DVD reviews: The Landlord | Who Dares Wins

By Alistair Harkness
Published on 08/10/2012 00:00

HAL Ashby’s debut film The Landlord hasn’t had quite the same lasting impact as more celebrated efforts such as Shampoo, Harold & Maude or The Last Detail, but it’s ripe for rediscovery.

The Landlord

StudioCanal, £15.99

First released in 1970, this social comedy captured the changing mood of late 1960s America and reflected the then-nascent New Hollywood’s brief ability to be relevant, daring and experimental. It also featured a revelatory performance from Beau Bridges that makes me wonder why his career didn’t flourish in quite the same way as that of his younger brother Jeff (who starred in Ashby’s final film, 8 Million Ways to Die). Bridges plays Elgar, a trust-fund kid from a wealthy New York family whose need to strike out on his own sees him purchasing a Brooklyn tenement slum. His plan is to turn it into an urban palace for himself; instead, as he becomes more and more involved with his black tenants, his gentrification plans gradually take a back seat to his innate need to rebel. What’s striking about The Landlord is the way in which Ashby, already an Academy Award-winning editor by this point, fluidly flits between broad satire, nuanced character work and poignant drama: this is a film that not only celebrates the spirit of the counterculture while recognising its limitations, it takes sideswipes at Nixon’s America and the country’s poor race relations without bashing us over the head with polemic.

Who Dares Wins

Arrow, £19.99

Coming from the opposite political point of view, Who Dares Wins makes its debut on Blu-Ray and still feels as outrageously right-wing as it did when first released in Thatcher’s Britain in 1982. It’s also still kind of amazing. Inspired by the Iranian Embassy siege of 1980, it stars The Professionals’ Lewis Collins as a hardnut SAS officer kicked out of his unit in order to infiltrate anti-nuke terrorists – led by Judy Davis – whose crazy plan to get their point across involves holding a bunch of politicians hostage until a nuclear device is dropped on Scotland. Davis (who gives a proper performance) disowned the film, and Lewis’s movie career sadly never took off (his subsequent Bond audition was apparently deemed too aggressive), but it’s still incredibly watchable and the final SAS attack – soundtracked by Roy Budd’s wah-wah inflected score – makes for ten of the best minutes in British cinema. And I’m only half-joking about that.

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