Hello!

We took off ten days ago for a real vacation, hiking and touring in Italy. Beautiful place, nice people plus lots of history and fantastic streets in which to wander. Also food to die for. A simple breakfast here in Larchmont can set one back $50; in Montefalco we had an excellent light dinner — best lasagna I ever had — for much less.

I found out I could still hike at my age and had a blast on the trails, even though I didn’t sign up for the extra-challenging groups. My own moglie esperta speaks beautiful Italian and found that most everyone we met accepted her and was willing to converse openly. We rang at the door of a convent boarding house in Perugia where she lived while taking advanced Italian courses, long ago. A lonely but friendly nun invited us both in and graciously talked for half an hour. She let me take pictures to make matching ‘then and now’ comparisons with my wife’s faded older snapshots.

I did fall sick, and I’m lucky that it happened just as we were leaving. So the long flight home was pretty miserable. The relative disaster topping that was missing a flight at JFK. Delta had booked us a connection we couldn’t possibly make, going through customs and re-going through security. We had to spend a full night in the terminal — feeling pretty sick — before the next flight in the morning. Portal to Portal, we were awake hauling luggage and unable to lie down or sit comfortably for over 40 hours straight. But hey, adventure is where you find it.  All of this was all out of reach when I was younger, and the experience just confirms that I am in so many ways a genuine lucky dog.

The vacation was a big success — we found that we are physically up to some tough demands and we proved we could travel together under adverse conditions. Met a very nice couple, too. Now to get myself reoriented to reasonable California clock time…

CineSavant now has a pile of fine pictures to review, and Charlie Largent will be taking on some good titles too. In addition to what you see reviewed today, the plan is to try and cover  Jill Sprecher’s  Clockwatchers,  Norman Taurog’s  Words and Music (with the Slaughter on 10th Avenue ballet),  Kino’s  Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema XXI:  Fritz Lang’s   Cloak and Dagger,  the campy  Shack Out on 101,  James Cagney’s  Short Cut to Hell,  John Mackenzie’s  The Long Good Friday 4K,  Todd Solondz’s wicked  Happiness 4K,  Alexander MacKendrick’s  The Ladykillers 4K,  Patricio Guzmán’s miraculous documentary  The Battle of Chile and  Kinji Fukasaku’s  The Threat.

October’s discs are due soon and the Halloween movies are great this year. I’ve already had a sample of Jacques Tourneur’s  I Walked with a Zombie 4K and  Mark Robson’s  The Seventh Victim 4K on TCM, and the Criterion 4K will look even better. Plus we’ve got G.W. Pabst’s remastered  Pandora’s Box, Masahiro Shinoda’s  Demon Pond 4K,  Columbia Horror: Behind the Mask, Black Moon, Air Hawks, Island of Doomed Men, Cry of the Werewolf, Soul of a Monster (Region B),  El Vampiro,
Two Bloodsucking Tales from Mexico (Region B),  Creature with the Blue Hand and  Web of the Spider, the delightfully sadistic and sexy  Circus of Horrors 4K, Karloff directed by Curtiz in  The Walking Dead, Bogie directed by Vincent Sherman in  The Return of Dr. X, and Peter Lorre directed by Robert Florey in  The Beast with Five Fingers.

Segue’ing into November we have a remastered  Godzilla ’54 4K, and a  NeverEnding Story 4K. So even if some of these don’t come in, we’ll be plenty busy.

I am recovering quickly — and can promise that, Harkonnens or no Harkonnens, the Reviews Must Flow!

Thanks for reading … Glenn Erickson