And so we begin…(after the flip, that is.)

*  “The Lady Vanishes“ turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock‘s penultimate English film before launching his Hollywood blockbuster career with “Rebecca.” Since it came out within a few years of the somewhat better known “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1934 and “The 39 Steps” the following year, this 1938 box office smash sometimes tends to get lost in the shuffle. That’s a crime because “The Lady Vanishes” is one of Hitch’s jolliest and most entertaining films, even if Hitch himself might have played it down because of all the justified attention the writing team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder received for their classic screenplay.

Like the master’s self-homaging “North by Northwest,” “The Lady Vanishes” is set largely aboard a train and features an in-the-dark protagonist suddenly embroiled in dangerous espionage shenanigans. The innocent who gets in over her head this time is a mostly charming but also somewhat entitled young lady of means (Margaret Lockwood) who has already had a run-in with a rude but chivalrous musicologist (Michael Redgrave). When she befriends a lovably hobbitish Englishwoman (Dame May Whitty) who disappears not only from the train but, apparently, from the memory of everyone she has encountered, something is very obviously up. Chills, suspense, comedy and romance definitely ensue, with an accent on comedy and romance.

Contemporary audiences might be a bit thrown off by the fact that the film opens as a light comedy with only the barest hint of a thriller element until a genuinely shocking murder about half an hour in. They might also be thrown by the use of very obvious miniatures for the establishing shots of a small Balkan village that open the film. Go with it — once the thriller elements kick in, it’s one tense little ride.

Also those miniatures, necessitated by a lowish budget — even Hitchcock, no stickler for realism, worried about them — are a fun reminder than this is a movie, not real life, and the lengthy intro is a pretty delightful comedy set-up which, among other treats, features one of the English screen’s most popular classic era comedy teams. Though they teamed up for the first time on “The Lady Vanishes,” actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne would come to be at least as tied to cricket-obsessed travelers Charters and Calidicott as John Cho and Kal Penn are seemingly forever wed to cannabis-loving journeyers Harold and Kumar.

Radford and Wayne would reprise their roles, sometimes under different character names and sometimes not, in a number of films. Their films ranged from a segment of the 1945 anthology horror classic “Dead of Night” to low budget vehicles like “Crooks Tour,” which is featured on this typically chock-full-of-greatness Criterion disc, a Blu-Ray update of a 2007 release. You can also see them in “Night Train to Munich”, a worthy World War II-era follow-up from writers Gilliat and Launder directed by Carol Reed (“The Third Man“) that is very nearly as much fun as “The Lady Vanishes.”

* While we’re on the topic of great thrillers set aboard trains, if you were one of the masses left perhaps a bit less than overwhelmed by 2009’s “The Taking of Pelham 123,” taking a look back at the nifty though special-feature free Blu-Ray edition of the crackling 1974 “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three“ may reveal something about the way violent action thrillers should actually be made, or at least the way I think they should be made.

Grumpy-not-yet-old-man Walter Matthau stars as a hang-dog head of the New York subway police who suddenly finds himself confronted by a group of murderous hijackers. Led by a wiley, utterly ruthless ex-mercenary played by the equally superb Robert Shaw (“Jaws“), the gang requests a cool million in return for the lives of a group of luckless passengers.

With a screenplay by one of the wittiest scenarists of his day, Peter Stone (“Charade,” “1776”), this adaptation of a novel by John Godey blends R-rated suspense with plenty of black comedy and satire. It’s main target is the brutality of contemporary urban life. “Screw the goddamn passengers! What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents – to live forever?” asks the world’s most callous dispatcher who seems to be angling for a position in the hardline Giuliani administration two decades early. Few movies not made by Sidney Lumet or Spike Lee capture the contentious  humor of the people of New York with this much accuracy and aplomb.

The top-notch supporting cast includes Hector Elizondo, Woody Allen pal Tony Roberts at his absolute best as an ultra-blunt deputy mayor, and Jerry Stiller — best known today as both Ben and George Costanza’s dad — as a lackadasical deputy. “Reservoir Dogs” fans will take note of the color coded names of the hijackers, Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong crime flick, “City on Fire,” was not the only movie Quentin Tarantino was borrowing from.

* We’re incredibly late for Valentine’s Day (and even later if you know when the Blu-Ray dropped) but, even among French films, there are few productions as purely romantic as 1934’s “L’Atalante.” The most famous of the two features included on Criterion’s “The Complete Jean Vigo,” it’s a moving, evocatively filmed, and extremely simple fable about a the highs and lows of love as experienced by the captain of a small canal barge (Jean Dasté) and his lovely bride (Dita Parlo). Delicate but also fierce in its gritty depiction of down-at-the-heels pre-World War II France, it also features a great comic performance by the legendary comic Michel Simon as a lovable old sea salt whose blood would probably test out at 40 proof.

Since writer-director Jean Vigo died at 29 the same year as his best known film was released, he has attained a sort of John Keats-like status among cinephiles enchanted by his romantic, melancholy surrealism. As sad as Vigo’s early passing remains, it at least means that it’s not hard to put the great cineaste’s complete works on a single disc and you can watch them all in a single long afternoon. These include the anarchy laden boarding school drama, “Zero de Conduit” (“Zero for Conduct”), and some frequently arresting experimental silent shorts.

* Is there a stranger, more interesting, confounding, and compelling 1990s movie than Todd Haynes’ seductive and mostly very entertaining 1998 ode to 1970s glam-rock, “Velvet Goldmine“? Somewhat hampered by the refusal of David Bowie to allow any of his songs to be used, Haynes nevertheless takes advantage of a treasure trove of iconic pop from such stalwarts as Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Roxy Music, and, of course, T-Rex, as well as such contemporary (14 years ago) bands as Pulp and Grant Lee Buffalo.

Although I once felt like a pretty lonely fan of this odd amalgam of rock and roll musical and off-kilter “Citizen Kane” rip-off by way of Phillip Dick and George Orwell, I’m glad to see the young folks have recognized it’s problematic brilliance. The new Blu-Ray, naturally looks superb, sounds amazing, and is a great vehicle for Haynes’ appropriately stylized vision. The commentary by Haynes and producer Christine Vachon is also a must for anyone who’s interested in the film and its many antecedents.

* It’s a thrill to finally see 1958’s “The Big Country“ in high definition 1080p on a big screen TV, but it would be even greater to see it in 35mm on an actual movie screen. Still, the home version ain’t bad for this big, big epic in which the characters themselves are obsessed with just how very, very large their little piece of the American West happens to be. Directed by William Wyler (“The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Roman Holiday“) and co-produced by liberal-minded star Gregory Peck, this very unusual epic western plays today as something of an enjoyably longwinded rebuttal to the those in public life for whom every problem may be solved by a war.

As with “The Lady Vanishes,” I could easily spend days writing about this film — and I’d link to a blog post about it on my old web site right now if I hadn’t been hacked — but all you need to know is that it’s much more than a message picture. There’s some really stirring action pieces, in particular an epic final three-way confrontation and a lengthy fight featuring Peck and his unbending romantic rival, played by Charlton Heston, who was cajoled by Wyler into taking a gig between playing Moses in “The Ten Commandments” and taking on the part of Judah Ben Hur in Wyler’s follow-up epic. It’s definitely one of my two or three favorite Heston performances.

“The Big Country” is also chock of sexy late-fifties romance, sexiness largely supplied by its two outstanding female leads, Carroll Baker (“Baby Doll”) and Jean Simmons (from “Guys & Dolls,” “Elmer Gantry” — not Kiss!). It’s a perfect movie for a long Sunday afternoon. I don’t like to say “they don’t make ’em like this anymore,” but I really do wish this kind of grand “something for everyone” mass entertainment still existed at the movies.

* There was a time when featuring a television star in a movie was pretty much considered the box office kiss of death. Since it starred two stars of a hugely successful TV series and did, in fact, bomb miserably, 1972’s “Hickey and Boggs“ might have been Exhibit A for that viewpoint. The real marketing problem, however, was that the stars were Bill Cosby and the late Robert Culp of “I Spy,” a lighthearted globetrotting buddy spy show that no one would have considered edgy or groundbreaking in any way if it weren’t for the fact that Cosby was the first African-American star of a U.S. TV show. The movie is anything but lighthearted.

Cosby and Culp had become buddies in real life and both were men of some real artistic ambition. Clearly, Culp — a cartoonist in his youth — wanted to be a serious filmmaker and he went all-in on this very dark tale post-noir about two down on their luck Los Angeles PIs. Though beset with a somewhat shambling and overly complicated screenplay by a young Walter Hill, it was clear that Culp had a strong sense of style and an eye for striking and stylish visuals. This really good looking transfer on a on-demand DVD is the first time the film has been available for a decent home video viewing in some time. (A previous DVD is, by all accounts, horribly inferior so be sure you’re getting the new MGM edition.)

* It’s fortunate for everyone that, unlike Jean Vigo, the very skilled director Alan Rudolph has enjoyed a good long life and a lengthy career, because if his filmmaking had ended with 1976’s “Welcome to L.A.,“ I wonder if anyone would remember him. This is a tough film to sit through and not in a good way, despite the requisite first-rate cast.

Presented by Rudolph’s mentor, Robert Altman, clearly the idea is to present something of a West coast follow-up to Altman’s heartland masterpiece, “Nashville.” Set largely in the Los Angeles music business, the results are mostly kind of unwelcome, as are the musical stylings of singer-songwriter Richard Baskin whose work, along with stars Keith Carradine and Geraldine Chaplin, had also been featured in “Nashville.” Baskin’s songs, like the movie, are morose without being engaging in any particular way.

Also featuring a young Harvey Keitel, Sissy Spacek, and Sally Kellerman (the original Hotlips from Altman’s film version of  “M*A*S*H”), this is a movie that only a young man could have made. It sports the special bitterness of those who have recently figured that life is not always what your parents said it would be. On the plus side, Angelenos might get some fun out of spotting old L.A. locations now long gone or transformed. On the other hand, there’s more of that stuff in Altman’s great “The Long Goodbye” and,  yes, “Hickey and Boggs.” Watch those instead.

“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” is the third installment in the adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s immensely popular fantasy novels. Though it was helmed by veteran filmmaker Michael Apted, it’s not entirely smooth sailing for the family-friendly adventures. Disney dropped the series after the somewhat disappointing showing of “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” back in 2008. Since then, as discussed by both Ben Fritz and jolly Carl DiOrio Fox has picked it up and trimmed the budget in partnership with Walden Media to an oh-so-thrifty $155 million (!).

That’s probably a good thing because it doesn’t seem to be generating a huge amount of excitement, at least from critics. On the other hand, Narnia fans are a sure bet to turn out and, as the first 3D installment in the series, “Dawn Treader” could enjoy a bit of a bump from those inflated ticket prices. DiOrio’s guess of $35-45 million seems reasonable.

From everything I’ve seen today, Sony’s “The Tourist” looks like it may be one of those movies that comes with the finest pedigree but just turns out to be a bit of a dog. Not only does this remake of a French thriller little-seen in the U.S. boast the truly enormous star voltage of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, it’s the follow-up film to the Oscar winning worldwide success, “The Lives of Others” by German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. I saw von Donnersmark introduce that film before its domestic opening. He turns out to be an extremely fluent and completely unaccented English speaker who, even before his film opened in the U.S., was not shy about his lust to take on American films.

The maker of the compellingly dour political thriller has taken on an attempt at a sophisticated, lighthearted thriller along the lines of such non-Hitchcock Hitchcock films as “Charade.” And, where that film had a screenplay by the great Peter Stone, this one has one credited to von Donnersmark, Christopher McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects”) and Julian Fellowes (“Gosford Park”). You can’t blame a guy for trying.

The review by our own David Medsker was entirely unenthusiastic, but it was a rave compared with the highly negative reaction of critics overall. The same scribes who rhapsodized over “The Lives of Others” largely found “The Tourist” an exercise in high-gloss boredom. While audiences will be lured by the appearance of an ideal date movie the first weekend, you’ve got to wonder how the film will do once people see it for themselves. Still, about $20 million seems to be figure for the first weekend. We’ll see about the legs later on.

There’s also a bunch going on in the realm of limited releases. Looking at Box Office Mojo, we have a significant expansions of “Black Swan” after its boffo opening weekend. One brand new entry this weekend in five theaters is a new version of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” which, despite starring the great Helen Mirren in a bit of gender-altering casting is getting pretty dismal reviews for famed/infamous director Julie Taymor.  A Shakespeare adaptation with bad reviews is a movie in trouble. “The Fighter” debuts also on four screens, though you can expect many more later.

Borgnine, Donen, Rainer

As someone with parents in their eighties and nineties, I’ve become especially interested lately in the way things work for people of a certain age. So it was with some some special interest that I listened to the words of 100 year-old thirties star Luise Rainer, 93 year-old star character actor Ernest Borgnine (“Marty,” “The Wild Bunch”), and 86 year-old directing great and one-time boy genius, Stanley Donen — best known for co-directing “Singin’ in the Rain” and other MGM musical classics with Gene Kelly but also an outstanding director in his own right of both musicals and “straight” films.

Both Donen and Borgnine could have easily passed for ten or even twenty years younger than their actual age and had plenty of interesting comments. Borgnine struck a sympathetic note with me in mourning the lack of movie westerns these days, speaking after a screening of the powerful, unusually emotional 1956 oater, “Jubal.”  For his part, Donen remains a charmingly self-effacing and sharp-witted man and as in-touch with our present day as the man who celebrated and spoofed hipness in films like “Funny Face,” “Charade” and the 1967 “Bedazzled” should be.

The Luise Rainer interview, which was prior to a screening of her key performance in 1937’s “The Good Earth,” was something else again. Organized as a television taping, it started as something of a potential fiasco when the charming but frail Ms. Rainer confessed that she had lost her hearing aid that morning. It quickly became obvious that, no matter how loudly host Robert Osborne might shout in her ear, she couldn’t hear a word. While Osborne outwardly maintained his professional-yet-sympathetic cool, he must have been panicking inwardly just a bit.

It took a shout from the audience to remind Osborne that writing the questions down would probably work. After that, the event went nicely since the actress, whose “inside out” technique marked her as well ahead of her time in terms of technique, has no problem chatting up a storm. Even though I was distracted by the (very temporary) loss of a recording device, I don’t think anywhere there was left unmoved. Ms. Rainer possesses a winning candor along with some genuine sweetness and wisdom and the delicate appeal that made her special as a young woman is still there today. Most amusingly, she discussed how she and co-star Paul Muni, a method actor himself but a far more  temperamental by Rainer’s account, were perhaps “not so much in love.” Something, by the way, not one bit in evidence onscreen.

Last Sunday was, by the way, my first time seeing “The Good Earth.” It’s longish and episodic in the way of many of MGM’s epics, but it’s a remarkable film that is far better and more sensitively made than you would expect from a largely “yellow-face” production. Rainer really is entirely believable and moving in a part that offered little dialogue, but plenty in the way of emotion. Muni was almost as good in the lead.

You may be feel some slight discomfort…

* Speaking of ethnic issues and the movies, another highlight for me was seeing author Donald Bogle’s presentation of Warner Brothers cartoons pulled out of circulation in 1968 due to cartoonish African-American stereotypes. I had seen Bob Clampett’s brilliant, and not quite as offensive as you might think, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” previously, but each cartoon was in it’s own way a revelation — not always a good one, exactly.

Still, it’s fair to say that while the films portrayed offensive stereotypes, these weren’t hateful in the way of, say, “The Birth of a Nation.” Indeed, in a world where the Confederacy whitewashing “Gone With the Wind” remains a very popular classic film staple, it’s perhaps not entirely fair for most of these film to be singled out. Indeed, several of the films celebrated the work of such legitimate black American cultural heroes as Cab Calloway and Fats Waller and were arguably more progressive in their way than the bulk of Hollywood films of the time, which routinely portrayed African-Americans as non-entities.

* On an entirely different note, the British-made New York-set “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” was preceded by an introduction from a borderline apologetic Tim Roth. The English actor, who actually knows how to do a proper American accent, humorously explained that this once controversial crime curio is a kind of love-letter to America, for all its often amusing flaws. Notorious on its release for its combination of sexiness and violence, the first act basically has numerous seemingly major characters introduced, only to be summarily knocked off a few minutes later. The mayhem slows down a bit after the very late introduction of the main character well-played by Muni-esque American actor Jack La Rue.

Still, for Americans today, the obvious issue is that this is an attempt by a British cast and crew at essentially making a gangster film in the classic U.S. style. Now I know how British viewers must have felt seeing any of the innumerable films where thoroughly American actors portrayed thoroughly English characters with little or no believability.

* Re: “The Day of the Triffids.”  This famed bit of early sixties British sci-fi/horror that is still in the midst of a hugely painstaking restoration which has resulted in an oftentimes visually stunning presentation, despite the goofy-by-modern standards monster effects. However, one of the film’s restorers introduced the midnight screening of the film and was equally painstaking and time-consuming in describing his work. This attention to detail lead to some audible discomfort from the audience — and some worry by me because I’d been told the garage I parked in closed promptly at 2:00 a.m. Still, it’s hard for a geek like me to come down too hard on anyone for an excess of film love, and we all got our cars out in time, I believe.

The Big Finish

That would be the final screening of the four day long event, the newest reconstruction of the silent science fiction film, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” As someone who’s been viewing various versions of the silent tale of futuristic class conflict my entire life, I have to admit to never really really loved the film despite it’s undeniably stunning visual brilliance. Though that extra hour might involve a bit of film-watching work for me, at over 2.5 hours some previously very minor scenes and characters are fleshed out in fascinating ways. Visually, it’s more a marvel than ever and totally worth checking out for anyone who cares about movies, science fiction, or sheer spectacle.

This is a strictly digital restoration and, since I’m a believer in the superiority of celluloid, I was skeptical about the digital projection of it in the enormous Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I have to say, however, that I’ve never seen the amazing sets and matte work of Lang’s film look more grand. Similarly, the performance of the original score by the three piece outfit, The Alloy Orchestra, was thrilling and received an entirely deserved standing ovation.

Oh, and there was free food and booze for us lucky pass holders at the party afterward. That always makes for a thrilling conclusion.