Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Games Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson August 13, 2018

Games (1967) was produced and released at a time when James Caan and Katherine Ross, the film's leads, were on the brink of major stardom. Although Caan gained prominence as the young gun to the Duke in Howard Hawks's El Dorado a year earlier, he'd become more famous when he portrayed Sonny Corleone some years later. Ross's rise was more immediate as she played Dustin Hoffman's love interest in a much better known film of 1967, Mike Nichols's The Graduate. (She also would figure in between Butch and Sundance a few years later.) In Games, Caan and Ross play Paul and Jennifer Montgomery, a recently married couple who live in a brownstone town house on New York's east side. Paul is a struggling artist whose career hasn't taken off yet while Elizabeth is an heiress whose inherited a pretty good fortune from her parents. The Montgomerys' abode is strewn with fixtures of Mod, Pop, and Op art. (For example, there's a Warholesque portrait of a Brigitte Bardot lookalike near the entryway. Paul and Jennifer stage magic shows replete with pyrotechnics for their quasi-intellectual guests. (They also have a Turnpike pinball machine.) They don elaborate wardrobes, wigs, and masks during their staged productions. They take in an unexpected guest when one day a heavy-set woman clad in back stops to speak with Elizabeth. Lisa Schindler (Simone Signoret) claims she is a saleswoman specializing in cosmetics and has some to offer Elizabeth. After she's let in, Lisa gets sick and stays at the Montgomerys. Dr. Edwards (Ian Wolfe) says that she has a form of malnutrition. It turns out that Lisa is actually a mystic with certain psychic abilities. She begins playing deadly games with Elizabeth and Paul, including Russian Roulette. The grocery delivery boy Norman (Don Stroud, in his movie debut) makes flirtatious advances on Elizabeth to the point of enraging an apparently jealous Paul to shoot him. But does the gun contain blanks or real bullets?

Games is an exercise in style but its plot and characters kept me completely invested up to the surprise ending on my first viewing. Director Curtis Harrington and producer George Edwards conceived a dozen-page story outline that scribe Gene R. Kearney developed into a full script. Games is a highly entertaining psychological thriller the blurs and the lines between illusion and reality and the binary opposition of presentation versus representation. When Games played in theaters, Roger Ebert pointed out: "Some of the best thrillers let you think you've figured them out, and then glide right past the obvious solution with only a wink to let you know how wrong you were. I kept hoping that would be the case with Games, but it wasn't. It turned out exactly the way I guessed it would." However, I couldn't determine the true intentions of the characters or predict their actions. Other critics beside Ebert also caught on to where the story was headed but nonetheless enjoyed the ride. A reviewer for Democrat and Chronicle (NY) wrote: "The story...is designed to tilt your expectations at every turn and, in this category, we give it an A rating." If the film has a weakness, it's that some of the f/x unintentionally look fake such as the shot of a lightning bolt. (Games was filmed entirely at Universal City Studios on one of the largest sound stages.) There's also some makeup that appears too artificial but I don't want to spoil what that consists of. Still, Games is marvelously photographed by first-time DP William A. Fraker and the art/set decorations are entirely contemporary for the period. Caan, Ross, and Signoret work very well together. Games is a forgotten classic and a must-see.

Games Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Games makes its global debut on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. The film didn't receive a true DVD release in North America as Universal issued it MOD for the studio's Vault Series. This fourth film by Curtis Harrington also received 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers on PAL DVDs in Germany and Spain. Shout! also presents it here in its native CinemaScope ratio. The transfer has a film-like appearance with a large amount of grain and texture especially evident after the first reel. Much of Games seems to have been shot at night primarily in interiors. It replicates what original critics saw in the release prints. Myles Standish of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch characterized the aesthetic as "somber-keyed color photography." George McKinnon, then a film critic for Boston Globe, also cited the "muted color." There is not a lot of clarity and sharpness to the image but this seems deliberate. Vincent Canby noted that Miss Signoret "gives authority to the eerie make-believe, even when photographed through a distractingly fuzzy filter in the close-ups." There is some dirt on this print but large damage marks are non-existent. Shout! has encoded the video on the main feature with a mean bitrate of 27996 kbps.

Twelve scene selections are available for the 100-minute film.

Games Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout! supplies the original monaural sound track in a DTS-HD Master Audio Dual Mono mix (1568 kbps, 24-bit). The master is in very good condition with tiny audible hiss in the background as the main source limitation in the recording. Dialogue is mainly intelligible for hearing Caan and Ross's characters. I found the optional English SDH (which were not included on Universal's DVD-r) handy when listening to Simone Signoret's German accent. Samuel Matlovsky's score is highly effective in establishing the film's shifting moods. The fidelity on the sound effects is average but acceptable for a mono track of this age.

Games Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original Theatrical Trailer (2:22) - a full trailer for Games that really is a teaser. Presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, it's artifact ridden and the titles/credits are partially cut off on the bottom of frame.

• Still Gallery (1:06) - the first dozen images are color still photos; the last two are the poster and cover for the novelization of Games.

Games Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you've seen Neil Burger's The Illusionist (2006) and other films about magic or the supernatural, I reckon that you'll definitely enjoy Games. I hope that this release will inspire Shout! or another label to license another film starring James Caan from the era: Coppola's The Rain People (1969) which Warner put out as a DVD-r as part of its "Archive Collection." Shout! delivers a very good transfer and a solid lossless presentation of the film's original mono. The extras are lacking but Games still comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.