Hello!

With no obvious column items leaping to the fore, let’s just do a round up of what’s in the CineSavant review hopper.

Up front from a label called Undercrank Productions is a much-desired silent western double bill of Sky High and The Great Diamond Robbery, starring Tom Mix. Robert S. Birchard used to screen his 16mm prints of some of these Mix and Buck Jones titles, all of which were good.

The Criterion Collection needs immediate review attention, with impressive new discs of Joseph Losey’s The Servant, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (4K) and a multi-disc set called Pasolini 101. Hotly anticipated from Criterion in the next couple of months are Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (4K), the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott Ranown Westerns (4K), Carl Franklin’s One False Move (4K), a Bo Widerberg New Swedish Cinema boxed set, Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (4K), Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (4K), Orson Welles’ The Trial (4K) and Luis Valdez’s La Bamba.

From Viavision [Imprint] we want to review impressive boxed sets of Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty, John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malèna.

Keeping up with The Warner Archive Collection isn’t easy; we’re presently jumping at terrific new remasterings of Andrew Marton’s King Solomon’s Mines, Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs, Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina, Tay Garnett’s One Way Passage and Vincent Minnelli’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Announced for July from the WAC are Wesley Ruggles’ 1931 Cimarron, Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy, the Liz Taylor picture The Last Time I Saw Paris, and the dawn-of-sound musical The Broadway Melody.

We’ve also just learned of The Warner Archive’s August titles: Liz Taylor again in Father’s Little Dividend, Judy Garland singing in Gay Purr-ee, William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola, the 1933 Katharine Hepburn classic Little Women, the Elvis Presely feature Spinout, and the Jacques Tourneur-Joel McCrea western Wichita.

From Deaf Crocodile is the exotic Czech fantasy Prague Nights.

Powerhouse Indicator has a quartet of titles for July: Rouben Mamoulian’s Song of Songs, Josef von Sternberg’s Thunderbolt and Jet Pilot, and John Farrow’s mysterious Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

A wealth of great pictures is on tap from Kino’s KL Studio Classics are Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (4K), Fritz Lang’s Human Desire and You and Me, Tom Gries’ Will Penny, John Frankenheimer’s original The Manchurian Candidate (4K) and his Ronin (4K), plus Michael Apted’s Gorky Park.

From Kino and Zeitgeist we have Tales from the Gimli Hospital; from Kino and Milestone comes Marcel Ophuls’ must-see The Sorrow and the Pity.

In the coming-soon hopper for Kino Lorber, Kino Classics and KL Studio classics are Ida Lupino’s Outrage, William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (4K), Henry Hathaway’s Nevada Smith, John Cassavetes’ Gloria, Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, Blake Edwards’ The Party, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (4K), Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (will they fix the sync?), Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes, Bernard Girard’s Dead Heat on a Merry-go-Round, James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet, and René Clément’s The Day and the Hour and Is Paris Burning?

And we musn’t forgot some promised oddities from the new label Film Masters, double bills of Giant Gila Monster & The Killer Shrews, and Beast from Haunted Cave & Ski Troop Attack.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson