The Criterion Collection and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment are delighted to confirm the titles to be released on Blu-ray in June 2023. On 19 June comes FISTS IN THE POCKET, a truly unique work directed by Marco Bellocchio, that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema. Following on 26 June, Charlie Chaplin’s first full length feature film as director, THE KID is released. A nimble marriage of sentiment and slapstick, the film is an expressive masterwork of silent cinema.

 

Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions, in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. With its coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humour, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 

New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Marco Bellocchio, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

Interviews from 2005 with Bellocchio, actors Lou Castel and Paola Pitagora, editor Silvano Agosti, critic Tullio Kezich, and filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci

New interview with scholar Stefano Albertini

Trailer

New English subtitle translation

PLUS: An essay by film critic Deborah Young

Charlie Chaplin was already an international star when he decided to break out of the short-film format and make his first full-length feature. The Kid doesn’t merely show Chaplin at a turning point, when he proved that he was a serious film director—it remains an expressive masterwork of silent cinema. In it, he stars as his lovable Tramp character, this time raising an orphan (a remarkable young Jackie Coogan) he has rescued from the streets. Chaplin and Coogan make a miraculous pair in this nimble marriage of sentiment and slapstick, a film that is, as its opening title card states, “a picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear.     

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: 

New 4K digital restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s 1972 rerelease version of the film, featuring an original score by Chaplin, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

New audio commentary featuring Chaplin historian Charles Maland

Jackie Coogan: The First Child Star, a new video essay by Chaplin historian Lisa Haven

A Study in Undercranking, a new program featuring silent-film specialist Ben Model

Interviews with Coogan and actor Lita Grey Chaplin

Excerpted audio interviews with cinematographer Rollie Totheroh and film distributor Mo Rothman

Deleted scenes and titles from the original 1921 version of The Kid

“Charlie” on the Ocean, a 1921 newsreel documenting Chaplin’s first return trip to Europe

Footage of Chaplin conducting his score for The Kid

Nice and Friendly, a 1922 silent short featuring Chaplin and Coogan, presented with a new score by composer Timothy Brock

Trailers

PLUS: An essay by film scholar Tom Gunning