Fully in the summertime, Criterion follows up one full month of releases with another month of them. While two films from the same year come out with re-editions, five more are new entrants. A nearly forgotten screwball comedy, an underrated ‘70s thriller, a watershed musical film, a documentary on a jazz legend, and one of Canada’s finest films ever made all come out this month. Most are from the most recognizable names in Hollywood, while others are getting their special showcase for the first time.
Midnight (1939)
Claudette Colbert plays an American showgirl who comes to Paris with nothing but an evening gown she wears and crashes the party by playing a wealthy Hungarian baroness. Her new scheme as a homewrecker is quickly caught by a nobleman (John Barrymore) and a cab driver (Don Ameche) who have both fallen for her. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote this witty comedy that cuts through the couture and observes the social hierarchy in their own rules being rigged by an outsider.
Sorcerer (1977)
William Friedkin’s remake of The Wages of Fear doesn’t stray too far from the original story but has its originality, making it stand out. In an isolated Latin American village, four people from different backgrounds (Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou) drive two trucks of highly explosive nitroglycerin through the jungle to extinguish a fire. It’s as intense as the original film, and Friedkin cuts away from the sociopolitical themes in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s version for a straightforward thriller. At the time, production problems, rising costs, and release during the Star Wars phenomenon were seen as negatives against the film, but Sorcerer has been reappraised as a gem of the era.
The Wiz (1978)
Before Wicked, this film was the first to give another perspective on the classic story The Wizard of Oz. Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, and Lena Horne star in the complete retelling set in Harlem and a teacher who is transported to a NYC-like version of Emerald City. It’s the same story put to an R&B soundtrack produced by Quincy Jones, scripted by Joel Schumacher, and directed by Sidney Lumet. Like Sorcerer, The Wiz was not well received upon release, but has also since been looked at again as a cult classic and a cultural moment for African Americans.
Brazil (1985)
The first of two re-editions is Terry Gilliam’s dystopian, autocratic world through the eyes of a bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce) who dreams of something better than this broken-down world. However, it is only just a dream as the world, a satire of Margaret Thatcher’s consumerist ideology, that makes things so bleak and so phony that people can see it yet cannot escape the Orwellian world taking place. Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, and Kim Greist also star in Gilliam’s masterpiece, which remains one of the most visually striking films ever made forty years after its release.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
The second re-edition is Paul Schrader’s biographical story about Japanese author Yukio Mishima and the events leading up to his shocking death. Following Mishima’s life while cutting with excerpts from some of his most famous works, we see him grow from a sickly boy to an adult whose obsession with masculinity and Japanese traditionalism leads Mishima to try a far-fetched idea he brazenly believed could happen. It is both beautiful and horrifying to see the ideas of a man whose words would turn into a crazed ideology for an era that had been nuked out of existence.
Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser (1988)
This documentary on a jazz legend recreates the live performances and closeness to Monk’s unique playing style that made him a force in music. Director Charlotte Zwerin, who had collaborated with David and Albert Maysles on Salesman and Gimme Shelter two decades earlier, worked on her own in unspooling the improvisational Monk as he put together some of the most unique pieces of music ever played. It also shines a light on Monk’s demons that plagued him and how they affected the pianist for the remainder of his life.
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
Instead of a single traditional narrative, director Francois Girard constructs vignettes around the life of the renowned Canadian pianist. Scenes of Gould’s life, interviews with friends, and archive footage that deconstruct Gould’s genius as an artist and his eccentricities that made him one of a kind and a legend. Colm Feore stars as Gould, who would leave live performance behind for a recording studio he would play from for the rest of his life, but is an illumination of a 20th-century virtuoso.
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