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.  

Busting up the boys, singing those skeletal blues, a MacGyver of improvised bikinis: the inimitable Ida Lupino graces two of the finest Fox noirs

Man, oh man, Ida Lupino. Just one of her loaded little wordless hms is worth more than reams of dialogue from most other actresses. She was born in Brixton, schooled at RADA, but like so many of the elements that fed the best of American movies of the 1940s, and film noir in particular, her outsider's, specifically European perspective seemed only to heighten her contribution to the deep, strangely poeticized Americaness of her on-screen presence. Émigrés helped nurture what would eventually be tagged—the by French, of course—as the noir sensibility, its fatalism and chiaroscuro stylistic economy, but Lupino never seemed less than American in her toughness and resilience, her fundamental vulnerability and make-due-with-what-you-got glamour. If you didn’t know better, you’d believe that she, Gloria Grahame and Barbara Stanwyck all came from the same little town—and all three of them anxious to escape.

Moontide (1942), one of three new releases in the ongoing ‘Fox Noir’ series, and a major discovery for most of us, was a proto-noir especially informed by European tastes. Fritz Lang was its first director before the more utilitarian Archie Mayo took over, and Lang’s moody aesthetics remain very much intact. The film was the US debut of French superstar Jean Gabin, familiar to contemporary cineastes, if not the average American moviegoer, from his roles in films by Jean Renoir, who’d also crossed the Atlantic to work in Hollywood. Ever vigilant regarding his image, Gabin was exactingly involved in the script’s development, and apparently much to the project’s betterment. There was also a delirium sequence initially designed by Salvador Dalí, though it seems little of his ideas made it through the censors. But perhaps the most European thing about Moontide had nothing to do with the personnel at all: after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast location shoot was cancelled and the production moved into the studios, where the luminous artificiality of the sets, the foggy docks especially, endowed the film with its sublimely dreamlike atmosphere, which only increased the story’s already considerable air of dread and romance.

Based on actor Willard Robertson’s pulp novel, deemed unfilmable by many on account of its being too sordid, and adapted by novelist John O’Hara, Moontide begins with a night of expressionistic alcoholic oblivion, with dockworker and working class bon vivant Bobo (Gabin) emerging from his ominous blackout in front of a bait shack. A murder’s been committed, and Bobo can’t be completely sure he didn’t do it. Bobo’s pal Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), to be found that morning, get this, snapping towels against the naked ass of the flamboyantly monikered Nutsy (Claude Rains in an interesting but smallish role), suggest the pair skip town, but Bobo’s usual wanderlust is suddenly overwhelmed by his fascination with Anna (Lupino), a waif with a background too painful for her to share. He fishes from the sea one night during a suicide attempt, keeping the fuzz at bay by pretending to be her husband. Anna threatens to domesticate Bobo and bring his alliance with Tiny, apparently forged in blackmail and repressed homosexuality, to a grinding, ugly halt.

Moontide is drenched in neurosis, swarming with damaged psyches and astoundingly loopy romantic gestures—at one point Bobo gives Anna a prostitute’s dress as a symbol of his affection—yet its never less than buoyant thanks to the profound charisma of its leads: Gabin’s sensuous gaze, his easy, gypsy hedonism and rather chauvinistic optimism—he has a magnificently callous speech where he extols the virtues of breakfast as a balm for suicidal depression—matched by Lupino’s aching sense of weary regeneration, her unspoken recesses of darkness and immensely touching surrender to love, at one point caressing Gabin's fleshy face like a precious stone. The film in its way looks forward to In a Lonely Place (50), one of my all-time favourite noirs, in its tender, brooding study of a fragile connection between a younger, secretive woman and an older, violent man that no one seems entirely safe around.

If Moontide has spent most of its cinematic life unknown or under-appreciated, Road House (48) has remained something of a legend, rather difficult to see but now finally appearing on DVD, only months after the death of the great Richard Widmark, whose appearance here formed yet another triumphant follow-up to his unforgettable debut in Kiss of Death (47). Curiously, it finds Lupino again coming between a seemingly untamable virile type and a seemingly more civilized, well-heeled associate, oddly matched male buddies whose friendship is tainted by compromise. When Midwestern rural roadhouse proprietor Jefty (Widmark) comes back from his travels with “a new attraction from Chicago” named Lily (Lupino, suddenly blonde though looking only more like some strange creature from elsewhere), his intentions are clearly more than professional. But Lily, the picture of feminine independence, seems utterly disinterested in romance, her response to all of Jefty’s increasingly intense come-ons being little more than barely softened brush-offs or some variation of those wonderful little shrugging hms of hers. She remains impenetrable until she suddenly sets her sights on Jefty’s manager Pete (Cornell Wilde), and that's when all hell breaks loose.

Watching Lily and Pete’s courtship shift from mutual antipathy to desire—he’s anal about tidiness while she chain smokes and leaves her butts burning everywhere—is supremely pleasurable, even sort of surprising despite the conventions. It's nearly as pleasurable and surprising as Lily’s debut as the road house chanteuse. As Lupino unceremoniously plunks herself down at her mini-upright we hear bowling balls still knocking about in the background. But by the time she starts singing her stark blues number in that seductive, gravelly, idiosyncratic voice—has Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, seen this movie?—there isn’t a single person in the joint who isn’t under her peculiar spell. The scene is magic, visibly stoking a flame within both the already swooning Jefty and the much cooler Pete.

The love triangle as originally conceived in the first versions of the script, something much discussed in the disc's supplements, strikes me as the source material for Blood Simple (84), though I've never heard the idea brought up elsewhere. But the story as it emerges here is at once more conventional and more emotionally pointed that was originally intended, building up to a last act that bristles with betrayal, manipulation and Jefty’s masochistic, maybe even suicidal mania. Indeed, Widmark steals the show in the final scenes, though there would arguably be no scenes to steal without Lupino’s  singularly beguiling presence charging every scene with attitude, conflicted desire and on-the-spot ingenuity—you’ll be amazed at what she can do with a few scarves during the scene where they go to the beach sans bikini. All of these qualities would come to shape Lupino’s groundbreaking work as a director: she was one of the first women in Hollywood to bust up the boys. But, as is evidenced in these films, she had already been rehearsing for that job for years.