Two key films from the era of peak paranoia, the late-’60s and early ’70s, are given exemplary disk releases – Theordore J. Flicker’s darkly comic The President’s Analst (1967) on Blu-ray from Imprint and Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmarish The Conversation (1974) on 4K in a dual-format edition from StudioCanal.
Yet more notes on recent viewing, featuring horror – both high and low end – some documentaries and action movies, gritty realism and slick fantasy … eclectic and somewhat random.
Howard Hawks’ Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932), newly restored in 4K and released by Criterion in a dual-format edition as well as a stand-alone Blu-ray, is in many ways the most modern of the 1930s gangster movies, filled with Paul Muni’s infectious energy as the ambitious Tony Cramonte, balanced by two string female characters (Karen Morley and Ann Dvorak), blending dark tragedy with streaks of comedy, and pushing violence as far as was possible in the years just before Hollywood established the Production Code.
Criterion gives Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Sam Peckinpah’s final, unfinished Western, stellar treatment in a two-disk Blu-ray set (also in a 4K UHD edition) with three different cuts plus extensive extras. The original theatrical release is presented alongside Peckinpah’s final preview cut and a more polished 50th Anniversary edit which restores and refines much of the material originally removed after the director walked away from the project.
I’m drawn to movies made on the fringes, far from the industry centre, and these have recently included low-budget ’60s noir, ultra cheap ’70s horror and ambitious ’90s direct-to-video sword-and-sorcery fantasy. Whatever their technical short-comings, all these movies exhibit the creative ingenuity essential to completing a feature with inadequate resources.
Two new Blu-rays showcase excellent restorations of a pair of late Boris Karloff movies – Daniel Haller’s Die, Monster, Die! (1965) from the BFI, Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967) from 88 Films. Despite being unwell and in constant pain, in both Karloff gives committed performances which illustrate why he remained a beloved star for four decades.
Indicator have taken a break from their recent spate of Mexican genre movies by dipping a little deeper into the Calderón family archives. Untouched (Sombra Verde, 1954) is a torrid romantic melodrama with allegorical notes which trades in the urban noir of a movie like Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin (1950) for the primal jungle of Veracruz. Both were produced by Guillermo Calderón and show him pushing against the boundaries of censorship and testing how far cinema could push a frank depiction of sexuality in a society still very much under the sway of the Catholic Church.
Indicator’s latest box set of noir B-movies is devoted to Columbia’s series adapted from a popular radio show in which the mysterious Whistler observes and comments on the fates of various characters whose lives go off the rails. In the first seven movies, character actor Richard Dix suffers a variety of situations, sometimes as victim, sometimes as the perpetrator of murder; after the actor’s death, the studio made one more film, replacing him with the bland Michael Duane, before retiring the Whistler for good.
Emilio Fernández’s Victimas del pecado (Victims of Sin, 1951), newly restored in 4K from the original nitrate negative, is a Mexican musical melodrama loaded with tragedy punctuated with ecstatic dance numbers from star Ninón Sevilla, who plays a cabaret dancer whose life is upended when she takes responsibility for an abandoned baby. Taut direction by Fernández and stunning photography by the masterful Gabriel Figueroa provide a remarkable showcase for Sevilla’s considerable talent.
Continuing my survey of what I’ve been watching this Spring… Mondo Macabro Mondo Macabro is a label I haven’t mentioned much here, though they specialize in genre movies from around the world and I’ve discovered some real oddities through them – like H. Tjut Djalil’s Mystics in Bali (1981) and Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1975). […]