Mothra VS Godzilla

Raiders Of The Lost Bukkake

Mothra VS Godzilla
aka Godzilla VS The Thing
aka Mosura tai Gojira
Japan 1964 Directed by Ishirô Honda
Toho/Criterion Collection
Godzilla - The Showa Era Box Set  Blu Ray Zone B

Mothra VS Godzilla is a sequel to both Mothra (which I reviewed here) and King Kong VS Godzilla (which I reviewed here). Directed by original Gojira and Mothra director Ishirô Honda, this is pretty much the last time in the Showa Wave of Godzilla films that he is portrayed totally as a menacing figure. Barring, of course, him being controlled by evil aliens but, yeah, I’ll get to that in a future review.

Another thing it shares with both the original Gojira and Mothra movies, courtesy of this particular director, is the slow and ponderous nature of the plot which once again concentrates on various human characters such as those portrayed by Akira Takarada, Yuriko Hoshi and Hiroshi Koizumi. This way of gradually building to the inclusion of the main monster characters can often work well but, as far as I’m concerned, this really doesn’t help the pacing at all on this one and the characters themselves, even the token human villains out to exploit Mothra’s egg, are all pretty dull and forgetful. The only bright spot is, of course, the pop duo The Peanuts, reprising their miniature roles from the first Mothra movie. Alas, their single costume in this is pretty hideous and it’s hard to take them seriously when they are wearing such silly, furry hats.

So the basic plot set up is this. After a mudslide caused by a typhoon carries Mothra’s egg onto the ocean and out to a beach in Japan, it is ‘bought’ by a philanthropist and his naive but still evil co-investor to design a theme park around it. The Peanuts try to retrieve the egg but are left empty handed. Then Godzilla rises from a beach in much the same way that a future George A. Romero zombie would and starts causing havoc. In fact, for a while there he just seems to be stumbling around and tripping over things, accidentally destroying them, until his aimless path of destruction becomes more focused and intentional.

The humans from Japan manage to enlist the aid of the original Mothra, who is near the end of her life cycle, to try to repel Godzilla. Alas, halfway through the first battle, Mothra finally expires but then the egg hatches and it seems she has given birth to twins. Two twin larvae finally take Godzilla down and then return with The Peanuts to Infant Island where they originated.

This one was very popular in Japan but, I have to say, the pacing really drags it down and the special effects don’t really hold up as well as even some of the earlier movies in the series. Shots of the giant Mothra egg on the beach while people stand around it and watch look terrible and it’s obvious from the inclusion of these shots that the close up scenes of the egg on the beach show the only small portion of the shell that the effects department built to full scale. The cracks on the egg as it hatches look a bit better than last time this happened though, it has to be said.

Some of the battles look okay and although her spawn only ever remain in their larvae state, the original Mothra looks pretty good. There’s also some interesting shot choices in the movie too. For instance, one of the shots of a cityscape has the camera panning along, stopping and then going back to a building it just passed before zooming in on one of the windows to give us the establishing shot of the next interior scene. This is quite bizarre and is almost a foreshadowing of the way modern TV shows use the camera in a kind of reactive mode to ‘find their shot’ as a play for authenticity.

Other things of interest in the movie include a scene where one villain punches the other and his face gets really bloody, before he shoots the other guy. And they don’t skimp on the blood there either... which is strange for a film which many might perceive to be a ‘family, kid-friendly movie’ but this ‘adult’ tone is not the last time this will occur in a Godzilla movie, if memory serves.

That being said, nobody even thinks to ask who or what it was that’s got Mothra in her pregnant state in the first place. Seriously, who has a penis big enough to fertilise Mothra? I didn’t notice Chuck Norris anywhere in the movie so this is a real plot hole.

And talking of penises... that’s exactly what the two Mothra larvae look like in the last ten minutes, when they take on Godzilla. Basically bobbing up and down and spraying Tokyo’s nemesis with white webby stuff which looks pretty much like they are... um.. cumming all over Godzilla’s head and shoulders repeatedly. Yep, I wouldn’t mind betting this is where the Japanese porn staple of bukkake really started, foreshadowing it by around 20 years. Never mind The Big G... this is pretty much The Big GGG (and if you understand that joke then you have no right to come complaining to me about the observation and, if you don’t understand it, don’t Google it around kids or at work and don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Ultimately, this film hasn’t aged well but it does have a nice score by Akira Ifukube, although the main march is absent. It also references certain orchestrations and melodies from Yûji Koseki’s score from Mothra, including The Peanuts doing a new rendition of the famous song. So there’s that. Certainly, Godzilla watchers will need to see this one in order to get all the links between previous and future films but it’s nowhere near the best in the series, for sure. That being said, the rushed production and release of the next one in the series, Ghidorah - The Three Headed Monster, brought out the same year as this one, is a fair bit better, if my memory of it is anything to go by. I guess I’ll be finding out for sure soon enough.

Gojira 1954/Godzilla King Of The Monsters (1956)

Radioactive Tokyo Calling!

Gojira (aka Godzilla)
Japan 1954
Directed by Ishirô Honda

Godzilla - King Of The Monsters (1956)
Japan/USA 1956
Directed by Ishirô Honda and Terry O. Morse

Criterion Collection - Godzilla - The Showa Era Box Set  Blu Ray Zone B

This Big G Criterion Collection box set of The Showa Era wave of Godzilla films is probably one of my more pricier Blu Ray box set purchases of recent years. It’s kind of worth it though because, for this specific wave of films lasting between 1954 and 1975, it’s very nearly the Holy Grail of Godzilla releases that fans and admirers of the movies have been waiting for over the years. Not quite the release we wanted, for sure and... I’ll explain one of the reasons why that's so in my review of the second and third films in the series but... well, it’s damn near to being the perfect set of these films and, in addition to some beautiful Blu Ray transfers, the packaging of an oversized hardback book with absolutely beautiful new commissioned illustrations for each title is nothing short of being an absolute work of art. Yes, it’s an expensive set but Criterion have really lived up to their usually exemplary standard with this release.

 Gojira is, of course, a combination of the Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira), which is how the creature was originally conceived, gaining a more dinosaur-like appearance as pre-production continued. It was apparently the first Japanese film to be properly storyboarded but, knowing Kurosawa’s attention to details on his own films for Toho (he was doing Seven Samurai with one of the main cast members of this, somehow, while this was being shot), I’m not one hundred percent that the storyboard thing is true, to be honest.

The original Japanese version of the film is definitely one of the highlights of the series. Unlike many of the later movies, Gojira is not Japan’s defender against attacks by other giant monsters or alien invaders. Here’s he’s definitely the antagonist of the movie and the film starts with a scene inspired by a real life disaster (where a Japanese fishing boat strayed into an American testing zone for nuclear bombs and the crew were irradiated) but with the light and heat of the ‘as yet unseen’ Gojira boiling the water around a full crewed ship and sinking it... pretty much killing everyone.

After a couple more downed ships and a subplot involving an ancient Gojira legend, with some folks living on an island who are attacked in the night by the titular creature, it is up to my favourite actor Takashi Shimura, as palaeontologist Dr. Kyohei Yamane, to advise the military of just what to do as Gojira, a supposedly Jurassic era beast reawakened by H-Bomb testing, starts tearing down Tokyo and generally having a ‘gorilla-whale’ of a time. He is aided by the three who make up the love triangle of other main protagonists of the film... his daughter Emiko, played by Momoko Kôchi (who would return to this role in the 1980s in her last film appearance), her new almost-boyfriend Hideto, played by Akira Takarada and her fiance, the self sacrificing Dr. Serizawa who, played by Akihiko Hirata, invents the ‘oxygen destroyer’ that kills Gojira and which would make an appearance in some of the later films in the other two waves (heck, the oxygen destroyer was still being used as a narrative device in last year’s big  budget US production, Godzilla - King Of The Monsters, which I reviewed here).

The film starts strongly with the footsteps and roars of the creature playing over the long opening titles, even obscuring Akira Ifikube’s tremendous score as the opening plays out and then into the terrifying nautical scene described above. There’s some great stuff where Dr. Yamane finds a trilobite in the radioactive footprint of Gojira and some nice details such as how, just like the corona virus, the appearance of The Big G also affects the local economy when the fishermen find their nets empty as all the fish in the area have been eaten or scared off by this behemoth.

The film is quite grimly told with no punches pulled. Gojira’s ‘heat breath’, here depicted as steam when, as in later incarnations, the fins on his back light up, is saved until almost an hour into the 96 minute film but the grimness comes not from his rampages, which are few in number... but from little details such as the radioactive poisoning of all the kids in a hospital. Or the moment where we see a mother sitting by a soon to be destroyed building, clutching her three infant girls to her and telling them they will be joining their, presumably very dead, daddy where he is very soon now.

And the tone holds. Yes, there are some silly bits too, like when Serizawa reveals the horrors of his ‘oxygen destroyer’ and Emiko asks him what would happen if his discovery is used for some awful purpose but, mostly it's quite dark. It’s at this point in the proceedings that I have to question what the heck positive, 'non-awful purpose' there could possibly be for a substance that destroys all the oxygen in a body of water, disintegrating all life there. This is a weapon, despite the protests of its troubled creator.

It’s perhaps not always noted but Honda has some nice shot compositions in here too, when he’s not having to deal with ‘man in suit’ destruction of miniatures, such as a wonderful moment when four characters are seen in a multilayered set with a dining room as the middle layer from the camera and another room in the background, all the actors framed with an almost square box made up of multiple verticals and horizontals thrown up by the different depths of the rooms we are looking at. Nice stuff.

For the record, some of the effects work is still quite impressive, with some almost seamless blending between the shots of people fleeing Tokyo stitched together with the same shots as Gojira wrecking the miniature Tokyo above them. Quite spectacular for its time, no doubt and... still holding up very well by today’s standards, as far as I’m concerned.

And, of course, there’s the ‘Japanese John Williams’, composer Akira Ifukube, who worked on several Godzilla scores and whose themes from this series are still being used today (again, check out Bear McCreary’s use of them in last year’s Godzilla - King Of The Monsters release). The score is a mixture of ‘terror cues’ which play like extended stingers and strident, jaunty marches which are full of melody and charm. The film is well ‘spotted’ too, with long passages with no music and some of Ifikube’s memorable melodies being held back until just the right moment to let loose, the main Gojira march re-occurring when the military mobilise, for example. A great score which has been reissued many times over the years.

Courtesy of this new Criterion box, I was also able to revisit this movie in the very first version I would have seen it in, when I was five or six, on early 1970s British TV. This is the famous... or possibly infamous... 1956 recut intended for American audiences. Lots of new footage was shot with Parry Mason actor Raymond Burr (his footage was all shot in six days) playing reporter Steve Martin. Even though a lot of footage is added, the US version still manages to play a quarter of an hour shorter than the original cut and... well it’s not the same film at all. It’s a lot faster and somehow very clumsy while at the same time having some very creative, if often hilarious, ‘solves’ to re-pitch the story in a form the distributors obviously thought would play better in the US.

It starts off quite dramatically with Burr pulling himself out from under a collapsed building, covered in blood, as he begins narrating the story and often integrating with.... the back of other peoples heads who speak the lines before cutting to a face on view of the actor from the original version. The American dubs are often quite hilarious and quite often reminded me of a clumsier version of the movie Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, where the real life comedian Steve Martin (not to be confused with the character of the same name who Burr plays here) is inserted into old film noirs.

And it’s amazing the lengths they go to in order to make Burr look like he belongs in the film. He always seems to be waiting on the sidelines of any particular scene, on replica scenery, with his Japanese friend who can translate for Burr and the audience just what is going on when all the actors are speaking a different language. He even rings up his ‘old mate’ Dr. Serizawa and when we see Serizawa, who wears an eyepatch on his right eye, pick up the phone... it’s obviously another completely different actor in profile, with his eye patch towards the camera in the hopes the audience won’t notice this, perhaps less than blindingly clever, deception.

It’s an interesting version too because scenes are literally deployed in a completely different order, with scenes from towards the end of the picture coming in very early and vice versa. They even split one scene in half and run the second half later as if it’s taking place days or weeks after the first half of the sequence. And even Ifikube’s score is sometimes clumsily redeployed, scoring different scenes to those it was written for.

The result... a different film which, despite the grim and somber expression on Burr’s watching face for most of the movie, never gets close to having the gravitas or impact of the original Japanese cut, which is easily the best version of the movie and the one it should be remembered by. Burr would, of course, reprise his Steve Martin role for a similar bit of recutting tomfoolery on the first of the 1980s Godzilla films when it was released in US theatres.

So, yeah, not much else to say on either of the cuts other than, you can probably, quite happily ignore the American version unless you are curious. If you want to watch Gojira as it should be seen... and that should frankly apply to anyone who is in love with the art of cinema... then the original Japanese cut is the way to go and it’s still a pretty great film.

The Criterion version also has commentaries for both cuts and interviews with some of the key cast and crew, including an almost hour long interview with Ifikube about the music which I haven’t had time to watch yet. The new Showa Era set from Criterion looks beautiful and so do the films in it. This is a very special set and lovers of cinema will want to grab this before it sells out for good. It’s not quite a perfect set but... it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get, I think.

The Lure

Fish N’ Blood

The Lure (aka Córki Dancingu)
Poland 2015 Directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska
Criterion Collection - available in US & UK as appropriate zone.

What if I told you that here is a film which tells the story of two flesh eating mermaid sisters who work with their mother in a strip club? What if I further told you that it’s a musical? And how about if I told you it’s an adaptation of The Little Mermaid, complete with nudity and gory violence?

Honestly, it only took knowing the first of those three propositions to hook me into The Lure. The musical numbers scattered prolifically about this movie are just the icing on the cake. As for The Little Mermaid? Well I don’t know the story and I haven’t seen any of the cinematic iterations of it over the years, except this one. I can’t imagine the Disney version ends the same way as the original story does, however and, it would be true to say that I suspect, in terms of its end game, this one echoes the source material a little closer... although without the end coda of hope and reward that the original story kinda drops into the mix as a spoonful of sugar to make the bitter pill of that original ending go down a little smoother.

However, I was blissfully unaware of the original story when I started watching this so... all the better when the characters here start talking about eating a certain character before one of them turns into sea foam and such forth, I guess. But I’m ahead of myself.

It’s been a while since I was properly looking at Polish cinema, I think. I’ve probably not seen any since the death of one of my favourite directors, Krzysztof Kieslowski, back in 1996. This one could well get me back into it though because it’s a meticulously crafted and beautiful film and I have to stop and give credit here to fellow tweeter and movie/art blogger Alex Kittle for giving me the ‘heads up’ on this one (and you can read her review of this film here).

I knew I was onto a good thing from the opening logo to the picture. It’s obviously a company that’s been put together to make this particular film, I would guess, as the animated logo shows two mermaids swimming in the sky around a long, phallic tower which starts ejaculating fireworks. It was possibly worth the price of the considerably expensive Criterion Collection CD for just this few seconds of imagery but, honestly, this is one of those films that doesn’t stop giving.

The opening credits are equally beautiful with some nice, minimalist animated work depicting the mermaid sister protagonists of the film in some kind of aquatic cave... the skulls and skeletons of their dead human victims piled up around their natural environment or bobbing on the surface of the water.

We then have a strange prologue which I didn’t quite understand, where the two sisters swim to the bank of a canal and, as I originally thought, ate two men. However, these men seem to be the same two characters who dominate the male cast in the movie and this scene definitely wasn’t a flashback. Since they just disappear through a jump cut to the mermaid’s mum screaming, I can only assume that they definitely didn’t get eaten after all and that this is why the two sisters end up in the strip club with their mother and the two men in the next sequence... which shows a singer belting out an old, I think, Bronski Beat (?) song. While this music continues, the manager is trying to track down a fishy smell and, as he goes through the different rooms in his strip club while the guests are being entertained, the various people such as the cook and the waiters are all in beat with the rhythm of the music. This was my first inkling that this really was going to turn into a ‘hard musical’ at some point soon. The manager tracks the smell down to the two mermaids in their mother’s dressing room and his main bouncer (played by Andrzej Konopka) shows the mermaids off to him. They are stripped down and they have no body hair at all and, it has to be said, rather curious looking vaginal lips (it might be the way it’s been shot, though). A cup of water is then poured onto their legs and their fish tails grow into place, with their real vaginas half way down their incredibly long and beautiful fish tails.

The two mermaids are called Silver (played truly joyfully by an amazing young actress called Marta Mazurek) and Gold (played truly sinisterly by another amazingly talented actress called Michalina Olszanska) and they are instantly given jobs as singers/strippers working with their mum. It’s to the credit of writer Robert Bolesto and director Agnieszka Smoczynska that they don’t try to explain the existence of mermaids and that all the characters who encounter them in the film in no way question that they must, in fact, be mermaids. This would only take time and get in the way of what is, after all, an adult fairytale with a simplistic purity to it. That being said, they are not the only ‘unusual creatures’ in the movie and there is a hint of a background world to the phenomena which is nicely done here without dominating the story. When the manager tells the others to take the girls out shopping for clothes, the film then goes full on into musical territory with a song and dance number set in a big clothes store and, by this point, I was completely hooked on the thing.

Now I’m not going to detail the rest of the story because I don’t want to spoil anything for you but I will say that the film doesn’t drag and I never once got bored with it. The style of the camerawork is pretty cool and almost shouldn't work, one might think. After all, various sequences are put together with smooth, slowish moving camera work with different angles being shot at different speeds of movement and edited together but, I have to tell you, the editor somehow gets away with it here and nothing detracts from the flow of the way you perceive the movie. It’s quite amazing.

The film is also very colourful with some wonderful combinations and also, occasionally, a logical colour coding system to some of the sequences. For instance, when one of the girls start singing in isolation with lyrics which are only for the ears of the people watching the film and not anyone actually in the scene, like a kind of musical narrative to the innermost thoughts of those characters, the lighting kind of suddenly takes on a turquoise shade, reflective of the sea, and everyone else but the character singing is frozen in time... which happens more than once.

There are also some lovely moments made by the director utilising the verticals of the environment as a big design feature in some of the shots. Sometimes she uses them like many directors have done historically, to highlight certain characters in their own delineated space and, at other times, she uses them to conceal things in the frame... such as when two layers of tiled wall are placed parallel to each other in front of the camera and the front plane is only revealed by a character walking out of view behind it... it’s cool stuff here.

Another nice touch is that the girls talk to each other telepathically. We get to hear what they are saying to each other through the subtitles but that’s obviously how it works on the original, non-subtitled Polish prints too because all that is heard on the soundtrack when the girls secretly communicate with each other is a kind of high pitched whale sound... and it works really effectively and is not out of place in a rather cute and fun, mostly light hearted film... albeit one that hides a dark and violent heart, as seen in various scenes as men become the bloody victims of one of the sisters. This is, after all, something of a comedy too and that’s more than amply demonstrated when the two sisters, in their fish forms, are being photographed naked but for stockings and suspenders awkwardly fitted over their fish tails. It’s a nice throwaway touch but it made me crack a smile, for sure.

And it’s a really great film which will stay in my mind for a long time. If I had any complaints it comes not from the film itself but from the translation. Song lyrics and rhyming poems are not the easiest thing to translate at the best of times, especially if you elect to keep the lines rhyming. So it would be true to say that the translations on the subtitles in some of the musical sections are... well, they’re a little but of a push with lyrics translated like...

“As fatal as hara-kiri,
My emotions make me silly.”

I couldn’t help but think of that old Simon & Garfunkel lyric from Kathy’s Song in this respect with their “words that tear and strain to rhyme”. However, credit to the translators for giving this a good go and, like I said, the films is very much a comedy piece too so the ridiculous lyrics here and there only add to the fun of the film.

And that’s me done on this one. The Criterion Collection release of The Lure is a sure fire tip to the hat on the quality of this production and readers based, like I, in Zone B needn’t worry about its availability. If you don’t yet have a multi-zone Blu Ray player then you’ll be fine because Criterion have also released this on their new Criterion UK label. Admittedly, it’s expensive and currently retailing at £18 here but, if you know the label then you know that you will be getting the absolute best transfer with some marvellous extras and that’s just what you get here. I haven’t watched those yet but included in the package are two short movie by Agnieszka Smoczynska so, yeah, this film is a bargain at this price. Especially when it’s such a great movie. If you are a fan of cinema in any capacity then you’ll want to give this one a look, I would think. I’m really pleased that this film dropped into my life and, as you can guess, it’s a definite recommendation from me.

On The Road (Zatôichi kenka-tabi)

Ichi Keen

On The Road (Zatôichi kenka-tabi)
Japan 1963 Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Daiei/Criterion Blu Ray Zone A 
 
So I’ve been inadvertently neglecting my Zatoichi watching and reviewing of late. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of that with this, the fifth of the 26 Zatoichi films starring Shintarô Katsu as the blind swordsman (not including his 100+ episodes of the TV show) and the first of the films to be directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda.

The film opens, pre-credits, with Zatoichi rumbling a gambling con. He slices a candle down the middle, extinguishing the light so he can get the upper hand, and deals with the whole roomful of gambling antagonists stating, in a shout out to the subtitle of a much later Zatoichi film in the series, that “Darkness is my ally.” As he finishes with his enemies, the title of the movie comes up and composer extraordinaire Akira Ifikube’s four note Zatoichi theme swells on the soundtrack. As the music and credits play out, we then follow Zatoichi’s progress 'on the road' as he encounters a fellow traveller and stops at the Edo period equivalent of a roadside diner with him to eat as the opening titles finish.

The traveller is on a mission to take Zatoichi to his boss so that said boss can negotiate for Zatoichi to join his side in a stand off against another boss in his town. Alas, it’s not long before this man becomes a casualty as three swordsmen kill him trying to take out Zatoichi. The blind man learns from the widowed wife of one of the men he has just despatched that they were just hired on the spot to get rid of Zatoichi. She seeks vengeance on Zatoichi but is obviously in no position to do anything about it... at least not right now.

We then stumble into another unrelated, at this point, subplot where our hero finds a dying man in a forest. A group of samurai are looking for a lady called Omitsu and have mortally wounded him as he was protecting her. The dying man begs Zatoichi to see Omitsu safely to Edo, just before he passes away. Zatoichi stumbles into her and, eluding the chasing samurai, takes her under his protection.

Like pretty much all of the Zatoichi films starring Katsu in the title role, as far as I can remember, Zatoichi always talks to himself, rendering his inner dialogue as an external monologue. Voice overs are rarely used in the Zatoichi movies, to let you know what he is thinking... Katsu always does it himself, in shot. This always has the trick of making him a much more likeable, easier to identify with character from the audience’s point of view, I suspect. Having these things rendered as such on the surface makes him seem less devious and more friendly... at least that’s how I always interpret these many instances of talking to himself that the character exhibits in the Katsu versions and he’s enough of a great actor to pull this stuff off without the audience, as far as I know, ever once questioning it. Works for me, anyway.

That being said, I think I spotted a rare, slight mistake in this one because, after Zatoichi has killed two of the pursuing samurai, he reaches around for Omitsu’s hand to lead her out of harm’s way. Since she is holding her hands up near her head, one wonders how Zatoichi would know to reach up there rather than drop his hand to where her hand would normally be expected to be. Now one could, of course, argue that the deductive radar system he has set up in his head from having his sight taken from him and which allows him to avoid or block the killing blows of his self-styled enemies could, in fact, easily tell just where someone’s hand is when they are at rest. I don’t know though... I think this is a bit of a stretch and a rare slip in the actor’s concentration which just got by the director at the time. Frankly, who can blame him or begrudge him that. Katsu does such a great job of playing a blind man over the decades that I think you have to cut him a little slack in the odd moment like that.

After this, of course, the two different sub plots become linked and Zatoichi is left to fight both sides of the big fight with one of the bosses, as they both try to gain the girl, who they believe is of some value, to use for either a reward or as a bargaining chip to buy the services of Zatoichi. It all gets integrated with various other plots threads dropped down in the early stages of the film and, of course, the widow of the samurai Zatoichi was forced to dispatch also plays a hand in the unfolding drama.

It’s a nice enough story with big flashes of action and Zatoichi taking out a heck of a lot of opponents towards the end... the majority of both warring factions. However, it’s not as flashy or overt in its cinematography as some of the more visually spectacular episodes in the film series and although there are some nice touches like a dragonfly taking off of a plant and then landing again (in reverse footage), bookending the flash of Zatoichi’s sword as he effortlessly takes out one or two of his enemies... the majority of the direction and camerawork is pedestrian. It doesn’t detract from the pacing and intrigue in any way... although I have to say that the actual through line on the story does seem a little fragmented and jumpy in certain stretches of the film. Almost like there were supposed to be more connecting scenes which never made it into the movie.

That being said, I did notice the occasional interesting shot at certain points. There's a cool shot on a transition where the camera is looking up and around the tops of the trees, almost as if searching for a sense of focus of the shot before meandering down to Zatoichi and Omitsu and then cutting to a tighter frame of them. That’s a pretty wild way of doing an establishing shot and I wonder what the reasoning behind shooting this one like that was. Another interesting visual flourish I noticed or, visual method at any rate, is that a fair few of the external location shots are taken from very low down, like the camera is in a ditch or a specially dug hole, to mask the bottom of frame with the landscape while the action plays out in top fifth sliver of the screen. It’s kinda interesting but it didn’t particularly, to my mind at least, gel with any of the other camerawork used in the movie, which seemed less special or focussed to a particular artistic expression than those sequences I just described.

At the end of the day, though, this is still a solid Zatoichi film and the director went on to helm a fair few more as the series progressed. The performances, as you would expect from this, are all pretty much faultless and Ifikube’s music, one of many scores he did for this series of films, while not particularly inventive or striking as some of the other composers who worked on these, is pretty reliable and packed full of emotion. On The Road is a pretty watchable entry in a truly magnificent series of movies about the blind swordsman. As I’ve noted before, the Criterion Blu Ray/DVD combination box set is the way to go when watching these films. If you haven’t seen these classics of Japanese cinema before, then... it’s definitely worth a purchase.

The Tale OF Zatoichi Continues (Zoku Zatôichi Monogatari)

Ichi keen!

The Tale Of Zatoichi Continues 
(Zoku Zatôichi Monogatari)
1962 Japan
Directed by Kazuo Mori
Daiei/Criterion Collection 
DVD Region 1/BluRay Region A 

I mentioned in my review of the first film in this series that, at the end, Zatoichi leaves his cane sword behind in the town in which he reluctantly killed his samurai friend as a kind of atonement... but the studio presumably hadn’t counted on the success of that first movie because, within that same year, this sequel was already released into the world. Therefore, that last little bit is not referred to again in this story and, right from the outset Zatoichi has a, presumably, new cane sword to defend himself with (a fact I seem to remember may get contradicted later in the series... but I’ll let you know when I get there).

This story is, in some ways, a continuation of the first but, really, only in terms of details such as locations and recurring characters. The first half of the film is set in a different town and this movie really is the first to set up the idea that Zatoichi is a wandering masseur. In The Tale Of Zatoichi (reviewed here...) he did indulge his new samurai friend in this but, in this movie, he is clearly taking money for his services... and that part of his established character is now a constant throughout the series, as much as his blindness, his gambling hustles and his expert swordsmanship.

The atmosphere is slightly different from the start in that the soundtrack is not composed by Akira Ifikube, like the first and a fair number of the others in the series are, but by Ichirô Saitô, who also contributed to later films, plus some of the Sleepy Eyes Of Death series (many of which are also reviewed on this site). It’s a different vibe but I think I almost prefer it over the Ifikube and I’m glad both composers got to do work on this franchise.

The film has less to do than the first one in terms of the set up of the character and gets on with the story. Also, in this regard, in terms of having more action sequences placed at key points through the narrative and building towards a final, “all against one showdown”, for the end part of the film... or in this case, not quite the end. I’ll get to that a little later, though.

Curiously, the style used by the previous director, of keeping the camera close to the actors and following them around, is eschewed in favour of more master shots from a distance. There is still camera movement but this is obviously slower as the shots can, for the most part, take in wider parts of the environment the characters are cohabiting. This also, and I’d never thought about this properly before I rewatched this in comparison with the first movie, gives the film a more voyeuristic feel... you are watching the action from a distance and judging it, rather than being in the thick of it and reacting with the characters on screen. That’s kind of an interesting trick to use to change the pacing of a movie and the way it is perceived, I suspect. So in this film, the dynamics of the shot are created purely by the movements of the actors and the way they fill the space in the general composition of the shots... as opposed to the somewhat visceral but different approach of the first.

Another thing is that the compositions are not all based on verticals as the first one was. The film begins with Zatoichi being a ”blind” witness to something a gang doesn’t want generally known. As the gang try to kill him, they learn that he is going to the location of the first film, to pay his respects to the samurai he killed one year earlier. They team up with the boss who has survived Zatoichi’s intervention in the last movie and, by the time Zatoichi gets to the previous films location, in the second half of what is actually quite a short movie... that’s when we start to see some of the vertical style compositions revisited. These are often used to show the separation of attitudes or classes of characters split within the same physical frame... which is a good way to do it.

There are some really cool shot designs and elements of beauty like this found throughout the film. Such as a beach fight where the incoming tide gently laps at Zatoichi’s feet as he takes on a series of opponents... most of whom run when they figure out our hero’s prowess with a sword. And the vertical jutting objects motif is played out in the final big battle where all of the characters are dwarfed by the foreground details and seem almost like ants against this forced perspective. Very nice.

There’s also some great little moments where the writers build on Zatoichi’s character traits as the series starts progressing. For example, a man who sneaks up on Zatoichi to kill him has his thunder stolen when Zatoichi asks him the time... just as he is about to strike a death blow. Realising his blind opponent knows exactly where he is and could kill him in a snap, the man backs down and engages in conversation instead. This not only shows Zatoichi’s abilities well but also his compassion... he could have just cut the man down where he was standing but, instead, fashioned an excuse for the man so his would-be killer would not lose face and not have to engage him.

There’s also a brilliant piece of what people these days would call stunt casting. The plot also involves an outlaw on the run from the authorities who also wants to kill Zatoichi for some, at first, unspecified reason. He is embroiled in Zatoichi’s past somehow and the two were once rivals for the love of Zatoichi’s life. I thought the guy looked very familiar when he came on and the role turns out to be played by Tomisaburô Wakayama (credited in the film under the pseudonym of Jo Kenzaburo). You may remember him more for the role he perfected 10 years later, as the infamous Ogami Itto, the lead protagonist in the Lone Wolf And Cub (aka Baby Cart) films. In a twist moment in this movie (don’t read further than this if you don’t want to know) he plays Zatoichi’s long embittered brother... which is not so much of a stretch as it happens because, in real life, he really was Shintarô Katsu’s brother and, when you see him this young and with his hair significantly different, the resemblance between the two of them is much easier to see.

Wakayama’s character, Nagisa no Yoshiro, actually wounds Zatoichi quite badly during the end sequences of the film... one of the few times this happens this badly to the main character of this series (although there is a quite spectacular Django tribute in one of the later films, if memory serves me correctly... I’ll get to it when I rewatch). The battle between Zatoichi and various opponents near the end sees the start of the “overwhelming odds” battles that mark both this and the Baby Cart series of films. Zatoichi’s body count in this final battle is around 15 on-screen kills, which is quite modest for him... but this is where this kind of battle spectacle really starts in this series of films, I think.

The end of the film is abrupt and leaves a few loose ends. After he finds his romantic interest from the first film is going to be getting married to someone we are on edge, wondering what will happen to the two of them. Will they get together? The question is never answered because the next battle scene gives us a very abrupt ending which finishes just before the battle properly starts. A very angry Zatoichi, for reasons I won’t reveal here, is surrounded by a bunch of men including the boss who he didn’t kill in the first movie. However, he has made up his mind now that this man must die. He lunges ostentatiously at the opponent, he might have sliced him or he may not but, knowing Zatoichi like we now do, it’s pretty much inevitable that every other man in this confrontation is going to lose their life. It is, however, a confrontation we never see...

The film abruptly cuts there, leaving the battle to play out in our imagination... not to mention leaving a few loose ends too. It’s both a powerful ending and a let down at the same time. We really want to see Zatoichi in action again but, honestly, the fury we imagine for ourselves is surely greater than anything the director could have captured on celluloid here. As I watched it, I was reminded of a movie I’d recently seen at the cinema... a little thing called The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here). If you remember the ending of that movie, you’ll realise that this is exactly the same tactic that the director of that one has employed as we have here in this one. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, we see Spidey throw the first punch (well, metaphorically) at the Rhino, the credits roll and we play out in our minds the rest of the battle. We know Spider-Man’s going to win... it’s moot. It’s purely used to give a dramatic punchline to the film and I suspect the ending of The Tale Of Zatoichi Continues involved a similar creative decision. Whatever.  For the Zatoichi movie at least... it kinda works.

This would be Zatoichi’s last black and white film... his popularity pushing him into colour stock from his third feature. As always with the Zatoichi movies, or most of them, this one is a definite recommend but I would add the caveat that you should probably check out the first movie before sitting down with this one... since this particular entry in the series is very closely linked to it and makes references to the first which you would want to know about when you are watching. Another great Zatoichi film and, once again, Criterion’s new blu ray transfer is the absolute best way to watch this other than seeing an actual print in a good cinema. Another good entry in the chanbara genre, I think.

The Tale Of Zatoichi (Zatôichi monogatari)

Blind, Sealed & Delivered

The Tale Of Zatoichi 

(Zatôichi monogatari)

1962 Japan

Directed by Kenji Misumi

Daiei/Criterion Collection 

DVD Region 1/BluRay Region A

I’ve loved the Zatoichi movies ever since I became aware of the character on the cinematic release of Takashi Kitano’s modern update back in 2003. I bought the, by then very cheap, UK releases of a few of the original movies in a sale at HMV and, after having watched those and realising why the UK versions were so cheap (you just wouldn’t believe the prints and transfers on the old Artsmagic DVDs at the time) I then proceeded to upgrade, and also buy the remaining films, on the two US labels who were issuing them around then... Home Vision Entertainment (a kind of sister label to Criterion, from what I can understand) and Animeigo (who also released the first, and sadly only the first, season of the Zatoichi TV show).

The one bone of contention was the film Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage. 

It had never been issued in either the USA or the UK, although many people thought it had been released a couple of times over here in England. This assumption is quite understandable, given the fact that a film “called” Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage was indeed released and, I believe, re-released in the UK. However... and this is bad enough on the first release but totally inexcusable on the reissue... the film being released as that title in the UK was actually Zatoichi At Large with an incorrect title on the packaging and subtitles. How they managed to screw it up quite so badly is anyone’s guess. Go figure!

So, up until now, the only way of getting a decent print of Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage was by getting it from Japan. Which I promptly did at the time but, yeah you guessed it, there are no English subtitles on that edition. Normally this wouldn’t be too much of a pain with a Zatoichi movie, because they do get quite formulaic from film to film and you can usually figure out what’s going on in them without necessarily needing to know what’s coming out of the various actors’ mouths. However, when I tried this approach with Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage, I found that the film deviated from formula enough that I really wasn’t getting all of it... so that has been a thorn in my side for a while.

And now, the always reliable Criterion Collection has come to the rescue with a big and beautifully packaged boxed set including all 26 of the original Zatoichi movies in a combination DVD/Blu Ray set and, despite the high price for this item, it was well worth it for me to finally lay this ghost to rest. So I’m going to be re-watching the entire series and reviewing them on here starting from... now.

Zatoichi was a minor character referred to in a story by Kan Shimozawa and developed for Daiei studios with Shintarô Katsu in the lead role. This may have partially been due to the success of a film made the year before and also starring Shintarô Katsu, where he played the main lead and antagonist in The Blind Menace (reviewed here). If you’ve seen this, you’ll know the character he plays in that one is a much more sinister and selfish character than the Zatoichi character he developed over the decades... but the fact that he was studying and picking up the body language of a blind man probably helped him quite a bit when he started building on that for his Zatoichi role, no doubt. 

This first film is absolutely brilliant in terms of both the beauty of the shot design and the pacing of the story. It’s quite short in the action department, compared to the bloodbaths you would start getting fairly soon in the series, but it’s at no point a boring film and it’s a great introduction to the character. 

We are first introduced to him over a strange, posterised credits sequence, which might have worked well if this film had been shot in colour but which is fairly questionable in terms of a mono movie. Here we see Zatoichi doing his usual comic shenanigans of what a blind man traversing narrow bridges etc. would get up to in as hilarious a manner as possible... almost clumsy, in a way. This, of course, undercuts and contrasts with the expert sword skills and hypersensitised senses that we learn the character possesses through the course of the movie. It’s always a nice contrast and Katsu plays with this comic contradiction at various points all the way through the film series... he got it down to a fine art fairly quickly, in fact. 

We next go into what would be a typical Zatoichi scene as the series progressed... that of a blind man conning a gambling den out of their money, playing dice. In this first one, which establishes very quickly the cunning of the character, we see him set up the other players by making them think they’re taking advantage of his blindness. When he turns the tables after the stakes have grown, they are put in a position where any accusations of him cheating, which he technically isn’t, would admit their own complicity in trying to cheat him. So this is a nice introduction to the character and helps establish that, while he tends to act the fool a lot, he really is quite a shrewd person.

We also see his tender side as he tries to help various people and develops a friendly, mutual respect and admiration with a samurai dying of consumption, who he will have to fight at the movie’s end. The samurai doesn’t want to die of an illness so, when he forces Zatoichi to kill him at the denouement, we know that he has died exactly as he wanted to... although our hero is clearly upset with the way events have turned out. Upset to the point where he leaves his famous, hidden “cane sword” with a boy at the end of the movie. Actually, this is a sure sign that Daiei didn’t have any idea just how successful this film would be, since he would have to take up the sword cane once again for the next film in the series. There’s even one movie which has a story built around the tensile strength of the cane sword, if I’m remembering correctly... but that’s for another review.

The direction is strange on this one, but beautiful. For instance, the shot design is all built around verticals, which is a natural given the Japanese architectural style of the period in which this was set, I would guess. But, even so, the director uses this to frame both people and objects and, also, uses it to express shifts in perspective within a shot. He even, at one point, has the protagonist stop to monologue in the only gap visible to the camera in a line of bamboo poles. This is great stuff. 

The curious thing about the mise-en-scene though, to my mind, is the way in which the camera seems to follow everybody around in medium shot. The Tale Of Zatoichi is shot in a full width, 2.35:1, or close to that, aspect ratio but, rather than pull the camera back and take in the full extent of the action in slower moving or static shots, the director decides to follow the various characters around. I was scratching my head while I was watching this, trying to figure out why, and all I can come up with is that the extra movement in the shot adds a kind of dynamism which then offsets the need for full on action sequences, until we get to those properly at the end of the movie. It’s not that distracting, just strange when you notice it first. It’s as valid a way as any, of course... so good for him.

The musical score by the master composer Akira Ifikube, of Godzilla fame (he even invented the famous roar) is not a masterpiece but it’s engaging and does have a few, sit up and listen, stingers at certain points. He’s not my favourite composer for this particular series but he did develop a kind of leitmotif for the main character which he came back to time and time again on the Zatoichi films he scored. Definitely stuff to listen out for if you’ve only heard his kaiju eiga compositions.

And there you have it... a fascinating and strong, scene setting first entry in a very long running series of chanbara, released the following year after Kurosawa’s Yojimbo... and possibly riding in the wake of that one, to some extent. Daiei had a hit on their hands and Shintarô Katsu was destined to become... probably the most popular actor in Japan. Criterion’s new Blu-Ray print is sharper and much better looking than I was expecting this film could look. If you can afford it and you have a player which can handle either Region 1 DVDs or Region A Blu Rays, I would definitely recommend this beautiful set and certainly recommend this brilliant movie. I’ve been following this character’s exploits for over a decade now... don’t miss out on these epic films.

Sanshiro Sugata (The Films of Akira Kurosawa #1)

Sugata De Blanc

Sanshiro Sugata

Japan 1943

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Criterion Eclipse Region 1

About a decade or more ago I went, with a friend, to a one day seminar on my favourite director Akira Kurosawa in London, followed by a special screening of his chanbara The Hidden Fortress. The day was held at the National Film Theatre and it was filled with presentations by various experts and fans of his work such as his main biographer and friend Donald Richie. Another director I admire somewhat, Mr. Alex Cox, showed us all a packet of postcards issued by the Japanese post office on the occasion of Kurosawa's death, each reprinting the original poster art for each of the 30 feature films that Kurosawa had directed (I would really love to get my hands on a set of these if anyone has any leads on where to get them).

Of these photographs, Mr. Cox invited the audience to discuss and vote whether each of the films could be considered a “masterpiece” and, after much lively discussion from the audience as to what the actual definition of the term masterpiece could usefully mean, the exercise began. It was Mr. Cox’ idea, I believe, to prove (and he really didn’t have to since we already knew the answer in regards to Kurosawa) that the measure of a film-maker’s success, influence and general richness as an artist could perhaps be measured, for fun, by the percentage of his work that could be considered to be masterpiece works. As the exercise continued using debate and shows of hands, the audience agreed that at least two thirds of Kurosawa’s output could be considered to be the great and influential works that prove him to be an artist of exceptional worth.

I relate this story by way of explaining to the reader a) what a daunting and challenging task it is to write my first review of a director's work when he's a director who I personally hold in such high regard and b) to say, having seen all but three of this director’s films to date (but don’t worry, they’re all in the pile to watch), that although the seminar day was fun, I’d have to disagree with the final verdict of Alex Cox’s presentation. For me, you see, Kurosawa is the perfect director and I believe his films are so riveting and full of absolute artistic genius (and integrity) that they are all masterpieces and couldn’t fail to be anything else. Each time one watches a Kurosawa film it’s like taking in a mini course on film making by osmosis... it’s that good.

So here, then, I present my review of Kurosawa’s first ever feature film as a credited director and, therefore, my review of the first of his many “masterpieces”...

Kurosawa worked his way through the Toho Film Studio’s apprentice system and after working on loads of movies as script editor, script writer, second unit director etc, he had become someone to be reckoned with and, for the first film he picked to actually direct himself, Kurosawa asked the studio to buy the rights to a novel he liked called Sanshiro Sugata, a period piece which tells the story of the competition and rivalry between the Martial Art of Jujitsu and the “new” form of self defence, Judo.

Sanshiro is a reckless youth played by Susumu Fujita, a regular Kurosawa actor who would later be supplanted by the “explosion of acting” that was Toshiro Mifune (a nice visual metaphor for “out with the old and in with the new” can be found in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo where Susuma Fujita plays the former bodyguard of one of the warring clans who does a runner and waves cheekily to Mifune as he makes his exit from the films of Kurosawa... at least as a major player). The character of Sanshiro is played pretty much as an “adult child” who wanders the slow path to enlightenment as he learns the spiritual and practical skills of Judo... although he’s still pretty much a wide eyed innocent at the end of the movie.

Loads of the classic Kurosawa signatures are already in place in this, his first feature. Those moving wipes that George Lucas favoured in his Star Wars films (which I suspect Kurosawa probably inherited from his love of US movies anyway... the Flash Gordon serials are full of those wipes) are already present, as is the really groundbreaking stuff like cutting a shot on motion... which was thought not to be the done thing and was, frankly, considered a mark of bad filmmaking for a long time in the western world... until film editor (and later director) Peter Hunt used the same techniques to add excitement and prove to Westerners that it is a valid technique all over again when he edited the first of his Bond films, Dr. No.

The film starts off brilliantly by leading, after a deliberate lull to show the inferiority of the jujitsu men that Sanshiro has initially come to study with, to a fight scene where the older sensei of the Judo school is harassed by the jujitsu guys and forced to despatch them all. Sanshiro joins up with him by replacing the man’s rickshaw driver, who has run off. He casts off his clogs to be able to run better and already, less than ten minutes into the film maybe, Kurosawa gives you a long visual metaphor of the casting off of his former life by fixating on one of these clogs as time marches on and you see it go, in a series of transition shots depicting the abandoned footwear while it passes from season to season, down a street in various states of distress until it is last seen floating away in the river in which the Judo master dispatched his opponents.

Fantastic stuff! And this is Kurosawa’s directorial debut? What style!

There are lots of visual and audio “surrogates” used in the film, such as Sanshiro throwing himself into a dangerously dirty sump for a number of hours/days after his chastisement (for his fondness of brawling) until he has an epiphany, of sorts, in the form of an appreciation of a flower (a thing of beauty surviving in the ugliness) growing at the side of the sump and sees himself, presumably, as this growing flower.

Another good tool Kurosawa uses is a children’s made up song about Sanshiro being a force to be reckoned with, which is chanted as they go about their play in a couple of scenes and is here used as short-hand by Kurosawa to get the message across to the audience that Sanshiro has moved on a little more over the course of the months/years.

There’s loads of dynamic moving camerawork... a lot more motion than you’d probably expect from someone who was labelled by his own people as being more of a Western director than an Eastern director, after his international success with Rashomon... although this was pretty much rivalry, jealousy and xenophobia on behalf of the Japanese for having to tolerate that Westerner’s could understand Kurosawa's films. And why is that? Because he’s using the international language of good cinema and strong semiotics which can be understood worldwide... that’s why. Even though, it has to be said, Kurosawa was an acknowledged admirer of the films of John Ford.

Also heavy in the mix on this debut movie is Kurosawa’s sheer genius of having establishing shots and, I guess you could call them “establishing moments” sneak up on you before you are aware of them on screen on a conscious level. Check out the young samurai’s introduction on Seven Samurai for an excellent introduction to this “technique by stealth” as the character is masked into shot with a load of other people before his appearance is slowly highlighted by the way in which the extras are aligned with the key players in those scenes. It’s almost like Kurosawa has found a direct line to the collective audience subconscious and uses it to throw elements of importance at you to begin their work before you’ve even consciously registered what they are... Steven Moffet uses the same approach with his “scary moments” in his writing for Doctor Who.

And this also, of course, is where Sergio Leone and the traditions of Italian spaghetti westerns truly begin... yes, I know Leone’s directorial debut was a remake of a Kurosawa film which didn’t originally get made until some 18 years after this one, but hold on a second and I’ll explain my theory...

This is where the Kurosawa action sequence starts and, hopefully most people will agree with me when I say that the majority of Kurosawa action pieces do not rely on great, strung together pieces of action. They may seem dynamic in speed and, in the case of epics like Kagemusha and Ran, scale... but they are actually more about pauses and machismo and the way in which the action is actually highlighted in intensity between the slow pacing and build up between each little segment of an action piece. And this is what Sergio Leone went on to do with his own action cinema when he started out with his Yojimbo remake A Fistful of Dollars. It’s all extreme close ups of the eyes and music and twitching facial muscles with Leone and, in the case of Kurosawa’s approach, though not overtly as stylised, it’s very much the exact same thing. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it unless proven otherwise. The final fight in a field of wheat in the extreme wind, for example, is all about the atmosphere created by the weather and that long, tall, rippling wheat in contrast to the martial arts skills being used. It is the atmosphere of action and the intensity of the feeling of action that Kurosawa seems more interested in... and not the actual details of the action itself, it seems to me. I believe without these early demonstrations of this kind of film-making, you would never have gotten to the Leone style which was taken up as a template for all Spaghetti Westerns after his first one... or at least, the Spaghetti Western would have evolved in another direction. So yes, I am saying that Kurosawa was accidentally responsible for creating a genre of Italian cinema which he had nothing to do with... just as he himself was influenced by the Westerns of such luminaries as John Ford and his ilk in his early career.

I first saw Sanshiro Sugata at the cinema in a retrospective of his work of which the aforementioned seminar was a part of and then, later on, went on to buy the awful Region 3 Poker industries release of this movie... which was muddy and had subtitles written by somebody who did not seem to be able to speak, or at least successfully write, the English language to such an extent that it was almost impossible to follow the story with the words which were being, almost randomly, thrown up on screen. This new Criterion edition is a definite improvement on all predecessors but I am annoyed that Criterion chose to release this movie as part of their “bare bones” Eclipse series as I would have loved to have seen the accompanying documentary episode of the TV show Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful To Create which accompanies the regular Criterion editions of Kurosawa’s movies. Perhaps one day.

Still... no contest. The Criterion Eclipse boxed set of The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (which includes his first four movies) is definitely the best way of seeing this movie so far, next to seeing the thing projected properly at a cinema.

All of Kurosawa’s movies are a definite recommendation from me... this is the first one... it won’t be the last.

The Criterion genie out of the bottle...

The Thief of Bagdad 1940 UK/US

Produced by Alexander Korda

Criterion Edition DVD Spine No. 431

Region 1

Alexander Korda’s troubled 1940 production of The Thief of Bagdad is one of those timeless movies that you never get tired of revisiting over the years and is very much a father of the full-colour special effects movie. Many of those old effects movies had effects which, if not easy, were fairly run of the mill for black and white movies but this remake of The Thief of Bagdad developed processes to do the kinds of effects needed in colour for the first time and so this will always be an important film.

It’s also brilliant in almost every other way you can want too... shot design, colours, music, acting and screenplay are all first class. Actually, the way the action flows may well be endemic to the awful problems of struggling to get the picture completed (Korda had to go to America in the end when he ran out of money on the project... fortunately, the US realised just how brilliant the footage he already had in the can was). There is an economy to the scenes which may well be due to the limitations of the process. For instance, instead of showing the two lead characters escaping from a dungeon cell, the characters say what they are going to do and then in the next sequence they are already out and on a boat. Directors should maybe take this kind of approach more these days.

This brilliant Criterion Region 1 release has everything you would expect from a Criterion edition... a great print, a flawless transfer and a whole load of extras - a Michael Powell propaganda film made while The Thief of Bagdad was on hiatus, a documentary about the special effects featuring such luminaries as Ray Harryhausen, a radio interview with composer Miklos Rosza and one of the commentary tracks is by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese... plus a few other nice extras.

All in all, the best possible DVD release so far of this classic movie. A must buy!