The Criterion Collection Archives

Breathless (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

October 29, 2024****/****, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

À bout de souffle
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Van Doude, Jean-Luc Godard
written and directed by Jean Luc Godard

by Walter Chaw Jean-Luc Godard is punk, and Breathless is his Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. If he’d only ever made this one film, it would have been enough: the sneer that launched a thousand film careers–the carbuncular adolescents gathered behind their enfant terrible king seeing a future in taking a giant piss on politesse and convention. Among the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard carried the flag of disaffection first and longest. Like the other young men of his generation, he was force-fed the cinema of France’s American occupiers, who flooded French theatres post-WWII with what they saw as genre detritus: B-movies and cheap melodramas, gangster flicks and westerns, tabloid movies and smoky noir provocations. France the capitulated, the humiliated, the liberated, exploited as a clearinghouse for used Yankee culture that became grist for a generational film movement that came of age having ingested it, working it through their biology in a hormonal stew then expelling it in alien tributes now fawning, now excoriating, always defiantly, well, French. What we sent to France, we got back with an experimental jazz score, a Paul Klee print, and a Sartre quote about isolation.

After Hours (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

July 18, 2023****/****, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Thomas Chong
written by Joseph Minion
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is an asshole. Let’s get that out of the way. He’s doing a shitty, half-assed job of training the new guy, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), in his daytime cubicle hell when Lloyd confesses that his dream isn’t mastering the antiquated data-entry system at their non-descript job, but to start a publication where struggling writers might find an outlet for their work. Paul doesn’t bother hiding his…not disdain, but complete disinterest in what Lloyd’s saying, finding himself distracted by the romance of sheaves of financial documents being moved from one desk to another before standing up and walking away. Paul is detestable. He is The Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) from the next year’s Aliens, the prototypical yuppie who shows up for a late-night booty call with a stranger in Soho wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt and tie. He is the American Psycho. Paul could give a shit about the voice of the oppressed looking for a creative outlet to contribute to the collective pool of art. He’s all about numbers. He is the reincarnation of North by Northwest‘s unctuous, mercurial ad-man Roger O. Thornhill, whose monogram is “ROT.” (The “O” stands for “nothing.”) After Hours, much like North by Northwest, becomes a nightmare of commodification in which numbers are the source of dehumanization and disassociation. The only reason we really like Paul at all is that we can empathize with his desire to go to bed with 1985 Rosanna Arquette.

Andrei Rublev (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 25, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Soviet Union, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Anatoly Solonitsin, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko, Nikolai Sergeyev
screenplay by Andrei Konchalovsky (as Andron Mikhalkov), Andrei Tarkovsky
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Despite the fact that little is known about the man’s life, Andrei Rublev is considered one of the greatest Russian painters of orthodox Christian icons. Only a single work has been attributed entirely to Rublev with certainty, but it’s a doozy, subtly reconfiguring an earlier, more pedestrian icon drawn from the Book of Genesis into a visually sophisticated meditation on the Holy Trinity. Though this work is generally dated to 1411, Rublev’s elevation to master status is a 20^th-century phenomenon. After a 1918 restoration revealed Rublev’s Trinity to be more brightly coloured and delicately imagined than previously thought–which some experts interpreted as a departure from Byzantine influences in the direction of a more specifically Russian sensibility–Rublev’s reputation soared. The Russian Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky famously put it this way: “There exists the icon of the Trinity by Saint Andrei Rublev; therefore, God exists.”

The Virgin Spring (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 11, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson
screenplay by Ulla Isaksson
directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer A pivotal film in Bergman’s corpus, The Virgin Spring is also perhaps the most disreputable. Borrowing the basic frame of a story from the 13^th-century ballad “Töre’s Daughter at Vänge,” and set, to gloomy effect, during Sweden’s transition from paganism to Christianity, it chronicles the brutal rape and murder of a teenaged girl carrying candles to church, her father’s equally violent vengeance against the culprits, and (critically, because this is Bergman) his subsequent anguish at the silence of an apparently cruel and uncaring God. Considering the film offers what feels like a concentrated dose of the director’s pet themes, it’s interesting that Bergman has no writing credit on the picture. Instead, he hired the Swedish novelist Ulla Isaksson for the adaptation. Isaksson developed a colourful cast of characters and some background to bolster the material included in the ballad, but her biggest alteration was moving the miraculous appearance of the spring that gives the picture its title to the very end of the story.

1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 20, 2020****/****, 1980s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Satire, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, UK

Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford

by Walter Chaw George Orwell’s 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother’s intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence…and that’s just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin’s native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn’t published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of “the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it’s worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I’d have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of “the machine.” So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell’s attempt to correct what he identified as that work’s essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 20201920s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG
***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, June (née June Tripp), Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault
scenario by Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

DOWNHILL (1927)
When Boys Leave Home
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine, Isabel Jeans, Ben Webster
scenario by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by Constance Collier & David L'Estrange (née Ivor Novello)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Alfred Hitchcock's fifth time at the plate produced his third completed picture, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (hereafter The Lodger), based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that was itself based on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, which still would have been in the immediate cultural memory of 1927. When first screened, distributor C.M. Woolf proclaimed it incomprehensible, jeopardizing its release until London Film Society founding member Ivor Montagu was enlisted to clear up the mess. In truth, Montagu liked what he saw, advised the reshooting of the darkest scenes, and, with Hitchcock's approval and assistance, discarded a good number of title cards to, in effect, leave the storytelling to the visuals. Producer Michael Balcon, already a supporter, called it good, and the picture allowed the British film industry to finally boast a product that could compete with not merely the artistically-dominant European cinema (France, Germany, and Russia), but also the commercially-dominant American dream factory. Just in time, as it happened. The passage of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act stipulated that distributors would guarantee at least 7.5% of their total output be British: a number that would increase in increments until it hit 20% in 1936. The skeletal British industry boasted few stars. On the strength of The Lodger and his earlier The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock was something of a known quantity before much of the British public had even seen any of his films.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 2020****/****, 1970s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Western

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller is, even more than his Nashville, the quintessential American film. The whole of it is in a constant state of construction and reconstruction, a continuous and ever-doomed battle against entropy and that human desire to matter a little before it’s all over too soon. The modern analogue for it is Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, as both films detail the sad lives of entrepreneurs staking a claim for themselves on the frontier at the beginning of America’s potential. The only reward for ambition, unfortunately, is death. Death is the only reward for anything. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a swaggering loudmouth in a big fur coat who one day struts into the tiny town of Presbyterian Church, pop. 120 (the majority of those prospectors and illiterate scumbags), lays a cloth across a table in the disgusting saloon of Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), and proceeds to take the rubes for everything they’re worth. With that cash, he buys three broken-down whores, then lights out for the edge of town, where he starts a company.

Business is good.

The Circus (1928) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 14, 2020****/****, 1920s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Charlie Chaplin, Allan Garvia, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker
written and directed by Charlie Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer It started with the tightrope. That was Charlie Chaplin’s original idea as he developed his feature-length comedy The Circus–his iconic character, the Tramp, forced into a high-wire act, defying death and injury on a rope stretched taut far above the ground. It was later, shortly before production started, that the monkeys came into the picture. Those mischievous animals, those gremlins, would crawl over his arms and body, wrap themselves around his face, and pull down his pants as the Tramp struggled to maintain his balance on the wire. From what we know of his off-screen life at the time, it’s easy to imagine why Chaplin felt bedevilled. His second marriage, to Lita Grey, still a teenager, was fundamentally unhappy. He spent his time away from home with divorce on his mind, and it was around this point he learned that Lita was pregnant with his second child. He also kept an eye out for the detectives he was sure had been hired to investigate his affair with Hearst’s wife, Marion Davies.

Le Samouraï (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 4, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Le samouraï
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Michel Boisrond
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

by Walter Chaw Jef (Alain Delon) is an assassin, and while he’s objectively terrible at it, he seems to be sought-after for his services. Maybe there’s a shortage of killers; maybe he lives in that bubble where handsome people exist without knowledge of the advantages they’re given for the fact of their attractiveness. Hired to assassinate some guy who owns a nightclub in Paris, Jef steals a car by trying out a lot of keys on this giant key ring he has and goes to the club to do just that. Everyone sees him: the guests, the bartender, and most notably the club’s unnamed, featured chanteuse (Caty Rosier), who catches him walking out of her boss’s office after hearing gunshots. Jef pauses when he sees her, and for a second you wonder if he’s going to kill her to eliminate any witnesses. I mean, that’s what a hardened criminal would do–but he doesn’t. It’s not that Jef isn’t smart, exactly, it’s that Jef is a cipher, and Le samouraï is less noir than it is a commentary on American genre films and, along the way, a satire of them, too. Jef’s affect is blank and pretty, perfectly turned-out in his neat suit and overcoat, a fedora perched on his head just so. Melville spends a lot of time watching Jef look at himself in the mirror, fiddling with his collar and smoothing down the crease in his pants. Not unlike a Robert Bresson film, Le samouraï is obsessed with gestures. It’s a story told by hands at rest and in motion.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2020****/****, 1990s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Taiwan, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Lisa Yang, Chang Chen, Chang Kuo-Chu, Elaine Jin
script and dialogue by Edward Yang, Yan Hong-Ya, Alex Yang, Lai Ming-Tang
directed by Edward Yang

by Walter Chaw My family fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, just ahead of the communist takeover. My grandfather on my mother’s side, a member of the Chinese military, asked his aide to fill out the paperwork necessary for their emigration. In his haste, the kids were given sequential birth dates (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…) to expedite completion of the forms so they could get on with their flight. My uncle, Fu Kun-Ning, was born on January 7, 1941, though his official identification documents say something different. I think he probably liked the chaos, the mystery represented by that discrepancy–he was nobody’s man but his own. He died on March 1, 2007, when I was 33. I hadn’t spent much time with him over the course of my life. I was quickly and irrevocably estranged from my family and my heritage, as are many Chinese-Americans born here to immigrant parents. I barely said anything to my own parents for thirty years. There was one visit, though, where I had a formative conversation with said uncle. He asked me what I was interested in and, ashamed to tell him the truth, I told him I wanted to be a biochemical engineer, the major I went into my first semester of college having declared.

Blow-Up (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 17, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Blowup
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A
starring Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (English dialogue in collaboration with Edward Bond), inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw Michelango Antonioni’s Blowup, when it appeared at the end of 1966, marked the confluence of a great many cultural throughlines. Sanctified by the grace of a long theatrical run on the rep circuit in the United States, it all but ensured (with an assist from Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that film’s gleeful use of the term “hump the hostess”) the final death of the antiquated Production Code when audiences disregarded the promise of eternal hellfire and went to see the damn thing anyway. There were other foreign arthouse sensations before it, of course (notably Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with which Blowup shares some surface similarity), but it was Blowup that felt like the revolutionary bellwether for the rise of the foreign arthouse as something of a genre unto itself. The picture’s success was of a moment with the peak of the British Mod period and right there with the birth of America’s version of it: namely, the Summer of Love and the concurrent season of assassination. We never quite recovered from that whiplash between love and death. Similarly, film language has never recovered from the teleological disruption of Blowup.

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 20201930s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue, William Gargan, William Collier, Jr.
screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, from the novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner
directed by Stephen Roberts

by Bryant Frazer In 1933, Paramount Pictures released The Story of Temple Drake, an unusually frank melodrama that depicted a brutal sexual assault and its aftermath, with special attention paid to the reputation of the well-liked party girl named in the title. Released during that brief, free-wheeling period before the industry began enforcing its production code to clamp down on screen sex and violence, The Story of Temple Drake took pains to show how a woman could fall prey to sexual predators through no real fault of her own. It also illustrated in detail her downward psychological spiral, fuelled, in large part, by a well-founded fear of the opprobrium of others. Just last week, in an interview recorded for THE NEW YORK TIMES during Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, reporter Megan Twohey asked the defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, whether she had ever been sexually assaulted. “I have not,” Rotunno answered, “because I would never put myself in that position.” Twohey was stunned; the conversation suddenly took on a different tone. Rotunno’s response is a textbook example of the ways that privilege blinds people to reality. It must be comforting to believe that you haven’t been raped because you’re just too darned smart to be raped, but it’s also delusional, not to mention hugely condescending to legions of sexual-assault victims who never requested their trauma.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 9, 2020****/****, 1940s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Stairway to Heaven
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw Watching 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death while the end of the American experiment is upon us is an amazingly painful thing. The film was conceived in part by hyphenates Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as a way of cementing the postwar British-American alliance. Accordingly, it ends with a trial in which the United States is celebrated as an inspirational model: a paragon of idealism, humanism, truth. If it ever was those things, it isn’t any of them today. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the movie now plays as an elegy for everything we’ve lost since 1946–for everything I’ve lost as I bid goodbye to what remains of my innocence and my optimism that there’s anything left in this country that resembles what I had been raised to believe about it. We are divided, hateful, unhealthy, selfish, stupid, and brutal. There’s a line from Graham Baker’s underestimated Alien Nation I think of often nowadays. Alien immigrant Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), drunk one night, tells his human friend:

Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2019)

December 17, 20192019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best-of Lists, Blog, Blu-ray Disc, The Criterion Collection

by Bill Chambers I learned to appreciate the benefits of streaming this past October when I became so fatigued from illness that getting up to load a disc may as well have been trekking across the Sahara. (It really put the “physical” in physical media.) Then Disney+ launched, and “Maclunkey” happened–a startling reminder that streaming content can change at the drop of a hat depending on corporate or creator whim. It remains a struggle to fight complacency, though, given that a) the screener pool is drying up and b) even the cheapest disc will probably set you back as much as a month’s subscription to a streaming service. In short, I wouldn’t call this a definitive or comprehensive list of the year’s best discs by any stretch, merely the best among those I had an opportunity to audit. But FILM FREAK CENTRAL will never stop championing physical media, for a variety of “because”s:

Polyester (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 12, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Divine, Tab Hunter, Edith Massey, Stiv Bators
written and directed by John Waters

by Bryant Frazer For anyone who kept up with John Waters’s gleeful forays into poor taste during the 1970s, Polyester, released at the dawn of the Reagan era, must have seemed like a change-up. It was hardly a big-budget affair, but it felt posher than the earlier, low-budget features that earned him his (dis)reputation. Those movies were filmed on grungier 16mm in the belly of Waters’s Baltimore hometown, but Polyester was shot on 35mm and set in the suburbs. Famed actor-in-drag Divine was once again in front of the camera, but instead of the usual outsider role, he was playing squarely against type as neglected housewife Francine Fishpaw–and sharing star billing with 1950s/’60s heartthrob Tab Hunter. Waters introduces Francine by having his camera glide into the Fishpaws’ home and up the stairs (the director’s first-ever Steadicam shot) to find her dressed only in bra and girdle, bathed in a golden-hour glow, as Hunter croons lines from the title tune (lyrics by Debbie Harry): “You know about abundant women/Well, this girl only aims to please/Outside there’s a load of noisy neighbours/Upstairs there’s a Polyester squeeze.”

House of Games (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by David Mamet

by Bryant Frazer House of Games pivots on a hand of poker that spirals out of control and reveals itself as more than a mere card game. It’s a moral hazard. On one side of the table, holding three of a kind, is Mike (Joe Mantegna), a small-time hood with a big mouth who runs a card room out of the back of House of Games, a pool hall that sits upstairs from a paperback bookstore in downtown Seattle. Across from him, George (the late, great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, in his first film role), who may or may not have drawn to a trips-beating straight or a flush. Spectating from Mike’s side is Margaret (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist (and best-selling author) who stumbled upon the tableau in an effort to negotiate down the debt of a troubled patient (Steve Goldstein), a gambling addict. Impressed by Margaret’s apparent fearlessness–when he makes an oblique threat to kill her, she calls him a bully–Mike enlists her help in a scheme that isn’t cheating, per se, but does rely on duplicity. Simply put, Mike contrives to leave the room for a few minutes; in his absence, Margaret watches for an indication that George is bluffing and signals Mike, quietly, to call.

Detour (1945) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 24, 2019****/****, 1940s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on his novel
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

by Bryant Frazer Among legitimate Hollywood classics, Detour is about as threadbare as they come: a small film, shot on a shoestring over a handful of days (between six and 14, depending on whose accounting you believe) at a Poverty Row film studio. And yet, the finished product is uniquely compelling. As a crime thriller, it’s notable for the absence of gunfights, chase scenes, double-crosses, and back-stabbings. What it’s lacking in film noir‘s usual narrative detail or expressionistic flourishes is compensated for by its overarching preoccupation with determinism and a healthy contempt for fate. Amplifying and accompanying the slow-building sense of despair and helplessness is an internal-monologue-in-voiceover that’s unrelentingly dreary and self-pitying, even for noir. Detour isn’t remotely sexy or exciting, though it is amply dour and uncomfortably personal–disturbing, even, in its spare vision.

True Stories (1986) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 25, 2019****/****, 1980s, 2019, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Musical, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Jo Harvey Allen, Swoosie Kurtz
written by Stephen Tobolowsky & Beth Henley and David Byrne
directed by David Byrne

by Sydney Wegner For as long as I can remember, Talking Heads have been my favourite band. They provided the soundtrack to road trips and living-room dance parties; theirs were the cassettes in my first Walkman and my first car. Among the weird stuff my brother and I cycled through during our blessed hours in front of the TV was a VHS collection of their music videos, which we must have played a thousand times. And then there was True Stories, a special favourite, something we never got sick of. I grew up in Austin but lived about ten miles from the centre of town. Our house was on an acre of land surrounded by untamed woods; we spent our time riding bikes and climbing oak trees and rolling in mud. It felt like we grew up in a small rural town, and those first 12 years of my life formed my idea of Texas. Some of my favourite memories are from road trips to visit my grandparents in San Antonio and summers spent camping our way to New Mexico and Arizona, driving for hours through land where the only evidence of civilization was the road we were on. As an adult, when I visited Utah I thought the mountains might fall and crush me. In Washington, the trees formed a picturesque prison. Only in Texas can I breathe. It’s a place where the world feels so big and flat that I can almost sense myself hanging onto the edge of the earth. What enchanted me about True Stories so much as a child is, of course, its music and its humour, but also that it captured this openness in a way that felt comforting and beautiful, very much unlike the desolate wasteland Texas appears to be in so many other movies about the state. Sometimes I wonder if it confirmed the Texas I already knew, or helped shape it for me. It never seemed like a coincidence that True Stories was released the same year I was born.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 4, 20181980s, 2018, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ken Ogata, Kenji Sawada, Yasosuke Bando, Toshiyuki Nagashima
written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader (Japanese screenplay by Cheiko Schrader)
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer A little more than halfway through Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a fragmented, multifaceted cinematic biography of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Mishima expresses nostalgia for an afterlife that existed only in the distant past. “The average age for men in the Bronze Age was 18 and, in the Roman era, 22,” Mishima reckons aloud, in voiceover. “Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful.” Like the rest of the film’s narration, the passage is quoted from Mishima’s published work, in this case an article he wrote in 1962, eight years before his death at the age of 45 by seppuku. “When a man reaches 40, he has no chance to die beautifully,” Mishima continues. “No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.” In 1984, when he made this film, Paul Schrader was 38 years old. He had just come off the commercial misfire that was 1982’s Cat People, a straightforward studio assignment he tailored to address his signature concerns about sex and death, putting them in the context of a dark fairytale with intimations of incest and bestiality. It wasn’t a good experience. Coked out of his mind for much of the shoot, Schrader fell into a dead-end affair with Nastassja Kinski that he hoped was something more; she wanted nothing to do with him after the movie wrapped, and Cat People‘s disappointing box-office receipts closed the door on his Hollywood career. He thought of suicide. He scurried away from Hollywood, heading first to New York and then to Japan, in search of a life change. That’s where Mishima came in.

The 39 Steps (1935) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 22, 2018****/****, 1930s, 2018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Manheim, Godfrey Tearle
adaptation by Charles Bennett, dialogue by Ian Hay, based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Following the success of 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock and his once-inseparable screenwriter Charles Bennett took to adapting John Buchan’s 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps as a breathless, sometimes-madcap chase flick employing a MacGuffin of many possibilities. The picture opens at the vaudeville act of one Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson): ask him a question and he’ll answer it–a human search engine and the centre of a film dealing with the very Hitchcockian theme of performance and how it keeps at bay, uneasily, the teeming chaos beneath the surface. In the middle of his act, a gunshot rings out and the audience, already unruly, crushes for the exits. Men first, old women–one in particular–trampled in the panic. Hitchcock’s cosmology is aligned with Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” suspended as it were above anarchy and animalism by the thinnest of agreements among men to engage in civilization. I don’t think Hitchcock disdains order–I think he mistrusts it. It’s the root of his Wrong Man issues, no less despairing in its fatalism than Edgar Allan Poe’s expectation/fear of premature burial. The critic Howie Movshovitz gave perhaps the best, certainly the most succinct, summary of Hitchcock’s world of Catholic transference and Original Sin: “Everyone’s got it coming.”