As 2006 drew to a close and national critics prepared their annual ten-best lists, it became clear that one of the best-reviewed films of the year was Jean-Pierre Melville’s magnificent Army of Shadows (L’Armée des Ombres), a powerful portrait of a group of French resistance agents set during the final year of the Nazi occupation. Appropriately enough for a movie loaded with pointed ironies, Army of Shadows’ acclaim in America came 37 years after it was made and released in Europe in 1969 and did not receive an official US release until last year. Similarly, at the end of 2007, critics are likely to continue praising Mafioso, Alberto Lattuada’s brilliant dark comedy from 1962 that was released earlier this year to appreciative American viewers, most of whom had never seen it before.
The American box-office and critical success of Army of Shadows (screening in the Dryden on November 15) and Mafioso (November 23) is the triumph of Rialto Pictures, a small, New York-based distribution company specializing in re-releases of canonized cinema classics, cult favorites, and movies from the past that deserve to be better known. Founded in 1997, Rialto has become, in the words of Los Angeles Times and NPR film critic Kenneth Turan, “the gold standard of reissue distributors.” The films Rialto makes available are presented in new 35mm prints and often feature newly translated subtitles. In the cases of Rialto’s reissues of Federico Fellini’s magical Nights of Cabiria (November 8 ) and Carol Reed’s postwar masterpiece The Third Man (December 13), the full-length European versions were shown to large American audiences for the first time.
Rialto has been dedicated to ensuring that contemporary audiences see the best work of the 20th century’s most important international cinema artists under the best possible circumstances. Their mission has brought back several films by Fellini, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard (represented in this series by Two or Three Things I Know About Her on November 1), and Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, December 20). With Army of Shadows and Le Cercle Rouge (December 9), Rialto has also been instrumental in boosting the reputation of the supreme stylist Jean-Pierre Melville, and their latest reissue is Melville’s gripping 1962 gangster-cop drama Le Doulos (November 16 & 18) starring the iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Great American movies, like Peter Davis’ celebrated documentary Hearts and Minds (November 29) and Mel Brooks’ side-splittingly funny first feature The Producers (December 27), have also received the Rialto treatment. We owe this plethora of celluloid riches to Rialto founder and co-president Bruce Goldstein, and his partner, Adrienne Halpern. Goldstein, who is also the repertory programmer at New York’s legendary Film Forum, will join us in person on December 6 to present a 20-minute trailer history of his company, followed by another terrific French thriller and Rialto re-discovery, Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi. On December 7, Goldstein will introduce one of Rialto’s monster hits, the restored original Japanese-language version of Godzilla, followed by a demonstration of how the film was re-edited for its initial US release.
~Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
