Video Dispatches: THE BOYS NEXT DOOR, KUNDUN, Tourneur, Giallo and MARIE ANTOINETTE & LITTLE WOMEN

Video Dispatches is a regular column covering recent home video releases.

Little Women (1994) / Marie Antoinette (2006) – Mill Creek Entertainment

Mill Creek Entertainment, an economy label that is more interested in putting a large quantity of titles out (which is definitely a meritable quality) than curating single titles bolstered by supplemental features, recently released a double-title Blu-ray disc featuring Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (presumably in anticipation of Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of the same title) and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

I suppose in the abstract, these two titles make some amount of sense coupled together: they’re both period-piece adaptations made by women about female adolescence … but these are two very different films. Little Women is a classically structured and formal piece of narrative, while Coppola’s film is nearly absurd in its playfulness, full of anachronisms and decentering rigid preoccupations of royal biopics.

I’m happy to have both readily available in HD, but this is also a case where I know each film deserves the attention that warrants a sole release. I would have loved to see Marie Antoinette get the …royal treatment from a label like Criterion (sitting next to Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides) or one of their peers, where we’re treated to interviews and essays. The film is truly a remarkable achievement that has already made its initial critics look silly. And while I like Armstrong’s film, despite my misgivings regarding its increasingly truncated pacing, I know it has its ardent fans.

I’m not sure what the rights situation for Coppola’s film in the UK, but I hope it gets the boutique treatment sooner or later. Until then, it’s comforting to have it and Armstrong’s film in HD.

The Boys Next Door (1985) – Severin

Twenty years before his sitcom Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen starred opposite another man, Maxwell Caulfield, in Penelope Spheeris’s on-the-run punk crime spree film, The Boys Next Door. The film, about two boys who commit a series of escalating crimes in their small California town, is a bold and relentless look at the danger of male anxiety and frustration. It doesn’t seem to have lost any of its wallop in the three decades since its debut.

Severin’s release is a late entry for one of my favorite single-title home video releases in 2019; the transfer is stunning and it’s loaded with features. Spheeris and Caulfield contribute a commentary, and the filmmaker is especially interesting and warm. The two are also on an included interview conducted in 2015 where Spheeris, again, is whip-smart, modest and candid.

Caulfield also does an interview alongside Christopher McDonald, where they talk at length about the content of the film, including the spectacular shopping mall sequence, Sheen as a screen presence and Spheeris as an underground filmmaker. In his interview, Kenneth Cortland also gives insight into working with Spheeris, as well as highlighting the importance of the film’s representation of outsiders.

Kundun (1997) – Kino Lorber

More than a decade ago, I bought a DVD of Martin Scorsese’s neglected film about the 14th Dalai Lama, Kundun, and in the time since, it hasn’t moved off the shelf … until now, when I replaced it with Kino Lorber’s terrific new release of the film, which I immediately popped into my player.

While I was dumb to not watch Scorsese’s film for so long, I felt somewhat fortunate that I left it for a more mature version of myself. Not sure the 20-year-old version of myself would’ve gotten as much out of this piece about the admiration of faith and hatred of violence — which, importantly, was Scorsese’s follow up to Casino. I’m not entirely sure everything in the film works, but this is certainly not the misfire its reputation would lead you to believe. Specifically, the contributions by Scorsese’s collaborators, Roger Deakins, Thelma Schoonmaker and Philip Glass, are immeasurable.

Kino Lorber have given Kundun the special treatment, with a second disc dedicated to a litany of extras, including a feature-length documentary on the making of the film, as well as, among other things, two very long interviews with Scorsese and Glass — all of which are fascinating. This is another incredible release making a strong contender for a spot on the short list of best releases of the year.

Great Day in the Morning (1956) – Warner Archive

Jacques Tourneur’s Colorado-set pre-Civil War western, Great Day in the Morning, was, previous to its recent HD release from Warner Archive, in the harder-to-find camp of Tourneur’s wide and rich filmography. Shot in beautiful color — brimming with reds and blues — it might be one of Tourneur’s denser films, albeit not amongst my favorite of his westerns.

Robert Stack plays a complex gunslinger named Owen Pentecost who pledges allegiance only to himself, and his arrival, and subsequent takeover of a Denver saloon. His anti-heroism is ahead of its time, and that characterization makes quite the alchemy when mixed with two local woman, played by Virginia Mayo (a Tourneur regular) and Ruth Roman, who both fall for him. Like with many of Tourneur’s films, especially the ones starring Mayo, the woman hold a significant portion of the film’s heart — Mayo’s own moral wrestling here might be the film’s most appealing characteristic.

Warner Archive discs are routinely bare bones, so I was pleasantly surprised to see Great Day in the Morning was home to four of the many shorts Tourneur made for MGM. These shorts typically ran 10 minutes and are markedly different from his features. They’re typically documentary shorts that walk the line between narrative and educational. Over the past year, I sought out as many of these as I could find on various websites, but one of the ones here — The Face Behind the Mask — had eluded me. Hope to see more of these brought to discs in the near future.

Watch Me When I Kill (1977) – Synapse

Antonio Bido’s 1977 giallo, Watch Me When I Kill, about a woman stalked by a murderer after finding herself at the wrong place at the wrong time, might not be much more than an average ripoff of Dario Argento’s Deep Red, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad way to spend 95 minutes. And Synapse’s new 4K remaster of it is a thing of beauty.

The disc is given a commentary with critic Nathaniel Thompson, who proves to be, time and again, an extremely knowledgeable source well fit for obscure tracks like these. His commentary is almost breathless, just filled with bits of context for the giallo genre, sexploitation genre, Italian film industry and the American film industry in relation to imports. One fun tidbit is Thompson’s giallo game of “find the bottle of J&B,” which I won’t soon forget.

There’s also a feature called “In defence of Watch Me When I Kill,” which is a 10-minute piece with Dr. Mikel Koven, Sr. Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Worcester, in which the academic does just that — defends Bido’s film. He calls it a good murder mystery that denies the key pleasure we expect from an Italian exploitation film, but is simply a solid piece of straight-forward storytelling that deftly tackles the living memory of Fascism. His enthusiasm is enjoyable and this kind of supplement on these schlocky releases is very welcome.

The disc has three Bido short films, all of which are odd music video of sorts for a piano performance. They’re much more modern than the feature and of a different thread. Synapse’s release also comes with a CD of the film’s lovely prog score by Trans-Europa Express.