There are few no lost masterpieces in Forgotten Noir Vol. 13 (VCI), the latest installment in the DVD series from VCI featuring orphaned crime films from the forties and fifties, and it’s a stretch to even call the films in this double feature “film noir,” but they are intriguing finds. Eye Witness (1950) is a moderately classy and somewhat sluggish murder mystery that has no real film noir credentials. Robert Montgomery directs and stars as a smart-talking American lawyer turned amateur detective in a rural British village, where his Yankee savvy and urban bluntness collides with British restraint and manners. It does have fun with the slang barrier, however, which recalls a classic quote about the American-British relationship: “Two great countries separated by a common language.” Longtime Hitchcock collaborator Joan Harrison produces and you can spot a young Stanley Baker in a bit part as a policeman on the witness stand. The disc is mastered from the “uncut British version” and features the British title on the opening credits: Your Witness.

Breakdown (1952), the sole screen effort by stage director Edmond Angelo, is a low budget and very American quasi-noir boxing drama set against a culture of political corruption and the brutal arena where young boxers are destroyed by greedy managers. The charismatically anemic William Bishop is a hot young boxer sprung from prison by a shady ward boss (Sheldon Leonard, who also narrates) to help out his kid brother, an aspiring boxing manager (Wally Cassell), only to be pressured into fighting the champ in a match he isn’t ready for. Though running a brief 76 minutes and shot on the cheap, it’s more of a low budget indie than an actual B movie. There isn’t much style to this stage adaptation but it moves along at a good clip and leaves more casualties than you might expect. The print quality is unexceptional but fine for both, with a softness to the image, minor print damage and hiss on the soundtracks.

Women of Twilight

The films in British Film Noir Double Feature (VCI) are indeed British but less noir than lurid social dramas with arch moral lessons. Twilight Women (aka Women of Twilight) (1953) is set in a boarding house that takes in wed mothers and notorious women no “respectable” rooming home will have. It’s like a low-rent Stage Door by way of a prison film with Freda Jackson as the landlady who puts on a show of maternal concern but is little more than a prison warden preying off women who have no other alternative. This mercenary monster even gets away with murder, or at the very least negligent homicide when it comes to taking care of the babies, shorting them on milk and nutrients and refusing to call the doctor when one of them becomes ill from starvation. Lois Maxwell (the future Miss Moneypenny) is an unwed mother awaiting her fiancé to return from Canada and René Ray the most notorious resident who looks out for the utterly defenseless Maxwell while wallowing in self pity while her cheating lover goes to the hangman after murdering one of his conquests. It’s adapted from a stage play and never shakes off its staginess, and the “happy ending” is strange sort of lifeline, though at least heartfelt from the women involved.

The Slasher (aka Cosh Boy) (1953) isn’t about a killer, simply a sneering young thug, a piece of pure juvenile delinquent melodrama set in post-war London where aimless thugs attack little old ladies (the term “cosh” refers to hitting someone over the head with a sap) and hide out in the rubble of bombed-out homes. The bullying leader of the aimless gang, Roy (James Kenney), is an angry, manipulative bully coddled (and essentially enabled) by a war widow who refuses to believe he’s such a bad egg, but the film refuses to extend any blame to her willful ignorance. Joan Collins gets prime billing in a small role as the younger sister of a gang member who falls under Roy’s sway with predictable results. The post-war setting offers a potentially solid framework to explore the loss of parents and siblings and see the damage on those left behind, but it’s trite and tired with a musty morality and dime-store psychology (wouldn’t you know that the film figures all the boy needs a good thrashing from an authority figure). Director Lewis Gilbert went on to much better work: Alfie, Educating Rita and three James Bond movies. The transfers are adequate at best and there are serious audio deficiencies and soundtrack damage in The Slasher.

Not to be confused with Amos Poe’s 1976 documentary of the same name, the 1979 Blank Generation (MVD) by Ulli Lommel also dives into the New York punk rock scene, but the parallels end there. Richard Hell stars as a burned-out singer having a tumultuous affair with an emotionally erratic French journalist (Carole Bouquet) in a film that seems to wanders around the streets of New York looking for a story and never finding one. What it does offer is a great snapshot of the city, grimy New York underground atmosphere and live performances by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, whose iconic punk hit is the film’s titles and theme song. Andy Warhol is an executive producer and makes a cameo as himself. Features a new interview 45-minute with Richard Hell conducted by Luc Sante, and the aging punk star doesn’t mince words about what he thinks is wrong with the film, director Lommel or even his own (non)performance. “There’s not a truthful moment in the film,” he confesses, though he does praise cinematographer Ed Lachman for his cinematic snapshot of 1978 New York. The DVD

And a film I didn’t have a chance to see but have set aside for later viewing is Return To The 36th Chamber (Vivendi), a sequel (of sorts) from The 36th Chamber of Shaolin director Lau Kar-leung and star Gordon Liu (playing, I’m told, a con man who impersonates Liu’s character from the original film). The Vivendi release is from the collection of Celestial Pictures restorations. The previous discs have looked excellent and arrived uncut and with original soundtracks and good subtitles (plus optional English dub track). No reason so suspect this is any different.

More cult titles: Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay (Synapse) starring Japanese wrestling sensation Cutie Suzuki battling zombies; The Alcove (Severin), another sexploitation from Joe D’Amato offering up the ample charms of Laura Gemser, cult goddess of seventies and eighties Eurotica; and Wong Jing’s gangster drama I Corrupt All Cops (Tai Seng), set in the days before the 1997 handover and starring Tony Leung Kar Fai as an Inspector out to reform a corrupt department and Anthony Wong (who else?) as his nemesis.

It’s Oscar week DVD releases and this batch includes one film that went home with two statues and an honorable runner-up that went home empty handed and deserved better. But, to quote an Oscar winner (albeit in a radically different context), “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” (That mantra is how I watch the Oscars without getting aggravated.)

George Clooney: Untethered

Precious came away with two wins but Up In The Air (Paramount) is, in my opinion, the superior film (it is certainly the more subtle and nuanced film) and should have taken the Adapted Screenplay award. It’s also a refreshingly mature movie about grown-up characters and serious issues, handled with a light touch with a depth of character and great intelligence behind it. George Clooney stars as a 21^st century traveling man who has trimmed his existence down to what can be packed into carry-on luggage and turned business class seating and airport lounges into his comfort zone. He’s spent so much passing through life that he treats relationships like layovers: a brief, impermanent stop on a never-ending journey. Which makes it easier to do his job: he’s the man that companies bring to fire employees that they don’t want to face themselves, and he’s just been assigned to show the ropes to an ambitious young professional (Anna Kendrick) fresh from business school who finds that the human equation can be a tricky factor in putting theory into practice.

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Think of the lighthearted eighties spy series Scarecrow & Mrs. King: The Complete First Season (Warner) as a Hitchcock lark of an American innocent caught up in the machinations of Cold War shenanigans, all relocated to the eighties-era suburbia of network TV. At least that’s what the pilot episode aspires to. Dashing American agent Lee Stetson (Bruce Boxleitner), aka Scarecrow, on the run from deadly foreign agents drops a package in the hands of Amanda King (Kate Jackson). Suddenly this divorced mother of two and busy soccer mom in the suburbs of Washington D.C. is thrust into the world of international espionage and Stetson’s mission gets hopelessly tangled with this civilian’s life.

Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson

I can just hear the pitch: He’s a slick playboy, she’s the mom next door. He’s charming and worldly, she’s chatty and practical. She dotes on him and, despite himself, he becomes quite fond of her. Especially since his boss decides she’s just the stabilizing influence this risk-taking solo agent needs and drafts her help as a freelance operative whenever they need believable cover in “the real world.” Which, it turns out, is practically every week. Meanwhile she keeps her double life a secret from her mother (Beverly Garland, forever trying to get her remarried), her grade-school sons and her (unseen) dates. It’s hard to call the growing affection between them as romantic tension, but there is a slow build and couple of near-kisses (always interrupted by the timely arrival of a suspect or a world-shaking crisis) to string the viewers along to the next season of their very low-key flirtation.

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One of my favorite films of 2009, Where the Wild Things Are (Warner) is Spike Jonze’s adaptation of/feature-length tribute to the Maurice Sendak picture book, expanded and reimagined in the spirit of the feelings that drives that story. Jonze and his screenwriting partner, Dave Eggers, preserve the imagination and the primal emotions of Sendak while grounding his preadolescent hero in a palpably real suburban world and then transports him to a landscape of craggy coasts and primal forests and sand dunes that is fantastical and primitive: the island of the wild things populated by a tribe of hulking yet childlike monsters equal parts mythological creature and demented stuffed animal. Call it an art film for kids or a fantasy for the child within, but it is unique and beautiful and as honest a tale of being a child as you’ll find on screen, with all of the joy of imagination and anxiety of childhood grounded in the imagery and the landscapes of a tyke’s mind. My feature review of the film is here.

A reflective moment for wild things

The DVD features four behind-the-scenes featurettes by Lance Bangs. Originally shown as webisodes, these pieces each have their own integrity as snapshots of an element of the production or profiles of collaborators and are full of personality and person expression in addition to providing a peak behind the scenes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition are the original live-action adaptation of Sendak’s Higgelty Piggelty Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (a fantastic live action/animated storybook creation brought to life with marvelous costumes, wonderful puppets, stop-motion figures and the voice of Meryl Streep), the “HBO First Look: Where the Wild Things Are” making-of featurette and four more webisode shorts.

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artists still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. They may seem old fashioned and perhaps too sweet for American audiences—his films, while loved by many, have never found the huge audiences that flock to the more knowing and culturally savvy Pixar films and Shrek sequels—but the lovely fables, epic adventures, ecologically-minded dramas and modern fairy tales are all treasures.

Ponyo: Below the waves

His most recent film, Ponyo (Disney), is released this week by Disney, which—despite the great voice line-up of their English language adaptations—treats his films more like exotic imports than mainstream movies. Part Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, part ecological fable and part children’s fantasy come to life, this gentle storybook film is a simple, sweet tale animated with a delicacy unique to animated features. Ponyo is a water sprite, a curious undersea creature and daughter of the sea gods who gets swept to the shore, trapped in the pollution of the human world and rescued by a human boy, with whom she falls in love. This isn’t the romantic type of love of Disney’s The Little Mermaid but the unconditional affection of young kids and she takes human form to join him on land, which upsets the balance of nature so carefully kept in check by her wizard father (voice of Liam Neeson) and elemental mother (Cate Blanchett).

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Kurt Russell is the King in Elvis (1979) (Shout! Factory), John Carpenter’s 1979 TV movie, which charts the rise of Elvis Presley from Memphis rockabilly phenomenon to rock and roll superstar to his phoenix-like comeback as a Vegas showman, but keeps the focus on the man behind the iconic image. Russell’s effortless impression captures the voice and cadence and physicality of Elvis without tipping into impersonation. He delivers the unbridled energy and musical passion that the young Elvis unleashed in every performance while allowing us to see then man in the bubble offstage, trapped by the very success that has made his fame and fortune. Carpenter, meanwhile, puts the dramatic focus on the relationships and tricky social dynamic with the male friends who became Elvis support group and entourage. It’s the first collaboration between Carpenter and Russell and it remains the most perceptive of Elvis biopics.

Kurt Russell is Elvis - thank you very much

Elvis impersonator Ronnie McDowell provides the singing voice and Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle and Joe Mantegna co-star. Trivia note: the film is written and produced by Anthony Lawrence, who earlier wrote three of the silliest of Elvis musicals back in the sixties. This is the DVD debut of this superb made-for TV production and the first time that the complete 170-minute production that has been available in any form for decades. Includes the featurette “Bringing A Legend To Life” featuring archival interviews with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter, commentary by vocalist Ronnie McDowell and author Edie Hand (who co-authored a handful of Elvis recipe books) and rare performance clips from “American Bandstand” among the supplements.

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My DVD of the week, Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion), was reviewed a couple of days ago here. Of slightly newer vintage is The Informant! (Warner), a film that straddles multiple eras: released in 2009, set in the nineties, directed with seventies flavor and set to a swinging Marvin Hamlisch score that channels the groovy sixties. I reviewed this lightfingered film, based on a true story but directed with a jaunty snap and a deadpan style that makes the absurd cascade of complications all the more astounding and hilarious, on my blog last year here. “Matt Damon is a constant churn of gee-whiz earnestness, righteous indignation, nervous exasperation and self-aggrandizing swagger as Whitacre,” I wrote. “It’s a brilliant dance of charm and delusion delivered with an amiable enthusiasm and wavering resolve and accompanied by a running stream-of-consciousness narration of constant distraction… ”

Matt Damon is The Informant!

The DVD features four deleted scenes which run about six minutes and were cut simply to move the film along; the scene with Damon and his FBI handlers, however, is a nicely understated bit that adds to a twist to their complicated loyalties. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is commentary by Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns. Soderbergh is one of the better commentary track jockeys around, having talked not just over his own films but been a guest on other film tracks. He brings that talent as a moderator to bring Burns front and center in a discussion that ranges over all aspects of the film, from its inspirations (Burns initially heard the story told on the public radio show “This American Life”) to Soderbergh’s conscious shift in style to working with composer Marvin Hamlisch. Also includes a bonus digital copy of the film for portable media players.

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G.B.H. (Acorn) is a savage satire of Thatcher-era party politics, a devastating drama of power and corruption and simple moral courage, and the best piece of dramatic television I’ve seen all year. Sure, it’s from 1991 and is perfectly reflective of its time, but it is so well written that the characters and conflicts haven’t aged a bit.

Robert Lindsay and Lindsay Duncan in "G.B.H."

The brilliant British mini-series, written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Robert Young, stars Robert Lindsay as ferociously ambitious and fiercely vengeful Labour Party politician Michael Murray, who has just been swept into power in a small industrial city with the help of old-school socialists who have their own agenda. Murray is a working class guy ready to use his newfound power to take revenge on everyone who ever wronged him along the way and Lindsay plays him as both a cunning opportunist and a man whose identification with the disenfranchised ultimately sets him in opposition with his Socialist supporters. Michael Palin takes a rare dramatic role as Jim Nelson, the compassionate headmaster of a school for special needs children who lands in his crosshairs when he defies a citywide strike to care for his students. “I’m here to tell you that if you screw up this day, I’ll screw up the rest of your life!” promises Murray, and he proceeds to make it happen. Palin brings a heartfelt warmth to a fragile but morally firm Nelson, who uses humor to cover vulnerability and fear. It’s heartbreaking to see such bullying happen to such an honest and dedicated man with such an emotional fragility and crippling anxiety.

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When Leo McCarey won the Oscar for Best Director for The Awful Truth in 1938, he reportedly accepted it with the comment, “Thank you very much, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.” The “right picture” that McCarey was referring to is this devastatingly moving story of an aged couple (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) who lose their home to the depression and their dignity and independence when their children separate them between their households.

Pa and Ma (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) lean in for the kiss, then modesty prevails

Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion) is McCarey’s most personal picture and his most moving drama, the rare Hollywood film to confront issues of aging head on. McCarey captures the shame of failure (they can’t tell their kids about losing the home until it’s too late), the frustration of losing independence, and the fragility of growing old with compassion and humor, while at the same the acknowledging the difficulties of their grown children, who are married with lives and careers (and in one case a family) of their own, trying to accommodate them. The most supportive son, George (Thomas Mitchell), moves mother into a bedroom with his teenage daughter (which doesn’t sit too well with her) and Ma drives the family crazy as she bemoans her state while insisting that no one worry about her, and fumbles every attempt to lend a hand by upending their routine and even, inadvertently, helps push her granddaughter into a situation that ends in terrible scandal.

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I review the Facets DVD release of Werner Schroeter’s Palermo or Wolfsburg for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Germany as seen by Nicola

Werner Schroeter is one of the least well known of the New German Cinema directors in the West. While fellow filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Margarethe von Trotta were bringing their sensibilities to the screen by bending the dramatic narrative form to their needs, Schroeter was content to explore the non-commercial realm of experimental shorts and fragmentary features through the 1970s and thus his films did not receive the exposure of his colleagues. It wasn’t until 1978 that Schroeter made his first “traditional” feature film, The Kingdom of Naples, an ambitious portrait in the life of a neighborhood over several generation that earned Schroeter the Best Director prize at the German Film Awards, his first of three such awards to date.

Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980), his second 35mm feature, returns to the poverty of Sicily explored in The Kingdom of Naples and then follows a young, unemployed man as he moves to Germany to find work. It’s a drama of cultural collision and alienation, a simple story with a dense mix of styles and an almost passive figure at the center. Nicola Zarbo, a non-actor with no other recordable screen credits, plays the dutifully religious Sicilian man also named Nicola Zarbo, the eldest son of a widower who dreams of buying the plot of land he works for the local landlord but always behind the rising asking price.

Read read the entire feature here.

The DVD of the Week is, without a doubt, Criterion’s magnificent edition of the 2008 restoration of Max Ophul’s final film, Lola Montes, and I review it here. But along with something old, Criterion has something new, or rather a couple of somethings new, foremost among them Steve McQueen’s unforgettable Hunger (Criterion). Before he went out speaking the king’s as a crisply proper British officer in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender played Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands who, at the age of 27, went on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize IRA inmates as political prisoners. British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen creates a film unlike any traditional biopic or historical drama: an overwhelming visceral experience composed of the sight and sounds and sensations of men in prison, played out as an almost abstract portrait in power and resistance until the film’s sole dialogue, a debate between Sands and a Catholic Priest.

Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands in "Hunger"

McQueen isn’t taking sides or making political points; in the brutal world of Ireland during the troubles, there’s plenty of reprehensible behavior to go around. Hunger is a study in the deterioration of the human body (we literally watch him waste away on camera) and the will it takes to endure such self-mortification in the name of cause. Available on DVD and Blu-ray, both featuring the tightly focused 13-minute documentary “The Making of Hunger,” bonus video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender and a 1981 British TV documentary on the Maze prison hunger strikes, plus a booklet. As a side note, the menus are particularly haunting and unsettling.

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Shakespeare’s King Lear (Omnibus) (E1) is stripped down to a fleet 70 minutes for this landmark live TV event, staged for the prestigious CBS series Omnibus in 1953. Peter Brook, then the phenom director of British stage, was brought in to stage this production for the cameras, Virgil Thompson wrote a minimalist underscore and Orson Welles (not even 40 years old at the time) was brought in as the aged Lear, his theatrical stature still of some name value even if his marquee was not. This presentation, which was (after the introduction by host Alistair Cooke) played straight through without commercials on its original broadcast, is so whittled down that it feels almost abstracted from the play. Brook prepared this version specifically for TV, chopping out subplots and cutting away on secondary characters to focus on the deterioration of Lear. So while the slow build of the sisters’ schemes comes on pretty fast here, the slide of Lear into madness takes on a momentum that is thrilling. Arnold Moss channels the great profile and theatrical dignity of John Barrymore as the Duke of Albany as he becomes appalled at the scheme he has been a part of and Micheal MacLiammoir (surely brought in with the blessing, if not the urging, of Welles, who had just cast him as Iago in his film of Othello) is a deft Poor Tom, who brings a little soul to the tragedy with his wit and his loyalty.

Orson Welles is King Lear

There’s a reason that this production has stood the test of time: while it suffers in many ways as a Shakespeare adaptation, it also shows the possibilities of TV to combine theater and cinema with the intimacy inherent in TV, and the expressionist solutions to production challenges of live TV and multiple sets needed for such a production. Brook moves the production from the formal throne rooms and banquet halls of the royal castles to more expressionist locales created with the limitations of TV in mind: a storm on the heath on a bare hill of artfully windswept grass against a simple black cloth, the rickety gears of an ancient windmill in which Lear and his loyal followers take refuge, the abstracted suggestions of tents on a sketch of a beachhead. The sets become increasingly alienated and despairing as they get more stylized and expressionistic and lighting adds to the dark night of the soul with slashes of illumination and beams of shadows falling across the cast. Andrew McCullough directs the television portion with a visual sensibility beyond anything that was being done in live TV at the time, anticipating the dynamic staging and effective use of extreme close-ups that directors like John Frankenheimer would bring to live TV.

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