Hello!

The new Trailers from Hell podcast The Movies That Made Me has snagged the director and home video entrepreneur David Gregory for their newest interview show of career highlights and film favorites.

We first met Mr. Gregory years ago, when his Severin Films was turning out DVDs; he directed  his first feature around 2008 and has continued to several documentary pieces. We’ll be looking for his newest, a  feature documentary on the history and legacy of the Paris Grand Guignol theater. According to TFH, David is tasked with profiling his 5 fave Severin releases, and 5 dream titles he’s like to someday release.

25 years ago, when editing a TCM documentary about Joan Crawford, there was one movie we couldn’t see, called  Letty Lynton. Correspondent Richard Coombs sent in this link to an article in The Guardian detailing the legal conflict that took Letty Lynton off screens just four years after its premiere.

Writer Pamela Hutchinson gives the pertinent facts. The story was based on a real-life murder, that later became a very different movie by David Lean. The movie created a fashion fad over an Adrian-designed ‘Letty Lynton’ dress style that became very popular. Crawford’s grandson Casey LaLonde took part in the effort to clear Letty Lynton to be screened again. It is going to be shown at the TCM Fest in May, and then be released on disc by The Warner Archive Collection.

Oh, and one more thing. We love living in California, but all those poor commuters are really in a rough spot right now … here’s the bad news at the pump this morning.

Let’s hope for the best for all of us.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We’re hoping we’re in line to review Ignite Films and Eagle Rock Pictures’ new 4K edition of Joseph H. Lewis’s key noir The Big Combo.  Ignite is a very special film collection, having accomplished such a terrific restoration and release for the previously abused classic  Invaders from Mars. 4K Ultra HD ought to do a lot for The Big Combo, with its ‘extreme noir’ lighting by John Alton.

The crime drama has been a focus of noir studies from the 1970s, focusing on the twisted personalities on view — every relationship has a perverse angle. The romantic triangle is really a tangle of sexual obsessions, while the only stable people are a pair of gay hit men. The stars carry the drama with ease: Cornel Wilde, Jean Wallace, Richard Conte, Brian Donlevy and Helen Walker. The inseparable hired killers are none other than Earl Holliman and Lee Van Cleef.

Ignite / Eagle Rock have announced four separate packages, standard editions in 4K and Blu-ray, plus two separate Steelbook editions. Each package includes an entire bonus feature filmed by John Alton, The Crooked Way. More info is available at the  Ignite Website.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Joe Dante circulated this link to a YouTube encoding by ‘Bone Jangler’ from a couple of years ago, an encoding of an episode of The Abbott and Costello Radio Show.

Bela Lugosi makes an appearance, to help plug the then- new movie  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

As expected, Bela is assigned straight man duty, to set up verbal jokes. Expect a LOT of jokes. Don’t expect a lot of good ones.

“Let’s Go with the Abbott & Costello Show!”  It’s said to be from May 5, 1948.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We very much enjoyed Dread Central’s April 3 article discussing the flurry of werewolf movies that hit in 1980 and 1981. Writer Matt Konopka skips the blather and goes directly into descriptions of storylines, distinguishing one from another. We of course have our favorites too. Like Matt, I really admire Michael Wadleigh’s  Wolfen even if it always ends as a big disappointment.

The article ends up a spirited defense of Joe Dante’s  The Howling, which gets my vote as well as the best of the bunch. Seen theatrically, it worked its magic 100%. Director Dante and screenwriter John Sayles found a good balance between humor and horror, with 2 or three really smart, exciting jump scares.

And we’ve got inks to a full-length Sci-fi landmark that I’ve usually only seen excerpted — the KTLA TV show from 1950, which took a TV camera to the soundstage of George Pal’s  Destination Moon. That landmark film has since suffered from comparisons to more exciting space adventures that (slowly) followed, so it’s difficult to communicate what an impact it had. The average American still thought of space travel as Buck Rogers fantasy, and to have it discussed as a factual possibility stirred everyone’s imagination. Few could have believed that the first moon landing would occur just 19 years later.

The kinescope of KTLA’s visit to George Pal’s moon was an episode of a live TV show called ‘City at Night.’  They’re certainly trying to be creative. It’s great fun to see the TV crew struggling to cover everything with two cameras … the on-camera hosts Keith Hetherington and Dorothy Gardiner are frequently forced to vamp, while we are left staring at piece of camera equipment. But they do their best not to come off as awkward.

When not panning across the impressive moonscape backdrop, we’re introduced to a number of the film’s creators. Part one starts with a nice pullback from a painted moon; over the course of the hourlong show, we wander all over the moon set, and then to the rocket interior sets.

We first meet the director Irving Pichel, who woould make a much better host than the TV people — Pichel did a lot of voiceover work in addition to acting and directing. The space crew comes next, in costume: John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers and Dick Wesson. The experienced actors can’t have been familiar with live TV. Nobody speaks unless spoken to, and Dick Wesson doesn’t use his comic character.

George Pal arrives, with his quiet voice and foreign accent — he’s immediately deflecting praise to his collaborators: author Robert Heinlein, artist Chesley Bonestell and art director Ernst Fegté. Bonestell shows a copy of his book Conquest of Space, which Pal later transformed into a movie.

I may have skipped somebody, but I caught intros for editor Duke Goldstone, director of photography Lionel Lindon with the Technicolor camera, and Technicolor color consultant Robert Brower. A couple of extraneous guests are there as well — a naval officer and the noted supersonic test pilot Eugene May. Everyone calls him Mr. May — does that mean that he was a civilian test pilot?

We noted last week that Destination Moon is on its away in a new Blu-ray encoding, perhaps sometime this summer.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Just a couple of semi-personal notes at today’s Column. I was intrigued to listen to Nathaniel Thompson’s  ideas about disc storage the other week, and have been corresponding with readers giving more advice. I am steadily progressing with my project to liberate the house from the tyranny of being overrun by discs.

I’m up to about 1700 discs repackaged in envelopes, and they’ve almost filled up a full dresser of drawers … one more drawer to go. I’m ‘enveloping’ far more DVDs than BDs, and trying not to discriminate — I have at least 3 copies of the movie Chinatown, including a 1998 DVD that’s not even 16×9 enhanced. I guess I’ll be able to help some student do a study on the progression of disc encodings?  Not so sure about that, but I do know that I’ve sorely missed a disc or two that I lost track of — that excellent BD of Raw Deal must be behind a piece of furniture somewhere.

The sleeves and booklets are numbered and stacked in boxes, about a 1,000 titles to a box. We’ll see how well that effort works.

So far I have at least a dozen more big boxes of discs to ingest into this system, and after that I’ll go through the ten or so shelves and weed out discs that can be consigned to the envelope list. I’m hoping that thinning out what’s displayed on shelves will have a double benefit: we may finally be able to locate anything fairly quickly — and my shelves might better reflect my personal taste, too. Figuring out what to do with these discs is based on some hard decisions: 1) There must be 10,000 collectors with collections bigger than mine, so I won’t operate under the illusion that I’m safeguarding a precious treasure. 2) Nothing is permanent, especially not me. The idea is to arrange this stuff so it can be enjoyed, without being a problem for the future.

We may check in with more progress later. … ?

We’ve lived in Los Angeles for 56 years and have only seen maybe a quarter the city, even if there are dozens of district names I’d need to search for on a map. One place I’ve never been to is where Venice Blvd. meets the beach, the sand-adjacent walkway with its permanent circus atmosphere. I’ve not been a fan of crowded places — we’ve hung out between the Santa Monica Pier and Ocean Park a lot, but have only seen the Ground Zero of the Venice Beach walkway in movies.

Well, we had a need to seek out a recommended food stand on the Boardwalk, and ventured there last Sunday, just to try our luck. It was something of a miracle that we chanced on a parking spot just a 3 blocks away. Some film location expert I am … I thought that the iconic Venice ‘collonade’ streets were further north, and had been comepletely eradicated. I was looking in the wrong spot … at Venice Way and the beach there still exists a partial block of the buildings with the columns made immortal by the movies  Touch of Evil and  Dementia. Some Angeleno I am, reporting on something everyone here knows well, except me.

There are more remaining columned buildings than seen in the photo. They are spaced out a little, but are obviously Touch of Evil’s Los Robles, where two full blocks carry the same design. The movie gives the impression of a seedy border town that exists only at night. Hints of a sandy nothingness beyond peek through between the buildings, like a landscape in a Dalí painting.

Today it’s of course hemmed in by dense development. It makes sense that one angle at the end of the block just shows darkness — that’s the beach, with the waves maybe 90 yards away. A half-block inland is the long street-alley where Charlton Heston is driven at breakneck speed, in a daylight scene. We can see more of what there is to the South — oil derricks, a lot of them. There were once many more ersatz Venetian canals, with those quaint bridges like the one where Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles make different exits.

Roger Corman’s  Wild Angels has daylight scenes around the canals and the oil wells. Curtis Harrington’s  Night Tide, Jacques Demy’s  Model Shop and Jacques Deray’s  The Outside Man give us a wider tour of what the area once looked like … back when a student could be reasonably poor and still live in L.A.. The biggest surprise, however, was seeing the area covered in Denis Sanders’ 1959 Crime and Punishment U.S.A..  The movie is no great shakes but the Venice locations are eye-opening. A view looking South from a rooftop reveals scrubland with an unending forest of oil derricks, like something from an Oil Boom western. No wonder rent down there was cheap, with all that industrial activity.

Hope this hasn’t been a waste, see you Tuesday.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson