Document4 THE WERNER HERZOG COLLECTION ANCHOR BAY FOR THE SAKE of ...
THE WERNER HERZOG COLLECTION
ANCHOR BAY
FOR THE SAKE of full disclosure, let me say straight off that I wrote the liner notes for six of the seven films included in this set. (Crispin Glover provided the seventh.) It might seem, then, to be a blatant conflict of interest for me to write a review, but truth be told, I'd be reviewing it anyway, and for the same reasons I wrote the liner notes: There are films in this collection that I consider to be among the greatest ever made. So there.
Renegade director Werner Herzog has never made a secret of the fact that, for him, the line between "fiction" and "documentary" is a fuzzy one. His documentaries often contain elements of fiction in order to help him express what he calls an "ecstatic truth"-and likewise, his narrative films (like Fitzcarraldo) often contain a heavy dose of dangerous reality.
The films in this new set (a necessary companion to Anchor Bay's previous Herzog/Kinski collection) exemplify this beautifully. Take Lessons of Darkness, his stunning, apocalyptic documentary about the fires in the Kuwaiti oil fields. Herzog plays a number of tricks on the audience-from insisting it's really a sci-fi movie, to the "mountain range" at the beginning of the film that turns out to be a close-up of tire tracks in the sand. On the flipside, his brilliant "fictional" films Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek (a black comedy about smashed dreams, and my Favorite Film of All Time) are both biographical portraits of star Bruno S.
In perhaps the strangest yet most effective blending of fact and fiction here, Herzog brings former POW Dieter Dengler, the subject of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, back to Laos, where he recreates scenes from his brutal captivity.
The most surprising and disturbing film in the collection is one of his earliest, Even Dwarves Started Small. Only the second movie ever made to feature an all-midget cast, Dwarves is a bleak, shocking, often brutal portrait of madness and revolutionary violence following an inmate uprising.
Another surprise, to me at least, was Fata Morgana, the result of Herzog's attempts to film mirages in the Sahara desert. I'd tried to watch Morgana several times in the past without luck. It's not an easy film to sit through, but if you can make it to the second half, things become very, very strange.
Add to that Heart of Glass, the film in which Herzog hypnotized the entire cast before filming, and it's quite a remarkable set. The discs are packaged in a beautiful, space-efficient slipcase, and each film comes with a commentary track (believe me, Herzog's commentaries are the most entertaining I've ever heard). Oh, and the liner notes are unbelievably brilliant and insightful.
JIM KNIPFEL
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
DIRECTED BY RONALD NEAME
20TH CENTURY FOX
YOU CAN STILL count on both hands the number of characterizations that have deservedly taken an Academy Award, and Maggie Smith's win for this movie is among them. Her Jean Brodie is one of film history's certifiable kooks, but no one in 1930s Edinburgh knows it. She's the most domineering teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, where she indoctrinates students in art, poetry, music-and the sexual magnetism of fascist figures like Mussolini and Francisco Franco. Not the teacher from hell, Miss Brodie's the misguided but charismatic fanatic we don't notice in life until it's too late. "How was I not good for you?" she asks a vengeful student, and the colorless girl-and we-are stumped.
Smith was a left-field choice for Brodie, yet she constructs this sardonic monster from comic flamboyance and dramatic precision. Brodie's motto, "Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life!" is also a breathtaking threat. Director Ronald Neame, a David Lean associate, knows how to showcase great actors, climaxing with Brodie confronting the school principal Miss Mackay (played by Brief Encounter's Celia Johnson), one of movie history's great battles of will.
ARMOND WHITE
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
DIRECTED BY MARTIN RITT
PARAMOUNT
RICHARD BURTON was known for the way his British-trained stentorian voice elongated the word "eeeeeee-ville" as if it were a place only the scariest people dare visit. Too classy for Dracula, too early for Hannibal Lecter, Burton was lucky enough to act out men with moral dilemmas at a time when Hollywood was interested in such things. This 1965 adaptation of John LeCarre's spy novel critiqued the Cold War using Burton's tired, cynical operative Leamus to illustrate the personal political tragedy. Leamus haunts his empty life (from Berlin to London), always the pawn of games-playing politicians. He's the anti-James Bond, and Burton plays Leamus with quiet fury.
Cinematographer Oswald Morris' b&w photography superbly creates a bitter atmosphere, creatively turning the noir style of The Third Man into the polished naturalism of the British New Wave. But Morris' remarkable trick of lighting was making then-tabloid-star Burton's famous blue eyes into burnt-out torchlights. Not evil, but eerie. That's the key to Martin Ritt's direction. After his own communist experience and the treachery of the blacklist, Ritt responds with a scathing depiction of all sides of the Cold War-a poetic suggestion of the damage inflicted by sneakiest ideologues.
ARMOND WHITE