For the week of September 14th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is continuing their great "Vestron Collector's Series" with their release of David Cronenberg's Shivers. This is it, folks. After two interesting-but-amateurish "test" features (1969's Stereo and 1970's Crimes of the Future, both of which you can find on the Scanners and Brood discs, respectively), the 1975 release of Shivers announced the arrival of a major force in contemporary genre filmmaking. You can see Cronenberg emerging almost fully formed. Low budget aside (this thing barely cost $200,000), Shivers follows the template of everything he'd make through his 1986 masterpiece The Fly. For one, it's a genre feature, through and through. While Cronenberg would eventually learn how to infect arthouse and prestige cinema with his singular filmic obsessions (Dead Ringers is definitely the tipping point in that regard), he started out as a smuggler, skilled at sneaking in provocative concepts about the mind or the nature of the self into otherwise disreputable grindhouse fare. Shivers, in its broad strokes, mashes up the traditional monster movie with an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque sci-fi thriller: a mad scientist creates a deadly parasite capable of infecting a person and breeding, and all while turning the host into a wanton maniac. Cronenberg releases these organisms into a hyper-modern Montreal apartment complex, which is all the better to trap and contain his hapless cast of characters. Minus the violence that reflects the more permissive mores of the 1970s, there's nothing here that you couldn't see in a cheapo AIP picture from the '50s. But Cronenberg ratchets up the body horror to an uncomfortable degree. These parasites aren't even close to microscopic - they look what you'd get if you crossbred the male member with a literal piece of crap - and Cronenberg delights in seeing them exit and enter the human frame through known and unknown orifices. Furthermore, the monsters are largely just a means to an end. Cronenberg has always been the Genre Filmmaker as Philosophy 101 student, and he's just as interested at how his monsters change his human cast. Humanity, he posits, is largely a mass of unrestricted urges and desires, and the parasites unshackle the id within. You can draw a direct line from Shivers to his A Dangerous Method biopic. The lineage is that clear.
ABKCO Films is presenting the six-disc Alejandro Jodorowsky Collection. Fans of cult cinema: you'd be hard-pressed this year to find as vital a Blu-ray release as this set. Although his filmography is fairly slight (eight feature-length films, four of which appear in this collection), Jodorowsky has left an influence that far exceeds his modest output. I would argue that of all the experimental filmmakers who emerged during the '60s and '70s, Jodorowsky got the closest to mainstream Hollywood success. Jodorowsky was a fixture in the elite '70s hipster scene - he could (and did) count Mick Jagger and the Beatles among his best celebrity buddies - and contemporary filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro thrill to his elastic approach to surrealism and fantasy. Credit Jodorowsky's means of presentation. As bold and outré as his movies are, he's very careful to nest his provocations within "acceptable" Hollywood frameworks. Fando and Lis, for example, looks like a love story between the titular innocents - it just so happens that his leads have to wander through a post-apocalyptic wasteland on the way to what might be Eternity. His (sort of) crossover masterpiece El Topo could be a Spaghetti Western, what with its Man in Black (Jodorowsky himself) navigating a world of brutal violence and sun-blasted intensity. That said, the 1.33:1 cinematography cues you into Jodorowsky's perversions from the start (Sergio Leone preferred 2.35:1, you see). I doubt Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson ever played characters named after moles, had nude children for sidekicks, and may or may not have been Jesus in films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Only The Holy Mountain doesn't hew to conventional form in the slightest, which probably explains why, for years, it was Jodorowsky's biggest flop. Even by his standards, people didn't know how to process a widescreen epic steeped in the writings of Greek philosopher George Gurdjieff. Something like his most recent film, Psychomagic, A Healing Art, tries to split the difference: ostensibly, it's a documentary about the man himself, but really it's just an excuse for Jodorowsky to throw audiences in the weeds of his weirdest beliefs and mantras. Some of you, I confess, will find this work tedious. And some of you have already pre-ordered this set.
Maybe it means I'll lose my film buff card, but I've always kinda liked Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes, which arrives courtesy of Paramount Home Media Distribution. Don't get me wrong: it's no Chinatown. That 1974 masterpiece remains a pinnacle in the careers of so many folks working on it - it's arguably the best film that Roman Polanski directed, that Nicholson starred in, that Robert Towne wrote, that Robert Evans produced - whereas The Two Jakes is a footnote. For all its tortured production history (Polanski was in until his legal situation made location shooting impossible; Towne was supposed to direct until Nicholson muscled him out; Evans was supposed to co-star until everyone realized he couldn't act; the script was, depending on who you talk to, either half to three-quarters finished when they entered production), the end result is strangely sedate, almost like all parties involved were so worried about messing with Chinatown's legacy that they tried to make as little fuss as possible. To some degree, that lethargy is baked into the film's central conceit. If Chinatown focused on water (and how Los Angeles city officials worked with the wealthy to redistribute it during the 1930s), The Two Jakes concerns itself with oil, and the way shadowy forces tried to exploit the rivers of crude running beneath the city. But as with oil itself, the film moves with no particular urgency. We open in 1948, where we check in with P.I. Jake Gittes (Nicholson), who has entered middle age and has incorporated his business to almost-respectable ends (in a nice touch, he's got a small oil derrick in his office parking lot). But when an investigation for a local real-estate developer (the other "Jake" of the title, played by Harvey Keitel) ends in bloodshed, Gittes faces the scrutiny of some very powerful people...and that's before he uncovers a connection to Evelyn Mulwray, Faye Dunaway's doomed Chinatown heroine and the source of the greatest regret in Gittes' life. It's a provocative setup, yet after a murder effectively ends the first act, things slow way down. Like Chinatown, The Two Jakes is similarly byzantine in its structure, employing a large cast of characters (Ruben Blades, Meg Tilly, Richard Farnsworth, David Keith, Eli Wallach, Frederic Forrest, Madeleine Stowe, Perry Lopez, Joe Mantell, and Tracey Walter) and a series of shocking revelations, only the film ambles along. Even a gas explosion does little to quicken the pulse. Still, the vibe that Nicholson and his crew (including DP Vilmos Zsigmond) cultivate is so enchanting that I always enjoy sinking into the whole mess, even if it doesn't always make sense. The L.A. of the late '40 is so vibrant - you feel the effect of the heat and the open spaces - that it's fun watching these folks play cops and criminals in such a hothouse locale. And while I don't think the narrative fully works, I respect how committed The Two Jakes is to the idea of aging, of time passing. You're not likely to find a mainstream American film so suffused with melancholy over a bygone era. Gittes is the most prominent example, but everyone here is haunted by the past, to the degree that they worry they won't even be doomed to repeat it. An interesting misfire.
From Warner Archive comes their four-film Film Noir Collection. Taken together, it's a remarkably consistent cross-section of hardboiled pulp from the studio's heyday. I'm less enthralled with Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet. Here, Dmytryk is adapting Raymond Chandler's great noir Farewell, My Lovely, which might be his best Philip Marlowe thriller. Most of the film works just fine - Dmytryk was a classic studio journeyman - but there's a gaping hole at the center, and that's Dick Powell. Powell plays Marlowe, and all respect to Chandler (who preferred this interpretation of the character), but Powell's got nothing on Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum. Speaking of Mitchum, he stars in Jacques Tourneur's masterful Out of the Past to Blu-ray. This is one of the genre's titans, a bleak, twisty thriller about Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum, giving one of his most iconic performances), a down-and-out P.I. who agrees to find the missing girlfriend (Jane Greer, as terrifying and seductive a noir heroine as the genre has ever produced) of a very bad man (Kirk Douglas, all shark's-teeth menace). It should come as no surprise that Markham does, or that he also falls in love with the femme fatale (it's the biggest mistake he'll ever make), but Out of the Past really isn't interested in shocking us. There's a simmering, low-lying fatalism to the proceedings that suffocates Markham even before the movie really gets going; director Jacques Tourneur begins the film in medias res, well after Markham has already doomed himself, and the rest of the picture unfolds like a slow-moving train wreck. The whole thing's a perfectly calibrated exercise in mood and style, with Tourneur making brilliant use of DP Nicholas Musuraca's chiaroscuro photography - as Roger Ebert, who was a huge fan of Out of the Past, put it in his "Great Movies" review, "few movies use smoking as well as this one; in their scenes together, it would be fair to say that Mitchum and Douglas smoke at each other, in a sublimated form of fencing...Musuraca throws light into the empty space between the two actors, so that when they exhale, the smoke is visible as bright white clouds" – and Daniel Mainwaring's acid-tinged script, which received uncredited assists from Frank Fenton and noir master James M. Cain. Less well known - but just as good - is Robert Wise's 1949 The Set-Up. Some might carp at this film's classification as "noir." DP Milton Krasner's gorgeous chiaroscuro photography casts everything in shadows of silver and black, and Art Cohn's script includes all sorts of disreputable characters, like George Tobias' scheming boxing manager or Alan Baxter's violent gangster, who exist in the liminal spaces between traditional moralities. Yet to brand The Set-Up as a true film noir feels imprecise. More than anything, it's a character study of one Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan), a washed-up boxer preparing for the fight of his life. Thompson's opponent (Hal Fieberling) is younger and more aggressive, and at thirty-five, Stoker is feeling his age acutely after years of punishment inside the ring. But Stoker clings to his dignity like a religious totem, and he's determined to go the distance even if it kills him. He's a true hero, noble and proud and decent, and his goodness separates him from the doomed ambivalence of a traditional noir hero. Best of all, though? The 1950 cult noir favorite Gun Crazy. Logically, there's almost no reason for Gun Crazy to be as good as it is. Take one anonymous journeyman director (Joseph H. Lewis, who had two films of note in over twenty years: this and The Big Combo); two vacuously pretty leads (John Dall and Peggy Cummins, both of whom got overshadowed by the titular entities in Rope and Curse of the Demon, respectively); a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (MacKinlay Kantor) who later admitted he used his onscreen credit as a cover for the film's actual screenwriter, blacklisted Hollywood legend Dalton Trumbo; and mix 'em all up into B-movie dreck, right? Wrong: somehow, this cheapo programmer (it started its existence as a Poverty Row entry) emerged as one of the most subversive thrillers to come out of the 1950s. Like Bonnie and Clyde, the film follows two young misfits (Dall and Cummins) who begin both a torrid affair and a violent crime spree, and like that 1967 classic, the film makes no pretensions about what gets them off more. As early as their lurid meet-cute, a shooting contest that plays like a revised take on "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," our leads can't help equating violence with sex. At a certain point, maybe it's best to stop pondering the hows and whys behind Gun Crazy's origins. The fact remains that it exists, and that fact alone should give us hope.