For the week of November 18th, Synapse Films is offering a gorgeous 4K pressing of Dario Argento's landmark gialloSuspiria. Since its 1977 debut, Suspiria has gotten a reputation for being Argento's most accessible film; it's certainly the one that acts as the cinematic gateway drug that leads so many horror geeks into the rest of his oeuvre. I love Suspiria, but let me say this now so there's no ambiguity: this film is bonkers, a surreal riff on the slasher genre that doesn't just flirt with incoherence - it topples head first into it, giggling all the way. Some of that, I'm sure, is by design. One of the things that always surprises me about Suspiria is how it keeps confounding your expectations of what kind of movie you think it will be. The opening ten minutes is a horrifying mini-movie that ranks alongside the cold open for Wes Craven's Scream. We meet two young women at a dance school. It's late, it's raining, and one of the two women seems almost psychotically concerned about...something. That's right before Argento unleashes a host of acid-soaked bloodshed that crosses right over from gratuitous into abstract art. All we have to ground us are the killer's hands, which seem hairy and decidedly male, so we might assume we're in for a slasher romp, except Argento isn't done with us yet. He switches focus to Jessica Harper's Suzy Bannion, the newest recruit at the school, and her journey to hone her craft and uncover the mystery at the heart of the school is less Friday the 13th and more Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Literally - Argento and his great DP Luciano Tovoli bathe the film in a similar three-strip Technicolor process as Snow White. If you've seen Suspiria, you know Argento makes more overt links to that fairy tale even as he's puncturing the fantasy with savage violence. There's a moment in Suspiria - it involves a blind man and his dog - where I stop trying to make sense of the proceedings and instead let them wash over me like a fever. You have to submit to this one. Like I said, nothing accessible about that.
The biggest release of the week is Shout Factory's fifteen-disc Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection, which bundles twenty-nine pictures that the iconic comedy duo made between 1940 and 1965. What Bud Abbott and Lou Costello did to comedy is so foundational that the uninitiated would probably take them for granted. To wit: they took the mismatched buddy dynamic of a Laurel and Hardy and honed it to its most ideal form. Most of these films follow the rigid template of a Looney Tunes cartoon; Abbott plays the grumpy stick-in-the-mud, and Costello is the bumbling wild card who keeps getting him and Abbott into wilder and wilder scrapes. Everything about this dynamic speaks to their personas, right down to their physical appearances. Abbott is tall, lean, and officious, while Costello is soft and short, an adorable bowling ball of chaos. Without them, I don't know if you get Lemmon and Matthau, Gleason and Carney, or even Martin and Lewis. Abbott and Costello are that important. Their movies are far more hit and miss, but with twenty-nine to choose from, you're guaranteed at least a few gems. My favorites are basic but no less enjoyable for it. Buck Privates, their big starring debut, is a gently cracked delight, and the Bela Lugosi/Lon Chaney-costarring Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein remains a seminal horror-comedy blend. Delve into this set and see for yourself.
Also from Universal comes a standalone release of Howard Hawks's 1932 gangster film Scarface. For years, the only way to see this version was to buy the 1983 remake, and even then, Universal treated the earlier film like an after-thought. The 2011 "Limited Edition" Blu-ray package offered only a DVD copy of the first Scarface (and this was a home-media set that packaged the discs inside a friggin' humidor); heck, the most recent Limited Edition upgrades De Palma's take to 4K but only gives Hawks the standard Blu-ray bump. And that's a shame because Hawks's Scarface remains a gangster-movie ideal. Back in '32, its violence and relentless velocity made films like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar seem comparatively sedate. You can see Hawks applying the same kind of screwball timing and pacing he would later give His Girl Friday to this far nastier piece of work. And his partner in crime? The great Paul Muni, who was never more brutally magnetic. We've still never had another actor quite like Muni, who combined the simmering magnetism of Benicio Del Toro with the volcanic unpredictability of Al Pacino. As Tony Camonte, Muni gives the impression of synapses firing in bizarre new configurations. You half-expect him to ignite the very film negative itself. You kinda want him to, too.
From the Criterion Collection comes the director's cut of Jean-Jacques Beineix's relationship saga Betty Blue. Of all the filmmakers to come out of the French cinéma du look movement, Beineix is, by far, the most frustrating. His 1981 thriller Diva is one of the great debut features: it remains as exciting, idiosyncratic, and stylish as when it first hit theaters. But none of Beineix's subsequent films has even approached Diva's effortless cool, with Betty Blue standing as his most maddening venture. The 1986 theatrical cut is, to put it mildly, a fiasco. It appeared that Beineix had taken a sensitive subject - the volatile relationship between a winsome French writer (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and a mentally ill free spirit (the title character, played by Béatrice Dalle) - and told it in the most exploitative fashion possible. That cut vacillates wildly between graphic sexuality and shocking violence, all of which feel more lurid because Beineix fetishizes them in the same stylized aesthetic as Diva. It's a career-ending movie, but to Beineix's credit, it wasn't his movie. He released a director's cut in 2005 that restored over an hour of footage. In all fairness, the new cut is certainly an improvement over the theatrical version. The extra footage lets us spend more time with Anglade and Dalle, who finally feel like human beings (as opposed to pop objects). However, their humanization comes at a cost. The longer Betty Blue now reminds me of something like Martin Scorsese's musical misfire New York, New York, where all the psychological realism in the world can't leaven the fact that you're spending three hours with two very unpleasant people.