Wise Guy
SCORSESE COLLECTION
Warner Home Entertainment has been exploding with great DVDs lately: the
noir series, the horror quartet, and now comes the Scorsese set, with Hitchcock to follow shortly (meanwhile,
Universal has its own noir set, plus a new collection of Spielberg films).
The Scorsese package includes WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR (1967), MEAN STREETS (1973), ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974), AFTER HOURS (1985) and GOODFELLAS (1990). Even the least of Scorsese's films are more interesting than the "best" of most directors, and the package offers up three of the films on DVD for the first time. Warner sent three of the five to me.
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I wouldn't necessarily want my high school newspaper movie reviews republished, but filmmakers are not so lucky. They become gods of cinema, and that means that every scrap of footage they ever touched must find its way to screen or disc. WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR is interesting historically if amateurish but without besmirching the reputations of anyone involved, among them Scorsese as director, Mardik Martin as collaborator, and Harvey Keitel as lead actor.
There is little doubt that KNOCKING is a dry run for MEAN STREETS in setting, subject matter, and philosophical concerns. Keitel is J. R., a guy who hangs out with his friends in the neighborhood but who starts a romance with a girl (Zina Bethune) from elsewhere, an upscale blonde This part of the plot's a little like SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. The "tragedy" of the story is that when she makes a grim, painful confession J.R.'s neighborhood bred morality prevents him from continuing to accept her.
Knocking's black and white transfer (1.66:1 enhanced) looks pretty good, with adequate DD mono. There are two main supplements, the first being selected scene commentaries by Scorsese and Martin and the second a video interview with Martin (12:00) that proves to be the source of some of Martin's audio commentary.
There are some Scorsese movies that are really so good I wonder why no one else likes them. I'm thinking of THE COLOR OF MONEY, NEW YORK NEW YORK, and CAPE FEAR. Widely viewed at the time as periodic examples of Scorsese trying to "prove" he could make commercial films, they are generally underappreciated by the critics, who tend to focus on MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, and GOODFELLAS.
AFTER HOURS is one of them. It's been likened to Kafka as it tells of an "innocent" young man trapped one night in Manhattan's Soho district but instead, AFTER HOURS is more like a Martin Amis novel (in his novels such as MONEY), with a little bit of Tom Stoppard thrown in (Stoppard once did a TV play about a guy who couldn't escape a cab because he couldn't find anyone to help him pay the fare).
The story finds Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) experiencing a walpurgisnacht of an evening that is also something of a bildungsroman as he finds himself trapped in what is presumably the terrifying terrain of Soho.
AFTER HOURS came at the tail end of a whole slew of basically anti-New York movies, starting with THE OUT OF TOWNERS, and leading to THE HOSPITAL, DEATH WISH, THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3, FORT APACHE: THE BRONX, and scores of others. But it owes a lot to certain Italian films that we now know Scorsese revered, such as I VITELLONI, but also other Fellini films such as hooker one, and also Antonioni's films about characters wandering solo through a perplexing city landscape. It's perfect Scorsese territory, night and the city, lonely figures battling inner and outer demons.
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AFTER HOURS has an odd cast ranging from Roseanna Arquette to Cheech and Chong, and a complicated, repetitive story that twists the noose around Hackett as he stumbles upon one grim disaster after another. Dunne looks a little like Scorsese (maybe it's just those connecting eyebrows) and the title suggests that the director is taking us on a tour of the dire nocturnal that exists outside our daylight ken. In fact, 20 years later, the film looks like a meditation on the madness that is Woman, given that nearly every female Hackett encounters is some nut case, unnerving shrew, or explicitly practicing sadomasochist.
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AFTER HOURS comes in a good widescreen transfer (1.85:1. enhanced) with DD mono. Extras are slightly more robust than for KNOCKING, with a yak track of discrete interviews by Scorsese, Dunne, co-producer Amy Robinson, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and DP Michael Ballhaus, followed by a 20+ minute retrospective "making of," curiously without the direct participation of Scorsese (he does happen to be busy making a movie).
There is also an eight minute deleted scene sequence, the most notable that of Catherine O'Hara yelling at Dunne on a stairway. Within that minute and a half is all the insanity of AFTER HOURS. Finally, on the disc also is the trailer.
The crowning achievement of the set is GOODFELLAS, a film that announced the 1990s as a new decade in American cinema. With its sweeping exposition and use of music it exploded on the screen as a new way to tell commercial Hollywood stories. It's simply one of the greatest films of all time.
Too bad the disc, a double platter set that replaces the old flipper, doesn't live up to the film itself. As my colleague Damon Houx points out, Anchor Bay has better extras on its disc than this.
The set sports what is advertised as a new digital widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) and it looks very good, with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (in English or Spanish, with French, English and Spanish subtitles).
That's all well and good. But when you stray into the supplements, the situation takes a downward turn. It's OK that KNOCKING only has a couple of supplements because in reality the movie isn't that good and only really of interest to specialists. But a film that, no joke, is on the order of CITIZEN KANE or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to mention other films released by Warner, deserves added value that truly honors the work.
After the two commentaries on Disc One, the first with the cast and crew (edited excerpts with Scorsese, writer Nicholas Pileggi, star Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, producers Irwin Winkler and Barbara De Fina, cinematographer Ballhaus, and editor Schoomaker), and the other with Henry Hill, the real life inspiration for the film's main character, and former FBI agent Edward McDonald, the man who got Hill into the Witness Protection Program, and who plays himself in the movie, there's a list of the film's many awards, which is nice to know, I guess.
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But things get bad on the second disc, with a 30-minute retrospective "making-of" featurette that mixes new interviews (Bracco, Pileggi, Liotta) with old (1990 chats with De Niro, Scorsese, and Pesci), followed by the eight minute "The Workaday Gangster," about on the realities of the gangster lifestyle, and the truly disappointing "Made Men: The GOODFELLAS Legacy," a 13 minute suite of video interviews with Richard Linklater, the Hughes Brothers, and John Favreau taking about how much they enjoyed the movie, a feature that attempts to replicate the featurette on SCARFACE that explored the impact of that movie on black culture.
All this stuff is OK and modestly informative, but doesn't cross the threshold of what makes a truly great set of extras. Finally there's "Paper is Cheaper Than Film," about Scorsese's storyboards, and the theatrical trailer, and you're out. The whole box hit the street on August 17, and goes for $59.92, or individual films for $19.97.
Good Fellas
I VITELLONI
Meanwhile next Tuesday the Criterion Collection coincidentally releases this episodic Fellini film from 1953 about a group of static male friends in Rimini (Fellini's home town) and the one guy who gets out. As Scorsese says in MY VOYAGE TO ITALY, Fellini's film was a major influence on first KNOCKING and then of course MEAN STREETS. It also happens to be one of Fellini's best films, before he went into intellectual hibernation with the heavily symbolic and archly pretentious run of films from LA STRADA to NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, before he got back on track with LA DOLCE VITA.
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The first flowering of Fellini's episodic narrative style, I VITELLONI concerns five friends, among them the dreamy Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), the "Billy Liar" of the bunch, and Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), the married one, living with his wife's parents. It's so soon after the war, but this group of young men are already bored and listless, more interested in their daily distractions than in contributing to society or being tied down to mundane jobs, precursors of the Beats and the Hippies.
Moraldo is the Fellini surrogate. And the rest of the film throws into play what will come to be the Fellini obsessions: women, the beach, Catholicism, family, faithfulness, and the conflict between generations in a changing society.
Criterion has provided a handsome disc, with a full frame black and white transfer and mono sound. The supplements are threefold. There is 30 minute retrospective "making of" with interviews with surviving cast and collaborators, including Interlenghi, who speaks movingly about Fellini. One of the more complex anecdotes told is about a role, originally intended for De Sica, who is gay, only no one told that explicitly to the actor who later took the part, and was outraged, when the movie came out, to see learn that his character was "ambiguous," so unlike the actor in his private life.
Finally, there's a 12-page foldout insert with cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, and an essay about the film by novelist Tom Piazza.
I VITELLONI goes on sale next Tuesday, August 24th, for $29.95.
Erotic Thriller
PAST MIDNIGHT
Quietly released a week after KILL BILL VOL. 2 was Tarantino's first credit (though as associate producer), PAST MIDNIGHT, an "erotic thriller" from 1992, released not too long before RESERVOIR DOGS came out, though apparently released directly to video.
Tarantino only wrote the movie, for the company CineTel, whose representatives had been briefly interested in TRUE ROMANCE in the summer of 1991. They liked his earlier scripts, and Catalaine Knell hired him to do a significant rewrite on one of the company's films already in progress.
Only partially written by Tarantino, and done so within a production history that makes it difficult to officially segregate Tarantino's contributions from that of the credited scripter, Frank Norwood (the last of that writer's official credits), PAST MIDNIGHT nevertheless contains some elements, present in a ghostly, inchoate fashion, that announce or anticipate Tarantino's cinematic personality.
Director Jan Eliasberg, however, didn't like some of those ideas, such as the insertion of an unwanted foot massage (which becomes the offer of a backrub) and a mentally retarded character (who is present).
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Past Midnight (the title means nothing) is linked by its few reviewers and even its writer to JAGGED EDGE, though that comparison is a little misleading. In reality PAST MIDNIGHT is one of several thousand lugubrious and remarkably similar straight-to-video "erotic thrillers," usually revolving around a terrorized woman. In this one she is Laura Mathews (Natasha Richardson, looking a bit like Liza Minelli). She is a social worker handed the case of one Ben Jordan (Rutger Hauer), just out of prison for killing his pregnant wife some 17 years earlier. Mathews, who has a platonic friendship with office mate Steve Lundy (a slightly miscast Clancy Brown) has just returned from the funeral of her beloved father and now finds herself falling for the irascible and troubled Jordan, whom she comes to believe is innocent, thanks to some girl detective investigations on the side.
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Tarantino has told interviewers that the scenes between Clancy and Richardson bear his hand, but those between Richardson and Hauer do not. Yet we first encounter moments that are now called Tarantinoesque in Mathews and Jordan’s first scene together, in which they compare the mysteries of David Goodis and John D. MacDonald, as well as in a shot (done earlier in the film) of an old Dell mystery cover found in a trunk of Mathews's dad's effects.
PAST MIDNIGHT bears some of the tedious markings of these low-budget, straight-to-video features: a paucity of sets, none of which looks lived in, a leaden pace and a ponderous editing style that treats all scenes as being of equal weight. But the film is not without its modest flourishes, such as the windshield wiper that slashes like a knife across only the pane of Mathew's window of her Scout International while she is sitting next to the ominous Jordan, or the foreboding crows reflected in the skylight through which we see Mathews and Jordan make love for the first time. PAST MIDNIGHT's opening scene is faintly reminiscent of HALLOWEEN (a shattered figure exiting a house at night with a bloody knife).
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But aside from these daring influences, director Eliasberg (who later went on to direct DAWSON'S CREEK among numerous other examples of series television) does a weak job of first convincing us that Hauer is the killer, and than later that he isn't. On the other hand, she handles well an interesting self-conscious movie angle to the story: The serial killer films his murders and they figure in the plot, with Mathews viewing the old footage seized at the crime scene as well as watching new footage left in her house. After she puts one small Super 8 reel into her projector, the first image Mathews sees is the wall itself that she uses as a screen; then the camera pans to the right to the short staircase that leads to her upstairs bed and bath. This unnerving movie-within-a-movie doubling is like something that De Palma might do (certainly going over and over the same footage resembles De Palm in BLOW OUT and its inspiration, Antonioni's BLOWUP) and may well have come from the pen of Tarantino. But it also weirdly anticipates the Robert Richardson-inspired film stock mélange of Oliver Stone's version of NATURAL BORN KILLERS.
Thematically Past Midnight also harbors an interesting nexus of psychological crosshatchings concerning mothers and fathers that doesn't really bear much on Tarantino's later films — but does mirror interestingly some of his biographical experience. Mothers have been a trope in psycho thrillers since PSYCHO and fathers since PEEPING TOM. The script to PAST MIDNIGHT mixes them all together with father substitutes and weird incest allusions. Mathews is more or less in love with her father, while the serial killer was the actual, if forced, lover of his own mother (thus the psychological explanation for his slaying of pregnant women). There is a hint that the killer's brother (Paul Giamatti in an early role) is also his son (a la CHINATOWN?). Meanwhile Jordan is something of a father figure to Mathews, even though from narrative clues the viewer knows that Clancy's Lundy is actually more like her father. All this is tangled up with the biographical details of Tarantino's life, the abandoning father, the subsequent father figures and mentors, the weird blend of competition with and inspiration from his own youngish mother.
Columbia Tristar's edition of past midnight, heretofore only available on videotape, makes for a fascinating experience for Tarantino buffs. It's a good widescreen (7.85:1, enhanced) transfer (should it go without saying that it is vastly superior to the tape?), with DD stereo, but with little supplements beyond English, Japanese, and Spanish subtitles. PAST MIDNIGHT hit the street August 17, and retails for $19.94.
Battle Royale With Cheese
MAD DOG TIME (a.k.a., TRIGGER HAPPY
Many viewers of KILL BILL VOL. 2 took note of Larry Bishop as Larry Gomez, the owner of the My Oh My Club where Budd works. Bishop has an interesting past, and an odd if strangely fascinating delivery. The son of Rat Pack court jester Joey Bishop and an actor-writer-director in his own right, Bishop, like the sons of many a Hollywood dinosaurs, entered the exploitation film world in the late '60s, thus joining near contemporaries such as Peter Fonda and Robert Walker Jr in movies along the lines of ANGELS UNCHAINED. Bishop's threshold into the twilight zone of pulp film was WILD IN THE STREETS.
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Cinematically, aside from appearances in THE STING II and THE BIG FIX, not much really was heard from Bishop until 1996 when MAD DOG TIME appeared briefly in theaters only to be shot down by Roger Ebert. If Bishop's bizarre blend of gangland story and COOL WORLD (Gabriel Byrne is in both) is Tarantino- or post-Tarantinoesque, than Tarantino has returned the favor by casting him in KILL BILL. There may have been a further influence. The Bride's speech at the end of VOL. 1 to Sofie Fatale ("I want him to know I know") may have found its roots in dialogue given to the character Jake Parker about 30 minutes into MAD DOG TIME ("I knew that if I waited, everything could be mine. I waited so long knowing what I knew. Knowing no one else knew what I knew. And I knew that I knew that. I'm one all-knowing fucker").
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MGM released MAD DOG TIME on DVD back on March 2, 2004 (retailing for $14.95), and I just caught up with it. It's fascinating without necessarily being fun. The narrative concerns the return of Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) to rule the unnamed city (think THE KING OF NEW YORK, without Walken) that seems to exist only at night and in a dream state after a brief stay in the nut house. The immediate cause? Grace (Diane Lane, who doesn't show up until the last 10 minutes or so). She's the with whom he had an unexplained falling out, though it mostly had to do with Mickey Holliday (Jeff Goldblum), the local roué who has been bedding Grace, along with Rita (Ellen Barkin), his "nighttime" girl, with whom he is reunited after a recent breakup. Rita is also Grace's sister (and their last name is Everly).
Though he is calm, suave, and agreeable, nobody seems to like Mickey much. He particularly inspires vitriol in Ben London (Byrne, here doing a comic, or near comic, or intentionally comical but in the end rather embarrassing twist on his character of Tom Reagan in MILLER'S CROSSING), but Mickey is equally reviled by Jake (Kyle MacLachlan), a rival to Vic, and by Wacky Jacky Jackson (Burt Reynolds).
Now out of the loony bin, Vic intends to sort this all out. He arrives back on the scene to thunderous applause in his club, walking down a red carpet while still in his asylum pajamas, insisting later to Mickey that he has been working with the shrinks on medication that will henceforth chill him out. "Tell Grace its chemical," he pleads with Mickey. Vic knows that Mickey has been seeing Grace. The one thing keeping Mickey alive is the fact that only Mickey knows where Grace is hiding. The tensions between all the factions come to a head on the night of Vic's second welcome back party, to which Vic has also invited Nick (Bishop), a renowned hit man, engaged to activate Vic's secret plan.
This all sounds perfectly noirish and gangsterish, but MAD DOG TIME exists in a weird zone hitherto unknown to film. From its cosmic opening, which serves as visual backdrop to a morbidly intoned philosophical treatise, to its cartoon like surface, MAD DOG TIME is less like a movie and more like a graphic novel come to life. It's entrenched in the lore of noir and gangster films but also feels a lot like DARK CITY (which Ebert loved, by the way), existing in a dream state beyond logic, like that episode of STAR TREK in which a whole planet has taken on the mores, lingo, and costumes of 1920s Chicago. One of the irrealities is that citizens of this burg can challenge each other to duels, which are conducted in spacious the basement of a club, the participants sitting behind a desk, with their seconds off to the side. With it's tone of kids (i.e., actors) playing grown-up with guns it's more like BUGSY MALONE than BUGSY.
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One could dismiss MAD DOG TIME as Bishop's cartoony gloss on MILLER'S CROSSING, except that there is something fascinatingly gripping about it. I think that the fascination lies in the fact that the film comes across as his bizarre take on the Rat Pack legacy. For one thing, all the songs are by Sinatra, Martin, or Davis. And the cast seems to be constructed along RP lines. Dreyfuss, with his burlap of gray hair, is The Chairman of the Board. Goldblum is Martin, Gregory Hines is Davis. And Byrne, I guess, is Joey, if for no other reason than that he tries to take over Vic's territory via comedy. Dreyfuss, who was a high school classmate of Bishop's produced the movie (written about a decade earlier), and other classmates of Bishop's (Rob Reiner) or cronies of the Rat Pack (Henry Silva, Paul Anka) make cameos in the film, along with other oddball integers who help make up one of the most unusual casts in film history, among them Billy Drago, Richard Pryor, Christopher Jones, Michael J. Pollard, Billy Idol, and Juan Fernandez. Bishop reserves for his own character the stage directions, "Smooches with supermodel Angie Everhart in the background."
Bishop's delivery is just as strange here as it is in KILL BILL, though not as appealing. He has the habit of putting curse words in sentences in the wrong place. Still, the movie offers further insight into the strange cameo that pops up in the middle of KILL BILL.
Not everybody found the film so interesting, however. As mentioned, MAD DOG TIME has received some of the most scathing reviews ever (though there are pockets of enthusiasm, one of them apparently being Tarantino, who is listed as a cast member in Bishop's next movie). MGM has done an adequate job in making the film available for consumers back in anticipation of KILL BILL, if only we had known then what we know now. Unfortunately, it is a full frame transfer, and that creates a real problem because there are several shots where it is obvious that there is visual information now cut off the screen. The only extra is the trailer. Surely, since MGM had taken the time to put out the disc in the first place, surely they could have issued a "director's cut," in which, among other things, the long shot of a nude Diane Lane, now obviously excised, were retained. [I borrowed my headline from someone who posted it at the Tarantino Archives Forum.]
NEXT TIME: Some SPIDERMANs, THE SNAKE PIT, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, some STAR TREKS, and more!
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