Halloween

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, and P.J. Soles  

Director: John Carpenter

91 minutes (18) 1978  

LionsGate 4K Ultra HD  

[Released 1st October]

Rating: 9/10

Review by Steven Hampton

“I spent eight years trying to reach him. Another seven trying to keep him locked up.” Ominous music. The slow approach of a pumpkin-head... A dark intruder preys upon a safe neighbourhood...

‘First is best’, so the old saying goes, and this guiding principle certainly applies when referring to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Taking Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960) as his movie’s baseline, Carpenter builds up a master-class thriller from the slightest of basic plots. A dangerous loony on the run, Michael Myers returns to his home-town and embarks on a killing spree that will shock the quiet little community to its core, despite constant early mentions of ‘the bogeyman’, and assorted evils that appear only on 31st October - All Hallows Eve. 

Originally, Michael was a killer-child, put away for the murder of his older sister Judith. When he escapes from a local asylum, 15 years later, he stalks the US town of Haddonfield as a looming figure of suspense and mortal fear, a masked knife-wielding maniac - ‘the Shape’ - as he’s credited in this movie. When the adult Michael is lurking around the local school, Halloween acquires a more chilling atmosphere in this daylight scene than it had 40 years ago.  

Carpenter’s bold trick, that makes Halloween something very special, can only be seen in retrospect, when comparing this classic horror to numerous copycat mad-killer movies that followed. It’s the director’s cleverly effective and inspired use of darkness. The killer stands silently in the shadows near the brightly lit, suburban home of baby-sitter Laurie Strode (20-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis in her screen debut), introduced in daylight scenes of creepy situations on ordinary streets. And although the killer’s malevolent intentions are clear enough, right from the start, we never know when he will strike next. As such a calculated menace, Myers’ brooding presence maintains the constant element of surprise attack, and so he’s a fearsome threat indeed. Dressed in black, the killer is revealed only by light reflecting off a rather large knife, and the inhumanly blank white Halloween mask that he wears.  

It’s also about the idea of home-intrusion, when the killer lurks outside your door, and he gets inside your house at night, instead of sitting and waiting for any potential victims to drop by his own place (as in subgenre predecessors The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Psycho). That’s far more frightening. Death incarnate is out there, and it’s coming to get you... is Carpenter’s genre theme here, and it’s a subjective view illustrated repeatedly in his best early feature works, from Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), and The Fog (1980), to his seminal masterpiece The Thing (1982).

Judith Myers gravestone stolen, a suspicious event far more worrying and foreboding than mere kids playing pranks. Halloween presents a narrative that’s all cruel tricks and no treats, as it bridges the subgenre homicides-gap between a spree killer and a serial murderer. Amusingly, at one point, the shocks are leavened by some sly humour when the villain hides behind a sofa. In the terrifying climactic confrontation between the killer and his female victim, the heroine does a great job of defending herself throughout a long night of terrors, and she manages to disarm and then wound her attacker. She is far from being just another helpless girl, stalked by a vicious monster. Thankfully, the heroic psychiatrist, Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is able to step into the final fight and put six bullets into the masked man, hurling him out trough an upstairs window. Is he dead, at last? How could anyone survive all that?    

The genre master-class of Halloween remains the ultimate American bogeyman thriller, with its imaginative mix of shadow-play, chillingly anonymous stalking, and violent death scenes. It remains compelling, even 40 years after it first appeared. Carpenter’s movie put Haddonfield on fictional genre maps of small towns haunted by grisly murders, both past and present, and yet his contribution to Psycho-inspired screen mayhem helped to spawn an increasingly monotonous cycle of slasher movies, many of which soon lapsed into simply disastrous imitation during the 1980s. The so-damned awful, and ugly, 2007 remake from Rob Zombie was not saved even by the quite welcome presence of Malcolm McDowell as Dr Loomis.

Watch Halloween, again, in awe of its narrative economy, atmospheric use of darkness, and stunning widescreen frames that imbue the ordinary with an undeniable creepiness. This 4K Ultra HD edition with HDR makes inky pools of shadows and its scarily darkened rooms more effective for screen fights and frights than ever before. This UHD edition is definitely a movie to re-watch (if you dare) with your house lights switched off.

Extras:

• Commentary track with writer/director John Carpenter and star Jamie Lee Curtis
• The Night She Came Home - featurette with Jamie Lee Curtis
• On Location featurette
• Additional scenes from TV version
• Trailers, TV & radio spots 
• 5 x B&W art cards

Last Year In Marienbad

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, and Sacha Pitoeff

Director: Alain Resnais

93 minutes (U) 1961

Studio Canal

Vintage World Cinema

Blu-ray region B

Rating: 9/10

Review by J.C. Hartley  

Reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), about a month ago, with its unreliably-narrated account of annual adulterous goings-on at a German spa, I found myself recalling Alain Resnais’ enigmatic Last Year In Marienbad (aka: Last Year At Marienbad), and now, with a nice sense of synchronicity, here is a restored version of that film popping up on DVD and Blu-ray. I haven’t seen this film for about 25 years, when I caught it on terrestrial TV sometime in the 1980s and, fittingly, given one of its many subtexts being the unreliability of memory, it isn’t how I remembered it. The epitome of enigmatic, this film might be said to have put the ‘vague’ in the nouvelle vague, and yes, I’m sure I’m not the first to make that terrible joke.

The plot, such as it is, consists of the meeting at a baroque hotel of an unnamed man, played by the Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi, with a woman, Delphine Seyrig, and his efforts to remind of her of an earlier assignation, possibly occurring the previous year at a spa such as Marienbad. In the screenplay, and presumably just for convenience, the man is referred to as ‘X’, the woman as ‘A’, and a second man who may be the woman’s husband, as played by the cadaverous Sacha Pitoeff, is referred to as ‘M’. The two main protagonists meet, as if by arrangement, in various settings within the house and grounds, and play out repetitive scenarios, the man recalling past events which the woman either cannot or will not remember. 

Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet in collaboration with the director, the film is acclaimed as a cinematic expression of techniques driving the nouveau roman, or new novel, in the French literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s. This movement favoured the abandonment of formal literary tropes such as plot, characterisation, and linear progression in narrative, in favour of something more closely resembling lived experience. In fact, there is nothing in the philosophy of the nouveau roman that hadn’t been addressed in the literary modernism of the first three decades of the 20th century, hence the shared atmosphere suggested during my reading of Ford’s The Good Soldier. 

Unreliable narration, fractured chronology, stream of consciousness, an attempt to replicate the actual way in which human beings experience and process the world around them, marks both modernist literature of the early 20th century and this later manifestation, and it seems inevitable that the dream-like medium of cinema should attempt to replicate that. As it was, Last Year In Marienbad was seen as ground-breaking and controversial, hailed as a masterpiece, or condemned as the height of intellectual pretentiousness. In any event it has proved massively influential. 

Beginning with a prologue in which Albertazzi’s voice is heard intoning the repetitive experience of navigating the corridors of the hotel in which the action, or indeed inaction, of the film is to take place, the camera follows suit, gliding down carpeted halls and passages, and examining the intricate decoration on cornices and ceilings. Anyone who has seen Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), will get a jolt of recognition from traversing those corridors, similarly the attention the camera pays to the baroque embellishments in the palatial rooms anticipates the papal sequences in Fellini’s Roma (1972). For all its innovation Marienbad hardly exists in a vacuum and the film hints at its own influences. The year after the film’s release Francois Truffaut met with Alfred Hitchcock, reinforcing the admiration the directors of the nouvelle vague held for Hollywood’s genre output. Alain Robbe-Grillet, we are told, would have liked Kim Novak for the female lead in Marienbad.

Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) may seem an unlikely influence on Marienbad but both films deal with repressed memory, psychological obsession, time as a loop rather than an arrow, and in both the motivation of the male leads has a sinister undercurrent.  Hitchcock and Robbe-Grillet shared an interest in the sexual politics of domination. Just as James Stewart’s Scottie bullies Kim Novak’s Judy, X attempts to impose his version of past events on A, who urges him to leave her alone even as she seems to respond to him. Chris Marker uses clips from Vertigo in his documentary Sans Soleil (1983), which also meditates on the unreliability of human memory. James Stewart’s tailing of Kim Novak’s car through the streets of San Francisco in Vertigo is not so different to Albertazzi’s stalking of Seyrig through the hotel corridors in Marienbad. Interestingly, Luc Lagier in Dans le labyrinthe de Marienbad (2009), as part of a distinct but equally convincing selection of interpretive readings of Marienbad, suggests another Hitchcock film as a prime influence, namely North By Northwest (1959).

It is assumed the setting for the film is a hotel, it could as easily be a country house, or an exclusive clinic, at one point the man M reminds A that she is here to rest. The guests seem to be permanently attired in evening dress, although in the presumed flashbacks to the man and woman’s original encounter slightly less formal wear is on display.  Entertainment is provided, a play, and a concert, the guests play cards, dance in a darkened salon or drink in a dimly lit bar. At first it seems as if the ensemble may be there to represent some form of allegorical commentary on class or society, like the inmates of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). The play the guests watch is ‘Rosmer’, which may be a version of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886), in which personal relationships are played out against a background of political and social change.

The guests are often shown immobile, or engaged in fatuous small-talk, or else recalling past events, a male guest visiting a woman guest’s room, someone breaking the heel of their shoe, events which are later shown to be episodes in the relationship which X insists he had with A. There is no suggestion of an outside world, nor is it possible to place the events or characters in a particular era, evening dress being particularly timeless. In the grounds of the hotel the guests strike poses like figures by Magritte in a setting by Paul Delvaux, the formal garden setting a clear influence on Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). 

Eventually, the film reaches a sort of crisis, X recounts the events leading up to his previous intimacy with A, and although this is not shown there is a strong suggestion he has raped her. In a scene in the bar, A appears to have a flash of recognition, as if a buried traumatic memory has suddenly surfaced. Nothing of course can be taken for granted and the couple are eventually shown leaving together, although the unspoken distance between them appears unresolved.

No plot summary or teasing out of themes can quite capture the experience of watching this film. In fact, as is suggested in one of the little films comprising the extras package, Marienbad should just be experienced without worrying-away at meaning. Formal, theatrical, allusive, elusive, repetitive, it reinforces the dream-like quality so often ascribed to cinema, a quality usually sacrificed on the altar of plot-development. Intentionally frustrating as attempts at interpretation might be, the film represents total cinema without a wasted shot or line of dialogue, where the sets and costumes are as integral as the script, and with a score, by Seyrig’s brother Francis, that can be as ominous as that of a thriller or as romantically playful as something penned by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

As befits this re-issue there is an impressive line-up of extras. ‘The Wanderers Of Imagination’ examines the collaboration between the director and writer and how they came to create the film, and includes analysis from actress Anna Mouglalis, and Robbe-Grillet’s widow Catherine. Film historian Ginette Vincendeau then looks at the history of the film and its reception. There are two documentary films made by Resnais, Le Chant du Styrene (aka: The Song Of The Styrene, 1959), a publicity short about plastic production with a poetic narration penned by Raymond Queneau, and Toute la memoire du monde (aka: All The Memory Of The World, 1957), about the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

The former film finds beautiful images in industrial production lines, and the latter is full of the graceful corridor glides that haunt Marienbad. ‘In The Labyrinth Of Marienbad’, is Luc Lagier’s superb deconstruction of the film, which is seemingly about to offer a single explanation but then goes on to provide a plethora of equally valid interpretations. There is a documentary on Alain Robbe-Grillet in which he comes across as a humorous and engaging interviewee, with comprehensible theories on literature less gnomic than some of his pronouncements from earlier in his career. The extras also include a restored trailer.

A final personal note on the rating for this film, as masterpieces and milestones of cinema would normally merit a 10/10. I’m not questioning the film’s status with my parsimonious 9/10, I just find it a little chilly and introspective compared with some other French movies of the period.