CineSavant Column
Hello!
Dick Dinman is back with another DVD Classics Corner on the Air podcast, this time with a vintage audio interview with star Jane Russell. The occasion is the Warner Archive double release of the Clark Gable pictures Mogambo and Red Dust. Russell discusses her memories of Gable, Howard Hughes and Marilyn Monroe.
This is interesting … a couple of years back, David Gregory of Severin Films talked online a bit about perhaps remastering the English battle epic Zulu Dawn for video. Now he’s announced that his company will be releasing a combo 4K Blu-ray in the mear future. That’s really great news.
They’re going to premiere the restoration at a theater screening just tomorrow, February 25 … in Southhampton, UK. Wish I could show up at the ‘Harbor Lights’ cinema for that. Maybe Severin will do a similar theatrical showing before its video premiere here. The movie didn’t really receive an American release.
It looks like they’ve come up with new poster art, which certainly improves on the old paper for the film.
And friend Chris Howard forwarded something crazy … several pages of a vintage French Photo-novel — a ‘ciné-roman’ — for a certain movie we tend to obsess over. It’s an issue of ‘Star-Cine Adventure: Revue Mensuelle,’ from September of 1965. It appears to have text articles as well.
The images are pretty ugly — they are frame grabs from the movie, and they are very contrasty. Since most are cropped from the Panavision images, the photo-novel reminds me of my old pan-scanned 16mm print, which couldn’t find a decent composition anywhere. (the images enlarge)
The French movie censors of 1965 made several deletions of dialogue they judged disrespectful to the French military — so I wonder if the foto-comic keeps the bits where French officers are humiliated, etc..
I scoured the French-language text for ‘missing material’ or secret messages but found none. The digest work is pretty extreme. Thanks Chris !
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson