Lost in Criterion

Yesterday was Hitler's birthday, so here's a film with a complicated relationship to Nazis?

On the one hand Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum (1979) does show some of the horrors of living under Nazi occupation in Gdańsk-- I've just now learned that Danzig is the German name for the city, and it seems inappropriate to use it here, Gdansk is the Polish name  -- and it briefly embodies the aftermath of the Holocaust in one scarred character (who was only recently re-added to the film for this Criterion release). On the other it is based on a book by a man that hid that he was a Nazi soldier for decades and is about someone who uses Nazism when its useful to him and abandons it when its not.

Of course it's also about a little boy who quite literally refuses to grow up.

As I said, it's complicated.

Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura are two of the greatest actors of the 20th century. It happens that they also frequently collaborated with one another and with some of the greatest film directors to come out of mid-century Japan. As such, it seems they may be the actors who most often appear in the Criterion Collection as well, though it's hard to track that information without it becoming a whole new obsession.

They costar in Stray Dog under the helm of Criterion standard Akira Kurosawa from 1949 and it would be a feat of pure disaster if all that talent didn't make for an amazing film. Plus it's a police procedural! Who doesn't love a good police procedural?

We return to the Yasujiro Ozu well with a double feature, or as Pat corrects me, a one and a half feature. Ozu made the silent black-and-white A Story of Floating Leaves in 1934 then during a break in his production schedule after finishing Good Morning early in 1959 he remade it as Floating Leaves in color and with sound. Fascinating to see a great artist approach the same basic material a quarter-century apart.

There are only three Fritz Lang films in the Collection -- discounting his delightful appearance as himself in Godard's Contempt -- and these appearances are fairly spread out. We last saw from him with Spine 30 and will next see him at Spine 649. But for now we have Spine 231, his 1933 follow up and sort of sequel to M (as Otto Wernicke plays the same detective in both): The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

M had an interesting background in that Nazis tried to shut it down during pre-production despite their not having come to full political power and Lang's insistence that the film was not meant to be anti-Nazi. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, however, was dedicatedly anti-Nazi and, well, the Nazis were many things, but they weren't really dense. The film was banned in Germany, not shown publicly in the country until 1961. It was the last film he made in Germany until 1959.

Robert Altman has had a long and varied career and Pat and I have only been familiar with his commercial highlights: M.A.S.H., Popeye -- plus for some reason I've seen Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion. None of them in the Collection though Altman does make quite a showing.

His first film that Criterion presents to us is 3 Women from 1977, a surreal and dreamlike drama of identity theft, which is appropriate since apparently Altman was inspired to make the film from a dream that he was making a film in the desert with Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek and decided that, hey, he should do that.