THE GLASS WEB (Jack Arnold, USA, 1953, 81 minutes)
"Blonde, Beautiful...and Born to Be Murdered!"--one of the lurid 1953 taglines
I wouldn't say that Jack Arnold's Universal noir, The Glass Web, an adaptation of TV writer Max Simon Ehrlich's novel Spin the Glass Web, is a lost classic, but any chance to see a film from the director behind 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon and 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man--a big favorite of the late Seattle Times critic John Hartl--on one of the biggest screens in town is a chance worth taking.
I'm not certain The Glass Web would score high marks from Czar of Noir Eddie Muller of TCM and Noir City fame, but it's a solid B-picture about ambitious actress Paula (Kathleen Hughes, who appeared in Arnold's It Came from Outer Space the same year), who has a cute orange tabby, so you know she isn't all bad, but her good qualities end there, since she's been using middle-aged bachelor Henry (Edward G. Robinson) for clout and married father Don (John Forsythe) for cash--the cat's propensity to nibble on electrical cords plays into the plot. Not to worry, the cat emerges unscathed, but things do not end well for two of these conniving characters.
If the basic setup is sufficiently compelling, Arnold's depiction of the live television era is sure to prove eye-opening to today's audiences. It doesn't get talked about much anymore, but it's how some of the finest filmmakers of the New Hollywood, like Arthur Penn and Robert Altman, got their start.
I don't know if co-writers Robert Blees and Leonard Lee took inspiration from an actual show, but it seems likely, and the unimaginatively-titled Crime of the Week predicts Law & Order, among other crime shows and podcasts, by dramatizing a ripped-from-the-headlines case each week--including one involving a cast member.
Forsythe, a dependable, if unspectacular actor who would find greater fame on TV in the 1970s and '80s, most notably on Charlie's Angels (as the voice of Charlie) and Dynasty, plays the guy who writes the episodes, while Robinson plays the researcher with an eye for detail--at least until Paula knocks him off his feet, and he loses all sense of reason. Like his paramour, Henry believes he's destined for better things, whereas Don is already living the American Dream, complete with Marcia Henderson's supportive spouse.
The actors are all quite good, including Richard Denning as the producer. Robinson would do even better work in more emotionally involving crime films, like John Farrow's Night Has a Thousand Eyes, but he always delivers, at least in my experience. As for Ms. Hughes, Bosley Crowther, in his original New York Times review, describes her character as a "dainty dish of poison." I'm not sure about that "dainty" part, but Paula is pretty poisonous indeed.
Like the show itself, the Continental Cigarette commercials, which feature an announcer puffing away like a chimney, are live (back in the 1980s, when I served as an intern at CBS News, there was plenty of smoking going on behind the scenes even as it had disappeared from screens by the 1970s).
It's the way things were done at the time, though it isn't simply about depicting a specific milieu, since both crime and solution tie into the production of the show, from the writing to the sound stages to the competition for better roles, both in front of and behind the camera, to the drive to keep a sponsor happy at all costs. No sponsor: no show.
Though I caught a 2D version of the film, SIFF attendees will get to enjoy the full effect of the objects that hurtle towards the camera during a mid-picture sequence. Granted, we're talking four brief moments squeezed into one to two minutes. Like the 3D version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 Dial M for Murder, which I caught at New York's Film Forum in 2004, it adds a little something extra to the picture, even if it has little to do with its themes.
Arnold would again turn to three dimensions for It Came from Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon, the latter so popular that it spawned two sequels and inspired Guillermo Del Toro's 2017 Oscar-winning fantasy romance The Shape of Water. The 3D version of those films, however, reached more viewers than this one, making the screening of the restored 3D version of The Glass Web at SIFF Cinema Downtown a rare treat indeed.
The Glass Web plays SIFF Cinema Downtown on May 18 at 4:15pm. It's also available on Blu-ray with 3D glasses through Kino Lorber. Images from Deranged LA Crimes (vintage poster), DVD Beaver (Kathleen Hughes), and the IMDb (John Forsythe, Edward G. Robinson, and Richard Denning).
Documentarian Sinéad O'Shea (Pray for Our Sinners) presents Edna O'Brien as woman, mother, writer, and rebel. And not necessarily in that order.
Since O'Shea spoke with O'Brien several times in the months before her 2024 passing at 93, her narration combines the author's voice with diary readings from Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who first came to my attention by way of Tom Harper's Wild Rose (SIFF 2019). The effect is quite seamless.
O'Brien recalls that she grew up in a small town where she felt stifled. Her parents were not worldly or cultured people, and when she got the chance to move to Dublin, she took it, hoping to follow in the footsteps of James Joyce of whom she was a great admirer. It wasn't quite the done thing in the 1950s if you were a woman, but it didn't take her long to land a weekly column in a railway magazine (under a pseudonym)--and to take up with an older man, writer Ernest Gébler, thus scandalizing her conservative family.
Though many writers struggle with their first novel, O'Brien found the writing of 1960's The Country Girls to be "a pure joy." It would jump-start a literary trilogy with The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss, and lead to a 1964 motion picture with Rita Tushingham as the younger woman and a 1983 tele-film with Sam Neil as the older man--both directed by Desmond Davis--but her frankness about sex, drink, religion, and patriarchy would shock a staid country and lead to several book bans, and even, reportedly, a book burning. God forbid that an Irish woman might have sex–and enjoy it.
If the Irish public and pundit class found her work shocking, writers in the UK and the US embraced it.
Her success, however, made her husband insanely jealous, even though he benefited financially, and led to the end of their marriage. His comments about O'Brien during this time are truly horrific. What a sad, small-minded man, the kind who would--and did--abandon their children without a second thought.
As a single woman living in London with a bit of money and a lot of fame, O'Brien hobnobbed with the likes of Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando, but she wasn't really a party girl or loose woman, as much as the press chose to portray her that way. She was, after all, always writing. O'Shea also includes excerpts from her vivacious talk show appearances. I got the impression that it was more about the media seeking her out than vice versa.
I also realized that the perfect person to play her in a biopic, in terms of both biography and appearance, would be actor/director/novelist Miranda July who has similarly striking light eyes, though blue rather than green.
Other speakers in the film beyond O'Brien include her sons Sasha and Carlo, Gabriel Byrne, Andrew O'Hagan, Anne Enright, Clair Wills, Louise Kennedy, and Devil in a Blue Dress author Walter Mosley, a former student at City College of New York, who describes her work as "revolutionary" and credits her for encouraging him to become a novelist.
O'Shea also covers several of O'Brien's works beyond the initial trilogy, including the Joyce-inspired 1972 novel Night and her final novel, 2019's Girl, a fictionalized first-person account told by a Nigerian schoolgirl, one among 276 kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram in 2014.
In her film, O'Shea doesn't cover everything O'Brien ever did or said. She doesn't provide much information, for instance, about her plays, biographies, and acting work, but the director has done her subject justice.
Though an American could have made this documentary, and it wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world, only an Irish woman could really get her as thoroughly, and I felt the same about Kathryn Ferguson's 2022 Sinéad O’Connor documentary, Nothing Compares, which also avoids melodrama and hero worship in favor of an empathetic, yet evenhanded approach.
Neither film suggests that these uniquely talented women were without flaw, and their native country certainly did them dirty at times, but it made them who they were in all their fiery passion, poetic fury, and feminist glory.
Though SIFF has requested that critics save detailed coverage for the official film openings, this week I also watched Dea Kulumbegashvili's April, a searing film about a one-woman family planning clinic in rural Georgia, and Alexandre O. Phillippe's doumentary Chain Reactions, a multi-faceted exploration of Tobe Hooper's immortal Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I would recommend both, not least since Philippe, maker of essay films on Alien (SIFF 2019) and The Exorcist, will be in attendance on May 16.
Blue Road plays Pacific Place on May 16 at 4pm and the Uptown on May 20 at 6pm. I would also recommend Sheila O'Malley's insightful interview with the director. April plays the Uptown on May 16 at 1:30pm and SIFF Film Center on May 17 at 8pm, and Chain Reactions plays the Uptown on May 16 at 9pm and Pacific Place on May 17 at 1:30pm. Images from Broadway Cinema (Edna O'Brien in early years), the IMDb (Girl with the Green Eyes poster), Royal Literary Fund (O'Brien in later years), and Byrneholics Online.
Much like the Seattle International Film Festival's 50th anniversary edition, which opened with Josh Margolin's Thelma,
SIFF's 51st edition opens on May 15 with another
crowd-pleasing, cross-generational comedy, though this one has
less of an action-adventure element. This time the setting is Dublin,
the younger man is gay, and the indomitable Fionnula Flanagan is in the
mix.
FOUR MOTHERS
(Darren Thornton, Ireland, 2024, 89 minutes)
Just because I don't have kids doesn't mean my life has no value."
--Edward (James McArdle) to his mother
Darren Thornton's followup to his directorial debut,2016's pleasingly prickly A Date for Mad Mary--also cowritten with his brother Colin--revolves around mild-mannered Edward (Mare of Easttown's
James McArdle, a Scottish actor with a credible Irish accent), a
put-upon YA novelist who doubles as a caretaker for Fionnula Flanagan's Alma, his
81-year-old widowed mother.
Alma, who is
recovering from a stroke, can't walk or talk, but her mind is sharp, and
she communicates by way of a robot-voiced speech tablet. Edward's
best friends–even his longtime therapist–are all in similar straits. They may love their
mothers, but care-taking can get pretty exhausting.
Worse
yet, Edward has a book to promote, but he can't leave Alma alone, and
when he suggests alternatives, she resists. If he can afford a cute physiotherapist, his ex-boyfriend Raf (Gaetan Garcia), he can't afford round-the-clock home care, and I get it. When my mom was receiving that kind of care, the
cost was $11,000 per month before she moved to assisted
living.
Then, the two friends and the therapist, all of whom are gay, dump their
mothers (nicely played by Stella McCusker, Dearbhla Molloy, and Paddy Glynn) on Edward to attend a pride fest weekend in Spain, and his problems
quadruple. I'd say he needs new friends, but that's a matter for another
day. The friends are thoughtless, the ladies are demanding, and he's a doormat.
If you've seen
Gianni Di Gregorio's 2008 film, Mid-August Lunch, which served as inspiration, the basic outline may seem familiar, though most of the details have been changed, like the fact that Edward is both younger and gayer than Di Gregorio's unemployed, debt-ridden, wine-sozzled bachelor.
Left: Flanagan in Four Brothers
Four Mothers has its comic moments, but it's more melancholic than Thelma,
in which June Squibb and Richard Roundtree hopped on motorized scooters to
expose a con artist targeting seniors, but it's certainly more upbeat
than John Singleton's 2005 western-inspired crime thriller Four Brothers
in which Flanagan plays the adoptive mother of sons
played by Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, André Benjamin, and Garrett
Hedlund. When their beloved Irish-American matriarch meets her maker,
they band together to avenge her death. Let it not be said that Ms.
Flanagan lacks range.
Though I missed hearing her speak in Thornton's film, she makes her presence known, much as Alan Arkin did in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash, other films in which gifted actors brought complex characters to
life with every tool at their disposal–except their voice. Nonetheless, the real star of the show is James McArdle, an experienced supporting actor of stage and screen, proving here he can easily command the screen--and your sympathies--as the leading man.
After the Four Mothers screening with writer Colin Thornton in attendance, the opening night party begins on 9th and Pine at 9:30pm with drink tickets, food trucks, and music from KEXP DJ Darek Mazzone. Since this year's theme is Escape to the Reel World, vacation-oriented attire is suggested.
For more information about the opening night festivities, click here. Four Mothers is one of three Irish films playing at this year's SIFF. In the next dispatch, I cover Blue Road, a profile of Edna O'Brien. The third, Ready or Not, plays next week. Images: MSP Film Society (Gaetan Garcia, Fionnula Flanagan, Stella McCusker, Dearbhla Molloy, Paddy Glynn) and Plymouth Arts Cinema (James McArdle and Flanagan), and the IMDb (Flanagan).
Between 2000 and 2014, I wrote a number of reviews for Amazon that have disappeared from the internet, so I have reproduced a few here. Slightly revised from the original text.
HAUTE CUISINE / Les Saveurs du Palais
(Christian Vincent, France, 2012, 95 minutes)
César Award-winning filmmaker Christian Vincent's 14th feature, Haute Cuisine, offers a glimpse into the life of François Mitterand's personal cook, presenting her as protective of her privacy and serious about her work.
In the 1980s, the president's personal secretary offers Hortense Laborie (Catherine Frot, The Page Turner), a provincial chef, the prestigious position due to her facility with "simple cooking" and locally-sourced ingredients--though foie gras and truffles may strike some as anything but simple.
If the kitchen staff at the Élysée Palace doesn't welcome her with open arms, Hortense forms a genial bond with her sous-chef, Nicolas (Arthur Dupont), but there's no mention of any friends or family (in reality, Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, a divorcée, also spent a few years in America). Though Mitterand (author-turned-actor Jean d’Ormesson), values her services, Hortense leaves when she can no longer give free reign to her creativity.
As a framing device, Vincent, who co-wrote the script with Étiene Comar (Of Gods and Men), uses her subsequent post as cook at an Antarctic research station, a potentially dramatic scenario that proves surprisingly uneventful, since the only real tension comes from Hortense's attempts to avoid a particularly persistent Australian documentarian (Arly Jover) with a pronounced Spanish accent (Vincent filmed these sequences in Iceland).
Though acted and directed with care, these flaws apply to the film as a whole. In attempting to avoid anything too political (Mitterand's policymaking) or personal (Hortense's background), Haute Cuisine comes across as blander than its overly-respectful makers may have intended.
MEEK'S CUTOFF
(Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2010, 104 minutes)
Meek's Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt's fourth feature and third set in the Pacific Northwest, arrives in the guise of a western.
On the Oregon Trail in 1845, three couples travel in covered wagons with slippery guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood, hirsute and unrecognizable), but days pass, and water remains elusive.
Emily (a never-better Michelle Williams, who anchored Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy) laments that "he's gotten in over his head." Meek insists that relief lies around the next corner, but that's never the case, until an alkaline lake appears. Unfortunately, it's unsuitable for drinking, so they push on.
About Meek, Emily's husband (Will Patton, also from Wendy and Lucy) wonders, "Is he ignorant or is he just plain evil?" (The fine cast also includes Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, and Tommy Nelson.)
The group's bond frays further when a Cayuse Indian (Ron Rondeaux of the Crow and Cheyenne tribes) locks them in his sights. Meek tries to squeeze information out of him, but he doesn't understand English. On the assumption that he's equally lost and scared, Emily tries to gain his trust by sharing food and mending a moccasin, but he keeps his distance from the settlers, leading to a showdown that produces an unexpected outcome.
Always attuned to the rhythms of nature, Kelly Reichardt's meditative take on the genre, written by Jon Raymond, feels more enigmatic than most--with the possible exception of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man--even if the period details look right. With her focus on faded calico dresses and vast aquamarine skies, Meek's Cutoff offers a beautiful vision of harsh times.
Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning film, The Separation, takes a procedural approach to two interlocking relationships.
When Ahmad (Iranian actor/director Ali Mosaffa, who learned French for the role) travels from Tehran to Paris, he expects to finalize his divorce from Marie (The Artist's Bérénice Bejo), so that she can marry Samir (The Prophet's Tahar Rahim), but he finds a chaotic domestic scenario: Samir's wife, Céline (Aleksandra Klebanska), is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt; their young son, Fouad (Elyes Aguis), has become difficult; and Marie's teenage daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet), won't speak to her.
Marie assumes Lucie can't stand Samir, but she's actually keeping a secret that's eating her up inside. With Samir's help, Marie has also been repainting the walls of her dilapidated house, which represent the havoc within.
Like a cross between a counselor and a detective, Ahmad starts putting the pieces together by trying to get Lucie to open up. He may not be her birth father, but she feels more comfortable talking to him than anyone else.
As Ahmad discovers, most everyone has been withholding information about the day Céline attempted to take her life.
By the conclusion, an undocumented worker and a restaurant owner get caught up in this absorbing, unpredictable drama, but if Mosaffa and Burlet are particularly good, Bejo and Tahar play more exasperating characters--Marie is high-strung and Samir is moody--though it's to Farhadi's credit that he would prefer to create characters who are more intriguing than loveable.
ROMEO & JULIET
(Carlo Carlei, UK/Italy/Switzerland, USA, 2013, 118 minutes)
Of the many ways to adapt Shakespeare for the silver screen, filmmakers often choose between the Bard's original era and their own (Richard Loncraine’s 1930s-set Richard III represented an exception to the rule).
Unlike Baz Luhrmann's 1996 designer-clad American edition, Carlo Carlei's Italian-made Romeo & Juliet aims for authenticity in its tale of the Montagues, the Capulets, and the star-cross'd young couple caught up in their feud.
Though Juliet (True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld) is only a teenager, her parents (Natascha McElone and Homeland's Damien Lewis with a very unfortunate haircut) have arranged for her to marry the drippy Count Paris (300's Tom Wisdom). Romeo (model-handsome Douglas Booth from the BBC's 2011 Great Expectations) has also been making wedding plans until he spots Juliet at a masked ball, and all thoughts of Rosaline (Colombian actress Nathalie Rapti Gomez) disappear.
While Mercutio (Christian Cooke) and Tybalt (Ed Westwick) try to keep the two apart, Benvolio (The Road's Kodi Smit-McPhee), Friar Lawrence (Paul Giamatti in an impish turn), and Juliet's nurse (the very capable Leslie Manville, prior to her breakout role in Phantom Thread) try to bring them together, but the hostility between the two camps ensures that all does not end well, and that's what the Bard intended, though Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes unnecessarily simplifies and condenses the text.
Further, despite their superior work elsewhere, Steinfeld and Booth make for a tepid match, unlike the lovers, played by Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, at the heart of Franco Zeffirelli's definitive 1968 version.
On the plus side, Gossip Girl bad boy Westwick attacks his role with such gusto that the film springs to life whenever he enters the scene--and deflates again whenever he departs.
I've been involved with the Seattle edition of Crypticon, a convention for fans of the macabre, for eight years now.
In 2018, Tony Kay encouraged me to participate. Since then, I've served as a panelist and moderator, and I've also suggested topics. Favorites have included French and Spanish horror--two separate panels presented with Jason Weiss, who definitely knows his stuff--Canadian horror, the filmography of Ti West, and bold new takes on the Frankenstein myth.
This year, I suggested a panel on the horror western, so I put together a list of films I've seen, like Michael Crichton's Westworld, and films I've been meaning to see, like Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk, which I found on Netflix. Then I turned to social media, and got so many suggestions, I created this post for those who would also like to explore the subgenre.
Unlike years past, I forgot to come up with a colorful title for the panel, so I hope "Horror Western" is sufficiently compelling. For Spanish horror, I proposed "Slicing Up Eyeballs with Spanish-Language Horror from Luis Buñuel to Guillermo del Toro and Beyond" since, as you can probably guess, we began with the 1929 Buñuel/Salvador Dalí short Un Chien Andalou.
Many would probably consider the B&W short closer to surrealism than horror, and yet it sets the scene for the unsettling visions to come.
Arguably, it did the same for Italian horror, since that eyeball-slicing sequence predicts similar moves from Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci (in case you missed it, Tony wrote a terrific review of Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling on the occasion of the Arrow Video release).
As for the horror western, I'm not certain when it began. The earliest examples I could find were from the 1940s, but since horror and western films date back to the silent era, I would imagine there are qualifying titles from the 1920s and 1930s, though they're probably harder to find, so consider this list a work in progress. As I come across more, I'll add them.
Some of these films barely qualify, while others may not qualify at all, but I would need to watch or re-watch them to be certain. One friend, for example, has already suggested that John Carpenter's The Thing doesn't belong, and she may be right, but I'm leaving it on for now. For what it's worth, I've seen it twice so far, but a third watch wouldn't be out of order.
I've also gotten suggestions for Gordon Douglas's The Fiend Who Walked the West and Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff.
Though I hadn't heard of the former before, I gave it a try, and I'm glad I did, not least because future producer Robert Evans plays a sniveling psycho killer, but I don't feel it fits, so I removed it. Though I get why others have suggested the latter, I disagree, so I've left it off. It's possible, however, that both may find their way back to this list at some point. None of this is set in stone, and it's almost as fun to talk about these movies as it is to watch them.
If I watched the film online, I've noted the streaming service in brackets.
1940s-1970s The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, writer Edward Dein, 1943) [YouTube] Curse of the Undead (Edward Dein, 1959) [Tubi] El Pueblo Fantasma (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1965) Billy the Kid vs Dracula (William Beaudine, 1966) Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! (Giulio Questi, 1967) The Valley of Gwangi (Jim O'Connolly, 1969) And God Said to Cain… (Antonio Margheriti, 1970) El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970) Cut-Throats Nine (Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, 1972) Godmonster of Indian Flats (Fredric Hobbs, 1973) Hex (Leo Garen, 1973) High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973) Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) [YouTube] Welcome to Blood City (Peter Sasdy, 1977)
1980s-1990s The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) Eyes of Fire (Avery Crounse, 1983) Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985) The Aurora Encounter (Jim McCullough Sr., 1986) Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986) Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987) Ghost Town (Richard McCarthy, 1988) Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (Anthony Hickox, 1989) Grim Prairie Tales (Wayne Coe, 1990) The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley, 1990) Tremors (Ron Underwood, 1990) Clearcut (Ryszard Bugajski, 1991) Dust Devil (Richard Stanley, 1992) Mad at the Moon (Martin Donovan, 1992) Cannibal! The Musical (Trey Parker, 1993) Ghost Brigade (George Hickenlooper, 1993) Silent Tongue (Sam Shepard, 1993) Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996) Vampires (John Carpenter, 1998) Purgatory (Uli Edel, 1999) Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)
2000s-2020s Dead Birds (Alex Turner, 2004) Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (Grant Harvey, 2004) Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (S.S. Wilson, 2004) The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) The Burrowers (J.T. Petty, 2008) [Plex] Legion (Scott Stewart, 2010) Gallowwalkers (Andrew Goth, 2012) Chowboys: An American Folktale (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Steven Kostanski, Conor Sweeney, 2018) [short] Bone Tomahawk (Craig Zahler, 2015) [Netflix] Southbound (Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Chad Villella, Patrick Horvath, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett, 2015) Brimstone (Martin Koolhoven, 2016) Let the Corpses Tan (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2017) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2018) The Wind (Emma Tammi, 2018) Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022) They Call Her Death (Austin Snell, 2024)* Blood in Them Hills (Kellen Garner, Christopher Sheffield, 2025) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)
Since it premiered at Cannes, David Cronenberg's 21st feature, The Shrouds, has been described as his most personal film.
Near as I can tell, this is meant as a compliment; at the very least, it's simply a neutral observation. The filmmaker has also said as much, but at worst, it implies that his previous films weren't personal, and I believe many of them are, and not just because he has a distinctly recognizable style or because he's been exploring certain themes since 1969's Stereo, which established a template for an ongoing project involving attempts to connect, a willingness to experiment, and the rejection of societal norms.
In a recent conversation with Jim Jarmusch for Interview, Cronenberg regrets that his films have often been described as "cold." That isn't how he sees them. Stanley Kubrick was bedeviled by the same descriptor--even as he ended his career with a film about a marriage that wasn't just an adaptation of a text with which he had long been obsessed, but played, intentionally or otherwise, as a reflection on his own 41-year union.
Cronenberg was married to editor Carolyn Cronenberg, who passed away in 2017, for nearly as long. Though his last film, 2022's Crimes of the Future, relied on a script he had written 20 years before, it also revolves around a marriage. One that has its challenges, but is built to last for as long as Saul (Viggo Mortensen, director of last year's The Dead Don't Hurt) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux, who was originally cast in the film) remain on Earth.
Because it's a Cronenberg production, these performance artists (left) aren't tempted by other people so much as their desire to push the human body as far as it can go, and not just as a vocation, but because it unites them, despite--or even because of--the physical risks.
The director's films may incorporate elements of horror and science fiction, but that makes them no less personal than those that exclude such trappings, and Crimes of the Future played as a reflection on his own marriage, not least because it was his first feature since Caroline's passing (significantly, it followed the Bruce Wagner-written Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, which seems less personal and less characteristic alike).
The Shrouds plays like a successor to Crimes of the Future (the second, and not the first film with the same title that appeared a year after Stereo). It isn't just personal, but more overtly biographical. If Crimes touched on the fear of losing a partner, the new film takes place after a partner has died.
Cronenberg introduces silver-haired doppelgänger Karsh (Vincent Cassel from Eastern Promises), co-owner of a high-tech cemetery, after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). On the surface, he's moved on, since he's dating again, but his health has been suffering. Unlike Saul, this isn't by choice. "Grief," his dentist tells him drily, "is rotting your teeth."
There are many ways to deal with grief, but Karsh's is uniquely Cronenbergian, because at any time he can log on to his GraveTech app to activate the Shroudcam connected to Becca's grave in order to view the nude, decomposing body of a once-attractive woman. Oddly, she recalls the nude, decomposing, once-attractive woman from Kubrick-by-way-of-King's The Shining--but without the zombie element.
GraveTech plans to expand so that European mourners can also watch their loved ones decompose. No doubt the company seeks to boost their profits, as well. I can't think of anything I would want less, but I've never felt Cronenberg is asking audiences to sympathize with the methods in his movies--to the extent that he once made a Freudian film called A Dangerous Method--so much as the reasons why a protagonist would want to use or invent the means to fill a certain need. The main thing is the need.
Karsh isn't a solitary figure. He maintains friendships with computer guy Maury (Guy Pearce) and Becca's ex-veterinarian sister, Terry (also played by Kruger), Maury's ex-wife (in contrast with his industrialist in The Brutalist, Pearce is in twitchy, geek mode here). The women's resemblance establishes a link with 1988's Dead Ringers and its twin doctors and twin patients.
When Karsh notices polyps on his wife's corpse, he consults Terry, but she dismisses the whole GraveTech thing as creepy. When a stranger sends him video in which they're desecrating the cemetery, The Shrouds turns into a mystery, and Karsh consults Maury, who finds the whole GraveTech thing both weird and beautiful, noting that Becca's body looks like its floating in outer space.
The desecration ends the Shroudcam transmissions. Beyond Terry and Maury, Karsh also turns to his AI chatbot-style personal assistant Hunny (voiced by Kruger). Instead of a simulacram of a human being, Hunny looks like a bubbly cartoon version of Becca, an odd choice on Cronenberg's part, but then the tech in his films isn't always especially sleek or sophisticated. EXistenZ, from 1999, with its gristle guns and umbilical cord-like cables is a case in point, though the makeup effects here are quite convincing.
While Karsh meets with people who might know what's going on--when he isn't cavorting with wealthy, visually-impaired client Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt)--he dreams about his wife. Cassel and Kruger appear nude in these sequences, though DP Douglas Koch's hazy lighting obscures as much as it reveals. Becca starts out intact before losing body parts and gaining stitches and staples as the result of cancer. This isn't presented as body horror, necessarily. Karsh accepts her changed body, reminding me of Rosanna Arquette's post-accident form in Cronenberg's Ballard adaptation Crash.
Karsh gets answers as he goes along, but I'm not sure we're meant to take them literally.
It's suggested, for instance, that certain nefarious forces were using Becca as a test subject. This adds intrigue to the scenario, and if it were a thriller like Michael Crichton's corpse-filled Coma from 1978, Karsh would become a target while trying to bring these forces to justice. On the contrary, when a loved one dies, some survivors would rather blame a conspiracy theory than accept the facts.
Russell Banks in his original novel and fellow Torontonian Atom Egoyan in his 1997 adaptation explored this impulse in The Sweet Hereafter. It's possible that these scenarios aren't even real; that they're all in Karsh's head.
Though I've never thought of Cronenberg as an impersonal filmmaker, The Shrouds is personal in ways that go beyond the obvious. For one, his Jewishness is integral to the plot. Though Karsh isn't Jewish, Becca was, and she didn't believe in cremation (though some adherents do). If Karsh had acted against his wife's wishes, this would be a different film--more likely, it wouldn't exist at all. Karsh and Maury are also particularly fond of a Jewish deli from which the former orders in a pastrami sandwich and matzo ball soup to keep his friend fortified while he works on the central mystery.
Then there's Cronenberg's country of origin. Though he has often filmed in Canada and worked with Canadian actors, his films tend to feel more placelessly Cronenbergian than specifically Canadian. In this one, however, Toronto plays Toronto. It's only on screen for a few seconds, but when Maury lifts a paper cup to his mouth, I noticed the unmistakable logo of a certain national coffee chain: a white maple leaf against a red background.
Later, Karsh and Terry are silhouetted against the picture window of his high-rise as the city lights twinkle below. Off to the left, and impossible to miss: the tall, spindly outline of the CN Tower. Since Crimes, Cronenberg has also worked with a local cinematographer rather than a British one. As he told The Film Stage, Douglas Koch is "a very Canadian, very Toronto guy."
The Shrouds concludes with what Cronenberg considers a happy ending, while acknowledging that it's pretty ambiguous.
Throughout the film, Karsh has been seeing signs of Becca in other women, and with her sister Terry, it's unavoidable. He flies off into the future with a version of that image that may or may not be real. Because Cronenberg is at the controls, Karsh never comes across as mentally unstable, and since he's such an unruffled figure throughout, as exemplified by the Zen-like home decor complete with koi pond, it's hard to tell if he's just imagining things.
The filmmaker, who is 82, has said The Shrouds may be his last film, and it certainly has a reflective or valedictory feel, though the widowed Karsh gets plenty of action, so it isn't as if he--or his director--has lost all interest in other women. The cool effect, however, doesn't always play to the film's benefit. It may not be cold, and Vincent Cassel is fine, but a more charged atmosphere or urgent performance wouldn't have been amiss, since it feels more like a coda or an epilogue than a final statement, though you can always count on Cronenberg to steer clear of self-pity and sentimentality.
The entire film, a surprisingly wry affair in light of the somber subject matter, is handily summed up by an early exchange between Karsh and Maury. "That's your grief strategy?" Maury asks about his friend's obsession with his wife's decaying body. "Well," Karsh shrugs, "It's an approach."
The Shrouds opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Friday, April 25. Images from Janus Films by way of the IMDb (Vincent Cassel), Artforum (Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux), Awards Watch (Kassel, Diane Kruger, and the high-tech cemetery), Indiewire (Kassel and Guy Pearce), Salon (Kassel and Kruger), and The Hollywood Reporter (Kassel after the desecration).
"If you like Kinkade, you're an asshole."--Ralph Bakshi
I grew up wanting to be an artist. Once I learned how to draw, I drew all the time. It made me happy, and the praise buoyed me when I felt insufficient in other areas. As I moved from grade school to high school, I figured it's what I would do professionally, so I majored in studio art, but shortly after graduating from college, I gave up. Instead of waiting to be rejected as an artist, I rejected myself, and pursued other interests.
Thomas Kinkade also grew up wanting to be an artist, and knew that the odds were stacked against him. In an audio recording made when he was 16, Kinkade admits that he doesn't want to end up like Van Gogh; not appreciated until well after his death. Unlike me, however, he didn't give up.
He could have simply developed a style and settled on a theme, but Kinkade went further by turning it into a lifestyle. Director Miranda Yousef doesn't just look at the paintings, prints, and ancillary products that made him rich, but behind the pious image to reveal what he really thought and the kind of art he really wanted to make, which might suggest an unauthorized documentary, except his family–brother, sister, wife, and four daughters–chose to participate, even though her portrait is troubling at best.
Kinkade turned to art as a refuge from a youth in Placerville, CA he found unsatisfying, since his parents were divorced and had little money. He also thought he was a genius, which makes him sound like a lot of fun to be around. That confidence, though, helped him to get a job working on 1983's Fire and Ice from animator Ralph Bakshi, who marveled at his skill and discipline. He left to strike out on his own.
Kinkade moved on to landscape paintings he sold at local galleries, but he was committed to making art that everyone could afford, so he switched to printmaking. Just as significantly, he traded impressionism for kitsch.
When he met Ken Raasch, who became his business partner, they decided to turn him into a brand. He wasn't just Thomas Kinkade, but the Painter of Light™. It’s like the way Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, was succeeded by Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. Granted, Jackson wasn't what I would call kitsch, but Kinkade set himself up as a successor to 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer, who was known posthumously as the Master of Light, except his work was marked by subtlety and naturalism.
In the film, former Washington Post art critic and Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik cites Turner rather than Vermeer, but Kinkade had little in common with either, though his brother Patrick sees the brightly-lit cottages as an attempt to recreate the childhood he wishes he had. It's like the opposite of the immortal Santana lyric, "My house is dark, and my thoughts are cold."
By the 1990s, Kinkade had gotten his wish, and his art was everywhere.
He was a QVC staple with shops in malls filled with plates, mugs, lamps, candles, pillows, greeting cards, snowglobes, illuminated paintings–you name it.
He could've simply revelled in his success, but then he wouldn't have been Thomas Kinkade. He wanted more. Knowing he'd never have the respect of critics, he positioned himself in opposition to the art they championed. He wasn't just an artist and an entrepreneur, he was a cultural warrior.
Like many cultural warriors, he had a public persona and a private one. To family and friends, the former wasn't fake necessarily. It's just that there were other aspects of his life that weren't as marketable, so he kept them under wraps. He had a storage room, for instance, filled with art that looked nothing like the "sentimental, a little garish, kind of twee" paintings, to quote New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, that became his stock in trade.
Though his wife and daughters come across as intelligent people, they believe the marketing around their patriarch prevented him from being himself in public. I take their point, but it's a part he chose to play. He wasn't a child, and no one forced his hand. His maudlin art and faithful façade combined with the evangelical and conservative figures with whom he appeared in photo ops–including the future 45th and 47th president of the United States–left little room for originality and free expression.
Nor did it leave much room for Kinkade to be the kind of father his wife and daughters wanted and needed, because he was always working. Something was bound to give, and the trouble began when the teetotaler began to drink. Since he had a tendency to do everything to excess, he never should have started, but it was the socially acceptable stress reliever he chose.
By 2001, the bloom was off the rose as he had oversaturated the market. Stores closed, sales declined, and the stock tanked. He could've cut his losses and returned to the more personal paintings with which he began as an art student at Berkeley, but egomaniacs never know when to quit.
Yousef recounts the many ways in which it all went to shit. It's easy to feel a sense of glee, or at least schadenfreude, when karma catches up with an evildoer, except Kinkade was more complicated than that, and throughout the film, she reveals the challenges he spent his life trying to overcome.
The second half of the film isn't as fun as the first, and that isn't her fault. Some heavy drinkers, like Oliver Reed, go out in a blaze of glory--partying with sailors in Malta during the making of Gladiator--but Kinkade comes across as sad and pathetic in his final days. He was free to finally be himself, but it was too late.
I believe this was the right approach in lightof the alternatives. Yousef spoke with art critics, curators, and professors, but avoided standup comedians, satirical cartoonists, and others who might have chosen to make fun of Kinkade and his art. She didn't speak with many collectors, but it wasn't really necessary, not least when some of the speakers in the film, like Bakshi and conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, were fans of a kind.
In the end, she finds a touching way to end an unhappy story that doesn't rely on false uplift, but rather genuine appreciation from the insiders who got to know the work–and the man–beyond the brightly-lit cozy cottages.
Art for Everybody, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2023,opens in Los Angeles on Fri, April 18, with Susan Orlean and Jeffrey Vallance in attendance, and expands in the weeks to come. Find more screenings here.
Images: Tremolo Productions (Thomas Kinkade at work), The Art Newspaper via The Kinkade Family Foundation (A Quiet Evening, Places in the Heart I/1998 and Self-Portrait with a Paint Stained Shirt/photo Jeff McLane/approx 1979), Pinterest (Kinkade with The Garden of Prayer/1997).
This is a revived version of a 2012 Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).
Even before I knew the driving force behind it, namely the Beatles, I was aware of Apple Records (1968-1975), because my divorced parents owned a few of their releases. Mom had James Taylor's 1968 self-titled debut and Badfinger's 1970 No Dice and Dad had John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1968 Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (separate households, separate collections).
I don't recall Dad ever playing the latter, but at least he
didn't hide it from my underage eyes—then again, he was a regular
consumer of Playboy and Hustler. Oddly enough, my parents didn't own any Beatles records that I can remember, but I was as familiar with the foursome as any child of the 1970s.
Watching Thomas Arnold's Strange Fruit: the Beatles' Apple Records got me thinking about the label all over again. My friend, Alan, describes Sexy Intellectual, the company that released the documentary, as "demi-hemi-semi-legit," which sounds about right. They previously issued Tom O'Dell's From Straight to Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and L.A.’s Lunatic Fringe, so Apple makes sense as a label-oriented follow-up.
Aside from the hit makers, like Badfinger, who moved on to bigger labels,
there were other musicians who made less of an impact and, in some
cases, no impact at all. I was particularly taken by Jackie Lomax and Mary Hopkin.
The former had no hits, while the latter sold eight million copies of
the charming 1968 single "Those Were the Days," but neither figures among the first artists that
come to mind when I think about Apple.
Aside from the Beatles, notable label employees included Mal Evans, Derek Taylor, and Peter Asher, the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend Jane Asher and a former member of Peter and Gordon. Lennon's infamous associate Allen Klein would become ringmaster in 1969, but the signing rules remained much the same from start to finish: at least one Beatle had to approve each artist.
So, McCartney went to bat for Hopkin, an 18-year-old from Wales, while George Harrison threw his lot in with Lomax, who had been fronting Merseybeat combo the Undertakers when he caught the attention of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, who signed him to a publishing contract through NEMS. After Epstein's untimely passing in 1967--he was only 32 years old--the Beatles signed him to a recording contract with Apple.
Lomax, who appears in the film, believes the imprint
tried to do too much too soon. Instead of a staggered release schedule,
they issued four singles at the same time, including "Those Were the
Days" and "Sour Milk Sea."
George Harrison wrote and played on Lomax's side, along with McCartney, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and Nicky Hopkins,
but it drummed up little business. The music writers in the documentary
believe the timing was off, since the UK was shifting from R&B
and blues rock toward psychedelia.
It's ironic, because "Sour Milk Sea," which almost ended up on The White Album,
holds up better than "Those Were the Days," though the latter was
always intended to have an old-timey, music hall feel, like an outtake
from 1968 musical Oliver!
By the time they released their full-length albums, the pattern would repeat: Hopkin's Post Card sold well, while Lomax's Is This What You Want?
did not. Other than the music featured in this film, I'm unfamiliar
with his work, but I like what I've heard, and 1960s specialist (and Stranger contributor) Mike Nipper* rates his first three records highly.
Despite her initial success, though, I rarely hear Hopkin's name anymore. I wouldn't say she's forgotten, but other Apple signings like Billy Preston
appear in today's musical conversations more often, due in part to the
fact that he once served as a Fifth Beatle--he also steals the show at
Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, an Apple double-LP that featured Badfinger.
Apparently, Hopkin was never especially interested in pop,
but I guess it was hard to say no to the Cute Beatle, who remade the
blonde soprano in his musical image. Success, fortunately, emboldened
the one-time Eurovision singer, and she would move in more of folk
direction in the years to come.
Hopkin's relationship with producer Tony Visconti,
who supported the move, may have also helped her to stand up to
McCartney and Apple. After that, her record sales began to dwindle, but
the documentary gives the impression that she valued art over fame and
commerce.
While Lomax, the ultimate road warrior, continues to record and perform, Hopkin took a three-decade break from full-time music-making, reemerging in 2007 with a trio of self-released albums. The documentary also features David Peel, Joey Molland of Badfinger, and Gary VanScyoc of Elephant's Memory, the Lower East Side collective who backed Lennon on 1972's Some Time in New York City.
Like the Bizarre/Straight documentary, Strange Fruit
plays almost like a miniseries, because it clocks in at 160+ minutes.
Though "unsanctioned by the Beatles or Apple Records," it contains an
impressive array of audio-visual material, including Beatles and Yoko Ono tracks, like the below number from Fly,
which makes Lomax sound like a commercial-minded chart-topper by comparison. If the latter
was too "retro" for the hipsters of the 1960s, the Ono of the 1970s was
too hip for most everybody—then and now.
*Nipper has heard more singles from the era than I ever have or will.
Sexy Intellectual/Chrome Dreams/MVD releases Strange Fruit on April 12, 2012. Images from the IMDb (home video cover art), Discogs (Jackie Lomax single cover art), eil.com (Mary Hopkin single cover art), and centerfield maz (Billy Preston wowing the MSG crowd at the Concert for Bangladesh).
DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING / Non si Sevizia un Paperino
(Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1972, 105 minutes)
By Tony Kay
Sometime in the mid-1960s, Hitchcockian suspense, pulpy whodunnits, psycho-sexual excess, and psychedelic splashiness converged in Italian popular cinema, giving birth to the movie sub-genre known as the giallo.
Then Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage hit theaters in 1970, and its colossal international success popularized the sub-genre. A rapid succession of likewise violent, sexually overheated, psychedelicized mysteries followed.
Gialli became so proliferate so fast that the movement quickly begat its own sets of tropes and clichés. So by the time director Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling saw wide release in 1972, the unmistakable waft of formula was already setting in.
Fulci, a journeyman who'd previously helmed everything from broad comedies to spaghetti westerns, had already directed two successful gialli (1969's Perversion Story and 1971's Lizard in a Woman's Skin), but with Don't Torture a Duckling, he ferociously subverted the giallo rulebook.
In the process, he crafted what just might be his best movie, and one of the sub-genre's finest efforts. Duckling makes its domestic debut as a hi-def 4K on Arrow Video this week, and the added audio-visual punch renders this unremittingly dark jewel of a film all the more impactful.
The subversion of cliché in Fulci's third giallo literally commences from the first frame. Most movies in the cycle take place in bustling, quintessentially urban settings: Duckling begins with a slow pan across a large, remote-feeling valley that houses Accendura, the movie's rural Italian village setting.
A small concrete ribbon of highway threads through the placid surroundings, and all's silent, save one young shepherd boy's plaintive singing. At first blush, things appear positively idyllic.
But seconds later, DoP Sergio D'Offizi’s camera settles on a patch of earth, as two hands begin clawing at the soil, unearthing what looks like a baby's skeleton. Riz Ortolani's musical score erupts into menacing staccato stings at the reveal. The hands belong to Maciara (Florinda Bolkan), the town witch, and we're immediately escorted into a world that conceals a hotbed of human ugliness beneath the most lullingly comforting of surfaces.
The imperfect reality beneath Accendura's scenic exterior continues to surface during Duckling's opening moments. Fulci follows some of the village's seemingly innocent kids as they engage in decidedly non-innocent behavior: One child gleefully imperils a harmless lizard with his slingshot, while three of his pals sneak cigarettes and leeringly discuss the attributes of two sex workers arriving to service rural clients. Kids will be kids, and while the movie stamps no judgment on these boys, no one's pure or particularly innocent here.
Things take a truly harrowing turn, however, as the town's shaken to its core by a series of murders targeting the young boys of the village, and the suspects pile up as rapidly as the bodies. Local police scramble to apprehend the killer as reporter Andrea Martelli (The Big Gundown's Tomas Milian) and wealthy socialite Patrizia (Casino Royale's Barbara Bouchet)—a suspect herself—conduct their own investigation.
Fulci and his co-writers, Roberto Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, do incorporate some genre tropes in their script.
Between the presence of amateur detectives, a bushel of red herrings, an effective score by genre stalwart Riz (mis-billed as Ritz in the credits) Ortolani, and a pinch of heady sexuality courtesy of Bouchet (one of the era's inarguable queens of the sub-genre), the screenplay concedes to formula, even as it plants the seeds of that formula's subversion.
Like any great giallo, Duckling also boasts some magnificent cinematography and direction. In the movie's one display of nudity, Patrizia reclines naked on a chair as she teases and flirts with the young son of her housekeeper.
Fulci and D'Offizi cannily frame and shoot the scene in a sensual fever: Bouchet's body is partly viewed through a clear art piece filled with surging blue liquid—a proverbial siren luring the boy to his humiliation (or worse). Ortolani's score just adds to the wooziness, with its downtempo pacing and sensual sax purring minor notes that sound like some subtly mocking parody of a love theme.
No one would ever accuse a giallo of subtlety, and Don't Torture a Duckling sometimes leans too hard into the giallo's traditionally operatic emotional and character beats. But for every turn into the operatic, there's a moment where Fulci dials it back brilliantly. Best of all, this easily stands as the closest Fulci ever came to a legitimately female-centric movie. He again subverts cliché by giving two of the most persistent female archetypes in the sub-genre some nuances.
Bouchet's always been a strikingly beautiful and charismatic physical presence, but she really gets inside what turns out to be more than just a stereotypical spoiled heiress. Patrizia, as it turns out, is a recovering addict struggling with (but successful in) staying clean. She's smart, acerbically funny, resourceful, sexually confident (if a little too chummy with a local underage boy or two), and strong. And Bolkan somehow reconciles Maciara's feral intensity with a surprisingly affecting thread of pathos.
With that in mind, it makes sense that the film's most wrenching murder set piece doesn't involve any of the child victims. Fulci shoots the murders of the boys with considerable restraint (loathsome as these crimes are, it's established early on that there's no sexual element to them). No, the most horrific attack/murder is reserved for a mentally unstable but innocent woman, and it's crystal clear where Fulci's sympathies lie.
Instead of sexualizing or glamorizing the murder (one of the more problematic tenets of a fair number of gialli), the killing is presented as blunt, ugly, messy, and brutal. And the horrific trauma leveled at the victim isn't delivered by some random psychopath, but by a band of supposedly law-abiding citizens.
The unsparing attack represents what could be the most pointed commentary on violence against women to ever surface in a giallo, and a damning indictment of mob mentality and toxic masculinity.
Every frame of Duckling feels flush with intense, righteous anger at humanity's ignorance, and at the universe in general. That fury wasn't formed in a vacuum. Three years prior to Duckling's release, Fulci's wife Marina took her life after a diagnosis of inoperable cancer (in an extra-cruel twist, the diagnosis was reportedly a false alarm).
It's hard not to feel the pain of loss—and the anger that the very Catholic Fulci likely felt at a seemingly uncaring, likely absent God—in Duckling's tragic but utterly riveting framework.
Such a life-changing tragedy also goes a long way towards contextualizing Fulci's career going forward. By the end of the '70s and for the rest of his life until his passing in 1996, he dedicated himself almost exclusively to depicting over-the-top, gut-churning violence in increasingly delirious and dreamlike horror movies.
Those films—Zombie, City of the Walking Dead, and The Beyond among them—won the director a large, dedicated cult of genre fans. But Don't Torture a Duckling stands as proof positive that Lucio Fulci was never better than when he wedded sledgehammer shocks with a tight storyline and a clear-eyed, ferociously compassionate point of view.
Per usual, Arrow's provided an embarrassment of bonus-content riches for this 4K release of Duckling, including interviews with Bolkan, Bouchet, and D'Offizi, an archival audio interview with Fulci, insightful audio commentary from giallo specialist/author Troy Howarth, and much more.
The extras essentially duplicate Arrow's previous Blu-ray release, with the addition of an illustrated collector's booklet and newly commissioned sleeve artwork by Ilan Sheady. That said, the 4K restoration undertaken by the label definitely provides more than enough reason to invest in the upgrade.
Simply put, this high-water mark of Italian genre cinema has never looked or sounded better.
Don't Torture a Duckling is available on Blu-ray+DVD from Arrow Video. Images: the IMDb (Barbara Bouchet and placid village), Pinterest (Lizard in a Woman's Skin poster), Drunk Monkeys (Bouchet and Tomas Milian), Jordan and Eddie (Florinda Bolkan), and Bidsquare (The Beyond poster).
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
