Criterion's criteria

Never having gotten around to subscribing to Filmstruck before it was shut down, I became a charter subscriber to the Criterion Channel as soon as it was announced.  But for the first few months, I barely watched anything, so now I will devote a month’s worth of viewing to the channel, to determine whether to keep the subscription going forward.

In watching and showing films on DVD or Blu-Ray, I always gravitated to Criterion Collection disks, for classic selection, technical excellence, and impressive extras.  Now they are immediately available by streaming, and it’s a stupendous resource, but one I have not delved into much yet. 

I’d been looking for Visions of Eight (CC) for a long time, until it was released in a Criterion boxed set of Olympic films, which is also available on the Channel.  Eight different directors look at different events at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the film lived up to my memories of it.  Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (CC) from 1964 was almost as good, and from time to time I will look at others of the hundred years of Olympic documentaries available to stream.   

For a little taste of Renoir in advance of the Clark’s summer exhibition, I watched Day in the Country (CC) for the first time in ages, and in preparation for visiting the H.M.S Victory at Portsmouth, I watched That Hamilton Woman (CC) with Laurence Olivier as Admiral Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton.  All very good stuff, but hardly enough to warrant several months’ subscription.

I’ve built up a watchlist to work through, but first off I took note of films that were leaving the service at the end of July, part of a “Summer of ’69” collection.  So I watched Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which certainly evoked the feel of fifty years ago, but not the feeling that they don’t make movies like that any more.  They do, and better.  But you have to put them in context of what went before, say Doris Day & Rock Hudson films, or Hud for example, or further back, Of Mice and Men.  The films of 1969 are certainly artifacts of a culture freaking out.  Criterion’s other offering under that rubric was Easy Rider, which I’ve seen more recently, but get the point of putting those three together, suggesting that the channel’s programming is a reliable guide to informed viewing.

Well, not entirely reliable.  De gustibus non est disputandum.  The title Something Wild (CC) caught my eye, though this wasn’t the Jonathan Demme film with Melanie Griffith, but a Fifties indie that I thought might be a find like The Little Fugitive.  It did have some notable NYC street scenes, edited into a jazzy opening credit sequence by Saul Bass, but devolved into a claustrophobic melodrama that made no psychological sense at all.  Jack Garfein directs his wife Carroll Baker according to The Method, as a college girl who gets raped and then is “saved” from suicide by a man who in turn entraps her in his basement apartment.  This, however, is not The Collector, which might read differently today anyway, but at least made some sense at the time.  No, this film is flat-out insane, about that there can be no dispute, though some may have a taste for the insanity.

I got more old-time-y gratification out of two Ida Lupino films from the Fifties, when she was practically the only female director in Hollywood.  Edmund O’Brien is the star of both.  In The Bigamist (CC), he’s very sympathetic as the traveling salesman who has sincere attachments to his wives in SF and LA, Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino respectively.  In The Hitch-Hiker (CC), he’s one of two buddies on their way to a weekend fishing trip, who are taken captive by a crazed but canny killer on the loose, and forced to drive him on escape through Mexico.  In the former, good acting makes for more than a potboiler, and in the latter, Ms. Lupino with an all-male cast creditably becomes the first woman to direct a film noir.  She was clearly one of the era’s intelligent and committed “Filmakers,” as her production company (with hubby) was called.

Since seeing First Reformed, I’d wanted to take another look at Winter Light (CC), which I remembered as my favorite of Ingmar Bergman’s faith trilogy of the early 1960s.  As Criterion will do, they presented an immaculate restoration of Sven Nykvist’s luminous cinematography, but Bergman’s grim obsession with the death of God no longer spoke to me directly.  Good compare and contrast exercise with Paul Schrader’s final film, however.  Characteristically good performances from Gunnar Bjornstrand and Ingrid Thulin.  But as much as I admire some of Bergman’s work, his cold and dark sensibility remains somewhat alien to me (except when made approachable by warm and life-filled actresses).  I will follow up with some other favorites from his filmography, and maybe even read his autobiography, which has been on my shelf for decades.

Ask and ye shall receive.  In my previous post, I asked where, oh where could I find Manny & Lo (CC)?  Lo and behold, it suddenly turned up on the Criterion Channel.  So that question was answered, and thereby also the question of whether to continue my subscription.  And then the question whether that 1996 film would live up to my memory of it?  Definitely so.  I remembered it for Scarlett Johansson’s debut, as an observant and thoughtful 11-year-old runaway on the lam from foster care with her 16-year-old sister, living in model homes and other hideaways.  When the sister can no longer ignore her pregnancy, they do the sensible thing and kidnap someone to help them with the birth.  And what a sensible person they pick, working in a childcare store and wearing a nurse’s outfit, with firm and certain answers to any question about babies!  We never get much of her backstory, but Mary Kay Place lets us in on the desperation behind the certainty, in a finely calibrated comic role.  So the film is funny and twisty, well-acted, well-shot, and well-directed.  So why hasn’t writer/director Lisa Krueger gone on to make more winning films like this?  I had one answer in hand from the recent documentary Half the Picture (MC-76, AMZ), in which many female directors lamented how much harder it was to get a second film made, even when the first was successful.  Manny & Lo remains a fine piece of work, though a more auspicious debut for the star than for the creator, who I suspect is telling a very personal story in comically exaggerated fashion.  So this film confirms my subscription, and certainly makes a 14-day free trial worth your while.

The program collection that really committed me to CC was "Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck," which allowed me to add a half-dozen films to my summary of her career.

Filling in another female star’s filmography, I watched Katharine Hepburn’s second feature, Christopher Strong (1933, CC), directed by Dorothy Arzner.  Bizarre that a film written, directed, and headlined by women should be named for the main male character, a stodgy aristocrat and politician who falls for Hepburn’s daring aviatrix, winner of a round-the-globe flying contest.  If you wanted to watch a Kate Hepburn film, there’s at least a dozen I’d recommend more, but this one has multiple fascinations, from its pre-Code boldness to its half-feminist slant, but most amazingly its great young actress.

So now that I'm a confirmed subscriber to the Criterion Channel, I will round off this post with the promise of more commentary on its offerings, especially in the compilation of career summaries, which will become more and more the focus for this blog.