Tag Archives: The Big Parade

December 16, 2013

Top 10 Home Video Releases of 2013 (#10 – #2)

By michaelgloversmith

I’m breaking the list of my favorite home video releases from 2013 into two separate blog posts. Below are numbers 10 through 2 from my top 10 list (each with a capsule review), as well as a list of 20 runners-up favorites. Next week’s post will be devoted entirely to my numero uno favorite home video release of the year — for reasons that will become clear in due time.

10. Dracula (Fisher, UK, Lions Gate UK Blu-ray)

dracula

Hammer Studios’ 1958 production of Terrence Fisher’s Dracula is one of the most influential horror movies of all time — it was the first film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel to endow the title Count with fangs, as well as the first to slather the now-familiar story with both blood-red paint and a healthy dose of eroticism. These latter aspects come through better than ever on Lions Gate UK’s new Blu-ray, which happily restores about 20 seconds of previously unseen sensuality and gore. (The fascinating story of how this missing footage was recently unearthed in Japan is included in a documentary among the disc’s copious extras.) If you love this movie, you need to own this definitive version. If you’ve never seen it, I would recommend a blind-buy; it features, after all, the best ever screen Dracula (the darkly charismatic Christopher Lee) pitted against the best ever Van Helsing (the morally rigid Peter Cushing). What more do you need? Full review here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/05/06/blu-hammer/

9. Underground (Asquith, UK, BFI Blu-ray)

underground

In recent years, the British Film Institute seems to have spearheaded an effort to raise awareness of silent British cinema in general, which I’ve been delighted to find is of interest beyond the earliest masterpieces of Alfred Hitchcock. One of my most pleasant film-related surprises of the past year was discovering the great silent movies of Anthony Asquith, an English director better known for his less-exciting sound-era work. BFI’s home video division released a revelatory Blu-ray of Asquith’s second film, 1928’s Underground, back in June. The plot, a love triangle between a shop girl, a nice-guy subway worker and a douchebag power-plant employee, allows Asquith to indulge in some wondrous cinematic conceits — including astonishingly fluid crane shots during a protracted climactic chase scene — and offers a fascinating, documentary-like glimpse of “ordinary” Londoners from a bygone era besides. The image has been painstakingly restored (as evidenced by a short doc included among the extras) and the new orchestral score by Neil Brand sounds brilliant in a 5.1 surround-sound mix. Can the Blu-ray release of the same director’s even better A Cottage on Dartmoor, a late silent from 1929, be far behind?

8. Black Sabbath (Bava, Italy, Arrow Blu-ray)

black

Did the three best vampire movies of all time receive Blu-ray releases in 2013? In addition to Kino’s Nosferatu release (on my runner-up list below) and Lions Gate UK’s Dracula release (number 10 above), UK-based Arrow Video dropped a superb version of Mario Bava’s 1963 horror anthology Black Sabbath, featuring “The Wurdalak,” the only film in which the legendary Boris Karloff played a bloodsucker. The other stories included here are the proto-giallo “The Telephone,” and “A Drop of Water” (the source of the unforgettable and terrifying dummy/corpse/prop pictured above). Arrow’s extras-laden Blu-ray includes two radically different versions of the film (the European and American cuts), audio commentary by Bava expert Tim Lucas, a handsome collector’s booklet, a DVD of the movie, and more. Most importantly, it is the most faithful home video transfer Black Sabbath has ever received, which is so crucial for a director with as precise a sense of color-timing as Bava (Kino’s Blu-ray, also released this year, skews unnaturally green by comparison). A must-own for Bava fans.

7. Foolish Wives (Von Stroheim, USA, Kino Blu-ray)

foolish

Kino/Lorber and the Blu-ray format have proven to be a match made in heaven, and the company’s release of Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece Foolish Wives is one of their finest releases to date. The Stroheim legend in many ways begins with this 1922 super-production, widely credited as the first “million dollar movie.” A delightfully decadent melodrama starring Stroheim himself as a monocled fake-aristocrat out to seduce and swindle the wife of an American diplomat stationed in Monte Carlo, Foolish Wives was brutally cut down by MGM executives from multi-hour epic status to a runtime of less than two hours for its original theatrical release. According to Kino’s press materials, the Blu-ray was “mastered in HD from an archival 35mm print of the 1972 AFI Arthur Lenning restoration” and runs 143 minutes. The quality varies, sometimes from shot to shot, as this restoration was clearly cobbled together from prints of varying quality but, my God, am I glad to have this. With its “innocents abroad” characters, nefarious criminal plots involving devious impostors, and potent, barely-concealed eroticism, this is as close as the American cinema ever came to the serials of Louis Feuillade. Also included as a very welcome bonus is The Man You Love to Hate, an informative, feature-length documentary on Stroheim made by Patrick Montgomery in 1979, which has also been newly remastered in HD. Now where’s Greed?

6. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Murnau, Germany, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray)

tabu

I had never bothered picking up the Eureka/Masters of Cinema DVD of F.W. Murnau’s great final film and was therefore only previously familiar with the serviceable Milestone DVD, which is both missing footage and in the wrong aspect ratio compared to the restoration that has served as the basis for Eureka/MoC’s releases. It was therefore quite eye-opening for me to see the German maestro’s gorgeous tone-poem of a movie as close as possible to the way it was meant to be seen via this new Blu-ray. Murnau had become disillusioned with both the mainstream German and American film industries when he went to Tahiti to independently make this tale of doomed love set among native islanders. He couldn’t have known it would be his last production (he died in a car accident shortly before its premiere) but the movie in general — and its haunting final scene in particular — serve as a fitting epitaph for the career of the man known as the best director to have only worked in the silent era. The images on Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray have a silky, silvery quality that fully does justice to the lyrical intentions of Murnau and his cinematographer Floyd Crosby (who deservedly won an Oscar for his work on this film).

5. Intolerance (Griffith, USA, Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)

intolerance

In less than a year, Cohen Media Group has established itself as a major new player in the U.S. home video market. Among their welcome 2013 releases were invaluable editions of Luis Bunuel’s Tristana and Raoul Walsh’s Thief of Bagdad but my absolute favorite title in their catalogue is this stellar new Blu-ray of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. One of cinema’s great mad follies, this quartet of stories about “love’s struggle through the ages,” which intercuts boldly and freely between different countries and centuries in order to show the tragic universality and timelessness of the title subject, looks as mind-blowingly fresh today as it must have in 1916. What’s new is Cohen’s admirable adherence to Griffith’s final cut of the film (the great director continued to tweak it well into the 1920s), which runs about 30 minutes shorter than the previous Kino DVD version; in other words, you definitely want to pick this up but don’t get rid of your old DVD either. Among Cohen’s many welcome extras are two of the segments edited by Griffith himself into stand-alone features (both of which feature footage not included in Intolerance). Essential.

4. The Quiet Man (Ford, USA, Olive Films Blu-ray)

quiet

There were actually quite a few John Ford movies that received their Blu-ray and/or DVD debuts in 2013. The best of them, in terms of image quality, is undoubtedly Olive Films’ unimpeachable Blu-ray of Ford’s beloved Ireland-set romantic comedy The Quiet Man. As I wrote in my appreciation of the recent flurry of Ford releases last week: “This movie has never looked good on VHS or DVD, the old video transfers of which were soft and blurry and sported sadly faded color (a particularly offensive crime since Ford insisted on shooting in Technicolor, the premiere color process of the day, over the objections of Republic Pictures boss Herbert Yates, who had patented his own color process — the cheaper, more lurid TruColor). So Olive Films did the world a huge favor by taking Ford’s single most personal film (and the only passionate love story he ever directed) and restoring it to something approximating its original luster.” Ford’s photography of the red-haired, blue-eyed Maureen O’Hara, herding sheep barefoot in an impossibly green, grassy field, is my idea of visual heaven, a claim I don’t think I would have made until I saw this particular transfer, which was made from the original camera negative. More here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/12/09/2013-the-year-of-the-ford/

3. The Big Parade (Vidor, USA, Warner Blu-ray)

bigparade

MGM’s prestigious production of King Vidor’s 1926 anti-war epic was the most commercially successful film of the entire silent era. For some reason (undoubtedly related to “rights issues”) it has never been released on DVD in the States but finally received its belated digital debut via Warner Bros.’ Blu-ray this past fall. And it was worth the wait: this is the single best-looking release of any silent movie I’ve ever seen on any home video format (besting even the superb Eureka/Masters of Cinema release of F.W. Murnau’s City Girl from a few years ago). I’ve never seen a silent film — and I watch them all the time — look so pristine and so blemish-free. For God’s sake, I own Blu-rays of movies originally made in the 21st century that look worse than this (ahem, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). The movie, a unique blend of broad comedy, heartfelt romance and tear-jerking tragedy, follows the experiences of John Gilbert’s American soldier before, during and after World War I, and is absolutely worthy of this impeccable restoration (allegedly taken from the original camera negative). One hopes that this release will be successful enough to encourage Warner Bros. to release the other classic MGM silents they control — including Vidor’s supreme masterpiece, The Crowd.

2. Three Films By Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman (Rossellini, Italy, Criterion Blu-ray)

voyage

Roberto Rossellini had already revolutionized the movies with his pioneering Italian Neorealist efforts in the 1940s before he single-handedly gave birth to the modern European art cinema with the second phase of his career — a cycle of five films starring his new paramour Ingrid Bergman — in the early 1950s. The Criterion Collection’s gorgeous, extras-stacked box set collects the three best Rossellini/Bergmans into one essential package. In Stromboli, Bergman is a Latvian woman who marries an Italian fisherman in order to escape a refugee camp after WWII. She soon finds life intolerable in his small village, which is located at the foot of (and threatened by) a large, metaphor-rich volcano. Europe ’51 explores the possibility of sainthood in the modern world as Bergman plays a mother who, grieving over the death of her young son, tries to live like a contemporary St. Francis of Assissi but winds up in a mental hospital instead. This shattering film features what may be Bergman’s best performance. Journey to Italy is quite simply one of the finest movies ever made: Bergman and George Sanders are an eight-years-married couple, the Joyces, who travel to Italy to settle the estate of a recently deceased “Uncle Homer.” With idle time on their hands for the first time in years, their marriage crumbles. Just as James Joyce posited Ulysses as a modern psychological epic (and perhaps the only way to fittingly redo Homer’s Odyssey in the 20th century), Rossellini finds a filmic equivalent of Joyce’s prose (made explicit by a nod to “The Dead”) in a story where nothing happens on the level of “story” but everything happens inside of his characters. The result paved the way for, among other things, L’avventura, Le Mepris, Certified Copy and Before Midnight. Regardless of who you are, you should own this.

1. To Be Continued . . .

20 Runners-Up (Alphabetical By Title):

11. Before Midnight (Linklater, USA, Sony Blu-ray)
12. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, USA, Warner Blu-ray)
13. City Lights (Chaplin, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
14. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Lang, Germany, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray)
15. The Hitch-Hiker (Lupino, USA, Kino Blu-ray)
16. How Green Was My Valley (Ford, USA, Fox Blu-ray) Full review here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/03/11/how-blu-was-my-valley/
17. John Cassavetes Five Films Box Set (Cassavetes, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
18. Laura (Preminger, USA, Fox Blu-ray)
19. The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi, Japan, Criterion Blu-ray)
20. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, USA, Paramount UK Blu-ray) More here: https://whitecitycinema.com/2013/12/09/2013-the-year-of-the-ford/
21. A Man Escaped (Bresson, France, Criterion Blu-ray)
22. Nosferatu (Murnau, Germany, Kino Blu-ray)
23. Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, USA, Warner Blu-ray)
24. Safety Last! (Newmeyer/Taylor, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
25. The Thief of Bagdad (Walsh, USA, Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)
26. Tokyo Story (Ozu, Japan, Criterion Blu-ray)
27. Tristana (Bunuel, Spain, Cohen Media Group Blu-ray)
28. Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, USA, Criterion Blu-ray)
29. White Heat (Walsh, USA, Warner Blu-ray)
30. Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, USA, Sony Blu-ray)

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July 27, 2011

A Silent American Cinema Primer, pt. 1

By michaelgloversmith

As I grow older, I am becoming more and more enamored of the silent film era. Even a bad silent movie will typically have a certain “lyrical” quality that I find myself admiring due to the necessity that bound all silent filmmakers of having to tell stories primarily through visual means. The silent cinema in America was a particularly fecund period, in which the rules of “narrative continuity filmmaking” (the predominant mode of filmmaking in the world today) were first invented and popularized; it was an exciting, experimental time when talented directors could improvise on the nascent language of movies in much the same way that Shakespeare riffed on verbal language in Elizabethan England. In Hollywood during the late silent era, this visual language had become almost impossibly sophisticated, as evidenced by films as disparate as King Vidor’s The Crowd, Paul Fejos’ Lonesome and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. After studying – and teaching – this period in depth, I can only concur with the old Hollywood masters who lamented that something was irretrievably lost when the transition from silents to talkies was complete.

The silent film era in America also saw the formation of Hollywood’s studio system, which paved the way for the “golden age” of Hollywood that began in earnest in the 1930s. As with the posts I made about that era, this list (consisting only of feature-length movies), has been supersized to include 26 titles and will be broken into two parts. Part one begins with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat in 1915 and continues through Buster Keaton’s immortal The General in 1926. Part two will be posted next week.

In chronological order:

The Cheat (DeMille, 1915)

Forget what you think you know about the conservative purveyor of stolid 1950s epics and experience the raw power of Cecil B. DeMille’s scintillating “yellow peril” melodrama when the trailblazing director was just beginning his career in the mid-1910s. Edith Harvey (Fannie Ward) is a socialite who embezzles money from a charity, loses it in a bad investment and borrows money from shady Japanese businessman Hishuru Tori (Sessue Hayakawa) in order to pay it back. The film’s most outrageous scene involves the Asian Hayakawa (an ostensible “villain” who exudes more movie star charisma than anyone else onscreen) literally branding the caucasian Ward with a hot iron. The dramatic use of chiaroscuro lighting was way ahead of its time and anticipates the rise of German Expressionism a few years later.

Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)

D.W. Griffith is mostly known today for creating The Birth of a Nation, a film whose unfortunate racism has had the side effect of dissuading budding cinephiles from exploring the director’s filmography in depth. But everyone should see Intolerance, an insanely ambitious, epic movie consisting of a quartet of intercut stories set in different historical eras united by the common theme of “love’s struggle through the ages”. The film’s audacious pageantry and complex structure show off the narrative cinema’s first true master at the height of his considerable powers.

Within Our Gates (Micheaux, 1920)

Oscar Micheaux was the first African-American director of feature length movies and the Chicago-shot Within Our Gates is both his earliest surviving film as well as his best. A convoluted melodrama about a northern woman’s attempt to raise money for a struggling school in the Jim Crow south, this film’s shocking climax contains an extended flashback to a white-on-black lynching and a near-rape that serve as an explicit rebuttal to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Low-budget and technically crude, this is nonetheless an invaluably authentic look at black life in early 20th century America, one of only a handful of movies about which that can be said.

The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (Ingram, 1921)

In 1968’s The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris listed director Rex Ingram as a “subject for further research” based solely on this masterpiece – an epic World War I/family drama that builds on the innovations of Griffith in its incredible painterly images and dynamic cutting, but which adds a more naturalistic acting style to the mix. Rudolph Valentino, in his first starring role, plays a rich ne’er-do-well who enlists in the French Army to impress the woman with whom he’s having an affair. But, once on the battlefield, he finds himself face to face with his German cousin . . . Sadly, Ingram is still a subject for further research; his movies, including this one, remain virtually impossible to see. Needless to say, this should be viewed at all costs whenever the opportunity arises.

Our Hospitality (Keaton/Blystone, 1923)

Buster Keaton hit his stride as writer/director/star with his second feature, a riotously funny version of the Hatfield/McCoy feud. Not as well known today as The General, this is for my money Keaton’s funniest film and the one with the most impressive physical stunts (the climactic waterfall rescue has never been equalled). Our Hospitality remains the most modern of all silent comedies due in part to Keaton’s hilariously blank facial expressions as actor as well as his beautifully engineered physical gags as director, which he always profitably captures in immaculately composed long shots. One of the best places to start exploring silent movies period.

Safety Last! (Newmeyer/Taylor, 1923)

As far as silent comedians go, Harold Lloyd was second only to Charlie Chaplin in terms of popularity. Safety Last! is his most famous film and one that anyone who cares about comedy movies should see. Lloyd plays his famous, can-do “Glasses Character” as a country bumpkin who arrives in the big city and gets a job in a department store. He concocts a publicity stunt to bring in more customers, which involves him scaling the exterior of the high-rise building where he works. This leads to a jaw-droppingly funny and amazingly acrobatic climax featuring one of the most iconic images in all of cinema: Lloyd suspended from the hands of a giant clock face near the top of the building.

Greed (von Stroheim, 1924)

Erich von Stroheim’s nine hour adaptation of Frank Norris’ classic American novel McTeague was brutally cut down to its present two hour and twenty minute running time by MGM executives, who also unconscionably destroyed all of the excised footage. Remarkably, the remaining shadow of Stroheim’s original vision (an excoriating indictment of the destructive power of money about a dentist, his wife and best friend who find their lives torn apart by greed) is still a deathless masterpiece. The powerhouse performances and shot-on-location Death Valley climax are unforgettable.

He Who Gets Slapped (Sjostrom, 1924)

Victor Sjostrom is best remembered today as the lead actor in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries but he also directed a couple of the best American films of the silent era – this Lon Chaney vehicle and 1928’s Lillian Gish-starring The Wind. Here, Chaney plays a scientist who is betrayed and humiliated by his wife and a wealthy benefactor. He consequently resigns himself to a life of self-flagellation by becoming a circus clown whose wildly popular act consists of being repeatedly slapped by the other clowns. Chaney was known for suffering for his art through the application of painful prosthetics but it’s the subtle emotions that play out on his face when he’s not wearing make-up that provide the high points of this awesome morality play.

Isn’t Life Wonderful (Griffith, 1924)

Polish refugees struggle to survive in post-World War I Berlin in D.W. Griffith’s final masterpiece, a deeply moving family drama shot almost entirely on location in Germany. Among the narrative strands is an exeedingly poignant subplot involving the courtship between Paul (Neil Hamilton), a war veteran whose lungs have been damaged by mustard gas and Inga, an orphan played by Carol Dempster (Griffith’s real-life love interest). A prototype of Neorealism, it is frankly astonishing that Griffith could extend such sympathy to the plight of a people who had been a much vilified enemy of the United States only a few years previously.

The Thief of Bagdad (Walsh, 1924)

The greatest of the 1920s swashbucklers, Raoul Walsh’s adventure epic stars Douglas Fairbanks as a thief who falls hopelessly in love with the daughter of the Caliph of Baghdad. In order to win her hand, the thief endeavors to best her other suitors by bringing back the rarest treasure before “the seventh moon.” This allows Walsh, one of the most astute directors of action ever, to execute the narrative as a series of exciting, self-contained set pieces, the elaborate special effects of which still impress and charm today.

The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925)

The highest grossing film of the silent era is King Vidor’s anti-war tour-de-force about Jim (John Gilbert), a callow rich kid who is shamed by patriotic friends into enlisting in the army during the first World War. Leaving his American fiance behind, Jim travels to France where he romances a peasant girl before heading to the front lines. The intense, realistic battle scenes were extremely influential on subsequent war movies (including All Quiet on the Western Front) but the highly emotional homecoming scene remains the most memorable in the film.

3 Bad Men (Ford, 1926)

John Ford’s first masterpiece is an epic western about a cowgirl (the splendid Olive Borden) who recruits the title trio to help her avenge the death of her father as well as find her a suitable husband. These twin plots unfurl, as happens so often in Ford, against the backdrop of a real life historical event – in this case the Dakota Land Rush of the 1870s. The climactic land rush sequence is presented as an exhilarating, fast-paced montage that rivals the best montage scenes coming out of the Soviet Union during the same period.

The General (Keaton/Bruckman, 1926)

Buster Keaton’s best-loved film tells the story of Johnny Grey (Keaton), a Civil War-era engineer from the South who ventures behind Yankee lines to rescue his beloved train after it is stolen by Union spies. Not only a very funny film and one that features Keaton’s amazing trademark stunt work, this is also notable for being one of the most authentic recreations of the American Civil War (influenced by the famed photographs of Matthew Brady) ever committed to celluloid.

To be continued . . .

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