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.
A decade after the end of World War Two, with Germany now an important ally against the Soviet bloc, popular culture was making an effort to rehabilitate the former enemy by showing “good Germans” in the movies. Twilight Time have recently released a couple of examples on Blu-ray: Edward Dmytryk’s The Young Lions (1958) and Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals (1967).
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.
Recent viewing runs the horror gamut from the low-budget exploitation of David Cronenberg’s debut, Shivers, to George Romero’s bid for studio respectability with a pair of adaptations in the late ’80s and early ’90s, to a really creepy Australian first feature, Jennifer Kent’s remarkably assured The Babadook.