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A couple of announcements — Flicker Alley has made an early announcement for its September 11 release of a new restoration of The Man Who Cheated Himself, a long- MIA film noir thriller that Eddie Muller premiered last weekend on TCM. It’s Lee J. Cobb’s one starring romantic role, and a very different acting exercise for Jane Wyatt — the All-American housewife plays a scheming Black Widow. It’s another case of film elements semi-abandoned but saved from extinction by The Film Noir Foundation.

And Twilight Time has revealed its quartet of Blu-rays for September: John Ford’s The Last Hurrah with Spencer Tracy, the soapy The Other Side of Midnight with Marie-France Pisier, Henry King’s handsome Gregory Peck western The Bravados and John Boorman’s drama In My Country with Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche.

Upcoming CineSavant review candidates — discs in hand: Super Fly, Maborosi, Dietrich and Sternberg in Hollywood, Let’s Make Love, My Gal Sal, Take a Girl Like You, The Maids, Under Capricorn, Shockproof, Scandal Sheet, The Thelma Todd & Patsy Kelly Comedy Collection (DVD), Crime and Punishment USA (DVD), A Distant Trumpet (DVD) and the sweetly titled Go to Hell Bastards!. I’ve got a couple of clear days to devote to viewing, so we should make some progress here. Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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New Warners titles … we’re still expecting Dark of the Sun, but also announced are Blu-rays of John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Peter Ustinov’s superb Billy Budd, and Wolf Rilla’s film of John Wyndham’s Village of the Damned. Beware the Eyes that Hypnotize!

Remember how Warners put standard-definition copies of The Invisible Boy and Mystery of the Wax Museum on Blu-rays of Forbidden Planet and House of Wax? We’re grateful that they aren’t putting an SD copy of Children of the Damned as an extra on Village.

That’s a good reminder. With all the attention on director Michael Curtiz this year, it would be great to see a fancy restoration of the 2-color Technicolor Mystery of the Wax Museum. It’s a sensational picture, and not a year goes by without somebody writing me to say that the old standard-def transfer has ‘issues,’ namely that the colorists tried to ‘fix’ the hues in the transfer rather than replicate the original’s weird color values.

Hey, I get to name drop!   One-time boss Richard Yuricich drew my attention to a semi-anonymous tumblr site called MOVIEBARCODE, which turns a movie into a pictograph, reducing selected frames to one vertical line and placing them side by side. Like a colorful spectrogram, the result spreads the ‘look’ of a movie out in a horizontal timeline that spans the length of the picture. All of the moviebarcodes are the same size, so I guess the sample frames pulled are taken proportionally, not at regular intervals.

A movie that plays out at night in the first half, and in the daytime in the second, would therefore be dark on the left and light on the right. (There’s no exact explanation, so I hope I’ve interpreted this correctly.) Some are just dull but others tell a story. I see that the Close Encounters moviebarcode starts with the sandstorm, moves to the ‘first night observation’ section and has the extended ending that’s very dark with bright colors popping up. The Complete Austin Powers (pictured) looks like a candy cane. For 55 Days at Peking it’s easy to spot the watercolor sequences for the main titles and end credits.

The page sells prints. I guess the idea is that you can have an abstraction of your favorite film hanging on the wall, to be admired the way botanists and lumberjacks count the rings in a tree (which represent time as well). As a kid I remember looking at my first vinyl lp of the ‘Our Man Flint’ soundtrack, and realizing that the grooves for loud music were different than the grooves for soft music. I looked to see if Moviebarcode had a sampler for The Shape of Water, as I would expect a near-solid shaft of green, teal and aqua. Although the site’s list of titles is long, I didn’t find that one.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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I found an article with input from CineSavant friend and advisor Craig Reardon over at the BloodyGoodHorror page, a quick interview with the site’s ‘Colin.’ This one struck me because it always seemed ugly the horror movie publicists exploited real tragedy. Way back on Rosemary’s Baby the press was quick to connect Roman Polanski with the Tate/LaBianca killings, under the assumption that Polanski was a satanist, etc. You expect this from tabloid trash, but five years later I heard a Warners publicist taking credit for similar nonsense on The Exorcist. The publicist came to the National Theater in Westwood for months, running poster and trailer ideas past the theater’s manager. One idea was to get ‘true’ ballyhoo ideas into the press. When covering the film’s long ticket lines, the TV news even showed my manager/boss on camera, peeking through a theater door and saying, “Gee, maybe there really is a Devil in there.” Then, early in the movie’s record-breaking run, newspaper articles appeared suggesting that actor Jack MacGowran, who plays a movie director in Exorcist, died as the result of an evil connection with William Friedkin’s movie. A famous Irish actor who should have been properly eulogized, was instead used as a prop in a cheap promotional gimmick.

Later on, I asked Steven Spielberg if the sudden rash of shark attacks around the time of the release of Jaws were legit, and didn’t get a good answer. they probably were. The near-explosion of flying saucer sightings that coincided with the opening of Close Encounters made me think that maybe publicists weren’t involved, that the public was sufficiently crazy about upcoming movies to generate their own saucer hysteria. Then again, President Carter owed up to having seen a flying saucer as well, with what seemed perfect timing to promote the movie.

Just by using the name ‘the Poltergeist curse’ in its title, the BGH article perpetuates the myth, mixing movies with reality and fact with fiction. With all of our information sources turning into Reality Programming it’s no wonder that we don’t know what to believe. The article: BGH Investigates the Poltergeist Curse with Craig Reardon.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Over at The Passionate Movegoer for June 13 Joe Baltake has a pretty thorough article about actors replacing actors in movies, for a dizzying variety of reasons. I thought he was going to stick with a few examples, starting with Madeline Kahn on the Lucille Ball Mame. But Baltake’s account outlines a great many instances of radical actor replacments, familiar and un-. Some movies affected were All That Jazz, The Goodbye Girl, The Untouchables, Romeo + Juliet, The King & I, Love Story, Claudine, A League of Their Own and The Apartment. Recommended.

New disc news! Criterion just hit us with some nice upcoming titles for September: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Assayas’ Cold Water, Sidney Poitier and the late Ruby Dee in A Raisin in the Sun, Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey. That last comedy with Carole Lombard has to be one of the funniest movies ever; it’s also high time that I took on the Bergman movie. I think my marriage can stand it.

And our joy know no bounds, as they say, for this last blurb. We’re happy to learn, through a Brad Norman Twitter Link forwarded by Joe Dante, that the city of West Hollywood is going to restore the giant statue of Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle and put it up on public display again (not sure where exactly). I’d volunteer my front yard, but the neighbors would complain and I’m not in West Hollywood in the first place.

Friend Allan Peach immediately recalled that in 1970, a billboard for the movie Myra Breckinridge went up across the street from the statue on Sunset Blvd., with Raquel Welch holding a pose similar to Bullwinkle’s. Jay Ward’s inspired response was to outfit Bullwinkle with a matching American-flag get-up. My preference for Bullwinkle’s attire is his classic no-sleeves collegiate ‘Wotsamatta U.’ sweatshirt.

And Gary Teetzel intercepted this message, reportedly from some Trump advisors with thick accents:

“Eez much vorse than Confederate monuments!  Must not honor Moose and Squirrel!  Make Pottsylvania Great Again!”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson