Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on April 14, 2002 at 11:51:24

Film history gets big rewrite

The DVD boom means new life for older misfits

By Chris Fujiwara, Globe Correspondent, 4/14/2002

It takes more than an armchair to be a film historian. You also need a DVD player.

The DVD boom has resulted in a flood of reissues of exceptional and misfit films - movies that have languished for years, relegated to cable screenings in the wrong aspect ratio or degraded cassette copies, or just unavailable.

The revival of neglected movies on DVD means the rewriting of film history day by day, living room by living room. And the emerging canon, I have no doubt, will include fewer ''Lawrence of Arabia''s and more films with titles like ''Au Pair Girls,'' ''Go, Go, Second-Time Virgin,'' and ''Pioneers in Ingolstadt.''

Less esoteric than those, but still underrated, is ''Play Misty for Me,'' the first film directed by Clint Eastwood. It was made in 1971, when a horror film could also be an honest portrait of male-female relationships.

Eastwood plays Dave, a womanizing jazz DJ in lovely Carmel, Calif., who makes the mistake of sleeping with a fan named Evelyn (Jessica Walter). Evelyn turns out to be a walking public-service announcement against the dangers of casual sex: She's possessive and delusional, and she won't leave Dave alone.

Quietly correcting much sneering mendaciousness from Hollywood on the subject of the new sexuality of the period, ''Play Misty for Me'' is both credible and unselfconscious about its truthfulness. In true liberated style, the characters constantly check with each other about the ground rules of their relationship. The irony of the film is that Evelyn lives by rules that are valid only in her mind.

Just because her schizophrenic character turns into a knife-wielding villainess doesn't mean that Jessica Walter's sympathetic performance isn't at least as praiseworthy as anything in ''A Beautiful Mind'' (which, to listen to some people, is the first-ever non-worthless celluloid portrait of mental illness - don't believe it).

Universal's lovingly produced DVD of ''Play Misty for Me'' includes Laurent Bouzereau's new documentary on the making of the movie, with comments by Eastwood, co-star Donna Mills, and the ever-intense Walter.

Overlooked, not forgotten

Ignored last year in the rush to puff Michael Bay's inconsequential and insulting ''Pearl Harbor'' was Paramount's DVD release of Otto Preminger's 1965 ''In Harm's Way,'' a superior account of how the US Navy recovered from Pearl Harbor to challenge the Japanese in the Pacific. Few critics have spoken up for ''In Harm's Way,'' but it has a loyal following, and, in my experience, almost everybody who has seen it likes it.

One of the best things about the DVD format is that it's helping make ''letterboxing'' - masking the top and bottom of the screen to create a wide image - the norm for home presentation of widescreen movies. The letterboxed DVD of ''In Harm's Way'' allows the viewer to revel in the complexity of Preminger's staging and the beauty of Loyal Griggs's cinematography.

Preminger loved long, sweeping horizontal compositions, and seeing his widescreen films (which also include ''Carmen Jones,'' ''Exodus,'' and ''Advise and Consent'') on TV without benefit of letterboxing - i.e., in ''full-frame'' versions that omit almost half the original image - isn't seeing them. In ''In Harm's Way,'' Preminger uses the width of the Panavision screen as the dynamic visual correlative to the story's sprawling arena, its long time frame, and the large cast (led by John Wayne and Kirk Douglas).

The DVD contains several trailers in which Preminger promotes starlet Barbara Bouchet (''a new face and a new body''). It also features a promotional documentary on the making of the film.

Though lacking comparable extras, Fantoma's release of Fritz Lang's ''The Tiger of Eschnapur'' and ''The Indian Tomb'' on DVD is sufficient in itself to justify the existence of the format. Made in 1959, these films were among the final works by the German director, and they testify to a lifetime of filmic thought and invention.

The two-part epic deals with a German architect who falls in love with a temple dancer on whom the Maharaja has designs. The lovers endure many trials before reaching their happy ending. Lang neither pumps the naive story with psychological realism nor (as Tom Gunning points out in his excellent liner notes to the DVDs) panders to his audience with irony and parody. Instead, he treats the escapist yarn as myth. This approach allows Lang to explore his career-long themes of desire and entrapment in a mathematically pure form, while creating sumptuous sequences that glow with an austere beauty.

Reborn in the USA

In the States, the two films were chopped down and recut into one. Over the years, Lang's versions have been screened occasionally, but the Fantoma DVDs can be called their first official US release.

Lang's Indian films heralded a boom in European action and adventure films in the '60s and '70s. Most of these films were ignored in this country if they were released here at all, but now there's a voracious and well-informed American audience for European genre movies of all kinds.

So far, the ''European trash'' genre best represented on DVD has been the horror film. One rich vein that remains all but unmined is the Italian crime film. Anchor Bay's release of ''Violent City,'' a 1971 thriller directed by Sergio Sollima, one of the masters of the genre, makes an important start toward correcting this omission.

Sollima's film stars Charles Bronson as a hit man (back when having a hit man as a hero was not yet a cynical cliche) who takes down his double-crossing employers. Told in an aggressive but dry style that sometimes recalls John Boorman's ''Point Blank,'' and driven by a brilliant Ennio Morricone score, the film achieves emotional integrity while being as uncompromisingly bleak and negative as Bronson himself - a granitelike actor who reveals unexpected depth here, without really doing anything.

Now if only Sollima's even better ''Revolver'' would come out on DVD, or Preminger's delirious ''Skidoo,'' or Eastwood's ''Breezy,'' or Lang's ''House by the River,'' or. ... The list of now-missing films hollering for rediscovery may be getting shorter every month - thanks to companies like Fantoma and Anchor Bay and the home-video divisions of the more enterprising major studios - but it's not going to be a blank and shriveled page any time soon. Film history is changing all the time, and there's less need than ever to stick with its cut-and-dried official versions - no matter how many times we feel we must watch ''The Graduate.''

This story ran on page L14 of the Boston Globe on 4/14/2002.