Michael (Blu-ray)

Danish film master Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael is a mature and visually elegant period romance that remains one of the earliest and most compassionate overtly gay-themed films in movie history. Based upon Herman Bang's 1902 novel, Dreyer's Michael refashions the classical Greek myth of Jupiter and Ganymede into a love triangle between an aging artist, Zoret (director Benjamin Christensen), his protagonist Michael (Walter Slezak, Lifeboat) and Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor, Rules of the Game), an aristocratic femme fatale as entranced by Michael’s youthful beauty as Zoret is. Co-written by Fritz Lang’s wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou (M, Metropolis), this intimate and compelling film possesses a bold level of emotional detail and depicts the twilight of a male-male romance with unusual daring and subtlety.