I play weekly poker games, and for the last game of the year – one that we played three scant days ago – I saw my triple-digit potential winnings whittled down to almost nothing, and it all happened in the last hand of the night. Emotions ran high, and there was a lot of chaos and commotion. Adding insult to injury, there is still some dispute as to the particulars of the evening that have not been completely settled. In honor of the five winning cards that (should have) split the pot, I’ve decided to revisit five winning hands committed to celluloid. READ MORE

In my last post I provided a look behind the curtain for the first five weeks of film programming for my fall film calendar. This week we look at the remaining 24 titles that round out the schedule. It features everything from classics such as Vertigo to the state premiere of the latest uncompromising and visually arresting film by Bruno Dumont, Outside Satan (a scene of which is pictured above). READ MORE

A boilingly hot summer day, a crush of commuters, a moment of carelessness. With these universal ingredients, Akira Kurosawa set up a film that would mix the grim obsessions of film noir with a documentarian’s observation of postwar Japanese life. Talk about universal–Stray Dog is a mashup of pulp pop and reportage, of true crime and intimate drama, of buddy cop movies and art house cinema, of East and West. There isn’t much a movie can do that Stray Dog doesn’t put on its agenda.

That being said, the international critical acclaim that greeted this film requires some dissection, because there’s something really weird going on here. Stray Dog was never a barn-burning commercial splash, and it wasn’t even distributed in the US until 1963 (almost 15 years after it was made) but it was an award-winning and highly regarded art house release that contributed substantially to Akira Kurosawa’s growing renown, and there’s something screwy about that.

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Having retired from the DVD business, I am realizing now that I’m sitting on 15 years’ worth of anecdotes from behind the scenes that I never felt like sharing publicly at the time, because I worried they didn’t gibe with my marketing plans, and I was also mindful of not misusing this forum for self-promotion.  But I no longer have a vested interest in any of these movies, and I’m now starting to feel more willing to talk about what went on in the making of some of these DVDs.  I’m posting a few stories these weeks to gauge reader interest.

This week I want to talk a bit about my triptych of DVDs with the estate of Victor Pahlen!

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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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For nine years running, MoMA’s To Save and Project international festival of film preservation has showcased the latest celluloid surgery jobs by archives the world over. It’s the one place where film stock is still a fetish, each new print ogled with the entitled leer of a sozzled Miss Universe judge. So I was sent to my oft-used fainting couch when it was announced that a digital restoration would open this year’s fest (which runs through Nov. 25th).   This prestigious pole-position was granted to Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy (1968), a delirious mash-up of pop culture detritus, from psychotic b-movies to baffling Bufferin commercials.

Dante and Jon Davison edited the entire feature by hand, splicing in new scenes when intriguing material passed their way. Eventually the project ballooned to 7 hours, but with its broad humor, broads, and critique of the military-industrial complex, it toured college campuses under a Schlitz beer sponsorship. By the end of its run the print had more stitches than Frankenstein’s monster, without the salve of Karloff’s soulful stare. It would be unlikely to survive another trip through a projector. So Dante shoved the benighted thing through a film-to-tape transfer, and after some screenings on the West coast has finally brought his beast to the East. Now at a svelte 4 1/2 hours, it’s a marvel of gonzo editing. It contains an actual narrative, collapsing the apocalypses  of a bunch of sci-fi/teen rebel/horror cheapies into one mega-Armageddon, while finding time for mini-comedies and grace(less)-notes in between.

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Take a look at this poster and tell me what you think this movie is about:

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One of the things that can be fun about watching remakes is the insight it gives into what constitutes directing.  Take two movies with essentially the same script, and the differences between them become more clearly the work of the different directors and actors interpreting that script.

Having said that, it’s pretty much impossible to evaluate the directorial style of Rudolph Maté from his work on 1948’s The Dark Past, because the film is a virtual clone of an earlier Columbia thriller, Charles Vidor’s Blind Alley (1939).  Maté’s choices = Vidor’s choices.  Where The Dark Past does differ, it differs by being a deracinated and miscast work of mimicry.  Which isn’t to say it lacks its own merits—The Dark Past has an interesting meta-irony that deserves some notice, and we’ll come to it in due course.

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This Wednesday, September 15, TCM presents “The Stars of Prohibition,” an evening of gangster movies set during the Roaring 20s. The “Stars” are not movie actors from the 1920s but gangsters, who became rich and powerful by providing liquor to the millions of Americans left parched by the 18^th Amendment.

Part of the fabric of the hedonistic Jazz Age and the tumultuous Depression era, gangsters such as Louis Lepke, Arnold Rothstein, Frank Nitti, Dutch Schultz, and Al Capone were both condemned and sensationalized in newspaper headlines, parlaying their notoriety into celebrity. Photos of gangster-related violence in the streets shared space with snapshots of famous athletes hobnobbing with Capone at the ballpark. These urban criminals, who were the product of big-city ghettoes where various immigrant groups struggled to survive, differed from outlaws like Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde. Outlaws hailed from small towns or rural back roads, robbed banks or other business for quick cash, and were 20^th-century versions of mythic Wild West figures such as Jesse James or the Dalton Gang. Gangsters controlled vice crimes like gambling, prostitution, illegal liquor operations, and later drug trafficking. The gangster organizations had been operating in major urban areas for decades, but they became powerful, financially sound, and politically connected during Prohibition. Often mentioned in the same breath, the gangsters of the Roaring 20s and outlaws of the Depression actually have little in common, save for being pursued by the FBI and mythologized in popular culture.

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