My Own SIGHT & SOUND Top 10 Greatest Films (in order of release)

Delphine Seyrig in Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN. 

Yesterday SIGHT AND SOUND magazine announced the winners of their once-per-decade poll among critics and directors of the Greatest Films of All Time. The Top 20 contenders on this latest critics' poll, beginning with #1, were as follows:

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Vertigo (1958)

Citizen Kane (1941)

Tokyo Story (1953)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Beau Travail (1999)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

The Godfather (1972)

The Rules of the Game (1939)

Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962)

The Searchers (1956)

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Close-Up (1990)

Persona (1966)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Seven Samurai (1954)

You can find the remainder of this list elsewhere online. I was among the many critics asked to contribute and can attest that making my selections was a painful process. I believe the results would change drastically were the scope widened to a Top 20 or 25, which would likely introduce a broader range of genre cinema. In assembling my list, my main considerations were to be properly observant of the word "greatest" and the whole broad chronology of cinema from the silents forward. Being limited to ten selections forced me to omit the silent era in the long run, nor could I (or would I have wanted to) pick one from each decade, which would have forced me outside the scope of what felt right to my mind and heart. Although the S&S poll made no such restrictions, I personally felt the selection of short films to be inappropriate and felt obliged to limit myself to only one documentary. With each selection, I've included a note of explanation.      

KING KONG
Year: 1933
Director(s): Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack
Comment: Having seen the film again recently in a theatrical setting, I am all the more impressed by its tremendous leap of imagination. Yet what most impressed me is the fact that - once Kong is introduced - the film never stops in its exciting forward movement. For a 1930s picture, and early 1930s at that, this is generally unheard-of.

JEUX INTERDITS / FORBIDDEN GAMES
Year: 1952
Director(s): René Clement
Comment: It was important to me to include at least one title to represent the relationship between people and animals, so this one was slugging it out against UMBERTO D., BAMBI, and AU HASARD BALTHASAR. I ultimately chose this film because it's also about the world of childhood in an historical moment that discouraged anything but the numbest adulthood. This is a powerful, uncompromising film that nevertheless preserves its senses of innocence and poetry; I'm very pleased to have found room for Clement on my list, and this particular film also encompasses a spirit I also recognize as Cocteau. 

LE MYSTÈRE PICASSO / THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO
Year: 1956
Director(s): Henri-Georges Clouzot
Comment: In coming up with my list, I found it very difficult to balance narrative cinema and documentary; it disturbed me that I could find no room at all for non-narrative cinema. It seemed to me that my list had to be all of one kind, or nothing. Then this film occurred to me, which is a marvelous composite of all three, and an invaluable record of the creative process of one of the great geniuses of 20th century art. This is the kind of film whose negative I can easily imagine trying to save from a burning building. 

L'ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD / LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
Year: 1961
Director: Alain Resnais
Comment: The single greatest film on my list. Anyone who reads the published screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet must admit that Resnais was more of a conductor of this film than its auteur; with the exception of a single excision, all of its direction stems from the written word. So I feel Robbe-Grillet should share the directorial credit. For me, this film is an ideal distillation of the conscious and subconscious, open to any number of interpretations, an art object in and of itself.  

HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES / SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
Year: 1968
Director(s): Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini
Comment: In my initial drafts of this list, I included Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT as a stand-alone short, as it is sometimes shown. After much consideration, I came to the conclusion that I find this segment works best as the culmination of its original three-story anthology form. It's long been the going idea to embrace the Fellini episode and dismiss the other two, but I find those two among the most personal work from either director. I've written an entire book in defense of SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (2018, Electric Dreamhouse/PS Publishing), in which I show that all three Poe tales tell essentially the same story and that they need each other. It is also important to note that the English version is the only way anyone should watch the Fellini episode (French works just as well for the Vadim and Malle segments), as it preserves Terence Stamp's vocal performance for his greatest character and the often impenetrable morass of language assailing him from the time he reaches the airport in Rome.  

MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD / MY NIGHT WITH MAUD
Year: 1969
Director(s): Éric Rohmer
Comment: Rohmer is one of the most important directors in my personal pantheon, and this is the first film on my list to star Jean-Louis Trintignant, my favourite actor, and one who starred in at least a half dozen other films I could have included. I most identify with him here. It's 90 minutes of people talking in different rooms but it conjures just as much suspense as one might want from Hitchcock or Clouzot, but with different stakes. My list leans somewhat toward the fantastic, but what I find endlessly appealing about this film is how well it evokes the magic that dwells just below (or above) the skin of reality: friendship, community, religion, Christmas, bookishness, morality, moral dilemma, the need to know and admit what we want. This film led me to read Pascal, far off my beaten path, just as Rohmet's later THE GREEN RAY led me to finally read Jules Verne, who became a much greater obsession.  

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
Year: 1969
Director(s): Sergio Leone
Comment: I first saw this film at the age of 12, intending to see the co-feature (Elvis Presley in CHARRO!) and due to a mix-up in scheduling having to sit through the Leone first. I hadn't seen any of the DOLLARS films yet; I didn't much like Westerns. Unexpectedly, it towered over me as no other film had done; I was terrified by the sheer symphonic magnificence and force of it, the depth of its passion for cinema. I didn't know the Western genre well enough to catch its scholarly quotations and references, but once it was over, I felt ravished by it. I staggered out without seeing the co-feature because I knew no other film could stand up to what I'd just experienced. I look back on this as the first adult decision of my life. When I see it now, with a hundred or more Westerns in my frame of reference, it only gets bigger, richer.  

THE DEVILS
Year: 1971
Director(s): Ken Russell
Comment: Ken Russell had to be represented here, as my late teens and twenties coincided with the period of his great reign in British cinema. His WOMEN IN LOVE (which brilliantly streamlined Lawrence's novel to its most essential material) had the greater personal impact on me, but I recognize THE DEVILS as his magnum opus, a harrowing, dizzying, non-stop tour de force that helped solidify my thinking as regards politics, organized religion, and the idea that Hell is other people. Above and beyond this, I tend to find it faultless on every level: it's a masterpiece of design and conviction, full of exquisitely etched performances and host to any number of Marlovian "mighty lines."  

TROIS COLEURS: ROUGE / THREE COLORS: RED
Year: 1993
Director(s): Krzyszof Kieślowski
Comment: When I discovered Kieślowski's films with THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE, it was the first time I fully identified with a film on a spiritual level; I felt not only that I had seen something extraordinary, I actually felt seen. This feeling that his films were showing me the world as I see and experience it continued to the end and was most powerfully conveyed in RED, which allowed him to work with Jean-Louis Trintignant and the remarkable Irène Jacob. For me, the greatest of all narrative themes is an unexpected meeting of two people that changes their lives, or their awareness of life; it doesn't have to be a love story, as this film proves, but love is involved somewhere, somehow that it's left to us to decide. With an assiduous use of orchestrated details and manufactured coincidence, Kieślowski exposes the invisible net encompassing all of us, discernible in bits of coincidence and layered harmonics that point to some form of intelligence. Of the three films in THREE COLORS, the whole trilogy is most important to its overall clarity and success, but it stands on its own as a very great film.  

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Year: 2008
Director(s): Charlie Kaufman
Comment: When I first saw this densely layered film about an artist's life (or even THE artist's life), I laughed all the way through it - partly from catching the subliminal touches that showed how rapidly time was passing, and also because I recognized so much truth in it - divine truth, bitter truth, awful truth. I couldn't wait to see it again. The second time, I watched it alone late at night and found myself weeping through it, as much as I'd laughed before. For the past 15 years, I've been scared to see it again, afraid that it might not be all I'd built it up to in my memory, but I needn't have worried. Watching it again while compiling my list, along with several other runners-up from this more recent era, I found myself laughing and also weeping at times but always profoundly impressed by the scope and concentration of Kaufman's idea, its execution and sensitive casting. Those 15 years have only served to make time's haste seem all the more merciless, and the maze of art stacked up around the protagonist at the end poor recompense for a life mostly untasted.  

Further Remarks:

The older I get, the more oppressive the word ‘greatest’ becomes. Generally speaking, I avoid writing about what I perceive as obvious greatness. I prefer to live with its mystery and focus on genre films. 

"Greatest" suggests a colossus, a thing of immense weight and stasis, yet some of the greatest films I've experienced have been an unexpected, furtive and fleeting kiss in the dark. That's an idea I determined to preserve in my list, which to me is as much a list of great affairs as of great movies. I feel a list such as this should dispense with any fantasies of objectivity right away, and embrace subjectivity; such a list should serve as an X-ray snapshot of the individual curator and be exchangeable with others like a mix tape. It should tell others "This is who I am."

Who I am is a man now in my sixties, who started going to the movies for entertainment in my single digits, and who fell in love specifically with horror and fantasy cinema. At the end of childhood, I experienced a series of films that were quantum leaps in my education; they overturned my thinking, changed my life trajectory, and revolutionized my set ideas about what a movie can and should be. So it was toward those forms of greatness that I gravitated. After choosing this as my basic guideline, dozens of movies I habitually call my favourites fell off the list (some, like LA JETÉE and GHOST WORLD, just by a hair); of course, to compile such a list at all means agreeing to betray one’s own heart. It kills me that there's no Bergman, no Antonioni, no Godard or Kubrick here, but we know they remain great. Likewise, there are fewer of the more obvious planets of my known galaxy present than you might expect - no Mario Bava, no Jess Franco, no Joe Sarno - all of whom I've written hundreds of pages about. They are great in a different way, and I understand and appreciate this. Zuławski and Borowczyk came close.

I started by assembling a list of the most meaningful films to me from each decade, 1910 to 2010. This in itself was murder. Then I began to whittle away, trying as best I could to represent the whole timespan of cinema. The 1910s through the 1930s were easy, though TIH-MINH was ultimately scratched; a magnificent recent discovery, but my guiding light was impact rather than sentiment. Likewise, in the case of the 1940s, despite no shortage of worthy titles, they all fell short of the too-many titles I felt necessary to include from the 1960s (for me, cinema’s richest decade), so I bent my rule on their behalf. 

I didn't pick any titles on the basis of self-evident stature or for their ability to entertain. Each of them has, in some way, been a lightning bolt in my life that caught me in its cross-hairs, showed me who I am or could be, or expressed to me in some way that I’m not alone. 

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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New Cult Movie Releases from Germany's Anolis Entertainment

The German Blu-ray label Anolis Entertainment GMBH recently released a very nice, uncut and English-friendly disc of Viktor Trivas' Die Nackte und der Satan (1959), better known abroad as THE HEAD. In addition to the familiar English dub, it includes the original German soundtrack with English subtitles, which makes it possible for the rest of us to appreciate the talented cast's performances on an entirely new level. I was honored to be asked to provide an audio commentary for the set, which is presented with optional German subtitles, and there is a German commentary as well by Anolis' resident cult film experts Into Strecker and Mirko Rekittke. The disc has been released in a choice of different covers, including two standard covers and a keep case edition. Best news of all: unlike some of the other Anolis titles, it is region-free.

When the kind folks at Anolis recently sent my contributor's copies of the HEAD disc, they also included some of their other new titles. What first attracted my attention in my Anolis care package were two other releases: KATAKOMBEN DES GRAUENS ("Catacombs of Terror") and DER TURM DER SCHREIENDEN FRAUEN ("The Tower of Screaming Women"), which we know respectively as Bernard L. Kowalski's ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES (1959) and Bert I. Gordon's TORMENTED (1960), neither of which I believe has enjoyed an HD release in the US to date.

Produced by Gene Corman and executive produced by Roger Corman, ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES is presented by Anolis as a two-disc media book with the B-picture pressed on Blu-ray (where it runs 63m) and on DVD (where it plays at 25 f.p.s. ad runs only 60m). Obviously, it's a B-picture but Kowalski—whose previous AIP features were HOT CAR GIRL and NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST (both 1958)—does an extremely capable job of filling that length with earnest actors, memorable characters, an appreciably early ecological message, and some of the most lurid, unforgettably gruesome and perversely erotic imagery of the 1950s.

Ken Clark (SOUTH PACIFIC, who later starred in Mario Bava's THE ROAD TO FORT ALAMO) has the lead role as Steve Benton, the warden of a Florida everglades preserve, whose swamplands become the site of various disappearances. When local grocer Dave Walker (Bruno ve Sota) pursues his two-timing wife Liz (ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN's Yvette Vickers) and her lover Cal (Michael Emmet) out there with a shotgun, he sees them attacked by giant monsters with human-like arms lined with suckers. The police don't believe Dave's story, charging him with murdering the couple, who have in fact been dragged down to an underwater cave where they and others become the centerpieces of an ongoing feast. Steve has a vocational commitment to preserve the wildlife at the location, so others take the problem into their own hands.

Scripted by actor Leo Gordon and scored by Alexander Laszlo with the same grating electric keyboard he brought to NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST, ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES is notable for Clark's eloquent leadership and manly central presence; those who appreciate such things would probably favor his bare chest over William Holden's in PICNIC any day. However, it's really the eerie atmosphere and the solid character performances of ve Sota, Gene Roth (as a smug and boastful sheriff), Jan Shepard (KING CREOLE, as Clark's fiancée), and especially Vickers (never more sultry than when modeling her nylons or submitting to the monsters' voracious sucking) that rivet the viewer. Doing much of the heavy lifting behind that atmosphere is art director Daniel Haller, who at this point had been working with Roger Corman since 1958's WAR OF THE SATELLITES. His creepy underwater cave may have been high school play-level stuff in its actual substance, but DP John M. Nickolaus (who later shot Corman's THE TERROR and several of the most memorable OUTER LIMITS episodes, including "The Zanti Misfits") lights it like gangbusters, turning it into its own panoramic level of Hell.

Here in America, GIANT LEECHES is a public domain title, which has consigned its fate to a series of ignoble DVD releases and enrollment in MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000's Hall of Shame. This anamorphic 1.66:1 presentation isn't likely to knock anyone's socks off, but when we see how sharp the main titles are (long with a handful of later individual shots, possibly post-production inserts), it becomes evident that whatever visual shortcomings we notice are the fault of the original film stock and inadequate location lighting. Suffice to say, if this is a title that matters to you, you won't find better elsewhere. The optional German soundtrack is vintage. The extras include a German commentary by Ingo Strecker and Alexander Iffländer (no subtitles), a US trailer, a poster gallery, and a colorful illustrated booklet (including UK and Mexican posters and lobby cards) with German text by Strecker.

Bert I. Gordon's TORMENTED, based on an original script by George Worthing Yates and Gordon, was Mr. B.I.G.'s first venture outside the giant monster territory he'd carved out for himself at Allied Artists and then AIP. Set on an unnamed beach with a disused lighthouse poorly matted into the scenery, it stars 1950s science fiction stalwart Richard Carlson as Tom Stewart, "the world's greatest jazz pianist," who sounds like your run-of-the-mill cocktail piano player and has somehow attracted the romantic interest of two statuesque blondes, the self-described "second rate songstress" Vi Mason (Amazonian cover girl Juli Reding) and the born-into-money Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders) to whom he's newly engaged. The blonde getting the largest share of screen time is actually little Susan Gordon, the filmmaker's daughter, who plays Meg's nine year-old sister Sandy, who's got a crush on Tom and discovers that he had something to do with Vi's death when she threatened to tell Meg of their love affair. As the day of the wedding approaches, Tom is beset by a series of hauntings by Vi, which take the form of footprints in the sand, voices on the breeze, a severed taunting head, and even a disembodied hand that ambulates across the rug like a tarantula to claim the ring he intends for his bride.                

For all its novelty in Gordon's early catalogue, this is basically the umpteenth retread of the Poe idea of a man haunted by a guilt that manifests tailor-made torments only he can perceive. For some reason, the script doesn't entirely blame Vi's death on Tom, who simply hesitates too long on a scary precipice and fails to rescue her from a fall he had no part in. The filmmakers probably thought this would help to make Carlson a more sympathetic protagonist, but there's nothing likable about him; it's hard to imagine him being any less likable had he actually pushed Vi to her doom and cackled about it. Carlson was probably the costliest item on the budget, but his performance offers little than some melodramatic eye-darting when others catch him in lies, and overplayed reactions to his hauntings which always involve him hiding his face behind both hands. We hear a lot about "jazz" in the dialogue but the only real jazz is in the dialogue of actor Joe Turkel (PATHS OF GLORY) who plays a jive-speaking incidental who sets out to blackmail Tom. The storyline is further padded with Mrs. Ellis (Lillian Adams), a blind housekeeper who is last shown at the end of the picture gawking like everyone else at the surprise washed up on the beach. The movie's primary source of interest, without exaggeration, is Juli Reding as the first character to be done away with; she's an absorbing sight in her sheer voluptuousness and hardly someone a story should be quick to disembody. The scene where Tom recovers her body from the sea only to watch her breathless abundance as it turns into a heap of seaweed is a scrap of fetishism at its finest. While Susan Gordon earns every bit of her screen time with a performance more competent than those of many of her more experienced elders, the character of Sandy feels shamelessly written to order for her and is anything but to the film's ultimate advantage. As the film goes on, it begins to end sections of the film with fades to black which give the film the feel of a failed TV pilot or early TV movie. Even Sandy's accidental witnessing to one of Tom's murders, which should add to the film's dramatic tension, fails to generate any real suspense because it's all-too-obvious that the film is playing everything too safe to venture into actual child endangerment. It's worth noting that the performance of Harry Fleer as Meg's father Frank (who disapproves of Tom, as well he might) is rather obviously dubbed by Paul Frees. It's hard to imagine how bad his line readings must have been to make such glaring voice-over work seem preferable.  

Anolis' 1.66:1 presentation of the B&W film utilizes an archival German print with a different title sequence than appears on the Allied Artists prints we're used to seeing. It's not a 2K or 4K restoration but the gain of pictorial detail over other available sources is noticeable and the audio quality is fine. The German audio option is sourced from the print seen and is, once again, vintage. The 75m feature is accompanied by an audio commentary by Ing Strecker and Mirko Rekittke, a nice 6m interview with Susan Gordon (who died in 2011), German and American trailers, a Mick Garris TRAILERS FROM HELL commentary, and various galleries.    

I've saved the best news of all for last. Also on Anolis' roster of recent releases is BESTIEN LAUERN VOR CARACAS ("Beasts Lurk in Caracas"), better known to us as Hammer's THE LOST CONTINENT (1968). While a very nice Blu-ray of this title was recently issued in the States by Shout! Factory, including an excellent audio commentary by LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS editor Richard Klemenson, Anolis's release—available in a choice of no less than four different cover designs (see below)—represents an outstanding and utterly unexpected restoration of the film, extending the picture from its US theatrical running time of 87m 4s and its extended UK length of 97m 3s to an international composite running time of 99m 52s!

The additions—nearly all of which involve some form of mayhem, eroticism or sexual suggestion—were reportedly found in a surviving 35mm German print and carefully inserted into the HD master. There is a slight but noticeable degradation of quality in that this footage was derived from an archival print instead of the original camera negative, but it's nice to be able to readily identify what has been restored and from where; there are some shots added to the scene of the crew moving the explosive PhosB canisters out of wet storage that were evidently only used in the German release print. In these bits, the dialogue is subtitled in English as no English soundtrack exists for these moments. Anolis has done an outstanding job of including this material without disrupting the musical soundtrack, and their composite version is the most fun I've ever had with THE LOST CONTINENT, a beloved Hammer title since my first viewing of it in August 1969. 

The balance of the BESTIEN LAUERN VOR CARACAS set is just as welcome, including two German-language commentaries (no subtitles), and roughly an hour's worth of James McCabe-directed featurettes interviews with virtually every last surviving member of the film's cast and crew: actors Dana Gillespie, Norman Eshley, and Sylvana Henriques (who was badly injured on-set during her first day, leading her to be written out of the movie!); music arranger Carlo Martell and uncredited love theme composer Howard Blake (who gives us an exclusive piano performance of the piece you'll want to applaud), and special effects technicians John Richardson and Peter Hutchinson. These interviews, which are both very informative and amusing, check all the boxes of things we might be left wanting to know after viewing the film. Also included are the UK trailer (in 1.37:1 and 1.85:1–which surprisingly credits star Hildegard Knef as "Neff" and includes some of the long-missing shots restored to this release), a very entertaining German trailer (which, among other things, misidentifies actor Tony Beckley), and US TV spots, as well as German and Belgian press books and a really nice photo gallery. The MB cover editions also include a second disc containing more than two hours of German film trailers in standard definition.

Needless to say, this German disc release (like all other Anolis releases) is Region B, unplayable on Region A players—in fact, I've found myself unable to provide my usual frame grabs for any of these titles with my present set-up. If you're an ardent fan of THE LOST CONTINENT, as I am, you can consider BESTIEN LAURERN VOR CARACAS an essential double (or triple) dip and—since it goes beyond mere cosmetology to include more than 12m of footage never before shown on US theater screens—one of 2022's most important film restorations.

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Kino Lorber's FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION Reviewed

FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION

1957-59, Kino Lorber BD

Includes:

SPEAKING OF MURDER (Le rouge est mis, "The Red Light is On," 1957, 1.37:1, 85:41)

BACK TO THE WALL (Le dos au mur, 1958, 1.37:1, 94:25) WITNESS IN THE CITY (Un témoin dans la ville, 1959, 1.66:1, 89:36)

Kino Lorber’s often tempting FILM NOIR: THE DARK SIDE OF CINEMA series (now eleven volumes strong) has collected more than 30 B&W crime and suspense films from the Gold and Silver ages of Hollywood. While the genuine film noir classics tend to score individual releases, these compendiums have cast a wider and deeper net, gathering up under-appreciated gems and taking care to pair them with expert contextualizing commentaries. Now Kino Lorber has extended their reach into international terrain with the release of FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION, which collects three outstanding (if lesser-known) Gaumont releases in what I can only hope will become a parallel continuing series. This is the sort of release I'm used to having to order from Amazon.fr, often without English subtitles, and brother, are we lucky to have it. 

While the films included all date from the late 1950s, by which time American film noir was somewhat past the grand climax proposed by such pictures as KISS ME DEADLY (1955) and SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1956), French noir was plainly at its peak. As good as it often was, the earliest examples of international noir were often imitative of American examples; for instance, Luchino Visconti’s OBSESSION (Ossessione, 1943) or Bernard Borderie’s initial Lemmy Caution adventure POISON IVY (Le môme vert-di-gris, 1953). However, when French noir in particular began looking away from the Hollywood model and focused on telling hard-bitten stories of struggling people forced into lives of crime, prostitution, and betrayal, they couldn’t be beat in terms of hard-bitten authenticity. Anyone expecting to find parallels to late 1950s American noir in this collection will be startled by the unflinching brutality, frank adult language, sexual candor and acknowledgment of marginal gay characters in their storytelling, which is actually more evocative of 1970s American cinema. Even admirers of a noir classic such as Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) must admit that its dense, nightmarish, borderland atmosphere is unnatural, something as calculated for dramatic effect as the Crazy House sequence in Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947); however, the world proposed by the three Gaumont titles gathered in this set is virtually documentarian, showing us a Paris that 1) no longer exists and 2) which is strangely alien to American eyes because it’s not the traditional tourist’s view of Europe's greatest city, but rather the Paris once known to its working-class locals. These films slap your face and remind you that the French didn’t have to invent noir, it was always part of their language and landscape. It also speaks well of these films that all three were scripted, or based on writings by outstanding authors of French crime and suspense fiction.

The set not only starts out impressively well but ascends in quality and impact as one advances from film to film. SPEAKING OF MURDER, presented as the lone title on Disc 1, presents the indomitable Jean Gabin in a story based on a novel by Auguste le Breton, the author responsible for his prior hit, RIFIFI (1955). Gabin takes the lead as Louis, the boss of modest but lethal crime ring headquartered behind the façade of his service station garage. It’s after hours, when “the red light is on” (the translation of the original French title), that their illegal business is conducted. Opening with an everyday scene that suddenly erupts in a brazen and violent daylight theft, the film maintains a steady simmer as it builds to a major extended heist sequence. When Louis’ gang (which includes the great Lino Ventura as the tommy-gunner Pepito) ends up killing two men and injuring two pursuant police cyclists, he is soon after betrayed to the authorities, with Louis’ younger brother Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi, who has eluded, even been protected from becoming directly involvement with the gang) being wrongly perceived as the most likely snitch. As push comes to shove, Louis must decide whether his fealty is stronger to his own flesh and blood or the men who loyally follow his orders.

Directed by Gilles Grangier (who, two years later, would direct Gabin in his Silver Bear-winning Best Actor Performance in Archimede le clochard, 1959), the film also marks the screen debut of Annie Girardot "de la Comédie Française" (THE APE WOMAN, SHOCK TREATMENT), introduced wearing only a pajama top as Pierre's girlfriend. She, like virtually everyone else in the story, is forced into duplicity and corruption of character by economic considerations. Future director Jean-Pierre Mocky is also featured in a supporting role. 

Of all the pictures in the set, SPEAKING OF MURDER is the most obviously constructed around the central performance of a vividly written character. While its dramatic goals are entirely within the traditional guidelines of noir, it's not as overtly stylized as its generic definition might suggest. On the contrary, this is a realistically presented story in which everyone is caught in a more or less inescapable trap. As in Martin Scorsese's most memorable films, the film casually yet effectively charts the schism between the mob's warm family ties and cold professional ethos. While the bulk of the film maintains a stimulating simmer, it builds to a chillingly tense and well-staged showdown between Louis, his brother, and an unhinged Pepito. Denis Kieffer's main theme, with its trumpet solo by Georges Jouvin, strongly recalls the later Jackie Gleason theme, "Melancholy Serenade." Also included on the disc are trailers for the main feature (including alternate takes of scenes), and other related KL releases PORT OF SHADOWS, TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, RAZZIA SUR LA CHNOUF, MAIGRET SETS A TRAP, MAIGRET AND THE ST. FIACRE CASE and THE SICILIAN CLAN - all of which KL has released separately. These should have been given a "Play All" option.

 

As good as SPEAKING OF MURDER is, the two films on Disc 2 are arguably even better. Both are directed by Édouard Molinaro, perhaps best-known for directing the original LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (1978) and, among my readers particularly, DRACULA AND SON (with Christopher Lee, 1976). BACK TO THE WALL—based on the novel DÉLIVEREZ-NOUS DU MAL ("Deliver Us from Evil") by Frédéric Dard (whose voluminous work was most popularly filmed by director Robert Hossein in THE WICKED GO TO HELL, 1955, and BLONDE IN A WHITE CAR, 1958) and adapted by Jean Redon (EYES WITHOUT A FACE) was Molinaro’s feature film debut and it’s a corker. 

BACK TO THE WALL was Molinaro's first feature film and it's hard to think of a more audacious, fully realized debut. The film's first 17m is a tour-de-force, unfolding with almost no dialogue; the only sound we get is incidental and does not pertain to the events unfolding in the foreground. The film opens with gripping music as a snap-brimmed, trench-coated man (Gérard Oury) exits a palatial villa and heads out for a night ride, whose spectral glide through the city streets quietly underpins the main titles. He goes into the city, dons dark gloves and enters a stranger's apartment, where he either murders the male tenant or discovers his corpse. (The scene cuts away briefly to a comic counterpoint in the building's lobby at the critical moment.) Either way, our intruder then proceeds to meticulously dispose of the corpse, and we are almost 20m into the film before he takes us into his confidence with some furtive, savory narration.

Jeanne Moreau (in the same year she made THE LOVERS and ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS) stars as Gloria, the wife of wealthy industrialist Jacques Decrey (Oury) who learns she is having a romantic affair with a young actor Yves Normand (Philippe Nicaud). Decrey, having the confidence of wealth and position, decides to make his duplicitous mate suffer by blackmailing the actor and then the pair of them, forcing them into a situation of mental cruelty that turns worse as his wife has to begin taking money from her husband to pay her supposed blackmailer. The supporting cast includes fine performances by Claire Maurier (as Ghislaine, an overlooked barmaid who also loves Yves) and the difficult-to-identify actors who play the quirky private detective hired by Decrey and his wife, who flaunts her infidelities in his face. Gorgeously photographed with impressively deep blacks by Robert Lefebvre (whose career ranged from CASQUE D’OR to GIRL’S DORMITORY and several José Benazeraf films including I AM FRIGID… WHY?), BACK TO THE WALL is a Hitchcockian noir masterpiece whose reputation stands to soar in light of this new release.

Remarkably, this praise is (if anything) truer of WITNESS IN THE CITY, which came along a couple of films later in Molinaro’s career. A star vehicle for Lino Ventura, here playing a wounded man on the run, this is an atmospheric suspense piece to beat most others, scripted by the famous crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (LES DIABOLIQUES, VERTIGO, EYES WITHOUT A FACE), photographed by Henri Decäe and drenched in voluptuous jazz by Barney Wilen, a tenor saxophonist who had previously worked with Miles Davis on the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS. (The Barney Wilen Quintet features Kenny Clarke, Kenny Dorham, Paul Rovere and Duke Jordan.) Again, the film opens with a stunning set-piece as yet another scheming industrialist (Jacques Berthier) commits a murder by forcing a woman (an early, brief appearance by Françoise Brion) to her death from a speeding train car. When the suave, contemptible killer is declared innocent of this crime in a court of law, the dead woman’s husband Ancelin (Ventura)—in another magnificently sustained, mostly silent sequence—enacts his revenge and meticulously stages the murder scene as a suicide by hanging. (The sudden introduction of heavy percussion during this scene anticipates the murder-jazz vibe of Quincy Jones' score for IN COLD BLOOD, 1968.) On his way out of the house, Ancelin is surprised by a taxi driver summoned to the house by a prior call. The driver narrowly escapes being hushed by a bullet, and the remainder of the film documents Ancelin’s attempts to hail the right taxi and silence the only witness to his act of justice. 

The film proceeds virtually without a traditional hero for its first half-hour, long enough for us to invest our conflicted concerns in Ancelin's’s fate for the remainder of the film. This early part of the film is also the more traditionally stylized. Then, with the introduction of taxi driver Lambert (Franco Fabrizi) and his switchboard operator girlfriend Liliane (JULIET OF THE SPIRITS’ Sandra Milo), the film takes a more documentarian turn to authentic locations and our traditional hero turns out to be just one charismatic face among many, all of them night drivers for Radio-Taxi of Paris. (This was an actual company employing some 400 drivers, who are thanked in the credits for their production assistance.) It’s unusual for a noir film to use night scenes to generate such a warm and prevalent sense of bonhomie and brotherhood, and when one of their own is injured in the line of duty, the other drivers (led by veteran actor Robert Dalban) band together to track down and apprehend Ancelin, some of them not emerging from their mission unscathed. The idea of an entire taxi squad mobilizing to stop someone who has harmed one of their own puts a surprisingly upbeat spin on a reel-long climax that recalls the resolution of Fritz Lang’s M (1930), and the film is thrilling in the way it captures an automobile's careening, almost three-dimensional prowling of the city by night. This is one of the very best films to carry the Boileau-Narcejac brand. 

The second disc also includes trailers for BACK TO THE WALL, LES LIASONS DANGEREUSES '60, VIVA MARIA!, THE VALACHI PAPERS, A PAIN IN THE ASS and ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES, which generally feature Moreau, Ventura or Molinaro. I'd be derelict in my duty if I didn't mention that this release's QC shows some carelessness, with occasional typos in its subtitling and some notably inaccurate accounting of the films' running times, which are actually more generous than they read. But these are minor quibbles considering that the set presents us with beautiful presentations of three major discoveries in this genre, each of which whets the appetite for more of the same.  

If you're drawn to films of human conflict, style and emotion, consider FRENCH NOIR COLLECTION an essential purchase.   

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Arrow's GOTHIC FANTASTICO Part 4: THE WITCH aka THE WITCH IN LOVE (1966)

Damiano Damiani’s THE WITCH aka THE WITCH IN LOVE (La stregha in amore, 1966) is the ringer of the GOTHIC FANTASTICO set, being a contemporary story and, ironically, the only truly supernatural film in this particular grouping. LADY MORGAN’S VENGEANCE and THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER foreground gaslighting situations which masquerade as supernatural events (the former eventually becoming truly supernatural to square things), and THE THIRD EYE is a modern-day psychological horror scenario about a titled family living in an oppressive ancestral villa.

THE WITCH is not only a contemporary tale, it boldly aspires to art rather than common entertainment, originating from a celebrated short novel by Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. Though the film doesn’t make a great show of being anything other than Italian, the witch it presents is of Spanish origin and closely attuned to the character created by Fuentes. Instead of the usual Italian villa found in this genre, the story takes place largely inside a spacious yet claustrophobic Italian apartment as bedecked in art nouveau as the Tanz Akademie in Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA (1977). These attributes pose major contradictions to this genre yet THE WITCH clings to Italian Gothic through its assertions of morbid agoraphobia, aristocratic privilege, and the tenuous veil separating idle perversions from availability to supernatural intrusions. 

If we observe the history of Italian Gothic overall, into its silver and bronze ages, THE WITCH seems an obvious fork in the road that connects Antonio Margheriti & Sergio Corbucci’s CASTLE OF BLOOD (an earlier story of a live character’s interaction with others who are not quite alive nor real) with later examples such as Margheriti’s THE UNNATURALS (Contronatura, 1969), Mario Bava’s LISA AND THE DEVIL (1973), and Luigi Batzella’s NUDE FOR SATAN (Nuda per Satana, 1974). It's an obscure title not easy to accommodate yet it's a key ingredient of what would come along subsequently. 

Scripted by Ugo Liberatore (who had a hand in writing Giorgio Ferrani’s MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN, 1960), THE WITCH attends the journey of academic and serial womanizer Sergio Logan (Richard Johnson) as he is inexplicably tempted outside his relationship with Lorna (Margherita Guzzinati) by the curiously persistent presence of an older woman in his orbit. When this curious stranger has the brass to specifically require a man of his explicit description when placing a newspaper ad for a personal librarian, Logan takes the bait to find out more about this human enigma. She identifies herself as Consuelo Forente (Sarah Feratti, at age 55-56 embodying a much older, almost reptilian yet still sensual woman) and she seems to already know everything about Sergio, personally and professionally. She is looking for a man of his precise qualifications to impose order on the library of her late husband, a devotée of occult and erotic texts. As a serial womanizer who knows the fair sex well, he picks up on an unpleasant sexual vibe from the aging Signora, whose preservation under glass of the remains of her dead husband is only the first of her many surprises. Sergio is determined to walk out on his prospective employment… until Consuelo introduces him to her smoldering, smoky-gazed daughter, Aura (Rossana Schiaffino). To make a long and involving dance more perfunctory, Aura succeeds in baiting Sergio, even though he is exposed to a strobing warning sign embodied by fellow tenant Fabrizio (Gian Maria Volonté), a tragic, broken man who is obviously Sergio’s predecessor in this web of erotic intrigue.

THE WITCH is also notable in the context of GOTHIC FANTASTICO as the only film in which the actors were allowed to be credited under their actual professional names. Though Richard Johnson was British, all the other cast members were Italian and their honest billing points to the fact that this film was aiming higher than the exploitation market. All four of the film’s primary performances are first-rate, with Johnson’s gaining a certain resonance from his earlier casting as the rational core of Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING (1961). It's tempting to declare that Volonté steals the film as he brings much more to his performance than would have been scripted, but the whole house of cards would have collapsed without the pas de deux portrayals of Ferrati and Schiaffino, each with a cobra-like fascination in its own right.

Made in the immediate wake of THE THIRD EYE, THE WITCH finds Damiani advancing beyond the lewd raciness that got Guerrini’s hand slapped, by patiently orchestrating a more erotic Italian Gothic cinema, which was forgiven in part by its art-house pretensions and also its imaginative and tasteful execution; at one point, Aura decides that she and Sergio should undress one another without using their hands - and in another scene, Fabrizio works out his mounting tensions with Aura by fencing with her. You may notice that the film is visually designed to lead the viewer, like Sergio, around by the nose through the sensuous choreography of its camera movement and the gestures and body language of its characters, particularly those played by Ferrati and Schiaffino, the story’s conjurors. In this way, DP Leonida Barboni (who would die only four years later, in 1970) shows the influence of the younger Gianna di Venanzo (EVA, 8 1/2, L’ECLISSE), who had died at the much younger age of only 45 as THE WITCH was being made in early 1966. The film is also notable for its interest in the sensual life of aging bodies, which later became a particular hallmark of the films of another Spanish master, José Ramón Larraz.

Mark Thompson Ashworth’s introduction admits that THE WITCH was the only film in this set that he felt challenged his confidence to properly discuss it. Indeed, while the film’s few extras acknowledge the picture’s ambition and ambiguity, and have much to say about its relationship to the other three movies, they fall somewhat short of engaging with the movie’s own bracing uniqueness - but this isn't to say they offer no food for thought. 

Kat Ellinger's commentary encompasses multitudes of cinematic/literary forebears and parallels; she relates the film not only to Italian Gothic traditions but also Damiani’s earlier work (such as THE EMPTY CANVAS/La noia, 1964) and the more morbid highlights of American noir cinema, particularly Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). She also discusses the Fuentes novella but only in brief, preferring to leave listeners to the experience of discovering for themselves the interesting ways it varies from the film. While she summons any number of other valid reference points, from Huysman’s AU REBOURS to Losey’s EVA (a very apt catch), the film’s own constantly morphing, mercurial nature doesn’t allow her the time to fully explore the many avenues of thought opened up by these connections. Consequently, there are times where we find ourselves being told about far more familiar films (for example, Don Siegel’s THE BEGUILED or Tony Scott's THE HUNGER) rather than THE WITCH itself. Ellinger also touches on the Damiani film’s curious distinction of being mistaken by many viewers (and cataloguers) as a straightforward drama rather than as the accomplished genre film it is, which may well be why such an accomplished film remains so little-known among the genre's fans. Also included are a 24m 25s video essay by author and academic Miranda Corcoran (which goes deeply into the history of Witchcraft before coming round to the topic at hand), and another vigorous on-camera dissection of the film by Antonio Tentori.

Rounding out this rewarding four-disc set are an 80-page illustrated book containing some sharp new writing by Roberto Curti, Rob Talbot, Jerome Reuter, Rod Barnett and Kimberly Lindbergs. So little has been written in-depth about these films in English that the booklet is a real treat, though it feels a trifle over-illustrated. Also included is a reversible folded mini-poster reproduction of the Italian poster art for HORROR and THE THIRD EYE.

The set and booklet were produced by Kat Ellinger and Michael Mackenzie and the restorations were supervised by James White and James Pearcey.

Amazon is presently offering GOTHIC FANTASTICO at 50% off here.

  

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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