Easily MGM’s most attractive stars in 1949. The movie’s not bad either.

 

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.

 

A New Kind of Werewolf:  Why  The Howling  has the Scariest Transformation Scene 

 

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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.

 

DESTINATION MOON  On The Set With George Pal
Part One
Part Two
Part Three 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Charlie Largent does a really good writeup on this one.

 

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. … ?

 

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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

It’s good but could be a lot better … it just needed a machine gun battle to go with the title.

Hello!

After the webpage format stumble of the weekend, I haven’t had time to snoop for more Column Items, here in my Sydney Falco file.

But my want list has accrued a number of notably desirable upcoming discs.

Let’s try this in what I hope is chronological order. On April 27, in 4K Ultra HD, Joe Dante’s comedic winner Innerspace is due from Arrow Films. The dazzling ILM visual effects are pre-CGI, I believe, but the real appeal comes from Dante’s cast — Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid, Kevin McCarthy, Fiona Lewis — and Robert Picardo, William Schallert, Henry Gibson, Kathleen Freeman and Dick Miller.

 

Innerspace  at Arrow Video 

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Kino Lorber is promising us a remastered encoding of a 1934 Universal picture that nobody seems to remember, despite the fact that it stars Claude Rains, right after making The Invisible Man. It also features Lionel Atwill and Joan Bennett. It also may be the finest hour for Edward Ludwig, the director of The Black Scorpion.

Although not technically a horror film, a bare synopsis brings to mind the Sam Peckinpah film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. It’s due on April 28.

 

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head  at Kino Lorber 

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Two pictures due in July from Radiance Films caught our eye. The first on June 22 is by Shohei Imamura, the director of Black Rain and Vengeance is Mine: his lauded 1966 drama The Pornographers. The subject is corruption of all kinds in 1960s Japan; we’ve never seen a more relentlessly honest director than Imamura. It’s a Region B disc in 4K Ultra HD.

 

The Pornographers  at Radiance Films 

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Of special interest is Radiance’s June 23 release of Georges Franju’s first feature film La Tête contre les murs, which translates as ‘Head against the Wall’. It takes place in an asylum and features the stars of Franju’s Eyes without a Face, Pierre Brasseur and Edith Scob, plus Anouk Aimée and Paul Meurisse. It also has the first credited feature film score by Maurice Jarre, whose melody is quite striking. There aren’t that many films directed by Franju — we want them all.

 

La tête contre les murs  at Radiance Films 

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And here’s a favorite we’re willing to go far out of our way to get — we’ve reviewed it twice on DVD, in fact.

It takes a bit of foreknowledge to appreciate what was originally a musical by Joan Littlewood,  that uses music to express the cosmic futility of warfare in World War One. It sank like a stone in the box office of 1969 — in the middle of the Vietnam war. The brilliant novelty is to show the reality of the war through songs sung by the troops — with mordant replacement lyrics. It has a long cast list of English stars doing their bit for pacifism, including a young Maggie Smith as a music hall entertainer. The director is Richard Attenborough, and it’s his first film.

England’s Eureka! has the disc slated for June 29. At the moment their sales page doesn’t say what Region coding it might have.

 

Oh What a Lovely War  at Eureka! Masters of Cinema 

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A Criterion ‘Eclipse’ DVD we loved for years is getting a very welcome HD redo for June 30: Spaniard Carlos Saura’s ‘Flamenco Trilogy’  starring top flamenco artist Antonio Gades: Bodas de Sangre plus the international hit Carmen with Laura Del Sol and Cristina Hoyos, and El Amor Brujo, Manuel de Falla’s full-on flamenco ballet musical. The three movies do for flamenco what The Red Shoes does for toe-shoe ballet. All three films were restored in 4K.

 

Carlos Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy  at Criterion Eclipse Series 6 

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I don’t have a sales link for the next item, but I couldn’t resist because it’s science fiction. George Pal’s Destination Moon hasn’t fared well on disc because its rights got sidetracked by the Wade Williams Collection, and all that we’ve seen in a long time is a pretty sad DVD from 26 years ago. UA has the Technicolor elements but nobody’s coming forward to digitally restore the picture.

Enter Film Masters, which has been doing very good remasters of films from various sources; we hope Pal’s film will look as good as some clips we’ve seen on TV. The show is lauded as the first of the 1950s Sci-Fi boom, although a Lippert space movie beat it to screens by a month or so. The space ship ‘Luna One’ is slated to launch on July 14, with a number of extras, including the entire feature Flight to Mars … which until  2021 was also ‘tied up’ with collector Wade Williams.

 

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I’m breaking form here to tout a pair of Kino Lorber discs from the previous month, March, that I’m still hoping to receive. They’re in 4K Ultra HD and each has a strong following.

Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic might really shine on 4K, with all of those shiny subterranean settings for a human cockroach monster to hang out. We’ve always liked the picture and admired its nicely-chosen cast — Mira Sorvino, Josh Brolin, Giancarlo Giannini and F. Murray Abraham. The release has two 4K discs with two cuts of the picture, and one Blu-ray. It’s due March 17.

 Mimic  at Kino Lorber 

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And finally there’s Jeannot Szwarc’s 1980 Somewhere in Time, which I’ve never seen … I just remember some pan-scanned clips on TV, plus waiting to see a horror film one afternoon at the Cinematheque, while a horde of enraptured Somewhere in Time fans emerged from their screening. They seemed transformed, which only made me feel more cynical. Not very nice, true.

Anyway, I figure a 4K Ultra HD presentation may erase my doubts — who doesn’t like Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer?  Plus, the title did great things for favorite author Richard Matheson.

 

Somewhere in Time  at Kino Lorber 

That’s for the moment … a couple more desirable announcements have surfaced, but I don’t have links or art images for them yet.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

It’s a brave movie … but we understand why why audiences would reject its acid, hyper-cynical worldview.

 

Hello!

We’re a day late due to some website issues — but Charlie Largent says it’s safe to publish … reviews, anyway

Mark Throop of the indispensable Movies ala Mark found this site, which has been around long enough to be familiar to lots of film fans (except uninformed me). It’s called Reel History and is run by Dr. Jared Frederick. He does a good job of analyzing movies about ‘true’ historical events, and comparing them to known historical reality.

It looks like most of the films discussed are about war or battles, at least the ones at the top of Reel History’s menu. We watched part of an illustrated video on John Wayne’s 1960  The Alamo and were impressed … the good doctor managed to relate the discrepancy between Wayne’s film and the historical record, without calling the picture an outright fraud.

I’m interested in a second video article because it’s about the Spielberg / Milius / Gale & Zemeckis  “1941”. Dr. Frederick rightly calls the epic comedy a mess, yet he has many interesting observations regarding its re-creation of / exaggeration of the real event of 1941, in which some Angelenos seem even more stupid than the characters in the movie.

Actually, it’s hard to find an article with four consecutive words that discuss “1941” in any context other that its box office success or lack thereof. I liked it. Maybe I should write an unexpurgated ‘Making of 1941’ sometime. Maybe not. From witnessing much of the filming, I have a wonderful recall of second-hand gossip, and scores of skewed subjective personal observations.

 

Dr. Jared Frederick’s  Reel History 

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Being reported from all sides is TCM’s schedule for April, which will set aside its Friday nights for a month-long tribute to producer-director  Roger Corman. They’ll be showing numerous Corman films, the films of some of the famed directors he helped get started, and a biographical documentary or two.

The news can be glommed at leisure, at the pages for  Warner Bros. Discovery,  All Hallows Geek and  Conskipper,

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

We didn’t post reviews yesterday because Trailers from Hell has  a formatting glitch that needs to be fixed up … we assume it will be straightened out shortly.  So … nothing is wrong with CineSavant or the rest of us here in Los Angeles!

We’ll hopefully be posting again shortly.

I wish the government had properly preserved these. They’re egregiously non-PC … in a good way!