Blu-ray Consumer Guide, Spring 2020

Hello there. Customarily I point to my PayPal wid­get whenev­er I post one of these mono­liths, but in this case I’ll instead ask you to con­sider donat­ing to the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund. Thanks.

Equipment: PlayStation 4, OPPO Sony KD50X690E dis­play, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver.

And Hope To Die (Kino Lorber)

A remark­able curio. One of Rene Clement’s last pic­tures, it’s leagues removed from the focus and dis­cip­line of Purple Noon. The droll Leone pas­tiche in this 1972 picture’s open­ing rail­way sta­tion scene sug­gests some­thing wholly oth­er from what the movie becomes. Jean-Louis Trintignant, in Canada try­ing to escape from venge­ful gypsies, stumbles upon what seems like a bungled caper run by, um, Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray. The dia­logue soundtrack is all French, with Ray dub­bing him­self and Ryan, um, not. It kind of sticks out if you’re accus­tomed to hear­ing Robert Ryan’s voice com­ing out of his mouth. Ryan’s psy­cho lead­er­ship eth­os and con­stant test­ing of Trintignant sug­gest James Hadley Chase, but the ostens­ible source mater­i­al is David Goodis’ Black Friday. Between the dick-measuring char­ac­ter dynam­ics of the prin­cip­al males and the psy­cho­dra­mas of molls Lea Massari and, um, Tisa Farrow, the thing mostly plays like some Claude Lelouch fever dream of exist­en­tial roman­ti­cism. In the 140 minute play­ing time, about an hour fifty is pretty much noth­ing hap­pen­ing as the vari­ous per­muta­tions of the ques­tion of hon­or among thieves is con­sidered. All of it cul­min­at­ing in one of the most logist­ic­ally ridicu­lous capers I’ve ever seen in a movie, played out with a com­plete poker face and capped by the crane shot of Johnny LaRue’s dreams. Weirdly enough this is one of the bet­ter look­ing discs I’ve seen in some time, although DVD Beaver says it has a skimpy bitrate. What do I know. Stalwart Kino Lorber Kommentary Krew Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson are appre­ci­at­ive, dis­curs­ive, and at times inform­at­ive. Inspirational tid­bit: “First black guy in the film I think.” —B+

Beau Brummel (Warner Archive)

“I won­der why Stewart Granger said that Scaramouche was the only movie he was proud of? This doesn’t look too bad,” thought I, as I pushed this disc into the old PS4. Well I found out. Not that this 1954 pic­ture is bad — on a ground-floor craft level it’s a sol­id piece of stu­dio peri­od product. It’s two things: Granger is bad in it. He can’t find a use­ful bal­ance between his 18^th-cen­tury egal­it­ari­an fop’s cha­risma and his arrog­ance, and so Peter Ustinov, as Brummel’s frenemy the future George IV, walks away with much of the film. Except when Robert Morley, as George IV’s better-known dad, shows up. And except when Elizabeth Taylor stuns in both white wig and nat­ur­al raven tresses. (Granger too is always very well turned out — the much bruited rus­set dress­ing gown is a knock­out.) And second, there’s the over­all feel­ing that this is a real, albeit inad­vert­ent, nothing-happens movie. Do I blame dir­ect­or Curtis Bernhard? Is it import­ant at this point? Let the anonym­ous crafts­man rest. Most of the time while watch­ing this my mind reached back thirty or more years, when my boy Mel Neuhaus was run­ning Laser Island and sold me a Japanese disc of Vincent Sherman’s 1948 Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn and Viveca Lindfors. No great shakes as a movie per se, he said, but the best Technicolor on home video ever. And he was right. Why hasn’t Warner Archive put THAT on a Blu-ray? —B-

Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (Scream Factory)

Seth Holt! Aubrey Morris! Oozing ampu­ta­tion wounds! And Valerie Leon, who’s both the tit­u­lar mummy (why did I just write that) and her modern-day coun­ter­part, a comely lass who’s the daugh­ter of one of the tomb raid­ers who unearthed the ancient Egyptian witch in the first place. Which makes things easy on the film­makers, location-wise. Anyway. As lur­id early-‘70s Hammer pic­tures go, this is a few smidges bet­ter than Scars of Dracula, no dis­respect to Roy Ward Baker inten­ded. It is a truth almost uni­ver­sally acknow­ledged that a highly attract­ive female lead in the vicin­ity of depraved mur­der­ous super­nat­ur­al goings-on equals hor­ror pic­ture suc­cess. As a mem­ber of this movie’s core demo, I grapple with ways to verbally con­vey Leon’s appeal without com­ing off like a drool­ing creep out of an early Jethro Tull tune. Suffice it to say that dir­ect­or Holt, as we’ll even see later in this column, has a knack for sat­is­fy­ing the male gaze. The extras are copi­ous and the com­ment­ary from Steve Haberman is relaxed and inform­at­ive, although he him­self some­times suc­cumbs to the tempta­tion to drool aloud. —A

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Kino Lorber)

I guess I under­stand why this 1938 pic­ture is con­sidered “minor” Lubitsch, all right. For me the forced absurd­ism of the finale slops on a — well, there’s no oth­er word for it — jejune qual­ity that you almost nev­er find in the maestro’s oth­er pic­tures. (The writers were Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and Wilder’s weak­ness for such stuff waned soon after, and star­ted emer­ging again at the very end of his career.) But the open­ing sequence, from its very funny shop-window gag (which Wilder fully cred­its Lubitsch for) to the con­vo­lu­tions of the meet-cute of Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert, is worth the price of admis­sion. And Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert con­tin­ue to appear through­out the whole film! Joseph McBride says “its plods tire­somely through its grat­ing plot mech­an­isms” and quotes Brackett call­ing it “a really embar­rass­ing pic­ture.” (In his swell book How Did Lubitsch Do It?) These days though, at 90 minutes, how plod­ding can it be? Also: Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert. The nice-looking disc also fea­tures a com­ment­ary by Kat Ellinger that you’ll for­give me for not listen­ing to. —A-

El Bruto (VCI)

A “major 4K res­tor­a­tion,” says the cov­er, and the pic­ture qual­ity of this 1952 Mexican pro­duc­tion is very good to excel­lent, but still a little soft in spots. “The law is for the rich,” one of the soon-to-be-evicted tene­ment dwell­ers notes after a crowd of them receives a vis­it from their all-but-gloating land­lord inform­ing them of their future home­less­ness. Director Luis Buñuel, in the inter­view book Objects of Desire: “I added the landlord’s fath­er” — a dod­der­ing, mord­antly com­ic­al fig­ure — “and also a scene between Katy Jurado and a roost­er that I impro­vised dur­ing the film­ing,” as one does. The real gist of the pic­ture is the Katy Jurado as the ser­vant of the landown­er, a not at all obscure object of desire.  Pedro Armendáriz is the title char­ac­ter, a simple oaf the land­lord hires to ter­ror­ize the poor com­munity. Two super cha­ris­mat­ic icons of Mexican cinema facing off is pretty hot stuff to begin with, but Buñuel makes it truly spe­cial. It should be noted here nobody before or since Jurado could make a droop­ing lower lip so las­ci­vi­ous. The movie’s pace is snappy but also delib­er­ate — the Brute and Jurado’s Paloma don’t even meet until 30 minutes into this 80 minute pic­ture. Good old Andrés Soler is prop­erly tetchy as the land­lord. The scen­ario enacts the old good girl/bad girl dynam­ic without mak­ing you sick, because Buñuel always brings a dynam­ic and skewed per­spect­ive to such tropes. This is part of a VCI series of restored Mexican pic­tures. While they are sold as being region-free, neither this nor a second title I bought played on my PS4 (and yes I did rebuild the machine’s data­base after get­ting the error mes­sage of “inval­id disc”). Played fine on my OPPO which is set to Region B. Caveat emptor. Otherwise, like all Buñuel, essen­tial in any format. —A

 Canyon Passage (Kino Lorber)

The present­a­tion of this 1946 Jacques Tourneur west­ern boasts an excel­lent image and a pro­fes­sion­al, well-organized com­ment­ary by Toby Roan. It’s a superb, unusu­al film. Largely a romantic drama around a kind of love quintangle, so to speak. Not a lot of action but a load of atmo­sphere — look at that mud in the middle of a non-boom town’s street, and the inef­fec­tu­al planks lead­ing into the bank and the hotel. Why does Dana Andrews even both­er to buy new dress boots, one won­ders.  Tourneur uses a steady, obser­v­ant, patiently poet­ic style. “It’s a beau­ti­ful film,” Martin Scorsese told Richard Schickel. “There’s a won­der­ful moment where Brian Donlevy is in the back room — I think Hoagy Carmichael sees him — and he’s weigh­ing some cold out of a pouch. It’s not his. He’s just meas­ur­ing it and mark­ing the weight down. Then he looks at it again. He takes some for him­self. That’s where the prob­lem begins. He’s a decent guy, but he’s got some busi­ness prob­lems. This kind of dilemma fas­cin­ates me.” Contrast this with the scene in The Searchers, over a dec­ade later, when Ward Bond watches Dorothy Evans caress Wayne’s coat. And speak­ing of Hoagy Carmichael, his pres­ence and his songs are a bonus.—A+

 The Cranes Are Flying (Criterion)

Whoa, look at that image. The title of Chris Fujiwara’s book­let essay says it all: “A Free Camera.” Free and also beau­ti­fully focused and wit­ness­ing scenes still incred­ible over 60 years later. Like Tarkovsky and a few oth­er Russians, Mikael Kalatozov’s movies can still eli­cit “how did they DO that?” gasps. But this love story of the Great Patriotic War (that’s World War II to us) is more than a tech­nic­al tour de force, it’s an unre­lent­ingly emo­tion­al movie. The char­ac­ter who dies ima­gin­ing the wed­ding he will nev­er have will break you. The great Ian Christie con­trib­utes a really sol­id video inter­view; there’s some mater­i­al on the miracle-working cine­ma­to­graph­er Sergei Urusevskiy; Claude Lelouch mov­ingly recalls his dis­cov­ery of the film, and bring­ing it to Cannes; and there’s a fea­ture doc on Kalatozov which opens with a trum­pet play­er in Havana play­ing “Nature Boy,” because I Am Cuba. — A+

The Criminal (Kino Lorber)

The entirety of dir­ect­or Joseph Losey’s filmo­graphy is fas­cin­at­ing, but each dis­crete peri­od of it is fas­cin­at­ing for dif­fer­ent reas­ons. This 1960 movie, also titled The Concrete Jungle (by some dis­trib­ut­or who wasn’t quite so clev­er as he reckoned, I reck­on) is argu­ably the last in that peri­od, which saw him, from 1947’s The Boy With Green Hair and into self-imposed exile from the States, find­ing and los­ing and re-finding his voice as he struggled for con­sist­ent employ­ment. (He details those struggles in Michel Ciment’s Conversations With Losey, a great film book.)  It’s a tight, urgent, beau­ti­fully observed study of rank and even­tu­ally impot­ent mas­culin­ity and the second film of Losey’s alli­ance with Stanley Baker. (The alli­ance with Dirk Bogarde began with The Sleeping Tiger six years pri­or. Baker and Bogarde would Losey-meet in 1967’s Accident, also a recent Kino Lorber release I did not review because it’s essen­tially the same as the BFI Blu-ray with few­er sup­ple­ments.)  Losey’s depic­tion of pris­on, both visu­ally and them­at­ic­ally, is strik­ing. The cine­ma­to­graph­er was Robert Krasker, and while his work here is not as con­sist­ently pin-sharp as in The Third Man (which I believe is at times delib­er­ate), it’s very good. (The prison-door pee­p­h­ole effect is a little janky, but it’s 1960, come on.) The sta­ging of the pris­on riots is some­thing. Patrick Magee does some pos­sibly unex­pec­ted under­play­ing as a pris­on guard. And Baker’s man out­side for a new crim­in­al endeavor is played by Sam Wanamaker, for all you want­ing to do some fur­ther research into the uni­verse of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I’ve enjoyed Kat Ellinger’s com­ment­ar­ies on cer­tain films but here her con­tri­bu­tion did not send me. In a scene set in the pris­on chapel, she observes that here the men are “united by anoth­er oppress­ive force, by the church.” In any event, this is a hel­luva movie. Very influ­en­tial, I think, in a kind of stealth way, on Scorsese’s crime pic­tures and on Fargo. Also the John Dankworth/Cleo Laine music­al con­tri­bu­tions are faboo. Did you know that my mom’s law­yer rep­res­en­ted those two in the States? Now you do. —A+

Day of the Dolphin (Kino Lorber)

Looks spec­tac­u­lar. Is spec­tac­u­lar. This movie got a lot of smack when it was released in 1973, and it didn’t do well, but look­ing at it now, you can see dir­ect­or Mike Nichols doing a sketch blue­print for E.T. The long track­ing shots, the mys­ter­i­ous mont­ages build­ing to a reveal, and more, are key com­pon­ents of a cine­mat­ic idiom designed to eli­cit Ye Olde “Sense Of Wonder.” But the dol­phin voices just don’t do it the way Spielberg’s creature did, you may say. Well I LIKE the dol­phin voices. (Which were provided by the late Buck Henry, also the movie’s screen­writer. I kind of regret not ask­ing him to do one for me the single time I met the great man.) The Berger/Mitchell/Thompson com­ment­ary is typ­ic­ally enthu­si­ast­ic and gar­rulous, albeit a little far-fetched; the fel­lows inter­pret this as a movie about a dir­ect­or being manip­u­lated and thrown away by the stu­di­os, and com­pare to De Palma’s The Fury, pos­it­ing that Andrew Stevens’ char­ac­ter in the lat­ter film is a stand-in for De Palma and…well you get the idea. I think. I’m not exactly sure I do myself. —A-

 Dodsworth (Warner Archive)

“The best. The best.” I remem­ber my old friend the film his­tor­i­an Ed Hulse char­ac­ter­iz­ing this 1936 William Wyler pic­ture thusly many moons ago, back when it was way harder to see. He’s right, and his opin­ion is not a minor­ity one among his and our ilk. Which is kind of inter­est­ing to con­sider these days, because this adapt­a­tion of a Sinclair Lewis nov­el is a quiet, delib­er­ate, nuanced char­ac­ter study that’s only a few steps on the oth­er side of the Art Film bor­der. This Warner Archive disc presents a 2019 Film Foundation res­tor­a­tion that is not merely a res­tor­a­tion but a rev­el­a­tion. Rudolph Maté’s cine­ma­to­graphy is every bit as sens­it­ive as Wyler’s dir­ec­tion and the three lead play­er, Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, and Mary Astor give career best per­form­ances that you can now view with start­ling clar­ity. The soundtrack is well cleaned up too. A mas­ter class in clas­sic­al cine­mat­ic lan­guage, par­tic­u­larly with respect to fram­ing (not to men­tion pacing).  he black tele­phone at Astor’s villa is a nifty pre­curs­or to the box in Wyler’s 1941 The Little Foxes Inspirational dia­logue: “They say we’ll have to behave ourselves when we become a couple of old grand­par­ents in December.”—A+

 ffolkes (Kino Lorber)

Roger Moore in 1980, grow­ing a beard and break­ing away from Bond…with Andrew V. McLagen. And bring­ing David Hedison along for the ride. (That makes it sound as if the par­ti­cip­a­tion of a Felix Leiter was delib­er­ate, and I can’t REALLY say it was.) Here he’s a very unortho­dox under­sea res­cue strategist called upon by a skep­tic­al British gov­ern­ment to pre­vent Anthony Perkins and Michael Parks and their pals from blow­ing up an oil rig. Moore’s character’s unortho­dox­ies include excess­ive cat cod­dling, a miso­gyny that truth to tell is expressed rel­at­ively mildly (he’s irrit­ated at hav­ing been brought up with only sis­ters, or some­thing), and swig­ging whisky straight from a bottle which winds up being the trait that registers most vividly. Action movie cult­ist com­fort food to be sure.  Another good look­ing disc, espe­cially color-wise. But not all that robustly cine­mat­ic. Can’t really com­plain though. —B

Hard Ticket To Hawaii (Mill Creek)

I have more than once related my con­ver­sa­tion with dir­ect­or Andy Sidaris dur­ing a screen­ing of this 1987 film, one in which he com­plained that the fel­low sit­ting in the row ahead of me (whom I did not admit to actu­ally know­ing) were gig­gling too much. On the intro­duc­tion to this disc, recycled from the Guns, Girls, and G‑Strings DVD box set, statuesque scream queen Julie Strain, rest in peace, says to Sidaris of the pic­ture, “It just cracks me up every time.” Why doesn’t Sidaris object when SHE says she finds it funny? I think we all know why. Anyway. This is a true clas­sic of the let’s‑discuss-this-case-nude-in-the-hot-tub sub­genre of action thrill­er, the one fea­tur­ing the giant uncon­trol­lable pois­on­ous snake. It is, as a pro­duc­tion, WAY slick­er than 1985’s Malibu Express. If you’re keep­ing score. Weirdly enough, giv­en the pur­pose­ful­ness of most Sidaris fare, this meanders a bit. As if he wants to put off the ulti­mate snake reveal but he doesn’t have enough plot to man­age. MST3K people take note:  Flying a small plane is to this movie what rock climb­ing was to 1951’s Lost Continent. While I miss Barbara Edwards and Susan Kiger from earli­er films (blame it on my dad’s stash of Playboy mags), Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton bring what they bring with aplomb. And then there’s that clas­sic Frisbee gag. Inspirational dia­logue: “I’m sup­posed to be soft, I’m a woman.” Inimitable Sidaris com­edy: “You tried to rape me last night!” “That was yes­ter­day!” Inimitable Sidaris sus­pense: One of the girls takes a Polaroid and as she’s hold­ing it up says, “Look, it’s devel­op­ing!” The instantly mem­or­able theme song is even “bet­ter” than I remembered: “It’s not para­dise all the time,” ver­ily. Image qual­ity is fine, and the audio com­ment­ary fea­tures immor­tal banter between Andy and his wife and pro­du­cer Arlene. Andy: ”Here comes a great joke,’ She’s so dumb she had to go home and study for her pap test.’” Arlene: “That was your joke Andy. I will nev­er take cred­it for it. Ever.” They also wax amazed that they man­aged to cred­ibly cut togeth­er foot­age shot in L.A. and Molokai, holy shit. Ultimate inspir­a­tion­al dia­logue: “One man’s dream is anoth­er man’s lunch.” —A+

 House By The Cemetery (Blue Underground)

Troy Haworth’s com­ment­ary observes, early on, “Classing this as a zom­bie movie is a little bit prob­lem­at­ic.” That’s not really what “prob­lem­at­ic’ means nowadays. A little later: “Fulci and women is one of those prob­lem­at­ic top­ics,” okay, I guess that’s more like it. But the thing is, if I were wor­ried about things being prob­lem­at­ic, I wouldn’t watch­ing a Lucio Fulci movie. I don’t want to drag Haworth too much, as I’ve got a Bluray with my own com­ment­ary on it com­ing soon. (Fortunately said disc’s com­ment­ary, on Ford’s The Long Gray Line, in a box from Indicator, also fea­tures Farran Smith Nehme and Diana Drumm, who are great, and make me look and sound bet­ter.) For the most part here he’s inform­al but inform­at­ive, and occa­sion­ally under­stated, as when he observes “Amityville Horror 2 has some inces­tu­ous things in it.” SOME? This remas­ter­ing has a very strong teal col­or cor­rec­tion. This prac­tice is con­tro­ver­sial, and I’m curi­ous as to why this 1981 grind­house item got this treat­ment. Its cool­ness com­ple­ments the movie well, as it turns out, at least to my eye. As Fulci stuff goes, this is rather under­stated — nobody vomits up their own intest­ines or any­thing — and con­cen­trates on creepy don’t‑go-into-the-basement set pieces. The oth­er extras are in the delight­ful Blue Underground  deep-dish tra­di­tion, and there’s a CD of the soundtrack for those delighted by mys­terioso organ chords and such. —A

Leave Her To Heaven (Criterion)

This is from the Film Foundation res­tor­a­tion, and it is a smidge or two bet­ter than the Technicolor source that Twilight Time used for its 2013 Blu. It looks mag­ni­fi­cent and until there’s a 4K disc this will stand as the ulti­mate home theat­er ver­sion of John Stahl’s mag­ni­fi­cent broad-daylight noir with Gene Tierney mag­ni­fi­cently play­ing against sim­patico siren type to con­trive and ice-cold selfish spider. This loses the 2005 com­ment­ary (recycled on the TT disc) that Richard Schickel did with sup­port­ing play­er Dwayne Hickman, which is a shame. But in a video inter­view Imogen Smith con­trib­utes a rel­at­ively thor­ough  exam­in­a­tion of Stahl, well-organized and reveal­ing. Citing Stahl’s restraint, she com­pares him with Naruse which is a sharp obser­va­tion.—A

Masked and Anonymous (Shout Factory)

I saw this at Sundance in 2003 and roared much of the way through; emer­ging from the screen­ing I pro­nounced it “the Plan 9 From Outer Space of Dylan movies.” (This was a thing for me back then; I called Toback’s 1999 Black and White the Plan 9 From Outer Space of race rela­tions movies.) Anyway, I think I was being kind of a dick about it. Not to say that the strained allegory sud­denly holds up…but its points seem rather more sali­ent now for some reas­on. In any event, the star-studded pro­ces­sion cer­tainly qual­i­fies as A Unique Object. Digitally shot, it looks more so here than I recol­lect it look­ing back in the day. And the extras help in mak­ing sense of the whole thing: Co-writer and dir­ect­or Larry Charles (who got to know Dylan via factot­um Eddie Gorodetsky, who Charles claims was bor­ing Larry David so much on a plane trip that Charles jumped in to engage him to spare Gorodetsky poten­tial humi­li­ation) recalls the project’s con­cep­tion as a “Bob Dylan slap­stick com­edy.” He also com­plains about the reviews. Sorry Larry! —A-

The Oscar (Kino Lorber)

It is a test­a­ment to the com­ic geni­us of the SCTV crew that they man­aged to suc­cess­fully send up this, a piece of Hollywood bom­bast so mired in excess that it seemed well bey­ond par­ody. Co-screenwriter Harlan Ellison was so upset by the end res­ult of this crazy crawl-your-way-to-the-top saga (although it is in fact replete with Ellisonean over­state­ment) that he used to mount a yearly Oscar Renunciation Tour, or some­thing. Long elu­sive in terms of decent home ver­sions, this is indeed a superb res­tor­a­tion. Jill St. John actu­ally looks a little TOO peaches and cream, if such a thing is pos­sible. Poor Tony Bennett. Anyway. The disc is equipped with two com­ment­ar­ies. The first fea­tures Patton Oswalt, Josh Olson (yup, the guy who said he won’t read your “fuck­ing script” although maybe he’s got time now) and Eric Nelson (dir­ect­or of the Ellison doc­u­ment­ary Dreams With Sharp Teeth). They enact an approx­im­ate MST3K riff ses­sion inter­spersed with gos­sip and much Ellison appre­ci­ation — they all knew the man. There are some good zingers. “Is he mar­ried to The Polyphonic Spree?” being one. Along the way the fel­low reveal that they don’t know who Guy KIbbee was. No won­der movies suck nowadays. The oth­er com­ment­ary fea­tures Berger, Mitchell and Thompson, who protest, re the movie’s alleged poor qual­ity, “Audiences ENJOY this!” and at some point work in a com­par­is­on to The Best Years of Our Lives. One notes, “I watch this movie and I see one big sim­il­ar­ity with one dir­ect­or and that’s Martin Scorsese.” These dudes are high as fuck. Eventually one of them des­cends suf­fi­ciently to make the more apt com­par­is­on, which is with Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire. Was the Jean Hale char­ac­ter truly based on Carroll Baker? We may nev­er know. —A+

Penelope (Warner Archive)

Directed by the oft-dreaded Arthur Hiller, writ­ten by the pro­du­cer of I Love Melvin, this 1966 piece of piffle of a is one of those things folks cite when com­plain­ing about How Hollywood Failed Natalie Wood. The movie is not quite the embar­rass­ment that its poster, repro­duced on the front of this Bluray, is, but that’s not say­ing much. Wood who is lovely and charm­ing, plays a well-kept wife who’s not so well-kept that she won’t rob her husband’s bank to work out some neur­ot­ic kinks. Ostensible comed­ic high­lights include attemp­ted rape by Jonathan Winters and Dick Shawn as a shrink. The move main­tains interest from a stand­point of sheer curi­os­ity, although I can­not lie,  the lead per­former run­ning around in her under­wear doesn’t hurt. She also sings. There’s a nifty 360 degree dolly shot (thank God for Harry Stradling Sr., the cine­ma­to­graph­er later beloved by Barbra Streisand), nifty loc­a­tion scenes in MOMA’s sculp­ture garden, Peter Falk work­ing out his Columbo man­ner­isms, Ian Bannen totally at sea, and a lot of hair and cos­tume changes. Also a wacky twist end­ing. As Candice Bergen remarked to Paul Schrader re American Gigolo, “The col­ors are won­der­ful.” —B

Pray for the Wildcats (Kino Lorber)

The open­ing cred­its for this 1974 good­ie tout “Special Guest Star” Robert Reed. It’s a made-for-TV movie, how can he be a “guest star?” This is one of the recent Kino releases that touts a “Brand New 2K Master” and makes you ask, “why this and not Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife?”  But wow, it really DOES look good. This is the third time I’ve seen this. The first was when it aired on ABC as a “spe­cial” (there’s that word again) “two hour event” or what they called it. It was pretty weird see­ing nice Andy Griffith (I’d nev­er seen A Face In The Crowd, whaddya want from me, I was 15) as a psy­cho exec inveigling some ad agency stooges to go dirt-biking with him, on a jour­ney where he even­tu­ally kills a couple of hip­pies. Aiieeee. Griffith over­plays when he’s tak­ing off his motor­cycle hel­met, for Christ’s sake. Even more spe­cial than Reed is William Shatner, who through­out deliv­ers the Most Shatner Line Readings Ever. The second time I saw it was in the late 90s with a bunch of drunk/high as fuck bar bud­dies dur­ing a mara­thon view­ing that also included that Powers Boothe Jim Jones movie. And now, in sobri­ety, it remains almost if not quite as uproari­ous as ever, in part because the pic­ture got its two-hour ABC time slot through pad­ding. And the pad­ding con­sists of, well, dirt bik­ing, doled out in rock-climbing por­tions. Commentators Amanda Reyes and Bill Ackerman do not riff on the movie or find it in any way hil­ari­ous. Instead, they  take it quite ser­i­ously, which I sup­pose is to their cred­it. Apparently aca­demia is begin­ning to catch up with TV movies, as they cite at least one study. Neat. They’re very inform­at­ive — although it’s clear that Ackerman read the same Wikipedia entry on score com­poser Fred Myrow that I did. Said score is pretty cred­it­able in fact. Did I men­tion Marjoe Gortner? This is his first post-Marjoe act­ing gig, and he’s not great. Supporting females Lorraine Gary, Janet Margolin and OF COURSE Angie Dickenson (who utters the immor­tal title) look very dis­pleased to be here. —B+

 Quai des Orfevres (Kino Lorber)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s third fea­ture, made in 1947, doesn’t pack quite the wal­lop of his pri­or Le Corbeau (1943) in part because its scen­ario is a little more dis­curs­ive, not as ruth­lessly focused. In a sense this is a fea­ture rather than a bug; Quai is a city tale loc­ated in dif­fer­ing milieus while Corbeau’s mur­der­ous pro­vin­cials motored a story that was almost imme­di­ately tight as a noose. But this movie gets there. Bernard Blier is the sad sack mar­ried to lus­cious Suzy Delair (who only just died at the age of 102!) who might be look­ing for a sug­ar daddy in old Charles Dullin. Soon someone ends up dead and Louis Jouvet’s inspect­or shows up. Much devi­ous char­ac­ter is revealed, Clouzot times kettles to boil over at them­at­ic­ally oppor­tune times, and the whole thing builds to a bru­tal end­ing. Clouzot’s mas­tery (some would say facil­ity) is more than fully formed here. My friend Nick Pinkerton flies solo for a long com­ment­ary and comes through with, well, fly­ing col­ors. And the movie itself looks great. —A

A Quiet Place In The Country (Shout Factory)

The slight rag­ged­ness of the mater­i­als used to mas­ter this disc is a bit of a plus. Makes the movie look even more dis­rep­ut­able, so to speak. But what, you may ask, is Vanessa Redgrave doing in a dis­rep­ut­able movie? Neither giallo nor pure art pic­ture, Quiet Place is a 1968 pic­ture dir­ec­ted by Elio Petri (who cowrote the script with Tonino Guerra) and cost­ar­ring Redgrave’s then-mate, Franco Nero. Nero plays a tor­tured artist tor­men­ted (or is that the word) by dreams of his lover/agent (Redgrave, natch) dom­in­at­ing him viol­ently while dressed in S&M gear. They hit upon the title res­id­ence, she leaves him to his own devices, and he starts going even more insane. Good col­or val­ues. A messy, weird movie that recalls a bunch of oth­ers from this time frame while not really resem­bling them. (I thought of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh once and then said, “Nah.”) The col­or val­ues of the present­a­tion are sol­id and the Troy Haworth com­ment­ary is one of his bet­ter one, at least that I’ve heard. My friend Dan Callahan, in his bio­graphy of Redgrave, calls her role “essen­tially thank­less,” which is fair enough. Unless Redgrave got a lot out of dress­ing in S&M gear. One hopes so. —B

Rasputin the Mad Monk (Scream Factory)

Don Sharp, of The Kiss of the Vampire fame, dir­ec­ted this 1966 Cinemascope pic­ture. And whatever you think it’s gonna be based on that, it’s not. As com­ment­at­ors Steve Haberman, Constantine Nasr, and Ted Newsom point out, Sharp didn’t have enough dough for lav­ish scenes, the res­ult of hav­ing 20,000 pounds cut from the budget. Hence, you don’t get a lot of the splendor of the Czar’s court. Really it’s mostly Christopher Lee’s Rasputin caus­ing trouble in bars. You laugh (I hope) but I kid you not. (The com­ment­ary as a whole is mostly excel­lent but the fel­low occa­sion­ally nod [one of them pro­nounces the great director’s name “VIncenty Minnelli”] or go out on weird limbs [“Rex Reed com­plained of Myra Breckinridge that his dance was not cut prop­erly”]. They do dis­play a lot of expert­ise on vari­ous refit­ted Hammer sets (one bar once was Dracula’s base­ment). There’s an ori­gin­al cast com­ment­ary too, fea­tur­ing Lee, which of course is older. Once you become accus­tomed to the movie’s onto­lo­gic­al real­ity, it’s kind of fun — there’s some super nasty acid-throwing stuff in the cli­max, if that’s your bag — and the image qual­ity as a whole is splen­did.—A-

Show Boat (Criterion)

Given the very par­tic­u­lar stand­ard set by MGM in the 1940s and bey­ond you may won­der, how good can a Universal-produced music­al in black-and-white made in 1936 be. Holy moley, do you have a treat in store. Never doubt James Whale is all I can tell you. It looks superb and per­haps more cru­cially it sounds bet­ter than fine. The pic­ture does have a side which many may con­sider stodgy, most of it resid­ing in its hew­ing in some respects, to the­at­ric­al music­al con­ven­tions of the time. But once you get accus­tomed to that it adds to the fas­cin­a­tion. The per­formers are incred­ible. Helen Morgan! Paul Robeson! Irene Dunne in gen­er­al but also her what-the-fuck-is-going-on dance dur­ing “Can’t Help Loving That Man.” Whale’s dir­ec­tion is  con­sist­ently excel­lent; there are moments of fas­cin­at­ing Whale Expressionism in “Old Man River” and the imagery dur­ing “I Have The Room Above Her” (a song com­posed espe­cially for the film, one of three) is stun­ning. The extras are superb. They include excerpts from the 1929 Show Boat, ori­gin­ally silent, rewired for sound  and also fea­tur­ing Helen Morgan, and a Paul Robeson doc from 1979, nar­rated by Sidney Poitier. (This is also a fea­ture of Criterion’s Robeson box set.) There’s also a new video fea­ture on the movie’s race issues, as nav­ig­ated by schol­ar Shana L. Redmond. She asks view­ers to inter­rog­ate what “makes us com­fort­able” about a num­ber of its tropes and depic­tions. As much as I admire Show Boat, I’ve nev­er been com­fort­able with it in that respect. Rather, I adore it largely because of the songs, their incred­ible melod­ies and quietly spec­tac­u­lar lyr­ics. People like to slag Oscar Hammerstein II but any guy who can come up with a couplet like “I’m tired of living/and scared of dying” has def­in­itely got some­thing on the ball. Many of you might not remem­ber that this was, a long time ago, a Criterion laser disc (spine num­ber 45) and the com­pany has included my old Video Review col­league Miles Krueger’s pro­fes­sion­al, pol­ished, inform­at­ive com­ment­ary from that edi­tion. An incred­ible pack­age. —A+

Slaughterhouse Five (Arrow)

I saw this movie when it first came out in 1972, at the age of twelve. I had read the nov­el. As you can ima­gine I was an incred­ibly pop­u­lar kid. Anyway, I con­vinced my mom’s young­er broth­er to be my adult guard­i­an; he was (and remains) twelve years my seni­or, and I do think he enjoyed the movie, largely due to Valerie Perrine. I would have my grand­moth­er take me to see Frenzy later in the year and that did not go nearly as well, by which I mean it did not go well at all. I don’t know what my point is except to under­score that both the nov­el and the film are art objects I have long held dear. So I’m quite glad to see this on Bluray, in an excel­lent trans­fer. Kurt Vonnegut loved this adapt­a­tion and I can under­stand why — it gets with­in bet­ter than swinging dis­tance of the novel’s tone des­pite (wisely, I think) jet­tis­on­ing com­pletely its man­tra, “And so it goes.” I know it’s flawed and its por­tray­als of women are bad, although I’d argue that Vonnegut and the movie were push­ing the ste­reo­types and cul­tur­al con­ven­tions that were part of the real­ity of American sub­ur­bia of the time, but we can argue about that later. The per­form­ances are all good to great, the struc­tur­ing is mas­ter­ful, the phys­ic­al edit­ing lives up to the concept behind the struc­tur­ing (and almost nev­er goes for cheap cor­res­pond­ences), and so on. With The World of Henry Orient, it’s dir­ect­or George Roy Hill’s greatest achieve­ment. The edit­or­i­al sup­ple­ments, I’m sorry to say, abound with examples of Not Getting It. The com­ment­ary is by Troy Haworth, who kicks off by explain­ing he’s inter­ested in this movie, since he’s usu­ally more into “European stuff.” He then says that Glenn Gould “com­posed” the score. Glenn Gould was not a com­poser. The score was com­posed by Bach. It’s “European stuff.”  He’s very good on the cast, except when he says of Perrine, “we’re going to be see­ing a lot more of her and I do mean a great deal more of her.” But man, he has a true mil­len­ni­al (at least I sup­pose it is that) appre­ci­ation of what World War II was all about, and almost con­stantly com­plains of how pass­ive and unin­ter­est­ing Billy is, without tak­ing much note of his, um, name. More dis­ap­point­ing is the stal­wart Kim Newman, who doesn’t seem to under­stand that the movie is about the dis­lo­ca­tion of PTSD and instead won­ders wheth­er Vonnegut had seen Last Year At Marienbad. Maybe he had, but one doubts that had any­thing to do with any­thing. What Vonnegut did in his book was pin­point the shattered real­ity of what Tom Brokaw would cor­rupt into “the greatest gen­er­a­tion.” When Billy’s wife, wish­ing to know who gave Billy the jew­el that he has put into a piece of jew­elry for him, asks “What was his name Billy?” and we know his name was Edgar Derby and we know how he died and Billy won’t say but Billy keeps loop­ing in and out of the event forever…I mean how dense do you have to be to get that this isn’t about Resnais? Or rather, that Resnais him­self was often about the same thing? (You, he and I have all seen Muriel, no?) Newman also glibly dis­misses “And so it goes” as words “of wry accept­ance.” Seriously man. After a while I was almost shout­ing at the tele­vi­sion: “IT’S ABOUT PTSD IT’S ABOUT PTSD IT’S ABOUT PTSD.” Anyway, the inter­view with Perry King is good. He’s superb in the movie, one of his best appear­ances. He at one point char­ac­ter­izes the film as per­haps “too gentle” and maybe that’s not a bad call.  It’s still great. —A

 Song of Songs (Kino Lorber)

Again — Force Ten From Navarone on Kino gets a 4K mas­ter but not this Rouben Mamoulian/Marlene Dietrich team-up. It’s a strange world. The image is mostly fine and hey, the movie is 90 years old. Soft at times. Lots of grain but it’s well-structured as they say. Sometimes a shim­mer effect. All of it is superbly trans­ferred. The movie presents a small but determ­ined spider’s web of male per­verts trap­ping the devout Dietrich. Sculptor Brian Aherne con­vinces her to pose nude for him, and per­haps he can provide the kind of love Dietrich dreams of, the kind spoken of in the title scrip­ture. The res­ult­ant sculp­ture is pretty racy, because it was 1932. Instead of being a true amour, Aherne then pimps her to kinky mil­it­ary faux alpha Lionel Atwill. Mamoulian’s touch is not as clev­er as what he wiel­ded in his pri­or City Streets (though the change of tone is appro­pri­ate to the ostens­ible tragedy of the melo­drama) but his mas­tery is pretty impress­ive non­ethe­less. Because it’s Mamoulian the swoony stuff gets close to actu­al sen­su­al­ity and the cheesy stuff has a con­sist­ently com­pel­ling qual­ity. David Del Valle’s com­ment­ary is per­tin­ent and inform­at­ive but he is prone to over­ex­cite­ment at times. “Look at those nipples!” he exclaims of the sculp­ture. Yup, there they are. Tom Milne, in his great mono­graph on Mamoulian, argues that the last third of the melo­drama calls for a dir­ect­or with Stroheim’s sense of cruelty, and that “wield­ing the scalpel has nev­er been Mamoulian’s forte.” Be that as it may, a few blows register. Highly worth­while.  —A-

The Stalking Moon (Warner Archive)

I don’t believe in the academy of the over­rated but I do believe in the academy of the under­rated, and Robert Mulligan belongs there. This 1969 Western is a mod­est but incred­ibly sol­id con­struc­tion, fea­tur­ing  great, great cine­ma­to­graphy by Charles Lang, spec­tac­u­larly trans­ferred here. Gregory Peck, who’d worked with Mulligan before in 1962’s To Kill A Mockingbird, iyou may have heard of it, is inspired while con­spicu­ously nar­row­ing his register. The under­play­ing of his track­er char­ac­ter makes him an enig­mat­ic hero but not an anti-hero, as was often the fash­ion with American Westerns of the time. Eva Marie Saint, as the woman he pro­tects, is a per­fect mys­ter­i­ous foil for him. The dir­ec­tion of this sus­pense­ful long-term chase drama is per­fectly judged, superb, under­stated, but also bru­tal on occa­sion.  As a char­ac­ter study and a tense cat-and-mouse, it’s still pretty unbeat­able.—A

Station Six Sahara (Netwerk UK Region B import)

I’ve often cited Robert Benayoun’s descrip­tion of “authen­t­ic sad­ist­ic cinema,” “a cinema whose elect­ive,  even cere­mo­ni­ous, cli­mate remains, venom­ous and intox­ic­at­ing, that of total per­di­tion.” Genre movies provide the most hos­pit­able grounds for such a cli­mate, but it’s not a require­ment. This 1963 num­ber, often cited as a per­verse favor­ite by Martin Scorsese (it was included in a double fea­ture pro­gram he and Jay Cocks cur­ated for Film Forum last sum­mer, where I finally saw it for the first time) is a super-squinchy bit of busi­ness that begins as a mucky men at work melo­drama. Specifically the men are post-war Germans and Brits (with Mario Adorf as a brute of not cred­ibly spe­cified eth­ni­city) pit­ted togeth­er and against each oth­er at a Saharan oil-pumping sta­tion. So it’s already a little tense. These grimy fel­lows (among them Denholm Elliot at his least ingra­ti­at­ing and an insuf­fer­ably lout­ish Ian Bannen, who we last spoke of in the Penelope cap­sule, and irrit­able as he is he makes a big­ger impres­sion here than there) get monthly vis­its from a van load of sex work­ers, but that hardly suf­fices to quell their pas­sions. On to the scene crashes (lit­er­ally) Carroll Baker, and it’s off to the races. Seth Holt, who we last spoke of in the Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb cap­sule, com­pels Baker (who we last spoke of in the The Oscar cap­sule) to tease the cam­era with everything she’s got, down to her little toe. The fel­lows, espe­cially ultra-Teuton Peter Von Eyck (even sli­mi­er here than in The Snorkel, which we have not spoken of, and here he doesn’t even murder any­one), all start to lose it, and badly. Just when you think things couldn’t get more skeevy, they kind of do, and the jaw-dropping end­ing does adhere to a cer­tain logic, one not just miso­gyn­ist but com­mit­tedly mis­an­throp­ic. The image qual­ity is some­times a little soft and there are no extras but I’m just glad to finally have a copy with which to Amaze My Friends. And I just found out the thing is some kind of remake? I must look into that. —A-

Straight On Till Morning (Shout Factory)

A Hammer pic­ture I hadn’t heard of before, dir­ec­ted by Peter Collinson, who made The Italian Job. This isn’t nearly as funsy. Dotty Rita Tushingham, too long sheltered by a cranky mom, strikes out on her own in not-quite-so-swinging-as-it-recently-had-been London (the pic­ture was made in 1972). Where she soon runs afoul of Shane Briant’s Peter, whose look clearly inspired the Linus Roache char­ac­ter in Pan Cosmatos’ Mandy. (Or maybe not. I should nev­er pre­sume. But I’d bet money on it.) The movie is very “hip” in its cine­mat­ic lan­guage — a lot of ping-ponging flash­backs and flash for­wards, interi­or mono­logues, dis­lo­ca­tion stuff, not inap­pro­pri­ate for the psychot­ic char­ac­ter we even­tu­ally learn Peter to be. But the movie also uses it with some oth­er ran­dom char­ac­ters, which is kind of point­less and show-offy. It builds to a thor­oughly icky con­clu­sion after being vaguely dis­taste­ful through­out. The disc looks fine. The com­ment­ary with Tushingham and Jonathan Sothcott  (author of The Cult Films Of Christopher Lee) was recor­ded around 2002,  first heard on the Anchor Bay DVD of that year. For Hammer com­plet­ists only, and might make you regret being a Hammer com­plet­ist. —B

 The Tall Men (Twilight Time)

Seems like this is one of the final releases from a really remark­able label; I sup­pose that co-founder Nick Redman’s death last year put it to an end. This release is just one reas­on I’ll miss it. It’s a gor­geous, enga­ging 1955 Raoul Walsh Western, beau­ti­fully trans­ferred with no extras save a typ­ic­ally astute essay by Julie Kirgo. Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell are ex-Confederate cow­boys drift­ing toward would-be cattle bar­on Robert Ryan. The three form an uneasy alli­ance for a big cattle drive, with Jane Russell com­plic­at­ing mat­ters. The pace is relaxed, with ten­sion rising and releas­ing; when pay­off times come, they’re delivered with power. Mitchell’s char­ac­ter is par­tic­u­larly mov­ing. Good script by two pros, Frank Nugent and Sydney Boehm. Really beau­ti­ful and sens­it­ive use of widescreen and col­or, handled by Lee Tover, who also did The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Heiress. Durable score by Victor Young, which, as is stand­ard prac­tice on Twilight Time titles, fea­tured on an Isolated track. The devo­tion of the Mexican vaquer­os to Gable’s char­ac­ter is a nicely under­stated theme here.  And because Walsh is Walsh, the movie’s occa­sion­al corn isn’t just tol­er­able, it plays. Pretty great.  —A

Teorema (Criterion)

The BFI Blu-ray from 2013 has a teal-leaning col­or cor­rec­tion that was not com­plained about at the time; this trans­fer just pushes it harder. Again, as with Criterion’s Midnight Cowboy it looks bet­ter than fine in motion, and in still frames too. I sup­pose this is a mat­ter of taste, but I do won­der about hon­or­ing directorial/cinematographic intent. I real­ize too that now might not be an oppor­tune time to try to do any report­ing on it. So I’ll just con­tin­ue to say how pleas­ing I find this edi­tion. The new mas­ter has real improve­ment in the over­all pic­ture with respect to detail, evid­ent in the early sepia sequence. Also look at Laura Betti’s eyes when she first sees Stamp’s char­ac­ter. A deep pleas­ure to watch, I found. The BFI pic­ture is harder edged, more con­trast heavy, almost anti­sep­tic. Bad Pasolini, cred­it­ing Mozart but not Ted Curzon, whose “Tears For Dolphy” plays under the open­ing titles. Shame!  The Robert Gordon com­ment­ary notes this, and good for him. I had not listened to this com­ment­ary on the BFI edi­tion and I have to say it’s first-rate. Peter Cowie-level. Fun fact:  Lee Van Cleef and Orson Welles had been con­sidered for the Stamp role, which would cer­tainly have brought dif­fer­ent dis­crete stresses to the allegory.  Essential cinema. —A+

Tex Avery Screwball Classics Volume 1 (Warner Archive)

I love Tex Avery and think he was a geni­us but let’s face it: the bois­ter­ous­ness of his humor walked hand in hand with some­thing of a mean streak. You all know what I’m talk­ing about: “Miss Repulsive 1898” in Swing Shift Cinderella (not included in this set but avail­able on Blu-ray in a Looney Tunes Platinum col­lec­tion), the repeated gag of a veil lif­ted from a shapely woman’s face to reveal pimples, buck teeth and so on, that sort of thing. In Big Heel Watha the title char­ac­ter is such a spec­tac­u­larly offens­ive mil­quetoast grot­esque aside from the ostens­ible racial ste­reo­type that the racial ste­reo­type kind of becomes a non-sequitur. Which doesn’t make it less objec­tion­able. Just more…confusing. One senses that Avery was aware his own pigtail-pulling sad­ism, but not with any kind of regret. Indeed the entire idea behind the Screwball Squirrel char­ac­ter was to be pur­pose­fully almost intol­er­ably obnox­ious. This mag­ni­fi­cent set includes the entirety of the Screwball Squirrel series and it’s also remark­ably, manically invent­ive, every bit remind­ing you that the excess is the point (I espe­cially like the multiple-doors chase in The Screwy Truant). In the less prob­lem­at­ic areas (boy does that well-worn Warner dis­claim­er at the front of this pro­gram have its work cut out for it) there’s the mag­ni­fi­cence of Red Hot Riding Hood. One gag therein prac­tic­ally invents the jump cut, while the sight of the wolf hit­ting him­self on the head with a ham­mer while look­ing at Red makes one won­der if Avery also inven­ted the “run me over with a truck” meme. Batty Baseball is extra rad­ic­al,  Bad Luck Blackie incom­par­able, and so on. No extras, beau­ti­ful trans­fers, Volume 2 can’t come quick enough. —A+

Tiger of Eschnapur/The Indian Tomb (Film Movement)

I’ve writ­ten extens­ively on this movie before so I’m doing a brief cap­sule here just to say this ver­sion looks fant­ast­ic. The pack­age retains the excel­lent David Kalat com­ment­ary from a pri­or stand­ard def release. And adds Mark Rappaport’s excel­lent Debra Paget, For Example, which opens with the ques­tion “Why Debra Paget?”  To which the answer is “Why not,” but indeed, there’s more to it than that. —A+

Wheels on Meals (Eureka!, Region B import)

“Dad’s in with a nervous break­down. He flipped! It’s really com­plic­ated.” The “Classic” English dub of this rol­lick­ing 1984 comed­ic mar­tial arts pic­ture really is, as the descrip­tion in the jack­et list of fea­tures says, “funki­er” than the oth­er audio options. Starring Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, and dir­ect­or Sammo Hung, and shot in Barcelona because by this time the three were so fam­ous that shoot­ing in Hong Kong became a logist­ic­al night­mare, this non­sensic­al tale is replete with low­brow humor con­cern­ing men­tal insti­tu­tions, men­tal health, the home­less, sex work­ers and more. It’s all so breez­ily tossed off, though, and the con­di­tions as depic­ted have so little to do with real life that one just rolls one’s eyes and waits for the next bit of action. Which is all fab­ulous. The 2K mas­ter looks swell, the extras, mostly impor­ted from a ver­sion of the movie released via the Hong Kong Legends label are enjoy­able and inform­at­ive and, suit­ably I’d say, hardly for­mid­able.—A

Whisky Galore/The Maggie (Film Movement)

Film Movement has been doing stal­wart work in the Bluray depart­ment recently. Their releases of the more obscure but reli­able delight­ful old Ealing pic­tures such at The Titfield Thunderbolt are exem­plary. Of course I was espe­cially tickled to get this, a double fea­ture gen­er­ously put on a double-disc set. Whisky, also known as Tight Little Island, is of course the dir­ect­ori­al debut of Alexander Mackendrick.  The story is of Scotch-starved Scots (WW II ration­ing, you see) who have the good for­tune of hav­ing a ship car­ry­ing a large cargo of the stuff go down off their coast. It’s a very droll com­edy with a bit of bite, some­thing Mackendrick could always deliv­er. The disc is a good trans­fer from a good piece of mater­i­al; I should say good rather than great. Every now and then, par­tic­u­larly in exter­i­or shots, it looks a little dupey but it’s not too dis­tract­ing. The com­ment­ary is by John Ellis also the pro­du­cer of a good doc­u­ment­ary on the film that’s included in the pack­age. He knows his stuff, and he inter­acts with the actu­al soundtrack in a way that’s unusu­al for com­ment­ar­ies. There is a good deal of pur­pose­ful eso­ter­ica here: descrip­tions of the per­spect­ives on reli­gion in the Compton Mackenzie nov­el on which the film was based, and how the film kinda sorta upends them, and a funny but not entirely far-fetched the­ory that The Wicker Man is a stealth remake of the movie. The Maggie, from 1954, is some­thing of a spir­itu­al sequel to Whisky. Another shipping-and-cargo shaggy dog tale, its endear­ing charms include Paul Douglas, here at a peak of soul­ful­ness, in the role of a mildly phil­istine American busi­ness­man whose heart is warmed by some con­niv­ing Scots (sounds a little like anoth­er, more recent Scottish pic­ture we know). Mastered from a BFI res­tor­a­tion, it actu­ally looks bet­ter than Whisky — beau­ti­ful con­trast and sharp detail abound. Mackendrick’s filmo­graphy is small, but it’s been elu­sive on Bluray let alone any oth­er format. This boun­ti­ful pack­age is a mean­ing­ful cor­rec­tion. — A+