Forgotten Films: High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987)

It pains me to no end to call Gillian Armstrong's High Tide a "forgotten" film. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, it was anything but. It was the film people pointed to when talking about Judy Davis's greatness as an actress. It was also the film people pointed to when talking about the brilliance of its director, a woman who would go on to make a number of other masterpieces and near-masterpieces, including Little Women, Last Days of Chez Nous, and Oscar & Lucinda. (Armstrong and Davis had also collaborated on the excellent My Brilliant Career earlier in their careers, a film that put both of them on the map.) But slowly, this staggering, heartbreaking tale of a mother and daughter reuniting started to vanish from viewers' radars. It has never had a proper DVD release in the U.S. -- even in Australia, it was released in a crappy pan & scan edition that is now out of print -- so maybe there were some rights issues that prevented its gaining a wider audience. (It's a gorgeous film, so presentation matters a great deal.) The good news, however, is that it's currently available on Netflix streaming, in a pretty good-looking version, so you could watch it right this very minute if you so wanted.

Forgotten Films: Gone to Earth (aka The Wild Heart) (Michael Powell, 1950)

To learn more about the Forgotten Films project, go here.

The legendary filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, aka “The Archers,” made Gone to Earth at the height of their popularity – they had just come off iconic films like The Red Shoes, and Black Narcissus – but its somewhat catastrophic reception would mark the beginning of their career decline. (Subsequent films, such as Oh, Rosalinda! and Battle of the River Plate, would not duplicate their earlier successes.) It didn’t help, of course, that the film never quite worked out production-wise: The project was a collaboration with the legendary producer David O. Selznick, who would later cut his own version of the film and release it in the US. (More on that later.) Any way you look at it, these troubles are a dispiriting legacy for such a beautiful and heart-wrenching film.

Forgotten Films: 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)

(For an explanation of the Forgotten Films project, go here.)

You’d think that John Ford’s final narrative film would have greater visibility -- especially since a number of influential film writers consider it to be one of the director’s finest. But it’s very hard to see, with no DVD of it available. (TCM does show it from time to time, and there was a widescreen laserdisc from MGM available back in the 90s.) It was a financial disaster upon its release, relegated to the bottom half of a double bill with The Money Trap -- this despite the fact that many influential critics and filmmakers of the 1960s were at that moment naming  Ford as one of their greatest influences. Why, then, the widespread indifference to 7 Women? Perhaps because it seems, on its surface, such a departure from the prototypical Ford film.

Forgotten Films: The Stranger (Luchino Visconti, 1967)

(For an explanation of the Forgotten Films project, go here.)

Forgive me for a second if this gets a bit personal. (Don’t worry -- not that personal.)

The other day, while suffering from a rather grotesque bout of food-poisoning, I found myself thinking back to the last time I’d been similarly laid low. And, amazingly, I could remember the exact date: I'm pretty sure it was November 27, 1997. Newly returned from nearly a year in Russia, I had just cooked myself a surprisingly delicious Thanksgiving meal of Georgian chakhokhbili and was now suffering from the even-more-surprising and previously unbeknownst-to-me fact that the chicken had been thawed and refrozen before I’d gotten to it. Worse: The following day MoMA was having a very rare screening of Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger, a film I’d been trying desperately to see since the age of thirteen, and the reason I'd chosen to remain in New York during Thanksgiving in the first place.

Forgotten Films: Our Mother's House (Jack Clayton, 1967)

Years ago, when I was writing (and later editing) Nerve.com’s now-defunct film blog The Screengrab, I introduced a regular feature that proved to be quite popular, focusing on films that were, for one reason or another, forgotten – that is to say, unseen, under-discussed, under-appreciated. Happily, some of the films I featured in the series have since become significantly more appreciated. I did a huge piece on Alex Cox’s Walker in mid-2006, and even Cox himself seemed surprised at the time that there were people out there who remembered his film and considered it a masterpiece; now, the film is available in a lovely Criterion edition, go figure.

Screengrab is long gone; not even its leaf-strewn sarcophagus appears to be cached anymore. So I hope the Nerve folks won’t mind if I reinstate that feature here and, to kick things off, revisit one of the forgotten films I felt most strongly about, Jack Clayton’s masterpiece, Our Mother’s House, since it is among my absolute favorite films of all time and is still very, very hard to find. (Ahem, Criterion…or, really, anybody.) So here goes nothing.