There’s something for everyone coming out on Blu-ray this month. From a lengthy, but devastating French film from the 70s, to a film noir treat starring Ann Sheridan, to the memorably bizarre Esperanto movie starring William Shatner, to a charming romantic comedy with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, to a startling original horror movie shot from the perspective of the killer, among others. Settle back and ring in the new year by shutting the door and forgetting the world for a few hours.
The Mother and the Whore (Criterion) Jean Eusatche’s 1973 French masterpiece is about the rootless, disaffected youth of 70s Paris. Starring Francois Truffaut’s cinematic alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud as Alexandre, living and sleeping with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who works in a dress shop. Alexandre doesn’t do much of anything. He’s impulsive, opinionated, full-of-himself, strutting down the street nattily dressed with his knotted, long silk scarf. He spends his days in cafes, chain-smoking and talking with friends when he isn’t picking up girls. He asks his sculptor friend, “What are you doing tomorrow?” and the friend replies, “Nothing, of course.” His new conquest is Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), an anesthesiologist at a hospital who is more sexually liberated, free-wheeling and mercurial than flings he is accustomed to. Veronika shows up drunk at 4 in the morning and climbs into bed with Alexandre and Marie. “Your romances are starting to piss me off,” Marie admits. Typically, when Marie admits to seeing another man, Alexandre loses it. Coming in at a punishing 3 hours and 27 minutes, there’s endless smoking, drinking, talking, fucking and listening to records. In one astonishing sequence, Marie listens to the entire Edith Piaf song- “Les Amants de Paris.” But it all has a cumulative, hypnotic power to it. At the end when Veronika unleashes a Joycean stream-of-consciousness rant about sex, it is cinema at its most personal, provocative and thrilling. This is a 4K digital restoration and the extras include new interview with Francoise Lebrun, a vintage French TV show featuring the director Jean Eustache, Francoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
Nora Prentiss (Warner Archive) Sensational 1947 noir-ish drama starring Kent Smith as a well-respected doctor and long-suffering married husband and father who throws it all away to pursue a beautiful lounge singer- Nora Prentiss (Ann Sheridan). It begins outside his medical practice one night in San Francisco when he assists a woman hit by a cab (Sheridan). Bored with his stifling, loveless married life, he enters into a steamy affair with her and even fakes his own death to follow her to Manhattan. Sheridan’s Nora Prentiss is refreshingly not a scheming femme fatale. She warns him right from the beginning, “You’re the kind of man I could make a fool of myself about. And I don’t like it.” But his own obsession leads him down a dark path to his doom. Crisply directed by Vincent Sherman with moody cinematography by the great James Wong Howe, this is the kind of memorable melodrama Warner Brothers does so well. I’ve always loved Ann Sheridan, the “Oomph Girl,” who was an accomplished comedian and great beauty, and her husky, smoky voice ideal for withering wisecracks and putdowns. But this is a different kind of dramatic role for her and she’s terrific in it. It’s also criminally underappreciated.
Incubus (Arrow) This bizarre 1966 film was the brainchild of Daystar Productions, which also made the memorable 60’s sci-fi TV series Outer Limits. After its cancellation, the company, on the verge of bankruptcy, turned to director Leslie Stevens to make a small independent horror film. Stevens was fascinated with Esperanto, the international second language created in 1887 by Polish occultist Ludwig L. Zamenhof, an experiment that never caught on and was even publically derided by Joseph McCarthy, Stalin and Hitler. Why Stevens thought an entire movie spoken in this ludicrous language- which sounds like a cross between Serbian, Swedish, Spanish and Latin- would be a financial gold mine is anyone’s guess. He hired his girlfriend Allyson Ames, and an intense young actor named William Shatner (still a year away from Star Trek), as well as expert cinematographer Conrad Hall. They headed for California’s Big Sur to film Stevens‘ supernatural vision. Supposedly set in the ancient seaside village of Nomen Tuum- “a place of dark miracles…a searching ground for demons, manifesting themselves as young women”- Incubus features Ames as a fiendish succubus named Kia, who lures “corrupted” men to their death. At the film’s beginning, she entices a drunkard to the sea and drowns him by holding his head underwater with her foot. Bored, she decides it would be fun to corrupt a “pure” soul, setting her sights on pious, God-fearing Marc (Shatner), who lives with his virginal sister, Arndis (Ann Atmar). Kia tempts Marc to “lie down naked in the sun by the sea,” while his sister goes blind by looking at an eclipse and wanders aimlessly through the forest. When Marc carries Kia into a church, her eldest sister, Amael, is incensed that she has been “defiled by the act of love” and calls up a dark, sweaty incubus from the ground (Milos Milos) who proceeds to rape Marc’s blind sister in retribution. The finale features a fight between good and evil outside a Spanish mission with Shatner, bleeding and over-acting, battling the incubus, who has transformed into a giant goat. Fino (which means “the end” in Esperanto). Visually, Incubus is reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, but few in this country have ever gotten a chance to see it, as the film was plagued by disaster. When it was screened at the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, the print lacked sound. No matter. The dialogue, which the cast speaks phonetically, appalled Esperanto speakers with its many mispronunciations. Milos Milos, who’d been having an affair with Mickey Rooney’s wife, murdered her, then killed himself. Ann Atmar committed suicide shortly after the film was completed. Incubus was, however, a smash in France, and the only two surviving prints surfaced a while back in the permanent collection of the Cinematheque Francaise.
In A Violent Nature (Shudder) Director Chris Nash’s impressively artful, gleefully gruesome meta-take on the slasher movie. A group of friends stupidly remove a locket at a fire tower way out in the forest. When they leave, a lumbering creature claws himself up out of the dirt and moves forward through the woods, now a virtual killing machine. There is even a campsite retelling of the legend of “Johnny” (Ry Barrett), and how he came to slaughter an entire squad of fire rangers many years ago. From then on there is almost a POV vision of this murderous entity as he works his way (literally and bloodily) through the unfortunate friends searching for that locket. Imagine Friday the 13th only directed by Gus Van Sant as one of his more arty experiments. Now when I first heard of the film I feared it would be a film gimmick that would grow weary, but I was dead wrong. It’s always surprising and beautiful in many ways (the cinematography by Pierce Derks is gorgeous). It’s also outrageously gory, for fans of this genre. Shot in Ontario, from what I gather, this film went through an earlier, troubled incarnation that had to be entirely re-shot. But what exists now is a one-of-a-kind shocker that lingers disturbingly in the mind.
Houseboat (Kino Lorber) (1958) Paramount Studio’s 6K scan of the 35mm VistaVision original camera negative. This is a big guilty pleasure for me. Cary Grant stars as Tom Winter, a lawyer that works for the State Department in Washington. Estranged from his family, when his wife dies he is determined to reconnect with his three young children and whisks them off to D.C. His youngest son runs off during a concert and runs into Cinzia (Sophia Loren), the daughter of a world-famous conductor (Eduardo Ciannelli). The two have a whirlwind fun evening and Cinzia ends up taking a job as the children’s housekeeper (keeping her real identity a secret). They all end up all moving into a dilapidated houseboat (which they fix up) and Cinzia teaches Tom how to be a real parent to the children and falls in love with him. The backstory of the 1958 film is actually more juicy and convoluted (according to the fascinating audio commentary by film historian Julie Kirgo and writer/filmmaker Peter Hankoff). But the movie is utterly charming. The three kids (Mimi Gibson, Paul Peterson & Charles Herbert) are just terrific. And Cary Grant and Sophia Loren have great romantic chemistry (as they did in real life also).
Teacher’s Pet (Kino Lorber) (1958) A new Paramount Studios HD 6K scan of the 35mm VistaVision negative. This 1958 romantic comedy stars Clark Gable as James Gannon, a hard-boiled senior editor of a NY city newspaper, who has a dim view of journalism taught in school. For him, in order to be a real newsman, one has to work, eat, sleep, live, breathe at the newspaper. As a lark, he poses at a student at a night college journalism class, whose professor is Erica Stone (Doris Day), who encourages her new student, seeing talent in him. Slowly, Gannon changes his mind and begins to have feelings for her, knowing that when the truth of his true identity comes out it will torpedo everything. This comedy actually makes some solid, thoughtful points about the newspaper business. The star power of Gable and Day help sell the romantic comedy elements. Mamie Van Doren has a hilarious star turn as a nightclub performer singing, “The Girl Who Invented Rock and Roll,” while Doris sings the theme, “Teacher’s Pet.”
The Beast Within (Kino Lorber) So happy to see this crackpot 1982 horror movie is back on Blu-ray- it’s been out-of-print and pricey on eBay. It’s about a woman ravished by a monster on her honeymoon and 17 years later her son Michael (Paul Clemens) begins to transform into a blood-drinking cicada. (Yes, you read that right). The script by Tom Holland (director of Fright Night and Child’s Play) is overloaded with gothic shocks, and this was the early days of air bladder effects so the poor kid’s head blows into a giant football at the end, but that’s the fun of this oddball fright flick.
The Killer is Loose (Kino Lorber) Wendell Corey is genuinely chilling as Leon Poole, a seemingly mild-mannered Savings & Loan bank teller who is discovered to be part of a carefully planned robbery. When police detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton) comes to arrest him, a shoot-out results in the accidental killing of Poole’s wife. Poole vows vengeance on the detective and his spouse during the trial. Then Poole escapes from prison and comes gunning for them, leaving a trail of bodies in his path. Rhonda Fleming plays Wagner’s pregnant, terrified wife. This 1956 film is a terrific cat-and-mouse suspense tale, economically directed by Budd Boetticher, with great cinematography by Lucien Ballard.
The Tall Target (Warner Archive) Taut, allegedly historical, 1951 thriller directed by Anthony Mann, starring Dick Powell as John Kennedy, a NY police sergeant, desperately trying to stop an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln right before he is about to be inaugurated as President. It all takes place aboard a train to Washington D. C. where Kennedy comes into contact with a long list of suspects including a militia captain (Adolphe Menjou), a West Point cadet (Marshall Thompson), his sister Ginny (Paula Raymond) and her slave Rachel (a young, incandescent Ruby Dee). Vaguely based on the “Baltimore Plot,” the film crackles with suspense and intrigue.