Extras:

• "Deep Space Nine: A Bold Beginning" (18:06)
  
• "Crew Dossier: Kira Nerys" (14:21)
  
• "Hidden Film 01," Avery Brooks on his character, filmed in 1992 (3:14)
  
• "Hidden Film 02," Colm Meaney (2:40)
  
• "Hidden Film 03," Rene Auberjonois (2:24)
  
• "Hidden Film 04," Rene Auberjonoirs (2:14)
  
• "Hidden Film 05," Terry Farrell (1:43)
  
• "Hidden Film 06," Terry Farrell (2:23)
  
• "Hidden Film 07," Siddig El Fadil (2:25)
  
• "Hidden Film 08," Nana Visitor (1:31)
  
• "Hidden Film 9," Cirroc Lofton (2:16)
  
• "Hidden Film 10," Jennifer Hetrick (2:42)
  
• "Michael Westmore's Aliens" (10:09)
  
• "Secrets of Quark's Bar," filmed 2002 (4:48)< br>
• "Deep Space Nine Sketchbook" (5:24)
  
• "Photo Gallery" (40 screens)
  
• "Alien Artifacts: Season One" Joe Longo, property master, 1992 (2:58)
  
• Optional English subtitles, close captions

Imagine a way station between ports, a neutral ground hosting international visitors often at odds with each other. Usually they gather in the location's favored bar, run by a transplanted scoundrel. It's a place where long lost lovers run into each other, illegal deals are forged, songs are sung, and high stake games are played.

No, it's not CASABLANCA, it's DEEP SPACE NINE, the second series spun off from Gene Roddenberry's original STAR TREK series, broadcast in the '60s. Produced by Rick Berman, the heir to Paramount's TREK franchise, and set in a static space station rather than in a free-range space ship, the series faced controversy from the beginning thanks to the coincidence of a similarly premised series, BABYLON FIVE, emerging at the same time. DEEP SPACE NINE made its debut in 1993 and lasted for seven seasons, succeeded by several more STAR TREK derived series.

You could make a case that DEEP SPACE NINE was the STAR TREK project that separated the fanboys from the more mainstream science fiction buffs. While the original series was a fun if often-hokey blend of derring-do grafted onto Rod Serling-style social message tales, THE NEXT GENERATION emphasized action over ideas. That trend was reversed in DS9, which emphasized ideas and spirituality in creating a complex setting in which numerous new worlds clashed, and drained the energy out of the series, at least in the first season. In true fanboy style, DS9's franchise caretakers began to build up the huge edifice of TREK, with worlds upon meticulously created worlds spreading out in such a way that only a diehard Trekkie could keep up. This project was continued after the completion of the series in subsequent original novels.

The premise of the show is that the Federation has taken over a disabled space station near the planet Barjor. This planet recently won liberation from its oppressors, the calcium-deposited Cardassians. The Barjorans, especially in the person of former station chief Kira (the Scully-esque Nana Visitor), rather resent the Federation, which didn't intervene earlier on their behalf (a reflection of the conflicts in Eastern Europe?), and in addition the Federation's emissary, Ben Sisko (Avery Brooks), a widower with one son, doesn't like the command he's been given. In due course, Sisko learns that the station is planted near a wormhole, a shortcut that played a significant role in the Bajoran-Cardassian conflict but also serves as a portal to parts of the universe unvisited by the Federation.

DEEP SPACE NINE is filled with an array of exotic creatures who pass though the space station on their way to universal parts unknown. These creatures are perpetually shown cruising down the station's promenade. Many of the regular characters hang out in a sort of unisex bar run by a Quark (Armin Shimerman), one of a Gypsy style alien breed called Ferengi (inherited from GENERATION). Another character, Dax (Terry Farrell) is a female Trill hosting symbiotically a male worm type thing whom Sisko knew previously in male form. The supposedly warrior like rebel Bajoran characters actually look quite soft, with off-putting and bizarre ear-ring sets shimmering on side of their faces. Most of the women have short hair, and in an episode in a later season Kira meets her double (also played by Visitor), who falls in love with her.

To quote Tony Soprano, this all sounds very gay to me.

Hey, not that it matters. Gay readers and viewers need their sci-fi series too, and if a nerdy, pimply, ostensibly straight SF nerd gets a little "gay" in his diet perhaps it will make him more tolerant, which after all is the point of most STAR TREK shows.

The series still has some continuity with its macho, heterosexual predecessors, what with its references to shield drainage, warped crystals (or is it the other way around?), and violations of the Prime Directive. For some reason, even as the series creators sought to find their footing they experienced an energy drainage of their own. But I think that it is commonly held that the first season, though noble in its ambitions, is a little low on energy. Take the episode "Move Along Home," in which the core operations crew finds itself in an AVENGERS-style game being played by others. The viewer has no sense of urgency or peril for the characters. This is a common problem throughout the first season. Moments that should create agonizing suspense, as they did in the previous two series, here have no effect at all. The opening season also relies a lot on common TV show plot devices, such as The Game, mentioned above, The Strange Virus, and various characters becoming Murder Suspects. They only devices missing is someone Losing His Memory, or Going Blind.

Which isn't to say that the show lacks wit. The writers gently (of course) rib the TREK ethos. In "The Nagus," the Ferengis appear to have their own self-interested version of the Federation's Directives, and Quark, chiding his brother, slips past the censors with the remark, "I didn't think you had the lobes."

Though the series starts out a little weak, it gets better as it goes along, and Paramount has made a commitment to release all seven seasons on disc throughout 2003. So far they have done a fantastic job. The shows, four to a disc, cover most of the set, with an additional disc of informative extras on the final platter. The transfers look good (though still soft, like most syndicated TV shows), and the DD 5.1 is a joy to hear, especially when Avery Brooks (Hawk from SPENSER) starts to talk, as he has one of the most beautiful voices in TV-dom.

The DS9 supplements disc is packed with material both old and new. It's a blend of making of footage from the time the show made its debut, with new retrospective material. "Deep Space Nine: A Bold Beginning" is a new shortish making of featurette that doesn't spoil too much of what is to follow in subsequent disc collections, while "Crew Dossier: Kira Nerys" is a 15-minute examination of the importance of this character to the show (I assume we can expect one each of these in the subsequent six sets).

The rest of the featurettes are also a blend of vintage and new. "Michael Westmore's Aliens" is a new doc about the task of creating a multitude of odd creatures, and "Secrets of Quark's Bar," is also a new featurette about how the props people round-up such things as the bottles used in the bar. "Deep Space Nine Sketchbook" tracks the conceptual drawings, and "Alien Artifacts: Season One" presents property master Joe Longo in 1992 showing the viewer some of the stuff the characters carry around.

There are also 10 unadvertised short "hidden films, that are character or actor profiles of the leads, with material mostly from 1993. The first one is on Avery Brooks on his character, filmed in 1992 , the second on Colm Meaney, the next two on Rene Auberjonois and his character Odo, two more on Terry Farrell, her character Dax, and how she got the part, one on Siddig El Fadil, the station's doctor, one more on Nana Visitor, one on Sisko's son, played by Cirroc Lofton, and a final one with Jennifer Hetrick, who in one episode reprised her Indiana Jones-style character from GENERATION.

Finally there is a "Photo Gallery" with about 40 screens from the show (and as usual with stills galleries they don't look so hot). The special features all have optional English subtitles and close captioning.

Knock Offs

KNOCKAROUND GUYS

• Theatrical release: 11 October, 2002
  
• New Line Home Entertainment
  
• $26.98
  
• 94 minutes
  
• R
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: February 25, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Color
  
• Widescreen transfer (2.35:1) enhanced for widescreen televisions, with a full frame version on the flip side
  
• Animated, musical menu with 22-chapter scene selection
  
• Double sided, dual layered disc
  
• Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, DTS 5.1 Surround, Dolby Digital 2.0
  
• English, and Spanish subtitles, and close captioning
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Barry Pepper, Vin Diesel, Seth Green, John Malkovich, Dennis Hopper, Tom Noonan, Kevin Gage
  
• Directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien
  
• Credited writers: Brian Koppelman and David Levien
  
• Cinematography: Tom Richmond
  
• Editing: David Moritz
  
• Significant music: Clint Mansell

Plot in one sentence: A quartet of young gangsters end up stuck in a Montana town trying to retrieve mob money from the local yokels.

Extras:

• Audio commentary track from writer/directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien
  
• Four deleted scenes: "No Problem on the Green" (3:51), "The Ballers" (2:19), "Working Hard for the Money" (3:25), "Cereal Stash" (1:42), with optional commentary track and "play all" option
  
• Theatrical trailer, widescreen (2:22)
  
• Additional trailers: A MAN APART (2:32), FINAL DESTINATION 2 (1:33), DINNER RUSH (1:32), FRIDAY AFTER NEXT (2:24), all widescreen
  
• DVD credits (two screens)
  

Since RESERVOIR DOGS, scores of Tarantino knock-offs have splattered the screen, but even Tarantino movies are in part knock-offs of Scorsese's films, especially MEAN STREETS with its attractive clutch of chummy aspiring wiseguys who circulate in a female-excluding world where violence breaks out like paradisial rain storms. Brian Koppelman and David Levien's KNOCKAROUND GUYS is the latest in a long line of vaguely-MEAN STREETS influenced buddy crime films that includes FEDERAL HILL and AMONGST FRIENDS among numerous others. In fact, Koppelman and Levien's previous film, ROUNDERS, for which they wrote the screenplay, recreates in its straight-laced and ambitious Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) and out-of-control rabble rouser Lester 'Worm' Murphy (Edward Norton) the same dynamic between Harvey Keitel's Charlie and Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy in MEAN STREETS.

As is well known (but not addressed on the supplementary material), KNOCKAROUND GUYS was completed in 1999 but not released until after Vin Diesel's summer '02 success XXX. And he is very good in it as Taylor Reese, a half-Jewish, half-Italian enforcer who flouts Jewish conventions by tattooing himself. But the rest of the cast is, in theory at least, top notch as well. Barry Pepper is Matty Demaret, the scion of a powerful mob family who has been thwarted both in his desire to be part of the Family and to escape it (into a career as a sports agent). His father is Benny Chains (Dennis Hopper), and his uncle is the ruthless Teddy Deserve (John Malkovich).

The plot goes into action when a loser and supposedly reformed cokehead pilot named Johnny Marbles (Seth Green), a member of Matty's set, earns the task of fetching a large amount of cash for Benny Chains. Marbles ends up in Wibaux, Montana (a real place, but not the location for the film, which was mostly shot in Canada), where he puts down the moneybag at the small airport in a kind of RESERVOIR DOGS moment of cop fear. The bag is then picked up by a couple of young pothead extreme athletes like the two kids in CLIFFHANGER. Marbles summons Matty, Taylor, and another crew member, Chris Scarpa (Andrew Davoli), to Wibaux to help him find the money and get everyone out of the jam.

At this point the story takes a RED ROCK WEST excursion as tough city guys meet some small town scum and the local sheriff (Tom Noonan) who rules this roost. There's a fantastic scene in which Reese beats the holy shit out of the town's local tough guy solely as a beacon signal emitted to the town as a whole that the guys want their money back. The beatee is Kevin Gage, who played Waingro in HEAT. Waingro is one of cinema's all time great scary morality-free hoodlums. KNOCKAROUND GUY's beating scene is one of those thoroughly satisfying movie-movie moments that appeal to the Saturday matinée habitué in all of us who thirsts for revenge in the guise of justice. This scene goes on and on and on and is superbly written, in a macho, posing, clever ROAD HOUSE fashion.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie percolates at a rather low temperature. Until the inevitable showdowns and reversals and revelations, the film crawls at a stately pace, and the final RED ROCK WEST style face-off doesn't feel all that much different from the thousand that have gone before it.

Much of the cause of the film's low heat goes to the somber manner in which most of the cast members play their parts. They all seem to be bothered by some tiny, quiet dissatisfaction that saps the energy out of their face and the limberness out of their limbs. This hangdog tribe has none of the pizzazz of Scorsese's mean street denizens. The grand old masters on the set are little help. Hopper has what appears to be two days' worth of scenes, while Malkovich has gone beyond parody into the realm of camp. Always the most self-regarding of actors, Malkovich has no qualms about violating the spirit of a film in order to tilt it to his own narcissistic ends. The bizarre accent, the weird hair—Malkovich actually added these elements to his already extreme affect. The way his long lips move wide over his feral front teeth makes you think of a Nick Park short. If Park ever makes a live action film of his most popular characters, Malkovich would make a perfect Wallace. Suffice it to say that he is utterly unconvincing as a murderous gangster.

New Line does another fine job in its transfer of this wide screen film, offering an image that is clean and bright and sharp. Though the disc comes with the complete panoply of current sound formats, it's a mostly talky gangster film with only fuller use of the surrounds coming in the bar-beating scene and the final shootout.

The most significant supplementary element is the audio commentary track from writer/directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Childhood friends who hint that they have been able to observe real life gangsters, enforcers, and golf hustlers at close range, the pair has an easy rapport and neither of them seems to be the "dominant" member. They reveal that Malkovich's consent was crucial to spurring on the production (they knew him from ROUNDERS), and describe how they managed to get Hopper into the film. Bruno San Martino At the moment (around 29:53) when they praise a great "Tom Noonan moment" when the actors does a nose sniff, they get the timing just slightly wrong (it occurs three shots later). They go into a lot of detail about the genesis behind Diesel's character, based on someone they know, and Diesel's lines in the barroom fight scene are taken from remarks made by this guy. And one of the most memorable lines from the movie, "It's the three Rs for us: it's either the roof, the river or the revolver," they credit to one Barry Gold, apparently a pal of theirs from New York. All in all it's an informative yak track that in subtle ways reveals how movies really get made.

Next there are four deleted scenes, with optional audio commentary, which fill out two subplots in the film that culminate in an alternative ending. The first is that Matty has a nicknamed based on a childhood episode. The second is that there was once an alternative ending. The first deleted scene is "No Problem on the Green" (3:51), a lengthy scene in which three of the pals sneak onto a golf course, based on a course called Wing Foot in Westchester, where they have a confrontation with a greens keeper. The fact that the two filmmakers don't like the scene, and tell you why, is educational. "The Ballers" (2:19) is a longer version of an existing scene that includes some conversation between Malkovich and the Guys that shows the standing of Matty's friends in the eyes of the elders. "Working Hard for the Money" (3:25) is a longer version of a scene between Noonan and his deputy. "Cereal Stash" (1:42) shows Noonan's Sheriff hiding some cash in a cereal box, which links up with the deleted ending, in which the pothead kids find it. The scenes come with optional commentary track and a "play all" option.

Finally, there's the theatrical trailer, and a handful of trailers for other New Line theatrical and DVD releases, and DVD credits for the boys and girls who put this fine disc together.

Vallée of the Doll

LA VALLÉE

• Theatrical release: 1972
  
• Home Vision Entertainment
  
• $19.95
  
• 105 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: February 25, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Color
  
• Widescreen transfer (2.35:1) enhanced for widescreen televisions
  
• Animated, musical menu with 14-chapter scene selection
  
• Single sided, dual layered disc
  
• Two channel mono (the box is unspecific about the sound format)
  
• Optional English subtitles
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Bulle Ogier , Jérôme Beauvarlet, Monique Giraudy, Michael Gothard, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valérie Lagrange
  
• Directed by Barbet Schroeder
  
• Credited writers: Paul Gégauff Barbet Schroeder
  
• Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
  
• Editing: Denise de Casabianca
  
• Significant music: Pink Floyd

Plot in one sentence: Bored diplomat's wife hunting for exotic bird feathers in New Guinea ends up running off with hippies in search of a peaceful valley.

Extras:

• Four page insert with chapter list, transfer information, and an essay by Andrei Codrescu
  

Before he went Hollywood director, Barbet Schroeder was one of the original members of the French new wave, writing for the magazine Cahiers du Cinema and assisting on, producing, and/or acting in films by Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and others. After directing a few films of his own in Europe and elsewhere, Schroeder came to America, like hundreds of other directors before him from Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock on. You can't exactly say he sold out, however. His American films have a cunningly hostile, subversive element that frees them from the usual charge of pabulum.

His first officially American film was BARFLY, based on a Charles Bukowsky screenplay. From there he moved on to esoteric and quasi-intellectual thrillers REVERSAL OF FORTUNE (about Claus von Bulow), SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (one of numerous "nightmare roommate" films at the time), KISS OF DEATH (a not execrable remake), DESPERATE MEASURES, and MURDER BY NUMBERS (with Sandra Bullock), with a sideways trip into the gay subculture with OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS. His films don't always work, mostly because they slip into commercial American set-ups, but the premises are always cunningly complex, with compromised, secretive characters driven by demons. There's always something anthropological about his films, as if he were studying extremes of humanity like a scientist.

That anthropological take forms the continuity between his early films and his commercial features. In MORE he studied drug-addled youths. In MAÎTRESSE he dipped into the world of S&M with the diminutive blonde Bulle Ogier as a leather-garbed dominatrix who frolics with bad boy Gérard Depardieu in her off hours.

Between these two films he made the weak sister LA VALLÉE, in which Bulle also stars as the bored wife of an unseen diplomat based in Australia who goes off impulsively with a gang of hippies, played by a bunch of French actors with too many accents in their names for me to bother typing in the HTML codes, on a search for a mysterious New Guinea valley where the natives lead a peaceful life free of the constraints of modern culture. LA VALLÉE is half documentary, half tale of an uptight, educated bourgeoisie seduced by the apparent free of the young. As in the anthropological documentaries of Robert Gardner (FOREST OF BLISS), the camera absorbs the doings of the natives without bothering to explain anything to the viewer. It's a difficult choice, and Gardner, for one, is himself not entirely confident that the approach is right, but when blended into a fictional narrative the problems of the stand offish stance are compounded doubly because the format even offers the filmmaker a chance to clear up obscurities through dialogue.

LA VALLÉE is all lush greenery and verdure, snakes and rustic jewelry, and fucking in the middle of tree groves. Though beautifully photographed in ultra widescreen by the late Néstor Almendros, the film has about 20 minutes of plot pancaked out over 90 minutes. Then it ends. In the fashion of the art house films of its day, LA VALLÉE peters out into arty obscurity just at the moment when it should be gearing up to really examine the clash between the westerners and the Aboriginals, and the dire similarities the hippies discover.

On the other hand, the film does star Bulle Ogier. The French Meg Ryan, Ogier has had a long, rich career (over 80 films) fueled by an unearthly cuteness that doesn't deny the sexual element of human life. The wide variety of films she has appeared in defies summary, but one can only hope that the appearance of LA VALLÉE spurs the release of other Ogier features, at least the others directed by Schroeder.

The transfer of LA VALLÉE from Home Vision Entertainment is announced as approved by Schroeder, and looks fine. The sole supplement, a four page insert, warns that there is a "noticeable tear" in the source print about 15 minutes in. Otherwise the transfer is as lush as the greenery it presents, with only some speckles at reel changes, and an overall and perhaps intentional graininess. The insert also has a chapter list, more transfer information, and a list-y essay by Andrei Codrescu in which the author tries to sell the reader on the film with little success, defensively calling it "a genuinely good film" amid sophistries such as "Pop was dissolved by its own success." Personally I see no reason not to put a bad film on DVD and try to sell it. I'd like to see every movie available on DVD, good or bad. That the otherwise dull LA VALLÉE has now joined the mix is fine by me, if only because it will please fans of Bulle Ogier.

Cut!

CINEMA PARADISO: THE NEW VERSION

• Theatrical release: Italy, 1988; U.S. short version, 23 February 1990; U.S. director's cut, 14 June 2002
  
• Miramax Home Entertainment
  
• $29.99
  
• 174 minutes
  
• R
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: February 18, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Color
  
• Widescreen transfer (1.66:1) enhanced for widescreen televisions
  
• Animated, musical menu with 38-chapter scene selection
  
• Dual-sided, dual-layered disc
  
• Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
  
• English language track with English subtitle options, and close captioning
  Audio Tracks: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono) , Italian (Dolby Digital 5.1) , Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
  Subtitles: Italian, Spanish, English, French
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin, Antonella Attili, Brigitte Fossey
  
• Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
  
• Credited writer: Giuseppe Tornatore
  
• Cinematography: Blasco Giurato
  
• Editing: Mario Morra
  
• Significant music: Andrea and Ennio Morricone

Plot in one sentence: An Italian filmmaker returns to the small village of his youth to attend the funeral of the projectionist who mentored his love of movies.

Extras:

• Original American theatrical release on the B-side, with French and Italian language tracks and English subtitles
  
• Trailers for CINEMA PARADISO (1:27), as well as MALENA (1:28), THE STAR MAKER (1:15), and AMELIE (1:09), all full frame
  
  

I was all set to mount a diatribe raging against Miramax for its long-time editing practices, using as the soapbox the recent release of CINEMA PARADISO, which was one of Miramax's first hits. I was going to declaim about Harvey Weinstein's heavy-handed interference, the lead wrist he has when it comes to editing and "revising" the films of international filmmakers, his micromanaging approach examined in all too horrific detail in a recent New Yorker article about Weinstein's supervision of GANGS OF NEW YORK and THE HOURS.

This may or may not all be true, but when I looked further into the history of CINEMA PARADISO its genesis appeared more complicated. According to sources I was able to find on the WWW, the film was originally released as a 155-minute movie in Italy, bombed, was pulled and re-released at around 122 minutes. This is the version that then went on to win the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Presumably at that point Miramax bought the film. Unless Weinstein has the power to descend upon the Italian film industry and wield his magic scissors there, then the picture that Miramax was already cut, and had the imprimatur of the French film industry in that state.

Eventually, a 174-minute "director's cut" was released in Italy and that is the edition that Miramax distributed in 2002 as "the new version." It's not technically new in that it has been around for a while, but clearly this version is new to Americans, although I recall articles at the time of the shorter version's initial release criticizing Miramax for its trick of leaping upon European imports and shortening them and dumbing them down for the American market. It's hard to convince an institution that it is doing something wrong when it is showered with Oscars for doing the very thing the critics decry. CINEMA PARADISO went on to win Best Foreign Film Oscar.

CINEMA PARADISO is, of course, the story of Salvatore (Jacques Perrin), a prominent film director summoned back to the village he left 30 years ago and never returned to for the funeral of his mentor, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the town's movie projectionist. There he takes a trip into his past, remembering how the town would gather for films in the theater, how relationships could be charted through the years there, how the local priest censored the films with a bell, how a booth fire blinded Alfredo, and how Salvatore fell in love with the young student Elena (Agnese Nano) only to break up with her in mysterious circumstances. In the new version the viewer sees the adult Elena (played by Brigitte Fossey), whom Salvatore tracks down, and also learns what happened to all the kissing scenes in movies that the priest had Alfredo snip out.

If the first half of the movie (the "Miramax version" so to speak) feels cinematically stronger than the second half, that's probably because of the film's sentimentality about children (you'll note that most of the big hit foreign films of the last 15 years have been featured a cherubic kid). I would argue that the second half is better. It's not sappy like the first half, it shows the hard lessons learned about life from heartache, and presents Salvatore as a not entirely likable fellow (he's kind of mean to his mom). When Salvatore finally re-unites with Elena, it is an experience fraught with all the regret, hopeless yearning, and pragmatic responsibility that maturity brings (although it seems unlikely that he wouldn't hear anything about her doings for three decades). The best thing about the new version of CINEMA PARADISO is the emotional payoff of the last five minutes, carefully and almost invisibly built up throughout the course of the whole movie.

The transfer is top-notch, with good sound that will imprint the Morricone theme on your brain. Because of the numerous citations within the film of other movies, many of them very important to Italians but little known here, it would have been nice to have an extra feature on the disc that annotates the references, the way the Criterion disc of Godard's BAND OF OUTSIDERS annotated his obscure references.

Kill Me Again

THE KILLERS '46

• Theatrical release: 28 August, 1946
  
• The Criterion Collection
  
• $39.95
  
• 105 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Region 1
  
• Folding digipak keep case

• Street Date: February 11, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Black and white and color
  
• Full frame (1.33:1) transfer
  
• Static, musical menu with 21-chapter scene selection
  
• Single sided, dual layered disc
  
• Dolby Digital mono
  
• English subtitles
  
• Cast: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Charles McGraw, William Conrad
  
• Directed by Robert Siodmak
  
• Credited writers: Anthony Veiller, Richard Brooks (uncredited), and John Huston (uncredited), from Ernest Hemingway's short story
  
• Cinematography: Woody Bredell
  
• Editing: Arthur Hilton
  
• Significant music: score by Miklos Rozsa

Plot in one sentence: An insurance investigator backtracks through the life of an ex-boxer killed by hit men.

Extras:

• Stuart Kaminsky on THE KILLERS (17:57)
• Isolated music score and effects track
• Bios on Burt Lancaster (six screens), Ava Gardner (six screens), Edmond O'Brien (three screens), Sam Levene (three screens), Jeff Corey (three screens), Albert Dekker (three screens), Vince Barnett (two screens), Jack Lambert (two screens), Miklos Rozsa (four screens), Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger (five screens)
• Publicity stills (52 screens)
• Production stills (82 screens)
• Behind the scenes photos with original studio captions (27 screens)
• Original press book (28 screens)
• Original advertising (37 screens)
• Winter Garden Theater, NYC premiere (14 screens)
• Theatrical trailer (4:03)
• Restoration trailer (1:56)
• Hemingway's short story, read by Stacy Keach
• Andrei Tarkovsky's THE KILLERS (21:16)
• Screen Director's Playhouse radio broadcast of June 5, 1948, with Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, William Conrad,
• "Notes on Film Noir," by Paul Schrader, nine chapters of text
• Siodmak trailers: SON OF DRACULA (1:37), COBRA WOMAN (2:06), THE KILLERS (1:52), CRY OF THE CITY (2:31), CRISS CROSS (2:31)
  
• Six page insert with an essay by Jonathan Lethem, movie and DVD credits, and transfer information
  

THE KILLERS '64

• Theatrical release: 7 July, 1964
  
• The Criterion Collection
  
• $39.95
  
• 93 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: February 11, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Color
  
• Full frame (1.33:1) transfer
  
• Static, musical menu with 19-chapter scene selection
  
• Single sided, dual layered disc
  
• Dolby Digital mono
  
• English subtitles
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Lee Marvin, Clu Gulager, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, Ronald Reagan, Claude Akins, Norman Fell
  
• Directed by Don Siegel
  
• Credited writers: Gene L. Coon, from Ernest Hemingway's short story
• Cinematography: Richard L. Rawlings
  
• Editing: Richard Belding
  
• Significant music: score by Johnny Williams, and the song "Too Little Time" by Henry Mancini and Don Raye, sung by Nancy Wilson

Plot in one sentence: Two hit men who have just killed a guy are puzzled by his acceptance of death and backtrack through his life to find out why.

Extras:

• "Reflections with Clu Gulager" (18:40)
• Isolated music and effects track
  
• "Don Siegel on THE KILLERS" selections from Siegel's memoir read by Wolf Wolverton (12 chapters, about 20 minutes)
• "9/9/63: Notes on JOHNNY NORTH script" (12 screens)
• "9/24/63: Siegel to Lang" (17screens)
• "11/20/63: NBC Broadcast Standards Department" (five screens)
• "10/22/63: Casting suggestions" (three screens)
• "5/27/64: Siegel to Angie" (three screens)
• "Pale Carbon Copy" (seven screens)
• Cast and crew bios: Lee Marvin (four screens), Angie Dickinson (three screens), John Cassavetes (four screens), Ronald Reagan (six screens), Clu Gulager (three screens), Claude Akins (three screens), Norman Fell (three screens), Don Siegel (six screens)
• Theatrical trailer (1:02)
• Publicity stills (30 screens)
• Behind the scenes stills (13 screens)
• Newspaper ads and one-sheets (four screens)
• Six page insert with an essay by Geoffrey O'Brien, movie and DVD credits
  

Meanwhile, Don Siegel's "remake," originally set to be the first made-for-TV movie but instead released to theaters (SEE HOW THEY RUN became the first MFTV instead), indicates yet another transition. Both the gangster film and the noir were about to be reborn, and Siegel's film was an index of that change. After a long, strange hiatus, THE GODFATHER would transform the genre, and at the same time, THE KILLERS was one of the first examples of a major change in film noir, toward what can only be called film soleil, or existential crime dramas set splayed out in the hot, unforgiving mid-day sun, a distinctly California or southwest form of crime drama as opposed to the New York City of noir. What Criterion, in its new double disc set that pairs both the '46 and the '64 KILLERS, manages to do is bookend the two major movements of American crime dramas, from noir to soleil. You always think you know a lot about an old crime drama you've seen on TV until you watch it again, especially under the auspices of Criterion, which has brought out a fine transfer of the '46 KILLERS. Based on the Hemingway "Nick Adams" story (which actually only takes up the first 15 minutes of the movie), Siodmak's film pairs and contrasts the lives of Swede (Burt Lancaster in his first film), a boxer down on his luck who is "ensorcelled" by a woman named Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner, never looking lovelier) into a robbery, and Riordan (noir axiom Edmund O'Brien), the insurance investigator on Swede's case after he is shot down by two hoods. Both Swede and Riordan and contrasted with Swede's childhood friend Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who grew up to be the cop who both arrested Swede and nailed the boxer's first girlfriend. As Jack Shadoian points out in his brilliant book DREAMS AND DEAD ENDS (recently published in a second edition by Oxford University Press), '46 takes on a bleak tone unknown in both noirs and gangster films, a world in which corporate American is just as much a hazard to gangsters as the cops. Swede is the more attractive character but because of his passions he is also the one most likely to fall, while Riordan is "the unquestioning agent of a dynamic, forward-looking historical prosperity." The film makes it clear that "an active, intelligent man, with plenty of opportunity for advancement in his legitimate line of work, would rather be a gangster." And that, despite the life expectancy. Lubinsky's seemingly happy marriage, normally a signpost of normalcy in American movies, is here presented as a dry, muddling relationship in which the passions that so lure Swede are kept at bay.

'46 is not a great film in the conventional sense, but it is a great noir, with rich subtexts, superb acting, and wonderful, quintessentially noir photography by Woody Bredell. If THE KILLERS '64 is the lesser movie it is not solely because of its made-for-TV limitations, but because American filmmakers had not figured out how to fully make the transition from black and white noir films to the bright severities of soleil. It would take some later films, such as POINT BLANK, which '64 resembles in some ways (not just because Lee Marvin is in both), to isolate the subtle differences and the changed playing field demanded of film soleil. In '64 you can also see some bare bones influences on both Tarantino and the film NURSE BETTY.

The '46 disc comes pack with extra material. First that there is some introductory material by crime writer Stuart Kaminsky, who gives a good summary of the roots out of which '46 sprang. Next there is the isolated music and effects track, which highlights Miklos Rozsa's dynamic score (you even hear a little bit of a DRAGNET at one point).

There is a great deal of supplementary text material, including bios on most of the cast and crew, publicity stills, production stills, behind the scenes photos, the original press book and the original advertising, and shots of the film's premiere at the Winter Garden Theater.

There are several other versions of the story also available on the disc. First, Stacy Keach reads the original Hemingway short story. That's followed by a real rarity, Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of the story for film school in the mid-'50s. This 20-minute short is in black and white (and has some embarrassing elements), but continues Criterion's relationship both with Tarkovsky and American noir. Finally, there is the Screen Director's Playhouse radio version of the film itself, also directed by Siodmak, and aired in June of 1948, with Burt Lancaster reprising his role and Shelley Winters doing Ava Gardner. It's funny to hear Lancaster sound so lively when he is in "promotional" mode in the chat after the drama is over.

Another nice addition is Paul Schrader's essay "Notes on Film Noir," which comes in nine chapters of text, though the essay is easily available in noir anthologies. It's a great essay, with almost every sentence a stand alone motto of precise film criticism.

There is a clutch of trailers for other Siodmak films, including CRISS CROSS. Since both CRISS CROSS and Steven Soderbergh's remake THE UNDERNEATH, are Universal films, and given that Criterion has a special relationship with both Universal and Soderbergh, it's not beyond the realm of possibility to see a similar pairing of a noir and its soleil later this year or early next year.

Finally, there is a six page insert with an essay on the film by Jonathan Lethem, movie and DVD credits, and transfer information.

The '64 disc has similar supplements. The best is a lengthy interview with Clu Gulager, who comes across as very informed about the version of the KILLERS he was in. His memoirs of Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan, as well as of Siegel, and very interesting. There is also an isolated music track for this film, and the text supplements consist of memos and letters from Siegel about the background of the project.

NEXT TIME: STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME, HALF PAST DEAD, ROAD TO PERDITION, and more!

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