The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter November 2024

Journey into Blu-ray

The 1943 RKO Radio Pictures thriller that Orson Welles did and did not direct, Journey into Fear, has been released by Warner Bros. as a Warner WB Archive Collection Blu-ray (UPC#840418310823, $22) after having never appeared on DVD (we reviewed an LD in Nov 89).  The film is stunningly good cinema, and after its long absence from home video, many motion picture fans are going to be outright surprised in a where-have-you-been-all-my-life? manner at how transfixing the squared, full screen black-and-white film is.  Running a brief 68 minutes, once you see it you want to keep watching it over and over all day long.  Show it in tandem with The Third Man (Dec 08) and you can persuade even the most jaded young person that black-and-white films are equal in validity, beauty and bedazzlement to color films, and are perhaps spiritually superior.

Welles’s Mercury Theatre produced the film for RKO and Welles has a supporting role, but like Howard Hawks producing The Thing from Another World and Steven Spielberg producing Poltergeist, there has forever been a wink-wink attitude that Welles was the film’s primary creative force.  Yes, it is the director who authors a film, but not all of the time and definitely not in the same way all of the time.  Norman Foster, who would go on to make another butchered RKO classic, Rachel and the Stranger (Oct 20), along with lots of enjoyable ‘B’ movies, is the film’s official director, and for that matter, Joseph Cotten, who stars, is credited solely as the film’s screenwriter.  Based upon a novel by Eric Ambler, Cotten is a representative for an American arms manufacturer doing business in Turkey before the war, who becomes an assassination target by Nazi agents wanting to delay the deal.  Much of the drama is set on a creaky steamer that the Turkish authorities have hustled Cotten’s character onto in hopes of ducking the assassins for the first leg of his journey home.  The steamer has a number of eccentric passengers, and the assassins pick up his trail soon enough.

Mercury was one of those fantastic creative organizations that was positively bubbling over with talent, and clearly, everyone was giving the film their all.  The production designs, credited to Albert S. D'Agostino and Mark-Lee Kirk, are absolutely incredible and are utilized up and down as well as left and right and back and forth and all around.  The cinematography, credited to Karl Strauss, is fantastic, capturing the depth and texture of the sets in every shot, and lit to squeeze every last piece of atmosphere and mood out of them.  The Blu-ray’s image is outstanding.  A substantial improvement over the LD, not only is it sharp and finely detailed, but it is free of any hint of wear or damage.  The audio design, by James G. Stewart by Richard Van Hessen, may not have the extravagance that Welles attended to his best films, but it is still a solid factor in the entertainment, with the sounds of the boat and the cheap walls of the cabins proffering all sorts of stray noises.  Again, the monophonic audio on the LD pales in comparison to the much cleaner and stronger audio on the BD.  And then there is the cast, which, in addition to Cotten—the nebbish hero giving the story its momentum—and Welles—great fun, as usual, as a Turkish official—features Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warwick (playing the wife of Cotten’s character, left clueless at a Turkish Hotel), the marvelous Agnes Moorehead, the even more marvelous Everett Sloane, Hans Conried, Jack Moss, Frank Readick, Jack Durant and several others, all delivering exquisitely idiosyncratic performances.

Yes, the film is more superficial than The Third Man, but it is still a spellbinding experience and has a sufficiently logical, coherent, witty and effectively paced narrative to provide visceral satisfaction.  From there, however, one need only settle back and watch the contrast levels between the completely dark portions of the screen, the gradations of shadows, and the brightly lit portions to realize that secondary to its tale of intrigue and suppressed sexual adventure (we’ll go out on a limb here and say that, like Ulysses in Nighttown and Eyes Wide Shut, the film is actually about slipping away and then coming back to the wife), Journey into Fear demonstrates the incredible, magical power that movies have to create vivid, imaginary worlds with an almost tactile presence, and then to draw viewers through those worlds, be it in terror or excitement or aesthetic pleasure (or all three at once), with the aid of movie star avatars.  Every artist who worked on the film contributed to its enduring power and beauty, and Welles, as the head of Mercury if nothing else, was the man responsible for is creation.

There are optional English subtitles.  The disc also comes with a real delightful treat, the first three, wonderful Mercury Theatre anthology radio programs originally broadcast during three sequential weeks in July of 1938 (most with Bernard Herrmann background music) and each running 59 minutes:  A lovely, genuinely creepy rendition of Dracula with Welles as the title character and one of the doctors, along with Moorhead, George Coulouris, and Ray Collins; the superbly crafted Treasure Island, which is even better than sitting at someone’s knee and having the story read aloud (we were in tears just listening to Welles’s introduction of how Robert Lewis Stevenson came to write the story—Welles plays the adult narrator and Long John Silver, and the aural staging of the story is outstanding, with Moorehead, Coulouris, Collins and others); and A Tale of Two Cities, which is more convoluted after the wonderful clarity of Treasure Island.  Welles plays both parts, with Collins, Erskine Sanders and others, and you wait patiently the entire hour to hear his reading of the work’s most famous quotation—although from that perspective, it’s worth the wait.

Project A+

Made at the height of their agility, Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung star in the 1983 Golden Harvest production, Project A, part of the Celestial Films 88 Films four-platter 4K Blu-ray release, The Project A Collection (UPC#760137143543, $100).  Set in Hong Kong during the late Victorian era, Chan plays a cop assigned to take down pirates who inhabit a nearby island.  Hung is a local thief who collaborates because, if the pirates are out of the way, it will mean more business for him.  Biao Yuen and Man-Ying Wing are also featured.  The film is comprised of almost constant action, much of it intended to be comical, but some of it is a bit more serious to sustain the stakes for the heroes.  Some of the gags intentionally call to mind the work of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (Chan is apparently unaware, however, of how similar his work is to that of Douglas Fairbanks).  The chases and fights are wildly inventive and death-defying, whether it is simply ducking a sword as it is swung in a fight or dropping sixty feet from a clock tower.  And since the action is so intricate and elaborate, the 4K presentation is especially valuable in its ability to delineate every split-second detail. 

The film and its sequel, Project A II, are presented on two standard Blu-ray platters and two 4K platters.  The films look terrific on the standard BDs, but they are even better on the 4K discs.  The crazier a scene gets, the sharper the 4K presentation looks in comparison to the standard BD, and the more exhilarating it is to watch the actors risk life and limb for your entertainment.  Both films are letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1.  On both, the colors are fantastic.  They look incredibly fresh and solid.  Once in a while the cinematography is a touch out of focus (because of the widescreen lenses, there are times when part of a shot is in focus and part is not), but most of the time the image is sharp, and sharper still in 4K.  Both monophonic films are in Cantonese with optional English subtitles, and both have other language options.  On both features, both the 4K platter and the standard BD platter have commentaries and three trailers each.  The standard platters have additional supplements.

Two versions of the original Project A are included on the platters, the standard Hong Kong release, which runs 106 minutes, and an alternate release that runs 115 minutes.  Since pacing is an intricate part of the film’s pleasures, the Hong Kong version is preferable for newcomers, but once you are familiar with the film, then the expansion afforded by the longer version, adding more character beats and other details, is most welcome and enhances the entertainment.  On both versions of the film, there is a Dolby Atmos track that expands the music beautifully while keeping the dialog and sound effects strong and direct.  That said, even the original mono track has an impressive clarity and smoothness.  There is also an English language track in mono.  The standard platter features a 31 minutes of interviews with Chan’s double, Mars Cheung, about his career and making the film and the sequel; a good 22-minute interview with fighting expert Hoi-san Lee about performing martial arts on the screen (he gives a demonstration of Wing Chun that can be followed, if you’re up to it) and working with Chan (and how Cheung doesn’t mind playing villains although in real life he isn’t a bad person); an 18-minute interview with Yuen about his entire career and his collaborations with Hung (primarily) and Chan; a 14-minute interview with co-star Dick Wei about his career playing mostly villains; a 17-minute interview with composer Michael Lai, deconstructing the music in the Project A films and other Chan movies; a cute 16-minute visit with a Chan memorabilia collector and a perusal of his Project A-related items;  a good 15-minute interview with co-screenwriter Edward Tang about conceptualizing several of Chan’s films; 36 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage and silent bloopers accompanied by the film’s score; and a different set of bloopers in the 2-minute Japanese closing credit sequence than appeared on the Chinese releases.  One of the trailers, incidentally, includes shots of Chan speaking to the camera to wish everyone a happy New Year.

Honk Kong film expert Frank Djeng and F.J. DeSanto supply an excellent commentary track on the first film, enthusiastically explaining why, in their opinion, the film is not just one of the greatest Hong Kong films, but one of the greatest movies ever made.  Their reasoning is that in addition to the film’s basic entertainment, coherent narrative, and meticulously staged action, it was a watershed feature for many reasons.  “This was a transitional film for Jackie, from the period martial arts films to the modern action films, where emphasis on the action kind of switched gradually from kung fu to modern fights and stunts.”  Although barely out of their twenties, Chan and Hung had been working together for at least a couple of decades, and structurally the film gave them a unique opportunity to display their by now instinctual coordination through the collaboration of their characters.  While Chan was officially directing, Hung was virtually a co-director, and the action scenes benefited as well from the way they could complete each other’s sentences, as it were.  While they would still appear in other movies together, the film’s success sort of pushed them into going their separate ways.  It was also the first time Chan played a fully adult character not spoiled by privilege.  He went from being, “A fun kid to leading man in this movie.”

Djeng then goes back through the film a second time by himself to add more details about the production, and to explain the cultural references and language idioms, further identify the locations and dig even deeper into the film’s historical references.  He also itemizes the scenes that were added to the longer version (including a view of Hung’s rear that didn’t make it into the standard cut).

Chan’s character is carried over to the 1987 sequel, Project A II, which does not have Hung and is a different movie from the first, although that actually improves their appeal significantly as a double bill.  Unlike the first film, it is not wall-to-wall action, but it still has plenty of fights and chases, and compensates with a much stronger and more involving plot.  Still set in Victorian Hong Kong, Chan’s police officer character is put in charge of an area of town that has been corrupted by gangsters.  Revolutionaries who hope to overthrow the government of Mainland China are also soliciting contributions there, and counter agents want to break up their group.  Rather innocently, Chan’s character lands in the middle of the conflicts between the gangsters, the corrupt cops, and the two sets of foreign agents, while a group of pirates annoyed at what he did to them in the previous film are also looking to take their revenge.  The film feels meatier than the first movie, while still providing a plethora of amazing moments, witty moves and exhilarating, brilliantly staged sequences.  At one point, during a fight in a marketplace, Chan’s character grabs a handful of peppers and stuffs them in his mouth so he can wipe the juice on the eyes of his opponents.  This is not Hollywood, and while the juice on the hands is undoubtedly faked, the peppers in the mouth are real.  Hung was not involved with the production at all, which co-stars Maggie Cheung, Rosamund Kwan, Carina Lau and David Lam.

Unlike the first film, some of the music remains centered and bland on the Dolby Atmos track, although other sequences do have a dimensionality on par with the earlier show.  Again, the original mono track is also very smooth and clear.

There are again two versions of the film, although this time the preferred version is the original Hong Kong Cut, which runs 107 minutes, while the shorter Export Cut runs just 98 minutes.  Since the narrative is a more important component of the film’s entertainment, the scenes that appear in the longer version add to an appreciation of both the characters and the stakes at hand.  The supplements on the standard BD include a very interesting 25-minute interview with stuntman Anthony Carpio about the entire process of becoming a member of Chan’s stuntman team and what being a member entailed (he says that like himself, Chan would never tell his mother about his injuries); a 20-minute interview with co-star Wai-man Chan (the film’s villain, no relation to Jackie) talking about training as a fighter in films (“You have to have a good memory and stamina.”) and about his memories of Bruce Lee; a really great 13-minute featurette shot in English about the stuntmen working on the set that includes all sorts of fresh outtakes; a 3-minute clip of Jackie Chan recording the film’s closing song; a 4-minute alternate ending used in the film’s Japanese release (a different set of outtakes over the final credits); and a brief collection of promotional photos in still frame.

Djeng and DeSanto supply another rewarding commentary track.  While they also claim that this is the best Chan movie ever, after saying the same thing about the pre­vious movie, it is an acceptable assessment, because the two films complement one an­other so well that, despite having been made several years apart, they function perfectly as a complete and highly satisfying entertainment.  Once again, the pair go over the careers and skills of the players, dissect the narrative, and analyze the stunt sequences, and they also contrast the film with its predecessor, pointing out the deeper narrative (which has pertinent links to Once upon a Time in China), larger budget and greater confidence in what could be accomplished.  “This is great French farce comedy here.  Just the intrica­cies of how these guys all dance around each other in this is great.  Everything is elevated here.  Everything is like something he’s tried to do in a previous movie—and, by the way, has done well in a previous movie—but he sort of has a realization here, ‘I can do it bet­ter.  I can do it in a way that’s bigger and grander,’ and that’s what this movie represents.”

The yellow saw of Texas is the only one for thee

Arriving in a very cute and quite hefty plastic yellow chainsaw, the three-platter 4K Blu-ray release from MPI Media Group and Dark Sky Selects, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 50^th Anniversary (UPC#03036839592, $300), is also accompanied by a VHS video tape.  The chainsaw, a spot-on replication of the one from the movie, comes in a box, and you have to insert the saw part into a hole in front of the main unit after you take everything out, but it is nice and secure once it is inserted.  Then you split the main unit open (again, it fastens securely when you re-close it), and inside is the jacket for the 4K presentation of the film, which also holds a standard Blu-ray presentation and a Blu-ray platter containing bonus features.  The jacket for the VHS tape is also lodged inside, but given that we have never owned a video tape player and have no intention of obtaining one now, we are not capable of assessing its presentation quality.

The VHS tape is primarily a keepsake tribute to the roots of the film’s true popularity, burgeoning on home video a couple of decades after the 1974 feature first unnerved theatergoers.  It serves as a reminder that the film has always been, intentionally, a slapdash affair, much like the barbecue at the gas station where the heroes make their fateful stop.  The film is conceptually grungy, and so the impact of its horrors was unharmed by low quality playback.  In some ways, the less you could make out, the scarier the film became.  That said, the 4K presentation is outstanding, and is definitely the scariest of all.  When Gunnar Hansen’s character lunges into the bright light with his chainsaw, the sharpness of the image adds significantly to the impact of the fright.  You scream louder and jump higher.  But even during the murkier moments, the 4K image conveys the sense of a fresh film print—grainy, but smooth and ill colored, but accurately ill colored.  It is hard to imagine how the film could look any better than it does, and its perfection helps to sustain a viewer’s concentration.

And speaking of screams, the 4K’s Dolby Atmos sound is just outstanding, as well as being a substantial improvement over the primitive stereo enhancements that were done on the Pioneer DVD we reviewed in Jun 99.  The cast members, particularly the actresses, scream a lot.  They scream so much that it stops raising your own adrenaline and becomes irritating instead—irritating, that is, in the same way that the grainy, dour-colored images and over-indulgent set dressings are irritating.  You’d think, in fact, that if Marilyn Burns’s character would just shut up, the none-too-bright villains would have no idea where she has run off to.  With the fresh, crisp and meticulously separated sound mix—it is so detailed that when a character runs around one side of a car, you hear every footstep in a proper progression from back right to front center—the screams are more piercing and more persuasive.  And if your neighbors don’t think you are murdering somebody, they will definitely believe that you are cutting down trees.  The chainsaw noises are epic.  It is also worth mentioning that the musical score, composed by Wayne Bell and director Toby Hooper, has been given an impressive dimensionality as well, which enhances not only its impact, but the understanding that there has actually been quite a bit of intelligence and talent channeled into the mayhem.

Hooper’s 83-minute feature represented a shift in how horror was presented on film, a shift that first appeared with Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho but took another decade to really sink in.  Although murder in normal movies had usually been about why the act was committed, from the Greeks to William Shakespeare, and on to the Grand Guignol, there had been a celebration of the act itself.  With the true mass audiences that accompanied motion picture entertainment, however, mass tastes suppressed dwelling upon what became known as, ‘the gory details.’  Films like the 1963 Blood Feast and the 1968 Night of the Living Dead were relegated to the exploitation market and weren’t generally known until home video enabled their dissemination.  While it straddled the exploitation market, Texas Chainsaw Massacre kickstarted an obsession with the act of murder itself—nobody cares about why it is happening—that penetrated the general populace even before home video whipsawed the film’s popularity to an even greater level.  He also melded it with the Fifties marketing obsession that he had come of age enjoying—the placement of teenagers in mortal danger from monsters.  By then, standards had lowered, permissiveness had flourished, and what Hooper accomplished—pushing the terror so far (without significant splatter) that it comfortably dips into a perverse humor—would expand to the many horror and slasher films we know and love today.  Nevertheless, by focusing on what made viewers scream, no one else ever quite duplicated the balance between the film’s horror moments and the unnerving idea that the murders were being perpetrated by bizarre but essentially regular people.

The 4K platter has optional English subtitles and four commentary tracks.  One track, with Hooper, Hansen and cinematographer Daniel Pearl, appeared on the Pioneer DVD.  Another track features Hooper with Texas Chainsaw historian David Gregory, who prompts Hooper to talk about various aspects of the production and also provide insights about the impact the film has had over the subsequent decades.  On the one hand, there are details that he can’t remember (did Burns really allow her finger to be pierced because the blood tube wasn’t working and they were running out of time to get the scene?), but on the other hand, he provides many interesting details about the shoot and how things were organized and executed, and he also talks philosophically about the manner in which monsters in movies were often depicted as ‘creatures,’ while the monsters here are, definitively, men.

On another track, Burns, co-stars Allen Danziger and Paul Partain, and pro­duction designer Robert Burns (no relation) have a pleasant talk, sharing their memories about the production from their perspective, and how they have seen the film enter into the general public consciousness.  “I think after this movie less hitchhikers were picked up.  I never checked into it but I would betcha it put the kibosh on picking up strangers.”

A fourth commentary track features Pearl, editor J. Larry Carroll (you gotta love his montage of successively nearer close-ups of Burns’s eye) and sound man Ted Nicolaou, prompted again by Gregory and providing loads of interesting anecdotes about the shoot and the specific production challenges.  They all came out of film school together, expecting to get no further in their careers than teaching, but the immediate success of the film paved the way for all of them to go to Hollywood.  Still, making the film was unnerving at times.

“What’s funny is that if you traveled outside of Austin in these days it wasn’t so different from the way it was presented in this movie.  You could get into some serious tangles with some seriously weird rednecks.”

“We were serious hippies, we were, at the time and we were pretty sure that if the rednecks ever got a hold of us they would have their way with us.  Basically, this film is about that fear.”

But in all of the commentaries and supplements, no one ever mentions a movie that might be considered the film’s chief inspiration—Deliverance.

The standard Blu-ray included in the set has the same four commentaries, and additional optional Spanish subtitles along with the English subtitles.  It does not have the Dolby Atmos track.  It does have a 7.1-channel DTS track, which also appears on the 4K platter, but lacks the exhilarating immediacy and clarity of the Atmos track.  The color transfer is also different, closer to the soft image that one is familiar with from past presentations.  If there were nothing to compare it with, then the image on the BD platter, which is a little brighter, would seem terrific, but the colors are substantially more realistic on the 4K platter, and the image is substantially sharper, so that the standard BD pales in comparison.  The chapter encoding is also slightly different.

The third platter, also a standard Blu-ray, contains three trailers, three TV commercials and two radio commercials.  Most of the 25 minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes appeared on the DVD, as did the 2 minutes of bloopers.  There are also 8 minutes of production photo montages that include detailed looks at the make-up applications; a very good 10-minute piece about the 4K re-mastering effort and how the film was originally shot; an 8-minute walkthrough of the house where the film’s mayhem was shot (which had been moved and restored as a restaurant); a jokey but still informative 20-minute visit to the film’s other locations and to the restored house; a thoughtful 14-minute piece about the film’s memorabilia and collectibles; an 11-minute interview with Carroll, who explains how he became involved, what some of the challenges were in putting the film together, what Hooper was like (he tended to sleep during the day and work at night), and his own subsequent projects; a 16-minute interview with co-star John Dugan who talks about the stress of shooting in such hot conditions wearing a ton of old age makeup and also becomes emotional over what Burns had to go through; a very nice 17-minute retrospective interview with co-star Teri McMinn (the one who gets put on the meat hook) who talks about the trials and tribulations of the shoot and what she has been up to since then; a 16-minute interview with production manager Ron Bozman (he later won an Oscar producing Silence of the Lambs), who shares a few fresh anecdotes about the shoot and then goes into fascinating detail about the film’s financing and profit distribution; a passable 54-minute talk between Hooper and William Friedkin in front of a live audience, going into detail about the original gestation of the film and touching on other filmmaking anecdotes; a 72-minute collection of shorter pieces, including another interview with Pearl, a very nice memoriam section about the individuals who worked on the film and have since passed away, more about the house that became a restaurant, an interview with co-star Nubbins Sawyer, a terrific interview with Hansen (who is now an author living in Maine), and other topics; and an excellent 83-minute appreciation of the film, intercutting the reflections of different critics, fans and filmmakers to dissect the film’s strengths and also to celebrate Hooper and his career.

MPI has also released the film as a regular two-platter 4K Blu-ray (UPC#030306836799, $45), with the Blu-ray supplement as the second platter, but no awesome yellow chainsaw jacket.

Lewton classics in 4K

Two wonderfully atmospheric 1943 RKO Radio Pictures features made during World War II that were produced by Val Lewton, to whom authorship of their overall cinematic impact is often ascribed, I Walked with a Zombie / The Seventh Victim, have been released in a two-platter 4K Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection (UPC#715515303415, $50), the films appearing together on both the 4K platter and the standard Blu-ray platter.  Both black-and-white films are presented in a squared full screen format, and both have reasonably clean monophonic audio tracks.  The films are supported by optional English subtitles.

To this day, I Walked with a Zombie, entirely because of its showmanship title, has a greater popularity than Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim, but the latter is our favorite of all the Lewton features from the Forties, a terrific suspense thriller that penetrates beyond its superficial mechanics at every turn.  Set in Greenwich Village during the middle phase of its Bohemian era, where a cosmetics entrepreneur, played with a straight-from-flapper-to-Goth hairdo by Jean Brooks, goes missing.  Her sister, played by Kim Hunter in an impressive debut, comes looking for her, uncovering not just the sister’s unseemly love life, but a cabal of sophisticated devil worshipers.  Running a succinct 71 minutes, the film has the compelling momentum of a mystery, with one unexpected discovery after another.  It is consistently intriguing and out of the ordinary, merging the ambiguities of romance with the uncertainties of suspense to create a unique and enduring film that indeed defies almost every categorization except for its being a ‘Val Lewton feature.’

Hugh Beaumont and Tom Conway co-star.  The picture quality looks terrific, adding greatly to the film’s subtleties of atmosphere and emotion, and holding one’s attention all the more.  It is substantially cleaner than the Warner Home Video DVD, part of The Val Lewton Horror Collection we reviewed in Nov 06, with a lovely, sharp and spotless image.  The Steve Haberman commentary from the DVD has been carried over.  Additionally, excerpts from a terrific a podcast profile of Lewton and his career entitled The Secret History of Hollywood with Adam Roche plays on another track as the film unspools beneath it.  While such podcasts are wonderful experiences at any time, it is especially rewarding to hear the pertinent passages with the film still so fresh in your mind. 

Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie is more clearly defined but still holds an inviting balance between enigma and exoticism.  Famously a ‘voodoo Jane Eyre,’ its weakest component is the casting of Conway as the male lead, who is ultimately too one-dimensional to convey the conflicted soul that the film really needs to sell its romance (he is much better as the guarded psychiatrist in Seventh Victim).  Frances Dee plays a nurse who has been called to the Caribbean sugar plantation to care for the wife of Conway’s character, who seems to be suffering from some sort of walking coma, if there is such a thing.  Eager to help cure her, Dee’s character ends up visiting local religious gatherings for some interesting treatment options.  Seeing how the film was created backwards from the chosen title and runs just 68 minutes, it is an admirable and enduring feature, with an abundance of the requisite atmosphere, a viable if not completely satisfying romance, and a few moderate thrills.  If it has become dated from a racial perspective, there is good as well as bad in its approach.  On the one hand, the movie introduced the calypso legend Sir Lancelot to American audiences, and has several strong black characters, but on the other hand, the tall, lanky Darby Jones, playing an apparent zombie, is shot in a way that is intended to unnerve audiences entirely because he is tall and black, since his character otherwise presents no threat to anyone or anything.  He would not be out of place in a contemporary political advertisement.

The picture looks terrific, adding significantly to the film’s appeal.  The image is absolutely spotless, an improvement over the Warner Bros. DVD (Nov 06), and contrasts are finely detailed.  The grain that does appear enhances the mood of the specific scenes where it is present.  The excellent DVD commentary by movie enthusiasts Kim Newman and Stephen Jones has been carried over.  More excerpts from A Secret History of Hollywood are included as the film unspools beneath it.  It is not a casual reading, as it is accompanied throughout by a pleasant musical score as well as other appropriate sounds—audio clips from other movies, Lancelot’s singles, and so on.  Again, you definitely catch things that would otherwise pass without notice if the music wasn’t there.  Additionally, the tale of the film’s production is inherently entertaining, and Lancelot’s story deserves a feature film all of its own.

On both movies, the standard Blu-ray presentation is almost as nice as the 4K presentation.  While the 4K image may seem sharper from time to time, the improvements will only be discernible on a very large screen.  The quality of the sound is also indistinguishable on the two presentations.  The standard Blu-ray, however, also contains a bevy of additional supplementary materials.  Shadows in the Dark The Val Lewton Legacy, a 53-minute retrospective look at Lewton’s films, is carried over from the DVD, as are trailers for the two films.  Also featured is a reasonably thorough 47-minute appreciation (“It’s astonishing how much these films pack into 70 minutes of running time, how compact and at the same time expansive they are.”) and comparative analysis of the two title features (although they miss how the shadow behind the shower curtain in Seventh Victim suggests the Devil’s horns); a really good 13-minute piece on the real history of zombies; another 53 minutes of excerpts from The Secret History of Hollywood about Brooks and her husband (briefly), Richard Brooks; and 70 minutes from Secret History of Hollywood about Conway and tangentially, his brother, George Sanders, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.  The special features do not start up where they left off if playback is terminated.

Wild Japanese folktale

An elaborate Japanese folktale with political undertones, kitschy embellishments and a Biblical finale, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1979 Demon Pond (Yasha-Ga-Ike), has been released as a two-platter 4K Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection (UPC#715515303712, $50).  The film begins realistically, in 1913, as a school teacher wrapping up his summer vacation decides to make one last stop on the way home, to visit the oddly titled body of water that he spots on the map.  Traveling on foot from the train station, seemingly across rivers and a desert, he becomes very thirsty, only to learn that the area he arrives at has been subject to an extreme drought and there has been no rain for several years.  Passing through a town where everyone is rude to him, he walks up a hill and discovers a verdant garden being irrigated by a small stream, and a woman rinsing flowers in the water.  He relieves his thirst and begins a conversation with her.  And then things start to get weird.  Later there is a sequence where a fish and a crab turn into men and discuss their lot in life as they walk down a path in the moonlight, coming upon a humanized catfish who has an urgent message for the princess of the Pond (the princess is also played by the same actor playing the other woman).  They are in costumes that would not be out of place in an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  Ultimately, the film cuts back and forth between the princess (whose lair would not be out of place in Barbarella), the teacher and his hosts (the woman rinsing the flowers is married), and the townspeople who want to sacrifice the woman to end the drought, shifting from serious and thoughtful conversations to wild, epic special effects as everything converges for the climax.  There are other surprises, such as with the film’s casting, that are best left to be discovered.  The film runs 124 minutes to take everything in, and while some viewers will be alienated by the understated and earnest opening, followed by a sudden shift in tone and presumption, others will take full delight in the understanding that they are watching something that is very different from anything they have ever seen before.  Subsequent visitations to the film, when you have a better idea of what to expect, are even more transfixing.

The one way you can tell that the film was made in the Seventies is the musical score, which is reminiscent of Keith Emerson, with synthesizer renditions of early Twentieth Century classical music pieces from Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun to Night on Bald Mountain and others.  The monophonic sound is solid and clean, and the film is in Japanese with optional English subtitles.  The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1.  Although soft at times, and deliberately hazy at other times (there are flashbacks, too), the picture is mostly solid and clean, and colors are accurate.  The 4K presentation is definitely nicer than the standard Blu-ray that is also included in the set, which has blander, less distinctive hues, although the differences are more pronounced in some sequences than in others.  At its best moments, even the standard BD is gorgeous.  The standard BD platter also contains an incisive 18-minute analysis of the film and Shinoda’s career, and a 13-minute profile of special effects master Nobuo Yajima (with an appreciation of the film’s Godzilla-style miniatures), which deconstructs the final sequence almost shot by shot.  The special features do not begin where they left off if playback is terminated—it goes back to the film instead.

China Blu

Twelve days before the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility, James Bridges’s 1979 Columbia Pictures thriller about problems at a nuclear power facility, The China Syndrome, was released in theaters.  The film is also a wicked satire about the vacuity of local news programs, and it endures as an exciting suspense drama with marvelous performances, but the center of its narrative is the fallout, as it were, from a construction flaw at a nuclear plant, and the film’s fortunes rose and subsided upon its being identified as a movie about the problems of nuclear power.  Within the film, but more pragmatically all around, the problems really aren’t about nuclear power but about contractors cheating on specs to make their budgets.  Nevertheless, the film came to be associated with a panic that has, in the years following the incident (and the even greater, muckier Chernobyl disaster in the USSR) subsided, thanks in part to a concentrated public relations effort by the nuclear power industry but in part to improvements in construction safety, as well.  Heck, there are even talks about reopening Three Mile Island, because the next scary technological advancement, A.I., needs a dedicated power source to grow.

Hoping that enough time has passed, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released The China Syndrome on Blu-ray (UPC#043396637139, $27) with a beautiful transfer that captures the texture and detail of the original images with near perfection.  Letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1, hues are fresh and fleshtones are