Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Talking to a casting director in Los Angeles about a film we were going to make together, I suggested having two actors—sisters, though that didn’t matter—play one role. My casting friend didn’t get it, reminding me that we could offer a part to only one actor at a time.

“No, I mean they should both play it,” I tried to explain, “like the two women playing one part in That Obscure Object of Desire.”

“What obscure object of desire?”

“You know, the Buñuel film.”

“Buñuel?”

This isn’t an illustration of the especial ignorance of Hollywood people. The scene could have occurred in New York or London or Hong Kong (though not in Madrid or Mexico City—maybe?). Films made in black and white, films made in languages other than English, struggle to survive the rigors of time, memory, and new formats. It’s very important that certain filmmakers aren’t allowed to slip through the cattle grid of history and disappear. Buñuel is one of these.  

No stranger to controversy, Sam Fuller was investigated by the FBI in late 1950, when The Steel Helmet—a priori sensational as the first Korean War film—was attacked as unpatriotic by the Hearst press (and as criminal by the Daily Worker). His file grew a bit fatter three years later, after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover voiced displeasure with Fuller’s representation of the bureau in the atomic espionage thriller Pickup on South Street. In part because of their lurid, highly politicized treatment of mental illness and child molestation, respectively, Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964) both received savage reviews—“Shock Corridor should never have been made” is how one began. But Fuller never had a film deemed so dangerous that it was shelved until White Dog (1982)—his last Hollywood feature and one of his strongest.

Was it the bark or the bite? A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, a section of which provided a Life magazine cover story, White Dog is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism. In the novel, Gary and his then wife, actress Jean Seberg, find a stray German shepherd that, they soon discover, has been raised to attack black people on sight. Although told that the dog is too old to be deconditioned, they turn him over to an animal trainer who turns out to be a Black Muslim and vengefully reprograms the creature to maul whites—including, at the book’s climax, Gary himself. (Some of the vengeance in this “found” allegory belongs to the author: Gary disapproved of his wife’s public support of the Black Panther Party, a political stance that put her under FBI investigation.)  

White Dog

Samuel Fuller

1982

90 min

Color

1.78:1

No movie is ahead of its time, just ahead of cultural gatekeepers. Sam Fuller knew this better than any other filmmaker after his 1982 White Dog waited almost ten years to get a theatrical release. Despite Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, White Dog (his twenty-first feature) was the first to suffer outright suppression. Due to the film’s impudent premise, in which a Los Angeles actress, Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), innocently discovers a guard dog trained to attack African Americans—a metaphor for socially indoctrinated racism—Fuller met with extraordinary industry and public resistance. His deliberate provocation, indicting social naïveté as well as film industry routine, worked too well. The film couldn’t slip under Paramount’s radar like earlier Fuller outrages, since B-movie exhibition no longer existed by the 1980s. Instead, White Dog was dumped in a television graveyard, before it was eventually released to theaters as a specialty art movie in 1991.

Paramount had quietly shelved the film after the Beverly Hills–Hollywood branch of the NAACP objected to its inflammatory subject matter and content. NAACP spokesperson Collette Wood protested, “We’re against the whole thrust of the film and what it says about racism, especially with the rise of the Klan, which always occurs during bad economic times.” That was enough to scare off an unenthusiastic distributor. Paramount was launching a box-office armada—American Gigolo, Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 48 Hrs., Flashdance—and Fuller’s complex sociological moral tale didn’t fit into its widely touted High Concept formula for success.  

White Dog

Samuel Fuller

1982

90 min

Color

1.78:1

We hope you like it. We couldn’t have built it without our friends in Palo Alto, the Auteurs. There are still a few kinks to iron out, so please be patient with us while we get it right. You’ll find plenty of new things to do at the new criterion.com, and some old favorites making a comeback. To help you find your way around, Jason Polan, our friend with the pen, made us this little orientation video.

This story of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, “the boys,” is a plucky tale of grit and high purpose. Wes and Owen are Texans, and so their endless fascination with the ol’ game of life (and the enormous sophistication of thought they bring to that game) is very often concealed behind tight-lipped rhetoric with a distinct sense of the absurd, the joke of it all, which they exhibit whenever there is danger in the air. Think Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. From past tours of Texas, I had come to appreciate the heart of the state’s culture long before I met the authors of Bottle Rocket. I was spoon-fed my most major Texas epiphany in one interview: a young man explained to me why he had fathered children when he was just past twenty, though he was fully aware that the decision meant shelving dreams and throwing out some fervent youthful ambitions to settle for doggedly making ends meet. His reason was: “I want my children to have a real knowledge of their grandparents. So I had to have them early to give them the years.” Family, real and extended, is at the core of Bottle Rocket. Dignan (my vote for the greatest name in film) and Anthony are brothers in all respects save blood, and though separable, their tie is indestructible.

So it is with the coauthors of Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson (also the director) and Owen Wilson (also the star). The other star of the film is Luke Wilson, Owen’s brother; two other key cast members are Andrew Wilson, also a brother, and Bob Musgrave, a lifelong friend. All of them lived together in a glop in the same Dallas apartment when I first met them. Now that Wes has distinguished himself as one of the leading young directors in film, and Owen and Luke have become respected, sought-after, and very highly paid actors, they all have naturally gone upscale. These days they live together in a glop in Hollywood.  

Bottle Rocket

Wes Anderson

1996

91 min

Color

1.85:1

A couple of years ago, I watched a film called Bottle Rocket. I knew nothing about it, and the movie really took me by surprise. Here was a picture without a trace of cynicism, that obviously grew out of its director’s affection for his char­acters in particular and for people in general. A rarity. And the central idea of the film is so delicate, so human: a group of young guys think that their lives have to be filled with risk and danger in order to  be real. They don’t know that it’s okay simply to be who they are.

Wes Anderson, at age thirty, has a very special kind of talent: he knows how to convey the simple joys and interactions between people so well and with such richness. This kind of sensibility is rare in movies. Leo McCarey, the director of Make Way for Tomorrow and The Awful Truth, comes to mind. And so does Jean Renoir. I remember seeing Renoir’s films as a child and immediately feeling connected to the characters through his love for them. It’s the same with Anderson. I’ve found myself going back and watching Bottle Rocket several times. I’m also very fond of his second film, Rushmore (1998)—it has the same tenderness, the same kind of grace. Both of them are very funny, but also very moving.

Anderson has a fine sense of how music works against an image. There’s the beautiful ending of Rushmore, when Miss Cross removes Max Fischer’s glasses and gazes into the boy’s eyes—really the eyes of her dead husband—as the Faces’ “Ooh La La” plays on the soundtrack. And I also love the scene in Bottle Rocket when Owen Wilson’s character, Dignan, says, “They’ll never catch me, man, ’cause I’m fuckin’ innocent.” Then he runs off to save one of his partners in crime and gets captured by the police, over “2000 Man” by the Rolling Stones. He—and the music—are proclaiming who he really is: he’s not innocent in the eyes of the law, but he’s truly an innocent. For me, it’s a transcendent moment. And transcendent moments are in short supply these days.

This tribute originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Esquire.

Bottle Rocket

Wes Anderson

1996

91 min

Color

1.85:1

These color tests from the production of Army of Shadows, taken by cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, were used during the 2006 restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville’s long-neglected masterpiece.

Criterion’s release of 10 Years of Rialto Pictures has critics giving thanks to the esteemed distribution company this holiday-time. Introducing his interview with Rialto cofounder Bruce Goldstein, Glenn Kenny asks, “Where would we cinephiles be without Rialto Pictures? More to the point, where wouldn’t we be? It’s through this distribution company’s work that we’re able to see gorgeous new prints of stone classics such as Reed’s The Third Man, Godard’s Contempt, and Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, not to mention timeless entertainments such as Dassin’s Rififi and Honda’s Godzilla. Without Rialto, Jean-Pierre Melville’s monumental Army of Shadows would have never gotten its belated American premiere. And so on.” Mick LaSalle also sings the praises of Rialto Pictures, at SFGate, as does Screen’s Peter Stamelman, who calls the ten-film box set, “an indispensable purchase for high school, university, and public libraries.” It also made the New Yorker’s list.

Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville

1969

145 min

Color

1.85:1

Contempt

Jean-Luc Godard

1963

103 min

Color

2.35:1

Nowadays, kids have been trained to regard bludgeoning CGI spectacle as the sine qua non of their movie entertainment. Yet it’s a moot point whether hyperreal visualizations of literally anything stimulate the imagination or stunt it. Amid the current digital overkill, one looks back wistfully to a film artist who put his faith in the simple, natural magic of photography. Albert Lamorisse distrusted special effects, holding that such ready-made miracles cheated the audience of its capacity for wonder. He began his career as a documentarian (with the 1947 ethnographic short Djerba), and can be said to have never truly lost that vocation. In the live-action children’s films of the 1950s and ’60s for which he is best remembered, the fantasy elements take off precisely because they remain grounded in a solid bedrock of reality.

Thus in Lamorisse’s most celebrated work, The Red Balloon (1956), the preposterous aerial high jinks of the rubber hero gain authenticity from being situated within observational shots of street life in Ménilmontant. It hardly matters if (as seems likely) the frisky inflatable was twitched by invisible wires; the candid-camera reactions of bemused pedestrians bear witness to the hocus-pocus as a purely photographic event. When children play games of make-believe, they project their inner desires onto an external, alien world. Lamorisse honors these formative psychological processes as loyally and scrupulously as any grown-up can. His principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams. Its masterpiece is the sublime White Mane (1952).  

White Mane

Albert Lamorisse

1952

39 min

Black and White

1.33:1