Hello!

Advisor-correspondent Gary Teetzel reports that Kino Lorber has signed a 65-title Blu-ray deal with Paramount. It’s actually 71 features after adding in 3 ‘Paramount renewals’ and 3 ‘CBS renewals,’ whatever that means. No specific titles were mentioned, but ‘The Kino Insider’ has stated that

— 43 titles will be released for the first time on BD in the U.S., 8 of them the first time on disc.
— “A few” of the titles in the new deal have been previously released by [Imprint].
— The list includes no titles previously released by Olive.
— Kino will remaster a number of titles, any from two to three dozen (seems a safe way to estimate).
— Some films are from the Republic library, but ‘not many.’
AND
— No silent films — No Elvis films — No Miramax titles.

That much information encourages the kind of wild & irresponsible speculation we’re happy to provide here at CineSavant, always no extra charge. Subjectively desired titles offhand include The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (it didn’t migrate to Universal with the other Preston Sturges pics), William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours, with Humphrey Bogart as a gangster, and why not Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets?  We’d like to see Catch-22, Oh, What a Lovely War, Dragonslayer, The Tin Star and Wild is the Wind.

My readers are indeed eager for domestic Blu-ray releases of the [Imprint] Sci-fi pictures When Worlds Collide, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, etc.; and I’d like to review them again.

Finally, one 3-D title, unnamed, is said to be part of the deal. We immediately began dreaming that the 3-D Hondo with John Wayne might sneak in there: if we’re going to be unreasonably optimistic, why not go all the way?  Unfortunately, ‘The Kino Insider’ put the kaibosh on that notion pretty quickly. Paramount’s arrangement with Batjac doesn’t allow for the title to be sublicensed. So no The High and the Mighty on Blu either.

 

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Outside of that news, Kino has announced that another 3-D title has been added to the release schedule, licensed from MGM. It’s the 1952 3-D picture that launched the Eisenhower-era 3-D craze, Bwana Devil. Written and directed by Arch Oboler, it stars Robert Stack, Barbara Britton and Nigel Bruce.

The Natural Vision ‘depthie’ is on the books as the first full-length color 3-D feature; its success bankrolled Arch Oboler’s next twenty years of oddball film experiments, capped by his development of an improved one-filmstrip, over & under 3-D process called Space Vision.

I’ve not yet seen Bwana Devil — friends that attended the 3-D festivals assure me that . . .  it’s a landmark picture, all right!

 

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And we just heard the news about Viavision [Imprint’s] disc lineup for August, and it’s a really impressive list — all desirable features with collectors in mind.

Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach is a two-disc set that includes the 2013 documentary Fallout, about the Shute novel and the making of the movie.
The Essential Film Noir Box 3 contains four definite winners, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, No Man of Her Own, The Turning Point and The Desperate Hours . . . which we were just asking for, above.
The Scarlet Hour is a rare VistaVision noir from 1956 with the movie debut of cult figure Carol Ohmart; also a commentary by Alan K. Rode.
I Am the Law is a seldom-seen 1938 Columbia gangster film with Edward G. Robinson, and a commentary by Jason A. Ney.
Secret of the Incas is the Charlton Heston thriller filmed in Peru at Macchu Picchu; a bogus conspiracy theory has circulated about this show’s relationship to a certain Steven Spielberg adventure thriller.
Storm Center is the 1956 Bette Davis drama about book-banning and political extremism.
Golden Boy is the classic with William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck.
The World of Susie Wong is the drama with William Holden and Nancy Kwan, in a two-disc set with a documentary on the life of Ms. Kwan.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson