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Alert CineSavant associate Dick Dinman points us to a ripe real estate opportunity: Snow White’s Larchmont Village House Could Be Yours . . . and the price tag is only $2 million!

I wrote about this house, the wishing well, and the singer Adriana Caselotti last year, back on July 10 and July 13 of 2021, explaining our neighborhood’s affectionate relationship with Ms. Caselotti 30 and 40 years ago.

That’s actually a pretty low price for the neighborhood.  The picture above brings back memories — in the 1980s there was no fence or tall hedge, and the Wishing Well was there for all to see, with no explanation. It was as if Senior Citizen Snow White was an affectionate neighbor.

The news has circulated that The Warner Archive releases for October will be Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Fredric March and Todd Browning’s Mark of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi. Those are fine choices; if Jekyll is further restored in any way it’ll be a major release. Mark of the Vampire is always disappointing, but it has at least 20 iconic shots of Bela Lugosi and Carol Borland, and it will likely look sensational. Gary Teetzel adds that it’s nice to have at least one title starring Karloff or Lugosi coming out in time for Halloween.

It was rumored that Freaks might be one of the Halloween Blu-ray offerings, but Gary tells me that the box art that circulated online was probably fan-generated. The Walking Dead and The Mask of Fu Manchu, both with Boris Karloff, would always be welcome. We also hope that there are no remastering issues outstanding with the final two Val Lewton classics, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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This month Dick Dinman’s DVD Classics Corner On the Air celebrates the Warner Archives’ glorious Blu-ray remaster of the Technicolor The Adventures of Don Juan. Errol Flynn and Viveca Lindfors star, and the music of Max Steiner almost steals the show.

Flynn was unavailable for comment, but Dick’s stellar lineup of interviewees includes Stewart Granger, Ann Rutherford, Rory Flynn and Joan Leslie, all of whom offer their take on the the screen legend.

From Kansas, CineSavant associate and friend Bill Shaffer wrote to mark the passing of one of the last directors to work with the legendary Buster Keaton.

Director and Animator Gerald Potterton made the 1965 short film The Railrodder, the last really great Buster Keaton short. Potterton also did work on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and directed the first Heavy Metal animated feature, plus a whole series of National Film Board of Canada shorts.

Bill has worked with silent film festivals and Buster Keaton festivals in particular; we got together in person when he came out to Los Angeles for a Keaton-related get-together in 2019. (I took him to see the site of Keaton’s old Hollywood studio.) The first photo of Mr. Potterton and Bill, from one of the Keaton festivals, was taken by Steve Friedman.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Fearless leader Joe Dante offers this vitally important link to an issue of paramount importance in these tension-filled times:

What else?  It’s none other than the big 2022 T-Rex Race, held at the Emerald Downs race track in Washington State. A 2019 race ‘went viral;’ rumors that it started the Pandemic have not been fully confirmed.

I’m as flabbergasted by this as anyone — those flip-floppy dinos are awfully clever. If they’re really tie-in toys for the Jurassic Park franchise, you can bet that Steven Spielberg signed off on them personally. Joe Dante reminded us of the original wobbly Maninsuitasaurs from 1948’s Unknown Island — and opined that they weren’t any better than these, only different.

What’s fun to see in the video is all the ‘dino impersonators’ really getting into their roles. There may be nothing to learn from this fun madness, but here’s the web page where potential participants were directed. And here’s a page about the inflatable costume itself, awareness of which has until now escaped me entirely. $50 at Amazon will take you right back to your Jurassic roots. Or if you’re a Creationist, is it Cretaceous?

Correspondent Jonathan Gluckman sends along this page dedicated to Los Angeles Theaters. That just about says it — it’s an illustrated, informative guide to the city’s movie theaters existing and historical, illustrated in full detail. They’re arranged in about 20 different categories and listed individually — there must be a couple of hundred individual entries.

At first it looks like something a stranger to town might be able to employ, but much of this page is news to me as well:  I’d have been The Guy to talk to if you needed to know where the hot places to see terrific movies were in 1975. It’s also a good guide to see the status of theaters vis-à-vis COVID shutdown status — some have reopened, most not. For instance, here’s the page’s direct link to the Vista Theater, which has recently been in the news.

Correspondent David J. Show forwards this arresting bit of YouTube amazement from a Vancouver-based artist: Mimi Choi  really has trompe l’oeil down pat. The clip is self-explanatory: How Mimi Choi’s Facial Illusions Come Together.

They are incredibly impressive.  It takes a minute or so to stop assuming that digital trickery is involved. Nope, it’s completely makeup and face paint!  For more brain-spinning fun, here’s a Mimi Choi Halloween Tutorial from 2020.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Well, the photo of my daughter’s pooch Mishka got all the attention last Saturday …. maybe I should change CineSavant from a website about video discs, to concentrate on cute dogs instead. All I can say is that I wish I were aging as well as he is.  She takes good care of him … all the Corgis I’ve seen here in Los Angeles seem to be grossly overfed, their bellies dragging on the sidewalk.

I repeat the image above from 2017, when a snap of Mishka reminded me of the poster pose of a certain beloved Irish sea monster. Hey, they both have big ears.

More wince-inducing ’70s TV musical drek, courtesy of correspondent Michael McQuarrie: It’s a stomach-turning Brady Bunch Variety Hour Disco Medley that’s been on YouTube for 13 years and has picked up 320,000 hits.

Florence Henderson does come off better than she did in Song of Norway… although she doesn’t look confident of her footing descending some stairs. What slays us is the aerobics-lite non-choreography; the empty-calory glitz kills us. We can’t blame the professional dancers either. Why does Rip Taylor’s ‘Disco Duck’ remind us of of Olga Baclanova’s final mutilated form in Tod Browning’s Freaks?  To avoid snide thoughts, we remind ourselves that these performers did have show-biz talent, no matter what the awful production does to them here.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Hot disc titles on the horizon: in addition to Ignite’s triple-format release of the 1953 classic Invaders from Mars, of course. That killer disc hits on September 26.

Newly announced or nailed for a street date:

*  From ClassicFlix, November 8 has been set for the release of their upcoming disc of Victor Saville’s Mike Hammer adventure I, The Jury. It’s listed as a 3-disc 4k + 3-D Blu-ray + Blu-ray combo.

It’s been tagged with a long list of extras, including two commentaries and three vintage TV shows, including an unaired 1954 Mike Hammer TV pilot starring Brian Keith.

*  And Powerhouse Indicator’s disc lineup for December 5 includes a new release of Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown (La resa dei conti). This is the ‘next best’ Italo western to the Leone classics, with Lee Van Cleef, Tomás Milian and best-ever music by Ennio Morricone.

We’ve seen two good Blu-ray releases but the specs say that PI’s set will include three separate versions: the US theatrical cut, the original 110-minute Italian version, and an extended US cut, which we assume will default to Italo audio for the added material while retaining as much of Lee Van Cleef’s English dialogue as possible.

*  And Flicker Alley has announced, for November 1, another top Film Noir restoration from The Film Noir Foundation and The UCLA Film & Television Archive:

Román Barreto’s El vampiro negro (The Black Vampire). The Argentinian feature from 1953 is not a horror picture — the ‘vampire’ is a murderer of children. It’s essentially a re-think of Fritz Lang’s “M”, and is described as being less about the general underworld than the plight of the women characters associated with the case.

I saw this screened at Noir City six or so years ago; it’s a suspenseful show with great sets and classic noir lighting.

***  Breaking News: Correspondent Gary Teetzel informs us that it “looks like Golden Age 3-D fans will have even more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: One week after I,The Jury arrives, Kino is releasing a 3-D disc of the 1954 feature The Diamond Wizard.”  It’s an English heist movie directed by and starring Dennis O’Keefe, and co-starring Margaret Sheridan. It was released flat in the U.S., according to Variety; big-net noir critics claim it as film noir, but some sci-fi folk list it in their logs just because the diamonds in question are synthetic. Or so I gather; I’ve never seen the movie.

Gratuitous photo feature!  On the left, meet the doggie named Mishka, now celebrating his 12th doggie year and looking really dapper for being well into his senior innings. He’s an extra treat for us when visiting my daughter.

And on the right, for no good reason except I think it looks good, is one of friend Steve Sharon’s photos of our old guardian Gort. This particular Gort was on display in Seattle. He looks good in his darker gunmetal tones. Both images are bigger than displayed.

We Sci-Fi fans are always curious about obscure titles just out of reach. Helping to alleviate our existential dilemma is the long-running web page by Janne Wass known as  scifist 2.0,  ‘A Sci-Fi Movie History in Reviews.’  Mr. Wass possesses the multi-lingual skills to dig into Eastern European resources. Although he covers the full genre we gravitate to his eye-opening reportage on obscure foreign titles given only sketchy paragraphs in English-language Sci-Fi Encyclopedias. For all practical purposes, many of these pictures are functionally invisible to us culturally deprived  American fans.

I’ve been fascinated by Mr. Wass’s essay on  Serebristaya Pyl (Silver Dust), a much-maligned Soviet anti-U.S. propaganda picture. Accurate info on it was so scarce, so-called ‘experts’ simply copied the same fuzzy synopsis from 1953. Sci-fist gives us the whole story.

Then there’s Croisières sidérales (‘Stellar Cruises’), an equally obscure French production from 1942. It involves time-space dilation based on Einstein’s theory, with a space voyager not getting older while people back on Earth do. We thought that subject was first filmed in an episode of The Twilight Zone.  We now have a full understanding of the picture.

Scifist has scores of films like those — titles we’d never heard of. It presently features a comedy about a dead star pulling the English hamlet of Shrimpton into space, all three of Harry Piel’s German sci-fi tales, and a 1921 adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau — not to mention exotic Sci-fi features from Brazil, Norway and Turkey!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson