GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1969) Fun City Editions Blu-ray Review + Screenshots

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1969) 

Label: Fun City Editions 

Region Code: A

Rating: R

Duration: 101 Minutes 50 Seconds 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Dual-Mono with Optional English Subtitles 

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:)

Director: Larry Peerce 

Cast: Richard Benjamin, Ali MacGraw, Jack Klugman, Nan Martin, Michael Meyers

 

Goodbye, Columbus (1969) is a coming-of-age love story, directed by Larry Peerce (Two-Minute Warning), based on the 1959 novella by Philip Roth, telling the unorthodox love story that brings together odd couple Neil (Richard Benjamin, Scavenger Hunt) and Brenda (Ali MacGraw, The Getaway) - he's a poor Bronx librarian clerk recently discharged from the military and she's a wealthy Jewish American princess from Westchester attending Radcliffe on summer break. The pair meet at a Old Oaks Country Club in Purchase, New York, a private club that Neil visits as a guest of his cousin Doris (Kay Cummings, Why Would I Lie?), a romance blossoms but fledgling couple meet resistance when Brenda's stuck-up mother (Nan Martin, Jackson County Jail) gets hung up on the issue of social status, and pushes back on it, not approving of his lower stature and aimless career goals, while her father Ben (Jack Klugman, TV's The Odd Couple), a hard-working, nouveau-riche businessman who has been successful in the plumbing business, is more accepting of Neil if it means his daughter's happiness. 

It's a terrific watch, a bit of an unorthodox love story to be sure with how it pans out, but MacGraw and Benjamin are dynamite together, and the film's observations of the Jewish American middle class and the idiosyncrasies of young love are both touching and compelling. The dinner sequences are gems as Neil gets to know Brenda's family, there's a wonderful wedding sequence when Brenda's brother Ron (Michael Meyers) gets hitched, and of course her spoiled younger sister is a bratty hoot. We also get some terrific New York spotting with scenes shot in Westchester and around the Bronx and Yonkers, including a couple of scene with Neil interacting at his library job with a curious young black boy who has a passion for art. If you're a fan of quirky love stories that are both humorous, poignant and with a socially curious conscience this tale of young love in the vein of The Graduate and Baby, It's You comes highly recommended. 

Audio/Video: Goodbye, Columbus (1969) arrives on Blu-ray from Fun City Edition in 1080p HD framed in 1.85:1 widescreen, sourced from a sparkling 4K restoration of the 35mm Original Camera Negative, the restoration looks wonderful, the source has been fine tuned removing most of the nicks and scratches, a few minor blemished remain by way of faint vertical lines or nicks, but it really does look tremendous. Depth and clarity please, black levels are solid, and colors have some nice punch to them. The lush Technicolor cinematography of Gerald Hirschfeld (T.R. Baskin) is sumptuous, I loved soaking in these late 60s vibes through his lens, wonderful stuff that is both nostalgic and bittersweet. Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 2.0 dual-mono with optional English subtitle. The track is clean and well balanced, dialogue is always easy to discern, room acoustics sound great, and the soundtrack features catchy tunes by the 60/70s popsters The Association as well as the lush score music by Charles Fox (Barbarella) that really drives home the melancholic tone of the film. 

FCE offer a well-stocked Blu-ray edition, we get a new Audio commentary by Bill Ackerman that digs into the book versus the film, the casting, the themes, locations, score and plenty more. There's also a new 15-min video interview with composer Charles Fox, in which he talks about his early career, love of jazz and classical music, getting into scoring with The Incident, and then Barbarella for Paramount and then getting invited to L.A. to score Goodbye Columbus, Meeting Henry Mancini, Nwil Hefti, Elmer Bernstein and on the Paramount set his first day, plus Mancini  getting invited to join the Motion Picture Academy, his relationship with director Larry Peerce, how he approached the score, pulling ideas from his own background, appreciation of the cast and film. The last of the disc extras is a 33-min Archival video of post-screening on-stage conversation with cast and crew that too place in 2016 at The Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, which is a wonderful gathering of the key participants as they looked back on the film and it's legacy. 

The single-disc Blu-ray arrives in a clear keepcase with a Reversible Wrap featuring three original movie poster display options. inside there is a  20-Page Illustrated Booklet with new essay by Jim Healy, which is limited to the First Pressing Only, the essay 'How Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus Became a "Very Big Movie"', detailing the adaptation of the book, changes in the film version, casting, the score what author Roth did not like about the film adaptation, and quite a bit more, its a terrific read.  

Special Features: 

- Audio commentary by Bill Ackerman

- New video interview with composer Charles Fox (14:56) 

- Archival video of post-screening on-stage conversation with cast and crew (32:56) 

- FCE Trailers: Goodbye Columbus (4:56)

- Image gallery (5:15) 

- Double-sided wrap with legacy artwork

- 20 Page Illustrated Booklet with new essay by Jim Healy (First Pressing Only)

Screenshots from the Fun City Editions Blu-ray: 

Extras: 

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ALRAUNE (1928) + THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1926): GERMAN SILENT GENRE RARITIES FROM DIRECTOR HENRIK GALEEN Deaf Crocodile Blu-ray Review + Screenshots

ALRAUNE (1928) + THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1926): GERMAN SILENT GENRE RARITIES FROM DIRECTOR HENRIK GALEEN 

Deaf Crocodile takes us back to the silent era to unearth two silent-era Austrian horror-fantasy films from director Henrik Galeen, who is notable for having penned writer of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Paul Leni’s Waxworks. 

ALRAUNE (A WOMAN OF DESTINY) (1928)

Label: Deaf Crocodile

Region Code: A,B

Rating: Unrated 

Duration: 136 Minutes 

Audio: English DTS-HD MA Mono with English Subtitles 

Video: 1080p HD Fullcreen (1.33:1) 

Director: Henrik Galeen

Cast: Brigitte Helm, Paul Wegener, Iván Petrovich

We start off with the erotic mad science tale Arlaune (1928) aka A Woman of Destiny, wherein genetics Professor Jakob ten Briken (Paul Wegener, director of The Golem) sets out to explore the folktale of how the mandrake root, which according to mythology is grown beneath the hanging gallows from the semen of condemned men, and is capable of impregnating women - already this pre-code slice of erotic horror sound pretty wild. The professor sends his nephew/assistant Franz (Iván Petrovich) to the local brothel to procure a suitable woman (Mia Pankow) to impregnate with his newly acquired mandrake root. The progeny of the disreputable woman and the mythical mandrake root is a baby girl, whom the professor adopts as his daughter, keeping her origins a secret. She grows up to become Arluane (Brigitte Helm, Metropolis), a beautiful woman with a magnetic gaze and a drivingly corrupted soul, the professor believing her origins means she has no soul and no morality. He sends her to a Catholic convent, where she is regularly in trouble for bad behavior and pranks, like putting ugly black beetles on the nuns robes. There she charms Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer) a bankers son into stealing money so they can run away together, which they do. Not long after  they both end up working at the circus where she catches the eye of a magician  magician Torelli (Louis Ralph), and begins working as his on-stage assistant, until the professor tracks her down and forces her to return home under threat. There she discovers the professor's journal and learns the hidden truth behind her origins, and decides she will stick around to have her revenge on the professor, who more and more is becoming obsessed and creepily sexually attracted to his adopted daughter. 

The film is terrific, gorgeously shot for the era with some wonderfully shadowy expressionistic lensing, but the film's biggest draw is easily Helm, her magnetic gaze and sexual allure are absolutely captivating, a twisted and perverse tale with semi-incestuous tones, one that has some surprisingly nuanced readings of morality, one that might surprise the uninitiated with it's themes of sexuality, morality, myth and mad science.

DER STUDENT VON PRAG (THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE) (1926)

Label: Deaf Crocodile

Region Code: A,B

Rating: Unrated 

Duration: 133 Minutes 53 Seconds 

Audio: DTS-HD MA 5.1 With Optional English Subtitles 

Video: 1080p HD Fullscreen (1.33:1) 

Director: Henrik Galeen

Cast: Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss

The Student of Prague (1926), also directed by Henrik Galeen, stars Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as Balduin, a poor but well-liked University of Prague student who in a Faustian deal agrees to sells his soul to the Devil in the form of a devious loan shark named Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) who uses his black magic to arrange for Balduin rescue the wealthy Margit (Agnes Esterhazy), the daughter of a wealthy Count (Fritz Alberti), during a fox hunt, the introduction allows him to pursue his love-interest, with the student gaining wealth and the love of Magrit, but as with every deal with the devil there is a price to pay, and in this instance it is a malevolent doppelganger which merges from Balduin's mirror which commits crimes in his name, resulting in a tragic finale that does not end well for the student who struck the deal. The film looks gorgeous, elegantly staged, an opulent ballroom scene, and some terrific trickery, including the evil doppelganger emerging from the mirror, and an expressionistic shadowy hand climbing up a wall, plus we get Veidt in a wonderful dual role

Audio/Video: Both film arrives on Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile, presented in 1080p HD framed in the original 1.37:! fullscreen aspect ratios, each with a dedicated Blu-ray. The original German version of Alraune no longer exists, this reconstruction is based on Danish and Russian versions, which lucky for us include shots that were originally censored and cut by the German censors, but sadly there is also additional footage which has long been lost through the years, with some newly created interstitials. The Student of Prague is a similar situation, what we have here is a reconstruction of a Spanish version from the with the original German title cards to it. Alraune is the more stable of the two, but these both look tremendous considering the age, and having these silent-era horror-fantasy flicks on disc and looking as wonderful as they do is a gift. Audio on both come by way of English DTS-HD MA, the scores on Alraune by Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski, and by Stephen Horne for The Student of Prague sound terrific. 

Extras are plentiful, we get a 16-min Excerpt from AUF GEFÄHRLICHEN SPUREN (DANGEROUS PATHS), 1924, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, a new 97-min 2-part video interview with Stefan Drössler of the Filmmuseum München about the preservation of both films, and the the career of writer/director Henrik Galeen, plus a pair of new Audio Commentaries by film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, former director of the UCLA Film & TV Archive and the Filmmuseum München, and senior curator at the George Eastman Museum.

The single-disc release arrives in a clear, full-height Scanvo keepcase housing the two Blu-ray discs, with a Reversible Wrap featuring artwork for both films. 

Special Features: 

- An excerpt from AUF GEFÄHRLICHEN SPUREN (DANGEROUS PATHS), 1924, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, 15 min. This extended clip from the 1924 crime film DANGEROUS PATHS is a rare opportunity to see Galeen’s work as both writer and actor, alongside frequent collaborat (15:40)

- New video interview with Stefan Drössler of the Filmmuseum München about the preservation of ALRAUNE and THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE, the career of writer / director Henrik Galeen, the Filmmuseum’s collection of rare Orson Welles and 3-D materials and more Pt. 1 (40:12), Pt. 2 (56:23) 

- New audio commentaries by film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, former director of the UCLA Film & TV Archive and the Filmmuseum München, and senior curator at the George Eastman Museum.

- Blu-ray authoring by David Mackenzie of Fidelity In Motion.

Screenshots from the Deaf Crocodile Blu-rays: 

Alraune (1928) 

The Student of Prague (1926) 

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