For the week of June 29th, we aren't getting a lot of home-media releases, but three of the four biggest ones make for a pretty solid B-movie festival. Moving in chronological order, we start with Arrow Films' limited edition of the 1966 Spaghetti Western Django. This idiosyncratic oater remains a notorious example of its genre, and for that, I credit director Sergio Corbucci. Corbucci wasn't the best or even second-best director of Spaghetti Westerns (those appellations go to Sergios Leone and Sollima, respectively), but he might have been the meanest. In films like Django or The Great Silence, Corbucci cedes the screen to a revolving door of brutal, amoral killers so depraved and violent that it almost seems besides the point to toss around labels like "hero" or "villain." Django himself (Franco Nero) is a little more ethical (he does kill a good portion of the KKK at one point), but he always tends towards overkill. To wit: unlike The Man with No Name or Josh Randall, Django's weapon of choice is a machine gun he hides in a coffin. He launches this film into orgiastic fits of violence; you understand why Quentin Tarantino wanted to pay homage to it in his similarly ultra-gruesome Django Unchained. Speaking of Tarantino: he's also a big fan of the trash classic Orca: The Killer Whale (from Shout Factory), which, like Django, is an Italian production and an enthusiastic purveyor of ludicrous chaos. Orca came out in 1977, which is significant - it's one of many films conceived to draft, remora-like, on the underside of Jaws's success back in '75. And make no mistake. This is no Jaws. It's not scary or tense or witty, and director Michael Anderson (of Logan's Run and Around the World in 80 Days) is definitely no Steven Spielberg. Orca's Ennio Morricone score isn't bad, but it can't compete with John Williams' iconic Jaws theme, either. But Orca is very silly, and in consistently entertaining ways. If Jaws flirted with Moby Dick homages, Orca leaps right into the deep end of that particular pool (ha ha). Richard Harris' crazed whaler is practically Captain Ahab, which suits Harris' yen for hammy overacting (I say that as a fan). And it anticipated Jaws: The Revenge's most bonkers plot detail. As in that film, the titular beast is seeking deliberate revenge against the protagonist. If nothing else, I can say that Orca is the Best Jaws Rip-off Where Bo Derek Also Gets Her Leg Ripped Off. That's not nothing.
Finally, we move from rip-off to remake with Narrow Margin, the 1990 updating of Richard Fleischer's 1952 B-movie favorite. In 1990, critics largely turned on this one, and I get why. The 1952 Narrow Margin is a model of terse, economical filmmaking (it's only 71 minutes long), and it's got a couple of terrific lead performances (Charles McGraw as the film's battering ram-of-a-hero and Marie Windsor as its unbelievably duplicitous leading lady). But the original is also not some unimpeachable classic - it's just a really solid programmer - and this remake deserves better than the tepid reception it received. Both films have the same irresistible hook: a law-enforcement officer (here a lawyer played by Gene Hackman) is escorting a federal witness (Anne Archer) by train to testify against a mob boss, only the Big Bad (Harris Yulin) has placed assassins all over their train, forcing our heroes to evade certain death with almost every geographical and physical advantage against them. But the two films approach this material differently, and in ways very specific to their times. The 1952 version takes its cues from noir and crime fiction, while Narrow Margin '90 is a far more straight-ahead action thriller. And as such, it's got some electrifying action sequences. Director Peter Hyams was, in the 1980s and 1990s, the most underrated action filmmaker working in America, and he galvanizes the film with his moody lensings and crunchy approach to stunt choreography. He sets a fist fight between Hackman and the top goon (a very good James Sikking) atop the moving train, and the sequence is far more absorbing than you might expect despite the lack of CGI or explosions - the stuntwork is insane, particularly a moment where, in one unbroken shot, Sikking throws Hackman off the train, and we see both stunt performers twist and scramble as the train barrels along. Best of all is Hackman's wry, rascally protagonist. For a guy who looks like a chartered accountant, Hackman always brought such charisma and charm to what could be a bland action hero. His lack of conventional physical prowess means we're all the more concerned: he's often only able to get one over on the bad guys through intelligence and dogged grit. And there's no American performer more likable when he's thinking on camera. Watch his mid-film verbal tete-a-tete with Sikking. Look at how carefully Hackman chooses his words. He's having so much fun outsmarting his nemesis. The feeling is mutual for us. Movies like Narrow Margin (mid-budget, R-rated thrillers) don't get made anymore outside of streaming platforms. Maybe if we'd known that, we would have been more generous to this one.
Finally, we end with Criterion's new restoration of the 1985 classic Come and See. "Fun" is a word that only a sadist would apply to this anti-war odyssey. In dramatizing the Nazi occupation of Belarus during World War II, writer/director Elem Klimov has crafted something more in line with a night terror than a conventional war epic. In a way, I'm reminded of Dante's Inferno: Klimov and his DP Aleksei Rodionov use gliding, patient Steadicam photography to lead us through one atrocity after another, with fourteen-year-old Flyora (an unforgettable Aleksei Kravchenko) serving as the unwitting Virgil to our Dante. Klimov's images are vivid, jolting, horrifying, and they linger not only because of their oft-graphic content but also because of Flyora's adolescent perspective. He's barely old enough to understand himself, let alone the madness of war, which Klimov stages with surrealist mania. There are moments of almost Chaplin-esque comedy (the photographer with the fake mustache; the interlude with the flower-loving nurse) that aren't funny at all because of how incongruously they fit inside this cauldron. We process such moments of levity like full psychotic breakdowns. Often, the film will borrow some of Apocalypse Now's hallucinatory menace to suggest that the very fabric of reality is breaking down. I'm thinking of Flyora absent-mindedly dodging red tracer fire, or his Herculean march through a primordial bog that sags and pulls at our hero as if possessed. And sometimes, the film has the affectless misery of a Tarkovsky picture, as when the camera simply stands back and regards the Nazis setting ablaze a church filled with screaming Belarus civilians. In these moments, we feel as powerless as Flyora does, and that impotence settles over the end of the film like a curse. There's no catharsis here, and even less transcendence. But as a thesis statement on the horrors of war writ large, I can't imagine a more impactful, staggering piece of filmmaking.