New on DVD: Aug. 19
by Jim Ridley
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THE SMALL BACK ROOM Released by its American distributor in a heavily hacked-up version as Hour of Glory, this 1949 chamber thriller by Michael Powell (Peeping Tom, Black Narcissus) and his longtime Archers collaborator Emeric Pressburger was a deliberately smaller-scale follow-up to their splashy 1948 ballet drama The Red Shoes. It has never enjoyed the reputation of their other films, but Criterion's new DVD builds a case for it as more than a minor diversion. David Farrar plays a maimed, embittered, hard-drinking bomb-disposal expert in 1943 London who faces an infernal device: a toy-shaped Nazi explosive that preys on children. Co-starring Michael Gough, Alfred the Butler from the Tim Burton Batman, the film arrives today in a single-disc package featuring excerpts from Powell's audio dictations for his autobiography.
Also new this week on DVD:
—Koch Lorber's eight-film Marco Ferreri Collection, including the Italian provocateur's scandalous 1973 La Grande Bouffe and the 1981 Bukowski adaptation Tales of Ordinary Madness (but not, alas, his Dillinger Is Dead).
—Frances McDormand and Amy Adams in the period-piece romp Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
—The controversial (and widely denounced) edit of Orson Welles' Don Quixote, assembled by Spanish schlockmeister Jess Franco from a Cervantes project Welles shot but never completed over nearly two decades.
—The 2007 remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis' head-scrambler The Wizard of Gore, with a sweet cult-movie cast (Brad Dourif, Jeffrey Combs, Bijou Phillips, the enticingly named Cricket Suicide) capped by Crispin Glover as merciless magician Montag the Magnificent. Consider it a warm-up for Glover's appearance Sept. 5 and 6 at the Belcourt with his film What Is It?
Aug. 19-25, 2008
Aug. 19-25, 2008
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