Arrow Video has become my favourite source for high quality releases of both serious films and exploitation titles. Their special editions rank with the best offered by prestige companies like Criterion and Masters of Cinema.
Criterion offer a real discovery, Swedish director Jan Troell’s debut feature Here Is Your Life (1966), a richly evocative coming-of-age story based on Nobel Prize-winner Eyvind Johnson’s four-part autobiographical novel set in the second decade of the 20th Century.
Criterion’s Blu-ray of The Killers, with two excellent new hi-def transfers of the 1946 Robert Siodmak and 1964 Don Siegel versions of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, as well as Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1956 student film, is a fascinating study in the process and possibilities of adapting literature to film.
The 19th Century French writer Guy de Maupassant had a spare style and an acute understanding of social class and psychology, both characteristics which lend themselves well to cinematic adaptation. Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and the older Montparnasse DVD edition of Robert Wise’s Mademoiselle Fifi represent the best of de Maupassant on film.
The English love ghost stories. There are the classics, of course – Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance – but after the advent of Gothic literature in the late 1700s, spirits, whether harmful or helpful, became less distant, increasingly incorporated into contemporary life. From penny dreadfuls to Dickens, ghosts impinged on the lives of characters not […]
Two years after writing The Wild Bunch (1969), Walon Green teamed up with respected documentary producer David L. Wolper for one of the oddest films ever to win an Academy Award. The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), although it got the Oscar for best documentary, isn’t actually a documentary at all … or at least it calls […]