I had a similar reaction to Mr. Stewart when I watched Kim Novak purr her way through Bell Book and Candle, just released by Twilight Time on a gorgeous blu-ray.  He also might have been agog at Westward the Women (1951), the William Wellman femme-Western released in a well-appointed DVD from the Warner Archive, which includes an audio commentary from film historian Scott Eyman. They are two films that focus on female desire, a rare occurrence in the generally leering male gazes of post-code Hollywood (pre-code films were replete with sexually independent women – check out Baby Face (1933) for a bracing example). Bell Book and Candle is set in motion because of Novak’s uncontrollable lust for Stewart, and Westward the Women kicks off because of hundreds of ladies’ self-sacrificing desire for a better life out in California, a gender bending variation on Horace Greeley’s advice to, “Go west, young man”.

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Edward L. Cahn directed 11 films in 1961, and You Have to Run Fast was one of them. MGM recently released it on their DVD burn-on-demand service in a crisp transfer, making it easy to appreciate the thriller’s tight construction and  open-air location shooting. The AFI Catalog lists no production dates but it was undoubtedly completed in a week or two before Cahn and producer Robert E. Kent moved on to the next programmer (17 of which are now streaming on Netflix). I was tipped to Cahn’s work by Dave Kehr’s “Further Research” column in the November/December 2011 Film Comment, where he says, “Cahn…seemed to embrace the aesthetic of speed with a passion and personal commitment not always apparent in the work of his more feverishly productive Poverty Row peers.” Cahn reportedly filmed “an astonishing 40 setups a day”, but as You Have to Run Fast clearly shows, they flow with an ironclad visual logic, and establish a moral equivalency between a mob boss and the innocent he is tracking down.

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Jim Brown retired from the National Football League in 1965, after nine seasons of transcendent athleticism. “For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith. Brown was only thirty years old when he shockingly hung up his spikes, but he never much cared about public opinion. Instead of exposing his body to more pounding (he never missed a game in his astonishing career), he entered the comfier confines of the movie business, where stuntmen will happily take beatings for you. In his debut, Gordon Douglas’ fine Western Rio Conchos (1964, I wrote about it here), he establishes the quiet tough guy routine he would soon build upon. It was with The Dirty Dozen (1967) that he became a bankable name, and Brown knew it, as  it was during production of that blockbuster that he announced his retirement from football. He went on to star in close to twenty films over the next decade, and the Warner Archive recently released a sample of this output on DVD, four works from 1968 – 1973: The Split (1968), Kenner (1969),…tick…tick…tick (1970) and The Slams (1973).

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Did you know that releasing a film on DVD is called authoring? Or, that a company or organization that releases films on DVD is a publisher? I used to be an editor for a book publisher, and I always found the appropriation of these terms a bit of a stretch but oddly comforting. I have worked in DVD publishing for Facets a long time—from the golden years of DVD sell-through till now when downloading movies onto laptop computers and streaming have dramatically altered the home viewing experience, at least for a current generation chained to their electronic gadgets.  Over the years, I have facilitated the release of dozens of titles, an experience that has expanded my knowledge and appreciation of foreign, independent, and documentary films—Facets stock and trade. In the process, I have met many talented filmmakers, critics, and film historians in addition to knowledgeable technicians who have worked miracles with the poorest of source material. Most of the time, the results were worth the effort and time put into a film’s DVD release, though some projects proved so frustrating that they added gray to my hair. My responsibilities have increased over time:  I have done everything from tracking down source material for a specific title to writing the copy for the DVD wrap.

Highlights over the years include the release of Philip Kaufman’s first film, Goldstein, onto DVD—one of the rare instances when I got to work with a Hollywood director. Mr. Kaufman was kind enough to produce an on-camera interview as an extra and to offer help for the booklet that I researched and wrote, which was included inside the DVD case. The 1964 film, which recently aired on TCM, was independently financed and produced by Kaufman, and it shows the influence of international cinema movements on young American directors. My favorite part of the film is that it was shot entirely on location in Chicago, providing a snapshot of the city from the early 1960s. I was already a fan of Kaufman’s before the Goldstein experience, and it was a bonus to discover that he was friendly, supportive, cooperative, and encouraging. I eagerly look forward to seeing his latest film, Hemingway and Gellhorn.

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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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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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The previously hazy career of William Dieterle is slowly being brought into focus, as the Warner Archive and repertory screenings grant incrementally wider access to this neglected German-American filmmaker. The Archive has just released Fashions of 1934 (’34) and Juarez (1939), while the 92Y Tribeca recently screened a gorgeous new print of Love Letters (1945, scheduled to air on Jan. 21st at 10PM on TCM). The Warner Archive discs display opposite poles of his career, the dynamic fantasist and the staid historical dramatist, while the hallucinatory Love Letters lies somewhere in between.

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Vincente Minnelli had been interested in making a surrealist musical since his days as a Broadway set designer and director. After he saw successful stagings of “Four Saints in Three Acts” (with libretto by Gertrude Stein) and “Pins and Needles” (starring members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union), he was convinced he could make it work. In 1938, he tried to woo musical comedy star Bea Lillie to take the lead role in a “surrealist revue” he titled “The Light Fantastic”. In a letter to Lillie, quoted in Minnelli’s autobiography, he wrote, “It sets out to prove that the world today is completely screwy. A surrealist fantasy set in jig time.” The project was shelved, and he moved on to direct “Very Warm For May”, the first Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein collaboration in eight years.

Once in Hollywood, and flush with studio goodwill off the hits Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) and The Clock (1945) (he had also directed the majority of the revue-style Ziegfeld Follies, which the studio tinkered with until ’46), he finally put his “Light Fantastic” inspiration into action, resulting in Yolanda and the Thief (1945), one of the strangest and most enchanting films ever released by a Hollywood studio. Released earlier this year on DVD by the Warner Archive, Yolanda and the Thief  is also screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October, as part of a complete retrospective of the director’s work (presented along with the Locarno Film Festival).

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