Hello!

I’ve been waiting for quite some time for a pro-Woman industry article that’s not out to indict the system … this one digs into a not-much-discussed corner of filmmaking history with good facts and a fair attitude. CineSavant associate Marc Edward Heuck often writes quality web essays for Quentin Tarantino’s Beverly Cinema, just down the road from CineSavant Central.

His post for February 28 New World Women is a thorough run-down on the women directors hired by Roger Corman’s production companies — New World, Concorde, New Horizons, etc. — from the ’70s forward. It’s an excellent primer on the progress of Corman’s woman assistant directors, production managers, and others who moved up to directing work. And it doesn’t shy away from explaining that not all of them fared well. Despite Roger’s industry halo for encouraging new talent, business and the bottom line always came first. Yes, working for Corman has been described as a kind of film school, but it can also be likened to skydiving lessons where you learn to sew your own parachute on the way down. Good article Marc, thanks.

What with an admired sister and several friends circulating in the world of libraries and archives, I was pleased to see an announcement for this Icarus Films Blu-ray or DVD of Alain Resnais: Five Short Films.

All five of Resnais’ shorts are excellent. For stylishness The Song of Styrene (Le chant do styrène) is a standout, a marvel of color and graphic brilliance. But every librarian ought to see All the World’s Memory (Toute la mémoire du monde). ↑  I don’t think it’s even twenty minutes long, but Resnais’ tour of the National Library of France circa 1956 is just sensational. The glimpses of collections are terrific but the mind really boggles at the library’s organization and internal systems, all pre-digital, all labor intensive.

Alain Resnais’ feature films often centered on the nature of memory. He clearly reveres the library as a repository for man’s memories, his collective conscience. Toute la mémoire du monde is also viewable as an extra on Criterion’s 2009 Blu-ray of Last Year at Marienbad.

And yes, the Blu-ray for a certain ‘waspish’ sci-fi-horror flick is now In-House … expect a review presently.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel tells us that that guy, Joe, Manco, or whatever his name is, now has a price on his head. A pretty steep price, plus ya gotta wait until October, Pilgrim: The Man With No Name is going to be a 1/6th scale figurine, highly detailed. Judging from the photo it is indeed pretty well turned out — that tiny pistol, for example.

The page describes this item as only the first offering in a proposed “Clint Eastwood Legacy Collection.”  Gary asks the question we all want to voice: can we look forward to an action figure based on Clint’s lab assistant from Revenge of the Creature, complete with a white rat in its jacket pocket?

More vintage photo fun. Both correspondent Jorge da Cunha and Tim Lucas responded last week with a bit of information to set CineSavant straight. Back on February 22 I posted an amusing gag photo of Steve Reeves and Sylva Koscina, joking with an ‘unidentified’ man during one of the Hercules movies.

It’s not absolutely confirmed, but the consensus is that the unidentified man is Mario Bava himself.  Bava was the lighting camerman on these movies. The word is that some Italo directors liked nothing better than to have the fast-working, detail-oriented Bava run the set and even pinch-direct for them. Why work so hard, when there were starlets to entertain and gourmet lunches to consume?

Jorge pointed out to me that Mario Bava was fond of gag photos like this; I just had a mental vision of the great director as being much better fed- looking. Tim Lucas says he expected a better-fed man as well, with a mustache, but that the joker in question could very well be our favorite regista.  No doubt many readers knew the likely answer to this one, and we thank Tim and Jorge.

Here’s great news: Charles Laughton’s creep-out masterpiece  Night of the Hunter  is said to be coming in 4K from Kino Lorber. This one ought to look super at the higher resolution, as MGM’s theatrical prints were very impressive — all those weird silhouettes and special effects.

Haven’t seen it in a long time, either. Back in the 1990s when some MGM Home Video executive needed a vintage UA picture to show in Tokyo or Cairo, I’d recommend either this or Kiss Me Deadly. Can’t go wrong with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish!

Right now it’s just a Kino Facebook post, which mentions a 4K Scan.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The new DVD Classics Corner on the Air podcast brings out the big critical guns this week: Dick Dinman and Joseph McBride Explore those ‘Wilder’ Years gives us a discussion with the noted author and critic on his recent book Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge , which I reviewed back in November. If you haven’t heard a McBride commentary, you’ll find him an engaging speaker.

Note: The link takes you to the podcast, but some browsers play it more quickly than others. I can play it directly with Chrome, but on Safari I need to download it first.

Advisor and co-conspirator Gary Teetzel sends along this ‘Folks Films’ 60-second blurb video posted on February 1. It’s called ‘Alien’ in 60 Seconds and it ought to be self-explanatory.

It was made for this year’s Canadian 10k movie in a minute competition, and the director is Taylor Brown.

Not enough beautiful people in your life?  CineSavant correspondent Michael McQuarrie sends link to the start of a whole string of Roddy McDowell Home Movies on YouTube. They just keep playing. Stars galore, that’s for sure. I hadn’t caught up with this encoding, which looks much better than what I saw a few years ago.

Michael wrote back to say that the editor Novella Troianiello has taken those reels of Roddy McDowell home movies and compiled a ‘best of’ sampler. It’s easier to pick out faces from this selection: The Long Summer of 1965. Now somebody annotate it with I.D.’s — there are too many beautiful people I still can’t place.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

According to my logs, Turner Classic Movies is showing a not-easy-to-see Arch Oboler film tomorrow, February 23, in the middle of the day. It’s The Arnelo Affair and I doubt it’s a classic, but I’m curious anyway. After studying Oboler with Matt Rovner for extras on a disc of Oboler’s movie Five I want to see everything by the erratic, eccentric man, the director of Bewitched, Bwana Devil, The Twonky, The Bubble and several other pictures that are even more obscure.

I guess The Arnelo Affair is a ‘cross off the list’ title. It stars George Murphy, who’s normally a snooze, but along for the ride are John Hodiak, Dean Stockwell, Frances Gifford and Eve Arden.

About cable and streaming, and DVR recording from cable: Friend Alan Peach is right, Turner Classic Movies streamed on Apple TV delivers a more reliable image than does my Spectrum Cable company. Alan set me up with the TCM app on the device and I hadn’t used it too much. But random TCM movies I DVR from Spectrum keep exhibiting funky frame rate issues, dropping and adding frames. This happened last week with the Randolph Scott movie The Bounty Hunter — my DVR encoding had playback problems. But on the TCM streaming app the picture was fine.

Huzzah, another 1st world dilemma resolved, sort of. Cable is expensive, and I tend to watch the same 6 shows while mostly watching video discs for entertainment. Is TCM being subsidized to stay cable-exclusive, so as to keep cable customers?  If I could stream TCM, the networks, a local station or two plus BBC World News America, my cable would go bye bye very quickly.

↓  And finally, long-time CineSavant correspondent Malcolm Alcala comes up with a good one, a photo borrowed from the highly-recommended Peplum TV page. It’s a behind-the scenes snap from one of the Francisi Ercole movies that made Steve Reeves a star. We know that’s Sylva Koscina seated, but can anyone identify the gentleman posing with Steve?  Malcolm suggests that it’s Reeves’ body double, which was the whole joke I’m sure. Anyway, what could be cooler than those two stars on an Italian beach, in 1957?

The PeplumTV site is good for all kinds of arcane news about sword ‘n’ sandal costume pictures. Presently, not far down on the page, is a comparison of several import versions of Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Just some short takes today — first up is a link to the page of respected correspondent Kyu Hyun Kim, on his long-running blog Q Branch Mirror Site … which three days ago posted Kyu’s ‘best of 2021’ list of Blu-rays. I always appreciate Kyu’s take on discs, which exhibit an original viewpoint. And if you’re interested in Korean (and some Japanese) movies and TV, other articles on his page will be especially rewarding.

Kyu says he’d have had the list up sooner but back-in-person teaching has slowed him up this semester. There’s apparently a Korean language version of the same page . . .

No critical chest-thumping here: Mr. Kim just calls out My Favorite Twenty Blu Rays/4Ks of 2021 and proceeds with good plain talk about them. He remarked in private that he’s always surprised when my favorites and his favorites coincide. “Well of course we do,” said the self-important disc reviewer CineSavant …

Those unstoppable disc folk from Australia keep releasing new and exclusive titles to Blu-ray. Viavision [Imprint]’s output could be difficult to access back in 2020 with gotta-have movies like When Worlds Collide were just too pricey to import from Down Under. Now they’re readily available on Amazon.us, if you’re not too slow on the draw. And ignore occasional bad info — everything I’ve gotten from them so far has been Region-Free.

Coming in May to tempt fans and empty wallets is another stack of interesting titles, with more Blu-ray exclusives. The link page is to the Imprint Bundle Pack – May 2022. I’m eager to see the two-disc set of Walter Hill’s The Warriors in both its theatrical and director’s cuts. The same goes for Rod Lurie’s The Contender, with its attractive star lineup of Gary Oldman, Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges and Christian Slater.

I’m also a serious fan of Paul Greenglass’s Bloody Sunday, the docu-drama recreation of horrible events in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1972. This month’s disc set knockout is [Imprint’s] 6-title After Dark: Neo Noir Cinema Collection One. It contains Lili Fini Zanuck’s Rush with Jason Patric, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Sam Elliott,  Carl Franklin’s One False Move with Bill Paxton, Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton, Alan Rudolph’s Mortal Thoughts with Demi Moore, Glenne Headly, Bruce Willis and Harvey Keitel,  Steve Kloves’ Flesh and Bone with Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, James Caan & Gwyneth Paltrow,  Robert Benton’s Twilight with Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, Stockard Channing, and Reese Witherspoon …

… and finally one I’ve been wanting on a decent disc seemingly forever, James Foley’s After Dark My Sweet, from the novel by Jim Thompson, starring Jason Patric, Rachel Ward & Bruce Dern. The unheralded show has a terrific role for Bruce Dern, and is possibly the best of the Jim Thompson film adaptations.

Correspondent Jason Hones is asking after the arresting ‘Greenwich Village’ paintings attributed to Edward G. Robinson’s character ‘Chris Cross’ in Fritz Lang’s grimly pessimistic noir Scarlet Street. We know they were painted by artist John Decker, and because we believe everything we read in Wikipedia, we also believe they were ‘sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for exhibition in March 1946.’

The paintings work well in the context of Lang’s film. The gifted amateur Chris Cross might have painted them, and they do satisfy as street art that might take off in an upscale art gallery. But where did the actual originals end up, Jason asks. Anyone know?   I myself would like to see them in color, especially the one with the giant snake hallucination under the 3rd Avenue El. It’s only 77 years later — did producer Walter Wanger keep the artwork?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson