CineSavant Column
Hello!
We love those old Youtube films that are simply moving car POVs on Los Angeles streets, back in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. We’ve found out that most are from the Rick Prelinger collection, and were filmed to be ‘process plates’ for rear projection work, to represent the view outside the back of taxis, etc.. Sometimes the time and places of the shots aren’t well identified, which encourages us to look for key visual cues. The easiest are movie marquees, which place a shoot at a specific address, and around a particular time.
This Downtown Los Angeles take just above must be from 1950, because the Warner Theater is showing Young Man with a Horn. The colorized images have a lot of detail, and can be enlarged.
We’ve shown this Sunset Blvd. shot before, but now it’s interrupted with recent modern comparison angles. The Oriental Theater was a ‘nabe’ house that played second-run movies; the Singin’ in the Rain marquee — and the shadows — indicate that this is probably the summer of 1952.
And this series of angles on Wilshire Blvd. must be from 1951, as the El Rey theater is showing The Frogmen. Film takes going both ways on Wilshire also show the fancy May Company building, but the L.A. County Museum complex is still in the future. The La Brea tar pits are hidden behind landscaping greenery. I don’t know exactly what year they constructed the decorative Mastodons, etc., in the tar pools. We see the famous big billboards on Wilshire, including one advertising bomb shelters.
The dependable Gary Teetzel provides a link to an interesting collector’s page specializing in the old glass advertising slides once used to promote movies. As recently as the 1970s, local theaters used slide projectors between shows to screen still images promoting local businesses, charity events, etc.. These collectors dote on the original glass slides used, we are told, from the ‘teens almost to the end of the 1950s. CineSavant has reviewed three of the four silent features pictured.
The page is called Starts Thursday! Cinema Slide Archive.
And finally, thanks to a Youtube link provided by David Schow, there is now a convenient way to see the original three-hour
It’s not the superb 1957 Hammer film Quatermass 2, but the original 1955 BBC TV serial, part video, part film and all kinescoped. Quatermass is the creation of writer Nigel Kneale; the good professor in this 6-part miniseries is played by John Robinson. The serial has more characters than the feature version and a few more story diversions, plus an extended ending that resolves the conflict in outer space orbit. Don’t expect high production values. The BBC sets were tiny and the visuals can be crude. It’s Kneale’s inventive storytelling and skilled dialogue that we celebrate.
Keen Quatermass fans note that this original teleplay has the ‘picnic’ scene that ends with a machine-gunned car being towed back into the alien chemical plant. The scene was cut from the Hammer version, but if you look closely, there is still a brief glimpse of the wrecked car being towed into the plant.
The BBC begins an episode with a veddy polite warning that its contents might be disturbing to nervous people. For title music, the show makes excellent use of ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets. Enjoy some seminal High Concept Sci-fi !
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson