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This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor discuss Eclipse Series 27: Rafaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas.

About the films:

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of director Raffaello Matarazzo. Though turning to neorealism for character types and settings, these haywire hits about splintered love affairs and broken homes, all starring mustachioed matinee idol Amedeo Nazzari and icon of feminine purity Yvonne Sanson, luxuriate in delirious plot twists and overheated religious symbolism. Four of them are collected here, chronicles of men and women on...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV

Ratings (out of 5): Chains **** ; Tormento **** ½ ; Nobody's Children **** ; The White Angel *** ½ ; Series ****

Chains (1949), the first film in Eclipse’s Raffaello Matarazzo set, begins simply enough: a stolen car breaks down and the thief, desperate to avoid apprehension, hides out at a mechanic’s garage. 388 minutes and four films later, 1955’s The White Angel closes the set with a standoff between a fearless nun and a group of ruthless female inmates who are holding an infant hostage.

These two scenes best illustrate the milieu of Director Raffaello Matarazzo, one of Italy’s most commercially successful filmmakers. Matarazzo’s films vacillate violently between the mundane and the histrionic, more than earning the set’s label: "Runaway Melodramas". Those who prefer subtlety in their storytelling have received fair warning.

"It's easy to enjoy Raffaello Matarazzo's melodramas for the campy excess of their acting and story lines," blogs Dave Kehr, "but it's more productive to take them seriously, I think — to see how cleanly and elegantly Matarazzo presents this bezerko material, with a visual style that reminded Jacques Lourcelles of Lang, Dreyer and Mizoguchi, and how perfectly engineered his narratives are, with every outlandish episode incorporated into a serene, symmetrical structure. The new Matarazzo box set (my New York Times review is here) from Criterion's budget Eclipse line contains four of Matarazzo's seven films with the towering star couple Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson (literally — Matarazzo's mise-en-scene somehow makes them seem larger, both physically and emotionally, than any of the other characters on the screen), all subtitled in English for the first time: Chains (1949) [image above], Tormento (1950), Nobody's Children (1952) and The White Angel (1955)."

"Though immensely popular, the films were dismissed by...

Raffaello Matarazzo has been called Italy’s answer to Douglas Sirk: a director who made wildly popular mainstream melodramas laced with details so lurid and absurd that they could be read as satire. Criterion’s “Eclipse Series” box set Raffaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas collects four of those, from 1949 to 1955: Chains, about a mechanic’s wife who has a life-changing encounter with a hood she used to date; Tormento, about a defiant woman whose working-class lover is falsely accused of murder; and the paired Nobody’s Children and The White Angel, which together tell the story of a ...

This one is coming up late, due to Criterion jam packing a ton of releases on Friday, right while I was finishing up the original post. I think they wanted to mess with me, which is very funny. But being the premier (and only) site that gives you the best coverage of Hulu Plus movies, I don’t mind taking the time at all. I’m hoping it has nothing to do with the recent shake-up going on that Josh just reported on the other day (here), and with Hulu wanting to be bought because of financial problems stemming from multiple sources, this makes one wonder what’s going to happen to the Criterion Collection and their deal with Hulu. I’m crossing my fingers that whoever buys the service, be it Amazon, Google or Yahoo (who is the frontrunner), it doesn’t ruin the deal in place for Criterion and its films.

With this week’s New Release Tuesday now past, those of us obsessed with Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs (as well as those who remain merely curious, just beginning their exploration) are able to latch on to what might be one of the oddest and most pleasurable old movie discoveries of 2011. I’m willing to bet that prior to the announcement earlier this year that something called Raffaello Matarazzo’s Runaway Melodramas would be among Criterion’s June offerings, few if any of us had one of Italy’s most commercially successful directors of the 1950s anywhere close to our wish list of hotly anticipated “must buy” DVDs.

I’ll admit that I was stumped when I first saw the news a few months back, and when I went to IMDb and Wikipedia to try and learn more about this newest addition to the Eclipse lineup, I didn’t...

Criterion have just announced their upcoming June disc titles with ten new films added to the collection.

On the list this month are Louis Malle's surreal adolescent sexuality tale "Black Moon" and his anarchic comedy "Zazie in the Metro"; the 1930 silent doco/narrative feature "People on Sunday" which was co-written by Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann; and Kon Ichikawa's adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki's beloved Japanese novel "The Makioka Sisters".

Also on hand are Rolbert Aldrich's noir masterpiece "Kiss Me Deadly", Nicolas Roeg's celebrity-skewing satire "Insignificance", and a four disc 'Eclipse Series' collection of Raffaello Matarazzo’s extravagant early 50's Italian melodramas - "Chains," "Tormento," "Nobody's Children" and "The White Angel". While the Eclipse Series titles will be DVD only, all the others will be available on both DVD and Blu-ray.

It always manages to amaze me how fast the months fly by, it seems like only yesterday we were announcing the May 2011 Criterion Collection titles, and here we are with June’s. This month continues Criterion’s recent trend of increasing the new titles selection, and bringing an amazing director to the Eclipse Series.

Let’s go through all of the new titles first this time. Earlier this year, Criterion released their “wacky new years” drawing, hinting at a couple of titles that we are finally getting to see made official this June. In that drawing we had an image of Marilyn Monroe with Albert Einstein’s head, hinting at Nicolas Roeg’s film, Insignificance. This will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 14. In that drawing, we also had the infamous glowing briefcase, hinting at Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (which also screened last year at the...