2008: the year in DVD

It’s one of my favourite parts of my job, discovering some treasure long forgotten, previously hard-to-find or crying out for reassessment. Looking over the past year’s standout DVDs I see two interesting trends: a steady stream of compelling westerns and fresh opportunities to appreciate the astonishing presence and emotional dexterity of the great actresses of Hollywood’s studio era—sometimes both in the same title.

The Furies, Day of the Outlaw
Barbara Stanwyck’s magnificent performance in Anthony Mann’s fascinatingly perverse 1950 western, a web of incest, gender reversal and land ownership, is alternately terrifying—keep your eye on those scissors—and moving. Equally scary and nearly as affecting is Robert Ryan, heartsick, vengeful and rivetingly repressed, in Andre De Toth’s wintry 1959 western, in which grotesque outlaws, led by Burl Ives, take over a farming community. 

Kid Galahad, Daisy Kenyon
The long road of high stakes and good times shared by the no-longer-young Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson reaches its terminus in this superb 1937 boxing flick. She falls for a naïve fighter but only winds up steering him toward another woman with a fraction of her easy-going charm. Joan Crawford however can’t decide between crazy WWII vet Henry Fonda and adulterous lawyer Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s 1947 women’s picture—yet watching her try makes for something of profound emotional textures.

Blast of Silence
Writer/director/star Allen Baron’s ultra-low budget 1961 noir is a stark portrait of a neurotic, lonesome hitman, as well as one of the movies’ most striking portraits of New York City. Criterion's supplements heighten the film's unique position as both an inspired one-off from an unusual and little known talent in American movies, as well as supplying a sense of how the city has changed.

Dr. Renault’s Secret, Dragonwyck
Gene Tierney’s the innocent country girl swept off to Vincent Price’s lordly lair of aristocratic rot in Joseph Mankiewicz’s excellent 1946 gothic melodrama. Yet Tierney’s not as fundamentally innocent as the amazing J. Carroll Naish, who plays both the brute, inarticulate hero and monster in Harry Lachman’s 1942 post-Darwinian horror film, which was truly my B-movie discovery of the year, brimming with strangeness and fascinating supporting performances, including one from the inimitable Mike Mazurki.

Moontide, Road House
Ida Lupino is the suicidal waif who pierces the heart of Jean Gabin’s wandering longshoreman amidst murder, booze and plumes of fog in this atmospheric, creepily homoerotic 1942 proto-noir half directed and then abandoned by Fritz Lang. Lupino then manages to turn just about everybody on, including Richard Widmark and Cornell Wilde, as the traveling take-no-shit singer and pianist in this sexy, very adult 1948 noir. Both came from Fox as part of their continuing series of noir releases, a series that hopefully keep up its annual yield in 2009.

Death of a Cyclist
Juan Antonio Bardem exposes the lower depths of classism in Franco’s Spain in this 1955 noir. A secret affair is threatened with exposure after an accidental killing on a bleak country road.

Mon Oncle Antoine
There’s something ridiculous in labeling what’s been deemed the greatest Canadian film of all time a discovery, but, sadly enough, there you have it. I confess, I never saw it until Criterion, and American company, put it out. But I don't think I'm alone in undervaluing the classics of my own country. Claude Jutra’s richly evocative 1971 masterpiece captures a moment of transition in rural Quebec and a child’s developing awareness of sex, death and the trail of hidden compromises that lead to adulthood.

Larisa Shepitko, Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy, The Films of Budd Boetticher
Three multi-title director showcase boxes of tremendous value. Shepitko’s films were poetic explorations of troubled Soviet memories; Kaurismäki’s are marked by a highly distinctive, minimalist comic deadpan and affection for crime stories about losers; Boetticher helmed some of the best westerns of the 50s, five of which are included here.


The Small Back Room, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 wartime drama features an alcoholic demolitions expert who has to both diffuse a bomb and keep alive an old flame. Martin Ritt’s 1964 spy story plunges us headfirst into the Cold War and the chilling lengths governments traverse for the sake of secrecy. It features a terrifically brooding turn from Richard Burton that seems like it must have been study material for Daniel Craig. Two brilliant British films about the toll of war on ordinary lives.

The Ballad of Narayama, Mishima
With the death of Ken Ogata last October, Japan lost one of its great film actors. In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 epic Palme d’Or-winner, set in a backward rural community, Ogata played the son of an old woman who must be taken up a mountain to die. In Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic, Ogata embodied legendary writer Yukio Mishima, who suicided in 1970 after a failed military coup, and remains a controversial figure to this day... Okay, so Mishima was anything but a discovery for me, but it deserves extra recognition here as some sort of milestone in the biopic, as a beautifully put together DVD package with commentary from the always articulate Schrader and as an extraordinary showcase for Ogata.  

Best westerns: Man with the Gun, Day of the Outlaw exude the brutality and grace of the genre's transitional period

Richard Wilson began his career under the auspices of Orson Welles, working in various capacities—producer, writer, actor—for The Mercury Theatre before following the leader to Hollywood in 1940. By the time Wilson was helming his own projects Welles was already lost in the wilderness of his unruly career, and perhaps this prompted Wilson to choose a more modest course. Man with the Gun (1955), Wilson’s directorial debut, in no way attempts to mimic Welles’ stylistic flamboyance. Rather, it’s an unfussy, well-crafted genre picture, the sort of work that doesn’t announce he arrival of a magnificent prodigy but does in fact hold up extremely well with age—and with any luck will reach a fresh audience with Fox’s new DVD release.

The story of a lone gunman hired to bring peace to a small town ruled by thugs, Man with the Gun, which arrived in theatres the same year as The Night of the Hunter, finds Robert Mitchum giving an unusually brooding performance as “town tamer” Clint Tollinger, dressed in head-to-toe gray, his face looking flat and cold—that is until the news about his estranged family he’s been searching for is finally delivered and he flies into a rage, unleashing his wrath upon the town saloon. Mitchum’s is a brilliantly measured, never ingratiating performance that only reveals all it needs to in the final scenes, making no apologies for Tollinger’s brutality.

In the first scene a man rides into town and gleefully shoots a dog. Later a whiskey seller perches on a front porch to enjoy the gunplay in the main street with a twisted smile while the local prostitutes seem increasingly aroused by the bloodshed. Violence in Man with the Gun is never excessively sensationalized nor simplified, with Wilson wisely and subtly building an atmosphere of dread rather than terror. The use of Alex North’s music creates striking juxtapositions, sounding eerily wistful in a scene where Tollinger tells the story of an unarmed man being slaughtered, or dream-like and droning during the build-up to the film’s climax. The result of such balance and elemental interplay is a bracing example of the transitional western at its best.

A blizzard slow engulfs a pioneer settlement as a pair of ranchers traverse the blank valley where a charcoal smear of trees line the horizon before distant mountain peaks give way to a flat, forbidding sky. One of these ranchers, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan), is coming into town to kill a man, ostensibly for putting up fences on a landscape intended for open grazing, though the fact that he’s in love with the man’s wife (Tina Louise) may have something to do with it. Messy, violent death looms as an empty bottle rolls across a bar in the wintry silence, its imminent crash intended to signal gunfire. The crash is interrupted however by the arrival of a former US military captain Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), on the lam and here to take siege of the town with a band of bush-crazed, horny degenerates. Bruhn can barely control his men, and what’s more he’s got a bullet in his chest that will likely kill him within a matter of hours. Everything seems geared toward something absolutely awful. I guess it’s just like Blaise tells his beloved Helen early on: “You won’t find mercy anywhere in Wyoming.”

It takes a hell of a movie to follow something as good as Man with the Gun. Fortunately Day of the Outlaw (59), also newly on DVD from Fox, is an even bolder, bleaker, more distinctive work, a western wrapped in bad weather, hardship, cold death and repressed longing. Maybe it has something to do with the cast and crew’s collective background in film noir (yes, there's even a part of Elisha Cook Jr.). Screenwriter Philip Yordan—Dillinger (45), The Big Combo (55)—honed Lee E. Wells’ source novel to a taut three acts of savagery, desire, desperate invention, moral realization and fatalistic suspense. Ryan’s in top form with a role very much in keeping with much of his best work—Crossfire (47), Act of Violence (48), On Dangerous Ground (52)—while using the now tangible accumulation of time and age upon his voice and visage to deepen the pathos. He’s at once frightening and deeply sympathetic, sick to his guts with heartache, a sense of futility and a suicidal urge toward pointless destruction.

Day of the Outlaw is also further evidence of the oft-forgotten mastery of André De Toth, the Hungarian-born director who pumped out a formidable stream of genre films in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s. His manipulation of time, space and sound elevates several sequences toward the cruelly sublime: letting scenes play out entirely in master shot before closing in on a character’s face just when he’s about to undergo a radical shift; allowing the violence to become more uncomfortable by letting only the whistling wind provide the score; allowing the farewell between the youngest, nicest of the degenerates and the town’s young maiden to unfold with tenderness, humour and transitory ache. It’s the kind of work that should rightfully draw even moviegoers uninterested in genre films, and deserves this advice: even if you don’t normally go for westerns, see Day of the Outlaw.