Last Embrace: Limited Edition (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Jul 31, 2024
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Jonathan DemmeRelease Date(s)
1979 (July 30, 2024)Studio(s)
United Artists (Cinématographe/Vinegar Syndrome)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Jonathan Demme was a filmmaker who had a reputation for quirkiness that was due in part to the fact that he made his name with offbeat character studies like Citizens Band (aka Handle with Care), Melvin and Howard, and Something Wild. Yet his quirkiness wasn’t limited to the style and personality that he brought to his best films; it was also because of his disparate choice of subject matter. Demme didn’t feel constrained by genre, and he was perfectly happy working with any kind of material. He got his start making low budget exploitation movies for Roger Corman and moved from that into the character studies that helped to build his reputation, but all of that was still just a small taste of what he would assay before his unfortunate death in 2017. He made extraordinary concert documentaries like Stop Making Sense and Swimming to Cambodia; sober dramas like Philadelphia and Beloved; thrillers like his remake of The Manchurian Candidate; and outright horror like The Silence of the Lambs. (Make no mistake: the latter is indeed a horror movie, and don’t let the five Academy Awards that it took home fool you into thinking otherwise.)
Yet even among the various thrillers and/or horror films that Demme directed, Last Embrace stands out as one of the most unusual of the bunch. That’s because it’s a pretty open Alfred Hitchcock pastiche, and while Demme greatly admired the Master of Suspense, he usually kept that admiration at arm’s length. Not this time, though; Last Embrace is liberally peppered with references to Hitchcock from beginning to end. Yet while other directors like Brian De Palma managed to make a career out of homages like this, it was Demme’s one and only attempt to do so. That’s at least partly because the critical reception to Last Embrace was mixed at best, and the box office was disappointing. Even Demme later disowned it. His next film Melvin and Howard launched his career in a completely different direction, and he happily rode that wave wherever it took him.
Still, the negative reception to Last Embrace wasn’t due to any failure on Demme’s part as much as it was simply a matter of bad timing. When Last Embrace was released in 1979, Demme’s resume consisted only of his work with Corman along with the amiable Citizens Band. In the eyes of many critics, he hadn’t established his bona fides to make a film like this, so he was seen as an inexperienced director who was slavishly aping Hitchcock. Over the next few years, Demme would clearly demonstrate his quirkiness in terms of subject matter, and reviewers would learn to expect the unexpected out of him. That wasn’t the case in 1979, so that’s also likely why reviewers were thrown for a loop by the quirky structure of the film. Homages to Alfred Hitchcock may have been the beginning of Last Embrace, but they weren’t necessarily its end, and you have to be willing to follow this oddball odyssey wherever it may take you.
That’s because the real beginning of Last Embrace is its non-Hitchcockian source material, the 1977 potboiler The 13th Man by Murray Teigh Bloom. The script that Demme developed with screenwriter David Shaber follows the basic form of the novel and retains many of the details of its complex plot, but elaborates on the framing device that surrounds that narrative. Harry Hannan (Roy Scheider) is a government agent who ends up institutionalized due to a nervous breakdown after the tragic death of his wife. When he’s finally released, he finds the pieces of his former life subtly altered, including the fact that doctoral student Ellie Fabian (Janet Margolin) has sublet his apartment. He’s paranoid that someone is trying to kill him, seeing threats from every corner, but while his boss Eckhart (Christopher Walken) is dismissive of Harry’s concerns, there really is more going on than meets the eye. It’s just that the spy game is the least of Harry’s problems, because he’s actually become the target of a different kind of avenging angel. The quirky cast for Last Embrace also includes John Glover, Sam Levene, Jacqueline Brookes, Mandy Patinkin, Joe Spinell, and Demme regular Charles Napier. (No Tracey Walter, unfortunately; he wouldn’t join the Demme family until Something Wild in 1986.)
Paranoia is the key to Last Embrace, and while the root causes of Harry’s neuroses may be due to the cat-and-mouse nature of the world of espionage, the threat that this particular mouse faces is from an entirely different sort of predator. In that respect, it foreshadows what David Mamet would do in his 1991 crime drama Homicide, where a police procedural morphed into an ethnographic cultural study. In Last Embrace, the Hitchcockian spy game is essentially the envelope that contains the real concerns of the film. The envelope came from Demme and Shaber, but the contents were pure Bloom. Demme threw in myriad references to Hitchcock classics like Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest, and even hired Miklós Rózsa to provide a lush Bernard Hermann style score, but that’s arguably just window dressing in terms of the primary focus of the narrative.
The tension between the form and the content of Last Embrace wasn’t lost on Demme. He later complained that he didn’t have the time to develop the script the way that he wanted to, but the reality is that the framing device and the primary narrative were never going to fully cohere. Yet that’s part of the inherent charms of Last Embrace. It’s a shell game where the wrapper is hiding something completely unexpected, and in that respect, it’s as quirky as anything else that Demme ever directed. That said, he still managed to bring the Hitchcockian elements full circle with an ending that blends the adventure of North by Northwest with nihilism of Vertigo. Harry ends up more or less in the exact same situation where he began, with the paranoia that resulted from his nervous breakdown forcing him into a situation that parallels what caused his nervous breakdown in the first place. The circle of life includes the circle of death, and sometimes paranoiacs have a damned good reason for believing that someone is out to get them.
Still, that may have contributed to Demme’s later rejection of his own film. He was far too sweet and gentle to ever be happy with the bitter cruelty that marked some of Alfred Hitchcock’s work, so it’s unclear why he and Shaber altered the ending of the book into something that was less contrived but far more melancholy. Supposedly, he shot two different versions of the finale, but while the one that he selected may have felt right to him in 1979, it’s unlikely that he would have made the same choice a few years down the road. Yet it’s another reason why Last Embrace remains one of the quirkiest films from this perpetually quirky director, and it’s worthy of rediscovery.
Jonathan Demme’s regular cinematographer Tak Fujimoto shot Last Embrace on 35mm film using Panavision cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, with digital restoration work and High Dynamic Range grading supervised by Ryan Emerson at Vinegar Syndrome. (Only HDR10 is offered on the disc.) Encoding was handled by David Mackenzie at Fidelity in Motion. Things start out unpromisingly, with the entire opening sequence consisting of a series of dissolves that were created on an optical printer, so all this footage had to be derived from dupe elements. The image is soft and the grain is coarse, frequently bordering on being far too harsh. This is one case where Vinegar Syndrome’s refusal to use grain reduction does more harm than good, as a judicious touch with the digital tools would have helped to replicate the smoother look of theatrical release prints. Once this sequence is out of the way and the titles are over, everything improves significantly. There’s little damage on display, and textures are better resolved, although the nature of the cinematography does limit things to less than true 4K levels of detail. The contrast and colors both seem accurate to Fujimoto’s intent, and while Roy Scheider’s skin can look a little reddish-bronze compared to everyone else, that’s hardly unusual for him. Last Embrace was never going to be 4K demo material, but minor caveats aside, this does demonstrate the capability of the format to reproduce the tangible look of film.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. Everything sounds clean and clear, with no significant noise or distortion to muddy it up. Unfortunately, there’s not much depth or heft to Miklós Rózsa’s music, but that’s just the nature of the original mix and recordings. Even the out-of-print 2009 soundtrack release from Intrada was a bit lacking in that regard, so it is what it is. His score still works beautifully in the film.
Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K Ultra HD release of Last Embrace is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. It’s part of their Cinématographe sub-label, and is currently available in a Limited Edition of 6,000 copies. The disc itself is contained in a simple but striking clothbound Mediabook with essays by Jeva Lang, Justin LaLiberty, and Jim Hemphill. The Mediabook is housed in a J-card slipcase featuring new artwork by Vlad Rodriguez, with a handy ribbon to help remove the book. The whole package was designed by Haunt Love. The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Audio Commentary with Steve Mitchell and Howard S. Berger
DISC TWO: BD
- Audio Commentary with Steve Mitchell and Howard S. Berger
- Interview with Michael Taylor (10:41)
- The Labyrinth of Last Embrace: From Hitchcockian Suspense Film to Erotic Revenge Thriller (16:33)
- Theatrical Trailer (2:55)
The new commentary reteams Steve Mitchell with Howard S. Berger, who describe themselves as tour guides for a nifty neo-noir that offers a healthy dash of tourism for New York State and Niagara Falls. (Berger says that the mixed critical reception that the film received across the country wasn’t necessarily true of those who actually saw it in New York.) They call it a movie about connecting between people who don’t actually connect, and proceed to do their best to help audiences connect with this underappreciated effort from Demme. That includes some practical information like the origins of the project (Scheider was apparently always connected to it) and the counterintuitive casting of Janet Margolin, as well as its stylistic and thematic concerns. They point out some the Demme trademarks and ideas that he would return to in his later work, and also offer plenty of praise for his collaborators like Tak Fujimoto, Miklós Rózsa, and editor Barry Malkin.
The Labyrinth of Last Embrace is a new video essay by Samm Deighan, and as her subtitle indicates, it traces that path that the film took from being what could have been a straightforward Hitchcock pastiche into an erotic thriller instead. She believes that it deserves a reappraisal due to the way that it toys with Hitchcockian motifs and other genres while still remaining its own beast. While Last Embrace is filled with references to various Hitchcock films, it reverses the standard Hitchcock trope of the main character being the “wrong man.” Yet ultimately, even Harry’s background and the plot against him becomes secondary to the other plot against him. Deighan also examines the way that Last Embrace operates adjacent to other neo-noir films from the era, and current political thrillers as well. (Along the way, she refers to The Silence of the Lambs as a thriller, so we’re not quite on the same page with that one.)
There’s one archival extra included with the set: an interview with producer Michael Taylor that was originally offered on the 2014 Blu-ray release of Last Embrace from Kino Lorber. Taylor talks about moving from being an executive at United Artists into being a producer, explains how they acquired the rights to the novel, and describes how the project was put together. He defends Scheider against accusations of being intense to work with, and offers nothing but praise for Scheider’s professionalism. United Artists gave producers complete freedom as long as they came in under budget, so he had a good experience making the film.
Last Embrace hasn’t received a whole lot of love on home video prior to this point, so the only noteworthy extra that’s missing here from any previous releases is the commentary track with David Thompson that was on the 2015 Region B Blu-ray from Signal One Entertainment in the U.K. (That disc also included still galleries.) Yet Vinegar Syndrome’s release offers a solid commentary of its own, and between the 4K version of the film and the other extras, this is the one Last Embrace to rule them all. It’s another winner from Vinegar Syndrome via their Cinématographe label.
- Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, and Letterboxd).