DVDs, 3/20.

When I was a budding film buff, there were a few common film books on everyone's shelves. If you went to the book store or to someone's house, you were likely to see Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, Arthur Knight's The Liveliest Art, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor by Murray Schumach and Karel Reisz's The Technique of Film Editing. Also among them was a bold book that had its author's name spelling down the thick spine like a theater or hotel sign: Hellinger. That's one book I never dipped into. In later years I learned, of course, that Mark Hellinger was a former newspaperman turned movie producer and, in fact, had his name attached to some superb early noirs, including Brute Force and The Killers.

In official cinema, however, Hellinger is best known for The Naked City, which Hellinger narrates himself, in his wise guy accent, which made famous the concluding sentiment, "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." Like many aspects of the film, this idea was borrowed later by the TV show The Untouchables, which was "narrated" by Walter Winchell. Naked City itself became a TV show, airing on ABC from 1958 to 1963. Reisz's Technique of Film Editing uses the final chase scene from Naked City up the Williamsburg Bridge as one of its premiere examples of fine editing. The influence of the film as a police procedural can be seen in works diverse as Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books and the various Laws and Order. Hellinger experienced none of this, as he died of a heart attack shortly after recording the film's narration.

The title of the movie comes from the book by Weegee, the photographer who inspired the Academy Award-winning look of the film's cinematography by William H Daniels. The film's claim to fame is that it took cinema back to the streets after a few decades of studio-bound if nevertheless convincing settings (Martin Scorsese says somewhere that Minnelli's Manhattan-set The Clock seemed more like New York to him than the city itself did, and he lived there). Written by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz, and with lush music by Miklos Rozsa, The Naked City, in the experience, proves to be a contradictory thing. The seeming reality of the streets clashes with the artifice of the room sets, and the arch narration clashes with the sentimentally, a reporter's cynicism-coated sentimentality perhaps, but there nonetheless.

Most of the sentiment is bestowed on Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lt Dan Muldoon, an isolate who is first seen singing along while preparing breakfast for himself. He may be a cop, but he is really a priest who has forsaken a private life for the selfless rigors of public service. He becomes mentor to raw recruit, the married Detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor, who would later fall into the clutches of Stanley Kubrick and eventually become a director himself; Kubrick may have met Taylor while hanging out on the set taking snaps for Look magazine). His mentorship is philosophical and even religious, like something out of a Janwillem van de Wetering novel. The wise old man showing a youngster the ropes is a trope of Hollywood at the time, as are subtle explorations of the effects of World War II subsequently on American society, which is one of the film's bigger themes. To this end, the film contrasts three men, Halloran, Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a sleazy user and con man who knew the deceased woman at the center of the film's case, and the frighteningly ethnic-sounding Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia), a brutal killer who is much in the spirit of William Bendix, only scarier. In a sense, they represent a "response" to post-war America, one conformist, a second exploitative, and finally one in which a brutal and brutalized figure simply takes what he wants. Images of a death march are evoked in the sheer footwork that Halloran has to endure while tracking down seemingly trivial aspects of the case, which is loosely based on actual events (indeed, it was a case that may also have formed the basis for I Wake Up Screaming and its remake, Vicki).

The Naked City comes to us via the Criterion Collection, which lately has taken a special interest in its director, Jules Dassin. The company has already released Rififi, Thieves' Highway and Night and the City and will come out with Brute Force in April (Criterion tends to release its auteur-oriented discs in pairs). The film comes in an excellent black and white full frame transfer; sound production on most of the interior scenes has the tinniness one comes to associate with low budget drive-in films. A 16-page insert contains cast and crew info, chapter titles, transfer info, an essay by Luc Sante and a memo by Hellinger on the chase sequence. Its supplements are rich. There are two brief video interviews, with Dana Polan who gives background on the production, James Sanders who talks about the locations, and Dassin himself, filmed at a 2004 LA Museum appearance (with bad sound). There is also the trailer, plus a stills gallery, and the final supplement, a commentary track from an aged Wald. Sadly, it is not one of the best yak tracks you are ever going to hear. In content it is repetitious and in production value it is compromised by the screenwriter's speaking habits. Nevertheless, there is good information in this and the other supplements and the disc is a must-have for noir collectors.

Round the digital horn, reviewers have chosen to take the stance that The Naked City is a supreme example of Hollywood art.

Glenn Erickson at DVD Talk kicks off by noting that noir buffs "reserve a special place in their hearts for Mark Hellinger and Jules Dassin's The Naked City, a highly influential crime thriller filmed almost entirely in the streets of New York City," especially for its "omniscient POV narrator, who seems to be the soul of the city itself." Erickson finds the transfer "a bit grainy and the audio is fine. Also at DVD Talk, Jamie S Rich digs into the box to define the film as an "anti-noir," writing of Dassin: "While notably trading the impressionistic shadows that were a hallmark of the genre with the documentary look of Neorealism (swapping, in effect, the Germans for the Italians), he also extracts the dark cynicism from the crime picture, creating instead a police procedural where the good guys are clearly defined and the bad guys unambiguously punished." About the transfer, Rich notes that Naked City has been on DVD before and that the earlier inferior transfer has been improved. "The back-and-white camera work is rich and detailed, and Dassin's photography of New York is seen here with a remarkable clarity. For the nitpickers, there are still some imperfections, such as stutters where the reels would have changed and sometimes a line or two ingrained in the picture."

DVD Authority's Fusion3600 promises that if "you like realism in your noir, then you'll love this movie, as it is about as realistic as possible, given the limitations of the time period. So if you need flash or sensationalism, look elsewhere, as The Naked City is about realism and a natural atmosphere." Dawn Taylor at the DVD Journal admits that it is "fascinating in today's forensics-obsessed culture to watch detectives crack a case using old-school methods."

For nostalgia's sake, it is interesting to look at Bosley Crowther's New York Times review, a generally positive take that still must acknowledge "two of the memorable weaknesses of Mr Hellinger's works," one of which is the "largely superficial" drama, "being no more than a conventional 'slice of life' - a routine and unrevealing episode in the everyday business of the cops," and a "staginess which, flagrant in several instances, rends the 'actuality' disguise."

March 6 saw the release of two interestingly contrasting films, a fake documentary and a drama based on a nonfiction book. I refer, of course, respectively, to Borat and Fast Food Nation. Borat, aka Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is the latest recipient of critical group think, a film few criticize. It has a 90 per cent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. So will the DVD reviewers be more skeptical, now that they've had time to think about the film, and absorb its various wins and nominations?

For a contrarian view, we naturally turn to... Harry Knowles? "I can't really recommend this. I'm that stick in the mud that [sic] doesn't enjoy Borat," he begins at Ain't It Cool News. For Knowles, the film is "R-rated cable bullshit polluting my local theaters." Knowles doesn't go into much detail about why he didn't succumb to Borat love, but Ken Tucker does at Entertainment Weekly. The writer predicts that "some people are going to feel a mild letdown, a sense of 'Oh, yeah, that was funny the first time around, but was it really such a pop culture event after all?'" and says, particularly of a deleted scene, that "I'm as much a sucker for mean jokes about cute animals as the next fellow, yet I felt sympathy for the woman at the animal control center who, after Borat describes what he wants to do with the puppy he's considering for purchase, grabs the little animal back and snaps, 'You're not going to kill or eat or have sex with my dog!'"

Matt Brighton at DVD Authority takes the more conventional view that Borat is the type of film "you just have to see in the theater acknowledging that, 'Yes, there are some questionable moments,'" but concluding that it all "seems to work. Borat is such a likeable personality that we overlook what he's actually doing and just enjoy the experience." Like Knowles, Brighton assumes, too, that "Fox is just getting this [bare bones] DVD out there so that they might double dip again later this year." Without reservation, Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits calls Borat "the funniest film I've ever seen. I honestly can't remember ever having laughed this hard in a movie before in my entire film-going life," and finds that the humor resides in the simple fact that "most of the Americans they meet seem to have no idea that Borat and Azamat are frauds, despite their often outrageous statements and behavior, nor do they quite ever know how to react to their antics." Even the slim supplements make for "very funny stuff," but like the other reviewers, he writes that "you just know that [more supplements] will be included eventually on some future 2-disc special edition."

Fast Food Nation is, of course, Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's critique of American society, its eating habits, and how they are shaped by rich and powerful fast food chains. The film fell fast upon the director's previous film, A Scanner Darkly, and both the Philip K Dick and the Schlosser adaptations in their peculiar ways take Linklater back to the world of Dazed and Confused. But Linklater and co-scriptwriter Schlosser have chosen not to recreate the book as a documentary feature but to dramatize it and explore the book's facts and implications in a fictional context. Confounding expectations, the result has disappointed some of the DVD reviewers. Ian Jane at DVD Talk found the film to be a "wildly uneven satirical drama that doesn't stay focused long enough to work." The adaptation suffers by "narrowing [the book] down to a few hollow characters and changing the names of the guilty parties for this fictionalized version, [and] much of the sting has been taken out of the material and the film loses focus fairly quickly by mishandling a few subplots and failing to develop the leads enough for us to care about them."

Brett Cullum of DVD Verdict had "high expectations" for the film because "the book changed my life. When I put down Eric Schlosser's nonfiction look at the fast food industry, I swore off McDonald's and other quick-fix, junk-food chains that dot the American landscape," but found the resulting film "strangely dispassionate," a film that "shows little and says nothing clearly - those who skipped Schlosser's treatise will just scratch their heads wondering what the point is." What's more, "the anger of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me captures the spirit of the Schlosser book even better than this bizarre film treatment."

The anonymous reviewer at Current Film agrees, finding that, in comparison to Linklater's film, Spurlock's "remains a much more compelling and informative look at the fast food industry and its effects on our culture," because Linkater's film, among other things, "doesn't exactly get into the material in the way that one would hope," and that "subplots are never really developed and characters wander in and out." Extras for the disc include a commentary by director and writer, a making-of, and four short animated films that parody The Matrix series, all of which all the reviewers seem to like.

- DK Holm

Laura Poitras's My Country, My Country (2006) is "the most sensible film yet about the [American] occupation [of Iraq]," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC News, "and as a counterpoint against acres of corporate-spun non-news, it is indispensable.... [W]hat we see, remarkably, has the electric heat of a new experience, of seeing what has been heretofore officially proscribed. Best of all, the film is so immaculately constructed that it cannot be dismissed with charges of partisan subjectivity — Poitras covers the waterfront as she avoids ideology and cant, and yet everything that unfolds, from the combat-copter rides over Baghdad to the Arab TV footage of the Fallujah bombing, is first-hand evidence of an illegal occupation, an oppressed native people, and an abundance of needless pain and decimation. Without uttering a word herself, she calls the cards on every prevaricating pundit and politician blathering about 'the enemy.'"

Also reviewed this week is Lim Dae-woong's Bloody Reunion, "a simple but full-blooded Korean slasher film that probes the high-school-memories dynamic with a laser."

"Here's a notion to kick around: WC Fields is America's answer to Yasujiro Ozu." Dave Kehr keeps that notion bouncing longer than you might at first think possible. As for the WC Fields Comedy Collection: Volume 2, Dan Callahan, writing in Slant, finds it a "respectable second set, though Never Give a Sucker An Even Break is the only one you really need to own."

Posted by dwhudson at March 20, 2007 3:22 PM