Many years ago, Dean Martin said, “It’s Sinatra’s World. We only live in it.” I feel the same about Andre Gregory. I don’t know him, yet he appears in my life with disturbing regularity. It’s possible Andre Gregory lives nearby, for whenever I walk on Broadway, there he is. How do I know what Andre Gregory looks like? I saw him at the movies, in MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. Now he seems to be everywhere I go. Once I was sitting in a café, minding my own business and reading the Sunday Times. Suddenly, I felt I was in a movie. Then I realized the movie was MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. It turned out Andre Gregory was sitting behind me, telling some people the same stories that are in the film. After that I went to a church basement with a woman I was dating to see a play by A.R. Gurney called The Middle Ages. The story concerned the difficult relationship of a son with his father. Andre Gregory played the father. He sang the dialogue like Pavarotti, he screamed, he danced across the stage. He made strange gestures that I found irritating. I wanted to leave. My girlfriend made me stay. At the end of the play, when the father is dying of cancer, Mr. Gregory sang the dialogue with a soft tremor, and grasped the air. I cried. It was the most moving evening of theatre I’ve ever experienced.

Now Mr. Gregory is in my apartment, captured within the digital interstices of a Blu-Ray from Criterion entitled VANYA ON 42nd STREET. Vanya is the protagonist of a Chekhov play, Uncle Vanya, which is being performed by a group of actors directed by Mr. Gregory; actually rehearsing is closer to what is going on, in the dilapidated shell of the New Amsterdam theatre on 42nd Street. The film was produced in 1994, roughly five years before the transformation of 42nd Street into a theme park. The New Amsterdam Theatre, originally built by Florenz Ziegfeld around 1900, was the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, long before it was renovated by Disney. There is nothing Disney-like in the wreck of a building seen in Louis Malle’s film, with gilded gargoyles eaten away by mice, and a stage that can not be stepped upon, for leaks have rotted away the wood. A gigantic net is strung overhead, as pieces of the ceiling are continually falling, making soft, rumbling sounds, comforting yet frightful, like the echoes in certain dreams.

VANYA ON 42nd STREET might be described as a documentary turned inside out, with the filmmakers – director Louis Malle & cinematographer Declan Quinn – improvising visually upon the verbal improvisation of the actors based on a text by Chekhov translated into contemporary English by David Mamet. The story concerns a family of artists who work at cross purposes, involving unrequited love and unpaid bills. Although the play is set in a foreign country and in a different century, it’s about the daily grind of things we all deal with, yet with language that somehow transforms, opening up spaces and places one usually doesn’t explore.

I can see why Mr. Malle was attracted to this material, for the actors, guided by Mr. Gregory, experiment with the words of Chekhov in a similar fashion to how the be-boppers led by Charlie Parker took the chords of popular songs and created a rhythmic, emotionally stimulating art form. The focus here, in terms of the interpretation of Chekhov’s text, is not only rhythmic, but also character based. Each sentence not only has the multiple layers Chekhov put there, but also new levels of meaning due to the three year process of rehearsal the actors have gone through.

Mr. Malle’s direction adds another dimension to this experiment, which is based on the practical essence of words spoken in a particular place. While the text has many sublime passages describing the natural world of cherry orchards and forests which are quickly slipping away, the camera focuses on the ravaged beauty of the New Amsterdam theatre, which one can see crumbling before one’s eyes as Chekhov’s words echo through the silent shell of Flo Ziegfeld’s desecrated dream world. This isn’t just a documentation of a performance, but a living document that changes as we watch and become emotionally connected, both to the incidents in the play and the human beings sitting, reciting and interacting in the New Amsterdam theatre, while the camera moves around them and with them, finding a piece of decaying plaster or ravaged gilding that somehow connects with the words that are being spoken.

I could talk about Julianne Moore’s red hair, the warmth of her complexion and how it blends with the wall behind her, gold going to gray and mottled with white streaks, as she talks about love and duty, freedom and responsibility. This isn’t so much a recitation or a performance as an evocation, magical and somewhat frightening, as the quotidian of grit in this decaying showplace becomes transformed through the voice of the actors and the composition of the camera. Ah, so then maybe the film is Disney-like after all, the Disney of PINOCCHIO, when the wooden puppet becomes flesh and blood, when the everyday is revealed as dreamtime or perhaps the dream we think we experience is really the everyday. That is an underlying theme in Chekhov, and it is in Disney’s best work as well.

Of course in Disney, there is singing. There is singing in VANYA ON 42ND STREET as well, especially Brooke Smith in her closing monologue, the rhythm and timber of which is pure beauty because it is so explicit and simple. That, I think, is the influence of Andre Gregory. Simple and yet something beyond what a human being is supposed to be. Song and yet simple breath. No wonder Susan Sontag, as Ms. Smith relates in the interview extra on the disc, showered her with such extravagant praise at the end of an earlier rehearsal at the Victory Theatre across 42nd Street. (Ms. Smith was a little nonplused, as she didn’t know who Susan Sontag was.) I could talk about Wallace Shawn, who seems to be almost sleeping and smiling with inner delight, then suddenly erupts into passionate confession and murderous intent. I should talk about the whole ensemble, the whole film, which should be in your collection if you care about cinema, and about life.

With VANYA ON 42ND STREET, Louis Malle has come full circle. His first feature, THE SILENT WORLD (1956), a documentary made in collaboration with Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was filmed under the sea. His final feature, VANYA ON 42ND STREET, is an exploration of another subterranean world, that of a decaying 42nd Street showplace and a group of actors who are trying to come to terms with a text from yet another vanished world, that of Czarist Russia. While the story of Uncle Vanya is concerned with the tragedy of experience, Louis Malle’s camera observes this heartbreaking ritual with the open-eyed innocence of a joyful child.

The transfer is perfection, as is the film itself. VANYA ON 42ND STREET is Highly Recommended.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is such a perfect match of subject and director, not to mention style and sensibility, that after basking in the film’s delicate afterglow, it’s easy to place George Cukor among the greatest directors of the American Cinema. All one need do is glance at the technical credits to realize this film was made by people at the top of their form, with such legends as cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, John Box, who was responsible for designing LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, and costume designer Anthony Powell, whose innumerable Tonys and Oscars could fill a small warehouse. The irony is that Mr. Cukor’s most perfectly crafted Hollywood film was created after Hollywood, or at least MGM, as a studio and a style, had ceased to exist, so that the film’s form and subject merge into a perfect reflection – that is, 109 minutes of expressive color and sublime camera movements to delineate not a slice of life, but rather a state of being.

Based on a novel by Graham Greene, the film presents Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen), a somewhat straight-laced bank clerk, who meets his elderly, eccentric Aunt Agatha (Maggie Smith) for the first time at his mother’s funeral. Aunt Agatha quickly disrupts Henry’s well-ordered existence by first hijacking his mother’s ashes and then him, managing to talk Henry into traveling with her to Europe, and then into a life of joyful crime as she attempts to rescue her lover, Mr. Visconti (Robert Stephens) from pirates. In the process, Aunt Agatha relives her youth, and Henry discovers what it is to actually live, from one moment to the next, without preconceptions.

In the many scenes that recount Aunt Agatha’s youthful indiscretions, Mr. Cukor is able to create a vivid, not to mention phantasmagorical, reconstruction of turn of the century Paris, with gilded ceilings, mirrored halls, velvet walls and dazzling chandeliers, the camera swirling among exquisitely costumed performers. Yet this Belle Epoch is no idealized fantasy world, for Aunt Agatha is a woman with no illusions, except perhaps her steadfast insistence on refusing to grow up.

Instead of Marcel Proust’s madeleines poised to reveal a vision of the past, Mr. Cukor uses the craft as well as the example of the classical Hollywood film. In particular, he references the luxurious, high key production style of MGM, where he was a contract director starting in the 1930′s, directing such classics as CAMILLE (with Greta Garbo’s greatest performance), THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (which rejuvenated Katharine Hepburn’s career), and GASLIGHT (bringing Ingrid Bergman an Oscar).

Mr. Cukor obtained extraordinary performances from four generations of Hollywood actresses by celebrating the visual and physical manifestations of both the dreamer and the dream. In other words, Mr. Cukor’s primary focus as a force for his cinematic imagination was the human form, through which he articulated an universe of subtle emotion transformed into light and shadow. Though often dismissed as a “woman’s director,” Mr. Cukor continually expanded both the breadth and expanse of American filmmaking through his formal innovations, such as his impressionistic use of CinemaScope and color to reflect the subjective experiences of his characters in A STAR IS BORN, as well as adapting the techniques of Italian neo-realism by shooting in working class households and on the streets of New York for THE MARRYING KIND.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a film that takes its time, slowly accumulating details, like a leisurely afternoon spent on a Mediterranean beach where one discovers for the first time how the colors of the ocean form a dance with the ever-changing light, and that by simply breathing in and out, one can perceive the most delightful aromas, no matter how briny. Because of this, TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a moving reverie rich in association through the marvelous mediation of Maggie Smith’s performance as Aunt Agatha, intermingling Mr. Cukor’s own expressive visual journey through forty years of filmmaking with that of the characters from Graham Greene’s novel.

One might even say that TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is George Cukor’s version, or perhaps an anticipation, of Jean-Luc Godard’s free-form exploration of both film history and his own life, HISTORIE(S) DU CINEMA. In TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT, one not only sees the history of cinema compressed into a vision saturated with red, gold and orange, extending one’s eye into infinity that bridges the development of sound film from DINNER AT EIGHT to MY FAIR LADY, but thanks to Mr. Cukor’s direction of Ms. Smith and Mr. McCowell, one also is given a model for living.

By the way, did I mention that this film is a comedy?

Highly Recommended. Rating: Film: ***** Transfer: ****

In THE BLACK BOOK, Anthony Mann’s deliciously dark, sumptuously entertaining period thriller set during the French Revolution, Richard Basehart, who plays Robespierre, lets his wig do the talking. Who ever thought a prop covered with white powder could be so expressive? Then again, Mr. Basehart’s wig is photographed by John Alton (AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, THE BIG COMBO), who lights this seemingly dense hunk of hair in such a multiplicity of ways, first pale and shimmering, then dark and frightful, that one begins to understand Robespierrre’s larger than life, almost hypnotic appeal to the French masses. This is not to criticize Mr. Basehart, who projects an over-the-top intensity that communicates the essence of blind ambition in one glance.

What’s more to the point is that for the first time on home video, one’s own glance can be so richly rewarded. Mr. Mann and Mr. Alton’s strangely pleasurable nightmare of exaggerated shadows, mysterious mirror reflections and labyrinth-like hidden rooms has just been released in a gorgeous MOD taken from the original negative. Finally, one can view this delirious film free of all the swirling detritus and cracking soundtracks of those unwatchable public domain DVDs, which, in the opinion of this reviewer, is not only cause for celebration, but should be shouted from rooftops.

This is a movie that continually has one rubbing one’s eyes in both disbelief and terror. Stylistically a crazy cross between a poverty row CITIZEN KANE full of deep focus tracking shots and an action packed revenge western edited like Don Siegel on steroids (with a virtuoso chase on horseback through a forest that would be more at home in Lilliput Land than the outskirts of Paris) BLACK BOOK is a work that burns all its bridges even when it is in the act of constructing them.

The plot concerns a missing book which lists all of Robespierre’s rivals who have a date with the guillotine, searched for by two agents of the republic working undercover, played by Robert Cummings and an unbelievably glamorous Arlene Dahl. With the aforementioned Mr. Basehart and a sinisterly elegant Arnold Moss as a devious political appointee the stand-out performers, BLACK BOOK’s story is told through the use of an unmoored camera whose wild movements seem to express the disorder of this specific period of French history, as well as the constant realigning, both personal and political, of its characters.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Arlene Dahl looking so beautiful. Mr. Alton has photographed her through clouds of lace, enveloped her eyes with a diamond-like glimmer, and encompassed her skin with a myriad of soft undertones the purity of which simply boggles the mind. Around Ms. Dahl is a world of shadows within shadows, accentuated by a wide-angle lens that transports both the characters and the action into a sphere of pure abstraction.

Mr. Cummings’ and Ms. Dahl’s breezy performances put one in mind of a screwball comedy submerged in a war torn landscape (not unlike Ernst Lubitsch’s TO BE OR NOT TO BE). Somehow this lightness exhibited by the main performers works within the macabre visuals that surround them, as well as Aeneas Mackenzie’s poetic dialogue, which finds metaphors expressing the concepts of political terror that parallel Mr. Mann’s use of doubling, especially in the compositions and camera movements. Mr. Mann frames his actors and these sinister shadows inside windows as well as the constricting patterns of shelves, mirrors and bars, with a fluid camera that is continually attempting to discover other, more open spaces, paralleling the main characters’ attempt to escape, only to become shut up again within another constricting frame.

While the concept of undercover is an major trope of late 40′s Hollywood thrillers, it takes on added resonance in the work of Anthony Mann, whose films express an affinity with the fates of complex antiheroes who are poised on the cusp between good and evil, working out a deep ambiguity both in the persona of the actors he cast (such as Gary Cooper in MAN OF THE WEST or the conflicted characters with a penchant for violence played by James Stewart) as well as in Mr. Mann’s mise-en-scene, bringing out all the possibilities between light and darkness, both formally and thematically.

Certainly BLACK BOOK has its roots in the closed and tragic universe of Fritz Lang, in particular FURY and RANCH NOTORIOUS, where innocent protagonists are caught up in an ever widening cycle of violence, just as Robert Cummings’ initially innocent and carefree character in BLACK BOOK being forced to become “the butcher of Strasbourg,” his alias, in order to defeat Robespierre. (A similar, more violent situation is in T-MEN, where the hero, an undercover cop, is forced to acquiesce to the murder of his partner.) What is most distinctive about Mr. Mann’s direction in BLACK BOOK is the aforementioned sense of ambiguity, seen as a continual change in Mr. Cummings’ character between being hunter and hunted, and finding both pleasure and fear in this dilemma, in addition to his own unresolved feelings about this double state of being, which is reinforced by the way the film is shot and edited.

The producer of BLACK BOOK was William Cameron Menzies, an Oscar winning production designer (GONE WITH THE WIND, THE THIEF OF BAGDAD) who invented many of the special effects and miniature production techniques used in films from the 1920′s through the 70′s. Although he is not credited as art director, one can see Mr. Menzies’ work throughout BLACK BOOK, for instance, in the use of a trio of riders in silhouette on a distant hill with a miniature farmhouse protected by a cascading oak tree (as in GONE WITH THE WIND), or the climactic meeting in the chamber of revolutionary delegates, the gesturing crowd portrayed by a back projection behind darkly dressed extras, the black and grey tones keyed to the torch lighting used in the foreground, which not only sustains a sense of monumentality, but also creates a visual compression that accentuates the feeling of claustrophobia and impending doom brought out by Mr. Mann’s use of the camera. There are also a number of spaces in the film containing chambers within chambers, for example, Robespierre’s headquarters hidden behind a bakery (one of the characters mentions Robespierre “likes to eat fresh bread when he wakes up in the morning.”), filled with torches and strange shadows through which the camera runs riot, similar to the use of actual locations in Mr. Mann and Mr. Alton’s prior’s films, such as the tear-gas filled tunnels under Los Angles in the climax of HE WALKED BY NIGHT.

Mr. Menzies and Mr. Alton’s contributions create a stylish surface of shadowy filagree that simultaneously contradicts Mr. Mann’s visceral mise-en-scene, while forming a constant dark undertow which enhances these images, bringing out the themes of collaboration and opportunism, which places one not only in the world of 1789, but also that of 1949. One need merely glance at the list of cast and crew, with names such as actor Norman Lloyd and composer Sol Kaplan, who were about to be blacklisted, to receive another, very contemporary meaning from the film about political paranoia and abuse of power.

For those who care, the Columbia logo is attached to the head of the film, followed by the Eagle Lion insignia. The soundtrack is so clean and precise that though there are no subtitles, I could make out every word clearly. Sol Kaplan’s surging and extremely chromatic orchestral score, simultaneously triumphant and melancholic (think of Mahler crossed with Offenbach), is also extremely well-served by the enhanced sound.

A one of a kind film that has been previously impossible to find in decent condition, BLACK BOOK, finally available as a pristine MOD from Columbia Classics, is a period noir crossed with an action-packed serial that will leave you on the edge of your seat. It is also a film in which both director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton came into their own as creative artists, as well as Arlene Dahl’s most luminous invocation, and two memorable performances by Richard Basehart and Arnold Moss.

Highly Recommended. Film: ****1/2 Transfer: ****

Like Wow, Bam, Boffo and Hotsy-Totsy! Please excuse me if my prose style is a little giddy but I’ve just seen BOMBSHELL, Victor Fleming’s exercise in pure zany pleasure expressed through a camera style that makes the dialectical montage of Sergei Eisenstein look shy and retiring, not to mention trumping by almost a decade the speed-crazed, overlapping dialogue of Howard Hawks’ HIS GIRL FRIDAY. A luscious valentine to Jean Harlow’s peroxide-tinged All-American womanhood as well as a send-up of movie-making in a manner that would seem positively avant-garde if the film wasn’t produced at MGM, that bastion of Hollywood political and aesthetic conservatism, BOMBSHELL may be 78 years old but is nonetheless up to the minute in sensibility.

The movie zings and wings its way through the chaotic but nonetheless joyous life of Hollywood star Lola Burns (Jean Harlow), her extended, leech-like family (Frank Morgan plays her bumbling con-man of a father, Ted Healy her drunken brother, Una Merkel her two-faced secretary) and Lola’s love-hate relationship with Monarch Studios’ cutthroat press agent “Space” Hanlon (Lee Tracy), whose behavior might best be described as a cross between Count Dracula’s and an amorous bunny on amphetamines. Mr. Fleming’s exploration of the thin line between egotism and what one might call life’s banana peels imbues Ms. Harlow’s and Mr. Tracy’s haphazard dance of attraction/repulsion with a laugh-out loud hilarity.

Mr. Fleming also pulls the rug out from under the audience both visually and narratively, adding immensely to the film’s humor as well as to its visual zest. Lola spends her life pretending to be someone else, which causes her to search for authenticity, except everyone she meets is a fake. In an ironic turnaround, the film suggests that this talent for phoniness is in fact the most authentic thing about both Lola and the people that surround her. The air becomes thick with aphorisms delivered by character actors at the top of their game, playing simultaneously fictional archetypes but also themselves. (For instance, at one point the very proper C. Aubrey Smith, dressed as a British aristocrat, turns towards the camera and asks, “How come Lewis Stone always gets these parts?”) Actual behind-the-scenes production footage from Mr. Fleming and Ms. Harlow’s previous film together, RED DUST, is inserted into the mix. Various production people at MGM have walk-on cameos, as well as real-life Hollywood celebrities, such as Coconut Grove bandleader Gus Arnheim and champion boxer Primo Carnera. The film expresses a confusion of fictional and everyday states of being sixty years before French philosophers brought this contemporary phenomena to our attention. Where do the movies end and life begin, the film seems to ask. Is this reality, performance, or something in between? Then again, does it really matter?

One is most impressed by the seeming effortlessness of it all. The editing sweeps us into the thick of things, as well as sweeping us off our feet, with an extraordinary sense of precision. If BOMBSHELL doesn’t resemble life as we know it, the film certainly maintains the informality, not to mention humor, of a wild weekend with old friends. For instance, Lola says to her maid: “Your day off is sure brutal on your lingerie,” or there’s Lola’s exchange with the new butler over a glass of orange juice: “His name was Summers and your name is Winters. Are butlers always in season?” Characters come and go in a swirl of invective and manic movement, speaking in a hyper-exaggerated style that mixes advertising slogans with street poetry. “Your hair is like a field of silver daises,” a passerby tells Lola. “I’d like to run barefoot through it.”

In addition to the spontaneity of Mr. Fleming’s direction is the anchoring of the story in a very specific Hollywood reality, fixed by the silvery light captured by Harold Rosson’s luminous cinematography. What one remembers most are the myriad details: the manicured tangle of rose bushes adjoining Lola Burns’ insanely white mansion, the absurd number of staircases that people run up and down with continually raised voices, and when Lola attempts to escape to a resort in the desert, the shimmering sands underfoot, so clean and reflective it appears one can see for miles.

At the center of this self-referential parade of confusion, avarice and mixed motives is Ms. Harlow, who simply shines through the film grain in a surfeit of authentic niceness. The more shrill Lola Burns becomes, the more she entangles what she desires with how she feels her public expects her to behave, the more charming is Ms. Harlow’s screen presence. How this was achieved I have no idea, but it creates yet another immensely entertaining level to the film’s interplay between acting and being, fiction and self-delusion, authenticity and subterfuge.

Yes, I know I’m making BOMBSHELL seem decidedly post-modern, but why not? Pre-code is often more advanced, both stylistically as well as philosophically, not to mention more fun, than the films being made today. Just look at Ernst Lubitsch’s DESIGN FOR LIVING (1934), which was released by Criterion a few weeks ago, a romantic comedy that deals with an open, loving relationship between two men and a woman, as a shining example of that very principle.

Of course, Victor Fleming is known today, if at all, as the director of GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ, two lumbering, over-produced films from 1939 that, in spite of their occasional felicities, are the antithesis of personal cinema. Warner Archive is to be commended for releasing this dazzling, inebriating, deliciously directed bonbon of a movie, so deadpan and deceptively bright that its cinematic brilliance takes one by surprise. While BOMBSHELL may be Victor Fleming’s greatest work (and arguably the most personal and idiosyncratic film ever made at MGM in the 1930′s) it’s by no means an anomaly. There’s the previously mentioned RED DUST, TREASURE ISLAND, CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS and A GUY NAMED JOE, as well as a number of deceptively effortless and deliriously subversive silent comedies, especially WHEN THE CLOUDS ROLL BY starring Douglas Fairbanks.

The Warner Archive’s remastered transfer of Mr. Fleming and Ms. Harlow’s magnum opus, while far from perfect and exhibiting occasional bouts of medium grain and hairline scratches, is still quite beautiful. The white silk dresses and flesh tones gleam, as they would in a fine grain nitrate print. Black levels are generous, and the detail, especially in the long shots of Lola’s mansion filled with shouting studio hacks, assistant make-up artists and hanger-ons, as well as the leaves of palm trees on the streets of Beverly Hills, is stupendous. The sound is extremely clean and natural sounding for a film of this vintage with no hiss that I could discern, allowing one to hear the zingers that pepper the dialogue very clearly. As is usual with a Warner Archive release, there are no subtitles, and the only extra is a trailer with Spanish titles, though the dialogue is in English.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It’s a cold, sun-streaked morning somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas. Two men, the brown suede and red plaid of their hunting caps uncharacteristically store-bought shiny for this out of the way place, walk into a worn, rough-hewn diner. An elderly man, bent-over, with wisps of stray white hair across his weathered scalp, carries a none too clean coffee pot their way. It’s Elijah Cook, Jr., fragile and scrawny, but the glint in his eyes is the same as when he kicked Humphrey Bogart in the head in THE MALTESE FALCON. We expect something to happen, possibly wild and unpredictable, but no, the hunters sit at the counter and ask for Cody, the owner of the place. In walks Joe Don Baker with a slight smile on his face, his good-old-boy demeanor positively disarming. “Can’t seem to place you boys,” he says. He goes behind the counter, grabs the largest knife and begins slicing a loaf of bread.

“We know some friends of yours,” the hunter in the suede cap says. “Old friends.” In the low light at the back of the diner, film grain dances like motes of light on the surface of a lake. Photographed by Bruce Surtees, who brought a dangerous beauty to films such as DIRTY HARRY, the image is so sharp, one can read the menu clearly in the distance: “Hamburger – 60 cents.”

“It’s always nice to hear from old friends,” Joe Don Baker says. He points to the hunters’ rifles standing in the corner. “Going quail hunting?”

“Sure. Quail.” Through the window, one can see a hillock of green suffused by shadows, like a brush stroke by Monet.

Cautiously, Joe Don Baker lifts the blade of the knife, holding it firm. “You boys are too late. You got to get up early when they’re feeding…if you want birds. Besides, your guns are too big. Twelve gauge would tear a bird apart.”

“Is that right?” One of the hunters picks up the rifle and points the barrels at Joe Don Baker. Still behind the counter, his smile darkens a little. One thinks of William Conrad and Charles McGraw waiting for Burt Lancaster in the small town diner in the opening scene of THE KILLERS, the other patrons enveloped in a sense of dread, but then suddenly everything changes.

“Want to know about guns, you ask Bob Caswell there, the Sheriff. He knows all about guns. Don’t you Bob?”

A middle-aged man in a cowboy hat and a Santa Claus moustache sitting by the window grins. “That’s the truth.”

The sunlight streams through the window as the hunters abruptly take their rifles and open the door to leave. “You know something, Cody,” suede cap says. “You ought to play the races. You’re that lucky.”

I wanted to try to give you a feeling of what watching this movie and this lovely transfer is all about. THE OUTFIT (1973), a made on demand disc of impressive quality and delicate, film-like characteristics, is the best looking DVD from Warner Archive I’ve yet come across. It also turns out, much to my surprise, to be a movie for the ages. An astonishing compendium of seventies grunge with fifties’ tough-guy actors (such as Robert Ryan and the legendary cult figure Timothy Carey), THE OUTFIT is a terse, brutal, yet surprisingly lyrical adaptation of the second Richard Stark paperback novel featuring Parker, a workaday criminal. While the story and characters have been slightly changed – Parker, for instance becomes Macklin and is given a girlfriend wheelman, something Parker himself would never condone while on a job – the stoic matter of factness and unadorned low rent background of a life outside the law described in the books is tone perfect.

Presenting the adventures of a lone wolf bank robber who is being chased by the mob and decides instead of running to fight back and rob the big boys, the film is filled with the kind of small, telling details found in the Parker books: a hired gun who crosses himself before a hit, the carny-like sales pitch, warm-hearted yet cagey, of an illegal firearms merchant, or an unsubtle shade of pink neon that bathes the cabins of a budget motor camp in a garish glow, imparting a carnival ambience to a scene of violence.

Produced in 1973 when former CBS wonder boy James Aubrey (THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES) was in the process of leaching out the glory of MGM into nothingness, THE OUTFIT fell through the cracks and was poorly distributed. It turned up once on a double bill with THE SPLIT, an anomie-ridden James Brown caper film, in a run-down theatre in Crown Heights, but I didn’t make it in time. I must say that this film was well worth the wait. In fact, if this movie had been promoted properly, I think it would have been a hit, for it’s head and shoulders above much more prestigious action films of the same period staring Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen. Like a stripped-down pro on a bank job, THE OUTFIT focuses on the matter at hand, yet every step along the way resonates.

Paradoxically, this disc has some of the most gorgeously saturated color I’ve ever seen in a 70′s film, as if the director, going for the visceral attack of Film Noir, decided to use the color palette of THE SOUND OF MUSIC for the sake of contrast. Yet somehow it all works. The action is pared-down and unsentimental, the consciousness as straightforward as the hammer locking in a Colt .45, and the stunning beauty of the images, rather than weighing down the narrative, stings like salt on the rim of a margarita glass.

The Parker novels came at the end of a Noir cycle of original paperbacks, the stories doom-laden and decidedly baroque in style, featuring rot-gut heroes at death’s door, written by such masters of the genre as David Goodis, Jim Thompson and Charles Wileford. The Parker novels signaled a changed in tone as the anxiety-ridden 50′s turned into the free-wheeling 60′s, focusing on the small details of assembling a team of criminals for a robbery, written in a laid-back ironic prose that was also capable of great subtleties. Richard Stark was actually Donald Westlake, a writer of comic caper novels such as The Hot Rock that were quite different in style. Once a friend complained that Donald Westlake should write more like Richard Stark. I told this comment to another friend that knew Westlake, and reported back that Westlake was quite amused by the comparison.

To say that Robert Duvall is perfect in the role of the robber Macklin is almost faint praise. He inhabits the character, fuses his skin and his every breath with Macklin’s unique contradictions, makes the character come alive to the extent that every fiber of Mr. Duvall’s being seems to exist in the slowly pulsing film grain that moves the narrative forward and which the technicians at Warner Archive have so wonderfully preserved in this marvelous transfer. The rest of the cast is equally impeccable. Joe Don Baker as Cody, Macklin’s partner, compliments Robert Duvall’s brooding intensity with an unimpeachable affableness that hides a sharp instinct for sensing the danger inherent in every situation. John Flynn, the director and screenwriter, has also cast a compendium of character actors that through their mere presence evokes an entire universe of cinematic feeling: Richard Jaeckel (ATTACK), Sheree North (THE UNTOUCHABLES), Marie Windsor (FORCE OF EVIL), Jane Greer (OUT OF THE PAST), Henry Jones (VERTIGO), and Emil Meyer (SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS). I must also reserve special praise for Karen Black, who as Macklin’s girlfriend Bett, takes what could have been a stereotyped role and transforms this into the emotional core of the film. Although I love Karen Black as a personality, I’ve never known her to play a part with such simplicity or transparency of feeling before.

By eliciting a performance of such verisimilitude, Mr. Flynn remains true not only to Richard Stark’s sense of realism, but also evokes crime author Jim Thompson’s vision of sublimely complicated women, which has not been at all well served by the cinema. In the film versions of such Thompson novels as The Grifters and The Getaway, while the fairly simplistic plots are retained, the complicated characters which make these books memorable are mostly excised. It is to Mr. Flynn’s credit that while THE OUTFIT is a beautifully made genre piece, full of moody characterization and tough action, what remains in the mind are the emotionally complex relations of the characters adrift in a world of violence.

A film that successfully builds on the rootless, road-movie style of FIVE EASY PIECES while incorporating the gritty ambience of such morally ambiguous Noirish thrillers as THE KILLING and KISS ME DEADLY, John Flynn’s THE OUTFIT is not only a continually impressive piece of filmmaking, but a stunningly produced disc of any stripe and should be in the collection of all serious movie lovers.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

As a title, Kiss Me, Deadly (with writer Mickey Spillane’s preferred comma included) is one hell of an inspired hook, the soft sibilants of the double “s” suddenly reverberating like a screeching subway train against the harsh consonant of the “d,” creating the verbal equivalent of a scarlet-edged comic book fist. Three simple words, blaring across paperback racks in the button-down culture of the 1950′s, had the power to induce legions of boys and grown men to open the first page. Unfortunately, the book itself is fairly sleep-inducing stuff, discounting the heavy-breathing opening scene, with detective Mike Hammer’s speeding sports car almost running over a nubile female, naked except for a tattered raincoat, on the highway. It turns out the woman is on the run from both the police and the mob. The problem: a million dollar package of heroin. Though Mike swears to protect her, the bad guys soon catch up with them. Only Mike survives, sending him on a journey of revenge. When I was 12 years old, the book’s opening caused me to tear through the 176 pages in under two hours, leaving sweaty thumb prints as a document of my immersion.

That opening scene is still intact in all its speeding menace and sensual abandon in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film version of KISS ME DEADLY (though the comma in Spillane’s title is missing). If anything, that scene has even more of a visceral punch on the screen, courtesy of Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography, which imparts a sparkling translucence to Cloris Leachman’s hair. She runs maniacally through the inky blackness of a lonely, late night highway, her raspy breathing faster than a heartbeat, the throbbing music building to a crescendo, though the film has been unreeling for less then a minute. Need I say that in Criterion’s extraordinarily detailed and luscious transfer, I feel as though I am watching this film for the first time? (Since only dupey 16mm prints and a muddy, washed-out looking DVD have been available since the mid 50′s, Criterion’s amazing transfer also finally makes it clear why Aldrich, working on a quickie TV schedule, chose Laszlo, known for his meticulous, time-consuming lighting, as cinematographer.)

Aldrich’s weirdly fragmented compositions emphasize speed and the possibility of danger that lingers in every furtive glance of Ms. Leachman’s (in her motion picture debut) as she looks at the hazy headlights behind her, and the sullen expression of Ralph Meeker (as Mike Hammer) in the driver’s seat. As the two of them sit there with the windshield reflecting what is behind them while revealing the thin white line of the highway ahead, one can imagine the young Jean-Luc Godard somewhere in a Paris cinema thinking how moving in a car is like moving forward in time and space, yet with the mind looking backwards, leading inexorably a few years later to the invention of the jump cut, in a sleek convertible just like Mike Hammer’s crazy coupe, with Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in BREATHLESS. (KISS ME DEADLY was one of the first films to mount the camera directly on the car, a practice that was later used extensively by the French New Wave.)

It is here that Aldrich’s film leaves Spillane’s book far behind, striking upon unknown territory that is still remarkably fresh and compelling more than fifty years after its original premiere. Although in the books Mike Hammer is synonymous with NYC’s Times Square area, the transposition of the action to LA is inspired, featuring souped-up sports cars, hip blues ballads, sleek cocktail lounges and a bachelor pad with futuristic lamps and a mouth-watering, automatic reel to reel answering machine.

In 1955, heroin couldn’t be mentioned in a movie because of the production code. Screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides (author of Thieves’ Highway and They Drive By Night) substituted a mysterious metal box that hissed in a multiplicity of voices whenever anyone opened the lid. This doomsday device is perfectly described in the film by Velda, Mike Hammer’s girlfriend and Girl Friday (brilliantly played with a mix of glamour and sincerity by Maxine Cooper) as “The Great Whatzit.” She also cautions Mike to “stay away from the windows, or someone might blow you a kiss.” In a volatile cocktail mixing seedy pulp fiction with end-of-the-world sci-fi, Bezzerides transformed a lethargic tale of revenge into an dark labyrinth of multiple murders and mysterious motives, not to mention eminently quotable dialogue. Borrowing the plot of THE MALTESE FALCON (a brilliant idea, as John Huston’s film was the beginning of Noir, while KISS ME DEADLY is at the darkest end of the cycle), Bezzerides has everyone trying to kill the other in order to possess the unknown object, assuming it’s worth lots of money since “so many people have died for it.”

Aldrich compliments his screenwriter’s nightmare vision by filling the faded filigree and rickety Rococo staircases of LA’s once fashionable Bunker Hill district (dominated visually by a trolley with the oddly doom-laden name of “Angel’s Flight”) with distorted shadows, turning the frames into a series of Jackson Pollock-like friezes that resemble protoplasmic writhing. Intercutting winding staircases that seem to stretch on for infinity with disintegrating storefronts that don’t fit architecturally, so that this landscape resembles a dream, the director purposely disorients a first-time viewer, except too much is happening – gunshot battles, seductions, brawls, recitations of Romantic poetry – for one to stop and notice. Aldrich also compresses and expands time, altering one’s perception of events, through the manipulation of rapid staccato editing that suddenly gives way to long hand-held takes, with the camera following characters from place to place, slowing the action down and making us squirm in our seats in suspense (a technique that Jean-Luc Godard adopted as a major element of his style in the mid-60′s).

This is not to imply that the film is merely a formal exercise. In fact, the screenplay is a model of narrative construction, in spite of the rapidity in which the dialogue expresses the plot’s complex twists and turns. For instance, one can examine the warm yet adversarial relationship between Mike Hammer and Police Detective Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy) in terms of the difference between how this is portrayed in the book and the film. Spillane spends reams of expository prose explaining their relationship – how they were war buddies, that they have dinner every week at the Blue Ribbon, etc. In the film, however, one merely sees Mike bum a cigarette from Pat, place the pack in his shirt pocket, which Pat then takes back. All that’s essential about them is expressed in this gesture, which clearly they’ve been repeating for as long as they’ve known each other. At the end of the film, Pat takes the pack back from Mike again and notices Mike has a radiation burn on his wrist. No dialogue is needed. Pat knows that Mike has opened the box and asks him for the key.

Aldrich and Bezzerides intended from the beginning for KISS ME DEADLY to be an “Anti-Spillane film.” By mounting an attack on the sadistic, anti-intellectual and Communist-hating Mike Hammer, the filmmakers felt they would also be attacking McCarthyism and a 1950′s conformist American culture that was poised on the edge of a nuclear precipice, seemingly rushing towards oblivion. Paradoxically, the film is the purest expression of Spillane’s vision in the cinema (though Spillane himself hated the movie).

As Bezzerides says in the accompanying featurette on the disc, after reading the Spillane book, “I knew I could make it better.” The characters are more believable, the world they inhabit darker and even more violent, and the action much more consistent and realistic than anything in the book. Bezzerides takes the two-dimensional (though immensely entertaining) pulp universe of Spillane and injects it with a shot of ambiguity and intense danger (as well as humor), investing Mike Hammer with a sense of mortality, making the film a lot scarier and also compulsively watchable, as a viewer never knows what might happen next.

As Mike Hammer, Ralph Meeker, a stage actor before this film, is a walking, talking, 6 foot, 180 pound sneer. He’s utterly obnoxious, yet also completely authentic and ultimately mesmerizing. Spillane’s Mike Hammer is a cartoon of super testosterone driven impulses, retooled as a Cold War hero. Meeker, on the other hand, creates a three-dimensional character in a cartoon universe, that unfortunately is all too close to the one we actually live in. The breathy quality in Meeker’s voice is simultaneously wistful and cagey, creating an insane contradiction – Sir Galahad as a clueless bedroom dick.

Though Mike Hammer is absurdly violent and stupid in the Spillane books, Bezzerides manages to make the detective even more so, yet somehow maintains the character’s authenticity and sense of integrity, quite different from the meaningless trashing of Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE. KISS ME DEADLY is a film that immortalizes Mike Hammer, even as it tears him to shreds. A number of changes were made in the character of Hammer in order to facilitate this, most importantly, changing his motive from vengeance to opportunism, or as he states in the beginning of the film, “What’s in it for me?” In the Spillane books, Mike is an independent operator (where he gets his money from is not clear) who focuses on righting wrongs visited upon less privileged members of society. In the film, he is a sleazy divorce detective who makes his living by siccing his girlfriend Velda on unsuspecting husbands, which Velda goes along with reluctantly.

Throughout the film, Mike is relentlessly criticized by all the women he meets. For instance, Christina, the woman Mike almost runs over on the highway, says, “You have only one real lasting love – you. You’re one of these self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself….You’re the kind of person who never gives in a relationship, but only takes. Ah, woman. The incomplete sex. And what does she need to complete her? Why, man, of course. Wonderful man.”

There is a vehemence, as well as a bitterness to Bezzerides and Aldrich’s tone, yet also a sense of pleasure in the genre conventions. Despite the critique of Mike Hammer’s character, the film remains faithful to Spillane’s work, while undermining the work’s moral implications. This is a trick that Aldrich performed throughout his career. For instance, the director was able to infuse THE DIRTY DOZEN, a savage indictment of the US military, with so much rah-rah camaraderie that it was a monster hit, enabling Aldrich to purchase his own studio. In addition, Aldrich liked to mix genres, such as the cross between Noir & sci-fi in KISS ME DEADLY, the amalgam of horror and the women’s picture in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE, and the placement of a football game in the middle of a prison break in THE LONGEST YARD.

As far as KISS ME DEADLY is concerned, because the film was so faithful to the extreme violence found in Spillane’s books, in addition to being highly critical of the policies of the then ruling Republican party, Aldrich’s film drew the ire of the Kefauver Commission in Congress, which tried to have it banned. Due to this political controversy, KISS ME DEADLY was only distributed in a few markets. Initially, the film was a box office and critical failure, finding champions only among such vanguard critics as Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris, in addition to Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in France, who lauded the film’s revolutionary style while ignoring its radical politics, to the extent that when Aldrich was interviewed by Cahiers du Cinema, he refused to discuss KISS ME DEADLY, as he considered the film an anti-McCarthy piece, not a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave.

As it has been pointed out by a number of commentators, Mike Hammer, the epitome of fast cars, big guns and dumb broads, is surrounded in KISS ME DEADLY by elements of high culture – especially Romantic poetry, Classical music and modern art. While this counterpoint between high adrenalin and high art is initially ironic, I feel it goes much deeper. (Of course, Mike Hammer can be seen as the literal embodiment of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels’ statement, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I take out my revolver.”)

Dr. G. E. Soberin (Albert Dekker), the main villain of the film, speaks in Classical allusions, especially about Cerberus and Pandora, and is also associated with Hypnos, the God of Slumber, as he prescribes sleeping pills for William Mist, owner of a modern art gallery, who falls into a deep sleep in order to avoid Mike’s interrogation. Also, the riddle which initially makes Mike aware of the mysterious box – “It’s very big, yet very small. It’s very important, but has no meaning.” – makes one think of Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx.

These fragments of high art are also there to serve the plot. For example, when Mike first enters the dead Christina’s apartment, he turns on the radio to hear Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” “She liked listening to that Classical music,” the super says. The music tells us something about Christina’s personality, and makes the fact that she would own a volume of Christina Rossetti’s poetry (a major clue in the film) more plausible. Also, because the music is titled “Unfinished”, it tells us something deeper about Christina’s life – it is unfinished – as is Mike’s quest. Later, Mike turns on the radio at home to hear Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quintet, which is almost an “in” joke, except it isn’t very funny.

As far as the Rossetti poem is concerned, and the stanza that allows Mike to solve the mystery (“But if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that we once had”), it not only reflects upon the state of Christina’s corpse, but also that corruption and darkness that possesses the film’s characters and American culture in 1955 as a whole.

Beginning in the 1950′s, Classical music on the radio was just another background sound, mashed in with pop, rock, sporting events, comedy, commentary and everything else that happened to be available to capture an audience. While the high art in KISS ME DEADLY is used to tell an alternative narrative from the narrow perspective of Mike Hammer, that of a society marching to its own death (hence the references to Cerberus, Pandora, etc), it is also a mish-mosh – Nat “King” Cole, Schubert, answering machine messages, the poetry of Christina Rossetti, a prizefight – all part of the cannibalistic orgy of that first decade where mass production came into play in terms of popular consumption. Because the cultural elements in KISS ME DEADLY are so undifferentiated, they ultimately refer less to a specific story than evoke a specific time and place.

Because of this, KISS ME DEADLY could be seen as one of the first “diary” films in the form of a genre exercise, exploding the conventions of plot to insert purely personal observations – a favorite piece of music, the specific way the light looked on a particular day, the quality of an actress’ face unrelated to her nominal character, an old friend who dropped by to say hello and was written into the film. This form that Aldrich developed as a specific reaction to McCarthyism and the culture that spawned it, ultimately lead to the French New Wave and beyond – films such as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, ALPHAVILLE (basically a shot for shot remake of KISS ME DEADLY) and their American counterparts MURDER BY CONTRACT, BLAST OF SILENCE, MICKEY ONE and the original version of THX1138. Despite KISS ME DEADLY’s pervasive influence, despite the detrimental conditions under which it was made (shot in 21 days on a budget of $425,000) the film remains remarkably fresh, as relevant and shocking and exciting to watch as it was in 1955.

Of course, KISS ME DEADLY is much more than a film that influenced Godard, Truffaut and countless post-modern thrillers. One finds a film that is perhaps the greatest expression of its genre, the Noirish detective tale, with all of the sleaze, sexuality and violence intact, along with a use of cinema that is as profound in its implications and poetic in its imagery and mythic associations as Jean Cocteau’s ORPHEUS, as funny and also frightening in its portrayal of a society bent on its own destruction as Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE, and as pleasurable to watch (while a million times better directed) as FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. In Criterion’s exquisite transfer and voluminous extras, there is a serious case being made for KISS ME DEADLY as the greatest film of the 1950′s, in the breadth of its influence and theme as well as for its innovative technique. In Alain Silver and James Ursini’s commentary, a case is also made for Robert Aldrich as the greatest director of the period. Don’t argue with me, just get the DVD. The Silver and Ursini commentary alone is worth the price of the disc, along with a great Mickey Spillane documentary, an essay on the Bunker Hill district where the film was shot, a piece on Bezzerides…well, you get the picture. Criterion’s release of KISS ME DEADLY belongs in the collection of everyone interested in motion pictures, and in the opinion of this reviewer, is the DVD of the year.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Back in 1978, I was the night manager of an art cinema on upper Third Avenue in Manhattan that was exhibiting DAYS OF HEAVEN, Terrence Malick’s now legendary second feature. One afternoon I showed up a little early to find myself surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic seniors who had just seen the movie. “They call the picture DAYS OF HEAVEN, so what about the angels? ” a portly man shouted to the people around him. “Listen Bernie,” a smiling, white-haired woman said. “It was great photography, wonderful acting, so who needs angels?”

It’s too bad Mr. Malick didn’t follow that advice for THE TREE OF LIFE, which has been playing in New York for the past few weeks after winning the Golden Palm at Cannes. Not that any winged messengers appear in Mr. Malick’s film, but much of the proceedings seem to be bathed in an other-worldly glow (courtesy of Douglas Trumbull, who designed the effects in 2001 and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) amid the whisperings of angelic voices, not to mention a sequence featuring the creation of the world, including cosmic flames, a cataclysmic tidal wave, and a fatherly dinosaur exhibiting tough love to his offspring, which climaxes in the rapid evolution of a tadpole into a human child who swims out of his mother’s womb into a small Texas town in the 1950′s.

Of course, F.W. Murnau (a director who is clearly an important influence on Mr. Malick’s imagery) had actual angels bringing Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien back together for the conclusion of SUNRISE (1927), a scene which reviewers at the time considered kitsch. In spite of its flaws, THE TREE OF LIFE has the potential to become an instant classic on the level of SUNRISE and CITIZEN KANE. So perhaps I’m being overly critical. Nonetheless, it’s as if Mr. Malick, whose 70′s films, BADLANDS and the aforementioned DAYS OF HEAVEN, both featuring a voice-over narration that was decidedly ironic and often clashed with what was going on visually, became possessed by the avenging ghost of Cecil B. DeMille, fashioning a framing device in the form of a sermon about America’s place’s in the divine order of things (borrowing in equal parts from the Book of Job and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species).

Not that I have anything against cinematic sermons. When THE TREE OF LIFE premiered at Cannes, Manohla Dargis of the NY Times ended her review by writing, “It’s a beautiful if hermetic vision that I admire for its ambition if finally not for its philosophy.” That statement made very little sense to me when I originally read it. Now that I’ve seen Mr. Malick’s film, I think the problem is not the philosophy per se, but the way a specific religious content is poured over the narrative of the film through the framing plot the way chocolate sauce used to be poured over a banana split at the local soda shop. If you take the ice cream and nuts out of the dish, you’ve got yourself a masterpiece. But that chocolate sauce is awfully sticky.

The story of THE TREE OF LIFE concerns a working class family in Waco (made up of a stern and distant father, a beatific mother and three sons) who are suddenly and unalterably marked by tragedy in the form of the middle son’s death. The film is bookended by Jack (performed by a grimacing Sean Penn), the oldest son and now middle-aged, looking back to his childhood to discover what went wrong. I love THE TREE OF LIFE, and feel it contains some of Mr. Malick’s best work, especially in the extended childhood sequences which exhibit a metaphysics of light previously only glimpsed in the director’s other films, not to mention an almost Proustian abandon in the film’s relationship to memory and meaning, bringing forth images of extraordinary delicacy.

However, the film’s basic function, in the way it presents itself from the outset, is to tell a story, specifically Jack’s attempt to come to terms with his past. While I have no argument with the way this story is told visually, and in fact feel that the experimental and elegiac manner of the film is one of its greatest strengths, the reasons for this family tragedy are presented so elliptically that the film’s conclusion, which should be very emotional, unfortunately didn’t work for me. It’s taken a week after seeing the film before I finally figured out exactly how Jack’s brother died and why this created an untenable situation between his parents. Nonetheless, I consider THE TREE OF LIFE to be one of the most extraordinary films I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been following Mr. Malick’s career for a very long time, and I’ve been waiting to see THE TREE OF LIFE, which was originally planned to go into production after DAYS OF HEAVEN, for more than 30 years. I’m aware that for Mr. Malick, filmmaking is often a process of discovery and transformation. For the past decade, Mr. Malick has been trying to express the inexpressible, divesting his films of expository elements, instead focusing on a Pantheistic exploration of nature, editing sweeping Steadicam shots together in a manner that simultaneously presents a situation in real time, while also attempting to portray the archetypal elements inherent in that situation. Because of this, the director has developed a dual editing rhythm that moves a narrative forward while suddenly lingering on images of nature seemingly unconnected to the story at hand, holding these shots for what seem like an inordinate length of time, a state of being, for want of a better word, that I would call meditative. It’s the contradiction between these meditative images, and a narrative that is often told through a rapid, contrapuntal editing rhythm that I think defines the place, esthetically, that Mr. Malick has now reached. This has caused, for some, a feeling of extreme disappointment, amid generally enthusiastic praise, upon the release of his new film.

During the week of June 13th, there was a very interesting discussion about THE TREE OF LIFE on Dave Kehr’s website, centering on a neo-Bazinian critique of Mr. Malick’s mosaic-like montage style. (Andre Bazin was one of the founders of Cahiers du Cinema, who argued for a deep-focus long take style as represented by directors Jean Renoir and William Wyler, whom Bazin considered more “democratic” because their films allowed a viewer’s eye to roam freely through the frames, and not be distracted by the more “manipulative” style of montage.) Many contributors on Mr. Kehr’s website expressed an nostalgic desire for classic American films that were “edited in the camera” as practiced by Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, and the “objective” long take typified by Otto Preminger, in addition to complaining about the number of shots per minute in Mr. Malick’s film (as if a paucity of edits were somehow linked to artistic quality). This perspective was most explicitly defined by Mr. Kehr, who criticized “the frantic, dissociated editing that needlessly fractures the narrative and prevents the emotions (already rather generic) from taking root.”

On my desk is a photo of my father burying me on the beach in wet sand that my mother took when I was a year old. It documents one of my earliest memories, and I can still imagine my father’s face quite clearly. His hair, which was reddish blonde, fell down across his green eyes in a smudge of sublime color. In my young life, I don’t think I had ever seen anything quite so beautiful. Behind him, the sun was a hazy yellow, reflecting off the water so that this intense azure glow flowed across his features. It’s this light, which is inscribed in my memory, and yet is mostly missing from the photograph, that I want to discuss in relation to the use of light, camera movement and montage, as well as the aesthetics of memory and point of view, in Mr. Malick’s film.

I agree with Mr. Kehr that there is something in THE TREE OF LIFE that gets in the way of emotion, but I would argue that the rapid editing is not the problem. For me, the major flaw is the lack of information in the opening scenes, which the associative editing partially alleviates. Rather than feeling left out, I was swept up in the flow of images, on a specific narrative level. It was only at the film’s conclusion that I realized I didn’t know enough about the characters’ relations with each other to have an emotional reaction to what I was seeing.

Everybody knows about childhood. In this respect, all of us are an audience of experts. Therefore, portraying the day to day life of a seven year old boy from deep inside his perception forms a very strong narrative in itself. This is accentuated by Mr. Malick’s editing, containing as it does an intense forward rhythm with a sudden lingering look backwards into the past. I feel that Mr. Malick’s attempt to do away with unnecessary exposition does not deter one having a deep emotional involvement in the childhood section of the film (roughly 103 minutes out of a 139 minute running time). Mr. Malick’s luminous mosaic of a densely detailed 1950′s Texas of the imagination became a Rorschach blot for my unconscious, enlisting me, along with the cinematographer, production designer and actors, as a collaborator. (Need I mention that Mr. Malick’s longtime collaborators, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Jack Fisk, produce work in THE TREE OF LIFE that comes close to genius –sorry, but I can’t think of a better word– and exists as an aesthetic achievement in its own right.)

Mr. Malick’s fragmentation of time and the continuity of narrative in THE TREE OF LIFE mirrors, I think, how we actually perceive events, and recapitulates the process of remembering the past and working through the roil of emotions in a manner that parallels the stream of consciousness techniques used by novelists such as William Faulkner and Cormack McCarthy. Giorgio Morandi, the Italian still life painter, was fond of saying, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.” On the other hand, in defense of Mr. Malick’s rapid, associative editing, one might also say, “Nothing is more real than abstraction.”

I’ve never before watched a film (except perhaps for sequences in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER) that has caused me to remember concretely what it was like to be a seven year old, especially the sense of unease and sudden anger in my relations with others (especially parents and teachers, in other words, those with power over me). In THE TREE OF LIFE, the children are not idealized nor seen as younger versions of adults, as happens in so many films. Instead, the child actors are allowed to express themselves as autonomous beings, giving us access to that forgotten county where all of us once lived. There’s a cruel and yet extremely tender interplay between the young Jack (brilliantly played by Hunter McCracken) and his younger brother which seemed very real to me. For instance, Jack encourages his younger brother to place his finger in an open lamp socket which Jack then plugs into the wall. Rather then recoiling in pain, the younger brother looks at Jack lovingly as the sudden jolt shocks him. There’s also a jarring scene during a hazily nostalgic Forth of July celebration in which the two boys steal a handful of fireworks and run into the woods, exploding the eggs in a bird’s nest. That cruelty and innocence (not to mention longing and direct, unmediated love) existing in children side by side is something that has been written about extensively, but to see it performed here in such an unselfconscious manner is very moving.

There’s an almost gothic sensibility at work revealing the possibility of a secret, secondary existence, far outside the programmatic notion of Grace versus Nature, in the close-ups of Hunter McCracken’s face. At certain points in the film, Mr. McCracken seems to contain two separate personalities, signaling a break in the very fabric of the film. (Call it duality, if you like, but for me these close-ups seeped outside of the film’s narrative flow.) This ambiguity is most fully realized narratively in the scene, shot in a single, breathtaking take, of young Jack stealing a slip from the unoccupied house of a young girl who sits across from him in elementary school. In the course of trying to hide the slip under a board by the river’s edge, Jack accidentally loses the silky fabric to the raging current, watching as the frilly undergarment suddenly seems to come alive as it drifts down the river out of sight. In that moment, ghosts seem to enter the film and take possession of both our own sensibilities as well as that of the young Jack’s.

Mr. Malick posits the flow of events from young Jack’s point of view, so that certain kinds of information about the adults surrounding him are left unspecified. In one of the most memorable scenes in the film (which is also a reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s LES CARABINIERS), Jack’s father (Brad Pitt) returns after a long absence dressed in white linen, embarking from a glimmering Chevy Impala station wagon to show Jack postcards and travel folders from around the world that he has accumulated. The light in this scene is so mysterious, every time I think about it tears come to my eyes. The light suffuses around Brad Pitt’s face in a near embrace and yet lingers outside, in the same way we sense the father wants to embrace the son and yet doesn’t.

One assumes Jack’s father is some kind of salesman, but other than this scene, there’s very little information. Anthony Lane of the New Yorker has found these ellipses extremely frustrating. For me, the lack of information is very consistent with the fact the story is told from the perspective of a child. Although my father showed me the cannibalized insides of television sets, I don’t think I really understood what he did for a living until I was 9 or 10 years old. Because Jack’s father is a frustrated classical musician ( a great deal is made of this in the film, both in terms of his precision in playing the organ and piano as well as swatches of music from his favorite composers, especially Berlioz) it’s also probable that he wouldn’t really take much pride in how he made his living and therefore wouldn’t spend much time discussing it with his son.

The other point of view that exists simultaneously with Jack’s childhood perspective is the middle-aged Jack’s process of remembering. As all of us middle-aged types know, the past does not exist as a whole, but rather comes back to us in fits and starts, with fleeting images of family gatherings and childhood dinners, inhabited by vague phantoms amid frustratingly arcane details – a floral patterned frock worn by a faceless, unknown relative fifty years before, for instance. I think this habit of memory to vanish, leaving only bits and pieces behind, is the reason Mr. Malick structured the majority of the film with montages of childhood events seen as if in a dream, images that some commentators have referred to as “generic.” (For instance, Jack’s mother freeing a monarch butterfly from her tangled hair, which then dances among her outstretched fingers, or the wrinkled face of a blue-eyed man who says, “See you in five years.”)

Rather, I think we are seeing visually the process of Jack’s remembering, beginning as vague, disconnected shots, fixing on specific times of day or the quality of light (hence, the focus on sweeping images of people in front of trees and occluded skies) then gaining in power as the film evolves, until Jack begins to put together the emotional core of his family’s life from the past and synthesizes these half remembered images with his persona in the present.

Still, the conflation of cosmic consciousness, fundamentalist Christianity, and Americana into a series of extremely over-ripe images at THE TREE OF LIFE’s conclusion almost seems like a conscious self-parody. For instance, the middle-aged Jack walks through a desiccated doorframe in a desolate desert landscape. Suddenly, all the adults from Jack’s childhood appear, bathed in a translucent light, including his mother. Jack’s girlfriend embraces him (where she came from I have no idea) and the spirit of Jack’s mother says, “I give him to you,” followed by a shot of a gigantic zygote being impregnated by a sperm to the music of a heavenly choir. Yes, it’s elegantly shot and edited, but also pure camp, to the point that I thought Jim Abrahams and the Zuker brothers (AIRPLANE!) had hijacked the film.

It’s possible Mr. Malick intended the plaintive voice-overs in THE TREE OF LIFE whispering about “God’s Grace” as well as the religious framing plot to be taken ironically. At least that would explain the perfunctory nature of the beginning and end of the film. It’s not really clear what the middle-aged Jack does for a living other than the fact he is seen walking through large glass and steel offices with a portfolio. Earlier, Jack is seen in a spare glass and concrete duplex drinking coffee with a woman in a dressing gown. As there is no dialogue, their relationship remains undefined, and she only appears for a few minutes in the entire film. Still, the conclusion places a great deal of importance in the fact that she and Jack are together and tries (unsuccessfully, I think) to link her with Jack’s mother and the idea of “Grace.” Also, other than the fact the middle-aged Jack appears as if he’s experiencing intestinal distress and shouts “Why God? Oh, why?” which is intercut with shots of his younger brother’s funeral, we never actually know what Jack’s feelings towards his younger brother are. For that matter, we don’t even know if his parents are still alive. (I’m assuming Jack’s mother is dead, since at the film’s end she is bathed in a heavenly glow.)

There’s a rumor on the Internet that Mr. Malick is considering releasing a six hour edit of THE TREE OF LIFE. It would be fascinating to see those scenes that are missing from the theatrical version of the film, except the version we now have is almost perfect, in my opinion. All that’s needed is about five or ten minutes additional information in the beginning to increase one’s understanding of what is at stake, emotionally, in the film.

In THE TREE OF LIFE, Mr. Malick takes one on a voyage to a strange and forbidding country, that of childhood, which I found as delightful and exhilarating as a day in the country. For me, it was a life-transforming experience, not to mention a very great film. I encourage everyone not to miss it, even though I found the trip to be a bumpy ride.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

For filmgoers of my generation, Cecil B. DeMille’s widescreen version of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS has always been held in esteem for its unique blend of tack and transcendence. When the film was released in November of 1956, Time Magazine compared DeMille’s nearly four-hour workout to a fifty foot chorus girl. (Could this have been an inspiration for THE ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN a few years later?) Recently I picked up a two-disc BluRay of a newly restored element from the original

VistaVision of DeMille’s final and longest, if not greatest, achievement. Having seen the film when it premiered in a theatre that was set up to project VistaVision, I was very curious to see whether the BluRay captured any of the film’s original dazzle.

I passed on the box set, in which the six discs are held in a plastic reproduction of Moses’ stone tablets, a characteristic mix of the bombastic and reverent which I’m sure DeMille would have approved. The box also includes a feature-length documentary as well as a new transfer of the silent 1923 TEN COMMANDMENTS, a much different and better film, in which the Biblical story is only used as a prologue, while the rest is set in modern times.

In the 1956 film’s introduction, DeMille says, “The Holy Bible omits some thirty years of Moses’ life. To fill in those missing years, we turn to ancient historians such as Josepheus.” Well, I’ve read Josephus, but I don’t recall anything about Moses being involved in a tempestuous love triangle with Princess Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) and his half-brother Prince Rameses (a glowering Yul Brynner, repeating his role of a noble savage from THE KING AND I, but with much less charm). “Your fragrance is like the wine of Babylon,” a love-drunk Moses tells Nefertiri, who waves her emerald-encrusted fan haphazardly in a manner that one assumes implies a grand passion. The marvelous Ms. Baxter, who embodied the scheming title character of Joseph Mankiewicz’ ALL ABOUT EVE (1951), snagging an Academy Award nomination in the process, here has no choice but to look petulant and repeat the same line, “Moses, Moses, Moses, what a stubborn, lovable fool you are!” throughout the picture. Poor Ms. Baxter.

Fortunately, the second half of the film deals with the historical Moses, rather than DeMille’s half-remembered fever dream of an Orientalist adventure tale. There is more than enough spectacle to set both DeMille and his designers all a-twitter, including day-glo colored plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea, Pharaoh’s chariots submerged in a glittery blue screen processed tidal wave, and even a full-blooded sex orgy involving the Golden Calf on Mt. Sinai (unfortunately within the chaste boundaries of the censors, so that the mingling bodies resemble an especially cryptic modern dance recital). What I found particularly striking, however, was how Moses (as performed by a stalwart yet surprisingly subtle Charlton Heston) was made into an especially complex figure, who refused almost to the very end any kind of active role in liberating his people, though was animated by a force that was his own yet seemed to come from outside him.

Seeing the 1956 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS at the tender age of five, for me the trick was VistaVision. In the theatre I went to, DeMille’s introduction was projected in standard size. Then the curtains closed, the lights went up briefly, and when the curtains parted again, I was confronted by this huge space that seemed to extend infinitely as far as my eye could see. Spread across the now gigantic screen was the Paramount logo re-imagined as Mt. Sinai, a frightening vision, awesomely magisterial and quasi-three-dimensional, combining the hand of God with that of the box office. How could I help but watch such an extravagant display?

It was Indian Summer, with the air uncharacteristically balmy for early November. I wanted to romp about in piles of autumn leaves, spreading a riot of crimson and gold across neighboring lawns, not to be dragged by my mother to a three hour and thirty-nine minute movie “with intermission,” as DeMille stated in his introduction. I didn’t even know what an intermission was. In fact, I was so impressed when the word “Intermission” appeared, edged in guilt, naturally, against a scarlet background, that I dreamt about it that night.

In my dream, I was walking about the craggy set used in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS for the burning bush sequence when a one-eyed monster appeared. I ran into a cave, and suddenly everything changed, for I was in a dark alley recently washed by rain, with fog-enshrouded streetlamps. At the end of the alley was a phone booth next to a raging river. The monster was coming closer, and I realized there was no escape. Then the phone started to ring, so I picked up the receiver. A voice said, “You are having a dream. Pinch yourself three times and you’ll wake up.” So I pinched myself three times, and still dreaming, woke up in the theatre where I had seen THE TEN COMMANDMENTS with the word “Intermission” on the screen. Sitting next to me were my friends from the first grade. “I didn’t think the phone booth was very plausible,” one of them commented.

It was seventy degrees and sunny on that Sunday afternoon when I went to see THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. After watching a stony faced Charlton Heston (in an increasingly fake-looking beard) transform staffs into snakes and water into blood for three hours and thirty-nine minutes, I had a real shock, for not only was it night, but the trees were covered with freshly fallen snow. For me, too young to have become familiar with the mercurial nature of the weather in upstate New York, I considered this a sign from above that everything I had seen in the movie was true.

In fact, I mentioned this to my classmates as we sat under the cafeteria tables during an air raid, which the school staged in case of nuclear war every other Monday. “The snow was a sign from God,” I said. At first my classmates just looked at me. Then finally one of them said, “How often does it snow in Syracuse in November?” Of course, it happened all the time, though for my friend Mel, who coincidentally saw THE TEN COMMANDMENTS back in 1956 in North Carolina on the same Sunday as I, exiting his small town theatre into that freak snowstorm that blanketed the entire East Coat must have seemed even more miraculous.

In any case, more than fifty years have passed. I’m quite a different person (or so I’d like to think) from the one who sat in that theatre in Syracuse, New York. As I watched the BluRay, in spite of the ridiculous length, a narrative that made little sense, Edward G. Robinson’s habitually vanishing toupee, Vincent Price’s sublimely bored expression, John Derek’s inability to recite the simplest line of dialogue, the beauty of the Egyptian locations (which I was looking forward to) rendered utterly phony by more traveling mattes of tempestuous skies than you could possibly count, the languorous pacing that would make a Phillip Glass opera seem action-packed; in spite of all this, there was an intangible something that approximated what it was like seeing THE TEN COMMANDMENTS for the first time in 1956, and I was enthralled.

The answer as to the how and why is a bit complex, combining as it does the technological with the evocations of emotions I haven’t felt since I was a child. Like many children, I completely believed in the spirit world. In fact, there was a tree on the way to the theatre that I knew was populated by ghosts, and I said hello to them as my mother and I passed. (What my mother thought of this, or if in fact she even noticed, I have no idea.)

What I remember most from seeing THE TEN COMMANDMENTS as a child was this feeling of faith that seemed to seep from the very grain of the film. For whatever reason, this intense religiosity of DeMille’s came across to me specifically as an awareness of being Jewish, ultimately leading to my moving to New York City and entering a yeshiva, a really strange place on Riverside Drive and 140th street that was a former nunnery, with Gothic turrets that overlooked the Hudson River. Suffice it to say that I quickly became disillusioned, and one gloomy afternoon began walking down Broadway deep in thought until I found myself in front of the New Yorker theatre, which was playing a double bill of NORTH BY NORTHWEST and SHANE. In the convivial darkness of the New Yorker’s art deco interior, I discovered what NYU professor William K. Everson later referred to as the religion of cinema. In a dozen years, I had come full circle.

Since DeMille mentions in the film’s introduction that he based his script on the Medrash, a Hebrew commentary to the Torah and one of the books I studied in yeshiva, I thought I would comment briefly. First of all, according to the Medrash, Yoheved, Moses’ mother, was a midwife, and one of the people most responsible for saving many first born Jewish males from Pharaoh’s decree. What a wonderful plot twist that would have made! Unfortunately, this information is nowhere to be found in DeMille’s film. In Hebrew, Yoheved’s name is formed of the same letters, yod hey vov hey, that make up the divine name of God. Think about that a moment and see how it expands one’s conception of the character. Then again, seeing as the majority of DeMille’s prospective audience didn’t know Hebrew, I can understand why this was not explored.

Although THE TEN COMMANDMENTS in conception as well as execution is inept in the extreme, nonetheless there is this aspect of simple faith unadorned, that transcends all the flaws inherent in the film. As Andrew Sarris points out in his essay on DeMille in The American Cinema, DeMille was possibly the last director who believed in telling a story for its own sake. It is DeMille’s investment in this story, no matter how implausible, combined with the audacity of his images, that weaves a spell to which most viewers, whatever their personal beliefs, succumb. It’s also a movie that is utterly stunning to look at, as well as jaw-dropping in its scale and ambition, which is finally brought to a close approximation of its original state by the amazing presentation on this Blu-ray.

DeMille, of course, was one of the great directors of silent cinema, whose work in the teens and twenties has never been equaled, and in both his innovative use of lighting and editing as well as his almost intuitive sense of imagery, in which a three-dimensional sense of character transcended the often melodramatic subject matter, influenced later directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang. If it hadn’t been for my love of the 1956 TEN COMMANDMENTS, I might never have discovered DeMille’s silents at such an early age. The RKO theatre in downtown Syracuse showed silent films on Saturday morning when I was growing up, and I went to see the 1923 TEN COMMANDMENTS, expecting another version of the story of Moses, instead discovering a unique universe, not to mention a completely different consciousness, expressed by DeMille and his fellow directors, which was lost to us for almost three quarters of a century, and is now only beginning to be unearthed on DVD.

Starring such charismatic talents as Rod La Roque and Nita Naldi, the 1923 silent version tells a story of two brothers that is moralistic in the extreme; yet, because of the naturalistic performances and DeMille’s use of lighting and framing, is extraordinarily subtle. DeMille creates a series of memorable images that somehow invoke the Biblical story of the prologue while avoiding the campy two-dimensionality of the 1956 version.

This is not to imply that DeMille’s sound films are not worth seeing, though they are on a much lower level of accomplishment, both in terms of subject matter as well as a strident campiness that comes in around the time of SIGN OF THE CROSS, a sexually suggestive Biblical spectacle that was so successful DeMille kept repeating the formula for the rest of his career. Still, there are exquisite moments, such as the barge scene in CLEOPATRA, and even whole movies, such as THE BUCCANEER and REAP THE WILD WIND.

Whereas, on an aesthetic level, the 1956 TEN COMMANDMENTS is far from DeMille’s best work, the use of VistaVision is extremely impressive, and, as seen on this BluRay, is an artistic achievement in its own right. Vista Vision was originally shot and projected horizontally as opposed to vertically, which expanded the frame by shooting an image twice as large (eight perforations as opposed to the normal four, for those of you out there who need to know). This larger image created, at least in the hands of a sophisticated visual artist like DeMille, an overwhelming emotional response in the viewer through the use of depth and color, which was greatly enhanced by the additional detail and crystalline smoothness, as well as by being printed on finer grain film (which was then just coming into use).

There’s a quality about DeMille’s images that not only seems to pre-date the sound era, but the 20th Century altogether. The compositions, balanced in their framing, appear classical, but also depend on extreme contrasts in lighting and in the relationship between foreground and background, often placing darkly lit figures with glowing highlights (such as hair) against a shallow, undefined space that suddenly opens up, either through camera movement or editing, taking a viewer by surprise. This causes what one is seeing to appear simultaneously iconic and yet of the moment, getting under one’s skin.

A good example of this is in the beginning of the Red Sea sequence, where the Pharaoh, in a darkened alcove of red stone and dressed in dark blue except for a glowing breastplate, raises his spear, and is surrounded by speeding chariots with white horses that have come from behind, the wheels and ornaments a bright gold, and the soldiers in red cloaks. The camera then pans against their movement so that everything seems blurred. In the larger format and sharper clarity of VistaVision, these colors take on almost abstract patterns, like a moving painting, layer after layer flowing before one’s eyes. Add to this an uncompressed stereo mix with blaring trumpets coming from the surround speakers in the same rhythm as the chariots moving on screen, and you have an image that is fairly hypnotic.

Ultimately, DeMille’s film attempts to be all things for all people, from a parable about freedom appealing to the then burgeoning Civil Rights movement (“Go, proclaim liberty throughout all the lands, to all the inhabitants thereof,” Moses says on the way to heaven), to a sermon about spiritual piety with fundamentalist overtones (“Who is on the Lord’s side, let him come to me!” Moses says before smashing the tablets of the Law and destroying the Golden Calf), to the heart-rending melodrama of a princess who loves not wisely but too well, to a lush, eye-popping boy’s adventure with lots of charging armies in chariots. Because of this, the film is a series of contradictions, veering between sober-sided pomposity and the sublimely silly (in a way mirroring the contradictions of the Holy Bible itself), finally accruing meaning by focusing both visually and narratively upon the gaze and transformation of a specific human consciousness, that of the prophet Moses.

What allows THE TEN COMMANDMENTS to still speak to us today is not only DeMille’s faithfulness to the human complexity of the man called Moses, but also by DeMille remaining faithful to himself. The filmmaking expresses the artist DeMille had been from the very beginning of his development, who first cried “action” on a vacant lot in an undeveloped Hollywood in 1913, and remained the same through the coming of the studios, the revolutions of sound, color and widescreen, as well as the transformation of the country during the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, and the Second World War. Due to DeMille’s steadfastness, the film’s story of a human being’s vision merges with that of its maker, and his surprisingly visionary cinematic style.

This Blu-ray from Paramount is the first home video I have seen that is close to the original VistaVision presentation of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS in both its visual virtuosity as well as a sense of the grandiose (and I mean that in a good way). While the aspect ratio is roughly 1:78:1, I myself remember the frame being closer to 2:00:1 when I saw THE TEN COMMANDMENTS back in 1956. Of course, it was a long time ago, and it’s possible that being used as I was to standard aspect ratios in neighborhood theaters of 1:35:1, the additional space and clarity simply bowled me over. If you’re a fan of this film, I would simply junk whatever other transfers you own. In terms of velvety color and remarkable, almost three-dimensional clarity, not to mention the uncompressed brilliance of Elmer Bernstein’s magnificent score, finally presented in true stereophonic sound, nothing else holds a candle to this remarkable BluRay, which is highly recommended.

For a long time, I’ve been a huge fan of Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, who have run Milestone Films out of their home as a labor of love on the sparest of shoestrings, resurrecting such films lost to the ravages of time and caprices of fashion as KILLER OF SHEEP and I AM CUBA. Milestone Films DVDs come with the most exquisite of transfers amid a bounty of interesting and informative extras. This sort of thing is not easy to do, especially in the shrinking DVD market, so I wanted to give their new release what support I could.

ARAYA is a movie I’ve never heard of before, though it did have a theatrical run here two years ago, which somehow went right past my radar. The film is considered a landmark in Venezuela as a prototype of poetic realist Latin American cinema of the 1960′s, and also won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, the International Critics Award, shared with Alain Resnais’ HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, and Le Grand Prix de la Commission Superieure Technique. In the United States, however, ARAYA sunk into a fog of cultural obscurity from which it has only now emerged, thanks to Milestone Films and this fabulous DVD, which has some of the most dazzling black and white cinematography I’ve ever seen.

The film, shot in 1957 by Margot Benacerraf, a Venezuelan journalist whose first and only feature this was, documents in brittle, iridescent images a treacherous universe of sea, sand and sun, lorded over both visually and dramatically by gigantic pyramids of salt, gathered up, then replenished by workers resembling bowed supplicants. Every day, the men of the island of Araya stack salt in pyramids to dry, while their wives and children shovel the salt of the previous day into mesh bags and sew them shut.

Araya is an island off the southern coast of Venezuela, whose harsh, desert-like terrain contains the largest salt marsh in Latin America. Founded by the Spanish conquistadores in 1500, this community system of mining salt was still in place when Ms. Benacerraf came upon the island in the late 1950′s. Araya’s inhabitants, who lived with no electricity or running water in ancient ramshackle huts separated into two communities – one for the salt miners, who were paid for their labor by a French company; the other by fishermen who sold a portion of their catch to the salt miners – existed in a kind of bubble, outside of time and seemingly unconnected to the modern, industrialized world of the 1950′s.

In reality, that modern world was quickly approaching in the form of a factory for processing salt that was being built as the film was being made. Therefore, Ms. Benacerraf’s main interest was to document what she refers to as “the ancient system of community labor” which through an incomprehensible quirk of fate was somehow preserved in all of its harsh beauty and brutal equanimity on the island of Araya.

The film follows the lives of the inhabitants of the island from sunrise to another sunrise on the following day. Because nothing happens except for the inexorable pattern of everyday life, Ms. Benacerraf is able to focus on the essential human core of this apparently exotic existence. Everything in this film – from the sun beating down on tempestuous ocean waves to pale pyramids of salt stacked on undulating stretches of sand – is seen from the perspective of people for whom these sights are simply part of ordinary existence. Somehow, this immersion in the quotidian in both storytelling and camera style makes for a much more compelling and satisfying film then one would think possible.

In Ms. Benacerraf’s film, the camera never seems to stop moving, just as the subjects of her film never seem to rest from their constant activity, and the pyramids never stop growing and simultaneously shrinking. Because of the indelible link of family labor with the harsh environment around them, where both object and subject merge in the shadows of the past to open a window upon the future, ARAYA posits a sense of community as an almost mystical communion with nature which is the central focus of the film, like a Pablo Neruda poem come to life. (Oddly enough, when Ms. Benacerraf finished the editing, she initially approached Neruda to provide a narration, who responded, “Your film is already a poem. What do you need another poem for?”)

For instance, in an image which is used as the illustration for the DVD box, we see Beltran Pereda, the patriarch of one of four families we follow through the course of the film, ascend to the top of a pyramid, his arms upraised. Behind him, as in a stanza of Neudra’s (the hand’s weight, the bird’s weight, are one/aerial substances, the bird or the man/alike in their self-will, their flights, and their passions…” ) a seagull raises its wings as it flies towards the sun, rising above the wispy clouds that part like a curtain. After following the bird’s ascent, the camera first pans then cuts to the ground below, where we see Beltrans’ wife, Petra, look up towards her husband as she finishes sewing up the last bag of salt that will go to the mainland that day.

I consider the continually moving camera of ARAYA, linear yet mysterious, linking its subjects to both the specificity of the land as well as the universality of the cosmos, as a harbinger of the revolutionary cinema of the 1960′s, realized in the films of such directors as Glauber Rocha and Miguel Littin. Ultimately, the camera movements and editing rhythms in ARAYA, which are simultaneously mythic in their poetic vision yet specific in the day-to-day activity that is being documented, seem to express an expansion of consciousness. “This is ours,” the images seem to say. “This is our sun. This is our salt. These are our people.”

In an extra that accompanies the feature, the filmmaker returns to Araya after 50 years, and meets with the subjects that have survived. The pyramids of salt have vanished, replaced by a factory, and the standard of living for the inhabitants of the island is much higher than before. (In the documentary, the salt marsh is pink and rose against a neon blue sky, making one regret that Ms. Benacerraf chose to shoot her film in black and white.) One elderly gentleman, Benito, who was in his early 30′s while the film was being made, laughingly complains how Ms. Benacerraf would make him repeat the same action over and over, “but she directed me so tenderly I couldn’t possibly refuse.”

While this kind of rehearsal seems the antithesis of the spontaneous aesthetic of documentary (in the liner notes, Ms. Benacerraf seems to anticipate this objection by calling her film a “tone poem” as opposed to a documentary), the pre-planning enabled Ms. Benacerraf to create the extraordinary sequences that move from close-ups of the individuals at work to panoramic views of the surrounding area, which not only imparts a palpable sense of the individuals in their environment, but also manages to fuse the present with the past.

Although I feel ARAYA is a true discovery that should be seen by everyone, the style of the film is somewhat problematic. I’m particularly referring to the irritating and mostly irrelevant narration – for instance, “They reinitiate the daily ritual of the salt, reencountering their same ancient gestures endlessly under the same sun.” – which works against the subtle, visionary quality of Ms. Benacerraf’s imagery (it’s too bad the filmmaker didn’t heed Neruda’s advice) as well as the sleep-inducing score with crescendos of cascading notes.

I also have problems with some of the editing choices the director made. For instance, her subjects seem completely isolated in an “existential” manner while being surrounded by family members in the midst of back-breaking labor. We hear their voices on the soundtrack but almost never see them speaking to each other. Instead, they stare out into space like stone faces carved in ancient monuments. This is something that I find not only implausible but also pulls me out of the reality of the film.

As I stated at the outset, Scott McQueen’s restoration of ARAYA is simply breathtaking, containing some of the most amazing black and white photography I’ve ever seen. Milestone’s 16×9 anamorphic transfer is utterly immaculate without any electronic flaws, looking to these eyes like a theatrical 35mm print projected under optimal conditions. The extra features are substantial and fairly engrossing, including Ms. Benacerraf’s short film about the Venezuelan artist Reveron, which is of similar quality and visual elegance as the feature which it accompanies.

While certain ultimately superficial aspects of the production, such as music and narration, definitely are beginning to show their age, ARAYA remains not only a revelation as filmmaking, but an unique documentation of a centuries old culture that has now vanished from the earth, and is therefore Highly Recommended.

It looks as if DILLINGER IS DEAD, an indescribable concoction from 1969 that mixes both Marxes (Groucho & Karl) in unpredictable ways, is turning into the forgotten DVD of the year. Amid all the current hoopla Criterion and NYC’s Film Forum have geared up for BREATHLESS’ 50th anniversary (including a Film Comment cover story and a tepid infomercial TWO IN THE WAVE, which presents a pouty French actress with a mole irresolutely thumbing through yellowing copies of Cahiers du Cinema aided by a perfunctory voice-over that reveals nothing of the film’s ostensible subject), Marco Ferreri’s DILLINGER IS DEAD, a recent Criterion release from the same decade, has been almost completely ignored.

As comic Sandra Bernhard once said about Patti Smith (“She was so ahead of her time she took ten years off”), DILLINGER IS DEAD, while steeped in the Zeitgeist of the late sixties – Michelangelo Antonioni crossed with extra-strength Purple Haze – has a clarity of vision and a purity of performance that places it smack dab in the present, evoking, for instance, Marina Abramovic’s recent exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which included stationary nude performers that gallery visitors couldn’t help but touch. Not that I’m suggesting you leave greasy fingerprints all over your widescreen tv while watching DILLINGER IS DEAD. But there is a similar mix of serene contemplativeness and messy provocation that animates Marco Ferreri’s one of a kind film, transcending the limits of genre or precursors (although the mischievous persona of Alfred Hitchcock comes to mind) making DILLINGER IS DEAD up to the minute, utterly compulsive viewing.

Staring Michel Piccoli, that genial anarchist of so many Bunuel films, DILLINGER IS DEAD is a little like having a conversation with a space alien whose only knowledge of English comes from watching re-runs of THE MOD SQUAD. A paradox, to be sure, but nonetheless a very specific one. With the late 60′s being rehashed so repetitively in recent films (from ACROSS THE UNIVERSE to TAKING WOODSTOCK) it’s refreshing to watch something from that period which definitively bursts the double stranglehold of reverence and nostalgia. DILLINGER IS DEAD, which, among other things, is a comedy about the death of consumer culture by reveling in its products to excess, embodies an inspired kind of nonsense that in the end is impossible to watch complacently. Or, if you prefer, let’s say the film sets forth a comic misunderstanding that somehow manages to evoke existential dread, while giving us a seemingly happy ending much sunnier than any found in a Doris Day film.

In 1970, when DILLINGER IS DEAD premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, it seemed to those who saw the film like a bolt out of the blue, marvelous but devoid of any context or contemporary exegesis. Today, glossily presented in Criterion’s pop art jewel box design of red, orange and blue polka dots, the film seems equally marvelous, not so much a film of the past as an simple human expression, initially puzzling, and then madly inebriating.

As you can see, I’m having difficulty describing what DILLINGER IS DEAD is really about. There’s no actual narrative or believable, three-dimensional characters (this is not a criticism, but one of the film’s strengths), just a series of incidents that are also open-ended visual metaphors anchored to Piccoli’s sublime physical presence, shot in lusciously sensual color, but framed very haphazardly, like a home movie shot by a precocious three-year old. So perhaps I should construct a metaphor of my own, in the form of a story.

I remember very little about 1970, but for some reason DILLINGER IS DEAD, which I never actually saw until this DVD release, as I was out of town at a peace rally in Washington, DC during the film’s only New York screening, remains etched in my mind. Maybe it’s because my roommate Michael was so enthusiastic. “I just saw the greatest movie ever made,” he said. “Except you can’t see it.”

It was a balmy Saturday in June and we were walking past the local supermarket – Key Food, if you must know – on Avenue B and 12th Street. Elderly women with shopping carts were milling about the entrance, but the rest of the street was deserted, the sidewalk cast reddish-brown from the uniformly painted tenements caught in the glare of the noonday sun.

“What’s the title,” I asked.

“DILLINGER IS DEAD,” he said. “Except the movie has nothing to do with Dillinger.”

“So what happens?”

As I said, the sun was beating down, but with a fillip of a spring-like breeze lifting girls’ miniskirts and also rumpling my hair, not to mention putting a positive slant on the grim debris and broken down buildings around us. Michael pulled out a press release from MOMA, which had a still of Michel Piccoli holding a painted revolver with polka dots.

“Not much, “he said. “This gas mask designer played by Piccoli, he can’t sleep, so he cooks a gourmet meal. He watches home movies and tries to break the fourth wall by placing his hands against a bikini-clad girl’s breasts.”

“Just like Godard’s LES CARABINIERS.”

“Yes. Except Ferreri focuses on Piccoli’s hands, which dance in the beam of the projector gate among the shadows like in a German silent.”

“NOSFERATU.”

“NOSFERATU meets Buster Keaton. Piccoli finds an old revolver wrapped in a newspaper about Dillinger’s death. He paints the gun bright red with white polka dots.”

“How decorative.”

“Very. Then he wakes up the maid played by Annie Girardot, asks her to strip, pours honey on her naked back and licks it off.”

“So does he kill everybody at the end?”

“No. He makes a chocolate mousse.”

Suddenly, two guys jumped me with knives and started going through my pockets. It all happened so fast my roommate didn’t even notice but kept on walking ahead. The street looked the same, the sunlight was the same, but now everything had changed. One mugger took my wallet and the other Chairman’s Mao’s little red book which an ex-girlfriend had given me as a parting gift and I kept in my back pocket as a keepsake.

The mugger showed his buddy the little red book and gave me the power salute. “Hey,” he said. “This dude’s cool.” He gave me back the little red book.

“All power to the people,” the other mugger said. Then he gave me back my wallet.

That most definitely would not happen today. Because of this, I wanted to sketch a portrait of my life when DILLINGER IS DEAD was first screened, to explain why the idea of Ferreri’s film still resonates for me to the extent that I rushed out and bought the DVD. Of course, you’re going to need a little more motivation than that, since you didn’t get your wallet back when you were mugged for the first time, did you?.

For a brief moment in the Summer of 1970, it seemed as if the world had changed, that the patterns of exploitation and alienation between people had broken inexorably, and that we could actually speak to each other as human beings, unfettered by economic or political barriers. I think that for Marco Ferreri, in post-May ’68 Europe, there was the same feeling of giddy liberation, and this sense of hope animates every frame of DILLINGER IS DEAD. When Marco Ferreri, in an interview included in the booklet speaks of “essential images,” I believe he is referring to a cinema that embodies this feeling of freedom. Each image of DILLINGER IS DEAD could go off into a completely different direction. Watching the film, there is this sense of being in the moment, where framing and camera movement become liberated from plot and theme, so that the theme of liberation itself – in all its paradoxical and provocative possibilities – stares us straight in the face.

Because DILLINGER IS DEAD is presented by Criterion, there’s a great deal of context on the disc itself, especially the cherubic, paradoxical presence of director Marco Ferreri. Ferreri’s essential role as a provocateur, not to mention that of a walking contradiction, can be observed in action in an interview in the accompanying booklet, where, in a conversation with two left-wing critics who are praising DILLINGER IS DEAD, he criticizes the very act of talking about films as “elitist.” This sense of provocation can also be seen in a segment of a roundtable discussion from French TV, where, with a twinkle in his eye, Ferreri states that cinema is dead, then, after the filmmakers around him try to shout him down, he eulogizes the death of cinema as epitomized in the lost sense of community once found in a movie theatre, especially in New York, where immigrants went to learn the language and the mysterious ways of their new country. “Our films,” he says, “shown on video, will continue to be made, but not cinema.”

Adriano Apra, on another extra feature (in spite of Ferreri’s opinions on this subject) spends twenty minutes discussing the many films that are parodied in DILLINGER IS DEAD. Although Mr. Apra spends a great deal of time looking for connections to other 60′s films, for me, DILLINGER IS DEAD is simply unique. In fact, the appropriation of imagery from Antonioni, Fellini and Rossellini makes Marco Ferreri’s film seem even more original. This may be due to the feelings of estrangement caused by the appearance of familiar imagery recast in a completely different light, the way Times Square might look as seen from the perspective of a passenger on the space shuttle, instantly nostalgic yet strangely detached; or to take a more down-to-earth example, listening to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” while taking the escalator after shopping in the Time-Warner Building’s concourse.

Although Anita Pallenberg (Rolling Stone Brian Jones’ lover at the time of his death) as Piccoli’s mostly slumbering wife brings to mind another paradoxically cool yet provocatively unclassifiable 60′s film in which she also appears, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s PERFORMANCE, the work DILLINGER IS DEAD most reminds me of, both in terms of its originality as well as the exploration of the inner recesses of the mind in an increasingly inhospitable world, is CRASH, not the feel-good Oscar winner but David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel. Many years ago, I met Mr. Ballard at a book signing here in Manhattan. Afterwards, we went to Ray’s Pizza for coffee, and he told me that the French edition of Crash was a highly moral, life-affirming act. Soon after that, Mr. Ballard received a letter from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard stating that Crash was, on the contrary, a pathological act of anger and violence against humanity. “And you know,” Mr. Ballard said, winking at me. “He was absolutely right.”

Whether a highly moral, life-affirming act or the expression of a pathological anger against humanity, Marco Ferreri’s DILLINGER IS DEAD is simply wonderful, not to mention unmissable, especially if you haven’t yet experienced this deliriously seductive carnival-like creation, with its candy colored cinematography inviting a viewer to partake lavishly of the film’s meditation on the human condition in the form of a comedy. In addition to the utterly sublime transfer, Criterion also presents memorable archival interviews with Michel Piccoli and Marco Ferreri that you’ll probably want to own if you have any regard at all for these unique individuals. For me, DILLINGER IS DEAD is my favorite Criterion disc so far this year.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED (****½)