Auteur Candy to Get You Through the Dog Days of Summer

It’s summertime and over on the Criterion Channel the streaming is easy. The plucky platform that’s fast becoming known by movie buffs as the best pound for pound viewing experience has curated a bucketload of top flight films for the dog days. The beauty of Criterion offerings, that range from under 5 minutes to full feature length films, and from exclusive world premieres of art house films, to restored classics ands “archival treasures,” is that they are often accompanied by a panoply of inviting features new to streaming including interviews with creators and critics. (And to those who say “Isn’t this the DVD / BluRay shit that no one wanted, repackaged as something that the right people love?” We say shame on you.)

Here then BFG’s take of the best of the platform’s currently on offer glorious and often quirky summer themed films.

Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Forbidden lust, cannibalism and lobotomies play out in this fetid Tennessee Williams tale of interfamilial angst and engaging over emoting set in The Big Easy. Tut tutting critics of the day declaimed Suddenly as “lurid.” It is. Watch Katherine Hepburn as Violet Venable make her grand dame, slightly deranged, deus et machina entrance via an ornate 19th century in-house elevator. A scene echoed a decade and a half later by a similarly coiffed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in fellow camp favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Post auto accident Montgomery Clift as soft-spoken wide-eyed cortex carver Dr. Cukrowicz falls for Elizabeth Taylor’s usefully young and pretty insane asylum habitué, Catherine Holly. Morally bankrupt hospital administrators, avaricious family members, and a Venus Fly Trap fed only on the finest imported flies fill out the bill.

Gidget (1959)

If this all seems too exhausting there’s your teenage beach movie Gidget. James Darren as Moondoggie and Sandra Dee as Gidget keep it simple. Emerging SoCal surf culture and sweet romance. Keep an eye out for Cliff Robertson as the Quentin Tarantino burger inspiring Big Kahuna. Watch it with Bruce Brown’s surf doc classic Endless Summer (1966).

Last Summer (2023)

Looking for more lurid? Seventy-seven year old French director Catherine Breillat’s latest uncomfortable, purposely provocative Molotov cocktail is the most lurid. She takes the Jerry Springer friendly, popular Pornhub premise — illicit stepson/mom relationships — and gives it the honey lit art house treatment. Léa Drucker stars as Anne, the eminently unsympathetic, sociopathic predator protagonist. In her professional life lawyer Anne acts as an advocate for minor victims of sex abuse. In her private life she takes advantage of her troubled 17-year-old stepson. When the boy tells his father about the abuse, Anne, a professed “gerontophile,” denies all and sets about cruelly, calculatingly undermining the fragile boy’s credibility. You know you are pressing buttons when director John Waters calls your characters “morally shocking.”

Last Summer was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival

House (1977)

House, the surreal Scooby Doo, Japanese post war fairy tale, commercial art inspired, candy coloured mashup of Western horror film tropes with a hidden message does not scare so much as surprise and startle. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s cult masterpiece posits a Seven Samurai of surprisingly steely, giggling teenagers facing off against “a house that eats girls.” Pianos, futons, and grandfather clocks cartoonishly and messily consume people. At dinner, nervously darting eyeballs of missing friends pop out of — and back into — an increasingly suspicious aunty’s mid chew mouth. You’ll laugh. You’ll scream. Often at the same time. Former art film and TV ad maker Obayashi changes tone, genre and technique at a frantic pace. No wonder overwhelmed Westerners often miss the atom bomb allegory and the Grave of the Fireflies (1988)-like bitterness and fear of intergenerational amnesia that pervades Hiroshima survivor Obayashi’s opus. Watch for the endlessly repeated motif of that menacing mushroom cloud of a fluffy white cat with flashing green eyes.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A literate and intriguing adult fantasy newly restored in 2020 using Martin Scorsese’s personal 35mm Technicolor print as a reference. Star Ava Gardner, epitome of 1950s glamour, is Pandora, a femme fatale leaving a trail of destruction in wealthy expat infested 1930s southern Spain. Pandora drives an effete poet to suicide, a dashing race car driver to push his beloved car over a cliff, and a famous matador to fight with his — in retrospect — understandably cautious tarot-card reading mom. All while she is amorously addling an amiable archeologist and drawing the legendary Flying Dutchman back into this world. Friends of writer/director Albert Lewin, artists Man Ray and Salvador Dali had extensive input into the dreamlike look of the film. Watch for the cubist chess set. Join in the surrealist beach party segment done in the style of Georgio de Chirico.

🎖 Honorable Mentions

– July Rhapsody (2002) Director Ann Hui
– The Beaning (2017) — Director Sean McCoy
– La Piscine (1969) — Director Jaques Deray
– Summertime (1955) — Director David Lean
– The Swimmer (1968) — Director Frank Perry
– Lime Kiln Field Day (1913) — Directors Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter