CineSavant Column

Saturday July 20, 2024

 

Hello!

After last Tuesday’s lean posts, let’s atone with two highly anticipated reviews, and several typically arcane Column items…

From correspondent Ian Whittle comes a link to something unusual, a post-synchronized ‘talkie’ version of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, sadly minus the talking as the vintage sound discs are missing. But the German Das Bundesarchiv has finally uploaded it in reasonable quality.

This new version is not very long, only 48 minutes. Someone named Waldemar Ronger changed all the character names and added those new scenes Ian thought stick out like a sore thumb.

Murnau’s original got in big copyright trouble, as an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The producers of this talkie revamp didn’t clear up the issue either. The official title translates as ‘The Twelfth Hour, A Night of Horror’:

 

Die zwölfte Stunde
 


 

CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel found a photo comparison that might please Orson Welles fans. Welles explored every kind of editorial montage technique in his first film  Citizen Kane, which included pulling in stock shots from sources far and wide.

 The first image is a rough snap from the 1934 Paramount film  Now and Forever, starring Carol Lombard and Gary Cooper.

Lombard is in the recliner center screen, and Cooper is next to her. Of course, she has her back to the camera and he’s almost a silhouette, so they are not really recognizable, at least not from this angle.

 

 The second frame grab is from the opening “News on the March” montage at the beginning of  Citizen Kane. Only a couple of seconds long, it illustrates the life of luxury to be found at Charles Foster Kane’s lavish Florida estate ‘Xanadu.’ Note the man on the far right is in a different position, suggesting this is an alternate take.

We always recognized background plates in Citizen Kane from (I think) The Son of Kong, but this one is new to me. Interesting that Now and Forever is a Paramount Picture, when we’d expect Orson Welles to pull stock shots from RKO’s library.

How many more recognizable shots did Welles purloin from other productions?

 


 

And …. The Criterion Collection has great news for horror addicts in October, starting with a two-title-plus-a-documentary 4K Ultra HD disc of the remaining two Val Lewton masterpieces:

 

I Walked with a Zombie  and  The Seventh Victim
 

They’re my two favorites from Val Lewton. Zombie has some of the most delicate B&W photography ever, evoking a breezy Caribbean on RKO sound stages. The quietly chilling Victim concentrates on failure, depression, and suicidal disillusion. Conceptually far ahead of the genre, it is Lewton’s most personal work.

Next up is a classic German silent, said to be a newly remastered digital restoration, G.W. Pabst’s amazing

 

Pandora’s Box
 

with Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, and Francis Lederer — and Alice Roberts, an image of whom coincidentally tops today’s CineSavant Column.

Finally there’s Masahiro Shinoda’s 1979 Kabuki folk-horror item with a music score by Isao Tomita, in 4K Ultra-HD,

 

Demon Pond
 


 

Plus one more item. Dick Dinman has revamped his DVD Classics Corner On the Airpodcast discussion of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers to take in the new 4K Ultra HD release, the one with two aspect ratios. As it’s partly assembled from an older interview, ‘DVD Savant’ makes a comment or two on the track as well.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson