Hello!

Lots of interesting email input this week. People are finally receiving their 4Ks of  The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,  and some were nice enough to write in and say that I didn’t steer them wrong. Friend Craig Reardon wrote a very detailed note saying that he thinks the new encoding is the same basic scan as the earlier Indicator disc that we liked, given greater attention and the simple ‘plus’ of 4K contrast and detail.

Charlie Largent took a look at our review disc and (happily) endorsed my coverage as accurate as well. Both of them did say that they wished ‘something could be done’ to enhance the audio track, as good as it is.

I was also struck by responses to the review of the 4K  Abandon Ship,  which a lot of people seem to have seen. As I guessed, everybody has an idea of what Tyrone Power should have done. At one point in the review I stopped to observe that the people in the lifeboat were an unusualy cooperative, civilized bunch. Readers pointed out to me that when survivors and castaways stay organized and productively on task, it’s usually because they are a group with some internal cohesion, like the soccer team that was lost in the Andes.

In Abandon Ship we have a group of mostly white Anglos wealthy enough to afford steamship tickets. They’re wet and miserable and scared, but they accept Power’s authority, at least in theory. One writer reminded me that in the original 1841 incident, the sailors in the boat just started throwing people out with no particular plan. All the sailors stayed, of course. An agonizing thing about the Titanic disaster is that plenty of pushy people jammed their way into boats against the officers’ instructions, taking some places meant for women and children. Polite and obedient passengers were out of luck that night. If that’s not enough, the stiff class division on board carried an unspoken assumption that the third class immigrants down below were not as lifeboat-qualified as the rich folk up top.

I remember having to deal with crowds of unhappy, self-important Beverly Hills types at movie premieres, people that normally refuse to wait in line even for a few seconds. I saw older women in gowns and wearing diamonds, ignore our instructions, push barriers aside and threaten us. I should never even have tried to be a good movie usher.

One writer said that any group of people put in an inconvenient situation with random strangers can start getting unreasonable. Tyrone Power really needed that gun, I think; I’m surprised that Abandon Ship keeps its grip on plausibility.

And I had some fun notes about  The Odyssey,  which I’m not likely to see in a theater. It sounds really attractive, even though it’s been a long time since I was carried off by the glamour of a grandiose spectaclar. And my thoughts are truly ignorant. How can that big Polyphemus hand prop work well?  Descriptions remind us too much of the pasty rubber blob that once represented Allison Hayes’ dainty mitt. I’ve also read no direct description from anybody who has seen The Odyssey in the full-gauge film IMAX format. How can they possible compose shots for two shapes of screens?  Perhaps Gary Teetzel will have the answers.

And finally, I wonder how many of those gigantic Trojan Horse popcorn containers are being sold?  Something tells me that it must be a big moneymaker. That has to take the prize for The Most Decadent Purchase of 2026.

All these uninformed notes and questions come from a reviewer who spends all of his free time digging into discs. I’ve clearly lost track of what remains of American moviegoing. And I’m right here in Los Angeles, with some of the best theaters around.
 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Since everybody’s caught up in Odyssey fever … at least that’s the news says … we looked into the past to remember some older, good versions of the same story.

The Odyssey is of course the sequel to a larger epic about War, The Iliad. We might be re-reviewing the  Wolfgang Peterson version of that tale, as there’s a new  Arrow disc due in mid August. It starred Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger, etc. Sean Bean plays Ulysses/Odysseus … all I really remember is the camera fussing over Brad Pitt’s hair and costume.

We still favor the old, somewhat stiff 1955  Robert Wise version of The Iliad, with Rossana Podestà, Jacques Sernas, Stanley Baker, Niall MacGinnis and Brigitte Bardot. Good old Torin Thatcher, ‘Sokurah’ himself, plays Ulysses / Odysseus as a crafty, ruthless strategist.

We reviewed one good version of The Odyssey. In one of the first instances of a big Hollywood star working in Italy, Kirk Douglas gave a good accounting of himself in a star-studded Italo epic, in color. From 1954,  Ulysses gets good mileage from Sylvana Mangano as both Circe and Penelope. The Cyclops sequence is excellent. Seeing how Ulysses gets involved with more than one woman on his ten-year effort to get home, we can’t help but think that the whole story is an excuse for a straying husband. “She looked just like you, honest!”

We also really enjoyed a version of The Odyssey that hasn’t a big profile, a Hallmark/Zooetrope  TV miniseries from 1997, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. It’s a couple of minutes longer than Christopher Nolan’s version. It was shot flat for TV, and has its share of shaky CGI effects, but the story plays extremely well. Armand Assante is Odysseus, and he’s magnificent … his big problem is his ego, and the Gods punish him by continually delaying his return to his home in Ithaca. Greta Scacchi is Penelope, Bernadette Peters is Circe, plus we’ve got Isabella Rossellini, Irene Papas, Vanessa Williams and Geraldine Chaplin in tow. Jeroen Krabbé, Eric Roberts, Nicholas Clay and Christopher Lee carry the name male roles.

I remember my kids being very taken with the Armand Assante version … he was the best actor/hero ‘fit’ since Liam Neeson played Rob Roy.

The old DVD of the ’97 Konchalovsky The Odyssey seems to still be around. It looks like it might be on Prime Video … the flag when I bring it up says ‘included with Prime.’

We don’t often look in the past to re-think this story, but correspondents Jeff Allee and Alan Dezzani tipped us off to an 8 minute discussion (happy rant) on a YouTube page called James Whale Bake Sale: none other than Quentin Tarantino weighs in on Steven Spielberg’s ‘problem picture’  “1941”, the one with the poor reputation.

Did you hear that Mr. Tarantino expresses his opinions with enthusiasm?  We’re not surprised that he’d choose 1941 as a title to praise, as he loves nothing better than to give out with interesting, wildly inconsistent reviews. He’s great when he likes a picture we like, as he finds unique ways to give a thumbs up. When we disagree with him, we usually grumble that he thinks movies like  Switchblade Sisters are a pinnacle of film art. Well, I liked that one too.

Everything Quentin says about 1941 make perfect sense, but even he seems to be straining for the right words … “it has great things in it,” etc. He judges the movie on the fact that he read Bob Gale’s novelization first. He’s absolutely right in that the big star characters push the show out of shape, letting us lose track of the small-scale story with the original non-stars from  I Wanna Hold Your Hand. I still have one of the first scripts, The Night the Japs Attacked, which ‘grew like Topsy.’ John Milius added his guns ‘n’ explosions bits, and then Gale and Zemeckis did constant rewrites and additions as more big stars and more Saturday Night Live and Second City personnel were added. The more the merrier.

We like most everything IN 1941, but by the last act we’ve gone past our tolerance limit for screaming people and explosions. The film might become a terrific editorial experiment: turn the 150 minutes into Ten Serial Chapters, with titles, re-caps and last-gag cliffhangers. Any ten minutes of the movie are exhilarating.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson