THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
When I was growing up, in the forties and fifties, there was nothing really available that I could find written about film – except one book – my first film book,” says Martin Scorsese at the beginning of his 1995 documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. “I hadn’t seen many of the films described in the book, so all I had at my disposal to experience them were these black and white stills. I would fantasise about them, they would play into my dreams.”
As a teenager in the late ’90s, I had a well-worn VHS copy of Scorsese’s doc, from which I’d drawn up a list of all the films he spoke of. Actually finding them was a different story. In 1998 an accompanying book was published with an index that noted the availability of these films on video in the UK. It wasn’t pretty. Scorsese had the dream-weaving stills in his first film book; I had the minute or so of footage excerpted in his documentary. Sure, the likes of John Ford’s The Searchers or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey were easy enough to find on tape at the bigger stores, but there was little chance of finding, say, Budd Boetticher’s 1957 western The Tall T on the racks of Our Price on Streatham High Road.
Fast forward two decades or so, and anyone who finds themselves struck by Scorsese’s description of Boetticher’s “gentlemen and desperadoes” in their hands that very same evening. And not just a copy of the film either, but a beautifully restored, high definition Blu-ray housed in a lavish box-set with four other Boetticher features and hour after hour of contextualising extras, all courtesy of Powerhouse Films’ Indicator imprint.
