As the founder of the World Cinema Project, Martin Scorsese has become an ambassador for global film preservation, elevating overlooked films from around the world and resurrecting them with the technology typically afforded to home-video releases of Hollywood mega-productions. Like the first two volumes of WCP restorations released by the Criterion Collection, the first in December 2013 and the second in May 2017, the third is both indispensable and flawed, as the six films collected here have no immediate relationship to one another aside from having been restored by the WCP.

Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos Monjes, from 1934, is an early example of Mexican gothic horror that ponders whether honest testimony in response to a traumatic event is possible when torrid emotions are involved. Two monks (Víctor Urruchúa and Carlos Villatoro) offer their recollections of murder and betrayal to an objective listener, and as their shared past is recounted twice, once from the point of view of each man, the comparisons to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashoman are inevitable; the dialogue exchanges between the monks help to articulate how pride and personal vendettas make constructing truthful histories next to impossible. The film, released early in the sound era, also employs an expressionist approach that recalls Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, especially in its use of close-ups.

The crown jewel of this collection, Humberto Solas’s 1968 epic Lucía follows three different women named Lucía at transitional moments in Cuban history: 1895, 1932, and an unidentified year in the 1960s. While each chapter functions independently of each other, they accumulate a sense of how a generation’s actions inevitably and irrevocably lay the groundwork for the next. Whether the film is in the midst of depicting murder, tragedy, or revolution—and Lucía abounds in depictions of all three—Solas directs with a focused fury seldom seen in the annals of cinema; he constructs indelible images of beauty and rage with an intensity that’s wild-eyed but simultaneously grounded in the specificity of each era.

Less virtuoso, though no less driven by a full-throated lament for injustice, is Usmar Ismail’s After the Curfew, a classic of Indonesian cinema. This 1954 melodrama tracks Iskander (A.N. Alcaff), a freedom fighter who finds coming home difficult, both psychologically and practically, in the wake of the Indonesian National Revolution. Ismail convincingly probes how colonial rule worms its way into the minds of the colonized by allowing the characters to emerge (they seem to linger in the foreground often) as embodiments of emotions that otherwise seem to remain suppressed within the country’s postcolonial milieu.

An important and successful work of the first wave of Iranian cinema, Bahram Beyzaie’s Downpour, set in pre-revolutionary Iran, achieves a comparable effect through its satirical focus on the foibles of Mr. Hekmati (Parviz Fanizadeh), a newly relocated schoolteacher who struggles both to reign in his rambunctious students and connect with his neighbors. Beyzaie tacks moments of slapstick humor onto a neorealist through line that also features instances of dazzling camerawork, making it difficult to pin down the film’s style or tone.

Scorsese calls Héctor Babenco’s Pixote another branch on the tree of neorealism, but the likes of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini never directed a film with such calculated brutality. This 1980 Brazilian drama mercilessly puts its eponymous 10-year-old protagonist (Fernando Ramos da Silva) through the wringer of poverty, crime, abuse, and trauma. It’s all meant to be an indictment, it seems, of Brazil’s military dictatorship, but Babenco only gestures at depicting institutional corruption beyond the most obvious melodramatic swipes at police making murders appear like suicides. At times, a teacher or a counselor appear empathetic toward Pixote and his ilk, but what’s Babenco really offering here aside from an overwrought glimpse behind the curtain of absolutely inhuman pain and suffering? The end result is less an aching cry for humanity than a torture contraption for willing, masochistic audiences.

Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô opts for a logic-oriented critique of seemingly immovable systemic corruption. The 1970 Mauritanian film proves remarkably complex despite its straightforward story concerning an unnamed African immigrant (Robert Liensol) trying to find employment, kinship, and stability in France. He’s turned away from jobs that are seemingly available, he engages in prolonged conversations with a white intellectual who uses logic to disguise his racism, and he endures hysterical local propaganda claiming there’s a “black invasion,” all while the local travel agency advertises a “Vacation in black Africa.” Hondo burrows into the madness wrought by systemic racism through various techniques, ranging from animation to interior monologue to montage sequences. Like Dijbril Diop Mambéty’s subsequent Touki Bouki, Soleil Ô is a tour de force of intellectual and cinematic daring.

Image/Sound

The World Cinema Project makes unwavering strides to restore films to the best of their abilities. In the case of a film like Downpour, where extant materials were either incomplete or irrevocably damaged, the restoration efforts don’t overcompensate with digital manipulation; the film is simply presented in accordance with the technology that produced it. That means, in this case, leaving in the original and, unfortunately, difficult-to-read English subtitles that were burned into the only existing print. But the WCP’s diligent work—1,500 hours according to their own estimates—ensures those moments are few and far between. When negatives are in immaculate condition, as is the case of Lucía and Soleil Ô, the result is a revelation: These 4K transfers are flawlessly assembled and color graded, with Lucía’s image detail especially of note for its depth of field, clarity in close-ups, and sharpness. The 4K transfer of Pixote and After the Curfew are largely pristine, with the colors of the former popping from the frame like the quick bursts of violence that litter the film. Sound is nearly flawless across the transfers; the uncompressed monaural soundtracks are free of pops, cracks, or hisses, and dialogue and music are mixed in accordance with their original filmic properties.

Extras

Given the importance of these restorations, it’s difficult not to be at least a little disappointed with the slim supplements. Each film gets an introduction from Martin Scorsese and an accompanying interview with either a historian, actor, or filmmaker. Scorsese’s intros each clock in at less than three minutes and provide key details about a film’s production and restoration efforts. The interviews that accompany each film are much weightier. Film scholar Charles Ramirez Berg explains how the coming of sound saved Mexican cinema, with Dos Monjes playing a key role in that momentous event. Journalist J.B. Kristano discusses the difficulties of studying Indonesian cinema when there’s hardly a single book on its history. A 2018 interview with Med Hondo delves into the “nonexistent” state of African cinema when he made Soleil Ô. Bahram Beyzaie explains how Downpour was a response to Iranian cinema during the early 1970s, and Héctor Babenco discusses his aversion to academia and how watching films by Yasujirō Ozu and Ingmar Bergman formed his cinematic identity. Finally, instead of an accompanying interview for Lucía, Criterion has included Humberto & Lucía, a 2020 documentary short by Carlos Barba Salva about the film’s production and reception. The box set also comes with a 76-page booklet featuring essays from critics Dennis Lim, Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu, Stephanie Dennison, Elisa Lozano, Aboubakar Sanogo, and Hamid Naficy.

Overall

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project 3 is best approached as a celebration of the hopefully ongoing collaboration between Criterion and the WCP, as the grouping of films here, as with the first two sets, is little more than incidental.

Cast: Víctor Urruchúa, Carlos Villatoro, A.N. Alcaff, Raquel Revuelta, Eslinda Núñez, Adela Legrá, Robert Liensol, Parviz Fanizadeh, Parvaneh Massoumi, Fernando Ramos da Silva, Marília Pêra Director: Juan Bustillo Oro, Usmar Ismail, Humberto Solás, Med Hondo, Bahram Beyzaie, Héctor Babenco Screenwriter: Juan Bustillo Oro, José Manuel Cordero, Asrul Sani, Humberto Solás, Julio García Espinosa, Nelson Rodríguez, Med Hondo, Bahram Beyzaie, Héctor Babenco, Jorge Durán Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 698 min Rating: NR Year: 1934 - 1980 Release Date: September 29, 2020 Buy: Video

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Frederick Wiseman’s 1975 documentary Welfare judiciously details the inner workings of a deeply flawed, woefully underfunded public institution, depicting the overwhelming influx of people who are constantly being forced to jump through hoops by the welfare system. Made just one year prior on the other side of Manhattan, John Berry’s Claudine tells the fictional story of a single mother struggling to meet the basic needs of her family and navigating the demands of that system. Where Welfare highlights the widespread failings of a bureaucracy seemingly designed to stymie most individuals’ attempts to benefit from its services, Claudine examines the rippling effects that those failings have on one family trying to survive in Harlem.

Responding to her new lover, Rupert (James Earl Jones), who’s annoyed that she won’t spend the night with him, Claudine (Diahann Carroll) sarcastically jokes that she might as well be married to “the welfare man,” since that’s who dictates nearly every decision she makes in her life. Going on to articulate her frustrations with the extreme restrictions she’s forced to deal with, she says, “If I can’t feed my kids, it’s child neglect. Go out and get myself a little job on the side…then I’m cheating. If I stay at home, then I’m lazy. You can’t win.” The film sees Claudine caught up in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze in which every door leads to a dead end. Indeed, even the most modest of home improvements are callously tallied against her by the social worker, Miss Kabak (Elisa Loti), who claims that she’s only there “to help.”

Claudine is far from helpless, though, as the film sees her not through the lens of her victimhood, but through her resilience. Her often arduous endeavors are backed by Gladys Knight & the Pips’s rousing soul soundtrack, which was written and produced by Curtis Mayfield and features songs full of biting humor (“Mr. Welfare Man”) and pathos (“Make Yours a Happy Home”) that are straight shots of positivity and compassion. They’re a mirror of this mother’s single-minded determination to carve out a life for her family.

Claudine’s six children crowd their tiny apartment with their own emotional baggage, be it her eldest son Charles’s (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) burgeoning social conscience, her younger son Francis’s (Eric Jones) desire for invisibility, or her teenage daughter Charlene’s (Tamu Blackwell) troubles with booze and boys. This family is perpetually arguing, and while Claudine occasionally spanks her children, her love for them is unwavering.

It’s the thoughtful manner in which Claudine juxtaposes the harshness of existing in a state of poverty with the simple, often fleeting pleasures of life that makes it such a fascinating and unique film. Particularly in the era of its release, when blaxploitation films driven by violence and exaggerated black masculinity were at the height of their popularity, Claudine was a true outlier: a tender and sobering rendition of the African-American experience from a female perspective, grounding the intense love and passion between Claudine and Rupert in a gentleness and vulnerability that wasn’t yet typically afforded to black characters on screen.

The authenticity of the film’s representation of black sexuality stems largely from Carroll and Jones’s dynamic performances and magnetic chemistry. But it’s the film’s refusal to pull any punches and highlight the flaws of its main characters that prevents its somewhat optimistic portrait of black love from tipping into the maudlin. Claudine is a strong, loving mother, but the film doesn’t paint her as an angel. And while Rupert, a garbageman, is patient and sweet with Claudine and her much less-enthused kids, he’s left a trail of ex-wives and estranged children in his wake that speaks to his own troubled past.

The two lovers, in part, embody the most prevalent stereotypes about black men and women in ‘70s America: the welfare queen and the absent father. But Claudine does this knowingly, and in shining such an empathetic light on its main characters, it complicates those stereotypes. The film is ultimately not about individual or systematic morality, but rather pure survival. As with its sunny, upbeat soundtrack, Claudine mines the humor and joy out of life on the fringes of society, making beautiful music out of difficult situations. And it does so without ever minimizing the direness of the social ills that torment its characters on a daily basis.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a new 4K digital restoration, the Criterion Collection’s transfer of Claudine is spectacular, boasting a consistently sharp image while still honoring the film’s gritty, rough-edged aesthetic. The color balancing is particularly impressive, with strong black levels and the wide array of skin tones all staying true to their natural hues. The yellows, browns, and reds that dominate the film’s color palette also really pop off the screen. The smallest of details are vividly rendered, lending the interiors of Claudine’s cramped apartment and her family’s Harlem neighborhood a strikingly tactile quality. Meanwhile, all signs of damage have been removed, and the healthy, even grain distribution ensures that the original filmlike textures are kept intact. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack is crisp, with clean audio even in the more cacophonous scenes full of overlapping dialogue, and the Gladys Knight & the Pips score is captured in all its warmth and sonic depth.

Extras

The audio commentary, recorded in 2003, features filmmaker George Tillman Jr. and a number of the film’s actors, along with Dan Pine, son of the film’s screenwriters, serving as something of a de facto MC. As each individual was recorded separately, there’s a fair amount of dead air throughout the track, but the numerous participants do manage to bring a diverse range of topics and opinions to the table. James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll’s reminisces are the most insightful and amusing, but Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who plays Claudine’s eldest son in the film, also offers some interesting thoughts on the social consciousness of his character and how he saw many of those same concerns reflected in many black teens from his own life.

In another move toward the new normal in Blu-ray supplements, Criterion has again included a Zoom conversation on this disc (the first was on the studio’s recent release of Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve), here between filmmaker Robert Townsend and critic and programmer Ashley Clark. It’s a seamless conversation in which Townsend and Clark express their deep admiration for the film. Townshend in particular loves the film’s sensuality and authenticity, contrasting it with the many blaxploitation films released at the time, in which black male sexuality is much more heightened and sensitivity hidden beneath a veneer of virility.

In another new interview, critic Imogen Sara Smith unpacks director John Berry’s diverse career in film and theater, focusing on his years in France after he was blacklisted, his return to Hollywood in the ‘70s, and his surprising connections to Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Anna Karina, and Jean Seberg. In audio excerpts from a 1974 seminar featuring Carroll, the actress discusses her training with Lee Strasberg, her television work, and the challenges of being a black female actress. The disc also comes with a foldout booklet with a deeply personal, and quite moving, essay by critic Danielle A. Jackson.

Overall

Criterion’s release of Claudine brings much-needed attention to John Berry’s tender portrait of black love and the failures of the welfare system.

Cast: Diahann Carroll, James Earl Jones, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Tamu Blackwell, David Kruger, Yvette Curtis, Eric Jones, Elisa Loti Director: John Berry Screenwriter: Tina Pine, Lester Pine Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 92 min Rating: PG Year: 1974 Release Date: October 13, 2020 Buy: Video

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Jules Dassin’s The Naked City was shot in dozens of locations in New York City, offering a vividly docudramatic sense of routine and place that’s affirmed by Mark Hellinger’s initially intriguing but eventually grating narration. The famed columnist turned producer most memorably identifies different neighborhoods and their interlocking relationships, his voiceover complementing anecdotes that suggest the typical lifecycle of the city before a more traditional plot kicks in. Such specificity is thrilling and unusual even today, as cities like New York and Los Angeles are still too often utilized vaguely as shorthand for cinematic myth-peddling. Spare offices, alternately bustling and desolate streets, harbors, and cramped low-income housing inform this film with a quiet and consistent urgency, illustrating in direct physical terms the class tensions that drive the plot. One can draw a direct line from The Naked City to Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets and On the Waterfront, as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, among others.

The film’s central plot is both revolutionary and sentimental, animated by Hellinger’s desire to translate his folksy columns to the cinema as a celebration of the intertwining infrastructures that comprise New York City as a synecdoche for America. Hellinger’s devotion to this idea allows for details that are now common of police shows and films, as many passages here concern fingerprinting, fabric analysis, and the successes and dead ends that result from interviewing witnesses. However, this sense of specificity doesn’t extend to many of the characters themselves, especially the police, who generally suggest white knights.

The Naked City arrives on Blu-ray alongside Brute Force, Hellinger’s prior collaboration with Dassin, and the films assume fascinatingly different attitudes about social systems, especially law enforcement. Brute Force is set in a corrupt and vicious ecosystem that’s best redeemed, if at all, by revolution, while the police of The Naked City are shown to be a reliable means to a justified end. The hothouse expressionism of Brute Force perfectly suited its attitude and subject, while The Naked City is torn between a radical aesthetic and a tidy theme.

In its emphasis on procedure over character, and on grit as a way to lend verisimilitude to dime-store twists, The Naked City established the template for the seemingly deathless television warhorse Law & Order and its offspring. And The Naked City has the very same limitation as Law & Order, as its fanatical devotion to “the system” squanders the sense of personal obsession and neuroses that drives classic noir and crime films. The film’s inciting incident, the murder of a model named Jean Dexter, is motivated by the usual mixtures of greed and sexual longing that one often expects of the murder mystery genre, but the revelations have no troubling or erotic charge. With one brief exception, Dexter’s absence doesn’t haunt The Naked City as, say, the eponymous victim haunted Otto Preminger’s Laura.

This exception is startling, however, and stands as one of The Naked City’s finest moments. When the investigators leading the case—self-consciously hambone veteran Lt. Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and young buck detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor)—find Dexter’s estranged parents, Mr. and Mrs. Batory (Grover Burgess and Adelaide Klein), the film takes an abrupt and devastating turn into melodrama. The Batorys are small-town folks who resented Dexter’s attraction to the “fast” city, and Mrs. Batory seems particularly steadfast in her assertion that Dexter deserved her fate. When the mother sees the daughter dead at the morgue though, she collapses into tears—an action that Klein invests with agonizing gravity. Here, the film’s structural and technical ambitions are usurped by a scene that frankly acknowledges the tolls of death. Another moment late in the film has a similar intensity, when Halloran finds one of the perpetrators, a stout ex-wrestler, Willy Garzah (Ted de Corsia), hiding out in an apartment so small it casually suggests a cage. De Corsia’s primordial, ravenously embittered energy is unsettling, imbuing the film with authentic suspense while resonantly suggesting how poverty can harden someone in the manner of the prison in Brute Force.

Seen through a contemporary prism, The Naked City is potentially more uncomfortable than it was ever intended to be, as Hellinger’s faith in law and order is charged in an era wracked by existential arguments over the necessity as well as the specific nature of police reform. Halloran and especially Muldoon are fantasies who live to serve and who are decisively troubled by no personal matters or human concerns—charismatic, reassuring ciphers with cute ticks who would influence many future police characters on film and TV alike. Depending on your own political convictions, this fantasy is either poignant, insidiously misleading, or both.

Halloran, Muldoon, and the evil warden of Brute Force are opposing simplifications, then, while the truth of the matter is thornier, unveiled by minute considerations of platform, education, and economic and racial reevaluations that are seemingly impossible to communicate to the mass public, by filmmakers and politicians alike. Yet, The Naked City’s glorious compositions tell their own truth, offering a portrait of a city that’s teeming with honor and evil and decay and beauty, as well as irreconcilable mixtures of all of the above.

Image/Sound

Like the Criterion Collection’s recent transfer of Brute Force, The Naked City boasts a new 4K restoration, culled together from many sources, that looks and sounds superb. As with the Brute Force disc, The Naked City’s image has been rendered with revelatory attention to detail. This transfer is a feast of pristine and revealing cityscapes and architecture. Gradations of light and shadow are nuanced and wide-ranging, from the rising sunlight that illuminates a harbor at the cusp of dawn, to the shrill overhead lighting of various office buildings, to the darkness that shrouds the streets at night. Fabric and facial details are also exacting, and the grain here is generally quite healthy, allowing of course for the fluctuations that come with shooting on the fly in an unpredictable environment. The monaural soundtrack is similarly sturdy, and the score by Miklós Rózsa and Frank Skinner has never sounded lusher.

Extras

The archive commentary from 1996 featuring screenwriter Malvin Wald, who wrote the story that inspired The Naked City, focuses on the film’s legacy, particularly how it influenced various TV shows and initiated the “buddy cop” template. Wald also shares compelling inside anecdotes on the film’s production, such as actor Barry Fitzgerald’s suspicion that he couldn’t play a police detective because he wasn’t a Humphrey Bogart type.

In the first of two archive interviews from 2006, film professor Dana Polan offers the best criticism to be found in these extras, suggesting that The Naked City’s “blandness” is a direct response to the existential crises facing many men who returned from World War II only to feel like anonymous cogs in machines. The film, per Polan, celebrates working-class life as part of an ongoing, beneficial social project, which would become a trait of police procedurals and distinguish them from the fear and social chaos the typically govern the film noir. In the second interview, author James Sanders analyzes the use of New York in The Naked City, which includes over 100 locations, most audaciously a morgue and the Williamsburg bridge.

In another archive supplement shot at the Los Angeles County Museum in 2004, filmmaker Jules Dassin discusses his illustrious career, including his work with journalist Mark Hellinger. In the disc’s liner notes are a terrific article by Luc Sante, discussing the differing voices of Hellinger and Dassin, as well as correspondence by Hellinger himself on The Naked City’s climactic chase sequence. A stills gallery rounds out a package that practically screams for updated material, especially in an age fraught with talk of police reform.

Overall

Criterion has outfitted this seminal but somewhat outdated crime film with a beautiful transfer, as well as supplements that could use an uplift.

Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Frank Conroy, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, Anne Sargent Director: Jules Dassin Screenwriter: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 1948 Release Date: September 8, 2020 Buy: Video

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Maverick Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky first came to prominence in Paris in the 1960s, where he co-founded the Panic Movement, a performance art collective inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, alongside Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor. Their provocative public performances were part secular ritual, part intentional scandal, replete with copious nudity and blasphemous religious imagery (elements not entirely lacking in Jodorowsky’s later films). Working in Mexico in 1968, Jodorowsky filmed Arrabal’s deliriously dystopian play Fando y Lis using only a one-page script and his memory of the stage production. The majority of the film consists of Fando (Sergio Kleiner) leading crippled Lis (Diana Mariscal), who’s largely confined to a pushcart, across a postapocalyptic landscape, seemingly populated by an endless parade of assorted grotesques, in search of the mythical city of Tar.

As with most of Jodorowsky’s films, Fando y Lis fuses elements of broad social commentary and a deep concern for spiritual illumination. The former can be detected most obviously in a matched pair of flashbacks that illustrate the eponymous couple’s traumatic childhood experiences: Lis is assaulted by a gaggle of degenerate aristos, while Fando witnesses his mother’s fatal denunciation of his father as a political radical. It’s a critique that’s later deployed in a more succinctly surreal fashion with the image of woman in formal attire playing a piano that’s on fire. The more spiritual aspects in Jodorowsky’s works are almost always depicted through a symbolic death and rebirth, never more literally than in this film.

Singlehandedly inaugurating the midnight-movie craze upon its release in 1970, El Topo combines the arid landscapes and ultraviolent showdowns of the Italian western with the dogged quest for spiritual illumination that’s at the heart of King Hu’s Touch of Zen. Clad in a black leather ensemble inspired by Elvis Presley’s televised concert from 1968, Jodorowsky himself plays the eponymous gunslinger, first seen instructing his naked son (Brontis Jodorowsky) in the fine art of putting away childish things by burying them in the sand. Despite plenty of bizarro flourishes, the first part of the film is its most conventional. El Topo tracks down a dissolute Colonel (David Silva) behind the brutal massacre of an entire village. What transpires wouldn’t be out of place in a film like Sergio Corbucci’s Django.

After retribution has been assured, the film enters upon a more abstract phase. El Topo faces off against four masters of the gun, each of whom embodies a different philosophical or spiritual path. The exchanges between El Topo and these gurus is often leavened with off-kilter humor and visual details: There’s a Zen meditation involving freshly laid eggs and a corral that encloses dozens of white rabbits, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland being the obvious referent. The final part of the film brings things full circle. Now doing duty as a shaven-headed monk, El Topo enters a desert town, hoping to be of some service, only to find the place entirely given over to exploitation, cruelty, and corruption. The finale doubles down on the brutality of the opening. Moving beyond failure and the death of the ego, Jodorowsky leaves things wide open for a new beginning of sorts (not to mention a sequel).

Given free rein after the international success of El Topo, Jodorowsky’s follow-up was 1973’s The Holy Mountain, a hallucinatory allegory about the quest for enlightenment that delves even further into the mystical ideas and occult symbolism of the earlier films. The Holy Mountain encompasses a heady brew of Eastern and Western thought: alchemy, tarot, the Kabbalah, and especially Zen Buddhism. Viewed superficially, the film might seem like an almost random assembly of visual and symbolic non sequiturs. But there’s method in Jodorowsky’s psychotronic madness, and anyone with half an interest in these matters doubtless will have their mind blown by the bold colors, striking set design, and surreal imagery alone. The unforgettable score by Jodorowsky and jazz trumpeter Don Cherry just lends a further, suitably psychedelic haze to the proceedings.

The film’s first act addresses the woes of modern civilization, from student massacres to religious hypocrisy. The second introduces nine personality types, each astrologically associated with a different planet, and proceeds to explore their principal predispositions in a series of often amusing blackout gags. After the deliberate artificiality of the first two sections, the film’s final act almost morphs into a verité documentary that follows the group of seekers, led by the Alchemist (Jodorowsky), as they make their way up the sacred mountain. In the end, Jodorowsky goes meta by turning the camera back on the very act of filmmaking. It’s a narrative conceit that has been done before and since, but rarely does it pack both the symbolic logic and narrative punch that closes The Holy Mountain.

In his first-ever documentary, Psychomagic, a Healing Art, Jodorowsky, near 90 at the time of filming, offers up a moving, visually striking exploration of the unconventional psychotherapeutic techniques that he’s developed over a lifetime spent reading tarot cards and studying various psychological systems and an astonishing variety of Eastern and Western spiritual practices. The film is effectively a daisy chain of individual interventions that seem to vary in format only slightly from case to case. After a brief introduction, during which Jodorowsky lays out the major tenets of his technique, we witness a selection of individual case histories. He recommends a course of treatment, a sort of symbolic activity that seems pitched somewhere between ritual and performance art. Then a follow-up interview permits the participants (some of them couples) to describe the therapy’s impact on their lives.

These episodes are often intercut with a similar moment from one of Jodorowsky’s earlier films—from El Topo and The Holy Mountain to his more recent self-reflexive and semi-autobiographical films, The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry—as though to emphasize the continuity of his vision from narrative cinema to documentary. Where the earlier films show Jodorowsky arriving at private rituals and symbolic acts to deal with his own issues, Psychomagic expands his sphere of influence to include men and women who find themselves in a cul-de-sac of existential distress. Whether or not the 91-year-old director makes another film, this documentary could easily stand as a compassionate encapsulation of the themes of suffering and transcendence that have run through his entire career.

Image/Sound

Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain are presented in new 4K restorations, and each looks pretty spectacular, marking a significant improvement not only over Anchor Bay’s 2007 DVD editions, but also over the individual Blu-ray releases of El Topo and The Holy Mountain from 2011. The monochrome Fando y Lis boasts deeper blacks and greater clarity of fine detail than ever before on home video. El Topo is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen for the first time ever, an aspect ratio meant as homage to Sergio Leone. It’s also available in the more familiar 1.37:1 full frame format, and (presented as an extra) in a separate English dub that’s also full frame. The widescreen format does lend a more epic feel to scenes of wholesale carnage and shots of sprawling desert vistas, though the framing of tighter shots can get a bit cramped. With The Holy Mountain, those psychedelic colors appear more deeply saturated, and grain levels look well-regulated. Considering its digital production and incorporation of various AV formats, Psychomagic, a Healing Art looks perfectly acceptable.

On the audio side, Fando y Lis is available in Spanish LPCM mono, which does a fine job of supporting the protean score and ambient sound effects. El Topo comes with both Spanish Master Audio mono and surround (as well as the aforementioned English dub in Master Audio mono). The 5.1 surround mix nicely opens up the already solid mono track, lending some depth to Jodorowsky’s hallucinatory score. The Holy Mountain has both English Master Audio mono and surround tracks, both of which do well by the outlandish psych score from Jodorowsky and Don Cherry. Psychomagic offers an English Master Audio surround mix, which gives some decent channelization to whatever bits of music may arise.

Extras

Each of the films comes in its own jewel case, all housed in a slipcase box, alongside a foldout two-sided poster, and a lavishly illustrated 78-page book replete with cast and crew information, essays on each film, a 1973 interview with Jodorowsky, and other ephemera. The El Topo and The Holy Mountain cases each contain a soundtrack CD. On their respective discs, the first three films come with an introduction from film scholar Richard Peña, a 2019 interview with Jodorowsky reminiscing about the film, and an archival commentary track from Jodorowsky. Taken together, these bonus materials constitute a master class in Jodorowsky’s early work, full of information about every aspect of the films from creation to reception, with particular emphasis on the occult and spiritual symbolism that runs rife throughout.

The Fando y Lis case holds six double-sided art cards: one side with images from El Topo, the other with ones from The Holy Mountain. The Blu-ray itself includes La Cravate, an early short film from 1957, based on a Thomas Mann novella, and told entirely in mime. It’s a colorful and charming tale of identity and loss and love. The feature-length documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky from 1994 features interviews with collaborators Fernando Arrabal and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, who worked with Jodorowsky on the aborted Dune project as well as numerous graphic novels. There’s some fascinating footage of a Panic Movement performance art piece, and a lengthy segment where Jodorowsky performs an early version of his “psychogenealogy” technique on the documentarian himself.

The El Topo disc has a recent interview with Brontis Jodorowsky, who appears in the film as the eponymous character’s naked son. He talks about meeting his father for the first time under circumstances that both mirror and diverge from incidents in the film, and gives an intriguing reading of El Topo and The Holy Mountain as spiritual companion pieces. A short archival interview with Jodorowsky from 2007 touches on the phenomenon of the midnight-movie craze inaugurated by screenings of El Topo at New York’s Elgin Theater in 1970.

The Holy Mountain Blu-ray has an occasionally emotional interview with Pablo Leder, who worked for Jodorowsky as both cast and crew member on several films. He offers some fascinating (and one or two pretty amusing) anecdotes about Jodorowsky’s on-set antics. “The A to Z of The Holy Mountain,” a video essay from Ben Cobb, provides an abecedarian assemblage of random tidbits about the film that range from Penthouse interviews to a recipe for your very own edible Jesus statue. Finally, there are five minutes’ worth of deleted scenes with commentary from Jodorowsky, including a brief look at an alternate ending, followed by nearly half an hour of silent outtakes billed as “newly discovered.”

Overall

Diving headfirst into ABKCO’s gorgeously assembled box set is bound to be a mind-altering experience for Jodorowsky fans and novices alike.

Cast: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal, Brontis Jodorowsky, Alfonso Arau, Mara Lorenzio, Paula Romo, David Silva, Agustín Isunza, Horacio Salinas, Ramona Saunders, Juan Ferrera, Adriana Page, Burt Kleiner, Valerie Jodorowsky, Nicky Nichols, Richard Rutkowski, Luis Lomeli Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky Screenwriter: Alejandro Jodorowsky Distributor: ABKCO Films Running Time: 432 min Rating: NR Year: 1968 - 2019 Release Date: September 18, 2020 Buy: Video

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For all the ink spilt extolling the innovations of Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight—the remarkably quicksilver visuals, the classy theatrical leaps of faith, the devil-may-care optimism—the film’s most astonishing feat is the vulnerable and charming performances that the director finesses from Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. The former, who had become a star largely on the strength of his willingness to pimp out a ludicrously guttural patois Françoise in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (one of many pairings with MacDonald), plays the role of a sweet-natured Parisian tailor, Maurice Courtelin, with far fewer garish expostulations than usual. Courtelin’s consistently dire financial situation also puts him on an even keel with the then-contemporary Depression-era audiences; no longer was Chevalier the mysterious-if-gregarious “other,” but a member of the proletariat just like everyone else. And MacDonald, who probably died wishing she could’ve widened her already ample tremolo a bit more, doesn’t so much change her approach to singing but is for once blessed with a character whose unfeasible romantic ideals are met with a touch of scorn (contrast this with her portrayal of the holier-than-thou Mary in San Francisco).

Love Me Tonight opens early one morning in Paris. A few workers step out into the street and begin pounding away at the concrete. This is the foundational beat. Eventually, shopkeepers emerge to sweep away dust from the sidewalk, supplying a counterpoint to the construction worker’s pulse. Housewives open their windows to shake out rugs, adding to the rising symphony of musique concrete. By the time Chevalier looks out his window to exclaim “this city is too noisy for me,” Mamoulian’s daring orchestration of “The Song of Paree” has taken the world of sound films light years beyond what was largely considered acceptable in the “talk into the plant” era of early talkies. (It has also predicted the funky fresh street rhythms of the percussive physical theatre troupe Stomp by roughly 65 years.) And it’s only the first sublime moment in a film that tiptoes lighter than air for its entire running time.

Mamoulian, who had been a fantastically successful theater director in New York, was wooed by Hollywood to make his first film, Applause, in 1929. This pre-Code film won rave reviews from urban critics for its audacious angles and then-unparalleled sleazy atmosphere (sadly, the film was only in theaters for a few weeks before the stock market crash turned audiences off downers for nearly a decade). But half of the credit for the success of the film needs to go to Helen Morgan’s ferociously unbridled, Greek-like tragic performance as the long-past-her-prime performer. Plot-wise, Applause is little more than an early incarnation of the sinful maternal-sacrifice films that would flourish during the Depression; Morgan’s full-tilt blitzkrieg of self-pity while left forgotten and alone in her apartment brings to mind Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-nominated tour de force in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (both got to wear fright-wigs). Practically as flamboyant was Mamoulian’s camera, which prowled every which way to mirror the brassy mise-en-scène. By the time he had established himself as a flashy purveyor of urban horror—Applause, City Streets, and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde—Mamoulian’s next move could scarcely have been less predictable.

Love Me Tonight’s Maurice Courtelin, who like everyone else in Paris owes everybody a little bit of money, has his best employees working overtime on a full suit of clothes for the wealthy Gilbert (a daft Charlie Ruggles), nephew of the wealthy Duke D’Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith). When Courtelin finds out that Gilbert’s allowance from the duke has been put on permanent suspension, he sets out to the family’s manor to collect his due. Along they way, he meets MacDonald’s beautiful and lovesick Princess Jeanette (the two had previously connected indirectly in a showstopping montage wherein the song “Isn’t It Romantic?” travels from Maurice’s shop through cabs, trains, military regiments, and gypsy bands to the countryside manor). Amid a gaggle of rich eccentrics—Myrna Loy’s nymphomaniac Countess Valentine; a trio of aunts who, though introduced as an oddball parody of MacBeth’s witches, turn out to be an innocuous flock of hysteria-prone biddies—Maurice pretends to be of royal blood so as to make himself welcome at the mansion and thereby initiate the game of love.

Though set pieces in Love Me Tonight are as abundant as they were in Mamoulian’s earlier films, their frothiness (and the acknowledgement of the diversion-based nature of the plot) allows them to snuggle into the fabric of the film in a much less stilted manor than Applause. The spirit of experimentalism didn’t escape the famed Broadway composer-lyricist team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart either. They supply the festivities with a full slate of witty, cheeky tunes that are as willfully facetious (“Mimi”) as they are heavily meta (on the artifice of the musical comedy, much in the same way as the more renowned Singin’ in the Rain).

Clever double entendres add to the fun, as when the princess sings “Lover” as she drives a coach and at the end of each verse yells an otherwise randy lyric as an aside to her horse: “You and I will roll in the…Hey!” Later in the film, she and Courtelin hear the titular duet in their sleep, and Mamoulian uses a split-screen effect to give the appearance that the two are lying side by side, post-coitus (predating a similar sequence in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante). Love Me Tonight still stands as a definitive musical because, aside from the filmmaking wonders Mamoulian conjured, it conveys one universal truth to the musical genre: that there’s no better motivation for breaking out into song than to express sexual satisfaction.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a new 4K master, Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray is an improvement over their spiffy 2003 DVD edition. The images are stable throughout, maximizing the textures of the medium-contrast cinematography; details are quite visible even across exceptionally bright scenes, and the black levels are deep and artifact-free. Only a few instances of print debris and scratches can be seen in an otherwise immaculate transfer. The soundtrack cleanly balances the boisterous score with the dialogue and singing. Only the tinny quality inherent to early sound films dates the audio, but the film’s busy soundtrack has never sounded as full as it does here.

Extras

On his commentary track, film historian Miles Kreuger is prone to pauses and dry summarizing, but he provides interesting information about the film’s productions and the careers of the cast and crew. Clips of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald singing songs from the film are included, as are screenplay excerpts of scenes that were deleted prior to shooting. There’s also a gallery of various production stills and documents, along with fascinating notes submitted to Paramount from the then-new Hays Office that show just how much of the film’s blatant innuendo is the product of incessant revisions and censorship that masked even more explicit content as was originally written.

Overall

Rouben Mamoulian’s antic musical is one of the first great comedies of the talkie era, and an exceptional new transfer highlights its aesthetic charms.

Cast: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Myrna Loy, Charles Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, C. Aubrey Smith, Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies, Joseph Cawthorn, Robert Greig, Bert Roach, Blanche Friderici Director: Rouben Mamoulian Screenwriter: Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young, George Marion Jr. Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 89 min Rating: NR Year: 1932 Release Date: September 29, 2020 Buy: Video

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Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo begins in the wake of the Axis capture of Tobruk, with Corporal John J. Bramble (Franchot Tone), the lone survivor of an attack on his unit’s tank, stumbling through the Sahara Desert before arriving at the Empress of Britain. The bombed-out hotel functions, not unlike Rick’s Cafe in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, as an essential gathering place for soldiers and civilians from various warring nations in the midst of World War II. The confluence of cultures and ideologies that define this place is well-suited to Wilder’s cosmopolitan sensibilities, and he and frequent co-writer Charles Brackett lend the clashes that ensue between the film’s characters a delightfully black humor, bringing levity to dire circumstances without undercutting their significance.

France is represented by the prickly Mouche (Anne Baxter), a chambermaid who fled her Nazi-controlled homeland and holds a grudge against the British for presumably abandoning her brothers in Dunkirk. Italy’s kowtowing to the Hitler is mirrored in the buffoonish, opera-singing General Sebastiano (Fortunio Bonanova), a mistreated guest of the Germans, while the Arabs of North Africa are signified by the skittish hotel manager, Farid (Akim Tamiroff). As for the ruthless Nazi Germans, the sneering, sinewy Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), who leads a Nazi brigade to take control of Northern Africa, is certainly a prototypical representative of the group. And while Bramble emerges as the film’s protagonist—as he assumes the identity of the hotel’s deceased, club-footed waiter, Davos, only to learn that the man was also a German spy—it’s von Stroheim who steals every scene he’s in.

Adorned in tightly fitting, white military regalia, and sporting a cocked cap and a bullwhip cum flyswatter, von Stroheim essentially reprises his role as the suave, arrogant officer from his 1922 silent-era masterpiece Foolish Wives. Rommel’s deadpan antics aren’t only amusing, they also speak to the nascent weaknesses that arise from his unwavering belief in the superiority of his race and nationality. “Of course. Nobody hates the Germans,” the field marshal blurts out at one point, and in such a blasé tone that it’s clear just how genuinely he believes the sentiment. It’s an ironic counterpoint to the fact that nearly every non-German in the film is secretly conspiring against him, but von Stroheim sells the man’s hubris with such gusto that the moment is simultaneously authentic and funny.

Five Graves to Cairo, though, is first and foremost an espionage thriller, and it spends much of its 96-minute running time ramping up white-knuckle tension as Bramble, with the help of Mouche and Farid, seeks to uncover how Rommel is able to secretly access fuel and other supplies so quickly out in the middle of the desert. Elements of maudlin and familiar wartime woes creep into the plot from time to time, but Wilder and Brackett coyly acknowledge their disdain for sentimentality when Rommel quips, “A familiar scene, reminiscent of bad melodrama,” after Mouche pleads with him to save her brother who has been taken captive by the Germans. In lieu of directly depicting Nazi depravity, moments like this exemplify Wilder’s tendency to deploy his acerbic wit as a means of attacking fascism at its ideological core.

Throughout, the film intriguingly airs the notion that war necessitates deception, which is evident in everything from Bramble’s masquerading as Davos to multiple outwardly amiable interactions between the Allied and Axis forces. There’s more than a hint of Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion here, but the gentlemanly displays of respect in Five Graves to Cairo are secretly laced with poison, and the filmmakers are particularly attentive to the subtle manipulations and duplicity that every character engages in.

Though Wilder resists the more saccharine and idealistic leanings of wartime propaganda, Five Graves to Cairo isn’t immune to them in the end. His celebration of the importance of fighting for the greater, rather than individual, good is laudable, which makes it all the more unfortunate that this stretch of the film feels so hopelessly tacked on, implementing on-screen text and generic wartime montages before returning to one final scene where Wilder uncharacteristically tugs hard at the heartstrings. It’s certainly not as egregiously jingoistic as many other Hollywood films made during the war years, but it’s a disruptive tonal and stylistic shift that mars what’s otherwise a taut, and often sharp, wartime thriller.

Image/Sound

Sourced from a brand new 4K master, newer even then the one used for Eureka’s recent release, Kino’s transfer is simply stunning, with a consistently sharp, richly detailed image that’s free of all signs of debris. Ample and evenly distributed grain helps preserve the original film-like texture of the 35mm print, while the high contrast ratio produces inky blacks and an impressive range of grays, which go a long way to highlighting John F. Seitz’s moody cinematography. The DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is well balanced, capturing the full depth of Miklós Rózsa’s rousing score and sporting perfectly clean dialogue.

Extras

Film historian Joseph McBride’s audio commentary is the only extra feature here. He provides a fairly comprehensive reading of the film and Wilder’s career, including how the death of the director’s mother during the Holocaust colored his representation of World War II in Five Graves to Cairo. Of particular interest is McBride’s focus on the multiculturalism in much of Wilder’s work, and how his recurring fascination with deception stemmed in part from his need to blend in as a European exile in Hollywood. Ample time is also spent covering Wilder’s work under both Mitchell Leisen and Ernst Lubitsch, which helped to develop his skill at melding comedy and drama. McBride also makes a compelling case in challenging Wilder’s reputation as a misogynist and digresses into a humorous and lengthy dragging of Bosley Crowther, whose 1943 review of Five Graves to Cairo for New York Times he uses to highlight the critical misunderstanding of the film when it was first released.

Overall

Kino’s release Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo boasts a gorgeous transfer and an illuminating audio commentary track by Joseph McBride.

Cast: Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, Erich von Stroheim, Peter van Eyck, Fortunio Bonanova, Leslie Denison, Ian Keith, Miles Mander Director: Billy Wilder Screenwriter: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett Distributor: Kino Lorber Studio Classics Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 1943 Release Date: September 29, 2020 Buy: Video

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Jules Dassin’s Brute Force scrambles the trajectory of the traditional noir film, which is often driven by lust and the fear of downfall. By contrast, this seminal 1947 production is set in a prison and features characters who are already paying for their indiscretions. Rather than standing front-and-center as individualistic antiheroes, they co-exist collectively as a rogues’ gallery of convicts, with occasional flashbacks that offer several ostensible noir narratives in miniature, in which the men break the law for glamour, money and women, or take risks for more noble measures—differing actions which all lead to a cramped cell with unlikely parole or escape. Brute Force is driven less by fear than by resignation and stasis, which collectively threaten to ignite wrath.

This wrath has another ingredient: the hypocrisy of the prison and society at large, which favors, as in real life, the proletariat sector for punishment. The enforcer of this prison, Chief Munsey (Hume Cronyn), pits the prisoners against one another so that he may hurt them for acting out according to his manipulations. He’s an overcompensating sadist, a small man with a Napoleon complex, which is pitilessly underscored in an early image that contrasts Munsey with Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster), a supernaturally statuesque prisoner. As Munsey taunts Collins in the prison yard, it’s obscenely obvious that Munsey’s Nazi-esque uniform is all that allows him to threaten his prey without retaliation. Society trumps natural selection in this case, and no one is more alert to this irony than Munsey, who revels in the role reversal. It’s the craving for such power that drove him to the prison industry to begin with, as a good-hearted, drunken doctor, Walters (Art Smith), poignantly insists late in the film.

Munsey might not be the warden, whom the filmmakers also despise, but he’s the prototype for many cinematic wardens, who are usually portrayed in American prison films as cowardly politicians with a bloodlust they gratify from afar, via their henchmen. By contrast, Munsey isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty—a tendency that gives him stature even if the character is contemptible. Munsey’s essentially understood to be a member of the proletariat himself, though he’s cannier than the protagonists and ruthless about ascending the social ladder. Dassin, the famed producer and journalist Mark Hellinger, and screenwriter Richard Brooks were all leftists, and they project onto Munsey their resentments of the authoritarian societies that were recently quashed in World War II (in which they served), and which were then rising in the United States in the form of various hard-right anticommunist measures. (Dassin was blacklisted in 1949 during the production of Night and the City.)

Though the politics of Brute Force can seem pat now, the notion of a prison as a corrosive extension of a corrupt society packed considerable heat, especially given production codes that forbade criticism of authority. Yes, Brute Force has a sentimentality that seems to be baked into the prison genre, and to the point that you may find yourself asking: Couldn’t just one of the prisoners have committed an authentically awful crime that challenged the filmmakers’ ideology? But the film’s sense of place, of violence, and of profound bitterness remain unshakable, even compared to the many modern productions that it has clearly inspired.

Dassin’s direction is terse, compact, and matter of fact. The geometry of the prison, the passage of time, and the gradations of power among the prisoners and guards are established via elegant long takes, and much of the film is an ongoing feast of close-ups and bodies, crouched among one another, that suggest some uncanny fusion of realism and cubism. Dassin captures both the constriction of this life and the weird comfort that the prisoners must find in order to function, especially in the shots of Collins and his fellow cellmates hunched over a card game while plotting escape. And while his methods are more severe, one can imagine Robert Bresson drawing on this film’s iconography for his extraordinary A Man Escaped.

Collins and his men aren’t entirely soft-soaped either, as they kill one of Munsey’s informers with surprising mercilessness in a set piece that’s staged by Dassin with an unsettling mixture of expressionism and docudramatic flair. The setting of the killing is a prison factory, and the sounds of metal pounding metal are symphonic, suggesting a death dirge. A distraction is staged, drawing the guards, while Collins’s friends stalk the man with blowtorches until he falls into a machine press. At that moment, they embrace the lure of dehumanized mass power—of the fascism that also intoxicates Munsey and his men.

This lure is also evident when Munsey beats a man unconscious with a phallic club, explicitly deriving sexual pleasure from his power. Dehumanization, even if it’s more understandable, also figures into the film’s even more violent climax, as the prisoners revolt against Munsey and his collaborators, moving in enraged, geometric waves that echo the corridors of their hell. Munsey mans a machine gun on top of the central tower of the prison, finally asserting his latent will to kill openly, even while his power goes up in literal flames. It’s difficult to find imagery of such comparably brutal, resonant, graphic power in other Hollywood films of this time—Howard Hawks’s Scarface might come closest—and the mixture of blunt savagery and symbolic suggestion retains a nightmarish pull. These images transcend any singular theme to tap the subconscious fears of oppression and subsequent destabilization that rise to the forefront of the mind, especially as society flirts again with fascism.

Image/Sound

As text at the beginning of the film and in the liner notes inform us, the new 4K digital restoration of Brute Force used elements from multiple sources, “primarily a 35mm nitrate fine-grain master positive from the British Film Institute and a safety duplicate negative.” The results are very impressive, especially in terms of image depth, which is of intrinsic importance to a film concerned with establishing a sense of confinement. The floors, walls, and bars of the prison really pop here. Facial details and postures are also superbly rendered, and are equally invaluable in conveying character relationships, reflecting Jules Dassin’s intense interest in actors and propensity for fashioning direct and pared imagery. (The blacks, especially shadows, are also quite sharp.) The monaural soundtrack is generally detailed and healthy, particularly supporting the many subtle diegetic sounds that establish the drudgery of the prison’s work details, such as the machine pressing factory and the drain pipe.

Extras

These supplements are all archival, though they still provide valuable context on the creation on reception of Brute Force. Most valuable is the audio commentary by film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver, coauthors of The Film Noir Reader and The Noir Style, that was recorded for the 2007 Criterion Collection DVD of the film. Ursini and Silver offer a general overview of the careers of Dassin and especially of producer-journalist Mark Hellinger, who was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers and hired by Warner Bros. and later Universal Pictures to bring his voice to a variety of projects, including Robert Siodmak’s The Killers and Dassin’s subsequent The Naked City, the latter of which he narrated.

The commentary also covers Hellinger’s leftist politics, which were shared by Dassin, who co-founded the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, which included Brute Force actor Hume Cronyn and many other performers who appeared in the film. These politics would get many of these artists in trouble as anti-communist fervor gripped the country, both with the government and, in the case of Brute Force, with Joseph Breen, the head of Motion Picture Association of American Production Code, who objected to the film’s violence and anti-authoritarianism. Some of the letters between Hellinger and Breen, whose passive-aggression chillingly parallels the behavior of Brute Force’s chief villain, are included in the disc’s liner notes.

In another featurette, produced in 2006, criminologist Paul Mason discusses the tropes of prison movies while alluding to the relationship between the media and the prison complex in real life—an idea that could’ve been plumbed at greater length. In an episode from the Criterion Channel series Observations on Film Art, film theorist and historian David Bordwell compares the various acting styles on display in Brute Force, complementing some of the thoughts that Ursini and Silver proffer in their commentary. The theatrical trailer, a stills gallery, an essay by film critic Michael Atkinson, and an archive Saturday Evening Post profile of Hellinger round out the package. Atkinson’s discussion of the meaning of noir in our society is a must-read with several unforgettable sentiments, such as “the American dream as such is a tissue of propaganda, a lie invented for crowd control.”

Overall

The supplements may not be new, but they’re still meaty, and the 4K restoration accentuates the brutal, beautiful punch of an essential noir.

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne de Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines, Anita Colby, Howard Duff Director: Jules Dassin Screenwriter: Richard Brooks Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 98 min Rating: NR Year: 1947 Release Date: September 8, 2020 Buy: Video

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The indomitable mystique of Audrey Hepburn captured international attention almost immediately following the release of William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. By a stroke of good luck, genius, or, more likely, some alchemical combination of the two, the 1953 classic plays surprisingly well as a whimsical deconstruction of the Hepburn persona even as that persona was only just entering its gestation period.

In its opening scene, the film announces its fascination with the conflicts that arise between a star’s public persona and their internal desires. The star in this case is the young and beautiful Princess Ann (Hepburn), who, during one of many stops on an international diplomatic tour on behalf of her unnamed European homeland, stands upright and displays an impassive expression across her face, politely greeting a seemingly endless line of world leaders. Her decorous nature carries with it an air of nobility, and draped in a lavish white gown, she looks more like a porcelain figurine than a red-blooded woman.

That Hepburn was also descended from royalty—her mother, Ella van Heemstra, was a Dutch baroness—only further connects her to the character she plays on screen. And as Wyler peels back the veneer of Ann’s built-up façade to reveal the humanity beneath, it feels as if we’re seeing Hepburn herself cutting loose. In a perfectly naughty move worthy of Lubitsch, Wyler cuts from a wide shot of Ann steadfastly giving off the appearance of perfection to a close-up under her dress where she scratches one of her feet with the other. It’s a succinct summation of the princess’s struggle to balance her internal needs and desires with the external demands constantly thrust upon her. Not unlike Hepburn when she became one of the world’s foremost fashionistas, you don’t see a single chink in Anne’s composure.

Once Ann sneaks out of her country’s embassy after being injected with a sedative, she ends up spending the night at the crummy apartment of Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck). Their free-spirited tour of Rome the next day engages in that familiar rom-com trope where neither of them wants to reveal their true self to the other: Joe plays it cool, never telling her he’s a beat reporter out for a story, while Ann keeps her royal background under wraps, enjoying her newfound anonymity. It’s a screwball scenario that banks successfully on the charisma and chemistry of the film’s two leads. Hepburn is particularly impressive, often tapping into deep wells of emotion through subtle shifts in facial expression and body movements.

As Ann and Joe jet around Rome aboard that now-iconic Vespa scooter, Roman Holiday revels in the beauty of the city, with the film’s long takes and deep-focus photography savoring everything from the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps to, in a scene that finds Hepburn and Peck at a pinnacle of charisma, the Mouth of Truth. The film may seem at first glance to be a trifle, but as Ann gradually realizes that her aristocratic responsibilities are inescapable, Joe and the princess’s adventures are retroactively endowed with emotional gravitas.

In the homestretch, Wyler wisely eschews sentimentality. As Ann, aloof and imperial, gazes down at Joe, who’s up front in a crowded press box, their eyes connect, and a brief shift in each of their facial expressions acknowledges the secret of their day together. Here, Wyler nimbly employs deep focus in a medium profile shot in which Joe and a group of other journalists patiently wait as the princess makes her way down the line to shake their hands. And in contrast to the film’s opening, it’s Joe who must keep up appearances, fighting to keep his feelings in check as he bids the princess adieu. It’s a sly way to signify Joe’s understanding of the woman who less than 24 hours earlier he was looking to exploit for a scoop.

Image/Sound

Remastered from a 4K film transfer for its first release on Blu-ray, Roman Holiday has never looked better. The image on the disc is remarkably sharp, allowing for even minute details deep in the frame to be perfectly visible, and the extremely high contrast ratio makes for a pleasing range of grays that only further add to the transfer’s beauty. There could stand to be a bit more grain, as the picture occasionally looks a bit too cleaned up, but the distribution is even. The audio is also quite strong across the board, with clean dialogue and the layered background sounds of a bustling Rome are perfectly balanced into the mix.

Extras

Most of the extras here are fairly cursory, never really digging too deep into the pre-production and making of the film. The 12-minute Dalton Trumbo: From A-list to Blacklist offers a brief yet judicious summary of the Hollywood blacklist and the nefarious tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Many of the other extras—focusing on everything from the film’s costumes and shooting locations to Audrey Hepburn’s seven films with Paramount and the studio’s overall output during the 1950s—all bear the strong imprint of Paramount’s involvement, and are as such geared less toward providing insightful revelations about the film and more toward propping up the studio’s accomplishments. Finally, Leonard Maltin provides a short intro in which he gushes over the film and its charming actors.

Overall

William Wyler’s Roman Holiday lands on Blu-ray for the first time, and this is sure to be the definitive transfer of the film for years to come.

Cast: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power, Harcourt Williams, Margaret Rawlings, Tullio Carminati, Paolo carlini, Claudio Ermelli Director: William Wyler Screenwriter: Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton, Dalton Trumbo Distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment Running Time: 118 min Rating: 1953 Year: 1953 Release Date: September 15, 2020 Buy: Video

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Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela picks up where Horse Money left off: immersed in a realm of suppressed memory and collective trauma. The film’s first image, of an alleyway lined by looming stone walls, cross-shaped gravestones dotting the upper right wall as a funeral procession silently emerges from the background shadows, renders a real street as a kind of military trench. The shot looks like something out of a post-World War I silent film, epitomizing Costa’s uncanny ability to balance realism and stylization.

The oneiric atmosphere of the film’s opening minutes is shattered, though, by the deafening roar of a jet engine heralding the arrival of Vitalina (Vitalina Varela) from Cape Verde. Costa frames her disembarkment as a series of contrasting images, such as her bare, calloused feet walking down the metal steps of the commercial airliner. Vitalina’s greeting party, such as it is, consists of several Cape Verdean immigrants who work custodial jobs at the Lisbon airport. The women, arranged artfully around Vitalina and offering stern warnings that she should return to Cape Verde rather than suffer the indignities of life in Portugal, bring to mind the three witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth for the way they ominously portend doom.

The reasons for their grim tidings are apparent enough to Vitalina even before she leaves the tarmac. Having long dreamed of moving to Portugal after her husband, Joaquim, left Cape Verde for Lisbon decades ago to establish himself there before sending for her, Vitalina arrives now only for his funeral. Joaquim’s squalid home makes clear that he never could have supported Vitalina in Portugal, and she wonders aloud why he chose to live in such conditions instead of returning home. Vitalina, like everyone else in Costa’s films, speaks in a declamatory fashion that brings to mind the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. But Vitalina’s long reflections on her thwarted dreams and her husband’s broken promises and lack of fidelity, drawn from some of the real Varela’s experiences, are shot through with tremors of suppressed rage and anguish that are rare across Costa’s calculatingly stoic filmography. The director has gotten some incredible performances from non-professionals over the years, but the inner pain and disgust that plays across Varela’s hardened features may be the most viscerally compelling acting to ever grace one of his productions.

It’s been two decades now since Costa refined his filmmaking approach by utilizing digital cameras, minimal on-location crew, and manipulations of available light with mirrors, and he continues to compose some of the most singular images in modern cinema. As in Horse Money, shadows blanket Vitalina Varela, with slivers of light only illuminating people and whatever objects Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões wish to call attention to. This yields images that are arresting on their face but also hint at richer meanings, as in a shot of Vitalina in silhouette folding the safety vest of a construction worker who stands in a doorway in the background, also in shadow, with only the reflective green-yellow of the vest giving off any light. The sight of the immigrants obscured from view as a symbol of their menial labor glows in the foreground speaks volumes to a way of life that consumes the characters.

Yet Vitalina Varela is no polemic. It raises delicate questions about postcolonial immigration, such as whether breadwinning vanguards should gamble on the allure of the unknown to make way for a possibly better life or settle for the hard but known life they already have. The film’s oblique nature elides any simple interpretations, and the irresoluteness of the social commentary mingles with Vitalina’s personal ruminations over her life. The film, like Colossal Youth and Horse Money, is a ghost story. Joaquim looms over it like a spirit with unfinished business, to the point that Vitalina’s extended, accusatory monologues about their relationship sound like direct addresses to his loitering soul just waiting off-camera. As Vitalina’s caustic assessments of her husband soften with nostalgic reflection and empathy for his life in Lisbon, she’s left feeling unmoored, loosed even from the tether of her anger.

For all the pain that reverberates through it, Vitalina Varela marks the first time in ages where a Costa film communicates more hope than despair. Networks of neighbors and friends have played a key role in all of his films since he began to document the residents of Lisbon’s now-razed Fontainhas shantytown, but arguably the presence of community has never before been felt so strongly in Costa’s work. When men arrive at Joaqium’s home to offer condolences to Vitalina, social rituals kick into gear and begin to bond them. She cooks for the men, one of whom tenderly confesses that he had forgotten what home cooking tasted like. Others talk to the woman about all they did to care for her husband in his failing health, with one neighbor noting insistently, “We also know how to help our fellow man.”

Vitalina may feel lost in Portugal, but she’s quickly accepted by the members of the immigrant community living in Fontainhas. Her presence even sparks life in some of the slum’s residents who’ve hardened emotionally, namely Costa mainstay Ventura, who here acts as the local priest of a long-empty congregation. Offering the last rites to Joaqium, the priest then performs mass for Vitalina and is momentarily rejuvenated by his faith. And the film’s coda, in which Costa returns to Cape Verde for the first time since Casa de Lava, marks the first indication in more than a decade that Costa might be leaving behind the literal and figurative darkness that has defined his filmmaking for 20 years. At last, he appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.

Image/Sound

Pedro Costa’s films, given their extensive use of minimally lit, mostly nighttime shots, present a challenge for home video, but Grasshopper’s transfer perfectly renders the dark images with no instances of crushing or other digital artifacts. The film’s colors and expressive lighting pop from the stable black backdrops, while skin textures and tones are sharply defined. So well balanced are the film’s black levels and color saturation that this could be used as a reference disc for calibrating a TV. Costa’s sound design is always subtle, stressing silence as much as noise, and this disc’s soundtrack is free of blemishes or any hiss during the many moments of quiet, while dialogue and off-screen noises are distributed cleanly across the channels.

Extras

This disc comes with an interview with Costa conducted at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, during which the director speaks at length on how his filmmaking has evolved over the years, especially in relationship to the neighborhood in Lisbon and locals he’s been filming for decades. Most interesting are his thoughts on digital, swimming against the notion of the technology making filmmaking easier by pointing out how much more difficult it can be to wring cinematic imagery from digital than celluloid. Also included is Chantal + Pedro, a short film by Júlio Alves that juxtaposes and superimposes images from Chantal Akerman’s 2007 installation Women of Antwerp in November and Costa’s 2003 short The End of a Love Affair in a silent dialogue of urban loneliness. Finally, there’s a theatrical trailer and a booklet essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum that concerns itself as much with the production’s behind-the-scenes activities and Costa’s shooting methods as it does with the film itself.

Overall

Vitalina Varela is the latest stage in a filmography that continues to evolve in moral terms as much as aesthetic ones, and Grasshopper’s Blu-ray faithfully preserves its haunting beauty.

Cast: Vitalina Varela, Ventura Director: Pedro Costa Screenwriter: Pedro Costa Distributor: Grasshopper Film Running Time: 130 min Rating: NR Year: 2020 Release Date: September 8, 2020 Buy: Video

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Much like Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog warns of the horrors in forgetting human atrocity, Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima uses its reenactment of the United States’s 1945 bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to call for an end to the development of atomic and nuclear weaponry. The most didactic of such moments occurs near the film’s end, as Yukio Endo (Yoshi Katô) explains to his teacher, Kitagawa (Eiji Okada), that a local factory has begun producing artillery shells. “We’ll all end up like this!” he exclaims, in reference to the radiation exposure that’s causing a variety of cancers in people throughout Japan, among them several students in Endo’s class.

The film is an incongruous patchwork of tones, invoking the neorealist aesthetics of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine and the Red Scare paranoia of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but its mix of pathos and cautionary rhetoric is reflective of how the despair of a country’s populace resembled a schizophrenic bedlam. While the film features passages that sentimentalize the catastrophic toll of the A-bomb, Hiroshima also complicates its political outlook with a two-pronged indictment of how both the U.S. and Japan have minimized the value of human life. To that point, the film works best as a time capsule for understanding how, nearly a decade after the atomic bombings, Japan was historicizing its own past to educate audiences in hopes of creating a future free of either atomic or nuclear warfare.

Despite containing multiple stretches of archival footage that predominately show actual devastation caused by the bombings, the film minimizes its initial newsreel realism with a melodramatic plotline across which a handful of teenage students and their teacher, several years after the bombings, either espouse or reject Japan’s military actions in contrived fashion. Sekigawa’s tear-jerking direction—replete with a remarkably sorrowful score by Akira Ifukube—places the actual bombing at the film’s core and chronicles the immediate aftermath over the span of a 30-minute sequence that features young children crying out for their parents and teachers while buried under debris. Hiroshima revels in such imagery to the point that you might question the motivation behind the representation and ask if the film, like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 more than 50 years later, by framing real-life tragedy as spectacle.

But if it’s difficult to see United 93 as anything other than a cheap 9/11 simulator, Hiroshima wrestles itself away from a similar fate by broadening its scope during its final third, during which Endo becomes the film’s protagonist. A schoolboy when the bombings occurred, he’s now a teenager flirting with delinquency, roaming the streets of Hiroshima and antagonizing younger boys. His antisocial behavior stems from his enduring the trauma of his missing sister, as well as his anger over having his innocence stripped away. One afternoon, he dips into a movie theater to see Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and emerges having taken the ironic line “One murder makes a villain, millions a hero” to heart. In making an American film the thing that awakens Endo’s consciousness with regard to personal responsibility, Hiroshima complicates its more rote expressions of unthinkable tragedy by acknowledging how art—and especially the movies—can cross borders and constructively shape hearts and minds.

Image/Sound

The high-definition transfer on this Arrow Academy Blu-ray is an unusual beast. At its best, the image is clean, appropriately and pleasantly grainy, and almost entirely free of scratches. At its worst, deep scratches are so apparent that they nearly outnumber that areas of the screen that don’t have them, leaving one to assume that those responsible for the restoration had to work with multiple prints of vastly varying quality. The audio track, while listenable, is no less compromised, as it abounds in pops and distortion. Still, this transfer must be graded a success on a fundamental level for offering a widely unavailable film in hi-def.

Extras

A trio of extras offer helpful contextual information on both the making of the film and the physical and psychological toll of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writer and curator Jasper Sharp narrates an excellent video essay about how the catastrophe impacted “Japan’s nuclear imagination,” by which he means the way it’s been depicted in films, either directly or tangentially. Sharp rattles off titles of monographs and films with the precision of an expert scholar, even spending a bit of time looking at the English-language posters for several films, including a rather tasteless one for Hiroshima that promised: “It blasts you out of your seat!” The 2011 documentary Hiroshima Nagasaki Download brings the matter of nuclear imagination into the 21st century, and features interviews with survivors of the bombings who now reside in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Finally, a brief archival interview with actress Yumeji Tsukioka dives into her recollections of shooting the film.

Overall

While the transfer certainly leaves a lot to be desired, it’s thrilling to have Hideo Sekigawa’s little-seen drama finally available on Blu-ray for the first time.

Cast: Eiji Okada, Yumeji Tsukioka, Yoshi Katô, Masayuki Tsukida, Takashi Kanda, Isuzu Yamada Director: Hideo Sekigawa Screenwriter: Yasutarô Yagi Distributor: Arrow Academy Running Time: 104 min Rating: NR Year: 1983 Release Date: July 14, 2020 Buy: Video

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