Grit and Determination

When Dan Gilroy brought Nightcrawler to TIFF in 2014, I think I underestimated it.

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Gilroy’s bleak, beautiful study of a sociopathic videographer whose relentless drive and terrifying lack of ethics power his rise through the Los Angeles broadcast news ecosystem. I loved Jake Gyllenhaal’s commitment to the role of Lou Bloom, which requires him to turn off his substantial charm and charisma to play an empty, ugly little weasel who speaks entirely in corporate boilerplate and self-help mantras, always looking past the person in front of him in search of the next opportunity.

I enjoyed the supporting performances of Bill Paxton, Rene Russo and Riz Ahmed as the people Lou uses as stepping stones in his chosen career, and I loved the look of the film, which Robert Elswit shot as somewhere between Michael Mann’s overheated neon landscapes and Walter Hill’s grittier, street-level cityscapes. But I thought Gilroy wrote himself into a corner, pushing Lou towards a choice I could see coming a mile away.

Twelve years and a complete cultural collapse later, I’m pretty sure that was the point. Nightcrawler – like Taxi Driver before it – presents us with an entirely unsympathetic character and dares us to empathize with him. Like Travis Bickle, we’re supposed to hope Lou sees the light before it’s too late; what we don’t realize, on that first viewing, is that this guy isn’t looking for happiness.

Their goals are very different, however. Traumatized by his experiences in Vietnam, Travis Bickle was chasing self-annihilation. (I’ve often wondered whether Paul Schrader had seen that Monty Python sketch where Graham Chapman confidently declares that “a murderer is just an extroverted suicide.”) Lou Bloom is different. He’s a time bomb, yes, but where Bickle was looking for an excuse to explode Lou Bloom can take his time. He’s in pursuit of success – and he’ll do whatever it takes to get there. The tension of Nightcrawler comes from wondering when he’ll stop chasing the carnage he records and start creating it.

And this is where Gyllenhaal shines. Lou Bloom cannot be backed into a corner: He is the corner. His willingness to violate ethical constraints and decency and privacy in the name of Getting The Story is where American media was clearly heading, even before Donald Trump elbowed his way into the Republican primary race and set the world firmly on its downward spiral.

Lou Bloom and Trump embody the same killer instinct: I want that. It’s mine. Get out of my way. Every moment of Nightcrawler dares us to empathize with him, and Gyllenhaal is such an interesting actor that we’re willing to do it – up to a point. He’s a scrappy little underdog! Why wouldn’t you root for him? It’s okay that he almost never blinks and doesn’t seem to have any outside interests beyond chasing the most lurid footage he can grab with his increasingly more sophisticated video rigs. That’s … that’s cool, right? Except that it isn’t, of course. Not at all.

There is no such moral ambiguity in Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, which arrived in 1969 around the midpoint of the all-star WWII action blockbuster wave that started in the early ’60s with The Great Escape and The Longest Day and ended in the late ’70s with the likes of Midway and A Bridge Too Far. There is no middle ground to be had in the clash between the Allies and the Nazis, a lesson lost on the current generation of warmongers. It’s oddly comforting to retreat to a film made less than a quarter-century after the end of that war, willing to nod in the direction of emotional complications among the good guys while refusing to give the Germans an inch.

It’s also interesting to watch Battle of Britain in the greater context of its genre, and see how Hamilton and his writers solve the problem of condensing a massive historical event – the air war that followed the retreat of British forces from France – into 132 minutes without losing the complexity of the story. The Nazi air invasion of England was a shock-and-awe campaign designed to level the British airfields and terrify the populace into submitting to the might of the German war machine; the decimated RAF wasn’t supposed to be able to regroup and repel that overwhelming force within a matter of weeks. But they did, and the movie knows it.

Opening just after the rout at Dunkirk, Battle of Britain follows three key groups through the summer of 1940: The pilots, played by the likes of Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Edward Fox and a fresh-faced Ian McShane; commanders and generals, played by screen veterans like Harry Andrews, Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Kenneth More and Laurence Olivier, and the Nazis operating in France, with Curt Jurgens as Von Richter, the German ambassador to Switzerland, and Hein Reiss as Luftwaffe reichsmarshall Hermann Göring.

I admit I was surprised to see the film devote quite so much time to its Nazis, especially since it shows them in high spirits after driving the British out of France. But Hamilton never makes them sympathetic; they’re always cheerfully discussing invasions and slaughter. The fall is coming.

Like most of these all-star history lessons, there’s not a lot of room for character development; the costumes do most of the work. But there are flickers of depth here and there: Caine’s squadron leader has a nice relationship with the unit’s dog, a lovely black Lab, and Olivier’s air chief marshal sometimes has an upper lip that’s not quite as stiff as he would like as he explains the scale of the air invasion.

McShane’s flight sergeant has an arc that sees his happy-go-lucky attitude cruelly ripped away from him, and Plummer goes all in on his Canadian flyboy’s constant badgering of his wife (Susannah York) to transfer with him to a new post in Scotland. Never an actor especially concerned with being liked by the audience, he’s childishly stroppy in those scenes, which feels like the most daring choice by any actor in the movie – and sets up a particularly tragic turn in the last reel.

We’re also given glimpses of the British ground crew and support staff, usually from the perspective of York’s character. But mostly we’re in the air, where Hamilton and his visual-effects crew re-create sorties, dogfights and bombing runs with remarkable technical facility for the time. The opticals used to achieve those effects are a little more obvious in the new 4K restoration that graces this release, as they’re a generation or two removed from the original camera negative – but that’s how they looked on the big screen, and this release replicates that experience very well indeed.

Battle of Britain is the 500^th Imprint title from Via Vision, and it’s been given the deluxe treatment admirers of that boutique line have come to expect. The three-disc set is packaged in the signature Imprint hardbox, with the feature offered in both 4K and Blu-ray – both mastered from the new restoration, of course – and accompanied by a slew of new and archival supplements.

Both the 4K and Blu-ray feature discs offer various audio options: You can watch the film with 5.1 DTS-HD audio based on the surround mix that accompanied the 70mm prints, or in the 2.0 mono track of the 35mm release. And you can select the original, unused score by Sir William Walton, or the Ron Goodwin score that replaced all but one of Walton’s tracks. The score options were also available on MGM’s previous DVD and Blu-ray releases, from which most of the archival goodies have been sourced.

An excellent 2005 DVD commentary (featuring Hamilton, the aerial unit’s production manager Bernard Williams and assistant director Garth Thomas, and documentarian Paul Annett) is now supported by two new tracks. There’s a thoughtful, exhaustively researched consideration from aviation historian Dr. Victoria Taylor, and a more conversational track from film historians Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin. All of these are included with both the 4K and Blu-ray presentations of the feature, along with the theatrical trailer; the Blu-ray disc also offers the bulk of the MGM supplements, which are not insubstantial.

Annett’s “The Battle for the Battle of Britain” is a 50-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, hosted by Caine, that’s polished and respectful in that old-school sort of way, but also gives us an excellent sense of the complexity and scale of the production. (There’s a reason they wanted a Bond director to steer it.) “Authenticity in the Air” and “A Film for the Few” are retrospective pieces produced for that 2005 DVD, also drawing on Hamilton, Williams, Thomas and Annett to discuss various aspects of the production. And “Recollections of an RAF Squadron Leader” spends 10 minutes with fighter pilot Basil Gerald Stapleton, a veteran of the Battle of Britain, letting him tell his own stories. There’s also a photo gallery, “Images from the Sky,” narrated by Williams.

There is one small issue with the master: The electronic subtitles for the German dialogue are incomplete, leaving about half of the actors' lines untranslated in their scenes. (It's clearly an encoding error, as the closed-captioning track translates every spoken line.) I haven't heard whether Via Vision is pressing corrected discs, but the workaround is pretty simple: Just grab your your remote whenever you see a Nazi.

The second Blu-ray platter is where you’ll find the new supplements, starting with “A Narrow Margin: Making Battle of Britain,” a one-hour retrospective piece from Simon Lewis – whose “The Making of A Bridge Too Far” was a highlight of Imprint’s deluxe release of that film earlier this year.

“Sheldon Hall on Battle of Britain” is a 25-minute argument from the English author and lecturer that the film has long been undervalued in the WWII cinema canon, and “Let Battle Begin: The Making of Battle of Britain” offers an hour and a quarter of new interviews with surviving crew members such as second-unit draughstman Terry Ackland-Snow, model maker Colin Arthur, camera assistant Martin Body and more.

Finally, there’s one more archival piece: The Battle of Britain segment of Frank Capra’s 1943 propaganda series Why We Fight, directed by Capra and Anatole Litvak. It’s an exemplary package, accompanied by a hardcover book of essays and photos that lets Lewis expand on his case for the film’s importance. I can see his point.

Shout! Studios’ special edition of Nightcrawler isn’t quite as elaborate, though it’s still pretty good. Shout has commissioned an engaging audio commentary with Joe von Appen, co-host of the Adjust Your Tracking podcast, and a new interview with composer James Newton Howard, who offers a really interesting story about how Dan Gilroy got him to understand the film’s tone by asking him to compose music that sounded like the work of someone being proud of their kid. (Lou Bloom is doing his best, after all.)

The excellent commentary produced for the original Blu-ray release in 2015 is also here, with the three Gilroy brothers (writer-director Dan, producer Tony and editor John) discussing the film and bouncing ideas off of each other in a loose, lively conversation. The disc also includes the brief EPK featurette “If It Bleeds, It Leads: Making Nightcrawler,” which tries to dig into the movie’s ideas but comes up against the limitations of a five-minute run time. And there’s a new trailer for the restoration, which is willing to be a little meaner and more savvy about what Nightcrawler is doing than the original marketing plan.

But as I keep saying about these restorations, the new 4K presentation of Nightcrawler is the real highlight of the package. Robert Elswit’s hybrid cinematography – shooting on film for daylight and interiors, and going digital for night scenes – looks richer and deeper in this new master, framing Gyllenhaal like a reptile in a terrarium. The audio has been remixed for Dolby Atmos, and while it’s slightly more enveloping and oppressive than the original 5.1 theatrical track (also included here, along with a two-channel stereo mix, both in DTS-HD), it’s not a huge leap forward. Put the Atmos track with the 4K platter, though, and the upgrade is obvious. It’s a great disc.

 

Nightcrawler is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Shout! Studios; Battle of Britain is available in a 4K/BD boxed set from Via Vision.

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