Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Saint Joan'
Between the two major bios of the man recently published—Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King by Foster Hirsch is meaty, informative, smart and fair-minded; I'm only just starting Chris Fujiwara's Otto Preminger: The World And Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, a critical bio, but I'm already revelling in Fujiwara's exquisite aesthetic sense and eloquence—and the superb retrospective at Film Forum recently (not to mention the recent excellent DVD of Daisy Kenyon, which I mull over here), I'd say a genuine Preminger revival is GO!, and I'm all for that. Alas, a lot of Preminger is not easily accessible. Fox, which has put out excellent DVD versions of some of Preminger's gems for its parent studio, Laura, Fallen Angel, and Kenyon among them, still sits on The Fan and the notorious Linda-Darnell-starrer Forever Amber. The notorious Skidoo has been rather widely bootlegged...but this oddity deserves an authorized special edition of its own. The late work much of it critically reviled, also deserves to be seen—as Hirsch points out, even Preminger's failures seem in some ways ahead of their time.
This being the case, the temptation to seek out domestically absent Preminger on foreign DVD is substantive. I was much looking forward to revisiting Preminger's 1957 adaptation of Shaw's Saint Joan, a fascinating picture on any number of levels. What other picture from this master of poetic objectivity opens with a dream? (Preminger and scenarist Graham Greene shift Shaw's coda of the Dauphin's dream of Joan to the front, which substantially effects the dramaturgy...and not for the worse, for my money.) Then there's the matter of Jean Seberg's casting, and her much-underestimated performance, and more.
Alas, though, for the first time in the history of the Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD report, I must issue a caveat emptor. The Spain-issued DVD of Saint Joan, on a label called Manga Films, is not even close to being an ideal video vehicle for a reassessment of Preminger's film. The above screen cap tells the whole story: Georges Perinal's silkily gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is here rendered with all the detail and contrast of a 16mm print that's been gnawed on by beavers after being washed through a mud bath. Which is all that counts—if the image were halfway decent I wouldn't mind so much that the Spanish subtitles appear to be unremovable when you're watching the film with the English-language soundtrack. The thing is so slack a production I wonder that it's not a bootleg itself, except it's got the Spanish-language version of that annoying "You wouldn't steal a car" ("How do YOU know," I always ask when it comes on) anti-piracy warning at the beginning. Not that that proves anything...
I won't link here to the spot where I bought it, as I'm not recommending. But I hope the still-extant Otto Preminger Films, now run by Preminger's daughter, has better plans for this fascinating film. (Incidentally, Manga also has put out a version of Preminger's Production-Code-challenging The Moon Is Blue, which I haven't looked at yet. I don't have high hopes...)
I know it's not your fault, and I'm sorry this is off-topic, but those are some truly awful next generation pop-up ads Premiere.com has saddled you with...
Posted by: Josh | March 24, 2008 at 03:06 PM
Seriously. I could be watching that stuff on a stolen four-foot plasma TV. They don't know!
Posted by: oakling | March 24, 2008 at 03:20 PM
Josh—you think? I could complain, but I imagine that you can imagine precisely how much good that'll do. I try to imagine the whole effect as a kind of Dadaist collage, myself, at least when I'm not sobbing and tooth-gnashing about it...
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | March 24, 2008 at 03:32 PM
Since the anti-piracy warnings obviously aren't working, maybe they should try a new strategy, like playing up the virtues of good old-fashioned stealing as a cooler alternative to piracy.
"People get away scot-free with all kinds of theft all the time. Think about it...you could get a brand new car - for free! Or you could sit here on your fat ass and spend 4 hours downloading SAW IV, which you're only gonna watch once anyway, and you won't even like it.
"Piracy is stealing - for losers."
Posted by: futurefree | March 24, 2008 at 06:00 PM