Imprint

[cdnchris]

Oh man, perfect gift for my parents.

[Aunt Peg]

December Titles

The Killer Elite (1975) – Imprint Collection #192

The Eagle Has Landed (1976) – Imprint Collection #193

Burn! (Queimada!) (1969) – Imprint Collection #194

Fear Is the Key (1972) – Imprint Collection #195

Pork Chop Hill (1959) – Imprint Collection #196

A Rage to Live (1965) – Imprint Collection #197

[domino harvey]

the Eagle Has Landed (John Sturges 1976) Loose riff on Went the Day Well? that benefits from the audacity of having all of its above the title cast playing Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, as Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland (with the world's least convincing Irish accent), and Michael Caine conspire to kidnap and/or assassinate Winston Churchill on the eve of the war's end. The film flows freely and makes good use of its leisurely running time to bounce between its characters, though the nature of the narrative means Duvall gets mostly left to the wayside as the film progresses. Though the better-known performers are a treat to watch, it is Larry Hagman who steals the film as a desk-jockey colonel so eager to see battle that he foolishly engages the enemy and shows just how inexperienced he is. It's a performance and a role that straddles the comedic and the tragic in unsure balance, and the same is true of the film. There aren't really any heroes or villains (even the Nazis are "good" Nazis, if you can buy it), and as a result one can't be sure who will or will not make it through to the end. That level of narrative uncertainty coupled with the breezy construction is more than enough to grant this entertaining lark a recommendation.

Shout put this out on Blu already though, so may not be worth the hefty import fee

[Maltic]

December Titles

The Killer Elite (1975) – Imprint Collection #192

The Eagle Has Landed (1976) – Imprint Collection #193

Burn! (Queimada!) (1969) – Imprint Collection #194

Fear Is the Key (1972) – Imprint Collection #195

Pork Chop Hill (1959) – Imprint Collection #196

A Rage to Live (1965) – Imprint Collection #197

More dad cinema, and perhaps a piece of grandma cinema (not that there's anything wrong with that).

[ryannichols7]

well there goes Burn! showing up, all these years after a rumored Criterion release (and it's been confirmed they have it too). wonder what kind of transfer this will be?

[videozor]

If anybody here owns Directed by Jim Sheridan, could you please comment on whether the discs have reversible covers, thank you!

[swo17]

These appear to have sold out since Ribs posted a stock update last month:

The World of Suzie Wong
The Scarlet Hour
Essential Film Noir 3
The Beast
The Music of Chance
Directed by Jim Sheridan
The Long Ships
A Night to Remember
The Nelson Affair
Julius Caesar
Bloody Sunday
After Dark: Neo-Noir Cinema #1
Man on a Swing
The Brotherhood
The Counterfeit Traitor
Cutter's Way
The Osterman Weekend
Marooned
Johnny Got His Gun
Kitten with a Whip
Let's Scare Jessica to Death

[jazzo]

If anybody here owns Directed by Jim Sheridan, could you please comment on whether the discs have reversible covers, thank you!

I do, and they aren't reversible. Each interior is a still from its respective film.

[videozor]

If anybody here owns Directed by Jim Sheridan, could you please comment on whether the discs have reversible covers, thank you!

I do, and they aren't reversible. Each interior is a still from its respective film.

Appreciate your response, thank you!

[swo17]

Music of Chance discussion moved here

[Beloved Aunt]

Imprint released this film some time ago, but here are my complaints about John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust. I've done my best to make this a pleasant reading experience, which I hope it is, as I have almost nothing good to say about this preposterous film !:

This film is so flipping terrible, you expect bugs to start crawling out of the screen while you're watching it. Waldo Salt's screenplay is a joke, taking Nathanael West's....distinguished....novel and turning it into....into what, exactly? For whom is he betraying West's vision? Intellectuals, middlebrow awards bait, the mass audience--I honestly don't know how this film could please a soul, but to a degree, it seems to have made out alright with all three groups. The material is made boring, rhythmless, obvious, toothless, laughable, and more than anything, pathetic. This is not even a dull respectable Hollywood (Hollyweird, amirite?) adaptation on the order of Cabaret or Deliverance or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but something a lot worse, absurd rather than objectionable, but totally terrible anyway. It really does feel like neither director nor writer had any remotely clear or compelling idea of what they wanted to do in making this film, what the ideas and justifications were behind their decisions and changes, etc. The changes and additions Salt and Schlesinger make, like having their camera, trained on some forsaken plebians sitting and staring on a sidewalk bench, reveal one less miserable pleb with each passing car (which is totally inane and not even physically possible), or references to Nazis and Hitler, or an especially gross, and abysmally staged, sequence with Geraldine Page as a fake preacher, not only coarsen and miss the point of whatever material on West's book that relates to them, but generally seem to have no discernible or worthwhile point to contribute or coherent logic on which to operate of their own. It just seems like they were trying to make a really dumbed-down nasty American Dream nightmare movie and obvious and cheap, cheeeeeaaap satire to cash in with the disillusioned Watergate audience that had shelled out big bucks for the tacky, sleazy, ridiculous film travesty of The Great Gatsby the year before. It's seedy business, this Day of the Locust For (and By, and About) Idiots.

The acting is, with the exceptions of William Atherton as Tod (too perky as well as too pretty for his role, but still crisp and intelligent), Burgess Meredith's Harry Greener (especially brilliant), and Billy Barty as the dwarf Abe Kusich (finely controlled), completely ridiculous down to the bit players. Strangely and kind of hilariously, poor Karen Black seems to often take total blame (and a Golden Globe too!) for this project's failure, as if the entire film wasn't decomposing all around her, but she is so bad here that I was genuinely worried, 40 years later, for her mental health. Sometimes she looks like a crazed prisoner, casting her eyes around the various sets to determine which would be best to sprint towards, quickly climb over, and make her escape. Lacking is any sense of control or psychological continuity--she's so all over the place it's a little appalling, to the point where often the torment of her character seems to actually blend with her, Karen Black's, inexplicable torment about....something. Honestly she's so off the rails it's kind of upsetting, as well as greatly puzzling as to any possible cause of her bizarre behavior. However, unlike other KB perfs I've seen that I would call "bad", where she is just disengaged, I saw her emanate a lot of raw histrionic material and effort that with some actual, you know, modulation and smart ideas from the director, could well be made into quite a compelling Faye Greener. Donald Sutherland and Jackie Earle Haley, on the other hand, seem quite uninhibitedly happy to oblige their tasteless director with two of the most soulless, graceless, stupid performances I've ever seen from any well-established actor, old or young. They bring no intelligent life or any kind of good creative energy to their characters--as the transvestite movie brat Adore Loomis, Haley just flails his limbs around and makes cacophonous noises, while Sutherland playing Homer Simpson struck me as a talentless non-entity (not all the time, just in this film) clumsily trying to play a talentless non-entity, which sure doesn't work! Sutherland gives an inane, loitering, weird, sweaty, ineffably objectionable and stinky performance that makes an indulgent hole in the movie's already almost unrelievedly stupid canvas. He seems to strain incompetently after mysterious understated histrionic effects like a man trying to thread a needle with a brick. Homer is a tiresome, insufferable idiot of a character, and Sutherland certainly makes an idiot of himself. Another example: I remember a particularly atmospheric early scene, where some Hollywood muck-a-muck, i assume a casting director, is picking people out of a group, and as he points to his choices, says, "You, you, YOU, YOU!", with a crescendo, in a very inappropriately loud, stupid, dorky voice, and is also IIRC excessively greasy--a Schlesinger "house" performance. It really does seem like the makers of this film actually went out of their way to make it as dumb and ridiculous as possible! Schlesinger spends practically his whole career having a tantrum about American, well, everything, and making facile and cheap fun of American tastelessness, and he also makes this film the way he does, with this screenplay! Haha, it's so absurd! He wasted too much of his life doing that, instead of building on his true strength, which is a powerful and even penetrating feeling for everyday human relationships--a quality which may actually be present, in one or two tiny, tiny moments, even in this dire film.

If Conrad L. Hall's cinematography was a woman's makeup, it would have been applied during an earthquake, with mascara on her forehead and lipstick all over her face. It's all gauzy and slimy, with bungled, clownish, sloppy framing and hapless, puzzling lighting effects, instead of the venomously precise, controlled, tight and unlyrical, but beautiful in their own right and highly evocative, visuals that would best match West's prose style--a perhaps harder and drier version of a Hitchcock shot in one of his color films (minus his camera slanting and tilting) is maybe the closest equivalent to West's literary mise-en-scene I can think of--or maybe one of Bunuel's last films. Seriously, it's the most ridiculous camerawork I've ever seen in my life! 2nd place: Douglas Slocombe's wretched work on the Clayton The Great Gatsby from the year before. The sets were designed by one of the greatest production designers in film, Richard Macdonald, and the staging is so shitty you can't even tell.

[Ribs]

It’s really a bummer they couldn’t do any extras at all for the Road Home - it was kind of totally ignored when the Yimou set launched but that every movie had 30m-1hr+ of excellent Tony Rayns context was seriously impressive. Was kind of hoping that a matching feature would appear on the eventual release here but it’s just bare bones - still happy to have it, of course.

[bugsy_pal]

Imprint released this film some time ago, but here are my complaints about John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust. I've done my best to make this a pleasant reading experience, which I hope it is, as I have almost nothing good to say about this preposterous film !:

This film is so flipping terrible, you expect bugs to start crawling out of the screen while you're watching it. Waldo Salt's screenplay is a joke, taking Nathanael West's....distinguished....novel and turning it into....into what, exactly? For whom is he betraying West's vision? Intellectuals, middlebrow awards bait, the mass audience--I honestly don't know how this film could please a soul, but to a degree, it seems to have made out alright with all three groups. The material is made boring, rhythmless, obvious, toothless, laughable, and more than anything, pathetic. This is not even a dull respectable Hollywood (Hollyweird, amirite?) adaptation on the order of Cabaret or Deliverance or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but something a lot worse, absurd rather than objectionable, but totally terrible anyway. It really does feel like neither director nor writer had any remotely clear or compelling idea of what they wanted to do in making this film, what the ideas and justifications were behind their decisions and changes, etc. The changes and additions Salt and Schlesinger make, like having their camera, trained on some forsaken plebians sitting and staring on a sidewalk bench, reveal one less miserable pleb with each passing car (which is totally inane and not even physically possible), or references to Nazis and Hitler, or an especially gross, and abysmally staged, sequence with Geraldine Page as a fake preacher, not only coarsen and miss the point of whatever material on West's book that relates to them, but generally seem to have no discernible or worthwhile point to contribute or coherent logic on which to operate of their own. It just seems like they were trying to make a really dumbed-down nasty American Dream nightmare movie and obvious and cheap, cheeeeeaaap satire to cash in with the disillusioned Watergate audience that had shelled out big bucks for the tacky, sleazy, ridiculous film travesty of The Great Gatsby the year before. It's seedy business, this Day of the Locust For (and By, and About) Idiots.

The acting is, with the exceptions of William Atherton as Tod (too perky as well as too pretty for his role, but still crisp and intelligent), Burgess Meredith's Harry Greener (especially brilliant), and Billy Barty as the dwarf Abe Kusich (finely controlled), completely ridiculous down to the bit players. Strangely and kind of hilariously, poor Karen Black seems to often take total blame (and a Golden Globe too!) for this project's failure, as if the entire film wasn't decomposing all around her, but she is so bad here that I was genuinely worried, 40 years later, for her mental health. Sometimes she looks like a crazed prisoner, casting her eyes around the various sets to determine which would be best to sprint towards, quickly climb over, and make her escape. Lacking is any sense of control or psychological continuity--she's so all over the place it's a little appalling, to the point where often the torment of her character seems to actually blend with her, Karen Black's, inexplicable torment about....something. Honestly she's so off the rails it's kind of upsetting, as well as greatly puzzling as to any possible cause of her bizarre behavior. However, unlike other KB perfs I've seen that I would call "bad", where she is just disengaged, I saw her emanate a lot of raw histrionic material and effort that with some actual, you know, modulation and smart ideas from the director, could well be made into quite a compelling Faye Greener. Donald Sutherland and Jackie Earle Haley, on the other hand, seem quite uninhibitedly happy to oblige their tasteless director with two of the most soulless, graceless, stupid performances I've ever seen from any well-established actor, old or young. They bring no intelligent life or any kind of good creative energy to their characters--as the transvestite movie brat Adore Loomis, Haley just flails his limbs around and makes cacophonous noises, while Sutherland playing Homer Simpson struck me as a talentless non-entity (not all the time, just in this film) clumsily trying to play a talentless non-entity, which sure doesn't work! Sutherland gives an inane, loitering, weird, sweaty, ineffably objectionable and stinky performance that makes an indulgent hole in the movie's already almost unrelievedly stupid canvas. He seems to strain incompetently after mysterious understated histrionic effects like a man trying to thread a needle with a brick. Homer is a tiresome, insufferable idiot of a character, and Sutherland certainly makes an idiot of himself. Another example: I remember a particularly atmospheric early scene, where some Hollywood muck-a-muck, i assume a casting director, is picking people out of a group, and as he points to his choices, says, "You, you, YOU, YOU!", with a crescendo, in a very inappropriately loud, stupid, dorky voice, and is also IIRC excessively greasy--a Schlesinger "house" performance. It really does seem like the makers of this film actually went out of their way to make it as dumb and ridiculous as possible! Schlesinger spends practically his whole career having a tantrum about American, well, everything, and making facile and cheap fun of American tastelessness, and he also makes this film the way he does, with this screenplay! Haha, it's so absurd! He wasted too much of his life doing that, instead of building on his true strength, which is a powerful and even penetrating feeling for everyday human relationships--a quality which may actually be present, in one or two tiny, tiny moments, even in this dire film.

If Conrad L. Hall's cinematography was a woman's makeup, it would have been applied during an earthquake, with mascara on her forehead and lipstick all over her face. It's all gauzy and slimy, with bungled, clownish, sloppy framing and hapless, puzzling lighting effects, instead of the venomously precise, controlled, tight and unlyrical, but beautiful in their own right and highly evocative, visuals that would best match West's prose style--a perhaps harder and drier version of a Hitchcock shot in one of his color films (minus his camera slanting and tilting) is maybe the closest equivalent to West's literary mise-en-scene I can think of--or maybe one of Bunuel's last films. Seriously, it's the most ridiculous camerawork I've ever seen in my life! 2nd place: Douglas Slocombe's wretched work on the Clayton The Great Gatsby from the year before. The sets were designed by one of the greatest production designers in film, Richard Macdonald, and the staging is so shitty you can't even tell.

Bravo - I enjoyed this review, and can't dispute any of it. In tone, it reminded me of a colourful review in the book "Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices", where one J. Karl Bogartte reviewed a book called "English and American Surrealist Poetry" published by Penguin in 1978:

"This is the most ridiculous anthology ever produced by anyone, anywhere, on any subject. It is so saturated with stupidity and falsification that its sole purpose seems to have been to serve as a platform on which editor Germain could castrate himself in print, and then - with his Introduction - kill himself.
...
The book is a hodgepodge of puny exercises by false poets who would themselves, in almost every case, admit that they are openly hostile to surrealism and its revolutionary aims. Old-line reactionaries such as John Crowe Ransom are featured with up-to-the minute opportunist scum such as Ted Berrigan. The best-represented "poet" in the book is the prize-winning idiot Robert Bly - with his own insipid mulings and some translations of the Stalinist thug Neruda...
...
The book, in short, is a disgusting fraud. If I ever run into the sniveling intellectual pimp who calls himself Edward B. Germain, it will give me great pleasure to kick his face."

(I do not condone violence - but I love Looney Tunes)

[L.A.]

Dersu Uzala @ Beaver

[black&huge]

I really want to own Dersu Uzala but I need to ask questions that have undoubtedly been asked/some confirmation about what I've read is true but...

1. The original materials if they still exist are in poor shape so could another label perform a restoration looking a bit better than this release or is this the best it can ;ook for at least a while? under these conditions the presentation does not look so bad to me

2. Is there actually or has there been a restoration going on for this? what is Imprint using?

[CSM126]

MosFilm started a restoration of Dersu Uzala years ago, though I have no idea of this is it.

[ryannichols7]

it's been confirmed by Criterion a few times (I think by Lee Kline and Peter Becker both) that Criterion was working with Mosfilm on a new restoration of the film. of course, it was already a long/painstaking process due to the elements not being stellar but then Russia has that little thing going on which has pushed back any progress on it. I'm personally going to pick it up, because who knows how long it'll take before we see a Criterion, and both Galbraith/our own Brooke would be reason enough for me to pick it up. I don't know if Criterion would port over those extras (they should!) so I think I can justify owning it for that reason

I think it looks fine for an "as is" product, better than what's on YouTube (Mosfilm put up the film free to stream) and assumedly the Criterion Channel. but that's the gamble with Imprint, you import their edition with an "as is" transfer and then another label in the US or UK announce a new edition with a 4K restoration.

MosFilm started a restoration of Dersu Uzala years ago, though I have no idea of this is it.

i doubt it, the version on Mosfilm's YouTube channel certainly isn't restored, and they have no problem uploading their new restorations (they did for War and Peace and Come and See before those two hit disc)

[swo17]

More recent releases now sold out:

Harem
Blue Chips
Secret of the Incas
On the Beach
Nobody's Fool

[Beloved Aunt]

Bravo - I enjoyed this review, and can't dispute any of it. In tone, it reminded me of a colourful review in the book "Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices", where one J. Karl Bogartte reviewed a book called "English and American Surrealist Poetry" published by Penguin in 1978:

Hmmm. I'm glad you like my review! but, on reflection after reading your excerpt of the other review, I think one of us needs to get our vitriol-ometer checked out, and I'm not at all sure which one of us that is. It wasn;t written in anger, I swear! Or mebbe I'm just simultaneously very precise about my tastes and completely lacking in self-awareness, like my hero Pauline Kael !

[dwk]

Imprint has announced they are releasing The War of the Worlds on UHD. But in the picture they posted it appears the UHD is the Paramount disc.

[swo17]

In celebration of our two-year anniversary, we are revisiting Imprint Collection #1 in our first 4K & Blu-ray SteelBook™, housed in a 3D lenticular hardcase and a special 44 page collector's booklet.

H.G. Wells' chilling novel of a Martian invasion of Earth becomes even more frightening in this 1953 film adaptation that's widely regarded as one of the greatest Sci-Fi movies of all time.

2000 COPIES ONLY.

AUD$104.95

Special Features and Technical Specs:

Disc One – 4K UHD

• Dolby Vision and HDR10
• Remastered DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
• Commentary by Actors Ann Robinson and Gene Barry
• Commentary by Film Director Joe Dante, Film Historian Bob Burns, and Bill Warren, author of Keep Watching The Skies!
• The Sky Is Falling: Making The War of the Worlds
• H.G. Wells: The Father of Science Fiction
• The Mercury Theatre On The Air presents The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Optional English Subtitles

Disc 2 – Blu-ray

• 4K restoration from the original camera negative
• Audio commentary by film critics Barry Forshaw & Kim Newman
• Remastered Dolby 5.1 surround remix
• Audio commentary by actor Gene Barry and actress Ann Robinson
• Audio commentary by "fans" Joe Dante, Bob Burns and Bill Warren
• Original English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
• "The Sky is Falling: Making War of the Worlds" documentary
• "H.G. Wells: The Father of Science Fiction" featurette
• "The Mercury Theater on the Air Presents: The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast" (with stills of Orson Welles)
• Theatrical trailer
• Optional English Subtitles

[Ribs]

Imprint are releasing a standard edition reissue of the Warriors - I believe one of their first since their first releases coming on two year ago! I’m curious as I think their model clearly changed to “buy it or you’ll miss it forever” if we might see things like the individual Yimous pop up or if this is a speciAl case for one of their definite biggest titles.

[Aunt Peg]

Watched Testament last night and it looked fine. It was never a great visual looking film to begin with and no doubt has not been restored.

Needles to say the film still packs a powerful emotional punch without a hint of manipulation (I've seen it numerous times over the decades). Jane Alexander's performance remains agonisingly real, down to the bone and raw. I do rank Testament up there with The War Game (1966) & Threads (1984) even though Lynne Littman's treatment is that of the typical of a family drama.

Far superior to The Day After (1983), which despite its shortcomings remains an important film of the apocalypse genre.

[bugsy_pal]

I watched 'Save the Tiger' on the weekend. It's another one that looks a bit rough, but probably was never too flash to begin with. Perhaps it's the best we'll get. Still a worthwhile purchase for me, as I love the film.

Jack Lemmon is brilliant, and I'd forgotten how good Jack Gilford is too. The extras are well worth watching.

[Aunt Peg]

I watched Pretty Baby the other night and the film has never looked so great. Beautiful 4K restoration by Paramount - just WOW. The interview with Brooke Shields is great.