GIVEAWAY: Nicolas Ray's "We Can't Go Home Again"

[stairifox]

I have go with Chris Marker's La Jetee. The way he used the images to tell a story was nothing short of amazing, and it is like all of the images tell their own story, and kind of have their own endings. There is only one shot of movement in the entire film, and it is breathtaking. It may just be the greatest scfi-fi film of all-time, because it goes down in the roots of the genre, and turns it on its head, to transcend. May Mr. Marker rest in peace, because he made a masterpiece.

[MrGregoryArkadin]

John Cassavetes finally had one up on Hollywood after the critical and commercial success of 1968's Faces. His next project, Husbands, features not only career best performances by all three actors, but is perhaps the most succinct portrait of grief, and it's many different forms, that I've ever seen committed to celluloid. I was lucky enough to assistant direct the US stage adaptation of it back it 2010- meeting Al Ruban, the producer and cinematographer of the film, only enhanced my appreciation and love for what is John Cassavetes' most under appreciated masterpiece.

[AfterTheRain]

My choice would be John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust. The movie - based on Nathaniel West's novel - stripped away the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, revealing a darker side to Tinseltown and it also revealed how dreams in the movies were truly made - on the backs of hopefuls, has-beens, and underlings of the studio system who saw eternity but never got a chance to dwell there. The casting of Burgess Meredith (as a dying vaudevillian), William Atherton (as the studio artist with some very grotesque drawings), and Karen Black (as the actress hopeful who has a hard time seeing past her own dreams) really cinched it for me. Schlesinger had always been interested in the darker half of life throughout his career - as his films Darling, Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man, The Falcon and the Snowman, The Believers, Pacific Heights, & Eye for an Eye illustrate - but the fact that he filmed this cynical tale of Hollywood during a time of great cynicism in America (Vietnam & Watergate) has only heightened my love and appreciation for what may be the most underrated masterpiece of 1970s cinema.

[Feego]

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is, for me, one of the most daringly subversive products ever to come out of Hollywood. The first of only two films Meyer would make in La La Land, it is at once a celebration, exposé, and condemnation of the Hollywood allure, from its nurturing and building up of young hopefuls to its ultimate emtional/mental/physical destruction of them, and all from a man who knew nothing about it! I can only imagine what the executives at Fox thought when they saw the final product and if they fully realized just how big a middle finger it was to them. But you have to give them credit for not flat-out shelving a film that took a horrific tragedy from which the Hollywood community was still reeling (the Manson Family killings) and turned it into a gloriously over-the-top indictment of the industry's destructive self-interest ("I AM Superwoman!"). And when I heard the 20th Century Fox fanfare blast triumphantly as a samurai sword struck the neck of a near-nude heartthrob bound on the floor, I knew I was witnessing brilliance.

[lingo]

I would have to go with one of the films more inside the Hollywood system that John Cassavetes made - A Child Is Waiting. Those familiar with the history of Child know that Cassavetes clashed with producer Stanley Kramer over the same philosophical issues raised in the film itself and Cassavetes was fired from the film during post-production. It's a compromised film in that sense, certainly by comparison to the films in the existing Criterion set, but one I find endlessly fascinating as the steely Burt Lancaster and a slightly unbalanced Judy Garland mirror the off-screen drama - or does the mirror face the other direction? But like his other films, we plunge into some difficult and emotional territory, and somehow it seems appropriate that the two points of view shaped the final product. It probably doesn't exist, but a Cassavetes cut would make an amazing extra if the film ever gets a decent release.

[cdnchris]

And winners have been announced!

BLU-RAYSs

user:
knives
"Brewster McCloud" by Robert Altman

user:
Professor Wagstaff
"Annie" by John Huston

user:
mfunk9786
"Bubble" by Steven Soderbergh

DVDs

user:
vertovfan
"The Big Shave" by Martin Scorcese

user:
who is bobby dylan
"Park Row" by Sam Fuller

Congratulations to all winners! You will be sent a Private Message on how to claim your prize.