INDEMNITY—to end with a lead- ing man dead and a murderess drifting away.
Criterion have done their usual beyond-the-call-of-duty job on this important title. The stan- dard frame transfer is excellent, with stable whites in many sun- baked exteriors and expression- ist blacks in the underground scenes. In the extras, Wilder sev- eral times pooh-poohs “fancy- schmancy” camera angles, but he was at the top of his game as a visual director here, as confi- dently filling the screen behind the leads with hordes of extras doing business as Cecil B. DeMille (note Jan Sterling stand- ing to one side of the frame as “S&M Carnival” trucks roll past her or Tatum’s self-destructive sermon on the mount to bewil- dered multitudes). Here, we get a long, sobering look at the film’s blazing lights and haunted shad- ows—like SUNSET BLVD., a gothic edge comes in, with bal- lyhoo Indian curses and rattle- snakes in boxes excusing some of the “fancy-shmancy.” Specific footnoting to ACE
IN THE HOLE comes in an after- word from Spike Lee, an informa- tive and eloquent commentary track by author Neil Sinyard and booklet essays from Molly Haskell and Guy Maddin amusingly pack- aged as a tabloid fold-out issue of the ALBUQUERQUE SUN-BULLE- TIN. A second disc runs to an audio interview with co-writer Walter Newman (Wilder had split with long-term collaborator Charles Brackett), a 1984 inter- view with Kirk Douglas (who ad- mits that turning down STALAG 17 was a mistake), excerpts from a 1986 Q&A session Wilder gave at the AFI and a 1980 documen- tary PORTRAIT OF A “60% PER- FECT MAN”: BILLY WILDER directed by Annie Tresgot in which Michel Ciment interviews the voluble but cagey director.
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The repetition of a few lines from PORTRAIT in the AFI session suggests Wilder polished his an- ecdotes, but he had pertinent things to say about his approach to cinema and works up an amusing, variously-accented Viennese/French Holmes and Watson relationship with Ciment.
THE BURNING
1981, MGM Home Entertainment, DD-2.0/MA/16:9/LB/ST/CC/+, $14.98, 91m 21s, DVD-1 By Kim Newman
BLACK CHRISTMAS was the
precedent, HALLOWEEN was the breakthrough, but FRIDAY THE 13TH made the psycho-kills- teens sub-genre an imitable for- mula, prompting the production in the early 1980s of at least a hundred look-alike items. The field was so crowded that, even beyond the fact that movies were obliged to be imitative of the ac- knowledged models, individual films couldn’t help but tread on one another. Inspired by a camp- fire tale popular at the sort of summer camp seen in FRIDAY THE 13TH, this was developed as THE CROPSY MANIAC in parallel with the lower-profile MADMAN, which was based on the same modern legend and had to change the name of its villain to “Madman Marz.” In addition, when the title was settled, the makers of another killer-with-a- flamethrower picture provisionally called THE BURNING had to go with DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE instead. THE BURNING arrived in theaters at about the same time as FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2, which make-up man Tom Savini turned down to take this project. A competent, watchable en- try in its field, THE BURNING was notable for a while as one of the more mainstream pictures cited by British Department of Public Prosecution as a “Video Nasty.”
This wasn’t due to any particular excess (the arguably nastier FRI- DAY THE 13TH PART 2 never made the DPP list, for instance) but a distributor foul-up whereby the cassette release accidentally featured the US cut of the film (containing a few seconds trimmed for UK theatrical showing by the British Board of Film Censors) but was emblazoned with an “18” certificate this version couldn’t legitimately claim. In recent years, the film has tended to float to the top of its pool because of the number of subsequently-no- table folks involved before and behind the cameras. “Created and produced by Harvey Weinstein” with a scripting credit for his brother Bob, this was the first official Miramax production (pre- viously, the Weinsteins had been rock music promoters) and thus the foundation stone of an em- pire; it also has a co-story credit for Brad Grey, later the executive producer of THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW (which he controversially co-created) and THE SOPRANOS, though British director Tony Maylam (RIDDLE OF THE SANDS) quibbles that Grey had nothing to do with the script (substantially the work of Peter Lawrence), but was aboard the project as the manager of Jeff De Hart, a stand- up comic who plays the (nothingy) role of the camp supervisor. Brian Matthews and Leah Ayres, good- looking persons who slipped into soaps and TV guest shots, are the notional leads, but the victims and screamers include Brian Backer (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, and also a Tony award win- ner for Woody Allen’s THE FLOAT- ING LIGHT BULB), Larry Joshua (THE SHADOW, SPIDER-MAN), Jason Alexander (SEINFELD), Ned Eisenberg (FLAGS OF OUR FA- THERS, WORLD TRADE CEN- TER), Fisher Stevens (SHORT CIRCUIT, AWAKE), Shelley Bruce (a former Broadway ANNIE) and
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