The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter September, 2023
Finally, Borsalino
It’s the Thirties, in Marseilles. Alain Delon and Jean-Claude Belmondo stroll into a casino. Delon, in a tuxedo, is impeccably dressed. Belmondo, also wearing a tuxedo, is dressed smartly, but his bowtie is ever so slightly askew where Delon’s is perfect, in every shot. Paramount Pictures’ first great gangster film of the Seventies, Borsalino, is at long last available on home video in America, as it is being released on Blu-ray by Paramount and Arrow Video (UPC#760137131984, $40). Directed by Jacques Deray, the 1970 feature paired France’s two biggest movie stars at the time in a delightful, grinning bromance set amid mob wars for control of the city. The two begin as petty criminals, but over the course of the film’s 124 minutes, they identify and take down the various corrupt officials and racketeering businessmen until just the two of them are on top (dressing better and better, every step of the way). The blend of drama, action, comedy, charm, abundant and beautifully tailored costumes, choice period locations and lovely, classic automobiles are all woven tightly together with one of the greatest musical scores ever conceived—a jaunty, immediately addictive piece with multiple variations by jazz composer Claude Bolling.
The film is in French with optional English subtitles, but your pickier friends can be appeased by a decent English dubbed track—the film is such a crowd pleaser that even people who have no idea who Delon and Belmondo are will immediately pick up on the screen talent that made them superstars, and be carried through the film by their savoir faire. On both tracks, the monophonic sound is crisp and clean, and Bolling’s bass shakes you just the way it is supposed to.
Letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.66:1, the picture transfer is immaculate, clarifying every bead and every silken thread in Jacques Fonteray’s magnificent wardrobe designs. Fleshtones are accurate and the crispness of the image enhances the immediacy of the entertainment. A great 11-minute piece is included that specifically deconstructs the accomplishments of Fonteray’s costumes, along with a similarly satisfying 12-minute deconstruction of Bolling’s music, a wonderful 13-minute appreciation of Belmondo’s career that includes an awesome montage of stunt sequences from his films, a basic collection of promotional materials in still frame and a trailer.
There is also an excellent, thoroughly researched commentary by film expert Josh Nelson, who shares many great stories about the film’s conception and production, details the backgrounds of the real underworld figures that the movie was based upon, goes over the often interconnected careers of Belmondo, Delon and Deray, shares the many critical opinions that have been issued about the film both positive and negative (there are an exceptional number of both opinions), suggests that not only The Sting, but even The Godfather was influenced by the film, and explains how Delon cultivated his own image as a gangster for the sake of publicizing his movies. Speaking of publicity, Belmondo was contracted to have top billing, but Delon also produced the film, so he arranged the first posters to read, “Alain Delon presents Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon in Borsalino.” Needless to say, that annoyed Belmondo to no end and he sued. Yes, he won the suit, but more importantly, his legal actions brought even more awareness and heightened urgency to see the film when it finally opened. That’s show business.
Bravo 4K
The original Blu-ray release of Rio Bravo (Nov 16) was in need of better source material than it had, and that has been rectified with the WB TCM Turner Classic Movies 4K UltraHD Blu-ray release (UPC#88392980-8366, $34). The film’s color scheme is deliberately subdued, but the transfer is meticulous and the 4K playback looks fantastic. Even the slower sequences in the 141-minute feature, such as the extended segment opening the third act where both Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing songs, with Walter Brennan joining in, are utterly captivating. The monophonic sound is so smooth that you feel like you are in the recording studio with them, and it becomes a wonderfully worthy break from the action. The gunfire and explosions are also invigorating. Indeed, if you didn’t notice it before, it seems very clear that Ennio Morricone was directly inspired by the plaintive brass that Dimitri Tiomkin employed for part of his musical score.
The 1959 film was the third for Martin to try his hand at a dramatic part, and the weakness of his performance probably sent him back to musicals and comedies for a while, but the 4K presentation enhances all of the performances. Not only are you aware of every pause and utterance coming from the film’s star, John Wayne, but in the same way that the format magnifies Martin’s shortcomings, it magnifies Wayne’s perfection. His scenes with Ward Bond are worthy of an acting class, and he handles the interruptions and line overlaps in his scenes with Angie Dickinson as deftly as any actor director Howard Hawks tried it with. The classic western, about lawmen preventing a siege on a jail to free a prisoner, already has enough kinetic energy to bounce between the lively dialog exchanges and the suspenseful action scenes, but 4K amplifies a viewer’s subliminal reaction to every moment. Preserved this well, the film will never grow old.
The cinematography does not have brown tones like today’s ‘western’ cinematography does, but the film’s color scheme is brown nevertheless, so that the image imparts a richness of true colors while the set designs and costumes generally emphasize different manifestations of wood and dirt coloring. Fleshtones are deep, and look lighter and pastier on the old BD. The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1. There are alternate French, Spanish, Italian and German audio tracks, eleven subtitling options including English, and the rewarding commentary track from film critic Richard Schickel and fan John Carpenter.
Enter the 4K Dragon
The Criterion Collection Blu-ray presentation of Enter the Dragon, part of their Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits boxed set (Aug 20), looked and sounded terrific, with bright, colorful hues and an awesome 5.1-channel stereo soundtrack, but the new WB SDS Studio Distribution Services WB100 4K UltraHD Blu-ray release (UPC#883929793723, $34), looks and sounds even better. While the colors on the Criterion release are brighter, the more subdued colors on the 4K presentation not only look more solid and better detailed, but they feel more accurate, as if the saturation on the Criterion image had been pushed a bit to make the film feel more playful. Criterion’s presentation is still a lot of fun, but the WB presentation feels definitive. As for the sound, the bass in Lalo Schifrin’s musical score was terrific on the Criterion version (which was, in turn, stronger than the great DVDs that came before it), but the 4K’s Dolby Atmos processing has even more power, and the sound in general is richer and better detailed. The 1973 film, blending the trappings of a James Bond movie with the action of a martial arts feature, which would have enabled Lee to have an even greater international career than the posthumous one facilitated by his untimely death before the film was released, is an exhilarating entertainment that transcends its narrative flaws and staging idiosyncrasies through the joy of what it delivers to an eager fan. The 4K presentation amplifies that joy while diminishing the flaws.
Criterion only presented the theatrical version of the film, which runs 99 minutes, but the 4K disc also offers the preferred 102-minute Special Edition version, as well, incorporating a bit more of the Eastern mysticism that Lee himself wanted included in the film. The presentation is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1. There is an alternate monophonic English track, seven alternate language tracks including a Chinese track that is only available on the Special Edition, thirteen subtitling options including English, the 2-minute introduction to the Special Edition by Linda Lee Caldwell, and the DVD’s sporadic but informative commentary track over the Special Edition from producer Paul Heller and screenwriter Michael Allin.
McQueen western
Perhaps Henry Hathaway’s 1966 Paramount western, Nevada Smith, does not belong in the canon of important Twentieth Century motion pictures, but it certainly belongs in any reckoning of the great films of the Sixties. Made between The Cincinnati Kid and The Sand Pebbles, the film reinforced Steve McQueen’s credentials as a boxoffice action star. Based upon a supporting character Harold Robbins had provided in a backstory for The Carpetbaggers (giving Alan Ladd a meaty part in 1964), the 130-minute film eventually supplied Paramount with an enduring, adult-ish marathon double bill that also served to remind audiences how close the past really was. By the Sixties, except for those living on ranches in Texas or the Mountain States, westerns were abstract entertainment, but following the same character from his western roots (it would be the last time McQueen played an actual teenager, not that you buy it for a second) in a revenge adventure thriller and then seeing him matured in the industrialized and cosmopolitan Los Angeles environs of The Carpetbaggers added a great credibility to the concept of the western as realistic entertainment. Nevada Smith is a highly enjoyable movie, but it is also a highly improbable one, with McQueen’s character placing himself in one unbelievable situation after another. The double bill helped to obscure the implausible moments, while magnifying the lingering thrill of the action scenes and of McQueen’s captivating command of the screen. Having spent scores of hours playing a cowboy on TV (and having learned that if he wanted to hold your attention he needed to do stuff with his hands), McQueen’s presence in the film is masterful, and the movie thrives not on whether the story is believable, but on how engaging it is to follow his character’s experiences.
Paramount and Kino Lorber Incorporated have released the film on Blu-ray as a KL Studio Classics title (UPC#738329263447, $25). When the parents of McQueen’s character are murdered by three roving bandits (indelibly embodied by Martin Landau, Arthur Kennedy and Karl Malden), he sets out single-mindedly for vengeance, learning what it means to be an adult in the process (until the very last shot of his very last film, McQueen, whatever his age, imparted the spirit of the eternal adolescent). Brian Keith, Suzanne Pleshette, Janet Margolin, Pat Hingle, Howard Da Silva, Raf Vallone and Paul Fix costar—most of them appearing in short sequences aiding or otherwise interacting with the hero as he traverses the country on his quest (including a stay in a Louisiana penal colony in the film’s middle—if there was one thing other than handling a gun and being ‘cool’ that McQueen was famous for, it was ‘escaping’). Hathaway makes terrific use of the widescreen framing, which is aptly transferred to the Blu-ray with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1, not just to place the characters in evocative western landscapes, but to put them at very opposite ends of the screen, often enhancing the tension between them as a result. With a rich and unspoiled color transfer that sharpens every detail, the story almost takes a secondary importance to the diversion of the images and the emotions those images convey. That is the pull of the film and why it remains such a compelling Sixties feature, presenting a display of the Hollywood traditions that were soon to become outmoded, but illuminating them with the glow of impetuous youth that, thanks to the movies and home video, will never diminish.
The monophonic sound is reasonably strong and worthy of the nice Alfred Newman musical score. Along with optional English subtitles, four TV commercials, a radio commercial and a trailer, there is a commentary track featuring movie authorities C. Courtney Joyner, Mark Jordan and Henry Parke, who are thrilled to be talking about the film. They spend a lot time discussing Hathaway and McQueen, sharing stories about their behavior on the set, and as each supporting star appears, they eagerly talk about each one’s contributions to the movies in general and this one in particular. While the talk is not overly informative, and once in a while, they are plain wrong (they miss a plot point explaining why McQueen’s character keeps Kennedy’s character alive for so long, and they claim that the TV series, Mission Impossible, was, “In full swing,” when in fact the series would not debut for another three months when the film first hit theaters—like many typecast bad guys before him, Landau had to transition to TV to become a screen hero), and they overlook some connections, such as never acknowledging Malden’s similar role in One-Eyed Jacks. Nevertheless, they do have a lot of Hollywood lore to share, and their enthusiasm for the film outweighs the lightness of the talk. As they explain, McQueen had a feud with Malden over rivalries on Broadway that took him a very long time to get over, but made for some wonderful cinema. In one confrontation scene, the commentators can’t contain themselves. “This scene is fantastic! The sense of competition here is just absolutely palatable.”
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