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It's impossible to point to a single thing that makes the original Die Hard so successful.
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The influence of Die Hard on Hollywood action pictures was so enormous that it became a movie executive shorthand: every action movie was described as " Die Hard on a." The original Die Hard, which introduced audiences to infinitely resilient NYC cop John McClane (Bruce Willis), did in fact change everything when it was released in 1988, shifting the idea of action movies away from gritty, cheap Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles and more in the direction of stylish, big-budget productions with a likable, emotionally vulnerable hero with a snappy comeback for everything.
#Die hard trilogy dvd set series#
With the release of A Good Day to Die Hard only two weeks away, 20th Century Fox has decided to take a look back at the previous chapters of one of the most influential action series of all time. 20th Century Fox has initiated a replacement program for the disc you can call call their customer service department at 1-87 for more information. Further along the line it is hard to imagine Fassbinder’s Despair, also with Bogarde, without the blueprint of The Damned.Note: Some people who purchased this set have reported that their discs for the original Die Hard are defective.
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It was so widely watched that it became unavoidable, and paved the way for movies that followed it, for Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling to reunite in the dark Nazi-inspired games of The Night Porter. The Damned can be stagey and operatic, often creepily and ponderously so, but it is fascinating for its long-term function as a trend-setting and highly influential work. When Visconti describes the smilingly evil character of Aschenbach, played by Helmut Griem, he sees him as representing the same function as the witches in Macbeth.
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And yet the story of the downfall of an aristocratic family also has literary antecedents, not just in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but also further back. He was equally fascinated by the Krupp heir who walked away from his inheritance, Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach, who is clearly a model for the doomed character Martin, the breakthrough role for Helmut Berger. Visconti was fascinated with the fact that “cannons have always served the German state”, and that the Krupps had been making them since 1587. The Essenbeck family clearly has a historical antecedent in the Krupps. Visconti elides and overlays both factual and fictional backgrounds in it, and that, too, has also proved fertile ground for exegesis. For those seeking a launch-pad to go off and explore things like “neo-Gramscian hegemony”, there may be no other film quite as provocative or as fertile for theorising as this one. Such internal dichotomies have produced a vast array of scholarly explorations.
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And that fascination and those tropes make The Damned a film alive with contradictions, bringing to the fore Visconti’s own ambiguities as a gay Catholic and as a patrician communist. Yet Visconti also flirts with Nazi depravity and “chic” in a way that would be impossible today. When asked why the carpets in one of the grand houses used in the film needed be replaced with parquet flooring for the film, an operation which was to take several days, he declared that it was necessary because “the floor must play the music of fear”. Visconti’s imperative to give a warning about the dangers of fascism ran deep. In particular, he intended the dawn mass-killing of Ernst Röhm’s brownshirts, the so-called Night of the Long Knives of 30 June–2 July, 1934, to be sgomento, "alarming". Visconti did, indeed, set out deliberately to surprise and to shock with The Damned, as he explains in a 1970 interview that's among the extras on this new Criterion release, a 2K digital restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna and Institut Lumière. The Damned, known in Italian as La caduta degli dei (meaning "the twilight of the Gods"), the writer explained, is “a masterpiece which is nonetheless suitable for the cinema-goers who fell asleep during Death in Venice (1971) or Ludwig II (1973)."