Hello!

Good news came in last Saturday for  The Warner Archive Collection, and today we have joyful disc tidings from the folks at The Criterion Collection. The April 2026 sale sheet lists a new 4K box with 3 pictures by John Singleton — Boyz in the Hood,  Poetic Justice,  Baby Boy, and an Eclipse Blu-ray collection for Kinuyo Tanaka — Love Letter,  The Moon Has Risen,  Forever a Woman,  The Wandering Princess,  Girls of the Night, and  Love Under the Crucifix.

We zero in on the classic collector titles: four 4K Ultra HD remasterings, with something for everyone.

Ernst Lubitsch’s  Trouble in Paradise with Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins, given a commentary by Scott Eyman and a video essay by David Cairns;

Charles Vidor’s  Gilda with Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford and George Macready, given an interview with Eddie Muller;

Terry Jones’  Monty Python’s Life of Brian with audio commentaries featuring Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin;

And John Boorman’s  Point Blank with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Carroll O’Connor and Keenan Wynn, given an audio commentary with Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, plus Lee Marvin on the Dick Cavett Show.

They’re all favorites we haven’t seen in a long time, so the anticipation is already settling in.

Up next and forwarded by advisor Gary Teetzel is a peculiar radio show from a YouTube channel called ‘Theater of the Mind – Old Time Radio.’

It so happen that today we are reviewing today one of the many movie adaptation- rethinks of Richard Connell’s timeless short story  The Most Dangerous Game. This radio show from 1947 is a straight presentation of the original. But Gary’s note (1.16.26) tells that he found it had a special appeal:

Glenn … I listened to another old Escape radio show the other day, this one an adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game. The cast is what makes it noteworthy: announcer Paul Frees is the big game hunter Rainsford and Hans Conreid is cast as the evil murderer Count Zaroff. Since it just happens to star two very distinctive voice actors from Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right cartoons, I naturally ‘saw’ the TV cartoon characters in the roles. Now I really want a Jay Ward version of the story, with Zaroff portrayed by Snidely Whiplash!  — Gary

Now try and listen to the radio show without imagining Snidely as Zaroff!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Well, the Warner Archive Collection has a terrific February coming up for classic collectors. The titles need no introduction, as they land on many lists of entertaining favorites.

Mogambo is the remake of Red Dust with Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. It ought to be a beauty in digitally re-integrated 3-strip Technicolor, maybe even the 16mm images of gorillas in the wild.

Stranger on the Third Floor is the highly stylized psycho thriller often tagged as the first real film noir. Peter Lorre is effective in a small part, but the show is carried by the fine direction of Boris Ingster, and the very expressionistic nightmare imagery. When we were kids, we thought of it as a horror picture.

and

Tarzan and His Mate is the second Johnny Weissmuller thriller and the wildest Tarzan picture of them all. In all its pre-Code splendor, it’s filled with risqué costumes, weird politcally incorrect attitudes, and some of the most sadistic, over-the-top violence in Hollywood history.

Plus more Hanna-Barbera completist cartoons: Loopy De Loop. Personally speaking, I checked out of kiddie cartoons about the time of ‘Tennessee Tuxedo.’

And a nice link from Michael McQuarrie …

… a bit of DC Comics fun from the days before everything Super required a ‘dark’ interpretation. In 1966 Robert Benton and David Newman wrote the book for a big Broadway musical based on Superman; I remember a big photo spread on it in Look or Life.

This 1975 TV adaptation stars David Wilson, Leley Ann Warren, Kenneth Mars, Loretta Swit, David Wayne, Malachi Throne, Al Molinaro and Harvey Lembeck … YouTube poster Vinnie Rattolle has uploaded an entire produced-for-TV broadcast.

It’s from a not-so-great video recording, but it’s all there …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Today’s links were found by the inquisitive Gary Teetzel, who points us to a worthy cause, film music-wise …

… a  The Night of the Hunter  Kickstarter Campaign to produce a new recording of the film’s Walter Schumann music score. The Kickstarter post is from Roger Feigelson, who includes some notes about the progress of the project (a lot seems to be done already) and what contributors can expect.

The Night of the Hunter of course has one of the best mystery-horror music scores ever — several cues chill the bones, especially the eerie vocals and the theme songs. I remember music producer-collector Bruce Kimmel being obsessed with the music — he got the rare original soundtrack album as a child.

The video provided at the Kickstarter page shows the actual session for the title cue, said to have been performed at the tail of a session for a different recording. The choir is a really good match!

And Gary Teetzel has a Radio Discovery for us … to avoid confusion, I’ll let him describe it in his own words :

“While driving to work today I was listening to the ‘audition show’ — essentially the pilot — of the 1947 adventure/suspense radio show “Escape”.  The drama stars Berry Kroeger, a busy radio actor of the time who didn’t become a regular in movies until the next year. Kroeger plays an English ventriloquist who seems to be going mad. He imagines that his dummy ‘Toby’ has a life of its own. He becomes jealous when Toby seems to want to leave him, to work with a more famous American ventriloquist. The ventriloquist’s derangement increases sharply, until finally ….. “

“Is all this sounding familiar?  I thought so, too, but figured there were dozens of ‘crazy ventriloquist’ stories out there.  Escape usually adapted short stories, so maybe it was just a coincidence. I was surprised, then, when the announcer at the end said that the name of the episode was Dead of Night, and thanked Universal Pictures for letting them adapt it. Universal distributed the Ealing Studios movie of  Dead of Night in 1945, so yes, it was an official adaptation. One more surprise: The voice of Toby the dummy?  Art Carney!     — Gary

You can listen to the episode here:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Thanks for sticking with CineSavant …. just making it through a new week feels like an accomplishment, frankly.

We have another worthwhile link purloined from the estimable David J. Schow — I took one look at Dinosaur Archive’s post documenting the fabrication of those giant display Lizards to be fascinating.

The automatons we see constructed here achive some really smooth motions. We skipped through to ponder the construction and materials strategy involved … it’s pretty elaborate. When it comes time to manufacture my own dinosaur hide, this video will have given me some good ideas. We really enjoyed the  Indiana Dinosaur Museum back in South Bend, but I don’t recall it having any animatronic dinosaurs like these.

The video has more on its mind than just the construction … which is the part that held my attention.

It’s time for another Book Review at CineSavant. This one is a nice surprise from a frequent review contributor to CineSavant, our UK correspondent Lee Broughton. He’s the editor of a new compendium of academic writing titled Reappraising Cult Horror Films,  from Carnival of Souls to Last Night in Soho.

Some of Lee Broughton’s earlier film writing skewed toward the western genre, but in the last ten years I’ve noticed an increased interest in horror and cult-oriented films, such as the excellent commentary he contributed to  Steppenwolf, a definite cult item positioned somewhere between a western and a horror film.

Omnibus film digests have the advantage of presenting a range of analytical voices, that offer more than one approach to the given subject. Lee has tapped a good group of writers that help us see where the horror genre has been going in the last quarter-century or so. A number of cult classics are perused, but we were equally engaged by discussions of pictures we’d never heard of.

Editor Broughton tempts fate with his lineup of 13 authors. Looking at roster I see more than half are from the UK, most of the rest are from the States, and one is based in Poland. As the book’s title announces, it begins with a well-known classic cult item, but soon veers off in multiple directions. The book does not endeavor to cover the full subject, as have numerous previously published round-ups of Cult Cinema; Reappraising aim appears to be to introduce some new thinking. Divided into sections on individual films, directors, and ‘cycles and clusters’ the approach is academic in nature. Most chapters are indexed with footnote bibliographies, a resource unto themselves. The notes point to film periodicals, trade papers, and for one politically-focused chapter, deleted Twitter tweets by Donald Trump.

The book begins with Bill Shaffer’s production history for Carnival of Souls. It’s the only entry that’s more historical than analytical, but it helps to reminds us of the eccentric origin of many cult pictures. The Polish scholar Kamil Koscielski looks at The Shining from a different direction than the recent pop autopsies performed on Kubrick’s film. Cynthia J. Miller and Tom Shaker plumb the psychological basis for Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Phevos Kallitsis examines the legacy of race discrimination as reflected in the folk horror of Candyman, including a graphic chart that plots the film’s main concerns, called ‘spaces.’ Craig Ian Mann examines the newer horror item The Hunt (2020), which replays ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ except with ‘jaded liberals stalking deplorables‘ as defined by Hilary Clinton.

In the directors’ section, Mark Goodall offers a welcome overview of Harry Kümel, the Belgian auteur of Daughters of Darkness and Malpertuis. Matthew Melia invites us to reevaluate the maverick Ken Russell, especially in his later microbudgeted, homemade ‘Garagiste’ pictures.

The third section offers even more new thinking, with articles that examine sub-genre groupings of films by theme and region. Xavier Mendik runs through a vein of ‘White Trash Horror’ theorized to have sprung from the success of John Boorman’s 1972 Deliverance. Pete Falconer looks at the extremes of Australian ‘Ozploitation’ cinema, a movement that resisted Hollywood influence and remained peculiarly local. Alice Haylett Bryan opens our eyes to post- 2000 French cult horror films, which she tells us have content that’s exceptionally extreme, even by horror standards.

Kevin Bickerdike defines a new subcategory, horror localized in public housing projects and ‘terrible towers.’ A seminal film for this horror offshoot is David Cronenberg’s Shivers / They Came From Within. And James Shelton’s article analyzes cult horror in terms of narrative construction, focusing on ‘investigative outsiders’ such as Sgt. Howie in The Wicker Man. He singles out narratives expressing the idea of ‘nemein,’ a concept not all that easy to define … an attempt to give balance to the universe?

Lee Broughton’s own contribution is a full breakdown and analysis of Roy Ward Baker’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Following up on his own study of gender typing  in westerns, Lee illuminates the curiously negative role given Julie Ege’s ‘adventuress’ in that hybrid-Chinese Hammer horror film.

As should be obvious, this cult horror digest is not a place to read about horror personalities. There are very few illustrations. But it provides some progressive thinking to the horror discussion, in directions some of us traditional horror fans haven’t examined. The book is available both soft and hard-bound; here’s the link for Bloomsbury Academic:

— Plus the Amazon US sales link.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I’m taking a pass on column entries today. The distraction of ‘larger world issues’ makes it hard to concentrate on our favorite pastime. This page’s readership comes here for escape, not to hear too many personal opinions. So we’ll proceed when this particular funk goes away. Don’t be concerned, I’m not the depressive type. Let us hope for the best.

We’re working on a book review and voting in the OFCS this week. I will do my best to concentrate on civilized values and common courtesy. Thanks very much for the notes and corrections; I’m grateful for my modest group of correspondent-friends. The comments on the reviews are becoming more constructive as well. I’ll try to contribute more responses to them.

Hasta el sábado… ¡ten coraje, sudamericanos!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson