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Whoah — I’m looking on Amazon under ‘Film Noir Boxed Sets,’ for DVD boxed collections that came out in the last ten years from Warners, Sony, etc.. A bunch must be OOP because some of the prices are through the roof: $110 for the First Warners Film Noir Classics Collection, most of the contents of which is now on Blu-ray. I remember one reader who was trying to nab one of the Sony collections just a couple months after its release, was frustrated because it was no longer available.

But new things are on the horizon. On April 9, Kit Parker will be releasing a jumbo box of films noir, entitled Noir Archive Volume 1: 1944-1954 9 Movie Collection. I’m curious to find out the quality of this 3-disc set, as Parker takes great care in his products — if the movies are under eighty minutes, three B&W pictures to a single Blu-ray need not suffer in quality. All the titles appear to be new to Blu-ray. I’ve never seen several of them.

The lineup is as follows: Address Unknown (1944), William Cameron Menzies; Escape in the Fog (1945), Budd Boetticher; The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), Henry Levin; The Black Book (aka Reign of Terror) (1949), Anthony Mann; Johnny Allegro (1949), Ted Tetzlaff; 711 Ocean Drive (1950), Joseph M. Newman; The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) and Assignment Paris (1952) both, Earl McEvoy; and The Miami Story (1954), Fred F. Sears. CineSavant hopes to snag a review copy — !

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Helpful Constantine Nasr answered a message sent a few days ago and confirmed that a most-highly anticipated science fiction Blu-ray is indeed still on its way from Scream Factory, and in fact, work on its extras is almost complete. The movie I’m talking about is none other than Val Guest’s Quatermass 2, the first sequel in Hammer Films’ Quatermass series. I didn’t ask for more details because people working for disc companies must stay mum about unreleased product details. But it is good news just knowing that the disc hasn’t been cancelled. I’m hoping that it gets a release date before the summer.

I guess Q2 must be my favorite science fiction film, simply because I watch it so often. In my Savant Science Fiction Reader it takes place of pride for the best UK Sci-fi with two other gems. Also directed by Guest is the suspenseful, realistic The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which today seems more relevant than ever due to its theme of a man-made weather cataclysm. That show is out on a beautiful BFI disc, unfortunately not in Region ‘A.’

And the third UK Sci-fi classic, Joseph Losey’s These Are the Damned is definitely in the works for Powerhouse Indicator’s next Hammer Films box. The word is that it hasn’t yet been announced because they’re taking extra time to get the extras right. Having been thoroughly reexamined since it was restored to its original length in the 1990s, Losey’s film is important enough to merit a major reassessment.

Actually, These Are the Damned’s first stab at Blu-ray availability will be from Germany. An Explosive Media disc is coming on May 23. It should be closer to a plain-wrap presentation, but definitely All-Region.

But back to Quatermass 2!  Like I say, I couldn’t ask for inside information, even though I’m dying to know what Q2 is going to look like. Twenty years ago, when Image released the existing open-matte flat DVD, we were told that the only source that could be found was a print held by the BFI. The reason that part of its opening scene did not look good, is because the print was too dark to yield an acceptable image in telecine. Here’s hoping that improved elements have been located.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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This year’s Noir City Hollywood Festival of Film Noir kicks off its 21st year at the American Cinematheque starting on March 29 and running through April 7. All the shows will be hosted by Eddie Muller and/or Alan K. Rode of the Film Noir Foundation. The continuing theme this year combines ‘A’ noirs with ‘B’ features, and the more interesting show is often the ‘B’. Trapped is a new 35mm restoration and not on videodisc. The FNF spells out the presentation formats for us: Playgirl is a new digital remaster and Monkey on my Back is 35mm from a private film collector. The opening night comes with a pre-show reception and photo opportunities with ‘Vintage Coppers’ and their noir-era appropriate police cars.

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And friend Craig Reardon points us to a good, short BFI video interview with Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood on 2001. They get into some nice talk about working within Kubrick’s complicated effects setups. The two actors certainly look… different, reminding us of how much time has passed. My own mind’s eye image of myself as I am now, is how I was then.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Last Sunday The L.A. Times reviewed Mallory O’Meara’s book The Lady From The Black Lagoon, making the case that designer Millicent Patrick was the original designer of the beautifully-conceived Gill Man from the 1954 movie. Universal Makeup Department head Bud Westmore took all the credit until it was revealed that the post-war Universal monsters were sculpted and constructed by other expert craftsmen like Chris Mueller and Jack Kevan; but in the last ten years or so Ms. Patrick has been nominated as the actual designer on the basis of some testimony. Although Universal monster authority Tom Weaver’s book displays photos of an earlier, rejected prototype Gill Man that nobody liked, no photos or intermediate designs by Ms. Patrick have turned up. As it is, even though Tom pegs Patrick’s association with the Gill Man through the memory of just one crew member, he doesn’t want to nix the possibility that she was the designer. And Tom says that O’Meara’s book has some great new photos.

All the photos we have of her are publicity poses to accompany her tour to promote Creature from the Black Lagoon, and don’t necessarily represent her work — in some photos she’s painting a mask, but it’s just for show — she’s wearing a swank outfit. She doesn’t appear in any workshop pictures assembling the costume, but that’s understandable as she was a designer, and in the early 1950s it’s likely that a lady special designer would be given her own space away from the boy’s club. Article writer Liz Hand isn’t very complimentary about book, saying that O’Meara makes unsubstantiated claims while mentioning other sources without saying what they contained. A sometime model, Ms. Patrick had quite a fiery background and put in some appearances as an actress. Without more documentation we still don’t know what to believe, even though O’Meara wants the lady to be acknowledged as a pioneering monster maker cheated out of proper recognition. The details divulged in the book review paint Patrick as a strong self-promoter, so what was keeping her from claiming credit after the fact?

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My Column entry on movie marquees (March 2) found some enthusiastic readers. Skip Huston of Decatur, Illinois, sent in some photos of his Avon Theater, which was built in 1916. Skip has owned the successful first-run independent house for twenty years years; he added 2-screen ‘Twins’ annex in 2004. He gets attention here because he put together a video for use in his theaters, that he credits with helping to curb cell phone use and unruly behavior problems. It’s pretty aggressive, take a look: Avon Theater – Two Strikes and You’re Out! But I want to know what Cinnamon Toast Popcorn tastes like.

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Credit OFCS colleague Phil Hall with the best graphic of the day: it’s self-explanatory, but the joke captions are piling up online, my favorite so far being “Rodan by RodanWest.”

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And news just in … Scream Factory has announced three more Universal ’50s fantasy films for June: the campy Monster on the Campus, the rather good The Monolith Monsters, and the long-awaited top title This Island Earth. I’m hoping this release is a good one so I can retire the fan-generated widescreen DVD of TIE that I watch at least once a year. It would also be nice if the new release buries memories of the MST3K fiasco.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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I have this hobby centered around fancy theater marquees, especially the ‘bright lights’ of New York City, that are so extravagant, one would think it would take two weeks’ worth of admissions to pay for them. John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows website and his books feed this habit, and I even tried my own little article on the subject last year, to some good response. A show was definitely a show back then, not simply a larger TV image projected on a screen instead of one’s own TV monitor.

I can sometimes be caught pausing and single-framing through movies to ID film marquees. With Blu-ray’s clarity (and lack of shared/smeared film frames), one can sometimes read text in the far background of shots. In the sci-fi realm. the Soviet space picture Nebo Zovyot has a view of New York, which happens to display a This Island Earth marquee. A terrible Bob Hope/Katharine Hepburn comedy called The Iron Petticoat (1956) gives us a fantastic color shot of a huge colorful Piccadilly Circus display for Tarantula. The same theater marquee appears frequently in other movies. Other film scenes prove that particular productions may have had delayed releases. The 1961 Gorgo shows a marquee for the 1959 The Mummy, while the 1962 The Day of the Triffids displays the 1960 marquee for Terror of the Tongs.

If you open the image above left in a new window you’ll see that it is much bigger. It shows the spectacular marquee display for 1949’s Home of the Brave, and tells us that Stanley Kramer’s picture got a first-class New York send-off. But what’s that partial marquee off to the left?   I blew it up (inset right) and saw the letters “ERE” over “GER-something.” What movie is that?  Ten minutes of online searching through lists of 1949 movies gave me the answer: John Huston’s We Were Strangers.

Naturally, I sent my findings off to John McElwee, to apply for a ‘Junior Greenbriar Woodchuck’ merit badge. Now, what a coincidence it is, that I’ve reviewed all but one of the movies mentioned in these marquee-spotting games.

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Correspondent Åke Bergvall reminds me that one of my favorite pictures is being released on Region-A compatible Blu-ray for the first. I’ve already reviewed the marvelous Czech science fiction space epic Ikarie XB 1 twice, for a 2006 DVD import and a 2017 Czech Blu-ray, and readers will likely think I’ve exhausted my stories of discovering the A.I.P. bowdlerization Voyage to the End of the Universe, my finding the last ruined Voyage projection print in 2000, etc..

Although I’m not going to shill for the new ‘Second Run’ disc directly, it can be found at Amazon.uk. — it streets near the end of March. Ikarie has gotten a lot of talk lately with various revivals of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although Kubrick went on record calling all previous space movies worthless, I think he was talking about their special effects. One can make some hard-to-discount parallels between the art direction of Jindrich Polák’s film and Kubrick’s. There’s also a figurative ‘Star Child’ at the finale of the Czech classic, that’s quite a coincidence. Thanks, Åke.

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And Bob Furmanek of The 3-D Film Archive reminded me that Kino Lorber Studio Classics’ 3-D of the 1954 Jivaro is due out in a few weeks; I’m taking a look at it this weekend and will try to review it in the next ten days or so. Jivaro will complete the Archives’ roster of all three Pine-Thomas 3-D pictures; they’ve already released Sangaree and Those Redheads from Seattle.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson