Gee, the holidays are almost here, and CineSavant’s elfin associates are bursting with great ideas for ‘interesting’ Christmas gifts. The last couple of days has seen the CineSavant emailbox filled with terrific suggestions for horror and fantasy themed Christmas Tree Ornaments… you know, the kind that your mother would demand you take down, were you to sneak one onto a bough of holly. (Note the boughs of holly just above. Festive thoughts need graphic reinforcement.)

The barrage of gift suggestions began with a highly unlikely candidate suggested because of our unrestrained love for a noted Iberian filmmaker, whose glory is so exalted that he deserves a place on every tree. He’s top-center below, dressed as Santa, although I think the Fez comes from one of his unforgettable film roles. It was found at the Little Shop of Gore, but I didn’t see it there today… the Severin people posted it, and then Tim Lucas shared it on Facebook.

Also up, more amazing delights to cause family members to accuse you of destroying the Merry good cheer vibe:

And I was asked, how can I live without these gems?

This year we’re being entreated, of course, to cancel out our biggest family gathering holidays of the year. Don’t travel!  Tie yourself to a tree with roots!  Embrace the stay-at-home glow of responsible citizenship. It’s Harrow Alley * out there, folks, and none of the news is fake.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

* Harrow Alley is, or for a long time was, the hands-down winner as best un-filmed screenplay. William Froug at UCLA wrote about it when we were students. When we read it we thought it was the perfect epic for Roman Polanski, and imagined Bob Hoskins, Tim Roth, Timothy Spall and others in key roles. Written in the 1960s, it was thought too grim and too expensive. And now the world is living it.

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I’ve been totally swamped the last week with an outside job, so this is going to be a poor excuse for a CineSavant Tuesday. I thank Charlie Largent for coming through with a must-read review. As a teenager I saw about ten minutes of The Wonders of Aladdin on a B&W TV with poor reception, and gave up on it. I became curious again in college when we discovered Donald O’Connor & loved him in a certain musical. Later on Tim Lucas reminded us that the show carries a credit for Mario Bava. So I’ll want to check it out after this workload goes away.

I did grab a very important quickie news item for today: we hope that the experts handling the Pandemic response do a better job than seen in this fifty-year-old news item about PCM … Poor Cetacean Management.

It’s a textbook case on how to make an annoying problem 1,000 times worse: Blasted Blubber Beyond all Believable Bounds. Aliteration helps to calm the nerves after you’ve Screwed the Pooch, I guess. The old video news item really plays like a parody … just like so many legit news reports do NOW.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Correspondent David S. Schow turns us toward an opinion article that meets with CineSavant’s full approval, mainly because it coincides neatly with my pre-formed personal bias!  Actually, Carly Foy’s article on the advantages of hard disc video over streaming, An argument for physical over digital media makes good sense. Foy sketches the usual reasons in her brief piece, and David pointed out one very real point made by the article — browsing through stacks of discs in a store or on a shelf is much more pleasant than an endless search for something to see on Netflix. The article is in ‘The Badger Herald’ of Madison Wisconsin. That paper is probably a modern media outlet, but I can’t help but mentally picture a man in bow tie and suspenders, rummaging around an old newspaper office.

Coming in February from Criterion is something special … Alan Pakula’s ultimate paranoid conspiracy film The Parallax View will be out from the flagship hard media disc company on February 9. The movie’s Corporate-Mabuse scheme to seize power no longer seems farfetched. The ice-cold visuals that once seemed so confining, now resemble the world we live in — nothing is what it seems, and even after you’ve imagined the worst, you’re still surprised at how evil things can become. Yes, it’s a feel-good movie for political defeatists!

The L.A. County Museum of art once showed Parallax in a film series devoted to widescreen movies. It seemed especially wide, with its graphics-oriented images that place Warren Beatty in an endless maze. And the show has one of the most impressive special montages ever put together … it’s meant to be a psych test for potential assassins, but now it looks like a political re-election TV commercial.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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←  Um, I guess I have no choice but to admit that this is Halloween material I couldn’t get to in the general rush a week ago. Gary Teetzel sent me a link to a vintage TV variety show on YouTube, that was pointed out last week by Bob Furmanek. Previously seen but apparently never in color, it’s a 1968 Red Skelton Show. At about 8:50 in begins a skit called He Who Steals My Robot Steals Trash, with none other than Boris Karloff and Vincent Price (who show up at about 13 minutes in). It’s great just seeing Karloff up and about, even if his legs look more bowed than ever. Don’t expect it to be funny, just nostalgic. Gary:

“To put it kindly, the comedy sketches have not aged well at all; they’re fairly excruciating. Karloff plays his part more or less straight. Price hams it up outrageously even by his standards, bravely compensating for the feeble script. I was slightly surprised to see Karloff doing so much walking in the sketch, considering his poor health. He allegedly rehearsed in a wheelchair, but was afraid audiences would feel sorry for him. I only feel sorry for him because of the script.”

The pair sing afterwards, which isn’t good either. But hey, it’s Karloff and Price. An earlier dance number gives us ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’ in complete Bob Fosse style … sort of.

→   Gary also sends along a B&W Red Skelton episode from 1965 with guest star Fred Gwynne in character as Herman Munster. Skelton is naturally funny, but these awful jokes are not. Red calls Fred “a reject from the Twilight Zone” at one point. The show also features Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas: Red Skelton Hour with Fred Gwynne. The skit ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Bum Today’ begins at about eleven minutes in, but don’t miss those deadly musical dance numbers.

We also offer a link to a soon-to-begin online Noir City: International film festival. Yes, thanks to a certain worldwide public health debacle that has made us all unpaid extras in a bad re-run of Contagion, this year’s traveling Noir City exhibition was rudely interrupted. In fact, the last public event I attended, just before the lockdown axe fell in March, was a Los Angeles showing of an Argentinian noir at Noir City. The news about Covid was just sinking in. When we saw the packed crowd at the reception we went straight home, skipping the free margaritas being offered. Yes, it was that serious.

The explanatory page makes participating fairly simple. Instead of being limited to a few urban venues, the festival will be accessible to aspiring noir fans everywhere within reach of the Internet. Many more people will have access to the rare and special films being shown.

The dates are from November 23 to 29, just three days away by my (faulty) calculations. It works something like the big theater version — you buy a full pass or tickets to individual pictures.

And in case I missed something, take a look at the other ‘noir’- related activities at the main Film Noir Foundation Page.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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First up is a treat for James Bond fans that’s been around for 9 years but, uhhh, I just found out about it. The 007 Dossier page has up for download something I thought was pretty rare: the Audio Commentary tracks for the first three 007 films, that came out on Criterion’s pricey multi-disc laserdisc sets starting around 1991. On the CAV versions each side of a disc could hold only half an hour of movie, so there was a lot of disc-flipping going on. Don’t even ask what we went through to watch something like Seven Samurai.

I barely remember the commentaries except for the one for From Russia With Love, which I recall being controversial for director Terence Young putting down the production company Eon for being so cheap with hotel rooms in Istanbul, etc.. As the page explains, producer Broccoli had the discs pulled from store shelves; the tracks never showed up again. Unlike later carefully policed extras, the contributors to these early tracks weren’t coached to say only positive things. So I’m looking forward to some fun listening.

In addition to the commentary tracks for Dr.No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger (the links are to my reviews, naturally) the 007 Dossier page offers up the entire music & effects track for Goldfinger as well. The films are great to revisit… you just have to get used to sexist quips, imperial posturing — and some great filmmaking. Again, the commentary and soundtrack downloads are on the 007 Dossier page Banned James Bond Commentaries.

Do any readers in Los Angeles have the necessary equipment to digitize DAT audio tapes? I still have sets of discrete dialogue and sound effects from a number of Bond films, but I have no DAT player.

I haven’t stressed the big news from Warner Archive because it’s three days old, but it IS big news, just as promised back in the beginning of October. CineSavant’s ingenious special agent T (for Teetzel) predicted the ‘surprise’ with an educated guess that we reported back on the October 3 CineSavant Page.

Gary observed that certain films restored for streaming on ‘HBO Max’ were showing up as Warner Archive DVDs… and Hammer’s first Technicolor horror picture The Curse of Frankenstein was one of them, in what looked like a newly remastered version with a restored shot of charnel-house gore. Restoration-wise the film has been a headache for ages, with an original negative that’s completely faded. So we’re hoping for the best for the new restoration from color separations. The restoration comparison online isn’t very helpful — the before doesn’t look like any previous release, but an untimed scan of a faded element.

It sounds as if The Curse of Frankenstein is being presented in three separate aspect ratios on a special two-disc presentation, with new commentaries and featurettes organized by Steve Haberman and Constantine Nasr.

Very good, Warners! I’d have to say that this release ought to get Hammer fans, who we all know aren’t particularly patient, to temper their grumblings against WHV. I’m pretty sure that last year’s Blu-ray of Horror of Dracula was plain-wrap due to proprietary issues — the WAC couldn’t just tap into extras like the alternate ending found in Japan, as other parties were involved.

The WAC seems to have been busy in lockdown. They have also promised additional goodies for December, which I’m happy to repeat here for CineSavant readers. I think I got this list right; it’s heavy with ‘Christmas Movies’: A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Life With Father (1947), The Harvey Girls (1946), Holiday Affair (1949), Mister Roberts (1955), Young Man With a Horn (1950), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947) …

… and, as a big surprise, ‘Tex Avery Volume 2’. The cartoons restored for Volume two sound better than what was on volume one … I can’t resist posting a full listing.

1 LITTLE RURAL RIDING HOOD, 2 THE CUCKOO CLOCK, 3 MAGICAL MAESTRO, 4 ONE CAB’S FAMILY, 5 THE CAT THAT HATED PEOPLE, 6 DOGGONE TIRED, 7 THE FLEA CIRCUS, 8 FIELD AND SCREAM, 9 THE FIRST BAD MAN, 10 OUT FOXED, 11 DROOPY’S DOUBLE TROUBLE, 12 THREE LITTLE PUPS, 13 DRAGALONG DROOPY, 14 HOMESTEADER DROOPY, 15 DIXIELAND DROOPY, 16 COUNTERFEIT CAT, 17 VENTRILOQUIST CAT, 18 HOUSE OF TOMORROW, 19 CAR OF TOMORROW, 20 TV OF TOMORROW and 21 FARM OF TOMORROW.

And finally, correspondent Jonathan Gluckman offers a video to reflect today’s general jubilation. Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson