Hello!

Last December 3 David J. Schow alerted us to the good news for Leslie Stevens’ 1966 fantasy Incubus: a new and better film source will make possible a vastly improved video remaster.

If you recall from the old, not-so-good DVD, the original film elements for Incubus were lost long ago. When a remaster was desired all that could be found was a 16mm print with burned-in French subtitles, which required boxy overlays to add English subtitles. All viewers needed subs, as the movie was performed in Esperanto.

Writer-director Stevens was looking for an artful, distanced approach, not a way to exploit the untapped Esperanto market.  Filmed by Conrad Hall and Bill Fraker, the show continues the light, filtered visual look those famed cameramen applied to Stevens’ Outer Limits TV show. The Dominic Frontiere music adds even more Outer-Limitsy deja-vu. The cast toplines William Shatner, one good reason that the movie has received exceptional attention.

David J. Schow says that the surviving 35mm print is being scanned in 4K. The production company in charge, Le Chat Qui Fume, reports that the image quality is excellent. Their Stéphane Bouyer forwarded some frame grab samples. ↑

Here’s a real treat: an excellent restored and upscaled remastering of a 1944 WB musical short, posted by Andy Lewis at Vimeo. It’s Jammin’ the Blues, an filmic jazz jam session featuring Lester Young. The director is Gjon Mili, whose status as a noted still photographer becomes immediately apparent.

Mili’s photographic skills really come to the fore — the short is given a progressive style that looks like something an experimental filmmaker might have filmed a decade later. The B&W visuals are terrific — it’s the first Hollywood cinematography credit for Alfred Hitchcock’s future collaborator, Robert Burks. He immediately graduated to feature work.

A special treat are two name performers. Marie Bryant gets a wonderful singing showcase; we know her from her performance of ‘Your Red Wagon’ in Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night. Dancing with Bryant is favorite Archie Savage, an actor in Vera Cruz and South Pacific, choreographer for Cabin in the Sky and Sodom and Gomorrah, and one of film’s first black astronauts, in the Italian Assignment: Outer Space.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Two days ago the 3-D Film Archive’s Bob Furmanek announced a big step for the long-in-gestation, Pandemic-delayed 3-D restoration of Phil Tucker’s immortal Robot Monster. The release is planned for this summer; Bob notes that Kickstarter subscribers to the restoration project will receive their copies earlier than the official publication date.

←  The final product artwork also made its debut. The good-looking painting depicts roughly 20 of the film’s credited Billion Bubbles.

The actual disc distributor has been announced: Bayview Entertainment. The 3-D Archive’s previous work has benefitted from excellent distributors — we hope the new arrangement turns out to be a winner. We’ve been following this project for at least two years; when the smoke clears hopefully we’ll learn the details on the rights issues with Robot Monster, if only because they were thought to be tied up for so long.

The official press release can be seen at Kickstarter.

Some promising restoration news, forwarded by Gary Teetzel: ClassicFlix has begun a video restoration job on the classic 1940 fantasy-drama  Our Town, directed by Sam Wood and designed (beautifully) by William Cameron Menzies. Sophisticated special effects were employed to depict the ghostly afterlife episodes in playwright Thornton Wilder’s stage presentation. Menzies’ radical designs express the notion that, beneath appearances, our daily lives are haunted byhuman frailty and regret.

The movie features William Holden in an early role, and stars Martha Scott, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Guy Kibbee and Doro Merande. Frank Craven is the original ‘stage manager’ character, a narrator who exists ‘outside time,’ as if speaking from the Twilight Zone. The music score is by Aaron Copland.

Originally released by United Artists, Our Town became an Oscar nominee for Best Picture. But it hasn’t been properly preserved. The original film elements apparently reverted to the rights holders. Who knows where they are now — this was one of the first films to become a Public Domain no-show and it’s been missed ever since. I’ve posted on CineSavant more than once that a ‘restoration’ has been promised on TCM … but every time I’ve tuned in they’ve shown the same wretched 3rd-generation dupe: full of splices and as difficult to hear as it is to see. The off-framing spoils William Cameron Menzies’ careful designs. Adding insult to injury, a PD video company has added their own names to the credits, as ‘restoration experts.’

Could the success of the recently restored Menzies classic Invaders from Mars have inspired this move?  ClassicFlix is working from a fine-grain master that they say “has baked-in issues like persistant scratching, staining, warping and instability, but when cleaned up will look very nice.” That’s encouraging. They offer a link to a sample raw scan of what they’re working from. Even with the scratches, the clip is already a vast improvement.

A greatly improved copy of another former PD eyesore showed on TCM a few months back. Also designed by William Cameron Menzies, the ‘lost’ classic So Ends Our Night was directed by John Cromwell and stars Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan, Glenn Ford and Erich von Stroheim. Where’s that improved disc?  I have the sinking feeling that these movies are already on the need-to-rescue lists of archives everywhere . . . is it possible that their original negatives were thrown away?  Say it ain’t so.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Not a lot happening at CineSavant Central, which is GOOD news. But I bumped into a couple of fun links to share. At a place called Filmsite Tim Dirks has collected various groupings of title screens, fairly sharp and accurate (I note that When Worlds Collide is from a trailer).

The screen grabs are not very large but they line up well, arrayed by year, and alphabetically within a given year. That’s how I once organized DVDs, until the volume became untenable.

The page is called Movie Title Screens Sci-Fi Creature Features of the 1950s. Filmsite’s home page is here.

Are there other pages with elaborate Screen Cap title frame grabs of our favorite genre films?

It’s a link from the past, but I just encountered it again and am impressed by how perfectly it all fits together. It’s even better than another favorite, a somewhat older mix & match video joke that confects a 007-Ghidrah Mash-up.

Krishna Shenoi put this one together eight years ago . . . it’s a fantastic, happy Alternate Ending for Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. The funny thing is that little or no digital futzing was needed to make the joke work — the shots appear to be exactly what’s in each show.

CineSavant’s original review for Gravity is here. A follow-up disc in 3-D Blu-ray is still a favorite.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Gary Teetzel forwards this link to the official Syracuse University listing for The Forrest J. Ackerman Papers, which you will be happy to know is a collection that occupies 351 linear feet in the Syracuse Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.

We of course read ‘4-E’ for years as kids. Plenty of us wrote him and it’s amusing to see names of friends and notables listed in his ‘You Axed for It’ columns. I’ve heard a few odd claims made about Ackerman but believed Bill Warren’s descriptions of him as an earnest enthusiast and self-promoter who could be generous at times. We were hoping that the contents of the Amazing Ackermansion would end up in some organized collection or museum, and weren’t all sure where all those valuable books, posters, props and keepsakes now reside.

This list of the official holdings at Syracuse give an idea of the different sides of Forrest Ackerman’s life as a career—fan, literary agent, and editor. The listings span the history of sci-fi fandom from the earliest days to the 21st century. Forry began by writing figures like Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft and ended up trading letters with Peter Jackson. The correspondence list reads like a Who’s Who of science fiction and horror authors.

The introductory notes clear up things a little bit — some of the Ackermansion’s treasures reportedly ended up in Seattle. It’s also amusing to learn that Forry’s own writings earned him the title of ‘honorary Lesbian’ — we didn’t hear that promoted in Famous Monsters of Filmland.

The guy was definitely a big force in fandom. If you’re ready to be bombarded with pro-Ackerman info and accolades, slip over to the Mr. Monster page, at efanzines.com.

Seattle is just a week or so away from its 2023 Noir City film estival, to be held at a venue called the SIFF Cinema Egyptian, from February 10-16.

Dapper Eddie Muller, host, raconteur and Noir authority will be there in person for the first three nights — he’s been the voice of the style going on twenty years now. If Seattle’s Noir City gatherings are anything like our Hollywood shows, it should be some guaranteed classy nights out on the town — appreciative audiences, fun distractions, and solid movie experiences of the communal kind. It’s not a ‘museum’ environment.

Eighteen films in seven days — one can parse the full list with other info at the Noir City Seattle page.

What’s this ugly image about?  Helpful correspondent John Charles read last Tuesday’s CineSavant Marco Polo review, and responded to the ‘mystery’ of a ‘missing’ shot in the movie. I explained in the review that when I saw the American-International release as a small boy, I was struck by a gory cutaway to a skewered corpse in the bottom of a treacherous torture pit. In the ‘Export Version’ on Kino Lorber’s disc, there is no cutaway.

John Charles obtained this screen grab, from some awful video from a faded surviving print. Tim Lucas apparently wasn’t kidding when he said the A.I.P. cut of Marco Polo was just not available, nowhere, no-how. Until the Kino disc, this may have been the best the movie looked.

It does look like a shot from the original shoot, with the same actor. In a decent color transfer I think the impression would be a LOT of blood.

But it’s good to know that I didn’t just imagine the cutaway. The lack of a cutaway in Kino’s Export Version plays a little strangely. We don’t know what Marco Polo (Rory Calhoun) sees when he looks into the hole in the floor. I’d assume the poor victim fell into a bottomless pit or something.

Perhaps the Italians provided sub-distributors with a ‘kit’ of extra editorial materials?  Nothing so violent or graphic happens anywhere else in the movie. We can imagine Nicholson saying to Arkoff: ‘Look, nobody complained too loudly at the gore in Black Sunday, and this relatively tame show needs something.‘ Maybe the optical folk that added VFX to Reptilicus painted in some extra gore . . . ?

Thank you, John Charles !

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

CineSavant contributor and artist Charlie Largent has been adding to his etsy store JestInTime with new pro digital illustrations. Charlie’s work is well known from Trailers from Hell and Video Watchdog, of course.

Charlie adds that he’s offering customized greetings on the cards as an option — just contact him here on Facebook. His overall business page is called Charlie Hill Illustration.

Dependable David J. Schow sends his greetings — he just circulated some fun ‘ant-‘ related links. This one is taken from an old DVD extra. We haven’t seen it in a long time, and it again inspired considerable thought.

The short video piece collects a few raw, uncut outtakes from the movie Them!, clearly sourced from the Warner Bros. stock film library. If you haven’t seen the Giant Ants Behind the Scenes it’s something of a revelation. We knew that the big ants were mechanical puppets, probably only one or two fully articulated creatures and a bunch of partial ants, like bobble heads. But only once or twice are we given a glimpse of an entire ant.

The uncut shots give us a really good look at them — the WB fabricators gave them moving heads, working pincers, excellent waving antennae, and legs that walk smoothly (but rather slowly). We wonder what color they might have been — Them! was at one point going to be filmed in color, and perhaps even in 3-D. In 1953 Variety reported dozens of movies as being planned for depth treatment; how many were seriously prepped is another story.

Here we can see details that might have looked sensational in color — the eyes had bubbly, sparkly liquid swooshing about inside, reportedly activated by washing machine agitators. In one close-up we can see the back of an ant’s head bulging as it tilts downward.

In the movie the cuts are really quick, and the outtakes tell us why — when seen any longer than a second or two, the ant-mannequins begin to resemble exactly what they are, puppets with limited movement. The brief cuts of ants always show them in motion, enhanced with camera trucks and tilts that disguise their limited mobility. I don’t think we ever see an ant foot ‘floating’ off the ground.

Whenever I see Them! I marvel at the skill behind the shooting and editing of the ant scenes. Executives looking at the dailies may have thought, jeez these are fake, this will never work.  Yet the editors find the right bits of action, and dynamic montage sells the monsters 100%. Can they really be talking about a Them! remake now?  To do better than the 1954 original they’ll have to do more than fill a screen with CGI cartoon critters.

And Gary Teetzel has contributed a link of interest, to Boris Karloff’s final dramatic performance. It’s a brief guest appearance on TV’s The Name of the Game, the episode The White Birch. It was filmed at Boris’s old stomping grounds, Universal Studios. His appearance starts about a half hour in.

The actor pictured with Karloff is Jean-Pierre Aumont. Gary adds:

“When Karloff arrived at the set in a wheelchair and accompanied by a nurse, director Lamont Johnson was alarmed by his frail appearance and his breathing, which was impaired due to his emphysema. Karloff shook his hand and said in a firm voice “What you see before you is not encouraging, I’m sure, but what is there is entirely at your service, sir.” The work and being among his fellow actors seemed to energize him.”

“Shortly after completing this role Karloff made a guest appearance on the Halloween episode of The Jonathan Winters Show. That was his last TV work and, I think, his last work period — although some of his final feature films had not yet been released.” — Gary

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson