For the week of November 26th, the Criterion Collection is bringing Orson Welles' 1942 melodrama The Magnificent Ambersons to Blu-ray. Along with Erich von Stroheim's Greed, The Magnificent Ambersons ranks as the most heartbreaking post-production tragedy in cinema history. See, Welles only got Citizen Kane made through an almost-Faustian bargain: sure, he got final cut right out of the gate, but he had to suffer financial and creative indignities for pretty much every subsequent film he'd direct. With The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles completed production confident he had a movie even better than Kane...and then RKO completely reworked Ambersons without his input, changing the ending and deleting over forty minutes of footage. Unlike, say, Touch of Evil, where scholars ultimately restored the film according to Welles' specifications, RKO destroyed what they cut from Ambersons. I wish I could add to The Magnificent Ambersons' reputation as a flawed masterpiece; unfortunately, the film itself proves uneven in ways I can't ignore. To be sure, there are moments here that are as good as anything in the Welles canon. Welles might be telling a smaller story than he did in Citizen Kane - he's adapting Booth Tarkington's novel about the titular family (Dolores Costello, Ray Costello, Richard Bennett, Don Dillaway, Agnes Moorehead, and a perfectly loathsome Tim Holt) and their long, slow decline after the turn of the twentieth century - but he does so with more visual tricks and technical innovations that he brought to Kane. The Amberson estate is a marvel of set design, a foreboding Gothic mansion that's all high ceilings and impossibly long hallways, and rigged so that Welles and his DP Stanley Cortez (whose work is almost the equal of Gregg Toland's landmark Kane lensings) could stage all sorts of extended tracking shots. At one point, Holt's spoiled George Amberson and Moorehead's judgmental Aunt Fanny ascend the huge spiral staircase in the middle of the house, and Cortez's camera rises with them, twisting and moving as one unbroken take as the two characters scheme. However, just as often, you're aware of some significant compromise or editorial revision working against the film. Welles might have loved long takes, but RKO sure didn't, and the studio's editors hustle the narrative along with little regard for mood or narrative. The opening scene, which introduces us to the Ambersons, unfolds through a montage so discordant and jarring as to seem almost avant-garde - were it not for Welles' narration, we'd have no idea what the hell was happening, and even his voiceover can't fix the ways the introduction chops away at the Ambersons themselves (minus Holt's George and Costello's Isabel) until they're almost peripheral to the main story. Still, even in its compromised format, you can see the exacting technical control Welles wielded over the proceedings, and after a while, it feels stifling. Welles equated the filmmaking process to "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had" and with The Magnificent Ambersons, you're aware that Welles views his elaborate sets and skilled actors as little more than props for him to pose and style. I'm not surprised to learn that the film made such an important influence on Wes Anderson, who fashioned his great The Royal Tenenbaums as an homage to Welles' work here, but Welles didn't yet have the emotional vocabulary to make us care about the characters in so artificial a setting. Ultimately, The Magnificent Ambersons functions as a noble failure, and an unfortunate harbinger of every bad day Welles would ever face.
Shifting gears, Scream Factory is offering the four-film Critters Collection. What can you say about a franchise that began with little more than exploitation on its mind? And I don't mean that these are exploitation films - rather, the first Critters emerged in 1986 to exploit all the goodwill left in the wake of Joe Dante's 1984 classic Gremlins. They're practically the same movie. Critters might sub in space aliens for supernatural creatures, but the title characters are still crude little monsters with a thirst for blood, and they're wreaking havoc on small-town Americana (personified by Dee Wallace, Scott Grimes, Billy Bush, and Nadine van der Velde's genial farming family). Yet while Critters never threatens Gremlins for the title of Ghoulish Norman Rockwell Subversion, it's way more fun that it has any right to be. Grimes is such an appealing child actor, and the Critters puppets (courtesy of the Chiodo Brothers) make up in personality what they lack in technical polish. And its modest success allowed the sequels to do something interesting: each follow-up is a rip-off of a different genre property. Critters 2: The Main Course is definitely aping Aliens in its desire to up the on-screen monster quotient: it introduces a tiny (but just-as-ravenous) Critter as well as a tractor-sized spinning ball of fused Critters. But Mick Garris helms this one, and he just isn't the director that Stephen Herek is. The action and horror are less inspired, although the film has one great gag involving an alien centerfold model (it'll make sense if you see Critters 2). The franchise went straight-to-video after that, yet it still maintained its genre-hopping ambitions. Critters 3 plays like a low-rent Die Hard clone, of all things, as the Critters rampage around an apartment building. Nowadays, Critters 3 marks the moment right before Leonardo DiCaprio would become the biggest star in the world - he plays a teenage kid fighting the beasts here, and two years later he'd be Academy Award-nominated for What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Not to be outdone, Critters 4 goes where most low-rent DTV horrors eventually go (Critters in Space!), but it double-downs on Academy Award-talent, somehow securing both Angela Bassett and Brad Dourif. Again, it speaks to these films' particular brand of modest ambition.
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the far more high-toned The Little Stranger. As someone who found both Room and Frank problematic, I think this might be director Lenny Abrahamson's finest feature. It's tricky to describe what makes this film so affecting, but suffice to say, Abrahamson is experimenting with genre in exceedingly subtle ways. When we begin, we're planted squarely in Howards End territory. It's 1947, and a series of unfortunate events have drawn Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson, cementing his legacy as a screen incel par excellence) into the post-WWII malaise suffocating British estate Hundreds Hall and its inhabitants. The maid (Liv Hill) fakes illnesses to avoid her duties, while Lord Roderick Ayers (Will Poulter, in a heartbreaking performance) is so physically and emotionally scarred by his war experience that he alternates between paralyzing hysteria and monstrous rages. As Faraday tries to treat his new patients' issues, he finds himself drawn to Roderick's mysterious, fragile sister Caroline (Ruth Wilson, who deserves an Oscar nomination for what she does here) as well as to the house itself, which holds a special power in Faraday's mind...and more than that, I should not say. Maybe a little more: in the best possible manner, The Little Stranger owes a huge debt to Jack Clayton's masterful The Innocents. Both features accentuate the trappings of a gothic chiller with probing psychological realism. Ultimately, this is the movie I wanted Hereditary to be. At no point does The Little Stranger ever compromise its social objectives even as it draws its characters ever closer to a different kind of unrest. And while you'll probably suss out its big twist long before it thinks you will, the reveal is so unsettling that it lingers far after the credits roll.
Robert Altman is such a distinctive screen voice that it's a shame he doesn't enjoy the same reputation as some of his peers: here's hoping this week's releases of Brewster McCloud (courtesy of Warner Archive) and Gosford Park (which arrives via Arrow) help reignite interest in his long, idiosyncratic career. They make for a great double feature: on the surface, they have absolutely nothing in common, and I suspect Altman would have cackled watching someone trying to reconcile the two movies as springing from the same person. He was a grand provocateur, and Brewster McCloud was always a deliberate provocation. Fresh from the success of his landmark war comedy M*A*S*H, Altman wanted nothing than to disabuse viewers of their expectations vis-ŕ-vis his career, and so he released this, which remains one of the most bizarre studio features I've ever seen. It defies description - we begin with our title character (Bud Cort), a young misfit who wants to teach himself how to fly in the Houston Astrodome, and we quickly spiral off into insanity. His best friend is a literal guardian angel (Sally Kellerman), and oh yeah, Brewster might be a serial killer, although I think Altman includes that detail just so he can have Michael Murphy show up as Detective Frank Shaft and lampoon all the tough-fisted cop dramas of the 1960s and '70s. It's a weird movie, and I get if anyone bails once characters start getting coated in bird crap or René Auberjonois shows up as a fourth-wall-breaking bird expert (who slowly mutates into a bird over the course of the film). But it announced that Altman would not be pigeonholed (ha ha). How else to explain Gosford Park, which remains as elegant and witty a social satire as I've ever seen. This is the good version of Downton Abbey (writer Julian Fellowes penned both) - we have a murder at a tony British country house, but as Altman sees it, violent death proves less upsetting than the rigid social codes binding the "upstairs" (including Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, Michael Gambon, Charles Dance, Tom Hollander, Bob Balaban, and Jeremy Northam as an impeccably cast array of arrogant twits) and "downstairs" (the equally auspicious grouping of Richard E. Grant, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Clive Owen, Derek Jacobi, Alan Bates, and Emily Macdonald, who's the heart of the film) biospheres of the house. Yet the same intelligence remains behind both movies. Altman loved actors, and he lets them play, encouraging improvisation in Brewster McCloud and Gosford Park alike. Plus, we get one great overlap in their Venn Diagrams. If Murphy is the ineffectual cop in Brewster McCloud, Stephen Fry plays a dunderheaded constable who's just as ineffectual in solving Gosford Park's central murder. Similarities in strange place: that could be the name of Altman's biography.
Finally, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is offering a 4K upgrade of Jonathan Demme's landmark drama Philadelphia. The common complaint levied against the film is that in dramatizing the legal battle between gay lawyer Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks, in the performance that won him his first Oscar) and the law firm that fired him for having AIDS, Demme offers a too-sanitized depiction of the LGBTQ+ community. Everything about Beckett reads as chaste. Hanks eschews stereotypical gay affectations, and while it makes sense that Beckett and his longtime partner (a very affecting Antonio Banderas) wouldn't have sex at this point in Beckett's medical decline, the tenderness between them seems less romantic than it does fraternal in nature. Heck, one could even argue that Philadelphia isn't really Beckett's movie. Hanks might have gotten a Best Actor Academy Award, but Denzel Washington's bigoted defense lawyer Joe Miller is the film's true protagonist: it's Miller who takes on Beckett's "losing" case, and it's ultimately Miller who learns to overcome his prejudices towards gay people. All of that is true - in a post-Brokeback Mountain, post-Call Me by Your Name film landscape, Philadelphia can't help but feel quaint. However, in 1993, the film's carefully measured approach towards queer culture was the right choice for mainstream Hollywood. Yes, Philadelphia isn't breaking ground in terms of representing gay characters, but it is normalizing them for audiences who might have been struggling with their own prejudices. Demme and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner structure the film as a courtroom drama above all else so it never feels too didactic - we can enjoy the proceedings we would an episode of Law & Order - and when Washington completes his big character arc, it gives viewers permission to question their own beliefs through a powerful moviestar surrogate. So it goes with Hanks. He dials up his likeability to about 1000% so that Beckett proves as immediately appealing as Josh Baskin or Jim Lovell. As I wrote about Crazy Rich Asians last week, sometimes conventional can be more powerful a weapon than provocative.