Movie Roundup #22: The Good

High And Low: Mifune, Nakadai and company talk it out.

High And Low (1963)

As compelling as the deepening moral abyss of Breaking Bad is (I'm now three episodes away from the end of what's available on Netflix and as they say, the sh*t done got real.) it's refreshing to watch this classic film by Akira Kurosawa, a crime story that turns on someone doing the honorable and right thing.

The film centers on Gondo, a shoe company executive played by Toshiro Mifune. He is plotting strategy in a struggle with some of his partners for control of the company when he gets a phone call telling him that his 8-year-old son has been kidnapped for a 30 million yen ransom. He frantically agrees to pay even though it would mean his financial ruin but then his son walks in the room completely unharmed. It turns out that the kidnappers mistakenly grabbed the son of Gondo's chauffeur, with whom his own boy had been playing but even when they realize their error, their demands don't change, 30 million yen or the kids dies. The question then becomes will Gondo pay the ransom money to save another man's child.

This story originated as one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, King's Ransom.  In that story the executive cannot bring himself to pay the ransom. Kurosawa flips that response and, in keeping with the self-sacrifice theme of some of his other films, Gondo, after a lot of soul-searching, pays the money. Much of the rest of the film is police procedural stuff of the police painstakingly tracking down the kidnappers while Gondo is forced out of his company and forced to start over while in middle-age.

The early part of the movie is laid out like a play. Set almost totally in Gondo's living room, the characters move through the scene's space often turning their backs to him in embarrassment as he rages about how he cannot pay while his wife and chauffeur plead with him. Later on as the focus moves to the cops' manhunt the movie starts to resemble Dragnet without narration, long scenes of conferences, interviews and suspect tracking that move through the differing levels of Japanese society. The scenes shift from open air markets to night clubs and finally, dope dens, far away from the rich man's house where the movie started. In the last scene Gondo confronts the kidnapper, now captured and on death row. He turns out to be a Raskolnikov-like medical intern who had never even met Gondo but just hated him because he was rich and lived in a big house on a hill. At the end Gondo, the ruined man, sits composed and at peace with his life while the kidnapper screams in denial of where he is and what's become of him.

Mifune, as usual, is excellent, raging and bellowing at the beginning but shifting to a controlled, philosophical resignation. In one beautiful scene the police have the suitcases to be used for the ransom money and are discussing where to put signal devices that would alert them if the cases are burned or dumped in the river. Mifune calmly gets out his shoe making tools and starts carving pockets into the cases to hide the devices. Tatsuya Nakadai, Mifune's nemesis in films like Yojimbo, plays the lead police detective while there are also plenty of faces from Kurosawa's regular stock company in small roles whom I don't know by name, with the exception of the great Takashi Shimura who shows up as a police official.

Akria Kurosawa made two of my all-time favorite films, The Seven Samurai and Ikiru. High and Low doesn't quite belong in that select company but it's damn close. Beneath the crime elements it has a respect for the decency and honesty of the individual that few filmmakers pulled off quite as well as him.

Carson Corners:  J'accuse - The janitor did it (or did he?)

"The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners" (1954)

Television drama was in a very different place than today in the early 50's.  There were no likable serial killers, sexy vampires, suburban drug lords, crime bosses with emotional problems, or psychotic government agents back then. Significant stories were still told. The best of them just worked on a lower keyed and more subtle level. Rod Serling's "Requiem For A Heavyweight" and "Patterns" are two of the more well-known examples of the period but the lesser-known "The Remarkable Incident At Carson Corners" written by Reginald Rose has something to say as well.

This drama was part of the Westinghouse Studio One anthology series and it told a very simple story. The kids of a small town called Carson Corners invite their parents to a special school project. When everyone has assembled in jolly "What are the little tykes planning?" good humor, the kids unveil their surprise. They are holding a mock trial and accusing the school janitor of the murder of one of their classmates.

Rose's most famous work was another Studio One play, "12 Angry Men" and you can see elements of that story here as some of the parents turn into an angry mob out for the janitor's blood while a few cooler heads try to get at the truth.  It turns out the kids are mistaken but as all the adults in the room are forced to reconsider the circumstances of the boy's death. The story follows one of Breaking Bad's (that show again!) guiding principles, The Law Of Unintended Consequences. Things done or not done that seemed harmless at the moment turn out to have contributed to the tragedy.

The show quietly puts out the message that we are all responsible for one another and if we neglect that responsibility something bad could happen, not a terrorist bombing or a drug cartel shootout, but something tragic all the same. The point is made well here without over-the-top histrionics or preachy dialogue. There are not any famous actors in early roles here as you sometimes get in these old shows, just a few faces recognizable to hardcore old TV fans like Frank Overton and Harry Townes. The relative anonymity of the cast keeps the message out front, not that the message is still that relevant. After all it's sixty years later and we all recognize the value of looking out for one another...right?

Virtue (1932) 

If you're an old movie fan and I were to tell you that this pre-Code film starred Pat O'Brien and Carole Lombard you'd be all set for a fast-paced, wise-cracking big city story and you'd be partially wrong. Virtue was made at Columbia not O'Brien's long time studio, Warner Brothers and O'Brien is not the fast-talking sharpie he usually was in Warners films even though the plot here could have been prime Warners material.

O'Brien plays a New York City cabdriver who meets and falls in love with Lombard who he thinks is an out of work stenographer. In reality she is a prostitute who just skipped out on a trip to an upstate work farm but that makes no difference and the two falls in love and get married. Things go along well for them even after O'Brien finds out the truth.  Then Lombard gives a sick friend $200 that O'Brien was saving to invest in a gas station and in the ensuing complications, he walks out and she gets charged with a murder.

Again this is a more subdued Lombard and O'Brien than you see in the fast-moving razzle dazzle of their signature movies and Lombard in particular shows a tough, dramatic edge worthy of a Stanwyck or Crawford, a side of her not apparent in My Man Godfrey or Nothing Sacred. The movie goes by fast, wrapping up in just over an hour without any overdone sentiment or annoying "comic relief" and showing some visual flair in a montage of a trip to Coney Island. It's a surprisingly likable little programmer.

Break

I know that most of the world has already found out the final fates of Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and the other people in their world but I'm still slowly making my way through Breaking Bad. Some people seem to like to watch TV shows in one big gulp now, devouring entire seasons either on DVD or online in one or two days. Not me. This show, in particular, deserves to be savored one episode at a time. Getting into a rhythm of no more than one a day gives me the opportunity to reflect on the plot twists and overall majesty of the series. This thing is shaping up to be a Shakespearean-style tragedy and I just hope the end lives up to the buildup.

One thing I'm particularly appreciating now is how all the supporting characters are turning out to have many facets beyond what they initially show.  Hank, Walt's blowhard DEA agent brother-in-law, has turned out to be a dogged cop with great reasoning skill. Skyler, Walt's wife, becomes chillingly pragmatic when faced with the facts about her husband's drug activities. Then, there's Gus, Walt's drug kingpin boss. His back story is still being revealed but it's become very clear that he can be monstrously cold-blooded and vengeful on one side and quietly practical on the other.

I've managed to stay clear of most spoilers, outside of the fact that Walt and Jessie do seem to live at least into the last episode, which lessens the tension whenever they get into a potentially deadly situation now.  I do know that Marty Robbins' song "El Paso" shows up in the final episode and provides it with its title, "Felina" and that Badfinger's "Baby Blue" comes up over the closing credits performing the function "Don't Stop Believin''" did in The Sopranos. I'm also intrigued by the vague references everywhere to how evil Walt becomes since I'm really not at that point yet. Where I've left off he has just had an emomtrinal talk with his son while recovering from the beatdown Jesse gave him at the same time that Gus, Mike and Jesse are escaping from the Mexican drug cartel. There would seem to still be a lot of fun times ahead of me.

Bad Company

Walter White, schoolteacher

I have an instinctive aversion to hype. Many times when I start reading about how some new TV show is the most awesome thing in the history of mankind, I'm immediately skeptical and avoid it for a long time, catching up long after the initial fuss has died down if then.  I've heard such things about the show Breaking Bad over the years and I paid little attention. It seemed as though every other new show coming out on cable the last few years shared this one's storyline of a decent person being corrupted by something or other. The very plot line of this show, a suburban parent getting mixed up in the drug trade, was paralleled by another program, Weeds. Still I saw that Breaking Bad seemed to scoop up awards every year so there looked to be something to it.  Recently I noticed that the show was available on Netflix Instant so a few days ago I finally sat down and began to watch the first episodes. My initial impression is...Holy Crap!

This show is about Walter White, a chemistry teacher living quietly in a New Mexico suburb with his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son. He is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and immediately starts worrying about what he's going to leave for his family when he dies. When his brother, a DEA agent, starts telling him about how lucrative the local drug trade is,  he decides to join forces with Jesse Pinkman, one of his former students who's now a small time drug dealer, to make and sell crystal meth. They try to sell the stuff to a bigger local dealer and things go very badly with Walter ending responsible for the deaths of two people  and an hitherto pent-up dark side starting to emerge.

I'm only four episodes into the first season so far and I'm really impressed by the focus of the storytelling and the depth of the characters.  I can already tell that Bryan Cranston deserved every acting award he's gotten for playing Walter White. Without often saying anything he expresses through his face and body a world of swirling emotions like horror, anguish, and rage. He looks like a man totally out of his depth most of the time but when pressed, there's an anger and potential for violence that takes less and less prompting to emerge. It's probably going to be significant that so far he has gone from beating up a high school jock making fun of his son and killing a drug dealer in self defense to destroying a man's car just because he's an obnoxious loudmouth. All the scripts so far have been by creator Vince Gilligan and I love the way that he has neither Walter nor any of the other characters give long soliloquies explaining their actions and thoughts. Most of their inner feelings are conveyed through gesture and expression.

This also applies to the Jesse Pinkman character played by Aaron Paul.  At first the guy is practically comic relief, a white suburban B-boy wannabe who talks in thick hip-hop slang and has a whacked out response to everything Walter says or does. As the episodes go on though, he starts to ripen into a real person.  In the last program I watched "Cancer Man"  he spends some time in his parents' house after running from his own place in a paranoiac, drug-fueled panic and it's poignant to see his futile attempts to connect with his parents and highly achieving kid brother.  You get the feeling there is basically a good man inside him and I have a feeling that knowledge is going to become wrenching as things go along.

I know I'm catching up with this show late. I'm just up to the point where Walter has told his family and friends about the cancer and he starts using the money from his one (and supposedly only) drug deal for his treatment.  Five seasons have been broadcast and the sixth and last starts in August, so I've got a ways to go.  I've heard a couple of general plot developments, that Walter gets deeper and deeper into the drug trade, his cancer goes into remission and his wife finds out what's he's doing.  Other than that I don't know any of the rest of the story and I don't want to yet. I have no idea what happens to the son, the drug cop brother-in-law or anyone else who comes into the plot.  I'm just very confident this show is going to be one hell of a ride.

Finally Tooned In

As I hoped for back in October here, Antenna TV came to my cable system this month, even though it didn't seem to fully start until around the 8th instead of January 1 like it was supposed to. With it, came their series of  Columbia theatrical cartoons, Totally Tooned In, which is being shown in a three-hour block from 7 to 10 AM on Saturday mornings. I sat down and watched all three hours today and even though nothing really blew me away, it was still fun watching a shifting melange of over a decade of changing Hollywood animation styles through cartoons I'd never seen before.

The star attraction, of course was Mister Magoo, the studio's one enduring cartoon legend. There was one of his shorts in each half-hour show, which all sported the unique modernist look of UPA Productions.  There was also another UPA-era short by John Hubley, "Family Circus", about a little girl who goes berserk when her new baby brother hogs all of her father's attention. This one had a section of animated crayon drawings that looked pretty unique among all the traditional cartoon antics that surrounded it.

    The earlier work shown seemed to indicate that Columbia's cartoons weren't very different from all the competition before UPA came along. There were shorts from the 30's produced by Charles Mintz that were mostly psuedo-Disney cuteness full of round faced little kids, puppies and other small animals and birds with one dark exception I'll mention later. Cartoons shown from the 40's, particularly with the studio's other stars, The Fox and The Crow, (seen on the left in their comic book forms) were far more full of the aggressive slapstick that was then ruling the roost at places like Warners and Universal. I'm sure that wasn't an accident since I recognized a few names in the credits from other animation studios, one of them no less than Max Fleischer who produced the two Fox and Crow shorts but also composer Darrell Calker who did a lot of the music for Walter Lantz cartoons.

While there were no really outstanding moments in any of these cartoons on first viewing, a few had interesting touches.  In the Fox and Crow short, "Slay It With Flowers" the two get into a nasty fight over Crow eating the seeds out of Fox's garden but stop abruptly when Crow finds out Fox is planting a Victory Garden. (This cartoon was made during World War II.) "Mountain Ears" is a Tex Avery travelogue-style short about hillbillys featuring a narrator with a Jack Benny-style voice who continually argues with a bratty kid on screen. At one point the narrator's supposed hands come on screen and try to catch the kid.

The most impressive cartoon of this particular bunch was "The Little Match Girl", a 1937 Mintz era rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen story.  It was gorgeous to look at, particularly the scenes where the little girl dreams of angels and Heaven and it was no surprise to learn that this short was nominated for an Academy Award. One thing though, the televised print of this went right up to the tragic ending of the story, the little girl freezing to death in the snow but stopped short of showing that. According to Wikipedia, that ending was part of the original cartoon which means sadly that some editing has taken place on a few of these TV versions. I'm not complaining though. I'm just happy that I'm finally getting to see this stuff at all.

Tate

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the western genre dominated television to an extent that no other genre has since. In the 1958-1959 season there were 31 western series on the air, which is really amazing when you remember there were only three networks back then. Some of those shows like Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Cheyenne and Maverick are well remembered today. Others have fallen through the cracks of history. That brings me to one old show I've just been watching that I had never even heard of until recently, Tate.

     Tate wasn't around for long. It was a summer replacement series that ran on NBC for 13 weeks in 1960. Its creator was writer Harry Julian Fink who, among other things, wrote several excellent episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel.  Tate, the show's hero, comes off as a less courtly and crafty version of Paladin. He is a gunman who lost the use of his arm during a Civil War battle and now roams the West as a bounty hunter.     Just going by the five episodes I've seen, the show had a severe and brutal view of the Old West without even the humor or warmth of other adult Westerns like Gunsmoke and Have Gun. Tate seemed to be invariably on the trail of someone who had committed some kind of brutal crime, usually involving the killing of women and children but that plot was always secondary to other trouble he would face like the killer's family trying to break him out of jail or entire towns refusing to give the bad guy up.  In one episode Tate runs into another bounty hunter who mistakes him for a killer and is nonchalant about bringing him in alive or dead even after he gets word that Tate is innocent.

     The most powerful episode I saw, "Stopover", was even more hard-bitten. In that one Tate finds his quarry, a legendary old fast gun, in a small town and shoots him in a gunfight in the first five minutes. His problem then is, while waiting to get his reward money wired to him, a younger gunfighter keeps hanging threateningly around him. It turns out he had been trailing the old man to face him in a fight and prove he was a faster draw, but now that's he dead, he wants the man who killed him...Tate. 

And that's still not all. There is one more main character in this episode, a young "saloon girl" who charges five dollars just for conversation. She makes friends with Tate and when he asks her why she doesn't go back home, she tells him home was a shack where she was one of fifteen children and she suffered some kind of unspecified abuse.  She's much happier in her current life where people are at least nice to her. That's pretty heavy territory for a 1960 TV show and I'm amazed the saloon girl stuff got past the censors, even as ambiguous as it was.

     As on just about any show from this era there are several actors in these episodes in the early stages of their career who would go on greater success, like Robert Culp, Robert Redford, Louise Fletcher and James Coburn as well as former child star Peggy Ann Garner as the saloon girl and Royal Dano as a sheriff caught in a Rio Bravo-like standoff against the family of a man about to hang for murder.  Tate himself was played by an actor named David McLean who was a new name to me. According to IMDB, though, he did gain later fame as one of the actors who played the Marlboro Man, the rugged cigarette smoking cowboy in the famous Marlboro TV commercials. He was also one of several actors in those commercials who eventually died of lung cancer.

    In its short thirteen week life Tate doesn't seem to have developed the breadth of the more successful adult Westerns, but it was an uniquely tough-minded show closer in tone to the original radio version of Gunsmoke than any of its TV contemporaries that I've seen so far.

The Vile Vivienne Vyle

You can have Tina Fey. When it comes to funny women on TV I'll take British writer and performer Jennifer Saunders. Her show Absolutely Fabulous was a fearless slapstick classic about two middle aged women boozing and drugging their way through the fashion industry like the Swinging Sixties never ended. Her 2007 show, The Life And Times Of Vivienne Vyle, is even darker, going way beyond what a show like 30 Rock would even dare. 

Saunders (above) stars on this show as Vivienne Vyle, a daytime TV host who runs a show where she parades the dregs of humanity before the cameras and tells them how disgusting they are under the pretense of helping them. There have been any number of these hosts in America,of course, from Jerry Springer to Maury Povich to Sally Jesse Raphael and beyond, but this character is supposed to based on a specific British TV star named Jeremy Kyle. If this concept had been attempted here by Fey or anyone else,  the host would be probably be humanized with some kind of inner conflict about what they are doing. Not Saunders, she makes Vyle a self-centered, unrepentant monster who will exploit anyone for her own gain, even her own husband.

There is still a lot of physical comedy on this show as on AbFab with Saunders still not above the occasional pratfall or bizarre sight gag. There are also a couple of characters that echo the earlier show's craziness. The talk show's producer, Helena, played by Miranda Richardson, is the same sort of scatterbrained, drugged-out mess as Saunders' Edwina and Vivienne also has a gay husband the same way that Edwina had a gay ex.

The overall tone of this show is much grimmer though. Vivienne is a more controlled person and she is so cold-blooded you can't identify with her in any way. There is a more sympathetic character in a therapist hired as a consultant on the show who is the closest thing to normal here and stands somewhat apart from the mad swirl of Vivienne's circle but he is really secondary. (Incidentally this show was created by Saunders and a clinical psychologist, Dr. Tanya Block. I haven't read anything where the doctor worked on a talk show but you have to wonder.) There is an evil genius in the way Vivienne twists a possible scandal involving her husband  to her advantage on live TV with a made up story of childhood abuse in the last episode but that's not something I could really laugh at. This is a fascinating show in its way, just not one of the laugh riots Saunders has done in the past.

Maverick on Netflix

I recently discovered while browsing through Netflix's instant play section that they offer a lot of "B" westerns that haven't been released on DVD yet. In looking deeper through the site the other day, I saw they also had seasons of old TV westerns like Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel beyond what was currently on DVD. Then I noticed a certain word I wasn't expecting to see..."Maverick".

That's right. Netflix is offering online viewing of one of the most legendary TV westerns of all time. Not every episode but they seem to have most of the shows from all five seasons.  This led to me spending Sunday afternoon watching three Maverick episodes that all starred James Garner: "The Sheriff Of Duck'n'Shoot", "Escape To Tampico" and "The Saga Of Waco Williams".

A few years ago the TV Land network, when it still specialized in old TV shows, ran an entire weekend of old Maverick episodes. That is when I realized that the show's reputation is slightly inflated. It was a wonderful satire of old west conventions, but only in some episodes, usually the ones where James Garner starred as Bret Maverick. Other programs, which usually seemed to be the ones that featured Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick, were conventional western dramas and dull ones at that.

The three shows I watched Sunday were from both the comedy and drama sides and also had echoes of television or movies from before and after the show's run. "Duck'n'Shoot" was a broad slapstick comedy where Bret is tricked into becoming the sheriff of a lawless town, an odd pre-echo of Garner's later hit film, Support Your Local Sheriff. It also featured the laughing brass soundtrack the show sometimes used to underline funny scenes, a bit I really found annoying this time around.

     "Escape From Tampico" was a mostly serious show but a pretty good one where Bret was hired to find an accused killer in Mexico and bring him back to the United States. The notable thing here is that most of the story took place in a Mexican cantina which was the same Warner Brothers set that had served as Rick's American Cafe in the movie Casablanca. Even odder actor Gerald Mohr played the owner of the cantina in a manner a lot like Humphrey Bogart. (SPOILER) He didn't end up like Bogart though. Mohr's character turned out to be guilty of murder even though all the dialogue and plot before the ending suggested that he was being framed. That may have something to do with the fact the man who seemed to be the real bad guy in the early scenes was played by Paul Picerni who would have been getting a steady job at about that time as one of Eliot Ness' men on The Untouchables. Did that have anything to do with his character disappearing from this episode leading to what seemed like a hasty rewrite?

     "Waco Williams" was a show with more subtle humor where Bret was travelling for his own undisclosed reasons with a heroic cowboy named Waco Williams, the kind of guy who would stubbornly walk into a fight when Bret would just as soon sneak out the back door. By the end of the episode Waco ends up the most popular man in town and engaged to a cattleman's daughter (played by a young Louise Fletcher) while Bret slinks away broke and forgotten. The plot was so good it ended up reprised by Stephen J. Cannell in Garner's later Rockford Files where down and out Jim Rockford is contrasted to brave and perfect P.I. Lance White played by Tom Selleck.

      As I said not every episode is on here. I was particularly bummed to see that "The Rivals", an adaptation of the 18th century comedy of that name, is not available. Still there is plenty here to enjoy until Warner Home Video finally gets its act together and puts the entire series out on DVD.

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Bye-Bye CI

There is only one TV show I make any kind of effort to watch regularly even in reruns, Law And Order: Criminal Intent. I watched the latest new episode last night and I think that's going to be the end for me. There is nothing in the show I really want to watch any more.

All three of the Law And Order franchises have long been the only watchable network television for me. Once I got into Criminal Intent I found it really engrossing because it wasn't really a police procedural. It was a mystery show where Robert Goren, the brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like lead, just happened to be a police detective. I really got drawn into the show's formula of detectives Goren and Kay Eames investigating a murder and uncovering a convoluted plot that made no sense whatsoever once you thought about it but was compelling for the time you were watching. A handwriting expert who forges evidence discrediting a dead priest's candidacy for sainthood so his mother will stop giving the priest's foundation money? A recording engineer who leads a gang of homidical teenage bicycle thieves by indoctrinating them in the writings of Marcus Aurelius? A masochistic transvestite who decapitates his best friend to prevent her from writing a book about how he killed his mother when he was a boy? Hey, for 44 minutes it all made sense.

     That was how it worked for the show's first five seasons. Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe worked well together as the detectives and the show clicked along fine, even when Chris Noth, a veteran of the original L&O, and Anabella Sciorra were brought in as a second team when the show's grind started affecting D'Onofrio's health. Then things started to change. Rene Balcer, the original executive producer, left and the shows started getting more sensational and erratic in quality. The mysteries got plainer and Eric Bogosian replaced Jamey Sheridan as the detectives' captain, playing an almost needlessly belligerent character.

  Last season Noth left and was replaced by, of all people, Jeff Goldblum which was really a sign of trouble. The Goren character was a mass of ticks and eccentricities, the kind of character Goldblum could play in his sleep. It was obvious that they wouldn't keep two actors playing virtually the same character around for long and sure enough, as the ninth season began a couple of weeks ago, the entire old cast was replaced. Bogosian's character was killed, Goren was fired from the force and Eames resigned, leaving Goldblum, his new partner played by Saffron Burrows and the new captain played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

The actual plot of the premiere involving weapons traders and an African king assassinated by his son wasn't much but it was worth it to see how Goren and Eames made their exit. Then last night came the first show with the new cast, a story about the shooting of a crooked cop and a grandfatherly Irish gangster that was almost insultingly simple. That killed it. There was none of the show's juice left. There is sone talk that Burrows is not working out and that Erbe may return but I don't think that will rekindle my interest. I'll still watch reruns when they show up or check out early episodes I've never seen through Netflix but the present-day CI has lost me.

At the same time I've just discovered another highly acclaimed police show that's been off the air for 15 years, Homicide: Life On The Street. I knew David Mills, the TV writer, slightly and when he passed away a couple of weeks ago I suddenly wanted to see some of his work so I got a disc of Homicide that contained a renowned script of his, "Bop Gun". I watched all four episodes on the disc. I was a little underwhelmed by the first episode but by the time I watched all four, I got it. I began to see what a singular show this was, a polilce drama with complex characters and stories that resisted easy, didatic labels. I got the full flavor of Richard Belzer's John Munch for the first time and saw what a ferocious actor Andre Braugher can be. I don't know how intently I'll pursue all seven seasons of the show but I did rent another disc from Season 6 that, coincidentally, features Vincent D'Onofrio a few years before Criminal Intent. I'll be interested to see if the quality holds up.