Drive-ins are now the Rodney Dangerfields of movie theaters: they don't get no respect. Those of us who are city slickers really miss them, however, and search them out whenever our travels take us through small town America. They are one of those simple pleasures of life that you took for granted but miss once they're gone. In days of old, little kids used to love them because they would cavort in the playgrounds that were inevitably on the premises. Teenagers loved drive-ins because they would go there to play inside the car. (The mind reels at how many people came of age in the back of an old Chevy - an experience immortalized in Bob Seger's Night Moves) Yet, there was a time when the film industry held drive-ins in high regard as a major source of box-office revenue. Take a look at this trade industry ad we came across in our archives...Drive-ins were actually supplied with 70mm roadshow prints of Lawrence of Arabia! The idea of seeing David Lean's masterpiece on a drive-in theater screen may seem bizarre, but where else could you experience the film while passing around a six-pack and cigars? I also used to love the mismatched double and triple features that rural drive-ins would offer. Once in upstate New York, we went to see Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier in Khartoum double-billed with Ferlin Husky in Forty Acre Feud. Only in America....- Lee Pfeiffer
(To read ad in it's entirety, use the bar at the bottom of this entry to scroll to the right)
On Tuesday evening, the day before the Festival officially opened, there was a press screening of the newly-restored Italian print of Fistful of Dollars. While normally the best way to watch a foreign film is in the original language with subtitles, that is not the case with Leone’s movies, unless you particularly want to hear Clint Eastwood dubbed into Italian by Enrico Maria Salerno. Contrary to rumours that recently-found additional material had been restored, the print seems much the same as that released in Italy on the Ripley’s Home Video label, only with the original opening credits – which feature as an extra on the currently-available disc – cleaned and restored, so that once again Ennio Morricone is credited as ‘Leo Nichols’, and Leone as ‘Bob Robertson’. Also, the scene in which the Rojos and the Baxters shoot it out at night in the cemetery, which was previously scratched, appears to have been cleaned up. However, what we were watching lacked the clarity of a restored celluloid print, and the suspicion arose that it was the restored DVD – which Ripley's presumably intend to reissue as a Special Edition – being projected on the screen.
At 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, there was a press conference relating to this restored edition. According to the day’s guest list notification for the press, Tonino Valerii, assistant director on Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, was due to attend, but he didn’t (though he's still expected later for the screening of his A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die). This left a number of people involved in the restoration to talk on in an alarmingly technical way about the Techniscope process, four-sprocket frames, digital re-mastering of soundtrack material, etc., etc., etc. If you’ve ever sat through one of those ‘Restoring the Film’ documentaries included as DVD extras, you’ll know what I mean. The most interesting fact to emerge was that, apparently, the restoration of Per un pugno di dollari cost more than the film itself (which had a budget of about $200,000).