The New York Times-20080129-Critic-s Choice- -The Arts-Cultural Desk-
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Critic's Choice; [The Arts/Cultural Desk]
Full Text (1210 words)EL CID
With the 1961 roadshow spectacular El Cid, the Weinstein Company has made an appropriate choice to inaugurate its prestige label, the Miriam Collection. Filmed largely at historical locations in Spain in Super Technirama, a 70-millimeter widescreen process, El Cid remains, even on home video, a feast of visual detail. Under Anthony Mann's direction, the film overflows with deep-focus vistas, towering sets, densely crowded battle sequences and the imposing presence of two remarkable physical specimens, Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren.
Unfortunately, these particular specimens are said to have strongly disliked each other, something even Mann's exalted gifts could not disguise. As a result, the emotional core of the film fails to take hold, even though it has been mostly lifted from Corneille's classical tragedy (which goes uncredited) by the blacklisted screenwriter Ben Barzman (also curiously unmentioned in the titles or packaging).
Once El Cid and his noble lady stop their squabbling (early on he kills her father in a duel), the movie loses any sense of interpersonal drama. As its intermission approaches, this 184-minute film fragments into a series of superbly staged battle sequences interspersed with abstract lessons on power and responsibility, themes close to Mann's Shakespearean soul.
Mann's most characteristic work was in film noir (Raw Deal, 1948) and the western (The Far Country, 1954), and his best period was behind him when he went to Spain to work for Samuel Bronston, the enterprising producer of El Cid. In The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate, Norma Barzman, Ben Barzman's widow, writes that Mr. Bronston had been able to finance his Spanish operations thanks to an arrangement with the DuPont family, who wanted to sell oil to Spain under Franco but did not want to be paid in unexportable Spanish pesetas. Instead the DuPonts plowed their local profits into Mr. Bronston's films, which could then be sold around the world for more convertible currencies.
As Mr. Bronston's biographer, Neal M. Rosendorf, and son, Bill Bronston, note on the commentary track, the film draws flattering parallels between Heston's medieval hero and Franco, whose government was in on the oil deal. The dastardly Moors, led by a kohl-eyed, black-robed Herbert Lom, became stand-ins for the Communists, whom Franco had crushed in the Civil War. And in the cold war context of 1961, such foes were still perceived as enough of a clear and present danger to make Franco a prized American ally.
To top it off, Mr. Bronston (born Bronstein) was related to Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein), a relationship that could hardly have thrilled Franco or even Mr. Barzman, still a member in good standing of the Stalinist Communist Party U.S.A. at the time he rewrote the script. Surely setting some kind of record for the number of strange bedfellows packed into a single cot, El Cid ought to have been either an extremely lively, contentious film or a total smoking train wreck. Oddly enough, it is neither, but rather a handsome, rather placid, perfectly professional production. (The Weinstein Company, $24.95; limited collector's edition, $39.95; not rated.)
EUROTRASH ROUNDUP
Beyond first-run films and television series, one of the fastest-growing segments in the DVD marketplace consists of the wide group of horror movies, crime films and soft-core pornography with a sadistic edge that has come to be known collectively as Eurotrash, imports without quite the cachet of Vuitton handbags and Hermes scarves. There are now several companies catering to discerning fans of antique gore who snap up new releases of obscure Italian horror movies, forgotten French porn films and the baroque German crime thrillers known as krimi.
The heroes of this school -- Lucio Fulci, Jess Franco, Max Pecas and countless others -- are instinctive rebels, yet their revolt, possibly subconsciously, takes the form of a blanket rejection of the high-art notions of quality, consistency, intelligence, beauty and so on.
Willed or not, theirs is an aggressive anti-aesthetic of ugliness and incoherence, a slap in the face of the well-made film that dominated European cinema for so many years, while these marginal genre films were playing to audiences in the seediest neighborhoods of Paris or, often in cut and dubbed forms, in the sticky-floored grindhouses of 42nd Street.
Oddly, the more disreputable the film, the more carefully produced the DVD. Blue Underground, which has a deserved reputation as the Criterion Collection of craven exploitation, releases its films in superb transfers often derived from original camera negatives, as is the case with the two Jess Franco sexploitation pictures -- Eugenie de Sade (1970) and Cecilia (1982) -- that come out on Tuesday.
Mr. Franco, a filmmaker with somewhere between 150 and 300 films to his credit (no one seems to know for sure), has no discernible talent beyond an eye for attractive young women willing to have simulated sex with various actors and objects. What meaning his work possesses lies, as his many academic defenders have claimed, in its inherent rebuke to outdated bourgeois notions of narrative intelligibility and dramatic coherence.
Still active at 71, and averaging three or four films a year, Mr. Franco stands as the elder statesman of Eurosleaze. He often appears in his own films as a voyeuristic surrogate for the audience: in Eugenie de Sade, for example, he is a Clare Quiltyish figure who dogs the protagonist, a Humbert Humbertesque novelist (Paul Muller), as he tours Europe in the company of his adoring teenage stepdaughter (Soledad Miranda), committing sordid sex crimes, all filmed with a blessed lack of convincing detail.
Dark Sky Films, a Chicago company, also has an interesting pair on offer this week. Tulio Demicheli's Ricco the Mean Machine, a 1973 Spanish-Italian co-production, features Christopher Mitchum, son of Robert. A grisly Mafia revenge tale, the film pits Mr. Mitchum against a sadistic capo (Arthur Kennedy, who in better days starred with Robert Mitchum in Nicholas Ray's Lusty Men).
Better and stranger is Tragic Ceremony, a defiantly disjointed horror film from 1972 directed by Riccardo Freda, a former pillar of the Italian film industry here reduced to shaky zooms and exploding heads. The story is the archetypal one of a group of attractive young people lured into the lair of Devil worshipers, yet the violent consequences are unexpectedly imaginative, and the film's wanton neglect of narrative logic gives it an insinuating, dreamlike flow.
The engineering of the disc is impeccable, with a rock-steady image and vividly reproduced Eastman Color: those lurid 1970s red-oranges practically leap off the screen. (Eugenie de Sade and Cecilia: Blue Underground, $29.95 each, unrated; Ricco the Mean Machine and Tragic Ceremony: Dark Sky Films, $19.98 each, unrated.)
ALSO OUT ON TUESDAY
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: THE COMPLETE SIXTH SEASON More comic dyspepsia from Larry David. (HBO Home Video, $39.98, not rated.)
THE KING OF KONGSeth Gordon's documentary about compulsive electronic-game players. (New Line, $27.98, PG-13.)
VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS Presented by Martin Scorsese and directed by Kent Jones, this illuminating documentary on an acclaimed producer of low-budget horror films is now available as a stand-alone title ($19.98) and as an addition to Warner Home Video's fine collection of Lewton films, The Val Lewton Horror Collection. ($59.98, not rated.)
[Illustration]PHOTO: Sophia Loren cuddling up to Charlton Heston as El Cid. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRIAM COLLECTION)