Hello!

A highly anticipated restoration has a release date: as reported back in February, ClassicFlix has been working on a remastered Blu-ray of Sam Wood’s 1940 film of Our Town, a brilliantly performed and beautifully visualized version of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. We’ve been chasing down a decent copy of this show ever since film school — it’s one of many United Artists releases that reverted to its producers and fell between the cracks, like John Cromwell’s So Ends Our Night.

ClassicFlix reminds us that Our Town earned six Academy Award nominations including best picture. It stars Martha Scott as Emily Webb, with a young William Holden, Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter and Guy Kibbee. One speech from the ‘Stage Manager’ Frank Craven transports us into a film blanc afterlife that brings the important issues of life into relief. “My, isn’t the moonlight terrible?”

ClassicFlix’s remaster of Our Town is set for release on November 7. The extras have just been announced and include an audio commentary by Ray Faiola, plus two radio performances from 1939 and 1940. One of them is produced by and stars Orson Welles.

We just reviewed ClassicFlix’s Blonde Ice and hope to review their disc of the TV show World of Giants, coming on October 24.

Blue skies, reviews to write and a new Blu-ray just in the door from Germany … good timing too, the disc got here in record time. Am counting my bulbous, crawling blessings today.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!  Some interesting last-minute disc news to slip in here.

Viavision [Imprint] has announced their November lineup, which has some attractive items . . . starting with an Essential Film Noir Collection Five set, with Island of Doomed Men, The Red Menace, The Burglar, and 13 West Street.

A Tales of Adventure Collection 2 comes next.  Angel on the Amazon, Daughter of the Jungle and Fair Wind to Java are rare releases from Republic; Safari has Victor Mature and Janet Leigh directed by Terence Young, and Elephant Walk is the well-known Liz Taylor show from Paramount, sort of  ‘The Naked Jungle’ only with pachyderms taking the place of formicidae.

The stand-alone discs are Assignment K with Stephen Boyd and Camilla Sparv, the pre- Major Dundee Charlton Heston/Jerry Bresler potboiler  Diamond Head, James Coburn in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, and . . .

. . .  and a movie we Americans haven’t had a look at in ages, Paramount’s 1944 horror item The Man in Half Moon Street, with Nils Asther and Helen Walker. It’s the original version of Hammer’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death, about a madman who has discovered a way to live forever. We saw Half-Moon street back at UCLA in a perfect nitrate print, but I barely remember it.

Announced just yesterday, we also have some impressive tidings from Arrow Video —

— they’ve just broken silence about a boxed set featuring the notorious Brazilian horror icon Coffin Joe, aka José Mojica Marins. The 6-disc, 11-movie colossus  Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe appears to include most of the slimy sadist’s filmography, from his ‘greatest hits’  At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul  and  This Night I’ll Posess Your Corpse  to films as new as 2008.  ←

Coffin Joe was one of the exotic discoveries we first discovered in the Hardy Horror Encyclopedia and one of the few out-there corners of horror on which Video Watchdog never seemed to get a firm grip. I’ll be very interested in learning about this guy — what possessed him to grind through such obsessively negative territory?

I’ve been only to three fantasy conventions — Greg Jein took me to one at the Bonaventure around 1978, Gary Teetzel talked me into attending one at the Roosevelt Hotel in 2000, and back in 1990, James Ursini took me to one to get a look at Barbara Steele. I think that’s where I took in the sight of Coffin Joe, sitting behind a stack of photos and VHS tapes. He looked small and insignificant. I don’t remember him having 5-inch fingernails, but I can’t be sure. I would have said hello, but he didn’t look welcoming, and he appeared to only speak Portuguese!

Backing up that will be a 4K Ultra HD disc of the De Laurentis / Roger Vadim / Jane Fonda space opera  Barbarella.  →   I know it will be welcomed in some quarters, especially if attractive extras are involved — the shoot for that movie sounds like the biggest party in film history. The street date for both  Barbarella and  Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe is November 28, the week after Thanksgiving.

And leave it to David J. Schow to once again leave terrific CineSavant-compatible links out where we can find them — someone has dressed up the Paul Frees ‘satanic preamble’ to Burn, Witch, Burn! (Night of the Eagle) with some expressive graphics . . . and a political smack at the end (apologies, not).

Put together 11 years ago by Jeffrey Sargent, it’s A Horror Reintroduced. Yes, I too wish there were incantations to protect one from evil forces afoot in the world.

With the good-faith logic of Quid Pro Grab ‘n’ Go, here’s David J. Show’s prodigious Amazon Sales page.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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.

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

Hello!

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.

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.

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

Hello!

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.

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