Hello!

Pardon the confusion!  Besides being away for two weeks, we’ve got three new reviewers and the monthly site housecleaning to do …. and while we were gone, the page that hosts our reviews Trailers from Hell underwent a complete revamp. It is said to clear up technical issues, load faster and be more streamlined in function.

The re-formatting of the thousands of CineSavant reviews came as a complete surprise. I’ll hopefully get new posts up right away …. but that may take a day or two. Wish me luck.

Coming to the rescue once again, Michael McQuarrie sends along this link to something special — a complete rendering of a 1955 novelty record with a space theme. This one gets our attention for the key talent involved.

The narrator is none other than the irreplaceable Paul Frees, whose authoritative and somewhat intimidating voice dominated the 1950s, especially when reading copy for classic Sci-fi, such as the films of George Pal. He’s of course the voice of Disney’s The Haunted Mansion.

Others will be just as interested to hear the music of composer Walter Schumann, who reportedly created the ‘dum-da-dum-dum’ Dragnet theme and is enthusiastically remembered for his incomparably expressive music score for Charles Laughton’s  The Night of the Hunter.

The credit on the cover goes to The Voices of Walter Schumann, a choral group he managed. The mood on the 12 tracks is spacey and eerie, sometimes verging on a sound appropriate for a religious-themed movie. The album was apparently very popular; I wonder if it was also released in a stereophonic pressing, to attract the new (in 1955) addicts to the Stereo Hi-Fi craze. One can audit the whole thing.

And here’s an image you’ll need to blow up to read … it’s an ad from an April 1970 issue of Rolling Stone. CineSavant reviewer and advisor ‘B’ thought of it after reading about the negative press being given a prominent upcoming film release. Here is ‘B’s explanation:

“A brief note ran in Variety this week describing a Facebook ad Warners has been running to offset the (extremely) poor advance notices on Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger. Such observations, per WB publicity, may strictly be a difference of opinion… decide for yourself.”

“The new Variety article is here, mainly so you can click on the little Warners ad which will beseech you to give DIGGER a chance.”

“This sort of advertising has been attempted before; it’s something you occasionally do when you’re desperate and need to try something. In the movie business, the best example of this is this old  Zabriskie Point ad, which I believe only appeared in the 4-4-1970 issue of Rolling Stone. I can’t say that it sold a single ducat to the movie, but the advertisement is committed to the picture, good or bad, 100 percent.”

That 1970 Ad is big enough to read, especially if you zoom a little. The main tagline refers to a perceived critical gap, but my first thought is that it is dissing Zabriskie Point as a bottomless hole. Reviewers of 1970 were indeed split … but is the same thing really happening with Digger?

I can tell you that big glossy posters for Digger are right now up in two European cities; besides the strange image of Tom Cruise buried in old age makeup, the ad copy line that stood out is that the whole movie was shot in big-format VistaVision … or at least that’s how it read to me in two foreign languages.

We certainly went for  Zabriskie Point when it was new — as a high schooler I didn’t who Michelangelo Antonioni was, but the LP soundtrack raised my interest.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s the third go-round for this protocol, so maybe we’ll get it right this time.

Yes, CineSavant is taking another break.
CineSavant Reviews will continue, but the CineSavant Page is going dark for a few days.
The same thing happened last Spring. It’s nothing bad, so no need for concern. I’ll be happy to explain later, the nefarious things I was up to.

New reviews should be posted at Trailers from Hell during the break, even though this Column won’t be updated. Yes, new reviews, it’s just that they probably won’t be promoted here or on my Facebook page for a couple of spins of the wheel.

The place to check for new reviews will be my CineSavant Archives Page at Trailers from Hell. Every new review posted shows up there first; it’s the official tally of what exactly we’re up to as guests of TFH. How many reviews go up will depend on what is prepped in time. CineSavant reviewers Terry Morgan and De nise Morrison will kick in as well.

Sorry for the break. DVD Savant and CineSavant have been up for 26 years without a whole lotta interruptions. Not that we can’t be tempted away . . .

Watch this space too. The CineSavant Column will be back very soon.

Our custom for these breaks is to invite that old rascal Sierra Charriba ↗ to step in and say a few friendly, reassuring words. They tend to be the same words, as Michael Anderson Jr. shot him stone dead 161 years ago. Charriba is too busy manufacturing drones to sell to our worst enemies right now to make a personal appearance. I did secure his permission to convey a message to all readers that dare set foot on his land, which he reminds us is 3 times the size of Texas.

As always, Charriba was his aggressive, confrontational self, the life of the party:

“CineSavant will be back!  Vote in the midterms!  Who you send against me now?”

See you a little later, Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The epic films of Samuel Bronston come to mind every once in a while; they’ve been slow arriving on disc in remastered presentations. That’s why the tip-off from advisor-reviewer ‘B’ of their availability streaming got my attention.

All four of the films that stayed in the Bronston corral can now be seen on Amazon Prime. We wandered over and sampled three of them. Anthony Mann’s impressive  El Cid Stars Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It is a little weak on color but looks better than my old DVD; it’s much better than the 70mm theatrical restoration from 1993. Although its history is slanted and its politics are conservative, this is the best of the four movies, very strongly felt. The knights-in-armor action is up there with Ivanhoe.

Nicholas Ray’s  55 Days at Peking has always looked good; I picked it up on a European Blu-ray some years back, and it might be available domestically by now. Topping the Bill again is Charlton Heston, with Ava Gardner. It’s strong suit is the colossal production, with the huge city set built just outside Madrid. Everything else is a strange pro-colonial political jumble that today’s history teachers wouldn’t endorse.

The relative rarity is 1965’s  Circus World, the all-star bore with John Wayne and Claudia Cardinale. I only watched the first few minutes, most of which looked okay. Not the script … it’s terrible.

The biggest super-epic of all is 1964’s  The Fall of the Roman Empire — it has a cast-of-thousands grandiosity that today’s CGI cannot match; all it needed was a more charismatic star than Stephen Boyd. We have a so-so DVD and have seen a not-bad European Blu-ray. The other three Bronstons are ‘included with Prime’ but Roman Empire is not, so we didn’t pay to sample it.

The last I heard, the Bronston films were owned by Disney (please correct me on that) so I wouldn’t be holding my breath for handsome remasters and disc releases. The best book on the Samuel Bronston empire is still Mel Martin’s  The Magnificent Showman, from 2016.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Sometimes it’s important to describe things just as they are.

We disc collectors are a mature bunch. We take steps to make sure that our collecting obsession doesn’t hold undue influence over our daily lives, that we’re not thinking too much about certain upcoming disc releases. This means not gathering things into one’s immediate environment that could reinforce those anti-social collector fixations. No cult-ish herd mentality here!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

This item might hand readers some fun, at least those curious about Hollywood real estate!   Good old Michael McQuarrie has once again made my day, with a film clip link from ‘Mega.nz’ of 9 minutes of aerial footage of the Hollywood area, reportedly filmed sometime during the 1940s.

Somebody took a full reel of 35mm film from a moving airplane, that’s flying pretty darn slow; we thought ‘helicopter’ until an errant wing and tail slip into our view.

The perfectly clear images do several loops up and down Hollywood Blvd., essentially the same corridor that in the movie  “1941” is lined with 4 and 5-story buildings. As you can see here, only occasional buildings are over two stories in height. The coverage begins at Hollywood and Vine, with The Broadway department store and I believe the Taft building, both of which were duplicated for the movie. The view then flies all the way West to almost La Brea, and turns back again. We can spot several theaters, the Pantages, the Egyptian, the Paramount (now the El Capitán) and finally Grauman’s Chinese with its walled forecourt.

↑  The picture just above comes from 01:49 on the clock that comes with the film clip. It shows the Chinese Theater just right of center. The big building on the left is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. By the way, not only did ‘1941’ give the Boulevard taller buildings (to make a trench for the planes to fly through, just like Star Wars), we relocated the landmark buildings closer together. The historic Hollywood USO was actually off on a side street.

After the aerial view hoses down Hollywood Blvd. a couple of times, we see some random shots I can’t identify, then Cahuenga Blvd. up until we see the Hollywood Bowl. We end up in The Valley, over two studios.

One of the last clips begins on the Universal Backlot, and then shifts East until we fly over Warner Bros. It moves over the dozens of sound stages to show the vast back lot of street fronts. By the 1970s most of those sets were gone, replaced by parking lots. The Warner lot was at that time shared by Columbia, and called The Burbank Studios.

↓  The second picture with all the arrows is a detail of a frame that pops up at 08:40. It’s the famed New York Street Set, that was never taken all the way down. The street fronts were all reconfigured many times, but this is where all the Hollywood Blvd. scenes from ‘1941’ were filmed.

The instructions to generate text failed me, so you have to put up with my crude letters and arrows. As you can see, all the fake buildings are about two stories tall, but they have no tops. Here’s the ‘legend’ for the diagram:

A. This, I believe, was the studio commissary in 1979. It had a little studio store up front. I only ate there once.

B. Walking downward on the photo, you get to the row of brownstone apartments, New York style, that resembles the street seen in many WB pix. Last month I mentioned  Wait Until Dark. As you can see when you watch, there are so many false front streets that there might be another similar streetfront that is the real location for that movie. In the video the view pivots so you can see the front of the row of brownstones.

C. This is the front of the building that became the USO for ‘1941’, with the big neon sign that is shot down.

D. This corner has the traffic signal in ‘1941’ that John Belushi’s strikes when his P-40 fighter plane crashes and slides across the intersection. It was a real full-sized plane mock up, with no visual effects at all. An enormous ramp was built down the middle of the street, engineered by A.D. Flowers and Logan Frazee’s crack special effects unit. Steven had this expensive stunt filmed twice. On the first attempt a cable snagged and slowed the plane down, so it didn’t come off the ramp as fast as it should. The second take, quite a bit later, was perfect. When struck, the traffic signal fell halfway over, perfectly. Exactly the luck of Spielberg.

E. Right in front of that corner, a few minutes earlier, is where Dan Ackroyd’s M3 Lee tank comes to a stop, in the middle of a crowd of rioters. Tank rebuilder and driver Pat Carmen drove it at full speed down the row of brownstones and took a hard right turn into the intersection, running over a car on the way. The shots in the movie are not sped up. Pat skidded to a stop in a rectangle space kept empty for the tank’s final position. A fatal mistake would seem too easy, but Pat knew he could do it safely.

F. This is where the movie theater is, where Robert Stack stops to see Disney’s Dumbo. The street only looks broad — it’s hard to believe that a car could do a U-turn in it. A big car stunt takes place there as well, during a dialogue scene. No optical effects.

and

G. The tank ‘charges’ to this point from position E, so that Bobby Di Cicco can rescue Dianne Kay from Treat Williams. Without a cut it skids to a stop, overturning a big truck, which was actually overturned with a Logan Frazee / AD Flowers mechanical trick.

Here’s the link for the full video:

And this idea for a good item just occurred to me. Fifteen years ago I frequented two ‘acccumulator pages’ I really liked, that gathered eclectic art and thought pieces and obsessive little memes from various corners of the web-o-sphere, arranged as if in an art gallery. The coolest was Tom Sutpen’s  “If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of Dead Copycats.”, and it was chock full of great art and frequent non-PC content, sometimes very non-PC content. It eventually disappeared, without being archived anywhere, it seems. [ That’s a good reminder to get serious about migrating some old DVD Talk articles over to Trailers from Hell. ]

But the second runner-up is still here, even if it is now a shadow of its former self. It’s called  This Isn’t Happiness and has something of the same modus operandi, except that in recent years it’s become somewhat tame and bland. It’s still worth checking out.

The biggest lift I get from This Isn’t Happiness is manipulating the URL to reach back in time … if one goes back just a couple of thousand posts, it gets fascinating, with clever, artistic, witty, creative, inspirationsal, and sometimes erotic items. Some are themed. What you do is drop into the page, go the second page listed as “2”, and then change the URL so that ‘2’ becomes any 4 numbers between roughly 2,000 and 9,000. Here’s a random starting link, to page  6584. Nothing is dated, but every once in a while pops up an ‘obit’ photo that will give you a clue where in the timeline a post item fell. Current events are sometimes noted as well. Good luck!  You’ll know right away if you like it, and if you do it will be addictive.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson