 |
| MIA:
(l-r) Rock Hunter’s Jayne Mansfield; Ken Carter’s
rocket car; Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman;
Coal Black lobby card; Double Indemnity. |
What
You’re
Missing
By
Shawn Stone
There
are plenty of great films available on DVD—but here are 10
that aren’t, and should be
The
number and variety of classic films available on DVD is staggering.
Just in the last two months, Warner Home Video released box
sets of Greta Garbo flicks and Val Lewton horror classics;
Paramount issued two long-unavailable John Wayne films; and
Kino on Video offered up a set of Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain
films. Next month, New Line Home Video will unveil a collection
of Harold Lloyd’s silent comedies—something that seemed unimaginable
not so long ago. And then there are the steady stream of recent
film releases, available with fancy extras like deleted scenes
and director commentaries.
There are plenty of interesting films still sitting on the
shelf, however, and here are 10 of the best.
10.
Star Wars (1977)
A
long time ago, in a Hollywood far, far away, there was Star
Wars. With impressive visuals and a simple narrative cribbed
from Joseph Campbell, Akira Kurosawa and 1940s-era movie serials,
Star Wars was good fun—the great popcorn movie Americans
craved in 1977. Unfortunately, it no longer exists. In its
place, filmmaker-god George Lucas offers Star Wars Episode
Four: A New Hope. This bastardization is plopped in the
middle of a poorly developed multifilm space opera. Hopefully,
Lucas will outlive his hubris and make the original available
again someday.
9.
The Gang’s All Here (1943)
You
can have your Gone With the Winds and Wizards of
Oz, but this is the great three-color Technicolor
film. After years in the wilderness, Busby Berkeley—he of
the geometric patterns of comely showgirls—was given a big
budget to make a musical with Fox’s most interesting stars,
Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda. The result is a disorienting
mix of the avant garde and the banal; the plot is dull, but
the musical sequences are amazing. Miranda shines in the Freudian
fantasia “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat,” with giant bananas
one would never mistake for bananas. Faye is equally compelling
in the erotically charged “No Love, No Nothin’,” about waiting
for her man to come home from war. Even the dumbass song about
polka dots is a psychedelic wonder.
8.
Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)
The
title of this cartoon, a seven-minute, all-black parody of
Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, explains
why it’s out of circulation. (It’s mostly all-black: While
Vivian Dandridge—Dorothy’s sister—and other African-Americans
did most of the voices, Mel Blanc is the villain and a couple
of dwarfs.) Nasty stereotypes? You bet: Prince Charming, for
example, is Prince Chawmin’, complete with zoot suit and dice
for front teeth.Then there are the hired killers who advertise
murder for $1, with “midgets 1/2-price” and “Japs free.” It
isn’t for the tender-hearted, but it’s a prime example of
the delirious, visually dazzling toons Bob Clampett made for
Warner Bros. in the ’40s.
7.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
One
way to get away with making fun of America in the paranoid
’50s was to dazzle the yokels with really big boobs. So, former
Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin starred sad-sack Tony
Randall with buxotic Jayne Mansfield in this eye-popping slapstick
satire of status-seeking consumerism and the decade’s obsession
with breasts. Herr Freud pops up in visual jokes all through
the picture; look kids, watch Randall try to keep his pipe
lit! Hey 20th Century Fox: Tashlin’s playful use of CinemaScope
would look great in a new anamorphic transfer, hint hint.
6.
The Devil at My Heels (1981)
Ken
“the Mad Canadian” Carter, the Great White North’s version
of Evel Knievel, is a forgotten man today. But his epic, five-year
struggle to do one spectacular stunt—jumping a mile over the
St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States in a rocket-
powered car—is chronicled in this terrific National Film Board
of Canada-produced documentary. Carter is both a tragic and
ridiculous figure. A poor kid from Quebec who lived in the
slums and played with rats, Carter grew up to be a fearless
(or stupid, depending on your point of view) stunt-car driver.
His story takes Shakespearian twists and turns, with a double-whammy
surprise ending. OK, VHS bootlegs of this are floating around;
our friends to the north would do well to make this available
legitimately.
5.
Double Indemnity (1943)
Billy
Wilder’s shocking tale of lust and murder is one of the few
really famous 1940s films that’s still unavailable. Fred MacMurray
is the sleazy insurance agent who cooks up a husband-murdering
scheme with unhappy wife Barbara Stanwyck, only to be hunted
down by his best friend, bulldog-like investigator Edward
G. Robinson. MacMurray’s narration is the model for all subsequent
film noir voiceovers, and Stanwyck oozes sex to a degree that’s
almost hard to watch. Why is it MIA? Universal released what
was generally derided as a piss-poor version in 1998, and
subsequently pulled it from distribution.
4.
Bedazzled (1967)
In
1966, Time magazine caused a stir with their cover
“Is God Dead?” A year later, director Stanley Donen suggested
that God, if not quite dead, was assuredly out to lunch in
Bedazzled. Peter Cook is Lucifer and Dudley Moore is
a tempted, suicidal shlub in this snarky Brit comedy (directed
by the very American Stanley Donen). The setup is simple:
Moore gets seven wishes in exchange for his soul, and Cook,
the wryest of devils, gives him exactly what he asks for—if
not precisely what he wants. In a typically droll scene, Cook’s
Lucifer illustrates why he fell from heaven. “I’ll be God,”
he tells Moore, “you be me.” He has Moore dance around him,
singing hymns of praise. After a minute, Moore says “I’m tired,”
and Cook shoots back, “so was I.” Bedazzled is available
in Europe and New Zealand; what’s the hold-up?
3.
I Am Suzanne! (1934)
German
star Lillian Harvey, in her brief Hollywood sojourn, is Suzanne,
an emotionally stunted dancer smothered by her imperious manager
and adored by a self-absorbed puppeteer. It sounds silly,
but it’s a compelling drama of a woman more exploited than
loved by both men in her life, and how she comes into her
own. Forgotten, underrated director Rowland V. Lee makes Suzanne
feel more like a European art film than a Hollywood love story;
the nightmarish dream sequence, in which Suzanne imagines
herself tried, convicted and executed by puppets, is a scary
tour-de-force. The film is unknown because only a couple of
prints exist in archives (and private collections); like most
Fox silent films and early talkies, its negative was destroyed
in a notorious 1937 vault fire.
2.
Die Bergkatze (1921)
You
probably associate German expressionism with drama—doom, gloom,
death and decay. Leave it to Ernst Lubitsch, the legendary
director of great comedies, to use expressionism’s visual
tropes to make a raucous slapstick comedy. Pola Negri is “the
wildcat,” the sexy leader of a band of mountain cutthroats
and robbers who falls in love with an oily, well-dressed Bavarian
officer. The film is a visual stunner, with outlandish compositions
and crazy frame-within-the-frame photographic tricks. It’s
also a rather blunt satire of militarism, something that didn’t
go over well in post-World War I Deutschland. Of all the films
on this list, Die Bergkatze is arguably the funniest—and
the least likely to get a DVD release.
1.
Jeanne Dielman (1976)
Her
groundbreaking early films don’t make for a breezy night at
the movies, but it’s inexplicable that Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne
Dielman has never been available on video. Delphine Seyrig
is the title character, a Belgian widow and mother who doubles
as a hooker by day. Over the course of three hours, we watch
her (in excruciating detail) as she goes about her mind-numbingly
boring routine: cook breakfast for her son, fuck the customers,
bathe, do the marketing, cook dinner for her son, sleep and
repeat. Little by little, however, this seemingly normal woman
begins to crack apart. Much is made of Akerman’s radical critique
of women’s place in society, which is powerful, but the thing
really gets me about her films is the use of sound. Her ultra-realistic
soundtracks make you feel like you’ve never seen a talking
picture before; for weeks after watching her 1978 film Les
rende-vous d’Anna, I listened—to everything—differently.
Akerman’s been called (by J. Hoberman) the great post-’68
European filmmaker. Her work should be available.
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