Hello!

This time I caught something link-worthy, all on my own. The CBS Evening News aired a sentimental sign-off piece a few days ago about a grand lady named Tao Porchon-Lynch, who at 99 years is still dancing ballet and conducting yoga classes. No complaints about the story, as she’s no less worthy than the cute animals and heroic veterans we’re given as human interest on the network news.

About halfway through “100-Year-Old Yoga Instructor, Ballroom Dancer on Life Well Lived” the image cuts to a still from the 1940 Thief of Bagdad, showing that film’s impressive multi-armed clockwork statue. The voiceover identifies it it as a sample of Ms. Porchon’s film work: “… her roles included the Golden Idol (?) in the 1940 remake of Thief of Bagdad.”

Here’s Tao Porchon’s IMDB page, and that of Mary Morris, the actress actually credited as playing the classic mechanical femme fatale. Note that Ms. Morris’ portrait is a dead ringer for the six-armed statue — it’s nice that Korda allowed her to use her own face, not an anonymous mask. Morris played a substantial role in Pimpernel Smith, as well as the later Brit Sci-fi TV serial A For Andromeda (1961), which incidentally introduced audiences to Julie Christie.

I don’t blame Ms. Porchon for the mistake — maybe there was a ‘golden idol’ in the film that I missed, and she wasn’t billed. Maybe she was one of the dancing harem girls. Or could she have been one of the extra sets of arms behind Mary Morris? Porchon was indeed working in London at the time parts of Bagdad were filmed. But hey, CBS needs to be a little more careful with its research . . . don’t forget what happened to Dan Rather.

Colleague and fellow reviewer Charlie Largent forwarded this Hollywood photo from the TV show My Mother the Car, starring the late Jerry Van Dyke. The 1965 camera view looks East across the intersection of Melrose and Larchmont, three blocks from my house. I’ve added a detail inset to point out the ‘Desilu’ logo written on the old RKO globe. The corner lot was originally RKO, then became Arnaz and Ball’s Desilu Productions, and eventually was gobbled up by the next-door Paramount lot. When I arrived in 1970 the ‘Desilu’ logo was already gone, leaving just the blank globe.

They’ve been talking lately about tearing down part of Paramount including this iconic corner building, and replacing it with huge buildings. Every few years they try to cross Melrose and buy up some of Larchmont, my local neighborhood. Resisting developers isn’t as easy around here as it once was; Larchmont’s ace in the hole has always been the ritzy Hancock Park neighborhood just to the South of us, that surely sees us as a needed buffer zone between them and commercial anarchy (not to mention the less desirable neighborhoods to the North). I’d say they ought to re-erect the RKO tower and globe as a historical landmark and leave the rest alone. If they really want to impress the tourists, they should bury the forest of power and telephone poles underground so this stretch of Melrose won’t be so &%#@ ugly.

If you have a desire to visit Hollywood, sooner would definitely be better than later. The telltale redevelopment cranes are everywhere, and high-rise buildings are demolishing all the places I once worked, when film work was like a cottage industry scattered around town.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

CineSavant’s new reviews today are:

Hello!

We offer hearty congrats to Alan K. Rode, whose new book Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film is featured prominently in Kenneth Turan’s L.A. Times article ‘Casablanca’ director Michael Curtiz is finally getting the recognition he deserves.

And I’d like to direct your attention to Milestone Films, which has put out an elaborate web newsletter for January that’s quite informative, with news about screenings, new Milestone Cinematheque discs on the way, and a nice link to the Library of Congress online streaming site.

I’m not exactly a front rank Three Stooges fan, but correspondent Gary Teetzel has done some web research and come up with some clippings and a couple of links that are pretty interesting. Accounts of the making of the 1960 Sci-fi picture The Angry Red Planet tell us that producer and inventor Norman Maurer also tried out his ‘Cinemagic’ effect on the 1962 comedy The Three Stooges in Orbit. The Cinemagic process processed hi-con live action film in such a way as (Maurer’s description) to make them look like animation art; in the space movie it is used to create a Martian landscape with an eerie alien appearance — as if a negative image were partly printed back onto a positive. (Come to think of it, it also looks a little bit like night vision images, only in broad Martian daylight. Gary has found two shaky Three Stooges in Orbit YouTube clips to contemplate. In the movie, a wacky professor supposedly uses an electronic process to turn the Stooges into animated cartoons. He’s essentially doing what Norman Maurer claimed to have done already, for a ‘revolutionary’ process that never took off.

The first In Orbit clip shows the Stooges dancing, wearing the extreme pancake makeup needed for the Cinemagic process. The second clip shows the result. From what I can see, the shot in the final film is just an ordinary sub-par animated cartoon, with figures rotoscoped from the test shot. Gary thinks that perhaps the Cinemagic effect was rejected, a guess that sounds good to me, except that Norman Maurer was the film’s producer as well. If ‘Cinemagic’ was indeed used at all, the effect probably made the entire image look strange, not just the Stooges — and not strange in a funny way. Cinemagic never looked like cartoon animation to me.

But somebody thought it did, as reported in trade paper blurbs unearthed by Gary. As reported in Business Screen Magazine in 1957, Maurer demonstrated a process called ‘Artiscope,’ touting it as a fast and cheap way to create animated cartoons without animating anything! It’s essentially automatic rotoscoping created by washing out character detail, leaving only outlines. They don’t explain how they’d add colors, without resorting to equally expensive animation; the article partly infers that the process can be best used for ‘cartoons’ for monochromatic TV use.

In his book Keep Watching the Skies! the late Bill Warren took this subject in an unexpected direction, faulting Cinemagic as an artistically bankrupt conspiracy to destroy the art of conventional animation. What dastards could possibly consider committing such a terrible cultural crime? . . . sayeth the motion-capture CGI engineers that would arrive several decades later.

In 1959 Sid Pink joined Norman Maurer and re-dubbed the process ‘Cinemagic.’ In Motion Picture Daily Pink said that Cinemagic ‘was being reviewed by the U.S. Patent Office,’ and that his film “Invasion of Mars” was going to roll in September. Back in 1952, Pink had garnered considerable industry credibility as Arch Oboler’s partner in the movie Bwana Devil, which launched the 3-D craze. Gary found articles from 1961 in which Maurer refers to the process with a third name, ‘Dynatoon.’ But Artiscope emerges again, possibly because (according to Maurer) his 1956 Artiscope patent application had finally been granted.

I suspect that all these announcements were efforts to interest potential investors; when Variety reviewed The Angry Red Planet back in late 1959, they surely took the wind out of Cinemagic’s sails with one disparaging sentence: “While it may take considerable ingenuity to produce this effect, the result really isn’t worth it.”

Pooh to that. I’ve watched all of Angry Red Planet maybe four times, but I’ve returned to the film’s impressive Cinemagic sequences more times than I can count. We didn’t see anything like it again until solarized images become popular in the pop art era, especially when used in movie title sequences.

Yes, never forget that, with all the pressing problems in today’s world, CineSavant knows what’s most important to write about.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

CineSavant’s new reviews today are:

Hello!

It was a good holiday . . . no calamities in the house, nobody sick, complete Peace in the Valley. I even liked most of the new movies we saw this holiday season, the ones bucking for awards. That’s very optimistic. Now if we can just get the rest of the world back into reasonable shape.

All I have today are some personal notes. For CineSavant 2018 arrives as a busy time reviewing and happily answering reader mail. I still feel awkward posting on Facebook, and marvel at the dexterity of some of my fellow writers on that forum. I prefer old-fashioned emails for conversing with new friends as it leaves a record of what’s been said so I won’t get lost. Being able to search through archived mail has been a blessing. When I think, ‘who wrote me about that movie way back when,’ most of the time I can find the email from as far back as 2000, and reconnect.

I’m getting lots of suggestions about what the CineSavant page needs, and I agree with all of them. I barely know how to make WordPress function, and haven’t yet mastered simple footnotes that work in the new text. I’ve got a functioning Review Archive happening now, although some of its interior links don’t work. I’m not ready to invest the effort in a newsletter of my own, although some readers liked that as a reminder, and keep asking me where it went. The best I’m doing at the moment are bi-weekly Facebook blurbs, which I hope aren’t too annoying. To cover social media decently is a full time job, yes?

But I do have a plan or two. The next step is to put together a secondary menu page that links to new versions of older Savant pages — lists of reviews by year, archives, the old non-review articles. Etc. I consider that a New Year’s resolution, because finding the time isn’t going to be easy.

That said, I’m having more fun than ever writing here, and plan to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. The circulation boost from Trailers from Hell has made things a lot easier, as have the experts that help check my facts (and help curb my opinions), and reader correspondents that help me get the word out — and keep me current on what’s happening out there on the disc-collecting grapevine.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are: