CineSavant Column
Hello!
Congratulations to filmmaker and disc producer Bret Wood. His very good 2002 feature documentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is getting a theatrical release on August 5 from Kino Cult.
The notorious docu is described as a ‘morbidly curious exploration of the near-mythical driver education films shown to American schoolchildren in the 1960s and ’70s. Produced in Mansfield, Ohio, films such as Signal 30 (1959) encouraged safety by force-feeding high school kids color footage of careless driving’s dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses.’
It’s the kind of movie The Addams Family would watch to cheer themselves up. We reviewed it for DVD Savant, back in 2003. It has reportedly been remastered and reconstructed, with new scans of the old Driver’s Safety pictures, and Wood’s 16mm interviews.
A Blu-ray will follow on September 8.
A new trailer has been prepared … the authentic live-action material always feels disturbing, like an invasion of privacy:
The dependable Michael McQuarrie has found us something cute — a prime example of a classic 16mm sales film, this one commissioned to sell a tract of houses in Arizona.
The reason we’re watching is that this one stars Buster Keaton. Mike says it’s from 1961. It’s in good color and the cinematographer is Hollywood’s Leo Tover; the director Joe Parker worked in TV.
We can see Keaton checking that the money was good, showing up, and working directly with cameraman Tover when setting up his smooth gags. Buster gets distracted by an attractive woman (uncredited). He does terrific work for these real estate people!
I recognize the music under the title as a Fox cue from The Gang’s All Here.
And this news just arrived in 187 languages along with their various dialects and sub-tongues … a deluxe 4K Ultra HD disc set of MGM’s Forbidden Planet is coming late in September. Content-wise it hews very close to the 2010 Warners Blu-ray, except that the new release is coming out under the Arrow Video label.
This promises to be something special. We’ll be keen to see what the ‘new’ colors look like, as we always suspected that the subdued pastels of the Blu-ray were the result of hard work on a faded negative. Just how do they decide what exact shade of green the sky is supposed to be? In many ways, the show is a pinnacle of Sci-fi in 1950s Hollywood.
Promised new extras are a Perspecta Stereo audio option, and a new featurette on the ‘electronic tonalities’ creators Bebe & Louis Barron. As before, an encoding of The Invisible Boy will be included. As is Arrow’s modus operandi, 4K and Blu-ray editions will be separate.
This conjures nice hopes for fab 4K releases of more Warners-controlled fantasy, horror and Sci-fi.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson