Hello!

We’ll be getting back to serious disc reviewing right away — we’ve got hot prospects from most every label — but a holiday ought to be a holiday, sez I … and Gorgo concurs. It’s a time of reflection and a chance to think of how incredibly lucky we are — simple security in this world is nothing we take for granted.

So rather than waste your time — shouldn’t you be snooping for something you can eat only because it’s a holiday? — we’re just saying Hi until Saturday and wishing you the best. I’ve done a round-up of disc covers with review links, of movies that were released last year that I’m ready to pick up and see again, without hesitation.

A special thanks to — CineSavant’s contributors. The feedback and advice and suggestions are a big boost . . . along with the ‘saves’ when I get some obvious fact so incredibly wrong. Thanks very much to:

Charlie Largent, Lee Broughton, Don Adams, Malcolm Alcala, Stefan Andersson, Michael Arick, Jeremy Arnold, Matt Barry, Aitam Bar-Sagi, Dennis Bartok, Ake Bergvall, Guido Bibra, Michael Bjortvedt, Robert Blair, James Pat Block, Francesco Borseti, Thomas Betts, Rutcherd Bong, Ulrich Bruckner, Giancarlo Cairella, David Carnegie, Brendan G. Carroll, Paul Cashman, Brad Caslor, John Charles, Arrianné Ulmer Cipes, Marshall Crawford, John Crummett, Jim Danforth, Joe Dante, Chris Dejardins, Alan Dezzani, Dick Dinman, Dennis Doros, Clark Dugger, Chris Endicott, Daniel Erickson, George Feltenstein, Christa Fuller, Bob Furmanek, John G., Rob Gaczol, Stuart Galbraith IV, Jonathan Gluckman, George Godwin, Vicki Greenleaf, David Gregory, Laura Grieve, Darren Gross, Phil Hall, Ted Haycraft, Jon Paul Henry, Avie Hern, Jonathan Hertzberg, Marc Edward Heuck, Josh Hibberd, Bruce Holecheck, Chris Howard, Mike Hyatt, Owen James, ‘Jameson,’ Josh Johnson, Lee Kaplan, David Kawas, Kyu Hyun Kim, Bruce Kimmel, John Kirk, Alex Kirschenbaum, Andreas Kortmann, Nicholas Krisfalusy, Justin LaLiberty, Lynn Lascaro, Arnold Leibovit, Christopher Lemaire, JT Lindroos, Marek ___, Marjan Manafi, Mel Martin, Mike Mayo, Joseph McBride, John McElwee, Michael McQuarrie, Alan Meier, John Miller, Kris Millsap, Eddie Muller, Constantine Nasr, Gregory Nicoll, Gary Palmucci, Kit Parker, Allan Peach, Chris Poggiali, Alan K. Rode, Christopher Rywalt, David J. Schow, Bill Shepard, Richard A. Smith, Ralph Coviello, Louis Helman, Scott MacQueen, Andy Powell, Annelise Purdie, Allan Peach, Chris Poggialli, Craig Reardon, Marie Remilius, Toby Roan, Jeffrey Rosen, Matt Rovner, Michael Ryan, Gene Schiller, Michael Schlesinger, Wayne Schmidt, Bill Shaffer, Steve Sharon, Chuck Shillingford, Mike Siegel, Francesco Simeoni, Greg Skora, Richard Harland Smith, Todd Stribich, David Strohmaier, Derek Stubinski, Ed Sullivan, Gary Teetzel, Jack Theakston, Gordon A. Thomas, Mark Throop, Kayla Torres, Hernan Esteban Guerrero Troncoso, Jim Tushinski, Morris Warren, Nick Wayman, Tom Weaver, Ian Whittle, Caryl Woods, Peter A. Yacavone, Richard Yuricich, Blair Zykan . . . and of course, ‘B’.

Each disc below links to a CineSavant review. This time I’ve put the disc covers in alphabetical order, to avoid the impression of playing favorites. Of course, there are favorites . . .

Okay, I’ll get back to the people here at home, in need of my annoying presence!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Happy holiday weekend, those of you not overwhelmed by weather issues. Drop us a note if you’re so inclined — I feel in the mood to answer!

I have a quick book report Book Review today … it’s the third ‘Mummy’ entry in the Scripts from the Crypt collection edited by Tom Weaver, a full-coverage script & scrapbook, essay & article-laden tome on the beloved penultimate title in the series, The Mummy’s Ghost. Although fans vote differenly, it’s my personal favorite of the ’40s Mummy pictures.

This time around writer Gregory W. Mank gets top billing — Tom Weaver ladles on the wealth of incidental info, random clippings, odd continuity ramblings and humor, but Mr. Mank carries the main 50-page production history piece on TMG, in fine form, I must say. Bryan Senn, Laura Wagner, Frank Dello Stritto, Alan K. Rode and Larry Blamire each add chapters, covering the actors and the director, and examining the series from multiple angles.

Tom handles an analysis of transformations, alterations, and changes made to the script so as not to offend Turks and Egyptians. Many changes seem intended just to save a dime or two on the Universal ledger books. The most fascinating stuff involves details that only meticulous, obsessed, certifiable truly dedicated fans would notice, such as a telltale birthmark that appears and disappears from one of the characters. Weaver also delves into head-scratching issues of simple cause & effect logic — the unlucky Amina (to-die-for Ramsay Ames) appears to be stricken by a terrible curse from the past . . . before said curse has been initiated.

You’ll be happy to know that in the midst of fighting WW2, the U.S. government filled a thick file with correspondence to make sure that TMG wouldn’t cause our Middle Eastern allies to switch to the side of the Axis — Weaver includes a fistful of documents on the matter.

In the true spirit of ‘Everything Goes and it’s all Interesting,’ The Ghost book ends with 75 pages of Addendums, odd ephemera and tangential items as worthwhile as the core material, plus one item inadvertently omitted from the previous Mummy book. And we told ourselves we wouldn’t spread rumors about Tom W. hittin’ the Old Tana Juice . . .

It’s a BearManor Media publication, released November 12 in both soft and hardcover editions. Here’s the Amazon order page, and one for BearManor too.

Okay, yes, I can’t resist the urge to tell an annoying personal tie-in story. In the third grade I discovered Famous Monsters at about issue #32, through pal Arthur Gaitan, whose family owned a fancy Mexican Restaurant. Already a confirmed monster fanatic, Arthur broke me in on basic lore regarding Frankenstein (that’s the doctor’s name, stupid) and Dracula (he bites ’em, but they don’t show it, stupid). I’d seen the Hammer Mummy theatrically and loved it, so was keen to see what Lon Chaney Jr. would be like in this Mummy’s Ghost show.

The chase finale was a cinema lesson in parallel cutting, but also an early life lesson in weirdness. Essentially, Kharis has Kharried off the lovely Amina (Ms. Ames, swoon). She is already affected by the curse, or a serum, or something … her hair has been turning white for a scene or two. As Kharis takes her right into the swamp, we keep cutting back to the posse and her boyfriend … who don’t seem to be making particularly good progress in their pursuit.

The Mummy’s Ghost didn’t cooperate with my assumptions of how ‘Suspense’ was supposed to work on screen. Amina is sinking deeper into the swamp. It really doesn’t look like the dumb boyfriend can rescue her in time . . . but something will intervene, right? . . . RIGHT?  I must have had a pretty funny expression on my face when ‘The End’ popped up. Raised mostly on stuff no edgier than Lassie, the idea of a surprise Bad Ending was unthinkable, a betrayal. Ten minutes later, I still thought it was a mistake, that maybe the movie wasn’t over. Thus ends the story of a Young Man’s Disillusionment. The balance of my childhood growing up simply repeated the ‘surprise, stupid’ cycle at regular intervals. And that’s why I’m always tickled by The Mummy’s Ghost.

Then, of course, there’s the TCM TCM Remembers montage. It came out days ago but you might have missed it.

This is a real lump-in-the-throat year … it’s as if everybody we ever knew and cared about is putting on angel wings. TCM’s taste and judgment are impeccable, giving us instant-recognition heart-throb reactions one after another. I saw no agents or publiciity people and the folk were lined up by Popularity or PC mandates. The TCM montage masters are really good at picking out so-called ‘minor’ talent that will nevertheless mean something major to many movie fans — when you see them you’ll know who I mean.

Yep, things just don’t stay the same, as they ought to. Years ago the Hollywood obits we read were of folk born fifty, sixty years before me. The movies changed the definition of who ‘we felt we knew’ — people like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln could only be experienced via a few photos, with no recordings of their actual voices. But in the last hundred years we’ve watched many stars grow from kids, get old and pass away. And they’ve done this in a continuum, any part of which can be revived with the spin of a videodisc.

If the culture abandons the film heritage, will they all be forgotten?  Will one have to be a specialist to know, or CARE, who major stars of the past were?  It’s interesting, when a face or two of people I watched work suddenly pop up, as if in farewell. I hope they had fun with their fame; I’m a grateful beneficiary of their talent.

Last up, Gary Teetzel points us to the Comicbook Anime page, where a Japanese-language Godzilla tie-in TV spot is viewable, in untranslated Japanese. As Gary explains:

Godzilla, not content to be presently starring in the top-grossing live-action Japanese film in U.S. history (Godzilla Minus One), starring in his own Apple+ TV show (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters), starring in a DC comic book (Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong) and preparing to star in his next American film (Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire), has taken time out of his busy schedule to shill for McDonald’s in a new Japanese TV commercial. Read about it and see it here:

Godzilla is Teaming Up with McDonald’s for a Beastly New Commercial.

We don’t know what is being said in the TV spot. Are the humans planning to stop Godzilla by clogging his arteries with McDonald’s food?  There is also some promotion for Bearbricks toys of Godzilla and the disturbingly freakish McDonaldland characters. Feel free to make up your own joke about how the toys are more nutritious than the food. — Gary

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello, and happy approaching holidays.

I believe we linked to this same item a number of years ago, but I just watched the whole thing all over again. Michael McQuarrie sent in a similar piece showing the Sunset Strip but we like this one better.

It’s called California 1952, Hollywood to Sunset Strip . . . an 11-minute car drive from roughly Cahuenga or Wilcox, all the way into the beginning of the Sunset Strip.

Was the original shot intended for rear-projection use in a driving scene?  Even with the imposed colorization it qualifies as a filmic Time Machine — the cars knock our eyes out, and so do the random pedestrians — a lady doing her shopping is unknowing commemorated for all time. It’s near noon, by the looks of the shadows, and there’s either a little haze or some authentic Los Angeles smog in the air. Raymond Chandler described awful smog conditions in his stories around this time.

This stretch of Sunset is well known to locals; it’s about half a mile from CineSavant Central. The entire route is now expensive commercial property, with high rises at each end. A few taller buildings are present in ’52 but a big part of the route is still single-family dwellings. Most of the traffic signals are from the 1930s. The City of the Angels’ beautiful old-style street light standards are still maintained today in many places.

I marked down some places I recognized, with timings, all on the Left:
• at 0 minutes 48 seconds we pass The Hollywood Athletic Club. Without the awning, it features in a key scene in Kiss Me Deadly .
• at 2 minutes 1 second is the front of Cross Roads of the World. I’m not sure it has the final style makeover seen in L.A. Confidential.
• at 3 minutes 6 seconds is Hollywood High, with its row of giant palms. The motel on the very next block is where our Hollywood In-IN-Out Burger is now.
• at 5 minutes 45 seconds we pass the marquee of the Oriental Theater, a nabe house playing a sub-run of Singin’ in the Rain. The Oriental is featured in a 1958 film (a good one) called Unwed Mother — a young Robert Vaughn robs the box office.
• at the very end at 10 minutes 51 seconds is a glimpse of Ciro’s, the famed nightclub eatery. In 1972, it became The Comedy Store.

When the quality is good, these ‘follow cam’ visual records can be fun to peruse on a big TV. Other similar ‘locked off’ street prowls are viewable on the web. In some we think we see ‘chase cars’ following the camera car, to keep a distance space open so the rear-projection composite doesn’t show cars becoming too big. In one of them, two chase cars straddle lanes, effectively blocking traffic. If sound were being recorded maybe we would hear a lot of horn honking.

A couple of Blu-ray announcements courtesy of Gary Teetzel:

Not everybody knows it, but MGM Home Video is again running a quiet Blu-ray operation under its own label, shipping out a trickle of titles untapped by outside licenses, like Bikini Beach and Pajama Party. They generally have no extras. The surprise is that on January 16 they’ll be releasing a Blu-ray of the crazy Sci-fi movie Red Planet Mars, the one laden with the pro-Christian, anti-Communist message that God Is Alive and Well on the Red Planet. Love or hate the movie, everybody agrees that it is off its rocker. We wrote it all up on our Revival Screening Review in 2018. Too bad there are no extras, that might tell us what the original stage play was all about. If a screener materializes, I’ll dust the review off and work on some of the typos.

We also want to put in a deserved plug for The Criterion Collection for February and March. The good news includes John Sayles’ superlative Lone Star in 4K, Robert Altman’s  McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 4K, Michael Roemer’s  Nothing but a Man, Raoul Walsh’s  The Roaring Twenties, and William Dieterle’s  All That Money Can Buy, aka The Devil and Daniel Webster. Every one a winner.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Gary Teetel forwarded this announcement of a new restoration by the Library of Congress and the Film Foundation, to be premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on January 24. It’s the original theatrical release version of John Ford’s film of Arrowsmith, with Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes, from the book by Sinclair Lewis.

Arrowsmith is one of many pre-Code movies that were censored for reissue, and the original release version not retained. The most famous is King Kong, but its gruesome ‘extra bits’ were eventually reinstated from surviving foreign prints. Jump-cuts persist in the latest restorations of Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, where some frisky dialogue was excised … the word virgin was eliminated.

It’s a much-anticipated event, but MoMA’s announcement is confusing. Arrowsmith’s new copy is said to be “restored from a nitrate print owned by the film’s star Ronald Colman, that’s 10 minutes longer than subsequent versions.” That sounds great until we read the new duration, 101 minutes. The existing Warner Archive Collection DVD of Arrowsmith from 2014 is 99 minutes. The DVD looks like one of WB’s worthy reconstruction jobs, incorporating footage here and there from a slightly inferior source. Is Ronald Colman’s copy only a little more complete than what Warners was able to reconstruct for DVD?

The AFI lists the original running time at 108 minutes. The original Variety review does as well. There are plenty of scenes in the film that could have been longer. Did producer Samuel Goldwyn perhaps use the censor cut to trim down rest of the movie?

The most-missed material in Arrowsmith is rumored to involve actress Myrna Loy. While fighting an outbreak of disease in the tropics, Ronald Colman’s doctor Martin Arrowsmith meets Loy’s character Joyce during a test of an anti-disease serum. Joyce is barely in the WAC’s 99-minute version, raising the suspicion that cuts were made to her scenes. The synopsis in the AFI Catalog says that “Joyce and Martin go to bed together,” but the WAC cut only shows him thinking about her from the next room.

We wouldn’t expect Ford to film anything resembling a real bedroom scene, so perhaps the original version simply shows Martin starting to walk in her direction. The ‘morning after’ has them sharing a knowing look. Was there another Martin & Joyce dialogue scene or two?  Perhaps some of the excised content showed them talking about their indiscretion, an equal Code no-no.

We’ll be curious to see these questions straightened out … a better copy of Arrowsmith will be reward enough.

Great!

Here I am barely finishing my Our Town review and wondering what I’ll have for the Column, and Dick Dinman sends over a handy link to his new DVD Classics Corner on The Air show on the new Kino disc of The Carpetbaggers.

Joining Dick to dish the dirt over Harold Robbins’ vintage trash-tale of Hollywood — the opposite of The Last Tycoon, reviewed last Saturday, is David Del Valle.

Our own take on The Carpetbaggers was through a foreign release, covered here in 2020. Kino’s new disc has twin commentaries, one by Del Valle and his cohort David DeCoteau, and another by the capable Julie Kirgo.

We’ve been trying to keep track, in the last few weeks, of desirable Region B discs that only crazy committed disc collectors can play. The dependable Gary Teetzel drops a flag and blows his whistle whenever something interesting is released, and I jump every time …

… the joke being that, if we buy, it soon shows up in Region A in a deluxe, and often cheaper, disc set.

So we wonder about our own sense of dedication when we eye a new Region B offering from UK’s Cult Classics (Studiocanal): the campy Brit Science Fiction thriller/sitcom/turnip Devil Girl from Mars.

We reviewed it ages ago in a cheap Image/Wade Williams disc set, and even though we remember it with smiles, we haven’t been tempted to watch it again.

On the other hand, we go crazy for ALL crackpot Sci-fi pix in beautiful new remasters, which is what this promises to be. Who can resist slinky, imperious Patricia Laffan and her pet refrigerator imposing killer robot, Chani.

Questions remain: will this only play in Region B, or will it be Region-Free?  What will the aspect ratio be?  The word from the experts is that it was originally 1:75 or 1:66, or thereabouts. The image of the back cover online says 1.37 and Region B . . . but I’ll have to see for myself. Reader reports encouraged.

We have to admit that the original cover art is difficult to pass up — the leather-clad Devil Girl Nyah looks like Cruella De Vil from Outer Space.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson