Movie Review: A Night to Remember (1958) d. Roy Ward Baker

Cover of the Criterion Collection edition of A Night to Remember (1958) d. Roy Ward Baker

Movie Review

A Night to Remember (1958)

d. Roy Ward Baker

Criterion Collection #7

   Billed as "the best movie ever made about the Titanic disaster" (take that James Cameron), A Night to Remember ultimately may be more memorable for it's low number position in the Criterion Collection: #7!!!  It was enjoyable to watch- every time I watch a Criterion Collection movie from the good old days I am struck anew by how much the digital restoration helps to appreciate the film.   Honestly, the ease that the Criterion Channel has brought to the watching experience makes me question why I would ever watch a contemporary film again.  

  One of the takeaways from this fact-based film is that a major cause of the disaster was the overloading of the telegraph office with orders from the finicky first class passengers, buying and selling stock, making travel arrangements, so that a warning from a nearby ship about an iceberg in front of them was ignored, and, in fact, never read. 

Movie Review: Oliver Twist (1948) d. David Lean

Criterion Collection cover for Oliver Twist, directed by David Lean

Movie Review

Oliver Twist (1948)

d. David Lean

Criterion Collection #32

   Generally acclaimed as "the best" Oliver Twist adaptation,  David Lean's Oliver Twist is less well known in the United States, perhaps because Alec Guinness' grotesquely anti-Semitic portrayal of Fagin kept it out for several years after release.   Grim and expressionistic, Lean's Twist is very grown up, with a haunting, expressionistic quality that emphasizes the strangeness of the Victorian milieu of the book.

   Lean does an incredible job- both in this film and in Great Expectations, his other Criterion Collection Dickens movie, in synthesizing the much longer book into a film that still feels like it captures all the important moments of the book.

Criterion Collection Review: A Taste of Honey (1961) by Tony Richardson

Cover of Criterion Collection #829 A Taste of Honey (1961) d. Tony Richardson

Criterion Collection Review

A Taste of Honey (1961)

d. Tony Richardson

#829

   The original idea for this blog was that I would read all 1001 Books and watch all the Criterion Collection films.   When I started, Criterion Collection still had titles on Netflix, then it moved to Hulu, then there was a brief Filmstruck period and now there is the Criterion Channel which you can install on your smart tv.  Criterion Channel far surpasses prior efforts, and it comes close to realizing the vision I thought I was getting into when I came up with the idea a decade ago.

   When I stopped watching Criterion Collection films the entire collection was at #703, A Taste of Honey, #829 came out in 2016.   That's the real problem with trying to stay current on Criterion Collection films- they come out five a month.  A Taste of Honey is a film example of the "Kitchen Sink" realism school of English art, unusual in that it takes place outside of London and the source material, a play, was written by a woman.   The story is about a high school student who lives with her louche mother in a succession of low-rent apartments in 1950's Manchester.   

  Part of the pleasure of A Taste of Honey is the Manchester locations- lovingly restored by Criterion of course.   The extras give the always interesting journey of pathbreaking films in the British film environment- marked by the absence of any first amendment protection and the ever-present British Film Censor.  Here, the controversy is obvious- an interracial coupling and an openly gay bff add to the native exoticism of the milieu.