Though Jasmine Dellal’s documentary suffers from a bad case of navel-gazing, it’s a capable look inside the mysterious and little-understood culture of American Roms, and well worth the 80-minute investment. Dellal’s persistent first-person narration is annoying — unless you’d rather hear about how she made the film than watch it — and the film bogs down at the beginning, spending too much time emphasizing how difficult her interviews were to get. (Maybe Orson Welles should’ve slapped an intro on Citizen Kane telling the audience what a meanie William Randolph Hearst was.) But if you can sit through the first twenty minutes or so, American Gypsy has a compelling story to tell. (It almost makes you wish P.O.V. was still chopping every movie to fit a 60-minute slot; this is one film that could have done with some paring.) Jimmy Marks was a leader of Seattle’s Rom community until police, following up a sting operation, raided the Marks’ house on information they’d been fencing stolen goods for years. Though it was later acknowledged the police had no case, and further confiscated items (including over $1 million in cash) not on their warrant, the household search violated several taboos of Romani culture (particularly having women’s clothing handled by strangers). As a result, the Marks were stigmatized and ostracized. Not only did Jimmy lose his leadership position, but he was essentially expelled from the community. The result was a lawsuit which dragged on for years and a barrage of publicity, leading to the inevitable suspicion that he might be exploiting the publicity for his own sake, and not, as he claims, as a vehicle to educate against anti-Rom prejudice. Whether or not Jimmy Marks’ motives are pure, though, American Gypsy accomplishes that last goal.

The Bank Dick/6 Short Films

Free of Philadelphia-bashing, these two discs (new additions to the Criterion Collection) show W.C. Fields at his misanthropic best. Little need be said about The Bank Dick, Fields’ established classic, in which he plays Egbert Sousé ("accent grave over the ‘E’"), an unemployed drunk who implausibly ends up with a job as a security guard when he accidentally foils a bank robbery. Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton and soon-to-be-Stooge Shemp Howard (as the bartender of the, ahem, "Black Pussy [Cat] Café") round out the cast of a thoroughly mean-spirited slice of comic anarchy. From the other end of Fields’ career, 6 Short Films compiles a 1915 silent specimen (Fields’ first appearance) as well as all five of his talking two-reelers (shot between 1930 and 1933). Ranging from the juvenile to the outright bizarre, the films show Fields adopting a variety of personae, from The Pharmacist’s baffled pushover to The Dentist’s brutal enamel-chipper. Comparable to Mae West’s work in She Done Him Wrong, The Dentist shows Fields (nearly) unadulterated by the production code. (A scene in which a patient clamps her legs around Fields, resulting in a burlesque dry-hump, is restored here after being excised by the censors.) When Fields sticks his drill in his patients’ mouths, it sounds like a buzzsaw felling a redwood. Also included is the charming oddity The Fatal Glass of Beer, a parody of Yukon pictures which in today’s light looks practically postmodern. Featuring deliberately corny rear projection and appallingly fake snow — after getting a mouthful, Fields remarks, "Tastes more like corn flakes" — it’s straight out of vaudeville. But it’s aged surprisingly well (better than the pictures it parodies, in fact) and it’s an intriguing look at a Fields that might have been.

North by Northwest

It may not have the elegant visual motifs of Strangers on a Train or the psychological depth of Vertigo, but North by Northwest is the breeziest, most successful entertainment Hitchcock made after leaving England. In a gorgeous transfer that shows off Robert Burks’ limpid cinematography, NxNW looks brand new, though the film’s glossy look may be precisely what long kept it from getting the recognition it deserved. In a way, it’s one of Hitchcock’s least personal films, but that also means it’s free of the troubling (and sometimes sickening) psychological baggage that makes a movie like Vertigo such a study in conflicting emotions. It’s about the only Hitchcock picture that’s sexy without being salacious, thanks mainly to Ernest Lehman’s barbed dialogue (one of Hitchcock’s best scripts) and the scalding rapport between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. Sadly, Lehman’s audio commentary doesn’t add much, and it’s drawn from the same interview as the accompanying making-of featurette (which isn’t helped by that fact that most of the film’s stars are dead and Saint, bizarrely, is relegated to "host" duty instead of being interviewed). Luckily, the film speaks quite well for itself, thank you very much.

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