The 400 Blows
1959
François Truffaut sensitively re-creates the trials of his own difficult childhood in The 400 Blows, the film that marked his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs and signaled the beginning of the French New Wave.
SYNOPSIS: Indispensable cinema classics from Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. For the devoted cinephile, these are the must-own fundamentals; for the novice film lover, this is precisely where to begin. For Volume II, we present six films from directors Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Anthony Asquith, Marcel Camus, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Collector’s set includes
Black Orpheus
1959
Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
Ikiru
1952
An aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer decides to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days. Considered by some to be Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievement, Ikiru offers a multifaceted look at a life through a prism of perspectives.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
1943
The passions and pitfalls of a lifetime in the military are dramatized in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s magnificent epic, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which follows the exploits of pristine British soldier Clive Candy (Roger Livesey).
Pygmalion
1938
Cranky Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) takes a bet that he can turn Cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) into a “proper lady” in a mere six months in this delightful comedy of bad manners, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.
La Strada
1954
Federico Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays Gelsomina, a naive girl sold into the employ of a brutal strongman in a traveling circus, in this poetic fable of love and cruelty, winner of the 1956 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Disc Features
- Pristine digital transfer
- Informative liner notes
- New and improved English subtitle translation