DB7

Where did all the good films go?

It is a scandal that so many of the cinema's greatest works remain unavailable on video

John Patterson
Friday June 27, 2003
The Guardian


The only thing I like about best-of lists is the chance to disagree with them violently, to slander their compilers' good names and damn their souls to oblivion. If you asked for my favourite movies of all time, I'd give you a list with a shelf-life lasting all the way to next Tuesday, at which point I'd demand the right to rip it up and offer another tally, with not a single name reappearing. And Citizen Kane wouldn't be on either. Not because I don't admire it. I'm just sick of seeing it. I could lip-synch the whole thing if you blindfolded me just after the RKO logo fades.
The funny thing is that most of the movies I'd put on my list seem almost impossible to see these days, even with the advent of DVD and the avalanche of reissues that has come in its wake. This isn't because I'm one of those losers who exults in the pursuit of obscurities, who equates rarity with worth, and is forever in search of John Ford's Army Information Dept short film instructing second world war sailors on the perils of venereal disease - though that's easily the most eye-catching title in Ford's oeuvre. It's simply because most of them are great by any measure. Sure, some of them were flops (there's your good indication of worth right there), and some are tied up in labyrinthine legal contests over rights, but many of them should be easily available, and aren't.

Foremost is FW Murnau's Sunrise which, if you stuck a gun in my mouth and started counting backwards, I'd probably name as my chart-topper. It won a special award as "most unique and artistic picture" at the first Oscars in 1927, so it was far from obscure. Unfortunately, a movie that represented the absolute pinnacle of achievement in silent cinema was doomed in the face of The Jazz Singer, which was released only days after Sunrise, and swept it away. Still, Sunrise is on Sight and Sound's all-time greatest rundown, somewhere in the middle.

Not that you can watch it in your own home, mind, at least not without making certain nasty compromises. Earlier this year Fox Classics indulged in a spectacularly tacky piece of marketing for Sunrise on DVD. You couldn't buy it in stores. The only way to get it was to buy a bunch of Fox catalogue-cloggers; boring, dated fare like Gentleman's Agreement. If you bought three or four of these respectable clunkers, you earned the right to buy Sunrise. This meant forking out over $80 in order to pay a further $30. I love Sunrise almost beyond my capacity to express it (apart from anything else, it's the most romantic date-movie ever), but I can't be party to a sting like that. I'd rather shoplift it. Except, like I say, it's not in the shops.

This is bottomlessly cynical of Fox, but at least they seem to know Sunrise's true value. You can't say the same for whoever holds the rights to many other movies I love. Just like Sunrise, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, another regular critical fave and, I understand, just released on DVD in Britain, currently exists in America only on an unbelievably crappy video transfer that makes it look like Renoir shot it underwater. Then we have my second candidate for Top Movie, Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night, which I've never found on video or DVD. Ray is a special case: if you listened to the American Film Institute you might think that Ray made Rebel Without a Cause and nothing else. But to assess his career without considering They Live By Night, or the similarly AWOL Bigger Than Life or Bitter Victory, is simply to patronise him as an artist. Poor, crazy old Nick. Can't get a break, dead or alive.

With other directors, the same problem arises. Often the one film that's least available is the very one that might reshape our understanding of the director's career. How can you understand John Boorman fully without access to Point Blank, one of the benchmark films of the 1960s, in proper Cinemascope, instead of the grimy, cropped video version currently available? (And while we're about it, whatever happened to his Leo the Last?).

Since Far from Heaven, the career-long genius of Douglas Sirk has been boiled down to All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, which are admittedly his finest works. But this leaves certain favourites, like There's Always Tomorrow, swinging forgotten in some purgatorial limbo, while The Tarnished Angels can only be found panned-and-scanned, all of whch leaves Sirk himself only partially understood.

The list is depressing. Altman's Images, filmed in Ireland in 1972, was glimpsed once by me in 1980, but nary a sign of it since. As a shocking thriller, it's utterly unlike most Altmans of the period. Where is Anthony Mann's The Tall Target, a noiry period thriller from 1951 about a plot to kill Abe Lincoln? With Mann, the master of three genres - noir, westerns and 'Scope epics - a ton of stuff falls through the cracks, like Target, Border Incident, and The Furies, his western adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Budd Boetticher is primarily famous for the seven spare and morally complex westerns he made with Randolph Scott, but not one of them has been available for years. Old Bullfighter Budd might as well never have made them. And good luck tracking down Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, currently owned by the luciferian Allen Klein, who Jodorowsky claims has destroyed the negatives. Add to these André De Toth's Crimewave and Robert Bresson's sublime Au Hasard, Balthasar.

I cherish the notion that someone, somewhere, is pulling a Hitchcock on us, and withholding these wonderful movies in the hope of inflating their cultural worth, the way the Fat Man held back two masterpieces and three others until he'd been dead four years. Alas, I fear this is not the case.

I think that our understanding of the rich cinematic heritage we have is being shaped by large media-industrial corporations, by the studios with their heaving catalogues, and by pliant, middlebrow, quasi-academic organisations like the AFI, that are hungry for support and financial aid from these entities. In short, by precisely the last market-rigging, conflict-of-interest cabal we want in charge of our visual culture.

With their bullshit lists and simple-minded marketing campaigns, they have in the dawn of the DVD era solidified film heritage into horrible blandness, elevating Spielberg and Lucas over their countless elders and betters, and other sins no less heinous.

In the meantime, the trunk of the tree of our film heritage rots. A new canon emerges, compiled apparently in order to sell a shrinking, teacher-approved set of "classics" to us over and over again, in different formats and with ever less interesting DVD bonus features, and as a result, much that is solid and old just melts into air, neglected to death.