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In between his pivotal independent classics Shadows and Faces, actor-turned-director John Cassavetes spent the early 1960s making two lesser-known studio films often neglected in studies of his work. One of these was MGM's A Child Is Waiting, which still gets some airplay thanks to the presence of Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster as the leads, while the other, Paramount's Too Late Blues, is rarely acknowledged except as a rare leading man opportunity for singer Bobby Darin.

Seen today, the film (which the director often dismissed) is a valuable snapshot of both a director in transition and a jazz culture in the midst of seismic changes. Some top talents can be found providing music for the many numbers here including Jimmy Rowles, Benny Carter, and Shelly Manne on such songs as ""Sax Raises Its Ugly Head" and "Look Inward Angel," as well as a sparing incidental score by jazz specialist David Raksin.

More freewheeling character study than traditional narrative, the film follows the creative spirit of "Ghost" Wakefield (Darrin), a determined musician dedicated to his art who refuses to sell out for fame. He hooks up with old flame and current floozy Jess (Stella Stevens, a year before she appeared opposite Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls!), and when he lets her front the band, the entire combo threatens to collapse.

The basic idea of this film sounds like one viewers had already seen countless times before, but what makes Cassavetes' take so unique is its focus on atmosphere and musical verisimilitude rather than soap opera dramatics. The friction of a recording session, the dynamics of a front man against the often overlooked backup players, and the challenges of keeping body and soul together in the face of financial difficulties are all captured here in a gritty, unflinching style that led to film to become branded as "depressing" by many critics and moviegoers at the time. However, time has been very kind to the film, and while it's odd to see Darrin in a music-oriented film where he doesn't actually sing, he acquits himself well in a role that veers into far more unsympathetic territory than one would normally expect at the time. Also significantly from a pop culture standpoint, this 1961 film also features a young Vince Edwards, who would go on to fame the same year as the lead on TV's Ben Casey.

Also among the cast is Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel as band mate "Red;" although he had a bit part in Shadows, this was only his second significant role after the forgotten Juke Box Racket. He would go on to remain with Cassavetes on and off through the director's penultimate film, Love Streams.

One of several key Cassavetes films kept out of home video circulation throughout the VHS and major DVD eras (though admittedly not as crucial as the long-MIA Husbands), Too Late Blues gets its first official release from Olive Films as part of its ongoing crusade to present overlooked gems from the Paramount vaults. As usual it's a no-frills package (with both Blu-Ray and DVD options on the market), and the packaging somehow misspells Vince Edwards' name. More important is the presentation of the film itself, and it looks terrific. Razor sharp with beautiful inky blacks and rich grays, it's lovely from start to finish and presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, slightly opened up from the 1.85:1 framing of the theatrical version. Even more impressive is the sound; for an early '60s mono track, it's shocking how clear and powerful the audio on this one really is. Considering the importance of the music on the soundtrack, that's certainly something for which movie fans can be grateful.

For more information about Too Late Blues, visit Olive Films.

by Nathaniel Thompson

Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer is a pirate movie by way of a grand historical adventure a la DeMille. Based loosely on the true story of the French-born "privateer" Jean Lafitte (he preferred the term to pirate), who fought side-by-side with General Andrew Jackson against the British in the War of 1812, it stars Fredric March as the flamboyant Captain who targets foreign ships passing through the Caribbean and sells his pillaged booty to New Orleans society on the black market. His brazen ways earn him a bounty on his head, which he embraces with just a modicum pride (the $500 bounty is a little too low for his ego) and a lot of humor (he puts a bounty out on the Governor in return). This wanted man claims no nationality ("I am a privateer, under the flag of Barataria," he proclaims) but he has a fondness for the still fledgling nation that made him Louisiana's Most Wanted.

DeMille plays fast and loose with his history, as usual, but is surprisingly accurate to the big picture of the historical record and to defining details that make Lafitte such a larger than life character. He makes his home in the self-proclaimed colony of Barataria, built on a cove deep in the Louisiana swamps, where his fleet hides from American law and conducted its smuggling and pillaging. He has standing orders to leave the crews and passengers of his victimized ships unharmed. And while he's wanted by the State of Louisiana for his black market operations and high seas piracy, he's quite popular among the citizens for breaking the shipping embargo on European goods.

More importantly, DeMille has more fun with the story than in many of his big historical spectacles. The Buccaneer opens in 1814 with the British invasion of Washington D.C. and the flight from the capitol. Spring Byington provides a classic DeMille take on Dolly Madison: cultured hostess with a streak of practical frontier spirit. As the presidential residence is evacuated in the midst of a reception, Dolly slips back in (without her guards) to retrieve a last-minute treasure before the British burns everything to the ground. What could be so important? Only the Declaration of Independence, she explains with a tossed-off aside and a matter-of-fact manner. That's DeMille's idea of American leadership -- sophistication, aplomb, and simple can-do spirit -- and this ideal defines General Andrew Jackson (Hugh Sothern), whose rustic dignity and colorful manner offers a hearty, earthy American contrast to the oily arrogance of British aristocracy and pompous stateside traitors.

In contrast to the salt-of-the-earth dignity of the American leaders, Lafitte is both a sly scoundrel with a brazen defiance of authority and a patriot at heart who appreciates the United States, the democratic underdog in a world of kings and dictators. March gives Lafitte one of the worst French accents ever heard on screen, admittedly, but he is commanding and charismatic as the leader who rouses his men to the American cause even after they have been double-crossed by the Louisiana Governor.

Between Lafitte's seafaring exploits and his rousing paeans to the ideals of the new country, DeMille and his screenwriters (adapting the novel "Lafitte the Pirate" by Lyle Saxon) give Lafitte a romance with a belle of New Orleans society (Margot Grahame) while a cute Dutch girl (Franciska Gaal), rescued from a rogue pirate, moons over Lafitte. You might say the film's biggest twist comes right in the first act, when one of Lafitte's own captains defies orders and attacks an American ship, leaving no survivors (or so he thinks). When Lafitte discovers this brutal breach of conduct, he responds with quick and unflinching justice and March plays it the scene without indignity or sentiment. He lets his disgust over such senseless brutality come out through uncharacteristic (for Lafitte) understatement, which in itself stands out in a performance of grinning vanity and roguish humor, and the reverberations of that massacre continue to haunt the film, reminding us of the blood on Lafitte's hands. Lafitte's recognition of his responsibility for the actions of his men makes him that much more layered a leader.

The rest of the film is a paean to the inclusiveness of the American melting pot (at least European stock). From Gaal's little Dutch girl to Akim Tamiroff's lovable, loyal rogue devoted to Lafitte (and smitten with Gaal) and Walter Brennan as Jackson's buckskin-clad aide-de-camp, this multicultural collection of characters celebrates the ideals of the nation of immigrants and individualists. Anthony Quinn, who has a small role as a devoted mate, lacks the more outsized presence of Tamiroff, yet he ended up having quite the presence in the 1958 remake. When DeMille fell ill, Quinn (who was by then DeMille's son-in-law) took over as director.

DeMille's films had a tendency to get bloated and starchy as his budgets and scope grew but The Buccaneer, which DeMille made between his two frontier epics The Plainsman and Union Pacific, has a lively energy to it, thanks to a plot full of betrayals and battles, a cast of larger-than-life characters, and a snappy script full of playful dialogue. It even, dramatic license and romantic fictions aside, keeps to the broad strokes of history. All of which makes for one of DeMille's more rousing and entertaining productions.

Olive Films releases the black-and-white film on DVD only. The print shows some wear, mostly light vertical scratches, but no serious damage, and the sound is fine. There are no supplements.

For more information about The Buccaneer, visit Olive Films. To order The Buccaneer, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker

Mario Monicelli, one of the most prolific and popular directors of post-war Italian cinema, never earned a reputation in the U.S. like his compadre, Federico Fellini, despite the international success of numerous films, from Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) to A Very Petit Bourgeois (1977). Perhaps it's because his preferred genre was comedy, notably the commedia all'italiana, a mix of social satire, clownish comedy, streetwise attitude, and earthy compassion, that he helped pioneer. But satire doesn't always export outside of its culture and comedy isn't often granted the same respect as "serious" drama and his modest, gentle visual style never attracted the attention of his flamboyant countrymen.

The Organizer (1963) brings the sensibility of commedia all'italiana to social drama. The story of a labor strike among the socially tight but politically disorganized community to textile workers in a mill outside of Turin in the late 1800s, this is not a political statement nor a social protest. It is lively, funny, chaotic, appreciative of the foibles and failures of the frustrated collective, if you can call them that. Not really a union by any definition, the workers meet after another 14 hour day in which one of their own was maimed by a machine to brainstorm a response. Half of them can neither read nor write and they have all resigned themselves to conditions that demand everything and still keep them in poverty. Their idea of a protest is simply to sound the whistle and walk out an hour early, and they can't even execute that plan, much to the ire of Pautasso (Folco Lulli), the hot-tempered veteran who volunteers to blow the shift whistle and thus make himself the most visible member of the nascent protesters.

Enter Professor Singaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), a threadbare intellectual riding the rails out of a previous scrape to hide out in this town. The arguments in the schoolhouse rouse him from his sleep in the storeroom and, in the manner of a gently encouraging teacher, builds up their confidence and spurs them on to greater (if still modest) goals, along with a little practical advice in preparing for a long strike. He's no con man, but his oratory passions sweep them up before they really know what they're in for. While they lack any faith in their power to effect change, he believes in the inevitability of labor's collective power. Just maybe not this time around.

Mastroianni made his reputation as a handsome romantic lead, but a large part of his charm was his self-effacing elegance and bemused poise, qualities that come to fore in this change of pace role. Warm, modest, passionate in his conviction and sincere in his actions, the Professor is an idealist with a practical side, whether he's rousing a deflated collective to hold out or scrounging for a meal. Even under a scraggly, unwashed beard and patchy clothes, he has an easy dignity and the comportment of a gentleman: offered a place to hide out from the police by a supportive prostitute (Annie Girardot), he folds himself into a short bench in her closet. But he's also a man, and when she proffers an invitation to climb in beside her, he leaps up with a grin and the spring of a man hungry for more than food.

Mastroianni is the ostensible lead and the most animated and entertaining performance, but the people of the town are the more dynamic, especially the angry young man Raoul (Renato Salvatori), a brooding, thuggish guy who puts the make on all women with a crude, leering manner and sneers at talk of collective action. He's all about looking after number one and is only grudgingly shamed into joining the strike, but his resolve grows through the process, as does his humanity, perhaps in part because he falls in love and starts feeling protective about someone besides himself. Bernard Blier's Martinetti is a decent, practical man too easily swayed to give in as the strike takes its toll on his family and Folco Lulli's gruff Pautasso is burly and short-fused, the first to sign on and quick to bow out when he feels abandoned by the rest. The characters are types, to be sure, but Monicelli and the actors make them memorable characters with depths beyond the clichés suggested in the early scenes, with full lives and real concerns to weigh on their commitment to the strike. And on the margins of the adult orbits is Omero (Franco Ciolli), a school-age boy resigned to the reality of working a full day in the factory but determined to keep his younger brother in school. This tough, scuffed-up boy never presents himself as a victim or feels sorry for his lot. He believes in the Professor wit ha passion that no adult can match, perhaps because he needs to.

The film is dense in detail, from the chilly, overcrowded homes (the films opens with Omero waking up and chipping a layer of ice from the pitcher holding their washing water) to the thrum of rows upon rows of clattering looms in a suffocating, steam-powered factory. (Monicelli found a shuttered old plant and rehabilitated it for the film, giving it an authenticity that no recreation could have matched.) Monicelli doesn't stop to comment upon the squalor except for one scene, when the locals march on the cabin of a Sicilian newcomer to "teach him a lesson" and end up shocked by the conditions of the mud-floor hovel that his enormous family huddles in. When these struggling folks are struck dumb by the poverty, you know how bad things are.

What is ultimately so moving is how little they ask, how much they sacrifice, and how little comes of it. The Organizer is neither a rousing celebration nor a triumphant drama. It is a drama of struggle and failure and people picking themselves up again to survive another day, buoyed by wonderful comic streak running underneath, not as satire but as simple human comedy in a tough world. It only makes the tragic dimensions more resonant, right down to the resignation of the final image. But even in that there is hope for another day.

Criterion releases the film on both Blu-ray and DVD in a lovely edition from a beautifully remastered print with a strong black-and-white image. The sole video supplement is a 10-minute video introduction by director Mario Monicelli (recorded in 2006) where the director talks of the origins of the project and shares details from the production. The fold-out booklet features an essay by J. Hoberman.

For more information about The Organizer, visit Criterion Collection. To order The Organizer, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker

Once upon a time, PBS television was a frequent sponsor of documentaries and even feature films. Among the fine pictures released first on public television and now strongly in need of rediscovery is Victor Nuñez' 1984 American Playhouse production of A Flash of Green. Almost as elusive was the acclaimed 1977 PBS feature ¡Alambrista!, the first American feature to loot at the migrant labor experience from the point of view of an illegal from Mexico. The word ¡Alambrista! translates as "wire jumper", or "fence jumper". An alternate American release titles is The Illegal.

In 1976 socially progressive documentaries were seen as a way of informing the public, and not as a means to advocate a specific political solution to a problem. A work of fiction, ¡Alambrista! is so true to its subject that it might as well be a documentary. It asks us to contemplate the situation of a particular illegal migrant worker, not to agree with an opinion.

Penniless Mexican Roberto (Domingo Ambriz) leaves his family and sneaks into the United States. Barely escaping the Migra, the Immigration Police, he finds a friend in Joe (Trinidid Silva), who counsels him in how to order breakfast in America, and how to avoid arrest. But after Joe is killed riding the rails, Roberto must go it alone.. He finds some work but is so exhausted that he falls asleep on the street. Anglo waitress Sharon (Linda Gillen) rescues Joe and takes him home. Despite the language barrier, she invites him to stay. Sharon remains close, even after she discovers that her new boyfriend has a wife back home. Caught in a raid on a dance hall, Roberto is swiftly deported, and almost as quickly smuggled back across the border. An Anglo broker in cheap labor (Ned Beatty) has a quota to fill, for workers to break a strike in Colorado. Roberto's disillusion is final when he discovers what became of his father, who left for America years ago and had not been heard of since.

Back in 1960, the legendary Edward R. Murrow capped his broadcasting career with Harvest of Shame, a TV documentary about migrant workers. A call for justice, the show advocated for the powerless underclass that picks the nation's food. A farmer in the show states, "We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them." By 1977 activist farm worker Cesar Chavez was making national headlines, and protests at supermarkets were asking consumers not to buy grapes. ¡Alambrista! made the issue personal.

Roberto's odyssey into the mysterious Northern land is a tangle of strange situations and customs. As he does not speak English, he deals almost exclusively with farm foremen and 'worker contacts', all of which are in the business of exploiting his labor for as little money as possible. Roberto cannot tell when a garrulous old cowboy (Jerry Hardin) is just being friendly, and he does not immediately understand that the sympathetic waitress Sharon has kept him from being robbed. A simple rural Catholic, Roberto is clearly frightened when Sharon takes him to a revivalist service run by a hellfire preacher. He thinks he has the best job in the world when the pilot of a crop duster hires him to do ground spotting flag work. Roberto proudly shows off his new company overalls, but does not understand that his employer is circumventing the law: the sprayer is soaking him in insecticide, without a face mask or any protection whatsoever.

Roberto eventually arrives at a painful. Living with the welcoming, understanding Sharon establishes him in a second family arrangement. When he learns that his father abandoned him for a new life in the United States, Roberto understands that he is taking the exact same path, and no longer believes he's doing the right thing. Roberto cannot articulate these feelings, but actor Domingo Abriz and director Robert M. Young communicate them clearly and directly.

Although every scene in ¡Alambrista! has the ring of truth, its most indelible moment is the finale at the border. As he's being ushered back into Mexico, Roberto witnesses a Mexican woman (Lily Álvarez) giving birth to a baby right out in public, with only the help of a couple of passers-by. At first the spectacle of the woman clutching a pole and grimacing in pain seems an ultimate degradation. But when the baby is born, she laughs and cries and calls out her victory. The pole she is gripping holds the border kiosk's American flag; her boy has been born in the United States. He will have papers allowing him the freedom to cross the frontier whenever he wants.

Although he progressed to more conventional feature films, writer-director Robert M. Young approached ¡Alambrista! through documentary work, including a number of National Geographic Specials. He also co-wrote and photographed Michael Roemer's impressive 1964 feature Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln as young marrieds trying to live a dignified life in the South. Young's hand-held camerawork in ¡Alambrista! is simply remarkable. The camera glides with Roberto as he walks, and, as young explains, "enters the character's personal space, staying up close but always showing the full reality of every location." We fully believe that actor Domingo Abriz is doing real backbreaking work. Young's filming strategy "invades" reality, turning documentary subjects into active participants. Playing a pair of drunks, actors Julius Harris and Edward James Olmos taunt a pre-dawn group of laborers waiting at a pick-up point. Filming the entire confrontation, Young gets authentic reactions from the workers, who are unaware that the drunks are not real. The scene has an authenticity that money can't buy.

The small film crew ranged for ten weeks all over the American Southwest. With only $200,000 to spend, director Young and his producer Michael Hausman made on the spot deals to shoot farmers' fields during real harvests. They also solicited cooperation from State Police and even the INS. Real police and border patrolmen perform on screen. Barriers since erected to such informal shooting would make ¡Alambrista! much more difficult today. Corporations, private landowners and government agencies are now obsessed by security and image control, and are completely de-incentivized against cooperating with filmmakers. The "reality" that filmmakers would like to document, is now privately controlled or government-regulated.

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of ¡Alambrista! is a remarkable restoration of an important social document. Feeling that he was never able to present his preferred cut, director Robert M. Young re-edited the show a few years back, adding more scenes with actor Trinidad Silva and trimming over a reel from the overall running time. The result is a leaner and more focused narrative.

The 1:66 widescreen transfer pulls every nuance from the original 16mm elements, giving the viewer a full appreciation of ¡Alambrista!'s excellent cinematography. Old TV prints from PBS and the "Z" Channel were grainy, with weak colors; most of this encoding looks as if the film were shot on 35mm.

Actor Edward James Olmos appears in a lengthy featurette, explaining why he feels Robert M. Young is such an exceptional director. They've kept up their working relationship over the years. Young directed several episodes of the Olmos-starring TV show Battlestar Galactica.

Director Young and producer Michael Hausman share the full commentary track, explaining the genesis of the show and their run-and-gun filming method. Young points out when a complex scene is done in one shot. Their most expensive day of shooting involved lining up an entire train and renting several cars to portray new autos being shipped by rail. Filmed from a helicopter, Domingo Abriz and Trinidad Silva are actually cruising down a rail line, twenty-five feet in the air, when the cops spot them from the highway.

A valuable extra is director Young's earlier short 1973 documentary, The Children of the Fields, about an Arizona family that follows the harvests as a working unit. It's a nomadic survival situation. The adorable children don't attend school but instead work all day helping to pick crops. The most heartbreaking scenes show a little girl no older than five using a sharp tool to trim onions; a slightly older daughter has a big scratch on her cheek, obviously from an accident with the adult-sized shears. The docu is an obvious precursor to and preparation for ¡Alambrista!

For more information about Alambrista!, visit Criterion Collection.

by Glenn Erickson

There was a vogue for South Seas exotica in the late silent and early sound era, films made up of varying degrees of ethnographic revelation, social commentary, and erotic spectacle. Moana (1926), Robert Flaherty's documentary portrait of life in Samoa, is the first expression of this idealized screen fantasy (every scene was carefully staged for his cameras), and the most spectacular expression comes via King Kong (1933), which exaggerates both the primitive exoticism and the primal fears of savage tribal culture to outrageous extremes. Along the way are films as varied as White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Pagan (1929), Tabu (1931), and King Vidor's Bird of Paradise (1932).

You wouldn't peg King Vidor, a social realist by nature, as a natural for such a subject, and the director himself dismissed 1932 Bird of Paradise as "a potboiler." He took the assignment with no script, merely a Hawaii location, a South Seas setting, Dolores Del Rio and Joel McCrea set for the starring roles, and a few directives from producer David O. Selznick, new ensconced as head of production at RKO. "Just give me three wonderful love scenes like you had in The Big Parade and Bardelys the Magnificent. I don't care what story you use so long as we call it Bird of Paradise and Del Rio jumps into a flaming volcano at the finish," is how Vidor (writing in his autobiography A Tree is a Tree) recalled Selznick's request. And that's what, after weeks of waiting out tropical storms to shoot location footage in Hawaii and completing the production with Catalina doubling Hawaii, he finally delivered. So many of these films revolve around forbidden love, often (though not always) about white male adventurers intoxicated by the primal innocence in a land of plenty and a culture of easy living. And so goes Bird of Paradise, with McCrea as Johnny, the all-American sailor who (with the blessing of his paternal captain) jumps ship to spend time on a tropical island and the chief's beautiful young daughter Luana (Del Rio), who is betrothed to the prince of another island. But of course.

McCrea, in an early leading role, makes Johnny quite the strapping specimen: athletic, courageous, generous, a real boy scout but with a red-blooded passion for adventure and for love. He's the youngest hand on an all-male crew in an undefined voyage through the South Seas and the rest of the crew (not really roughnecks -- they talk more like urban wiseguys than wharf rats -- but certainly more experienced than the boyish Johnny) looks out for the guy like he's a beloved kid brother. Del Rio, the bigger star in 1932, takes top billing here as the native princess. The Mexican-American actress doesn't look particularly Polynesian, especially next to the cast of Hawaiian locals as the tribal islanders, but her dark, exotic beauty contrasts nicely with McCrea's strapping boy-next-door, and she carries herself with a sense of regal confidence and assurance that gives Luana a gravitas beyond the usual virginal innocence of such portrayals. She's no passive maiden but a resolute woman. After Johnny has been warned to steer clear of her, she takes matters (romantic and sexual; there's little difference between the two in this pre-code production) into her own hands.

Luana is a fantasy, to be sure, dancing with abandon in grass skirts and resilient flower leis (which manage to stay put through all sorts of physical activity) or discovering the joys of kissing like a teenager eager to practice at any opportunity. But she is sexually forthright, a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it with a giddy playfulness and a sense of purpose. Her nude midnight past the sailboat is like a mermaid siren teasing sailor Johnny to follow, which he most assuredly does, but the only trap here is desire and romance. (She's not actually naked, but through the haze of underwater shooting and careful backlighting, you get a comely image in motion that suggests more than it reveals.) And in the interest of fair play, McCrea is constantly stripping off his shirt and displaying his well-toned physique.

They are a frisky pair of lovers and Vidor makes their affair both physically intimate and earnestly innocent as they leave their respective societies behind to make their own Eden as a star-crossed Adam and Eve. But their societies haven't left them. As Johnny pines for the bustle of the city and the marvels of modern technology, the roar of the volcano on Luana's nearby island calls her back to her fatal destiny. It is indeed quite the potboiler tale, an echo of Murnau's more resonant Tabu with a snappy American attitude in paradise, but Del Rio and McCrea bring both an unaffected earnestness and a youthful playfulness to the film and Vidor matches them with a commitment to the innocence of their love and the inevitable tragedy, just as requested by Selznick. Paradise: found and lost.

The rights to this film, produced by David O. Selznick for RKO, fell into the public domain decades ago and it has been a familiar title in VHS and DVD bargain bins as long as such things have existed. As a result, previous editions have ranged from unimpressive to unacceptable. Kino's edition, licensed from Selznick Properties and mastered for DVD and Blu-ray from an original nitrate 35mm print preserved by George Eastman House, is not pristine but it is light years ahead of any previous release (at least that I've seen). There is minor scuffing and surface scratches throughout the print and a slight loss of contrast, but the image is otherwise crisp and the clarity enables you to see through the scratches to the beauty of the image.

The soundtrack, however, is an issue, trebly and distorted, as if a weak source has been cranked up beyond its limits. The source is aurally thin but the audio mastering just makes it worse and mars what is otherwise the definitive home video edition of the film. There are no supplements beyond a trailer.

For more information about Bird of Paradise, visit Kino Lorber. To order Bird of Paradise, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker

In between his pivotal independent classics Shadows and Faces, actor-turned-director John Cassavetes spent the early 1960s making two lesser-known studio films often neglected in studies of his work. One of these was MGM's A Child Is Waiting, which still gets some airplay thanks to the presence of Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster as the leads, while the other, Paramount's Too Late Blues, is rarely acknowledged except as a rare leading man opportunity for singer Bobby Darin.

Seen today, the film (which the director often dismissed) is a valuable snapshot of both a director in transition and a jazz culture in the midst of seismic changes. Some top talents can be found providing music for the many numbers here including Jimmy Rowles, Benny Carter, and Shelly Manne on such songs as ""Sax Raises Its Ugly Head" and "Look Inward Angel," as well as a sparing incidental score by jazz specialist David Raksin.

More freewheeling character study than traditional narrative, the film follows the creative spirit of "Ghost" Wakefield (Darrin), a determined musician dedicated to his art who refuses to sell out for fame. He hooks up with old flame and current floozy Jess (Stella Stevens, a year before she appeared opposite Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls!), and when he lets her front the band, the entire combo threatens to collapse.

The basic idea of this film sounds like one viewers had already seen countless times before, but what makes Cassavetes' take so unique is its focus on atmosphere and musical verisimilitude rather than soap opera dramatics. The friction of a recording session, the dynamics of a front man against the often overlooked backup players, and the challenges of keeping body and soul together in the face of financial difficulties are all captured here in a gritty, unflinching style that led to film to become branded as "depressing" by many critics and moviegoers at the time. However, time has been very kind to the film, and while it's odd to see Darrin in a music-oriented film where he doesn't actually sing, he acquits himself well in a role that veers into far more unsympathetic territory than one would normally expect at the time. Also significantly from a pop culture standpoint, this 1961 film also features a young Vince Edwards, who would go on to fame the same year as the lead on TV's Ben Casey.

Also among the cast is Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel as band mate "Red;" although he had a bit part in Shadows, this was only his second significant role after the forgotten Juke Box Racket. He would go on to remain with Cassavetes on and off through the director's penultimate film, Love Streams.

One of several key Cassavetes films kept out of home video circulation throughout the VHS and major DVD eras (though admittedly not as crucial as the long-MIA Husbands), Too Late Blues gets its first official release from Olive Films as part of its ongoing crusade to present overlooked gems from the Paramount vaults. As usual it's a no-frills package (with both Blu-Ray and DVD options on the market), and the packaging somehow misspells Vince Edwards' name. More important is the presentation of the film itself, and it looks terrific. Razor sharp with beautiful inky blacks and rich grays, it's lovely from start to finish and presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, slightly opened up from the 1.85:1 framing of the theatrical version. Even more impressive is the sound; for an early '60s mono track, it's shocking how clear and powerful the audio on this one really is. Considering the importance of the music on the soundtrack, that's certainly something for which movie fans can be grateful.

For more information about Too Late Blues, visit Olive Films.

by Nathaniel Thompson

Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer is a pirate movie by way of a grand historical adventure a la DeMille. Based loosely on the true story of the French-born "privateer" Jean Lafitte (he preferred the term to pirate), who fought side-by-side with General Andrew Jackson against the British in the War of 1812, it stars Fredric March as the flamboyant Captain who targets foreign ships passing through the Caribbean and sells his pillaged booty to New Orleans society on the black market. His brazen ways earn him a bounty on his head, which he embraces with just a modicum pride (the $500 bounty is a little too low for his ego) and a lot of humor (he puts a bounty out on the Governor in return). This wanted man claims no nationality ("I am a privateer, under the flag of Barataria," he proclaims) but he has a fondness for the still fledgling nation that made him Louisiana's Most Wanted.

DeMille plays fast and loose with his history, as usual, but is surprisingly accurate to the big picture of the historical record and to defining details that make Lafitte such a larger than life character. He makes his home in the self-proclaimed colony of Barataria, built on a cove deep in the Louisiana swamps, where his fleet hides from American law and conducted its smuggling and pillaging. He has standing orders to leave the crews and passengers of his victimized ships unharmed. And while he's wanted by the State of Louisiana for his black market operations and high seas piracy, he's quite popular among the citizens for breaking the shipping embargo on European goods.

More importantly, DeMille has more fun with the story than in many of his big historical spectacles. The Buccaneer opens in 1814 with the British invasion of Washington D.C. and the flight from the capitol. Spring Byington provides a classic DeMille take on Dolly Madison: cultured hostess with a streak of practical frontier spirit. As the presidential residence is evacuated in the midst of a reception, Dolly slips back in (without her guards) to retrieve a last-minute treasure before the British burns everything to the ground. What could be so important? Only the Declaration of Independence, she explains with a tossed-off aside and a matter-of-fact manner. That's DeMille's idea of American leadership -- sophistication, aplomb, and simple can-do spirit -- and this ideal defines General Andrew Jackson (Hugh Sothern), whose rustic dignity and colorful manner offers a hearty, earthy American contrast to the oily arrogance of British aristocracy and pompous stateside traitors.

In contrast to the salt-of-the-earth dignity of the American leaders, Lafitte is both a sly scoundrel with a brazen defiance of authority and a patriot at heart who appreciates the United States, the democratic underdog in a world of kings and dictators. March gives Lafitte one of the worst French accents ever heard on screen, admittedly, but he is commanding and charismatic as the leader who rouses his men to the American cause even after they have been double-crossed by the Louisiana Governor.

Between Lafitte's seafaring exploits and his rousing paeans to the ideals of the new country, DeMille and his screenwriters (adapting the novel "Lafitte the Pirate" by Lyle Saxon) give Lafitte a romance with a belle of New Orleans society (Margot Grahame) while a cute Dutch girl (Franciska Gaal), rescued from a rogue pirate, moons over Lafitte. You might say the film's biggest twist comes right in the first act, when one of Lafitte's own captains defies orders and attacks an American ship, leaving no survivors (or so he thinks). When Lafitte discovers this brutal breach of conduct, he responds with quick and unflinching justice and March plays it the scene without indignity or sentiment. He lets his disgust over such senseless brutality come out through uncharacteristic (for Lafitte) understatement, which in itself stands out in a performance of grinning vanity and roguish humor, and the reverberations of that massacre continue to haunt the film, reminding us of the blood on Lafitte's hands. Lafitte's recognition of his responsibility for the actions of his men makes him that much more layered a leader.

The rest of the film is a paean to the inclusiveness of the American melting pot (at least European stock). From Gaal's little Dutch girl to Akim Tamiroff's lovable, loyal rogue devoted to Lafitte (and smitten with Gaal) and Walter Brennan as Jackson's buckskin-clad aide-de-camp, this multicultural collection of characters celebrates the ideals of the nation of immigrants and individualists. Anthony Quinn, who has a small role as a devoted mate, lacks the more outsized presence of Tamiroff, yet he ended up having quite the presence in the 1958 remake. When DeMille fell ill, Quinn (who was by then DeMille's son-in-law) took over as director.

DeMille's films had a tendency to get bloated and starchy as his budgets and scope grew but The Buccaneer, which DeMille made between his two frontier epics The Plainsman and Union Pacific, has a lively energy to it, thanks to a plot full of betrayals and battles, a cast of larger-than-life characters, and a snappy script full of playful dialogue. It even, dramatic license and romantic fictions aside, keeps to the broad strokes of history. All of which makes for one of DeMille's more rousing and entertaining productions.

Olive Films releases the black-and-white film on DVD only. The print shows some wear, mostly light vertical scratches, but no serious damage, and the sound is fine. There are no supplements.

For more information about The Buccaneer, visit Olive Films. To order The Buccaneer, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker

Mario Monicelli, one of the most prolific and popular directors of post-war Italian cinema, never earned a reputation in the U.S. like his compadre, Federico Fellini, despite the international success of numerous films, from Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) to A Very Petit Bourgeois (1977). Perhaps it's because his preferred genre was comedy, notably the commedia all'italiana, a mix of social satire, clownish comedy, streetwise attitude, and earthy compassion, that he helped pioneer. But satire doesn't always export outside of its culture and comedy isn't often granted the same respect as "serious" drama and his modest, gentle visual style never attracted the attention of his flamboyant countrymen.

The Organizer (1963) brings the sensibility of commedia all'italiana to social drama. The story of a labor strike among the socially tight but politically disorganized community to textile workers in a mill outside of Turin in the late 1800s, this is not a political statement nor a social protest. It is lively, funny, chaotic, appreciative of the foibles and failures of the frustrated collective, if you can call them that. Not really a union by any definition, the workers meet after another 14 hour day in which one of their own was maimed by a machine to brainstorm a response. Half of them can neither read nor write and they have all resigned themselves to conditions that demand everything and still keep them in poverty. Their idea of a protest is simply to sound the whistle and walk out an hour early, and they can't even execute that plan, much to the ire of Pautasso (Folco Lulli), the hot-tempered veteran who volunteers to blow the shift whistle and thus make himself the most visible member of the nascent protesters.

Enter Professor Singaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), a threadbare intellectual riding the rails out of a previous scrape to hide out in this town. The arguments in the schoolhouse rouse him from his sleep in the storeroom and, in the manner of a gently encouraging teacher, builds up their confidence and spurs them on to greater (if still modest) goals, along with a little practical advice in preparing for a long strike. He's no con man, but his oratory passions sweep them up before they really know what they're in for. While they lack any faith in their power to effect change, he believes in the inevitability of labor's collective power. Just maybe not this time around.

Mastroianni made his reputation as a handsome romantic lead, but a large part of his charm was his self-effacing elegance and bemused poise, qualities that come to fore in this change of pace role. Warm, modest, passionate in his conviction and sincere in his actions, the Professor is an idealist with a practical side, whether he's rousing a deflated collective to hold out or scrounging for a meal. Even under a scraggly, unwashed beard and patchy clothes, he has an easy dignity and the comportment of a gentleman: offered a place to hide out from the police by a supportive prostitute (Annie Girardot), he folds himself into a short bench in her closet. But he's also a man, and when she proffers an invitation to climb in beside her, he leaps up with a grin and the spring of a man hungry for more than food.

Mastroianni is the ostensible lead and the most animated and entertaining performance, but the people of the town are the more dynamic, especially the angry young man Raoul (Renato Salvatori), a brooding, thuggish guy who puts the make on all women with a crude, leering manner and sneers at talk of collective action. He's all about looking after number one and is only grudgingly shamed into joining the strike, but his resolve grows through the process, as does his humanity, perhaps in part because he falls in love and starts feeling protective about someone besides himself. Bernard Blier's Martinetti is a decent, practical man too easily swayed to give in as the strike takes its toll on his family and Folco Lulli's gruff Pautasso is burly and short-fused, the first to sign on and quick to bow out when he feels abandoned by the rest. The characters are types, to be sure, but Monicelli and the actors make them memorable characters with depths beyond the clichés suggested in the early scenes, with full lives and real concerns to weigh on their commitment to the strike. And on the margins of the adult orbits is Omero (Franco Ciolli), a school-age boy resigned to the reality of working a full day in the factory but determined to keep his younger brother in school. This tough, scuffed-up boy never presents himself as a victim or feels sorry for his lot. He believes in the Professor wit ha passion that no adult can match, perhaps because he needs to.

The film is dense in detail, from the chilly, overcrowded homes (the films opens with Omero waking up and chipping a layer of ice from the pitcher holding their washing water) to the thrum of rows upon rows of clattering looms in a suffocating, steam-powered factory. (Monicelli found a shuttered old plant and rehabilitated it for the film, giving it an authenticity that no recreation could have matched.) Monicelli doesn't stop to comment upon the squalor except for one scene, when the locals march on the cabin of a Sicilian newcomer to "teach him a lesson" and end up shocked by the conditions of the mud-floor hovel that his enormous family huddles in. When these struggling folks are struck dumb by the poverty, you know how bad things are.

What is ultimately so moving is how little they ask, how much they sacrifice, and how little comes of it. The Organizer is neither a rousing celebration nor a triumphant drama. It is a drama of struggle and failure and people picking themselves up again to survive another day, buoyed by wonderful comic streak running underneath, not as satire but as simple human comedy in a tough world. It only makes the tragic dimensions more resonant, right down to the resignation of the final image. But even in that there is hope for another day.

Criterion releases the film on both Blu-ray and DVD in a lovely edition from a beautifully remastered print with a strong black-and-white image. The sole video supplement is a 10-minute video introduction by director Mario Monicelli (recorded in 2006) where the director talks of the origins of the project and shares details from the production. The fold-out booklet features an essay by J. Hoberman.

For more information about The Organizer, visit Criterion Collection. To order The Organizer, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker

Once upon a time, PBS television was a frequent sponsor of documentaries and even feature films. Among the fine pictures released first on public television and now strongly in need of rediscovery is Victor Nuñez' 1984 American Playhouse production of A Flash of Green. Almost as elusive was the acclaimed 1977 PBS feature ¡Alambrista!, the first American feature to loot at the migrant labor experience from the point of view of an illegal from Mexico. The word ¡Alambrista! translates as "wire jumper", or "fence jumper". An alternate American release titles is The Illegal.

In 1976 socially progressive documentaries were seen as a way of informing the public, and not as a means to advocate a specific political solution to a problem. A work of fiction, ¡Alambrista! is so true to its subject that it might as well be a documentary. It asks us to contemplate the situation of a particular illegal migrant worker, not to agree with an opinion.

Penniless Mexican Roberto (Domingo Ambriz) leaves his family and sneaks into the United States. Barely escaping the Migra, the Immigration Police, he finds a friend in Joe (Trinidid Silva), who counsels him in how to order breakfast in America, and how to avoid arrest. But after Joe is killed riding the rails, Roberto must go it alone.. He finds some work but is so exhausted that he falls asleep on the street. Anglo waitress Sharon (Linda Gillen) rescues Joe and takes him home. Despite the language barrier, she invites him to stay. Sharon remains close, even after she discovers that her new boyfriend has a wife back home. Caught in a raid on a dance hall, Roberto is swiftly deported, and almost as quickly smuggled back across the border. An Anglo broker in cheap labor (Ned Beatty) has a quota to fill, for workers to break a strike in Colorado. Roberto's disillusion is final when he discovers what became of his father, who left for America years ago and had not been heard of since.

Back in 1960, the legendary Edward R. Murrow capped his broadcasting career with Harvest of Shame, a TV documentary about migrant workers. A call for justice, the show advocated for the powerless underclass that picks the nation's food. A farmer in the show states, "We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them." By 1977 activist farm worker Cesar Chavez was making national headlines, and protests at supermarkets were asking consumers not to buy grapes. ¡Alambrista! made the issue personal.

Roberto's odyssey into the mysterious Northern land is a tangle of strange situations and customs. As he does not speak English, he deals almost exclusively with farm foremen and 'worker contacts', all of which are in the business of exploiting his labor for as little money as possible. Roberto cannot tell when a garrulous old cowboy (Jerry Hardin) is just being friendly, and he does not immediately understand that the sympathetic waitress Sharon has kept him from being robbed. A simple rural Catholic, Roberto is clearly frightened when Sharon takes him to a revivalist service run by a hellfire preacher. He thinks he has the best job in the world when the pilot of a crop duster hires him to do ground spotting flag work. Roberto proudly shows off his new company overalls, but does not understand that his employer is circumventing the law: the sprayer is soaking him in insecticide, without a face mask or any protection whatsoever.

Roberto eventually arrives at a painful. Living with the welcoming, understanding Sharon establishes him in a second family arrangement. When he learns that his father abandoned him for a new life in the United States, Roberto understands that he is taking the exact same path, and no longer believes he's doing the right thing. Roberto cannot articulate these feelings, but actor Domingo Abriz and director Robert M. Young communicate them clearly and directly.

Although every scene in ¡Alambrista! has the ring of truth, its most indelible moment is the finale at the border. As he's being ushered back into Mexico, Roberto witnesses a Mexican woman (Lily Álvarez) giving birth to a baby right out in public, with only the help of a couple of passers-by. At first the spectacle of the woman clutching a pole and grimacing in pain seems an ultimate degradation. But when the baby is born, she laughs and cries and calls out her victory. The pole she is gripping holds the border kiosk's American flag; her boy has been born in the United States. He will have papers allowing him the freedom to cross the frontier whenever he wants.

Although he progressed to more conventional feature films, writer-director Robert M. Young approached ¡Alambrista! through documentary work, including a number of National Geographic Specials. He also co-wrote and photographed Michael Roemer's impressive 1964 feature Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln as young marrieds trying to live a dignified life in the South. Young's hand-held camerawork in ¡Alambrista! is simply remarkable. The camera glides with Roberto as he walks, and, as young explains, "enters the character's personal space, staying up close but always showing the full reality of every location." We fully believe that actor Domingo Abriz is doing real backbreaking work. Young's filming strategy "invades" reality, turning documentary subjects into active participants. Playing a pair of drunks, actors Julius Harris and Edward James Olmos taunt a pre-dawn group of laborers waiting at a pick-up point. Filming the entire confrontation, Young gets authentic reactions from the workers, who are unaware that the drunks are not real. The scene has an authenticity that money can't buy.

The small film crew ranged for ten weeks all over the American Southwest. With only $200,000 to spend, director Young and his producer Michael Hausman made on the spot deals to shoot farmers' fields during real harvests. They also solicited cooperation from State Police and even the INS. Real police and border patrolmen perform on screen. Barriers since erected to such informal shooting would make ¡Alambrista! much more difficult today. Corporations, private landowners and government agencies are now obsessed by security and image control, and are completely de-incentivized against cooperating with filmmakers. The "reality" that filmmakers would like to document, is now privately controlled or government-regulated.

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of ¡Alambrista! is a remarkable restoration of an important social document. Feeling that he was never able to present his preferred cut, director Robert M. Young re-edited the show a few years back, adding more scenes with actor Trinidad Silva and trimming over a reel from the overall running time. The result is a leaner and more focused narrative.

The 1:66 widescreen transfer pulls every nuance from the original 16mm elements, giving the viewer a full appreciation of ¡Alambrista!'s excellent cinematography. Old TV prints from PBS and the "Z" Channel were grainy, with weak colors; most of this encoding looks as if the film were shot on 35mm.

Actor Edward James Olmos appears in a lengthy featurette, explaining why he feels Robert M. Young is such an exceptional director. They've kept up their working relationship over the years. Young directed several episodes of the Olmos-starring TV show Battlestar Galactica.

Director Young and producer Michael Hausman share the full commentary track, explaining the genesis of the show and their run-and-gun filming method. Young points out when a complex scene is done in one shot. Their most expensive day of shooting involved lining up an entire train and renting several cars to portray new autos being shipped by rail. Filmed from a helicopter, Domingo Abriz and Trinidad Silva are actually cruising down a rail line, twenty-five feet in the air, when the cops spot them from the highway.

A valuable extra is director Young's earlier short 1973 documentary, The Children of the Fields, about an Arizona family that follows the harvests as a working unit. It's a nomadic survival situation. The adorable children don't attend school but instead work all day helping to pick crops. The most heartbreaking scenes show a little girl no older than five using a sharp tool to trim onions; a slightly older daughter has a big scratch on her cheek, obviously from an accident with the adult-sized shears. The docu is an obvious precursor to and preparation for ¡Alambrista!

For more information about Alambrista!, visit Criterion Collection.

by Glenn Erickson

There was a vogue for South Seas exotica in the late silent and early sound era, films made up of varying degrees of ethnographic revelation, social commentary, and erotic spectacle. Moana (1926), Robert Flaherty's documentary portrait of life in Samoa, is the first expression of this idealized screen fantasy (every scene was carefully staged for his cameras), and the most spectacular expression comes via King Kong (1933), which exaggerates both the primitive exoticism and the primal fears of savage tribal culture to outrageous extremes. Along the way are films as varied as White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Pagan (1929), Tabu (1931), and King Vidor's Bird of Paradise (1932).

You wouldn't peg King Vidor, a social realist by nature, as a natural for such a subject, and the director himself dismissed 1932 Bird of Paradise as "a potboiler." He took the assignment with no script, merely a Hawaii location, a South Seas setting, Dolores Del Rio and Joel McCrea set for the starring roles, and a few directives from producer David O. Selznick, new ensconced as head of production at RKO. "Just give me three wonderful love scenes like you had in The Big Parade and Bardelys the Magnificent. I don't care what story you use so long as we call it Bird of Paradise and Del Rio jumps into a flaming volcano at the finish," is how Vidor (writing in his autobiography A Tree is a Tree) recalled Selznick's request. And that's what, after weeks of waiting out tropical storms to shoot location footage in Hawaii and completing the production with Catalina doubling Hawaii, he finally delivered. So many of these films revolve around forbidden love, often (though not always) about white male adventurers intoxicated by the primal innocence in a land of plenty and a culture of easy living. And so goes Bird of Paradise, with McCrea as Johnny, the all-American sailor who (with the blessing of his paternal captain) jumps ship to spend time on a tropical island and the chief's beautiful young daughter Luana (Del Rio), who is betrothed to the prince of another island. But of course.

McCrea, in an early leading role, makes Johnny quite the strapping specimen: athletic, courageous, generous, a real boy scout but with a red-blooded passion for adventure and for love. He's the youngest hand on an all-male crew in an undefined voyage through the South Seas and the rest of the crew (not really roughnecks -- they talk more like urban wiseguys than wharf rats -- but certainly more experienced than the boyish Johnny) looks out for the guy like he's a beloved kid brother. Del Rio, the bigger star in 1932, takes top billing here as the native princess. The Mexican-American actress doesn't look particularly Polynesian, especially next to the cast of Hawaiian locals as the tribal islanders, but her dark, exotic beauty contrasts nicely with McCrea's strapping boy-next-door, and she carries herself with a sense of regal confidence and assurance that gives Luana a gravitas beyond the usual virginal innocence of such portrayals. She's no passive maiden but a resolute woman. After Johnny has been warned to steer clear of her, she takes matters (romantic and sexual; there's little difference between the two in this pre-code production) into her own hands.

Luana is a fantasy, to be sure, dancing with abandon in grass skirts and resilient flower leis (which manage to stay put through all sorts of physical activity) or discovering the joys of kissing like a teenager eager to practice at any opportunity. But she is sexually forthright, a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it with a giddy playfulness and a sense of purpose. Her nude midnight past the sailboat is like a mermaid siren teasing sailor Johnny to follow, which he most assuredly does, but the only trap here is desire and romance. (She's not actually naked, but through the haze of underwater shooting and careful backlighting, you get a comely image in motion that suggests more than it reveals.) And in the interest of fair play, McCrea is constantly stripping off his shirt and displaying his well-toned physique.

They are a frisky pair of lovers and Vidor makes their affair both physically intimate and earnestly innocent as they leave their respective societies behind to make their own Eden as a star-crossed Adam and Eve. But their societies haven't left them. As Johnny pines for the bustle of the city and the marvels of modern technology, the roar of the volcano on Luana's nearby island calls her back to her fatal destiny. It is indeed quite the potboiler tale, an echo of Murnau's more resonant Tabu with a snappy American attitude in paradise, but Del Rio and McCrea bring both an unaffected earnestness and a youthful playfulness to the film and Vidor matches them with a commitment to the innocence of their love and the inevitable tragedy, just as requested by Selznick. Paradise: found and lost.

The rights to this film, produced by David O. Selznick for RKO, fell into the public domain decades ago and it has been a familiar title in VHS and DVD bargain bins as long as such things have existed. As a result, previous editions have ranged from unimpressive to unacceptable. Kino's edition, licensed from Selznick Properties and mastered for DVD and Blu-ray from an original nitrate 35mm print preserved by George Eastman House, is not pristine but it is light years ahead of any previous release (at least that I've seen). There is minor scuffing and surface scratches throughout the print and a slight loss of contrast, but the image is otherwise crisp and the clarity enables you to see through the scratches to the beauty of the image.

The soundtrack, however, is an issue, trebly and distorted, as if a weak source has been cranked up beyond its limits. The source is aurally thin but the audio mastering just makes it worse and mars what is otherwise the definitive home video edition of the film. There are no supplements beyond a trailer.

For more information about Bird of Paradise, visit Kino Lorber. To order Bird of Paradise, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker