Hello!

The Cinesavant reviews at Trailers from Hell have an entire new look.

The new formatting of CineSavant reviews is proceeding nicely. We’ll see if the automatic formatting will fix most of the strange things happening to older reviews. I’m far too old to go in manually and fidget with 4,000 separate files. But Trailers From Hell’s website engineers have already accomplished their share of miracles, so we’ll wait and see.

The reviews now have a format choice that toggles from dark to light, via a command on the upper right of the screen. The black background looks great but mine will be the lighter choice. The darker format reminds me more of a blog, and I think of CineSavant as more of an ongoing source of articles, a full website. In the isolation of writing for the web, ya gotta double down on the delusions that feel the best.

I hope you can navigate okay … please write in with comments …

So … upcoming discs!

We’re already getting antsy for some of the Halloween-themed discs promised this month, a thought that motivated this quick list of discs I call Mailbox Watchers. It’s neither comprehensive nor particularly well organized, just a stack of titles that come to mind when we ask, ‘what are we most waiting for here?’

We’re naturally most keen for the 2 Warner Archive Collection releases of Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula in 4K. In addition to the monster box, the WAC is offering  a more practical, more economical set. It’s a genuine event in the fan world of classic Hammer: every horror freak in the world wants to know exactly what is meant by ‘the original uncut pre-censorship’ version we’re supposedly getting in prime condition. We intend to review both sets, splitting that chore with Charlie Largent. Now all we need are discs to review, thankyouverymuch.

The stack that follows is more than a laundry list; I’ve skipped some high profile titles (a musical, etc.) that I can’t see myself watching again. Looking at the logs between here and late November, here’s what stuck out:

The Warner Archive Collection has some super surprises: David Lean’s  Ryan’s Daughter in 4K, hopefully remastered from 65mm. George Pal’s  Tom Thumb is a fantasy that I’ve somehow never managed to see straight through. Sidney Lumet’s all-star military prison picture  The Hill will hopefully have English subtitles, enabling me to undestand what’s going on when prisoners are screaming in various accents. We’re also happy with the WAC’s firm commitment to  Blu-ray 3-D, with both  Phantom of the Rue Morgue and  The Charge at Feather River.  Thanks, George!

We’re just now getting into Deaf Crocodile’s fine disc of Aleksandr Ptushko’s  Scarlet Sails, a Russian adventure movie said to be one of the director’s best.

While Radiance Films continues its flow of prime Japanese and European thrillers, we are primed for its immediate Halloween titles, Mario Bava’s  Planet of the Vampires 4K (perhaps a reissue), Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s chilling  Who Can Kill a Child 4K, and a much-anticipated horror box, enticingly titled  Fantastique: Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema.

Criterion has our full attention with a deluxe 4K disc of Netflix’s presentation of Guillermo Del Toro’s  Frankenstein. The only other direct-horror
title we see is Sergei Parajanov’s weird Ukranian fable  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 4K. But we’re also primed to receive several other desirables. A new ‘Eclipse’ box offers Samuel Fuller’s early features for Lippert Films,  I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona, and The Steel Helmet. A bit later we get François Truffaut’s  Shoot the Piano Player 4K, and Philip Kaufman’s  The Right Stuff 4K. I will have to invite Todd S. over for that one.

KL Studio Classics has a potential deal-maker coming in November, a monster box of Four Sergio Leone Masterworks westerns, all in 4K:  A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, and as a surprise  Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s a guaranteed all-nighter.

And there’s one more title that popped up that feels fun to mention. Paramount is once again giving us Frank Capra’s Christmas picture  It’s a Wonderful Life in an 80th Anniversary deluxe 4K gift set. There must be a million more movie newbies out there needing an introduction to the tale of Harry Bailey. Not to get on the Xmas bandwagon too hastily, but I think it’s a good film to introduce kids to what we used to be proud of as core American values … you know, honesty, integrity, a sense of neighborly fair play.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Good old CineSavant host Trailers from Hell, where our reviews reside, has launched an improved page, with a different look and (I am assured) a wealth of functional improvements. It is said to run more smoothly and suffer fewer glitches.

Today’s CineSavant reviews are the latest I’ve uploaded with a new publishing process … we’ll see if I’m successful. There are a few bugs which will likely be fixed or addressed in the next couple of days. I like the way the reviews display, but the font size undergoes a change after the first paragraph and I think it ought to be uniform. More importantly, the ‘top photo’ on each of my reviews is missing … and I’ll be looking to see that fixed. There are 4,000 of them so hopefully they’ll pop up automatically. Otherwise, the planning seems very smart and considerate … I think it will be smooth sailing very shortly.

That’s important because we have a LOT of reviews to write!

And now for something different, a little think-piece contemplating Influences that are hard to pin down.

Years ago we were intrigued to learn that Jefferson Airplane’s old song  Crown of Creation had lyrics (and its title) lifted directly from  The Chrysalids, a 1955 novel by that grand old man of British Science Fiction, John Wyndham.

A few nights back we decided to re-read Wyndham’s popular novel  The Midwich Cuckoos, the imaginative, scary shocker that became  Village of the Damned, the classic Sci-fi thriller about the weird children with ‘the eyes that hypnotize.’ We last read the book around 1972 …

… and it read well, even if some aspects did seem a bit dated. But one paragraph jumped out at us. Other sources suspect that it provided inspiration for a later artist, in this case writer-director Terrence Malick. This time around it’s not quite a full quote. The paragraph is a statement about woman’s place in the cosmos … and may be a bit dated itself. It reads as follows:

‘Man’s arrogance is boastful,’ he observed, ‘woman’s is something in the fibre. We do occasionally contemplate the once lordly dinosaurs, and wonder when, and how, our little day will reach its end. But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever. She doesn’t believe in the dinosaurs: she doesn’t really believe the world ever existed until she was upon it. Men may build and destroy and play with all their toys; they are uncomfortable nuisances, ephemeral conveniences, mere scamperers-about, while woman, in mystical umbilical connexion with the great tree of life itself, knows that she is indispensable. One wonders whether the female dinosaur in her day was blessed with the same comfortable certainty.’

Like we did, you might also make a connection with Malick’s monumental ethereal-cereal epic  The Tree of Life … its title also quotes a line from a John Wyndham book. The subject of the paragraph is women as the source of life, which is a major concern in Malick’s film. And then there’s the out-of-left-field concern with a dinosaur, which in Malick’s film becomes a bizarre sequence. Is Malick’s dinosaur supposed to be female?  The movie observes what might be a moment of very non-reptilian mercy … not Wyndham’s allusion to a dinosaur with motherly instincts.

You be the judge … it’s not exactly the most meaningful mystery to contemplate, but we’ll take what we can get.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Pardon the confusion!  Besides being away for two weeks, we’ve got three new reviewers and the monthly site housecleaning to do …. and while we were gone, the page that hosts our reviews Trailers from Hell underwent a complete revamp. It is said to clear up technical issues, load faster and be more streamlined in function.

The re-formatting of the thousands of CineSavant reviews came as a complete surprise. I’ll hopefully get new posts up right away …. but that may take a day or two. Wish me luck.

Coming to the rescue once again, Michael McQuarrie sends along this link to something special — a complete rendering of a 1955 novelty record with a space theme. This one gets our attention for the key talent involved.

The narrator is none other than the irreplaceable Paul Frees, whose authoritative and somewhat intimidating voice dominated the 1950s, especially when reading copy for classic Sci-fi, such as the films of George Pal. He’s of course the voice of Disney’s The Haunted Mansion.

Others will be just as interested to hear the music of composer Walter Schumann, who reportedly created the ‘dum-da-dum-dum’ Dragnet theme and is enthusiastically remembered for his incomparably expressive music score for Charles Laughton’s  The Night of the Hunter.

The credit on the cover goes to The Voices of Walter Schumann, a choral group he managed. The mood on the 12 tracks is spacey and eerie, sometimes verging on a sound appropriate for a religious-themed movie. The album was apparently very popular; I wonder if it was also released in a stereophonic pressing, to attract the new (in 1955) addicts to the Stereo Hi-Fi craze. One can audit the whole thing.

And here’s an image you’ll need to blow up to read … it’s an ad from an April 1970 issue of Rolling Stone. CineSavant reviewer and advisor ‘B’ thought of it after reading about the negative press being given a prominent upcoming film release. Here is ‘B’s explanation:

“A brief note ran in Variety this week describing a Facebook ad Warners has been running to offset the (extremely) poor advance notices on Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger. Such observations, per WB publicity, may strictly be a difference of opinion… decide for yourself.”

“The new Variety article is here, mainly so you can click on the little Warners ad which will beseech you to give DIGGER a chance.”

“This sort of advertising has been attempted before; it’s something you occasionally do when you’re desperate and need to try something. In the movie business, the best example of this is this old  Zabriskie Point ad, which I believe only appeared in the 4-4-1970 issue of Rolling Stone. I can’t say that it sold a single ducat to the movie, but the advertisement is committed to the picture, good or bad, 100 percent.”

That 1970 Ad is big enough to read, especially if you zoom a little. The main tagline refers to a perceived critical gap, but my first thought is that it is dissing Zabriskie Point as a bottomless hole. Reviewers of 1970 were indeed split … but is the same thing really happening with Digger?

I can tell you that big glossy posters for Digger are right now up in two European cities; besides the strange image of Tom Cruise buried in old age makeup, the ad copy line that stood out is that the whole movie was shot in big-format VistaVision … or at least that’s how it read to me in two foreign languages.

We certainly went for  Zabriskie Point when it was new — as a high schooler I didn’t who Michelangelo Antonioni was, but the LP soundtrack raised my interest.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s the third go-round for this protocol, so maybe we’ll get it right this time.

Yes, CineSavant is taking another break.
CineSavant Reviews will continue, but the CineSavant Page is going dark for a few days.
The same thing happened last Spring. It’s nothing bad, so no need for concern. I’ll be happy to explain later, the nefarious things I was up to.

New reviews should be posted at Trailers from Hell during the break, even though this Column won’t be updated. Yes, new reviews, it’s just that they probably won’t be promoted here or on my Facebook page for a couple of spins of the wheel.

The place to check for new reviews will be my CineSavant Archives Page at Trailers from Hell. Every new review posted shows up there first; it’s the official tally of what exactly we’re up to as guests of TFH. How many reviews go up will depend on what is prepped in time. CineSavant reviewers Terry Morgan and De nise Morrison will kick in as well.

Sorry for the break. DVD Savant and CineSavant have been up for 26 years without a whole lotta interruptions. Not that we can’t be tempted away . . .

Watch this space too. The CineSavant Column will be back very soon.

Our custom for these breaks is to invite that old rascal Sierra Charriba ↗ to step in and say a few friendly, reassuring words. They tend to be the same words, as Michael Anderson Jr. shot him stone dead 161 years ago. Charriba is too busy manufacturing drones to sell to our worst enemies right now to make a personal appearance. I did secure his permission to convey a message to all readers that dare set foot on his land, which he reminds us is 3 times the size of Texas.

As always, Charriba was his aggressive, confrontational self, the life of the party:

“CineSavant will be back!  Vote in the midterms!  Who you send against me now?”

See you a little later, Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The epic films of Samuel Bronston come to mind every once in a while; they’ve been slow arriving on disc in remastered presentations. That’s why the tip-off from advisor-reviewer ‘B’ of their availability streaming got my attention.

All four of the films that stayed in the Bronston corral can now be seen on Amazon Prime. We wandered over and sampled three of them. Anthony Mann’s impressive  El Cid Stars Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It is a little weak on color but looks better than my old DVD; it’s much better than the 70mm theatrical restoration from 1993. Although its history is slanted and its politics are conservative, this is the best of the four movies, very strongly felt. The knights-in-armor action is up there with Ivanhoe.

Nicholas Ray’s  55 Days at Peking has always looked good; I picked it up on a European Blu-ray some years back, and it might be available domestically by now. Topping the Bill again is Charlton Heston, with Ava Gardner. It’s strong suit is the colossal production, with the huge city set built just outside Madrid. Everything else is a strange pro-colonial political jumble that today’s history teachers wouldn’t endorse.

The relative rarity is 1965’s  Circus World, the all-star bore with John Wayne and Claudia Cardinale. I only watched the first few minutes, most of which looked okay. Not the script … it’s terrible.

The biggest super-epic of all is 1964’s  The Fall of the Roman Empire — it has a cast-of-thousands grandiosity that today’s CGI cannot match; all it needed was a more charismatic star than Stephen Boyd. We have a so-so DVD and have seen a not-bad European Blu-ray. The other three Bronstons are ‘included with Prime’ but Roman Empire is not, so we didn’t pay to sample it.

The last I heard, the Bronston films were owned by Disney (please correct me on that) so I wouldn’t be holding my breath for handsome remasters and disc releases. The best book on the Samuel Bronston empire is still Mel Martin’s  The Magnificent Showman, from 2016.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson