Hello!

We’ve got some good video clips from an Internet Archive link found by Michael McQuarrie: Super-8 home movies of the filming of a Tony Anthony Spaghetti western from 1975, taken by his girlfriend Diane Dobronte.

“Spaghetti Western 1975”
The action at first looks like two separate movies, one a Clint Eastwood imitation — and then a costume battle movie in historial Spain. Fortunately, I had Italo western source Lee Broughton to tell me what was going on. He wrote from the middle of a heat wave in England:

Hi Glenn, Yes, this is Ferdinando Baldi’s Get Mean from 1975. It starts with Anthony’s ‘Stranger’ in the West. He takes on a mission to escort a princess (Diana Lorys) back to her homeland in Spain. Then there’s some kind of a flip through a time warp, and he winds up in an earlier era, in conflict with barbarians, etc, as seen in the Super-8 battle footage. The main face seen at 1:44, 3:04, 5:04 is I believe actor David Dreyer.

The IMDB blurb reads, “A wisecracking gunfighter is hurled through time and space as he escorts a Spanish Princess back to her homeland while contending with barbarians, Moors, evil spirits, a raging bull, and a maniacal Shakespeare-quoting hunchback.”

 

The fort was known as Fuerte el Condor. It was built for John Guillermin’s Lee Van Cleef / Jim Brown Euro-Western El Condor (1970) and appeared in several films after that. The IMDB lists ’em:

Fuerte El Condor in Film.
The Western town at the end is now known as Mini Hollywood. It is of course the town of El Paso that Carlo Simi designed and built for For a Few Dollars More. The well-remembered El Paso bank building comes into view at one point. Great footage! — Lee

And this once again allows me to plug Lee’s book The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film.

 

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And … since we’re  halfway through 2024  it’s time to trot out a pile of package covers and review links to favored discs we’ve reviewed in the first half of the year. Jeez, life is passing fast, isn’t it?

There are a lot of them — a great many really good movies and impressive restorations have showed up here at CineSavant, and as always we’re eager to promote them. I’m much obliged to reviewers Charlie Largent and Lee Broughton, for their high quality contributions to the review roster.

They’re in the order they were covered, starting with the first of January. Each image is a link. I’d be ready to see any of these shows again, no hesitation …

See you in July.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

 

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Tuesday June 25, 2024

The film record of his juggling act alone makes this a classic…

 

Hello!

Welcome to Summer Heat.  We take advantage of an article from last year circulated by Joe Dante, a really nice piece about the consummate filmmaker Michael Powell.

Written for ‘The Arts Desk.com’ last October by Saskia Baron, the brief but telling article discusses the moviemaker’s  Peeping Tom but also Powell’s skirmishes with producer David O. Selznick on  Gone to Earth, starring Jennifer Jones.

As always, the Powell quotes are choice. He even remarks on Francis Coppola’s wild Zoetrope Studios experiment. The link to the article is here:

Michael Powell interview – ‘I had no idea that critics were so innocent.’ 

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Ignite Films, the people that brought us  Invaders from Mars two years ago, are back with another major restoration for Blu-ray, one of the most respected films from WW2.

The Story of G.I. Joe  dramatizes the experience of journalist Ernie Pyle, who chooses not to cover the European fighting from behind the lines, but up close with the infantry. It was directed in fine semi-docu form by William Wellman, and stars Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith. It was the film that launched Mitchum’s career; he was nominated (for the first and last time) for an Oscar, one of the film’s four nominations.

I’ve seen a sample of the final encoding, which betters anything previous by far; even the TCM copies tended to be rather rough, with troublesome soundtrack issues.

The special edition carries two new video essays, an original trailer, and an audio commentary by Alan K. Rode. Street date is July 25, ’24 and preorders are under way.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Awww… what a favorite, what a great guy. Classy in every respect.

 

Hello!

The warmth has finally arrived, with that Endless Summer we’ve advertised in Los Angeles since the time of Bruce Brown. All of us kids had zero opportunity to get to the beach, yet wanted to be surfers … well, when we were 12.

So all we’re going to do is point out some interesting titles in the review hopper. Arrow has 4K and Blu-ray releases prepared of Paul Schrader’s  AMERICAN GIGOLO, a movie I had little to say about at the time because I resented actor Richard Gere, who I thought was a complete blank on screen. (Probably just envious of his looks). Twenty films later, Gere’s acting was much better. Plus the movie has Giorgio Morodoer and Blondie.

NEVER OPEN THAT DOOR (No Abras Nunca esa Puerta) is a noir extravaganza from Argentina, film adaptations of short stories by Cornell Woolrich. Noir must have been popular in Buenos Aires, for they made quite a few of their own, which Eddie Muller has been promoting for the last ten years or so.

I’ll soon find out if  VICTIMS OF SIN (Víctimas del Pecado) is the Mexican night clubs & gangsters feature I saw in a hotel in Mexico City … if so, it will be one of those Mexican thrillers with big-shouldered, big-suited hoods speaking well-enunciated standard Spanish and driving around in big ballooney late ’40s automobiles. Plus it’s got camerawork by Gabriel Figueroa and music by Pérez Prado.

Then The Warner Archive fields another one from the filmography of director Raoul Walsh — this time one of Ida Lupino’s biggest WB mellers,  THE MAN I LOVE.

Expected but not here yet is the hardcore revenge noir  ACT OF VIOLENCE (Fred Zinnemann), 4K remasters of Joe Dante’s  MATINEE, Don Siegel’s  INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and Sam Peckinpah’s  PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID. Plus the 3-D  BWANA DEVIL, a little later. A stand-alone Paramount Blu-ray of the remastered  WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE is due on or before July 20. Those titles alone add up to a nice summer at CineSavant headquarters.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Newer and Bluer Meanies have overrun our sources of information. In November, choose sanity.

 

Hello!

Michael McQuarrie’s link contribution for the day is an Atom bomb reel, that looks to be a silent clip from a government film.

We recognize scenes later used in  The Atomic Cafe … but some nice, longer takes are here, all from the Prelinger Archives:

Atomic Bomb Blast Effects. 

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Here’s something I didn’t know existed, a sentimental, somewhat self-congratultatory hour-long TV documentary on John Ford for CBS in 1971. … that has the participation of Ford and John Wayne in Monument Valley. James Stewart and Henry Fonda are there as well, speaking mostly platitudes about the director. Andy Devine does a glorified walk-through.

It’s directed by Denis Sanders and uses a great many film clips, saving special honors for The Searchers. The clips look pretty terrible, but it shows that John Wayne already thought that film was his best.

The American West of John Ford 

It’s all partly rehearsed, which is a little strange. Ford is on camera directing Wayne — and in general behaves like a gent. This is in stark contrast to a parallel documentary film from the same year: in Peter Bogdanovich’s  Directed by John Ford, the director is cranky and obnoxious throughout … something Bogdanovich uses to comic effect.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

A refreshing fantasy alternative to Kaiju … but couldn’t the H- Creatures behave with a little more H- Consistency?

 

Hello!

CineSavant correspondent Martin Hennessee sends along a link that I may have used before, but details like that never daunt this proud bastion of democratic journalism.

Martin’s link is a full fifteen-minute reel of teaser promos, entitled

Cannon Films Promo Reel ’86 – Half of These Were Never Made!
The ‘half of these films were never made’ line is no exaggeration. Cannon’s modus operandi was to barnstorm commercial film festivals, to promote their upcoming product. But the promo reels they showed in their sales suites didn’t really match what they had in production. In an addendum to my review for Mark Hartley’s documentary  Electric Boogaloo, The Wild Untold Story Of Cannon Films,  we explained how I came to Cannon early in 1987 to cut TV spots, at first for their ‘fairy tales’ series. I was soon churning out these trade show promos, that were produced by Elizabeth Beckman and illustrated with her graphic artwork, stills, and film clips.

This 25-minute reel is from a few months before my arrival, and covers many genuine Cannon films in their production pipeline. Believe me, a movie called ‘It Ate Cleveland’ was indeed on the ‘coming up’ lists for quite a while. But we note at least six impressive-sounding projects with name stars that indeed never came to pass. The reel makes it look as if Cannon were a major studio producing scores of high-profile mainstream movies. For all we know, the ‘announcements’ of upcoming features with John Travolta and Anthony Quinn were only in the discussion stage.

Also noted, the promo for  Powaqqatsi is called North/South; when I did my follow-up promo, using workprint snips from the real film, it was to be called North/South Powaqqatsi. And Marvel fans will note the promo for a live-action epic based on Spiderman — which at the time couldn’t find funding traction. Who in Hollywood wanted to make a movie about a comic character other than Superman?  This particular promo names no star actor, but Spiderman stayed in our ‘coming soon’ lineup all the way through 1988 — each time updated with a new, lesser actor. This happened with more than one doomed project … the first names would be Robert Redford or Richard Gere, but eventually they’d slot in Michael Dudikoff!

 

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We just reviewed Edward Dmytryk’s filmed-in-England ‘exile’ thriller Obsession, aka The Hidden Room, and a second viewing revealed something fun.

We always watch medium-close ‘drive-away’ shots in movies, to see if the film crew is reflected on the window of an exiting vehicle. It’s often the case that two lovers in a car are suddenly revealed to have a whole audience watching them.

↑  One shot in Obsession is especially revealing. The police inspector played by Naunton Wayne dismisses a van that’s been waiting for him, and as it drives off we get a split-second reflection of none other than Edward Dmytryk himself, attentively watching the take. Behind the director is a line of about eight crew people, standing still and staring. We can see (barely) the notebook of the continuity person, on the right side of the frame.

It’s Dmytryk, all right, forging ahead with his show while wondering if he’ll really have to report back to prison in the states. Pretty impressive …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Luis Buñuel, directing a film about practical politics in a Caribbean revolution.