CineSavant Column
Hello!
A season or two ago The Warner Archives’ George Feltenstein promised great Blu-ray news going forward on a monthly basis, and it soon became clear that he wasn’t kidding …
… since spring the monthly tally of WAC releases per month has doubled; every month has had can’t-miss-it special items ( Last Summer) and a pleasing selection of vintage vault classics.
September is better than we could have hoped. The Archive will release a 4K Disc of David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, from 1970. This is one BIG movie, and the prospect in seeing it in 4K is already building up anticipation — Ryan’s was filmed in 65mm; I should think that it is going to look sensational. I’m already hearing from readers who know how much I like it personally.
Arriving with or near Ryan’s Daughter are some very desirable titles, in Blu-ray: John Ford’s The Lost Patrol, the Doris Day movie Please Don’t Eat the Daisies., Glenn Ford and Geraldine page in Dear Heart; Bette Davis in Marked Woman, the Complete Maverick TV Show from the 1950s, and the extreme-case preCode drama SkyScraper Souls.
We can also rest a little easier in regard to the umpcoming fancy restoration of Terence Fisher’s Dracula / Horror of Dracula. It’s expected this Fall, although I don’t think it’s been given an official date as yet. The good news is that the trusted home video producer
Constantine Nasr has posted a clear statement that assures us of the content of the new 4K remaster. Quoth Mr. Nasr:
“This is the complete original film prior to any censorship. Full stop. You’ve not seen what is here because I am working on this release, have seen it and can assure you that even past ‘restorations’ are incomplete.”
Finally, a trusted voice on the subject. So good for us …
And finally, Michael McQuarrie has located an online copy of the old Victory at Sea TV show … not the full series of 26 half-hour shows, but the version that was edited into a single-length feature. It telescopes the entire season of the documentary show down to about 90 minutes. It’s a good way to get an overview of the Navy war, at least as how it was seen in 1956 or so, from Pearl Harbor to the A-Bomb. But it hasn’t been shown much since the 1960s.
It’s also nice to not have so many repeats of the Richard Rodgers / Robert Russell Bennett music score — I remember Steven Spielberg saying that he had asked John Williams to give some of his music for ‘1941’ the flavor of Victory at Sea, and that’s exactly the note hit when the submarine surfaces in the first scene.
P.D. copies of the whole series are easy to find. Michael looked for this feature version because I had written about it in my review last month of Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross. I remembered being emotionally affected (as a child) by a brief montage alluding to concentration camp horror, that was not part of the finale of the TV show. I can now finally see that the shot of scores of hanged prisoners is not an outtake from The Seventh Cross, but part of the Army film record.
If you check out the end of the show, you’ll come across the montage — that brief shot that disturbed me had more impact because it was cross-dissolved with the shots before and after. The superimposed smoke made it look like a scene from hell. Video makes viewing a lot different now, because we can study individual shots — rather than wait a year to maybe catch them again.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson