Hello!

Respected correspondent Edward Sullivan pointed us to this article related to our favorite non-Connery 007 movie, 1969’s  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The article is from The Observer, by author Jonathan Coe. It’s a good read that comes under the heading ‘movies that influenced my work.’  The feeling he describes happens fairly often for film fans in Los Angeles or New York City — turn a random corner and you’ll be thinking, ‘Buster Keaton performed a gag here 100 years ago,’ or, ‘This is where William Holden walked into Paramount pictures in Sunset Blvd. In this case Mr. Coe had a revelation on a certain beach …

Boy, Coe really likes that movie. We do too, but we want to see it remastered with its original rich and dark color scheme. The Amazon-MGM people just did a great job with the Sean Connerys, so we’re hoping they’ll be able to do the right thing transfer-wise with this very different original 007 offering. Coe’s article pegs OHMSS as a preferred Christmas movie. He references a place in Portugal called Guincho beach:

And just to prove that we at CineSavant think about more than little plastic discs … a suitable second column item eluded us, so you get to see some pix from an outing to Beverly Hills. The city is presently sponsoring an impressive art installation, to be in place until August 1.

The exhibit is a full hundred full-sized pachyderms made of steel and an Indian plant called lantana camara. They’re spread across a three-block span of downtown Beverly Hills, in the park that fronts Santa Monica Blvd, right across from city hall.

It’s a pleasant sight. We dropped by fairly early on Sunday, before the crowds arrived and when the parking was free. Beverly Hills is the last stop of a year-long tour through 7 U.S. cities. We wonder how many trucks were needed to cart the herd. More info:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s time to circulate welcome good news for horror fans … Severin Films announced about three days back that their latest restoration will be in the spotlight at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.

The first part of the news is that they’ve remastered, in 4K from original materials, Riccardo Freda’s follow-up to  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock,  1963’s  Lo spettro, aka The Ghost. It’s a haunted murder mystery again starring Barbara Steele, but decent copies were even harder to see … and we’ve never been impressed by the ‘remnant’ quality of discs such as Retromedia’s  old DVD.

Now maybe we’ll be able to appreciate why Lo spettro has such a high reputation. Severin says that the 4K remaster came from newly-located original film materials, with a few replacement shots taken from a print held in the collection of film producer Jon Davison.

Even more impressive, the restoration of Lo spettro will re-premiere in September at the Venice International Film Festival, where Severin Films honcho David Gregory will appear in person with Barbara Steele. Lo spettro will then proceed to Spain in October, to open the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia. These sound like major film events to us; I hope Severin covers the re-premiere on video.

Meanwhile, both The Criterion Collection and The Warner Archive Collection made impressive release announcements.

Criterion for October will give us a stack of impressive titles, some seemingly chosen for the Halloween season:

Altered States  4K : Ken Russell’s fantastic visual feast;
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me  4K
Georges Franju’s incomparable Eyes Without a Face  4K
Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley  4K
Deep Crimson  4K by Arturo Ripstein;
And two by David Cronenberg — A History of Violence  4K
and Cronenberg’s newest, The Shrouds.

And just a few weeks away at the end of August, The Warner Archive has some special items too:

John Ford’s final film 7 Women starring Anne Bancroft;
Clarence Brown’s searing Intruder in the Dust with Juano Hernandez;
Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way by Vincent Sherman;
Mario Lanza in That Midnight Kiss, heaven protect us;
Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show
and Mike Hodges’ Get Carter in  4K, starring Michael Caine.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Contributed by Gary Teetzel is a nice thread from the  Classic Horror Film Board, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Willis O’Brien’s original silent feature  The Lost World, and quoting from some facebook posts by Greg Kulon :

An actual London pub called The Blue Posts is seen in the film, with a stop-motion Brontosaurus passing by and causing damage. A cute photo comparison post gives us the pub as seen in the film, and as it presently exists,  for a little fan reunion just a few days ago.

A very nice little item!

Meanwhile, I’m explaining the presence of just one review today with a trip to Indiana over the weekend, to confab with family and see the sights. As it turns out they’ve got a very nice little dinosaur museum in South Bend, which is conveniently right next door to a working chocolate factory that gives free tours, and samples. Can’t beat that.

There’s a short stack of new discs I haven’t even opened yet … so the reviews will flow right away. Shouldn’t have another interruption ’til September at the earliest. Thanks to Charlie Largent for coming to the rescue.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The first item comes from Cuba. Charlie Chaplin fans that have Criterion’s old disc of  Modern Times may have seen it. It’s a little bit of wonderment from Cuba’s ICAIC state film company. Along with making moves to eliminate illiteracy, the Castro government invested in cultural opportunities for large sections of the country that were all but cut off from civilization.

Por Primera Vez translates as ‘For the First Time.’ It’s a simple movie, filmed in a day, showing a mobile movie theater arriving in the Baracoa area of Guant´namo. The show is only a little over ten minutes long, but the last three or four minutes record the faces of villagers, many of them children, watching a motion picture for the very first time. It’s 1967, not 1930.

The film has long been a favorite — I wish moviegoing could get back to being as basic and wonderful as this, once in a while.

Make sure to turn the closed captions on, for English subtitles. The ‘showtime’ sequence doesn’t need subs.

On July 26, UCLA will be presenting a rare 1960 TV show taken from an original story by Arch Oboler, first heard as a radio show in 1945. The two-hour show features Shepperd Studwick and James MacArthur, and stars William Shatner as ‘an extremely wealthy, egotistical industrialist who finances a pioneering space flight for the U.S. government,’ and whose ‘malignant narcissism emerges under the allure of the media spotlight, triggering horrific events.’

Oboler wrote about the nuclear threat many times. His best feature film is an apocalypic tale of the  last five people on Earth.

The photo above is from a stage production …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Here’s a well-documented bit of film production history that might appeal: an in-detail web page explaining the creation of a practical radio-control prop for the horror comedy  Gremlins  —  Gizmo’s Pink Corvette,  for his madcap midnight ride through a department store in snowy Kingston Falls.

Here in Los Angeles, any celebrity in a pink Corvette brings back memories of spottings of the ubiquitous Angelyne. But that’s another story.

In the article, photos document the construction and the shooting, and the multiple cars and Gizmos needed to support the workings of the radio-control prop. RC fans will be interested to see how much equipment could be crammed into a ‘Barbie Corvette’ toy.

It’s an unexpected extra laugh in the movie, but we didn’t guess how much work and planning was involved. The little article from ‘Gremlins.com’ covers the scene’s inspiration, too. Director Joe Dante was thinking of a gag in a WB cartoon, naturally.

We’re now beginning the second half of 2025, and I don’t know whether I want time to slow down or speed up … but I was eager to put up this poster-show of notable discs reviewed in the first half of the year. I’ll look at this grid of disc covers and think, “I didn’t get to see all of that one,” and follow that thought with, “Now can I find it?”

Last New Years’ I decorated a grid for 2024 with a photo of a disc shelf here at CineSavant Central … it proved popular. I like rummaging through titles on shelves, too. The image here can be blown up much bigger. I couldn’t get rid of the reflections this time, so it’ll be a quiz game challenge to read them all.

It’s one shelf of about 8 dedicated to film noir. Note that they’re two discs deep. All the horizontal titles need to be incorporated into the (non-existent) filing system. What do I do with older DVD versions … sometimes I want them to compare, as I just did with Danger: Diabolik. Does Tim Lucas back in Cincinnati really have some amazing system that allows him to find anything?  His place must now be more of a museum than the Ackermansion was.

The ‘favored’ titles for the first half of 2025: I could watch any of these, any time. For the last one I’d better be careful who’s in the house.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson