Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who made the utterly bonkers 1977 kinda-horror film House, currently getting a first-time American theatrical run from Janus Films, is profiled by Paul Roquet in a new essay for Midnight Eye. One of the few pieces that’s been written on Obayashi in English, Roquet’s essay presents a fascinating overview of his career, following him from his early experimental films to his work as an artist for Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising firm, where he became a stylistic innovator. This led to his making his first film for Toho Studios, House, based on, as Roquet lovingly calls it, “his own completely incomprehensible script.” Roquet goes on to detail Obayashi’s many formal experiments and contributions to Japanese cinema in this invaluable piece.

Louis Malle’s shadowy Paris comes to our nation’s capital on November 12 and 19, when the HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz & Blues in Washington, D.C., will host special live performances of Miles Davis’s evocative music for Malle’s moody 1957 noir, Elevator to the Gallows. The score, which was famously recorded in a single, impromptu session, will be played by the Thad Wilson Big Band (whose namesake is a mainstay in the city’s U Street jazz clubs). The performance will be accompanied by a screening of the film, which concerns an adulterous couple whose nefarious plans go very wrong. Visit HR-57’s website for pricing and showtime info.

Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle

1957

92 min

Black and White

1.66:1

Ever wonder how a gem like Downhill Racer, which Roger Ebert called “the greatest sports movie ever made,” could get lost in the Hollywood shuffle? In an interview for our release of the film (out next week), the star of and force behind it, Robert Redford, spoke frankly about the trials he faced getting his project made—and seen (including a mortifying, though very humorously recounted, screening experience with his friend Natalie Wood). The excerpt is presented here exclusively.

Downhill Racer

Michael Ritchie

1969

101 min

Color

1.78:1

“If American independent cinema could be said to have a birthday, November 11 is as good a date to celebrate as any,” writes Elbert Ventura in a terrific new article in Slate. The occasion is the fortieth anniversary of the release of John Cassavetes’s Shadows, that most unassuming and unpolished of trailblazers, which, writes Ventura, “isn’t just a historical curio or an academic footnote. The surprise is that it still surprises.” Ventura digs into this low-budget, highly inventive classic, describing Cassavetes’s workshop process, detailing the controversy surrounding the film’s cuts and reedits, and making the case that Shadows “not only anticipated Mean Streets, Stranger Than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It, and Slacker, among countless others—it helped will them into being.” As a bonus, Ventura’s insightful piece is supplemented by three eye-catching clips from the film.

Shadows

John Cassavetes

1959

81 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Eugene O’Neill’s groundbreaking The Emperor Jones is making waves again. The controversial 1920 play is back, in a heralded new off-Broadway production starring John Douglas Thompson as Brutus Jones, the Pullman porter turned Caribbean island despot. It’s a role Paul Robeson made famous, onstage and evenutally on-screen, and that in turn made him the most popular African-American actor of the first half of the twentieth century, despite his initial misgivings about its racial politics—as explained here in an essay written for the Criterion collector’s set Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist by New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als. The revival, which is directed by Ciaran O’Reilly and has been getting rave reviews (Thompson is “wondrous,” writes New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley), is now playing at New York’s Irish Repertory Theater and has been extended through December 6.

When, in 1920, Eugene O’Neill’s expressionistic The Emperor Jones was to be first performed, at the Provincetown Playhouse, the show’s original director, George “Jig” Cook, was determined to find a black actor who could bring the title character of Brutus Jones to life; before that time, major black characters were played by white actors in blackface. So Cook cast the brilliant, erratic Charles Gilpin in the title role. But Gilpin drank, and he also didn’t take easily to O’Neill’s portrayal of black life, specifically his use of the word nigger. For the 1924 revival, then, Cook and O’Neill turned to the titanic Paul Robeson.

As a member of the Harlem Amateur Players, Robeson had heard a great deal about Brutus Jones from the Playhouse’s set designer, Cleo Throckmorton. Moved by Robeson’s performances with the Manhattan-based troupe, Throckmorton was the first to approach him about donning the emperor’s clothes. But the Harlem Amateur Players’ star performer did not like what he heard. “You may know this kind of person, and Mr. O’Neill may know this kind of person, but I don’t,” Robeson said. (There were other “race men” who were less conflicted about O’Neill’s take on race and power. In a piece written for the 1923–24 season of the Provincetown Playhouse, W. E. B. DuBois said that O’Neill was “bursting through” black stereotypes onstage and giving us “Negro blood.”) In the end, however, Robeson, convinced of the play’s worth, accepted the assignment.  

The Emperor Jones

Dudley Murphy

1933

105 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist

Saul J. Turell

1979

30 min

Color & Black and White

1.33:1

Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer, which arrives on Criterion special-edition DVD next week, is remembered today primarily for its winning star performance. Yet as evidenced by this November 1969 piece from the Sports Illustrated archives by author and sports columnist Dan Jenkins, when the film came out, its male lead, some young whippersnapper named Robert Redford, was an unknown entity, an actor “who may be more familiar to moviegoers as the subtly humorous sidekick of Paul Newman in the new western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Geared toward skiers, Jenkins’s piece profiles the soon-to-be megastar but is mostly about his love of the sport (Redford studied Alpine racing in Europe) and his determination to get a movie about it made.

Downhill Racer

Michael Ritchie

1969

101 min

Color

1.78:1

When one thinks of Orson Welles, one can’t help but imagine a genius alone, monolithic—an image perhaps fostered by his greatest creation, the colossus Citizen Kane. Yet as the new book In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by his eldest child, Chris Welles Feder, reminds us, he was also a dad and husband. In a lengthy Bright Lights Film Journal review of this “beautifully written, disturbing, and painfully sad memoir,” Joseph McBride describes the author’s revelations about the difficult relationship she had with Welles growing up. The daughter of the first of the filmmaker’s three wives, she writes about Welles’s “chaotic” parenting, long absences, and inability to exist within any domestic parameters, and McBride does a terrific job of summarizing all the trying years the child spent—or didn’t spend—with her father. But McBride proposes a light at the end of this dark tunnel, ultimately calling In My Father’s Shadow “a poignant account of a girl and woman struggling to carve out her own personality and triumphantly succeeding, despite great odds, unlike many children of Hollywood figures who wind up being crushed into oblivion by their parents’ shadows.”

The Third Man

Carol Reed

1949

104 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Complete Mr. Arkadin

Orson Welles

1955

105 min

Black and White

1.33:1

F for Fake

Orson Welles

1975

87 min

Color

1.66:1

The following essay originally appeared in The Logic of Images, a collection of Wim Wenders’s writing that was published in 1992.

In the last few years, since Paris, Texas, Berlin has been the place where I’ve stopped off. I started to feel at home there, in spite of the fact that I see the city with the eyes of someone who’s spent a lot of time away.

Up until now, the stories in my films were always told from the point of view of a main character. This time, I rejected the idea of some returning hero who rediscovers Berlin and Germany for himself. I couldn’t imagine the character through whose eyes I would see Berlin; such a person could only have been another version of myself. Besides, Travis had been a man returning to a city.

I really don’t know what gave me the idea of angels. One day I wrote “angels” in my notebook, and the next day “the unemployed.” Maybe it was because I was reading Rilke at the time—nothing to do with films—and realizing as I read how much of his writing is inhabited by angels. Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.

After a while, I began to doubt whether it would amount to a film. I tried to push the idea away, but it was never quite extinguished.  

Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders

1987

127 min

Color & Black and White

1.66:1

Critics are rallying around the Criterion special edition DVD of Costa-Gavras’s benchmark political thriller Z. As Film.com’s Amanda Mae Meyncke cries, “This 1970 Academy Award best foreign film winner is a simultaneous declaration against tyranny and call to arms.” The Dallas Morning News’ Chris Vognar exclaims, “Costa-Gavras’s frenetic masterpiece is no less startling today than it was forty years ago . . . After you watch Criterion’s new edition of Z, delivered in one of the distributor’s customary pristine digital transfers, you might be tempted to stay put, return to the menu, and soak it all in a second time.” And DVD Talk’s Jamie S. Rich writes that this is “a remarkable re-creation of a volatile political tragedy” and “an important, influential picture.”

Leonard Lopate interviewed Costa-Gavras on public radio about Z earlier this year. We told you about it at the time, and you can listen to it again here.

Z

Costa-Gavras

1969

127 min

Color

1.66:1

Anthony Asquith is remembered primarily as the director of Pygmalion, The Browning Version, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all stage-to-screen adaptations comfortable flaunting their own theatricality. Yet as critic Jay Weissberg writes in the latest issue of Sight and Sound, a new BFI restoration of Asquith’s 1928 silent film Underground proves that the son of a prime minister was not, as his detractors claimed, “an aristocrat without a proper feel for realism” but a maker of vivid, socially engaged cinema. This film, his first solo effort as director, is a populist love triangle; Weissberg writes that it is “about the social interactions that can only exist in the confined, democratic spaces of the London Underground” and is marked by “thrilling location work.” Also in the piece, Weissberg delves into the restoration process that brought Underground (which played on October 23 at the BFI’s London Film Festival) to shimmering new life, and composer Neil Brand, who contributed a new musical score, sings the film’s praises.

Pygmalion

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard

1938

96 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Browning Version

Anthony Asquith

1951

90 min

Black and White

1.33:1

The Importance of Being Earnest

Anthony Asquith

1952

95 min

Color

1.33:1