Released on Blu-ray alongside This Is Cinerama, Windjammer is not a true Cinerama film. Originally released as the first film shot in Cinemiracle (a rival format that was quickly purchased by Cinerama), it was later re-released in Cinerama. The difference between these formats is negligible, having more to do with projection method -- unlike Cinerama, Cinemiracle could be projected from a single projection booth -- than audience experience. As a result, the visuals on this Smilebox Blu-ray are not dissimilar from those found in This Is Cinerama, once again bringing the format to home video in something approximating its original glory. Windjammer has a more muted, subdued color palette than This Is Cinerama, but it improves upon that film in several key ways.
Cinerama was a major step forward in the technological history of cinema, giving the medium fresh life as it was starting to feel endangered by a new adversary: television. Shot with three interconnected cameras and projected (via three separate projectors) on a giant curved screen, Cinerama films updated the widescreen innovations of Abel Gance’s Napoleon for an era of color and sound. The first film made in this format, This Is Cinerama offered the kinds of sights and sounds that couldn’t be translated to the small screen, which might explain why it's been so difficult to see the film for the last five decades or so. Cinerama was designed to enhance the theatrical experience, but it was also designed to demonstrate the limitations of television. Therein lies the challenge Flicker Alley faced in making this Blu-ray. Can a film that is deliberately incompatible with television be translated to the small screen? Thankfully, the answer is a resounding yes.
Anatomy of a Murder is arguably the greatest courtroom film, edging out Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution and Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. Featuring a unique blend of suspense, humor, character study and insight into changing American mores, this 1959 film is also the last unqualified masterpiece by Otto Preminger. In a small town on Michigan’s upper peninsula, folksy attorney Paul Biegler (James Stewart) defends Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), an army lieutenant charged with the murder of a man who raped his wife, Laura (Lee Remick).
A film doesn’t have to make complete sense to be engrossing. Visual style and a striking central performance carry Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill despite the director’s pronounced indifference to clarity. Hanada (Joe Shishido) is Japan’s third-ranked hit man and not a bit happy about it. (Suzuki never explains who compiles such rankings.) In fact, he doesn't even believe that the number-one assassin exists. The film follows Hanada through several hits, leading to the inevitable showdown with his nemesis (Koji Nanbara). Along the way, he indulges in S&M with his wife (Mariko Ogawa) and meets a strange, mysterious young woman (Annu Mari).
Alfred Hitchcock’s final British masterpiece, The Lady Vanishes is one of the legendary filmmaker's most entertaining films, and a template for several of his later films, most notably North by Northwest. All the elements of classic Hitchcock are here in abundance: suspense, romance, comedy, irony and sexual innuendo. When the English governess Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) disappears on a train somewhere in central Europe, no one on board will confirm that she even exists, despite the protestations of our heroine, Iris (Margaret Lockwood). Even when the handsome hero (Michael Redgrave) tries to help, obstacles keep blocking their path to the truth.
Design for Living is not one of Ernst Lubitsch’s masterpieces, but this 1933 film is thoroughly entertaining and provides a wonderful example of the sexual content Hollywood could get away with before the advent of the Production Code. Beyond the title and the basic premise, the film has little to do with Noël Coward’s 1932 play. Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist working for an advertising agency in Paris, meets George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Frederic March) -- a painter and a playwright respectively -- and falls almost immediately in love with both, while fending-off the advances of her stuffy boss (Edward Everett Horton). Some rash decisions are made, leading to misery for all concerned -- until an unconventionally happy fade-out.
Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game has had one of the most complicated histories of any famous film. Condemned by French critics and audiences after its 1939 premiere and shortened by thirteen minutes a few days later, the film was finally restored -- with an additional twelve minutes -- in 1959. Since this restoration was hampered by the destruction of the original negative during World War II, The Rules of the Game has never looked quite as good as it should. The Criterion Blu-ray edition is grainy at times, with a few scratches here and there, but Renoir’s use of deep focus has never been so clear. As the overwhelming number of extras on this disc explain, Renoir wanted to comment subtly on the rapidly approaching war through what appears to be an extramarital farce.
While some consider Wes Anderson’s films a tad precious and insular, few can dispute the charm of Rushmore. Released in 1998, the writer-director’s second film is one of the best ever about the pains of growing up, anguish which seems amusing only in retrospect. The life of fifteen-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is idyllic because of his involvement in a slew of extracurricular activities, notably the Max Fischer Players, a theatre group that stages flamboyant productions of films such as Serpico. Things become more complicated when Max finds himself vying -- along with millionaire Herman Blume (Bill Murray) and a doctor (Luke Wilson) -- for the affections of widowed teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). One of the film’s many highlights comes when Herman, overcome by his burgeoning love while delivering a message from Max, sprints away from Miss Cross like a cartoon character.
Regardless of how you feel about Kelly Reichardt’s films, you have to admire her audacity. She’s going to make them her way, an approach that couldn't be further from the rom-coms, comic-book movies and earnest indie films cluttering theatres. Meek’s Cutoff is slow, but it's action-packed compared to Reichardt’s Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Suggested by a real event, this film tells the story of a small group of settlers heading for Oregon in 1845 under the guidance of Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who proves to be an incompetent blowhard. Only the stubborn resolve of Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) keeps things from tipping over into complete chaos.
Claude Chabrol's 1959 follow-up to Le beau Serge shows the director becoming more sure of himself and inching toward the crime cinema that would dominate his later career. Les cousins has the same stars as its predecessor, but this time they reverse their roles. Charles (Gérard Blain) is an innocent from the provinces, who comes to Paris to study law. While there, he stays with his decadent cousin Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy) -- also a law student -- in their uncle's apartment. Instead of studying, Paul stages an endless series of parties, while Charles struggles to avoid temptation. This becomes impossible when he meets Florence (Juliette Mayniel), who proves unworthy of his love.
Claude Chabrol's 1958 debut is often called the first French New Wave film, primarily because the director was previously a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, along with future nouvelle vague luminaries Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut. However, Le beau Serge is more traditional than the early efforts by these filmmakers. François (Jean-Claude Brialy) returns to the village of Sardent after a long absence and is shocked to see how much his friend Serge (Gérard Blain) has declined, falling far short of his ambitions and weighed-down by his marriage to Yvonne (Michèle Méritz). Between confrontations with Serge and the local priest (Claude Cerval), François has a brief affair with Serge's teenaged sister-in-law (Bernadette Lafont, then married to Blain).
Before he established himself as a genius with Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick made three low-budget films (Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, The Killing) and this is easily the best: tightly constructed, with fully developed characters, quotable dialogue and beautiful black-and-white cinematography by Lucien Ballard. Visually, this is one of the most striking examples of fifties noir -- Ballard gets startling effects from lamps and bare blubs -- but Harris claims that the cinematographer hated the director. Many of the images resemble the photographs of Kubrick and they have a beautiful clarity in this new HD transfer.
In several recent reviews (Diabolique, Life During Wartime), I've become preoccupied with the effect of repeat viewings. High and Low is another intriguing case study, as its exhausting suspense is largely dissipated on a second viewing. When I first saw this film years ago, I was convinced that it might be Kurosawa's best (to be honest, I've had this reaction to several Kurosawa films), but when you watch High and Low with an awareness of its outcome, its greatest virtue (suspense) is lost. To be clear, I don't think this is a weakness, just an unfortunate fact for those of us hoping to re-live that amazing first viewing. If you're gearing-up to see this incredible film for the first time, consider yourself lucky.
When I saw Life During Wartime at TIFF in 2009, I had several major problems with the film. While Todd Solondz's collaboration with cinematographer Ed Lachman yields the most refined visuals of his career, there were four glaring problems: 1) the characters seem like pale imitations of their more striking Happiness incarnations, 2) there's a complete lack of tension in the film's muddled, rambling narrative, 3) it's far too talky and 4) Solondz can't stop himself from ridiculing his characters. While I stand by the first three criticisms, I can now retract the fourth. As Solondz points out (in a 45-minute, audio-only Q&A on this disc), his audience tends to be divided between those who laugh at the characters and those who get mad at those who laugh at the characters. I've never really been in either camp, but the mean-spirited laughter in the Life During Wartime screening I attended turned me (somewhat unjustifiably) against Solondz. Re-watching the film alone in my living room, a surprising empathy emerged, no longer concealed by the condescension of an audience.
Jean-Pierre Melville has been acclaimed for cool, existential thrillers, but Léon Morin, Priest is something of a surprise since it's a psychological study of two non-criminals. Since Melville was a Jewish atheist, his sympathetic portrayal of a Catholic priest is also unusual. Adapted by Melville from Barny -- a 1948 semi-autobiographical novel by Béatrix Beck -- this 1961 film occurs during the German occupation of France and centers around Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), who works in an office in a small village. A widow with a small daughter whose father was Jewish, she launches an initially antagonistic relationship with Leon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo), only to find herself falling for this priest.
The Adjustment Bureau is a perfectly respectable blend of science fiction, paranoid thriller and love story. In fact, everything about the film is perfectly respectable. It’s well made, intelligent and entertaining -- but it lacks that extra something necessary to make it remotely memorable. Expanded considerably (by writer-director George Nolfi) from Philip K. Dick's 1954 Adjustment Team, The Adjustment Bureau wants to be both romantic and action-packed, in the tradition of North by Northwest. Yet we never feel that New York senatorial hopeful David Norris (Matt Damon) is truly in danger. The fate-controlling group trying to keep him from hooking-up with dancer Elise (Emily Blunt) is not quite ominous enough, despite the worthy efforts of the great Terence Stamp (playing a no-nonsense Adjustment Bureau representative).
36 Quai des Orfèvres was a huge hit in Europe and was nominated for eight Césars, but the 2004 film is only now becoming readily available in North America. It is something of a marketing challenge: too violent for fans of French cinema and too French for the action crowd. Tartan Video seems to be aiming at the latter by calling it 36th Precinct and including both subtitled and dubbed versions. As he points out in the extras, writer-director Olivier Marchal -- who appears here as an ex-con and previously acted in Guillaume Canet’s sublime Tell No One -- has created a semi-autobiographical policier inspired by events he witnessed while serving in the anti-terrorist division of the Paris police. A gang of thieves is robbing armored cars, often killing the guards. Former friends Leo Vrinks (Daniel Auteutil) and Denis Klein (Gérard Depardieu) compete to find the robbers, with the winner succeeding their just-promoted boss (André Dussolier). While neither hesitates to bend the rules, Klein is the more ruthless of the two, ultimately bringing about tragic consequences that turn Vrinks’ life upside down.
Criterion has been unusually generous to Louis Malle fans in recent years, releasing no fewer than sixteen of the underrated auteur's films on DVD and/or Blu-ray since 2006. This thoroughness has resulted in the long overdue reconsideration of some incredible, largely forgotten films (The Fire Within, Zazie dans le métro), but it has also resulted in the reconsideration of some lesser efforts. Black Moon is to Malle what a film like Quintet is to Robert Altman: an original, audacious, yet not entirely successful experiment from a great filmmaker in unfamiliar territory.
Of Louis Malle’s early films, Zazie dans le métro is the most emblematic of the French New Wave and arguably the director's most influential film. Released in 1960, Malle’s third film constantly calls attention to its technique, even having a character ponder the film's place in the New Wave at one point. Based upon veteran surrealist Raymond Queneau’s 1959 novel, Zazie dans le métro follows ten-year-old Zazie (Catherine Demongeot) during a visit to Paris. While her mother (Odette Piquet) is busy cavorting with her latest boyfriend, Zazie stays with her female impersonator uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret). Zazie is opinionated and foul-mouthed, qualities which reportedly led angry French parents, expecting to see a children’s film, to drag their tykes from theatres. Zazie causes chaos throughout, ranging from a massive traffic jam to a lengthy slapstick fight in a restaurant.
Pauline Kael once famously said that she rarely watched any film more than once. Diabolique makes an interesting case for both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. When I first saw Henri-George Clouzot's celebrated and influential thriller, I was extremely impressed by the metaphysical mystery at the film's core (a dead man's body disappears in a way that suggests he may have come back to life to haunt the women who murdered him). However, the film's twist ending left me disappointed, not because it's predictable or unconvincing, but because it reduces the film's suggestive enigma to a literal-minded trick. Watching the film a second time with full knowledge of this twist has an effect that is both enriching (the complexity of the film's narrative strategies is exposed) and diminishing (the film's haunting metaphysical elements are drained of their evocative power).
Pale Flower is an exceedingly stylish Japanese gangster film, but it would be misleading to leave it at that. Fans of American crime cinema are accustomed to stylization that invites the audience in -- with humor, surprise and narrative coherence. Pale Flower offers a far more difficult, enigmatic form of stylization, asking more questions than it answers and leaving the film's moody protagonists distant and opaque (rarely have actors brooded so elegantly onscreen). But even if we never truly understand what these characters are thinking, we're given intriguing clues throughout, delivered via one triumphant feat of mise-en-scene after another. Balancing aspects of sixties Seijun Suzuki and Akira Kurosawa, director Masahiro Shinoda (Double Suicide) finds a distinctive blend of hip, modern genre cinema and uncompromising, elliptical art cinema. The result is an enduring work that, nearly five decades after its original release, continues to resist easy categorization.
Smiles of a Summer Night is always cited as Ingmar Bergman’s first international success, but before this 1955 film, his efforts were not too popular in Sweden either. Who would have expected Bergman -- creator of such downbeat films as Sawdust and Tinsel -- to make a comedy, much less a completely charming one? Set at the turn of the century, Smiles of a Summer Night focuses on the overlapping romances of smug, middle-aged lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his much younger wife Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), his clergyman son Henrik (Bjorn Bjelfvenstam), the famous actress (and his former mistress) Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck), Desiree’s current lover Count Carl Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), his jealous wife Charlotte (Margit Carlqvist) and lusty maid Petra (Harriet Andersson). Most of the characters may be in love with two of the others, leading to misunderstandings stopping just short of farce, as they slowly evolve from stereotypes to complex figures.
The myth about Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the 1955 Vladimir Nabokov novel, is that it was made too soon, before mainstream films were allowed to be sexually explicit. However, the novel -- which was called pornographic in the uptight Eisenhower era -- isn't really all that explicit either. What matters is Nabokov’s vision of America, embracing its distinctive blend of innocence and vulgarity, Humbert Humbert’s slow realization that he truly loves Dolores Haze and his guilt over stealing her childhood. While Kubrick cannot approximate Nabokov’s style, he has an exhilarating style of his own, which helps capture the writer’s other intentions. The film's only glaring weakness is the casting of Sue Lyon (who at times resembles both Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley) in the title role. Fifteen when the film was made, Lyon adequately captures her character’s coquettishness but reveals nothing beneath Lolita’s surface.
Unlike the filmmakers he associated with in the seventies (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola), Brian De Palma never really made the kind of prestige pictures that earn Oscar nominations. In fact, he's been nominated for five Razzies. Of course, that's not the whole story. At least two of the films he earned Razzie nominations for (Dressed to Kill, Scarface) are now regarded as borderline classics. The problem has never been De Palma's skill as a filmmaker -- most seem to agree that he's one of the premiere stylists working today -- but he's always preferred disreputable genres, as they provide maximum room for visual invention. He inherited this preference from Hitchcock and has passed it on to Quentin Tarantino, but whereas those filmmakers earned awards and respect, De Palma has always remained a guilty pleasure. At their core, Hitchcock and Tarantino are crowd pleasers, but De Palma would much rather antagonize his audience. Nowhere is this more evident than Blow Out, his unforgettably dark fusion of Hitchcock, Pakula and Antonioni.
Through the ups and down of twenty-plus years directing features, Jane Campion has maintained an impressively personal sensibility, avoiding mainstream opportunities in favour of artful classicism (The Portrait of a Lady, Bright Star) and eccentric, even radical genre films (Holy Smoke, In the Cut). But nowhere is her individualism more apparent than in her enigmatic, hyper-stylized feature debut (prior to this, she made two TV movies and several shorts). The world of Sweetie is more ordinary than any of the worlds Campion went on to explore later in her career, but the film's most quotidian elements liberate her to take risks elsewhere, particularly in terms of character, tone and style. The result is arguably the best film of her varied and provocative career.
