AT HOME

With Michael Hootman

JOHNNY GUITAR (Eureka Blu-ray).

Few films have been open to as much interpretation and re-evaluation as Nicholas Ray’s operatic Western. On its release, Americans found it a laughable misfire while the French New Wave critics adored it. In the interim, it’s been seen as a camp classic, a critique of McCarthyism and capitalism, a mythic fairytale and a Freudian story of sexual repression.

Early on John Carradine says of saloon owner Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, “never seen a woman who was more of a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not”. Well, that’s a gender studies monograph in those two sentences.

The plot, unusually for a Western, revolves around two female antagonists, the other being Mercedes McCambridge as Vienna’s rival, though the exact cause of their enmity is deliberately ambiguous. Vienna is in love with the eponymous musician played by Sterling Hayden, but she’s also had an affair with the Dancin’ Kid, the latter seems to be very attached to the prettiest and youngest of his gang of hoodlums – plus his name is hardly the butchest in Western history – so I think we can throw homosexual subtext into the mix.

The dialogue is full of snappy one-liners and razor-sharp retorts, sometimes overly so, with the characters occasionally sounding as if they’re in a sophisticated Broadway drama. But then the world of Johnny Guitar is not one of gritty realism. On first viewing I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it, but mulling it over I now can’t wait to see it again.

PROFONDO ROSSO (DEEP RED) (Arrow Bluray).

This revered slasher from Dario Argento is given a lift in stature from the presence of David Hemmings as a jazz musician who witnesses a murder and then gets embroiled in an increasingly bizarre plot. The prowling camera and the compositions are fantastic: where most directors try to make sets look like real locations, Argento reverses this and makes Turin look like a sound stage. It’s not perfect and the characterisations are thin: Hemmings does as best he can but can’t find any inner life to Marcus, who perhaps doesn’t have one.

Daria Nicolodi’s crime reporter seems to belong to a screwball comedy, which might have succeeded if she’d had some flair for either comedy or acting. But you don’t watch a giallo to learn about the human condition. For its baroque plot and its ability to see beauty even in violence Deep Red is a sensual masterpiece, not an intellectual one.

FASSBINDER VOLUME 1 (Arrow Blu-ray).

This is an essential selection from the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema. It includes his first feature, Love is Colder Than Death, and the film adaptation of his play The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which focuses on the loves, losses and lamentations of the eponymous Petra, a successful fashion designer with two marriages behind her and an estranged daughter.

The Ulli Lommel-directed Tenderness of the Wolves is produced by Fassbinder and is based on the crimes of serial killer Fritz Haarmann, who committed the sexual assault and murder of boys and young men in ’20s Germany.

VEN VR ADVENTURE (Monologic Games).

The first thing to say about this game is that it’s easily the best-looking I’ve yet seen on the Quest. Its sizeable 7.8GB allows for incredible detailing, richly constructed landscapes and sweat-inducing vertiginous depths. It’s a platformer in which you control Ven as he jumps around these amazingly beautiful/terrifying worlds, collecting incredibly cute little baby versions of whatever species he’s a member of.

Ven is the first VR character I’ve really taken to, he’s like a fox version of Errol Flynn with a cheeky – God help me I almost said ‘sexy’ – smile. Like any good game you slowly learn how to master its more complex tasks. Though it took me about a week to conquer one level, where you have to run off a moving platform and somehow jump round a corner mid-air to avoid three consecutive barriers, it was worth it for the adrenaline rush that made up for the not inconsiderable amount of frustration (and sweary shouting) that accompanied each previous attempt to finish the level. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being captivated by this challenging and constantly inventive game.