15 February 2010

May Criterions and Paramount Catalogues in 2010!

Criterion announced their May titles earlier today, which includes a second volume of films by Stan Brakhage, and both collections on Blu-ray. In addition to that excitement, the Eclipse box set for May is Nagisa Oshima's Outlaw Sixties, including the films Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, Pleasures of the Flesh, Violence at Noon, Sing a Song of Sex and Three Resurrected Drunkards. With the Akerman and now Oshima sets this year, I'm more excited for the Eclipse box sets than the mainline releases it seems. Also in store for May are a remastered edition of Nicolas Roeg's great Walkabout (DVD and Blu-ray), John Ford's Stagecoach (DVD and Blu-ray) and Fritz Lang's M (on Blu-ray).

I also was doing some browsing on the IMDb and saw that on the page for Joseph Strick's maligned adaptation of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer that Olive Films Opus is listed as the DVD publisher for 2010. So I did a little more investigating, and it seems Olive Films have snatched up a number of Paramount's catalogue titles (kind of like Legend Films did in summer of '08. Aside from Tropic of Cancer, the other titles listed as upcoming DVD releases from Olive Films include Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face [Ansikte mot ansikte] with Liv Ullmann; Guy Green's adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough with Kirk Douglas, Melina Mercouri and George Hamilton; the Raquel Welch western Hannie Caulder; Stuart Rosenberg's WUSA with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Perkins; Otto Preminger's Skidoo, Hurry Sundown and Such Good Friends; William Dieterle's Dark City with Charlton Heston and Rope of Sand with Burt Lancaster; the Jean Harlow biopic Harlow with Carroll Baker; Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents; Edward Dmytryk's Where Love Has Gone with Susan Hayward and Bette Davis and The Mountain with Spencer Tracy.

In addition to those Paramount titles, it looks like they've also got the rights to some recent films from Scandinavia, including the gay neo-Nazi film Brotherhood [Broderskab], which won the Best Film prize at last year's Rome Film Festival, and Letters to Father Jacob [Postia pappi Jaakobille], Finland's Oscar submission from 2009. Way to go, Olive Films.

7 comments:

Simon said...

Is it wrong that, out of these collectively, I've only heard of M? It feels wrong.

reassurance said...

I doubt many have seen the Oshima films, but both Walkabout and Stagecoach are pretty famous films.

I think Bergman's Face to Face is better known for being hard-to-find than it is for anything else.

Eric said...

I've seen a few of the Oshimas. They are quite awesome.

But I'm surprised Olive picked up Skidoo and Such Good Friends but NOT Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon. Is this an oversight on imdb, or did Olive really exclude this one?

reassurance said...

As my only source for this information is the IMDb, I couldn't say.

Blake Williams said...

If Such Good Friends is my favorite Preminger, does that mean that Otto is not for me.

reassurance said...

Do you not like Laura?

Blake Williams said...

my indifference to Laura still baffles me. I thought I liked it when i saw it, but that faded pretty quickly.
Like Advise and Consent the most of his canon, but Such Good Friends was another level.