All Rise...

Buñuel, Godard, Bresson...all in one set? Judge Dan Mancini's brain hurts.

Editor's Note

Our reviews of Army Of Shadows (published May 15th, 2007), Army Of Shadows (Blu-Ray) Criterion Collection (published January 11th, 2011), Au Hasard Balthazar: Criterion Collection (published June 14th, 2005), Billy Liar: Criterion Collection (published August 22nd, 2001), Mafioso: Criterion Collection (published March 18th, 2008), Rififi: Criterion Collection (published May 15th, 2001), The Third Man: Criterion Collection (published May 22nd, 2007), The Third Man (Blu-Ray) (published September 14th, 2010), The Third Man: Criterion Collection (Blu-Ray) (published December 16th, 2008), and Two Films By Jacques Becker: Criterion Collection (published February 21st, 2005) are also available.

The Charge

Ten years. Ten films. Ten discs.

Opening Statement

In 1997, New York's Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein decided that if he wanted something done right he would have to do it himself. He was disgusted by his difficulty in getting decent subtitled prints of classic foreign films for the Forum's programs. In response, he launched Rialto Pictures, a company on a mission to restore and exhibit important films that otherwise might succumb to the ravages of time or disappear into the black hole of careless licensing and distribution.

Over the past decade, Rialto has been responsible for rescuing major classics ranging from Godard's Contempt to Mike Nichols' The Graduate. Rialto handled its first first-run picture with 2002's Murderous Maids by Jean-Pierre Denis. The company was also responsible for the first ever American exhibition of the original Japanese cut of Godzilla in celebration of the film's 50th anniversary in 2004.

Home theater fans will know Rialto less for their work in the art house and festival circuits than for their partnership with The Criterion Collection. Rialto is the source of many of Criterion's top releases, including The Battle of Algiers, Bob Le Flambeur, Grand Illusion, and Umberto D.

Facts of the Case

Ten Years of Rialto Pictures is a ten-disc set containing 10 films previously released by The Criterion Collection or its one-time parent label, Home Vision Entertainment. It's an interesting collection of titles, eschewing obvious choices like Juliet of the Spirits or Grand Illusion in favor of a fine blend of heavyweight classics, nearly forgotten films, and one recent production (Murderous Maids).

Here's what you'll find:

Army of Shadows
It's fitting (though serendipitous—the movies are organized alphabetically) that Ten Years of Rialto Pictures kicks off with this 1969 movie about the French Resistance by Jean-Pierre Melville: Army of Shadows was ignored in America until Rialto rescued it from obscurity in 2006. Set in Vichy France in late 1942, the film traces the episodic adventures of Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura, Les Misérables), a leader in the Resistance. As the film opens he's been captured by the Gestapo and thrown in a camp where he rubs elbows with a potpourri of men of different nationalities and anti-fascist political ideologies. After his escape, Gerbier and his comrades—Félix , Le Bison, Le Masque, Jean François (Jean-Pierre Cassell, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), and Mathilde (Simone Signoret, Ship of Fools)—undertake a series of covert operations meant to undermine the Nazis, including the execution of an informant, working with British allies to help supply French freedom fighters, and a daring rescue attempt after Félix is captured by the Gestapo.

Like most of Melville's films, Army of Shadows favors meticulous scripting and carefully nurtured suspense over explosive action. The influence of Alfred Hitchcock is readily apparent. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect Army of Shadows is one of the most accurate depictions of the French Resistance ever committed to film. Instead of grubby French fighters who smoke cigarettes, sport berets, and ponder existential philosophy, Gerbier and his team look boring—middle-aged and middle class. We're told at the beginning of the movie that Gerbier was a civil engineer prior to the Nazi occupation. This background is important because it establishes Gerbier as a man who knows his city intimately, knows how to organize men and projects, and who can make the leap into military engineering with relative ease. Indeed, Gerbier is a common (albeit bright and successful) man who works covertly to coordinate efforts against the Nazis, rather than openly fighting them. That Melville makes the movie absolutely compelling across its entire 145-minute running time is a tribute to his directorial greatness. Gerbier's adventures are about the organization of fine operational and logistical details. Through the explication of these minutiae, we're introduced to the sorts of sharp and resilient minds needed to defeat an enemy as fearsome as the Third Reich. Gerbier and his like aren't men whose heroism is defined by a single death-defying feat, but by a relentless series of small acts that are significant only because of their cumulative effect over the duration of the occupation.

Au Hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson's emotionally gripping 1966 film traces the life and death of a donkey. As the film begins a donkey colt is christened "Balthazar" by a young girl, Marie, and her friend Jacques. For years Balthazar is showered with love and kindness by Marie, who is the daughter of a former school teacher trying to make it as a farmer. Eventually, the family is crushed financially by unjust accusations and gossip about Marie's father. Balthazar is sold and falls into the hands of Gerard, a petty criminal who treats the donkey cruelly. Gerard also pursues Marie (now a teenager) romantically. Despite Gerard's pleasure in humiliating her, she gives in to him, though Jacques still loves her. As Balthazar ages and begins to break down physically from his years of burden, Marie falls into a downward spiral of sexual degradation.

Like all Bresson films, Au Hasard Balthazar's narrative is delicate and elliptical, but dense with meaning. He tosses us into a world of closely-observed detail and forces us to construct a kind of resonant emotional meaning from what we see—a meaning more poetic and expansive than in a typical story designed to be parsed intellectually. A devout Catholic, Bresson favored characters who seek (and often fail to find) spiritual transcendence in a cruel and unforgiving world. In Au Hasard Balthazar, Marie and her father doom themselves with stubborn pride. The father's inability to reconcile with a business partner who wronged him destroys his reputation and ruins him financially. Marie denies herself Jacques' love by deciding, against his protests, that she isn't worthy of him. Again and again, Bresson's human characters brush up against one another, soul to soul, yet find it impossible to shelter one another from life's cruelties. In the midst of this maelstrom of human relationships is the donkey Balthazar. Tranquil and patient, he suffers greatly but accepts life's hardships as a servant devoted to his masters, cruel or kind. Though void of personality, his presence in the film is so powerful that it doesn't seem a stretch in the least when Bresson has one of his human characters describe the long-suffering animal as a saint.

Band of Outsiders
A loose and Franco-fied adaptation of Dolores Hitchens' crime novel, Fool's Gold, Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 classic is about young friends Arthur (Claude Brasseur, Rififi) and Franz (Sami Frey, Cleo from 5 to 7). The boys meet a girl named Odile (Ann Karina, Alphaville) at school. They team with her and fixate on the romantic notion of a robbery, a kind of mini-heist that appeals to the trio's desire to be the sort of dangerous, marginal characters they see in Hollywood crime films. The friends joke, dance, and philosophize. The crime plot is tempered with the requisite romantic tension and a predictable nod to noir fatalism in the form of a finale the viewer dreads but can see coming from a mile away.

A classic of the French New Wave, Band of Outsiders was meticulously restored by Rialto and re-released in art house theaters throughout Europe and America in 2001. As in most of his films, Godard goes out of his way to point out the artifice of film, twisting obvious genre conventions, subverting audience expectations, and having characters break the fourth wall and address the audience. That said, Band of Outsiders isn't as intellectually dense or theoretically rigorous as the director's most difficult work. In many ways it is most similar to his faux musical, A Woman is a Woman—detached and aggressively intellectual, but also precociously playful and easy to digest. It's not the equal of Breathless (with which it has much in common), but it's still one of the most entertaining of Godard's movies.

Billy Liar
A mortician's assistant living with his intrusive parents in drab Yorkshire, Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay, Doctor Zhivago) constructs a Walter Mitty-like fantasy life to fight the monotony—a fantasy life that intrudes into the real world as Billy tells co-workers that his father had to have a leg amputated or spins yarns about his plans to move to London to pursue success. Such is the central concern of director John Schlesinger's 1963 film, Billy Liar. Though tonally lighter, the movie stands alongside Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (also starring Courtenay) as a fine critique of the smothering dead-end lives of Britain's working classes in the late '50s and early '60s, and the youth culture's growing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Billy's non-fantasy adventures include the simultaneous courtship of two women and honest efforts to develop himself as a comedy writer. When an adventurous former girlfriend, Liz (Julie Christie, McCabe & Mrs. Miller), arrives on the scene and a London-based television comedy show expresses interest in Billy's writing, he must decide if he has the courage to stop dreaming and live.

Based on Keith Waterhouse's successful West End play (which was, in turn, based on his own novel), Billy Liar fits most comfortably into the comedy genre, though its laughs are often uneasy. Though common and predictable to the point of cliché, Billy's longing for and fear of adulthood as represented by romantic cohesion, professional success, and independence from his parents is made fresh both by his fantasies (which are whimsical critiques of British postwar capitalism) and by the rich but naturalistic visual design of Schlesinger and cinematographer Denys N. Coop. Shot in black at white and framed at 2.35:1, Billy's hometown is a rich landscape of ornate old churches and cemeteries, local storefronts, cottage houses, and towering, skeletal industrial centers. Coop's fine photography of lived-in locales gives Billy's humorous (yet pathetic) flights of fancy a needed dose of gritty realism.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Absurdity rules the day in Luis Buñuel's story of Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey, The French Connection), the ambassador to France from a South American banana republic called Miranda. Acosta and his gauche French friends—François Thévenot (Paul Frankeur, The Phantom of Liberty), his cheating wife Simone (Delphine Seyrig, Stolen Kisses), and her booze hound sister Florence (Bulle Ogier, Venus Beauty Institute); and Alice Sénéchal (Stéphane Audran, Babette's Feast) and her dapper husband Henri (Jean-Pierre Cassell, La Ceremonie)—live their lives on a seemingly perpetual hunt for a satisfying dinner party. Their efforts are stymied by corpses, ghosts, mixed up dates, interrupting soldiers on maneuvers, tea houses fresh out of tea (and coffee and milk), and zealous cops executing a cocaine bust. Their frequent encounters with people who have seen real suffering and deprivation—a gardener/monsignor whose parents were murdered when he was a child; a soldier who murdered his stepfather at the behest of his mother's restless spirit—fail to shake their complacency, their petty obsessions with the correct way to drink a dry martini or whether it's possible to be served properly salted snails at a restaurant.

As with Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, it's often difficult to tell which parts of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are real and which are dreams. And as in Fellini's film, it doesn't really matter because the truth invades both realms. Buñuel's film is playful, precociously intelligent, and fiercely funny. Poking fun at bourgeois affectations is like shooting fish in a barrel, but Buñuel does it with such gleeful verve that it's a pleasure to watch him work. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a fine distillation of the director's trademark surrealism employed to expose the hypocrisies of polite society as well as figures of political and religious authority. It also provides a clinic in Buñuel's unostentatious visual style, characterized by long takes and copious use of master shots.

Mafioso
Nearly forgotten about until Rialto's rescue of the picture in 2007, Alberto Lattuada's mob comedy has quickly obtained classic status (it's not uncommon now to hear it cited alongside Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather as being among the greatest and most accurate mob movies ever made). In the picture, workaholic Antonio "Nino" Badalementi (Alberto Sordi, I Vitelloni) decides to leave his cosmopolitan life in Milan in order to visit the home of his youth in rustic Sicily. Fish-out-of-water laughs ensue when he takes his pampered and sophisticated wife Marta along for the ride. The plot takes a turn for the ugly when Sicilian crime boss Don Vincenzo's intervention in a land dispute on Nino's behalf leads to Nino having to carry out a mob hit in New York in order to show his gratitude.

Mafioso is funny despite itself, its many laughs grounded in keenly-observed detail rather than broad stereotypes or silly gags. Lattuada's directorial achievement was in crafting a genuinely funny movie despite a tense and realistic storyline. The script is tightly formed and well-written. Most of the laughs come at the expense of Marta, who perpetually offends the sensibilities of her in-laws with her unknowing violations of their rigid and age-old customs. The polished sophisticate among a gaggle of rubes is an old gag, but one that is well-executed in Mafioso. More importantly, it lays the groundwork of familial and village duty that makes us believe Nino would feel compelled to cram himself into a wooden crate and be flown cargo across the Atlantic Ocean to New York in order to fulfill an obligation to a dangerous village bigwig.

Murderous Maids
Forget Christopher Miles' The Maids and Nancy Meckler's Sister My Sister, Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids is the finest telling of the gruesome Papin sister murders ever committed to film (at least among the ones I've seen; the story's been told so many times that I'm sure there are versions I've missed). Set in Le Mans, France in 1933, the movie tells the tale of Christine (Sylvie Testud, Karnaval) and Léa Papin (Julie-Marie Parmentier, Charly), who are hired to keep the house of Madame Lincelan and her teenage daughter. The sisters have a disturbing co-dependent relationship created by years of parental neglect, abandonment, and abuse. Christine is obsessive and controlling. The younger Léa is simple and eager to please. When Christine is castigated by Madame Lincelan, who discovers that the girls' odd relationship has crossed the line into incest, the girls' humiliation fuels a horrific act of violence.

The trial of the Papin sisters was a media circus in France, something akin to the (first) O.J. Simpson trial in the States. The mix of gory brutality (Lincelan and her daughter were savagely beaten to death), class resentment, and lesbian incest were a dream come true for newspapers and gossip mongers. Most film adaptations have either wallowed in the tawdry sexual aspects of the story or interpreted the events through a Marxist critique of the French bourgeoisie (as though the Lincelan women's class made them somehow deserving of their ugly fate). Denis is far more interested in Christine's psychology, specifically the sort of mental illness that may have caused the psychotic break that preceded the murders (the real-life Christine never recovered her wits during her four years of incarceration before her death). For Denis, the Le Mans murders are the result of a complex cocktail of an abusive childhood, mental illness, and class resentment.

Murderous Maids is restrained and elegant. The tension builds slowly and effectively across the movie's brief 93-minute running time, using viewers' knowledge of the killings to produce a smothering fatalism. The murders are shot with enough restraint to allow our imaginations to run wild. The bloody aftermath has a stomach-churning, documentary feel. Denis' assured direction results in a psycho-drama with the chilling punch of a grade-A horror movie.

Rififi
Jules Dassin's 1955 masterpiece is the granddaddy of all heist films. Based on the novel by Auguste le Breton, it tells the tale of Tony le Stéphanois, a jewel thief who falls back into bad habits among a bad crowd when he hits the streets after doing a nickel in prison. At first he refuses to be involved in a heist planned by his buddies Jo and Mario, but changes his mind when he learns his girlfriend Mado has dumped him for a nightclub owner.

Dassin was an American director distinguished for his fine work in noir crime films before the Hollywood blacklists of the of the late '40s and '50s forced him to shuffle off to France in order to save his career. Considering Dassin's American work included excellent crime films like The Naked City, Brute Force, and Thieves' Highway, his relocation was American's loss and France's gain. Rififi ranks easily alongside the director's best American efforts—if not higher. Its heist is one of the greatest set pieces ever committed to film. A masterpiece of direction and editing, it stretches to over 30 white-knuckle minutes without dialogue or music.

The Third Man
Carol Reed's 1949 Orson Welles' vehicle is such an exemplary piece of noir that some continue to insist, all these decades later, that Reed couldn't have directed it, that the only explanation for its taut perfection is that Welles himself was secretly pulling the strings. Count me among those who think Reed was in charge and that, despite his otherwise middling career, he managed to churn out a bona fide masterpiece (these things do happen, after all). In the film, American writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten, Shadow of a Doubt) arrives in postwar Vienna for a visit with his friend Harry Lime (Welles) only to learn that Lime is dead, a victim of an accident…or murder. Martins is surprised to learn that Major Calloway (Trevor Howard, Brief Encounter), the head of security for the British quadrant of the city, is interested in speaking with him because Calloway believes Lime was a racketeer. Putting his investigative skills to work, Martins discovers that there may have been a third man at the scene of Lime's demise. Martins' hunt for the third man will reveal disturbing secrets about his friend.

A fine script by literary great Graham Greene (based on his own story) and crackerjack performances by Cotten, Welles, and Howard ensure The Third Man's classic status. The gorgeous chiaroscuro of Robert Krasker's (El Cid) Oscar-winning cinematography puts the movie on par with any of the noir greats—no small feat considering The Third Man is a British picture. Seen through the lens of Krasker's camera, Vienna becomes an essential part of the movie's texture and charm, an additional character in the story. A third act chase through the city's elaborate underground sewer system is particularly memorable for its visual aplomb.

Touchez pas au Grisbi
Widely credited with setting the cinematic stage for Dassin' Rififi and Melville's Bob le Flambeur, Jacques Becker's 1954 crime picture—a direct imitation of American noir—is a solidly entertaining, tightly constructed thriller in and of itself. The movie is about master criminal Max (Jean Gabin, Grand Illusion) who, after pulling off a heist of almost 100 million francs worth of gold bullion, wants to retire. The problem is, he has to wait for the heat to subside before he can cash in the bullion. In the meantime, he risks double-crosses by his partners and the menacing schemes of enemy gangsters who want in on the action.

Touchez pas au Grisbi marked a return to form for the great French actor Jean Gabin, whose career was fading before the film's release. It's a brilliant little thriller that, unlike Rififi, skips the minutiae of the heist in favor of offering a close study of the relationships between criminals—their psyches' constant war between distrust and dependence. Like countless movie gangsters, Max wants to go legit. The problem is that he requires the help of men he doesn't necessarily trust in order to make the leap out of crime. The paradox is simple but psychologically rich, and Becker plays it for everything it is worth.

The Evidence

Though released in conjunction with the Criterion Collection, Ten Years of Rialto Pictures is not a repackaging of that production house's prior releases. Reflecting Rialto's raison d'etre, it is essentially a film festival in a box. There are no directors' audio commentaries, no video interviews of casts and crews, no scholarly essays. Inside the cardboard slipcover, there are 10 slimline DVD cases with Rialto's re-release posters (usually based on the original release posters) used as cover art. Inside the slimline cases are four page booklets with cast and crew information and brief excerpts from Rialto's original program notes. The discs for Army of Shadows, Band of Outsiders, Mafioso, and Murderous Maids also contain the re-release trailers for their respective pictures. There are no other supplements. This isn't a release about extras; it's about the films themselves.

So far as I can tell, the transfers are identical to those released by the Criterion Collection (in the case of The Third Man, which has been released twice by Criterion, the image matches the quality of the later remastered edition). The transfers vary in overall quality given the disparate ages of the films and the degrees to which they were cared for and preserved over the years but, all things considered, each films looks marvelous. Detail is strong across the board. The black-and-white movies sport delicate contrast and excellent shadow detail. The color films are accurate across the entire spectrum. As you'd expect from a Criterion master, each transfer has a pleasant and appropriate patina of film grain. Digital artifacts are nearly non-existent. Original theatrical aspect ratios are maintained throughout, meaning you'll find everything from full frame, to both European and American flat ratios, to scope. All widescreen presentations are enhanced for 16:9 displays.

The bottom line is that Ten Years of Rialto Pictures is a slim and stylish set perfect for the budget-conscious cinephile. Its contents are an artful and cosmopolitan mix of films by great directors, great movies by journeyman directors, and once-neglected pictures nearly lost to us forever. Taken as a whole, the set's blend of comedy, drama, tragedy, and intrigue, delivered by an artistically potent collection of French, British, American expatriate, and Italian filmmakers (as well as one Spanish/Mexican/French filmmaker) make it a satisfying ride from beginning to end. The crime elements in each picture create a cohesive through-line for the set, making Ten Years of Rialto Pictures a carefully assembled film festival for the home theater.

Closing Statement

Those wanting a clinic on the making of each film in Ten Years of Rialto Pictures will need to take a pass on this box and shell out the big bucks for the individual Criterion releases. Those primarily interested in the films themselves, and willing to forego a heap of supplemental materials, will find the box a great foreign/art house starter set at a bargain basement price. Even at the $150 list price, that works out to only $15 per movie—a steal, considering the incredible quality of the movies inside.

The Verdict

Not guilty.

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