Jeff Heinrich

While I await delivery of this Czech movie, here's the blurb sent out by the Blu-ray's distributor, Britain's Second Run:

"Juraj Herz’s distinctive, decadent film is adapted from the renowned novel by Jaroslav Havlíček, and set at the turn of the 19th-century in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This atmospheric period drama is a bitter 'romance' which centres on the tragic marriage between two cousins: Štěpa (the fabulous Iva Janžurová), a vivacious, modern-minded, wealthy young woman ... desperately seeking love and happiness; and Pavel (Petr Čepek), an arrogant, retired army officer weighed down by debt, cynicism and syphilis. Herz’s lavish film evokes a pungent atmosphere of decay and features superb performances ... gorgeous costume and set design, stunning cinematography and a wonderful Luboš Fišer score."

An archetype of criminal sociopathy, "Dr. Mabuse" began life a century ago as a popular character in the bestselling novels of Luxembourg writer Norbert Jacques and went on to fame in the cinema in two contemporary adaptations by German director Fritz Lang: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). After his emigration to America and rebirth as a Hollywood director, in 1960 Lang returned to Germany and made his final film, completing his Mabuse trilogy with The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, once again starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge in the title role of the arch-villain and master of disguise, but to diminishing returns. Over the next half-decade, some lesser German directors took up the Mabuse mantle with equally B-movie results: five "krimis" (crime thrillers) in four years, each starring Wolfgang Preiss. Pumped out by Artur Brauner's CCC Film studios, these five have now been restored in 2K and collected, along with Lang's third Mabuse film, in a Blu-ray boxset by British distributor Eureka! Masters of Cinema: they are The Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961), The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962), the remake The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1962), Scotland Yard Hunts Dr. Mabuse (1963), and The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964). In each, Mabuse sows chaos wherever he goes: brainwashing prison inmates to commit crimes, plotting to steal a secret "invisibility" device, masterminding evil deeds from within an insane asylum, spreading his mayhem across the English Channel (Klaus Kinski plays a Scotland Yard inspector in that one), and lastly, striking out to a remote island to get his hands on a weapon that could destroy the world. In the Masters of Cinema set, all six films come with optional English dub tracks and optional English subtitles; the discs are code-locked to regions A and B (North America and Europe, essentially). For extras, you get audio commentaries new and old, interviews new and old as well (including one with Brauner's daughter Alice, his heir to CCC, and another with Preiss, from 2002), new introductions to each film (by Tim Lucas), a video essay on "krimis", an alternate Italian cut of Death Ray, an alternate French ending to Thousand Eyes, and trailers. A 60-page book completes the package, featuring new writings by journalist Holger Haase and German film scholar Tim Bergfelder, an archival essay by David Cairns, archival writing by Lang, and notes by Lotte Eisner on the great director’s final unreleased projects.

Playing in an orchestra was a civic duty for many a classical musician in communist Czechoslovakia, but finding the time to rehearse properly could be a struggle. Everyone from cellists to timpanists had to juggle their duties as musicians with a bevy of ordinary civilian activities: participating in workers' committee meetings, showing up for state-run fitness classes, attending official receptions for the party brass. At least, that's the picture painted in Slovak director Peter Solan's dark comedy The Barnabáš Kos Case. Released near the start of the Czech New Wave in cinema, the movie charts the rise and fall of the titular hero Kos, played by sad-eyed Josef Kemr (a Czech, dubbed into Slovak). Kos is a low-ranking member of a state orchestra who's occasionally called upon to play his percussive instrument: the triangle. Avoiding the limelight is his chief quality, and yet when the management go looking for someone to take over the directorship of the orchestra, running its day-to-day affairs and planning new concerts, for some reason they choose him. At first Kos declines, but then he sees an advantage: he'll use his new position to raise the status of his cherished instrument. Soon enough, he has moved the triangle to centre stage and commissioned a composer to write a new work especially for him, which he premieres at a gala concert at Bratislava's symphony hall attended by throngs of the party faithful and hoi polloi. It's then that everyone sees that the new emperor has no clothes. The concert is a disaster – as a featured solo instrument, the triangle falls on deaf ears, the audience left simply dumbfounded – and Kos's power trip comes to a humiliating end. A satire of a state system that rewarded mediocrity with all-too-predictably lousy results, The Barnabáš Kos Case is also an example of artistically inventive filmmaking. There's a touch of Tati in its sight-and-sound gags (cigarette lighters play a music-box tune when lit, everyone bumps their head on the same construction beam backstage, a voluble party boss is seen and heard only through a half-open door while he takes a bath), and when he's not focused on the players themselves cinematographer Tibor Biath's eye is drawn to semi-abstract compositions of wall fixtures, spreads of food and shadows on pavement. Briskly paced, its absurdist humour ringing clear as a bell, in normal times the movie would have been a surefire hit on the international festival circuit, but since its release it has been little seen outside its native land. Now comes a crisp new restoration in 2K by the Slovak Film Institute (SFI), rendered onto a region-free, newly English-subtitled Blu-ray by the U.K. boutique distributor Second Run. Extras include a short introduction to the film by SFI director Rastislav Steranka (whose thickly accented English begs for subtitles, unsupplied). There are also three short Slovak films: made between 1968 and 1974, these range from a Solan documentary about an infamous Nazi massacre that happened at the end of the Second World War, to a fly-on-the-wall portrait of a popular Slovak actress rushing between public appearances (she's Jarmila Koštová, who plays Kos's secretary in the film), to an animated short by Viktor Kubal that mirrors Barnabáš Kos in its depiction of a ladder-climbing everyman who takes a tumble. Completing the package is a 32-page booklet with new essays by Czechoslovak film expert Jonathan Owen and director Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga, Berberian Sound Studio).

Spring 2025 on Blu-ray

04.2025

03.2025