Film Freak Central

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) - DVD

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Simon Ward
screenplay by Bert Batt
directed by Terence Fisher

by Jefferson Robbins I've wondered for a long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I discovered them in my youth, so there's the nostalgia thing; and they typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage, viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than that. Guillermo del Toro describes his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a Catholic embracing Jesus: "At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart." Yeah.

TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Western Adventures - DVD + Jeremiah Johnson (1972) - Blu-ray Disc

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A+
starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah
directed by Sam Peckinpah

McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
****/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
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

THE TRAIN ROBBERS (1973)
1/2*/**** Image B- Sound C Extras F
starring John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor, Ricardo Montalban
written and directed by Burt Kennedy

JEREMIAH JOHNSON
*/****
DVD - Image D+ Sound C- Extras F
BD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Robert Redford, Will Geer, Allyn Ann McLerie, Delle Bolton
screenplay by John Milius and Edward Anhalt
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Walter Chaw From John Ford to Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone then back to the United States with Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, trace the odd, international lineage of the American western genre as the seeds of its own completion are sown by Ford, only to be harvested a few decades down the line with a singular bloodbath south of the proverbial border. You could say that the western was already nearing its completion in the postwar films noir set in the sunshine and bluffs of the Old West: homegrown oaters by Anthony Mann and Fritz Lang; William Wellman's Yellow Sky and Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon; Budd Boetticher's subversive Ranowns; Arthur Penn's glass darkly Billy the Kid pic The Left Handed Gun; Brando's filthy One-Eyed Jacks; and even Ford himself with terminal pieces like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers. But it's through Kurosawa's admiration and transfiguration of Ford's themes--then Sergio Leone's incandescent prism of dirt and blood that transfigured Kurosawa's (and Ford's) ideas about heroics and individualism into something poetically base--from which Peckinpah¹ took his cues.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) - DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound C Extras D
starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
screenplay by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicster, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Sidney Salkow

by Walter Chaw If the execution of The Last Man on Earth, Sidney Salkow's adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, is sometimes clunky, the ideas contained therein seem prescient at least, profound at best. Disowned by Matheson and oft-derided as slow-moving, it's actually an exceptional film in an exceptional year for film, a beautiful, occasionally stunning piece about loneliness and alienation. I wouldn't call it a metaphor, but as a bleak emotional landscape--Eliot's "The Wasteland" committed to genre schlock--it boasts of an intimidating gravity. Take the scene where titular plague survivor Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) refuses to turn over his freshly-dead wife (Emma Danieli) to an army crematorium crew, endeavouring instead to bury her in the woods. His act of love is rewarded that night with her undead corpse paying him a visit. Yes, the pacing is off, leaving the shock of a shambling loved one to be milked properly in four years' time by George Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, yet the duration of the attack by itself underscores the horror and revulsion of the dearly-departed now up and walking. Veteran television director Salkow isn't very good, it's true, but DP Franco Delli Colli (Strip Nude For Your Killer), on one of his first films, provides beautiful, empty tableaux littered with car husks and burning pits fed with the corpses of the baddies Morgan stakes in the daytime.

The Prisoner: The Complete Series (1967-1968) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A Sound A- Extras B
"Arrival," "The Chimes of Big Ben," "A, B, and C," "Free for All," "The Schizoid Man," "The General," "Many Happy Returns," "Dance of the Dead," "Checkmate," "Hammer into Anvil," "It's Your Funeral," "A Change of Mind," "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling," "Living in Harmony," "The Girl Who Was Death," "Once Upon a Time," "Fall Out"

by Walter Chaw The closest television came to true surrealism until the inception of "Twin Peaks", Patrick McGoohan's remarkable, landmark brainchild "The Prisoner" is the headwaters for a dizzying array of modern genre confections. It's audacious in its ironclad refusal to provide the happy ending; in its determination to bugger expectation with every complex set-up and sadistic resolution, the show effectively honours the surrealist manifesto of defeating classification. The fact of it is the function of it--the delight of it being that the series functions as a tonal sequel to Antonioni's Blowup, using the disappearance of that film's photog protag as the launching point for its hero's imprisonment in his Welsh oubliette. Colourfully, quintessentially mod, it even looks the part, after all, acting in 1967 as prescient post-modern (po-Mod?) commentary on the elasticity of this genre model (Bond films in particular, the lead in said franchise McGoohan was offered, er, once upon a time) as allegory for the plastic-fantastic of a progressively absurd world. In its setting of a small town, isolated and beset by what seems a common psychosis, find a connection to Robin Hardy and Anthony Schaffer's claustrophobic The Wicker Man (1973), John Frankenheimer's similar-feeling Seconds (1966), and, yes, Godard's structuralist textbook Alphaville. Of all the ways to approach "The Prisoner", in fact, the most fulsome--if also potentially the most obscure--is that, like Alphaville, it establishes itself as a structuralist (as in Claude Levi-Strauss) exercise while predicting through its execution the post-structuralism/deconstructionism (and eventually surrealism) of, say, a Jacques Derrida.

H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director's Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors' Edition] - DVDs

From Beyond
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
screenplay by Dennis Paoli
directed by Stuart Gordon

Sei donne per l'assassino
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden
screenplay by Giuseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marcello Fondato and Mario Bava
directed by Mario Bava

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon's follow-up to his flat-awesome Re-Animator reunites that film's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with source material by H.P. Lovecraft for From Beyond¹, a nominal splatter classic that lacks the energy and cohesiveness of Re-Animator, even as it establishes Gordon as a director with a recognizable, distinctive vision. A picture that arrived concurrently with Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart" (the source material for Hellraiser), it's useful as a means by which Lovecraft's and Barker's fiction can be paired against one another as complementary halves of a symbolist, grue-soaked whole. With the latter's cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture², consider that Barker's vision of an alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos--a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception. Lovecraft and Barker give description to the indescribable, name to the nameless. They are in pursuit of the sublime and their quest underscores the idea that any such chase is, at its heart, inevitably a spiritual one.

The Odd Couple (1968) [Centennial Collection] - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, John Fiedler, Herb Edelman
screenplay by Neil Simon, based on his play
directed by Gene Saks

by Alex Jackson My high-school psychology teacher used The Odd Couple's Oscar and Felix as an example of two men who had never resolved the anal stage of Sigmund Freud's model for psychosexual development. Oscar (Walter Matthau) is anal expulsive, rebelling against toilet-training well into adulthood, wallowing in his own filth and living completely in the moment. Felix (Jack Lemmon) is anal-retentive, finding pleasure in withholding his feces as a child, and as an adult obsessively cleaning and re-cleaning his surroundings and living by a strictly-controlled schedule. Indeed, playwright Neil Simon's The Odd Couple seems custom-built to illustrate the anal-stage concept in Freudian psychosexual development. In a broader sense, The Odd Couple is also an overt embodiment of the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy: Felix represents the need to create order, whereas Oscar represents the need to maintain a natural chaotic state.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) [2-Disc DVD Collector's Set - Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Extended English-language Version)
***/****
DVD - Image A- Sound A- Extras A
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Aldo Giuffrè
screenplay by Age & Scarpelli & Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone
directed by Sergio Leone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Perhaps it had been too long between screenings, or perhaps my mind had been playing tricks on me, but my most recent viewing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn't as good as the others. There was still much to admire: the wild structure, which doesn't properly introduce its MacGuffin until about half an hour in; the hilariously cavalier attitude towards human decency; the raw-meat attitude towards bodies and faces; and, of course, the idea of Eli Wallach playing a Mexican, which is always appealing. But all of this seems somehow only fitfully successful now, the film's conceptual high points surrounded by the same arid desert that nearly finishes off two out of three of the protagonists. Perhaps I should chalk it up to the distance of memory--even downgraded, the experience has something bizarre for just about everybody, whether their memories will be kind to it or not.

Psycho (1960) [Special Edition - Universal Legacy Series] - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, John Gavin, Vera Miles
screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the book by Robert Bloch
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'd wager there aren't any films that have been more analyzed than Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the expanse of scholarship spent on it a curious echo of its own curious psychobabble anti-climax. Find studies of this film as the wellspring for everything from feminist film theory to measured leaps into psychoanalytic theory, from technical dissertations to Citizen Kane-style forays into authorship pitting the contributions of Hitch against those of graphic designer Saul Bass. I've read pieces on composer Bernard Herrmann's unparalleled work in the picture; on the artwork used in the Bates Motel; on the ways that Hitch's own queasy obsessions--themselves on the verge of explosion with his collaborations with poor Tippi Hedren--bled into the production. I've read about how the film was shot with Hitch's television crew on a minimal budget and about the controversy surrounding, of all things, the depiction of a toilet for the first time since the pre-Code silent era in the United States. I even recall writing something about how this film, along with the other miraculous releases of 1960 (Peeping Tom, Eyes Without a Face, Breathless, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Rocco and His Brothers, Shoot the Piano Player, The Stranglers of Bombay, and Nabuo Nakagawa's miraculous Jigoku), announced that cinema after this very particular point would never be the same. I've heard Janet Leigh's oft-repeated tale of how the flesh-coloured pasties on her breasts peeled away as they tried to get that shot of her hanging over the tub and how, damnit, she wasn't going to move even if it meant the crew in the rafters getting a good look at those world-class goodies. I know my favourite quote regarding the Sixties in film belongs to Ethan Mordden's indispensable Medium Cool, comparing the previous decade to the new day dawning like so: "Surrender to the Wild Ones yields a dissolution of society.  Surrender to Mrs. Bates turns you psycho." I've heard the apocryphal tales, the legends; I've listened to Truffaut interview Hitch about the shoot. Hell, I've taught the picture a few times in my own limited way to classrooms still surprised to learn there are more things left to discover in Psycho.

Thunderball (1965) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi
screenplay by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins,
based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh Thunderball is far from the worst Bond film--you'd be hard-pressed to even label it outright bad--but it may be the entry in this venerated series most worthy of contempt for its concerted, ultimately successful effort to formulize its hero's adventures. After the grim uncertainty of From Russia with Love and the classic iconography of Goldfinger, Thunderball is more than content to let a suddenly-enormous budget ($9M compared to Goldfinger's $3M) carry it far, far over-the-top with ludicrous underwater battles and pieces of gadgetry that become full-blown set-pieces in and of themselves. (That jet-pack sequence must have been astonishing in 1965, but it comes from a different cinematic world entirely--and, maddeningly, the filmmakers bend over backwards to accommodate it.) It's not too difficult to understand such a lopsided reliance on special effects, however, considering that Thunderball's premise is far too slim to accommodate its bloated 130-minute running time: SPECTRE hijacks a NATO bomber jet and threatens to detonate its nuclear warheads in a major city in America or Great Britain unless both governments pay a hefty ransom. Heading the operation is Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a sinister something-or-other calling the shots out of the Bahamas. Bond travels to Nassau to contact "Domino" Derval (Claudine Auger), Largo's mistress and sister of the missing jet's pilot, and persuades her to help.

From Russia with Love (1963) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendáriz, Lotte Lenya
screenplay by Richard Maibaum, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh The first indelible image of From Russia with Love finds steely-eyed, platinum-blond killer Red Grant (Robert Shaw) taking a garrotte to James Bond (Sean Connery), slowly choking the life out of him without witty repartee or a single hope of close-shave escape. The victim turns out to be an impostor, live-target practice for Grant's escapades later in the film--but that momentary shock establishes right from the start that the rules have changed since last we saw 007. Here's a point in time when we weren't completely conditioned to accept Bond as undefeatable, when it wasn't unreasonable to believe that these globetrotting adventures could come to an unfortunate end at any moment. In fact, I wonder if it's reasonable to regard the unpolished Dr. No as mere prologue to From Russia with Love¹, with the breezy, romantic life of a Cold War secret agent violently exposed as a lie.

Dr. No (1962) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord
screenplay by Richard Maibaum & Johanna Hardwood & Berkely Mather, based on the novel by Ian Fleming
directed by Terence Young

by Ian Pugh Sean Connery looks utterly lost in Dr. No. From the vantage point of this first crack at a big-screen James Bond, it's easy to see why Ian Fleming initially dismissed him as an "overgrown stuntman." Unable to convey much beyond a dashing, self-important man of the world, his attempts at cold-blooded murder and forceful interrogation are dispassionate and wooden at best. Considering how his individual performances as Bond rose and fell with different interpretations of the formula¹, one wonders if Connery served as a barometer of the filmmakers' confidence in the series' early days. It's evident that no one involved with Dr. No had a very clear idea of what that formula was, or would be. How far should we go in directly translating the book for the screen? Even the possibility of sequels turns out to be a question that distracts from a successful product: A little too bombastic for a leitmotif, Monty Norman's now-familiar "James Bond Theme" follows our hero around as if testing the waters, toying with the possibility that this character could support a series.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel"
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey as a film about evolution is natural but ultimately inaccurate, I think. The Darwinist views evolution as an external response to the world--a survival mechanism--while the Nietzschian views it as an internal, ethical one. Both are touched on in 2001 and both are misleading in that they fail to acknowledge that Man's evolution in this film is born out of destiny. Out of fate. More appropriate to view evolution here in terms of the lifespan of the butterfly or moth. Guided by a supreme alien intelligence, the species of 2001 evolves from the larva (ape) to the pupa (human) to the butterfly (star child).

Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) [Two Disc Special Edition] + The Adventures of Aquaman: The Complete Collection (1967-1970) - DVDs|Justice League: The New Frontier - Blu-ray Disc

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER
*½/****
DVD - Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
BD - Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
written by Stan Berkowitz with additional material by Darwyn Cooke, based on the graphic novel DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke
directed by David Bullock

THE ADVENTURES OF AQUAMAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
Image C- Sound C Extras D+
"Menace of the Black Manta/The Rampaging Reptile Men," "The Return of Nepto/The Fiery Invaders," "Sea Raiders/War of the Water Worlds," "The Volcanic Monster/The Crimson Monster from the Pink Pool," "The Ice Dragon/The Deadly Drillers," "Vassa, Queen of the Mermen/The Microscopic Monsters," "The Onslaugh of the Octomen/Treacherous is the Torpedoman," "The Satanic Saturnians/The Brain, the Brave and the Bold," "Where Lurks the Fisherman!/Mephisto's Marine Marauders," "Trio of Terror/The Torp, the Magneto and the Claw," "Goliaths of the Deep-Sea Gorge/The Sinister Sea Scamp," "The Devil Fish/The Sea Scavengers," "In Captain Cuda's Clutches/The Mirror-Man from Planet Imago," "The Sea Sorcerer/The Sea-Snares of Captain Sly," "The Undersea Trojan Horse/The Vicious Villainy of Vassa," "Programmed for Destruction/The War of the Quatix and the Bimphars," "The Stickmen of Stygia/Three Wishes to Trouble," "The Silver Sphere/To Catch a Fisherman"

by Ian Pugh Utterly incomprehensible thanks to a deadly combination of rigid adherence to its source material and a discernible lack of vision, the DC Animated Universe's latest stab at the direct-to-video market can only be described as a complete embarrassment for everyone involved. Adapting a graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke that isn't that great to begin with (it's basically a portable art gallery of Fifties-era superheroes, too long by half and tied together by a belaboured treatise on why the decade wasn't all it's cracked up to be), Justice League: The New Frontier doesn't attempt to build on the kernel of an idea therein. Instead, apparently weighing time constraints against the most exploitable elements, it pays lip service to the plot and reduces everything else to a series of biff!pow! pin-ups. I've been a steadfast defender of comic books for years now, but sometimes I wonder if artists and fans really know what has to be done to make them viable as an adult medium. Their long-suffering quest for legitimacy has seen a pronounced downturn since the introspective melancholy of Superman Returns suffered wholesale rejection for not featuring enough people punching each other in the face--and it appears that Bruce Timm and his crew won't be the ones to try to change minds. There's an awful moment in their last animated opus, Superman: Doomsday, in which the Man of Steel laments that he has saved the world a hundred times over but still hasn't cured cancer--shortly before the film pounds its audience with nearly a full hour of mind-numbing violence. The New Frontier contains a similar moment, except that it replaces social issues with political analogies so simplistic and heavy-handed they would make Emilio Estevez cringe. When Lois Lane (Kyra Sedgwick) says, circa 1954, that "whatever party, whatever administration, there'll always be bogeymen like [Joe McCarthy]" in summarizing that "we need a leader"--and then stares directly at the viewer--it's difficult not to see this entire enterprise as just a bunch of kids playing dress-up.

The Graduate (1967) [40th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels
screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb
directed by Mike Nichols

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Walter Chaw Bonnie and Clyde's counter-cultural bridesmaid, Mike Nichols's The Graduate is the "easy" version of Arthur Penn's American nouvelle vague classic. It's too "straight," too deadpan--a safer Harold & Maude (think of it as doing for cradle-robbing what Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? did for miscegenation) with a similarly "hip" period soundtrack of previously-released hits (there Cat Stevens, here Simon & Garfunkel). 'Nuff said that the film failed to offend Bosley Crowther. Bonnie and Clyde is the blueprint for Quentin Tarantino--The Graduate is the blueprint for Wes Anderson; and while both 1967 pictures find a goodly portion of their bedrock in images mined from Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, and the rest of the film-brat arthouse pantheon, it's only Bonnie and Clyde that speaks at all to the culture in revolt at the close of the Flower Power generation. By the climax of Penn's picture, the rebellious youth, contemplating integration into the society at large, are betrayed by The Father, gunned down in cold blood by The Law. By The Graduate's finale, there's just that old, one-second reconsideration of the wisdom of vowing to spend the rest of your life with an unbelievably beautiful, fresh-faced starlet in the full bloom of her attractiveness.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) [Global Warming Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lorre
screenplay by Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett
directed by Irwin Allen

by Alex Jackson Take a gander at the sleeve for Fox's "Global Warming Edition" of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The title is contained in a downward arrow in drippy, bright-red lettering. It's guiding us towards the main action, a gleaming submarine and lime-green scuba divers fighting off a one-eyed, giant red squid. Dig the curvy brushstrokes, the action lines around the charging submarine, and the flecks of paint signifying bubbles. The cast, meanwhile, is in the top-left corner: there's Walter Pidgeon with a Vincent Price moustache, Joan Fontaine with a face of granite, a gasping Barbara Eden, and behind them all, Peter Lorre pointing up at God knows what. Doesn't it just get your juices flowin'? If I were browsing the video store and happened upon this, I'd be tempted to purchase it sight-unseen, and I'd like to think it's rare that a DVD's mere packaging could encourage me to do that.

Cult Camp Classics, Vol. 3: Terrorized Travelers - DVD

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

SKYJACKED (1972)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, James Brolin, Jeanne Crain
screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on the novel Hijacked by David Harper
directed by John Guillermin

Skyjacked is the inevitable result of people pretending to be casual and relaxed while actually being stiff and formal. The actors would desperately like you to believe that they just happened to be on a jumbo jet when it was, by sheer chance, hijacked by a crazed veteran--but who are they fooling? As everybody is cruelly slotted into a stereotypical role (and forced to spout inane pleasantries no thinking person would utter), the artificiality of the proceedings is about as plain as the nose on Chuck Heston's face. Pulse-pounding excitement--which would have required people in whom we could invest--is not on the menu. In fact, the whole thing seems remarkably tranquil as a bunch of slumming character actors cash easy paychecks.

Succubus (1968) - DVD

Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden
**/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B-
starring Janine Reynaud, Jack Taylor, Howard Vernon, Adrian Hoven
screenplay by Pier A. Caminnecci
directed by Jess Franco

by Alex Jackson Jess Franco's Succubus begins with heroine Lorna (Janine Reynaud) torturing and molesting a man chained to a stake while his similarly bound, bloodied, and partially-nude lover watches. The lover protests, so Lorna tortures her some until she passes out. She then goes to the man and plays with him a bit before skewering him with her ceremonial knife. The lights fade up and an audience applauds. The snuff scene was simulated. It's part of an act Lorna performs at a chic nightclub. This opening is the most eloquent and lucid scene in the film, for it establishes that director Jess Franco no longer has a responsibility to be eloquent and lucid. Succubus is going to be told subjectively through the perspective or Lorna, who is going schizophrenic (or something) and is increasingly unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Thus, whatever we see might actually be happening--and then again it might not be. We never really know.

The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 (1959-1960) + The Scarface Mob (1959) - DVDs

THE UNTOUCHABLES: SEASON 1, VOLUME 1
Image B+ Sound B Extras D+
"The Empty Chair," "Ma Barker and Her Boys," "The George 'Bugs' Moran Story," "The Jake Lingle Killings," "Ain't We Got Fun," "Vincent 'Mad Dog' Coll," "Mexican Stake-Out," "The Artichoke King," "The Tri-State Gang," "The Dutch Schultz Story," "You Can't Pick the Number," "The Underground Railway," "Syndicate Sanctuary," "The Noise of Death"

THE SCARFACE MOB
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D+
starring Robert Stack, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Nichols, Pat Crowley
written by Paul Monash, based on the novel The Untouchables by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley
directed by Phil Karlson

by Ian Pugh I love Brian De Palma's The Untouchables precisely for the self-consciously fictionalized varnish that curiously seems to have earned it disdain among the director's devotees. Apart from its romantic, "pure cinema" thrills, however, its Hollywood gloss is the perfect complement to De Palma's penchant for effortlessly transforming assaults on the body into assaults on the mind: an undercurrent of violence constantly threatens to erupt and destroy the gentle exterior of a make-believe 1930s Utopia dictated by fedoras and pinstripe suits. No such undercurrent exists in the original 1959-63 Robert Stack television series on which the 1987 film is ostensibly based--it, too, is pure romanticism, but of a sleazier, more straightforward breed. Corruption and greed are obvious and rampant in "The Untouchables"' world, and the violence that greets dissent is treated as an accepted fact of everyday life. Each episode of the series begins with a brief preview of the scene featuring the most gunfire (usually taking out some poor schmuck who crossed his superiors), which quickly establishes the down-and-dirty rules in play. The greatest aspect of "The Untouchables" lies in how these scenes incite both a visceral thrill and the soon-fulfilled desire to see justice served.

Muriel (1963) - DVD

Muriel, or the Time of Return
Muriel ou le temps d'un retour
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Nita Klein, Jean-Baptiste Thierrée
screenplay by Jean Cayrol
directed by Alain Resnais

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Alain Resnais films are more interesting to me for their differences than for their similarities. Though you can find an oft-cited obsession with memory running through his oeuvre, the high-profile literary screenwriters with whom he chooses to collaborate tend to impose their own sensibilities. Thus Hiroshima, mon amour features Marguerite Duras' passive-aggressive desperation and Last Year at Marienbad is marked by Alain Robbe-Grillet's mathematical abstractions. Neither of those two canonical works--which are at least united by a conceptual monumentalism--looks very much like Muriel, or The Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d'un retour) (hereafter Muriel, also its promotional title), which enlists Jean Cayrol to sketch a story of domestic dishonesty and historical trauma that's at once spatially smaller and more emotionally expansive. Here, if one isn't confronted with the ostentatious "artistry" of Resnais' more famous work (not that great artistry isn't evident), one is aware of a tangle of guilt and regret behind the brave faces. And whoever can be said to be in the driver's seat, it's an amazing film.

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection (1934-1965) - DVD

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
directed by Robert Wise

THE KING AND I (1956)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Martin Benson
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on Margaret Landon's play "Anna and the King of Siam"
directed by Walter Lang

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)
*½/**** Image A+ (Theatrical) A (Roadshow) Sound B Extras C+
starring Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston
screenplay by Paul Osborn, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
directed by Joshua Logan

CAROUSEL (1956)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the Ferenc Molnár's play "Liliom"
directed by Henry King

LILIOM (1934)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
starring Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray, Robert Arnoux, Roland Toutain
screenplay by Robert Liebmann, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer, based on the play by Franz (a.k.a. Ferenc) Molnár
directed by Fritz Lang

STATE FAIR (1945)
½*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Vivian Blaine
screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Philip Strong
directed by Walter Lang

STATE FAIR (1962)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye
screenplay by Richard Breen; adaptation by Oscar Hammerstein II, Sonya Levien, Paul Green
directed by José Ferrer

OKLAHOMA! (1955)
***/**** Image A (CinemaScope) C (Todd-AO) Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gene Nelson
screenplay by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Walter Chaw God, The Sound of Music is so freakin' nice. Nazis are the bad guys, no controversy there; raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens--have you no heart, man? But when I like Rodgers & Hammerstein--and I like them quite a lot, truth be wrenched--I like their ambiguity, their irony, their goddamned fatalism in the face of eternal romantic verities. Consider the animal (jungle?) heat of "Shall We Dance," cut off like a faucet by the fascistic abortion of The King and I's secondary love story; or the persistence of love despite abuse and abandonment in Carousel; or the slapdash kangaroo court that justifies love in Oklahoma!. This is all so much more than the slightly shady (and ultimately redeemed) shyster of The Music Man--this is reality in the midst of the un-, sur-, hyper-reality of the musical form. Yet what The Sound of Music offers up is a military man shtupping an ex-nun with no corresponding sense of fetishistic eroticism. How is it that the two most popular adult Halloween costumes engaged in naughty Alpine sexcapades could be totally free of va-va-va-voom? It's so relentlessly wholesome that of course it's the most beloved artifact of its kind in the short history of the movie musical: If you're of a certain age, the plot of the thing is almost family mythology, resurrected every holiday like a dusty corpse at a decades-long Irish wake gone tragically awry. That ain't a grin, baby, it's a rictus.

Westerns with a Twist: Three Feature Films - DVD

THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR (1965)
Die Söhne der großen Bärin
*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Gojko Mitic, Jirí Vrstála, Rolf Römer, Hans Hardt-Hardtloff
screenplay by Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, based on her novel
directed by Josef Mach

CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE (1967)
Chingachgook, die grosse Schlange
**/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Gojko Mitic, Rolf Römer, Lilo Grahn, Helmut Schreiber
screenplay by Wolfgang Ebeling and Richard Groschopp, based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper
directed by Richard Groschopp

APACHES (1973)
Apachen
*½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Gojko Mitic, Milan Beli, Colea Rautu, Leon Niemczyk
screenplay by Gojko Mitic, Gottfried Kolditz
directed by Gottfried Kolditz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On paper, it seems like a good idea: a series of westerns that not only adopt the Indian point-of-view but also paint the advancing white hordes as monstrous despoilers of the landscape and its peoples. From 1965 to 1982, that's exactly what East Germany's DEFA studios proposed: fifteen Native-centric westerns featuring chiselled Gojko Mitic as an Indian hero ready and willing to kick settler ass. But though these films took the most American of genres and used it against its homeland (a propaganda coup if ever there was one), that's where the fascination ends. Once you've dispensed with the hilarious Cold War contortions, you're left with education-film-quality productions that preach loud and long while boring the audience early and often.

A Man for All Seasons (1966) [Special Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw, Paul Scofield
screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play
directed by Fred Zinnemann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Assessing A Man for All Seasons is no easy task. In its favour is the fact that it's quite sensitively directed: Fred Zinnemann lays on a level of melancholy largely unheard-of in the costume-movie sweepstakes, making the film plenty more affecting than the twilight-of-Old-Hollywood clunker it could very well have become. Alas, Robert Bolt's screenplay (and presumably his stage play) is resolutely impervious to directorial manipulation--and also completely full of crap. Bolt's hilariously over-the-top deification of Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and More's opposition to the divorce of Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is so emptied of contemporary meaning that you can project anything you like onto it. Such care has been taken to shift the discussion away from political matters and towards "personal ethics" that an atheist like me can groove to More's rigid refusal to indulge Henry's transgression over God's law.

The Illustrated Man (1969) - DVD

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on the book by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Smight

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man (hereafter The Illustrated Man) lays its cards out on the table right from the start. There's not much going on, just a couple of drifters named Carl (Rod Steiger) and Willie (Robert Drivas) taking a dip in the river, unaware of each other's presence. It should have been fairly simple to communicate this, but director Jack Smight is no simpleton: he throws the cuts at you, struggling to achieve with sweeping helicopter shots and other ephemera an effect he ultimately can't articulate. This pretty much sums up the movie, a series of attempts to look like somebody's working when nobody has any idea why they bothered. Coupled with Steiger's obnoxious persona and Drivas' blankness, The Illustrated Man is largely a hole in the screen that turns Ray Bradbury's gripping anthology of the same name into something sluggish and unpleasant to behold.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector's Edition] - DVD

by Ian Pugh "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you'll find of Michael Apted's "Up" documentary series. Of course, you can't really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it's the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as "a glimpse into Britain's future." That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they're doing; they've been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

The Addams Family: Volume One (1964-1965) + Bones: Season One (2005-2006) - DVDs

THE ADDAMS FAMILY: VOLUME ONE
Image B Sound B- Extras B+
"The Addams Family Goes to School," "Morticia and the Psychiatrist," "Fester's Punctured Romance," "Gomez, the Politician," "The Addams Family Tree," "Morticia Joins the Ladies League," "Halloween with the Addams Family," "Green-Eyed Gomez," "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets the V.I.P.s," "Morticia, the Matchmaker," "Lurch Learns to Dance," "Art and the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik," "The Addams Family Meets the Undercover Man," "Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family," "Uncle Fester's Illness," "The Addams Family Splurges," "Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family," "The Addams Family in Court," "Amnesia in the Addams Family"

BONES: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Man in the S.U.V.," "A Boy in a Tree," "The Man in the Bear," "A Boy in a Bush," "The Man in the Wall," "The Man on Death Row," "The Girl in the Fridge," "The Man in the Fallout Shelter," "The Woman in the Airport," "The Woman in the Car," "The Superhero in the Alley," "The Woman in the Garden," "The Man on the Fairway," "Two Bodies in the Lab," "The Woman in the Tunnel," "The Skull in the Desert," "The Man with the Bone," "The Man in the Morgue," "The Graft in the Girl," "The Soldier in the Grave," "The Woman in Limbo"

by Ian Pugh Charles Addams's darkest cartoons for THE NEW YORKER were routinely hilarious, not just for their brazen denial of the nuclear family unit, but also because, unlike so many of the publication's other strips, they take their one-panel restrictions to heart without coming off as smarmy. Moreover, Addams's scenarios were simple without being stupid, e.g., family of ghouls about to dump boiling oil on Christmas carollers. The problem in turning these characters into a half-hour sitcom, namely "The Addams Family", should be self-evident: it bloats the brisk silliness into a particularly tiresome game of "Opposite Day"--thirty minutes of a family that cheerfully approves of the macabre and homicidal while despising normalcy and respectability.

Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection - DVD

THE V.I.P.S (1963)
½*/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elsa Martinelli, Margaret Rutheford
screenplay by Terence Rattigan
directed by Anthony Asquith

THE SANDPIPER (1965)
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Morgan Mason
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson
directed by Vincente Minnelli

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward Albee
directed by Mike Nichols

THE COMEDIANS (1967)
*½/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C-
starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov
screenplay by Graham Greene, based on his novel
directed by Peter Glenville

by Walter Chaw Also called International Hotel, The V.I.P.s--the first chronologically-released vehicle for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor following the initiation of their legendary infidelities on the set of Cleopatra--is unwatchable dreck of the Old Hollywood variety. When people say "They don't make 'em like they used to," it's a good corrective to start listing off dusty artifacts like this one. As it was something of a financial windfall at the time (though not enough of one to offset the impending disaster of Cleopatra), one assumes that audiences flocked to theatres to sniff the musky odour of Burton/Taylor's forbidden l'amour that had dominated the world's lascivious imagination as production on an epic failure (or failed epic) dragged on for months and years. For me, the curiosity about The V.I.P.s, currently available in Warner's freshly-minted box set of Burton/Taylor pictures made during the height of their notoriety, has a lot more to do with Richard Burton, who was, to my mind, his generation's Russell Crowe. Like Crowe, Burton is thick with virility and gravitas and the ability, by himself, to carry a picture on his broad shoulders; I wonder if his seduction by a relic of Old Hollywood glamour hasn't tainted his legacy irrevocably. My voyeuristic impulse ultimately isn't so different from that of contemporary viewers, in fact, though I do offer the slight caveat that I'm in it to see how touching a match to Burton's already-boundless explosiveness would infect, for good or for ill, what are essentially vanity pieces for a couple drunk on the cult of themselves.

Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) - DVD

****/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Marilyn Hanold, Jim Karen, Lou Cutell, Nancy Marshall
screenplay by R.H.W. Dillard, George Garrett and John Rodenbeck
directed by Robert Gaffney

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Now, I think we're allowed to define these terms for ourselves (fans of exploitation movies being a friendly and decidedly unpretentious bunch), but the way I see it, there's a sharp difference in style between B-movies and Z-movies. B-movies are your creature features. Their narratives are actually quite strongly defined and they tend to produce a rather primitive but potent and genuine emotional reaction from the audience. You can picture yourself seeing these films at a drive-in double feature or maybe a Saturday matinee. In contrast, Z-movies are all jumbled noise. The audience does not exactly have an emotional reaction to Z-movies, they just watch them in a sort of dissociated daze. You could never imagine seeing Z-movies at an actual movie theatre or drive-in. The only place where they could possibly play is on a local unaffiliated television station at three in the morning.

Equinox [The Criterion Collection] - DVD

THE EQUINOX ...A JOURNEY INTO THE SUPERNATURAL (1967)
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Skip Shimer, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers, Jr., Robin Snider
screenplay by Mark Thomas McGee
directed by Mark Thomas McGee & Dennis Muren

EQUINOX (1970)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Edward Connell, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers jr., Robin Christopher
written and directed by Jack Woods

by Walter Chaw Four teens on a double-date venture into the hills around California in search of an old, dotty professor only to learn that the crazy old bat's unleashed the spawn of Hell with a book written by the devil. When producer Jack Harris bought The Equinox ...A Journey Into the Supernatural (hereafter The Equinox) and hired B-hack Jack Woods to partially rewrite and reshoot it three years after its completion, he would insert a new character in evil, unibrowed park ranger Asmodeus (Woods), thus imposing a weird element of pervy grope cinema while handily washing away in a wave of lowbrow mediocrity most of what makes The Equinox so exceptional. Comparing the two versions (the revamp's title streamlined to Equinox) is an example of the difference between gifted amateurs pursuing a passion and slick exploitation artists applying their own interpretations (this time the burgeoning drive-in market) of where they might grab the quickest buck. For The Equinox to endure as an underground classic despite its co-optation is something like The Magnificent Ambersons maintaining its masterpiece status despite the non-existence of Welles's original cut. It's quite a relief, in other words, that Dennis Muren's The Equinox has survived for comparison's sake.

Monterey Pop (1968) [The Criterion Collection] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras A
directed by D.A. Pennebaker

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's impossible for a certain generation to not feel wistful looking back at Monterey Pop. Those who only know a world with a DVD for every band might be blasé about an early concert doc with mere clips of soon-to-be foregone conclusions, but for those who can remember a time (or have endured the rantings of those who can remember) know that in the Summer of Love, a music festival wasn't just the names above the title. The film captures the relaxed atmosphere surrounding some fabulous furry freaks safe in the knowledge that they were about to take on the world; the music is but affirmation of the groundswell bubbling up in the milling crowds. D.A. Pennebaker's camera is deft enough to capture the mood in addition to the tunes, coming up with something more than a hippie variety act.

Valley of the Dolls (1967) [Special Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Paul Burke, Sharon Tate
screenplay by Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley, based on the novel by Jacqueline Susann
directed by Mark Robson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's little left to say about Valley of the Dolls that hasn't already been said by either its contemporary critics or legions of mock-adoring fans. The former were correct in establishing it as a cynical cash-in crushed under the weight of its vapidity, the latter justified in their identification of its trash playground of mansions, film sets, and nightclubs as the ideal stage for queening and camping. By all rational standards, the movie is awful, yet its rapid-fire stream of meshuggah takes it into some realm of nonsensical fantasy that makes it as good or better than successful films of its genre. There are so many critical errors in judgment that they meld together to become a hyperbolic cocktail that goes to your head and knocks your legs out from under you.

The Short Films of David Lynch + Dumbland (2002) - DVDs

THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH
Image A Sound A Extras B-

DUMBLAND
Image B Sound A-

by Bill Chambers One is tempted to appropriate Jean-Luc Godard's oft-misquoted "The cinema is Nicholas Ray" in discussing the origins of David Lynch, whose blossoming sophistication unwittingly paralleled that of film itself. From the magic lantern-style innovation of his sculpture installation Six Men Getting Sick to the fixed camera placements of The Alphabet to the rudimentary narrative of The Grandmother (whose heavy's freakishly accentuated jawline transforms his countenance into that of a snarling villain in the "Perils of Pauline" mode) to, finally, the total aesthetic compromise of the shot-on-video The Amputee, the first few entries contained on "The Short Films of David Lynch" imply that there is only one destiny for the medium, whether its evolution is spread out over a century or concentrated in the time it takes for an artist to develop a conscience. If most film students go through a similar rite of passage, there's often an attendant, ineffable impatience with primitive techniques in undergrad films that's absent in Lynch's early work.

Tennessee Williams Film Collection - DVD

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

BABY DOLL (1956)
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock
screenplay by Tennessee Williams
directed by Elia Kazan

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Jack Carson
screenplay by Richard Brooks and James Poe, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1961)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vivien Leigh, Warren Beatty, Lotte Lenya, Jill St. John
screenplay by Gavin Lambert, based on the novel by Tennessee Williams
directed by José Quintero

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A
starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Ed Begley
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)
****/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon
screenplay by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by John Huston

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' SOUTH (1973)
**½*/**** Image C Sound D
directed by Harry Rasky

by Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He's said that he modeled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan's flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando's Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he's on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It's said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he's something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he's only ever written comedies. In Kazan's and Brando's too, I'd hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley's "acquaintances" are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche's suitcase. The way he invokes "Napoleonic Law" with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he's right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film--aside from his torn-shirt "STELLA!"--are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, "Hey, why don't you cut the re-bop!"

Jerry Lewis: The "Legendary Jerry" Collection - DVD

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you're savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it's supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn't.) But the thing is, there aren't a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies--the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he's the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

We at FILM FREAK CENTRAL have decided to put a stop to this. Over the next ten weeks, we will be interrogating the Lewis canon (as it relates to Paramount's recently released DVD box set "Jerry Lewis: The 'Legendary Jerry' Collection") for traces of artistic merit--assuming there are some to be found. We may come up with revelations; we may come up with suggestive patterns; or we may come up with nothing whatsoever. By the end, though, we hope to have definitively answered the question of whether the French are onto something--and if we can really point fingers in a culture that conversely embraces Betty Blue. And Luc Besson. And Amélie. Originally published: November 11, 2005.

The Scalphunters (1968) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, Ossie Davis
screenplay by William Norton
directed by Sydney Pollack

by Alex Jackson In that glorious blow-job-thinly-disguised-as-a-documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, director Sydney Pollack claims to remember Pauline Kael's pan of 2001: A Space Odyssey "very well." A decade later, he says, the film was considered a classic--suggesting that Kael was seriously out of touch when she reviewed it, I guess. Pollack fails to mention the punch line, though: in the same piece, a notorious essay called "Trash, Art, and the Movies," Kael exalts Pollack's own The Scalphunters! 2001 is pretty lousy art, she decided, while The Scalphunters is pretty great trash. Between the two, she frankly prefers The Scalphunters.

The Flesh Eaters (1964) - DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Byron Sanders, Barbara Wilkin, Rita Morley, Martin Kosleck
screenplay by Arnold Drake
directed by Jack Curtis

by Alex Jackson When I pan Jack Curtis's The Flesh Eaters, I want you to know that this isn't code to go see it anyway. Watching it, I found myself wondering from time to time if I was no longer capable of appreciating movies like The Flesh Eaters. Comparing my happy memories of Night of the Creeps and the collective work of Ed Wood to this, I've decided that they really do have something that The Flesh Eaters does not. This isn't a "good" bad movie, friends, it's just a bad one.

War Gods of the Deep (1965)/At the Earth's Core (1976) [Double Feature] - DVD

War-Gods of the Deep
The City Under the Sea
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson
screenplay by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward
directed by Jacques Tourneur

AT THE EARTH'S CORE
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant
screenplay by Milton Subotsky, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Kevin Connor

by Walter Chaw Jacques Tourneur kicks all kinds of ass. He shone in the Forties with his Val Lewton collaborations and his magnificent, atmosphere-laden pictures Night of the Demon and Out of the Past. Having turned his attention primarily to moody Joel McCrea westerns and adventure pulpers in the Fifties, Tourneur, by the time the Sixties rolled around, unfortunately found himself outside his black-and-white comfort zone (his last great work is probably an episode of the original "The Twilight Zone", "Night Call") and at the helm of productions starring people like Steve Reeves and Vincent Price. One of his last pictures--1965's abominable War-Gods of the Deep--finds its way onto DVD via MGM's admirable "Midnite Movies" line as the front end of a double feature. It's a flat, fish-eyed stinker that positions itself as a ripper of both the Price-anchored Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films and the bona fide cycle of Jules Verne spectacles that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), continued through From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and culminated in 1964's still-creepy First Men in the Moon, to which this film might owe its greatest debt. Ostensibly based on a Poe poem called "The City in the Sea," War-Gods of the Deep grafts its gothic settings (complete with another voiceover intro of Price reading a poem) to a Verne-like tale of a mysterious egomaniac (named "The Captain," of course, and played by Price) living in a giant, velvet-lined mansion beneath the sea, just off the coast of Cornwall.

The Buddy Holly Story/La Bamba - DVD

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Gary Busey, Don Stroud, Charles Martin Smith, Conrad Janis
screenplay by Robert Gittler
directed by Steve Rash

LA BAMBA (1987)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Esai Morales, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rosana DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña
written and directed by Luis Valdez

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don't know enough about music to pass judgment on the legacies of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Everybody knows they had their mutual rendezvous with destiny (and Don McLean) in a plane crash that helped end the first phase of rock-and-roll, but their legends are the distorted shotgun marriage of crazy fame and early death that makes totalling their actual achievements a tad difficult. Strangely, their movie biopics (now available on DVD in a two-pack) don't really try. The Buddy Holly Story is really an ode to people sitting in rooms playing music regardless of anyone's relative fame, while La Bamba is a family story hinged on the rise of a credit to his community. The real pleasures of these films are strangely incidental to hero worship, and passing judgment on them is a matter of aesthetics: where Buddy triumphs by attempting something modest and nailing it with a vengeance, La Bamba bites off more than it can chew and sails into the waters of respectable mediocrity.

A Farewell to Arms (1957) + Francis of Assisi (1961) - DVDs

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Mercedes McCambridge
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
directed by Charles Vidor

FRANCIS OF ASSISI
*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
starring Bradford Dillman, Dolores Hart, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendariz
screenplay by Eugene Vale, James Forsyth and Jack Thomas
directed by Michael Curtiz

by Walter Chaw One of David O. Selznick's many attempts to shape the largely immutable mug of lady-love Jennifer Jones into the face that launched a thousand cinematic ships, the badly-fumbled Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms finds Jones, about two decades past the age of her Red Cross nightingale Catherine, paired opposite the not-quite-long-in-the-tooth-but-almost Rock Hudson as her doomed love Lt. Henry. The setting is Italy during The Great War; playboy Lt. Henry falls for mad "Cat," who, as written by the legendary Ben Hecht (himself a decade removed from his best work and well on his way to becoming king of cheese epics), comes off as an entirely inappropriate nod to Blanche Dubois. Selznick served John Huston--the right man for this picture--his walking papers early on for correctly identifying the love story in Hemingway's novel as just a metaphor for the tragedy and irony of WWI's carnage, subbing Huston with second-stringer Charles Vidor, who meekly agreed to amplify the alleged love between Lt. Henry and Cat while pushing all manner of hysterical spectacle to the wings of the proscenium.

The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Glynis Johns, Dan O'Herlihy, Dick Davalos, Lawrence Dobkin
screenplay by Robert Bloch
directed by Roger Kay

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The first thing we gotta do is get past the title. Contrary to popular belief (as exhibited in Pauline Kael's tome 5001 Nights at the Movies), The Cabinet of Caligari does not share its title with the classic 1920 Robert Wiene film. You're thinking of The Cabinet of DR. Caligari--emphasis my own. That being said, I have no right to be a prick about this, as every time I've typed "The Cabinet of Caligari" I've found myself instinctively inserting "Dr.".

Oliver! (1968) [Special DVD & CD Gift Set!] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Ron Moody, Oliver Reed, Harry Secombe, Mark Lester
screenplay by Vernon Harris, based on the novel by Charles Dickens and the play by Lionel Bart
directed by Carol Reed

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's an exception to every rule, and Oliver! bucks one of the most depressing: that every bloated, twilight-of-old-Hollywood musical is crass and overblown. To be sure, Carol Reed was far from his The Third Man/Outcast of the Islands heyday when he directed this Oscar-winning roadshow, and one can sense a sigh of resignation as he puts on the mega-musical feedbag. But unlike the once-great craftsmen who started turning in horrors like Hello, Dolly!, the movie has style and credibility--Reed is genuinely interested in the narrative and the mood, as opposed to what other declining directors would highlight: the production design and the money. Oliver! is still sealed in an expensive cocoon, but what's inside is a world worth watching and enjoying.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960) - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Doris Day, David Niven, Janis Paige, Spring Byington
screenplay by Isobel Lennart, based on the book by Jean Kerr
directed by Charles Walters

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Please Don't Eat the Daisies is not a seismic work of filmic mastery, but instead a rather modest (if well-upholstered) domestic comedy with Doris Day thanklessly holding down the fort as she so often used to. David Niven is her husband, recently hired as one of the "Butchers of Broadway" who decides which shows live or die; he's British enough to be classy, yet Hollywood enough to believe that a play's first mission is "to entertain." And there are the "four little monsters," the children who go through babysitters and hugely inconvenience poor Doris. But as you wait for Please Don't Eat the Daisies to turn condescending or cute, it somehow never does--creeping up and gently holding you until the curtain finally falls. Sometimes we critics thank heaven for small mercies.

Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) + I'll Take Sweden (1965) - DVDs

BEDTIME FOR BONZO
**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Ronald Reagan, Diana Lynn, Walter Slezak, Jesse White
screenplay by Val Burton and Lou Breslow
directed by Frederick de Cordova

I'LL TAKE SWEDEN
*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Bob Hope, Tuesday Weld, Frankie Avalon, Dina Merrill
screenplay by Nat Perrin, Bob Fisher and Arthur Marx
directed by Frederick de Cordova

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover FILM FREAK CENTRAL now heads into uncharted waters with the first auteurist assessment of one Frederick de Cordova. Yes, the man who inadvertently wedged his foot in pop history by bringing Ronald Reagan and a monkey together in Bedtime for Bonzo indeed has themes that remain consistent--at least in the fifteen years that intervened between that film and his Bob Hope vehicle, I'll Take Sweden. Both find a rigid father figure finally lightening up after aggravating bad situations with some abstract and inflexible rules. But while Bedtime for Bonzo bristles with surprise implications and rear-view Reagan desecrations, I'll Take Sweden lies dead on the screen thanks to terrible lines and unpleasant "racy" humour. Which means that whatever de Cordova's thematic uniformity, I suspect the Cinémathèque française monograph is not forthcoming.

The Reivers (1969) + Tom Horn (1980) - DVDs

THE REIVERS
*½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel by William Faulkner
directed by Mark Rydell

TOM HORN
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Billy Green Bush
screenplay by Thomas McGuane and Bud Shrake
directed by William Wiard

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The oldest, most tired story to beguile the male artist is the Moment at Which Innocence is Irretrievably Lost. Most writers try their hand at it at some point, and I really wish they wouldn't: it suggests they'd rather be stupidly oblivious to not just the pains but also the rewards of adulthood. It's a boring default trauma, but at least when William Faulkner did it (in The Reivers), it was a boring default trauma with genius digressions that occasionally distracted from the emptiness of the narrative line. Not so Mark Rydell's big-screen adaptation of The Reivers, from which all of Faulkner's background about the landscape and the history and his characters' desperate lives has been excised, leaving the innocence-losing adventures to hog the spotlight and make you wish you were watching something that aspired to dissipation for a change.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Junior Bonner (1972) [Western Legends] - DVDs

THE CINCINNATI KID
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Terry Southern
directed by Norman Jewison

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston
written by Alan R. Trustman
directed by Norman Jewison

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I imagine our American readers are astonished to learn that Norman Jewison is lionized in English Canada. Rest assured, it's not because we think his films are better than flimsy liberal mush (even if we pretend otherwise)--it's because for the longest time, he was the biggest fish in our cinematic pond. Until the rise of Cronenberg and his many disciples, Jewison was, expat or not, the highest-profile Canuck director in the game, and our nation's disbelief at his success has allowed him to seem more important than he actually is. Though he's good at nice-guy friendliness rendered with a modicum of craft, anything more ambitious comes off a little strained. Thus, his downplaying of the grim parts of The Cincinnati Kid makes the film a tolerable entertainment, while his self-consciously "creative" The Thomas Crown Affair wears out its welcome pretty fast.

Beach Red (1967) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Cornel Wilde, Rip Torn, Burr DeBenning, Patrick Wolfe
screenplay by Clint Johnston, Donald A. Peters and Jefferson Pascal
directed by Cornel Wilde

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Naiveté can sometimes take you places. Beach Red is a pacifist war movie that believes so strongly in its material that it makes you want to believe, too--even when the material in question is hackneyed, unconvincing, or Ed Wood fanciful. The film's attempt to suggest an American version of Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White trades on the figure instead of dialogue and image instead of word, with director/star Cornel Wilde trying to give his attack on the futility of war a lyrical spin. "The futility of war" is, of course, an idea that's older than the hills, but so it was for Jancsó--and though Wilde lacks the Hungarian filmmaker's virtuosity, he has a similar attraction to agonized bodies and the power of a picture to trample over a person like a tank.

The Manson Family: Unrated Version (2004) [2-Disc Special Edition] + 99 Women (1969) - DVDs

THE MANSON FAMILY
***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Marcello Games, Marc Pitman, Leslie Orr, Maureen Alisse
written and directed by Jim VanBebber

Der heiße Tod
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B
starring Maria Schell, Mercedes McCambridge, Maria Rohm, Rosalda Neri
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Attempting exactly the same thing as Mel Gibson's bloodier and no less exploitive telling of a hippie religious leader whose teachings produced immediately sanguine results (with Gibson's martyr going on to establish what is possibly the bloodiest nation in the history of the planet), Jim VanBebber's laudably disquieting The Manson Family is distinguished by its self-awareness as a document of hate rather than one of hosanna on high. Fifteen years in the making, it demonstrates a commensurate level of passion in its creation, the same obsession with recreating the period in the mode of its predominant artform (static representation for the one, drive-in cinema for the other), culminating in an orgy of violence that's gotten a bad rap precisely because there's no prurient thrill to be gained from it. Close examination reveals, in fact, that the deeds of Manson's merry men and women aren't shown in as much detail as they could have been--the chief excision being the fate of Sharon Tate and her in utero baby. The madness of King VanBebber, then, seems to have a method: not to, like Gibson's blood-soaked reverie, revel in every minute detail of flayed viscera and spilled humours, but to recreate the uncomfortable viciousness of loose ideology set free in the schizophrenic fin de siècle sandwiched between free love and its Vietnam War bloodletting counterweight. The Manson Family is about how tragic is the loss of mind and life; The Passion of the Christ is about how tragic it is, for their sake, that the Jews and the Romans didn't know what a bad motherfucker they were messing with. Context is everything.

Hawaii (1966) - DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Julie Andrews, Max Von Sydow, Richard Harris, Gene Hackman
screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Daniel Taradash, based on the novel by James A. Michener
directed by George Roy Hill

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover As a movie, Hawaii isn't very good, but in a way it's great. While it's hard not to grow weary with its 161 minutes of leaden historical pageantry, especially as there's not a single interesting shot in the whole thing, it's equally difficult to not be amazed by its acid take on colonial arrogance--or by its lead, one the most astoundingly unsympathetic in Hollywood history. You can't help but wonder what comes next, even as the filmmakers botch the execution and you grow impatient for what's-next to show its tardy face. They're not naturals, but they're not hypocrites, either, and if all fusty quality pictures were like this I'd have considerably less to complain about.

Venus in Furs (1969) - DVD

Paroxismus
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring James Darren, Barbara McNair, Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski
screenplay by Jess Franco & Malvin Wald
directed by Jess Franco

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Masterpiece is such a relative term. The keepcase for Venus in Furs (a.k.a. Paroxismus) anoints this rough jewel in Jess Franco's crown as "the one fans and critics alike call his masterpiece," but all this means is that next to some of the other films in Franco's dissipated oeuvre, Venus in Furs is comparatively competent, hangs together decently, and won't cause the intense eye-rolling of something like the same year's The Girl from Rio. But though it's slick and watchable, it's still a conceptual mess, combining a blithe pretentiousness with a total inability to suggest cause and effect--not to mention Franco's usual sophomoric sexuality. Or does being propositioned by Dean Martin while on acid count as a masterpiece?

Ice Station Zebra (1968) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown
screenplay by Douglas Heyes, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by John Sturges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Imagine a lobotomized, irony-free Antonioni relocating White Desert to the North Pole and you'll have a hint of the freakishly chilled formalism that drives John Sturges's Ice Station Zebra. So consumed is it with the gleam of grey steel and the snap of pale Styrofoam that it chucks all considerations of pacing, character development, and ideological orientation. It's a thriller without thrills, a drama without drama, a cold-war bromide barely aware of what hemisphere it's in; all it knows is that the cold, clean surfaces of metal and ice are pretty pretty pretty (please don't touch me). But despite its trouncing of the basics of pop excitement, the picture makes a surprisingly good case for its necrophiliac obsession. Considering the standard-issue material it has to work with, it at least succeeds as an anomaly where a regular production would have failed as hackwork.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) [Special Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich
screenplay by Abby Mann
directed by Stanley Kramer

by Walter Chaw By the end of the Fifties, the toll of about two decades of mainstream entertainment steadfast in its studied inoffensiveness catalyzed a movement in film and televison ("The Twilight Zone", one of the most politically-charged TV series in history, launched in 1959) that, fuelled by the twin prods of the death of Louis B. Mayer (the last of the studio moguls) and the discovery of Ed Gein's naughtiness in his wood shed (both in 1957), began to redefine what it meant to be "real." (One freed the artists, the other seemed to inspire them.) The new turks of the New Hollywood were Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, a real jerk and a screen jerk, respectively--self-serving, self-satisfied Old Glory jackanapes-next-door who embodied the theory of the antihero. And they put it in context of the blue-eyed, milk-fed, horse-kicked average Joe, the guy you wanted to be or wanted to bed, not just because they were dead sexy, but also because they were the future. You cast your lot in the Sixties with the rebels and didn't do a lot of apologizing for it.