It was a glorious Groundhog Day, which means we’re due for six more weeks of winter—and that we’re a little late with this newsletter. We really appreciate all the feedback regarding where to purchase Criterion discs. Many of you mentioned DeepDiscountDVD.com as a good source, and we want to pass that along. Several of you also touted your local retailers and pointed out the advantages of one-on-one contact and personal recommendations in this kind of setting.

We’re happy to report that Jon Mulvaney’s back from vacation. He has a large backlog of mail but promises to get to it all and keep everyone posted on what’s in store for 2006. Happy viewing . . .

Street date:
2/14
In an introduction to La bête humaine featured on this DVD, director Jean Renoir explains how authenticity played a crucial role in the film, how he and actors Jean Gabin and Julien Carette immersed themselves in trains and railroads. On a few occasions, Gabin drove trains illegally between Le Havre and Paris, unbeknownst to authorities and passengers on board.

Street date:
2/28
Maverick director Robert Hamer made his reputation with this celebrated Ealing comedy, though none of his subsequent work ever achieved the success he had with this one. In the liner notes to this release, Philip Kemp explains how Hamer rejected the kinder comedic conventions associated with Ealing for this deliciously dark tale of murder. Pointing arrows at the aristocracy, Hamer seemed to take on the order of England itself. The studio did not approve.

Street date:
2/14
It’s a classic tale of independent filmmaking in the 1990s, told no better than by the film’s director, Whit Stillman:

"Wanting to make films but knowing no way into the business, I started acting as sales agent for some Spanish filmmakers I met. Fortunately, I was spared success in that field by following a Variety critic’s advice not to see the first Pedro Almodóvar film.

"Metropolitan's inception was when one of the directors I represented said that he'd only really had about $50,000 in cash to do it—just the amount the co-opters of my building on West 40th Street told us we might be able to make buying our rental apartments and reselling them. So with the idea that I could find the amount to make a movie this way, I started writing Metropolitan as a story that could be shot for such an amount and still have a bit of class.

"We started the shoot with the $50,000, but put more in as we went along, with $40,000 from coproducer Peter Wentworth allowing us to go right into editing before raising more money. (My friends Valerie Carney and Russell Pennoyer were the other major angels.)
To live I found semiraw loft space in Soho, where we shot Audrey’s dream sequence and Charlie and Tom pounding on the door before entering Rick’s sunbathing den.

"Unfortunately, I still own no real estate. The lease for the Soho loft had a hard out the weekend The Last Days of Disco opened in 1998, and it has been foreign exile ever since."

Street date:
2/14
We’re proud to introduce John Ford into the Criterion Collection with this overlooked gem, which the director always considered a favorite. Young Mr. Lincoln proved to be a brilliant pairing of actor and director, with Henry Fonda going on to star in some of Ford’s most famous films, including The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine. Fonda originally balked at playing the beloved president, and Ford ultimately “shamed” him into taking the part, assuring him he would be playing a “jackleg lawyer, not the Great Emancipator.”
Elevator to the Gallows
Fists in the Pocket

The Complete “Mr. Arkadin”

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© 2006 The Criterion Collection
The spotlight shines on Robert Altman this month. On March 5, Altman will receive a long-overdue Oscar for his remarkable career, one that has pushed the filmmaking envelope for nearly five decades. Perhaps best known for such grand-scale masterpieces as M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, and Short Cuts, he is also a master of the intimate. His 1984 Secret Honor is a triumph of independent filmmaking and a testament to Altman’s genius: he took a successful one-man play about Richard Millhouse Nixon and transformed it into something much more on film. In an interview on our DVD release, Philip Baker Hall (brilliant as Tricky Dick) reveals much about the director’s process, the small-scale nature of the production, and the creative energy that emerged out of it. Altman was teaching at the University of Michigan and took advantage of campus locations and students to make the film, and of its dorms to house the crew. By hunkering down together, Altman and Baker Hall, who often shared a student room to rest after the grueling takes, found their way into Nixon’s mystique and paranoia, producing one of the most remarkable solo screen performances to date.
Grey Gardens: The Musical
Jackie O.’s eccentric cousins Edith Beale and her daughter “Little Edie” first gained celebrity and notoriety in the Maysles brothers’ extraordinary 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. Over the years, they’ve developed a loyal following, inspiring fashion designers (like Todd Oldham and John Bartlett) and musicians (Rufus Wainwright wrote a song by the same name). It was only a matter of time before they got their own musical. It will run from February 10 to March 26 at New York’s famed Playwrights Horizons theater. For more info, go to PlaywrightsHorizons.org. But first, revisit the DVD—because it would be hard to find two more unique characters than the originals.
Richard Linklater, whose groundbreaking Slacker we released in 2004, offers up his list of favorite Criterion DVDs this month. Rick’s in production on a new film, Fast Food Nation, a fictionalized account of Eric Schlosser’s best-selling tale of fast-food culture in America. Look for it in theaters this year. We’re also thrilled to be working with Rick on another project for Criterion. About his “ever-changing but current top ten,” Rick says: “I’ve been revisiting ‘spirit and the flesh’ titles, with a little comedy mixed in.” Here’s what he came up with:

Andrei Rublev
Au hasard Balthazar
The Flowers of St. Francis
Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set
Tokyo Story
The Last Temptation of Christ
Unfaithfully Yours
Fanny & Alexander Box Set
Pickpocket
I Know Where I’m Going