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There have been some very cool physical media announcements in the past day or so -- yes, even on top of Bottoms! (I will never get tired of that one.) So here, a quick rundown of the three that feel the most important to me right this second. First Radiance Films (based out of the UK) have announced a blu-ray of Luchino Visconti's first film La Terra Trema (aka The Earth Trembles but I never see it called that). I've briefly posted about this movie a couple of times but mainly just to recognize that its leading man Antonio Arcidiacono (seen above) is one of the most stunning men every put onscreen. He wasn't a trained actor -- Visconti just had eyes. And so he put him in front of a camera and had him stand there. And that's why Visconti remains a legend! In all seriousness (not that I wasn't being serious already) this is a really stunning and meditative film that captures 1940s Sicily in all its neo-realist finery and I can't wait to see an upgrade from the shitty DVD I have of this. (PS when buying Radiance titles I recommend buying from DiabolikDVD or OrbitDVD here in the US -- it takes a little extra time but you save on shipping costs.) 

The other title from Radiance I recommend is Todd Solondz's 2005 movie Palindromes, which has gotten a full 4K upgrade in time for its 20th (!!!) anniversary. We'd figured this physical media release was coming because IFC is premiering this restoration in a couple of weeks here in NYC (and you'd best believe I'm seeing it with Solondz there to talk about the movie on opening weekend!) On that note there's a good chance this will get a U.S. release (maybe from Criterion, who's released most of Solondz's other movies here) so maybe hold off? Personally speaking I'm impatient so I already bought this one -- Radiance does beautiful work so I'm sure I'll be happy with their version.    

The third physical media release I'm recommending is the double-feature set of vintage porn-ster Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s films Juice and Daddy Dearest from the mid-80s -- you can pre-order this set right here, which is coming to us to the elite queer historians at Altered Innocence. I haven't seen either of these yet but Altered Innocence has yet to steer me wrong, and I've liked what else I've seen of Bresson's work.

Oh and now that I'm thinking about it (it being gay porn) -- I don't think I mentioned here on the site prop-er that Vinegar Syndrome has Bruce La Bruce's two most recent works of art-porn  for sale this month -- click here for his twincest flick Saint-Narcisse (which isn't actually pornographic; just semi-obscene in theory really) and click here to buy his new movie The Visitor, a reowrking of Pasolini (Sidenote: Happy birthday, Pasolini!) that is very very pornographic indeed. Now look at all of this entertainment I have brought you! You won't have to pay attention to the nightmarish real world for literal hours!

RIP Helmut Berger

Do your hot asses a favor and go home and watch one of the Luchino Visconti movies starring the now dead dreamboat Helmut Berger tonight, in honor of his hot ass. Ludwig or The Damned or the marvelous Conversation Piece, which I only saw last year for the first time. An actor who imbued beauty with such easy cruelty you weren't ever sure whether to orgasm or cry -- Helmut was la petite mort in a single gorgeous package. Check our archives on Berger content right here -- he was a fave, for sure. What was your favorite performance from him? I really don't think you can beat his still shocking and scary work as institutional rot itself in The Damned...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Servant (1963)

Barrett: I'm not staying here in a place

where they just chuck balls in your face.

As I admitted back on Criterion Announcement Day of this month -- I have never seen Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant, which Criterion are putting out onto blu-ray for the first time on June 20th, right in the thick of Gay Pride. (P.S. You can pre-order it at Amazon right now.) So whatever specific context there is to that quote above it's lost on me -- that said I think we can all agree it's best out of context. That's some proto-Clueless hilarity! Anyway I'm quoting the movie I still haven't seen today...

... because it's actor and this movie's star Dirk Bogarde's birthday today -- he was born 102 years ago. I've only just recently become slightly better acquainted with his movies and how ahead of his time he was -- I only saw Victim for the first time around the beginning of the pandemic. I'd seen Darling and Death in Venice of course, but he really was a hell of a gay pioneer -- does anybody know if there is a good biography of him? I can only imagine how much bullshit he had to deal with, and marvel at how incredible it is that he managed to carve out so many legendary roles anyway.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Ludwig (1973)

Elisabeth of Austria: What do you want anyway? To go down in history with the help of Richard Wagner? Like my mother-in-law with her ridiculous painters? If your Richard Wagner is really so great then he doesn't need you. Your pathetic friendship only gives you the illusion to have done something creative. Just like I give you the illusion of love. You don't want to be left alone. You want me to become your unrivalled love. To confirm yourself. You need help I can't give you.

Happy 50 to Luchino Visconti's film Ludwig, which immediately became a favorite of mine when I got to see it projected on my favorite screen in New York a few years back. One of Visconti's lushest (and gayest!) films -- which is saying a lot, given this is the man who directed The Leopard and Death in Venice -- it's much easier to see it than it was just a couple of years ago, as it now streams on the Criterion Channel and the previously out-of-print Arrow blu-ray got re-released. So you have no excuse! I mean yes it is four hours long, but you've got nothing better to do. I know you don't. Don't pretend. Don't make me send Helmut Berger after you.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from...

The Damned (1969)

Herbert: It's all over... It was everyone's fault, even mine. It does no good to raise one's voice when it's too late, not even to save your soul. The fear of a proletariat revolution, which would've thrown the entire country to the left... was too great, and now we can't defend it any longer! Nazism is our creation. It was born in our factories, nourished with our money!

Luchino Visconti was born 116 years ago today.

Burt Lancaster One Time

Thinking about Burt Lancaster a little bit today because the fine folks at the UK physical media retailers Indicator have announced a gorgeous limited edition blu-ray of his 1968 movie The Swimmer -- seriously they do the most beautiful editions, look at that beauty below! If I'm being honest I've always found both Burt and that movie a little overrated, but that's obviously from my perspective deep inside a bubble of Movie Nerd-dom -- the general audiences of the world at this point barely know who Lancaster was, much less a 1968 John Cheever adaptation about a man wandering through his suburban neighbors backyards. That's not a crazy thing to say right? Do you think Burt Lancaster is well remembered by people under oh let's say 50? That said I do always give him credit for his more daring work with Visconti -- the man did know how to pick interesting projects. So my stance is that he should be remembered better than he is by general audiences but also that he's always left me a little bit cold, personally. Where do you stand on big ol' Burt?

The Odyssey Stays Home

Weirdly I spent some time on Twitter yesterday talking about Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes and suddenly today there is new news of Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes making a new movie together -- hey if I have this sort of power let me put "Oscar Isaac and Kit Harington Erotic Thriller" energy into the world right now, while I'm at it. As for Ralph & Juliette they've previously co-starred in the 1992 version of Wuthering Heights (which is leaving Amazon Prime in a few days and which is what I was yammering about on Twitter) and then in 1996 again and more famously with the Oscar-winner The English Patient. Those two are off the top of my head -- have they done anything else together? It seems possible. 

Anyway they are definitely doing one more with today's news that they're going to star in a new adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, with Ralph as Odysseus and Juli as his wife Penelope -- their spin is this movie will be a drama entirely about the moment when the Big O returns home from fighting monsters and men and finds his wife besieged by suitors, everybody having thought him undeniably and reliably dead. The film will be directed by Uberto Pasolini, who apparently is not related to the director Pier Paolo, but he IS related to the director Luchino Visconti? He's Visconti's nephew? That is weird! Weird information! Anyway this sounds great, I will watch this movie, the end.

Did the 1992 version of WUTHERING HEIGHTS with Ralph Fiennes & Juliette Binoche for today's "Five Frames" post and realized -- I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS WTF??? It's leaving Prime on the 2nd if you wanna join me and watch before then! Any fans? pic.twitter.com/LF8ohc4d5j

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 27, 2022

Which is Hotter?

I am more than well aware that Alain Delon has turned out to be a pretty shitty person in real life but, having lost both Jean-Paul Belmondo and Nino Castelnuovo in the past six months, I still want to mark his birthday while he's around and kicking at 86 -- his body of work (ahem) has sure meant a lot to me. Try to not be so shitty, Alain! I'd love to focus on said body of work when I write about you rather than all of the far-right political leanings and misogynistic bullshit. For today I'll split the middle and focus on the body, period.

bike tracks

6 Off My Head: Visconti's Stunning Menfolk

It's the 115th anniversary of the birth of Luchino Visconti, our problematic king -- the Italian aristocrat turned film director made some of my favorite movies of all-time, from his early Neo-realist masterpieces like La terra treme up through his baroquely crumbling critiques of the aristocratic bullshit he knew so intimately like The Leopard and The Damned. He made less than twenty movies but I have yet to see a single one I haven't found absolutely riveting. But even more importantly -- obviously! -- is the fact that he had one of the greatest eyes for male beauty we've ever been blessed the opportunity to share sight with, and his movies are feasts for those of us who appreciate such things. And so now that I have seen a majority of his movies -- not yet everything, but a majority! -- I feel safe in finally making this list...

The 6 Sexiest Men in Visconti Movies

Massimo Girotti in Ossessione (1943)

(see more here)

Helmut Berger in The Damned (1969)

Farley Granger in Senso (1954)

(see more here)

Antonio Arcidiacono in La terra trema (1948)

(see more here)

Renato Salvatori in Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Alain Delon in The Leopard (1963)

(And Alain also counts in Rocco too, obviously -- Alain in any movie he ever starred in, ever! -- but Alain with that black bandage over his eye is a personal kink!)

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What are your faves?

Get Damned Today

Luchino Visconti's 1969 stab-to-the-eye The Damned, starring Helmut Berger at his cruel-prettiest alongside Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling (looking absolutely stunning), and Ingrid Thulin, is out on Criterion blu-ray today! You can buy it right here. I only saw this one myself for the first time in the last couple of years and man is it a knock-out -- a lurid Technicolor melodrama about the Nazi elite's perversions it doesn't pull its punches, and will probably offend plenty of you -- as a movie about such things should! Those are clearly offensive things -- like the actual definition. Any fans of the film? Any detractors? Tell me all about it. And here's a photo of note of Berger being friendly with Bogarde at Cannes that year: 

I Will Wait For You, Nino Castelnuovo

I don't feel as if I can write a proper memorial to Italian actor Nino Castelnuovo because I've only seen a very small handful of his movies. But his most famed role -- that of "Guy" in Jacques Demy's 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of my all-time favorites -- is so crucial to my love of the movies that I can hardly not give him a loving mention here on the site. Especially since he's got his own wee little Archives, which I heartily recommend clicking through. Other films I've seen him include Luchino Visconti's very brilliant Rocco and His Brothers, which put him opposite Alain Delon...

... for which every gay for all of time owes Luchino a debt of gratitude. And then the 1975 giallo with the fabulously perfect giallo title of Strip Nude For Your Killer, a film I covered pretty thoroughly right here, at least gratuity-wise. 

Not too long ago Arrow put out a great blu-ray of that film, by the way, and if you have any affection for giallo it's one you should check out. It's not particularly scary but it's got that vibe in spades, you know the one, that giallo one. And then later in life I guess he had a small role in The English Patient...

... which I never knew or noticed until it got mentioned in his obits, not even when I watched that movie just a couple of weeks ago. Shame on me, but the role's really not substantial and we are talking twenty years since the last time I'd seen him. And I think that's all of his that I have seen? But Umbrellas is an annual watch for me, sometimes even more often than that, and his Guy remains the swooniest lead in any movie musical according to me, hands down. 

I re-watched the film for the ten millionth time last night in his honor (you can see the Twitter thread here to go along with that) and that first chapter of the film, as he and Catherine Deneuve fall in love and then are forced to separate, makes me cry every time just from the perfect exquisite beauty of it -- seriously my boyfriend looked over and laughed at me because at only the twenty-minute-mark I already had tears rolling down my face. It's probably the most romantic sequence ever put on-screen. Anyway if you've got more recommendations from his filmography please share in the comments, and I'll give you a few more worthwhile photos of him after the jump...

Beautiful Boy Takes September

Earlier this year I told you about the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which takes as its subject the Swedish actor Björn Andrésen, who once upon a time got starred in Luchino Visconti's classic film Death in Venice -- more recently he had a small role in Midsommar. The film focuses mainly on his Venice experience though, which was traumatic for the teenager -- the sexual attention he received well before he was anywhere near prepared for it has affected his entire life. The doc played at Sundance -- I reviewed it right here -- and now we have word of a release date, September 24th. In NYC and LA anyway; it'll presumably hit streaming not long after. Here's the trailer!

10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1965

It's somehow been four months since we've done one of our "Siri Says" posts! And that's a darn shame. I know y'all enjoy them, and I do too, so let's reboot the season this week (although no promises we'll keep any momentum going given how I've got several film festivals lining up real quick for our immediate future) with a look at the Movies of 1965, after the lady who lives inside my telephone whispered the number "65" in my ear when I asked her for a number between 1 and 100.

One, I am surprised I hadn't done 1965 yet -- there are still good years left scattered about, although the pickins have admittedly gotten as slim as Jean-Paul Belmondo's waist. And Two, I was surprised by how many damn good movies there are from 1965 when I got to digging; movies I truly adore. So instead of our usual five movies I chose ten faves. And it's almost all foreign cinema? Foreign or genre film, anyway. The 1960s have all sorts of gems to offer once you escape Hollywood's bloated lameness.

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1965

War and Peace 

(dir. Sergey Bondarchuk) 

-- released on July 1965 --

Darling

(dir. John Schlesinger) 

-- released on August 3rd 1965 --

Pierrot le fou 

(dir. Jean-Luc Godard) 

-- released on November 5th 1965 --

Juliet of the Spirits

(dir. Fellini) 

-- released on October 19th 1965 --

The 10th Victim

(dir. Elio Petri) 

-- released on December 2nd 1965 --

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

(dir. Russ Meyer) 

-- released on August 6th 1965 --

Doctor Zhivago

(dir. David Lean) 

-- released on December 22nd 1965 --

Gamera the Giant Monster

(dir. Noriaki Yuasa) 

-- released on November 27th 1965 --

Planet of the Vampires

(dir. Mario Bava) 

-- released on September 15th 1965 --

Repulsion

(dir. Roman Polanski) 

-- released on May 19th 1965 --

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Runners-up: Die! Die! My Darling! (dir. Silvio Narizzano), The Nanny (dir. Seth Holt), My Hustler (dir. Andy Warhol), Invasion of the Astro-Monster (dir. Ishirô Honda), Bad Girls Go To Hell (dir. Doris Wishman), The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise), War-Gods of the Deep (dir. Jacques Tourneur) 

Never seen: Sandra of a Thousand Delights (dir. Visconti), Who Killed Teddy Bear (dir. Joseph Cates), What's New Pussycat (dir. Clive Donner), Simon of the Desert (dir. Bunuel), Up to His Ears (dir. Phillipe de Broca), That Darn Cat (dir. Robert Stevenson), Cat Ballou (dir. Elliot Silverstein), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (dir. Martin Ritt), Help! (dir. Richard Lester), The Naked Prey (dir. Cornel Wilde)

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What are your favorite films of 1965?