Hello!

A quick note about the top image above, the one with the link. It’s a close-up of a 35mm film scrap I saved from a screening in 2000 — A.I.P. / Orion / MGM’s last print of Voyage to the End of the Universe was stored so badly, that when we tried to screen it, each reel disintegrated about halfway through, leaving a solid block of fused celluloid at the core. I afterwards helped the projectionist sweep the floor of crunchy film scraps. The photo above has been horizontally stretched — it’s a ‘scope picture so normally looks like this. ←

A huge assist from correspondent Ed Sullivan. At last Saturday’s CineSavant Column I asked who the ‘mystery actress’ was posing with Bud Westmore in the Universal Special Makeup Lab. I shouldn’t have been surprised when Ed solved the mystery.

Snooping around on Ebay, Ed found this sales post with a pub photo from the exact same shoot, identifying the starlet as Marianne Koch, the German actress best known for Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars. Ms. Koch is still around, and her story is pretty inspiring — after her years as an actress she became a doctor.

What was the established European actress Marianne Koch doing at Universal-International in 1957?   She was in two Universal releases that year, director Douglas Sirk’s Interlude with June Allyson & Rossano Brazzi (actually filmed in Germany), and also Jack Sher’s Four Girls in Town. In both she was billed as ‘Marianne Cook.’

The next year, director Sirk brought over Germany’s Lisolette Pulver to star in Universal’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die. She was billed as ‘Lilo Pulver,’ a name used again when she appeared in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three.

After last Saturday’s review of the Dennis Hopper / Vincent Price film Backtrack, friend and advisor ‘B’ sent along this note, with a link, showing me that Vincent Price was still acting after 1990. I’ll give ‘B’ the Last Word:

Glenn:  Nice reviews today.

Vincent Price seems a bit out of it when speaking in Backtrack, although he does give Hopper’s camera a few good silent snarls and baleful looks. It is true that his part in Edward Scissorhands was shortened. I think his Inventor character does briefly speak, but perhaps not on camera. But VP did give one more short performance a few years later in which he retains at least a little of the old Price panache.

In The Heart of Justice, a 1993 TNT original drama, Price is seen briefly as a famous elderly gay author dining with … Dennis Hopper, playing another well known author. The two trade bon mots about life, some of them slightly amusing, for a minute or so. As Hopper gets up to leave the restaurant, he pauses to sweetly kiss Price on the forehead. If you wanna take a look at this, it’s at YouTube: The Heart of Justice.

Price’s scene with Hopper is at the very beginning; Price has a later, slightly longer scene with Eric Stoltz at about 57:40. The scenes are supposed to take place at the National Arts Club, but were shot elsewhere.

Anyway, VP looked okay (if fragile) in this. He remains greatly missed.  — B.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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It’s Share and Tell Day. We just tripped over our photos of  Mike Hyatt’s  poster display for  a certain Sci-Fi attraction  at his 2012 midnight show at the TCM Film Festival — it filled one of the larger theaters.

This is less than half of the ‘Hyatt Collection’ on this title, so I just chose a few interesting, unusual variations. The graphic does zoom larger, to read some of the smaller print. The titles translate thusly: #’s 1 and 3 Italian:  ‘Invasion of the Green Monsters’;  #2 German:  ‘Flowers of Terror’,  #4 Spanish:  ‘The Green Menace.’ The big text in #2 is  ‘Fear! Horror! Panic!’

I mean honestly, what online outlet can match CineSavant for important public service?

This second image above enlarges as well. Correspondent Malcolm Alcala forwarded; it’s a Universal-International publicity photo from (presumably) 1957, the release year of The Land Unknown, the movie featuring the goofy T-Rex on the left. That costume must have weighed a ton.

The cutesy posed photo is from Universal’s makeup department. Department head Bud Westmore (right) was notorious for usurping sole credit for the work done by the ‘department staff’ — impressive creations like Ann Blyth’s mermaid outfit, the Mole Men and of course the best man-in-suit monster of them all, The Gill Man. Westmore pretends to be working on a Mole Man mask. Detractors said that Westmore showed up on the floor mainly when the publicity cameramen came around. In many photos Bud pretends to be working on creations made by others. What now sounds like an artistic crime was then studio business as ususal.

We at first thought that the woman on the left, teasing Bud with a Mole Man claw, was Millicent Patrick, the actress and talented artist-designer now credited with designing the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Friend and noted makeup veteran Craig Reardon assures me that the woman above is not Ms. Patrick. Can anybody identify her?

In his deep-dive research book The Creature Chronicles Tom Weaver quotes expert Bob Burns as reporting that sculptor Chris Mueller named Millicent as the Creature’s main designer. Mueller’s main point was to emphasize that department head Westmore had nothing to do with The Gill Man. Through independent hand-me-down testimony, Craig Reardon was also told that Mueller ‘did credit her with breaking through with a design that nailed the look of the beast.’

→  Millicent Patrick (the woman not in the top photo) also sat for a great deal of publicity art, sketching at her drafting table and posing with the department’s creations, also pretending to be ‘touching up’ various masks, etc. That was normally Bud Westmore’s exclusive domain, and he didn’t like sharing the spotlight. The department’s guild employees — the artists and sculptors who actually made the monsters — deeply resented Westmore’s relentless credit hogging.

According to Tom Weaver’s documentation and research, Bud Westmore wouldn’t have been playing around with Millicent Patrick when this photo was taken, sometime in 1957. Back in 1954 the Universal front office proposed a publicity tour that would send the photogenic Millicent Patrick from city to city making media appearances as The Creature’s creator. Westmore blew a fuse over that idea. He wrote a memo claiming that he alone had come up with the Creature’s design, and that Ms. Patrick had merely sketched the ideas he dictated. This proprietary tyranny is what made the makeup department head so unpopular.

It’s quite likely that the Creature promotion tour was just a passing proposal in the publicity department.  At any rate, it looks like the #MeToo movement had to come along before Millicent Patrick was properly recognized.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Correspondent Michael McQuarrie forwarded what I thought would be a joke, but turned out to be an excellent YouTube encoding of a Highway Patrol episode from 1956, Motorcycle A with featured player Clint Eastwood.

From April of 1956, the episode references the movie The Wild One, from three years earlier. Clint and his pal (John Compton) ride their motorcycles into a town that was hit by a lawless gang several months before. Uplifting moral lessons ensue, via star Broderick Crawford. Clint plays the motorcycle rider who isn’t a hot-head . . . no “Make my day, Highway Pig!,” not by a long shot.

Only actor John Compton has reason to complain — 11 years before, he played the poor society kid fleeced by the evil Veda Pierce.

And I’ve just learned that among The Warner Archive Collection’s May title offerings (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Queen Christina, King Solomon’s Mines, Clash by Night, Border Incident, Hey There It’s Yogi Bear) will be Joseph Losey’s debut feature The Boy with Green Hair. The weird anti-war parable plays like an Afterschool Special version of Losey’s later These Are the Damned . . . the themes align perfectly.

The 1948 show stars Robert Ryan, Barbara Hale and a young Dean Stockwell, and was filmed in 3-Strip Technicolor. We’re excited at the idea of seeing it with one of the WAC’s fine digital remaster jobs.

Can’t resist this last observation … I understand that using Technicolor separations, with unlimited digital color control, the transfer colorists will finally be able to get that strange tint out of Dean Stockwell’s hair. It’s ruined every copy so far.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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There’s always something new to be discovered, as we found out in a pub email from Deaf Crocodile Films, announcing an upcoming Blu-ray of the rare Czech omnibus fantasy,  Prague Nights  (Pražské Noci).  In a deal with Comeback Company and the Národní filmový archiv, the rare 1969 feature has been restored for its first- ever U.S. release.

Prague Nights was in production during the Soviet occupation of Prague. Its three stories were directed by Miloš Makovec, Evald Schorm and Jiří Brdečka, and are split between modern day and medieval times, something on the order of Mario Bava’s  I tre volti della paura.  The framing encounter with a seductive storyteller takes place in a graveyard. One story is about a countess with a strange destiny, and a second concerns a medieval murderess who makes her own poison.

The third story is a version of the Golem legend, described as dreamlike and scored with ‘a chorus of ghostly voices.’ The pop-influenced score for the ‘poison’ episode is by Zdeněk Liška, the composer of the Czech sci-fi classic  Ikarie XB 1.

We’ll be looking forward to a release date announcement. In the meantime, Deaf Crocodile has posted a  Prague Night trailer  . . . which is mildly NSFW.

The ever-vigilant Dick Dinman has a new podcast up, a celebratory tribute to the latest selection of Warner Archive Blu-ray offerings, at his  DVD Classics Corner On the Air  page.

Frequent Dinman guest George Feltenstein is back to explain the selection and restorations from a curator’s point of view.

It’s a strong month of Warners and MGM greats: Greta Garbo in  Camille,  Anatole Litvak’s  Confessions of a Nazi Spy,  Esther Williams in  Neptune’s Daughter,  Susan Hayward in  I’ll Cry Tomorrow,  Joan Crawford in  Flamingo Road  and Marilyn Monroe in  The Prince and the Showgirl.  The theme seems to be four frantic divas, interrupted by one deep cover Nazi agent.

You can’t win them all — CineSavant would have wanted to review at least three more of these, but the only one sent was the incredible new restoration of the Marilyn Monroe movie. We have some excellent titles promised for next month. Until Tuesday —

— thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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We wish this social media post circulated by Joe Dante were some kind of fake: it certainly sends the wrong corporate message, especially during the big ‘Warner Bros. Studio 100th Anniversary Celebration,’ when they’re pretending to be so respectful of the studio history and heritage.

I see some ad paper for the movie Penelope. As the studio does maintain an organized archive, are these just mountains of duplicates that were taking up space?  It reminds me of the treasures I saw discarded when Columbia Pictures moved, around 1974.  Those weren’t duplicates — they included the original key still books for all the Harryhausen pictures. Sony now has a well-organized archive, with the negatives for all those stills preserved. At least, that’s what I saw in 2006 or so when I was allowed a peek at their holdings for Major Dundee.

Say it ain’t so!  This image will make poster collectors, and anybody against tossing film heritage out the window, more than a little upset.

A nice report from roving investigator Gary Teetzel, who took an interesting trip to Tarzana on April 7 in response to this announcement and invite from Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated. Here’s what Gary had to say about what he found:

Today is the 100th Anniversary of the formation of Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated, and a Good Friday half-day work schedule provided an opportunity to head out to Tarzana and take part in a little Open House gathering at the Edgar Rice Burroughs offices, which handle the licensing of Tarzan, John Carter, and other Burroughs properties. A shrewd businessman, Burroughs was the first author to trademark his characters, assuring that they remained protected even as the original novels themselves slip into the public domain.

The Burroughs structure is a modest three-room building recessed a bit from a busy stretch of Ventura Blvd. It was built in 1927 on Burroughs’ sprawling Tarzana Ranch, separate from his home. (The Burroughs home was situated on what is now the El Cabellero Country Club.) The place is packed floor-to-ceiling with Burroughs books and memorabilia, mostly hundreds upon hundreds of editions of his novels, but also paintings, toys, statues, etc. It is a vivid reminder of the enormous popularity of his work and his impact on the culture. The central room features a large, elaborately carved ‘partners’ desk that was used by Burroughs himself.

The Anniversary came with a little celebration. A video was shown outlining Burroughs’ life and career, and featuring greetings and tributes from family members, authors and actors such as Casper Van Dien from 1998’s Tarzan and the Lost City. There were maybe 30 or more attendees of various ages, plus representatives of the office and the Burroughs family. These included a great-granddaughter named Dejah, after John Carter’s favorite Princess of Mars (or Barsoom, as the natives would say). There were a few special guests: actor Wolf Larson, who played Tarzan on a TV series in the early ’90s; Donald F. Glut, who wrote some Tarzan comics; and another author or two. Among the guests I ran into historian C. Courtney Joyner, a frequent contributor to Blu-ray commentaries and featurettes these days, and chatted with him for a little while.  ←  Guests were given a gift bag with a mug, a commemorative coin depicting Burroughs, a bookmark and a flyer or two promoting the company’s current licensing activities. — Gary

Gary is our go-to resource on vintage thriller pulp fiction — when I asked if Edgar Rice Burroughs is a good writer, or fun to read, he sent along two good links, to  Gore Vidal on Tarzan  (Esquire, 2008) and  Ray Bradbury on Burroughs  (ERBzine).  Esquire let me past its paywall, so good luck with that.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson