Antonioni's risqué 1966 art film 'Blow-Up' is back

By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service

Dustin Hoffman stars in the legal drama "Runaway Jury," based on a John Grisham novel. Monarchy Enterprises S.a.r.l. and Regency Entertainment

The belated DVD release (Warner Home Video) provides an opportunity for viewers who have seen only the films that bear it tribute, most notably Brian De Palma's "Blow Out," to see if it lives up to its reputation.

What most people remember about the film is its quasi-suspense movie plot pivot. David Hemmings plays Thomas, a fashionably cynical freelance fashion photographer in what was then called Swinging London. While developing pictures he took of a couple in a park — much to the distress of the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) in the shots — he discovers something he didn't see before. This leads him to an investigation of sorts, but it turns out to be more cerebral than mysterious, as Antonioni returns to the themes of alienation and dislocation central to his earlier hypnotic head-scratchers, "L'Avventura" and "The Red Desert."

The release of "Blow-Up" will also excite music fans, since it features the first full-length score by Herbie Hancock (with the late Joe Henderson on tenor sax, no less) and the only film of the brief incarnation of the Yardbirds featuring both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, though the recording they mime is actually pre-Page. As for the breakthrough nudity and much-talked-about orgy scene, it's more interesting now for who's in it than what gets shown: That's a young Jane Birkin, who would go on become a very fine actress, in her birthday suit.

Out of the vaults

Warner is also releasing two of the best films by Italy's Luchino Visconti — 1969's "The Damned" and 1971's "Death in Venice." The former, a malicious melodrama about a Krupp-like steel baron's family in Nazi Germany, features bravura performances by Helmut Berger, Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, and was one of the first recipients of the dreaded X rating, which it deserved.

The latter, a gorgeous adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella, also stars Bogarde, as a man whose obsession with ideal beauty leads to a fateful obsession with a young boy. The digitally restored score makes excellent use of the music of Gustav Mahler, on whom Bogarde's character is based.

The classic 1953 "Pickup on South Street" (Criterion) is the most overtly commercial film made by hard-boiled maverick Sam Fuller. It is a twisty noir starring Richard Widmark as a small-time thief who picks the wrong purse on a New York subway and finds himself caught between FBI agents and commie spies. Shot almost exclusively in alleys, dives and dimly lit bedrooms, "Pickup" exudes seediness and serves as a great introduction to Fuller. He is seen in the fine menu of extras, being interviewed by Richard Schickel and on French TV.

Criterion can also take credit for the newly restored edition of the 1943 French thriller "Le Corbeau." While not as well known as two other films by Henri-Georges Clouzot, "The Wages of Fear" and "Diabolique," it is every bit their equal. It's about the turmoil visited on small French village when someone begins anonymously charging the residents with crimes and misdeeds. In a fine analysis by an admiring Bertrand Tavernier, the director rebuffs the long-held notion of the film as pro-Vichy propaganda and argues it was intended as an anti-occupation parable.

Criterion's hat-trick is completed with Ronald Neame's 1960 drama "Tunes of Glory," in which Alec Guinness plays a hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth Scottish colonel who makes a ready enemy of fellow colonel John Mills, an uptight, rule-abiding martinet. Guinness talks about the emotionally compelling film in an old BBC interview, while Neame and Mills have sat for new interviews.

Recent releases

The top rental of the week will almost certainly be "Runaway Jury" (Fox), yet another entertaining adaptation of a John Grisham novel. This one stars Dustin Hoffman as a lawyer attempting to hold a gun manufacturer liable in a murder, Gene Hackman as a win-at-all-costs jury consultant and John Cusack as a juror who lets it be known his vote is for sale to both of them.

Bob Dylan's "Masked and Anonymous" (Columbia Tristar) debuted on DVD Tuesday. No extras, just his convoluted, challenging, talky and occasionally fascinating tale of a Dylan-like singer-songwriter who is sprung from jail in a revolution-rocked America by unscrupulous promoters (Jessica Lange and John Goodman) putting on a televised benefit concert for the current dictator.

Dropping in because they were asked, we presume, are Christian Slater, Cheech Marin, Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Bruce Dern, Mickey Rourke and many others. While the movie's a mess, the music, which includes a rollicking "Down in the Flood" and a melancholy "Dixie," is masterful.

Taken from the tube: "Roswell — The Complete First Season" (Fox), a six-DVD box, has the first 23 episodes of the cult teen drama that supposes that the aliens who secretly landed in that New Mexico burg have grown up alongside the human residents, providing for even more high school tension than usual. Seven of the shows get a commentary, there are numerous deleted scenes, and as is increasingly common with TV boxes, some of the original music had to be replaced when the producers could not obtain DVD clearance. Season 2 is due this summer.

"The Celts," a six-hour BBC miniseries first shown in Britain in 1987 and tracking the Celts from Austria to Rome to the British Isles, is now available as a 2-DVD set (BBC) with a remixed soundtrack that showcases the score that made Enya a star. BBC has also released Series 3 and 4 of "Red Dwarf," which together include 12 episodes of the eccentric late-'80s-early '90s comedy that mutated from a wild "Odd Couple" series for sci-fi-stoners to a surreal, sardonic sci-fi series for those who can't take the universe. Hard-core fans will appreciate the copious extras.

"The Ingmar Bergman Collection," reviewed here last week, was delayed because two of the six films included were mastered in the wrong screen ratio: A redone box will be out in April, but the four films mastered properly are on shelves now.