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84 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
about the small-town 20th-anniversary
reunion of the middle-aged ‘Disciples
of James Dean’, makes a virtue of its cramped
theatricality. It’s part women’s picture, part
memory-driven melodrama, the quarrelling
female ensemble exorcising their personal
demons in a fly-blown dime store to create a
‘therapy’ piece that complements the psycho-
femme horror of Altman’s That Cold Day in the
Park (1969), Images (1972) and Three Women
(1977). Lee Gambin’s fine, full-to-bursting audio
commentary picks up usefully on the almost-
religious aspect of fandom (David Gropman’s
art direction creating a dusty store-as-shrine),
with Sandy Dennis’s self-mythologising ‘Mona
Magdalene’ shrilly devoting her life to an illusion.
A film about self-creation, it sets the trapped
Mona against Karen Black’s truth-telling
transwoman Joanne, keen to testify about the
gay-bashing cruelties of the 1950s. Mirrors
act as a memory portal to this hotly disputed
past, with Altman’s innovative use of two-way
mirrored sets for 1955 and 1975 dissolving the
years. Altman uses the film’s claustrophobic
feel to probe deeply into his characters,
celebrating rich female performances – Dennis’s
trademark-twitchy Mona lets rip at Cher’s
smart-mouthed Sissy (the first outing for the
tough-but-tender working-class woman Cher
incarnated through the 80s). But in an era when
transgender characters were routinely tragic
(Dog Day Afternoon, 1975) or monstrous (Dressed
to Kill, 1980), Karen Black’s elegant, straight-
shooting Joanne is a thoughtful revelation.
Disc: The slightly grainy quality of the transfer
(it was originally shot on Super 16 and later
transferred to 35mm) adds a useful period
patina. Travis Crawford’s smart booklet
essay reveals that despite having co-directed
memorial documentary The James Dean
Story (1957), Altman cheerfully confessed: “I
never liked Dean that much – I hated Rebel
Without a Cause and I didn’t like Giant.”
THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD
OF CHARLEY BOWERS
17 SHORT FILMS 1917-1940
Charley Bowers, H.L. Muller, various; USA 1917-40; Flicker
Alley; all-region Blu-ray; 288 minutes; 1.33:1. Extras:
featurette, image gallery, documentary booklet.
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
The gleefully absurd films of Charley Bowers
combine whimsical stop-motion animation with
live action to create spectacles that recall the
mechanical ingenuity of Buster Keaton or Heath
Robinson and the incredible metamorphoses
of Max Fleischer. Although he worked solidly
throughout the silent and early sound eras,
Bowers’s work was almost forgotten for decades
and it’s only now that we are affording the man
known in France as ‘Bricolo’ his due place in the
canon of silent comedians. It’s not just that he is
as funny as his more celebrated peers, but that
he has an unmistakably distinctive style too.
Bowers was born in Cresco, Iowa, in 1889, and
grew his career from creating cartoons for Mutt
and Jeff shorts to starring alongside his fantastical
animated effects in his own slapstick comedies
for small studios. He considered himself an
inventor as much as a comic, and marketed his
mixed-media work as ‘the Bowers Process’. In
later life he wrote and illustrated children’s books
and drew newspaper cartoons. He died in 1946.
This joyous compilation from Flicker
Alley comes packed with manic machines
and comical creepy-crawlies. It collects 17 of
Bowers’s surviving films, tracing a path from
his cartoonist days (The Extra-Quick Lunch, 1917)
through some of his finest comedies (Now You
Tell One, 1926; There It Is, 1928) to commercial
work in the very early 1940s (Oil Can and Does,
1940, a Technicolor animation for a petroleum
promotional film, directed by Joseph Losey).
The whole disc is a real joy, containing some
jaw-dropping moments of comic invention: a
tree that grows cats, cars hatching from eggs, a
troupe of elephants entering the Capitol building,
a kilted insect detective. As a performer, Bowers
mostly plays the role of a hapless Harry Langdon-
esque innocent, though character work comes
second to the superb, escalating visual gags.
Disc: All the films have been restored by
Lobster Films and the silents are supplied
with sympathetic new scores by Neil Brand,
Antonio Coppola and Donald Sosin. A
short documentary by Christophe Coutens
traces the revival of Bowers’s fame in France.
There’s also an image gallery and very
good booklet essay by Sean Axmaker.
FRAGMENT OF AN EMPIRE
Fridrikh Ermler; USSR 1929; Flicker Alley; all-region
DVD & Blu-ray dual format; 110 minutes; 1.33:1.
Extras: restoration featurette; commentary by Peter
Bagrov; choice of scores; image gallery; booklet.
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Fragment of an Empire (1929) is a harrowing,
high-concept film, and something of an
overlooked highlight of Soviet cinema. It’s
the final silent feature made by director
Fridrikh Ermler, himself little discussed
outside Russia, despite an incredible slate of
films made from the 1920s to the 1960s.
The film’s story is a speculative scenario
exploited for both horror and humour. A
shell-shocked World War I soldier emerges
from amnesia to find himself in an alien post-
revolutionary landscape. Travelling to the city he
knows as St Petersburg, he encounters shock after
shock in the brave new communist world. Proto-
Method actor Fyodor Nikitin apparently spent
time undercover in a psychiatric clinic in order
to prepare for the role. And perhaps that’s why
his performance here is so chillingly convincing.
Watching him come to terms with such a
fundamentally changed society is more moving
than similarly propagandist narratives could
hope to achieve. Much of the credit must also go
to Ermler’s direction: this is an astonishing film to
look at, with striking chiaroscuro compositions,
and punishing close-ups. The opening sequence
in particular is especially starkly shot, to
reflect an unsparingly cruel moral universe.
This emotionally bruising, brilliant film
should reach a wider audience now, as it has
benefited from a meticulous restoration,
based on two separate nitrate prints, achieved
jointly by Eye Filmmuseum, Gosfilmofond
of Russia and the San Francisco Silent
Film Festival before arriving on disc.
Disc: The two most important, and impressive,
extras here are the two scores. On one track
pianist Daan van den Hurk performs an
adaptation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original
piano score. On the other, multi-instrumentalist
Stephen Horne and percussionist Frank Bockius
play a remarkably sensitive and imaginative
new score for the film. On another audio track
there’s a very informative commentary by
film historian Peter Bagrov and restorer Rob
Byrne. There’s also a poster gallery, a rather
staggering before-and-after demo of the
restoration and a booklet essay by Bagrov.
THE INCIDENT
Larry Peerce; US 1967; Eureka; Region B Blu-ray &
Region 2 DVD; Certificate 12; 99 minutes; 1.85:1. Features:
commentaries by Peerce and Nick Redman, and by critic
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; 2017 Q&A with Peerce; trailer;
booklet notes by Samm Deighan and Barry Forshaw.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Further evidence that 1967 was a significant
transitional year for American cinema comes
with this welcome reissue of an urban thriller
deserving consideration alongside such
landmarks as Bonnie and Clyde and In the Heat
of the Night. High-contrast black-and-white
camerawork captures the street-lights flaring
in Brooklyn as various passengers converge
on a late-night downtown train: bickering
middle-class couples, a lonely gay guy, a black
couple with different attitudes to everyday
racism – and two knife-wielding young hoods
about to turn their journey into a nightmare. As
Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000) would
explore decades later, the train carriage can
be an unnerving public/private space, where
the passengers’ studious efforts to ignore their
tormentors reveal the atomisation of society.
This being a studio-badged movie from 1967
America, what’s remarkable is the unflinching
precision with which those divisions are exposed.
No easy brotherly-love resolutions on offer here.
It’s gripping, sinewy fare, and shows that
director Larry Peerce had more to offer than his
subsequent reputation as a talented journeyman
suggests. On a technical level, it’s striking: since
the New York City Transit Authority refused to
allow the crew on their network, the filmmakers
pieced together candid undercover footage and
a highly convincing train-carriage set, built in
the city’s Biograph studios – a survivor from the
silent era. Of course, it stands or falls on
the performances, and Peerce marshalled
New releases
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