Hello!

Dick Dinman and DVD Classic Corner on the Web have a podcast this month that covers two interesting subjects.

On the docket is Dick and producer Dan Marino discussing John Wayne’s The Conqueror which we reviewed here at CineSavant a couple of weeks back.

Dick discusses some other new releasess, but an extra thrill is an audio interview he conducted with Kathleen Hughes, the star of the also- recently reviewed disc The Glass Web, in 3-D. Dick inquires about her experience working with Edward G. Robinson.

And Joe Dante gravitated toward this BBC Online article from last October by Áine Quinn, that collects video interviews asking four top horror actors — Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price — to explain their individual opinions on the subject of Horror.

Peter Cushing’s video interview is hidden in the text, but it’s there. I guess our main takeaway is admiration for these congenial gentlemen … each is articulate and telegenic.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s time to tell Los Angeles fans that Noir City Hollywood is back in town again for the next two weekends. They really know how to put on a show — the traveling festival will light up the Egyptian Theater on March 20-23 and March 27-30, with a full roster of 23 features.

The theme this year is Femmes Fatale, in keeping with Eddie Muller’s book Dark City Dames. The special treat promised will be in-person appearances by Annette Bening and Jennifer Tilly,

The women-in-noir celebration begins with an Ida Lupino thriller — projected on nitrate. Appreciative Noir Fans seem to be everywhere, turning out for Noir City festivals across the country. Full details for our Hollywood gathering are at the American Cinematheque site:

Doing its educational bit for the ongoing fight against fascism, TIME magazine online offers this short but good  historical article by Chris Yogerst on the fine record of Warner Bros. in the 1930s, to galvanize American opposition to Hitler’s Germany. The personality in focus is the studio’s founder Harry Warner. He led a coaliton of Hollywood bigwigs to fund investigations of subversive organizations like the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund.

Last year I read a thorough history of the Hollywood’s anti-Nazi counter-espionage effort, Steven J. Ross’s book  Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.

Brought up in the article is the fact that Warners produced the first big anti-Nazi movie, Confessions of Nazi Spy. Its advertising didn’t shy away from the attack, with the tagline “The pictures that calls a Swastika a SWASTIKA!”  Groucho Marx is quoted as saying that Warner Bros. was “the only studio with any guts.”  From March 6, the TIME article:

Advisor and all-round sage Gary Teetzel informs us of an upcoming disc set of interest from Radiance. Twenty years ago we finally caught up with Der Verlorene, aka The Lost One, starring Peter Lorre. Produced in Germany, the 1951 drama was always noted for two things — 1.)  it was the only film directed by Peter Lorre, and — 2.)  it was really difficult to see.

We learned firsthand about the ‘hard to see’ part when the ratty video copy we found turned out to be a poor transfer, with possible missing scenes. Its subtitles didn’t cover all the dialogue and didn’t feel accurate anyway. We couldn’t tell if the movie was good or bad — it certainly seemed intense. Our screening mostly told us that, you know, it would be really nice to see Der Verlorene for real sometime.

An opportunity to do that is a couple of months away. The UK company Radiance has announced their  World Noir Vol. 3  disc set. Radiance’s pub copy says that a fully restored encoding of Peter Lorre’s one directing effort will share the box with two other highly-regarded thrillers from France and Sweden. The extras might will clear up some of the stories we’ve heard aboutDer Verlorene. The one most repeated is that something (a fire?) forced Lorre and producer Arnold Pressburger to reshoot some or all of the picture.

Radiance has its full fact sheet up for the disc set, which appears to be All-Region. The release date is still a ways off, June 25, so we’ll be checking up on its progress:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We have A Revised Book Review today. Five years ago we were engrossed by author S.M. Guariento’s book Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations . I loaned it to a friend who was in publishing in New York, who loved it. I’ve just now seen the New Revised Edition which prompts a repeat of the old review-essay. We’ve added some notes at the bottom.

From August 8, 2020:

… I have a Book Review of an impressive discovery: an exhaustive, well-written study of film novelizations — the (mostly) pocketbook tie-ins for movie releases, both to promote them and maximize profits. They were everywhere when I was young, and for all kinds of pictures.

The Deluxe Edition from Ideogram Press of Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations turns my thinking around 180 degrees…. author-researcher S.M. Guariento has broken ground on a fresh topic and done it justice. The text dives right into the subject, paying no need to the fact that many novelizations are fast-buck items that some were spun out by hack writers. Guariento’s title says fifty novelizations but his 480 authoritative, entertaining pages cover hundreds more movies that were converted into reader bait for the drugstore racks. All the collectable oddities are covered, even those strange tie-in versions of Gorgo and Reptilicus that added laughable sex scenes. We’re still disturbed by mental images of Peter Cushing lusting after schoolgirls in Brides of Dracula.

Light into Ink qualifies as an art book as well — it is illustrated with hundreds of color reproductions of vintage paperback covers, in many cases, multiple covers for popular novelizations. I know a couple of collectors that would consider this volume something of a Bible on the subject.

The easy-reading but academic-level text does more than give an overview. The author analyzes his fifty focus titles in great detail, explaining why novelizations vary so much from their accompanying films. In most cases the book is written before the movie is released, and the author must work from an early script draft. Guariento covers specialists in the form, but also charts unusual situations, at least one in which the original story author, who had nothing to do with the movie script, is brought back to do a novelization. He essentially got to ‘direct’ his version of the story.

A full range of films and genres is represented — pulp thrill items and even European art pix. Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote book versions of their movies for the news stands. Annie Carlisle’s novelization for  Liquid Sky, which she only starred in, is described as autobiographical in nature. We’re told that the authors of the tie-ins for  Forbidden Planet and  Mad Max used an epistolary format.

The text of Light into Ink isn’t padded. All of the facts in the previous paragraph came from page 43 and 44. I was hooked by the book only a few pages in, when Guariento broke the ‘Information Barrier’ on the mysterious horror movie  Blood and Roses. He says that the published novelization follows the feature closely, and includes the rumored blob vampire-monster in the heavily-edited dream sequence, that now exists only in a couple of tantalizing photos. Guess who is going to be trying to track down an elusive, 60 year-old pocketbook? Until now all I collected were different editions of Day of the Triffids.

There’s a revelation to be had on every page. Light into Ink puts photo-faces on scores of unheralded novelization writers. Frankly, some novelizations made us think that the writer slammed out his words behind an alias, holding his nose as he typed. That’s how I felt when I first read the paperback edition of Major Dundee which Harry Julian Fink adapted from his treatment, and presumably his unused screenplay. It’s a shapeless mess, plain and simple.

The fifty films given individual chapter attention are an eclectic bunch, from horror pix by Carpenter and Cronenberg to Leone’s spaghetti westerns to things like  The Day the Earth Caught Fire. In comparing images to ink we learn something about both. The novelizations will illuminate different elements, or follow a different path than the film entirely. Guariento’s dedication to detail digs deep into foreign version research for the pocketbook adaptations of a number of Giallo classics.

The book gravitates toward films that might be difficult to adapt to print: a section called ‘Dangerous Visions’ covers films as diverse as  “X”,  Performance,  Zardoz,  Phase IV,  Sorcerer and  Harlequin. Extensive quotes make the case that the novelization for ‘X” betters the movie in visualizing Dr. Xavier’s X-Ray visions. For the book tie-in for  Taxi Driver we learn that author Richard Elman preferred to skip the descriptor ‘novelization’ in favor of the phrase ‘parallel reimagining of the screenplay.’ Author Guariento argues well that the writers of tie-in books are not necessarily hacks — you know, like the thuggish architect in  The Fountainhead who growls out, “We wanna express our creativity too!”

Note March 10, 2025: the revised edition is about fifty pages longer. It has more detail and information on the films and books discussed, plus a discussion new of tie-in publishing post-2019. According to Guariento, the field has exploded, with new titles and ‘classic’ reprints, and writer Alan Dean Foster has penned a memoir. Guariento’s revision now includes a helpful index. So many titles and names are involved, that I had to keep dropping Hansel & Gretel post-it markers into the first edition. It really makes a difference.

The hardcover Deluxe Edition   Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations  is in full color (white cover) and is available exclusively through Amazon.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Gary Teetzel alerted us to an old car commercial making the rounds on Facebook, posted by ‘garyp11111.’

It’s for the ‘Plimley Chrysler-Dodge Dealership’ of Vancouver. The explanation is that the monster on view is a homemade suit built around a Don Post Mask. In this lo-res remnant, the suit looks pretty good. We doubt that anyone had a widescreen TV in the 1970s, though … this could have been produced to show in local theaters.

‘Plimley Motors’ was real. Performing due diligence, we came across a ‘two hungry blokes’ webpage with the full history of Plimley Motors. The man in the ad is listed. He’s Basil Paul Plimley, the third generation of Plimleys to run the firm, which was founded in 1893.

The description given of Basil’s interests is incomplete … in addition to ‘music, art, horses, golf, antiques and all things to do with William Shakespeare’ they should have added  ‘classic movie monsters.’

This is Gary Teetzel’s replacement title, not ours:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s a Flying Saucer Scare, from 1957.

Circulated by both David J. Schow and Joe Dante are these vintage newspaper photos that tell a story every Sci-fi fan will appreciate. They say these surfaced years ago, so they must have slipped unseen past these eyes.

According to the message I received, the The L.A. Times ran these photos in January 1957, taken ‘in the mud and dark of night in an area off Lakeridge Road.’  Hearing some talk about a flying saucer landing in the neighborhood, none other than Gloria Swanson and some friends (one of them in a very posh-looking coat) trundled through the mud and took these photos. We like seeing that the practical Ms. Swanson was smart enough to wear her mud shoes; she took off her dark glasses for the photo. As it looks like a dark and rainy day, were the glasses an attempt to maintain anonymity?

‘Just off Lakeridge Road’ places the saucer not in Bronson Caverns, but in Cahuenga pass up behind Lake Hollywood and the Ford Theater, in some clearing between Mulholland Drive and the Hollywood Sign. Monster movie fans will recognize the saucer right away, as being from Tom Graeff’s tiny, over-achieving production  Teenagers from Outer Space.

I think even Roger Corman would make sure to clean up after himself, as this is a rather large piece of junk to leave behind for somebody else cut up and haul away. The Teenagers movie is a hard-luck Hollywood tale … apparently filmed in late 1956, it didn’t surface until 1959. It’s not likely that Tom Graeff saw any profit participation in its national release from Warner Brothers.

(Both images enlarge.)  I saw Teenagers from Outer Space new in 1959 at age seven. I thought it was terrific, and really felt sorry for the teenage spaceman. But even I wasn’t fooled by those big lobster shadows.

And some scheduling news gives us the opportunity to say something nice about Turner Classic Movies. The blurb is short and sweet — the cable station is presently devoting a ton of air time to  Hollywood Pre-Code Movies,  dozens of them. It’s happening now and continues through March.

They’re listing at least ten we haven’t seen, so the DVR will get a workout. TCM has grown more corporate, but it still provides a basic access to classic films, and they still make it their business to air rare and unusual items.

TCM has its own list, but the one at this pre-code.com link is convenient. It comes in an article that also plugs a new TCM book by Kim Luperi and Danny Reid.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson