List Price: $24.96 Our Price: $21.72YOU SAVE $3.24!
Buy it
DVD Lilith
Few actresses are adored by the camera as much as Jean Seberg is in the brooding, 1964 psychodrama Lilith. The legendary American and European star (Godard's Breathless), playing Lilith Arthur, fixes one's attention on her every nuance in Robert Rossen's tale of a beautiful, sexual omnivore and psychotic patient at a New England mental hospital. Withdrawn into her small world of dolls and fantasies, Lilith responds to the attention of a laconic, Korean War veteran, Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty), who is trying to find himself by working as an occupational therapist. Burdened by a murky, guilt-ridden past (involving his mentally ill mother), Vincent gradually falls into an unnervingly passionate affair with Lilith--much less a romance than a shared journey toward mutual implosion. Rossen's severe, sincere, stark black-and-white drama is sometimes lost in a muddle of undefined character motivations, but it's quite a ride toward the film's last-minute epiphany. Watch for Gene Hackman in a small role. --Tom Keogh
This is a slow, delicate film. There are no car crashes, and no muscle bound hero to save the earth from some impending doom. What you will see is a brilliant study in how the weakness of one man, Warren Beatty, can cause so much harm. His misdirected passion causes the mental collapse of one, Jean Seberg, and the death of another, Peter Fonda. All cast members give excellent performances. This is a haunting film that has stayed in my memory for many, many years.
A Faithful Adaptation; Beatty Stiff As A Board
Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Salamanca's novel of the same name, I had very little hope that the film would catch the unsettling nature of the novel. I was wrong.
Rossen captures Lilith's spirit even in the opening credits, as an abstract drawing reveals what appears to be a spider breaking away from its web. Is this symbolic of Lilith leaving the mental home? Or of Vince, the main character, leaving his ideals of himself? Whatever it might mean, the "dreamy" music and the stark black and white film convey the mood of the book quite well, and borders on what one might perceive as a "horror" film. And viewed in this light, the grounds of the mental home (where most of the story takes place) are both comforting and disturbing.
Lilith, played with absolute conviction by the wonderful and beautiful (sans god-awful wig) Jean Seberg, really made the film enjoyable for me. Just witnessing Seberg's performance was inspiring. Hackman has a small character role (in what was his first) as a "hack" husband to Vincent's teen-romance girlfriend. And Peter Fonda is here too, in an almost unrecognizable role as an overly sensitive man at the hospital, competing with Vincent for Lilith's love.
Let's say all is good, almost great, with this film, excepting Beatty's cardboard performance. I can't imagine why Beatty, given a very defined and complex character like Vincent to portray, couldn't be less stiff than he is here! He didn't ruin the picture for me, but his inability to convey ANY emotion, and just stare numbly out into nothing in most of his scenes, simply frustrates. His performance makes you want to kick him in the pants and say, "C'mon, man! Get it together!" through most of what is otherwise, as I've cited earlier, a successful film.
Kudos to Rossen for not shying away from the somewhat controversial subject matter found in the book, and for capturing the elusive quality of Salamanca's story. Congratulations to Seberg for an amazing performance, and a visibly furrowed brow to Beatty for his sleepwalking.
Very risque of its time!
Warren Beatty's first flick is a disturbing little bugger! Beatty begins working for an "mental asylum" but falls for the wrong girl patient (Seberg). Scary & devilish! You can see where "Pretty Poison" came from! A must for the collector!
This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vanessa Redgrave - David Hemmings Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $4!
Buy it
With this magnificent Criterion DVD release, Luchino Visconti's 1963 historical drama The Leopard will finally earn widespread recognition as one of the most beautiful epics ever produced. In adapting the popular novel by Giuseppe Tomassi di Lampedusa (an Italian equivalent to Gone with the Wind, set during the tumultuous Garibaldi revolution of 1860-62), Visconti was initially reluctant to cast Burt Lancaster as the melancholy Prince of Salina--the aging aristocrat "leopard" of the title--who accepts change as inevitable during the struggle for a unified Italy. But Lancaster (even with his voice dubbed in the fully restored Italian release) delivered one of his finest performances, modeled after Visconti himself, and reacting to political and familial upheavals with the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Burt Lancaster DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $49.95 Your Price: $39.96YOU SAVE $9.99!
Buy it
Three years after Lawrence of Arabia, the largely impressive Lord Jim (1965) finds Peter O'Toole again essaying a self-doubting but remarkable, white Englishman who leads a foreign people against their oppressor. Based on the Joseph Conrad novel, Lord Jim is the story of a British maritime officer, Jim (O'Toole), who takes a brief post on a tramp steamer and flees in terror during a storm at sea. Dogged by a reputation for cowardice, Jim attempts to reinvent himself in his own eyes, commanding an attack against a feudal warlord (Eli Wallach) in a distant, Southeast Asian village and basking in god-like glory afterward. A sinister plot by a gentleman pirate (James Mason) sets the stage for Jim's confrontation with his true destiny. Simplified and adapted by... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Peter O'Toole - James Mason Director(s): Richard Brooks DVD Release Date: Released the 24 August 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $24.96 Your Price: $20.47YOU SAVE $4.49!
Buy it
Some boxed sets claim to be definitive, but are haphazardly selected. Not this one. Four of the five titles here can legitimately lay claim to being essentials in the film noir canon, and the fifth, The Set-Up, is a terrific boxing picture with a strong noir atmosphere. If you're a fan of noir--or have no idea what it's all about--this collection is a treat.
Of course, none of these movies were made as "film noir." The term was coined later by French critics to describe the moody, anxious feel of postwar American movies, especially the genre that highlighted duplicitous dames and susceptible men lost in the criminal jungle. Indeed, the title The Asphalt Jungle conveys the edgy urban arena of these pictures. That film is John Huston's masterly 1950 account of a heist,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Whitmore DVD Release Date: Released the 06 July 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $49.92 Your Price: $39.94YOU SAVE $9.98!
Buy it
If you think Zorba the Greek is a simple-minded homage to a man with a zest for life, then you haven't seen the movie. Basil (Alan Bates), a reticent British writer, comes to the Mediterranean island of Crete to revive a mine his father owned. On the way, he meets a Greek roustabout named Zorba (Anthony Quinn) and hires him to help, little suspecting that Zorba's exuberance will lead him to some dark and troubling places--frankly, if the last 30 minutes of Zorba the Greek are what it means to embrace life, some viewers will want to shut the door in life's face. But there's no denying the movie's ambitious scope and implacable force, even as it paints an alien and disturbing portrait of life in a Greek village. On top of that, gorgeous cinematography and one of the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Anthony Quinn - Alan Bates Director(s): Michael Cacoyannis DVD Release Date: Released the 03 August 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
