Hello!

The Warner Archive Collection listed its July and August offerings this week, and I saw three that caught my attention.   ← 1940’s Greer Garson-Laurence Olivier version of Pride and Prejudice holds up extremely well; it’s one of the better literary adaptations/condensations I’ve seen.

Also in July is Busby Berkeley’s Million Dollar Mermaid, the most spectacular and physically demanding of MGM’s Esther Williams pictures. The Technicolor ought to look good too.

And then in August comes the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy sports-oriented George Cukor comedy Pat and Mike. The comedy centering on Hepburn’s lady athlete was once considered a takeoff on gender roles and the way women are underestimated; now I’m wondering if it will pass muster with current feminist thinking. Oh, it’s funny at times, and it has an early appearance by Charles Bronson, too.

The only surprising thing is why this choice and Woman of the Year should arrive on Blu-ray before Adam’s Rib, the duo’s only slightly sexist masterpiece, also directed by Cukor. The WAC has also announced the Hepburn/Spencer film Without Love for a little further down the line.

Steve Reeves fans will applaud these three or so minutes of publicity shots of Steve Reeves in Italy. I don’t know who put them online, but I caught it through a helpful Facebook post by Tim Lucas. He arrives and departs by plane, and performs on the set of what looks like one of the original Hercules movies, and perhaps another sword ‘n’ sandal epic. He apparently showed up for work with his Hercules beard already grown.

Naturally, every pub flack has the famous bodybuilder pick up heavy objects — the nearest bellissima attrice italiana, mostly. He obliges every request. They even have him drag a large airport stairway  a few feet before he boards his plane, beard shaved. Reeves looks like a friendly and agreeable guy — even though he’s always posing there’s not a hint of narcissism. The publicity clip puts the Enzo Masetti music score in the background. I can’t identify the numerous leading ladies on view. But we certainly recognize the great Gordon Mitchell arriving at the airport as well — what a terrific chiseled face!  Offhand I don’t see any movies in which the two actors co-starred.

And this final item should be self-explanatory for anybody who was a little boy in the 1950s. I swiped it without so much as a how-do-you-do from the astute observer of arcane culture, amiable colleague, and fellow family man Richard Harland Smith. I guess it’s from a 1954 Australian trade magazine called Retailer and it appears to be 100% genuine. Who is this kid, Aldo Ray Junior?   He works up an impressive Sgt. Rock grimace there. It’s a dirty job disintegrating alien slimeballs, but Little Aldo’s got what it takes.

The graphic becomes bigger and fully readable when opened in a new window.

To fully understand the vibe, you had to have been a 1958 tyke, exposed to twelve weekly hours of gun-and-gundown western fare on TV. I remember a Kellogg’s cereal box that explained how to save up coupons to send away for one of nine different machine gun toys that were pictured. I couldn’t make up my mind.

This ad is actually from a couple of years before my time, in the Space Patrol days when spaceman toys were apparently really popular. I don’t know if the ray gun – helmet combo worn by the little boy in It Came from Outer Space was a commercial item or not. But it’s important for CineSavant to attest to the truth: if I were reading that ad at seven years old, I’d be thinking,

“I can look tougher than him, and I can squint better too. After the outer space monsters are toast, I know a few playground bullies that need to meet ‘my little friend here,’ heh heh heh.”

Look at it this way — it lights up and makes a noise, but it won’t put my eye out.  Thanks for reading — Glenn Erickson

Hello — we have links today…

Last Tuesday’s Toho Sci-fi Double Bill review prompted correspondent Bill Shaffer to send along a pretty incredible link, to a hobbyist master model maker named Bill Gudmundson. Bill says that Gudmundson’s kit miniature of the Moon Bus from Battle in Outer Space ( ↑ ) is about 6-to-7 inches tall and just over a foot long. The man has several other impressive constructions artworks that appeal … half the joy in those Toho space movies is their raw, unadulterated TOY appeal. Gudmundson’s page Bill’s Kitchen has extensive galleries of well-photographed models. His ‘SPIP’ Moonship miniature kit is really something. Look for the Moon Bus also, under Original 3 — Lunar Exploration Vehicle.

While fumbling about looking for an image of some garden-variety Triffids, I stumbled on a really satisfying website that I think I may have linked to years ago. It’s A Guide to The Day of the Triffids, a photo-article ‘Great Reading Adventure’ written by Melanie Kelly back in 2004. The page examines the book (it was given a wealth of cover art), the author John Wyndham, and goes through the movie and TV iterations of his story, as well as visiting some of his other books. Not all are still in print — I long ago remember buying additional copies of The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cookoos just to enjoy the different pocketbook cover art.

And good news from The Criterion Collection on their September Blu-ray lineup: the discs for back-to-school month (gulp) are
Claire Denis’s Beau Travail,
Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli with Gian-Maria Volonté;
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3, an international compendium with films from Brazil (Pixote), Cuba (Lucía), Indonesia (After the Curfew), Iran (Downpour), Mauritania (Soleil Ô), and Mexico (Dos monjes);
Jules Dassin’s noir classics The Naked City and
Brute Force (both new 4K restorations); and
David Lynch’s superb The Elephant Man.

Finally, correspondent Norman Frizzle is responsible for my ‘mystery image’ up top today, the controversial monument to the notorious Jubilation T. Cornpone. Al Capp had the right idea to lampoon the veneration of Civil War rebels; I once had the mistaken notion that the Confederate Generals got statues because the history books say most were better than the Generals fielded by the Union.

Norman also sent along a YouTube clip to a full musical number from Li’L Abner where the offending statue of a Confederate General appears. Besides the featured player Stubby Kaye, Norman told me to look out for Valerie Harper and Hope Holliday among the dancers. I think that dancer Bob Banas is there as well. Someday his original home movies from the shoot will surface … we hope.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Powerhouse Indicator has announced its titles for August, a trio of Region B releases. Two of the titles haven’t yet been made available here in Region A: Joseph Losey’s much-discussed, seldom seen Eve ↑ , and the low-reputation high-interest Chris Lee / Peter Cushing picture I, Monster. The 1961 picture Eve has a sterling critical reputation, but I don’t know whether to expect a riveting masterpiece, or one of Losey’s tepid, artsy dramas.

The horror picture was filmed in a goofy kind of non- 3-D process that only worked on one axis, or was really only 2½-D or something. Gary has told us about it once or twice but the explanation didn’t stick. According to unreliable but entertaining sources on the web, the proposed 3-D process was more of an optical illusion, called The Pulfrich Effect. The description given sounds exactly how my eyes behave before I’m properly awake in the morning, when reality barely looks 1-D.

I knew it was happening: Scorpion Releasing’s Night Visitor disc is completed and its extras have been announced, although no formal release date has as of yet been announced. The 1989 horror feature with Allen Garfield, Elliott Gould, Richard Roundtree and Shannon Tweed was too good an experience for me to turn down talking about it, which I did last December … you know, before the world was semi-permanently placed on Pause.

We’ll have to see just how much my memories do or don’t clash with those of the screenwriter and director. I’m just the guy who assembled their work, on a long- extinct Convergence linear video editing machine — No, NOT steam-powered.  I love that when MGM/UA needed a publicity image, they had to re-rent that off-the-shelf devil mask — the film’s main advertising item is just a photo of the mask sitting there, as if for a prop shop catalog.

Once again Gary Teetzel has been scouring old Hollywood trade publications — this time he has corralled some old clippings illustrating the way Universal’s Dracula was marketed to exhibitors and ballyhooed on the local level back in 1931. The following articles can be made readable by opening them in a new window (that’s the right-click instruction on a Mac).

The first item on the left simply touts the film’s box office performance, and if you consider that admission to ‘nabe’ theaters in the Depression years might have only been a dime or a quarter, pulling in $20,000 in one week must have been good business. The other trade news items constitute a grassroots round-up of the creative ways that Universal’s horror shocker was promoted in individual theaters. There seems to have been a going trade in teens willing to dress up in silly costumes and put on little performances as a publicity gimmick, whether in front of the theater or on-stage. As you can see, local movie showmen took these charades pretty seriously, even if their pantomimes aren’t quite William Castle quality. Remember:

“His Kiss is like the Icy Breath of Death, yet no Woman can Resist — Dracula!”

Thanks Gary ! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

←  We have A New Banner up. Is there a middle step between ‘Shelter In Place’ and ‘Second Wave’ that I’ve skipped over?  We also tried to show some discretion with the banner’s tagline. The text was for a while going to be ‘Waiting for the Second Wave,’ but I wanted to express wondering concern, not morbid anticipation. The first banner stayed up for two months — it would be nice if this one were to become old-news obsolete without delay.

The irreplaceable Gary Teetzel has rounded up some happy future Blu-ray horror news for us… Scream Factory has announced that their September lineup will include the delayed How to Make a Monster and War of the Colossal Beast ↑.

Plus, Scream is also going to reissue Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death separately and in a new pressing of their older Vincent Price Collection, Volume 1.

The first difference is that the Public Broadcasting Service introductions that previously accompanied the Price pictures will no longer be there (although new extras will be added). The second is that Masque will be presented in two cuts, the previous version but also the Academy of Arts and Sciences’ new restoration, which I am told looks fantastic and adds a few new moments of screen time. Gary writes:

“The big additions are the scene between Esmeralda and Hop-toad, and a longer version of the scene between Jane Asher and Price on the battlements, where Price releases the hawk. Censor cuts restored: the word ‘God’ from Asher’s exclamation in the opening scene in her village; a longer version of Asher being tossed into the tub; possibly one line of dialogue during the bal masque at the end. I think that’s it, but I’m not 100% certain.”

This will be a reward for patient horror fans that remember the old (mid- 1990s?) discussion of missing scene fragments and shots from Masque back in the old, indispensable Video Watchdog magazine.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Well, today we have actual posts about actual Blu-ray issues. Charlie Largent will be reviewing Severin Films’ Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection, the unthinkable 14-disc collector’s set. I asked Charlie if he liked the movies, as I’d already drawn my personal line against them when I reviewed the David Gregory documentary Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson. Charlie reminded me that they’re “just a part of the wacky history of movie production” and therefore will draw interest. So I’m looking forward to the review.

Correspondent Bob Furmanek is working furiously on his next restoration project, which isn’t in 3-D. It’s the Nassour Brothers’ Abbott and Costello feature, the first of their non-exclusive projects enabled by a new Universal contract. To promote the movie, it looks like they’ve taken a surviving trailer, replaced the wretched old visuals with their clean restored images, and re-composited the original animated text. They did the same thing in 3-D for Taza, Son of Cochise, to really good effect. The result is a non-original ‘original’ trailer for Africa Screams that ought to bring the 1949 movie back from Public Domain limbo in grand style.

And host Dick Dinman hosts William Wellman Jr., to talk about the recent Kino release of the William Wellman classic Beau Geste. It’s a good conversation, and I’m glad it doesn’t contradict anything in our Beau Geste CineSavant review.

I haven’t forwarded any hot Turner Classic Movies tips lately, but these two are hard to pass up if you’re connected to that cable service. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Eddie Muller’s show Noir Alley screens Cy Endfield’s The Underworld Story, a savage & subversive 1950 movie that takes on media tyranny, blacklisting and racial injustice: a black maid is set up as the patsy in a murder, and every institution in sight encourages it. The searing exposé, made just when Red Channels was first published, is strong stuff — the words ‘blacklist’ and ‘nigger’ are used openly. The film’s title is not particularly apt — something like “America = Hate” would be more accurate.

Then on Sunday night on TCM, a real treat: Georges Franju’s 1963 Judex, an affectionate and poetic retelling of the silent Feuillade serial about a (sometimes) masked avenger who battles an array of pre- WW1 villains, including the Irma Vep-like Diana Monti, a slinky catwoman prototype in a leotard with a dagger at her waist. The incredible music by Maurice Jarre abets the art-deco/surreal goings-on. Judex is followed by Franju’s other genre masterpiece, also with a superb Jarre music score: Eyes Without a Face.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson