Stuart Galbraith Iv

Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s The Threat (Odoshi, “Blackmail,” 1966) is an obvious fusing of two relatively recent hit films, William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), about escaped convicts terrorizing a wealthy suburban family whose home they hole up in; and Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), in which a company executive becomes morally responsible for an unrelated kidnapping victim and, later, even its kidnapper. Fukasaku’s film isn’t within light years of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, and it has a singularly Toei-flavored take on the story and its characters. In Japan the film is not particularly well regarded; there’s no Japanese-language Wikipedia entry for it, for example, one of the few Fukasaku films not to have one; and Cinema Club, a kind of Japanese-language equivalent to Leonard Maltin’s long-running TV Movies, gives it two stars out of four—average.

With few exceptions, 1950s Hollywood movies about the U.S. Armed Forces were aggressively patriotic and pro-military. Even Cinerama’s innocent travelogues usually found ways to insert unsubtle pro-American propaganda, often by showing off U.S military might in the form of the latest jet aircraft and carriers. Stanley Kramer’s production of The Caine Mutiny (1954) dared to show the U.S. Navy as something less than infallible, but counterbalanced its criticisms in showing a military system that ultimately works, justice prevailing. That film was a huge success ($2 million cost vs. $22 million at the box-office), paving the way for the somewhat similar The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955).

Though the list of 1940s Westerns include My Darling Clementine, Red River, The Ox-Bow Incident, Fort Apache, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, among others, the vast majority of A-picture ‘40s Westerns were much more along the lines of California (1947). In terms of output, B-Westerns starring people like Roy Rogers, William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd, Tim Holt and dozens more, dominated. Though generally targeting younger audiences and fiercely formulaic, the best B-Westerns are still enormous fun. When Hollywood’s big studios made the occasional A-Western, mostly they were little more than gussied-up Bs. Such is the case here. As Leonard Maltin, in his book generally remembered as TV Movies put it, California is “an elaborately ordinary Western.” Boy howdy.

Seijun Suzuki’s Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965) is also known under its more directly translated title, One Generation of Tattoos as well as White Tiger Tattoo, which was the title Toho International gave it when they distributed it abroad on behalf of Nikkatsu Studios. Under any title, however, this is an above-average if by-the-numbers yakuza-on-the-run action melodrama.

If your exposure to Mexican fantasy cinema has been limited to Aztec Mummies and the wild and wooly wrestling movies of masked icon Santo and his friends, you’re sure to find The Vampire (El Vampiro, 1957) and The Vampire’s Coffin (El Ataud del Vampiro, 1958) a big, pleasant surprise. Both have a stateliness utterly lacking in the anything-goes world of Mexican horror-fantasy of the 1960s and ’70s. Both show a lot of imagination and are especially intriguing in that they bridge the gap between the classic Universal horror films of the 1930s and ’40s with the Hammer Gothics that immediately followed. Previously released to Region 1 DVD in 2006 by CasaNegra/Panik House Entertainment with good-for-the-time video transfers, Powerhouse Film’s new Blu-ray discs present the films in much-improved high-definition versions, and they’ve packed them with fascinating extra features.

A perfectly dreadful French sex comedy starring Brigitte Bardot and Maurice Ronet, Les Femmes (“The Women,” 1969), also known as The Vixen, is rather like François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women but done in the style of Confessions of a Window Cleaner. The film has precious little of any interest, the final nail in this Blu-ray release’s coffin being it’s the worst video transfer I’ve encountered in many years.

Broad stereotypes bordering on cartoonish notwithstanding, Fernando Di Leo’s The Italian Connection (La mala ordina, “Mob Orders”) is an entertaining crime thriller, the second-third of Di Leo’s “Millieu” trilogy, preceded by Caliber 9 (also 1972) and followed by The Boss (1973).

Established by Lew Grade in 1954, the company generally known as ITC produced many of Britain’s best-known TV programs, including The Saint, Danger Man, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds (and all the other Supermarionation programs), and later Space: 1999, and distributed others internationally, including the original incarnation of The Muppets. Unlike most British-made TV shows of the era, generally shot on videotape with only exteriors and location scenes on film, and even that in 16mm, most ITC shows were lavishly made in 35mm, with production values in line with the biggest American prime time series. Grade justified the additional expense of his programs because a key part of his empire’s income was in selling ITC programs internationally, particularly to the American market.

British comedies of roughly 1946-64 were most commonly done in the Ealing Studios mold: small-scale but witty, eccentric character-driven films built on clever premises, satirical but usually with affection for their subject matters. In the U.S. these “little” comedies tended to play small arthouse-type cinemas, but some of the best ones had wider releases, and helped establish actors like Alec Guinness, Alastair Sim, and Peter Sellers beyond the U.K.

Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), from James Jones’s bestselling novel, had been one of the biggest hits of the entire 1950s. At a time when Hollywood was shifting over to color and widescreen, this black-and-white, standard format movie, made for around $2 million, earned $30 million, or fifteen times its cost. George Seaton’s The Proud and Profane (1956) very much wants to recapture that magic, even casting one of Eternity’s stars, Deborah Kerr, in one of its two leading roles. Like the earlier film, it dances around various taboo subjects as far as the Production Code would allow: casual sex and adultery, pregnancy out of wedlock, attempted suicide, post-traumatic syndrome disorder, and other issues spurred by an American military at war in the Pacific. Though handsomely produced with decent performances, the film is a something of a confused, unsatisfying mess.