Quote:
Originally Posted by rapta
The Lodger - not watched it yet, but heard it's great and one of their best releases!
|
The first of several screen versions of and variations on Marie Belloc Lowndes’
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film (only his third solo effort) has tended to be a film more talked about than seen despite its career-making critical and box-office success. His first British film and his first thriller, it sets up some recurrent themes in his work: a woman falling for an ambiguous protagonist who may or not be planning to kill her, a wrong man hunted because of circumstantial evidence himself on the trail of the real killer, a fascination with blondes (the Jack the Ripper-like Avenger’s victims all have ‘golden curls’), plenty of black gallows humour (“He killed another fair-haired girl.” “No more peroxide for yours truly!”) and his obligatory cameos (two for the price of one here).
The story was inspired by a story Walter Sickert (himself a less than credible suspect for many Jack the Ripper theorists) told Lowndes about his landlady, who was convinced that one of her lodgers who often went out at night was Jack the Ripper, and although there are substantial changes in the last third, the film retains the basic outline. As London is terrorised by a serial killer with a penchant for blonde victims, Ivor Novello’s mysterious stranger appears out of the fog to take a room and his strange behaviour – turning all the pictures of blonde women in his room around, disappearing on the night of each new murder, and just what is inside that Gladstone bag that he keeps locked up in? - starts to stir up suspicions in his landlady (an impressive Marie Ault) while stirring more dangerously romantic feelings in her daughter Daisy (June, one of those performers who never bothered with a surname), much to the ire of her would-be boyfriend Malcolm Keen, a detective on the case who becomes convinced that Novello is the man they’re looking for.
There’s not a lot more to the story than that, with the suspense built on the slow accumulation of clues pointing to his guilt and the possibility that Daisy will fall for him in a very different way than she intends. Yet it’s executed with tremendous style and imagination, not to mention a very heavy influence from German Expressionism – not surprising since Hitchcock had served his apprenticeship in Germany and was a great admirer of German directors and Murnau’s The Last Laugh in particular. The opening montage of a city thrown as much into excitement and frenzied but unproductive activity as fear by the latest murder is a striking bit of editing, the Expressionist influence even extending into the stylised graphics in the subtitles, the classic scene of the Lodger’s relentless pacing in the room above seen through a glass floor one of his most strikingly effective early visuals as is the Lodger’s first appearance at the door (a shot that both anticipates The Man Who Laughs’ scarf covered face and The Exorcist’s entrance into the troubled house) while the final lynch mob scene wouldn’t be out of place in a Fritz Lang film. Yet it’s still set in a recognisable, predominantly working class London that the Leytonstone-born director knew so well, with much of the film unfolding over the kitchen table as it would in his later British films like Blackmail and Sabotage.
Yet there’s no denying that for modern viewers the film is somewhat hobbled by its leading man’s agonised fey posturing in a performance that’s not just awkward because of its matinee idol theatricality. By all accounts Novello never made a secret of his homosexuality and audiences at the time were surprisingly accepting of it, but at times it’s a problem here: unlike most other gay actors of the time, rather than a gay man playing a straight man in love with a woman, he seems to be very obviously playing a gay man in love with his own exquisite mental torture, and his constant agonised rejection of her seems less because of psychological torment and more because he’s ashamed of the love that dare not speak its name. (The film does actually make a knowing joke of it at times – Keen’s detective jokes that “I’m glad he’s not keen on girls” only to be reprimanded with “Even if he is a bit queer, he’s a gentleman,” a line that seems ahead of its time.) It doesn’t help that Novello is a ludicrously theatrical performer at times, given to florid overstatement and tortured posing: at times it’s like watching the young Rupert Everett in the days before he came out playing Oscar Wilde hearing the verdict.
Nor does he bring out the kind of ambiguity about his guilt that the admittedly more sinister Lair Cregar did in the 1944 version, depriving the film of some tension. Despite what we ultimately discover about him, he’s not the most proactive of main characters, almost entirely at the mercy of events, never even taking charge in the finale, which tends to reduce him to something to be admired or feared based on his looks. Only in his final scene does he really convince as a human being rather than an ACT-or. While it’s certainly a problem, it’s not a fatal one, and the film is strong enough to stand on its own as a drama even without all the pointers to Hitchcock’s later work that film buffs will pick up on.
The Lodger hasn’t had the best luck on home video, for years enduring poor public domain releases or equally poor semi-authorised ones from poor master material. Network’s Hitchcock boxed DVD set included two versions, neither satisfactory – an uncut one with no music track at all and an abridged 74-minute reissue version with a library soundtrack. That’s been amended by their DVD release from the BFI’s 91-minute restoration, which restores the original tints and improves the picture dramatically, but the specially composed score is a more contentious matter. Nitin Sawhney wrote a fine score for the BFI’s restored release of A Throw of the Dice where he was perfectly suited to the material, but his efforts here are a very mixed bag.
Despite his curious assertion that it’s a very British film when the style is often anything but, he opts for a very unBritish and modern score that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, but never seems like an ideal fit for the film. Its absolute nadir is when it suddenly breaks into a pop song as the Lodger and Daisy first start to connect, which is particularly jarring and ill-judged. It’s not that it’s a bad song, but it’s the wrong song telling the wrong story in the wrong part of the film. Worse, it overpowers the scene, turning it into a distraction from the lyrics and reduces the film to the kind of 80s music video that used to use silent movie footage out of context. It’s not the only time he gravely misjudged the tone of a sequence and requirements of the music to support rather than dominate: in one scene where the landlady listens for the muffled, slight sounds of Novello’s lodger creeping back into the house late at night as he attempts not to be heard, despite Hitchcock’s exemplary talent for implying the smallest sounds through imagery, rather than emphasising the stillness and suspense Sawhney plays up the noise to the point of increasingly chaotic cacophony as if unaware of the subtlety of the scene. On the plus side it’s never as bad as the Michael Pohler industrial techno score Kino used on their DVD of Lon Chaney’s The Penalty, but there are times when it overpowers the movie or threatens to pull you out of it.
Network’s Region B Blu-ray release is a nice transfer but it’s somewhat short on extras – an interview with Sawhney and his full score on 2 CDs, a stills and poster gallery and, by far the best of them, a booklet with an excellent history and appreciation of the film by Neil Sinyard.
Quote:
|
Flying Deuces - going to get it at some point...extras not great but transfer is alright, apparently
|
Laurel and Hardy's careers didn`t just hit rough waters when they left producer Hal Roach for better paying jobs with studios that hadn't a clue what to do with them like MGM and 20th Century Fox, they all but ran aground, but their first independent effort away from their old home (though made while still working with Roach), 1939's The Flying Deuces, stands out like a diamond in the rough among the exponentially worse and increasingly unwatchable films that would follow. Returning to the Foreign Legion stamping ground of their classic 1931 short Beau Hunks, bringing Charles `Ming the Merciless' Middleton along with them again as their bad tempered commandant as well as regular stooge Jimmy Finlayson as their exasperated jailer, the plot's as thin as Stan is. Ollie, having fallen hopelessly in love with a Parisian waitress who loves another, is persuaded by Reginald Gardiner's officer to join the Legion to forget, which takes about as long as it does for the boys to find out the pay is three cents a day ("We don't work for anything less than 25 cents a day!") and they have to do the washing for the entire regiment...
It all ends with that old comic standby, with our heroes in a plane they don't know how to fly, but while it's never uproariously funny it is a very pleasant and amusing hour and a bit. Not everything is as good as it could be - the suicide setpiece fails to exploit the idea of an escaped shark circling the section of the Seine Ollie chooses to much effect, so it's no surprise the shark was absent from some reissue prints - but it helps that, for the only time outside the Roach films, Stan Laurel had a hand in the writing and editing, something which greatly antagonised director A. Edward Sutherland, who said he'd rather eat a tarantula than work with Laurel again. Just to add even more color to the production, producer Boris Morros was at the time spying for the Soviet Union before changing sides six years later and becoming a double agent!
It also contains one of their most delightfully gratuitous musical numbers when they stop for a brief soft shoe shuffle to the tune of Shine On Harvest Moon (which Matt Smith's Doctor Who invaded in the 2011 episode The Impossible Astronaut), as well as another where Stan plays a wire bedspring like a harp playing The World is Waiting for a Sunrise - while waiting to be shot at sunrise. (It's been claimed that it was Harpo Marx doing the actual harping: certainly the opening shot portrait of Stan and Ollie was the work of forgotten silent comedian Harry Langdon.) No classic, perhaps, but genuinely likeable.
Since falling in the Public Domain the market has been swamped with budget label releases on DVD of execrable quality.
Network's 2015 DVD and region-free Blu-ray release may come up short of extras - just a dubbed and unsubtitled German version and copious stills and poster gallery - but has truly excellent, pin-sharp picture quality thanks to a superb restoration from the BBC that turns what was long one of the worst looking Laurel and Hardy film on home video to what is almost certainly their best. Highly recommended.
Quote:
|
Rome Express - supposed to be good, plan on getting it at some point
|
From the original pressbook adverts included on Network’s Blu-ray, Gaumont British didn’t spare the hyperbole when pitching their first major picture shot at their new Shepherd’s Bush Studio, 1932’s
Rome Express, not only selling it as Grand Hotel on rails with an all-star cast but ‘one of the greatest pictures ever made.’ The stars may have faded with time but surprisingly the picture does a good job of living up to the claims thanks to a smart script by Sidney Gilliat that has hints of his later work on The Lady Vanishes and superb direction by Walter Forde that’s full of energy and visual invention. The opening sequence along as the camera darts and tracks through a Paris railway station discovering and introducing some of the ensemble is a wonderfully invigorating bit of filmmaking and even when everyone’s aboard he finds ways to keep the pace from flagging through Günther Krampf’s terrifically kinetic camerawork and smart crosscutting that never feels like he’s just showing off.
On the passenger list: Esther Ralston’s movie star with a past (“One gets suspicious of old friends who know things”) and her huckster of a press agent Finlay Currie, sporting a very decent American accent (“Don’t forget, I was once press agent to Tom Mix’s horse!”); Cedric Hardwicke’s pompous businessman chasing a knighthood with big charitable donations while short-changing a waiter’s tip and begrudging his secretary Eliot Makeham eight francs for a taxi ride; Gordon Harker, looking and sounding for all the world like Lionel Jeffries in First Men in the Moon as the gossipy neighbour and golf bore who just would be on the same train as married (but not to each other) couple Harold Huth and Joan Barry; Muriel Aked’s pessimistic spinster (“I always go through life expecting the very worst. It’s so nice if it doesn’t happen”); Frank Vosper’s bug hunting French bore whose day job shakes things up; and, most importantly, Donald Calthrop’s art thief with a stolen Van Dyke in his briefcase trying to dodge his double-crossed partners in crime Hugh Williams and a banana-munching Conrad Veidt, who wants to arrange for him to take a long holiday….
Naturally almost everyone has a secret and some connection to each other, with possession of the painting and Calthrop’s increasing desperation as he jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire driving the plot as it twists and turns like a twisty turny thing with plenty of black wit: the scene where Harker assembles a poker party is a particular gem, but its constantly throwing one damn enjoyable thing after another into the mix. Everyone ends up getting what they deserve, and generally in the most entertaining way in a film that definitely deserves more of a reputation than it enjoys today.
Network’s Blu-ray comes from the BFI’s restoration, and it’s only fair to say the film doesn’t look like it was made yesterday: it looks like it was shot 80 years ago and the elements weren’t always as well looked after as they could be and needed to be pieced together from a variety of sources. But it’s equally fair to say that they’ve done a good job with what they had to work with and that this is the best it’s ever likely to look, and certainly better than it has looked for a long time despite the occasional bit of print damage (no dropped frames but some visible tears and scratches) and the odd contrast issue losing some but not all detail in a few shots, with the soundtrack pretty decently cleaned up but still offering optional subtitles (a rarity on Network’s discs) for those lines where the early sound recording presents a problem. Aside from the still and pressbook gallery there’s also a lengthy booklet with an excellent and well-researched appreciation by Neil Sinyard that covers the making of the film and its breakthrough success in the USA. All in all it’s well worth it, especially at the budget price – a first class film for less than a second-class return train fare to London, let alone Paris to Rome!
Quote:
|
Sabotage - good PQ, or so I've heard...you might find some reviews around if you search (DVD Compare?)
|
Sabotage is one of Hitchcock's best British features, a smart updating of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent that cleverly gets around the censor's objections to the author's saboteur hiding behind the counter of a Soho shop selling mucky books under the counter by turning him into the manager of a seedy fleapit cinema, which is clearly the next best thing. That's not to say that Hitchcock isn't pushing the material as far as he can - in the film's most famous sequence he doesn't just put a boy with bomb on bus but a loveable puppy as well while the police are resolutely unambitious, simply happy to go after the minions rather than the masterminds - though he does lose the petty politics of the novel and the tragic finale to turn it into a more conventional and pacier thriller. Rather than a useless talking shop of anarchists who never do anything until manipulated by a foreign government into action, Verloc's acquaintances here are a more overtly criminal gang made up of the likes of Torin Thatcher and Peter Bull, and Verloc himself is a more mercenary figure in it for the money. It also changes the target of the atrocity, no longer the symbolic Greenwich and an assault on `time itself' but Piccadilly Circus, `the centre of the world.'
More significantly, Sylvia Sidney's Mrs Verloc is a much stronger figure here than in the novel, with more than a mere insinuation of romantic attraction to John Loder's undercover cop who is ultimately willing to cover up a crime for her (in true movie formula you know they'll get together because they start off hating each other). That their relationship has more than a hint of Hitchcock's earlier Blackmail is perhaps not so surprising considering its screenwriter Charles Bennett's prominence among the four credited writers. But while it may follow the formula of many of Hitchcock's British films, it's still filled with strikingly memorable detours like the bomb-making professor and his silent but communicative daughter and granddaughter ("Is the father dead?" "I don't know. He MIGHT be.") and technical flourishes such as an Aquarium tank turning into Piccadilly Circus as it crumbles into dust after a imagined bomb blast as well as more subtle ones like the soft squeak of Verloc's shoes in one key scene. And it also has a terrific turn from Oskar Homolka as Verloc, who may be a less complex figure than Conrad's self-critically semi-autobiographical creation, but still manages a superb combination of pathetic desperation and amoral reptilian menace.
One of Hitchcock's best, unlike the plethora of public domain releases flooding the market,
Network's UK PAL DVD copy is superb, looking almost like new, and comes with a few minor extras - a brief but informative introduction by Charles Barr, a featurette on the locations introduced by a fidgety Robert Powell and a brief stills and poster gallery, the latter revealing that the film was originally intended to co-star Robert Donat in the Loder role when it had the working title 'The Hidden Power.'
Network's Blu-ray carries these over and while the upgrade to higher definition does reveal a few problems with the source material in a few night shots where the contrast is noticeably lighter (mostly in the opening scene), it's still so head and shoulders above the cheap releases from other labels that it's a worthwhile upgrade.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Linear Mode
