Hello!

The AMIA’s The Reel Thing conference is happening up on Vine Street as I write, and last night the AMIA itself spilled the beans as to what mystery sci-fi title restoration would be shown in its surprise screening. Unless this graphic is a fake, they’ve indeed restored George Pal’s 1953 The War of the Worlds. That’s great news, as the picture was in dire need of work. The old DVD is just okay, and a full restoration might be able to give us back the film’s original stereophonic audio track. The film’s audio is so dynamic, that even the monaural track sounded like stereo in a good theater, but I hope the experts surprise us.

We also hope that Paramount does something with the transfer: six or seven years ago Disney premiered an incredibly good extra-wide widescreen restoration of its 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the only place I know that it has surfaced is a single TCM cablecast.

Of course, the big question for The War of the Worlds will be, ‘what about the wires?’ Should they leave them in, or take them out? A few years back the issue of wire removal during restorations came up at The Reel Thing. Grover Crisp commented that he had never spoken to a director who didn’t want wires removed when asked.

The Kino company has announced its release schedule for the rest of the year, on its various sub-labels. Titles that jumped out at me are Filmworker (9.18), Brazilian Cinema Novo director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade: The Complete Films (9.25), the silent epic Old Ironsides & Jonas Mekas’ avant-garde feature Hallelujah the Hills (10.30), Bill Moyers’ interview series Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth and a collection Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (11.20), the famed French director H.G. Cluzot: Early Works (11.27), a remastering of the influential documentary-satire The Atomic Café (12.04), Mario Bava’s viking tale Knives of the Avenger (1.15).

Meanwhile, The Warner Archive Collection has hard dates for a string of new Blu-ray announcements: John Milius’ surfer epic Big Wednesday (9.11), Michael Crichton’s odd sci-fi thriller Looker (9.18) and the unfathomable Zsa Zsa Gabor space opera Queen of Outer Space (9.25).

And everybody’s happy on board this Piper Cub, heading into that remote, radioactive Mexican valley! Reported by the Warner Archive for September 25 is the much-appreciated Bert I. Gordon monster mash The Cyclops, one of my most favored ‘fifties Z-pix. Also tagged but date-less are an extended edition of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm and a re-issue of Franklin Schaffner’s Papillon. Last summer we were told that Jack Cardiff’s Dark of the Sun was on its way, but it appears either to be put back aways or lost in the shuffle. Readers of the WAC’s facebook page may know more about that.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I’ve found that some readers don’t realize that CineSavant and DVD Savant reviews at Trailers from Hell and elsewhere are loaded with pertinent links, in red. The links go not just to other CineSavant reviews but to all kinds of relevant material. So I reluctantly add this note. It’s part of my effort that I think is most useful.

That having been said, Dick Dinman wrote in to correct/ clarify my review of The Last Hunt. He’ll be doing one of his audio shows on The Last Hunt and Home from the Hill soon, and when it’s ready I’ll link to it. The topic Dick addressed was actress Anne Bancroft’s abrupt exit from the movie, which caused her to be replaced by Debra Paget:

Hi Glenn, Stewart Granger told me all about the Bancroft accident on the The Last Hunt location and half-kiddingly framed it as ‘the biggest break that she ever had.’ Granger was supposed to pick her up from a galloping horse but dropped her. The accident caused Bancroft to be laid up for some time but also enabled her to audition for the stage play of The Miracle Worker which established her Broadway (and eventually film) career. Did you notice that Bancroft could clearly be seen by freeze-framing two shots?

Unfortunately the massive failure of The Last Hunt was the final nail in Taylor’s career. It followed the equally poor reception of Quentin Durward, for a combined loss of more than $4 million. With the exception of a loan-out to Fox for D-Day the Sixth of June — also a flop — never again would Taylor be offered a major film.

Well, now I have to see The Last Hunt again, to find the mystery shots with Anne Bancroft! The image above is actually from Walk the Proud Land, an Audie Murphy western.

UK correspondent Dave Carnegie sends along a YouTube link to the early color film The Open Road, a 1926 travelogue of London. The ten-minute show was filmed by one of the initial creators of motion pictures, Claude Friese-Greene. We have read accounts of his later attempts to create the alternate-frame ‘Friese-Greene Color Process,’ some of which claimed that it never worked. This restoration would seem to prove that it did. The restoration is by the BFI. Thanks Mr. Carnegie!

Also from YouTube, Gary Teetzel sends along, by way of the Classic Horror Film Board, an original audio promo for William Castle’s The Tingler, from way back in 1959. The hokey jingle is augmented with good sound effects and some terrific recitation bites from star Vincent Price, in the same inimitable voice he later brought to Tim Burton’s short subject Vincent and John Landis’ music video Thriller. The promo uses the deeper-than-deep voice of Thurl Ravenscroft. A ‘straight’ version of the song without Price is also online — credited to “The Tinglers.”

Meant to be played endlessly in theater lobbies to hype the coming attraction, the song likely drove more than a few theater ushers totally insane. I almost went nuts back in 1973, listening to an endless loop of the Burt Bacharach soundtrack for the remake of Lost Horizon. I can now recall every gloppy line of lyrics.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Criterion’s Blu-ray lineup for November is a winner: Mizoguchi’s tragedy A Story from Chikamatsu, a new 4K transfer of Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot. David Byrne’s terrific True Stories and the long-awaited Blu-ray of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.

Some Like it Hot will be in its correct 1:85 aspect ratio, which is a good thing. Various online voices would like to impose personal preferences on aspect ratios (even me, sometimes) and it’s good when the documented specifications are followed. Criterion once caved to scattershot aspect ratio demands for its release of Kazan’s On the Waterfront, unnecessarily releasing it in three separate ARs. I’m glad they’re not continuing that practice.

Consumers will be happy to hear that today’s standard for full-coverage film mastering on video is to produce a Full Aperture Transfer (‘FAT’) digital file that records everything on the film, from perf to perf and frame line to frame line. Any desired aspect ratio can be down-converted from that file, and endlessly adjusted if necessary. Even in 1:85, care must be taken to see if the scan is dead center, or if the cameraman raised the top cutoff point higher, to make it easier to hide lights on the set.

Gary Teetzel can’t be stopped: he’s found vintage American Cinematographer articles on favorite fantasy pictures, readable online. From 1960 comes a piece on George Pal’s The Time Machine. The same issue has a profile of Eiji Tsuburaya. Weirdly, the article claims that the Toho monster films start when Tsuburaya dreams up a new creature, hammers out a rough plot, and assigns it to a screenwriter; I wonder if Tomiyuki Tanaka ever read this? From a year later comes a short, not terribly informative article on Gorgo, and Roger Corman is interviewed for his Vincent Price thriller Pit and the Pendulum. They consistently refer to Daniel Haller as ‘Heller.’

Correspondent and friend Marshall Crawford was faster on the scene than I last week, and caught this view of a ‘set’ for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie. It’s a fake copy of the old East wall of Grauman’s Chinese, which was much different in 1969. A door on the forecourt indeed led to a dedicated parking lot — there was no Kodak Theater, and a street (now erased) led North to Franklin Avenue. The parking lot indeed had signage like we see here — maybe that elaborate ‘pagoda’ sign was taken out of storage? The picture cars for the shoot appear to still be in place.

This is course is some other building standing in for Grauman’s, which looked more or less just like this from that angle. Note the price for parking (which I can’t believe was ever that cheap). Just inside the real doors, on a morning in 1972, I filmed Super 8 movies of Ali MacGraw getting her footprints set in concrete, when The Getaway was a hot release. They were good movies, too.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Gary Teetzel has unearthed a pair of informative American Cinematographer articles on the making of MGM’s Forbidden Planet, from 1955. According to Teetzel,

“…the weird thing is cameraman George Folsey’s descriptions of the scenes with the Id Monster, where he talks about visualizing the monster’s presences with strange lighting effects. But no strange lighting effects are apparent in the scene where ‘the blasted thing’ sneaks aboard the spaceship. There is, of course, red lighting when we see the Id Monster outlined by the force field and laserfire, but not as the monster approaches as Folsey remembers. He makes no mention of animation being added to the scene, either. Did they perhaps experiment with different lighting effects, and ultimately rejected them? Or is it possible that they made an attempt to never show the monster at all?”

The article is of course interesting, but Folsey should have checked his dictionary. I’m not sure he knew the definition of the word ‘pretentious.’ Part two of the Forbidden Planet article is here. Folsey also says that in 1922 he filmed a movie for Biograph called The Man from Mars, that had Martians with ‘huge heads and gleaming talons.’ Somebody tell Bob Furmanek: it was in 3-D.

The ever-vigilant Gary also tipped CineSavant off to an announced Sony Blu-ray MOD disc release of Ishiro Honda’s Toho Sci-Fi attraction Battle in Outer Space on September 25. All the info I have is that a commentary will be included, perhaps the same one from the DVD release. That leaves us asking, will both the Japanese and American cuts be included? If we’re given the longer Japanese version, will accurate subtitles be provided this time around? It’s mostly rumors we hear so far — someone online has claimed that it will be a pressed disc, not a burned MOD. The link is to the older DVD Savant DVD review.

Blu-rays of colorful Toho science fiction fantasies sound like a good idea to me — expensive Japanese releases normally omit English subtitles. But will we ever see a quality release of their third early outer space film, Gorath? We want the giant walrus, for crying out loud.

I almost missed an occurrence over at Paramount Studios last weekend — apparently Quentin Tarantino turned the outside of what was originally the old RKO building at the corner of Gower and Melrose into a filmic exterior of Columbia Studios, circa 1969, for his new movie about the Manson Killings. My tip came late and I got there just in time before the two posters came down — crews had already removed several others. When the show comes out, I’ll have to see how they cover up other Paramount signage visible in these photos. Those poster panels are BIG — it was pretty impressive.

Various photos have been showing up online from a couple of weeks earlier showing how Tarantino’s art directors redressed of parts of Hollywood Blvd. as well. It’s likely that the Paramount corporate lizards preferred that the ads for a rival studio be removed without delay.

Just arrived in-house are the new Warner Archive discs of The Last Hunt with Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, Russ Tamblyn and Debra Paget, and Raoul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead with Cliff Robertson, Aldo Ray and Raymond Massey. Plus I have a review lined up for Severin’s The Changeling.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Friend Phil Hall has a good site up called The Bootleg Files, which reviews hard-to-see or graymarket items, the kind that fall between the cracks. This week he covers a film that was in production when I was at ‘The Cannon Group,’ Menahem Golan’s Mack the Knife. I never got to see a good copy of it either, although in 1989 I hadn’t seen any version of The Threepenny Opera.

Helpful correspondent Rob Gaczol found this odd cue Mothra Metal, that samples the original Yumi & Emi Ito, aka ‘The Peanuts’ from the 1961 film Mothra. The original Yuji Koseki song has been reinterpreted by Isao Bito, with new lyrics. The title is, I guess, ‘Mothra Song the Best.’

On my review of the new Bfi disc of It Happened Here, one listed extra is a book introduction by critic David Robinson. Correspondent Bee Hall couldn’t access it. She wrote the Bfi and found out that it had been left off the disk… but the Bfi responded by putting it online at a custom Special Bfi ‘It Happened Here’ Page. Careful, it’s loaded with spoilers. but Robinson does give an excellent account of the the controversy about Kevin Brownlow’s so-called ‘Nazi picture.’ Many thanks to Ms. Hall.

And contributor-advisor Gary Teetzel once again finds something fun with a 1935 Picture Play magazine article by Helen Louise Walker, Three Live Ghosts. It’s a fluffy tinsel-town overview of the three top actors associated with horror, albeit at a time when the Production Code had curbed most of the desired excesses of the pre-Code horror wave.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson