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Continuing his deep-dive research activities into film arcana, the indomitable Gary Teetzel has turned up a winner, a publicity blurb for Flint, Michigan’s The Daily from 1958. Apparently the assistant manager of a theater showing the first-run engagement of Horror of Dracula took one of those pressbook publicity recommendations seriously: to tout the booking of Hammer’s Technicolor horror picture, he ran around downtown Flint dressed as Dracula. The theater got the desired publicity, maybe a little too much of it.

The scan of the clipping chopped off the right extreme, but CineSavant never shirks its journalistic responsibility. Here’s a transcript:

At the police station Kern drew a suspended sentence — but not until Henry Capogna, advertising head of the circuit, had paid $100.

That’s a great story, sort of a real-life prequel to the ballyhoo celebrated in Joe Dante’s Matinee, which also features a slightly irresponsible assistant donning a monster suit to scare up business for a new horror attraction. Assistant manager Kern sounds like a typical millennial gore hound, one with a sick, sick morbid imagination — or an average young art student. There’s every possibility that the news story was partly or wholly invented by a friendly newspaperman helping out a buddy over at the Capitol Theatre… even the cops might look kindly on this kind of gag.

I was hoping that the overeager sidewalk Dracula hadn’t been identified — because then we could have spread the rumor that a teenaged Michael Moore was the maniac going all radical on the old ladies of Flint. Oh wait, Moore would only have been four years old…

The date on the news blurb is May 28. The IMDB gives the U.S. opening date for HOD as May 8, so that part checks out. I didn’t catch up with the vampire fun personally until the 1964 reissue of Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula — as an extremely impressionable twelve year-old, I was floored to be confronted by a super dose of so much Hammer blood & thunder. Back in ’58, Peter Cushing and Chris Lee’s clash between of good and evil must have been the biggest Springtime movie thrill of them all.

On the obsessive filmgoer front, correspondent Michael Bjortvedt has located a full YouTube encoding of the cult Indian movie Gumnaam from 1965. It’s the feature that contains the full “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” rock ‘n’ roll musical number featured in Raja Nawathe’s Ghost World, the one in which the dancers shake their heads so violently, we expect to see their brains fall out. The insane surf-guitar song comes immediately after the main titles.

I watched a little — it’s still pretty amazing. If Flash Mob groups of the kind that perform Thriller were to do “Jaan Pehechaan Ho”, they’d need to call ambulances to carry away the injured.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Only two reviews today due to a family visitor over the weekend. We’re avoiding what is presently 92-degree heat outside, which feels like a hundred. It was a very strange weekend. Taking our houseguest down Hollywood Blvd., we ran into Quentin Tarantino’s street dressings turning the clock back to 1968 — with Larry Edmunds’ bookstore returned to the slot next to ‘The Supply Sergeant,’ and The Night They Raided Minsky’s up on the marquee at the Vogue, across the street.

We’re also reflecting on more unpleasant happenings. Last Saturday I was just thinking about the need to drop by the Trader Joes’ market on Hyperion, which is not the closest TJ’s to me but makes a nice loop when I drop by Albertsons and Gelsons. Up on TV pops the news of the tragic shootout, ‘not far from home’ as they say. It brought back memories from four years ago, learning online that my wife’s college was the site of another shooting. I leaped up and was halfway down the stairs before I realized that it was her day off, and she was home with me, quite safe. There’s really no room at all any more for complacent thoughts that such things won’t affect us.

No big news — I’m late with reviews as it is. I’ve only reviewed The Stranglers of Bombay from the new boxed set Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror collection, but Charlie Largent will be working on a full review presently.

Sci-fi fans might want to know that a restoration of an unnamed restored Paramount science fiction film is promised to screen at this year’s AMIA- ‘The Reel Thing’ presentation up on Vine Street. We’re hoping that it’s either 1953’s The War of the Worlds or 1951’s When Worlds Collide. I’ll report when I find out — perhaps a Blu-ray will be in the offing. We’re still waiting for a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Blu-ray, after seeing Disney’s spectacular restoration at The Reel Thing way back in 2012. The best When Worlds Collide presentation is still a laserdisc from 1995 or so.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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I finished Joseph McBride’s major new film book How Did Lubitsch Do It? a few days back, and needed some time to think about what I’d read. Really good books about directors don’t come along very often, and of the newer breed this one joins Bernard Eisenschitz’s book on Nicholas Ray, Foster Hirsch’s on Otto Preminger and Alan Rode’s recent study of Michael Curtiz as a fascinating, illuminating read.

McBride has written some of the closest studies of John Ford, who he was able to interview; the great Ernst Lubitsch passed far earlier in 1947, yet left his mark as one of the most influential directors in Hollywood history. McBride digs into the producer-director’s roots in Germany, when he worked with Max Reinhardt on the Berlin stage. Lubitsch transplanted his talent to America early in the 1920s and was thus firmly established before the arrival of waves of refugees from the Hitler regime. Interestingly, although his special gift was comedy, Lubitsch’s extravagant epics caught the attention of Hollywood, which was always on the prowl to snap up ‘artistic’ European directors. He worked for stars like Pickford and moved between several studios, gaining a reputation for bedroom farces pitched at a higher level of wit than those from homegrown directors like Cecil B. DeMille.

Author McBride never lets go of his prime mission, which is to try to isolate, explain and define what was meant by ‘the Lubitsch Touch.’ Even in silent films, Lubitsch consistently invented comic situations loaded with innuendo and irony, that illuminated visual jokes that seemed to spring from the characters, as opposed to being imposed on them by a gag writer. Often slyly suggestive, a perfect Lubitsch Touch construction was understated, sometimes ironic but seldom cynical. A ‘shared understanding’ generated by direct author-viewer communication, a Lubitsch effect expressed his love for things European, elegant and sentimental.

McBride finds The Touch in German films made during WW1 and several key silent comedies in Hollywood. The style really came together when sound was added. Toying with the possibilities of the musical format, Lubitsch confected affectionate, playful & naughty romantic comedies with Maurice Chevalier. The big Lubitsch films are given a serious going-over, examined from multiple angles using a wealth of research. McBride adds his own interpretations to trends in the director’s work, praising some pictures to the skies (Trouble in Paradise) and surprisingly, not others (Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife). The analysis of Trouble in Paradise convinces us that it may be the most sophisticated picture ever made. The show suggests all manner of sexual excess without once making anything overt, yet was shelved as wholly unacceptable when the Production Code was enforced.

McBride’s focused assessment of Ernst Lubitsch’s contribution is compared to that of Rouben Mamoulian, who is found wanting when he imitated Lubitsch’s style. The hothouse exercises in style and glamour of Paramount’s hot director Josef von Sternberg were not to Lubitsch’s taste. Sternberg’s career took a nosedive when Lubitsch became the Paramount production chief for a couple of years, but we are assured that Lubitsch did not have it in for his fellow director. When he gets his directing career going again, Lubitsch intersects with more writers (Walter Reisch, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder) and continues to develop his signature style. Unlike some directors Lubitsch was a friend and true collaborator with his writers, challenging them to perfect their jokes into constructions that paid off in extra, even funnier jokes. Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be Or Not To Be and Heaven Can Wait are all originals with few repeated elements, by turns satirical, sentimental, politically savage and sweetly fantastic.

Although some of us tend to relate to Ernst Lubitsch through his most vocal, loyal acolyte Billy Wilder, McBride uses Wilder mainly to help zero in on the concept of The Lubitsch Touch. Wilder often returned to film subjects that seemed to be direct attempts to recapture Lubitsch’s elegant perfection of form; and often adapting the work of some of the same European playwrights Lubitsch favored. The book’s title is derived from a motto Wilder kept on his office wall, an oath-reminder to remember the Master.

Joseph McBride’s holistic approach doesn’t try to sort Lubitsch into biographical and thematic pigeonholes, which makes the read an intense experience for film adepts that want their analysis thoughtful, straight and deep. McBride doesn’t button up a topic and move on, but instead keeps angles of study afloat in an ongoing discussion. A particular film title will bounce back scores of times when some scene or event becomes relevant again. Some readers may confuse this with repetition, but it begins to pay off when we think we’re gaining purchase on an understanding of what the elusive Lubitsch touch might be. Billy Wilder never claimed that his hommages to his mentor ever quite equalled the Master’s work. I think McBride gets as close as anybody to an understanding of Lubitsch’s twinkle-eyed genius.

Yes, the McBride How Did Lubitsch Do It? is a heavyweight item. Grab it when you have some solid reading time, and prepare some bookmark placeholders to allow a return to the good parts.

(How Did Lubitsch Do It? Columbia University Press, June 26 2018, 576 pages)

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Just a note today from correspondent Bill Dodd, after screenings of The WAC’s Billy Budd brought back memories of renaissance talent Peter Ustinov. July 14, 2018:

Glenn — one of the less desirable things about getting older is the feeling that one may be repeating one’s self. If I’ve already waxed poetic about Billy Budd back when the DVD came out, please forgive me and disregard this.

I have no idea if that’s true or not, but I can tell you that’s what he said. And he gave a 22 year-old broadcaster an unforgettable day. I managed to write a letter to him about a month before he died to thank him for that day. I hope he got it. — Bill Dodd, Retired Broadcaster and movie freak.

I told my own ‘meeting Peter Ustinov’ story in a footnote to my 2010 review of his film Hot Millions.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson