Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

This post is a strange non-sequitur after nearly a month of silence, especially with so many threads dangling and so many novelties (like a redesigned website!) looming on the horizon... but this is the weekend of Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-Thon, and I hate to miss out. Once you see the beautifully illustrated and deliciously detailed showcase of Chicago cinemas in 1927 that Goatdog has prepared as the centerpiece to his feature, you'll want to participate, too.

All the Oscar enthusiasts out there probably know that during the first year of the Academy Awards, honoring films exhibited in 1927 and 1928, the "Best Picture" category was complemented by a second race called "Artistic Quality of Production," designed to honor films that made extraordinary achievements in their overall formal techniques and poetic modes of expression. F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was the winner, and anyone who has beheld that pearly, rapturous masterpiece would hardly dispute the outcome. Still, rumor has it that the path to victory was cleared for Sunrise by some ideological misgivings about an equally esteemed and durable masterpiece, King Vidor's The Crowd; indeed, the Academy Board had originally anointed The Crowd as the winner until Louis B. Mayer spent all night filibustering against it.

The implication behind this widely accepted Academy lore is that the third entrant in this race, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, was a bridesmaid from the beginning. Given the legendary status of its fellow nominees, Chang may well have deserved its bronze-medal finish, but the movie, an enormous commercial hit at the time of its release, deserves a much bigger audience and more vocal critical support than it has tended to elicit. When Andrew Sarris published The American Cinema in 1968 and basically rewrote popular American film studies as a hierarchical constellation of auteurs, he didn't even afford Cooper and Schoedsack their own paragraph or chapter (this despite the critical and commercial colossus of King Kong), and Chang doesn't appear anywhere in his catalogue of 1927's major releases. Image Entertainment, through its Milestone Collection imprimatur, released a splendid and feature-packed DVD of the film back in 2000, but it's hard to find stores that stock it or places to rent it, apart from online behemoths like Amazon and Netflix.

What I love about Chang, a film as exciting and entertaining to teach as it is to watch, is that even a casual viewer can see how Cooper and Schoedsack are simultaneously feeding into the nascent genre of the feature documentary even as they are telegraphing the various short-cuts, contrivances, and white lies (in more sense than one) on which their sentimentally exciting and affectionate ethnographic adventure-yarn depends. Like its obvious model, Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Chang introduces us to a genial but hardworking nuclear family who come to stand in for the entire region they inhabit (northern Thailand, in this case) and a vast imaginary field of "custom" and "tradition" that ostensibly permeates the area. Kru, our protagonist, his wife Chantui, and their children live in an elevated cottage with their pet monkey Bimbo (about whom more later). The family mostly live on the food they grow and the animals they hunt, though we also enjoy brief glimpses of a wider village life in which they participate, on the occasions when they leave their isolated home. Chang already makes for beautiful, engaging viewing just on the bases of the radiant location photography, the textures of the foliage, the ground, and the manmade structures, the spontaneous movements of the children and their pets.

As with Nanook, most of the humble "life" and domestic rituals we observe in Chang are recreations of already-outmoded or fanciful practices, enacted by a locally selected cast who were very conscious of performing for the camera. Kru really was married to Chantui, and their onscreen children really were their children, which is more than you can say for Nanook, and as the senior location scout and interpreter for the film crew, Kru himself enjoyed more of the creative process and was perhaps more creatively involved in the staging of his own (mis)representation than was Allakariallak, the Itinivuit man who played Flaherty's "Nanook."* In these ways, Chang captures a family group and a setting that are slightly more "real" than Nanook's, and yet the film flaunts its artificiality much more obviously. Some well-shot and extremely exciting sequences of "spontaneous" leopard attacks are nonetheless blocked suspiciously well toward the sightlines and placements of the cameras; the interior shots of the treehouse, in at least some instances, don't match the exterior perspectives of what is supposed to be the same structure.

Then there is Bimbo, the monkey, who pulls a peculiar triple-duty within Chang's terms as comic relief, as a primary site of audience identification (doting on the cute children, fleeing various predators), and as an uncomfortably anthropomorphized character, blurring the human/animal divide in ways that refract poorly on the film's representations of Kru and his family. If you count the title cards, I believe that Bimbo has the most "dialogue" in the movie, interacting with the family in a fully integrated way. He has some close shaves escaping a leopard and an elephant that make obvious use of rear-projection and other photographic tricks. Cooper and Schoedsack dote on Bimbo in a way that they don't on the human characters, and every viewer has to decide whether this choice relieves the humans of the obligation to be "adorable" or if Chang implies a mental, emotional, and linguistic continuity among the people of Siam and the gibbons in their midst.

Whatever its political implications, Chang (the Thai word for "elephant") is a remarkably efficient entertainment, packing more visual punch and pulse-quickening spectacle into 69 minutes than Trader Horn did, and with less jarring cuts between the personal scenes and the animal footage. Indeed, Chang's cameras get daringly close to several beasts, and though you notice and even relish the clear fictional contrivance of the climactic elephant stampede—it would be horrible if this razing of an entire village, portrayed to us as entertainment, were real—the pure, thundering spectacle of this sequence is quite something to behold. Watching one pissed-off elephant maul Kru's hut when she thinks he's kidnapped her baby is impressive enough, but a sprinting fleet of elephants is something altogether different, without so much as a pixel of special effects.

Chang scored with the public and with the industry. As you'll notice from the copious clippings and press notes included on the DVD, the exotic stories about the filming of Chang—frequently turning on the directors' reckless pursuit of the best, closest footage of their dangerous, unpredictable animals—were almost as crowd-pleasing as the film itself. If Chang's box office earned the duo the opportunity to direct King Kong, Cooper and Schoedsack's reputations as bold explorers and thrill-seeking image-makers certainly played into the Kong screenplay's decision to center the action around Carl Denham, a reckless filmmaker who'll do anything and venture anywhere for the right shot, and who promotes himself just as hungrily as Cooper and Schoedsack did. One tidbit on the Chang DVD includes this injunction from the directors and their studio to the theater-owners across the country exhibiting Chang: "If you are not in the habit of personally endorsing your programs, digress from the straight and narrow path just this once. Chang will live up to anything you say!" The filmmakers also declaim the virtues of projecting Chang inside pet-stores or zoo compounds, so that audiences could ostensibly watch the excited reactions of animals to their own on-screen images.

I haven't tried watching Chang in a zoo, but I have screened it for an auditorium full of restless, pent-up college undergraduates, and their reactions—excited, skeptical, nostalgic, ironic, but universally intrigued—were thrilling to gauge, and Chang's aspirations to "reality," even as it serially undercut its own pretenses in that direction, make it a fascinating time capsule of popular cinema at a moment where talkies were just arriving and the drift toward theatrical, narrative- and human-centered comedies and dramas was not yet graven in stone. Sunrise, in its more delicate and elegiac way, is just as commemorative of cinema's moment of reckoning, after thirty years of evolving traditions and on the cusp of seismic revolutions, ascendant studios, and much more standardized production. Cinema, up to that point, subsisted on a recipe of short "actualities" (acrobats flexing, boats docking, fires, kisses, rescues), nature photography, slapstick humor, formal experiments with light and continuity, and literary narratives. Chang gives you a little of all of this at once, and it's built, shot, and scripted to entertain literally anyone, from a 4-year-old to a nonagenarian member of its own original audience. Give it a whirl, tell your friends, and if you're drafting a film-studies syllabus pretty soon, consider giving the admittedly wondrous Nanook a rest.

* Turns out this family's a fraud, too! (Note the comment below.) Let's at least hope that Cooper and Schoedsack didn't keep filming while Kru and his compatriots cried for help and relief on their seal-hunting mission, as Flaherty allegedly did, and that Kru didn't die of starvation on an ice floe right after Chang came out, as Allakariallak/"Nanook" apparently did. Most of all, let's hope that reviewers like me will stop dropping tidbits of knowledge that turn out to be false, and stick to the center-ring task of reviewing and extolling what's on screen! Mea culpa. —the Management

Images © 1927 Paramount Pictures, 2000 Image Entertainment

Best Actress Update: 5 More Down, 85 to Go

Claudette Colbert in Private Worlds (1935) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Bette Davis in Dangerous)
Precious few actresses of the early sound era were as blithely comfortable before the camera as Claudette Colbert, especially while radiating such innate intelligence and good humor. Her consummate, seemingly unflappable professionalism makes her a smooth match for her role in Private Worlds as a gifted psychiatrist, winning the confidence of patients and colleagues as well as the audience, even as Charles Boyer's chauvinist hospital director can't quite adjust to the notion of a female doctor. The script sputters a little among its various tones and subplots, and one has the feeling that major moments in Colbert's characterization have been dropped, either in the writing or editing stages. Still, she keeps every scene believable, and like supporting players Joan Bennett and Helen Vinson, she thrives under the directorial hand of Gregory La Cava, whose later success with 1937's Stage Door proved how gifted he was at balancing a wide range of fully plausible women within the same film.

Bessie Love in The Broadway Melody (1929) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Mary Pickford in Coquette)
Bessie Love's starring performance in 1929's Best Picture winner gets off to a pretty rough start. Her stiff discomfort as a vaudevillian performer plagues the picture, given that her showstopping "talents" and those of Anita Page as her sister comprise the driving conceit of the story. Their musical numbers never improve, even when the screenplay suggests that they are supposed to, but as the emotional threads of the piece take center stage, Bessie piquantly conveys her distress over Anita's gallavanting, as well as her gradual realization that her lover prefers the other sister. Her best moments verge on the maudlin without quite collapsing into it, and the very idea of a singing-and-dancing backstage musical was so brand spanking new in 1929 that you forgive a few growing pains in the film and the performances.

Geraldine Page in Summer and Smoke (1961) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women)
The good news first: Page's wild mannerisms and almost feral conviction perfectly suited her for her next Tennessee Williams project, the 1962 adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth, where she duly plays a wild and feral exhibitionist who only thinks she's a recluse. Unfortunately, everything that clicked for Page as Sweet Bird's Alexandra Del Lago makes her grotesquely wrong for Summer and Smoke's epicene Alma Winemiller, who is scripted as a much more delicate creature, even in her most id-driven moments. Instead, Page fusses and snorts through a grandiloquent version of "repression" that is very much the conceit of a struggling actress and a flawed, tricky script—but not at all the stuff of life. Blythe Danner came much closer to the mark in a televised 1976 version of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Williams' apt revision of the almost self-parodic Summer and Smoke. Evidently, Danner recognized that misplaced softness and measured affectation can be plenty abrasive, as the story insists, without veering anywhere near a caricature. By contrast, Page strangles every line and moment, finally tarnishing Williams' reputation as well as her own.

Rosalind Russell in My Sister Eileen (1942) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver)
Here's another actress who never gets truly comfortable in her role, thus enervating the audience she is supposed to entertain. The trouble is, Russell looks as though she thinks she's nailing it: for someone who balanced star showmanship and ensemble relations so sublimely in His Girl Friday, Russell could be astonishingly callous toward her fellow players in other movies, and My Sister Eileen catches out her arrogance several times too often. She slings out punchlines and waits for the laughs to circulate, usually while shifting her weight distractingly from one foot to another, or rolling her eyes, or tugging repeatedly at her costume. She waits to speak instead of listening, probably failing to notice that young Janet Blair is showing much more finesse in the sillier but trickier part of Eileen. Russell's physical overstatements almost kill the conga scene that would become so central to Wonderful Town, the 1953 musical derived from the same source material. Still, at least Russell can sell a gag when she's under control and staying in the moment, and her reactions to New York City's urban indignities are often charming. She's too funny to be bad, exactly, but she's too haughty in this part to be legimitately good.

Norma Shearer in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night)
A very pleasant surprise—the kind of performance that snaps you back to attention, even after you think you've got a performer and a genre pegged. No one could accuse Shearer of being the most technically skilled actress, and "serious" projects like this one often froze her up a little, even as MGM banked her reputation on them through most of the '30s. Still, she has clearly connected to the role of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the basis of her performance is not dull adulation for a great lady and her words, but rather Elizabeth's active skepticism about her controlling, almost lascivious father. More and more aware of how dangerously he hems her in, Shearer's Elizabeth wrestles with the confusing stakes of being caught amongst an illness, a parent, and a lover. She lets Fredric March bounce around as Robert Browning without slackening her own performance, and her climactic flight from the Barrett abode works terrifically, mostly because Shearer has so clearly, gradually telegraphed Elizabeth's rational and emotional divorce from her father's influence. Hardly a turn for the all-time trophy case, but both the performance and the movie are more richly shaded than I expected.

The Pick of This Litter: Basically, it's between Colbert and Shearer, both of whom had already won by the time they assumed these roles, and both of whom have been better elsewhere. I'll give the slight edge to Norma Shearer since Barretts hinges powerfully on her work, right at the same moment when Private Worlds starts spinning into a handful of opposed directions.

(Images © 1935 Paramount Pictures, reproduced from FilmPosters.com; © 1961 Paramount Pictures, reproduced from the Animation Station; and © 1934 MGM, reproduced from FilmPosters.com.)