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I’m buried in discs but happy for it — and I tossed in a review from a company that’s not sending out screeners, because it was a fun picture to write about. I think I’m covering the bases fairly well here, especially with the help of Charlie Largent and Lee Broughton.

Release news: Twilight Time just announced their February offerings: Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, Mark Rydell’s Harry and Walter Go To New York, Larry Peerce’s The Incident and Paul Newman’s The Effect of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds. Their November titles are all in house and reviews are on the way.

Meanwhile, Criterion in February will be getting a lot of attention, with new discs of Night of the Living Dead (in George Romero’s ‘preferred’ flat ratio, fudgesicles), Silence of the Lambs (I’ve always wanted to review it), Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, An Actor’s Revenge, The Hero and Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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Joe Baltake has some amusing reminiscences of actors Larry Keating and Fred Clark this week at The Passionate Moviegoer. Plus John McElwee does the same for a lesser-known Bulldog Drummond feature, over at his Greenbriar Picture Shows (11.13.17). And David Cairns relates a typically strange incident from a Ken Russell film, today at his criticism page Shadowplay.

I’ve got some German discs of American westerns on the way from Explosive Media, and I’m eager to see how they look in HD. I now have more foreign Blu-rays of Universal library titles than I do domestic releases. The three I’m most interested in are Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River, the almost- Anthony Mann Night Passage (both with James Stewart) and Robert Aldrich’s scorchingly violent Burt Lancaster western Ulzana’s Raid, which I can’t say I’ve ever seen in a really satisfactory presentation. And I’ll find out whether or not the discs are encoded all-region.

I’m waiting on Arrows, Twilight Times and more Kinos, plus a book or two to review. And it’s time to get a list going of possible ‘best of’ discs for this year.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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If there’s a strange web clip to be found, count on Gary Teetzel or Ed Sullivan to tip me off with a link. Today Gary sends along this self-explanatory YouTube curiosity, GoPro Gets Melted by Lava and Survives.

Scary stuff, lava — one has to remember that it’s as hot as a blast furnace. Maybe my morbid imagination has kept me from getting in trouble doing crazy things like these intrepid GoPro enthusiasts: while they are setting their camera to capture a great video of a creeping blob of molten rock, how can they be sure that the cooled lava they’re standing on isn’t being undermined by an enormous unseen flow? Or that a vent won’t open up a few feet away and blast them with superheated gas? I still have strange dreams that recreate ridiculous dangerous pickles I got myself into when I was young and stupid adventurous. Do other people have ‘revisits’ of the same kinds of dreams?

More interesting news from Gary, about a film score release on what to me is an unfamiliar format:

“Dutton Vocalion, a label I’ve never heard of, has reissued the Charles Gerhardt RCA Classic Film Scores album dedicated to Dimitri Tiomkin on the SACD Hybrid format, meaning you can play it on regular CD players as well as SACD players. As a bonus, they’re including the lengthy Tiomkin suite from The Thing from Another World that was previously only available on the compilation album Spectacular World of Film Music. (Details Here.) An asterisk next to The Thing suite says that the music is for the “first time available in quadraphonic sound.” Apparently, the Tiomkin album was released in a quad version as well as stereo, but the Spectacular World of Film Music album was not.

No word on whether this music label will revisit any of the other Charles Gerhardt RCA recordings. On the first CD release of his Sea Hawk album, Gerhardt wrote that extra music had been recorded for all of the albums but was cut due to time restrictions on the LPs. He planned to include the never-released music on the CD versions, and indeed, The Sea Hawk did include a few minutes of hitherto unreleased Korngold. Then Gerhardt died, and RCA simply reissued the old albums on CD with no additional music, and some dubious 5.1 remixes. Weirdly, some unreleased music did later surface courtesy of the U.S. Post Office. When they released their stamps devoted to film composers, there was a companion CD of Gerhardt suites which included an extra cue in the suite for The Fountainhead.

Incidentally, I read a rumor online that before RCA pulled the plug on the series, there were plans for albums devoted to Sir William Walton, Elmer Bernstein, Victor Young, westerns, horror, sci-fi movies and classic scores for great actresses. I want to slip into some alternate universe where those albums came to fruition. — Gary”

I thought this was of interest because those Gerhardt albums in the 1970s were what got me interested in old film music, of course after the Phase 4 Bernard Herrmann – Hitchcock records of late 1960’s.

And finally, Olive Films has announced, for its Olive Signature Series, new discs of Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman and Elaine May’s A New Leaf. The releases are scheduled for early December, which is excellent timing. It’s also good news for me, for not long after I got my standard disc of the Joan Fontaine movie, it had an unfortunate encounter with some scalding coffee. Not recommended.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Savant’s new reviews today are:

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A couple of notes today. This should be unnecessary for most readers, but after another letter from someone who didn’t understand, the highlighted words and titles in CineSavant reviews are links, mostly to other reviews but sometimes to material outside the site. I like to leapfrog to related material in what has become a 5600-entry review matrix.

I miss not doing footnotes, and every once in a while might drop something in brackets ‘[ ]’ that should probably be a footnote. I haven’t mastered doing footnotes in wordpress yet (I might take a class next Spring).

And finally, helpful correspondents write in from time to time to tell me that I’m reporting aspect ratios incorrectly, that ‘2:35’ is correctly written ‘2.35:1’. I’m well aware of this. I first learned ratios projecting for Hollywood types (mostly Mike Frankovich but also singer Barry White and dailies for Close Encounters). Projectionists back then just wrote ARs on film leaders in shorthand, as I do — 2:35 is just easier. Anyway, when people write in to correct me, it’s a chance to make a new contact, so I’ll keep doing it my way.

I announced some Powerhouse/Indicator titles last time. I thought I was pretty clear but a helpful reader has suggested that I reiterate that the two Universal-sourced movies, The Border and Charley Varrick were listed as Region B locked. The other two Columbia films The Fortune and The Border are region-free.

Gary Teetzel and other Kaiju fans are excited that Criterion has announced that they’ll be bringing out the entire Toho Showa collection of Godzilla films for Region A. The merry monster honor roll will include Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, Godzilla Raids Again, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, Invasion of the Astro-Monster, Son of Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Gary explains further: “So that gives them all the Showa-era Godzilla films except for King Kong vs. Godzilla, Ebirah Horror of the Deep (Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster) , Godzilla vs. Hedorah (/The Smog Monster) and Godzilla on Monster Island (Godzilla vs. Gigan). Universal, of course, controls KK vs. G; the other three were released on U.S. Blu-ray a couple of years back by Kraken Releasing.

If we do get a Zatoichi- or Lone Wolf and Cub– style boxed set, I hope they include the commentaries and featurettes from the Classic Media releases. And why not look into the rights to all those Toho sci-fi titles released years ago by Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock: The Mysterians, Atragon, Dogora, Varan, Matango, Latitude Zero and Yog? – – Gary.”

Yes, why not indeed!

Thanks for reading — Glenn Erickson