CineSavant Column
Hello!
After the webpage format stumble of the weekend, I haven’t had time to snoop for more Column Items, here in my Sydney Falco file.
But my want list has accrued a number of notably desirable upcoming discs.
Let’s try this in what I hope is chronological order. On April 27, in 4K Ultra HD, Joe Dante’s comedic winner Innerspace is due from Arrow Films. The dazzling ILM visual effects are pre-CGI, I believe, but the real appeal comes from Dante’s cast — Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid, Kevin McCarthy, Fiona Lewis — and Robert Picardo, William Schallert, Henry Gibson, Kathleen Freeman and Dick Miller.
Kino Lorber is promising us a remastered encoding of a 1934 Universal picture that nobody seems to remember, despite the fact that it stars Claude Rains, right after making The Invisible Man. It also features Lionel Atwill and Joan Bennett. It also may be the finest hour for Edward Ludwig, the director of The Black Scorpion.
Although not technically a horror film, a bare synopsis brings to mind the Sam Peckinpah film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. It’s due on April 28.
Two pictures due in July from Radiance Films caught our eye. The first on June 22 is by Shohei Imamura, the director of Black Rain and Vengeance is Mine: his lauded 1966 drama The Pornographers. The subject is corruption of all kinds in 1960s Japan; we’ve never seen a more relentlessly honest director than Imamura. It’s a Region B disc in 4K Ultra HD.
Of special interest is Radiance’s June 23 release of Georges Franju’s first feature film La Tête contre les murs, which translates as ‘Head against the Wall’. It takes place in an asylum and features the stars of Franju’s Eyes without a Face, Pierre Brasseur and Edith Scob, plus Anouk Aimée and Paul Meurisse. It also has the first credited feature film score by Maurice Jarre, whose melody is quite striking. There aren’t that many films directed by Franju — we want them all.
And here’s a favorite we’re willing to go far out of our way to get — we’ve reviewed it twice on DVD, in fact.
It takes a bit of foreknowledge to appreciate what was originally a musical by Joan Littlewood, that uses music to express the cosmic futility of warfare in World War One. It sank like a stone in the box office of 1969 — in the middle of the Vietnam war. The brilliant novelty is to show the reality of the war through songs sung by the troops — with mordant replacement lyrics. It has a long cast list of English stars doing their bit for pacifism, including a young Maggie Smith as a music hall entertainer. The director is Richard Attenborough, and it’s his first film.
England’s Eureka! has the disc slated for June 29. At the moment their sales page doesn’t say what Region coding it might have.
A Criterion ‘Eclipse’ DVD we loved for years is getting a very welcome HD redo for June 30: Spaniard Carlos Saura’s ‘Flamenco Trilogy’ starring top flamenco artist Antonio Gades: Bodas de Sangre plus the international hit Carmen with Laura Del Sol and Cristina Hoyos, and El Amor Brujo, Manuel de Falla’s full-on flamenco ballet musical. The three movies do for flamenco what The Red Shoes does for toe-shoe ballet. All three films were restored in 4K.
I don’t have a sales link for the next item, but I couldn’t resist because it’s science fiction. George Pal’s Destination Moon hasn’t fared well on disc because its rights got sidetracked by the Wade Williams Collection, and all that we’ve seen in a long time is a pretty sad DVD from 26 years ago. UA has the Technicolor elements but nobody’s coming forward to digitally restore the picture.
Enter Film Masters, which has been doing very good remasters of films from various sources; we hope Pal’s film will look as good as some clips we’ve seen on TV. The show is lauded as the first of the 1950s Sci-Fi boom, although a Lippert space movie beat it to screens by a month or so. The space ship ‘Luna One’ is slated to launch on July 14, with a number of extras, including the entire feature Flight to Mars … which until 2021 was also ‘tied up’ with collector Wade Williams.
I’m breaking form here to tout a pair of Kino Lorber discs from the previous month, March, that I’m still hoping to receive. They’re in 4K Ultra HD and each has a strong following.
Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic might really shine on 4K, with all of those shiny subterranean settings for a human cockroach monster to hang out. We’ve always liked the picture and admired its nicely-chosen cast — Mira Sorvino, Josh Brolin, Giancarlo Giannini and F. Murray Abraham. The release has two 4K discs with two cuts of the picture, and one Blu-ray. It’s due March 17.
And finally there’s Jeannot Szwarc’s 1980 Somewhere in Time, which I’ve never seen … I just remember some pan-scanned clips on TV, plus waiting to see a horror film one afternoon at the Cinematheque, while a horde of enraptured Somewhere in Time fans emerged from their screening. They seemed transformed, which only made me feel more cynical. Not very nice, true.
Anyway, I figure a 4K Ultra HD presentation may erase my doubts — who doesn’t like Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer? Plus, the title did great things for favorite author Richard Matheson.
That’s for the moment … a couple more desirable announcements have surfaced, but I don’t have links or art images for them yet.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson