Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:48:19 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Gary Giddins :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Gary+Giddins istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-dark-knight-orson-welless-don-quixote/85402/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the highlights of the 35th Telluride Film Festival, which took place over the Labor Day weekend, was the documentary "Prodigal Sons," by Kimberly Reed, who endeavored to film the reaction of her family and friends as she returned to Helena, Mont., for her 20th high school reunion. Her hometown had known her as Paul, the school's star quarterback. Other than her rivalrous and mentally impaired adopted brother Marc, no one seemed fazed by her "transition." Ms. Reed, however, had a shock in... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/salvaging-a-forgotten-director/86363/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A troubled movie production, parented by too many writers and directors, usually ends in catastrophe. So it is no small thing when a director swoops in to salvage a debacle, creating immediate profit and enduring pleasure. A series of neglected films, released today from Columbia Pictures under the inexplicable title "Martini Movies" (do you have to imbibe a few dry ones to endure them?), offers three slick, big-star vehicles from the early 1970s — "The Anderson Tapes," "The New Centurions,"... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/majewskis-magic/83634/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Reading Lech Majewski's résumé can give you a headache. A prolific poet and novelist, painter, composer-librettist and director of operas, and director, writer, composer, producer, and cameraman of video and films, the 54-year-old Polish-American has released 11 movies (not including Julian Schnabel's 1996 "Basquiat," which he co-wrote and co-produced), from 1978's "Zwiastowanie" to 2007's "Glass Lips." He assembled the latter from a 33-part video installation called "Blood of the Poet," which... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/warner-bros-celebrates-hollywoods-jazz-age/82767/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The cycle of gangster movies launched by Warner Bros. in the early 1930s often included scenes in speakeasies with anonymous musicians in the background. Anatole Litvak's "Blues in the Night" (1941) and Jack Webb's "Pete Kelly's Blues" (1955), which were released this month by Warners on DVD, reversed the perspective. These are Warner gangster pictures told from the band's point of view: Idealistic white jazz players, determined to play their music despite rude audiences and mob interference... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/trafic-when-tati-drove-himself-to-the-edge/81387/ Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Jacques Tati's penultimate, transcendent film "Trafic" (1971) is one of those often misperceived or neglected works by great filmmakers that deserve better than they've got and will surely, however long it takes, gain their righteous stature. "Don't play what the public wants," Thelonious Monk famously advised. "Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing — even if it does take them 15, 20 years." For Tati's film, 37 years may be the magic number. Next week, the... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-great-mann-of-the-west/80528/ Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the Western — the period in which clichés were sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style, and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable clichés are reframed against classical paradigms. Consider "The Furies," in which a baggy reworking of the Oresteia is played out in an agora that stretches to the horizon, encompassing endless cattle pastures, mountainous outposts, a city strip with a saloon and bank, and... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/princes-and-thieves-on-dvd/78607/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Re-watching "The Thief of Bagdad," released today in a glorious Criterion DVD transfer, is not unlike rereading "Treasure Island." Conceived to enchant children, they both requite the adult longing for formative influences that withstand disillusionment and fashion. Unlike "Treasure Island," an exemplary display of English prose and plotting, with one of the finest first sentences in fiction, "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940) occasionally sputters, losing tempo and continuity; yet it, too, survives... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/lets-be-frank/76331/ Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In acknowledging the 10th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's death, Warner Bros. raises its DVD flag to half-mast today with the thrifty release of 13 films, supplemented by few (and in most instances, zero) extra features. The selection covers 23 years (1943-65) in an often feckless Hollywood career that began in 1941 with uncredited vocal cameos and ended resignedly in 1970 save for a halfhearted return a decade later. By then, Sinatra had elected to focus his creative energy on television and... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/merrills-marauders-deserve-justice/75906/ Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 EST During the slaughter of Japanese troops at Burma's Walawbum in March 1944, members of the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), better known as Merrill's Marauders, hurled — alongside mortars, grenades, bullets, and shells — various epithets, including the allegation that Hideki Tojo ate excrement. According to a Marauder staff sergeant, the Japanese yelled back, "Eleanor eats powdered eggs!" Whether this rejoinder was intended as a critique of Mrs. Roosevelt, K-rations, or both, it portended a... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/viva-la-disney/75047/ Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Before Antonio Carlos Jobim, there was Ary Barroso; before Jobim's classic "Desafinado" and "The Girl from Ipanema," there were Barroso's "Brazil" (originally "Aquarela do Brasil") and "Bahia" (originally "Na Baixa do Sapateiro"). During the war, Barroso's songs, composed in the late 1930s, launched Brazilian popular music around the world. They were taken up by dozens of jazz and dance bands and pop singers. Yet unlike Jobim's songs, which took flight after North American jazz musicians... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/escape-from-the-vaults-of-history/74324/ Tue, 8 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST For nearly five years, beginning in 1918, Harry Houdini — the most famous magician since Merlin, most fabled escapologist since Jonah, most resourceful publicist since Barnum — tried his hand at filmmaking. He starred in one 15-chapter, five-hour serial and four feature-length films (a rumored fifth feature, "The Soul of Bronze," probably wasn't made and almost certainly wasn't distributed), at times involving himself as a producer, writer, and director. Houdini displayed little cinematic... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/gangsters-we-love-to-love/73122/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Warner Bros.' DVD arm is releasing many of its pre-Production Code movies according to gender. Its "Forbidden Hollywood" series, which was recently expanded by an irresistible second volume, focuses on women who indulge in sexual bravado. As free souls and the equals of men, they instigate affairs, exploit male assistants, and assault the citadels of power, mounting one gatekeeper after another. These pictures ask us to identify with the women. On the men's side, we are often asked to identify... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/mob-mentality/72264/ Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The nearly concurrent DVD releases of Alberto Lattuada's "Mafioso," from Criterion, and Marco Turco's "Excellent Cadavers," from First Run, make for a discerningly complementary treatment of the Sicilian Mafia as an indestructible force of evil. Americans have adopted mobsters as cultural house pets — as urban outlaws, dapper rogues, or House of Atreus incendiaries, depending on one's metaphorical preference. These two films — a dark comedy from 1962 featuring a perfectly judged performance by... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/early-german-psychos/71446/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST This past year, Kino has been offering boxed sets culled from its DVD catalog, arranged by theme (noir, silent horror) at prices far reduced from the top-dollar value assigned individual discs. It's a good deal for film lovers curious about relatively obscure films, especially those presented in spotty prints with few if any extras. Yet Kino's latest set, German Expressionism Collection, released today, stands apart. Each of the four pictures is a 1990s German restoration, but two are new to... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/this-woman-is-dangerous/71151/ Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Anyone impervious to the mild but genuine pleasures of "Sadie McKee" (1934), the earliest of five movies collected in "The Joan Crawford Collection, Volume 2," out today from Warner Bros., is probably immune to the genius-of-the-system artisanship that buttressed old Hollywood. Not being immune myself, I respond like Louis B. Mayer's dog, synapses cued to every calculated stimulus, as Sadie works her way through three loves and a four-chamber roundelay of the classes: old money, underclass... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-home-with-el-cid/69940/ Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Director Anthony Mann gets the possessor credit when fans and critics speak of "El Cid," but the film assigns that billing to its producer, the imperturbable hustler Samuel Bronston, who practically reinvented movie spectacles on the plains of Spain in the early 1960s. Shunning the waning studio culture of Hollywood, Bronston created his own studio in Madrid in 1958 and financed it with an intricate money laundering operation involving the Franco government and a vindictive member of the DuPont... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/dark-sky-rising/69096/ Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Fewer American movies are inspired by the life of George Washington than by that of Ed Gein. The father of our country eludes its imagination, while the only famous son of Plainfield, Wis. has fathered a cinematic genre in which murder and cannibalism coexist with transvestitism and freaky arts and crafts. Within three years of his 1957 arrest, the graying, glassy-eyed little Ed was stretched into the tall, lanky, crush-worthy Norman Bates. In 1960, the year Italy produced "La Dolce Vita" and... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/sir-ridley-gets-it-right/68230/ Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST It's official. Rick Deckard, the fatigued replicant-hunter played by Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott's latest stab at "Blade Runner" (1982, 1992, 2007), is himself a replicant, though he doesn't know it. How do we know? Because Mr. Scott, who likes to talk about himself with phrases like "I'm all about …" and "That's what I do," says so, and he's the auteur, pal. The unicorn dream, which made its debut in the 1992 version, is the evidence. Hampton Fancher, who wrote the original screenplay, can... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/model-ford/67452/ Tue, 4 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Anyone with an aneurism may want to think twice about "Ford at Fox," a 21-disc salute to John Ford's nearly three decades at Fox and its successor, 20th Century Fox. I'm guessing it weighs 15 pounds. After days of carrying it between home and office (an elevator trip), I notice enhanced biceps and labored breathing. Of course, the latter may reflect my susceptibility to these movies, which, as sure as the earth turns, raise my sights, gladden my soul, worry my intelligence, jerk my tears... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/soviet-guide-to-cuba/66720/ Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST They should be popping a magnum at the offices of Milestone, which is today releasing definitive DVDs of two of the most important films it has rescued from obscurity. The first, Charles Burnett's sublimely astringent ballad of Watts, "Killer of Sheep" (1977), includes his 1983 feature, "My Brother's Wedding," and four shorts. The second, Mikhail Kalatozov's "I Am Cuba," is the object of veneration in a cleverly simulated cigar box, supported — along with interviews, slide shows, and a pamphlet... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/hustons-novel-approach-to-film/65924/ Tue, 6 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST It is an axiom of cinema that second- and third-rate books often make for good movies, while great books rarely do. Ethel Lina White ("The Lady Vanishes"), Alan Le May ("The Searchers"), and Mario Puzo ("The Godfather") all are immortalized in auteurist filmographies, whereas Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty have not fared too well at the movie theater. Still, personal and even visionary films adapted from slavishly admired literary works do exist, and John Huston made an... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/changing-the-face-of-america/65053/ Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST "My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out the sodden words, the greasy sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed." So wrote Aldous Huxley, in 1929, after seeing "The Jazz Singer." Half a century later, David Thompson was no less censorious: "It is as if printing had been invented to fill labels on ketchup bottles: That sound on film ... should have been born on the lips of a Lithuanian... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/fox-classics-pay-tribute-to-brahm/64218/ Tue, 9 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST John Brahm is not exactly a film school luminary, but he made his mark in 1940s Hollywood, showing a sharp eye and psychological acuity during his seven years with 20th Century Fox. Most of his long and prolific career — he died at 89 in 1982 — was spent elsewhere. Born in Germany, he thrived for two decades as a theater director, until the collapse of Weimar. Then he moved to London, where he worked as an editor and writer before landing a directorial assignment in 1935: a remake of D.W... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/pennies-from-heaven/63322/ Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST One of the most illuminating DVD releases of the year is Criterion's new two-disc presentation of G.W. Pabst's much contested 1931 film adaptation of "Die Dreigroschenoper" ("The Threepenny Opera"). When he took on the project, Pabst was adapting Berlin's theatrical sensation of 1928, a sharp parody of John Gay's 1728 parody, "The Beggar's Opera," by Bertolt Brecht (and his uncredited assistant Elizabeth Hauptmann), with music by Kurt Weill. The film was modestly successful in its day, and much... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/restoring-the-miniseries/61403/ Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Erich von Stroheim, the director of the legendarily mutilated 1924 masterpiece "Greed," was 45 years ahead of his time when he filmed the nine-hour adaptation of Frank Norris's novel "McTeague." In 1969, after a British miniseries based on John Galsworthy's "The Forsyte Saga" crossed the Atlantic, and PBS committed itself to more of the same — under the self-parodying rubric, "Masterpiece Theatre" — a nine-hour version of "McTeague" might have been just the thing for Sunday evenings. Yet even... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/mr-chan-and-the-sailor-man/60452/ Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST In a summer besieged by recycled characters launched like political campaigns (Spider-Man, the Simpsons, Jason Bourne, et al.), let us recall franchises of yore, when beloved familiars made their way to theaters so frequently and economically that little fanfare was necessary. Today we have two such artifacts, both of the 1930s, though their origins lie in the 1920s: the third and final installment in 20th Century Fox's "Charlie Chan" series, and Warner Bros.' first of two volumes collecting... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/glorious-grime-below-the-surface/59518/ Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Today Warner Bros. releasing eagerly anticipated DVD collection "Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4," with 10 films (as opposed to the usual five). One might think that a "Vol. 4," by definition, is an exercise in barrel scraping, especially when it generously offers five double-features. But all of these films are worthy, and most are better than worthy. Nor will this set stem the tide: Several major noirs are tied up in legal knots or forgotten and many others await restoration. Noir is... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/playing-the-wilder-card/58557/ Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST One of many memorable lines ground between the teeth of Kirk Douglas, as the fallen journalist Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder's brutally trenchant "Ace in the Hole," is a faux-axiom: "Bad news sells best 'cause good news is no news." In 1951, when the film was released to critical brickbats and public indifference, Americans could remember when good news sold better than anything — from the summer of 1942, when the Allies began to turn the tide, through August 1945, when Japan surrendered... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/noir-series-showcases-robinson/57776/ Tue, 3 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST The release next Tuesday of four unadorned DVDs in an MGM film noir series illustrates the fluid nature of movie rights. The films were produced by independent companies and distributed through either United Artists or RKO, having nothing to do with the MGM lion. Two of them, "The Stranger" and "Kansas City Confidential," even floated into the public domain, surfacing regularly in scratched, dingy prints. Those two are now restored, along with the less enchanting "A Bullet for Joey." The best... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/no-overturning-lumets-verdict/56886/ Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Almost all films are bound to genres. The ones that stand out either subvert generic conventions or burnish them with stylish resourcefulness. Two very different examples come to DVD this week: A Spanish horror film from 1976, "Who Can Kill a Child?," makes its debut, and Sidney Lumet's justly celebrated "The Verdict" graduates to a double-disc collector's edition. The latter actually married two genres: courtroom drama and lost-soul-seeking-salvation, an unbeatable combination. A hit in 1982... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/hawkss-eagle-eye/55918/ Tue, 5 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST The movies of Howard Hawks give as much pleasure as those of any filmmaker. But the price is often a heavy dose of didacticism, an endless if narrow discussion of what makes a man a man (taciturn virility and a refusal to acknowledge death) and a woman a woman (getting along with men is essential). Add to that a curious paradox in which individualism is honored only within the context of teamwork, and Hawks (1896–1977) can sometimes pall. His dramas have little tolerance for outsiders, rebels... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/who-is-harry-lime/54980/ Tue, 22 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Carol Reed and Graham Greene's masterpiece, "The Third Man," opened in London in 1949 and came to New York early the next year in a version butchered by its American distributor, David O. Selznick. He sheared anti-Americanisms and other passages that he thought too European or mature or cynical or something for those of us living on what one character calls "the other side." During the next 40 years, the print quality declined with endlessly compromised television airings. But none of this had... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/dont-fear-the-keefer/53560/ Tue, 1 May 2007 00:00:00 EST War is hell; writing about war is Homeric. The settings, fighters, and armaments change, but the fervor, terror, heroism, cowardice, agony, resentment, egotism, majesty, relief, pain, death, joy, love, corruption, humor, and insanity abide, as does the desire to mythologize war's grotesquerie. Unlike his progeny, though, Homer didn't bother with scoring political points. Neither pro- nor anti-war, he offered no special succor to those appalled or elated by it. For that, we've got liberals... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/fun-with-jimmy-and-doris/52588/ Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Any list of the most enduring films of the Hollywood studio era is likely to include a few films by the Budapest-born director Michael Curtiz, who was among the top contract directors at Warner Bros. for an unmatched 28 years. Stylistically, his work is distinguished by inventive visual compositions, aggressive acting, quick cuts, fluid camerawork, shadowplay, location inserts, romantic and period realism, the kind of speed that results from keeping a story on track and free of distraction... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/hard-boiled-hero/51722/ Tue, 3 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Between 1940 and 1942, 20th Century Fox made seven films starring Lloyd Nolan as Brett Halliday's detective, Michael Shayne. Detective movies were among the most dependable of B-features — cheap to make, easy to take — and Fox added Shayne to a roster that already included low-budget series involving those inscrutable Oriental minstrels, Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto. Like them, the Shayne films usually ignored the novels; but rather than create original stories, the scriptwriters adapted novels... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/second-look-at-a-french-classic/50814/ Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Alain Resnais's "Muriel, or the Time of Return" has languished beneath the radar of most film lovers, even those who came of age with the Nouvelle Vague. Arriving on the heels of Mr. Resnais's two international sensations, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad," his third feature film tested the patience of those who had perhaps too enthusiastically accepted the portentous incantations of the former and the silky inscrutability of the latter. Bored with metaphysics, they missed the... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/classics-on-the-screen-if-not-on-the-page/50001/ Wed, 7 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST It's an axiom that few great Hollywood movies are based on genuine literary classics, while a great many are based on hackwork, whether of the best-seller or pulp variety. If a book offers a cracking story but little ingenuity in sentence making, a first-rate picture can, as aborigines rightly suspected of cameras, steal its soul. A thousand adaptations of "Madame Bovary" leave Flaubert's novel unscathed. One excellent rendition of "The Prisoner of Zenda" renders Anthony Hope's briskly readable... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/on-the-town-with-a-serene-songbird/48904/ Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST Loosely speaking, the great musicals of Warner Bros., Paramount, and RKO were made in the 1930s, the great musicals of MGM were made in the 1950s, and the great wartime musicals were made at 20th Century Fox. The Fox musicals are often dismissed as clichéd escapism. For one thing, they can least afford the offhanded treatment traditionally accorded movies by early television and revival houses — the butchered 16 mm prints, scratched by projectors and faded by time. If the colors don't pop off... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/movies-that-brought-war-west/48066/ Tue, 6 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST It's easy to forget how good "All Quiet on the Western Front" is — film (1930) and novel (1929). Both have been anti-war staples so long they've become almost invisible, relics from an era when its theme (war is madness visited on the young by delusional old men) had novelty. In Homer, warriors instigate war; in Tolstoy, war is a product of historical forces; in Crane, it bestows red badges of courage. It took World War I to engender a battlefield literature of futility, outrage, repentance... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/searching-for-musical-stars/47222/ Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Obituaries for the movie musical have proven premature. Recent films echo the diversity if not the quantity of the 1940s assembly line, when musicals ranged from prestigious A-list productions to D-list programmers. Most were Hollywood originals, though many had theatrical pedigrees or existed solely to exploit radio and swing stars. Similarly, we now have — in the course of a few years — hulking Broadway adaptations like "Dreamgirls" and "Chicago," sentimental biopics like "Ray" and "Walk the... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/kurosawas-red-harvests/46309/ Tue, 9 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Criterion is about to release glistening new transfers of two catalog staples, Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" (1961) and its sequel, "Sanjuro" (1962), suitably boxed together. Like the first two "Godfather" films, they enlarge each other. "Yojimbo" (bodyguard) was Kurosawa's international blockbuster, and the character of Sanjuro (the bodyguard's alias), an ultimately infallible freelance samurai, endures as Toshiro Mifune's most popular role. Indeed, if neither film is ranked with Kurosawa's... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/james-janus/45970/ Tue, 2 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Few aspects of moviegoing during the past 50 years have remained unchanged. The double feature disappeared along with 35-cent tickets, 35-foot screens, continuous showings, cartoons, travelogues, unruly balconies, nicotine, illuminated Bulova clocks, affordable popcorn, re-releases, theater curtains, Technicolor, Dynamation, Westerns, musicals, Will Rogers coin-boxes, ad-free zones, and most repertory theaters. Watching the first scene of a new direct-to-DVD atrocity in which a teenager... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/uncle-walts-prairie-home-companion/44968/ Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Walt Disney's Legacy Collection, which packs its archival desiderata in stately tin boxes with hours of celebratory extras, has collected all 14 of the True-Life Adventures released to theaters (and later televised) between 1948 and 1960. Also included are a few nature films that fell outside the True-Life rubric, relevant episodes of the show "Disneyland," tributes to the men and women responsible, advertisements for theme parks, and, best of all, "Filmmaker's Journals" that, among other... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/unhappy-film-in-its-own-way/44186/ Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST As autumn leaves turn to shopping sprees, ornate DVD packages proliferate, and a few gems are bound to get lost among the munificent boxed sets, with their dazzling restorations and pointlessly elongated director's cuts. Such a one is Aleksandr Zarkhi's "Anna Karenina," a 1967 Soviet film, little-seen in the West, which exceeds expectations despite Kino's necessarily compromised transfer. For one thing, it is remarkably faithful to Tolstoy, yet dodges the mummification that results from the... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/collecting-legends/43463/ Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST For the past 50-plus years, you had about as much chance of seeing a complete print of a 1940 Bing Crosby vehicle called "If I Had My Way" as you did of, say, the initial seven-hour version of "Greed" — which is to say no chance at all. Admittedly, there wasn't much demand for it. Still, while "Greed," the lost grail of cinematic obsession as practiced by Erich von Stroheim, was permanently sacrificed to greed, Universal held onto what a company archivist assured me was a "pristine"... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-westerns-made-their-way-east/42479/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST In 1965, East Germany's nationalized film studio, DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft, currently parked in the archives of the University of Massachusetts) took envious measure of its West German counterparts. West German films didn't often cross the Atlantic, but their widespread European acceptance earned international recognition for their stars, who did — Curt Jürgens, Maria and Maximillian Schell, Hardy Krüger, Horst Buchholz, Romy Schneider, Gert Fröbe, and others. Their secret was no... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-literary-classics-made-screen-classics/41688/ Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST It is a universally acknowledged truth that a movie studio in possession of a good fortune must be in want of Great Books. The desire fulfills two needs: to borrow prestige and flaunt high Anglican taste. In the studio era, the first helped keep watchdogs at bay and the second indulged the very pretensions that triggered Leo the Lion's roar: ars gratia artis ("art for art's sake"). The moguls, especially at MGM, meant to entertain and improve minds — or at least wean them from actual books... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/best-of-bogey/40816/ Tue, 3 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST The only uninspired facet of "Humphrey Bogart: The Signature Collection, Volume II" (Warner Bros.) is the title. This irresistible set of seven films is one of the most focused and illuminating in the series. It tracks not only the making of Bogart's stardom in the years 1941–44, after a long apprenticeship of interchangeable heavies, but also the studio's four stages of wartime concern: denial, lampoon, flag-waving, and Marseillaise-singing. The films, of which the crown jewel is a three-disc... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/more-than-just-neck-bolts-and-boots/39910/ Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Great film acting results from an empathic collaboration between actor and director. However much a director guides theater actors, the performers are ultimately alone onstage. In a film, we are permitted to see a performance as a montage pieced together by director and editor. Movie technicians can undermine a good actor as decisively as they can redeem a bad one. In "The Strange Door" (1951), one of five twisted, mediocre films collected in "The Boris Karloff Collection," Karloff makes a... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/oldies-and-goodies-rule-summers-end/39146/ Wed, 6 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST In most cultural arenas, August is a slow month, a prelude to the big events lining up to welcome the winter solstice. Not so with DVDs, which enjoyed a remarkable month, climaxing with this week's releases. Almost inevitably, these include restorations and improved editions of films you may already own. In some cases, however, the refurbishing is so impressive you simply have to bite the bullet. In 2001, Image released an apparently definitive 219-minute edition of Fritz Lang's 1922 spectacle...