Black and White Thrillers on Blu-ray

It’s September and school is back in session, including a full film studies program at MSUM, and both Intro to Film classes and a Creative Movie Production class at UND. As I’ve written before, if you’d like a respectable education in film, you can easily avoid the outrageously high tuition fees at a big-name film school or even the substantially less but ever-increasing tuition at MSUM or UND. Simply purchase a few used textbooks, find a few screenplays online and do your own self-study with a well-chosen selection of DVDs and all their supplementary features.
Now, with Blu-ray and a full 1080p high-definition video projector, it’s possible to see several of the common “film school” titles in editions virtually as crisp as a 35mm film screening, and far better than the typical 16mm prints used in classrooms over the past several decades. Unfortunately, there are not yet enough films made before 1990 released in Blu-ray editions to allow a self-education in film exclusively using that format, but a few of the major studios and the independent Criterion Collection are gradually filling the gap with sporadic releases of key titles.
Polish-born director Roman Polanski is best-remembered today for “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” and for a controversial personal life that led to his fleeing the United States, but his fifty-year filmmaking career includes a variety of interesting and off-beat works. After an impressive feature-film debut in his native Poland with “Knife in the Water,” his first English-language feature was the low-budget but groundbreaking British production, “Repulsion,” which came out on Blu-ray this summer from Criterion.

“Repulsion” (1965) is a dark psychological thriller that is sometimes labeled as a horror film and often compared with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” French actress Catherine Deneuve is excellent in one of her first screen roles, the beautiful but disturbed young manicurist who gradually loses her sanity. Polanski takes his time building up her character, skillfully getting the audience to see the world more and more through her eyes as the film goes on, yet always keeping a sense of cool detachment that parallels her own relationship to the real world.
The Blu-ray disc has a beautifully sharp transfer, preserving the film’s original 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio as well as its effective use of film grain and blend of scenes with both low and high contrasts. There is an audio commentary with both Polanski and Deneuve (recorded 15 years ago, individually) recalling the film’s production and giving insights into the story and character. Besides original theatrical trailers, the disc also has a very good and relatively recent (2003) British documentary on the making of the film, as well as a fascinating 1964 French TV documentary filmed on the set during its production. In the box is a 16-page pamphlet with an essay by a film scholar and a listing of disc credits.

“REPULSION” ON BLU-RAY:
Movie:  B+  /  Video: A /  Audio: A-  /  Extras: A-

Sometimes-controversial French director Henri-Georges Clouzot is noted mainly for his Hitchcockian thrillers “Diabolique” (1955) and “The Wages of Fear” [“Le Salaire de la Peur”] (1953), the latter of which came out on Blu-ray from Criterion last April.
Clouzot began preparations for “The Wages of Fear” by 1949 and shot it under difficult conditions in 1951 and 1952. The original 155-minute version won best picture at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and British Academy Awards, but its American distributor cut nearly an hour for the 1955 U.S. release that circulated for years, mainly from its first half. Even the 105-minute version was denounced by many 1950s American critics as both anti-American and unacceptably bleak, besides suggestions of a distasteful homosexual subtext. A restored 147-minute edition was finally released in 1991, and that is the version now on Blu-ray.
“The Wages of Fear” begins very slowly and deliberately, lingering on details and beautifully-composed shots that establish the poverty-stricken Central American village and its diverse collection of seedy, international (and multi-lingual) ne’er-do-wells who struggle to maintain a precarious and sordid existence. The town’s main source of income derives from an American oil company that relies on villagers for dangerous and low-paid labor.
When an oil well catches fire, the company shows up to hire truck drivers to transport loads of nitroglycerin to the site across bumpy, perilous rural roads. The last half of the film is one of the most tension-packed sequences in cinema history as two pairs of volunteers attempt to make the trip without exploding along the way. Throughout all the nail-biting suspense, the characters continue to develop and evolve.
The film has influenced many other directors, notably Sam Peckinpah in his opening shots of “The Wild Bunch.” In 1977, American director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist,” “The French Connection”) remade the story under the misleading title “Sorcerer.”
The Blu-ray disc has a superb high-definition transfer of the striking black-and-white image in its original 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio, with very good sound. As usual, Criterion includes a 16-page pamphlet with an essay about the film, and several interesting disc supplements, this time unfortunately all in standard definition. There is no audio commentary, but there are some recent interviews with an assistant director and a biographer of Clouzot, plus a 1988 interview with star Yves Montand. There’s a good 2004 feature-length French documentary on the life and career of Clouzot, and a brief documentary that details the cuts made for the film’s first American release.

“THE WAGES OF FEAR” ON BLU-RAY:
Movie: A-  /  Video: A+  /  Audio: A /  Extras: B+

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