Countless police thrillers over the last several decades have doubled as meditations on the ideological perils of black-and-white morality, the authoritarian proclivities of law enforcement, and the proverbial thin blue line, but most have landed with a redundant thud in light of Don Siegel’s genre-defining crime movies of the 1960s and ‘70s. The filmmaker’s San Francisco-set Dirty Harry effectively bottled up the law-and-order zeitgeist of the late ‘60s, tackling police brutality and rising urban crime rates with a bareknuckle bluntness that would make most contemporary action directors blush.

Dirty Harry might not have come to be had Siegel not taken an earlier stab at telling the story of a loose-cannon cop with Madigan, though to deem the earlier film merely a warmup for a more iconic, more incendiary variation on the same themes is to undersell it. Scripted by Howard Rodman (credited under the pseudonym Henri Simoun) and the formerly blacklisted Abraham Polonsky from a novel by Richard Dougherty, a former police commissioner, Madigan tells the story of an unorthodox police detective, Dan Madigan (Richard Widmark), and his partner, Rocco Bonaro (Harry Guardino), who together botch a pickup of a homicide suspect and instigate a three-day manhunt that practically throws off the equilibrium of the entire New York Police Department. Where Dirty Harry isolated its magnum-wielding hero against a police force defined by bureaucratic tepidity and incompetence, Madigan gives conventional rules-and-regulations authority its due, incarnating it within the person of Police Commissioner Anthony X. Russell, played by a perfectly cast Henry Fonda.

Fonda had by this point cultivated a formidable roster of conflicted authority figures over a span of nearly four decades in Hollywood. His aged, beleaguered police commissioner is an idealist without a shred of naïveté, a man who has slowly been coming to terms with incidental moral corruption in all facets of his police force for some time but who’s never directly stared it down. That opportunity comes when his longtime friend, Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore), is caught red-handed in a bribe. Russell sits on the information, keeps up a friendly façade, vents to a married mistress (Susan Clark) in a subplot that understatedly imparts the extent to which Russell’s high ideals have already eroded, and takes out his frustration on Madigan, with whom he has something of an antagonistic history.

The storytelling genius of Madigan is that Widmark and Fonda don’t come to occupy the same space until almost 90 minutes into the film. Russell may give the dangerous order for Madigan to apprehend the killer on the loose within a 72-hour window, but that order trickles down an elaborate chain of command before it reaches its recipient. While Madigan is racing against the clock on the gritty streets of Spanish Harlem and Russell is stationed in his plush office or making appearances at PR events, the tension between the two men is always palpable.

As for Widmark, it’s tempting to take his performance as the rough-around-the-edges detective for granted. One of the defining figures of 20th Century Fox’s noir cycle of the 1940s and ‘50s, specializing in cagey hoods and unhinged sadists (he was Oscar-nominated for Kiss of Death), Widmark had spent much the ‘60s acting in more respectable roles, with a newly emergent penchant for military brass. Madigan was an opportunity for the actor to summon some of his earlier street-smart edge, and his volatile scenes with Inger Stevens (as Julia, Madigan’s unfulfilled wife) contain some of the finest work of his late career.

Madigan has never perched near the top of the Siegel canon, and in terms of raw craftsmanship or personal expression, it has nothing on more provocative works like Riot in Cell Block 11, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or even The Beguiled. Perhaps a less intrusive producer than Frank P. Rosenberg—who assumed a near-total license to tinker with the shooting script, and much to Siegel’s chagrin—might have allowed the director more breathing room to execute his vision. But compared to some of Siegel’s lesser work, such as the same year’s relatively campy actioner Coogan Bluff, Madigan is a substantial achievement, an ostensible action picture cloaking a meditative character piece, and its innate quality of moral sordidness has stayed with genre forever since.

Image/Sound

Kino’s new transfer varies in image quality: The brightly lit, foregrounded surfaces are vibrant with definition—the scar-like creases of Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark’s close-ups now register with full clarity—but the picture loses considerable sharpness and solidity as visual information recedes toward the background, with consistently washed-out textures and the black levels frequently unstable. The DTS-HD audio fares better, especially as concerns the propulsive, yet atypically romantic score by jazz arranger Don Costa.

Extras

Excluding a trailer and a few TV spots for other Don Siegel films, the lone extra here is an audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson. Fortunately, it’s a very good one, as these obvious Siegel buffs clearly size up every square inch of the film, while also bringing considerable historical muscle to the discussion. Scene-specific analysis alternates evenly with broader contextual discourse, broaching everything from the television cop dramas of the era to the studio practices of Universal. The result is as comprehensive a survey of the film’s production as is likely to be found anywhere.

Overall

This release of Don Siegel’s morally knotty police procedural isn’t the most well-rounded package, but a new audio commentary offers ample justification of the film’s enduring legacy.

Cast: Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Inger Stevens, Harry Guardino, James Whitmore, Susan Clark, Michael Dunn, Harry Bellaver Director: Don Siegel Screenwriter: Howard Rodman, Abraham Polonsky Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: November 12, 20109 min Rating: NR Year: 1968 Release Date: November 12, 2010 Buy: Video

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Beloved by cinephiles today, Carol Reed’s Vienna-set The Third Man was also a sensation when it was released in 1949, popularizing zither music and inspiring a spinoff radio show starring Orson Welles as the droll but jaded black market dealer Harry Lime. The Man Between, Reed’s subsequent urban noir, was clearly intended to rebottle some of his earlier film’s magic. Set in rubble-strewn Berlin—and featuring, like The Third Man, an abundance of location photography, unique in a studio film of the era—The Man Between likewise addresses the conflicted postwar European character through a morally ambivalent but seductive male protagonist.

Ivo Kern (James Mason), like Harry Lime, has found dubious occupation in a Reich city. A former lawyer and, as a soldier in the Germany Army, a participant in war crimes, he now conducts kidnapping operations on behalf of the East German authorities, clandestinely bringing refugees or wanted men back to the Russian-occupied territory. Still, it’s not immediately apparent—though it probably was to 1950s viewers who saw Mason’s name on the marquee—that Ivo is The Man Between’s main character. As he did with Harry Lime, Reed delays the introduction of his film’s titular character, using the arrival of an outsider to first introduce us to the milieu of early-‘50s Berlin, and then to gradually construe the enigmatic Ivo as the subject of intrigue.

In the first quarter of The Man Between, Reed anchors the audience’s perspective in Susanne (Claire Bloom), a young English woman who’s come to Berlin to visit her brother, Martin (Geoffrey Toone), a military doctor who’s stationed in the city. She’s greeted at the airport by Martin’s wife, Bettina (Hildegard Knef), an archetypically tall, blond German woman who Susanne immediately suspects is hiding something. Quite the clever voyeur, as it happens, Susanne peeks unobserved around corners, from behind doors, and via angled mirrors to try to catch glimpses of the mysterious figure that the visibly distressed Bettina is in contact with. This will turn out to be Ivo, who’s in the process of extorting Bettina, scandalously revealed to be his ex-wife, for information on West German spies.

Until Ivo takes over the narrative reins and Susanne is settled into her ultimate position as love interest, it almost seems as though the film should be called The Woman Between. After all, Martin is a nonentity, and the drama of the early scenes plays out entirely between Susanne and Bettina. Reed’s handling of Susanne’s growing suspicion that Bettina is having an affair doesn’t add much to the character’s rather anemic characterization, but it does result in some brilliantly constructed scenes, as Reed uses Susanne’s oblique gazing at obscure events to suggest Berlin’s subterranean world of espionage and partially submerged pasts. Unconventional framing estranges the resplendent nightlife of the West, and an almost painterly use of film noir’s conventional low-key lighting lends a gothic, paranoiac quality to Bettina’s inherited haute bourgeois home on the edge of Berlin’s demolished no man’s land.

After Susanne comes in contact with Ivo, however, the narrative shifts focus. Ivo, at first appearing to have all the detached self-confidence connoted by Mason’s posh diction, turns out to be conflicted, haunted by his dark past and persecuted by his superiors in the East German secret police. He is, in other words, much more a character than Susanne gets to be, and The Man Between soon abandons Bettina almost entirely to focus on Susanne’s growing, selfless admiration for him. Perhaps inevitably, given the film’s era and context of production, Susanne’s character becomes the innocent damsel—representing, both metaphorically and mechanically, Ivo’s hope for asylum in the West. When she’s mistakenly taken prisoner by an East German secret police force headed by the dastardly Halendar (Aribert Wäscher), Ivo sees his opportunity to free her, and in doing so gain the favor of Western authorities.

If The Man Between pales in comparison to The Third Man, the problem is Harry Kurnitz’s screenplay, which tends toward the conventional. Despite strong performances from Mason, Bloom, and Neff, many of the characters here exude a bland, studio-manufactured quality. The exploration of the female characters ends about a third of the way through the film, while most of the supporting characters lack distinguishing color (Berlinerisch or otherwise). And despite Mason’s dashing charm, Ivo is never as seductive an antihero as the deviously mirthful Harry Lime from The Third Man. Also unlike that earlier film, there’s little that feels daring about The Man Between’s story, which, rather than confronting the darkness at the heart of postwar Europe, proves much more comfortable with the emergent Cold War global order.

Despite the evident similarities between The Third Man and The Man Between, their differences paint Vienna and Berlin as distinct places—and 1949 and 1953 as distinct moments in history. While the purportedly easygoing Vienna of The Third Man turns out to be suffused with an inescapable fatalism, the famously hardnosed Berlin of The Man Between represents the very possibility of flight from the cynicism and regret of postwar Europe, identified with the dilapidated and unfree East, into its democratic, morally rehabilitated future. Reed’s mise-en-scène conveys Berlin’s strange, often dangerous liminal quality, its status as an often dangerous interface between two worlds, but the director’s acute sense of atmosphere isn’t particularly well served by his Kurnitz’s script. The Man Between isn’t without anything to say about the order of things circa 1953, but it lacks the memorable characters and world-weary tone that have made The Third Man an indelible part of the film canon.

Image/Sound

The 1080p disc handles Desmond Dickinson’s high-contrast cinematography impeccably, presenting a perfectly balanced black-and-white image that preserves the atmospheric effects of the film’s heightened, nighttime suspense sequences—as well as the grittier, documentary feel of its daytime images of divided Berlin. Subtle film grain is preserved in the image, and the transfer is clearly based on a print that was either exceptionally well preserved or expertly restored, given that there are almost no pockmarks or other flaws on display. The mono soundtrack is likewise flawlessly reproduced on the disc’s DTS stereo track.

Extras

This release lacks any accompanying booklet but includes an impressive set of extras on the disc itself. A well-researched audio commentary by critic Simon Abrams draws upon the biographies of the stars and filmmakers, as well as contemporary critical reactions of The Man Between, to offer background on the film. Abrams adds his own critical interpretation of what he feels is a too-often neglected work, pointing toward Carol Reed’s artful scene construction and the themes of waiting and stasis that distinguish the film from The Third Man.

Also available on the disc is an interview with star Claire Bloom, who expresses little admiration for The Man Between, reiterating multiple times that it was chosen for her by producer Alexander Korda and that it isn’t a film that she would have chosen herself. She does, though, speak admiringly of Reed and co-star James Mason. As a production, the interview is rather slapdash: At one point, Bloom recounts working with Charlie Chaplin on his late-period film Limelight and the picture spliced into the video is, amusingly, a black-and-white still of Robert Downey Jr. as a young Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin.

Much more polished is Carol Reed: A Gentle Eye, a 45-minute documentary on the career of the filmmaker, featuring surviving collaborators discussing his versatility and his impact on British cinema. One intriguing insight offered here is the influence of the British documentary movement of the ‘30s and ‘40s on Reed’s filmmaking, which suggests The Third Man and The Man Between in a fascinating national lineage, leading up to the kitchen-sink cinema of the ‘60s. A conversation with Mason—every bit as disarming as Bloom—also appears among the disc’s extras, in the form of audio of a lecture and interview conducted at a career retrospective at the BFI in 1967. Finally, this release includes trailers for other noirs in Kino Lorber’s library.

Overall

Although not quite an overlooked masterpiece, Carol Reed’s The Man Between is a stylish and visually intelligent thriller from a master of atmospheric cinema, and it’s been preserved beautifully—and with a healthy set of bonus features—on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release.

Cast: James Mason, Claire Bloom, Hildegard Knef, Geoffrey Toone, Aribert Wäscher, Ernst Schröder, Dieter Krause, Hilde Sessak, Karl John, Ljuba Welitsch Director: Carol Reed Screenwriter: Harry Kurnitz Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 102 min Rating: NR Year: 1953 Release Date: November 5, 2019 Buy: Video

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By the time the Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight world championship bout took place in Kinshasa in October 1974, Muhammad Ali was considered past his prime, standing almost no chance against a ferocious George Foreman, then 24 years young and undefeated. Despite this, Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings predominantly thinks in terms of the dialectic between Ali’s boundless charisma and Forman’s impervious aloofness, rather than the one between the former’s age and speed and the latter’s youth and brute strength. Ali was a 7-to-1 underdog heading into the fight, and his arrogance in the face of those odds, along with his wit, eloquence, and sense imagination, makes him a compelling, complicated, and compulsively watchable screen presence. And his fearless, vociferous activism in black communities and political dissent to American imperialism made him a fitting hero to his thousands of African fans, who swarmed him everywhere he went in the weeks leading up to the main event.

With Ali in the spotlight, When We Were Kings relegates Foreman unwittingly to the role of supporting player, a dour but menacing villain who’s seen primarily in glimpses, leaving impossibly huge dents in punching bags or speaking without any hint of emotion to the press. All the while, Ali is front and center, thriving in his leading role as the lovably mischievous, and all-too-cocky, David to Foreman’s Goliath—riffing poetically throughout press conferences and feeding off the energy of his loyal fans, whose constant chants of “Ali, bombaye!” (or “kill him!”) pumped him full of just enough gusto to allow him to actually believe half the things he said about destroying the seemingly unbeatable Foreman.

But Gast doesn’t cast Ali as the heroic underdog merely to set up the potentially monumental upset that comes to pass. Ali also serves as the embodiment of black unity, the de facto face of the Rumble in the Jungle; the fight was paired with Zaire 74, a music festival that featured all-black musical acts, including James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, and a slew of African musicians. While aboard a plane in Africa, Ali quips, “All-black pilots, an all-black crew? The American negro could never dream of this.” It’s this ideal of communal solidarity and empowerment that Ali sought during this trip to his self-declared homeland, and which he hoped would reverberate back in America. As Gast and his crew capture Ali’s oratory ingenuity and intense training, as well as snippets of remarkable concert footage, When We Were Kings becomes a celebration of not just one man, but of black excellence as a whole.

Lurking beneath this fascinating, one-of-a-kind event, though, lies an undercurrent of nefariousness. Organized by none other than Don King, the shrewd huckster who later cheated Mike Tyson and other boxers out of millions of dollars, the fight was funded entirely by Zaire’s brutal dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, like King, used the event as a means to further his career and enrich himself. The ultimate goal of putting artistic, organizational, and monetary control into the hands of black talent certainly created a general sense of harmony and some genuinely inspirational moments, such as when dozens of African-American musicians jam and dance together during their flight to Africa. But the film also acknowledges the complicated and, perhaps necessarily, compromised nature of such a bold undertaking.

As the editing of the initially commissioned film didn’t begin until nearly two decades after Ali knocked out Foreman, Gast also judiciously employs talking heads, filmed in the mid-1990s, to help contextualize the cultural significance and impact of the fight and festival, and address the questionable behind-the-scenes dealings and Ali’s legacy as both a boxer and activist. With everyone from Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, who covered the fight from Zaire, to black artists, Spike Lee and Malick Bowens, on hand to offer fascinating and divergent perspectives on the events as they occurred and attest to their lasting importance, When We Were Kings provides a prismatic view of one of the biggest sports spectacles of the 20th century. It seamlessly captures the event’s politically radical undercurrent, and with both a tactile sense of urgency in its vérité archival footage and a reflectiveness about the role athletes can play in affecting social change, along with the inevitable costs that comes with it.

Image/Sound

Although the Criterion Collection’s release boasts a new, restored 4K digital transfer, this is a prime example of a film whose source materials benefit only modestly from a high-resolution restoration. The image is consistently bright, but this only exacerbates the film’s frequently blown-out and wildly shifting color tones from one scene to the next. Clarity is also incredibly erratic, with certain shots exuding a sharpness and depth of detail that one expects from a 4K restoration, while others are quite hazy and soft, even for 16mm footage shot on the fly over 40 years ago. Obviously, there’s only so much to be done with overexposed archival footage—which was also not helped by sitting in the can for nearly two decades before being compiled into the finished film—but the final result is less than impressive. Fortunately, the 5.0 surround DTS-HD audio soundtrack is nicely layered, with a richness to background and crowd noises, and is particularly booming during the musical interludes.

Extras

Cut from the same footage used for When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s 2008 documentary Soul Power serves as a perfect companion piece to Leon Gast’s earlier film, focusing primarily on the Zaire 74 music festival that was scheduled to take place right before the Rumble in the Jungle, prior to the fight’s six-week delay. The behind-the-scenes footage focuses a bit too much on the organization and construction of the festival, but the concert footage itself is impressive, featuring a typically electrifying and sweaty James Brown (donning an elaborate black-and-blue one-piece, bejeweled in pearls), Bill Withers, B.B. King, and a slew of remarkably talented African performers, including Fania All-Stars with Celia Cruz.

The only other disc extras are a pair of interviews: one with producer David Sonenberg, who delves into the process of getting When We Were Kings made, and another with Gast, who discusses how supportive Muhammad Ali was during filming, in stark contrast to a belligerent and uncooperative George Foreman. A fascinating essay by critic Kelefa Sanneh susses out both the complexities and contradictions of the Black Power politics espoused by Ali, Don King, and Mobutu Sese Seko, and also touches on the countless challenges of mounting the music festival and, later, getting both When We Were Kings and Soul Power made.

Overall

Criterion’s new 4K transfer may not be a radical leap forward from earlier ones of When We Were Kings, but this release attests to the enduring power of Leon Gast’s documentary.

Cast: Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Don King, James Brown, B.B. King, Mobutu Sese Seko, Spike Lee, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Thomas Hauser, Malick Bowens Director: Leon Gast Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 87 min Rating: PG Year: 1996 Release Date: October 22, 2019 Buy: Video

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Violence and sex are intimately linked in the horror genre, though Hellraiser takes this connection to a remarkably explicit level. In his feature-length debut as a director, Clive Barker follows a family that’s splintered by its subterranean desires. Julia (Clare Higgins), not getting what she needs from her husband, Larry (Andrew Robinson), agrees to help Frank (Oliver Smith), Larry’s undead brother, restore his body with the blood of men she lures to the family’s home. Harlequin-like flashbacks, almost satirical in nature, explain the intensity of Julia’s commitment to Frank (played in human form by Sean Chapman), who brings Julia to climax with the threat of valuing his pleasure over hers. Frank eventually took his pain-as-pleasure ethos to supernatural levels, hence his present existence as an ectoplasm in the attic of his and Larry’s family estate—a place which Barker pointedly sprinkles with gaudy religious iconography (as well as clichéd haunted-house motifs).

Barker is in sync with a hunger that’s especially taboo now: the desire to be objectified and dominated. Larry is a sensitive and agreeable patriarch who exudes the stability we’re supposed to like about well-adjusted men—a callback to the 1950s-era idea of the nine-to-five breadwinner. Frank, stereotypical in an opposing direction, is the taut stud who has intense sex with Julia immediately upon meeting her. In the way he contrasts the men, Barker reveals that he’s too comfortable with shorthand, as he provides little context as to the brothers’ relationship beyond such broad differences. Larry never shares a scene with either the hot or grotesque version of Frank, which feels like a result of narrative pruning as well as, perhaps, a paucity of imagination. Larry isn’t quite a prudish foil, as Robinson imbues the character with a clueless vulnerability and earnestness that’s poignant, though he’s nevertheless undernourished, especially since there are also so few scenes between him and Julia.

Hellraiser often suggests a familial drama, though Barker isn’t especially interested in dramatizing the textures of domesticity. As sexually neurotic ‘80s-era chamber body-horror films go, Hellraiser is much thinner emotionally than The Fly. Where David Cronenberg is authentically interested in his characters, Barker regards Frank, Larry, Julia, and Frank’s innocent young-adult daughter, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), mostly as variables necessary in the unleashing of his symbolism. Nonetheless, what gives Hellraiser its graphic power are the visual metaphors that Baker fashions for the yearning of the annihilation of self.

Barker establishes Frank to be a wayward stud who travels the Earth, presumably for the ultimate orgasm. His adventures lead him to a metallic Chinese puzzle cube that, when manipulated correctly, unleashes the Cenobites, otherworldly agents of torture and pleasure who, per the ringleader who would be identified in sequels as Pinhead (Doug Bradley), can serve as either angels or demons. With their rotating wooden pole of disembodied flesh, flesh-tearing hooks, leather gear, and deformities that are the result of hungers that had be actualized at the cost of the corporeal body, the Cenobites are unmistakable symbols of the fear and desire that can afflict those tempted by sadomasochistic sex. They also suggest debauched rock-stars who are so burned out they must travel all realms of existence to find comparative lambs for induction into their theater of damnation.

The Cenobites—especially Pinhead, a regal demon with pins sticking out of a white, bald dome that’s animated by piercing, hauntingly intelligent eyes—would become pop-cultural icons, and Barker uses them shrewdly and sparingly, contrasting them with the somewhat repetitive conflict between Larry, Frank, and Julia. One suspects that Barker wants the audience to yearn for the Cenobites, a reaction that fosters a kinship between us and the people of the world who have cravings which mainstream society abhors. (There’s a gay subtext in Hellraiser, and even an incestuous one, as Larry comes to steal Frank’s body—an act that feels sexual in itself—while leering at Kirsty.) Released during the AIDS epidemic, the film offers a nightmare of extremes: Frank and the Cenobites are prisoners of their libertinism, while Larry and Clare are entombed in the bitterness wrought by platitude and politeness. Both existences feel like hell.

Image/Sound

This new 2K restoration of Hellraiser, approved by cinematographer Robin Vidgeon, is rich and attractive, abounding in deep browns and blacks, garish reds, purposefully shrill whites and silvers, and robust flesh tones. Quite a bit of grain in this image, though it’s appealing and feels inherent to the film’s handmade, low-budget aesthetic. Two sound mixes have been included, an uncompressed PCM 2.0 and a DTS-HD MA 5.1, and both offer an immersive sound stage, though the Cenobites’ clinging and clanging really soars on the 5.1. Both mixes also honor the rich and elegant beauty of Christopher Young’s score, which goes a long way toward distancing Hellraiser from the various other ‘80s-era horror series.

Extras

“Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser” is a feature-length documentary that offers an engaging deep-dive into the making of the film, particularly in terms of how its memorable creatures and special effects came about. (Doug Bradly, the actor who played Pinhead, is an especially memorable interview subject.) Clive Barker is notably missing from “Leviathan,” but he has two audio commentary tracks here, one by himself and the other with actress Ashley Laurence. The second track is unsurprisingly looser and more conversational, but both abound in juicy details about the film’s construction, symbolism, use of sets, and evolution of effects. (Barker is particularly engaged with an evocative bit of crosscutting, in which a flashback to Julia’s affair with Frank is interspersed with a sequence in which Larry tries to move his and Julia’s marital bed up into their bedroom.) Interviews with actors Sean Chapman and Bradley offer more insight into the film’s making, while another talk with ex-Coil member Stephen Thrower discusses the Hellraiser score that might have been. A variety of other odds and ends round out an excellent package, including a trailer and TV spots, an image gallery, a vintage featurette, and even drafts of the film’s screenplay via BD-ROM.

Overall

With a beautiful new transfer, Arrow Video reminds us that time has been relatively kind to Clive Barker’s sadomasochistic morality play.

Cast: Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Sean Chapman, Oliver Smith, Doug Bradley Director: Clive Barker Screenwriter: Clive Barker Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 93 min Rating: R Year: 1987 Release Date: September 24, 2019 Buy: Video

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What is the “Lubitsch touch” if not the quiet thrill of being in on the joke? Ernst Lubitsch’s penchant for sly elisions—the knowing pan away from imminent hanky-panky or the arch relish of a double entendre—rests upon an implicit understanding between filmmaker and viewer, a trust that, coming from such a sophisticated source, feels like a gift unto itself. He takes for granted not only a worldly knowledge of sex, romance, class, and the multitude of ways that adults so royally mix them up, but an attitude toward such foibles that’s at once wry and empathetic. This cocktail of urbane compassion is a very specific blend—the eye must roll in bemusement, but also twinkle in self-recognition—or, rather, it feels specific when you watch a Lubitsch film, his observations on human experience as seemingly candid as a wicked bon mot murmured into your ear above the din of a cocktail party.

That comedy so seemingly contingent upon the felicities of individual temperament can tickle so many viewers speaks not only to the delicacy of Lubitsch’s tone and the mastery of his technique, but to the sneaky accessibility of his narratives, which frequently consider the pleasures and perils of social and sexual transgression. Decked in suave European refinement and surrounded by Lubitsch’s twin brands of dolt (clueless aristocrats and stick-up-their-butt philistines), his protagonists’ sly mistrust of societal convention marks them as isolated outsiders as much as stylish renegades. Lubitsch applauds their casting off of ridiculous communal strictures, while also recognizing the sting of rejection and the difficulty of sorting our life—and especially love—on your own terms. These pinpricks of regret and uncertainty ground the lighter-than-air farce in poignant self-awareness without deflating its comic buoyancy: an acknowledgment that being in on the joke often means choosing to separate oneself from the rest of the party—which was probably not worth attending to begin with.

Cluny Brown, Lubitsch’s last completed film before his death in 1947, offers ample evidence that the then-aging filmmaker still possessed a sharp eye for the absurdities of class snobbery. The year is 1938, and anti-Nazi Czech refugee Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer) has come to prewar London to find safe haven with a professor friend. Finding the apartment occupied by a fussbudget subletter, Hilary Ames (Reginald Gardiner), awaiting the arrival of a plumber to fix his stopped-up sink, the wily Belinski nevertheless makes himself at home. Enter the eponymous plumber’s niece (Jennifer Jones), a spirited orphan who arrives in her uncle’s stead and quickly unclogs the pipes. Belinski and Brown hit it off in their brief—and unexpectedly drunken—afternoon together, and are surprisingly reunited after she gets a job as a chambermaid for the wealthy Carmel family, whose earnest if callow son, Andrew (Peter Lawford), takes it upon himself to shelter Belinski at the family estate.

Belinski and Brown continually cross paths in the estate, sharing the kind of easy rapport that makes their eventual pairing a sweet inevitability. If Belinski and Brown dance around romance in a familiarly protracted manner, however, they move more to the rigid waltz of class consciousness than the looser rhythms of personal neuroses that usually drive movie couples apart until the closing act. Few Hollywood films of the time (or any time, for that matter) foreground the economic barriers between their characters as much as Cluny Brown, even if Lubitsch does so largely in the name of light-fingered satire. The Carmel estate proves a ripe target for skewering old-money intransigence, with father Henry (Reginald Owen) and the family’s butler both barely able to conceal horror when Cluny makes a whispered suggestion on which piece of meat to take from the tray as she serves the family dinner. And while Henry can barely muster the interest to keep track of the impending Nazi threat, Andrew twists himself in liberal-guilt knots over the forthcoming crisis, writing irate letters to The Times and threatening to join the RAF—though only after his marriage proposal is rebuffed by the coolly elegant socialite Betty Cream (Helen Walker). (Wife Alice, played by Margaret Bannerman, has some similarly oblivious moments, but possesses more intrinsic wisdom than she lets on.)

But Lubitsch chides the Carmels while still casting an affectionate glance at their daily lives and inner workings. He saves his most barbed humor for Wilson (Richard Haydn), a simpering, nasal-voiced pharmacist whose courtship of Cluny includes tea with his sour-faced mother. For all its delicious dialogue (courtesy of Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt’s screenplay, adapted from the novel by Margery Sharp), the biggest laughs might come from this scowling matriarch, whose sole verbal utterances of harrumphs and throat-clearings speak volumes about the film’s vision of middle-class banality and pettiness.

Belinski remains a respected outcast within these overlapping milieus, a prototypical Lubitsch male who recognizes the blinkered sightlines of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie and gently manipulates them for his own survival. Cluny Brown largely downplays Belinski’s role as an anti-Nazi freedom fighter, though he does offer a plea toward the end for British intervention that feels strikingly earnest in a film whose eyebrow appears perennially cocked in self-amusement. (The issue of his German heritage aside, is it any wonder that Lubitsch’s disdain of uncritical groupthink would so often manifest itself in unsparing mockery of fascism?)

Cluny, on the other hand, lacks Belinski’s cosmopolitan defenses, and finds herself the clearest target of supercilious class condemnation. There’s a sad moment when she first enters the Carmel estate escorted by their neighbor, the courtly Colonel Duff-Graham (C. Aubrey Smith). Mistaken for an acquaintance of the colonel’s, she’s invited for tea by Henry and Alice. Cluny energetically chats up the Carmels, commenting on their graciousness and hospitality, until Henry and Alice suddenly realize who she really is. With little more than a few judiciously edited close-ups and medium shots (Dorothy Spencer is the film’s superb editor), Lubitsch charts the conversation’s sudden deflation to its quietly heartbreaking conclusion: a crestfallen Cluny sitting alone, her cup of tea a mocking totem of mistaken social parity.

The scene wouldn’t be such a punch in the gut if it weren’t for Jones’s vivacious performance; her breathless comic energy marks Cluny as a mold-breaking original and underscores those moments when the wind gets knocked out of the character’s sails by those attempting to squeeze her into “appropriate” social roles. Jones excels in that delicate balance of guilelessness and self-awareness shared by so many screwball goddesses of 1930s and ‘40s Hollywood comedies; somehow, we simultaneously buy that she knows Wilson is a dud and that she wants to live up to his skewered expectations of middle-class propriety. When she leaps from the table mid-dinner-party at Wilson’s to fix his backed-up sink, the look of revulsion on Haydn’s face and the slow track-in on Jones as he proceeds to dress her down stings like little else in all of Lubitsch’s oeuvre.

It’s difficult to say that Boyer and Jones have great sexual chemistry. Their burgeoning romance lacks the spark of such earlier Lubitsch pairings as Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan in The Shop Around the Corner or Kay Francis and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise. (Certainly, no moment in Cluny Brown matches the sly melancholy of Francis and Marshall’s late-film farewell, one of the great, poignant shrugs in the annals of American comedy.) Rather, they delight because they’re twin displaced souls stuck in a conformist universe, finding in one another the possibility of surprise and cheerful defiance.

Lubitsch, similarly, offers his viewers low-key pleasures over grand gestures throughout Cluny Brown, admittedly lacking some of the winking verve more prominently displayed in his earlier films. His penchant for hinting at off-screen naughtiness by shifting the focus onto telling details in the mise-en-scène is kept to a minimum—save for a film-ending joke involving a blossoming book series and its connection to the couple’s sexual shenanigans. DP Joseph Le Shelle’s camera moves with graceful unobtrusiveness, all the better to highlight the film’s note-perfect ensemble. Indeed, this formal simplicity fits snugly with Cluny Brown’s relaxed comic rhythms and gently skeptical view of social barriers and the rare people who can transcend them. For Lubitsch, happiness is the pleasure of having someone to smile with about the world’s absurdities. It’s his great gift as a director that, by the end of his films, we feel as if he’s graced us with that smile, and the sad, funny knowledge that comes with it.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s 4K scan from a 35mm composite looks robust, with a considerable boost in the fine details of clothing (like Peter Lawford’s pinstripe suit) and set design (you can now discern every bit of rubbish in that blocked sink) compared to earlier SD releases. Black levels appear dense and uncrushed. The LPCM mono track is sturdy, with optional subtitles available if you don’t happen to have an ear for the various British accents.

Extras

Criterion assembles a slender but informative roster of extras. The featurette “Squirrels to the Nuts” finds critics Molly Haskell and Farran Smith Nehme talking about the archetype of the “Lubitsch female,” how the director subverted gender stereotypes and audience expectations throughout his career, and the role of politics and class structure in Cluny Brown. Kristin Thompson exhibits her usual critical acumen in a video essay that formally deconstructs Lubitsch’s use of the reaction shot in the film, with a particularly nuanced reading of the birthday party scene. In “The Lubitsch Touch,” an archival program from 2004, critic Bernard Eisenschitz provides an overview of the filmmaker’s career from his youth in Berlin’s garment district, days as a member of Max Reinhardt’s famous theatrical troupe, silent film career in Germany and subsequent move to Hollywood, later health issues and distress at developments in postwar American politics, and inspirational role in the career of Billy Wilder (who famously had a sign over his desk that read “What Would Lubitsch Do?”). There’s an hour-long radio version of Cluny Brown from 1950 that finds Charles Boyer reprising his role as Adam Belinsky alongside Dorothy McGuire as Cluny. (If nothing else, this program pretty definitely proves the difficulty of catching comedic lightning in a bottle.) Finally, a booklet contains Siri Hustvedt’s essay “The Joys of Plumbing,” a thorough, thoughtful reading of the film, which is a definite plus, since Criterion’s release lacks anything in the way of a commentary track.

Overall

Ernst Lubitsch’s final finished film is a deceptively lighthearted exploration of class and gender issues in Britain on the brink of World War II.

Cast: Jennifer Jones, Charles Boyer, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, Reginald Owen, Margaret Bannerman, C. Aubrey Smith, Richard Haydn Director: Ernst Lubitsch Screenwriter: Samuel Hoffenstein Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 1946 Release Date: September 17, 2019 Buy: Video

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The films in Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy have a sense of immediacy—an in-the-moment exactitude—that adds up to an expansive vision of life. After watching Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees, especially in close succession, it may feel as if you’ve actually navigated the Iranian farming village of Koker, perhaps even strolled the iconic zig-zag trail up a hill to what appears to be the neighboring village of Poshteh. In these films, Kiarostami revels in narrative, pictorial, and verbal patterns, which he revises to express the open-endedness of life, as well as the porous boundaries between “reality” and art. The master filmmaker also fuses documentary and fiction, elaborating on the strengths and limitations of each form, suggesting that documentary is fiction and vice versa.

Throughout the trilogy, Kiarostami keeps allowing people’s identities to fluctuate (for instance, a major character in one film might be an extra in another), with lines between scripted and “found” roles consciously blurred. This instability cumulatively communicates the changes wrought by the passage of time, and so the characters’ shifting identities render them more lifelike than the cemented stereotypes of TV shows and conventional movie sequels. Yet amid this fluctuation is the seeming permanency of that zig-zag trail, of a grove of olive trees, of a porch outside a fierce grandmother’s home, of landscapes that embody the Sisyphean comedy of everyday travails that come to mean everything.

The loose narratives of these three films offer another sort of permanency, as they all concern a variation of the same plot, following a protagonist who’s thwarted in his quest to communicate a message to another party. And none of these protagonists achieve their quest the way they had imagined, and this frustration acquaints them with the mystery and majesty of the quotidian of their lives, allowing them to integrate with their society.

In Where Is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami spins one of the greatest of all films out of a child’s urge to return a notebook to his classmate. Dramatizing this dilemma, Kiarostami offers a tapestry of life, revealing how the domestic textures of Koker embody its class issues and politics. Trying to find his friend, Ahmad (Babak Ahmadpour) navigates multiple definitions of authority and varying generations of his family and neighbors. At first, Ahmad regards adults as impediments to his generosity, though the boy gradually comes to see that these men and women have their own vulnerabilities, which Kiarostami expresses in images of rapt beauty. The filmmaker renders common acts, such as an elderly craftsman’s task of taking off his shoes by his doorway, as emotionally revelatory moments of process.

And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees are wilder and more free-wheeling than Where Is the Friend’s House?, pondering the ramifications of the earlier film’s existence. In And Life Goes On, a filmmaker (Farhad Kheradmand) clearly modeled on Kiarostami searches for the children who appeared in Where Is the Friend’s House in the wake of the real-life earthquake that devastated Koker in 1990. In Through the Olive Trees, another Kiarostami stand-in (Mohammad Ali Keshavarz) shoots And Life Goes On, getting stuck on a vignette that reveals the real romantic tensions between two of his moonlighting non-actors. The films nest inside one another, freeing Kiarostami from the (comparatively) traditional plotting of Where Is the Friend’s House? With this freedom, Kiarostami creates sequences that are interlocked and isolated at once, existing as stanzas that are both journalistic and figurative.

The tedium of conventional three-act narratives rests in a certain rigidity: Most stories are equations with dilemmas that must be resolved as one might a proof, and to make such equations work, most filmmakers shortchange the spontaneous, ambiguous, sensual textures that are the manna of life. Kiarostami has it both ways, using formal patterns to convey stability, and to give us reassurance of the familiar, while abandoning plots to pursue his more original fancies. In And Life Goes On, there’s a powerfully pragmatic and intimate scene where a husband (Hossein Rezai) explains he and his wife’s need to marry in the face of tragedy, as well as a moment of profound insight in which a young man explains his need to watch the World Cup even among the ruins wrought by the earthquake. And in Through the Olive Trees, there’s a poignant yet piercingly unsentimental moment in which an illiterate villager pleads for the necessity of intermarrying between the rich and poor. Desperate to transcend himself, he’s both classist and self-loathing, willing to breed his people out of existence.

Above all, Kiarostami’s intermixing of fact, fiction, and metatextual confessional affords him and his audience space. These films have dozens of extraordinary moments in which narrative and time seemingly freeze to allow us to register characters’ complex reactions to common stimuli. Some of these sequences are simple and rapturous, such as a close-up of a soda bottle as a boy buys it from a store deserted in the wake of the earthquake; others are troubling and profoundly moving, such as a lingering medium shot of Ahmad as it dawns on him that he has his friend’s notebook, which could get the friend expelled. In the latter scene, we see the crystallization of this boy’s morality as well as his calculation of the perils of honoring it, and Kiarostami accords this moment its full weight without rushing along to tend to the plot. The true story of the Koker trilogy are such poetic moments of extremity, ones that seemingly arise out of nowhere and force us to reckon with the tenor of our existence.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s restoration and promotion of these films, given their relative obscurity in the West, is good news in itself, though the better news is the formal magnitude of these transfers. The images are pristine, with vibrant and varied colors and healthy grit. The textures of characters’ faces and of Koker’s natural landscapes are stunning, especially the rugged mountains and trees. The soundtracks are also impressive, particularly underscoring Kiarostami’s masterful use of diegetic sounds to establish a sense of place—especially the noises made by domestic animals and machines, such as construction equipment and cars. Dialogue is clear, unless it’s not meant to be, and music is rendered with clarity and a becoming lightness of body.

Extras

These extras offer a wonderful examination of the films in the trilogy and their larger cultural context. For a wide-reaching discussion of Iran’s political textures, and of Kiarostami’s use of varied perspectives, the new audio commentary on And Life Goes On with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, co-authors of Abbas Kiarostami, makes for invaluable listening that will be especially useful for Western audiences. Complementing the commentary are a variety of new interviews, such as the conversation between scholar Jamsheed Akrami and critic Godfrey Cheshire, in which the men wrestle with Kiarostami’s style and the use of the word “trilogy,” and an incisive discussion with scholar Hamid Naficy. Meanwhile, another new interview with Kiarostami’s son, Ahmad, offers a more personal perspective, while a 2015 interview with Kiarostami himself abounds in choice descriptions, such as his approach to non-actors: “They were not acting, they were living in front of the camera.”

A 1994 documentary, Abbas Kiarostami: Truths and Dreams, follows the filmmaker in Koker after the trilogy’s completion, and nearly functions as a sequel to the original films. Even better, Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary Homework is included here; it’s essential for helping to elaborate on the evolution that his filmmaking process was undergoing at this time. (Another critical film in Kiarostami’s canon, Close-Up, was a pivotal influence on And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, and is prominently mentioned by many of the writers on this set.) Rounding out this essential collection of extras is a booklet featuring an essay by Chesire that beautifully encapsulates the complex humanist structure of these classic films.

Overall

This magnificent set of essential restorations, accompanied by passionate and well-researched supplements, is a strong contender for Blu-ray release of the year.

Cast: Babek Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Khodabakhsh Defaei, Iran Outari, Ait Ansari, Sadika Taohidi, Biman Mouafi, Ali Djamali, Aziz Babai, Farhad Kheradmand, Buba Bayour, Hocine Rifahi, Ferhendeh Feydi, Mahrem Feydi, Bahrovz Aydini, Ziya Babai, Mohamed Hocinerouhi, Hocine Khadem, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Zarifeh Shiva, Hossein Rezai, Tahereh Ladanian, Hocine Redai, Nosrat Bagheri, Azim Aziz Nia Director: Abbas Kiarostami Screenwriter: Abbas Kiarostami Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 281 min Rating: NR, G Year: 1987 - 1994 Release Date: August 27, 2019 Buy: Video

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Blending horror and comedy is tantamount to walking a tightrope. In the wrong hands, the disparate elements tend to undercut—thereby nullifying—each other. On the heels of the ticklesome trifecta of Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, and The Blues Brothers, no one would have doubted that writer-director John Landis could bring the funny. But that he could also terrify audiences with a canny updating of Universal’s 1940s monster movies would be demonstrated definitively by An American Werewolf in London.

The film pithily outlines the relationship between two American backpackers, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), as they make their way across the bleak, fog-shrouded Yorkshire moors. And their status as strangers in an increasingly strange land is rendered laughably evident when they enter a pub bearing the charming soubriquet of The Slaughtered Lamb. Inside, Landis ramps up the awkward comedy as the locals do their best to engage the interlopers, until Jack makes the mistake of inquiring about a pentagram daubed on the wall. The aftermath is equal parts menace and mirth. The way one dart player (David Schofield) intones, “You made me miss,” indicates just how easily the whole encounter could erupt into violence.

That explosion is delayed, however, until our boys have done an admirable job of losing themselves on the moors. Landis stages the sequence brilliantly, the tension steadily mounting as a terrible howling (accomplished by playing of a reverb-heavy elephant’s roar backwards) seems to come from all directions at once. You almost think that their camaraderie might get them through, until an act of proffered aid is interrupted by wanton slaughter. When David resumes consciousness, he finds himself in a London hospital.

An American Werewolf in London’s middle section effectively alternates between some delightfully surreal, if increasingly violent, dream sequences and a number of encounters with a progressively decomposing Jack, who advises David to take his own life before he can harm anyone else. Though the film’s interspersed with subdued moments of humor, the predominant mood throughout is one of impending doom and lingering melancholy, offset somewhat by David’s growing infatuation with a nurse (Jenny Agutter). Their relationship isn’t particularly convincing, since the characters aren’t really developed beyond their archetypal functions, but it’s appealingly conveyed through Naughton and Agutter’s performances.

The film’s indisputable centerpiece is the protracted werewolf transformation sequence. Earlier werewolf movies were content to get the transformation over with as painlessly as possible with a series of simple lap dissolves, wherein each shot finds the metamorphosing main character covered with more hair and other makeup applications, such as increasingly longer ears and teeth. But with An American Werewolf in London, special effects guru Rick Baker concocts excruciatingly realistic visuals (a lengthening hand, a growing snout) that occur more or less in real time, and by seamlessly combining makeup and practical effects. The trend Baker inaugurated here would continue throughout the 1980s in films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, where audiences turned out to gasp at the latest FX wizardry as much as (or even more than) the film’s narrative.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the transformation sequence is that, because it’s set to Sam Cooke’s plaintive rendition of “Blue Moon,” it taps into the same aura of sadness and regret as the film’s middle section. But An American Werewolf in London’s final act again doubles down on the gruesome humor. The werewolf’s nocturnal rampages sit alongside endlessly quotable lines like “A naked American man just stole my balloons!” At one point, Jack beckons David into a porno theater (Landis also shot See You Next Wednesday, the titillating title on display) where he meets the victims of his carnage, their wounds still bloody. It’s a consummately eerie sequence, leavened with some blithe comedy, that culminates with David’s final transition into the bestial. One can only wonder how it would have played out if it had been set in a “cartoon cinema” full of children, as Landis had originally scripted it.

When the beast gets loose in Piccadilly Circus, Landis indulges in some of the same Keystone Cops-refracted demolition-derby action that peppered The Blue Brothers, played here for a maximum of mayhem: bodies smashing through windshields, bodies being repeatedly run over, double-decker buses toppling sideways. The scene moves dexterously from actual location shooting to a mockup of the locale without missing a beat. But the sobering finale takes place in a back alley, where Agutter gets to play an emotional farewell opposite a slavering wolf. That she manages to come across as genuinely affecting is some of most impressive movie magic to be found in An American Werewolf in London.

Image/Sound

Arrow’s new 4K restoration improves considerably on Universal’s previous editions of the film, with colors in low-light and nighttime scenes really coming across (witness the neon-hued hairdos on those punks David encounters on the Tube). Black levels look deeper and better resolved. There’s also the anticipated upgrade when it comes to the fine details of costume and set design. This is the first home-video release of An American Werewolf in London to include the original mono track as well as the rejiggered 5.1 surround (both in Master Audio), and while the mono is obviously more limited in its dynamic range and channeling of effects, it’s nonetheless truer to the theatrical experience. It’s certainly nice to have it here as an option. Either way, the soundtrack’s needle drops sound crisp and clear, as do the snatches of Elmer Bernstein’s atmospheric score that crop up over the course of the film.

Extras

Arrow has ported over practically every available bonus feature from earlier Universal home-video releases of the film and added some impressive new ones. The best of the older material is far and away Paul Davis’s 2009 making-of documentary Beware the Moon, which runs slightly longer than An American Werewolf in London itself. Davis covers every detail and aspect of the film’s production from its conception in 1969 to its release and reception in 1981. There are talking-head contributions from practically the entire cast and crew. The documentary is so comprehensive that it renders some of the other archival extras a tad redundant, though it’s good to have them gathered here for the sake of completion, especially those involving special makeup effects guru Rick Baker.

The new audio commentary from filmmaker Paul Davis miraculously contains little in the way of overlap with his making-of documentary, culling new anecdotes that were uncovered during research for his book on the film, including some fascinating information about deleted and extended scenes whose original elements have been lost. The terrific feature-length documentary Mark of the Beast is a deep-dive into the figure of the wolf man from a well-selected roster of film historians and technicians, beginning with the ubiquity of the lycanthrope or shapeshifter archetype across human cultures, laying out how screenwriter Curt Siodmak singlehandedly concocted the “lore” of the werewolf (pentagrams, silver bullets, wolf’s bane) for The Wolf Man. The doc systematically then touches on practically every iteration of the werewolf film from The Werewolf of London through An American Werewolf in London, with particular emphasis on the films’ makeup and transformation effects.

There’s a recently filmed interview with John Landis in which the writer-director reminisces about the time he spent in London in the late ‘60s, his love of British cinema (from kitchen-sink realism to the Carry On films), and his experience working with a British cast and crew on An American Werewolf in London. The intriguing video essay “I Think He’s a Jew” examines the ways Wolf Man screenwriter Curt Siodmak encoded elements of the Jewish experience into his script and how Landis updates and expands upon them with some canny post-World War II refences in An American Werewolf in London. The new featurette “Wares of the Wolf” is a nifty glimpse at some of the remaining artifacts from the film, including David’s puffy red North Face jacket, one of the Nazi werewolf masks, and the prosthetic head used for the transformation sequence. Arrow also includes a wealth of swag in their packaging: a double-sided fold-out poster; six double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions; and a 60-page booklet featuring new essays from Travis Crawford and Simon Ward, as well as archival articles and original reviews. Altogether this is one of Arrow’s most impressive recent releases.

Overall

John Landis’s landmark horror-comedy gets the deluxe Blu-ray treatment, with a colorful new transfer, as well as a pack of new bonus materials.

Cast: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne, John Woodvine, Brian Glover, Lila Kaye, Frank Oz, David Schofield Director: John Landis Screenwriter: John Landis Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 97 min Rating: R Year: 1981 Release Date: October 29, 2019 Buy: Video, Soundtrack

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Chuck Russell’s The Blob toes a confident line between affectionate parody and straight-faced homage. Russell and co-writer Frank Darabont, at the time both young bucks hot off the surprisingly good and successful A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, clearly understand that the 1958 version of The Blob is ridiculous and hypocritically conformist, boasting young “rebels” that always seem to be ready at a moment’s notice to oversee the next policeman’s ball. The filmmakers also realize that a new Blob would have to up the ante considerably on the gore, which isn’t a tall feat in this case, as Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s original film featured a jelly alien that was never seen doing much more than (weirdly and poignantly) ambling up an empty street with a casualness that might suit an offhand search for a soda fountain. Russell and Darabont shrewdly build these concerns into their version, transforming the titular blob into a vividly sticky, viscous creature and setting it loose in an anachronism of a small 1980s town that could fit, comfortably, into the world as it was presented by the already 30-year-old original.

The weirdness of this film’s small California town is never far from Russell and Darabont’s collective sense of awareness. Gorgeous establishing shots of the setting show us a burg that appears to be enviably beautiful and tucked into itself—a monument to “minding your own business” while the rest of the world goes to hell. A child attempts to cajole his mother into letting him go with his buddy to see a Friday the 13th clone, assuring her that there’s no sex or anything bad while boasting of all the dismemberments the film’s bound to contain. It’s a fun, decidedly Joe Dante-ish moment that skewers puritanical Americana while efficiently setting the stage for the eventual reenactment of the theater scene from the first film.

Most pointedly, the teenagers in this version of The Blob are actually shown doing the things that teenagers often try to do—namely, getting drunk and laid, preferably simultaneously. This carnality is often played for comedy at the expense of the teenagers’ parents, who all consciously resemble 1950s archetypes: the pharmacist, the diner waitress, the small-town sheriff, the folksy mechanic, and so forth. Most bluntly, the blob isn’t an alien this time, but a government experiment gone awry—a twist that informs the monster with a sense of metaphoric, Romero-esque outrage at society’s self-concern, and which also serves to undermine the authority that the original film unquestioningly celebrated.

But the filmmakers wear this subtext lightly; they’re pranksters, not preachers. The Blob is ultimately a drive-in movie similar to its predecessor, and the primary difference is that it happens to be pretty good. The most obvious triumph is the beastie itself, which has been reimagined as a memorably disgusting batch of ambulatory, ever-mutating, brownish-pink ooze that occasionally springs Thing-style tentacles while dissolving and contorting its victims in remarkably inventive fashions that testify to Russell and Darabont’s glee at implicatively tearing Mayberry down to its foundation. (My personal favorite set piece involves a poor dishwasher who somehow gets sucked down a sink drain.)

Like all great monsters, the blob is democratic in its bloodlust: Women, children, and the nicest guys most obviously up for the role of town savior are the first to suffer its indifferent, acidic wrath. The third act falters (too many perfunctory explosions and explanations, too little majestic blobbing), but The Blob still belongs to the tradition of ‘80s horror movies that updated ‘50s curiosities to surprisingly potent and resonant effect. It shows that a genre remake mustn’t solely be an act of studio bookkeeping, as it can also be a call for playtime.

Image/Sound

Shout! Factory’s transfer is crisp and clear, and although colors appear slightly muted at times, the image has a nicely textured look throughout, going a long way to highlight the intricacies of the film’s homespun, yet impressive, practical effects and production design.
The neutral color balancing makes for consistently natural skin tones, while the strong contrast ensures a wealth of detail remains present even in the film’s numerous misty nighttime and dimly lit sewer-set sequences. The 5.1 audio is evenly mixed, presenting clean dialogue and giving a robustness to the more action-heavy sequences.

Extras

“Collector’s Edition” is typically nothing but a cheap marketing ploy, a meaningless phrase slapped onto countless Blu-ray covers in order to convince prospective buyers that they’re getting the best possible release of a film. But given the quality of the bountifulness extras on their release of The Blob, Shout! Factory actually gives fans and collectors a Blu-ray that will stand as the definitive edition of Chuck Russell’s undervalued gem for many years to come.

For starters, the disc comes with three feature-length commentary tracks, two of which are newly recorded. In the first of those, Russell, special effects artist Tony Gardner, and cinematographer Mark Irwin get into The Blob’s botched theatrical release, the influence of Hitchcock’s Psycho on the film’s narrative misdirects, and the challenges of location shooting and working on a tight budget. The trio also takes a stimulating and informative deep dive into how the practical effects were achieved and the tactics they used to get the blob to move in a naturalistic manner. The second and other new track, with lead actress Shawnee Smith, offers little more than aimless reminiscing and admiration for how well the film holds up. And the third track is a previously recorded one with Russell and producer Ryan Turek, and as such has a bit of crossover with Russell’s newly recorded one. But their rapport is engaging, and Russell’s passion for his work and that of others is unmistakable, especially as he discusses his personal feelings for Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s original The Blob and how he tried to strike new ground with his remake, while remaining respectful of its forebearer.

The disc also comes with a staggering 11 interviews, covering virtually every aspect of the film’s production and post-production processes. If his two commentaries weren’t enough, Russell is also on hand for another 40 minutes of on-screen talk concerning, among other things, how he was inspired by silent comedians and everything he learned about stunt craft while on set with Roger Corman. Elsewhere, Irwin provides some fascinating anecdotes about his work with David Cronenberg on Videodrome and The Fly, while actors Jeffrey DeMunn, Donovan Leitch Jr., Candy Clark, and Bill Moseley all discuss their early acting influences and how The Blob changed their careers. But the most fruitful interviews here are with the film’s unsung heroes—production designer Craig Stearns, mechanical designer Mark Setrakian, and “blob mechanic” Peter Abrahamson—each of whom reveal technical tidbits about the nuts-and-bolts of practical effects that will be an absolute treat for anyone with even a passing interest in FX work. The package is rounded out with some silent behind-the-scenes footage of the assemblage of a handful of effects, a few theatrical trailers, and a TV spot that’s even more ‘80s than the epically feathered hairdo of Smith’s character in the film.

Overall

Shout! Factory’s new Blu-ray release of The Blob comes outfitted with a spectacular array of fascinating extras and the best transfer of the film to date.

Cast: Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Donovan Leitch Jr., Jeffrey DeMunn, Candy Clark, Joe Seneca, Jack Nance, Del Close, Bill Moseley Director: Chuck Russell Screenwriter: Chuck Russell, Frank Darabont Distributor: Shout! Factory Running Time: 95 min Rating: R Year: 1988 Release Date: October 29, 2019 Buy: Video

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Christopher Lee was Hammer Films’s most popular and versatile performer. Well, perhaps versatile isn’t quite the word for it. Even though Lee was equally effective in roles on either side of the good-evil dichotomy, he seemed uninterested in the territory of ambiguity. And again, that’s too hasty a judgment, because there’s something truly subversive about Lee’s intense way of bringing similar qualities to roles that either brandish the banner of virtue or vice. Fully capable of playing self-righteous Christian soldiers with the most granite of jaws as well as embodying the honeyed seductiveness of evil incarnate, Lee demonstrated how most continuums are less like straight lines with good and evil situated as far as possible from each other, but rather like a circle where extreme behavior is actually closest to exactly the thing it hates.

Take Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out, where Lee plays the Duc de Richleau, a modern-day warrior-saint against a cult of Satanists (led by the always silken Charles Gray) out to ensnare his surrogate son, Simon (Patrick Mower). From the first scene, where de Richleau arrives to meet their mutual friend, the skeptical Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene), at an airstrip, Lee seems to be sniffing out the evil. Arriving at Simon’s mansion that evening, his eyes are immediately drawn to the astrology observatory. When his suspicions are confirmed (the group of pagans have gathered in the living room and Simon begs de Richleau and Van Ryn to call on him another evening because they’re interrupting his “society meeting”), Lee books it to the observatory and almost instinctively knows where to find the sacrificial roosters.

“I’d rather you were dead than fooling around with this,” de Richleau growls to Simon, in full-blown moral outrage. Not to downplay Fisher’s top-notch work (the Hammer auteur turns the centerpiece “circle” sequence into an endless nightmare of atmosphere, suggested evil and, finally, terrifying manifestations) and famed genre novelist Richard Matheson’s smoothly structured screenplay, but Lee’s performance pushes The Devil Rides Out from being merely one of Hammer’s better films into the territory of horror classic.

Image/Sound

Shout! Factory’s 2K scan of Fox’s interpositive looks positively smashing, a definite cut above the prior Studio Canal HD edition. Colors are deeper and richer, with more satisfying skin tones and black levels, and a definite boost to fine details. (For the record, the Studio Canal version, with its digitally “completed” special effects, is available here as an extra.) The Master Audio mono track sounds pretty good, with just a touch of hiss and crackle occasionally evident, but nicely putting across James Bernard’s score, by turns haunting and rollicking.

Extras

Shout! presents a roster of bonus materials carried over from prior home-video releases, as well as several new extras. From Anchor Bay’s 2000 DVD, there’s an archival commentary track featuring actors Christopher Lee and Sarah Lawson, moderated by Hammer historian Marcus Hearn, that’s an easygoing, engaging listen, with Lee discussing his role in getting the film made and playing a protagonist for a change. The archival “World of Hammer” featurette is a fun but superficial overview of the studio’s history, narrated by actor Oliver Reed.

More recent featurettes come from Studio Canal’s 2010 Blu-ray. “Black Magic” is a satisfying making-of piece with recollections from screenwriter Richard Matheson, actor Patrick Mower, and the children of special effects supervisor Michael Stainer-Hutchins, as well as several film historians and critics. And “Dennis Wheatley at Hammer” examines the popularity of the writer, his views on the occult, and the process of adapting Devil Rides Out (as well as The Lost Continent, which was shot simultaneously), and the outrageous mid-‘70s Satanic panic exposé To the Devil…A Daughter (not to mention Wheatley’s indignant response to that last title).

There are also three newly commissioned extras. A commentary track featuring film historians Steve Haberman and Constantine Nasr and Richard Christian Matheson (son of Devil Rides Out screenwriter Richard Matheson) is an information-packed examination of the film that offers some great tidbits about how elements from Wheatley’s novel (like a mummified penis) were carried over into the elder Matheson’s script but never made it to the screen. The commentary also details some key differences between the book and film’s conception of several characters, including the suppression of one character’s Jewish heritage.

“Satanic Shocks” finds critic Kim Newman waxing enthusiastic about Matheson’s contribution to the film while pretty thoroughly slagging the source material, though Newman does take great pains to situate the novel within Wheatley’s larger body of work, and he has some cogent points to make about where Hammer Films was at this point in its history. And in “Folk Horror Goes Haywire,” critic Jonathan Rigby delves into the Swinging Sixties social and cultural context, the downward-spiraling career of director Terence Fisher, and the fact that Hammer initially wanted Charles Boyer (in all his Frenchy-ness) to star as the Duc de Richleau.

Overall

Terence Fisher’s standout Hammer Films horror title gets a sterling Blu-ray transfer and a satisfyingly comprehensive slate of bonus features.

Director: Terence Fisher Screenwriter: Richard Matheson Distributor: Shout! Factory Running Time: 95 min Rating: NR Year: 1968 Release Date: October 29, 2019 Buy: Video

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Described upon release as an uncharacteristically remote and lethargic entry in Martin Scorsese’s otherwise energetic oeuvre, Kundun has, with time, become easier to see as being of a piece with the director’s other, frequently experimental work of the 1990s. The film, a worshipful biographical account of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and current Dalai Lama, follows the religious figure from the age of two, when he was identified by monks as the reincarnation of the previous lama, all the way through his 1959 departure from Tibet to escape the anti-religious persecutions of the communist Chinese government that annexed the nation. Using multiple actors to capture the figure at various stages of his early life, the film follows a linear timeline, albeit in a fashion that regularly feels out of step with time. In a way, Kundun is structured like one of the many Buddhist sand mandalas that Scorsese captures on screen, creating intricate narrative lines that weave in and out of each other to yield something that feels like one unbroken image.

Throughout, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s use of dissolves works to suggest a simultaneous occurrence of events: the Dalai Lama’s education in monasteries, his observance of Tibetan customs, and the increasingly tense encroachment of Communist China over Tibet. Roger Deakin’s lush, vista-heavy cinematography feels suited to the epic sweep of a western, but the film’s editing filters these vast panoramas and classically blocked interiors through an intimate, impressionistic prism. Combined with the looping techniques of Philip Glass’s score, Kundun’s structure belies the occasionally arch tone of its impassive protagonist.

Indeed, Kundun’s editing perhaps does more to define the Dalai Lama than any of the actors who play him. Scorsese’s films tend to concern protagonists whose narcissism blinds them to how little power they actually have, but Kundun inverts this dynamic by centering itself around a hero who, at a very young age, is bestowed tremendous authority, and who fears his unworthiness to wield it. The Dalai Lama may have achieved serenity, but his stoicism is complicated by the film’s editing and occasional bursts of camera movement, stylistic tics that reflect the turmoil raging just beneath his calm exterior. In effect, Kundun’s technical craft undermines what could have been a simplistic portrait of the Dalai Lama’s wisdom, suggesting that his outward appearance is the result of a constant struggle to suppress his thrill at cultural displays and his horror of China’s steamrolling of Tibetan independence.

As a meditation on the conflict between inner faith and the politics of organized religion, Kundun can be seen today as the middle film in an unofficial trilogy centered around religious figures that includes The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence. As one example of how these films are united in their characterizations, the ruthless inquisitor played by Issei Ogata in Silence was anticipated by the portrayal of Mao Zedong (Robert Lin) in Kundun. Both men mix uncompromising brutality with an unexpectedly affable personality, a cajoling tone that convincingly enumerates the dangers of religion as a brainwashing tool even as he clearly sees such conditioning as an impediment to his own secular, political brainwashing. Even as Scorsese seriously examines how faith can inspire individuals and collectives, he ponders the worth of its philosophies in the face of the material threats of the world.

Eventually, the Dalai Lama’s calm silence starts to look like hopeless indecision in the face of his people coming to him for help against the invading Chinese. Kundun is hagiographic, subjecting the Dalai Lama to perhaps the least amount of subtextual criticism of any Scorsese protagonist, yet, even so, it ponders how the same commitment to philosophy that makes the monk such a revered figure can also offer so little comfort to his followers. “Nonviolence takes a long time,” he says in the face of China’s relentless march through Tibet, to which another monk replies, “Do we have the time, Holiness?” “I have never known,” the Dalai Lama meekly responds, and his uncertainty defines the film as much as his hope for nonviolent victory.

Image/Sound

Kino Lorber’s transfer beautifully renders Roger Deakins’s cinematography, highlighting its emphasis on the vibrant reds of monks’ robes and the Chinese flag, as well as the golden hues of palatial interiors and warmly lit landscapes. The transfer lacks any visible traces of debris or scratches, and detail is consistently sharp. The audio is no less bombastic, with the rhythmic swelling of Philip Glass’s score filling all the surround channels, while dialogue remains clear in the center speaker. For a film with such a quiet protagonist, Kundun can be overwhelmingly boisterous, but the audio track keeps each element in elegant balance.

Extras

An audio commentary with film historian Peter Tonguette makes an extended case for the film as one of Scorsese’s most underappreciated, countering notions of Kundun as an anomaly in the director’s canon with numerous connections both great and small to his other work. A second disc comes loaded with more extras, including two feature-length documentaries, one on the production itself and one on the real Dalai Lama. The latter is a typical social-issue documentary made for television, observing the Dalai Lama’s activities in exile and providing a summary of the history of Tibet’s conflict with China, while the former includes interviews with the crew about Kundun, along with copious footage of Scorsese filming and navigating the unpredictability of child actors, groups of non-professionals, even animals.

There are also separate archival interviews with Scorsese, Glass, and screenwriter Melissa Mathison, all of whom speak at length about their views on the project’s subject matter and their approach to it. Kino’s set is so thorough that they even found and included an hour-long interview with Michael Henry Wilson, the director who made the behind-the-scenes documentary. Also included here are brief EPK interviews with the crew, recorded at the time of release. An accompanying booklet contains an essay by filmmaker Zade Constantine, who further defends the film’s merits against its lukewarm legacy.

Overall

With its exceptional transfer and wealth of informative extras, Kino’s Blu-ray of Kundun makes a strong argument for Martin Scorsese’s oft-neglected curio as a standout entry in his oeuvre.

Director: Martin Scorsese Screenwriter: Melissa Mathison Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 134 min Rating: PG Year: 1997 Release Date: October 29, 2019 Buy: Video

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