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.

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

Hello!

It’s Book Review time, and this week’s offering is pretty special. Unlike many film-related books, we read this one front-to-back straight through. It felt more like a good novel than a career bio.

We’ve been privileged to review filmmaker biographies written by Joseph McBride and Alan K. Rode, and now we have a new authoritative voice covering a classic director, Jason A. Ney. The subject is a director with a remarkable career, whose achievements were passed over by the rush of Auteur worship initiated by Andrew Sarris in 1968. Sarris slammed Fleischer as inconsistent, with a career that he said ‘sputtered, alas, at less than 50 percent efficiency.’  Ney’s new book  Richard Fleischer: Journeyman uses a less narrow index to assess the director’s work, enlarging his stature in our eyes. Never a hog for publicity, Fleischer’s goal was just to make the best movies he could. He didn’t trumpet his personality, but Ney shows us several themes that run through his work.

The new book Journeyman also corrects some misconceptions borne of Richard Fleischer’s own 1993 autobiography, Just Tell Me When to Cry: A Memoir. As now seems typical of the man, instead of touting his own accomplishments, Fleischer recounted the outsized filmic personalities he worked with, celebrities that would appeal to a wider swath of readers. He didn’t dwell on the details. Jason Ney has found a way to turn Fleischer’s remarkable personal story into a page-turner. The early chapters covering his roots and upbringing are not something we want to skip past; the passages about his courtship of his wife — their marriage lasted 63 years — are a great read. Fleischer is of course a son of the animation legend Max Fleischer. He might have become the heir to a film studio if his dad’s empire of Popeye and Betty Boop hadn’t been taken over by Paramount, and re-dubbed ‘Famous Studios’ to replace the family name. He was part of a warm and loving family that started poor but kept moving to better neighborhoods in the New York boroughs as Max and his brothers’ fortunes rose.

Author Ney convinces us that Richard succeeded through his own efforts, first in college theater and then in various road companies, where he experimented with Theater In the Round. He confected a way to repurpose old silent comedies as new attractions, and made his first mark in short subjects and documentaries. He collaborated with talents like Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Carl Foreman and producer Stanley Kramer. One of documentaries won an Oscar — which went to its producer, of course. Fleischer was never personally nominated. One of his shows was nominated for its writing, and three others for their special effects.

Many know the way Richard Fleischer came to direct the huge production  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — for Walt Disney, his father Max’s long-time business enemy. And we’ve only heard one side of Fleischer’s direction of  Compulsion, prevailing against the egotistical interference and outright sabotage by his star Orson Welles. But Fleischer didn’t detail his early successes at RKO, moving from family films to noir thrillers. That’s where he made his first masterpiece  The Narrow Margin, which Howard Hughes almost junked. He re-shot much of a big  Robert Mitchum-Jane Russell opus without credit, to get out of his contract with Hughes.  He was one of the few RKO staffers to leave the employ of Howard Hughes with a full skin, a maneuver that enhanced his industry reputation. Walt Disney picked him for the Verne Sci-fi epic, because he was capable, qualified and trustworthy … and likely a bargain.

Through all of this Richard Fleischer comes off as an even nicer guy than we thought. His patience with problem people and his skill at interpersonal diplomacy sound almost too good to be true. Much like director John Sturges, Fleischer became known for getting along with demanding and sometimes unreasonable stars and producers. Besides Orson Welles, there was the imperious Anthony Quinn and the infinitely egotistical Kirk Douglas. We get a full accounting of the sometimes-edgy filming of  The Vikings. The prize for noxious charmlessness goes to the infinitely insufferable Rex Harrison. I’ve never made it through a full viewing of  Doctor Doolittle, but Ney’s account of its filming will make anyone appreciate Fleischer’s refusal to just give up and ‘let it be what it is.’  He never walked off a picture, and his temperament kept several troubled pictures on the rails.

John Huston also failed Sarris’s Auteur Test; both directors varied their subject matter and didn’t pepper their work with too many personal references. Fleischer wasn’t one to billboard his directing personality. He was good at most everything; the lamest criticism I’ve read said that he got the directing nod when somebody needed a specialist in submarines and sea-going effects.

Fleischer spent most of his career as a free agent, working steadily because he was in demand, and not just an available asset on a studio’s payroll. He did good work on projects other directors might have turned down, such as the sprawling, historically accurate epic  Tora! Tora! Tora!.  Its pre- CGI action effects are filmed on a spectacular scale, right where the events happened. Some of Fleischer’s best movies are his least well-known:  Trapped,  Violent Saturday,  The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,  Barabbas,  The Last Run. His late career was sustained in part by his ability to cooperate with producer Dino De Laurentiis, but he also turned in some mature masterpieces. Fleischer made the best dramatic use of split screen effects in  The Boston Strangler. He then directed the over-achieving English true-crime story  10 Rillington Place, a tragedy so forceful that it’s difficult to watch.

Writer Ney had the cooperation of the Fleischer family, and was encouraged to be as truthful as possible. We do read of some of the director’s less than optimal choices. Like most established directors in the ’70s and ’80s he had to defend his turf against those who had never heard of his older movies. His physical decline was steep, but he was always surrounded by a loving family. His final farewell with his wife was as touching as anything from a sentimental romance.

At all times in Journeyman we feel we’re dealing with a forthright personality making the best of his opportunities, and trying to do his best work without abusing those around him. I have to admit that I began the book with a high opinion of director Fleischer. Working on a big feature that reunited his special effects crew from Tora! Tora! Tora!, I was befriended by the effects ace A.D. Flowers; his pros remembered Fleischer as one of the best filmmakers they ever worked with. And I still remember film writer Stuart Galbraith IV’s account of recording an audio commentary for a DVD of Tora! Tora! Tora!: after taping the entire 2.5 hour track with Fleischer, the Fox people told Stuart that a mistake had been made, that the session hadn’t been recorded at all. To Stuart’s surprise, when he gave Fleischer the bad news, the 85+ year-old director simply said, “let’s go back tomorrow and do it again.”

Every chapter backs up that impression of Richard Fleischer. Journeyman tells the story of the making of twenty interesting pictures, but it also gives us a positive personality that we wish we had known.

Here is the sales page for Ney’s book directly from The University of Kentucky Press. It was published three weeks ago, on May 12:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We found something interesting while spooling through a better-than-average compilation of 1930s travelogue pictures of Hollywood and environs … you know, those YouTube things that show up optimized and colorized.

This one has some pretty good items, such as the still-standing radio buildings and the Earl Carroll theater on Sunset, the Griffith Observatory on mostly undeveloped hills, the Hollywoodland Sign, etc. Also, (at 8:04) we see some really handsome shots of the Pan Pacific Auditorium and its distinctive pylons, from right in my neighborhood. The present day replacement building has but one pitiful pylon.

The big surprise was seeing, on the Columbia Ranch Lot, a glimpse from afar of  the giant set for Frank Capra’s 1937   Lost Horizon. The shot pans right from a fake mountain until we see the distinctive art deco towers poking out over the edge of a wall. The really impressive set looks even bigger on screen.  (beginning at 7:22 )

Looking online for a good photo, we came across these Instagram movies of the stars posing for pictures on the huge Lost Horizon set — Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, John Howard, H.B. Warner. Jane can’t have been happy bundled up in that costume.

Then, CineSavant correspondent Phil Smoot responded to last week’s column picture of Vincent Price, to write to tell me about seeing a screening of A.I.P.’s Vincent Price horror show  The Last Man on Earth with a completely different main title card … The Damned Walk at Midnight.

CineSavant’s go-to authority on all things A.I.P. is Gary Teetzel, so I asked him if he knew anything about such a title change. It wasn’t rare for distributors and theater owners to ‘invent’ new titles for movies, especially far away from Hollywood. The title might be changed for print ads, but the movie itself would usually retain the original title. John McElwee brought up this subject at least once on his  Greenbriar Picture Shows page, about  Major Dundee.

Gary had heard about the title The Damned Walk at Midnight. He forwarded a picture from the web, supposedly taken at a drive-in theater. Not only does Last Man have a new title card, it’s obviously a studio-produced job. The lettering matches the original design, and the text is cleanly matted over the correct background scene.

My idea of deep research, reviewer’s style, is a double-click to the IMDB. It indeed lists The Damned Walk at Midnight as an alternate title …. but where, how, and why?  No doubt about it, CineSavant is a treasure trove of important mysteries to be solved.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson