Lost in Criterion

This week Donovan Hill joins us once more, discussing boat law, America’s indifference to international law, the hilarious/frightening nostalgia within the book Hagekure (and WW2 era views of same), pretty much every adaptation of the 47 Ronin we can think of, and, oh yeah, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff. It’s a jam-packed episode (read: long), as episodes with Donovan tend to be.

Jean-Pierre Melville draws on his personal experience as a member of the French Resistance to tell the heroic story of a bunch of ineffectual French Resistance fighters, whose only prize for avoiding death is the chance to avoid death once again.

In October 2016 we were unimpressed with Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers, but the Collection has finally brought us another of his and this time we don’t hate it. Not to say either Pat or I will be watching it again anytime soon, but Vengeance is Mine is at least more interesting to us than The Pornographers was and makes us actually look forward to seeing more of Imamura’s work in the future.

We return to the films of Jules Dassin (and to the starring roles of Burt Lancaster) with a prison drama that’s sort of undermined by Dassin’s later pro-cop movie Naked City which we watched a few weeks ago. In that movie cops are good. In this movie prisons are really quite bad. Pat and I certainly don’t share Dassin’s (or each others’) views on cops, but we are much more on board with the idea that prison needs massive reform at the very least. I’ll say I’m more extreme than Dassin’s imagination could take him. For more information on what I mean there, check out Angela Davis talking to Democracy Now about Prison Abolition.

We kick off the New Year with arguably the most pro-war film we’ve watched. And argue we do as I keep hoping to come to some anti-war interpretation and Pat shoots me down over and over in this extra-long episode. Truffaut argued that “to show [war] is to ennoble it”, that one cannot make an anti-war film that depicts war. We’ve seen some noble attempts, and I think, in the works of Kon Ichikawa we discussed a few weeks ago, some successes. So Truffaut may be wrong, but Pat is right here, Stuart Cooper’s Overlord is not an anti-war film. It still may be an interesting experiment.