Great Movies
TV/Streaming
Home Entertainment Consumer Guide: May 12, 2017
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD, including "Gold," "Heat," 'Age of Shadows," 'Serial Mom" and more!
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD, including "Gold," "Heat," 'Age of Shadows," 'Serial Mom" and more!
On the occasion of Isabelle Huppert's new film, "Elle," Dan Callahan looks back the most memorable roles of the enigmatic actress.
A review of "Agnès Varda in California," the new box set from Criterion and Eclipse.
A film-by-film look at the Criterion Blu-ray box set for "The Essential Jacques Demy."
Fred Zinnemann's "The Day of the Jackal" (1973) is a great example of how a film can do a good job of creating tension and involving the viewer by sticking with the most basic cinematic elements. We have the benefit of comparing it with a remake ("Jackal," 1997) that went on the opposite direction and by wrongly doing everything that its predecessor got right, making he merits of the earlier version all the more evident. Both are distinctive reflections of how studios perceived audience tastes in their respective time periods. They are as different as two movies based on the same source might be and can hardly be classified in the same genre. The later entry is a brainless action flick; the original is a "thriller" in every sense of the word.
View image: It starts here...
View image ... and ends here. And nearly everything that happens, except for a slow movement in on the house, happens off-screen.
From Richard T. Jameson, Editor, Movietone News, 1971-81; Editor, Film Comment, 1990-2000:
The opening shot of Joseph Losey's "Accident" (1966) begins under the main-title credits and runs for a minute or so after they have concluded. We're looking at the front of a good-sized but hardly palatial house in the English countryside -- the home, as it happens, of an Oxford don whose academic career has been less than stellar. It's nighttime, tangibly well into the wee hours. No lights are burning, no activity within is apparent. The credits roll without musical accompaniment. On the soundtrack we detect an airplane passing overhead; onscreen, a slight alteration of perspective on the surrounding tree boughs makes us aware that the camera is slowly nudging closer to the house. After a moment, there is the sound of an automobile approaching. The noise grows loud; the engine is racing. Then, a screech of tires and the sound of impact and shattering glass, abruptly cut off. There is a further pause. Then the front door of the house opens, only a hint of light glimmering in the interior. Hesitantly, a man steps out, then begins advancing into the night. Cut to several murky shots impressionistically marking his progress as he moves toward the scene of the titular accident.
The shot, though plain as, uh, day, is remarkable for several reasons. One, of scant concern to most of us, is that with it the director and his first-time cinematographer Gerry Fisher achieved their goal of shooting a color scene that actually looks like what it's supposed to be: a nighttime exterior as seen by moonlight, rather than a day-for-night fakeroo or some other conventional attempt to imitate nighttime via filters and technical trickery. Losey and Fisher went to extreme pains with the film lab to get the shot to look exactly as they wanted it -- even though, as Losey ruefully observed in interview, they knew most theaters would bathe the screen with mauve houselights for the benefit of late-arriving seat-takers, and in any event a few passes in front of the projector's carbon arc would soon alter the image on the emulsion.
So, technically, a real, if effectively unnoticed and ephemeral, coup.
