The look of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 crime thriller Le Samourai is cold and metallic. So is hit man Jef Costello (Alain Delon). He shuts off feeling. He lives through his weapons and tools. He casually exploits those who love him. When he finally loses his heart, to a witness who inexplicably refuses to identify him as a killer, it's clear the rest will follow. This is a fatalistic film, and a terrific one.
The legend is that Melville began reading out his script to a reluctant Delon, who stopped him after the ninth page and said: This story has no dialogue so far; I will do the film. Delon wears a trench coat; his matinee-idol looks are topped with a fedora; his character is given the rigid code of honour of a samurai, believing that even a paid assassin can expect people to abide by certain rules. No such luck. After he shoots a man, the police inspector is obsessed with breaking his false alibi while the people who hired him want to kill him.
Melville, who made his first movie in the 1940s, influenced Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers in the French New Wave by shooting on location with a tiny budget and using whatever came to hand. Hong Kong director John ( The Killer) Woo, who drew much from Melville, praises him in a 1997 essay reprinted in the booklet accompanying the Criterion DVD. "To me, Melville's movies are existentialist, as you find in the loneliness of the characters played by Yves Montand in Le Cercle Rouge and Alain Delon in Le Samourai. Nobody cares for them, nobody knows who they are; they are loners, doomed tragic figures, lost on their inner journey."
Conduct Unbecoming (1975) is based on a play about a British regiment in colonial India at the end of the 1800s, where stiff upper lips, regulations and dark secrets are the currency. It's essentially a courtroom drama, though the courtroom is a private tribunal without official standing. A war widow (Susannah York) has been brutally attacked, and a new recruit (Michael York) is called upon to defend the lieutenant she names (James Faulkner) while such estimable actors as Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Stacy Keach and Richard Attenborough exchange knowing looks until the underlying secret is revealed. The DVD offers a sporadic commentary by director Michael Anderson and a fuller one by Michael York, who says people insist on thinking he and Susannah York are related, which they aren't. So they figured they would cook up a story. "I think we arrived at a pact that we were in fact the bastard offspring of some bishop of, I think it was Warsaw."
Broadway's Lost Treasures III is the latest DVD to be mined from PBS broadcasts of decades of song and dance numbers from Broadway's annual Tony Awards. The introductions by Carol Channing and the like grow tiresome, but the numbers are great, by Julie Andrews, Jerry Orbach (a hoofer in Promises, Promises long before Law & Order), Kristin Chenoweth (from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown) and Zero Mostel. Highlights include Jonathan Pryce's 1991 rendition of American Dream from Miss Saigon and a version of 42nd Street in which the cast dances out in the street and down in the subway.
Diana Ross gives a compelling performance as Billie Holiday in the musical biopic Lady Sings the Blues (1972), but it's Richard Pryor, in a supporting role as her pianist, whose final scene has stuck with me for years. It's a tour de force, moving from banter with Holiday to the arrival of a drug dealer who, Piano Man quickly realizes, is intent on killing him. In a commentary shared with executive producer Berry Gordy, director Sidney J. Furie acknowledges that it's one thing to shoot the scene with actors who you know will get up and walk away at the end, and another to attend the movie as a viewer who sees only the characters. "I remember sitting in a theatre watching the audience watch this scene. Very uncomfortable."
Also out: Remington Steele: Season 2 (1983-84), introducing Doris Roberts as the new secretary to Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan; The White Shadow: Season 1 (1978-79), with Ken Howard, recently Jill Hennessy's father on Crossing Jordan , as a former pro basketball player coaching an inner-city team in Los Angeles; and Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, available either as a single disc or as a two-disc set with additional features. Both have a segment explaining how actor Deep Roy was transformed into hundreds of Oompa-Loompas.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
Sally Potter's Yes (2005), with Joan Allen leaving husband Sam Neill for a whirlwind romance with Simon Abkarian, is built of visible artifice. Everyone speaks in rhyme. The woman who cleans house (Shirley Henderson) functions as a Greek chorus: "I doubt they ever realize I know it all. They think that those of us who clean are small." Camera shots slow down, speed up, fade and jump. So it makes a change to watch the DVD bonus: an unvarnished record of the shooting of an exterior scene between Allen and Abkarian. Technicians tinker, actors stand around and patience frays. Potter: "We're losing the light really, really fast." Camera operator: "We're doing our best." Potter: "No, I know you are. I'm just asking the question of how long." No fades or jump cuts here; just the hard, real-time slog of filmmaking.
-- W.C.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST
The unwavering message of the animated feature FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) is that rain forests must be saved from the evil tree-cutters, which suggests loggers won't be buying this one for the kids at Christmas. But the all-ages tale of tree fairies and others battling a destructive force called Hexxus in FernGully (modelled on Australia's Lamington National Park) is no squishy treatise. The animation is gorgeous, far richer and subtler than the cover art on the new DVD would suggest. The celebrity voices (Tim Curry as Hexxus, Christian Slater, Cheech and Chong) include a pre-Aladdin Robin Williams as a bat who has escaped from an experimental lab and recounts the experience in a rap song written by Thomas Dolby. Tone-Loc, as a hungry goanna, wraps his gravelly voice around If I'm Gonna Eat Somebody (It Might as Well Be You). Extras on the two-disc set include games and a commentary by the director and his colleagues, who say the film was financed by an Australian insurance company looking for a tax credit. Oh, and the glow that comes from doing good, of course.
-- W.C.