The intrepid Twilight Time label continues their line of limited edition Blu-Ray releases with an absolutely gorgeous version of Picnic, Columbia’s romantic smash of 1955-1956. Sold exclusively through on-line retailer Screen Archives, it presents James Wong Howe’s Technicolor cinematography in eye-titillating detail. Based on William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize winning play from 1953, Picnic is a garishly entertaining melodrama that sets earthy he-man William Holden after prim beauty queen Kim Novak, upending a small Kansas town in the process.

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The Warner Archive continues to summon the ghosts of Hollywood past onto DVD, a bit of studio witchery we should all get behind. One of their most intriguing recent séance jobs is Frank Borzage’s Smilin’ Through (1941), a haunting WWI melodrama. Despite the mammoth Murnau, Borzage and Fox box set, there are still great stretches of Borzage’s career missing on home video (including essential titles like Man’s Castle (’33, hopefully a Sony MOD candidate) and Moonrise (’48), which is streaming on Netflix)). Smilin’ Through, though flawed, has moments of doomed romanticism that rival anything else in his work, with superimpositions establishing the intractable hold the past exerts on the present. A similar theme is lugubriously told in Welcome to Hard Times (’67), a Western in which old studio hand Burt Kennedy flails to channel A Fistful of Dollars on a low budget. Originally made-for-TV, MGM decided to release it into theaters before airing it on ABC, after which it disappeared. Featuring a spate of studio standbys, including Henry Fonda and Aldo Ray, it’s a fascinating failure in which MGM hires old studio craftsman to make a film that blatantly reaches for the youth market.

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On December 6th, RaroVideo released two films from director Alberto Lattuada on DVD. Relatively unknown in the U.S., he was an eclectic talent who came up under the sway of neorealism, and who later made an uncategorizable series of literary adaptations and bitterly satirical farces. I have asked a Ph.D candidate in Italian Studies at NYU, Alberto Zambenedetti, to help me discuss his work. Mr. Zambenedetti will write about The Overcoat (1952), widely considered his masterpiece, and I will look at Come Have Coffee With Us (1970), one of his late sex comedies.

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As the carcasses of prestige pics get picked over by awards committees and prognosticators, I like to distract myself from this pointless posturing by watching movies featuring actual corpses. After last year’s rundown of genre flicks received a good response, I return to the bloody well again, this time with twelve of my favorite action/horror/exploitation items released in the past year. Sure to be ignored by your local film critics circle, they are works of grim resourcefulness and ingenuity, deserving of more attention. I look forward to your criticisms, insults and recommendations in the comments. My picks are presented in alphabetical order, and if you’re interested in my overall top ten list, it’s posted here.

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My favorite mad scientist may just be Dr. Arthur Carrington, the hopelessly naive (but very dressy) ascot-, turtleneck-, and blazer-wearing trailblazer in The Thing From Another World (1951). Every time I see this movie set in a military and scientific observation station in the frozen North, I always wonder where this man’s parka could be.  Did he forget to pack it in a moment of absent-mindedness while in the lower 48?  As played by character actor Robert Cornthwaite (seen above, with his head in a script),  he is the embodiment of polished intellectual curiosity without a shred of common sense.

As far as I’m concerned, you can keep the other actors in this movie, (even George Fenneman, shortly before he became Groucho Marx’s game show flunky and that big galoot lumbering around in disguise long before Gunsmoke premiered on television)–the star of this film is the rather epicene Doc Carrington, played to a fare-thee-well by the unsung Cornthwaite, a small man with a receding hairline, a sneaky wit, and a cold mien that suits this part perfectly. The authoritative actor, seething with a bookish hauteur, appears to have created a colorful backstory for his character–He is the erudite man of science, disheartened (and maybe bored out of his skull), who is becoming increasingly unable to cope with the psychological demands of his daily grind after months penned up inside the bleak, fetid atmosphere of  this frostbitten outpost where he languishes in the company of a passel of Air Force yahoos, a few doddering biologists, and some malleable underlings. The bottled-up, almost terminally frustrated Carrington appears to be a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as eventually becomes clear throughout the nimbly staged 87 minute movie. He’s also quite a hoot.

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I love those comedies from the Swinging 1960s that are part farce, part caper movie in which a huge international cast sashays through Europe in an incomprehensible plot. The cinematic equivalent to a 1960s discotheque, with its trendy music, jet set movie stars, mod costumes, and fab hair styles, this subgenre not only includes breezy examples such as Casino Royale (1967) and What’s New Pussycat? but also atrocious bombs like The Happening and Skidoo! My favorite has always been After the Fox, which I recently saw again after many years. I was delighted to discover that After the Fox not only held up for me this time around but that there was more to the film than I realized.

After the Fox failed with the critics and at the box office in 1968 when it was first released, and few have warmed up to it in the interim. The odd assembly of creative personnel is frequently cited as one of the film’s weaknesses. Comic actor Peter Sellers and beefcake movie star Victor Mature appear alongside perennial starlet Britt Ekland in a film directed by Vittorio De Sica and written by Neil Simon. While Simon, who is famous for his very American, middlebrow comedy, and De Sica, who was the acclaimed neorealist director of The Bicycle Thief, do not generally come up in the same conversation, I found nothing disastrous in their collaboration.

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If you had asked me when I was just growing up on the movies in the mid to late seventies who was going to be the big director of the decade, I might have answered Franklin J. Schaffner.  That wouldn’t have been a crazy answer either.  Sure, there was Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin and Hal Ashby.    Not to mention Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg,  John Boorman and Peter Bogdanovich.  Oh yeah, and let’s not forget  Bernardo Bertolucci,  John Cassavetes, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, Milos Forman… okay, okay, enough!  The point is, despite all those great talents, Franklin J. Schaffner was the first director I really got to know by name.

Let me rephrase that.  I knew of Welles and Hitchcock, Renoir and Kurosawa, Fellini and Powell and a host of other classic directors but, as a growing cinephile in the seventies, of the contemporary directors, Franklin J. Schaffner was the first one whose name I recognized because it just happened to be on three of my favorite movies when I was young:  Planet of the Apes (POTA), Patton and Papillon, the three P’s of my movie-loving childhood.

So you’d expect I might possibly answer, “Yeah, Schaffner, he’s the one.  He’ll be remembered.”  And then, of course, he fell off the edge of the world.   The culprit?  Some of the worst script selection in the history of Hollywood.

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It is now possible to hold Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema in your hand, after remaining a rumor in the years following its completion in 1998. It was caught in a snarl of copyright issues that lasted almost as long as the ten years it took Godard to make it, with Gaumont not able to clear the fusillade of music and film rights until 2007. Olive Films took the gamble to license the film for a U.S. DVD release, and now Godard’s grand cinematic convulsion can finally be grappled with in the relative privacy of your mortgaged home, starting today.

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Each semester in my film studies class, I look forward to presenting the work of the Film School Generation of the 1960s and 1970s. Not only do the students respond well to the era of film history that broke the rules, but I am always surprised at how many of the films feel fresh and contemporary. This semester, I showed Dog Day Afternoon. It remains as vibrant and moving as it was 35 years ago when it was first released, undoubtedly because of the caliber of talent behind its making. Director Sidney Lumet, who understood the inner-city madness that was New York in the 1970s, was in his element with this real-life story of a bank robbery gone awry. Cinematographer Victor Klemper infused the shots with movement, either through camerawork or character blocking, which created a visual tension that fit the material. Editor Dede Allen cut with precision and deliberateness to capture the intensity in the dialogue between stars Al Pacino and John Cazale, who improvised many of their scenes.

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