As I sat watching the original 1954 Godzilla, it dawned on me that I don’t think I had ever seen the film before. Oh sure, I’ve seen the Raymond Burr version, but never had I actually watched the original Japanese film in its entirety. It’s easy to see why Criterion chose to add this film to their collection; it’s an important piece of post-war cinema that launched a franchise that would remain popular for over 50 years.
If only it was a better film in and of itself. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about the movie, but there’s a lot not to like as well. The acting is wooden, the special effects are dated (but charming) and the storyline is murky at times. It’s hard not to recognize the movie as a cultural milestone, but it’s also a little bit on the dull side for the first 40 minutes or so. I know there are legions of Godzilla fans out there who would crucify me for saying that, but it remains how I feel.
The film has been given the Criterion treatment, but don’t expect a pristine print here. This is a nearly 60-year-old negative from another country. While image clarity is solid and contrasts bold, there is a LOT of print damage, in the form of scratches to the negatives. It kind of looks like it’s raining white rain throughout the entirety of the film. The sound is your typical mono presentation, so no complaints here in terms of fidelity.
Extra features include:
- Audio commentary by David Kalat (A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series)
- New high-definition digital restoration of Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, Terry Morse’s 1956 reworking of the original, starring Raymond Burr
- Audio commentary for Godzilla: King of the Monsters! by Kalat
- New interviews with actor Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima, and effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai
- Interview with legendary Godzilla score composer Akira Ifukube
- Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects
- New interview with Japanese-film critic Tadao Sato
- The Unluckiest Dragon, an illustrated audio essay featuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel Daigo fukuryu maru, a real-life event that inspired Godzilla
- Theatrical trailers
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic J. Hoberman
I’m not generally the biggest Steven Soderbergh fan in the world, but I had somehow never seen Traffic and wanted to check it out, as it’s obviously a well-respected film. Without a doubt, it’s Soderbergh’s most accomplished film. With multiple storylines and multiple fronts, the film takes a look at the “war on drugs” in the United States, and the various people whose lives it effects, from addicts to parents to cops to politicians to drug smugglers, and everyone in between.
What really sets the film apart are the performances. Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Erika Christiansen, Dennis Quaid, and a supporting cast filled with recognizable faces brings this multi-layered film to life in truly excellent fashion. For my money, Michael Douglas turns in one of his best roles ever, and his storyline was one of my favorites in the film.
The movie is shot in a nearly monochromatic way; every scene has its own color palette. For example, almost all of Michael Douglas’s scenes are varying shades of blue. The scenes in Mexico are almost entirely yellow and brown. The Criterion transfer captures this perfectly, with an extreme color palette the order of the day here; even if there’s barely a handful of scenes in the movie that are in full color. The film is, however, plagued by major issues of visual noise that elevate the graininess to epic proportions. This may be how Soderbergh wants the film to look, but it’s not my favorite transfer from Criterion.
Extra features include:
- Three audio commentaries, featuring Soderbergh and writer Stephen Gaghan; producers Laura Bickford, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz and consultants Tim Golden and Craig Chretien; and composer Cliff Martinez
- Twenty-five deleted scenes, with optional commentary by Soderbergh and Gaghan
- Three sets of demonstrations: one on film processing and the look of the Mexico sequences; one on film editing, with commentary by editor Stephen Mirrione; and one on dialogue editing
- Additional unused footage of various scenes, from multiple angles
- Theatrical trailers and television spots
- Gallery of trading cards depicting the U.S. Customs canine squad used to detect narcotics and illegal substances
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Manohla Dargis
I love me some Alfred Hitchcock, and while it’s considered “lesser” Hitch, The Lady Vanishes remains one of my favorite films of his. While Hitchock’s films always made room for black humor, The Lady Vanishes is one of his few films that could be considered a comedy. But while it’s making you laugh, there’s also an intriguing and suspenseful mystery that culminates in an action-packed finale. What more can you ask for?
What makes the film so enjoyable is exactly that most people don’t remember it as one of the big Hitchcock films. The cast is made up of mostly B-players, and while it certainly has its share of inventive camera work and signature Hitchcock moments, it doesn’t have any of the more memorable shots of the director’s career. It’s a lean film with tight pacing and a perfect running time, and I guarantee you’ll be completely sucked into the intrigue, mystery, comedy, and romance of it all before the train (from which the titular Lady) even leaves the station.
The film looks remarkable on Blu-ray, thanks to the Criterion stamp of quality. Despite being almost 70 years old, the picture quality is impeccable. Although occasionally a tad bit on the dark side, the image clarity is sharp and clean, and contrasts are sharp, with deep, rich blacks. The sound is presented in its original uncompressd monaural format, so while there’s not much to get your home theater going, it is at least being heard as it was created. Fidelity is good, with no audible hiss or pop to get in the way of the native audio.
Extra features include:
- Audio commentary by film historian Bruce Eder
- Crook’s Tour, a 1941 feature-length adventure film starring Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott, their beloved characters from The Lady Vanishes
- Excerpts from François Truffaut’s legendary 1962 audio interview with director Alfred Hitchcock
- Mystery Train, a video essay about Hitchcock and The Lady Vanishes by Hitchcock scholar Leonard Leff
- Stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and promotional art
- PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and Hitchcock scholar Charles Barr
Design For Living is an Ernst Lubitch film. If you’re a fan of the Criterion Collection, you know who he is and what that means. Lubitch was best know for bringing a “sparkle” to a number of romantic comedies and musicals, and Design For Living is certainly among the best of what the director has to offer. With a terrific script by Ben Hecht, and a trio of great performances by Gary Cooper, Fredric March, and Miriam Hopkins, the movie plays out as a high-spirited romantic romp featuring an unusual love triangle.
As a pre-code film, however, Design for Living earned no small amount of controversy, and while it might be hard to see why nowadays, in the pre-code era, this film was seen as scandalously racy. The idea of two men and a woman in some sort of quasi-relationship, while all portrayed very innocently, was not the stuff of which mainstream films were made back in the 1920s. Despite that, it’s a cracking good time, with an interesting subtext and history below the surface.
The film is some 80 years old, and it does look it, although Criterion has done a great job with this transfer overall. There is some very minor debris on the print, but image clarity is impeccable for a film of this age, and contrasts are exceedingly strong. Knowing Criterion, I have no doubts that this is the best this film could possibly look.
Extra features include:
- “The Clerk,” starring Charles Laughton—director Ernst Lubitsch’s segment of the 1932 film If I Had a Million, which he made just before Design for Living
- Selected-scene commentary by film professor William Paul
- Play of the Week: A Choice of Coward, a 1964 British television production of the play Design for Living, introduced on camera by playwright Noël Coward
- New interview with film scholar and screenwriter Joseph McBride on Lubitsch and Ben Hecht’s screen adaptation of the Coward play
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Kim Morgan
Branded to Kill & Tokyo Drifter are two films from Japanese director Seijun Suzuki. Both films feature former assassins on the run from the men they used to work for. But to say that these movies are crime films or assassin films completely undermine everything about Suzuki’s work. Suzuki, a former B-film director, took what studio bosses wanted to be standard crime films and turned them into studies in pop culture and Warhol-ian art. Tokyo Drifter practically fetishizes color, while Branded to Kill is in black-and-white, but still features visual tricks throughout.
The thing about Suzuki’s films is that, while they’re fascinating, they’re not the most easy films in the world to watch. To call these movies “enjoyable” is a bit of a stretch for me. They’re interesting, but they really do play out more like art projects than movies. Maybe I’m just a bit too mainstream for them, but they’re not entirely my cup of tea.
Both films look great, with the colors in Tokyo Drifter really popping, while the black and white contrasts of Branded to Kill are strong as can be. The soundtracks are bright and brassy, and while these films show their age, Criterion has done a nice job with them both here.
Extra features include:
- Video piece featuring new interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
- Interview with Suzuki from 1997
- New interview with actor Joe Shishido
- Original theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and historian Tony Rayns, author of Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Suzuki Seijun, and a statement by the film’s art director, Sukezo Kawahara
- Video piece featuring new interviews with director Seijun Suzuki and assistant director Masami Kuzuu
- Interview with Suzuki from 1997
- Original theatrical trailer
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Howard Hampton
The Moment of Truth is billed on the back of the Blu-ray case as “The greatest bullfighting movie ever made.” That may be true, and I don’t mean to laugh at Criterion’s marketing efforts, but I would say that’s a relatively small playing field. I mean, really, how many bullfighter movies of any note have ever been made? Not that many, I would argue.
And so The Moment of Truth is a great bullfighter movie, mostly for its grittiness and cinema verite style, plus the fact that the lead actor was a real-life bullfighter before he stepped in front of the camera. The film follows the ins and outs of the daily life of a prize bullfighter, and it’s certainly an interesting movie overall. While parts of it are very gripping, other parts suffer in terms of pacing and engagement. Still, if the bullfighting scenes don’t get your heart pounding, I don’t know what will.
Image clarity is pretty sharp, and there’s just the right level of grain. There is some minor edge enhancement present, but not enough so to distract from the picture, while the print is largely free of debris or scratches, except for the occasional speck here or there. The mono soundtrack presents the film the way it was intended to be heard, and while it’s a bit brassy, music and dialogue all sound fine.
Extra features include:
- Interview with director Francesco Rosi from 2004
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Peter Matthews
The Sabu Collection brings us three of the four films from the early 20th century movie star who would reach the apex of his fame with The Thief of Baghdad (not included here because it has its own separate Criterion release.) The three films included here are Elephant Boy, The Drum, and The Jungle Book. While all three make evident why Sabu became a movie star (he graces the screen quite naturally) it’s The Jungle Book which is both the most enjoyable film in the set and the most well-filmed.
The Drum suffers as Sabu takes a backseat somewhat to another, less interesting character, while Elephant Boy is an enjoyable introduction to Sabu, and an interesting star-making performance in its own right. While I was somewhat familiar with Sabu before I got a chance to watch this set, it’s interesting to go through his most well-known films and watch his evolution.
There are no extra features.
