"Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" as part of the Criterion Collection... this year?

by Chris MaGee

Seeing that we were giving you a blitz of Nagisa Oshima reviews this week from the recently released Criterion/ Eclipse "Oshima's Outlaw Sixties" box set we thought it only proper that we mention a rumour of an upcoming Criterion release of another Oshima film. For the longest time the rumour was kicking around that the folks at Criterion had the rights to Oshima's 1983 prisoner of war drama "Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence". It seemed like a no brainer that someone, preferably the Criterion Collection, would release this film as it's got the heavy duty star power of David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kitano in the cast. Besides the cast it's a fantastic film (probably my personal favorite Oshima film). So when Pow-Wow writer Marc Saint-Cyr mentioned that the long cold rumour of its DVD release had recently gone red hot I had to investigate. According to Criterion Cast a recent question on the Criterion Twitter feed asked "When can we see Mr. Christmas Mr. Lawrence on Criterion?", to which the response was "This year..." Can we believe it? Well, we think it's a matter of do we want to believe it, and we do! Let's hope this is a go!