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Correspondent Michael McQuarrie has found a good one, a half-hour ‘Century 21 Films’ documentary on the voice artists that provided the personalities for the wooden characters in Gerry and Sylvia Andersons’ English Sci-fi shows starring marionettes —  Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet etc.

The well-produced show encouraged these seldom-seen performers to ‘act up.’ They tend to be very entertaining … and proud to shine on camera.

… the wonderful  June Foray was once stuck waiting with me on a phone line for 20 minutes. Instead of griping, she proceeded to fill the minutes with more character voices, jokes and friendly gab than I ever heard from a celebrity. Ms. Foray insisted on talking ‘normal’ to me as Rocket J. Squirrel — I couldn’t believe my ears but my mind’s eye pictured her as the cartoon character.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Dick Dinman has his newest DVD Classics Corner on the Air show up and ready:

It’s all about the new 4K disc release of  Shane from Kino Lorber. Judging by reader response, the movie still generates a great deal of interest. Dick’s guest is George Stevens Jr., and he says that he thinks this talk is in the Top Ten of all the shows he’s done:

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I also see that Sharon Braun has a newish website up. Sharon was MGM/UA’s digital artist back when DVDs were first introduced, and our department (Home Video video advertising) got to see a lot of her work as it was created.

Although a few other DVD companies were doing interesting things with DVD menu interfaces, Sharon was one of the first to add complicated ‘buffer’ animation, and the first to hide Easter Eggs in her menus. Some companies, especially Disney, got too ambitious with opening montages and animated seques that took forever. Sharon’s semi-abstract animated graphics for the first James Bond DVDs are fairly incredible — very busy, very fast, but always with an eye to function and user clarity.

Ms. Braun’s website has some examples of her work — just still images, but enough to want to sample these again. Times have changed — studios are no longer investing in lavish extras, leaving that field to independent disc boutiques. The same goes for artwork and animation in the menus. The new 4K James Bond disc menus are as plain-wrap as can be, with the same generic, photo paste-up graphic for all six movies.

And Michael McQuarrie, having seen last Saturday’s review of  Fire Maidens from Outer Space, reminds us of the existence of a ripe Second City Television spoof from 1984, based on the ‘Amazon babes in Space’ motif.

It begins as a parody of 2001 and goes sideways from there.

The impersonations are choice. Joe Flaherty and Martin Short look like Simon and Garfunkel, but channel Stooge-like behavior. Eugene Levy does an incredible riff on Ernest Borgnine, gap-tooth and all. The spoof is painfully accurate — “Botchino!”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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The Warner Archive, Warners itself, and MGM are hitting me with desirable reissues. We want to cover a lot of them and they are arriving fast, so we might be trying an abbreviated review format. All will have a quality assessment, as CineSavant readers just want to make sure they’re not disappointed with what they’ve bought.

We ordered a reissue Blu of Michael Caine’s Get Carter one day before a fancy 4K disc was announced, coming up in August. So expect that one to be reviewed twice in the next couple of months. Maybe I can break this habit of over-writing everything. We’ll see.

But it’s also an opportunity to write more about The Wild Bunch!  How could I resist that?  That’s one WB title that really wants an ambitious 4K remaster and special editon … you know, with restored bits from Sam Peckinpah’s personal version. Or send it to Criterion, like  Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dreams never end here at CineSavant.

And we look look kindly to Film Masters’ upcoming disc release of the delirious atomic hysteria opus Invasion, U.S.A..  The notorious Albert Zugsmith production depicts those sneaky commies annihilating America with an overwhelming nuclear full court press. It’s not exactly responsible filmmaking; 1952 had its crazies, for sure.

The ‘communist invasion’ is all done with slippery special effects and an outrageous manipulation of military stock footage. The central drama is a hoot, with scenes of oily Gerald Mohr hitting on pert & perky Peggie Castle in a Manhattan bar. Lending some class to the proceedings is the terrific Dan O’Herlihy, as a bartender who delivers an eerie warning of doom.

This one will be great fun to write up. We hope those ’35mm archival elements’ Film Masters describes are in tip-top shape. The disc’s equivalent of a second feature to ‘clear the house’ is Rocket Attack, U.S.A., a mind-numbing anti-movie from that great auteur Barry Mahon. But fans of atom freakout movies will want to see that one, too.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Respected correspondent Edward Sullivan pointed us to this article related to our favorite non-Connery 007 movie, 1969’s  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The article is from The Observer, by author Jonathan Coe. It’s a good read that comes under the heading ‘movies that influenced my work.’  The feeling he describes happens fairly often for film fans in Los Angeles or New York City — turn a random corner and you’ll be thinking, ‘Buster Keaton performed a gag here 100 years ago,’ or, ‘This is where William Holden walked into Paramount pictures in Sunset Blvd. In this case Mr. Coe had a revelation on a certain beach …

Boy, Coe really likes that movie. We do too, but we want to see it remastered with its original rich and dark color scheme. The Amazon-MGM people just did a great job with the Sean Connerys, so we’re hoping they’ll be able to do the right thing transfer-wise with this very different original 007 offering. Coe’s article pegs OHMSS as a preferred Christmas movie. He references a place in Portugal called Guincho beach:

And just to prove that we at CineSavant think about more than little plastic discs … a suitable second column item eluded us, so you get to see some pix from an outing to Beverly Hills. The city is presently sponsoring an impressive art installation, to be in place until August 1.

The exhibit is a full hundred full-sized pachyderms made of steel and an Indian plant called lantana camara. They’re spread across a three-block span of downtown Beverly Hills, in the park that fronts Santa Monica Blvd, right across from city hall.

It’s a pleasant sight. We dropped by fairly early on Sunday, before the crowds arrived and when the parking was free. Beverly Hills is the last stop of a year-long tour through 7 U.S. cities. We wonder how many trucks were needed to cart the herd. More info:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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It’s time to circulate welcome good news for horror fans … Severin Films announced about three days back that their latest restoration will be in the spotlight at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.

The first part of the news is that they’ve remastered, in 4K from original materials, Riccardo Freda’s follow-up to  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock,  1963’s  Lo spettro, aka The Ghost. It’s a haunted murder mystery again starring Barbara Steele, but decent copies were even harder to see … and we’ve never been impressed by the ‘remnant’ quality of discs such as Retromedia’s  old DVD.

Now maybe we’ll be able to appreciate why Lo spettro has such a high reputation. Severin says that the 4K remaster came from newly-located original film materials, with a few replacement shots taken from a print held in the collection of film producer Jon Davison.

Even more impressive, the restoration of Lo spettro will re-premiere in September at the Venice International Film Festival, where Severin Films honcho David Gregory will appear in person with Barbara Steele. Lo spettro will then proceed to Spain in October, to open the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia. These sound like major film events to us; I hope Severin covers the re-premiere on video.

Meanwhile, both The Criterion Collection and The Warner Archive Collection made impressive release announcements.

Criterion for October will give us a stack of impressive titles, some seemingly chosen for the Halloween season:

Altered States  4K : Ken Russell’s fantastic visual feast;
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me  4K
Georges Franju’s incomparable Eyes Without a Face  4K
Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley  4K
Deep Crimson  4K by Arturo Ripstein;
And two by David Cronenberg — A History of Violence  4K
and Cronenberg’s newest, The Shrouds.

And just a few weeks away at the end of August, The Warner Archive has some special items too:

John Ford’s final film 7 Women starring Anne Bancroft;
Clarence Brown’s searing Intruder in the Dust with Juano Hernandez;
Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way by Vincent Sherman;
Mario Lanza in That Midnight Kiss, heaven protect us;
Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show
and Mike Hodges’ Get Carter in  4K, starring Michael Caine.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson