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Review: Contempt

review | Contempt

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Only Jean-Luc Godard could create an epic that’s all about intimacy

by Michael Gaughn
June 12, 2022

Godard again. If A Woman Is a Woman is the most accessible of his films, Contempt (Le Mépris) is the most mainstream, with a CinemaScope presentation, exotic locations, and a cast featuring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance. Where Woman Is a Woman takes a decidedly oblique look at the Hollywood musical, here Godard directs his loving, withering gaze at the Hollywood epic.

Of course the whole exercise is droll, with the “epic” scenes staged with what would clearly be the catering budget for a Hollywood production. The main characters in the film within the film of The Odyssey are literally a bunch of statues, with the whole shot in extreme widescreen, which Fritz Lang famously quips “wasn’t made for man—it was made for snakes and funerals.”

But all of Godard’s films have that kind of sardonic carapace, and you’re likely to feel little more than annoyed or mildly amused if you don’t take up the challenge of trying to pierce their protective shell. For all its trappings of a travesty epic, Contempt—as Godard states explicitly during the opening credits—is a meditation on how the movies frame and channel our desires. The pivot for this is all the many shots of Bardot nude, which range from pinup to the bedroom intimacy of a couple in love.

But staying at that level would be love on Hollywood’s terms. Godard for the most part either eschews or exaggerates most of the traditional gestures used to express desire in movies, for instance brilliantly taking our dependence on the soundtrack to tell us what to feel and pumping George Delerue’s music cues so far past 11 that it feels like the film’s on the brink of a core meltdown. The music here isn’t used to just Mickey Mouse or accompany the action but is compensatory, both a parallel commentary and a force of nature. The lead characters are too cool with their emotions, too distanced from them to realize how deeply, almost inexorably, those surging undercurrents are guiding their actions—but the score makes it clear they’re playing with fire.

The masterstroke, though, is Godard turning widescreen on its head, most effectively deployed in the virtuoso half-hour-long scene in Bardot and Michel Piccoli’s unfinished apartment where we watch their marriage implode in real-time, shown in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio that transforms their domestic space into a battlefield and makes their feints and jabs, regroupings, and head-on assaults the offensives of massed armies. Godard here journeys back to the roots of Homer, using the movie spectacle as his sleek but insubstantial modern vessel.

The point of the above is that there’s plenty of meat here—so much that the film reveals some satisfying new level on every viewing—but that doesn’t mean it’s all prepared and presented with equal flair. The most egregious fumble is Palance, who often feels robotic, and who Godard encourages to behave like the worst kind of caricature of the ugly American. Godard’s disdain is so fierce it blinds him, resulting in a performance so predictable and one-dimensional it ultimately defangs some of his most telling points.

If A Woman Is a Woman is an evocative and indispensable record of Paris in the very early ‘60s, Contempt is an equally valuable document of the last, intense upwelling of modernism before it was devoured by the postmodernist beast, of the offshoot style that began to emerge in the mid ‘50s and was just beginning to get its bearings and bear its richest fruit when it was cut down and purged by the conformist, lowest-common-denominator impulses of mass culture, the army of the children of the machine.

But while the current online manifestation of A Woman Is a Woman is satisfying enough for now, the version of Contempt on Amazon Prime (which I would imagine is the same that’s on Google Play and elsewhere) can be maddening, offering tantalizing glimpses of how the film originally appeared but ultimately feeling like a faded family photo from the era. Studio Canal created a 4K intermediate for a theatrical release a few years ago, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, but hopefully we’ll get a chance to glimpse it soon enough.

Be warned that the sound is pretty awful, but it’s apparently just being true to the source tracks. Delerue’s music is distorted throughout, as is much of the dialogue track, and the quality of the dialogue recordings is all over the place, especially in the projection-room scene. But I wouldn’t want it any other way. Better a movie that bears traces of its origins than one that feels artificially pure, the product of endless lines of code.

One, kind of pointless, regret, though—because not much can be done about it—is that the original mix was mono. That seems like a lost opportunity, especially given all the widescreen blocking in Bardot and Piccoli’s apartment, where it seems like stereo could have been used to play off all the different presentations and meanings of distance.

Contempt is ultimately about how Hollywood romanticizes everything, even when it’s being sadistically cruel, and the dismal odds of anything resembling real emotion being heard above all the style- and genre-driven din. Nobody would ever use the words “gregarious,” “ebullient,” or even “warm” to describe Godard. There is something fundamentally cold about both him and his work. But you can sense him, in his early films at least, constantly trying to fend off the deadening chill of alienation, using abstraction, of all things, to keep his films fundamentally and intensely human.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Watching Contempt on Prime can be maddening, offering tantalizing glimpses of how the film originally appeared but ultimately feeling like a faded family photo from the era

SOUND | Be warned that the mono sound is pretty awful but it’s apparently just being true to the source tracks

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Review: A Woman Is a Woman

review | A Woman Is a Woman

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Probably Godard’s most accessible film, this remains a charming dissection of the American musical—and an indispensable record of Paris in the early 1960s

by Michael Gaughn
June 4, 2022

Watching a Godard film is a lot like taking an exam in 20th-century philosophy administered by a brilliant but sadistic college professor. No matter how certain you are of your answers, he will always find some fiendishly abstruse and cryptic way to prove you wrong, relishing making you feel like a dope in the process. Godard is the film snob’s equivalent of a secret handshake, the thing the cognoscenti deploy to mock and spit on the peasantry.

And it doesn’t help that his work became more and more harsh and inscrutable as the ‘60s went on, until he reached his Vertov Group period, doing highly politicized, abstract films in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin that are for the most part both wearisome and gratingly coy.

But there is still that initial period of the early ‘60s where, yes, he was aggressively and blatantly reinventing cinema, but he was doing it playfully, with abundant energy and wit, not yet embarrassed by his obviously sincere romanticism. Films like Bande à part, Contempt (Le Mépris), Alphaville, and Pierrot le Fou remain fresh and unmatched and, from beginning to end, exhilarating. Maybe the most accessible of that early batch is Godard’s riff on the Hollywood musical, as a way of riffing on the whole artifice of movies, A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme).

You don’t need to get film-school analytical to explain the joys of this movie. It’s easier to just tick them off: Anna Karina, who the camera (and clearly Godard) loves and who devours the camera in turn; Raoul Coutard’s véritê shooting style, in subtle but evocative Eastmancolor, which keenly documents early ‘60s Paris without turning it into a series of postcards; the gags, which are admittedly quirky and smartass but still startlingly funny; and that constant playing with and questioning of film technique, which somehow hasn’t dated a day and energizes the movie in a way that can never be done by coloring within the genre lines.

Godard was always a radical, but he was a radical who knew he had a large international audience, especially in America, and while his affection for American culture soured as the ‘60s went on, and while his skepticism is apparent throughout A Woman Is a Woman, he also knew Hollywood was the lingua franca of moviemaking at the mid century, and you can sense he’s almost in awe of what it was able to churn out.

This is probably best on display in the long scene where Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo sit at a table in a small cafe while she struggles with whether to sleep with him to spite her live-in boyfriend. It’s all very New Wave-y with a lot of oblique comments and a lot of jump cuts. But then Karina asks Belmondo to play a Charles Aznavour record on the jukebox, and the movie basically just stops for three and a half minutes while the tune plays out. Yes, that was revolutionary for the time, and is still radical because, unlike the theme-park experience of most contemporary movies, which essentially straps you in for the duration then guides every millisecond of the ride, inducing carefully graduated jolts along the way, Godard wants you to use that caesura to inject your own thoughts and feelings into the film, to essentially collaborate with him—which is why A Woman Is a Woman can never be the same for any two people who come across it, or for any one person viewing it more than once.

But that moment, by leaning on pop music, is also very Hollywood, is Godard knowing that, if he was going to unravel the fabric of the typical movie-watching experience that drastically, he needed to toss a sop to make it palatable. Sadly, his subversive impulse here would, like everything, be ultimately coopted and corrupted by mainstream filmmaking, leading to the now pervasive use of pop songs as a crutch to cover up the filmmakers’ basic lack of creativity (and feeling).

But you don’t have to watch A Woman Is a Woman at anything approaching that level to enjoy it. Even skimming its surface brings pleasures you won’t find elsewhere. Coutard’s cinematography is groundbreaking, justly famous, and remains sublime. There are salient examples everywhere but a couple of the most striking (both night shots) are Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy standing in front of a shop window with “Lancome” in white neon behind them and Brialy stepping out onto the apartment balcony with the boulevard lights floating off into the distance. The former is very much like what Russell Metty was doing in Douglas Sirk films like All That Heaven Allows, but shot simply, on location, without soundstages or lighting grids, and with a documentary-size crew.

And while Amazon Prime’s presentation isn’t the last word—you long for a 4K release while praying nobody will be dumb enough to attempt what currently passes for a restoration—it’s so true to the elegant grit of the original film that very little is lost by watching it this way. The colors are rich but never over pumped, and the subtlety of the gradations—essential to presenting this film—is for the most part maintained. It’s legitimate to hope something better will some day come along, but it will need to be significantly better than what’s offered here to mean anything at all.

The audio isn’t pristine, but it wasn’t at the time, and the patina of the era—reflected in the heavy reverberation in a lot of the music cues—is essential to the film’s impact. Putting the score on an equal footing with the dialogue and then bringing cues in and out like he was arbitrarily flicking an on/off switch was a big part of what Godard was after, using the lulling reassurance we usually take from wall-to-wall film music to yank us out of our complacency—kind of like taking a toy from a baby to ultimately return it in the end. So, while the score isn’t very well mixed by contemporary standards, it’s actually a stunning mix if you’re focusing on the needs of the film, which is as it should be.

There’s only one real irritant here: The size, thickness, and black border around the subtitles, which are all out of scale and a constant distraction. Retaining the original crappy-looking titles baked into the print would have been a huge improvement all the way around.

There is really only a handful of movies that qualify as true classics, a number small enough to rest comfortably in the palm of your hand; films that transcend the zeitgeist, fleeting emotional attachments, and the aura created by relentless marketing and that tap into far deeper and more sustaining currents than the vast majority of fare. This is one of them. But given the aversion, which still persists, to foreign films—or at least to the ones that don’t try to ape American films—it’s necessary to make the case a little more forcefully here than you have to for the Hollywood standards. So let’s try this: You can’t say you know and love movies if you haven’t at least tried Godard. And possibly the best place to begin that journey is the current release of A Woman Is a Woman.

PICTURE | Amazon Prime’s 1080p presentation isn’t the last word but it’s so true to the elegant grit of the original film that very little is lost by watching it this way

SOUND | The audio isn’t pristine but does a serviceable job of maintaining the patina of the era, which is essential to the film’s impact

Review: The Lady from Shanghai

review | The Lady from Shanghai

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Probably Orson Welles’ most eccentric—and biting—film, Shanghai features two for-the-ages supporting performances

by Michael Gaughn
June 1, 2022

Why review an older film like The Lady from Shanghai if it’s not a restoration or appearing in 4K for the first time? Partly because certain older films are far more vibrant and relevant than others and it’s worth it to pluck the gems from the pile. Partly to underline for anyone who’s gotten burned by checking out catalog titles online that the consistency of the quality of their presentation has improved tremendously of late. And partly because, in a culture obsessed with living in a perpetual present and with erasing history on its way to erasing memory, it’s important to push back by emphasizing the value of the past.

Citizen Kane kind of sells itself. It hasn’t yet been pulled down from its pedestal—and hopefully never will be—so you don’t really need to say a lot about the film itself when reviewing something like the 4K release. But what about the other Welles, the stuff he tried to make within the studio system but that was inevitably extensively retooled on its way to release, the films you have to work at a little to appreciate because you have to peer around all the obstructions erected by the studio if you want to catch glimpses of the film Welles originally made?

The Lady from Shanghai wasn’t just reshot and recut by Columbia, it was savagely beaten into submission. But enough of Welles’ effort survives in the theatrical release, even though broken and bruised, to make watching it a satisfying experience. In fact, the tension between what he created and what the studio did to it actually played into his hands, making the film even edgier, even more collage- and dreamlike.

Shanghai comes from the period when Welles had exhausted almost all his credit in Hollywood and was on the verge of becoming a caricature, ensconced so deep inside his arrogance that he was all but blind to when he just looked silly. That too much of his smugness shows through to make him believable as a wide-eyed innocent in no way diminishes the value of this film. He offers up so much else to be savored that it’s more than worth it to look beyond his perpetual gloat.

Shanghai is usually labelled a film noir, and I guess that pertains, as far as it goes—but it doesn’t go far enough to define what it really is, which is a dense cluster of character studies of a depth and incisiveness—and of the kind of people—Hollywood hardly ever allows. And the irony of that is that this movie isn’t really that much about the romantic leads, Welles and Rita Hayworth, but about the two law partners, Grisbee and Bannister. You can watch it for the stylistic stuff, but you’ll be missing the real meat if you don’t surrender utterly to what Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders put forth.

Sloane delivers one of the best performances ever captured on film—the kind of thing he might have been able to do in Kane if he wasn’t relegated to playing a thinly-drawn ethnic stereotype and if he and Joseph Cotten weren’t in constant danger of Welles eating them alive. You’re led to believe early on that his character is the villain, and he is, in a way, but who’s the villain, and the definition of villainy, is so slippery in this film that you’re left more with the impression of a brilliant but broken man whose physical paralysis has come to cripple his entire being.

As for Glenn Anders—there’s something miraculous about what he pulled off here. His performance is famously eccentric, but gloriously so, and fully, and impishly, fledged. It shouldn’t work, but it does, partly because Anders and Welles make his madness insidious. While Sloane’s crafty attorney is to some degree descended from Victorian mustache twirling, Anders is something new, the craziness of a heedless society embodied, that craziness then spreading out and permeating the rest of the film. (It’s hard not to watch Anders now and not see anticipations of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance in The Shining.)

Partly because of all the reshoots, and partly because of the state of the film, the look of Shanghai is all over the place, but the moments that are solid—especially the camera lingering over Hayworth on the Circe, the probing closeups of Sloane, and the jarring closeups of a sweating, twitching Anders—look strikingly good in 1080p on Prime. Unless somebody does a digital makeover and turn this into a kind of 4K comic book à la The Godfather—which isn’t likely—Shanghai will always look this uneven. But if you see this movie as off-kilter to its core, as you should, then that’s OK.

(A quick update on the whole “films looking good on Prime” thing: I’ve been spotchecking titles, pretty much at random, and you can’t take this as gospel, but I would say the odds are about 3:1 of a film looking pretty damn good if you dive into the catalog offerings. There’s a lot of room for improvement, of course, but Prime is becoming a boon for anyone who cares about the entire breadth and depth of film and not just the fleeting shiny objects of the moment.)

As usual, there’s not much to be said about the sound. It probably wasn’t that good to begin with, and this presentation is probably faithful to whatever there was to work with. Wish they’d balanced out the disparity between the dialogue and the music cues, and between some of the scenes, but that’s not a dealbreaker.

Every time I want to dismiss Orson Welles as more than a bit of an overweening jerk—which he was—I find myself getting pulled deep into something like Lady from Shanghai or Touch of Evil, works so sublime and subversive and of their own world they almost forgive all his many sins. Almost.

PICTURE | The look of Shanghai is all over the place, but the moments that are solid—especially the closeups—look strikingly good in 1080p on Prime

SOUND | The sound probably wasn’t that good to begin with, and this presentation is probably faithful to whatever there was to work with

Review: California Split

review | California Split

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Pretty much Robert Altman’s last uncompromised effort, it can take a while to settle into this movie’s groove but it’s a great ride once you’re there

by Michael Gaughn
May 26, 2022

California Split came right after The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us and right before Nashville—in other words, during that period when practically no one knew what to make of Robert Altman anymore and when most people, even during the directionless era of early ‘70s filmmaking, were ready to write him off. This is Altman at his most uncompromising and elliptical—which, with him, were pretty much the same thing—when he was really making his audiences work to keep up with him but was rewarding them well if they rose to the challenge.

Nashville would be kind of a concession to prevailing tastes and would restore some of his luster. But then something went awry and Altman spent the rest of the ‘70s and all of the ‘80s just wandering from one ill-conceived, half-baked and, for the most, not very interesting project to another until he hit on The Player. In a sense, California Split is his last film at his strongest.

You can forget about heroes & villains here—fortunately, the return of that delusional and ultimately oppressive worldview was still three years off at the time. But you can forget about anti-heroes, too. Altman tended to eschew most of the accepted gestures of his era and just did what he wanted to do. If he referenced fads, it was usually to skewer them.

His is some of the most mature filmmaking to ever make it into the mainstream—which isn’t to say it was hugely mature but just more so than the puerile fantasies of most filmmakers. There has always been something fundamentally adolescent about American cinema, going back to its roots, so it’s not too surprising that, since the early ’80s, we’ve seen one wave after another of increasingly more childish directors. The big difference from the past is that we now tend to laud the most emotionally retarded of them as our most serious artists—which is an accurate enough reflection of the state of the culture, but one that ought to scare instead of sustain us, and should send us scrambling back to Square One. It’s not.

The above isn’t the bitter digression it might seem but crucial to understanding Altman’s importance. Looking at his peak from 1970 to 1975 and comparing it to the present really underlines how far we’ve devolved and how much we’ve lost. Yes, the audiences are way bigger now, but they’re also way more stunted, thuggish, almost primal, uninterested in edification but happy to just be manipulated and shocked and placed under the culture’s thumb, deadening their nerve endings along the way.

Altman’s characters are rarely mainly good or bad but are almost inevitably to a great degree compromised, and lost. While that expressed a somewhat elitist view of society, it was also an acute one—a mirror not a lot of people want to look into, but a self examination necessary for achieving any kind of integrity and meaningful self-worth. Not surprisingly, it’s what the broader audience has always disliked most about Altman’s work.

Altman tries everybody’s patience during the first half hour or so of California Split, making you wonder why you should care about Elliot Gould or George Segal—or Ann Prentiss or Gwen Welles. What you pick up on early on is that it’s a film about gambling, that the two male leads are good at it and that they’re bonding but their lives beyond the tables are nothing but a mess. And that ends up being pretty much the whole film. What makes it compelling is Altman incisively capturing the world at that somewhat unsavory and desperate level and then setting Gould and Segal in motion within it while resorting to as few clichés and trendy devices as possible, which helps it all feel like not just another movie.

Early on you get you get the sense, as you often do in Altman, that he doesn’t care that much about the technique. But that always turns out to be the wrong place to go because, just because he’s not flashy in the usual sense doesn’t mean he doesn’t have virtuosic control over his material. The way he develops characters, builds scenes, and creates the overall arc of a film really has no precedent, but it’s all accomplished masterfully and in a way that kind of creeps up on you from behind.

What I saw on Amazon Prime seemed remarkably true to how this film should look. This is another one of those HD offerings, like The Apartment and the other titles I mentioned in my review of that film, that looks exceptionally good on Prime. Nothing really happens to make you aware of the presentation or to suggest it’s in any way distorted or otherwise compromised. It’s perfectly apt to the material at hand. And California Split is a dazzling study in grain, in how it can bring an energy and interest to the frame, a nuance that’s lost when it’s inexcusably damped down or scrubbed away.

But I have to add this footnote to my comments in The Apartment review: Step carefully. While many of the movies on Prime do look way better than they did until recently, there’s tremendous inconsistency from title to title, and a lot of them are lemons. Amazon says Detour is in UHD, but it’s not. It looks just as bad as it did as a public-domain closeout on VHS. The Man with the Golden Arm is unacceptably washed out and fuzzy. So is Tom Waits’ Big Time. And on and on.

The sound in California Split is clean enough but there’s nothing particularly interesting going on there—but it seems like there should since this was the first time Altman used multitracking to capture overlapping or simultaneous dialogue. There’s not a lot of lateral separation when this occurs in the mix, even when the characters speaking are placed some distance apart in the frame, and sometimes the balance just feels off between the voices. This was probably all in the original mix but there were moments that seemed flat-out wrong.

In a world of brain-dead action flicks, of pervasive gun-toting empowered females, of one-dimensional beings running around in their footie pajamas, I realize the audience for Altman is small. But you have to think of it as the equivalent of the monks who kept literacy alive in the Middle Ages, point toward the things that can give us sustenance and hope in a dismal age, and pray that, somehow, this too will pass, with something more enlightened eager to be born on the other side. Altman would have laughed his ass off at the suggestion that California Split should be seen as a beacon of hope, but such is the world we’ve come to create, who we’ve come to be.

PICTURE | Another one of those HD offerings that looks exceptionally good on Prime. Nothing really happens to make you aware of the presentation or to suggest it’s in any way distorted or otherwise compromised.

SOUND | The sound is clean enough but there’s nothing particularly interesting going on there—but it seems like there should since this was the first time Altman used multitracking to capture overlapping dialogue

Review: The Apartment

review | The Apartment

Review: Rear Window

review | Rear Window

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The 4K transfer exposes both the good and the bad of Hitchcock’s best-known film, but ultimately offers a satisfying way to re-engage with a classic

by Michael Gaughn
September 19, 2020

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, more has been written about Hitchcock than any other filmmaker—and more has probably been written about Rear Window (1954) than any other film. It and Vertigo (1958) are often considered his most accomplished efforts—a conclusion I would vigorously dispute, but not here. Rear Window has gotten the most attention because, between the two, it’s the squeakier wheel.

It’s undeniable that this hubristic exercise in artifice, or stagecraft as cinema, would have completely unravelled in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. And it remains impressive how much Hitchcock is able to make the pure contrivance of his elaborate set a big part of what makes the film so engaging. You almost don’t care that it’s the epitome of mid-’50s Broadway set design. There’s something about its sheer physicality that makes everything that’s presented on it feel convincing.

Because Hitchcock was relentlessly ambitious, his reach constantly exceeded his grasp, so Rear Window has more than its share of shots that don’t quite work, storyboard concepts that had to be triaged in post, characters that could have used a little more development. Thelma Ritter’s part is ridiculously overwritten, and you can feel her pausing for laughs that faded it into the void more than five decades ago. Grace Kelly is just a little too Grace Kelly, with a patrician accent that can’t help but grate on modern ears.

The film works mainly because of the ingenious way Hitchcock makes the set, with its vignettes, convincing as projections of Jimmy Stewart’s various states of mind, making the film from early on feel dreamlike. And it works because of Stewart’s performance. He, pre-World War II, was a good, even great, actor—his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is jawdropping, even today. But he was also kind of lightweight, sometimes clownish. After the war, there’s an undeniable sense of experience behind his eyes that he was able to employ deftly in his best roles—like in the Anthony Mann westerns, in Vertigo, and here.

Not that his performance is flawless. As always with Hitchcock, there are weak moments in the script and in the direction that cause Stewart, adrift, to lapse into his patented Stewartisms. But in the hands of a more traditional Hollywood pretty boy type, L. B. Jeffries snooping out of the back of his apartment could have seemed just comic, or even diseased. Stewart creates a perfect tension between making it all seem justified and also the dangerous preoccupations of a troubled soul.

The 4K HDR presentation is a must-have for anybody who even thinks they care about movies—not because it smooths over the flaws but because it presents everything honestly, the good and the bad. Seeing Rear Window in any other format inevitably puts you at a distance from the film, which inevitably places you at too great of a distance from what’s going on in the apartments across the way. You need to see it at this resolution to get pulled back into the film, so it stops feeling quaint and again becomes relevant and compelling.

The flaws are pretty egregious. Hitchcock, of course, endlessly obsessed over how to present Kelly, but there’s a shot at 29:51, during a sequence meant to scream “beguiling beauty,” where she looks like a walking corpse. Even more jarring is a closeup at 1:50:29 of the hapless Wendell Corey that looks like it was originally part of a wider shot that was ruthlessly enlarged on an optical printer.

For whatever reason, cinematographer Robert Burks didn’t do as good a job here as he would on Vertigo, but for everything that takes you out of the film, there’s plenty to keep you engaged. Probably no other movie has better conveyed the feel of New York at sunset, or especially at three in the morning. And, while the HDR makes its presence felt just here and there, it is an absolute revelation during the climax. Anyone who knows Rear Window will know exactly where I’m going with this, but Raymond Burr being blinded by Stewart’s flashbulbs fell solidly into the “suspension of disbelief” camp until now. Presented in HDR, those white flashes become searing, making you feel Burr’s disorientation and sense of absolute loss. Rear Window is worth seeing in this form just for that moment alone.

The audio is “only” DTS-HD Master Audio stereo. I used quotes because the thought of somebody mucking around with Hitchcock’s innovative and masterful sound mix to take it into the land of Atmos is both terrifying and nauseating. In the right hands, it could definitely enhance the experience—but who’s got the right hands? And I think there’s a good chance an enhanced sense of spaciousness could actually end up emphasizing the one-dimensionality of a lot of the stagecraft.

The mix here does a great job of allowing you to savor what Hitchcock originally wrought, where he used mainly volume, timing, and reverb to convey the sense of voices and other sounds heard in various spaces and from various distances away. The soundtrack, as is, is so strong it could almost stand on its own as a radio play.

But allow me just a brief swipe at Franz Waxman’s score, which is the weakest link in the film. It’s not that I don’t like Waxman—his work on Sunset Boulevard represents the pinnacle of the film-scoring art—but he’s just not in sync with this film at all. The opening theme—if you can call it that—is a hackneyed pastiche of Gershwin clichés—42nd Street meets The Naked City. But what makes it really fall flat is the sense of complete disconnection from the evocative use of source cues that makes up the rest of the soundtrack. I know Hitchcock was aiming for a kind of overture as the curtains literally went up, but he missed the mark.

And then there’s that song. Another of Hitchcock’s offerings placed on the altar of Grace Kelly, it was a great idea in concept—show a composer struggling to write a song to parallel Jimmy Stewart’s conflicted feelings about Kelly and then have it all come together as an example of songwriting perfection. Problem is, the song sounds fully worked out—and not very good—from the start. Had it been great, it could have really enhanced the film—and not made the salvation of Miss Lonelyhearts look like the worst kind of Victorian contrivance. But “Lisa” is a real stinker.

I’m not a big fan of Top 10 or Top 100 or whatever lists—they’re almost all laughable when they’re not outright dangerous. So let’s just say that Rear Window, for too many reasons to ignore, is an essential. Not only does it stand on its own as entertainment for all but the most jaded contemporary audiences, but its reverberations can still be strongly felt in filmmaking in the present. In 4K HDR, it becomes not just another movie, but a glimpse of the very wellspring of cinema.

PICTURE | This 4K HDR presentation is a must-have for anybody who even thinks they care about movies—not because it smooths over the flaws but because it presents everything honestly, the good and the bad

SOUND | The stereo mix does a great job of allowing you to savor what Hitchcock originally wrought, where he used mainly volume, timing, and reverb to convey the sense of voices and other sounds heard in various spaces and from various distances away

Review: Shadow of a Doubt

review | Shadow of a Doubt

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One of Hitchcock’s very best films almost flawlessly presented in 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
May 9, 2022

I suspect it’s a rights thing, but the latest round of Hitchcock in 4K is a surprisingly weak lot. There can’t be more than a handful of people clamoring for The Trouble with Harry and Family Plot, and yet there they are. No Strangers on a Train anywhere to be seen. But there is one standout in the pack—Shadow of a Doubt, which, along with Strangers, may be Hitchcock’s best work.

I realize that last bit is an arguable, if not controversial, statement, but both of those films rank at the top for me exactly because they don’t exhibit the kind of bravura showmanship, bordering on P.T. Barnum, that’s generated such mass affection for his mid to late ‘50s concoctions from Rear Window through Vertigo to North by Northwest. Both Shadow and Strangers stay focused on the material, with the film technique always in proportion, never overwhelming it. As a result, you have a sense throughout both of completely developed characters in believable environments instead of specters drifting through stage-managed dreamworlds.

And let’s cut right to it: Shadow of a Doubt is the best 4K HDR Hitchcock release to date. It’s a still compelling, even riveting, work presented in a way that couldn’t be more true to how the film was made, without any jolts triggered by bad elements or overzealous hands at the knobs. If you want to see a Hitchcock film from the period when he was in full control of his artistry presented pretty much as he intended, this is it.

And it isn’t a museum piece. Not only was Shadow about 30 years ahead of its time with the treatment of its protagonist, but in not only subject matter but technique feels surprisingly contemporary. Hitchcock sensed, in the midst of World War II, before the A bomb and before the horrors of the concentration camps became known, how that conflict would yield a more cynical world and used the Joseph Cotten character to develop a take on society that wouldn’t even begin to scratch at the door of pop culture until more than 10 years later in works like Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. You can also sense the influence on the anti-hero films of the ‘70s, and on the far more adolescent and superficial take on dark that seems to have permeated the whole of current culture.

But there’s no raging madman here, no cocksure vigilante. Cotten’s Uncle Charlie is a sophisticated but damaged man in a smug and content society that can only survive sheltered from the realities of the larger world. It’s clear that Hitchcock’s sympathies lie with him, one of the many troubling aspects of a deeply troubling work. Hitchcock creates an idyllic microcosm and then gets you to pierce it by adopting the viewpoint of a misanthropic murderer. That’s old hat now, but he has such a firm command of his material that it still works, and, by contrast, shows just how shallow and silly the current efforts are.

This is probably Cotten’s best performance, here able to craft a role without being upstaged by Welles’ endless scenery chewing in Citizen Kane or baroque expressions of technique in Magnificent Ambersons. His Uncle Charlie is a compelling human being, the most rounded of the film’s characters, not some convenient bogeyman. That doesn’t mean, though, that Hitchcock denies he’s essentially evil. In fact, he underlines that brilliantly in the famous shot of the train bearing Uncle Charlie arriving in Santa Rosa vigorously belching a massive cloud of thick black smoke, like it’s in transit from the mouth of Hell, the noxious plume then settling over the town like a shroud. That shot is particularly striking in this transfer—especially the depth of the black cloud against the highlights of the sun-drenched All-American town. And it’s done while maintaining the balance of the overall visual fabric of the film.

But here’s why Shadow of a Doubt is a great movie: While Uncle Charlie is fully developed, all of the other characters are fleshed out to nearly the same degree. And although Hitchcock’s disdain, if not contempt, for their small-town world is clear, he realizes he needs to honor that world in order to make Cotten’s troubling of it compelling. And he stays so true to its conventions that those other characters’ emotions are convincing throughout and are actually, at times, moving. You’d be hardpressed to find anything like that in any other Hitchcock film. You can sense he feels drawn to their sheltered society—or at least to the reasons why the characters find it so attractive—while knowing it’s a kind of Potemkin village that can never stand. (Lynch tried to adopt that same stance in Blue Velvet, deliberately exploiting parallels with Shadow along the way, but didn’t pull it off half as well.)

And then there are the seemingly endless grace notes, the kind of thing a master artist does when he has an overabundance of energy and ideas but is so in sync with his material that he knows how to make every touch apt. Those accents, ornaments, and inflections are so abundant, there’s little point in citing many, and it would take a lot of the fun out of watching the movie to anticipate them here, but to highlight a couple: Hitchcock, feeding from his roots in German Expressionism, uses some angles and lighting (like looking down on Teresa Wright through the staircase balusters) that would seem gratuitous in any other film or in lesser hands but, because they’re acute extensions of the character’s frame of mind, ring true. Or the various startling ways he reveals Cotten’s character by having him engage directly with the camera, striding toward it when he goes to grab the newspaper from Wright’s hands or the slow track in on his profile as he makes his “silly wives” speech only to have him turn and look straight into the lens after the camera has come uncomfortably close.

There’s not a lot to say about the transfer exactly because it so well serves the material. There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to “improve” the look of the original film (a frequent sin in 4K HDR transfers) but instead a deliberate effort to honor its visual fabric and keep the look consistent throughout. For the first time in a while, there was nothing here that at any point pulled me out of the movie, and someone deserves kudos for that alone. I didn’t realize until this viewing how extraordinarily well photographed this film is, and the transfer can take a lot of the credit for that.

What can I really say about the sound? It’s a stereo mix of the original mono that never draws too much attention to its stereo-ness—which, until it occurs to someone to make the original mono part of 4K presentations, is probably the best we can hope for. My only complaint is that the Dimitri Tiomkin cues can come on a little strong, especially during the otherwise low-key “chase” scene near the beginning. This disparity was probably in the original mix, but the presentation here is so dynamic it only heightens it.

To sum up: Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock’s very best films presented in the best 4K HDR transfer to date of any of his work. Yes, watch it to savor the transfer, but also watch it to savor the film, which is one of those classics that’s so strong at the core that it feels untouched by time.

PICTURE | There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to “improve” the look of the original film but instead a deliberate effort to honor its visual fabric and keep the look consistent throughout

SOUND | The stereo mix of the original mono never draws too much attention to its stereo-ness, although the music cues can come on a little strong at times

Review: Singin’ in the Rain

review | Singin’ in the Rain

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This most classic of classic musicals bucks the recent trend and actually proves to be well served by its 4K incarnation

by Michael Gaughn
May 3, 2022

I’m a sucker for films about process. It’s one of the reasons why most fantasy films do nothing for me—when you’re in a universe where anything can happen and where credible cause and effect no longer pertains, yes, everything is possible but nothing is interesting. Showing process makes characters meaningful within a fictional world—it gives them a reason to be. The more convincing the process is, the more convincing the world portrayed becomes, and the more compelling the characters.

And process isn’t genre specific. It can range from heist films like The Asphalt Jungle to a financial-meltdown flick like The Big Short to engineering the end of the world in Dr. Strangelove. And then there’s the whole subgenre of show-biz process. A sitcom like The Dick Van Dyke Show still holds up because its backstage world is self-consistent; the characters’ wisecracks ring true because they’re comedy writers.

Most musicals bore me because they tend to veer too much toward fantasy, leaving credibility behind. But there’s a sub-subgenre of show-biz-process musicals that tend to be more substantial than the rest, that give you something to chew on besides production numbers. And I don’t think it’s pure coincidence that the two best musicals ever—The Band Wagon and Singin’ in the Rain—both spring from the process mold.

I have to give the edge to The Band Wagon because basing it in Broadway culture, as opposed to Singin’ in the Rain’s more superficial world of Hollywood, lends it a more satisfying depth. Also, the dilemma of Fred Astaire’s character—cast back into a theatrical milieu that’s completely changed around him, trying to not just hold his own but transcend it—is more compelling than Gene Kelly’s need for a little bit of emotional propping up.

All of that said, Singin’ in the Rain still plays as well now as it did when it was released in 1952. And, yes, much of that has to do with the production numbers, which were the primary draw then and remain so now. But its longevity, and its energy, and its continued relevance owe just as much to its faithful, if arch, portrayal of Hollywood during its disorienting 1920s transition to sound. And for that we can thank the brilliant, slyly witty writing team responsible for so much other meaningful fluff, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also penned The Band Wagon, by the way).

One more thing before I get to the transfer: Process films lend themselves particularly well to satire (again, Strangelove), and Comden and Green, with their spot-on portrayals of show-biz worlds, were always able to lace their confections with a little dollop of well-placed acid—which also has a lot to do with their efforts’ relevance and longevity.

As for this presentation: Singin’ in the Rain is a legitimate classic (it’s kind of surprising how many illegitimate classics there are out there—products more of the zeitgeist and misplaced affection than of talent and craft), and truly classic films haven’t been faring too well lately in 4K HDR (witness Citizen Kane and The Godfather). So I was a little trepidatious about approaching this release, especially since the original negative isn’t around anymore to work from, which can be a warning of a bumpy ride ahead.

But, while it might not reach reference-level quality, Singin’ in the Rain is a pleasure to watch in 4K HDR. The experience is, for the most part, visually consistent, and the inconsistencies that do exist aren’t likely—with one particularly egregious exception—to pull you out of the film. The colors are sumptuous and vivid without lapsing into garish (which has been a problem with earlier home video releases of this film). In fact, the HDR grading lends them just enough subtlety to make the more visually heightened moments (like the deliberately gaudy montage of first stabs at musicals that leads up to “Beautiful Girl”) look appropriately exaggerated but never cartoony.

The truly problematic spots seemed to be confined mainly to moments on either side of optical dissolves. For instance, the color palette collapses completely at the end of “Moses Supposes,” making Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor look like they’re suffering from some kind of vitamin deficiency. The particularly egregious moment mentioned above falls in the middle of the big “Broadway Melody” number as Kelly fantasizes about Cyd Charisse after she walks into a casino. There’s a long (almost one-minute) take after the dissolve as Kelly begins to dance with her, and the resolution is so jarringly low that it induced a DVD flashback. This is likely a product of the elements they had to work with, but the shot goes on for so long that you just can’t brush it off.

One last thing to gnaw on about the image transfer: I know this has become a critical saw, but HDR makes some of the shots stunning—for instance, all of the lighted signage in “Broadway Melody” and the medium shots of Jean Hagen and Debbie Reynolds as they stand on either side of the curtain at the film’s finale. This comes mainly from having plenty of highlights to accentuate within the shots. Here’s my query: Doesn’t the ability to do this throw off the visual balance of the film? What about all the other footage (the bulk of the movie) that doesn’t lend itself to creating a 3D-ish effect? I loved seeing the shots mentioned above looking so vivid, but it seems to me more to the point to stay true to the look the filmmakers intended. Something tells me we’ll look back at this first round of releases of old films in 4K HDR and find a lot of it gimmicky.

As for the audio: It’s surprisingly dynamic and palatable. But, as much as I know it pains some people to hear this, I have to say it again: This film was originally mixed in mono so it should be listened to in mono, no matter how deep your addiction to all those other speakers in your room. We can’t claim to care about the filmmakers’ intent, and support a booming market of director’s cuts, etc., and then just pick and choose which aspects of that we’re actually going to honor, based on our proclivities. (Sadly, as with The Godfather, the original mono isn’t an option with the 4K HDR version. You have to descend all the way to the lowly DVD-quality download to have that experience.)

But to boil all of this down to its essence: Singin’ in the Rain is well worth seeking out in 4K HDR because it still holds its own as both a musical and a classic film and provides a visual and aural treat despite a few unavoidable hiccups along the way.

PICTURE | It might not reach reference-level quality, but Singin’ in the Rain is a pleasure to watch in 4K HDR. The inconsistencies that do exist are, with one exception, unlikely to pull you out of the film.

SOUND | The audio is surprisingly dynamic and palatable but, unfortunately—and inexcusably—there’s no option here for listening to the original mono mix

Achieving Serenity

ACHIEVING SERENITY

How an impossible private cinema came to bloom in the Palm Springs desert

by Michael Gaughn
updated April 24, 2023

Serenity is a freshly minted 22,000 sq. ft. home nuzzling a golf course in Indian Wells, CA. Done in the kind of Mies-gone-wild style that’s become a signature look in expansive post-millennium west coast homes, it features a wide-open floorplan that’s as much about outdoors as indoors, and hinges its effect on a seamless flow between those two worlds.

The whole is infused with a very contemporary sense of play, best evinced on the lower level, which gives off a distinctive carnival vibe, with guests free to stroll from the sports-car collection past a two-story rotating wine tower and onto an elaborate dance floor, then pass a Zen garden on their way to the private cinema—a cinema, by the way, that really shouldn’t exist. And yet there it is.

Everything about Serenity, from broad strokes to light touches, is an effective extension and expression of the somewhat diametric dispositions of its owners—he a businessman with an engineering background, she an artist. And that melding of creativity and ingenuity, of art and technology, may be best realized in the theater, a space brimming with know-how, but all of it invisible, and all in the service of entertaining and being entertained.

photos | William MacCollum
video | Geoff Franklin, Be Film Inc.

CINELUXE SHOWCASE

right rear | the car collection & wine tower
foreground | the dance floor
left rear | the cinema

The couples’ expectations for the space were all reasonable enough—but seriously stretched the limits of what current tech can do. They wanted a theater with exceptional picture and sound where they could watch movies without distractions but that didn’t disrupt the no-boundaries flow of the rest of the home, allowing guests to dip in and out freely. They also wanted it to offer a rather generous view of the adjacent Zen garden so the room wouldn’t feel like an outlier in the home’s defining indoor/outdoor gestalt.

Most of the above goes well against the grain of the widely accepted criteria for creating a home cinema, dicta chiseled in stone, sacrosanct and inviolable:

The room must be sealed off, admitting no light or sound. Reflective hard surfaces like glass and metal are forbidden. There must be generous, unimpeded wall space for the placing of speakers for surround sound. Strict symmetry is king. And no Zen gardens.

left | the subterranean Zen garden with a glass-floor walkway on the main level, above, and an open-air courtyard glimpsed at the far end
right | the cinema

left | the subterranean Zen garden with an open-air courtyard glimpsed at the far end, and with a glass-floor walkway on the main level, above
right | the cinema

The Serenity theater checks none of those boxes. In fact, it seems to thumb its nose at the age-old practices. It’s not that the owners were deliberately trying to transgress—they just wanted what they wanted. And what they wanted meant breaking almost all the rules.

walls & bridges

The hardest request to honor was the seemingly contradictory desire to have a movie theater-quality experience while also keeping the room open to everything around it. While it is possible to create a wide-open space that can deliver decent enough picture and sound, the light and noise from beyond its perimeter will inevitably compromise performance. The solution was to employ two retractable curtain walls, which allow the space to function both as a dedicated theater and as a more casual media room that readily welcomes strolling passersby.

Those walls also helped address another significant problem. The gated community where Serenity rests only allows for single-story dwellings, but the owners wanted their entertainment spaces to exist separate from their living area on the main floor, so they dug down instead. But to fend off subterranean gloom, large courtyards were placed fore and aft of the surface level to provide generous sunshine.

That sunshine, as well as the artificial light from outside the theater, would easily wash out the image on the theater screen—an issue mostly resolved by closing the curtain walls. But what about being able to watch something when everything’s open, which was a big part of the ask? The traditional go-to would have been a projector/screen combo but, as Serenity integrator Jeff Williams relates, they would have needed a projector “the size of a small Volkswagen” to generate a picture bright enough to be seen in all that light. The answer was a 185-inch Samsung video wall, which creates a cinema-sized image viewable under just about any conditions.

Serenity is just one instance of the growing demand for flexible entertainment spaces that can achieve the picture and sound quality of a dedicated theater room while fitting into the more open flow of contemporary homes

design touches in the theater include dramatic uplighting between the seat rows, a bar area in the back, and custom-made Elite HTS love seats in red Valentino leather to match the color of the husband’s favorite Ferrari

PROJECT TEAM

architect | Mark Whipple AIA

project manager | Ty Harrison
Whipple Russell Architects

integrator | Jeff Williams
Jeff Williams Inc.

audio consultant | Robert Melendez
Triad Speakers

audio calibration | Chuck Back
Trinnov Audio

A bigger challenge was how to get a full-blown 41-channel Dolby Atmos surround system to achieve peak performance in a theater where almost all the wall space was off limits to speakers—and where two of the walls are just curtains. Sure, there was enough room to accommodate everything up in the soffits and ceiling—just. But for the Atmos experience to work, a decent number of the speakers need to be down at ear level. It took some deft high-tech sleight of hand to make that happen.

Of the 35 Triad speakers deployed, 19 were designated for ear-level listening—a statement that sounds counterintuitive as hell given the conditions. But the Trinnov Altitude processor tasked with juggling the theater’s sound includes a function that can create the impression of a speaker being heard from somewhere other than its physical location. It’s similar to the illusion of stereo, where sounds seem to come from an area between the speakers. Here, the sound, run through the Altitude, can be rejiggered to create a convincing sense of being at ear height.

And this was all accomplished without leaving any clues that almost the whole of the soffit and ceiling is crawling with gear. As project manager Ty Harrison relates, “The designer obviously knows, and the homeowner knows, but people coming in for the first time would never know that.”

The Altitude also gets most of the credit for the room being able to have impressive sound whether the walls are open or closed. The processor creates detailed profiles of the space in both sonic configurations and then uses them to compensate for any of the various gremlins that could compromise performance. The theater changes automatically to the appropriate soundscape whenever someone triggers the wall.

testify

The execution of the Serenity theater is unique, but the impulse behind it isn’t. Serenity is just one instance of the growing demand for flexible entertainment spaces that can achieve the picture and sound quality of a dedicated theater room while fitting into the more open flow of contemporary homes. That wasn’t possible until recently, and this room would have to rank as one of the best executions to date.

And it is was all done without making it look like a science project but instead a very organic part of a very ambitious and elaborate but still, in its way, minimalist design. “It was really important,” says Harrison, “to focus the visual on just the video wall and the atmosphere of the room rather than walking into, you know, Speaker Central.”

The room apparently serves its purpose well. The owners make it a point to do all their viewing there. According to Harrison, “They don’t even have a TV in their master bedroom. At the end of the day, they instead like to come down and unwind and watch a movie. That’s when they spend their most time together.”

The husband has made it part of another daily ritual as well. “At lunchtime,” says Williams, “he goes downstairs, makes a toasted cheese sandwich, and sits and watches The Golf Channel and one news broadcast. Religiously.”

As for whether Serenity measures up as a “true” home theater, Williams relates the time a fellow integrator drove from Scottsdale, four hours away, to show the room to a client: “The integrator, who does extremely high-end homes, said it was the best theater he had ever sat in.”

Taking all of the above into account leads to a simple and obvious conclusion: It’s now possible to dream big dreams confident they can be realized, completely and without compromise. The recently impossible is now very much possible.

Is Serenity the future? No—it’s the here and now.

photos | William MacCollum
video | Geoff Franklin, Be Film Inc.

a closer look

the speaker system

THE SOUND PROCESSING

THE HOME AUTOMATION

Noah Kaplan–Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again

Noah Kaplan—Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again

A deep dive into how Kaplan and his company are at the forefront of the effort to make entertainment tech not just attractive but major statements in design

by Michael Gaughn
April 22, 2022

As much an artist as an entrepreneur, as much musician and music lover as speaker maker, Noah Kaplan has seen his business—Leon Speakers—grow rapidly, as both a presence and an influence, exactly because it’s the antithesis of an electronics behemoth. A creativity-driven craft operation that’s as much local as international, Leon is the speaker-company equivalent of a microbrewery. (No big surprise to learn, then, that Kaplan shepherds one of those as well).

But there’s little point in providing deep background in this intro since a lot about Leon emerges in the interview that follows. Just know that the artistic impulses that define and drive its efforts have synced up nicely with the larger movement to bring design back to home entertainment, making Leon one of the most significant forces in the push to make components not just visible but forms of expression, and, ideally, works of art.

PART 1

The Leon Speakers founder is a leading force in the movement to reintroduce a long lost sense of style into luxury home entertainment

“For decades, the prime directive when it comes to luxury home entertainment has been ‘hide it all away’—an edict that’s caused all the various gear purveyors to find ingenious ways to make everything from speakers to electronics to projectors virtually disappear. Problem is, it has also often led to unfortunate compromises in performance (although you’d never know it to look at the marketing). Maybe even more unfortunate, it’s resulted in some huge lost opportunities for making innovative design statements in the home.” read more

PART 2

The man behind Leon talks about the other companies helping to drive the movement to make entertainment tech fashionable again

PART 2

“In our previous conversation, Leon Speakers’ founder Noah Kaplan described how his efforts are grounded in the work of innovative mid-century industrial designers like Dieter Rams, who found ways to turn pieces of entertainment technology into compelling design statements. Picking up the ball again below, he discusses the contemporary companies that share his don’t-hide-the-gear approach to not just integrating but showcasing technology in the décor of design-conscious homes.” read more

PART 3

On translating the desire to bring design flare back to entertainment tech into real-world product

PART 3

“Having, in Part 1, discussed the movement to free entertainment technology from its anonymity by transforming it into distinctive design statements and, in Part 2, limning some of the companies that are helping propel that effort, Leon’s guiding spirit and tech-design evangelist here talks about his own contributions to the cause, citing examples of how he’s put his theories—and inspiration—into practice.” read more

PART 4

The interview concludes with a glimpse of a time to come when entertainment tech will once again fully embrace innovative design

“As we wrap things up, Leon Speakers‘ Noah Kaplan neatly brings things full circle, weaving together all the threads he laid out in the previous three installments. The focus here is primarily on the future—not just of Leon but of home entertainment in general as it continues to spread out, in increasingly sophisticated forms, throughout the home, and thanks to more nuanced and responsive technology and design, evolves from an often awkward add-on to an integral and stylish part of the domestic environment.'” read more

Michael Gaughn

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Achieving Serenity

Noah Kaplan–Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again

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