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I haven’t seen a lot of discussion on the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly disc I reviewed a week back, but I was pleased to read this The Edit Room Floor article on various versions of the film. It jibes closely with my own memories of what happened with the versions at MGM, and also agrees with my assessment on the film’s color. I have heard from a couple of European contacts that, in their opinion old IB Tech prints from Italy were a little more yellow — but that they were nothing like the 2014 Fox disc, with its green skies.

A couple of nice items from This Isn’t Happiness, a challenging image & ideas page I’ve been looking at almost daily for at least 13 years now. This item “Oh Boy” is a quote from an old ABC News broadcast, about the impending solar eclipse, but also about a future that happens to be our present.

The second This Isn’t Happiness item is Harry Frankfurt’s Bull****, a frank and concise appreciation of the difference between fact and baloney in modern discourse. Whups — those were two non-film related links, even though the second uses some prime film clips to make its case. My quota for the summer is now filled.

Is it true what correspondent Andrew LeBlanc tells me, that a particular Warner disc of King Kong Skull Island is now hitting astronomical prices online? The disc in question, says Andrew, is a Best Buy Exclusive, containing a 4K + 3-D + Blu-ray + Digital. Mine doesn’t have the 4K, so I guess I’m out of luck for the Big Payday.

And collectors have found out that Kino’s expected Blu-ray of William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (due October 24) won’t be overloaded with extras, but will be favored with a new commentary from Troy Howarth. I’m hoping Troy supplies more insights into the film’s twisted, convoluted production and release history: I’ve been following it ever since reading an article in one of the very first Cinefantastique magazines. Actually, if Kino delivers a high-quality transfer and audio track, that will be more than enough to rock my jolly meter: The Wind Blows — The Sea Flows — No — bo — dy knows.

Over at the new page Current Thinking on the Western, Italo-western connoisseur Tom Betts has a new article up detailing the history of his ‘zine Westerns… All’Italiana!, from its origins in 1983, when typing and photocopying pages gave way to primitive first-generation home computers. Mr. Betts was an inexhaustible and generous resource for the documentary featurettes we cut on the Sergio Leone movies fifteen years ago, but I was only tangentially aware of the scope of his network of Italo western fandom. Tom’s terrific 21st century online ‘zine iteration, the Westerns… All’Italiana! webpage, goes into incredible detail on the genre and its colorful stars and filmmakers.

And Gary Teetzel closes out the column with a link to a new trailer for a thing called Godzilla: Monster Planet. You’re on your own, brave Kaiju fans…

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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The Cohen Collection’s new Blu-ray of the long-missed The Old Dark House now has a street date, October 24. Gary Teetzel found the blurb on a Barnes and Noble page. I’m already thinking about a nice po-ta-to. They dropped the video promo from YouTube, the one that made the famous James Whale horror show look better than new.

And just in: Kino has announced that its new Avanti! disc will have new interviews with actors Juliet Mills and Clive Revill!

Here’s one for the ‘it isn’t always me’ department. Craig Reardon pointed out that in the review of Duel in the Sun, I had written ‘Joseph Cotton’ numerous times instead of ‘Joseph Cotten.’ It’s one of the various spell-check programs that changes what I write as I write it, ‘correcting’ me. So just remember when you read my error-ridden texts, I’m not (quite) as incompetent as I seem. Or, now that I’ve established plausible deniability, I can behave as if I never make mistakes. Win-win.

Civic wisdom and political sanity are in short supply these days, so here’s a genuine boost for your morale. Joe Dante is circulating this link to the short subject Don’t Be a Sucker!, which Joe reports was at one time edited into his epochal comedy marathon The Movie Orgy. Done in the earnest style of an educational picture, it’s an anti-fascist film, a scary, patriotic 17 minutes with excellent work from Paul Lukas, Felix Bressart, Kurt Kreuger, Richard Lane, George E. Stone, Ivan Triesault and everyone’s favorite Nazi swine impersonator, Martin Kosleck (right). As a news report on the nature of Fascist slime, it’s highly pertinent today, and who better to teach us basic American values than our favorite character actors from the 1940s?

Produced by the Army, the short subject is dated 1947, but some of its content indicates that it is a slight revision of the 1943 original listed in the IMDB.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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It’s upcoming disc round-up time. Newcomers Classic Flix have favored Savant with the Abbott and Costello comedy The Noose Hangs High (August 14), while the UK label Powerhouse Indicator may start sending review material in September. Kino has enough desirable product out to warrant a review every few days; a review of last month’s Bob Hope movies My Favorite Brunette, The Road to Rio, The Road to Bali, The Lemon Drop Kid and Son of Paleface is almost finished, with Duel in the Sun, Barton Fink, Prizzi’s Honor, Custer of the West, Visit to a Small Planet, They Shoot Horses Don’t They, The Birthday Party and Tobor the Great just arrived.

Twilight Time promises 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, The Long Hot Summer, The Emperor in August and Suddenly, Last Summer up next, with Hour of the Gun, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and Gun Fury 3-D due in September.

Arrow USA is hot as well, with Ronin and The Love of a Woman in hand and Don’t Torture a Duckling, Erik the Conqueror and The Big Knife on the way. The loss for this summer are some Shout no shows — they’ve put out two-score desirable horror pix and we’ve only reviewed two because a writer bought them for himself. How are Savant readers going to live without the full skinny on the irreplaceable The Manster? Hey, Tim Lucas loves it!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

Hello!

I’ve been reading a bit, thanks to some helpful links. I enjoyed Nick Pinkerton’s Film Comment interview with Mario Adorf, especially what the German actor has to say about Sam Peckinpah and Major Dundee, where he played Sgt. Gomez, a Mexican cavalryman. The joke on that movie set was that Adorf made a more convincing Mexican than did the real Mexicans.

Valued correspondent ‘B’ has sent me an interesting book that I just finished, Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist by Kevin Brianton. It’s a fascinating research summary on the famous Directors’ Guild meeting in 1950, where, legend has it, John Ford led a rebellion against Cecil B. DeMille’s underhanded campaign to toss Guild president Joseph Mankiewicz and institute a loyalty oath, one that would spread to other guilds and take over Hollywood. According to author Brianton, everything we know about this episode is wrong, taken from 1970s accounts either embellished or mis-remembered. DeMille was trying to jam the Mankiewicz recall through, but there’s no direct evidence that he mispronounced the names of foreign-born directors at the meeting to make them seem un-American. Mankiewicz was never against a loyalty oath as long as it was voluntary. And John Ford defended DeMille as much as he criticized him. Not only that, but Ford’s famed introductory line, “My name is John Ford. I make Westerns” is not an accurate quote! The most fascinating thing about the book is reading what scores of well known directors had to say at the six-hour meeting, and on which side of the fence they stood. According to Brianton, my late friend Robert S. Birchard in his bio Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, was one of the first historians to correct the ledger as concerns DeMille. The great filmmaker was still a super-patriot who informed for years on the industry to the F.B.I., but he wasn’t as dark a villain as painted by other accounts.

Gary Teetzel checks in with a video of comedienne Rose Marie taped at a screening last week at the Aero of a new documentary on her life and career, Wait for Your Laugh. Gary reports:

“At one point during the audience Q & A, someone asked Rose Marie if she dated anyone after the death of her husband. She said she had gone out a few times, and then shared an anecdote about her fellow Hollywood Square contestant who happens to be one of our favorite horror stars . . . how often do we get to hear a new prime-source story about Vincent Price?”

The photo is of Rose Marie in Paramount’s International House, a pre-code picture . . . made eighty-four years ago.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson