Go Sabu!  I’m betting that the baby elephant scenes were rotoscoped as guides for Disney’s Dumbo.

 

Hello!

At his DVD Classics Corner on the Air podcast page, Dick Dinman’s new show is titled Warner Archive Westerns.

‘Dick Dinman and George Feltenstein Go West’ is the sub-heading for their discussion of the 2 versions of Three Godfathers (John Wayne or Chester Morris) and Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway (Robert Taylor). Dick shares with CineSavant a keen desire to promote George’s good work over at the WAC.

 

---

 

This seemed like a worthwhile little project: there is so much good will out there for the movie producer, filmic artist and brilliant businessman Roger Corman, we thought it would be fun to assemble all of the DVD Savant and CineSavant review links for his films in one compact resource. We were never at a loss to think of something good to say about a Corman picture — those that he directed always rewarded multiple viewings.

Some of these reviews go back twenty-five years. I’ve listed the newest coverage for titles reviewed more than once. A number are reviewed by Charlie Largent. In one way or another, Corman also produced everything he directed. And he partly directed some of the titles he officially or unofficially produced (listed in red). Let’s see what we come up with …

1954
Highway Dragnet   Co-Producer
Monster from the Ocean Floor   Producer

1955
Five Guns West
The Beast with a Million Eyes   Uncredited producer
Day the World Ended

 

 

1957
Attack of the Crab Monsters
Not of this Earth
Teenage Doll
The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent

1958
War of the Satellites
The Brain Eaters   Uncredited producer
Teenage Cave Man
Night of the Blood Beast   Uncredited producer

 

 

1959
Beast from Haunted Cave   Uncredited producer
The Wasp Woman
A Bucket of Blood

1960
Ski Troop Attack
House of Usher
Last Woman on Earth
Little Shop of Horrors

 

 

1961
Creature from the Haunted Sea
The Pit and the Pendulum

1962
Battle Beyond the Sun   Uncredited producer
The Premature Burial
The Intruder
Tales of Terror
Tower of London

 

 

1963
The Raven
The Terror
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
Dementia 13   Producer
The Haunted Palace

1964
The Masque of the Red Death
The Secret Invasion
The Tomb of Ligeia

 

 

1966
Blood Bath   Uncredited producer
Queen of Blood   Uncredited producer
The Shooting   Uncredited producer
The Wild Angels
Ride in the Whirlwind   Uncredited producer

1967
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
The Trip

 

 

1968
Targets   Uncredited producer

1969
Pit Stop   Uncredited producer

1970
The Dunwich Horror   Producer
Bloody Mama
Gas-S-S-S – Or – It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It

 

 

1971
Lady Frankenstein   Producer
Von Richthofen and Brown

1972
Boxcar Bertha   Producer

1975
Capone   Producer

 

 

1978
Piranha   Producer

1979
The Lady in Red   Uncredited producer

2008
Cyclops   Producer

2010
Sharktopus   Producer

 

Roger Corman movies we wish were available on quality discs:

The Fast and the Furious,  Apache Woman,  Gunslinger,  The Oklahoma Woman,  It Conquered the World,  Not of This Earth,  The Undead,  Rock all Night,  Carnival Rock,  Sorority Girl,  Machine-Gun Kelly,  The Cry-Baby Killer,  I Mobster,  Last Woman on Earth,  Atlas,  The Intruder. So there.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The end of an Era. What a life in film!

 

Hello!

As you might imagine, the passing of the great Roger Corman is a major occurrence at Trailers from Hell. The principals behind the site and many of the contributing ‘gurus’ knew Corman well. More than one began their film career working for the man now credited with re-inventing American pop cinema.

If you slip over to Trailers from Hell  you’ll find the beginning of a series of accolades and dedications to the master filmmaker. Corman was himself a CineSavant guru, and frequently commented on his own films.

Joe Dante has also been circulating some terrific Corman-related background links. They seem to be wide open to the public, so I’m passing a couple of them along here.

 

The first piece up, from 2014, is director Brian Reddin’s hour-long documentary about the film studio that Corman built in Ireland. He had first visited there back in 1962 when Francis Coppola shot Dementia 13. Dig that commentary and subtitles, in Gaelic!

It Came from Connemara! 

 

Then there’s this very interesting, very funny Daniel Kramer-made item in honor of Corman, posted two days ago on Vimeo by editor Nathan Boone. An introduction to a ‘Trailer Trash’ screening show, the 17-minute piece is hosted by Roger Corman’s then- trailer gurus Allan Arkush and Joe Dante. We see where they worked, as well as a pile of great photos of other Corman ‘folk’ back in the day — and get to hear Joe and Allan’s top ten ‘crazy working for Roger stories.’ It’s a winner.

Dante and Arkush’s New World Pictures Trailer Extravaganza. 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

This nice guy wants to use you to explore his neurotic sex obsession … for another woman, not you.

 

Hello!

Why do we plug random stuff?  Because we LIKE it. Back in high school I took a chance on the first London Phase IV LP of Bernard Herrmann’s themes for Alfred Hitchcock, a record I played until the grooves wore out. The Psycho music was a huge hit; Vertigo prepared me for a fantastic screening at a Grauman’s Chinese FILMEX marathon in the Fall of 1970.

Later on, I eagerly invested in the Charles Gerhardt albums with re-recordings of themes from other great Hollywood composers. In many cases I had the music memorized long before seeing the actual movie, as was the case with  Friendly Persuasion by Dimitri Tiomkin,  The Red House by Miklos Rozsa and  The Constant Nymph by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

In my last year of high school arrived Bernard Herrmann’s Phase IV take on Gustav Holst’s The Planets, which ended up being one of the records I played the most. I’m just reading now that it wasn’t well reviewed, that critics complained about Herrmann’s tempo changes to Holst’s music. I found the Herrmann slow-down to be hypnotic. Mars, The Bringer of War had twice the punch, and the final track Neptune, The Mystic was the closest this very square teenager got to a drug trip. As I was never very adept at the art of needle-drop, the three ancient copies of the LP upstairs are in various states of scratch-O-phonic sound.

I bring all this up because I don’t recall there ever having been a CD release of this album, and I always wanted one. Wayne Schmidt just tipped me off that it’s presently being sold by Screen Archives, so I’m taking the plunge on this new restoration and remaster from Quartet Records. I hope it’s good:

The Planets: Conducted by Bernard Herrmann.

 

---

 

This week also gives me a chance to plug the multi-talented Michael Schlesinger, a Trailers from Hell guru by virtue of his directing and producing credits, but also for his good work in studio film distribution, promoting Samuel Fuller and rescuing classics from neglect.

But this week Trailers from Hell just finished posting trailers for a trio of comedy westerns for which Michael Schlesinger did the gab tracks: The Hallelujah Trail, Support Your Local Gunfighter and the Johnny Depp The Lone Ranger. Michael is a natural for this kind of personality-forward speaking. When I once covered TCMFest screenings, I’d make a point of attending Michael’s live introductions, ‘warming up the house’ for pictures like Johnny Guitar and One, Two, Three. In couple of minutes Michael could turn a sleepy, cranky 9am festival crowd back into movie enthusiasts. His many audio commentaries are funny, but also astute and well researched. The place to start is Michael’s marathon track for Criterion’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World — you’ll soon discover that it’s his favorite film.

Michael loves comedies … he has a good thing to say about every comedy, no matter how dire. Can he entice me to see The Hallelujah Trail again?  We’ll have to see about that.

We’ll be back with Michael when Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid arrives on 4K early in July — he had a hand in keeping an alternate cut of that film from being obliterated.

Schlesinger’s Hallelujah Trail TFH Commentary …. and CineSavant’s Blu-ray review.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

One must never forget the ears … ears are important, Hoichi.

 

Hello!

CineSavant has but one review today, with a good excuse — we’re both working on some of the most-awaited titles for Spring, and I have some catching up to do after a weekend trip.

Charlie Largent and I have some great pictures in hand, that we want to give extra attention:  Once Upon a Time in the West 4K,  The Mask of Fu Manchu,  Bluebeard,  Planet of the Vampires,  Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors 4K plus wanna-cover titles like the Russian  Kin-Dza-Dza!, Nancy Savoca’s  Dogfight and  True Love,  Picnic at Hanging Rock and  High Noon 4K.

Until Saturday — thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

A serial killer in Nazi Berlin … a telling story of justice under political pressure.

 

Hello!  More Metropolis madness!

It’s a wave of Metropolis items today, cued when correspondent Ian Whittle sent along an image of the cover graphic for an old Australian VHS release — where somebody made a rather creative photo choice.  →  It goes into the hopper labeled ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’

The source is an older blog called  The Buffalo Report. The blog is an interesting catch-all, and its writer (R.J. Buffalo?) doesn’t date things consistently. At first glance, we wonder if his intention is to slam the famed Fritz Lang movie. His initial quote is  “Metropolis is an embarrassingly dreadful movie that is strangely addictive.”  But he then goes on to prove his obsession with the film.

His initial blog appears to be  When Metropolis Was on PBS. We saw it here in Los Angeles on our local PBS station late in 1978, touted as a UK restoration.  But Buffalo then continues with a long string of pages devoted to the Fritz Lang movie — 48 lengthy blog entries on the subject. They’re loaded with interesting observations and images, and scans of vintage newspaper articles. Metropolis received heavy editorial coverage wherever it played.

The first numbered entry is titled  Where It All Started. Included in the second posting are numerous newspaper articles reporting on and debating the merit of Channing Pollock’s notorious cut-down re-edit, that became the film’s (incoherent) international release version — and that was still deemed a masterpiece. But none of the 1927 editorials ask if Fritz Lang’s original is being retained.

Buffalo also links to the heavily researched and annotated posts of Michael Organ, an Australian. I see one string of his Metropolis- themed blogs beginning at  this link — it seems to be fairly recent. An example is a page from 2022 entitled  ‘Film Censor Cards and Lengths … which has an entire glossary of the film’s original German intertitles, with English translations. It’s claimed to be complete.

We see cards that correspond to scenes only in the  ‘Complete’ version … which is very interesting. Will this intertitle resource include titles from pieces of scenes still missing, and perhaps clear up some of the film’s remaining mysteries?  Even the Complete Version feels abridged, continuity-wise.

 

We’re still floored by Aitam Bar-Sagi’s post for his The Film Music Museum page, entitled  Metropolis Around the World. He updates the page as new information arrives. The long article gathers hard data, all documented, on where the film was shown and its exact length in different releases. Most are accompanied by original ads. It appears that Argentina received an uncut Metropolis premiere print because an exhibitor there made an early deal with UfA. His copy was struck and shipped to Buenos Aires before the Americans hired Channing Pollock to cut the movie down by half.

Aitam was a DVD Savant / CineSavant correspondent for quite a while back when the first pre-Argentina Murnau Stiftung restoration was done. Our screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater (since demolished) was a big deal, right after 9/11. The beautiful print was screened at 20 fps and Robert Israel provided a full music accompaniment. Mr. Bar-Sagi became a noted research contributor on subsequent restoration work.

I’m saving these links for further study … all this key source information is really fascinating. We plan to use one of the censor intertitle logs to read along with the video’s German inter-titles, and hopefully discover some new ones not in the ‘Complete’ video version.

(Note: all of the graphics enlarge.)

 

---

 

 

Plus, a couple of extra announcements: the esteemed Alan K. Rode wants to spread the word that his Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival is having its 25th annual meet in May, out in the desert of Palm Springs, California. →

The screenings run from May 9-12 … they’re showing  Body and Soul,  No Man of Her Own, Across the Bridge and others; several screenings have special guests. The full info is at

Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival 

 

 

 

←  And Tom Weaver is spreading the word that the Ed Wood-written monster opus The Bride and the Beast, with Tom’s fun audio commentary, can now be watched on Youtube.

The movie is funny by itself, but Tom’s commentary (from 2005?) enlists the film’s star Charlotte Austin, actor Slick Slavin and movie gorilla expert (and a lot more) Bob Burns.

CineSavant was tickled to learn that Ms. Austin interrupts the commentary because she wanted to read a funny excerpt from a review she found online … and it’s the old DVD Savant review. The comment begins at 50:40.

The Bride and the Beast Commentary Version

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

“Don’t get attached to items you might find during your trip;
think of how awkward and inconvenient they may become later on.”