New Classics

Play it again, Sam

by Sam Adams

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Oct 22, 2008

FOR GRANTED: Alfred Hitchock's Notorious, starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, gets the re-issue treatment. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Any genuine cinephile can reel off at the drop of a hat a list of stone-cold masterpieces that have never been released on home video. The movie industry has taken to issuing and reissuing the same handful of titles while letting treasures molder in the vault. Far be it for me to suggest that we don't need three editions of Reno 911!: Miami, but that's three more than The Magnificent Ambersons.

Of course, some reissues are more welcome than others. The first issue of the Godfather trilogy was a travesty, drawn from a visibly worn print, but the new restoration rights that wrong, making even Part III worth watching again.

Unless you're some sort of featurette nut, there's no reason to replace your old single discs with Universal's new two-disc editions of Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo. But their two-disc edition of Orson Welles' decadent noir Touch of Evil more than merits the double-dip. Along with the "restored" 1998 version, posthumously re-edited in accordance with Welles' unheeded studio memo, the set includes the original theatrical cut as well as a rarely seen preview version that bridges some of the gaps between the two. As with so many of Welles' films, the notion of a definitive Touch of Evil is chimerical, but there's enough supplementary material to let you compose your own version.

Aficionados of Terence Malick's The New World (and the movie has no lukewarm admirers) still pine for its first cut, the 150-minute version that was released in a handful of theaters, withdrawn and re-edited before wide release. That version is still MIA, but the new "extended cut" adds either 20 or 30 minutes, depending on your frame of reference, making Malick's lyrical fantasia even more immersive. Malick's transcendentalist spin on the Pocahontas tale takes your breath away with each new image. It's a shame it wasn't released in hi-def. (The DVD includes a code to download a digital version, so you can watch one of the great visual masterworks on a frickin' iPod.)

The carefully constructed world of Max Ophüls is light years away from Malick's sun-dappled paradise, but no less glorious. As they so often do, the Criterion Collection has in one fell swoop rectified a major filmmaker's near-total absence from the digital age, with well-appointed discs of La Ronde, The Earrings of Madame de ... and Le Plaisir. Often tying his movies together with narration by a ringleader or emcee, Ophüls was an orchestrator of grand, sprawling tableaux, which his mobile camera would explore with the inquisitiveness of an eager snoop.

With a gimlet eye for the hypocrisies of the upper classes, Ophüls glides seamlessly between worlds. Rather than skewering their decadence, he celebrates it, while acknowledging its inevitably tragic consequences. In Madame de ... , Danielle Darrieux's noblewoman seals her fate by pawning her jewelry to pay off her debts, but on the way down she becomes involved in a passionate (if doomed) romance with Vittorio de Sica's guileless baron. In La Ronde, Anton Walbrook presides over a merry-go-round whose turning is both time and fate, walking into and out of scenes of love and betrayal.

It's the lesser-known titles that are of greatest interest in MGM's Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection. Surely no Hitchcock fan needs to be reminded of the glories of Spellbound and Notorious, but the delightful Young and Innocent is a real find, a peak of Hitchcock's early period that has circulated only in unwatchable public domain copies. Deftly mixing romantic comedy and wrong-man thriller, the movie is the template for the Hitchcock of North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief. Cramming eight movies, including Rebecca, The Lodger and Lifeboat, and innumerable supplements into a nifty binder (and at a reasonable price, too), the collection mixes old favorites and new discoveries in perfect proportion.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Get Poe
Repertory Film