Hello!

Eric Levy’s National Film Registry Fan Site gives unofficial coverage of the films chosen each year by the United States Library of Congress, with helpful information about availability on video disc — you know, the essential format that is not going obsolete.

Rather than link directly Eric Levy’s page, I’m guiding you to the great monthly newsletter page that showed me the link — the Milestone Films Newsletter for October 2021. Just scroll down a bit through some of the Milestone people’s interesting items for this month. More power to them!

I’m in the process of reviewing CineSavant U.K. correspondent Lee Broughton’s latest book, The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film. It’s a scholarly study that fits in very well with today’s reassessment of film history in terms of women & minorities. So far it’s making a good comparison of how U.S. and European westerns handled similar content; Sir Christopher Frayling gave it an enthusiastic endorsement.

Also, Lee’s first book has been re-issued as a paperback with a more customer-friendly price tag. The book is
Reframing Cult Westerns: From The Magnificent Seven to The Hateful Eight. It’s a series of essays that Lee edited to explore new thought in the western genre.

And a friend sends along this interesting link: electric guitarist David Ferri plays lead on Miklos Rozsa’s main theme Star of Bethlehem from Ben-Hur. Yup, it’s the tune from the Charlton Heston movie all right, but I’ve never heard it sounding like this. Mr. Ferri does some pretty fancy playing, I don’t mind saying.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson