CineSavant Column

Saturday December 7, 2019

Hello!

Here’s a fun link — Craig Reardon notes that it’s a few months old, but if you missed it, it’s worth a peek. It’s a 1989 CBS This Morning interview via a TV hookup that unites Adam West, Julie Newmar, Cesar Romero and Burgess Meredith, to spend several minutes hashing over the old Batman TV series. When the new Tim Burton movie is brought up, Romero remarks in gentlemanly fashion, “I understand Jack Nicholson is fantastic as the Joker!” whereupon Meredith snipes, “Well, that’s too bad…”  Ha!

They all look good but then again it’s 1989, thirty years ago. The CBS host entreats Burgess Meredith to do the ‘Penguin’ quack, and he eventually does, but not before complaining, “Well, at these prices…” Romero says he hears the new movie ‘is too violent for kids,’ while Newmar notes that her Catwoman was ‘wicked,’ not ‘evil.’  That would be a good distinction to make at impeachment hearings, maybe.


And Gary Teetzel connects us to two links of interest. The first is a Movie-Censorship.com censorship comparison page of the European Lycanthropus and its American recut Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory. It’s pretty thorough, has frame grabs and includes a mini-review; they like the Severin discs that we reviewed here at CineSavant back on November 5.


The second Teetzel steer is to an ‘eventbrite’ page for a pair of concerts to be held at Los Angeles’ Autry Museum of the American West on January 24 & 25, entitled The Music of Elmer Bernstein. Gary reports: “The website plays up his western scores, To Kill a Mockingbird, Ghostbusters etc. but one insider says that some lesser-known works will also be featured, including music from the immortal Robot Monster. I’ll spare readers the CineSavant message chain of Robot Monster jokes that ensued. Well, almost: we hope the conductor will don a gorilla suit, and someone will crank up the ol’ Billion Bubble Machine to really capture that unique Ro-Man nostalgia. Or was someone just kidding about the concert including Bernstein’s ‘lesser-known’ film scores?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson