Hello!

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.

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.

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

Hello!

1974: →  David Niven and friend show ’em how it’s done.

Ha! The perceptive Joe Baltake (for February 22) writes about self-appointed ‘Oscar analysts,’ “a breed of nobodies who are multiplying faster than rodents.” I wasn’t going to comment on the Oscars at all, but if doing so gains me entry into such a select group…

I did a pretty good job not paying much attention to the Oscars this year, I guess because the crop of films overall seemed less involving than ever. The best show I saw was Roma, and I’m pleased that it got so much attention. I still like to star-gape as much as anyone, I suppose. I know folk that attend Oscar parties and play guessing games with the winners, which sounds like a good excuse to get together with friends. For the past few years I’ve DVR’d the show and listened to most of it from the next room while I putter on-line. Then toward the end I fast- and skip- forward from the beginning, stopping to see what people look like, to see the fancy montages, the ‘In Memoriam’ piece, and the most dramatic awards. I get to skip the interminable commercials and some of the more mawkish acceptance speeches. If the next day’s news tells me that something outrageous occurred, I’ll go back and look for it.

This year’s stripped- down experiment is a good idea. I liked the more international scope of the show — a lot of Spanish was spoken. The political statements were less tacky, perhaps because without the usual single host in charge, no single viewpoint was enforced. The montages were fewer and not particularly well done, and the ones intended to be funny, weren’t.

I love Obit montages, as I have as much emotional attachment to favorite actors as does anyone. I compared the Academy’s In Memoriam montage to a full list of celebrities that passed away last year, and quickly realized that there was no way to do that piece shorter than ten minutes — they had to skip plenty of beloved actors. Because the time constraint makes a comprehensive montage impractical, perhaps the concept needs to be re-thought. TCM’s ‘Remembering’ montages are more satisfying, even with their funereal style that intersperses fussy atmospheric visuals in between clips of the departeds.

The obit format has another difficult problem, no matter who’s in charge or what the style is. It’s natural to build the emotion to a big finish that places emphasis on ‘special’ stars, ending with someone guaranteed to be universally mourned. Unfortunately, that only reminds us that even in death, Hollywood celebrities must follow a pre-determined billing, a stellar pecking order. It brings back Billy Wilder’s joke about the news reported some Hollywood people killed in a plane crash. Wilder noted that ‘other’ people that perished with the noted celebrity were effectively billed as, “Additional Dying By…”

My Oscar enthusiasm can be gauged by the fact that I turned off the broadcast the moment the Best Picture was named, but that’s only a symptom of Awards Show burn-out. I saw most of the movies nominated this year and can only say that they seemed overloaded with social messages, some more worthy than others. The nominees that focused on old-fashioned entertainment were all about celebrity superstars. I was impressed by Roma, which is genuine movie art. The show that most engaged me emotionally was the documentary about Fred Rogers.

Congrats to the winners!  And that concludes this frivolous Oscar report from CineSavant’s Rodent Nobody!

←   We happily return our attention to the important news now crossing CineSavant’s editorial desk: associate Gary Teetzel found this impressive behind-the-scenes Gorgo photo at a Facebook page called Facebook Monsterland. I think it shows us the nearly finished ‘baby’ Gorgo head piece. Or does it still need work?  The throat area doesn’t seem quite final.

The operator / monster actor’s head would have to be positioned inside Gorgo’s neck, it seems safe to say. We note the wiring hanging below the rubber helmet-mask, which perhaps leads to solenoid mechanisms to flap Gorgo’s ears, open and close his eyes and move his hinged jaw; his eyes are electric too. That’s pretty fancy animatronic work for 1959 or 1960. The featurette on the VCI Gorgo disc has a very brief 8mm shot of a similar Gorgo head, but this is much clearer. The only BTS shots I’ve ever seen from the English movie are views of the Thames River miniature landscape in American Cinematographer. Even that article lacks the kind of detail we’d like to see.

Thank you Gary, and thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I wasn’t going to continue with the ‘Movie Tie-In Novelty Songs’ thread I had going, but frequent collaborator ‘Bee’ located a particularly elusive item: Livingston & Evans’ “Vertigo” tune, recorded by Billy Eckstine.

It’s … awful. So awful, somebody ought to slug it in over the main titles in place of the Bernard Herrmann music, just to find out how low film vandalism can sink. Here’s one of the better lyric lines:

“Oh, this Vertigo that has me spinning like a top — where will it stop?”

My associates seem pretty excited about the Scream Factory announcement for a new Blu-ray of the Val Lewton The Body Snatcher. The undisputed classic with Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell and Bela Lugos is probably Daniell’s best picture and is easily among Karloff’s top five. Although we’re glad that Scream is continuing with its Lewton releases, this one seems especially important: it’s said to be a 4K scan from the original negative.

The Body Snatcher was very popular and in demand for screenings way after its initial release. It was re-issued theatrically more than once, even into the 1950s. Once the older prints wore out, it stopped looking particularly good; when RKO put on a huge RKO retrospective at the County Museum in 1977, all they could come up with on the title was a crummy 16mm copy, full of splices. The 2003 DVD was no great shakes either, so we assumed that it was one of those unfortunate movies that had simply been printed to death. Amazon says that the disc is due on March 26, so we won’t have long to wait… and then, if we’re lucky (try your best Karloff accent) we’ll never be rid of Toddy. Hope not!

Gary Teetzel also sends forward a link to the Warner Archive Collection’s upcoming DVD of the strange, part-talkie MGM version of Mysterious Island from 1929. We’re hoping this will someday be restored — it was originally (partly?) in 2-strip Technicolor. Stills have always looked incredible, especially the steampunk alien civilization at the bottom of the sea, populated by fanciful duck-like creatures. The first one on the left is NOT named Huie, Dewey, Louie, or Howard.  I’ll be asking to review this show for sure. Full details are at the WB Shop.

And finally, a shout-out to pal Craig Reardon for his birthday gift of the terrific art book Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures. I never knew much about poster illustrators before a Cinefantastique article back in the late 1980s … but once you get a look at Brown’s work, it seems to be everywhere. His character and action paintings are unequalled; I was surprised to see that some ’60s posters that I assumed were knock-offs are indeed Reynold Brown originals: Reptilicus, Planet of the Vampires, The Day of the Triffids, etc. The bright yellow backgrounds are the first clue!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Thank providence for the long Presidents’ Day weekend — I respect those gentlemen of the past more than ever now.

Just a couple of links for the day, courtesy of the helpful Charlie Largent:

Janus Films, the film library associated with The Criterion Collection, now has a catalog of all their holdings on site with numerous images. Usually they’re listed right under the film info but sometimes you need to scroll to ‘Details:’ Janus Films Reference. Criterion of course licences plenty of its product from studios and other outside vendors, but it’s good to have this handy reference to what’s actually in the Janus library on film and videodisc.

And Charlie has come through with an even more interesting resource, an online repository of movies called Rarefilmm: the Cave of Forgotten Films. Most are in fine shape; going through the very long list I was shocked to see several titles I’ve been looking for seemingly forever, including an excellent copy of a Georges Franju movie. Just be advised that the alphabetized list doesn’t skip initial words like ‘the’ and ‘la,’ so that La maison sous la mer (1947) is placed under ‘L,’ not the expected ‘M.’ Good hunting, and let me know if you see something great that I should check out!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson