CineSavant Column
Hello! Halloween is upon us with a couple of 3-D attractions for CineSavant fanatics still capable of screening the format — today’s Mickey Spillane adaptation, and perhaps next Tuesday, an English-produced 3-D spy caper. It’s The Diamond Wizard, at this point pretty much an unknown quantity.
↑ Fans as desperate as I to get our mitts on the new restored Invaders from Mars disc got the word last week that, yes, delivery has been delayed — the late-September launch date now didn’t even make the Halloween cutoff. My take on this is that a new disc label trying to navigate fulfillment in the middle of all these supply-side woes might indeed have these kinds of problems. Speaking for myself, the best thing is for the discs to get here when they get here, without any technical compromises. We’re hoping that it’s the disc of the year.
The Column items! Dick Dinman has uploaded a new DVD Classics Corner on the Air podcast. This time his guest is Paramount’s front person overseeing their archives and special projects, VP Andreas Kalas. The subject is the earlier potential ‘disc of the year,’ the 4K + Blu-ray The War of the Worlds / When Worlds Collide combo that we reviewed back in September.
Dick actually saw The War of the Worlds as a child, in its first NYC engagement at the Mayfair in Times Square. That memory prompts a discussion with Ms. Kalas about the film’s original sort-of Stereophonic soundtrack.
And Joe Dante has been circulating this link to a film clip that features writer-director Preston Sturges’ only sustained movie scene as an actor, in the Bob Hope-Fernandel feature Paris Holiday.
Sturges’ acting is just fine . . . but if you ask me, his dubbed voice flattens the performance. It is dubbed, is it not? The clip looks flat, but the original movie was in Technicolor and widescreen Technirama, so imagine big open spaces left and right. The movie itself doesn’t look like a winner. I wonder if it’s worse than Bob Hope’s awful The Iron Petticoat with Katharine Hepburn — a ‘comedy’ that plays like slow torture.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson