Some Came Running

"Dead" sexy

Call me a slob if you will, but I just gotta say that regardless of her subsequent accomplishments and stuff, Jane Fonda was just a heck of a lot more diverting, strictly cinematographically, back when she was hanging out with that suave perv Roger Vadim. Above, she's being all decadent coquetteish in Vadim's Metzengerstein, just one groovy episode of Spirits of the Dead, a swinging '60s anthology of Euro-Poe adaptations that features quite a few other screen icons back When They Were Funsier. I discuss this state of affairs in my review of a SPECTACULAR new Blu-ray disc (a region-free one, at that!) of the film for my Foreign Blu-ray Disc Report, at The Daily Notebook. 

Image of the day, 11/19/10

The Sound of Music, Robert Wise, 1965

Some know-somethingish drip over at Slant tried to take a contrarian or counter-intuitive or whatever the hell they call it "take" on the motion picture from which the above screen capture is derived in a review of its 45th Anniversary DVD and Blu-ray edition, said take consisting of him pissing all over the material, but then playing "devil's advocate"...by allowing that the film version has a more tolerable book, as it were, than the stage one. Damn, that hardly even qualifies as faint praise. His qualification to deliver this verdict is based, I guess, on the fact that he played Friedrich for eight months when he was a kid. The circumstances of this portrayal are not given; I suppose we're to infer that the author was a child actor of some kind, but I prefer to think he was kidnapped and forced to live the role. In any event, prior to reaching this monumental conclusion, the reviewer, Eric Henderson by name, really goes to town, to wit, "Light and flaky, with all the nutritional value of any food typically given said descriptors," "self-aware of its inherent stupidity," "its white elephant"—ooh, you've clearly read your Manny Farber, aren't you a smart one?—"eagerness manifests itself as a direct riposte to art," "overbearing Broadway titans Rogers [sic] and Hammerstein's most rudimentary song score," okay, whoa, hold on there, Hoss. "Rudimentary?" Oh really.

This, you see, is what we in the biz call "overreaching." If the "awful" (Henderson's word again) songs of The Sound of Music are "rudimentary," they are rudimentary in a way that requires total mastery—both verbal and musical—to pull off. You try and write a song both as catchy and as multiform as "Do-Re-Mi" some time, using only one octave of the C scale. Also, John Coltrane didn't take "My Favorite Things" and use it to completely transform modern jazz pretty much overnight because he wanted to demonstrate to the squares how he could make a stick-up-its-ass show tune swing, or some such thing; he did it because, well, as he said, "This waltz is fantastic: when you play it slowly, it has an element of gospel that’s not at all displeasing; when you play it quickly, it possesses other undeniable qualities. It’s very interesting to discover a terrain that renews itself according to the impulse you give it." Henderson, who in a notice about a Glenn Gould documentary shrugged that Gould was "a pianist to be reckoned with," might be one of those fellows who just says "whatever" at the mention of Coltrane, so I don't imagine this citation will impress him much. But really, there's so much that one can easily get away with when drubbing The Sound of Music; why extend one's ambitions into areas where trouble may follow?

Actual fans of the film, by the way, should be informed that the new Blu-ray edition really is awfully pretty in the way the film is pretty.

Image of the day, 11/17/10

Charlie Chaplin and Eric Campbell in The Rink, Chaplin, 1916

A bunch of years ago Premiere did a "Ten Best Sex Scenes In Cinema" feature, and for some insane reason it wasn't done by committee; I was permitted to pick the scenes wholesale and write about them. And being the perverse soul I am, I picked a bunch of things that weren't even sex scenes, really; the Lancaster/Kerr clinch in From Here To Eternity, and, pretty high up on the list, the David Hemmings/Veruschka photo session in Blow-Up. When the piece was on newsstands, I was sent on publicity rounds to promote it, and I got booked on whatever the CNN show was that Anderson Cooper was on before he got "360." It was a memorable episode for a few reasons, my favorite being the guest prior to myself, who was this Southern guy in his thirties who had this theory that you could be cured of homosexuality, because he himself had been. I was in the green room watching, and there was this attractive blonde woman there also, and this guy was going on about how before he had been cured he had been having all sorts of awful anonymous sex with men and doing poppers and this and that, all in some detail, and I chortled slightly and said, to the monitor, "Dude..." and the woman got all huffy and announced, "That's my husband." Oops. Anyway, first thing Cooper says to me as my segment starts is, "There are an awful lot of old movies on this list," and what pops into my head is, "Hey, Blow-Up is, like, maybe a whole year older than you, you clot." But of course I didn't say that. I bring this up because I was watching the lovely new Criterion Blu-ray of Chaplin's Modern Times last night, and was excited to see that the exhilarating The RInk, featuring some of the funniest and most frenetic stunt work in the entirety of Chaplin's career, was included in the supplements, and I asked My Lovely Wife to join me to look at it, because I knew she'd be wowed, and she was. "This is just the thing to show to any know-something-ish hipster douchebag who tries to tell you that those Jackass clowns are in some way the inheritors of the great slapstick tradition," I noted in my typical loving and tolerant fashion. I also mused that the best way to get over the tendency to draw some false dichotomy between Chaplin and Keaton is to watch more Chaplin. But mostly we just enjoyed the brilliance, and My Lovely Wife asked, "So what year was this?" an interesting question given the homage to The Rink contained in Modern Times, and Chaplin's incredible physical agility when he made the latter film, in his mid-forties; and as it happened...I had to look, and discovered the film was released in December of 1916, which means Chaplin was approaching his late twenties...but then we were like, "1916? Holy crap! That's very nearly one hundred years ago!" And we concluded, well, this really does qualify as an "old" movie. And a still incredible, wonderful one. 

Tales From the Warner Archives #8: "Brewster McCloud" (Robert Altman, 1970)

"I think he just made up my part because he wanted to work together. I loved it. He gave me wing scars and let me sing 'Rock-a-bye Baby' to Bud. I stopped people on the road to tell them about Bob and how I loved Bob and how I’d do anything for Bob. And of course he took full advantage and he put me sitting naked in the fountain. To his credit it was a long lens and there was nobody in the streets and I was this bird, this fairy godmother. Why I did those things…"—Sally Kellerman in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Mitchell Zuckoff, 2009

The 1970 Brewster McCloud was the immediate followup to M.A.S.H., a surprise hit that, among other things, lifted a substantial number of once-struggling actors, including Kellerman, out of obscurity and into a particularly hip limelight. As another one of those performers, Michael Murphy, notes in Zuckoff's endlessly engaging book, the expected thing for a director to do in the wake of such success would have been to have calculated a follow-up that capitalized on that newly-found prominence, bolstered it, brought it to the next level. Murphy: "A lot of directors [...] would be thinking, 'Let me be careful about my next film and who is in it and who can help me remain successful[...]" You know, like the way Gary Winick did 13 Going On 30 in the wake of Tadpole. OK, maybe that's not even close to the best example? But you get the idea. In any event, no; Altman went with more than a few of his M.A.S.H. company to Houston, Texas, to make a picture from a script by the same writer whose name is credited for Otto Preminger's legendary disaster of several years prior, Skidoo, about a reclusive young man who tries to realize the isn't-that-just-like-us-crazy-humans dream of becoming a bird. And after this Altman would make the masterful McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As different as these three films seem if you judge them strictly by their précises, and as differently as they each play on screen, there's a real through-line to these pictures. If you want to see genuinely improvisational American filmmaking as backed (after a fashion) by major studios, you probably couldn't ask for more instructive representations than these. 

McCloud is, of course, in many respects the absolute messiest of the three, and even for many of Altman's hardest-core admirers, it occupies a place of befuddlement in the director's ostensible canon. Robin Wood can barely be bothered with it in his exhaustive, somewhat tortured essay on Altman, "Smart-Ass and Cutie-Pie," which appears in Wood's seminal text Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. This despite the fact that from the very start of the film, it kind of embodies those very two qualities that Wood names in the essay's title. The credit sequence begins, stops at the request of Margaret Hamilton's dyspeptic national anthem singer, then starts again, leading up, among other things, to this very smart-ass title card:

For what it's worth, here's Wood's sole consideration of McCloud, from that essay, the context being an exploration of the European influence in Altman's work: "At its worst, the hankering for European models expresses itself in cheap opportunistic borrowings that deprive the originals of all their complexity: the "Last Supper" pose in M.A.S.H., the Makavejev effects (notably René Auberjonois' recurrently intercut bird lecture) in Brewster McCloud, the use of Romeo and Juliet to accompany and counterpoint the lovemaking in Thieves Like Us (surely traceable to the English lesson in Bande a Part) What is interesting here is not the effect Altman achieves but the relative resourcefulness of the gleanings—Buñuel, Makavejev, and Godard, instead of the usual Fellini (though he turns up too in the circus finale of Brewster McCloud)."

The self-referentiality inherent in the smart-ass attitude comes to something of a head with the demise of Hamilton's character, when the fact that the one-time portrayer of the WIcked With of the West is lying in death wearing something like a pair of ruby slippers ("red rhinestone shoes," they're called in the dialogue), after which point McCloud becomes something like a film of parts, parts that will likely be most gratifying to lovers of lead actor Bud Cort.

There are funny bits, weird bits, nasty bits. The great character actor Bert Remsen shows up, playing as he frequently did for Altman, a grotesque, a relentless racist caricature who hassles McCloud for his fancy camera. Shelley Duvall makes her screen debut, largely seeming to be doing an impression of the Warner Brothers cartoon creation Sniffles the mouse; near the film's finale, her character vomits (more European hankering, Bergman division?) and almost immediately thereafter kisses her Young Republican boyfriend, and so on. There are also bits of unexpected elegiac lyricism, as in Kellerman's exit from the Astrodome to the strains of a song by John Phillips, whose then manager Lou Adler was a producer on the picture; the long take somehow slightly anticipates the kosmische finale of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

The film sometimes seems to luxuriate in a certain kind of half-assedness, which is also kind of fascinating; the indifference with which it treats its car-chase sequence is all the more kind of extraordinary given that said chase had been coordinated and staged by the same man who concocted the epic, classic chase in Bullitt. In Zuckoff's book, Michael Murphy remembers how that sequence's denoument came to be: "One night toward the end of the movie, I could tell [Altman] was getting sick of being in Houston. It was a hundred and forty degrees and we’re in those hot clothes…Bob says 'I’m going to kill you tomorrow.' I said, 'Kill me? Why what do you mean, kill me?' He says, 'Yeah, it’ll be great. We’ll run your car into that lagoon down there in the park. You’re going to kill yourself. It’ll be great.' I knew that part of it was he just wanted to end this movie and get the hell out of there."

Reviewing the film in the New York TImes, the astute and witty Vincent Canby demurred: "It made me uneasy, as I'm inclined to be when I meet a $150,000-a-year movie executive whose newly freed spirit is expressed by his custom-made dungarees, his shoulderlength, "styled" hair and his love beads. It's imitation hip." Time has proven the film to be genuine Altman, at least, which makes this film's release by the Warner Archive a noteworthy event, although said bare-bones release likely precludes the possibility of an extras-laden Blu-ray or complete Altman DVD box or some such thing seeing the light of day. It's a good looking transfer of exceptional materials, as witness the detail in the zoom-in on Kellerman in the top screen capture; yes, you can see those cosmetic wing scars on her fetching back.

Party out of bounds

The aftermath of one of those nights as seen in Pia Marais' strong 2006 feature debut Die Unerzogenen (released, after a fashion, in English-speaking territories as The Unpolished), an underseen film brought to our attention anew by the fine curators at the British label Second Run. Its DVD release (over last summer; the intended contemporaneous review was one of the casualties of my Plasma Display Problem of 2010) prompts thoughts on "boutique" labels and trust of such, and more; in today's Foreign Region DVD Report at The Daily Notebook. 

"World" enough & time

A very exciting addition to the Michael Powell canon in high-definition, the BFI's wonderful recent edition of the maestro's 1937 adventure/melodrama/tragedy The Edge of the World is the subject of my Foreign Region Blu-ray Disc Report this week, at The Notebook. This is a good 'un, for sure. 

Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide: Incredibly late, clearing-the-decks July 2010 edition

Hey, kids! Remember when I put together that massive Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide back in June, when the world was young and full of hope and promise? And it went over so well I thought, why, I ought to make this a regular, or semi-regular, feature for the pleasure and delectation of the Some Came Running readership? Yeah, those were the days. I had plans, big plans, for my second installment; among other things, I was gonna make it at least in part a referendum on opera on Blu-ray, because I know that's what the SCR audience craves. No, okay, it was because I felt like it and thought it might be interesting, same reason as I do everything I do on this blog. So there I was, working away on the thing...and then my plasma display ceased to function. And if you're not aware of what happened then, well, as Bryan Ferry once sang, you can guess the rest.

My plasma has been restored to me recently—albeit so late and under such tortuous circumstances that I am now afflicted with a neurosis that makes me believe that the thing is going to (metaphorically) blow up again every time I turn on its power, or every time a cable channel isn't coming in correctly, or...well, you get the idea—allowing me to take up where I left off, problem being that the titles I have notes and half-written entries for are all, well, pretty sorely out of date. Not that I ever intended this column to be dictated by the constraints of get-there-first timeliness (and in fact its model, music critic Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide was explicitly not, particularly in its early days; it kept up with new releases, sure, but it could sometimes take Bob several months to weigh in on a particular album) but still...

For all that, I didn't want to just throw away what work I'd done up to the point my set stopped working; by the same token, there are a lot of newer titles for me to look at/enjoy/assess. So. My idea was: forget the opera side-tack, which was going to take a fair amount more as far as consideration and time were concerned. Leave stuff like Red Desert and Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, which have already been discussed somewhat in earlier posts, be. And get out briefer-than-perhaps-normal-even-by-the-capsule-standards-of-this-format reviews of the rest. So as to clear the decks for what should be the next couple of what ought to be very proper Consumer Guides (if I can keep my damn display working). And show those publicists who have been so kind as to provide me with product that I haven't been defrauding them (although n.b., hardly all of the stuff under consideration here was comped). And so, this. Not quite as polished or expansive in the writing as it might have been, but a necessary step in getting one foot in front of the other and hopefully something of value to you. 

Absolute Power (Warner): I haven't been able to see all of the Eastwood pictures that Warners has released on Blu-ray, in its recent big push to upgrade the Eastwood oeuvre to high-def. I have heard and read very mixed reports. Of course, many of us remember the rather problematic but hardly unwatchable Dirty Harry of a while back. I couldn't get my mitts on everything in the run of Warners' Clint stuff, but I was particularly keen to get this, which I find one of the man's juiciest thrillers on high-powered acting alone. The whole package made me think that maybe supposedly "indifferent" looking films (and I don't for the record, find Eastwood's films to be indifferent-looking, but I think you get the idea) can benefit especially from super-sensitive high-def mastering, largely because artifacts such as blocky blacks are more distracting within a "plain" frame than they are in one that's filled with stuff and movement, or one that doesn't hold for particularly long. As it stands, the Blu-ray of this 1997 picture looks very good, but not great; first 30 minutes of the picture constitute some of Eastwood's tersest, most effective, Siegel-inflected suspense filmmaking. And they take place largely in the dark. And the blacks are blocky. —B

Caddyshack (Warner): I do have quite a bit of affection, and not even of a vestigial kind, for this "slobs versus snobs" comedy, which throws in some not un-pertinent class analysis with its not-always-entirely-dumb humor. The Blu-ray looks nice, not eye-poppingly extraordinary, and is sharp enough that for some reason certain of its insert shots—for instance, Dangerfield's "pay up" bit near the very end are more obvious than they were in the theatrical projection. Nifty extras, including a previously-seen-on-cable making-of doc that I think may be longer than the feature itself. —B+

City of the Living Dead (Blue Underground): I don't know what's gotten into me. It's been years since I talked myself into believing that I've "grown out" of this kind of material, particularly this kind of material done as arguably ineptly and inarguably crassly as director Lucio Fulci does it, and still, I consumed this like a bowl of M&Ms. Blue Underground, you're like a drug...The picture is rather variable, sometimes razor-sharp, other times grainy, perhaps reflecting the dust-bowl phenom plaguing the film's setting of Dunwich (along with those living dead and all), ar ar ar. But that's a reflection of the materials, which really have been superbly mastered. A superb presentation overall, good for what ails you on those occasions when you, too, might need some Fulci. The guy had something, that's for sure. The gore effects—and in case you don't recall, this is the notorious 1980 film in which one of the characters vomits up the entirety of her internal organs, intestinal tracts and all—can still elicit "ughs" and "yeeechs!" 30 years later. —A

Close-Up (Criterion): My notes on the Blu-ray of this classic 1990 Kiarostami:  "Raw, beautiful, old. The autumn leaves of Tehran/The backgrounds are somehow fascinating/Good, conversational commentary..." Of course this picture cannot be termed "old," but its Academy aspect ratio and the qualities of the film stock give it the feel of something not just from anpother country but another era. It's yet one more example of Criterion's exemplary policy of making a high-def video rendering of cinema look like film. If you get that, you're going to love this. And for other reasons as well.—A+

Darkman (Universal): Very strong rendering of Sam Raimi's idiosyncratic 1990 superhero not-quite classic. One of those films about which some might say it looks  "better than it has any right to." And to heck with that; it looks pretty amazing, and is a real pleasure. —A

Everlasting Moments (Criterion): I was hoping that the release of this might function as something of a consciousness raiser with respect to director Jan Troell, who is at the very least one of the greatest cinematic craftsmen still working today. And...not so much. For now, let me just unreservedly recommend this, an immaculate rendering of an immaculate film, an account of an early 20th-century artist by accident, as it were, as sensitive a feat of lensing and construction as you're likely to see anywhere. —A

Flash Gordon (Universal): Very garish, but why complain, given the content and context of this 1980 Dino De Laurentis-produced mega-cheese fest, whose self-consciousness pertaining to its own cheesiness is still kind of hard to read. Hard to say how this Blu-ray looks in comparison to how it "should" look in a theater, but here the very vivid colors and near-3D qualities not only don't reek of overt digital manipulations, they feel entirely appropriate. Good surround audio on that goofy Queen score, too. I also have to admit I enjoyed the decadent-European-aliens debauching boring-wholesome-Americans subtext, such as it it, this time around, too. Fun, for what it's worth.—A

Greenberg (Universal): This 2010 Noah Baumbach character dissection is the sort of thing that some benighted souls look at and say "Why does this warrant a Blu-ray?" Well...because. Just on account of it's low-budget doesn't mean it's not meant to be seen. And Harris Savides' lensing IS by...Harris Savides. As it is, this film takes the '70s-ish lensing of Payne's Sideways a sunshine-is-boring step further; there are lots of revelatory perspectives on the dust motes floating around a kitchen by the much-used door just off a pool deck, for instance. The disc is very accurate in nailing the film's visual depiction of dingy, Southern California anomie. So that's why it warrants a Blu-ray. What I wanna know is why Resnais' great Wild Grass doesn't have a Blu-ray, but if I bring that up here, I'll be bitching to the wrong company, so there's that... —A

Happy Together (Kino Lorber): Ravishing, as have been all of the Kino Lorber Wong Kar Wai Blu-rays. Wait, there's only one other so far, Fallen Angels. That's great too. Essential. —A

Home (Kino Lorber): Another entry in the "Kino Lorber is doing something right" trend. A gorgeous rendering of a very interesting French film, a deadpan-surreal and genuinely galvanizing account of what happens when the highway that's supposed to have been operative right next to your quaint quiet home finally opens for real. Absolutely worth a look.—B+

Hot Tub Time Machine (Sony): The most salient technical feature of this disc is that it's really loud. The second most salient is that its picture detail makes its cheap-ass production values look even cheaper. Watching it in tandem with Caddyshack, I determined that squirrel jokes are not as funny as gopher jokes. Sample dialogue from the film: Character played by  Craig Robinson: "I can't believe we're all here."  Character played by John Cusack: "I can't believe we all made it." Sample dialogue from My Lovely Wife, on hearing this while getting ready for work: "I can't believe this is a script somebody actually wrote." —C

Jason and the Argonauts (Sony): This is not a film that needs to be oversold to its target audience, so let me just report that to my eyes the high-def rendering is superb, sensitive. The thing I feared most from this: that the detail doesn't exaggerate the nature of the rear-projection effects, does not happen. Which isn't to say that they don't look like what they are; they do. As they did in theaters, which is not enough to "take you out" of the thrills of a given sequence. Great stuff, and very good extras. —A+

Kelly's Heroes/Where Eagles Dare (Warner): A good strong vintage look, one would say. Not what you'd call pristine or revelatory, more like what you'd see at a drive-in where all the equipment was up to snuff and the projectionist knew what he was doing. Which is, really entirely appropriate for this pair of, shall we say second-tier '60s/'70s Clint Eastwood starrers, both directed, as it happens, by Brian G. Hutton. And that's not to say that certain details don't pop: Check out the blue in Carrol O'Connor's eyes in Heroes! Gorgeous!  Look how solidly the high-def format holds the identical Gothic red type faces used in the opening credits of both films! In terms of content, Dare is probably best appreciated while half-asleep, and it should amuse some to note that Don Rickles' presence in Heroes has dated far less than Donald Sutherland's has. Just goes to show, I guess...  —B

The Leopard (Criterion) Gorgeous; individual details in the early battle scene, and the introduction of Claudia Cardinale's character, and so on, just pop like mad. The inclusion of an English-language version with Burt Lancaster's own voice is very welcome, and the one we WWOR-raised tri-state area cinephiles remember; Peter Cowie's commentary is as epic as the film itself. Just magnificent.  —A+

The Living Dead of Manchester Morgue (Blue Underground): This first-rate 1974 zombie cult item is, among other things, a remarkably well-photographed film (one of the last things shot by Francisco Sempere), and this is an excellent transfer. As was the custom of its time, the male lead is a great beardy-longhair obnoxious jerk (played to perfection by Ray Lovelock), which brings up the question as to whether the cover shot constitutes a spoiler. No matter, really. Another score for Blue Underground, whose catalog is growing as essential, in its way, as Criterion's (yeah, I know DVD Beaver's already said the same thing, or something, but I'm just concurring). —A

Mystery Train (Criterion) Just beautiful, great extras, and kind of revelatory; some have dismissed this as minor, frivolous Jarmusch, but looking at it again I see a great, melancholy hangout movie that's all the more poignant for its touches of whimsy. The director does an audio-only fan-submitted-query Q&A instead of a commentary, and it's entertaining, although I was personally frustrated by the fact that it never addresses the whole Stephen Jones thing. That's the guy who plays the ghost of Elvis, in case you're asking. And the guy who gave Paula Jones his last name, in case you're asking why I'm asking. Anyway... —A+

Showgirls (MGM):A missed opportunity: now that some people are beginning to actually take this film seriously (as I'm sure many of you already know, Jacques Rivette has always been a fan), MGM had a chance to issue an anniversary edition full of you-thought-this-movie-was-camp-crap-but-you-were-wrong extras. Demonstrating the lack of vision that has no doubt contributed to its business woes, it instead festoons this Blu-ray with the usual it's-so-bad-it's-good supplements, or something. The big news is the transfer/mastering; again, as with Flash Gordon, it's on the garish side, and again, this seems entirely appropriate to the film's milieu and, you know, mise-en-scene. But as just how you're supposed to take it seriously, this package will leave you high and dry.

 —B+

A Star Is Born (Warner): Good lord. I'll admit it: this film completely wrecks me every time, and I hate it for it. That said, my word, this is a wonderful, wonderful presentation of it.  For all its widescreen/color production value, it hits hardest in its intimate scenes, which feel just...that. Intimate, that is. Shows you Cukor's real value as a director. You need this. But handle with care, lest someone come home and find you in a fetal position on the couch, blubbering at the finale. A+

Steamboat Bill Jr. (Kino Lorber): This is just beautiful. The film itself, the restoration, the high-def mastering.  "No jury would convict you..."; who else came up with that stuff? No one, that's who. Another library essential. —A+

The White Ribbon (Sony): I run hot and cold on Haneke,but I have to admit, this black-and-white semi-epic allegory got me good, at least up until its damn punchline. And even then, its particulars were such that it got me good anyway, in spite of the damn punchline. In any event, this high-def presentation of it is damn near perfect. Only the recent Criterion edition of Bergman's The Magician (discussed a bit here) beats it as an impress-your-friends B&W Blu-ray. —A

Image of the day, 11/01/10

Yes, I am rather excited to dive into the Blu-ray of Scott Pilgrim..., one of my favorite entertainments of the year. And will do so right after hitting "Publish."

What, and give up show business?

One imagines that certain Ingmar Bergman skeptics and out-and-out detractors might find cause to term his 1958 picture Ansiktet, also known as The Face, and released in the United States as The Magician, as the writer/director's first substantive self-pity party. Because it is, for all intents and purposes, something of a parable of The Misunderstood Artist. Max von Sydow stars as Vogler, a self-proclaimed—well, not really self-proclaimed, as he pretends to be mute, but he has a spieler who extols his abilities, and loud—mesmerist who works a variety of mysterious and mind-boggling entertainment miracles in an appropriately chiaroscuro-laden 19th-century landscape, via the appropriately mystifying-by-19th-century-standards powers of "magnetism." He and his troupe are waylaid by an impetuous petit-bourgeouis bureaucrat and a pompous, sadistic rationalist physician determined to expose Vogler as a charlatan. Vogler's "art," such as it is, is eventually both vindicated and revealed as "mere" trickery; and Vogler himself, stripped of all his artifices, is revealed as something of a pathetic, grasping figure, more or less reliant on the credulity and/or kindness of the strangers he bamboozles as he and his entourage shamble from one engagement to the next. 

"Didn't I do everything in my power to make you feel something?" Vogler begs of his former tormentors directly prior to the film's final and supremely ironic reversal of fortune. Concocting this picture in the wake of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries could have struck some as an odd way to complete a hat trick, but it is in fact a splendid one—although it's even more splendid if one forces one to see it more or less out of its context. Because in fact whatever self-referentiality it contains needs neither redemption nor justification (although Bergman's splendid prose account of/apologia for the film, from his book Images: My Life In Film, and included in the booklet of the new Criterion Collection edition, provides ample supporting evidence for any such case); and also because, viewed without such stuff in mind, The Magician works like the devil as a fleet, witty, atmospheric entertainment, something of a Bergman genre film as it were (as The Seventh Seal also is, in a way), a sometimes faux-gloomy jest that recalls certain of the vintage Universal horrors as it does Seastrom's The Phantom Carriage and other Nordic touchstones. Its narrative briskness and stiff spine is matched by a loose-limbed playfulness beautifully embodied in the utterly unconvincing way gorgeous Ingrid Thulin attempts to impersonate a teenage boy (she is in fact Vogler's wife). The film feels more alive than most period pieces of the contemporary cinema. 

This past July marked the third anniversary of Bergman's death, and the continuing—as opposed to waning—fact of his stature as a cinematic master makes Jonathan Rosenbaum's new-conventional-wisdom op-ed in the Times in the wake of the filmmaker's death seem even more churlish than had likely been intended. With a "case closed" confidence, Rosenbaum stated,"The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday." I've never quite gotten over that last bit, which seems to blame Bergman for the scorn straw man Rosenbaum erects. But the more germane self-satisfied faux-"tant pis" occurs earlier in the piece, with Rosenbaum's oh-gee-isn't-that-tough-luck shrug, "Like many of [Bergman's] films, 'The Magician' hasn’t been widely available here for ages." But—ooops!—here's The Magician on DVD, on Criterion no less, in a gorgeous restoration that gives amazing solidity and depth to Gunnar Fischer's black-and-white images—I was practically hypnotized by the steely frames of the eyeglasses worn by  Naima Wifstrand's  crone and Gunnar Björnstrand's inquisitor. And there's a major Bergman retrospective at, which moved Mike D'Angelo in the L.A. Weekly to insist that coming to grips with Bergman is a necessary "rite of passage" for the "budding cinephile." That doesn't sound like much fun, mind you, but it does sound important. "Like almost any other significant, prolific artist," D'Angelo, slightly adopting Rosenbaum's shrug, proclaimed, early in September, "Bergman produced both towering masterpieces and self-indulgent drivel." There's a different kind of confidence at work in that assessment; as much as I might dislike or object to a particular work of Bergman's or a particular aspect of a Bergman work, I've never been sure that I could apprehend it well enough to dismiss it, literally, as drivel; for me in this respect it's a case of not having enough context. Is the monologue on Mozart from Hour of the Wolf, which Bille August later transposed to A Song For Martin, inspired musicological analysis or just something that sounds nice? I can't rightly say. But someday I may learn. Until that point, I believe that we'll continue to keep arguing about, and learning from, the great Ingmar. And, yes, actually enjoying a good deal of his work. As you should definitely do with this really great disc of The Magician. 

"Rock" of love

This delightful picture-within-a-picture image is brought to you courtesy of the great Frank Tashlin and his entirely trenchant and hilarious and disturbing 1957 masterstroke Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, now on a fantastic Blu-ray from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema and the subject of this week's Foreign Region Report, at The Daily Notebook, where it belongs. Enjoy.