2009: The year in DVD

There were countless great movies released on DVD in 2009, so what follows isn’t “the best” of them so much as the ones that seemed to cry out most urgently for a wider audience, some quite old, some unjustly forgotten, some previously ill-served on video, all of them very much worth your while.

The Whole Shootin’ Match
Gorgeously packaged and generously supplemented, Watchmaker’s release of Eagle Pennell’s lost 1978 debut reminds us how seldom we see resonant stories from the vast America existing between the costal metropolises. Alternately despicable and deeply endearing, old pals Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman—who was sadly murdered in his Austin home earlier this year—are forever stumbling between get-rich-quick schemes and humbling disasters, between bouts of drunken revelry and bursts of terrifying lucidity. Theirs is a rambling, fumbling, comically inspired waltz across Texas.


Husbands
Another chronicle of male friendship by turns appalling and touching, this 1970 feature is among the best of John Cassavetes, the father of modern American independent film. Following the death of their fourth musketeer, Peter Falk, Cassavetes and Ben Gazarra undertake one long, lost, wasted weekend, getting as far as England before they even realize what the hell happened.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Criterion’s typically deluxe release of Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 ultra-slow-building, devastating debut about three days in the life of a single mother and prostitute is impeccably preserved and encourages hypnotic revisits. Its observance of everyday banalities is so exacting and immersive as to make high drama of the smallest event, and to invite compassion and repulsion in equal measure. It also makes you wonder if Delphine Seyrig isn’t one of the great unheralded actresses of cinema history.

The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert

Two crowning achievements from Luis Buñuel's prolific and under-appreciated Mexican period, the former (1962) finds Mexico City's snotty elite huddling together inexplicably in a house that they just can't seem to leave, while the latter (65) is an outrageously bizarre biopic about a saint who has to contend with Silvia Pinal's Satanic minx tempting him from his pedestal in the desert. It ends with them trapped in a cabaret where young folks gyrate to a dance called 'Radioactive Flesh.' I'm definitely performing a reenactment this New Year's Eve.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When you spend as much time as I do compulsively gazing at the young, handsome, sleepy-eyed face of Robert Mitchum in his many films of the 1940s and 50s, it comes as something of a shock to see him as the palpably world-weary protagonist in Peter Yates’ wonderfully detailed, downbeat, Boston-based crime drama, originally released in 1973 and newly resurrected from oblivion by our dear friends at Criterion. Mitchum’s so damned good here as the titular gunrunner trying to retire, one more shifting point in the film’s wintry geometry of crime and punishment.


The Walking Dead
The diamond hiding in Warner’s otherwise pretty negligible Karloff and Lugosi Horror Classics box, this melancholy tale, released in 1936, of a lonely man framed and sent to chair, only to be resurrected and thus able to exact his revenge, is endowed with far more poetry than its generic premise would have you believe, thanks in part to director Michael Curtiz and in part to Boris Karloff, one the true greats, who makes us believe in a sadness that follows us beyond the grave.


A Matter of Life and Death
The astonishingly beautiful use of Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece is only one reason to own this sublime Sony reissue. A fantastical romance perched on the edge of mortality—one sufficiently attuned to the strange workings of the mind as to garner accolades from Oliver Sacks—it finds a British WWII pilot tumbling to earth and miraculously surviving, only to be shot heavenward by his love for an American radio operator. Will the celestial tribunal allow this trans-Atlantic couple to stay together?

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1
The Sniper (1952), The Lineup (58), Murder By Contract (58): none had been on DVD before, and every one of them is a gem, encapsulating much of what was thrilling, fascinating, daring, and deliciously nasty about the final years of the classic noir cycle. Add Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (53) into the mix and you’ve got yourself one of the best noir collections ever released. Your image of genteel 1950s America will never be the same.


Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura
Among the most woefully under-represented of Japanese directors in the West, Shohei Imamura was lovingly devoted to the seedy, the undigested, the vulgar, and the desperate masses living at the bottom of the social totem pole, a rather outrageous way to shape one's career in postwar Japan. This trio from Criterion are perhaps not my absolute favourites, but they're nonetheless crazily entertaining, terrifically perverse, often strangely beautiful tales of sex, murder, crime and obsession.

What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.