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Mr. Klein



One of the crowning achievements of blacklisted Hollywood director Joseph Losey’s European exile, the spellbinding modernist mystery Mr. Klein puts a chilling twist on the wrong-man thriller. Alain Delon delivers a standout performance as Robert Klein, a decadent art dealer in Paris during World War II who makes a tidy profit buying up paintings from his desperate Jewish clients. As Klein searches for a Jewish man with the same name for whom he has been mistaken, he finds himself plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare in which his identity seems to dissolve and the forces of history to close in on him. Met with considerable controversy on its release for its portrayal of the real-life wrongdoings of the Vichy government, this haunting, disturbingly beautiful film shivers with existential dread as it traces a society’s descent into fascistic fear and inhumanity.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Interviews with critic Michel Ciment and editor Henri Lanoë
• Interviews from 1976 with director Joseph Losey and actor Alain Delon
• Story of a Day, a 1986 documentary on the real-life Vél d’Hiv Roundup, a central historical element of Mr. Klein
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
  PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

yoloswegmaster wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 3:59 pm Mr. Klein will be released by Criterion in December according to Studiocanal's press release on their website.

This would be the best possible news for me if it is true (fingers crossed).

On May 12, Jon Mulvaney had responded to my pleading for Mr. Klein as follows ---

Hi (Kurtz), I hope this finds you well. While we are licensing MR. KLEIN for The Criterion Channel at this time, please be aware that we do not hold the rights/license to this film. MR. KLEIN is currently a part of Rialto Pictures' catalog, and you may want to contact their team to clarify if they have any plans for a physical release of this title in the future'. We'll note your interest with our team for further consideration. Kind Regards, Jon Mulvaney

I responded to him on May 12 ---

Jon, Thanks for the update. There are a lot of people that would snap up a physical release of Mr Klein from you. I'm pretty sure this would outsell La Piscine. It's an all-time great and was absolutely riveting on the big screen even though I was already familiar with it. Klein is an important film. Piscine isn't. Warm regards, (Kurtz)

I am only offering the above as background for hoping the release is indeed imminent.

For what it's worth, I also emailed Mulvaney a few months back urging they release this. Great news.

Coming May 10

Of course it comes out a month after I buy the Studio Canal blu. Still, happy to see Losey and this film enter the CC.

Not crazy about the cover artwork, but it's an upgrade over SC's completely generic cover. And one new bonus feature--the Losey and Delon interviews from '76.

The SC looks great and I'm sure the CC will too.

tolbs1010 wrote: Tue Feb 15, 2022 7:07 pm
And one new bonus feature--the Losey and Delon interviews from '76.

Actually 2 new bonus features. Forgot to mention the documentary about the Vel d'Hiv roundup, which will probably be enough to make me want to buy this even though I have the SC.

A big shout-out to JM and Criterion for their gracious email to me on announcement day linking to their spiffy new Mr. Klein page and telling me to enjoy their new release.

That was really sweet. Thanks JM!

My god, the tealification on this one is even worse than usual. It looks absolutely awful.

Wow. It looked good on the screen at Film Forum, but compared with the warmer tones of the original release it just looks GREEN. I mean I guess it could make sense, if that's what was originally intended by Losey & Co to cool down the image. Any explanation as to the drastic shift in color palates?

Tonally and thematically it is a very cold film, so I'm guessing this new restored look is what was intended. I owned the original DVD and always thought it looked too hazy and soft compared to what I remembered from seeing the film for the first time in a theater. The UK Studio Canal blu looks outstanding on my LG 4k.

The screen caps in the Beaver article don't do the new restoration justice, imo.

It's quite clear the older DVD was magenta-pushed. It's also quite clear the new restoration falls in line with some debatable grading choices from Hiventy, though closer to the debates around Le cercle rouge than anything stronger.

Can anyone compare the StudioCanal blu with the Crit?

They're likely to be equivalent except for the encodes.

Man, what a film. Seems so relevant to present day USA, very reminiscent of the ICE thugs demanding identity papers to "prove" you are American or you get shipped off to El Salvador or Uganda or God knows where. Robert Klein is an excellent representation of the kind of person who turns a blind eye to injustice until it happens to him, and only now is it totally unfair to persecute and exploit people for their ethnic background. While not blatantly or openly racist, his tacit racism is clear in how he treats the desperate Jewish man at the beginning of the film and how he considers it a "joke" that he would be confused for being Jewish (the newspaper publisher is not amused by that comment). When he visits his father we see where that mentality came from.

The movie is intentionally ambiguous about who the other Robert Klein is and why Delon's Klein is being mistaken for being him, though I'm guessing that's intentional in putting us (the audience) into a similar uncertain and incomplete understanding as the main character. But at the end we get a hint that the character doesn't:

Spoiler

The Jewish man he fleeces for his painting at the beginning is the man ominously standing over his shoulder in the train car at the end. I assumed he was the "other" Robert Klein, using the business card he made a point of obtaining before he left the house after selling his painting as his way of faking his identity, part of his plan in setting up Delon's Klein to get a taste of what it feels like to be unfairly persecuted. He's also probably the person who was snatched by the French Gestapo when he tried to meet with him.

Tellingly, even Klein's lawyer/friend eyes him distrustfully ("Is your family French-French or are there Jews in your family?") takes advantage of him when he's vulnerable.

Showing the collaborationist attitude of many French citizens during the Nazi Occupation presents an interesting counterpoint to all of the Resistance films.

RPG wrote: Tue Dec 23, 2025 1:32 pm Man, what a film. Seems so relevant to present day USA, very reminiscent of the ICE thugs demanding identity papers to "prove" you are American or you get shipped off to El Salvador or Uganda or God knows where. Robert Klein is an excellent representation of the kind of person who turns a blind eye to injustice until it happens to him

Its continued relevance is not lost on one great contemporary American filmmaker, who quoted the film's ending in a release this year:

Spoiler

Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind

These days I feel like Docteur Petiot with Michel Serrault is even more prescient, if you feel like seeing the absolute worst of humanity in the face of evil

diamonds wrote: Tue Dec 23, 2025 2:49 pm

RPG wrote: Tue Dec 23, 2025 1:32 pm Man, what a film. Seems so relevant to present day USA, very reminiscent of the ICE thugs demanding identity papers to "prove" you are American or you get shipped off to El Salvador or Uganda or God knows where. Robert Klein is an excellent representation of the kind of person who turns a blind eye to injustice until it happens to him

Its continued relevance is not lost on one great contemporary American filmmaker, who quoted the film's ending in a release this year:

Spoiler

Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind

Oh wow, great catch!