Hello!

We’re back after a week of vacation, a very healthy rest. It was so diverting that I’ve been running around the house having to remember how everything works and what our routines were.

Charlie Largent launched reviews so I didn’t have to think about the page at all, which gave me real peace of mind. Now, with palmy breezes behind us, we’ll get back to the ususal reality stuff that helps us maintain equilibrium.

Much has arrived in our absence. A big pile of attractive discs to review, but also two new books that sound exciting, Tom Weaver’s  From Page to Silver Scream and Daniel Kehlmann’s biography of German director G.W. Pabst,  The Director. Give me a few days on those.

And at least one new review for Saturday, while we get the dynamos of production (cough) churning here at CineSavant. Gotta admit that it’s nice to be missed a little. We’re hoping to take a similar break in the Fall.

Correspondent Jonathan Gluckman points us to this YouTube upload by SabuCat of a deleted musical number from the Fred Astaire / Paulette Goddard musical  Second Chorus. No known film copy is known to have survived, but Jeff Joseph’s company has up-rezzed a Betamax tape to HD.

The deleted song is about ‘a ghost that lives upstairs,’ with the ghost danced by famed choreographer Hermes Pan. The comments on the YouTube post critique the AI process used to clean up the low-quality digital source. We’re shown a bit of comparison. The final product ‘improves’ but also revises, cleaning up Astaire’s face while erasing details, creases, shadows. Presuming that the Betamax source was frame-rate adapted to NTSC TV 30fps, some odd motion effects show up as well.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson