• Type:
  • Genre:
  • Duration:
  • Average Rating:

Reviews

Review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Logo
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

review | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

related reviews

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

Calling this roguish Sergio Leone romp a classic western kind of misses the point—it’s something so much bigger and better than that

by Michael Gaughn
August 18, 2022

Most movies, especially contemporary ones, are first and foremost about genre, about making the audience feel snug within a certain set of expectations and conditions and never too radically disrupting the womb-like sense of security that induces. Sergio Leone is, of course, the guy who created the spaghetti western but by the time of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he had moved well beyond the genre into a realm that can best be described as, for want of a better term, pure film.

While GBU has elements of the American western and its Italian offshoot, it’s just as much a war movie, an epic, and an action film; but it subsumes all of that into a much greater whole. It never stops to do a set piece and then smugly nudge the audience with a, “Hey, look what I just did.” Instead, Leone shows throughout an incredible, seemingly naive, love for making movies in that place beyond genre—and, like all the best films, beyond time. And it all just seems to pour out of him like a rustic but still elegant wine. 

This movie is undeniably part epic but it’s an intimate one. Like Lawrence of Arabia, it’s about, first, the individual and the consequences of individual action and, second, about the larger stage those actions play out on. It doesn’t rise or fall based on its battle scenes or creating a sense of grandeur but on the crafting of the three principals. But there’s far less of a one-to-one relation between the individual and that larger stage here than in Lawrence. GBU is far looser, more picaresque, roguish, puckish. (It’s like a Cormac McCarthy novel—if McCarthy had a sense of humor, didn’t have an adolescent fixation on depravity, and allowed even a smidge of humanity into his work.)

Like all of Leone, this is 100% a director’s movie. The actors are basically marionettes to be positioned and manipulated, no more or less important than the settings, the score, and the endlessly inventive, often sinuous camera moves. His ability to so carefully and completely devise the action underlines just how little most actors’ performances have to do with their abilities and far more with how they’re shot, cut, and above all, directed. 

Find me a great Lee Van Cleef performance anywhere outside this film—it can’t be done because he never worked with another director this good. Clint Eastwood has the acting range of a doorknob but he was savvy enough to surrender completely to Leone, who created the terse, snarling persona Eastwood was able to exploit throughout a long and lucrative career. The only real actor here is Eli Wallach—which explains why he gets almost all the lines and all the big scenes. Peer beyond the Eastwood aura and you realize this is really Wallach’s film. 

Because GBU is more than anything an exceptionally pure projection of Leone’s imaginative world and not just an excuse for actors to strut in front of the camera, every aspect of the film carries equal weight. But first among those equals is probably atmosphere. The depiction of the fringes of the Civil War might not be authentic but, as far as creating the most evocative stage possible for the action, it feels authentic—in the same way John Ford’s vision of the west in My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache and (although there’s probably some kind of law against my saying this) D.W. Griffith’s portrayal of Civil War battles in The Birth of a Nation may or may not be accurate but are so compelling they become how we want that period to feel and be. 

That ability to make atmosphere enthralling helps explain why this film was such a huge influence on Full Metal Jacket—in particular the odd commingling of silence and menace in the sequence in the abandoned town still being hit with cannon fire. Both Leone and Kubrick were masters of summoning up a palpable mood, so it’s not surprising they stole from each other shamelessly.

This is essentially a silent film—you could watch it with the sound off and still know everything that’s going on and, more importantly, feel the emotion. It’s also a deliberately paced film—surprisingly so for a western—and while Leone makes that work for the most part, the material is just too thin for those kinds of larghetto beats to be sustained throughout the extended cut here. With most films that would be a dealbreaker; here it’s just a quibble. 

The transfer is astonishingly, seductively good. This is the way older films should look in 4K. The images are alive with grain, which is so essential to Leone’s style that it’s scary to think anyone would ever think of scrubbing any of it away—let alone all of it, à la The Godfather. This release is sans HDR but it’s hard to see where going there would do much to enhance its impact. It would likely result in the usual tradeoff of grit for polish, and if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about anything, it’s grit.

(I have to harp on this string again: If the main titles are any indication of what HDR would yield, then we should all pray that day never comes. There’s the usual attempt to enhance the title cards and turn them into a slideshow instead of doing the obvious and right thing of having them feel like they’re being run through a film gate—in other words, make them feel like they’re part of the movie. Fortunately, so much of the sequence depends on animation that some of the analog feel is still there, but it just makes the cleanup look that much more alien. And someone deserves to be eviscerated for ruining the film’s last, lingering shot by making “The End” look like something out of an iMovie project.)

There’s nothing wrong with the stereo and 5.1 mixes; they’re just not appropriate. And it continues to be a bone of contention that the original mono tends to get kicked to the curb with 4K releases of older movies that supposedly represent the filmmakers’ intent.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, of course, a classic film, but not a perfect one—but its rough edges have a lot to do with its power. For as long and epic as Once Upon a Time in the West is—and that film doesn’t waste a single second of screen time—GBU actually has a more drawn-out pace, which sometimes drags, but more often than not is languorous in the most generous sense of that word. And there are moments when style lapses into affectation, like during the final showdown, where Leone cuts about five times too often to extreme closeups of shifting eyes and twitching eyebrows, to the point where it starts to feel like a Monty Python sketch. But you forgive him because of his Rabelaisian drollery and because he made it clear from the moment Eli Wallach crashes through the window at the beginning of the film that this was going to be a very tall tale indeed.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The 4K transfer is astonishingly, seductively good, with the images alive with the grain that is so essential to Leone’s style 

SOUND | There’s nothing wrong with the DTS-HD stereo and 5.1 mixes but where’s the original mono?

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Video Game Review: The Last of Us

Last of Us (2020)

video game review | The Last of Us, Pt. II

related articles

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

This game’s story is so compelling it can match any TV series or movie, making it a must-see for gamers and causal viewers alike

by Dennis Burger
July 26, 2020

I’m starting to feel like I’ll never finish playing The Last of Us Part II. And it’s all my wife’s fault. Mind you, this isn’t your stereotypical story about a man’s nerdy hobby and his other half’s nagging insistence that he put down the controller and help out around the house. We are not that kind of couple. No, the problem is that my wife has become as obsessed as I am with the game’s gripping story and incredible visuals, and since she has no desire to play it herself (“too many buttons”), she won’t let me play unless she’s around to watch.

It’s funny, all this fuss, especially given that I had no intention of playing this game to begin with. The original game, released in 2013 at the end of the PlayStation 3’s life cycle, was one of the most compelling single-player video games ever created. It was a simple tale, a sort of post-pandemic, American-horror-story riff on Kazuo Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, released years before The Mandalorian would bring that classic Shogun epic swinging back into the pop culture consciousness. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the original The Last of Us was such a perfectly told tale that creating a follow-up seemed as sacrilegious to me as making a sequel to Citizen Kane. 

But I got The Last of Us Part II for Father’s Day and figured “What the hell?” Even if it lived up to all my fears, it couldn’t spoil my appreciation for the original. It turns out, though—despite what you may have heard from the nerd-rage circles of the internet, where legitimate creative expression is met with ire and only repetitive and pre-chewed fan service is allowed—The Last of Us Part II is not only a brilliant sequel, it may well be the single most compelling and challenging work of art released this year in any medium.

And that’s the problem. My wife occasionally watched me play the first Last of Us, and she had a pretty good handle on the story despite experiencing it only in snippets. But she can’t take her eyes off of Part II, and now my play time is dictated by her viewing schedule. 

That’s why I’m only 35 hours or so into the story a month after the game’s release. From what I’ve seen so far, though, this new game is a revenge tale that’s ultimately about the futility of revenge—reminiscent of the very best samurai flicks. It’s a necessarily violent (at times) narrative about the personal cost of violence. It’s a non-linear storytelling experience that not only forces to see, but also to experience—to feel—the conflicting emotions and motivations of the various major players—each the antagonist of the other. It is, in a sense, a narrative extrapolation of the famous MLK quote: “The reason I can’t follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everybody blind.” What’s more, it proves that in such a contest, no one agrees who took the first eye.

Add to that some of the most impressive HDR visuals you’ve ever seen on any screen and a dynamic surround sound mix so convincing that it has at times made us think there was a real storm brewing in the distance outside, and it’s understandable that my wife treats The Last of Us Part II more like a movie or TV show than a vicarious gaming experience. (Indeed, she almost seems to forget there’s an interactive element at all except during those times when I need to use the PS4 controller to strum a guitar in the occasional musical mini-game interlude.)

The point of all this is not that you shouldn’t play The Last of Us Part II if you’re not a gamer. The point is, if you have a gamer in your household and you’ve relegated them to the basement or bedroom, invite them into the home theater or media room. Let them play on the best AV system in the house. That’s the environment for which today’s cinematic single-player games are designed. 

Let’s face it: some of us are already starting to get a little starved for new content to watch, and that problem is only going to get worse as more film releases are delayed or taken off the release schedule altogether. With a new generation of video game consoles slated for release this Christmas, though—and with any number of new story-driven games waiting in the wings—you may just find that your spouse’s or kid’s next favorite game may become your new favorite home cinema viewing experience. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE |  Some of the most impressive HDR visuals you’ve ever seen on any screen, from a movie, series, or game 

SOUND | The dynamic surround mix is so convincing you’ll think there’s a real storm brewing in the distance outside

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Video Game Review: Stray

Stray (2022)

video game review | Stray

This home cinema-friendly game goes decidedly against the grain, using deep-bass purring instead of mayhem to give your subwoofers a workout

by Dennis Burger
August 12, 2022

From time to time, a video game comes along that reaffirms the validity of the medium and forces a conversation about whether interactive fiction should be seen as art. Off the top of my head, a non-comprehensive list of a few such landmark games would have to include Super Metroid; PaRappa the Rapper; Papers, Please; Minecraft; Disco Elysium; and The Last of Us and its sequel. 

It’s a bit too early to say whether Stray will join that pantheon, but it might. Not because of its graphics or sound or even because of its gameplay. Those help, but what really makes Stray such a wonderful experience is that it uses all the hooks, tropes, and trappings of video games to say something fundamental about the nature of life that’s wholly antithetical to everything we think of as inherent to gaming. 

You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that from the premise. You play as a cat—not a cartoon or anthropomorphic cat, but a bog-standard Felis catus whose only skills are meowing, jumping, and scratching things, who roams the surface of a post-apocalyptic world with his family. One day, though, he falls into the sewers and ends up in a dystopian subterranean cityscape highly reminiscent of the Kowloon Walled City by way of the Los Angeles seen in Blade Runner.  That plants Stray firmly within a tradition of fiction that employs architectural stratification as a metaphor for social stratification—everything from Metropolis to Star Wars: The Clone Wars to the theme song for The Jeffersons—with the major difference that in the world of this game, there’s no society left. At least not an obvious one. 

It’s obvious from the giddy-up, though, that the goal is to return to the surface to be with your feline family. The curious thing is that neither the game nor the world in which it’s set puts a ton of pressure on you to do so at any appreciable pace. In fact, aside from obvious action set pieces, it’s exactly the opposite. At odd intervals it encourages you to scratch out on a spot on a rug, curl up, and nap. And it doesn’t do so by saving your progress or refueling your energy or any of the normal sort of video game rewards. It’s a nap for the sake of a nap. The camera pulls back, the sound effects get a little more diffuse, and if your subwoofers can handle truly subsonic bass, you’ll feel as much as hear the purring of your little feline character as he drifts into a slumber. The whole audiovisual experience of it all is your reward, and there’s something refreshing about that. If anything, it feels sort of like those “lo-fi beats” screensavers that captivate people for hours on end on Twitch and YouTube. 

It’s just one of any number of ways the game encourages you to live in the moment, to be present, to experience the fleeting now of it all. Another way it accomplishes this is by surrounding you with a world that feels legitimately, chaotically real. Built, sure, but by a gaggle of architects who never met, not a solitary game-world designer. There are alleyways and rooms and ledges and awnings to be explored that serve no purpose other than to delight the explorer’s heart. Dead-ends that would feel like punishment for bad navigational choices in any other game feel instead like unexpected rewards: “If not for that wrong turn or that missed jump, I wouldn’t have ended up seeing this!” That’s a neat trick. It’s the exact opposite of the theme-park mentality that has driven even supposedly open-world games for years.

But, getting back to the graphics and sound: Both make this whole virtual reality a little less virtual and a lot more real. The lighting—a lot of which comes from screens and neon lights—not only serves as the occasional subtle beacon when it’s time to stop clawing at sofas and make your way to another part of the world, but also helps set the overall mood. 

The audio, meanwhile, isn’t mixed in Dolby Atmos but you’d never know that if I didn’t tell you. It upmixes gorgeously into the immersive format, mostly because the sound is already frighteningly immersive even in 5.1. Close your eyes and you can sense where you are in this dilapidated subterranean cityscape. You can hear the dripping of water from the storm sewers, the hum of electric lighting, the pitter-pat of your character’s claws as they skitter across surfaces ranging from steel to cement, reverberating off the walls around you to create the sort of believably subtle sonic textures we rarely experience in Hollywood movies, much less video games—much less super-low-budget indie video games. The air in your room takes on the quality of the environments you explore rather than merely slinging sound effects at your head. It’s the most convincing sound experience I’ve had in my media room since I can’t remember when.

Perhaps more than anything, what sets Stray apart is its rebellious hopefulness. It’s a defiantly uplifting story about stopping to smell the roses even when there are no roses to be smelled. It’s about the importance of fellowship, the power of cooperation, and the joy of swatting things off tables and shelves for no reason whatsoever. It’s a powerful exercise in empathy, an ode to individuality, a meditation on community, and simply one of the most heartwarming tales I’ve experienced in any medium in quite some time. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE |  Hyper-detailed environments and deliciously specular lighting effects help make the world of the game feel convincingly real

SOUND | The audio isn’t in Atmos but does up-mix gorgeously into the immersive format—mostly because the sound is already deeply immersive even in 5.1

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Prey

Prey (2022)

review | Prey

also on Cineluxe

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

This Predator sequel sets the action in Comanche territory in the early 1700s with surprisingly satisfying results

by John Sciacca
August 11, 2022

I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of upcoming attractions, but—perhaps fittingly—Prey snuck up on me almost out of nowhere. It wasn’t until just a few weeks before its premiere on Hulu that I saw an ad for it while my wife and I were watching Dopesick. Even from the trailer it was clear this was something entirely new and fresh for the Predator franchise, and, man, did it look cool!

The original Predator—from way back in 1987—was a terrific blend of action, sci-fi, and horror, and was a perfect vehicle to pit larger-than-life action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger against an enemy even bigger, badder, and more equipped than himself, locked in a hunt-to-the-death battle of survival in the jungle. While they’ve attempted to reboot, refresh, and relaunch the Predator franchise over the years, none of the sequels came close to matching the original.

Honestly, Prey was so good, I can’t believe it went directly to Hulu and bypassed a theatrical release, and the film had the biggest premiere for any TV show or movie in the streamer’s history. (Interestingly, it debuted on Disney+ in many markets outside the United States. The disappointing thing for US viewers is that Prey on Hulu doesn’t include HDR or Dolby Atmos while the Disney+ stream included both Dolby Vision and Atmos.)

Prey takes place back in 1719 in the Great Plains of North America. While most women in the Comanche tribe tend to things around the camp and welcome warriors back from hunting parties, Naru (Amber Midthunder) wants become an excepted hunter in the tribe. She spends her days mostly alone, practicing her tracking and fighting skills while also gathering medicinal herbs. Her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) is the tribe’s Great Hunter, and he doesn’t think she is ready to go on her first big hunt/trial known as a Kuhtaamia, where you hunt something that can also kill you. While out hunting a lion, Naru follows the hunting party, and notices some unusual tracks along with a skinned rattlesnake. When one of the hunting party is killed, Naru is convinced there is something else out there even more dangerous than the lion, and she goes off on her own to track it.

There is so much about Prey that just works. First, it feels authentic. Between the casting, the sets, and the wardrobe, you feel like you’re being dropped into this tribe and watching Naru on her quest to be accepted as a hunter. Second, the pacing knows when to go slow to let you actually come to know the characters and learn about them, and in the case of Naru and her brother, to actually care about them, and to see the Predator adapting to this new world. But it also knows when to put the pedal to the floor and not let up when the action starts. Director Dan Trachtenberg—who also co-wrote the screenplay—showed he knew how to develop slow tension in his debut with 10 Cloverfield Lane, and he deftly handles the build-up to action here. Third, like the original Predator, the plot doesn’t try to get overly complicated. The story doesn’t get bogged down in side plots or distractions, doesn’t try and get overly complicated with MacGuffins, and isn’t trying to offer a social commentary or force in some agenda. It’s simple and focused. Finally, Amber Midthunder is just terrific, cool, and fierce. Her goals and motivations are clear and consistent, she is focused, smart, and her fighting and skills are all believable.

Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, the Hulu stream is in 4K resolution and I thought it looked great. But there were definitely moments when I longed for an HDR grade to deliver more highlights and shadow depth. There were a lot of night scenes lit by torches that were just a bit flatter without HDR and the black levels not as deep and inky, and the Predator’s glowing green blood not as vibrant. Much of the film takes place outdoors, and the color palette is very natural, with lots of browns, tans, and earth tones lit by sunlight and warm red fires, with plenty of greens in fields and trees. Images throughout are sharp, clean, and clear with plenty of detail in the mossy ground cover, leaves, with individual strands of hair visible, along with the leather braids of Naru’s war outfit or fine patterns on clothing worn by French trappers.  

Honestly, short of some minor banding at points, I had no qualms over the picture quality, only that I knew it could be even better with the HDR grade. It really just makes me look forward to watching it again when it becomes available in higher quality.

Prey makes a bit of history as the first film to be dubbed in the Comanche language, and Hulu offers the option to watch Prey with the Comanche language dub. I’m a fan of foreign films and don’t mind subtitles, and I thought this would be the best and most immersive way to enjoy it. Unfortunately, this is a dub, meaning that it is pretty clear the mouths and the words don’t match up, which is a bit distracting. And watching this dub required using the subtitles for the English translation. But, unfortunately, engaging subtitles on Hulu turns on all the subtitles, not just the translation. That means that you have to endure things like “(Dog barking),” “(Birds chirping),” and “(Predator growling)” which, on top of the dubbing, was just too much for me to endure.

Unlike the Disney+ stream, Hulu only offers a 5.1-channel surround mix, not the more immersive Dolby Atmos option. Even still, I found the audio to be pretty immersive and engaging when upmixed by my Trinnov processor, though I could tell it was lacking in the depth and dynamics of a TrueHD lossless mix, especially in the bass region. There are tons of little ambient sounds like birds chirping, wind blowing through the forest, or rolling thunder. There are also lots of strong directional cues like hearing Naru’s axe whistling in from the side of the room or hearing the Predator’s clicks move around the sides and back of the room helping you locate where it is even when you can’t see it. 

The Trinnov Dolby Surround upmixer also did a terrific job placing sounds overhead, like the Predator’s ship sailing above and scattering dust and debris around the room or flies buzzing overhead as they circle around one of the Predator’s kills or little rattles of objects rubbing together overhead inside Naru’s teepee. 

Dialogue remains clear and intelligible, though, similar to the way Steven Spielberg handled Spanish language spoken in West Side Story, the dialogue spoken in French isn’t translated on the subtitle track. The thinking is that Naru doesn’t understand what is being said and so neither should you. 

While it is violent, it isn’t overly gruesome, and the camera often pans away, with the most brutal acts happening just out of view. 

Prey most closely captures the spirit of the first Predator film, but also manages to put its own spin on the story, being both familiar but also wholly new. I highly recommend watching it, even if it means picking up a subscription to Hulu for the month. Really—it’s that good.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | The 4K stream on Hulu looks great, but there were moments when an HDR grade would have helped to deliver more highlights and shadow depth

SOUND | The 5.1 audio is pretty immersive and engaging when upmixed but lacks the depth and dynamics of a TrueHD lossless mix, especially in the bass

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Luck

Luck (2022)

review | Luck

also on Cineluxe

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

Several Pixar alumni crafted this AppleTV+ offering, which features first-rate animation and a kid-friendly plot but lacks the adult sophistication of a Soul 

by Roger Kanno
August 10, 2022

Apple TV+’s first major animated feature, Luck, is a collaboration with Skydance Media’s new animation division headed up by Pixar veteran John Lasseter and several other former Pixar producers. With a big budget, stellar cast, and a proven creative team behind the project, Apple TV+ looks to make a big splash in animated films starting with Luck, which began streaming on August 5. 

The film’s novel premise centers on Sam (Eva Noblezada), an orphan who has aged out of the foster-care system and sets out to start a new job and live on her own for the first time. The problem is, she is incredibly unlucky and almost everything that can possibly go wrong in her life does. Then one day while eating a panini, her fortunes change when she meets Bob (Simon Pegg), a talking cat from the Land of Luck where good luck is created for everyone on Earth. 

The cast also includes Whoopi Goldberg as Bob’s boss, a leprechaun who has it in for him, Jane Fonda as a dragon named Babe in charge of the Land of Luck, and Flula Borg, who voices Jeff, a unicorn and maintenance engineer in a place called the In Between. The voice work is superb, although I wished Babe’s character would have been a bit more multidimensional to give the legendary Fonda more of a chance to shine. And while the performances are very good and the initial premise is intriguing, the film never really stretches much beyond that, with Bob and Sam’s quest to obtain a lucky penny leading to further, more harrowing, but somewhat predictable adventures. 

The whimsical and inventive animation, Sam’s perpetually upbeat mood in the face of adversity, and the movie’s overall positivity are charming and will likely appeal to younger children. I did find the visuals like the many tiny bunnies that appear throughout to be quite endearing, even though I thought them to be a bit reminiscent of minions. And while the movie tries really hard, even having John Ratzenberger voicing a supporting character like he did in so many Pixar films, it just can’t reach the same heights as some of its predecessors like the more thought-provoking and cerebral Inside Out or Soul. 

As with much of Apple TV+’s recent programming, the Dolby Vision presentation is absolutely first-rate. The picture is bright and punchy, as you might expect from a film set mostly in a place called the Land of Luck, with deep saturated greens in the intricate herring-bone patterns on the leprechauns’ uniforms and the foliage consisting of four-leaf clovers found on every type of tree and plant. Bob’s black coat ranges from deep black to dark gray depending on the realistic reflection of light off his coarse fur, which appears quite different in texture from the fuzziness of the bunnies. The picture is always razor-sharp, which reveals plenty of fine detail in the intricate animation, such as reflections in the visors of the bunnies’ hazmat suits and the shiny surfaces of the many whimsical vehicles zipping around the Land of Luck. The CGI visuals of Luck will look excellent on a high-quality HDR display.

The soundtrack, presented in Dolby Atmos, is engaging with some very catchy songs but could have benefited from a more aggressive mix. For instance, the opening credits begin with a delightful cover of Madonna’s “Lucky Star” with a clean and open sound spread evenly between the front speakers, but there isn’t much use of the surround and height channels or much bass energy either. Later, when Sam follows Bob through a portal to the Land of Luck, the swirling sound effects make much better use of all the available channels. Except for a few instances, scenes with such immersive sonic bombast are mostly absent from the rest of the film until the climactic scene featuring sweeping orchestral music and plenty of raucous directional surround effects. 

Luck is a rare near miss for Apple TV+, whose strategy of providing limited content comprised of only original films and shows allows them to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. However, this film still looks great and will be suitable for younger children with its positive themes and kid-friendly content.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The Dolby Vision presentation is absolutely first-rate with a bright & punchy picture and CGI visuals that will look excellent on a high-quality HDR display

SOUND | The Atmos soundtrack is engaging with some very catchy songs but could have benefited from a more aggressive mix

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

review | A Funny Thing Happened on
             the Way to the Forum

A brilliant and still hilarious translation of the stage hit—that is, until you get to the second half

by Michael Gaughn
August 8, 2022

This is going to be a tough one. Anyone who loves comedy and is openminded enough to check out efforts beyond the current flavor of the month and has never come across A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum owes it to himself to make a beeline for this film. But, be warned that while the first half is a pitch-perfect farce, the second half eventually collapses under its own weight—unless you’re into madcap ‘60s chase scenes. I’m not.

You can also approach this as an important historical document, as the last real manifestation of schtick, adroitly and vigorously performed by Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, and, of course, the larger-than-life Zero Mostel, and lovingly captured by the seemingly ill-suited Richard Lester. Most of the jokes are on the level of “My dog has no nose,” but the verve and punch are in the timing—not just the individual delivery but the breathtaking synchronization between the three principals and how they manage to bring the almost entirely British supporting cast up to their level and into their world. 

All that scenery-chewing causes some collateral damage, but they’re acceptable losses—up to a point. For instance, Michael Hordern’s droll turn as the henpecked husband with a keen eye on the courtesans next door would have stood out in a traditional British comedy but is unfairly drowned out by all the American hamming here. And putting almost all his eggs in the Mostel/Gilford/Silvers basket backfires on Lester when he has to bring the pompous Miles Gloriosus onto the stage. Actor Leon Greene just can’t generate a fraction of the energy summoned up by the three tummlers and his hunky wooden presence manages to suck almost all the life out of the production. 

Richard Lester was a curious case. He’ll likely always be best known for his first major film, A Hard Day’s Night, which gave him a bit of a free ride on the Beatles’ coattails but which he took full advantage of, translating Nouvelle Vague filmmaking techniques into the mainstream, changing the look and feel of movies forever. But he proved to be wildly inconsistent, doing intriguing surrealist comedies like How I Won the War and the now ignored but well worth reviving Julie Christie drama Petulia—works that garnered some praise but didn’t draw audiences. He didn’t have another big hit after Hard Day’s Night until he did the Musketeers films for the Salkinds, which led to them enlisting him to reshoot Richard Donner’s Superman II, which then led to the truly dismal Superman III.

Just off the Beatles’ Help!, Lester was a hot director—maybe the hottest—when he took on A Funny Thing, and while the things he does well he does brilliantly, you can sense his reach exceeding his grasp. It would have been easy to completely bungle translating a frantic stage farce to the screen—a dubious honor he managed to earn 10 years later, making a train wreck out of The Ritz—but here he gets almost all of it right, freely mixing up and reinventing the conventions while showing them a deep respect. That is, until those massive miscalculations in the third act. (To be fair, some of the blame for that lies in flaws in the Broadway source material, but the producers never should have allowed Lester to indulge his weakness for silly chase scenes.)

It’s astonishing he was able to maintain the stage-friendly pacing of the lines and bits of business—in other words, didn’t screw up his core ensemble’s inimitable timing—while doing all his experiments with composition, blocking, and cutting. And while he takes the obvious path of turning the production numbers into music videos, he does it playfully and without running roughshod over the source material—like, say, Ken Russell with Tommy. The standout is “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” which he treats as the throwaway it is, using it to unleash a cascade of gags that often break the fourth wall.  

He was also wise to align himself with DP Nicholas Roeg (Doctor Zhivago, Fahrenheit 451), who documents the squalor of the action’s “less fashionable” quarter of ancient Rome without having it become a drag on the comic mood, conjures up some striking compositions without making the film feel affected, and manages to keep up with, and is sometimes one step ahead of, Lester’s freewheeling approach to the material. 

Before mentioning the picture quality, I have to digress for a moment and point out that A Funny Thing was, when I previously saw it about six months ago, one of the films that showed me Amazon had seriously upped its game with HD delivery. It was literally unwatchable a year ago on Prime. Some of the scenes with elaborate action broke up so badly they looked like ravenous paramecia darting under a microscope. All of that is in the past now and the streaming quality has become consistently first-rate. Of course, the quality of Amazon’s transfers is still all over the map (I only made it about 30 seconds into Hangmen Also Die before I had to bail), and it remains about a 50/50 crapshoot whether whatever title you pick will look acceptable in HD. But, all told, a huge leap forward for what was once a joke of a service.

This transfer falls toward the middle of the gamut. It’s relatively faithful to the original film but looks like it could use a little cleanup and color correction. The source seems to have suffered from benign neglect, but a few of the sequences are vibrant enough to suggest what some judicious and respectful attention could yield, likely significantly upping the film’s impact.

The audio is another instance of that phenomena I’ve been coming across lately in films from the ‘60s and early ‘70s—pristine stereo music tracks with decent dynamic range sounding all out of proportion to relatively flat all-but-monophonic dialogue tracks. Since this movie was originally mixed in stereo, it’s possible this is faithful to the initial release, but the disparity is a little jarring.

Comedy has gotten so jaded and brutal that it’s become fashionable to dismiss anything older as sentimental and naive. That’s a mistake in general, but a serious mistake here. A Funny Thing’s roots stretch all the way back to Plautus, traveling, among other places, through the French farceurs and the often hardknock worlds of vaudeville and early TV to arrive at Broadway and then the movies. It’s a hell of a genealogy and tradition—which this film both honors and aggressively mucks around with without once acting like it feels superior to its heritage or its material. In the current stifling climate, just being exposed to something that uncynical can be bracing.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The transfer is relatively faithful to the original film but looks like it could use a little cleanup and color correction, which would likely significantly up its impact

SOUND | The pristine stereo music tracks exhibit decent dynamic range but sound out of proportion to the relatively flat all-but-monophonic dialogue tracks

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Lightyear

Lightyear (2022)

review | Lightyear

also on Cineluxe

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

Although it’s got a distinct straight-to-streaming feel, the latest Pixar offering does raise the bar on photorealistic animation

by John Sciacca
August 6, 2022

Pixar Animation changed the world of filmmaking in 1995 when it released Toy Story, making it the first entirely computer-animated feature film, and creating a new frontier for storytellers to explore. Beyond that, they proved that animation didn’t have to be a forum reserved for kids’ movies. Through rich storytelling, character development, smart humor, and broad themes that transcend ages, Pixar showed that animated movies could be enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

Since then, we’ve seen three followups in the Toy Story franchise, with the most recent, Toy Story 4, released back in 2019. And along with watching these beloved characters grow, evolve, and change, we’ve also witnessed continual improvements in the quality and detail of Pixar’s animation, which we can appreciate now more than ever with modern 4K HDR displays. 

While Toy Story 4 was kind of a sendoff and farewell of sorts to Woody, with Lightyear, Pixar gives Buzz a spinoff of his own with a bit of an origin story. As the opening titles proclaim:

In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. 
It was from his favorite movie. 
This is that movie.

So, don’t expect any of Woody’s roundup gang here as this is a completely separate animal about the character Buzz Lightyear, not the toy Buzz Lightyear based on that character. (Kind of like if we had been watching a movie called Skywalker Saga for years where a boy played with his Kenner Star Wars action figures, and now we are seeing Star Wars about the actual Luke Skywalker. Make sense?)

This is also why we don’t have Tim Allen returning to voice Buzz, rather having him voiced by Chris Evans, who sounded more like George Clooney to me. According to Lightyear producer Galyn Susman, “Tim Allen is Buzz Lightyear the toy, and he’s the embodiment of Buzz Lightyear the toy. We weren’t making a Toy Story movie. We’re making Buzz Lightyear’s movie, the Lightyear movie. And so first and foremost, we just needed to have a different person playing that Lightyear, separate from the toy.”

More than anything else, Lightyear is a sci-fi adventure that takes place on an uncharted planet 4.2 million light years from earth that just happens to star a version of a character we’ve become pretty familiar with over the past 27 years. There are scenes, designs, and moments that are reminiscent of Wall-E, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, 2001, Alien, and more. 

While it is a wholly different kind of movie, you can expect Buzz’s familiar gadget-laden spacesuit, and callbacks to some of his popular Toy Story catchphrases and quirks like “To infinity and beyond” and “Buzz Lightyear to Star Command, come in, Star Command.” Or, you know, the kinds of things that would make a Buzz Lightyear toy really cool and fun to play with.

After landing on an uncharted planet, Space Ranger Captain Buzz Lightyear and commanding officer/best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) begin exploring, only to discover the planet is filled with hostile vegetation and lifeforms. After damaging their ship during retreat, the crew is forced to stay on the planet while performing repairs and while also trying to develop the formula for the crystallic fusion fuel necessary for hyper-speed travel so they can leave the planet. 

While testing the fuel, Buzz discovers he is gone one year for every minute of space travel, meaning the lives of his friends back on the planet blink past in time-lapse moments with each subsequent test. After many years of failed testing, a new formula has Buzz returning after 22 years have passed, during which time the planet has been invaded and overrun by robots, and Buzz must work with a new team to try and take back the planet.

Lightyear gives Pixar a chance to introduce us to a new set of characters, including Mo Morrison (voiced by Taika Waititi), a clumsy, accident-prone member of Buzz’s new crew, and SOX (voiced by Peter Sohn), an emotional-support robot cat given to Buzz to help him cope with being alone after so much time away, which I found to the most entertaining and humorous character.

Visually, Lightyear is stunning and continues Pixar’s tradition of raising the bar of what is possible with computer animation. While the studio has kind of settled on a look for human characters, the remaining visuals of backgrounds, ships, textures, and clothing can be near photorealistic. When you remember that every pixel up on screen was deliberately drawn/shaded/rendered/lit by a digital artist, it is even that much more stunning to appreciate all the fine details that are visible.

Instead of a glossy and shiny digital look, there is an almost film-like grittiness or softness to some of the images. (Remember, according to the opening, this movie happened back in 1995 . . .) But this gives the film a more cinematic look. Color is also used to define different environments, with the planet exterior shots having a rusty color palette by day and a blue-ish purple by night, with interiors of the space port and ships leaning grey and blue.

Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, there is incredible detail in every frame. Look at the thick metallic texture and detail on the space suits, with bits of wear and scratches, or the flaking and pebbling in the paint or the texture on buttons in the space ships or the scape and scale of some of the colony facilities or the massive external shots of spaceships. 

The visuals also greatly benefit from the HDR grade, giving us not only true, inky blacks but also with many scenes producing bright, often eye-searing, visuals. Whether it’s red-hot balls of stars, the glowing streaks of hyper-speed travel, fire-orange sparks and flames, gleaming blue-white lights, raging red robot eyes, or probing lights in dark nights or interior corridors, Lightyear pops off the screen in HDR. 

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos audio mix on the Kaleidescape download is one of the biggest arguments for buying Lightyear over just streaming it on Disney+. Right from the get-go, you experience big, furniture-rumbling bass, with the big spacecraft engines letting you feel their massive power or loud cracks and groans as things collide. The sound mixers also use the sound to establish different environments, like the really expansive nature of the planet’s soundscape and atmosphere, letting you hear the subtleness of the large, open outdoor space or the spacious, echoing sounds in the large hanger bays or the heavy whirr and whine of machinery as big launch doors open up. There are also plenty of moments with creatures and ships flying about overhead or high up on the front walls. 

Any time you’re dealing with time travel, the plot can get a bit shifty and complex, and there are a lot of scary-ish scenes that might be a bit much for a younger audience. (My six year old took a pass.) While it was generally entertaining, the plot and whole of Lightyear just feels a little thin, and doesn’t really tread any new ground or give us any real insight into the Buzz Lightyear character we’ve grown to love, or produce the heart and feels Pixar usually delivers. Honestly, it feels a bit more like a straight-to-streaming film rather than the latest big feature in Pixar’s canon. Which is probably why it is the lowest-rated Pixar film that doesn’t have the word Cars in its title. 

For me, a Pixar movie is as much about the technical merit and evolution of computer animation, and for that reason alone Lightyear deserves a watch. Whether you’ll want to go back and visit it a second time remains the question. 

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | Lightyear continues Pixar’s tradition of raising the bar of what is possible with computer animation, displaying incredible detail in every frame and with the whole greatly benefitting from the HDR grade

SOUND |The TrueHD Atmos mix on the Kaleidescape download is one of the biggest arguments for buying Lightyear over just streaming it on Disney+

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Serpico

Serpico (1973)

review | Serpico

related reviews

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

It might be the archetypal ’70s movie—and looks surprisingly good on Amazon Prime—but does Serpico still hold up as a film?

by Michael Gaughn
August 5, 2022

This review was originally going to be along the lines of, Serpico isn’t that great but it’s such a perfect embodiment of the ‘70s film that it’s worth writing up just to provide a guidepost for anyone trying to wrap their arms around that genre. But about two-thirds of the way in I realized that, while the movie definitely has problems, it rises above them magnificently for a while, and in a way that makes it worth anyone’s time to wade through all the rest of it.

I’ve always had my doubts about Serpico, and the years haven’t treated it particularly well. Directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Al Pacino, cut by Dede Allen, shot entirely in New York during the city’s period of worst decay in a gritty documentary-inflected style, it is the epitome of the ’70s film and, as such, helps highlight the virtues and underline the flaws of that genre.

By 1968, American filmmaking was in complete disarray, and throughout the early and mid ‘70s, everyone was just kind of guessing, throwing everything they could think of at the screen. Since nobody was quite sure what to shoot or how it would come together, movies from the era tend to suffer from over-zealous editing, and there are gratuitous bursts of that here. The ‘70s were also the absolute nadir of the film score. With lush orchestral arrangements decidedly out of favor, strait-laced composers struggled, post The Graduate, with how to work pop, rock, jazz, and funk into their cues. Since little or none of that came naturally, the results were often unlistenable—a case Serpico only bolsters. And nobody knew what to do with women. Here, they magically appear for Pacino to bed down and then just kind of hang around for exposition, the obligatory nude scene, and to have something to break up with. 

The general uncertainty over who was actually coming to the movies and why resulted in a fact-based film saddled with way too much TV-movie sentimentality, especially during the first half. Trying to cling to traditional notions of good guys and bad guys while also trying to be fashionably anti-authority, it aims for hard-boiled and knowing but often comes across as woefully naive. But even the rawer Taxi Driver isn’t immune from all that, feeling like the product of a hyperactive adolescent who’s trying to reprocess the reality of New York at a more rudimentary level that he can handle. (Scorsese was far from alone, of course, in reacting to the ‘60s and ‘70s by resorting to emotional regression. We wouldn’t have the blockbuster cinema of the ‘80s, which has become the superhero cinema of the 2000s, without it.)

It’s not like Lumet wasn’t capable of better ‘70s films—he aced the genre two years later with Dog Day Afternoon and, in 1981, did a better Serpico with Prince of the City (although it’s been a while since I’ve seen the last named, so it might not hold up as well as memory suggests). Here, you sense him trying to figure out how much to retain from ‘50s and ’60s crime dramas, how much the movie should adhere to the urtext The French Connection while also pulling back from the wall-to-wall brutality, and how much he should strike out on his own. Serpico finally clicks when it gets to the police investigations, and once again, it’s process that comes to the rescue, lending a movie some solid bones when there’s nothing more substantial to be found. 

It’s Pacino, though, and not Lumet, who ultimately provides the glue. He does an engrossing job of convincingly and wrenchingly portraying Serpico’s massive struggles with his conscience as he’s left all but alone in an impossible situation. At those moments, Lumet knows enough to just step back and let the acting be the film.

And Amazon Prime’s 1080p presentation (via Roku’s ScreenPix) really brings to the foreground what a—as odd as this word might sound in this context—beautiful film this is. It’s not pretty—true to its documentary influences, every frame is spattered with the requisite grime. And it’s plagued by that fog-filter look that marred almost every movie of the era through Jaws and beyond. But, for great stretches, it’s shockingly good, evocatively expressing the material, which is, of course, the goal. It’s hard not to gape at some of the sequences, this transfer is so true to the original. It’s so good, I fear for what might happen if Serpico gets dipped in the 4K HDR vat—especially if Paramount is doing the dipping. 

The music is surprisingly well recorded and effectively mixed in stereo—but, again, really has no place in this film. It reminded me of the mix for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the dialogue was crisp and clean but not very imaginatively placed, while the score existed in a kind of Van Allen Belt outside the movie proper. 

Sidney Lumet wasn’t a master filmmaker but a frequently inspired one, so most of his movies are at least worth a watch and some have displayed prodigious staying power. Serpico starts out vaguely in the former camp but begins to become intriguing and then compelling once it crosses the midway point. Pacino did consistently engaging and often riveting work in the early part of his career, sometimes achieving the impossible, and he summons up a standout performance here. So you can approach this as a decent enough effort by some supremely talented people trying their best in a world they don’t fully understand, or you can see that confusion and uncertainty as the very lifeblood of that most important decade in filmmaking—not just for what it created but for the seismic reaction it spawned—and see Serpico as its most apt manifestation. Either way, it makes for a provocative night at the movies. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | While every frame is spattered with grime and plagued by that fog-filter look you expect to see in a ’70s film, this presentation is, for great stretches, shockingly good. It’s hard not to gape at some of the sequences, the transfer is so true to the original. 

SOUND | The completely unnecessary score is surprisingly well recorded and effectively mixed in stereo, while the dialogue is crisp and clean but not very imaginatively placed

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)

review | The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

related reviews

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

The big hit of 1944 and maybe Preston Sturges’ best film, this manic romp still delivers, despite an uneven transfer

by Michael Gaughn
August 2, 2022

Reviewing The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, James Agee famously concluded that the Hays Office, responsible for policing film content, had ”been raped in its sleep.” And It’s kind of easy to see why, since the film is about a super horny juvenile who uses wartime hyper patriotism as a cover to bed down with GIs departing for the front, resulting in her committing bigamy (among other things) and having not one but six illegitimate children. On Christmas Day. 

Pretty racy for 1944, but that didn’t seem to deter anyone from going to see the Preston Sturges comedy, which ended up being the biggest hit of the year. They might have been deterred if they’d been given a chance to pay attention to what was actually going on, but Sturges keeps the action so manic and cartoonish that contemporary audiences treated the quieter moments, where the plot comes to the foreground for consideration, as little more than badly needed breaks from all the mayhem.

If you know Sturges at all, you probably know all of the above, and if you don’t, you have no idea what I’m talking about. Preston Sturges was yet another bratty rich kid who got to show up in Hollywood and walk pretty much straight into making pictures—like the CEO’s kid who starts in the mailroom and rapidly works his way up to the top. Like he was destined to land anywhere but there. (To be fair, Hollywood was slightly more democratic before the 1980s, and someone born elsewhere than within the upper crust occasionally got to make a movie, unlike the complete stranglehold the wealthy have on the creative end—and every other aspect—of filmmaking today.)

There was always something a bit precious about Sturges—which was OK as long as he held it in check, but helps explain why I’ve never been head over heels about either Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve, which many consider the pinnacle of his work. I find more to savor in Hail the Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours, and even have a soft spot for the tissue-thin Christmas in July. But Morgan’s Creek might be his most satisfying effort because he tries to do as much as possible while trying to make it look like the film is about nothing at all. And it displays—even though it might all be a pose—a disarming humility. 

Yes, everyone in the town of Morgan’s Creek is a bit of a dope—and ill-mannered and, often, duplicitous and grasping, and sometimes just flat-out mean. But you can tell that Sturges kind of envies their intimate connections, their elaborate interwovenness. And he expresses that early on through a four-minute long-take tracking shot as Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton stroll from Hutton’s house, through the neighborhood, and into the heart of town. It’s artificial as hell, but it makes you buy into the film because it’s in real-time, and everyone at that time knew it was true to those towns and how people lived in those towns. Without it, none of what’s to come would make sense or would land as strongly as it does. And maybe the biggest miracle of all is that the somewhat aloof and very privileged Sturges could even get onto that more mundane and frowsy wavelength and portray it all so well. 

Eddie Bracken is the kind of actor who emerges because the movies temporarily need a certain type—here, an out-and-out schlub—which it then tosses aside when the fad has passed, so it would be easy to write him off as a one-trick wonder. But his performance is mesmerizing, flawlessly timed and turning schtick that would sink lesser comedians into something so telling it’s poetic. It would be similarly easy to dismiss William Demarest, who was typecast—even in Sturges films—as a perpetually dyspeptic grouse. But he transcends that here to play someone who, despite all his bluster, clearly cares about his daughters and his town and, ultimately, Bracken’s Norval. 

Maybe the greatest irony of Morgan’s Creek is that this whole raging avalanche of a movie turns out to be nothing but a 90-minute setup so Demarest can do a perfectly timed pratfall in a hospital corridor. And, indulgent as that sounds, it’s worth it.

Morgan’s Creek was shot by master cinematographer John Seitz, best known for single-handedly defining the film noir genre with Double Indemnity. The rule has always been that you never want a comedy to look too pretty or too moody, but, while Seitz never goes overboard, he doesn’t shy away from making his frames nuanced and expressive, in a comic-elegant way. Creek looks passably good on Amazon Prime—as in, you wouldn’t turn it off if you watched on a home cinema-sized screen, but you’d always be wanting more. But the wraparound scenes—the first three and a half minutes and some shots near the end—are curiously flat and washed out. 

This film is really just a succession of master shots and long takes, which really allows the comedy to thrive. But while Sturges rises to that self-imposed challenge masterfully, he does indulge in maybe two too many of them—and in too many big physical gags, when it’s inevitably the smaller bits of business that play better—which can make Morgan’s Creek seem a little grating at around the 2/3s mark. But hang in there—it all ultimately pays off. The movie still works on its own terms, and time has leant it some little touches—like finding out the Kockenlockers live in the same house as The Girl from Lover’s Lane, and encountering a newspaper headline that screams “Hitler Demands Recount”—that provide a kind of gruesome pleasure in retrospect.

Little fades faster than comedy—except maybe fantasy. The best silent comedies hold up surprisingly well, especially the shorts, maybe because they’re so abstract and don’t rely much on the world of the time for their effect. And the best of the screwballs remain resilient—most of Sturges’ output and Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday in particular.  Go much outside of that and you’re talking the very definition of the ephemeral. So it’s more than worth it to seek out and plumb the best ones, and it’s hard not to be in awe that they even exist at all. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Acceptable when viewed on a big screen, except for a couple of passages, but catching glimpses of what the original looked like only makes you long for a proper restoration

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil (1958)

review | Touch of Evil

related reviews

Sign up for our monthly newsletter
to stay up to date on Cineluxe

Orson Welles’ second-best film remains an evocative, engaging, disturbing, and visually stunning film noir

by Michael Gaughn
July 29, 2022

Labeling things, even if it’s to figure out who’s done something best, is usually a great way of robbing them of their essence because the exercise inevitably makes the best of whatever seem too much like other, more mediocre things when the whole point ought to be to highlight what makes them stand out because they’re different—unique. That said, the best film noir is probably the first, Double Indemnity; the most perverse—because it caused the genre to start eating away at itself from within while it was still in its prime, introducing a fatal dose of doubt into a genre that was already all about doubt—is, hands down, Kiss Me Deadly. And the ultimate expression of noir as stylistic exercise while also being its deepest and most troubling character study is Touch of Evil. 

We usually associate style with something superficial, and that’s usually a pretty safe bet to take, especially if we’re talking about any of the giggly, pointlessly gruesome, less-than-human recent stuff that crows itself as neo-noir. But the genius of Evil—Welles’ genius—was to take every element of the film and set it in counterpoint, in the Baroque sense, with every other element. Nobody had done that in a noir before (or has since), and the instances of it in other genres are sadly few. And it’s the furious texture Welles created—both rough as sandpaper and smooth as silk—that makes Evil inexhaustible, as evocative and engaging and disturbing a film now as it was when it was released—in studio-butchered form, of course—in 1958.

And we should all be grateful the studio held sway here—that is, if the so-called director’s cut is any indication what Welles would have wrought if given his editing druthers. Somehow I doubt that last part. The misguided attempt to be true to the long-deceased filmmaker’s intentions—in other words, to read his mind by reading his notes—smacks of being an unimaginative academic exercise leagues removed from Welles’ brilliance. But a lot of people lap up whatever comes out under the “director’s cut” moniker as gospel, without ever stepping back to figure out whether it adds up to anything worth watching. 

The studio’s edit actually enhances Welles’ grand design, keeping the film moving in a heedless head-long rush that subsumes anything that might have smacked of pretentiousness into the larger mission. That can’t be said of the sputtering. lumbering director’s cut. And, fortunately, it’s the studio version you get, in 1080p, when you view Evil on Amazon Prime. 

Again, saying some film is the most or the best of anything is usually just so much critical bloviation. Too many films have now been made by too many only meagerly talented people, hopelessly muddying the waters, for those words to mean much. But Evil deserves to be placed with some rarefied company, is one of the very few movies where if you say something’s about it’s the best, that word still has some relevance and weight. 

In a genre that tends to invite visual flamboyance and outright excess, this is a tough call to make but, of all the noirs, Evil is the most visually stunning. And that’s not just because Welles’ feverish conceptions and cinematographer Russell Metty’s ferociously inspired realization of them succeed in creating a plausible and engrossing twilight world of corruption and menace, but because, for all its exuberance and smart-assery, that visual canvas is integrated into every aspect of the production in a way that’s mutually reinforcing. (Again, that counterpoint.) In other words, it’s all meant in the service of art and not of just showing off. 

Metty was a master of both black & white and color—consider his still unmatched work on such Douglas Sirk films as Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life (1959), and, especially, All That Heaven Allows. And having him more than ably manning the camera gave Welles an expressive freedom he hadn’t had since his collaboration with Greg Toland on Citizen Kane. Metty gave Welles wings—and some badly needed discipline.

But putting so much emphasis on the visuals suggests the audio somehow takes a back seat. It’s doesn’t. It, like every other element in the film, is co-equal, and the mix, not in terms of technical quality but of aptness to the material (which is all that should really matter) is pretty much peerless. The sound has as much to do with evoking the relentlessly grimy border town of Los Robles as any of the imagery, and the use of sound during the prolonged climactic scene where Vargas deploys Quinlan’s deputy with a wire so he can lure Quinlan into incriminating himself is both subtle and dazzling. No amount of surround gimmickry could ever improve its impact. 

And we meet up with Henry Mancini again, here in his breakout film. Known for his smooth, clean style, this is Mancini at his dirtiest, delivering a perfectly apt soundtrack that’s surprisingly gritty and raw. It’s a kind of warmup to his equally loose tracks for Peter Gunn later that year, but without the mitigating dollop of cool. 

At its heart, Evil depicts an almost Darwinian struggle as one group / culture / generation supplants another. And it’s a tale of the Fall, as idealism comes up against the tangled complexity of reality and, as it always does when it tries to impose rather than adapt, breaks apart on the rocks, taking down everyone on board. Welles constructs a fiendishly nuanced moral labyrinth of a kind Hollywood films aren’t built to sustain, ruthlessly questioning everything, but showing an amazing compassion for people who remain true to their innate sense of duty, even when it leads to their downfall. A hell of a mature and discriminating statement from a pampered brat—and one he was incapable of making until this film. 

All of which helps to explain why Evil is a kind of Citizen Kane reunion, with many of the secondary roles populated by players from that film. Welles wanted to show how much he and movies had changed since he naively burst on the scene—and then got his head handed to him. 

Evil is also a film about faces—even more so than Dreyer’s Joan of Arc—and therein lies its redemption. Every person on screen displays character. While some of the roles might be stereotypes, Welles cast the film so every actor, by their presence alone, could rise above those stereotypes. Which once again brings us to ethnicity, and all I can say about that here is: Charlton Heston is offensive as a Mexican because he’s a bad actor who doesn’t understand the character he’s been asked to play. Akim Tamiroff is brilliant as a Mexican because his Uncle Joe Grandi is fully dimensional, expresses his history and being with his every gesture and word—which is all that ought to matter if you’re trying to create, first, fiction and then art, and not propaganda.

Touch of Evil is, on more than one level, so relentlessly bleak it would be impossible to sit through it if wasn’t balanced by the elegance of its camerawork and wit of its score, and if it wasn’t redeemed by its love of its characters, its humor, and the honesty of its portrayal of inevitable human failing. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | At moments, so striking you wish someone would do a restoration that didn’t include mucking with the studio edit

SOUND | About as good as the late ’50s had to offer, but serviceable at presenting the startlingly ingenious sound mix

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Scroll to top

sign up for our newsletter

receive a monthly recap of everything that’s new on Cineluxe