Samuel Fuller: Forty Guns (1957)

....Hollywood legend Barbara Stanwyck saddled up with writer-director Samuel Fuller ( "I Shot Jesse James", "Hell and High Water", The Baron of Arizona), for the pulp maestro’s most audacious western, a boldly feminist spin on the genre that pivots effortlessly between ribald humor, visceral action, and disarming tenderness. High-riding rancher Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) commands a forty-strong posse of cowboys, ruling Cochise County, Arizona, without challenge. When U.S. Marshal Griff Bonell (Barry Sullivan) and his brothers arrive in town with a warrant for one of her hired guns, Jessica begins to fall for the lawman even as he chips away at her authority. With astonishing black-and-white CinemaScope photography, hard-boiled dialogue laced with double entendres, and a fiery performance by Stanwyck at her most imperious, Forty Guns is a virtuoso display of Fuller’s sharpshooting talents.

Barbara Stanwyck in FORTY GUNS from Criterion Collection on Vimeo.

• Samuel Fuller
• United States
• 1957
• 80 minutes
• Black & White
• 2.35:1
• English
• Spine #954


Special Features




• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with director Samuel Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang Fuller, and daughter, Samantha Fuller
• A Fuller Life (2013), a feature-length documentary by Samantha Fuller about her father, featuring filmmakers Wim Wenders, William Friedkin, and Monte Hellman; actors Mark Hamill, James Franco, Jennifer Beals, Bill Duke, and Constance Towers; and others
• Audio interview with Samuel Fuller at London’s National Film Theatre from 1969
• New interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith, author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City
• Stills gallery
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Lisa Dombrowski and a chapter from Fuller’s posthumously published 2002 autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking
New cover by Kim Thompson

Kenji Mizoguchi: A Story from Chikamatsu-aka The Crucified Lovers

One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi (A Geisha, The Love of Actress Sumako, Flame Of My Love, The Woman In The Rumor, Tales of Taira Klan) in the first half of the 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu (a.k.a. The Crucified Lovers) is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution. Based on a classic of eighteenth-century Japanese drama, the film traces the injustices that befall a Kyoto scroll maker’s wife and his apprentice after each is unfairly accused of wrongdoing. Bound by fate in an illicit, star-crossed romance, they go on the run in search of refuge from the punishment prescribed them: death. Shot in gorgeous, painterly style by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this delicately delivered indictment of societal oppression was heralded by Akira Kurosawa as a “great masterpiece that could only have been made by Mizoguchi.”
A Story from Chikamatsu was restored by Kadokawa Corporation and The Film Foundation with the cooperation of the Japan Foundation.

PANIQUE (1946) BY JULIEN DUVIVIER FROM THE CRITERION COLLECTION.

Proud, eccentric, and antisocial, Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon)

has always kept to himself. But after a woman turns up dead in the Paris suburb where he lives, he feels drawn to a pretty young newcomer to town (Viviane Romance), discovers that his neighbors are only too ready to suspect the worst of him, and is framed for the murder. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, Julien Duvivier’s first film (Under The sky Of Paris, Anna Karenina, Voici Le Temps Des Assasins) whom  Jean Renoir called him, a "great technician, [a] rigorist, a poet",  after his return to France from Hollywood finds the acclaimed poetic realist applying his consummate craft to darker, moodier ends. Propelled by its two deeply nuanced lead performances, the tensely noirish Panique exposes the dangers of the knives-out mob mentality, delivering as well a pointed allegory for the behavior of Duvivier’s countrymen during the war.


Panique - Trailer from William Hohauser on Vimeo.

QUENTIN TARANTINO'S "THE NEW BEVERLY CINEMA" : A MOVIE THEATER WORTHY OF YOUR CINEPHILE SUPPORT

The #NewBeverlycinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, Phone 323.938.4038, plays only 35mm prints....Here's the schedule for December 2018. Also  featuring movies from the Tarantino's vault. In case you didn't know about the existence of this movie theater....After 10 years of being a benefactor of the theater, Oscar-winning filmmaker Quentin Tarantino became owner and head programmer. Committed to celluloid, Quentin made the unique decision to have the New Beverly solely project film prints. 
"...I want the New Beverly to be a bastion for 35mm films. I want it to stand for something. When you see a film on the New Beverly calendar, you don’t have to ask whether it’s going to be shown in DCP or in 35mm. You know it’s playing in 35 because it’s the New Beverly." 
..It's a movie theater and a cause worthy of your cinephile support!

Take a look at their film offers in December:

http://thenewbev.com/schedule/