Created by Daiei Studios as an unabashed cash-in on Toho’s burgeoning Godzilla franchise, the Gamera series features a giant, fire-breathing turtle that can fly using jet power when it retracts its limbs into its shell. Much like Godzilla, Gamera is clearly the antagonist of the first film in the series, only to become a cuddlier, kid-friendly creature in subsequent films. Indeed, by the third or fourth film, Gamera is overtly invoked as a protector of children, a role it will continue to enact thereafter. With its quasi-documentary style and repeated invocation of scientific authority, Gamera the Giant Monster takes its tonal cues from the first Godzilla film. But where Godzilla was spawned from very real fears about the consequences of underwater nuclear testing, Gamera the Giant Monster is as interested in the realm of myth and folklore as it is in verisimilitude, a preoccupation that will only increase over the course of the series.

While it may be ill-advised to cast our nets too deeply into the waters of thematic interpretation when it comes to movies with a giant monster turtle at their center, it’s nevertheless clear that the Gamera series has a few things on its mind, often enough announced at film’s end in the form of a neatly beribboned moral lesson (at least in the original Showa-era films from 1965 to 1980). Gamera vs. Barugon and Gamera vs. Gyaos, the second and third films, respectively, excoriate greed on both the individual and collective level. The latter pits corporate rapacity (a not uncommon target in mid-‘60s Japanese cinema) against the avariciousness of villagers looking to blockade the construction of an expressway for their own gain. Interestingly, the villagers end up paying penance for their misdeeds, while corporate know-how helps save the day, a mixed message if ever there was one.

Environmental concerns crop up in the seventh and final film of the Showa period, Gamera vs. Zigra, which is set in and around the Kamogawa Sea World facility. The film is a pitched battle between kaiju for control of the bathysphere, which stands as a pellucid metaphor for the state of the deep seas in the era of rampant pollution and the practice of overfishing. The “Heisei trilogy” puts ecological affairs front and center by suggesting that our collective treatment of the planet places it in constant jeopardy from oversized beasties of all sorts, a monstrous metaphor that demands no particular divinatory skills to be read.

The Gamera series takes myth and folklore quite seriously, even if it often plays fast and loose with its own internal mythology. The first film tentatively supplies an Atlantean origin for Gamera (a notion the “Heisei trilogy” picks up and runs with). Gamera vs. Barugon validates its “native warning” in the face of modern rationality. Gamera vs. Jiger has an ancient idol that protects against incursions of the titular antagonist in a way that combines both modes of thought. And Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris proposes mana, a ubiquitous life force derived from Polynesia mythology, as the source of Gamera’s fire-breathing powers.

In terms of sheer watchability, the first seven films range (depending, in part, on budgetary limitations) from modestly compelling to outright risible. Certainly it’s easy to see why they were deemed fodder worthy of ribbing on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But it’s precisely that sometimes goofy, handmade quality of the “suitmation” effects and set design that gives them their charm. The “Heisei trilogy” constitutes a startling step up in every aspect, from CG-sweetened effects to little grace notes of detail (both narrative and character-based), amounting to three of the greatest kaiju movies ever made. Alas, then, the second reboot Gamera the Brave stumbles backward into cuddlesome critter cuteness. It’s an unfortunately retrograde finale to a series that really deserved better.

Image/Sound

There’s not much information in the enclosed booklet about the provenance of the HD masters for the first eight films, other than that they were “prepared and supplied” by the current rights holder, the Kadokawa Corporation, while the ‘90s trilogy come from director-approved 4K restorations. The transfers look uniformly excellent, notwithstanding some minor issues with color density and grain levels that occur intermittently throughout.

Audio comes in Japanese and English Master Audio mono for the first eight films, sometimes accompanied by either an English dub prepared for American television or an alternate U.K. English dub. The later films add Japanese and English 5.1 Master Audio surround tracks, which are thunderous wonders, rocking the side and rear channels, and giving real presence and depth to the kaiju battle scenes. The earlier mono tracks range from the solid, if dynamically limited (the Japanese tracks), to the somewhat boxy and tinny (the English dub tracks), which is pretty much par for the course given the history of the series.

Extras

To match the sheer heft and wealth of bonus materials contained in Arrow Video’s Gamera: The Complete Collection box set, you have to go back to their 2016 release of The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast, which was similarly packaged in a large-format rigid box. Inside this one there’s a 130-page hardback that reproduces the four-issue Gamera miniseries from Dark Horse Comics in 1996, as well as a new prequel comic from artist Matt Frank, who also designed the outer box artwork. There’s an 80-page softcover that contains a rundown of the entire Gamera series from Patrick Macias, X-ray illustrations of the various kaiju monsters, an interview with director Noriaki Yuasa, and BTS dispatches from the ‘90s trilogy from Fangoria magazine. The eight individual discs come housed in a fully illustrated hardback with thick cardboard pages, each of which holds two discs in half-moon slits, which can make removal a bit of a challenge at times. Tucked inside the front cover is a foldout of “Gamera’s Map of Japan,” and on the last page are art cards for each of the films with artwork by Matt Frank.

The 12 films in the collection come with a staggering amount of bonus materials. There are introductions from Japanese cinema expert August Rangone for every title save Gamera the Brave. Rangone packs a lot of information into a compact run time, takes a suitably jocular tone, and often concludes with an amusing bit of ballyhoo. For a deeper dive into individual titles, there are commentary tracks for all 12 films by a variety of genre specialists. Alternate U.S. theatrical and TV edits are provided for several titles. A three-part, making-of documentary that runs over six hours is divided across the “Heisei trilogy” from the ‘90s. Finally, there are any number of archival interviews, featurettes, promotional materials, and even a comedic dub track or two. Whatever you make of the films themselves, Gamera: The Complete Collection is without a doubt one of the major home video releases of 2020.

Overall

Arrow Video has unleashed an absolute monster of a box set devoted to the exploits of our favorite giant, flying, saber-toothed turtle.

Cast: Kôji Fujiyama, Akira Natsuki, Kôjirô Hongô, Eiji Funakoshi, Reiko Kasahara, Ayako Fujitani Director: Noriaki Yuasa, Shigeo Tanaka, Shûsuke Kaneko, Ryuta Tazaki, Sandy Howard Screenwriter: Niisan Takahashi, Kazunori Itô, Richard Kraft, Shûsuke Kaneko Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 1174 min Rating: NR Year: 1965 - 2006 Release Date: August 18, 2020 Buy: Video

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Ostensibly about the bond between an Ozark mountain community and its land, Henry Hathaway’s 1941 Technicolor drama The Shepherd of the Hills reveals as much, if not more, about the love of a director toward the natural beauty of his home state. Filmed 7,000 feet above sea level in the forests around Big Bear Lake (roughly 4,000 feet higher than the altitude of the film’s southern Missouri setting), this adaptation of a bestselling Harold Bell Wright novel is a startlingly gorgeous paean to the golden meadows, dense pine canopies, and steep vistas of the San Bernardino Mountains—all of it bathed in the honeyed warmth of the California sun. Setting itself apart from other early Technicolor films that privileged pops of vibrant primary color, The Shepherd of the Hills is painted in delicate, earthy tones, giving the impression that we’re viewing its images through one of the bottles of illicit moonshine produced by its cantankerous central family, the Matthews clan.

The pride of the family is Matt (John Wayne), a cerebral, stubborn boy whose better qualities—including his love for good-natured local girl Sammy Lane (Betty Field)—are jeopardized by the bitterness he harbors toward the father who abandoned his family years earlier, leaving his mother to die while stunting him with an unsatiated hunger for revenge. Even as the film’s script identifies this fixation with a past trauma as a handicap on Matt’s heart, Hathaway betrays a deep compassion for the gravity of his situation in a number of scenes in which the boy visits his mother’s gravestone, located on one Moaning Meadow, a plot of land the family refuses to sell lest it cease to be the symbolic site of their accumulated grief.

Opposite Wayne, and bringing an unadorned directness to his role, is an aging Harry Carey as the enigmatic Daniel Howitt, a man of unknown origin and impressive means who arrives in this small backwoods community hoping to settle down there. In this town of scrupulously heeded rituals, however, Howitt is greeted by all but Sammy as an unwelcome outsider, a perception that only starts to break down as he embarks on a series of good Samaritan gestures that include funding the medical treatment of a blind dowager, Granny Becky (Marjorie Main). At first his generosity seems purely a matter of disposition, though gradually and with great subtlety, Hathaway hints at Howitt’s personal connection to the land. In a magnificent scene whose funereal tone matches that of Matt’s gravestone respites, Howitt takes stock of the abandoned old cabin in Moaning Meadow, meditating upon the objects left in the living room, all of them inscribed with Matt’s mother’s name.

The look and feel of this scene—largely scoreless, shot in rich chiaroscuro, and patiently cut to grant weight and significance to each image—matches the languid spaciousness of many of the film’s finest moments, all of which suggest a director enamored of the folksy lifestyles on display, and deeply respectful of this fictional community’s sense of history. Wright wrote The Shepherd of the Hills after summers spent in an Ozark commonwealth, where the author ostensibly drank in people’s mellifluous mountain-speak, which is carried off with casual confidence by the film’s actors. (“Mighty pretty thing for human gladness,” muttered by Granny Becky when she sees a friend’s joyful tear after a medical miracle restores her sight, is an especially memorable nugget.) That Wayne passes off his dialogue-heavy role—he gets two lengthy monologues, including one with Carey, his idol—with such melancholic nuance is particularly impressive after the actor’s breakthrough turn in Stagecoach just two years earlier, a performance that pointed to a more heroic, physical star persona.

In certain places, such as a closing shot of grazing sheep that drips off the screen with magic-hour dewiness, Hathaway’s reverence for his milieu very nearly borders on kitsch. But The Shepherd of the Hills is a story about the transformative power of optimism and forgiveness (Wright was a devout Christian), and Hathaway invests wholeheartedly in the premise, prioritizing hushed psychological drama over the action he was so known for. In granting considerable time and space to observe the slow revelations of his characters, and rooting them so firmly in natural splendor, he turns this artificially constructed scenario into something that feels not only authentic, but genuinely spiritual.

Image/Sound

Henry Hathaway and cinematographers W. Howard Greene and Charles Lang use Technicolor in remarkably counterintuitive ways in The Shepherd of the Hills, emphasizing the auburn warmth of log cabins and fireplaces and only letting certain wardrobe pieces depart from the muted chromatic palette. Though such a brownish patina may easily have appeared muddy in a digital transfer, what Kino Lorber has accomplished with this disc is stunning. The image is sharp with painterly detail and fine variations of color, albeit without ever appearing as though too much filmic character and grain was scrubbed away. The soundtrack isn’t quite as rich—it’s easy to long for more natural ambience that simply isn’t there in the source material—but in a film of so many quiet passages and whispered monologues, there’s never anything inaudible.

Extras

Film critic Simon Abrams delves into the film’s production history, its style, anecdotes about its cast, and even discusses the unlikely touristic legacy of the film’s Ozark setting in his well-researched commentary track. Also included here is a grab bag of contemporaneous trailers.

Overall

A generous ode to a rural community and a touching intergenerational drama lavished with pictorial beauty, Henry Hathaway’s The Shepherd of the Hills demands a more robust home-video treatment than Kino Lorber provides here.

Cast: John Wayne, Betty Field, Harry Carey, Beulah Bondi, James Barton, Samuel S. Hinds, Marjorie Main, Ward Bond, Marc Lawrence, John Qualen, Fuzzy Knight, Tom Fadden, Olin Howland, Dorothy Adams Director: Henry Hathaway Screenwriter: Grover Jones, Stuart Anthony Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 98 min Rating: NR Year: 1941 Release Date: November 3, 2020 Buy: Video

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Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, his first western as a director, has the sort of elementally simple narrative that propelled Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, as well as genre hallmarks such as Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon and George Stevens’s Shane. The story involves that old chestnut in which a mysterious man (Eastwood) rides into some town and helps its people prepare to do battle with bandits. Yet the bitterness lurking between the cracks of Shane and High Noon has been profoundly amplified here, as the townspeople are venal, greedy cowards who’re regarded by the drifter with a contempt that verges on the biblical. Next to High Plains Drifter, Eastwood’s midcareer masterpiece Unforgiven is sentimental, and hell, this film might even make Akira Kurosawa’s merciless Yojimbo, the wellspring for the modern American western, blush. Yojimbo punctured its Darwinian nihilism with joyous black comedy, while High Plains Drifter is funny in a more dread-inducing key, offering a lingering visit in purgatory while revealing notions of “society” to be a sham.

Early in High Plains Drifter, Eastwood establishes the film’s stark terms with a scene that’s perhaps more shocking now than it was in 1973. The drifter rides into the mining town of Lago and is harassed by a trio of toughs who’re used to having the run of things. After casually killing them with the skill and aplomb of Eastwood’s Man With No Name from Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy, the drifter runs into Callie (Marianna Hill), an attractive woman who picks an argument with him seemingly for the attention, which spurs the drifter to drag her into a nearby barn and rape her. The abruptness of this scene is chilling, and, yes, Eastwood maintains a certain macho ambiguity as to whether or not Callie “enjoyed” it as a reprise from coupling with the local beta males, though the action itself is terse, brutal, and unglamorized. Even more unnerving is the townspeople’s indifference to Callie’s violation, though we soon learn they have a habit of allowing atrocity to flower for their own convenience.

It’s hard to imagine any star now who’d be as willing to confront the disturbing implications of their “image” as strenuously as Eastwood does in High Plains Drifter, which elaborates on the eroticized heartlessness that he previously mined in Don Siegel’s The Beguiled. The drifter’s callousness is never soft-soaped, as this character suggests the apotheosis of the resentment that drives various Eastwood heroes who are constantly tasked with saving people who can’t stick up for themselves and—worse—have no gratitude for the services provided.

In scene after scene, the drifter degrades and exploits a town with a history of ceding power to maniacs, and Eastwood, a blossoming directorial talent at the height of his on-screen magnetism, uncomfortably makes room for the audience to enjoy these humiliations. We respond to his iconic authority, envisioning perhaps that we would be “him” in such a scenario, even if most of us would be among the lambs. Which is to say that High Plains Drifter honors and explodes the sicko pleasure of the vigilante film, which allows us to pretend that we’re the alpha and thusly indulge the alpha’s sense of superiority over what are, ironically, more accurate representations of ourselves. The film could be a libertarian’s dream, which is fascinating given Eastwood’s own conservative politics.

Yet Eastwood’s politics have rarely gone unchallenged in his films. High Plains Drifter periodically enjoys a superhuman loner’s power, which is expressed via bold imagery that evokes Leone’s aesthetic, only with a tinge of gothic neuroses. Yet this film also rues this community’s weakness as a perversion of democratic ideals. The drifter is an avenging angel, perhaps literally, who treats oppressed people such as Native Americans honorably, and who’s haunted by flashbacks of a marshal being beaten to death by a trio of outlaws with bullwhips.

This is among the most disturbing sequences of Eastwood’s career, as the town’s citizens watch the murder with paralyzed awe while shrouded in darkness as the whips crack into the air like gun blasts. One is primed to consider the legend of the dozens of people who watched Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered in New York City in 1964, an incident that has inspired many works, such as Harlan Ellison’s short story “The Whimpering of Whipped Dogs.” We are led to wonder, especially by the film’s final image, if the drifter is this marshal returned to even the ledgers—a suggestion that’s intensified by a perverse meta twist: The marshal is played by Buddy Van Horn, one of Eastwood’s most famous stunt doubles.

The film’s horror element is teasingly evocative, emphasized mostly via the sheen of Bruce Surtees’s otherworldly cinematography. Lago is positioned along and often above a large body of water that reflects the sky, subtly proffering the illusion that the town itself is in the clouds, a notion of heavenly paradise that the drifter destroys when he assumes control and orders the townspeople to paint every building a deep, dark red. This red town cuts to the truth of the lonely brutality of western settlement in general, and could’ve sprung out one of Roger Corman’s most surreal productions, particularly The Masque of the Red Death.

When the gang that killed the marshal returns to find this hellscape, its members are brutally dispatched before the drifter rides off into a desert that shimmers with primordial, hallucinatory heat. Unforgiven was said to challenge various valedictory motifs of the western and the revenge narrative, but it essentially allows us to like Eastwood’s character and to feel that delayed closure and justice have been achieved. High Plains Drifter is a more bitter brew, suggesting that violence begets violence indiscriminately, due to authority that’s derived from the acquiescence of populations who’d rather be comfortable than righteous.

Image/Sound

The image here can be a bit murky and soft on occasion, especially in interior shots, which is admittedly at least partially in keeping with the film’s aesthetic. Colors are terrific though—with the infernal reds, aquatic blues, and hot whites especially standing out—while the exteriors and facial and fabric details are sharp, with appealing levels of grain. Meanwhile, the 2.0 Master Audio track is rich and very nuanced, lending particular, disturbing body and vitality to the violent scenes, though the small sounds are also pristinely rendered.

Extras

In his audio commentary, filmmaker and writer Alex Cox astutely observes the various similarities and differences between High Plains Drifter and the films of Italian maestros like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci. Cox also celebrates the film’s superb sense of location, as High Plains Drifter is set in a western town that was built out of scratch, including functional interiors in many of the buildings. Instead of cutting from a picturesque location to an obvious set, Clint Eastwood and cinematographer Bruce Surtees frequently capture interiors and exteriors simultaneously, tightening claustrophobia as well as our impression of “knowing” this town. Mining his own filmmaking experience, Cox also talks of scenes he might’ve snipped or of the interior images he finds to be underlit, despite his obvious reverence for the film. In general, this is an enjoyable commentary, which allows room for many cross-references to Eastwood’s blossoming stock company. In new interviews, actors Marianna Hill, Mitchell Ryan, and William O’Connell speak of their various experiences working with Eastwood, all describing him as an erudite and unpretentious artist who trusts his actors and keeps them on their toes with his famous preference for single takes. An archive promo and trailers for other vintage Eastwood productions round out a slim yet engaging supplements package.

Overall

Kino Lorber outfits High Plains Drifter, one of Clint Eastwood’s bleakest westerns, with a sturdy transfer that honors its savage beauty.

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Billy Curtis, Mitchell Ryan, Jack Ging, Stefan Gierasch, Ted Hartley, Geoffrey Lewis, Dan Vadis, Anthony James, Walter Barnes Director: Clint Eastwood Screenwriter: Ernest Tidyman Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 105 min Rating: R Year: 1973 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video

Ostensibly the underdogs that the audience would ordinarily be rooting for, Chama and his band show themselves to be prone to gratuitous acts of cruelty, like tying a man to a post with barbed wire, proving little better than Harlan and his thugs when balanced on the scales of conventional morality. Chama, for his part, is an egomaniacal messianic type, content to sacrifice the lives of innocent peasants so long as it ensures his own continued existence. This makes his abrupt about-face so difficult to believe, when, out of nowhere, he decides to accept Kidd’s advice about turning himself over to the representatives of law and order whose authority he so vehemently (and, arguably, correctly) questioned earlier in the film.

That very notion of “justice for all” figures prominently in Joe Kidd’s climax. Just after the surreal sight of a locomotive crashing through several buildings, the final showdown between Kidd and Frank takes place in the very courtroom where the former was arraigned earlier in the film. Now Kidd occupies the judge’s chair, gun rather than gavel in hand. Sentence is passed with a single shot. Ultimately, Sturges’s film argues not in favor of self-interested establishment justice, nor the rights of a hardscrabble bunch of radicalized peasants, but instead for the justice of the six-shooter in the hands of a righteous man, neatly aligning Joe Kiss with Eastwood’s previous film, Don Siegel’s vigilante apologia Dirty Harry.

Image/Sound

Kino’s 1080p transfer of Joe Kidd looks terrific, capturing Bruce Surtees’s evocative cinematography in all its painterly, magic-hour glory. Colors are bright and densely saturated, flesh tones lifelike, and grain levels well-managed. The image reveals some real depth and excellent contrast. Kino use a two-channel Master Audio track that’s clean and clear, and places significant emphasis on Lalo Schifrin’s unfortunately rather middling score.

Extras

Filmmaker and author Alex Cox provides an authoritative commentary, albeit one that starts off a bit slow and seems on occasion out of sync with the on-screen events. Cox touches on the location shooting at Old Tucson and Lone Pine, California; the talented constellation of crew members that Clint Eastwood would work with again on his directorial projects; elements that Cox feels don’t particularly work in the film’s favor; and lots of comparisons between Joe Kidd and other westerns foreign and domestic. He’s particular astute when pointing out visual and narrative links to Sergio Corbucci’s masterful Italian western The Great Silence, including a tidbit about how Fox held up the film’s American release so that Eastwood could both direct and star in a remake that never actually happened. In an on-camera interview, actor Don Stroud discusses getting the role in Joe Kidd after working with Eastwood on Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff, the fractious relationship between director John Sturges and Eastwood, working with other cast and crew members, and filming his unusual death scene.

Overall

Joe Kidd ambles onto Blu-ray with an exemplary transfer and a couple of interesting extras.

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall, John Saxon, Don Stroud, Stella Garcia, James Wainwright, Paul Koslo, Gregory Walcott Director: John Sturges Screenwriter: Elmore Leonard Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 88 min Rating: PG Year: 1972 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video

Image/Sound

In short, a revelation, especially for those who own Blue Underground’s 2011 Blu-ray, on which the black levels are so strong that they sometimes threaten to swallow up the rest of the screen with them. No more, as the 4K restoration practically reinvents Daughters of Darkness right out the gate as rosy-faced Stefan and Valerie screw on the night train to Belgium, their compartment bathed in warm, naturalistic hues. The image is remarkably sharp across the board, which also means that there’s plenty of film noise, especially noticeable on the actors’ faces and especially light backgrounds, which won’t be a concern for anyone who likes being reminded of a time when all films were shot on celluloid. The English 5.1 DTS HD, which is preferable to the mono French dub, also consistently proves its might, especially when François de Roubaix’s superlative score fills the soundtrack.

Extras

Most of the extras here have been carried over from Blue Underground’s prior Blu-ray and DVD editions, including the self-serious and esoteric commentary featuring director Harry Kümel and a second with actor John Karlen and journalist David Del Valle that verges on proving Kümel’s apparent reservations about heterosexual masculinity entirely justified. You’ve got to love an actor who all but thanks the gay community for worshipping him and, in the same minute, licks his lips over his female co-stars, wishing he could go back and kiss them all over again. Not that Kümel and co-writer and co-producer Pierre Drouot prove much better when, as they’re taking a camera crew on a tour of the hotel locations where they shot Daughters of Darkness, they take pot shots at Danielle Ouimet’s allegedly robust measurements. Both Ouimet and Liza Minnelli look-alike Andrea Rou get a word in, and it’s a little saddening that the late Delphine Seyrig didn’t end up getting the same chance. All this chauvinism gets balanced by the inclusion of a third commentary featuring critic Kat Ellinger, whose enthusiasm for the film (and its restoration) is infectious from the start. Ellinger spent a decade writing Devil’s Advocates: Daughters of Darkness, and the knowledge that she brings to her commentary is enriched by conversations she had with Kümel at various points. No inclusion of Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride this time around, but de Roubaix’s score is included on its own separate disc. Finally, this three-disc set comes with a collectible booklet that includes a new essay by former Fangoria editor-in-chief Michael Gingold.

Overall

Making its 4K UHD debut, Daughters of Darkness gets a significant facelift from Blue Underground alongside a smattering of new extras.

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Danielle Ouimet, John Karlen, Andrea Rau Director: Harry Kümel Screenwriter: Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, Harry Kümel Distributor: Blue Underground Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 1971 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video

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The protagonist of Henry King’s The Gunfighter will seem familiar to audiences of the revisionist westerns that surfaced in the late 1950s and flourished in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Loosely based on Old West outlaw Johnny Ringo, Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo is a legendary killer with a gun that’s said to be as fast as Wyatt Earp’s, yet he’s beyond taking pleasure in such stature. He’s a solitary and regretful man in his mid-30s and carries the weight of his reputation in his anguished angular frame. In the film’s opening, we see Ringo kill a young hotshot looking to make a name for himself, and whom Ringo gives multiple chances to walk away. We keep hearing of how violent Ringo once was, yet what we see is a likable, tentative, assured person who desperately wishes to be left alone. And this contrast—between what we hear and what we see of Ringo—is intensified immeasurably by Peck’s performance.

Seen today, The Gunfighter has an incongruous element that many of its revisionist offspring lack. One may expect to see Warren Oates or Robert Ryan in the role of a taciturn, melancholy outlaw, as Peck is popularly associated with characters who embody a bedrock of shaman-like decency. But like the unduly sentimentalized James Stewart, Peck was willing to toy with this persona, which wasn’t cemented in 1950 at the time of The Gunfighter’s release. By this point, Peck had given what’s still his riskiest performance as the horny villain in King Vidor’s hallucinatory 1946 film Duel in the Sun, and had mined subtler forms of sexual obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case the following year. Which is to say that Peck as a killer may have been less startling for audiences seeing The Gunfighter for the first time in 1950.

Regardless of context, Peck doesn’t even attempt to conjure the evil of an iconic killer, as his Jimmy Ringo is refined and unruffled, seemingly untouched by violence, and this disjunction is the point here. King’s film is a tall tale—or, more accurately, a resonant celebrity myth constructed by a person who no longer wishes to play it. The relationships between Ringo and the residents of a town called Cayenne, where he holes up for a morning, suggest a parallel for how modern icons are both empowered and entrapped by their disciples. Ringo’s failure to look the part of the killer, which triggers much of the violence that occurs in The Gunfighter, mirrors how many of us expect our favorite athletes, actors, and singers to be more than mere people. The film understands such an expectation to be a dangerous kind of dehumanization.

King and screenwriters William Bowers and William Sowers, working from a story co-written by filmmaker André De Toth, cannily physicalize the notion of entrapment by celebrity throughout. Ringo hides out in a saloon from various fans, as well from enemies looking to kill him, in order to avenge either nonexistent sleights or incidents that weren’t Ringo’s fault. And all the while, King and cinematographer Arthur C. Miller accentuate the vastness of the saloon while vividly establishing the spatial relationships between the bar and the surrounding buildings, imparting the sense that Ringo could get plugged anytime from anywhere.

The claustrophobia of the setting and the compact time period recall subsequent modernist western prototypes such as Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon and Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma. King also savors intimate moments of small-town American life, detailing, say, the specifics of shopping for potatoes and onions, or of the day-to-day trials faced by Marshal Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), who has a relationship with Ringo that evokes the one between William Holden and Robert Ryan’s characters in Sam Peckinpah’s seminal The Wild Bunch. The film’s supporting characters indicate a flawed yet vibrant society that Ringo has divorced himself from via violence, while his long moments of thoughtfulness suggest atonement.

Yet Ringo’s ironic decency isn’t without sentimentality. The Gunfighter is highly critical of the young guns looking to bring down Ringo, while the protagonist himself, who once lived this sort of life, is uncriticized and unexamined—accepted by the filmmakers wholly as a doomed member of the reformed. If Ringo had shown even a trace of the crazy swagger that was said to once drive him—the kind of swagger that Michael Bien gave to a much different conception of the character in George P. Cosmatos’s 1993 western Tombstone—the film would have more bite. Think also of Clint Eastwood’s Will Munny in Unforgiven, or of the general air of hopelessness and viciousness that drives De Toth’s later, somewhat similarly plotted Day of the Outlaw. However, Peck communicates a supreme, restrained longing that quietly envelopes the film, imbuing it with a haunting, confessional grandeur. Like many postwar noirs, The Gunfighter is about a man who already knows he’s a ghost.

Image/Sound

Per the disc’s liner notes, this 4K restoration was undertaken by the Twentieth Century Fox Restoration Department in 2015. The image here is spotless: pristine and healthy, with sharp whites and rich, weighty blacks. This clarity particularly emphasizes the stature of Arthur C. Miller’s gorgeous deep-focus cinematography, which suggests the work of Gregg Toland. The disc’s single sound track, in English LPCM 1.0, is correspondingly nuanced, intensifying the film’s influential use of diegetic sounds to establish location and magnify suspense.

Extras

Two superb new supplements discuss the careers of director Henry King and editor Barbara McLean. Filmmaker, writer, and archivist Gina Telaroli offers an overview of King’s life, claiming that he was underrated because he lacked the flash of such contemporaries as John Ford and Raoul Walsh. Telaroli portrays King as a humble man and astute collaborator who was fascinated with the internal functioning of specific communities, such as a fair in State Fair, the military in 12 O’Clock High, and the western town of this film. Intriguingly, Telaroli compares King to documentarian Frederick Wiseman, perhaps the most famous portraitist of social infrastructure. Meanwhile, film historian J.E. Smyth charts the influence of McLean, who worked closely with King on several productions and was prized by studio head Daryl Zanuck as an auteur in her own right. McLean rose through the studio system and became so influential that she would sit on sets and tell directors when they needed to shoot more coverage for her cut, which often included working with the sound elements as well.

Nineteen-fifty was a big year for McLean, who not only edited The Gunfighter, which Smyth analyzes in exhilarating detail, but also Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, which illustrated her gift for balancing spectacle with performance. McLean’s accomplishments are incredible for anyone, let alone a woman working in a male-dominated industry in 1950, though Smyth pushes back against this perception, reminding us of the enormous role that women played in the shaping of classic Hollywood. Two archive supplements allow us to hear from the subjects themselves: audio excerpts of McLean, from 1970, and King, from 1971, from interviews that were both conducted by historian Thomas R. Stempel for the AFI’s Oral History Collection. These interviews offer more context about each filmmaker’s career and their work within the studio system. Rounding out a slim but noteworthy package is a booklet featuring K. Austin Collins’s essay “You Can’t Go Home Again,” which beautifully contextualizes The Gunfighter’s melancholia within the framework of postwar America.

Overall

With this characteristically beautiful disc, Criterion sheds light on an underrated, mournful western that anticipated the genre’s revisionism roughly a decade later.

Cast: Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier, Anthony Ross, Verna Felton, Ellen Corby, Richard Jaeckel Director: Henry King Screenwriter: William Bowers, William Sellers Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 84 min Rating: NR Year: 1950 Release Date: October 20, 2020 Buy: Video

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Since he first emerged on the international film scene with 1989’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto has evolved one of the most distinctive bodies of work within contemporary Japanese cinema. What’s more, he’s something of a one-man band—acting in, writing, directing, editing, and production designing his films. Arrow Video’s impressively compiled Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto contains eight feature films and two shorts, roughly half of Tsukamoto’s output over the last 30-plus years. The set provides an ideal opportunity to trace the emergence and development of the filmmaker’s key themes and visual motifs.

Though the individual surface textures of the films included in this box set may vary from, to take just one example, the harsh alienating cityscapes of his early films to some of the more bucolically inclined latter-day works, there are a few thematic constants that run like a scarlet thread throughout Tsukamoto’s filmography. There’s the ubiquitous emotional triangle (love, per se, not necessarily factoring into events), often with the focus on a strong, catalyzing woman caught between two very different men; an abiding interest in perverse, or at any rate extremely fetishistic, forms of eroticism; and a fixation on the human body, prone as it is to endless varieties of usually disturbing metamorphosis, in fraught relationship with its immediate environment.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man suggests the love child of a David Lynch and David Cronenberg film, combined with a little of Jan Švankmajer’s scrapheap stop-motion animation. The emphasis on the beauty of decay, not to mention the backdrop of a post-industrial heavy metal wasteland, could’ve been lifted straight from Lynch’s Eraserhead, while the progressive fusion of flesh and metal that Tetsuo’s nameless salaryman (Tomorô Taguchi) undergoes can be traced back to the biomechanical gun that James Woods pulls out of his gut in Cronenberg’s Videodrome. But the ultra-stylish deployment of these tropes is Tsukamoto’s own, epitomized by his razor-stropped editing techniques, set to the propulsive post-punk soundtrack of Chu Ishikawa, who went on to score most of Tsukamoto’s subsequent films.

The film’s eroticism is pronounced, starting with a round of sweaty sex between the protagonist and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara), followed by a surreal dream sequence where she sodomizes him with an immense serpentine strap-on, much to his chagrin. Things get even weirder in the final scenes when the wholly transformed salaryman is wooed by the “metal fetishist” (Tsukamoto) into complete bodily fusion. What emerges from their mating is a hybrid man-machine, resembling nothing so much as a giant cock rolling along abandoned Tokyo thoroughfares, as the duo promise to reduce the universe to dust and decay.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, from 1992, expands on the original in a number of ways. Gone is the high-contrast monochrome, traded in for full-color film stock that brings out the blues and grays of the modern and more prominently featured Tokyo cityscape. The cast has also been expanded from the central trio—here configured as two brothers (Taguchi and Tsukamoto) and one of their wives (Nobu Kanaoka)—to include a mad scientist (Torauemon Utazawa) and a pair of thyroidal weightlifting skinheads (Hideaki Tezuka and Tomoo Asada). And this time around the male leads are given something of a backstory involving childhood trauma and amnesia. When the repressed memory is finally recovered, it yields Body Hammer’s one real fetishistic flourish: an act of simulated fellatio, playing on that old gun-equals-penis metaphorical chestnut, that turns suddenly and gruesomely mind-blowing. Where the first film concluded with homo-eroticized destructiveness, the sequel proffers the reinstitution of the nuclear family, albeit against a backdrop of utter devastation.

Tokyo Fist, from 1995, begins by opposing Tsuda (Tsukamoto), another stereotypical salaryman, and his former schoolfriend, Kojima (Kôji Tsukamoto), who’s now a professional boxer. At first, the juxtaposition between the two types is clear-cut, but as the film progresses, and Tsuda takes up amateur boxing, Tsukamoto effectively blurs the boundaries between the two. At the same time, Tsuda’s fiancé, Hizuru (Kahori Fujii), explores radical body modification through tattooing and inserting metal rods into her flesh—in an obvious callback to the Tetsuo films. Tokyo Fist is Tsukamoto’s Raging Bull, where the body (especially the human face) does penance through its transformation into raw meat.

With its tale of a bereft loner out to score a gun and then some payback, 1998’s Bullet Ballet openly invokes another Martin Scorsese film: Taxi Driver. But Tsukamoto ultimately takes the film in a completely unexpected direction, teaming up his version of “God’s Lonely Man” (Tsukamoto) with a youth gang whose members, at first, seems to spend most of their free time kicking the shit out of him. What slowly emerges in an idiosyncratic spin on Taxi Driver’s notion of the generation gap, with the older man trying to save misguided youth from themselves. But, for Tsukamoto, age and experience only count for so much. Mostly it means you’re more proficient at coldly blowing away your competition.

A Snake of June, from 2002, is one of Tsukamoto’s most radical productions. It’s also his most flagrantly fetishistic. The setup is more or less straightforward, in keeping with your average Japanese pink film: Shutterbug and voyeur Iguchi (Tsukamoto) blackmails a neglected housewife, Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa), into some very public displays of exhibitionism. But about halfway through the script flips, and the timeframe alters, going back over events from the POV of Rinko’s husband, Shigehiko (Yûji Kôtari). Then, in its final act, the film shifts gears again into a surreal conflation of all three viewpoints, where time and place seem to come unmoored. Whatever exactly transpires, the film ends with Tsukamoto’s most unambiguous embrace of the married couple as a desiring machine geared for mutual gratification.

Where most of Tsukamoto’s earlier films had been concerned with acquiring self-knowledge through the process of transformation, 2004’s Vital explores techniques of stripping away as a means to wisdom and existential acceptance. Suffering amnesia as the result of a car crash that killed his girlfriend, medical student Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano) discovers that the body currently on his dissecting table belongs to her. The film suggests that Hiroshi’s recollection of his relationship with Ryôko (Nami Tsukamoto) increases the deeper he delves into her innards. Of course, this being a Tsukamoto film, Hiroshi is at the same time engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with straight-A student Ikumi (Kiki) that involves erotic asphyxiation. The film’s final images are a memory of nature’s verdant glory. But trying to decode precisely whose memory it is gives the ending the perfect note of ambiguity.

Suggesting a distaff spin on Fight Club, 2011’s Kotoko uses Tsukamoto’s disorienting editing techniques to put us squarely inside the headspace of the title character (Cocco), who suffers from schizoid visions of aggressive doppelgangers. Despite this description, the film plays for long stretches as a demented romantic comedy, after Kotoko meets famed novelist Seitaro Tanaka (Tsukamoto). Not surprisingly, their relationship consists of her plunging forks into Seitaro’s hands and beating him to a bloody pulp, for which he seems genuinely grateful. But when this regimen has her feeling whole again, Seitaro picks up and leaves (it’s implied that he’s only interested in her so long as she’s sick). Both Kotoko and the film soon spiral downward into one of Tsukamoto’s most heartbreaking final scenes.

Killing, from 2018, is a gory exercise in turning the conventions of the samurai film against themselves. There’s no glory or honor to be found anywhere in this tale of an older samurai, Sawamura (Tsukamoto), recruiting a younger man, Mokunoshin (Sosuke Ikematsu), to go off and fight for their kind in the imperial city of Edo. Rather than Akira Kurosawa, Killing is closer to Harold Pinter in its free-floating air of menace, and Samuel Beckett in its sense of utter stasis, since Sawamura and Mokunoshin never quite manage to leave the small farming village where the film is set. In Vital, the wonders of the natural world imparted a sense of pastoral calm and forbearance. But in Killing, nature is impassive, indifferent—a green world that only serves all the better to set off those prodigious gouts of arterial spray.

Image/Sound

There’s little information about source materials in the set’s accompanying book, other than the bald disclaimer: “HD transfers provided by the Nikkatsu Corporation.” Luckily, the films collected here look excellent overall, certainly several noticeable steps above previous DVD releases. There are only two relatively minor caveats: A Snake of June displays some persistent distortion at the top and/or bottom of the frame, and the SD video origins of Haze (not to mention its murky lighting schemes) leave the transfer looking noisier than usual. The films are all provided with Master Audio tracks that range from mono to 5.1 surround, all of which do fine by the films’ percussive sound design and evocative scores from Chu Ishikawa, which run the musical gamut in style from hardcore industrial to synth-heavy prog rock.

Extras

Packed inside the slipcase for Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto alongside the four individual jewel cases is a double-sided, foldout poster with newly commissioned cover art on one side and fresh artwork for Tetsuo: The Iron Man on the other. There’s also a nicely illustrated hardcover book with typically incisive essays from Kat Ellinger and Jasper Sharp on certain overarching aspects of Tsukamoto’s filmography.

All 10 films come with commentary tracks from Tom Mes, who literally wrote the book on Tsukamoto’s films: 2005’s Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. The tracks were recorded chronologically, as Mes often points out, making it all the easier to track the development of (as well as variations on) some of the filmmaker’s predominant visual motifs and thematic preoccupations. Not surprisingly, Mes is deeply versed in all things Tsukamoto, and delivers his comments in a low-key, occasionally humorous style.

Jasper Sharp’s visual essay “An Assault on the Senses” lays the groundwork for an appreciation of Tsukamoto’s themes and techniques. Extensive archival interviews with Tsukamoto cover all the films, including one from earlier this year that spans his entire career. He remains a perceptive explicator of his own work, touching on aspects of his life and filmmaking from early childhood fears to his unabashed love of celluloid as a medium. Finally, there are archival behind-the-scenes featurettes for A Snake of June, Vital, and Haze, as well as the requisite trailers, image galleries, and even some music videos.

Overall

Arrow Video’s impeccable box set allows you to follow the development of one of contemporary Japanese cinema’s true visionaries.

Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto, Tomorô Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Torauemon Utazawa, Hideaki Tezuka, Tomoo Asada, Kahori Fujii, Kôji Tsukamoto, Kirina Mano, Tatsuya Nakamura, Takahiro Murase, Asuka Kurosawa, Yûji Kôtari, Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto, Kiki, Cocco, Yu Aoi, Sosuke Ikematsu Director: Shinya Tsukamoto Screenwriter: Shinya Tsukamoto, Cocco Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 754 min Rating: NR Year: 1987 - 2018 Release Date: May 26, 2020 Buy: Video

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From the opening staccato notes of John Barry’s lilting score, so redolent of his music for the early Bond films, Sidney J. Furie’s The Ipcress File is very much in conversation with the spy franchise that rose to pop-cultural prominence in the early 1960s. Along with Barry, producer Harry Saltzman and editor Peter Hunt also joined in on this new endeavor after working on the first several 007 films, with the initial directive of making a low-budget knockoff. But Furie and cinematographer Otto Heller had other ideas, making a highly stylized, moody, and deliberately paced spy thriller that strives for an artful deconstruction of the Bond-iverse.

In attempting to bring a gritty realism and distinctly middle-class flavor to the milieu of international spycraft, The Ipcress File directly counters the more fantastical elements of the Bond series and deglamorizes the life and work of an intrepid, continent-hopping secret agent. When the film’s hero, Harry Palmer (Michael Caine), awakens blurry-eyed, putting on his thick pair of glasses before going about his mundane morning tasks, he feels very much like an ordinary bloke. He’s not the kind of guy who will turn heads as he walks by and, aside from a knowingly ridiculous shot where a female agent, Jean (Sue Lloyed), gazes excitedly down at his crotch as he stuffs his gun into his pants, Palmer’s sexual prowess is a non-factor—particularly compared to Sean Connery’s Bond, whose carnal appetites are ever threatening to burst through the surface of his cool demeanor.

At one point in the film, Harry is described by his boss, Major Dalby (Nigel Green), as “insubordinate, insolent, and a trickster, perhaps with criminal tendencies.” But Caine’s performance is so muted, his face rarely changing from a placid expression, that he comes across more as aloof and unflappable than the cad that Dalby describes. The man wouldn’t be out of a place in the minimalist noir world of Jean-Pierre Melville, but the absurd, convoluted story of The Ipcress File, complete with a high-tech MacGuffin, and its high stylization couldn’t be further from Melville’s stripped-down aesthetic approach to the crime film.

Nary a shot in Furie’s film goes without a canted camera angle or a busy mise-en-scène with objects deliberately obfuscating that action on screen. This is a handsomely shot film, and it’s a clever touch on the part of the filmmakers to make it seem as if the camera is often hidden from view, as if the audience were spying on the action. But the use of such techniques is simply too imprudent, with off-kilter shots being deployed with equal aplomb in lighthearted romantic scenes and the more suspenseful sequences, where they feel more organic.

The Ipcress File’s narrative also feels a bit at odds with the filmmakers’ intentions. When the film is focused on Harry as he goes about the legwork of tracking down a missing British scientist (Aubrey Richards) or sussing out a potential mole in his office, it’s firmly grounded in the workaday life of a secret agent. But as the larger, overarching elements of the plot take center stage, namely the revelation of the meaning behind “IPCRESS,” the film veers into the similarly ludicrous terrain of your average Bond caper. In the end, The Ipcress File abandons its more low-key, nuts-and-bolts depiction of spycraft, and as such morphs from the pure antithesis of a 007 romp into something far closer to a self-serious send-up.

Image/Sound

Kino’s transfer of a 2K restoration boasts a sharp, richly detailed image with color balancing that stays true to the film’s mostly drab color scheme, while still presenting a fairly high dynamic range of colors and strong black levels that help to emphasize cinematographer Otto Heller’s moody lighting. Grain levels are consistently solid and even, helping to retain much of the texture and depth of the original 35mm. The lossless audio is crisp and clear, revealing the depth of the mix in the film’s few fight sequences and in John Barry’s wonderful score.

Extras

Kino has gone the extra mile with the features on this disc. The first of two commentary tracks consists of a newly recorded and lively discussion between film historians Troy Howarth and Daniel Kremer, who profess their fondness for the film and make a compelling case for the value of director Sidney J. Furie’s lesser known work, like Leather Boys. The conversation also covers the film’s attempts to function as a deglamorized reaction to the early James Bond films and offers insight into the visual style employed by Furie and cinematographer Otto Heller, whose work here influenced the great Vittorio Storraro. On the second commentary track, Furie and editor Peter Hunt cover the film’s production issues, particularly the tensions between Furie and producer Harry Saltzman and the odd circumstances of the film’s editing process, which led Hunt to essentially have final cut before Furie ever saw the final product.

In an entertaining 20-minute archival interview, Michael Caine talks about his outrageous first day on the set when Furie burnt a copy of the script in front of him, deciding to have the film rewritten as they shot. He also recalls how he met Saltzman, who signed the actor to his first big movie contract after seeing him in Cy Endfield’s Zulu. Caine goes on to recount several amusing stories about the cantankerous producer, including how the two of them decided to come up with the most boring name they could think of for the film’s protagonist. The disc also comes with an interview with production designer Ken Adams, who describes the lengthy location scouting process, and a short Trailers from Hell segment focusing on the film’s score.

Overall

Kino Lorber’s release of Sidney J. Furie’s seminal British spy film boasts a strong A/V presentation and an abundance of fascinating extras.

Cast: Michael Caine, Nigel Green, Guy Doleman, Sue Lloyd, Gordon Jackson, Aubrey Richards, Frank Gatliff, Thomas Baptiste, Freda Bamford, Anthony Blackshaw Director: Sidney J. Furie Screenwriter: Bill Canaway, James Doran Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 109 min Rating: NR Year: 1965 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video

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The first film Bong Joon-ho has made in 10 years that’s set entirely in his native South Korea, Parasite finds the eccentric, genre-driven auteur scaling back the high-concept ambitions of his prior two films, the post-apocalyptic Snowpiercer and the globe-trotting ecological fable Okja, in favor of examining a close-knit family dynamic that’s reminiscent of the one at the center of The Host, Bong’s 2007 breakout monster flick. Except this time the monster isn’t some amphibious abomination that results from extreme genetic mutation, but the insidious forces of class and capital that divide a society’s people.

In a cramped apartment, a family of four are sent into a panic when the WiFi network they’ve been pirating goes offline. Ki-jung (Park So-dam) and her brother, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), scurry about as their father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), instructs them to try holding their phones up to the ceiling, and to stand in every nook and cranny of their home until they find a new connection. All the while, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) bemoans her husband’s laziness and prods him to find work. But it’s Ki-woo who pulls his family out of their impoverished life, when he gets an opportunity to tutor Da-hye (Jung Ziso), daughter of the rich Park family.

Parasite essentially puts an absurdist spin on both the concept behind Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sentimental Shoplifters from last year and the bitter class commentary that underpins Nagisa Oshima’s 1969 film Boy. Bong positions Ki-taek and his family as grifters so adept at pulling off cons as a unit that they successfully convince the Parks to bring them all into their employ, in one capacity or another. Ki-jung becomes an “arts therapy” teacher for the Park clan’s precocious young son, Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun), and, later, the rich family’s driver and nanny are pushed out of their jobs through elaborate scandals manufactured by the poor family, in order to install Ki-taek and Moon-gwang, respectively, into those roles.

Bong pulls off a neat trick by insinuating that the parasite of his film’s title must be Ki-taek’s family; after all, they certainly live off the “host” to which they’ve attached themselves. But in typical fashion, Bong starts to lace Parasite with all sorts of complications that begin to challenge the audience’s perceptions—left turns and big reveals that not only bring new layers to the film’s social commentary, but also develop the characters and their attendant psychologies, which encompass the psychic toll of shame, lack of empathy, and deception.

The twists in this narrative also activate some of Bong’s more inspired and sociopolitically loaded visual ideas. At one point in the film, the slum village where Ki-taek and his family live is devastated by a massive flood during a night of severe weather. Meanwhile, in the upper-class neighborhood where the Park clan lives, a backyard camping trip is ruined by rain. The particular layout of one unexpected setting, which sees members of the lower class literally occupying a space below the rich, doubles as an ingenious metaphor for class subjugation. Remarkably, Bong even finds room for a commentary on Korean peninsula relations.

The only thing that keeps Parasite just slightly below the tier of Bong’s best work, namely The Host and his underrated and similarly themed 2000 debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is the overstuffed pile-up of incident that occurs toward the end. This is frequently an issue for Bong’s films (both Snowpiercer and Okja climax with busy and disorientating action set pieces that lose sight of their characters in the process), and here it manifests in a boldly gruesome scene of violence that’s undercut by a lengthy and rather contrived denouement.

Ultimately, Bong’s excoriating indictment of South Korea’s dehumanizing social culture isn’t far removed from that of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, but he mounts it with a dazzling control of genre conventions that he continues to seamlessly bend to his absurd comic rhythms. Parasite also reinstates the emotional core that’s been missing from Bong’s recent work, and even feigns a concise narrative structure. It’s the kind of bold and uncompromising work that confirms why Bong is one of our most exciting auteurs, for how his sociocultural criticisms can be so biting, so pungent, when they’re imbued with such great focus and sense of intent.

Image/Sound

The transfer on this Criterion edition remains faithful to Parasite’s theatrical exhibition, boasting sharp detail and vibrant color; the subtle visual and textural delights nestled within Bong Joon-ho’s stark compositions are perfectly preserved throughout. A second disc includes the film’s black-and-white version, but not unlike the similar retooling that Mad Max: Fury Road received, color is such a spectacularly rendered, carefully considered element of the original cut that this version feels superfluous. The soundtrack on both cuts is as enveloping as the film’s visual schema, calling particular attention to the retro sci-fi aspects of Jung Jae-il’s eerie, theremin-filled score while keeping dialogue and ambient effects clear in the mix.

Extras

With the film already available on 4K, the appeal of this Blu-ray release comes down to its extras, and on that front it certainly delivers. For one, the commentary track announces itself as a deep dive right of the gate, with Bong and critic Tony Rayns swiftly tying elements of Parasite to the director’s prior films and explaining the symbolism buried in minutiae of characterization and design. Interviews are included with crew members, including editor Yang Jinmo and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who notes how he crafted the film’s look by making wide-angle lenses that didn’t distort the dimensions of the image. Bong himself has a lively discussion with critic Darcy Paquet, who changes things up for the press campaign-beleaguered director by using free-associative prompts to let him dictate the flow of the conversation. Bong and fellow South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook discuss the legacy of the New Korean Cinema movement, while footage from Parasite’s Cannes premiere and a Master Class lecture with Bong are also included. Storyboard comparisons with the final film demonstrate the director’s carefully mapped planning, and a booklet essay by critic Inkoo Kang that unpacks the film as the culmination of its maker’s career.

Overall

Bong Joon-ho’s historic international breakthrough receives a superlative Blu-ray package, though it inadvertently calls attention to Criterion’s slowness in pivoting to UHD.

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Lee Sun-kyun, Park So-dam, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung-eun, Jang Hye-jin, Jung Ziso, Jung Hyeon-jun Director: Bong Joon-ho Screenwriter: Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 131 min Rating: NR Year: 2019 Buy: Video, Soundtrack

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An unconventional British gangster film from director Stephen Frears, The Hit largely avoids the usual trappings of the genre—in particular, the penchant for ultraviolence on display in roughly contemporary films like The Krays—opting instead for a thoughtful, even philosophical, character study. For one thing, mob informer Willie Parker (Terence Stamp), actually reads. For another, he attempts to live his life according to the implications and complications suggested by these books. Not only that, but his books serve as plot points both major, providing the existential and metaphysical themes that crop up later in the film, and minor, as in his extensive collection of books, which come in handy as projectiles in an early scene where a gang of youths attempt to abduct him. Talk about your Foucauldian “power-knowledge.”

Employing a series of sinuous mobile crane and tracking shots, often combined with wide-angle lenses for some fashionable distortion, the film’s prologue, set in the early 1970s, succinctly lays out the requisite backstory: From his safe house, we follow informer Parker into the courtroom, where his testimony against leading mob bosses clinches his subsequent fate. Then, out of nowhere, the accused gangsters break out into an impromptu rendition of “We’ll Meet Again,” a moment that surreally blends menace and mirth.

The film then flashes forward 10 years, shifting location to a remote, desolate Spanish village. Parker is captured and handed over to two British hit men, who constitute your somewhat stereotypically mismatched pair: experienced, hardened killer Braddock (John Hurt) and overeager tyro Myron (Tim Roth). At one point, Braddock uses a photo of Stamp taken from his role in Poor Cow for the purposes of identification, leading Frears to joke in the commentary included on this disc that he’d got there years before Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey.