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Last week we posted an image from the 1955  Oklahoma!, which prompted correspondent Allen Moss to send in a link he’d found, to a YouTube encoding of a song & dance number from the Fred Zinnemann musical.

Oklahoma was actually filmed twice, once in ordinary CinemaScope and once in the giant 65mm format Todd-AO. A few years back Fox released a full set of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that included the original Todd-AO version. It was an entirely incompatible system, that ran at 30 frames per second, not 24 …. the picture was brighter and fast action was less blurry. Since the frame rate was more like video, fire and water had a different quality in Todd-AO.

Anyway, we wonder if many people can still tell the difference in a video transfer. The YouTube poster ‘marlbrouk’ adds his own version of ‘Smilebox’ formatting to the equation, which looks rather handsome. He calls it ‘Ultra-Curve.’  I honestly don’t know whether or not the original Road Show performances of the Todd-AO version were projected on a curved screen.

Note: A helpful follow-up from correspondent and mentor Dick Dinman …

Hi Glenn, I saw Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days first run at the Rivoli in N.Y. and can attest to the fact that a giant and deeply curved screen was utilized to absolutely spectacular effect.  Cheers, D.D.

Next up, CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel was the first to jump on this New York Times article by Ben Kenigsberg about an unusual film restoration.

The Museum of Modern Art has been working for quite a while to properly restore Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 comedy Shoulder Arms. Who knew a restoration was needed?

It’s a World War One combat comedy filmed during the fighting. The restorers say that we’ve never actually seen Chaplin’s original movie, only a reconstituted recut assembled from outtakes. The original negative wore out and deteriorated to the point that no new copies could be made. But Chaplin saved everything. He shot many takes, and ranked them in order of preference to assemble alternate versions. Years afterwards, new cuts were made from 3rd and 4th- ranked takes. The new replacement version was also step-printed so it could be shown at 24 frames per second and not look too jerky. In other words, what’s been shown forever has all been rejected material.

This new reconstruction effort conducted a worldwide archive roundup to collect existing original prints. They’re calling it a work in progress, because a few shots have still only been found in 16mm.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Todays reviews take a detour from weird horror and Sci-fi, but never fear, more fantastic reviews are on the way. We do have a brief fantastic Book Review to offer, for David J. Schow’s latest,  Incubus: Inside Leslie Stevens’ Lost Horror Classic.

The subject is the same movie we reviewed in 4K Ultra HD just last December 28. Schow is pretty much the reigning authority on the writer-director-producer Leslie Stevens, starting way back when we all had copies of his guidebook to Stevens’ TV show  The Outer Limits. This new book is a making-of compendium, an everything-welcome scrapbook of research and analysis. It prints two separate screenplays … one is the ‘cover’ script titled ‘Religious Legends of Old Monterey,’ that helped them get permission to film on church property.

The depth of information here is fairly astonishing, considering how obscure Incubus has become. Schow and his associates Craig Beam and Tom Weaver take us through a dozen weird angles on the film: its relationship to Outer Limits, the script written and performed in Esperanto, the casting of a rather intense group of actors, the artistry of cameraman Conrad Hall, the soundtrack made from the Outer Limits library of Dominic Frontiere cues, the aborted ‘nudie’ film shoot, and of course the suicide of one leading actor and the appalling murder suicide committed by another. And don’t forget ‘Everything ‘William Shatner,’ including his penchant for purloining expensive wigs made for his productions.

Tom Weaver’s entire original interview with the producer is included, telling the tale of how an completed feature film can just be lost and presumed destroyed. Believe me, it’s easy in Hollywood. The entire Esperanto issue is covered — the movie didn’t end up pleasing the language’s proponents in the least.

David Show assembles this with a great deal of wit. He includes even more sideways insights about Leslie Stevens’ stormy private life and his nonconformist approach to his career. The background biography of actor Milos Milosevic is bizarre — at one point he was a bodyguard for French actor Alain Delon.

We also get the lowdown on every previous attempt to bring Incubus to home video, on which author David J. Schow was usually involved. There’s a lot of territoriality in film writing, but Schow isn’t your garden variety fan / video expert. People know he’s the go-to guy for Incubus. There’s no guesswork and no padding in his book.

It’s also well organized, with a full index. Forget where the spin-off show Ghost of Sierra de Cobre was discussed?  Page 19.

The compact 250-page item is published by Cimarron Street Books:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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The generous David J. Show links us up with yet another excellent web item. Frank Frazetta’s granddaughter Sara Frazetta gives us a detailed account of the illustrator’s work for the National Lampoon magazine in the early 1970s. The brisk 12-minute video piece is snappy, engaging, and packed with FF’s stirring artwork.

National Lampoon’s art director Michael Gross figures in quite a bit. It’s all fun and fresh and Ms. Frazetta is an excellent hostess:

The video is one of a series, attached to an all-things-Frazetta website, Frazetta Girls.

Ah, CineSavant doesn’t like rumors, and naturally never web-publishes unsubstantiated rumors, because that’s not good journalism. All of America in 2025 is making a big effort to stay aboveboard and honest about everything!

… which is why we’re intrigued to hear rumors about the film collection of the late Wade Williams … Mainly, that it may be in the hands of new owners sooner than later.

If the new rights holders (the made up, fantasy rights holders of rumorville) exploit and release that library properly, a nice chunk of 1950s Sci-fi and horror could finally see the light of day in decent restored quality. Anything is possible.

We’re of course thinking of movies that need serious revisits, like our favorite originals  Rocketship X-M and  Kronos.  ↑  Our latest, up-to-date reviews of those two pictures are now 25 years old. Here’s hoping the rumor has weight. The joke that’s going around is,

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Well, ignoring the world for the moment, we go forward with movie fun as best we can.

First up is a gem posted by Matt Bucy on Vimeo, relayed to us by the unsinkable David J. Schow. What Mr. Bucy has done is to re-edit  The Wizard of Oz, but in a way nobody expected … actually, a few years back we saw this same insanity applied to Star Wars ….

Bucy’s method is to break the film down by words — every word in the entire movie, and then rearrange the entire movie alphabetically. That explains the altered title, for starters, and then the very perplexing credits. The movie is the same length, only rearranged. At ten minutes in, I’m listening to a number of ‘arounds;’ Dorothy must say the word ‘auntie’ 20 times. The movie goes back to normal when nobody’s talking, which puts some transitional scenes in the clear. Early on we get a full minute of the film’s screams, listed as ‘aieee.’ It’s maddening, but also brilliant in its way. Flurries of words like ‘but’ may only be 2 or 3 frames in duration.

Frankly, the words heard in Of Oz The Wizard are more interesting than those in Star Wars …. George Lucas doesn’t know winners like ‘Cellophant.’

CineSavant doesn’t review many Silent Movies, and we’re happy not to be criticized for it, but a close collaborator on silents lately has been Jonathan Gluckman, who clued me into good discs of some silent Sci-fi I should have reviewed long ago.

I asked him for a good link or two, and Jonathan steered me directly to the page of the  Mary Pickford Foundation, which has dozens of authoritative articles, accompanied by rare photos, of Pickford’s career, her associates, publicity sidebars, and topics relevant to her partnership in the United Artists corporation.

Newly uploaded is an article by I think Cari Beauchamp on the production of the silent Ernst Lubitsch production Rosita, a Spanish Romance, from 1923. It’s great history … Pickford brought Lubitsch to America, a move that was resisted by some that still had it in for anything German.

Jonathan notes that the only Rosita disc he can find online is from a company called Grapevine; at the  Nitrateville page is an in-depth collectors’ bulletin board that discusses the film, Grapevine’s disc and a new restoration. Sourced from elements with Gosmofilm, The Pickford Foundation and two other entities, it’s supposed to premiere in Venice in August.

I haven’t heard so much about silent film personalities since taking classes with David Bradley at UCLA. The director would bring his personal 16mm prints to screen, and rhapsodize over the lost art of this and that. He invited his movie celebrity friends to a New Years’ party every year.

Another J. Gluckman link is to a 2011 piece about Mary Pickford’s fairly controversial brother Jack, at Steve Vaught’s historic Hollywood page  Paradise Leased. Jonathan writes that Jack Pickford is often portrayed as an example of Hollywood at its worst. But Steve Vaught doesn’t agree and comes to the defense.

And Michael McQuarrie found this short article from 2013, on a page called Movies and Mania, that gives us the bad news about a film company we remember from the 1970s, Tyburn. Written by David Flint, we start off learning that Tyburn did not only not inherit the crown of Hammer Films, it wasn’t even as successful as Amicus and Tigon.

There’s a lot of information here that’s new to me, not being a full-time follower of the impressive Klemensen Dynasty of fine reporting, mainly on Hammer Films.

The article asserts that none of Tyburn’s films were successful!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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We received this funny little toy the other day … Criterion is using them to promote its Criterion Closet Van, which is presumably roaming the country spreading joy and video discs wherever it goes.

The vehicle is a mobile copy of the ‘Criterion Closet’ in the company’s New York office, where they’ve videotaped many celebs going on happy shopping sprees, as shown at this page.

The Criterion article about the roving van is here:

And just a few days ago, animation expert Jerry Beck posted a great ten minute YouTube video about the animation giant Tex Avery:

It’s an audio recording of Avery, illustrated with animated overcuts … ten minutes of fascination. It’s from Jerry Beck’s authoritative blog Cartoon Research, home to a multitude of insights on the world of animation.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson