The Criterion Collection Newsletter

“Wow, this assignment kicked my ass in a glorious way! As with everyone before me, picking just ten Criterion classics is too daunting; so you have to find a system that allows you to play a favorites game, all the while knowing there are others you have left out that you love as much but maybe have less original things to say about.”

Allison Anders is the codirector of Border Radio and has also directed five other feature films, including Gas Food Lodging, Mi vida loca, and Grace of My Heart.

1. A Woman Is a Woman
2. Charade
3. 3 Women
4. Carnival of Souls
5. Young Mr. Lincoln
6. My Man Godfrey
7. Monterey Pop
8. Gimme Shelter
9. Dazed and Confused
10. The Red Shoes

To read Anders’s thoughts on her top ten selections, click here.

Last month we asked you to name all the actors appearing in Criterion releases who also played Ebenezer Scrooge on-screen. The Scrooges we had in mind were Green for Danger’s Alastair Sim (A Christmas Carol, 1951), Traffic’s Albert Finney (Scrooge, 1970), Rushmore’s Bill Murray (Scrooged, 1988), and Mona Lisa’s Michael Caine (The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992). But some of our subscribers surprised us by coming up with others we hadn’t thought of. To wit: The Fallen Idol’s Ralph Richardson, who appeared in a Fireside Theatre TV adaptation from 1951; Russell Thorndike, who appeared in Olivier’s Hamlet and played Scrooge in a silent short film from 1923; and the recently deceased Jack Palance (Contempt), who threw his hat into the ring with Ebenezer, a 1998 TV adaptation that transplanted Scrooge to the old west. Whew, you guys are thorough! Congratulations to the first-place winner, Moise Poite, and the four runners-up, Gerald Ruark, Al Sacco, Marshall Deutelbaum, and Lee Farber.

Novelist and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, who lent his pen to some of the most acclaimed film noirs of the forties and fifties, died this month, at age ninety-nine. In addition to the pitch-dark classic Kiss Me Deadly, you can get an eye- and earful of Bezzerides’s sharp vision with Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway, a brutal nighttime journey into the treacherous world of the “long-haul boys,” starring Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb. Bezzerides wrote the crackerjack screenplay, adapted from his novel Thieves’ Market.

Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist
Bicycle Thieves
Green for Danger
49th Parallel
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs


This year starts with a bang . . . or perhaps a roar: Rubber suits and gory makeup abound in the *Monsters and Madmen* collection, featuring two classic Boris Karloff chillers and two science fiction thrillers, all from the late 1950s. Also this month, Robert Bresson’s exquisite tragedy *Mouchette, for the first time on DVD in the U.S.; American indie filmmaker Allison Anders’s first feature film, the eighties postpunk diary Border Radio; and deluxe, newly remastered editions of Akira Kurosawa’s witty action duo Yojimbo* and *Sanjuro. And click here* to read about our brand-new line, Eclipse, coming in March. The first series is *Early Bergman*. Happy viewing!		“Wow, this assignment kicked my ass in a glorious way! As with everyone before me, picking just ten Criterion classics is too daunting; so you have to find a system that allows you to play a favorites game, all the while knowing there are others you have left out that you love as much but maybe have less original things to say about.” Allison Anders is the codirector of *Border Radio* and has also directed five other feature films, including Gas Food Lodging, Mi vida loca, and Grace of My Heart. 1. A Woman Is a Woman 2. Charade 3. 3 Women 4. Carnival of Souls 5. Young Mr. Lincoln 6. My Man Godfrey 7. Monterey Pop 8. Gimme Shelter 9. Dazed and Confused 10. The Red Shoes To read Anders’s thoughts on her top ten selections, click here. Last month we asked you to name all the actors appearing in Criterion releases who also played Ebenezer Scrooge on-screen. The Scrooges we had in mind were *Green for Danger’s Alastair Sim (A Christmas Carol, 1951), Traffic’s Albert Finney (Scrooge, 1970), Rushmore’s Bill Murray (Scrooged, 1988), and Mona Lisa’s Michael Caine (The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992). But some of our subscribers surprised us by coming up with others we hadn’t thought of. To wit: The Fallen Idol’s Ralph Richardson, who appeared in a Fireside Theatre TV adaptation from 1951; Russell Thorndike, who appeared in Olivier’s Hamlet* and played Scrooge in a silent short film from 1923; and the recently deceased Jack Palance (*Contempt), who threw his hat into the ring with Ebenezer, a 1998 TV adaptation that transplanted Scrooge to the old west. Whew, you guys are thorough! Congratulations to the first-place winner, Moise Poite, and the four runners-up, Gerald Ruark, Al Sacco, Marshall Deutelbaum, and Lee Farber. Novelist and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, who lent his pen to some of the most acclaimed film noirs of the forties and fifties, died this month, at age ninety-nine. In addition to the pitch-dark classic Kiss Me Deadly, you can get an eye- and earful of Bezzerides’s sharp vision with Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway, a brutal nighttime journey into the treacherous world of the “long-haul boys,” starring Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb. Bezzerides wrote the crackerjack screenplay, adapted from his novel Thieves’ Market*. Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist Bicycle Thieves Green for Danger 49th Parallel When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

STREET DATE: 1/23	There is no better demonstration of the on-the-fly creativity of the films of British producers, brothers, and film obsessives Richard and Alex Gordon than *The Haunted Strangler*, one of four golden-age sci-fi and horror films included in Monsters and Madmen. Concerned about how to achieve Boris Karloff’s transformation from dignified lawyer to grotesque psycho killer on such a tiny budget, the filmmakers were at a loss. Yet when Karloff stepped in, it was apparent that prosthetics wouldn’t be necessary: “Mind if I try my own?” he asked, and when he turned back around, his face had become a sunken, terrifying mask; he had removed his false molars, rearranged his jaw, sucked in his lower lip, lowered his eyelids, and slackened his limbs. A monster was born.
STREET DATE: 1/16	There was only one collaboration between master French filmmakers Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard—and the two directors never even worked together on it. The original theatrical trailer for Bresson’s Mouchette, featured on Criterion’s new special edition release, was conceptualized and edited by Godard. In it, he does everything Bresson does not: foregrounding technique (“a mess of colors . . . black-and-white colors!”) and flaunting the story’s more sensational aspects with attention-grabbing headlines. For decades after, Godard refused to admit that this trailer was his own handiwork, but recently the director called his own bluff by including it in a retrospective of his films.
STREET DATE: 1/16	During the four-year production of their labor of love Border Radio, filmmakers Allison Anders and Kurt Voss were so broke that they often had to sell records for a little extra cash. One day, as they were bringing a pile to the Rhino Record Store in Santa Monica, California, they found themselves face-to-face with Chris D., the lead singer of the Flesh Eaters and the star of their film, who was working behind the counter. In an effort to convince Chris that things weren’t quite so financially difficult and to keep him optimistic that the film would get finished, Kurt and Allison stuffed the records under their arms, as if they had just purchased them, and proceeded to pretend to browse through the store.
STREET DATE: 1/23	Akira Kurosawa has always been known for his exacting attention to detail, and in *Yojimbo* he gave his sound department a new challenge—to approximate the “thwack!” of a sword cutting into flesh and bone. In response, they hacked away at various hunks of beef and pork, to no avail. Finally, they found what they were listening for: a whole chicken with bunches of bamboo chopsticks stuck through its flesh, when chopped and sliced, was the gory solution.
STREET DATE: 1/23	The climactic geyser of bloodletting in Sanjuro may be one of Kurosawa’s most memorably violent scenes, but the result was gorier than the filmmaker intended. When the valve on the air compressor was opened, shooting liquid from the hose wrapped around Tatsuya Nakadai’s body, the impact nearly lifted the actor off the ground. Yojimbo and Sanjuro also available together in a box set.

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