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DVD The River - Criterion Collection
When speaking of Jean Renoir's timeless masterpiece The River, one can easily exhaust their supply of superlatives. Frequently listed among the greatest films ever made, it was Renoir's first English-language film and his first in color…and what rich, astonishing Technicolor it is! Shot by Renoir's nephew Claude, the film is a love letter to India, seen through the eyes (and narrated as memories) of an adolescent British girl living with her family near the banks of the Ganges, a location which allowed Renoir to indulge his burgeoning affection for the region, it's people, and the exotic allure of the Orient. Under challenging conditions, Renoir and author Rumer Godden adapted Godden's autobiographical novel into an elegant, loosely plotted reflection on the romance of India, and on coming of age in a culture that, until then, few Western filmgoers had ever seen on screen. (To enhance this journey to a new world, Renoir used Indian music recorded live in Calcutta instead of a traditional score; the effect is hypnotically inviting.) Blessed with eternal lessons of life, death, and love, The River offers a transcendent film experience, guaranteed to touch the heart of anyone who sees it. The film was meticulously restored to its original glory in 2004; Criterion's DVD release preserves that restoration with a pristine digital transfer. --Jeff Shannon
Renoir's River of Life is a Masterpiece on the Human Condition
On the surface, Jean Renoir's film "The River" is a docu-drama on India and its people, replete with temples, religious festivals and cultural practices, set amidst the backdrop of the Bengal River. Scratch the surface and "The River" becomes a metaphor on the meaning of life, or at least the Hindu concept of it -- a cycle of births and deaths.
Several scenes allude to this theme. For instance, the statue of Hindu goddess Kali, symbolising creation and destruction, is moulded from the river's clay and returns to clay when it is submerged in the river after devotees complete a ritual celebration. Mr. John (Arthur Shields) at one point philosophises on life with his American cousin, Capt. John (Thomas E. Breen), stating one man jumps from the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge while another goes on his way across the bridge. When young Bogey (Richard Foster), Harriet's brother, dies from a cobra's bite a sibling is born some months after his death.
Between birth and death are the lives of ordinary people who reside, work, play or worship along the river. Some face conflict which is either solved or insoluble. Capt. John is the war veteran (unspecified war) who has lost a leg and is struggling to put his past behind him. Valerie, Melanie and Harriet (Adrienne Court, Radha and Patricia Walters) are adolescent girls who express their respective infatuations for Capt. John and their ensuing growing pains. Mr. John is the British expatriate and widower who has contentedly adopted the ways and culture of India, yet agonises over the mixed-race status his marriage to an Indian woman has created for his daughter Melanie. Harriet's father (Esmond Knight) is the manager of a jute factory, busy with its operation, yet concerned about his children growing up. Boats laden with jute ply the river bringing Indian labourers, pursuing their livelihood. And holy men spend their days mediating at the banks of the river. The point is, each represents an extension of how humanity as a whole goes about living between birth and death.
As for the photography, "The River" is nothing short of spectacular. Interestingly, it was the first Technicolor film shot in India, which apparently posed some inherent technical limitations that Renoir had to overcome while filming in the tropics, which makes it all the more magnificient. The result is an impressionist's dream. Renoir does a Renoir in setting up shots that could have been stills from his father's own paintings. Look for the twin girls sleeping, the nanny and children peering through a colonnade lined railing, the teenage girls sneaking a view of Capt. John's arrival from a crumbling brick fence. There are so many lovely images, actually far too many to mention in this review.
Some reviewers have commented about the weak performances of the actors. While this is a fair assessment, Renoir had little choice. Had he compromised artistic preference and authenticity for the stereotypical India the studio heads in Hollywood wanted, perhaps the funding for more notable actors of the day could have been cast. When producer Kenneth McEldowney, a newcomer to the film industry, consented to Renoir's concept for "The River" funding was limited to no more than a handful of well-known actors. Although he cast amateurs like Breen (an actual amputee) and Radha (a classical Indian dancer), it is arguable their personal backgrounds made their roles more realistic and believable.
All in all, "The River: Criterion Collection" is EXCELLENT. In addition to this beautiful 90-minute movie, there's a commentary from Martin Scorsese -- a key figure in the restoration of the film, an interview with Jean Renoir, a conversation with Rumer Godden, the author of "The River", as well as the original theatrical trailer and some off screen stills taken during the filming. A booklet comes with this collection too, featuring essays from notable film scholars (Ian Christie and Alexander Sesonske) and technical insight on the restoration of the film.
Where's the Maharishi when you need him?
I thought, since this was a Criterion Collection flick, that it was gonna be a psychedelic, spaced-out trip through India with heavy Ravi Shankar music, incense, and flower children with bells and long hair trying to "find themselves". It was about as far away from that as anyone could get, but it was WEIRD nonetheless. Basically, it's the story of a bunch of rich white people living in India on some sort of plantation, far from the everyday realities of India itself in their luxurious palace. When I found out the plot I was immediately turned off, because I hate movies about rich white people, especially when they slum around in foreign countries ripping off the local economy through some sort of corporate pseudo-slave labor arrangement, sitting back on their plantations acting all sophisticated in white linen clothing.
So anyway, the movie centers on this one white chick, Harriet, and SHE IS UGLY. Good grief, can she peel the paint off a wall. Anyhow, she's living on this plantation with her ritzy family and her one very bizarre younger brother who likes to play with his lizard or something. All of a sudden, some rich white heart-throb guy named Captain John shows up and suddenly Harriet GETS IT, her first crush, and she discovers something besides bad poetry and horses. She first visits him while he is at her neighbor's house, which strikes me as a weird sort of sexual harem because the neighbor's wife died and ever since then the neighbor apparently has the hots for a pre-pubescent Indian girl. (Ah, the elegance of foreign lands, where there are no child exploitation laws.)
Anyway, Captain John is an American, a sleazy bohemian type that looks like a cross between Harry Chapin and Eraserhead. He smokes cigarettes in a very sexual manner while galavanting around town in Tommy Bahama clothing. Harriet invites him to a party at their ritzy family house (called "the big house", go figure) and after she flirts with him non-stop, he decides to go for Harriet's SISTER, Valerie, who looks like an impish Meryl Streep with a bad nose job. So, jilted by Captain John for her own sister, Harriet decides to stalk him all over the stereotypical "Indian Village" where we see all sorts of truly Indian things like cobra-charming and a marketplace where you can buy tapestries made by children enslaved in sweatshops all over India. What I noticed at this point is that Captain John looks about 30, and Harriet's like 15, but even though he's fascinated with her in a quasi-sexual way, he plays hard-to-get. In a sad development, Harriet says "I have decided to conquer him", and attempts to seduce him by reading her bad poetry, which seems to amuse him, like, "wow, I've got a 15 year-old rich white chick who thinks I'm the man". But the best part is that Valerie, who we've come to totally despise for being the Ego Princess From Hell, steals Harriet's diary and reads it aloud to Captain John (which, of course contains bad love poetry about him). So the two sisters get in an ALL OUT BRAWL right in front of this guy, and he intervenes to cop a feel with both of them while "breaking it up". Harriet then storms off, which causes Captain John to think Valerie is a bitch for reading the diary. So Valerie then "plays" with him by throwing a toy at him, which causes him to tear his hamstring, and he limps off in a hilarious scene, vowing never to hang out with her again.
At this point, the movie turns really, really STRANGE. Suffice to say a THIRD girl gets involved, and good ol' Captain John starts spreading himself a little too thin, keeping 3 juvenile girls hanging as he tries to figure out which one to pop first. However, tragedy strikes as Valerie & Harriet's brother (the one with the lizard fetish) gets a little too close to a pet cobra. The sad outcome gives everyone a big wake-up-call, and everyone gets real moody. The final outcome is an anti-climactic scene where Harriet resumes her poetry-writing in a funk about failing to seduce a 30-year-old.
This flick wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the archaic screenplay, atrocious acting (even for 1950), and dull character development. I mean, it tries hard to be really "Indian", but it's about as Indian as a trip to The Bombay Company or Pier 1. Most annoyingly, the movie itself would be no more than a half-hour in length if it weren't padded with very bizarre National Geographic-style narrations about Indian culture, complete with some British voice-over chick that makes it seem like a 3rd grade social studies filmstrip. (At times I was waiting for the little "beep" to indicate where I needed to advance the frame.) The footage of India is swell, in its weird early-Technicolor restored glory, but after you get over that, the whole package strikes me as really contrived. I think of all the truly wonderful films that could stand the Criterion treatment and it makes me wonder how they arrive at the decision to bother with crap like this.
A hideously dated, shamelessly didactic bore.
Every single line uttered in this movie is so stilted, its "message" so plasted on every action, every scene, that it plays like an after-school special or some 16mm film you would have watched in Social Studies class. The obvious attempts to make the story "magical" only draw attention to the narrative's totally ineffective paint-by-numbers moralizing.
It is nice location photography, and has a certain appeal if just for putting some of the images on screen and music on the soundtrack. But, let's give great films their due while deflating the reputations of drivel like this.
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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For a knock-out combination of timeless entertainment and vintage studio history, you can't do much better than The Warner Brothers Gangsters Collection. In the 1930s and '40s, Paramount specialized in glossy comedies, MGM popularized lavish musicals, Universal produced signature horror classics, and Fox scored hits with sophisticated dramas. But it was Warner Bros. that generated controversy--if not always box-office profits--with so-called "social problem" films, and that meant gangsters. When viewed in their pre- and post-Prohibition context and in chronological order (Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, 1931; The Petrified Forest, 1936; Angels With Dirty Faces, 1938; The Roaring Twenties, 1939; White Heat, 1949), these six films... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Cagney - Humphrey Bogart - Edward G. Robinson DVD Release Date: Released the 25 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Among the earliest writers to set his sights on the director's chair, Preston Sturges brought a frank, unsentimental view of the war between the sexes to his mid-'40s features that exemplify his style, as demonstrated in this prescient 1942 gem. Architect Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea) and his wife, Gerry (Claudette Colbert), further refine the archetypal Sturges couple--the male embodying strength, idealism, and a certain naivete, the female ultimately stronger, smarter, and (as revealed early on in an astonishing speech by Colbert) clearer-eyed and more pragmatic about the subtext of sex. This giddy shaggy-dog story follows the couple's split, and Gerry's subsequent flight to Palm Beach. This head-snapping frolic is paced by double-entendres and lampooning looks at the very rich, with... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claudette Colbert - Joel McCrea Director(s): Preston Sturges DVD Release Date: Released the 01 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Samuel Fuller came up with one of his gutsiest "headline shots" for House of Bamboo: Mount Fuji, in CinemaScope, framed between the boots of a U.S. soldier lying murdered on a snowy Japanese embankment. Happily, the movie that follows is no letdown. This brutal gangster film was the first American production to shoot in Japan, and Fuller exploits his locations to the max, up to and including a climactic gun battle around a Tokyo rooftop facsimile of the turning Earth. Officially the screenplay is credited to Harry Kleiner, with Fuller cited for "additional dialogue"; in actuality, the 20th Century-Fox movie transplants the basic premise of the Kleiner-scripted Street with No Name (1948) from an American Midwest town to Tokyo, but otherwise the picture is unmistakably... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robert Ryan - Robert Stack Director(s): Samuel Fuller DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Otto Preminger expanded his vision in the 1960s with a whole series of ambitious, expansive dramas with huge casts and big themes. Advise and Consent (1962), an examination of deal making, party politics, and congressional diplomacy in Washington's legislative halls (based on the novel by Allen Drury), is one of his best. Preminger broke the blacklist with his previous film, Exodus, and it rings through in this drama about a controversial nominee for secretary of state (a confident, stately Henry Fonda) accused of being a Communist. The nomination process becomes the center ring of the political circus, with fidgety accuser Burgess Meredith in the spotlight; devious, silver-tongued Charles Laughton cracking the whip as a southern senator with a grudge against Fonda; and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda DVD Release Date: Released the 10 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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