Hello!

Yep, it’s Spring, and the sap is running. The little birds outside my window seem to have one thing on their chirpy little minds, at least judging by the racket they’re making trying to out-sing the other guy competing for an amorous conquest. It’s warm enough to open the window for an hour or two each afternoon. I hope I get a bunch more ‘it’s Spring!’ sensations in the future . . . I’ve been so fortunate.

A couple of shout-out plugs for OPG’s today — Other People’s Blogs. I haven’t yet figured out a way to get a list of ‘favored pages’ on CineSavant, so I frequently tout some great, favorite destinations like John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows and David Cairns’ Shadowplay.

This time out a writer by the name of David Lawrence got my attention by linking to my page. Lawrence’s informative site is called Crime Film Hub, where he neatly summarizes disc news, and other reviewers & critics in reference to Crime-related pix. He wrote the following much-appreciated paragraph:

My defense is that this isn’t hollow praise — he’s giving reasons why somebody might not regret clicking their way to the CineSavant doorstep. As for ‘working in the film industry for many years’ . . . that feels like quite an exaggeration. And nah, I’m a relative latecomer in writing about physical media.

Maybe it’s Springtime that has me doing all this backhanded crowing about CineSavant I finally discovered this second site a year or so ago. It’s a real resource, like I want CineSavant to be. A correspondent told me that its writer, Janne Wass had information on obscure sci-fi pix that even I hadn’t read.

I’m not too crazy about most online sci-fi movie pages but this one is an exception: scifist 2.0. Janne Wass describes himself as a Finnish journalist and culture geek, but I’m very impressed with the depth and breadth of his articles on the 1,001 sci-fi pictures that also shape my worldview. What sets him aside is his special knowledge of really arcane sci-fi cinema, especially silent cinema and Eastern European pictures.

Wass keeps coming up with fascinating documentation on titles I’ve never heard of — he reads some Russian, which may explain why he can offer facts not accessible to us here in the States. He has a full article on a movie I’ve been whining about forever because of the lack of English-language information online, the Stalin-era Russian ‘satire’ Serebristaya Pyl (the poster just above, I think). Wass’s page (or long article) on Corman’s Beast with a Million Eyes is far better informed than my own review. In other words, I can’t start reading from his site too late in the evening, because I won’t get enough sleep.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Correspondent Lee Kaplan was impressed to stumble upon this post by Scott Essman, from way back in 2007: Boris Karloff on This Is Your Life, the Jack Pierce Segment. It’s an excerpt from the November 20, 1957 episode in which Pierce comes on the show to surprise his old friend and colleague.

Noting that I don’t mind if a good link is a couple of years old, Gary Teetzel offers this link to an impressive audio recording: Nino Rota playing Godfather themes for Francis Coppola.

I wonder if this indeed was sort of an audition tape. It was posted on YouTube by Vincent Di Placido, late in 2020.

This last item came up while watching Arrow Video’s new RoboCop 4K disc the other night. All of a sudden a composition similarity jumped out at me that I should have seen thirty years and fifteen viewings ago.

If I’m crazy to think this please be kind, but I’m convinced that someone making RoboCop — I’m guessing producer Jon Davison — purposely set up the color angles on Dan O’Herlihy as ‘The Old Man’ to mirror Joseph Losey, Arthur Grant and Bernard Robinson’s image of Alexander Knox’s mysterious ‘Bernard’ in a sci-fi movie filmed 26 years earlier. In the Losey film the sculpture on the right is called a ‘graveyard bird.’ I’d like to know more about what we see in the Verhoeven picture — is it an eagle atop a skyscraper?

If this visual comparison is already common knowledge among 5th grade sci-fi fans, please be kind too!  A new RoboCop review is on the way.

Plus a last note to disc producers — if anyone plans on prepping a new disc of RoboCop 2 please contact me, informally, for a good extras tip.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Sam Peckinpah was a master at being interviewed, whether trying to impress with his macho attitude and tough-guy cool, or for other venues, coming across as a civilized artist disassociating himself from the violence in his movies. In print or in person, the consistent angle is that he plays the wise man, who expects to be listened to.

He sounded like a reasonable guy if the subject wasn’t his unhappy dealings with studios and producers. This Brief Peckinpah Interview excerpt from a longer documentary was conducted by Oliver Assayas in 1982, when I believe Peckinpah was in decent shape, ‘getting clean.’ It’s for a foreign audience so he just lays on a couple of sage quotables: his work simply reflects the violence in society, and his job is to get his public to participate in the action.

Peckinpah was a lot different back in 1974 (or was it 1975) when the future ‘Z’-channel programmer Jerry Harvey lured him to The Beverly Canon theater for two showings of his personal uncut print of The Wild Bunch, the legendary cut with the Intermission. He stepped on stage in his mirrored glasses and talked in a gravelly voice, expressing sincere thanks for the two sell-out crowds. He left with an entourage of three or four, one of whom was Warren Oates. They both had the look of visionaries — or guys flying on something. I’m glad my contact with Peckinpah was so positive — he would soon made himself an industry pariah with his disorderly behavior at banquets, etc.

David J. Schow forwarded this link a while back: David Bowie BBC interview 1999 predicts the impact of the Internet. He’s pretty eloquent on the meaning of the Internet, especially considering when he’s speaking. He really believes the Internet is going to make big and scary changes, which certainly came to pass — you know, electing Presidents and all that. He also predicts that entertainment for this century will center on the ‘space between the performer and the audience.’ The BBC interviewer doesn’t look too convinced, as if Rock Stars aren’t meant to be profound.

I myself prefer the vintage Krell interpretation of the Internet — a vast human communication linkage that has great possibilities of instant species communication, but also terrifying self-destruction, as envisioned by Cyril Hume, Irving Block and Allen Adler.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I’ve been talking to Bob Furmanek and Jack Theakston about the crazy original color sequence in Monster from Green Hell, and can say that I will soon have an illustrated follow-up CineSavant article about exactly that subject. So hold your Pulitzer nominations ’til you’ve read it. Bob & Jack are amazing film collectors — they seem to have a line on every arcane film mystery from the 1950s.

While getting my bad information corrected on that subject I also solicited some information about the progress of the 3-D Film Archive’s ongoing Cinecolor restoration of the Abbott and Costello feature Jack and the Beanstalk.

An ongoing Kickstarter Campaign for the restoration is still underway.  As I’ve tried to say before, the kiddie musical Jack and the Beanstalk has always appealed. I thought Lou Costello was fine when playing for children and wish his career had allowed him to make more pictures in that direction. Jack in the Beanstalk is disarmingly naïve; the main song is catchy and I even like the rudimentary dance numbers. The sappy romantic leads are exactly how such characters were pictured in children’s books of the 1950s.

I DVR the show from TCM now and then and what keeps popping up is a degraded image with wilted color. When the 3-D Archive announced a restoration back in 2020 the news was a nice break from the Covid blues.

I asked Bob and Jack for an update. They asked me to distinguish their upcoming restored disc, to be released by ClassicFlix, from a recent VCI disc billed a a 4K restoration. The 3-D Archive’s project is much more involved.

How much more involved?  Let’s hope you like technical talk, because Jack Theakston didn’t hold back on the details of their work. Here goes, from Jack:

Long story short here…

Bob and I had four to five prints of Jack and the Beanstalk to work from. As you know, no pre-print on this show exists.

The “A” print came from the Library of Congress, and short of a few splices and emulsion digs, was in fine condition.
The “B” print came from a collector on the West coast, and was in a rougher shape. Lots of splices, scratches, arc burns, etc.
The “C” print came from BFI, and looks to have been an answer print. The color sections were almost all misregistered and of bad gamma. The sepia sections were in near mint condition, however, making the “C” print the basis for the film’s bookend sequences.
The “D” print was odds and ends Bob picked up from a collector in the ’70s, and was quite incomplete, but yielded a couple of drop-in shots that we needed.

The biggest challenge for this show was assembly (from the four sources), which took a lot of video trickery to smooth over: a heavy application of cleanup, and worst of all, color grading. I think we spent something like two and a half weeks total color grading this film to get it to look near normal. The original SuperCinecolor prints had an odd artifact which to us looked like some sort of projection arc burn effect, where a box in the middle of the image stays static. Much of the color grading was spent dialing this out. This is the only SuperCinecolor print that I’ve seen that had this issue, and Bob and I suspect that it was an artifact in printing, not in projection.

We found SuperCinecolor to be a nightmare to work with in several different ways. There is Cyan-Magenta-Yellow dust from the first positive dupe, then there’s Red-Green-Blue dust from the dupe negative that’s used to print the final film. The colors are very good, but this three-generation intermediate adds considerable film grain. Comparing it to the one section of original camera neg we have (feature outtakes) shows that a lot of detail was compromised. The one blessing is that the dyes SuperCinecolor used for the color layers are very stable, and most of the information we needed was all there.

Best,
Jack

Bob Furmanek volunteered this additional blurb:

Thanks Jack. I will all add that all of the film’s master 35mm elements — which include the original Eastman color camera negative and red/blue/yellow separation masters — went missing when worldwide rights were sold in December 1959 to Sterling Television in New York. RKO Radio Pictures acquired rights for theatrical reissue and struck new B&W 35mm prints in March 1960.

When I did extensive research with Joe Trentin in the RKO files back in the mid-1980s, they had no record whatsoever of receiving any color master elements. It’s hard to believe — those master color elements have been MIA for a VERY long time.

Bob

This restoration group is always working on more than one project at a time, so I was happy to read here and there that Jack and the Beanstalk was coming along nicely. Jack Theakston’s March 5 Facebook post read

“If you contributed to Jack and the Beanstalk your wait will be well met. Bob and I just signed off on the color and, well . . . wow. Also, we were able to make the sepia sections look like preprint quality. Picture is 99% done. Audio is next. Wrapping bows on special features, and this is out of the door by the middle of the month.”

Mr. Theakston forwarded the sample frame with the final color. I haven’t tweaked it as I do most pix on CineSavant. As with some of the other images here, if you zoom it or open it in a new window it gets much larger:

Jack and the Beanstalk is a weird favorite for me. Many people love The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, a show that always gave me the creeps. But Jack always did the trick for some reason. Lou Costello looks like he really wants little kids to be happy. He makes me remember being an uncritical six year-old, in the kiddie spirit. ClassicFlix is as yet giving no projected date for their Blu-ray release. I’m hoping for the best.

Meanwhile, back in the mundane world of disc reviewing, newly arrived and ready to review is the long-awaited full video restoration of George Pal’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. I watched it last night, and the fabulous presentation really helps. It could be David Strohmaier and Tom March’s biggest accomplishment, taking a show nobody thought could be restored all the way to a final product this pristine.

Just as impressive was a 40 minute restoration making-of video, which becomes exceedingly technical. We loved every minute.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

This two-year-old Harryhausen tribute video — a really elaborate piece of work — was just pointed out to us, as it’s making the rounds on Facebook again. StopmoNick does it nicely — it’s short, sweet and imaginative.

It’s at YouTube at Harryhausen at 100 Tribute, from June 28, 2020. I particularly like the detail of the animation gauge.

I just received my replacement 4K UHD disc of Criterion’s A Hard Day’s Night, as promised. There were some odd errors in the first pressing, and the company made good with replacements rather quickly, I think. The Blu-ray and DVD copies are just fine, we are told.

If you think you qualify for a replacement disc, here are two links. Posts at the Home Theater Forum detail the odd flub that occurred. Posts at Blu-ray.com repeat Criterion’s exchange instructions.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson