By Ernie Magnotta

The 1980s were chock full of amazing action franchises and action stars. The stars were legendary: Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, etc. The franchises were just as legendary: Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Rambo, Terminator, Missing in Action, Lethal Weapon, etc. Not to mention the beloved James Bond series which produced five blockbuster movies throughout the 80s, three starring Roger Moore and two starring Timothy Dalton. Then, there were the great one-shot action films of which there are way too many to list here. Of course, martial arts/action; especially those featuring ninjas, were just as popular with cinemagoers. Yes, it was an exciting decade.

In 1985, Cannon Films, led by immortal producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, decided to start a new action movie/martial arts franchise titled American Ninja. Cannon, who were responsible for the popular Missing in Action and Death Wish series of films as well as several well-loved ninja movies which starred the fantastic Sho Kosugi and partly started the ninja craze, wanted Chuck Norris to play the lead role of Private Joe Armstrong. However, Norris declined. Cannon then went on a worldwide search and, after auditioning over 400 candidates, they chose up and coming actor Michael Dudikoff. The well-made movie would go on to spawn four sequels, two of which (parts 2 and 4) would see Dudikoff return as the silent, but deadly Armstrong. Thanks to our friends at Kino Lorber, the original film has now been released on Blu-ray.

Written by Paul De Mielche (from a story by Gideon Amir and Avi Kleinberger) and directed by action veteran Sam Firstenberg, American Ninja tells the story of Joe Armstrong (Dudikoff), a US Army private who uses his Ninjitsu skills when a supply convoy is ambushed by rebels led by a Black Ninja Warrior (Tadashi Yamashita). Now marked for revenge by the Black Star Ninjas, Joe, with the help of his friend, Corporal Curtis Jackson (played by the late, great Steve James), must do everything in his power to rescue the kidnapped Patricia Hickock (Judie Aronson)—daughter of Joe’s commanding officer—and take down the Black Star Ninjas for good.

Made for one million dollars, American Ninja (aka American Warrior and American Fighter) is a solid and entertaining 80s action film with an engrossing enough story, a terrific cast, and exciting action sequences which are more than competently handled by director Firstenberg (who already had some Ninja experience directing the Sho Kosugi martial arts/action classics Return of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination for Cannon). The fun, 95-minute movie also features John Fujioka, Don Stewart and Richard Norton.

Trained by 10^th degree black belt and martial arts champion Mike Stone, American Ninja instantly made Michael Dudikoff an action movie star. Over the next two decades, Dudikoff would appear in a plethora of action films. He would also reunite with Steve James two more times in American Ninja 2: The Confrontation and Avenging Force; both directed by Firstenberg. James, who I believe would have become a major action star if not for his untimely death, went on to reprise his role as Curtis Jackson a third time in American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt.

American Ninja has been released on a region one Blu-ray. It is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and the film looks and sounds incredible. The special features include an informative audio commentary by director Sam Firstenberg (moderated by filmmaker/editor Elijah Drenner) as well as a second commentary with Firstenberg and Stunt Coordinator Steven Lambert. We are also treated to Rumble in the Jungle: The Making of American Ninja, the original theatrical trailer and TV spot, and a very cool-looking slipcover. This is pure 80s goodness. Don’t miss it.

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“TO BE OR NOT TO BE… A FASCIST”

By Raymond Benson

The film classic that put director Bernardo Bertolucci on the map outside of Italy was 1970’s The Conformist, hailed by the arthouse cinema circuit as one of the masterpieces of international filmmaking in that decade.

An Italian-French-West German co-production, The Conformist was filmed in Italy and France and stars celebrated French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who made several pictures in Italy along with the many in his native country. Although Trintignant could speak Italian, he was almost always dubbed by an Italian actor in these pictures; in fact, all Italian movies of the era were usually dubbed in post-production. Luckily, the dubbing here is quite good because at least Trintignant is mouthing the correct Italian language dialogue.

This is a gorgeous-looking movie, often cited as a groundbreaker in cinematography. Vittorio Storaro made his name with the picture, just as Bertolucci did. Francis Ford Coppola allegedly used The Conformist as the “look” he was going for when he made The Godfather. Storaro is one of only three people who have won the Best Cinematography Oscar three times (he won for Apocalypse Now, Reds, and The Last Emperor, another Bertolucci title).

This is reason alone to view the film today. The content is perhaps a little too attached to the time period in which it was made, in that the editing and narrative flow of the movie is somewhat experimental with its use of flashbacks and time-jumping that filmmakers liked to play with in those days. As a result, the first half of The Conformist takes some getting used to (and is, at first, difficult to follow), but the second half is riveting. The subject matter is also extremely political in that it is a psychological character study of a man torn between the desire to fit in and to do what is right within the context of the socio-political climate of his time.

It’s 1930s Italy, during Mussolini’s reign. Trintignant is Marcello, a wannabe social climber… but to do so, he must during those years be a member of Mussolini’s party and, well, a fascist. Most of his friends are members of the party, as is his closest pal, a blind man named Italo (José Quaglio). In 1938, Marcello accepts the assignment to assassinate his former college professor, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), a staunch anti-fascist living in Paris with his wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda). Marcello marries Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), a pretty girl who is naïve and rather common, in an attempt to be “more like ‘normal’ people.” Marcello disguises his true purpose on the trip to Paris by bringing along Giulia, and he is shadowed by his handler, Agent Manganiello (Gastone Moschin, recognizable to Western audiences as Don Fanucci from The Godfather Part II). Once in Paris, Marcello and Giulia enjoy social gatherings with the Quadris, and there is some eyebrow-raising hanky-panky that occurs between Anna and not only Marcello, but also Giulia! (The seductive dance between Anna and Giulia at a party is a highlight of the movie, and stills from the sequence dominated its marketing.) In the meantime, Marcello is struggling with his assignment. Thrown into his head torment is the trauma he suffered back in 1917, when as a boy he was molested by a young man.

There is a lot going on within the characters’ psyches in The Conformist. It is a rich, deeply layered motion picture that asks many questions and provides few answers. Some sequences were shocking in 1970 and are still disturbing today. This is potent cinema, providing the early evidence that Bertolucci was a formidable artist who would push the envelope.

The RARO Cinema Art Blu-ray edition (from RAROvideousa.com, distributed by Kino Lorber) is a 2-disk set. The first disk contains a new stunning 4K restoration from the original camera negative. This is accompanied by an audio commentary by film critic Bilge Ebiri. The second disk is the 2011 HD restoration that both Bertolucci and Storaro worked on. The inclusion of the second disk feature is curious since the new restoration is far, far superior and should be the go-to viewing. It appears that the second, older version is simply there for comparison.

Supplements spread over the two disks include an interview with Valentina Ricciardelli, the president of the Bernardo Bertolucci Foundation; an hour-long documentary, “In the Shade of The Conformist”; and trailers of the film from 1970, 2014, and 2023.

The Conformist is for fans of Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio Storaro, Jean-Louis Trintignant, international cinema, and political films.

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By Lee Pfeiffer

Writer/Producer Norman Lear has died at the tender of 101. Lear was one of the few remaining people in the entertainment industry that could truthfully be called a legend. His background is far too detailed and remarkable to summarize here but we should remember he was a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Forces and flew over 50 combat missions in Europe in WWII. His admirers may also be surprised to know that he was an Oscar nominee, having been nominated for his screenplay for the acclaimed 1967 comedy "Divorce, American Style". But Lear was best known for transforming the face of American television and, along the way, bringing about important social changes. Lear was a life-long liberal who wanted to address controversial issues through his work. The 1971 premiere of "All in the Family" brought a sea change that no one saw coming. Until then, most American sitcoms were safely following the rule book of presenting non-controversial scenarios. It was rule followed by even the greatest and most beloved comedy shows such as "The Honeymooners" and "The Andy Griffith Show". With "All in the Family", Lear introduced the character of Archie Bunker, played in immortal style by Carroll O'Connor. Archie was a working class stiff from the working class borough of Queens, New York. He was rude, crude, selfish and bigoted. However, Lear was wise enough to also give him redeeming qualities, 'lest audiences would quickly tire of tuning in each week to simply be offended. The scripts caught the tensions of the era, in which dinner time conversation was often a battle between generations.The show was a huge hit that ran for many years and even spawned a successful follow-up series, "Archie Bunker's Place". Lear was also conscious of representing minorities in a humorous but dignified manner. There were predecessors: Diahann Carroll played a Black single working mother a few years earlier in "Julia" and post- "I Spy" Bill Cosby had his own short-lived sitcom years before his legendary 1980s series. But both of these series played it safe in terms of taking on any subjects that might make white viewers uncomfortable. With "Good Times", "Sanford and Son" and "The Jeffersons", Lear brought Black sensibilities to TV for the first time. Audiences of all backgrounds tuned in. Lear's minority characters weren't saints. They were flawed human beings. Audiences appreciated Lear's determination not to be patronizing to the characters.The result probably went a long way to bring about racial understanding, though there's no way to measure the impact. He also produced "Maude", which was also a major hit and show that promoted women's liberation and touched upon the most sensitive issues of the day. Norman had his share of flops, but, fittingly, no one remembers them. Only the hits come to mind.

I only spent time with Norman Lear on one occasion, ten years ago at a party he and Carl Reiner hosted for our friend producer David V. Picker in Beverly Hills. Lear was a spry young 91 years-old at the time and listening to him and Reiner engage in hilarious banter, you felt he was immortal. Now he, Carl and David are gone. It's hard to believe they are no longer with us but their work and achievements live on and Norman's legacy is a towering one. Perhaps writer Mike Barnicle expressed it best today on the "Morning Joe" chat show: "He brought America into people's living rooms."

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By Hank Reineke

Nicholas Anez’s Science Fiction Thrills… Horror Chills is the fourth installment of the author’s “Celluloid Adventures” series, all published by Baltimore’s Midnight Marquee Press. Although I’m not familiar with Anez’s original triad, I can reliably muse - based solely on the strength of his newest effort - the preceding trio are as well-researched, informative and against-the-grain-in-opinion as is this new volume.

In his introduction to Science Fiction Thrills, Anez – full disclosure, a contributing writer to Cinema Retro magazine - informs readers that his intent in the writing of this current book is to “hopefully create interest” in fourteen –mostly dismissed upon original release – sci-fi and horror films. These were films that, in one way or another, failed to find an appreciative audience despite creative merit. Being a guy from New Jersey, I can appreciate Anez’s fighting up from the mat for recognition of these underdog efforts, championing under-performing films he posits as overlooked cinematic treasures.

The fourteen films that go under Anez’s microscope are: Son of Dracula (1943), Alias Nick Beal (1949), The Maze (1953), Donovan’s Brain (1953), 1984 (1956), The Mind Benders (1963), Crack in the World (1965), The Mummy’s Shroud (1967), The Power (1968), Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969), The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), Who? (1974), The Medusa Touch (1978) and Capricorn One (1978). The latter title, Peter Hyman’s “space mission” conspiracy film Capricorn One is, of course, an odd man out in this study. Though not critically praised on its release, the film actually performed reasonably well at the box office.

Each of Anez’s contributing essays are formulaic in presentation: an introductory paragraph or two; a multi-page synopsis of the film’s storyline; a discussion of the movie’s production history (including full cast and crew credits); a review of a film’s critical reception and subsequent box office performance. The book is filled with a score of illustrations – both photographs and promotional memorabilia - all well-reproduced in balanced black-and-white saturations. The book additionally closes with an eight-page Appendix where the author lists his favorite sci-fi and horror flicks - as well what he considers the greatest performances by an actor or actress in both genres. Suffice to say, I share many of the author’s cinematic enthusiasms.

To his credit, Anez doesn’t argue that any of the films under examination - in an extremely readable and cogent two-hundred and fifteen page paperback - is necessarily a “lost classic.” But Anez does suggest that each film studied here offers challenging ideas and (mostly) cerebral storylines. Some of the films, he argues, were critically maligned or were proven box office disappointments for economic reasons: that is, a shortfall of money. Too often the production budgets allotted were simply too modest to mount and support the project’s ambitions. Having said that, Anez also notes the paucity of money wasn’t always the reason a particular film did not light up the big screen as hoped. The author opines some of the films perhaps simply fell to the wayside due to the carping of critics (i.e. the alleged miscasting of Edmond O’Brien as “Winston Smith” or of Michael Andersons’ “unobstructive” direction of George Orwell’s novel 1984).

Other films, such as Basil Dearden’s The Mind Benders, might not have met expectations due to the filmmakers having chose to mix multiple genre devices into their storylines. Anez gives examples: The Mind Benders is described as being “as much a domestic drama as a thriller.” He offers John Farrow’s Alias Nick Beal as “a supernatural horror story,” but one that “also fits in the category of film noir.” The author also contends that Robert Siodmak’s Son of Dracula (a personal favorite of mine, featuring an arguably miscast corn-fed Lon Chaney Jr.) remains “a vastly underrated horror movie that is also a romantic tragedy.”

It soon becomes apparent that Anez’s argument that certain films failed at the box office - or with film critics – was not due to the quality of the films themselves. Instead many were perhaps doomed by visionary “outside-of-the-box” productions that were tough to commercially pigeonhole. Perhaps these films didn’t achieve nor enjoy a measure of acclaim due to the schematics of the filmmakers. It’s suggested such creative teams, at their own expense, had gambled on their film’s commercial potentials – perhaps accidentally, perhaps purposefully. Ultimately, they chose not to cater to clichés or to rigid formulas or to the expectations of their target audience.

In the book’s afterword, Anez notes he chose to focus on “an era in which science-fiction movies depended on ideas and not special effects,” a time when horror films conjured chills “upon the power of suggestion and not graphic gore.” Reading through these essays it becomes obvious that Anez is a strong champion of scenarios that feature solid writing and cerebral storytelling. It’s of interest that of the fourteen films examined here, no fewer than eight had been adapted from pre-existing science-fiction novels or other literary sources published from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Anez acknowledges that some of these films under his microscope might now appear dated - even open to some ridicule by contemporary standards - for their dopey, unsophisticated poor-science-based projections. He muses other films might have been doomed at the box office by their gloomy, paranoid prognostications of a dreary, dystopic future. (Certainly none of the films Anez examines here can be thought of as “feel good” movies – quite the opposite, in fact). Such dystopic melancholia is reflected in Anez’s own opinions. He writes of his fear that contemporary exercises of political correctness and encroaching Orwellian cancel culture movements might yet alter - even expunge – aging artistic works and forms of “popular culture from the past.” “In today’s Hollywood,” Anez sighs, “nothing is implied anymore; everything is explicit.”

I’m probably not as fatalistic as Anez on some of the points he makes, though one can certainly understand – and even sympathize with – some of the arguments he makes. But by my reckoning, home video has - from inception - assured that a majority of cultural artifacts will survive in their original forms for some time well into the future. Certainly books and films and music reflective of the aggrieved historical period in which they were created will survive in their original state. How could they not? There’s too many of us who have carefully collected and curated these artworks to see them suddenly made unavailable. But it is also true that many of these works might – might - need to co-exist alongside a bowdlerized version for generations to come.

The real question is whether or not our shared histories – good, bad, tragic, celebratory or indifferent - can be erased easily? The jury is out on that point, and the debate on the historical revisionism of culture, I imagine, will be argued long into the future. It’s of interest that many of the future-looking films that Anez studies in Science Fiction Thrills… Horror Chills cautions and forewarns against the censorship of free ideas - be those ideas well-meaning, ignorant, brilliant or otherwise. I was going to end this review with Shakespeare’s famously reflective and internal ponder on the duality of intentions, “Ay, there’s the rub.” But I admit I almost didn’t, perhaps employing a bit of guarded self-censorship. After all, Shakespeare, the “immortal bard” of Avon, might not prove so immortal after all. He too is now a target of cancel culture.

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“THE EDGE OF THE WORLD”

By Raymond Benson

One of the more under-seen and underrated films from 1985 is John Boorman’s impressive The Emerald Forest, which gave us an ecological message long before that was much in the public consciousness.

Of a more cinematic significance, this picture is a grand adventure full of action and spectacle, much like Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) or Excalibur (1981) before it. The production values also indicate that this was no easy feat of a movie to make.

The Emerald Forest was shot in and near São Paolo, Brazil, right smack by the Amazon River and in the rain forest. Native extras populated much of the movie, which possibly for the first time provided to audiences of a mainstream motion picture depictions of how indigenous tribes in the jungle live. The result is fascinating, and the National Geographic lesson is enhanced by an exciting tale of kidnapping, exploration, survival, and human trafficking!

Powers Boothe is Bill, a high-ranking engineer with a corporation that is building a large hydro-electric dam on the edge of the rain forest. He’s moved his family of a wife and two young children—a boy and a girl—to the city. One day while overseeing the work of clearing the area of trees, Bill and his family have a picnic at the edge of the jungle. Little does he know that the “Invisible People,” a tribe that has not had contact with civilization, has dared to get close to what they refer to as “the edge of the world.” When Tommy wanders off, he is kidnapped by the tribe. Bill thus embarks on a long process to search for his son, but to no avail.

Ten years later, Tommy (Charley Boorman) has assimilated into the tribe and become one of the Invisible People. His “father” of the tribe (Rui Polanah) loves him like a son, and Tommy loves him back, although he has dreams of “Daddy.” Now Tommy is ready to take a mate, and he chooses young and beautiful Kachiri (Dira Paes). Meanwhile Bill and a photographer embark deep into the jungle to look for Tommy again. They encounter the hostile “Fierce People,” who force Bill to become prey in a hunt through the jungle. Tommy ends up saving Bill, and the real father and son reunite. Tommy, however, refuses to accompany Bill back to his first home. And then the human traffickers enter the story. To say more would spoil the tale!

There is a lot of “Tarzan movie” aspects to this picture, but without the unintentional racism. There is also a lot of nudity of all the indigenous people on display, which received some criticism when the picture was released (Dira Paes was only fifteen years old). However, this was not exploitation. Boorman and his team took great pains to be accurate and truthful in the depiction of the tribes’ customs and ways. Yes, the Fierce People are portrayed as the villains and the Invisible People are ultimately shown to be good at heart (even though they kidnapped a young white boy). There is indeed some idealism and moral ambiguity going on in The Emerald Forest, especially when it comes to the film’s climactic raid on a human trafficking center in the jungle. Finally, there is the message that indigenous people are being wiped out by the actions of white people who are cutting down rain forests.

Powers Boothe does an admirable job here, but it is Charley Boorman (son of the director) who steals the movie. He was around eighteen when the picture was made, and he manages to speak the indigenous language, perform jungle stunts, and carry on with his native costars as if he were one of them. Boorman’s direction is notable, too, given the locale and the cast with whom he had to work. Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography is also quite commendable.

Kino Studio Classics’ new Blu-ray release is a welcome one, and its 1920x1080p presentation is colorful and rich. There is an audio commentary by filmmaker Edgar Pablos and film historian Nathaniel Thompson that sheds light on the production. Supplements include the theatrical trailer and other Kino trailers. There is also reversible sleeve artwork.

The Emerald Forest is for fans of director John Boorman and of jungle exploration adventures. Recommended.

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“THE BUSTER KEATON COLLECTION, VOLUME 5”

(Three Ages: 1923; Directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline)

(Our Hospitality: 1923; Directed by Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone)

(Cohen Film Collection)

“KEATON CLASSICS DOUBLE FEATURE”

By Raymond Benson

The availability of Buster Keaton on Blu-ray can be a head-scratcher. Kino Lorber seems to have the monopoly on Keaton’s features and shorts, but the puzzlement comes with more than one release of certain titles in Kino’s catalog of disks for sale. Add to this befuddlement is the Cohen Media Group and their Cohen Film Collection’s ownership of Keaton’s library. Cohen has also released Keaton Blu-ray disks—and they’re distributed by Kino Lorber! (And still others are released by Eureka Entertainment, licensed by Cohen!) Which editions are we supposed to get?

A new Cohen Film Collection release, available from Kino Lorber, is The Buster Keaton Collection, Volume 5, which includes a double bill of the master filmmaker’s 1923 features—Three Ages and Our Hospitality. (Also available from Cohen Film Collection are Volumes 1 – 4, which likewise contain double bills of Keaton’s features from the 1920s.)

Here on the Cinema Retro site, I reviewed the Kino Lorber release of Our Hospitality in 2019. Apparently the Kino versions are different restorations from the Cohen’s restorations. The latter are performed by Cineteca di Bologna as part of Cohen’s “Keaton Project.” Long ago, Cohen Media Group acquired the rights from the Keaton estate, even though other companies have had access to them. I won’t even attempt to sort out the rights issues here. Just know that the Kino Our Hospitality disk had bonus features, whereas the Cohen Film Collection double bill discussed here does not contain any supplements aside from Cohen’s own trailer of Our Hospitality release and other Cohen releases.

That said, the Cohen restorations by the Keaton Project are likely the best to come about. They look marvelous. Bonus features? Who needs supplements when the feature films are the best quality available?

Three Ages was Buster Keaton’s first feature film (not counting The Saphead, 1920, in which he only starred). Co-directed with Eddie Cline, Keaton presents the “story of love,” i.e., courtship, in three different time periods—the stone age, the Roman age, and modern times (the 1920s, of course). The same cast portrays the same character types in each story, and the film narrative jumps back and forth between these time periods throughout the run of the picture. Keaton stars as the “lesser” man when compared to his more attractive, manly, and wealthier rival played by Wallace Beery. The woman who is the object of both men’s affection is played by Margaret Leahy (the actress made only one film, and this is it). Beery’s character is a bully, and Keaton must overcome the man’s physical strength and social standing with cunning and trickery. There is certainly amusement and clever bits here, but Three Ages could be called baby steps for Keaton as a feature filmmaker when compared to later works. Three Ages was perhaps the Keaton film most in need for preservation, as there are many instances—a few seconds here and there—in which visual elements are deteriorated. The restoration folks have done the best they could, and this is probably the finest you will ever see Three Ages. The lively score for this release is composed and conducted by Rodney Sauer.

Of more importance and interest is Our Hospitality, considered one of Keaton’s greatest works, and it was only his second feature (it is co-directed by John G. Blystone). The story takes place in the early 1800s and draws upon a rural family feud like the Hatfields and McCoys—in this case the McKays and Canfields. When patriarch John McKay is killed by James Canfield (and vice versa), Mrs. McKay flees with little baby Willie McKay (played by Buster’s real-life infant son, Buster Keaton Jr.). Twenty years later, Willie inherits the old family estate in the south and returns to claim it, only vaguely aware of the feud that has existed for decades. On the way he meets Virginia (played by Keaton’s wife at the time, Natalie Talmadge), who happens to be a Canfield. Upon arrival at home, Willie continues to court Virginia, but her brothers won’t have it. The rest of the picture is a cats-and-mouse game of Willie avoiding being killed and at the same time wooing the woman he wants to marry.

There are many striking aspects about the picture. Keaton’s paid great attention to detail in the design and location shooting. Apparently, he took great pains to create realistic locomotives and tracks that depicted early train development in America (although he played with time period accuracy for the sake of more interesting visuals). The final act contains some spectacular and hair-raising stunt work by the star, including an incident of falling into rapids and almost drowning on camera. Mostly, though, the story is well-constructed, the characters have more depth than in the other silent comedies of the day, and, in the end, Our Hospitality is one of Keaton’s most satisfying movies.

Interestingly, it’s the only Keaton film to feature three generations of Keatons—Buster himself, his previously-mentioned son, and his father, Joe Keaton, as a train engineer.

The Cohen presentation here is gorgeous and near perfect. Carl Davis supplied the wonderful musical score that accompanies it.

For Buster Keaton fans, you can’t go wrong with this double bill release (nor with the Cohen Film Collection’s other four volumes). Highly recommended.

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“WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?”

By Raymond Benson

The celebrated filmmaker Elia Kazan’s last picture, The Last Tycoon, was adapted from celebrated writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel (published unfinished in 1941). Released in 1976, the film features a stellar cast, Oscar-nominated Art Direction, and a respectful, intelligent screenplay by playwright Harold Pinter.

And yet, The Last Tycoon is a noble and interesting failure. That is not to say it’s not worth seeing. There is a lot to admire in the movie, especially for audiences interested in Hollywood history.

Robert De Niro plays Monroe Stahr, the production chief and creative head of one of the biggest studios in 1930s Hollywood. Anyone who knows anything about this era of Tinsel Town will realize instantly that the character of Monroe is inspired by Irving Thalberg, the genius producer who held the same jobs at MGM during its golden age. He’s young, handsome, smart, and has some health problems… but he has a way dealing with talent and executives.

Robert Mitchum is the head of the studio, Pat Brady, perhaps something of the Louis B. Mayer of the story. His daughter, Cecilia (the radiant Theresa Russell in her first film) would like nothing more than to be with Monroe, but the moody and melancholic Monroe, a widower, has his eyes and heart set on the enigmatic Kathleen (Ingrid Boulting in her first film), a woman of beauty and mystery who is not part of the Hollywood scene.

Throw in a supporting cast—the likes of Tony Curtis, Jack Nicholson, Jeanne Moreau, Ray Milland, Donald Pleasence, Dana Andrews, Peter Strauss, Jeff Corey, John Carradine, and even a young Anjelica Huston in a small role—and you’ve got classic Hollywood on the screen.

So what’s the problem? Pinter’s script does a splendid job of emphasizing the themes of the novel and Kazan manages to present a gorgeous-looking canvas of star power and fine acting… but the movie ends up being, well, flat. There’s something missing.

Guess what… the missing element is the source material. Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel is about dreams and ambitions left “unfinished.” Monroe’s “lonely at the top” persona is because his life and work is unfulfilled, just like the house he’s building on the beach—it’s unfinished. It’s not even clear that he wants to finish it.

The main love story thrust of the movie—that of Monroe pursuing Kathleen—is ultimately unsatisfying, even if what does occur is what naturally should. Once again, the issue is that we are left with threads that are vague, uncertain, and unsettled.

In a wonderful bit in which a famous novelist played by Donald Pleasence is having difficulty adapting his style of excessive dialogue to the movies, Monroe improvises a scene without characters speaking by describing what a character “sees,” and in turn, what the audience sees. When Monroe stops without completing the scene, Pleasence asks, “What happens next?” And Monroe has made his point that the pictures are a visual medium.

What happens next? Exactly.

Unfinished.

There is an intriguing subplot tease involving the possible formation of a writers union (in which one of those “commie” organizers from New York, played by Nicholson, attempts to come to terms with Monroe), but this, too, is never resolved. The sequence is doubly ironic in that Kazan himself was embroiled in the HUAC Red Scare witch hunts in Hollywood in the 1950s, and there was a large faction in that town who had knives out for the director in later years for his cooperation with the government.

It was an honorable attempt to bring Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon to the screen, though. Revisiting the picture after nearly fifty years, seeing these actors again when they were young and vibrant, and delving into the myths and ambiguities of the Golden Age of Hollywood is still very much worth the time.

Kino Classics’ Blu-ray release features a handsome 1920x1080 restoration that shows off Victor J. Kemper’s cinematography and the lush production design by Gene Callahan, Jack T. Collis, and Jerry Wunderlich. There is an audio commentary by film historian Joseph McBride, who shines light on the darkness of this strange piece of cinema. Trailers of other Kino Lorber titles round out the supplements.

The Last Tycoon is for fans of classic Hollywood, Robert De Niro, Elia Kazan, Harold Pinter, and any of the other actors featured in this unusual presentation.

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Cinema Retro has received the following press release:

On November 28th, Arrow Video brings director Roger Vadim’s Barbarella to 4K UHD and Blu-ray with a brand new, eye-popping 4K restoration from the original negative. The film is based on the scandalous international comic book and stars Jane Fonda as a beautiful and intrepid cosmic adventurer. The story follows space vixen, Barbarella, as she engages in sexy, interplanetary romps while trying to stop the evil Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea) from using the ultimate weapon of mass destruction he’s created. Featuring actors John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, David Hemmings, Claude Dauphin, and Anita Pallenberg, and an out-of-this-world ‘60s pop visual style, Barbarella is a feast for the eyes in 4K UHD.

The two-disc 4K UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray limited edition bonus content includes a reversible sleeve and a fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tula Lotay; six double-sided collector’s postcards; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Anne Billson, Paul Gravett, Véronique Bergen and Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, and select archival material.

Both discs are loaded with bonus content, including audio commentaries, featurettes, interviews, trailers, image galleries and more. 

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RETRO-ACTIVE: MEMORABLE ARTICLES FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Hank Reineke

In September of 2021 I attended Manhattan’s Quad Cinema screening of Thomas Hamilton’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster. As a life-long fan of the actor - and the owner of dozens of books examining the actor’s career in film, stage and radio - this was the sort of career-spanning appraisal I was hoping to someday see. Then, only a few weeks following that theatrical screening, Cinema Retro was provided a stream of the doc for critical review. This enabled me to watch the film a second time, revisiting bits of commentary I had missed or recalled only hazily. At the time the stream was provided to Cinema Retro, it was still uncertain if Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster would be offered on physical media. That question was answered in October 2022 when the film became available as a two-disc combo Blu ray/DVD set from Voltage Films/Abramorama.

In the sixteen-page booklet that’s included in the set, director Hamilton advises both he and scripter Ronald MacCloskey originally envisioned their Karloff doc as a bold “4-hour, 2-part film or a 6 part miniseries.” They certainly had enough material to do so, with a reported 60+ hours of interviews involving no fewer than fifty-five subjects. And, that sixty hours of recorded interviews, of course, didn’t include the footage gleaned from Karloff’s fabled filmography.

While you’re not going to find some sixty-odd hours of extras on this release, the set does suggest that it offers an expanded director’s cut (titled on packaging - but not on the film itself - as Boris Karloff: The Rest of the Story). This is a bit curious. The version screened theatrically at the Quad ran 103 minutes – at least as per its billing at the cinema. The Rest of the Story disc runs one hour and forty-three minutes. Which, if my math skills haven’t failed, equals the same 103 minutes of running time.

Of course the new set does feature two additional bonus selections. The first, Meeting Boris Karloff, is, truthfully, not a terribly essential addition, but not uninteresting. It’s an offering of fourteen minutes of interview/commentary by three figures a bit tangential to Karloff’s legend. Of the trio, author and film historian Kevin Brownlow shares his reminisce of his November 1964 interview with Karloff. He recalls Karloff as an interesting interviewee – one who wasn’t remiss to take issue or correct erroneous information found in the press clippings Brownlow had collected. But he noted Karloff always challenged misinformation in a gentlemanly manner.

Andrew Pratt, described as a “great nephew” of the actor, then shyly recounts his one and only meeting with his great uncle. He credits that meeting as inspiration to pursue a career in film art direction – a career that would earn him a number of nominations and awards from the Academy, BAFTA, and the Art Directors Guild. The last subject interviewed was Anthony Bilbow, a television host of BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up. His only real connection to Karloff was when the actor was a guest on the program, September of 1968. He recalls Karloff as a gentleman kind and warm, modest and self-effacing – but not in a “counterfeit” sort of way.

The final bonus feature of the set is a three-minute interview with the co-scriptwriter of Boris Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster, Ron MacCloskey. This New Jersey-based writer and comedian fell under Karloff’s spell at age seven, having caught Frankenstein on a late night TV telecast. A collector of Frankenstein memorabilia, MacCloskey’s interest in Karloff’s work proved lifelong and ultimately led to his teaming with director Thomas Hamilton to start shooting this documentary in 2018.

If the doc itself is truly an expanded version of the original, it doesn’t really change or radically alter anything presented in the theatrical cut. I’m more than willing to stand corrected if indeed, the doc is offered here in an expanded form. My frame-by-frame memories of those 2021 screenings are all a bit hazy now, so I can’t say with any certainty if extra footage/commentary was included. But, if you missed it the first time, I’ll tack on my original “streaming” review of October of 2021. I very much enjoyed the doc on its original run and my opinion of its merit has not changed at all. Read on, should you wish:

There’s a telling moment at the dénouement of Thomas Hamilton’s and Ron MacCloskey’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: The Man behind the Monster. Sara Karloff, the now eighty-two year old daughter of the beloved actor, opines that her father’s lasting cinematic legacy is due, in part, to the tenaciousness of his devoted fan base. It’s a demographic that we soon discover consists of a number of amazingly creative people: folks whose loyalty to and enthusiasm for Karloff’s work has not wavered over the decades. Sara’s contention is inarguably true. As this ninety-nine minute Voltage Films/Abramorama documentary unspools – crisply narrated by Paul Ryan and featuring commentary by preeminent Karloff scholar and “Biographical Consultant” Stephen Jacobs - we discover the actor’s admirer’s bridge several generations of fans and filmmakers.

The first generation to discover Karloff in the decades following his big splash as the Frankenstein monster in 1931, include directors Roger Corman and Peter Bogdanovich. Both men would have the opportunity and honor to work with the actor in his twilight years. The second generation of admirers were those introduced to Karloff via neighborhood cinema screenings or through television broadcasts of Shock Theater in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

These filmmakers, profoundly influenced by Karloff’s art, would go on to create a few cinematic gems of their own: John Landis, Joe Dante, and Guillermo Del Toro, to name a few. The latter gentleman is particularly effusive in his praise, describing Karloff’s performance as the vampiric Wurdalak in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath as a “tremendous” example of the great actor’s “physical presence, his majesty, his demonic power.”

If the documentary is chock-full of talented filmmakers offering tributes, the film is also supported by the erudite commentaries of film scholars David J. Skal (The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror), Gregory W. Mank (Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: the Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration), Donald F. Glut (The Frankenstein Legend: a tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff), Sir Christopher Frayling (Frankenstein: the first Two Hundred Years), and critic Leonard Maltin.

There are also short tributes and reminisces by several actors – three now gone - who had worked with Karloff at some point in their career: Dick Miller (The Terror), Christopher Plummer (The Lark, Even the Weariest River), Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers), and Orson Bean (Arsenic and Old Lace). Karloff’s tells part of his own story through audio recordings made available to the filmmakers courtesy of the British cinema historian/author Kevin Brownlow (The Parades Gone By…) and the Pacifica Radio Archive.

It has long annoyed me that when one searches out the term “Boris Karloff” in the ever-expanding IMDB, the resulting prompt identifies the actor’s signature film as The Grinch that Stole Christmas (1966). My daughters would remind me that my personal agitation of this result is, by definition, a “first world” problem, one hardly worthy of condemnation. But as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman for four decades, seeing Karloff’s storied career reduced to a role featuring only his disembodied voice as the Grinch… Well, let’s just say that I still find it somewhat misleading and inappropriate.

Be that as it may, Hamilton’s film reminds Karloff himself might disagree with my wariness of the Grinch being bandied as the cinematic crown jewel of the actor’s legacy. Sara Karloff recalls receiving a phone call from her father immediately following his recording of the narration for that beloved Dr. Seuss vehicle. The actor we learn was profoundly happy with his work on the now-famous animated holiday classic, telling his daughter proudly, “I’ve done something which I think is pretty good.”

Karloff would pass away a couple of years following the first broadcast of The Grinch that Stole Christmas, but he worked to the very end of his days, appearing in a number of memorable – and a few less-than-memorable – films, several of which would see release in years following his passing. His last films were little more than cameo-length appearances shot on a Hollywood sound stage. It was director Jack Hill’s idea to take the Karloff footage from these shoots and blend the results into a series of Mexican horror films.

Karloff, rightly and proudly, would choose to refer to his spell-binding turn as the semi-autobiographical aging horror film actor Byron Orlok in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) as his feature film swan song. Technically, it wasn’t. But the brief appearances in that post- Target series of Hollywood-Mexico co-production mash-ups were mostly an excuse for an old pro to continue to ply his trade and keep busy. But working oxygen-tank dependent and wheelchair bound on the Jack Hill-directed sequences, Karloff was prevented from doing much of anything with the already somewhat cut-and-paste material given to him.

Karloff, of course, was not the only “horror film” star of the genre’s celebrated Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s. Karloff, we learn, was actually not happy with the designation “horror movie”, much preferring his films to be termed as “thrillers” or “shock” pictures. His contemporary competitor as grand ghoul of the horror film - one whose own legacy would burn bright into the next century - was Bela Lugosi. Although Lugosi had too often played second-fiddle to Karloff in matters of employment and billing, the Hungarian’s post-mortem fame may have eclipsed his friend’s star over the last few decades.

For starters, Lugosi’s sad and lurid dependency on morphine and alcohol in his final years made him the subject of tabloid fodder, and gossip then – and now – still rules. Lugosi’s slow demise coupled with his appearances in several of Edward J. Wood’s revered cult films brought him a big degree of post-mortem fame. A brand new generation would discover the actor through Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning turn as Lugosi in Tim Burton’s semi-biographical drama Ed Wood.

To be fair, Lugosi’s string of mad performances in Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Glen or Glenda (1953) are, in many ways, were no less better or worse or more undistinguished than Karloff’s walk-ons in the creaky Jack Hill/Mexi-horror films of spring 1968. Though both sets of films are passably entertaining in their own uneven, cult-ish ways, both actor’s cinematic exits were ignoble ends to these two great men who famously made audiences shiver in 1931.

James Whale’s Frankenstein would ultimately transform Karloff into a full-fledged movie star, but it had been a long road to achieving such fame. The actor had been working on various Hollywood backlots since the silent era. In the course of his earliest silent film efforts – beginning with such titles as The Lightning Raider (1919) and His Majesty, the American (1919) – he worked as little more than an extra. His subsequent fame would cause a score of budding film historians to carefully survey battered old prints of Karloff’s earliest filmography in the often futile hope of catching a glimpse as he passed by the camera.

In truth, his decade-long career as a silent film actor was mostly non consequential. He would appear in approximately sixty or so silent films between 1919 and 1929. He would, on occasion, be gifted a role of some heft, most notably as that of “The Mesmerist” in The Bells (1926) opposite Lionel Barrymore, but he was most often cast in adventure-orientated serials as a heavy, or as a Hindu, Mexican or an Arab, a mystic or a general ne’er-do-well.

It was his casting as the sadistic “Galloway” in Howard Hawk’s sound prison drama The Criminal Code (1930) that brought him to the attention of Universal executives looking to cast a suitably cadaverous-appearing actor as the Frankenstein monster. Following Lugosi’s rejection of the part due to the absence of dialogue afforded, Bela’s pass on the role was fortuitous for Karloff. He was still hungry and looking for that big break. Although the role of the monster would forever typecast him, the actor remained forever grateful for having taking the role in Frankenstein, once describing the career door-opening creature as “the best friend I ever had.”

It’s not hard to see why Karloff’s portrayal of the monster remains the preeminent of the Universal series. He was, after all, the only actor to have been given the opportunity to actually act and emote, to bring a sense of pathos to the role. He was abetted, of course, by Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up which, rather than masking, cannily sculpted and made highlight of Karloff’s facial features and sunken cheeks. This gave the monster, according to one of the participants in the documentary, a “full expression range.” The trio of actors who would subsequently portray the monster in the Universal series simply weren’t given the opportunity to apply any emotive effect of their own. Even by Son of Frankenstein (1939), the third film in the series, the screenwriters had already reduced the monster into little more than a hulking, lumbering menace and henchman.

It is discouraging to learn that when Frankenstein had its gala premiere in the autumn of 1931, Karloff was not even invited to attend. He was already forty-four years of age when he assumed the role, a no-name celebrity and hardly a handsome matinee idol of any recognition. The unexpected phenomenal success of Frankenstein would change all that, and Universal was quick to capitalize on the actor’s sudden notoriety as Hollywood’s most beloved boogeyman. Karloff’s natural proclivity for taking on roles of menacing villainous characters with icy stares would allow his casting into a string of Golden Age horror classics – not only for Universal but for other studios as well, including memorable turn in MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. The latter remains a great, entertaining film… if undeniably one of the most politically-incorrect lavish big studio productions of the 1930s.

When the market for horror films softened in the mid-1940s – thanks, in part, due to the horror genre’s continuing perceived transgressions of the Hays Code - Karloff easily transitioned to character roles, where, according to his daughter, her father’s natural “dark coloring,” permitted him to slip easily into “ethnic roles.” As one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, he was able to exercise his freelance status by working for, amongst others, RKO, Columbia, Monogram, and Warner Bros.

Another avenue of opportunity had presented itself around this same time. In 1941 Karloff was lured, against his better judgement according to this film, to take on the Broadway role of the villainous Jonathan Brewster in Joseph L. Kesselring’s stage play Arsenic and Old Lace. It was to his life-long disappointment that a clause in his theatrical stage contract prevented his returning to Hollywood – as did several fellow members of the original Broadway cast – to reprise the role for the much beloved Frank Capra film adaptation of 1944.

Though initially frightened to work in theatre before a live audience, the success of Arsenic emboldened Karloff to accept several other roles in such Broadway productions as The Lark (with Julie Harris), The Linden Tree, The Shop at Sly Corner, and even in a memorable turn as Captain Hook in a 1950 production of Peter Pan. Fortunately, we of a certain age who missed out still can get a small taste of what we missed since kinescopes survive from early Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcasts of the original production of The Lark and a 1961 re-staging of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Though Karloff’s work in radio is mostly ignored in this documentary, the film does take pains to point out that he was among the first movie stars of his generation to fully embrace television. Though he would often appear in serious televisions drams for such programs as Texaco Star Theater or Playhouse 90, he was not above spoofing his own curious fame as Hollywood’s grandest ghoul on any number of variety programs hosted by the likes of Red Skelton or Dinah Shore.

(Stefanie Powers and Robert Vaughn with Karloff in "The Mother Muffin Affair" on "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." (Photo: Cinema Retro Archives)

In the 1960s, he would famously host (and occasionally act) in episodes of the television program Thriller, or appear in drag as “Mother Muffin” in an episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E – or with former U.N.C.L.E. agent Robert Vaughn in the spy-film The Venetian Affair (1966). Joe Dante also references the series of wonderful long-playing albums Karloff would record over the years, his unmistakable, lisping voice introducing children to a wonderful selection of folk tales, ghost stories, Washington Irving classics, and time-worn fables.

Boris Karloff: the Man behind the Monster reminds us that the actor (1887-1969) accomplished a lot in his eighty-one-years, a large percentage of which would encompass appearances on screen, on stage, on air, on record, and on television. To their credit, the filmmakers share what they can in the constraint of the film’ ninety-nine minute running time, and the film certainly succeeds as an excellent primer. Karloff wonks like myself might hold out hope that a multi-part, Ken Burns-style series might someday be put into the works, but I imagine that’s unlikely. One hundred and thirty four years have passed since Karloff’s birth. The fact that contemporary audiences remain completely entranced by his filmography in 2021 is testament enough to the worthiness of this loving tribute painting him as one of Hollywood’s greatest.

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BY LEE PFEIFFER

"Young Billy Young" is the kind of film of which it can be said, "They don't make 'em like that anymore". Not because the movie is so exceptional. In fact, it isn't exceptional on any level whatsoever. Rather, it's the sheer ordinariness of the entire production that makes one pine away for an era in which top talent could be attracted to enjoyable, if unremarkable, fare such as this. Such films, especially Westerns, were churned out with workmanlike professionalism to play to undemanding audiences that didn't require mega-budget blockbusters to feel they got their money's worth at the boxoffice. Sadly, such movies have largely gone the way of the dodo bird. In today's film industry, bigger must always be better and mid-range flicks such as are no longer made. However, through  streaming services such as ScreenPix, it's possible to still enjoy the simple pleasures that such movies provide. (The Kino Lorber Blu-ray is now out of print.) 

The story opens with botched robbery in Mexico committed by Billy Young (Robert Walker) and some cohorts including Jesse (David Carradine). The plan to steal horses from the Mexican military goes awry and Billy is forced to split from his fellow robbers with the army in hot pursuit. Making his way back across the border to New Mexico, he is penniless and desperate. He has a chance encounter with Ben Kane (Robert Mitchum), a tough, sarcastic older man who he encounters again in a nearby town. Here, Billy is being cheated at cards by the local sheriff, who goads him into a gunfight. Billy ends up killing him but stands to be framed for the sheriff's death. He's saved by Ben, who rides along with him to another town where Ben has agreed to take on the job of lawman. Ostensibly he is there to keep order and collect back taxes from deadbeats but in reality, he is on a mission of revenge. Some years before, Ben's son had been gunned down by a criminal named Boone (John Anderson) and Kane has learned that Boone is a presence in the new town and that he is being protected by a local corrupt businessman, John Behan (Jack Kelly). Ben makes his presence known immediately by enforcing the law in a strict manner. He's confronted by Behan, who tries to intimidate him. This results in Behan being slapped around by Kane. Behan also grows to resent the new lawman because he is flirting with his mistress, saloon entertainer Lily Beloit (Angie Dickinson). When Behan abuses her as punishment, he gets another beating from Kane. Meanwhile, Billy runs into Jesse and accuses him of having deserted him in Mexico. The two men fight it out and Jesse is later involved with the accidental shooting of the town's beloved doctor while in the employ of Behan. Kane learns that Jesse is Boone's son and holds him in jail as bait for Boone to come out of hiding. The plan works all too well. Boone turns up with a small army and lays siege to the jailhouse where Kane and Billy are holed up.

"Young Billy Young" was compared to a TV show by New York Times critic Howard Thompson on the basis that it contains so many standard elements of westerns from this time period. There is the bad girl with the heart of gold, the evil business tycoon, the brash young gun and his wiser, older mentor, the heroes outnumbered by superior forces and a lovable old coot (played against type by Paul Fix in full Walter Brennan/Gabby Hayes mode.) Yet somehow it all works very well, thanks mostly to Robert Mitchum's stalwart presence. With his trademark ramrod stiff walk and cool persona, Mitchum tosses off bon mots like a frontier version of 007. Even the Times acknowledged that "Mitchum can do laconic wonders with a good wise-crack". He has considerable chemistry with Dickinson, though the action between the sheets is more implied than shown. Robert Walker Jr. acquits himself well in the title role and David Carradine makes an impression even with limited screen time. The film was directed by Burt Kennedy, an old hand at directing fine westerns in reliable, if not remarkable, style and it all culminates in a rip-snorting shoot-out that is genuinely exciting. The fine supporting cast includes Willis Bouchey, Parley Baer and Deanna Martin (Dino's daughter) in her acting debut.  One oddball element to the film: Mitchum croons the title song over the opening credits. If this sounds strange, keep in mind that Mitchum improbably once had a hit album of calypso music. 

The film is currently streaming on ScreenPix, which is available to Amazon Prime customers for $2.99 a month.

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Lee Pfeiffer

There has been a very positive response to Cinema Retro's coverage of "B" WWII movies in some of our back issues. Writer Howard Hughes concentrated on the films produced by Oakmont Productions, the British-based company that financed and released such modestly-budgeted gems as Attack on the Iron Coast, The Thousand Plane Raid, Hell Boats, and Mosquito Squadron. These films had no lofty pretenses of being potential Oscar winners. Instead, they were made simply to generate a modest profit. However, they tended to be intelligently scripted and well-directed and acted, with showcase roles afforded to stars who didn't usually get top-billing (Lloyd Bridges, Christopher George, David McCallum). The 1970 film Underground was not an Oakmont production but is largely indistinguishable from the company's catalog of titles. It stars Robert Goulet as Dawson, an embittered American agent for military intelligence who is based in England. Dawson is wracked by guilt because his mission behind German lines in occupied France ended disastrously. Both he and his fellow agent (his wife) were captured. Dawson, under extreme torture, revealed his wife's true identity and she suffered a horrendous death at the hands of the Gestapo. Dawson managed to escape and make his way back to England, though how he achieved this remarkable feat is glossed over in the script.  The film opens with Dawson bluffing his way aboard a plane carrying a fellow agent on a new mission over occupied France. Dawson, who is determined to atone for his previous failure by taking on this mission himself, disables the agent and parachutes in his place to meet his contacts in the French Resistance. His French underground colleagues find him to be a bitter, unpleasant man and it isn't long before they realize that he is an imposter for their real contact. Nevertheless, Dawson persuades them to let him carry out the important mission which involves kidnapping a high profile German general who has vital intelligence information and bringing him back to England. Dawon's team is headed by Boule (Lawrence Dobkin), a headstrong and valiant man who frequently locks horns with Dobson over strategy. The team also includes Yvonne (Daniele Gaubert), a beautiful agent who is Boule's wife. Complications ensue when Dawson shows his more human side and he and Yvonne secretly become lovers.

Underground is the kind of film that often receives the backhanded praise of benefiting from "workmanlike" efficiency from its stars and director Arthur H. Nadel. Yet, like the Oakmont productions, it probably plays better in today's era of overblown, CGI-stuffed action movies than it did at the time of its initial release. The film is tightly scripted and the plan to capture the German general is straight out of a top-of-the-line Mission: Impossible episode. The movie was shot on location in Ireland but the countryside passes convincingly for France. Goulet, grim and determined, makes for an impressive leading man and there are fine turns by Lawrence Dobkin and Carl Duering, who is impressive as the German general who adds a clever plot twist to the story line. Like most of these WWII mini "epics" of the period, the production team manages to make the film look far more expensive than it probably was. The action sequences are exciting and well-staged, particularly a climactic shootout as Dawson awaits the arrival of a British plane on a makeshift runway as German forces close in on him and his team.

Underground has been released by MGM as a region-free DVD with a rather bland cover design instead of the terrific original poster artwork. Transfer quality is very good but there are no bonus extras.

By Chris Bainbridge & Cai Ross

We basically became friends because we both loved The Prisoner. They were showing the series on Channel 4 for its 25th anniversary; we were both hooked and stayed hooked, too. As with a lot of people, the tedium and restrictions of lockdown led us to consider the idea of a podcast. There were a few Prisoner podcasts already out there, but they were either a bit dry and professorial or strangely dismissive. One frustrating aspect was the apocryphal information that had cemented itself as part of Prisoner lore, we really wanted to set the record straight where we could.

The ‘Free For All’ podcast was an absolute hoot to make, and it brought us into contact with loads of Prisoner devotees from around the world. We’d expected a bit of pushback from a certain type of social media gatekeeper, but there was absolutely none. Plus, we got to interview Prisoner stars Derren Nesbitt and Jane Merrow, which was a thrill.

The problem with making a podcast about something as finite as a 17-episode TV series is that once it’s done, it’s done. We’ve made some specials (a Columbo episode and a look at Danger Man aka Secret Agent) and have more in the works, but ultimately, we were Prisoner-ed out.

We thought that what we’d recorded had the makings of an entertaining book. It had to be more than just a transcription of what we’d said in the podcast, but we did incorporate some of that element into the text to give it a conversational feel. With the book, as well as the podcast, we wanted readers to feel that they were hanging out with like-minded friends. This was also an opportunity to create an entry point for new viewers by injecting contemporary connections and a lot of humour, making it accessible to everyone.

We also felt that we’d uncovered things about The Prisoner that didn’t seem to be covered in any of the literature or ongoing discussions. We have some theories about the controversial final episode ‘Fall Out’, that we think, are quite unique and stand up to scrutiny better than many of the tired 1960s drug culture theories. As much as the book is a deliberately fun and entertaining read (even if your memory of The Prisoner is a bit rusty), it holds its own as critical analysis of a much-discussed series.

(L to R: Authors Chris Bainbridge & Cai Ross.)

There were a few obstacles to overcome, mainly in the form of rights issues. Necessity being the mother of invention, we created a Prisoner-ish original, with the invaluable help of Alan Hayes, the book’s designer, Prisoner expert Rick Davy and talented graphic artist Jemima Duncalf, who illustrated it.

I hope that it will sit snugly on the shelf in amongst the grand tomes that make up The Prisoner library. It’s a testament to the enduring fascination of Patrick McGoohan’s extraordinary series that the number of books written about it is still growing nearly sixty years after it first appeared.

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Here's a vintage public service announcement in which John Wayne promotes the American Cancer Society. Strangely, the spot has some factual errors. The Duke says he went for a check up after completing his 199th film...which may be accurate if you count every chapter in the old serials he made as a separate movie. The segment shows him in "North to Alaska", which was released in 1960. In fact, Wayne came down ill while filming "In Harm's Way" in 1964 and had a lung removed shortly thereafter which did save his life. The spot goes on to have him show a clip from the 1969 movie "True Grit" which he says was seven years after his diagnosis. In fact, the film came out only five years after his cancer surgery. Well, at least the spot was well meaning and did cause a spike in people getting cancer screenings.

By  Lee Pfeiffer

If there is such thing as a family-oriented sex farce, the 1969 hit "Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell" fits the description. The delightful concoction stars Gina Lollobrigida as Carla Campbell, a vivacious woman of relative wealth who lives in a modest Italian village. She is known for her rather upscale lifestyle that includes a live-in maid, Rosa (Naomi Stevens) and the fact that she can afford to send her 18 year-old daughter  to a fancy American university in Switzerland. Life is very pleasing for Carla, who is known for using her money for charitable purposes. She has told everyone that she came by her wealth when her husband, an American officer named Captain Campbell died in action during WWII. She tells a moving tale about how she married him when he took shelter at her house when she was only 16 years old. They fell in love, married and had only a few days together before he was shipped out and killed in battle. During their brief marriage, she became pregnant with their daughter Gia (Janet Margolin), who is now far more American than Italian in her speech and mannerisms. Carla claims that her financial security comes from her late husband's family in America, which has been kind enough to send ample checks every month to provide for her and Gia. Carla also has her own boy toy, hunky Vittorio (Philippe Leroy in a very amusing performance), who oversees her small wine business. As with most Italian lovers depicted in comedies of this period, the two spend a good deal of time verbally sparring with each other but every time one of them threatens to leave, the other uses sex as lure to get her/him back.   

A crisis erupts one fine morning when Carla discovers the town is preparing to host a reunion of American airmen who were stationed there during the war. Turns out she has been living a lie. She confides to Rosa and Vittorio that there had never been a "Captain Campbell" who she married. In fact, she created him out of thin air to cover the fact she was pregnant and took the name from a can of Campbell's soup! In reality, three different airmen had been housed with her family during the same week. As one moved out, another moved in...and she had relations with each of them. At the war's end, she was not certain which of them was the real father of her baby so she wrote to each man and told him he was the father. The three men all believed that he was her only lover and dutifully and secretly sent checks to Carla over a period of twenty years, continuing the practice even after they married and had kids of their own. Now the three ex-G.I.'s are coming to town and will expect to slip away from their spouses and see Carla. Making matters worse, Gia has heard about the reunion and has made a surprise return from school in order to meet the men of her father's fighting unit. All the set pieces are now firmly in place for a traditional Italian farce. There is a script flaw in that the film should be taking place some years earlier, as the age of some of the characters doesn't add up. Also, as the movie was released in 1968, why are the Americans visiting Italy to celebrate their 20th anniversary reunion? That would mean they were in the country three years after the war ended. 

The three men who think they are Gia's father are a diverse lot. Justin Young (Peter Lawford) is an aristocratic playboy who is accompanied by his long-suffering wife Lauren (Marian Moses), who can barely endure his constant womanizing. She correctly assumes that he intends to hook up with another girl while in Italy for the reunion, though she doesn't know that he believes he will be seeing the mother of his daughter. Walter Braddock (Telly Savalas) also has an abrasive relationship with his wife Fritzie (Lee Grant), who constantly throws painful insults at him because the couple can't have children. (Walter doesn't believe the medical diagnosis because he feels he fathered Gia). Then there's Phil Newman (Phil Silvers) and his loyal wife Shirley (Shelly Winters in full Shelly Winters mode). The couple has their young sons along for the trip and Phil finds that every time he concocts a way to meet up with Carla, family responsibilities intrude. Finally, each man manages to contact her and Carla finds herself in the unenviable position of having them all make secret visits to her villa at the same time. This results in the predictable madcap scene in which she tries to hide them from each other. Director Melvin Frank (who co-wrote the script) demonstrates an ability to make such ancient comedy scenarios work, thanks in no small part to the presence of those great male second bananas, each of whom gets plenty of screen time. (Only Lawford seems miscast. He looks too much like a dapper movie star and no one attempts to explain why an American airman has a British accent.)  Carla's complex situation becomes increasingly troublesome as pace becomes frantic, resulting in car chases, lovers quarrels, the unveiling of long-kept secrets and a very moving and sentimental finale.

Lollobrigida gives one of her best performances in this film and was nominated for a Golden Globe. The sheer amount of talent on display makes us point out once again that in days of old, such marvelous actors were taken for granted. Today, there is a dearth of great character actors and the film industry is not better off because of it. The film zips along at a brisk pace, accompanied by Riz Ortalani's inspired score, topped off by the infectious title tune which is crooned by Jimmy Rosell, which was also nominated for a Golden Globe.   

The movie is currently available for streaming through Screenpix, which is available to Amazon Prime subscribers for an additional $2.99 a month).

Here's a vintage behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of the 1968 western "Guns for San Sebastian" which had Anthony Quinn squaring off against villain Charles Bronson in an underrated gem from the era. Click here to order Blu-ray from Amazon.

If you're of a certain age and grew up in the New York City area, then you know that WPIX TV used to show Laurel and Hardy in "Babes in Toyland", otherwise known as "March of the Wooden Soldiers", every Thanksgiving. If you remember those days, then here's pleasant blast from the past.

(To view in Full Screen Mode, click on "Watch on YouTube.)

The good folks at Shout! Factory have a streaming site, Shout!TV and are making it possible for fans to stream beautifully mastered episodes of "The Prisoner", the classic series starring Patrick McGoohan. In fact, every episode is available for streaming. Be seeing you at Shout!TV...Click here to view.

Writing on the TCM web site, Raquel Stecher looks back at the connection between Warner Bros. boss Jack Warner and Frank Sinatra and how it resulted in several of the Rat Pack motion pictures, though Sinatra would ultimately discard old pals Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford due to personal disputes. The crime classic "Oceans Eleven" featured the full Rat Pack but by the time "4 for Texas" was made, only Sinatra and Dean Martin appeared together. Click here to read.

We love these vintage studio production featurettes and here's a good one: Irwin Allen's 1973 blockbuster "The Poseidon Adventure".

THE FUGITIVE COMES TO 4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY^TM AND DIGITAL

THE 1993 ACTION THRILLER FILM STARRING HARRISON FORD AND TOMMY LEE JONES WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 4K RESOLUTION WITH HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE (HDR)

Purchase the film on 4K Ultra HD Disc and Digital November 21

Burbank, Calif., October 4, 2023 – As part of the year-long centennial celebration for the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros. Studio, the acclaimed action thriller film The Fugitive from director Andrew Davis (A Perfect Murder, Holes) will be available for purchase on 4K Ultra HD Disc and Digital for the first time on November 21.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of its 1993 release, The Fugitive will be available to purchase on November 21 on Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc from online and in-store at major retailers and available for purchase Digitally from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Vudu and more.

The Fugitive stars Academy Award nominee Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy U.S. Marshall Sam Gerard, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.  The film also stars Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, and Jeroen Krabbé.  

Directed by Davis from a screenplay by Jeb Stuart and David Twohy from a story by Twohy, the film is based the television series “The Fugitive” which was created by Roy Huggins and ran from 1963 to 1967. The film was produced by Arnold Koppelson.

The Fugitive was nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor, for which Jones won the award, and Best Original Score.

The Fugitive will be available on Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc for $33.99 ERP and includes an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc with the theatrical version of the feature film in 4K with HDR and a Digital download of the film. Fans can also own The Fugitive in 4K Ultra HD via purchase from select digital retailers beginning on November 21.  

The 4K restoration of The Fugitive was completed at Warner Bros. Discovery’s Motion Picture Imaging (MPI) and was sourced from the original camera negative.  The restoration was overseen by director Andrew Davis.

About the Film

The Fugitive Ultra HD Blu-ray disc contains the following previously released special features:

Introduction by Andrew Davis and Harrison Ford

Commentary by Andrew Davis and Tommy Lee Jones

"The Fugitive: Thrill of the Chase"

"On the Run with the Fugitive"

"Derailed: Anatomy of a Train Wreck"

Theatrical Trailer

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Publisher: Headpress

Paperback
Street Date: October 5, 2023
Size: 229mm x 152mm

Pages: 434
Illos: 64 B&W stills and ads

ISBN: 978-1-915316-09-7

RRP: UK £22.99

Review by Adrian Smith

One of the most important and influential television writers of the twentieth century, Nigel Kneale has enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity of late. Headpress published the biography Into the Unknown by Andy Murray (not the tennis player) a few years ago, Electric Dreamhouse published a lavish collection of essays on his legacy called We Are the Martians, Comma Press reissued his collection of short stories Tomato Cain last year, and now Headpress again brings us this dense, information-packed study of his 1970s folk horror-inflected (before the term ‘folk horror’ had been invented) anthology show Beasts. This attention is well deserved: Nigel Kneale wrote the screenplay for the groundbreaking 1954 BBC production of 1984 before creating The Quatermass Experiment, a show that was so popular that pubs across the country would empty as people ran home to watch it. Quickly followed by Quatermass II and what was arguably the best of the three, Quatermass and the Pit, these shows were hugely important in the early history of television, and Nigel Kneale’s name was forever associated with science fiction and horror. The sixties proved to be a bit more difficult for him after some issues he had with the BBC, but there was still some amazing work, such as The Year of the Sex Olympics, which effectively predicted the rise of Big Brother and Survival-type reality shows.

In the mid-1970s he was commissioned by ATV, one of the independent commercial stations that formed part of the ITV network, to write a show loosely connected by a single theme. There were many such shows in the 1970s, often hung on one writer’s work and with a horror focus, such as Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected or Brian Clemens’ Thriller. The six episodes of Beasts, plus pilot episode ‘Murrain,’ had some form of animalistic connection and explored strange and unexplained phenomena; a couple besieged by rats, a ghostly dolphin, an actor becoming obsessed with the monster he plays in a film, a pet shop owner conducting werewolf experiments, a shopgirl whose telekinesis manifests as a destructive rodent, and a family who discover a mummified animal in the walls of their new home. These were unique, disturbing and memorable television dramas that undoubtedly made for memorable viewing experiences, and they have remained influential to this day.

Screen’s new book on Beasts is a well-researched piece of work. The author has had access to production records, scripts and other ephemera, and he also covers the wider social and historical context around the subject of each episode as well as the critical and public response. It’s an incredibly deep dive and one which will keep fans of the show, and of strange 1970s British television in general, thoroughly engrossed. It is not a book to read if you have yet to see Beasts however, so do seek out the DVD collection, enjoy its equal levels of nostalgia and creeping dread, and then dig into The Book of Beasts to discover everything you could ever want to know about this series and its impact on popular culture.

Click here to order from Amazon UK

Click here to pre-order from Amazon USA (Ships December 1)

Imprint, the Australian video company, has released a boxed set of Blu-rays devoted to Gene Hackman. The set is region-free and limited to 1500 copies.The set includes "I Never Sang for My Father", "Bite the Bullet", "March or Die" and "The Domino Principal".

Click here to order. (Prices are in Australian dollars. Use currency converter to see value in your local currency.)

By Ernie Magnotta

Horror films featuring either attached, murderous hands with minds of their own or just a homicidal, disembodied hand on the loose have been around since the early days of cinema. Classic films like The Hands of Orlac (1924), it’s 1935 remake, Mad Love, as well as The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) are just a few that immediately come to mind.

After the phenomenal success of 1973’s The Exorcist, a plethora of demonic possession films flooded theater screens, creating a popular cycle of movies which consisted of, amongst other things, satanic possession and the power of good (usually in the form of a Catholic priest) to stop it. Titles such as Beyond the Door (1974), Abby (1974) and The Omen (1976) quickly followed, with the first two, although thoroughly entertaining, aping The Exorcist quite a bit. Unfortunately, there were also many films that were merely unenjoyable and stale Exorcist cash-ins. However, in 1981, a low-budget filmmaker smartly combined the homicidal hand idea with satanic possession and created a fun, little cult film called Demonoid.

While in Mexico, Mark Baines (Chinatown’s Roy Jenson) unwittingly unleashes an ancient evil in the form of a severed hand. The hand immediately possesses Mark and wreaks havoc until the poor man is killed and the demonic hand is separated from his dead body. Once free, the hand continues to possess anyone it comes across, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. With the help of benevolent Irish priest, Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman from Eaten Alive), Mark’s wife, Jennifer (The Brood’ s Samantha Eggar), does everything in her power to try and stop the evil hand before more innocent blood is spilled.

The fun film features two Academy Award nominees: Samantha Eggar (for 1965’s The Collector) and Stuart Whitman (for 1961’s The Mark). Needless to say, Eggar and Whitman are both convincing due to taking their roles and the premise of the film seriously. This only helps the audience to believe in it as well, therefore making the film even more enjoyable. Fans of 60s/70s cinema and television will also be happy to spot highly recognizable character actor (and sometime stuntman) Roy Jenson from Our Man Flint, The Getaway, The Gauntlet, Kung Fu and Star Trek, just to name a few. Last, but not least, actor/stuntman Ted White (Starman), who is best known to genre fans for playing our favorite hockey-masked slasher-killer, Jason Voorhees in 1984’s Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, shows up as an unfortunate victim of the hand’s deadly rampage.

Filmmaker Alfredo Zacarias’ idea for Demonoid sprang from a desire to make a film about the good and evil that dwells within every person. Combining the disembodied hand idea with demonic possession/Exorcist-like themes, Zacarias fashioned a somewhat original and enjoyably cheesy drive-in film that grindhouse fans like me find extremely pleasurable. The movie may be a bit silly in spots (certain scenes of the hand moving around as well as the actors pretending that their left hands have a mind of their own are unintentionally hilarious and quite charming; not to mention the fact that Stuart Whitman goes in and out of an Irish accent whenever he feels like it), but it’s still an interesting and entertaining enough horror-thriller with a solid, likeable cast and a fun monster in the form of the disembodied hand.

Demonoid has been released as a Blu-ray/DVD combo from the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome. The film, which has been restored from the original 35mm camera negative and scanned in 2K, is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and, with the exception of a little grain here and there, the transfer looks beautiful. Special features include the theatrical trailer, TV spot, an artwork gallery, and an interesting and informative video interview with writer/director/producer Alfredo Zacarias. The disc also contains the international version of Demonoid titled Macabra, which runs ten minutes longer than the US version and features a different soundtrack (the US version uses music taken from the 1977 sci-fi classic The Incredible Melting Man). We are also treated to a Macabra trailer and TV spot. The eye-catching, original poster artwork for Demonoid can be seen on the Blu-ray sleeve and the Blu-ray disc itself while the striking artwork for Macabra shows up on the DVD disc as well as on the reversible sleeve. All in all, a very well put together collection of a not very well-known, but extremely fun film.

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By Doug Oswald

William Holden, Grace Kelly and Mickey Rooney star in James A. Michener’s Korean War drama, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. Holden is Lieutenant Harry Brubaker, a lawyer and Naval Reservist called to active duty during the Korean War. The film opens in November 1952 where we meet Brubaker returning to the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Savo Island off the coast of Korea. He ends up ditching his plane in the ocean after running out of fuel and is rescued from the icy waters. Mickey Rooney gives a memorable performance as Chief Petty Officer Mike Forney, the helicopter pilot who rescues Brubaker from the ocean. Forney wears an unauthorized addition to his uniform, a green top hat and matching scarf, when flying. He also likes to brawl while on shore leave due to girlfriend problems. Earl Holliman plays Nestor Gamidge, the rescue man who assists in getting the pilots into the helicopter and brawling with Mike.

Brubaker is a good pilot and WWII veteran who’s resentful because his civilian life was disrupted by the recall for the Korean War. He starts to question his abilities as a pilot after ditching his plane and is nervous about an upcoming bombing mission. Grace Kelly plays his wife, Nancy Brubaker, who surprises her husband by visiting Japan with their children which casts additional doubts on Brubaker’s ability to carry out dangerous missions.

Headquartered on the USS Savo Island, the naval task force commander is Rear Admiral George Tarrant and is played by Fredric March. Tarrant lost his sons during WWII and is filled with many regrets in life but tries to change Brubaker’s mind about his career as a naval aviator. Rounding out the cast is Charles McGraw as Commander Wayne Lee, the fighter wing commander, who leads the climactic assault on the bridges. Robert Strauss is Lieutenant “Beer Barrel,” and Willis Bouchey as Captain Evans. There’s also an uncredited bit role by Dennis Weaver as the mission briefing officer.

The movie is divided into three parts. We meet the members of the carrier crew in part one. The middle section features shore leave in Japan where we meet Mrs. Brubaker and the Brubaker’s two young daughters. There’s also some shore leave drama involving Forney and Nestor which shows Brubaker’s dedication to these men. The final part of the movie involves the bombing mission at Toko-Ri which pays off beautifully.

The movie features great use of United States Navy resources as the bulk of the film takes place on the deck of the carrier USS Essex with extensive use of the F9F Panther and shots of the carrier task force. The use of actual United States Navy ships and aircraft rather than models is an essential part of the authenticity of this movie. Michener himself spent time on board the USS Essex gathering research for what would become the short novel, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” which was released in 1953. That experience by Michener was made into the MGM release, “Men of the Fighting Lady,” with Michener played by Louis Calhern. That movie was released in May 1954, a few months prior to the premier of “Toko-Ri.”

Holden gives one of his typical cynical performances which he was great at doing, especially in such films as “Sunset Blvd,” “Stalag 17” and later in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “The Horse Soldiers.” He’s not quite so cynical in this film and gives a great performance as Brubaker. Grace Kelly isn’t given much to do other than looking beautiful as the dutiful wife with kids in tow, but she’s important in sealing her husband’s’ doubts. All her scenes were filmed on studio sets in Hollywood with someone doubling for her in long shots in the location scenes. I think Rooney gives the standout performance as Mike Forney with the green top hat and scarf. Earl Holliman is also good as Mike’s best friend and sidekick with Fredric March and Charles McGraw good as the stoic and capable father figures. I wish Robert Strauss’ comedic skills were put to greater use in the film, especially considering he is fondly remembered in “Stalag 17” with Holden. There’s a side story set up at the start and end of shore leave involving a set of golf clubs carried by Beer Barrel that’s never explained.

The movie is directed by Mark Robson with a screenplay by Valentine Davies. While Robson is not a name that rings bells, you certainly know his movies which include “Peyton Place,” “The Prize,” “Von Ryan’s Express,” “Valley of the Dolls” and “Earthquake” to name a few of his most well-known movies. Robson started his career working uncredited as an assistant editor for Orson Welles and eventually worked his way up to editor and director culminating in several high-profile big budget movies. He died of a heart attack in 1978 shortly after the completion of “Avalanche Express” which was released the following year.

The score by Lyn Murray is serviceable and the on-location shipboard filming adds great production value to the movie. The model work depicting the crash landing scenes are very done as well. The film was released theatrically in December 1954 by Paramount. This Kino Lorber release looks and sounds better than ever. The movie clocks in at 102 minutes and is presented in a widescreen aspect ratio which resembles VistaVision, even though it isn’t, as the movie went into production during the transition period when the process was still being perfected. The Blu-ray release includes an outstanding audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Steven J. Rubin as well as trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases. The movie is highly recommended for fans of Holden, Kelly, Rooney and military drama.

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By Cai Ross

To TV fans of a certain age, the acronym ITC instantly invokes memories of spies, guns, girls, espionage, memorable theme tunes, lush sideburns, flared trousers, almost continuous smoking, purple flock wallpaper and grand, globe-trotting adventures.

Actually, the wide-ranging TV shows made by Lord Lew Grade’s pioneering company have fans of all ages, with shows like The Saint, The Champions, The Persuaders! and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) (US. My Partner The Ghost) still appearing in television schedules to this day, nearly 70 years after Grade scored his first hit in 1955 with The Adventures of Robin Hood.

And so it’s everyone from grandparents to grandkids who have been tuning in in their droves to hear ITC Entertains The World, a podcast that celebrates all things ITC. Fronted by devotees Jaz Wiseman, Al “Smudge” Samujh and Rodney Marshall, the podcast casts an eye at the output of this much-loved stable, from whole-series overviews to individual episodes. They also look at the movies made under the ITC banner (films like Blake Edwards’s The Tamarind Seed and Peter Sellers’s career-reviving The Return of The Pink Panther).

I spoke to Rodney Marshall about the podcast and his love of all things 1960s, starting with the genesis of the podcast.‘Like a lot of podcasts, ours started in lockdown. Jaz approached me and suggested that we did one based on the little-known ITC show Gideon’s Way, which I hadn’t actually seen. I watched them all and thought it was fantastic. You have all those great 1960s guest actors, the Anton Rodgerses, Peter Bowleses and Annette Andres. I thought the podcast would be very niche but it proved surprisingly popular.

‘I’ve known Jaz for a long time through my late father. Jaz interviewed him for lots of DVD commentaries when The Avengers came out.’ Rodney’s father just happens to be Roger Marshall, a very familiar name to fans of vintage espionage television shows. The creator of popular UK dramas like Travelling Man, Zodiac and Floodtide, Marshall Sr also co-created the highly regarded and influential private detective show Public Eye in 1965, starring Alfred Burke as down-at-heel gumshoe Frank Marker.

He was also a regular contributor of scripts for the likes of The Avengers, writing 15 episodes of the iconic 1960s series.

After the success of the Gideon’s Way podcast, they were encouraged to broaden their scope and cover the entire range of ITC shows, but to do that they needed a new recruit. ‘We thought that in terms of voices, three is better than two. Jaz got in touch with his old friend Smudge, who is very much into the history of Elstree studios, into Hammer films and of course, ITC shows. I think all three of us bring something different to the podcast. Jaz is into things like music and titles, Smudge is very into things like directors and direction, talking about fish-eye lenses and the like. I’m more into the scripts, probably because of dad.

‘It was a learning curve for me because these two guys are ITC-mad. They probably have huge tardis-sized rooms full of all things ITC. If I said to one of them, “Do you have a copy of the scripts for The Persuaders! that my dad wrote for?” and they’d probably have three different copies of it.’

We bemoaned the fact that following the sad demise of the distribution company Network, it now seems unlikely that long-running shows like The Saint will receive the BluRay treatment and be discovered anew in pristine condition. It’s a huge shame since the likes of The Prisoner and Man in a Suitcase have enjoyed BluRay remastering and look breathtakingly fresh and vibrant as a result.

(L to R: Rodney Marshall, Jaz Wiseman and Al Samujh.)

'Man in a Suitcase is very much a shared love. I discovered it in the early nineties when BBC started showing it again during the school holidays. In my early misguided smoking days, I used to copy McGill’s habit of standing my cigarette up on the table between puffs. Naturally, I wasn’t able to pull it off with the same je ne sais quoi as Richard Bradford.

Marshall is very much an admirer of the US actor. ‘Bradford’s performance is astonishing. When you put him up against someone like Colin Blakely or Jacqueline Pearce, Bradford is dynamite. He has an incredibly magnetic presence. A lot is made of the fact that there was a lot of tension between him and the actors and stuntmen, but the main directors on the show absolutely loved him. Peter Duffell who was one of the main directors was our next door neighbour and one of dad’s mates, and he raved about Bradford.

‘He may have overdone the Marlon Brando thing; he would race around the set four or five times in order to look breathless before a take, but he really invested himself in his performances. Like Patrick McGoohan, he was a lead actor who wouldn’t take bullshit. If an actor came along and just wanted a quick cheque, they wouldn’t put up with it. Bernard Lee turned up drunk for an episode of Man in a Suitcase, and Bradford walked up to him and said, ‘I’m not putting up with this crap.’ Bernard Lee immediately switched onto acting-mode and suddenly there were no problems.’

Marshall’s other great ITC love is one of its earlier hits, Danger Man (or Secret Agent in the States), a popular and innovative pre-Bond spy series that made a global star out of Patrick McGoohan. ’I think what kept McGoohan engaged with Danger Man for so long is the fact that he’s undercover in so many different roles. One week he might be playing a roaring drunk, the next week he’s a timid school-teacher in glasses, sending someone into a nervous breakdown by stalking them! That variety made him feel like he was back in his old rep company in Sheffield.’

Danger Man was one of several ITC shows that, like ABC’s The Avengers, made the shift from black and white to colour in the mid sixties, when the US networks made it mandatory. Marshall however, believes that something was lost after the transition.‘I still think that The Prisoner, Man in a Suitcase and the amazing Strange Report aside, the best ITC series are from earlier in the decade like Gideon’s Way, Danger Man and The Saint, which I much prefer in black and white.

‘I always felt that when a show went from black and white to colour, you lost a lot of the subtlety. Take an episode of The Saint like ‘Scorpion’ with Dudley Sutton, who rides around on a motorbike bumping people off and even tries strangling his girlfriend. Perhaps its something to do with the shadows, but you can pull off a kind of darkness in a monochrome episode which doesn’t quite work in colour. Jaz recorded a DVD commentary for the Avengers episode ‘Town of No Return’ with Brian Clemens and director Roy Ward Baker, and they both said, ‘you know, black and white is more…real.’

The podcast casts its net wide to cover not just the big, popular hits but some of the ITC gems that may have faded from the public consciousness. ‘Man of The World from 1962 is very interesting, with Craig Stevens from Peter Gunn playing a photo journalist travelling the world getting himself into scrapes. It actually started in colour then went back to black and white after its budget was slashed.’

Intriguingly, The Sentimental Agent starring Carlos Thompson started off as an episode of Man of The World. The powers that be were so impressed with Thompson that they span it out into a whole series. Marshall explains, ‘Carlos was like a continental Roger Moore, very good looking, very charming, very flirty. But suddenly he fell ill, and they had to make the rest of the series with this humourless guy who was none of the above.’

The podcast, like the work it celebrates, is a labour of love and it’s benefitted from some Lew Grade-style serendipity that brought exactly the right three people together to extol the many virtues of a series of entertainments that are still adored by millions.

‘We’re lucky,’ concludes Marshall,‘because Jaz has access to a library of things like the music and a lot of interviews and DVD commentaries that he’s done with the likes of Richard Bradford and Sir Roger Moore, who was hilarious. On the commentary for The Saint, they debunked the theory that Patrick McGoohan turned down the role. He was interviewed for it, but producer Bob Baker thought he was unsuitable for the role as he refused to do any romantic scenes. They said to Roger, ‘we knew that kissing ladies on screen wouldn’t be a problem for you,’ and he replied in that most Roger Moore way, ‘Indeed not!’

(ITC Entertains The World is available to listen to across all streaming platforms.)

By Todd Garbarini

I was introduced into the world of Billy Idol’s music in late 1983 when my younger sister discovered his music. His signature hits “White Wedding (Part 1)” and “Dancing with Myself” from his self-titled 1982 album emanated from her room daily and I found his energy to be infectious. At that time, his follow-up album, the widely popular Rebel Yell, was just released (it’s now forty years-old!) and it really put him on the map, setting him apart from the group he burst on to the scene with in 1976: the short-lived Chelsea, and then later, Generation X. With guitarist Steve Stevens, who has been with him ever since, and a group of musicians, Billy Idol, whose surname was inspired by one of his teachers labeling him as an “idle” student, began his Rebel Yell tour and was Yours Truly’s first foray into the world of rock concerts. Since then, he has toured the globe and garnered legions of fans the world over.

A self-professed history buff and environmentalist, Billy teamed with then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio in February 2020 just weeks before the COVID-19 shutdown to promote a public awareness Anti-Idling campaign in New York City to remind drivers that motor vehicles are forbidden to idle for no more than three minutes, and no more than one minute in a school zone. So, he’s very pro-environment.

In April of this year, Billy did something that no artist has ever done before: he performed a concert at the Hoover Dam in Boulder City, NV, which was filmed for the new concert film Billy Idol: State Line, playing in theaters this week. The first 20 minutes of the film reveal that Billy would have been a history professor had he not been in a band (I for one am glad that he never got his teaching license) and gives a brief history of the construction of the modern engineering marvel. Amazingly, this is Billy’s maiden voyage to Hoover Dam and you can tell that he is stunned by it.

He plays an acoustic set at the foot of the dam with Steve Stevens of “Eyes Without a Face” and “Rebel Yell” before taking the stage or, in this case the Hoover Dam helipad, to belt out “Rock the Cradle of Love,” “Dancing with Myself,” “Flesh for Fantasy,” “Eyes Without a Face,” his trademark cover of “Mony Mony,” “Blue Highway,” “Rebel Yell,” “Hot in the City,” and “White Wedding (Part 1).”

Will this venue become a mecca for future bands?

This is a must-see on the big screen for Billy Idol fans.

See the press release below for more information:

BILLY IDOL: STATE LINE MAKES U.S. THEATRICAL DEBUT NOVEMBER 15

FILM DOCUMENTS THE FIRST CONCERT EVER PERFORMED AT HOOVER DAM

IDOL CONTINUES WATER CONSERVATION ACTIVISM WITH PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS IN CONJUNCTION WITH U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

Billy Idol: State Line, a Vertigo Live concert film documenting the rock legend’s April show at the famed Hoover Dam - the first ever concert performed at the location - is set to make its U.S. theatrical debut on November 15, 2023. The movie highlights the history and significance of Hoover Dam and includes performances from two unique sets of Billy Idol’s iconic hits: a full band concert at sunset with special guests that electrified and illuminated the surrounding Black Canyon and an acoustic duo set on the roof of the powerhouse at the foot of Hoover Dam straddling the Colorado River, directly on the Nevada/Arizona state line. Tickets and additional info on film screenings can be found at billyidolstateline.com, with additional screenings to be added shortly.

For both sets, Idol is joined by his collaborator and lead guitarist of over forty years, Steve Stevens. Performed in front of only 250 fans, the full band set features special guests Alison Mosshart (The Kills, The Dead Weather), Steve Jones (Sex Pistols, Generation Sex) and Tony Kanal (No Doubt). See the film’s trailer here.

“Our show at Hoover Dam was a monumental and surreal career highlight,” notes Idol. “I’m excited to get State Line out into the world. With this film we set out to highlight the continued importance of one of the most inspiring infrastructural achievements of the 20th Century, while also bringing the power of rock n roll to a stunning, magical location. I think we more than succeeded on both accounts.”

Idol’s first-person experience of the Colorado River Basin drought conditions while shooting the film at Hoover Dam inspired his ongoing efforts to promote the importance of water conservation, including appearing in a series of public service announcements being released by the U.S. Department of the Interior. See Idol’s most recent P.S.A. with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland here.

Of his activism relating to water conservation, Idol adds, “The drought conditions prevalent in the American West are severe and impossible to ignore. It takes all of us conserving water in whatever ways we can to preserve the future of our natural resources for our grandkids and beyond. I’m proud to help amplify this issue in whatever way I can.”

Billy Idol: State Line is produced by Lastman Media for Vertigo Live in collaboration with the Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas and is distributed theatrically throughout North America by Unbranded Events and U.K./rest of world via Kaleidoscope Entertainment.

Idol will also perform in Las Vegas the same day as Super Bowl LVIII in February; see below for a complete list of tour dates.

For 46 years, Billy Idol has been one of the definitive faces and voices of rock’n’roll. Between 1977 and 1981 Idol released three albums with Generation X as their camera-ready frontman. In 1982 he embarked on a transatlantic/trans-genre solo career that integrated the bold and simple lines of punk and rock’n’roll decadence. Touring consistently around the world for the last ten years and showing no signs of slowing down, Idol released both The Roadside EP in 2021 and The Cage EP in 2022 on Dark Horse Records, earning praise from fans and critics alike. In January, Idol cemented his name among Hollywood legends with the first Walk of Fame Star of 2023.

Idol recently wrapped the first-ever Generation Sex tour in the U.K. and E.U. The punk supergroup is comprised of Idol and Tony James from Generation X, and Steve Jones and Paul Cook from Sex Pistols. November 10 marks the 40th Anniversary of Idol’s seminal record Rebel Yell, with an expanded edition of the album due in early 2024.

By Todd Garbarini

Paramount Home Video has released a set of five horror films in 4K UHD format. Here is a breakdown of the films included in the set.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

I was in the minority of those left unimpressed by Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), based upon the 1967 novel of the same name by Ira Levin. I never saw what the fuss was about and could not find it even remotely scary when I originally saw it in the 1980s on VHS. I rewatched the film when the Criterion Collection released it on the now-out-of-print Blu-ray in October 2012 (if you have that version, hold on to it) and I realized that I had an incorrect reading of it. I believe that the terror that oozes from the screen is directly attributed to Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) new life in the enormous Dakota Apartments (made famous by Mark David Chapman following his murder of John Lennon in December 1980) which is surrounded by people who initially make her feel safe and welcomed, but slowly begin to reveal their true natures which are malevolent and evil. Her husband Guy (maverick independent film director and actor John Cassavetes) is a struggling actor who understudies for a Broadway play and is suddenly fast-tracked to the lead role by the inexplicable blindness that befalls the play’s lead actor (portrayed by an off-screen Tony Curtis over the phone) following a discussion with two nosy neighbors (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon as Roman and Minnie Castavet, respectively) who ingratiate themselves into their lives. Coincidence? Guy is often short-tempered with his wife, but midway through the film he suddenly has a burst of fatherhood when he suggests to her that they have a baby. Overwhelmingly happy, Rosemary soon becomes suspicious of the people around her during her pregnancy. They are revealed to be a coven of witches, and Rosemary is carrying Satan’s child during a disturbing sequence of supernatural impregnation that she believes was just a dream.

Rosemary’s Baby is the ultimate gaslighting movie. It is also a movie that, I would imagine, would work to great effect on the psyche of female audience members for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is due to knowing what the outcome of Rosemary’s pregnancy is, and knowing that no one, not even the doctor (Charles Grodin) she has foolishly and naïvely confiding in regarding her suspicions regarding the coven, can or is even willing to help her. The film is set against a backdrop of complete normalcy, and when that normalcy is slowly eroded by the Devil’s minions in sheep’s clothing, it’s too much for us and Rosemary to bear. It’s also a film about betrayal, and it’s shocking to see how Guy willingly confesses to her that he had no problem selling her out to this life inorder to make an easy life for themselves, something he sees as a bonus. Her reaction to him and to the (offscreen) face of her baby is complete disbelief, and Ms. Farrow is more than capable of carrying the film. Rosemary’s horrifically contorted face when she sees her baby for the first time, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (sorry, Walt…), is all that the audience needs to know that the evil has come full circle.

Rosemary’s Baby turns 55 this year. Filmed in the final four months of 1967 and released on Wednesday, June 12, 1968, it takes place in 1965 and 1966. Ruth Gordon won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest horror films of all time, and it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2014. The film spawned a TV-movie follow-up in 1976 with Patty Duke.

(Photo: Cinema Retro Archive)

The new package contains the film in 4K UHD on one disc, and the film on a standard Blu-ray, the latter boasting the following extras:

Rosemary's Baby – A Retrospective – this piece, originally shot in 2000 for the DVD, runs just under 17 minutes and includes comments from the late film producer Robert Evans, the late production designer Richard Sylbert, and Roman Polanski.

Mia and Roman – this piece runs roughly 23 minutes and contains a lot of nice behind-the-scenes shots taken during filming on location in New York City, with input from actress Mia Farrow and director Roman Polanski.

Theatrical Trailer

50th Anniversary "Redband" Trailer

This is a nice upgrade to 4K that will make you feel as though you’re watching it in a cinema again, though the lack of a feature-length commentary by film historians is disappointing given the film’s stature in the genre, making one wonder if the director is just against this sort of thing. Steven Spielberg and David Lynch do not offer commentaries on their works, sadly.

NOTE: It has come to Paramount’s attention that there is an error on this pressing, and they are going to correct it with a disc replacement program. Apparently there is a line of dialog missing from the film! When you purchase this box set, click on this link to request the replacement discs which should become available in the next several months.

Pet Sematary (1989)

Stephen King published two frightening and best-selling novels in 1983: Christine and Pet Sematary. Attempting to sandwich these massive tales into films that ran less than two hours is a near impossible task and neither film, the former directed by John Carpenter and the latter by Mary Lambert, is completely successful in this regard. Lensed between August and November 1988 and released on Friday, April 21, 1989, Pet Sematary begins with a familiar nod to Dan Curtis’s creepy Burnt Offerings (1976) as Dr. Louis Creed and his wife Rachel (Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby) leave the Windy City and arrive at their new Ludlow, Main home with their young daughter Ellie (Blasé Berdahl) and even younger son Gage (Miko Hughes). The house is located right in front of a major road that trucks whiz by at a high rate of speed, setting up the roadway as the imminent threat. Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne), the family neighbor, takes them to the Pet Sematary and explains how children bury their pets there. This proves convenient when the family, sans Louis, visit Rachel’s parents for Thanksgiving, and Ellie’s cat Winston Churchill (“Church” for short) is killed by a truck. Jud takes Louis to a location beyond the Pet Sematary called the Micmac Burying Ground dating back to ancient Native American days. Buried pets have come back to life, though their personalities are different, and this is no exception with Church. The idea is to save Ellie the grief of losing him.

Following Ellie’s displeasure of the now-reanimated Church’s smell, Gage finds himself in the path of a truck and, following his death, Louis digs up his corpse and heads for the Micmac Burying Ground despite verbal warnings from Jud. Unfortunately, Gage comes back as a meanie, killing those around him until a final showdown with his father.

Despite being written by author King, the screenplay never really manages to get above the level of a gross-out horror film. The subject of grief is best left to serious dramas (think Ingmar Bergman) as director Mary Lambert can only give us what’s on the written page as a truncation of an oversized novel, is fairly schematic at best. Whereas the novel is more of a deep-rooted mediation on the nature of the overwhelming emotion of grief over the death of a child, the film focuses more on the horrific aspects of the deaths at hand. It does seem to be enough, however, to satisfy genre fans.

Bonus Content (on both 4K UHD Blu-ray and Standard Blu-ray Disc):

Feature-length commentary by director Mary Lambert

Pet Sematary: Fear and Remembrance – this piece is in high definition and runs about 7 minutes. Select members of the film’s cast and crew look back on the film and its reception.

Pet Sematary: Revisitation – this piece is in high definition and runs about 10 minutes. The director discusses the film’s production, how she came to direct the movie, and restoring the film.

Still Galleries – this is in high definition and consists of a large selection of photos separated into four sections.

Storyboards Introduction by Mary Lambert – this intro runs 1 minute in length. She explains how they derived the new transfer from the original camera negative and how the storyboards came to be.

Storyboards – this feature is extensive and recalls the image galleries of the laserdisc days. By using the left and right buttons on the remote control, you can navigate what is essentially a visual representation of the film. Very cool!

Behind the Scenes – this is a stills gallery that, like the storyboards, can be navigated in a similar fashion, showing images on the set of shooting during the summer of 1988.

Marketing – nice section of stills containing the marketing of the film for both theatrical and home video exhibition.

The following extras are only on the standard Blu-ray, though I will never understand why they do not replicate all extras on both discs as there is more than enough room to do so:

Stephen King Territory – this is a nice piece from 2006 that is shot in standard definition for the then-DVD release and runs about 13 minutes. It discusses the autobiographical genesis for the story, which really happened to Mr. King’s family and daughter.

The Characters – also from 2006 and shot in standard definition, this runs 13 minutes and looks at the motivations behind the characters and the cats used on the set. They had an ingenious method of making the cat’s eyes glow maniacally with an attachment to the Panavision cameras.

Filming the Horror – running 10 minutes, Mary Lambert discusses how the script came to her and while she read Stephen King’s novels, she did not consider herself to be a horror film director. Miko Hughes, who was two-and-a-half-years old when he played Gage, appears to have had a fun time on the set!

Smile (2022)

David Sandberg’s 2013 short film Lights Out is a brilliantly frightening, just-under-three-minute film about a woman seeing a strange creature in her kitchen and bedroom. It is widely available on Youtube and is one of the scariest movies I have seen in my 42 years of watching horror films and thrillers. It provided the basis for an unnecessary, feature-length film of the same name three years later, also directed by the same person, who has gone on to direct Annabelle: Creation (2017), as well as other projects. Likewise, Parker Finn is a director who made a short film called Laura Hasn’t Slept (2020), starring Caitlin Stasey and Lew Temple as her somnologist. It’s the second short he made after his impressive and creepy The Hidebehind (2018), a nearly ten-minute now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t bit of computer trickery that will make you think twice about trekking solo in a forest. In Laura Hasn’t Slept, which is just under twelve minutes, Laura tells her therapist that she has a recurring nightmare wherein a frightening man is constantly smiling at her. While I appreciated the effort of this film and experienced no difficulty in determining the ending, the prospect of sitting through the theatrical version entitled Smile simply did not sit well with me. My disappointment with Lights Out nearly made me pass on Smile, and I am glad that I reconsidered.

Unlike most of the horror films marketed today, Smile is every bit as terrifying as its marketing campaign has professed. Like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Smile feels like the sort of film that would emotionally bifurcate the audience into those who love it and those who hate it. In terms of genre tropes, the film’s most obvious cinematic antecedent is David Robert Mitchell’s superb It Follows (2014), and a nod to the film’s title can be further traced back to the malevolent chauffeur, played with icy stillness by the late Anthony James in Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings (1976). While it is true that familiarity can often breed contempt, this does not make Smile any less frightening. There is credence to the notion that although the film might offer up a less-than-compassionate view of mental illness and handle the subject flippantly, the movie should ultimately be judged for what it sets out to do: scare you. It may not be completely original, but it is no less frightening.

Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, gives a bravura performance as recently engaged Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist who meets a new patient, Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey, the actress from the short film), who fails to convince Rose that she is being chased by a demon that possesses people by smiling at them. Rose’s training misinterprets this as an episode of some sort of psychosis until Laura screams and reacts violently to something in the examination room invisible to Rose. Laura’s terror suddenly turns inexplicably serene wherein she effortlessly cuts her own throat with a broken plant’s pot while smiling maniacally at Rose, who reacts with complete terror. Unbeknownst to Rose, a terrible curse that plagued Laura has now been transferred to her. It takes Rose a while to make this realization. In the interim, she blames what she experiences on overworking, reluctantly taking a week off at the urging of her manager. Her fiancée (Jesse T. Usher) wants to help her but feels powerless. Rose begins to have hallucinations, and as the audience we see what she sees. Her mother’s painful death becomes a force that she needs to reckon with and is a major reason why she works as hard as she does. The hallucinations become more and more unnerving. With the aid of her ex-boyfriend cop Joel (Kyle Gallner), she begins looking into murder cases wherein people having died by suicide that they committed in front of another person, and they themselves have also witnessed a suicide. A turning point occurs when Robert Talley (Rob Morgan of Netflix’s Stranger Things, in a small but powerful role), a murderer currently in prison, managed to escape the clutches of the entity. With Joel’s help, Rose goes to the prison to see him. He tells Rose that the entity feeds on other people’s trauma. Apparently, the only way to relieve oneself of this curse is to murder someone else in front of a witness to thereby transfer the trauma on to them (again, similarly like in It Follows). Rose attempts to do this, yet it turns out to be another hallucination. By the end of the film, Rose confronts her childhood trauma at her now-abandoned childhood home in an unsatisfactory ending that paves the way for a sequel.

Thematically similar to Rosemary’s Baby in that the protagonist knows the truth and cannot seem to convince anyone around them that they are not crazy, Smile, while certainly not original, manages to take a familiar horror genre trope and seriously make it its own, packing a powerful emotional punch with several genuine jump scares nearly on a par with Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972) and William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III: Legion (1990). In order for a film like this to work, the performances need to be believable and they are all spot-on.

Bonus Content (on 4K Ultra HD Disc):

Audio Commentary by director Parker Finn – this is a feature-length discussion by the film’s director who speaks about the movie scene by scene regarding what he wanted in the scenes and what he got. I normally shy away from such commentaries as I am not interested in a blow-by-blow description of the film, but the director speaks so intelligently about it that he is a constant pleasure to listen to.

Something's Wrong with Rose: Making Smile (HD) – at just under 30 minutes, this is a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to make the film in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Flies on the Wall: Inside the Score (HD) – Smile has one of the creepiest scores that I have ever heard, and it was composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer. In under nine minutes, we are treated to his vast studio and his methods of creating ungodly sounds for the film.

Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary by director Parker Finn – there are two scenes provided here with an optional commentary and add depth to Rose’s character. These run just under 12 minutes. I would have loved to have had these scenes added as an optional cut of the film viewable through seamless branching.

Laura Hasn't Slept – Original Short with Introduction by director Parker Finn – this is the short film that Paramount scouts saw at South By Southwest in Austin, TX that paved the way for Smile. It runs about 11 minutes.

Cinema Retro has received the following press release: 

THE BELOVED HOLIDAY FAVORITE COMES HOME

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER ON 4K ULTRA HD

"LOVE ACTUALLY 20^TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION"

YOURS TO OWN NOVEMBER 21, 2023

FROM UNIVERSAL PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT

INCLUDES BLU-RAY™ AND DIGITAL CODE

SYNOPSIS: Funny, irresistible, and heartwarming, Love Actually is the ultimate romantic comedy that follows eight couples whose lives intersect shortly before Christmas. From the makers of Bridget Jones's Diary and Notting Hill, this beloved film is headlined by an incredible roster of stars including Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Rowan Atkinson and more. Take a breathtaking tour of love's delightful twists and turns as you fall under the spell of Love Actually and share the laughs and charm again and again!

• BONUS FEATURES:
• · Making LOVE ACTUALLY (NEW)
• o Join Writer/Director Richard Curtis along the with cast and crew as they reflect on the making of the film and its legacy 20 years later.
• · Deleted Scenes with Introductions by Richard Curtis
• · The Music of LOVE ACTUALLY with Introductions by Richard Curtis
• · The Storytellers
• o A featurette exploring the film’s main storylines, featuring interviews with the cast discussing their characters and the major elements within each on-screen relationship.
• · Kelly Clarkson “The Trouble with Love is” Music Video
• · Billy Mack “Christmas is All Around” Music Video
• · Feature Commentary with Director Richard Curtis and Actors Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy and Thomas Sangsters

Instagram: @uniallaccess

X: @UniAllAccess

Tiktok: @universalallaccess

LOVE ACTUALLY FILMMAKERS:

Cast: Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Martine McCutcheon, Rowan Atkinson

Casting By: Mary Selway _CDG

Music By: Craig Armstrong

Co-Producers: Debra Hayward, Liza Chasin

Costume Designer: Joanna Johnston

Line Producers: Chris Thompson

Production Designer: Jim Clay

Director of Photography: Michael Coulter _BSC

Editor: Nick Moore

Produced By: Duncan Kenworthy, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner

Written and Directed By: Richard Curtis 

Click here to order from Amazon

“A VISCERAL LIFE IN LITTLE ITALY”

By Raymond Benson

Although he had made two previous feature films and several shorts, it was Mean Streets that placed Martin Scorsese into the minds of discerning filmgoers. This low budget independent picture (released by Warner Brothers) proved, as filmmaker Richard Linklater states in a Directors Guild of America interview with Scorsese from 2011 (presented here as a supplement), that artists who wanted to make a movie could go out and find the means to put their vision on the screen without interference from studio brass. Indeed, that’s what Scorsese did.

At the time, Scorsese was trying to make it in Hollywood. It was John Cassavetes who had urged him to stop working for Roger Corman (for whom Scorsese had made 1972’s Boxcar Bertha) and “go back to his roots.” Well, Scorsese’s roots were in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York City. He had grown up there. He had friends there. He knew the life there, all the “goodfellas” and wannabe tough guys and low level (and some high level) gangsters. So the filmmaker crafted a screenplay with fellow NYU film school alumnus Mardik Martin, cast guys he knew such as Harvey Keitel in the lead (he had starred in Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door from 1967, retooled and released in 1968 and again in 1969) and Robert De Niro (who had also grown up in the neighborhood and had known Scorsese when they were younger; this was Scorsese’s first collaboration with De Niro, then an actor who had done some Roger Corman films and was still attempting to up his game). Other familiar faces that have appeared in Scorsese’s oeuvre were also cast—Victor Argo, Harry Northup, David Carradine, and Murray Moston—but also other notable actors who have been in mob-related pictures such as David Proval, Richard Romanus, and Cesare Danova. Amy Robinson, who later became a producer (she co-produced Scorsese’s After Hours in 1985) was cast as the female lead.

Mean Streets features the hallmarks of what we would come to know to be in a “Martin Scorsese Film,” especially when he focuses on the underworld, a topic to which he has returned many times: brotherhood, loyalty, friendship, betrayal, guilt (lots of guilt), Catholicism, sex, drugs, rock and roll, crime, and violence. This life in Little Italy is edgy, gritty, dangerous, and quite self-contained. There isn’t a moment in which an audience might think—oh, this couldn’t happen… because Scorsese convinces you that it can and has.

Charlie (Keitel) is a small time hood in Little Italy. His uncle is Giovanni (Danova), a big time Mafioso. Charlie acts as a big brother figure to his friend, Johnny Boy (De Niro), who is reckless and not the brightest bulb in the socket, and who owes money to several gangsters, including Michael (Romanus). Charlie secretly dates Teresa (Robinson), who is Johnny Boy’s sister. She suffers from epilepsy and is an outsider to the closed-knit Italian culture of the neighborhood. Giovanni wants Charlie to get away from Johnny Boy, but Charlie can’t do it. Eventually the debtors come to get Johnny Boy to pay up, and Charlie must make decisions that will tear him apart. And that’s when the violence erupts.

What’s truly amazing about Mean Streets is that, according to cinematographer Kent Wakeford, only 6% of the film was actually shot in Little Italy (this reviewer believes it is slightly more, but certainly not as much as 10%). The rest was all shot in the Los Angeles area! Scorsese and his design team managed to find locations in California that somewhat resembled New York City, and nearly all of the interiors were shot in real spaces (existing bars, hotels, and apartments). No sound stages were used. For decades, critics and film historians have touted Mean Streets to be one of the “great New York films, shot on the streets” when, in fact, it wasn’t! That’s not to say that it’s not a great New York film, because it is.

Mean Streets is a rough and ready, visceral, fast moving, in your face crime picture with unsavory characters and a vibe that will make you nervous. You might ask, well, is it entertaining? You bet your life it is. But with these ne’er-do-wells, your life may not be worth much.

The Criterion Collection presents a new 4K digital restoration approved by Scorsese and frequent collaborator/editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who was not involved with the film), with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. After several home video releases in the past on DVD and Blu-ray, this one is obviously tops.

Supplements include the excellent previously mentioned discussion about the film between Scorsese and Richard Linklater at the DGA; an audio commentary by Scorsese and Amy Robinson on specific scenes from the film; a new, observant video essay by Imogen Sara Smith about the picture; an interview with DP Wakefield; excerpts from a documentary about co-writer Mardik Martin; a vintage promo video from 1973 about the making of the film (the only supplement ported over from previous home video releases); and the theatrical trailer. The package booklet contains an essay by critic Lucy Sante.

Mean Streets is a must-have for fans of Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, and New York City mob movies. Get it now… just remember to pay your debts!

Click here to order from Amazon

From a 1974 issue of Boxoffice magazine, though the photos are from at least a couple of years previous to this issue with the exception of the depiction of the Colorado 4 Cinemas in Denver, which was an artist's concept drawing. The Alameda Theatre in San Francisco is showing "Pete 'n Tille" with Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau, while the Americana 5 multiplex in Panorama City, California is showing "The Graduate", "Doctor Zhivago", "The Dunwich Horror", "The Brain" and "Take the Money and Run". The photos were from an advertisement promoting theater chains.  

Here is an official 2008 Warner Bros. video documentary about the making of the 1967 Paul Newman classic "Cool Hand Luke".

Click here to order 4K+Blu-ray+digital code special edition

For those readers of a certain age who have retained fond memories of the laser disc era, here are a couple of treats: two 1990s ads promoting laser discs of "Dances with Wolves" and "Terminator 2:Judgment Day".

On this date in 1963, Stanley Kramer's all-star Cinerama comedy "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" opened at the Cinerama Dome Theatre in Los Angeles. The film represents what people mean when they say "They don't make 'em like that anymore!"

Here's the original trailer for one of the greatest espionage movies of all time: director Martin Ritt's acclaimed 1965 screen adaptation of John LeCarre's international bestseller "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". At the height of the James Bond-inspired spy craze, Ritt's film presented the dark, ugly and non-glamorous side of espionage. Richard Burton received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his brilliant performance as the weary, cynical spy who is disgusted by his profession but finds he can't leave it. 

Click here to order Criterion Blu-ray special edition.

By Lee Pfeiffer

"Some Kind of a Nut" is yet another obscure movie from the late 1960s (1969, to be precise) that is available through Screenpix, which is an ancillary subscription channel through Amazon Prime. The film is not currently available on home video in the U.S. and I don't know if it ever was. I was aware that the movie didn't make any impact upon its initial release but, given the amount of talent involved in it, I thought it was time to invest 90 minutes of my life to see a collaboration between star Dick Van Dyke and legendary writer/director Garson Kanin. Van Dyke was a hot property at the time, having left his classic TV sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show" to concentrate on a career in feature films, where he initially found considerable success. Van Dyke was busy with so many projects at the time that "Some Kind of a Nut" had a bizarre shooting schedule to accommodate him. According to the TCM web site, some of the film was shot in May of 1968 with the rest filmed in January 1969. The logistics of arranging this with a full cast and crew must have been challenging but Van Dyke's presence in the film led United Artists to agree to the terms. The company had recently released "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" with Van Dyke in the starring role. The studio was also seeking a long-term relationship with Garson Kanin and signed him to a four-picture deal arranged by producer Walter Mirisch, but none of the other projects came to fruition and Kanin retired from making feature films after "Some Kind of a Nut".

Van Dyke is cast as Fred Amidon, a mousey bank teller who works in a busy branch in the heart of mid-town Manhattan. He and the other employees suffer in an Orwellian atmosphere under the thumb of a priggish, humorless boss who demands complete conformity with conservative banking policies. Fred is also carrying the weight of his pending divorce from his wife Rachel (Angie Dickinson) which will be finalized in a few weeks time. His one pleasant diversion is his romantic relationship with fellow bank clerk Pamela Anderson (no, not that Pamela Anderson) played by Rosemary Forsyth. While enjoying a precious lunch hour together in Central Park, Fred is stung on the chin by a bee. The painful sting proves to be stubborn and won't go away even when the couple leave on a cross-country vacation. Frustrated by the unsightly wound on his chin, Fred decides to grow a beard. (For a bank with prison-like working conditions, the institution must have a very liberal vacation policy, as Fred and Pamela have enough time to drive to San Francisco and back and for Fred's beard to come into full glory.) Upon returning to the bank, his new appearance causes a scandal. His boss insists that he shave it off, as beards are against bank policy. When Fred refuses, he is summarily fired. His stance earns him the respect of his fellow employees and when the media learns of his situation, he becomes a cause celebre. Before long, Fred becomes a reluctant hero to everyday people who are fed up with having to conform to outdated policies in society. He is particularly embraced by the counter-culture movement, making him an unlikely figurehead for local hippies. He has more problems: his soon to be ex-wife Rachel reconnects with him because she is impressed by his new-found courage. This complicates things with Pamela, who detests the beard and the symbolism it represents. She's under the influence of her two meddlesome brothers who seek to compromise Fred's status as a cult figure. Meanwhile, Fred starts to dabble in Eastern mysticism and begins consulting an Asian guru in one of the film's funniest scenes. Beyond this, however, Kanin's script is anything but unpredictable and you can pretty much guess the outcome of the movie long before it arrives.

"Some Kind of a Nut" was filmed under the working title "The One with the Fuzz". It was a dud with critics and audiences, as was often the case when older filmmakers tried to be relevant to the anti-Establishment crowd of the era. (All the hippies are safe, joyous and satisfied carrying protest signs that are about as controversial as "No Trespassing". There isn't a hint of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests that defined the era, let alone any expletives. The film paints a Brady Bunch-like depiction of a time that never was. Nevertheless, the script does have something to say about the price of conformity, expressed in comical fashion through the inimitable talents of Dick Van Dyke, who makes otherwise unfunny scenes amusing. Angie Dickinson has a rather bland role and her screen time is limited, though director Kanin ensures there is a scene set at a swimming pool for no other reason than to present the welcome sight of Dickinson in a bikini.The film also has the virtue of presenting some nostalgic scenes shot on location in Manhattan. For Dick Van Dyke, the movie would be the first of two feature films released in 1969 that were ambitious in content but failures at the boxoffice and with critics, although the second film, Carl Reiner's comedy/drama "The Comic" has earned respect over the years in certain quarters. Van Dyke would only star in one more comedy on the big screen, "Cold Turkey", released in 1971. That film proved to be quite popular. Thereafter, he would not star in a feature film for another eight years, when he appeared in the leading role in Stanley Kramer's admirable but under-appreciated final movie "The Runner Stumbles", in which Van Dyke gave a fine dramatic performance. He returned to the medium where he had originally found success: television and his late career series "Diagnosis: Murder" would prove to be a major hit that ran for many seasons.

("Some Kind of a Nut" is currently streaming on Screenpix, available to Amazon Prime subscribers for an additional $2.99 a month.)

When we think of the 1969 Oscar winner "Midnight Cowboy", chances are Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'" comes to mind, as the song played a key part in setting the tone and atmosphere of the film, even though it was not written for the movie. United Artists made a deal to include it in the film.  John Barry's moody, haunting main theme for the movie is one of the great composer's best works. If you need to be reminded why, you can relish the song again in this video montage.

By Nicholas Anez

The incentive for this 4^th volume in my Celluloid Adventures series was a dismissive review in a reference book of the 1956 film version of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, calling it “a great disappointment and a lackluster adaptation of the briliant novel.” This derogatory opinion remains the general consensus among many critics. I disagree with this assessment, in part

because the movie remained in my memory long after I first saw it. Furthermore, I had read the novel so I knew that, though the adaptation was definitely a loose one, it was actually faithful to Orwell’s ideas. So I wanted to redress this negative opinion of the movie and proceeded to write about it. This led to my considering other movies in the science fiction and horror genres that, I believe, are also underrated. Thus was born the concept for Celluloid Adventures 4: Science Fiction Thrills….Horror Chills.

I should state at this point that I became a fan of science fiction and horror movies in my adolescence. I also loved Westerns (Shane is my all-time favorite movie) and it has always upset me when a good movie, particularly in my favorite genres, fails at the box-office. Thus, my objective in the first three volumes was to bring overdue attention to some of these movies. In these books, I discuss films within several genres while I devote individual chapters to science fiction and/or horror movies. For this fourth book, I decided to focus only on science fiction and horror because the ascendancy of these genres that began with Star Wars (1977) and The Exorcist (1973) relegated to relative obscurity many fine movies that preceded this dominance along with a few that followed. And it is some of these films that I wanted to retrieve from anonymity for this book. (Not coincidentally, my devotion to the genres more or less ended in the late 70s, coinciding with this ascendancy, but that’s another story.)

It was very rewarding for me to research the movies in Celluloid Adventures 4 because I discovered numerous interesting details about their development and production that I hope will make this book equally interesting. For instance, here are just a few of the many intriguing facts that I learned:

The director of one movie fired his own brother who had written the screenplay.

One movie is based upon a legend of the birth of a deformed monster.

One movie was made by a married couple that later engaged in an acrimonious divorce.

One movie failed upon its original release but played to enthusiastic audiences in New York

and Los Angeles 65 years later.

The screenplay for one movie is based upon actual inhumane experiments conducted in

prestigious universities.

The producer of one movie was forced to cast the actor who starred in it.

The director of one movie considers it among his worst.

One serious movie suffered because its studio promoted it as an exploitation movie.

The 14 movies that I highlight cover a period of three and one-half decades, from 1943 to 1978, and I would speculate that the average moviegoer today has not heard of most of them. With one exception, they were financial failures or disappointments, a fact that contributes to their obscurity. However, I believe that they still deserve the recognition and praise that they did not receive upon their original release. In my estimation, these are all excellent films but yet most of them did not attract wide audiences.

These movies include a wide variety of subjects. In Son of Dracula (1943), the main character is a woman who is not only eager to die but is also willing to kill the man that loves her. In Alias Nick Beal (1949), Lucifer is determined to condemn an innocent man him to eternal suffering. Both The Power (1968) and The Medusa Touch (1978) portray men with superior brains that have the capability to either save or destroy the entire world. One of them will choose destruction because he hates humanity with a passion.

Very few people have heard of the movie, Who? (1974), and those who have heard of it were probably confused by the title. And yet it is a poignant story of an altruistic man who is victimized by futuristic technology. The protagonist of The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) also endures tremendous suffering from another type of futuristic technology. The future of the aforementioned 1984 (1956) is extremely frightening because it depicts a world in which a sweet-looking child will betray her own father to be tortured and perhaps killed.

I am hoping that this book will encourage people, including some of you who are reading this, to view these movies. They are all entertaining and, in some respects, provocative. For instance, after seeing The Maze (1953), you might actually sympathize with a monstrous amphibian. If you believe that a brain is lifeless once it is removed from its body, Donovan’s Brain (1953) may change your mind. You might also discover how fragile our brains are after viewing The Mind Benders (1963), a story about the cruelty of pitiless scientists. If you view Crack in the World (1965), you will witness how the earth is almost destroyed by a scientist with abundant hubris. Upon viewing Journey to the far Side of the Sun (1969), you will witness a benevolent scientist lose his sanity because of his extraordinary discovery.

There are moments of pure excitement and suspense as well as pure terror in these movies. Viewers of Capricorn One (1977) will inevitably break out in ecstatic applause at the sight of a rickety biplane suddenly appearing on an isolated desert road. This is the only movie among the 14 in this book that was a success – with the public if not the critics. In contrast, The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) played the bottom-of-the-bill of double features and was unnoticed upon its release. But I believe it deserves some kind of awareness.

So I hope that I have piqued your curiosity enough to encourage you to read about the making of these movies. But even if you choose not to buy the book, for your own safety, I implore you to please heed this warning: Beware the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!

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By Adrian Smith

For international audiences, the words “Australian comedy” probably conjures up images of Dame Edna Everage, or the sexual adventures of Alvin Purple. What may be less familiar is the work of the comedy group Double Take, led by former child actor Des Mangan, who began performing live in the mid-eighties in cinemas, screening the schlock horror classic Astro Zombies (Ted V. Mikels, 1968) whilst lip-syncing an entirely new script. What had begun as a group of friends throwing funny lines at the TV during late might screenings of B movies developed into a successful series of live screenings that spread in popularity throughout the country, and eventually overseas with an appearance in 1987 at the Edinburgh Fringe. In 1989 they began a new show using the relatively obscure Italian peplum film Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus gli invincibili (Samson and the Mighty Challenge, Giorgio Capitani, 1964). This was coming from the tail end of the sword and sandal boom that had begun with Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, Pietro Francisci, 1958) a few years and hundreds of films earlier, and as such was already almost spoofing the conventions, particularly in having mythological heroes from different backgrounds (Greece, Israel and Rome) fight each other. Double Take, by this time consisting of just Mangan and comedian Sally Patience, took this already amusing film and drastically rewrote the story so that Hercules, a Sinatra-style crooner, falls in love with the beautiful Labia, whose mother runs the Pink Parthenon nightclub in Climidia, and, well, you get the point. It’s smutty, politically incorrect and hilarious.

The success of the ‘Double Take Meets Hercules’ live show encouraged an American business and wannabee film producer to provide funding to turn the whole thing into a movie, so Mangan wrote a wraparound story about Brad (David Argue), a disillusioned cinema executive who quits his job with one of the major distribution franchises to restore and open his own reparatory cinema. With publicist Lisa (Mary Coustas) and projectionist Sprocket (the legendary Bruce Spence, a man so tall he probably wouldn’t fit in a real projection booth), they plan a gala black tie event opening screening featuring the last film to be screened at the venue before it closed down – Hercules. It is not until the guests arrive that they realise the print they have been sent is in Italian, so Brad and the gang must dub the film live, much the great delight of the audience. This set-up is obviously just the excuse needed to be able to present large sections of the original Hercules film with the new dubbing, and it works very well. Unfortunately, despite successful film festival appearances around the world, Hercules Returns did not stick around in cinemas for very long and was largely forgotten. The Double Take team went back on the road with shows based around, among others, Morgan the Pirate, (André De Toth & Primo Zeglio, 1960) and Starcrash (Luigi Cozzi, 1978), and later Mangan became a well-known face on Australian television through presenting film screenings and Eurovision coverage.

This new, fantastic blu ray release from Umbrella Entertainment features not only the restored Hercules Returns, but also the full English-language version of the original film, Samson and the Mighty Challenge. This is a very entertaining and funny film in itself; a sort of Italian Carry On film. However, the jewel in the crown of this release is the full original recording of ‘Double Take Meets Hercules’. Whilst much of the script was used in the rerecorded version for Hercules Returns, in my opinion this version is purer and funnier, uninterrupted by the new narrative segments required to make the Hercules Returns story work. It is witty and frequently outrageous, and it’s easy to forget that there are only two people doing all the voices. There is also a new audio commentary for Hercules Returns with the cast and crew, which raises the slightly meta prospect of watching the film, which is mainly a commentary, with another commentary over the top. This deluxe, limited-edition package also comes a book which tells the complete story of Double Take, the making of the film and the critical reaction, as well as a copy of the wraparound story script. Housed in a hardbox with fantastic new artwork, it also contains a complete set of lobby cards and a reversible poster.

This Collector’s Edition of Hercules Returns is only available from the Umbrella Entertainment webstore, and is highly recommended.

By Ernie Magnotta

Nick Martin (Joey Travolta, Hollywood Vice Squad, Normal People Scare Me), the leader of a gang called the Nightcrawlers, dreams of moving his girlfriend, mother and two brothers out of Sunnyside, Queens, but becomes involved in a violent war against a rival gang called the Warlocks.

Beautifully directed by Night Gallery’s Timothy Galfas (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff King from a story by King and Robert Schaffel), and released by American International Pictures, Sunnyside is an engaging and entertaining drama/love story that carries an important message. Although it never reached the popularity of other gang films like Walter Hill’s The Warriors, Sunnyside is still an extremely well-done movie that I not only feel is underrated, but that should definitely be seen.

Besides Travolta’s solid and likeable performance, the movie also features an amazingly talented cast of actors such as John Lansing (More American Graffiti), Stacey Pickren (Runaway Train), Andrew Rubin (Police Academy), Michael Tucci (Grease), Talia Balsam (The Kindred), Chris Mulkey (The Hidden), Joan Darling (The Troublemaker), Jonathan Gries (The Monster Squad), Peter Kwong (Big Trouble in Little China), Eric Laneuville (A Force of One), John Megna (To Kill a Mockingbird), Thomas Rosales, Jr. (The Hunter), Mykelti Williamson (Forrest Gump), John Alderson (Against All Flags), Grand Bush (Colors), Billy Jacoby (Bloody Birthday) and Robert Dryer (Savage Streets).

Sunnyside has been released on a Region 1 Blu-ray and is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The film looks great and the audio is also superb. Special features include a terrific interview with actor Chris Mulkey, the original theatrical trailer as well as trailers for Dirty O’Neil; Checkered Flag or Crash, and Walk Proud.

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From TCM: "In this episode of Film 101, we're focusing on three from the charming duo of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant--Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940).” 

The segment also goes into the draconian decency rules that were imposed on older films and how studios managed to get around topics such as sex and infidelity.  

For info and tickets, click here.

Once again we visit the archive pages of the New York Times to celebrate an abundance of fine movies that were all playing in theaters simultaneously. In this case, the precise date was February 2, 1967. Among the gems: "A Fistful of Dollars" (just opened), "The Quiller Memorandum", "Is Paris Burning?", "Georgy Girl", "A Man for All Seasons", "Gambit", "Night of the Generals", "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", "The Sand Pebbles", "The Bible", "Hawaii", "Alfie", "The Blue Max", "The Deadly Affair", "Blow-up" and perennial favorite "The Sound of Music". 

By Fred Blosser

“The Hands of Orlac,” a 1960 U.K.-French co-production, was the third movie version of “Les Mains d’Orlac,” a sensational 1920 novel by French writer Maurice Renard. Like many of the other horror pictures released in 1960, it was filmed in black-and-white. The director, Edmond T. Gréville, was a veteran French-born filmmaker who had worked in both France and England. His previous picture, “Beat Girl” (1960), had featured Christopher Lee as a strip club impresario in an exploitative story about beatniks, aspiring rockers, and strippers. Lee and other British actors filled most of the major supporting roles in “The Hands of Orlac.” Exterior scenes were filmed on the French Riviera, interiors at Britain’s Shepperton Studios. An American actor, Mel Ferrer, was cast in the lead. Ferrer was a reliably familiar leading man for the all-important U.S. market. His name lent box-office appeal in those days when foreign movies were suspect in small-town America, as it did for another offbeat horror production in which he also starred that same year, Roger Vadim’s “Blood and Roses,” a French and Italian co-production. But U.S. distributors apparently saw no pressing need to slip Gréville’s film into American theaters, since it didn’t open here until 1964. By that time, a promotional still from the movie had appeared in the October 1963 issue of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine, in a preview of upcoming horror and fantasy releases.

In the story, a celebrated concert pianist and composer, Stephen Orlac (Ferrer), flies from London to France to visit his fiancee, Louise (Lucile Saint Simon). His small plane wrecks in a fog, and Orlac’s hands are “burnt to the bone” in the crash. After his ambulance passes through a police checkpoint where a condemned murderer, Vasseur, is being transported to the guillotine, Louise prevails on a famous surgeon, Dr. Volchett (Donald Wolfit), to operate in an effort to save her lover’s badly injured hands. Coming out of the anaesthetic, Orlac finds his hands encased in huge, unsightly plaster casts. Worse, he sees the front page of a newspaper that juxtaposes a report about Vasseur’s execution with one about his own injuries. To his groggy eyes, the stories gradually merge into one under the headline, “Stephen Orlac Receives the Hands of Vasseur, the Murderer.” Lifting the grotesque casts, Orlac flies into hysterics. This was the publicity still that intrigued us young readers of “Famous Monsters” in 1963. It was also the centerpiece of the movie’s lobby-poster art.

Did the newspaper actually display the stories that Orlac read, more or less as he interpreted them? Was he hallucinating? Was there even a newspaper at all? No matter, the high-strung pianist becomes convinced that the surgeon found his hands irreparably damaged, amputated them, and replaced them with Vasseur’s, especially since, as he mourns, “They feel as if they no longer belong to me!” After the casts come off, he can’t get his fingers to strike the right notes on the keyboard.

The obsession grows stronger when Orlac and Louise make love. His fingers unconsciously tighten around her throat, and she begins to choke. That incident and others convince the pianist that Vasseur’s hands have a violent will of their own, and his fiancee’s life is in danger as long as they’re together. He checks into a sketchy Marseilles hotel under an assumed name, where he encounters a small-time stage magician named Nero (Christopher Lee, returning from “Beat Girl” as an even sleazier character). Nero senses an opportunity for blackmail; obviously, “Mr. Stephen” is a well-off guy who wouldn’t be holed up in a dump unless he had something to hide. Nero pimps out his pouty assistant and mistress, Li-Lang (Dany Carrel), to cozy up to Orlac and get him to talk.

Orlac’s self-imposed exile doesn’t last long. After Louise tracks him down, he decides to straighten up, return to England, marry Louise, and resume his career. But he continues to brood over his persuasion that his hands are no longer his own. Discovering “Mr. Stephen’s” true identity, Nero and Li-Lang follow. Nero sets about to feed Orlac’s paranoia, reasoning that the unhinged pianist will kill someone sooner or later, opening himself to big-time extortion.

To the extent that film enthusiasts take notice of “The Hands of Orlac” at all, they mostly judge it seriously inferior to the previous movie versions of Renard’s novel. Robert Wiene’s “Orlacs Hände” (1924), also called “The Hands of Orlac” in English-language prints, was a classic of German silent cinema, with Conrad Veidt as the title character amid feverish Expressionist sets. Following in 1935 from MGM, Karl Freund’s “Mad Love” with Colin Clive as Orlac draped the story in sadism and sexual perversion, to the extent Freund could do so under the vigilant eyes of the Hays Code censors.

Gréville’s remake dialed back on Wiene’s and Freund’s extravagance, accounting for some of its lacklustre press from critics who like to see the gothic thriller envelope pushed further than Gréville pushed it, at least in their opinion. It’s very much a product of 1960, emphasising the psychological aspect of Orlac’s dilemma and stepping into film noir territory once the intimidating Nero and Li-Lang enter the plot. It even evokes the emerging New Wave of French cinema with its documentarian exterior shots on the Riviera. Claude Bolling’s musical score includes light jazz for a scene in which Orlac tools around in a vintage sports car, and rinky-tink cabaret music for Li-Lang’s sultry song-and-slink routine following Nero’s magic act, juxtaposed with Beethoven and Liszt in the concert scenes that open and close the movie. Mel Ferrer lacks Conrad Veidt’s eye-popping hysteria and Colin Clive’s furrowed anxiety, his Orlac repurposed for 1960 as a sophisticate in shades, pullover sweater, and tailored slacks for casual wear, and an expensive suit for business occasions. If you’re a retro-fan of JFK-era men’s fashions, you probably won’t mind. You may even prefer Ferrer’s interpretation over his predecessors’. Like other British horror films of the time, such as “Jack the Ripper” (1959) and “The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll” (1960), “The Hands of Orlac” promises plenty of sex appeal courtesy of Lucile Saint Simon’s filmy negligees and Dany Carrel’s showgirl outfits. In truth, this stuff is pretty tame by 2023 standards, but it was a draw for male filmgoers at a time when even the centrefolds in “Playboy” were often modestly posed.

For most of the picture, we don’t know whether Orlac’s obsession has a basis in reality, since we don’t actually see the operation itself. Were the killer’s hands really grafted onto his wrists, or is the pianist suffering from a morbid neurosis? An explanation is made toward the end that for may find satisfying or frustrating, depending on your tastes. It doesn’t help that Orlac is surrounded by oddball characters who only compound his unease. Nero is the only one who is overtly menacing, but others are unsettling in their own ways. In his few minutes on screen, Donald Wolfit’s Dr. Volchett is brusque and possibly alcoholic; his decision to save (or replace) Stephen’s damaged hands seems more a whim than a humanitarian impulse. His unnamed assistant (Anita Sharp Bolster) is a starchy spinster who wears rimless glasses with impenetrably thick lenses, like Albert Dekker’s in 1940’s “Dr. Cyclops.” When Orlac tries to call Dr. Volchett to either confirm or relieve his suspicions, the assistant tells him the surgeon is on professional travel—to Moscow!—and unreachable in that era before cellphones and Zoom. She brightens up as she enjoys a chance to extol her boss, but her comments only deepen Orlac’s fears: “Dr. Volchett is a magician,” she declares. “Your case was his greatest triumph.” In a small but bravura appearance, Donald Pleasence plays Coates, a sculptor who wants to use Orlac’s hands as the model for those of Lazarus in a biblical tableau of Lazarus raised from the dead. “All we see of Lazarus is his hands—your hands, Orlac!”, he exclaims, seizing the pianist’s wrists. Given Stephen’s state of mind, the sculptor’s fervor is more invasive than flattering, like the irritating stranger who latches on to you at a party and won’t let go. As he makes his pitch with growing enthusiasm, Orlac stares at his hands (poised exactly as he had scrutinized his grotesque casts earlier in the story), and runs off in panic.

“The Hands of Orlac” isn’t the best horror thriller of 1960. That would be Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” with “Blood and Roses” and Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face” as close seconds. But it’s better than its obscurity would imply. In the U.S., “Eyes Without a Face” was dumped onto double bills as “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus” and generally ignored by critics, much as “The Hands of Orlac” was. Now, it’s widely regarded as a classic. It’s surprising that Gréville’s picture hasn’t received similar reappraisal, given the renewed interest in neglected horror films in the home video era, and the movie’s value as an early showcase for Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasence. The problem may lie with the fact that an official DVD or Blu-ray edition for fair evaluation doesn’t exist in the U.S., the U.K., or anywhere else as far as I can tell. DVD-R versions are sold on the collector’s market, with caveats about their visual quality.

We discovered this presentation of the film on YouTube, apparently sourced from tape, perhaps one of two competing VHS releases in the 1990s, or a videotape from a long-ago television broadcast. The image is better than you might expect, if inferior to the hi-def transfers we’ve come to expect nowadays. It’s also the easiest way to find the movie, at least until we can hope to see original elements unearthed, if they still exist, and a better print prepared for Blu-ray or one of the major streaming platforms.

(To watch in full screen format, click on "Watch on YouTube".)

By Doug Gerbino

Flicker Alley’s recent Blu-Ray release of “Laurel & Hardy Year One-The Newly Restoed 1927 Silents” is the start of a ground-breaking project which is a joy for all film fan,s especially Laurel & Hardy aficionados. Produced by film historians and restoration specialists Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange in conjunction with Lobster Films, Blackhawk Films and The Library of Congress, this 2-disc set contains the first 15 extant films that feature Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in the casts. A number of the films can just boast having Laurel & Hardy in the same film-not yet a team.

Many of these films are being seen in their most complete versions thus far due to the collaboration of various film archives and collectors. This is the seminal period of the teaming of Laurel & Hardy. They are not quite a team in the earliest films in this collection. This set gives us the opportunity to study their evolving partnership.

In typical Flicker Alley fashion the set is chock full of wonderful bonus materials. Each film has newly recorded audio commentary by Laurel & Hardy scholar Randy Skretvedt. There are three documentaries: Restoring Laurel & Hardy, Laurel & Hardy on Location & Hats Off!-a slide show presentation of the only completely lost Laurel and Hardy film. There are Multiple Image Galleries, additional music scores for three of the shorts and a very informative 35-page booklet.

If you have seen any previous Flicker Alley releases, you know the image quality is superb. This initial release is an exciting start to a multiple year project. Year Two (1928) is next. We will have the opportunity to watch the teaming of one of the greatest comedy teams mature into legends. Very much recommended.

Films included in the set:

Lucky Dog (1921)

45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926)

-1927-

Duck Soup

Slipping Wives!

Love ‘Em and Weep

Why Girls Love Sailors

With Love and Hisses

Sailors, Beware!

Do Detectives Think?

Flying Elephants

Sugar Daddies

The Second 100 Years

Call of the Cuckoo

Putting Pants on Phillip

The Battle of the Century

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Titanic the Musical

Music and Lyrics by Maury Weston

Book by Peter Stone

Theatrical Production by Thom Southerland

Film Production by Austin Shaw

By Giacomo Selloni

The Titanic's sinking occurred over 111 years ago and yet it still holds a special place in not only history, but popular culture as well. If you are reading this you probably know its history already. It crashed into an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. One thousand, five hundred and twenty two men, women, and children perished in the freezing water. Whether from James Cameron's Oscar- winning film, multiple documentaries throughout the years, or the smash hit stage musical being reviewed here (the filmed version), people have been drawn to its tragic story.

The musical first opened on Broadway April 23, 1997 and ran for 804 performances. It

won all five Tony Awards it was nominated for, Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score, along with Best Orchestrations and Scenic Design, and successfully toured both the US and Europe for years. In its current "revival" Fathom Events, along with By Experience, are bringing the production of the recent UK tour to the silver screen.I did not see the original production. I feel it puts me in a better position to review this filmed version as I have no preconceived notions or memories about the show.

Twenty five actors perform in this filmed version as opposed to forty three in the Broadway production. From what I read about the Broadway version, the set was so expensive (it tried to encompass all three classes of passengers along with the ship's bridge), there were no out-of-town tryouts. In this filmed version, since it was a tour, the producers made a similar, if smaller set for the show, but whether it was or not a recreation, it is, once getting past slight distractions, a very good set.

(Photo: Pamela Raith)

The cast is terrific. Standouts are Martin Allanson as J. Bruce Ismay, director of the White Star line, the "Villain" of the show, cast with a Snidely Whiplash moustache is, if not "evil incarnate," than at least "evil a-boat-ate." Graham Bickley as the put-upon by Ismay ship's Captain Edward Smith, is one of the most sympathetic characters, Alice Beane, as portrayed by Bree Smith is the social climbing, selfish wife who sneaks into First Class to hobnob with the hoi polloi who puts her marriage at risk. Adam Filipe as Stoker Frederick Barrett is an experienced stoker, who becomes engaged to be married through the wireless while at sea. He knows the voyage is at risk due to Ismay's machinations to increase the ship's speed to set the Atlantic crossing speed record.

To list all the wonderful performances and numbers would take too much time and effort, as I am not being paid by the word.

This filmed version will be available to see at over 700 U.S. theaters country-wide on November 4th and 8th. At approximately $20/a seat, it is a whale of a bargain to see this multi-award winning show.

For tickets, click here.

By Hank Reineke

Roger Corman had, over a relatively short period of time, directed and/or produced more than a half-dozen pictures since his entry into the movie industry in 1955. His first efforts were modest successes, but the filmmaker firmly broke into a dependably bankable stride within two years’ time. Though already having helmed two low budget science-fiction pictures with some success (Day the World Ended (1955) and It Conquered the World (1956) his reputation in Hollywood - as a budget-minded money-spinner - was properly recognized following the box office counting of his 1957 chiller combo: Attack of the Crab Monsters/Not of This Earth. Variety noted the package – each film made on a “slenderized bankroll of $85, 000,” had brought in an impressive domestic gross of $800,000. By early November of ’57, that package, distributed through Allied Artists, had earned back the entirety of its production and marketing costs within twelve weeks of its release.

Through the remainder of the 1950s and well into the early 1960s, Corman continued to grind out a dizzying array of feature films, not all of the horror and sci-fi variety: there were plenty of exploitative teenage rock n’ roll pictures and crime dramas offered as well. But from 1960 through 1964, Corman worked primarily – though not exclusively – producing and directing an impressive slate of upscale horror classics. He had already given fans such soon-to-be low-budget cult favorites as Bucket of Blood (1959) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960). But in 1960 he more famously scored with House of Usher, the first of his iconic and moody cycle of Poe and H.P. Lovecraft adaptations - many featuring Vincent Price in roles as both tormentor and tormented.

One of Corman’s most important collaborators in his early years was screenwriter Charles B. Griffith. Griffith would receive screenwriting credit – or co-credit – on no fewer than eight of Corman’s earliest films 1956-59. The writer would later recall for Beast from Haunted Cave he had been commissioned by Corman to essentially rework the storyline of an earlier film they had crafted together – Naked Paradise (1957) aka Thunder Over Hawaii. Naked Paradise, of which Griffith was brought on late to the project for a re-write, was essentially a South Seas crime-drama set in a pineapple plantation under the umbrella of a glistening sun.

Since that film had done well enough, Corman wanted to revisit the scenario of Naked Paradise for the reimagined crime drama titled Beast from Haunted Cave. There would be a new twist: the new scenario was to take place in and around a gold mining community nestled in the dead winter snow of South Dakota’s Black Hills. Oh, and Corman advised Griffith that he also wanted a genuine cave-dwelling monster thrown in for good measure - that sort of thing was still selling. That was essentially all the background material given to Griffith to get started on the project.

Despite its menacing title Beast from Haunted Cave appears more a crime-drama than horror flick in the course of its 65-minute running time. The story revolves around the criminal doings of a circle of bandits: chain-smoking mastermind Alexander Ward (Frank Wolff), his two minions Marty Jones (Richard Sinatra) and Byron Smith (Wally Campo) and Ward’s oft- inebriated “secretary” Gypsy Boulet (Sheila Carol). The thieves have gathered in the snow-capped mountain winter of the pioneer town of Deadwood, South Dakota. Their plan is to plant an explosive in an abandoned cave in the early hours of a quiet Sunday morning. The explosion is set merely as a strategic ploy to distract authorities for a time, enabling the thieves’ free reign to steal gold bars from an unattended payroll office of a local gold-mining company.

Unfortunately, their plans don’t run smoothly. Ward’s dissatisfied and affection-starved lover-secretary, Gypsy, has a bit of a drinking problem. She complicates matters when she falls hard for ski instructor and trail guide Gil Jackson (Michael Forest), a swarthy, dark-haired gentleman of gentle temperament. (As an aside, I occasionally had a bit of trouble understanding actress Sheila Carol’s dialogue in this film: her diction seemed a perplexing amalgam of drunken slurred words and a faux Katherine Hepburn accent). The cold Ward takes notice of his woman’s wandering eye but is unworried. He has plans to kill Jackson once the skier - unwittingly - guides this gaggle of crooks on a cross-country trail run to a remote location.

Ward had plans to rendezvous with a waiting plane to ferry his gang - and their misbegotten treasure - off to safe sanctuary in Canada. But this plan too is scuttled by an unwelcome blizzard passing through the mountains. (As a second aside, Ward’s cross-country ski scheme is surely the most ineffectual escape route ever mapped by criminals carrying weighted gold bars in rucksacks. They really would have done better just hightailing it out of town in their rented car). To complicate matters further – and this is where the horror finally comes in - their explosive mine charge has awakened the titular beast, sort of an upright walking, giant spider that collects his victims by webbing them against cave walls and drinking their blood at his leisure. Let’s just say the moral of the story is a familiar one: essentially, crime doesn’t pay.

In Corman’s attempt to make their chilly time in the Black Hills more productive and worthwhile (i.e. profitable), the filming of Beast was to be produced back-to-back on location in Deadwood with yet another Charles B. Griffith script, Ski Troop Attack. This second film was to be a somewhat more ambitious project, a snow-bound WWII action-adventure pitting American ski-troopers against their wintry Nazi counterparts. The Corman team would use the same primary on-and off screen talents featured in the cast and credits of Beast for Ski Troop Attack.

The scenario of Ski Troop Attack referentially takes place in the snow-capped mountains of Germany’s Hürtgen Forest, circa December 1944. A small American band of ski-troopers are the only remaining Allied force active in this Nazi-controlled region, hiding themselves behind enemy lines so they can spy and report on SS ski-troop movements. The level-head Lieutenant Factor (Forest), a graduate of the Army’s Officer Candidate School, wishes to stay clear of engaging in active combat with the enemy. As the only team of Allied forces positioned inside the Nazi-controlled German-Belgian border, it is Forest’s belief his outfit should purposely avoid direct contact. He instead wants to concentrate his efforts on secret reconnaissance missions. By acting as the covert eyes of the good guys behind enemy lines, his outfit would be able to transmit vital information on Nazi troop movements back to HQ.

But Factor is at loggerheads with tough-talking Sergeant Potter (a mustache-less Wolff, again cast in a “heavy” role). Potter is described by Factor as an old school “regular army guy,” a man of pure fighting spirit but someone strategically short-sighted. Potter desperately wants to engage the Nazi ski-troopers in active combat and is mostly dismissive of the Factor’s civilian background and wartime decision-making capabilities. Potter does get a number of chances to engage in hand-to-hand combat. The film actually offers no shortage of brutal on screen violence with competing ski-troops ambushing and beating one another with fisticuffs, rifles butts, bayonets, knives and machine-gun fire.

Ultimately, the American’s decide to blow up a strategic railroad bridge that Allied air powers are unable to access and target. But while attempting to get to the base of the bridge to set off their detonators, they must first successfully climb an ice-covered vertical cliff side. If this isn’t problematic or dangerous enough, they must also fend off a team of six pursuing Nazi ski-troopers hot on their trail. The German skiing contingent, incidentally, is led by the badly-dubbed Roger Corman himself. The film’s climactic ending is, somewhat surprisingly for this type of adventure, more bleak than celebratory.

Griffith’s screenplay is actually far more nuanced than it is given credit for in the film’s original round of reviews. The sensitively written dialogue is mature – the scene where soldier Grammelsbacher (Sinatra) sits around a campfire musing if somewhere out there there’s still “a bullet with my name on it” – is particularly gripping. The better written dialogue also brings out better acting performances of all involved – including Shelia Carol who appears midway through the film as a spiteful German captive of the Americans.

The film does plod a bit. There’s a lot of wartime newsreel footage interlaced throughout, and no matter how beautiful the mountain settings are photographed, there’s far too many time-filling shots of ski-troopers silently trudging cross-country style through the tundra. Having said that that, there’s also some well-executed ski chase scenes captured on screen, such action-footage surprising for a film shot on a threadbare budget. The soundtrack of the film is riddled with the sound of machine-gun fire and a decent score courtesy of composer Fred Katz – though fans of Corman’s earliest films will surely recognize a good number of Katz’s recycled musical motifs are in play.

As both projects were to be shot on tight schedules, Roger’s brother, Gene, stepped in as the de facto producer of Beast. Once a Hollywood agent, Gene Corman was co-founder (with Roger) of their company Filmgroup, Inc. Gene’s earliest entries as producer would include a number of exploitative sci-fi efforts such as Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). With Roger set to both produce and direct Ski Troop Attack, the directorial duties of Beast were given to first-timer Monte Hellman - whose only previous film experience was having worked as an apprentice editor at ABC-TV.

In his entertaining memoir, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (Random House, 1990), Roger Corman recalled the wintertime location shooting in and around snowbound Deadwood as “unbearable” and “a very tough challenge.” When shooting was to commence on the peak of Mount Terry, Corman recorded temperatures of a frigid thirty-eight degrees below zero. In the recollection of script supervisor Kinta Zertuche, her primary job was simply “to find ways to keep the film warm enough so it wouldn’t get brittle and crack.” She was also deigned to find ways of keeping the production cameras from freezing – not always successfully.

Production assistant Paul Rapp recalled he had been tasked to drive the parsimonious Corman – and an automobile-filled cache of film props - from Los Angeles to Deadwood, so the director “could save on airfare and have an extra car on location.” When filming one downhill ski sequence, Corman accidentally set off a small avalanche by shouting “Action!” too loudly through a bullhorn. Rapp recalled while the incident scared him half-to-death, Corman quickly realized the potential visual impact of what the camera was capturing. So the team was commanded to continue to roll film, Corman exhorting via bullhorn that his terrified skiers try their best to “Stay Ahead of the Avalanche!”

In March of 1959, there was a trade announcement that “Corman’s distributing outfit, The Filmgroup,” was planning to release Beast from Haunted Cave nationally (paired with The Wasp Woman) as early as June 1, with Ski Troop Attack (to be paired with Task Force 38) a little more than a month later, July 13. But neither of those prospective release dates would actually roll out as planned, even though the films themselves were ready to roll. Beast would come closest to realizing its projected release date, appearing on some screens in July 1959.

As early as February of 1960, Variety reported that the steamroller that was Filmgroup was optimistically planning to roll out eight feature films a month between March and June of 1960. Ski Troop Attack was to see release on the very tail end of that schedule. The Hollywood Reporter suggested Filmgroup’s plan as more ambitious than even originally announced: the company was planning on issuing no less than twenty-four features over a year’s period, with eleven of those titles already in the can and ready to go.

The company was also interested in testing international markets. It was reported that the usually closed-to-outsiders Soviet film market was interested in importing four Corman titles – including Beast and Ski – assuming whether or not Irving Allen, president of Canada’s Astral Films, could finalize a deal while visiting London. Later in May of 1960, it was reported Filmgroup had sealed another deal to distribute eight films – again, including Beast and Ski - throughout the Philippine islands. Finally, in August of 1960, Continental Distributors would obtain rights of Filmgroup product for European markets.

But the U.S. market was of most concern to the filmmakers. On March 16, 1960, there was a very belated press screening of the Beast and Wasp combo at the Hollywood Theatre. Variety was generally impressed with Hellman’s Beast, but suggested the film’s scenario was completely illogical. The critic also pondered that perhaps interest in horror films was generally on the wane. He opined, audiences were growing “inured to monsters and hardly blink when this one guzzles its customary quota of blood.” The review of Wasp was likewise middling in praise. The trade noted, while the film was certainly an “exploitable” passable entertainment, “it’s pretty slow and not very frightening.”

The “official” premiere of Beast from Haunted Cave was to take place at dual locations in South Dakota: Rapid City’s State Theatre and the Hile-Hi Drive-in outside of Deadwood: the latter venue was to enjoy a four day night run of Beast beginning August 2, 1959. This was obviously a nod of acknowledgment to the folks living in the area of the Black Mountain Hills who hosted and assisted the film’s production. But no matter how well-intentioned the “premiere” honor, Beast from Haunted Cave and The Wasp Woman had already been projected on screens in the mid and southwestern U.S. as early as July of ’59.

Earlier that spring, director Gene Corman had written Allan “Birdie” Arnold of Deadwood’s Chamber of Commerce City Council, a champion of the film shoot. “We saw a rough cut of our picture, it is very good and I’m sure everyone who helped, especially you, will be proud and pleased,” Gene wrote, adding, “I plan to make it a full length picture and hope to release it in the summer.” For their assistance, both Arnold and Mayor Ed Keene of Lead, South Dakota, were given “Technical Advisor” credits on Beast.

By Lee Pfeiffer

A film that became a legendary bomb, the 1977 Western The White Buffalo has been re-evaluated by movie fans in recent years and many consider it to be an underrated classic. Count me out of this assessment. The film is certainly unique: an ambitious attempt to blend the Western and horror film genres, but it falls short on most counts.The United Artists production stars Charles Bronson as Wild Bill Hickcok, who- for reasons never adequately explained- is haunted by terrifying nightmares involving him in a life-or-death confrontation with a giant white buffalo. I didn't know that buffalo come in colors, but I'll cede the point. (Given the dreadful styles of the 1970s, it's surprising the film wasn't titled The Plaid Buffalo.) Simultaneously, Chief Crazy Horse (Will Sampson) is having his own white buffalo problems. Seems the actual rampaging beast wreaked havoc on his village and killed his child. In order to restore his pride and stature among the tribe, he must hunt down and slaughter the animal- or be stuck with the monicker of "The Worm" henceforth. (This must be the Indian equivalent of "nerd".)

The two men are on obsessive journeys and are destined to meet up - but both feel they have the singular right to kill the buffalo. Hickcok meanders through some cow towns under an alias and hooks up with a mountain man geezer (Jack Warden, channeling the ghost of Gabby Hayes) who decides to accompany him on his quest. When Hickcok and Crazy Horse do meet up, they end up saving each other's life in respective ambushes and declare themselves blood brothers. Despite this, each man is determined to be the one who slays the white buffalo.

The film is moody and atmospheric and at times is offbeat enough that, if it weren't for the Colorado scenery, one might suspect this is an Italian Western. Nevertheless, the screenplay by producer, screenwriter and director Richard Sale (based on his novel) is erratic and contains many disparate elements that never blend together in a satisfactory manner. The film is peppered with welcome appearances by many Western favorites (Stuart Whitman, Slim Pickens, John Carradine) but their characters are superfluous and smack of gimmicky cameos. Clint Walker shows up briefly, well-cast and playing against type as a villain. There is also the rather odd presence of Kim Novak in a nothing role as a good-hearted hooker who suffers the humiliation of being rejected by Hickcok even as he shares her bed. (This must be the first case of erectile dysfunction caused by a white buffalo.)

The movie was an attempt by producer Dino De Laurentiis to exploit the dying Western genre by finding a way to incorporate elements of Jaws. De Laurentiis seemed to have a fixation on giant, mythic animals taking vengeance on mankind, as he produced "King Kong", "Orca" and "The White Buffalo" all within a two-year period. Despite the prestigious cast and the fact that this was a United Artists production, the budget was clearly skimpy. The film abounds with shoddy rear screen projection shots and some amateurish sets, particularly in the mountain sequences set at night. There's plenty of plastic snow and the sets are somewhat less realistic than a Christmas window display at Macy's. Then there is the titular character of which much has been written in movie lore. Apparently devoid of anything other than a $20 bill for special effects work, the white buffalo is generally shot in extreme closeup in very brief cuts to mask its ludicrous appearance. Although the buffalo is seemingly immortal and can crash through mountains of snow and cave walls, it never looks any more menacing than a slightly perturbed mountain goat. The analogies to Moby Dick also become a bit too obvious especially when Crazy Horse rides atop the beast, flaying at it with a knife. (just like Ahab and the whale- get it?) All of this is set to an atmospheric if somewhat low-key score by John Barry that fits the proceedings well.

Perhaps the most unintentionally amusing aspect of the movie is the initial meetings between Hickcok and Crazy Horse. The two men face each other and gesture with elaborate Indian sign language- despite the fact they are simultaneously speaking to each other in perfect English! This is as practical as using signal flags to communicate with a dinner companion and seems more suited to an episode of Police Squad.

Despite all of these criticisms, there is something admirable about the concept of The White Buffalo in that the film at least tries to be an original take on an age-old genre. It also represents one of the last movies in which Charles Bronson at least tried to stretch his acting muscles. With his saggy eyes and droopy mustache, he's perfectly cast as Hickcok. The failure of this film seemed to discourage his professional ambitions. With a couple of exceptions (Telefon, Death Hunt) Bronson went happily into B movie hell, churning out low-rent but profitable potboilers aimed at inner city and drive-in audiences. The shame of it is that he also encouraged once respected directors like J. Lee Thompson and Michael Winner to go along with him.

The White Buffalo was one of those major failures that initiated the virtual end of the Western film genre, and it was Heaven's Gate three years later that nailed the coffin shut. The Bronson film has grown in stature as a curiosity in the ensuing years and apologists claim that the chintzy set pieces must have been intended in order to convey the dream-like quality of the plot. Much the same has been said of Hitchcock's Marnie, which was also heavily criticized for its abysmal sets, rear screen production work and use of matte paintings. However, in both cases the hypothesis seems unlikely. They were simply troubled productions overseen by directors who seem to have lost interest in their respective projects. Universal ended up losing money on the Hitchcock drama while United Artists was forced to pick up the tab for the buffalo bill, if you'll pardon the pun.

The White Buffalo has recently been re-released by  Kino Lorber Studio Classics. The transfer is superb, which only makes the white buffalo look even phonier, but that just adds to the fun.  An original trailer is included and this time around, a commentary track has been added by Paul Talbot, author of the terrific "Bronson's Loose" books. Talbot admits he's obsessed by Bronson and his films and provides a master class on the making of The White Buffalo. His track is highly informative, if lacking in humor, as he discusses the career credits of virtually every actor who appears in a speaking role. Talbot's contribution makes the film worth obtaining, even if you had the earlier version.

Bloomsbury Academic

April 2023

Paperback

Illustrations: 26 BW images

ISBN: 9781350265127

RRP: £28.99

Review by Adrian Smith

The 1980s was a fun time to be a child. The monster kids of the 1950s and 1960s may have had Forrest J. Ackerman and his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, but we had full-blown horror content in films ostensibly made for a young audience, from the melting Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the terrifying library apparition in Ghostbusters, to a melting Stripe in Joe Dante’s equally hilarious and scary Gremlins. In this new book dedicated to horror films aimed at children, Catherine Lester begins by drawing on early examples such as Frankenstein’s murder of the little girl by its titular monster, along with other pre-code horrors that primarily drew a young crowd, through to its modern, reanimated version, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie. The book then takes a deeper look at the ‘horrific’ childlike gremlins who both commit violent acts and then have violence acted upon them (along with the aforementioned Stripe, who can forget the gremlin in the microwave?). What happens to the representation of children in the horror film when children are the audience? Did the children in the audience take sympathy with the gremlins, who let’s not forget, just happily sit watching Disney films with childlike wonder when the adult world just leaves them alone? The violence combined with the Looney Tunes tone of Gremlins caused some issues for the MPAA, something which the book also goes into. Ultimately it led to the introduction of the PG-13, apparently suggested by Steven Spielberg, the film’s producer, who described the new rating as “PG with a little hot sauce on top.”

Lester also draws on another eighties staple, The Monster Squad, a sort of The Goonies meets The Lost Boys via Universal’s horror canon. By introducing the concept of the ‘Crazyspace’, a space in which child characters are able to be the prime agents in dispatching evil forces in the complete absence of adult supervision, the book explores the way in which many films present children as autonomous and often superior to even the most masculinised models of authority; in this case the kids defeat Dracula and his fellow monsters before the US Army arrive, something which would have been very different in the 1950s monster and science fiction movies, where it was usually the army who saved the day.

Bringing the discussion into the 21^st Century, Lester also looks at the animated children’s horrors ParaNorman (one of this reviewer’s favourites), Coraline and Monster House, along with Joe Dante’s return to the children’s horror genre with 2009’s live action The Hole. By covering almost a century of children's horror films, this book makes for an insightful and entertaining examination of the horrific child and the cathartic nature of the genre. For this reviewer, as a child horror was an escape from the terrors of the real world, and as such it is a rewarding experience to be able to read this major contribution to the study of these strange and wonderful films. Horror Films for Children is highly recommended, both the book and the films themselves!

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(Photo: Cinema Retro Archives.)

By Lee Pfeiffer

Richard Roundtree, whose portrayal of New York City private eye John Shaft made the character an iconic pop culture symbol, has passed away from pancreatic cancer at age 81. Roundtree was not the first actor to elevate the the image of Black male characters on the big screen. Stars such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Jim Brown and Fred Williamson preceded him. However, Roundtree had his own inimitable style as Shaft: brash, self-assured and cocky. Poitier's detective Virgil Tibbs was also a ballsy man of action but, as a police officer, he still had to stay within the system. Roundtree's Shaft had his own rules and code of ethics. The success of "Shaft"  for MGM in 1971 also was a milestone for director Gordon Parks, making him the first Black director of a highly successful big studio film. Isaac Hayes's Oscar-winning classic title song also helped elevate the film's success. The MGM production inspired two sequels: "Shaft's Big Score" and "Shaft in Africa" as well a a short-lived TV series starring Roundtree. The actor would also appear as the same character in spin-off feature films released in 2000 and 2019. However, there was far more to Roundtree's talents and career and he worked consistently in TV and films before and after the release of the original Shaft film. Click here for more.