For the week of April 22nd, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing William Friedkin's Sorcerer to Blu-ray. If nothing else, Sorcerer has earned its notoriety as the movie that temporarily torpedoed Friedkin's career. After finishing up a hot streak that included The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin went way over budget and schedule with this thriller, which follows four criminal ex-pats (Roy Scheider, Francisco Rabal, Bruno Cremer, and Amidou) as they attempt to transport unstable nitroglycerin to help put out a massive oil fire. Without getting too spoilery, this is not a happy story, and in 1977, Sorcerer's bracing nihilism couldn't compete with the swashbuckling optimism of George Lucas' Star Wars at the box-office. The film tanked and went down on the history books as a directorial folly on par with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Martin Scorsese' New York, New York. However, like those two pictures, time has been far kinder to Friedkin's unfairly maligned work. Whatever its darkness, whatever budgetary and production woes Friedkin had to contend with, the end result is near flawless, a chilling, exciting record of bad men who try to eke out some measure of moral redemption from tragedy. On the surface, Sorcerer might look like a simple remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, but it's a remake the same way John Carpenter's The Thing and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are remakes, and it's Friedkin's emphasis on character that distinguishes his efforts. The movie is more than half over by the time the nitroglycerin expedition begins, but that preamble isn't wasted time. Friedkin knows if we don't see how thoroughly broken his heroes are before they begin their journey, we won't appreciate the gravity of their psychological situation alongside their physical struggle. And what a struggle it is Friedkin might have broke the bank when he was shooting, but all the money's on the screen, particularly in a heartstopping setpiece where Scheider and his team need to move the nitro over a rickety suspension bridge.
Michael Reuben's Sorcerer Blu-ray review noted that "Friedkin has repeatedly (and perhaps imprudently) said that he didn't get the cast he wanted for Sorcerer. He originally wanted Steve McQueen to play Roy Scheider's part, and if McQueen had done the film, he would have been joined by Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura playing Manzon and Nilo. Even after McQueen dropped out, followed by Mastroianni and Ventura, Friedkin reportedly pursued a major star for Scanlon, asking Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, among others. Despite the success of Jaws, Scheider was never a box office draw, and Friedkin considered him strictly 'second banana' material (The two had fallen out when Friedkin refused Scheider the part of Father Karras in The Exorcist). Sorcerer might have performed better on initial release with a big name as headliner, but it has aged well precisely because there are no obvious stars making an effort to 'de-glam' for a role into which they can never completely disappear. Over the course of the film, Scheider and his co-stars effectively become the men who are so far over the edge that they'd actually take on the suicide mission of driving trucks packed with nitroglycerine 218 miles over wild and treacherous terrain. Their believability and commitment to such a lunatic project is a big part of what makes Sorcerer fascinating to watch."
Warner also provides a far less heartening look at the remake experience with its simultaneous releases of the 1971 classic Get Carter and its 2000 remake of the same name. The original Get Carter is one of the meanest, nastiest noir thrillers ever made; while it is a revenge story, one that follows gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) as he investigates the death of his younger brother, director Mike Hodges (who also helmed the neo-noir Croupier as well as, oddly enough, the 1980 Flash Gordon adaptation) strips away any pulp sentimentality, leaving the film as cold and rotting as its bleak Newcastle environments. What violence erupts is quick and unsexy, and it provides no release from the crushing misery of the physical and psychological surroundings these are hard, doomed men doing awful things to one another, and Jack Carter is no exception. As Caine plays him, Carter is so cruel and intimidating that, in another movie, he'd be the bad guy, and his personal stake in the revenge mission barely obscures that fact. The same cannot be said about Sylvester Stallone's take on Carter in the remake. His Jack Carter is a mob enforcer, but he doesn't actively court trouble the way Caine's character did. Stallone's catchphrase is, "My name is Jack Carter, and you don't want to know me," and that line perfectly encapsulates how much softer this version is, since he's warning people to stay away from him and what he's capable of. It's a fatal compromise: this Carter is tough simply because he's Sylvester Stallone and not because we think he's capable of anything. He's even saddled with a redemptive character arc, which is almost as galling as the needlessly colorful cast of side characters (including Miranda Richardson, John C. McGinley, Alan Cumming, Mickey Rourke, and Michael Caine, collecting a paycheck this time around), all of whom flail and overact in an effort to distract from the fact that the plot is no simpler than in the Caine version. Hodges used that simplicity to focus on moral rot - remake director Stephen Kay just turns the film into another overblown actioner. If you've never seen the original picture, you might find this iteration less galling (Stallone has made far worse movies), but the comparison does the newer film no favors.
Of the original Get Carter, Michael Reuben wrote "Jack Carter's odyssey through the backstreets and dirty underground of the hometown he abandoned long ago follows a twisted and often confusing path. Hodges, who also wrote the screenplay, omitted substantial parts of the novel that explained who is who and provides Jack with backstory. He did not want to burden his film with chunks of exposition explaining old rivalries, who works for whom or how each illegal business operates. Hodges is far more interested in watching Carter's fearless indifference to consequences as he calmly pushes his way in and out of bars, clubs and private homes filled with men who want him to leave well enough alone and take the next train back to London. You didn't even like your brother, people keep telling him. Why do you care what happened? They haven't yet grasped that family is one of the few values (perhaps the only one) that Jack Carter respects. Touch his family, and he'll kill you...Jack does eventually unravel the mystery, but the price is high and so is the body count. One of the hallmarks of the typical American crime film is the presence of a moral center. In the classics from Warner's golden age, crime never paid and the forces of law and order generally prevailed. Later, with the rise of the anti-hero, a criminal who escaped the law was usually shown to have a code of honor; he resorted to violence with good cause and only when there was no other choice. Get Carter is notable for its utter lack of any concession to morality. It offers neither justification nor excuse for Jack Carter's ruthless amorality or for the viciousness of those arrayed against him. They simply are who they are. If you know what's good for you, you'll keep your distance."
In his Blu-ray review of the remake, Michael Reuben noted that "Director Stephen Kay (The Last Time I Committed Suicide) stages some effective action scenes, including the requisite car chases and an extended fight between Rourke and Stallone that takes full advantage of their respective boxing skills. Technically, this Get Carter is entirely proficient, but it's also generic. Stallone's Jack Carter turns out to have a soft center of regret buried under layers of beef cake and emotional scar tissue, and it emerges in his scenes with his niece, to whom he tries to give genuine advice and support (whereas Michael Caine's Carter just handed her money). As the film proceeds toward its resolution, you can hear the telltale drip of accumulating sentiment that, even with the reshot ending, brands this version of Get Carter as a sweet soft drink rather than the straight shot of hard liquor that Caine and Hodges poured for audiences in 1971."
One of last year's biggest surprises was the underseen in America, anyways Israeli thriller Big Bad Wolves, which Magnolia is distributing on Blu-ray. No less an authority on film than Quentin Tarantino called Big Bad Wolves the best film of 2013, and while Tarantino's critical eye is sometimes suspect (the dire Kick-Ass 2 also got the Tarantino stamp of approval), in this case, his praise certainly has merit: Big Bad Wolves is a suspensful, often brutal look at the effects of violence. While hunting a murderer, a tough cop (Lior Ashkenazi) becomes convinced that a nebbish schoolteacher (Rotem Keinan) is the guilty party, and he starts resorting to ever more extreme methods to prove his suspect's culpability. Their interactions grow increasingly stomach-churning, though the film never quite lurches into torture porn territory thanks to the instincts of directors Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales. Papushado and Keshales certainly don't shy away from the situation's inherent violence, but like Tarantino they also approach it with a sly wit and black comedy. However, their canniest contribution is far more unexpected. During Big Bad Wolves' early goings, it's engaging and entertaining, but then Papushado and Keshales have a third major character the distraught father (Tzahi Grad) of one of the victims - enter the fray, and the picture shifts gears. Without losing any of its lurid thrills, Big Bad Wolves starts developing a political subtext thanks to Grad's work, it becomes a commentary of sorts on the nature of retribution in the Middle East. That's heady stuff, to be sure, and it's so much more effective since it sneaks in under the guise of a bloody revenge thriller. This is the movie that Prisoners wanted to be, and though it isn't the masterpiece that Tarantino claims, Big Bad Wolves is still a tough, funny, and surprisingly resonant slice of exploitation cinema.
Michael Reuben wrote that the film "is a thriller with darkly comic overtones about a teacher suspected of being a pedophile serial killer who becomes the target of a renegade cop and a grieving father willing to go to extreme lengths to obtain a confession. 'Maniacs are only afraid of other maniacs,' says the father, and thus he has transformed himself into his enemy. Still, he will interrupt a brutal interrogation to take a call from his mother. Otherwise, he explains, she worries about him. Big Bad Wolves premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, then opened in Israel later that year and in the U.S. the following January. The film got a PR boost when Quentin Tarantino declared it his favorite film of 2013. The compliment was especially meaningful, because Keshales and Papushado have acknowledged Tarantino's work as a major influence, along with that of Sergio Leone (specifically, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil and the Coen Brothers. Still, the young writer/directors have added something of their own to the mix, not only in their selection of elements but also in a distinctively deadpan humor that sneaks into the most horrific events at the least likely moments. One of the most diabolical features of Big Bad Wolves is how its creators imprint its grisliest scenes on the memory by making you laugh as you're cringing, even while you feel guilty about it."
Finally, from Criterion comes the drama Riot in Cell Block 11. The film is the unique brainchild of producer Walter Wenger and director Don Siegel. After serving some time in jail himself, Wenger wanted to make a film that dealt with the savage realities of prison life, and Riot in Cell Block 11 became his vehicle for conveying a message of social justice to the public. However, it is Siegel who kept Wenger's more didactic interests in check; in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers, and Dirty Harry, Siegel proved himself a master of the no-nonsense B-movie, and his economic, ruthless sense of narrative and character keeps Riot in Cell Block 11 lean and mean. While the titular riot affords Wenger an opportunity to address the indignities that convicts must endure, Siegel gives it a gritty, vιritι energy that works on just a pure thriller level, with scenes of prison violence that were as rough as it got for American cinema in 1954. The film has a palpable sense of danger: thanks to the influence of Sam Peckinpah, who was serving as assistant casting director on the picture, Siegel was able to shoot Riot in Cell Block 11 at Folsom State Prison with minimal interferences, and he used actual guards and inmates as extras. It helps, too, that many of Siegel's leading men were either character actors or bit players. With no stars and few familiar faces on deck, Siegel better sells the reality of this hard world, and he's able to give unsung talents like Neville Brand, Emile Meyer, Frank Faylen, and Leo Gordon (who was a real ex-con himself) the spotlight in a way that these actors never really had before or since the film's release. Siegel would go on to make another classic prison feature 1979's Escape from Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood but in many ways, he never equaled the raw, unpredictable power of Riot in Cell Block 11, which remains one of his best films.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "Shot in sixteen days, Riot in Cell Block 11 has the raw quality of a standard documentary feature. Indeed, immediately after Siegel's camera enters the prison it feels like it tries to capture as much of the chaos as possible without respecting any conventional cinematic rules. Additionally, there is complete lack of interest in glamorizing the men who have to make the important decisions as the drama unfolds. As a result, the film does not have any major heroes. The majority of the mass scenes are very intense and a few look flat-out dangerous. There is one scene, in particular, where the inmates storm the prison yard and there isn't a single guard around. The camera is positioned on one of the nearby towers and captures the mayhem from afar. (While watching it, I felt that Siegel and his crew were clearly aware that something really terrible could happen while the inmates were 'acting'). The progression of the events and some key relationships in the film mimic those of a real riot that took place in Michigan's Jackson State Prison. Important characters in the film...also had real life counterparts whose actions during the riot were well documented."