THE FLOWERS ARE RED AS BEAUTY AND BLOOD

(Plus Shout! The New Year In with FITZCARRALDO and The Talking Horse, MR. ED, SECRET AGENT, HILL STREET BLUES
and THE RANGE RIDER)
Copyright 2015 by Don McGregor

Some movies are as much life experiences as they are films.
Some films resonate on such a timeless, basic human level that dissects men and women’s behavior wherever you live, whatever time you live, yet also manages to capture the specificity of a particular time and place.
Shout! Factory’s release of Claude Berri’s 1986 French period drama, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring are based on the novel by Marcel Pagnol is one of those movies.

Berri shot the film, set in the small town of Provence, over seven months, so he could capture all the seasons of the year to reflect its dry, dusty, humid summers and its lashing rain-storms against vast sweeping panoramas of countryside, but also be able to showcase the cruel, sharp winters of ice and isolation.
The time period is right after the first World War, and Berri opens his film with Ugolin Soubeyan (Daniel Auteuil) returning to his rural home and the last of his family, his Uncle Cesar (who he often calls “Le Papet”) (Yves Montand).
Ugolin lives in dust and squalor, but he has dream.
He sees images of startling color in the land about him of tans and browns and chocolate and gray.
Images of carnations, growing, where none have grown before.  Dreams born in the midst of wartime, of being in a strange place in dangerous times, perhaps without much hope.
The carnations are a poetic colorful dream to a man used to living alone and surviving meagerly off the land.
Ugolin is not a fanciful man.
Cesar is a man at the end of his years, successful within the realm of where he lives, but without wife or child, and thus without family to inherit what he has accumulated in his life.

In a film that is a visual feast on Blu-ray, with Berri covering its gardens and hills and trees and stone buildings standing alone and apart from other dwellings to the sun-dappled town, almost devoid of color, but unique with its old architecture and sense of decades bordering on a Century, you become a part of that world not long after entering its four hour running time.

The film captures the surface, showcases the dream, yet also examines, with heart-breaking clarity that dreams can be fine, it is what one does to achieve the dream, even a poetic dream, even one of colorful beauty that can make people commit cruelties that turn to the color of blood torn from victims, emotionally and physically.  If the deed to achieve what the individuals desire leads to acts which they may vocally justify, living in denial, even to themselves, as to what their acts have wrought.

Carnations need water.
There is a lush spot that would provide the water, but a new man has inherited the land from his mother, Florette (a woman Cesar once knew in his youth).
Jean Cadoret (Gerard Depardieu) has his own dreams.

He is going to convert the land that has been so barren, unaware of the spring that lies hidden because of Cesar and Ugolin, to a place where he can live in peace with his lovely wife, Aimee, and his young daughter, Manon.

Ugolin and Jean de Florette and Aimee.  Schemers and neighbors in languid daily routine,
trying to survive in an outwardly beautiful setting, as deceptively cruel as some of the people living atop it.
Manon, the child of 8 or 9, is the witness, the observer, of events.
She instinctively knows, vaguely, not in a traditional film way, but the way children can, that something is not quite right, that events are not all what they seem.

But she is young and she cannot define those impressions, because she has yet to learn how deceptive and self-serving and manipulative some people can be.
In the second film, Manon of the Spring, Manon (Emmanuelle Beart) becomes the centerpiece.

Manon is now a young woman, still at first an observer, enduring what she has witnessed, and eventually realizing what all the tragic events amid the passage of days of her childhood meant.

Emmanuelle Beart is exquisite as the elusive, ethereal shepherdess of the hills, glimpsed from afar.   She moves with grace and elegance, blending into the branches and leaves, into the fronds of tall grass.

The schemes and manipulations are starkly revealed when Ugolin watches her bathe nude in the mountain water.

Ugolin becomes obsessed with her and filled with lust he can scarcely deny.
This lust overshadows the carnations now a bright and red reality sprouting from the earth; a sexual obsession that disintegrates the flowery dream.
Her beauty and grace haunt him; move him to desperate acts of perverse devotion.

And Manon learns not just of the treachery of the individuals, but the complicity of the town, and its inhabitants, to their indifference to the plight of her father, and to her family.
She realizes she can affect all of the villagers, the way they ruined her life.
She has never had a desire before as strong.
But will her desire corrupt and eventually destroy her, or bring justice, to her and to her family?

 Emmanuelle Beart was so popular that when she appeared on the cover of Elle Magazine in May 2003, the entire print-run of 350,000 copies were gone within three days!  Print media would kill for those kinds of numbers these days.

This exquisite combination of both films on two-Blu-ray discs from Shout! Factory, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, only suffers from, as far as I am concerned, a lack of Extras.  I would love to know much more about the ambitious endeavor to make such an elaborate movie, over so much time.
These were the most expensive French movies made in their time-frame, and it would be interesting to know how the decisions were made to make them into two separate, yet cohesive films, a success both artistically and commercially.
This is a film experience that will stay with you, long after you have seen it, visually and emotionally.
It has with me, for over a decade.
https://www.shoutfactory.com/ /film-drama/jean-de-florette-manon-of-the-spring-double-feature    
Shout! Factory has finished out 2014 and come into 2015 really diversifying its release of DVDs and Blu-rays, from foreign art films such as Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring to Horror films with its Scream Factory sub-division, its extensive widening of titles in classic television series, with complete collections from Sgt. Bilko to Hill Street Blues to Secret Agent to Mr. Ed.   For B-Western fans it has extended its inventory of titles with re-mastered prints of many Gene Autry films, four films to a set, with many Extras.
Let me touch briefly on a few of Shout’s various offerings.
Since I am already in foreign film territory with themes dealing with a facet of having a
dream and making it a reality, it is an opportune time to discuss briefly another Blu-ray
that deals with the desire, to do something unconventional with one’s life.
The question here, some folks might have, is: 
And you would want to do this…Why?
Fitzcarraldo is one of those movies I have known about for years, but never seen.
I had read about Werner Herzog’s determined desire to film the real-life vision of Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald to bring Opera deep into the Amazon jungles via steamboat.
Herzog’s cinematic obsession was to do it for real, on film, to capture in moving images a 320-ton steamship travelling down the Amazon River, to a lush area inhabited only by fierce tribes that protected their domain with stealth and suspicion of any outsiders.
Herzog proclaimed himself the “Conquistador of the Useless” and hired Klaus Kinski to play the rubber baron, changing the name slightly by adding an “o” at the end of the name. 
If you have ever seen Kinski in one of the horror genre films he is noted for, you know there are times onc might wonder if he is acting, or if he really is this crazed in real life.

Kinski may have been a terror during the arduous months of actually filming the journey, employing the native people at the steep mountain site where Herzog would actually film, with no special effects, no fucking CGI, what you see is what is really happening, hauling this monstrous steamship up the mountain side and then, as treacherously dangerous, going downhill to the river below that will allow the steam-ship to bring the opera to its remote destination.
It’s like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd for real in What’s Opera, Doc?
Except with real human beings, many of whom paid with physical injuries.

The beautiful Claudia Cardinale portrays the woman who helps Fitzcarraldo make his obsessive dream become a reality, overcoming whatever set-backs may occur.
I should note that Kinski’s performance is controlled and even warm at moments despite whatever turmoil happened when the cameras weren’t filming.
The film moves slowly.  Dreams do not fulfill in a moment’s fanciful wish.
The images drift deeper into places where cameras and actors had not been before.



Unlike Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring Shout! Factory has a superb Extra on how all this came to be, with a commentary on this Blu-ray with Herzog that details many of the incredible events that happened while making his compulsive vision into cinematic reality.
And if Shout! Factory is looking for more international films to release, maybe they should check out Claudia starring side by side with Bridget Bardot in Les Petroleuses.
I’ve never seen the film, but would I check it out?
With Cardinale and Bardot together?
You would not have to ask why.

https://www.shoutfactory.com/film/action-adventure/fitzcarraldo
In its television division, Shout! has really stepped up the pace in bringing complete collections of TV series to DVD that are from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and has now really rescued some from the 80s that had been started by other companies, and then abandoned before those series could be completed.
Shout! has done some of my favorite TV series, and you can read Riding Shotgun columns on some of them here:
http://comicsbulletin.com/spy-season-3-tv-series-never-accepted-white-peoples-homesexcept-defied-racists-declarations/
http://comicsbulletin.com/mary-hartman-mary-hartman-haunting-echo-fading-validation-disintegrating-woman/
http://comicsbulletin.com/peter-gunn-film-noir-comes-tv-big-time/
http://comicsbulletin.com/route-66-dvd-more-tod-and-buz-zoom-about-their-corvette-they-become-either-small-or-giants/
Now, some people, who have read my work for decades might ask: What the hell is Don McGregor doing with a talking horse like Mr. Ed?

One of the series Shout! has just released as complete sets, with every show in one package, is Mr. Ed.  Oddly enough, I have a friend who I used to affectionately tease with the lyrics from the theme song, and it is a fond recollection of that time and when we saw so much of each other.
When Shout! offered a complete set of I Spy in 2014, it prompted me to write extensively about a show that is still probably my favorite show ever, and certainly spoke loudly to me and became a part of who I am.
Mr. Ed is certainly not in that category for me, personally.
For a show that is most of the time a sit-com (probably my least favorite genre because it often does not require much in the way of the language of telling a story with film), it hasn’t aged the way many of the family based shows have.
I believe that is because the lead characters Wilbur (Alan Young, known by many now as the voice of Uncle Scrooge) and Carol (Connie Hines) did not have children.  This means there is not a patriarchal voice that delivers advice, especially to daughters, that sometimes can make one cringe. 
That does not mean there aren’t some couple dynamics, at times, that aren’t a little cringe-worthy.
I often tell Marsha, “If the writers are in doubt, go to the horse.  Let Ed do the talking.”
Mr. Ed will only talk to Wilbur, so only he and us know Ed really does talk, but the horse gets to say all the lines that the human beings can’t.  He can be acerbic, offensive, ruthlessly observant, speak with a candor that takes the show beyond its more traditional confines.
Shout! offers some good Extras with The Complete Mr. Ed, unlike the bare-bones Complete I Spy, where there weren’t any extras.   The commentaries by Robert Culp from the Image release of the show in the beginning of the century were lost. 
The Complete Mr. Ed  has some fascinating interviews with both Alan Young and Connie Hines that fans of the show will welcome.
I learned a lot of things I did not know, including Connie Hines integral part in the rigged game shows on television in the 1950s.
And as Alan Young has come to be known as the voice for voice Uncle Scrooge, Alan “Rocky” Lane (who was Red Ryder, in the series of Republic films with a little Bobby Blake as Little Beaver) would probably be remembered more for the off camera voice of the talking Mr. Ed.
It is observed that Mr. Ed might have been the series that opened up the possibility for shows with fanciful fantasy at its core, like Bewitched and I Dream Of Genie.
Depending on who you are, I guess, that can be a good or a bad thing.

https://www.shoutfactory.com/kids/kids-comedy/mister-ed-the-complete-series
As long as we are on the topic of horses, I might as well touch on how Shout! in their Timeless Media Group titles offer the Western genre to audiences.
There is a complete Gene Autry TV series which keeps the original openings and Gene sitting astride Champion (his horse) while hawking Wrigley’s Chewing Gum.  I love the one where Gene just tosses the gum wrapper into the sagebrush as he rides off with Champ.
They also offer 4 title collections of Gene Autry films.
Dusty Rogers (the son of Roy Rogers) did not seem to comprehend the importance of the source material for his parents’ legacy.  The Roy Rogers films are difficult to find uncut, or re-mastered, unlike Gene’s Flying A Company and his museum, which has kept the films complete and restored.
 
All the films on this set procliam that they have been re-mastered, although I thought Rim of the Canyon would have been sharper, especially in its night-time sequences.
I get a kick out of this particular Autry film because Jock Mahoney is one of the bad guys.  He and Gene get into a slug fest brawl in the midst of the story.  Good thing the script says “Gene wins.”  I don’t believe it for a moment.
But then again, I’m sure Jock was being careful not to hit the boss.
And by the way, Timeless, my favorite series of all the Flying A titles from Autry’s company is The Range Rider, with Jock (with the name “Jack” in the credits, although I swear, even as a kid, I knew he was Jock) Mahoney and Dick West.
For an early 1950s TV series it is remarkably advanced in its attitude toward Indians.  Perhaps that was because Jock had some Indian heritage in him.
But what stands out about the show is that both Jock and Dick did all their own stunts.
To this day, there are stunts in The Range Rider that I have never seen anywhere else.  
You will never see its likes again!
I always loved Dick Jones (who was the voice of Disney’s Pinocchio) leaning under the neck of his galloping pinto, shooting at bad guys.  I always wished I could do that.  I don’t know why you would choose to shoot that way rather than sitting straight up, but Man, it sure looks cool.  Maybe that is reason enough.  I still can’t imagine how Dick managed to do that without falling off under those thundering hooves!

Jock was so limber and could do so many different kinds of stunts, from horse riding gags to slug-fests to leaps to sword play to bullwhips.
They had to shoot these shows in about 2 and ½ days!

I know there must have been mornings Jock and Dick must have been so stiff it was difficult to get out of bed.
You will never know it watching the shows.
How about it, Shout!  Timeless!
A complete Range Rider series!
I’m beggin’ ya!
https://www.shoutfactory.com/film/film-western/gene-autry-collection-6

In The Complete Series – Secret Agent you will not find James Bond anywhere around the Riveria beaches or Bombay alleys where John Drake catches the sun or bleeds.
I actually like the packaging for the old A & E DVDs for Secret Agent better.  I just like the use of color and the design.
There is no denying this new set takes up much less space on the shelves.  So if space is at a premium for you, this set is compactly put together, with Patrick McGoohan’s talent and charisma showcasing through-out one of the best 1960s spy series ever on television.
The prints are nice and sharp.
An Extra that I found entertaining and warm is an interview with Patrick McGoohan’s daughter, Catherine.
She talks fondly about her dad, and the actor, and the character of John Drake.
I hope my daughter, Lauren, and son, Rob, will remember their dad as fondly.

https://www.shoutfactory.com/tv/tv-action-adventure/secret-agent-aka-danger-man-the-complete-series

Hill Street Blues went out onto the streets and sidewalks and put them onto television screens in 1981, careful not to catch any palm trees near the tenements and garbage strewn alleyways.
Unlike Naked City, Hill Street was not filmed on the actual locations, but it managed to capture the squalor pretty accurately.  This show is the one that clearly shouted that multiple story-lines and complex continuity could be done on television successfully.
It still resonates powerfully with its iconic characters and strong story-lines, dealing with hurts and struggles that are still complexly bedeviling to this day.
It is a 1980s show of America, trying to see the humanity and inhumanity that exist side by side, one stabbing into the other.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is no way Steven Bochco and the other writers of Hill Street could not be aware of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. I feel compelled to write this, since the series has never been mentioned in any of the interviews (which are great to have) on the complete sets, or in articles over the years.  I can even understand why the 87th Precinct is not mentioned.  But I would have a hard time believing anyone writing police procedurals for any length of time wasn’t aware of Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer and Burt Kling and Artie Brown and all the others. 
Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) noted many of the similarities between the two in the middle of one of the 87th novels while the show was running.
It isn’t just comparison of characters (though one can do that in many cases), but it is the tone, the spirit of the books that Hill Street captures.  The mordant humor.  The intermixture of personalities within the precinct.  The continuity as characters lives evolve.
For one interested in court cases dealing with plagiarism, no one does it better than Evan Hunter in his novel, The Paper Dragon.  It depicts a court case between two writers and ends with the court summations after all the emotional bombardment to the authors and the people in their lives.
Hollywood told Evan they found the novel interesting for a movie, but wished it was about rape, because they felt no one understood what plagiarism was. 
Evan’s reply was to tell them that that was what the book was about, and if a movie was made they would know what plagiarism was.
McBain left the topic of Hill Street with the cavalier statement, “We’ll still be here, long after they are gone.”
The 87th Precinct continued for 50 novels and only ended when Evan Hunter/Ed McBain died.  The books still survive and are re-issued.  Books are written about the series.
It is my favorite series of books to this day!
But Hill Street is finally here on DVD and complete for the first time.
And I for one am glad it is here.
Let’s be careful out there.
Let’s do it to them, before they do it to us.

https://www.shoutfactory.com/tv/crime/hill-street-blues-the-complete-series

Copyright 2015 by Don McGregor
You can travel with the one tap on the link here to http://donmcgregor.com/ and see DETECTIVES INC material seen nowhere else, illustrations and histories, behind the scenes sections on SABRE and MELISSA SIREN, columns on many of the artists Don has worked with, insights into series like RAGAMUFFINS.  It’s all waiting for you to visit thanks to Gary and Dawn Guzzo and Atomic Studios.

For those of you who want copies of the hardcover IDW DETECTIVES INC., Denning and Rainier are standing back to back in the rain-swept alleyway at Amazon.com, and copies are still available.  Bring them to a comic con Don does in the future and he will sign them for you.  Promise.  http://www.amazon.com/Detectives-Inc-Don-McGregor/dp/1600104940/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422251760&sr=1-5&keywords=don+mcgregor