Essential Art House, Vol. 2 [Criterion Collection] [6 Discs]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Janus Films and the Criterion Collection present more selections from the Essential Art House line: indispensable cinema classics in simple, affordable editions. For Volume II, they've selected six of the greatest films from around the world, from directors Franois Truffaut Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Marcel Camus, Anthony Asquith, and Powell & Pressburger. All are available separately, or in one box set. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film-lover, this is precisely where to begin. Films include: La Strada, 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Ikiru, Pygmalion, and The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp.

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 6
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 (Cinemascope)
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Foreign Language Film - 1959 (Marcel Camus)
•     Won Best Foreign Language Film - 1956 (Federico Fellini)
•     Won Best Screenplay - 1938 (W.P. Lipscomb, George Bernard Shaw, Ian Dalrymple, Cecil Lewis)
•     Nominated Best Original Screenplay - 1959 (François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy)
•     Nominated Best Original Screenplay - 1956 (Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli)
•     Nominated Best Actor - 1938 (Leslie Howard)
•     Nominated Best Actress - 1938 (Wendy Hiller)
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1938

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Nominated Best British Film - 1960 (François Truffaut, Marcel Camus)
•     Nominated Best Film - Any Source - 1955 (Federico Fellini)

• Cannes Film Festival

•     Won Best Director - 1959 (François Truffaut)
•     Won Palme d'Or - 1959

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Nominated Best Foreign Film - 1959

• National Board of Review

•     Won Best Acting - 1938 (Wendy Hiller)
•     Nominated Best Foreign Film - 1956
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1945

• New York Film Critics Circle

•     Won Best Foreign Film - 1959
•     Won Best Foreign Film - 1956

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2002

• Venice International Film Festival

•     Won Silver Lion - 1954 (Federico Fellini)
•     Won Volpi Cup for Best Actor - 1938 (Leslie Howard)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Breno Mello - Orpheus
       Anthony Quinn - Zampano
       Anton Walbrook - Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff
       Al Silvani - Mr. Giraffa
       Albert Lieven - Von Ritter
       Jean Cadell - Mrs. Pearce
       David Tree - Freddy Eynsford-Hill
       Ursula Jeans - Frau von Kalteneck
       Iris Hoey - Ysabel
       Phyllis Morris - Pebble
       Arthur Wontner - Embassy Counsellor
       Count Zichy - Col. Borg
       Carl Jaffe - Van Reumann
       Eric Maturin - Col. Goodhead
       A.E. Matthews - President of Tribunal

• Director:

  Marcel Camus, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, Federico Fellini

• Producer:

  Sacha Gordine, François Truffaut, Shojiro Motoki, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Gabriel Pascal, Dino de Laurentiis, Carlo Ponti

• Screenwriter:

  Marcel Camus, Jacques Viot

• Play Author:

  Vinicius de Moraes

• Screenwriter:

  François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Anthony Asquith, Ian Dalrymple, Cecil Lewis, W.P. Lipscomb, George Bernard Shaw

• Play Author:

  George Bernard Shaw

• Screenwriter:

  Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli

• Cinematographer:

  Jean Bourgoin, Henri Decaë, Asakazu Nakai, Georges Périnal, Harry Stradling, Otello Martelli

• Composer (Music Score):

  Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfa, Jean Constantin, Fumio Hayasaka, Allan Gray, Arthur Honegger, Nino Rota

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Franco Ferrara

• Editor:

  Andrée Feix, Marie-Josephe Yoyotte, John Seabourne, David Lean, Leo Cattozzo

• Production Designer:

  Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki, Alfred Junge

• Art Director:

  Bernard Evein, So Matsuyama, Laurence Irving, Brunello Rondi

• Costume Designer:

  Joseph Bato, Prof. Czettell, Worth, Schiaparelli

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Desmond Dew, C.C. Stevens

• Makeup:

  George Blackler, Dorrie Hamilton

• Special Effects:

  W. Percy Day

• First Assistant Director:

  Philippe de Broca, Tom Payne

• Consultant/advisor:

  Lt.Gen. Sir Douglas Browning

• Camera Operator:

  Jack Cardiff, Geoffrey Unsworth

• Production Manager:

  Sydney Streeter

REVIEWS:

• Black Orpheus was something of a phenomenon of its time, an international success with a best-selling soundtrack that was crucial to launching a bossa nova craze in the United States. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and the 1960 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, the novelty of seeing Rio de Janeiro's Carnival played out backed by the strains of seductive Brazilian jazz has worn off, revealing a winningly energetic movie with some noticeable faults. Director Marcel Camus reworks the Orpheus myth for no discernible reason, and while the straightforward transliteration is agreeably unpretentious, he doesn't add much to the story. The Technicolor cinematography is notable for its vivacious use of saturated colors and real-life location shooting in Rio's favelas and mountainous countryside. The choreography of people and color in front of the camera is well executed, but not much is done with the camera itself. There is little movement and the action occasionally feels constrained by the frame. During moments of play, when the characters are flirting, dancing, or playing music, the filmmaking gels into a sensual reverie, but in moments of seriousness the movie feels rather pedestrian, and the actors in particular are drab and unconvincing. However, time has not effected Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa's charming samba score and it's hard to be too disappointed in a movie that begins and ends with the upward lilt of "Samba de Orfeo." ~ Michael Buening, Rovi
• By today's standards, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp seems a brilliantly written and executed character study with period overtones -- "the British Citizen Kane," as one critic described it in recent years. But the 163-minute movie was one of the most controversial productions in England during the war, and the disputes over its content and distribution overshadowed the film's virtues for nearly 40 years. Powell and Pressburger, also known as "The Archers," had already courted controversy in 1941 with their propaganda movie 49th Parallel. Blimp seemed as if it was designed to engender displeasure from the government: Anton Walbrook, who was the leader of the anti-Nazi Germans in 49th Parallel, plays an even more sympathetic expatriate German in this movie; the title character, who represents the epitome of the British officer class of the First World War, is depicted as a well-meaning but doddering old buffoon, incapable of dealing with the Nazi threat; and the hero, Clive Candy (brilliantly played by Roger Livesey), makes his name on a civilian escapade during the Boer War, just as Prime Minister Winston Churchill had. The movie seemed certain to attract official censure, and it did. Powell and Pressburger were denied the use of military equipment or personnel while Blimp was in production, and the government voiced its further strenuous objections to the parties financing the movie. Once it was completed and released, the film was denied an export license to the United States until almost two years after the war, by which time it had been shorn of nearly an hour of material. It took 40 years for the uncut version to reach America in its original Technicolor splendor. After the wait, audiences found a movie that seized upon many of the structural elements found in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, with its back-to-front-to-back narrative path. The Archers took the class satire and social consciousness found in the best work of Noel Coward -- as well as in the original David Low cartoon whence the Colonel Blimp character originated -- and turned those elements into something uniquely theirs, a film very wry and dry in its tweaking of British sensibilities, universal in its observations on life, love and longevity in the middle of a world war. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
• Dedicating the film to his mentor Andre Bazin, 27-year-old critic-turned-director Francois Truffaut put his critical views into practice in his debut feature, The 400 Blows (1959). Unlike the French "Tradition of Quality" literary adaptations that he reviled, Truffaut looked to his own childhood for the source of Antoine Doinel's delinquent exploits in The 400 Blows, evoking Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933). Inspired by the stylistics of favorites like Orson Welles and Jean Renoir, Truffaut's moving camera and long takes, combined with location shooting and natural sound, lent Antoine's tribulations a fresh, fluid immediacy that caught critics' and audiences' attention. His innovative final freeze-frame suspending Antoine in an indeterminate future spawned numerous imitations. The Cannes Film Festival gave The 400 Blows the Best Director prize one year after banning Truffaut for his critical harshness; the New York Film Critics' Circle awarded it Best Foreign Film. Released the same year as Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, The 400 Blows' international success helped put Truffaut at the forefront of the nascent French New Wave. He would continue Antoine Doinel's story in three more features, Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), Love on the Run (1979), and one short, Antoine and Colette (1962). ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
• La Strada is often considered one of the masterpieces of 20th century filmmaking, a sad and poignant remembrance of innocence lost and of the roads that each of us must choose. As with much of the work of director Federico Fellini, man is viewed as suspended between the heavens and the earth, adroitly symbolized here by Il Matto/The Fool (Richard Baseheart), a high-wire circus performer. Fellini's motifs are among the most influential of all post-WWII filmmakers, and you'll find clever Fellini and La Strada references in such unlikely films as John Landis's Blues Brothers 2000. Giulietta Masina's Chaplin-like Gelsomina is among the screen's most poignant and tragic performances, and she, like the entire film, is aided by Nino Rota's evocative score. Fellini had few production values to work with, but here he doesn't need them. La Strada is among the most studied films of late Italian Neo-Realism and a classic of the first rank. ~ Richard Gilliam, Rovi
• One of George Bernard Shaw's most popular and durable plays concerns the stuffy British professor of phonetics who, on a bet, tries to transform a flower girls' speaking style from lower-class Cockney to proper English, with all it implies. Pygmalion was first filmed in Great Britain in 1938 and became an instant classic. Featuring well-pitched performances from Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in the lead roles, this Anthony Asquith film has the exquisite timing and tenor of a sophisticated comedy of manners. Barely concealed beneath the story is a devastating satire of British class pretensions. This material was adapted as the musical My Fair Lady in the 1950s and the film of the same name in 1964. It also inspired numerous imitatations, such as Educating Rita. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi
• This contemporary drama from Akira Kurosawa, better known for such sweeping samurai epics as The Seven Samurai (1954), is arguably his best film and the most articulate vision of his existential philosophy. The film's protagonist seems to spring directly from the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre or Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych: a tragic, pathetic figure who has so immersed himself in daily routine that he never learned to live. Only when confronted with his own imminent demise does he give his live meaning by building a playground over an open sewer in an impoverished section of town. The film is structured in a peculiar bifurcated arrangement: it begins as a straightforward plot that, halfway through, shifts into a fragmented narrative recounted in flashbacks by mourners at Watanabe's funeral. In the second half, we witness Watanabe's dogged struggle through the lenses of his baffled co-workers' own unexamined lives. Initially viewing his efforts with suspicion if not contempt, his workers fail to give Watanabe any credit for his single-handed effort to build the park. This section of Ikiru becomes compelling and ironic thanks to Kurosawa's deft depiction of Watanabe's inner state in the first half. Ikiru opens with an X-ray of Watanabe-a literal manifestation of his interior world. The rest of the section, through a tour-de-force of impressionistic and expressionistic cinematic devices, shows Watanabe's slow awakening from his quarter-century stupor to learn what it is to live. Takeshi Shimura delivers a staggering performance as Watanabe; his large pleading eyes and hangdog face burn a haunting image in the viewer's mind long after the film ends. The emotional force of Ikiru leaves the viewer feeling both transformed by Watanabe's evolution and contemplative about one's own life. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi