Hello!  Some welcome new disc announcements today.

Olive Films is following up their DVD release with a new 4K remaster of A Bucket of Blood, Roger Corman’s first foray into all-out ‘sick humor’ horror. The comedic saga of misunderstood artistic genius Walter Paisley is still a winner thanks to writer Charles B. Griffith’s crazy-man wit, the dead-on spoof of coffee shop beatniks, and the original performances of the late Dick Miller, Barboura Morris and Anthony Carbone.

As an Olive Signature item, the list of extras sounds encouraging as well: Video interviews with Roger Corman, and Dick & Lanie Miller; an audio interview with Charles B. Griffith, a feature commentary by Elijah Drenner and text input from Miller biographer Caelum Vatnsdal. The release is billed as a 4K remaster, so we’re hoping that it clears up some minor flaws in the previous DVD. The expected street date is September 24. Good call, Olive!

And there are more vintage classics on the way:

One can make a convincing case that this is shaping up as Bette Davis Season, at least for Blu-ray fans. I’m primed to review the Warner Archive Collection’s new remastered release of the classic Jezebel, which ought to look great — many older WB classics are showing up on TCM in sparkling HD remasters. Just the other day I re-viewed Kings Row.

But just on Thursday, the WAC also announced Davis’s The Letter, and The Criterion Collection announced new Blus of All About Eve and Now, Voyager, all three top Bette Davis titles, for November. That the Fox picture would be licensed by Criterion is no surprise, but we’re especially pleased whenever Warners digs deeper into the 1930s, as they did a bit back with a terrific disc of the Busby Berkeley/James Cagney musical Footlight Parade. I keep forgetting that Warners is periodically licensing things out now.

And finally, CineSavant resource, associate and advisor Gary Teetzel attended a Thursday night Aero Theater screening of David Swift’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, prompted by the promised attendance of its star Robert Morse. Morse’s visibility has peaked in recent years, thanks to his excellent work in TV’s Mad Men. As Gary relates, it was apparently the film gathering of the month:

“Saw How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying last night at the Aero for the Q & A with 88-year old Robert Morse afterward. He hadn’t watched the movie in a few years, and seemed genuinely touched to see it with an enthusiastic, appreciative audience; he said that at his age it’s nice to be reminded that “Bobby, you had a damn good career.”

The subject of the missing Coffee Break musical number inevitably came up. Morse didn’t know if it had been filmed or not. Someone in the audience shot their hand up and breathlessly explained what had happened to the sequence, and said he had called John Kirk (‘who was then the head of preservation at MGM’) years ago, and John had told him he had already searched, without success.

Among those in the audience: Larry Mirisch; the sister of Maureen ‘Hedy LaRue’ Arthur (Maureen is ailing; Morse said to pass on his best wishes); an actress who had understudied Smitty during the original run, and then played the part with the road company; Michael Schlesigner; and Leonard Maltin. Morse said he had expected Michelle Lee to show up, but she didn’t. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner — or maybe it was his son — had been there for the screening, but left before the Q & A.” — Gary

And wait, there’s more and it has nothing to do with movies whatsoever.

When my parents moved to Lake Havasu City, Arizona in 1970, we watched the London Bridge being reassembled in the middle of the desert. Two years later, Billy Wilder made a crack about rude rich Americans buying English landmarks in his movie Avanti!  Well, here’s a new skillful aerial video of the lake area taken by my brother David, from his radio controlled airplane early one morning on a glass-smooth lake just south of the Bridge (which almost but doesn’t quite appear in the video). I don’t see many videos like this so I was impressed.

I like what the video camera does with the spinning propeller — very interesting. That jagged ridge of mountains to the South can be seen prominently in the 1944 movie 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, either representing Japan or a test flight area, I forget which.   Wait, that video’s not enough?   Here’s another, a front view. You’re welcome, don’t mention it.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

An attempt at a different kind of feature today… looking for odd anomalies in the margins of movies. If you’re anything like me, your family has remarked that they don’t understand how you can pick details out of the clutter of movie shots, finding mike booms and cable shadows in shots, etc. The answer is of course that they would too, if they concentrated on such irrelevancies. My colleagues and friends aren’t so impressed, and instead remark that I don’t seem capable of operating the most simple video remote.

I first thought of this when reader Mike Siegel wrote to ask why I didn’t notice the entire film crew exposed in a shot from last week’s Lust for Vampire, but we’ll overlook that. Watching the new transfer of Quatermass 2 allows us to see more detail, and what a reader picked up on inspired me to do this little exercise, taking crude frame-grabs from several pictures that came to mind. The first little anomaly was pointed out to me by Craig Reardon, and the other three I found myself. I’m sure that plenty of sharp-eyed viewers have noted these many times before, but they certainly surprised me. My low-res images do enlarge quite a bit, if you open them in new windows.

1.

Craig Reardon showed me this one several years ago. It got past me even after at least seven or eight big-screen VistaVision viewings of this western classic by John Ford. My eyes always gravitated to the horses rushing through the freezing water — we all think, how’d they ever get horses to do that?  But up in the high background is something almost ridiculously anachronistic, in full view. Apparently there’s a highway up there, and we can see a truck traveling left to right, stopping during the shot. It’s the little white spot, to the left of the building with the chimney smoke, right in the gap between two clusters of trees. The white spot is actually the side of the truck. (remember to enlarge.)

Amazing!  With just one ‘woke’ viewing, your awareness of interstate truck traffic circa 1868 will be forevermore enhanced.

2.

This second example is from another western classic, this one by Sam Peckinpah. I can’t account for why I only noticed it after thirty years and at least forty viewings. Maybe my excuse is that many of the theatrical screenings I saw were likely on screens that routinely shaved off the left and right extremes of the Panavision frame. I had to watch this scene at 1/8th speed to finally see the anomaly in question.

We’re watching more exciting, non-ASPCA-approved horse action again — an escaping bandit has already been shot off his horse, and now the horse is shot too. But in plain view at the extreme right of the frame, a cowboy-wrangler with a long rope is helping with the stunt. His heels dig into the dirt as he pulls that horse’s head into a pretzel configuration. I think the rope gag was used because the horse is riderless, and stunt horses normally require riders to cue their trick-falls. These days, the CGI pixel police would simply erase the wrangler with a digital clean-up. Back when movies were movies, a director could rely on strong compositions to direct our attention within the frame.

3.

This isn’t a goof like in a particular Harryhausen movie, where I was shown a crew member in plain sight on Sinbad’s boat deck. The crew person on view here is in full costume and so blends into the scene. But he isn’t actually part of the scene. The figure on the left of this shot from a fairy-tale horror movie is the dance choreographer Tutte Lemkow, beating out dance time with a stick. It is the finale of a vampires’ ball, when the assembled vampire dancers promenade toward the tell-tale mirror that allows the three principals (including Sharon Tate) to discover that they are the only dancers that cast a reflection.

Note that there must be an entire second ballroom set on the other side of the mirror, with a trio of doubles. Tutte Lemkow is easy to spot because we already know his face: he took frequent supporting bit parts in many pictures, including Anastasia, Bonjour Tristesse and The Guns of Navarone, often in a dancing context. A behind-the-scenes still from this sequence exists showing Lemkow sitting with the frustrated, exhausted director-actor Roman Polanski.

4.

And finally, here’s the ‘maybe’ discovery from the new Quatermass disc. The scene is the riot that breaks out at the gate of the top-secret Winnderden Plant. The web gives us several behind-the-scenes shots of director Val Guest setting the scene and talking to actor Brian Donlevy, which a reader has studied carefully — he thinks that a figure in the back of the mob is Guest, egging on his extras. Maybe-Guest even waves a stick, but not at all like a hooligan.

I’m not sure that it’s really the director… the hairline is similar but he looks a little too tall for me. In a cut just previous, the maybe-Guest can be seen closer to the fence, perhaps speaking into a walkie-talkie. Is the ‘stick’ actually the antenna of the walkie-talkie?  Could he be one of the assistant directors?

However, the man at the bottom of the inset frame, wearing a pair of very non-Winnerden Flats sunglasses, looks to me a lot like Michael Carreras, doing his bit to fill out the crowd. Any chance either of these ‘extras’ are really above-the-line participants?

Gary Teetzel has already weighed in on this pressing mystery… he thinks that, quote:

“Sunglasses guy in Q2 does look like Michael Carreras, but as he looked in the 1970s. Back in the ’50s, he looked more like this.” ( ← picture, left.) “So the answer is obvious: Michael Carreras built a time machine in the 1970s and went back in time to warn himself not to make Prehistoric Women. But he got the decade wrong and ended up at the Q2 location.” — Gary

Anybody have additional suggestions for crazy things showing up in the margins of movies?  Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I’m just coming off Holiday, and have returned to a nice note from Gary Teetzel about Quatermass 2. For twenty years the talk has been that the 1957 film is on the endangered movies list, that the only existing copy is one surviving print, etc. Apparently, author and series originator Nigel Kneale took a page from the Orwell estate, and had it written into his contract that rights to the second Quatermass show would revert to him over time. I’m guessing that that happened around 1970, because that’s when the movie disappeared from view — Kneale just didn’t like it and saw to it that it was withdrawn from exhibition. The movie didn’t resurface until at least 1987 or so. Although I became re-enthused about it back at Cannon, when the first VHS tapes came out, by that time Q2 was virtually forgotten by all but diehard Sci-fi fans.

Gary’s welcome note was forwarded from a post by Robert Harris, probably at the Home Theater Forum. He published a list of film elements for Q2 presently held by the British Film Institute. They appear to include everything one would need for remastering — dupe negatives & dupe positives for both the feature and the trailer. But they’re all labeled ‘Master – Restricted access to preserved film.’ It’s likely that Shout Factory simply couldn’t access the restricted feature materials for any number of reasons, and certainly not right away. I remember this same thing happening 25 years ago at MGM Home Video. When George Feltenstein heard that The Quatermass Xperiment was a little longer than the beat-up ‘The Creeping Unknown’ copy held in the United Artist vaults, he went to the trouble of petitioning for access to the restricted materials preserved by the BFI. That began a slow and frustrating process, but the result was a breakthrough for Sci-fi fans.

So, it’s great to know that Q2 is not teetering on the edge of extinction, that a whole set of Tinkertoys for a terrific resto are being safeguarded. The new disc looks quite good to me, showing detail I’d never seen before. And some day a fantastic hi-resolution remaster might come along. Just tell everybody that the diabolical alien conspiracy in Quatermass 2 is really about Brexit … that’ll get deluxe attention for the film.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s holiday time. The palm trees on my street have given me permission to hang with friends and family… yet the reviews will continue. See you Saturday —

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Thanks for all the reactions to my non-spoiler thoughts about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last Tuesday — it’s nices to share an experience with so many fellow fans at the same time. It’s sort of the same vibe as I felt in 1974 with Chinatown or 1976 with Taxi Driver or 1980 with Raging Bull or 1995 with Pulp Fiction … the decision to see it was automatic, as if we were sharks smelling blood in the water from five miles away. I sometimes feel awkward recommending movies, especially the odd titles I dote on at CineSavant — not everybody has my taste, so some of those that take my suggestions must think, what a maroon. So far no complaints on OUATIH.

Correspondent, commentator and friend Toby Roan has a new book just out, like, two days ago: A Million Feet Of Film: The Making Of One-Eyed Jacks. The title is self-explanatory, but Roan has a big story to tell, of a complicated development (Rod Serling, Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah were involved) and a shoot that tested Paramount’s patience and pocketbook. The budget tripled, the studio took over and took it away from Brando in post-production. They call the finished film a compromise, which makes me more eager to read the book — the movie I know plays like a masterpiece just the way it is.

CineSavant is all but drowning in desirable review titles right now. The idea is to give each its due, so they might be trickling out for a while. We’re in the middle of a summer of terrific vintage Sci-fi, horror and fantasy on Blu-ray; thanks to the able co-reviewing of Charlie Largent we’ve covered a lot of great stuff already. Working backwards: Piranha, The Reptile, Weird Science, Alphaville, This Island Earth, Mothra, Dead of Night, These Are the Damned, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Universal Horror Collection 1, The Day Time Ended, The Andromeda Strain, Fantomas Three Film Collection and The Mysterious Island.

Pictures in hand or expected that I will jump at reviewing are Val Guest’s Quatermass 2, Jack H. Harris’ 4D Man and Dinosaurus!, Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World, David Duncan’s The Leech Woman, Joe Dante’s Gremlins (UHD), the big Criterion Showa Godzilla Box, the deliriously Sadeian Circus of Horrors and probably a few I’ve forgotten. Hinted at and rumored as ‘out there’ from Arrow Academy is G.W. Pabst’s hotly desired L’Atlantide. Come December, putting together this year’s ‘best of’ CineSavant article is going to be impossible.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson