DiscWorld

Play it again, Sam

by Sam Adams

C_ IN _ EAS_ W _ _ D: Blondie's in a bad spot in the Sergio Leone classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Easily one of the saddest and most beautiful movies ever made, Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff rivals Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc in its flawless simplicity. The story of a mother and two children who are sold into slavery and struggle their entire lives to regain each others' company, it's an unrelenting tragedy shot with extraordinary discipline. Every time a jagged slash cuts across one of Mizoguchi's meticulously arranged frames, you know something terrible's about to happen. Visually stunning as it is, though, Sansho's outlook is violently bleak, as summed up by the song the mother sings to remember her children: "Isn't life a torture?"

For Mizoguchi's contemporary Yasujiro Ozu, life was less a torture than a series of disappointments. In Late Autumn, the best of the five films in the Late Ozu boxed set, three graying salarymen conspire to find husbands for their late friend's widow and his daughter, while admitting that their own marriages have hardly been happy affairs. Old but not wise, they scheme behind both women's backs, deaf to the fact that neither one wants to marry. As a younger man, Ozu's films were world-weary, but here he moves close to a kind of not-unhappy resignation, a sense that happiness lies in inaction rather than its opposite. As one inept plotter finally realizes, "It's people who complicate life. Life is surprisingly simple."

The simplicity of Ozu's films is deceptive, a way of focusing on the essential. Repeating plots, angles and color scheme, he gives the sense of a contiguous universe where the details change but the struggle to make life meaningful rarely alters. Filmed just after his international breakthrough Tokyo Story, Early Spring and Tokyo Twilight repeat that film's turn toward melodrama with less success, while Equinox Flower and The End of Summer find him working in more muted tones � quite literally, as the late-life switch to color seemed to coincide with a an overall mellowing. Although Eclipse's sets are devoid of extras, Ozu's films are best watched together, making this modestly priced five-pack an ideal way to experience the depth of his oeuvre.

Based on the true story of a spree killer's 78-day flight from the police, Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine seems like the polar opposite of his countryman's meticulous modesty. The murders carried out by Ken Ogata's opaque killer are bloody and brutal, animalistic acts without reason or sanctifying grace. The movie juts back and forth in time, placing two murders up front and telling us that there were five victims in all, leaving the final three (one of which occurs offscreen) hanging over our heads for the better part of an hour. The structure is deliberately disorienting, so much as to seem arbitrary, but a pattern, more intuited than explicable, emerges, as does a visual scheme favoring shocks of red against muted backdrops. Shifting focus for a time to the killer's wife and father-in-law, who are tempted to their own kind of animal behavior, Vengeance creates a world where base instincts are always threatening to break through, even if (as in one gruesome scene) you scald them with boiling water.

Repressive tendencies prompt an even greater cataclysm in If.... , where Malcolm McDowell's wild-eyed rebel bristles against the strictures of British boarding-school life. Lindsay Anderson's 1968 allegory is often regarded as a classic, and the voices on Criterion's disc credit the film with forecasting the Parisian student revolts of that same year. But Anderson's fable-making is flabby and undisciplined, and its vision of freedom (naked girls! motorcycles!) paltry and dated. Still, McDowell's performance is just about good enough to save the lot, bridging the gulf between wish-fulfillment and id unleashed as he later would in A Clockwork Orange.

Speaking of id, the second volume of Paramount's Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis Collection boxes five of the duo's latter-day films, including Pardners, Hollywood or Bust, Living It Up, You're Never Too Young and Artists and Models. The gems are Hollywood and Artists, both directed by former animator Frank Tashlin. Tashlin's work with living cartoons like Jayne Mansfield could be antic past the point of tolerability, but Martin's calming presence smooths things out like the vermouth in a good martini. Gorgeously replicating the original's VistaVision color, the Artists transfer vividly showcases Tashlin's graphic genius.

For wide-screen mastery, however, it's hard to beat Sergio Leone, whose classic westerns are (finally) collected in one MGM box. Deluxe discs of the Man with No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) as well as Duck, You Sucker have been out overseas for years, but the wait's been worth it, since the box includes the foreign editions' sterling transfers and commentaries in addition to the films' original mono soundtracks, which are vastly superior to their too-busy surround-sound remixes. One sour note: The box only includes the inferior expanded version of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, with 18 minutes of superfluous footage that's at best negligible and at worst undermining. Care to restore the original cut?

(s_adams@citypaper.net)