Hello!

The reliable Gary Teetzel forwards the info that Kino Lorber is promising two English Sci-fi films for Blu-ray this year, one a classic and the other — uh — not. Region A folks will finally be able to get their eyeballs massaged by Val Guest’s essential-viewing The Day the Earth Caught Fire ( ↑ ), a 1962 movie that gets global warming right. Not the cause of the warming part, but the vision of a world turned upside down by violent altered weather patterns. That, and Janet Munro in a wet towel.

The second movie is They Came from Beyond Space, a turkey of turkeys of which I’ve never choked through more than four or five minutes on old TV broadcasts. There must have been ‘Bowling for Dollars’ or Roller Skating on another channel. But I’ll check it out — what if it’s a classic that I overlooked?

‘Black Moon Studios’ has done something that certainly interests me — he’s examined a bunch of shots from the 1971 movie Omega Man and points out several dozen continuity flaws showing moving traffic and pedestrians, rotating signs and working traffic lights that pop up in the supposedly ‘dead world.’ He’s very proud of his digital fixes.

A question: does anybody know if the 1977 ‘Poo’ records cover version of the Omega Man main theme is online anywhere?  Susan Turner gave me a copy of a certain bootleg record album way back when. I was told it was produced by someone we know, and his name is (redacted).

The album contains a lot of UA horror and sci-fi music, plus the original Italo 45rpm sexy version of Diabolik sung by Maria Cristina Brancucci aka ‘Christy.’ “di stare più vicino a me!” … great stuff. I’ll go search for the album this coming weekend.

Stephen Bjork found it … YouTube has the ‘Disco Omega Man’ cover by Chuck Cirino. For me, its relation to the soundtrack tune is what Hugo Montenegro’s Good, Bad & Ugly radio hit is to Ennio Morricone’s original.

Another one from Gary Teetzel: AP has a news item by Ben Walker talking an old radio show making a comeback: Long-Lost Rod Serling Baseball Comedy on Deck. Serling, we are told, was an avid fan of the National Sport. The show is about baseball but also introduces a Cold War theme, with a Russian embassy worker who spends his afternoons watching the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. The article tells where Serling fans can hear a new performance, which I believe is coming tomorrow night, Wednesday.

Are we locked down or what? And, Why does this month look and feel like a Sci-Fi / Sontag Imagination of Disaster movie?

Los Angeles goes Quiet and so does The Rest of the World, two brief videos showing views of underpopulated public spaces, a potential Ghost World. Those aren’t the only two out there, as a whole stack of these videos are piling up online; maybe they’ll make people think a little. The weird thing is that we’re now seeing classic Sci-Fi ’empty world’ visions come to life on the TV news.

Don’t stop there, Glenn, name as many ’empty streets’ epics as you can: Seven Days to Noon, FIVE, Target Earth, The World The Flesh and The Devil, On The Beach, Last Woman On Earth, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Last Man On Earth ( ↑ ), The Omega Man, The Quiet Earth, and who cares about newer movies… Maybe we aren’t too badly shaken by these images because we’ve already seen ‘the coming attractions’ for them in old movies.

Here in Los Angeles there’s been an unexpected side benefit: standing outside on my porch, the air smells sweeter. Less auto traffic means better air, and less noise — I noticed tweeting birds more this morning and the horizon (the view to the Hollywood Sign) was clear all day. They say that in Paris under the Nazi occupation, the trees flowered more often and the air quality was better — nobody had gasoline for their cars. Of course, I’d rather have a our health security back.

Not that I consider myself Mister Public Service, but…

For decent information about what’s happening in the world, I recommend to U.S. viewers the nightly BBC America Broadcast.  Sure, they’re slightly U.K.-centric, but they’re free of home-grown hysteria and don’t waste time on feel-good fluff. Most important, they actually care what’s happening elsewhere in the world and offer excellent coverage. Why are we so-called ‘exceptionals’ being asked to hunker down and self-isolate?  A couple of minutes looking at a young Spanish doctor tearfully begging people to stay home ( ↑ ) answers that question: it can and perhaps WILL happen here. Doctor Virginia Oro is not selling anything, she’s merely reflecting the disaster that right now is killing hundreds in Madrid every day.

That some of our leaders minimize the threat is not good … even if this thing gets under control sooner than later, a lot of people are going to suffer, some of them unnecessarily. Tim Lucas reports that the famed actress Lucia Bosé, aged 89, has succumbed to the virus. We just watched her famous Spanish film Death of a Cyclist on TCM a couple of nights ago.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! Three reviews today … the spice must flow! (Saying that makes me feel more important.)

My correspondent Rev. Paul F.M. Zahl regularly suggests faith-based films to readers of an Anglican website called The Living Church. Instead of modern product that calls itself faith-based he looks to older pictures, which we’ve discussed more than once. This week he has a little feature up called Hopeful Movies for Episcopalians in Self-Quarantine; I snooped into his back pages and found another one with a title I admit I wouldn’t have thought of, Seen Any Good Lent Movies Lately?  Paul seems fond of movies about miracles, as with his choice of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy pictured just above, with Ingrid Bergman. I wonder if the devastating miracle movie Ordet is to Paul’s liking — it’s kind of severe.

We look forward to all of Criterion’s just-announced June titles… there’s Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh (I was just talking about that in Semi-Tough), the Russian war horrorshow Come and See, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, and this year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma.

I know, I know, I’m a pushover for the first ten years or so of Toho’s Kaiju and science fiction films … the price tag on this Mill Creek disc is so enticing that I’m going to have to spring for it, even if the encodings are not tip top super-neato (I was there in 1960 cheering for these things, so I can write like that). The double bill is due June 9 according to Amazon.

I’m all for prioritizing crucial and sensitive shipments at this time, so if deliveries are delayed or companies can’t ship for some reason, you won’t hear any whining here — by my measure, the ready availability of 150,000 classic movies, a mouse-click away, is an absolute miracle I’ve never forgotten. If any readers have anecdotal info on shipments delayed or (gulp) cancelled, please let me know.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Yep, good old Dennis Price has arrived, with two friends in hazmat suits. Luckily, I’m not alone here at CineSavant headquarters, and won’t be going batty like Dennis. But plenty of people are soon going to feel very isolated. In a few days we’re going to be really grateful for our web connection to our friends and family.

I don’t have a virus filter for my Modem (that was in the health guidelines, wasn’t it?)  In the interest of Public Safety I considered taking CineSavant offline … but I figure that the public needs to be informed about the searing controversies that surface in these pages: Aspect ratios! Transfer speeds! Original versions! Just doing my bit.

Contributor/advisor/conscience Gary Teetzel knows how to use humor to defuse tension. After an exchange about COVID 19, he sent a picture from The Andromeda Strain of the scientist having a tiny layer of skin burned off as a sterilization ploy. Gary plans to do that before he goes out. Just to be extra safe, he says he’s going to do what the old man in the movie did to stay safe — start drinking Sterno!

The photo above is from a Universal horror-western (?) movie called Curse of the Undead, which Kino Lorber has announced for Blu-ray. I haven’t seen it, but I told Gary it must be a classic because Michael Pate is in it, and Michael Pate plays the marauding Apache Sierra Charriba in my personal obsession Major Dundee. Gary’s answer is typical:

“Yes Glenn, Sierra Charriba is a vampire in Curse of the Undead. Charlton Heston plays Major Van Helsing, who obsessively pursues him across the Old West.”

Sounds okay to me.

After I linked last time to an online encoding of The Beatles’ docu feature Let it Be, correspondent Mike Hasch told me that Peter Jackson has made a documentary about the final year of the group before their breakup. He sent along links to two announcement articles online: in Rolling Stone and in Variety.

Wait, don’t go away yet. Correspondent ‘Chuck’ has contributed a link to a Japanese-for-American-Viewers video piece about Japan’s top Inventions. The ‘invention’ in this particular episode is our old friend Godzilla, the monster with the radioactive personality. Gotta include a Godzilla link, it’s the law.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! I can imagine readers have plenty of important things to do today … but we’re still in a position to review discs here. Yesterday morning I had one Column item, and now I have too many.   I know I will miss at least one interesting disc announcement that will have to wait ’til Tuesday…

Film Movement has been giving us good Blu-rays of top British comedies; now they’ve put together a five-title compilation of top Brit pix about WW2, due on March 31. It’s just plain good stuff, with good extras. The set gives us remastered presentation of Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?, Eric Ambler’s wild what-if tale of a stealth invasion; Guy Hamilton’s The Colditz Story, a pre- Great Escape true story of an Allied POW break from a fortified castle; Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters, about the spectacular ‘bouncing bomb’ raid on the Ruhr dams ( ↑ ), Leslie Norman’s Dunkirk, an earlier epic take on the mass evacuation, made the subject of a Brian Trenchard-Smith TFH Commentary, and J. Lee Thompson’s Ice Cold In Alex, a tense, under-seen movie about the North African campaign.

Film Movement has put together a corny but exiting YouTube promo for Their Finest Hour: 5 British WWII Classics, showing the quality of the restorations.

The Warner Archive Collection has announced something unusual for April: John Huston’s psychosexual potboiler Reflections in a Golden Eye, with Brando, Liz Taylor, Brian Keith and Robert Forster in an early role. This will be a curious item for Blu-ray, for the show is yet another of Huston’s ‘color experiment’ movies, the others being Moulin Rouge and Moby Dick. Warners is presenting the movie both in optimized ‘normal’ color, and also with the stylized ‘golden eye’ color treatment. I didn’t see the film new, but I was told that original Technicolor prints were not simply given an amber tone … they were described as genuinely golden in appearance, as if something really special had been done. Why?  You tell me.

Gary Teetzel has forwarded a mind-boggling 20-minute piece called What happens when an architect sees the movie Parasite?   What is shown must be the most exacting, detailed overkill miniature ever — magic hands seem to be at work. I’ve seen some pretty fancy model-makin’, but this is something else. The beautifully filmed and directed piece is apparently one of several. What Gary said is right, we wish it carried a modelmaker commentary.

And today is a good day for more podcast / web radio from Dick Dinman: in this show he and Alan Rode discuss three separate Blu-ray releases. In Dick’s own words, they “marvel at the erotic exoticism of Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman, Ernest Schoedsack’s Doctor Cyclops (both now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber) and Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic (just released in mind-blowingly lustrous fashion courtesy of Film Movement Classics).” The show has been given the compact, abbreviated title Dick Dinman & Alan K. Rode Salute The Exotic Fever Dream Fantasies of Siodmak, Lang & Shoedsack. That’s pretty raw stuff there. Personally speaking, I try to keep my exotic fever dream fantasies to myself.

The insanely busy and productive Alan Rode just saw a certain health crisis shut down his great Hollywood Noir City film festival, the last group activity I voluntarily attended: we’re all feeling the slowdown on the social and personal level.

More great news from Warner Home Video’s George Feltenstein, who confirms that the just-announced Blu-ray of the 1948 film Rachel and the Stranger will be a major restoration. The show stars Loretta Young, William Holden and Robert Mitchum; I learned from George a few years ago that Howard Hughes cut it by a full fourteen minutes, and that’s what we’ve been watching for generations. In George’s words, so I don’t get it wrong:

“Hi Glenn, IT IS the lost long version!  Complete and quite gorgeous. It is a combination of a 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative (which was cut, and had the main titles re-filmed to remove writer Waldo Salt’s credit and contributions) and a 4K scan of an uncut British nitrate negative (which has the original full titles, and the fourteen minutes of missing footage).

I knew that the film had been cut severely, but I had never seen the original version, and I was unaware of Salt’s contribution beyond the screenwriting credit that had been removed — he also wrote the lyrics to the songs. We had never released a DVD because of the edits; there will be a DVD later down the line.

There is SO much great stuff on the way, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised… and often.  All my best, George”

When George says ‘great stuff is on the way,’ he’s usually not kidding. Since his note, the Robert Wise ‘noir’ western Blood on the Moon and Richard Brooks’ Tennessee Williams adaptation Sweet Bird of Youth have been announced for Blu-ray as well. I’ve always liked Rachel and the Stranger — maybe Robert Mitchum does some more singing?   The other RKO pix I’m aware of that are in dire need of work to restore cuts made in reissue are Howard Hawks’ The Big Sky (140 minutes reduced to 122) and another title that few folk seem to know was ever cut, the fine film noir They Won’t Believe Me (95 minutes reduced to 80). It was directed by Irving Pichel and stars Robert Young, Susan Hayward, and (sigh) Jane Greer.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

After that marathon of links last Saturday, I’ve run fairly dry today. But fellow conspirator-in-reviewing Charlie Largent zapped over a rather exciting link that promises no end of discovery, at least for those with time to dig through it. It’s called the Internet Archive VHS Vault, and it consists of a bunch of random digitizations of things that are presumably in the Public Domain. The shockeroo right on the first page is a rather good copy of the Beatles’ Let it Be, which I saw once when it was new and never again. Yup, there’s Yoko, all right, just a few seconds in. Her face prompted a few ‘boos’ at my screening, way back when — deserved or undeserved, she took the rap for breaking up the band.

Other offerings on the site do look a little dicey — I mean, I see what looks like Disney content. But also an okay Invaders from Mars, in case you’re tired of holding your breath for a remastered Blu-ray.

← And leave it to Gary Teetzel to find more odd stuff in his web searches. He provides the answer to that question I know must be bugging everyone out there: What Frightens Boris Karloff?

Well, we now have photographic proof that what most terrifies old Boris is Gale Storm and Zasu Pitts!  I don’t recall ever seeing this photo before, either; it’s publicity foolishness to promote the 1950s TV comedy The Gale Storm Show. Judging by Zasu’s character name in the show, maybe Boris is worried that she’s going to rub her knuckles into his scalp. The text can be read by opening the graphic in a new window … it’s larger.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to correspondents writing in to tell me about the region coding on their German Explosive Media GmbH discs. Much appreciated!   Our three ‘Clicker’ friends with the ball-bearing eyes in the photo up top appreciate the help as well. They’re the stars of what is still the most perceptive Sci-fi movie about the robotic future — Glenn Erickson