On Blu-Ray - David Hare waxes lyrical about UGETSU (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1953) and DONOVAN'S REEF (John Ford, USA, 1962)

This week’s haul after a week of delays.

Well, Ford and Mizo were contemporaries. And among the greatest masters. But their commonality probably ends there.

Picking up again on Ford’s madcap reverie after decades of shit video incarnations is to join in this most sublime meditation of paradise on earth. If there’s any closeness in mood with Mizo generally, it’s perhaps the last few seconds’ throwaway giggle from Tanaka’s prostitute, Oharu as she recalls her great beloved and her entire life and everything else in Mizo’s incomparable filmography as she giggles and totters down the street, beyond focus and forever into eternity, as Sarris used to say.

These two discs are beyond catnip for the dedicated collector. The source for Criterion’s Ugetsu is the 2017 Film/Foundation et al 4K scan from two prime 35 elements (but no existing o-neg.) Criterion’s Blu from that year is still good but the makeover for 4K and limited HDR gives the image a nudge further into the sublime, like Oharu’s giggle.

The Ford was previously around in very blah PAL discs taken seemingly from dog-eared faded exhibition prints. The new Kino which unusually includes a Blu disc as well as the UHD is a brand new scan of the o-neg and what can only be described as a totally flawless new encode following a prime Technicolor IB for colour reference, down to the superbly rendered grain field. There are shades of green in this vision of Fordian madcap paradise that defy description. IIn saying this I agree with my colleague Mark Gross this is one the five or six greatest colour films ever made.

What more can I say about a Ford movie in which old hands from his long career turn up and parody themselves to the balcony - Dorothy Lamour, John Wayne, Cesar Romero and Mike Mazurki ( who three short years later will play off his “Tunga Khan” against the hard drinking Ann Bancroft/“Doctor Cartwright” in Ford's farewell picture, Seven Women.

Go out and buy, earthlings and engage yourselves with two visions of Paradise and Paradise apprehended.