The foreign-region shopping cinephile sometimes is obliged to accept redundancy in order to achieve the highest level of fulfillment. For instance, my Criterion Collection double feature disc of The Killers features a superb presentation of Robert Siodmak's 1946 adaptation of Hemingway; I don't need another. So a French DVD box featuring that film doesn't seem like any kind of draw...except that Carlotta's "Coffret Robert Siodmak" also throws in two of the German director's most delirious Hollywood films, both from 1944: the worshipped-by-Jack-Smith Technicolor Maria Montez good-versus-evil twin fantasia Cobra Woman, and the entirely irrational quasi-noir Phantom Lady, starring Ella Raines as a good-girl secretary who becomes an undercover bad girl in order to clear her beloved boss of a murder conviction.
The bad news about the set is that Cobra Woman looks pretty tepid; te print's got noticeable damage and the color's largely faded. This diminishes its lurid appeal quite a bit; one only hopes a restored version will come from Universal's domestic Studio Classics line (hey, they did the lesser Montez Arabian Nights). Phantom Lady is a different, happier story; from the clouds of cigarette smoke contantly rising in front of the shadows of prison bars in the credits sequence on, it's a beautifully dark delight. The greatest thing about this picture, adapted from a novel by "William Irish" (a pen name for Cornell Woolrich) is its completely invented reality which, while certainly informed by German Expressionism, spins off into a realm of horrific hilarity, as in the picture's legendary "jazz drummer" sequence, wherein Raines, dolled up and playing hep-kitten, eggs on hopped-up Elisha Cook Jr. (who has information that could exonerate Raines' boss) to a kind of percussive orgasm.
Wow. It's even better when it moves.
Dialogue's not bad either.
Detective (licking ice cream cone): Eh...
Other detective: Told you not to get pistachio!
Detective: How's yours?
Other detective: Never go wrong on vanilla.
(It doesn't hurt that one of the dicks is Regis Toomey.)
One need not get the whole box in order to see Phantom Lady, as it is in fact available on a single disc. Watching it gave me a revived enthusiasm for Siodmak, and I'm gonna chack out a British disc of his Christmas Holiday—also 1944, a busy year for the director—some time this week...
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