Hello!

A friendly neighbor reported that his creative team — I think he works in advertising or trailers of some kind or another — just got an Emmy for this humorous promotional piece. It’s months old but I hadn’t seen it and thought it quite good — especially the image quality: So Good You’ll Scream! And I promise CineSavant will never link to videos of cute puppies and kittens.

CineSavant has got a stack of horror, fantasy & sci-fi winners that it hopes to cover in the next few posts, beyond today’s Universal Volume 5 and the great The Elephant Man. A couple of these are real discoveries. Coming up from Kino is the oddball Universal horror entry from Edward Dein, starring Sierra Charriba Michael Pate, Curse of the Undead. It features a Tom Weaver commentary. A big surprise is The Face at the Window, my first Tod Slaughter film, also from Kino. You have to see it to believe it — it’s an incredibly old fashioned stage drama from the Victorian period, with utterly earnest performances. The writing is stylized, almost like a Monty Python sketch, and Tod Slaughter works up a terrific sneering villain performance as the dastardly bad guy. It’s really different, with a charm similar to Feuillade’s silent Fantomas serials.

Then, I was knocked over by Arrow Video’s Warning from Space, which nobody seems to appreciate enough, not even friend Stuart Galbraith IV in his commentary. The first Japanese Sci-fi film in color may seem to imitate American models, but its attitude and approach are refreshingly different. The color is really something. I may be trying to review this first. There’s also the Amicus film I, Monster to consider — it’s one of the last Peter Cushing / Christopher Lee films that I haven’t seen.

On Charlie Largent’s review plate are the new restoration and remastering of Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death plus one of his Hammer favorites, the 1962 Herbert Lom The Phantom of the Opera. It looks like we’re being shortchanged for good Halloween disc offerings this year, but these Blu-ray offerings more than make up for it.

Oh, and in the coming weeks most of the best of what’s out there will be coming our way … including more Viavision, Criterion and Powerhouse Indicator.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s been up for a while but I still strongly recommend Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Trailers from Hell trailer commentary for 55 Days at Peking. Trenchard-Smith times his words artfully, hits all the important points of Nicholas Ray’s film pro and con, has the historical context down pat, and even talks against a terrific-quality scan of the trailer.

I particularly like the show & tell Trenchard-Smith does with a clip from his first feature film, explaining how his personal awareness of the historical Boxer Rebellion underwent an on-the-set ‘adjustment’ via sensitivity training from his Hong Kong star Jimmy Wang Yu.  I don’t like one shot in the movie that’s also in the trailer: the child actress carries a tot out of a room as explosions are set off behind her… It doesn’t look like a good idea, no matter who said it was safe. Then, cough, cough, there’s always my homegrown 55 Days disc review to foist on innocent readers.

Oh, Brian knocked another review commentary out of the park just yesterday, for our favorite Zulu Dawn. What, you want to read CineSavant’s coverage of that movie, too?

Next up, longtime correspondent and advisor Darren Gross offers a good link to a pair of new web encodings of a short-lived 1945 radio show called Stay Tuned for Terror. Darren says that the show featured adaptations of stories written for Weird Tales magazine by none other than horrormeister Robert Bloch. No episodes were believed to exist until recently, when two turned up (courtesy of a certain David Lennick) and have been uploaded for your enjoyment. The Boogey Man Will Get You and Lizzie Borden Took an Axe are each fifteen minutes in duration. I like the organ accompaniment: Swan Lake! … also fun is watching the moving audio graph that helps one anticipate the loud music stings.

And let me finish up by promoting two eagerly anticipated disc releases due out about a month from now. Arrow video has the elusive Japanese science-fiction show Warning from Space aka Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru (‘Unknown Satellite Over Tokyo,’ October 13), which ought to be something special … it appears that with this show the Daiei company got the jump on Toho for outer space- related thrillers. I was reminded of it yesterday because filmmaker and scholar David Cairns informs us that he’s done a featurette for the disc about the various dubbing and re-dubbing versions of the film, presumably in different foreign territories. It will carry a full commentary by a second old friend, Stuart Galbraith IV, who is definitely the right man for the job.

Warning from Space is easy to order here in the states, but I’m split on how to best obtain a reasonably on-time copy of the BFI’s Dementia aka Daughter of Horror (October 19). Amazon.uk says it won’t deliver to the United States, so I guess my next option is our importer Diabolik DVD, which doesn’t gouge with its prices and did well by me with last Spring’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. However, their page only says that the import Dementia Blu-ray is ‘coming soon.’ What’s an impatient and unreasonable Yank reviewer to do in this situation?  Concerns like this are healthy for my blood pressure, as they keep my mind off the Supreme Court.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello… national events just keep getting more incredible…

Dependable correspondent-advisor Gary Teetzel has been scouring the web lately…

… first up is a link to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen guiding the Los Angeles Philharmonic through the furious music cue for Bernard Herrmann’s Death Hunt, from the score for the great noir pic On Dangerous Ground. The editing is nicely done. Is it just me, or does the orchestra seem a bit off-balance, as if not everybody is keeping up the tempo?  The Herrmann- conducted versions just seem twice as sharp, more focused. I’m really overstepping my range of competence with that thought.

Gary also forwards a FB link by the helpful Jack Theakston, to 3.5 minutes of beautiful Two-Color Technicolor excerpts from the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera held by Holland’s Eye Filmmuseum. I’ve never seen those scenes look this good. Those 2-Color ballet sequences, we are told, haven’t been seen for 95 years. For a few seconds the Artist’s Bal-Masque becomes the Masque of the Red Death, it seems. Lon Chaney strikes some terrific poses — it’s too bad that director Rupert Julian so rarely puts the camera in a good position in this classic. I readily believe that Chaney himself dictated the camera angles and cutting in the big face reveal scene, the one at the pipe organ deep in the underground catacombs. The magical moment plays as if it’s from a different movie.

Then there’s Andreas Feix’s 2015 German short subject ‘Citipati’, which ruminates on the end-of-days theme of When Worlds Collide from a metaphysical viewpoint. A chicken-like prehistoric dinosaur seems to comprehend the cyclic nature of worlds in collision, of a continuous cycle of creation and destruction. Plus, the computer animation is spectacular. The IMDB says that the original is in 3-D. When you see the so-so image of worlds crashing together in the Pal film, just mentally substitute some of the imagery in this movie, which compares an apocalypse to pebbles colliding in a swift-flowing brook.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Don’t look now, it’s Renzo Cesana. Who?  About a week ago I was looking at Kino’s new disc of Joan Tewksbury’s Old Boyfriends (1979) with Talia Shire and John Belushi, and was surprised at what jumped out at me.  Let me backtrack: an ongoing sidebar story by Alan K. Rode and Eddie Muller comes up at Noir City festivals whenever the grim noir saga Try and Get Me! is screened. The producer of the 1950 film insisted on having an intellectual character in the movie, a foreign philosopher-busybody who repeatedly lectures the main characters about morality. “Don’t you think,” he purrs, that it’s a deplorable idea to form a vigilante mob and hang two men before they can be tried for murder? (Actually, maybe we need this philosopher-busybody now, to get the public at large to calm the hell down.) Anyway, this foreign-sounding windbag in Try and Get Me! is played by the ultra-calm actor Renzo Cesana. Film students may also know him from Rossellini’s Stromboli, as a priest who advises Ingrid Bergman to relax, even when sulfurous volcanic rocks fall from the sky, something that happens almost every day.

Rode & Muller’s Renzo story:  in 1952 the CBS network picked up Cesana’s odd late-night TV show called The Continental. It consisted only of Cesana, dressed in a tux, in a reality TV sketch: he simply talks to the audience, presumably lonely women, with soothing romantic intimate talk, serving an unseen ‘her’ a glass of champagne, smiling, paying her compliments, etc. It’s truly bizarre. I never saw this in person but Cesana released similar vocal recordings. This one has Cesana reciting song lyrics. Christopher Walken did a spot-on SNL parody of The Continental… but did viewers remember what he was spoofing?

The (tenuous) connection here is that when the lonely Talia Shire turns on a motel TV in Old Boyfriends, up pops our old friend The Continental, to offer her a smile and some comforting small talk, like Pepe Le Pew only more oleagenous. Well, in his own way Renzo is a pretty smooth dude… more seductive than Rossano Brazzi in South Pacific or Yves Montand in Grand Prix. Talia’s character looks like she’s enjoying this particular fantasy… Signor Cesana’s advanced course in ‘Gigolo 101.’ Old Boyfriends was written by Paul and Leonard Schrader — were they fans of ‘The Continental?’ Thanks for pointing this out to us, Alan.

‘News’ flash: contributor Paul Penna adds to ‘Continental Fever’: He sends along a YouTube link to a 1956 Popeye cartoon Parlez Vous Woo, with Bluto impersonating ‘The International.’ Sounds like Jackson Beck, Bluto’s regular voice at the time, does the Cesanaesque stuff as well. Thank you Mr. Penna!

Here’s something inspired by the When Worlds Collide review last Saturday. New correspondent Parfyon Kirshnit directs us to a fascinating website that’s all in Russian: a 1955 Soviet film strip for children made from an article by A. Zhigarev that appeared in the October 1954 issue of the magazine ‘Znanie-Sila.’ The author says that the color is weak because the filmstrip has faded.

The filmstrip lays out a proposition for a U.S.S.R  Rocket to the Moon program. The interesting thing to us is that the 48 +/- illustrated pages display imagery similar to George Pal’s films, and Walt Disney’s Man in Space television shows. The spaceship’s name is ‘Luna-1.’ It takes off from an inclined ramp that vaults up the side of ‘Mount Kazbek,’ assisted by a rocket-sled undercarriage, just like the Space Ark in When Worlds Collide. The ramp even has a snow shield. The ship’s overall design is similar as well; it’s described as a ‘strato-plane.’ The lunar landing gear fold out of the ship’s fuselage, just like Disney’s ‘Rocket to the Moon’ feature at the then-new Disneyland.

The filmstrip’s title card reads “Flight to the Moon, artist K. Artseulov.” The text has more technical detail than the average 1950s ‘space future’ articles and books that were popular here in the U.S.. According to one of the illustrations, the ship’s speed leaving the ramp is supposed to be 600 meters per second … like a skyrocket, I guess. Radar from the ground detects a meteorite and the ship shifts course a bit to avoid it. The final page tells us this is all a prediction of the future and that maybe the young readers will help to make it reality.

Language translators online are indispensable for investigating these things. I imagine that Soviet space researcher Robert Skotak knows all about this filmstrip… I wish he would publish his promised book about Soviet space films.

A fun bit of video from U.K. correspondent Dave Carnegie of some people erecting an inflatable screen for an outdoor movie presentation during quarantine — nothing that remarkable, but I haven’t seen it done before. It’s at somewhere called Sutton on Sea, Lincolnshire. I bet the skies aren’t smoky THERE today, cough cough. Dave Carnegie writes:

“A happy band of volunteers set up an open-air cinema to bring people together. 148 viewers turned up for the first show on September 9, 2020. A good evening was had by all. There was a strong wind which did not help but on the second attempt the young lads had the screen up in five minutes. Brilliant display. Picture and sound were more than adequate. It shows what can be done ‘if you have a go’ as Wilfred Pickles used to say.”

It doesn’t look like something you want to do in even a slight breeze, but I thought it was cute, especially the dialogue. I’ll have to ask Lee Broughton about Wilfrid Pickles… ?   Good going, Dave.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson