Blu-ray, DVD Release: La Cage aux Folles

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Sept. 10, 2013
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Ugo Tognazzi (l.) and Michel Serrault take it as it comes in La Cage aux Folles.

A modest French comedy that became a breakout art-house smash in America, Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film La Cage aux Folles inspired a major Broadway musical and the blockbuster remake The Birdcage.

Renato (La grande bouffe’s Ugo Tognazzi) and Albin (Diabolique’s Michel Serrault)—a middle-aged gay couple who are the manager and star performer at a glitzy drag club in St. Tropez—agree to hide their sexual identities, along with their flamboyant personalities and home decor, when the ultraconservative parents of Renato’s son’s fiancée come for a visit. This elegant comic scenario kicks off a wild and warmhearted farce about the importance of nonconformity and the beauty of being true to oneself.

Filled with period color, hilarious performances and ahead-of-its-time social message, La Cage aux Folles remains audacious, funny and original.

Presented in French with English subtitles, the Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions of La Cage contain the following features:

• New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview with director Edouard Molinaro
• Archival footage featuring actor Michel Serrault and Jean Poiret, writer and star of the original stage production of La Cage aux Folles
• New interview with Laurence Senelick, author of The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre
• French and U.S. trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• A booklet featuring an essay by critic David Ehrenstein

 

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.