In The Middle Of Winter, Hope Springs Eternal
BLU-RAYS: KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS
Early February finds Kino Lorber Studio Classics releasing two of Bob...
The Village Detective: a song cycle tells of a mysterious canister of 35mm movie film rescued from the ocean floor by the crew of an Icelandic fishing vessel. The decades-submerged celluloid within proved to be four reels of a 1969 Soviet crime-comedy called The Village Detective (Derevensky detektiv). Having been down there for years, the film itself had taken on all kinds of peculiar chemical degradations. Although The Village Detective, directed by Ivan Lukinsky, is not considered any kind of rare or lost film, the physical damage to this print puts its discovery right in the wheelhouse of experimental documentarian Bill Morrison.
The many musical performances, both in-world and integrated, are good (particularly a tightly coordinated split screen number) and the music itself is even better. Director/producer Val Guest, for all his potshots taken at the coffee shop “rebellion” of the youth set, does a formidable of depicting the budding scene and the neon-y, urban and modernized world surrounding it. The film is never better than when the kids get to groovin’ on the dance floor. It’s the newfangled widescreen frame a-hoppin’ and a-boppin’. Clearly, the espresso- or, er, “expresso”- is freely flowing!
