The Criterion Collection – February 2010 Releases – Hunger, Lola Montes, Revanche, Make Way for Tomorrow, George Bernard Shaw on Film

November 16, 2009 by J!-ENT

HOWARDS END (DVD edition)
The pinnacle of the decades-long collaboration between director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, Howards End is a thought-provoking, luminous vision of E. M. Forster’s cutting 1910 novel about class divisions in Edwardian England. Emma Thompson won an Academy Award for her dynamic portrayal of Margaret Schlegel, a flighty yet compassionate middle-class intellectual whose friendship with the dying wife (Vanessa Redgrave) of rich capitalist Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) commences an intricately woven tale of money, love, and death that encompasses the country’s highest and lowest social echelons. With a brilliant, layered script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who also won an Oscar) and a roster of gripping performances, Howards End is a work of both great beauty and vivid darkness, and one of cinema’s greatest literary adaptations.

1992 • 142 minutes • Color • Surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

FILM INFO
• Directed by James Ivory (A Room with a View, Maurice, The Remains of the Day)
• Produced by Ismail Merchant (Heat and Dust, The Bostonians, The Europeans)
• Starring Emma Thompson (The Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility, Brideshead Revisited)
• Starring Anthony Hopkins (The Remains of the Day, The Silence of the Lambs, Nixon)
• Starring Vanessa Redgrave (Blow-Up, Julia, Mrs. Dalloway)

SPECIAL EDITION TWO-DISC SET FEATURES
• High-definition digital transfer, supervised by cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts
• New appreciation of the late Ismail Merchant by director James Ivory
• Building “Howards End,” a documentary featuring interviews with Ivory, Merchant, Helena Bonham Carter, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and Academy Award–winning production designer Luciana Arrighi
• The Design of “Howards End,” a detailed look at the costume and production designs for the film, including original sketches
• The Wandering Company (1984), a 50-minute documentary about the history of Merchant Ivory Productions
• Original 1992 behind-the-scenes featurette
• Original theatrical trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Kenneth Turan

TITLE: Howards End (DVD edition)
CAT: CC1881D
UPC: 7-15515-05531-4
ISBN: 978-1-60465-255-0
SRP: $29.95
PREBOOK: 1/26/10
STREET: 2/23/10

HUNGER (BD & DVD)
With Hunger, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners, rather than as ordinary criminals. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.

2008 • 96 minutes • Color • Surround • 2.35:1 aspect ratio

FILM INFO
• Starring Michael Fassbender (300, Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank)
• Starring Liam Cunningham (A Little Princess, Prime Suspect, The Wind That Shakes the Barley)

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Steve McQueen, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender
• A short documentary on the making of Hunger, including interviews with McQueen, Fassbender, actors Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, and Brian Milligan, writer Enda Walsh, and producer Robin Gutch
• “The Provo’s Last Card?” a 1981 episode of the BBC program Panorama, about the causes and effects of the IRA hunger strikes at the Maze prison and the political and civilian reactions across Northern Ireland
• Theatrical trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Chris Darke
TITLE: Hunger (BLU-RAY edition)    TITLE: Hunger (DVD edition)
CAT: CC1868BD             CAT: CC1867D
UPC: 7-15515-05291-7        UPC: 7-15515-05281-8
ISBN: 978-1-60465-235-2         ISBN: 978-1-60465-234-5
SRP: $39.95            SRP: $39.95
PREBOOK: 1/19/10        PREBOOK: 1/19/10
STREET: 2/16/10             STREET: 2/16/10

LOLA MONTÈS
Lola Montès is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophuls charts Montès’s scandalous past through the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she ends up performing. Ophuls’s final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a meticulous, one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.

1955 • 115 minutes • Color • Stereo • In French and German with English subtitles • 2.55:1 aspect ratio

FILM INFO
• Directed by Max Ophuls (The Earrings of Madame de . . . , La ronde, Le plaisir)
• Starring Peter Ustinov (Le plaisir, Spartacus, Topkapi)
• Starring Anton Walbrook (49th Parallel, The Red Shoes, La ronde)
• Cinematography by Christian Matras (The Earrings of Madame de . . . , Fanfan la tulipe, The Milky Way)

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary featuring Max Ophuls scholar Susan White
• “Max Ophuls ou le plaisir de tourner,” a 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps, featuring interviews with many of Ophuls’s collaborators
• Max by Marcel, a new documentary by Marcel Ophuls about his father and the making of Lola Montès
• Silent footage of actress Martine Carol demonstrating the various glamorous hairstyles in Lola Montès
• Theatrical rerelease trailer from Rialto Pictures
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Gary Giddins

TITLE: Lola Montès (BLU-RAY)        TITLE: Lola Montès (DVD edition)
CAT: CC1866BD                             CAT: CC1865D
UPC: 7-15515-05271-9                   UPC: 7-15515-05261-0
ISBN: 978-1-60465-233-8               ISBN: 978-1-60465-232-1
SRP: $39.95                                  SRP: $39.95
PREBOOK: 1/19/10                        PREBOOK: 1/19/10
STREET: 2/16/10                           STREET: 2/16/10

REVANCHE
A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section of Vienna, hardened ex-con Alex (the mesmerizing Johannes Krisch) works as an assistant in a brothel, where he falls for Ukrainian hooker Tamara. Their desperate plans for escape unexpectedly intersect with the lives of a rural cop and his seemingly content wife. With meticulous, elegant direction, Spielmann creates a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forest of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side.

2008 • 122 minutes • Color • Surround • In German with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio

FILM INFO
• Directed by Götz Spielmann (Antares, The Stranger)

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Götz Spielmann, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New video interview with Spielmann
• The Making of “Revanche,” a half-hour documentary shot on the film’s set
• Foreign Land, Spielmann’s award-winning student short film, with an introduction by the director
• U.S. theatrical trailer
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Wood

TITLE: Revanche (BLU-RAY edition)    TITLE: Revanche (DVD edition)
CAT: CC1873BD                                CAT: CC1859D
UPC: 7-15515-05121-7                      UPC: 7-15515-05211-5
ISBN: 978-1-60465-215-4                  ISBN: 978-1-60465-227-7
SRP: $39.95                                     SRP: $39.95
PREBOOK: 1/19/10                           PREBOOK: 1/19/10
STREET: 2/16/10                              STREET: 2/16/10

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW
Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, aging, and the generation gap. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi headline a cast of incomparable character actors, starring as an elderly couple who must move in with their grown children after the bank takes their home, yet end up separated and subject to their offspring’s selfish whims. An inspiration for Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Make Way for Tomorrow is among American cinema’s purest tearjerkers, all the way to its unflinching ending, which McCarey refused to change despite studio pressure.

1937 • 92 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

FILM INFO
• Directed by Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, Going My Way, An Affair to Remember)
• Starring Beulah Bondi (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life,
The Furies)
• Starring Victor Moore (Swing Time, Ziegfeld Follies, The Seven Year Itch)
• Starring Fay Bainter (Jezebel, Our Town, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)
• Starring Thomas Mitchell (Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life)

SPECIAL EDITION TWO-DISC SET FEATURES
• New, restored high-definition digital transfer
• Tomorrow, Yesterday, and Today, a new video interview featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich discussing the career of Leo McCarey and his thoughts on Make Way for Tomorrow
• New video interview with critic Gary Giddins in which he talks about McCarey’s artistry and the political and social context of the film
• PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critic Tag Gallagher and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, as well as an excerpt from film scholar Robin Wood’s 1998 piece “Leo McCarey and ‘Family Values’ ”

TITLE: Make Way for Tomorrow
CAT: CC1862D
UPC: 7-15515-05241-2
ISBN: 978-1-60465-230-7
SRP: $29.95
PREBOOK: 1/26/10
STREET: 2/23/10

ECLIPSE SERIES 20: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON FILM

The hugely influential, Nobel Prize–winning critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw was notoriously reluctant to allow his writing to be adapted for the cinema. Yet thanks to the persistence of Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal, Shaw finally agreed to collaborate on a series of screen versions of his witty, socially minded plays, starting with the Oscar-winning Pygmalion. The three other films that resulted from this famed alliance, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Androcles and the Lion, long overshadowed by Pygmalion, are gathered here for the first time on DVD. These clever, handsomely mounted entertainments star such luminaries of the big screen as Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains, Wendy Hiller, and Rex Harrison.

THREE-DISC BOX SET INCLUDES:

MAJOR BARBARA
Filmed in London in 1941, during the Blitz, Major Barbara emerged from a troubled production to become a major success for Shaw and producer-director Gabriel Pascal. Pygmalion’s Wendy Hiller returns as one of Shaw’s most memorable, controversial characters, Barbara Underschaft, a Salvation Army officer who speaks out against the hypocrisy she believes exists in her organization. Rex Harrison, Robert Newton, and Deborah Kerr costar in this merrily satirical morality play.

1941 • 121 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA
Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains pop off the screen in vivid Technicolor in Pascal’s version of Shaw’s 1901 play about love and politics in ancient Rome and Egypt. At the time the most expensive British film ever produced (complete with real imported Egyptian sand), Caesar and Cleopatra is a lavish epic, featuring standout performances by its two stars.

1945 • 128 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

ANDROCLES AND THE LION
Shaw’s breezy, delightful dramatization of the classic fable—about a Christian slave who pulls a thorn from a lion’s paw and is spared from death in the Colosseum as a result of his kind act—was written as a meditation on modern Christian values. And Pascal’s final Shaw production plays it broadly, casting comic character actor Alan Young as the titular naïf; he’s ably supported by Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Robert Newton, and Elsa Lanchester.

1952 • 98 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio

TITLE: ECLIPSE SERIES 20: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON FILM
CAT: ECL089
UPC: 7-15515-05521-5
ISBN: 978-1-60465-250-5
SRP: $44.95
PREBOOK: 1/26/10
STREET: 2/23/10

Eclipse is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.