Tonight's Movie: Marcella (2024) - A Kino Lorber DVD Review

One of the things I appreciate about Kino Lorber is the company's steady stream of documentary releases.

Often these nonfiction films are available from Kino Lorber in affordable DVD formats. Since I enjoy documentaries but don't feel they typically have the same "rewatch value" as other films, the DVD format makes a lot of sense to me.

One of the newest documentary DVDs from Kino Lorber, MARCELLA (2024), is an American Masters program about Italian chef Marcella Hazan.

I'll insert here that this film is among several "foodie" related documentaries from Kino Lorber over the years. Reviews of a number of additional cooking-related titles may be found at the end of this post, along with reviews of other Kino Lorber documentary releases on a variety of topics.

I found it interesting that although I love cooking and am familiar with many famous chefs, including Jacques Pepin and Lidia Bastianich, who both appear in MARCELLA, Marcella Hazan was a vaguely familiar yet at the same time relatively unknown name for me.

I realized while watching the documentary that my lack of knowledge about Marcella was probably because she was known for her cookbooks and cooking classes but, hampered by poor English, she never had her own TV program. I did read her editor Judith Jones's 2007 book, which mentions Marcella, but that was close to two decades ago and my memories of those few pages had faded; more importantly, I'd never bought one of Marcella's cookbooks. I'm now considering adding the 30th anniversary edition of ESSENTIALS OF CLASSIC ITALIAN COOKING to my collection.

I was eager to learn more about Marcella, especially after reading that Julia Child called her "my mentor in all things Italian," and I found MARCELLA to be an especially good documentary which really piqued my interest in exploring more deeply into the subject's career and writing.

As I began watching, right off the bat it was as though my words collided, because who should be one of the main narrators but Mayukh Sen, the Merle Oberon biographer I met just last weekend at a UCLA screening of DARK WATERS (1944).

Sen not only writes on film (including a nice essay on Linda Darnell for Criterion), he's a food writer who has won a prestigious James Beard award. Marcella was one of the women profiled in his 2021 book TASTE MAKERS: SEVEN IMMIGRANT WOMEN WHO REVOLUTIONIZED FOOD IN AMERICA, which I just ordered; here's an additional piece he wrote on Hazan for The New Yorker in 2021.

I found a connection with Hazan in another way upon learning from the film that when Marcella moved to the United States in the mid '50s, she first began to learn English by listening to Dodgers baseball. She surely would have been listening part of the time to the great Vin Scully, who began broadcasting Brooklyn Dodgers games in 1950.

When Marcella, a science scholar and teacher, moved from Italy to New York with her husband Victor, she found herself without much to do. Encouraged by Victor, she began learning to cook, specifically food from their native Italy. She was dismayed by American supermarkets, with all of their prepackaged foods, and had to go to considerable lengths to find markets with fresh ingredients.

When it came time for Marcella to write a cookbook, it was Victor who spent his evenings after work translating and typing up manuscripts; they seem to have been a wonderful team. Over the years they collaborated on many cookbooks, and Victor also supported Marcella as she gave cooking classes both in the U.S. and Italy; eventually he became known himself as an expert on Italian red wines.

Victor is still with us today at the age of 97, and Marcella and Victor's son Giuliano is also a cookbook author.

Marcella was a lifelong smoker, though she lived until the age of 89, when she passed away due to emphysema. It was a bit hard to imagine the students in the lovely cooking classes described in the film learning and smelling the food through a haze of cigarette smoke, but according to the documentary, that's the way things were. Different times!

Marcella died in 2013, but she's fondly recalled in the documentary by her husband and son, who are each very articulate, as well as by several other food journalists and chefs. Their comments are supplemented by Marcella's own words from a memoir, read by actress Maria Tucci.

MARCELLA runs 97 minutes. It was written and directed by Peter Miller.

The DVD print has a fine picture and sound, as one would expect from a film of recent vintage. Disc extras consist of the trailer plus a gallery for four additional releases available from Kino Lorber.

I really enjoyed MARCELLA, learned a great deal, and recommend it.

Previous reviews of documentaries released by Kino Lorber: OBIT: LIFE ON DEADLINE (2016), HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY (2015), DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (2016), THE GODDESSES OF FOOD (2016), BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY (2017), CHEF FLYNN (2018), LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE (2019), DIANA KENNEDY: NOTHING FANCY (2019), THE DONUT KING (2020), FIDDLER'S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN (2022), THE AUTOMAT (2021), FACING NOLAN (2022), SOUTH: ERNEST SHACKLETON AND THE ENDURANCE EXPEDITION (1919), MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER (2024), MERCHANT-IVORY: THE DOCUMENTARY (2024), MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK (2022).

Thanks to Kino Lorber for providing a review copy of this DVD.

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