Vintage Newspaper Ad: Southern Comfort (1981, Walter Hill)

I dig that Cinema Group logo, seen in the lower left corner of the ad, and reminiscent of the Filmways logo from the same year.

In honor of Mr. Hill's latest theatrical feature, Bullet to the Head, and the recent Blu-ray of Southern Comfort, courtesy of Second Sight.  I had the pleasure of seeing a 35mm print of the film earlier this week accompanied by a post-screening discussion and q & a with the director.

Watching this film for the first time in years the other day, I found myself thinking of my late father and how he would have enjoyed this film, its ambiance, its directness, and the perfectly attuned score by Ry Cooder.  Then I realized that I probably had watched the film, or at least part of it, in the company of Dad, via this laserdisc, which I no longer have, but which got a lot of play in my teen years. 

The screening also reminded me how much I like Powers Boothe in this film and pretty much whenever I see him on film or television.  Considering his talents and screen presence, the man did not get enough feature film (sole) lead opportunities in his prime, aside from Boorman's The Emerald Forest, a film I have strong memories of seeing tv spots and prints ads for, but which I never actually watched.  This rekindled admiration for the actor brought me back to my dad, as I suddenly had a memory of him saying something like, "I like that Powers Boothe.  Good actor."  Which brought to me to an even earlier memory (circa 1983) of watching Boothe as Philip Marlowe, with my dad, on the (first) HBO original drama Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.  As I've written here before, anyone who's lost a loved one probably has one or two things they'd like to do with, or say to, that person more than anything else.  The cinephile in me just wants to sit down and watch a "Dad movie"--Southern Comfort will do--with Dad.

Cruising's Original Color

Some captures from a DVD-R I made several years ago, pre-DVD release, of a cable broadcast of Cruising.  These stills more closely reflect the original theatrical look of the film before it was re-colored / re-tinted by director William Friedkin for the film's DVD release in 2007.  I earlier posted about this here.

Please forgive the sub-DVD quality of these clips--they come from a non-HD broadcast--but they are better than VHS, at least, and in the correct aspect ratio.  If you see one of the '90s-era 35mm prints struck by Warner Bros. you'll get a very good sense of how much the film was altered for its DVD release, with the color palette being the most striking difference, in addition to some new transition and slow-mo effects (I am not fond of those alterations, either); the club scenes, in particular, are stripped of much their original color in favor of a very pervasive blue hue, which covers everything.

I do hope that if Cruising is released on Blu-ray, Friedkin follows a similar course that he did with the re-released French Connection Blu-ray, wherein he and d.p. Owen Roizman restored the look of the original theatrical prints to Blu-ray.  Roizman was none too thrilled with the first French Connection Blu-ray, supervised by Friedkin, and which had a radically different color scheme.  I wonder how Cruising d.p. James A. Contner feels about the DVD of the film, which has undergone a similar transformation and which I don't think he had any part in.  The disclaimer pictured below was removed by Friedkin in the DVD version of Cruising.