Severin Films – Morbid Pleasures: A Compendium of Grand Guignol & the Grand Guignolesque

[domino harvey]

Severin has been teasing a 60+ film box set of Grand Guginol-related movies, from the silent era through modern times. I imagine this is where that Maurice Tourneur title Ann Harding teased is showing up

[Calvin]

Severin has been teasing a 60+ film box set of Grand Guginol-related movies, from the silent era through modern times. I imagine this is where that Maurice Tourneur title Ann Harding teased is showing up

and also Jean Gremillon's The Lighthouse Keepers!

[therewillbeblus]

Jean Gremillon's The Lighthouse Keepers!

Wow, what a get - I've watched The Lighthouse Keepers twice this year and it's mesmerizing even with shoddy quality. Can't wait to see it restored!

[domino harvey]

Wow, now that’s a box set!

[swo17]

Jean Gremillon's The Lighthouse Keepers!

Wow, what a get - I've watched The Lighthouse Keepers twice this year and it's mesmerizing even with shoddy quality. Can't wait to see it restored!

Since it's presented as a bonus film, should we lower our expectations?

[domino harvey]

Am I missing the release date?

EDIT NM late December

[domino harvey]

Here’s my write ups of the films on the Hossein disc (though I think their connection to this theme is rather tenuous)

La menace (Gerard Oury 1961) A half decade before actor turned director Oury would make the highest grossing French film of all time, he was associated by some with the New Wave, and a film like this, his second as director, shows why. Rebellious teen Marie-Jose Nat tries to impress some local “wastrels” by implicating Robert Hossein’s chemist in the murder of a young girl, a crime she did not witness as she claims. While the story is the creaky stuff of pulp fiction, there are elements here that complicate what we think of when we designate a film nouvelle vague or not. This was, unsurprisingly, panned across the board by Cahiers, but on paper there’s little to distinguish it from many of the markers one uses to discuss the movement: We have a story of young people of the moment, we have movie references (the moped punks love Cocteau and there’s a Bresson poster prominently displayed, plus an amusing A bout de soufle riff), we have location shooting, we have a jazzy score, we even have a dynamically shot sequence in which Nat stands in full knight's armor with a rose in her mouth as the gang encircle her on their bikes in an attempt to pry the flower from her lips… but we also have stars who are associated with mainstream cinema, a director who used to be one of them, and a rather dubious view of the youth culture it depicts. Still, there’s something here for future study, because this Is a hard film to write off as not belonging to the movement, even with its flaws. To some degree, those films which solidified into the canon and even the appendages of more obscure outputs are the result of gatekeeping. Obviously a guy who starred in mainstream films and cast mainstream actors couldn’t be trusted by some, but looking at it with enough distance and without the biases of the era, I’m not so sure I can advocate writing it off and sweeping it out of the movement so lightly… Is anything here really as tone deaf and mainstream as Cahiers' own beloved Rendez-vous de juillet, for instance? [P]

Le Vampire de Düsseldorf (Robert Hossein 1965) A meek day laborer spends his nights in pre-war Germany pining after a cabaret singer and murdering women who look like her. Hossein’s direction is fine if unremarkable, but he is woefully miscast as the killer. Hossein is one of the great on-screen pricks, and you don’t put him in a movie like this and have him act vaguely autistic instead of lashing out violently with the full-force of his capacity for assholedom. On one hand I admired the film’s initial restraint at eliding the violent crimes themselves, but eventually this too goes away. I also found it entirely unlikely and more than a little self-serving to have the cabaret singer actually fall for Hossein's character. A couple scenes of Nazis tormenting Communists while ignoring Hossein on the street are, I’m sure, Totally Deep.

[therewillbeblus]

Should we expect Orbit et al. to get this, or at least DeepDiscount; or is it a website exclusive?

[swo17]

I'd expect it to be as widely available as the All the Haunts Be Ours sets

[therewillbeblus]

Jean Gremillon's The Lighthouse Keepers!

Wow, what a get - I've watched The Lighthouse Keepers twice this year and it's mesmerizing even with shoddy quality. Can't wait to see it restored!

Since it's presented as a bonus film, should we lower our expectations?

Well its lack of clean visuals is part of the charm, so I don't expect a substantial upgrade, but I also doubt it'll be presented in the state you can currently find it in

[senseabove]

This may be the first time I've ever been disincentivized by an LE disc exclusive?

[soundchaser]

I can't believe I'm going to drop $250 for the one Grémillon, but here we are. No idea what merits its inclusion in this particular set, but then I haven't seen most (if any) of the other films on offer.