In The Company Of Glenn

Criterion working Blu

I can't find any confirmation of this on the Criterion site itself yet, but according to the home page of the great site DVD Beaver, the great label will introduce its Blu-Ray line in October, and the introductory titles will be The Third Man, Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, El Norte, The 400 Blows, Gimme Shelter, The Complete Monterey Pop, Contempt, Walkabout, For All Mankind and The Wages of Fear.

This is huge. Criterion does an astonishing job in Standard Definition—I'll put my Criterion Days of Heaven up against just about any High-Definition format disc I've seen—so the mere prospect of what they'll do in High Def has me drooling. Good God. Contempt. Walkabout. Chungking. Christmas will be early this year.

Department of Redundant DVD Package Design Department

You really know a studio's behind a film when it comes up with a powerful, original design for the DVD package of the picture...

Yeesh! And the Weinstein Company's not even recycling an in-house design—Eastern Promises is a Universal pic...

Ah, hell, what do I care as long as the Weinsteins keep putting out great DVDs of those Samuel Bronston pictures...

(Mostly) Viewing Diary, May 1-5

May 1:

The day is spent looking at Blu-Ray versions of varied non-masterpieces. I do a column over at the website proper rating High-Definition DVDs, and while my first couple of installments were pretty much release-date-non-specific, it's now at the point where some semblance of timeliness counts. Last month's Warner release of an excellent Blu-Ray of Bonnie and Clyde was the sort of thing I'd like to see more of, but this month I've got to keep a sharp eye on, and apply some wit to the evaluation of, such not-inordinately distinguished titles as The Devil's Own and


Alvin and The Chipmunks. "Why The Devil's Own?" I think. "I can come up with at least three Alan J. Pakula films I'd sooner see on Blu-Ray than this." (And you can, too, I'm sure—mine were All the President's Men, Klute, and The Parallax View.) But, Devil's Own is, like so many Pakula pictures, shot by Gordon Willis. This plays very much in favor of the Blu-Ray disc—my evaluations skew to the technical side, for many reasons, not least of which being I've always hated DVD reviews that were just film reviews in disguise.

By evening I'm Blu-Rayed out, and, waiting for My Lovely Wife to get home, decide to treat myself by chacking out a couple of the new Universal Cinema Classics discs. A Mitchell Leisen double feature: 1937's Easy Living, starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, and Ray Milland, directed by Leisen from a Preston Sturges script, and 1934's 1939's Midnight, starring Don Ameche, Claudette Colbert, and John Barrymore, directed by Leisen from a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

Ameche and Colbert in Midnight

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'The River'

This is one of those discs that, for some film lovers, is in and of itself the justification for a purchase of a multi-region DVD player. (Although, to get a little technical here, the region coding of the disc—region 0—is not the roadblock to playback on a U.S. player. It's the PAL braodcast standard, which multi-region players also conquer.) A loving restoration of a once-thought-lost film...a fantastic window on the work of an underrepresented-on-DVD film artist...supplemented by an eye-opening piece of movie scholarship and topped with a sampling of the film artist's revelatory early work, the Edition Filmmuseum presentation of Frank Borzage's The River is like some cinephilic dream made plastic.

A spot of color

Damn, I've been running a lot of black-and-white screen caps lately. People are gonna start to think this is a blog about old movies or something.

To remedy, here's Dean Martin in an iconic (some would say seminal) image from Vincente Minnelli's great 1958 Some Came Running, to remind you that the long-awaited domestic DVD version of this influential picture streets on May 13, from your friends at Warner Home Video.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Letter From An Unknown Woman'

What, exactly, is melodrama? That question came up as I read the Self-Styled Siren's provocative post "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs: A Brief Defense of Melodrama," which itself was inspired a bit by the recent cinema blogosphere fulminations and such on behalf of Murnau's Sunrise.

Sunrise, like a lot of the other melodramas of its period, plays it straight. It's not crude, but it is about creating a galvanic effect. The genre has its stealth uses, of course, as the exquisitely ironic work of Douglas Sirk has shown.

And then there's Max Ophuls.

DVD wish list/Q&A thread...

James Mason and Barbara Rush discuss a quite crucial theological point in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, available in good foreign-region editions, but no domestic yet...

The post below has turned into a back-and-forth about upcoming DVDs, wished-for DVDs, and seemingly un-findable DVDs. The (fabulous) Self-Styled Siren had a query on the harrowing 1956 Bigger Than Life, which as of now can only be enjoyed by those with a foreign-region disc player (lucky us). Bill wants to check out Michael Reeves much-sought-after The Sorcerers—and boy, so do I. But I missed the boat on that foreign-region disc, which is now out-of-print and commanding pretty unaffordable prices on Amazon.com.

The Siren's query on Life put in mind another fascinating mental-illness themed '50s film—Minnelli's 1955 The Cobweb, in which the choice of a pattern of drapes throws an exclusive psychiatric clinic (presided over by Richard Widmark) into disarray. I know that Warner Home Video head George Feltenstein is a Minnelli maven, so I can only hope it's in the works.

In any case, I wanted to designate this space to wish, inquire, and otherwise yack about discs we want...

Monday Evening Palate Cleanser

It vexes me. I am terribly vexed.

Why, on this mild Monday evening, do the words of Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus echo through my head?

That's a rhetorical question. I know exactly why. That answer's multi-faceted. Part of my vexation stems from encountering, in this here blogosphere, a putative paean to a particularly distinguished work of cinema, which praises the particular work at the expense of practically every other movie the director of that work ever did, trotting out heavyweight quotes the better to swat at...David Denby, who recently had the temerity to cite said director's "refinement." What such score-settling has to do with the work at hand is, naturally, beyond me. But the score-settler seems to believe he's achieved the ambition of that character in Gass' "In The Heart of The Heart of The Country," which I guess is nice for him, not so nice for those turning to him for some wit or perception. And in thinking about all this, I further think, "Dude, you really want to get into it like this?" "It" being the week, after a weekend of examining some of the other discontents readily available in the film-appraisal corner of our world. And I answer, "No, I do not."

So instead, here's a stately and august image from Anthony Mann's strange and fascinating 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire—the same story as Gladiator, sorta, with Christopher Plummer as Commodus—a film that seems to luxuriate in a stately slowness; it's more a film about the contemplation of action than action itself. And the imagery, created by Mann once again in tandem with cinematographer Robert Krasker (they also worked together on El Cid) is always breathtaking.

Here, in the opening scene, Alec Guinness' gloomy Marcus Aurelius congratulates James Mason's Timonedes on correctly predicting the sunrise. He's not joking.

The new disc of the film (from Miriam, which also put out the excellent recent DVD of El Cid) looks incredible thus far; it streets next Tuesday. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to luxuriate in it a bit before the next sunrise.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: Special Tom O'Neil VS. Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Edition: 'Sunrise'

I don't need to do research on why Sunrise is so highly regarded. I know that point of view and happen to disagree with it strongly. Isn't that permitted? Of course not. Groupthink is ruthlessly enforced in the film realm. That's what I mean when I refer to "Oscar Nazis"...

—Tom O'Neil, The Envelope/Gold Derby, April 16, 2008

2: Film Credits/ 4: Restoration Notes, by David Pierce (2003)/ 6: "A Song of Two Humans": F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, by R. Dixon Smith (2004)/ 10:The American Debut, by Lotte H. Eisner (1944)/ 24: A False Dawn, by Robin Wood (1998)/ 35: City/Country, by Lucy Fischer (1996)/ 40: DVD credits

—Table of Contents, booklet, Eureka!/Masters of Cinema DVD, Sunrise, 1927, F.W. Murnau

'Blast of Silence': Psychotronic noir

I can't think about Allan Baron's 1961 Blast of Silence without thinking of Cleveland, even though not a frame of the film takes place or was shot there. But the film's hitman anti-hero, "Baby Boy" Frankie Bono (played with note-perfect inarticulate inexpressiveness by Baron himself), is, as Lionel Stander's narrator notes, "out of Cleveland," and this bit of info was sufficient to compel a small coterie of film freaks from that burg to even-more-fanatically embrace a film they would have loved anyway.