THEY LIVE BY NIGHT: Nicholas Ray's "little" classic hits Blu-ray via The Criterion Collection

Who'd have thought that a relatively small, kids-on-the-run movie, with leading actors who were newcomers (or nearly so) and a first-time director with no reputation to speak of, would down the decades quietly burn itself into the canon, ending up as a Blu-ray disc as part of the prestigious Criterion Collection? Back in 1948, when THEY LIVE BY NIGHT was released, Nicholas Ray (shown below) had made none of the several groundbreaking movies -- from In a Lonely Place and Johnny Guitar to Rebel Without a Cause -- that would put him permanently, if always a bit bizarrely, on the map.

Watching today this fascinating, moving and entertaining melodrama that broke new ground visually and aurally at the time of its release is a rather grand experience. In addition to viewing the Oscar-caliber supporting performances from Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen (shown left and center left, respectively, two photos below), we are also treated to two wonderful and memorable lead performances from Farley Granger (below, left, who would go on to make Hitchcock's Rope the same year) and Cathy O'Donnell (below, right, from The Best Years of Our Lives), who are as exceptional here and as they would ever be.

Ray combines bank robbery, thriller, romance, film noir and social justice into one unusual genre-jumping movie that, if it's no outright masterpiece, remains one of the most impressive directing debuts of its own time and even now (up there with the likes of The Usual Suspects), while the filmmaker's genuine concern for all his characters shines through, as always.

While it is now indeed a "period piece," the movie simultaneously seems to exist in its own special time and place: something that critic Imogen Sara Smith notes in her excellent critical appreciation of the film, which is part of the Criterion disc's Bonus Features and is "must" viewing. Ray's film is -- by turns -- exciting, sweet, charming, moving and surprising, even featuring, toward the finale, a first-rate musical number that exists beautifully on its own, while commenting on a number of themes to which we're being treated.

They Live By Night is first of all a romance between two genuinely nice-but-problemed kids, neither of whom have had anything approaching a helpful or normal childhood. We root for them both and especially as a unit because they work together so well. Mr. Ray allows us to understand this without piling on the sentimentality. If the finale must end in a kind of tragedy, even the character who betrays these two is given a measure of understanding and respect.

The new Blu-ray transfer is very good, as you would expect from Criterion, with new 2K digital restoration and uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The audio commentary is from a decade ago and features Farley Granger and film historian Eddie Muller, and the remaining "extras" include a new essay from film scholar Bernard Eisenschitz and just so-so audio excerpts from a 1956 interview with producer John Houseman.

The new Blu-ray, running 95 minutes, in black-and-white with an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, hits the street this Tuesday, June 20, as part of The Criterion Collection and will be available for purchase and rental.

THE CONNECTION: Shirley Clarke's grubby classic returns to sport spiffy, silvery sheen

Milestone has done it again. The company that keeps turning out major restorations, with the help of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, of major (or minor, depending on how you view them) works of cinema -- from Araya to Rogosin, The Exiles to The Edge of the World -- has a new one opening tomorrow in New York City, fifty years from the time it first appeared, only to be shut down by the New York City Police Department. At the time of its debut in October of 1962, THE CONNECTION, directed by Shirley Clarke, from the stage play by Jack Gelber, was already a cause célèbre. Back in those days, the play itself was considered raw and real -- too raw and real for the more popular, affordable and accessible entertainment offered by the movies. (This was prior to the creation of our current and ever-ridiculous ratings board.)

At the time of the film's initial release TrustMovies was a very young man who had arrived in New York the month previous to begin drama school. He missed opening day and didn't see the film until it was once again allowed to be shown, at which point, that "raw and real" subject mater -- a group of junkies, including some fine jazz musicians, sitting around a dilapidated cold-water flat waiting for a fix from their connection who, unlike Godot, really does show up to service the guys -- did indeed seem shocking and much more frank than anything he had seen up until then. That's about all he remembers of the film -- except that the print did not seem particularly good. Certainly nothing like the gorgeous one we saw at the press screening of The Connection at the IFC Center, where the film opens this Friday, May 4th. (Is that even possible? That today's restoration might look better than the film projected at the time of the initial release?) The dismal apartment that is the set of the film still looks like shit, but the film itself -- all silvery sheen and so many lustrous shades of grey that you want to lick them off the screen -- is a jewel.

Are we now so carelessly used to watching DVDs at home and digital projection in theaters that we can be so easily shocked into renewed appreciation by something this beautiful? (This restoration is up there with the best of them -- like Rogosin's On The Bowery.) Past the film beauty on display, however, The Connection, as is true of a number of these restored films, has not been treated kindly by the passing of time. Gelber's play and Clarke's film of it is a kind of play-within-a-play/movie-within-a-movie that posits a filmmaker/journalist (William Redfield, above) and his crew making a documentary about these guys and their "habits."

What may have seemed like stark realism in the 1960s comes off now as not a little pompous and "arty." And Gelber's writing, which again, seemed so honest and pointed at the time can sound awfully "theatrical" now, with some of the more "dramatic" moments resounding as the least real. The apartment's owner, Leach (played by a terrific William Finnerty, above) is afflicted with a boil on his neck that pains him no end. It's a very theatrical boil, however, and the actor is often referencing it to huge dramatic effect. Just when we're thinking, "Will somebody please pop the damn thing so we and this poor actor can move on!", somebody does, and we do.

Fortunately, four of the junkies are musicians, so we get a nice dose of jazz (a form of music I appreciate much more now than when I first saw the film). Nearly half the cast is black, and though civil rights had barely begun to make its mark in our country by 1962, you can feel the shimmering beginnings in this film. Gelber, Clarke and the cast show us how things were, with just a hint of what's to come. The strongest character in the play/film is Cowboy (played by Carl Lee, below), the titular connection who provides a little bit of heaven -- drug-wise -- along with philosophy, strength and cynicism for his crew.

Clarke put together a grand crew of her own to man the film, with some movie greats doing great work. Arthur J. Ornitz (Serpico) was cinematographer, Albert Brenner (The Pawnbroker, The Hustler) did the art direction, and Richard Sylbert (with dozens of classic films to his credit) handled the production design. The still below gives you a sense of what was achieved by these three.

For her part Clarke has Ornitz's camera constantly prowling the apartment; she's seldom still, and her movement keeps us enrapt. At 103 minutes, the film still feels a tad too long for what it has to say. Yet, in its way, it is so visually stunning, I don't think you'll mind sitting, listening and looking. Then, too, there's all that jazz.

As I noted above, The Connection, from Milestone Films, opens Friday, May 4, at the IFC Center in New York City (and elsewhere, I hope?) -- with a promise of the institutional DVD and home DVD release available this coming winter, 2013.

Rogosin's ON THE BOWERY: the return of a classic -- plus a terrific new "making-of"

TrustMovies had heard about ON THE BOWERY for nearly all of his adult, film-going life (he was 15 when Lionel Rogosin's ground-breaking combination of documentary and narrative was made), yet only this week did he finally see the movie. Labeled anti-American in its own time (by the likes of Henry Luce and wifey Clare), this likely most-under-seen American classic ever was much more appreciated elsewhere around the world -- as we learn from the indispensable and information-filled documentary about the making of the film, THE PERFECT TEAM, which accompanies the original in its week-long run that just opened at NYC's Film Forum.

Finland, for instance, saw it as "a documentary with a capital D," notes one talking head from whom we hear. Yet the film, though documentary-like, was not a documentary at all. Instead, it was an unusual combination of the narrative and the real -- somewhat in the manner of the recently-released Alamar.

In that excellent Mexican film, writer/director Pedro González-Rubio uses people playing themselves in a film that is narrative but makes use of the roster of documentary techniques. Mr. Rogosin (shown at right), who died in 2000, uses a bevy of men (plus a couple of women) -- all of them alcoholic -- found on New York City's then-infamous Bowery and places them inside a filmed short story of his (and also, I rather imagine, of their own) creation that brings to life the truly awful existence of these "Bowery bums."  Weird facts department: This non-documentary was actually "Oscar"-nominated for a Best Feature Documentary in 1958. Well, why not? It had already won the BAFTA award for Best Documentary the year before, and the Grand Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival the year before that! (Please: can we now refrain for five minutes from arguing about whether or not Catfish is a real documentary.)

At this point, I should admit that I have major trouble watching anything with an alcoholic at its center.  Having spent years of my adult life working under two such men (and living below another for a time, hearing those bottles drop and roll across his uncarpeted floor at 2am), my patience with and empathy for alcoholics has long since dissipated. (I do not mean those in AA who have stopped drinking but still consider themselves alcoholics-for-life; the guys I tried to help were "drinking alkies" who refused to be separated from their bottle.)  So it's hard, very hard, for me to watch a film with this situation at its center.

On the Bowery makes it easier, in some ways, due to how beautifully realized it is.  The cinematography by Richard Bagley is superior stuff, and the restoration of the film -- based on original negatives preserved at NYC's Anthology Film Archives and carried out by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory -- is spectacular. As is the transfer to DVD. The film looks better than anything I've yet seen on Blu-ray, with the black-and-white photography so gorgeous you want to lick it off the screen. Tactile, full of texture and the richest shades of gray imaginable, the film is a feast for cinephiles who appreciate the art of great black-and-white cinematography.

So impressed by the look for the film was I that I immediately called its distrbutor, Dennis Doros of Milestone Films, to learn more about this. "It's great, isn't?!" Doros responded with his usual enormous enthusiasm. "They went from a 2K scan to high def. But mainly it’s the restoration -- and then the transfer -- that's so great"  Further, the distributor insists, it has to do with something else. "This is a film of close-ups. When the crew was all at Lionel’s apartment -- you see this in the making-of film The Perfect Team -- he tells them that he wants faces, and everyone agrees.  Well, they got ‘em! Very few films these days do this. I don’t know why. Shooting great faces, doing it right, really is a lost art.

"I suspect," Doros continued, "that On the Bowery looked pretty damn good back in its own day. This is not always true. The Exiles, for instance did not look as good in 1961 as it does now. UCLA did a frame-by-frame exposure to get this restoration. But back in 1960," he chuckled, "nobody could have afforded this. These films are so immediate and direct with simple plots that pull you in. You feel as though the characters are looking back at you. No exposi-tion. Nobody telling you what you have seen. Films that are simple stories, told artfully, really take you in, and this is one of them."

And this is a simple story (written by Rogosin and his Greenwich Village neighbor Mark Sufrin): Newcomer alkie (Ray Salyer, above, who may remind you a lot of Gary Cooper), suitcase in hand, joins a group of mainstays at a Bowery bar.  One of them in particular (Gorman Hendricks, seen several photos above, through that chicken wire, and below, right) befriends him, then steals from him, continually gets him drunk before finally....  I have to admit feeling that the movie goes just a tad sentimental at its conclusion.  But at just 65 minutes, it should hold your attention and pay you back with that superior cinematography, as it looks at a venue that had heretofore not been seen. And certainly not like this.

Immediately after viewing On the Bowery, I had so many questions, I felt about to burst. Fortunately the accompanying "making-of" documentary, The Perfect Team, answered almost every one of these, so I can't stress how useful, not to mention entertaining, this addition is -- an unmissable accompaniment to the original film. Made by the filmmaker's son Michael Rogosin, it's fascinating account of the making of On the Bowery that includes both recent (in later years Rogosin seemed to resemble Danny DeVito) and archival footage.

Michael details the history of his father's film and its crew -- some remarkable filmmakers who all had their own oddities -- and features two of the few filmed interviews with Lionel ever recorded: one by Russian film director Marina Goldovskaya, the other an astonishing 1956 interview on The Today Show, in which host Dave Garroway -- who admits not having seen the movie that he and Rogosin are talking about (imagine a TV host having the balls to do that today!). Ray Salyer also appears on the interview, and we learn a lot more about this unusual man, who very easily could have had a film career post-Bowery, but instead -- well, you'll find out when you see this double bill. The Perfect Team, a France/USA/Italy co-production, runs 47 minutes, is in both color and black-and-white, and has an aspect ratio of 1:1.85. (On the Bowery has an aspect ratio of 1:1.33.)

Now playing at Film Forum through next Thursday, September 23 (I apologize for the tardiness of my coverage), after which -- and soon I hope -- we'll see a DVD release of both the film and its making-of featurette. And since it's from Milestone, you know it'll look good. Mr. Doros, by the way, promises that we'll eventually see restorations of Rogosin's other two films: Come Back, Africa (another narrative/documentary combo about South Africa and apartheid) and Good Times, Wonderful Times (an experimental documentary that Doros calls "the first anti-Vietnam film."