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Steve Guariento forwarded this link to a ‘Classic British Telly’ YouTube encoding of an entire BBC production from 1965, George Orwell’s 1984.

I’ve only had a chance to see the first five minutes. It looks very polished, with the progressive graphics we expected from the BBC back then. It’s technically an episode of ‘Theater 625’ and stars David Buck, Jane Merrow ( The Lion in Winter) and Joseph O’Conor ( Gorgo).

The script is basically the same as that for a famous 1954 BBC broadcast that made a TV star of Peter Cushing. The writer was none other than Nigel Kneale, of the Quatermass productions. Kneale contributed a second teleplay to the Theater 625 show, entitled The Year of the Sex Olympics.

This link is to an Imogen Sara Smith article posted on Criterion’s page, on a subject that always grabs me — movies by blacklistee directors like John Berry, Joseph Losey and the focus of this article, Cy Endfield, that back in the day were sometimes labeled ‘anti-American.’

Now mostly known for his epic  Zulu, Endfield delivered a one-two punch of features in 1950 that still make one’s skin crawl, in no small part because the ‘social issues’ his writers lament are now in the news every day. The article discusses  Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury) with Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges, the equally disturbing  The Underworld Story with Dan Duryea, and Endfield’s searing English attack on capitalist greed, Hell Drivers.

Ms. Smith’s essay is a good entryway into a subgenre that makes us wonder if civilized values exist anywhere: “There ain’t no law against what’s right!”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Two worthwhile Michael McQuarrie links today. He first steers us to G.W. Thomas’s Darkworlds Quarterly website, which on May 28 floated a quick article offering a stack of links for adaptions of novels and stories by author John Wyndham.

That includes several BBC TV shows and radio shows we’d never heard of. The links go most to trailer and TV blurbs, but the lineup starts with episode 1 of a 1957 radio adaptation of The Day of the Triffids by Giles Cooper. We love the 1981  Triffids BBC miniseries, and Thomas links to a vintage on-air promo.

It’s hard to believe that John Wyndham goes in and out of print. Triffids was one of the first books I remember reading, at age 12. In 1972 when I was keen to read The Midwich Cuckoos a bookstore in Westwood imported a little hardbound edition from London for me. It was a top Wyndham experience.

The link round-up includes a 7-minute BBC TV clip from 1960, a brief interview with Wyndham. He comes off as a very proper fellow who warms up as he talks. The chat isn’t deep but we get a nice glimpse at his personality.

We agree with Thomas that the Wyndham stories are neglected. We still need a definitive Triffids adaptation, and The Midwich Cuckoos could use a creative remake or re-think too.

Thomas’s home page helps promote his own fantasy novels.

And here’s a link to a decent web encoding of a German Science fiction show that was once a mystery … clips from it ended up edited into odd documentaries. We remember getting a first glimpse of it on L.A. TV’s  Engineer Bill kiddie show, re purposed as stock footage for a syndicated science series called The Space Explorers.

The original movie is Weltraumschiff 1 Startet from 1940. The 23-minute film was once obscure because it was produced by the Nazi film industry. The translation is ‘Spaceship 1 Launches.’  The director was Anton Kutter.

The film emphasizes that the Third Reich prioritized rockets and promoted the idea that a victorious Germany would use its avowed technical superiority to conquer the heavens as well. At the  SFE website we learn that Weltraumschiff became a short film after two feature space adventure projects were cancelled. The Nazis dropped them because the resources for the elaborate special effects were needed for the war effort.

The visual effects are not bad, especially the hangar reveal and the launch up an inclined ramp, the ‘roller coaster to heaven’ idea favored by  Soviets,  Americans and  Englishmen.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Michael McQuarrie has a cute one for us, a B&W Volkswagen commercial for TV that stars Dustin Hoffman.

The spot looks like one of those old magazine ads with the ‘humble’ VW appeal. Hoffman’s delivery is spot-on perfect. We like details that no car company would normally allow. When Hoffman opens the trunk, it isn’t a fluid gesture. We also hear the warp-buckle of the thin metal trunk lid. That’s the tin-can appeal, right in the ad.

I drove a VW for a number of years, so can’t complain.

On the other hand, the first thing I thought of after seeing this was a scene from  Rosemary’s Baby, a TV motorcycle ad that John Cassavetes’ ‘Guy Woodhouse’ performs in. Cassavetes plays it perfectly: Guy is okay, but nowhere near as personable or talented as Dustin Hoffman. Maybe that’s why he decides his career needed some Satanic help.

And Joe Dante circulated this very nice CBS Sunday Morning tribute to Roger Corman, that aired on TV in 2012. It’s great — in seven minutes it synopsizes the basic Corman appeal without overstatements or factual missteps. It floats some nice film clips and shows the producer-director at his congenial best.

The host is Mo Rocca.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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It’s a brief notice today … I pride myself for going over my review of  The Silent Star and removing whole paragraphs that read too much like showing off, or that push opinions I can’t back up with real facts … not that the review isn’t still a bit overloaded. When discs are released that CineSavant really really really wants to see, this is what happens.

The only column item today is a winner picked out by our Michael McQuarrie: an archive audio recording from 1966 that’s a recital of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.

The gimmick in this case is the voice talent reader of the short story, none other than cinema horrormeister William Castle, he of the showmanship gimmicks, and personal appearances with his everpresent cigar. Castle’s reading is …. enthusiastic?   emphatic?   Just too much?  He’s giving it all, so no complaints here. You know what they always never say about old Bill Castle: “Gee, if he had directed Rosemary’s Baby himself, it might have been much better!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Thanks to a little help from friends, shall we say, CineSavant will soon have some fun review writing to do. A disc of the UK Region B  Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA arrived, and will clearly grab our attention for several hours; the Eureka! disc is loaded with extras.

I’ll be concentrating on the set’s main attraction, Kurt Maetzig’s 1959 interplanetary epic  Der schweigende Stern, aka  The Silent Star, aka  Milcząca gwiazda, aka  Raumschiff Venus antwortet nicht, and finally dubbed and chopped up as  First Spaceship on Venus, which is how I saw it on a 1962 double bill, with an equally mutilated Japanese Kaiju, Varan the Indigestible.

And thanks to contributor Gary Teetzel we have a review loaner for an import from the other side of the world, the [Imprint] box  Tales of Adventure Collection 5, which happens to be a Sci-fi compendium with three (or four?) productions making their Blu-ray debut in Region A.

The biggest title is actually from Universal-International, and has already been released here in a near-definitve Blu, Joseph M. Newman’s  This Island Earth. It’s accompanied by three Columbia efforts,  The 27th Day,  The Gamma People and  The Night the World Exploded, plus an oddball English show with a noted Camp reputation,  Devil Girl from Mars.

It’ll be a concentration of ’50s Sci-fi damsels in distress — Faith Domergue, Eva Bartok, Kathryn Grant, Valerie French and the immortal Patricia Laffan:

Second up, the reliable Michael McQuarrie has found a winner at the seemingly inexhaustible archive.org, an entire fantasy film magazine from 26 years ago.

It’s Cult Movies issue 28 from 1999, published by Michael Copner. I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of this decently-assembled item. It has the usual film reviews and announcements, and some just-okay articles, but also a lot of worthy items written by people I came to know much later, like Cenk Kiral, who helped out a bit on our long-ago Sergio Leone DVD extras.

The full lineup has Mr. Kiral’s excellent interview with Mickey Knox, plus Tom Weaver interviewing Booth Colman, and David Del Valle’s interview piece with Joyce Jameson. Forrest J. Ackerman contributes a rambling column, while more genuine research-oriented pieces are offered by Scott MacGillivray & Ted Okada (Realart Pictures), and Frank J. Dello Stritto & Gary Don Rhodes (Bela Lugosi).

There’s even an interview piece between the publisher and Jan Alan Henderson, a Superman and Lugosi expert I met long ago through a mutual friend, editor Steve Nielson. I remember Jan dropping by once in the middle of the night in 1978, to either buy or sell an extra 16mm reel of Val Lewton trailers…

All in all, I was impressed … I’ve seen a lot of magazines of this kind, and this one had pieces I really wanted to read.

Finally, we’re pleasantly surprised at a recent announcement from Kino Lorber. It’s definitely welcome news: Mario Bava’s incomparable comic book masterpiece  Danger: Diabolik will arrive on July 22 in 4K Ultra HD.

Several years back, beautiful Blu-rays came out from both [Imprint] and Shout! Factory that solved the film’s many odd audio issues. This is said to be a brand new master from a 4K scan, so we hope they replicate the previous good work — older discs had used revisionist re-dub voice tracks, and buried Ennio Morricone’s wonderful music at too low a level.

And an equally interesting announcement is that Kino will concurrently release a triple-bill Blu-ray of the Manetti Brothers’ recent Diabolik remakes, now called  The Diabolik Trilogy.   the three features are  Diabolik (2020),  Diabolik: Ginko Attacks! (2022) and  Diabolik: Who Are You? (2023). Initial reviews were mixed; we’ll finally get to see for ourselves how they shape up. I’m assuming they’ll fare better than the 1960s trilogy of  Fantomas movies, that turned out to be a big disappointment.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson