DVD Releases We Dig This Week (03.26.13)

Good heavens, there is a lot of great stuff this week, no matter what kind of cinema you're into. (Easter is around the corner, so if the Easter Bunny leaves you any money, it'll be well used at the DVD shop.) As always, Olive Films has a boatload of titles. First up, there are a handful of John Wayne films from his days at Republic: Westward Ho (1935); The Lawless Nineties (1937); A Man Betrayed (1941); Wyoming Outlaw (1939) (the latter is part of the Three Mesquiteers series, of which Olive had released several films last year).

And here are some more classics from Olive: The Duke's frequent boss John Ford is represented with the excellent underrated The Sun Shines Bright (1953); Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn in the brilliant screwball comedy The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) (My God- how has this not been released previously!?); Ruthless (1948), from everyone's favourite poverty row auteur Edgar G. Ulmer; Mickey Rooney in the underrated comedy The Atomic Kid (1954) (scripted by a young Blake Edwards!); the 1954 film noir Hell's Half Acre; and Samuel Fuller's offbeat Korean War epic, China Gate (1957) (another one long overdue). And for good measure, there is also Hector Babenco's underrated screen adaptation of Ironweed (1987).

Two new releases from Criterion for the arthouse crowd: Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956) and Charlie Chaplin's black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947). 

There is no shortage of fun for the midnight movie - cult film enthusiast either! The always impressive Shout! Factory has released collectors' editions of the favourites, Phantasm II (1988) and From Beyond (1986). This week they also debut Futureworld (1976), the underrated sequel to Westworld, and the complete series of the great Japanese TV show, Johnny Sokko and His Giant Robot. 

 Still want more? Okay, then! Scorpion's line of Katarina's Kat Skratch Cinema releases the cult epics Alley Cat (1984), and (be still my heart) Angels Brigade (1979)!!

Whew! What a world. More next week.

DVD Releases We Dig This Week (02.26.13)

Wow, we have a boatload of releases to report this week; there should be something new on the shelf for any tastes. Debuting today from the Criterion Collection is the celebrated 1960 documentary, Chronicle of a Summer, by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. In light of today's "reality TV" climate, this experimental documentary about real people's reactions to a camera should be even more timely.

And as always, there is a significant pile of DVDs from the ever-surprising Olive Films. We're especially excited because among the new titles is the long overdue DVD release of Robert Altman's moody 1969 film, That Cold Day in the Park. In addition, there is the underrated 1946 Jean Renoir adaptation of Diary of A Chambermaid, starring Paulette Goddard, written by and co-starring her then-husband Burgess Meredith. (The Octave Mirbeau novel was more famously adapted to the screen in 1964 by Luis Bunuel.)

Film noir fans should rejoice that they have also put out Anthony Mann's first noir, the 1944 Strangers in the Night, starring Virginia Grey. Their continued spelunking of the Republic catalogue has resulted in releases of the 1942 John Wayne curio, Lady for a Night, co-starring  Joan Blondell, and the 1949 propaganda picture The Red Menace, directed by R.G. Springsteen, who did many westerns.  For crime fans, there is also the 1963 French film, Monsieur Gangster, starring Lino Ventura.  And lastly, Olive has released the 1957 horror thriller She-Devil, with Mari Blanchard and Albert Dekker! Whew!

Midnight movie fans can also check out the Severin boxed set, The Euro-Sleaze Collection, which features grindhouse delights: The Sister of Ursula, The Sinful Dwarf and Hanna D: The Girl from Vondel Park.  It seems that Fred Olen Ray's Retro Media label is getting back into business. Hot off the recent release of Mark of the Gun is another long-unseen curio. 1967's I, Marquis de Sade is noteworthy for being directed by Richard Hilliard, perhaps best remembered today for his involvement with Del Tenney on The Horror of Party Beach and Curse of the Living Corpse.

This should keep us busy for a while; more next week!

DVD Releases We Dig This Week (10.02.12)

This week features a real (ahem) eclectic bunch of films for DVD release. Wong Kar Wai's visually sumptuous In The Mood For Love is the re-released from the Criterion family, with the usual truckload of extras. 

Classic comedy fans will want to check two boxed sets released by Universal. Don Knotts: Reluctant Hero releases features the comedian in: The Reluctant Astronaut; The Ghost and Mr. Chicken; The Shakiest Gun in the West and The Love God?. I hope this is a step up from the 2004 release that squeezed all four films onto one double-sided disk.

The Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road To Comedy Collection features four of their classic Road films (Road to Zanzibar; Road to Morocco; Road to Utopia; Road to Singapore). These are definitely worth having-- but four features on one double-sided disk? Oy.

Although it was a flop in its day because far too many fantasy films were released in that summer of 1982, the futuristic action movie Megaforce has since attracted a cult following.  It finally debuts on DVD, thanks to the fine folks at Hen's Tooth. I've never seen this Hal Needham vehicle, featuring Barry Bostwick (Rocky Horror's Brad), but hope to soon!

And finally, a slew of titles from Olive Films. In addition to mining the vaults at Paramount, Olive has recently acquired a long list of movies from Republic. Today, a handful of "Three Mesquiters" westerns, featuring John Wayne (pre-Stagecoach), Ray "Crash Corrigan" and Max Terhune, are released: The Night Riders,  Overland Stage Raiders, Red River Range and Three Texas Steers. Of these, I'm most interested to see Overland Stage Raiders, as it features the legendary Louise Brooks in her final screen role.

ed.

Bullfighter and the Lady (1951)

Here's a word I don't use lightly or often enough, but it applies. "Masterpiece."

Tonight TCM showed the restored, 124-minute version of Budd Boetticher's 1951 epic Bullfighter and the Lady, a thrilling piece of gritty melodrama (produced by John Wayne!). When Republic Pictures released the movie, they had cut more than 30 minutes out of it. Towards the end of Boetticher's life, the film was restored to its original full length, thereby realizing the filmmaker's true intentions. I have not seen this movie before in any duration, so cannot account for what the studio removed for the release version. But suffice to say, this two-hour cut is an American masterpiece- one of the most breath-taking commercial pictures from the golden age of the studio system.

While perhaps Boetticher is better remembered today for the string of gritty westerns he made with Randolph Scott (The Tall T, Ride Lonesome), he was a bullfighter before entering the movie business, and got his big break as a technical advisor for Tyrone Power's matador epic Blood and Sand (1941), and spent a decade directing B noirs and thrillers, before getting the opportunity to venture to his surrogate home of Mexico to make this motion picture.

32 year-old Robert Stack plays Johnny Regan, an American upstart in Mexico who takes bullfighting lessons from aging matador Manolo Estrada (Gilbert Roland) in order to impress a young lady (Joy Page) whose suitor was injured in the ring. Throughout the film, Regan creates much heartache and misunderstanding (unintentionally or not) because of his ignorance of Latin culture in general. He is truly a stranger in a strange land who too often lets his bravado make up for lack of experience.

Boetticher and cinematographer Jack Draper create an ambiance that is by turns docu-realistic and dream-like. The deep focus chiaroscuro photography, with rich tones and long shadows, and the striking composition, turn nearly every shot into a separate work of art. The excellent footage within the ring is properly gritty. With so many scenes of natural light (in the ring, on the streets, in pastures), and where sequences often play without any English translation, one quickly forgets this is a movie, and believes we are really there in the crowds next to the camera.

This story of twentieth century bullfighters perhaps finds its cinematic equivalent in, of all things, sword and sandal epics, where these matadors are gladiators in an arena who play with their lives for sport. The scene with the glowing, sweaty, rippling bodies of the matadors in the steamroom recall similar moments of beefcake eroticism in any big-budget toga movie you can think of. A clever framing device of shooting the matadors in low angles against the sky recalls the striking composition of Sergei Eisenstein (and many outdoor scenes here surpass what he attempted in Que Viva Mexico), and makes the modern-day matador look like a warrior out of mythology.

Perhaps the most telling scene is when they visit an older man whose book on bullfighting remains unfinished because he failed to answer the question of why matadors do what they do. That answer is not revealed explicitly here, but to see Robert Stack's open-faced radiance after being in the ring is to suggest that the appeal of such a dangerous vocation is that one truly feels alive after dancing with death. In a film about male virility, this inference may not be far from the truth. (In fact, the two-shots where Stack and Page exchange longing glances are extremely erotic.)

Budd Boetticher returned to the arena later in his career for the 1972 documentary Arruza about the famed matador, and is likewise hard to find. Having scanned all of the titles in his filmography, I sheepishly confess to having seen only three of his forty features. This is why I love this job-- there is always new work to discover. In an age where more obscure films are being resurrected on DVD each week, the work of Budd Boetticher is a perfect candidate for rediscovery by a new generation. As for Bullfighter and the Lady in specific, this cries for a Criterion release (in its full version of course) with a documentary of this auteur as a bonus. In the meantime, this masterpiece plays again on TCM February 6. Warm up the VCR.