Hello!

For Sale: One Used Spaceship. Gary Teetzel found this ad, looking for a collector with deep pockets…

It’s said to be the original 20th Century Fox model for Klaatu’s intergalactic space ship, and it’s quite big.

I know, I know, it lacks the propulsion system that will take you to Paris at 4,000 miles an hour … ‘Holy Christmas!’

And the price tag is pretty hefty. You must wish you were like me, living next door to a Middle-Eastern Prince who likes to give out quaint gifts. I’ll send my neighbor a hint … you never know.

Full details at the link. It’s apparently from the estate – collection of my old boss Gregory Jein.

And also from Gary, a film clip from an outer space movie starring Buster Keaton … well, it’s a technically accurate description.

In 1946 Keaton took a role in a Spanish-language comedy,  El Moderno Barba Azul, a typically scattershot Mexican farce. Keaton’s career was of course at low ebb, but he kept working whenever possible, even when didn’t know the language.

The picture did get an English title and maybe a tiny U.S. release, as Boom in the Moon. No Kidding.

As a WW2 soldier, Buster’s plane crashes in Mexico, where he’s misidentified as a serial killer and arrested. As is standard practice with mad killers, he’s turned over to a scientist who shoots him into space in his new rocket. The rocket is a dud. It only flies as far as a remote area of Mexico. Buster and his fellow astronauts see a beekeeper in his suit and believe they’re looking at an alien.

I can’t stop laughing either. Gary forwards this clip with some rocket shots, and much more of the show can be found online. And good old SciFist has a  full review. He gives it his lowest rating. You’ll love it too.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The new issue of Noir City has arrived … and it’s yet another quality film book in disguise as a special interest magazine. Editors Imogen Sara Smith and Danilo Castro enforce a high bar for quality.

The magazine is the academic outreach conduit for the Film Noir Foundation; the articles are at the forefront of thinking on the American style. This Issue 46 bursts with articles about American Noir Actors in Italy, peeping Tom movies, a newly-found noir called The Crimson Canary, and ‘pregnancy’ in noir … that’s a new one. Also an article on a Japanese noir trilogy by Imogen Sara Smith — plus regular articles and disc reviews by colleague Sean Axmaker.

Details on subscribing are to be found at the Film Noir foundation page:

The Bright Lights Film Journal has touched on a subject that hasn’t had much new thought in a spell, Sam Peckinpah’s  The Wild Bunch. Writer Daniel Gauss takes a psychological approach to the film, with a fresh investigation of motivations and rationalizations for crime and violence .. ‘micro-moralities.’

We like this kind of analysis, which reminds us of critical studies directions back with professor Howard Suber at UCLA. Mr. Gauss goes beyond generalities (the sin of reviewers like CineSavant) to nail down ‘fifty discrete moral incidents’ in The Wild Bunch for inspection. Sure, it’s academic, but its not dis-connected.

And intelligent criticism on Peckinpah is always welcome. The publication date for Daniel Gauss’ essay was March 12, 2026.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We’re not feeling too well today and need a day to recover …  sorry to skip a Tuesday but hope I can be back with a review tomorrow. It’ll be a 4K of a Joe Dante classic ….

Thanks for your patience — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Artificial Intelligence is insidious, isn’t it? . . . AI playtime videos are beginning to proliferate.  Joe Dante  circulated this link to a page called  CineNova Universe.  Its unnamed creator describes himself as an audio-visual artist, art director and music producer; he uses AI to ‘create things that come from the human brain.’

Making fake videos that look like vintage film has come a long way from superimposing scratches.

At the moment he specializes in retro comic book adventures, in the style of old movies … with ‘exclusive characters such as “The Impossible Man” “The Gentleman” and “Roaring Star.”‘  Each of these little bursts of creativity is just a few minutes long.

From his data page we get the idea that Mr. CineNova may be a Spaniard. Take a peek, it’s pretty cute.

The Warner Archive Collection has quite a treat waiting for us in July. We expect a nice handful of new Blu-ray releases each month, with perhaps one or two coveted vintage titles among them. But the WAC has just announced a big July-August disc crop, a bounty that will include a number of classic gems. They were all to land late in July, but on Wednesday it was announced that half would be delayed until August 4. All are remastered in 4K from original elements. In the realm of vintage pictures, there’s something for everyone here.

The biggest surprise and the one we’re most eager to see is the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the all-star Shakespeare comedy that captures a fine fairy tale magic. The older transfers hinted at how beautiful it might be, so we’re hoping that the 4K remaster will reproduce the glowing quality of all those original film stills.

We’re also partial to a trio of B&W mysteries, spread across three studios. They are the strained RKO noir Macao with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, Warners’ hardboiled Andre De Toth noir Crime Wave with Sterling Hayden, Phyllis Kirk and Charles Bronson, and MGM’s fantastic amnesia romance Random Harvest, with Ronald Colman and Greer Garson.

Colt .45 is a Technicolor Randolph Scott western. Say the name, no explanation needed.

The Keyhole and Lily Turner are pre-Code dramas directed by Michael Curtiz and William Wellman, starring Kay Francis and Ruth Chatterton.

Presenting Lily Mars is an MGM Judy Garland musical with Van Heflin and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

We’re curious to see how the Technicolor Captain Horatio Hornblower will fare, with Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo … we just read about designer Ken Adam’s work fixing up its real sailing ships.

The Sisters is a Bette Davis / Errol Flynn picture we haven’t seen, so it will be a curiosity.

Bonnie Scotland gives us Laurel & Hardy, a Hal Roach feature released by MGM … made with a lot of studio politics I’ll need to read more about.

And the rollout concludes with Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross, a wartime suspense thriller with Spencer Tracy that was one of the first films to contemplate the possibility of massive war crimes, an all-consuming Holocaust. The direction is brilliant, even if we think the Zinnemann picture from MGM that most merits the 4K upgrade is his The Search.

How can we review all of these?  We’ll find a way.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Correspondent Steve Iverson forwarded a link to a YouTube video piece by ‘Adam Savage’s Tested‘, a 25-minute video piece by some really dedicated Star Wars fans. A group of enthusiasts constructed a full recreation of the original Industrial Light and Magic model shop.

The level of obsession here is high on the scale. These guys carry those miniatures of X-Wing fighters around the room as if they were religious icons. They’ve duplicated their shop room down to the old model kits on the shelves and the trash in the wastebaskets.

The general look of things certainly feels accurate to me. I saw the ILM’s Van Nuys facility on Valjean several times in 1976 and ’77, whenever they swapped equipment with our much smaller CE3K shop on Glencoe in Marina Del Rey. Their shop indeed looked a lot like this. Just a few steps away were the motion control systems with those adapted VistaVision cameras, shooting models of spacecraft and parts of the Death Star surface. 1976 is before CGI, of course. And also before personal computers. Special effects were a glue-and-paint activity.

I remember a fun detail out by the front door. Greeting arrivals was a poster promising the the movie for Summer 1976 … Hand-printed notes had been added as the release date got pushed back, with messages like “How about Christmas 1976?  Easter ’77?”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

…  D-Day.

Hello!

The ever-dependable Darren Gross sends us a real winner. The fledgling magazine Journal of Science Fiction began publishing in 1951, with intial entries contributed by Robert Bloch (‘Immodest Proposal’), Fritz Leiber (‘Hornbook for the Atomic Age’) and Ray Bradbury (‘Where Do I Get My Ideas?’).

One of the debut ‘zine’s three editors was none other than … drum roll … wait for it …Edward D. Wood, Jr.. He has his own short article, coming in right after Ray Bradbury’s, entitled ‘The Case Against Bradbury.’

Yes, it’s true, the writer of the immortal  Glen or Glenda?  weighs in on the literary fraud being perpetrated on the publishing world by Ray Bradbury. As Gary Teetzel says,  ‘It’s hard to argue with Wood, the author of ‘Parisian Passions’ and ‘Sideshow Siren.’

It’s pretty good reading … the Internet Archive carries the entire magazine, in all its hand-typed glory. Boy, good ol’ Ed sure puts that pretender Bradbury in his place.

” You’ve Got to Take the Journey Out and In. “

And we drift over to the London Review of Books for an article forwarded by Joe Dante. It’s a new piece by Malcolm Gaskill that’s actually a review of a movie, the Ealing Studios masterpiece  Dead of Night.  That great movie finally received a handsome disc remaster a while back. We reviewed 4K releases from both  StudioCanal and  Kino last winter.

Most of the article is a simple review that explains the story (gee, I never do that). But Gaskill soon steers the subject to the difficulties horror films encountered in England, mainly because of censorship. Influential pundits and bluenoses made it happen, it wasn’t because the moviegoing public hated horror … English literature is famed for its chilling ghost stories. Since censor boards might ban individual films right before they were set to play, distributors stopped importing them.

Gaskill’s remarks about post-war anxiety and kitchen-sink vérité cinema are interesting, but he ends with a quite a surprise — he states that Dead of Night’s unnerving circular story structure provided the inspiration for mathematician Hermann Bondi to re-think his theories for a model of the entire universe. The theory was first published in 1948, shared by Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle.

Collaborator Fred Hoyle was also a science fiction author and screenwriter (!) — of the conceptually brilliant  A For Andromeda, that we just happened to mention in a review last week.

These ‘random’ connections begin to get dizzying. Will the fruity old actor Miles Malleson poke his head out of a celestial Black Hole, and say “Room for one more inside, sir!” ?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson