Some Came Running

A Christmas Gift To You From Some Came Running (That Is, A 2017 Blu-ray Consumer Guide)

Let's get right to it. 

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver.

I can’t believe I actually carved out the time to do this, although if you check out the release date of the very first disc reviewed (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s August of last year) you’ll see it’s been indeed over a year in the making. Whew!

3 Bad Men (Kino Lorber)

This 1926 Western, not to be confused with 1919’s Marked Men, which was Ford’s first stab at the story that would become Three Godfathers, is a fleet and exciting film with a similar theme—the title fellows, en route to a gold stake, save the life of, and then look after, a fair waif. This disc presents a beautiful restoration terrifically augmented by a wonderful Joseph McBride audio commentary. Aside from its erudition (fun fact: this was Ford’s last Western for over a decade; he would not revisit the genre until, yup, 1939’s Stagecoach) it’s a master class in how to deal with, um, problematics. One of the movie’s most thrilling moment sees a baby lifted from the ground in the middle of what’s effectively a stampede (an antecedent to several stunts in Raising Arizona). The clear-eyed McBride, who loved Ford and Ford’s films, says “this is a famous shot, unfortunately in my opinion it’s reprehensible…I think it’s unconscionable to risk the life of a child for the sake of an effect.” And that’s that. —A

All the Colors of the Dark   (Shameless UK Region B)

You never forget your first Edwidge Fenech movie. I picked up a German DVD of this lurid and nonsensical 1972 sort-of giallo in the mid’ 90s. It was a 4x3 image that was pictureboxed to honor its widescreen framing, and the image was sufficiently blah that you might have guessed the negative had been processed in dirty bathwater. And yet the power of La Fenech’s ultry-sultry screen presence somehow shone through. This U.K. Blu looks…okay. It’s 16x9, always a plus of course. The opening minutes, featuring the credits, are dingy enough to raise an eyebrow, but then you realize this was always a cheap film in every respect, not just content. Once you make peace with. that it’s completely watchable and sometimes a bit better. And the lead actor looks great. The package has satisfying extras, including casual but enthusiastic and informative commentary from Kat Ellinger (editor of Diabolique magazine) and Samm Deighan (contributor to that magazine; both do a podcast called Daughters of Darkness) and a 20-minute interview with director Sergio Martino. —A-

Battle Cry (Warner Archive)

Raoul Walsh conducts this nearly 150-minute adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel at a spanking pace, which is salutary not just for the usual reasons but also because the story is maybe 80 percent soap opera and 20 percent war movie. No extras here, but the widescreen color image is very nice. The WA release of Hell on Frisco Bay, while vivid, suffered during dissolve transitions in which color values were lost, a limitation of the material they had to work with. This is not the case here, for the most part, and in the rare occasions that it is, it’s so fleeting only the sharpest eye will catch it. Attractions include Tab Hunter trying to play drunk, Walsh using short fast pans as an accommodation to CinemaScope (see James Whitmore telling Perry Lopez to take off his fake medals, and Lopez then bragging about Guadalcanal to a group of strangers, all in the same shot). Aldo Ray playing a rapey character who is talked down from committing actual assault is a very, um, vivid portrayal. —B+

The Birthday Party (Kino Lorber)

Don’t know why I haven’t seen more Friedkin-heads celebrating the release of this 1968 picture, his follow-up to, um, Good Times, that Sonny and Cher movie. This, on the other hand, is an adaptation of the Haold Pinter play about a withdrawn boarding house tenant who receives a visit from some existential gangsters on what may or may not be his birthday. Their introduction is really special: the cut from Robert Shaw’s Stanley sneaking out the kitchen window to Patrick Magee and Sidney Tafler standing in the house’s sitting room is really one of the great edits in cinema. Friedkin shows remarkable sensitivity to Pinter’s text, and if you only know Magee and Shaw from A Clockwork Orange and Jaws respectively, you’ll be surprised at how good they are at underplaying. (I know Shaw does SOME underplaying in Jaws, but here he even underplays underplaying.) The image looks great relative to what Eastman Color in the late ‘60s generally yielded. Although I wish the responsible parties had cleaned up the soundtrack a little more. Extras include a Friedkin interview in which he relates material that readers of his Friedkin Connection book will remember, including how the movie irritated Joseph Losey. —A-

Casa De Lava (Grasshopper)

This 1994 picture was Pedro Costa’s second feature, and while it’s in some respects much more conventional than his stiffer future pictures, it’s still suffused, as they say, with a singular voice, achieved through formal mastery. And confidence. The much-cited influence of I Walked With A Zombie is evident but it’s more subterranean than many accounts would have you believe. The excellent Blu-ray image honors the work of cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel (who also shot, not insignificantly, Bresson’s L’Argent); aside from its characters and story, the movie is also about a volcanic island in the Cape Verde archipelago, and the movie’s color palette, its range of lights and darks, the often charcoal quality of the landscape, is well-represented. Machuel is interviewed in one of the discs’ supplements. The other notable extra is a 24-minute paging through Costa’s scrapbook for the movie, which features lots of shots of Edith Scob (one of the picture’s stars) in Les Yeux sans Visage; the famous photograph of Robert Johnson and guitar, which seems to inform the movie’s characterization of the role played by Isaac De Bankole; and pictures of Edgar Allan Poe and Edie Sedgwick. —A+

Chandu The Magician (Kino Lorber)

The dream team of William Cameron Menzies (direction) and James Wong Howe (cinematography) having some fun with pulpy radio-play characters, baroque villainy, in-camera effects and so on. The material used in the Blu-ray of this 1932 picture shows some damage (speckles and such), especially during transitions. Still great, sometimes dazzling, fun, not least due to Bela Lugosi’s scenery-chewing as a baddie named Roxor. (In future sequels he would play the hero Chandu, just to confuse people.) Commentator Greg Mank is super enthusiastic albeit possibly unavoidably stodgy in his praise of analog effects as opposed to these kids today with the CGI. Pretty much all the extras are taken from the 2008 Fox DVD, including a commentary by Richard Schickel that I’ve still not gotten around to listening to. —B+

Death Laid An Egg (Cult Epics)

What do you say about a 1968 giallo starring Jean-Louis Trintingant, Gina Lollobrigida, and Candy’s Ewa Aulin that climaxes with the introduction of a headless, all-breast-meat live chicken? Quite a few things, and I said some of them about eight years ago in a piece for MUBI, in which I categorized this picture as being one of the “genre films that embedded a Marxist critique of Western economic and/or social practices into the thrills of their particular subsets.” This transfer beats hell out of the Japanese standard def DVD that was my reference for the review, which like my first disc of All The Colors of the Dark, was letterboxed in a 4x3 format. The image here is pretty bright; in sequences when there’s a lot of white light pouring through windows you get the impression of tipping into overexposure. But everything holds nicely, making the viewing experience gratifying. I did not spring for the three-disc version that was part of the crowd funding campaign for the disc, which included a CD of Bruno Maderna’s striking modernist score. —B+

The Earth Dies Screaming (Kino Lorber)

This 1964 British sci-fi cheapie is one of those pictures that, seen at an early enough age, will lodge in one’s unconscious and forever resonate with the stiff, sniffy inverse-claustrophobia of its scenes depicting human survivors of an alien onslaught sniping at each other in empty pubs and hotel lobbies. The sense of desolate isolation created by director Terence Fisher and his cast (especially the ever-tetchy Dennis Price) is not upended by the ridiculous dome-headed killer robots roaming the empty streets, but enhanced by them. After years away from the picture, you’re not sure if it’s something you saw as a movie, or just dreamed. But it is real, as this Blu-ray attests. This peculiarly remarkable film is presented in a good-looking, smooth, 1.66 picture. The commentary from Richard Harland Smith is good and thorough (dig, for instance, how he identifies footage repurposed from Village of the Damned) and leavened by his dry sense of humor: “We begin…with stock footage.” —A-

Freebie and the Bean (Warner Archive)

Did Stanley Kubrick really call this the best movie of 1974? Because it’s not very good. This despite being shot by Laszlo Kovacs, having a theme song crooned by Bobby Hart , and featuring a glimpse of City Lights books early on. Other things that had me on its side included a terrifying scene on a building crane, a vehicle featuring the logo “Vertigo Trucking Company,” and, well, not much else. But as it happens, James Caan and Alan Arkin yelling at each other for almost two hours is not as entertaining as it sounds. (Yes, this is my first time seeing it. I couldn’t make it to the movie when it first opened, despite its poster tease "...and look who’s playing Consuelo.” [It’s Valerie Harper].) The image is vivid enough that it’s no trouble at all to see that during one shot in the rough-housing-around-the-fountain scene, Caan is replaced by a very indifferently disguised stunt double. The ending, when put up against The Color of Night, suggests that Richard Rush, the director of both pictures, has some issues with trans people. I guess the thing has curio value. Inspirational dialogue: “She’s on the pill.” —B-

Funeral Parade of Roses (Cinelicious Pics)

Speaking of Kubrick, it’s said that this 1969 quasi-underground picture by Toshio Matsumoto was screened by Kubrick as research for A Clockwork Orange. Lest that give you the wrong impression, this is hardly a picture about wayward/criminal youth, regardless of what Japan’s policy concerning trans people or cross-dressers. In any event, this is a remarkably striking picture in every particular, starting with lead performer Pita (a.k.a. Peter), whose portrayal of the beautiful night life queen Eddie makes everything else about the film possible. Pita’s own artifice of self-presentation constitutes an immutable truth that makes the movie’s diverse postmodern strategies not just unforced, but necessary. The movie’s black-and-white immediacy is beautifully captured in the transfer, and there’s a superb and informative commentary by Chris Desjardins, a.k.a. Chris D. of Flesheaters and fanzine fame (the prior DVD edition of this, from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, had liner notes from Jim O’Rourke—musicians looove this movie). The package is rounded out by a separate disc of eight shorts by Matsumoto, ranging from the early ‘60s to 1975, many featuring psychedelic music by Toshi Ichiyanagi, avant garde composer and ex-husband of Yoko Ono. —A+

Le Gai Savoir (Kino Lorber)

Released on Blu-ray in tandem with La Chinoise, this is arguably the more difficult of the two films that Godard made in the run up to May ’68. These prophetic pictures were of course irrevocably affected by the events they more or less predicted. Our world is still wracked by the concerns, philosophical and social, of the films; only the vocabulary has changed. Savoir, originally conceived for television, has no story as such; instead, it features Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliette Berto, as characters named Emile and Patrice (referencing Rousseau and Lumumba) but also as themselves, inhabiting the black expanse of a studio and talking education, overlaid frequently by montages that are, no surprise, quintessentially Godardian. The movie gets more visually “interesting” the more you watch it, actually, and the disc includes an informative and cogent commentary by Adrian Martin. Also, and this is not an insignificant detail, Léaud and Berto have the richest, most lustrous hair of anyone in motion pictures before and after this film. It’s not just the backlighting. It’s great hair. —A+

Gidget (Twilight Time)

The exceptional label Twilight Time’s always idiosyncratic releases suggest an alternate history of Hollywood. Not an anti-canon so much as an aesthetic animated by discrete pop cultural blips that were executed with notable technical panache. This 1959 picture, in CinemaScope and “Columbia Color” finds the studio, bereft of Harry Cohn (he died in February 1958) grappling to deal with the Youth Culture. Adapting a novel by Fredrick Kohner (Susan Kohner’s uncle, since you ask) that he based on his own teen daughter’s adventures with surfing, it came up with this oddity. Sandra Dee plays the title character, a “girl midget” who’s roundly sassed when she tries to ingratiate herself into a cadre of male surfers, including the snooty Moondog (James Darren) and the adult beachcomber “The Big Kahuna” (Cliff Robertson). Look for Tom Laughlin, Doug McClure, and Yvonne Craig in small roles. Cringe at dialogue like “Hey Moondoggie! You’re not going for that jailbait caper are you?” Thrill to the unexpected lyricism of Cliff Robertson looking out of the Kahuna’s shack at all the younger surfers. Directed by Paul Wendkos with an efficiency he would be disinclined to supply in his later films (trust me, I watched The Mephisto Waltz a few months ago), this is an often glum and tetchy film that gets downright weird when the moments of tension are broken by characters bursting into song, because while it may not be a full-fledged drama it sure ain’t a musical either.   A fascinating artifact and of course it looks mighty good. Not much shaking in the extras department, save a typically astute Julie Kirgo essay. —B+

Innocent Blood (Warner Archive)

At the Venice Film Festival last fall, John Landis headed the jury, and so they showed a lot of his stuff, some newly restored. The video for “Thriller” isn’t that great, really. The making-of documentary is slightly more interesting, and creepy in part. 1985’s Into the Night, which screened in a restored version, is a remarkably indulgent movie in soooo many ways. Many of which sound cool. You’d think a picture in which David Bowie has a knife fight with Carl Perkins would be some kind of sure thing, but you’d be surprised. The whole thing is logy as hell, every scene a kind of non-sequitur. And the overall sadism had a self-serving AND self-loathing quality to in. It made me wonder: had Landis forgotten how to make a movie after that Twilight Zone business? Not that it wouldn’t have arguably served him right—but this isn’t the venue for such discussion. (Although, when you consider the entirety of the Landis Sage you may reasonably conclude that karma doesn't exist, or if it does exist, it is a weirdo rather than a bitch.) Anyway, I mention all this because part of my interest in this high-def version of was my curiosity as to whether, five films after Night, he had remembered how to make a movie. The answer is, kind of. This super-grisly horror comedy from 1992 sort of ups the ante on American Werewolf In London’s total disregard for human life. The hook here is a turned vampire victim who likes it, and can derive some advantage of if, that is, Pittsburgh mob maniac Sallie the Shark, played by Robert Loggia with chop-smacking ferocity. A kind of genre template for Loggia’s Mr. Eddie in Lost Highway. The Blu-ray gets the movie’s garish color schemes—lots of neon-lit nightclubs and stuff—very well. I said it back then (in Entertainment Weekly I think), and I'll say it now: any movie that puts Don Rickles and Dario Argento in the same frame has got something going for it. —B

Kill Baby Kill (Kino Lorber)

These are the times that try men’s souls, to be sure. On the other hand, think back to thirty years ago, when the only way we could watch movies such as All The Colors of the Dark, Death Laid an Egg, and this were via VHS tapes from Video Search of Miami or something. And now we have them on Blu-ray, complete, often restored, sometimes pristine. This 1966 Mario Bava picture is a key work in many respects, amping up the dreamlike qualities that would spin into a fantastic delirium in his subsequent Lisa and the Devil. It also features the Demonic Little Girl figure that would recur in Fellini’s greatest film, Toby Dammit. Which, Tim Lucas allows in his typically excellent commentary, could have its roots in Juliet of the Spirits. In any event, each director and each little girl is somehow distinctive in spite of the affinities. In the case of the one in this picture, Tim tells us, it’s in part because the child is a little boy in a wig, who was not happy to be in the role. —A

Letter From An Unknown Woman (Olive Signature)

This replaces the Olive Blu-ray from a few years back and it’s worth the double-dip I’m afraid. The 4K transfer appears to have been scanned from different source; there’s a Universal logo before the Dozier/Rampart card…but that’s hardly the only difference. The point is that differences are clear from the opening credits on. It’s a picture improvement of maybe 30 percent, possibly more. So, for this exquisite bit of canon you know what you have to do. The extras are almost all astonishing. Lutz Bocher’s commentary is unlike any I’ve heard before. His delivery is kind of abrupt (sounds as if English is not his first language). But his detailed formal analysis, and accounts of what the film could have included, how shots were constructed, and so on, all informed by production documentation and Ophuls’ own notes, consistently informs and fascinates. Tag Gallagher’s visual essay is a tour de force on the film’s very subjective POV. There’s a brief, moving interview with Marcel Ophuls, son of Max and a master of cinema his own self. Dana Polan on the origins of the production is very good. The only dud in the supplements (and not one worth docking a notch over) is cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ tiredly snide interview, in which he reveals that the first time he laid eyes on Letter star Louis Jourdan, it was in Swamp Thing. Wow, man. —A+

The Lost World (Flicker Alley)

This is hardly a conventional upgrade from standard-def to high. It’s a whole new construction of this 1925 granddaddy of giant monster movies, supplemented by a raft of scholarship and exciting related material. The movie itself, with giant reptile special effects work by Willis O’Brien, is an important precursor to King Kong but also a brisk and sometimes eccentric, other times repellent, adventure yarn, based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. The movie looks remarkable for the most part, and the commentary by Nicolas Ciccone consistently identifies the source materials for each part of the reconstruction. It does a lot more, too. Conan Doyle’s yarn was inspired, you will learn, by the real-life explorers who were the subjects of this years The Lost City of Z. Ciccone also frankly addresses the movie’s repellent racist aspects, particularly with respect to the character Zambo, a betrayal, as it happens of Conan Doyle’s more benign but still colonialist conception. The more pleasant stuff includes two Willis O’Brien shorts, test footage from his abortive Creation, deleted scenes. Serge Bromberg contributes a “Secrets of the Restoration” essay in the booklet—A+

Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case (Kino Lorber)

Whose fault is it when critical reputations go down the tubes in a way that’s so ignominious that twenty years (or so) after the fact, a rep-series revision, motivated as much by sentimental regret as it is by critical curiosity, emerges to dole out praise and blame and woe? In other words, does every reassessment of William Wyler have to drag Andrew Sarris for his “Strained Seriousness” categorization of the director in The American Cinema? Why not accompany a celebration of Wyler with André Bazin’s celebration of The Little Foxes instead? Also, Ben-Hur is not that good. Come on. Anyway. This is a roundabout way of noting that this year saw the re-release of two 1950s policiers, based on popular novels by Georges Simenon about his classic detective Maigret. These pictures were directed by Jean Delannoy, one of François Truffaut’s favorite punching bags back when Truffaut was a critic. Invariably, when such pictures are revived, they are accompanied by complaints about how mean Truffaut was. Delannoy is not someone whose films I know a lot about, and when 1958’s Maigret Sets A Trap was revived for theatrical release in the fall, I checked it out. It’s not at all bad—Jean Gabin, while not exactly Simenon’s own vision of the detective, takes over the character with brio, and the story is a good juicy one. But in what should have been the film’s climax, I began to get what Truffaut was on about—the goods Delannoy delivers are talky, monochromatic, pedestrian, saved only by Gabin and the story itself. Not for nothing, but this 1959 follow-up, which did not play in any N.Y. theater in the fall, is rather a better picture. It’s got a more interesting story, the milieu is more intriguing, or at least intriguingly portrayed; the direction is better. And the 1.66 image on the disc is superb. Alas, that’s it for the Delannoy/Gabin Maigret films, so maybe I should be ticked at Truffaut—seems like Jean was hitting his stride with the material just as Cahiers was hammering him. —B+

Night School (Warner Archive)

I thought this 1981 picture would be fun to check out, as it was one of the remaining few entries in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film that I haven’t seen. About ten minutes into the movie I paused it to see what Michael Weldon said about it—he was a lot more dismissive than I remembered. And yet here I was, watching. Oops. No point in stopping now, though. The “Lorimar Presents” logo at the opening was a nice blast from the past…and the 1980s grain in the nighttime image was not displeasing. Nor was the news that the DP was Mark Irwin, who worked with David Cronenberg for many years. Sure, the director was also responsible for one-fifth of the second Casino Royale, as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Cromwell, and Sextette—not the credentials you are necessarily looking for in a Halloween derivative. Ken Hughes’ sense of restraint only takes him so far, though; while this decapitating-serial-killer tale is not inordinately gory, the vast array of red herrings the plot offers up include a mentally disabled busboy. Bad form. Also anachronistic is the half-milquetoast/half-smarm-king academic who, for all his thin-haired blandness, is catnip to the lady grad students. Drew Snyder, who portrays the simp, puts on a hilarious look of resignation when his character overhears the female dean telling a TA that she’s going to fire him. is going to fire him. So, yes, the main distinguishing characteristic of this movie is that it features Rachel Ward taking a shower. And she’s not killed therein. For very good reason. Anyway, the presentation is, some would say, better than the movie deserves. But my argument, as a general rule, is that all preserved films should be this well-preserved. Whatever. —B

The Old Dark House (Cohen Media)

As I wrote when I saw it in Venice in September: “This is the archetypal horror comedy, or would be, had it ever been equaled.” Or nearly equaled, even, I ought to have said. To continue: “Ernest Thesiger is genius incarnate as the house’s very nervous master Horace Fenn, while British stage actor Eva Moore is an exemplary crone as his religious fanatic sister. The movie brims with quotable dialogue, including the immortal line ‘Have a potato.’ The restoration, produced by U.S. outfit Cohen Media, looks dazzling.” Yes it sure does, and never more so that when Moore takes Gloria Stuart’s silk nightie between her fingers and says “That’s fine stuff—but it’ll rot.” You really get the fineness of the stuff. And the distorted mirror business that follows looks like it could have been shot yesterday. Extras are from the prior Kino disc. And are fine. —A+

Red Line 7000 (Kino Lorber)

One of the hardest Hawks films to see, generally, which has been frustrating for not just cinephiles as a general class but for Robin Wood devotees—his chapter on the 1965 picture is one of the hinges that hold his 1968 book-length study of Hawks together. So this disc is cause for much celebration. It presents the film well, with a solid image and clear soundtrack. The racing footage has some rawness to it, but that’s kind of an asset—there’s a resonance of period authenticity to it. At the start it feels like Only Angels Have Wings transposed to the world of stock car racing, but it mutates into a sort of All-American La Ronde, one in which the male characters—typical Americans!—suffer from sexual jealousy of practically maniacal proportions. Although the film, true to its era, looks at them as Normal Guys With A Few Problems. James Caan’s character is particularly truculent, and Caan portrays him with utter conviction. The whole thing’s kind of unsettling. On the other hand, George Takei has a small role, and the nightclub musical number is almost completely insane, and that’s fun, no? Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo, usually the highlights of the Twilight Time commentaries, are here, and Kirgo has a special insight—her dad wrote the screenplay. She is not as partial to the movie as the relation might imply, which makes for an even more interesting commentary than she usually delivers. —A

Suspiria (Synapse)

I know that Synapse head Don May, Jr., has been working on this labor of love for literally years. David Mackenzie, who did the compression and authoring on the project, is a friend and someone I’ve worked with on a lot of Blu-ray projects—he is the recordist on every  Blu-ray commentary I’ve done in the 21^st century. So I’m…partial? But I’m also a Suspiria nut, and a demanding one.  If this were to disappoint, I might have just let it pass without comment. But honestly, I’d also be shocked, because I know the technical acumen and commitment to quality of the people making the product. Well, here we are, and here is a review of it, so you can guess what I think of the new version. Indeed, it is wonderful. Indeed, I’ve never seen it look better. Yes, all of the baroque lighting effects are incredibly vivid and fresh but there's more. The flesh tones are incredible. Jessica Harper’s “natural” healthiness versus the overly made-up overseers of the ballet school, or the ruddiness of the professor with whom she consults near the end—this  contrast constitutes its own theme in the movie as presented here. There is none of the oversaturation that plagued the German version I wrote about in 2010. It’s beautiful. Perfect. Too perfect? Since the restoration has the enthusiastic approval of cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, I’m comfortable saying “not likely.” And the audio. There’s an amazing depth of detail that I’ve never heard before in this very loud but intricately “composed” movie. I’ll be honest, I haven’t even delved into the separate disc of supplements yet, and if I did things like declare “Blu-ray of the year” this would win in a walk, even if I never got around to those extras. The extras I did sample were the two audio commentaries. Troy Howarth is very informative with bios of the cast, stories of the movie’s development, and whether or not it’s a “giallo.” He says no and I agree. On the other commentary, David Del Valle and pal Derek Botelho kick around critical ideas, invoke Jung, and all that. They also speculate on a theoretical Suspiria expanded universe: “Are we to believe that some of these girls are part of the coven?” I got the collectible steelbook, which I pre-ordered for a mere $50; on Amazon it’s going for $90 as I write this. I pre-ordered not because I’m such a collectibles enthusiast, but because I wanted to SEE THIS THING, and man am I glad I did. $90 is a lot of money, and I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but knowing what I know now, I'd shell it out if I had to. If Synapse's pattern runs true to what it was with the Phenomena Blu-ray of a few years back, a less fancy version of the same restoration will come down the pike some time. But none such item has been announced at press time as they say. Inspirational commentary line, from Mr. Del Valle: “You can never use black magic to do anything good. Kenneth Anger told me that.”—A+

Witchhammer (Second Run)

To paraphrase John Belushi, I suggest you buy as many Eastern European period films from the '50s through the '70s as you can. I'm not sure I've ever been let down by one yet. This nightmarish 1970 Czech picture directed by Otakar Vávra—who began as an avant-garde filmmaker (his first short, 1931's The Light Penetrates The Dark, made when he was 20, is included here) and died in 2011 at the age of 100, with over 50 films to his credit—is a meticulous simulation of an ignorant procedural. Given the circumstances of its production, it is of course specifically allegorical. But it also speaks the universal truth that abuse of power should come as no surprise, and a few other universal truths as well. Its widescreen black-and-white imagery is dazzlingly precise, creating an unusually immersive atmosphere. Second Run, the British label responsible for this release, always does an amazing job with its releases and I'm here with good news: its Blu-ray discs tend to be region-free. That goes for last year's Horse Money and its new upgrade-from-standard-def disc of The Cremator, which I haven't been able to watch yet. So if you've been curious about this fare but lacking in what had been the necessary equipment, jump on all three of these.  —A+

Young Mr. Lincoln (Criterion)

Beyond the high-def image, which is breathtaking, this Blu-ray reissue of a Criterion standard-def features a new, excellent supplement. Yes, I’m bookending Consumer Guide with Blu-rays of two John Ford films with audio commentaries by Joseph McBride. Here McBride considerately separates myth from fact and contributes deep-dish analysis of Henry Fonda’s performance. Frank as ever, he recalls some personal anecdotes about Fonda that reveal both commendable and less-than-delectable aspects of the actor’s character, but his storytelling never takes a punitive tone. He explains why Ford was usually anti-moving camera (in the context of one of this film’s few tracking shots, one which I reckon was suggested by a Murnau work) and takes apart the famous Cahiers du Cinema deconstruction of the movie. Geoffrey O’Brien’s booklet essay, featuring the line, “We are invited to indulge a naïve lyricism that always proves deceptive,” holds up, as of course it would. As for the movie, well, cinema doesn’t get more essential than this. As Orson Welles said (and of course this is cited by McBride): “John Ford knows what the earth is made of.” —A+

Return Of The Son Of Blu-ray Consumer Guide: July Fourth Weekend 2016 Edition

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to be shutting down the blog maybe, not writing for no money ever again definitely, and all sorts of stuff like that. And yet. Here it is. Some things refuse to be killed, and/or die a natural death.

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver.

Recommended without comment (because I got to them too late to really formulate readable capsules in time for my self-imposed deadline here): Belladonna of Sadness (Cinelicious Pics), Everybody Wants Some!! (Paramount), Hawks and Sparrows/Pigsty (Region B U.K. import, Eureka!/Masters of Cinema), Horse Money (Region B U.K. import, Second Run), The Last Command (Region B U.K. import, Eureka!/Masters of Cinema).

Appassionata (Twilight Time)

Twilight Time’s eclecticism is genuinely unpredictable; just when you think you’ve got the label’s tastes pegged (it loves strong music scores, CinemaScope, uber-competent studio directors like Henry Levin and…Ralph Nelson? Yeah, Ralph Nelson) than they release something wholly other. In this case, a 1974 Italian domestic drama with 100-proof psychosexual content, starring then-teen Ornella Muti and then-newly-turned-20 Eleonora Giorgi. Gabrielle Ferzetti, of L’Avventura jaded-stud fame, looks pretty tired of being a jaded stud, and is here Muti’s dad, a dentist whose wife is going bonkers and whose daughter’s best friend has the hots for him. The movie’s opening scene features young Ornella in schoolgirl white blouse and sweater, so you know the movie wants to make you feel dirty right off the bat. About 41 minutes in, do take note of the “what the hell is she doing with that dog scene.” Eventually all the sexual repression/expression—which really begins roiling once Ornella’s character starts inexplicably swaying her butt at daddy—builds to a, um, climax of staggering WTFness. Not since the “Knock it off, Vix” shower sequence in Russ Meyer’s Vixen has the male gaze had to contend with such seriously icky mixed feelings about being the male gaze. As for the disc, damn—the transfer has excellent color values and the image quality overall is spectacular for a 40-plus year old film. Not big on extras, but a highly memorable viewing experience. Inspirational dialogue: “All big, handsome cowards, all filthy pigs like you are.”

—­B

Bad Influence (Shout! Factory)

Early David Koepp, sure, why not. Early Curtis Hanson, ditto. Relatively early Robert Elswit—WTFIU?! This 1990 movie still looks and feels a little‘80s, and some of that look and feel is a mite cheesy—the white walls of James Spader’s apartment, the overdetermined shadows of Venetian blind slats on Lowe’s face. On the other hand, the late afternoon job promotion scene with Spader and John DeLancie is pretty sweet and definitely suggests visual expressiveness to come from the Elswit camp. As does the discovery of the emptied-out apartment. And then there’s that great party scene where they’re projecting Alphaville on the wall of a house. Ace soundtrack too—Les Negresses Vert, Don Cherry and Nana Vasconcellos, Gavin Friday… and the movie holds up, for the most part. The sole extra of note is a 30-minute interview with, Koepp, which has lots of solid stuff. —B+

 

Candy (Kino Lorber)

Not a bad looking disc, but pace pal-of-mine Kim Morgan, who contributes an eloquent and impassioned defense on one of the discs extras, an almost unspeakably bad film. I think the only way a viable movie could have been made from Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s porn pastiche would have been to film it completely straight =-faced, in the mode of either Douglas Sirk or Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Renata Adler was terribly unkind to young Ewa Aulin in the former’s New York Times review of the movie but she also had a point—the poor young thing looks so puffy in the film’s opening scene that she’s almost unrecognizable in the following schoolroom scene. Which is where the film’s problems proper begin, with John Astin’s intolerable nonstop mugging. A fascinating curio though, what with the cameos (Brando’s is less mortifying than Burton’s) and the location stuff (is she actually walking over the Verrazano Bridge?) and so on. Good looking disc, too; the other extra is screenwriter Buck Henry offering a frank assessment of the film while unabashedly recalling what a great time he had with director Christian Marquand while making it. —B-

The Chase (Kino Lorber)

Of the 300 movies titled The Chase, this 1946 Arthur Ripley-directed number, from a Cornell Woolrich tale, definitely belongs in the top five at least. The thing about Woolrich, or one thing about Woolrich, is that like a lot of genre writers he was not allergic to using pretty hoary plot devices but was always smart enough to use them in completely insanely inspired ways. As you will see if you’re watching this very nicely restored and transferred thriller for the first time, in which Robert Cummings, as a down on his luck nice guy who turns chauffeur to bonkers gangster Steve Cochran and OF COURSE falls for his wife Michèle Morgan, is largely eclipsed by his co-stars, another one of whom is Peter Lorre. The pervasive atmosphere of the picture is such that it’s completely fitting that Guy Maddin does the commentary. (“A little sprocket wriggle…it’s still alive, in other words,” he notes of the UCLA restoration.) Other extras include two-count-‘em-two radio adaptations of the Woolrich story. —B+

La Chienne (Criterion)

I’ve always been pretty nuts about Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, which was based on this 1931 Jean Renoir picture. A picture, I admit, that I had never seen until now. This is another reason Criterion is kind of the best. Street gets the kudos for bone-chilling sexual sadism and voluptuousness, and near-nihilist ending hijinks, while Renoir’s film is a remarkably fluid slice of sleazy life that displays a lot more sexual frankness and has a realism that’s as raw-nerve-provoking as Lang’s fevered stylization. (Check out the amazing hand-held camerawork in the arts-patron-courting scene here.) Hence, the films are as alike as Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir are alike, and as different as Edward G. Robinson is different from Michel Simon. The Criterion package also contains Renoir’s first sound feature, which looks as good as the main feature, another 97 minutes from Jacques Rivette’s made-for-television study of/tribute to Renoir, and more. An essential purchase. —A+

City Heat (Warner)

The picture quality on this is really something—more ‘80s cheese, this time ‘80s cheese doing period, so lots of red neon and such. So the disc is a pleasure to look at, always. And for about three or four minutes you get the feeling that this might hold for the movie itself—it can’t be as bad as the critics said it was, or as I remember it, can it? Oh yes it can— this is just a really terrible movie that gets worse as it goes on. I can forgive Clint Eastwood a lot but clearly his inclination to act upon his inability to get along with Blake Edwards was a major failing on his part. For Eastwood or Burt completists only. I may be both those things, as I still have the Blu-ray of At Long Last Love (don’t even get me started). —C+

Cuba (Kino Lorber)

In his book Getting Away With It, partially a series of interviews with Richard Lester, Steven Soderbergh classes this picture in the category of “fascinating films that get better with age.” Interestingly, when he made Che with Hispanic actors in Hispanic roles and shot the whole thing (almost) in Spanish, he added, within the cinematic canon, to the aggregate of movies that actually make Cuba, with its casting of the likes of Martin Balsam and Chris Sarandon in roles as Cuban natives, seem that much more anachronistic. Nevertheless, this remains fascinating, particularly for Lester nuts (and why wouldn’t you be one) and those who enjoy watching Sean Connery deconstruct his screen persona (which, as Lester revealed to Soderbergh, was something that in this particular case he was actually rather reluctant to do). This disc provides a very handsome version of the film, which, as it happens, twists around the standard-issue Casablanca scenario in a way that Soderbergh would later attempt with The Good German, a movie that, it so happens, I have found to have gotten better with age. Circles within circles. But back to Cuba: Evocative and trenchant visuals, low-key characterizations, and the tragic-comedy of errors in the climactic battle scene really sells the whole thing. The unstable dynamic between Connery and female lead Brooke Adams is fantastic and rare. The only extras are trailers, but that’s okay. —B+

Death By Hanging (Criterion)

Nagisa Oshima’s 1968 anti-death penalty movie is part absurdist theater, part parable, possibly not wholly artistically successful in the way that, say Cruel Story Of Youth is, but most certainly more that a curio. Its claustrophobic setting, unshowy black and white cinematography, and standard 1.85 frame combine to yield, well, not one of Oshima’s most visually distinctive films. But the animating impulse behind it gathers a power that increases the way decibels do, and yields a movie whose hatred of injustice is potent, vicious. —A

Dillinger (Arrow)

Watching this excellent release a while back, thoughts along the lines of “John Milius is so much better on paper than in reality” kept bouncing through my head. But the movie’s snuck up on me since; little bits in which Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Harry Dean Stanton et. al. do all sorts of their characteristic stuff, and the brutality of the shootout scenes, and lots more, keep popping up and resonating. So, you know. A picture that can displace the 1945 Lawrence Tierney Dillinger from my consciousness is worth reckoning with. Excellent transfer, fantastically persistent use of “Red River Valley,” and the customary passel of engaged extras. My favorite has producer Lawrence Gordon waxing sort-of nostalgic for his time in no-budget filmmaking and expressing an affection for and belief in Milius that you wish every producer had for a good director. —A

Dr. Strangelove (Criterion)

Not much to say about this one. Lately I’ve been seeing a few Feisty Young People weighing in on how they “don’t like” this movie, and I don’t know what to tell them except “Bless you hearts” and/or “Good luck.” (I know the Self Styled Siren doesn’t consider it her cup of tea either, but she gets a dispensation because, well, Self-Styled Siren.) It’s a genuinely canonical film and The Culture is stuck with it, although you’re of course under no obligation, say, to buy this Blu-ray. But if you are a sensible person and you like this movie you definitely should. On this new transfer derived from new a 4K scan—made from the same source as the prior excellent Sony BR—there’s an overall barely detectable uptick…but an uptick nonetheless. A good point of comparison—the low angle close-ups of Sterling Hayden and his cigar, where there’s definitely more facial-crease detail, for instance. So until 4K discs, players, and displays are common, this is the definitive home version for the movie alone. The extras manage to say a few newish things about the movie, which you might not have thought possible. —A+

Eureka (Twilight Time)

A very odd movie that’s been very difficult to see decently in a proper state for some time, this is the object of near-simultaneous Blu-ray releases by Twilight Time in the U.S. and Eureka!/Masters of Cinema in the U.K. In the spirit of international cooperation I hoped to foster in my New York Times piece about differing U.K. and U.S. Blu-rays of The Fury, the two releases share the on-disc extras, my favorite of which is the nearly hour-long chat with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg in which he lays out the movie’s complex symbology, and discusses how it does and does not riff on Citizen Kane. The region-free TT disc gets an edge for its region-freeness, while the Eureka gets an edge for having more Nicolas Roeg stuff (including an excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography) in the printed extras. The movie looks stunning on both.—A+

 

Father Of The Bride (Warner Archive)

Wow. When Elizabeth Taylor comes bounding down the stairs to greet Spencer Tracy in her first scene, I almost cried. I wonder how this film will play for people who don’t have the same associations of Tracy and Taylor that I others of my and prior generations do. But I insist they had something numinous that transcends that, and that anyone who can watch the aforementioned bit and not have their heart melt just a little might not be a movie person, or a person. Anyway. When Scorsese had Vicki spending an afternoon at this movie in Raging Bull he knew whereof he spoke, that is, who MGM and Vincente Minnelli made this movie for. This 1950 delight presents a vision of middle class America that must look now to be 500 times more of a fantasy than it might have then, but I know it was the America that my children of immigrant grandparents bought into (that is, desired) big time. The movie version was as seductive as Lubitsch’s Paris, Hollywood. Minnelli’s meticulous assuredness is evident in every shot of this movie. This, of course it one of his parables of normalcy, which through the ‘50s and into the ‘60s would kind of alternate with his parables of neurosis (The Cobweb, Two Weeks In Another Town). He was so absolutely at home with both. But also very knowing about “normalcy:” note the woozy dissolves after the Dunston patriarch breaks out the martinis at the first in-laws summit. The high angle shots from church ceiling of the wedding rehearsal and its attendant choreography are also spectacular. Every frame of this Archive Blu-ray is worship-worthy. Just perfect. And you can also see why Truffaut kinda hated Minnelli—he’s so spectacularly adept at reifying values Truffaut probably considered utterly sham at the time. Very few extras, which would normally deprive it of an A+ but I’m still giving it an —A+

Garden of Evil (Twilight Time)

When the Fox DVD came out, I thought it was one of the most visually beautiful discs I’d ever seen…this Blu-ray is almost maybe too gorgeous: those matte paintings in the first cantina scene look an awful lot like, well, matte paintings. But you can still drown in the blues if you like. This better than decent 1954 double-cross Western is also supplied with, among other spiffy supps, a commentary from TT honcho Nick Redman and three film music guys: Stephen C. Smith (a Bernard Herrmann biographer), John Morgan, William T. Stromberg. They talk about a lot more than the music though: other topics include the studio system, optical vs. magnetic tracks, how and why they don’t make ‘em like these anymore, etc. A terrific package overall. Which leads to my question for Twilight Time: How about Warlock, pretty please?—A

Gold (Kino Lorber)

“No more mischief with the high voltage!” one character says in this 1934 Ufa production, presented by Kino Lorber from a handsome Murnau Foundation restoration. This sci-fi melodrama about modern-day alchemists and the corporate scum who seek to steal their secrets could have used a little more mischief with the high voltage, frankly. The electrical arcs redolent of Metropolis are a little more fun than the overheated machinations of the characters. Although it is interesting to contemplate this picture’s circumscribed world, in which an alluring vamp like Brigitte Helm could fall big time for a puffed up dude who looks like Charles Dance’s stuffier grandfather. I’m glad this disc exists, but I still more-eagerly await a Blu-ray of one of those fucked up Alraune movies I read about in the Overlook sci-fi encyclopedia. —B+

Hound of the Baskervilles (Twilight Time)

Haven’t seen the U.K. version from Arrow, but this version of the 1959 Hammer picture, with Peter Cushing as Holmes, Christopher Lee as Sir Henry, and André Morrell as the most competent, least goofy Watson ever, is really beautiful. Scanned from spotless materials, it seems, with great color. A really fun, effective movie; Cushing’s Holmes is a thing of beauty to the extent I sometimes consider it better than Rathbone’s. The wide-ranging extras here include two equally diverting commentaries. —A+

I Saw What You Did (Scream Factory)

William Castle’s 1965 hybrid of Psycho and The World Of Henry Orient certainly does not lack for novelty value, premise-wise. Capitalizing on what it presents as the new fad with the kids, it shows a couple of charming teens (and little sis too!) calling random folks and asking stupid questions. The married couple who get a call and react with grins that say “Prank calls are such good fun!” Unfortunately the girls call John Ireland and say “I know who you are and I saw what you did” right after he’s pulled his estranged wife into the shower with him to stab her to death. No really. And Ireland just gets tetchier. He develops the conviction that he can just solve all his problems by killing everyone who irritates him, not realizing this is in fact only likely to increase his troubles. Not a rational thinker. Joan Crawford, as Ireland’s inexplicable next-door neighbor AND girlfriend, is here in her second and final collaboration with Castle, and she stomps through the proceedings with real “who do I have to fuck to get off this picture” zeal. The movie is pretty crisp looking in this as-usual conscientious Shout/Scream presentation. But it is one odd picture: tonally all over the place, sometimes consciously, sometimes maybe not, and saddled with a music scores that’s part ‘60s sitcom and part…Big Valley? I’d say this could be profitably remade but contemporary phone culture doesn’t really support the idea. (A trailer in the scant supplements actually posits the phone book itself as something to be terrified of.) —B 

Journey To The Seventh Planet (Kino Lorber)

How can one not have affection for this cheesy/earnest/ambitious 1962 picture whose premise presaged Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and by extension the two movies made from that book? As Michael Weldon summarized/rhapsodized in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia Of Film: “Five astronauts on Uranus have their brains picked by a giant eye creature. Their fears, desires, and memories appear as realistic hallucinations. One of the weird monsters is a Cyclops-dinosaur-rat animated by Jim Danforth. One of the dream women found lounging in a bikini is Greta Thyssen, seen in many of the final Three Stooges shorts. One of the astronauts is John Agar! What a movie!” Indeed. This is plainly one of the rocks upon which the church of Psychotronic/fantastic cinema is built. Carrying the torch, Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas provides an informative and astute commentary, noting of the picture that it’s “the last of the naïve films about space travel.” As for the movie itself, I’ve never seen it looking so good. Healthy color, rich detail, clean picture throughout. —A

The King and Four Queens (Olive)

The film materials used to make this high-def version, one can see from the opening craggy vistas, were ever so slightly on the pink side. But this is something that will only be really noticeably if you’re looking at it with a color corrector’s eye, not a movie-watchers. That aside, this is a handsome looking presentation of Raoul Walsh’s 1956 chamber Western, in which Clark Gable settles in at a ghost town to play footsie with the four daughters-in-law of an outlaw matriarch. All the girls are waiting for their outlaw fellas—them that’s survived, if any—to come back to the ranch with a fortune in gold. Pretty entertaining stuff. Poor Jo Van Fleet has to endure the indignity of playing mom-in-law to four actresses who are only between thirteen and seven years younger than her, and Eleanor Parker is the wiliest of the beauties. As the movie’s story is a bit of a waiting game, nobody really goes anywhere, which keeps its vistas limited. Gable plays the melodeon and sings (badly) “In The Sweet Bye And Bye.” Composer Alex North plays with some Copeland voicings during a bizarre dance sequence. The movie’s laid-back vibe may account somewhat for the filmmakers getting the definitely morally unacceptable denouement past the Breen office. Not much in the extras department, but it’s Clark Gable and Raoul Walsh. Come on. —B+

Million Eyes of Sumuru/Girl From Rio (Blue Underground)

I always stop for a Harry Alan Towers double feature. 1967’s Million Eyes, shot in expedient Techniscope, looks mighty fine here, and the movie itself promises at first to be a bikini clad feature-length catfight, which is great, but then Frankie Avalon shows up. (Uninspirational dialogue from Avalon: “I wonder if this is where I’m supposed to sing.”) The movie nonetheless maintains a certain voluptuous goofiness, thanks in part to Goldfinger girl Shirley Eaton, withstanding several not-great hair days in the title role. The movie also features George Nader reaching a kind of apotheosis, and Klaus Kinski wearing makeup that vaguely recalls that of Daniel Gelin in The Man Who Knew Too Much. You’re sold, right? But wait, there’s more: the Jess Franco directed sequel Girl From Rio, boasting wacky Rio and Brasilia locations. It’s a fun movie but a little repetitive with the mild torture scenes, which is a complaint I never thought I’d make. A very Francoesque touch is the use of what looks like a dental X-ray machine to represent a deadly heat-ray generator. In the supplements Ms. Eaton waxes slightly priggish about Mr. Franco, which made me sad, and I thought ever so slightly less of her as a result.—A-

Panic In The Year Zero (Kino Lorber)

Ray Milland’s directorial debut is a terrifically downbeat look at the disintegration of an American family as it escapes what it believes to have been a nuke attack on Los Angeles. It should make great Election Night viewing.  Milland cast himself as the stolid patriarch, a Good Liberal who has to make some Tough Choices, while Jean Hagen tamps down her comedic skills to play the world’s now most stressed-out 1950s white housewife. Mary Mitchell is good as the daughter…and Frankie Avalon, as the son, evokes the deathless question “Where the hell is Ricky Nelson when you need him?” Hell, even David Nelson would do. This is nevertheless a tough and tense picture, and it looks super crisp here. Richard Harland Smith of Movie Morlocks gives one of the most informative and well-organized audio commentaries I’ve ever heard. Discussing the movie’s locales, he starts off talking about the Republic Pictures back lot, mentions a particular house on its street set, and says “I’ll tell you about that in about 75 minutes,” and sure enough, 75 minutes later, he does. —A-

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (Olive)

A remarkably solid-looking presentation of an idiotically under seen film. George Sanders is genius, in the title role of the Maupassant-derived cad. Angela Lansbury is great and gorgeous. The script is magnificently highfalutin—the actors CLEARLY love the dialogue. Darius Milhaud did the score, and the movie is also Warren William’s last stand. Pictures of determined, even willful, refinement were director Albert Lewin’s stock-in-trade, and their aspirational qualities turned off critics like Andrew Sarris. But there are several scenes here that provide solid evidence that Lewin truly was a director of the first rank. Look at the sequence in which Sanders counts off twenty-five paces prior to a duel and tell me that’s not filmmaking. As for the refinement, maybe it seemed pretentious in 1947 but in 2016 it strikes me as rather tonic. A good and memorable film.—A-

Rollercoaster (Shout! Factory)

This 1977 movie, the first really memorable egg laid in the ‘70s disaster genre, looks really good here. Timothy Bottoms’ skin tones are a little red, but he IS playing the villain, a psycho who’s planting bombs on roller coasters at America’s amusement parks. Like Dr. Evil, he wants “one million dollars.” There’s what I like to think of as a nice in-joke here when George Segal says to Richard Widmark “You remind me of the man I work for—I don’t like him either.” “He seemed nice enough to me,” Widmark responds. The man Segal’s character works for is played by Henry Fonda, so laugh it up, Madigan people. Phoning in his demands, Bottoms talks like Douglas Rains, and Segal keeps saying “Screw you” to him. And it’s like maybe 45 minutes straight of this sort of thing. So clearly, this movie’s trouncing by the likes of Star Wars was not unearned. The Sensurround gimmick, here rendered in a mutation of three-channel stereo, is not entirely compelling either. In the disc’s sole substantial supplement, one-time child actor Tommy Cook, who came up with the story idea and the scenario, waxes so enthusiastic about his dream project you feel kinda bad that it turned out so meh. Things only really heat up about an hour and 25 minutes in, when both Sparks and a wild-eyed long-haired Craig Wasson show up. —B-

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

They Were Expendable (Warner Archive)

“Custer is dead,” now that is one heck of an opening line. It’s the opening line of the cavalry movie, not the World War II movie, obviously. Yellow Ribbon doesn’t immediately seem to possess the gravitas of Fort Apache or even Liberty Valance, but it’s entertaining as all getout and in terms of the heavy stuff it’s a grower. The key is Ford’s use of Technicolor, which is as determinedly anti-realistic as it is in any Powell-Pressburger. We get to practically expressionist levels, particularly in the scene where Wayne’s character is at his wife’s grave site—a beautiful echo of Young Mr. Lincoln but also much more. Expendable, along with The Best Years Of Our Lives one of the Hollywood pinnacles of immediately-post WWII filmmaking, is in black and white, and visually “plainer” because it wants/needs to be. Both discs look pretty spectacular (yes, there are one or two “soft” shots in Ribbon, and here and there in Expendable the process shots are more process-y than you might remember them) and both films are library items. —A

Summer Lovers (Twilight Time)

Director Randall Kleiser contributes an informative, thorough, albeit stiffly delivered commentary to this high-def version of his shot-in-the-Greek-islands 1982 youths-experiment-in-polyamory sex drama. The scenery is pretty and the people—a very buff Peter Gallagher, a very lithe Daryl Hannah, and a very continental Valerie Quennessen—equally so. The look is sun-dappled, so it’s aged less drastically than many other 1980s pictures. Cinematographer Timothy Galfas was no Nestor Almendros, but he was no slouch either. While in several respects the movie is fluff, on a base level it’s still a smarter and more engaging movie about being a young adult in the ‘80s than fucking St. Elmo’s Fire was. And for what it’s worth, all the way down to extras casting, Kleiser really knows how to appeal to the heterosexual male gaze. —A-

Susan Slept Here (Warner Archive)

Yes, the whole setup of this not-quite-bedroom farce is potentially infuriating. (If you don’t know the setup, think of the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon dueling-Michael-Caine bit in the first Trip movie.) But the movie’s energy and spectacular visuals create a cartoon vulgarity that transcends cartoon vulgarity. Even the most relatively sedate frames of this early Frank Tashlin live action feature are pop-art insane. He makes Ann Francis look like a real-life version of his colleague Tex Avery’s Swing Shift Cinderella or some such lust object. The Blu-ray gets every last bit of visual tinsel, from the light glinting off the Christmas presents when Dick Powell steps off the elevator to the sheen of a cop’s hat band. Spectacular, and a clear influence on Godard’s Une femme est une femme if you want to get highbrow about it. —A

Suspicion (Warner Archive)

One of the most frustrating Hitchcock pictures, due to his inability to get an actually convincing ending past either the censors or the studio or whoever ultimately put the kibosh on the letter-mailing twist that should have been the final shot. Nevertheless, like every Hitchcock picture, it is of considerable interest for students of film language and other living things. The Blu-ray looks good and slick—check out Cary Grant’s pomaded coif in the “kissed in a car” scene, you can count each particular hair. Other moments jump out: the movie’s opening in the dark, Grant “breaking” the fourth wall when clowning in wretched antique chairs. The character played by Carol Curtis-Brown ought to be catnip for today’s cultural studies undergrads. There’s a certain deliciousness in Grant’s character is so abysmal, but on rewatching one gets an intense reminder of how insufferable Nigel Bruce’s best friend is as well. It’s kind of excruciating—and Hitchcock’s sympathies are with Joan Fontaine throughout: he portrays the character not as a fool but a genuinely lonely and vulnerable There’s an acute awareness of just how Grant’s character is textbook abusive, particularly in the depiction of the “give us a smile” torture he inflicts. Finally, Hitchcock and Fontaine and Grant are so great they sell the stupid ending anyway. —A

Too Late For Tears

Woman On The Run (Flicker Alley)

Two “rediscovered” and restored noirs from the always-impeccable Flicker Alley, and they are both revelatory and enjoyable. Tears features Lisabeth Scott falling in love with a suitcase full of money, and Arthur Kennedy and Dan Duryea paying the cost of that love. Byron Haskin directs with apt vinegar and movement. Woman stars poor Ann Sheridan, only 35 but aged by booze bloat, in the middle of a killer-wants-to-off-a-murder-witness plot that ends with nightmare imagery of the same horrible amusement park mascot that figures so prominently at the climax of Lew Landers’ Man In The Dark. Inspirational dialogue from the latter: “What are you worried about mister, he missed.” Both discs feature lively engaged commentaries from Alan Rode and Eddie Muller respectively, and extensive video supplements on the restoration. Noir nuts will be very satisfied. —A

Under The Sun Of Satan (Cohen)

A two-BR set, part of the label’s Pialat collection, and it’s a beautiful rendering of one of the Great Films of the 20^th century, so what do you want? The second disc of extras replicates much of the Eureka/MOC standard def set, including an interview with a very thoughtful Gerard Depardieu from 2003 in which he makes the immortal observation “acteurs son des…des…des animaux malade.” But the package does NOT contain the two Pialat shorts from the early ‘50s, and so as much as I don’t seek title redundancy in my DVD library I’m hanging on to both. But when I want to watch Satan itself, this is the version I’m watching. —A

The Vikings (Kino Lorber)

I understand that the casting of this 1958 picture (alternate title: Kirk Douglas Presents “My Life As A Blond”) imbues it with unintentional camp or kitsch value, but if you can get past that, this is a surprisingly credible period action picture and yes, Ernest Borgnine actually pulls of his role as a patriarch/warrior. This Blu-ray of the movie is very nice; the renderings of the exteriors in daylight are particularly beautiful. Some of the content is what some call “rapey” these days, with dialogue exchanges like: “She said she’d kill herself…if I touched her.” “They all say that. What they really mean is that they’ll kill themselves if you don’t!” But the story is reasonably eventful: by the end, poor Kirk has only one eye, and poor Tony Curtis only one arm: it’s hard out there for an early Common Era warrior. A career high for director Richard Fleischer, and, in a sense, for cinematographer Jack Cardiff.. —A-

Where’s Poppa? (Kino Lorber)

I have a confession to make. While this 1970 movie looms large in my childhood memory, largely due to its reputation as an object so outrageous as to be practically taboo—despite its being the product of Hollywood rather than of young John Waters—I’ve never actually seen it until a couple of weeks ago. When it first came out on DVD, I was running the DVD reviews section at Premiere, and I assigned the disc—MGM/UA, if I recall correctly—to the woman who I would eventually marry. I don’t remember why I did that. “Was it to punish you?” I asked her the other day. “I think it was more that I drew the short straw,” she said. Because now that I’ve seen the movie I’m a little mixed up about it. Despite the participation of very talented people, from director Carl Reiner on down, the movie is creepily unpleasant in a way that goes beyond the standard level of discomfort aspired to by black comedies. It’s unremittingly ugly and racist, and not all that funny either. I had not been aware, not having seen it, that the whole thing, a miserable scenario in which George Segal contends with a mother whose dementia has rendered her, well, demented, takes place over a fraught maybe 30-hour period. The movie’s extended rape, um, joke, is curious. In a sense it’s too ridiculous/idiotic to be taken in earnest, but it still makes you want to take a long shower. The climactic scene at a senior “home” run by Paul Sorvino is, on the other hand, pointedly and purposefully horrific—one of the aspects of the movie that give it a “you won’t believe it unless you see it” reputation. Which is not a recommendation. The transfer is good looking—ever dingy moldy tile of Segal’s shower looks dingy and moldy. —B-

The Blu-Ray Consumer Guide That Wouldn't Die: Labor Day 2014 Edition

WHAT'S GOING ON HERE: Well, when I started writing for RogerEbert.com last year, around the time MSN Movies closed up shop, I thought maybe I could "monetize" this feature. I'd pitched it around to other revenue-generating sites before, and received...unenthusiastic responses, but my Ebert pals were into it. But it really didn't work out in terms of traffic (thanks Obama) and so we decided my contributions would have to be of a different nature. But...I couldn't...stop...watching Blu-rays...and making...notes on them. So we're back at the blog, without promise of regular updating, even though if I can't sell a Gift Guide to a revenue-generating site, that'll end up here, too. Enjoy! Consume! Leave me a tip! Or not. But at least enjoy. 

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver.  

25^th Hour/He Got Game (Disney)

This is the debut volume of the so-far two-volume “Spike Lee Joint” collection on Blu-ray.  If you’re strapped for media-buying cash, I’d say this is the one to get: his second-greatest film (Hour, that is, second to Do The Right Thing) alongside one of his strongest and most-worthy-of-revisiting efforts (the underrated-in-its-time Game). Both pictures look  very good to great, the extras are not comprehensive but they’re hardly negligible, and what else do you want. —A-

All That Jazz (Criterion)

Looks great, sounds great, feels great. A boatload of good extras, including some from previous incarnations, my favorite being the commentary from editor Alan Heim. (A new doc short with Heim features the editor talking a little smack about Dustin Hoffman.) The return of Erszbet Foldi, who plays the beleaguered daughter and never made another film after this! Fosse biographer Sam Wasson giving a mini-bio on camera—Wasson’s a smart guy and knows his stuff but has an unfortunate fondness for fatuous ideas, including his proposition that Quine’s My Sister Eileen is a “rinky-dink” movie. I actually first saw this at a press screening—my very first one, when I was a college student working at the school paper, I don’t know how or why I got the invite—and I was full of snotty collegiate observations about its derivativeness and was also grossed out by the open-heart surgery scenes. And yet I’ve always revisited it with affection. And now I think it’s a Great Film. It has an energy and ambition that steamrolls over its flaws, and it’s really just beautifully put together. And Roy Scheider gives the performance of seven lifetimes. Exemplary. —A+

Bang Bang You’re Dead (Olive)

This 1966 item appears to promise much to the aficionado of oddball old cinema; Tony Randall co-starring opposite Euro-beauty Senta Berger in an espionage-picture pastiche produced by Harry Alan Towers and featuring Klaus Kinski as a heavy. Alas, director Don Sharp, the man behind a bunch of lesser Hammers, doesn’t maintain anything like a snappy pace let alone inject any wit, so the biggest kicks to be derived from the picture proper come from anachronistic dialogue along the lines of “I’m with Iranian oil.” The visual presentation is soft, pleasantly colored. A bit of damage here and there but never less than watchable. But only the most fanatic of Randall, Berger, or Kinski fans will have a compelling reason to watch.  —C

Born Yesterday (Twilight Time)

This 1950 picture looks terrific, especially relative to its prior video editions: I believe I remember this title from the early VHS years. Anyway, the image is a silky-smooth black-and-white, made from materials in clearly good shape. There’s not a lot of evident DNR artifacting. This is pretty much standard operating procedure with Sony-derived product, so I’m not surprised. The soundtrack feels like it was mastered at a lower-than-standard volume, though, as sometimes we had to boost the volume to hear the dialogue. Which leads us to a problem: the movie’s really hard to listen to. And to watch sometimes. It’s actually more jarring to see Broderick Crawford smack Judy Holliday than it is to watch Lee Marvin hit any of the women in Point Blank. As much of a miracle as Holliday is, this gets as grating as any movie you can call a classic can. I’m not even sure I’d call it a classic, myself.  —B+

Caught (Olive)

This spectacular, essential 1949 not-quite-noir directed by the divine Max Ophuls (here rendered “Opuls” in the credits) gets a very solid presentation in this Olive rendering. The shot of lead actress Barbara Bel Geddes in the hospital bed looks kind of dupey but that’s the only problem I discerned. I don’t know much about the making of the movie but the way Robert Ryan’s character is rushed out of the narrative combined with the dubious hospital-bed shot inclines one to suspect studio tampering with the vision, which was partially that of Arthur Laurents, who scripted. Among its many points of interest (exceptional moving camera stuff aside, and there’s plenty of it here) is that it was edited by Robert Parrish, features the ineffable Curt Bois in a great juicy/sleazy support role, and has bit parts for future television sitcom icons  Natalie Schafer Barbara Billingsley. Also that it builds to an insane delirium that is in some respects reminiscent of Black Narcissus, of all things. It’s also a bold picture in terms of its character “likeability” or, God spare me, “relatibility” quotient: I had forgotten just how callow and whiny Bel Geddes’ character, the ostensible heroine, is for almost two-thirds of the film. Fantastic stuff in any event. Good grief, Robert Ryan’s performance. —A

The Children’s Hour (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)

This is a pretty good presentation of a dour, self-serious film that’s more an emblem of William Wyler’s downturn as a director than was his picture prior to this, the much-disparaged Ben-Hur. I kind of blame playwright/screenwriter Lillian Hellman, given Wyler’s slight rebound after this with the equally dark but much more impressive The Collector. The interest here comes from the cast’s grappling with the material. And grapple they do, as, of the principals, only Shirley MacLaine and, um, Miriam Hopkins are particularly suited to their roles. James Garner and Audrey Hepburn are obliged to run counter to their individual strengths. The picture is solid black and white in its delightfully early-60s 1.66 aspect ratio. Now a Blu-ray of The Little Foxes, that I would get behind with more enthusiasm.—B

Cobra Woman (Alive AG Region B locked German import)

Thanks to Jack Smith, and Susan Sontag’s apprehension of Jack Smith, this film and its star, non-acting bombshell Maria Montez, became defining emblems of Camp. The lush visuals and relentless ridiculousness of this second-tier romance/adventure aside, this does, when all is said and done, nevertheless present Surrealist-influenced director Robert Siodmak at a disadvantage he did not have to grapple with even with the likes of Phantom Lady. Which is a perhaps overly wordy way of saying that this is, cultural significances aside, a helluva goofy movie. This German Blu looks VERY good. A couple of shots show something like registration problems, but not that’s infrequent. Also, and I don’t know how to say this without coming off piggish so I’m just not gonna bother, but Camp icon or not, Maria Montez sure did have a rack on her. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean. If you invest in this, remember to set the audio to English before you start the movie, or else you’ll get Sabu speaking German, and that’ll really fuck up your shit. —B+

Eden And After/The Man Who Lies (Kino/Lorber)

Having gotten through the entirety of the early films of Alain Robbe-Grillet offered in very nice editions from the fine folks at Kino/Lorber, I’ve concluded that the idea of Robbe-Grillet as a filmmaker is often more enticing/attractive than the reality. Which boils down to the fact that as sophisticated as his ideas concerning the upending of film narrative conventions were, he simply did not have the technical expertise (or, to be fair to him, in some cases, the money) to pull off his most ambitious coups. He gained fluency as he went on, to be sure: La Belle Captive, a 1983 picture not included in this series (which terminates with the 1974 Progressive Slidings of Pleasure [reviewed here]) was pretty much everything for which it aimed. But the best transposition of Robbe-Grillet’s storytelling mojo to film will ever be Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad. As for these two pictures, the memory-and-guilt wartime labyrinth The Man Who Lies, from 1968, looks nice and clean in 1.66 black and white, and features one of the most antic and peculiar performances from Jean-Louis Trintignant, but is in many other respects dead on its feet. The 1970 Czech co-production Eden and After is a pleasingly psychedelic color picture with lots of red liquid, nudity, and deadpan depictions of perversion as it “follows” a group of students whose violent, sex-fueled gaming takes them places they hadn’t counted on, thanks to a Steranko-character-come-to-life agent played by Pierre Zimmer. Its companion piece, N Took The Dice, recut from Eden footage for a television presentation, is a funny translation of Eden’s essential abstractions into a critique of television conventions. If you can only afford one, ask yourself whether you’re more a fan of Trintignant or nude young women, and proceed accordingly. Both films: —B+

Follow That Dream (Twilight Time)

The King meets The Other King…here’s an Elvis Presley film directed by latter-day alternate-auteurism hero Gordon Douglas! How come you aren’t more excited. Although the opening of this picture sees the main characters driving over a seemingly large body of water, the 1962 film is neither set nor shot in the Florida Keys but rather in several towns in the northern and central part of that state. Florida’s a pretty big state, as it happens. In any event the sunny locations look terrific in wide-screen, as does Mr. Presley, here with nice brown hair rather than threatening dyed-black, and playing, as had become his costume, one of those likable, slightly thick, but secretly crafty and entirely decent quasi-rednecks. Those who scoff at his film career underestimate his real appeal as a screen performer; he’s thoroughly watchable, always. This picture, while less deplorably risible than, say, Kissing Cousins, still isn’t all that—the songs are not terribly distinguished, and while the female leads Anne Helm and Joanna Moore are hardly unattractive, they’re kinda bland—this could have used a Yvonne Craig or Ann-Margret. Still. It really is very briskly directed and features some bathroom humor that’s curious in a film of its vintage. That aside, it’s pretty much for the hardcore fan of Presley and/or Douglas. The former is a very powerful lobby, it seems, as it got the stretch of road featured in the opening rechristened the “Follow That Dream Highway” back in 1996.—B+

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Fox)

Wes Anderson’s latest, which surrounds a throbbing vein of melancholy with a near-insane cornucopia of eccentric and rough humor and high-whimsical pictorial detail, gets a beautiful rendering here in its parent-studio high-def release. As was the case with the theatrical presentation, the only “full screen” sequences are those in the 1.33 and 2.35 ratios: the 1.85 sections are recessed, so there’s never an ACTUAL full-screen picture on your TV display. It matters little and/or makes sense depending on your viewing temperament. The minimal extras include a fun short of Bill Murray touring the thrillingly quaint German town where much of the film was shot, and a few clever promo shorts, including one that provides the extremely daunting instructions for the baking and construction of a delightful sweet pastry featured in the film (the Mendl’s “Courtesan au Chocolat,” to be precise.)—A

Hit The Deck (Warner Archive)

This is maybe what you call a “minor” MGM musical of the ‘50s, and as such one would like to make a case for it as a representative studio product that reveals interesting things about the time it was released but oops, Wikipedia tells me the whole thing was a box office flop so…so much for flogging this as what my teenage parents were into or something. When did Vic Damone get popular, anyway? But still. This is a really nifty-looking widescreen color picture and a lot of fun in its way, but I’m the kind of guy who likes seeing Walter Pidgeon as Russ Tamblyn’s dad.  And ridiculous pretexts for musical number. The disc has really sharp color and detail. A registration issue crops up about 58 minutes in, but nothing fatal. Every character gets a song, including Damone’s mom, played by operatic singer Kay Armen.  gets a song. The Funhouse number is a real highlight, as is “Join The Navy See The World.” I dug it. —A-

Jodorowsky’s Dune (Sony)

A well-constructed documentary about an epic film that never was and never will be. Exceptionally watchable and engrossing even given the presence of my virtual reality nemesis Devin Faraci, who has a pretty squeaky voice for an Internet tough guy but whom director Frank Pavich keeps on his best behavior, and lights pretty mercifully as well.  (Kinda weird that the young’un  talks of the  riot at the Mexican premiere of  Fando and Lis as if he had been there.) Why is this desirable on Blu-ray? For the idea artwork, animation, etc., all of which looks spectacular and deserves to be seen looking so.   Many surprising folks turn up, e.g., Amanda Lear, which is one of the many things that keep it engaging. The mavens among us will also eat up the 46 minutes of deleted scenes.—A- 

King And Country (VCI)

When last we were rating Losey Blu-rays, we had Stranger on the Prowl. I watched it again after reading the great J. Hoberman’s measured praise of it in his Times column, and I still was pretty “meh” about it. Then this comes along.  As much as I have enjoyed many VCI products over the years I’ve seen a fair share of non-16x9 optimized or otherwise lacking videos from the company that I was a little wary about this, the company’s digital rendering of Losey’s superb 1964 anti-war jolt. But boy, was I pleasantly surprised. From the old-school, color Janus Films logo through the nasty rat imagery and beyond, it's a pleasure to watch. Excellent, clean black and white. A trenchant, bracingly high-modernist vision. That rat stuff it brutal, though, I’m warning you. Great acting from all the cast, toplined by Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay and featuring Barry Foster, Frenzy’s necktie killer in a prominent role. My only complaint is that the cover art is a fucking spoiler if you haven’t seen the movie before. Jeez. —A-

Kismet (Warner Archive)

It’s easy to forget this is a Vincente Minnelli movie, because, for lack of a more refined assessment, it’s all kinda goofy and borderline dumb. Mainly on account of its whole Western-Musical-Comedy-Conventions-And-Tunes-In-The-World-Of-Islam premise, which, especially nowadays, can be, in the immortal phrase of Stephen Metcalf, “off-putting to the contemporary sensibility.” It also has one of the weirdest casts ever, including Jamie Farr, Sebastian Cabot (!), Dolores Grey, Monty Wooley (!), Jack Elam and Jay C. Flippen (no really) and yeah, Vic Damone again. Who was it that came up with “Take my gland/I’m a stranger in your thighs?” Lennie and Squiggy? Nah, too dirty for TV, musta been New Bomb Turk. But I digress. The picture is not super vibrant but very clear and attractive. A real study in mauve. The picture was apparently in some four-track magnetic stereo configuration that translates very attractively to a 5.1 Surround track. Lyrics like “Don’t underestimate Baghdad” and the rhyme of “Aden” with  “maiden” and “laden” are eyebrow-raising. Kinda fun but also one of the reasons that François Truffaut once referred to Minnelli as “un esclave.” —B+

Legend of Hell House (Scream Factory)

This movie messed with my head but good when I saw it as a tender-hearted 13-year-old, not just because Pamela Franklin was my first really serious movie-girl crush. (I had felt feelings for Diana Rigg prior to my encounter with Franklin, but I didn’t really understand those feelings.) The new high-def rendering of this then-edgy and still remarkably effective haunted-house-investigation movie is gorgeous: those pastel colors, the enveloping darkness, the spectacular settings swallowed up into Stygian black. Plus a nifty commentary from the lovely and delightful Ms. Franklin herself.  Also, I repeat: the movie holds up really well. It’s damn good.  —A

Love Streams (Criterion)

An exhausting movie in an exhaustive package. More than an essential appendix to the Criterion Five Films By John Cassavetes box, the film that may be J.C.’s crowning achievement, in all its emotional demolition and cinematic dismantling. (Alternate title: Stop Breaking Down. ) The extras are amazing, moving, disturbing: J.C.’s distended gut when he’s out of costume and directing, a ghastly portent of his four-years-off death. Inspirational quotes: “Well, if it was easy, anybody could do it” and “We’re making a picture about inner life and no one believes it can be put on the screen. I don’t believe it either, but...screw it!” The subtextual news on this release is that Criterion has managed to license a Cannon film from the MGM archive. I remember calling an executive there over six years ago inquiring about rights to Godard’s King Lear for a friend who had a video label; she never called back. That the great label is having better luck at this is not a surprise and may bear some more exciting fruit in the future. —A+

Mr. Majestyk (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)

This 1974 crime movie, from an original script by Elmore Leonard and directed by Richard Fleischer, got slaughtered by critics hostile to Charles Bronson back in the day, folks who were kinda used to reflexively hating on anything with Bronson’s name attached to it. Here’s the thing about Bronson: as canny as he was about his anti-glamour screen appeal, there really wasn’t all that terribly compelling a performer underneath that, and yes, I have heard what Sergio Leone said about him and I respectfully disagree. Anyway, Once Upon A Time In The West will always by Bronson’s supreme screen moment, and this…well, it’s underrated. But that’s not to say it’s great. It’s solid. Leonard’s script is laconic even by his standards, and Fleischer’s direction is solid. The plot setup is the most perversely enjoyable thing, and boy does Al Lettieri enjoy glowering as the never-say-die heavy. Shot by Richard Kline so it looks real good, lotta natural light or what looks like it. The high-def transfer is consistent and stiff-backed, but you do get a lot of grain in the cabin interiors if you’re bugged by that sorta thing. On the whole both movie and disc Get The Job Done. —B

Manhunt (Twilight Time)

A brilliant, shimmery, shadowy transfer of a really first-rate Hollywood picture from Fritz Lang. As with Ministry of Fear, some of the imagery is silent-era quintessential especially the cat-and-mouse in the Underground sequence. You’ll laugh at Joan Bennett trying to do a cockney accent, but she’ll win you over soon enough, and then you’ll feel bad. This retains the commentary from Patrick McGilligan, who wrote a pretty hatchet-jobbish bio of Lang, and I suppose you can listen to it if you like. I won’t dock the disc any notches on its account. —A

Noah (Paramount)

Darren Aronofsky’s  visually majestic, emotionally bold Bible extrapolation looks really great in this iteration. Not many extras though. Still, it’s a movie that gives up more with each viewing. There really isn’t much more to say about this disc, except thank the parties who afforded me a review copy. —B+ 

Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony)

“That was very visual.” A signature line from this Jim Jarmusch instant classic, a very smart film in which the aging auteur draws the crucial distinction between hanging on to youth and hanging on to one’s own youth, and makes the entirely supportable argument that the Elizabethans and the first wave of CBGB patrons were and remain Western Civ’s greatest generations. The Blu-ray gets the lovely, simple but packed with telling detail visuals just right. The extras are fun: 50 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage with a highfalutin title. Dribs and drabs of deleted and extended scenes, revealing the movie was once bookmarked by Rumi quotes, that sorta thing. Inspirational dialogue; “I’m like…Gomez Addams.” —A

Out of the Past (Warner Archive)

When word of this came out, I saw a few people online complain that a manufactured-to-order Warner Archive release was an “insult” and that this deserved a full bells-and-whistles release. Well, bells and whistles are all well and good but sometimes the movie is enough. And in this case, this truly great movie—exciting, sardonic, poetic, lyric, exhilarating, tender, tragic—looks so beautiful it’s more than enough. This is why Blu-ray exists. —A+

Phantom of the Paradise (Scream Factory)

The most eccentric of Brian De Palma’s ‘70s films, and if that sounds like a “and that’s saying something” kind of pronouncement, it sure is. But watch this and try to tell me I’m wrong. This new transfer has a very neon bright look, which seems appropriate to the pop art material. It is very different from the French version I got a few years back, which is much more subdued. And I never got the Arrow edition, which is apparently more subdued still. In any event, I like this garish version, makes the whole thing play like the sick live-action cartoon it at least partially is. And is also subjectively attractive to me. There’s a huge number of extras here, some more disciplined/informative than others. The De Palma interview is a real keeper. This is not a universally beloved movie—I saw a film critter of high standing, and not even a psychotronic-averse one, condemn it as “awful” on the Twitter machine just the other day—but if you DO love it, this is the edition to get. Guess where I sit on the issue. —A 

Pickpocket (Criterion)

A fabulous picture upgrade that makes the black-and-white imagery very handsome without rendering it fake-beautiful, because Bresson didn’t play fake-beautiful, sucker. All the extras from the standard def survive, and they’re all good. Not optional.—A+

Point Blank (Warner)

Superb. Essential. The amazing color coordination (the yellows of Marvin’s shirt, Dickinson’s dress, and the spy glass) and the water imagery, all of John Boorman’s galvanic, psychologically acute visual beauties are beautifully rendered here. Lossless soundtrack has good clarity, but a  wildly wide dynamic range—the nightclub scene’s music is really loud—that may make this not an ideal late-night watch for urban apartment dwellers with easily excitable neighbors, and that’s the reason this disc’s grade doesn’t have a plus sign attached. A small but solid coterie of extras includes a commentary with Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, who admits early on to “stealing” a lot from the picture, and indeed, this time around I noticed the elevator gag here repeats in Out of Sight. —A

Radio Days (Twilight Time)

Its frequent touches of mordant humor notwithstanding, this 1987 picture is Woody Allen’s most consistently pleasant film, and its burnished look suits its mode of lyric but not entirely treacly nostalgia. (Carlo Di Palma, who went for a similarly cozy look with Hannah And Her Sisters the year before, shot.) The Twilight Time disc is just beautiful, and if you’re still a Woody fan the movie’s great fun: the jokes are pretty good to excellent, and the cast, from Mia Farrow to Kenneth Mars to Josh Mostel to the recently departed and very dear Don Pardo, is one of Allen’s best. —A 

Scanners (Criterion)

“Why is this getting the Criterion treatment?” Some People asked a while back, dismissing this as a low-budget genre movie and hence Disreputable Cronenberg. Boy, Some People can be really fucking dumb. Disreputable Cronenberg IS Cronenberg, and in this 1981 picture shows him not just in full command of his Unique Ideas but also really ruling cinematic space. Really an awesome movie, Stephen Lack is FINE in the lead, the transfer’s fabulous, and the wonky FX-centric extras are disturbing—no wonder these guys come up with all this oddball stuff, what with their inadvertently huffing chemicals all the time. Also: whoa, Michael Ironside is old! —A+

 The Secret of the Santa Vittoria (Twilight Time)

Despite featuring a largely, you know, Italian cast in this 1968 life-loving-wine-making-Italians-flim-flam-oenophile-Nazis period comedy/drama, a good deal of this movie really plays like Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day. The real Italians include Anna Magnani, Sergio Franchi, Virna Lisi, and a super-young Giancarlo Giannini, which is pretty cool. Looks pretty good, too, with vibrant colors and sharp detail. If Stanley Kramer had hung up his directing shoes right after making this, which got ignored and/or dissed at the time, his rep would be a lot better today, as it’s a movie that goes down relatively easy. Gotta admit it really picks up when Magnani is kicking the shit out of  impish/apish male lead Anthony Quinn (not a real Italian). —B

Southern Comfort (Shout! Factory)

I hope the mini-revival of Walter Hill stuff on Blu-ray, which began in my book with Twilight Time’s releases of Hard Times, then The Driver, and continuing with this merciless 1981 swamp shocker, given a really swell treatment from the Shout! Factory folk. Starring Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, Bryon James and Peter Coyote in the Janet Leigh role, it teems with unusual directorial and editing choices (lotsa dissolves, which is unusual for a kind of action movie, but highly appropriate to this one’s soupy setting). Hill was/is a really top-notch director forever out of step with his ostensible peers. This is as good a movie as any to catch up with him on. Inspirational dialogue: “It’s like a steel pussy.” “Hell, man what kinda women you been hanging out with?” Inspirational supplements quote: “I don’t make movies about metaphors.” (That’s Hill.) —A

Thunderbirds Are Go/Thunderbird 6 (Twilight Time)

If you like marionettes inhabiting truly awesome art-direction, then you’ll like them even more in high-def. This truly nifty (if I were doing ad copywriting I’d of course say “FAB”) Twilight Time one-disc package bundles the two feature films concerning the adventures of the privatized Red Cross embodied by the Tracy family and their spaceships and their heavy friends and such. The movies look very good, all bright and pop-art, the extras mostly date from prior video editions (Sylvia Anderson’s recounting of how she handled a phone call from Stanley Kubrick revels, for better or worse, the way in which she was the brains of the “Supermarionation” team), but there is some newly unearthed material; as a big Shadows fan, I was particularly chuffed at the nearly 20 minutes of test footage Gerry Anderson made of the combo, the better to turn them into puppets for the benefit of a really interesting space-nightclub fantasy scene in Are Go.  Also, the isolated score feature lets you hear the Shadows without dialogue stepping on them. —A-

The Wind And The Lion (Warner Archive)

Looks very good—really quite beautiful at times. Sounds pretty good. (Jerry Goldsmith’s score has fun with hints of Arabic modes and ironical variants of Maurice Jarre-style pageantry, and is almost a constant presence.) John Milius’ high point as a director is an almost 40-year-old movie that plays as if it should be an almost 70-year-old movie. Not a bad thing—“crackerjack,” as they used to say. Bonus points for featuring Geoffrey Lewis in the role of a more or less normal person. Inspirational commentary tidbit: “That’s why this movie is held in such high regard in the world of Islam.” —A-

Image of the day, 4/25/14

Virginia Leith in Violent Saturday, Richard Fleischer, 1955.

I got so terribly excited by the new Eureka! blu-ray disc of this ineffable thriller that I just had to post a screen cap of it, and I've always loved this particular shot from the POV of peeper Tommy Noonan. I got so excited that I forgot that I wrote at length about Noonan and this film a couple of years back. Which musings may provide some consonance for the above image.

For a long time the only home video versions of this movie have been non-optimized for 16:9 displays, meaning they put a 2.55 image in a 4:3 box, which is obviously less than optimum. The Eureka! disc is the first second true widescreen version [as a commenter below points out, Carlotta in France issued a prior such rendition, I apologize for the error] and hence cause for celebration. It's beautiful in pretty much every other respect too. If you don't have a region-free player you're out of luck at the moment, as the disc if Region-B locked,  but I'm reasonably confident a domestic-player-friendly version will surface.  

A Tale of two versions of "The Fury"

Back in the Spring of this year, I expressed some reservations on the Twilight Time Blu-ray disc of Brian DePalma's 1978 The Fury, and promised to do some investigating once a new version of the title from Arrow appeared. And so I did. But I did it for the New York Times, as a guest DVD columnist, and the results of my research are here. Enjoy!

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Labor Day 2013 edition

Given how and when the last Blu-ray Consumer Guide came into being, it may be that scheduling these to appear at random national holidays may be the way to go. 

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver.  

Blood and Sand (Fox)

This has been on my “to see” list since I read Tom Milne’s passionate and persuasive monograph on Rouben Mamoulian, recently reprinted in the BFI’s wonderful Silver series. It cites an article by Mamoulian for American Cinematographer in 1941, the year of this film’s making, in which the director writes of how he deliberately styled scenes in the movie after the work of Spanish painters: Murillo, Goya, Velasquez, El Greco, Titian, Veronese, Sorolla. The strictures of Technicolor in that year allowed Mamoulian sufficient flexibility to achieve dazzling visual effects, and this high-def transfer is simply breathtaking in their reproduction. The fact that Rita Hayworth and Linda Darnell are also dazzling visual effects in Technicolor is also a major plus. As for the remainder of the movie, you know how some people don’t really get Glenn Ford? I’m kind of like that with Tyrone Power. Oh well. Doesn’t matter. An amazing picture, and an absolutely appositely wonky commentary (imported by the standard def issue) by cinematographer Richard Crudo who, among other things, makes note of the scarcity of diffusion-wedge use in contemporary cinema. —A+ 

Body Double (Twilight Time)

Not a guilty De Palma pleasure, but a complicated one, in my case at least in part because my first New York girlfriend had a horrible date with Craig Wasson a little while before she first met me. So I’m torn between being grateful to him for being such a lunatic ass that he made me look good, and kind of thinking he nonetheless was asking for a smack in the chops. This was clearly made from a less wonky HD master than that from which the problematic Twilight Time Blu of The Fury was derived (I’ll be covering the corrected rendering of that picture soon to come from Arrow). It is a really beautifully detailed version, a little disquietingly so at points, as in the visibility of Melanie Griffith’s lower ribs in her topless dancing scenes. Have a cheeseburger, girl, it won’t kill you! The dazzling parts remain dazzling, and there are plenty of them. The silly parts remain silly, but I’ve developed affection for them. — B+

Cleopatra (Fox)

Sure is pretty. As is not unusual, the movie is not as bad as its detractors claim, or as good as its contemporary champions trumpet. Good lord it is long. But hardly as unwatchable as has sometimes been threatened. I recommend looking at it in 45-minute chunks. That way you’ll be all like “Hey! Hume Cronyn!” and all that, but not have enough time to start feeling super-bad for Elizabeth Taylor, who’s trying SO hard throughout. The transfer is so sharp that there are several scenes in which the leading lady’s real-life tracheotomy scar is PAINFULLY visible. Was that the case on the big screens on which it famously flopped? I need to ask my mom. —A-

 The Driver (Twilight Time)

A good, solid high-def transfer of a movie that didn’t inspire all that rapturous a reception when it came out but now plays perfectly all the way down the line. Inspired by Melville, clearly, but to my mind even more perfectly distilled than Melville’s own Le Samourai, in which one can detect a whiff of affectation compromising his attempt to wed Les enfants terribles to Le doulos. Writer/director Walter Hill achieved a kind of perfection here, particularly with his depiction of the brutality of the story’s criminal world. The movie is noteworthy for its preponderance of chase sequences, many of them set at night, and all of them are rendered nicely here. The greenish hue discerned in the DVD Beaver review was not quite as noticeable on my display’s settings, but where it was most present, as in O’Neal and Adjani’s exchanged-glance-on-the-modernist walkway, it wasn’t inapposite. Extras are typically minimal, which I usually don’t much care about but in this case I’m VERY curious about the makings of this movie, specifically Hill’s influences in the writing, and this disc tells me NOTHING about those things, so I’m withholding the “plus” from my grade. That’ll show ‘em. —A

The File on Thelma Jordan (Olive)

This unusually discursive 1950 noir mismatches Barbara Stanwyck against Wendell Corey. With Robert Siodmak at the directorial helm, one might expect some primo oddness, but the movie is frustratingly diffuse as it plods to an admittedly bizarre finale. The Olive Blu is an unextraordinary transfer of a not-great (scratches, wobbly contrast in places, etc.) source. For Siodmak completists only. —B-

 The Fog (Scream Factory)

Silly snobby me turned up my nose at this thing when it first came out in 1980, because it wasn’t “scary” enough. It’s still not particularly scary but good lord is it a beautifully crafted film, a complete pleasure to watch from shot to shot, start to finish. This Blu-ray honors that, far more than the Optimum issue released in the U.K. in 2008. It’s an example of the “good things come to those who wait” ethos of Blu-ray collecting. Although five years ago Scream Factory didn’t exist. How was I to know? Anyway, this is a gorgeous thing with terrific extras and something you’ll want to watch pretty often; there’s something kind of classic-movie-appealing about the way it plays with campfire ghost-story conventions that makes it apt for, you know, Halloween quadruple features and such. —A+

Heaven’s Gate (Criterion)

Still a problem movie, in that it wants grandeur, and largely achieves bloat. Also, the director’s cut doesn’t have my favorite line in the movie, which is “That man is a friend of the President of the United States.” (So Kristofferson’s character observes of a guy who’s mooning him from across a battlefield if I recall correctly.) Other portions of the extant dialogue are sloppy: one doesn’t admit to “blackballing” someone, seriously. I’m still fond of the line “Sure as hell isn’t convenient,” though. I’m rambling here. As far as the movie’s concerned, here are more complaints; No characters, just good actors looking tragic; overlong expository scenes; numbingly obvious political and moral points scored with relentless ham-handedness. The homage to Dr. Zhivago with Waterston in fur hat on train is pretty funny though. And there are some “stirring” moments and a fair amount of protean filmmaking. I’m glad this exists, I think the treatment is in many respects deserved, but don’t feel bad about yourself if you don’t fall in love with it. —B-

Help! (Apple)
Remarkably beautiful, in every respect. It’s one of those movie’s that’s directed with such simultaneous freedom and assurance that the flow of the innovations is kind of moving in and of itself. This is particularly true in the musical sequences, which in their way are as sublime as anything Busby Berkeley ever concocted. Richard Lester doesn’t much care if he pushes the aperture so the grain gets to Pennebaker levels, and he is wise not to care; his command of focus and color are what gives him the confidence to experiment, improvise. He happened to be working with artists of a similar bent, who were maybe a little tired of being put through comedy paces by this point but looked good and performed gamely. Wrote good songs for the picture, too. — A+

Keep Your Right Up (Olive)

In the late-Godard-aspect-ratio war, Olive puts its foot down at an unambiguous a 1.33 for this 1987 feature, a slight, light picture that extrapolates from the Woody Alien film editing scenes of King Lear and the string quartet rehearsal sequences in Hail Mary First Name: Carmen. Featuring Godard in a lead role, sorta channeling Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardener and some unspecified Buster Keaton character simultaneously. Doesn’t do a bad job, either. The movie as a whole has an almost antiseptic look; unlike the maddeningly dark Detective or the multi-hued Nouvelle Vague this is bright and flat…rather like a TV commercial advertising the end days of cinema as Godard knew it. No extras, no choice about the subtitles, ‘cause they’re burned in; in other words, the usual gift-horse-you-ought-not-look-in-the-mouth from Olive. For Godard completists only. —B+

Kentucky Fried Movie  (Shout! Factory)

The food-oil-as-fuel joke in this movie has ACTUALLY COME TRUE, people. Other than that: This movie STILL looks terrible. As in super low-rent; the materials used were likely at their best, and they were transferred well. Actually, for celluloid nuts, the grindhouse crudity of much of the lensing has its own appeal, and given the pastiches involved in a lot of the takeoffs, the cruddy look is purposeful in a lot of instances. The first time I saw this 1977 movie I didn’t quite get it all. The second time, with a cannabis assist, I laughed harder than I had at any other movie. This time around, I thought it was pretty funny. Not quite sure I can pronounce it an immortal comedy on that basis. I still like it though. —B+

Lifeforce (Scream Factory)

The Showgirls of horror/sci-fi movies! Once considered louche and risible, what with its Steve Railsback post-Helter Skelter/Stunt Man cuh-razy astronaut and constantly nude space vampire Matilda May, it now plays pretty damn well, a gonzo Hammer picture with all the exploitation elements taken to their logical ‘80s extreme. The movie’s 70MM status wasn’t too played up at the time of its release but damn, on this GREAT looking disc the fisheye widescreen vistas look especially great. Terrific extras too. Unmissable. —A+

The Only Game In Town (Twilight Time)

I was looking for an auteurist lost cause to champion…and I didn’t find it here, alas. George Stevens’ last film is drab and lifeless, with decent individual moments (Warren Beatty’s stalk into the casino after he gets his money off of Elizabeth Taylor) lost in a fog of theatrical speechifying, dubious sexual chemistry, and cultural desert-wandering (you’d never guess this was a 1970 movie). The Blu-ray has a mixed look that mostly matches the movie’s lifelessness. Every now and then, on some comment thread or another, the perpetually dissatisfied and tetchy cinephile who calls himself Lex G goes on a rant about how 1.85 is a complete pussy aspect ratio. I do not agree with him, but if I had to take his side on the debate team, I’d make this movie Exhibit A. Stevens, who had done superb work in both CinemaScope and1.66 in the past seems utterly lost in the framing department here. And the cinematographer is Henri Dacae, for heaven’s sake. — B-

Possession (Second Sight region B U.K. import)

This movie is so great for a number of reasons, one of which is that is starts off at a pitch of emotional hysteria that most dramas take an hour or two or six to build to, and then it goes CRAZIER from there. The distribution and home video history of the 1981 Andrzej Zulawski is long and storied and perhaps even more insane than the movie itself. Hell, I didn’t even know this picture was in 1.66 until the excellent Second Sight Blu-ray, which gets my unqualified recommendation. Zulawski, predictably, does fabulously in the audio commentary, revealing that the movie was initially a project for Paramount (!!!) and recounting a dinner he had with Gulf and Western head Charles Bludhorn at which Bludhorn asks Zulawski “What is this movie about” and Zulawski responds  “It’s about a woman who fucks an octopus” and Bludhorn delightedly asks him when he starts shooting. And it gets better from there. —A+

The Producers (Shout Factory)

This label is unostentatiously turning into pop culture’s answer to The Criterion Collection. Mel Brooks’ debut feature is as sloppy a piece of technical work as you can get and still be a Great Film, but it is nevertheless delightful to be able to see it in something resembling the glory with which Avco-Embassy presented it in 1969. A single extra that wasn’t on the MGM standard def disc is the only addition to the disc array. But the Drew Friedman cover art is an absolutely marvelous extra in and of itself. —A+

 Safety Last (Criterion)

The 2005 box set The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection was a labor of love, and that was evident throughout, but certain technical hurdles didn’t get fully addressed. The image on the features and shorts, while clear, had a lot of combing artifacts. That’s generally a thing endemic to an interlaced television picture, which, in the new HD era, ought not exist any more. The Criterion issue of  Lloyd’s best-known and perhaps best-loved film is in fact a 1080i (for interlaced) transfer, but nevertheless rids us of the combing problem, and presents a delightful, pristine image that represents the best way to appreciate the performer and gagman’s sunny  can-do disposition and athletic slapstick prowess. This retains most of the extras from the 2005 box (including an informed commentary featuring Leonard Maltin) and adds three shorts and a twenty-minute documentary featuring writer John Bengtson, who also contributes commentary to the shorts. One hopes more Lloyd of this quality turns up in high-def. —A 

Seconds (Criterion)

Sometimes one gets the feeling that John Frankenheimer enjoyed working in black-and-white more than he did with color. Or maybe it’s just that it shows more; I can’t really figure whether his black-and-white movies are more genuinely visually expressive than his color ones or if black-and-white brought out his ostentatiously arty side. In films wherein the subject is a kind of madness—this, The Manchurian Candidate—it doesn’t matter. And it especially doesn’t matter here, where the cinematographer is James Wong Howe, whose sensitivity and mastery more than redeem what would elsewhere be severely overdetermined use of the fish-eye lens. Not that such hell-visions perspectives are not apt to this horrific, grim fable about the denial of death and aging. The 1.78 image here is gorgeous, grainy, with blacks so solid you could swallow them, or they could swallow you. I have to look through my old Video Watchdogs to figure out what version of the grape-stomping orgy made it into the theatrical release; this may blow my theory about Blow Up being the first studio picture to feature full-frontal nudity (Seconds came out several months before the Antonioni). I discuss this picture in a bit more detail here. Upgraded from “A” for making Jeffrey Wells unhappy. — A+

The Servant (Studio Canal region B U.K. import)

Man, this is certainly the best looking version of the first Losey/Pinter collaboration I’ve ever seen, so much so that throughout I kind of wondered if it was too perfect. Little if any damage with respect to film materials shows. The black-and-white image is very smooth, with not much in the way of grain. But everything also has a filmic integrity: not much in the way of irritating digital artifacts show up either. A thoroughly credible, nearly breathtaking presentation of a movie of supreme creepiness and multiple ambiguities, with a lot more going on in its odd little world than mere role reversal. Master guitarist Davy Graham is now fully visible and appreciable in his bit part as a pub muso. The extras are voluminous, not all are in the greatest of shape, but the segment of the arts television program Camera 3 on the first New York Film Festival, featuring Losey and Adolph Mekas, is astonishing. —A+ 

Simon Killer (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

Some may blanche that the “Masters of Cinema” imprimatur is going on the second feature of an American filmmaker who’s part of a production collective made up of what the aforementioned Wells would call “beardos” (see also William Holden in Billy Wilder’s Fedora). Let’s get some perspective here. This isn’t the first contemporary picture that the label has released. See also The World, Mad Detective, Tokyo Sonata. And while I myself am not 100 percent sold on this explicit portrait of a very ugly young American getting up to bad behavior in Paris, it is a largely effective construction (although director Antonio Campos is a little too hidebound in his belief that the slow back-and-forth camera pan is a really interesting way to connote that something sinister is happening beneath what’s playing out on the screen). The excellent disc is an object lesson in getting a great home-digital project from a digital source, a process that is not as automatic as a lot of people assume it is. The extras include a persuasive essay by Karina Longworth and a comic documentary short in which the filmmaker and star of the picture are interviewed in tandem with their mothers, and which ought to be avoided by viewers who are already super-skeptical about beardos in moviemaking. —B+

Tabu (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

I shall make a confession here: this 1931 picture is probably my least favorite Murnau. Yes, it’s staggeringly visually beautiful, yes, its final moments of grim implacability are among the most sublime cinema has offered at any time and in any context. But, not to get all holy leftist or anything, its perspective necessarily is entrenched in Western paternalism, which turns out to be more of a stumbling block for me than Sunrise’s sexism. I think this is a genuine problem for the movie, objectively, just as the sexism in Sunrise is. (City Girl remains the most startlingly “progressive” extant film of Murnau’s late period. The MOC Blu-ray of that puppy is pretty awesome too.)  On the other hand,  it’s still effectively just a prejudice on my part because this is still an indispensable movie and it looks wonderful here (although man oh man is the 1.19 aspect ratio SEVERE) and the extras, which include an enthusiastic and informative commentary by critic Brad Stevens and historian R. Dixon Smith, are superb. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to the Nosferatu Blu-ray from this label. —A+

 The Tarnished Angels (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

I didn’t expect to be watching this again so soon after I wrote a bit about Sirk and Faulkner for the blog, but the MOC Blu-ray seemed to land at my door mere moments after it was announced, and My Lovely Wife was interested in seeing it, so… Anyway, watching the movie with another person and with a different discipline in place, what struck me this time around was how the material was both hemmed in and made strange through the film’s marriage of convenience to conventions of ‘50s melodrama, particularly with respect to Dorothy Malone’s performance. Interesting, though, that Robert Middleton plays the ostensible heavy Matt Ord right down the middle; you could almost mistake him for one more lonely guy in this movie of lonely guys. The whole movie is more or less contained in the shock moment when the Mardi Gras partier masked as Death bursts in to Hudson and Malone’s reflective drinking; a shot I sometimes see in my mind in garish color. Angels is of course CinemaScope black and white, beautiful here. The extras are both scholarly and nifty and include unexpected treats such as a video interview with William Schallert and a contemporary article about the shooting of the aerial sequences from Air Progress magazine. —A+

Teorema/Theorem (BFI Region B U.K. import)

One of Pasolini’s drollest provocations and one of Terence Stamp’s most blithely enigmatic performances. There are very few extras, but one gets the feeling that the movie doesn’t want any explication beyond itself, such is its magisterially serene perversity. Nifty Morricone score too, you could almost swear the title theme was taken off a Freddie Redd record, but it wasn’t! (Per Nick Wrigley's tip, it's actually Ted Curson, not that you'd know from any goddamn credits. Morricone's versatile but not THAT versatile.) Watch on a loop until it tells you what to do with YOUR complacent bourgeois life. —A

Things To Come (Criterion)

I was getting all set to do a Very Important Comparison of a British issued Blu-ray and a Ray-Harryhausen-overseen Blu (on a double feature with She) of this eccentric futurist fable when along comes the announcement of a Criterion version. And once the Criterion version showed up in my mailbox, my suspicions were kind of confirmed: this renders the British disc…well, as it happens, not quite irrelevant. Criterion’s rendering sacrifices a barely discernable smidge of sharpness in the interest of smoothing out the picture for a more internally consistent viewing experience, while the 2012 Network issue opts for getting top detail out of a scratched-up source. I’ll be kind to the late great Ray and just leave his presentation out of the conversation. Anyway, my preference is for the Criterion. I’m not satisfied by the black levels on either rendering. Some will bitch about the grain, there’s a very good deal of it. Until a full-scale restoration is performed, and that’s not a matter of when but rather a very big if, this is as good as we are likely to get. And what a weird ass movie, with all those haughty guys in togas at the end. Yet as William Cameron Menzies directorial efforts go, this is on the relatively sober side (check out The Maze if you ever can; see also Chandu The Magician, twice a year is optimum). —A

Twixt (Fox)

You want personal filmmaking from an established old master? Well, like it or not, it doesn’t get any more personal that Francis Coppola’s digitally-shot, occasionally in 3D (although the disc I’m reviewing doesn’t have that option) sort-of genre movie in which still-bloated but highly game Val Kilmer plays a dissolute hacky horror novelist stuck in a zero-bookstore town (his signing is at the hardware emporium) sucked in to a twisty tale of bohemians and murder and vampires and ghosts. The first gonzo frisson is that the wife Kilmer argues about money with over Skype is Kilmer’s actual ex-wife Joanna Whaley. Then Ben Chaplin shows up as the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, to give Kilmer’s character some writing advice. Then Alden Ehrenreich turns up in a hybrid of his role in Tetro and Mickey Rourke’s role in Rumble Fish. Then it becomes plain that a lot of the movie is about Coppola’s guilt over his son Gian Carlo’s 1986 death in a boating accident. Coppola demonstrates enough detachment to have a sense of humor about the manifestation of that guilt (and the scenes of Kilmer doing improv impressions to exorcise his writer’s block are a stitch) but there’s nothing funny about the complex sense of loss the movie evokes through various horror tropes, some more hoary than others. A sumptuous-looking transfer of a digital source, its only extra is a charmingly open making-of doc by Gia Coppola, the daughter Gian-Carlo never knew and Francis’ granddaughter, who has since the 2010 shooting of the film made another feature, Palo Alto. —B+ 

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: May 2013, A Memorial Day Gift To You From Some Came Running

How did this forty-disc monster CG happen, you may wonder? (Then again, you may not wonder, in which case just skip ahead to the capsules.) Well, it’s like this: whilst working on the De Niro book I would take breaks from the intensive De Niro watching by popping in a Blu-ray to “relax,” and mostly they would be things that I’d had in the “staging area” for the Consumer Guide anyway. Once the De Niro book was done, and I’d done another round of revisions on The Novel That I Delusionally Expect Will Catupult Me Out Of This Particular [redacted] Business, I had been hoping to get a few weeks work on another actually remunerative project, but that DIDN’T HAPPEN. Also My Lovely Wife has had to work late a lot. What’s a fella to do? Go to rep theaters? Interact with OTHER PEOPLE? Hell no.

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver. 

3:10 To Yuma (Criterion)

Commended by Andrew Sarris for his “stylistic conviction in an intellectual vacuum,” Delmer Daves does in fact offer stronger, better stuff than that, according to his post-Andrew champions. Dave Kehr has written compellingly on his frequently dismissed melodramas, Susan Slade and Parrish, particularly (“Call it Camp…”—Sarris) and in the booklet essays for this and the also-superb Jubal, Kent Jones makes the case that Daves was the master of a rare and particular kind of Western, one in which the depiction of goodness was paramount (“or call it Corn,” Sarris continued). Jones is compelling and well-informed, and his descriptions of Daves’ technical innovations in shooting his uniquely American landscapes adds persuasive ballast to his case for the director as a major one. But  here it’s really the seeing that’s believing. The simple-as-death storyline (adapted from an Elmore Leonard tale) gets a beautifully measured treatment here; this is a far, far more substantial film than its lazy movie-guide categorizations as a “solid B Western” or whatever give it credit for, and the transfer of the black-and-white film is gorgeous. Outtakes include still shots from an excised Felicia Farr nude scene. OK, that’s not actually true. Extras are sparse but as I said the Jones essay is an education. And I can’t emphasize enough that the movie is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, on pretty much every conceivable level. —A

Bakumatsu Taiyo Den (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

This 1957 picture ranked fifth in a 1999 poll of greatest Japanese films conducted by the nearly hundred-year-old magazine Kinema Jumpo. It’s relatively obscure in the west; the reasons for the high esteem there and the scarcity of its reputation here are probably not unrelated; it’s a very culturally specific film, an allegorical farce in which the dwindling of  the shogunate in the mid-to-late 19^th century reflects upon the Japan of the time the film was released. The opening montage, as it happens, has a lot in common with that of the veddy British On Approval, reviewed below; taking the viewer by the hand and saying this story is about “then,” but it’s also about now. So what is it about, anyway? It takes its time with that; the ostensible plot hook, in which a broke brothel patron starts doing odd jobs around the joint because he can’t pay his bill, doesn’t really kick in until about 45 minutes into the nearly two-hour film, directed by  Yuzo Kawashima and co-written with his then protégé, the soon-to-be-great Shohei Imamura. The movie is diverting for its picaresque humor, social observations, and overall frankness (never not funny: when a bunch of the film’s male characters gang up for a group piss); sometimes it comes off like a Moliere farce with a change of venue. The disc boasts an excellent transfer of a recent digital restoration; extras are confined to the disc package booklet, which has some essays. I’d tend to recommend this most highly to viewers already very conversant with Japanese film looking to catch up on what had been a hard-to-find canon classic. —A

Band of Outsiders (Criterion)

How audience friendly was this Godard film considered to be back in 1964? Please note the Columbia Pictures logo between the “Visa de controle Ministériel No. 28712” card and the opening title montage. Yep, with its tack-piano theme, jokey credits, quirky tendresse, and more, this really is the sort of film that represents to perpetually disillusioned one-time Godard fans of a certain age what “earlier, funnier films” meant to the aliens chastising Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories. To such an extent that one almost is tempted to trash it, the better to extol the virtues of Ici et aeilleurs. OK, not really. Much. It’s wonderful, the race through the Louvre and the much-bruited Madison bit are as great as everyone says they are, and in all this is Godard’s most Queneau-esque film, not just with respect to Gallic “charm” and all that, but also in terms of a structural self-consciousness that’s designed to enhance genuine feeling rather than preclude it. In short, a Great Film. This Blu-ray is a lovely upgrade of what had been an already excellent package, the wintry black-and-white rendered in exceptional crispness and detail. Even the booklet essay by Joshua Clover, quite possibly my least favorite writer of all time (because I’m sure you were wondering)  is better than all right. —A+

Black Sabbath (Arrow region B U.K. import)

I think this anthology picture may be Mario Bava’s best film, by virtue not only of its consistency but its variability. Alternatively dead serious and irrepressibly playful, every shot a wonder and certain images so hauntingly terrifying and sad as to be unforgettable, it’s a concise feast of very particular cinematic inspiration. I speak of course of the Italian language version of the 1963 film, entitled I tre volti di paura (The Three Faces of Fear), which retains the original order of the three tales and has a final shot featuring “host” Boris Karloff that’s an utter delight. That version is the highlight of this three-disc (one Blu-ray, two standard def) edition of the film from Arrow. There’s also the English-language American International cut, which gives us Karloff’s own voice, which is nice. The most salient extra on the Blu-ray is a very good half-hour video with split-screen explanations of the aural and visual differences between the two versions. The picture quality of my favored version, from red telephone to sickly green vampire family to grimacing jewelry-wearing corpse, is so staggeringly great it brought tears to my eyes, almost. A definitive edition and an intense pleasure. Wowsers. Co-starring Jean-Pierre Leaud’s mom, by the way.  —A+

Cloak and Dagger (Olive)

I raised my eyebrows in an approving way when I saw the logo of The Film Foundation on the back cover of this edition of the 1946 Fritz Lang thriller. The restoration presented here looks pretty grand. A little damage in the form of scratches and such is visible here and there, but overall this has really superb picture quality with excellent contrast and detail. It’s a damn fine film, too, boasting a solid Gary Cooper performance (whether you buy him as a nuclear physicist really doesn’t matter after about six minutes or so) and some very nice bits, including a a scene in which attracted-to-each-other-awkwardly roommates have to contend with a hungry cat, and a killing-in-self-defense scene that’s a definite precursor to the nasty kitchen-murder sequence in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. Check it out. —A 

Crimewave (Shout! Factory)

As the saying goes, films don’t get too  much more maudit than this 1985 item. Director Sam Raimi’s second proper feature, and the first that he and his associates (Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert, et. al.) made for/with THE MAN,  was a behind-the-scenes tragedy/farce from the get-go, from imposed leading man to unforeseen union overages to clueless execs doing recuts that mutilated a plethora of elaborate and possibly beautiful master shots and more. Surely an object lesson not just for Raimi and company but for co-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, who here dub a correctional facility “Hudsucker State Penitentiary” and make a blink-and-you-miss it cameo appearance (Frances MacDormand plays a nun, too). So how’s the movie? Sometimes quite entertaining, always exuberant, a bit of a mess, and an unexpected stylistic link between Raimi, the Coens, and honestly, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Like the Coens’ subsequent Raising Arizona, it’s a real cartoon movie, although at this point Raimi has a slight edge in chops. Still, never such innocence again and all that. And I bet Tarantino was a big fan, for reasons you’ll get if you watch it yourself. The picture quality is very good and will likely satisfy the recollections of the five people who actually got to see this in its abortive theatrical “release.” The extras are nicely explanatory overall but the jewel is of course the Bruce Campbell commentary, because production train wreck tales are way more interesting than success stories and because it’s the irrepressible Campbell telling them. Speaking of Reed Birney, who got the lead role that Raimi wanted for him, Bruce notes, “Reed’s pretty cute in this. I wonder why he didn’t work much after this. I guess it’s because we destroyed his career.” He also refers to Louise Lasser as “a piece of work.” Great stuff. —A

Day of the Falcon (Image)

Every now and then I hear of a direct-to-DVD (more or less) release of a film of the sort maybe that they don’t make anymore, and I kinda get my Sentimental Old Man hopes up, like somehow I’m gonna be gifted with a latter-day Khartoum or something that will help me to banish dull care or something. This is particularly weird because I don’t even like the actual Khartoum all that much.  Anyway, I thought maybe this produced-by-some-obscenely-rich-Middle-Eastern-dude item, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, might do some kind of trick in this realm, but alas, no. It opens in “The Yellow Belt, somewhere in Arabia.” And boy, that belt sure is yellow! The noble heads of warring factions come to an uneasy truce involving one of the scions of a warlord living under the safekeeping of the former rival, or something, setting the stage for an epic (not quite) series of conflicts once the land of the Yellow Belt is discovered to be oil rich. The disc looks very good, but the  visual splendor does not ameliorate a cliché-collection storyline and script, po-faced direction that takes every cliché dead seriously, phoned-in performances, and….well, the battle scenes take forever to get started, and aren’t so hot once they do. I’m sticking with Khartoum. —C+

The Devil And Miss Jones (Olive)

Ah, Olive Films. Its Blu-rays of old Republic Westerns (right, as opposed to the up-to-the-minute Republic Westerns) kept me sane when I took breaks from grappling with The De Niro Perplex and other inerleckshul challenges. And its off-kilter but hardly random selection of other vintage Hollywood fare consistently uncovers gems of substantial cinephilic pertinence. This 1941 Norman Krasna-scripted, Sam Wood-directed comedy is an excellent case in point, a swell vehicle for the great Jean Arthur and an amusingly agitationist pro-labor parable to boot, with Charles Coburn as a magnate who conceives the concept for the later television series Undercover Boss, as it were. A crackerjack picture with a standout sequence set in Coney Island, and a very interesting just-pre-World-War-II time capsule (although there’s not a single allusion to the troubles in Europe at the time). All this and production design by  William Cameron Menzies. (Cogent, but a little on the subdued side for him, although the Coney Island police station did give this viewer an eerie little pre-echo of Invaders From Mars.) The Blu-ray is crisp looking,  but a little lowish in the contrast department, which I sometimes find to be the case with Olive. Hardly a cardinal sin and in any event and the movie is well worth your time. —B+

Diary of a Chambermaid (Olive)

Hollywood-studio bound Jean Renoir is frustrating in a lot of ways, I noted as I began watching this, struck by the stage sets, and the sometimes-Mickey-Mousing musical score. This ain’t no Toni, in other words. However. Once you’re accustomed to the climate, the salient features of which include Paulette Goddard’s incarnation as a blonde, the movie builds up a nicely sly and sardonic head of steam. And of course this 1946 gloss on Mirbeau is an excellent double feature with Buñuel’s 1964 treatment of the same material, starring a Jeanne Moreau who’s permitted to keep her natural hair color. The cursory treatment Renoir accords this picture in My Life and My Films tends to confirm my suspicions that this was more a passion project for Burgess Meredith (co-star, co-screenwriter, co-producer, and Goddard’s husband at the time) than the director himself. In any event, the disc looks good, there’s a slight uptick in contrast relative to The Devil and Miss Jones, and ostensibly minor Renoir is still Renoir. —A-

From Beyond (Scream Factory)

Barbara Crampton’s metamorphosis from bespectacled researcher to  leather corseted dom is possibly the greatest sexy librarian switch in cinema history. And the Stuart-Gordon-directed 1986 followup to the immortal Re-Animator doesn’t disappoint in its other particulars either. The disc is first rate: Good detail, great psychedelic colors. Gordon’s brio and the overall inspiration of the rest of the crew bring this latter-day exploitation goodie way above generic Italian-studio Charles Band-dom. (Longtime Fangoria and/or Video Watchdog subscribers know too well what I mean.)  Filmmaking lesson: various gradations of psychedelic pink lighting definitely give your rubberized creature effects a more convincing feel. Good explosions and fire, always a sign of a well-done transfer. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “From Beyond has a machine!” —A

Frontier Horizon (Olive)

The good news is that this 1939 B oater, the eighth and last Three Mesquiteers picture to star John Wayne, is the best-looking of all such Blu-rays I’ve looked at thus far (I haven’t yet  gotten to Santa Fe Stampede and Red River Range). It’s one of the more unstuck-in-time Mesquiteers adventures, with an engaging land-grab storyline and tight narrative margins and brisk action; a real tonic. Also the film debut of Jennifer Jones, here billed by her real name Phyllis Isley, and looking and acting very fresh, innocent as she is of the knowledge that David O. Selznick would soon come along and CRUSH HER SPIRIT.—B+

The Fury (Twilight Time)

This, as it happens, is one of my favorite Brian De Palma movies, largely because it’s just the director going virtuosically nuts on a B-movie “Don’t fuck with Kirk Douglas” scenario. For the first quarter or so I was having a wonderful time with the high-def version. The beach scene with William Finley, and its bizarre depth-of-field show-offery, looked amazing. And I noticed that Hillary Thompson, the girl Amy Irving gives the nosebleed to, was a dead ringer for Sasha Grey, who was not even a concept in 1978. This is what movie watching’s all about. However. Once the night scenes started, the picture got pretty wonky: a good deal of speckling akin to what one sees in the Italian transfers of some Dario Argento pictures. It’s particularly evident in a scene after Douglas puts Irving on the bus: the over-graininess doesn’t get as bad as that of the misfire French Connection Blu-ray of a while back, but it’s close. Off-the-record consultations with technically trusted sources suggests the problem arises from an anomaly of an outmoded storage medium for digital transfers. It certainly didn’t kill the movie but it took me out of it for a bit, and it’s a poor comparison with the wonders inherent in the daylight scenes. A shame, and a problem I hope can be corrected at some point in time. —C

The Grandmaster (Mei Ah mixed region Hong Kong import)

If you wanna see the latest from Wong Kar-Wai before Harvey Weinstein regales the U.S. with his shorter-by-fifteen-minutes cut, this  pricey import would seem to be the way to go, and it’s a beauty. An evocative and sometimes elliptical biography of martial arts legend Ip Man (in case you were wondering, that’s the guy’s actual NAME, not like a superhero title or anything) it begins with a rain-soaked fight sequence that’s both quintessential and unlike anything the director’s done before. The colors are quietly ravishing, the performers profoundly enigmatic, and on the whole it’s more assured and cohesive than My Blueberry Nights, which I’ve actually gotten fonder of in recent years. On this disc, movie itself is region-free, and has English subs; special features are region-locked, and have none. They look pretty EPK-generic, as far as I can tell.  Your call. —A-

The Grapes of Death (Kino Lorber)

That’s a goofy title (and the French original, Les raisins de la mort, isn’t much better) for a genuinely remarkable horror movie, one of the most desolate films ever made, its often goofy special effects notwithstanding. There’s something about zombie-like pestilence occurring in the bucolic French countryside (Michael Haneke exploited it for rather similar effect, in fact, for his more arthouse-respectable [and also excellent] Hour of the Wolf) that just gets to you. Director Jean Rollin’s determined simplicity alternates with genuine (blank verse0 poetry, and the atmosphere of dread and despair is simply remarkable. Brigitte Lahaie-aiie-aiie-aiie is great as a not-what-she-seems character and her “behold my infection-free naked body” bit is a rather hilarious bit of exploitation deadpan in an otherwise mordant vision. The disc looks spectacular, very true to its source. Which source contains the aforementioned cheesy special effects, but what are you going to do. —A-

The Grifters (Miramax/Echo Bridge)

Ah, Echo Bridge, perpetrators of that wretched Blu-ray of Dead Man back in 2011. How I dread the idea of spending money on your product. So I think what happened is that I picked up this (admittedly cheap retail price point) disc in a trade in, because my curiosity got the better of me and also because damnit this is a pretty great picture that belongs in one’s library and it has a Donald E. Westlake script and naked Annette Bening and so there. Still, once it was home I didn’t look forward to checking it out. It’s not bad. The opening credits are in 1.66, which piqued my interest for a minute, but once they were through the picture reverted to a plasma-screen-filling 1.77 (not even 1.85, those motherfuckers). The picture’s solid, a little soft at times (like during Bening’s nude scene, imagine that) but it doesn’t have any jump-out-at-you pixilation screw-ups as Dead Man did. Not terrible, but also nothing special. I’d recommend you shoplift it but what kind of person would that make me?—B- 

The Hobbit (Warner)

I don’t have full-time access to a 3D display, so I acquired the flat Blu-ray of this, a movie I’d probably like a lot more if I smoked pot, because I was curious about how a more conventional version would look—I saw it on the big screen in 3D and at the controversial 48 fps projection speed and was mixed but sometimes very impressed. The “regular” version on Blu-ray is more…mixed. The textures of the visuals offers more disctrete distinction between the live-action and animated components within a given frame that I was comfortable with; the images rarely, if ever, merged into a coherent and satisfying whole. Again, this might not have been a problem had I been watching stoned. But I think the thing is, this movie actually needs  3D, if not necessarily 3D in 48fps. Having figures inhabit different planes just makes the multi-platform effects more digestible, as it were. Whenever I get a display upgrade (and it’ll probably be a while), I’ll give the 3D version a look and report back. —B

The Hudsucker Proxy (Warner Archive)

Almost ten years after their pal Sam Raimi got majorly burned on Crimewave, the Coen Brothers got a big budget and no studio interference on their own arguably final Full Cartoon movie, their first effort to really take a bath at the box office, as it happened. Like all Coen pictures, it’s since acquired a cult, but not nearly the one that The Big Lebowski entertains. And so, its Blu-ray gets a bare-bones Warner Archive release. Not that you go to Coen Brothers movies on video for the DVD extras anyway. This movie looks very nice; the disc nails the movie’s highly burnished look, which we come to understand as but one function of its Dada-by-way-of-Preston-Sturges snideness. By this time the Coens’ chops had come to match the ambition of their crazy gags (if you watch Raising Arizona today, while it’s still delightful, you might be shocked at how ragged some of it looks), and with more money to throw at production design and such, they really went to town. It’s kind of astonishing that the movie even exists. And yes, I think Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance works. —A-

The Jazz Singer (Warner)

One rather wishes that Michael Curtiz rather than Alan Crosland had directed this 1927, um, breakthrough film, but what are you going to do. It would have still retained its problem-picture status. What this Blu-ray really demonstrates is how great a result is yielded via application of expensive up-to-the-minute technology. I’m admittedly speculating here; I don’t have the details of how this transfer was made but it simply has to be a meticulous frame-by-frame scanning of good or eminently restorable materials. Look at the whites of Warner Oland’s eyes when he pops them out in indignation that Jakie is late to sing at temple. It’s incredible in a movie that’s almost ninety years old. As good as the older movies Olive puts on Blu-ray can look, their transfers are done by more conventional means, and it shows. The rest of this package runs along the same lines as the 2007 standard-def release, with multiple eye-popping hours of vintage musical entertainment, while the commentary track on the movie itself from  Ron Hutchison and Vince Giordano is one of the best of its kind. Just amazing. —A+

Knightriders (Arrow Region B U.K. import)

I cannot tell a lie: until this Arrow release came under my transom, I’d actually never seen this crucial George A. Romero film. I regret I didn’t sooner; it’s a pretty spectacular film. And it’s really not nearly as goofy as its conceit of stunt cyclists enacting Arthurian myth in the modern world might strike you, in large part due to Ed Harris’ superb lead performance and to the workmanlike, thorough way that Romero and his company enacts said conceit. Expansive, emotional, but never sentimental, it’s a quintessential Romero treatment on the wages of integrity. The transfer looks terrific, and the extras, including a commentary and a contemporary interview with Harris, are also excellent. Shout! Factory has this slated for a domestic release in July but I’m not sure if the company will best this particular product.—A+

Leave Her To Heaven (Twilight Time)

There has not been an extant Technicolor source for this glorious Technicolor film since maybe before you and I were even born, which is a shame and maybe even a crime. So as much restoration as it gets, we shall never be able to behold the full glory of John Stahl’s mesmerizing 1945 plunge into murderous neo-noir amour fou, starring Gene Tierney at her most hypnotically ga-ga gorgeous. But this Blu-ray boasts a beautiful picture for all that, so much more than passable that I wonder whether viewers of the real Technicolor were struck by Stendhal syndrome en masse. Essential. —A+

Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles (Warner)

What a sort of random idea: a two-Blu-ray anthology of  Looney Tunes mice-themed cartoons, billed as “The Chuck Jones Collection.” The adventures of Abbott-and-Costello-esque Hubie and Bertie are featured, as well as a bunch of shorts featuring neurotically gabby Sniffles. While I grant that a little Sniffles goes a long way, I also insist that in small doses he (she? it?) can be kind of winsomely delightful. Aw, fuck it, I’m a complete sucker for Looney Tunes on Blu-ray in any permutation, so maybe take my grade with a grain of salt. But know also that the collection includes “Trap Happy Porky,” which has that drunk-mice singing “On Moonlight Bay” and one of them hiccupping “You’re flat” at the end, still one of the most reliably hilarious gags in all of cinema, for my money.—A

 Major Dundee (Twilight Time)

The heroic-not-quite restoration of a too-much-messed-with Sam Peckinpah coulda-been-a-masterpiece looked great in the standard-def package released in 2006; this version looks better still. Even the 1965 Columbia opening logo has this particularity of grain that provides a Proustian rush of movie-palace power. The reconstruction of Peckinpah’s vision is a movie one wished one could have seen in precisely that context, because it would have blown minds; it begins by coloring very deftly within the lines of the standard Cavalry Western and grows progressively wilder and stranger while never betraying its prime directive, so to speak. It’s also one of the most emotionally stirring pictures of its kind. Cinephiles who are unconvinced by claims for Peckinpah’s genius will at least have to credit him for a very particular singularity of vision after seeing this. And in this format you need make no excuses for the presentation.—A+

Monsieur Verdoux (Criterion)

Speaking of strange, Charles Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy, based on an idea of Orson Welles’, is one of the filmmaker’s odder creations, the character a very upfront mix of self-love and self, if not loathing, then some degree of disapproval. Verdoux is Barbe-bleu as bourgeois fallen on hard times, as it were, his endeavors in murder slapstick cookies dipped in arsenic and his exercises in restraint and/or compassion sentimentally self-aggrandizing. Fascinating, to say the least. This is a good-looking but not extraordinary rendering of the film—there’s apparently only so much that can be done with the material available from the licensing agent. Nevertheless, a necessary entry in the Cinema of Extraordinary Personality. And it’s pretty funny, at least in parts, particularly those parts in which Chaplin jousts with Martha Raye.—A

On Approval (Inception)

No, I had never heard of it before either. Dave Kehr had, of course Dave Kehr had, and it was his review of it in the Sunday New York Times that convinced me to check it out. I’m very happy I did. The 1944 take-everyone’s-mind-off the war comedy (set in the Victorian era, it has a present-to-past prologue that pokes gentle fun at the torn-from-the-distressing-headlines pictures of its day) is pretty much a fat-free puff pastry of droll dialogue exchanges in a Wildean mode, to wit, “You have a sweet voice, Helen.” “Thank you, George.” “But you seldom sing. That is a great accomplishment.” Reproduced in stellar, high-contrast black and white, and supplemented by a dry but informative commentary from scholar Jeffrey Vance. Aside from featuring a rare film performance by British comedy queen Beatrice Lillie, the wonderful movie happens to have been adapted, directed by, and starring Clive Brook,whom you may remember as “Doc” Harvey from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. I had no idea he had it in him. —A 

Pals of the Saddle (Olive)

Another Mesquiteers title. No windowboxed opening this time. A clear crisp  image, not quite as crisp as that of Frontier Horizon. I like it better than Frontier Horizon though because it features kinds creepy quasi ventriloquist Max Terhune as “Lullabye” Joslin, whom I find a more compelling (not to say Lynchian) character than Raymond Hatton’s Rusty Joslin. Terhune’s character also indulges in some merciless mocking of sap Tucson, played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan. It’s also one of the Mesquiteer’s present-day-set adventures, and it involves a woman of initially ambiguous allegiances and the smuggling of something that’s not quite uranium but is definitely meant to be. Hence, the movie is Notorious avant la lettre, and hence cinematically important. Look, my point is that if you don’t get your hands on every Three Mesquiteers western you can, you’re a bad American. I don’t know how else to put it. —B

Panic In The Streets (Fox)

Essentially a high-def clone of  the Elia Kazan box set edition (note the menu, which is designed in the style of the box set), but a really good looking version of a masterful movie. As Kazan himself understood, this 1950 thriller was much more than a genre exercise, but it works on that level just fine. It’s thrilling filmmaking right from the get-go, with Kazan deploying genuine locations and idiosyncratic performers (Zero Mostel has a major role in one of his scarce films from this period before the blacklist kept him out of movies for pretty much a decade) with remarkable energy and invention. The contrast is just as I like it, the detail looks just fine to me. A couple of  newer extras are added (docs on costars Jack Palance and Richard Widmark), but the commentary from  Alain Silver and James Ursini remains the crucial one.—A    

The Telephone Book (Vinegar Syndrome)

This Blu-ray from a relatively new concern that seems commendably concerned with unearthing and preserving unusual grindhouse and quasi-underground fare does a nice job with this curio, written and directed by Nelson Lyon, whose unfortunate subsequent claim to fame would be accompanying John Belushi through a good portion of the Hollywood drug binge that killed the performer. This not-quite-tale of a girl Candide’s search for the world’s greatest obscene phone caller (no, really) boasts lovely vintage NYC locations rendered in yummy black and white and features, not necessarily in this order, Roger C. Carmel yelling “Fuck,” William Hickey contemplating a giant erection, and Jill Clayburgh loading a gun while wearing a sleep mask. Producer Merv Bloch provides a lively and sometimes sadly nostalgic commentary. Utterly intriguing but not for everyone. —B+

Tess (BFI Region B U.K. import)

One of Polanski’s greatest films, it’s rarely acknowledged as such for reasons I’m not sure I ought to speculate on. So I won’t, and instead will hope that this beautiful albeit extras-short Blu-ray from a restored source will help find it a newish and appreciative audience. Yes, the British countryside of Hardy, not to mention of Turner and Constable,  is  evoked via the ravishing cinematography (Ghislain Cloquet took over for Geoffrey Unsworth after the latter died some weeks into shooting) but the effects are not “merely” picturesque; the beautiful golden glow  that illuminates “Sir John D’Urbeville” throws that character’s strong ignobility into sharp relief, and throughout, natural glory is undercut by human stupidity and/or cruelty. The director is at his most expansive and his most crushing, simultaneously. —A

That Cold Day In The Park (Olive)

Pre-M*A*S*H Altman, but the purposeful murk of the imagery, and  the focus fakeouts throughout,  presage McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Images and Three Women more than they do the subsequent film that would make him famous. The movie got slagged as a squalid but conventional psych thriller at the time but seen today its particular tetchiness is really auteur-distinctive, if you ask me. The drab of the supposedly swank apartment inhabited by the Sandy Dennis character speaks volumes. The Olive disc seems to have been transferred from not pristine materials, but the Blu-ray renders what is likely a pretty accurate account of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs’ long-lens impressionism. Fun fact: after retiring from acting male lead Michael Burns became an academic historian and has written more than one book on the Dreyfus case. — B+

Tristana (Cohen)

Goddamn there are a lot of trailers before the beginning of this movie. And that’s my only complaint. This high-def version of what I still consider Buñuel’s masterpiece of masterpieces looks amazing right from the beginning, as it casts a seemingly simple but ultimately devastating spell. Kent Jones fortifies his reputation as The World’s Most Enviable Film Critic by hosting a commentary track with Catherine Deneuve herself, and he keeps it relaxed and gets great stuff.  The included alternate ending is interesting. The actual ending is…well, unbelievable. Get this. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “He was really happy to be back in Spain, to be back working in Spain.”  —A+

 

Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics (Warner)

Good idea, putting these things on Blu-ray. The individual discs reproduce the extras, “Warner Night At The Movies” cartoons and shorts and all, of the standard def editions. And we approve. As for the high-def picture quality, the films are, in backward chronological order: White Heat, which looks very nice; there's some crackle on the audio of the 1949 film, and one insert shot in the opening train robbery sequence kind of stands out like a sore thumb, but otherwise solid, terrific. The longest movie of the bunch, almost two hours, because it’s kind of surprisingly plotty. Never lags a minute though. 1936’s The Petrified Forest screened in a restored version recently, and I presume that’s what’s on this Blu-ray, because the picture is easily the sharpest and most consistent in the set (not that the others are considerably behind, mind you). I mean, you can see stray hairs pop off both Bette Davis and Leslie Howard’s heads in medium closeup when they’re facing each other. Also the painted desert backdrops of the set are more evident. Terrific film, a bit on the talky side, but great performances (it made Bogart a star, but Howard really sells his slightly ridiculous role; the guy was some actor) and interesting action…and the two African-American characters are not broad stereotypes or even really stereotypes at all, a near-impossiblity for a Hollywood picture of this time, I used to think. The Public Enemy looks spectacular, sometimes grain heavy but what of it. Little Caesar  displays a  little softness in the shallow focus shots but it’s likely endemic to the material and it’s neither displeasing nor “bad.” A wonderful thing in all respects. —A+

  Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning (Sony)

A lot of The Kids have been raving about this one (and I gotta say that getting behind Peter Hyams’ son could be Vulgar Auteurism at its most innovative), so I thought I’d check it out, despite the fact that I turned off the similarly-praised The Raid after about twenty minutes cause the thing looked as if it had been developed in a mud bath. The first twenty minutes of this were really disgusting (slaughter of lead character’s family in graphic detail, including much-teased adorable-little-girl death), and looked pretty damn good. Eventually I thought I discerned a pulpier, freaked-out extrapolation of The Bourne Legacy and/or Unknown, with some intriguing Fire Walk With Me "touches."Eventually I had to own up to the fact that I was being way too optimistic and that the movie really wasn’t about much more than a guy who comes out of a coma to discover that he has a British accent. This does have more nudity than an average Bourne knockoff, plus the lead actress is a pretty credible Stoya lookalike. (Don’t hassle me for knowing too much about porn stars, she was on the cover of the goddamn Village Voice.) The action stuff is pretty credibly bone-crunching, I admit. The commentary is the usual “we had a great second unit” stuff. Verdict: not as essential as you may have been led to believe. —B-

The Vampire Lovers (Scream Factory)

No real complaints from me on this one. Yeah, maybe the materials weren’t pristine/super-restored, but they look decent. If there’s ever a Blu-ray of Fearless Vampire Killers, I’ll expect it to look better. But, no disrespect to Roy Ward Baker intended, the way this looks is both objectively good, and also entirely appropriate to the movie’s aesthetic pay grade. Inspirational dialogue: “German’s so difficult.” Among the extras: ten minutes of pasty but nicely dressed white males trying to come up with more erudite ways to exclaim “Boobies,” (because there sure are a lot of them in the movie, and most of the guys saw the movie when they were at an impressionable age). On the other hand, while the very sensible and nice and still lovely second female lead Madeline Smith gives an interview my wife characterizes as “darling!” Commentary features very sedate-sounding Ingrid Pitt,  delightfully named screenwriter Tudor Gates,  and the great Baker in a dry but informative interview format. (All three are now deceased, which is lamentable but inevitable.) —A

Van Gogh (Gaumont Region B French import)

Gaumont’s been putting out the Pialat catalog in new high-def editions and while I am sufficiently pleased by my current Eureka!/Masters of Cinema standard-def editions of the films and I figure eventually the company or some like concern will step up to the plate with versions featuring English-language extras, in a couple of cases I have not been able to resist. This 1991 picture is one. (It’s not among the MOC titles, is one reason.) This is a magnificent film, an artist’s portrait of an artist that concentrates on interstices, pauses, and work, work, work rather than the usual romanticized “artiste” stuff. It’s kind of the ultimate act of respect to its subject and likely a kind of self-portrait of its director. It looks sweet throughout, though there are hints of noise in some of the darker scenes near the end (for instance, Jacques Dutronc’s Van Gogh with a prostitute in the Moulin Rouge back room). I hold out hope for cheaper, more English-comprehensive editions (you’ve got subtitles on the feature but not on any of the extras) but I’m still glad to own this. —A

The Verdict (Fox)

The long-awaited (by me and Jeffrey Wells and probably some other people too) Blu-ray of the 1982 movie looks pretty splendid: a good library copy of a movie that belongs in your library. Watching it this time around I noticed for the first time that the relationship between Paul Newman’s Frank Garvin and Jack Warden’s Mickey Morrisey rather neatly reverses the dynamic between the Jimmy Stewart and Arthur O’Connell characters in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. Director Sidney Lumet often complained that critics didn’t really appreciate the depth of cinematic craft he brought to his deceptively straightforward storytelling; this movie is a master class in it. As Phillip Lopate put it in a recent Cineaste review of the Blu-ray of Lumet’s film of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which I haven’t gotten around to looking at yet), “If Lumet refuses to disguise the theatricality of the source material, he brings an impressive array of cinematic techniques to its moment-by-moment realization.” Where, say,  Preminger moved the camera, Lumet likes to place it in a comprehensive overview position and keep it there for a good long time (see the pretrial conference with Newman, James Mason, and Milo O’Shea), but he then places his emphases via judicious cutting to ground-level medium shots as the scene builds in verbal and strategic complexity. In other words, he is rather like a theater director in that his moves service the script, and this script, by David Mamet from  a novel by Barry Reed, is a very strong one. One of the best by the director, the screenwriter, and the star. —A+

Viva Zapata! (Fox)

I haven’t kept up on the critical reputation of this 1952 picture, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time,  and I have to say I was not that thrilled by it (and I recall not having been too thrilled by it first time around, which must have been when I was in my twenties). It looks beautiful; Joseph MacDonald’s lensing of various parts of the North American west standing in for Mexico is inspired. But I  found it dramatically stilted (John Steinbeck’s script wears its earnest didacticism on its sleeve) and kind of a waste of Brando, who is very conscientiously consistent in his portrayal of the plaster-saint version of the title character. This movie immediately precedes another Kazan non-favorite of mine, Man on a Tightrope. Maybe the guy was having personal problems in the mid-50s, I dunno. The disc is a solid presentation to be sure.—B

Wake In Fright (Alamo Drafthouse)

This highly disquieting 1971 thriller directed in Australia by Canadian-born Ted Kotcheff could just as well be titled Alcohol Is A Hell Of A Drug. A dissatisfied outback schoolteacher en route to Sydney makes a stop in the so-called “Yabba” that, after a few beers and a few more after that, submerges him in what we’ll call a distinctly unwholesome culture. Definitely a movie you ought to show anyone who thinks the “Wolfpack” ethos endorsed by those idiotic Hangover movies is something, you know, real. Also, you'll never see Donald Pleasance the same way again, even if you already do know Cul-de-sac. Long considered lost, Wake was revived on the rep circuit recently and the Blu-ray from relatively a new distrib outfit (an offshoot of the legendary Texas movie venue) is highly admirable: a great transfer that really puts across that baking-heat yellow light that seems endemic to Australia and certain Australian films, and good extras. If you can stand the (multiply disclaimered) kangaroo hunt that’s the movie’s horror centerpiece you’re golden. If not, well, you’ve been warned here. —A

War of the Wildcats (Olive)

Lest anyone accuse me of being completely in the tank for any Republic western, I cite this 1943 relative dud, which is kinda dull although arguably as semi-interestingly weird as one would expect any movie that casts Albert Dekker and John Wayne as romantic rivals to be.  Originally titled In Old Oklahoma, it features Dekker and Wayne as two different types of oil men, one the rapacious land-grabbing type, the other the hard-working man of the people. Guess who’s which. Martha Scott plays the object of their affections, a former school teacher turned early 20^th-century chick lit purveyor. Nothing against Scott, but Claire Trevor might have put more oomph in the role. Also featuring Sidney Blackmer as Theodore Roosevelt. Seriously, it’s not as good as I’m making it sound. And the disc presentation itself is quite mixed, what with the frequent speckling of the source material. For Republic junkies only.—C

Zeta One (Kino Lorber)

This 1969 secret agent/sci-fi pastiche looks pretty good. GREAT colors. (Note the orange kitchen. If you watch it. Which I'm not recommending.) Whiter than white whites. Too bad it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. INSIPID direction, coy dialogue, flat delivery. Nice 60s art direction…I think my parents had those white swivel chairs. The first scene goes on forever and nothing happens. It’s like The Room of James Bond parodies, honest. But I watched it all the way through! And the the image quality does hold up but man, does this movie ever answer the question “How bad can it be?” And the answer is: in the final shots, the At the end the hero is surrounded by six naked and/or semi-clad women and he looks absolutely bored to death…and you completely understand how he feels. Brilliant. —C+

Zombie Flesh Eaters (Arrow Region B U.K. import)

This 1979, um, classic, looks pretty amazing, and you’ll know a little about why from the interview I conducted with supervisor James White, here. The clarity and detail is such I was able to cogently identify (for my own self) the hallmarks of  The Lucio Fulci “Look:” Shallow focus, almost exclusively long lenses, not ostentatiously lit, lotta “natural” light. And you know, maybe it’s my grindhouse taste talking, but I think it’s a pretty good horror movie. And now one word never associated with prior video versions can be applied to it: beautiful. Nifty extras, too, including three different discrete title sequences, ‘cause that how international distribution of Italian exploitation cinema used to roll. —A+

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: April 2013

I was working on a March Consumer Guide when I got called up to do the De Niro book. I duly accepted and submerged in De Niro studies, and left you all relatively blogless for over a month. Well. Now I’m up for air…and feeling rather like Steve Brody at the end of the Arthur-Davis-directed Looney Tune “Bowery Bugs,” when the lug is all like “Everybody’s turning in to rabbits!” only in my case it’s “Everybody’s turning into De Niro!”  So for a break, I thought, why not finish what I started, throw in a couple of newer titles, get a nice twenty-disc (no, wait, twenty-one!) Consumer Guide up? It’s fun! Because I don’t WORK enough, you see.

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver. 

Black Sunday (Arrow, Region B U.K. import)

I don’t wanna seem ungrateful for the decent Kino/Lorber high-def edition of this ineffable Mario Bava work, but it’s plain that the U.K. concern Arrow has a more personal stake in the presentation of this movie, given the extensive care displayed in this presentation. This three-disc set—one Blu-ray disc, two standard-def discs with various extras AND Freda’s I Vampiri, to which Bava contributed considerably—is a protean package that, most notably, features a transfer of the European release version that’ has more contrast and detail than the Kino/Lorber version, and thus brings it way closer to the Black Sunday of one’s dreams/imaginings than was the domestic issue, which to my eye suffered from too-low contrast, among other things, in the prior high-def incarnation, And we’ve still got the Tim Lucas commentary and a huge number of enjoyable/informative extras besides. If you’ve got a multi-region player this is the no-contest way to go.— A+ 

Cabaret (Warner)

Pretty exquisite. The lighting, diffuse or direct, is captured with excellent grain and almost no noise. Immaculate flesh tones and color all around. An exemplary example, at time, of a kind of gauzy  but quasi-documentary style of ‘70s cinematography, with Geoffrey Unsworth adapting with the times while also refining his ever-first-rate eye, with director Bob Fosse clearly getting the most out of him with some unusual challenges, as in the reverse zoom shot that takes up much of the standout Liza number “Maybe This Time.” Speaking of Liza, The Huffington Post could probably milk an entire standalone sideboob gallery of the Oscar winner from this motion picture. Confession: I’m not sure whether I’d ever seen it in it entirety prior to watching this Blu-ray. It’s a worthwhile film, really!—A+

China Gate (Olive)

A long time hard-to-see Samuel Fuller fave, this 1954-set 1957 Prophetic Book On The Vietnam War, made under the aegis of Daryl Zanuck and God bless him for it,  gets its anti-Commie hooks right into you with its voiceover narration, and then in one fabulous crane shot reminds you that nobody shot bombed-out ruins like Fuller. Black-and-white Cinemascope, and the excellence of the transfer makes the frequently clumsy interpolations of stock footage look clumsier still.  (Occasional composite shots also look pretty obvious, and Fuller’s inability to integrate them into his usually fluid action style is, well, unfortunate albeit possibly unavoidable.) Although as the picture goes on there are brief instances of scratching and such that crop up, it’s nothing you wouldn’t see at a rep screening…and there’s not that much of it. By the time Fuller pays tribute to his beloved “Big Red One” outfit in the dialogue, you should be thoroughly engrossed in SamWorld.  For the most part it’s an excellent presentation. Good to see one of Nat “King” Cole’s relatively scant efforts at dramatic film acting get such a release, too. —A

Chronicle of a Summer (Criterion) 

“We’re young and the sun shines;” thus one of the young people interviewed at the beginning of this documentary shrugs off a question about happiness. This 1961 collaboration between Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin brought the phrase “cinema verité” to the forefront of critical consciousness. As Richard Brody has pointed out, it’s a social survey of Paris that becomes a Holocaust documentary in the middle—inadvertently presaging Georges Perec’s great literary works Things: A Story Of The Sixties and W, or the Memory of Childhood simultaneously. Not that this would, or should, necessarily occur to you while watching the film, which is all kinds of excellent, not least for the fleet way it acknowledges its myriad of concerns— the problem of getting people to not “act” before the camera, for example—and in so doing assembles something as narratively engaging as a more conventional fiction. The stuff of which the actual film is made of is a tough but never ugly black-and-white, and the transfer is a marvel of clarity. The extras represent an exemplary journey further into, and then past, the movie. Great stuff. —A+

Deadly Blessing (Shout! Factory)

Most of the time when know-somethingish would-be film assessors say that something looks “like a TV movie” they’re complaining about a picture that appears shot without some requisite flash. THIS 1981 movie, from the cheesy title font and beyond, looks like a TV movie. And it looks like a TV movie, not to beat a soon-to-be-dead horse, from precisely that cheesy title font...to the sepia-tinted stills from shots later in the movie images over which the titles appear… to the actual title that reads (no kidding)“introducing Lisa Hartman”…and beyond and beyond and beyond (hey, look, music by James Horner!). (DP Robert C. Jessup did Dallas and a bunch of other TV stuff). Then there’s the nighttime soap production design. Let’s face it kids: for a filmmaker such as Wes Craven, these touches at this time represented “polish.”  But the dialogue is, um, kicky (“Incubus!” “Retard!” goes one exchange), Maren Jansen is cute, early Sharon Stone is funny, Ernest Borgnine in his Mennonite costume is always thrilling (he’s not the heroic figure here that he was in Violent Saturday) and the shocks in this thriller are sufficiently diverting to make one finally not care that it’s yet another religion-debunking horror pic without the courage of its contingent convictions.  (To my shame I hadn’t seen Shivers/ It Came From Within at the time I first saw this, so didn’t realize what a stone ripoff of Cronenberg's movie the snake-in-the-bathtub scene in this movie is.) Good transfer of a so-so looking but not-without-genre-value picture.  —B- 

Don Giovanni (Olive)

Joseph Losey’s vision is still about neck in neck with Bergman’s Magic Flute as far as second-best-filmed-opera goes, their highly different approaches notwithstanding. Bergman’s is a filmed staging, while Losey brings his Don out into the world, specifically Venice and the Veneto region of Italy. It’s a sensual, erotic, vision that turns magnificently dire when the stone guest does his business. Losey the sybarite and Losey the dispenser of doom are both at their inspired best here. Only occasionally do you get the sense of his feeling constrained by having to use the actual opera singers in the roles of the characters (something Syberberg did not feel compelled to do in his Parsifal, which is my oick for BESTEST filmed opera; Straub and Huillet’s Moses und Aron gets close third place, if you’re interested).  Olive’s presentation is at a pleasing and correct 1.66 ratio, and visual highlights abound: Very beautiful night scene in the opening, the shots of a boat journey through  reeds as Don Octavio vows to avenge Donna Anna; Giovanni’s consideration of the nudity of a bathing milkmaid; and so on. Super nifty. —A

 Easter Parade (Warner)

Another glorious Technicolor triumph for Warner Home Video. At first you might feel that’s the best thing to be said about it, because in its first sixth or so it seems like a heckuva treacly picture.  Once its Pygmalion-out-of-spite backstage musical storyline starts it picks up and turns into a pretty good one (backstage musical that is) at that. I haven’t too much overt experience with so-called “lossless” audio soundtracks but I paid special attention to this one and the mono is indeed glorious, clean and bright. Astaire and Garland’s combo magic is potent throughout, particularly on  “A Couple of  Swells” of course. And Astaire’s slo-mo simulation on “Steppin’ Out” is even more of a “how did he do that” thing than his ceiling dancing in Royal Wedding. All this IS better seen in its proper context (which includes some odd casual racism in the portrayal of a scheming maid) than on a YouTube video or even That’s Entertainment, and the clips in Entertainment haven’t been remastered like this one, which I cannot emphasize enough is lovely. —A

Experiment in Terror (Twilight Time)

Super-incredible widescreen black-and-white image quality attached to an excellent thriller that makes you sad Blake Edwards didn’t do more of them. Man, was that guy one hell of a director. The control he has over this material is magnificent, and he imbues every scene with sharp observation, vivid characters, engaged intelligence. Lee Remick is superb in her understatement and Glenn Ford exactly right. And again, this transfer: not a smidgen of noise, and the  materials seem completely pristine  Can’t figure why the soundtrack is in full surround; I don’t know much about Columbia Pictures’ sound processes in the early ‘60s (this is a ’62 film), whether the studio was experimenting with multi-channel sound as Fox did, so I can’t figure out what’s the deal. But the surround soundtrack isn’t bad at all, doesn’t feel tacked on, not does it have irritatingly/obviously simulated effects. Highly recommended. —A

Gypsy (Warner Archive)

My first time out with a Warner Archive Blu-ray and I am positively impressed. It’s very solid.  Not that this well-liked musical is a feast of varied color or any such item. Man, between this and Quo Vadis you’d think director Mervyn LeRoy had a fetish for lavender or something. He doesn’t seem terribly inspired here, so the resulting movie comes off more or less like a filmed play. But. Good songs, committed performances all around, and Natalie Wood is SO cute. "How is it a less-than-deluxe disc in the bare-bones Warner Archive mode?” you ask. Well, there is no “scene selections” option on the main menu, so you just have to go through chapters manually. No extras either. Still, for twenty bucks it’s a solid value if you’re sufficiently invested in the movie. I’ll get to Hudsucker Proxy next go-round. —B+

Hannah and Her Sisters (MGM)

A little disappointing, image-wise. The flushed skin tones that abound on this Blu-ray are not in keeping with the burnished warmth I associate with cinematographer Carlo Di Palma. This suggests a materials issue, and also a transfer issue. It’s hardly a disaster, just not as good as prior Woody Allen Blu-rays. Given how beloved this movie is among his fans I’d expected something more special. Then again, the movie didn’t hold up as well as I remembered either—some of the interior monologues are super awkward, and the scene, say, in which Michael Caine interrogates Barbara Hershey about AA meetings suggests Allen’s occasions of cultural out-of-it-ness are not an entirely recent manifestation. On the other hand, in who else’s movies will you come upon Lewis Black, Julia Louis Dreyfus, J.T. Walsh and  John Turturro not just in the same scene but the same shot? (Also, I noticed this time around that Joanna Gleason is in it.) — B

In Like Flint (Twilight Time)

Did you know this was the last Cinemascope picture? Me neither. Fox went widescreen differently after this. Anyway, this looks great. Weird movie though.  Gordon Douglas, who HAD had some experience with comedy (“From the director of The Great Gildersleeve!”), directs the 1967  007 pastiche as if it’s not a spoof. And he’s still abler than Daniel Mann, who made Our Man Flint the year before. James Coburn is droll, Lee J. Cobb is flustered, the plot is sexist, Yvonne Craig is adorable, it moves fast and the sets and cinematography are good eye candy. I can’t tell you why every time someone lights a cigarette in this movie, the matches look like road flares. Funniest line: “The John C. Calhoun High School in Roanoke Virginia.” You know you want it.  —B

King of the Pecos (Olive) 

Olive seems to be putting out early John Wayne republic Westerns by the truckload lately. These morsels tend to be fast-paced, no-nonsense affairs not entirely lacking in production, or at least scenic, value. Cinematic historical appeal aside, they really do the trick when a film lover of a certain age wants a brisk entertainment. I picked one at random to look at for Consumer Guide purposes, ‘cause I liked the title, and am pleased to report that Pecos has a really pleasing look to it, yielding a black-and-white picture of excellent contrast and detail. Much of this action of this tale is set in shadowed geological nooks and crannies, with shrub as pictorial garnish, and all these are rendered well. The materials themselves seem in excellent shape. Very pleasing. This was the sixth, by my count, of the approximately three hundred (OK, not that many) Republic Westerns Wayne shot before the Stagecoach breakthrough, and if you watch a couple you’ll be able to understand their appeal. I am particularly partial to the “no Indians, no Cavalry, just evil cattle rustlers and the lone men who mobilize the community against them” storylines, and I rate this slightly higher than its immediate predecessor, The Lawless Nineties, the novelty presence of a coherent and relatively dignified George “Gabby” Hayes in that one notwithstanding. Good stuff. —B

Laura (Fox) 

Goddamn this looks good.  Everyone should get this. The enhanced detail of high-definition provides the depth that the moving camera wants to convey, so the visual relief in every cinematic sentence is completely realized. Fabulous blacks. I don’t think I need to sell you on the movie itself. At least I hope not. —A+

 Naked Lunch (Criterion) 

I remember not being crazy about the look of this, theatrically, back in the early ‘90s. Too bright, making the undulating Mugwumps look rubbery in an unconvincing non-meta fashion, and so on. The Criterion standard-def had a burnished quality that ameliorated this issue to a substantial extent…and the Blu-ray continues this improving trend commendably. The confluence of Burroughs and Cronenberg resulted in one of the clammiest (and most horrifically funny) of Cronenberg pictures. And the Mugwumps for some reason look better. —A+

Nicholas and Alexandra (Twilight Time)

Really quite a fantastic looking movie. (Freddie Young lensed, and should have been awarded the Nobel.) The snows and the forests and the architecture; each shot more beautiful than the last.  Shame about the movie itself though. My friend Robert A. Harris, who’s similarly crazy about the disc, rates it higher as a movie than I do; and yes, it is an exemplary Sam Spiegel superproduction in every respect that makes for an amazing cinematic experience on a particular level. But the story is a huge bummer to the extent that it’s almost impossible to dramatize in a compelling way, or at least impossible from this particular epic angle. And the never-not-heavy-handed Franklin Schaffner is hard-pressed to bring to life material that David Lean himself would have had hassles with. (Many insensitive souls consider Dr. Zhivago a slog; I imagine compared to this Zhivago looks like, well, Lawrence of Arabia.) Anyway, other visual highlights include rooms illuminated by red candlelight, a protest in the snow, and Brian Cox as Trotsky. Demo disc material, and actually not a bad movie if you’re in the mood for gargantuan, slow, and old-school picturesque.—A 

The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Distribpix/Video X Pix)

A sentimental favorite…for reasons mostly revealed in my yet-to-be-published memoir My Life In Pornography, so I don’t want to give too much away. It’s no secret that my “Erotic Connoisseur” character in The Girlfriend Experience quotes a bit of dialogue from this in a crucial “pan” for the film’s central figure. The 1975 picture—another Pygmalion variation, this one featuring a Higgins who wants to mold a perfect sex worker—is an important “porno chic” landmark, directed by Radley Metzger under the nom du porn Henry Paris. Featuring, among other things, the first screen appearance (non-sex, we are compelled to reassure) of future Darren Aronofsky regular Mark Margolis. Metzger was/is, for lack of a better term, a “real” narrative filmmaker, which means he’s often more concerned with choreographed gags and character momentum than the actual lubricious content, which makes this a not uncompelling study in how narrative porn often ends up as neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring, the exceptional attractiveness of lead actress Constance Money notwithstanding. This super-special Blu-ray edition boasts a 2K transfer from the original negative and this mostly-shot-in-Super-16-by-a –guy-who-knew-what-he-was-doing film looks pretty damn great, right in step with the likes of more ostensibly respectable Metzger fare such as The Lickerish Quartet. Winner of the first AVN Award, I read. As much care has been applied to the disc itself, the manufacturers only printed the liner notes book in standard-def packaging size, which makes for awkward filing. But the essays within are revelatory, the other extras (including an audio commentary from Metzger) are invaluable for the adult scholar.—A

Richard III (Criterion)

I do not joke when I say this would make a spectacular double feature with the 1959 Disney Sleeping Beauty, which, unlike this, is an animated film. Olivier’s VistaVision-shot 1955 veritable orgy of color and design and lighting simulating rococo post-medieval times is just as dazzlingly regal a contrivance, and this Blu-ray of it is remarkable, every frame like a particularly unnerving stained-glass window. Its kaleidoscopic appeal is nicely augmented by the, you know, good acting by Olivier, Claire Bloom, and the usual gang of expert British Shakespearean Actors, and of course the story and the words and stuff. Two hours and forty minutes and sometimes I wish it twice that length. Super-exciting and essential. —A+

Ruthless (Olive)

A weird Edgar G. Ulmer. Unlike most of his pictures, it looks like he had some money to use here, and Ruthless is very elegantly crafted. He doesn’t seem quite as fully engaged with the material as with, say, Detour, largely maybe because the material is so…one wants to say “schizoid,” but the less offensive and probably more accurate word is “tentative.” Is this about Louis Hayward’s obsession with his one-time best friend, is it a portrait of a morally warped Man of Power in the tradition of The Power And The Glory and/or (not so much, really ) Citizen Kane? There’s also the matter of its structural bifurcation and…well, that the picture holds together as well as it does CAN be credited to Ulmer, and to a remarkable performance by Sydney Greenstreet, whose performance has distinct echoes of Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh, the Murnau film Ulmer was a not insubstantial component of. Greenstreet looking in the mirror and walking out of the bedroom after a dressing-down from Lucille Bremer is an indelibly pathetic image, and a prior look at him pulling her head up by her hair is Ulmer at his most mordantly perverse. And the disc itself is quite handsome, even though the movie does wind up being more a super-wonky business thriller than a noir. Inspirational dialogue: Greenstreet: “$300,000 is a lot of money to some people.” Zachary Scott: “Not to me. My nuisance value is worth more than that!”—A

Skyfall (Sony) 

Storied cinematographer Roger Deakins’ inaugural foray into digital lensing gets its high-def home video manifestation, and, relatively predictably enough (although you never really know), there’s no news here. It looks great. You can kind of tell how much he amused himself with the new technology in the Shanghai scenes, ever pushing the overlaying of the neons and reflective surfaces and so on. Everything holds, steady as a rock. Also, in the subsequent casino scene, the darkness from which out of nowhere a komodo dragon rushes: very impressive. I like the movie, too, but the look of this disc is the real treat. —A 

Westworld (Warner)

Another movie about the near future that didn’t predict widescreen TV! J’accuse! This was Michael Crichton’s first theatrical directorial effort, and MAN, did he learn a lot between this and The Great Train Robbery.  This legendary test of Asimov’s Law of robotics, with it hilarious casting of Yul Brynner as his Magnificent Seven character as an android, is not a very smooth cinematic ride but it’s got its moments. Whoa, were these chroma key effects REALLY state of the 1973 art? Who can say. Well, I guess I could if I did more research, But, you know.  Richard Benjamin as the schlemiel character and James Brolin as, well, the James Brolin character (and here you’ll see the extent to which Josh is really a chip off the old block) are fun, as are the pixilated (actually part of the visual scheme this time) POV shots from the robots eyes. A good looking disc. I did not notice what the DVD Beaver review cited as horizontal stretching, I admit. It retails cheap, though, so I doubt stalwart fans will be disappointed.—B-

Wild Geese (Severin)

There’s a remarkable high-def improvement here over the frequently pixilated (no, really)  standard-def version (you can compare them yourselves as this is a dual-format package). The alcohol-flushed faces of Richards Burton and Harris are ruddier still in the Blu-ray version. Which naturally ups the watchability quotient of the public-schoolboy-tooled antecedent of The A Team, whoo-hoo, which was not much to look at to begin with, but…Heck, it is a cinematic curio of note, I would argue. If pressed, I would insist it earns the respect one confers to amiable tripe produced by the once-great. Ish.  —B-

Film restoration in the digital domain: A chat with James White

Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). This is how the frame appears in the current Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Blu-ray disc edition of the film. Below, the image before restoration. 

I first heard from James White, the British film restoration maestro, a few years back, around the time the below-mentioned ITV Blu-ray of Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus came out in Britain. White and I reconnected around last year's Christmas holidays, just as two very disparate projects in which he had a restoration hand were coming on the scene: the above-depicted version of the Dreyer masterpiece, and Arrow Video's iteration of Lucio Fulci's notorious Zombi, known in Britain as Zombie Flesh Eaters. We figured the time was right to catch up on some of the issues concerning film restoration in the brave and still relatively new but increasingly pervasive world of digital, and thus an e-mail exchange began.  It took some time, but I think the results are informative, and contain news that is both heartening and distressing. If you can, you should read in conjunction with Nick Wrigley's essay "Crimes Against The Grain" in the December 2012 issue of Sight & Sound. Wrigley was one the founders of the Masters of Cinema imprint and worked as a restoration supervisor with White on the Dreyer project. The interview with White follows: 

1) Film restoration seems to have pretty definitively shifted from a photochemical process to a digital and electronic one. When was the tipping point for this, and what does it mean in terms of the economics of film restoration? Not to mention the distribution of restored motion pictures?

It's certainly true that over the past decade or so, film restoration has moved from a largely photochemical process to one relying almost completely on digital technology. When I began working in this field in New York back in the mid-1990s, digital restoration was still in its infancy and most of the major projects such as those being overseen by Photoplay (Napoleon) or Harris & Katz (Spartacus, Vertigo) were being produced almost solely through traditional photochemical processes. These days, however, if someone embarks on a new restoration, they will almost always begin by scanning the best existing film materials and working in digital throughout the entire process. 

My time at the BFI reflects this shift in approach. When I started working there in 2002, film restoration was still very much the preserve of the archive lab, with digital technology having little to no involvement. Restorations from that era represented the best that could have been achieved at the time, but in recent years the BFI has seen fit to revisit many of their key titles using digital tools, having seen the advantages these bring. A title like Blackmail for instance, restored last year by the BFI as part of their silent Hitchcock project, now looks amazingly improved in its digital incarnation in comparison to the prior restoration completed in the 1990s. 

I don’t think there’s been a single tipping point that made this change happen, other than restoration simply mirroring the film industry at large, and its shift to using digital tools for pretty much everything under the sun. The simplest reason though, is that the tools just got better. Most importantly, the software became sympathetic to the needs of archive films and offered solutions to problems that traditional restoration hadn’t ever been able to deal with sufficiently. Issues that had always been difficult to impossible to fix - things like image stability, density issues, deep emulsion scratches, warping, registration issues, deterioration brought on by heat or moisture, and damaged or even missing frames – these could now be improved upon in a way that just couldn't be done by traditional means. 

Having access to these new tools hasn't made the work cheaper, though. If anything, restoring a film has become more expensive simply because audience expectations are so much higher now. Fortunately there are so many more outlets to distribute these titles, so the economics are there to support the work. Mind you, there's definitely a limit to what most distributors can afford. A top-tier restoration like The Red Shoes or Lawrence of Arabia can demonstrate beautifully what digital restoration is capable of - these films now truly take your breath away - but the vast majority of film titles don't enjoy anything near to the restoration budgets these projects had. So while restoring the majority of film titles to a 2K/4K level might be beyond the means of some distributors, restoring a film to a very high standard in HD is often within their means. I should mention that going this route doesn't support a film's archival basis - restricting your end result to HD doesn't create what most archivists would agree is the basis for film preservation - but it does provide distributors with a format suitable for the majority of current release platforms (DCP, Blu-ray/DVD, etc). 

In any case, what's encouraging is the high amount of restoration work currently going on internationally. Rights-holders of film libraries have started to see the value in restoring their titles to make them accessible for HD broadcast and online platforms. DVD/Blu-ray sales have helped create new audiences for archive titles, and the improved presentation quality has made viewers more aware and appreciative of the practice of film restoration on the whole. Back when I started, Criterion was the only company around that devoted time, attention and a decent budget to giving a film the best presentation possible on video, but now in addition to well-established labels like Eureka/Masters of Cinema, the BFI, Milestone and Kino/Lorber, you've got all these new labels like Olive in the US, Second Run in the UK and Edition Filmmuseum in Germany resurrecting lost cinema or rarely-seen classics.  It's the work of companies like these that is really helping to bring new interest in film restoration. I mean, it's great when Casablanca or Singin' In The Rain gets treated to another state-of-the-art restoration, but there now seems to be an actively growing interest in discovering new films and film collections from all corners of the globe. A project like Milestone using Kickstarter to fund a new restoration of Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason is a great example of the public taking an active role in film restoration. Likewise for Distribpix's recent restoration of The Opening of Misty Beethoven - that film now looks better than anyone probably ever expected it to!  

2) The tools for film restoration have evolved to the point that the lay viewer is under the impression that it can perform miracles, which to some extent seems objectively true. So let's look at it from the other end of the telescope, as it were, and talk about the things that the tools CAN'T do.

Well, as I said there’s a great amount of things that digital tools can do to repair the issues that have always blighted older film titles that we couldn’t do just a few years ago. That said, it’s important to bear in mind that in the most fundamental sense, no amount of restoration, digital or otherwise, can significantly improve the quality of the image of the film element that it’s sourced from. The issues I’ve mentioned - dirt, scratches, stability, flicker, missing or damaged frames, etc – these can all be improved significantly through the careful application of digital tools. But the basic details within that original image, meaning the film grain, the level of detail, etc – these can only be improved within the parameters of what the original element would allow.

It’s like up-rezing an image from SD to HD. An increase in detail doesn’t happen simply because you’ve added more pixels. Of course one can give the illusion of increased detail or sharpness through digital enhancement, but then it’s no longer the film you’re working with, it’s something else. I work to create the best representation of an old film possible, but that means keeping the results within the historic bounds of what that film would be able to achieve at the time – be it its film grain, the saturation of its colors, the level of its contrast, etc. A film from 1930 shouldn’t look like a film from 1950, and it most definitely shouldn’t resemble a film from 2013. Whatever tools you’re using should be done in service of what the film looked like at the time of release, not some ill-advised notion of what it could look like now. That, for me, is probably the most important thing.

Unrealistic expectations are a common source of frustration for film restorers, as often the best existing film elements simply won’t allow for a "miraculous" result.  The project is only as good as the material it's sourced from, and not all films have been subjected to the same treatment over the years. Often with older titles the original negative has been lost, or is far too damaged to work from. In this case you might be relying on the next best thing, like a second-generation interpositive or fine grain element. But there may be problems with these materials as well. Often restorations have to make use of more than one element, each subjected to vastly different histories, and then it can prove a real challenge to make the overall results consistent. To put it simply, every film is different, and every restoration has its own set of challenges.

One interesting development of late has been the discussion of the differences between what we’re now able to see digitally in comparison to what was visible on a film print. The Wizard of Oz scenario is well-known – in Warner Brothers' new Technicolor restoration you could suddenly see wires holding up the Scarecrow, whereas in all previous releases of the film, they were invisible. Clearly back in 1938 Victor Fleming and his Director of Photography understood enough about the photochemical process that they could expect the wires to be invisible by the time theatrical prints were created in the printing chain, but in working digitally from the first generation elements, the wires are now there, clear as day. Likewise, I've heard it recently remarked that with Vistavision films such as Vertigo we’re now seeing a level of detail on Blu-ray that was never intended for the cinema, as theatrical prints would have been made from separate matrices reduced for printing. So how does one approach situations like these? It’s an interesting dilemma.

3) What are your favorite/favored tools, or the ones you find yourself applying more often? What have you had a hand in developing? 

I can’t claim to have had a personal hand in the development of any specific software tool, but I’m fortunate that I work with such an amazing team of technicians at Deluxe Labs in London, who are always working to find new ways of meeting the numerous challenges this kind of work presents. We’ve worked together on so many projects over the years for the BFI, Eureka and most recently Arrow (Zombie Flesh Eaters) we’ve developed a great rapport together, which is crucial when you're working on archive titles. 

With picture restoration there's a variety of tools at hand that benefit some films more than others. I'm always cautious about any so-called "automated" processes, as it's so easy for these tools to have an unwanted effect on film grain and detail even if applied carefully. So while it takes far longer to do, nothing works better for me than old-fashioned frame-by-frame cleanup, performed manually. It can be incredibly complicated, time-consuming work, but there's just no substitute for treating each individual frame with the utmost care. Full disclosure, though - I don't do any of the hand-on stuff myself anymore. As a restoration supervisor, I oversee all the steps of a project from the initial research and selection of film materials to the reviewing of scans to the full grading of the film to all stages of picture and sound restoration. Whenever possible we'll work with the director or director of photography (if alive and available) and we always work to deliver the highest quality representation of a film's original release within the parameters the budget and time frame allow for.   

4) The two projects that were the springboards for this correspondence were pictures that seem to have almost as wide an aesthetic gulf as a temporal one: Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 masterwork The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, which you supervised the Eureka!/Masters Of Cinema Blu-ray version of, and the aforementioned Zombie Flesh Eaters, the notorious 1979 Lucio Fulci horror cult fave. In terms of materials, each one must have presented unique challenges. But there's also a question of properly serving a given film's aesthetic. I understand I'm constructing a bit of a big tent question here but I'm interested in your thoughts on all of these considerations. 

One could hardly choose two more different films than those two, could they? Though I still think they'd make a great double bill! Hey, they both feature heavy doses of pain and suffering, both base the reasons for their violence in religion of one kind or another, and both really know the power of a well-executed close-up. Although it's true that only one of the films features a punch-up between a zombie and a shark...

Anyway, the fundamental criteria for me is always to present the film as close to how it originally appeared in the cinema. That means restoring the film to the highest quality possible but not employing any means to "update" or "improve" the image or the sound in some misguided effort to refashion it to fit in better with modern-day expectations. I want the results of something I restore to appear as a film artifact, not a digital one, which is why I've been using the term "preserving a film's photochemical integrity" lately. 

The Passion of Joan of Arc project grew out of Eureka's interest in releasing the film on Blu-ray and the Danish Film Institute's desire to see Carl Dreyer's original Danish version made available to the public. As far as I'm aware, Gaumont are still planning to restore it themselves, but the version they eventually produce will almost surely be the French version we've all been familiar with for years. So as this stood as the only likely chance to have Dreyer's debut version seen to properly, we wanted to make sure we presented Joan in the best and most accurate representation possible. 

We had the good fortune to be working from the Danish Film Institute's preservation materials, struck directly from a first generation 35mm print discovered in Oslo. This is as literally good as it gets with this film, a film we're amazingly lucky still exists in any form given the problems it faced from the very beginning. For those unfamiliar with the saga this film was put through, the story bears repeating, so I'll crib a bit from a piece written about the restoration for Moviemail last year:

"The trouble began just six months following the film's Copenhagen premiere in 1928 when the original negative was destroyed in a fire and the two original prints created from this element were subsequently lost. A new second negative, incorporating extra footage not featured in the original version, was subsequently cut together by Dreyer but this material swiftly fell victim to misfortune, and was presumed to have perished in a lab fire as well. Although fires like this were fairly commonplace at a time when highly flammable nitrate film stocks were used, the fact that the film had been destroyed on two separate occasions seemed to imply that The Passion of Joan of Arc was destined not to survive in any form.

Over the years that followed, several incomplete prints and material believed to represent the second lost negative re-surfaced; as a result numerous versions of the film have been edited together and screened for international audiences, but Dreyer’s original version remained lost, presumably forever. 

Then in 1981, one of the original prints struck from Dreyer’s first negative was miraculously discovered at a Norwegian psychiatric hospital. The Danish Film Institute (DFI) immediately acquired this material, which came to be known as the "Oslo print" and created a new preservation negative, guaranteeing a secure future for the film and keeping the elements in optimal conditions for years to come. Finally, after over half a century, The Passion of Joan of Arc could finally be seen exactly as Dreyer had originally intended."

Before-and-after restoration images from Joan.

So with all that history facing you, the responsibility you bear to remain faithful to the film and the materials at hand should be always first and foremost on your mind. Given that we had a specific budget and fairly tight schedule to work by, my approach was to do the best job possible but to be wary of not "over-restoring" anything. The entire film required stabilization due to the shrinkage and sprocket wear the print had endured throughout its 80-plus year lifespan. Every join between shots required manually re-setting as there were bumps on literally every cut - a fairly daunting task for a film as creatively and heavily edited as Joan. Density inconsistencies manifested in the form of heavy flickering had to be significantly reduced. There were numerous instances of damaged and missing frames, often requiring new frames to be digitally interpolated, as well as a steady stream of heavy and light scratches throughout. Not all of these issues could be remedied completely, and some problems could only be marginally improved. If you watch the restored version of Joan, the film still exhibits quite a few of these issues, although it's now a fraction of what we started with. The important thing is that none of the work we did compromised the original photochemical look and feel of the film, and the original texture of Joan remains. Fortunately most of the feedback we've received on the Blu-ray has been very positive, so I think on the whole people appreciate this approach, even if the results aren't 100% pristine, which would be a very tall order with any film from this era. 

Zombie Flesh Eaters was quite a bit different, in that it's a film that's been widely available for years, most recently in a fairly decent Blu-ray presentation from Blue Underground. But Arrow felt strongly that the film deserved better, so they decided to fund a new restoration of the film on the basis that we would be granted access to the original Techniscope negatives. A little digging revealed that these elements hadn't been made available for transfer since the film's original print run (contrary to a good deal of misinformation that's been circulating on the web), so we had a good opportunity to correct for some home-video crimes of the past and restore the film to its original release presentation. 

Techniscope was a fairly popular format in Europe throughout the 1960s and 70s - it was essentially a low-budget version of Cinemascope, using two perforations instead of the standard four. After the initial negative is processed and edited, secondary elements (Interpositive, Internegative, etc) are produced by blowing up the image to fill the 4-perf frame. Having worked on another Techniscope project a couple years ago for the BFI (La Vallée, Barbet Schroeder, 1972) I knew that using the negatives provided the ability to capture a good deal more image area in the film frame than any of the other printing elements in the film chain, as the blow-up process would have forced the cropping of all sides of the image in order to fit within the 4-perf frame. So working from 2K scans of these original negatives, I was able to bring the color palette, the grain replication and all the details present on the negative back to its proper place, as well as reveal a good deal more picture area on all sides of the frame for most of the film. None of the work was exceptionally challenging, although the footage from the famed shark-zombie sequence was blighted by a lab fault that proved impossible to do anything but digitally minimize - fortunately this issue has always been a part of the film, as it was printed into every version anyone's ever seen! 

The reviews we've received for Zombie have been overwhelmingly positive - considering how it was represented on VHS here in Britain for so many years, I think people were amazed to see the film looking as good as it did! That said, It shouldn't really surprise anyone familiar with Fulci's work - he's a director with an amazing eye, the camerawork by Sergio Salvati is frequently stunning, and the combined use of locations, colour, and music by Fabio Frizzi make Zombie one of the best films of its kind. That said, it does bring up something interesting in terms of your question about properly serving a given film's aesthetic. Might some viewers actually prefer the rough VHS-era representation they grew up with, complete with faded colour, horrible sound, video snow and tape damage? It certainly makes for a very different viewing experience, but one I suppose that should be treated as just as valid, as it was viewed by so many people, particularly in this country, in exactly this way.  

So in a nutshell, my criterion is to represent the film in as close an approximation to how it originally appeared on screens as possible. More than being just a technical preference though, I view it as a true responsibility that I wish everyone would take very seriously. Which is why I'm disappointed when Gaumont Pathe chooses to apply a headache-inducing level of de-graining to Les Enfants du Paradis. Or when Hammer chooses to replace the original optical effects in The Devil Rides Out with new, "modern-day" digital versions. Or when so many recent restorations of classic films coming out of Italy are digitally sharpened to the point of resembling a Playstation game. Or when Pathe choose to put Le Samorai through so much image processing that each frame of Alain Delon in his raincoat and fedora end up resembling an oil painting more than anything captured on film. These are extreme examples, but there are plenty of others. Given the expense of restoring a film, practices like these should be actively discouraged, as the results will likely be the only means of seeing that particular film title for years to come. Considering the fact that the use of celluloid is quickly vanishing as we speak, and that very soon simply being able to project 35mm will be a thing of the past, it's essential that the tangible, textural look of celluloid is preserved properly and accurately. 

 5) Back in the late 1990s, I was at an event in New York City at which the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff spoke. In the audience was Robert A. Harris, who asked him if the lavender tint on Black Narcissus was deliberate. Cardiff's answer was something like "What lavender tint?" and hence a great error in film preservation/presentation started on its way to being corrected. I believe we first corresponded after the ITV restoration of Narcissus that you were involved in, a project that occurred even after the removal of the lavender. My question is, how important is the input of someone involved in the original work, and in the event that no survivors are around to supply input, what are the research roads you and your team find yourselves most frequently traveling?

Well first I should make it clear that I wasn't part of the restoration team responsible for Black Narcissus, although I was there in the periphery when it was happening. That restoration was produced by the archive team at ITV, with Thelma Schoonmaker and Jack Cardiff supervising throughout the process. I was fortunate enough to be invited to some work-in-progress screenings in which different film stocks were being tested to replicate the original 3-strip Technicolor look of the film. Thinking back, this served as a pretty good illustration at the time of the limitations of modern film stocks and their ability to replicate the look of older formats accurately, and the help that digital, if used with care, could provide in this regard.  I was lucky enough to meet with Jack Cardiff off and on during my years at the BFI, and true gent that he was, he was always happy to answer the numerous questions I was constantly springing on him (and I certainly wasn’t the only one). I've also had the great pleasure of working with Thelma Schoonmaker, most recently on BFI's Blu-ray restoration of what Michael Powell considered his first "true" film, The Edge of the World - an amazing film, if you haven't seen it.

Anyway, there's no real substitute for having the original talent in the suite with you while you're working on these films. Unfortunately when working on older films this just isn't possible a lot of the time, so it's imperative that one has a real understanding of a film's history and the way it's supposed to look and sound. One of the alarming aspects of the expanse of digital technology is that more and more people entering this industry will have had virtually no hands-on film experience. How is one supposed to accurately restore a film if one doesn't understand the photochemical properties of the medium? Small decisions can have an enormous impact on a way of film is represented, and those decisions need to be informed ones.  

I've already mentioned the importance of maintaining the original film grain structure, but grading the image correctly is just as important. From Eastmancolor to 2-strip and 3-strip Technicolor way back to Dufaycolor or the experiments of Friese-Greene, there's been so many ways to interpret color throughout the history of cinema that one needs to be very careful in how those colors are represented in any new restoration.  The temptation to make the colors pop, to over-saturate, to make them much deeper and heavier than they would have looked on an original film print, is one that needs to be kept in check. Working from negatives, especially those that haven't been subjected to much fading over time, gives one a great deal of latitude when grading, and as a consequence the films can be as graded as warm or cool as one likes, so one needs to approach the grading with care. It's the same story with black and white titles. There's a tendency by some people to push the contrast on their black-and-white titles a bit too heavily, in an effort to make the image appear bolder and sharper, thereby giving it a look possibly more dramatic to the modern eye. But going this route is often incorrect, as most film print stocks from earlier years wouldn't have been able to support this look. As a consequence the tones in the grayscale often get lost and the subtleties of the original light and shade are simply "graded out" in favor of heavier contrast. Fortunately, the adoption of HD and Blu-ray have brought improvements to this area, as the higher resolution allows for proper replication of these subtleties. 

My thoughts about audio are pretty much the same, meaning I'm really not in favor of presenting any film in an audio format not from its time. So 5.1 or 7.1 mixes for film originally released in mono I realize it's done as an effort to make young audiences more likely to accept these older films presented in this way, but it's historically irresponsible and about as convincing to the ear as "electronically re-channeled for stereo" was in the 1960s. 

I'll give you an example of the range if choices you can be presented with. A few years ago, I was working on Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes (1992). The grading operator and I had a day to get things ready before Terence Davies and his DP Michael Coulter arrived, so we spent part of that afternoon applying an overall grade to the first couple reels. Right away we could see that the colors held in the negative were so bold and rich, that if we notched up the saturation a bit it looked just like a Douglas Sirk film! So for fun we graded the film as if it were, with bright and lurid primaries on show throughout. Now as anyone who's familiar with the films of Davies knows, he's extremely specific when it comes to color and has often used it in a creative way to evoke specific feelings for the past. So as soon as he and Coulter arrive, the first thing they tell us to do is drain all the color from the image and to start again. As with Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Davies and Coulter had applied a bleach-bypass to The Long Day Closes giving it a carefully faded, almost sepia feel throughout. As the material we were working from hadn't been subjected to this lab process (this is traditionally done later on in the printing ) we could have very easily graded the film in any number of ways, including our attempt at 1950s melodrama. Of course we wouldn't have done this as we were well familiar with the film and it's printing history, but one could easily imagine a scenario in which the person restoring the film hasn't done his homework, or doesn't have the filmmakers on hand to show him the way, and you'd wind up with a version of the film that would be completely wrong, both historically and aesthetically. 

That said, there are times when one can be too deferential when working with original talent. I'm talking about those rare occasions when a director has decided this is his opportunity to "fix" an aspect of the film he was never satisfied with, or "update" it in some way to bring into line with his current thinking. The results can often be interesting, but producing some updated version should never be done at the expense of presenting the film as it was originally released. I don't have a problem with Lucas or Friedkin or Coppola re-working their film every so often provided they allow the original films to survive intact. It's when this doesn't happen that I feel there's been an abuse of power, as somebody's personal agenda has created a deliberate distortion of a film's history. I've never subscribed to the idea that the director or any one person "owns" a film - a film belongs to history, and it's our responsibility to ensure that that history is accurately represented.

UPDATE: James White writes in, via email: "To answer Mr Kroll's question in your comments section, how these restorations are archived really comes down to the level at which they're restored. The current industry spec for archiving file-based film work is to store them on LTO5 archive tapes, which, as per good archive practice, should be cloned and the copies stored separately. If a restoration is being produced to the level of 2K/4K result, then the resolution would be high enough to justify producing a new Digital Internegative (DI), which was until recently the source for creating new restoration prints. Truth be told, there's still no better-proven long-term storage medium better than film, but sadly this seems to be happening less and less - a clear consequence of the diminishing need for film prints and the drive to go file-based for as many things as possible. That said, one should take heart that restoring a film anew would never result in the original film elements being discarded. On the contrary, the availability of a new restoration, at whatever level its been produced, would likely mean that the film elements would then be left alone and safely preserved for years to come. "

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Face up to reality February 2013 edition

Well. Talk about the best-laid plans. Last time we spoke in the context of this feature, I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about future prospects, having set up ground rules that were going to allow me to run the Consumer Guide on a regular basis. Almost four months later and with no natural disaster to REALLY keep me in the house, here we are, with a Consumer Guide you’ll find to be pretty low on really NEW stuff.

What can I tell you? Among other things, I found myself consumed by what Jack Torrance would call “a new writing project” which turned into a nearly compulsive pursuit. That’s finished, and now I am trying to, as they say, monetize the result. And while, to my surprise, I now find that I have enough of a  new idea in my head that I could just start on something similar now, for various reasons I’m not going to. Which left me to come back to this. I might as well face it: the only way this is going to become a regular monthly thing is if I’m paid to do it, and the format’s still too niche, and my approach still to ostensibly cinepilic to make it something any organ wants to pay for, let’s not even talk about pay what I would want for it.

So I’m just going to accept reality, a specific reality, which is that this feature’s only ever going to appear on a sporadic basis, a basis that will be decided according to my whim and/or whether I’m physically available to do the work necessary for the feature to exist. Which isn’t to say I’m giving up. There’s plenty piled up in my home theater “staging area” to look at, and things are going to be chilly outside for a good thirty days or so more. Who knows what could happen. In the meantime, there’s a pretty impressive bunch of stuff considered below. Thanks as ever. Before we start, here is a very amusing snapshot of a bit of the end credits of the Streisand A Star Is Born.

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/reciever.

Baron Blood (Kino/Lorber)

This movie is, I think, better than its reputation as subpar Bava would suggest, and I think that Bava biographer Tim Lucas agrees with me, as his audio commentary on this early-‘70s item is affectionate as well as informative. This haunted-castle number has plenty of baroque scares, lots of icky gore makeup effects (what’s all that tissue hanging from the spikes in the iron maiden, ugh), and Elke Sommer running around in a mini-skirt screaming, which isn’t as exciting as Elke Sommer naked (see Lisa and the Devil) but nothing to sneeze at either. The Blu-ray has a terrific picture, more impressive than that of Black Sunday, I must say: good solid colors throughout and a consistently clean image. —A

 The Big Trail (Fox)

A cinematic curio: a 70mm widescreen picture made in…1930, pretty much the dawn of the sound era. The process here was called “Grandeur,” and director Raoul Walsh also shot the film in regular 35mm. The Fox presentation here is very conscientious, including both version of the film, from restored prints and transferred well in either case. The story of a young character played by recent discovery John Wayne leading a caravan across the West feels more like a regular Walsh film in the 35mm version, which is shorter, more direct and narratively-oriented. The widescreen version is stodgier, full of longer takes that don’t have much dramatic interest but show off a lot of scenery and panoramas and such.  But truth to tell, both versions are pretty stodgy; neither has the vulgar dynamism that distinguished such Walsh classics of the era as For Me And My Gal or even Sailor’s Luck. No, this movie’s predetermined fate as a prestige item seems to have hemmed in the filmmakers to an extent. Not that this is a bad picture; it’s certainly of historic interest for technical reasons alone. But as an entertainment, it’s not even close to the first Walsh or Wayne Western I’d pick off a shelf. For  cinephile collectors only. —B+

Bonfire of the Vanities (Warner)

This notorious failure, the disastrous making of which was chronicled in the still seminal and satisfyingly dishy book The Devil’s Candy,  seems an unlikely candidate for Blu-ray preservations, but stranger things have made it to the format. So how bad IS this, really? Well, it’s not good, but there’s a part of me that thinks the smirky thing is exactly the adaptation that Tom Wolfe’s shitty little book deserves. Some sections, on the other hand, give the DePalma maven a sense of what a big-budget version of  Hi Mom! Might have looked like. In any event, it has the most apt casting of Geraldo Rivera of any movie of all time. And a lot of virtuoso camera movement and cheeky image juxtapositions, all of which is captured quite nicely on the disc. The Hanks/Willis subay meet-up makes the DeNiro/Pacino summit in Heat look like the DeNiro Pacino summit in Heat, on the other hand. For DePalma nuts only. —C+

Bonjour Tristesse (Twilight Time)

One of my all-time favorite movies, or one of my all-time favorite Preminger movies, what’s the dif,  a thoroughly beautiful and audacious picture that is still structurally and pictorially more vibrant anything you’d care to compare it to. You’d figure I’d be satisfied with just a really good transfer of it…and I am. Some of the black-and-white sequences are little more sepia than I’ve seen in theatrical presentations, but other than that the image is clean and bright and beautifully colored. —A

 The Boogens (Olive)

Stephen King, blurbed on the cover, is right—this really is “wildly energetic monster movie.” Okay, it’s an energetic monster movie, at least. It represents one of my favored subgenres, being an independent non-Hollywood production; regional horror pictures have intrigued me since Carnival of Souls. While the title is still a problem, this is a strong presentation of the monsters-from-a-long-disused mine story. A good clean image, not mind-blowing, but definitely better than a step up from standard-def in terms of detail, which always makes a difference with such scares-in-the-dark material. There’s some  source-material based speckling about 15 minutes in, but this is not entirely incongruous with what the theatrical experience might have been like. The commentary from director James Conway, co-writer David O’Malley, and star Rebecca Balding, who’s married to Conway, is lively and dishy and pretty funny on the subject of de rigueur female nudity in ‘80s horror movies .—B

Cinderella (Disney)

The 1950 animated version of the fairy tale came at a transition point for Disney, who needed a big hit and got one here; this was to be the last of his pictures distributed by RKO the success of this picture enabled him to set up Buena Vista and self-distribute a couple of movies later. The anthropomorphized animals—goofy helpful mice, a fussy fat cat named Lucifer (boy, some people would have a field day with that name now)—show the pop influence of Looney Tunes on the studio, and the lead characters are crafted for postwar teen appeal. Not particularly daring, and nor would be the three films that followed (Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady And The Tramp) 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, with its bold color design and use of widescreen, has more appeal for Blu-ray buyers looking for Innovation In Animation. But in terms of beauty this has a bunch, most notably the soap-bubble fantasy set piece, very nice indeed. And kids love it!. The usual stellar transfer job, generous extras. If you like this stuff at all you can’t lose with these packages. —A

Cleopatra (Eureka/Masters Of Cinema Region B U.K. Import)

I’ve had a weird thing for Claudette Colbert ever since I saw a picture of her in an old paperback reprint of a buncha Photoplay magazines, the photo depicting her in costume as “Cigarette” in the movie Under Two Flags. I’ve never been able to see that thing, come to think of it. Anyway, it wasn’t that weird a thing, except, you know, she was 56 years older than me and a movie star. Anyway. She’s still the greatest, particularly in her early work, of which this is a stellar, sexy example, director Cecil B. DeMille in his cheeky-historical-epic mode. Colbert’s presentation to Warren William’s Caesar remains one of the all-time classic moments in dramatic depiction. The near-kitsch extrapolations on ancient world design are pretty spectacular too. This is a bee-yooo-ti-ful high-def transfer with lotsa  healthy grain  (which noticeably upticks during optical effects such as dissolves) and incredible detail. While the movie doesn’t offer any moments quite as ineffable as Colbert’s milk bath in DeMille’s subsequent prior, even more outrageous The Sign Of The Cross (can we have THAT in high-def, pretty please?), it’s still got plenty of her sass, which is also very healthy. The informative F.X. Feeney commentary is imported from the Universal 2009 domestic “Anniversary Edition” DVD of the movie. —A+

Grand Hotel (Warner)

While it is undeniably true that digital technology cannot reproduce that mercury glisten that makes a silver nitrate print feel so special, what it CAN reproduce is not to be deplored, and this high-def version of the old more-stars-than-there-are-in-heaven chestnut gets a lot of at the very least SILVER into the picture. Which is to say it looks truly grand. My most cherished memory of this movie is seeing it at Paris’ legendary Cinema MacMahon in May of 1990, and the way I remember the film looking…well, what I remember, because of the theater and its cachet and the magic of Paris and all that, may well have been an illusion, but this disc re-conjures it. —A

The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp (ITV Region B U.K. Import)

One supposes that there will be a domestic issue of this latest restoration in due time, but if you have a region-free player and can’t wait, well, yes; this is remarkable. I was privileged to see the restoration on a 35mm print on the big screen up at Suffern’s Lafayette Theater. Every time this gets another pass through restoration—and I’ve been looking at this on home video since the Criterion laser disc—it’s like another pane of streaky glass has been removed from in front of the image. The difference is palpable from the opening credits tapestry. Really SO beautiful…although nothing beats seeing it in a theater, on a theater size screen, with an audience willing to be swept up by it. Like the Kazan film discussed later in this guide, Blimp is a unique object. No other film has precisely what it has. And this disc of it it impeccable. (UPDATE: I missed the announcement, but this is indeed in the works from Criterion, here's hoping the movie Scorsese/Powell commentary from way back makes it on to that edition...)—A+

Looney Tunes Platinum Collection  Volume Two (Warner)

Okay, I’ll fess up. I haven’t sat through every minute of this three-disc, six-hour-not-including (some not in high-def) extras package. It is also worth recalling that the brash, not inordinately nuanced style of the Tunes, while it of course does benefit from the high-def treatment, is not the sort of thing that yields incredible revelation in that format. (That’s an arguable point, I suppose, but that’s my assessment of the issue. I am willing to entertain countering perspectives.) But damn, any package that includes eleven Tex Avery MGM shorts as an EXTRA is gonna get a pretty high grade from me, even if those eleven do not include “L’il Tinker.” (Can’t have everything.) Not to mention the incredibly range of this thing—the entertaining and informative documentaries, the appallingly vulgar and racist Private Snafu shorts, the attention to detail in the choices of cartoons featuring music-and-effects-only options. It’s really paradise for fans, and it includes the complete “Tortoise and Hare” and “Buzzards” series, and more, and yes, the high-def transfers of the material are eye-poppingly gorgeous if not necessarily “revelatory,” so hell yes, this gets an… —A+

On The Waterfront (Criterion)

The last DVD of this title was actually a rather telling example of how a transfer that somehow emphasizes too much of the wrong picture detail can skew the way a film reads. I hesitate to use the word “wrong,” but bear with me. The Sony DVD’s particular quality, which was overbrightnes, tended to washout the skin tone and boost the visibility of the face makeup on Marlon Brando, particularly his eyebrows, one of which has a scar cutting through it. The dark eyebrows and the pallor of his face gave him a Kabuki-like aspect which made the the feminized qualities of the character/performance stand out more. Also, he didn’t look as if he had any facial hair. Interesting, but perhaps not what the filmmakers were going for. The new transfer corrects this. I’ve taken screen caps from standard-def editions. Look at Brando’s chin in the Sony, left. It's soft, white. Now look at the capture from the Criterion capture; he’s a man who shaves. The feminization is not quite gone, but it’s tempered. Given its proper place in the gestalt of the film as it were, which remains a, yes, unique achievement for as much previous films informed it at the time.  As for the rest? Criterion at its best, and the aspect-ratio extra a concise education. —A+

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The Passion of Joan Of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc’s lidelse og dod) (Eureka!Masters Of Cinema Region B U.K. import)

Not just a  great film but a film with its own language that’s never been replicated or used since. Which is one way of saying its barrage of intense close-ups is in a sense very deeply weird and likely to flummox the inexperienced viewer. This Blu-ray is remarkable not just in its feature presentation but its scholarly chops, as in its inclusion of the “Lo Duca” version of the film, the critic-modified version that was the one first seen by much of this film’s original audience. Not to mention the 100-page booklet. To have the film like this is one thing; the supplements make it a genuine “critical edition,” raising the bar for creators of cinephile product everywhere.  —A+

Rashomon (Criterion)

One can, if one is feeling particularly know-somethingish, have a look at this 1950 picture and pronounce it “minor Kurosawa” in spite of the fact that its central trope was once part of what used to be called the lingua franca. (I remember when people who had not even seen the film would talk about a “’Rashomon” situation;” these days not so much…not to mention the devolution to “he said/she said,” which is itself attached to a REALLY minor film.) Something to do with…well, never mind what it has to do with, it’s not a fight I’m gonna get into in the context of this service journalism feature. My point is that if you watch this high-def disc of the movie, you will be almost instantaneously disabused of the notion that the movie is minor ANYTHING, because it’s just that pictorially beautiful, not to mention inventive. That rain! That forest! Seriously Essential. — A+

 The Sound and The Fury (Twilight Time)

In which the pioneering label continues its unusual tradition of taking great care in issuing oddly marginal major studio movies in very viewable editions. This one has sunk into sufficient obscurity that I had to create a page for it in order to log it in to my Letterboxd viewing diary. One would like to say that while it ain’t Faulkner, it ain’t nothing, but by the same token, a movie that switches the gender of one major character, then casts Yul Brynner as Jason and Jack Warden as Benjy has problems that go beyond standard adaptation issues. If you can forget its source material, it’s not a bad ‘50s big studio Southern melodrama, but, come on. Stuff like this weighs heavier for the “Martin Ritt was a minor director” argument than No Money Down weighs for the “no he wasn’t” argument, at least in my book. So are you ready to buy this yet? Well, this IS a handsome edition of a film that represents a certain apex of studio craft, although if it indeed was a Fox Four-Track Stereo sound recording, it’s too bad the disc doesn’t reproduce that, and instead goes with a two-channel soundtrack and an isolated track of Alex North’s score, also in two-channel stereo (hell, Fox itself put the four-channel soundtrack on its standard-def disc of House of Bamboo). Don’t knock three-or-four channel mixes ‘til you’ve tried ‘em, they’re pretty sweet. —B-

 A Star Is Born (Warner)

What is the matter with me? Why did I look at the high-def iteration of this almost universally-derided iteration of the alkie-showbiz classic before even cracking open the Blu-ray of Cabaret, which is at least a decent movie and also features a truckload of Liza Minnelli sideboob? Who can say. Maybe I had a repressed memory of Montrose’s “Rock Candy” being on the soundtrack, and that attracted me. No, that’s not it. Anyway, the good news is that it looks pretty good: Robert Surtees in his grittiest ‘70s mode, lots of edible blacks and an enveloping warmth that never succumbs to gloss. This is reputedly the first picture with a Dolby surround soundtrack and some of the But Jesus, this movie. Do Joan Didion fans give her a pass for this kind of crap? Because the stuff that’s most irritating and false in this movie’s depiction of its milieu (e.g. the Rolling Stone “journalist” who beds Kristofferson’s character in a bid to get an interview with Streisand’s) practically reeks of Didion, or of Eve Babitz trying to channel Didion, which makes no sense, I know. On the other hand, Ms. Streisand’s commentary, while digressive in that way that can be a little difficult to listen to,  is also REAL interesting. I like the way she laughs at the beginning when speaking the words “Jon Peters, who wanted to be a producer.”  —B+

Taxi For Tobruk (Olive)

This 1960 WWII adventure of some Free French troops driving through the desert with a German officer who toggles between reluctant ally and captive is like a more downbeat, fatalist variant on the amiable 1958 Ice Cold In Alex. If that latter name means anything to you, you’re likely to eat this up. The film is also an excellent source of Lino Ventura, Charles Aznouver, and Hardy Kruger. The transfer of this wide-screen (French-bred Dyalliscope, same process as The 400 Blows, not CinemaScope...although...oh nevr mind) black-and-white picture is pretty much crystal clear so connoisseurs of the format will also be pleased. —A-

The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Region B U.K. Import)

Amazing. This 1930 Prophetic Book Of Fritz Lang is still startling in its odd audacity. Not just technical audacity; everything about it is off-the-wall in its particular genius. This edition makes it all palpable. Because Lang’s  experiments with sound and cutting were so bold, they’re not as seamless in their effects as they might have been, but they make the movie crackle with electric discovery. Some of the images are so crisp and spectacular the restoration feels like a miracle. And it is, because the film itself is a kind of miracle.  —A+

Universal Classic Monster Collection (Universal)

The core collection, all given superb restoration and cleanup treatments and one of them displaying overindulgence on digital noise reduction and all that. Everything here is beautiful in its way. The 1931 Dracula is the biggest revelation. The cleaned-up frames reveal more depth to the mise-en-scene and more detail in the performances themselves. The movie takes on a more accurate dimension and feels less stodgy and leaden than the latter-day criticisms of it chide it for. Freund’s The Mummy is also remarkable, silver and shadow melding in creepy grandeur. Which isn’t to take away from the magnificent two Frankensteins. The Wolf Man is handsome but not my favorite of the Universal horrors. People love to slag the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera because it’s really an operetta musical instead of a horror movie, but that Technicolor still is glorious (although in certain shots some registration problems are visible). The Creature From The Black Lagoon is what it is. I only wish for a Blu-ray collection of the sequels, the B-horror pictures (Ulmer’s The Black Cat, come on!), pretty much everything else in this mode that can be upgraded. Not gonna happen.  —A+

Weekend (Criterion)

Wowsers, I have never seen this movie looking so good! I know, I say that all the time. But this is genuinely a revelation. The early scenes with Mireille Darc and her therapist or boyfriend or whatever the hell he is (the new picture clarity doesn’t answer ALL of the movie’s mysteries) going over the supposedly disgusting erotic anecdote (frankly I’ve heard worse) was pretty much impossible to SEE in just about every prior home version. Here it is entirely visible, albeit in its proper alienating silhouette. The rest looks pretty hot, too, if you can take it; people talk about Joe D’Amato movies and the animal killing in those, but caveat emptor, prescient social commentary radical despair or no, some of the stuff at the end of this would get Godard in big trouble with PETA if there were any cinephiles in PETA. —A+

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Warner)

Between this and The Legend of Lylah Claire you almost gotta wonder where Robert Aldrich got his dog-food-ad hard-on from, but he certainly did put an edge on it, and then put it to good use. This really is another Warner home run on a classic title. Ohmigod that face makeup on Davis—like she put it on with a trowel. And yes,in this case it IS supposed to be visible. Every frame is crystal-clear without giving the impression it’s been killed with DNR, and the added detail provides new things to really see; I never before noticed the very visible silent “bitch” Bette David articulates after “you miserable” early in the film. Not so much a camp classic as one of the most knowing, and saddest, movies about Old Hollywood, not to mention alcoholism, ever made. —A+