When an insensitive and dysfunctional film crew descends on the small town of Waterford, Vermont to make a historical drama called The Old Mill, the clash of new Hollywood and insular townspeople makes for one eventful shoot. Among the very best movies ever made about the exhilarating panic of making movies, writer David Mamet’s lucky seventh film in the director’s chair is a slam-bang laff riot of riotous one-liners and elaborate putdowns, all in the name of getting the shot. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rebecca Pidgeon (Mrs. Mamet) head the terrific cast and make the year’s most improbably appealing couple as the timid screenwriter and the local bookstore owner, while Mamet regular William H. Macy gets all the good lines as no-nonsense director Walt Price. The supporting cast is packed with Mamet’s unofficial stock company, giving State and Main the best show-business resonance since Preston Sturges’ immortal 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels (itself due for the Criterion treatment in late July). The New Line Home Entertainment DVD offers the choice of widescreen or fullframe (go with the former -- always go with the former), some interactive comment for those who care to let the dreaded PC Friendly software invade their hard drive, and kind of a tag-team audio commentary track featuring stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Macy, Clark Gregg, David Paymer and Patti LuPone (who also sings a cheeky and swingin’ song over the in-jokey closing credits).

A gaggle of used car salesmen lead by the abrasive Reggie (“Murder One”’s Daniel Benzali) lie, cheat and steal their way to success. Suckers is the latest feature from director-editor Roger Nygard, who made a name for himself with the immensely funny documentaries Trekkies and Six Days in Roswell. The subjects of his new film are no less out-of-this-world than the denizens of “Star Trek” conventions or creepy  New Mexico towns -- they just wear business suits instead of pointy ears or cowboy boots. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Nygard says in the press notes, and in fact he didn’t: the script was written in collaboration with stand-up comic Joe Yannetty, who found himself working the floor at a showroom and couldn’t believe the great stories swirling around him. The first two thirds or so of the film is full of this kind of backstabbing material, which plays with energy and freshness despite the well-worn clichés inherent in the subject matter. Unfortunately, the film eventually segues into a more melodramatic and violent thriller that may confirm our worst fears about the lack of morals in the business but feels tacked on nonetheless. The big news is Nygard’s way with actors, with Benzali, Louis Mandylor and Lori Loughlin leading a fine cast of vaguely familiar faces through some genuinely amusing and sporadically shocking stories of greed and deceit, all in the name of making a buck. Suckers is one of those exclusive-to-Blockbuster rental titles, and is also available for sale on DVD. 

Cliffhanger meets Wages of Fear in the clichéd and unengaging Vertical Limit, in which Chris O’Donnell leads an expedition up K2 to save his sister (Robin Tunney) who vaguely dislikes him because he killed their father during a climbing accident years before. Along the way there’s plenty of cool outdoor and electronic gear, but the plot itself is an absurd grab-bag of natural disasters, human flubs and guys staring each other down behind dueling agendas and macho posturing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… New Zealand-born director Martin Campbell (GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro) continues his penchant for the overblown by punctuating the film with many skillful action sequences, only to skip through them in an oddly perfunctory way, as if the entire cast and crew had a plane to catch. That’s fellow New Zealander Temuera Morrison (Once Were Warriors) and popular New Delhi-born character actor Roshan Seth (Such a Long Journey) as Pakistani soldiers (!!!), but against the intricate special effects and breakneck pace no single actor stands a chance of crafting anything approaching a multileveled character (even the normally dependable Bill Paxton seems distracted as the Rich Millionaire Who Has to Get to the Summit at Any Cost). Fans of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and similar recent mountaineering adventures may be thrilled by the climbing on display, but the story itself never gets past base camp. The VHS tape is priced to rent, and the Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment “special edition” DVD includes a commentary track by Campbell and producer Lloyd Phillips, an HBO production featurette, various tales of survival and, most tantalizingly, the National Geographic special “Quest for K2.”

Beyond the A List

Known for his 1950s melodramas, Douglas Sirk was born Detlef Sierck in either Denmark or Hamburg at the turn of the last century, and had to rebuild his successful European theatrical and filmic career in America after a lifetime of leftist views (and a Jewish wife) forced him to flee Germany in 1937. This he did via a series of films that applied his formal elegance to the more repressive sexual landscape of Eisenhower America, where churning emotions lie just beneath the tidy surfaces of prosperity and social intercourse (in Sirk films, people drink “cocktails”). All That Heaven Allows stars Jane Wyman (the former Mrs. Ronald Reagan, who won an Oscar in 1948 for Johnny Belinda) as widow Cary Scott, whose love affair with gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) angers her grown children and forces her out of the superficial country club set. Written on the Wind stars Hudson again (two years removed from his Oscar nomination for Giant), this time as the practical but tortured Mitch Wayne, best friend of alcoholic playboy and oil heir Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack); Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone are the women over which they tangle. The Criterion Collection offers superb digital transfers of the Technicolor originals that preserve the vivid colors of Sirk’s palette (his regular cinematographer was Russell Metty, who shot Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and went on to a 1960 Oscar for Spartacus). Each disc has a booklet featuring an essay from respected film theorist Laura Mulvey. Heaven sports an hour of excerpts from a 1979 BBC documentary on Sirk, various publicity material and the true keeper, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s irreverently informative and adoring illustrated essay on the director. Wind includes a huge filmography/publicity material collection dubbed “The Melodrama Archive” and well-preserved trailers for both titles. Illuminating for the uninitiated and essential for the converted, both films are highly recommended.

More anime from the Manga Entertainment people, Amon Saga is the slam-bang story of young Amon, a warrior on a desperate quest to avenge the death of his mother who becomes involved with the Imperial army of Emperor Valhiss. Along the way he becomes involved with Princess Lichia, the daughter of King Sem Darai, who may or may not be trade bait for a very special map. The chief attraction of the disc is the character design of Yoshitaka Amano, famous for such anime touchstones as Vampire Hunter D and the original “Final Fantasy” game. Amon Saga is available at retail or by clicking on to www.manga.com.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s best films are about emotional estrangement and complex visual ennui amongst the idle upper classes, traits which made him and his work popular and controversial in the 1960s. There was a time not so long ago when it was virtually impossible to find decent show prints of Antonioni’s films, which makes these recent releases even more valuable to the collector. The first film in a loose trilogy about the futility of relationships, L’Avventura may be quintessential art film: while on a yachting trip, a girl (Lea Massari) disappears, and the subsequent search for leads to an affair of empty eroticism between her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti). Jeered off the screen at the 1960 Cannes festival -- where it won a special jury award for “a new movie language and the beauty of its images” -- the film is a touchstone for artistic change at the dawn of that decade. In La Notte, icons Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau play a married couple on the verge of infidelity who eventually decide to remain united more out of habit and fear of loneliness than anything else. The Criterion Collection pressing of L’Avventura has the film on disc one (with an available commentary track from film historian Gene Youngblood), and an entire second disc of extras that include a 58-minute documentary on the director, Antonioni’s writings and some personal reminiscences read by Jack Nicholson (who treasures his work with the director on 1975’s The Passenger so much he bought the rights to the film) and a restoration demonstration. Winstar’s DVD edition of La Notte includes filmographies and an awards list. The third film in the trilogy, L’Eclisse (Eclipse), is available on a letterboxed but visually inferior VHS from Facets Video, the company that also recently brought The Mystery of Oberwald (1979), Identification of a Woman (1982) and Beyond the Clouds (1996) back into circulation. Hopefully, as you read this someone is negotiating with Nicholson for a DVD release of Antonioni’s late-career masterpiece, The Passenger.

In the nowheresville of Deadwood, South Dakota, a gang of ne’er-do-wells plans to rob a mine office but don’t factor in the appearance of the title beast. “It’s basically Key Largo with a monster added” is how cult director Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) describes his directorial debut, shot in twelve days for producer Gene Corman (Roger’s brother). Yet seen today, Beast is a very interesting low-budget effort, cumulatively more creepy than most monster movies of the period and filled with fine performances and cool movie trivia: the beast itself (nicknamed “Humprass”) was built and inhabited by Chris Robinson, who segued into a career as an actor (he’s Jack Hamilton on the daytime soap “The Bold and the Beautiful”). Viewers with a sharp eye will also recognize Michael Forest, the actor who plays ski guide Gil Jackson, as Jack, one of the pilots who doesn’t die in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away (see above). All this info comes courtesy of the long and very funny essay by “Keep Watching the Skies” and “Evil Dead Companion” author Bill Warren, reprinted in the brochure included with Synapse Films clean and complete DVD transfer. 

In late 1950s Rome, a ragtag group of bunglers and misfits conspire to crack a safe sequestered in an office on the title boulevard, a reward that will prove to be a Big Deal on Madonna Street. There’s boxer Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), new father Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni), veteran thief Cruciani (Totò) and others -- each more inept than the last. Director Mario Monicelli keeps the pace brisk and the character interplay just complex enough to give each man subtle character shades, with time to spoof such Italian clichés as the over-protective brother (that’s a young Claudia Cardinale as the sheltered Carmela). Among the most influential foreign films released in the United States, Big Deal’s current obscure status alongside the movies it spoofs (Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing) and the films it inspired (The Hot Rock, The Brinks Job, Louis Malle’s forgettable 1984 remake Crackers) should be rectified courtesy of this fullframe digital transfer of a 35mm fine-grain master from The Criterion Collection. It appears to be the same source material used for the Voyager LaserDisc, a clean if occasionally worn picture with adequate subtitling (beware the Italian intertitles, which are translated with all-too-brief English subtitles). Film historian Bruce Eder provides a brief but informative essay on the stylish six-page fold-out brochure, focusing on the movie’s place in Italian post-war cinema. So close on the heels of Criterion’s sparkling Rififi (click here), Big Deal on Madonna Street offers a sly send-up of 1950s European caper films and is a subtly delightful chapter in Italian cinema. 

On and under the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, itinerant trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) and a ragtag confederation of chums (including “Sex and the City” star Kim Cattrall) become reluctant action heroes to do battle against a series of otherworldly entities, causing Big Trouble in Little China. It’d be great to report that the intervening fifteen years have been good to this ambitious mixture of comedy and action from director John Carpenter (he of the possessory credit), and in fact there’s much to like here, beginning with Russell’s spoofy yet affectionate John Wayne imitation and general go-for-broke attitude. Yet Carpenter’s sense of rhythm and pace seems to be off throughout; some of the jokes work and some don’t, and those that misfire do so because he waits to long for an audience reaction that never came in the movie’s theatrical run and is even less likely in the living room. And the martial arts action, which in some ways anticipates the gravity-defying violence of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is workmanlike but cumulatively unspectacular. What makes this two-disc set from CBS/Fox Home Video so revelatory, then, is the seven deleted scenes that indicate an original cut at once more developed and visually snappier (without, apparently, being all that much longer than the movie’s ninety-nine minutes). This is especially apparent in the eighth cut “scene,” actually a grab-bag of unused shots and bits entitled “Six Demon Bag.” Each sequence is viewable either as a film workprint or in video form, giving viewers a fascinating glimpse of the various generations of a film during the editing process. One clip is even available by itself or on a splitscreen with the storyboard (aha! At last a use for that “Angle” button!). There’s a bizarre music video starring Carpenter and confederates/future directors Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace; a slightly longer ending; and a vintage, fullframe, seven minute-plus production featurette. For more details on the Carpenter/Russell commentary track, click on Joe Barlow’s appreciation here. Carpenter fans will welcome this fine, widescreen transfer (cinematographer Dean Cundey was the director’s chief asset in those days), but the uninitiated may wonder what all the fuss is about.

Director Heiner Carow’s Coming Out was the first feature film made in the former East Germany to deal openly, and unapologetically, with homosexuality, at one time a punishable offense in that country; the film premiered at the same time the Berlin Wall began showing cracks. Philipp (Matthias Freihof) strides into his high school-aged class of students wearing a loose, long-sleeved shirt worn over a dark undershirt, and jeans which fit well enough that he doesn't have to wear a belt (and he's apparently unaware of the effect this has on his students). He meets, then impulsively becomes engaged to, another teacher, Tanja (Dagmar Manzel), but soon after meets the young and darkly-handsome Mathias (Dirk Kummer), who falls for Philipp like a ton of bricks. Soon, Philipp is sneaking out on Tanja to be with Mathias, while failing to tell Mathias that he's engaged -- a fundamental bit of dishonesty that the film does seem to notice or acknowledge. Dramatically, the picture feels a little skimpy, and prosaic, but aside from its historical placement, it's worth seeing for Matthias Freihof: square-chinned, and with a pensive cast to his eyes and mouth, but his face lights-up when he laughs. He's one of a rare breed of performers who can infuse joyfulness into a scene. The First Run Features DVD has no extras.

In a silent country mansion, the dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is attended to in her last hours by her warring sisters Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), with the assistance of maid Anna (Karin Sylwan). As time ticks slowly on, flashbacks reveal the complicated relationships among these tortured women. Finally, a miracle seems to occur that brings peace to the family. A late-career triumph for writer-director Ingmar Bergman, Cries and Whispers is a deliberately stately but cumulatively devastating look at sibling rivalry, coming to terms with mortality and the complicated interrelationships among relatives over the course of a lifetime. Sven Nykvist’s extraordinary red-and-white color schemes are brought vividly to life via a digital transfer from a 35mm color interpositive print courtesy of The Criterion Collection, which has thoughtfully supplemented the invaluable release with a fifty-two-minute video interview with long-time Bergman collaborator Erland Josephson (who plays David here), an optional English-dubbed soundtrack and a fine printed essay by Scandinavian film scholar Peter Cowie -- who sums up this essential disc by writing “as in all of Bergman’s greatest films, from The Seventh Seal [also in The Criterion Collection] to Fanny and Alexander, there is in Cries and Whispers an abiding aspiration to beauty and serenity.”

One of director Luis Buñuel’s least-publicized great movies, Diary of a Chambermaid (from the 1900 Octave Mirbeau novel, and filmed once before by Jean Renoir in Hollywood in 1945) is another link in the filmmaker’s chain of politics, subtle sexual perversion and feminism. Summoned to work at a vast petit-bourgeois estate where there are more servants than masters, young Célestine (Jeanne Moreau) sees all manner of subtle cruelty and class prejudice, turning these flaws to her advantage in a manipulative bid to seize control in the house. This new edition from The Criterion Collection surrounds a flawless Franscope (widescreen) transfer from the original camera negative with a raft of extras, including a video interview with co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière and a booklet that couples critic Michael Atkinson’s admiring essay with an extensive 1970s print interview with Buñuel.

Paris, 1981: a young postman (Frédéric Andrei), infatuated with an opera star (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez) who refuses to record, runs afoul of some underworld types (including the distinctive Dominique Pinon) in search of his bootleg recordings and must seek the help of enigmatic soldier of fortune Serge Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) and his worldly thirteen-year-old Asian accomplice Alba (Thuy An Luu). Adapted from one of a quartet of wildly popular postmodern crime thrillers by the mysterious writer Delacorta (later revealed to be Swiss author Daniel Odier) by debuting director Jean-Jacques Beineix, Diva was poorly received at first before touching a nerve with the public and garnering a Best Foreign Film Oscar submission. It also helped usher in a new new wave of French cinema, along with exciting work by then-young directors Leos Carax and Luc Besson (both of whom have seen or are about to see their early films remastered for DVD). Vladimir Cosma’s memorable soundtrack mixes punkish stylings with passages from Alfredo Catalani’s haunting opera “La Wally,” and Anchor Bay’s beautifully sharp DVD edition preserves Philippe Rousselot’s blue-tinted urban photography. The disc also includes a new six-minute interview with Beineix, who claims Diva hasn’t aged and has stayed modern; he’s right on both counts. 

A respected Chicago surgeon (Harrison Ford) goes on the run to catch his wife’s one-armed killer, pursued by a dogged U.S. Marshal (Tommy Lee Jones, who won the supporting actor Oscar) in The Fugitive, the visceral and unexpected hit from director Andrew Davis. Not to be confused with the 1997 bare-bones pressing (one of the very first feature films on DVD), this new transfer of this shrewd adaptation of the 1960s television program features the nine-minute documentary “Derailed: Anatomy of a Train Wreck” (with a terrific kicker at the end), a twenty-three-minute "making-of" featurette with reminiscences from key cast and crew (the usually stiff Ford describes his acting style from the set: “I like the talking part, and I like the running part”), and a multi-city video introduction by Davis, Jones and Ford (from which the tremendously informative commentary track by the sincere Davis and the irreverent Jones -- who says “these are really cool titles, Andy” during the credit sequence -- was culled). If Die Hard, which is due shortly in a remastered edition, marked the beginning of the glory days of the contemporary action genre, The Fugitive may mark the beginning of its oversaturation; seen today, it’s an intellectually engaging -- and, incredibly, largely improvised -- triumph of razzle-dazzle genre storytelling. 

In pre-World War II Fascist Italy, the aristocratic Jewish Finzi-Contini family maintain their Ferrara estate and contacts with middle-class friends in the face of escalating tensions. As war draws ever closer, siblings Micol (Dominique Sanda, from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist) and Alberto (Helmut Berger) hold tennis parties for friends thrown out of local country clubs, but denial eventually gives way to defeat as social and political pressures force the family out of their self-imposed seclusion. After a recent restoration and brief theatrical re-release via Sony Pictures Classics, Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis will garner a new generation of fans via this spotless DVD transfer (the film was shot by Ennio Guarnieri, who later photographed Fellini’s Ginger and Fred). De Sica, of course, was the mind behind the Italian neorealist film movement to the rest of the world; his Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1948) are unassailable classics of documentary-like melodrama. The rap against him and his films has always been the manipulative nature of his stories in service to a planned emotional response, and in that sense Garden (made by De Sica, who lived through the period he dramatizes, out of what he called “conscience”) is at once a continuation of this tendency and a renouncement of it -- the family’s story is a heartbreaking one and viewers sense how it will end, yet the emotional distance of the film gives it heightened power, like watching a road accident one is powerless to stop. 

French director Gaspar Noé's astonishing, and at times frankly terrifying, 1998 film showing the decent of a man (Philippe Nolot), who's past the age of fifty, and who violently separates from his second wife, goes to Paris in order to resume his original trade as a butcher, and is frustrated at every single turn. Each event causes him to become more bitter and to seethe just a little bit more -- he can't even instigate and finish a proper bar fight without things going against him. What makes the difference with this film is how it shows the progress by which a person can go bad -- you can see how some kindness, understanding, or even a little bit of luck could have caused things to turn out in a much different way. This film also is known for a device that Noé uses, almost near the end of the film, that suddenly informs the audience that they have thirty seconds “to leave the showing of this film” before a key sequence takes place. Philippe Nolot's performance in the central role is superb -- he’s in almost every scene in the film, and he never lets his character's anger and resentment turn him into stone. Noé's tenacity is of note, as well: working on a film that might not be initially perceived as one that would have the widest audience appeal, he persisted in making the picture his own way, on his own terms, even to where he had to shut down production until completion of the film was funded by the intervention of French couturier Agnès B. The Strand Releasing DVD has no extra features. 

Here’s a cornucopia of Kovacs, as the two discs in this White Star DVD release offer six full hours of bits from the television pioneer, including poet Percy Dovetonsils, the Nairobi Trio, constant jibes at then-contemporary TV shows and even a clutch of outtakes. The Trenton-born Kovacs, with his elastic face and ever-present cigar, is among the most prolific of television pioneers, experimenting with the technical possibilities of the studio with each and every show (and without the safety net of a laugh track, too. Five years prior to his untimely death in an automobile accident, Kovacs had branched out to Hollywood, appearing with some success in Bell Book and Candle, North to Alaska, and a handful of other films. Yet it is his cynically joyous TV work for which he will be forever remembered, and in truth it’s hard to imagine “Saturday Night Live,” David Letterman, or in fact any contemporary television sketch comedy that doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Ernie Kovacs. Also released in June via Anchor Bay Entertainment is the fictional biopic Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter, starring Jeff Goldblum as Kovacs. 

Shadow of the Vampire piqued your interest in 1920s German cinema? Kino on Video has the answer with this trio of pivotal films from the era. Following the success of Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau followed it with the equally prominent expressionistic masterpiece The Last Laugh, which showcases the heart-rending performance of Emil Jannings as an aging doorman stripped of his duties and, thus, his dignity. Karl Freund’s photography vividly portrays Jannings’ nightmarish self-loathing less than a decade before he shot Tod Browning’s Dracula. For Faust, Murnau pulled out all the creative stops, utilizing every special effect the UFA studio had to offer (as well as another commanding Jannings performance) to create an allegorical epic of the supernatural. G.W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney employs elements of the Hollywood melodrama, German expressionism and even Soviet montage in its saga of the title character’s adventures as a young French woman in the unstable Europe immediately following the first world war. The print quality on all three is decent, with noticeable wear and tear to the image. The Last Laugh is accompanied by excerpts from an alternate German version and a photo gallery; Faust comes with a collection of production stills and a printed essay by noted film historian Jan Christopher Horak; Jeanne Ney has no extras. Timothy Brock composed vivid scores for each title, and each has English intertitles. Warning to computer users: all three discs have the dreaded PC Friendly software, which must be disabled before using the disc-playing program of your choice. 

In December 1183, the all-powerful King Henry II (Peter O’Toole), in the throes of what would now be called a mid-life crisis (“there’s no other way to be a king, alive and fifty all at once,” he says by way of explaining his abrasive demeanor), summons his three children, Geoffrey (John Castle), John (Nigel Terry) and Richard the Lion-Hearted (Anthony Hopkins) to his side for the holidays. And even though his mistress (Jane Merrow) is moping about, Henry releases the wife he’s kept imprisoned for years, the sharp-tongued Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), to join the reunion. Over the course of the holidays the children squabble operatically over the successor to the throne with their father and visiting King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton), as Henry and Eleanor do battle over the hearts and minds of the family (“hush, dear, mother’s fighting,” she says absently) and, by extension, the kingdom. Adapted by James Goldman from his own play, The Lion in Winter deservedly won Oscars for the script, John Barry’s score and Hepburn (her then-record third, neck-and-neck with Barbra Streisand’s turn in Funny Girl -- Oscar’s only tie to date) and is a fresh today as when it first arrived on Broadway thirty-five years ago. The film also marks the big-screen debuts of both Hopkins and Dalton. MGM’s bare-bones DVD is no great shakes visually, although it does nicely preserve the widescreen format of Douglas Slocombe’s earthy photography; pity the studio, with among the busiest slate of DVD releases, couldn’t spring for booklets in this and other releases such as The Apartment and Sweet Smell of Success, a la their James Bond releases. In any event, The Lion in Winter is a welcome addition to any collection.

In the wild territorial town of Shinbone, the arrival of idealistic young lawyer Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his tense friendship with the pragmatic Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) leads to a showdown with local badman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” is the famous epitaph of John Ford’s mellow and elegaic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of the great director’s most enduring, undervalued and even prophetic films (look how it predicts the exploitative nature of journalism cloaked in pious idealism). Made in then-untrendy black and white (“I just can’t see it in color,” Ford told a colleague) and filmed mostly on hyperreal indoor sets when most of the film’s budget went to the two leads (between them Wayne and Stewart made a then-unheard-of million dollars), the film reworks an existing novel into a movie at once representative of everything fans like in a western, a cracking good civics lesson and a poignant reflection on both a chapter in American history and the genre that celebrates it. Paramount’s bare-bones, generally good-looking enhanced DVD restores the film to its original aspect ratio and refreshingly offers either 5.1 surround or restored mono tracks, but major points are taken off for the hideously glib plot synopsis printed on the outer sleeve (and one of the trio of stills reproduced on the single-page insert isn’t even from the film!).

In 1930s Berlin, flamboyant and headstrong German actor/director Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) cooperates with the Nazis and enjoys a brilliant and high-profile career -- while at the same time working to aid his leftist friends during an uncertain and dangerous period in history. Mephisto is based on the true story of Gustaf Gründgens, an actor best known to American audiences as the bowler-wearing underworld leader in Fritz Lang’s M who had a similar high profile in Germany during the period (at one point he was married to Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, whose brother Klaus later wrote the book on which the film is based). Infinitely more aborbing than his most recent film, the atmospheric but dramatically shallow Ralph Fiennes starrer Sunshine (recently released to home video), acclaimed Hungarian director István Szabó’s Mephisto deservedly won the 1982 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and garnered lavish critical praise for Brandauer exuberantly ferocious performance. Anchor Bay’s spotless new DVD pressing is enhanced for 16x9 televisions and sports optional English subtitles (the film is spoken in German). Features include David Gregory’s 2001 22-minute assemblage of English-language interview clips with both Szabó and Brandauer entitled “The Naked Face” as well as a four-page booklet with an informative essay by Jay Marks. Anchor Bay has also released the subsequent collaboration between director and star, 1984’s probing Colonel Redl; taken together, these films illustrate Szabó’s ongoing fascination with questions of history, identity, complicity and survival.

Subtitled “The Survival of the Weakest,” director Hector Babenco’s laceratingly bleak social expose Pixote follows the 10-year-old title child from reform school to the extremely mean streets of Sao Paulo and later Rio de Janeiro, where he becomes involved in drugs, prostitution and murder. The film is acted entirely by non-professionals, and none is more heartbreakingly real than Fernando Ramos Da Silva, who brings to the lead character an oddly enthralling grace. The film received a raft of international festival awards upon its initial release, and New Yorker’s fullframe DVD presentation enhances a decent print with fine electronic subtitles. Tragically, Da Silva, eleven when the film was made, was shot to death by police in his home at nineteen -- to this day a tragic poster child for the doomed scrappiness of urban street urchins in underdeveloped nations. 

In the pitiless world of 1950s Manhattan society, ruthless press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) goes head-to-head with powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) in pursuit of the Sweet Smell of Success. Lancaster’s production company produced this bracing noir, from an adaptation of Ernest Lehman’s short story by playwright Clifford Odets and Lehman himself (who segued into North by Northwest for Hitchcock). The atmospheric black-and-white photography of James Wong Howe brings the clubs and offices of Manhattan to life, while the cool jazz of the Chico Hamilton Quintet drenches the whole thing in the seductive rhythms of Elmer Bernstein’s score. Curtis has never been better, and this is the performance on which Tom Cruise has said he based his Jerry Maguire. Credit British director Alexander Mackendrick (Whisky Galore/Tight Little Island, The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers) with bringing a fresh eye to an insular, unforgiving world -- the depressingly prescient prototype for today’s sausage factory of fame. MGM’s stripped-down DVD edition doesn’t even have a booklet, and there are scratches and reel markers evident throughout the print. But it appears to be in the proper aspect ratio, and the digital transfer of Wong Howe’s noir palette is nicely preserved. 

Before Deep Throat and Basic Instinct, there was the Scandinavian sex film, sorry, “art” film, which sensitively and artistically rendered scenes of happy, healthy young people frolicking, without guilt, shame, or inhibitions, through the steps of courtship and mating, usually in the fresh air and sunlight of the great outdoors. In America, anything that hinted that it was from Denmark or, better, Copenhagen, could cause audiences to storm the barricades of the movie houses, freely parting with their money and just waiting to see something dirty (Sweden was still the provenance of Ingmar Bergman, which meant that you got brilliant dramatic and psychological insight along with any sex scenes, until fellow Swede director Vilgot Sjoman's I Am Curious (Yellow) was seized by U.S. Customs in 1968, causing lines to form around the block at theaters when it was finally adjudged to be as offensive as Saran-Wrap). This 1968 film, released by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films (in an English-dubbed version), is set on "GOTLAND -- an island off the coast of Sweden. Midsummer" (sic), and scrutinizes the goings-on at an artists' colony which includes blonde Anika (Yvonne Persson), and her friend, brunette Eliza (Essy Persson, that I, a Woman girl); another blonde, toothy and pure Barbara (Margareta Sjódin); Jonas (Ulf Brunnberg), who wants to be an actor, misquotes Shakespeare and then laughs himself silly; and a mystic-artist (Ardy Struwer) who creates paintings which contain abstract depictions of various orifices and body parts. There is also a dark, gloomy girl (Annmari Engwall) who pines after the other girls but is never seen with one (which is probably why she's gloomy). In steps Maurice (Sven-Bertil Taube), who wears trousers with vertical stripes that he just got from Paris, and is supposed to be pounding out some hack work, a book on astrology. He gets more work done when he turns his winsome eyes in the girls' directions. That’s about all there is for plot, as the film honestly looks like it was put together with the scenes out of order. The fairly discreet sex scenes don't so much show people coupling as mushing their bodies together, flat, like hamburger being pressed into patties. I don't know what they're trying to accomplish or how, but it doesn't look like fun. Filmed in flat, naturalistic black-and-white by director Torbjörn Axelman, with jazz and pop music by Taube, the Ronnie Dunne Quartet, and Ulf Björlin. The First Run Features DVD has no extras. 

Box Set Corner:

An occasional exploration of video and DVD’s higher end

Controversial even from beyond the grave, director Stanley Kubrick sparked a firestorm shortly after he died when a seven-disc collection of his films, from 1962’s Lolita through 1987’s Full Metal Jacket, were given the boxed set DVD treatment in a package apparently approved by the director but generally considered to be technically substandard (mono sound, improper aspect ratios). Nearly two years later to the day, this updated package, dubbed the “new” Stanley Kubrick collection, rights many of those wrongs and is thus essential for the collector. Yet in the process, it raises questions new and old regarding just how the consumer should want, or be expected to, duplicate the movie theater experience in the private home (not to mention the wishes of the artist). The answers are entirely dependant upon individual taste, which means that this nine-disc set will for many replace 1999’s collection, but for others it will supplement the set. The unqualified good news is that there are two more discs in the box, with 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut and producer/brother-in-law Jan Harlan’s splendidly thorough and exclusive new documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (which is also popping up on cable) joining Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980) and Full Metal Jacket. The picture quality is excellent overall, with the greatest improvement apparent in the recently-restored 2001 (now presented in anamorphic widescreen), Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket (considered to be by far the worst-looking trio in the first box). But the audio questions are thornier. It’s common knowledge that Kubrick had demandingly high standards for theatrical presentation of his films, sending advance teams to check light levels and sound system quality in advance of firstrun engagements -- this is why 2001 was the only picture he made in stereo. Now, under the supervision of long-time personal assistant and technical advisor Leon Vitali, all features save Lolita, Dr. Strangelove (which is otherwise identical to the version released earlier this year by Columbia TriStar, extras and all), 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut have been given their first-ever Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mixes. Sonically, the results are very impressive -- but they’re not the mono tracks Kubrick created with the films. While not a criticism, consumers should be aware that the version of A Clockwork Orange, for instance, they’ll be hearing through their home system isn’t the sonic force that Kubrick insisted be played to distortion in cinemas to further agitate moviegoers. This is a pedantic difference, to be sure, and one that is more than made up for by the luminous new picture quality (beefs about the lack of extras on five of the eight films are just that, beefs: extras are a privilege, not a right). The point is that cost aside, each box has its value in the collection of any serious film fan. With the upcoming release of Steven Spielberg’s difficult yet important A.I. Artificial Intelligence sure to thrust the director and his oeuvre back into the public eye (Kubrick apparently bequeathed the property to Spielberg), Warners has picked a very good time to issue a very good and very important boxed set. -- Eddie Cockrell

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