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Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1956 / Color / 1:37 / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

The Colossus of Rhodes

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1961 / 2:35 / Street Date June 26, 2018

Starring Rory Calhoun, Lea Massari, Georges Marchal

Cinematography by Antonio Ballesteros

Directed by Sergio Leone

Fred Astaire once said of an undulating Cyd Charisse, “She came at me in sections.” So does the star of Sergio Leone’s The Colossus of Rhodes, a 300 foot titan whose sky-scraping vertical stance is at extreme odds with Leone’s widescreen frame. Save for some long shots, one of The Seven Wonders of the World is reduced to a slide show of disconnected body parts. Such are the giant-sized headaches of epic movie-making.

Even before an earthquake would wreak havoc on the community and topple the Colossus in 226 BC, Rhodes was a city in turmoil. Darios, a Brylcreemed military hero and would-be romeo has just dropped anchor but in lieu of a warrior’s welcome, he’s immediately ensnared in a two-pronged...

Luis Buñuel’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois, with a surreal spin. All of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. This beautiful color show is a worthy jungle adventure tale shot through with Buñuel’s signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.”

Death in the Garden

Region B Blu-ray + DVD

Eureka Entertainment / Masters of Cinema

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date June 19, 2017 / La mort en ce jardin / Available from Amazon UK / £ 11.65

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Michèle Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein, Marguerite Renoir

Original Music: Paul Misraki

Written by Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel, Raymond Queneau, Gabriel Arout from a novel by José-André Lacour.

A father, worried sick that his wife may be dead, walks his son and daughter across a rain-slicked square, while a long line of black-clad children from an orphanage snakes past them in the other direction. The bars of a castle-shaped birdcage, which has been the backdrop for a bitter quarrel between an aristocrat and his middle-aged mistress, gives way to a shot of a mountaintop hotel crisscrossed by countless panes of glass. A man and woman on the verge of an affair walk through an empty seaside house that evokes both their waning marriages and the life they will never have together.

Those are three moments from the three movies in Eclipse's set, Jean Grémillon During the Occupation: Le ciel est à vous, Lumière d'été and Remorques. This DVD release marks an extraordinary stroke of luck for those who, like me, had barely heard of this director. How often does anyone encounter,...

La mort en ce jardin / Death in the Garden (1956) Direction: Luis Buñuel Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, and Raymond Queneau; dialogue by Queneau and Gabriel Arout; from a novel by José-André Lacour Cast: Georges Marchal, Simone Signoret, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Michèle Girardon, Raul Ramirez Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal Death in the Garden I hadn’t even heard of Death in the Garden before its recent DVD release on the Microcinema label. It ranks as among the least-known of Luis Buñuel’s films, probably because it’s the least obviously Buñuelian. Aside from some fairly incidental bits of surrealist imagery – a freshly killed snake devoured by ants; Simone Signoret dressed in an evening gown and diamonds in the [...]...

Of the forgotten nonpareils to have been found by DVDing in the neglected, semi-seen recesses of Luis Buñuel's world-class filmography, none may seem odder than "Death in the Garden" (1956). A semi-Marxist workers' rebellion drama that segues into a lost-in-the-wilderness survival adventure? Shot in Mexico with a famous French cast (Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Charles Vanel) right in the middle of the filmmaker's "Mexican period," during which the world had supposedly forgotten about him? In color? Except it's not so freakish when you remember he shot a version of "Robinson Crusoe" two years earlier, in color, and that his Mexican films were making it to the Venice and Cannes fests, even before the earthquake of "Viridiana" in 1961.

Thumbnailing a filmography of almost 50 years is never easy or effective, but more to the point is the startling realization of how much Buñuel there is still to see. I count over a...

DVD Playhouse—October 2009

By

Allen Gardner

The Wizard Of Oz 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’S Edition (Warner Bros.) A true highlight in digital restoration technology, Warner Bros. restoration of the 1939 classic is cause for celebration. The Technicolor of the late ‘30s looks as though it was shot yesterday, and is especially stunning on Blu-ray, which was produced by scanning each of the film’s original Technicolor camera negatives using 8K resolution. From this scan, a final “capture” master was created in 4K, yielding twice the resolution seen in the master utilized for the film’s previous DVD release. Judy Garland’s Dorothy is charming as ever, and the entire cast: Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley and Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch, are all stellar. Four disc set bonuses include: Sing-along track; Documentaries and featurettes; Two 1914 silent films produced by Oz author L. Frank Baum, based on his stories...