And once again it is that time of year – the season of “best of” lists – and our now-three-year tradition is to play along with a selection of our favorite home video releases. A reminder of the ground rules: this is an appreciation of home video releases, not favorite movies, so the list leans heavily towards discs that offer valuable extras, and those that make newly available films that had been hard to find or obscure. (That said, these are movies we highly value; otherwise, you know, who wants the extras?)
Last year’s spectacular Bergman box set shattered the notion that we could not (and would not) rank our favorites in order. This year we return to the blissful egalitarianism of alphabetical order, in fulsome spirit of the philosophy that such competitive comparisons of works of art are odious and unclean. (When we say “the nomination is the award,” we mean it!) Here then, this year’s favorites:
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. In our estimation, the totality of Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling Vietnam epic is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. But so many of those set-pieces are brilliant, and every possible one of them can be found somewhere in the various cuts of the film packed into this comprehensive box set, which includes the must-see documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. As the 1970s drew to a close, the studio suits became less interested in making introspective New Hollywood films. And so Robert Altman was offered a ton of money—to make something called MASH II. Instead he shuttered his production company and went small, directing plays and often subsequently filming modestly scaled versions of them. 1982’s Jimmy Dean is one of the best, with riveting performances from seventies legend Karen Black, as well as Sandy Dennis, Cher, and Kathy Bates.
Klute. As we wrote in Cineaste: “The Criterion Collection has surpassed its customary high standards with this long-overdue Blu-ray of Alan J. Pakula’s landmark seventies film Klute, starring newly-radicalized Jane Fonda in a where-did-that-come-from professional reinvention (and her greatest performance).” This New Hollywood treasure, the first entry in what would become known as Pakula’s “paranoid trilogy,” was shot by Gordon Willis and, in support of Fonda’s cental character study, also features excellent performances from Donald Sutherland and Roy Scheider.
Jane Fonda in Klute
The Man Between. Carol Reed’s 1953 thriller is relatively new to us—and something of a revelation, seamlessly falling in place following all-time-greats Odd Man Out and The Third Man to complete what is arguably in retrospect a loose, thematic trilogy. With Odd Man, The Man Between features Mr. James Mason in an outstanding performance as a sympathetic outlaw (if with a much harder edge here); echoing Third Man, it takes place in a divided city early in the cold war (here Berlin), with all the drama, complexity and moral ambiguity such settings naturally invoke. The great location work includes some stunning nighttime cinematography.
Melo. Alain Resnais made some of our favorite films over the course of his long career, including, among others, La Guerre Est Finie, and Providence. Melo is a less obviously ambitious effort, a minor key, theatrical mediation on intimacy, envy, and the complexities of friendship. But heed the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum, who sees Melo as an “incomparable masterpiece [that] is bound to baffle spectators who insist on regarding him as an intellectual rather than an emotional director.”
Mickey and Nicky. Stanley Kauffmann declared Elaine May’s movie one “one of the 10 best American films of the decade.” And adding for good measure, that in his estimation, “the last sequence is one of the most harrowing images that modern American film has given us.” We will not argue with him, having lavished praised Mickey and Nicky, which follows John Cassavetes and Peter Falk deep into the dark Philadelphia night, both in general and in particular. Do you want to see a movie that the studio tried to seize from its furtive, production schedule-shattering auteur, who made off with several reels of the rough cut and hid them in her psychiatrist’s office? Of course you do.
Peter Falk and John Cassavetes in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky
The Phantom Lady. Great stuff here via film noir maestro Robert Siodmak. The story is simple and the motivations perhaps a tad thin, but Phantom is a glorious exemplar noir sensibilities – all darkness, shadows, rain, doom – and, the expressionism, oh, the expressionism—we are especially fond of the “train without train” sequence. And like (but ahead of) Jean Pierre Melville, when the cops first walk in, they look like gangsters. We’ve waited a long time for a fine edition of this one, with its sure handed compositions, effortlessly engaging scenes . . . and your only opportunity to see the great Elisha Cook Jr. transform drumming into an overheated exhibition of sexual abandon.
The Reckless Moment. Another remarkable tour de force, glimmer of humanity in a hard cruel world performance by Mr. James Mason. Here directed by the legendary Max Ophus – flashing his trademark effortless cinematic expressiveness – in a film noir-inflected drama featuring Joan Bennet, whose comfortable life, in classic noir fashion, threatens to unravel after one false move. Legendary cinematographer Burnett Guffey was on hand to contribute to this (relatively) obscure masterpiece, now properly fêted in this special edition.
Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan. Scorsese. Rolling Thunder. Those four words really ought to be enough to send you racing to the home theater (it’s a Netflix production). But we’ll add: If you appreciate Dylan, this is a must-see. If you don’t appreciate Dylan, this is a must-see. If you stopped paying much attention to the output of his Bob-ness after, say, 1966, and have missed the last fifty years of material, the performance of Isis will change your life.
Dylan with Joan Baez
Wanda. Rounding out another banner year, the Criterion Collection lands a third film on our list with another long overdue, much-needed special edition of a key seventies film. Molly Haskell, from her outstanding essay in this nifty book offers this: In a film “which cuts so disturbingly close to the bone, [Wanda] inhabits a psychological wasteland . . . She remains a woman unglamorized and unredeemed by even the possibility of change.” Written by, directed, and starring Barbara Loden.
Barbara Loden in Wanda