A Little Sadness

We start with some depressing news: William Friedkin has died, age 87 – just weeks before his last feature, a new adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, is set to premiere at Venice. In lieu of an obit, you should read Noel Murray’s excellent summation of his career from the late, lamented website The Dissolve.

Friedkin’s death brings down the curtain on six frequently brilliant decades of cinema and television, including still-unmatched work like The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer and To Live and Die in L.A. – all of which messed with audience expectations and reinvented their chosen genres in remarkable ways.

The decision to shoot The Exorcist in a cinema-verité mode gave that film a distressing realism that still lands half a century later; it was the natural evolution of what he’d done with two years earlier, racing handheld through New York City in The French Connection to make the audience feel they were right there alongside Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider.

Warner’s much-anticipated 4K edition of The Exorcist arrives next month, and I guarantee you that picture hasn’t lost a step. Some of his later work is pretty good too; Arrow’s recent Blu-ray of Cruising exhumed a psychologically spiky thriller that feels a decade or so ahead of its time, and Via Vision has just announced a new Imprint edition of his 2006 adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Bug for October. That’s a good one too.

Fun fact: The Exorcist is rolling out as part of Warner’s centenary catalogue celebration, which also delivers three titles this month: Elia Kazan’s East of Edenand Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, which arrived on shelves last week, and Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon, which drops today. Each one of them works as both a refurbishment of a studio classic and a snapshot of a specific cultural moment at the movies.

East of Eden was the first of three films James Dean made for Warner Bros., and the only one released before his death in 1955. Rio Bravo, made in 1959, is considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made, with Hawks somehow turning all the weird studio mandates of the era – aging contract players, forced comic relief, a bubblegum pop star to attract the kids – into strengths. And Enter the Dragon – which also marks its 50^th anniversary this year – was the film that effectively canonized Bruce Lee, arriving a month after his untimely death to show the world the superstar he was about to become.

All three films have received various special editions over the decades – East of Eden in various Dean gift sets, Rio Bravo as a cornerstone of Warner’s various John Wayne promotions and Enter the Dragon in multiple anniversary editions on DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Which is to say, if you’re reading this newsletter and you like these movies, odds are you probably already own at least one or two of them. And that’s good, because while the 4K editions present all three films at their absolute best, with excellent new restorations that look absolutely wonderful – and in the case of Enter the Dragon, better than I ever thought possible – they come up short in one other rather crucial way. As with a number of Warner’s other recent 4K upgrades, these editions don’t include companion Blu-rays – or the supplements that would be included on those discs.

The 4K discs do carry over the audio commentaries that accompanied their various features, but leave out almost everything else that appeared on earlier releases. Rio Bravo has the great appreciation track from Richard Schickel and John Carpenter, a Hawks devotee whose breakout feature Assault on Precinct 13 cleverly updated Rio Bravo to ’70s Los Angeles, but leaves out the excellent half-hour doc “Commemoration: Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo” in which Carpenter was joined by Walter Hill and Peter Bogdanovich to expound on the film, the Western genre and Hawks’ filmography. (You can find it on the Blu-ray, which also included a look at Old Tucson Studios and an episode of the 1973 TV series The Men Who Made the Movies that focused on Hawks.)

Similarly, Schickel’s scholarly commentary is the only supplement to carry over from Warner’s East of EdenBlu-ray; the wealth of archival and retrospective material on that disc (and on the DVD special edition that preceded it), including deleted scenes, screen tests, wardrobe tests, premiere footage and the feature-length documentary Forever James Dean, has all been left behind.

Ditto with Enter the Dragon’s bounty of supplemental material from the various special editions Warner’s released over the years, including two feature-length docs (Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey and Curse of the Dragon) a celebration of Lee’s martial-arts philosophy and prowess and a priceless home-movie clip; the only elements that made it to the 4K disc are Linda Lee Cadwell’s video introduction and the audio commentary from producer Paul Heller and writer Michael Allin. Obviously, the extras produced for Criterion’s 2020 Bruce Lee boxed set aren’t included here either – though this edition does include both the original theatrical cut as well as the 25^th anniversary extended “special edition” cut of the film, meticulously restored and remastered to an entirely new level of obsessive fealty. (Via Blu-ray.com, here’s Warner’s explainer on the restoration.)

I suspect that, with replication plants straining to keep up with demand, this is a way for the studios to ensure they deliver their discs on schedule; it’s a lot easier to get to market if you’re only waiting on one platter rather than two. (And even then, Warner did bump the release dates of East of Eden and Rio Bravo by a couple of weeks; they were originally slated to come out last month.) But surely it’d be possible to include the extras on the 4K discs; at a maximum resolution of 1080p, it's not like they’d take up that much space. I know at least three people who are compulsive enough that they can only tolerate one disc of a given movie on a shelf; the idea of having separate 4K and Blu-ray cases next to each other is unthinkable.

I am not one of those people, by the way. I have multiple editions of plenty of films! Triples is best!

Maybe the solution is to release these 4K editions in cases with a notch for the Blu-ray, so those of us who have them can just pop it in and save on shelf space. Everyone else gets a free notch. There’s no downside, really.

Anyway, if you want to see a new 4K release that gets it right, take a look at Paramount’s new UHD upgrade of John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

This is still Hughes’ best picture, by the way, with the post-facto aspect of Jeffrey Jones being exposed as the very opposite of a righteous dude now working to balance the near-sociopathic entitlement of Matthew Broderick’s scheming Ferris. And no, I’ve never bought into the theory that he’s a projection of Alan Ruck’s depressive Cameron; that scene where Mia Sara’s Sloane calls Cameron on his peeping would make no sense if this was a Tyler Durden situation. The whole point of the film is that this preposterous series of events is really happening, with Cameron going from hostage to participant; Hughes doesn’t deal with consequences because he never dealt with them. Every one of his movies ends before his characters have to think about what they’ve done; that’s why teenagers love them!

In addition to a good-as-new presentation of the feature (with a remixed Atmos soundtrack that made me feel like it was 1987 all over again), Paramount has included all of the existing supplements from the previous DVD and BD editions right here on the 4K platter. That’s the entire suite of retrospective docs from the “Bueller … Bueller Edition” (and god, Paramount had some silly ideas about special-edition branding) as well as the long-unavailable Hughes audio commentary recorded for the film’s initial DVD release in 1999 and subsequently disappeared at the director’s request.

I guess the estate didn’t have any objections to restoring it here, which will make a generation of aging nerds very happy – though if I’m being honest there’s nothing here that seems especially controversial or regrettable. Hughes discusses every aspect of the picture – the casting, the production, the structure, the locations, the response at the time and its subsequent cult status – with genuine affection, making even the most complicated shoot day sound like a fun hangout with some very gifted friends. To bring it back to James Dean and Bruce Lee, it’s a way of reconnecting with the promise of Hughes’ career, rather than get weighed down with all the stuff he didn’t live to do. It’s great that it’s back in circulation.

The 4K editions of East of Eden, Rio Bravo and Enter the Dragon are available now from Warner Home Entertainment. (Well, Enter the Dragon comes out tomorrow.) The 4K edition of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is now available from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Coming soon: I'm moving house in about a week and a half so it really comes down to what isn't boxed up on the day I have time to write. But Blackberry and Fast X are right next to the player, so that's looking good ...