Touch of Evil: Three Versions of an Orson Welles Masterpiece

Textual authenticity is a central issue in the work of Orson Welles. The director saw so many of his films altered in the editing room by his producers that only a few of his completed pictures can be said to fully represent his original intentions. 

This has made the prospect of releasing "restorations" of Welles' films on DVD a bit complicated. Some of his pictures exist in multiple versions; some exist only in a single, bastardized version; and many of his films were never completed at all. 

The Criterion Collection set the standard for Welles releases a couple of years back with the company's three-disc set of Mr. Arkadin. There was no single version of that film that could be said to represent the director's original vision, so Criterion released all of them, including a "composite" version which attempted to recreate the film according to written evidence and best guesses as to the director's intent. None of these versions are the final word; Criterion simply put all the material out there for viewers to make of it what they will. 

Universal's new 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil follows this model, and the two-disc set is precisely the sort of release that is sorely needed for the Welles canon. Containing all three extant versions of the film, it provides an excellent perspective on the shape and scope of this 1958 noir masterpiece. 

Among the many Welles films that were altered and re-edited without his consent, Touch of Evil might be said to have fared the best, or perhaps suffered least. The studio-sanctioned version, released in 1958, was a lesser film than what Welles had intended, but studio interference could not subdue or destroy the power of Welles' imagery and narrative. 

However, years later, a longer cut was found, and for decades this version supplanted the original version, as it was believed to be at least slightly closer to Welles' intent. 

In 1998, Rialto released a new version, re-edited in accordance with a 58-page memo Welles sent to Universal after having previewed the studio's truncated version of his film. The restoration was not a "director's cut," for Welles never completed his own final cut before the studio removed him from the project. Nor was Welles' memo a plea to return entirely to his original design. Welles' memo took into account new footage shot by the studio without his involvement, dismissing some of it yet praising some of it as well. The memo was essentially an attempt at cooperation and diplomacy, saying to the studio, "Given what we have now, here's how we can make this a great picture." 

The restored version is, for the most part, a significant improvement. Welles' editing patterns were restored, including his elaborate cross-cutting between two story lines; the score and soundtrack were reshaped in accordance with his requests; and the credits were moved from the opening sequence to the end, offering an unobstructed view of one of the most spectacular opening shots ever filmed. 

Critics still found plenty wrong, suggesting that the pacing in the second half of the film was too slow. Some preferred one of the previous versions to the new, but until now the restoration was the only version available on DVD. 

To finally be able to see all three side by side, to compare the repercussions of every edit and adjustment, is a gift for Welles fans. Hopefully similar releases will follow, with multiple versions of his landmark works: Hamlet and Othello, both before and after their soundtracks were altered; The Stranger and Lady From Shanghai, with descriptions, stills, storyboards and shooting scripts to explain Welles' original visions for those films and how they were dramatically cut and reshaped by his producers; and perhaps one day someone will finally discover missing footage of The Magnificent Ambersons, and we may perhaps get an approximation of the masterpiece that might have been. 

Universal's Touch of Evil stands in contrast to Image Entertainment's release of Welles' unfinished opus, Don Quixote, which offers a 1992 recreation — a purely hypothetical one — of what Welles intended with this highly amorphous project. 

It is not Image's fault that so little of Welles' Quixote footage is available. The company has endeavored to present us with what is essentially the only available home video release of Quixote, and there is merit in that. But what's available is, unfortunately, a butchered and largely discredited restoration project undertaken by a one-time Welles associate who had nothing to do with this particular film. 

Don Quixote was indeed a quixotic adventure for Welles, a project he worked on for decades. He was questioned about it so often he threatened to release it under the title When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? It still isn't quite certain if he ever intended to finish Quixote. Writers and painters have works they keep for themselves, he once said; why not filmmakers? 

Shot independently and often on the fly over many years, Welles outlived the two principal actors—Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff—and in fact, never had a final script. The film was largely improvised, using available locations, actors and conditions to fashion his narrative. 

In 1992, Jess Franco, who served as an assistant to Welles on Chimes at Midnight, obtained as much Quixote footage as he could, re-recorded much of the dialogue and music, and edited the footage into something resembling a film. Though there are many excellent shots and scenes, and plenty of evidence of good performances and dialogue, the result is not the least bit impressive. 

The odds were against Franco, but indeed the odds were so bad that there was really no reason to go through with the project. Legal battles kept him from obtaining much of the footage, including perhaps the most arresting scene—available for viewing on YouTube—of Quixote in a movie theater, drawing his sword and stepping up to rescue a celluloid maiden by slashing the screen to ribbons. Without the film's most innovative and famous scene, how could any completed version claim relevance? 

But even without these omissions, the project should not have been attempted. After all, Welles himself claimed that he kept the footage scattered in various storage facilities to prevent a project like this one from being attempted without his consent. He didn't want some hack to try to assemble this, his most cherished and personal film, into some dim-witted, half-formed movie. His was a unique and idiosyncratic vision that could not be replicated, even with the best of intentions. 

One day perhaps this film too will be given a decent DVD release. Done properly, it would simply gather all the existing footage like a documentary, grouping scenes for clarity but otherwise with no attempt to structure it as a narrative. It wouldn't make for a great commercial success certainly, but rather it would present us with something of a historical document, allowing us to see Don Quixote as it exists — as a mass of footage lovingly shot but never fully edited. In other words, leave the incomplete film incomplete and let us imagine, as we must with so many of Welles' films, what might have been. 

Touch of Evil (1958). 95 minutes / 109 minutes / 111 minutes. Universal. $26.99. 

Orson Welles' Don Quixote (1992). 115 minutes. www.image-entertainment.com. 

Widescreen Suspense: Kurosawa's High and Low

Akira Kurosawa, more than any other filmmaker, is strongly associated with the samurai genre. And with a body of work that includes Yojimbo, Sanjurio, Throne of Blood, Rashoman, Seven Samurai and Ran, it is certainly understandable. But Kurosawa was not limited to period pictures.

High and Low, Kurosawa's gripping adaptation of a novel by Ed McBain, could be called a genre masterpiece, and yet it is hardly limited to any particular genre. Tense psychological drama gives way to police procedural which in turn gives way to noirish, expressionist melodrama.

The film begins with a long sequence that never ventures outside the protagonist's home. Toshiro Mifune is introduced as business tycoon Kingo Gondo, and quickly enough the plot develops — a child has disappeared, though as it will turn out, it is not the right child. An unknown kidnapper seeks ransom from Gondo but has accidentally abducted the child of Gondo's chauffeur. No matter — the extortion plan will continue as planned.

What follows is an extended sequence of beautiful widescreen compositions within a room full of people — Gondo, his wife and chauffeur, and a bevy of policeman on the case. Kurosawa choreographs a tour de force of shifting compositions as actors move across the space, their relationships and dilemmas exemplified as they turn toward and away from each other, move forward and recede and traverse the wide frame, crossing, blocking and boxing each other in.

A moral dilemma is being systematically examined here, and Kurosawa sticks with it, milking every bit of tension, every scheming angle to full effect. It is a dilemma of some complexity: Is one child more valuable than another? Is a child's life worth a man's dreams and goals and wealth? Can Gondo be expected to throw away the dreams of a lifetime with no certainty of recompense, or of even of getting the child back? Kurosawa fills the frame with people, using his camera to make their relationships manifest. And the panoramic view of the city from Gondo's house on a hill reminds us of his vulnerability. The man who once seemed to stand above the city like a lord is now held captive by an unseen enemy below; the house on the hill is no longer a watchtower, but a cage that can be assaulted from any angle.

To this point the film has essentially been a chamber piece, but once Gondo makes the decision to pay the ransom the film leaps into action with a breathtaking sequence aboard a train. Kurosawa insisted on a real train, with real cramped passenger cars and real scenery rushing past. He used eight cameras to capture the action almost entirely in real time. The result is a stunning sequence of taught action, compelling drama and unyielding suspense. And once the sequence comes to its emotional conclusion, at the film's one-hour mark, it is the end of a chapter and the beginning of what amounts to an entirely new film.

In the next hour High and Low becomes a gripping police procedural, following investigators as they follow leads and report their findings. Their excursions into the field are interspersed like flashbacks much like in Fritz Lang's M. Gondo slips out of the spotlight as the plot shifts to the battle between the police inspector and the kidnapper, one dedicated to ensuring Gondo's sacrifice doesn't go unavenged, and the other bent on the great tycoon's destruction.

Kurosawa maintains the tension throughout, as clues unravel into facts and facts lead to the criminal. Credulity may be strained slightly with the police delay the kidnapper's capture in order to hit him with more serious charges, resulting in a death, but the film never lets up. And once he is apprehended, the film once again adopts another tone, delving further into social commentary as the kidnapper and Gondo confront one another before the window slams shut and the film comes to an end.

High and Low (1964). 143 minutes. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

Cinematic Haiku: An Autumn Afternoon

By contrast with the dynamic action of his better known contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu sought to minimize the kinetic drama of his films. Ozu does not reach out and grab ahold of the viewer with startling compositions and frenetic movement; he holds his camera still and makes the viewer come to him. 

Ozu's style is like haiku. His imagery, his characters and dialogue are stripped to their essence; performances are purged of nuance, of subtley and naturalism, reduced to precise movements. Endless takes where the director chiseled away at his actors' mannerisms might have resulted in stilted performances, but instead Ozu and his company produce pure, streamlined poetry. Like the decor and architecture surrounding them, the actors are spare and minimalist by design, and Ozu uses similarly spare and minimalist camerawork to film them, keeping his camera as still, as zen-like and as patient as he asks his actors and his audience to be. 

The reticence of his characters and the austerity of his style may leave the impatient viewer a bit restless. The first 20 minutes or so of an Ozu film may seem both slow and confusing as characters are introduced almost in mid-conversation. Ozu doesn't insert clumsy expository introductions into his characters' mouths to help orient the viewer. Instead he thrusts us directly into the scene and allows relationships and connections to gradually become clear. On the surface it may appear that we are simply listening in on a series of polite conversations, broken up here and there by a few of Ozu's characterisitic transition shots — still life images of rooms, hallways, furniture, streets and buildings. But situation piles upon situation and character upon character until a full and rich world has been created, almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it dawns on us that not only do we know these characters, we care about them and have somehow become invested in them. 

This is not the identification that comes from cheap pandering or directorial manipulation, from simpering, soft-focus close-ups or crescendos of tear-jerking orchestral notes; it is instead the measure of Ozu's artisanship, of his unique talent for rendering a film with the depth of a novel — his ability, as both a writer and director, to fully and eloquently express the thoughts, dreams, emotions and desires of his characters to the point that we cannot help but take an active interest in their welfare. 

An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's final film, reflects his late-career interest in the shift to post-war modernity. Japan's increasingly Americanized culture is a central issue in the director's later work, with new attitudes, priorities and interests widening the gap between old and young, between parents and their adult children. The nation's newfound prosperity simultaneously enriches, distracts and destroys the lives of the middle class; wealth purchases convenient appliances and luxury goods but opens the door to the creeping malaise of materialism and threatens to undermine the old social order. 

An Autumn Afternoon dwells on a theme he had worked before, that of a parent facing the unwelcome decision to marry off a daughter and thus embrace a new life without her presence. Ozu's films often deal with such generational issues, of the young leaving behind the aged. It is one of several themes that he returned to in film after film throughout his career, using different characters and situations to more fully examine the complexity of the issues at hand. It is a common joke that Ozu's films are essentially interchangeable, in style, in theme, and in the similarity of their titles: Early Spring, Late Spring, Late Autumn, Autumn Afternoon, etc. And while there is some truth in that observation, once you immerse yourself in Ozu's world you see that though nearly all of his films share a certain aesthetic, they are remarkably distinct from one another, each as rich, as engaging, as distinct as the faces of the actors he photographed. 

Criterion has released many of Ozu's films on DVD over the years, both in stand-alone editions and in the more recent line of Eclipse box sets. The "Silent Ozu" collection presented three of his early silent family comedies, and "Late Ozu" presented five of his late-career films. But Criterion did not include An Autumn Afternoon in that collection, opting instead to release it as a separate title. It was a good decision. While all of Ozu's later films are excellent, An Autumn Afternoon is essentially the culmination of a directorial style that evolved over several decades. The spaces Ozu leaves between scenes and between characters are deftly handled, wistful and open-ended; his compositions are as balanced and precise and idiosyncratic as ever; his use of color bold yet understated, with blacks and whites offset by strategic dashes of red; and his everyday themes as sincere, as universal, and as heartrending as the medium will allow. 

An Autumn Afternoon (1962). 113 minutes. $29.95. Criterion Collecton. www.criterion.com. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women

Director Kenji Mizoguchi secured his international reputation in the early 1950s with such films as Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu, and Ugetsu. His output was prolific and varied, but the plight of women was a recurring interest throughout his career, with many of his films centered on strong, resilient women characters. 

Criterion has released "Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women," a box set in the company's Eclipse series that features four films that focus on the plights of women among the lower strata of Japanese society. 

The set includes two of Mizoguchi's early sound films (Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, both from 1936), a mid-career gem (Women of the Night, 1948) and the great director's final film (Street of Shame, 1956). All use the topic of prostitution to examine the hardships faced by women in a patriarchal society that renders them helpless without the aid of men. 

Sisters of the Gion follows two sisters and their vastly different approaches to life and their profession. Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) is ruthless, manipulative and grimly pragmatic, determined to use whomever she can to claw her away above her meager station. Her bold, gritty crassness calls to mind Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers from the 1934's Baby Face. Omocha's sister Umekici (Yoko Umemura) is far more fatalistic, resigned to her station in life. Neither approach works out too well in the end as the women are still unable to get ahead and are finally reduced to despair. 

Mizoguchi's final film, Street of Shame, was originally to be shot with a documentary approach, taking his camera and crew to the Yoshiwara, Edo's red-light district. However, ongoing political battles seeking to ban prostitution made brothel owners wary of participating in a project that would bring them unwanted attention at a sensitive time, forcing Mizoguchi to return to the studio. 

Street of Shame tracks the lives of five prostitutes at a brothel called Dreamland. Again, one is manipulative and ruthless; Yasumi lends money to her colleagues at ever-increasing interest rates, and entices a young, lovestruck businessman to embezzle from his employer with the false hope that she will one day marry him. Mickey, a brash young beauty who dresses like a 1950s American high school girl, has sought the geisha life as an almost welcome reprieve from life under the oppressive reign of a neglectful and possibly abusive father. Yorie clings to the idea of marriage as her salvation, but when she finally takes the plunge she finds she has only escaped into a life of loveless drudgery. Hanae has a young child and an unemployed husband and is thus the only breadwinner in the family. When her husband attempts suicide, she tackles him and hits him, demonstrating with her wordless fury that his supreme act of self-pity would have rendered moot the enormity of her sacrifice. Yumeko left the country to work as a prostitute in order to support her son, hoping that he would be able to support her when he grew to manhood. Now a young man, the son comes to the city to inform his mother that he will be taking a job at a factory, but when he learns how she has been supporting him over the years, he turns on her. 

Street of Shame was a commercial success and a few months after its release, prostitution was outlawed in Japan, with many attributing at least some of the credit to Mizoguchi and his final film. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women. $59.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

Osaka Elegy (1936). 71 minutes. 

Sisters of the Gion. (1936). 69 minutes. 

Women of the Night. (1948). 74 minutes. 

Street of Shame. (1956). 85 minutes. 

2008 Berkeley Video and Film Festival Showcases the Indie Spirit

Time and time again we’ve seen the word “independent” co-opted by the very corporate forces the independents claim independence from: “indie” record labels engulfed by a corporate parent; “indie” film festivals that draw Hollywood’s A-List roster to remote Western boomtowns. 

Well, there’s at least one independent film festival that has not only retained its true indie character, but prides itself on a “celebrity-free” environment. 

East Bay Media Center’s 17th annual Berkeley Video and Film Festival starts Saturday at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley, running Friday through Sunday and screening more than 50 films. Shows start at 7:30 p.m. Friday and at 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and continue to nearly midnight each night. 

This year’s program features the usual eclectic blend of wide-ranging fare, from student films to experimental short subjects to feature-length films with a high-gloss sheen—all of them truly independent and all of them unlike anything showing at your local megaplex. 

Things get off to an offbeat start Friday with Emma Strebel’s 45-second Self Portrait, an art project she says developed from “a radical intervention to remedy my head lice.” Get your popcorn early. 

Next up is Eli Akira Kaufman’s California King, a surprisingly moving tale of a mattress salesman who uses his lofty position to bed his more attractive female customers. That is, until he meets one that stirs more than his libido. Like a minimalist short story, the 22-minute California King manages to convey much about its characters with little or no background information; we know their states of mind without needing to know the details. It’s a pared-down love story, with no frills and really no surprises; it simply tells a simple story well. 

Another short subject, Attila Szasz’s Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (30 minutes), takes us in another direction entirely with a story that employs a touch of science fiction in a sort of dark parable of marriage and parenthood. When a work-a-holic scientist uses a formula to make his son invisible, he widens the rift between father and mother and child with tragic results. 

Screening between those two short films are two even shorter films, together adding up to just five minutes, but which open up a brand new world of filmmaking. George Aguilar, who created one of the best films in last year’s festival (The Diary of Niclas Gheiler), returns with two examples from his series of virtual films. Aguilar has immersed himself in the online world of Second Life and has used his avatar, an artist-borg by the name of Cecil Hirvi, to create a series of cinematic poems. The first film, Virtual Starry Night, shows Hirvi stepping into a 3-D world constructed by Second Life users based on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. The second film, First Love of a Borg, consists of camera movements that sensually trace the contours of a metallic sculpture of a ballerina on display in a virtual museum. 

Festival director Mel Vapour may have to put an asterisk behind his “celebrity-free” claim this year when poet Michael McClure makes an appearance Friday night. McClure will be on hand to answer questions following a screening of Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure, a 34-minute film that features that Beat Generation poet reading his own work and offering perspectives on his contemporaries. 

The festival’s opening night concludes with Fix (93 minutes), a feature by Tao Ruspoli. Shawn Andrews carries the film with a charismatic performance and a devilish grin that conveys love and arrogance and dissipation all at once. The film’s conceit—a cinephile films every aspect of his life, even as he ventures to Los Angeles to bail his drug-addict brother out of jail and get him into rehab—wears thin after a while, as the device of the first-person camera requires that much screen time be spent defending and justifying it. And the technique lends far less sympathy to the characterizations than Ruspoli probably hoped for. But when it works it strikes an almost voyeuristic tone that makes some scenes come to life. 

Saturday’s screenings include two documentaries. The first, Road to Bonneville (60 minutes), follows two hot-rod builders as they trek across the country in their homemade vintage race cars to the salt flats of Utah, spouting homespun, geeked-out hot rod jargon all the way. Documentaries can bring us into close contact with subcultures we might never otherwise encounter, and Road to Bonneville does just that, giving us a glimpse of a unique and highly specialized world. 

Stop the Presses (80 minutes) is another kind of documentary, giving us an extensive cataloging of a vexing societal problem, in this case the slow-motion death spiral of the newspaper industry. Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza traveled the country and conducted more than 100 interviews to produce this examination of the shifting American media landscape and what it portends for the future, for an informed citizenry, and for the First Amendment. It’s hardly news to news industry insiders of course, but it elucidates for the uninformed the ramifications for democracy once the watchdogs have been put down. 

Tate Taylor’s feature Pretty Ugly People (100 minutes) closes out the festival’s second night. An animated prologue introduces us to Lucy, an overweight woman who undergoes gastric bypass surgery and stages a dramatic reunion to surprise her friends with her new body. But while attempting to enjoy the good and svelte life with them on an extended camping trip, a series of encounters with each friend’s dark side shows her that life isn’t necessarily all that better for the trim and fit. 

Also included in this year’s program are two Chilean features. Just to make things confusing, Sabado screens on Domingo, depicting a real-time drama of a marriage that falls apart just as it is about to begin. The film, with the exception of a single edit, appears to be shot in real time, using its 63 minutes to follow a would-be bride as she discovers her fiancé’s secret, confronts him with it, and then concocts a plan for moving forward, documenting it all with the help of a student cameraman. As with Fix, the first-person camera can be trying at times, and again the script and actors are called upon to continually justify its presence, but it adds up to a fun little experiment in cinema verite. 

The best feature film of the festival is also the strangest. Malta con Huevo is another Chilean entry and it’s quirky from the start as Vladimir, a sketchy cad-about-town, wakes up to find that he has somehow jumped ahead in time a few weeks. Yet when he sleeps and wakes again, he’s back where he began, and no one seems to know what he’s blathering about. We suspect early enough that his signature beverage of malt beer and raw eggs is playing tricks on his mind, but soon enough the film takes a stark left turn as a more nefarious and absurd comic-horror plot reveals itself. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival. One-day passes ($13, $10 for students and seniors) are available starting Friday at the Shattuck Cinemas box office, 2230 Shattuck Ave. 464-5980. One-day and three-day passes ($30) are available in advance at East Bay Media Center, 1939 Addison St. 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org.

Vampyr: The Indelible Imagery of Carl Th. Dreyer

Ten years after the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first and greatest of all vampire films, Carl Th. Dreyer released Vampyr (1932), the next great vampire film, and one that took the genre in a new direction. Vampyr is the vampire film reduced to its essence, to an unrelenting flow of eerie imagery, off-kilter camera movements and a hushed soundscape consisting of sparse, enigmatic dialogue and a muted, foreboding score. Less plot than impressionist montage, the film is an almost surrealist blend of unexplained actions and haunted faces. Imagine Dracula as presented by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. 

Criterion has released the film in a two-disc DVD set, complete with bonus features that include an interview with Dreyer, a commentary track, and a book containing the original script and the novella on which Dreyer claimed the film was based—though the final product bears little resemblance to its source. 

The film itself looks superb, though it is still not quite the film Dreyer would have wanted us to see. It’s a sound film—the director’s first—produced in several different languages. Dreyer shot Vampyr silent, his actors reading the lines in several languages and later synching the different scores for release in various countries. However, the only version that currently exists in a form suitable for restoration is the German, and thus we are left with something he tried mightily to avoid: his mesmerizing images are overlaid with the distraction of subtitles. Still, given the fate of other Dreyer films, we’re lucky to have any version at all. 

At the time, Vampyr seemed a most unlikely project for Dreyer. While it was certainly within reason to expect another masterpiece from this uncompromising filmmaker, Dreyer isn’t the first name that comes to mind when discussing the horror film. After all, this was the man who made The Passion of Joan of Arc just a few years earlier, a powerful and uncompromsing avant garde film that to this day remains one of cinema’s artistic masterpieces. 

Dreyer made just 14 films in his career and no two of them alike, altering his style and approach, often radically, to fit his subject matter. He began his career in the silent era in his native Denmark, creating several well-regarded works before venturing into the greater European film industry in search of more plentiful resources and increased autonomy. One of his films from this era, Mikaël (1924), a German production that showed at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, is considered one of the landmarks of early gay cinema. 

But nothing in that oeuvre would quite prepare a viewer for what came next. 

Dreyer went to France to make a film based on the trial of Joan of Arc. Joan had only recently been sainted after centuries of excommunication, and though the French were eager to see a film about her, they were more than a little chagrined to find the task handed over to a Dane, and the role of Joan given to an Italian. Rene Falconetti was a stage actress and a very successful one; The Passion of Joan of Arc would be her first and only screen appearance, and thus for decades she has been associated in the public mind with this role, a stunning performance of grace, passion, dignity and sorrow. 

Stylistically, it is a radical departure, not just from Dreyer’s previous work, but from virtually anything that came before it. Dreyer relied almost exclusively on close-ups and text to tell the tale, relegating the vast sets to relative obscurity, only allowing them to be glimpsed in a few sequences. The film was a commercial failure, and was recut and altered into many different forms, depending on the prevailing political forces in whichever county it was being presented in. The original negative was lost to fire, and Dreyer re-composed the film from alternate takes; that version too was lost to fire. For decades Passion then was considered lost forever, with no surviving prints of Dreyer’s original film known to exist, until one was accidentally discovered in 1986 in a supply closet in a Norwegian mental institution. 

After observing the fate of Passion, Dreyer sought a bit less controversial and more commercially viable project for his next film, and settled on horror as a genre which was not only popular, but conducive to artistic independence; horror films of the silent era had managed to go relatively untouched by censors while remaining uncompromising in artistic merit. 

The result is a moody, atmospheric film modeled on the horror genre but more restrained, more obscure and more elliptical in its examination of terror, mystery and the occult. Dreyer’s expressive camera work involves wonderfully disorienting movements that shuttle the camera from one indelible image to another. As the camera circles around rooms, the lens distorts the field of vision, causing walls to appear to shift and move, leaving the viewer at all times on uneven ground, with little in the plot or in the visual terrain to anchor oneself. This is not your typical horror film; it is a dreamlike and hallucinatory experience that is content to leave much of its mystery unresolved. 

Consecutive commercial failures left Dreyer unemployed for more than a decade afterward, either unwilling or unable to mount another production. He returned in 1943 with Day of Wrath, followed by Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964), all of which, along with The Passion of Joan of Arc, are also available in Criterion editions. 

Vampyr (1932). 75 minutes. $39.95. Criterion. www.criterion.com. 

Anthony Mann's The Furies

Ambition, deception, manipulation and dispossession: The Furies (1950), Anthony Mann's genre-defying noir-epic-western-melodrama, has enough treachery and love and treacherous love to fill several pictures. 

Mann brought everything he had learned during his apprenticeship in the world of noir — even his cinematographer — to this, one of his first forays into the western, a genre to which he had long aspired. Also completed and released that same year was Winchester '73, one of the more famous and accomplished of Mann's westerns, and the first of many collaborations with Jimmy Stewart. 

Winchester '73, along with Mann's later westerns, especially the ones featuring Stewart, has long overshadowed The Furies. And while there may be plenty of justification for that fact — Mann having matured greatly as a director over time — The Furies does not deserve to be overlooked. For while it is certainly a flawed film, it has more than its merits: fascinating dynamics, superb photography, and excellent performances by Walter Houston and Barbara Stanwyck, two formidable actors at the peak of their talents in their portrayal of a father-daughter relationship so Freudian that it borders on incest. 

Houston, in his final screen appearance, delivers a delightfully hammy portrayal of a ham-fisted tycoon, a lordly lord of the manor forever seeking to re-establish his prowess and power. Houston plays it for all it's worth, making his T.C. Jeffords into a brawling blowhard, full of bluster and braggadocio. As with his celebrated role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Houston manages to walk the line of histrionic bombast without quite slipping into caricature, rendering Jeffords by turns a tyrant and a fool, but always a man—human, humane and fallible. 

Stanwyck is at her steely, brassy best as Jeffords' daughter, a wild, tempestuous siren of a tomboy and heiress to his sprawling New Mexico ranch. Stanwyck manages once again to defy her era's gender stereotypes; her Vance Jeffords is strong-willed, wily and tough as the rugged landscape she oversees. And yet her beauty, sensuality and charismatic self-confidence, even arrogance, make her as alluring as any eye-batting southwestern belle. 

The bond between father and daughter is as sexual as it is familial, and as ruthless as it is tender. T.C. and Vance admire each other with a curious gleam in their eyes, looking upon each other with equal parts fascination and wariness. The proud T.C. does not want to give up an inch of his domain, while Vance is eager to prove herself every bit as much a ruthless tycoon as her father by taking over his role. Mann squares them off in face-to-face compositions, each leaning toward the other in shots that convey both aggression and love. T.C. is frequently pictured in his office, where mounted bull horns on the wall perch just above his head, signaling both his swaggering arrogance and his susceptibility to the feints and jabs of the stoic Rip Darrow, played by Wendell Corey with the haughty stillness of a matador. 

Criterion has given the film the full treatment, with an excellent (if phallic symbol-obsessed) commentary by film historian Jim Kitses, and a pressing of the novel by Niven Busch on which the film was based. 

The Furies (1950). 109 minutes. Criterion Collection. $39.95. www.criterion.com. 

Death of a Cyclist

It starts with a cold and cold-hearted opening scene. On a fog-shrouded road amid a desolate, Godot-like landscape, a cyclist appears in the foreground and heads toward the horizon where the road bends and vanishes. We hear a car swerve and a quick cut presents us with a close-up of the bicycle, twisted and broken with one wheel spinning. A couple steps from the car and the man kneels over the unseen cyclist as his lover stands at a remove, urging him to get back in the car. He does and the car pulls away. 

Juan Antonio Bardem knew how to get an audience on the hook. At a time when the younger generation of European directors—in France, in Italy and in his native Spain—were breaking away from the American influence, Bardem embraced it. The filmmakers of France’s nouvelle vague and Spain’s neo-realist movement were establishing a more intimate, more auteurist style, forsaking light commercial fare for a more topical approach, delving into social and political commentary. While he shared their inclination to make more substantive films, Bardem used different methods, employing all the conventions and devices of conventional Hollywood storytelling in pursuit of a more engaged cinema. 

In Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released on DVD by Criterion, Bardem starts with a perfect Hollywood plot device: a stark, dramatic event which leads to a dramatic shift in fortune for his two lead characters. Only gradually will we piece together an understanding of these two, of their social milieu, their relationship, of their origins, motives and desires. There is a bit of Hitchcock here, a bit of noir, and plenty of A-movie Hollywood, with the luminous Lucia Bosé as a sort of self-absorbed femme fatale version of Ingrid Bergman, and Alberto Closas portraying a coddled ne’er-do-well with a bit of the droll, world-weary nobility of Humphrey Bogart. It’s Casablanca turned on its head, stripped of its romance and pervaded instead with cold calculation and bourgeois disillusionment. 

Out of this tale of adultery, manslaughter, nepotism and blackmail, Bardem spins a story more meaningful and complex, as Closas finds himself on “a journey back to myself,” a long, difficult climb out of the morass of privileged narcissism toward absolution. Though the censors demanded an amended conclusion for Death of a Cyclist, the compromise is handled with great aplomb, coming full circle with a final flourish in which a cyclist must decide whether to report a fatal accident or simply keep pedaling. And in the end the film packs as much punch as any of the more overtly topical films of Bardem’s contemporaries, but with a style that retains all the gloss and sheen of the slick entertainment those films rejected. 

There is one curious moment, however, that I have yet to see explained or even mentioned in discussions of the film. Toward the end, in a shot from the back of a car looking over Lucia Bosé’s shoulder, a mysterious gloved hand appears briefly in the corner of the frame. It’s more than likely an accident, the director or cameraman briefly intruding on the image—though how it could have gone unnoticed in the editing process is anyone’s guess. But could it have been intentional? Could it have meaning? Nowhere else is it suggested that there is someone else in the car, not before and not after, but the subtle suggestion of collusion, of an unseen partner, could greatly alter one’s interpretation of the film’s closing sequence. 

Death of a Cyclist (1955). Directed by Juan Antonio Bardem. Starring Lucia Bosé, Alberto Closas. 88 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

Indiana Jones Loses His Footing

If the Indiana Jones films were never exactly realistic, they were at least grounded; they were rooted in archaeology, in the earth—in the discovery of things ancient and mysterious, yes, but always terrestrial. Jones himself was grounded too, an unlikely hero by turns deft and incompetent, benefiting from equal doses of intelligence and dumb luck. And that made him all the more charming and his adventures all the more appealing. For the wide-eyed child in the audience, there was no need to conjure images of outer space, of aliens or monsters or supernatural powers; all you needed was a hat, a jacket and a rope. The fantasy was all the more effective for containing the illusion that it was within reach.

Throughout the first three films, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg kept the series fairly close to that essential premise. As much as possible, they kept Indiana Jones’ feet on the ground, or at least somewhere beneath—in tunnels, in caverns, in crypts and caves. And that’s precisely where the latest installment loses its footing.

As entertainment, it’s good enough. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is pleasant viewing for two hours, with all the ingredients you expect from the series: ultra-villianous villians who, despite all their diabolical powers, simply can’t shoot straight; mysterious rites and riddles encoded on crumbling parchment; plenty of self-effacing humor, even if it isn’t always all that humorous; and that familiar, charming self-awareness, an attitude that shamelessly embraces the inherent absurdity of the whole enterprise.

The series began as a throwback to the old serials that accompanied the feature each week at movie theaters across America. It was both an homage and a modern update of those cliffhangers of yesteryear, a wild, silly ride through unlikely scenarios, with thrilling action and an utter lack of pretentiousness. It’s hard to expect a series to retain its allure through one sequel much less three, but with nearly 20 years passing since the last film, expectations run abnormally high. So while there’s really not all that much to complain about—it’s still better than much of what passes for action entertainment these days, and takes itself far less seriously—Crystal Skull still manages to lose sight of one of the franchise’s essential charms.

Almost from the start, there’s something not quite right. There are hints of the supernatural waiting at the heart of the mystery, and the plot always seems poised for a plunge into Erich Von Daniken territory. But there’s always the hope that the inherent pragmatism of the character and his creators will reign in the excesses and that the solution will ultimately prove to be terrestrial in origin.

And yet, after two hours of chases that are three minutes longer than you’d like and four minutes longer than necessary, fight scenes with so many punches thrown that it seems there’s a quota in place, and three—count ‘em, three—waterfalls through which John Hurt never loses his grip on the prize, we come to an absurdly un-Indy-like ending that almost renders the hero obsolete during a spectacularly unspectacular special effects sequence. As a swirling paranormal maelstrom of destruction swirls overhead, Jones stands small and silhouetted in the immediate foreground, a mere observer of digital effects that are meaningless, emotionless and, despite all their fury, dramaless. Cast in shadow and virtually inanimate, Indiana looks, for all intents and purposes, like one of us, like a member of the audience just a few rows ahead—and just as irrelevant to the action on screen.

Despite the whirlwind of gimmickry that has been added to the formula, it is the old standbys that still deliver—the snakes, scorpions, quicksand, and, in one of the film’s most effective sequences, a swarming colony of man-eating ants. Lucas and Spielberg could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble had they stuck with the creepy-crawlies and stayed clear of the close encounters.

Three Films Examine the German Conscience

First Run Features has released three provocative films on DVD that delve into the complex consciousness of the German people. From the atrocities of the Holocaust to the repressive post-war socialist government of East Germany, these films offer fascinating glimpses of artists and historians struggling to come to terms with their nation’s past while battling forces—in the form of both the government and the people—who would rather keep such horrors hidden. 

The Second Track 

Joachim Kunert’s The Second Track went unseen for decades, only recently resurfacing and taking its rightful place among Germany’s greatest films. This 1962 noirish thriller examined the burden of the Holocaust on the German conscience at a time when the country as a whole was eager to forget and move on. 

A freight yard inspector stumbles upon a robbery but does not inform the police that he has recognized one of the perpetrators, a man from his past whom he is eager to avoid. This sparks a chain of events in which the inspector’s daughter begins delving into her father’s past as well as her own, uncovering a debilitating cache of Nazi-era secrets. 

The movie is filled with spectacular black and white photography, juxtaposing emotional close-ups with stunning imagery of trains and railroad tracks, of steam drifting across black skies, of glistening cobblestone streets, and impressionistic shots of industrial architecture: freight yard bridges, passageways, stairwells, and gleaming tracks that merge and separate and crisscross the frame. 

The film has been compared to the dark tales of suspense crafted by Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, but its most apparent influence is Carol Reed’s English masterpiece, The Third Man (1949). Traces of that film can be seen in the angled shots, atmospheric nighttime photography and zither score, and most decidedly in the closing shots, which seem to deliberately draw a parallel with the earlier film. But whereas Reed’s film ends with a single long take of the heroine walking toward and past the hero in what amounts to a romantic rejection, The Second Track closes with a much more troubling and ambiguous rejection, as a woman walks along railroad tracks, toward and past a man who turns to follow her until they approach a gate. The gate may represent passage to another plain, but does it lead to a purgatory in which the German people acknowledge and do penitence for the past, or does it mark entry into a hell of recrimination and reproach? And will the these two figures pass through the gate at all? The image fades to black before we find out. 

Extra features include a short film about Second Track’s cinematographer, Rolf Sohre, and an essay and newsreels about the film. 

The Rabbit Is Me 

A few years later, Kurt Maetzig’s The Rabbit Is Me (1965) shined a light on the opportunism, careerism and political calculation that undermined the professed principals of the repressive East German socialist government. 

A young woman’s brother is imprisoned for subversion, though his crime is never revealed to the public or to his family. The sister embarks on an affair with the judge who sentenced her brother, and eventually the truth behind the sentencing is exposed. Though the film was made with solid studio backing, the final product proved too hot to touch, the film’s politics, sexuality and frank moral discussion deemed too dark and skeptical by government censors. 

It was not the only film to draw the government’s ire that year. Many more were likewise banned in the wake of Rabbit Is Me, the whole lot of them thereafter referred to as “the Rabbit films.” The Rabbit Is Me was not screened for the public until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

Rabbit calls to mind the films of the French New Wave, and anticipates the edgy youth-centered films of America in the 1950s. The movie not only challenges the validity of government institutions but sets up a generational conflict between the young heroine and her much older lover, between the energy and idealism of youth and the stodgy, self-interested avarice of the establishment. Maetzig delights in some of the new tools available to filmmakers, most notably the zoom lens, which would become a common fixture in American films of the 1960s and ’70s, allowing the director to create both establishing shots and close-ups without a cut. 

The disc includes a 1999 interview with director Kurt Maetzig and an essay and brief documentary about the banning of the Rabbit films. 

The Unknown Soldier 

First Run has also just released an intriguing documentary, The Unknown Soldier (2006), that tracks the volatile controversy surrounding a museum exhibit that first opened in Germany in 1996. The Wehrmacht Exhibition documented the complicity of the German Army in the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Waffen SS and the Gestapo. For decades, the accepted portrait of the German soldier was that of an innocent pawn, who knew nothing of the crimes being carried out by the Third Reich. While many were oblivious to the horrors of the Holocaust, many were fully aware, and the exhibit featured evidence, in the form of personal letters, photographs and film footage, of knowing collaboration between the army’s common foot soldiers and Hitler’s Nazi forces. The exhibition sparked riotous protests from an outraged populace and revealing a split in the German psyche as the nation struggled to pay tribute to its veterans while confronting once again the horror of its past. 

It wasn’t only the neo-Nazi skinheads who were angry; World War II were incensed, as were the children and grandchildren of deceased soldiers who felt the memories of their loved ones were being tarnished. A second exhibit a few years later, which sought to correct a few troubling issues with the first, elicited a similar response. Michael Verhoeven’s film captures the pain and conflict of a nation caught in the midst of an identity crisis. 

First Run Features. www.firstrunfeatures.com.

The Artistic Restraint of Yasujiro Ozu

Almost from the beginning of the medium, filmmakers sought to exploit cinema’s unique properties. From the moment they could, directors were eager to transcend the limits of traditional theater by putting the camera in motion, by sending it racing, swooping and soaring; by using a variety of lenses to shape the image, to magnify, distort and exaggerate; and by using the editing process to suggest, startle and surprise. 

And while some of the most exciting filmmakers over the past century have been those who found ways to employ these devices with flash and panache, one of the greatest directors the medium has ever produced was one who limited himself to the simplest and most austere techniques. 

Yasujiro Ozu, rather than employing his camera in bravura displays of pyrotechnic virtuosity, used it to simply observe his characters, to linger on their faces, on their homes, on their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. Not for Ozu the moody shadows and vertiginous angles of the expressionists, or the heightened reality and stylized melodrama of Hollywood fare. Ozu was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—no dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic code focused greater attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points would gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes. 

Criterion has just released a three-disc set of Ozu’s early, silent films, called "Silent Ozu." The set is the most recent in the company’s line of Eclipse boxed sets, highlighting lesser-known works, and follows the recent release of "Late Ozu," a five-disc set of films from the last few years of the director’s career. Together the two sets form the bookends of one of cinema’s monumental oeuvres. 

It is a body of work consisting of more than 50 films, nearly all of them created in the same mold, with Ozu’s patient camera calmly observing his characters. He was not interested in dense plots or edge-of-your-seat melodrama; his work was almost literary, owing more to the novel than to film. “Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.” 

Though he is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors, whose cinema captured unique and very specific aspects of that nation’s life and culture, Ozu’s work easily transcends international boundaries, delving into character, relationships and commonplace issues to find the universal. His favored subjects included families and the relationships between generations; the aging process; city life versus rural life; and all the values that complement and conflict with one another in the ensuing drama: pragmatism and idealism, love and kindness, justice and forgiveness. “Intellectually we may be different,” said film scholar Donald Ritchie in reference to Ozu’s work, “but emotionally we’re very much the same.”

The three films on this set display Ozu’s remarkable ability to blend comedy with poignant drama.Tokyo Chorus starts with a long comedic sequence that soon seems like a wild digression as young men engage in a series of pranks and gaffes under the stern gaze of a schoolmaster. But once the sequence is over and the Chaplinesque hijinks have concluded, the film takes on a more somber tone, following the hardships of one of the young men as he grows up, struggles to support a family, and in the process learns humility, compromise and the value of friendship. But eventually, Ozu brings the film full circle, and the connections with the earlier scenes are made not only clear but dramatically satisfying. 

These early films also give us a glimpse of a side of Ozu not visible in his later, more well-known work. A clever use of the moving camera draws parallels between the toil of children at school and the toil of clerks at the office. And a sustained bit of Lubitsch-style humor plays up the methods by which the workers attempt to glean the details of each others’ end-of-year bonuses. 

I Was Born, But... examines the difficulties both of children growing up and of their parents in handling them. A man’s young sons brawl with the local kids in their new neighborhood to assert their dominance, and once they do they exercise their power without restraint. Later their father falls from his figurative pedestal as they witness him kowtowing to his boss, the father of one their schoolyard underlings. What follows is both a loss of innocence and a tough lesson in parenting, as the father tries to express the realities of adulthood and the boys learn that there are other ways to get along than by thundering in the brush and pounding one’s chest like a baboon. 

On display in these early films are some of the techniques that Ozu would employ throughout his career: the floor-height vantage points that place his camera at eye level as his characters sit on the traditional tatami; and the alternating dialogue shots in which each character looks directly at the camera, placing the viewer right in the middle of the exchange, allowing greater identification with each character, with each argument and with each perspective. 

The End of Summer, from the "Late Ozu" collection, demonstrates the tenacity with which Ozu stuck to his principles of filmmaking throughout his career. In this, his penultimate film, we see Ozu and his actors spin the same complex web of dreams and desires, motives and secrets. The family patriarch, a widower, seeks the company of his long-estranged mistress in his twilight years, much to the chagrin of his children. Meanwhile the next generation is struggling to maintain the family business he has left in their care. The film examines the issues faced by three generations of the family as they clash, argue and try to understand one another. There is no ill will involved, just the understated spectacle of people at different stages of life, trying to get on. Along the way, we see them share, deceive, sacrifice and scheme, but they are always human, always sympathetic and always compelling. 

And herein lies much of the appeal of Ozu’s films: His calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also deeply care about them—to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions—so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.” 

This is the essential sadness and loneliness that resides at the core of Ozu’s work—the awareness of the inevitability of change and that beginnings are followed all too soon by endings. 

"Silent Ozu." 3-disc set. $44.95. 

"Late Ozu." 5-disc set. $69.95. 

www.criterion.com.

Scorsese and the Stones: Shine a Light

You may ask, Why another Rolling Stones concert film? Aren’t they a tad past their prime? And haven’t these guys had enough camera time over the past 45 years? 

The answer is simple: Not only is it unprecedented for a rock ’n’ roll band to stay together this long, to keep recording and performing well into their 60s, but the Stones are undoubtedly a better live band today than they’ve ever been. 

Martin Scorsese’s new concert film, Shine a Light, showing at Shattuck Cinemas and in an IMAX version at San Francisco’s Metreon, captures the latter-day Stones in its current incarnation as the hardest-working band in show business. 

The dynamics of the band’s performances have changed over the years, and at nearly every significant stage of their development they’ve had a great director drop in to document the proceedings. In the early 1960s they were a British white-boy blues band, with much of their repertoire drawn from the songbooks of their Chicago blues idols: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy. By the late ’60s, the band was something quite different, having carved out its own identity with a unique sound that blended their influences into an idiosyncratic new brand of rock. The band’s image had grown darker, and their live shows began to take on a somewhat menacing air—the Stones seemed genuinely dangerous. The era reached its conclusion with the infamous free concert at Altamont in which a man was murdered by Hell’s Angels right in front of the stage, a harrowing moment caught on film in the first of the great films about the Stones, Gimme Shelter. 

By the early ’70s the aura of danger had faded a bit, and the Stones took on an air of camp rock ’n’ roll decadence, dabbling in reggae and disco, glitter and makeup, and staging ever more outrageous live performances. Once again, they were put on the big screen in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. In the 1980s, the Stones set out on rock’s first stadium tour, proving that even while pushing 40, they were still the biggest band in the world, and the great director Hal Ashby caught it all on film in Let’s Spend the Night Together. Since that time, as the band morphed into a smoothly run global enterprise, they’ve been competently filmed by a variety of lesser-known directors for the band’s various DVD releases. 

But here they get another great director, one able to go beyond the mechanics and craft of a concert film to strive for something more, to attempt to capture the essence of a live performance and transform it into something distinctly cinematic. 

Critics have complained that Shine a Light isn’t a documentary, that it neither seeks nor provides much insight into the inner workings of the band and the secret to its longevity. These critics are missing the point. There is no shortage of documentaries about the band’s storied career. Perhaps it is true that the definitive Stones documentary has yet to be made, and perhaps Scorsese, coming off well-received films about Bob Dylan and blues, is just the man to do it. But this is not that film. Here Scorsese is simply interested in the performance itself. The Stones have never been particularly introspective, never sentimental, never prone to dwelling on the past. Thus it is entirely fitting that Shine a Light should simply focus on the moment. 

A good concert film first requires a good concert, but more than that it requires an understanding of what makes that concert good. Most of the ingredients are here: a great band at the peak of its form; a great venue, New York’s Beacon Theater, intimate and packed to the rafters; and a great director to capture it all. What is missing from Shine a Light is a true Stones crowd. The occasion was a benefit concert for Global Warming Awareness, with Bill and Hillary Clinton and their vast entourage taking up the center of one balcony. But the real problem is the floor crowd, which Scorsese decided to fill with a bevy of photogenic 20-something women—hardly the Stones’ prime demographic these days. As a result, much of the first few rows are filled with young fillies more focused on being photographed than on the band and the music. Their conspicuous placement and posturing only detracts from the film. 

Still, you’ve never seen such a beautifully photographed concert. Scorsese matches the movement of his cameras to the pace of the band, following guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood around the stage, registering the crack of Charlie Watts’ tightly controlled drumming, and relentlessly pursuing singer Mick Jagger as Jagger relentlessly pursues the audience. Scorsese built a team of top-notch cinematographers to man the 17 cameras that relentlessly traverse the theater to keep pace with the whirling dervish that is Jagger. Low-angle shots transform the lights and ceilings into a dizzying pattern that swirls above the heads of the band as they roam the stage and dart in and out along the catwalk. Close-ups of the guitarists give a glimpse of the band’s unique dual-guitar attack, in which both trade off playing lead and rhythm. And plenty of screen time is given to the cast of backing musicians, most of whom have been touring with the Rolling Stones for at least 20 years, and, in the case of saxophonist Bobby Keyes, for nearly 40. 

And Scorsese never loses sight of the crowd, keeping them dappled in warm light and misty shadow, as much a part of the tableau as the gilded theater and set design. 

Though the set list begins and ends with stalwart Stones classics, 12 of the concert’s 18 songs are lesser-known or at least less-often-performed tracks. After the behind-the-scenes prologue, which, in the IMAX version, is projected at standard movie size, the frame immediately expands to full IMAX size at the first notes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the frenetic pace, rapid editing and flashing lights make the experience a bit overwhelming. But things settle down a bit with “Shattered,” as the Stones settle into gear and highlight album tracks and overlooked gems, with a special emphasis on 1978’s Some Girls album. And in between, Scorsese peppers the film with brief archival clips from interviews with the Stones through the decades, most of them adding a light comedic touch to the proceedings. There is just one misstep, as Scorsese interrupts Richards’ rendition of the rarely performed “Connection” with clips of interviews with the guitarist. 

Fittingly, the one moment where Scorsese’s restless camera comes to a stop, if only for a few seconds, is for a prolonged close-up of guest star Buddy Guy. Fitting because Guy, as one of the still-living icons of the Chicago blues sound of the 1950s, is at the very center of what the Stones are all about. He joins them for a cover of “Champagne and Reefer,” a song by the great Muddy Waters, the man who more than anyone else inspired the Stones’ music and identity. They even took their name from a Waters song. Sure, most of their signature riffs are based on the guitar work of Chuck Berry, and there were myriad other influences along the way. But it was Waters, along with the rest of the electrified, urban, plugged-in Chicago blues masters, that led the way for a quintet of English white boys in the early 1960s. 

The Stones have always been loyal to those roots and paid homage to them, sharing the stage with their idols and helping to bring greater fame to those elder gentlemen, even when it means getting blown off the stage by them. For all of Jagger’s manic energy and cheeky posturing, for all Keith Richards’ swaggering attitude, it is Buddy Guy who summons the essence of the hard, driven sound that inspired them, with his deft, soulful guitar work and powerful, resonant voice. As Guy solos, standing firmly at center stage, the band circles him, surrounding the man like worshippers paying tribute to the sound and spirit which launched them on their five-decade journey.