Restored Films | Cagey Films

James Whale’s Show Boat (1936): music and race in Golden Age Hollywood

Posted on November 2, 2022November 1, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Black labour with echoes of slavery in James Whale's Show Boat (1936)

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.

George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park (1975)

Posted on October 19, 2022June 2, 2024 by Kenneth George Godwin

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.

David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997): Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on October 12, 2022October 12, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Mystery Man (Robert Blake) undermines Fred (Bill Pullman)'s sense of reality in David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997)

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.

The Pemini Organisation on Blu-ray from Indicator

Posted on October 5, 2022October 4, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

John Drummond (Edward Woodward) expresses his grief through violence in Peter Crane's Hunted (1972)

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.

World Cinema Project 4: Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on September 28, 2022September 27, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Servant Kanizak (Shohreh Aghdashlou) schemes for power in Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind (1979)

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 resurrection

Posted on August 17, 2022August 15, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The blood-drinking witch (Henriette Gerard) peers into hero Allan Gray (Nicholas de Gunzburg)'s coffin in Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932)

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).

Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976): Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on May 25, 2022May 23, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Robert Klein (Alain Delon) takes the place of the other Klein on the transport to Auschwitz in Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein (1976)

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.

Early Mexican horror from Indicator

Posted on April 27, 2022April 27, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Cristina (Marta Roel) tries to overcome Alfonso (Enrique del Campo)'s reticence about betraying Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro) in Fernando de Fuentes’ The Phantom of the Monastery (1934)

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.

Rethinking Kane and Chain Saws

Posted on April 20, 2022December 4, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles)'s opponent James Gettys (Ray Collins) understands the political game far better than the upstart newspaperman in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941)

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).

David Lynch’s Dune redux

Posted on March 9, 2022July 20, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The battle for Arrakeen in David Lynch's Dune (1984)

With a new 4K restoration of David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Arrow Films and Koch Media have given us pretty much the final word on this magnificent, yet almost fatally crippled, epic, surrounding it with hours of new and archival extras (including two commentaries on the Arrow, and Daniel Griffith’s feature-length making-of on the Koch). The Koch edition claims primacy, though, for including not only a soundtrack CD, but also the remarkable, unofficial fan-edit by the anonymous Spicediver, who has used all publicly available material to construct an intelligent, thoughtful three-hour version which reveals that so many of the theatrical cut’s acknowledged problems were the fault of Dino De Laurentis and Universal Studios, and not Lynch; there really is a coherent, comprehensible narrative in what was shot, yet it was ruined by idiots whose only concern was keeping the movie under 135 minutes.

Tag: Restored Films