Four of the best movies ever made arrived on Blu-ray this week, all of them in black and white and three of them silent. They flopped when first released, but posterity has been kind, and smart.
Night of the Hunter (1955) was actor Charles Laughton's directorial debut. He produced a gripping tale of evil and goodness, with the feel of an ageless fable, but audiences stayed away and Laughton never got to direct another movie. He was devastated.
Every element of this film works. Robert Mitchum, with LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE on the other, is by all appearances a passionate preacher, but in reality he's a villain seeking the proceeds of a robbery. He will live with Shelley Winters to get close to the money, and he will terrorize and chase her two children to find out where the cash is hidden. If there is light, it comes late in the game from Lillian Gish.
Some people couldn't believe Laughton directed the film. Fortunately, he left the camera running while he worked with the actors, particularly the children. His widow, Elsa Lanchester, gave the rushes to film archivists. Robert Gitt assembled a 150-minute work, Charles Laughton Directs Night of the Hunter, that shadowed the finished film scene by scene and showed how effectively Laughton drew the performances he wanted from his cast. That 2002 work is included on this week's Criterion DVD and Blu-ray.
Fritz Lang's silent Metropolis (1927) needed its own reconstruction. The German director's big-budget dystopian melodrama about sky-high luxury for the rich and underground oppression for the workers flopped at the box office. It lost so much money that Paramount in the United States chopped the film by an hour. A somewhat restored version was shown a decade ago, but the original was thought to be lost forever. Then archivists in Buenos Aires found a scratched print dating from 1927.
The 25 minutes of restored scenes in the new 148-minute Metropolis are in visibly worse shape than the rest, but, as the extras on the Kino DVD and Blu-ray observe, the plot is now clearer. The actors can be hammy but the story and visuals are compelling (and influenced such films as Blade Runner). Brigitte Helm (playing two roles) is a marvel as a party-hearty robot who drives the elite into a sexual frenzy.
Charlie Chaplin, convinced that dialogue was the enemy of physical comedy, made Modern Times (1936, on Criterion) largely without dialogue years after sound came to the cinema. He constructed his movie one flawless set-piece at a time: the Little Tramp (in his final appearance) being pulled through the gears of a machine, or acting out after ingesting cocaine ("nose powder") in jail, or trying to penetrate a crowd as a waiter (and then singing in fluent gibberish). Social comment is woven throughout: scenes of labourers being ground down by the Depression, marching for justice and being pushed back (or worse) by police.
The DNA of the fourth film, Buster Keaton's 45-minute Sherlock Jr. (1924), is most obviously in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. The projectionist hero (Keaton), framed for a theft, fantasizes that he can walk into the film he is projecting. After tumbling through a few scene changes, he interacts with the characters onscreen. A detailed bonus on the Kino Blu-ray - which also contains Keaton's 63-minute film Three Ages (1923) - looks at how Keaton achieved his miraculous special effects.
If you're looking for a more popular film - indeed, the most popular film of all time, judging by box-office receipts - James Cameron's Avatar (2009) is back on DVD and Blu-ray this week, still in 2-D, but 16 minutes longer than before, with behind-the-scenes bonuses. Really, though: Spend some time with the first four movies. They're worth it.
ALSO NEW THIS WEEK
The Kids Are All Right (2010) Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a lesbian couple whose teenage kids contact the sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo) who sired them. Well, things get a bit complicated, though director and co-writer Lisa Cholodenko says in a commentary that she didn't want "sperm-donor dad to come in and be the villain or the creep. ... I don't really want to sacrifice any of these characters." The three making-of features are four, three and two minutes long, so don't blink.
Coopers' Christmas (2008) When it played at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008, this was called Coopers' Camera, but someone clearly thought it had potential as a holiday perennial. It's Christmas Eve, 1985. Nancy Cooper (Samantha Bee) is unhappily married to Gord (Jason Jones, Bee's real-life husband and fellow Daily Show contributor). Loopy relatives arrive; chaos ensues. There are witty moments in this low-budget comedy of discomfort, shot as if by the family's new video camera, though the escalating mania gets a bit tiring by the end. Dave Foley, playing a sleazy neighbour, shows more of his anatomy than it's safe to see.
Sondheim: The Birthday Concert (2010) To celebrate the 80th birthday of songwriter Stephen Sondheim, a who's who of musical theatre (Elaine Stritch, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, many more) takes the stage with the New York Philharmonic to sing 24 of his superb songs, mainly from Follies, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George. It's a love-in, with cute twists: George Hearn and Michael Cerveris, both of whom have played Todd, trade lines in songs from that show. Sondheim is visibly moved by it all.