Blu-ray Review: Akira Kurosawa, Samurai Collection

Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Misa Uehara
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Rating: 9/10

It’s extraordinary to think that this box set represents only part of Akira Kurosawa’s output during the ’50s and early ’60s. What we have here are his period movies in the sword-fighting genre. At the same time as getting these in the can, he was also making important and weighty films with modern-day settings such as Ikiru, The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low, as well as more meditative costume dramas. It was a stream of productivity that few, if any, directors have matched.

Comments about HD transfers and extras follow on from discussions of the individual movies.

The box set opens with Seven Samurai (1954), but as the BFI’s standalone Blu-ray of this hugely celebrated masterpiece has already received wide coverage, we’ll pass straight on to Throne of Blood (1957), Kurosawa’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with Toshiro Mifune in the role of the captain who distinguishes himself in battle and then has his head turned by a supernatural prophecy delivered by an evil spirit. Inevitably, he takes matters into his own hands, egged on by his wife (Isuzu Yamada), who is hardly less scary than the spirit and who argues convincingly that if his superiors get wind of the prophecy he’s dead anyway.

Despite the western source material, this is one of the most “Japanese” of Kurosawa’s period dramas. It’s infused with the influence of Noh theatre, from the formal, near-statuesque compositions to the elaborate costumes and mask-like makeup, to the stylized acting which in the case of Mifune requires him to express himself in a series of animalistic growls and yelps (apparently Kurosawa turned down the treble on the male voices in post-production to heighten this effect). It’s an elevated, refined approach to match Shakespeare’s status in western culture, and as a consequence Throne of Blood is not perhaps the most immediately accessible of Kurosawa’s films.

That said, it boasts some outstanding set-pieces, particularly the early encounter with the evil spirit in her glowing white pavilion, with its build-up of flickering lightning and its pans through thickets of grotesquely tangled branches, atmospherically shot in the studio. And it concludes with a great death scene for Mifune that does Shakespeare one better and that ranks among the most memorable moments in the whole of Kurosawa’s oeuvre.

It’s also, if anything, even darker than Shakespeare’s play. Whereas Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a character singled out for a tragic fate, Kurosawa makes it clear that Mifune’s power-hungry thug is nothing out of the ordinary – the lord he eventually kills slew his own master and breaks treaties without warning, when it suits him. “Every samurai longs to be master of the castle,” says Miki, the Banquo figure, honestly. The evil spirit lives in a part of the forest that has been used as a dumping ground for human bones, and it seems to be born out of the general destruction. Throne of Blood is about violence feeding on itself and begetting more violence, and it is a cycle that occurs at ever-accelerating speed, with events that span years in the play seeming to happen in a matter of weeks in the film.

Like Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood is presented in 4:3 format. There’s a little grain to the transfer and some persistent but unobtrusive scratching to the print, but the imagery – all that gleaming armour, all those flickering banners, the electrifying moments of the supernatural – punches through strongly, with inky blacks and ghostly whites. It comes with a very lively and knowledgeable audio commentary by Michael Jeck, which examines the film’s debt to Noh drama and the ways in which it differs from Shakespeare’s play.

Outwardly at least, The Hidden Fortress (1958) is a complete contrast to Throne of Blood. Whereas the earlier film is formal, buttoned-up, consciously elevated, tightly controlled, this tale of a small, ragtag group stuck behind enemy lines is sprawling, playful, serio-comic, and it seems to exult in all things lowly. Offering a worm’s eye view of events, the plot concerns a pair of farmers turned soldiers who had hoped to make their fortune in war but have ended up on the losing side and are desperately trying to find their way back home. Not entirely willingly, they fall in with General Makabe (Mifune), who is zealously guarding the losing clan’s hoard of gold and its young figurehead, the Princess Yuki Akizuki, and plans to smuggle the girl and the gold out of enemy territory using the peasants as cover.

On the surface it looks like it ought to be one of the most fun and light-hearted of Kurosawa’s films, but the tone is soured by the bitterness of the director’s worldview. It’s as though he had expended all of his good vibes on Seven Samurai and had only bile and hatred left. It’s a pitilessness expressed in the visuals, in blank, baleful skies and arid landscapes (much of the movie was shot on the volcanic slopes of Mount Fuji). Sympathetic characters are in short supply. Makabe is a snob who bullies the pair of peasants and treats them like vermin and then acts surprised when they live down to his expectations. But then again, there’s no point in getting too sentimental about them. They’re treacherous and base, dangerously shrewd when they’re not blinded by greed, and it’s a given that if they were left alone with the princess they would rape her.

Luckily, the princess herself is delightful, as played by Misa Uehara – a tomboyish figure in the 16th century Japanese equivalent of a tight blouse, hotpants and knee socks, constantly flexing a cane like a dominatrix. She’s the only one who seems at all enlightened, the only one who speaks out against the cruelty and inhumanity all around her, although even in her case the kind-heartedness is more theoretical than actual and she treats her lowly helpers more or less as non-persons.

Yet notwithstanding Kurosawa’s misanthropy, The Hidden Fortress captivates and sparkles. The story sweeps you up headlong, and the set-pieces are among the most big and energetic Kurosawa ever attempted. An early scene, for instance, where our two hapless protagonists have been taken prisoner inside a enemy fortress and then get caught up in a mass escape, is like something from a silent era Cecil B. DeMille spectacular, a churning ant-heap of bodies, all grubby skin and shiny leather. A later sequence, where they stumble comically into an intense, firelit religious festival and do their best to fit in, is one of those Kurosawa originals that has been imitated to death since (most notably in Disney’s The Jungle Book).

The Tohoscope (Japanese widescreen) film stock has a rawness unlike the slickness of Kurosawa’s later ‘scope movies, rough-textured, scratchy-looking, with blotchy blacks and glaring whites, but it’s ideal for the earthy subject matter, and it comes up very sharply on this HD transfer, with no grain or dirt, a high contrast, and plenty of detail in the moiling crowd scenes. Throughout, there are moments that stick in your mind for their beauty, as when the group set off on their trek to the freedom, then turn and see, in the distance, that their mountain hideaway is being burnt to the ground and that they have escaped just in time. The film is accompanied by an 8-minute interview with George Lucas (who borrowed the two lowly characters and the princess for Star Wars); he talks enthusiastically about Kurosawa’s visual storytelling and use of long lenses.

Yojimbo (1961) is tied with Seven Samurai as the most influential film Kurosawa ever made. It’s the granddaddy not only of the spaghetti western, but also of the Mad Max films and their progeny. It brought a new tone to the Japanese adventure story: violent, mocking, cynical. The opening is arresting: a lone samurai (Mifune again) wanders into a small town and as he strolls down the deserted, windswept main street he sees a dog trotting along with a severed hand. The plot – the hero playing two rival gangs off against each other to ensure their mutual destruction – is famous, largely because Sergio Leone stole it for A Fistful of Dollars, but don’t feel too bad for Kurosawa, because he lifted it from the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest.

Even if you come to the movie already knowing what is going to happen, Kurosawa’s parade of genre-defining moments will still leave you in awe: the weaselly representative of law and order, eager to have his palm greased; the tireless coffin-maker; the clueless but vicious thugs (including a troll-like giant with a big mallet – how many times has that trope been borrowed by now?). And then there’s Mifune’s nameless samurai – outwardly callous and irreverent, with no respect for anything and operating according to his own unintelligible code. It’s not that he’s bad, it’s just that this is a man who knows it’s uncool to seem to care about anything.

It’s probably the one Kurosawa film with a theme tune that you go away humming – a jazzy, cocksure melody that perfectly captures this liberating nonchalance. Throughout, both the script and the direction have a sheer panache which is exceptional even for such a clever filmmaker, with every beat, every sight gag, falling neatly into place, and it features some of Kurosawa’s most inventive camerawork – as in the moment when Mifune appears at the bottom of the street, while a pair of feet dangle in the foreground (they belong to a curmudgeonly sake-seller who has been punished for helping him).

Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and even to some extend The Hidden Fortress feel like grand artistic statements. Yojimbo and its sequel Sanjuro don’t; they present themselves as nothing more than entertainments, smart, slick, rather heartless. But even so they are packed full of a sly critique of Japanese society. As Philip Kemp points out in his accompanying audio commentary, Yojimbo can be read as an attack on the rise of the yakuza and their sinister involvement with big business, and it also offers a total debunking of the notion of bushido, the way of the warrior (Mifune’s character breaks all the rules by being dirty, by taking payment for his services and at one point by disgracefully losing his sword, although then again you can argue that he’s not so much anti-heroic as a new kind of hero who reckons nought to these things).

Sanjuro (1962) is, among other things, a humorous portrayal of the dangers of conformity and the habit of judging people on outward appearances. Both vices are exhibited to a comical degree by a group of hopelessly blundering young samurai who get themselves in hot water when they try to mount a crusade against the political corruption they see all around them. Fortunately for them, Mifune’s scruffy but worldly-wise samurai is there help them out, and together they attempt to rescue an honest chamberlain who has been taken prisoner by the crooks and their private army.

This is the closest Kurosawa ever came to making a Howard Hawks movie. It’s an altogether gentler affair than Yojimbo, and a modern audience will be wise to its twists and turns. But Mifune is in his element, and Kurosawa has endless fun using the samurai – who follow Mifune around like ducklings – to create various groupings and compositions. There’s much creeping around at night, spying and infiltration of the enemy HQ, daring rescues and escapes, plots and counter-plots, but all played out in a relaxed, good-natured way, and there’s even time for some comedy of manners when they spring the chancellor’s elderly, over-refined wife and try to get her to scramble over a garden wall. Kurosawa isn’t really known for his verbal wit, but the script is particularly elegant, littered with sharp and pithy remarks.

Both Yojimbo and Sanjuro were shot in gorgeously smooth widesceen which, bar a handful of tiny scratches, comes up beautifully on HD. Sanjuro is especially crisp – you can see the shiny worn patches on Mifune’s kimono, and a scene where a row of ostentatious decoy palanquins goes filing into the woods looks particularly picturesque. By way of extras, Alex Cox provides a pithy, 9-minute potted survey of Kurosawa’s life and career, plus a 5-minute intro in which he reveals that the arterial spurt in the film’s final quick-draw showdown was created with three gallons of chocolate syrup.

This box set also features a 49-minute discussion of Kurosawa’s achievement and influence by Tony Rayns, and an illustrated booklet with essays by Philip Kemp. Watching these films in sequence only enhances your appreciation of all the things that make a Kurosawa movie different from any other – the director’s signature sweeping pans, his bravura set-pieces, his boldness in shaping narrative, the stock company of actors who reappear in different roles and become familiar faces, and even such trademarks as the typical Kurosawa weather – either withering heat, drenching rain or howling wind. His take on the world may at times be depressingly bleak, but Kurosawa’s films continue to exhilarate with the brilliance of their ideas and execution.

DVD Review: Werewolf Rising

Starring: Melissa Carnell, Matt Copko, Brian Berry
Director: BC Furtney
Rating: 4/10

After an absence of twenty years, Emma (Melissa Carnell) returns home to the old family homestead on the edge of the woods, only to experience a complete absence of peace and quiet. For starters, Johnny Lee (Matt Copko), a beardy, beady-eyed escaped convict is hanging around at all hours. And then there’s old family friend Wayne (Brian Berry) – he takes a keen interest in her, but is it just paternal or is it something more? Then Johnny Lee gets bitten by a mysterious creature in the forest, and before you can say, “Down, boy!” he’s eating nauseating scraps, gulping water and running under the full moon.

For a good part of the time, BC Furtney’s low budget horror channels a slightly cleaned up Winter’s Bone vibe. Everyone has something wrong with them: Emma and Wayne are both recovering alcohols, Johnny Lee is an ex-drug addict. They’re all out here in the sticks, presumably, because they just can’t cut it in civilisation. Looking convincingly fragile, Melissa Carnell makes a good fist of her role, and the tension tightens as she helps the sickly, wounded Johnny Lee inside her little cabin, then puzzles over why he seems to be getting better rather than worse.

Most of this has some merit. All the same, it would be nice if the werewolf could have arrived on the scene a bit sooner, and that when it did it could have been a bit more convincing. As it is, it’s like watching someone being attacked by the contents of a horsehair sofa.

Still, the film puts a low-powered middle section behind it and bucks up considerably for an eventful last twenty minutes or so, with a snarling, bullet-riddled showdown and the unexpected appearance of a mysterious naked lady in the woods (ably played by the very striking Irena Murphy, and it’s a shame the director didn’t think to flesh out her part a bit more), followed by a kind of nightmare firelit orgy. Yes, you think, watching those scenes, now that’s what a werewolf movie should be like.

Blu-ray Review: The Beast

Starring: Guy Trejan, Lisbeth Hummel, Sirpa Lane
Director: Walerian Borowczyk
Rating: 10/10

Walerian Borowczyk’s most infamous film is a curious combination of country house farce, sex comedy and creature feature, all set to the jaunty tinkling of a Scarlatti sonata. It seems to creak into motion almost arthritically, as the Duke de l’Esperance (Guy Trejan), scion of an ancient line crumbling into ruin, plots to marry off his only son, Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti), to a wealthy American heiress, Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel). Lucy duly arrives, bouncing out of her Rolls, all wide-eyed with excitement. But would she feel the same if she knew that there’s a hairy monster in the de l’Esperance family tree and that Mathurin shows signs of being a chip off the old block?

If the family truly is cursed or whether it simply suffers from some infirmity in the bloodline and the rest is mere fear and superstition – all this is still a matter of debate by the end of the film, but it’s enough to ensure The Beast‘s enduring shock value, because bestiality is a taboo that shows no signs of going away any time soon. For the most part, though, the movie’s attacks on good taste are teasing rather than visceral, playing on the mind rather than the nerve-endings. Just as some of the characters have their way with each other on screen, so Borowczyk gives the viewer’s fondly held notions about heredity, noblesse oblige, innocence and virtue a good seeing to, but in a light-hearted, genteel way which leaves you respecting yourself in the morning. There’s even a certain cultural cache to it; The Beast belongs to a tradition of intellectual provocation, of serious frivolity, that goes back in France to Voltaire (who supplies the film’s epigraph).

Borowczyk is easily the equal of Bunuel in his ability to spring traps on the unwary, but the surfaces of his movies remain far fresher than Bunuel’s, which now (at least the ones in colour) seem a little stale and stagy. The Duke’s chateau is a character in itself, musty, distressed, shabby-chic, and Borowczyk’s set-dressing is brilliant and replete with symbolism – note the vitrine parked in a corner of the drawing room, which contains, like a religious relic, the torn and tattered corset of the Countess Romilda (the one reputed to have had congress with the hairy monster). Against this mouldering backdrop, riddled with secrets and forgotten codes, the three lusty young girls who feature in the story feel like a force for life, and that’s why their nude antics still give such satisfaction, even today when the internet is awash with naked ladies.

Lucy pleasuring herself with a rose and Countess Romilda (Sirpa Lane) shedding her clothes and her inhibitions in the woods are The Beast‘s two most scandalous set-pieces, but one shouldn’t overlook the role of Clarisse (Pascale Rivault), the Duke’s hippy chick daughter. The way in which she and Ifany (Hassane Fall), the well-endowed footman, are constantly interrupted in their sex games is presented as a throwaway running gag, but their eventual happy coupling makes a reassuring statement in a movie where relations between the sexes are on the whole strained. Oddly enough, these scenes also contain what are arguably the film’s most controversial moments, at least for modern tastes, the one example where Borowczyk really does seem to go too far. Without cutting, the camera tracks Clarisse from her bed, which she’s just shared with Ifany, to her wardrobe, which she opens, revealing two young children who have been hiding there the whole time (and later there’s a reversal where Clarisse and Ifany are now in the wardrobe and they creep out, naked, past the sleeping boy and girl). It’s a set-up that, these days, would earn the producers a furious phone call from children’s services.

That aside, this is one of those rare movies where every element is just right, the costumes, the decor, the casting. Guy Trejan, reptilian as the Duke, the force of repression who is trying to keep the chateau’s dirty secret under wraps; the great character actor Marcel Dalio (best known for La Regle du Jeu) as Rammendelo, the Duke’s rebellious yet decrepit uncle; and Lisbeth Hummel, who immerses herself in the more intimate moments of her role but also shows a fine flair for physical comedy as she stumbles and skids around the chateau in nothing but her fur coat in the film’s frantic conclusion.

The Scarlatti harpsichord sonata which tinkles away during the dream sequences is in a way a perfect analogy for the film’s waspish humour – insistent, potentially annoying, like a gnat in the ear. But The Beast also cheers and refreshes, exposing the primitive fears and superstitions about our own nature that lurk in men’s hearts while at the same time detaching you from them with its crispness of touch, its cool, classical rationality. Because the beast stands not so much for our base natures as for our terror of them, and that’s why what the lovely countess does to it out there in the woods is a service to us all.

The 2K transfer from the original 35mm camera negative is very good. There’s just a tiny flicker of grain across some of the faces on occasion, but the Duke’s chateau, the red walls, the dusky ormolu and old leather bindings all come up with a new vividness of hue and fidelity of texture. The exteriors have a lovely sense of depth; the forest scenes have a lively play of light, and the establishing shot of the chateau, when Lucy drives up to it, could have come out of Downton Abbey. The audio, too, has clarity and presence.

One person’s shocking art porn is another person’s object of nostalgia: in a 57-minute “making of”, Noel Very, camera operator, talks fondly about The Beast to the accompaniment of a whole mass of silent 16mm footage of Borowczyk at work on the film on location at the Chateau de Nandy. We get to see the Panaflex camera that Borowczyk favoured, and the way he would direct scenes, with the eye of a designer, looking through the viewfinder and then telling the actors exactly where to stand within the frame. Borowczyk’s mouth never stops moving. It’s a shame we can’t hear what he’s saying, but this footage gives an extraordinarily vivid sense of what it was like to be on set with him. He’s here, there and everywhere, adjusting hair and makeup, coaching his actors through the smallest of gestures (which must have driven some of them mad). There are also shots of the young Very, the camera mounted on his shoulder, in the manner of a Steadicam. Oh, and we also learn that Borowczyk prepared the beast’s sperm himself, at home, and brought it into work in a lunchbox. For anyone who assumes that The Beast is just a piece of soft-core porn cynically knocked off with little thought or care, this documentary tells a different story.
Also included on the disc is the short film Venus on the Half-Shell, a montage of erotic drawings which reveals Borowczyk’s peculiar obsession with snails.

Following on from their limited edition box set, Arrow have released five Walerian Borowczyk titles on Blu-ray: The Beast, Immoral Tales, Blanche, Goto Isle of Love and The Short Films & Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal.

Blu-ray Review: Immoral Tales

Starring: Lise Danvers, Paloma Picasso, Florence Bellamy
Director: Walerian Borowczyk
Rating: 10/10

Walerian Borowczyk had one of the more unusual career trajectories in cinema, going from being the creator of charming homespun animations to – at least in the public mind – a notorious pornographer. It’s as if Oliver Postgate went from making The Clangers to directing Deep Throat. Except that Immoral Tales (1974), the film that marked this startling switch-around, is no ordinary piece of soft-core porn, and in fact there’s no other film quite like it.

It divides into four sections, receding back into time as though to remind us, reassuringly or not, that no one era has a monopoly on naughtiness. The modern day tale The Tide concerns a bossy lad, André (Frabrice Luchini) who lures a submissive younger cousin, Julie (Lise Danvers), to an isolated cove and there inducts her into a convoluted sexual fetish. In the Belle Epoch-set Therese Philosopher, an overly pious young girl (Charlotte Alexandra) is locked in a junk room that is like an Antiques Roadshow expert’s wet dream and there delivers her body unto God with the aid of a cucumber. Erzebet Bathory, the longest of the sections, recounts the familiar story of the 17th century Countess who bathed in blood, and Lucrezia Borgia offers a snapshot of wickedness in 15th century Italy.

Immoral Tales is a tricky movie to discuss, you can argue it so many ways. It’s easy enough to mistake the film simply for a parade of cheesecake. And yet recurring themes are there, if you hunt for them: all of the women in the film are imprisoned, in one way or another, and suffer willingly or unwillingly at the hands of the forces of oppression – overbearing boyfriends, cruel elders, the state, the Church, family. One way of looking at it is that the film knocks these tyrants off their pedestals and has the last laugh by turning them into figures of titillation within the context of a marginalized, often outlawed genre. Another way of looking at is that the victims, the girls, ascend out of their circumstances in some sense by being transfigured by the director’s artistry. We’re not seeing the thing itself, but a picture of the thing, and the picture is very beautiful. It’s these contradictions that keep Immoral Tales vibrant and alive.

Therese Philosopher has been transferred from a blown-up 16mm print and seems a bit soft and blotchy, but all of the other segments have enjoyed a 2K transfer from a 35mm interpositive (with sound from the original magnetic reels), and the results are first class, even better than on The Beast. Even if you know the film of old, you’ll feel like you’re seeing it for the first time.

Of all Borowczyk’s films, this is the one that is the most informed by a Fine Arts sensibility. Watching this Blu-ray, you’ll marvel at his painterly eye. The Tide, for instance, is drenched in rugged yet gauzy Post-Impressionism. On a human level, you’ll probably want to punch the garrulous André and rescue the piteous Julie from his clutches, but at the same time you’re enthralled by the way Borowczyk uses the flinty blues and slatey greys of the Normandy coastline, the mist-shrouded cliffs, a sky thronging with seagulls that twinkle like stars, to isolate and draw attention to the rosy pinks of Julie’s flesh, especially her mouth, the one burst of colour in the entire panorama.

Erzebet Bathory begins in a bawdy, Breugel-like manner, all dung heaps and lusty peasants bathed in a golden sunlight. There’s a shot of a cow in a manger where you can see the subtle silvery-blonde hues of the beast’s fur in amazing detail. Then the Countess arrives, black-caped and feather-hatted, and the scene transitions to Bathory’s bathhouse and the Countess’ Alma-Tademaesque harem of nudes. It’s a unashamedly sybaritic vision, as much about lush fabrics, harmonious colours and intriguing perspectives as it is about bare flesh. Paloma Picasso’s self-possessed Countess, wafting around in nothing but a train of lace and pearls but with a dangerous alertness in her eyes, almost seems to sum up the segment’s aesthetic. It’s a piece of filmmaking that has more in common with the paintings of Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David than it does with your average blue movie, and it’s mere cultural convention that stops one from according it a similar respect.

Like Erzebet Bathory, Lucrezia Borgia shows Borowczyk at the height of his powers. It’s also one of the most shocking things Borowczyk ever filmed. Her husband dragged off to be murdered, Lucrezia (Florence Bellamy) indulges in kinky sex games with the Pope and a Cardinal, who also happen to be her father and brother (played, in another twist of perversity, by a real father and son). As the Pope thrusts his tongue into the corner of her mouth, even now you think, “Oh no, he didn’t…” and you can’t help wondered whether the actors were afraid of being struck by lightning at the end of each take.

But it’s hard to hold onto a feeling of censure. The sacrilegious orgy unfolds with the glow, the jewelled colours of a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece. Florence Bellamy looks stunning in her Renaissance togs and even more so out of them. Borowczyk’s skill at counterpointing naked flesh with ornate costumes and décor is breathtaking. The whole thing is a feast for the senses; and not just for the eye, for the ear as well, as the visuals surge to the rhythms of Guillaume de Machaud’s ravishing Messe de Notre-Dame, sounding rich and full-bodied on this transfer. This trio of great sinners and heretics seem to disappear in a blaze of seraphic bliss.

In both of these segments particularly, the images have such bite and force in HD, they encourage you to float on an aesthetic high and lose yourself in an appreciation of the world as pure surfaces. But at the same time you’re aware, in the back of your mind, that you could be regarding things in an altogether different light, that the Count’s harem is meant for the slaughter and the Borgias are about as cuddly as an armful of snakes, and this knowledge serves the same purpose as the grinning skull or gathering clouds that Old Masters would tuck into the corners of their canvases.

As seen on this transfer, Immoral Tales is simply one of the most beautiful films of the 1970s, brimming over with radiant camerawork, authentic-looking costumes, meticulous set-dressing and disarmingly natural performances from its array of pretty young actresses. (Anyone keen on antiques will wonder where on earth Borowczyk sourced the marvellous bric-a-brac packed into every corner of his movies, and the answer is that he made a lot of it himself.) While it’s never going to be everybody’s cup of tea, it at least deserves to be reassessed by those interested in the figurative arts and not averse to a naked lady or two. Hopefully this Blu-ray release will finely see it being appreciated and understood.

Immoral Tales was originally supposed to include a fifth segment, The Beast of Gevaudan, but it was dropped, the footage being recycled as the dream sequence in The Beast (1975). This disc comes with an alternative version of Immoral Tales that restores that fifth segment. Transferred from a 16mm print, the segment is a bit grainy, but fans will be very glad to have it as it contains several minutes of extra footage: there’s a much lengthier shot of Sirpa Lane running along in just her corset, seen from behind, and a few additional seconds of her fondling the beast’s appendage and covering up his body with leaves. Oh, and there’s quite a bit more sperm.

A Private Collection (1973) is a 12-minute long pseudo-documentary, supposedly about a gent showing off his dazzling collection of vintage erotica – a wax doll that rolls its eyes as it masturbates, a mechanical silhouette that rogers away vigorously, etc. In fact, many of the automata were constructed by Borowczyk himself, which only makes it even more fascinating. It’s a delight and the picture is lovely. There’s also another version, longer by two minutes and more explicit, including some surprisingly dirty Victorian photographic porn. Be warned, both versions contain gratuitous amounts of scratchy wax cylinder music.

Also, there’s a 5-minute intro to Immoral Tales, and a 16-minute “making of”. In this, we get to see the home-made harness that camera operator Noel Very designed so as to mount the Panaflex camera on his shoulder for tighter shots (apparently Borowczyk’s enthusiasm for DIY was catching). We also learn that Isabelle Adjani was approached to play the part of Julie in The Tide and turned it down, and that they used 30 gallons of real blood (from pigs) for the Countess Bathory’s bath. Finally, there’s a 7-minute piece in which some of Borowczyk’s old friends and collaborators get together for a chat over lunch. Here the juiciest snippets of gossip come from the delightful Florence Dauman, daughter of Anatole Dauman, the movie’s producer. She reveals that, having had a small role in the Bathory segment, she was due to play the part of Clarisse, the Duke’s randy daughter, in The Beast, but her father refused to let her do it and was moreover horrified when he caught sight of her naked in Immoral Tales’ rushes.

Following on from their limited edition box set, Arrow have released five Walerian Borowczyk titles on Blu-ray: The Beast, Immoral Tales, Blanche, Goto Isle of Love and The Short Films & Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal.

DVD Review: Fading Gigolo

Starring: John Turturro, Woody Allen, Sharon Stone
Director: John Turturro
Rating: 7/10

Fading Gigolo lives up to its name by being lazily seductive – you probably shouldn’t fall for it, but you do. The story won’t win any awards for gritty realism. New Yorker Murray (Woody Allen), bitter and strapped for cash after his beloved second-hand bookshop goes belly up, comes up with the idea of pimping out his friend Fioravante (John Turturro), a part-time florist, to his horny dermatologist (Sharon Stone). Against all the odds, Fioravante turns out to have a knack for this sort of work, and they soon have a thriving concern on their hands with an eager clientele. But when Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), the widow of a highly respected rabbi, starts benefiting from Fioravanti’s attentions, their activities arouse the suspicions of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a member of an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood patrol.

It’s a plotline that tilts towards wish-fulfilment for writer/director John Turturro. His Fioravanti is an unworldly soul who has always eschewed the rat race, and who can only turn to being a male prostitute because he allows himself to be persuaded that comforting needy, depressed, insecure women is a noble calling. But pushing the film the other way are all the female characters, who are vividly individualized, with plenty to say for themselves, and dazzling cast – especially Sofia Vergara’s cougarish Selima, and Vanessa Paradis’ touching widow, hemmed in by her grief, her own beliefs and the expectations of her community: the rawness and realness of her situation is a reprimand to Fioravanti, who can only be so glib and smooth because he is so detached from ordinary responsibilities.

Given that Woody Allen has a prominent supporting role, it’s hard not to think of this as in some sense a Woody Allen film, but actually it all feels much grimier and more hip than if Allen had helmed it himself. It’s even quite sexy at times (not in Allen’s scenes, perish forbid). Turturro’s direction shows a keen sense of place – this is a story that couldn’t occur anywhere else but within these few city blocks – and a brash way with New York’s multicultural melting pot, most noticeably in the fashion in which it makes the city’s Orthodox Jewish community a key plot-point and butt of mockery.

Whatever you think of it, his decision to do this undoubtedly vitalizes the film, as does his handling of Allen, who is more consistently funny here than he has been in years, especially in a scene where he is strong-armed into a car with tinted windows by a bunch of heavies with sidecurls and scuttles straight out the other side – Allen, it turns out, can still do physical comedy. Unlike Fiorvanti, who has his scruples, Murray is all about the cash. You could wag a finger and say “Jewish stereotype”, but it doesn’t feel that way because Allen seems only too delighted to play the rogue.

Another of the movie’s saving graces is an ongoing theme that develops over time. We see Fioravanti arranging flowers with delicate hands, we see Avigal meticulously boning a fish. If flowers and fish are to be savoured, the message seems to be, there’s a correct way of doing these things, one that requires patience, and your whole life should be treated with a similar fastidiousness and attention to detail. Instant gratification is no gratification at all. Not a bad moral to take away from a movie about a male hooker.

Blu-ray Review: The Wind Rises

Starring: Emily Blunt, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stanley Tucci
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Rating: 8/10

The fact that The Wind Rises is almost certainly Hayao Miyazaki’s last film places a special burden of expectation on it. Even before the credits roll, you’re already a bit quivery, ready for a leave-taking. In some sense it does exactly what you would expect. It rehearses old themes and motifs – illness, the clash between idealism and militarism, funny-looking aeroplanes – one final time, and the mood of nostalgia in Joe Hisaishi’s score (his last score for a Miyazaki film – just think!) is almost palpable. But yet – and this is a real surprise – we also find the veteran director breaking new ground. Because who ever thought he’d have a go at making a biopic?

The film’s protagonist is the aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed many WWII Japanese fighters, including the “Zero” – think the Japanese equivalent of R.J. Mitchell, inventor of the Spitfire. We follow him from childhood, a boy who longs to be a pilot but suffers from poor eyesight, through his student years and his early unsuccessful prototypes right through to the height of his career just before the outbreak of war. But there are complications, because Miyazaki seems to have morphed this historical personage into a portrait of his own father (who ran a company making parts for the Zero) – most particularly by giving him an ill-fated romance with a girl suffering from TB, as Miyazaki’s mother did.

Unless you happen to be a particular admirer of the real-life Jiro Horikoshi, none of this is likely to trouble you, though. Whatever games it plays with the truth, the film’s portrayal of Japan in the ’20s and ’30s is persuasive. We start off in a landscape of steam launches, locomotives and wooden planes that to us seem enchanting, but to the young Jiro and his friend and fellow designer Honjo are signs of a backward nation decades behind its rivals. At the Mitsubishi plant in Nagoya where Jiro goes to work, oxen are used to haul prototypes onto a tussocky testing field. Surrounded by poverty, the young engineers are uneasily aware that they are being paid handsomely to build planes which the country can ill afford.

Animation is rarely used as a tool for social observation, or to chart the minutiae of changing times, but that’s what Miyazaki and his team do impressively well here. In terms of historical reconstruction, perhaps the highlight of the movie is the sequence where Jiro and Honjo go to to Germany, to the gleaming Junkers plant, and the animators treat us to a loving recreation of the mammoth G.38 transport plane, with its huge wings where passengers could sit and gawp down at the passing landscape – it’s a triumph of accuracy (at least one assumes it is), and a gorgeous moment for plane buffs.

If Junkers is an example of what can be achieved through industrial might, the sheer fancifulness and delight of taking to the air are embodied in the friendly, bowler-hatted figure of the Italian engineer Giovanni Caproni, who appears to Jiro in dreams which are among the most enchanting sequences in The Wind Rises, recapturing the carnivalesque excitement of the early Miyazaki of Laputa and Cagliostro . (According to Wikipedia, the real-life Caproni was responsible for the world’s first multi-fatality aviation disaster, but never mind.) These culminate in an evocation of Caproni’s Ca.60 Noviplano, his monstrous nine-wing flying boat, which looks like something straight out of Porco Rosso. (Miyazaki has such fun with these bits, you can’t help wondering what a Ghibli movie entirely devoted to Caproni would be like.)

One of the most appealing things about The Wind Rises is its emphasis on the role of the imagination in engineering. Sitting at his desk with his slide rule, Jiro takes off into a world of ideas and pure forms, and it’s in these moments, as well as in those dream sequences with Caproni, that the film finds its high spirits. But the pull of reality, the knowledge that he is making planes that will be used in a ruinous war, is there too, and it reminds you of the divisions in earlier films, such as the one between the forest gods and the mining town in Princess Mononoke. Only, unlike Ashitaka in Mononoke, Horikoshi never makes a stand.

Perhaps that’s why The Wind Rises is full, not just of a feeling of life flashing by, but of what is almost a sense of wistful futility. It’s a strange summing up for a director whose career is jam-packed with glittering achievements. But then, perhaps it isn’t meant to be a summing up, but rather the beginning of something new. A biopic, even a highly fictionalized one, is inevitably more episodic and scattered in its effects that the well-wrought fantasies for which Miyazaki is famous, but in its own way The Wind Rises is just as admirable – a fine demonstration of how to tell a subtle, grown-up story in animation.

The Blu-ray comes with a feature where you can look at the original storyboards in comparison to the finished film. There’s also a 1 hour, 27 minute round table discussion with Miyazaki and others. This feels a little awkward initially and it takes a while for the participants to warm up, but eventually some interesting details emerge as the director takes about the real Jiro and his hope that the project would signal a new direction for the studio. He also admits to crying when he saw the finished film – ah, the white wizard of anime is only human after all.

Blu-ray Review: Salvatore Giuliano

Starring: Frank Wolff, Salvo Randone
Director: Francesco Rosi
Rating: 9/10

Salvatore Giuliano – the Sicilian Robin Hood, so-called – might give his name to the title, but in all other respects he’s an elusive figure in this classic docudrama. We see him mainly from the back, in a white dust coat and sporting cap, forever darting out of view. The only time we get a really good look at him is when he’s lying in the morgue. (That’s not a spoiler, the film opens with his death, shot three times in mysterious circumstances.)

But then this is no conventional portrait of a popular hero. It’s a demystification, a cool-headed inquest. And anyway, director Francesco Rosi is less interested in Giuliano as an individual than in what his rise and fall tells us about the nature of power in Italy in the post-war years.

The script is a model of clarity, moving around freely in time, following the evidence rather than the chronology, and explaining the situation so that even a non-Italian viewer can become versed in the subtleties at work. The film breaks broadly into two halves – the discovery of Giuliano’s body and the subsequent official proceedings, intercut with flashbacks to his infamous career, and then a trial concerning the involvement of his men in the notorious Portella della Ginestra massacre of 1947, when eleven peasants celebrating May Day were murdered. We learn how Giuliano, a mountain bandit, was recruited to fight for Sicilian independence, and how, once that was achieved, he was abandoned by his political paymasters and became a thorn in their side, taking to kidnapping and extortion. And we see the more and more extreme attempts made by the police and army to dislodge him, with the people of his hometown Montelepre caught in the middle. What emerges in a picture of a ruling elite where everyone is in bed with everyone else. “Outlaws, police and the Mafia – they are an unholy trinity,” says Giuliano’s second-in-command at one point. And there are questions – how exactly did Giuliano die? And were his men really involved in the Portella della Ginestra massacre, and if so, who put them up to it?



Throughout, the tone is cool, dry, dispassionate, unemotive, Rosi’s own undoubted fury held in check. Filming in the actual locations where much of this took place, using locals as actors, Rosi achieves a level of authenticity which isn’t just impressive for its own sake, it’s also highly revealing – looking at the town of Montelepre, with its gaunt, closed in houses, you instinctively grasp the psychology of a people who respond to representatives of centralized authority with stubbornness and silence.

Dramatically, the story may be all shades of grey, but visually, Rosi plays with great slabs of light and shade. He shoots from low down, creating monolithic, mythical images. Sunlight pours down from overhead on stark landscapes and townships that seem to etch themselves onto the screen – monuments of permanence that people move across like shadows. In a way, the film conveys a contradictory message. Rosi’s documentary impulse suggests that all this can and must change; his bleak, scorching vision of Sicily suggests the opposite, that it will never be other than what it is. But those are the sorts of tensions that make a piece of art vital and fascinating.




This Blu-ray boasts a 4K restoration from the original camera negative, with a restored soundtrack. It’s simply one of the best HD transfers of a black-and-white film you’re likely to see. Detail is fine-grained, the blacks of cars and umbrellas satisfyingly inky. The deep focus camerawork is pitilessly sharp. Throughout, the actors stand out in an almost 3D way against the rugged scenery. You’ll have your own favourite shots, but mine includes the early top-down view of the dead Giuliano, surrounded by police, reporters and gawpers. Another set-up that comes across very well is the one where the army draw up for a dawn raid on Montelepre, with the town on the hill ahead and the rocky skyline (Giuliano’s domain) beyond – three layers of the story caught in one telling image.

Turning to the extras, first up is a 55-minute Italian-made documentary from 2001. Filmed in his book-lined flat, Rosi talks about his early life, the start of his career in theatre and then working for Visconti, and he also airs his views on, in his own words, “the relationship between people and power.” He goes back to some of the locations of Salvatore Giuiiano and describes how he reconstructed the Portella della Ginestra incident with locals from nearby towns. Along the way there are some clips from his films, including a jarring one of James Belushi speaking dubbed Italian.
There’s also a more recent, 12-minute interview with Rosi, in which he explains why Giuliano is largely absent from the film. In addition, there’s a 14-minute featurette which revisits some of the movie’s locations; Giuliano’s nephew takes the opportunity to get a lot off his chest about Sicily’s ongoing grudges with mainland Italy. Finally, there’s a 10-minute piece in which a journalist roundly dismisses Giuliano’s reputation as the Sicilian Robin Hood and sums him up as a “Mafia hit man”, but also argues that his men were unlikely to have been responsible for the deaths at Portella della Ginestra. Given the recent Scottish referendum, there could hardly be a better time to rediscover a film which deals so powerfully with themes of local autonomy and a sense of disenfranchisement, and it’s well served by this excellent release from Arrow Video.