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We’re all hoping for the best with Pacific’s Cinerama Dome theater and the Arclight theaters. Marc Edward Heuck theorizes that the chain and their landlord will be negotiating to work out a better deal, and various activists say that the Dome was protected from redevelopment demolition way back in 1998. I don’t think the movie habit is going to go away when the pandemic recedes, so it doesn’t make sense to chloroform this high-class chain.

I did get in touch with David Strohmaier to assure myself that this problem with Pacific Theaters wouldn’t compromise his upcoming disc restoration of the full 3-panel Cinerama MGM feature The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. Nope, says Dave, the disc release is still on track. He sent along an image he prepared for the Home Theater Forum a couple of weeks ago, comparing the previous DVD composite with what he’s doing combining the three Cinerama panels. The images can be ‘zoomed,’ or they get bigger when opened in a new window.

Oh — since I wrote David Strohmaier, this Variety article came out, and it’s more informative anyway…

And correspondent Martin Hennessee tips me off to this ComicBook.com article by Spencer Perry, The Wild and Complicated Story of the Rights to King Kong. It’s a little brief, but it reads well enough … I’ve been reading about the tangled Kong franchise ever since the Toho King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Good news from Kino — we’re finally getting a Blu of John Farrow’s long-absent ‘eerie’ noir Night Has a Thousand Eyes. I haven’t seen it since UCLA in the early ’70s — the fledgling film archive took possession of all of Paramount’s studio screening prints, and many were nitrate copies. All I remember is that it was definitely dark, and that Gail Russell’s eyes were haunting, as always. Russell had the saddest eyes of any film star ever. The moody noir also stars Edward G. Robinson and John Lund.

One of my daydream ideas for a revival theater was to program quirky lead-in music that would work like an overture — turn the house lights down by half, etc.. Of course, the whole point would be to not play music from the movie, but instead songs suggested by the movie. For Thousand Eyes the obvious item would be this Bobby Vee tune, written fourteen years later. Counter-programming, you know.

Kino is also being kind to Universal completists, announcing upcoming discs of The Spider Woman Strikes Back with Gale Sondergaard and Rondo Hatton, and the 1941 Basil Rathbone mystery movie The Mad Doctor. I haven’t seen either one, but the Spider Woman movie seems to have attracted fan love and attention for completely inverted reasons. Here’s a quote from an email I received yesterday: “The release will serve the purpose of putting to rest any claims that The Spider Woman Strikes Back is a hidden programmer jewel or something. To me it’s the nadir of Universal output of the era. Even Sondergaard and Hatton can’t liven it up. It’s just bad on so many levels.”

Gee, what an endorsement, now I have to see it. Kino ought to be able to extract some great advertising bites from that quote.

And hey, I got a nice surprise over the weekend. The first visit from my daughter in 14 months, due to you-know-what… and she brings me a flying saucer- themed cookie jar with COOKIES in it. It looks like a ‘glass ray’ is beaming down from the saucer. It’s time to count one’s blessings, here.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Associate Allan Peach sends along a link to an illustrated lecture, from the Museum of Jurassic Technology: Dr. Olesya Turkina’s talk is called Kosmos, Russian Space Flights of the Imagination, from Tsiolkovsky to Klushantsev. The lecture uses documents, photos and sketches by the seminal space scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, plus film clips from several Soviet space films, including one I’ve reviewed, Kosmitcheskiy reys. Ms. Turkina’s accent requires some close listening, but it’s a rewarding talk. A film from 1965 gets very specific about conditions on the moon — being accurate in some ways and way off in others.

And CineSavant just secured a screener of Severin’s latest massive cult box set The Dungeon of Andy Milligan Collection. A review copy was not easy to come by, but now CineSavant’s intrepid reviewer Charlie Largent will be able to broaden his high art horizons with screenings of pristine, restored HD encodings of most of Milligan’s surviving cinematic oeuvre. With titles like this, who can resist?: Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Curse of the Full Moon, Man with Two Heads, The Rats Are Coming! The Werewoves are Here!, Fleshpot on 42nd Street and Carnage!   The long list of extras, swag and other cancer-causing content is at the Severin Films Shop.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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The new Godzilla-King Kong movie opened up a few days back, and I’ve been getting plenty of emails on the appeal of giant monsters and related subjects. We noticed this on-air blurb announcing a vintage Toho Kaiju romp on Spectrum cable’s program schedule… which misreads the storyline of Mosura tai Gojira but atones by giving concerned parents a badly-needed warning as to how this dangerous film can damage impressionable young minds. ↑  (Actually, Mothra vs. Godzilla is harmless, wholly suitable for any child not terrified by Disney’s The Three Little Pigs.)

We scratched our heads trying to think of what the ‘adult situations’ in this particular show might be … or is it just one ‘situation?’   The all-knowing Gary Teetzel says

“Shame on Spectrum, which failed to warn parents that the movie includes smoking!  The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn here, is that Spectrum is in the pocket of Big Tobacco.”

Reader Mark Throop sends along a pair of great links to two separate performances of the same song, by the same artiste, but separated by fifty-three years. First up, French songstress Mireille Mathieu belts out the energetic, rousing call to battle “Paris en colère”.  Written by Maurice Vidalin and Maurice Jarre, the tune is part of the Maurice Jarre music score for the 1966 René Clément epic Is Paris Burning?  My personal opinion is that that much-disparaged movie needs some kind of big-scale revival — it’s an awesome recreation of the re-taking of Paris from its occupiers in 1944. This B&W piece is a simple pre-music video TV recording, perhaps lip-synched to playback.

In the second link Ms. Mathieu sings “Paris en colère” again in 2019, celebrating 130 Years of the Eiffel Tower.  This second recording is live, on location, and spectacular. I’ve read a translation of the lyrics but I don’t know in what regard the song is held in France. Who cares? — to me it’s inspiring. We hope to see the city’s Notre Dame cathedral fully restored sooner than later.

And as we were assured would happen, The Warner Archive Collection confirmed yesterday on their Facebook page a series of upcoming remastered and restored Blu-ray titles. They don’t say when, but can we assume that the planned month is April?  The list:

Drunken Master II, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, They Won’t Believe Me, The Yearling, and Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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First up today from Dick Dinman is a new DVD Classics Corner On the Air discussion of the 3-D Wings of the Hawk with author Jeremy Arnold; they get into the film and the 3-D process as well as director Budd Boetticher and the star Julia Adams. CineSavant’s Blu-ray review from January 26 is here.

Fearless investigator Gary Teetzel steers us to some fun vintage film clips from the Archivio Luce newsreel library: Latarnia Forums poster Mike Mariano linked to a July 1963 news item filmed at Cinecittà called Donatori di sangue del cinema. Christopher Lee, in costume for The Whip and the Body, pauses to donate blood at an Italian bloodmobile. And who is the woman preceding il sadico Conte Kurt? Rossana Podestà, in costume for The Virgin of Nuremburg/Horror Castle. It’s a pretty cute clip, especially the dippy ‘lite’ music cue.

But wait, there’s more. From the same source, a link to a 43-second promo for La maschera del Demonio, from May of 1960. Mariano pointed out that it includes a close-up of Barbara Steele’s stand-in lying on the slab in the crypt. It fooled me for a second.

And this Archivo Luce link is a collection of stills showing the brutal working conditions on the set of the horror film The Vampire and the Ballerina. It’s 48 behind the scenes images from December of 1959 called Fondo Vedo / Momenti della lavorazione del film L’Amante del Vampiro. Wait, they’re all glamour photos of Heléne Remy, Ombretta Ostenda and Tina Gloriani. Who would have thought that an Italian movie promotion would concentrate on sexy actresses?

Finally, some hopeful guesses about what’s coming from The Warner Archive Collection. You may have noticed that the WB Shop is no longer up; that contract ended and the discs are now being sold through a new Warner Archive Store at Amazon. Although not officially announced, we think we have a list of upcoming product based on what’s being promoted at the Warner Archive Collection You Tube Channel. Actually, the WAC had its best year in 2020, profit-wise.

The suggested list, all of which are said to be scanned in 4K, is as follows: Jane Powell and the Mr. Universe winners in the musical Athena (1954); Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds in The Tender Trap (1955); the Bob Hope comedy Bachelor in Paradise (1961), Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman in The Yearling (1946), William Holden and Eleanor Parker in Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), the Bette Davis / Errol Flynn Technicolor classic The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939, with Vincent Price ↑ ), Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (1948), and the Jackie Chan Drunken Master II (1994) in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

More welcome Warner Archive news for fans of film noir is a restored They Won’t Believe Me (1947) with Robert Young, Susan Hayward, Jane Greer and Rita Johnson. As hinted at earlier here at CineSavant, it’s the full 95-minute original cut — for reissue it was slashed by a full fifteen minutes, and most of us have never seen the full show.TCM’s Noir Alley showed They Won’t Believe Me a few months back, and it was the expected short version. The WAC earlier rescued the longer original cuts of both The Thing from Another World and Rachel and the Stranger, each time making big news.

Like I said, none of these have been officially announced; we’re expecting some news on that early next week. They seem to be fairly firm but none are up for order yet… and there are enough titles here to keep the schedule going for months.

Thanks for reading — Glenn Erickson