Glen Or Glenda (1953)

After 30 years of working in Hollywood as actor, screenwriter, director, producer and pulp novelist without artistic or financial success, Edward D. Wood, Jr., recently evicted and staying with his wife at a friend's North Hollywood apartment, his health broken by years of alcohol abuse, his films largely forgotten, died in 1978 at the age of 54. In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, called his Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the "worst movie ever made," and sparked a revival of interest itheradiatorn Wood's colorful and trsequencemic life and bizarre career in cinema; today he is probably one of the best known, and also most well-loved, makers of cult film. He has been the subject of essays, books, documentaries and even a Hollywood bio-pic directed by Tim Burton in 1994, Ed Wood.

While the Medved brothers' largely patronizing and derisive treatment of Wood definitely set the tone for much of Wood's posthumous reputation, the books and films mentioned above have done much to rehabilitate his status from a laughing-stock to cinema's quintessential outsider artist, someone whose devotion to movies was heartfelt and passionate enough to surmount lack of funding and contacts, public indifference and even his own lack of aesthetic discernment, craft, and sophistication: Wikipedia's article on Wood lists thirteen feature films directed by him, three television films, and seventeen produced scripts written by him. His drive and zeal, his love of his chosen medium, and his pride in his own work would do any artist credit, and his films have the power to delight, enchant and even inspire. They are uncynical, bewilderingly different from just about anything else, and above all personal, bearing witness to his own enthusiastic, ebullient and eccentric personality.

Glen Or Glenda was originally to be a film called I Changed My Sex, capitalizing on the notoriety of George Jorgenson, who became Christine Jorgenson after the world's first gender-reassignment surgery. When Wood agreed to producer George Weiss's offer to write and direct the project, Wood rapidly turned the bulk of the film into a docudrama about cross-dressing. For one of the major aspects of the Ed Wood legend was his cross-dressing: he was particularly drawn to angora sweaters -- the latter are so much associated with Wood that one of the above-mentioned documentaries was called Look Back In Angora.

The film opens in a rented room where Patrick, a man who has been arrested four times for wearing women's clothes in public, lies dead in his favorite outfit, a suicide who would rather die a happy woman than live as a miserable man. Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot), the detective in charge of the case, is puzzled by the young man's motivation for suicide and consults psychiatrist Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell), who tells him of one of his patients: Glen (played by Wood himself under the name "Daniel Davis"), a man with a compulsion to wear women's clothes. Glen agonizes over whether to tell his fiancée Barbara (Wood's then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller) about his "other self," Glenda, whom Glen becomes when in women's clothes. Dr. Alton also tells Inspector Warren of another case: Alan-Ann ("Tommy" Haynes), who decided to actually go ahead and have his gender reassigned, and who, after hormone therapy and many grueling surgeries, faces the world as a happy and attractive young woman. The detective and the doctor return to Glen's case and discuss how Glen and Barbara worked out the problem of "the other woman" with the help of true love and the understanding of modern medicine.

In essence, Glen Or Glenda is a film about "gender identity" decades before the term would be coined and defined through reams of abstruse academic and polemical prose. Dr. Alton takes pains to define what transvestitism is and is not: it is not homosexuality (and indeed it isn't: cross-dressers are overwhelmingly straight males who are very secure in their sexual orientation and masculinity), neither is it transexualism. Here it is difficult to tell how "accurate" Wood is in his assessment of men who want to be women: Alton refers to Alan-Ann as a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" who carries physical characteristics common to both genders. What is clear is Wood's open, tolerant, and non-judgmental attitude towards all the groups discussed: if one is only allowed to be what one feels one is, then one is happy. As a denizen of the Hollywood fringes, Wood knew all sorts of eccentrics and people whose lifestyles did not fit the molds of a repressive time. At a time when gender, class, and race were strictly defined and as immutable as the law of gravity, Wood's message was subversive and forward-thinking, and one that is more comprehensible and relevant today than he probably ever imagined.

Ahead of its time though it may be, and historically significant for its message, Glen Or Glenda is still an Ed Wood film, and the message of tolerance comes in Wood's own inimitable way. While Dr. Alton discusses the stories of these two patients, the comfort of women's clothes as opposed to men's, and the differences between transvestites, homosexuals and transsexuals, actor Bela Lugosi, whom Wood befriended and revered as a sort of touchstone of the old Hollywood films which inspired his own career, appears at intervals in a dark study-laboratory set and offers cryptic comments, strange metaphors, mysterious platitudes about modern life, and nursery rhymes. At one point he fiddles around with laboratory glassware, mixing vaporous potions with his test tubes and flasks; at others, characters such as Glen, Barbara and Alan-Ann enter and kneel before his chair and disappear with a wave of his hand. Often he utters his cryptic pronouncements while looking at crowded streets in split-screen, or superimposed over shots of stampeding bison. Billed as "Scientist" in the credits, Lugosi's role in the picture resembles nothing so much as a distant, god-like figure, observing his creation and offering his comments to the viewer, but never deigning to intervene or even to judge.

Meanwhile Dr. Alton compares present-day objections to transvestitism and transexualism with the objections that were supposedly once raised against automobiles and airplanes. Men and women say "If the Creator had intended us to be born [boys/girls] we would certainly have been born [boys/girls]," accompanied by extreme close ups of faces and ears. A close up of the radiator in Patrick's room accompanies the reading of Patrick-Patricia's suicide note, for no discernible reason (it has been reported that this random cutaway inspired the "woman in the radiator" sequence in David Lynch's Eraserhead). But the centerpiece of the film has to be the nightmare sequence, where Glen's fears of social ostracism and losing Barbara are played out. "Normal" men and women point and laugh, Glen alternately appears as himself and as Glenda, in a jumbled, half-struck version of the set that served as Barbara's apartment, where Glenda cannot lift a log that pins Barbara but Glen can. Glen and Barbara are married by a minister with the Devil (played by a man credited on IMDB as "Captain DeZita" and who also appears in the film as Glen's father) as witness. Suddenly a number of shots of scantily-clad women, dancing, posing or even in light bondage appear to blaring jazz music, with the faces of Glen, Glenda and Lugosi's character intercut at intervals (this last being added by producer Weiss after Wood completed the film). Glen awakens from his nightmare determined to come clean with Barbara, and after explaining everything to her, Barbara reels in shock... but slowly decides to accept him as he is, and in a moment that is as touching as it is ridiculous, removes her angora sweater and gives it to Glen.

God knows what George Weiss, whose name can be found associated with films from the forties to the sixties, from burlesque to poverty row noir to sexploitation, thought of what he received from Wood, but it was released because it had already been presold to theaters. However, from this point on, Wood became his own producer, going on to make films like Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1961) before he became unable to find financing. As the sixties wore on, he did more screenwriting, production assistance, and occasional acting on titles like The Violent Years (1956), Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), Shotgun Wedding (1963), and Orgy of the Dead (1965), this last a nudie-cutie with a horror theme directed by Stephen Apostolof that breathes pure Ed Wood in its cheapness, overblown dialogue and an appearance by television psychic and Plan 9 player Criswell. His only other appearance as a lead is in one softcore sexploitation film, The Love Feast (1969), which is also worth checking out. He also made at least one hardcore porn movie, again with a horror theme, Necromania (1971). Screenwriting and pulp writing occupied his last years.

(My own library contains three titles published by Four Walls Eight Windows in the late nineties: Killer In Drag and Death of a Transvestite, and his memoir, Hollywood Rat Race. Feral House had reprinted a number of his other titles, but have suspended publication and sales of their Wood titles as of late last year. The Ed Wood article at Wikipedia, linked above, explains why.)

Dolores Fuller (b. 1923) appeared in two other Wood films: Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster, after which their relationship ended. According to the IMDB, She went on into the music business, writing songs for Elvis Presley, and started a record label, Dee Dee Records, where she was instrumental in the careers of Johnny Rivers and Tanya Tucker. She also has frequently appeared at showbiz conventions, often with the angora sweater she wore in her Wood films. Since 2003 she has been living in Las Vegas.

Lyle Talbot (1902-1996), an actor of some ability, performed in A and B pictures, often as a heavy. He also appeared in Plan 9 as a general. A busy, prolific actor, his career in films and television lasted from the early 30s to the 50s. Timothy Farrell (1922-1989), who also appeared in Jail Bait, was an actor of less ability, with a stone face matching his monotonal delivery, but memorable to exploitation fans in such films as Girl Gang (1954) and Dance Hall Racket (1955), a film directed by Phil Tucker (Robot Monster) and written by Lenny Bruce, who also plays Farrell's violence prone henchman.

I viewed Glen Or Glenda on a 2000 Image Entertainment DVD, which contains the original theatrical release version and a trailer. Another version, which I viewed some years ago on VHS, contains a longer cut including some footage of Glen being approached by a homosexual man.

Postscript: 5-14-11: The Los Angeles Times reported that Dolores Fuller passed away at her home in Las Vegas on May 9 at the age of 88. She is survived by husband, film historian Philip Chamberlin, a son, three grandchildren, and a number of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren, to all of whom we send our condolences and best wishes.

Branded To Kill (1967)

Elliptical, surreal, and absurdist, Branded To Kill is an assassin film stripped down to the essentials and twisted to near-unrecognizability as a genre film. Although the plot is actually very simple (when an assassin botches a job by accidentally killing a bystander rather than his target, he is marked for death by his employers), the film takes more than one viewing to really take in, and more viewings only underline the weirdness of the film that ended director Seijun Suzuki's career at Nikkatsu.

Goro Hanada, played by Nikkatsu action stalwart Jo Shishido, is known as "Number 3," his ranking among assassins. Just back from vacation with a new bride in tow, he is in need of money and takes on a job picking up a man (Koji Nanbara) and keeping him protected while delivering him to his destination. Having finished the job, his car breaks down and his is picked up by a mysterious, death-obsessed woman, Misako (Annu Mari), who returns with a proposition for the fatally botched hit. Now a marked man, he is nearly killed by his wife, who is having an affair with his superior Yabuhara (Isao Tamagawa), and then Misako, with whom Hanada has fallen in love, attempts to kill him, hoping to die herself in the process. He escapes, as he does from subsequent setups against his opposite numbers in the organization, until he finally faces the Phantom No. 1, the master assassin whom no one has seen.

Born in 1923, Seijun Suzuki first learned the ropes of cinema production at Shochiku in the late forties after taking an exam to become an assistant director, but by the early fifties, the long lines of ADs waithing to direct their first films at Shochiku left Suzuki with few prospects for career advancement with that company. Nikkatsu, to this day Japan's oldest existing film company, had lost its film production unit in the early forties in a government-mandated consolidation of the film industry, but in the early fifties the domestic market was favorable enough for Nikkatsu to seriously consider starting up film production again. The career tracks were faster and the pay was better, so Suzuki went over to Nikkatsu and by 1956, he was directing films.

Suzuki hit on his signature style in 1963 with Youth of the Beast: a mix of slick, colorful visuals and strange juxtapositions, frequently undercutting tragedy with black humor. But he always considered himself a director of program pictures; he was assigned his scripts and his stars, and his stated aims were always to make entertainment, not art. In pictures such as Gate Of Flesh (1964, which I discussed in these pages), Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy (both 1966), he beguiled the boredom of making by-the-numbers genre pictures by experimenting with color, framing and continuity. Suzuki had an intuitive grasp of the artificiality of narrative film without all the critical and aesthetic baggage that usually goes with such insights. He realized that as long as a film cut together, all sorts of liberties could be taken with continuity and logic and the results could still be interesting. Branded To Kill shows how many of the conventional rules of creating a coherent and realistic story-world could be ignored while still creating an entertaining film, and Suzuki accomplishes this without being programmatic or theoretical.

The violence in action films, compared with real life, is frequently fanciful: hundreds of rounds of ammunition are expended without hitting anyone, fist-fights don't result in broken noses, cheekbones, jaws or teeth (or knuckles, for that matter), swordfights in Japanese films result in aerosol sprays of blood; in the finale of Brian De Palma's Scarface, Al Pacino practically stops his own weight in hot lead, shooting all the while from an incredibly heavy-looking machine gun, before he finally succumbs. But Branded To Kill dares to be preposterous: Hanada kills one target by shooting him between railroad cars from a billboard advertising cigarette lighters, timing it so that he gets the fatal shot when the giant lighter's lid hinges up; he kills another target by shooting him in the head through the drain-pipe of a sink (a little piece of business Jim Jarmusch paid homage to in his film Ghost Dog), and escapes from another hit by floating away on a balloon. He stops one pistol shot with a belt buckle, and later a certainly fatal shot to the head with one of Misako's plastic hairbands.

Thus Suzuki deftly undercuts the pretensions of the action genre to serious dramatics, showing its relation to comedy and even farce, which is one thing that might have irritated Nikkatsu studio head Kyusaku Hori. But Suzuki doesn't stop there; one of Hanada's peculiar pleasures is the smell of cooked rice, a pleasure bordering on fetishism. Other motifs are rain, birds, and dead butterflies and moths, all associated with Misako, a death-obsessed woman who only yields to Hanada's advances when she is convinced that Hanada will kill her. A quasi-mythological creature (Hanada reaches for her in one scene and comes away with a handful of mashed-up moths), Misako is one of the creepiest and weirdest femmes fatales in cinema, using the presence of Annu Mari (whose exotic looks reportedly derive from mixed Japanese-Indian parentage) to great effect. There is also the mystery of the top-ranked killer, "Phantom Number One" who in the final act engages with Hanada in a cat-and-mouse game to end all cat-and-mouse games. After an initial siege which keeps Hanada holed up in his high-rise apartment, the two spend a day or so together in the apartment under an uneasy truce where they sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom together (a sequence which again turns the typical matching-of-wits of two killers into hilarious farce as Number One sleeps with his eyes open and urinates in his pants in order to keep his vigil on his target) until the finale in a boxing stadium. Although Number One is shown doing, well, number one, he is also a character who is apparently everywhere and sees everything.

Today, Branded To Kill is considered Seijun Suzuki's masterpiece and is often compared to the films of David Lynch, a filmmaker frequently accused of incomprehensibility on his own part, and who uses genre clichés to suit himself in an intuitive and subversive fashion. But in 1967, Suzuki was not an "artiste," but a contract director at a studio known for youth-oriented action films that was also struggling to stay afloat in a film market losing audiences in droves to television. Suzuki remarked in 1997 that by the time he did Gate of Flesh, he was being warned by the company just about every time he directed a new picture, and Branded To Kill was the last straw. He was fired by Nikkatsu, and Kyusaku Hori was quoted as saying that Suzuki's pictures did not make money, and did not make sense (though Nikkatsu did release the picture more or less as delivered to the studio). There was some outcry from students, intellectuals and film fans to Suzuki's dismissal, but to no avail. Suzuki responded by taking the studio to court for breach of contract, and eventually prevailed, though it took years and left him blacklisted by the industry for ten years.

When Suzuki returned to filmmaking, it was as an independent. He made Tale of Sorrow and Sadness in 1977, and the three films known as the "Taisho Trilogy" (1979-91): Zigeunerweisen, Heat Haze Theater and Yumeji. Suzuki's post-Nikkatsu films have been praised by critics, but are also, from what little I have been able to see or read of them, very different from his earlier periods, going much further in the direction of strainge imagery and narrative incoherence. In 2001 he revisited -- sort of -- his earlier film and made Pistol Opera, which returns -- again, sort of -- to the universe of Branded To Kill, in which the current Number 3 killer, played by Makiko Esumi (known to aficionados of more serious Japanese cinema from Hirokazu Kore'eda's Maborosi) must run the gauntlet of even more eccentric ranked assassins and meets a figure of death in the form of a cute and lovable little girl, as well as the old Number 3 -- now a retired and foolish old fart with an inflated sense of his own importance (but alas, not played by Jo Shishido). Bringing together his earlier visions of action cinema with his later work in nonsensical surreal art film, Pistol Opera makes his earlier film look almost normal. Viewers less interested than I am in the oeuvre of Seijun Suzuki, or who might have less of a penchant for the cascading torrents of surreal eye-candy, but who just like to watch beautiful, elegant and deadly East Asian femmes fatales on occasion (and I think that includes most of us) might still enjoy this picture for Esumi's performance.

I viewed Branded To Kill on the 1999 Criterion Collection DVD, which includes an interview with the director from that time, as well as a gallery of film posters from the collection of musician John Zorn, who also writes a short introduction to the film in the package's booklet. Those who are interested may also see Pistol Opera on DVD from Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock label.

Rollerball (1975)

I think of Hollywood in the seventies as a sort of "silver age" for American cinema after the "golden age" of the Hollywood studio-system years (the 20s to the early 50s). An influx of young, film-school-trained talent, new influences from Europe and the independent film scene, and an admirable consistency in craft, style and intelligence characterizes many films in the late sixties and the first half of the seventies (Point Blank, Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.), and the congenial environment for new ideas and approaches benefited many middle-of-the-road films as well, such as the one we are looking at today. It was also a fertile time for science-fiction films, as titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, Westworld, Soylent Green, THX-1138, and The Andromeda Strain injected social commentary into a view of the future that went beyond the space-suited clichés of the space-opera.

In 2018, corporations have replaced nation-states in a world order without war, poverty, or crime, and the global masses thrill to a spectator sport called rollerball, where two teams, on skates and motorbikes, vie for possession of a heavy steel ball shot onto the sharply-inclined circular track, attempting to get the ball into the opposing goal. The play is fast, exciting -- and violent: players can be hurt, crippled or killed in the normal course of play, which is part of the appeal for the game's fans. One of the world's top rollerball teams is the Houston team, sponsored by the Energy corporation and led by captain Jonathan E. (James Caan), who is the sport's longest-lived and most successful player. After a victory over Madrid, Jonathan is taken aside by Energy executive Bartholomew (John Houseman) and asked, quietly but firmly, to retire. For rollerball has an important social function: it is not a game in which individuals are supposed to matter, but a lesson in group effort over individual ambition, and Jonathan's success and fame are running counter to the intentions of the game. Jonathan, not comprehending why he should retire when he and his team are at the top of their game, refuses. While he refuses to budge and attempts to find out what he can on the corporate social order and how decisions are made, rule changes are announced, making the game much more dangerous and it becomes obvious to Jonathan that he may not leave the field alive.

Rollerball was based on a short story, "The Rollerball Murders," by William Harrison, who in his career as a professor at the University of Arkansas was engaged in research on management methods at multinational corporations, private entities many of which were dwarfing political states in economic size and power, and who conceived his story while watching the crowd at a university basketball game. Director Norman Jewison was intrigued by the story and paid Harrison for the film rights to it and to write a screenplay. In addition to the phenomenon of giant transnational corporations, Harrison and Jewison were also observing the increasing popularity of televised spectator sports and their escalating emphasis on violence, conflict, and warlike behavior on the playing field and among fans. American football, as well as ice hockey (a sport which the Canadian Jewison grew up on and came to regard with increasing ambivalence), were obvious models for rollerball, but there was also the phenomenon in Europe and especially the UK, where Jewison spent a lot of time, of soccer hooliganism, in which fans of rival clubs engaged in pitched battles in the stands and outside the arena. Another obvious comparison would be Roman gladiatorial games, the proverbial example of violence being used to placate the masses.

The two elements of Rollerball's premise -- multinational corporations and the exploitation of violence in mass media -- give the film a solid footing and a prescience which can be seen today, when the multinationals of Harrison's time have become even bigger and more powerful and popular entertainment has become even more atavistic and focused on violence. The film's visual impressions of the future, while dated in details (which comes with the territory: all films set in the future show their age at one point or another) still look great: Jewison's view of the future (designed by production designer John Box) recalls Kubrick's approach in his futuristic films 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with their chilly formalism -- combined in the latter with visceral violence and deft editing. Like Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, Jewison chose his locations carefully, heading to Munich where the world's largest circular sports stadium was built for cycling events at the 1972 Olympics, and where the headquarters of BMW was located. For Jonathan's trip to Geneva to consult with the world's most advanced computer, Zero, on corporate society, the old League of Nations building located there was used.

Most memorable are the game sequences, so absorbing and yet appalling that Jewison was predictably accused of what the film opposes, exploiting violence. The uniforms, based on the gear for American football -- helmets and protective pads under numbered jerseys -- were familiar to American audiences, yet subtly alienated by the alterations: the lack of mascots or logos, the nasty-looking studs on the gloves and the helmets, and the futuristic looking font of the numbers on the jerseys. The game itself was designed by Harrison and Jewison and refined by the stunt team in rehearsal, who apparently enjoyed the game so much they played it even when the cameras weren't rolling (a man in Texas who saw the film reportedly expressed interest in starting a real rollerball league). Director of cinematography Douglas Slocombe and editor Anthony Gibbs keep the action fast and furious, while the sound design prefigures the pounding, bass-heavy presentation of more recent cinema films. The violence is jarring but mostly bloodless in the hygienic style of much Hollywood violence -- a real rollerball game would undoubtedly be much bloodier.

Offsetting the film's strong concepts and the execution of its game scenes is a frequently plodding and heavy-handed narrative. Harrison and Jewison have constructed such a difficult labyrinth for their characters that Jonathan cannot form a coherent understanding of the nature of the society that he lives in. It's an age when books are nearly extinct as the world's libraries go through a process of being "transcribed" and "summarized" into electronic form: in essence, rewritten and destroyed. The Geneva sequence shows something of this process as the head librarian (Ralph Richardson in one of the film's real treats, by turns comical, surreal, and pathetic) takes him to see Zero, the central computer, while chatting to him offhandedly about that morning's loss of the entire 13th century: "just Dante and a few corrupt popes ... poor old 13th century." Living memories of pre-corporate society are vague and selective, like those of his older friend and trainer Cletus (Moses Gunn). So Jonathan cannot develop the knowledge which might lead to a coherent opposition. His personal grievances against the corporations -- the losses of his wife Ella (Maud Adams) to an executive who wanted her and used his privileges to get her, and of his friend and teammate Moonpie (John Beck), brain dead after a blow to the head on the track in Tokyo -- are classic Hollywood, in the tradition of the movie cop who only gets serious about going after the bad guys when they do something to his wife, family or worst of all, his partner.

Therefore Jonathan's main motivation ends up being, in essence, "you're not the boss of me," which leaves his defiance of the system hollow and futile, and the much-vaunted pro-individualist message of the film rather silly. And it seems rather silly of Bartholomew and his fellow executives not to see that Jonathan's success and fame aid their cause in the long run rather than threaten it, as we see in an era of disposable cults of personality, and the cultivation of "individuality" through the consumption of dress, music and politics. They (Bartholomew and his cronies, that is) have forgotten that while their drama has played out, the masses who chant Jonathan's name from the stands are still as ignorant and passive as when it began.

Further notes on the film:

• One of the film's nods to Kubrick is its classical music soundtrack by André Previn, who conducted the orchestral selections with the London Symphony Orchestra, played the organ music (the pregame's corporate anthems and hymns, as well as J. S. Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor for the title sequence), and also came up with the futuristic music (a sort of soul groove with Moog flourishes) for the party sequence which ends with the guests recklessly setting fire to trees with a flare-gun (an indictment of the decadence and indifference of the people for whom this society is run). Unfortunately the film depends heavily on Tomasso Albinoni's mawkish Adagio for Strings at the moments when it wants to really tug on the viewer's emotions, and overall lacks Kubrick's gift for choosing music for his films that was not only apposite thematically but also fresh and unexpected.

• Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan in 2002, an awful film gutted of the original's intellectual content, elegant design and even its futuristic setting, and symptomatic of the fetish for recycling old material that has gripped Hollywood in recent years.

• James Caan (b. 1939), a longtime sports and rodeo enthusiast off the set, began in films in 1963 with a bit part in Irma La Douce, but his career only took off with his appearance as Sonny Corleone in 1972's The Godfather. His star burned brightly during the seventies, dimmed in the eighties, but revived somewhat in the nineties as he began to specialize in character roles.

• John Houseman (1902-1988) was born in Bucharest to an Alsatian father and an English mother and turned to writing and the theater in the thirties, collaborating with Orson Welles on many theater projects, most famously the Mercury Theater, which spun off into radio projects and finally Citizen Kane (1941), a project over which the two men quarrelled and split. After the war he produced many distinguished films while working as producer and director for many New York stage productions and also teaching theater at Vassar. He is best known for his creation of the redoubtable Professor Kingsfield in the law-school drama The Paper Chase (1973) a role he reprised on television in the seventies and eighties. His combination of gentility, aristocratic bearing, and daunting intellectualism was used to great effect in a series of commercials for an investment firm I remember well in which he concludes "We make money the old-fashioned way ... we earn it."

• The filmography of Norman Jewison (b. 1926) is a mixed bag, ranging from romantic comedies to musicals to satire to serious dramas, though he is reputed a craftsman whatever the value of any particular project. Born in Toronto, he began his career in British, then Canadian, then American television before turning to feature films. His films include Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! (1966), Fiddler On The Roof (1971), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), ... And Justice For All (1979), and Agnes Of God (1985).

I viewed Rollerball on a 1998 double-sided DVD release from MGM Home Entertainment, containing a letterboxed wide-screen version and a pan-and-scan version, featuring dialogue and subtitles in English, French and Spanish, commentary track by Norman Jewison, a featurette made at the time about the film (what we would now call an EPK or electronic press kit), an illustrated booklet, and an "exciting interactive rollergame" which turns out to involve rearranging scrambled scenes from the film into their original order ( ... fun). No trailers, teasers or stills, but what the hell; it was cheap. I understand there have since been DVD re-releases of the film which contain more material, including a commentary track by screenwriter William Harrison.