It’s the brightest debut feature of 1970, and perhaps the warmest movie ever about the American race divide. Hal Ashby and Bill Gunn’s work is inspired: rich boy Beau Bridges buys a slum tenement and launches a wonderful ensemble comedy-drama in confrontation with the fantastic quartet of actresses — Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey and Marki Bey. The humanist picture doesn’t cheat on its subject matter. The cast list contains fresh debuts and and more best-of-career showings: Louis Gossett Jr., Melvin Stewart, Susan Anspach, Robert Klein.
The Landlord
Blu-ray
1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / Street Date May 14, 2019 / 29.95
Starring: Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey, Walter Brooke, Louis Gossett Jr., Marki Bey, Mel Stewart, Susan Anspach, Robert Klein, Will Mackenzie, Trish Van Devere, Hector Elizondo, Marlene Clark, Gloria Hendry, Bobby V. Garvin.
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Film Editor: William A. Sawyer, Edward Warschilka
Original Music: Al Kooper
Written by...
The Landlord
Blu-ray
1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / Street Date May 14, 2019 / 29.95
Starring: Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey, Walter Brooke, Louis Gossett Jr., Marki Bey, Mel Stewart, Susan Anspach, Robert Klein, Will Mackenzie, Trish Van Devere, Hector Elizondo, Marlene Clark, Gloria Hendry, Bobby V. Garvin.
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Film Editor: William A. Sawyer, Edward Warschilka
Original Music: Al Kooper
Written by...
- 5/11/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, made in 1970, is probably the best movie of the 1970s not to be widely known by younger audiences, and even by some older audiences whose appreciation of the last great era of American moviemaking needs to be expanded beyond go-to classics like The Godfather and Chinatown and Taxi Driver. It’s Ashby’s first directorial effort, after work as assistant editor and chief film editor on The Diary of Anne Frank, The Cincinnati Kid and In the Heat of the Night, and it finds Ashby delighting in the freedom of fashioning experimental rules of editorial and visual expression in the process of translating a script from Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess), based on Kristin Hunter’s novel, into what stands today as one of the funniest, most honest, cogent and probing explorations of race and American race relations in movie history. We had it on...
- 12/4/2017
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
Ashby was born fully formed as a film-maker with this debut, a wise and exact meditation on race relations in New York at the end of the 1960s
Sometimes I imagine a scene of a time capsule opening years after its burial, and a noxious stink arises from the urn because its socio-temporal contents have lost all their context, and thus all their meaning. "Ew," says the crowd assembled, "why ever did we bury that?" Not so Hal Ashby's The Landlord, long unavailable despite being, to my mind at least, one of the most assured directorial debuts in Hollywood history, and also perhaps my favourite of all his work. I saw it as a teenager in the 70s, before it vanished out of circulation for decades. This particular time capsule is all madeleines and bitter almonds, its contents apparently not having aged a day in 42 years.
Ashby, one of...
Sometimes I imagine a scene of a time capsule opening years after its burial, and a noxious stink arises from the urn because its socio-temporal contents have lost all their context, and thus all their meaning. "Ew," says the crowd assembled, "why ever did we bury that?" Not so Hal Ashby's The Landlord, long unavailable despite being, to my mind at least, one of the most assured directorial debuts in Hollywood history, and also perhaps my favourite of all his work. I saw it as a teenager in the 70s, before it vanished out of circulation for decades. This particular time capsule is all madeleines and bitter almonds, its contents apparently not having aged a day in 42 years.
Ashby, one of...
- 10/4/2012
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
With Black Friday nearly upon us, the urge for many a movie buff's friend or significant other will be to grab that $5 Blu-ray of Angels and Demons off the shelf and call it a day. (Oh, we're only kidding with Angels and Demons. Titles like Kick-Ass and The Wrestler will be nearly as cheap.) But for those who are willing to be a little more adventurous or just looking to impress, many of the major studios have started to open up their archives to make DVDs to order for films that may not be popular enough to have warranted a major pressing in the past, but certainly have their fans and have long been unavailable on any format.
Warner Brothers, in particular, has pioneered this type of mail order program with Warner Archives, which has made available over 700 films since originating last year while similar services from MGM (Limited Edition...
Warner Brothers, in particular, has pioneered this type of mail order program with Warner Archives, which has made available over 700 films since originating last year while similar services from MGM (Limited Edition...
- 11/25/2010
- by Stephen Saito
- ifc.com
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