Cutter's
Way 4K
(1981/United Artists/MGM/Radiance 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Set)/The
Dead 4K
(1987/Criterion 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray)
4K
Ultra HD Picture: A Sound: A Extras: A/B Films: A/B+
A
post-hippie slacker and a scarred, loose-cannon Vietnam veteran
reluctantly work together to solve a mystery one of them, at least,
is convinced has been orchestrated by one of Southern California's
Reaganite millionaire tycoons.
Today,
that kind of logline points directly to The
Big Lebowski.
But 17 years earlier, it was how you could describe (in the simplest
possible way) the plot of Cutter's
Way.
In the earlier film, set in Santa Monica, a young woman's mutilated
body is found dumped in a back-alley trash can. Richard Bone (Jeff
Bridges), his janky car broken down in that same alley, saw the
perpetrator. Or he thinks he did. And when he instinctively points
that man out - local tycoon J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott) - Bone's...
not friend, exactly, but his kind of soul mate, Alex Cutter (John
Heard), sets his Vietnam-twisted mind and body toward the single goal
of bringing Cord to justice. Caught in between Cutter's Ahab complex
and Bone's selfish indifference is Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), Cutter's
long-suffering wife and object of Bone's desire (for conquest more
than love).
The
overlap with Lebowski is eerie - to the point that Bridges can be
found in both in the slacker role - but Cutter's
Way
is the opposite of a good hang. Directed by Ivan Passer and based on
the cult novel Cutter
& Bone
by Newton Thornburg, this is a grim, bummer of a film, a jaundiced
autopsy of America and the American Dream as Ronald Reagan's new
morning dawns on the Land of the Free. Passer signals this
immediately, with the opening credits rolling over slow-motion
footage of a Fourth of July parade, a blonde-haired young woman
smiling brightly as she marches toward the camera twirling a baton,
that goes from black and white to color as composer Jack Nitzsche's
depressingly melancholic score sets the tone. And a dark and bleak
tone it is, a direct repudiation of both the moment's politics and
the film's sunny and smiling SoCal locations.
Understandably,
this all creates a high bar to clear for some audiences. You expect
a certain amount of cynicism in a noir, but Cutter's
Way
is a magnitude different from what you get with, say, Bogart or even
Samuel Fuller. The closest prior analogue is Robert Altman's The
Long Goodbye,
a deconstructionist noir (also in sunny Southern California) that
points the genre in the direction it would take in the 1980s with
films like Cutter's,
To
Live and Die in L.A.,
and Eight
Million Ways to Die.
In other words, you do not leave this film feeling like you've been
through the emotional ringer but, hey, at least the crime was solved.
There's just the ringer, and you're put through it over and over and
over again. In fact, the last 90 seconds are some of the toughest
you'll find in an American film of the era: the instant collapse of
identity, belief, and individuality to ensure the triumph of extreme
wealth, capitalist power, and violence.
I
admit to rejecting Cutter's
Way
the first time I saw it more than a decade ago. It felt muddled and
confused. Was it a small film with a big idea, or a big film with
universal ideas? Passer's direction seemed to imply the first, but
Heard's huge, over the top performance suggested otherwise. And why
was Bridges moping around, seemingly uncommitted, with bad facial
hair, meandering between his Last
Picture Show
boyish handsomeness and the kind of sexy leading man you'd find in
Against
All Odds?
I wasn't in the mood or I expected something else.
But
after watching it again on Radiance's exquisite 4K restoration I had
a much different response. Passer's TK over a script that's
simultaneously blunt and generic and razor-sharp and precise is
remarkable. Bridges, meanwhile, treats this as an announcement. If
you thought he was good in Bogdanovich's film, look at the
interiority, restraint, and control he displays here, the masquerade
of confidence (and, yes, bad facial hair) betrayed by the regret and
self-recrimination in his eyes. And then there's Heard. A big,
showy performance, complete with the illusion of missing limbs, it
is, but to a specific end - not to win an Oscar, but to keep the
characters, film, and audience perpetually off balance. We never
know what he's going to do because it seems like he never knows what
he's going to do, either. His booming maximalizing comes in hot and
annoying, only to cure into something more refined when balanced
against the implicit malevolence when he goes quiet. If there's a
better depiction of a veteran's post-war PTSD, I can't think of it.
The
other thing I missed, though, is how demanding this film is. Besides
what it puts its characters through, Cutter's
Way
speaks to a core American experience that, until only recently, was
easy to stuff back into the deepest recesses of your mind. The
American Dream only exists for those who can buy it. For everyone
else, it's a nightmare you're trapped in. You can self-medicate or
wallow in self-delusion, convincing yourself you can bootstrap your
way to the Dream state; or you can fight and thrash and rage in the
desperate hopes someone, anyone, will join you on your foolish quest
to awaken everyone else unfortunate enough not to be born into the
right class. The power of the film is that while Bone and Cutter map
onto these two experiences cleanly, Passer never rubs our faces in
it. He leaves it to us to untangle what's actually happening beneath
the surface of this sordid murder mystery. Yes, it takes place in
1980, 1981, but it's so exquisitely made and so attuned to the poor
and working-class experience in America (we don't live neat,
well-manicured lives in neat, well-manicured domiciles) that it could
have been made today. In all of these ways, Cutter's
Way
is depressingly perennial.
That
surely contributes to the kind of cult notoriety the film has
achieved over the last 45 years. After being dumped by United
Artists, collateral damage in the fallout from the studio's Heaven's
Gate
implosion, Cutter's
Way
slowly and steadily found its audience, first at film festivals, then
on VHS, and, indeed, all formats of home video. It was in the DVD
period where the exhortations of the cultists got me to seek out a
run-down copy at my local library. I returned it thinking it was a
lot of noise about not much at all. How wrong I was. Cutter's
Way
is a quintessential piece of American cinema. It's a noir, one of
two genres pioneered by America; and it stars Bridges, arguably the
most consequential American actor of his generation. Most
importantly, though, it captures America as it is, not the way the
Hollywood dream machine would prefer to propagandize. It's a downer,
sure, but encountering the truth is rarely easy - or pleasant.
What's
not a bummer, though, is Radiance's limited-edition release of
Cutter's
Way.
I've only ever experienced the film on a lousy DVD, but watching the
new 4K restoration with Dolby Vision HDR (2160p HEVC/H.265, 1.85 X 1,
Dolby Vision/HDR (10; Ultra HD Premium)-enhanced Ultra High
Definition image,) completed from the original camera negative, was a
revelation. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth captures the full
range of Southern California. All of the daytime colors and hues
come through bright and clear; the blacks and dark, shadowy moments
of the dank nighttime scenes are rich and supple; and the spaces in
between, interior scenes lit by candles or commercial overhead
fluorescents, are natural and evocative. The uncompressed mono
soundtrack also does its job. This isn't a loud film, driven more by
dialogue than foley effects - often, the most extreme sound is Cutter
screaming some kind of invective - but the track is excellent,
similarly balanced between foreground/background and
primary/incidental sound.
Cutter's
Way
has been released before on disc, including a Blu-ray from Twilight
Time and a 2K restoration from Radiance. This edition, limited to
5,000 copies, though, is the gold standard. It comes in a rigid box
packaged with an 80-page book with new writing from Christina
Newland, Nick Pinkerton, and Travis Woods, as well as an archival
interview with Passer. There are also two discs in the set, one 4K
and one Blu-ray, the Scanavo packaging coming with a reversible
sleeve with new artwork.
Let's
just laundry-list the extras found, primarily, on the Blu-ray disc:
''Piety,
Patriotism and Violence: The Legacy of Cutter and Bone,''
a new featurette on the legacy of the film featuring mystery writers
Megan Abbott, Jordan Harper, and George Pelecanos; three archival
commentaries (novelist Matthew Specktor, film historians Julie Kirgo
and Nick Redman, assistant director Larry Franco and unit production
manager Barrie Osborne); archival video interviews with Eichhorn,
Passer, producer Paul Gurian, screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, and
UA Classics executive Ira Deutchman; an archival featurette on
composer Nitzsche; an archival video with director Bertrand
Tavernier; an archival audio introduction from Bridges; the option to
watch the film with the original Cutter
and Bone
title sequence; and trailers.
From
what I can tell, this accounts for everything ever released on a
Cutter's
Way
disc, with the exception of the isolated score found on the Twilight
Time and earlier Radiance discs. In other words, this is the most
complete Cutter's
Way
package ever released, and will likely remain so. A must for
collectors and a no-brainer for fans.
For
more on that out of print edition, try this link:
https://fulvuedrive-in.com/review/14258/Cutter's+Way+(1981/United+Artists/MGM/Twilight+Tim
When
John Huston made his final film, The
Dead,
based on the James Joyce short story, he was 81 years old, the same
age Martin Scorsese was when he finished Killers
of the Flower Moon,
his sprawling 206-minute late-career epic, which followed the
209-minute The
Irishman.
Steven Spielberg, now 80, just released the entertaining yet shaggy
145-minute Disclosure
Day,
which was preceded by the 151-minute The
Fablemans.
Setting
aside we live in a time of runtime bloat, these kinds of excessively
long films can be seen as achievements: look at what ''Scorsese was
able to pull off as an octogenarian!'' was a regular line of
discourse around the release of Flower
Moon.
But they're also warnings: left unchecked, two of our greatest
living filmmakers made bloated epics with none of the narrative
control or decisiveness that are hallmarks of their best works.
There are ideas and enjoyment in there, but boy are they slogs.
I
point this out because Huston's The
Dead,
made while he was dying and on an oxygen tank, is a spartan 83
minutes. There are, maybe, half a dozen locations. It's stagy and a
bit theatrical, a chamber piece compared to Scorsese and Spielberg's
symphonies. And yet it feels more complete and coherent, an elegant,
restrained, and intimate film that encompasses the sweep of human
experience made by a true master with total control of his medium.
And
he's sly about all of this. Set in early 1900s Dublin, just as the
independence movement is gaining traction, a tight-knit group of
friends and family gather for a midwinter dinner at the home of two
elderly sisters and their niece, music teachers and musicians who
have created a community around them. The film begins with the
hurly-burly of arrivals, moves into the clinking-clanking of
pre-dinner small talk and entertainment, continues to where
conversation continues and flows into departures, before reaching a
quiet, emotionally devastating meditation on life, grief, and regret.
None
of this is telegraphed. When The
Dead
begins, you're waiting to see star Anjelica Huston or for some major
crisis to emerge from some minor slip in protocol. (Years of
immersion in drawing-room, upstairs-downstairs storytelling has
curdled the mind.) She does enter the film, elegantly and
unpretentiously, but Huston is more interested in immersing us in the
comparatively mundane and pedestrian experience of the dinner party.
We're whisked from this conversation to that as if we're meandering
through the room, less eavesdropper and more silent participant.
It's
the illusion of movement in film with very little of it. And it
makes us take notice when things truly stop, like when one guest
recites the Gaelic poem ''Donal Og,'' moving Gretta (Anjelica Huston)
to intense attention and introspection and her husband, Gabriel
(Donal McCann), to wonder what's going on inside his wife's head and
heart. It's a majestic scene that reverberates through the rest of
the film, leading to Gretta stopping on the steps of her aunts' home
as another guest sings ''The Lass of Aughrim'' the final revelation
to Gabriel of a long-ago love and how she has carried the weight of
grief for the dead boy for years.
As
I write this, I realize all of this sounds anti-climactic when set
down in a review. It's difficult to capture the way Huston
transmutes one of Joyce's most indelible stories into a piece of
humanist cinema. In another filmmaker's hands, this would easily be
a forgettable episode of Masterpiece
Theater.
Huston, though, compresses everything he learned about acting,
writing, staging, pacing, camera movement, editing, desire,
motivation, and relationships into this compact, perfect gem. I
admit I didn't know the film before Criterion announced its release.
After watching it, it's hard to imagine my cultural life without it.
It's one of those films that to unpack, deconstruct, parse means
losing something essential. Fortunately, at 83 minutes, the easiest
way to explain it is to just see it.
Criterion
Collection's release of The
Dead
is a 4K digital restoration supervised and approved by director of
photography Fred Murphy and presented in Dolby Vision HDR (2160p
HEVC/H.265, 1.85 X 1, Dolby Vision/HDR (10; Ultra HD
Premium)-enhanced Ultra High Definition image.) It looks great. A
lot of the film is lit by candle and dim electricity, giving it a
warm amber hue, which on the disc is consistent and supple. It also
gives the film a sepia-like tone, evocative of old photos and memory,
which works perfectly for it. The 4.0 surround DTS-HD MA (Master
Audio) lossless soundtrack, meanwhile, doesn't have a lot to do -
this is almost totally a dialogue-driven film, but is from the
original 4-track magnetic soundmaster, so it more than does justice
to the script, written by Huston's son Tony.
The
Blu-ray disc included in the package houses the special features,
including a 2K restoration of John
Huston and the Dubliners,
a behind-the-scenes documentary from 1987 directed by Lilyan
Sievernich. It's an interesting artifact that adds to our
understanding of the conditions under which Huston, who was near the
end, made the film. But as Anjelica Huston recounts in the audio
excerpt from her memoir Watch
Me,
also included on the disc, the presences of Sievernich's cameras were
unwelcome intrusions into her ability to realize such an emotionally
rich and heavy performance. Finally, there's an insightful interview
with author Colum McCann, who provides excellent commentary and
context on the short story, the adaptation, and James Joyce's
centrality to Irish literature and people. The requisite booklet
includes an essay by author and film critic Michael Koresky and a
1987 piece by Tony Huston about the making of the film.
This
is a full set for a film that's not well remembered, either in the
John Huston filmography or in American cinema more broadly. It's a
welcome addition to the Criterion Collection, and to mine.
-
Dante A. Ciampaglia
