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Star Trek: The Original Series: Season One fencing maestro. Sandy’s no great shakes at (1966–67), Paramount/CBS, 2016, 24 hrs Crosscuts fencing, so it’s an unfair duel, but the PI lev- and 21 mins, $24.99 • Enhanced, remas- BRIEF DVD REVIEWS els the field with typical American ingenu- tered, and brighter and more ebullient ity, converting everything in the kingpin’s than ever, this 1960s masterpiece values GRANT TRACEY room to a weapon, tossing swords, spears, a liberal principles and the idea that every telephone, a trophy, whatever he can mus- life is important. When you treat people ter at the sadist. Here, Fuller deconstructs with respect and dignity and give them the masculinist aesthetic of “fair fighting” social and economic equality the world and returns us to his dogface days of World is aglow with hopeful optimism. Shows War II, where as a corporal in the Big Red like Naked City, The Defenders, and Rod One Fuller did whatever he had to to sur- Serling’s existential The Loner vive the meat grinder of battle. Fascinating weren’t full of dystopic, angsty realism, but and a lot of fun. character-driven people wanting love and the American Dream. values life, Carol (2015), Weinstein, 2016, 118 mins, peace, and understanding across cultures. $9.95 • The film opens with a shot of a James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is a great subway grate and the distant thud and leader: smart, strong, compassionate, and clack of a subway train, and then a man forcible when the need arises. He makes interrupts two women talking, the gist of moral decisions and apologizes after their conversation muted, unheard. In the haranguing a fellow crew member. Mr. midst of these opening credits, director (Leonard Nimoy) and his rational Todd Haynes gives a wonderful shout- logic provides a fun counterpoint, and out to the classic Brief Encounter (1945). throw in the emotionalism of Dr. McCoy There, a man has a muted conversation (DeForest Kelley) and you have a wonder- with a woman and an intruder, an- ful mix of storytelling gumbo. The early other woman, breaks their intimacy. We episodes are a little derivative of the prem- discover, through voiceover narration, ise to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as which “victims” are selected through that the man and woman are having an some kind of monster infiltrates the USS a draft lottery and ordered to commit illicit affair: he’s a married doctor; she’s a Enterprise and must be held in check: state-sanctioned suicide. Of course, Kirk married housewife. In Haynes’s film, set “”; “”; “Where No sets them straight. Mesmerizing, ground- in 1952 NYC, the women’s love is queer- Man Has Gone Before”; and “The Enemy breaking, and always worthy of revisiting, based, “illicit” in a different way, like the Within” all fit this mold. In the gritty this Star Trek looks better than ever and muted sounds of the subway train, their “No Man—” a friend of Kirk’s, through has me yearning for a return to counter- love is forced underground. Haynes clev- psionic power, becomes a vengeful god; in culture idealism. erly borrows Brief Encounter’s narrative ’s “The Enemy Within,” structuring, including a departing hand the Voyage formula is turned on its side Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972), on a woman’s shoulder, but takes it in a as Kirk bifurcates into two selves, one Olive Films, 2015, 127 mins, $24.95 • different direction. His story lacks the ineffectual, the other ruthless. Everyone Restored from 98 to 127 minutes, this first-personvoiceover , creating characters loves the episode that director’s cut of Samuel Fuller’s homage to at some distance from the spectator. Of- comes near the end of Season One, but the French New Wave is deserving of reap- ten we look at the two principles (Rooney my personal faves include the poignant praisal and rediscovery. Fuller’s tone here Mara and Cate Blanchett) from another “Miri” about children turning into is refreshingly postmodern, affirming and room, through a window, or are forced to radioactive pulp once they hit puberty; denying his past potboiler yarns, mixing shift our gaze beyond foreground clutter ’s two-part “Menag- crime noir with Godardian pop-art sensi- blocking their love. Haynes also disarms erie” where a debilitated man finds peace bilities, shifting from the absurdly comic to us with stillness, staying in the frame after living in a world of illusion; “Shore Leave,” the angsty sadistic. Sandy (Glenn Corbett, a character exits. This unusual staging a frolicking party on a strange planet star of Fuller’s earlier classic The Crimson places us in and out of the characters’ that personalizes into a series of Kimono [1959]) is an American private eye world simultaneously. They are presented cheap amusements, a kind of SF Coney in Germany, trying to uncover compro- to us as “other” and we are made to feel Island romp; and the antiwar “A Taste of mising photographs that could destroy “otherly” in the film’s stylistic choices, Armegeddon” where a 500-year conflict a US senator’s career. Sandy gets mixed strangely and wonderfully aligning us has gone virtual. In order to be more up with a sword-wielding kingpin and a with the characters’s discomfort of find- “civilized” and protect the infrastructures quirky femme fatale (Christa Lang, Fuller’s ing happiness in the repressive 1950s. of cities, computers play a war game in wife). The film’s highlight: Sandy fights the Mesmerizing and poetically haunting. ☐

Winter 2017 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 45