Back when interracial marriage was a shady topic (are those dark days coming back?) the U.S. military had some adjustment issues. Full integration of the ranks didn’t remove the anti- Japanese bigotry. James Michener’s novel has been transformed into a big-scale romance, with Marlon Brando coming to terms with a split in loyalty between the flag and his private life. The big shock is that the Paul Osborn’s screenplay doesn’t let the military off easy.
Sayonara
Blu-ray
Twilight Time
1957 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 147 min. / Street Date November 14, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95
Starring: Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Martha Scott, Miiko Taka, Miyoshi Umeki, Red Buttons, Kent Smith.
Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks
Film Editors: Philip W. Anderson, Arthur P. Schmidt
Production Design: Ted Haworth
Original Music: Irving Berlin, Franz Waxman
Written by Paul Osborn from the novel by James Michener
Produced by William Goetz...
Sayonara
Blu-ray
Twilight Time
1957 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 147 min. / Street Date November 14, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95
Starring: Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Martha Scott, Miiko Taka, Miyoshi Umeki, Red Buttons, Kent Smith.
Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks
Film Editors: Philip W. Anderson, Arthur P. Schmidt
Production Design: Ted Haworth
Original Music: Irving Berlin, Franz Waxman
Written by Paul Osborn from the novel by James Michener
Produced by William Goetz...
- 11/21/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The Yakuza
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1975 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 112 & 123 min. / Street Date February 14, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Brian Keith, Eiji Okada, Richard Jordan, Keiko Kishi, James Shigeta, Herb Edelman.
Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki, Duke Callaghan
Production Design: Stephen Grimes
Art Direction: Yoshiyuki Ishida
Film Editor: Don Guidice, Thomas Stanford
Original Music: Dave Grusin
Written by: Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne
Produced by: Michael Hamilburg, Sydney Pollack, Koji Shundo
Directed by Sydney Pollack
The Warner Archive Collection is on a roll with a 2017 schedule that has so far released one much-desired library Blu-ray per week. Coming shortly are Vincente Minnelli’s Bells are Ringing, Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend and Val Guest’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and that only takes us through February. First up is a piercing action drama from 1975.
There are favorite movies around Savant central,...
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1975 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 112 & 123 min. / Street Date February 14, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, Brian Keith, Eiji Okada, Richard Jordan, Keiko Kishi, James Shigeta, Herb Edelman.
Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki, Duke Callaghan
Production Design: Stephen Grimes
Art Direction: Yoshiyuki Ishida
Film Editor: Don Guidice, Thomas Stanford
Original Music: Dave Grusin
Written by: Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne
Produced by: Michael Hamilburg, Sydney Pollack, Koji Shundo
Directed by Sydney Pollack
The Warner Archive Collection is on a roll with a 2017 schedule that has so far released one much-desired library Blu-ray per week. Coming shortly are Vincente Minnelli’s Bells are Ringing, Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend and Val Guest’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and that only takes us through February. First up is a piercing action drama from 1975.
There are favorite movies around Savant central,...
- 1/24/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The irrepressible Sam Fuller fashions a crime thriller for German TV with his expected eccentricity: old-fashioned hardboiled scripting, freeform direction and bits of graffiti from the French New Wave. Christa Lang is the femme fatale and Glenn Corbett is the twofisted American hero, whose name is Not Griff. And yes, a pigeon does bite the pavement on Beethoven Street, and I tell you, that's one dead pigeon. Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street Blu-ray Olive Films 1974 / Color / 1:33 flat full frame (for German TV / 127 min. / Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße / Street Date April 19, 2016 / / available through the Olive Films website / 29.95 Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Sieghardt Rupp, Anton Diffring, Stéphane Audran, Alexander D'Arcy, Anthony Chinn. Cinematography Jerzy Lipman Film Editor Liesgret Schmitt-Klink Original Music The Can German dialogue by Manfred R. Köhler Produced by Joachim von Mengershausen Written and Directed by Samuel Fuller
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Not that it helped Sam Fuller's career much,...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Not that it helped Sam Fuller's career much,...
- 4/26/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
or, Savant picks The Most Impressive Discs of 2015
This is the actual view from Savant Central, looking due North.
What a year! I was able to take one very nice trip back East too see Washington D.C. for the first time, or at least as much as two days' walking in the hot sun and then cool rain would allow. Back home in Los Angeles, we've had a year of extreme drought -- my lawn is looking patriotically ratty -- and we're expecting something called El Niño, that's supposed to be just shy of Old-Testament build-me-an-ark intensity. We withstood heat waves like those in Day the Earth Caught Fire, and now we'll get the storms part. This has been a wild year for DVD Savant, which is still a little unsettled. DVDtalk has been very patient and generous, and so have Stuart Galbraith & Joe Dante; so far everything...
This is the actual view from Savant Central, looking due North.
What a year! I was able to take one very nice trip back East too see Washington D.C. for the first time, or at least as much as two days' walking in the hot sun and then cool rain would allow. Back home in Los Angeles, we've had a year of extreme drought -- my lawn is looking patriotically ratty -- and we're expecting something called El Niño, that's supposed to be just shy of Old-Testament build-me-an-ark intensity. We withstood heat waves like those in Day the Earth Caught Fire, and now we'll get the storms part. This has been a wild year for DVD Savant, which is still a little unsettled. DVDtalk has been very patient and generous, and so have Stuart Galbraith & Joe Dante; so far everything...
- 12/15/2015
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Twilight Time brings Sam Fuller’s exotic 1955 color noir House of Bamboo to Blu-ray, a resplendently colorful film and the first major Us production to film in post-war Japan. While Fuller re-tooled Harry Kleiner’s script for the 1948 film The Street with No Name to meet his own offbeat needs, the film experienced a rather cool reception, garnering praise for Joseph MacDonald’s cinematography (and has since been hailed by sources as some of the best uses of widescreen photography in the history of cinema) but little else. Following on the heels of successful black and white titles like Hell and High Water (1954) and the acclaimed film noir Pickup on South Street (1953), it’s a harder title to classify, featuring Fuller’s usual signature of off-balance touches in a production that now seems ahead of its time (especially compared to something like 1964’s black and white provocation The Naked Kiss...
- 9/1/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
This week on Off The Shelf, Ryan is joined by Brian Saur and Scott Nye to take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for the week of August 11th, 2015, and chat about some follow-up and home video news.
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Episode Links & Notes Follow-up Dressed To Kill Follow-up Vudu Aspect Ratios The Simpsons DVD sales Don Hertzfeldt’s Kickstarter News Arrow Announcements: Jacques Rivette box set, Honeymoon Killers, Nekromantik 2, Moc Announcements: Imamura box set, Naked Prey, Man With A Movie Camera, Seconds Kino Lorber Studio Classics: How I Won The War, Salaam Bombay, Cop, Bray Studios Kickstarter Toy Story That Time Forgot – November 3rd Twilight Time: November / December 2015 titles Star Wars Blu-ray Re-release / Steelbooks New Code Red Blu-rays up for order – Sweet Sixteen, Trick or Treats & The Cheerleaders More Sony Supreme Cinema Series Blu-rays announced: The Fifth Element and Leon The Professional...
Subscribe in iTunes or RSS.
Episode Links & Notes Follow-up Dressed To Kill Follow-up Vudu Aspect Ratios The Simpsons DVD sales Don Hertzfeldt’s Kickstarter News Arrow Announcements: Jacques Rivette box set, Honeymoon Killers, Nekromantik 2, Moc Announcements: Imamura box set, Naked Prey, Man With A Movie Camera, Seconds Kino Lorber Studio Classics: How I Won The War, Salaam Bombay, Cop, Bray Studios Kickstarter Toy Story That Time Forgot – November 3rd Twilight Time: November / December 2015 titles Star Wars Blu-ray Re-release / Steelbooks New Code Red Blu-rays up for order – Sweet Sixteen, Trick or Treats & The Cheerleaders More Sony Supreme Cinema Series Blu-rays announced: The Fifth Element and Leon The Professional...
- 8/12/2015
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
Alexander Kluge speaks at the Oberhausen Manifesto press conference 1962
For all the news tumbling out of Rotterdam and Berlin over the past couple of weeks, we don't want to overlook a couple of pretty major announcements coming from other festivals regarding their upcoming editions. Starting with this one: "The 58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto (February 28, 2012) with a large-scale thematic program entitled Provoking Reality: Mavericks, Mouvements, Manifesto. To honor the anniversary of the Manifesto, perhaps the single most important group document in German film history, the festival has compiled a selection of films of the signatories, many of which have not been shown for decades and had to be restored expressly for the program."
In addition to the inevitable panel discussion, there'll also be a double DVD from Edition Filmmuseum and, in German, a collection of essays. Before moving on, this...
For all the news tumbling out of Rotterdam and Berlin over the past couple of weeks, we don't want to overlook a couple of pretty major announcements coming from other festivals regarding their upcoming editions. Starting with this one: "The 58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto (February 28, 2012) with a large-scale thematic program entitled Provoking Reality: Mavericks, Mouvements, Manifesto. To honor the anniversary of the Manifesto, perhaps the single most important group document in German film history, the festival has compiled a selection of films of the signatories, many of which have not been shown for decades and had to be restored expressly for the program."
In addition to the inevitable panel discussion, there'll also be a double DVD from Edition Filmmuseum and, in German, a collection of essays. Before moving on, this...
- 1/15/2012
- MUBI
Mt. Fuji in the background is House of Bamboo's introductory image, snow-capped and serene, a travelogue shot; then, a few moments later, the same mountain is viewed from the vantage point of the scene of a crime by a ground-level camera, framed through the outstretched feet of a murdered soldier: Samuel Fuller in Japan, like tabloid ink sprayed on kakejiku scrolls. Tokyo in 1955 is noticeably the same one filmed concurrently by Ozu and Naruse, but it's also something of an open city, the war a fresh memory and the American Occupation fresher still, with glimpses of the wharfside shanties—anxious worlds barely afloat—Nagisa Oshima would explore in The Sun's Burial. Into it stomps agent of mystery Robert Stack, who's such a truculent Yank that, rather than taking in the rooftop rehearsal of a Noh troupe or the awe-inspiring tracking shot that captures the CinemaScope sprawl brimming with movement,...
- 8/27/2011
- MUBI
Vera Farmiga's Higher Ground "admirably tries, on a minuscule budget, to evoke the spirit of American cinema from 35 years ago: the age of Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, an era much more hospitable to serious roles for women than the current one." Melissa Anderson in the Voice: "As reported in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the actress in 2006 (three years before her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Farmiga has expressed her disgust with the roles offered her by setting scripts on fire: 'I stack up all those crass female characters, all those utterly ordinary women, all those hundreds and hundreds of parts that have no substance or meaning and turn them into a blazing pyre.' It's a shame, then, that Higher Ground never really ignites."
Farmiga plays "Corinne, a Midwest rural woman who embraces a hippie-inflected but paternalistic evangelical community with her high...
Farmiga plays "Corinne, a Midwest rural woman who embraces a hippie-inflected but paternalistic evangelical community with her high...
- 8/26/2011
- MUBI
by Vadim Rizov
The best—or least most characteristically forceful—Samuel Fuller movies veer excitedly from one violent moment and camera movement to the next, like someone justifiably punching you in the face. 1955's House of Bamboo is a calmer production. Fuller novices shouldn't start here: for a introduction to the two-fisted director's earlier work, try on the sleazy Cold War noir Pickup on South Street (made two films before this) or 1957's Forty Guns, a widescreen Western that often accelerates to warp speed. House of Bamboo has patches of standard-issue narrative tissue to get through, and the camera's less mobile and impulsive than usual. Compared with, say, 1952's Park Row, in which Fuller tracks so fast the camera gets wobbly out of sheer urgency (speed trumps thought), Bamboo is more tableaux-bound.
Continued reading Film Of The Week: House of Bamboo...
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Comments on this Entry:...
The best—or least most characteristically forceful—Samuel Fuller movies veer excitedly from one violent moment and camera movement to the next, like someone justifiably punching you in the face. 1955's House of Bamboo is a calmer production. Fuller novices shouldn't start here: for a introduction to the two-fisted director's earlier work, try on the sleazy Cold War noir Pickup on South Street (made two films before this) or 1957's Forty Guns, a widescreen Western that often accelerates to warp speed. House of Bamboo has patches of standard-issue narrative tissue to get through, and the camera's less mobile and impulsive than usual. Compared with, say, 1952's Park Row, in which Fuller tracks so fast the camera gets wobbly out of sheer urgency (speed trumps thought), Bamboo is more tableaux-bound.
Continued reading Film Of The Week: House of Bamboo...
Comments (0)
Comments on this Entry:...
- 8/23/2011
- GreenCine Daily
Joe Dante speaks well of Samuel Fuller and declares it Verboten! to do otherwise.
Once again Samuel Fuller uses the skimpiest of budgets as a tool to contrast reality with artifice. A long cherished project for the director, this German-set postwar drama was the last Rko picture, and has been out of circulation for years until its recent Warner Archive dvd release.
Check out the trailer commentary and then keep reading for some bonus annotations.
Let’s talk about Samuel Fuller for a moment, shall we? Or, more importantly, let’s let Samuel Fuller talk about Sam Fuller (in the context of his film Pickup on South Street):
How can you not love a cigar-chomping guy like that? And then to look a the movies he made is something unto itself. His films have verve and impact and, despite their b-picture nature, are never just blank programmers; they’re fully always alive.
Once again Samuel Fuller uses the skimpiest of budgets as a tool to contrast reality with artifice. A long cherished project for the director, this German-set postwar drama was the last Rko picture, and has been out of circulation for years until its recent Warner Archive dvd release.
Check out the trailer commentary and then keep reading for some bonus annotations.
Let’s talk about Samuel Fuller for a moment, shall we? Or, more importantly, let’s let Samuel Fuller talk about Sam Fuller (in the context of his film Pickup on South Street):
How can you not love a cigar-chomping guy like that? And then to look a the movies he made is something unto itself. His films have verve and impact and, despite their b-picture nature, are never just blank programmers; they’re fully always alive.
- 6/1/2011
- by Danny
- Trailers from Hell
[Find Part 1 here.]
So, once you settled on detective fiction and the hard-boiled film noir take, and then the technology came into being, what specifically about postwar L.A. made you gravitate to that time and place?
Well, for me specifically, when I grew up in the '70s and stuff, I'm a child of Vietnam. Australia is fairly closely linked to America in lots of ways. I read a lot about WWII and this moral authority that America had during the second World War and how they get to Vietnam and where we are now.
For me, it's the chance to explore that underbelly of the American dream. It's about what Hollywood meant--as much of the Golden Age of Hollywood, everything from Gone with the Wind and all that kind of stuff--and what still might carry over from that era. Hollywood kept churning out these bright cheerful movies, but the film noir...
So, once you settled on detective fiction and the hard-boiled film noir take, and then the technology came into being, what specifically about postwar L.A. made you gravitate to that time and place?
Well, for me specifically, when I grew up in the '70s and stuff, I'm a child of Vietnam. Australia is fairly closely linked to America in lots of ways. I read a lot about WWII and this moral authority that America had during the second World War and how they get to Vietnam and where we are now.
For me, it's the chance to explore that underbelly of the American dream. It's about what Hollywood meant--as much of the Golden Age of Hollywood, everything from Gone with the Wind and all that kind of stuff--and what still might carry over from that era. Hollywood kept churning out these bright cheerful movies, but the film noir...
- 2/8/2011
- by Evan Narcisse
- ifc.com
Videogames have always trended toward outlandish visions. The history of the medium is top-heavy with monster-infested fantasy worlds, outer-space battles, and racetracks that feature a perhaps-unrealistic amount of exploding cars. But the makers of the upcoming La Noire are trying to capture the most spectacular image of all: The human face. The look and narrative of the game is taken from the noir-detective genre — lots of shadows and moral ambiguity — but the real draw of L.A. Noire is the photo-realistic technology that makes the characters look far more humanlike than, say, the mannequin-people of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
- 1/24/2011
- by Darren Franich
- EW.com - PopWatch
It is with great sadness that I write of the passing of actor Robert Quarry.
To most who read Fangoria, he was Count Yorga, Vampire (Aip 1970) who Returned (1971) before he found that Dr Phibes Rises Again that same year, became a Deathmaster in 1972, met Sugar Hill and went to the Madhouse in 1974.
He was more than that, though. Born Robert Walter Quarry on November 3, 1925, the highly intelligent Quarry (who it was said had an I.Q. of 168) graduated High School at age 14, and started his acting career soon after on radio. Living in Santa Rose, Quarry won an acting scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse. When Alfred Hitchcock came to Santa Rosa, Quarry auditioned and won the role of Theresa Wright’s boyfriend in the 1943 classic Shadow Of A Doubt. His role, however, was all but cut out (he swore he appeared a nanosecond mooning over the actress), but it led to his Hollywood career,...
To most who read Fangoria, he was Count Yorga, Vampire (Aip 1970) who Returned (1971) before he found that Dr Phibes Rises Again that same year, became a Deathmaster in 1972, met Sugar Hill and went to the Madhouse in 1974.
He was more than that, though. Born Robert Walter Quarry on November 3, 1925, the highly intelligent Quarry (who it was said had an I.Q. of 168) graduated High School at age 14, and started his acting career soon after on radio. Living in Santa Rose, Quarry won an acting scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse. When Alfred Hitchcock came to Santa Rosa, Quarry auditioned and won the role of Theresa Wright’s boyfriend in the 1943 classic Shadow Of A Doubt. His role, however, was all but cut out (he swore he appeared a nanosecond mooning over the actress), but it led to his Hollywood career,...
- 2/22/2009
- Fangoria
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