Hello!

We certainly post too many links circulated by Joe Dante, and have been trying to behave ourselves. But this Mubi  ‘Notebook Festival’ article by Forrest Cardamenis from just a few days ago calls out to be read:

The Necrophile’s Dilemma
The subject is the screening of rare film prints by special groups, archives, museums and collectors, with an eye to the reality that precious ancient film, especially nitrate prints, are fragile and unstable, and that even best projection wears them out and risks their permanent loss.

That’s of course a problem. Movies were meant to be seen, yet screening them puts them at risk. I remember that long ago the County Museum of Art held a D.W. Griffith series, showing a lot of very precious, very old film … some of which surely was nitrate. Was that wise, or appropriate?  I’m not the one to judge. At UCLA in Melnitz Hall in the 1970s, the then-new Film Archive constantly screened the studio library prints on deposit from Fox and Paramount.

The generosity of the donation was likely an illusion — not only did the studios save a fortune in storage fees for the libraries, they probably negotiated a sweet tax break.

Melnitz 1409 was the ideal picture palace — 300 or so seats with better-than-ideal projection. ‘Scope movies looked enormous there, stretching wall-to-wall. We knew were were privileged, to be able to see all of the Marlene Dietrich – Von Sternberg pictures in flawless 35mm nitrate. Audiences were spellbound by  The Scarlet Empress, which looked like a hallucination. The phrase, ‘the silver screen’ took on a real meaning.

On the other hand, the Archive’s perfect 35mm nitrate print of the pre-Code horror  Island of Lost Souls apparently saw a lot of use, being shipped here and there to festivals. Although I think I saw it on TV in the ’60s, it was considered difficult to see. When Island of Lost Souls finally arrived on disc from Criterion, it looked good but not terrific — I have a terrible feeling that that one print may have been the best available source. That’s just a guess, but in 1973, before video and before what we now think of as systematic film preservation and ‘asset management,’ not too many experts had a pure preservation mindset.

The Cardamenis article is an excellent read — he touches on a number of important issues and talks about specific archival screenings in a way that assures me that a film élite somewhere is seeing all the great stuff I’ll never see. Recommended.

 

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We’ll eagerly check out a new disc from Mario Bava any day. To my (faulty) knowledge, no Mario Bava film has been yet released on 4K … Riccardo Freda beat Mario to the punch last year with Vinegar Syndrome’s surprise 4K Ultra HD of  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.  Does the legion of Bava completists extend to his son Lamberto, also a film director?

In August, Synapse will test that question with Lamberto Bava’s horror shows  Demons and  Demons 2 in 4K Ultra HD. Coming from the ‘gore splatter’ era of Euro-horror, these are pretty much after my time, but their fans are legion. The advertising stresses the rock music soundtracks. Whattaya going to do with fans of ’80s horror, anyway?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Westwood’s famed ’30s picture palaces have closed their doors … although the Village may persist.

Hello!       An ode to changing Hollywood…

Whoa, talk about personal history being erased. As the era of photochemical film passed years ago, I’m just coming to accept that every place I ever worked in ‘Hollywood’ is drastically altered, if not expunged. Giant labs are now storage facilities and a hundred small businesses catering to film production have vanished, from little sound companies that specialized in temp mixes, to storefront labs that developed ‘dirty dupe’ B&W copies from which we edited TV spots and trailers. I’d visit editor friend Steven Nielson in little cutting rooms all over town, wherever cheap rent could be found, running into freelance special effects wizards and actors-turned producers like James Hong.

But I didn’t expect all the movie palaces to go away. I never really got to see the cathedral-like downtown theaters in operation, as most of them folded in the 1960s. But in the ’70s we still had Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Westwood, which was THE place to see new movies, the place for celebs to be seen, AND the happy haunt of 30,000 UCLA students. Those of us without cars could walk down for a bite, snoop around several big bookstores, and take in the very latest first-run movie, at the then-steep ticket price of Three Dollars. The first Westwood show I personally saw was  Catch-22, the summer before I started school.

I had student jobs in Westwood, first on a parking lot (what a bunch of crooks!) and then at Westwood’s brand-new National Theater, where I thoroughly abused the free movie tickets perk. I got to take my out-of-town girlfriend (bless her) to hot-title attractions like  The Godfather and  Deliverance, not to mention FILMEX at the Grauman’s Chinese, to see a miraculous Technicolor print of  Vertigo on an enormous screen.

The papers have reported that the ‘flagship’ theaters The Village and The Bruin have shuttered.  (Top Image) ↑  They were considered top venues. I don’t remember too many terrific memories at The Bruin, the theater Sharon Tate visits in Tarantino’s  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I do remember seeing Days of Heaven there, in 70mm, I believe. But The Westwood, the one with the tall tower, is packed with memories — a preview of the De Laurentiis  King Kong with Rocco Gioffre (ugh), Wilder’s  Avanti! with Steve Sharon, watching Jon Davison pace the lobby during a preview screening of  Starship Troopers, and a wonderfully memorable screening of  The Thin Red Line with my teenaged son. Great stuff all around.

They say that a consortium of film directors will try to keep The Village going, but the question is, can any single-screen theater stay open without a good flow of exclusive product people are willing to Go Out to see brand new, without waiting?  I was once a theater rat, running from museums to school to The Vagabond and The Encore. At my present age I now have an excuse to stick closer to home. But the rest of the culture now has so many other interests and entertainments to pursue. Movies are no longer the universal Thing To Do that everybody keeps up with. Who knows what will be?

Westwood and The Village Theater in 1933… a mostly undeveloped landscape. (from This eye-opening web page.) 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

I wish these mop-tops were more Wyndham-menacing, and less like pacifist martyrs.  It takes a Village, I guess.

 

Hello!

I hope you aren’t sitting in an airport somewhere, still trying to get home from a ‘minor’ computer melt-down that crippled a big chunk of civilization last Friday. We had a minor hangup in Atlanta with Delta just three days before, and thought we had bad luck. Good grief.

↑  First up today at CineSavant is a handsome bit of stop-motion fun from StopmoNick. It was posted a year ago but has been floating around the web for week; if you’re as disconnected as I am, maybe it’ll be news.

And it’s very brief, too:

Orlock 

The talented animator-craftsman offers additional ingenious stop-motion treats, on his YouTube page, just titled  ‘StopmoNick.

 

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And congratulations to Laura of the movie review blog  Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings, which has just marked its 18th year. Laura’s posts can always be depended upon for sane, sensible & thoughtful insights. I envy her ability to so consistently ‘muse’ with such finesse. She sees things in movies that flit by my dim perception.

I almost don’t want to think about how long I’ve been doing this online writing … I’m convinced that people I meet must think,  “What…?”  and  “Don’t you know that hard media is dead?”  and  “Why?”   Well, having been able to exchange occasional notes with people like Laura is a reward in itself.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

It’s a relationship movie… Lulu and Countess Geshwitz could have lived happily ever after. (And coming on Blu-ray.)

 

Hello!

After last Tuesday’s lean posts, let’s atone with two highly anticipated reviews, and several typically arcane Column items…

From correspondent Ian Whittle comes a link to something unusual, a post-synchronized ‘talkie’ version of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, sadly minus the talking as the vintage sound discs are missing. But the German Das Bundesarchiv has finally uploaded it in reasonable quality.

This new version is not very long, only 48 minutes. Someone named Waldemar Ronger changed all the character names and added those new scenes Ian thought stick out like a sore thumb.

Murnau’s original got in big copyright trouble, as an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The producers of this talkie revamp didn’t clear up the issue either. The official title translates as ‘The Twelfth Hour, A Night of Horror’:

 

Die zwölfte Stunde 

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CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel found a photo comparison that might please Orson Welles fans. Welles explored every kind of editorial montage technique in his first film  Citizen Kane, which included pulling in stock shots from sources far and wide.

↑  The first image is a rough snap from the 1934 Paramount film  Now and Forever, starring Carol Lombard and Gary Cooper.

Lombard is in the recliner center screen, and Cooper is next to her. Of course, she has her back to the camera and he’s almost a silhouette, so they are not really recognizable, at least not from this angle.

 

↑  The second frame grab is from the opening “News on the March” montage at the beginning of  Citizen Kane. Only a couple of seconds long, it illustrates the life of luxury to be found at Charles Foster Kane’s lavish Florida estate ‘Xanadu.’ Note the man on the far right is in a different position, suggesting this is an alternate take.

We always recognized background plates in Citizen Kane from (I think) The Son of Kong, but this one is new to me. Interesting that Now and Forever is a Paramount Picture, when we’d expect Orson Welles to pull stock shots from RKO’s library.

How many more recognizable shots did Welles purloin from other productions?

 

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And …. The Criterion Collection has great news for horror addicts in October, starting with a two-title-plus-a-documentary 4K Ultra HD disc of the remaining two Val Lewton masterpieces:

 

I Walked with a Zombie  and  The Seventh Victim 

They’re my two favorites from Val Lewton. Zombie has some of the most delicate B&W photography ever, evoking a breezy Caribbean on RKO sound stages. The quietly chilling Victim concentrates on failure, depression, and suicidal disillusion. Conceptually far ahead of the genre, it is Lewton’s most personal work.

Next up is a classic German silent, said to be a newly remastered digital restoration, G.W. Pabst’s amazing

 

Pandora’s Box 

with Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, and Francis Lederer — and Alice Roberts, an image of whom coincidentally tops today’s CineSavant Column.

Finally there’s Masahiro Shinoda’s 1979 Kabuki folk-horror item with a music score by Isao Tomita, in 4K Ultra-HD,

 

Demon Pond 

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Plus one more item. Dick Dinman has revamped his DVD Classics Corner On the Airpodcast discussion of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers to take in the new 4K Ultra HD release, the one with two aspect ratios. As it’s partly assembled from an older interview, ‘DVD Savant’ makes a comment or two on the track as well.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

They never learn… it’s the ‘poke sticks at monsters’ syndrome.

Hello!

Sorry, no reviews today … we’ve just gotten back from a quick trip East to hobnob with our fellow wizards attend to some forbidden personal family errands … We are a lot more refreshed than we would be if we tried to jam in a review laden with typos, awkward sentences and egregious mistakes for our esteemed correspondents to correct.

Melville x 2 !   Kaufman x 2 !   Bert I. Gordon x 2 ! 

But we have some good disc announcements, none of them more than a week old!  First up is KL Studio Classics’ announcement of their August lineup. It has a number of very welcome surprises, starting with a stack of worthy genre pictures in 4K Ultra HD: Jean-Pierre Melville’s  Bob Le Flambeur and  Le Doulos (with Jean-Paul Belmondo), Michael Ritchie’s PC outrage Prime Cut and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad … plus …

 

… plus … Jean-Luc Godard’s  Alphaville in 4K, which I’m hoping will be a bit of an improvement over the previous Blu-ray.

Blu-ray debuts or reissues include Phil Karlson’s 99 River Street with John Payne and Evelyn Keyes, Burt Reynolds in  Navajo Joe, with its screaming soundtrack of Ennio Morricone; Bert I. Gordon’s  Food of the Gods and  Empire of the Ants (never seen ’em, I’m sure they’re ‘special’), Ray Milland in  Frogs, Jeff Lieberman’s  Squirm, Philip Kaufman’s  The White Dawn and a Volume Twenty (XX) for the series  Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema.

 

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Also to be very much welcomed by fans of Classic Eurohorror, from the always-reliable disc boutique Radiance, is the coming-soon announcement of the Riccardo Freda – Mario Bava horror opus I vampiri. The B&W CinemaScope thriller was the icebreaker for gothic horror in Italy. It preceded Hammer Film’s first all-out Technicolor horror release by one year.

After Radiance’s stunning remasters of  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock,  Planet of the Vampires, etc., this is big news. We loved the old Image disc from 23 years ago, but wondered if its odd jumble of scenes fairly represented the movie; perhaps the experts can straighten it out for us. At any rate, it will be illuminating to hear commentator Tim Lucas contrast I vampiri  with the U.S. recut version The Devil’s Commandment.

Radiance also has a special edition on the way of Benjamin Christensen’s ultra-creepy silent infotainment documentary  Häxan. Also listed as Coming Soon, it carries three alternate music scores, and a couple of additional re-cut versions.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Aww … Shelley!  She was often the main reason to see an Altman picture.

 

Hello!

We got interested in some videos circulated by David J. Schow, produced by an impressive graphics-restoration company in Canoga Park called Fourth Cone Restoration.  Collectors with cherished old movie posters in his closet can imagine them being restored and mounted as if they were fine art in a museum. The Fourth Cone demo videos certainly convince us that they could do wonders with the paper in our attic right now.

We see them washing and prepping the paper posters, in one case dissolving and removing a backing of brown wrapping paper. We see various techniques employed to keep the paper intact while smoothing out wrinkles. Then they touch up colors missing from various folds and tears.

Although I recommend first checking out their webpage, there’s another YouTube Video Homepage listing Fourth Cone Restoration’s featured videos.

Or go directly to a video showing work being performed on a French poster for  The Day the Earth Stood Still, a ’60s reissue item that pulls in an image from This Island Earth. Here are two more direct links to posters being rejuvenated — a vintage  King Kong poster, and one for  Star Wars.

Another Fourth Cone YouTube page has more video links, including one about packing tips for Posters.

Wishful thinking — this professional service most likely costs thousands of dollars … my French Major Dundee poster, the one that’s bigger than a U.S. one-sheet, is still wrapped up, un-displayed. Dream on.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The most fun ever with mutilations, torture, grotesque makeup and spectacular 9th century undergarments.