Hello!

Good friend Malcolm Alcala sends along a nifty little link to nine minutes of fine B&W cinematography.

12 years ago the Los Angeles County Museum of Art put on an exhibition called Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa — Art and Film. The most celebrated Mexican cinematographer shot scores of top Mexican classics and some of the best films by Luis Buñuel, not to mention a number of classy Hollywood pictures.

This is the exhibition’s video sampler of fine Figueroa movie images. Several appear to be from John Ford’s  The Fugitive. We’re big fans, so it certainly works for us. And nobody photographed classic ‘Spanish Eyes’ with quite the same finesse.

Noir City 2026 is coming back to Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater for two weekends in April. The exhibition has become practically a vacation destination over the years, what with the fine show put on by The American Cinematheque and the Film Noir Foundation, and hosted in-person by Eddie Muller and Alan K. Rode.

The lineup this time guarantees extra entertainment — the theme is Face the Music!,  in twenty films that carry musical performances. Ida Lupino and Ann Sheridan sing in  The Man I Love  and  Nora Prentiss, while Jazz performers and compositions feature big in  Anatomy of a Murder  (Duke Ellington),  All Night Long  (Dave Brubeck, Johnny Dankworth, Tubby Hayes & Charlie Mingus),  The Sweet Smell of Success  (The Chico Hamilton Quartet),  Odds Against Tomorrow  (John Lewis), and  Pete Kelly’s Blues  (Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee).

Some of these pictures really take off on the big screen — the talent roster has some of the best directing work of Otto Preminger, Raoul Walsh and even Jack Webb.

Noir City screenings are always ideal, like an old-time communal theater experience. They will be having live music at every show, often with vocal accompaniment — 20 movies in two weekends!  I might try to attend this year!  Full information is through the American Cinematheque link:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

This first link is fun … Gary Teetzel sends along a little bit of music heaven, credted to Stereozentrum. It’s the main title cue from Alfred Hitchcock’s  Psycho, arranged for solo piano.

Since the YouTube video is a live performance, we get to see the pianist’s skill uninterrupted. The post has a couple of paragraphs of learned music talk, that happens to discuss something called the ‘Hitchcock Chord’ … if it’s a joke, I wouldn’t be able to tell. But I was certainly entertained.

‘Stereozentrum’ doesn’t identify himself directly, so forgive the omission of the name of the talented pianist.

As long as we’re in the neighborhood, here’s some extra Psycho links — for  Petra Hayden’s Psycho Acapella;   Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score explored for A-level music students;  and score explored for A-level music students; and of course the immortal  Psycho Sleigh Ride medley.

Producer-director and restorationist Arnold Leibovit has another Puppetoon release coming on Blu-ray. It’s a 4K remaster of a restored Director’s Cut of the original 1987  The Puppetoon Movie.

It sounds like a digital overhaul of the entertaining feature, which includes classic by producer George Pal, and creative contributions by Ray Harryhausen, Willis O’Brien, Gene Warren, Sr., Wah Chang, Fred Moore, Buddy Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Peggy Lee. A look at the sales page gives a full description of the restoration, and the improvements made to the Puppetoons included.

The disc is due in late April, the link is to a preorder page — it’s loaded with bright Technicolor images.

Other Puppetoon compilations are at Arnold Leibovit’s  Puppetoons Productions Home Page.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s a Book Review Day.

A fistful of years ago, we first encountered Chris D.’s movie writing in his encyclopedic look at Japanese crime and Yakuza films,  Gun and Sword  (scroll down to May 25).  Those 900+ pages are still a key item on my reference shelf. It is one of those books that makes one realize that the worldwide volume of film and film art is much bigger than we thought.

At first glance, the title of Chris D.’s new book makes us think he’s taken a dive into film noir commentary. The launch point is a section on the great femme stars of film noir, a series of essays on ‘The Humanity of Femmes Fatales’ through a group of individual noir actresses. That core theme is just the springboard for an expanded body of writing that ranges far and wide. The list of chapter headings promises interesting reading on a wide range of film trends, with a focus on genre studies, taking on directors and individual films from around the world. It’s the kind of book in which one scans the 5-page index and finds a half-dozen items one wants to read.

There is an overarching organization, but our first attention went to individual films Chris chooses to closely profile. Just a quick sampling:  Johnny Guitar,  Baby Face,  End of the Affair,  The Camp Followers,  The Night Porter,  Machine Gun McCain,  Adua and her Friends,  A History of Violence,  The Devils,  Deep End,  Bi Gan’s 2018  Long Day’s Journey into Night. It’s a fairly eclectic selection,

Chris served for years as a programmer at The American Cinematheque on Hollywood Blvd.. One might think that all that time organizing screenings would have turned him into a movie house zombie. No, he apparently continued to engage with the films themselves, compiling a mental diary of his reactions.

Chris D.’s writing style pulls one in — his concentrated thought process expresses aspects of the film experience not covered by an academic approach. We like scholarly essays, and the book does carry a sub-title worthy of a thesis paper: International Noir/Neo-Noir: Signifiers, Gender & Beyond Genre. But we found it easy to get into Chris’s flow of words and ideas. It’s a very personal account. Chris’s occasional asides are a reminder that our personal histories with films includes the particulars of how we saw them. I identify with that approach. Specific movie experiences are etched in my memory timeline, too … remembering the where, the when and the with whom.

Chris has interesting opinions to impart, and he communicates them well, in short bursts of honesty. A random example is his assessment of John Sturges’  Bad Day at Black Rock. We had internalized the critical praise given the film’s use of CinemaScope. Chris instead sees Sturges’ blocking of a large cast on the wide ‘scope screen as stilted, and relates it to his view of the characterizations as also schematic, superficial. There’s no snark factor to Chris’s observations, none of the attitude of a reviewer trying to be clever. We instead think, ‘oh, maybe Black Rock could use some reassessment.’

The book is not just for readers already familiar with the films he covers. It has potential appeal for film school / film culture newbies searching for new corners of cinematic interest. Some of his categorized overviews are accompanied by lists of films, some annotated and some not. These also carry his personal ratings, that are not a generalized good/bad barometer. He often makes use of detailed movie synopses, which I find helpful in that they emphasize the elements he feels are relevant.

The film writing from across the years includes Chris’s unfiltered interviews with Samuel Fuller and Mary Woronov published long ago when Chris was connected with the L.A. punk scene tabloid Slash. The tome is 826 pages long, and mostly dense text. There is a large section that’s again devoted to Japanese crime pictures, that for a few pages made me think I was back in Gun and Sword again.

That first set of Noir essays collects a group of core noir masterpieces, but the focus is on the femme fatales — each features a key actress illuminating, in Chris’s view, another aspect of gender dynamics. Not political gender dynamics, but perhaps the pondering of ‘how do the sexes get along, in the first place.’ Chris’s occasional asides tend to be choice — we wonder how someone’s love life would fare, if they tried to organize their personal relationships through what most films noir teach us about women.

Again the scope of interest is broad for this compendium of film writing from a special point of view. Chris D. devotes entire sections to non-pantheon Italian and Japanese masters. The choice of screen artists grabbed us right away: Florinda Bolkan, Francesco Rossi, Hideo Gosha, David Cronenberg, Leonard Schrader, Claude Chabrol, Robert Hossein. He looks into the Alain Delon & Romy Schneider affair, the evolution of Twin Peaks and the films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

The book has plenty of B&W photos and other illustrations. The table of contents is inviting but no index is in the back.  My copy already has several post-its to mark things to re-read, that I didn’t want to lose track of. (My bookshelves aren’t pretty, but they are practical…) I have not yet read the essays on Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes and Yasuzo Masumura, knowing they’ll be there when I’m ready.

Chris doesn’t hold back — he’s there with an opinion for everything and more than a few value judgments. Reactions to The World According to Chris will of course vary, but I found him level-headed and open minded. I was attracted to his choice of topics, and never disappointed by what he had to say.

We frequently come across $60 film books that can be read in an afternoon, yet still feel insubstantial, padded. Chris D.’s killer softcover is just the opposite. It’s a recommended deep-dive read.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Advisor Gary Teetzel reminded me of this attractive disc, said to be coming down the pike from the company ClassicFlix. I remember Olive Films releasing several volumes of Betty Boop cartoons on Blu about a decade ago. This compendium of Max Fleischer hits throws a wider net — looking at the titles, even I recognize some great, one-of-a-kind animation masterpieces.

It all depends on the quality, but ClassicFlix is promising that the disc will measure up.

One of the better experiences in Film School was Bob Epstein’s animation class, which showed original prints of everything from Lotte Reiniger to Ladislas Starevich to Tex Avery to Ray Harryhausen. Bob demonstrated that the art was a lot more than Cartoonarooney Fun. He had a particular yen for early Max Fleischer, especially some of the silent Koko the Clown classics. They showed us 1970s faux-hipster know-it-alls that our generation invented very little — everything surreal, subversive or sexually provocative had arrived way before. Before a big screen presentation of some classics in Royce Hall, he screened Koko’s Earth Control, an apocalyptic preview of Crack in the World, only completely insane.

The link below takes one to ClassicFlix’s sales page, for the curious — this first Greatest Hits volume combines remastered Fleischer marvels of  Koko the Clown,  Bimbo,  Popeye the Sailor Man,  Superman,  and of course,  Miss Betty Boop. The expected arrival date is May 26.

And correspondent Scott Stirneman surprised me today, with something I’d forgotten about entirely.

Back in the days of DVD Talk I spent a lot of time organizing and trying to keep current a ‘DVD Savant Wish List’, to which readers could contribute desired titles. It was plenty popular, as it reflected the frustration in the first years of DVD that ALL of our FAVORITE discs weren’t coming out fast enough. I knew the pain of various disc boutiques. After making an all-out effort to release some highly-desired feature, when it arrived the fan base only demanded more discs, the ones that those stingy studios and disc companies were hoarding.  That of course wasn’t the case (most of the time), but I remember the attitude very clearly.

What I forgot was where these Wish Lists were — they weren’t linked like the thousands of other DVD Talk / DVD Savant reviews. It’s rather nice that that old content hasn’t been taken down from the web, 25 years later. Someday it will surely disappear, which is why we’ve retained backups here. When that happens, Assuming I’m not six feet under (I’m not holding my breath) I should be able to recover any review, complete with misspellings, mixed metaphors, head-scratchingly odd syntax and pathetic attempts to be clever. It’s what the world needed in the Clinton and Bush years, that’s fer shure.

I think this Wish List is the last one from 2012, after which I begged off — it required an extra hour a week in text management. Long-time Savant readers may find their own names listed. It starts off with that of Brad Arrington, a steady correspondent who suggested many titles, who is now gone. I told the kindly Mr. Stirneman that I was grateful for his help locating the lists. My plan is to print this last one out — the ‘collectors’ game’ could be to cross off all the AWOL titles that have since appeared — and in Blu-ray or 4K, to boot.

And hey, it’s good nostalgia for my websites, reminding me how well I’ve succeeded in keeping them stupendously unprofitable!

For fun, this extra link may be my first stab at a wish list … from (cough) 2002. The text will show me where my greedy disc-collecting brain was at back then, you know, when we were so, so, young.

Practically everything on this 2002 list is now on the shelf here at CineSavant Central, in one format or another:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Lets proceed with optimism, even if the global forecast is — well, it changes every 45 minutes.

We found some cute stuff for this weekend’s Column. Michael McQuarrie directed me to the Film Board of Canada’s latest website, to see a movie about Buster Keaton. Unfortunately, the Canadians were blocking it, along with other content, with placards reading ‘Not available to view in your current location.’

In truth, I am grateful that Canadians are still having anything to do with us. That goes for pretty much the world right now.

But there are so many super, hilarious Canadian animated films. I looked up an old favorite short animated film, which thankfully was viewable. We caught up with this particular mini-masterpiece on early DVDs, 25 years ago. It is To Be by John Weldon, and features the great voices of Kim Handysides and Howard Ryshpan. It’s a science fiction fable, and as such was written up with great enthusiasm for my old  DVD Savant Sci Fi Reader (gee, anybody interested in a follow-up book?).

It’s hilarious, insightful and genuinely profound … and has a cute song, too. If you haven’t seen it, do — it’s not long and the online copy is flawless.

And once again we’ve been graced with a fave disc list from Kyu Hyun Kim, whose opinions have always impressed me, along with his knack for communicating the special appeal of a picture in fewer words than I thought was possible.

We reviewed several of these titles —  Unknown World,  Winchester ’73,  Yojimbo / Sanjuro,  World Noir No. 3 — and note that Kyu draws from a couple of UK & European companies that stay mostly inaccessible to CineSavant.

He once again he comes up with releases that never crossed my radar and as such now draw my interest. Interesting that his ‘top fave’ is a Kino Lorber Jean Belmondo costume picture!

Kyu’s comments go the extra step — he names the companies that he think are overtaking Criterion in the effort to bring forth more treasures from the hidden corners of cinematic history.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson