New Yorker Films unspools its last

Arthouse film fans with long memories were depressed this week by the announcement of the closing of New Yorker Films, a firm that has been one of the key U.S. distributors of some of the greatest European filmmakers of the Sixties through the Eighties. I have very mixed feelings about this. Firstly, of course New Yorker owner Dan Talbot and company did an invaluable service to all of us in getting the work of these filmmakers (including Godard, Straub and Huillet, Fassbinder, Herzog) to the public when it counted. However, as VHS/DVD purveyors, New Yorker has not exactly been a fan-friendly label. It's not the lack of supplements on their discs — I can't fault a company for not having the dough (or the Criterion-like reputation) to acquire the rights to extras.

However, as a VHS label, New Yorker was the first company to introduce the dreaded MacroVision copyguard process that not only prevented copying of the tape, but also made the viewing experience pretty dreadful (the picture "breathed" if you had a lower-cost VCR). They also had a practice of putting out quite little of their back-catalogue on tape and DVD, concentrating primarily on their latest releases. I’d be surprised every time MOMA or another rep house would do festivals with extremely rare European films of a certain vintage, seeing a “New Yorker Films Presents” logo right before the “lost” picture began. The question “why the hell has this been kept on the shelf?” constantly came to mind — with individual titles, like Agnes Varda’s Les Creatures, as well as entire filmographies, like that of Jean-Marie Straub (two of his films have been released on disc by New Yorker, none on VHS, despite the fact the company had seemingly acquired almost all of his output).

As DVD became the medium of choice, I think that one of the central factors to New Yorker-distributed films “disappearing” was the issue of print condition. DVD is a format that has touted “perfection” since it first appeared, and as one looks back at some New Yorker VHS releases, it becomes apparent that, for a DVD release to have materialized, the company would have had to have acquired a pristine copy of the film from its country of origin, restored it if wasn’t already restored, and then re-subtitled it. Thus an essential title like Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (seen at right) just disappeared in the transition from medium to medium. The company would return to its back-catalogue sporadically (as with the latter-day releases of Herzog’s shorts, Godard’s Week-end and Straub’s Moses and Aaron), but mostly the label seemed to be staying away from the older titles, even as DVD was offering a new life for classic foreign films.

It also came to light when the Fassbinder films were eventually put out in pristine prints by other labels, that New Yorker’s video label had *re-framed* the films for their VHS releases to turn them from 1:33 "square" films to 1:66 "letterboxed" titles — presumably in an effort to make them look less than “television shows” and more like “art movies.”


But back to the efforts of Talbot and co. back in the Sixties, which are indeed worthy of gratitude from American cinema buffs (Talbot's purchases seemed like a "wish list" of items lauded by the great Susan Sontag in her essays and reviews). As for the theater that gave the company its name, I only went there when it was in its final years of existence (when this picture of it was presumably snapped), but it was a grand theater when it was around. The 88th and Broadway movie palace (below) is now best-remembered as the place where Woody introduces Marshall McLuhan to the know-it-all in Annie Hall.

A list of some of the filmmakers whose works were distributed by New Yorker (besides those named above) would include Ozu, Bertolucci, Losey, Bresson, Rohmer, De Antonio, Pereira dos Santos, Tanner, Sembene, Rocha, Diegues, Oshima, Wenders, Schlondorff, Fellini, Wajda, Rossellini, Kieslowski, Pialat, Handke, Malle, Chabrol, Kurys, and Skolimowski. From the high-water marks set by these releases, we come to the point where stories circulated about the poor quality of New Yorker prints that were leased to local film festivals, and arguments over money required for the rentals of certain key films in a director’s oeuvre. They were not pretty stories, and not worthy of a company considered the “best friend” in America of these same filmmakers.


It will be interesting to see who acquires the company’s catalogue; it doesn’t say in this New York Times article about the company biting the dust. Perhaps we do stand a chance of finally seeing new prints of New Yorker’s key European films (like Jean Eustache's amazing The Mother and the Whore, right) on DVD — or whatever medium rules in the years to come.

Dead End Kid: Deceased Artiste Robert Mulligan

Robert Mulligan’s career is a bit of an enigma. A director who is best known for one film that occurred rather early in his career, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Mulligan evidenced a Bronx Irishman’s melancholy in his best pictures.

His career began in the fertile field of television drama in the 1950s. He made his directing debut with a film starring everyone’s favorite nervous actor, the late, great Anthony Perkins, Fear Strikes Out (1957). After he scored a genuine Oscar-certified hit with Mockingbird, he continued through the Sixties making films with the most charming male and female movie stars of the decade, Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood, and even cast them in a somewhat unlikely but still winning NYC romance, Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).


My own favorite from this period is the atmospheric and, yes, melancholy ode to teaching in the inner-city school system, Up the Down Staircase (1967) with another of the greatest “edgy” (in several senses of that word) actresses of the period, Sandy Dennis.

In the Seventies, Mulligan scored a major box-office hit with a rather sentimental bit of smarm, The Summer of ’42 (1972) and his career began to go off the rails a bit afterward. The films appeared sporadically, and by the final years he was essentially making Mockingbird-esque “lonely kids” movies like Clara’s Heart and his final pic, The Man in the Moon with the young Reese Witherspoon.


In the midst of the Seventies, though, Mulligan directed a film that has the tone of the time as it looks back to the classic film noir. The Nickel Ride (1975) features Jason Miller as a connected “key man” who runs various institutions owed by the mob in the sleazier portion of Los Angeles. Miller was a talented, forgotten performer (best known for, natch, The Exorcist) who wrote the play That Championship Season, and who seems to be one of Mulligan’s best alter-egos on screen. Miller was another Irishman who looked as if time had weighed heavily on him (he was only 35 when Nickel was shot, but looks much older), and who seemed as if, yes, the Irish scourge of “havin’ a few” had had some part in his life.

The film was never released on VHS, and has never shown up on DVD. I offer these two scenes to provide a bit of its flavor. I’m going to ignore the fact that the screenwriter who wrote this wonderful forgotten gem later on turned into a mainstream Hollywood scribe who gave us two “concept” pieces that were very popular and hold no interest at all for me….

In the first, we learn that our antihero had a past on the carny circuit:


And in the second, we see him confronted in his get-away mountain cabin by the man brought in by the mob to replace him, a cowboy hotshot played by the always wonderfully sleazy Bo Hopkins. The scene has the same tone as many in the work of Funhouse favorite Robert Altman, who took his cues from the greatest melancholic filmmaker of all, Ingmar Bergman: