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The Godfather: The Greatest, or Just Great?

The Godfather—The Greatest, or Just Great?

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Coppola’s breakout film continues to ascend in the pantheon for reasons that don’t have much to do with the worth of the classic he created

by Michael Gaughn
April 5, 2022

The Godfather keeps creeping up the list of Greatest American Movies, and, with its 50th anniversary upon us, the time seems ripe for a consensus to form to anoint it the best. It’s not. It might not even belong in the Top Ten—unless you subscribe to the movie-by-blender school of filmmaking. It’s an undeniably great effort, but the reasons it still resonates have very little to do with its worth as a film—thus this column.

In the early ‘70s, American society was still numb from the chaos of the ‘60s. Hollywood had tried, and failed, to assimilate the Counterculture, and did an even worse job of repackaging things like Vietnam, civil rights, and the almost complete collapse of governmental authority. (Forget that it didn’t even sense the seismic tech revolution rumbling in its midst.) Beyond lost, the movie industry looked backward, leaping completely over the turmoil—but also considerable ferment—of the previous 15 years.

The Godfather was really the first manifestation of that that really meant anything, the first stab at retro that resonated on the big-box-office scale. The Long Goodbye came the next year, but closed as soon as it opened. Chinatown appeared the year after that and did well with audiences and critics, but Polanski was far more wary of the Romanticism Coppola aggressively embraced.

Every one of those films represented a probe, sent forth to see what spin on the safe and understood (i.e., predigested) past the traumatized public might be willing to fork over big dollars for.

The traditional argument is that The Godfather was somehow transformative because of the brutality of its violence. It wasn’t. It came five years after Bonnie and Clyde, three after The Wild Bunch, and a year after both A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs. It had nothing new to teach us there. What was transformative was its wedding of graphic mayhem with the snug glow of the Studio Era. Making violent death not just palatable but heartwarming for the masses is The Godfather’s masterstroke, laying the groundwork for the emergence of late ‘70s blockbuster- and franchise-driven cinema, which continues to plague us today.

But even that doesn’t explain the film’s continuing appeal. The Godfather represents possibly the greatest pivot in the history of American movies, and continues to rise in esteem year after year, because it is the first blockbuster that was, to its core, cynical. That cynicism became a virus that has infected practically every film made in its wake. No other piece of filmmaking has had a greater influence on changing the tone of the movies, on making dark not just an aesthetic choice but (hopefully not permanently) the coin of the realm.

The Godfather continues to rise in popularity and reputation not based on its merits as a movie but because it embodies the beginnings of, and allows us to reaffirm our faith in, the mass surrender of hope that spawned the Reagan Era and the near-constant churn of too-big-to-fail cinematic exercises in nihilism and oppression we continue to respond to with, “Don’t take it too seriously—it’s just a movie.”

Accepted wisdom sees Coppola and Lucas as developing on parallel paths and then radically diverging. But viewed through the lens offered here, Star Wars becomes not an alternative to Coppola’s work but its natural and inevitable extension.

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.

Review: Annie Hall

review | Annie Hall

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Woody Allen’s first truly great film is less a romantic comedy than an incisive and beguiling cultural document of New York in the mid ’70s

by Michael Gaughn
January 5, 2021

It’s impossible to talk about a Woody Allen movie without having to first weigh in on the ongoing efforts to vilify Allen and obliterate all traces of his career. He’s been spattered with so much bile by Hollywood types like Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page who’ve blindly bought into the Me Too herd mentality that there are fewer and fewer people even willing to approach his films let alone consider them objectively.

I’m hoping to do an appreciation of his career where I can go into all this a little more. What I would ask for the moment is that you try to ignore the grating cacophony of squeaky wheels and appreciate the works of one of the most accomplished filmmakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s for what they are.

Annie Hall is known as a romantic comedy—a perception that had a lot to do with it snagging a Best Picture Oscar. The thing is, it’s not really a romantic comedy—at least not for me.

That I’ve never found Diane Keaton to be very attractive, or a very good actress, has helped me develop a different—and I think more accurate—take on the film. Annie Hall is actually a very ambitious, incisive, and candid attempt to capture the essence of a particular culture at a particular moment in time via its embodiment in a particular personality—and that personality is not Keaton.

There had to be a reason why Allen suddenly shifted away from all of those gag-driven early movies that served as his film school and allowed him to build the fan base he was able to ride for the next four decades. And there has to be a reason why he suddenly went from being a good-enough comedy director to a fully fledged and inspired filmmaker.

And I think the answer lies in this exchange from the film:

“The failure of the country to get behind New York City is anti-Semitism.”

“But, Max, the city is terribly run.”

“But we’re not discussing politics or economics. This is foreskin. . . . Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks at New York like we’re Left-Wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.”

New York City had pretty much imploded in the wake of the social upheaval of the ‘60s and was in a wretched state by the mid ‘70s. Very much like the way it’s portrayed in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, it had become a kind of repository for all of the country’s sins. This was probably the city’s darkest period, years before the unfettered avarice of the ‘80s turned Manhattan into a playground for billionaires and Brooklyn into a day-care center for their kids.

Allen’s identification with the city was so strong that this all had to have sent him reeling. Knowing that it was the prime source of his inspiration—and of his creativity in general—he needed to work out what it meant to be a popular entertainer trying to create within a metropolis that the rest of the country was treating like it had the plague.

That’s what Annie Hall is really about—Diane Keaton was just his Trojan Horse, a way to open some doors and to make sure the studio got its money back.

The movie comes very close to being a drama. Just slightly shift the emphasis of almost every one of the scenes and it becomes a sobering look at people desperately trying to define themselves at a time when there were very few reliable guideposts to lean on. Had Allen approached the film that way—although he wasn’t yet that good of a filmmaker—Annie Hall would have been wrenching instead of hilarious.

Consider how Allen treats his own character—which is the same as saying, how he treats himself. This is not a very flattering portrayal—miles away from the narcissism he’s too often accused of. Alvy Singer displays a lot of bluster, and uses his jokes as his armor, but you can tell the guy is hopelessly lost—which Allen expresses through the movie’s loose, improvisational structure, trying on different styles and techniques and attitudes to see what will stick.

But that shouldn’t be mistaken as Allen himself flailing from behind the camera. Just consider the famous scene of him and Keaton on line at The New Yorker, where Allen humiliates the pontificator by dragging a seemingly embalmed Marshall McLuhan into the shot. It’s a nuanced and logistically complex near-3-minute single-take piece of bravura comedy filmmaking that only a self-assured and truly inspired director could have pulled off. And that’s just one example among many.

True, this isn’t the film Allen set out to make, and a lot of Annie Hall did come together in the editing room. But the list of genius directors who’ve confided that the real filmmaking happens in the editing is long. And they’re not wrong.

Allen started out with a film that was true to his intentions but was all cake and no icing, and he sweetened it just enough to make it palatable for his audience, which was expecting another Sleeper. In the end, he found himself named King of the Romantic Comedy with a couple of Oscars left at his door—an experience he likely wasn’t expecting and that probably scared the bejeezus out of him.

Annie Hall was Allen’s Rhapsody in Blue—a loosely structured, jazz-inflected work that announced that he had ambitions that went beyond being a successful pop performer. And, as with Gershwin, he was never able to do anything quite that fluid and intuitive again, instead trying on different genres defined by others with decidedly mixed results.

But Hall holds up. A surprising number of the jokes and gags still land, his approach to the material and the scenes remains fertile unexplored territory for other filmmakers, and the way he took the careening wreck of New York City and turned it into the most vital and romantic place on Earth is still seductive. The City owes him a statue—but then some group of Yahoos would come along and demand that it be taken down.

Talking about seeing the film in HD is difficult. Gordon Willis’s cinematography is known for being dark and bold, but it’s very subtle, almost documentary-like here. In HD, it feels flatter than it should—not unwatchable, just flat. And then there’s the weird dilemma of having to separate the shots where he deliberately and beautifully exploited grain—like the famous shot of Annie and Alvy standing on a pier at twilight with the East River bridges arrayed behind them—from the ones that are overrun with grain because the elements for the transfer probably weren’t the best.

As for the sound—come on, this is a Woody Allen movie. One of Allen’s greatest strengths as a filmmaker is the ability to make his material compelling without relying on CGI, flashy editing, explosions, or other gratuitous effects. This is moviemaking stripped down to its essence, and it can be cleansing to luxuriate in a piece of cinema that doesn’t pivot on its ability to mercilessly abuse you.

Forget that this is supposed to be a romantic comedy. Forget about its Oscars. Forget about the well-heeled mob of Hollywood conformists bleating for Allen’s blood. Approach Annie Hall as an adventurous and innovative and unusually honest piece of filmmaking and you’ll get the chance to experience—or re-experience—one of the best American films of the final quarter of the last century, the movie that helped start the wave that brought New York back from the dead, for better or worse.

PICTURE | This HD presentation feels flatter than it should—not unwatchable, just flat

SOUND | Come on, this is a Woody Allen movie

Review: The Godfather

review | The Godfather

review | The Godfather Part II

column |
The Godfather—The Greatest, or Just Great?

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The 4K treatment of this cinematic landmark can seem stunning—until you watch the new transfer of Part II

by Michael Gaughn
April 1, 2022

I was all prepared to write a review that boiled down to: Yes, there are problems—maybe a lot of problems—with The Godfather in 4K, but it’s ultimately worth watching because it wipes away the memory of all previous home releases, allowing you to reconnect with the film anew. But then I watched The Godfather Part II in 4K. And I realized I’d been had. I’m a little ashamed to admit that had I not watched the sequel before I wrote this, you would be reading a completely different review—one I would have had to repent for later.*

I’m going to be stepping onto Dennis Burger’s turf a little here, but that’s unavoidable. And, unlike with most any other two movies out there, I don’t think it’s unfair to review the first Godfather film in the context of Part II because it’s extremely likely vast numbers of people will watch both of these films in 4K, possibly back to back, and will end up having an experience somewhat similar to mine, although they might not reach the same conclusions.

It all comes down to this: The Godfather Part II looks like the film Gordon Willis shot and that Paramount presented in 1974. The transfer is visually consistent throughout, whatever tweaks were made to the images are judiciously subtle, and there’s a constant flow of organic grain that gives it an appropriate analog energy and warmth. The first Godfather, though, is all over the map visually, with HDR accentuating the flaws of the not infrequent patches of compromised footage and with a lot of heavy-handed digital manipulation scrubbing away far too much of that gorgeous, essential grain. Yes, it does sometimes feel like you can reach into the frame, but that’s not the movie Willis lensed. The 4K transfer can be dazzling when you first experience it—I readily admit I fell for it like a brick—but it’s ultimately just a kind of gimmick that couldn’t run more counter to the gritty elegance that helped define the original film.

Reviewers rarely find themselves in this position—a double-edged one that puts their necks way out there because it allows them to be held so easily accountable—but feel free to take any of the examples below from the first film and compare them to how similar material was handled in the transfer of the second. I just don’t see how anyone could argue that The Godfather transfer is the more faithful presentation of the two. And, beyond that, I don’t see how anyone could find the overall experience of The Godfather in 4K superior to the experience of Part II in the same format—unless, of course, you just never much liked Part II.

Let me cite a few things, then try to pull the threads together.

The first moment that got my attention and that, in retrospect, felt off, was early in the opening scene when it cuts to a medium shot of The Godfather sitting behind his desk. Everything until then had looked OK, but that shot had the video-like sheen that always sends my antennae shooting out a mile whenever I’m watching something in HDR. Fortunately, there are few instances that egregious in the rest of the transfer, but it was the first strong signal that this presentation might not adhere closely to either the letter or the spirit of the movie.

A more frequent problem was that, once you decide to start cleaning and enhancing shots, you inevitably expose and accentuate the flaws in the most compromised footage, which can seriously disrupt the experience of watching the film. It’s not news that many of the outdoor shots during the wedding sequence have never synced up well visually. All of that is only hammered home here. Similarly, the reliance on stock footage was beginning to die off at the time The Godfather was released, but audiences were still willing to buy into the illusion. But all of the too crisp, too vivid original footage to either side of the stock stuff here makes the use of the latter seem inept. The shot under the el, which has always been borderline, goes full-bore late-period Monet in this transfer, in a way that would make an uninitiated viewer question the filmmakers’ competence.

Then there are the seriously crushed blacks—not consistently but often enough to stick out sorely. All of which is ironic for a film that’s legendary for its chiaroscuro style. Two easy-to-spot examples: When the Don is getting ready to leave the Genco offices with Fredo, right before he’s gunned down in the street, and the tighter shot on the black car that stops in front of the hospital while Michael and Enzo stand at the foot of the stairs. Instead of having the sense of someone lurking in the back seat, you get a glimpse into an impenetrable void.

My biggest slice of beef, though, is reserved exactly for the shots that look most stunning. With almost all trace of the grain banished, they’re pristine, vivid, and yes, like you can reach into them—but that’s not the movie that captured the public imagination back in 1972 and influenced practically every film made since. You won’t find anything like that in Part II—not because some of the footage couldn’t have been distorted that way but because whoever handled that transfer decided not to go there. The scene in the first film where Michael finds out his father has been left unprotected at the hospital loses much of its tension because, without the constant low simmer grain provides, the shots of the empty corridors just look impressive, not menacing.

I doubt any of my arguments will sway anyone in the “Look—pretty!” crowd that sees anything that’s been given an HDR buff and shine as an improvement, but chances are they’re just watching Godfather the conformist shibboleth—the something-to-have-on-in-the-background that cable’s AMC has managed to marathon into the ground—rather than the movie itself. All I can say is that they don’t know what they’re seeing, therefore, they can’t know what they’re missing.

Look: 4K will always be a very mixed blessing. When done right, it can result in transfers like The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and The Godfather Part II that honor the films they’re meant to serve. But then there are Jabberwocks like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, disjointed experiences that take you someplace other than where the filmmakers wanted you to go. Watching The Godfather in 4K HDR can be an enjoyable, even edifying, experience, but you have to understand and make allowances for what’s feeding what you’re seeing. The Godfather Part II, though, is pure viewing pleasure, something you can surrender to utterly without ever once having your critical brain get in the way.

*This is, for me, a very unorthodox review because it focuses, from start to finish, on the transfer of the film. Traditionally there would also be some commentary on the film itself, its cultural or historical context, etc.—which, in most reviews, adds up to little more than obligatory throat-clearing. Here, it’s actually important—but not as important as telling the tale of two transfers. Which is why I’ve shuttled my comments on the movie itself to a separate column.

PICTURE | Crisp and bright and visually dazzling, with blacks frequently taken deep into the netherworld—but that’s not the movie that changed filmmaking forever

SOUND | It was originally mixed in mono so it should be listened to in mono. Unfortunately—and inexcusably—that’s not an option here.

Noah Kaplan–Bringing Entertainment & Design Together Again, Pt. 2

Noah Kaplan—Bringing
Entertainment & Design
Together Again, Pt. 2

by Michael Gaughn

“One of the best companies we work with, Admit One, has engineers now to help customers choose things like their fabric, shades, and light fixtures so the tradespeople can go ahead and figure out how to integrate all that technology.”

click on the images to enlarge

The Josh AI Nano voice-activated system controller
top | placed within custom millwork
bottom | integrated within a Lutron home-automation keypad

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

March 30, 2022

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.

—M.G.

Since home theaters are the most technologically sophisticated room in many high-end residences, they’ve functioned as a kind of lab to get people used to tech and how to integrate it into the design of the rest of their environment.

I love what you just said because that was the intention of that space. The intentionality of a home theater space is generally managed by a design team. The integrator works in tandem with a home theater designer who handles all of those little details like the chairs, the fabrics, the paneling so the integrator can say, “Where can I put my technology? Cool.”

We’re starting to see integrators bringing people like designers in-house. One of the best companies we work with, Admit One, has an on-site interior designer, and they have engineers now to help customers choose things like their fabric, shades, and light fixtures so the tradespeople can go ahead and figure out how to integrate all that technology.

above | For this collaboration with Admit One Home Systems out of Edina, Minnesota, Leon created custom speakers that play off from the lighting in the skylight beams

The best firms know how to work in tandem with the other trades. It’s just a giant responsibility to put on an electrician to say, “I want all the light sockets to look this way, and I want you to choose the Lutron light socket and then choose the style and finish from the thousands of finishes available.” So we’re seeing this new interim position of design being an immense part of the conversation between clients, designers, and integrators.

The integrators of the world need to know the language of the designers and architects. And I think that’s an amazing trend. Like Josh AI just came out with the Nano—a beautiful little fixture that easily fits into spaces so designers can comfortably work with it.

How has the interest in having high-quality entertainment tech in spaces beyond the theater room played out with what you’re doing at Leon?

Home theaters really were a harbinger. So let’s apply that to the living room. At Leon, we call something like that “living space theater,” which is a mix of blended technology and oftentimes complementary design. We rely on interior designers because, by the time we’re involved with the interior, the designer is more involved than the architect, so we know whatever we do has to work with the interior-design intentions.

It’s really cool to actually see a design get introduced. We consider ourselves as much a design company as a speaker company, and a lot of our calls are about design consultations. So we’ve started bringing in architects and designers to work with us here on staff. So now we have an insider view.

above | This CEDIA Integrated Home of the Year from 2018 features Leon Profile Series side-mount speakers and a Media Décor Eclipse art lift

Do you find there are other companies that are basically on your wavelength that you can collaborate with?

We work with a lot of bespoke manufacturers that get it. Séura is a great example. I work very closely with the people on their team, like Gretchen Gilbertson. She has a very similar design belief to mine about how to bring technology into the house in a way that’s multifunctional. Number one, it has to be built properly so it can meet the technical specifications, but it also has to have the right style and quality to fit in a luxury home. She creates a tremendous palette of products.

Lutron is an amazing company that does a great job of not only creating perfect integration with things like with its Radio RA and Homeworks control systems but also has an immense portfolio of fixturing. It’s amazing how well they train people. They show integrators how to make the lighting and shades work perfectly but they also train their designers to be able to choose perfectly. So, for us, Lutron is always a design leader. They have an amazing asset catalog, they’re always up to date and modern, and they’re always making changes. You see Savant starting to make moves toward this, more on the lighting side, bringing in other disciplines to try to add shades or add lights. I see a lot of others working on this as well, so I would say it’s a trend for most.

But the hardest thing for a tech company is letting go. For me, I had to completely let go and say, “I want an actual architect to design the products. I want real interior designers to choose the fabrics.” So I brought them in and said, “What do you need us to do to make this conversation work for you?” They’re definitely not talking about frequency response—that’s my job. It’s like, I’m the plumber. They don’t care about what the cone material is on the woofer, but they absolutely care whether the cabinet is made of sustainably sourced black walnut.

Coming Soon: Part 3—Noah discusses some Leon projects that highlight where his company is and where it’s going

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

For this collaboration with Admit One Home Systems out of Edina, Minnesota, Leon created custom speakers that play off from the lighting in the skylight beams

This CEDIA Integrated Home of the Year from 2018 features Leon Profile Series side-mount speakers and a Media Décor Eclipse art lift

Lutron’s Alisse lighting control, shown here in brushed brass, comes in 11 designer finishes

Review: Citizen Kane

review | Citizen Kane

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Perhaps the most innovative and audacious movie ever makes the move to 4K

by Michael Gaughn
March 21, 2022

No matter how you slice it, a 4K HDR release of Citizen Kane is a big deal. Whether or not you agree that it’s the greatest American film, it is undeniably a hugely important one, and its leap to UHD is inevitably to going draw more attention than it would for most other movies.

So let’s get this out of the way: If you come to this expecting an audio/video experience that’s significantly better than has been delivered on the earlier home releases of Kane, you’re going to be disappointed. If you’re approaching Kane for the first time and are expecting the 4K to help sell you on the film, it likely won’t. And if you’re skeptical of Kane and its reputation, this release could very well help shore up your biases.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t check it out—you should; but just don’t expect the picture or sound to be any kind of tremendously revelatory experience. Adjust your expectations accordingly. There are revelations here, but they’re mostly reserved for attentive viewers already familiar with the film who are willing to tolerate some pretty erratic fluctuations in the presentation. For them, it will be the first home release that even hints at what Kane was like when it was released in May 1941.

The good stuff first: There are certain shots—typically medium shots and closeups —that have a subtle gradation and a luminous quality that suggest what Kane looked like when the first prints were struck. Since the original negative is lost, it will never be possible to confirm that conjecture but, if true, it suggests that Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland were going for a much more nuanced look than was usually found in Hollywood films. And, if true, it was likely a (successful) effort to give Kane a quiet emotional resonance, to help temper the often blind and sometimes brutal actions of its lead character.

Taking in those shots, and then imagining that look applied to the whole film, Kane becomes a different experience—one very similar to my recent encounter with the 4K HDR release of A Clockwork Orange, which had never felt right in any of its earlier home releases. Orange is a nasty film, but Kubrick never meant for it to be that relentlessly nasty, and seeing the cinematography finally done right gave it wit and verve, restoring the original aesthetic balance.

Certain shots in Kane have a startling depth and subtlety very much reminiscent of what Alfred Stieglitz was able to achieve with the platinum prints of his photos. (See, for instance, the shots listed in the “Reference Images” sidebar.) Little of the rest of Kane in this 4K release—and none of Kane in the earlier home releases—looks much like this, and it’s hard to know how many of those deviations in the look, sometimes extreme, are attributable to having to make up for the lost negative, for the elaborate compositing and optical printing used in many of the shots, or other factors.

All of the above might sound like esoterica—it’s not. If Kane was meant to have a look more toward those tighter shots I cited, then we’re talking about a different, and more profound, film. “Rosebud” has frequently been dismissed as just a gimmick, a way to keep the audience hooked during Welles’ elaborate time-jumping, but if the original photographic style was meant to give certain shots and scenes a subtle but sustained emotional subtext, then Rosebud becomes something much more than a sop for the masses.

It also goes beyond just being a gratuitous reference to Marion Davies’ pudenda. Famously, the film opens with Kane’s death and it effectively ends when he staggers across the terrace after Susan’s departure. That moment has never really carried its proper weight before, and I suspect that’s because Susan has never been properly presented before. You have to literally see how much Kane is projecting onto her to glimpse the core of the film and to fully understand what drives his character.

Like I said, this transfer is a bit of a mess and its visual inconsistency will likely throw the casual and uninitiated, who might be better off approaching the film through a lower-res presentation, where a lot of the unevenness would be smoothed over. But it’s a tantalizing opportunity for anyone who’s wondered whether Kane deserves its reputation. Yes, you have to work at it, but the dividends are huge.

Because it’s hard to nail down exactly what contributed to which flaws, there’s little point in listing all the various problems with the transfer. But I need to point to two things in particular. Many of the shots seem unnecessarily contrasty and harsh, abuzz with noise that doesn’t seem to be organic grain. And somebody needs to be slapped with a big penalty for consistently pushing the whites to 100 percent. That is not how this film was meant to look. The various white-on-black title cards all stick out jarringly—partly because of that extreme whiteness, partly because they look static, frozen. (Titles were created knowing they would be run through a film gate and reflected off a screen.)

Just as bad are the moments when certain whites are pumped so hard they make some of the scenes look artificially digital. One is the end of the scene in Bernstein’s chairman-of-the-board office where the flames in the fireplace are so distractingly bright they look matted in. Another is Kane’s dress shirt during the legendary low-angle confrontation between him and Leland, which is so white it occasionally seems to float in mid air, independent of Welles’ body.

One last little bit of carping on my way out the door: Why does this release, from the transfer to the extras to even the cover art, feel so half-hearted and perfunctory? It’s like all involved vaguely understood this is an important film but they weren’t really into it. The extras are the same stuff that’s been floating around for decades, presented in a somewhat slapdash way. Kane, of all films, cries out for some context and some new perspectives—there are none here. The cover art looks like it was thrown together in about 20 minutes in Photoshop by some office lackey. What gives?

Does Kane deserve its reputation? Hell, yeah—every square inch of it. And mainly not for the reasons that are usually trotted out. Welles, with this film, beat the studio system at its own game and reinvented filmmaking. The problem is that his innovations were so radical—and I’m talking about things, like thematic material, aesthetics, and the reflexive deployment of movies, that go well beyond technical considerations—that it took more than 50 years before even some of it, half-digested and mostly superficially, began to make its way into mainstream filmmaking. Eighty one years on, we have barely even begun to mine this particularly rich vein, and there are good reasons to think we never will.

PICTURE | The transfer’s visual inconsistency will likely throw the casual and uninitiated. But the upping in resolution creates a tantalizing opportunity for anyone who’s wondered whether Kane deserves its reputation.

SOUND | The track exhibits an impressive dynamic range but, for Jiminy’s sake, opt for mono not stereo because that’s how it was meant to be heard

Reference Images

52:26 | medium closeup of Emily Kane
Chapter 15 | the closeups of Susan during her first meeting with Kane
1:01:33 | Emily Kane and her son at the political rally
1:30:54 & 1:30:59 | the alternating closeups of Kane and Susan during her opera performance

Review: Rosemary’s Baby

review | Rosemary’s Baby

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The film that created the modern horror/thriller genre looks fine in Blu-ray-quality HD but cries out for 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
October 22, 2020

1968 saw the lowest movie attendance in history. It was also the year of 2001, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Night of the Living Dead, If . . ., The Producers, Bullitt, The Party, Petulia, Planet of the Apes—and Rosemary’s Baby. In other words, the movies that would reinvent Hollywood and define it for the next 50 years.

Coincidence? Of course not—and it’s exactly that creative ferment born from cultural strife that gives me hope this eerily similar era might lead to another radical reinvention of the movies. Because boy do they (and we) need it.

But that’s a topic for another day. The focus of attention here is Roman Polanski’s genre-defining, damn near perfectly calibrated horror/thriller Rosemary’s Baby. And let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: This is not a serious film, let alone an art film. Polanski knew full well he was making a trashy potboiler and didn’t care. He wanted to know what it felt like to create a big hit within the studio system, and he did. He hit the jackpot.

That’s not to say that Polanski colored within the studio lines. He toys with both the studio conventions and a very wary but looking to be jazzed audience the way a cat torments a half-dead mouse. The movie gets its big perverse kick from seeing how far it can push the boundaries without breaking them. There’s the continual sense that this stuff shouldn’t be happening in a mainstream crowd-pleaser and yet it is, which makes the film, beyond its subject matter, feel very much like a nightmare. But that approach has since become so commonplace that it’s lost its impact—which means you have to approach Rosemary’s Baby on its own terms and with fresh eyes if you’re going to get anything out of the experience at all.

There’s barely a frame that doesn’t bear evidence of Polanski’s lightning-quick paw, but probably the most striking example, especially since it essentially sets the whole grisly machine in motion, is Teresa Gionoffrio’s suicide juxtaposed with the entrance of the Castevets. We go from shots of a woman’s head framed in an improbable amount of blood (Weegee never photographed a crime scene that gory) to a seemingly incongruous low angle of two archetypal geriatric Manhattan flânuers strolling toward the camera dressed like they just came from Mardi Gras. The whole sequence is as disconcerting as it is hilarious. It’s like, “OK—I just got my first big, gruesome shock, so why am I laughing?” It’s Polanski’s way of saying you’d better trust him on this ride or you should just go watch another film.

There’s no point in recounting the plot or the set pieces. If you’ve seen the movie, you know all of that well; if you haven’t, why spoil it for you? What’s worth underlining is that—like Kubrick’s The Shining, which owes Rosemary a huge, and amply acknowledged, debt—Rosemary’s Baby still works. I know it’s arguable, but I don’t think anyone’s ever pulled off anything as odd yet apt—perverse yet airy—as the elaborate ritual leading to Rosemary’s insemination, where she’s granted an audience with a Samsonite-lugging Pope while being straddled by Satan.

The film has flaws but Polanski, out of sheer creative exuberance and guile, manages to trump them all. He’d wanted Robert Redford for the lead, which would have been amazing. He got John Cassavetes instead—which would have sunk the whole enterprise under the hand of a lesser director. Cassavetes acts like an asshole from the very start, so of course he’d sell his soul to the Devil. And yet the film somehow manages to glide right over that major lost opportunity.

I was also struck watching the movie this time by what an outright flake Mia Farrow’s Rosemary is. I realize Polanski wanted to keep the audience wondering if all of this was happening in the character’s head, but this Antichrist-toting Midwesterner is such a dim bulb that you almost don’t care if she’s delusional to boot.

And I have to ask: If Farrow is a housewife and Cassavetes is a struggling actor, where did they get the money to rent an Upper West Side apartment that would easily sell for many millions today?

I’ve never had a chance to see Rosemary’s Baby in a theater, so watching it in HD on Kaleidescape was a better than expected experience—that only made me long to see it in 4K. William Fraker’s cinematography was more compelling than I’d remembered from other home video incarnations—although I would hope that going to the next level of resolution will help minimize that damn flashing they used throughout when printing the film. It seriously dates what would have otherwise been an exquisitely photographed movie (and will forever haunt a large number of otherwise excellent films from the late ‘60s through the ’70s).

Christopher Komeda’s weird gothic-jazz soundtrack, bringing the evil of the East European woods into ‘60s Manhattan, still holds up, partly because it’s applied sparingly instead of being blared wall to wall. And this, like Rear Window and The Birds, is yet another older film that would seem ripe for an Atmos makeover, but it has such an ingeniously done original audio mix that expanding the surround field wouldn’t necessarily make it more atmospheric. That said, as with those other two films, I’d be intrigued to see somebody give it a shot.

To repeat myself: Nobody needs to convince you to watch Rosemary’s Baby. Its reputation as a horror classic is unassailable and secure. But I would urge you to first scrape away as many of the accreted conventions Polanski’s shocker has spawned and try to see it as if all those other films had never happened, as this is the place where it all began.

PICTURE | Watching this in HD on Kaleidescape is a better than expected experience, with William Fraker’s cinematography more compelling than it’s been on other home video incarnations

SOUND | Christopher Komeda’s weird gothic-jazz soundtrack, bringing the evil of the East European woods into ‘60s Manhattan, still holds up, partly because it’s applied sparingly instead of being blared wall to wall

Review: Full Metal Jacket

review | Full Metal Jacket

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You can sense Kubrick’s filmmaking powers beginning to wane, but this remains the single most intriguing riff on Vietnam to date

by Michael Gaughn
September 28, 2020

It’s obvious in retrospect that, sometime around 1962, Stanley Kubrick sold his soul to the devil. In Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, he was able to tap into a level of filmmaking no mortal had been able to access before, and none have come even close to since. His work during that period made every other movie, no matter how seemingly well done, feel cliché, compromised, and inept.

Then, in the early ‘80s, his deal with the Dark Prince began to go sour. By the early ‘90s, they had clearly parted ways, and with Eyes Wide Shut, Satan exacted his revenge.

With Full Metal Jacket (1986), you can clearly sense the Master failing—but keep in mind that’s compared to the best of his own work. He was still way ahead of what any other mainstream director was doing.

During the Strangelove-to-Shining period, you might not have always been able to fathom some of his creative choices but, even when they were inexplicable, they felt like they were somehow a part of the whole. With Full Metal Jacket, you have entire passages that, both upon viewing and reflection, feel inert, like they’re keeping the movie from hitting its stride.

Just to be clear: Jacket is a great film—it’s just not quite one of the greatest Kubrick films. The boot-camp sequence, from the second R. Lee Ermey appears on the screen though Vincent D’Onofrio’s self-inflicted head wound, is, if not flawless, undeniably compelling and even exhilarating. But the movie then sputters throughout the second act, trying out various stuff just to see what will stick, before recovering its stride for the conclusion in Hué.

It’s easy to re-edit Jacket in your head, removing the dead spots, and seeing it as a much tighter 90-minute affair that wouldn’t have been any less sardonic or bleak or exhausting but wouldn’t have so many things that would make you cringe. (“Paint it Black”? Really?!)

I’m not at all saying you shouldn’t watch it—in fact, there are some pretty compelling reasons to put it above anything you currently have on your Watch list. First off, it’s worth it just to savor Ermey’s Sgt. Hartman and D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Pyle, two of the most iconic film performances ever. Kubrick is often shortchanged as an actor’s director, but you just need to consider that D’Onofrio had never acted in a film before and Ermey had never had a major role to appreciate just how masterful he was.

It’s also worth watching for its (and I’m about to say a dirty word here) ambiguity. At a time when you’d be hard pressed to name a film that doesn’t ultimately reinforce accepted beliefs, no matter how convoluted it might be in getting there, it can be bracing to watch something that pushes back so hard against the status quo.

Consider Pvt. Pyle’s blanket party. Kubrick has been using Matthew Modine, with his Wonder Bread blandness, as the traditional point of audience identification, but he’s been increasingly making Pyle’s plight the focus of the action. And, for all his abuse, Ermey has been serving as comic relief and the volcanic source of the film’s energy. By the time of the assault on Pyle, Kubrick has put the audience in an untenable position where Pyle’s suffering, the recruits’ contempt for him, and the Corps’ impersonal need for steely discipline all have equal weight. If you can watch that scene and not feel that incredible tension, and not be thrown by it, you should probably just stick with Wes Anderson.

The other main reason Jacket is worth revisiting is for its intimacy—a term that’s hardly ever used in connection with war films, but it defines Jacket and sets it apart from almost every other entry in the genre. There are no epic battle scenes, is never the sense of massed forces colliding and none of the fetishistic portrayal of war machinery that’s defined the genre (and practically every other genre) since militarization, weaponization, and armoring became de facto cultural norms. You are in close quarters with every character here for the duration, and since this isn’t a particularly warm and fuzzy, or even articulate, bunch, it can be an incredibly uncomfortable feeling.

Finally, Jacket is worth watching just to appreciate that something like this could never be made today. It features an unvarnished, unromanticized, and unblinking portrayal of racial and sexual attitudes no contemporary filmmaker, too busy anticipating the outraged squeals of various pressure groups, would ever have the balls to attempt. If Jacket was in heavier rotation on cable, it would probably get slapped with the kind of silly, titillating, reality-denying warning labels that now precede any film that doesn’t toe any number of faddish political lines.

And, O yeah, one more thing—Kubrick had the stupefying ability to make his films look like they were created from somewhere beyond their era. Jacket was made in the mid ‘80s, but it has none of the excessive grain, contrast, saturation, or softness of most films from that time. The 4K HDR transfer faithfully reproduces what he wrought—which isn’t always easy, especially in the final third, most of which was shot during the Magic Hour and is filled with smoke and flames.

I do have two nits, though. The HDR tends to overemphasize the gold rims of Joker’s glasses and the silver dog-tag chains, especially during the boot-camp sequence, which can briefly pull you out of those shots. And I have to wonder if, given what Kubrick was going for here, the film doesn’t look just a little too pretty. Watching the Blu-ray version to check out the audio commentary, I couldn’t help wonder if that flatter, more documentary look wasn’t closer to what he was after. But that’s not really a criticism—more a matter of taste. And I don’t think I would ever opt for the Blu-ray over the 4K HDR, especially for the finale in Hué.

The sound mix is so subtle—especially for a war film—that it’s hard to appreciate just how good it is. There are no elaborate surround effects, mainly because Kubrick tends to keep the action squarely in front of you. Where it really pays off is with the steady, almost subliminal, succession of explosions heard at a distance once you’re in Hué. Often little more than muffled thumps, they’re meant, like the breathing in 2001 and the heartbeat in The Shining, to represent the pulse of the film.

All of that is presented cleanly and effectively. My only criticism is with the distortion in some of the dialogue tracks. I suspect this stems from the original tracks recorded on location, but it’s hard to believe Kubrick ever signed off on the results.

The extras can be summed up in two words: Don’t bother. The promotional film, “Full Metal Jacket: Between Good and Evil,” has some interesting comments from Kubrick’s collaborators, but you have to fight your way through a lot of annoying, and often silly, manipulation of footage from the film and strictly amateur motion graphics.

The commentary is a slice-and-dice affair involving D’Onofrio, Ermey, Adam Baldwin (Animal Mother), and critic Jay Cocks, with everyone in isolation and no one getting a chance to speak at length. And it just gets painful once Ermey drifts away and D’Onofrio goes off to the sidelines and you’re stuck with the obsequious Cocks for most of the duration. If you really want to know more about the film, read Modine’s Full Metal Jacket diary or check out the extremely uneven documentary Filmworker.

It was once a big deal to figure out who had created “the” Vietnam film. And given how big a trauma that war was, I can kind of see why that used to be important. Ironically, no one has ever really risen to that challenge. Full Metal Jacket isn’t really about Vietnam but about America’s obsession with war, and its whole second half feels much more relevant to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other recent exercises in empire than it ever did to the jungles of Southeast Asia. It’s worth a good, long look for anyone who can handle a little truth.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer faithfully reproduces what Kubrick wrought—which isn’t always easy, especially in the final third, most of which was shot during the Magic Hour and is filled with smoke and flames

SOUND | The sound mix is so subtle—especially for a war film—that it’s hard to appreciate just how good it is. There are no elaborate surround effects, mainly because Kubrick tends to keep the action squarely in front of you.

Review: Nashville

review | Nashville

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Robert Altman’s American microcosm still rings true as an unflinching look at the time—and at the time to come

by Michael Gaughn
May 8, 2021

Shot in a city meant to be a not-too-flattering microcosm of the whole of American society on the cusp of the country’s Bicentennial and released during what should have been a celebratory but turned out to be a very flat and bitter, still hung over from the ‘60s, year, everything about Robert Altman’s Nashville screams that this is supposed to be an important film—which is deeply ironic since Altman was rightly known as an iconoclast who openly mocked the idea of important films. And yet he succeeded mightily in creating a movie that was, and remains, important without succumbing to any of the lazy pretentious of Oscar fodder.

Given all that, Nashville needs to be approached on its own terms; and within the context of the country at the time; and, maybe more importantly, from the vantage of the state of the country today. And that all needs to be done without turning this review into a scholarly essay.

The widescreen (2.35:1) aspect ratio says this is supposed to be an epic, but any action that approaches the epic is treated ironically, and the framing is mainly deployed—similarly to The Long Goodbye but on a much more ambitious level—to capture intimacy; the chaotic intimacy of people alone in groups, but also of people just alone.

Altman saw the country rapidly devolving into individuals encouraged to fetishize their own importance, leading to what the French philosopher Paul Virilio called, awkwardly, totalitarian individualism—an overinflated, ultimately fascist, sense of self that at the end of the day only reinforces how unimportant each individual is. This is probably the strongest through-line in Adam Curtis’s documentaries, that Americans keep confusing narcissistic indulgence with freedom—something corporations are happy to exploit because vanity makes people easy to sell to, and that political groups ride just as hard because it creates the illusion of free expression while stifling meaningful dissent in resentment and rage.

All of this was just beginning to coalesce at the time Altman made Nashville, with corporations groping toward figuring out how to channel the earnest childishness of the ’60s, guiding it through things like EST, Scientology, Ayn Rand, and Tony Robbins so that when people looked around, all they saw were themselves. Altman got a lot of this right but missed one crucial thing—like a lot of people, he assumed that the Carterian malaise would lead to the emergence of a viable third party. What it got us instead was Reagan.

Every character in the film reinforces this theme of crippling isolation—and it’s a massive cast—but there’s no redundancy. Instead, each portrait contributes to a mosaic that, when you step back and consider it as a whole, is devastating. On an emotional level—in a film about the death of emotion—the two key characters are Gwen Welles’ endlessly pathetic Sueleen Gaye and Keith Carradine’s promiscuous troubadour, Tom. Sueleen, hopelessly naive—and dumb—is imperviously optimistic, while the sociopathic Tom exploits the Romantic notion of the wandering minstrel to bed down every woman he encounters. They represented the two poles of American existence at the time, positions that have only become more entrenched and grotesque, and infinitely more dangerous, since.

Stepping to one side of all the sociopolitical stuff for a second, you have to marvel at the consistency of the performances Altman was able to draw from such a sprawling group of players. It’s almost impossible to single anybody out because everyone gets their standout moments, but it’s worth focusing in particular on Ronee Blakely, Keenan Wynn, and the always underrated but strangely compelling Henry Gibson. The weakest link is David Hayward—and it’s not really his fault because he did the best he could with what he had to work with, but Altman’s conception of the lone gunmen was stuck in ‘50s psycho-dramas so he failed to grasp how non-human these emptied-out souls tend to be—ironic since he accurately sensed the same thing in Carradine’s Tom.

Nothing in this film is supposed to be beautiful—not in the gauzy Geoffrey Unsworth style admired at the time or the kind of relentlessly smart-ass and ultimately vacant compositions we’ve come to idolize since. Like in The Long Goodbye, Altman is going for a deceptive flatness, a grittiness, relying on telephoto lenses so he’s more spying on the characters, having them reveal themselves, than framing them. The “pretty” shots are deliberately vicious, and always tied to Geraldine Chaplin’s clueless documentary for the BBC—the masses of parked school buses turned into a kind of refugee camp and the truly gorgeous in its grunge shot of the crushed and mangled junked cars.

That last shot is a good way of judging the quality of the 4K HDR transfer, which for the most part seems sincerely committed to Altman’s visual plan but occasionally wanders off the reservation—especially early in the film, where some of the shots look a little oversaturated, so traditionally pretty that they border on cartoonish. Not that Altman ever made this easy for anybody, constantly looking for ways to approach the idea of Hollywood movies from the obliquest possible angles, so anyone not completely on his wavelength is inevitably going to make mistakes transferring his work. But the material is compelling enough that you don’t notice the visual stumbles unless you seek them out.

Altman was notorious for his overlapping dialogue, which could occasionally lapse into mannerism but works for the most part here. That approach has been so widely adopted since that it really shouldn’t throw anybody coming to the film at this late date. But the 5.1 mix here didn’t seem to do much to improve the separation between the voices. The music is well, but not spectacularly, presented—but that was part of Altman’s point, that feeble, desperate tunes like these are just crap meant to be borne off by the wind.

I’m probably making Nashville sound preachy and heavy. It’s not. But it’s not exactly light and fluffy either. Altman does a great job of keeping things moving and of creating a pleasant enough surface for people who want their movies to be nothing but bright and shiny distractions. But everything just beneath that surface is troubling, and earned, and disturbingly prescient. This isn’t the whiny kiddie darkness of contemporary film. Altman saw how truly dark things were about to become and recorded it all as faithfully as he could. Nashville is a document of a past lost and a future more than earned.

I can’t let Nashville lie without talking about the ending—not that anything I, or anyone, could say could do it justice. All I can do is point toward it and say that no one has ever done something this coolly unsparing before or since. Altman managed to perfectly sum up the entire film there—not really narratively, but aesthetically, emotionally. It’s all very wry and detached, but it had to be because, without that distance, it would be impossible to watch.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer seems sincerely committed to Altman’s visual plan but occasionally wanders off the reservation, especially with some slightly oversaturated shots that border on cartoonish

SOUND | The 5.1 mix doesn’t do much to improve the separation between the voices in Altman’s infamous overlapping dialogue. Meanwhile, the deliberately crappy music is well, but not spectacularly, presented.

Review: The Killing

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Kubrick’s first real feature is rough around the edges but is still one of the seminal works of American filmmaking

by Michael Gaughn
August 2, 2021

The staging is often stilted, the acting often laughably bad when it’s not just mismanaged, it’s a concatenation of crime-drama clichés that leans almost to the breaking point on John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, the whole punctuated by pretentious, even silly, compositions and tracking shots that convey nothing, and yet Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing is one of the seminal works of American filmmaking, poised right on the pivot into what would become, for better or worse, the modern era of the movies. This is Kubrick’s first real feature, and he freely admitted that, in that age before film schools, he still had his training wheels on—and it shows. But, determined not to be a studio hack, aiming to be the first true independent within the studio system, he pushed the boundaries throughout. The results might be ludicrously mixed, but they’re a damn sight more interesting than what almost any other director was doing at that time, and their ramifications were, in retrospect, huge.

Critics did dismiss The Killing as a low-budget Asphalt Jungle knockoff—an accusation that was true as far as it went. And Kubrick might have seen himself as more of a Hustonian director at that point (although his affinity lay more with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but as he hit his stride as a filmmaker, it became obvious that if you created a Venn diagram of the two directors, any common ground between them would be minimal, and suspect. The more plausible explanation is that, in a bid to be palatable to the system, Kubrick donned a Huston disguise and used it as a Trojan horse to insinuate himself with the studio elders.

I can’t begin to do the film justice in this short review, just point out some things that might make the experience more interesting if you decide to revisit it—beginning with the fact that, while Jungle was a character-study-driven crime drama that was also about process, Kubrick decisively shifted that emphasis, not unsympathetically showing that his characters were pawns of much larger forces—not metaphysical but post-war societal ones defined by increasing dehumanization. (This viewpoint is captured in the many meanings of the title—all but one of which is lost on contemporary viewers, with their blinkered obsession with bloodshed.)

While Kubrick wanted to attract the largest possible audience, he had no interest in feeding them A-list pablum. He instead drew from the fertile muck of the B- (and often C-) movie world—a vital perspective on his work that’s rarely (actually, as far as I know, never been) explored. In many ways, his movies owe far more to Ed Wood and Burt I. Gordon than to William Wyler or Cecil B. DeMille. Just consider the recurring presence of actors like Ted Corsia and Joe Turkel or those godawful Gerald Fried scores (with Fried joined at the hip to the equally obstreperous Albert Glasser). And while it wasn’t deliberately placed there for the production, it’s not just pure chance that a poster for “Lenny Bruce and His All Girl Review” can be glimpsed on a seedy downtown LA wall when Sterling Hayden goes to buy a pawn-shop suitcase for hiding the loot. In a sense, Kubrick always showed an affinity with Bataille, constantly reminding us of the fetid underbelly that was essential to creating the Hollywood sheen—and driving the American engine.

And then there’s Jim Thompson, the roman noir King of the American Underbelly, whose work went through a very much lauded revival thanks to a seemingly endless string of film adaptations from the 1990s into the new millennium. Accepted wisdom has it that moviemaking wasn’t equal to Thompson’s material at the time he was an active writer. The truth is that none of those recent adaptations are worth anything more than the spit it took to make them. None of them understood Thompson but just pushed the more lurid elements for all they were worth. If you want to know his work, read his books—or watch The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or The Shining.

True, Kubrick didn’t know what to do with what Thompson was handing him—the scenes between Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook Jr. were great on paper but beyond what Kubrick was then capable of as a director. But they’re still meaningful, and amusing in ways that go beyond their status as kitsch, because they make it clear that Cook’s put-upon George Peatty is very much the heart and fulcrum of the film (which you would never know by looking at Kaleidescape’s cast list, where his name is oddly omitted.)

There’s also Lucien Ballard, who’s a bit of a curious case. Known for shooting Three Stooges shorts, he lensed for Kubrick here with mixed but sometimes inspired results, then went on to do both Blake Edwards’ The Party and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch—which officially qualifies him as a kind of subversive chameleon. The Blu-ray-quality transfer of The Killing—like the hit-and-miss 4K one for Dr. Strangelove—helps highlight the huge impact Kubrick’s photojournalistic work had on his films—something that was a lot harder to discern in earlier, lower-res releases. That documentary aesthetic lends an authentic grit to the action that more polished studio noir could never capture.

Brace yourself for a lot of grain, along with a lot of digital noise, but The Killing is definitely viewable on a big screen, and it’s worth making the effort for the shots where those forces aren’t as much in play, such as the many tight shots, a lot of them—like most of the closeups of Sterling Hayden and those key exchanges between Cook and Windsor—quite striking. (As with most older films, the opening titles are overly enhanced. When is somebody going to figure out how to make those stop looking like bad student video and more like film?)

Not much to be said about the audio, except that nothing could ever be done to ameliorate the impact of Fried’s clangorous blaring except to scrub it from the film completely. I noticed on this viewing, though, that there were big disparities in the levels of the actors’ voices, which I’m sure is a baked-in problem but one someone should address if this ever makes it to 4K.

I don’t mean to dump too heavily on The Killing, but it’s in no sense a great film—but it is an infinitely intriguing one, with moments of undeniably bold camerawork, editing, design, sound, and acting that still hold up. And of course there are all those early indications of the filmmaker Kubrick would eventually be. Maybe what most redeems the film is that you can sense him trying to claw his way above all the then-current melodramatic and romantic clichés in an effort to find higher, more authentic ground. (The contemporary equivalent would be trying to make a film that’s not hopelessly fouled by adolescent fantasy and its attendant fascist notions of power.) He would continue furiously pursuing that quest all the way through Paths of Glory and Lolita, with decidedly mixed results, before emerging a master artist with Dr. Strangelove. (Even Kubrick freely admitted that Spartacus doesn’t count.)

You don’t have to be a Kubrick—or Jim Thompson or Sterling Hayden—fan to enjoy The Killing. But you do have to leave most of the current cultural biases at the door (and there are so many of them) to even begin to appreciate it. It’s not mindless entertainment, a diversion—it’s a movie.

PICTURE | Brace yourself for a lot of grain, along with a lot of digital noise, but The Killing is definitely viewable on a big screen, and it’s worth making the effort for the moments where those forces aren’t as much in play, such as the many striking tight shots.

SOUND | Not much to be said about the audio except that nothing can ever be done to ameliorate the clangorous blaring of Gerald Fried’s score except to scrub it from the film entirely. The big disparities in the levels of the actors’ voices is likely a baked-in problem that someone should address if the film ever makes it to 4K.

Review: The Party

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This rowdy Blake Edwards comedy has gone from bomb to classic but has never gotten the presentation it deserves

by Michael Gaughn
March 21, 2021

Blake Edwards’ The Party actually opened on the same day as 2001: A Space Odyssey in that very strange year of 1968. It took a while for 2001 to gain some traction but it eventually became a big deal (thanks largely to a faithful following of stoners) and went on to become a classic. The Party closed almost immediately and the twin blows of that and the godawful Darling Lili almost obliterated Edwards’ career. But the film has shown surprising tenacity, and while it doesn’t have anything like 2001’s reputation, it is, in its broad, neurotic, and fundamentally conservative way, a deeply radical film.

Oddly, The Party and 2001 have things in common beyond springing from a radical impulse, primarily that, while they both have audio, they’re basically widescreen silent films—an itch Jacques Tati scratched at around the same time with Playtime. (It wouldn’t be inapt to see that retreat into silence as a kind of traumatic reaction to the times.)

But The Party’s biggest—and highly dubious—honor is that it single-handedly created the frat-boy/gross-out comedy genre that eventually proved stupidly lucrative for the studios and still plagues us today. And that, of course, has since morphed, as the culture has grown more callous, into the even more smug and sadistic genre of horror comedy. But Edwards can’t really be held responsible for that last crime against humanity.

And then there’s the fact that The Party would fall somewhere near the top of that daily longer list of films that could never be made today. The announcement that anyone like Peter Sellers was going to play an Indian in a comedy would cause vast hordes of rabid Millennials to well up trailing endless miles of hangman’s rope, Edwards’ and Sellers’ intentions and the actual execution of the film be damned. The sad truth is that any form of expression outside of some very rigid and oppressive guardrails has become verboten. There was far more latitude in the mid ‘60s, obviously, but nobody was quite sure what to do with the freedom that had suddenly tumbled into their laps.

That anyone who could enjoy this film might be dissuaded from watching it just because some zealots have labeled it “racist” is tragic.

While Edwards tried to make important films—including some basically unwatchable dramas—and dabbled in social commentary, he was mainly an extremely gifted metteur en scène with a deeply intuitive sense of the physics of comedy who probably would have been happiest doing slapstick shorts in the 1920s but was born too late. The first Pink Panther film is a work of genius, an almost flawless classical farce in the style of Molière, Feydeau, and Beaumarchais. Its followup, A Shot in the Dark, is OK but begins to feel forced. All of the subsequent Panther films aren’t worth the time it takes to watch them.

The Party is essentially Edwards’ baffled reaction—common to square-but-desperate-to-seem-hip society in the ’60s—to almost the whole of the social order being tossed into a blender. It takes the sophisticated, ’50s-inflected chaos of the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—a milieu he knew well—and wonders what would happen if that anarchy-within-bounds were allowed to roam free. But Edwards didn’t have a politically rebellious bone in his body, so the best he could arrive at was something that often resembles the finale of a Beach Blanket movie. Only the fact the he was a far more talented director than William “Bewitched” Asher begins to redeem this mess.

But it’s a both beautiful and nasty mess, and something to be savored—beginning, of course, with Sellers. This is his last great comic performance. After reaching his peak with Strangelove, Clouseau, and, here, Bakshi, he had little left to give and spent the next decade and a half stumbling from one mediocre film and half-hearted performance to another. (Being There is such an oddity it’s hard to say where it falls in all that.)

This is also his most fully rounded performance. Bakshi obviously meant something to Sellers (and Edwards) and he took the time to develop him into a complete character with a resonance that goes well beyond his comedic presence. You can laugh at him but at the same time can’t help but feel for him. None of Sellers other creations evoke that kind of emotional response.

While there are some perfectly tuned supporting performances (with the exception of the unfortunate Claudine Longet), they are all, appropriately, meant to create foils and a frame for Sellers. About the only thing that approaches deserving second billing is the studio head’s cringe-worthy home. Edwards and cinematographer Lucien Ballard captured the sheer awfulness of mid-‘60s West Cost architecture and design, and, again echoing Tati, turned this hideous altar to status into a character. It’s so ugly it’s, within the context of the film, beautiful.

Edwards and Ballard set up elaborate widescreen compositions with multiple bits of business playing out at the same time. The dinner scene contains endlessly cascading sight gags that display virtuoso timing and reward repeated viewing. (This was one of the first films to use a Sony video system for playback, which Edwards deftly deployed to develop his set pieces.)

You can’t say The Party looks great in Blu-ray-quality HD, but you can’t say it looks lousy either. The opening titles are better defined, less blotchy, than they’ve been in the past, and the increased detail helps enhance the impact of complex set pieces like that dinner scene, which have just been visually busy before. The film would obviously benefit from a bump up to 4K, but you can also see where certain elements would likely just look like too contrasty exercises in excess grain.

(One quick aside: No other Edwards film looks and moves like this one, which can probably be largely attributed to Ballard, who cut his teeth shooting shorts for The Three Stooges and who would move on from The Party to shoot The Wild Bunch. Like I said, it was a very strange year.)

Poor Henry Mancini. Just four years earlier, on the heels of Peter Gunn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Pink Panther, he had been the king of the pop music world, but the British Invasion had since all but wiped him from the face of the planet, and you can sense him struggling mightily here to figure out how he fits into a world of Day-Glo, psychedelica, and fuzz-tone guitars. The answer, unfortunately, is that he doesn’t, and his title song, with its sitar played with a Garden Weasel, ragtime syncopations, and Keith Moon at a high-school dance drumming, is so out of touch it’s unintentionally funny.

The Party should have a surround mix on par with the brilliance of its visual gags but it would be impossible for anyone, at this late date, to get far enough onto Edwards’ wavelength to pull something like that off. So what we get instead is serviceable but not what the film deserves.

There’s something deeply medieval about the present, where the most honest and potent creative works are being forced into hiding, held in some form of safekeeping until the day—that may never come—when they can again be appreciated for what they are. The Party, at its heart, is a tale of the outsider—and it’s exactly the iconoclasts, the outsiders, who are being purged. Enjoy it for what it is, but also for the badly needed context it provides.

PICTURE | You can’t say The Party looks great in Blu-ray-quality HD, but you can’t say it looks lousy either. The film would obviously benefit from a bump up to 4K, but you can also see where certain elements would likely just look like too contrasty exercises in excess grain.

SOUND | The Party should have a surround mix on par with the brilliance of its visual gags but it would be impossible for anyone, at this late date, to get far enough onto Edwards’ wavelength to pull something like that off. What we get instead is serviceable but not what the film deserves.

Michael Gaughn

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