Radiance Blu-ray Film Review

The Landlord (1970) • Limited Edition Blu-ray [Radiance] — racial politics, realistic people, and crazy comedy in Hal Ashby’s debut

In 1960s New York City, a wealthy young white man buys a house in a Brooklyn ghetto.

The name Hal Ashby isn’t heard much these days. Perhaps it’s because his career fizzled out as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, or perhaps it’s because the celebrated films of the ’70s tend to be the darker, more paranoid kind, rather than the frothier crowd-pleasers. So it may be easy to forget that Ashby was a big name then, most notably for Shampoo (1975) as well as other once-well-known films like Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Coming Home (1978), and Being There (1979).

The Landlord, his first feature film as director, hints at the path Ashby would take over the coming decade — making films that were frequently humorous but never lost sight of a more serious meaning — and also introduces several ideas that would recur in his work. In The Landlord, we see a young man trying to escape a domineering…