By Mark Cerulli

After a meticulous 4K restoration by none other than the Criterion Collection, the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Days Night, was unveiled at LA’s Raleigh Studios. Yes, the image was crisp and clean, not a smudge or scratch in sight. (No surprise there as the film’s director Richard Lester personally approved the restoration.) And yes, the music sounded glorious in a new 5.1 mix. In fact, George Harrison’s iconic opening riff on the title track just about knocked this Cinema Retro scribe off his seat! But what was really special about this whimsical film was watching it through the prism of fifty years. From frame 1, we know how we lost both John Lennon and George Harrison. We are living with climate change, al-Qaeda, overpopulation and deforestation, so this movie is a welcome relief, capturing a simpler time in a quainter London which was then still throwing off the shadows of WW II. Most importantly, the film delivers The Beatles in close-up after close-up – all are young, strong and so full of life. To say they “stole the show” doesn’t apply, they ARE the show. The plot, about the trials and tribulations of getting the white-hot group to a live performance is basically filler between musical set pieces, but it earned writer Alun Owen a 1965 Oscar nomination. George Martin’s thumping score also landed an Oscar nod.

Along for the ride is Paul’s cranky grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell) who keeps the band and their managers (dour Norman Rossington and goofy John Junkin) on their toes. Odd looking and angular, Brambell, a major UK TV star at the time, was a sneering contrast to the Fab Four’s glowing charisma.

The film is as much about movement as it is music. The band is always on the move, - on foot, in trains, cars and a helicopter. Richard Lester’s cameras are on the move as well, with numerous hand-held shots and a beautiful aerial sequence where the band escapes a stuffy rehearsal to mess about in a playing field accompanied by Can’t Buy Me Love. With much of the dialogue improvised on the spot, A Hard Day’s Night has a breezy, cinéma vérité feel that obviously worked for its stars as they seem to be having a blast from start to finish.

When The Beatles finally go “live”, the climactic concert delivers vintage “Beatlemania” in all its screaming glory. The lads blast out Tell Me Why, If I Fell, I Should Have Known Better and She Loves You, intercut with an audience full of hysterical teens and the show’s harried director (Vincent Spinelli) having a meltdown in the control booth. It’s all innocent, upbeat and just simply, fun. Are there plot holes you could drive a double-decker bus through? Sure. But who cares? For a brief shining moment the Beatles are together again and all is well with the world.

On July 4^th, Janus Films will re-release this restored version of A Hard Days Night in more than 50 cities across America.

(Cinema Retro's next issue (#30) presents a 50th anniversary tribute to the film.)  

CRIME, COSTUMES, AND MASKS

By Raymond Benson

Apparently the French had their own Batman-like character in the early days of silent film. Created by Louis Feuillade and Arthur Bernède, Judex (“judge” in Latin) was a crime-fighting avenger that appeared in silent serials in 1916-17. The character was resurrected once in 1934 in a sound feature, and once again in 1963 by celebrated director Georges Franju. The Criterion Collection has seen fit to release Judex, this later version, on Blu-ray and DVD in a dual format package. The results are splendid.

Judex doesn’t bother to disguise his face when he’s in character. He wears a black cape and a Zorro-like hat. You could say he’s kind of like The Shadow. By day, though, he applies old-age makeup and assumes the role of Vallieres, the right-hand man to an evil banker. Judex is in love with the banker’s daughter, Jacqueline, who is played by Franju regular Édith Scrob, the thin doe-eyed actress who was creepily effective in the director’s excellent horror film, Eyes Without a Face (also on Criterion). Judex himself is played by an American stage magician, Channing Pollock, who curiously has little screen presence but performs a lot of impressive sleight-of-hand in the picture.

The crime-fighter and his team (a group of guys all dressed in black) quickly disposes of the evil banker and locks him away, but Jacqueline is kidnapped by the family’s governess, Diana (superbly played by Francine Bergé), who in reality is a masked Catwoman-like criminal. She plans to hold Jacqueline for ransom, that is, until Judex comes to the rescue.

It sounds like an episode from the 1966 Batman television show, but in fact, Judex is stylish and in some spots very surreal. For example, the scene in which the banker is “poisoned” (actually drugged by Judex) is a masked ball. The attendees’ costumes—many of which are birds—are bizarre and unsettling. Franju turns the pulp material into something rather poetic, despite numerous holes and flights of fancy in the plot.

Also notable is that Franju seems to be more interested in his villain than in Judex. Bergé’s Diana is the most engaging character and has the most screen time in the film. In a 2012 video interview extra with the actress, Bergé reveals that she was told to simply play “evil”—and that’s what she does, with a capital “E.” It’s her performance that makes Judex a fascinating piece of celluloid.

The Blu-ray looks great with its new 2K digital restoration. Extras include a 2007 interview with co-writer Jacques Champreux and an excellent 50-minute documentary of Franju’s career. The best extras are two Franju shorts—one is a documentary about a Paris military complex; the second one, a film about filmmaker/magician Georges Méliès (who is played by Méliès’ son), is almost worth the price of the entire package. The enclosed booklet contains an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and an interview with Franju.

Cool stuff!

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By Lee Pfeiffer

Impulse Pictures continues its obsession with sleazy 1970s porn flicks with the release of "The Chambermaids", a 1974 opus that exploits erotic fantasies regarding the otherwise mundane occupation of hotel maids. Yes, there is something about maids and nurses that appeals to below-the-belt interests of men and these scenarios were often the basis of porn flicks going back to the beginning of the genre. Naturally, in order for the fantasies to be enacted, the maids in question have to be young and pretty and not look like members of the old Soviet Olympics team. In "The Chambermaids" two young women, Mary Ellen and Sally, are bored with their low-paying professions of cleaning rooms in a big city hotel. They devise a plot to become considerably more friendly to male guests in the hope they will be financially rewarded for their efforts. It doesn't take long for the plan to meet with success. One of the maids ends up bedding a businessman who is awaiting the arrival of a married colleague. After a hot session with said maid, he asks her to bring a friend back later so he can "entertain" the client in an even more special manner. The other maid, meanwhile, is tidying up the suite of a newlywed couple when she encounters the distraught groom. He explains that his wife is in the bedroom, frustrated, because he can't rise to the occasion. The maid theorizes that he is unnecessarily paranoid about now being married and gives him a crash course in revitalizing his mojo. The grateful hubby then goes back into the boudoir with renewed confidence. Somewhere along the way, the scenario begins to play out like a French bedroom farce with mistaken identities and chance encounters adding some comedic touches. The new bride (conveniently clad in a nightie) ends up wandering into an adjoining hotel room where she observes one of the maids and another woman pleasuring each other. They immediately seduce her and, following this session, she is mistaken for a hooker and ends up bedding the businessman's client. 

"The Chambermaids" doesn't boast any of the big names from the porn industry during this era. Even the ubiquitous John Holmes is nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless, it's a middle-of-the-road production, more ambitious than some and boasting a cast that is fairly attractive, if you don't count the guy who plays the business client. (He resembles the love child of porn legend Ron Jeremy and character actor Al Letieri.) The sex scenes are pretty straight forward and aren't marred by the goofy slapstick comedy that permeated a lot of the X rated flicks of the day. It's  undoubtedly also the only time in screen history in which a woman indulged in oral sex to the strains of Burt Bacharach's Oscar-nominated "Casino Royale" song "The Look of Love". 

Impulse Pictures has wisely chosen to market the movie's shortcomings as strengths. Consider the copy from the back of the DVD sleeve:

"The amateur camerawork, microphone shadows, elevator music, terribly recorded sound and "you are there" extreme close-ups, will bring you back to the days when adult film were cheap and fast and VERY sleazy. Re-mastered from a scratchy, barely surviving theatrical print, "The Chambermaids" is a steamy slice of 70's sex cinema that will have you cleaning up your own room after you watch it!"

At last- a case of truth in advertising! How can you help but love this company?  Besides, that cover art is worth the price alone. 

Click here to order from Amazon 

By Don Stradley

While recently watching Sweet Hostage (1975), I couldn’t stop thinking that Martin Sheen should’ve been a much bigger star. I didn’t get out to the movies much as a kid, and could only watch a small black & white TV in my bedroom. Hence, it was Sheen, the king of the TV movie, who gave me my first inkling of what an actor could do.

Aside from his iconic turn as the homicidal Kit in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Sheen did most of his 1970s work on the small screen. He had a shifty-eyed way about him that screamed “troubled loner.” Granted, he could dial it down long enough to play Bobby Kennedy in The Missiles of October, but generally, he played twitchy, neurotic types.

Sheen seemed to be on television every month in those days. I remember him as the doomed Private Slovick, shaking like a leaf as he stood in front of an execution squad. Then he was as a cocky hot rodder trying to upstage a sadistic sheriff in The California Kid. He was “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the Depression era bank robber. There was the Kennedy turn, and then, of course, the endless reruns of various cop dramas where he often appeared as misfits and derelicts, cackling all the way.

Sweet Hostage originally aired on ABC in Oct. 1975, the peak of the “made for TV movie” era. Sheen’s portrayal of Leonard Hatch, an escapee from a Boston mental ward who kidnaps a lonely teen played by Linda Blair, was quite a big deal at the time, especially among women. I recall overhearing various females – aunts, teachers, ladies at the supermarket – talking about this movie. “Did you see it?” they’d ask each other. “Did you cry at the end?”

In the decades since, the movie appeared to fall into the rabbit hole where a lot of made-for-TV flicks go, but it loomed large in my mind. I recalled it as a dark tale of a man who held a woman hostage, and somehow they fell in love. I’m not familiar with Nathaniel Benchley’s novel, Welcome to Xanadu, which served as the basis for the movie, but I’ve heard the movie is much more of a tearjerker. On a side note, I remember a day in the 1990s when Sweet Hostage was airing on an obscure local station, wedged in between Mexican mummy movies and infomercials. I hadn’t seen it in years and wanted to get reacquainted with it. To my surprise, the movie felt sentimental and overblown. Watching it tonight streamed on the Warner Archive, though, it seemed a nearly perfect relic of the era.

The first image is a tight close-up of Sheen’s gaunt, slightly haunted face. The wind blows his hair back, all the better to see his thousand mile stare. As Hatch, Sheen may have reached the pinnacle of his psycho period. He’s a literature spouting nutcase, the sort of eccentric who wanders the grounds of the asylum reciting poetry and demanding the nurses call him ‘Kublai Khan.’ He escapes one night, steals a truck, robs a store (while wearing a clown mask) and heads for parts unknown.

Blair plays Doris Mae Withers, a 17-year-old who dreams of the day when she can leave her father’s chicken farm. One day her truck breaks down on the highway and Hatch picks her up. When he decides she’s an illiterate who could use some mentoring, he holds her captive in his cabin, trying to impress her with the beauty of poetry. She makes a few feeble attempts at escaping, but gradually succumbs to Hatch’s weird charm. True, he has an irrational temper, but when he’s not yelling at her, he’s rather kind, like a man from another era, someone out of a story book of princes and rogues. He even wears a puffy shirt. Hell, it beats living on the chicken farm, so she gets comfortable and hunkers down for the long hall. Far-fetched? Sure, but I never said the movie was flawless.

Sheen, at times, comes dangerously close to overdoing it as Hatch. He’s a dervish of fake accents, odd mannerisms, cackling laughter, and manic outbursts. But for all of his frenzied behavior, we never learn why he was in the mental hospital. For all we know, he’d been locked away because he loved poetry. (There’s an odd scene where Hatch meets a townie who babbles at him in lines borrowed from Star Trek. He even gives Hatch the Vulcan salute. What do we glean from this? Quoting Mr. Spock is permitted, but quote Lord Byron and you go to the psycho ward?)

Cinematographer Richard C. Glouner shoots the hell out of the Taos, New Mexico locations, but his strategy of filming the main characters from below works against the theme of the movie. Shooting from below makes Sheen and Blair look like large powerful figures, when they’re actually two little people in a big lonely world. Glouner’s work is striking, but it doesn’t fit the story. He does have a flair for making Taos look like big sky country, and he makes Hatch’s cabin look rustic and hard, but his best work is a scene where Sheen and Blair waltz around inside the cabin – he brings his camera above the scene, looking down at the two as they appear to be growing closer. It’s a warm scene, and it’s a reminder of how director Lee Philips carried off the neat trick of making us believe Blair could fall in love with her captor.

Philips, a veteran TV director, keeps the movie motoring along, but he nearly destroys it with music, including a terrible theme song that he dumps into the movie at random sections. The song, which I won’t glorify by mentioning its title or singer, nearly capsizes the movie. Imagine if, while watching Badlands, or, say, Bonnie and Clyde, a scene was suddenly interrupted by Terry Jacks singing ‘Seasons in the Sun.’ That’s how off-putting the music is here. Since most TV shows of the period had an opening theme song where the plot would be described ( i.e. “Here’s the story of a man named Brady…”) television producers may have thought a TV movie needed the same thing, a song to describe the action. Still, it’s ridiculous. This is probably why I had a bad reaction to the movie back in the 1990s.

Philips also had a bad habit of laying drippy music underneath all of the emotional scenes, as if he’s determined to tell us how we should feel. The score, a schlocky mix of TV music clichés by Luchi De Jesus (who had done a lot of Blaxploitation movies), really hasn’t aged well. Some of the scenes were magical on their own, such as when Sheen and Blair embrace after she reads a poem that moves him to tears. Strip the music away and the scenes would be much more powerful, for Sheen and Blair don’t need musical accompaniment. And as much as I like Sheen, it’s really Blair who made this movie sit up and speak. As Doris Mae, Blair gives just about the most honest performance ever given by a teenager.

Blair, like Sheen, had become a bit of a TV icon, emerging from The Exorcist to appear as various teen alcoholics and runaways on somewhat scandalous TV movies. (Her name is above Sheen’s on the credits, which shows you the power of The Exorcist was still in the air). And while Sheen hyperventilates as Hatch, Blair has the sense to underplay their scenes together – she’s the rock in the middle of his windstorm.

And consider this: If female viewers fell in love with Sheen in this movie, they were doing so through Linda Blair’s eyes. Blair must have tapped into something that exists in all women, some strange desire to be trapped, combined with a need to nurture. The creepy cabin in the woods becomes a kind of enchanted cottage, with Doris Mae sweeping up and hanging curtains, her eyes widening as Hatch tells her of exotic, faraway lands. Yet, she also knows that this grown man is still something like a kid himself. For Doris Mae, Hatch is all men in one: the unpredictable but gentle father, the encouraging teacher, the playful brother, the flirtatious boyfriend, and even, in a roundabout way, the son who needs protection. With so many facets of Hatch to deal with, Doris Mae can only grow. To her delight, she likes growing. In what is probably the performance of her lifetime, Blair shows us the inner workings of a sad girl warming up to life.

The ending is a bummer, with bloodthirsty vigilantes closing in on Hatch’s cabin. When he spots a police helicopter hovering over his place, he decides to take the only way out he can think of, sacrificing himself so Doris Mae can live. TV viewers bombarded newspapers with angry letters, asking why the film had to end in a death. The movie was a success, though, and was even given a theatrical release in several European countries. There were even rumors that 34-year-old Sheen and 17-year-old Blair had some sort of off-screen affair (which both denied).

Sheen announced at the time that he was leaving television to focus on big screen features. He started by killing Jodie Foster’s hamster in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. He got as far as Apocalypse Now, suffered a heart attack during filming, and spent the next 30 years bouncing between TV and independent pics. He’s never hit the peaks I’d imagined for him. As for Blair, well, Roller Boogie was beckoning. Blair, too, has worked steadily, but she was never better than she was as the girl in Leonard Hatch’s cabin, her eyes widening with love for the strange man who brought out the poetry in her.

(Sweet Hostage is available for viewing on the Warner Archive streaming service.)

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(This review pertains to the limited edition Region 2 UK release from the BFI) 

By Paul Risker 

As well as asking the question “Is cinema more important than life?” Francois Truffaut showed a flair for statement when he declared Werner Herzog to be “The most important filmmaker alive.” 

If the BFI have the final word this summer, it will be remembered as the summer of Herzog, as they align themselves with the German filmmaker and journey headlong into his cinematic world. This rendezvous starts with a descent into the past with two distinct forms of horror - the hallucinatory horror of human obsession in Aguirre, Wrath of God and the genre horror Nosferatu.

Aguirre, Wrath of God represents an important entry in Herzog's career, and by coupling it with his 1971 feature documentary Fata Morgana, this release highlights the spatial thread that runs through his cinema. From the jungle, the desert, Antarctica and the urban geographical spaces resemble continents in Herzog’s cinema. Therein the decision to offset Herzog's early foray into the jungle with an early montage of images of the desert set to songs by Leonard Cohen is a fitting accompaniment to Aguirre’s obsessive jungle march.

It is theoretically possible to appreciate select films via the filmmaker’s commentary on a first viewing, and Aguirre, Wrath of God is one of those films to support such a theory. Herzog’s commentary intertwines well with the film, and whilst the film functions as an independent entity - the grown up child who has come of age and has been sent out into the world; Herzog’s words take you behind the images to tell you the transparent narrative of the human experience behind the film.

Whilst in one sense the films exist separately of their filmmaker, in equal measure an extension of him. In Aguirre, Wrath of God Herzog’s audacity to confront the inhospitable jungle as well as the arduous nature of the filmmaking process finds him mirrored in the tale of obsession and the obsessive nature of Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski).

Herzog’s primary focus appears to be trained on the experience or sense of feeling the film offers over the consideration of narrative, by opening himself up to the environment as a source of inspiration. He allows the jungle to reveal its nature and to guide him in creating an experience for him, his characters and us the audience. Aguirre feels authentically gruelling, and lacks the artificial feel of a performance, merging the physical and psychological experience of a trek, and despite the improvisational approach, Herzog manages to create a melodic flow amidst the arduous natural terrain, imbuing it with graceful beauty despite the descent into an obsessive voyage of death.

Aguirre, Wrath of God offers a powerful meditation on a theme of insanity - the susceptibility versus the immunity. Whilst Kinski’s Aguirre floats on the surface in a state of disquieting peace, his counterparts are inevitably dragged beneath the calm surface. Kinski’s delivers a pitch perfect performance, both his idle and glaring stare offset against the awkward physical movements that masterfully merge the physical abruptness with a shade of a devilish soul.

The jungle setting affords Herzog the opportunity to take advantage of the space and setting as a mirror to reflect his characters psychology - the wildness of their natures, and the labyrinth of obsession that the winding river becomes a metaphor for. But the fatalities suffered by the native’s offers a reflection that man is his own undoing, and mother nature is only a backdrop or a reflection capable of showing us both our Jekyll and Hyde.

Aguirre sits as the opening chapter in the tumultuous Kinski-Herzog collaboration; the full story of which was wonderfully told in Herzog’s 1999 documentary My Best Fiend. This relationship imbues Herzog’s career with a shade of folklore. If Woody Allen listed reasons to live, then one of the reasons to be grateful for Aguirre, Wrath of God is Herzog’s infamous threat to shoot Kinski. Whilst disputes on set are not unheard of, Kinski and Herzog pushed into the realm of the absurd. Whilst the two men plotted each other’s murder together they created a series of films that have come to represent one of the great cinematic collaborations in the history of film. But the distortion of these stories has imbued them with a sense of myth; where what happened differs to what we think happened. The stories of threats of physical harm and fleeing native tribes could be read as filmic parables or cautionary tales for other filmmakers. If the story of the making of a film can be just as compelling as the narrative that plays out onscreen, the Kinski-Herzog dance more often than not produced such a compelling second narrative. What better place to start than with Aguirre, Wrath of God where this collaboration was born.

Alongside a fine selection of extras including an old commentary track moderated by Norman Hill and the montage documentary Fata Morgana, included on this release are three early shorts that see Herzog experiment with the subjective and objective perspective of his characters. An entertaining trilogy representing a young filmmaker cutting his teeth, they present him as a filmmaker fascinated by human nature, behaviour and personality from the very dawn of his filmmaking career. 

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By Lee Pfeiffer

The Warner Archive has released director Ken Annakin's madcap comedy "The Biggest Bundle of the Them All" as a burn-to-order DVD. The film's title has multiple meanings. It's a romantic ballad that is crooned over the opening titles by Johnny Mathis and a rock 'n roll version is heard later in the film. It also refers to a kidnap victim as well as the loot a group of thieves hope to gain from an audacious robbery. Finally, there is the sexual twist on the title with a bikini-clad Raquel Welch adorning the advertising posters.

The film is set in Italy and director Annakin makes the most of the lush locations. The film opens with an inept group of amateur crooks gently kidnapping a local crime lord, Cesare Celli (Vittorio De Sica), in the hopes of holding him for an elaborate ransom. Although Celli is refined, cultured and pompous, the leader of the crooks, Harry (Robert Wagner), soon discovers that Celli is past his sell date in terms of his influence in Italian crime circles. In fact, he is penniless and without the slightest influence among the real "dons". In an ironic twist, Celli becomes humiliated by this discovery and tries valiantly to find ways to collect his own ransom and prove that he still has some value to somebody. When that fails, he convinces Harry and his four confederates to enter into a partnership with him to mastermind a grand theft that will make them all rich. It involves an elaborate operation in which they will rob a train and steal a fortune in platinum, which will then be flown out of the country on an old WWII U.S. bomber. In advance of putting the scheme into play, the gang attempts several other minor crimes but they prove to be far too inept to carry even these out successfully. Celli enlists the aid of an influential American, "The Professor" (Edward G. Robinson), an equally sophisticated man who outlines the "foolproof" master robbery scheme. 

The film is delightful on many levels. First, there is the inspired cast with De Sica stealing every scene in a truly inspired and very funny performance. The "gang that couldn't shoot straight" has several genuinely amusing actors including Italian character actor Francesco Mule, Brit Davy Kaye and American Godfrey Cambridge as a fey gangster who seems to have every amusing mannerism of Joe Besser of the Three Stooges. Raquel Welch, then in the early days of her superstardom, holds her own quite well in this "boy's club", playing the gorgeous arm candy of Wagner's Harry and there is an amusing sequence in which she dances in a disco with Edward G. Robinson (!) Director Annakin had the good sense to show plenty of gratuitous footage of Welch jiggling, gyrating and dancing about, often clad in a sexy bikini. Victor Spinetti turns up in a cameo, as does Mickey Knox, the American character actor who made good in Italy be rewriting Italian dialogue for American audiences on classic Westerns for Sergio Leone. 

The film has many very funny vignettes and a whimsical score by Riz Ortolani. Annakin, who was equally adept at directing dramatic action films, never lets the pace flag for a second and the chemistry between his cast members is one of the movie's great pleasures.

The Warner Archive release is from a print that shows some fluctuations in lighting and color but is overall quite acceptable, though unfortunately there are no extras.  

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Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief Lee Pfeiffer with Eli Wallach at The Players in New York City.

By Lee Pfeiffer

Cinema Retro mourns the loss of Eli Wallach, the prolific actor of screen, stage and television, who passed away Tuesday in his New York City home. He was 98 years old. Wallach was one of the last of the Hollywood legends. He rarely enjoyed a leading role but was considered to be one of the most respected character actors of the post-WII era. He was as diversified as a thespian could be and would play heroes, villains and knaves with equal ease. For retro movie lovers, his two most iconic performances were as the Mexican bandit Calvera in John Sturges' classic 1960 film The Magnificent Seven and as Tuco, the charismatic rogue bandit in Sergio Leone's landmark 1966 production of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Although he never won or was even nominated for a competitive Oscar, he did receive a lifetime achievement award from the Academy in 2010.

On a personal basis, this writer knew Wallach because we were both members of The Players, the legendary club for the arts at Gramercy Park in New York. Wallach's portrait adorns the club's Hall of Fame and he was an active participant in the club, appearing in readings and plays throughout the years. The last time I saw him there was in late 2012 when he made a surprise appearance to greet actress Carroll Baker, who was speaking at the club about her long career. Wallach, who played her lecherous older lover in the notorious Baby Doll, showed up to see her, much to the delight of the audience. As always, Wallach was accompanied by his devoted wife, actress Anne Jackson, to whom he was married for 66 years. I first met him in 2005 when I joined the Players. We both attended a black tie dinner in honor of Ben Gazzara. Coincidentally, the first issue of Cinema Retro had just been published and I gave him a copy. He was delighted to see an article in which we editorialized that he should have been nominated for an Oscar for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and proceeded to tell some amusing stories about the making of the film, including having to temporarily share a bed with Clint Eastwood due to lack of accommodations in Spain. Wallach was always good for a funny anecdotes and seemed to be perpetually in a good mood.  I tried on many occasions to have a formal interview with him and he was agreeable. However, by the time his non-stop work schedule finally abated, his health had deteriorated. The last time I spoke to him at length was after I saw the film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in 2010. I was delighted to see he was looking so fit. I called him up for an impromptu conversation and, as usual, he spent about an hour explaining how he didn't have time to talk. During the course of that conversation, he related priceless tales of working on The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and John Huston and bemoaned the fact that only he and fellow Players member Robert Vaughn were the only remaining cast members from The Magnificent Seven. I informed him that when I had asked Vaughn how that felt, he said "It stinks- but it beats the alternative!" Wallach let out a typically hearty belly laugh.

Eli Wallach was a Hollywood legend and an actor's actor. However, his real legacy is that he was an even rarer breed in today's film industry: a class act, a devoted family man and a true gentleman.

Rest in peace, Tuco.  

For more on Wallach's life and career, click here. 

By Fred Blosser

In the Old West, small homesteaders run afoul of a big landowner who controls the local law and levies killer taxes on their ranches and farms. The homesteaders finally refuse to pay the taxes, and petition the governor for help. Meanwhile, expecting reprisal from the landowner’s hired guns, they build a makeshift fort for refuge. They also send for help from a mercenary who comes to their aid with his private army of four associates and a Gatling gun.

Just kidding about the Western setting. This is actually the plot of “Gonin No Shokin Kasegi,” also known as “The Fort of Death,” a 1969 Japanese chambara by Eiichi Kudo. Nevertheless, the similarities are there. The homesteaders are peasants, the landowner is their oppressive feudal lord, and the higher official they’ve petitioned is the emperor. It’s easy to squint and superimpose an Old West setting out of an American B movie, with Audie Murphy or George Montgomery riding to the rescue.

I’m not joking about the Gatling gun, though. The film is hazy about the historical period of the action, but I would guess the setting is meant to be the 1870s, when Western goods and weapons have entered the Japanese economy.

Fans of the Lone Wolf and Cub samurai movies will recognize the star of that series, Tomisaburo Wakayama, as Ichibei, the head mercenary. The movie calls him a “bounty hunter,” and “The Fort of Death” is one of three movies (1969-72) about the same character that the reference books call the “Bounty Hunter” series. In this one at least, he seems more like a soldier of fortune who might collect bounties one day and lead a team of quasi-military specialists the next.

Wakayama should be the poster boy for middle-aged, dumpy, homely males: the women in the movie keep making passes at Ichibei, if not downright trying to get in his pants, including a smokin’ hot lady ninja on his team of mercenaries.

In contrast to his dour Lone Wolf and Cub ronin, Wakayama loosens up with Ichibei, who runs a medical practice when he’s not fighting a war for downtrodden peasants. There’s a funny, raunchy scene where a jittery patient comes to Dr. Ichibei complaining about pain “down there”; Ichibei diagnoses the clap and somberly tells the poor bastard that he’ll have to “cut it off.” When the patient reacts in terror, Ichibei says, “Oh, all right” and directs his nurse to bring a pump with a very long hollow needle, and . . . Trust me, you won’t see a scene like that on “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Dr. Oz.”

I first read about “The Fort of Death” years ago -- I think in one of John Willis’ “Screen World” movie annuals. I had the impression that the film was intended to be a Japanese version of a Spaghetti Western, bringing full circle a pattern that began when Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (1961) inspired Sergio Leone’s groundbreaking Spaghetti, “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964). I don’t see much of a Spaghetti influence, though, unless Ichibei’s Gatling gun was intended to remind contemporary viewers of Franco Nero’s machine gun in Sergio Corbucci’s “Django” (1966).

Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” (1954) would seem to be more of a prototype, at least in the basic premise of expert warriors coming to the aid of besieged peasants. But “The Fort of Death” is mostly action for action’s sake, without the deeper themes of honor and duty that characterized “The Seven Samurai,” or for that matter Kudo’s own “The Thirteen Assassins” (1963) and “The Great Killing” (1964). Presumably, an American company will someday issue an official stateside edition of “The Fort of Death.” In the meantime, a good, home grown, letterboxed, sub-titled print is available on the collector’s circuit.

By Lee Pfeiffer

(Cinema Retro is pleased to announce that we will be reviewing titles now available on the Warner Archive Instant Streaming Service.)  

Warner Archive has released The Venetian Affair as a streaming video title, having previously been released as a burn to order DVD. The intriguing 1967 spy thriller is often mistaken for a Man From U.N.C.L.E. feature film since it stars Robert Vaughn, was released by MGM and features the word "affair" in the title. Yet the movie is far removed from the fanciful world of U.N.C.L.E. In fact it's a refreshingly downbeat espionage drama that was based on a best-selling book by Helen MacInnes. Vaughn plays Bill Fenner, a disgraced ex-CIA man who battles a penchant for booze while trying to eek out a living as a reporter for an international wire service. Fenner is sent to Venice ostensibly to investigate the apparent suicide bombing of an international peace conference committed by a respected U.S. diplomat. Fenner soon discovers he is a pawn in a complex plot that involves mind control and enemy agents. The role afforded Vaughn a chance to showcase his considerable acting skills and he plays Fenner as a moody and not particularly heroic figure. The one trait similar to Napoleon Solo is that he manages to intertwine with some exotic European lovelies including his ex-wife Elke Sommer and mysterious femme fatales Luciana Paluzzi and Felicia Farr. 

Original movie tie-in paperback edition.

Although the interiors were obviously filmed at MGM studios, director Jerry Thorpe capitalizes on the exotic sites and sounds of Venice, always a prime location for stories of mystery and intrigue. The movie is largely devoid of humor but reliable character actor Roger C. Carmel provides a few moments of levity. The excellent supporting cast includes Edward Asner as Fenner's crotchety former CIA boss who still harbors hatred for him, Karl Boehm as the enemy agent who masterminds the mind control plot and Boris Karloff, who is refreshingly given an important and intelligent role at a point in his career when he was largely relegated to low-budget Mexican horror movies. The movie also boasts a wonderfully atmospheric score by Lalo Schifrin. 

Click here to access the Warner Archive streaming service.  

By Don L. Stradley 

What can one say about a movie that is nothing more than 90 minutes of a guy trying to start an old VW bus? That’s what Ryan Steven Green’s Circle the Wagens seems to be, as we follow a couple of good-hearted fellows in their attempt to bring a “baby blue ‘72” across the country to California. The vehicle, a rusted Volkswagen Transporter Deluxe won on eBay, is affectionately known as “The Croc.” It breaks down. It starts up. It breaks down. It starts up. Somebody paints it. It breaks down. And that’s the story.

The movie is supposed to amuse us with the camaraderie of men linked by their love of VWs, but there’s really not enough here to hang a story. It grows monotonous to hear someone groping for words to explain why these vehicles inspire such devotion. No one really has a good reason, although a few people correctly point out that all cars “look the same nowadays.” True, the old VWs stand out and have some character, but what’s the point if yours won’t start?

Our happy go lucky protagonist, Dave Torstenson, doesn’t help matters, labeling himself early on as someone who knows nothing about cars. Great, just the guy we want to spend 90 minutes with as he fumbles with his heap. We’re told constantly about his adventurous spirit, and how he went to Iraq in 2006 to teach elementary school, but while I’m sure he’s a nice guy, none of this makes one care if he gets his piece of junk bus across the country. Green even stops the movie halfway through so Torstenson can enter a steak eating contest at some hillbilly dive, as if watching someone chew a steak is any more interesting than watching someone try to start up an old rust bucket.

According to the movie’s website, Green “made his first documentary at the tender age of 19. Its subject was the ‘blue flame,’ that is, lighting farts on fire. The topics of subsequent films are equally symptomatic of an unfashionably happy childhood: snails, moustaches, modern homesteaders, coffee, and now Volkswagens.” Well, I haven’t seen his movies about farts or mustaches, but if Circle The Wagens is any indication, I’ll avoid them. Circle the Wagens is almost saved by cinematographer Lawson Demming, who shoots the roadside motels and the big sky scenery with élan. It’s not enough, though.

The movie has been well received on the festival circuit, and given a surprisingly high rating on the IMDB, I imagine due to its DIY vibe. (Green edited the thing on a computer inside the Croc, which earns him some points from “do it yourselfers.”) Some viewers may be satisfied with the colorful photography, the nostalgia for cheap roadside kitsch, and the earthiness of the characters. Some may find a metaphor here for an old America that is dying. Some may even be tickled to know about this Volkswagen subculture. To me, watching this was like listening to someone who doesn’t speak a language try to bluff his way through a conversation. The rhythms may be there, and the right facial expressions, but there’s nothing being said.

If you can’t wait for this one to hit the cable channels devoted to cars and such, it will be available VOD on 7/29, and DVD 8/26. For more about the film, visit CircleTheWagen.com. 

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By Rod Barnett

DVD production company Vinegar Syndrome seems to be trying to pick up the market that Something Weird Video has cultivated over the past fifteen years or so. And that is a good thing! Their desire to restore and release as many independently produced exploitation films as possible is both laudable and impressive. I count myself as a cult film fan but a look at their list of titles leaves me scratching my head in wonderment as I have never heard of most of the movies they are dealing to the public. My few dips into the VS catalog have been interesting, sleazy fun but I was caught off guard by this disc. The company is following the Something Weird template of having each DVD comprised of a double feature of titles that have some kind of themed connection. In this case we have two set-bound, low budget talky dramas spiced with sex in one case and ..... I'm not sure what in the other.

The Candidate (1964) was pitched to me as a sexploitation film staring Ted Knight and my mind rejected that description sight unseen. There can be no such film, said logic and reason. Surely the planet would rip asunder if such a movie existed, said sanity. Ted Knight of The Mary Tyler Moore show engaged in sexual shenanigans? This cannot be true. And in the end this thought process was proven right enough for me to retain my intellect after screening the film. Now, there are sexploitation elements in the film as you might expect with any film that top lines sex kitten Mamie Van Doren, but those are the least interesting parts. (Of the film, I mean…) She plays Samantha, a hard working modern woman who, because of a chance encounter with senatorial candidate Frank Carlton (Ted Knight), is offered a job by conniving campaign runner Eric (Buddy Parker) aiming to work for the prospective senator. She agrees and we are then shown the complicated way various relationships shape the campaign and how it all falls apart. In a strange choice, the story is related as a series of flashbacks as the main characters are grilled in front of a Congressional hearing which causes the film to feel like a mild and overly solemn courtroom drama. It can be pretty entertaining to watch Eric procure ladies for the Washington elite but the film bogs down once the shape of the downfall of Knight's character comes into focus. Parker plays the ruthless Eric as a cynical bastard and he isn't bad in the role but its Knight who is most impressive. As his character meets and falls in love with Angela (June Wilkinson) we see this shy man come alive and have to face the fact that the woman he cares for will destroy his hoped-for career. Knight is exceptional in the role, investing great care in showing very nuanced emotions as he struggles with his options. In the scenes involving his character, the film is solid and the courtroom sequences are very well- scripted.However, the rest of the movie- the sexploitation parts- are dry as dust. This is the film's problem- it has half of a good movie but it has been shackled to a silly lingerie show with Miss Van Doren. In the end The Candidate isn't a bad movie but it isn't very good either, which is a shame.

Vinegar Syndrome has coupled the main feature with a decidedly 'B' picture from 1957 called Johnny Gunman. If The Candidate sometimes felt a bit set-bound, it looks better with this movie immediately following it. Extremely low budget, the film seems to have been shot on the cheap and quick with little time for second takes. The story takes place in New York (I think) as gangster Johnny G (Martin Brooks) spends a long night hiding out from a rival hood. This other gang boss named Allie (Johnny Seven) is up for the same new position as Johnny but has the added impetus of a Lady MacBeth-like girlfriend pushing him to off the competition. While on the run from gunmen, Johnny finds himself in a cafe where he threatens the patrons and then propositions the only pretty girl in the place, Coffee (Ann Donaldson). The other customers don't like the idea of this nice girl spending all night with this dangerous man so a bargain is worked out- she will spend two hours with each of the three men who want her attention over the next six hours. If this sounds artificial, you are right. The rest of the movie plays out with Coffee spending her required time with each man as she seeks a story worth writing about- she's a journalist, you see. As you might expect, she falls for Johnny's criminal charms and must decide if she will return to her little home town or stay in the big city to love a bad man good. To call this film dull is to be too nice. It has a 67 minute running time and I nearly dozed off twice in the first forty-five minutes. The movie feels both rushed and static with only a few poorly constructed sets on view. The acting is half-hearted with Miss Donaldson taking top honors as the stiffest actress in memory. Some of her line deliveries are as if she had never read the script before walking onto the hastily nailed together set. Ugh! Save yourself the time and skip it.

The DVD carries no extras but both movies look very good. The Candidate is in very sharp black & white anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen presentation with Johnny Gunman looking just as good on a 1.33:1 print. I might have wished for some more information on these movies but in the end I'm just happy they are available. Well, I'm happy one of them is available.

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(Visit Rod Barnett’s blog, The Bloody Pit of Rod for more retro movie reviews). 

“HEARTS AND MINDS” (1974; directed by Peter Davis)

(The Criterion Collection)

‘LEST WE FORGET

By Raymond Benson

The Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1974 went to the controversial and incendiary Hearts and Minds, the first big movie about the Vietnam War that attempted to prove to the world that America made a huge mistake. A lot of people didn’t like that being said.

Produced by Bert Schneider (of BBS Productions fame—Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, many others) and director Peter Davis, the documentary is most definitely one-sided in its arguments. The entire film is shaped and edited to present the most anti-war statement possible, as well as put a bad light on the men in power that made the decisions to go to war in the first place.

You can imagine that in 1974 this was not an easy pill to swallow. Never mind that the picture is brilliantly made—the footage is unbelievably powerful and sometimes very difficult to watch. Remember those photos of the little Vietnamese girl running naked down the road, a victim of a Napalm attack? Well, in the movie, you see film footage in color of that very scene as it happened. The same is true of the famous photo depicting the execution by gunshot of a Vietcong prisoner in the street by a Saigon police chief. In Hearts and Minds, we don’t see the still photo, we see the actual killing, again in color. These are among the many horrific imagery contained in the picture, much of it stock footage. However, most of the running time is taken up by interviews with guys like General William Westmoreland, Clark Clifford (Secretary of Defense 1968-1969), Walt Rostow (aide to Kennedy and Johnson), Daniel Elsberg (former aide to Defense Department), and many other talking heads. Most of them come off as windbags spouting stuff we now know is simply not true (General Westmoreland: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.”).

The film is obviously divisive as to which side of the aisle you reside—liberal or conservative. I’m sure even today there are plenty of conservatives who still believe we were right to go to Vietnam. While this column is meant to be a review of the documentary, I think I can safely say that history has proven that the liberals were right all along. Looking back at this picture now, it simply reconfirms what we should have learned from the mistakes made.

The Criterion Collection has re-issued Hearts and Minds in a dual format—Blu-ray and DVD (three disCs)—in a high-definition digital restoration supervised by director Davis and cinematographer Richard Pearce. The audio commentary is by Davis. Added to this new release are over two hours of unused footage, including interviews of people not seen in the film (e.g. David Brinkley). Overkill? Perhaps, but for war history buffs who want to dig into the depths of this admittedly biased but fascinating condemnation of a black mark in our time, then don’t miss Hearts and Minds.

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By Todd Garbarini

Director Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service celebrates its 45^th anniversary this year. Actor George Lazenby, who donned the role of Bond, James Bond, for this singular film will be appearing for a Q and A at the screening on Tuesday, July 8, 2014. The event will be held at the Landmark Theatre, 10850 West Pico at Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. From the press release:

James Bond goes undercover in the treacherous Swiss Alps in this underrated, highly entertaining, action-packed epic filled with artillery-laden ski pursuits, incredible stunts and nonstop thrills! George Lazenby (in his only appearance as James Bond) leaps into the role of Agent 007 with supreme confidence and undeniable charisma, even finding love with the beautiful and seductive Tracy Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg). But first Bond must stop evil genius Blofeld (Telly Savalas) from releasing a germ warfare plot that could kill millions! Directed by Peter R. Hunt (Gold, Shout at the Devil).

Click here for more information.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Harrison Ford's recent injury on the set of the new Star Wars film, now shooting in England, resulted in a broken ankle and he may miss filming for up to eight weeks. Nevertheless, producers are confident that they can get around the problem and that the film's December 18, 2015 will not be affected. For more click here 

By Lee Pfeiffer

Having been friends with a number of people in my life who are- or have been- car salesman, one thing becomes clear very quickly: you need to have a thick skin and a good sense of humor in order to survive in this curious profession. Not even bank robbers have seen their reputations degraded as much as car salesman- especially those who specialize in used cars...er, make that "previously owned vehicles", in the parlance of today. As with any profession, generalities can be dangerous. There are undoubtedly many reputable people selling cars but even they will tell you that, behind the scenes, the overriding strategies are to close the deal, no matter what it takes. I've always found it rather ironic that while, on the national level, car companies spend a fortune to present their products in TV ads that have production values that suggest class, style and elegance- while at the local level, car dealers swamp the airwaves with home-made ads that are cheap, cheesy and unintentionally hilarious. The consumer sees an ad during the Super Bowl with a guy who looks like 007 behind the wheel of a spanking new vehicle. Yet his local dealership sells the same product through ads featuring the owner, his mother, his cutesy kids - and in some cases over the top comic scenarios that are something out of the old Second City TV skits. (A local dealer near me is a portly fellow who routinely sells his cars while dressed in tights as a super hero!)

Car dealerships already had shaky reputations by the time director Robert Zemeckis rode a semi over the profession with his 1980 comedy "Used Cars". Twilight Time has released the special 2002 DVD edition as a limited edition (3,000 units) Blu-ray title. The film clearly exploited the new screen freedoms in the realm of tasteless humor that had been introduced a couple of years before by director John Landis with "National Lampoon's Animal House". There are those who consider "Used Cars" to be on par with that comedy classic, while others feel its "everything-but-the-kitchen sink" structure makes it more chaotic than consistently funny. In this writer's opinion, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Zemeckis and his co-writer Bob Gale had previously written and directed the 1978 film "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", which Steven Spielberg produced. The underrated and largely under-exposed comedy was the antithesis of "Used Cars" in that it was a sweet-natured look at how the arrival of The Beatles in America wreaked havoc on the lives of New York teenagers. Zemeckis and Gale went on to write Spielberg's epic 1979 WWII comedy "1941" before getting the green light to do "Used Cars", which was executive produced by Spielberg and John Milius.

"Used Cars" opens on a cynical shot of Arizona car salesman Rudy Russo (Kurt Russell) tampering with the odometer on a beat-up vehicle in the hopes he can sucker some poor soul into buying it. Rudy is a charismatic young man who is a charming as he is soulless in terms of his moral fiber. He is intent on raising $10,000 so he can afford to be a credible candidate in the forthcoming race for state senator, a job he presumes will enable him to benefit from even greater graft and corruption. Meanwhile, the only person he respects is the owner of the car lot, the elderly Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden), a man in precarious health whose days are clearly numbered. Luke is locked in a constant daily battle with his more affluent brother Roy (also played by Warden) who has a successful car lot directly across the highway from Luke. Despite the fact that Roy's sales far out-gross those of Luke, he is intent on using dirty tricks to gain control over his less fortunate brother's lot so that he can have the biggest dealership in the state. Much of the humor derives from Rudy's intense attempts to use chicanery to outwit Roy's attempts to seize Luke's property. When Luke suddenly expires, Rudy fears that Roy will inherit the car lot. He enlists the assistance of his two slovenly co-workers Jeff (Gerritt Graham) and Jim (Frank McRae) to hatch an audacious plan whereby they bury Luke inside a car on his own lot then try to convince Roy that he has taken a sudden trip to Florida. Roy isn't buying it and uses his affluence to buy off local officials to launch an investigation. Complicating matters is the arrival of Luke's estranged daughter Barbara (Deborah Harmon). Rudy woos and beds her while hiding the fact that her dad is actually dead. As the film unwinds, the story becomes increasingly ludicrous and culminates in a wildly ambitious sequence in which Rudy organizers a fleet of 250 dilapidated vehicles driven by high school students on a race across the Arizona desert as part of a scheme to ensure Barbara inherits her father's car lot.

"Used Cars" boasts some truly amusing performances with Kurt Russell as the glue that holds this disparate cast together. For Russell, who had recently won acclaim for his portrayal of Elvis Presley in a TV movie, the Zemeckis film was pivotal in proving he could also draw audiences to movie theaters. (Heretofore, he was primarily known as the child and teen age star of many Walt Disney films). Every cast member is impressive and adds immeasurably to the fun, but it's Jack Warden's terrific tour de force performance as both brothers that dominates the film. Zemeckis and Gale have some misfires among the machine gun-fire like rapidity of jokes and comic situations, but they score more than they miss their targets. In one amusing sequence, they actually incorporate footage of then President Jimmy Carter in an outlandish manner. The highlight of the film is clearly the junk heap car race across the desert with Rudy and Roy battling each other from side-by-side pick up trucks like a modern version of the "Ben-Hur" chariot race. The sequence is so over-the-top and logistically impressive that you can honestly say that you've never seen anything like it. "Used Cars" has something to offend everyone: vulgar language abounds, there is disrespect for the dead, the American political system is mocked in a cynical manner and there is plenty of gratuitous tits-and-ass. No wonder I feel like watching it again.

The Twilight Time releases keeps the features from the previous special edition DVD including an award-winning 2003 commentary track featuring Zemeckis, Gale and Russell that is delightful throughout. The guys even goof about their own sloppiness in making the film (the opening frames accidentally reveal a soundman's arm and boom mic in a rear view mirror of a car). Clearly, they had as good a time reflecting on the experience as they did in making the film. There is an isolated score by Patrick Williams and an unused score by the estimable Ernest Gold. Additionally, there are radio spots and a TV ad done for a local Arizona car dealership where the movie was shot in which Kurt Russell actually appears (obviously as a favor) on camera with the lot's owner and help's pitch that week's specials on used cars!  A gag reel and some outtakes are surprisingly flat and unfunny. There is also an original trailer from the days in which trailers themselves did not have to be rated. Thus, it's packed with gratuitous nudity even though it was screened to family audiences, which must have caused countless parents to have "that" conversation with their kids before they were ready to do so. There is also a terrific gallery of promotional materials including one ad that features notes from Steven Spielberg in which he complains that they may have produced a distasteful movie, but the ad campaign he is rejecting went too far in pointing this out. The movie was released during the presidential election period of 1980 and one ad notes that Ronald Reagan was not the only actor vying for the nation's top office- and invites audiences to see then incumbent President Jimmy Carter's movie debut. (As mentioned previously, this is a sly reference to newsreel footage seen in the film.) This particular ad also featured the likenesses of both candidates. Try doing that today! 

The Twilight Time release is top notch. The film is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it is inspired lunacy that, at times, makes Animal House look as sophisticated as 'Love's Labour's Lost'. 

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THEY BOUGHT US LOVE

By RAYMOND BENSON 

Released in the summer of 1964, A Hard Day’s Night, starring The Beatles and directed by Richard Lester, is arguably the second most influential British film of that decade (the first being Goldfinger, coincidentally released the same year.). Why? For one thing, it brought The Beatles to a worldwide audience that was just getting to know them through their music. Secondly, it spawned imitations and knock-offs (The Monkees, anyone?) and is arguably the genesis of music videos—where would MTV have been without it? Thirdly, the film itself was innovative, fresh, and surprisingly funny (those long-haired boys from Liverpool could actually act!).

One of the best things about the Criterion Collection’s new deluxe box set of the film (dual Blu-ray and DVD, three discs) is the short extra, On the Road to “A Hard Day’s Night,” an interview with author Mark Lewisohn, that documents how The Beatles did not magically appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, already brilliant, already at the top of their game. In fact, as every serious Beatles fan knows, their story began in 1958 when John Lennon met Paul McCartney in Liverpool at the ages of seventeen and fifteen, respectively, and they started playing music together and writing songs (George joined not long after at age fourteen!). The first four years embodied a lot of work gaining experience, honing their skills, and creating an act that would change not only music itself, but pop culture. The Hamburg days, the early shows with Pete Best, the gigs for peanuts, the obtaining of managers (first Allan Williams, then Brian Epstein), auditioning for producer George Martin, being rejected by a major record label, and then finally landing a contract with one—these were all things none of us in America were aware of when we watched the four lads perform on Ed Sullivan. What we saw was a tight, talented band, and it seemed as if they’d come from nowhere. (Apologies to UK readers, who of course knew how great the band was all through 1963.)

Anyway—on to A Hard Day’s Night. Kudos to United Artists executive David Picker, who greenlit a three-picture deal with producer Walter Shenson (Picker was also responsible for green-lighting Dr. No, a little picture featuring a character named James Bond). Picker had the foresight to make the deal with The Beatles in 1963, well before the band’s appearance on U.S. television. Apparently his instincts were good. If he hadn’t done it then, someone else would have much later, and I dare say the results would not have been as good.

It was no accident that American director Richard Lester was hired to helm the movie, either. He was living in the UK and had directed British television, especially those crazy guys known as the Goons (Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe), who were forerunners of that type of English humor we Americans found odd but grew to love, especially by the time Monty Python came around. The Beatles were fans of the Goons, so they figured Lester was their guy. It was a perfect match. Lester not only brought out that odd British humor, but he also combined the elements of the British New Wave in cinema (the “kitchen-sink dramas” of the “angry young men”) and the French New Wave (radical editing, improvisation, hand-held camerawork, low budget), and created something very new.

And then there’s the music. Did you know that the song, “A Hard Day’s Night,” was written overnight, on demand by producer Shenson, because they needed something that matched the title? Not only was it a good song, it was a massive hit song! Imagine that... “Hey boys, could you write a number with the title in it?” “Sure, Walter, we’ll have it for you in the morning.” Bang. Oh. My. God. And that’s not to mention all the other great tunes in the film. (For my money, the UK version of A Hard Day’s Night, the album, is one of The Beatles’ five best records.)

As this is a Criterion release, you can expect nothing but an outstanding transfer of the film itself—4K digital restoration, approved by Lester, with three audio options—monaural soundtrack, a stereo 5.1 surround mix, and a DTS-HD master audio on the Blu-ray. Wow. There’s also an audio commentary by some of the cast and crew.

The extras are wonderful—some we’ve seen before, but others are new. A nice piece on Lester, Picturewise, is narrated by Rita Tushingham and features Lester’s early work (and there’s the obligatory inclusion of Lester’s The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film). In Their Own Voices is a new piece mixing 1964 interviews with The Beatles with behind-the-scenes footage and photos. A longer 1994 documentary, “You Can’t Do That: The Making of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’” by producer Shenson, also includes an outtake performance by the band. Things They Said Today is a 2002 documentary about the film featuring interviews with Lester, Martin, screenwriter Alun Owen, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor. And there’s more, much more.

Can’t buy me love? Forget it! The Beatles, Walter Shenson, Richard Lester, David Picker, and everyone else involved with the film certainly bought enough love for us... and we’re still basking in it.

The Criterion Collection’s A Hard Day’s Night is a must-buy.

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The Hollywood Reporter visits Jerry Lewis at his home in Las Vegas and finds the 88 year old comedy legend as opinionated, cranky and funny as ever as his career undergoes yet another renaissance. Click here to read  

Neil deGrasse Tyson is universally regarded as one of the top astrophysicists in the world. He hosts the popular Cosmos series and is a ubiquitous presence on American television as he promotes the study of science and astronomy is layman's terms.  Nevertheless, the generally calm, cool deGrasse does have something that irks him more than the flat-earthers who continue to argue that the planet is only a few thousand years old and that humans romped around in the presence of dinosaurs. Turns out that a routine question from TMZ regarding his opinion of the movie that bastardized science the most, set deGrasse into a humorous "rage" when he immediately recounted how the 1979 Disney flick "The Black Hole" continues to irritate him to this day. deGrasse said that the scriptwriters didn't even make a token attempt to convey the actual science behind real black holes and claims that, had they done so, they would have also turned out a more compelling film. deGrasse isn't a totally stick-in-the-mud, however. He acknowledges that the Bruce Willis blockbuster Armageddon was also amiss when it came to science, but he gives it a pass because he feels it was a very entertaining film. Click here to watch the interview. 

After being attached to the forthcoming "Ant-Man" Marvel super hero flick for a staggering eight years, director/co-writer Edgar Wright left the project he has been nurturing on the basis that the studio made changes to his script without his permission. Variety presents nine other examples of high profile film productions dating back to "The Wizard of Oz: and "Gone With the Wind"  that saw directors replaced, mostly due to "creative differences". Click here to read. 

Dee became a Broadway sensation as the female lead in A Raisin in the Sun. She also played the role in the acclaimed 1961 film version opposite Sidney Poitier.

Ruby Dee, the acclaimed star of stage and screen, has died at age 91. Dee was part of a generation of African-American actors who broke through racial prejudice and elevated the status of black characters in film and theater. She won both Emmy and Grammy awards and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2007 for American Gangster. Dee enjoyed a creative collaborative relationship with her husband, the late actor Ossie Davis, who was a legend in his own right. In addition to their contributions to the arts, Dee and Davis were also fervently involved in the issue of civil rights. For more click here. 

On his web blog Hill Place, writer Shaun Chang catches up with former actress Cristina Raines for an exclusive interview. Raines had prominent roles in such 1970s gems as Michael Winner's The Sentinal, Robert Altman's Nashville and Ridley Scott's The Duelists. Interestingly, this accomplished actress gave up the glamour of show business for a career in nursing. Click here to read.  

By Dave Worrall

One of the most sought-after film scores in the last 40 years has finally been released on CD. When released in 1968, Michael Reeves’ classic Witchfinder General (released in America as The Conqueror Worm) , starring Vincent Price (in arguably his finest role) featured an equally impressive score by Paul Ferris. At the time of the film's initial release a 45rpm record of the love theme was issued in England, but not a complete soundtrack. Thought to be have been lost forever, the original 1/4-inch master tapes were found in the vaults of recording studio De Wolfe Ltd in 2013.

Recently-discovered box containing reels of the original score.

The tapes, which are the original recordings, and not a copy, include every cue used in the film, and are now available on a CD for fans of this film (and the music) to enjoy at long last. Released by De Wolfe Ltd, the 3-sided gatefold sleeve reproduces photos of the newly discovered tape box and reel itself, and also comes with a 12-page booklet detailing the film's history. For this author, this is the 'find' of the decade!

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(Issue #5 of Cinema Retro (now almost sold out) features extensive coverage of the making of the film.)

By Lee Pfeiffer 

MPI Home Video has released producer/director Dan Curtis' 1973 production of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" on Blu-ray. The film was shot for American television and starred Jack Palance as the legendary vampire.  The production was released theatrically in some European markets and this Blu-ray is the theatrical cut. In general, vampires had been good to Curtis and he returned the favor by popularizing them in his high profile TV productions such as "Dark Shadows" and "The Night Stalker". For "Dracula", Curtis enlisted some top talent, aside from Palance: legendary screenwriter Richard Matheson and acclaimed cinematographer Oswald Morris, among them. He also spent rather lavishly on the project with location filming in Yugoslavia and England. Matheson's intelligent script follows the Stoker novel in most major respects with the exception of jettisoning the character of Dracula's fawning slave Renfield and the accompanying subplot set in an insane asylum. The action begins with Jonathan Harker's (Murray Brown) arduous journey to Dracula's foreboding castle in Transylvania. The Count ostensibly wants Harker to suggest some real estate holdings so that Dracula can relocate to England. Upon seeing a photograph of Harker's friend Lucy (Fiona Lewis), he is instantly mesmerized. It seems she is the spitting image of his own lover from hundreds of years ago. They were both victims of Dracula's war time enemies and he has been pining away for her ever since having been transformed into a vampire. Matheson and Curtis very much wanted to add this new plot device in order to give the character of Dracula and emotional aspect that was missing from previous cinematic incarnations of the character. As presented here, Dracula is as much victim as villain. His motives are largely related to his quest to make Lucy a reincarnation of his former lover. Thus, he imprisons Harker in his castle and immediately sets about relocating to a home that is near the residences of Lucy and her fiancee Arthur (Simon Ward). Perhaps in the interest of the 98 minute running time, designed to fill a two-hour broadcast slot, Matheson only briefly alludes to the fatal and murderous sea crossing by Dracula in which the entire crew of the passenger ship dies under mysterious and horrific circumstances-- though there is a haunting image of the last victim strapped to the wheel of the ship with a cross clutched in  his hand. Once in England, Dracula wastes no time in ensuring that Lucy becomes his victim. This leads to the introduction of Prof. Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport) who correctly diagnoses her bizarre maladies as having been caused by a vampire. The plot then follows the traditional elements of Stoker's novel with the manhunt on for Dracula and attempts to rescue Lucy and Harker's financee (Penelope Horner) from eternal damnation, both having been victimized by the Count. 

The centerpiece of any Dracula film, of course, is the actor who plays the title role. Jack Palance makes for a striking visual representation of the Count: tall, imposing and seething with barely-restrained menace. Palance could chew the scenery if he didn't have a strong director, but Dan Curtis keeps him in check and, if anything, his performance may be a bit understated. Nevertheless, it's a very credible interpretation of the role and Palance deserved the kudos he received. Similarly, Curtis does a fine job as director, drenching the action in a menacing atmosphere and getting fine performances from his cast members. (Davenport is particularly good as Van Helsing). Adding to the commendable aspects of the production is Robert Cobert's fine, atmospheric score and Oswald Morris' creative camera angles. The film is a winner on all counts, if you pardon the pun. 

The MPI Blu-ray is also very good indeed. The transfer is excellent and the release includes some interesting bonus extras including brief interviews with Palance and Curtis done in the early 1990s. Palance is surprisingly funny and says he had never seen the production, joking that he might have found it too scary. Curtis insists in his interview that Palance was the definitive screen Dracula, something that others may argue with especially when confronted with names like Max Schreck, Christopher Lee and Klaus Kinski. Nevertheless, Curtis' enthusiasm for the film remains apparent even twenty years after it had been filmed. There are also some silent footage snippets identified as deleted scenes when, in fact, they are mostly just different camera angles. Most interesting is a comparison between scenes in the TV and theatrical versions. The main differences are confined to scenes in which vampires are "staked" by Van Helsing. Predictably, the theatrical takes are far gorier with oceans of blood ejecting from the mouths of the vampires There is also a theatrical trailer that seems to have been intended for the British market. 

In total, a very worthy release of a very worthy take on a timeless literary masterpiece.

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Cinema Retro's Matt Field and Dave Worrall on the red carpet.

By Matthew Field

Prince Harry headlined an exclusive red carpet event at the Odeon Leicester Square in London, to mark the 50^th anniversary of Zulu – the 1964 epic about the historic 1879 battle at Rorke’s Drift.

Arriving at the cinema, the Prince told Suzannah Endfield Olivier, the daughter of the film's director Cy Endfield, that Zulu was one of his favourite films. 'I watch this film every single year before Christmas time,' he said. 'Maybe once. Maybe twice.'

Matt and Dave with Cinema Retro contributor Paul Adsacks.

Inside and ahead of the film, guests were treated to a screening of rare behind the scenes footage shot on location in South Africa in 1964. Cinema Retro’s Dr. Sheldon Hall, gave the 2,000 strong audience a running commentary to the black and white footage. Film critic Mark Kermode and Historian Dan Snow both addressed the audience giving the film a cultural and historical context.

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who played King Cetshwayo the leader of the Zulus in the film, was also in attendance. He said in a short recorded piece to camera “My portrayal of King Cetshwayo, my maternal great-grandfather, was not only a privilege, but almost inevitable once the idea was conceived. Cy Endfield and Sir Stanley Baker came to see me at KwaPhindangene to request my assistance in enlisting the thousands of extras for the Zulu regiments and the part of King Cetshwayo. But when Endfield saw me, he was struck by the family resemblance, and persuaded me to play the role myself.”

The Choir of the 1^st Battalion Welsh Guards performed Men of Harlech on stage before a specially filmed message from Michael Caine. The event benefited three very worthy charities - Walking With The Wounded, The David Rattray Memorial Trust and Sentebale.

Zulu actor Dickie Owen and Henry Coleman a historian of the film who supplied rare footage. Henry also runs a Zulu web site that can be accessed by clicking here.

Finally the audience enjoyed the gorgeous 50^th anniversary digitally restored print of the film. As the lights came up, we began talking to an elderly gentleman sitting next to us, only to discover, he was in fact 88 year old actor Dickie Owen, who played Corporal Schiess in the film. In all, a memorable commemoration of a very memorable British film classic.

OH, THE SCANDAL!

By Raymond Benson

Director Douglas Sirk was known primarily for his “adult” melodramas of the 1950s that usually dealt with bucking the small-town America social mores of the times. All That Heaven Allows is a prime example. In lush, bold Technicolor (the superb cinematography is by Russell Metty), Sirk tells the story of a May-September romance between an “older” widow and a younger man (in actuality, star Jane Wyman was only 38 when the film was made, and her paramour in the picture, Rock Hudson, was 30; obviously the intention was that Wyman’s character is even older, say, in her 40s, since she has college-age children). The couple must face gossip, scorn, and ultimate rejection from Wyman’s society friends and even her grown children. The message of acceptance and tolerance hits one over the head like a hammer, to be sure, but, granted, at the time the subject matter was most likely indeed scandalous to most Americans. Now it’s a big “so what.” That said, the point of the story—that women need to be responsible for their own happiness and not cater to what other people think—is still relevant today. A mother’s children will eventually grow up and leave the nest; why should she remain in an unhappy situation just to please them when they’re not even there?

Ah, but yes, Rock Hudson. Looking back at his performance in this and his other hits of the 50s and 60s and knowing what we know about him today, one cannot help but view the actor in a different light. And, for me, anyway, I saw right through Hudson’s performance. I couldn’t believe that a) Wyman fell for the guy, and b) that Hudson was really attracted to her. In 1955, the audience for whom the picture was aimed (female, I imagine) may have bought the romance; today, it’s superficial and frankly unbelievable. If there had been a bit more spark between the actors and some clues that there were aspects about each other that they found appealing (other than Hudson’s Adonis good looks), it might play better. As it is, All That Heaven Allows is now a curious relic of a time when America had more bugs up its ass than a mother spider.

The Criterion Collection presents the picture in the classiest way possible—a 2K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray—and it looks marvelous. Of particular interest is the extra, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, in which we are treated to clips from his films that he edited himself; they compile the moments in which the subtext implies the truth about his sexual orientation. A Profile of Douglas Sirk, a 1979 BBC documentary, features rare interview footage and is an interesting portrait of the filmmaker. There is more, of course, in the dual Blu-ray/DVD format package, including an essay on Sirk in the accompanying booklet, written by none other than filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work was inspired by the director’s pictures.

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The Cinema Retro archives once again delves into its limitless images to present two great stars indulging in the Hollywood ritual of posing for cheesecake photos: Errol Flynn, seen here in an undated publicity photo at the height of his career and young Raquel Welch in the mid-1960s.  Back in the day, stars and stars-in-the-making were subject to many glamour shoots designed to play up their images as sex symbols. 

By Darren Allison, Cinema Retro Soundtrack Editor

Let’s face it, 1979 was a particularly bad year for the Concord. It was the year in which the ‘Airport’ franchise were about to deliver their latest offering in the shape of the quite awful Airport ’79 The Concord. However, Airport ’79 was beaten (by several months) to the screen by a cheesy little flick from Italy, Concord Affaire '79. Directed by Ruggero Deodato, Concord Affaire '79 is more an action thriller rather than the formulated disaster flick that we have come to know. Some commentators have argued that it is actually far better than its ‘Airport’ rival, and to be honest, I would probably side with that opinion. But let’s be clear from the start, neither film will ever be described as a classic…

Deodato’s film was not a big budgeted project, the film’s restraints are apparent – mainly through the use of stock footage of the British Airways supersonic ‘bird’ or the (less than seamless) shots of some average miniature models. But of course, that is half of the film’s 70s charm and its era defining identity stamp. Concord Affaire '79 separates itself from the typical disaster genre film right from the start, largely by having the plane crash in the first reel. There is no long laborious build up – this plane is down, crashing into the ocean off the coast of Martinique and leading us to believe there are no survivors. Of course, that’s not quite true, Jean Beneyton, the young French flight attendant played by Mimsy Farmer, does survive the crash. She is captured / rescued by the man responsible for the crash – Milland, played by Hollywood veteran Joseph Cotton. The film in fact boasts a string of established stars; Van Johnson plays Captain Scott, whilst Edmond Purdom played Danker, one of Milland's leading henchmen. Heading the cast is the ever enjoyable James Franciscus as Moses Brody, an American investigative reporter who decides to go to the Antilles in an attempt to rescue Jean Beneyton and uncover the story. From here on, it’s all rather good fun.

Stelvio Cipriani’s score for Concord Affaire '79 marks its debut release on CD. It’s only previous release was on vinyl LP consisting of 15 tracks and released in Japan on Polydor records. Whilst Cipriani sets an energetic pace with his opening main title Danger flight, there are also plenty of lush romantic cues. The score does however illustrate an age, due mainly to an overwhelming backbeat of Euro disco, an era which perhaps does not transfer too easily in today’s society. But of course, its style is very much of its time and still retains a certain retro charm. The composer cleverly based his score on variations of a single theme, which is hard to achieve unless in the hands of someone such as Cipriani. The central theme is used to good effect, sometimes melodic and rich or in the case of the underwater scenes there is an edgy dreamlike quality attached. But above all else, Cipriani uses Concord Affaire '79 to indulge himself deep into a world of synths and electronica, perhaps in reflection of the futuristic, supersonic era of the film’s narrative. Synth theme in particular is a long, almost operatic homage to a haunting electro heaven. However, Cipriani never seems to step too far over the line, and later adds more familiar analogue instrumentation (such as strings) to the synth sound and as a result, the blending works very well in deed.

Concord Affaire '79 is a curious, almost experimental score, yet Cipriani ultimately succeeds in making it work. But there are moments where one is left considering, if Cipriani perhaps deliberated over which route to take when composing this score. It is certainly an eclectic mix of styles, both in mood and in its instrumentation. For Cipriani collectors and soundtrack collectors in general, Concord Affaire '79 is well worth adding to your collection. Consisting of 27 tracks, (7 of which did not make it into the film), the CD is a huge improvement over the original album and its audio has been beautifully remastered. Chris’ Soundtrack Corner has demonstrated a full commitment to Cipriani’s work - with Concord being the composer’s Sixth title in their increasingly impressive catalogue. We can only hope there is more to come. 

http://www.soundtrackcorner.de/

By Mark Cerulli

Writer/Director Nicholas Wrathall turned an introduction to Vidal by his nephew into a rare filmmaking opportunity. The result is Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, a new, in-depth look at the writer’s long and singular life.

“It took seven years to make,” Wrathall told CinemaRetro, “five years of interviewing him and I benefitted from the time frame because I got to know him.”

The author wrote a number of historical novels including Burr, Lincoln and 1876 along with screenplays, essays and teleplays; but was best known for speaking out, totally unconcerned about the feathers he ruffled along the way. In addition to Wrathall’s interviews, the film makes use of decades of Vidal’s televised appearances – arguing about sexuality in the 1950s, arguing against  the Vietnam War and social inequality in the 1960s, stirring the intellectual pot whenever possible. Archive footage shows Vidal’s incredible reach – he was friends with JFK, Paul Newman, Eleanor Roosevelt and numerous other boldfaced names. Viewers also see a remarkable progression - from a young, vigorous Vidal, thoroughly enjoying sparring against arch conservative William F. Buckley, to a more mature provocateur railing against Ronald Reagan and finally an increasingly frail elder statesman horrified by American imperialism and the Iraq war. Through it all, Vidal maintained his wry sense of humor noting that “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Filmed in NY, LA, Washington as well as Italy and Cuba, the film offers a definitive look at one of the last “intellectual celebrities” of our time. “He was courageous, and provocative, that’s why Carson and Cavett loved having him on their shows.” Wrathall adds.

Along with his razor sharp opinions, Vidal was also known for throwing lavish parties, attracting movie stars, artists and politicians. Ground Zero for these coveted events was his beloved villa, Rondinaia in Ravello, Italy. In fact, one of the film’s emotional highlights is Vidal’s final visit, packing up books and memories and staring out at the incredible view one last time. Actor Tim Robbins reminisces about bringing his family for a stay with Gore and his partner, Howard Austen - only to be joined by two other dinner guests, Sting and Bruce Springsteen and their spouses. There was nobody Vidal didn’t seem to know.!

Another notable talking head was author Christopher Hitchens – in one of his last on camera interviews. He and Vidal had a complicated relationship – at one point Hitchens was his literary heir apparent only to be cast out when he spoke out in favor of the Iraq War, something Vidal found unforgivable.

The documentary ends with a final off camera question – “What is your legacy?” Although Vidal dismisses it with a sneer, the documentary’s director thinks that along with being a “writer, essayist and novelist… he was a brave, outspoken person who lived at the center of our culture.”

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia opens in Los Angeles on June 6^th. It is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York. 

(For Don L. Stradley's review of the film click here)  

By Lee Pfeiffer 

Sex may be fun but it shouldn't be funny, at least when it comes to erotic filmmaking. That's my humble opinion, anyway. Most people would seem to disagree and from the inception of porn cinema, goofy comedy has been routinely blended with the more traditional aspects of the genre. Case in point: "Honey Buns", which was shot under the title "Heads or Tails" back in 1973 by director James Chiara. If that was his real name ("nom de plumes" were standard in the industry), nothing more has been heard from his since. The film is standard grind house fare from the period, with fairly low production values and a few exterior shots in L.A. to give the production a bit of atmosphere. Chiara, who is also credited as the writer, provides a familiar scenario: a nerdy male virgin who seems hopelessly destined to have his sexual fantasies remain unfulfilled. Here, our protagonist is Harry (Matt Hewitt, an odd-looking duck with an even odder, hard-to-place accent.) When we first meet Harry he is laboring as a clerk in the small office of a feminine hygiene company. He is working under the oppressive rule of a tyrannical, Captain Bligh-type boss who enjoys berating him in front of his sexy secretary, who he routinely takes into "private meetings" for some quickie sexual gratification. Alone and miserable, Harry's fortunes seem to change when he encounters an eccentric street magician who gives him a magic pill (this was pre-Viagara era, mind you) that allows Harry to conjure up the bed mates of his dreams, each of whom is completely submissive to his desires. However, as with all such fantasies, there is a down side- literally. Every time Harry is about to consummate the act, he finds that the ladies vanish into thin air. The film follows the frustrated Harry as he tries to find a solution to his problem. In between, the viewer is treated to a good deal of hard core action, some genuinely steamy, but most of which is compromised by the presence of this unappealing leading man. It's like watching "Last Tango in Paris" with Jerry Lewis in the Brando role. The movie boasts appearances by two of the cult sex symbols of the day, porn legend Rene Bond and the supremely endowed Uschi Digard, whose appearance is somewhat of a tease. She struts around in a mini skirt but leaves the rest to the viewer's imagination. Most of the film's gags are rather lame and predictable but there is no doubt that there always has been a market for these rather non-threatening porn releases that emphasize humor as much as sexual content.

As usual, Impulse Pictures does a good job of presenting a long-forgotten "B" movie in a fairly respectable manner. The transfer elements are fine although the packaging lacks the informative liner notes that accommodate some of the company's releases.  

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Timeless Media, which is affiliated with Shout! Factory, has released the classic 1960s TV series "I Spy" in a boxed set that contains all 82 episodes. Although Image Entertainment had released the series previously on DVD, this marks the first time the show is available in its entirety in one set. The show was one of many TV series that capitalized on the recent success of the James Bond films. Suddenly, TV and cinemas were playing spy-related fare virtually non-stop. NBC had some of the best elements of the spymania craze with "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.", Get Smart" and "I Spy". The latter series premiered in 1965 and ran three seasons through 1968. It presented Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson, who uses his status as an international tennis pro as a cover for his activities as a CIA agent. He is assisted by his good friend Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby), who ostensibly is his trainer, but who is also a top spy for the American government. What set the series apart from most of the competition was producer Sheldon Leonard's determination to spend a lot of money on the show. While the men from U.N.C.L.E's "foreign" intrigue was limited to stock footage and back lot sets, the "I Spy" guys really got to travel to exotic locations around the world. Consequently, the show has a glamorous aspect lacking in most other action adventure series from the period. Then there was the fact that in an era of hip spies, Culp and Cosby were arguably the hippest. They traded genuinely funny wisecracks that often seem improvised. The series was also significant from a social issues standpoint. Bill Cosby was the first African American leading man to play a dramatic role in a weekly TV series. He was awarded numerous Emmys for his performance but his presence in the show was controversial during an era when anti-segregation laws in the South had to enforced by gun-toting National Guardsman. Some southern affiliates of NBC refused to air the series. Cosby, who was by then a well-known stand-up comic, always credited Culp for putting his career on the line for him by insisting that either Cosby got the co-starring role, or he would quit the show before it even got under way. There is no real way to measure the impact Cosby's presence on the series had on young African American kids. However, I was in grade school when the show aired and the racial mix in the school was about 50/50. Suddenly, black kids finally had their own TV icon to admire and he was arguably the hippest of all the action stars of the era. Cos looked good in a tux, wooed pretty ladies and was an intrepid man of action.

We have obviously not viewed every one of the 82 episodes contained on the 18 DVDs in this set but a random look indicates the quality of the transfers is top notch. The series has also aged very well and, like the Bond movies, never seems out of date. Culp and Cosby still generate terrific chemistry together as well as with some of the big name guest stars who range from Don Rickles and Jim Brown to young Ron Howard. The only gripe is that one wishes there were at least a few bonus extras to point out the impact of the series and its significance in pop and societal culture. Image Entertainment had released a couple of special DVDs titled The Robert Culp Collection in which the actor provided commentary tracks. Those are not included here so you may want to hang on to them even if you add this irresistible new set to your DVD collection.  

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If you have $10 million laying around that you don't know what to do with, you might consider buying the iconic apartment seen in the 1961 classic film Breakfast at Tiffany's. It served as the personal residence of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) and key sequences were shot for exteriors in the film including Hepburn's interactions with co-stars George Peppard and Patricia Neal. It's located at 169 E. 71st Street and is otherwise just another building in the tony neighborhood. It sold for over $5 million two years ago and the current owner thinks he can now double that investment. Interiors were shot in a studio, though a representative for the owner thinks the famed party sequence was actually filmed inside the apartment. One thing is certain: if you want to buy the place, it won't go lightly on your wallet. For more click here

One of our loyal subscribers, Rodney Barnett, has his own addictive retro movie blog, Bloody Pit of Rod. He's located some cool, cheesy 1970s original ads for a line of Planet of the Apes toys. We especially love the "Forbidden Zone Trap"!  Click here to view.  

The toy image above comes from Hunter's Planet of the Apes Archive, a super cool site dedicated to everything "Apish".  Click here to visit. 

By Lee Pfeiffer

In a lifetime of reviewing movies, there have been some titles I generally try to avoid. With a few exceptions, Biblical epics aren't my thing, nor is anything with "Adam Sandler" above the title. One retro-based film I've tried studiously to avoid is "Ilsa: She Wolf of the S.S." I've got a pretty liberal attitude when it comes to watching distasteful movies, but the idea of blending Nazi concentration camp horrors with eroticism was too much. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the 1975 film, shot for $150,000 in sets left over from "Hogan's Heroes" (I kid you not!), was a boxoffice smash on the grindhouse circuit back in the day. Recently, I received a review DVD of the film from a company I won't identify, not only because the transfer was lousy but primarily because it apparently isn't available any longer. (The movie is now in the public domain and there are apparently a wide range of releases of varying quality).  I decided to finally take the plunge and judge the film as objectively as I could.  I've heard that there are very good transfers of the film on the market. Unfortunately, this isn't one of them. The plot centers on a Teutonic goddess named Ilsa, who is the de facto commandant of a Nazi prison camp. Her primary obsession is conducting gruesome medical experiments on inmates in order to prove a bizarre theory that women can withstand more pain than men. (Exactly what scientific value of such research would be is never explained, but real life Nazi quacks such as Dr. Josef Mengele did indeed conduct hideous experiments on helpless people.) As played by Dyanne Thorne, an Amazonian, blonde ex-show girl, Ilsa is indeed an imposing presence. She has the run of the camp and is feared by inmates and guards alike. Ilsa takes special delight in mixing sexual perversions with her daily grind. She has a loyal staff of female soldiers who parade around topless and excel at whipping and torturing female prisoners. Men receive special treatment. If Ilsa finds a male inmate attractive, she treats him to a night of passionate S&M sex, ironically with her playing the submissive role. Yet, there is a bit of a downside. The day after making love to Ilsa, these men are routinely castrated so that they can never have sex with another woman.

Ilsa meets her match when she meets a hunky prisoner named Wolfe (Gregory Knoph), who is cunning enough to make his services indispensable to Ilsa, while secretly organizing inmates to attempt to take over the camp. In the interim, viewers are treated to all sorts of depravities. If these were limited to sex, it would be bad enough (historically, sexual manipulation was indeed an everyday part of life in a concentration camp with certain female inmates allowed special treatment if they served in bordellos.). However, director Don Edmonds indulges in stomach turning sequences of men and women being systematically flogged and butchered under the most heinous circumstances imaginable. In one particularly awful sequence, a beautiful young woman has a noose tied around her neck and she is placed atop a block of melting ice so that she is slowly strangled to death. The fact that she is dying while standing atop a dinner table where Nazi officers dine and laugh in amusement make it almost unbearable to watch- precisely because such "creative" tortures were implemented in the camps.The film culminates in a limply-staged battle between guards and inmates in which the bad guys get their comeuppance.

There are legions of fans of this movie who argue it represents genuine eroticism. There are also legions of people who think it's cool to wear T shirts with Charles Manson's image on them. I can't understand either point of view. Yes, sexual fantasies are just that-fantasies. If you dream of being flogged by an Amazon woman, good for you. However, blending sexual fantasies with real life horror of the Holocaust makes me wonder how anyone can find this film a turn-on. The fact that it was released during an era when there were still millions of survivors of concentration camps still alive makes the subject matter all the more atrocious. There certainly is a place for artistic expression of sexual content in films that push the envelope. (The Night Porter comes to mind, but at least it was a quality film with an intelligent viewpoint beyond shameless exploitation.)

The film was so successful that it spawned two sequels, though they dropped the Nazi angle. I guess that says all we need to know about what passes for entertainment in some quarters.

I suppose there is an audience for anything and I don't argue the producers had every right to release and profit from this claptrap. You just have to wonder how anyone can derive sexual pleasure from seeing screaming women being disemboweled and hapless men being castrated. Call me old-fashioned, but I would personally rather watch "Hogan's Heroes."

Click here to view trailer and judge for yourself (Warning! X-rated and not for the squeamish.)

Click here to order Prime Time DVD (illustrated above)  from Amazon, but please note: this is not the DVD we actually reviewed, though it is said to be of superior quality. 

 By Lee Pfeiffer 

The latest grindhouse vintage porn double feature from Vinegar Syndrome is one of their best releases yet. "Sadie" is an unlikely 1980 hardcore "adaptation" of Somerset Maugham's classic story "Rain", though we doubt ol' Somerset ever envisioned the types of goings-on that occur in this film, directed by Bob Chinn, a prolific name in the industry who was born in Hawaii (please refrain from making the old joke "on the island of Kumoniwannaleiya")  and went on to direct dozens of X rated feature length movies. Here the titular character is a blonde bombshell played by Chris Cassidy. Sadie is a prostitute living in Borneo and the action all takes place in a low-rent beachfront hotel here she plies her services and receives paternal loving care from the seedy owner of the resort. Sadie is in love with an American soldier on leave to Borneo but finds she can't leave the island because the local Raja insists that he "bought" her in Saigon and that she must become a member of his harem. Sadie is a moody young woman, prone to selfish and occasionally reckless behavior. Her stress level only increases when an Evangelical U.S. senator and his wife and teenage daughter check into the hotel. The senator has married his wife in order to make an "honest woman" of her because she had been unwed when she gave birth to her daughter. Since then the couple has led a chaste marriage, as the senator believes sex is the work of the devil. The daughter, who has just turned 18, has no such beliefs and her raging hormones can't stand the strain as she witnesses the unapologetic free love practiced by Sadie and her friends. Before long, she's joining in the action while Sadie tries to construct a plan to work with corrupt government officials to get out of the country with her lover. 

"Sadie" is largely confined to a few rooms in the hotel and there are no exterior shots. Yet the film is somewhat ambitious and rises above standard porn because director Chinn has a degree of skill in presenting a reasonably compelling story. His leading lady fits the bill in terms of the erotic sequences but is weak dramatically. Unusually for this type of film, Chinn gives plenty of screen time to what appear to be accomplished middle-aged character actors who don't get involved in the down-and-dirty stuff. The film is all the better for it. Chinn also knows how to skillfully lens the sex scenes but never overdoes them. There are twosomes, threesomes and orgy scenes but there is plenty of time devoted to at least attempting to tell an engaging story. 

Another Chinn film fills out the double feature, thus making this a genuine "Double Chinn" presentation. "The Seductress" is a 1981 film, that like "Sadie", is far more ambitious than standard grindhouse fare of the era. Porn superstar Lisa De Leeuw plays Cindy, a young wife married to Richard, a local commissioner on the Las Vegas fire commission board. He's a chauvinist boor who talks to her as though she is the hired help. She finds out about a "service" that blackmails spouses by having them seduced, then secretly photographed from behind a two-way mirror as they have their illicit liaisons in a hotel room. Cindy engages the service and sure enough, Richard goes for the bait and ends up in bed with Renee (Lee Carroll), who pretends she is also married and is nervous about having an affair. In reality, she is a heroin-addicted hooker. Cindy's plans go awry when Renee refuses to turn over the photos of her husband unless Cindy "fills in" for her at the next night's liaison. If she doesn't, Renee will blackmail her. Cindy reluctantly takes on the task and ends up in a foursome with a cynical hooker and two men, one of whom is also being set up for blackmail/divorce. The plot gets pretty confusing at times but Chinn elicits good performances by old pros De Leeuw and Carroll, though his luck runs out with much of the supporting cast, some of who read their lines as though they are in a school play. Nevertheless, the film boasts a good story line that involves organized crime and a conspiracy to manipulate who sits on the fire commission. The political intrigue aspect has a genuinely creative payoff in the last frames, as Chinn ties it in with real life news footage of the disaster 1981 Hilton Hotel fire in Vegas that was caused by arson. 

The print quality of these two features is above average and Vinegar Syndrome has even gone to the effort of tracking down the original trailers for each film. Although both "Sadie" and "The Seductress" are hardcore films, these represent an early attempt to appeal to female viewers who, at the time, might have wanted to experience some X-rated fare without being totally grossed out.  Both hold up well today and are probably more creative than the largely indistinguishable fare being made today. 

Click here for a preview of both films.

Hepburn arrives at the 1988 Oscar ceremonies.

Audrey Hepburn would have been 85 years old this month. As a tribute to her special sense of class and style, the Huffington Post provides a series of photos illustrating Hepburn in the 1970s and 1980s as evidence that her beauty and elegance only became more impressive as she aged. Click here to view 

Rod Barnett, writing on his blog The Bloody Pit of Rod, has an intriguing take about what went wrong with both attempts to make The Lone Ranger the subject of big screen feature films. The first debacle, The Legend of the Lone Ranger, was a costly flop back in 1981 but it looked like a smashing success compared to the 2013 Disney version, which is estimated to have lost $250 million despite the presence of Johnny Depp. Barnett's article, written contemporaneously with the release of the latter film last summer, examines why both films veered far off course. Click here to read 

By Don L. Stradley

The first image we see in Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, a handsome new documentary by Nicholas D. Wrathall, is of Vidal at the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C., standing over what will soon be his own tomb. He’s heavier than we remember, leaning on a cane for balance. He recalls a few friends who are already buried nearby, mentions his “pathological hatred of death,” and ambles away. This is the titan at midnight, crumbling at the edges, still formidable.

The movie’s cryptic opening segues into a respectful, occasionally moving, look back at Vidal’s life. It’s more a tribute than a full-blown biography, for Wrathall presents Vidal as a kind of intellectual colossus, utterly devoid of faults, a near perfect thinker, and the last lion of America’s golden age of liberalism. The movie stops short of hagiography, but just barely. What keeps it interesting is Vidal, a born entertainer who, even in his final years, could still spin a tale, drop a name, or do an impression of JFK.

Vidal seems a natural subject for a documentary - there have been several already, including a 2004 episode of the PBS American Masters series - for his life was very much like a long, American novel of the 1920s. His mother was a ditzy alcoholic. His father was an aeronautics instructor at West Point, had an affair with Amelia Earhart, and wanted to be the Henry Ford of aviation. The job of raising Vidal was left to his blind grandfather, the fiery Senator T.P. Gore of Oklahoma. When Vidal reminisces about the senator, the respect and awe is palpable. T.P. passed on to Vidal not just his liberal politics, but also a love of literature, and a fearsome oratory skill.

After a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II, Vidal went on to become a scandalous novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, a television dramatist during TV’s golden age; he was a self-described member of the ruling class who struggled to escape it; he never referred to himself as ‘gay,’ but wrote books and essays defending bisexual and homosexual lifestyles; he was deeply involved in politics, and later, was a TV gadfly, appearing on The Tonight Show a dozen times, as well as many other programs, even lending his voice to The Simpsons and Family Guy.

Wrathall taps most of those aspects of Vidal’s past (not, alas, the cartoon work), but focuses mainly on Vidal the political commentator, the weary traveler who sees America as a series of shams and failures, the gruff grumbler. Indeed, the movie shows Vidal holding court at various speaking engagements; all he has to do is call George Bush “a fool,” and the walls of the joint practically come down. If the movie has a glaring fault, it’s that we see Vidal go from being a young author of gay themed novels to a socio-politico bon vivant, with very little in between to illustrate his journey. Instead, Wrathall relies on nameless, faceless narrators to offer such bromides as “Gore was everywhere, like a shape shifter.”

The cornerstone of any documentary about Vidal will be his televised 1968 debates with William F. Buckley. Wrathall includes a hearty helping of them here, and they still bristle nearly 50 years after their first airing on ABC. Buckley is especially fascinating – he’s so effete he doesn’t even know how to show anger. He bites his lip and cranes his neck like a man having a fit. Vidal doesn’t come off well either. He and Buckley were both trying so hard to be witty, and so unable to conceal their hatred of each other, that whatever topic was on the table grew cold quickly.

Much of the footage comes from late in Vidal’s life, when he was bothered by physical problems and needed help getting around. Hence, we see Vidal being helped up stairs, helped across bridges, helped up hills, helped onto a stage at the 2005 Pen awards, and carted around in a wheelchair. These scenes are interwoven with a sort of “greatest hits” collection from Vidal’s past, where the great pundit railed at this and that, his words rolling over his enemies like a tank. The effect is entertaining enough, and if Wrathall intended to depict Vidal as a fallen hero, he sort of succeeds. Still, a more thorough and less deferential documentary might have considered some of Vidal’s resounding flops. Remember Caligula?

Vidal’s long life, which included friendships with Tennessee Williams, Paul Newman, and other bright lights of our popular culture, can’t be jammed into a 90 minute documentary. For instance, Truman Capote is barely mentioned, which is akin to leaving Joe Frazier out of a movie about Muhammad Ali. The saucier aspects of Vidal’s life, such as his affairs with women, are not mentioned here, either. His engagement to Newman’s future wife, Joanne Woodward, is ignored, although there are several odd photos of the Newmans with Vidal, including one of Vidal and Newman fondling a statue’s buttocks.

Wrathall doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on Vidal’s books, or the notion, held by many, that Vidal possessed a great facility with words but could not quite write a masterpiece. Instead, Wrathall gets cute and shoots close-ups of Vidal’s pithy quotes, including “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” And, “Never offend an enemy in a small way.” Anyone who doesn't know better might think Vidal composed blurbs for fortune cookies.

Where Wrathall succeeds grandly is in showing Vidal’s soft side. It's touching to hear of Vidal's relationship with longtime companion Howard Auster, and Wrathall is smart to let the camera linger when Vidal turns melancholy. Watch how Vidal pauses when recalling a childhood friend who died in WW2, or the way his eyes mist over when he recalls “school boy’s stuff, at a boys’ school, long, long, long ago.” These moments, and the gorgeous scenery surrounding Vidal’s Italian home, make the documentary worth seeing. Wrathall’s movie is like one of Vidal’s novels in that it’s not great, but very good.

(The film has just opened theatrically in New York. Click here to view trailer.)

By Lee Pfeiffer

Vinegar Syndrome has released another grindhouse double feature of '70s hardcore porn flicks. "The Altar of Lust" is a boring, snoozefest masquerading as erotica when, in fact, it is about as stimulating as an Amway party. Erica Landers (billed in the film credits as "Erotica Lantern" (!), plays Viveca Hansen, a nubile Dutch teenager who is brutally violated by her barbaric stepfather in the only rape sequence ever filmed that is more boring than offensive. She makes her way to New York where she confides her life story to a sympathetic psychiatrist. For whatever reason, the dialogue comes from superimposed voices from both characters that give the impression that the film was badly dubbed. Erotica Lantern doesn't live up to her name, even in an era when everyday women could become major porn stars. She is far from exotic looking and is adorned with a dime store fright wig that gives each one of her scenes an unintentionally funny overtone. The entire "story line" involves her inability to have a stable relationship with men. After being abused by her stepfather, she enters affairs with other men who verbally abuse her (including porn super star Harry Reems, who uses the screen name "Stan Freemont".)  One night, she walks in on her boyfriend  Don as he's getting it on with another girl. The other woman ends up seducing young Viveca, much to the amusement of Don. However, when the two get carried away with sapphic lovemaking, he realizes there's no room for him in this party and he angrily departs the scene. Henceforth, Viveca becomes obsessed with women, leading her to see the therapist to find out what is wrong with her. The only intriguing angle of the flick is to evoke a bygone era in which gay people were seen to be suffering from a mental disorder. At the end of the flick, Viveca is put back on track when her own psychiatrist gets it on with her, a plot device you can see coming from minute one. The film is unexceptional on every level and will disappoint fans of the genre because the majority of sex scenes are softcore. The transfer, however, is top notch, given that source material for such releases comes from the "take what you can get" school.

The second feature on the DVD is "Angel On Fire", a 1974 flick that attempts to capitalize on "The Devil in Miss Jones". The film opens without credits but Darby Lloyd Rains is the female lead and stalwart male performers Marc Stevens and Jamie Gillis have major roles. The first scene finds Steven, a young hunk,  in bed having torrid sex with his adoring girlfriend. However, when she informs him she is pregnant with his child, he verbally abuses her and abandons her without a second thought. He is a lifelong chauvinist who treats women as sex objects and nothing more. He is ultimately struck by a van and killed by driver (Stevens), who has been distracted by the fact that his girlfriend had been performing a sex act on him while they were cruising the streets of Manhattan. Steven finds himself in Heaven and in the presence of a comely female angel who tells him his fate: he is to be sent back to earth, this time as a female. Steven is "reborn" as a good look young woman named Stephanie (Darby Lloyd Rains) who is as sex crazed as his male alter-ego was. Before long, she enters a relationship with an arrogant man (Jamie Gillis), who treats her every bit as callously as he treated his own girlfriend. Speaking of whom, that woman reappears at his apartment and doesn't seem to be overly-startled by the revelation that her former lover has been reincarnated as a woman. In fact, the two get down to serious canoodling right away for the film's primary prerequisite lesbian sequence. As her dependence on her new boyfriend grows, Stephanie finds herself serving as a virtual sex slave to her deplorable lover- and her devotion only increases the more he abuses her. Finally, she discovers she is pregnant- and he abandons her as callously as he once abandoned his own lover. Stephanie is so heartbroken the she begs to die and - Presto! She is back in Heaven as Steven. He tells his angel guardian that he has learned an important life lesson about respecting women. For this, he is informed that in Heaven, sex is frequent and guilt free. She rewards him for recognizing his flaws and correcting them and the two start getting it on. ("If this cloud is a rockin', don't come a knockin'",  you might say.) As The Temptations pointed out, everyone's doing fine on Cloud Nine. Angel on Fire is crudely made and suffers from an insufferable performance by Rains. Beyond that, however, it is far superior to "The Altar of Lust" and contains some genuinely erotic sequences. The flick also looks like it went through a meat grinder, with numerous blotches and edits apparent. As with previous Vinegar Syndrome releases, however, this only adds to its appeal.

Click here to watch a preview clips from the double feature.

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By Lee Pfeiffer

When it comes to documentaries about the American Civil War, it's pretty much acknowledged that the gold standard was set with Ken Burns' acclaimed 1990 PBS series. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss other filmmaker's take on the conflict. One of the most impressive documentaries we've seen is producer, director and writer Chris Wheeler's "Civil War: The Untold Story", a  five-episode series presented on two DVDs through Athena Home Video. The series is impressive on every level and rivals Burns' film in terms of educating viewers and providing emotional impact. Whereas Burns relied entirely on photographs of the period and location photography, Wheeler delves into the risky realm of using re-enactments of famous battles. If such sequences are not up to par, the effect can look cheesy and distracting. However, in "Civil War: The Untold Story", Wheeler was obviously working with a very substantial production budget. The battle sequences are meticulously staged and take on the feel of an epic, often evoking the grandeur of the big screen feature film "Gettysburg". The title is a bit misleading. There really isn't much here that has been "untold" but there is plenty that has not been covered in the detail Wheeler goes into. The series begins with a look at the plight of black slaves in the old South and poignantly shows the horror of their living conditions. The show then delves into the complex socioeconomic and political  factors that brought about secession and the start of the war in 1861. As with most such series, this one is peppered with plenty of scholarly talking heads, each of whom adds immeasurably to one's understanding of the conflict. I did learn a great deal from the show, including how some famous generals were known to have made enormous military blunders such as ordering frontal assaults on embedded enemy positions, thus resulting in mass casualties. Wheeler's literate script also details how fragile American democracy was by 1864. With President Lincoln's popularity at its lowest point, war-weary northerners were more than willing to make peace with the south. In fact, Lincoln suffered the humiliation of having one of his former top generals, McClelland, nominated to be his Democratic opponent in the election. Violent and deadly riots had already torn apart New York City in protest of the draft. Lincoln had to pull off a major victory or America, as we know it, would have been confined to the dustbin of history. In fact, democracy itself as a form of government would have been doomed. Although we know the outcome of all this, Wheeler skillfully builds these crisis to the point of considerable suspense. He also manages to tell the story of the war through focusing on individual soldiers from both sides as well as freed slaves who found emancipation to be a crisis in and of itself. Where did these poor souls go? With no education, money or support structure, many ex-slaves traded one hellish life for another. Wheeler also points out the the legacy of the Civil War still permeates North/South relationships today. Indeed, even some elected officials call the conflict "The War of Northern Aggression".

The series, wonderfully narrated by Elizabeth McGovern, is completely addictive and you'll find yourself on a viewing binge, looking forward to each successive episode. The only downside is that one would have hoped that Athena had included an interview with Chris Wheeler about the making of this remarkable show. The only extras are some silent WWI-era newsreels that show fascinating footage of Civil War veterans from both sides attending "Peace Jubilees". It's truly surprising how many thousands of these veterans were still alive and well in the era of the automobile. The set also includes an instructional booklet of historical biographies and facts.

"Superb" is not a word one throws around casually but "Civil War: The Untold Story" is a superb achievement.

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By Don Stradley

It’s hard to say why the brain trust at Troma decided to release Dangerous Obsession on DVD this year. Perhaps someone thought the Esquire network’s recent re-airing of the old HBO Dream On series would create interest in Brian Benben, who stars in this film (originally called Mortal Sins) as Nathan Weinschenk, a brash private investigator from New York who gets involved in a complex murder case involving some transplanted Southern religious zealots. But even if there is a sudden renewed interest in the Benben catalog, it’s difficult to imagine that even the most devoted Benben completists would derive any pleasure from this cheaply made 1989 flick with its clichés and hack dialogue. I can’t even label this one as decent 1980’s kitsch.

When Reverend Park Sung (James Saito) is murdered in his Manhattan apartment, Weinschenk is hired by rival evangelist Malcolm Rollins’ (James Harper) who wants to protect his own Manhattan church (‘The Divine Church of the People’). Weinschenk also ends up protecting Rollins’ lovely daughter (Debrah Farentino), which adds a little steam to the proceedings. The daughter, you see, has a complicated sex life, as most women in movies did back in the late 1980s, whether or not they knew Mickey Rourke or Michael Douglas.

Weinschenk mines the humor of being a Jew in a nest of bible-thumping Southern vipers. True, the idea of Southern-fried televangelists setting up shop in Manhattan may have sounded edgy at the time (this was the 1980s, remember, when Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were involved in serious scandals, and TV preachers had become popular punching bags), but the film is played out in such broad strokes that any good ideas are quickly crushed by cartoonish acting. Weinschenk, for instance, has the stereotypical Jewish parents who are oblivious to anything outside their little household. He also shares his office with a no-account male relative (I couldn’t tell if they were brothers or cousins) and there’s even a running gag where the Southern folks can’t pronounce his name.

If the Jewish stereotypes aren’t enough, we also get a lot of TV private eye clichés. As if he’s auditioning for a role in a network cop show, Weinschenk drives a classic 1950s car, and listens to classic R&B (I’ll give some points to this movie for including a cut of Jackie Wilson’s ‘No Pity In the Naked City’). He also thinks he’s a real wiseass, although his level of wit is restricted to lines like, “Nice work if you can get it.” Benben curses a lot, too, and while he can drop the F-bombs with convincing venom, he’s still stuck with playing a wooden character. The Southern stereotypes are pretty thick, too. The Southerners are all portrayed as bloated, effete, Jerry Falwell types, speaking in exaggerated, syrupy drawls; if you told me they were all stoned on Quaaludes during filming, I’d believe you. The perfectly named Brick Hartney has some success as the slimy Billy Beau Backus, playing his part like a community theater star vamping for his friends in the front row. Proving that some people know how to get out while they’re on top, Hartney never acted in films again.

There are plenty of extras here, but none are about Dangerous Obsession. The extras are solely Troma related, including vintage trailers for The Toxic Avenger, Return to Nuke ‘Em High: Vol. 1, Badmouth, Poultrygeist, and Cars3, plus a snippet of a Troma documentary called How To Sell Your Own Damn Movie, featuring filmmaker James Gunn discussing the dubious wonders of social media.

For those who enjoy spotting character actors early in their careers, you’ll find a surprising number of them in Dangerous Obsession. Anthony LaPaglia has a small role, as does Maggie Wheeler, who went on to recurring roles on Friends, Ellen, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Anyone who has watched TV during the past 25 years will also recognize Peter Onorati, who has made a career out of playing guys named Angelo or Sal. Director Yuri Sivo and screenwriter Allen Blumberg have worked infrequently since 1989 – Blumberg has directed a couple of small projects, with Sivo’s highpoint being a couple episodes of the Swamp Thing TV series.

On the plus side, Dangerous Obsession is visually striking, with a sophisticated use of shadows and silhouettes. That’s no surprise since it was shot by underrated veteran Bobby Bukowski, whose recent work includes two excellent titles, The Messenger (2009) and, what is perhaps my favorite movie of the past few years, The Iceman (2012). Even while strapped to a no-budget howler like Dangerous Obsession, Bukowski shows the immense talent that would make him one of the most reliable and sought after cinematographers of the past two decades. (Hell, he even shot Shakes the Clown!) In fact, I’d only recommend this DVD to those who want to marvel at how a ham-handed script made on an Ed Wood budget can feature so many lollipops for the eye. Even the final shot is superb, with Weinschenk and his girlfriend arguing on a fire escape, the camera pulling back and wheeling around to reveal a lush New York skyline at what must have been the so-called magic hour. The idea that the evil Southerners are gone and the New Yorkers can get back to arguing among themselves is trite, but Bukowski shoots it like he’s practicing for his future.

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By Martin Sheffield

The Empty Canvas (original Italian title La Noia), is a 1963 Italian drama waiting to be rediscovered as a classic by retro film lovers in America. Besides being a solid outing for Horst Buchholz and part of Bette Davis’ 1960’s resurgence, this film is a reminder of why French-born Catherine Spaak was the “IT” European teenager of the period. She was described by critic Rex Reed as "[h]alf kittycat go-go girl, half petulant defiance, … like a sexy lollipop [with] soft hair the color of maple syrup.” In The Empty Canvas, the 18-year-old actress gave the best performance of her career in a role intended to make her an international star. That performance earned a special Golden Plate award at the David di Donatello awards (presented by The Academy of Italian Cinema) in 1964.

Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, the film follows Dino (Buccholz), the twenty-something artist son of a rich, American ex-patriot from New Orleans (Davis).  Dino has lost his way in life and no longer feels inspired to paint, or inspired for life in general, so it seems.  He resents his mother and her money, spending as little time with her as possible.

Dino's life changes, however, when he meets Cecilia (Spaak), an amoral young woman.  Cecilia has been carrying on a torrid affair with a much-older married painter, who is Dino's neighbor.  Upon the painter's death, Dino and Cecilia slide into a torrid affair of their own.  As their affair progresses, Dino, suddenly filled with feelings and purpose in his life, becomes obsessed with obtaining commitment from Cecilia.  In the film's penultimate scene, Dino covers Cecilia's nude body in lira notes in an effort to win her commitment.  Cecilia, on the other hand, is just out to have fun and do whatever makes her feel good.  Dino is in danger of letting his obsession with Cecilia destroy his life, just as the old painter’s life was destroyed by his obsession with Cecilia.

Of the "money" scene, director Damiano Damiani was quoted in The Saturday Evening Post as saying that "It was the most important scene of her career in her first English-language picture, one that would either make or break her as an international star.  And she was cold as ice." While she may have been cold as ice in controlling her nerves, as Cecilia, Catherine exudes a sensuous quality that leaves no doubt about how a man like Dino could become obsessed with her charms. In one scene set at an outdoor cafe overlooking the city, as Rita Pavone sings "Now That You've Gone," Cecilia dances seductively while Dino watches attentively from a swing.  Without a word being said, you can see Dino's resistance falling and his obsession budding.  That is one of my all-time favorite scenes from any film.

Shot in gorgeous, mood-setting black-and-white around Rome in the summer of 1963, the film's set was a linguistic adventure.  Director Damiani spoke English to Bette Davis, German to Buchholz, French to Spaak, and Italian to others.  The actors spoke their lines in English for later dubbing. It had to have been interesting to watch Bette Davis try to reign supreme over such an eclectic mix of talent. In Rex Reed's N.Y. Times profile of Catherine in 1966, he quoted her as saying:  "I acted with Bette Davis in 'The Empty Canvas.'  Everyone in Rome was terrified of her.  I said only one thing to her: 'Hello'."

On a curious side note, Bette Davis biographer Charlotte Chandler recounted in her book an odd incident concerning Bette's arrival in Rome for filming.  She was greeted at the airport by Buchholz, who wanted to get things started off on a good note with the notoriously persnickety Davis.  Buchholz leaned forward to kiss Bette on the cheek, as custom would dictate, whereupon Bette proceeded to put her tongue in Buchholz's mouth in a more-than-friendly kiss!  Buchholz never knew whether she was just trying to shock him, or whether she had other intentions. 

It is also interesting to note that Sophia Loren’s 18th century castle, renovated at a cost of nearly $2,000,000, was loaned by her to represent Bette Davis' villa in the film. Furthermore, the filming of the garden party, which provides the setting for the "money" scene, included the participation of more than 150 leaders of Rome's cultural set, who were there to honor Bette Davis' first film in Rome.

The Empty Canvas was a hit in Italy before being distributed in the U.S. in March 1964 by Joseph Levine’s Embassy Pictures. Levine was quoted by The Saturday Evening Post as saying that “[Catherine Spaak] will be the biggest new star of the 1960's.  This girl will be the Bardot of her generation.  Ten years from now there will be girls billing themselves as the new Catherine Spaak.” In Bardot tradition, I suppose, some of the advertising showed Cecilia draped only in a towel and was considered too risqué in some circles. As a result, some of the advertising was censored. Levine even took to Variety to express anger about the ad censoring by the L.A. Times and the L.A. Examiner. Censoring can still be seen on many of the surviving lobby cards for the film. My how times have changed!

The Empty Canvas generally received mixed-to-negative reviews at the time from American critics, but it did respectable business and garnered considerable attention for Catherine in the U.S. She was featured on the cover and in a story in the July 1964 issue of Cosmopolitan, and she was also the subject of a feature story in the May 2, 1964 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

Catherine’s story was a dream come true for the press, because she was the daughter of well-known screenwriter Charles Spaak, was the niece of famed Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak, and had married actor Fabrizio Capucci (of the Capucci fashion-design family) in February of 1963, while seven months pregnant with their first child. Amazingly, after giving birth to daughter Sabrina in April of 1963, Catherine shot a film called The Little Nuns before commencing work on The Empty Canvas in July. By the time the film reached U.S. shores, Catherine and Capucci had already split, including a well-publicized incident at the Italian border, where authorities stopped Catherine as she was trying to leave the country with her infant daughter. I am sure that the tabloids of the day were all over this story.

The Empty Canvas has never been released on DVD in North America, but it was released by Embassy Home Entertainment in an English language version on VHS in 1987.    With The Criterion Collection’s impressive recent release of the 1962 Italian classic Il sorpasso (aka The Easy Life), in which Catherine has a prominent supporting role, the time is ripe for rediscovery in America of her classic work in The Empty Canvas as well. Furthermore, there should be no Bette Davis film from the 1960’s that is unavailable on DVD in the U.S.

We want our DVD!

By Fred Blosser 

On a windy night, a black-clad stranger rides into Daugherty City, Texas. He flips a coin to a scruffy drunk who is strapped for the price of a drink. He exposes a crooked dice game in the local saloon, where most of the townsfolk seem to be congregated. Then he departs. In the meantime, down the street, a gang of acrobatic robbers breaks into the bank and heists a safe containing $100,000 in Army payroll money. The getaway crew escapes town before a wounded trooper can raise the alarm, but out on the trail they run into the stranger, Sabata, who picks them off with a tricked-out rifle and recovers the stolen money.

Thus, in under 15 minutes of running time, Gianfranco Parolini neatly sets up the events that will drive the remaining 90 minutes of his 1969 Spaghetti Western, "Ehi amico... c'è Sabata, hai chiuso!" -- better known simply as “Sabata,” as United Artists retitled the English-dubbed version that debuted in the U.S. in 1970. The original Italian title translates to something like, “Hey, Pal, Sabata’s Here, You Lose” . . . or maybe closer to the film’s rambunctious spirit, “. . . You’re Screwed.”

Bracketing the opening credits, Parolini economically introduces most of the movie’s main characters, establishes their personalities, and through their interactions with Sabata and each other, defines the interpersonal relationships that will drive the plot.

Sabata (Lee Van Cleef), the sharp-eyed “man who knows,” as the drunk Carrincha (Pedro Sanchez) calls him, deduces that the men behind the attempted robbery are the local businessman Stengel, his partner Ferguson, and their crony Judge O’Hara (Gianni Rizzo). He approaches them and demands $10,000 in hush money. Refusing, Stengel dispatches one assassin after another to kill him. Stengel’s henchman Slim, a hulking gunman named Sharky, two hit men dressed like the Earp brothers, and a nervous killer disguised as a clergyman all try and fail. With each attempt, Sabata raises his price higher and higher.

An old acquaintance, barroom minstrel Banjo (William Berger), one of the supporting characters deftly sketched in the opening saloon scene, ambles in and out from the periphery, toting his own tricked-out weapon, a carbine hidden under his musical instrument. Sometimes he sides with Sabata for money, sometimes he works for Stengel; in any event, not to be trusted by either. He and a greedy saloon girl, Jane, have a sort of romance characterized by mutual boredom and availability. Carrincha and a mute Indian acrobat, Alley Cat (Nick Jordan), help Sabata.

Arguably, “Sabata” represented the high tide of Spaghetti Western popularity in the States in 1970, benefiting from the box-office success of Sergio Leone’s groundbreaking films and preceding the decline of the genre as it sputtered toward a slow box-office death in the mid-‘70s. Where Leone’s movies were generally panned by mainstream U.S. media on their initial release, but nevertheless attracted a small early following of more progressive critics, “Sabata” ironically met the opposite reception.

Major outlets like The New York Times gave it good notices, but the pioneering book-length studies of the genre by Christopher Frayling and Laurence Staig & Tony Williams were lukewarm. Staig and Williams dismissed it as “a mixture of gimmickry and borrowed themes.” Citing Banjo’s hidden carbine, Frayling said that the movie was one of the “derivatives” inspired by Leone’s scenes in which “guns are fired from unexpected places.”

Other commentators over the years have noted additional Leone influences. Before you see Sabata’s face in the opening scenes, Parolini gives us a shot down the main street of Daugherty City, framed between Sabata’s boots in close-up -- a favorite Leone visual angle. Paralleling the three lead characters of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Parolini (who also co-scripted with Renato Izzo) builds the action around an unflappable protagonist, an icy bad guy, and a talkative, slippery secondary lead. Sabata’s black suit, black military coat, and fanciful weapons recall Colonel Mortimer’s from Van Cleef’s break-out Spaghetti role in “For a Few Dollars More.”

The argument that Leone cast a long shadow over Parolini’s movie is valid as far as it goes, but then Leone cast a long shadow over all the Italian Westerns that followed after his enormously successful pictures with Clint Eastwood. If we acknowledge that “Sabata” often follows the visual and dramatic conventions of Leone’s movies, it’s only fair to Parolini to note that he also departed from those conventions in ways that other Spaghetti directors such as Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima, and Luigi Vanzi generally didn’t.

For example, like John Ford, Leone held a sentimental reverence for the sanctity of the traditional family; the families in his movies symbolize social stability. There are no traditional parents and children in Parolini’s universe, even if a kid’s chorus heard in the movie’s bouncy title tune suggests there will be. The only offspring and parent in “Sabata” are Sharky -- a burly, slovenly adult -- and his gray-haired old virago of a mother, who berates him verbally and physically for not settling a score with their neighbors the Mallorys. “They stole your woman, didn’t they?” she shrieks. No, Sharky retorts, “you sold her to the Mallorys.”

Carrincha, who looks a bit like Sharky in girth and disheveled appearance, laments his life of thirst and poverty: “I curse the mother who bore me, and my brother, and my whole family.” Almost everything Carrincha says is prone to exaggeration, so it’s difficult to know whether this sentiment is real or not. Regardless, it mirrors and reinforces the satiric relationship between Sharky and his mother, poles away from the traditional relationships portrayed by Leone and Ford.

Playing with the “trio” aspect of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Parolini assigns the trickster role of “the Ugly” not to the boisterous Mexican (in name, at least) Carrancha, as Eli Wallach’s Tuco was “the Ugly” in Leone’s movie, but to the Anglo drifter, Banjo. This way, Parolini finds not only differences but also similarities between the two characters, including allusions to a shared history during and after the Civil War and maybe a shared past outside the law. This gives their relationship an extra dimension not present in the relationship between the Good and the Ugly in the Leone movie.

Critics and fans who appreciate “Sabata” on its own terms usually employ terms like “hectic and chaotic,” and “fun” that’s “not to be taken too seriously.” The movie hardly lets up for a moment (none of Leone’s long, measured takes), but a term like “chaotic” can be misleading if you think it means slipshod. In fact, even though Parolini doesn’t build the movie around a mystery as Leone does in “For a Few Dollars More” (what do those seemingly shared flashback memories by Colonel Mortimer and Indio mean?) or around a character arc as Sollima does in “The Big Gundown” and Corbucci in “The Mercenary,” “Sabata” has its own ingenious design. Beyond the action, stunts, and cynical humor, “Sabata” bears repeated viewing to appreciate the two techniques that Parolini uses to bring unity to the film.

One technique is repetition. Little details that appear in one scene in the visuals or in the dialogue will unexpectedly and sometimes subtly reappear later in a different context. Slim’s loaded dice in the opening saloon scene always come up 7. There are seven men in the getaway crew from the bank robbery whom Sabata ambushes. When Sabata checks into a hotel in Daugherty City, Banjo’s squeeze Jane gives him Room 7 -- “next to mine,” she says suggestively. (Sabata isn’t interested. As Jules Feiffer once observed of Superman, he is so self-sufficient and self-confident that he doesn’t need to pursue every woman he encounters, or even to respond to every pass that comes his way.)

Parolini’s other technique is music. Like Ennio Morricone’s compositions for Leone, Marcello Giombini’s score is integrated into “Sabata” as an essential part of Parolini’s fabric. Like Morricone, Giombini tailors certain musical themes and cues to specific characters in the story. As John Mansell observes in his liner notes for a 2001 CD soundtrack edition, Sabata’s theme incorporates “a rather buoyant sounding guitar piece … interspersed with a solo muted trumpet, occasional harpsichord flourishes plus the added support of choir, which is carried along on a backing of slightly upbeat percussion.” Banjo’s theme is a cocky melody plucked on his namesake instrument, sometimes augmented by jingling bells like those sewn on his trousers.

But Mansell’s description of Sabata’s theme, while insightful, fails to note that the theme also incorporates a glissando passage like the swirling of the wind. Sabata is associated with the wind throughout the movie. In the first scene, tumbleweeds blow down the street and lamplight flutters as Sabata rides into Daugherty City. In the closing scene, Parolini and Sabata use the wind to the same ironic effect that John Huston used it at the end of “Treasure of Sierra Madre” and Stanley Kubrick in the finale of “The Killing.” Although Judge O’Hara wonders if Sabata is a government agent, and Stengel snaps back that “he’s nothing -- just a drifter who’s after our money,” the man in black perhaps suggests his true elemental nature when he advises Stengel in one exchange: “Don’t shoot at the wind.”

Parolini and Giombini also take their partnership one step further than Leone and Morricone did in their collaborations. In Morricone’s scores, Leone’s primary characters have (in the words of Staig and Williams) their own “individual musical signatures” -- the template followed by Parolini with Sabata’s and Banjo’s themes. The difference is that, in Morricone’s scores, in any one scene where the character either enters or dominates the action, his theme predominates. Parolini combines his individual themes for Sabata and Banjo as point and counterpoint in the same scene to underscore the two gunmen’s shared history and one-up rivalry.

Banjo’s theme sounds a little like the old military marching tune, “The British Grenadier,” a reminder of Banjo’s allusion to his and Sabata’s Civil War past on different sides of the conflict: “You in the North and me in the South.” In their first meeting after Sabata’s arrival in town, Banjo plays a mocking version of the tune, in increasingly frantic tempo, as if trying to get under the other man’s skin. Sabata stops the performance by shooting one of the pegs off the banjo. “You were out of tempo,” he says dryly.

Near the end of the film, as Banjo leaves Daugherty City in apparent triumph after a pivotal final encounter with Sabata, a merry version of his banjo theme begins to play, bolstered by a fife and drum that underlines the similarity to military marching music. The jingle of bells joins in with a close-up of the bells on Banjo’s trousers. The viewer senses that this is the victorious music that Banjo probably hears in his own imagination. However, Sabata’s wind-theme presently swirls in. As if in competition, the strum of the banjo gains tempo, becoming increasingly insistent. Remembering the association of the fast-tempo strumming with the much earlier scene in which Banjo was humiliated, you may anticipate that Banjo’s present victory will be short-lived, too.

There isn’t an official 45th anniversary edition of “Sabata,” but the Swiss label Explosive Media recently released a new Blu-Ray combo pack that also includes a DVD print, a supplemental disc of interviews and features, and a nice souvenir booklet in German, copiously illustrated with stills and pictures of various international posters.

“Sabata” and the two Parolini films that immediately followed it are popularly known as “The Sabata Trilogy,” although only one is a true sequel. “Indio Black, sai che ti dico: Sei un gran figlio di . . .,” released in Italy in 1970, was imported to the U.S. the following year as “Adios, Sabata.” Yul Brynner played the hero who wears black, this time a black fringed shirt and bell-bottom trousers instead of Lee Van Cleef’s more formal outfit. In the Italian version, he’s Indio Black; in the dubbed U.S. print, Sabata.

Both movies are strongly linked in casting and style. Three of the major supporting roles in the two movies are occupied by the same actors (Jordan, Rizzo, Sanchez) and fulfill similar functions in character and plot. Dean Reed, who looks like the young Roger Moore, plays an opportunist named Ballantine who serves as this film’s surrogate for Banjo. There are several big-action set pieces, mostly involving Sabata’s mission in Mexico to relieve a tyrannical officer, Colonel Skimmel, of a hoard of gold during the revolution against Maximilian.

“Adios, Sabata” is an entertaining Spaghetti with a bigger cast of extras and more explosions than its predecessors. One set piece, in which Sabata sends the no-good Murdock Brothers to their “just reward” in a showdown at the Bounty Hunters’ Agency, is particularly well dialogued and choreographed.

But “Sabata” is the better movie, partly because Van Cleef and Berger had stronger chemistry than Brynner and Reed, and partly because Brynner’s character is a more traditional soldier of fortune and do-gooder (he’s friends with benevolent old priests and small children) than Van Cleef’s enigmatic loner. Although Bruno Nicolai’s score for “Alias Sabata” is quite good on its own terms, the title track emulating the full-on symphonic, choral sound of Morricone’s Spaghetti music, it isn’t as ingeniously integrated into the movie as Giombini’s composition was.

Parolini’s authentic sequel to “Sabata,” released in Italy in 1971 as "È tornato Sabata... hai chiuso un'altra volta," reached the States in 1972 as “Return of Sabata.” Lee Van Cleef returns as the lead character, and Giombini returns as the soundtrack composer, but unfortunately this movie doesn’t measure up to its predecessors.

As in “Sabata,”Van Cleef’s character rides into a town where a cabal of seemingly respectable citizens is engaged in nefarious activity. This time, the heavies are the outwardly pious McIntocks who trumpet civic expansion in Hobsonville by raising money for new buildings and businesses. They do so by imposing exorbitant taxes on the town’s goods and services.

In truth, patriarch Joe McIntock is conniving with his brother-in-law, banker Jeremy Sweeney, to smuggle the money out of town for his own enrichment. Sabata, who arrives in Hobsonville as a sharpshooter in a traveling circus sideshow, following a hunch about something being rotten somewhere, uncovers the fraud. As in “Sabata,” he demands blackmail from the bad guys in return for keeping their secret. The McIntocks, reluctant to pay, send a series of would-be assassins after him.

Again, Parolini employs his stock troupe of Jordan, Rizzo, and Sanchez in supporting roles, and inserts a slippery intermediary character, Clyde (Reiner Schone). Clyde, like Banjo, shares a Civil War past with Sabata. Giombini’s music isn’t as ingenious as his score for the first movie, and the circus aspect of the story never quite jells with the plot about the McIntocks’ scam; as a whole, the movie lacks the little visual and aural details that wove “Sabata” together.

Another problem: Sabata loses much of the steely, enigmatic quality that defined his personality in the first movie. In “Return of Sabata,” an old girlfriend, a hooker named Maggie, drifts into town, and Sabata shacks up with her. Maggie is never quite integrated into the story either. Sabata as a mysterious loner in the original film was intriguing. As a more conventional character with a sexy main squeeze, like a hero out of a paperback adult western, he isn’t. Still, “Return of Sabata” hardly merits a place among the “50 Worst Movies of All Time,” as the Medved brothers asserted in their 1978 book. Maybe Parolini has the last laugh: the Sabata movies live on while the Medved book is long forgotten.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER "THE SABATA TRILOGY" FROM AMAZON USA

(For information about Explosive Media's Blu-ray European special editions, click here. For more information, see the story in Cinema Retro issue #29. Click below to purchase). 

 Cinema Retro issue #29:

Gordon Willis, one of the most acclaimed cinematographers of all time, has passed away at age 82. Praised by critics and prominent filmmakers alike, Willis helped transform the way modern movies were shot and had a unique style that defined his work. His most prominent films include The Godfather triology and numerous movies with Woody Allen including the 1979 classic Manhattan, which Willis shot in black and white. It became what many consider to be his signature achievement in motion pictures. Willis never won a competitive Oscar but was honored with an Academy Award on the basis of his lifetime achievements. For more click here 

Some of the international movie posters presented in Cinema Retro issue #28, which features in-depth coverage of the making of Zulu.

By Brian Hannan

The 50^th anniversary showing of Zulu in Britain next month is unlikely to be repeated in the U.S. where the film flopped. But even the poorest box-office performer has an afterlife. So in 1965 Zulu was pushed out again anywhere that would have it. That meant it supported some odd, not to say ugly, bedfellows – exploitationer Taboos of the World in Kansas City, The Three Stooges in The Outlaws Is Coming in Phoenix, B western Stage To Thunder Rock in Long Beach, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini in Des Moines and Rhino in Abilene. They liked it in Long Beach where it supported both Circus World and That Man from Rio. It was the second feature to None But the Brave in Provo, Utah, and to two more successful Joe E. Levine movies, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in Ironwood, Michigan, and Marriage, Italian Style in Corpus Christi, Texas. Triple bills being a staple of drive-ins, it was seen with Viva Las Vegas and Beach Party in Tucson.

But it was not just support meat. Almost a year after its release, it topped the bill in Helena, Montana, with Robert Mitchum in Man in the Middle as support. In Chester it was the main attraction with Homicidal in support. In Weimar, Texas, it was supported by Tarzan the Magnificent and in Bridgeport by First Men on the Moon. At the Cecil theatre in Mason City, Iowa, it played on its own, as it did in Colorado Springs where it was advertised as “in the great tradition of Beau Geste” (supply your own exclamation marks.)

But it was not done yet. Exhibitors in San Mateo had a soft spot for Zulu in 1966. It played there seven times, as support to The Great Race, Marlon Brando western Appaloosa, Fantastic Voyage (in two theaters), What’s Up Tiger Lily?, The Leather Boys and Lawrence of Arabia. Abilene brought it back twice, for a re-match with Rhino and then in a double bill with Kimberley Jim starring singer Jim Reeves when it was promoted as “a true story of the Zulu tribe.” Fremont cinemas also ran in twice – with Return of the Seven and Fantastic Voyage. In Troy and Bennington it rode shotgun with Elvis in Harum Scarum. In Charleston it supported Arabesque, in Winona The Second Best Secret Agent and in Long Beach What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?

The highlight of 1967 had to be a double bill with The Daleks (Dr Who and the Daleks) in Delaware, or perhaps the teaming with Batman in Cumberland, Maryland, or El Cid in Ottawa. Zulu returned twice to Fremont to support Africa Addio and John Sturges’ Hour of the Gun. In Modesto it played with Where The Spies Are. In Long Beach it was put on at a pop concert where the headline act was Organized Confusion (anybody remember them?). These three years of repeated showings hardly counted as a proper reissue, but it did cast an interesting light on what may – or may not – have turned into something of a cult film. In Britain, where it was a smash hit, it was reissued on the ABC circuit in 1967 and 1972/

Brian Hannan is the author of the forthcoming The Reissue Bible.

CLICK BELOW TO ORDER CINEMA RETRO ISSUE #28

Brian Williams and Ron Howard. (Event photos copyright Giacomo Selloni. All rights reserved.)

Earlier this month, Cinema Retro was invited to cover Tribeca Talks, a new live interview series that took place as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. We sent our "Man About Manhattan", Giacomo Selloni to cover the initial event at which Ron Howard was interviewed by  NBC newsman Brian Williams. Here is his report:

By Giacomo Selloni

Ron Howard is an articulate film director. So it should come as no surprise that he is also an articulate speaker. He also has a way with anecdotes, as one might expect, given the length and diversity of his career.

"I think it's wrong to think of what I'm in as the movie business," Howard says. "It's the moving image business. I think it's necessary to work in all different mediums." He also says it's hard  to call it the film business as the industry moves further towards digital movie making. Part of his process is deciding not only how to tell a story but what medium to use, film, television even the internet. "Some stories might work better on the internet, with little three-minute segments. The audience is always going to tell you what they want," he continued, "the audience clearly wants to have the option to view different stories in different ways."

"You're sixty, and a grandfather; it's enough to make one check their watch," Brian Williams said about Howard as he asked him questions about his career. When called upon to tell stories about the people he's worked with in his career that has now spanned six decades, Howard's abilities as a story teller came to the forefront. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Betty Davis, Jimmy Stewart are among the legends he's acted with or directed. Howard recalled his first meeting with "The Duke." He was picked up at the airport in Carson City, Nevada by "The Shootist" dirctor, Don Siegel and driven to the motel where they were all staying. "C'mon," Siegel said, "let me introduce you to The Duke." Upon introducing the young star of "Happy Days" to John Wayne, Siegel handed Wayne a copy of the latest TV Guide that he picked up at the airport. It featured Ron Howard and Henry Winkler on the cover. "A big shot, huh?" said Wayne. Howard later asked Wayne if he wanted to run lines. Wayne told Howard that no one had ever asked him to do that before. Howard was struck by how hard Wayne worked on finding the right spots to insert his trademark pauses and hitches. They weren't by accident, they were part of a "structured performance." "That's one thing all the great ones had in common," Howard recalled, "they always worked a little bit harder than everyone else."

Howard co-starred with John Wayne in the Duke's final film, the 1976 Western classic The Shootist. Wayne considered young Howard to be among the most professional actors he had ever worked with.

Williams asked Howard if he would ever return to acting. "I would kind of like to," Howard replied - much to the audience's approval. Now that he and his wife are empty nesters she's urging him to get out of the house more.
He told the story of how he got his first full-length feature directing job. "Kids off TV sitcoms were not from the fertile ground where the industry looked for directors." He made a deal with Roger Corman who wanted him to make "Eat My Dust," a film he did not want to star in. Corman gave him the opportunity to pitch a film that was in the same car-chase vein. "Grand Theft Auto" was the result. Howard co-wrote the script with his father, actor Rance Howard, and it was a major boxoffice success. The rest, as they say, is history. A few years later Howard gave up acting completely in order to concentrate on his booming career as a director, although out of sentiment, he did co-star in the smash hit TV movie "Return to Mayberry" in 1986 out of sentiment and respect for his co-stars from "The Andy Griffith Show".

The subject of politics and popular culture came up. Howard is a great believer in American culture. "We are truly a melting pot nation and we understand how to make it work and grow." Working primarily in Europe for  the last few years, he is troubled by the confusing messages the United States sends to the rest of the world, the whole red state/ blue state thing. People are purposely polarized. Moderate ideas, he claims, don't get any attention. The only messages that get attention are those of the extremists.
In closing, Brian Williams told Howard that "If our country were to prepare a time capsule, your films would have to be in it - if not you, yourself." A quick look on IMDB  as a reminder of his distinguished directorial career may have you feeling the same way.

(Giacomo Selloni is a playwright and serves as Treasurer of the legendary Players club in New York City.)  

Cinema Retro has received the following press release relating to our columnist Howard Hughes' new book:

I.B.TAURIS PRESS RELEASE

OUTER LIMITS

THE FILMGOERS’ GUIDE TO THE GREAT SCIENCE-FICTION FILMS

Howard Hughes

Published in Paperback
30 May 2014
£14.99 | 9781780761664

The up-to-date detailed companion to the best sci-fi movies of all time

Science Fiction is probably the most popular box office genre in movie history and has given filmgoers some of their most memorable cinematic experiences. Outer Limits takes its readers on a tour of the sci-fi cinema universe in all its fantastical, celestial glory.

The milestone films of sci-fi cinema from Metropolis to Avatar are discussed in this Filmgoers’ Guide for anyone who enjoys a cinema that has pleased and amazed filmgoers since the dawn of cinema. Illustrated with fine examples of sci-fi film poster-art, Outer Limits goes deep into the most interesting and popular movies across sci-fi cinema’s many forms, with core chapters used as launch pads to discuss lesser-known influential movies and follow-on sequels. Howard Hughes tells the stories from pre-production to box office returns of The War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Tarantula, Godzilla, The Time Machine, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, Barbarella, Galaxy Quest, Minority Report, Planet of the Apes, Mad Max 2, Back to the Future, Alien, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Matrix, Star Trek, Apollo 13, Blade Runner and many more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Film writer and historian Howard Hughes is the author of Aim for the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood (I.B. Tauris) and of the Filmgoers’ Guide series, When Eagles Dared, Crime Wave, Once Upon a Time in the Italian West and Stagecoach to Tombstone (all from I.B. Tauris). He is contributor to ‘The James Bond Archives’, the official fiftieth anniversary celebration of 007, and writes regularly for film magazine Cinema Retro.

PRAISE FOR HOWARD HUGHES’ BOOKS

‘expertly dissected...a fascinating read.’ - The Times

‘offers much to inform and plenty to enjoy...Highly recommended.’ - Kamera

Hughes is ‘rigorous...engulfing us with history and myriad detail.’ - Empire

‘Entertaining, illuminating and packed with information’ - Sight and Sound

‘Hughes is a fan and his enthusiasm, as well as his research, shines through.’ - Tribune

‘a goldmine of such film trivia, wide-ranging and often delightful...Hughes is a thorough researcher and knows his stuff’ - The Australian

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON USA

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There will be a special two-day 50th anniversary tribute to the James Bond classic "Goldfinger" held in Oslo, Norway May 22-23. Ken Adam, the legendary Oscar-winning production designer, will be an honored guest along with his biographer Sir Christopher Frayling, Norman Wanstall (who won an Oscar for his sound effects for the film) and actress Margaret Nolan, who played "Dink" and whose body was seen in the classic opening titles sequence. For full information and schedule click here

Joe Dante's Trailers From Hell site presents the original theatrical trailer for John Boorman's classic 1972 screen adaptation of James Dickey's "Deliverance" starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty, both in their feature film debuts. The trailer includes commentary by film director Neil Labute. Click here to view  Click here for Cinema Retro's review of the Blu-ray 40th anniversary release.

(This review pertains to the Region 2 UK release) 

By Paul Risker

Unemployed and disgruntled Ronnie (Robert Buchanan) hatches a plan to steal  ninety sinks as a means to solving his financial hardship. Recruiting his closest friends, against the grey backdrop of Glasgow, eight teenagers plan to pull off the cinematic caper that would define 1979.

Alongside the 60th Anniversary release of Akira Kurosawa's seminal action masterpiece Seven Samurai, the month of April would find the BFI with one eye fixed on Japan, and the other on home soil.

With their Flipside label the BFI proudly champions the rediscovery of British cult films, and the latest film to find itself inducted into this illustrious catalogue is Bill Forsyth's 1980 caper comedy That Sinking Feeling.

It is hard to think of two more distinct films finding themselves on the release slate alongside one another. In spite of being worlds apart, they share a single similarity, and to the astute eye it is a singularity that multiplies. That Sinking Feeling and Seven Samurai together are perhaps a testament to the fact that films, like people, are individuals but also live within a cinematic or narrative society.

As unmistakably Japanese as is Seven Samurai – although it would be the seed of inspiration for John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven -- Forsyth's Glaswegian crime caper has British cinematic blood coursing through its veins. It is indelibly a cult British classic,, regardless of whether or not you’d describe it in that typically English way as your “cup of tea.”

The role That Sinking Feeling plays in the story of both British and international independent cinema should not be overlooked. Highlighted in an entry of Kermode Uncut that can be found amongst the extras, Forsyth discusses how he constructed the film’s budget and how he gathered non-financial resources that made his debut feature anything but a sinking endeavour. It positions Forsyth as one of cinema's ingenious independent filmmakers, and his story allows us to compare the landscape of independent cinema and the working filmmaker from then to now.

With its shade of social realism through the disenchanted youth, Forsyth and his cast of characters turn hardship into comedic gold, or at least they attempt to do so through a caper that more than thirty years on may strike one as pointless, and even perhaps, as amusing as the film itself. That being said, with the recent scurrying around for scrap metal and copper that has helped regional news programmes fill their schedule, That Sinking Feeling may not have sunk as deeply into the past as one might imagine.

From the outset Forsyth imbues the film with playfulness - the film's title sinking off-screen to the suggestion of Glasgow as a fictitious place. Add to that the wry smile that frequents Ronnie’s (Robert Buchanan's) lips and it is almost as if the film is trying not to laugh along with itself; an infectious humour that would similarly plague Seinfeld cast members years later.

The fictitious place known as Glasgow is one that may just intertwine itself with an inner knowing truth that Glasgow is real, and the grey urban landscape of Forsyth’s debut feature is a reflection that possesses a certain proportion of truth.

Constructed with a seeming focus on individual moments - the opening monologue, the science-fiction comedy element and the encounter with a pretentious art dealer amongst others, That Sinking Feeling is made up of comedy segments that undermine the fluidity of a narrative gliding towards its destination. Whilst it does successfully tell the story of a caper, and the forming of a gang, it decidedly feels as if it is a film of moments that should be appreciated as such.

Although it is rough around the edges, and it habitually surrenders to the moment, it should be regarded as both criticism and praise. These faults afford That Sinking Feeling a vitality that so often can be found in first films where directors succumb to the moment, a creative energy or instinct. After all, film is constructed of moments, and the creation of these moments that permits a film to exude charm and energy is reason enough for celebration.

With a comprehensive set of extras of first-hand accounts, the BFI have pulled Forsyth's debut out of the shadows cast by Forsyth’s better known and often more celebrated Gregory's Girl and Local Hero. That Sinking Feeling may be a title of introspective truth regarding its own fate.

Whilst the dark confines of the cinema may be the traditional spiritual experience of the cineaste, to fine connoisseurs of home entertainment such as the BFI, they are equally a beguiling means towards discovery or rediscovery. If the truth be told, they possess a greater capacity to take us beyond the film, and with the restored original Glaswegian audio track and a spate of extras, for those either not born in 1979 or for those too young to see That Sinking Feeling on its initial theatrical release, the BFI Flipside release is a beguiling means of discovery, and for all others re-discovery with it restored to Forsyth’s original vision.

Click here to order from Amazon UK

By Don L. Stradley 

Martin Ritt's Conrack, now available on Blu-ray from Twilight Time, first hit theaters in 1974. This was a time when new, brash directors were reinventing American cinema, a time when movie screens were likely spackled with vomit from demonically possessed little girls, or blood from the victims of Dirty Harry Callahan's .44 Magnum. Theaters in your neighborhood were just as likely to be playing hardcore porn as the latest Paul Newman movie. Ritt's simple tale of an optimistic white teacher in a schoolroom of dirt poor black students was a success just by squeaking through to its birth.

Looking at it 40 years later, one is struck by two things, namely, Jon Voight's relentless energy and goodwill as the big-hearted teacher, and the very realistic performances from the kids. Even while acknowledging the film's uneven tone, or what one critic deemed "a crazy quilt of naturalism, farce, and soap opera all jumbled together," one is still intrigued by Conrack. Maybe the idea that a caring soul might try to educate some people who would otherwise remain ignorant strikes a primal cord within us. Maybe there's something irresistible about sheltered folks suddenly realizing there is more to the world than their dirty little backwater. Or maybe, and this might trump all the other maybes, we all hated school so much that we wish our own lives had been enriched, even briefly, by someone like Conrack.

Pat Conroy, a young idealist, takes a teaching position on a remote island in a South Carolina river delta. He's vowed to grow his hair until the war stops (the story takes place in 1969) and the locals look at him as if they're seeing a mythical animal up close, for a towering blonde white man on an island made up almost entirely of blacks is as odd as a unicorn. The locals can't even pronounce his name, which creates the movie's title. The newly dubbed Conrack fends off their suspicions with a grin as wide as the Bible belt, and then sets about teaching "the babies," as these fifth through eighth graders are called. He's shocked to find out the level of his students' ignorance - they can't read, they know nothing about life beyond the island, they've never heard of Babe Ruth or Halloween, have never played football, and, Heaven forbid, they don't even know that coffee comes from Brazil.

Based on Pat Conroy's memoir ‘The Water Is Wide,’ the story follows Conrack's effort to help these children even as he is met by resistance from the school's principal, a middle aged black woman (Madge Sinclair) who believes the children need to beaten with a leather strap, and superintendent Skeffington (Hume Cronyn), a grinning sadist who likes to grab a kid by the thumb and twist, a punishing move he calls "milking the rat." Add to this a local drunk (Paul Winfield) who skulks around the island like Boo Radley, the talkative Mr. Quickfellow (Antonio Fargas) who stalks 13-year-old girls with promises of new dresses, plus the natural reluctance of students who have never been challenged, and it seems Conrack has entered a world that may be too much for him to conquer.

Yet, armed with nothing but his enthusiasm, Conrack gradually earns the love and respect of the classroom. The kids, as meek as church mice at the movie’s start, are soon chanting James Brown songs, and dressed up for a Halloween trip to Beaufort. Conrack's teaching methods are unorthodox - he tickles, wrestles, and teases the students, and when he learns that no one on the island knows how to swim, he promptly throws the kids, one by one, into the river. His freewheeling style gets results. He even gets the class to sit still long enough to listen to some recordings of classical music. I like how the kids calmly pay attention to the sounds coming from the old turntable. In a more contemporary movie, they all would have picked up instruments, mastered them overnight, and would have then gone on to win a contest of some kind, for in modern America a story is only uplifting if you can crush someone and win a prize. But in Conrack, the kids merely listen; they’re quietly mystified by the music, happy that they can come close to pronouncing the names of Beethoven or Brahms. Conrack even picks up one of the younger boys and cradles him as the music plays, inviting him to close his eyes and sleep. Somehow, Conrack's good intentions get him labeled as "an outside agitator" and fired from his job. Conrack tries to fight the verdict but is no match for Skeffington’s power as superintendent. His good spirit bloodied but unbowed, Conrack leaves the island. To the children he says, "May the river be kind to you when you cross it."

As one might have expected, reactions to the movie were mixed: syndicated columnist David Sterritt dismissed it as "an audacious attempt at mythmaking." Indeed there are scenes of Conrack jogging along the beach, his class running along behind him, as if he’s some sort of golden haired pied piper, an image that probably ruffled some feathers in the super cynical ‘70s. The New York Times gave it a mostly positive review, but lamented the film's "glaze of sentimentality that sugars much of the narrative."