Hello!

Advisor Gary Teetzel directed us last Wednesday to the Kino Lorber sales page for their upcoming Invasion of the Body Snatchers ’56 4K release … which lists a very interesting format specification …

I believe the final wisdom on Don Siegel’s movie is that it was actually filmed in standard 1.85:1 widescreen, but that Allied Artists made a last-minute decision to convert it to the 2.00:1 ‘Superscope’ format. The difference between the two ratios is just enough for Superscope to trim chins and foreheads a tad, making those choker close-ups look really tight.

It’s easy to prove that the original cinematography was actually flat — the trailers show acres of head and foot room above and below the Superscope stripe taken out of the middle. Joe Dante remembers the earliest TV prints actually being flat-full frame as well. Later flat TV prints took a 1:33 slice out of the already cropped Superscope image — a 20mm square out of the middle of the frame!  No wonder we were blown away by Criterion’s first widescreen laserdisc in the late 1980s.

Earlier publicity announcements were ambiguous about how the film would be presented in 4K. Kino’s latest says that the new 4K special edition will be present in both ratios, and suggests that the 2:00 we’ve seen was cropped from a flat printing source. The Superscope Blu-rays looked great, but they’re a complete optical print-down. This is potentially very exciting. If the 1:85 version is indeed from a flat element, it may or may not be greatly improved in quality.

The Kino website so far indicates separate format releases, not a 4K / Blu-ray combo. This is of course the kind of show we love to promote here … can’t wait to see what we get.

 

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Here’s an unusually clear, complete vintage film clip of a Hollywood premiere, submitted by advisor Gary Teetzel. From ‘History Comes to Life’ on YouTube, it’s a full reel of news film from the Grauman’s Chinese first-night for the 1934 20th Century picture The House of Rothschild.

The reel is in excellent shape. The angle is from a high position, and not too flattering; the swells certainly dressed up for these things, and we like the parade of big cars, too. We’re especially impressed by the giant marquee spelling out the film’s name, just like what we see at the beginning of Singin’ in the Rain.

It looks like the cameraman snagged almost every celeb coming in. An observer like Michael Schlesinger or George Feltenstein could surely ID almost all of them … I got only one in ten, with a lot of bad guesses.

It’s difficult to miss Darryl F. Zanuck, the film’s producer. He’s there with MGM head Louis b. Mayer (at 7:31), with exhibitor Sid Grauman (at 7:50), with Grauman and the film’s star George Arliss (at 8:41) and with Arliss alone (at 10:00). Most of the attendees that stop to pose are women I don’t recognize. A group that doesn’t stop might include Joan Crawford (?), but I definitely spotted gangster actor Jack La Rue (at 6:36).

Several actors from the movie appear to be present — the ones I can identify are Robert Young (at 9:37) — and of course Boris Karloff, at 8:24. ↑

Original nitrate prints of The House of Rothschild were part of the Fox print library that was donated to the brand-new UCLA Film Archive in the early 1970s. Associate professor Bob Epstein was going through the new holdings, and would sometime screen odd items in UCLA’s state-of-the-art Melnitz Hall auditorium … for instance, they had two prints of the 1950 Night and the City, one on safety film and one on nitrate … and they weren’t identical. A later researcher may have determined that one was the UK version.

Epstein screened for us a reel of Rothschild that had an experimental Technicolor section … we got to see Boris Karloff in 2-color Technicolor. I rememember not being impressed by the pale hues, that (in memory) seemed like blue and pink tints, or a faded color Xerox. It was just a group scene with a lot of actors in period costumes in a fancy sitting room.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson