Full transparency: All Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber, Criterion, Code Red, and Arrow Video.
This month’s round-up is an eclectic bunch, which, if you know me at this point, is a good thing. Things are beginning to lean towards the change of seasons thematically. There is a Carl Reiner/Steve Martin comedy-noir collab called Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid featuring some help from a bevy of screen legends, plus an unexpected discovery from Code Red in the form of Story of a Woman, a romantic drama starring Ingmar Bergman regular Bibi Andersson, Dead and Buried star James Farentino, and Unsolved Mysteries host Robert Stack. In collaboration with Greenwich Entertainment, Kino Lorber brings us All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997), a loving look back at two subcultures intersecting right before they became mainstream. Kino Lorber also has a delectable double feature starring IU Cinema favorite Vincent Price with The Tomb of Ligia, debatably the best of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, and Theater of Blood, the second best Price movie where he theatrically and thematically gets revenge on those who wronged him. My dual picks of the month come in the form of Criterion’s release of Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, starring the late great Bob Hoskins in a surprisingly tender role, and Arrow’s luxuriant release of Ridley Scott’s aesthetically ambitious Legend.
To me, it’s a line-up of films that feel like fall (noir! dramatic romance! dark fantasy! horror!) and nicely transitions us to the spooky stuff coming down the pipeline in October. As always, a month filled with pleasures I can’t wait to tell you about.
Also out this month…
Lucky Luciano / Illustrious Corpses
I was not familiar with the works of Francesco Rosi before this month but I was certainly familiar with the name, always spoken alongside the likes of Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci. Rosi was a political post-neorealist filmmaker famous for his down-to-earth crime pictures about real-life events and figures that would ultimately be about the symbiotic relationship of crime and politics. His two films Lucky Luciano (1973) and Illustrious Corpses (1976) were decent diving-in points for someone who admittedly has many blind spots in Italian cinema when the credits don’t read “Fellini” or “Antonioni,” but these were great discoveries as someone who loves a grounded approach to weaving together political alignment, money, and crime.
Lucky Luciano profiles the second most-famous gangster of the 20th century (I’d say sitting comfortably behind Al Capone) and the circumstances that led to his “rise and fall.” I put those in scare quotes because what becomes so evident outside a couple of scenes featuring some dazzling flourishes (there’s a massacre early on in the film that feels like something Brian DePalma would extrapolate more on in The Untouchables and is the inspiration for the beautiful poster art) is that the film is going for even-handed realism. The triumphs and setbacks of Lucky Luciano aren’t presented as these baroque, incredibly tortured occurrences — they are just another part of the business he’s decided to get into. The meetings of the agents (one of which is played by Charles Siragusa, the real federal agent assigned to Luciano’s case) and politicians who bring down Luciano don’t have so much the spirit of “let’s get the sonovabitch” as much as they do the weary conversations of men who don’t have much of wiggle room to work with. It reminds me so much of how David Simon’s The Wire was less about cops vs. criminals and more about how that ecosystem has to function despite having diametrically opposing ideals… on the surface. With its muted colors and decidedly restrained temperament, Lucky Luciano doesn’t set out to make the life of a cop or criminal a glamourous one.
Yet while Rosi’s penchant for having less vibrant action and color in these films could lead some to believe that these are workman-like projects, you only need to watch a few minutes of Illustrious Corpses to understand that the lack of flash doesn’t imply a lack of impactful framing (considering this was shot by Romeo and Juliet’s Pasqualino De Santis, it shouldn’t), editing, and pacing that leads to a satisfying crescendo. Illustrious Corpses burns slow but hooks so immediately with its premise. Supreme Court judges being systematically murdered and political intrigue that reveals how far people are willing to go to manipulate others for power? That’s a spicy neo-noir meatball! Lino Ventura — who has popped up here before with the film L’emmerdeur — is so well-suited to be the no-nonsense investigator wrapped in a conspiracy that feels doomed before it really even starts. His face conveys such an intelligence and weariness that you just don’t see quite as often as you want to anymore.
Both films, especially Illustrious Corpses, feel like such good companion pieces to something a little more showy and expressive like Bertolucci’s The Conformist, considering they cover such similar thematic ground in very different ways. The world of post-neorealist Italian cinema feels vast and exciting and I can’t wait to explore more.
Along with commentaries on both discs (Lucky Luciano has film critic and author Simon Abrams while Illustrious Corpses features Repo Man director Alex Cox), both include the original theatrical trailers and are available from Kino Lorber.
Apocalypse ’45
Erik Nelson’s Apocalypse ‘45 hits a personal sweet spot for war documentaries for me. While I find both WWI and WWII fascinating and a wellspring of stories and context for the very nature of humanity, I don’t salivate when another narrative feature or doc decides to dive into the subject because it’s such well-trodden ground, especially from the American POV. Yet I’m always up for any WWII documentary that decides to interview what few veterans we have left. Why? Because many of these men are approaching or are in fact over a century old at this point and their feelings about the war and their part in it, as well as how they view America, has shifted so many times that it makes their testimonials that much more valuable as we move so far away from the event that what they talk about might seem extraordinary and fictitious to those who don’t have WWII so firmly planted in their zeitgeist anymore.
Apocalypse ‘45 highlights the war in the Pacific as told by the men who were there. It’s still mostly an American perspective, but there are interviews with surviving Japanese soldiers as well and the movie does make time to talk about the complex morality of war at a time when you didn’t question serving your country, but the movie isn’t so much concerned with moralizing, just contextualizing. Though there is a moment near the end of the film when one soldier points out that the moniker “The Greatest Generation” was something an ad man came up with and in no way reflects his feelings about his generation, but he does concede that they were built differently.
Pairing these testimonials with fully colorized and restored footage has the same effect as Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old. It keeps you from being at a remove the whole time. It immerses you and hammers home just how brutal the conflict really was. The movie comes with restored footage directed by John Ford in Pearl Harbor, along with two Oscar-nominated short subject documentaries, To The Shores of Iwo Jima and The Last Bomb. You can find Apocalypse ‘45 through Kino Lorber.
Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
I always felt that continuing someone’s work after they passed has to be one of the hardest things to do as an artist, especially if it’s someone you shared a deep and personal connection with. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters gracefully makes this the guiding force behind a documentary about one of the most celebrated pieces of dance in modern history. “D-Man in the Waters” was a tribute to Bill T. Jones’ friend, Demian Acquavella, who passed away from AIDS (a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company; Arnie Zane would also pass away from AIDS-related lymphoma in 1988). They were close and, by the account of those who were in the company and worked with him, Demian was a one-of-a-kind force in the world of dance. So while yes, this documentary does take you down the path of how these two people met and the origins of the piece and its quirks, it also smartly engages with how a piece and artistry evolves when it’s placed on someone else’s shoulders. The movie shows us a community dance troupe of college students rehearsing the piece and the challenges of adapting something that was written so specifically for a particular group of performers inspired by a very particular person. Jones comes and watches the rehearsal and is taken aback by the changes but is open to its interpretation. It also parallels his own struggles adapting his friend’s style and the lack of his collaborators’ influence. It’s a moving and lovely reminiscence about an exhilarating piece of dance and those who created and inspired it.
You can find Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters on Kino Lorber.
David Carter is a film lover and a menace. He plays jazz from time to time but asks you not to hold that against him. His taste in movies bounces from Speed Racer to The Holy Mountain and everything in between.