Extras:

• Zero
  

"Things I hate, I kill."

That's the less than equitable, but at least straightforward, philosophy of Zatoichi (in some sources spelled Zato Ichi), the "blind swordsman" of the long-running Japanese series of some 24 films stretching from 1962 to 1973 and including ZATOICHI MEETS YOJIMBO, sort of the Jason Vs. Freddy of its day.

Zato Ichi is a wanderer, professionally a masseuse, a man poor of garb (even his sword is made of bamboo), but with a soft spot for poor villagers. He is also haunted by the past. In film after film he is either encountering the relatives of victims of his blade, or waylaid in some way by the woes of a peasant or his/her village.

This particular Zato Ichi film finds the meandering swordsman paying his respects at the grave site of a man he unnecessarily killed earlier (in a previous film?), when he is accused of robbing a village of the cask of gold it needs to pay its taxes. Unusually humble in the presence of the villages as they bang him around in an accusatory manner, Zato Ichi vows to find the real thief and prove his innocence. Plot complications ensue. As per the series, the film builds until Zato Ichi has a face off with the most powerful of the opponents gathered in the film.

Zato Ichi is an interesting character within the context of series films (and it was the most popular series of films in Japan). Not only is he poor, but he is blind, which sets him apart from those around him, and as a practitioner of butsudo, he feels remorse for the violence he has to commit, as he does in this film at the beginning and the end. He is alienated with the alienation that already exists in the world of the films. As the privileged lead character we are invited to identify with him, and within the confines of the series' popular formula (regret, unconsummated crushes, coming to the aid of women, children, and other victims of tyrannous swordsmen), Zato Ichi is very much in the spirit of romanticized Western (and western) characters who silently practice a rigorous code that is the only thing that gets them through a violent terrain. The films are not overly explicit about Zato Ichi's past (how he came to be blind, how he learned to fight), so he is another man without a past who rides in to save the day when weakness hobbles a village's ability to help itself.

In other words, he's Xena all over again (or she is he).

The only question is, given both the popularity of the series in Japan and its resonance with Western genre conventions, why aren't the films as great as the samurai films made by Kurosawa? Why do we revisit THE SEVEN SAMURAI over and over, but view this series for what it is, slightly elevated popcorn viewing?

One reason may be (besides the obvious fact that the films are studio products that are loath to deviate from a proven formula and have no sole guiding artistic force or auteur behind them) that the film's weren't as visually strong as Kurosawa's effortless seeming visual masterpieces. That error is corrected in ZATOICHI AND THE CHEST OF GOLD by hiring AK's DP, Kazuo Miyagawa (he also worked for Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, and others, as the liner notes of the DVD's box point out). CHEST OF GOLD has a visual sophistication that startles, and one expects Quentin Tarantino to borrow some of the unusual and visually witty camera angles found here any day now.

Still, fun as the film is to just watch, the visual pyrotechnics do not make it transcend its genre, as any great film or series might. ZATOICHI AND THE CHEST OF GOLD is better than the average series-type martial arts film, to be sure, but if a director or writer with the scope, vision, moral questioning, and sense of realism of a Kurosawa had done these films, watch out.

To these eyes the wide screen transfer (2.35:1) is colorful but a little muddy and dark. The sound is adequate to the film's needs.

Supplements consist solely of a four page insert with the chapter titles, DVD credits, and an essay by Japanese cinema expert Michael Jeck, who gives summary, context, and history about the film.

For the record two more Zato Ichi films are released simultaneously with this one, No. 7, ZATOICHI'S FLASHING SWORD (1964), and No. 8, FIGHT, ZATOICHI, FIGHT (also 1964), each also with a poster included, and a four page insert with chapter titles, transfer info, and additional informative essays by Michael Jeck.

Dud River

RIO LOBO

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 18 December 1970
  
• 114 minutes
  
• G
  
• National General
  
• Directed by Howard Hawks
  
• Credited writers: Leigh Brackett and Burton Wohl
  
• Cast: John Wayne (Col. Cord McNally (Jorge Rivero (Capt. Pierre Cordona a.k.a. Frenchy), Jennifer O'Neill (Shasta Delaney), Jack Elam (Phillips), Christopher Mitchum (Sgt. Tuscarora Phillips), Victor French (Ketcham, Boss of Rio Lobo), Susana Dosamantes (Maria Carmen, Tuscarora's Girlfriend), Sherry Lansing (Amelita), David Huddleston (Dr. Ivor Jones, Rio Lobo Dentist), Mike Henry (Sheriff "Blue Tom" Hendricks, Rio Lobo), Bill Williams (Sheriff Pat Cronin, Blackthorne Texas), Jim Davis (Rio Lobo Deputy), George Plimpton (4th Gunman), Don 'Red' Barry (Feeny, Bartender at saloon outside POW camp), Bob Steele (Rio Lobo Deputy), Clint Walker (Sheriff) Ethan Wayne, Hank Worden (Hank, hotel clerk)
  
• Cinematography: William H. Clothier
  
• Editing: John Woodcock
  
• Significant music: Jerry Goldsmith
  
• Production design: Robert E. Smith
  
• Second unit: Yakima Canutt
  
• Awards: Zero
  
• Budget: $4 million
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: After the Civil War, a Union colonel goes to Texas in search of the Northern soldiers who betrayed his company.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Zero
  

Someday John Wayne is going to enjoy a major revival. It will have to be long after the political issues he seemed to favor have all been rendered more or less moot, and it will probably be sparked by a bunch of Harvard students haunting the last remaining movie theater-revival house-museum in 2046, where Wayne films are shown continually all year long, thus prompting a national obsession with Wayne as an anti-hero. Certainly many of his films merit closer attention: THE SEARCHERS, THE QUIET MAN, RIO BRAVO. This movie isn't one of them.

Howard Hawks's last movie, it shows the director in TV form (Hawks could have spent his remaining years shooting episodes of BONANZA for all the style this film betrays) and working from a terribly written script credited to Leigh Brackett and Burton Wohl. It starts out as a Civil War film, turns into a heist movie (the gold taken never figuring much in the movie anyway), then becomes a revenge trek that turns into a "lone stranger comes into town to settle the war between settlers" kind of western. As a Civil War story, it's not as powerful as Ford's much earlier HORSE SOLDIERS or Leone's THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, which came out roughly around the same time as RIO LOBO.

"Old" Wayne is at the center of all this, the barrel-chested, massive jawed and jowly old man wearing modern jewelry and perching himself on his back leg, growling out orders with one smoke-filled lung. Hawks and Company try to surround him with youngsters to deflect the fact that it's an old man's movie, and in fact what little fame the film has is due to the fact that the supporting players are more interesting than the leads. There's George Plimpton, the PARIS REVIEW editor and journalist covering the film by appearing as a bit player who gets knocked down by Wayne, and Sherry Lansing, the future studio exec, who shocks the viewer by being nearly nude in a Hawks film of all things.

This is pretty sloppy filmmaking done at that difficult transition the studios experience going from the failed big-budget flops of the '60s to the youthquake films of the early '70s. RIO LOBO suffers from bad dubbing in early scenes, obvious day-for-night shots, "big" music over dull shots of wagons pulled down dusty trails, and lousy back projection. In fact, a lot of the film doesn't even look like a Hawks movie, with its zoom lenses and low angle tracking shots. That can probably be attributed to the fact that stuntman Yakima Canutt did the second unit and tilted this Hawks film to things unHawksian.

RIO LOBO seems merely an excuse for Hawks and a bunch of his friends to get together and play, a quality admired in Hawks by many critics. They like Hawks for his relaxed films, but this is relaxed to the point of narcolepsy. Here the Hawks tics, such as the use of the phrase, "You're good," and the overlapping high speed dialogue (which happens only once, when Jennifer O'Neill arrives about 38 minutes in) seem forced and tired. O'Neill's Farrah Fawcett-like voice can't really handle the overlapping dialogue and Hawks gives it up for the rest of the film. It's a dumb movie like world in which a single punch knocks a guy out and he stays out. Then, at the 1:15 mark the film becomes a re-make of RIO BRAVO and since we've all seen that American masterpiece many, many times, there's really no need to hone one's attention on the inferior remake (Hawks's second retread of the BRAVO material).

The most galling failure is that the acting is so bad. But then, bad acting is a badge of honor in a Hawks film. It's a statement of authority by the director. "We don't care," the bad acting announces, "we're just having fun and so should you. We don't take all this sissy moviemaking stuff seriously." That's entertaining up to a point, but not past the point when you feel minutes being ticked off your valuable time and your lifespan.

It's a beautiful transfer with excellent sound, but the disc comes with no supplements despite the fact that many of the participants — O'Neill, young Mitchum, Plimpton and others — are still around and could reminisce about the film either on an edited yak track on in video interviews. Hell, even Lansing could have contributed. After all, she runs the studio.

The Graduate

LITTLE BIG MAN

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 14 December 1970
  
• 147 minutes
  
• PG-13
  
• National General
  
• Directed by Arthur Penn
  
• Credited writers: Calder Willingham, from the novel by Thomas Berger
  
• Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Jack Crabb), Faye Dunaway (Mrs. Pendrake), Chief Dan George (Old Lodge Skins, Chief of the Cheyenne ['The Human Beings']) ), Martin Balsam (Mr. Merriweather), Richard Mulligan (Gen. George Armstrong Custer), Jeff Corey (Wild Bill Hickok), Amy Eccles (Sunshine ), William Hickey (Historian), Thayer David (Rev. Silas Pendrake), M. Emmet Walsh (Shotgun guard)
  
• Cinematography: Harry Stradling Jr.
  
• Editing: Dede Allen
  
• Significant music: John Hammond
  
• Production design: Dean Tavoularis
  
• Make up: Dick Smith
  
• Awards: National Society of Film Critics Awards, New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and Golden Laurel awards for Chief Dan George
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: The picaresque adventures of a young man who alternates between life among the plains Indians and among white folk.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Zero
  

RIO LOBO seems particularly old fashioned when set against a film that came out the year after. Arthur Penn's version of Thomas Berger's anti-novel about the west becomes in Penn's hands an anti-western about Vietnam. This tale about the life of Jack Crabb (Hoffman), a lad who spends his life alternating between life among whites and among the Cheyenne, mocks the hypocrisy of white invaders, especially blundering militarism in the form of General Custer, and heralds the social order of the nomadic plains Indians, where warfare is civilized and social dissent, the film says, can be accommodated (gay Indians live without ridicule among the women of the tribe, for example).

With its up-to-date politics and its surfeit of New York method actors joyously successfully impersonating heavily mustachioed westerners, the only thing wrong with the film really is that it tries to hard to be funny. The book was mocking the picaresque novel with its episodic account of Crabb's adventures yo-yo-ing comically from one emblematic element of western fiction and history to another, the book being a modern attempt to recreate the "voice" of Mark Twain, but the movie doesn't quite fully integrate the humor with the social protest.

In other words it ends up being a pale imitation of George McDonald Fraser's brilliant and hilarious Flashman novels, which started appearing around the same time, in 1969, and which also ping-ponged its hero through a cavalcade of peripatetic episodes in which he manages to encounter nearly every important figure of Victorian culture. McDonald's comedy is the humor of situation and exposing the dunderheaded hypocrisy of that culture (frankly little changed from Victorian times to now despite the addition of computers and nuclear weapons), while Penn's LITTLE BIG MAN goes in for mugging. Crabb goes from orphan to Indian to medicine huckster to farmer to gunfighter to scout to shopkeeper to town drunk to survivor of the Little Big Horn, eventually hitting, in an Altmanesque way, all the high points of Western mythology, only to mock them and expose how past films have failed to capture the "reality."

Yet this film isn't so subtle itself. Custer is a parody of the shortsighted military braggart. And in order to make the connection between the old west and modern military excursions, Penn casts many Chinese thespians as the Indians. The preacher's wife (Dunaway) who becomes a prostitute is also not so subtle a leap. It could have been done subtly, but Penn, despite his reputation as a realistic barrier breaker, comes from the theater, where subtlety doesn't get you past the footlights.

Paramount offers another beautiful transfer, but again no supplements even though most of the participants are still around.

Gay Paree

DRôLE DE DRAME

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 20 October, 1937, in France
  
• a.k.a. BIZARRE, BIZARRE
  
• 109 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Pathé
  
• Directed by Marcel Carné
  
• Credited writers: Jacques Prévert from the novel His First Offence by J. Storer Clouston
  
• Cast: Michel Simon (Irwin Molyneux, alias Felix Chapel), Françoise Rosay (Margaret Molyneux), Louis Jouvet (Archibald Soper, Bishop of Bedford), Jean-Louis Barrault (William Kramps), Nadine Vogel (Eva), Jean-Pierre Aumont (Billy the milk-man), Pierre Alcover (Det. Insp. Bray), Henri Guisol (Buffington, the reporter)
  
• Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
  
• Editing: Marthe Poncin
  
• Significant music: Maurice Jaubert
  
• Production design: Alexandre Trauner
  
• Awards: Zero
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: The pseudonymous author of murder mysteries is accused of killing his own wife.

Disc Stats:

Extras:

• Zero
  

We know what we think of the French. We know what we think of the British. We know what the Brits think of the French. But what do the French think of the British?

They're all a bunch of hen-pecked eccentrics and puffy shirted poofs. That's the message of a thinly disguised example of gay porn from 1937 called DRôLE DE DRAME.

Oh? It's suppose to be high art by one of France's most beloved auteurs? Well, you could have knocked me over with a pink ostrich feather.

DRôLE DE DRAME is a French comedy about English manners that is as odd as it sounds. Made by Marcel Carné and his team of frequent collaborators, it is droll in parts, witty in others, and altogether weird. It's Carné's second film, and made about eight years before his universally recognized masterpiece CHILDREN OF PARADISE (which is equally weird, by the way), and shows not a trace of that film's somber romanticism and fatalism.

Unless it is a part of a secret project to release all of Marcel Carné's films on DVD, it's difficult to see the urgency behind this release by Home Vision Entertainment, the parent company to Criterion. As usual, HVE doesn't do anything particular with the disc. It's derived from a scratchy, shaky print and comes with mono sound that shreds at the higher registers. Still, though it takes a while to get into, the film becomes almost enjoyable when it turns conservatively surrealistic.

The premise is complex in its simplicity. At the behest of his social-climbing wife (Françoise Rosay), Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon), a botanist, writes murder mysteries on the side under the pseudonym Felix Chapel. This inspires the attention of two people, Molyneux's conservative minister in-law, a lanky hawk named Soper (Louis Jouvet), who rails against Chapel's books at public meetings, and William Kramps (Louis Barrault), a young man who says he was driven to become a serial killer of meat butchers as a result of reading Chapel's books, who now comes to the conclusion in his unhappiness that he must kill Chapel. The film opens with Molyneux attending one of Soper's ill-attended anti-Chapel lectures—and sitting right next to Kramps.

Plot complications ensure when Soper invites himself back to Molyneux's house for some of the wife's duck l'orange. Unfortunately, the household's butler and cook just quit in a huff. In order to maintain appearances, Madame Molyneux must cook the meal herself, but stay out of hiding, all to keep up "appearances." Molyneux contrives a flimsy story that Madame is visiting sick friends, but Soper quickly comes to the conclusion that Molyneux has killed her and hidden the body in his mimosa greenhouse and, being a responsible British citizen, calls Scotland Yard.

On the lam, the Molyneuxs hide out in Chinatown, staying in a room—right next to Kramps. Paradoxically, Molyneux as Chapel receives an invitation to cover the Molyneux "murder" for the tabloid press, so leaving his wife behind, he returns to his own home "disguised" as Chapel, only to find that the cops investigating the crime have turned his home into a playpen. Meanwhile, back at the Chinatown inn, Kramps sets out to seduce the unwitting Madame M.

And that's just the first 40 minutes.

Suffice it to say that things get weirder. But not as weird as the funny clothes that everyone wears. I guess that Carné and his regular writer Jacques Prévert set out to say something interesting about identity and the guises it wears, but instead the film comes across like the product of a couple of queens passing off some gay signifiers as "art" under the nose of the haute bourgeoisie.

A police inspector wears a dress (under his moustache), and all the women are mannish. Barrault has a nude bathing scene, and Soper shows up in the most feminine Scottish garb this side of Madonna. Worst of all is Jean-Pierre Aumont, later in life to be so moving as the actor in Truffaut's DAY FOR NIGHT, as Billy. He's the neighborhood milkman who indirectly has been supplying the unimaginative Molyneux with his plots. Billy pops into the kitchen wearing puffy shoulder pads and a black dress that makes him the oddest cross-dresser since Mel Gibson in MAD MAX III.

Interestingly, Michel Simon, a regular in the high art films of Renoir and Vigo at the time, here does a reversal on his anarchic character from Renoir's BOUDOU SAVED FROM DROWNING. There he blew his nose in the pages of his host's fine first editions. Here he is the bourgeoisie who gets epatered, and, in one of the film's legitimately funny yet most complex moments, he stands by helplessly in the disguise of Chapel as he watches his house vandalized by the cops who are ostensibly suppose to be solving crimes, drinking and smoking, drawing graffito on paintings, and in general acting like chimps.

The only supplement is a four page insert with the chapter titles, some DVD credits, and a brief essay by CHICAGO READER reviewer Jonathan Rosenbaum, who tries to sell the reader on the film by citing its "capacity to find the bizarre within the familiar." He doesn't know — or acknowledge — the half of it.

Comic Book Confidential

THE WHITE SHEIK

Original Movie:

• Theatrical premiere: 6 September, 1952, at the Venice Film Festival
  
• 92 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Janus Films (in America)
  
• Directed by Federico Fellini
  
• Credited writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli
  
• Cast: Leopoldo Trieste (Ivan Cavalli), Brunella Bovo (Wanda Cavalli), Alberto Sordi (Fernando Rivoli), Giulietta Masina (Cabiria), Ernesto Almirante (Director of "White Sheik" Strip), Gina Mascetti (White Sheik's Wife)
  
• Cinematography: Arturo Gallea
  
• Editing: Rolando Bebedetti
  
• Significant music: Nino Rota
  
• Production design: Raffaello Tolfo
  
• Awards: Zero
  
• Budget: NA
  
• Stated initial box office returns: NA

Plot in one sentence: Newlyweds hit Rome only to be separated when the wife secretly goes off to give a drawing to her favorite fumetti star.

Disc Stats: