DVDHousekeeping

Lino's your uncle

By June 1, 2010No Comments

Lino small Today at The Daily Notebook we con­sider one of the minor Venturas, George Lautner’s 1963 Les Tontons Flingueurs, a breezy crime com­edy that was a pretty big hit in its day, which Gaumont has released in a very good-looking region-free Blu-ray edi­tion over in France. Lino is one of those act­ors who, once you’ve decided you like what he’s got, becomes a well-nigh irres­ist­ible draw. I mean, just look at that face. (That would be the man him­self, at right.) Grave, yet droll. He gets to do that a lot in the film in ques­tion, whose title trans­lates as…well, it could trans­late into quite a few things, with the word “uncles” as the con­stant. I dis­cuss more fully over at what is today called the Foreign Blu-ray Disc Report. 

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No Comments

  • Stephen Bowie says:
    June 1, 2010 at 4:34 pm

    Love the French crime films. If I’d known about this when I placed that last Amazon.fr order, it would’ve been in there. So … your tim­ing is prob­ably good.
    Are there any oth­er inter­est­ing Blus with English subs from Gaumont?

  • Glenn Kenny says:
    June 1, 2010 at 5:27 pm

    Don’t know, I haven’t nar­rowed my search­ing that spe­cific­ally. I do remem­ber learn­ing that THIS par­tic­u­lar film had English subs from the descrip­tion at the French Amazon site, so such info should­n’t be hard to come by if one estab­lishes the prop­er para­met­ers when shop­ping there…

  • Stephen Bowie says:
    June 1, 2010 at 7:55 pm

    Thanks, Glenn. So few French DVDs have subs that I haven’t picked up that habit at Amazon.fr … and I should not start now.

  • Gareth says:
    June 2, 2010 at 8:55 am

    This is one of my favour­ite entries in a very fine series: it’s fun to see you write on a film that’s not just unavail­able on DVD in the US but also more or less unknown here – a real hid­den treas­ure. A couple of Lautner’s col­lab­or­a­tions with Belmondo in the early 1980s are fun, too; cer­tainly not great cinema, but often very entertaining.

  • The Siren says:
    June 2, 2010 at 11:35 am

    My hus­band is crazy about this movie and tried to drum up attend­ance for a screen­ing via my blog, the only time he’s ever writ­ten any­thing for it. I loved Audiard’s defin­i­tion of a gen­tle­man (someone who can describe Sophia Loren without using his hands).
    http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/search?q=tontons+
    If I may quote my bet­ter half:
    “Hilarious, witty, ruth­less in its social descrip­tion but gen­i­al in its hand­ling of polit­ic­al situ­ations, this movie goes so deep into Frenchness that it reaches the core of the human spir­it. In these sorry times, it will restore your faith in the abil­ity of human­ity to over­come our idi­ots, while mak­ing clear the amount of work required.”
    I don’t remem­ber who showed, but I really liked the movie a lot. Having my own trans­lat­or helped.

  • Stephen Bowie says:
    June 2, 2010 at 11:55 am

    Yes, LES TONTONS FLINGEURS showed at BAM and maybe also at Alliance Francaise dur­ing the last few years … missed it both times.
    A couple of later Lautners (ICY FLESH and LE PROFESSIONEL) are in the recent multi-volume Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo DVD col­lec­tions from Australia’s Madman label. My cred­it card is throb­bing for those as well.

  • The Siren says:
    June 2, 2010 at 12:06 pm

    BTW, Stephen, I have the same prob­lem with French DVDs. Seems like a stu­pid busi­ness decision to me. They don’t even do closed-captioning, which would also help those with small French. And of course if you’re a French deaf per­son who likes movies you’re also SOL.

  • Gareth says:
    June 2, 2010 at 1:06 pm

    The same is true for a fair few oth­er coun­tries, too; a friend of mine teaches Spanish film, for instance, and only film in his large col­lec­tion of Spanish-released DVDs has sub­titles in any lan­guage! It’s a par­tic­u­lar pity when many of the films were released in one or oth­er over­seas mar­ket so the sub­titles do exist in most cases.

  • Stephen Bowie says:
    June 2, 2010 at 6:22 pm

    Well, y’know, cheese-eatin’ surrender-monkeys … whad­daya gonna do?
    Japan is the same way, and on the rare occa­sions when a Japanese DVD does have English subs, it costs a for­tune. Although there seem to be far more “fan-subtitled” Japanese films cir­cu­lat­ing than there are French films, for some reason.

  • PaulJBis says:
    June 2, 2010 at 6:57 pm

    This hap­pens too with eng­lish DVDs, as in, DVDs released in England. I remem­ber not buy­ing a copy of “Hideous kinky” in London, des­pite being very inter­ested in it, because I noticed it did­n’t have sub­titles of any kind and I was­n’t sure I’d be able to fol­low the dia­logue (writ­ten English I’ve got no prob­lems, but spoken English… some­times I still get stuck).
    God bless whatever reg­u­la­tion forces all amer­ic­an DVDs to have at least closed cap­tion­ing. Of course, it’s not ideal to have the film con­stantly inter­rup­ted with “[birds chirp­ing]” or “[rock music plays]”, but if the altern­at­ive is not under­stand­ing anything…