BERGMAN: A YEAR IN A LIFE, Jane Magnusson, director/ BFI 3-disc Blu-ray set and DVD Admirers of the greatest director in the history of the cinema, Ingmar Bergman — plus those as yet unconvinced– need to do two things: check out the Bergman career overview (indispensable!) I did for Arrow’s issue of the director’s The Serpent’s Egg, but they also need to look at this quite mesmerising documentary, which is every bit as thorough and accessible as virtually every reviewer has claimed. What’s more, it is by no means a hagiography — Bergman’s greatness as a filmmaker was (we hear again and again) not matched by his behaviour towards those around him – he was often monumentally cruel. In fact, one of the themes of the documentary is an enquiry into just how much leeway we should cut for geniuses. Always confrontational, the Swedish giant of cinema dealt in an honest and serious fashion with issues of human communication, the relevance of art and music in the modern world, the false consolations of belief, and a crucial theme: the uncomfortable relationships between men and women as in the plays of August Strindberg, which Bergman had directed in the theatre). Bergman’s work altered the parameters of the treatment of sex in film, and the battles over such films as The Silence, The Virgin Spring and Summer with Monika were much-reported in their day; his most significant year, however, was 1957 (the focus of Jane Magnusson’s film) which produced two seminal Bergman masterworks: Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. This unmissable set also contains the expanded four-hour version made for Swedish TV, Bergman: A Life in Four Acts.
THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB, Fede Alvarez, director/Sony Blu-Ray Lisbeth Salander has been working with an eccentric Swedish computer scientist, Balder, whose innovative work concerns artificial intelligence. But Balder has a mute, damaged son with an astonishing secret. Salander has also cracked the US National Security Agency database, and has both the security services and a shadowy, murderous group called The Spiders on her trail. It is, of course, inevitable that journo Mikael Blomkvist and Salander – ex-lovers as well as former colleagues – will meet and will soon be up against the kind of lethal enemies they encountered in the earlier Stieg Larsson’s books. How much suffering and trauma can an author put one of their characters through before it begins to border on a kind of literary sadism? The multiple rapes, torture and beatings that the late Larsson’s signature character endured in his massively successful Millennium trilogy posed challenges – never, in the event, confronted – for the author. His original plan was a 10-novel sequence, but, in order to maintain the character dynamic and give Lisbeth Salander a revenge motivation for all the gruesome violence she visits on her tormentors, would she be forced to endure more of the repeated abuse of the first three books in each new volume? As Larsson himself is now out of the picture, the same problem presented itself to his successor, the Swedish writer David Lagercrantz: who both echoed the motifs of the earlier books and attempted something new. The film version bristles with kinetic energy and makes the English actress Claire Foy makes the part of Salander her own, while not displacing memories of Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara. Stripping out various elements may not please Larsson admirers, but allows the film to function efficiently as a fast moving thriller (with particularly impressive cinematography from Pedro Tuque Priozzo). The director, Fede Alavrez,- allows the characterisation take care of itself, suggesting he has confidence in his efficient cast, though Sverrir Gudnason’s Blomqvist makes very little impression, with a relatively minimal part. Those coming to the film with no knowledge of its predecessors (or, for that matter, the books) may be unaware that Salander is bisexual and that she and Blomqvist were lovers — apart from one brief moment, Lisbeth is presented here simply as gay. The problem with this is that it cuts into the protean nature of the character — she becomes what is necessary (or what she desires) for any given situation. Nevertheless, Lisbeth admirers should feel that they have had (with reservations) a satisfying fix.
Four from POWERHOUSE INDICATOR: PSYCHE 59, A DANDY IN ASPIC, THE THIRD SECRET, A SEVERED HEAD, Various directors/Powerhouse Indicator Blu-rays I’ve repeatedly said that there are few DVD/Blu-ray companies doing such splendid exhumation work on neglected films as the plucky Powerhouse Indicator team, and one of the particular pleasures of their bimonthly issues is the chance to relish the very disparate films they have chosen, offering features which have largely slipped from filmgoing memory — and are more than worthy of a dusting-off and sprucing-up (and the latter is precisely what the company does in the splendid Blu-ray iterations of these older movies — not to mention the copious and informed extras, to which I’ve been known to contribute). This month has a full-blooded psychosexual drama in Alexander Singer’s little-seen PSYCHE 59 with Curt Jurgens, Patricia Neal, Ian Holm and Samantha Eggar caught up in a overheated ménage-a-quatre. If the film seems a touch parodic, look more closely; Singer knows exactly what he’s doing. Cinéastes are well aware that the complex spy thriller A DANDY IN ASPIC was the last film of the great director Anthony Mann, who died during its making; the film was finished by its star, Laurence Harvey, and the patched-together result is a fascinating curio, even though one might wonder what the final film would have looked like had Anthony Mann had lived to finish it. The mystery thriller THE THIRD SECRET benefits from an understated performance by one of the most neglected of film actors, Stephen Boyd, often written off as merely a pretty boy, but his performances often demonstrate (as here) that he was an actor of subtlety. If the film of Iris Murdoch’s A SEVERED HEAD broadens the effects of the original novel and tends to go for more comic moments, it still functions capably on that level, not least for its colourful performances from such players as Claire Bloom, though hardly the ‘ugly’ academic of the novel (and Richard Attenborough is over the top). Like PSYCHE 59, it’s game of sexual musical chairs with partner swapping on the menu.
PHANTOM LADY, Robert Siodmak, director/Arrow Academy Blu-ray In the annals of Film Noir, there are possibly more respected titles than in practically any other popular genre – and among the litany of names repeated in admiration by aficionados is the relocated (to Hollywood) German director Robert Siodmak, very few of whose films are not intensely memorable. Phantom Lady is one of his signature works, and it has never looked better than in this remarkable print. From the year 1944, this adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich novels is almost a summa of the entire genre, with all the requisite buttons pushed. Siodmak, who would subsequently direct such classics as The Killers with Burt Lancaster and The Dark Mirror with Olivia de Havilland, finessed (in Phantom Lady) a terrific performance from Alan Curtis as a man obsessively trailing an enigmatic mystery woman (played by Ella Raines) who is the only person who can supply an alibi for his wife’s murder. This disc also includes a documentary on the history of noir, and a radio play adaptation of Phantom Lady.
IKARIE XB, Jindřich Polák, director/Second Run Blu-ray For many years, aficionados of intelligent science-fiction cinema were desperate to see a film whose reputation (among those who had seen it) was of the highest. And those yearnings became even more pressing after we learned that the greatest of all science-fiction films, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, had been influenced by this hard-to-see Polish classic. Of course there was a way to see it (sort of): a cutdown, dubbed American version called Voyage to the End of the Universe had been put together under the aegis of American International. But when we finally saw the film in its original unedited form, we realise that its reputation had not been overstated (though the model work is of its era). Even such things as the (doubtless enforced) pro-communist agitprop which is built into the screenplay are of piquant interest (it goes without saying that these elements were removed in the American print). The earlier DVD incarnation of the film is history; in this sharp-looking Blu-ray, the image has a clarity and transparency that positively leaps off the screen. This is the new 4K restoration of Polák’s film which premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
SINK THE BISMARCK! Lewis Gilbert, director/Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray This famous film version of one of World War II’s best known sea battles appears for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK as part of the Eureka Classics range. There was a generation of filmgoers (including this critic) who first encountered several much-loved British war films through school showings. It’s not hard to see why such films as Sink the Bismarck! were considered acceptable fare for schoolchildren, presenting as they do a particular version of Britishness without too much questioning of the ethics of war (and I remember that we were shown another such film, Carve Her Name With Pride). If the intensity and anti-establishment tone of such films as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is absent here, the virtues of utterly professional filmmaking are fully on view, and the film and is a reminder of just what an excellent actor Kenneth Moore was, a performer often taken for granted because of his ubiquitousness. This is story of how (in the spring of 1941) Nazi Germany’s greatest battleship – the Bismarck — is trapped at her anchorage in Norway before making a break.
RENDEL, Jesse Haaja, director/4 Digital Media Promotional materials for Rendel stress the resemblance between the brutal masked hero and DC’s Batman, but the bone-crunching protagonist is perhaps closer to Marvel’s Daredevil — specifically the dark and unsparing first season of the television series (in terms of extreme violence meted out to the wrongdoers). Finland’s violent, pulp noir sports a black-clad vigilante who wages a one-man war on the criminals ruining his city. And when a worldwide corporation known as VALA launches an untested vaccine called Nh25 into the market by bribing, threatening, and killing every official opposing them, he is in his element. Strong action sequences, but Rendel himself is something of a blank.
CRUCIBLE OF THE VAMPIRE, Iain Ross-McNamee, director/ Screenbound Entertainment Will the loving echoes of classic British horror evinced by the makers of Crucible of the Vampire make up for its sometimes workaday execution? That is a question that only the viewer can answer, but Iain Ross-McNamee’s gothic chiller (issued in dual format DVD and Blu-ray and on digital platforms) features the much-employed Neil Morrissey alongside new names Katie Goldfinch and Florence Cady, with a narrative that focuses on a young museum curator (Goldfinch) dispatched to look at an ancient artefact discovered in the basement of a stately home in Shropshire and encountering evil forces. Striking cinematography is a plus here.
This immortal tale, which moves from the English Civil War to the present day, is smart, stylish, sexy and as sharp as vampire’s teeth.
HUMAN DESIRE, Fritz Lang, director/Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray Admirers of the great German director Fritz Lang have a particular affection for his astonishing American crime films, and if Human Desire is not as intense as Jean Renoir’s cinematic take on Zola’s masterpiece La Bëte Humaine, it still functions like a well-oiled machine, both for Lang’s incisive direction and its luminous star Gloria Grahame. This, late film noir reunited the director with actors Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame from the preceding year’s classic The Big Heat and the writer of Lang’s Clash by Night, Alfred Hayes. Lang admirers will relish the superb transfer on offer from Eureka Entertainment.
PICNIC, Joshua Logan, director/ Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray The playwright William Inge is less regarded these days than he was in the 1950s and 1960s, but his best work (such as his early Warren Beatty-but-late-William Inge film Splendor in the Grass) still marks him out as a writer of real distinction, with a notable feeling for the damage that human beings can do to each other. It is particularly instructive to watch this slightly overblown but still impressive treatment of his work by the director Joshua Logan, a film most famous these days for a slow, sensuous dance (to the chords of the tune ‘Moonglow’) by William Holden and Kim Novak. And in a newly censorious era when it is becoming politically incorrect to relish the undressed bodies of female stars, it is interesting to see a film in which it is a male body that is an object of erotic fixation for most of the women in the film: that of the tanned, shirtless William Holden. Holden is particularly good as the none-too-bright visitor to an American town who causes chaos – and even though the actor was a tad too old for the part, that inconvenience is excused by the dialogue. The film (shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe) looks gorgeous in this transfer.
SISTER STREET FIGHTER COLLECTION, various directors/Arrow Blu-ray When the hyper-violent Sonny Chiba ‘Streetfighter’ films first appeared in the UK, martial arts aficionados had never seen anything quite like them. The brutality of the Bruce Lee films was dialled up to the nth degree, and Chiba himself was a truly magnetic star with his distinctive monobrow and permanently scowling manner. It was hardly surprisingly that a distaff version of his character would appear, and Arrow have made available (in splendid new prints) all the films of the sequence in remarkably vivid colour. This is a collection of some of the liveliest exploitation cinema Japan produced in the 1970s, starring the athletic Etsuko Shihomi as the titular character, alongside (for luck) Sonny Chiba himself. The stories are paper-thin, but it’s the wildly choreographed action that counts.
FRIGHTFEST: BENEATH THE DARK HEART OF CINEMA, Central City Media Everything you ever wanted to know about FrightFest…but were afraid to ask! This has been described as a portrait of the horror film festival that will delight its longstanding fans yet which is thorough and insightful enough to be of interest to outsiders too.
KOLOBOS Arrow Blu-ray If you’re an admirer of the macabre, perhaps you need to check out this demented effort. The obscure horror entry is trumpeted by Arrow as follows: ‘Kolobos. The Real World meets Saw by way of Suspiria in a super-smart, super-gory late ’90s slasher effort, released in the midst of the post-Scream slice-and-dice revival.’ And if that strapline works for you, note that this made available a 2K restoration that includes a new making-of featurette and sports a booklet looking at this neglected genre piece. (Arrow have also issued The Ring Collection, the trilogy inaugurated in 1998, when director Hideo Nakata (Dark Water) produced his flesh-creeping revision of the horror film. Ring, Ring 2 and Ring O, along with the ‘lost’ sequel Spiral, All the films are now in high definition and supplemented by copious archival and newly created bonus materials (along with several deleted scenes).
