Hello!

The word on the street is that classic Euro-horror with Barbara Steele is in the works. Severin Films’ David Gregory announced a group of upcoming titles last weekend at an event they hosted.

The eye-opener is a new restoration of Antonio Margheriti’s 1964 shocker Castle of Blood with Barbara Steele, George Rivière and Margrete Robsahm. When written up by European critics the given title is usually the original Italian Danza Macabra or the French Danse Macabre. It’s the horror tale of a man who takes a bet from Edgar Allan Poe to spend the night in a creepy house, where ghosts replay a ghastly murder.

What’s more, the new restoration is said to be going forth in both Blu-ray AND  4K Ultra HD.

21 years ago we reviewed a Synapse DVD of Castle of Blood that had a passable image and included for the first time a censored scene we thought we’d never see. Back in 2015 at Stuart Galbraith’s World Cinema Paradise I reviewed a Severin Blu-ray of Nightmare Castle (L’Amanti d’oltretomba) that included a couple of bonus features, one of which was a decent HD transfer of Castle of Blood from a good-looking Woolner Bros. print. But alas, no uncut European scenes.

Severin has been stepping up its remarkable Eurohorror restorations for years now — let’s hope they’ve got something really special for us in the pipeline, versions and languages-wise. This title is well-remembered — about 20 years ago we were able to see a (pretty crummy) copy at the American Cinematheque, attended by Ms. Steele herself. Yes, that was fun and special.

 

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Yet another topic CineSavant’s been harping on for years is how classic Sci-fi pointed to ‘future anxieties,’ such as the kind of climate trepidation we’re now feeling. The watchful David J. Schow came across this new (August 14) BBC Culture shout-out to one of the most prescient films of the 1960s, Val Guest & Wolf Mankowitz’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire: The 1961 film that predicted a ‘boiling planet’. The brief article was written by Gregory Wakeman.

We thank David, and tout our own reviews of the excellent Blu-ray discs that are available, from The BFI and KL Studio Classics.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Insecure?  You can’t turn your back for two seconds these days.

 

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Weather break, anxiety level 2.5. This is a photo taken at 7 a.m. from CineSavant Central, and as you can see it’s a beautiful August morning in Los Angeles. It’s sunglasses and sandals weather. Yet we’re assured that by tomorrow, a major tropical storm called Hilary will be here, coming from due South. We’re told that said storm *could* be stronger than anything that’s hit in my lifetime.

We already spent part of yesterday puttering around, doing preparatory things. We’re basically in good shape. We don’t normally worry about the weather around here too much, not being in a fire or flood zone, or on an iffy hillside like some of our good neighbors. In a big rain storm our only weakness is drainage — will the pumps keep up?  The thing that scares out-of-towners to death is our earthquakes, which come every twenty years. At present we’re late for a killer quake by ten years.

The other thing is California weather guilt . . . we have some of the worst fires, but our weather is generally kind and forgiving. The national news makes it look as if entire states are being wiped out on a daily basis, washed down raging rivers or blown away by typhoons or tornados. Everything is a shock, a bolt from the blue. Maybe we need a new way to report weather news … if everything is ‘unprecedented,’ shouldn’t ‘unprecedented’ be the new default state?

Los Angeles is never ready for anything so I’m curious as to how we’ll react if we get a dose of the punishment dished out elsewhere. I will also start practicing my, ‘ah I wasn’t worried’ attitude.

 

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Next up, it’s another web radio show in the series DVD Classics Corner On The Air, the interview/variety/review site hosted by the esteemed Dick Dinman.

This week Dick delves into Criterion’s new 4K release of the 5 Columbia ‘Ranown’ Westerns starring Randolph Scott; the expert host along to introduce them is author Jeremy Arnold. Jeremy is a contributor to the disc set and an authority on the films’ director, Budd Boetticher.

CineSavant recently reviewed the Ranown-Boetticher-Scott 4K western box as well.

 

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To finish up, advisor and all-around knowledgeable film expert Gary Teetzel usually sends links, but today he sends along something he heard on his daily work commute, Instead of music or an audio book, it’s an old radio show. Gary was listening to . . . aw, I’ll let him tell it:

I was listening to an episode of the Burns & Allen radio show from August, 1940 on the way to work this morning. George says that the producer Joe Pasternak is coming to consider him for a part in a movie, so that leads to this exchange with Gracie, who kids him that the offer is going to his head.

I’ve abridged the exchange slightly:

GEORGE: Remember, when Joe Pasternak gets here, I run the show!  I come up with the idea!  I write it, direct it, produce it and star in it!

GRACIE: OK, Orson.

GEORGE: You don’t even know who Orson Welles is!

GRACIE: I do so. He’s making a picture for 21st Century Fox.

GEORGE: Don’t you mean 20th Century Fox?

GRACIE: By the time he’s finished making it–

GEORGE & GRACIE (in unison): –it’ll be 21st Century Fox!

Pasternak does appear on the episode as himself, commenting that he’s currently producing Seven Sinners with Marlene Dietrich. He doesn’t bother mentioning the male lead, John Wayne. — Gary

Orson Welles fans ought to see the joke as significant — it acknowledges that in 1940, a whole year before the debut (and accompanying ruckus) of Citizen Kane, the national media had tagged the boy genius Orson as a fussy artist, and a procrastinator.

 

Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday, God willing and the river don’t rise. — Glenn Erickson

This image doesn’t do it justice — it’s the convergence of fairy tales and medical madness.

 

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Tom Weaver’s Scripts from the Crypt book series is on a Mummy Roll this year — hot on the heels of his book analyzing Universal’s The Mummy’s Hand comes an all-inclusive tome on the second show in the wartime series, The Mummy’s Tomb.

Weaver is of course the compiler of informed interviews with actors and other creatives responsible for decades of classic horror and sci-fi pictures. Now that most everybody from that era has retired to the pearly gates, his Bear Manor ‘Scripts from the Crypt’ series has extended and improved upon older books that annotated reprints of classic screenplays. Weaver’s notes on Tomb benefit from a close examination of Universal records, Variety announcements and a microscopic comparison of script to finished film.

These books are for fans that can’t learn enough about these legendary pictures. The comprehensive look at Lon Chaney Jr. helps place the actor in Hollywood’s pecking order, striving for good roles. Also covered is the inside story on the creation of Chaney’s mummy — even while wearing a mask (instead of an hours’ long makeup job) Chaney still found the costume a pain. To help him heft the femme victime Elyse Knox, Chaney wore a rig similar to a telephone lineman’s harness sling. The book points out where the sling can be seen in production photos, as well as on the screen.

After reading Laura Wagner’s thorough bio on the appealing Elyse Knox, we’re disappointed that the movie restricted her to such a decorative role. Weaver’s fellow tomb desecrator Fred Olen Ray offers his personal remembrance of the gentlemanly matinee idol Turhan Bey. The actor performed in Ray’s video release Possessed by the Pickle Jar Night.

In addition to general production notes, Tom Weaver covers the unusual career story of George Zucco, delving into the details of a morals charge brought against the actor in New Zealand. Nobody’s perfect. The book’s 250 pages are packed with unusual photos, the full pressbook, arcane details, screwy conjectures, stabs at graveyard humor, fan homages and interesting newspaper articles. If you’re on a tight budget, it’ll set you back less than the cost of a week’s supply of Tana leaves.

 

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And as long as we’re in such a happy ‘Universal Monsters’ mood, David J. Schow has been circulating an impressive montage by Anthony Magnoni entitled Universal Monsters – Fan Made Trailer, that incorporates some stylish graphics.

David offered his compliments:  “it recognizes several simple truths about the staying power of the classics . . . Not a wink or a nudge-nudge or an elbow-jab joke in the whole assembly.”  I think it’s a great montage — the well-timed images make Lugosi’s Dracula look especially dynamic, and those static images from Karloff’s The Mummy carry real impact.

David added a link to an older, different montage celebration of Mighty Universal Monster Magic. ‘Gorizard’s’ Horror is Universal – A Tribute to Universal’s Monsters even works in a little Lon Chaney Sr., Carlo Villiarías and Lou Costello. It uses music by Danny Elfman, from The Wolfman remake.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Still the one Wes Anderson that charms 100%, no reservations.

 

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The theme at CineSavant today is Two Faces Has Barbie. I thought our trip to the attic to dig up some 70 year-old toys would be the end of the subject here, but I was wrong …

College friend Clark Dugger filmed my UCLA Project 2 and was also my Best Man; he filmed ‘Kirlian’ phenomena for Thelma Moss and worked for designers Charles and Ray Eames for a spell — and then spent a rewarding career doing glamour photography and audiovisual tech development for Mattel Toys. I never asked Clark for details of his personal ‘life with ,’ but he recently posted a clip from a documentary he produced on the company, which included the official story of its creation:

Barbie Clip from Mattel Toys Documentary 

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Then there’s the alternate explanation for the source of Mattel’s astoundingly popular toy line. It’s been around for a while, but our favorite commentator David J. Schow resurrected it a week or so back. A different set of toy historians are convinced that Barbie’s origin came from a German cartoon character with a less wholesome backstory:

Meet Lilli, the German Call Girl Who Became Barbie
Writer ‘messynessy’ describes the German comic strip character known as ‘Bild Lilli’ as ‘a postwar gold-digging buxom broad who got by in life seducing wealthy male suitors.’  It wasn’t just a cartoon image — a doll was manufactured as well.

 

Speaking of outdated, politically invalid images of women, we’re still surprised that nobody found a way to market new dolls, cartoons, movies, whatnot, of Hugh Hefner’s naughty Femlin, the LeRoy Neiman creation seen in vintage Playboy magazines. Obvious PC explanations aside.

 

. . . And finally, there were distinct possibilities with the 1957 French science fiction comedy Un amour de poche (“A Girl in His Pocket”) directed by Pierre Kast, a Cahiers du cinéma critic not celebrated as part of the New Wave. A dubbed version showed on TV a few times in the 1960s and since then has made itself scarce. ↓

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

We had glee in ’63 . . . when some of the best Sci-fi was on the tube.

 

Hello!

The generous Joe Dante circulated this hot short subject from Eric Lavoie, who says it received a good reaction at last week’s Fantasia festival.

The entertaining subject is the Wilhelm Scream, the ever-present audio scream that everyone recognizes. NPR had a radio item on it a couple of weeks back, playing the entire recording session. The creative Mr. Lavoie has made a 7-minute short subject that shows the vocal effect’s initial use, a second film where it was attributed to a bit character named ‘Wilhelm,’ and numerous re-uses in films, especially after it was discovered by the Star Wars generation.

It’s The Scream That Wouldn’t End. It finishes with some examples where it doesn’t belong. A manipulated image of Sheb Wooley, the actor who voiced the original scream, serves as the short subject’s host.

 

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The passing of director William Friedkin made us think of when we worked with him on DVD Blu-ray projects …

We hope to be reviewing Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. soon, as it contains an extended making of documentary with some of our best work — intercutting feature film clips with extensive, not-before-seen video from the set. The bountiful BTS coverage enabled us to edit a kind of ‘exploded’ car chase scene.

We also edited several pieces for the DVD of Friedkin’s The Hunted from 2003 . . . but the most fun we had was on Friedkin’s first personally curated Blu-ray release of The French Connection.  My producer organized a great two-camera shoot for Anatomy of a Chase, with Friedkin taking his producer Philip D’Antoni back to Brooklyn to retrace the chase scene, with Randy Jurgensen driving the car. Friedkin’s energy in the piece is infectious. He dares D’Antoni to run up the steel ‘El’ stairway, making fun of his producer’s slower pace.

On the same 2009 disc is the now-obsolete extra in which Friedkin explained his strange revsionary method to completely change the film’s color. It wasn’t well received at the time and looks even weirder now, but the director touts his method with more of his signature attitude, unbridled enthusiasm. I’m told that he tried to get Barbra Streisand to apply his ‘oversaturated, de-focused’ color technique to her movie Yentl.

He was certainly an unforgettable artist, a true original.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson