The definitive edition of another landmark musical film, A Hard Day's Night, which forever captured the electricity of the English musical group, The Beatles, has recently been released by Miramax Entertainment in a two-disc set replete with extras. The DVD ROM features allow you to read two different versions of the screenplay (one with handwritten notes), that you can also read as you watch the film. Among the many highlights of this package is an interview with director Richard Lester who reveals that it really never occurred to anyone to ask the Beatles to play anyone but themselves. That desire to capture them and the times led to Lester deciding to shoot in real places with low ceilings and people constantly nagging the group. "I wanted it to be as natural an experience as possible," Lester says. "If you have three weeks to cut, edit and dub, mix, check a print on a film, you have no chance to think, 'I've achieved aesthetic greatness.' I think when we made A Hard Day's Night, we knew that they were really wonderful and I enjoyed their music. As to their longevity, I had never thought about it. We knew by contract we had to get the film out quickly. The reason that was so was because United Artists thought they would be a one-month wonder. I think I owe them a lot more than they owe me. They gave me a film career. I was able to trade on that for about 40 years. All I did was to try to make sure that they were presented in a way that was respectful and as honest as could be, and to be as close to what they would have liked to make as a film."

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Complete First Season (1970)

What show turned the world on with a smile? From the '70s until today it's been The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one of the most honored situation comedies in history. 20th Century Fox Home Video has recently released on DVD the first season of this landmark show. In addition to the 24 episodes, there are a number of extras, including an audio commentary on the pilot, "Love Is All Around," featuring director Jay Sandrich, executive producer and writer Allan Burns, and actor Ed Asner. Burns tells that when they originally shot a test version of the first office meeting between Moore and Ed Asner as Lou Grant, after viewing it, Perry Lafferty, head of CBS Programming, called him and diplomatically tried to get him to recast the role of Grant by saying, "You know, Ed Asner is really a fine 'dramatic' actor, 'dramatic' actor." Fortunately, Asner remained as Grant, and the key relationship between Mary and her boss carried the show for another seven years. But the show continued to face hurdles. For instance, network execs kept remarking that the scripts weren't funny. There were no obvious jokes in them. They couldn't see that the show's humor was coming from the characters and their relationships.

In an excellent documentary featuring interviews with the cast, Burns and executive producer/writer James L. Brooks, Sandrich talks about how critical the director is to any show. "The director will speak for the cast to the writers so there's a middle man. So it doesn't have to be contentious," he says. "The really hard part on the Mary show, because we had a really brilliant group of writers, sometimes an actor wouldn't do it as well, or lose a line, and these six brilliant minds would try to change things. [The director] has to be in synch with the writers, but you have to fight if you think it's the performance that isn't going the right way. So it has to be very collaborative. There still has to be the division between writer and director. You can't have 18 people talking to the actors because it gets too confusing. What a director does is create the style of the show. The writers come up with the wonderful dialogue and plots but there are so many different ways to play a scene."

The Last House on the Left (1972)
Directed by Wes Craven

In July this year, the British Board of Film Censors finally overturned its 18-year-old ban on Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), which had been withdrawn from video distribution at the government's behest as a result of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, known as the "Video Nasties" law. Swept out of sight along and lumped in with other such "classics" as Cannibal Corpse, Driller Killer and SS Experiment Camp, Peckinpah's examination of violence under duress duly disappeared, living on until 2002 in popular hyped mythology. Enjoying a similar fate, The Last House on the Left was likewise recently reinstated to the video mainstream, albeit losing a few frames in the process. Britain's stance on video violence was laudable, but maddeningly swinging. It made no allowance for art or artistry, all became exploitation. Here's the question: Is Last House on the Left art, or even artistic? Wes Craven is a pretty damned good filmmaker, and the negligible production values and low-tech primitivism actually works in its favor; in the end Last House carries the power of an aberrant, nightmarish documentary, containing a verisimilitude still shocking today. Loosely based on Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960), (don't laugh), this tale of kidnapping, murder and revenge is quite unlike anything seen before or since, and is really, genuinely disturbing. MGM's DVD contains the complete cut of the film and a useful commentary from the director and his producer, Sean S. Cunningham, along with some outtakes and video interviews with the principals. Wes Craven faces the difficulties of his material with candid honesty and a refreshing seriousness; his enthusiasm for cinema is evident and heartfelt.

Man Bites Dog (1992)
Directed by Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde

Twenty years after Last House, came Man Bites Dog, a full-bore attempt to make a "faux" documentary about the cause and effect of violence. Following a serial killer around Belgium, we watch as he rapes and murders in a disarming and charming fashion. Palling around with his filmmakers, the killer engages in a fine discourse about any topic on his mind, while getting ready to consign another victim to the ether. He offers to help finance the guys who are doing this "thing" on him. Eventually the filmmakers become more complicit and involved in the crimes, helping to dispose of bodies and participating in the odd mayhem themselves. A sensation at film festivals, Man Bites Dog is never as clever or as funny as it should be, and its boring repetitiveness soon wears thin, but it does nevetheless resonate to some degree, and makes us cringe at the nature of media coverage when applied to violent events. Criterion's disc treats its subject with appropriate solemnity, and presents the grainy visuals as pristinely as possible. Benoit Poelvoorde, one of the film's makers, plays Ben the serial psycho with lighthearted joie de vivre, and it is his chuckling, cheery madness that lingers in our minds long after the film is over.

–Nick Redman

Leading off our column this issue is Agnes Varda's evocative, melancholy, exquisitely life-affirming documentary, The Gleaners and I (2000). When I saw this film for the first time two years ago at the Chicago Film Festival, it was one of those rare experiences where the film washes glacially over you as you sit there, but when it's done it will not leave your head for an instant. It refuses to budge, nudging you with its quiet insistence; its artfully composed digital images recurring playfully just when you least expect it. The consummate skill and craft of this movie is shocking — effortlessly conveying its thoughts and ideas with unearthly clarity. Agnes Varda has been described as "the Grande Dame of the French New Wave" and her pedigree, both as a director of movies as diverse as Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond (1985), and as the widow of Jacques Demy, whose own contributions to the nouvelle vague have left an indelible impression, is peerless and unmatched. The Gleaners and I is difficult to describe; it merely unfolds as a ruminative study of the need to glean, whether fruit, vegetables or rubbish others have left behind, or the collection of ideas, feelings, needs that humans have in the course of their odd, enclosed lives. Traveling across the French countryside, Ms. Varda encounters all manner of gleaning, which she documents uncritically, sympathetically, tying the shards of debris together, along with her own bric-a-brac, both literal and philosophical. Almost alchemically, the images on view form a collage of beauty and strangeness. Pointing her little handheld digital eye at anything or anyone that strikes her fancy, Ms. Varda's unerring vision somehow conspires to make a garbage dump resonate with meaning. This is filmmaking of the highest quality, and just about as hard as anything can be to pull off. It's marvelous. Recently released by Zeitgeist Video, the DVD has (as its special feature), a sequel to the film — Two Years Later. Revisiting some of the places and people, Ms. Varda creates a wry adjunct to her masterpiece.

One of the most popular series in British television, Doctor Who, which ran from 1963 until 1989, is well represented in the BBC and Warner Bros. Home Video release of Doctor Who — The Key to Time — The Complete Adventure. There are numerous commentaries from cast, including leads Tom Baker and Mary Tamm, as well as with directors Pennant Roberts, Darrol Blake and Michael Hayes. The director commentaries are particularly illuminating as they talk about the budgetary limitations that make many of the show's effects seem so primitive today. But the strength of the stories and performances continue to draw fans who are willing to overlook the absence of more contemporary effects. These digital transfers superbly illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the show.

Following their beautiful presentations of Notorious and Rebecca, Criterion continues its Hitchcock program with Spellbound (1945), which now enjoys deluxe treatment on DVD. The psycho-melodrama has never looked better, and Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman practically glow with key-lit luminosity. The disc is stuffed-to-the-gills with succulent bits-and-bobs, including an authoritative commentary from Criterion regular Marian Keane, an audio interview with composer Miklos Rozsa, and a complete Lux Radio Theatre adaptation starring Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli.

As overheated as the sizzling romance becomes, however, it does not compare to the overheated sizzling fates of the disgusting traveling family on view in Near Dark (1987), Kathryn Bigelow's amusing take on vampire folklore. Co-written by her and Eric Red, it playfully updates the '70s road movie, carrying to illogical extremes the butchering antics of some undead degenerates. Shot on a low budget, with an excellent cast (Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein), Near Dark perambulates along, employing its yucks and sucks with admirable dexterity. Anchor Bay Entertainment has bestowed on it a lavish, two-disc presentation that elevates the movie from guilty pleasure to cult classic. Disc one presents the film, both with and without Bigelow's sardonic commentary, and disc two proffers a 47-minute, well-put-together documentary, and a deleted scene and the usual rogues' gallery of stills, screensavers and storyboards that Bigelow drew.

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