Macbeth (1948/1950)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
It's complicated. Not just the tumultuous life of the formidable Orson Welles; not just the tortuous genesis and history of his Macbeth, the first screen adaptation he ever made of a Shakespeare play; not just the Scottish bloodlines and difficult accents of the story's characters. No, what's also complicated is what edition of this classic film to watch on home video. I have three. The newest release comes from Olive Films; it's a Blu-ray (also available on DVD) that boasts the best image and sound but has no subtitles (for those accents) and no extras. The second and third are from France and Britain and only work if you have an all-region DVD player, a wise investment if you want to access amazing collections of material like those available here. Out-of-print but buyable new or used on amazon.fr and other sites, the French three-disc set from Wild Side Video includes the film's original long version (114 minutes) and butchered short version (85 minutes); a rare vintage excerpt from 'Voodoo Macbeth,' Welles' famous 1936 staging of the play with an all-black cast; a 78-minute audio recording of his 1940 Mercury Theatre stage production of the Shakespeare original; and much more. The one big drawback: non-removeable French subtitles for the film itself, and the high cost of the set (over $70). My advice: Buy the Olive for the film and, if you're flush, seek out the Wild Side for the extras. Still too complicated? Then just forget Welles and get the budget-priced DVD of Roman Polanski's Macbeth; shot in 1971, it's bloody brilliant. JH
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The Dark Mirror
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Olivia on Olive - how fitting. Olivia de Havilland plays a double role as identical twin sisters in this 1946 psychological murder mystery distributed on bare-bones Blu-ray and DVD by Olive Films. The doppelg?nger casting was very appropriate: de Havilland famously had a strong sibling rivalry with her actress sister Joan Fontaine, who was less than a year her junior. Here, aided by a solid script by the prolific writer/producer Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, The Three Faces of Eve), de Havilland gets maximum screen time as Ruth Collins and her sister Terry; one is a happy-go-lucky New York City shop assistant, the other her cagey and manipulative sister. When a doctor Ruth knows is found stabbed in the back, and a witness claims to have seen her leaving his apartment, it looks like this crime will be easy to solve - until the detective (Thomas Mitchell) discovers Ruth has a twin sister. So whodunnit, Ruth or Terry? A psychiatrist (Lew Ayres) is enlisted to help the police in their investigation, and after some Freudian analysis and Rorschach ink blots and lie-detector tests, the truth finally outs. "It don't make more sense to me than Chinese music," quips the detective, but the 85 minutes go by in no time. Directed by German exile film-noir master Robert Siodmak (The Killers) with a spooky score by Dimitri Tiomkin (Dial M for Murder), the movie was one of the first to use a seamless blend of split screens and body doubles to make one actress play two characters; Bette Davis did it the same year in A Stolen Life (and again in 1964 in Dead Ringer). Vladimir Pozner got an Oscar nomination for Dark Mirror's story, and de Havilland - in an ironic twist on the twin motif - won the best-actress Oscar for another film she starred in 1946, To Each His Own. JH
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Secret Beyond the Door
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
German director Fritz Lang is best remembered for his silent classics: Metropolis, 'M', the two Doctor Mabuse films, Die Nibelungen and others. All are available in fine collector's editions on home video. His Hollywood period is getting a revival on DVD and Blu-ray these days, too, but to mixed results. In April, Olive Films came out with Lang's 1946 wartime thriller Cloak and Dagger, an entertaining if uneven twist on the spy genre starring Gary Cooper. Last September, in an edition only now being made available in Quebec, the distributor released the 1947 potboiler Secret Beyond the Door. It's a psychological thriller starring Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett, but aside from fans of them or the director, I can't say I recommend it. The lovely chiarascuro visuals (by cinematographer Stanley Cortez) are not enough to distract from the stiff staging, hokey script and turgid plot of this mess of a movie, in which Redgrave, in his American screen debut, plays a shady architect to Bennett's deceived wife. There's a dangerous scene where they have to run through fire in a burning house, and apparently Lang, a perfectionist known for his sadistic streak, made them do it so many times it almost killed them. In the end, none of it was worth the trouble. "From start to finish," Patrick McGilligan wrote in his 1997 biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, "Secret Beyond the Door had fared an utter failure. When it was finally released in January 1948, the film would receive the worst reviews of Lang's career." Rent it if you must, just don't buy. As usual with Olive, there are no extras on the discs. JH
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Wild Bill, Hollywood Maverick
Rating: 3 out of 5
William A. Wellman (1896-1975) got the nickname 'Wild Bill' long before he became a famous movie director. It's what his French Foreign Legion friends called him in World War I when he braved a number of dangerous dawn patrols over enemy German lines. His luck only lasted so long; in 1918 his Nieuport biplane was finally shot down, leaving Wellman severely injured. He survived, however, and the nickname carried through to his postwar career in Hollywood. He was a risk-taker, a loner, an arrogrant SOB who wouldn't take no for an answer, a man who berated his actors and infuriated his producers - and yet, despite his faults, he remained one of the most admired directors in town. His big break came in 1927 with a mega-budget war movie right up his flight-jacket sleeve: Wings, winner of the very first Academy Award for best picture. Wellman would go on to make dozens of films in many genres: gangster movies (like The Public Enemy, which launched James Cagney), melodramas (the first A Star is Born, in 1937), westerns (the best being The Ox-Bow Incident), and, after World War II, more battlefield movies, a couple of them starring his buddy John Wayne. Made in 1996 by Wellman's son, directed by Todd Robinson and narrated by Alec Baldwin, Will Bill the documentary doesn't stint on criticism of its subject, but it's a loving criticism that never doubts the director's genius or his genuinely good intentions. The list of interviewees who knew the man is exceptional: Clint Eastwood, Sidney Poiter, Robert Mitchum, Nancy Reagan, Martin Scorsese, Richard Widmark, Robert Redford and many more. Unfortunately, there are no extras on the unexceptional Kino DVD, which doesn't look a whole lot better than the VHS release back in 1997 and has the same 1.33:1 framing. But what a life story. JH
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No
Rating: 3.5 stars
Gabriel Garc?a Bernal stars in this docudrama about Chile - specifically, the plebiscite in 1988 in which Chileans were asked to say Yes or No to eight more years of dictatorship by Augusto Pinochet, or finally get to vote in democratic elections. Bernal, a Mexican, plays a young American-trained creative director for a Santiago advertising firm who's drafted by the No side to come up with a TV campaign to bring down the dictator. His boss (Alfredo Castro) winds up working for the Yes side - he's both friend and nemesis. Directed by Pablo Larra?n and based on a play by Antonio Skam?ta, the movie was nominated for best foreign film at this year's Oscars (it lost to Michael Haneke's Amour). Like the pervading paranoia that hovers over the characters in the twilight years of the Pinochet regime, the story plays out quietly and sensitively with brief bits of gallows humour, with Bernal particularly good at reining in his emotions and showing the irony at the heart of the ad man: When the votes are all counted, he'll go back to shilling schlock (Chile sure loves its TV soaps, and they need to be promoted, no?) Sony is distributing the movie on DVD and Blu-ray with English and French subtitles, but the hi-def is a bit of a waste, given the (deliberate) limitations of the source material: The whole thing was shot on low-def, flarey Betacam and U-Matic tape, the kind of video used in Latin America in the late '80s, the better to integrate archival news and ad footage from the time, and is in the boxy 1.33:1 ratio. It certainly looks authentic, but for contemporary viewers accustomed to near-perfect resolution on their home-theatre systems, it'll be a turn-off. Extras include an audio commentary by the star and director, a Q&A with Bernal at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a trailer. One last note: If Chile under the dictatorship is your thing, check out the Sundance award-winning movie playing at Cin?ma du Parc as of June 28: Violeta Went to Heaven is about the troubled life and times of iconic Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra (Gracias a la vida). JH
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Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
Rating: 4 out of 5
German-born silent expressionist master F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) travelled far from Hollywood to make this, his final film before his untimely death in a car accident in 1931. Done partly in collaboration with writer-director Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) before the two had a falling-out, and released only a week after Murnau's death, it's a "documentary story" of forbidden love between two young islanders in a fishing community in the South Seas. Shot in the paradise of Bora Bora and Tahiti, it was almost entirely cast with native non-actors, whom Murnau posed in every shot in the falsely "naturalistic" style of the day. The boisterous score by Hugo Riesenfeld makes this far more than a silent picture, and the fine cinematography by Floyd Crosby earned him an Oscar. Unlike its previous edition on DVD in 2007, this Blu-ray release (also available on a newly remastered DVD) by British distributor Eureka! Masters of Cinema is coded for European players only - it won't work on standard North American players, so buyer beware. The new edition is remastered from the same 75th anniversary restoration used on the old DVD but shows much more image in the frame - a big improvement. It duplicates the two old extras in high-def (an audio commentary and a 15-minute retrospective making-of, in German), and adds two new extras: roughly 20 minutes of outtakes from the original Tabu shoot, and a 1940 short made from unused material from Tabu showing villagers spearhunting fish. The scholarly illustrated booklet - always a strong feature of Masters of Cinema releases - had been shrunk down from 80 pages in the old edition to 56 in this new one, but it's the same material. Bottom line: Fans of silent cinema and exotic vintage documentaries will want to get their hands on an all-region DVD or Blu-ray player to access what the Brits are making available overseas in high-def - think of it as an investment, if you haven't already. JH
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The Naked Island (Blu-ray)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Another British offering of a fine old black-and-white classic, this time from Japan - yet again, unfortunately, on a European-coded disc that's unplayable on regular North American Blu-ray machines. Read on if you've already worked out a solution to that absurdity (as the distributor says, CDs are playable worldwide, so why aren't DVDs and Blu-rays?). The story of Kaneto Shind?'s 1960 film is beautifully simple: A small family of farmers are the sole inhabitants of Sukune, a tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea; their island has no fresh water, but a larger, neighbouring island does; and the family can only survive if they do there regularly and bring it back for their crops. Not much happens - and yet everything happens, for this, the movie says, is the nature of human existence: a daily, repetitive struggle against death. The action, if you can call it that, takes place over the course of a year, and is almost entirely free of dialogue, communication between the family members happening more in their look and gestures. A mesmerizing score fills in the silences, and the cinematography is poetry in motion. Though it was a Moscow Film Festival Grand Prix winner, the film was criticized for offering up a fatalistic, agrarian image of Japan at a time when it was modernizing and rebuidling from the devastation of the Second World War. Today, it just seems timeless. The disc by Eureka! Masters of Cinema displays a noticeable crisper resolution of the lovely visuals over the British distributor's otherwise fine DVD from 2005. Extras include a commentary by the director and composer, a video introduction by Alex Cox, and a 32-page booklet; unfortunately not carried over from the DVD are a gallery of production stills and a playable archive of the French 7" soundtrack vinyl. JH
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Empire of the Sun (Blu-ray)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
When the Japanese occupy Shanghai in 1941, an upper-class British boy is separated from his parents and shut up in an internment camp for the duration of the war. J.G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel was adapted by Steven Spielberg in 1987 into a feature film starring, in his screen debut, Christian Bale (as Jim, the young lad), John Malkovich and Miranda Richardson. Filmed in England, Spain and on location in Shanghai, the movie was a critical success when released but did so-so- box office; it's now considered one of Spielberg's under-rated triumphs. In the 1990s, the director was notoriously slow to get his movies released on DVD and this side of the century was in no rush to adopt the Blu-ray format, either. But in the past year he has finally made the plunge - and in a big way - with a dozen or so titles now available in the high-def format, some in fancy packaging. His masterpiece, Schlinder's List, was issued in a solid cardboard box, Jaws got a colourful digibook edition and now so does Empire of the Sun. Released last November in the States but delayed in Canada, the Warner Blu-ray is finally available here (it was released June 4 - I got mine late). The disc boasts a fine-looking transfer with uncompressed sound and comes in handsome book with 36 full-colour pages of illustrations and background on the film. Besides a trailer there are two video extras: the Blu-ray has The China Odyssey, a 49-minute making-of from 1987 that's narrated by Martin Sheen; on its own separate DVD is Warner at War, a 2008 TV documentary narrated by Spielberg that details the studio's role in promoting America's involvement in WWII; that one runs 47 minutes; both are in old-style 1.33:1 ratio.
jheinrich@montrealgazette.com
Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/June/8568242/story.html
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