Lessons from Criterion:"Diabolique" by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Before “Psycho,” and well before our minds were agitated by the uncertainty of details in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” there was the ominous nuance of “Diabolique.” Ideas this stark and unflinching were rather slow to penetrate world cinema in the days monopolized by glitzy melodramas and directors always treading in safe creative trenches, but once the chilling presence of homicidal impulses had taken route in the imagination of auteurs like the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, those behaviors colonized the movie screen in precipitous succession. From that moment on, it was not enough for stories to simply view murder from detached fascination, or with the misplaced context that was obligatory of very unspeakable morals (in those years, murderers in movies were either hardened criminals or outright psychopaths, and certainly not sympathetic). Here was one of the first pictures of its kind to instill the concept into the minds of common individuals, who were driven by fear and anxiety rather than primitive instinct, and rattled by the ambiguity that followed them in an uncertain aftermath. And just as staggering as it was to discover these compulsions possessed by identifiable minds, no realization was more astounding than the notion that such forces could be stirred in women, who were usually the victims of such endeavors.

Lady and the Tramp / ***1/2 (1955)

The arrival of Disney's "Lady And The Tramp" in the mid-50s was not one of those traditional cartoon introductions that the studio had been giving moviegoers for almost 20 years. Here was something far beyond anything foreseen by avid audiences, a movie that stayed in its narrative limits, but leaped beyond the technical boundaries. Yes, I am referring to that elusive but effective format known as 70mm, in which the dimensions on a picture scale were stretched beyond the conventional restrictions to take advantage of larger backgrounds and visually complex material. You will recall that most of the big Hollywood epics at that time--like "Cleopatra" and "Ben Hur"--relied on this technique because their massive stories and images could not be scaled down to the typical 35mm dimensions. But it is the animated movies that were destined to be seen in widescreen, and "Lady And The Tramp" was the first to arrive at that conclusion.