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It was more than a little heartening to see Roger Corman paid tribute by Quentin Tarantino at Cannes’ closing night. By now the director-producer-mogul’s imprint on cinema is understood to eclipse, rough estimate, 99.5% of anybody who’s touched the medium, but on a night for celebrating what’s new, trend-following, and manicured it could’ve hardly been more necessary. Thus I’m further heartened seeing the Criterion Channel will host a retrospective of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations running eight films and aptly titled “Grindhouse Gothic,” though I might save the selections for October.

Centerpiece, though, is a hip hop series including Bill Duke’s superb Deep Cover, Ghost Dog, and numerous documentaries––among them Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, making Michael Rapaport a Criterion-approved auteur. Ten films starring Kay Francis and 21 Eurothrillers round out series; streaming premieres include the Dardenne brothers’ Tori and Lokita,...

Poor Louis J. Gasnier! Doomed to be remembered for a single late work, Reefer Madness, a.k.a. Tell Your Children (1936), the worst film he or maybe anyone else ever made. It's a piece of staggering incoherence and incompetence which can take a simple scene and put it through a kind of fractal mirror-maze of bad cutting and coverage so as to render you constantly uncertain how many people are in a room and which way any of them are facing.

It was not always thus. Gasnier began directing in France around 1905, worked with the great Max Linder, and was a perfectly serviceable craftsman by the standards of the day. By 1925 he was in Hollywood and working at a high level in the industry, directing Clara Bow in Parisian Love, a tale of "Apaches" (French street roughs) and the upper classes, and a forbidden love affair that crosses these class boundaries.

Reefer Madness 1936 George A. Hirliman Productions Directed by: Louis J. Gasnier Starring: Dorothy Short, Kenneth Craig, Lillian Miles, Dave O’Brien, Thelma White, Carleton Young, Warren McCollum The Plot is Afoot! Women cry for it–men die for it! This is the woeful story of one young man’s entanglement with the dreaded drug known as reefer, and how it spelled a life of crime for him. Tell Your Kids. The Damage: Reefer! Pot! Hash! Dope! Ganja! Weed! It may be in our country! It may be in our city! It may be in our backyard! Your backyard! It might be raping your dog right now! What? Rape jokes are over the line? Well, what will happen when marijuana becomes the downfall of western civilization? It won’t seem so ludicrous then, now will it? We as good American citizens must snuff out this epidemic destroying our world before it’s too late.

Several famous actors, including Michel Piccoli, Pierre Arditi, Lambert Wilson, and Mathieu Amalric, receive the same phone call informing them that Antoine d'Anthac, a prominent playwright who would frequently cast all of them, has passed away. Summoned to the late man's estate by his well-mannered butler, they arrive to see Antoine's videotaped last will and testament: speaking from the screen, the deceased asks his lifelong friends to evaluate a contemporary take on his play, Eurydice, adapted by a much younger company. As the projection begins, the spectators involuntarily repeat the familiar dialogue, as if it were lifted out of their shared favorite movie; so the performance begins on its own and the spacious living room suddenly turns into a small-town railway café. Orpheus starts his soft fiddle-scraping. He is about to meet Eurydice.

"The playwright's duty," Jean Anouilh, French dramatist, once wrote, "is to produce plays on a regular basis.