For the week of September 7th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection to Blu-ray and with it, the first batch of Hitchcock thrillers in 4K. For that reason alone, this set merits your attention. While I would have hoped for something a little more comprehensive than this four-film set (maybe along the lines of The Masterpiece Collection), each feature feels well suited to the extra resolution and visual density that 4K provides. To wit, the earliest film in the "Classics Collection" is 1954's Rear Window, which remains one of mainstream cinema's most self-reflexive commentaries on the act of seeing. As a thriller, it's peerless, thanks to a still-durable hook: after a broken leg turns ace photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart, in the second of his four Hitchcock collaborations) into a bored, irritable shut-in, Jeff starts spying on the other people in his apartment complex...only to suspect that a neighbor (Perry Mason himself, Raymond Burr) may have committed a terrible crime. Stewart turns up his star-wattage to peak likability, especially in his scenes with on-screen Grace Kelly's on-screen love interest, and Hitch mounts one incredible suspense sequence after another (the showdown between Stewart, Burr, and a handful of flashbulbs is still one for the history books). But look closer, as Jeff does, and you'll see Hitchcock interrogating the ways that cinema turns us all into voyeurs. Watching Jeff watch his neighbors is like engaging in some weird, proto form of channel surfing, with Jeff desperate to find something more "exciting" than upscale house parties or half-naked sunbathers. When he stumbles upon the murder plot, Hitch makes him semi-culpable, like he willed it into being, and not dissimilar from how our love of salacious content drives Hollywood to ever-more depraved content ends. That's an idea Hitchcock would mine further in the set's next film, the 1958 melodrama Vertigo, which marries gorgeous technical brio (Hitch shot in VistaVision, and all the better to capture 1950s San Francisco) to disquieting thematic menace. Stewart returns as a retired cop who investigates a friend's strange wife (Kim Novak), and his quest leads him into a genre mélange that's not quite mystery, not quite romance, and not quite ghost story. It's a dreamlike, deliberately obtuse picture. You understand why audiences largely rejected the film in '58. It's also Hitchcock's most lacerating examination of self. If he used Rear Window to blame us for our deviant viewing habits, Vertigo finds him looking inward. Stewart emerges as an unlikely Hitchcock proxy, his amiable façade masking unsettling urges, particularly in terms of how he treats Novak during the film's second half. He can't stop fetishizing her, and as he overwrites her humanity in favor of his own desires...well, a more apt metaphor for how directors reshape the world to fit their art, you will not find.
Along those lines, his iconic proto-slasher Psycho might be less personal, but it's no less perverse. Sixty years later, it remains a potent cinematic trolling device. So much of Psycho plays like Hitchcock is deliberately goosing the censors: his heroine (Janet Leigh) is a sexually liberated woman whom we meet having an affair with a married man (the bland John Gavin), and that's only minutes before she robs her place of business and goes on the lam. When she stops at a roadside motel to weigh her decisions, it's a toss-up as to what audiences found more shocking - the brutal murder that unfolds in her shower OR the shot of her flushing a toilet (which would have been - I kid you not - genuinely verboten in 1960). And that's all before Psycho veers full tilt into bloody crime scenes and intimations of masturbation, necrophilia, and gender fluidity (or as "full tilt" as you could go in a Universal Studios picture in the early '60s). As tame as Psycho looks today, it obliterated the boundaries of what people considered "accessible" in mainstream cinema. The relative freedom and experimentation of the American New Wave starts here. By comparison, 1963's The Birds can't help but feel more conventional than the other films in this series. It's a hybrid of disaster movie and "when Nature attacks" picture, pitting the denizens (including Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, and Jessica Tandy) of a sleepy California town against hordes of ravenous birds. The Birds is slightly more graphic than you might expect (gotta love the exploding gas stations and pecked-out eyes studding the film's last forty minutes), although it's a crowd-pleaser through and through, with its chaotic action sequences and playfully ambiguous ending. Still, we get hints of something deeper. It feels significant, for example, that the birds only start attacking humans after Tandy registers her disgust at Hedren dating her son. Do the birds represent her inner fury? And if so, what's driving such a profound rage - is her interest in her child more than maternal? Hitchcock doesn't plumb these depths as deeply as he might elsewhere in this set, yet he's unmoored us so well that when we reach The Birds, we're already looking for the worst.
The other big multi-film set this week? Target's exclusive Rob Zombie Trilogy steelbook, which bundles the three films in Zombie's "Firefly" trilogy. I think it's clear by now that these pictures will ultimately cement Zombie's peculiar screen legacy. That's mostly a good thing. Across the board, they represent some of his most consistent and engaging horror efforts. I'd rank the first feature - House of 1000 Corpses - as the worst one. Zombie is all over the place in terms of his aesthetic, throwing in splattery gore and wildly varying film stocks and shock cutaways (this looks like the most expensive music video he ever made, for better or worse), and I suspect that's because what he's ultimately up to isn't all that revolutionary. He's riffing on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - some unlucky teens face off against the Firefly crew (Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Karen Black) and mostly die horribly - and outside of the look, he doesn't have that many surprises in store. Somewhat famously, Zombie's original cut was so gruesome that Universal (before Lionsgate picked it up) made him hack it down to what we have here, but since the excised footage has never resurfaced, we're left with grindhouse pastiche. However, with the film's 2005 follow-up The Devil's Rejects, we move from grindhouse pastiche to honest-to-God grindhouse thriller. It's a smart move - this is easily Zombie's masterpiece. This time around, Zombie doesn't even bother mediating our experience through the lambs he's sending to the slaughter. His protagonists are the Fireflys (minus Karen Black, replaced by Lesile Easterbrook), and that shift in audience association lends The Devil's Rejects discomfiting power. When the gang brutalizes a family in a roadside motel, we almost can't watch. The violence becomes as luridly personal for us as it is for the killers. But in Zombie's universe, no one is all that innocent, and by the film's transcendently bloody climax, we've forged this disturbing alliance with the Family Firefly, especially given the depredations of the Sheriff (William Forsythe) ready to kill any and all between him and his quarries. Which leads us to 3 from Hell, and if you're wondering how the Firefly clan might return after their violent death by gunfire (to the strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Firebird." It's actually much cooler than it sounds), then fear not. 3 from Hell begins with the news that the Fireflys survived that hail of bullets and are now imprisoned for their crimes. While I'd never say that Zombie has gotten nostalgic in his older age (he's too big a fan of juvenile vulgarities), he's more cognizant of the passing of time than I would have expected. It's been fourteen years since The Devil's Rejects, and that amount of time has passed in the movie, so the Fireflys are a little wearier, a little more desperate. That worry gives them some interesting notes to play (especially Moseley, who's terrific), and Zombie puts them through the ringer by changing 3 from Hell's tone every few minutes. My biggest problem with the movie is how piecemeal the whole endeavor is. You get the sense Zombie shot what he could when he could, gathering whatever actors were available (Haig is basically an extended cameo, and the movie suffers from his absence), but Zombie compensates by structuring the film as four or five genre exercises in one. For ten minutes, it's a deranged media satire; then it turns into a prison escape movie; Baby's stuff transforms the movie into a more lurid "Women in Cages" vibe. By the end, we could be watching a low-rent Peckinpah entry, especially once Emilio Rivera's fearsome Big Bad enters the picture. Zombie treats 3 from Hell as a genre playground, and if you're in on his wavelength, you'll have almost as much fun as he's having.
Also from Lionsgate comes a 4K remaster of the iconic sci-fi anime Ghost in the Shell. Watching it today, you'd think you were seeing the Rosetta Stone for every important sci-fi feature of the past twenty-five years. Films like Avatar, TRON: Legacy, Ex Machina, and all three Matrices have borrowed whole-cloth from the film's cyberpunk aesthetic, riffing on its provocative themes of digital consciousness and free will. And I understand why. The film, which takes place in a dystopian future where cybernetic enhancements have become so commonplace that the biggest threat is an insidious computer virus (nicknamed "The Puppet Master") capable of literally hacking one's brain, is undeniably arresting. Director Mamoru Oshii worked with Production IG, and they give the film the staccato, unsettling texture of that company's great Neon Genesis Evangelion. There aren't many action sequences in Ghost in the Shell, but the two big ones are all-timers: we watch "The Major," a cybernetic law-enforcement agent, tail and apprehend a perp who can make himself invisible (it feels like if you put Predator in a Lethal Weapon movie), and later she squares off against a mobile attack vehicle that could be ED-209's sleeker, more savage cousin. Sandwiched between these beats? A whole lot of talk, and that's simultaneously the best and worst thing about Ghost in the Shell. I was not expecting so much of the film to play like a philosophy course. The Major is starting to doubt what makes her "real" if large swaths of her are robotic upgrades and computer chips, and when we meet The Puppet Master, it seems less like a terrorist than a sentient being passionate about its rights to exist. The Matrix connections are strong here, but at 82 minutes, Ghost in the Shell feels like it's getting started right as it ends. The Major and The Puppet Master engage in a manner that took my breath away...except we've only a minute to consider the implications (and all the possibilities for drama) before Oshii rolls credits. Maybe that's why so many filmmakers take inspiration from this piece. They're trying to show fealty, to be sure, but they're also trying to build on what Ghost in the Shell leaves frustratingly undefined.
The best American film of the year is Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, a picture that's largely concerned with two men (John Magaro and Orion Lee) milking a cow under cover of night. Shortly before their first excursion in this regard, Reichardt shows the men tidying up Lee's makeshift house in a series of long, unbroken takes: Magaro's Figowitz grabbing a broom and sweeping out detritus, Lee's King-Lu chopping wood for a fire, both men cleaning and preparing mussels for dinner. Much of the dialogue is hushed, furtive - King-Lu is the "talker" of the pair, and when he speaks, it's in flat, declarative sentences - and when we get fragments of William Tyler's original score, they work less to propel the narrative along than they do to reinforce First Cow's quiet reserve. And the whole aesthetic is similarly understated. While Christopher Blauvelt's captures the wild, mossy beauty of the Pacific Northwest, he's working in Reichardt's favorite aspect ratio: 1.37:1, which has the effect of confining both characters and environments within the frame. Yet as Roger Ebert once said, "It's not what a movie is about; it's how it is about it," and to that end, First Cow consistently transforms the possibilities of narrative filmmaking. As anyone familiar with Reichardt's oeuvre can attest, you have to work a little to get into First Cow, but the film rewards careful attention. All that time we spend with Figowitz and King-Lu doing chores? It isn't aimless - rather, it's revealing these two men through pure action. Just from observing him scamper from task to task, we learn that King-Lu is a survivor who can adapt to any hardship life throws at him. And watch how carefully Figowitz cleans a floor or whisks a batter. He is an uncommonly gentle man (the beauty of Magaro's performance is that he can make kindness compelling - he's never more riveting than when he's thoughtfully considering something) with a preternatural gift for cooking and baking. For these qualities, we both sympathize with him and fear for his safety. Magaro plays Figowitz as a man who doesn't know he's in the wrong time - he belongs in pre-pandemic Brooklyn, running an artisanal bakery and supplying it with locally sourced goods - whereas First Cow roots these people in the 1820's when life was barbarous and cruel, when fortunes were made (and lost) in handfuls of makeshift currency and infrequent kindness, and where the greatest advantage one could have would be a partner who complimented them in the ways they might be deficient. That's the beauty of what Reichardt is doing. She lays out this world and its inhabitants piece by piece, and we start to see the significance of every interaction. Which brings us back to that cow. Our heroes determine that, to ensure their survival, they've got to make and sell Figowitz's "oily cakes" (think fried dough), and the only way to make those requires milk from the region's lone cow. Simple enough, except we've seen the class disparity between our hand-to-mouth protagonists and the haughty British landowner (a wonderful Toby Jones) who owns the cow. We've heard Jones opine on the value of brutal punishment as a means of bringing order to a lawless world. And if we've been paying attention at all, we watch these milking scenes with our hearts in our throats. The film's agonizingly tense second half sets up an immutable standoff - one that Reichardt foreshadows in the opening scene - made no less heartbreaking for how much we've come to care about Figowitz and King-Lu and their simple, quotidian struggle against their own limitations. A beautiful, wrenching piece of work.
Finally, from the Criterion Collection comes Jules Dassin's 1947 programmer Brute Force. Before Dassin was blacklisted by the HUAC board and fled to Europe (where he directed the likes of Rififi and Topkapi), he was just starting to cement his reputation as a purveyor of exceptional American noirs. The offbeat prison drama Brute Force is one of his best. It's hard to classify what makes this film so special. As a prison-set potboiler, it lacks the brutal realism of Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 or the rigorous attention to character you'd find in a Birdman of Alcatraz; Dassin's inmates (including Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, Howard Duff, Whit Bissell, John Hoyt, and Jeff Corey) roam the halls of Westgate Penitentiary with the kind of terse jocularity you might in an episode of M*A*S*H (Westgate seems to have a thriving, inmate-run newspaper office, of all things). I mean, famed calypso singer Sir Lancelot has a small role that basically lets him swan in every ten or so minutes and offer a little musical interlude - Brubaker, this is not. In fact, the vibe of the film has more in common with a POW movie like The Great Escape or especially Stalag 17, given the fierce loyalty that the prisoners have for one another. That goes double every time they face off against Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn), a soft-spoken martinet whose fussy demeanor masks an almost bottomless capacity for sadism. Quentin Tarantino would covet the sequence when Munsey tortures a prisoner to the strains of Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" - this feels like one of the first instances of American movies using diegetic popular music as ironic commentary, with the piece underscoring the savagery of the moment. The picture in Munsey's office makes him look like he's an aspiring member of the S.S., and it's in the distinctions between inmates and Munsey that Brute Force distinguishes itself. Dassin and screenwriter Richard Brooks (of In Cold Blood fame) keep emphasizing the prisoners' inherent humanity. Sure, the film's first big set piece sees a bunch of convicts executing a snitch, but only because the rat agreed to inform for Munsey. More often than not, the cons are coexisting peacefully, playing dominos, watching movies, or reminiscing about the women they left behind, a conceit that lets Dassin stage a number of floridly romantic flashbacks. These beats release some of the tension building up inside Westgate, but again: Dassin's mission is to empathize with these "savages" at all cost, and to condemn a kind of indiscriminate violence that only serves to dehumanize and degrade. As Art Smith's drunken, decent Dr. Walters tells Munsey in the speech that gives the film its title, "brute force does make leaders. But you forget one thing: it also destroys them." Moments like these give Brute Force a tragic grandeur. And something else: dimensions that resonate today.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the core of [the film] has a noir identity - the blending of explicit violence and pessimism infuses it with a type of atmosphere that is very common for classic noir films from the early '40s. However, there are numerous political overtones in the film that actually bring it closer to being a crime melodrama which pushes various social and political agendas. (A quick comparison between the fascist warden who enjoys Wagner's music and Joe and his boys who have all been imprisoned for the wrong reasons makes this painfully obvious). Despite the oversimplified characterizations the film is enormously entertaining. Lancaster exudes tremendous confidence and a type of energy that give the film its character. Though not likeable, Cronyn is also astonishing. There are also memorable cameos by Art Smith, who plays an aging doctor, and a very young Yvonne De Carlo."