Blu-ray Consumer Guide: May 2013, A Memorial Day Gift To You From Some Came Running

How did this forty-disc mon­ster CG hap­pen, you may won­der? (Then again, you may not won­der, in which case just skip ahead to the cap­sules.) Well, it’s like this: whilst work­ing on the De Niro book I would take breaks
from the intens­ive De Niro watch­ing by pop­ping in a Blu-ray to “relax,” and
mostly they would be things that I’d had in the “sta­ging area” for the Consumer
Guide any­way. Once the De Niro book was done, and I’d done anoth­er round of
revi­sions on The Novel That I Delusionally Expect Will Catupult Me Out Of This
Particular [redac­ted] Business, I had been hop­ing to get a few weeks work on
anoth­er actu­ally remu­ner­at­ive pro­ject, but that DIDN’T HAPPEN. Also My Lovely
Wife has had to work late a lot. What’s a fella to do? Go to rep theaters?
Interact with OTHER PEOPLE? Hell no.

Equipment:
Playstation 3 for domest­ic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera
TCP50S30 plasma dis­play, Pioneer Élite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver. 

3:10 To Yuma
(Criterion)

Commended by Andrew Sarris for his “styl­ist­ic con­vic­tion in
an intel­lec­tu­al vacu­um,” Delmer Daves does in fact offer stronger, bet­ter stuff
than that, accord­ing to his post-Andrew cham­pi­ons. Dave Kehr has written
com­pel­lingly on his fre­quently dis­missed melo­dra­mas, Susan Slade and Parrish,
par­tic­u­larly (“Call it Camp…”—Sarris) and in the book­let essays for this and
the also-superb Jubal, Kent Jones makes
the case that Daves was the mas­ter of a rare and par­tic­u­lar kind of Western,
one in which the depic­tion of good­ness was para­mount (“or call it Corn,” Sarris
con­tin­ued). Jones is com­pel­ling and well-informed, and his descrip­tions of
Daves’ tech­nic­al innov­a­tions in shoot­ing his uniquely American land­scapes adds
per­suas­ive bal­last to his case for the dir­ect­or as a major one. But  here it’s really the see­ing that’s
believ­ing. The simple-as-death storyline (adap­ted from an Elmore Leonard tale)
gets a beau­ti­fully meas­ured treat­ment here; this is a far, far more substantial
film than its lazy movie-guide cat­egor­iz­a­tions as a “sol­id B Western” or
whatever give it cred­it for, and the trans­fer of the black-and-white film is gorgeous.
Outtakes include still shots from an excised Felicia Farr nude scene. OK,
that’s not actu­ally true. Extras are sparse but as I said the Jones essay is an
edu­ca­tion. And I can’t emphas­ize enough that the movie is beau­ti­ful, beautiful,
beau­ti­ful, on pretty much every con­ceiv­able level. —A

Bakumatsu Taiyo Den
(Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

This 1957 pic­ture ranked fifth in a 1999 poll of greatest
Japanese films con­duc­ted by the nearly hundred-year-old magazine Kinema Jumpo.
It’s rel­at­ively obscure in the west; the reas­ons for the high esteem there and
the scarcity of its repu­ta­tion here are prob­ably not unre­lated; it’s a very
cul­tur­ally spe­cif­ic film, an alleg­or­ic­al farce in which the dwind­ling of  the sho­gun­ate in the mid-to-late 19^th
cen­tury reflects upon the Japan of the time the film was released. The opening
mont­age, as it hap­pens, has a lot in com­mon with that of the veddy British On
Approval, reviewed below; tak­ing the viewer
by the hand and say­ing this story is about “then,” but it’s also about now. So
what is it about, any­way? It
takes its time with that; the ostens­ible plot hook, in which a broke brothel
pat­ron starts doing odd jobs around the joint because he can’t pay his bill,
doesn’t really kick in until about 45 minutes into the nearly two-hour film,
dir­ec­ted by  Yuzo Kawashima and
co-written with his then protégé, the soon-to-be-great Shohei Imamura. The
movie is divert­ing for its picar­esque humor, social obser­va­tions, and overall
frank­ness (nev­er not funny: when a bunch of the film’s male char­ac­ters gang up
for a group piss); some­times it comes off like a Moliere farce with a change of
ven­ue. The disc boasts an excel­lent trans­fer of a recent digit­al restoration;
extras are con­fined to the disc pack­age book­let, which has some essays. I’d
tend to recom­mend this most highly to view­ers already very con­vers­ant with
Japanese film look­ing to catch up on what had been a hard-to-find canon
clas­sic. —A

Band of Outsiders
(Criterion)

How audi­ence friendly was this Godard film con­sidered to be
back in 1964? Please note the Columbia Pictures logo between the “Visa de
con­trole Ministériel No. 28712” card and the open­ing title mont­age. Yep, with
its tack-piano theme, jokey cred­its, quirky tendresse, and more, this really is
the sort of film that rep­res­ents to per­petu­ally dis­il­lu­sioned one-time Godard
fans of a cer­tain age what “earli­er, fun­ni­er films” meant to the aliens
chas­tising Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories.
To such an extent that one almost is temp­ted to trash it, the bet­ter to extol
the vir­tues of Ici et aeil­leurs.
OK, not really. Much. It’s won­der­ful, the race through the Louvre and the
much-bruited Madison bit are as great as every­one says they are, and in all
this is Godard’s most Queneau-esque film, not just with respect to Gallic
“charm” and all that, but also in terms of a struc­tur­al self-consciousness
that’s designed to enhance genu­ine feel­ing rather than pre­clude it. In short, a
Great Film. This Blu-ray is a lovely upgrade of what had been an already
excel­lent pack­age, the wintry black-and-white rendered in excep­tion­al crispness
and detail. Even the book­let essay by Joshua Clover, quite pos­sibly my least
favor­ite writer of all time (because I’m sure you were won­der­ing)  is bet­ter than all right. —A+

Black Sabbath (Arrow
region B U.K. import)

I think this antho­logy pic­ture may be Mario Bava’s best
film, by vir­tue not only of its con­sist­ency but its vari­ab­il­ity. Alternatively
dead ser­i­ous and irre­press­ibly play­ful, every shot a won­der and cer­tain images
so haunt­ingly ter­ri­fy­ing and sad as to be unfor­get­table, it’s a con­cise feast
of very par­tic­u­lar cine­mat­ic inspir­a­tion. I speak of course of the Italian
lan­guage ver­sion of the 1963 film, entitled I tre volti di paura (The Three Faces of Fear), which retains the ori­gin­al order of the three
tales and has a final shot fea­tur­ing “host” Boris Karloff that’s an utter
delight. That ver­sion is the high­light of this three-disc (one Blu-ray, two
stand­ard def) edi­tion of the film from Arrow. There’s also the English-language
American International cut, which gives us Karloff’s own voice, which is nice.
The most sali­ent extra on the Blu-ray is a very good half-hour video with
split-screen explan­a­tions of the aur­al and visu­al dif­fer­ences between the two
ver­sions. The pic­ture qual­ity of my favored ver­sion, from red tele­phone to
sickly green vam­pire fam­ily to grim­acing jewelry-wearing corpse, is so
stag­ger­ingly great it brought tears to my eyes, almost. A defin­it­ive edition
and an intense pleas­ure. Wowsers. Co-starring Jean-Pierre Leaud’s mom, by the
way.  —A+

Cloak and Dagger
(Olive)

I raised my eye­brows in an approv­ing way when I saw the logo
of The Film Foundation on the back cov­er of this edi­tion of the 1946 Fritz Lang
thrill­er. The res­tor­a­tion presen­ted here looks pretty grand. A little dam­age in
the form of scratches and such is vis­ible here and there, but over­all this has
really superb pic­ture qual­ity with excel­lent con­trast and detail. It’s a damn
fine film, too, boast­ing a sol­id Gary Cooper per­form­ance (wheth­er you buy him
as a nuc­le­ar phys­i­cist really doesn’t mat­ter after about six minutes or so) and
some very nice bits, includ­ing a a scene in which
attracted-to-each-other-awkwardly room­mates have to con­tend with a hungry cat,
and a killing-in-self-defense scene that’s a def­in­ite pre­curs­or to the nasty
kitchen-murder sequence in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. Check it out. —A 

Crimewave (Shout!
Factory)

As the say­ing goes, films don’t get too  much more maudit than this 1985 item.
Director Sam Raimi’s second prop­er fea­ture, and the first that he and his
asso­ci­ates (Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert, et. al.) made for/with THE MAN,  was a behind-the-scenes tragedy/farce
from the get-go, from imposed lead­ing man to unfore­seen uni­on over­ages to
clue­less execs doing recuts that mutil­ated a pleth­ora of elab­or­ate and possibly
beau­ti­ful mas­ter shots and more. Surely an object les­son not just for Raimi and
com­pany but for co-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, who here dub a correctional
facil­ity “Hudsucker State Penitentiary” and make a blink-and-you-miss it cameo appearance
(Frances MacDormand plays a nun, too). So how’s the movie? Sometimes quite
enter­tain­ing, always exuber­ant, a bit of a mess, and an unex­pec­ted stylistic
link between Raimi, the Coens, and hon­estly, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Like the
Coens’ sub­sequent Raising Arizona, it’s
a real car­toon movie, although at this point Raimi has a slight edge in chops.
Still, nev­er such inno­cence again and all that. And I bet Tarantino was a big
fan, for reas­ons you’ll get if you watch it your­self. The pic­ture qual­ity is
very good and will likely sat­is­fy the recol­lec­tions of the five people who
actu­ally got to see this in its abort­ive the­at­ric­al “release.” The extras are
nicely explan­at­ory over­all but the jew­el is of course the Bruce Campbell
com­ment­ary, because pro­duc­tion train wreck tales are way more inter­est­ing than
suc­cess stor­ies and because it’s the irre­press­ible Campbell telling them.
Speaking of Reed Birney, who got the lead role that Raimi wanted for him, Bruce
notes, “Reed’s pretty cute in this. I won­der why he didn’t work much after
this. I guess it’s because we des­troyed his career.” He also refers to Louise
Lasser as “a piece of work.” Great stuff. —A

Day of the Falcon
(Image)

Every now and then I hear of a direct-to-DVD (more or less)
release of a film of the sort maybe that they don’t make any­more, and I kinda
get my Sentimental Old Man hopes up, like some­how I’m gonna be gif­ted with a
latter-day Khartoum or some­thing that
will help me to ban­ish dull care or some­thing. This is par­tic­u­larly weird
because I don’t even like the actu­al Khartoum all that much. 
Anyway, I thought maybe this
produced-by-some-obscenely-rich-Middle-Eastern-dude item, dir­ec­ted by
Jean-Jacques Annaud, might do some kind of trick in this realm, but alas, no.
It opens in “The Yellow Belt, some­where in Arabia.” And boy, that belt sure is
yel­low! The noble heads of war­ring fac­tions come to an uneasy truce involving
one of the scions of a war­lord liv­ing under the safe­keep­ing of the former
rival, or some­thing, set­ting the stage for an epic (not quite) series of
con­flicts once the land of the Yellow Belt is dis­covered to be oil rich. The
disc looks very good, but the 
visu­al splendor does not ameli­or­ate a cliché-collection storyline and
script, po-faced dir­ec­tion that takes every cliché dead ser­i­ously, phoned-in
per­form­ances, and….well, the battle scenes take forever to get star­ted, and
aren’t so hot once they do. I’m stick­ing with Khartoum. —C+

The Devil And Miss Jones (Olive)

Ah, Olive Films. Its Blu-rays of old Republic Westerns
(right, as opposed to the up-to-the-minute Republic Westerns) kept me sane when
I took breaks from grap­pling with The De Niro Perplex and oth­er inerleckshul
chal­lenges. And its off-kilter but hardly ran­dom selec­tion of oth­er vintage
Hollywood fare con­sist­ently uncov­ers gems of sub­stan­tial cinephil­ic pertinence.
This 1941 Norman Krasna-scripted, Sam Wood-directed com­edy is an excel­lent case
in point, a swell vehicle for the great Jean Arthur and an amusingly
agit­a­tion­ist pro-labor par­able to boot, with Charles Coburn as a mag­nate who
con­ceives the concept for the later tele­vi­sion series Undercover Boss, as it were. A crackerjack pic­ture with a standout
sequence set in Coney Island, and a very inter­est­ing just-pre-World-War-II time
cap­sule (although there’s not a single allu­sion to the troubles in Europe at
the time). All this and pro­duc­tion design by  William Cameron Menzies. (Cogent, but a little on the
sub­dued side for him, although the Coney Island police sta­tion did give this
view­er an eer­ie little pre-echo of Invaders From Mars.) The Blu-ray is crisp look­ing,  but a little low­ish in the contrast
depart­ment, which I some­times find to be the case with Olive. Hardly a cardinal
sin and in any event and the movie is well worth your time. —B+

Diary of a Chambermaid
(Olive)

Hollywood-studio bound Jean Renoir is frus­trat­ing in a lot
of ways, I noted as I began watch­ing this, struck by the stage sets, and the
sometimes-Mickey-Mousing music­al score. This ain’t no Toni, in oth­er words. However. Once you’re accus­tomed to
the cli­mate, the sali­ent fea­tures of which include Paulette Goddard’s
incarn­a­tion as a blonde, the movie builds up a nicely sly and sar­don­ic head of
steam. And of course this 1946 gloss on Mirbeau is an excel­lent double feature
with Buñuel’s 1964 treat­ment of the same mater­i­al, star­ring a Jeanne Moreau
who’s per­mit­ted to keep her nat­ur­al hair col­or. The curs­ory treat­ment Renoir
accords this pic­ture in My Life and My Films tends to con­firm my sus­pi­cions that this was more a
pas­sion pro­ject for Burgess Meredith (co-star, co-screenwriter, co-producer,
and Goddard’s hus­band at the time) than the dir­ect­or him­self. In any event, the
disc looks good, there’s a slight uptick in con­trast rel­at­ive to The
Devil and Miss Jones, and ostens­ibly minor
Renoir is still Renoir. —A-

From Beyond (Scream
Factory)

Barbara Crampton’s meta­morph­os­is from bespectacled
research­er to  leath­er cor­seted dom
is pos­sibly the greatest sexy lib­rar­i­an switch in cinema his­tory. And the
Stuart-Gordon-directed 1986 fol­lowup to the immor­tal Re-Animator doesn’t dis­ap­point in its oth­er par­tic­u­lars either.
The disc is first rate: Good detail, great psy­che­del­ic col­ors. Gordon’s brio
and the over­all inspir­a­tion of the rest of the crew bring this latter-day
exploit­a­tion good­ie way above gen­er­ic Italian-studio Charles Band-dom.
(Longtime Fangoria and/or Video Watchdog sub­scribers know too well what I
mean.)  Filmmaking les­son: various
grad­a­tions of psy­che­del­ic pink light­ing def­in­itely give your rubberized
creature effects a more con­vin­cing feel. Good explo­sions and fire, always a
sign of a well-done trans­fer. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “From
Beyond has a machine!” —A

Frontier Horizon
(Olive)

The good news is that this 1939 B oat­er, the eighth and last
Three Mesquiteers pic­ture to star John Wayne, is the best-looking of all such
Blu-rays I’ve looked at thus far (I haven’t yet  got­ten to Santa Fe Stampede and Red River Range).
It’s one of the more unstuck-in-time Mesquiteers adven­tures, with an engaging
land-grab storyline and tight nar­rat­ive mar­gins and brisk action; a real tonic.
Also the film debut of Jennifer Jones, here billed by her real name Phyllis
Isley, and look­ing and act­ing very fresh, inno­cent as she is of the knowledge
that David O. Selznick would soon come along and CRUSH HER SPIRIT.—B+

The Fury (Twilight
Time)

This, as it hap­pens, is one of my favor­ite Brian De Palma
movies, largely because it’s just the dir­ect­or going vir­tu­osic­ally nuts on a
B‑movie “Don’t fuck with Kirk Douglas” scen­ario. For the first quarter or so I
was hav­ing a won­der­ful time with the high-def ver­sion. The beach scene with
William Finley, and its bizarre depth-of-field show-offery, looked amaz­ing. And
I noticed that Hillary Thompson, the girl Amy Irving gives the nosebleed to,
was a dead ringer for Sasha Grey, who was not even a concept in 1978. This is
what movie watching’s all about. However. Once the night scenes star­ted, the
pic­ture got pretty wonky: a good deal of speck­ling akin to what one sees in the
Italian trans­fers of some Dario Argento pic­tures. It’s par­tic­u­larly evid­ent in
a scene after Douglas puts Irving on the bus: the over-graininess doesn’t get
as bad as that of the mis­fire French Connection Blu-ray of a while back, but it’s close. Off-the-record consultations
with tech­nic­ally trus­ted sources sug­gests the prob­lem arises from an anom­aly of
an out­moded stor­age medi­um for digit­al trans­fers. It cer­tainly didn’t kill the
movie but it took me out of it for a bit, and it’s a poor com­par­is­on with the
won­ders inher­ent in the day­light scenes. A shame, and a prob­lem I hope can be
cor­rec­ted at some point in time. —C

The Grandmaster (Mei
Ah mixed region Hong Kong import)

If you wanna see the latest from Wong Kar-Wai before Harvey
Weinstein regales the U.S. with his shorter-by-fifteen-minutes cut, this  pricey import would seem to be the way
to go, and it’s a beauty. An evoc­at­ive and some­times ellipt­ic­al bio­graphy of
mar­tial arts legend Ip Man (in case you were won­der­ing, that’s the guy’s actual
NAME, not like a super­hero title or any­thing) it begins with a rain-soaked
fight sequence that’s both quint­es­sen­tial and unlike any­thing the director’s
done before. The col­ors are quietly rav­ish­ing, the per­formers profoundly
enig­mat­ic, and on the whole it’s more assured and cohes­ive than My Blueberry
Nights, which I’ve actu­ally got­ten fonder of in recent years. On this disc,
movie itself is region-free, and has English subs; spe­cial fea­tures are
region-locked, and have none. They look pretty EPK-generic, as far as I can
tell.  Your call. —A-

The Grapes of Death
(Kino Lorber)

That’s a goofy title (and the French ori­gin­al, Les
rais­ins de la mort, isn’t much bet­ter) for
a genu­inely remark­able hor­ror movie, one of the most des­ol­ate films ever made,
its often goofy spe­cial effects not­with­stand­ing. There’s some­thing about
zombie-like pes­ti­lence occur­ring in the bucol­ic French coun­tryside (Michael
Haneke exploited it for rather sim­il­ar effect, in fact, for his more
arthouse-respectable [and also excel­lent] Hour of the Wolf) that just gets to you. Director Jean Rollin’s
determ­ined sim­pli­city altern­ates with genu­ine (blank verse0 poetry, and the
atmo­sphere of dread and des­pair is simply remark­able. Brigitte
Lahaie-aiie-aiie-aiie is great as a not-what-she-seems char­ac­ter and her
“behold my infection-free naked body” bit is a rather hil­ari­ous bit of exploitation
dead­pan in an oth­er­wise mord­ant vis­ion. The disc looks spec­tac­u­lar, very true
to its source. Which source con­tains the afore­men­tioned cheesy spe­cial effects,
but what are you going to do. —A-

The Grifters
(Miramax/Echo Bridge)

Ah, Echo Bridge, per­pet­rat­ors of that wretched Blu-ray of Dead
Man back in 2011. How I dread the idea of
spend­ing money on your product. So I think what happened is that I picked up
this (admit­tedly cheap retail price point) disc in a trade in, because my
curi­os­ity got the bet­ter of me and also because dam­nit this is a pretty great
pic­ture that belongs in one’s lib­rary and it has a Donald E. Westlake script
and naked Annette Bening and so there. Still, once it was home I didn’t look
for­ward to check­ing it out. It’s not bad. The open­ing cred­its are in 1.66,
which piqued my interest for a minute, but once they were through the picture
rever­ted to a plasma-screen-filling 1.77 (not even 1.85, those motherfuckers).
The picture’s sol­id, a little soft at times (like dur­ing Bening’s nude scene,
ima­gine that) but it doesn’t have any jump-out-at-you pix­il­a­tion screw-ups as Dead
Man did. Not ter­rible, but also nothing
spe­cial. I’d recom­mend you shoplift it but what kind of per­son would that make
me?—B- 

The Hobbit (Warner)

I don’t have full-time access to a 3D dis­play, so I acquired
the flat Blu-ray of this, a movie I’d prob­ably like a lot more if I smoked pot,
because I was curi­ous about how a more con­ven­tion­al ver­sion would look—I saw it
on the big screen in 3D and at the con­tro­ver­sial 48 fps pro­jec­tion speed and
was mixed but some­times very impressed. The “reg­u­lar” ver­sion on Blu-ray is
more…mixed. The tex­tures of the visu­als offers more dis­ctrete distinction
between the live-action and anim­ated com­pon­ents with­in a giv­en frame that I was
com­fort­able with; the images rarely, if ever, merged into a coher­ent and
sat­is­fy­ing whole. Again, this might not have been a prob­lem had I been watching
stoned. But I think the thing is, this movie actu­ally needs  3D, if not neces­sar­ily 3D in 48fps.
Having fig­ures inhab­it dif­fer­ent planes just makes the multi-platform effects
more digest­ible, as it were. Whenever I get a dis­play upgrade (and it’ll
prob­ably be a while), I’ll give the 3D ver­sion a look and report back. —B

The Hudsucker Proxy
(Warner Archive)

Almost ten years after their pal Sam Raimi got majorly
burned on Crimewave, the Coen Brothers
got a big budget and no stu­dio inter­fer­ence on their own argu­ably final Full
Cartoon movie, their first effort to really take a bath at the box office, as
it happened. Like all Coen pic­tures, it’s since acquired a cult, but not nearly
the one that The Big Lebowski enter­tains.
And so, its Blu-ray gets a bare-bones Warner Archive release. Not that you go
to Coen Brothers movies on video for the DVD extras any­way. This movie looks
very nice; the disc nails the movie’s highly burn­ished look, which we come to
under­stand as but one func­tion of its Dada-by-way-of-Preston-Sturges snideness.
By this time the Coens’ chops had come to match the ambi­tion of their crazy
gags (if you watch Raising Arizona
today, while it’s still delight­ful, you might be shocked at how ragged some of
it looks), and with more money to throw at pro­duc­tion design and such, they
really went to town. It’s kind of aston­ish­ing that the movie even exists. And
yes, I think Jennifer Jason Leigh’s per­form­ance works. —A-

The Jazz Singer
(Warner)

One rather wishes that Michael Curtiz rather than Alan
Crosland had dir­ec­ted this 1927, um, break­through film, but what are you going
to do. It would have still retained its problem-picture status. What this
Blu-ray really demon­strates is how great a res­ult is yiel­ded via applic­a­tion of
expens­ive up-to-the-minute tech­no­logy. I’m admit­tedly spec­u­lat­ing here; I don’t
have the details of how this trans­fer was made but it simply has to be a
metic­u­lous frame-by-frame scan­ning of good or emin­ently restor­able materials.
Look at the whites of Warner Oland’s eyes when he pops them out in indignation
that Jakie is late to sing at temple. It’s incred­ible in a movie that’s almost ninety
years old. As good as the older movies Olive puts on Blu-ray can look, their
trans­fers are done by more con­ven­tion­al means, and it shows. The rest of this
pack­age runs along the same lines as the 2007 standard-def release, with
mul­tiple eye-popping hours of vin­tage music­al enter­tain­ment, while the
com­ment­ary track on the movie itself from 
Ron Hutchison and Vince Giordano is one of the best of its kind. Just
amaz­ing. —A+

Knightriders (Arrow
Region B U.K. import)

I can­not tell a lie: until this Arrow release came under my
transom, I’d actu­ally nev­er seen this cru­cial George A. Romero film. I regret I
didn’t soon­er; it’s a pretty spec­tac­u­lar film. And it’s really not nearly as
goofy as its con­ceit of stunt cyc­lists enact­ing Arthurian myth in the modern
world might strike you, in large part due to Ed Harris’ superb lead performance
and to the work­man­like, thor­ough way that Romero and his com­pany enacts said
con­ceit. Expansive, emo­tion­al, but nev­er sen­ti­ment­al, it’s a quintessential
Romero treat­ment on the wages of integ­rity. The trans­fer looks ter­rif­ic, and
the extras, includ­ing a com­ment­ary and a con­tem­por­ary inter­view with Harris,
are also excel­lent. Shout! Factory has this slated for a domest­ic release in
July but I’m not sure if the com­pany will best this par­tic­u­lar product.—A+

Leave Her To Heaven
(Twilight Time)

There has not been an extant Technicolor source for this
glor­i­ous Technicolor film since maybe before you and I were even born, which is
a shame and maybe even a crime. So as much res­tor­a­tion as it gets, we shall
nev­er be able to behold the full glory of John Stahl’s mes­mer­iz­ing 1945 plunge
into mur­der­ous neo-noir amour fou, star­ring Gene Tierney at her most
hyp­not­ic­ally ga-ga gor­geous. But this Blu-ray boasts a beau­ti­ful pic­ture for
all that, so much more than pass­able that I won­der wheth­er view­ers of the real
Technicolor were struck by Stendhal syn­drome en masse. Essential. —A+

Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles (Warner)

What a sort of ran­dom idea: a two-Blu-ray antho­logy of  Looney Tunes mice-themed cartoons,
billed as “The Chuck Jones Collection.” The adven­tures of
Abbott-and-Costello-esque Hubie and Bertie are fea­tured, as well as a bunch of
shorts fea­tur­ing neur­ot­ic­ally gabby Sniffles. While I grant that a little
Sniffles goes a long way, I also insist that in small doses he (she? it?) can
be kind of win­somely delight­ful. Aw, fuck it, I’m a com­plete suck­er for Looney
Tunes on Blu-ray in any per­muta­tion, so maybe take my grade with a grain of
salt. But know also that the col­lec­tion includes “Trap Happy Porky,” which has
that drunk-mice singing “On Moonlight Bay” and one of them hic­cup­ping “You’re
flat” at the end, still one of the most reli­ably hil­ari­ous gags in all of
cinema, for my money.—A

 Major Dundee
(Twilight Time)

The heroic-not-quite res­tor­a­tion of a too-much-messed-with
Sam Peckinpah coulda-been-a-masterpiece looked great in the standard-def
pack­age released in 2006; this ver­sion looks bet­ter still. Even the 1965
Columbia open­ing logo has this par­tic­u­lar­ity of grain that provides a Proustian
rush of movie-palace power. The recon­struc­tion of Peckinpah’s vis­ion is a movie
one wished one could have seen in pre­cisely that con­text, because it would have
blown minds; it begins by col­or­ing very deftly with­in the lines of the standard
Cavalry Western and grows pro­gress­ively wilder and stranger while never
betray­ing its prime dir­ect­ive, so to speak. It’s also one of the most
emo­tion­ally stir­ring pic­tures of its kind. Cinephiles who are uncon­vinced by
claims for Peckinpah’s geni­us will at least have to cred­it him for a very
par­tic­u­lar sin­gu­lar­ity of vis­ion after see­ing this. And in this format you need
make no excuses for the present­a­tion.—A+

Monsieur Verdoux
(Criterion)

Speaking of strange, Charles Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy,
based on an idea of Orson Welles’, is one of the filmmaker’s odder creations,
the char­ac­ter a very upfront mix of self-love and self, if not loath­ing, then
some degree of dis­ap­prov­al. Verdoux is Barbe-bleu as bour­geois fallen on hard
times, as it were, his endeavors in murder slap­stick cook­ies dipped in arsenic
and his exer­cises in restraint and/or com­pas­sion sentimentally
self-aggrandizing. Fascinating, to say the least. This is a good-looking but
not extraordin­ary ren­der­ing of the film—there’s appar­ently only so much that can
be done with the mater­i­al avail­able from the licens­ing agent. Nevertheless, a
neces­sary entry in the Cinema of Extraordinary Personality. And it’s pretty
funny, at least in parts, par­tic­u­larly those parts in which Chaplin jousts with
Martha Raye.—A

On Approval
(Inception)

No, I had nev­er heard of it before either. Dave Kehr had, of
course Dave Kehr had, and it was his review of it in the Sunday New York Times
that con­vinced me to check it out. I’m very happy I did. The 1944
take-everyone’s‑mind-off the war com­edy (set in the Victorian era, it has a
present-to-past pro­logue that pokes gentle fun at the
torn-from-the-distressing-headlines pic­tures of its day) is pretty much a
fat-free puff pastry of droll dia­logue exchanges in a Wildean mode, to wit,
“You have a sweet voice, Helen.” “Thank you, George.” “But you sel­dom sing.
That is a great accom­plish­ment.” Reproduced in stel­lar, high-contrast black and
white, and sup­ple­men­ted by a dry but inform­at­ive com­ment­ary from schol­ar Jeffrey Vance. Aside from fea­tur­ing a rare film per­form­ance by British comedy
queen Beatrice Lillie, the won­der­ful movie hap­pens to have been adap­ted, dir­ec­ted by, and star­ring Clive Brook,whom
you may remem­ber as “Doc” Harvey from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. I had no idea he had it in him. —A 

Pals of the Saddle
(Olive)

Another Mesquiteers title. No win­dow­boxed open­ing this time.
A clear crisp  image, not quite as
crisp as that of Frontier Horizon. I like it bet­ter than Frontier Horizon
though because it fea­tures kinds creepy quasi vent­ri­lo­quist Max Terhune as
“Lullabye” Joslin, whom I find a more com­pel­ling (not to say Lynchian)
char­ac­ter than Raymond Hatton’s Rusty Joslin. Terhune’s char­ac­ter also indulges
in some mer­ci­less mock­ing of sap Tucson, played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan. It’s
also one of the Mesquiteer’s present-day-set adven­tures, and it involves a woman of ini­tially ambigu­ous alle­gi­ances and the
smug­gling of some­thing that’s not quite urani­um but is def­in­itely meant to be.
Hence, the movie is Notorious avant la lettre, and hence cine­mat­ic­ally import­ant. Look, my point is that if you
don’t get your hands on every Three Mesquiteers west­ern you can, you’re a bad
American. I don’t know how else to put it. —B

Panic In The Streets
(Fox)

Essentially a high-def clone of  the Elia Kazan box set edi­tion (note the menu, which is
designed in the style of the box set), but a really good look­ing ver­sion of
a mas­ter­ful movie. As Kazan him­self under­stood, this 1950 thrill­er was much
more than a genre exer­cise, but it works on that level just fine. It’s
thrill­ing film­mak­ing right from the get-go, with Kazan deploy­ing genuine
loc­a­tions and idio­syn­crat­ic per­formers (Zero Mostel has a major role in one of
his scarce films from this peri­od before the black­list kept him out of movies
for pretty much a dec­ade) with remark­able energy and inven­tion. The con­trast is
just as I like it, the detail looks just fine to me. A couple of  new­er extras are added (docs on costars
Jack Palance and Richard Widmark), but the com­ment­ary from  Alain Silver and James Ursini remains
the cru­cial one.—A    

The Telephone Book
(Vinegar Syndrome)

This Blu-ray from a rel­at­ively new con­cern that seems
com­mend­ably con­cerned with unearth­ing and pre­serving unusu­al grind­house and
quasi-underground fare does a nice job with this curio, writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by
Nelson Lyon, whose unfor­tu­nate sub­sequent claim to fame would be accompanying
John Belushi through a good por­tion of the Hollywood drug binge that killed the
per­former. This not-quite-tale of a girl Candide’s search for the world’s
greatest obscene phone caller (no, really) boasts lovely vin­tage NYC locations
rendered in yummy black and white and fea­tures, not neces­sar­ily in this order,
Roger C. Carmel yelling “Fuck,” William Hickey con­tem­plat­ing a giant erection,
and Jill Clayburgh load­ing a gun while wear­ing a sleep mask. Producer Merv Bloch
provides a lively and some­times sadly nos­tal­gic com­ment­ary. Utterly intriguing
but not for every­one. —B+

Tess (BFI Region B
U.K. import)

One of Polanski’s greatest films, it’s rarely acknowledged
as such for reas­ons I’m not sure I ought to spec­u­late on. So I won’t, and
instead will hope that this beau­ti­ful albeit extras-short Blu-ray from a
restored source will help find it a new­ish and appre­ci­at­ive audi­ence. Yes, the
British coun­tryside of Hardy, not to men­tion of Turner and Constable,  is  evoked via the rav­ish­ing cine­ma­to­graphy (Ghislain Cloquet
took over for Geoffrey Unsworth after the lat­ter died some weeks into shooting)
but the effects are not “merely” pic­tur­esque; the beau­ti­ful golden glow  that illu­min­ates “Sir John D’Urbeville”
throws that character’s strong ign­o­bil­ity into sharp relief, and throughout,
nat­ur­al glory is under­cut by human stu­pid­ity and/or cruelty. The dir­ect­or is at
his most expans­ive and his most crush­ing, sim­ul­tan­eously. —A

That Cold Day In The Park (Olive)

Pre-M*A*S*H Altman, but the pur­pose­ful murk of the imagery,
and  the focus fakeouts
through­out,  pres­age McCabe and
Mrs. Miller and Images and Three Women more than they do the sub­sequent film
that would make him fam­ous. The movie got slagged as a squal­id but conventional
psych thrill­er at the time but seen today its par­tic­u­lar tetchi­ness is really
auteur-distinctive, if you ask me. The drab of the sup­posedly swank apartment
inhab­ited by the Sandy Dennis char­ac­ter speaks volumes. The Olive disc seems to
have been trans­ferred from not pristine mater­i­als, but the Blu-ray renders what
is likely a pretty accur­ate account of cine­ma­to­graph­er Laszlo Kovacs’ long-lens
impres­sion­ism. Fun fact: after retir­ing from act­ing male lead Michael Burns
became an aca­dem­ic his­tor­i­an and has writ­ten more than one book on the Dreyfus
case. — B+

Tristana (Cohen)

Goddamn there are a lot of trail­ers before the begin­ning of
this movie. And that’s my only com­plaint. This high-def ver­sion of what I still
con­sider Buñuel’s mas­ter­piece of mas­ter­pieces looks amaz­ing right from the
begin­ning, as it casts a seem­ingly simple but ulti­mately dev­ast­at­ing spell.
Kent Jones for­ti­fies his repu­ta­tion as The World’s Most Enviable Film Critic by
host­ing a com­ment­ary track with Catherine Deneuve her­self, and he keeps it relaxed
and gets great stuff.  The included
altern­ate end­ing is inter­est­ing. The actu­al end­ing is…well, unbe­liev­able. Get
this. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “He was really happy to be back in Spain,
to be back work­ing in Spain.”  —A+

Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics (Warner)

Good idea, put­ting these things on Blu-ray. The indi­vidu­al discs repro­duce the extras, “Warner Night At The Movies” car­toons and shorts and all, of the stand­ard def editions.
And we approve. As for the high-def pic­ture qual­ity, the films are, in back­ward chro­no­lo­gic­al order: White Heat, which looks very nice; there’s some crackle on the audio of the 1949 film, and one insert shot in the open­ing train rob­bery sequence kind of stands out like a sore thumb, but oth­er­wise sol­id, ter­rif­ic. The longest movie of the bunch, almost two hours, because it’s kind of sur­pris­ingly plotty. Never lags a minute though. 1936’s The Petrified Forest screened in a restored ver­sion recently, and I pre­sume that’s what’s on this Blu-ray, because the pic­ture is eas­ily the sharpest and most con­sist­ent in the set (not that the oth­ers are con­sid­er­ably behind, mind you). I mean, you can see stray hairs pop off both Bette Davis and Leslie Howard’s heads in medi­um clos­eup when they’re facing each oth­er. Also the painted desert back­drops of the set are more evid­ent. Terrific film, a bit on the talky side, but great per­form­ances (it made Bogart a star, but Howard really sells his slightly ridicu­lous role; the guy was some act­or) and inter­est­ing action…and the two African-American char­ac­ters are not broad ste­reo­types or even really ste­reo­types at all, a near-impossiblity for a Hollywood pic­ture of this time, I used to think. The Public Enemy looks spec­tac­u­lar, some­times grain heavy but what of it. Little Caesar  dis­plays a  little soft­ness in the shal­low focus shots but it’s likely endem­ic to the mater­i­al and it’s neither dis­pleas­ing nor “bad.” A won­der­ful thing in all respects. —A+

  Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning (Sony)

A lot of The Kids have been rav­ing about this one (and I
gotta say that get­ting behind Peter Hyams’ son could be Vulgar Auteurism at its
most innov­at­ive), so I thought I’d check it out, des­pite the fact that I turned
off the similarly-praised The Raid after
about twenty minutes cause the thing looked as if it had been developed in a
mud bath. The first twenty minutes of this were really dis­gust­ing (slaughter of
lead character’s fam­ily in graph­ic detail, includ­ing much-teased adorable-little-girl
death), and looked pretty damn good. Eventually I thought I dis­cerned a
pul­pi­er, freaked-out extra­pol­a­tion of The Bourne Legacy and/or Unknown, with
some intriguing Fire Walk With Me “touches.“Eventually I had to own up to the
fact that I was being way too optim­ist­ic and that the movie really wasn’t about
much more than a guy who comes out of a coma to dis­cov­er that he has a British
accent. This does have more nud­ity than an aver­age Bourne knock­off, plus the
lead act­ress is a pretty cred­ible Stoya lookalike. (Don’t hassle me for knowing
too much about porn stars, she was on the cov­er of the god­damn Village Voice.)
The action stuff is pretty cred­ibly bone-crunching, I admit. The com­ment­ary is
the usu­al “we had a great second unit” stuff. Verdict: not as essen­tial as you
may have been led to believe. —B-

The Vampire Lovers
(Scream Factory)

No real com­plaints from me on this one. Yeah, maybe the
mater­i­als weren’t pristine/super-restored, but they look decent. If there’s
ever a Blu-ray of Fearless Vampire Killers, I’ll expect it to look bet­ter. But, no dis­respect to Roy Ward Baker
inten­ded, the way this looks is both object­ively good, and also entirely
appro­pri­ate to the movie’s aes­thet­ic pay grade. Inspirational dialogue:
“German’s so dif­fi­cult.” Among the extras: ten minutes of pasty but nicely
dressed white males try­ing to come up with more eru­dite ways to exclaim
“Boobies,” (because there sure are a lot of them in the movie, and most of the
guys saw the movie when they were at an impres­sion­able age). On the oth­er hand,
while the very sens­ible and nice and still lovely second female lead Madeline
Smith gives an inter­view my wife char­ac­ter­izes as “darling!” Commentary
fea­tures very sedate-sounding Ingrid Pitt,  delight­fully named screen­writer Tudor Gates,  and the great Baker in a dry but
inform­at­ive inter­view format. (All three are now deceased, which is lamentable
but inev­it­able.) —A

Van Gogh (Gaumont
Region B French import)

Gaumont’s been put­ting out the Pialat cata­log in new
high-def edi­tions and while I am suf­fi­ciently pleased by my current
Eureka!/Masters of Cinema standard-def edi­tions of the films and I figure
even­tu­ally the com­pany or some like con­cern will step up to the plate with
ver­sions fea­tur­ing English-language extras, in a couple of cases I have not
been able to res­ist. This 1991 pic­ture is one. (It’s not among the MOC titles,
is one reas­on.) This is a mag­ni­fi­cent film, an artist’s por­trait of an artist
that con­cen­trates on inter­stices, pauses, and work, work, work rather than the
usu­al roman­ti­cized “artiste” stuff. It’s kind of the ulti­mate act of respect to
its sub­ject and likely a kind of self-portrait of its dir­ect­or. It looks sweet
through­out, though there are hints of noise in some of the dark­er scenes near
the end (for instance, Jacques Dutronc’s Van Gogh with a pros­ti­tute in the
Moulin Rouge back room). I hold out hope for cheap­er, more
English-comprehensive edi­tions (you’ve got sub­titles on the fea­ture but not on
any of the extras) but I’m still glad to own this. —A

The Verdict (Fox)

The long-awaited (by me and Jeffrey Wells and prob­ably some
oth­er people too) Blu-ray of the 1982 movie looks pretty splen­did: a good
lib­rary copy of a movie that belongs in your lib­rary. Watching it this time
around I noticed for the first time that the rela­tion­ship between Paul Newman’s
Frank Garvin and Jack Warden’s Mickey Morrisey rather neatly reverses the
dynam­ic between the Jimmy Stewart and Arthur O’Connell char­ac­ters in
Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.
Director Sidney Lumet often com­plained that crit­ics didn’t really appreciate
the depth of cine­mat­ic craft he brought to his decept­ively straightforward
storytelling; this movie is a mas­ter class in it. As Phillip Lopate put it in a
recent Cineaste review of the Blu-ray of Lumet’s film of A Long Day’s Journey
Into Night (which I haven’t got­ten around to look­ing at yet), “If Lumet refuses
to dis­guise the the­at­ric­al­ity of the source mater­i­al, he brings an impressive
array of cine­mat­ic tech­niques to its moment-by-moment real­iz­a­tion.” Where,
say,  Preminger moved the camera,
Lumet likes to place it in a com­pre­hens­ive over­view pos­i­tion and keep it there
for a good long time (see the pre­tri­al con­fer­ence with Newman, James Mason, and
Milo O’Shea), but he then places his emphases via judi­cious cut­ting to
ground-level medi­um shots as the scene builds in verbal and stra­tegic complexity.
In oth­er words, he is rather like
a theat­er dir­ect­or in that his moves ser­vice the script, and this script, by
David Mamet from  a nov­el by Barry
Reed, is a very strong one. One of the best by the dir­ect­or, the screenwriter,
and the star. —A+

Viva Zapata! (Fox)

I haven’t kept up on the crit­ic­al repu­ta­tion of this 1952
pic­ture, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time,  and I have to say I was not that thrilled by it (and I
recall not hav­ing been too thrilled by it first time around, which must have
been when I was in my twen­ties). It looks beau­ti­ful; Joseph MacDonald’s lensing
of vari­ous parts of the North American west stand­ing in for Mexico is inspired.
But I  found it dramatically
stil­ted (John Steinbeck’s script wears its earn­est didacti­cism on its sleeve)
and kind of a waste of Brando, who is very con­scien­tiously con­sist­ent in his
por­tray­al of the plaster-saint ver­sion of the title char­ac­ter. This movie
imme­di­ately pre­cedes anoth­er Kazan non-favorite of mine, Man on a Tightrope.
Maybe the guy was hav­ing per­son­al prob­lems in the mid-50s, I dunno. The disc is
a sol­id present­a­tion to be sure.—B

Wake In Fright
(Alamo Drafthouse)

This highly dis­quiet­ing 1971 thrill­er dir­ec­ted in Australia
by Canadian-born Ted Kotcheff could just as well be titled Alcohol Is A Hell Of
A Drug. A dis­sat­is­fied out­back school­teach­er en route to Sydney makes a stop in
the so-called “Yabba” that, after a few beers and a few more after that,
sub­merges him in what we’ll call a dis­tinctly unwhole­some cul­ture. Definitely a
movie you ought to show any­one who thinks the “Wolfpack” eth­os endorsed by
those idi­ot­ic Hangover movies is some­thing, you know, real. Also, you’ll nev­er see Donald Pleasance the same way again, even if you already do know Cul-de-sac. Long considered
lost, Wake was revived on the rep cir­cuit recently and the Blu-ray from
rel­at­ively a new dis­trib out­fit (an off­shoot of the legendary Texas movie
ven­ue) is highly admir­able: a great trans­fer that really puts across that
baking-heat yel­low light that seems endem­ic to Australia and cer­tain Australian
films, and good extras. If you can stand the (mul­tiply dis­claim­ered) kangaroo
hunt that’s the movie’s hor­ror center­piece you’re golden. If not, well, you’ve
been warned here. —A

War of the Wildcats
(Olive)

Lest any­one accuse me of being com­pletely in the tank for
any Republic west­ern, I cite this 1943 rel­at­ive dud, which is kinda dull
although argu­ably as semi-interestingly weird as one would expect any movie
that casts Albert Dekker and John Wayne as romantic rivals to be.  Originally titled In Old Oklahoma, it
fea­tures Dekker and Wayne as two dif­fer­ent types of oil men, one the rapacious
land-grabbing type, the oth­er the hard-working man of the people. Guess who’s
which. Martha Scott plays the object of their affec­tions, a former school
teach­er turned early 20^th-cen­tury chick lit pur­vey­or. Nothing
against Scott, but Claire Trevor might have put more oomph in the role. Also
fea­tur­ing Sidney Blackmer as Theodore Roosevelt. Seriously, it’s not as good as
I’m mak­ing it sound. And the disc present­a­tion itself is quite mixed, what with
the fre­quent speck­ling of the source mater­i­al. For Republic junkies only.—C

Zeta One (Kino
Lorber)

This 1969 secret agent/sci-fi pas­tiche looks pretty good.
GREAT col­ors. (Note the orange kit­chen. If you watch it. Which I’m not recom­mend­ing.) Whiter than white whites. Too bad it’s one
of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. INSIPID dir­ec­tion, coy dia­logue, flat
deliv­ery. Nice 60s art direction…I think my par­ents had those white swivel
chairs. The first scene goes on forever and noth­ing hap­pens. It’s like The
Room of James Bond par­od­ies, hon­est. But I
watched it all the way through! And the the image qual­ity does hold up but man,
does this movie ever answer the ques­tion “How bad can it be?” And the answer
is: in the final shots, the At the end the hero is sur­roun­ded by six naked
and/or semi-clad women and he looks abso­lutely bored to death…and you completely
under­stand how he feels. Brilliant. —C+

Zombie Flesh Eaters
(Arrow Region B U.K. import)

This 1979, um, clas­sic, looks pretty amaz­ing, and you’ll
know a little about why from the inter­view I con­duc­ted with super­visor James
White, here. The clar­ity and detail is such I was able to cogently identify
(for my own self) the hall­marks of 
The Lucio Fulci “Look:” Shallow focus, almost exclus­ively long lenses,
not osten­ta­tiously lit, lotta “nat­ur­al” light. And you know, maybe it’s my
grind­house taste talk­ing, but I think it’s a pretty good hor­ror movie. And now
one word nev­er asso­ci­ated with pri­or video ver­sions can be applied to it:
beau­ti­ful. Nifty extras, too, includ­ing three dif­fer­ent dis­crete title
sequences, ‘cause that how inter­na­tion­al dis­tri­bu­tion of Italian exploitation
cinema used to roll. —A+