Criterion has announced June street dates for They Live By Night (1948), The Lodger (1927) and Ugetsu (1954) with all three films making their Blu debut.
They Live By Night, originally dropped in 2007 from Warner as a double feature with its 1950 companion Side Street, is receiving its introduction into the Criterion Collection. The Lodger was released on DVD via MGM in 2009. Ugetsu was initially released via Criterion in 2005.
Each Blu will be single-disc while The Lodger and Ugetsu's DVDs will be 2-disc sets.
Bonus features are planned to accompany each disc (below).
Ugetsu arrives on June 6th, They Live By Night on June 13th and The Lodger on June 27th.
They Live By Night
Legendary director Nicholas Ray began his career with this lyrical film noir, the first in a series of existential genre films overflowing with sympathy for America's outcasts and underdogs.
When the wide-eyed fugitive Bowie (Farley Granger), having broken out of prison with some bank robbers, meets the innocent Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell), each recognizes something in the other that no one else ever has. The young lovers envision a new, decent life together, but as they flee the cops and contend with Bowie's fellow outlaws, who aren't about to let him go straight, they realize there's nowhere left to run.
Ray brought an outsider's sensibility honed in the theater to this debut, using revolutionary camera techniques and naturalistic performances to craft a profoundly romantic crime drama that paved the way for decades of lovers-on-the-run thrillers to come.
BONUS FEATURES:
The Lodger
With his third feature film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, Alfred Hitchcock took a major step toward greatness and made what he would come to consider his true directorial debut. This haunting silent thriller tells the tale of a mysterious young man (matinee idol Ivor Novello) who takes up residence at a London boardinghouse, just as a killer who preys on blonde women, known as the Avenger, descends upon the city.
The film is animated by the palpable energy of a young stylist at play, decisively establishing the director's formal and thematic obsessions. In this edition, The Lodger is accompanied by Downhill, another 1927 silent exploration of Hitchcock's 'wrong man' trope, also headlined by Novello-making for a double feature that reveals the great master of the macabre as he was just coming into his own.
BONUS FEATURES:
Ugetsu
Having refined his craft in the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi was an elder statesman of Japanese cinema-fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other younger directors-by the time he made Ugetsu. And with this exquisite ghost story, a fatalistic wartime tragedy derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, he created a touchstone of his art, his long takes and sweeping camera guiding the viewer through a delirious narrative about two villagers whose pursuit of fame and fortune leads them far astray from their loyal wives. Moving between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, Ugetsu reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men.
BONUS FEATURES: