I
remembered the pictures and a few minor details from American history
class in grade school, but otherwise recollected little about Hoover
Dam. I hadn’t even stopped to visit it during the several times I’ve
driven through Nevada and the surrounding areas. So, settling down to
watch Hoover Dam, I was prepared for a staid little history
lesson. Wrong. I was quickly sucked into the fascinating story of the
controversial construction America’s own pyramid — a towering structure
which employed thousands during the Great Depression and helped reshape
the economic outlook of all lands to the west.
“Never before have carnal lust, sex and sin been so clearly depicted,” begins a promotional clip for Amazon Jail, one of two slices of ’80s sexploitation from filmmaker Oswaldo De Oliveira new to DVD. Really, never
before? Well, that might be a stretch. Still, these well-produced
titles succeed rather unerringly within the caged confines of their
genre and intent.
Starring Maria Stella Splendore, Nadia Destro and Marta Anderson, 1980’s Bare Behind Bars
is set in an all-women’s penitentiary where group showers, full-on
beatings, water hosings and, yes, body cavity searches at the hands of
a creepy nurse are all part of the normal everyday existence. To stay
out of the torture chamber, inmates can choose to barter their bodies
to the wicked (female) warden, submit to said nurse or rage emptily
against the machine. Fed up with their lot, the inmates eventually rise
up and decide to wreak vengeance on their jailers. Bare Behind Bars
lacks in the detail of its characterizations (no surprise, really), but its full-throb conviction goes a long way, both in terms of the
performances and De Oliveira’s manic staging of its many love scenes,
which highlight the charged dash for release of any kind in such a
shuttered environment.
Set deep in the Amazon jungle (natch), 1982’s Amazon Jail
similarly tracks a group of imprisoned nubile naïfs who writhe about a
lot, suffer the abuses of subjugators who aren’t above sampling the
merchandise themselves (a swarthy Sergio Hingst and his whip-cracking
female second-in-command, Joao Paulo Ramalho) and eventually turn the
tables on their white slave owners. This is probably the more wildly
plotted of the two films, including an illicit love plot and protracted
escape sequence in which some of these desperate women go from out of
the fire and into the frying pan so to speak, escaping brutal bounty
hunters only to get scooped up by a perverted priest that you just know
Marlon Brando would have had a hoot playing. The energetic make-out
sessions and seriocomic writhing of its first third — despite the grim
tawdriness of its set-up — gives way to legitimate unease in this final
act of flight and fight, with De Oliveira using quick cuts to build the
movie’s rhythm to an impassioned pitch. Amazon Jail won’t be
mistaken for great art, but it does rather artfully blend sex and
violence, indulging a base human preoccupation with both subjects.
Both discs are housed in regular clear Amray cases with thin
cardboard slipcovers with raised lettering, and presented in 1.66:1
widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions. The audio mixes are English
language Dolby digital mono tracks, and extremely poorly dubbed at
that, but capture the aural demands of the pictures quite fine. And
speaking of those pictures, the image for both movies is superb,
consistent in color and free from scratches and other debris. The only
extras on each disc, unfortunately, are each film’s own declamatory
trailer (“This is the story of women trapped into white slavery,
revealing their innermost desires in their fight to escape the terrors
of the Amazon,” intones Amazon Jail), which are a bit amusing in their meticulousness. I mean, if you have movies titled Bare Behind Bars and Amazon Jail,
you don’t exactly have to spend money on overwritten narration, right?
De Oliveira did, though, and that’s one of the things that made him
different. B- (Movies) C+ (Discs)
Probably the most famous entry of the French New Wave, 1959’s The 400 Blows
introduced not only a precocious film talent to the world, but also
kick-started, in a simplistic yet emotionally florid style, a whole new
trend in cinema — in the process no doubt fooling a small army of
dirty-minded teens looking for more salacious fare based on the title
and its strange English transliteration. In offering up François
Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical account of a troubled adolescence, the
movie would find welcome global commercial and critical reception.
Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s cinematic stand-in, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows
details a somewhat unsentimental, Dickensian world of aloof parents,
oppressive teachers and stifled opportunity. In both story and image,
Truffaut searches for the poetical in the mundane, be it taking out the
trash, suffering the indignities of a mother (Claire Maurier) and
stepfather (Albert Rémy) too busily wrapped up in their own lives to
engage in much hands-on parenting or even grifting a typewriter or a
bit to eat.
For all the talk about the film’s quotidian grace and beauty, its
paramount perceptiveness lies in the manner in which it captures the
clandestine, swallowed anxiety of youth — of how one doesn’t have to be
abused to be detrimentally effected, just merely neglected. Over the
ensuing two decades, Truffaut (and Léaud) would return to Doinel four
more times, fleshing out both the character and this central thematic
preoccupation.
A re-release of one of its earliest, most popular, out-of-print
titles, Criterion’s single-disc release includes a restored, sterling
high-definition digital transfer of the movie, presented in 2.35:1
widescreen with monaural French audio and optional English subtitles. Two audio-commentary tracks stud the release, one from cinema professor
Brian Stonehill and the other from Robert Lachenay, a lifelong friend
of Truffaut, production supervisor on the movie and the model for
Antoine’s best friend, René. Stonehill’s speaks nicely to truths one
can more readily sense on the screen, while Lachenay’s subtitled chat, en français, provides all sorts of background — about the scene involving said stolen typewriter, for instance.
Criterion’s deep contacts in Europe, where upon-release academic
discourse was and still is more encouraged than Stateside, often help
provide valuable tertiary extras for its discs, and The 400 Blows
is no exception. Alongside six minutes of rare audition material and
another half dozen minutes of newsreel footage of Léaud at the Cannes
Film Festival for the film’s premiere, there are excerpts from a French
television program, Cinéastes de notre temps, in which Truffaut
discusses his youth, his body of critical writing, the origins of the
character of Doinel and his similarities and divergence from his own
youth. There’s also a seven-minute television interview with the late
director about his thoughts on the film’s reception. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)
 and the four, 56-foot diameter diversionary tunnels<br />
that opened up the canyon. The period piece photographs are amazing,<br />
particularly some time-lapse shots, and there’s also quite a bit of<br />
home video footage, which puts viewers right in the thick of things.<br />
Equally important is the time the program affords to the period leading<br />
up to the building of the structure, like the great Imperial Valley<br />
flood of 1905. This contextual material lends the Hoover Dam — which<br />
had many detractors at the time, and some still now — an important<br />
sense of reason and necessity.<b></p>
<p>As with most programs of this ilk, however, <i>Hoover Dam</i>’s<br />
bread and butter comes in the form of its overview interviews</b>, which<br />
here include well-spoken talking heads like Nevada state archivist Guy<br />
Louis Rocha and architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, but also<br />
several natty old coots who were actually there. These include<br />
photographer W.A. Davis, who richly details the jeers that went up when<br />
it was announced the dam would be named for the tremendously unpopular<br />
sitting president, Herbert Hoover.<br />
Like other “American Experience” releases on DVD from PBS, <i>Hoover Dam</i><br />
is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with an English language Dolby<br />
digital audio track that easily accommodates the meager aural demands<br />
of its production. <b>The only supplemental extras include printable<br />
teaching materials that educators may access through the Web.</b> It’s a<br />
testament to the allure of <i>Hoover Dam</i>’s salute to American ingenuity that it leaves you so mightily irked, wanting more. <b>B+ (Show) C- (Disc)</b></p>
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