Savant Column
Hello!
Friend Phil Hall has a good site up called The Bootleg Files, which reviews hard-to-see or graymarket items, the kind that fall between the cracks. This week he covers a film that was in production when I was at ‘The Cannon Group,’ Menahem Golan’s Mack the Knife. I never got to see a good copy of it either, although in 1989 I hadn’t seen any version of The Threepenny Opera.
Helpful correspondent Rob Gaczol found this odd cue Mothra Metal, that samples the original Yumi & Emi Ito, aka ‘The Peanuts’ from the 1961 film Mothra. The original Yuji Koseki song has been reinterpreted by Isao Bito, with new lyrics. The title is, I guess, ‘Mothra Song the Best.’
On my review of the new Bfi disc of It Happened Here, one listed extra is a book introduction by critic David Robinson. Correspondent Bee Hall couldn’t access it. She wrote the Bfi and found out that it had been left off the disk… but the Bfi responded by putting it online at a custom Special Bfi ‘It Happened Here’ Page. Careful, it’s loaded with spoilers. but Robinson does give an excellent account of the the controversy about Kevin Brownlow’s so-called ‘Nazi picture.’ Many thanks to Ms. Hall.
And contributor-advisor Gary Teetzel once again finds something fun with a 1935 Picture Play magazine article by Helen Louise Walker, Three Live Ghosts. It’s a fluffy tinsel-town overview of the three top actors associated with horror, albeit at a time when the Production Code had curbed most of the desired excesses of the pre-Code horror wave.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson