Hello!

Well, the Warner Archive Collection has a terrific February coming up for classic collectors. The titles need no introduction, as they land on many lists of entertaining favorites.

Mogambo is the remake of Red Dust with Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. It ought to be a beauty in digitally re-integrated 3-strip Technicolor, maybe even the 16mm images of gorillas in the wild.

Stranger on the Third Floor is the highly stylized psycho thriller often tagged as the first real film noir. Peter Lorre is effective in a small part, but the show is carried by the fine direction of Boris Ingster, and the very expressionistic nightmare imagery. When we were kids, we thought of it as a horror picture.

and

Tarzan and His Mate is the second Johnny Weissmuller thriller and the wildest Tarzan picture of them all. In all its pre-Code splendor, it’s filled with risqué costumes, weird politcally incorrect attitudes, and some of the most sadistic, over-the-top violence in Hollywood history.

Plus more Hanna-Barbera completist cartoons: Loopy De Loop. Personally speaking, I checked out of kiddie cartoons about the time of ‘Tennessee Tuxedo.’

And a nice link from Michael McQuarrie …

… a bit of DC Comics fun from the days before everything Super required a ‘dark’ interpretation. In 1966 Robert Benton and David Newman wrote the book for a big Broadway musical based on Superman; I remember a big photo spread on it in Look or Life.

This 1975 TV adaptation stars David Wilson, Leley Ann Warren, Kenneth Mars, Loretta Swit, David Wayne, Malachi Throne, Al Molinaro and Harvey Lembeck … YouTube poster Vinnie Rattolle has uploaded an entire produced-for-TV broadcast.

It’s from a not-so-great video recording, but it’s all there …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson