(Mostly) Happy Anniversaries

As you may have heard, Criterion released Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla in 4K this month in honor of its 70^th anniversary, but you know what other Japanese colossus is celebrating the very same milestone? That’s right, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and the Collection is here for that as well.

Do I need to explain the appeal of Seven Samurai? It can be approached from a dozen different directions – as a Rosetta stone for the ensemble action picture, as the quintessential study of men defining themselves through honorable acts, as the moment where Japanese cinema acknowledged the existence – and the value – of Western cinema. It’s the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven, sure, but also every picture where a bunch of strangers are drawn together to face an impossible challenge.

The movie never stops weaving, in the best possible way. It's three and a half hours long but moves like a freight train. It’s epic in sprawl but immediate and intimate in its relationships. Toshiro Mifune is having the time of his life as the boisterous warrior Kikuchiyo, giving a performance that is itself a performance: Kikuchiyo understands the value of a good story, and the importance of being the hero of one. Everything he does is intended to be memorable, to puff up his own legend – but if he’s actually capable of following through on all of his boasts, doesn’t that make him a genuine hero?

Seven Samurai keeps throwing questions at us as it explores complex themes of service, loyalty, morality and justice – always in the most entertaining way possible. Kurosawa draws on decades of show-stopping action sequences, from the silents to the glory days of John Ford, and then outdoes them with complex choreography and stunt work as his heroes take on wave after wave of bandits – paying off all the character work laid in the first half of the picture in tiny moments of comradeship and sacrifice. We know who these people are, and their reasons for fighting and dying. This wasn’t the first action movie to do that, but it did it best: Seven Samurai perfected a genre.

Criterion has released Seven Samurai on every format it’s ever produced – LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and now 4K – with each new iteration improving on the last. The UHD disc offers a new 4K digital restoration of the feature, and while Criterion still doesn’t use HDR on black-and-white movies it’s still sharper and clearer than the earlier Blu-ray. It’s not the massive leap in detail that a scan of the negative might offer, but as Bill Hunt points out in his review on The Digital Bits, that negative no longer exists. Certainly this is the best I’ve ever seen it look.

That earlier Blu-ray is also included here, as well as a second BD of special features worthy of a classic; the new edition also includes the stronger-than-usual booklet of essays by critics and filmmakers. (Arthur Penn! Sidney Lumet!) But the film is, rightly, the star of the show; it might be going on three-quarters of a century, but Seven Samurai feels downright modern. Kurosawa saw the future, and in a lot of ways we’re still catching up to him.

And speaking of highly influential films marking milestones: Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and James Cameron’s The Terminator turned 65, 50 and 40 this year, respectively, and Warner Home Entertainment just rolled them all out in new 4K restorations.

Hitchcock, Brooks and Cameron are three of the most influential filmmakers who ever got behind a camera, and while these specific titles might not be their best, or even their best-known, their impact on film history is undeniable. It’s the Kurosawa question all over again: Seven Samurai defines its chosen form, and so did these three pictures. Shall we?

With its convoluted spy plot sending Cary Grant’s gormless ad man Roger O. Thornhill (ROT, for short) on a series of chases, fights and seductions, North by Northwest lays out the template for the Bond movies and dozens if not hundreds of knockoffs.

Confused for the mysterious (and nonexistent) secret agent George Kaplan by foreign agent Vandamm (James Mason), and asked to keep the ruse going by a CIA-like organization so they can crack Vandamm’s latest attempt at espionage, Thornhill fumbles his way through various close calls and assassination attempts … while falling for his ostensible babysitter, actual spy Eve (Eva Marie Saint).

The chase stuff is fun, but the love story is where the movie really catches fire. Sure, there’s a 20-year age difference, and Thornhill’s petulance and Eve’s composure make them feel more like a better match than some of Hitchcock’s more age-appropriate pairings.

It also really helps that Eve holds most of the cards in their relationship, with Thornhill a rank amateur who needs constant guidance and protection. Grant was never more endearing than when he was about to trip over his ego, and Saint’s little reactions to his squawking are the key to their chemistry.

And in repeat viewings, it’s a goddamn delight to watch Vandamm’s henchman Leonard – played by a young Martin Landau – see right through Thornhill from the start and spend the entire movie trying to convince his boss they’re being played. Every part of this thing works beautifully.

Now, Blazing Saddles, that’s another situation. It’s still a landmark work of cinema, in that Brooks and his team broke new ground by applying the madcap comedy format to a feature-length send-up of Westerns, defining the spoof genre that the ZAZ team would then perfect in Airplane! and Top Secret! As a social commentary on the racism that’s inextricable from the American drive to mythologize its past, it still has some very salient points. And Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder are truly wonderful together, striking a kinship between Sheriff Bart and jailbird Jim – also known as the Waco Kid, of course – based on how ridiculous they find the rest of the world. They get each other, and it’s really sweet to watch that easy friendship roll through the picture.

The film looks exactly like the Westerns it parodies – except for the tailoring on Cleavon Little’s outfits, of course – and of course the rousing title song is a perfect imitation of the kind of opening number a big studio picture would deploy to kick off its prestige oater. (The story goes that Frankie Laine sang it straight because no one bothered to tell him the movie was a comedy, but why would you hire Frankie Laine and not ask him to do his thing?)

But it’s lumpy. Brooks doesn’t really have a sense of how to shoot in scope and repeatedly settles for long wide shots, and the script feels like the work of a sketch troupe trying to stitch a bunch of ideas into a feature. It’s almost shocking to think that Brooks released Young Frankenstein in the very same year, given how much more accomplished and elegant that movie is … but of course, Wilder was the driving force there, and given his own subsequent work as a writer and director, he had a much better appreciation for structure.

And then we come to the slurs. The casual use of N-words and F-words is also inextricable from Brooks’ concept, of course, and there’s some contextual cover in the fact that Richard Pryor was one of the writers who worked on the script – and was even originally set to play the role of Bart. But watching the film now, its satirical aspects are colored by the fact that the entire production pipeline had no trouble throwing the ugliest racial epithets and queer stereotypes around so casually. And at this point, the homophobic material seems far worse than the racism, because the film isn’t asking us to see through it.

I cited Brooks’ famous assertion that his movies “rise below vulgarity” in this very newsletter mere weeks ago, but watching Blazing Saddles fifty years later is a very strange experience. Comedy changes, and mores evolve, and when Madeline Kahn’s self-aware Lily Von Shtupp is batting away the twitchy advances of Harvey Korman’s Hedley LaMarr, all is forgiven.

Even Alex Karras’ Mongo turns out to be more dimensional than initially presented, and refreshingly secure in his sexuality for a horse-punching thug.

But Brooks’ own appearances in the film – as the horny idiot Governor Le Petomane and the alter kocker leader of the tribe that spares Bart and his family in a flashback – don’t land the way they used to. Fun fact: The one new supplement on Warner’s 4K disc lines up comedy figures like Ike Barinholtz and Jeff Garlin (and, for some reason, film critic Pete Hammond) to recount their favorite scenes and celebrate the film’s transgressive appeal. They’re all white guys. It’s … revealing.

Cameron’s The Terminator is a lot easier to watch. It’s an era-defining event, an inventive sci-fi thriller that builds an elegant machine out of a B-movie premise, and announces the arrival of a generational talent. And its time-travel premise means the big hair and pastel fashions of 1984 Los Angeles now feel like reference points rather than dated styles. The “punk” look on Bill Paxton and his buddies, that’s a different situation.

Forty years on, The Terminator still works. That’s all there is to it. I feel the same way about Cameron’s script (written “with” producer Gale Anne Hurd and a mostly uncredited William Wisher) as Earl Boen’s snide criminal psychologist feels about Reese’s tale of his dystopian Skynet future: It’s brilliant, because it’s airtight. The plot is infernally simple, requiring just three characters to chase each other around Los Angeles. Those characters are immediately recognizable archetypes – unstoppable killer, underdog hero, helpless victim – who are allowed to develop in unexpected directions over the course of the story.

Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor will go from panicked wallflower to confident warrior; Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese will reveal a tenderness and a romantic heart that belies his military training. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg doesn’t develop, of course; he just keeps coming, gradually shedding the illusion of humanity as he goes. In the end he’s just a murderbot, but that’s enough.

What struck me on this viewing was just how well-written the supporting characters are. I mentioned Earl Boen’s obnoxious Silberman, but the script also finds inner lives for the generic cops played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen, and gives Sarah’s roommate Ginger (Bess Motta, better known at the time as one of the models on the syndicated jiggle show 20 Minute Workout – look, it was a different time) a fun relationship with her boyfriend Matt (Rick Rossovich).

Dick Miller’s doomed gun salesman is just going through the motions, but he knows it; even Paxton’s punk is allowed a flash of depth before he and his buddies try to roll the T-800, laughing off his brief moment of swagger after breaking that beer bottle. There’s an eccentric sense of humanity running through the picture, the better to remind us what Reese – and Sarah – are ultimately fighting for. We never even see Sarah’s mother up in Big Bear, but we feel her loss. Hell of a picture.

Do I even need to talk about the action? Like Kurosawa, Cameron knows exactly what he’s doing in every shot; his pacing and blocking, even in this relatively raw state, are simply brilliant. The car chases are expertly assembled, the shootouts are clear and unambiguous, the little moments where the Terminator’s facility with violence and disregard for human life are precise and chilling. The shots of functional machinery that run through the film keep reminding us what’s under its Schwarzenegger suit, too; The Terminator is a very, very smart movie, and it hasn’t aged a day.

Now, to the discs. North by Northwest was shot in VistaVision, which ran 35mm stock sideways through the camera to expose a larger image, and that means there’s more detail to capture in Warner’s 4K restoration.

This is a splendid new master, bright and clear and positively reveling in the details of clothes and cars and locations; it looks brand new. The original mono soundtrack is also here, along with a new Atmos mix that expands Bernard Herrmann’s robust score into the rear channels, along with certain sound effects – like the roar of a crop duster. I’m just happy Warner regularly includes original audio on its 4K upgrades; Not everything needs to be supercharged.

Blazing Saddles similarly looks great, with the veteran cinematographer Joseph Biroc – an unsung DP who surely deserves his own biopic – doing his best to enliven Brooks’ fairly basic compositions. If the goal was to look like a proper Western, he achieves it, setting the action in a dusty brown and auburn palette and then going for a more modern look once the story breaks out into 1970s Hollywood. Does the world of Rock Ridge look a little cleaner and sharper when Bart and Jim return from their excursion into the "real" world, or is that just a trick of the light? I often wonder.

And then there’s The Terminator, which will likely be the most contentious disc of the three. Produced by the team at Peter Jackson’s Park Road, it’s another of Cameron’s digitally manicured reinterpretations – though one that’s more subtle and artful than I’d expected. As we saw with Aliens and The Abyss, the image has been made brighter and sharper, but not entirely scrubbed of film grain. It still looks mostly like film, and a low-budget one at that; Cameron and DP Adam Greenberg worked wonders with this shoot, and the temptation to smooth out its rougher edges has been avoided. The models still look like models; the rear-projection scenes still have a mismatched authenticity. That puppet Terminator head is as stiff as ever, and the climactic stop-motion elements haven’t been replaced or even buffed.

What we do get is the occasional over-enhancement on the texture of hair and clothing, and the odd car grille. It’s not nearly as distracting as the intense smoothening performed on True Lies – which, jesus christ, smash that drive and start again – and it only happens a handful of times, but it is noticeable; that said, I was watching this projected on a 92-inch screen, and everything is pretty noticeable at that scale. Your mileage may vary. But you’ll want to take the ride.

Up next: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Woman of the Hour hit the new-release shelves, and 4K releases of A Simple Plan, Hush and Bones and All offer a trio of auteurist chills. See you soon.