2010: the year in DVD and BD

from top to bottom: Close-up, Metropolis, Red Desert

Just as the rise in the digital consumption of music gradually prompted a number of smart record labels to more seductively package and carefully master CDs, not to mention a most welcome resurgence in the production of vinyl—if you’re going to seek out a tactile object to contain your music, it might as well be the most beautiful, information-rich and sonically satisfying sort of object—the increase in the digital consumption of movies seems to be encouraging some home video distributors to put as much care as possible into their physical releases. Below are the three multi-title DVD and/or Blu-ray collections I consider the best of 2010. What constitutes “the best”? I guess it’s some mixture of relevance, discovery value, quality of supplements, thoughtful packaging and, most of all, curatorial verve.

from top to bottom: Ossos, In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth

Letters From Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (Criterion)
The other selections listed here are essentially celebrations of cinema’s past, but this feels representative of what’s most dynamic in cinema’s present, and perhaps its future. Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (00) and Colossal Youth (06), in combination with the wealth of insightful supplementary materials available in Criterion’s box, tell the story of how Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa went from making what were already cool yet compassionate, funky yet formally elegant, non-didactic yet socially conscious art films to something more akin to artisanal films, the products of countless hours spent alone with just a camera, a microphone and a reflector or two, quietly immersing himself in Lisbon’s labyrinthine ghetto of Cabo Verdean immigrants—even though the place is destroyed by the end of In Vanda’s Room. Somewhere between intimate reportage and epic fabulation, Costa’s films draw to a substantial degree upon the lives of the inhabitants of Fontainhas, who are the films’ stars, yet are equally imbued with mythical and poetic monologues and narratives—one of which was inspired by John Ford. In practice, Costa’s isn’t a model of filmmaking that many can or should follow, yet in spirit, his very personal approach sets a shining example that urges filmmakers to keep redefining what cinema is or can be.

from top to bottom: Human Desire, Nightfall

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II (Sony)
Film noir was the dark star of the studio era, the chiaroscuro chamber of repressed desire, and while many of its most celebrated examples burbled up from poverty row, the major studios caught on quickly and produced their own deluge of moody, twisted crime thrillers. Sony’s sophomore attempt at luring noirophiles with its 1950s, transitional Columbia Pictures noirs is, like its predecessor, not entirely consistent, or even consistently noir, but its highlights are so outstanding as to demand plaudits. They include Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (54), based on Émile Zola’s novel. It stars Glenn Ford as a Korean vet who returns home to resume his modest career as a train engineer, and Gloria Grahame as a doomed object of desire too genuinely mysterious, complex and desperate to fit the proscribed model of the femme fatale. It’s a sensuous, sinster film bathed in industrial gloom, a striking alternative to the often brightly day-lit and thus ironically titled Nightfall (57), a long-lost gem from director Jacques Tourneur, best known for his collaborations with low-budget horror producer Val Lewton. Based on a novel by David Goodis, Nightfall finds another young, physically strapping yet psychologically frail veteran on the run from the authorities and a couple of bank robbers, one of whom is a sadist very memorably embodied by Brian Keith.

from top to bottom: A Safe Place, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider

America Lost and Found: the BBS Story (Criterion)
The titles in Criterion’s inspired box set chronicle the development of BBS, the production company that perhaps best represents the promise of the 1970s New Hollywood, the death throes of the studio era, and the American cinema’s response to the Vietnam War and the French New Wave. In Five Easy Pieces (70) and The King of Marvin Gardens (72), it offers director Bob Rafelson’s finest character studies of dissatisfied masculinity. In Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (71) and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (71), it offers a pair of very, very different yet mutually tender and fascinated attempts by young, wildly ambitious male directors to investigate female dissatisfaction. In no less than six of the seven films here it offers a beat-by-beat tracking of the ascendancy to stardom of one thritysomething hyphenate named Jack Nicholson. And for all the dissatisfaction noted above, I should add that there’s a lot of fun, adventure, formal provocation and plain old audacity too. Did I forget to mention Easy Rider (69)?

Bigger Than Life

Of the many excellent single-film releases I was able to catch up with in 2010, in particular, those not previously easy to find on DVD or Blu-ray, the most noteworthy included Kino’s Complete Metropolis (27), Criterion’s Paris, Texas (84), Red Desert (64), Close-Up (90), Vivre sa vie (62), House (77), The Thin Red Line (98) and Bigger Than Life (56), and a whole bunch of forgotten titles and cult classics now available in no-frills, special order-only packages from the Warner Archive Collection, among them Brainstorm (65), a wonderfully bizarre study in genius and madness directed by veteran character actor William Conrad!

Brainstorm

Fear and Desire, weird attempts at male bonding: More Columbia Film Noir on DVD

The hero is thick-necked, gravel-voiced, steely-eyed, a strapping young veteran who looks imposing yet is passive by nature. He’s lonely, in hiding, and complains of weariness, yet the most mundane gesture of kindness turns him into as bashful a boy as Tobey Maguire. There’s a scene where he’s camping somewhere near Moose, Wyoming, with an older friend, a doctor, graying, fatherly and kind, and that much more arresting in his gentleness for being recognizable as the ten-gallon hat-wearing grotesque who flirts with and is robbed by Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960). The men settle down to lunch over a fire and the doc gets to explaining how much it means to him that the hero never put the moves on his lovely young wife. This is before they spot the car skidding off the nearby road and go to help and wind up the captives of two bank robbers, one a sadist and the other Brian Keith. The sequence is strange, haunting for its specificity and simplicity that slips so quickly into something like nightmare. It’s from a too-little known picture called Nightfall (57), directed by Jacques Tourneur, based on a novel by David Goodis, and is emblematic of what makes film noir such genuinely rich terrain. It’s not the clichés, which are false anyway—there were never half as many detectives in trench coats or femme fatales in noir as people seem to think—but the way these films cloud the frontiers of the everyday and the chimerical.

Nightfall is one of titles available on the new Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Two, which closely follows the format of its predecessor in that its selections are all from the ’50s, its weakest stars Kim Novak, its most established classic stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame and is directed by Fritz Lang, and its most curious entry is directed by Irving Lerner and stars Vince Edwards as a compelling yet entirely unfeeling antihero. Fortunately, for all the similarities in the line-ups of these box sets, they nonetheless each feature utterly distinctive and almost uniformly sublime works, most of them long unavailable.

Tourneur, probably most remembered for the canonical Out of the Past (47), and for Cat People (42), I Walked with a Zombie (43) and The Leopard Man (43), the first three horror pictures produced by Val Lewton at RKO, was a very special filmmaker, one who seemed intuitively drawn to noir material. His approach was subtle and engrossing in a way that causes you to wonder what you did and did not actually see during his films once they’re done and you’re left to piece them back together in your memory. Throughout Nightfall, trusting the high drama of Goodis’ narrative to provide forward movement, Tourneur seems attuned to the small, to the behavioral, such as in a second conversational scene between two men that slyly juxtaposes the first, the one where, in an almost comically inappropriate moment, the sadistic bank robber suddenly really needs to know why Brian Keith doesn’t seem to like him much.

Such passages of seemingly non-essential exchanges also permeate Karlson’s The Brothers Rico (57), based on a story by Georges Simenon. It begins and ends scenes of domesticity and emphasizes paternal and familial concerns—rather aptly, given that it’s basically a gangster picture, and a very, very good one. Richard Conte plays a former mob accountant now running a lucrative laundry business in Florida. He receives a call from his old benefactor, a two-faced mobster eloquently embodied by the kindly doctor who turns out to be a cold-blooded alien in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), and is sent on an arduous cross-country errand to find his errant brother, a journey which becomes only more devastating and violent as it goes along—though all the while, Conte, convincingly tormented, keeps calling home to speak with his wife, with whom he’s trying to adopt an orphan.

The contrast between such wonderfully detailed works as Nightfall and The Brothers Rico and something like Pushover (54), the aforementioned Kim Novak vehicle, is striking. The story is virtually a series of semaphores, a shopping list of all the noir clichés alluded to above. It even has otherwise straight-laced bachelor Fred MacMurray falling for a blonde in tight sweaters who draws him into plotting murder and theft in a limp resuscitation of Double Indemnity (44) dynamics. There’s not a single moment in which MacMurray and Novak’s chemistry feels anything more than pure artifice.

Yet it would be misleading to say that mining the essential ingredients of noir is in any way negates the possibility of invention or sheer genre mastery. Human Desire (54), directed by Lang, based on a novel by Émile Zola, which had been adapted previously by Jean Renior as Le bête humaine (38), features a number of identifiably noir elements yet in no way depends on them to automatically supply gravity or style in and of themselves, partly because Zola wrote decades before Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain, and partly because Lang and his collaborators have crafted a work so deeply immersed in the complexities of desperation, complacency, and, well, desire.

Glenn Ford returns from Korea with no greater ambition than to return to his earlier life as a small town locomotive engineer, but chance deposits him in a lonesome passenger car at night with Gloria Grahame, only moments after Grahame’s husband kills a man in a fit of jealous rage. Bathed in industrial gloom—the cinematographer is Burnett Guffey, who also shot Nightfall and Brothers Rico—Human Desire explores a lot of territory in a short amount of screen time, touching on postwar transience and the threat of the newly independent woman, on different kinds of marriage and urges most of us never even know we have, manifesting in Ford’s gripping Grahame’s curls with violent passion as they secretly kiss in the shacks of the train yards. Grahame is especially fascinating, sexy, and sad here, an object of erotic currency, wanted but never accepted. She seems always to have been cast as the lover of violent men, but in this case we learn things about her past that might explain her choices—only thing is, we never really know the truth about her, not even in that final, ostensibly explanatory dismal little sequence where she’s confronted by her hulking husband while Ford rides up front, willfully oblivious to all of it, dreaming of something safe and banal.

Lastly, City of Fear (58) finds Vince Edwards escaping from prison with what he believes is a canister of high-grade heroin. It’s actually a radioactive substance called “Cobat-60” that could spell doom for the entire city of Los Angeles if not disposed of quickly. Reuniting Edwards with Lerner immediately after the terrific Murder by Contract (58), City of Fear is slightly less a character study, preoccupied as it is with a larger civic canvas and authorities in heated debate about whether or not to go public with the threat of contamination and the panic it will surely incite. Lerner makes inspired use of limited resources with montages of mobilizing city officials and focuses on the handful of interesting and entertaining lowlifes with whom Edwards meets, not to mention the fragments of billboard advertising that provide subliminal commentary on the action. Excitingly scored and beautifully photographed by Lucien Ballard, it’s the most neo-noir of the noirs here, a little self-conscious, but playfully so, and just one of four very good reasons to invest in this tour of the obscure peripheries of America’s sunlit ’50s.