Hello!

First, a happy news repeat from yesterday:

NBC Universal has announced a Creature From the Black Lagoon Blu-ray Legacy Collection that will include a new 3-D presentation of 1955’s Revenge of the Creature! The 3-D Film Archive has completed the Blu-ray formatting work, the scene-by-scene stereoscopic alignment and left/right panel-matching. The job has been executed using 4K scans of the original 35mm left eye and right eye camera negatives. According to 3D expert Bob Furmanek, the show has not been seen in widescreen 3-D since the original theatrical release in 1955.

The street date for The Legacy Collection is announced as August 28, 2018.

Coming really late in the 3-D craze, Revenge of the Creature nevertheless is designed for depth even better than the first smash hit Gill Man movie. The Legacy Collection set will presumably feature all three original Creature pix, including 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, which is unfortunately, flat. It’s going to be a monster-lovers’ wish come true for 3-D equipped viewers. Since all three pictures will be widescreen and in 2-D HD as well, there’ll be something desirable for everybody.

The street date for The 3-D Complete Creature Legacy Collection is announced as August 28, 2018.

I didn’t realize just how many Golden Age 3D pix the 3-D Archive has restored. Furmanek reports that only a few Universal 3-D features have not made the jump to Blu-ray ‘in depth’: Jack Arnold’s The Glass Webb; Douglas Sirk’s Taza, Son of Cochise and Budd Boetticher’s Wings of the Hawk. And we’re told not to forget the cartoon The Hypnotic Hick with Woody Woodpecker! Even deeper into his research, Bob says that Universal also have three musical shorts, but that they’re unlikely to see a release due to excessive music clearance costs.

For more information on the restoration and rare Creature memorabilia, please visit The 3-D Film Archive.

And Universal’s Complete Legacy Collection page.

Other Important Blu-ray News:  Kino has posted a long list of their ABC/Selznick holdings, and the prognosis for HD restorations on a title for title basis. A lot of expensive 4K scans are involved. According to Kino, the films Good Times (1967), The Rover (1967), Ring of Bright Water (1969), Midas Run (1969), Jenny (1970), Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came (1970), Too Late the Hero (1970), Kotch (1971) and Zachariah (1971) are ‘coming soon.’ The long-absent Song of Norway (1970) and the excellent The Last Valley (1971), both 65mm road show pictures, are listed as having ‘element issues’ — which hopefully is just the unwieldy format, not a comment on the film elements’ condition. It all sounds good to me.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

NBC Universal has announced a Creature From the Black Lagoon Blu-ray Legacy Collection that will include a new 3-D presentation of 1955’s Revenge of the Creature! The 3-D Film Archive has completed the Blu-ray formatting work, the scene-by-scene stereoscopic alignment and left/right panel-matching. The job has been executed using 4K scans of the original 35mm left eye and right eye camera negatives. According to 3D expert Bob Furmanek, the show has not been seen in widescreen 3-D since the original theatrical release in 1955.

Coming really late in the 3-D craze, Revenge of the Creature nevertheless is designed for depth even better than the first smash hit Gill Man movie. The Legacy Collection set will presumably feature all three original Creature pix, including 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, which is unfortunately, flat. It’s going to be a monster-lovers’ wish come true for 3-D equipped viewers. Since all three pictures will be widescreen and in 2-D HD as well, there’ll be something desirable for everybody.

The street date for The 3-D Complete Creature Legacy Collection is announced as August 28, 2018.

I didn’t realize just how many Golden Age 3D pix the 3-D Archive has restored. Furmanek reports that only a few Universal 3-D features have not made the jump to Blu-ray ‘in depth’: Jack Arnold’s The Glass Webb; Douglas Sirk’s Taza, Son of Cochise and Budd Boetticher’s Wings of the Hawk. And we’re told not to forget the cartoon The Hypnotic Hick with Woody Woodpecker! Even deeper into his research, Bob says that Universal also have three musical shorts, but that they’re unlikely to see a release due to excessive music clearance costs.

For more information on the restoration and rare Creature memorabilia, please visit The 3-D Film Archive.

And Universal’s Complete Legacy Collection page.

Thanks to Bob Furmanek, one more time, for the heads-up! That’s it until tomorrow! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Can’t get enough of stories about Budd Boetticher’s classic westerns? In his latest interview show Dick Dinman Salutes the Scott/Boetticher Blu-ray Collection, Dick welcomes two guests. Actor Michael Dante (pictured right) had a role in the Boetticher-directed Westbound. Sony’s restoration chief Grover Crisp is the executive responsible for putting the 60-year-old Columbia pictures in shape for HD disc.

What do you watch on TV, Savant?  Mostly things my wife requests, but I sometimes scour the Turner Classic Movies schedule looking for goodies. When I’m smart I look ahead to see what’s on . . . and here’s what I found this month:

June 8: Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (The Hidden Room) (1949), a promising English movie made on the run from the blacklist.


June 15: The Man Who Found Himself (1937), to see John Beal twenty years before The Vampire.

June 18: The Wasp Woman (1960), reportedly Roger Corman’s first Filmgroup picture, to see Barboura Morris and Lynn Cartwright (pictured left).

June 23: The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), to see if John Dall can do something different.

June 29: She (1965), to see if it’s been remastered (great choice for a WAC Blu, this).

June 30: The Arrangement (1969), the one Elia Kazan picture I’ve never seen.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

As circulated by Joe Dante, Laura Jacobs has written a fine essay for Vanity Fair that revisits a fine, fine movie by that guy tossed out of the Academy — what’s his name? It’s The Devil Inside: Watching Rosemary’s Baby in the Age of #MeToo.

What’s coming up on the CineSavant threat board? We’re looking at reviews of Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop Greenwich Village, Norman Lear’s Cold Turkey, William Wyler’s The Big Country, Vincente Minnelli’s Designing Women and Two Weeks in Another Town, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Michael Schlesinger’s The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster and probably a lot more. Summer is here but we’ll try to keep up the pace. And I hope to sneak in a few retro titles, and things that I missed.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

A book review today, for a new Film Noir tome that I enjoyed very much: Film Noir Prototypes: Origins of the Movement. It’s yet another book on noir edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, part of the group that put together the first influential English- language reference on noir in 1979, Film Noir The Encyclopedia. That earlier volume is still the place to start for serious noir study, but the refreshing concept of the new Prototypes book improves on many of the noir readers and essay collections that followed. The earliest French authors and Paul Schrader tried to nail down a firm definition of Noir, starting with the question of whether it’s a genre, a style or a movement with specific parameters. The new Prototypes book analyzes the actual sources credited with forming noir, comparing them to films in the noir mainstream and adding plenty of visuals to make the comparisons concrete.

If that sounds too academic, the book itself is not. The various new articles and reprints naturally start with the style’s acknowledged debt to German expressionism. In fact, the handsome cover illustration is not from a Hollywood noir, but G.W. Pabst’s 1929 Die büchse der Pandora. Skipping down the chapter list, the subjects dealt with as sources for noir make for compelling reading: Victorian fiction, American painting (Edward Hopper!), Universal horror pictures, British Gaumont thrillers, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Gangster classics, French films from the Occupation, Cornell Woolrich, Gothic thrillers, Social realism and tabloid journalism. The studies even rake the work of Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford for noir antecedents. The broad net pulls in a wealth of relevant trends, insights and proto-noir knowledge; a ‘familiar’ subject yields up some thoughtful new angles.

Besides Ursini and Silver, the compendium of articles includes work by Julie Grossman, Todd Erickson and the late and missed Robert G. Porfirio. His original essay on German Expressionism and noir starts the show.

The Prototypes book is printed on heavy glossy paper, and the quality illustrations are beautifully reproduced, film stills and artwork alike. I skipped around, looking first at the chapters of greatest interest. I read most of them within a week, and only then the wrap-around essays. I found the book a useful antidote for noir studies that rehash the same fifty pictures and fifteen directors — the good authors tapped by the anthology bring new ideas to this still-interesting topic.

The Applause Books paperback went on sale on May 15.

Now, to get really serious, here’s a link from Gary Teetzel about favorite subject #38 here at CineSavant Central. Toho Kingdom has Nicholas Driscoll’s in-depth book review of a Japanese Godzilla Manga from the 1950s. The elaborate graphic novel covers the adventures of two Godzillas, parent and child. And yes, it does appear to be for kids.

Of course, Gary always tops me . . . I thought this business sign for a local llanteria on Virgil St. in Los Angeles was kind of cute. When the shop is open, various stuffed Kaiju toys hang in the shop door!

And one more link has slipped in at the last minute — it’s a very good one — Joe Dante is circulating a Paleofuture article by Matt Novak about the criminalization of film collectors, How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking. This Mr. Woody Wise must be the fellow I bought my 16mm print of It’s a Wonderful Life from in 1978. That was a real Christmas treat for several years. . . thanks, Woody!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson