"Actor: Peter Bonerz"

• Medium Cool (1969) | Blu Ray | (31/08/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  A carefully crafted open-to-everything mixture of live-wire reality and controlled narrative  Medium Cool is the debut fiction feature of Haskell Wexler who had already established himself as one of Hollywood’s premiere cinematographers in the post-studio-system-era on such films as Elia Kazan’s America America and Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In 1968  he hurled himself into the tear-gas of the cultural-political moment. The result was alongside Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider a seminal early work of what came to be known as “the New Hollywood”. John (the prolific Robert Forster who would find latter-day fame in Jackie Brown  Mulholland Drive and Breaking Bad) plays a television cameraman who has become disenchanted as a creative subservient to the mainstream. Eileen (Verna Bloom latterly of High Plains Drifter and After Hours) depicts a newly relocated war-widow swept up in the maelstrom of the conflicts of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago — the actual events of which serve as the spontaneous backdrop for Wexler’s picture. Documentary and narrative blur in the upheaval and chaos and perhaps only Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park stands analogous as such a powerful statement on the politics media and cinema of the late-‘60s — and the present. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool for the first time in the UK on Blu-ray and DVD. Special Features Including: Gorgeous 1080p presentation of the film on Blu-ray from the 4K digital film transfer approved by director Haskell Wexler Original trailer Booklet featuring new and archival writings and imagery

• Man On The Moon | DVD | (04/04/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A master at manipulating audiences, Kaufman could generate belly laughs, stony silence, tears or brawls.

• Whatever Happened To Aunt Alice? | DVD | (02/07/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? sees a change of direction for Robert Aldrich's unofficial trilogy which all involve "ageing actresses" in macabre thrillers (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte). The busy Aldrich only produced What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, calling in TV director Lee H Katzin (a Mission: Impossible regular) to handle the megaphone. Aldrich also opted to shoot the film in pastel colours appropriate to the unusual Arizona desert setting rather than the gothic black and white of the earlier films. The film cast the less iconic Geraldine Page as the genteelly unpleasant Mrs Clare Marrable. Left apparently penniless by her departed husband, Mrs M opts to keep up appearances by hiring a succession of timid elderly housekeepers, bossing them around with well-spoken nastiness, duping them out of their life savings and, on the pretence of getting help with a midnight tree-planting program, lures them into their own graves, batters them to death and plants lovely pines over them. Page gets her own way with the meek likes of Mildred Dunnock, until the feistier, red-wigged R!uth Gordon applies for the job and gets down to amateur sleuthing. While Bette Davis and her partners went wildly over the top in previous films, Page and Gordon play more subtly, finding odd pathetic moments in between the monstrous, irony-laced horror stuff. The supporting cast of pretty or handsome young things, mostly putty in the hands of the manipulative Page, contribute striking little cameos (Rosemary Forsyth sports a pleasing 1969 hairdo as the kindly but intimidated neighbour), but the film belongs to its leading ladies, delivering a fine line in twist-packed cat-and-mouse theatrics. The video is handsomely letterboxed, as befits a film made before widescreen films were shot with all the action in the middle of the frame to facilitate television sales. --Kim Newman