Excellent Blu-ray editions from Criterion and the BFI respectively do full justice to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), two very dark examinations of the post-war crisis of masculinity.
Although now he’s best-known for his four witty Gothic horror movies – Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein – Show Boat (1936) is arguably James Whale’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker. One of the decade’s great musicals, it is also one of the most complex and nuanced treatments of race and its impact on American culture produced at the height of Hollywood’s studio era. Criterion’s Blu-ray does full justice to the film’s intrinsic qualities and historical importance.
The rediscovery of a film commissioned by Lutheran Services from Pittsburgh’s The Latent Image company in 1975 shines a light on a transitional stage of George A. Romero’s career. The Amusement Park transforms a PSA about neglect of the elderly into a bleak nightmare of abuse and paranoia as Lincoln Maazel (Tata Cuda in Martin [1976]) is subjected to disdain, neglect and outright violence at a rundown amusement park.
Criterion’s new 4K restoration of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996) captures all the film’s dark and unsettling mysteries with an impressive image and ominous soundscape.
Indicator unearth an obscure corner of ’70s British cinema with a box set of the three movies made by recent filmschool graduates who formed a production company called The Pemini Organisation. Despite extremely low budgets, director Peter Crane and writer Michael Sloan benefited from skilled technicians and high-profile casts who give the films professional polish; but the vagaries of commercial distribution made them disappear until this revival on disk fifty years later.
With their fourth set of World Cinema Project restorations, Criterion again present a fascinating collection of films from different periods and different cultures: two features from post-colonial Africa which illuminate the complex effects of tradition distorted by colonial influences; a South American movie which also deals with colonialism and the exploitation of labour; a pre-war Hungarian feature about two women struggling to survive in a city towards the end of the Depression; an Indian film exploring myth and the politics of Independence and partition through music and dance; and a pre-revolutionary film from Iran which uses melodrama as a metaphor for the nation’s transition from feudalism to modernity.
Digital tools put in service of restoring films from a century ago produce spectacular results with Blu-rays of Carl Th. Dreyer’s uncanny Vampyr (1932) and Louis Feuillade’s serial Tih-Minh (1919).
Criterion’s new Blu-ray release of Joseph Losey’s chilling allegory of identity disintegrating under the pressure of anti-Semitism in Occupied France features a new 4K transfer from the original negative and includes three-and-a-half hours of supplements about the production and the real history in which the story is grounded.
Two new releases from Indicator illuminate the origins of Mexican horror (best known from the work of filmmakers like Chano Urueta, Fernando Mendez and Rafael Baladon in the 1950s and ’60s) in the early days of sound in the 1930s when filmmakers first strove to create an indigenous industry rooted in Mexican history and culture. Ramon Peon’s La llorona (1933), rooted in a local folk legend, was the country’s first sound horror movie, while Fernando de Fuentes’ The Phantom of the Monastery (1934) uses a Twilight Zone-like narrative to teach three characters a moral lesson. Both films have been impressively restored on disks which include a commentary and informative featurettes which illuminate their position and influenbce in Mexican cinema.
However many times you watch a movie, there’s always a possibility to see something new and find new responses which surprise you out of complacent familiarity – two recent cases in point: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).