Hello!

We’re pretty much in awe of the work schedule of friend Alan K. Rode , who very shortly will be opening the 2026 instalment of the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. The Palm Springs festival has been going strong since 2000.

This year’s festival runs from May 7-10 with a great lineup of pictures. New digital restorations of Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet and Blake Edwards’ Gunn, plus an eclectic lineup of moody thrillers — Joan Crawford in The Damned Don’t Cry, Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark in No Way Out, the gritty English productions Hell Drivers and It Always Rains on Sunday, and even a chance to see the explosive Bonnie and Clyde on a big screen.

Allan has the particulars of the festival all mapped out … attendees slip into town to enjoy the show and the town before the summer heat takes over.

Thanks to a nice tip from correspondent Michael McQuarrie, we get to see a YouTube encoding of a documentary by favorite Trailers from Hell guru Brian Trenchard-Smith: a 1974 piece on stunt work in Hong Kong action pictures, circa 1974.

Trenchard-Smith wrote, produced and directed the martial arts movie documentary, which features stuntman Grant Page, but also Carter Wong, Lawrence Lee, June Rhee, Wang Yu — and stars George Lazenby and Stuart Whitman, then in Hong Kong filming Hammer’s Shatter. It’s one of 4 or 5 stunt-related films by Trenchard-Smith, before his directing career took off with The Man from Hong Kong.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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

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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

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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