Hello!

We’ve taken a look at plenty of good Location Comparison photo series, but David J. Schow sends along a link to one of the most precise we’ve seen so far.

Gluecement’s YouTube video Psycho (1960) Filming Locations nails down camera angles exactly, in several cases finding the one element in a cityscape still standing after 63 years. A road has been reconfigured as a freeway, but Gluecement finds a detail in an old fence that shows he’s retracing Alfred Hitchcock’s exact steps.

By the time we get to the Universal Lot, everything is gone — the house was moved and key sound stages were torn down to make room for Universal Tour rides.

And we’re always ready to showcase anything promoting Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This five-minute YouTube excerpt by ‘Nineteenth Century Videos’ is yet another colorization experiment. I like this one because it slows the frame rate in a pleasing way, and doesn’t go overboard with its colorization scheme.

‘Parufamet’ took over Metropolis and cut it to ribbons, and we are not surprised that one of the first things to go would be the full eroticism of the club dance by the False Maria. This clip uses the restored version of a key scene, which incorporates the full cut and continuity discovered (albeit in poor quality) in Argentina in 2008.

It’s an astonishing piece of Futuristic cinema: the ‘reality’ of Maria’s dance is warped by the sex fixation of the all-male audience. THAT is experienced as the hero’s telepathic hallucination during a stress breakdown, and his ravings are further embellished by an apocalyptic quasi-Biblical prophecy.  All three ‘idea threads’ are intercut, fever-dream style.

Most of the world saw the Channing Pollock / Parufamet cutdown version, which reduced this scene to incoherent mush.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson