Lost in Criterion

Oh boy. Sometimes the Criterion Collection hears a whiff that there's two guys doing a Spine Number podcast and says to themselves, "What can we do to mess this up?" Normally, within the Collection, and therefore within our podcast, each Spine Number release is a single film (or maybe a couple) or a collection of short works. Sometimes a boxset will have it's own number, but if the films in the boxset are features, each will have it's own release. But there are notable exceptions to this rule, boxsets made of feature works that it would not make sense (artistically or financially) to sell individually, so Criterion packages them all together under a single Spine. On exceedingly rare conditions, that single boxset contains over 2000 hours of material. We cannot talk about 2000 hours of material in a single episode. This week we start the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman boxset. It contains 25 films released between 1962 and 1973, and we have decided to cover the set by as one bluray disc per episode. There's three films per disc, in chronological order of their release. Yes, that means we'll be spending nine weeks on this set. Our first episode covers The Tale of Zatoichi (Kenji Misumi, 1962), The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (Kazuo Mori, 1962), and The New Tale of Zatoichi (Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963).

We kick off 2026 with a Michelangelo Antonioni film which totally bodes well. La Notte (1961) is the second of three or four films about middle class discontents in a rapidly changing world, and the last of the four that Criterion has decided to show us. It also caps off nearly two months of Lost in Criterion episodes dealing with divorce or other marital troubles - especially if you cast that net wide enough to count the mother-in-law jokes of The Uninvited and take the title of I Married a Witch at face value. What we're saying is that it feels like someone in a decision making position within Criterion was going through some stuff, and since next week starts a boxset of 25 Samurai films, they are no beating those charges. Anyway, we don't like Antonioni or his stated purposes in making these films, so we once gain must come up with a better interpretation of the story in order to stay interested.

Every December, during the darkest times of the year in our part of the world, we take a little break from our unending Criterion Quest to gather with friends and watch a film that takes place during the winter holidays that is not at all a holiday movie. We may have found the platonic ideal of that concept in this year's offering. According to the intertitles, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), directed by the late William Friedkin and co-written by Freidkin and former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich adapting his own novel, takes place from December 20 to January 30. While many holidays take place during that time period each year, including the anniversary of Lost in Criterion and the birthdays of our two hosts, yet no one in this movie has any loved ones to spend their time with. Instead they are too busy being bad cops. Sure, all cops are bad, but at least in fiction some are competent, here they are morally, tactically, and investigatorially terrible. Our old friend Donovan H. joins us to talk about this bleak midwinter tale.

Lewis Allen only gets one film in the Criterion Collection but it's a pretty fun one. The Uninvited (1944) doesn't have great special effects for a haunted house flick, or especially bad ones which can be fun in their own right, but it does have an over-complicated story about family lies, two ghosts who hate each other, a mean lesbian, and cinematography by Charles Lang Jr. And while the film is allegedly groundbreaking for approaching the haunted house genre with seriousness, it's also got some pretty great jokes (just not the ending one).

René Clair was an early favorite among the filmmakers this project introduced us to. It was a lifetime ago what we watched Le Million (Spine 72), A Nous la Liberte (Spine 160), and Under the Roofs of Paris (Spine 161) but they have stuck with us. And indeed it seems like Clair had lived a lifetime or two between those early 1930s French films and I Married a Witch (1941) just 10 years later, his second film in the US under contract with Paramount. I Married a Witch is a sexy screwball comedy that's perfectly fun to watch, but it's very much not the stories of the lower class that we were primed for from our other films.