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Bullfighting has long been exploited for exotic film stories of romance and betrayal, as in the two American versions of Blood and Sand. With its attendant pomp and circumstance, costumes and rituals, the ornate Spanish tradition lends itself well to stylized melodrama. The prospect of death in the arena instantly points up questions of courage and ambition. American director Budd Boetticher discovered a fascination for bullfighting that became a lifelong passion. His Bullfighter and the Lady with Robert Stack is one of the best unheralded films of the 1950s. When his frequent star Randolph Scott retired, Boetticher spent the better part of a decade filming a documentary about a Mexican matador, Carlos Arruza.

In 1965 the Italian director Francesco Rosi went to Spain to film The Moment of Truth (Il momento della verità), his own study of bullfighting. A prominent "committed" leftist director, Rosi was best known for a crime movies that exposed deep corruption in entrenched Italian institutions: La Sfida, Salvatore Giuliano, Hands over the City. Peter Matthews tells us that Italian reviewers reprimanded Rosi for taking his talent on a tourist trip to Spain, away from the politics of Southern Italy and Sicily that he knew so well.

But Rosi's bullfighting movie is infused with the observances of a keen social critic. The film's semi-documentary style emphasizes the economic imperatives that lead the poor farmer's son Miguelín (Miguel Romero) to the bullring. Young Miguel leaves the farm for the city, and finds that the only way to secure even the most menial day labor is to hand over a portion of his wages to an intermediary. Fed up with sleeping in a communal dormitory, he attaches himself to the aged bullfighting teacher "Pedrucho" (Pedro Basauri) and begs and wheedles his way into the arena. Miguelín has the skill, determination and sheer nerve to succeed, and quickly rises to success. But his manager's fees eat up his earnings, while he pays the overhead for a full entourage. After the thrill of luxury and notoriety wears off, Miguelín begins to question why he's putting himself in such jeopardy, again and again. We remember the words of Miguelín's worn-out father: "Stay home. There's nothing better than bread and wine in your own house."

Viewers that wonder what really happens in bullfights when the Hollywood cameras cut away will likely be deeply impressed by the bloody carnage in Rosi's The Moment of Truth. Armed with widescreen Techniscope cameras that capture every detail in full-frame color, the film delivers close-up sensations that even spectators do not see. The bull is flayed and stabbed again and again, and is finally dispatched with a curved sword that pierces its heart and/or lungs. Before these incomparably strong animals collapse, gallons of blood seem to go every which way. In some fights the sleeves of Miguelín's beautiful chaquetilla are soaked in blood.

Seeing The Moment of Truth makes us wonder how many Spaniards were maimed by these violent encounters. Miguelín participates in a 'running of the bulls' ritual designed to offer young men the opportunity to prove their manliness: in one breathtaking shot a charging bull plows through a crowd, throwing boys and men left and right like a hit and run driver. What makes the action so impressive in Rosi's movie is that practically nothing is faked. A genuine matador plays the role of Miguelín, and everything he does in the bullring is real. A natural actor, the handsome Miguel Romero makes us believe that he's a brash kid willing to take chances to better himself. To get the attention of the promoters, Miguelín dashes into the middle of a bullfight and steals the spotlight to perform some deft passes. The crowd cheers, even when he's forcibly ejected. Miguelín quietly accepts a secondary position behind a pampered young candidate, and seizes his big opportunity when the favored son panics in the arena and refuses to fight. We see enough bullfighting to recognize sloppy performances, of which there are plenty, especially in local exhibitions. But it's immediately obvious that Miguelín has the Right Stuff: no matter how intimidating the bull, he never loses his graceful stance or sense of control. When the bull is exhausted, he'll drop his cape and stand unarmed before it, touching its head. One really needs to be able to 'read' the bull to do this, and even then the animals are unpredictable. It is just this kind of bravado that makes Miguelín a star.

Our hero's arc follows the standard pattern: one day he's just another unskilled kid on the street, and the next he's driving home in a convertible car with red leather upholstery, to have a phone installed in his mother's house so he can call the tiny old lady after every fight. Although he's suddenly the center of attention at parties, no great love enters Miguelín's life. He strikes up a conversation with a sweet girl at the harvest back home. Had he remained a farmer she might have been an attractive prospect. But because he's dressed in his city clothes and driving that car, she no longer seems a match. Substituting for Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth is star Linda Christian, in the brief role of an American playgirl who eyes Miguelín at a party and wastes no time seducing him. "You're not afraid of the bulls," she asks, "But are you afraid of me?"

The Moment of Truth's riveting scenes in the arena reach heights of realism unknown in Hollywood filmmaking, with its cheating cutaways and process shots. But we're also acutely aware of Miguelín's emptiness and lack of security. His handlers urge him to take on an accelerated schedule, so as to maximize his earnings while he's young and hot. Yet it is the same as when he was a street laborer -- he takes the risks while others collect the secure paycheck. Director Rosi doesn't harp on this problem, but it is never far from our thoughts.

Rosi's visual thesis doesn't end with his pointers to the exploitive nature of society. The film is bookended with footage of a religious procession, the kind in which huge golden floats honoring Jesus and the Virgin Mary are borne through the streets by dozens of worshippers. Just as the bullring is an unavoidable reminder of the masculine struggle for honor and dignity, the procession is a microcosm of traditional Catholic society. The gilded statues are carried by faceless laborers who toil like slaves; the procession includes mystical figures in black hoods and is flanked by marching soldiers in Franco-era steel helmets. The idea of changing any element of this society, including its cruel and barbaric bullfights, seems impossible.

Twenty years later, when director Rosi directed his movie of the opera Carmen, he was criticized for opening the film with bloody close-ups of a bullfight in progress. After seeing The Moment of Truth, we're convinced that no images could serve as a better introduction for a drama set in the Spanish culture.

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of The Moment of Truth is a bright and colorful widescreen transfer of this strikingly visual show. The Techniscope images are beautifully rendered in both the bullfighting episodes and the conventional dramatic scenes.

The movie was completed in the Italian language. We Americans reserve the right to dub any language we want into English yet object when filmmakers from other countries do the same thing. The displaced language sounds natural after just a few minutes.

The disc contains fewer extras than usual and is priced accordingly. Peter Matthews' essay makes a connection between Neapolitan Rosi's concern for Southern Italy, and the economically depressed South of Spain. Francesco Rosi appears in an extended, thoughtful interview to explain the circumstances of the production. Citing an acute discomfort with the violence seen through his viewfinder, Rosi's cameraman Gianni de Venzano left the film, and was replaced by Pasquale De Santis. Their work with telephoto lenses is masterful, especially considering how difficult it is to hold focus at such distances. With today's CGI, who would bother with real bulls and real danger? A hazardous undertaking like The Moment of Truth would probably be denied production insurance.

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

by Glenn Erickson

"Sony Pictures' Screen Classics By Request," an unwieldy label that doesn't actually appear on the packaging of this line of made-on-demand DVDs (a line also known as "The Columbia Pictures Classics Collection"), has proven so far to be a mixed bag. Matching the awkward label is, well, an awkward set of new titles every month that runs from outright bombs to films that could be called, at best, ordinary -- and certainly not worthy of the hefty price tag of around twenty dollars per disc. A recent slate of offerings, for example, included the stinkeroos Escape From San Quentin (1957), For Singles Only (1968) and Lovelines (1984).

However, sometimes mixed among such head-scratching titles are a few solid and desirable studio-era pictures, like Ladies in Retirement (1941) or 711 Ocean Drive (1950), or obscurities that are actually quite worthy of rediscovery, such as the recently issued The Missing Juror (1945) or Town on Trial (1957), the latter a British mystery and police procedural that seems to have come out of absolutely nowhere.

John Mills steals the show as a hard-bitten detective trying to solve the murder of the most beautiful young woman in Oakley Park, England (or as some villagers would call her: the town tramp). On the surface, the film simply follows Mills as he pokes around interviewing residents and examining crime scenes (there is more than one murder), narrowing the list of suspects down to a small handful. But the mystery of the killer's identity is the least interesting aspect of Town on Trial -- it's not a huge surprise when it's revealed, and the film overall is not particularly suspenseful until the climax.

Instead, what lifts the movie to something considerably more absorbing is the intelligent depiction of the town's residents and social dynamics. This prosperous little place ends up containing a host of tensions, secrets and interpersonal hostilities that belie its surface charm, and while the effect doesn't rise quite to the level of the best American melodramas and noirs of the 1950s, which delve beneath a surface of fake domestic tranquility to reveal deep societal unease, it does nonetheless serve as an engaging British variant of what was happening in '50s American filmmaking. One unspoken subtext is of course class, a subject that permeates seemingly every British film in one way or another. Issues of serious social etiquette and unwed pregnancy also come up, and there is even a touch of Rebel Without a Cause-like teen alienation and parent-teen anxieties.

Mills' relentlessly focused, no-nonsense detective (who seems like a British version of Glenn Ford) keeps these issues from overwhelming the movie and turning it into something too abstract and metaphorical. In the end, the balance is just fine, and the credit for this must go to director John Guillermin, who in later years would achieve fame for directing The Towering Inferno (1974) but also made notable films like Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959), The Blue Max (1966) and The Bridge at Remagen (1969) along the way. He is extremely effective here (in a much less action-oriented film) with his dramatic use of locations, from a town church and a lake to a tennis club and a gas station (the setting for one of the best little scenes in the story). And the equal number of interior sets are as detailed as the exteriors are vivid.

Guillermin establishes the unseen murderer's point of view early on, as a police report narrates the killer's moves (the film then is told as a flashback); this opening device allows Guillermin to stage all the murder scenes from the killer's POV -- a chilling effect that quite closely anticipates Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) three years later.

Finally, Town on Trial is enjoyable simply as a showcase for a great cast of British actors including Mills, Alec McCowen, Geoffrey Keene, Derek Farr and Harry Locke, and a couple of Americans, too, notably 80-year-old Charles Coburn as the town doctor and a chief suspect. This was one of Coburn's last features -- the three-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner would pass away just four years later.

To order Town on Trial, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold

Every decade brings major changes to the horror genre, and the mid-1970s featured more upheaval than usual around the world. A generation of audiences weaned on the monsters of Hammer and the shocks of Psycho had to contend with the presence of more explicit violence and sexuality in their cinematic diet, and one director confronted with the changing tide was Jean Rollin.

France's horror output has been more erratic and difficult to define than those of its continental neighbors like Italy or Spain, often veering more into the hazy territory of the fantastique with supernatural elements used to beguile and unsettle rather than outright terrify. Though many of Rollin's films were profitable, he was only a modest success outside of France and never a critical favorite; anyone working purely in the horror genre was considered disreputable, and on top of the commercial indifference to his more adventurous gothics like The Iron Rose, Rollin also had to deal with the French public's growing demand for explicit sex. The advent of porno chic in the wake of Deep Throat had unleashed a new market whose boundaries had yet to be defined, and by 1975, Rollin would make his last formal vampire film for over two decades, Lips of Blood (Lèvres de sang).

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Rollin had a thing for vampires - especially female ones. The combination of eternal life, predatory sexuality, and an odd naiveté that comes with never being able to grow old resulted in a string of fanged creatures in most of his early films, beginning with his riot-causing debut feature, 1968's The Rape of the Vampire. He made three subsequent films with the word "vampire" in the title, all featuring loose narratives involving human interlopers in remote castles and chateaux stumbling upon enclaves of the living dead. However, Lips of Blood finds him departing from the formula a bit; there's no "vampire" in the title this time, and the story takes place in a distinctly modern nocturnal Paris before transitioning back to his beloved crypts and beaches. The film also presents the first variation on a recurring theme of a childhood bond having ripple effects on the lives of his adult protagonists, which would later reach its most thorough execution in his 1982 masterpiece, The Living Dead Girl.

While attending a party with friends, a man named Frédéric (played by co-writer Jean-Loup Philippe) notices a poster depicting an ancient castle. The sight triggers a childhood memory at the same location where he met a mysterious woman (Annie Brilland, aka Annie Belle from House on the Edge of the Park) with whom he fell in love, promising to return someday. His family kept him from coming back, and as seen in the film's mysterious opening, his mother (Rollin regular Nathalie Perry) might have more than a little to do with this decades-long mystery. Our hero seeks out the photographer of the shot (Marine Grimaud), but when they meet at a late-night cinema screening, she turns up dead... and as he soon learns, beautiful vampires are wandering the streets and holding the key to his boyhood memory.

Both this film and the previous year's The Demoniacs found Rollin tightening his filmic narratives a bit, using themes like loss, revenge, unrequired love, and nostalgia to forge stories of destinies extending beyond the grave. Lips of Blood also offers several showcases for the surrealistic flourishes upon which Rollin founded his career, including the standout cinema sequence (at which attendees are watching a film his fans will find oddly familiar) and the poetic finale involving a sea-swept coffin. Also noteworthy is perhaps his most impressive array of vampiric femmes fatales in transparent gowns, including his blonde twin discoveries, Cathy and Marie-Pierre Castel, who had earlier graced The Nude Vampire in one of his most outrageous costume conceptions.

Unfortunately, Rollin's delicate balance of eroticism and gothic mystery proved to be a waning force at the box office in France. The film was never theatrically released in any English-speaking territories, and in Parisian theaters it died a quick death despite featuring one of Rollin's most striking poster designs. The following year saw the release of a film called Suce Moi Vampire, a hardcore composite of sequences from this film with new footage featuring some completely different actors as well as a few participants from the original. Strangely, Philippe returned to film an additional softcore scene for the version, but a body double was also used to place him in some unsimulated scenarios as well. This approach was also repeated for his starring role in another 1975 film, Claude Mulot's Le sexe qui parle, which soon became one of France's most successful sex films, Pussy Talk, whose co-star, Sylvia Bourdon, appears in Souce Moi Vampire was well.

Despite tantalizing descriptions in such tomes as Phil Hardy's horror edition of The Overlook Film Encyclopedia, Lips of Blood remained out of reach for most horror fans until well into the 1990s. A deal with Video Search of Miami resulted in an English-subtitled VHS edition, albeit taken from a very smudgy SECAM source that did little to convey the look of the original film. A superior DVD edition followed soon after from Redemption under a distribution deal with Image Entertainment; the non-anamorphic 1.66:1 presentation was a major step up at the time, and coupled with optional English subtitles, it marked the beginning of the film's critical reassessment. The Dutch label Encore subsequently released a limited triple-DVD edition contained a misframed 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, but it featured by far the largest bounty of extras to date including a Rollin video intro, Philippe and Perrey video interviews along with Cathy Castel and Serge Rollin, a video location tour, and the Rollin short "Les amour jaunes." Some of these were carried over to the film's U.S. reissue from Redemption under its solo banner along with the same transfer.

All of this finally brings us to Kino's Blu-Ray edition, again with the Redemption brand. The transfer is easily the best of them all and is the only one both accurately framed at 1.66:1 and anamorphic. Though the film will never look as crisp and vibrant as many of its American peers, the presentation here is quite impressive with rich colors and a beautiful filmic texture. Like the Encore release, the opening sequence plays out textless as opposed to the opening titles which are present on the initial American release. The extras here are definitely slimmed down in comparison, but you do get a quick Rollin video intro, a 9-minute Perrey interview, trailers for this film and the four additional Rollins debuting with it on Blu-Ray (Shiver of the Vampires, The Iron Rose, Fascination, and The Nude Vampire), and an insightful booklet of liner notes for the same quintet of titles by Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas.

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

by Nathaniel Thompson

A quintessential L.A. punk rock band that scorched through the Hollywood scene, they put their brand on the musical landscape with one letter: X . Founded in 1977 by vocalist/bassist John Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom, they were soon joined by Doe's then girlfriend Exene Cervenka, whose poetry and vocals sparked a chemical fire. Drummer DJ Bonebrake sealed the wax on the envelope. Ex-Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek helped deliver the whole package to a wider audience when he produced their debut album titled Los Angeles, in 1980 (Manzarek also produced the next two albums, Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun ). Around this time director W.T. Morgan gets involved and then spends five years working on a film, which is not just about the band, but also about an era. It is released in 1986 as X: The Unheard Music, an innovative documentary that would eventually get archived by Sundance into their UCLA collection. It also, recently, finally got the Blu-Ray treatment (the film had long been plagued by legal problems that had otherwise kept it from being easily seen). Several recent screenings of the film preceded live shows with the original lineup of X as they played at various stops in the U.S.

After the title sequence for the film we see a woman in a car, listening to a handheld radio, and reading The Power of Positive Thinking . She is narrating her own letter to the band, during which we cut to live scenes onstage of X as a clapboard is positioned in front of Cervenka's face. Scene: L.A. Take: 2. Sound: Sync. Angel City Prods. 7247 "Unheard Music" Dir: Morgan May 4 '81. Gentle guitar chords build up to something noisier as the musicians take their place. We cut back to the narrator as she leaves her parked car and walks off toward the L.A. cityscape in the background, and then we see X ripping into their song Los Angeles . As the song plays, we see footage of the band intercut with homeless gamblers, helicopters, flashing neon signs advertising "Bail Bonds," a shoeless drunk passed out in front of a Savings and Loan Hollywood branch, a Los Angeles Police Dept. van, and a blur of other images evoking the messy humanity of its time.

Not much has changed with that messy bit of humanity. The same scenes are with us now, if not more so. Unsurprising for any documentary shot during the early '80's, Reagan is referenced several times during the visual collages. To some of that time it was obvious that an auspicious new form of televised class warfare was being elevated to new levels that simultaneously glorified trickle-down-economics while demonizing a mythological welfare queen. Here we are now, almost 30 years later, and the complaints leveled against Reagan that the rich were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer are quaint by comparison.Thank God for music. It's what's left for the rest of us.

Guitarist Billy Zoom's life changed in '77 when he saw The Ramones at the Golden West Ballroom in an L.A. suburb. Soon thereafter he met John Doe via a want-ad in a local music rag. Doe, originally from Baltimore, but familiar with the CBGB's scene, connected with Zoom, and from there the ripple effects spread further.

B&W footage of a nuclear test bomb footage. Our protagonist returns, still in the car as she flips through her handheld radio. A collage of ads illustrate "Western Civilization at its most hideous." Cut to: Wolves. Then: more shots of L.A., and again the band. Interviews. A bit of history. This if followed by some home footage. We hear Exene's voice as she talks about meeting John at a poetry workshop in Venice. There's a scooter. Color. Could this bohemian vibe be an extension of the Beats? Close enough. The home movie footage continues and we suddenly see Zoom talking about how his dad was into jazz. Next up: drummer , whose roots go into both big band music and Captain Beefheart. Cut to: a live performance of X playing their song "Year One."

The band reminisces about playing at The Masque, alongside many others - The Plugz, the Germs, the Go-Gos, etc. Graffiti-covered walls give way to the song "We're Desperate," played over a quick montage of mostly black-and-white photos to chronicle the club's glory years, punctuated by strong colors, destitution, unexpected skulls, scenes from the mosh pit, 'zine covers, leather boots, and all of this hits your retina at a Bonebrake pace. We're only three songs in, with 13 more to go. It's not a chore. It's a thrill.

Coming up: <"Because I Do", "Beyond & Back", "Come Back to Me", "Soul Kitchen", "White Girl", "The Once Over Twice", "Motel Room in My Bed", "The Unheard Music", "Real Child of Hell", "Johny Hit & Run Paulene", "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts", "The World's a Mess"; "It's in my Kiss," and..."The Have Nots."

By now it should be clear that X: The Unheard Music will not be a straight-up doc with trained cameras only paying attention to either musicians or their audience. Morgan's film aims for something bigger. By mixing in photographs, found footage, news-clips, and much more, he is aiming for a cinematic form of cubism that captures more than the musicians themselves. He wants the time in which they lived, their scene, and their place within a fuller context as covered from as many angles as possible. X was more than a spot marked out in Los Angeles. It helped map a generation.

The "Xtras" on X: The Unheard Music include: "John & Exene Dialogue," "Interview with Angel City," "Some Other Time (Live Outtake)," "Original Theatrical Trailer," and "The Unheard Music Songbook."

To order X The Unheard Music, go to TCM Shopping.

by Pablo Kjolseth

Milestone Film has outdone themselves with their new Blu-ray of On the Bowery, a pioneering, wholly original independent docu-drama that earned an Oscar® nomination for Best Documentary of 1957. The picture has been claimed as a major inspiration by the greats of the American independent film, from documentarian Emile de Antonio to actor-turned director John Cassavetes. Milestone's 2-Blu-ray set is officially titled The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Volume 1, and contains other contents just as impressive.

In the 1950s many New York- based filmmakers talked about finding a more truthful path to cinematic virtuosity, but it was Rogosin who showed everyone the way. His On the Bowery takes us to a place where nobody wants to end up: skid row. Five minutes into the movie we're convinced that everything we see must be absolutely real, unrehearsed and unscripted. A few minutes later we realize that director Rogosin has somehow drawn performances from un-directable subjects, in a place where a camera crew would not possibly be tolerated -- the awful streets and miserable bars of The Bowery. This is one story about alcoholism not told in the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition.

Today we have "homeless people", who were perhaps always with us but rendered invisible by the media. On the Bowery deals with the pathetic denizens of a couple of really vile city blocks in lower Manhattan. Chronic, advanced alcoholics mill about on the sidewalks. They live in filthy clothes and survive from drink to drink, scrounging the money as they go along. Some of them apparently receive money from the outside, but we see others making "squeeze" from poisonous Sterno cooking fuel. If they have thirty cents they can sleep in a flophouse, and if they don't they collapse on the sidewalk. Many of these guys just get so wiped out that they fall down as soon as they exit the bars.

There is a story of sorts. A fairly young fellow (30? 35?) named Ray (Ray Salyer) arrives with a suitcase and some cash from a railroad job. He's soon chiseled and fleeced by Gorman (Gorman Hendricks), an elderly, sharp operator who befriends Ray, secretly steals his possessions and then arranges to play the hero by giving some of the cash back to him, as a gift. Ray finds a day's work unloading a truck, and almost joins a church mission that promises a clean room and food for a few weeks for those willing to cut out the booze. Ray instead goes on an even worse bender, and narrowly avoids being picked up in a police sweep.

What makes On the Bowery so special? First, the excellent cinematography is on a quality level with high-grade ethnographic still photography. There is no grainy footage and none of the catch-as-catch-can handheld work that became the standard five years later, with the advent of sync-sound 16mm cameras. Secondly, we can scarcely believe that Rogosin or anybody could get such candid, authentic, performances from these men. Some of the action on the streets may have been captured from hidden trucks but the scenes in the bars are phenomenal. Almost everyone we see is seriously inebriated. Many appear to have 'diminished capacities' and some may have been feeble-minded before they pickled themselves. Led by his two main characters, Rogosin has these rummies participating in absolutely convincing conversations, leaning on each other for handouts and drinking, always drinking. It's like a peek into a world you couldn't see unless you were a participant, which gives a clue as to director Rogosin's technique.

Many critics have commented on the film's parade of faces, which are both fascinating and frightening. We are confronted with scores of brutalized faces in every minute of film. Some have clearly been beaten bloody. Plenty sport untreated injuries, perhaps suffered when under the influence. They're all so close up and authentically human. Each must have a story yet we wonder how many can carry on a real conversation. The denizens of the Bowery seem like strange inhabitants of an existential asylum, living in plain sight but ignored (or mythologized) by society.

On the Bowery is one of the few non-narrative films that generates the same interest as a good drama. Gorman claims that he's broke but retreats every night to a semi-permanent "flop" he can call his own; he uses his congenial manner to steal but is human enough to still want to be liked. His good story about once being a doctor is so good, we almost believe it. In contrast Ray seems a sensible guy but is definitely addicted to the bottle. It's as if he just doesn't see any point to life beyond his next drink.

Milestone has previously given us an entry into masterpieces by great independent filmmakers: Kent McKenzie (The Exiles ) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep). These documentarians are all drawn to reveal aspects of the urban underclass in America. Rogosin's reputation is very much alive and the evidence presented in the The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Volume 1 can only enhance it. The first Blu-ray disc contains On The Bowery, which can be watched with an introduction by Martin Scorsese. The Perfect Team, a making-of docu by Rogosin's son Michael, answers many of the questions left open by the film itself. After experiencing WW2 Lionel Rogosin determined to use a camera to change society. He wanted to film in the Bowery but found that the only way he could was to spend months with the locals until he gained their friendship and trust. He and his cameraman were hard drinkers as well, and his two main actors were recruited from the street. Gorman Hendricks was on his last legs. He stayed sober (and alive) just long enough to finish the film. Rogosin believed that Kentucky man Ray Salyer had a future as an actor and claims that Ray had offers from Hollywood. We see Salyer appear on TV, cleaned up and in a suit, asserting that he likes to drink the way some men like to fish or play golf. His eventual response to the attention was to hop a freight train out of town, and disappear forever.

The first disc also contains a newer piece by Michael Rogosin called A Walk Through the Bowery, a 1972 docu (Bowery Men's Shelter), a 1933 newsreel (Street of Forgotten Men) and an On The Bowery trailer.

Disc two turns contains films just as powerful. With the experience of On the Bowery under his belt Rogosin turned toward the bigger themes of war and inhumanity that were his original motivation. 1964's Good Times, Wonderful Times belies its title to make a direct assault on complacent attitudes toward war -- its causes, its effects, its importance. Rogosin invents a docu scripting strategy that was soon abused by others: ironic contrast. His framing device is an English cocktail party. We hear a non-stop litany of trivial talk and small-minded observations. The central speakers are a gaggle of male admirers that congregate around a couple of "outgoing" young women that tease them with mild provocative talk. Some of the men are ex-soldiers. These party scenes are very convincing. Various pointed statements come out -- that war builds character, that war is a natural thing, that it controls the world population like floods or disease. Quite regularly Rogosin cuts to film footage culled from film archives around the world: England, Japan, the Soviet Union.

The footage is in mostly excellent condition, and when it isn't we're very aware that we're seeing 'rescued film' that somebody didn't want shown. Much of it is wholly unfamiliar, unseen in any war docus I've yet encountered. Rogosin starts with some disturbing scenes of Hiroshima bomb victims, including graphic shots clearly edited from of other docus. A cocktail party discussion about "who permits wars to take place?" is followed by segments devoted to the utter worship granted Adolf Hitler by the German citizenry. Admiring throngs throw flowers in his path; men are inspired and women enraptured, as if in the presence of a god. The atrocity footage that follows includes Russian footage of children murdered by German troops and some very disturbing, unfamiliar concentration camp footage. Film rescued from deterioration records a Ghetto packed with starving, horrifyingly emaciated people. Little kids caught gathering food on the outside are forced to dump it on the ground before re-entering the barbed wire. Other sequences advance the horror into the 1960s, including some Civil Rights violence and Ban The Bomb rallies. The news film ends on the then brand-new voice of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech -- before it became a default item in every socially conscious documentary. Good Times, Wonderful Times was widely shown when new and reportedly influenced students who would soon be protesting the Vietnam War, or resisting the draft. In 1964, our access to news of ongoing strife in Africa, Asia and South America was very limited, and the raw truth of Rogosin's film would certainly have served as a wake-up call.

Backing up GTWT is Rogosin's making of docu, Man's Peril which goes into the technical and philosophical reasoning behind his approach. Humanitarian Bertrand Russell was involved in the filmmaking process as well. Also included is another war-related Rogosin film, Out, which is about refugees from Hungary that fled into Austria in the wake of the revolution of 1956.

Both main features are in excellent shape, with On the Bowery exceptionally sharp and detailed in HD Blu-ray. Seen in close-up, some of those battered faces look like maps of the scarred and cratered moon. The B&W image quality on this disc is unsurpassed.

Lionel Rogosin's films may not attempt the intellectual complexity of later docus by people like Emile de Antonio, Chris Marker, Patricio Guzmán or Alain Resnais, but he succeeds beautifully in connecting with his audience. On the Bowery will make you feel differently about terminal alcoholics. Good Times, Wonderful Times will greatly lower your tolerance for the excuses of pampered materialists, who claim to be apolitical but in reality couldn't care less about the world beyond their personal comfort zones.

For more information about On the Bowery, visit Milestone Film.

by Glenn Erickson

Bullfighting has long been exploited for exotic film stories of romance and betrayal, as in the two American versions of Blood and Sand. With its attendant pomp and circumstance, costumes and rituals, the ornate Spanish tradition lends itself well to stylized melodrama. The prospect of death in the arena instantly points up questions of courage and ambition. American director Budd Boetticher discovered a fascination for bullfighting that became a lifelong passion. His Bullfighter and the Lady with Robert Stack is one of the best unheralded films of the 1950s. When his frequent star Randolph Scott retired, Boetticher spent the better part of a decade filming a documentary about a Mexican matador, Carlos Arruza.

In 1965 the Italian director Francesco Rosi went to Spain to film The Moment of Truth (Il momento della verità), his own study of bullfighting. A prominent "committed" leftist director, Rosi was best known for a crime movies that exposed deep corruption in entrenched Italian institutions: La Sfida, Salvatore Giuliano, Hands over the City. Peter Matthews tells us that Italian reviewers reprimanded Rosi for taking his talent on a tourist trip to Spain, away from the politics of Southern Italy and Sicily that he knew so well.

But Rosi's bullfighting movie is infused with the observances of a keen social critic. The film's semi-documentary style emphasizes the economic imperatives that lead the poor farmer's son Miguelín (Miguel Romero) to the bullring. Young Miguel leaves the farm for the city, and finds that the only way to secure even the most menial day labor is to hand over a portion of his wages to an intermediary. Fed up with sleeping in a communal dormitory, he attaches himself to the aged bullfighting teacher "Pedrucho" (Pedro Basauri) and begs and wheedles his way into the arena. Miguelín has the skill, determination and sheer nerve to succeed, and quickly rises to success. But his manager's fees eat up his earnings, while he pays the overhead for a full entourage. After the thrill of luxury and notoriety wears off, Miguelín begins to question why he's putting himself in such jeopardy, again and again. We remember the words of Miguelín's worn-out father: "Stay home. There's nothing better than bread and wine in your own house."

Viewers that wonder what really happens in bullfights when the Hollywood cameras cut away will likely be deeply impressed by the bloody carnage in Rosi's The Moment of Truth. Armed with widescreen Techniscope cameras that capture every detail in full-frame color, the film delivers close-up sensations that even spectators do not see. The bull is flayed and stabbed again and again, and is finally dispatched with a curved sword that pierces its heart and/or lungs. Before these incomparably strong animals collapse, gallons of blood seem to go every which way. In some fights the sleeves of Miguelín's beautiful chaquetilla are soaked in blood.

Seeing The Moment of Truth makes us wonder how many Spaniards were maimed by these violent encounters. Miguelín participates in a 'running of the bulls' ritual designed to offer young men the opportunity to prove their manliness: in one breathtaking shot a charging bull plows through a crowd, throwing boys and men left and right like a hit and run driver. What makes the action so impressive in Rosi's movie is that practically nothing is faked. A genuine matador plays the role of Miguelín, and everything he does in the bullring is real. A natural actor, the handsome Miguel Romero makes us believe that he's a brash kid willing to take chances to better himself. To get the attention of the promoters, Miguelín dashes into the middle of a bullfight and steals the spotlight to perform some deft passes. The crowd cheers, even when he's forcibly ejected. Miguelín quietly accepts a secondary position behind a pampered young candidate, and seizes his big opportunity when the favored son panics in the arena and refuses to fight. We see enough bullfighting to recognize sloppy performances, of which there are plenty, especially in local exhibitions. But it's immediately obvious that Miguelín has the Right Stuff: no matter how intimidating the bull, he never loses his graceful stance or sense of control. When the bull is exhausted, he'll drop his cape and stand unarmed before it, touching its head. One really needs to be able to 'read' the bull to do this, and even then the animals are unpredictable. It is just this kind of bravado that makes Miguelín a star.

Our hero's arc follows the standard pattern: one day he's just another unskilled kid on the street, and the next he's driving home in a convertible car with red leather upholstery, to have a phone installed in his mother's house so he can call the tiny old lady after every fight. Although he's suddenly the center of attention at parties, no great love enters Miguelín's life. He strikes up a conversation with a sweet girl at the harvest back home. Had he remained a farmer she might have been an attractive prospect. But because he's dressed in his city clothes and driving that car, she no longer seems a match. Substituting for Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth is star Linda Christian, in the brief role of an American playgirl who eyes Miguelín at a party and wastes no time seducing him. "You're not afraid of the bulls," she asks, "But are you afraid of me?"

The Moment of Truth's riveting scenes in the arena reach heights of realism unknown in Hollywood filmmaking, with its cheating cutaways and process shots. But we're also acutely aware of Miguelín's emptiness and lack of security. His handlers urge him to take on an accelerated schedule, so as to maximize his earnings while he's young and hot. Yet it is the same as when he was a street laborer -- he takes the risks while others collect the secure paycheck. Director Rosi doesn't harp on this problem, but it is never far from our thoughts.

Rosi's visual thesis doesn't end with his pointers to the exploitive nature of society. The film is bookended with footage of a religious procession, the kind in which huge golden floats honoring Jesus and the Virgin Mary are borne through the streets by dozens of worshippers. Just as the bullring is an unavoidable reminder of the masculine struggle for honor and dignity, the procession is a microcosm of traditional Catholic society. The gilded statues are carried by faceless laborers who toil like slaves; the procession includes mystical figures in black hoods and is flanked by marching soldiers in Franco-era steel helmets. The idea of changing any element of this society, including its cruel and barbaric bullfights, seems impossible.

Twenty years later, when director Rosi directed his movie of the opera Carmen, he was criticized for opening the film with bloody close-ups of a bullfight in progress. After seeing The Moment of Truth, we're convinced that no images could serve as a better introduction for a drama set in the Spanish culture.

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of The Moment of Truth is a bright and colorful widescreen transfer of this strikingly visual show. The Techniscope images are beautifully rendered in both the bullfighting episodes and the conventional dramatic scenes.

The movie was completed in the Italian language. We Americans reserve the right to dub any language we want into English yet object when filmmakers from other countries do the same thing. The displaced language sounds natural after just a few minutes.

The disc contains fewer extras than usual and is priced accordingly. Peter Matthews' essay makes a connection between Neapolitan Rosi's concern for Southern Italy, and the economically depressed South of Spain. Francesco Rosi appears in an extended, thoughtful interview to explain the circumstances of the production. Citing an acute discomfort with the violence seen through his viewfinder, Rosi's cameraman Gianni de Venzano left the film, and was replaced by Pasquale De Santis. Their work with telephoto lenses is masterful, especially considering how difficult it is to hold focus at such distances. With today's CGI, who would bother with real bulls and real danger? A hazardous undertaking like The Moment of Truth would probably be denied production insurance.

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

by Glenn Erickson

"Sony Pictures' Screen Classics By Request," an unwieldy label that doesn't actually appear on the packaging of this line of made-on-demand DVDs (a line also known as "The Columbia Pictures Classics Collection"), has proven so far to be a mixed bag. Matching the awkward label is, well, an awkward set of new titles every month that runs from outright bombs to films that could be called, at best, ordinary -- and certainly not worthy of the hefty price tag of around twenty dollars per disc. A recent slate of offerings, for example, included the stinkeroos Escape From San Quentin (1957), For Singles Only (1968) and Lovelines (1984).

However, sometimes mixed among such head-scratching titles are a few solid and desirable studio-era pictures, like Ladies in Retirement (1941) or 711 Ocean Drive (1950), or obscurities that are actually quite worthy of rediscovery, such as the recently issued The Missing Juror (1945) or Town on Trial (1957), the latter a British mystery and police procedural that seems to have come out of absolutely nowhere.

John Mills steals the show as a hard-bitten detective trying to solve the murder of the most beautiful young woman in Oakley Park, England (or as some villagers would call her: the town tramp). On the surface, the film simply follows Mills as he pokes around interviewing residents and examining crime scenes (there is more than one murder), narrowing the list of suspects down to a small handful. But the mystery of the killer's identity is the least interesting aspect of Town on Trial -- it's not a huge surprise when it's revealed, and the film overall is not particularly suspenseful until the climax.

Instead, what lifts the movie to something considerably more absorbing is the intelligent depiction of the town's residents and social dynamics. This prosperous little place ends up containing a host of tensions, secrets and interpersonal hostilities that belie its surface charm, and while the effect doesn't rise quite to the level of the best American melodramas and noirs of the 1950s, which delve beneath a surface of fake domestic tranquility to reveal deep societal unease, it does nonetheless serve as an engaging British variant of what was happening in '50s American filmmaking. One unspoken subtext is of course class, a subject that permeates seemingly every British film in one way or another. Issues of serious social etiquette and unwed pregnancy also come up, and there is even a touch of Rebel Without a Cause-like teen alienation and parent-teen anxieties.

Mills' relentlessly focused, no-nonsense detective (who seems like a British version of Glenn Ford) keeps these issues from overwhelming the movie and turning it into something too abstract and metaphorical. In the end, the balance is just fine, and the credit for this must go to director John Guillermin, who in later years would achieve fame for directing The Towering Inferno (1974) but also made notable films like Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959), The Blue Max (1966) and The Bridge at Remagen (1969) along the way. He is extremely effective here (in a much less action-oriented film) with his dramatic use of locations, from a town church and a lake to a tennis club and a gas station (the setting for one of the best little scenes in the story). And the equal number of interior sets are as detailed as the exteriors are vivid.

Guillermin establishes the unseen murderer's point of view early on, as a police report narrates the killer's moves (the film then is told as a flashback); this opening device allows Guillermin to stage all the murder scenes from the killer's POV -- a chilling effect that quite closely anticipates Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) three years later.

Finally, Town on Trial is enjoyable simply as a showcase for a great cast of British actors including Mills, Alec McCowen, Geoffrey Keene, Derek Farr and Harry Locke, and a couple of Americans, too, notably 80-year-old Charles Coburn as the town doctor and a chief suspect. This was one of Coburn's last features -- the three-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner would pass away just four years later.

To order Town on Trial, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold

Every decade brings major changes to the horror genre, and the mid-1970s featured more upheaval than usual around the world. A generation of audiences weaned on the monsters of Hammer and the shocks of Psycho had to contend with the presence of more explicit violence and sexuality in their cinematic diet, and one director confronted with the changing tide was Jean Rollin.

France's horror output has been more erratic and difficult to define than those of its continental neighbors like Italy or Spain, often veering more into the hazy territory of the fantastique with supernatural elements used to beguile and unsettle rather than outright terrify. Though many of Rollin's films were profitable, he was only a modest success outside of France and never a critical favorite; anyone working purely in the horror genre was considered disreputable, and on top of the commercial indifference to his more adventurous gothics like The Iron Rose, Rollin also had to deal with the French public's growing demand for explicit sex. The advent of porno chic in the wake of Deep Throat had unleashed a new market whose boundaries had yet to be defined, and by 1975, Rollin would make his last formal vampire film for over two decades, Lips of Blood (Lèvres de sang).

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Rollin had a thing for vampires - especially female ones. The combination of eternal life, predatory sexuality, and an odd naiveté that comes with never being able to grow old resulted in a string of fanged creatures in most of his early films, beginning with his riot-causing debut feature, 1968's The Rape of the Vampire. He made three subsequent films with the word "vampire" in the title, all featuring loose narratives involving human interlopers in remote castles and chateaux stumbling upon enclaves of the living dead. However, Lips of Blood finds him departing from the formula a bit; there's no "vampire" in the title this time, and the story takes place in a distinctly modern nocturnal Paris before transitioning back to his beloved crypts and beaches. The film also presents the first variation on a recurring theme of a childhood bond having ripple effects on the lives of his adult protagonists, which would later reach its most thorough execution in his 1982 masterpiece, The Living Dead Girl.

While attending a party with friends, a man named Frédéric (played by co-writer Jean-Loup Philippe) notices a poster depicting an ancient castle. The sight triggers a childhood memory at the same location where he met a mysterious woman (Annie Brilland, aka Annie Belle from House on the Edge of the Park) with whom he fell in love, promising to return someday. His family kept him from coming back, and as seen in the film's mysterious opening, his mother (Rollin regular Nathalie Perry) might have more than a little to do with this decades-long mystery. Our hero seeks out the photographer of the shot (Marine Grimaud), but when they meet at a late-night cinema screening, she turns up dead... and as he soon learns, beautiful vampires are wandering the streets and holding the key to his boyhood memory.

Both this film and the previous year's The Demoniacs found Rollin tightening his filmic narratives a bit, using themes like loss, revenge, unrequired love, and nostalgia to forge stories of destinies extending beyond the grave. Lips of Blood also offers several showcases for the surrealistic flourishes upon which Rollin founded his career, including the standout cinema sequence (at which attendees are watching a film his fans will find oddly familiar) and the poetic finale involving a sea-swept coffin. Also noteworthy is perhaps his most impressive array of vampiric femmes fatales in transparent gowns, including his blonde twin discoveries, Cathy and Marie-Pierre Castel, who had earlier graced The Nude Vampire in one of his most outrageous costume conceptions.

Unfortunately, Rollin's delicate balance of eroticism and gothic mystery proved to be a waning force at the box office in France. The film was never theatrically released in any English-speaking territories, and in Parisian theaters it died a quick death despite featuring one of Rollin's most striking poster designs. The following year saw the release of a film called Suce Moi Vampire, a hardcore composite of sequences from this film with new footage featuring some completely different actors as well as a few participants from the original. Strangely, Philippe returned to film an additional softcore scene for the version, but a body double was also used to place him in some unsimulated scenarios as well. This approach was also repeated for his starring role in another 1975 film, Claude Mulot's Le sexe qui parle, which soon became one of France's most successful sex films, Pussy Talk, whose co-star, Sylvia Bourdon, appears in Souce Moi Vampire was well.

Despite tantalizing descriptions in such tomes as Phil Hardy's horror edition of The Overlook Film Encyclopedia, Lips of Blood remained out of reach for most horror fans until well into the 1990s. A deal with Video Search of Miami resulted in an English-subtitled VHS edition, albeit taken from a very smudgy SECAM source that did little to convey the look of the original film. A superior DVD edition followed soon after from Redemption under a distribution deal with Image Entertainment; the non-anamorphic 1.66:1 presentation was a major step up at the time, and coupled with optional English subtitles, it marked the beginning of the film's critical reassessment. The Dutch label Encore subsequently released a limited triple-DVD edition contained a misframed 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, but it featured by far the largest bounty of extras to date including a Rollin video intro, Philippe and Perrey video interviews along with Cathy Castel and Serge Rollin, a video location tour, and the Rollin short "Les amour jaunes." Some of these were carried over to the film's U.S. reissue from Redemption under its solo banner along with the same transfer.

All of this finally brings us to Kino's Blu-Ray edition, again with the Redemption brand. The transfer is easily the best of them all and is the only one both accurately framed at 1.66:1 and anamorphic. Though the film will never look as crisp and vibrant as many of its American peers, the presentation here is quite impressive with rich colors and a beautiful filmic texture. Like the Encore release, the opening sequence plays out textless as opposed to the opening titles which are present on the initial American release. The extras here are definitely slimmed down in comparison, but you do get a quick Rollin video intro, a 9-minute Perrey interview, trailers for this film and the four additional Rollins debuting with it on Blu-Ray (Shiver of the Vampires, The Iron Rose, Fascination, and The Nude Vampire), and an insightful booklet of liner notes for the same quintet of titles by Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas.

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

by Nathaniel Thompson

A quintessential L.A. punk rock band that scorched through the Hollywood scene, they put their brand on the musical landscape with one letter: X . Founded in 1977 by vocalist/bassist John Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom, they were soon joined by Doe's then girlfriend Exene Cervenka, whose poetry and vocals sparked a chemical fire. Drummer DJ Bonebrake sealed the wax on the envelope. Ex-Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek helped deliver the whole package to a wider audience when he produced their debut album titled Los Angeles, in 1980 (Manzarek also produced the next two albums, Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun ). Around this time director W.T. Morgan gets involved and then spends five years working on a film, which is not just about the band, but also about an era. It is released in 1986 as X: The Unheard Music, an innovative documentary that would eventually get archived by Sundance into their UCLA collection. It also, recently, finally got the Blu-Ray treatment (the film had long been plagued by legal problems that had otherwise kept it from being easily seen). Several recent screenings of the film preceded live shows with the original lineup of X as they played at various stops in the U.S.

After the title sequence for the film we see a woman in a car, listening to a handheld radio, and reading The Power of Positive Thinking . She is narrating her own letter to the band, during which we cut to live scenes onstage of X as a clapboard is positioned in front of Cervenka's face. Scene: L.A. Take: 2. Sound: Sync. Angel City Prods. 7247 "Unheard Music" Dir: Morgan May 4 '81. Gentle guitar chords build up to something noisier as the musicians take their place. We cut back to the narrator as she leaves her parked car and walks off toward the L.A. cityscape in the background, and then we see X ripping into their song Los Angeles . As the song plays, we see footage of the band intercut with homeless gamblers, helicopters, flashing neon signs advertising "Bail Bonds," a shoeless drunk passed out in front of a Savings and Loan Hollywood branch, a Los Angeles Police Dept. van, and a blur of other images evoking the messy humanity of its time.

Not much has changed with that messy bit of humanity. The same scenes are with us now, if not more so. Unsurprising for any documentary shot during the early '80's, Reagan is referenced several times during the visual collages. To some of that time it was obvious that an auspicious new form of televised class warfare was being elevated to new levels that simultaneously glorified trickle-down-economics while demonizing a mythological welfare queen. Here we are now, almost 30 years later, and the complaints leveled against Reagan that the rich were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer are quaint by comparison.Thank God for music. It's what's left for the rest of us.

Guitarist Billy Zoom's life changed in '77 when he saw The Ramones at the Golden West Ballroom in an L.A. suburb. Soon thereafter he met John Doe via a want-ad in a local music rag. Doe, originally from Baltimore, but familiar with the CBGB's scene, connected with Zoom, and from there the ripple effects spread further.

B&W footage of a nuclear test bomb footage. Our protagonist returns, still in the car as she flips through her handheld radio. A collage of ads illustrate "Western Civilization at its most hideous." Cut to: Wolves. Then: more shots of L.A., and again the band. Interviews. A bit of history. This if followed by some home footage. We hear Exene's voice as she talks about meeting John at a poetry workshop in Venice. There's a scooter. Color. Could this bohemian vibe be an extension of the Beats? Close enough. The home movie footage continues and we suddenly see Zoom talking about how his dad was into jazz. Next up: drummer , whose roots go into both big band music and Captain Beefheart. Cut to: a live performance of X playing their song "Year One."

The band reminisces about playing at The Masque, alongside many others - The Plugz, the Germs, the Go-Gos, etc. Graffiti-covered walls give way to the song "We're Desperate," played over a quick montage of mostly black-and-white photos to chronicle the club's glory years, punctuated by strong colors, destitution, unexpected skulls, scenes from the mosh pit, 'zine covers, leather boots, and all of this hits your retina at a Bonebrake pace. We're only three songs in, with 13 more to go. It's not a chore. It's a thrill.

Coming up: <"Because I Do", "Beyond & Back", "Come Back to Me", "Soul Kitchen", "White Girl", "The Once Over Twice", "Motel Room in My Bed", "The Unheard Music", "Real Child of Hell", "Johny Hit & Run Paulene", "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts", "The World's a Mess"; "It's in my Kiss," and..."The Have Nots."

By now it should be clear that X: The Unheard Music will not be a straight-up doc with trained cameras only paying attention to either musicians or their audience. Morgan's film aims for something bigger. By mixing in photographs, found footage, news-clips, and much more, he is aiming for a cinematic form of cubism that captures more than the musicians themselves. He wants the time in which they lived, their scene, and their place within a fuller context as covered from as many angles as possible. X was more than a spot marked out in Los Angeles. It helped map a generation.

The "Xtras" on X: The Unheard Music include: "John & Exene Dialogue," "Interview with Angel City," "Some Other Time (Live Outtake)," "Original Theatrical Trailer," and "The Unheard Music Songbook."

To order X The Unheard Music, go to TCM Shopping.

by Pablo Kjolseth

Milestone Film has outdone themselves with their new Blu-ray of On the Bowery, a pioneering, wholly original independent docu-drama that earned an Oscar® nomination for Best Documentary of 1957. The picture has been claimed as a major inspiration by the greats of the American independent film, from documentarian Emile de Antonio to actor-turned director John Cassavetes. Milestone's 2-Blu-ray set is officially titled The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Volume 1, and contains other contents just as impressive.

In the 1950s many New York- based filmmakers talked about finding a more truthful path to cinematic virtuosity, but it was Rogosin who showed everyone the way. His On the Bowery takes us to a place where nobody wants to end up: skid row. Five minutes into the movie we're convinced that everything we see must be absolutely real, unrehearsed and unscripted. A few minutes later we realize that director Rogosin has somehow drawn performances from un-directable subjects, in a place where a camera crew would not possibly be tolerated -- the awful streets and miserable bars of The Bowery. This is one story about alcoholism not told in the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition.

Today we have "homeless people", who were perhaps always with us but rendered invisible by the media. On the Bowery deals with the pathetic denizens of a couple of really vile city blocks in lower Manhattan. Chronic, advanced alcoholics mill about on the sidewalks. They live in filthy clothes and survive from drink to drink, scrounging the money as they go along. Some of them apparently receive money from the outside, but we see others making "squeeze" from poisonous Sterno cooking fuel. If they have thirty cents they can sleep in a flophouse, and if they don't they collapse on the sidewalk. Many of these guys just get so wiped out that they fall down as soon as they exit the bars.

There is a story of sorts. A fairly young fellow (30? 35?) named Ray (Ray Salyer) arrives with a suitcase and some cash from a railroad job. He's soon chiseled and fleeced by Gorman (Gorman Hendricks), an elderly, sharp operator who befriends Ray, secretly steals his possessions and then arranges to play the hero by giving some of the cash back to him, as a gift. Ray finds a day's work unloading a truck, and almost joins a church mission that promises a clean room and food for a few weeks for those willing to cut out the booze. Ray instead goes on an even worse bender, and narrowly avoids being picked up in a police sweep.

What makes On the Bowery so special? First, the excellent cinematography is on a quality level with high-grade ethnographic still photography. There is no grainy footage and none of the catch-as-catch-can handheld work that became the standard five years later, with the advent of sync-sound 16mm cameras. Secondly, we can scarcely believe that Rogosin or anybody could get such candid, authentic, performances from these men. Some of the action on the streets may have been captured from hidden trucks but the scenes in the bars are phenomenal. Almost everyone we see is seriously inebriated. Many appear to have 'diminished capacities' and some may have been feeble-minded before they pickled themselves. Led by his two main characters, Rogosin has these rummies participating in absolutely convincing conversations, leaning on each other for handouts and drinking, always drinking. It's like a peek into a world you couldn't see unless you were a participant, which gives a clue as to director Rogosin's technique.

Many critics have commented on the film's parade of faces, which are both fascinating and frightening. We are confronted with scores of brutalized faces in every minute of film. Some have clearly been beaten bloody. Plenty sport untreated injuries, perhaps suffered when under the influence. They're all so close up and authentically human. Each must have a story yet we wonder how many can carry on a real conversation. The denizens of the Bowery seem like strange inhabitants of an existential asylum, living in plain sight but ignored (or mythologized) by society.

On the Bowery is one of the few non-narrative films that generates the same interest as a good drama. Gorman claims that he's broke but retreats every night to a semi-permanent "flop" he can call his own; he uses his congenial manner to steal but is human enough to still want to be liked. His good story about once being a doctor is so good, we almost believe it. In contrast Ray seems a sensible guy but is definitely addicted to the bottle. It's as if he just doesn't see any point to life beyond his next drink.

Milestone has previously given us an entry into masterpieces by great independent filmmakers: Kent McKenzie (The Exiles ) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep). These documentarians are all drawn to reveal aspects of the urban underclass in America. Rogosin's reputation is very much alive and the evidence presented in the The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Volume 1 can only enhance it. The first Blu-ray disc contains On The Bowery, which can be watched with an introduction by Martin Scorsese. The Perfect Team, a making-of docu by Rogosin's son Michael, answers many of the questions left open by the film itself. After experiencing WW2 Lionel Rogosin determined to use a camera to change society. He wanted to film in the Bowery but found that the only way he could was to spend months with the locals until he gained their friendship and trust. He and his cameraman were hard drinkers as well, and his two main actors were recruited from the street. Gorman Hendricks was on his last legs. He stayed sober (and alive) just long enough to finish the film. Rogosin believed that Kentucky man Ray Salyer had a future as an actor and claims that Ray had offers from Hollywood. We see Salyer appear on TV, cleaned up and in a suit, asserting that he likes to drink the way some men like to fish or play golf. His eventual response to the attention was to hop a freight train out of town, and disappear forever.

The first disc also contains a newer piece by Michael Rogosin called A Walk Through the Bowery, a 1972 docu (Bowery Men's Shelter), a 1933 newsreel (Street of Forgotten Men) and an On The Bowery trailer.

Disc two turns contains films just as powerful. With the experience of On the Bowery under his belt Rogosin turned toward the bigger themes of war and inhumanity that were his original motivation. 1964's Good Times, Wonderful Times belies its title to make a direct assault on complacent attitudes toward war -- its causes, its effects, its importance. Rogosin invents a docu scripting strategy that was soon abused by others: ironic contrast. His framing device is an English cocktail party. We hear a non-stop litany of trivial talk and small-minded observations. The central speakers are a gaggle of male admirers that congregate around a couple of "outgoing" young women that tease them with mild provocative talk. Some of the men are ex-soldiers. These party scenes are very convincing. Various pointed statements come out -- that war builds character, that war is a natural thing, that it controls the world population like floods or disease. Quite regularly Rogosin cuts to film footage culled from film archives around the world: England, Japan, the Soviet Union.

The footage is in mostly excellent condition, and when it isn't we're very aware that we're seeing 'rescued film' that somebody didn't want shown. Much of it is wholly unfamiliar, unseen in any war docus I've yet encountered. Rogosin starts with some disturbing scenes of Hiroshima bomb victims, including graphic shots clearly edited from of other docus. A cocktail party discussion about "who permits wars to take place?" is followed by segments devoted to the utter worship granted Adolf Hitler by the German citizenry. Admiring throngs throw flowers in his path; men are inspired and women enraptured, as if in the presence of a god. The atrocity footage that follows includes Russian footage of children murdered by German troops and some very disturbing, unfamiliar concentration camp footage. Film rescued from deterioration records a Ghetto packed with starving, horrifyingly emaciated people. Little kids caught gathering food on the outside are forced to dump it on the ground before re-entering the barbed wire. Other sequences advance the horror into the 1960s, including some Civil Rights violence and Ban The Bomb rallies. The news film ends on the then brand-new voice of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech -- before it became a default item in every socially conscious documentary. Good Times, Wonderful Times was widely shown when new and reportedly influenced students who would soon be protesting the Vietnam War, or resisting the draft. In 1964, our access to news of ongoing strife in Africa, Asia and South America was very limited, and the raw truth of Rogosin's film would certainly have served as a wake-up call.

Backing up GTWT is Rogosin's making of docu, Man's Peril which goes into the technical and philosophical reasoning behind his approach. Humanitarian Bertrand Russell was involved in the filmmaking process as well. Also included is another war-related Rogosin film, Out, which is about refugees from Hungary that fled into Austria in the wake of the revolution of 1956.

Both main features are in excellent shape, with On the Bowery exceptionally sharp and detailed in HD Blu-ray. Seen in close-up, some of those battered faces look like maps of the scarred and cratered moon. The B&W image quality on this disc is unsurpassed.

Lionel Rogosin's films may not attempt the intellectual complexity of later docus by people like Emile de Antonio, Chris Marker, Patricio Guzmán or Alain Resnais, but he succeeds beautifully in connecting with his audience. On the Bowery will make you feel differently about terminal alcoholics. Good Times, Wonderful Times will greatly lower your tolerance for the excuses of pampered materialists, who claim to be apolitical but in reality couldn't care less about the world beyond their personal comfort zones.

For more information about On the Bowery, visit Milestone Film.

by Glenn Erickson