CineSavant Column
Hello!
Pardon the confusion! Besides being away for two weeks, we’ve got three new reviewers and the monthly site housecleaning to do …. and while we were gone, the page that hosts our reviews Trailers from Hell underwent a complete revamp. It is said to clear up technical issues, load faster and be more streamlined in function.
The re-formatting of the thousands of CineSavant reviews came as a complete surprise. I’ll hopefully get new posts up right away …. but that may take a day or two. Wish me luck.
Coming to the rescue once again, Michael McQuarrie sends along this link to something special on the Internet Archive — a complete rendering of a 1955 novelty record with a space theme. This one gets our attention for the key talent involved.
The narrator is none other than the irreplaceable Paul Frees, whose authoritative and somewhat intimidating voice dominated the 1950s, especially when reading copy for classic Sci-fi, such as the films of George Pal. He’s of course the voice of Disney’s The Haunted Mansion.
Others will be just as interested to hear the music of composer Walter Schumann, who reportedly created the ‘dum-da-dum-dum’ Dragnet theme and is enthusiastically remembered for his incomparably expressive music score for Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.
The credit on the cover goes to The Voices of Walter Schumann, a choral group he managed. The mood on the 12 tracks is spacey and eerie, sometimes verging on a sound appropriate for a religious-themed movie. The album was apparently very popular; I wonder if it was also released in a stereophonic pressing, to attract the new (in 1955) addicts to the Stereo Hi-Fi craze. One can audit the whole thing.
with the Voices of Walter Schumann
And here’s an image you’ll need to blow up to read … it’s an ad from an April 1970 issue of Rolling Stone. CineSavant reviewer and advisor ‘B’ thought of it after reading about the negative press being given a prominent upcoming film release. Here is ‘B’s explanation:
“A brief note ran in Variety this week describing a Facebook ad Warners has been running to offset the (extremely) poor advance notices on Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger. Such observations, per WB publicity, may strictly be a difference of opinion… decide for yourself.”
“The new Variety article is here, mainly so you can click on the little Warners ad which will beseech you to give DIGGER a chance.”
“This sort of advertising has been attempted before; it’s something you occasionally do when you’re desperate and need to try something. In the movie business, the best example of this is this old Zabriskie Point ad, which I believe only appeared in the 4-4-1970 issue of Rolling Stone. I can’t say that it sold a single ducat to the movie, but the advertisement is committed to the picture, good or bad, 100 percent.”
That 1970 Ad is big enough to read, especially if you zoom a little. The main tagline refers to a perceived critical gap, but my first thought is that it is dissing Zabriskie Point as a bottomless hole. Reviewers of 1970 were indeed split … but is the same thing really happening with Digger?
I can tell you that big glossy posters for Digger are right now up in two European cities; besides the strange image of Tom Cruise buried in old age makeup, the ad copy line that stood out is that the whole movie was shot in big-format VistaVision … or at least that’s how it read to me in two foreign languages.
We certainly went for Zabriskie Point when it was new — as a high schooler I didn’t who Michelangelo Antonioni was, but the LP soundtrack raised my interest.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson