Norman Mailer and the Criterion Collection

Maidstone and Other Films By Norman Mailer New York: The Criterion Collection, 2012 $31.96 Many words have been used to describe the three films that Norman Mailer directed in the 1960s, but "accessible" has never been one of them. Historically, Mailer's films have more often been talked about than actually viewed, as attested by the publication of his script to the rarely screened Maidstone (1970). To the extent that they have surfaced on home video, it has largely been in the form of poor quality bootlegs marred by weak visual definition and bad audio, the sad result of inferior transfers that have been copied and recopied ad infinitum. Given the legal limbo in which these versions existed, they were also hard to find, save for excised clips posted on YouTube, where one could easily view Maidstone's climax that features Mailer, Rip Torn, and a hammer. Here was access, but of a type that unfairly removed a famous scene from a less famous film, thus placing emphasis on a segment best understood as part of the greater whole. In January 2007, the French company Cinemalta released Coffret Norman Mailer (Trois Films Underground de Norman Mailer), a DVD set featuring all three of Mailer's early films: Wild 90 (1967), Beyond the Law (1968), and Maidstone; the same company also released each of them individually. While these transfers easily bested the American VHS and DVD-R bootlegs (and also included an oncamera interview with Mailer), they were available only in Europe on Region 2. They also featured subtitles, a minor distraction for English-speaking audiences. That said, many of us applauded Cinemalta for their support of Mailer's cinema at a time when it was being ignored in America. Fortunately, the Criterion Collection has rectified all of these issues by releasing the same three films in their Eclipse Series, which promotes itself as a "selection of lost, forgotten, or overlooked classics in simple, affordable editions." Here Mailer's directorial filmography (save for Tough Guys Don't Dance of 1987) appears in a streamlined, two-disc DVD set entitled Maidstone and Other Films by Norman Mailer. The first disc pairs Wild 90 and Beyond the Law. While Mailer himself admitted that Wild 90 was amateurish, he was also correct in believing it possessed merit, both intrinsic and in terms of its influence on his future work. The film finds three "Maf Boys" (one portrayed by Mailer) holed up in a Brooklyn apartment to avoid being arrested or killed. Tedium begets tedium, with the audience feeling much of the same sense of boredom and entrapment as the film's characters for 81 minutes of running time that does not exactly run or even sprint. The quality of the acting and dialogue vary greatly, so much so that it is easy to understand the negative responses it has received in the past. However, Wild 90 allowed Mailer to initiate his pursuit of a particular breed of onscreen "authenticity," one that he captured to some degree thanks to the film's use of handheld camera and existing lighting. Gritty and raw, Wild 90 was an experiment, and deserves to be understood as such. At approximately 98 minutes, Beyond the Law reveals a far more developed cinematic methodology. Increasingly comfortable with prevailing documentary aesthetics of the period, Mailer again relied upon handheld camera and natural lighting, but experimented further in his attempt to draw simultaneous attention to the film's fictional qualities, ranging from wipe transitions to a careful use of narrative flashbacks. The interplay between fact and fiction suits a storyline in which lawmen and lawbreakers swim in the same dirty water. Serving these goals is a far more consistent level of acting quality than seen in Wild 90, including from Mailer himself, who plays an Irish cop. Disc Two of Criterion's set features Maidstone, Mailer's most fully realized and important film, in which he portrays a film director who considers a bid for the presidency. …