Summertime Blus

Play it again, Sam

by Sam Adams

Courtesy of Warner Archives McCLOUD 9: Shelley Duvall and Bud Cort in Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud, now available on DVD.

Ah, the dog days of summer, when temps are hot and movies are not. You could just wait for fall, or you can catch up at home. The flow of catalog releases from the major studios may never return to its pre-crash highs, but the trickle has at least increased to a modest rill, and independents have stepped in to pick up some of the slack.

As ever, it would be easy to devote this entire column to the Criterion Collection's recent output. Among its recent treasures are upgrades (on both DVD and Blu-ray) for Powell and Pressburger masterworks Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, as well as a new Blu-ray for Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, with its sinuously graceful lead performance by Burt Lancaster. New to the collection are Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (here's hoping Criterion continues to work backward through Kiarostami's underserved early years) and a four-disc boxed set of Akira Kurosawa's first films, which, minus Madadayo, mops up the titles formerly exclusive to the massive 25 Films compendium. But let's focus for a moment on a title from earlier this year: Leo McCarey's heartrending Make Way for Tomorrow.

Originally (if barely) released in 1937, McCarey's tender tearjerker took more than seven decades to find its way to home video, extending for nearly three-quarters of a century the disdain with which the movie was greeted by Universal executives. What they expected, no doubt, was a crackerjack comedy of the kind McCarey was known for, a movie like those he'd directed for Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers. What they got was a comic-tinged drama about the indignities of old age, one that, as Orson Welles put it, "could make a stone cry." Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play the septuagenarian parents of five whose hard fortunes have left them without a roof over their heads. Their adult children reluctantly take them in, but insist on splitting up the couple, separating them in what their creaking movements suggest will be their final months. Moore is crotchety, hectoring a young doctor who comes to check out his cold, and Bondi is oblivious to the upset she causes in son Thomas Mitchell's house, kibitzing as his wife teaches bridge to bring in a few extra dollars. But the ungrateful offspring inevitably come off the worse, representing a world — and, more to the point, a country — eager to obliterate any trace of its past. There's something profoundly un-American, in the mythic sense, about Bondi's philosophy that "everyone is entitled to just so much happiness," a sentiment audiences still reeling from the Depression may have identified with but surely didn't want to hear. Her insistence that she and her husband will soon be reunited in spirit, if not in the flesh, is almost a death wish, a theme McCarey carries through by staging their ascent into a hotel ballroom as if it's a gateway to the hereafter. No matter how fond one is of McCarey's The Awful Truth, for which he won a directing Oscar the same year, it's hard to argue with his contention that the Academy gave him the right award for the wrong film.

Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud has only been MIA for as long as McCarey's fugitive masterwork, but Warner Archives' long-awaited DVD is still a welcome sight. Ever prone to champion the misfit, Altman often cited it as his favorite film, and in some ways it's the first real Altman movie, the missing link between the relatively tidy comedy of M*A*S*H and the opiate sprawl of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Held together, just barely, by Rene Auberjonois' ornithological narration, the movie drifts birdlike through a mildly dystopian Houston, ostensibly following owlish visionary Bud Cort's quest to aviate through the Astrodome. Its venal protagonists constantly spattered with bird shit (prefiguring the omnipresent dog poop of Ready to Wear), the movie is deliberately crude at times, a self-willed work of art brut from an industry veteran who was working his way out.

Equally singular is Albert Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a modern myth whose restored Technicolor glows from Kino's new Blu-ray. With Ava Gardner and James Mason as the titular figures, the movie fuses present and past as ably as anyone this side of Michael Powell. Working from the opposite direction, Ilisa Barabash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's hypnotic documentary Sweetgrass follows Montanan sheep herders into the mountains, accompanied only by a chorus of bleats and the sound of the wind. (If you don't have surround sound at home, you might want to watch it with a friend who does.) Zeitgeist's Le combat dans l'e resurrects Alain Cavalier's largely forgotten New Wave castoff, with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider in an abstract neo-noir that is brutal and poetic in equal measure.

Last but not least, Disney's new Blu-ray/DVD combo of James and the Giant Peach exhumes Henry Selick's least-known film, an ungainly but often inspired hybrid of stylized live action and stop-motion animation. The added sentimental overtones don't always go down smoothly, especially when accompanied by Randy Newman's unimaginative songs, but Selick nails Roald Dahl's brand of morbid fantasy, an element too often missing from sanitized children's culture.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)