The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (out now) Five years ago, Saving Private Ryan was acclaimed for its toughness and realism; as a balance, there's Samuel Fuller's blunt 1980 World War II drama, smaller-scaled but more exacting in its autobiographical detail. Drawing upon his own World War II experiences, the cinema's preeminent termite artist follows The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) and four long-timers from North Africa to D-Day to the liberation of the death camps. The episodic movie, in the works for decades, was hamstrung by budget problems and ultimately whacked by at least an hour; even in this fascinating reconstruction led by critic Richard Schickel, which restores 45 minutes of footage (including Fuller's cameo as a newsreel photographer), the limitations show. But there are sequences here among the most haunting depictions of warfare on film. As a counterpoint to Spielberg's IMAX Omaha Beach, there's Normandy vet Fuller's poetic evocation of D-Day—ending as the surf turns red, with a dead soldier's watch to mark the time.
Warner Bros. does right by the film with a fabulous 2-disc special edition: among the voluminous extras are deleted scenes, an extensive reconstruction documentary, an episode of Schickel's fine TV series The Men Who Make the Movies devoted to director Fuller, and a War Department promo film about "The Fighting First." Watch in the next few weeks for new disc editions of Fuller's crime drama House of Bamboo and his great psycho-western Forty Guns.
Burden of Dreams (Tuesday) Following director Werner Herzog as he films his hallucinatory epic Fitzcarraldo, filmmakers Les Blank and Maureen Gosling end up with a portrait of visionary folly to rival Herzog's subject: a mad adventurer obsessed with building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle. Blank and Gosling's 1982 documentary rivals the Apocalypse Now doc Hearts of Darkness as a harrowing peek inside a filmmaker's methodical madness: the most unforgettable sequence has Herzog commanding hundreds of natives to pull a 32-ton steamship up a muddy mountainside. Criterion's double-disc set doesn't include Fitzcarraldo, alas, but it has a commentary by Blank, Gosling and Herzog as well as Blank's 1980 film "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe," in which the German director settles a bet with filmmaker Errol Morris by doing just that.
Jules and Jim (May 31) François Truffaut's beautiful 1961 film concerns two friends, the German Jules (Oskar Werner) and the Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), in the years surrounding World War I, and the maddeningly willful woman, Catherine (the unforgettable Jeanne Moreau), whom they both love. (Stanley Kauffman once described it as the story of an isosceles triangle that gradually becomes equilateral.) Like the director's later Two English Girls—another film about a doomed love triangle, also adapted from an Henri-Pierre Roché novel—this film about the ultimate impossibility of lasting romantic love is among the most romantic movies ever made. The Criterion 2-disc edition features two commentaries (one with Moreau and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana), an interview with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and Truffaut-related excerpts and episodes from French television.
The Driver (June 7) Thanks for nothing, Fox, for dumping this underrated 1978 thriller on the market without even a whisper of an extra. The ne plus ultra in car-chase cool, this thriller about an expert getaway man known as The Driver (Ryan O'Neal) pursued by his nemesis The Detective (Bruce Dern) was written by director Walter Hill for Steve McQueen: if that deal had gone down, this would be the centerpiece of the much-marketed McQueen mythos. (The character speaks only 350 words in the entire movie.) Instead, it's the closest we'll ever get to seeing a Robert Bresson remake of Gone in 60 Seconds—a spare ballet of screaming metal, with deliberately dehumanized performances at its core. It was also shot by Philip Lathrop, who shot some of the toughest crime pictures of the 1960s and 70s (including John Boorman's awesome Point Blank—more on that one in a few weeks).
Nightmare Alley (June 7) They don't get any more noir than this. Credit matinee idol Tyrone Power for having the cojones to play a complete bastard, one who plummets to unspeakable depths of tent-show depravity in this macabre 1947 masterpiece. Power begged the brass at Fox for the role of Stan Carlisle, a conniving carny hustler who's blessed with a silver tongue and dormant scruples. Signing on at a fleabag circus, Power's Stan sees a ticket to the big top in phony spiritualism designed to part gullible losers from their money. At every turn, though, he hears the phantom laughter of the geek—the pathetic sideshow act who chews the heads off chickens. Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck reportedly insisted that the movie close on a note of hope rather than the mirthless, blood-chilling punch line that screenwriter Jules Furthman intended, but no matter: Not even a redemptive ending can sugarcoat this bitter pill.
A Moment of Innocence (June 21) If I were to show one movie in order to prove what the big deal about Iranian cinema really is, it would be Mohsen Makhmalbaf's disarmingly humane 1996 film, inspired by a real event in the director's past: As a teenage protester against the Shah's regime, he stabbed a policeman while trying to disarm him. To reenact the crime, Makhmalbaf hires an untrained teenage actor to play his younger self—and, in the spirit of equanimity, he allows the man he stabbed, Mirhadi Tayebi, to "direct" his own stand-in. The idea is that, given the right preparation, the event will transpire exactly as it happened. But the two men remember the details of the attack very differently—and, on top of that, the teenagers playing them have grave moral doubts about the actions they're being told to commit. The whole matter is settled in a wonderful last shot—a punch line that can make you cry. As for the disc, it's coming from New Yorker, which is rarely a good sign—but the movie is special feature enough.
Born to Kill (July 5) Like its hair-trigger leading man, the irreplaceable Lawrence Tierney, this acid bath of a 1947 noir exists in a category all its own. Who'd want to join it? The surliest and most volatile of '40s leading men, pitbull Tierney is all hard-ons, fists, and gritted teeth as an ex-boxer who meets his murderous match in Claire Trevor, an ice-cold divorcee who takes his thuggish cruelty as a turn-on. As if to atone in advance for his late-career goo-fest The Sound of Music, director Robert Wise glories in the prime of his disreputable genre work, never blinking at the characters' vicious amorality, warped sexuality, and brazen depravity. The result is one of the sickest and strongest character studies of its decade, a psycho-noir masterpiece awaiting shocked discovery by a generation of Tierney's Reservoir Dogs devotees. The disc arrives in Warner's five-film Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 2, a boxed set that includes Richard Fleischer's terrific 1952 train-bound thriller The Narrow Margin.
