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You may still have a chance to see them — this afternoon and evening TCM is showing movies by Edgar G. Ulmer, including a pair I barely remember, The Naked Dawn and The Cavern.
Plus the usual suspects The Black Cat, Detour, and The Man from Planet X. I keep tuning in for Detour, hoping a perfect print will someday surface. Best wishes to Arriané!

Joe Dante has circulated a YouTube link to a 1930s tour of Max Fleischer’s Animation studio in Florida … in Cinecolor. It’s at a YouTube link called Popular Science. I hope those animators didn’t wear those ties and tight collars all the time, in the hot Florida climate.

And if you’re on your way to Rio de Janeiro, don’t forget the wolfsbane, garlic and crucifixes. As reported by Gary Teetzel, they’re currently having a slight problem with vampire bats down there. Time to wear shirts with collars again.

As soon as I posted the review for the French movie above, I received a nice note from correspondent Pierre-Charles Robitaille, who reminded me that, in addition to “Renée Simonot (mother of Catherine Deneuve, born in 1915) and Gisèle Casadesus, a noted member of La Comédie Française (b.1914), the beautiful Danielle Darrieux, on May 1st, joined the circle of French actresses who have lived for more than a century.”  Thanks, Pierre.

And finally, before I forget, the news has broken online that Kino will be remastering and releasing on disc the two seasons of Leslie Stevens’ and Joe Stefano’s Outer Limits. That’s great news for those of us who shivered in front of our TVs wondering what it meant that a ‘control voice’ was taking over our televisions. They say that season one will hit this Fall and season two next Spring. I asked OL expert David J. Schow a while back if the show was filmed allowing for widescreen, so that it could be re-formatted and shown theatrically overseas. He said no, so we’ll have to make do with all those great Conrad Hall images in the flat format. But the HD clarity should make them look MUCH better — all those misty shots in the Outer Limits style will no longer resolve as digital mush.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Gary Teetzel is on top of the links again today, reporting first on the storm of excited stop-motion fans talking about a new restoration of Willis O’Brien’s 1925 The Lost World. Reading all of the posts is a bit confusing, but the new version appears to be of much better quality, and as much as ten minutes longer than anything we’ve seen. That claim wouldn’t mean much if the frame rate were simply being slowed down; but those that have seen it say that numerous new scenes are involved, with new animation. The disc is coming from Flicker Alley and the extras include a new Bob Israel score, new transfers of three other Willis O’Brien animation items. And Gary links to a restored clip that shows scenes with original tinting. To me it looks almost too good to be true.

And as promised, Gary reports on his screening of the new Pirates of the Caribbean in the new “ScreenX” format from South Korea. It doesn’t seem to be so much a new format as an enhanced screening experience. I haven’t seen it but it sounds rather like the feature on old flat Disney animation movies, that fill in the pillarbox extremes on widescreen TVs with ‘related’ visual information, something like art illumination in ancient books. Here’s Gary’s report.

On Tuesday, May 30, I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales at the CGV Cinema in Los Angeles’ Koreatown to experience the film in “ScreenX.” First developed in South Korea in 2012, the process is a modern twist on Cinerama: additional picture information is projected onto the side walls of a movie theater to give viewers ultra-wide, panoramic visuals — a full 270 degrees of image. ScreenX has been used on several South Korean feature films and in-theater advertisements; Piratesmarks the first Hollywood feature to receive a (very limited) U.S. release in the process.

It should be noted up front that the entire film did not utilize the system, but rather just 10 to 15 minutes sprinkled throughout the runtime, not unlike the selected scenes Christopher Nolan shot in IMAX for the last two Dark Knight films. Furthermore, in a small handful of instances the walls did not depict contiguous image, but general “atmosphere,” such as flickering flames.

So how was it? First, a few negatives. Since the system projects directly onto theater walls and not smooth screens (at least in the venue where I saw it), one might note a distracting detail now and then, like the auditorium’s speakers. Also, since the film was shot with only the front screen in mind, visuals on the walls sometimes draw the eye away from where the central action is. A few establishing shots using the process are relatively brief and don’t give the viewer enough time to take in the full image.

In spite of those drawbacks, the system was at times very impressive, and did indeed deliver the ‘immersive’ effect promised in the ballyhoo. The best sequences came just before the climax, in which the characters explore some fantasy environments. Several shots linger long enough for viewers to take in dazzling sights all around them. It’s very effective and adds a touch of welcome old-fashioned showmanship to the proceedings.

Ultimately, though, one walks away from ScreenX feeling its application to narrative features to be limited. Even if filmmakers planned to use the format from the get-go, it’s unlikely that audiences would want to sit through an entire feature that demanded they constantly turn their heads right and left to follow the action. It would be ideal for travelogues or perhaps some experimental shorts–but when was the last time you saw a travelogue or a short subject in a mainstream theater?

For more information on ScreenX, check out their website. For Angelenos interested in seeing the process for themselves, the ScreenX version of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is still playing at the CGV Cinemas in Koreatown and Buena Park. Note that the film has English audio, but Korean subtitles. — Gary Teetzel

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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We’re trying to get these Tuesday reviews off early, so as to take advantage of the Monday holiday!

I finally got a gander at all of MGM’s 1933 Men Must Fight the other night, DVR’d from TCM. It’s a real jaw dropper, a creaky adaptation of a creaky play with one insanely good special effects sequence. Diana Wynyard, a nurse in WW1, loses her flyer boyfriend (Robert Young) in France but bears his child. To make everything morally Kopasetic for the high-class Diana, she marries her generous admirer, Lewis Stone. The theatrics are beyond stiff.

Back in the USA and twenty years later it’s now a futuristic 1940, complete with picture phones. All other progress seems stuck in 1933, however. Stone is now the Secretary of State trying to bolster a failing peace plan. Diana is a vocal pacifist, a position that gets sticky when war breaks out with an enemy unidentified only vaguely as the ‘Eurasian States.’ When Diana proclaims that the world’s mothers must stop producing sons to die in men’s wars, the savage hecklers at her speeches turn into an angry mob, screaming death threats and attempting to storm her 5th Avenue home. Diana’s grown son Phillips Holmes proclaims that he subscribes to the same pacifist credo, which prompts his outraged fianceé to break off their engagement, and his stepfather to finally divulge the fact that he’s a bastard rather than part of his family. The bizarre finish sees the son flip-flopping and racing to a biplane to battle the enemy (who?) in the skies over New York City. Learning that his real dad died a hero, the son becomes a dashing air pilot, seemingly in just one day. An inane final scene sees the three generations of rich women now rooting for the fight, yet also lamenting their abandonment of pacifist ideals. Grandmother May Robson says her last line, that mothers will just be ignored the same as always, as if it’s supposed to be funny. Having made no coherent dramatic point, the movie just ends, in mid-war.

TCM’s print has a patch with a bad buzz on the soundtrack but is otherwise okay. The shocker is in the next-to-last reel. For over sixty minutes the show has taken place in stuffy interiors, with out-the-window cutaways to silent stock footage of victory parades, etc. Just as the family is breaking up over the pacifism issue, a full-on air raid hits NYC. Massed biplanes (in 1940) drop little wing bombs. One tiny bomb is all that’s required to wipe out the Brooklyn Bridge, and just two are enough to blow up the Empire State Building. The miniature effects are excellent, with blasted skyscrapers falling into the streets via traveling mattes and more miniature explosions. It looks like thousands should be killed, but the only casualty we see is Diana, whose arm is broken when her taxi is hit by one of those bombs that obliterate entire buildings. I’d never heard of Men Must Fight until a few years ago when I think Richard Harland Smith mentioned it . . . is it the first negative-subjunctive future history war movie? For the prediction of an aerial war in 1940 it beats Things to Come by three full years.

See you next Saturday — Thanks for reading — Glenn Erickson

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I’ve been impressed lately with Phil Hall’s The Bootleg Files reviews over at Cinema Crazed, wherein he’s tracked down information about barely-known titles not released on, uh, authorized discs. Phil was one of the first critics to welcome me at the Online Film Critics Society, going on sixteen years ago. I think he’s found a good vein of reporting here, as every Bootleg entry I’ve read has been news, and I tend to be one of those people with the illusion that I’ve seen everything. This week the subject is The Bootleg Files: Afrique 50. Phil’s back-story explanation of the film’s suppression says a lot about colonial politics — the filmmaker René Vautier paid the price for defying French law, when he filmed actual conditions in French West Africa. I knew that the French were really touchy about such subjects, because they even censored the old western Major Dundee, taking out dialogue that implied that French colonial Legionnaires used torture. Phil’s column serves a useful purpose. Each entry begins with ‘just the facts’ data: ‘where last seen,’ ‘reason for bootleg status,’ ‘chances of seeing a commercial DVD release.’ Good show.

I’m hoping for a full report next week on the much touted new “ScreenX” format, from a special correspondent. Movie audiences (prompted by David Letterman) rejected Peter Jackson’s attempt to raise the frame rate in his Hobbit movies, but maybe they’ll respond favorably to what sounds like an exaggeration of Abel Gance’s silent ‘Polyvision’ tryptich effect. Apparently, either the whole show or certain sequences will open up to cover a 270- degree field of vision. That slice of a circle goes beyond ear-to-ear coverage . . . are they looking for a virtual reality effect?  I’ll be curious to learn more about the format: is it worthwhile? Does the image have seams? Do the ‘sides’ show matching live action, or is everything relevant concentrated in the front panel (if there are indeed panels)? Does the camera pan to follow action, or do we instead turn our heads? What happens in close-ups and fast cutting? The good part about this is that my contact knows enough to give an accurate report. Here’s the Hollywood Reporter article on the film and the ScreenX format.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson