on the Moon (Warner Archive)

Nicolas “Nick” Musuraca’s sharp and shadowy cinematography looks really good here. A super solid film, with a little something extra because of  director Robert Wise’s ultra-competence and the cast. (Barbara Bel Geddes is particularly fine. ) It doesn’t get to Mann (Anthony) level but if you dial down your expectation appropriately, you’ll love it.  There are frequent references to drifting in the spoken exchanges, just like the Situationists. Which is cool.  Inspirational dialogue, delivered impeccably by Walter Brennan; “I always wanted to shoot one a’ ya. And he was the handiest.” —A-

The Bolshevik Trilogy (Flicker Alley)

We — and when I say “we” I should be clear, as so many others refuse to be, that I mean me and some other people living in my head — don’t talk about Pudovkin much anymore, but back in the ‘60s and ‘70s he was a staple of Parker Tyler picture books and college film appreciation classes. Unlike Eisenstein this architect of film language didn’t mind toeing the Soviet line and his films showcase some unusually striking content as a result.  The iterations of his works on this set unfortunately point up the limitations of film restoration when the optimum materials don’t exist. 1926s Mother, about a mom who makes the ultimate sacrifice — for the Revolution, of course — is pretty raggedy but watchable. The commentary by Peter Bagrov is very erudite and sharp, a little academic. The End of St. Petersburg, his commemoration of October 1917 on its 10^th anniversary, looks crisper and sharper, with some stunning frames. Storm Over Asia looks mostly solid. It’s the most action packed and, in part because it’s not set in Russia, the most gonzo of the features, with often startling imagery. Its anti-Buddhism is vicious — so over the top as to be mordantly funny. The scene of the Western generals’ meeting with the Dalai Lama is a real treat, you could say. Jan-Christopher Horak contributes a solid commentary with a slightly stiff delivery. Often startling imagery. Voluminous extras including the immortal short Chess Fever, which has no politics as such and should be watched in conjunction with reading Nabokov’s The Defense. (I guess Queen’s Gambit people might also enjoy.) —A-

 

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (Scream Factory)

A rather terrific 1974 Hammer one-off, which is too bad — I could have gone for a series featuring this character and I do not say that too often. Tongue in cheek, but hardly ostentatiously or egregiously so, which apparently Hammer majordomo Michael Carreras took exception to. Schmuck. There’s a remarkable sequence featuring an unkillable vampire — digging the new breed thing, so to speak — that’s as good as anything in any given “serious” Hammer horror you could name. Good commentary by Bruce G. Hallenbeck — a little stiff but solid, informative, and low-fat. Carreras’ dislike of the film is treated in detail. There’s a second, older commentary with writer/director Brian Clemens and female lead Caroline Munro. Good image quality; whole package really hits the spot. —A

 

The Far Country (Arrow Region B import)

“A different part of the landscape and a different set of fictions” is one particularly evocative phrase in Adrian Martin’s commentary for this actual Anthony Mann Western, from 1954,  which was shot around the locations where its story is set, one of them being Dawson City — yes, the same place memorialized in the great recent Bill Morrison documentary. One of the crucial Stewart/Mann pictures, it highlights what Manny Farber called Mann’s “sharp geographic sense” while unfolding a story that enables what Farber called “crawling, mechanized tension.” The material from which the 4K master was made is not  pristine. You definitely can see it in the dissolves, for instance. The image overall is still pretty handsome. Arrow presents the movie in two aspect ratios, 2.0 and 1.85, and that’s great. I can’t say I have a preference for one over the other but I’m delighted to have a choice.  —A+

 

The Fate of Lee Khan (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema)

A spectacular restoration of King Hu’s 1973 film. Since 1967’s Dragon Inn he’d been producing his own films; the color in this one though is rather redolent of Shaw Brothers stuff. I reviewed this version when it had a theatrical release in New York so you can read my plot précis and such here. As for this excellent disc, there’s one authoring choice I considered strange; Tony Rayns has a “Selected Scene Commentary” and when you select that on the menu it plays only those scenes. 1 hour and 13 minutes of a 1 hour 43 minute movie. I could roll with the half hour of silence. Anyway, Rayns' commentary is as usual informative, astute, sober and rewarding. The English dub has cute idiomatic touches: “Where’s the rest room?” This is a mostly chipper film, only pretty much everybody dies at the end. As a demonstration of Hu’s mastery of cinematic space, it’s peerless. Most of it takes place in the confines of an inn but the movie feels as expansive as one shot in Monument Valley. The video essay contributions from Anne Billson and David Cairns are excellent. —A+

 

Flame of New Orleans (Kino Lorber)

“Rudy Maté,” is how commentator Lee Gambin refers to this movie’s cinematographer. But that’s about as loose as he gets. He lays out fundamentals known to a lot of aficionados already. But his cohort, the actor Rutanya Alda, is uninhibitedly dishy. “I’m sure she went to bed with everyone,” she notes of star Marlene Dietrich, before asserting that on Destry Rides Again  James Stewart got her pregnant, and Dietrich got an abortion. What the fuck is going on here, anyway? As for the movie:  As a scenarist Norman Krasna was fine but he wasn’t quite Brackett/Wilder, and this saucy yarn tends to period screwball, but never quite gets the right boisterousness/buoyancy. It picks up when Mischa Auer shows, as most things do. Shemp Howard shows as well, and Andy Devine plays a character whose interest in rape might have raised an eyebrow with the future producers of Andy’s Gang. Or maybe not. While the movie’s racial portrayals are hardly hugely enlightened — it’s a 1941 Hollywood movie after all — it’s worth noting that a romance between African American characters here (they’re played by Clarence Muse and Theresa Harris) is treated with almost no real condescension. One is tempted to put it down to director Rene Clair, but one never can tell. In any event, “Rudy”’s imagery looks very nice here. Overall the package is for Clair or Dietrich completists only, but why are you not either or both in the first place? Inspirational dialogue: “What a boawing town.” Also: “Excuse me, my monkey jumped in the window.” —B

 

Force Ten From Navarone (Kino Lorber)

I did not watch this with a stopwatch so I couldn’t tell you exactly when one of the Anglos in this storyline make a “Zulu” joke to Carl Weathers, but it sure does happen. A stone-faced Harrison Ford joins Weathers, Edward Fox and Robert Shaw in this rather remarkable boondoggle. Guy Hamilton’s uninspired “action” directing had me preoccupied with questions like “Why does Shaw look like that? Did he get plastic surgery or just dry out?” Also starring Angus MacInnes, the beloved Gordie of Strange Brew, and Richard Kiel. The WW II machinations here head to the eastern regions of Europe, but Come and See this is not. When the motley band get to the bridge — guess what they’re supposed to do with it — one of them observes, “There’s no bridge in the world that can’t be blown. That’s what Force Ten is here prove.” And to think Ford complained about George Lucas’ dialogue. Only Franco Nero gets through this thing with his dignity intact. The 2K restoration really lets you appreciate how overlit the interiors are. Imagine being chained to a stone wall in a cave-like prison illuminated by klieg lights. The blowing the dam effects are not as good as anything in When Worlds Collide or, for that, matter Deluge. From the audio commentary by Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin: “These are supposedly Chechnyans [sic]  because…” “Chetniks!” “Excuse me, Chetniks. But I think they’re related to Chechnyans [sic], I would think, perhaps…” “Yeah, it’s all in the same neighborhood.” —B-

The Golem (Kino Lorber)

Did this 1920 Paul Wegener film, based on Jewish fable,  inspire Schuster and Siegel to create  Superman? Tim Lucas is not unpersuasive on this point in his commentary. The new Murnau House 4K restoration is incredibly beautiful; it’s like seeing the movie for the first time. A really magical and haunting movie; this version ought to  move it up in the estimation of any skeptics.  My only complaint is that the producers did not include my friend Gary Lucas’ inspired, raucous alternate score, which he’s performed live to enthusiastic audiences for decades, as a soundtrack option. —A+

King Creole (Paramount)/Wild In The Country (Twilight Time)

Two of the King’s more credible stabs at Real Acting in Real Movies. 1958’s Creole, with Elvis playing a particularly hungry boy, benefits from Michael Curtiz’s energetic direction, a juicy melodramatic storyline, and a bevy of A-plus 1950s character players in the ensemble:  Walter Matthau! Dean Jagger! Paul Stewart! Carolyn Jones! Vic Morrow! Pretty good picture, as normal moviegoers used to say, and the new presentation is pleasing indeed. 1961’s Wild in the Country is mostly a straight-down-the-middle piece of craft from the Twilight Time favorite Phillip Dunne, with Elvis as a would-be writer as earnest as Dunne himself. A potential  Youngblood Hawke who doesn’t make it to New York. He gets plenty of action in the titular country, courtesy of Hope Lange, Tuesday Weld, Millie Perkins. It’s all a bit…peculiar. Also, he plays a guy named Glenn, which was personally weird. The songs are a bit more of an awkward fit than they are in King, because (duh!) he doesn’t play a singer. A curiosity, to be sure, but a well-meant one. — A-/B+

Khrustalyov, My Car! (Arrow)

I love this movie while only having the most rudimentary understanding of what’s going on with it. Not because the filmmaking is obscure or indirect —every frame teems with action, life, dread, hilarity, what have you — but because the intimacy with which it depicts a history that I have only book knowledge of is by definition too INSIDE for me, or maybe any other U.S. resident, to fully get. I don’t think director Alexei German wanted to be hermetic, but he also had no interest in “universalizing” this story of Stalin and national and personal trauma (all of which register with crushing strength in any event). So the superb commentary by Donald Bird, laying out all of Russian in-jokes and German in-jokes, is crucial, giving you a skeleton key. He also details German’s painstaking (to say the least) method — he changed lighting cameraman four times in the making of this 1998 masterpiece. He’s a sharp erudite critic too: “Dostoevsky is hysterical, is baroque, and these qualities have more to do with German’s cinema than with Bresson’s.” Arrow’s amazing package presents the movie beautifully. It includes an excellent visual essay; an interview with German, about 50 minutes, with his  wife and collaborator Svetlana Karmalita constantly at his side; Jonathan Brent holds forth on the actual history of the “Doctor’s Plot,” the movie’s animating atrocity, for over 40 minutes. And there’s more still. This is the  best overall Blu-ray package I’ve seen in some time. —A+

Rachel and the Stranger (Warner Archive)

Robert Mitchum sings! Well of course he does, you’ve heard his calypso album, haven’t you? And he does it in Night of the Hunter too. This might be his first time singing in a movie. Said movie being a 1948 sort-of Western with less emphasis on action than on character and the depiction of rough frontier living. Mitchum is the pest in this story of Very Good William Holden taking over the contract of an indentured servant played by Loretta Young. “Buy a human being out of servitude,” he observes to his cranky kid Gary Gray; “it’s the right Christian thing to do.” Later another character observes, “I’ve seen love take seed on rockier ground than this.” Eww. Mitchum and his guitar put some moves on Young, and things get slightly squirrely. Pretty austere, in part because there’s almost no cast per se. The animated birds are odd. Director Norman Foster keeps things brisk, there’s an awesome “aw shucks” ending, and the whole thing — an RKO production rushed into release to capitalize on Mitchum’s newfound notoriety upon being busted for reefer (again, it’s 1948; what a pioneer) — is very Dore Schary, I guess. The Blu-ray looks good but as a library item this is mainly of interest to intense devotees of one or more of its stars. Inspirational dialogue: “Sure got a mess o’ hair.” —B+

 

Raining on the Mountain (Eureka!/Master of Cinema Region B Import)

Another super beautiful restoration of a fantastic King Hu movie — and my official review is here — and another faboo Tony Rayns commentary (although it’s funny to hear Rayns, usually pretty genteel, refer to its principal faux-monk characters as “mercenary scumbags.”) Rayns also drops some surprising Jeff Bridges trivia. David Cairns’ excellent video essay takes a biographical tack, discussing Hu’s “craving for China” (he shot this in South Korea) and discussing how the female swordfighter had been popular in Chinese silent cinema. Like Lee Khan in its ingenious spatial relations but different, more abstract. —A+

Reflections in a Golden Eye (Warner Archive)

Warner Archive do movie cultists a solid by releasing this John Huston adaptation of  a Carson McCullers novel in two versions: Huston’s Experiment in Color “Golden hue edition” is pretty…interesting looking. Fucking spotless too. And then there’s the normie color version the studio put out when Huston’s experiment proved a bit of an alienation effect for audiences. Featuring Marlon Brando torturing himself as he starts to put on the pounds, and Elizabeth Taylor torturing him and herself, in a “I Dreamed I Was In A Nightmare Marriage In My Maidenform Bra” mode, Eye is a melodrama so peculiarly overheated that why people give Boom! a hard time when this exists is beyond me. So, pretty great! —A

Romance on the High Seas (Warner Archive)

Now THIS is Technicolor. And Sir Lancelot is in it! (The calypso guy, not the knight. Come on.) An utterly trivial yet utterly perfect 1948 construction/confection, gorgeously staged and shot. Made when director Michael Curtiz fancied himself a talent scout, and made Doris Day a star. She looks luscious and plays feisty, never realizing that she’s got a date with destiny in the sexually magnetic person of Jack Carson. For whom she spurns Oscar Levant. The late ‘40s were odd. The supporting cast features Grady Sutton, Eric Blore, Franklin Pangborn, and S.Z. Sakall doing their delightful stuff at their career twilights, more or less. —A

 Woman Times Seven (Kino Lorber)

It’s weird to hear Bosley Crowther evoked with the implicit accusation of being too woke. But Kat Ellinger, framing her commentary as a “defense of Italian comedy,” disdains ole Boz here for bemoaning the way director Vittorio De Sica kicks around Shirley MacLaine in this 1967 sort-of anthology movie. Well,  just because it’s Italian comedy doesn’t mean it gets off the hook for misogyny, and Crowther had a point. Whether MacLaine is portraying a widow, a would-be adulteress who learns the ropes from some prostitutes, or a fashion diva, she’s mainly asked to toggle between willed mouseburger or bitch. Lex Barker is in it. So is Alan Arkin. And Michael Caine. Shot in Paris, so that must have been nice. There’s wacky nudity, wigs, wigs, and wigs upon wigs. Very colorful and very ‘60s, albeit very pre-May-’68 ‘60s for sure. Best watched in segments, because as a movie in toto it’s pretty insufferable. —B-

Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain (Eureka Region B import)

Tsui Hark’s amazing 1983 picture was a direct influence on John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. And as buoyant as Carpenter’s movie is, it’s still mild compared to this wacky account of vampires and devils assaulting the titular mountain and meeting their match against magic swords and celestial powers. Or something.  There’s a new weird lo-fi effect every 13 seconds or so. And the action is always furious. As much fun as Hercules in the Haunted World. I may watch it again right now. —A+

Blu-ray Consumer Guide, Spring 2020

Hello there. Customarily I point to my PayPal widget whenever I post one of these monoliths, but in this case I’ll instead ask you to consider donating to the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund. Thanks.

Equipment: PlayStation 4, OPPO Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

And Hope To Die (Kino Lorber)

A remarkable curio. One of Rene Clement’s last pictures, it’s leagues removed from the focus and discipline of Purple Noon. The droll Leone pastiche in this 1972 picture’s opening railway station scene suggests something wholly other from what the movie becomes. Jean-Louis Trintignant, in Canada trying to escape from vengeful gypsies, stumbles upon what seems like a bungled caper run by, um, Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray. The dialogue soundtrack is all French, with Ray dubbing himself and Ryan, um, not. It kind of sticks out if you're accustomed to hearing Robert Ryan's voice coming out of his mouth. Ryan’s psycho leadership ethos and constant testing of Trintignant suggest James Hadley Chase, but the ostensible source material is David Goodis’ Black Friday. Between the dick-measuring character dynamics of the principal males and the psychodramas of molls Lea Massari and, um, Tisa Farrow, the thing mostly plays like some Claude Lelouch fever dream of existential romanticism. In the 140 minute playing time, about an hour fifty is pretty much nothing happening as the various permutations of the question of honor among thieves is considered. All of it culminating in one of the most logistically ridiculous capers I’ve ever seen in a movie, played out with a complete poker face and capped by the crane shot of Johnny LaRue’s dreams. Weirdly enough this is one of the better looking discs I’ve seen in some time, although DVD Beaver says it has a skimpy bitrate. What do I know. Stalwart Kino Lorber Kommentary Krew Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson are appreciative, discursive, and at times informative. Inspirational tidbit: “First black guy in the film I think.” —B+

Beau Brummel (Warner Archive)

“I wonder why Stewart Granger said that Scaramouche was the only movie he was proud of? This doesn’t look too bad,” thought I, as I pushed this disc into the old PS4. Well I found out. Not that this 1954 picture is bad — on a ground-floor craft level it’s a solid piece of studio period product. It’s two things: Granger is bad in it. He can’t find a useful balance between his 18^th-century egalitarian fop’s charisma and his arrogance, and so Peter Ustinov, as Brummel’s frenemy the future George IV, walks away with much of the film. Except when Robert Morley, as George IV’s better-known dad, shows up. And except when Elizabeth Taylor stuns in both white wig and natural raven tresses. (Granger too is always very well turned out — the much bruited russet dressing gown is a knockout.) And second, there’s the overall feeling that this is a real, albeit inadvertent, nothing-happens movie. Do I blame director Curtis Bernhard? Is it important at this point? Let the anonymous craftsman rest. Most of the time while watching this my mind reached back thirty or more years, when my boy Mel Neuhaus was running Laser Island and sold me a Japanese disc of Vincent Sherman’s 1948 Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn and Viveca Lindfors. No great shakes as a movie per se, he said, but the best Technicolor on home video ever. And he was right. Why hasn’t Warner Archive put THAT on a Blu-ray? —B-

Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (Scream Factory)

Seth Holt! Aubrey Morris! Oozing amputation wounds! And Valerie Leon, who’s both the titular mummy (why did I just write that) and her modern-day counterpart, a comely lass who’s the daughter of one of the tomb raiders who unearthed the ancient Egyptian witch in the first place. Which makes things easy on the filmmakers, location-wise. Anyway. As lurid early-‘70s Hammer pictures go, this is a few smidges better than Scars of Dracula, no disrespect to Roy Ward Baker intended. It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that a highly attractive female lead in the vicinity of depraved murderous supernatural goings-on equals horror picture success. As a member of this movie’s core demo, I grapple with ways to verbally convey Leon’s appeal without coming off like a drooling creep out of an early Jethro Tull tune. Suffice it to say that director Holt, as we’ll even see later in this column, has a knack for satisfying the male gaze. The extras are copious and the commentary from Steve Haberman is relaxed and informative, although he himself sometimes succumbs to the temptation to drool aloud. —A

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Kino Lorber)

I guess I understand why this 1938 picture is considered “minor” Lubitsch, all right. For me the forced absurdism of the finale slops on a — well, there’s no other word for it — jejune quality that you almost never find in the maestro’s other pictures. (The writers were Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and Wilder’s weakness for such stuff waned soon after, and started emerging again at the very end of his career.) But the opening sequence, from its very funny shop-window gag (which Wilder fully credits Lubitsch for) to the convolutions of the meet-cute of Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert, is worth the price of admission. And Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert continue to appear throughout the whole film! Joseph McBride says “its plods tiresomely through its grating plot mechanisms” and quotes Brackett calling it “a really embarrassing picture.” (In his swell book How Did Lubitsch Do It?) These days though, at 90 minutes, how plodding can it be? Also: Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert. The nice-looking disc also features a commentary by Kat Ellinger that you’ll forgive me for not listening to. —A-

El Bruto (VCI)

A “major 4K restoration,” says the cover, and the picture quality of this 1952 Mexican production is very good to excellent, but still a little soft in spots. “The law is for the rich,” one of the soon-to-be-evicted tenement dwellers notes after a crowd of them receives a visit from their all-but-gloating landlord informing them of their future homelessness. Director Luis Buñuel, in the interview book Objects of Desire: “I added the landlord’s father” — a doddering, mordantly comical figure — “and also a scene between Katy Jurado and a rooster that I improvised during the filming,” as one does. The real gist of the picture is the Katy Jurado as the servant of the landowner, a not at all obscure object of desire.  Pedro Armendáriz is the title character, a simple oaf the landlord hires to terrorize the poor community. Two super charismatic icons of Mexican cinema facing off is pretty hot stuff to begin with, but Buñuel makes it truly special. It should be noted here nobody before or since Jurado could make a drooping lower lip so lascivious. The movie’s pace is snappy but also deliberate — the Brute and Jurado’s Paloma don’t even meet until 30 minutes into this 80 minute picture. Good old Andrés Soler is properly tetchy as the landlord. The scenario enacts the old good girl/bad girl dynamic without making you sick, because Buñuel always brings a dynamic and skewed perspective to such tropes. This is part of a VCI series of restored Mexican pictures. While they are sold as being region-free, neither this nor a second title I bought played on my PS4 (and yes I did rebuild the machine’s database after getting the error message of “invalid disc”). Played fine on my OPPO which is set to Region B. Caveat emptor. Otherwise, like all Buñuel, essential in any format. —A

 Canyon Passage (Kino Lorber)

The presentation of this 1946 Jacques Tourneur western boasts an excellent image and a professional, well-organized commentary by Toby Roan. It’s a superb, unusual film. Largely a romantic drama around a kind of love quintangle, so to speak. Not a lot of action but a load of atmosphere — look at that mud in the middle of a non-boom town’s street, and the ineffectual planks leading into the bank and the hotel. Why does Dana Andrews even bother to buy new dress boots, one wonders.  Tourneur uses a steady, observant, patiently poetic style. “It’s a beautiful film,” Martin Scorsese told Richard Schickel. “There’s a wonderful moment where Brian Donlevy is in the back room — I think Hoagy Carmichael sees him — and he’s weighing some cold out of a pouch. It’s not his. He’s just measuring it and marking the weight down. Then he looks at it again. He takes some for himself. That’s where the problem begins. He’s a decent guy, but he’s got some business problems. This kind of dilemma fascinates me.” Contrast this with the scene in The Searchers, over a decade later, when Ward Bond watches Dorothy Evans caress Wayne’s coat. And speaking of Hoagy Carmichael, his presence and his songs are a bonus.—A+

 The Cranes Are Flying (Criterion)

Whoa, look at that image. The title of Chris Fujiwara’s booklet essay says it all: “A Free Camera.” Free and also beautifully focused and witnessing scenes still incredible over 60 years later. Like Tarkovsky and a few other Russians, Mikael Kalatozov’s movies can still elicit “how did they DO that?” gasps. But this love story of the Great Patriotic War (that’s World War II to us) is more than a technical tour de force, it’s an unrelentingly emotional movie. The character who dies imagining the wedding he will never have will break you. The great Ian Christie contributes a really solid video interview; there’s some material on the miracle-working cinematographer Sergei Urusevskiy; Claude Lelouch movingly recalls his discovery of the film, and bringing it to Cannes; and there’s a feature doc on Kalatozov which opens with a trumpet player in Havana playing “Nature Boy,” because I Am Cuba. — A+

The Criminal (Kino Lorber)

The entirety of director Joseph Losey’s filmography is fascinating, but each discrete period of it is fascinating for different reasons. This 1960 movie, also titled The Concrete Jungle (by some distributor who wasn’t quite so clever as he reckoned, I reckon) is arguably the last in that period, which saw him, from 1947’s The Boy With Green Hair and into self-imposed exile from the States, finding and losing and re-finding his voice as he struggled for consistent employment. (He details those struggles in Michel Ciment’s Conversations With Losey, a great film book.)  It’s a tight, urgent, beautifully observed study of rank and eventually impotent masculinity and the second film of Losey’s alliance with Stanley Baker. (The alliance with Dirk Bogarde began with The Sleeping Tiger six years prior. Baker and Bogarde would Losey-meet in 1967’s Accident, also a recent Kino Lorber release I did not review because it’s essentially the same as the BFI Blu-ray with fewer supplements.)  Losey’s depiction of prison, both visually and thematically, is striking. The cinematographer was Robert Krasker, and while his work here is not as consistently pin-sharp as in The Third Man (which I believe is at times deliberate), it’s very good. (The prison-door peephole effect is a little janky, but it’s 1960, come on.) The staging of the prison riots is something. Patrick Magee does some possibly unexpected underplaying as a prison guard. And Baker’s man outside for a new criminal endeavor is played by Sam Wanamaker, for all you wanting to do some further research into the universe of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I’ve enjoyed Kat Ellinger’s commentaries on certain films but here her contribution did not send me. In a scene set in the prison chapel, she observes that here the men are “united by another oppressive force, by the church.” In any event, this is a helluva movie. Very influential, I think, in a kind of stealth way, on Scorsese’s crime pictures and on Fargo. Also the John Dankworth/Cleo Laine musical contributions are faboo. Did you know that my mom’s lawyer represented those two in the States? Now you do. —A+

Day of the Dolphin (Kino Lorber)

Looks spectacular. Is spectacular. This movie got a lot of smack when it was released in 1973, and it didn’t do well, but looking at it now, you can see director Mike Nichols doing a sketch blueprint for E.T. The long tracking shots, the mysterious montages building to a reveal, and more, are key components of a cinematic idiom designed to elicit Ye Olde “Sense Of Wonder.” But the dolphin voices just don’t do it the way Spielberg’s creature did, you may say. Well I LIKE the dolphin voices. (Which were provided by the late Buck Henry, also the movie’s screenwriter. I kind of regret not asking him to do one for me the single time I met the great man.) The Berger/Mitchell/Thompson commentary is typically enthusiastic and garrulous, albeit a little far-fetched; the fellows interpret this as a movie about a director being manipulated and thrown away by the studios, and compare to De Palma’s The Fury, positing that Andrew Stevens’ character in the latter film is a stand-in for De Palma and...well you get the idea. I think. I’m not exactly sure I do myself. —A-

 Dodsworth (Warner Archive)

“The best. The best.” I remember my old friend the film historian Ed Hulse characterizing this 1936 William Wyler picture thusly many moons ago, back when it was way harder to see. He’s right, and his opinion is not a minority one among his and our ilk. Which is kind of interesting to consider these days, because this adaptation of a Sinclair Lewis novel is a quiet, deliberate, nuanced character study that’s only a few steps on the other side of the Art Film border. This Warner Archive disc presents a 2019 Film Foundation restoration that is not merely a restoration but a revelation. Rudolph Maté’s cinematography is every bit as sensitive as Wyler’s direction and the three lead player, Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, and Mary Astor give career best performances that you can now view with startling clarity. The soundtrack is well cleaned up too. A master class in classical cinematic language, particularly with respect to framing (not to mention pacing).  he black telephone at Astor’s villa is a nifty precursor to the box in Wyler’s 1941 The Little Foxes Inspirational dialogue: “They say we’ll have to behave ourselves when we become a couple of old grandparents in December.”—A+

 ffolkes (Kino Lorber)

Roger Moore in 1980, growing a beard and breaking away from Bond…with Andrew V. McLagen. And bringing David Hedison along for the ride. (That makes it sound as if the participation of a Felix Leiter was deliberate, and I can’t REALLY say it was.) Here he’s a very unorthodox undersea rescue strategist called upon by a skeptical British government to prevent Anthony Perkins and Michael Parks and their pals from blowing up an oil rig. Moore’s character’s unorthodoxies include excessive cat coddling, a misogyny that truth to tell is expressed relatively mildly (he’s irritated at having been brought up with only sisters, or something), and swigging whisky straight from a bottle which winds up being the trait that registers most vividly. Action movie cultist comfort food to be sure.  Another good looking disc, especially color-wise. But not all that robustly cinematic. Can’t really complain though. —B

Hard Ticket To Hawaii (Mill Creek)

I have more than once related my conversation with director Andy Sidaris during a screening of this 1987 film, one in which he complained that the fellow sitting in the row ahead of me (whom I did not admit to actually knowing) were giggling too much. On the introduction to this disc, recycled from the Guns, Girls, and G-Strings DVD box set, statuesque scream queen Julie Strain, rest in peace, says to Sidaris of the picture, “It just cracks me up every time.” Why doesn’t Sidaris object when SHE says she finds it funny? I think we all know why. Anyway. This is a true classic of the let’s-discuss-this-case-nude-in-the-hot-tub subgenre of action thriller, the one featuring the giant uncontrollable poisonous snake. It is, as a production, WAY slicker than 1985’s Malibu Express. If you’re keeping score. Weirdly enough, given the purposefulness of most Sidaris fare, this meanders a bit. As if he wants to put off the ultimate snake reveal but he doesn’t have enough plot to manage. MST3K people take note:  Flying a small plane is to this movie what rock climbing was to 1951’s Lost Continent. While I miss Barbara Edwards and Susan Kiger from earlier films (blame it on my dad’s stash of Playboy mags), Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton bring what they bring with aplomb. And then there’s that classic Frisbee gag. Inspirational dialogue: “I’m supposed to be soft, I’m a woman.” Inimitable Sidaris comedy: “You tried to rape me last night!” “That was yesterday!” Inimitable Sidaris suspense: One of the girls takes a Polaroid and as she’s holding it up says, “Look, it’s developing!” The instantly memorable theme song is even “better” than I remembered: “It’s not paradise all the time,” verily. Image quality is fine, and the audio commentary features immortal banter between Andy and his wife and producer Arlene. Andy: ”Here comes a great joke,’ She’s so dumb she had to go home and study for her pap test.’” Arlene: “That was your joke Andy. I will never take credit for it. Ever.” They also wax amazed that they managed to credibly cut together footage shot in L.A. and Molokai, holy shit. Ultimate inspirational dialogue: “One man’s dream is another man’s lunch.” —A+

 House By The Cemetery (Blue Underground)

Troy Haworth’s commentary observes, early on, “Classing this as a zombie movie is a little bit problematic.” That’s not really what “problematic' means nowadays. A little later: “Fulci and women is one of those problematic topics,” okay, I guess that’s more like it. But the thing is, if I were worried about things being problematic, I wouldn’t watching a Lucio Fulci movie. I don’t want to drag Haworth too much, as I’ve got a Bluray with my own commentary on it coming soon. (Fortunately said disc’s commentary, on Ford’s The Long Gray Line, in a box from Indicator, also features Farran Smith Nehme and Diana Drumm, who are great, and make me look and sound better.) For the most part here he’s informal but informative, and occasionally understated, as when he observes “Amityville Horror 2 has some incestuous things in it.” SOME? This remastering has a very strong teal color correction. This practice is controversial, and I’m curious as to why this 1981 grindhouse item got this treatment. Its coolness complements the movie well, as it turns out, at least to my eye. As Fulci stuff goes, this is rather understated — nobody vomits up their own intestines or anything — and concentrates on creepy don’t-go-into-the-basement set pieces. The other extras are in the delightful Blue Underground  deep-dish tradition, and there’s a CD of the soundtrack for those delighted by mysterioso organ chords and such. —A

Leave Her To Heaven (Criterion)

This is from the Film Foundation restoration, and it is a smidge or two better than the Technicolor source that Twilight Time used for its 2013 Blu. It looks magnificent and until there’s a 4K disc this will stand as the ultimate home theater version of John Stahl’s magnificent broad-daylight noir with Gene Tierney magnificently playing against simpatico siren type to contrive and ice-cold selfish spider. This loses the 2005 commentary (recycled on the TT disc) that Richard Schickel did with supporting player Dwayne Hickman, which is a shame. But in a video interview Imogen Smith contributes a relatively thorough  examination of Stahl, well-organized and revealing. Citing Stahl’s restraint, she compares him with Naruse which is a sharp observation.—A

Masked and Anonymous (Shout Factory)

I saw this at Sundance in 2003 and roared much of the way through; emerging from the screening I pronounced it “the Plan 9 From Outer Space of Dylan movies.” (This was a thing for me back then; I called Toback’s 1999 Black and White the Plan 9 From Outer Space of race relations movies.) Anyway, I think I was being kind of a dick about it. Not to say that the strained allegory suddenly holds up…but its points seem rather more salient now for some reason. In any event, the star-studded procession certainly qualifies as A Unique Object. Digitally shot, it looks more so here than I recollect it looking back in the day. And the extras help in making sense of the whole thing: Co-writer and director Larry Charles (who got to know Dylan via factotum Eddie Gorodetsky, who Charles claims was boring Larry David so much on a plane trip that Charles jumped in to engage him to spare Gorodetsky potential humiliation) recalls the project’s conception as a “Bob Dylan slapstick comedy.” He also complains about the reviews. Sorry Larry! —A-

The Oscar (Kino Lorber)

It is a testament to the comic genius of the SCTV crew that they managed to successfully send up this, a piece of Hollywood bombast so mired in excess that it seemed well beyond parody. Co-screenwriter Harlan Ellison was so upset by the end result of this crazy crawl-your-way-to-the-top saga (although it is in fact replete with Ellisonean overstatement) that he used to mount a yearly Oscar Renunciation Tour, or something. Long elusive in terms of decent home versions, this is indeed a superb restoration. Jill St. John actually looks a little TOO peaches and cream, if such a thing is possible. Poor Tony Bennett. Anyway. The disc is equipped with two commentaries. The first features Patton Oswalt, Josh Olson (yup, the guy who said he won’t read your "fucking script" although maybe he’s got time now) and Eric Nelson (director of the Ellison documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth). They enact an approximate MST3K riff session interspersed with gossip and much Ellison appreciation — they all knew the man. There are some good zingers. “Is he married to The Polyphonic Spree?” being one. Along the way the fellow reveal that they don’t know who Guy KIbbee was. No wonder movies suck nowadays. The other commentary features Berger, Mitchell and Thompson, who protest, re the movie’s alleged poor quality, “Audiences ENJOY this!” and at some point work in a comparison to The Best Years of Our Lives. One notes, “I watch this movie and I see one big similarity with one director and that’s Martin Scorsese.” These dudes are high as fuck. Eventually one of them descends sufficiently to make the more apt comparison, which is with Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire. Was the Jean Hale character truly based on Carroll Baker? We may never know. —A+

Penelope (Warner Archive)

Directed by the oft-dreaded Arthur Hiller, written by the producer of I Love Melvin, this 1966 piece of piffle of a is one of those things folks cite when complaining about How Hollywood Failed Natalie Wood. The movie is not quite the embarrassment that its poster, reproduced on the front of this Bluray, is, but that’s not saying much. Wood who is lovely and charming, plays a well-kept wife who’s not so well-kept that she won’t rob her husband’s bank to work out some neurotic kinks. Ostensible comedic highlights include attempted rape by Jonathan Winters and Dick Shawn as a shrink. The move maintains interest from a standpoint of sheer curiosity, although I cannot lie,  the lead performer running around in her underwear doesn’t hurt. She also sings. There’s a nifty 360 degree dolly shot (thank God for Harry Stradling Sr., the cinematographer later beloved by Barbra Streisand), nifty location scenes in MOMA’s sculpture garden, Peter Falk working out his Columbo mannerisms, Ian Bannen totally at sea, and a lot of hair and costume changes. Also a wacky twist ending. As Candice Bergen remarked to Paul Schrader re American Gigolo, “The colors are wonderful.” —B

Pray for the Wildcats (Kino Lorber)

The opening credits for this 1974 goodie tout “Special Guest Star” Robert Reed. It’s a made-for-TV movie, how can he be a “guest star?” This is one of the recent Kino releases that touts a “Brand New 2K Master” and makes you ask, “why this and not Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife?”  But wow, it really DOES look good. This is the third time I’ve seen this. The first was when it aired on ABC as a “special” (there’s that word again) “two hour event” or what they called it. It was pretty weird seeing nice Andy Griffith (I’d never seen A Face In The Crowd, whaddya want from me, I was 15) as a psycho exec inveigling some ad agency stooges to go dirt-biking with him, on a journey where he eventually kills a couple of hippies. Aiieeee. Griffith overplays when he’s taking off his motorcycle helmet, for Christ’s sake. Even more special than Reed is William Shatner, who throughout delivers the Most Shatner Line Readings Ever. The second time I saw it was in the late 90s with a bunch of drunk/high as fuck bar buddies during a marathon viewing that also included that Powers Boothe Jim Jones movie. And now, in sobriety, it remains almost if not quite as uproarious as ever, in part because the picture got its two-hour ABC time slot through padding. And the padding consists of, well, dirt biking, doled out in rock-climbing portions. Commentators Amanda Reyes and Bill Ackerman do not riff on the movie or find it in any way hilarious. Instead, they  take it quite seriously, which I suppose is to their credit. Apparently academia is beginning to catch up with TV movies, as they cite at least one study. Neat. They’re very informative — although it’s clear that Ackerman read the same Wikipedia entry on score composer Fred Myrow that I did. Said score is pretty creditable in fact. Did I mention Marjoe Gortner? This is his first post-Marjoe acting gig, and he’s not great. Supporting females Lorraine Gary, Janet Margolin and OF COURSE Angie Dickenson (who utters the immortal title) look very displeased to be here. —B+

 Quai des Orfevres (Kino Lorber)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s third feature, made in 1947, doesn’t pack quite the wallop of his prior Le Corbeau (1943) in part because its scenario is a little more discursive, not as ruthlessly focused. In a sense this is a feature rather than a bug; Quai is a city tale located in differing milieus while Corbeau’s murderous provincials motored a story that was almost immediately tight as a noose. But this movie gets there. Bernard Blier is the sad sack married to luscious Suzy Delair (who only just died at the age of 102!) who might be looking for a sugar daddy in old Charles Dullin. Soon someone ends up dead and Louis Jouvet’s inspector shows up. Much devious character is revealed, Clouzot times kettles to boil over at thematically opportune times, and the whole thing builds to a brutal ending. Clouzot’s mastery (some would say facility) is more than fully formed here. My friend Nick Pinkerton flies solo for a long commentary and comes through with, well, flying colors. And the movie itself looks great. —A

A Quiet Place In The Country (Shout Factory)

The slight raggedness of the materials used to master this disc is a bit of a plus. Makes the movie look even more disreputable, so to speak. But what, you may ask, is Vanessa Redgrave doing in a disreputable movie? Neither giallo nor pure art picture, Quiet Place is a 1968 picture directed by Elio Petri (who cowrote the script with Tonino Guerra) and costarring Redgrave’s then-mate, Franco Nero. Nero plays a tortured artist tormented (or is that the word) by dreams of his lover/agent (Redgrave, natch) dominating him violently while dressed in S&M gear. They hit upon the title residence, she leaves him to his own devices, and he starts going even more insane. Good color values. A messy, weird movie that recalls a bunch of others from this time frame while not really resembling them. (I thought of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh once and then said, “Nah.”) The color values of the presentation are solid and the Troy Haworth commentary is one of his better one, at least that I’ve heard. My friend Dan Callahan, in his biography of Redgrave, calls her role “essentially thankless,” which is fair enough. Unless Redgrave got a lot out of dressing in S&M gear. One hopes so. —B

Rasputin the Mad Monk (Scream Factory)

Don Sharp, of The Kiss of the Vampire fame, directed this 1966 Cinemascope picture. And whatever you think it’s gonna be based on that, it’s not. As commentators Steve Haberman, Constantine Nasr, and Ted Newsom point out, Sharp didn’t have enough dough for lavish scenes, the result of having 20,000 pounds cut from the budget. Hence, you don’t get a lot of the splendor of the Czar’s court. Really it’s mostly Christopher Lee’s Rasputin causing trouble in bars. You laugh (I hope) but I kid you not. (The commentary as a whole is mostly excellent but the fellow occasionally nod [one of them pronounces the great director’s name “VIncenty Minnelli”] or go out on weird limbs [“Rex Reed complained of Myra Breckinridge that his dance was not cut properly”]. They do display a lot of expertise on various refitted Hammer sets (one bar once was Dracula’s basement). There’s an original cast commentary too, featuring Lee, which of course is older. Once you become accustomed to the movie’s ontological reality, it’s kind of fun — there’s some super nasty acid-throwing stuff in the climax, if that’s your bag — and the image quality as a whole is splendid.—A-

Show Boat (Criterion)

Given the very particular standard set by MGM in the 1940s and beyond you may wonder, how good can a Universal-produced musical in black-and-white made in 1936 be. Holy moley, do you have a treat in store. Never doubt James Whale is all I can tell you. It looks superb and perhaps more crucially it sounds better than fine. The picture does have a side which many may consider stodgy, most of it residing in its hewing in some respects, to theatrical musical conventions of the time. But once you get accustomed to that it adds to the fascination. The performers are incredible. Helen Morgan! Paul Robeson! Irene Dunne in general but also her what-the-fuck-is-going-on dance during “Can’t Help Loving That Man.” Whale’s direction is  consistently excellent; there are moments of fascinating Whale Expressionism in “Old Man River” and the imagery during “I Have The Room Above Her” (a song composed especially for the film, one of three) is stunning. The extras are superb. They include excerpts from the 1929 Show Boat, originally silent, rewired for sound  and also featuring Helen Morgan, and a Paul Robeson doc from 1979, narrated by Sidney Poitier. (This is also a feature of Criterion’s Robeson box set.) There’s also a new video feature on the movie’s race issues, as navigated by scholar Shana L. Redmond. She asks viewers to interrogate what “makes us comfortable” about a number of its tropes and depictions. As much as I admire Show Boat, I’ve never been comfortable with it in that respect. Rather, I adore it largely because of the songs, their incredible melodies and quietly spectacular lyrics. People like to slag Oscar Hammerstein II but any guy who can come up with a couplet like “I’m tired of living/and scared of dying” has definitely got something on the ball. Many of you might not remember that this was, a long time ago, a Criterion laser disc (spine number 45) and the company has included my old Video Review colleague Miles Krueger’s professional, polished, informative commentary from that edition. An incredible package. —A+

Slaughterhouse Five (Arrow)

I saw this movie when it first came out in 1972, at the age of twelve. I had read the novel. As you can imagine I was an incredibly popular kid. Anyway, I convinced my mom’s younger brother to be my adult guardian; he was (and remains) twelve years my senior, and I do think he enjoyed the movie, largely due to Valerie Perrine. I would have my grandmother take me to see Frenzy later in the year and that did not go nearly as well, by which I mean it did not go well at all. I don’t know what my point is except to underscore that both the novel and the film are art objects I have long held dear. So I’m quite glad to see this on Bluray, in an excellent transfer. Kurt Vonnegut loved this adaptation and I can understand why — it gets within better than swinging distance of the novel’s tone despite (wisely, I think) jettisoning completely its mantra, “And so it goes.” I know it’s flawed and its portrayals of women are bad, although I’d argue that Vonnegut and the movie were pushing the stereotypes and cultural conventions that were part of the reality of American suburbia of the time, but we can argue about that later. The performances are all good to great, the structuring is masterful, the physical editing lives up to the concept behind the structuring (and almost never goes for cheap correspondences), and so on. With The World of Henry Orient, it’s director George Roy Hill’s greatest achievement. The editorial supplements, I’m sorry to say, abound with examples of Not Getting It. The commentary is by Troy Haworth, who kicks off by explaining he’s interested in this movie, since he’s usually more into “European stuff.” He then says that Glenn Gould “composed” the score. Glenn Gould was not a composer. The score was composed by Bach. It’s “European stuff.”  He’s very good on the cast, except when he says of Perrine, “we’re going to be seeing a lot more of her and I do mean a great deal more of her.” But man, he has a true millennial (at least I suppose it is that) appreciation of what World War II was all about, and almost constantly complains of how passive and uninteresting Billy is, without taking much note of his, um, name. More disappointing is the stalwart Kim Newman, who doesn’t seem to understand that the movie is about the dislocation of PTSD and instead wonders whether Vonnegut had seen Last Year At Marienbad. Maybe he had, but one doubts that had anything to do with anything. What Vonnegut did in his book was pinpoint the shattered reality of what Tom Brokaw would corrupt into “the greatest generation.” When Billy’s wife, wishing to know who gave Billy the jewel that he has put into a piece of jewelry for him, asks “What was his name Billy?” and we know his name was Edgar Derby and we know how he died and Billy won’t say but Billy keeps looping in and out of the event forever…I mean how dense do you have to be to get that this isn’t about Resnais? Or rather, that Resnais himself was often about the same thing? (You, he and I have all seen Muriel, no?) Newman also glibly dismisses “And so it goes” as words “of wry acceptance.” Seriously man. After a while I was almost shouting at the television: “IT’S ABOUT PTSD IT’S ABOUT PTSD IT’S ABOUT PTSD.” Anyway, the interview with Perry King is good. He’s superb in the movie, one of his best appearances. He at one point characterizes the film as perhaps “too gentle” and maybe that’s not a bad call.  It’s still great. —A

 Song of Songs (Kino Lorber)

Again — Force Ten From Navarone on Kino gets a 4K master but not this Rouben Mamoulian/Marlene Dietrich team-up. It’s a strange world. The image is mostly fine and hey, the movie is 90 years old. Soft at times. Lots of grain but it’s well-structured as they say. Sometimes a shimmer effect. All of it is superbly transferred. The movie presents a small but determined spider’s web of male perverts trapping the devout Dietrich. Sculptor Brian Aherne convinces her to pose nude for him, and perhaps he can provide the kind of love Dietrich dreams of, the kind spoken of in the title scripture. The resultant sculpture is pretty racy, because it was 1932. Instead of being a true amour, Aherne then pimps her to kinky military faux alpha Lionel Atwill. Mamoulian’s touch is not as clever as what he wielded in his prior City Streets (though the change of tone is appropriate to the ostensible tragedy of the melodrama) but his mastery is pretty impressive nonetheless. Because it’s Mamoulian the swoony stuff gets close to actual sensuality and the cheesy stuff has a consistently compelling quality. David Del Valle’s commentary is pertinent and informative but he is prone to overexcitement at times. “Look at those nipples!” he exclaims of the sculpture. Yup, there they are. Tom Milne, in his great monograph on Mamoulian, argues that the last third of the melodrama calls for a director with Stroheim’s sense of cruelty, and that “wielding the scalpel has never been Mamoulian’s forte.” Be that as it may, a few blows register. Highly worthwhile.  —A-

The Stalking Moon (Warner Archive)

I don’t believe in the academy of the overrated but I do believe in the academy of the underrated, and Robert Mulligan belongs there. This 1969 Western is a modest but incredibly solid construction, featuring  great, great cinematography by Charles Lang, spectacularly transferred here. Gregory Peck, who’d worked with Mulligan before in 1962’s To Kill A Mockingbird, iyou may have heard of it, is inspired while conspicuously narrowing his register. The underplaying of his tracker character makes him an enigmatic hero but not an anti-hero, as was often the fashion with American Westerns of the time. Eva Marie Saint, as the woman he protects, is a perfect mysterious foil for him. The direction of this suspenseful long-term chase drama is perfectly judged, superb, understated, but also brutal on occasion.  As a character study and a tense cat-and-mouse, it’s still pretty unbeatable.—A

Station Six Sahara (Netwerk UK Region B import)

I’ve often cited Robert Benayoun’s description of “authentic sadistic cinema,” “a cinema whose elective,  even ceremonious, climate remains, venomous and intoxicating, that of total perdition.” Genre movies provide the most hospitable grounds for such a climate, but it’s not a requirement. This 1963 number, often cited as a perverse favorite by Martin Scorsese (it was included in a double feature program he and Jay Cocks curated for Film Forum last summer, where I finally saw it for the first time) is a super-squinchy bit of business that begins as a mucky men at work melodrama. Specifically the men are post-war Germans and Brits (with Mario Adorf as a brute of not credibly specified ethnicity) pitted together and against each other at a Saharan oil-pumping station. So it’s already a little tense. These grimy fellows (among them Denholm Elliot at his least ingratiating and an insufferably loutish Ian Bannen, who we last spoke of in the Penelope capsule, and irritable as he is he makes a bigger impression here than there) get monthly visits from a van load of sex workers, but that hardly suffices to quell their passions. On to the scene crashes (literally) Carroll Baker, and it’s off to the races. Seth Holt, who we last spoke of in the Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb capsule, compels Baker (who we last spoke of in the The Oscar capsule) to tease the camera with everything she’s got, down to her little toe. The fellows, especially ultra-Teuton Peter Von Eyck (even slimier here than in The Snorkel, which we have not spoken of, and here he doesn’t even murder anyone), all start to lose it, and badly. Just when you think things couldn’t get more skeevy, they kind of do, and the jaw-dropping ending does adhere to a certain logic, one not just misogynist but committedly misanthropic. The image quality is sometimes a little soft and there are no extras but I’m just glad to finally have a copy with which to Amaze My Friends. And I just found out the thing is some kind of remake? I must look into that. —A-

Straight On Till Morning (Shout Factory)

A Hammer picture I hadn’t heard of before, directed by Peter Collinson, who made The Italian Job. This isn’t nearly as funsy. Dotty Rita Tushingham, too long sheltered by a cranky mom, strikes out on her own in not-quite-so-swinging-as-it-recently-had-been London (the picture was made in 1972). Where she soon runs afoul of Shane Briant’s Peter, whose look clearly inspired the Linus Roache character in Pan Cosmatos’ Mandy. (Or maybe not. I should never presume. But I’d bet money on it.) The movie is very “hip” in its cinematic language — a lot of ping-ponging flashbacks and flash forwards, interior monologues, dislocation stuff, not inappropriate for the psychotic character we eventually learn Peter to be. But the movie also uses it with some other random characters, which is kind of pointless and show-offy. It builds to a thoroughly icky conclusion after being vaguely distasteful throughout. The disc looks fine. The commentary with Tushingham and Jonathan Sothcott  (author of The Cult Films Of Christopher Lee) was recorded around 2002,  first heard on the Anchor Bay DVD of that year. For Hammer completists only, and might make you regret being a Hammer completist. —B

 The Tall Men (Twilight Time)

Seems like this is one of the final releases from a really remarkable label; I suppose that co-founder Nick Redman’s death last year put it to an end. This release is just one reason I’ll miss it. It’s a gorgeous, engaging 1955 Raoul Walsh Western, beautifully transferred with no extras save a typically astute essay by Julie Kirgo. Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell are ex-Confederate cowboys drifting toward would-be cattle baron Robert Ryan. The three form an uneasy alliance for a big cattle drive, with Jane Russell complicating matters. The pace is relaxed, with tension rising and releasing; when payoff times come, they’re delivered with power. Mitchell’s character is particularly moving. Good script by two pros, Frank Nugent and Sydney Boehm. Really beautiful and sensitive use of widescreen and color, handled by Lee Tover, who also did The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Heiress. Durable score by Victor Young, which, as is standard practice on Twilight Time titles, featured on an Isolated track. The devotion of the Mexican vaqueros to Gable’s character is a nicely understated theme here.  And because Walsh is Walsh, the movie’s occasional corn isn’t just tolerable, it plays. Pretty great.  —A

Teorema (Criterion)

The BFI Blu-ray from 2013 has a teal-leaning color correction that was not complained about at the time; this transfer just pushes it harder. Again, as with Criterion’s Midnight Cowboy it looks better than fine in motion, and in still frames too. I suppose this is a matter of taste, but I do wonder about honoring directorial/cinematographic intent. I realize too that now might not be an opportune time to try to do any reporting on it. So I’ll just continue to say how pleasing I find this edition. The new master has real improvement in the overall picture with respect to detail, evident in the early sepia sequence. Also look at Laura Betti’s eyes when she first sees Stamp’s character. A deep pleasure to watch, I found. The BFI picture is harder edged, more contrast heavy, almost antiseptic. Bad Pasolini, crediting Mozart but not Ted Curzon, whose “Tears For Dolphy” plays under the opening titles. Shame!  The Robert Gordon commentary notes this, and good for him. I had not listened to this commentary on the BFI edition and I have to say it’s first-rate. Peter Cowie-level. Fun fact:  Lee Van Cleef and Orson Welles had been considered for the Stamp role, which would certainly have brought different discrete stresses to the allegory.  Essential cinema. —A+

Tex Avery Screwball Classics Volume 1 (Warner Archive)

I love Tex Avery and think he was a genius but let’s face it: the boisterousness of his humor walked hand in hand with something of a mean streak. You all know what I’m talking about: “Miss Repulsive 1898” in Swing Shift Cinderella (not included in this set but available on Blu-ray in a Looney Tunes Platinum collection), the repeated gag of a veil lifted from a shapely woman’s face to reveal pimples, buck teeth and so on, that sort of thing. In Big Heel Watha the title character is such a spectacularly offensive milquetoast grotesque aside from the ostensible racial stereotype that the racial stereotype kind of becomes a non-sequitur. Which doesn’t make it less objectionable. Just more…confusing. One senses that Avery was aware his own pigtail-pulling sadism, but not with any kind of regret. Indeed the entire idea behind the Screwball Squirrel character was to be purposefully almost intolerably obnoxious. This magnificent set includes the entirety of the Screwball Squirrel series and it’s also remarkably, manically inventive, every bit reminding you that the excess is the point (I especially like the multiple-doors chase in The Screwy Truant). In the less problematic areas (boy does that well-worn Warner disclaimer at the front of this program have its work cut out for it) there’s the magnificence of Red Hot Riding Hood. One gag therein practically invents the jump cut, while the sight of the wolf hitting himself on the head with a hammer while looking at Red makes one wonder if Avery also invented the “run me over with a truck” meme. Batty Baseball is extra radical,  Bad Luck Blackie incomparable, and so on. No extras, beautiful transfers, Volume 2 can’t come quick enough. —A+

Tiger of Eschnapur/The Indian Tomb (Film Movement)

I’ve written extensively on this movie before so I’m doing a brief capsule here just to say this version looks fantastic. The package retains the excellent David Kalat commentary from a prior standard def release. And adds Mark Rappaport’s excellent Debra Paget, For Example, which opens with the question “Why Debra Paget?”  To which the answer is “Why not,” but indeed, there’s more to it than that. —A+

Wheels on Meals (Eureka!, Region B import)

“Dad’s in with a nervous breakdown. He flipped! It’s really complicated.” The “Classic” English dub of this rollicking 1984 comedic martial arts picture really is, as the description in the jacket list of features says, “funkier” than the other audio options. Starring Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and director Sammo Hung, and shot in Barcelona because by this time the three were so famous that shooting in Hong Kong became a logistical nightmare, this nonsensical tale is replete with lowbrow humor concerning mental institutions, mental health, the homeless, sex workers and more. It’s all so breezily tossed off, though, and the conditions as depicted have so little to do with real life that one just rolls one’s eyes and waits for the next bit of action. Which is all fabulous. The 2K master looks swell, the extras, mostly imported from a version of the movie released via the Hong Kong Legends label are enjoyable and informative and, suitably I’d say, hardly formidable.—A

Whisky Galore/The Maggie (Film Movement)

Film Movement has been doing stalwart work in the Bluray department recently. Their releases of the more obscure but reliable delightful old Ealing pictures such at The Titfield Thunderbolt are exemplary. Of course I was especially tickled to get this, a double feature generously put on a double-disc set. Whisky, also known as Tight Little Island, is of course the directorial debut of Alexander Mackendrick.  The story is of Scotch-starved Scots (WW II rationing, you see) who have the good fortune of having a ship carrying a large cargo of the stuff go down off their coast. It’s a very droll comedy with a bit of bite, something Mackendrick could always deliver. The disc is a good transfer from a good piece of material; I should say good rather than great. Every now and then, particularly in exterior shots, it looks a little dupey but it’s not too distracting. The commentary is by John Ellis also the producer of a good documentary on the film that’s included in the package. He knows his stuff, and he interacts with the actual soundtrack in a way that’s unusual for commentaries. There is a good deal of purposeful esoterica here: descriptions of the perspectives on religion in the Compton Mackenzie novel on which the film was based, and how the film kinda sorta upends them, and a funny but not entirely far-fetched theory that The Wicker Man is a stealth remake of the movie. The Maggie, from 1954, is something of a spiritual sequel to Whisky. Another shipping-and-cargo shaggy dog tale, its endearing charms include Paul Douglas, here at a peak of soulfulness, in the role of a mildly philistine American businessman whose heart is warmed by some conniving Scots (sounds a little like another, more recent Scottish picture we know). Mastered from a BFI restoration, it actually looks better than Whisky — beautiful contrast and sharp detail abound. Mackendrick’s filmography is small, but it’s been elusive on Bluray let alone any other format. This bountiful package is a meaningful correction. — A+