Vernon, Howard

The Train

This tense 1964 action drama from John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) stars Burt Lancaster as a member of the French Resistance trying to prevent Nazi looters from taking valuable art treasures out of the country. A great ride all the way with Frankenheimer at his inimitable best. This is a true human-scale action movie of the sort we used to think of before "action" meant blowing up asteroids in space. Kinetic but almost rueful in tone the films chases and fights are not just eye candy but rather encourage audience involvement in moral stakes. Crisp and serious performances all around from Lancaster and 1960s icons Paul Scofield and Jeanne Moreau. System Requirements:Starring: Burt Lancaster et al. Director: John Frankenheimer Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating:  UPC: 027616753922 Manufacturer No: M110330

This is one of John Frankenheimer's breathless gems--all marvelous action that never lets up. Burt Lancaster plays a French train engineer during the waning days of the German occupation who tries to prevent Nazi colonel Paul Scofield from transporting a precious art collection back to Germany. Utilizing sabotage and cunning deception, Lancaster and his Resistance colleagues stall for time with the Allies on their way. It's a brilliantly made film, showing off Lancaster's acrobatic skills (he performed all of his own stunts) and Frankenheimer's sense of pacing and brilliant use of space. It's choreographed with the utmost precision (those are real explosions during the pivotal strafing sequence) and extremely authentic in its details. Lancaster is in rare minimalist form, and Scofield manages to extract intelligence and sympathy. A firecracker action film shot in crisp black and white, with yet another telling audio commentary by the always instructive director. --Bill Desowitz

What's New Pussycat

It's tough being the cat's meow! A "zany blend of slapstick gags and madcap comedy" (Cue) this "hilarious" (Motion Picture Herald) romp starring Peter Sellers Peter O'Toole and Woody Allen in his acting and screenwriting debut is the "wildest wackiest" (Boxoffice) film to emerge from the swingin' '60s. Burt Bacharach's Oscar®-nominated* title song only adds to the infectious appeal!Michael (O Toole) has a problem: he's a mademoiselle magnet! His demented psychiatrist (Sellers) and sex-starved friend (Allen) would kill for this problem but his would-be fianc e (Romy Schneider) might just kill him. Undergoing therapy that would put Freud in a straitjacket Michael tries to reform but it won't be easy with sex kittens like Capucine Paula Prentiss and Ursula Andress on his tail!System Requirements: Running Time 109 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 027616924704 Manufacturer No: 1008470

An appealing, free-floating lunacy fuels What's New Pussycat?, and there's enough of it bubbling around to carry the movie past its many defects. The cast is like a collection of terribly attractive people stumbling over each other at a disorganized cocktail party--they aren't always witty, and some of them are drunk, but there's enough going on to keep you distracted. Peter O'Toole plays a swinging London womanizer seeking help for his addiction, who makes the mistake of consulting one Dr. Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers), a demented psychoanalyst. Woody Allen made his movie debut here and wrote the script (much altered, to Allen's chagrin, in the filmmaking process). This movie and Casino Royale--which also features Sellers, Allen, Ursula Andress, and a Burt Bacharach song--are overstuffed '60s artifacts, brimming with mod chaos. Alas, neither film is as funny as it should be. --Robert Horton

Alphaville - Criterion Collection

As the French New Wave was reaching its maturity and filmgoing had evolved as a favorite pastime of intellectuals and urban sophisticates, along came Jean-Luc Godard to shake up every convention and send highfalutin critics scrambling to their typewriters. 1965's Alphaville is a perfect example of Godard's willingness to disrupt expectation, combine genres, and comment on movies while making sociopolitical statements that inspired doctoral theses and left a majority of viewers mystified. Part science fiction and part hard-boiled detective yarn, Alphaville presents a futuristic scenario using the most modern and impersonal architecture that Godard could find in mid-'60s Paris. A haggard private eye (Eddie Constantine) is sent to an ultramodern city run by a master computer, where his mission is to locate and rescue a scientist who is trapped there. As the story unfolds on Godard's strictly low-budget terms, the movie tackles a variety of topics such as the dehumanizing effect of technology, willful suppression of personality, saturation of commercial products, and, of course, the constant recollection of previous films through Godard's carefully chosen images. For most people Alphaville, like many of the director's films, will prove utterly baffling. For those inclined to dig deeper into Godard's artistic intentions, the words of critic Andrew Sarris (quoted from an essay that accompanies the Criterion Collection DVD) will ring true: "To understand and appreciate Alphaville is to understand Godard, and vice versa." --Jeff Shannon

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Godard's irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to kill the inventor of fascist computer Alpha 60. Criterion's edition of this seminal film features a new digital transfer.

Bob le Flambeur - Criterion Collection

A singular masterpiece that served as a clarion call for the coming French New Wave, this 1955 love letter to the city of Paris and the American urban noir films of the 1930s and 1940s is precisely the sort of cinematic consideration of genre influences that became the soul of early works by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (a filmmaker so enamored of American culture he adopted the name of Moby Dick's author), Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler) concerns a courtly gangster who plans on robbing a casino. But the film is less about the trappings of a conventional heist tale than about Melville's embrace of the form and his wistful weavings within it. The title character (Roger Duchesne) is almost a knight errant, with a visible gallantry and code of loyalty suggesting Melville's own dreams of film tradition, reinvented into something both faithful and new. A terrific experience and an important sliver of film history. --Tom Keogh

Suffused with wry humor, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication to lay the roadmap for the French New Wave. As the neon is extinguished for another dawn, an aging gambler navigates the treacherous world of pimps, moneymen, and naïve associates while plotting one last score-the heist of the Deauville casino. This underworld comedy of manners possesses all the formal beauty, finesse and treacherous allure of green baize.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang's all-but-unseen final film, a low-budget German thriller that resurrects (sort of) his legendary underworld genius Dr. Mabuse, is a flashback to Lang's early days of criminal conspiracies and wild, fast-paced adventures. A relentless police inspector (Gert Goldfinger Fröbe) targets the Nazi-built Hotel Luxor as the central connection in over a dozen murders and camps out in the lobby. Upstairs an American industrialist (played by the very German Peter Van Eyck) rescues a suicidal woman (Dawn Addams) from the ledge and falls in love, while in the basement a mysterious, club-footed character watches everything on an elaborate closed-circuit surveillance system. Rounding out the cast of shady characters are a jovial but nosy insurance salesman, a creepy blind psychic, and a particularly menacing Howard Vernon as an icy assassin with a silent rifle. The complicated, at times confusing plot is secondary to the web of blackmail, murder, secret identities, and incessant surveillance at the center of the conspiracy: everyone is spying on somebody and almost no one is as he or she seems. The generic sets and frankly cheep special effects are made up for with ingenious cinematic signatures (the opening assassination is a model of cool simplicity and striking suggestion), dark humor, a rich cast of vivid characters, and a driving pace that sends the film hurtling headlong toward a fatal climax. --Sean Axmaker

The last film ever made by the great Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, The Big Heat), this fascinating thriller combines elements of film noir, horror, and science fiction. Gert Frobe (Goldfinger) stars as police commissioner Kras, trying to uncover the sinister secret of the mysterious Hotel Luxor, ground zero for a massive crime wave. The crimes show all the hallmarks of evil genius Dr. Mabuse--but he died 30 years ago! Digitally restored from original studio negatives.

Zombie Lake

The most terrifying zombie massacre ever to come to the screen! In a small lakeside town in the French countryside, young women are disappearing without a trace. The superstitious locals blame "The Lake of Ghosts," but the town's mayor (Howard Vernon) seems reluctant, or powerless, to take any action. When another girl is found with her throat ripped out, a Paris reporter begins to uncover the deadly secrets of the lake and the dead, green-faced Nazis who are aroused to action!

From Hell to Victory

On August 24 1939 at a small French cafe six friends are about to go their separate ways. They vow to reunite on that day each year at the cafe. The film follows each of their lives: one begins work with the French resistance one joins the French commandos another is forced to join the Nazi army one becomes a flier and the two others are just simple officers.System Requirements:Run Time: 101 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/MILITARY & WAR Rating: PG UPC: 692865160335 Manufacturer No: T-1603

Marquis de Sade's Justine

The Girl in the Bikini

The Girl in the Bikini was filmed in 1962 along the Mediterranean and in Paris by director Will Rozier. In France the film was known as Manina la Fille Sans Voile and in the United Kingdom as The Lighthouse Keeper s Daughter . It was only the 18-year-old Bardot s second movie appearance but already her sensuality and screen presence is more than evident on the frames. The French were almost exclusively privy to viewing the film for many years until 1957 when And God Made Woman would transform Bardot into an international phenomenon.This DVD for the first time in REMASTERED EDITION presents a significant piece of cinematic history a visual document of the superstar before she achieved vast global fame.System Requirements:Run Time: 86 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 873820000334 Manufacturer No: SKDDV638902

Succubus

"Perversely naughty!" -Vincent Canby The New York TimesAt a chic nightclub for jaded jetsetters a simulated snuff performance is the main attraction and Lorna its leading lady is the obsession of men and women alike. Little do they realize that Lorna's Mephistophelean manager has transformed her into "the essence of evil-a devil on earth!" Soon the sensuous starlet's stage persona possesses her entirely thrusting Lorna into a hallucinatory world of sadomasochistic excess and drawing everyone she touches into her debaucherous delirium. Can anyone stop Lorna before her perverse stage show becomes a murderous reality?Starring the beautiful Janine Reynaud (Two Undercover Angels Kiss Me Monster) Jack Taylor (The Ghost Galleon The Ninth Gate) and Howard Vernon (The Awful Dr. Orloff Delicatessen) Jess Franco's (99 Women Vampyros Lesbos) Faustian fever dream provides the blue-print for the erotic horror that has become the infamous director's enduring legacy. Newly remastered from original vault materials Succubus features exclusive Extras including a revealing interview with Uncle Jess himself!System Requirements:Running Time: 79 MinutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: MATURE/ADULT Rating: NR UPC: 827058111799 Manufacturer No: 1117

Va-va-voomish Janine Reynaud (Kiss Me Monster) plays Lorna, the star of an underground nightclub's Grand Guignol theater who harbors a dark, haunting secret. She performs elaborate S/M fantasies nightly with a bound naked couple before she pretends to kill them, but she's losing her grip on reality. Dreams, flashbacks, and erotic fantasies blur with her waking world and pretty soon she's murdering her sexual partners for real... or is she? The answer may have something to do with a furtive stranger on the fringes of her consciousness and a plot to drive her insane, but it's hard to tell for sure. Sexploitation master Jess Franco creates an alienated but gorgeous vision of the decadent grotesque-chic world of European high society with oblique camera angles, distorted images, and disorienting editing, turning a kinky erotic thriller into a heady (if abstract) psychological fantasy. If it's ultimately too obscure to make sense, it's nonetheless an ambitious, intoxicatingly dreamy piece of Eurotrash cinema. German leading men Howard Vernon and Adrian Hoven lend their aristocratic bearings in costarring roles. --Sean Axmaker