For the week of July 1st, a number of boutique labels are distributing some intriguing vintage titles. From Arrow Video comes John A. Alonzo's comedy FM. Today, we mostly remember Alonzo for his cinematographic efforts (he lensed both Scarface and Chinatown), but he offers an admirable steadying hand as director here. FM is an amiable hangout farce, content to chill alongside the misfits and rebels running Q-SKY in Los Angeles. If you remember WKRP in Cincinnati, then you'll have a pretty good idea of what to expect here. That isn't a bad thing - Alonzo has assembled a talented cast of performers (most notably Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan, Norman Lloyd, and the late, great Cleavon Little), and he surrounds them with a still-catchy pop soundtrack: we get tracks from the likes of Tom Petty, Bob Seger, Jimmy Buffett, Linda Ronstadt, Queen, and Steely Dan, who sing the film's title song. You'd never mistake FM for anything revolutionary, but it's pleasant, and that's good enough. Far more incendiary is Vinegar Syndrome's release of the cult satire Putney Swope. Director Robert Downey Sr. was a towering figure in the world of 1960's and '70s independent cinema - he made puckish, deeply subversive comedies that attacked as many sociopolitical norms and taboos as Downey could imagine. And Putney Swope is the one for which he'll be remembered. It centers on the title character (Arnold Johnson), a low-level black executive who, after a series of absurdist mishaps, becomes the CEO of a mostly-white ad agency. Swope wastes no time wielding his newfound power like a sledgehammer, firing most of the white employees and creating explicit ads that ultimately prove less offensive to the world than Swope's radicalized agenda. See, Swope hates the poisonous influence of the alcohol and tobacco lobbies, and when he refuses to promote them, Swope unwittingly starts a fiery confrontation between his company and the military-industrial complex. It's a lot, and at times, you wish Downey would choose his shots more deliberately. The bold satire of the racial politics doesn't always square with the Dadaist ads (which contain as much leering nudity as a softcore porno), which - in turn - feel divorced from the surrealist conflagration of the last act. But the film is a thrillingly alive mess, and one that proved formative to filmmakers as diverse as Robert Townsend and Paul Thomas Anderson.
In his FM Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "when FMfirst appeared, radio was the preferred method for hearing music in a 'mobile' (or what passed for it in the 'Dark Ages') manner. FM was always kind of the 'cooler' relative to the more mainstream AM formats, offering what [film critic Glenn] Kenny details as Album Oriented Radio (I had always heard that the acronym AOR stood for Album Oriented Rock), with a supposedly more diverse playlist, though as Kenny gets into in his engaging overview of this era and its radio formats, 'corporate' intrigue ultimately led to a homogenizing of even FM content. Kenny finds it interesting that FMdoesn't really get into that aspect of the business, despite the fact that it was already at least nascent by the mid 1970s, instead offering a kind of silly conflict that does posit corporate interference, though not really in terms of what kind of music could be broadcast to eager listeners in the Los Angeles market. FM is certainly a relic of its time in more ways than one, with a soundtrack that will no doubt create huge waves of nostalgia in Baby Boomers in particular, and an anti-military subplot that frankly feels kind of old fashioned for a 1970s opus (it might have been more at home in a film from the late sixties), as well as a few tangential moments (like one character leering at a woman's posterior among other blatantly sexist behaviors) that may strike some as vestiges from a thankfully discarded past."
Not to be outdone, Kino Video is giving some Blu-ray showcases for star Jean-Paul Belmondo and director Jean-Pierre Melville. In fact, I might recommend you skip the Belmondo programmers The Outsider and The Professional - watching Belmondo do his best Charles Bronson is fun but junky, and wholly inessential - and skip right to the overlap between Belmondo and Melville. First off, the 1963 thriller Le Doulos. While not as striking a genre pastiche as Melville's Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge, or the delightful Bob le Flambeur (a postmodern heist thriller that officially started the French New Wave and also gets a Blu-ray release this week), Le Doulos finds Melville playing with the genre's top signifiers. This is a film of inky shadows and hard faces, of tragic loyalties and wounded fatalism: the title refers to a criminal informant, and Melville wants us wondering whether Belmondo's ex-con would squeal on his associates or keep his mouth shut and preserve his "honor." Melville made noirs that functioned like philosophical exercises - Le Doulos lets its B-movie scumbums engage in endless debates about the nature of ethics and order within their fundamentally lawless world. In that regard, Le Doulos would make a great double feature with Léon Morin, Priest, which ranks as Melville's second or third best movie (it's Army of Shadows, and then either this or Le Samouraï). Yes, the films don't share much in the way of subject matter. If Le Doulos is a crime-movie programmer, Léon Morin, Priest, then, concerns itself with nothing less than the landscape of the human soul. As WWII rages just outside of her small village, young Barny (the luminous Emmanuelle Riva) becomes obsessed with Belmondo's hunky new priest, and the two embark in a series of charged religious conversations. And there's the link to Le Doulos. Melville's characters are obsessed with codes and procedures whether they belong to larceny or religion, and they interrogate these ideas in almost Socratic exchanges. In Léon Morin, the attraction between Riva and Belmondo both underscores and elevates the spiritual conceits. These two people are clearly into one another, but since they can't act, they sublimate their ardor into theology. We know what they're feeling even if they can't say the words, and that mix of the earthly and the divine gives Léon Morin a charge both erotic and transcendent. It's one of the great spiritual movies.