Cinema Retro has received the following press release from Paramount Home Video:
Called “an absolute spectacle of filmmaking from start to
finish” (Lauren Huff, Entertainment Weekly) and “extravagant,
decadent…phenomenal” (Jazz Tangcay, Variety), writer/director Damien Chazelle’s
glittering tale of Hollywood glamour and excess BABYLON arrives for fans to
watch at home on Premium Video-On-Demand and to purchase on Digital January 31,
2023 from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Nominated for three Academy Awards®, including Best Original
Score, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design, BABYLON is a must-see
spectacle featuring outstanding work from a world-class cast and filmmaking
team. Fans who buy the film on Digital will have access to over 40
minutes of behind-the-scenes interviews and deleted scenes to further
illuminate how the cinematic tour-de-force was brought to life. Bonus content
is detailed below:
•A Panoramic Canvas Called Babylon— The cast and
crew discuss the inspiration and motivation behind the original story and
development of this epic, 15 years in the making.•The Costumes of Babylon— Discover how costume
design was fundamental to character development and the challenges that went
into creating over 7,000 costumes for the film.•Scoring Babylon— Take a peek into Justin
Hurwitz's musical process to understand the artistry behind composing an iconic
score that further elevates the film.•Deleted & Extended Scenes
BABYLON follows an ambitious cast of characters -- The
Silent Film Superstar (Brad Pitt), the Young Starlet (Margot Robbie), the
Production Executive (Diego Calva), the Musical Sensation (Jovan Adepo) and the
Alluring Powerhouse Performer (Li Jun Li) -- who are striving to stay on top of
the raucous, 1920s Hollywood scene and maintain their relevance at a time when
the industry is moving on to the next best thing.
The film will arrive on 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray™, DVD, and in
a Limited-Edition 4K Ultra HD SteelBook® March 21, 2023.
Here are some fun highlights from "The Addams Family", which last only two seasons on television (1964-66) but which has become a major part of pop culture through the ensuing decades. These scenes are a tribute to Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday Addams, and who passed away recently at age 64. The show was so politically incorrect that it is amazing it was ever telecast in the 1960s. Tribute must be paid to Loring's talented co-stars, Carolyn Jones, John Astin, Ken Weatherwax, Jackie Coogan, Ted Cassidy and Blossom Rock for their iconic interpretations of these immortal characters who were created by cartoonist Charles Addams. - Lee Pfeiffer
Richard Boone is best known for playing the iconic role of gentleman gunslinger Palladin in the classic TV series "Have Gun, Will Travel" which ran between 1957-1963. But there was much more to his career in TV, stage and film. The YouTube channel Remembering Hollywood Celebrity presents a fine overview of his work and reveals some surprising facts through the assistance of Peter Boone, Richard's son. For example, Boone played a pivotal role in the filming of "Hawaii Five-0" on location in Honolulu. This is a fine tribute to a fine actor.
Actress Lisa Loring has passed away from a stroke at age 64. Loring was the first actress to portray the character of Wednesday Addams in the classic TV series "The Addams Family" in 1964. She was only 6 years-old at the time but proved to be totally adept at performing among a cast of talented adult character actors. She also lived to see the popularity of the series transferred into a Broadway stage production, hit feature films and, most recently, the popular Netflix series "Wednesday".
It took sixty-three years but there is now a complete
score for Elmer Bernstein's 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven. Quartet Records
in association with MGM has released a four-CD set of The Magnificent Seven
Collection. It includes the soundtracks for the four movies in the franchise -
the original, Return, Guns and Ride. As an extra, the set includes The Music
from Marlboro Country, a promotional LP made by Phillip Morris in 1967 which
consists of recycled cues from Return and orchestrations inspired by
Bernstein's themes. As I recall, the record was sent free to fans who submitted
proof of purchase of Marlboro cigarettes. The best news is that the entire
original 1960 score is finally available.
The first disc is for the original film and has a running
time of 78:40 with a runoff of additional cues, not in sequence, on disc four.
Some cues are as short as both eleven and sixteen seconds. Bernstein's
daughter, Emilie, previously produced a 1998 CD of the original but it only had
twenty-four tracks, whereas the new release contains forty-one, including some
as memorable as "Chico's Bravado", "Enemy Camp" and
"Lee's Problem". There is also an illustrated thirty-six page booklet
about each movie and Bernstein's involvement. The liner notes don't specify how
the tracks were enhanced or tweaked but they all sound the best they ever have.
The entire package is, well, magnificent.
Press Release from Quartet:
Celebrating the centenary of Maestro Elmer Bernstein,
Quartet Records and MGM are proud to present a mammoth, deluxe 4-CD collection
with the original iconic MAGNIFICENT SEVEN saga that comprises four films produced
between 1960 and 1972, all of them scored by the great Elmer Bernstein.
Bernstein’s music is a genre-defining masterpiece.
Inspired, in part, by the work of Aaron Copland, the composer created a
distinctive blend of Americana and what he called Tex-Mex elements without
resorting—as so many of his predecessors did—to quoting actual folksongs. The
score is replete with memorable themes and rife with tension when such is
called for. Following the development of Bernstein’s music through all four films
makes for a fascinating journey!
The score of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN was not officially
released until 1998 by Ryko. For this new release, on Disc 1, we accessed three
1/4? full-track monaural rolls of “print” takes vaulted by MGM to expand upon
the earlier edition. Several bonus tracks are included at the end of Disc 4 due
to insufficient room on the first disc.
For RETURN OF THE SEVEN, only the celebrated re-recording
done by Bernstein in London has survived; the scoring masters and music stems
remain lost. For Disc 2 of this set, we newly transferred the 1/4? stereo album
master and have maintained the spacing the composer placed between each track.
We have also included the CD premiere of the rare album recorded by the
composer for a promotional Philip Morris & Co. campaign on United Artists
Records: THE MUSIC FROM MARLBORO COUNTRY, sourced from the 1/4? stereo album
master.
GUNS OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is perhaps the most varied and
musically satisfying of the sequels. We have used on Disc 3 the same extended
stereo program produced by Lukas Kendall for the Film Score Monthly label and
included in a long-out-of-print western box set.
For the final entry in the series, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
RIDE!, Bernstein’s orchestrators, Leo Shuken and Jack Hayes, adapted the
composer’s thematic material to fit sequences in the movie. A single day was
spent recording at the Universal Scoring Stage in Los Angeles with Bernstein
conducting. While scoring masters remain elusive, we have accessed the monaural
music stem to include the 45 minutes of music heard in the film on Disc 4.
Meticulously produced, restored and mastered by Chris
Malone, the package designed by Nacho B. Govantes comes with cover art created
by Jim Titus and a 36-page booklet with an in-depth essay by authoritative
music writer Frank K. DeWald.
Elmer Bernstein never wavered from his commitment to
write music that enhanced every film he scored with beauty, excitement, passion
and dignity. Quartet Records is proud to celebrate his centenary with this 4-CD
compendium of all the surviving music Bernstein recorded for the four original
MAGNIFICENT SEVEN films. Enjoy the ride!
By
Sandra de Bruin with Dean Brierly (BearManor Media), 218 pages, Hardback,
Paperback & Kindle, ISBN 979-8-88771-028-0
By Steve Stiefel
Overview
Hollywood
with a Smileis
not your typical self-indulgent memoir. You will find no axe grinding, closet
skeleton rattling, or “MeToo” posturing in these pages, just captivating
accounts by Sandra de Bruin of her successful and fascinating life as an
actress in the film capital of the world. During a career that spanned decades,
de Bruin enjoyed professional and personal encounters with countless Hollywood
icons. But rather than beating her own drum, she generously directs the focus
onto these familiar faces of film and television.
These
beguiling narratives enlighten and charm in equal measure: a hilarious
fender-bender with Paul Newman; a working relationship/friendship with Charlton
Heston; an affecting encounter with Elvis Presley; accolades from Ricardo
Montalban, James Garner and Dolly Parton; recurring chance meetings with Cliff
Robertson; adventures and misadventures on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny
Carson; a romantic relationship with legendary film director Robert Wise. Plus, intimate
perspectives on de Bruin’s life and dreams, follies and foibles, friendships
and loves.
A
poetical prologue sets the book’s tone and tempo and clarifies its raison d’être.
Additional context is provided through capsule biographies that introduce each
chapter and personality, and which underscore an era in which stars really were
stars. This one-of-a-kind book reveals a side of Hollywood rarely remarked
upon—its good side. Furthermore, the insights that de Bruin offers into the
vagaries of human character and behavior aren’t limited to her star-studded
subjects, but have a universal resonance beyond the bounds of the fabled Dream
Factory.
Photo courtesy of Sandra De Bruin.
Q&A
with Sandra de Bruin and Dean Brierly
Q:One of the most
unique aspects of the book is reading about famous stars like Paul Newman and
Charlton Heston outside of their familiar movie star personas.
A: This was a conscious
decision—to present these iconic figures in a down-to-earth and real-world
context in which they behave just like anyone else. We're all familiar with the
classic stories that have been endlessly repeated and recycled. But in our
book, you will encounter a different aspect, a different side, to people like
Paul Newman, James Garner, Jason Robards.
Q:What was your
reason for starting each celebrity chapter with their mini-biographies?
A: We did that partly
with younger generations in mind who might not be familiar with some of the
celebrities from Hollywood's Golden Era. And we tried whenever possible to draw
parallels to contemporary entertainers: for example, comparing Harry
Belafonte's talents and accomplishments to those of Usher. Not all of the
subjects in the book received the same renown during their lifetimes, like
actor Frederick Combs, designer Ret Turner, or C. Bernard Jackson, the
African-American playwright and founder of the Inner City Cultural Center in
Los Angeles, yet all three made huge creative and social contributions in their
respective domains.
Q:In fact, not all
of the people you write about were superstars.
A: We felt it was
important to pay tribute to the working actresses and actors and the
behind-the-scene folks who, in a real sense, are the backbone of Hollywood.
Their stories can be just as important and inspiring as those of their famous
contemporaries.
Q:Talk about the
tone of the book, which is uplifting and positive rather than self-indulgent
and snarky.
A: This was never
intended as a "tell-all" book, which as a genre feels overdone. There
are countless books devoted to dishing dirt on Hollywood stars, but we felt it
important to take a different approach. Everyone who has read the book says
they appreciate how positive and uplifting and funny it is in a nonjudgmental
way.
Q:Sandra, to a
remarkable degree, you don’t blow your own horn, and willingly reveal, as the
book's subtitle reads, your own follies and foibles. The focus really seems to
be on the subjects you write about rather than yourself. Why did you opt for
this approach?
A: We didn’t want this
book to be just another memoir about someone the general public has never
really heard of. We wanted it to mainly be about the icons of Hollywood and my
encounters with them, not the other way around. However, I also wanted to
include some of my own follies and foibles so the reader would have a sense of
who I am.
Q:Yet, these
anecdotes do reveal a great deal about your character and perspective, not only
with regard to the famous people you met, but towards your career as well. Were
you conscious of this during the writing of the book?
A: Yes, I certainly
was. Acting is definitely an art, but it is also a business. When not actually
performing, I always conducted myself according to my instilled values and in a
friendly business fashion. I never relied on my looks or my sexuality. Talent,
intellect, and tenacity made me a professional working actress.
Q:How did these
unique encounters influence your career and career decisions?
A:
Meeting
all these astonishing and highly successful people in a genre known for its
harsh climate made me realize that I could succeed by being true to myself. The
powers that be apparently respected that and my talent.
Q:
What
was the most enjoyable aspect of writing this book and the most challenging?
A: Writing this book
brought back wonderful memories. It made me giggle at my naiveté and applaud my
tenacity. The most challenging parts of it were the bios and pulling it all
together, but those issues were solved by my writing partner, Dean Brierly.
What a guy!
Q:Sandra, how did
you come up with a limerick for the prologue? It’s heartfelt, inspiring, and
delightful.
A: Thank you! Dean and
I agreed that most prologues are a tad boring and wanted to come up with
something different. After a glass of wine, or maybe two, I just sat down at
the computer and rolled it out. It came so easily! It still astonishes me.
Q:What do you hope
people will take away from your book?
A: That Hollywood is
not just Tinseltown, but is also filled with lovely people, some of whom become
well-deserved icons.
Testimonials
“Sandra
de Bruin’s memories of a cherished era in entertainment history are sure to
keep you captivated from one page to the next. The author’s unforgettable
encounters with select celebrities are presented with such authority and
clarity you feel as if you’re almost reliving the experiences with her.
—J.R.
Jordan, film historian and author of Robert Wise: The Motion Pictures
“What
a happy romp Sandra has written: a mélange of memorable vignettes about stars
she met or admired as a longtime actress in Hollywood. It’s at once warm,
revealing and hilarious. I loved it!”
—Nick
Lyons, author of Fire in the Straw
“I
always felt that actors who did not achieve superstardom have the more
interesting stories, and Sandra de Bruin is no exception. She shares her life
as a working actress, describing amusing encounters with some of Hollywood’s
biggest stars.”
—Tom
Lisanti, author of Carol Lynley: Her Film & TV Career in Thrillers,
Fantasy & Suspense
About
the Authors
• Sandra de Bruin has appeared in over 200
television shows, several major films, many Los Angeles stage productions,
numerous commercials, voiceover and looping...and, oh, yes, danced in a
production at the Los Angeles Music Center. Her informative and witty articles
have appeared in several magazines, and her scripts have been optioned, bought,
sold and dropped by major studios and independent producers alike. She created
the "Actor's Audition Log" and the "Performer's Workshop
Log" to fulfill the organizational needs of her fellow performers from
coast to coast and around the world.
•
Dean Brierlyis a film historian and writer who
has contributed to numerous print and online magazines, including Cinema
Retro, Filmfax, Outre?, and others. Among his many celebrity
interviews are Gordon Parks, David Carradine, Michael Moriarty, Stella Stevens,
Fred Williamson, and Joe Dante. Dean has contributed liner notes for Blu-ray
and DVD releases, and publishes several film blogs, including Fifties Crime
Films and Classic Hollywood Quotes.
Click here to order from Amazon. Available in hardback, softcover and Kindle versions.
"THE WAY WE WERE: THE MAKING OF A ROMANTIC CLASSIC" (Applause)
By Tom Santopietro
I started thinking about The Way We Were as the
subject of a possible book when I happened to hear two women quoting the entire
last scene of the film by heart, re-enacting Barbra Streisand’s Katie Morosky murmuring
“Hubbell, your girl is lovely” to the aging but still golden Robert Redford.
This behavior wasn’t just liking the film- this was quasi-obsession. When I
then happened to catch a re-run of “Sex and the City” where the four best
friends decide that the entire world is divided into “Katie girls” and others,
followed by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw re-enacting The Way We
Were’s finale in front of the Plaza Hotel, I was intrigued. Hooked. Why
does this decidedly flawed film carry such romantic heft? After all, if the
best movies form parts of our world views and shape our dreams, what did this
hyper fandom for a fifty-year- old film say about the way we are today?
As I started to research the history of the film, my
“possibly writing” became a definite “yes”; accelerating the decision was
realizing that by writing about The Way We Were I was actually, if
unconsciously completing my trilogy of books centering on films that people
don’t just like, but actually obsess over: The Godfather Effect- drama, The
Sound of Music Story- musical, and now The Way We Were- romance.
The backstory was juicy in and of itself. Redford didn’t
want to make the film, dragging his heels until director Sidney Pollack wore
him down with promises of rewrites.Screenwriter Arthur Laurents
remained dissatisfied throughout filming, feuding with desperate producer Ray
Stark. The deeper I dug, the more intrigued I became: I spent several days at
the Library of Congress reading through Laurents’s papers, including a
scorching eight-page memo to Stark in whichhe enumerated the film’s
perceived flaws; flaws which he felt- and I’m translating politely here- were
so egregious that they made him feel sick. Eleven different screenwriters had a
hand in the script- no wonder Laurents was perpetually angry. His own life had
inspired several key incidents in the screenplay and his life was now being
re-written by eleven other people.
I liked the fact that in the early going this now iconic
film’s success was far from assured; as one studio executive only half-kiddingly
said to Sydney Pollack: “Barbra Streisand doesn’t sing and she plays a
communist—are you trying to kill me?!” The fact that no one expected a romantic
classic made its now half-century of success all the more intriguing. The film
had received decidedly mixed reviews upon its initial release, although the
stars were highly praised, and Streisand received an Academy Award nomination. (She
lost to Glenda Jackson for A Touch of Class, and when was the last time
anyone decided that they just had to watch A Touch of Class again?)
Streisand, she of the fearsome reputation, proved to be the
easiest personality for Pollack to handle. This was her chance to prove her
chops as a dramatic actress and she was happy with her part; she signed on as
soon as she read the treatment, acknowledging that the treatment more than met
David Lean’s dictum that five good scenes dictates an answer of “yes”. In her
own words: “This had more than five good scenes.” She may have worried over every
last detail during filming, but, Pollack explained, she was not being
difficult- she came from a place of deep concern. She wanted it all to meet her
own perfectionist standards.
A sneak preview proceeded swimmingly- until, that is, the
political unrest of the blacklist period, so central to Laurents’s life and his
conception of the story, shot to the foreground. As soon as the love story
receded, audiences left the theater for popcorn and a cigarette. It was the
love story people cared about, not the polemics. Which meant that after that
first preview in San Francisco, ten minutes of politics was edited out
overnight with a razor blade. Literally. It left the film in a choppy state but
the love story now remained front and center and audiences at the second
preview cheered.
Industry publications predicted a big box office opening followed
by a quick drop-off, but the drop-off never came. Viewers returned to the film
over and over, which leads to the ultimate question: Why did audiences care so
much, unfailingly starting to cry over Katie and Hubbell’s final break-up. And
the more I read, the more I watched, and the more I interviewed (Streisand,
James Woods –his first film- lyricist Alan Bergman, Lois Chiles), I
found four reasons for the film’s extraordinary 50-year hold on audiences
around the world:
nStar chemistry in spades. Redford and Streisand at their
early ‘70s peak, looking great and throwing off sparks together, proving that
opposites really do attract. Everything about them reads as a contrast- looks,
acting styles, manner of speech- and it all blends beautifully.
nIll-fated love affairs are universal. Like Katie and
Hubbell, everyone in the viewing audience has loved the wrong person at one
time. Or at several times. Everyone has loved passionately, if not wisely. As
film historian Jeanine Basinger put it: “Yes- everyone really has loved the
wrong person at one point or another. Except for maybe 10 people- and who wants
to know them?”
nThe uber romantic score by the then unknown Marvin Hamlisch,
who composed the title song on spec, in hopes of scoring the entire movie. His
reward? Two Oscars.
nThat killer ending in front of the Plaza. For the three
people over 50 in the United States who haven’t seen the film, I won’t describe
it- except to say that even critics who didn’t like the film fell for the
ending- it’s an all time keeper.
And as audiences clamored to know if Katie and Hubbell would
ever get back together, the clamor for a sequel grew in volume.Talks were held.
Screenplays were written. So what happened?
To find that out you have to read the book. Besides, I have
my own idea for a sequel.
The Australian video label ViaVision's Imprint line has released "The Avengers: The Emma Peel Collection (1965-1967) as a Blu-ray special edition set consisting of 16 discs containing every episode featuring Diana Rigg. We just received a review set and haven't even made a dent in the mind-boggling number of bonus extra features but we can say that the quality is outstanding throughout. Best of all, the set is region-free.
Here is the official description:
Extraordinary
crimes against the people and the state have to be avenged by agents
extraordinary. Two such people are John Steed, top professional, and his
partner, Emma Peel, talented amateur. Otherwise known as The Avengers.
With lethal bowler hat and umbrella, killer fashion and kung fu, the secret
agents investigate bizarre and colourful adventures with nonchalant efficiency,
sophistication and charm.
Whilst
every era of the long-running, enduringly popular and trend-setting British
series has its own unique style, charm and wit, it is the Emma Peel years that
have become the programme’s most iconic and recognisable, with Diana Rigg’s
portrayal of Mrs. Emma Peel ushering in a new era of excitement, fashion and
iconology, coupled with Patrick Macnee’s continuing depiction of the urbane and
sublime John Steed.
Now,
this 16-disc Blu-ray set brings together every episode from the Emma Peel era
in stunning high-definition encompassing the complete Series 4 and 5, plus a
copious collection of vintage and new Special Features celebrating this peak
era of The Avengers.
Special
Features and Technical Specs:
1080p
high-definition presentation from the original 35mm elements
Collectable
double-sided Hardbox packaging LIMITED to 1500 copies
120-page booklet
featuring essay by Dick Fiddy of the British Film Institute and Story
Information for every episode taken from the original studio files
Original ‘as
broadcast’ mono audio tracks (LPCM)
Original ‘as
broadcast’ “The Avengers in Color” opening slate on Series 5 episodes
Audio Commentary
on “The Town of No Return” by producer / writer Brian Clemens and director
Roy Ward Baker
Audio Commentary
on “The Master Minds” by writer Robert Banks Stewart
Audio Commentary
on “Dial A Deadly Number” by writer Roger Marshall
Audio Commentary
on “The Hour That Never Was” by director Gerry O’Hara
Audio Commentary
on “The House That Jack Built” by director Don Leaver
Audio Commentary
on “The Winged Avenger” by writer Richard Harris
Audio Commentary
on “Epic” by guest actor Peter Wyngarde
NEW Audio
Commentary on “The Joker” by filmmakers Sam Clemens and George Clemens
(sons of writer/producer Brian Clemens) (2022)
Audio Commentary
on “Return of The Cybernauts” by Diana Rigg’s stunt-double Cyd Child
Audio Commentary
on “Murdersville” by producer / writer Brian Clemens
Filmed
introductions to eight Series 5 episodes by producer / writer Brian
Clemens
Filmed
introduction to “The ?50,000 Breakfast” by guest actress Anneke Wills
Brief audio
recollection from guest actor Francis Matthews on filming “The Thirteenth
Hole”
“THE AVENGERS
AT 50” – Footage captured from the 50th anniversary celebration
of the series, held at Chichester University in 2011. Includes: video
message from Patrick Macnee, interviews with producer / writer Brian
Clemens, director Don Leaver (never before released), director Gerry
O’Hara (never before released), stunt co-ordinator Raymond Austin, guest
actress Carol Cleveland, guest actress Anneke Wills, writer Roger
Marshall, and Patrick Macnee’s biographer Marie Cameron
“Dame Diana Rigg
at the BFI” – 2015 on-stage interview and Q&A held at the British Film
Institute in London to celebrate 50 years of Emma Peel
“The Series Of
No Return” – audio interview with actress Elizabeth Shepherd, who was
originally cast as Emma Peel
Granada Plus
Points featuring actor Patrick Macnee, composer Laurie Johnson, writer
Roger Marshall and stunt-double Cyd Child
Bonus Series 6
episode “The Forget-Me-Knot” – Emma Peel’s final story and the
introduction of Tara King
“K Is For Kill”
– excerpt from The New Avengers episode featuring appearances by
Emma Peel
ARCHIVAL
MATERIAL
Armchair Theatre episode “The
Hothouse” starring Diana Rigg (the performance that led to Rigg’s casting
as Emma Peel in The Avengers
Chessboard
Opening Title sequence used on US broadcasts for Series 4
German and
French title sequences
Series 4 UK
Commercial Break Bumper slates
Alternative
titles / credits / end tag of select Series 4 episodes
Series 4
Commercial Break Bumpers
Production trims
from select Series 5 episodes
“The Strange
Case Of The Missing Corpse” – Series 5 teaser film
German
television interview with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg by Joachim
Fuchsberger
Colourisation
test footage for “Death At Bargain Prices” and “A Touch Of Brimstone”
Reconstructed
John Stamp Series 4 trailer
“They’re Back”
Trailers, Series 5 Trailer and Series 5 German Cinema Trailer
Extensive Photo
Galleries from the studio archives
1973 Interview
with Diana Rigg discussing her US sitcom Diana, and leaving The
Avengers
Original Aspect
Ratio 1.33:1, b&w / colour
Audio English
LPCM 2.0 Mono
English
subtitles for the Hard of Hearing (Series 4 & 5 episodes only)
BONUS
DISC 1: ADDITIONAL SPECIAL FEATURES
More interviews
from “THE AVENGERS AT 50” including composer Laurie Johnson, writer
and guest actor Jeremy Burnham, stunt-double Cyd Child, and a
screenwriters’ panel discussion featuring Brian Clemens, Richard Harris,
Richard Bates and Terrance Dicks
“Brian Clemens
In Conversation” – on-stage interview at the British Film Institute in
London discussing his early writing career
Extensive Photo
Gallery from The Avengers Fashion Show
Diana Rigg Photo
Gallery
BONUS
DISC 2: THE ORIGINAL EPISODES FILE
Featuring the 4
original episodes from the Cathy Gale era of the series which were remade
in Series 5: “Death Of A Great Dane”, “Don’t Look Behind You”, “Dressed To
Kill” and “The Charmers” (Standard Definition)
Audio Commentary
by writer Roger Marshall on “Death Of A Great Dane”
Audio Commentary
by actress Honor Blackman and UK presenter Paul O’Grady on “Don’t Look
Behind You”
Filmed
introduction by Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman to “Don’t Look Behind
You”
“Tunnel Of Fear”
– a full-length, previously lost episode from Series 1, recovered in 2016
“THE AVENGERS
AT 50” – interview with Honor Blackman by Paul O’Grady
Click here for full details and to order. (Price is in Australian dollars.)
"Gun the Man Down" is yet another Poverty Row low-budget Western shot
during an era in which seemingly every other feature film released was a
horse opera. Supposedly shot in nine days, the film is primarily
notable for being the big screen directing debut of Andrew V. McLaglen,
who would go on to be a very respected director who specialized in
Westerns and action films. The movie also marked the final feature film
for James Arness before he took on the role of Marshall Matt Dillon in
TV's long-running and iconic "Gunsmoke" series. After failing to achieve
stardom on the big screen, Arness found fame and fortune in "Gunsmoke"
when John Wayne recommended him for the part. Wayne had been championing
Arness for years and provided him with roles in some of his films.
Following "Gunsmoke"'s phenomenal run, Arness seemed content to stay
with TV and had another successful series, "How the West Was Won". John
Wayne was one of the first actors to successfully launch his own
production company, Batjac, which produced this film and Wayne's
influence is felt in the project. Andrew V. McLaglen was the son of
Wayne's good friend and occasional co-star Victor McLaglen. The
screenplay was written by Burt Kennedy, who Wayne would later hire to
direct several of his own films. The movie provided young Angie
Dickinson with her first role of substance and she would reunite with
Wayne years later on Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo". Speaking of which,
another Wayne favorite, character actor Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez appears
in both films. Also in the cast is Harry Carey Jr. , son of Wayne's idol
and and personal friend, Harry Carey. The cinematography is by William
Clothier, who would lens many of Wayne's later movies and the film was
produced by Duke's brother, Robert Morrison. "Gun the Man Down" is very
much a Wayne family affair.
The film opens with three fleeing bank robbers: Rem Anderson (James
Arness), Matt Rankin (Robert J. Wilke) and Ralph Farley (Don MeGowan),
who arrive at their hide-a-way cabin with the law in hot pursuit. Rem
has been seriously wounded and Rankin makes the decision to leave him
behind. Rem's girl, Jan (Angie Dickinson), objects at first but Rankin
convinces her to go with them in part because they have $40,000 in loot
from the local bank. The law arrives at the cabin and arrests Rem. He is
nursed back to health and is offered a deal for a light sentence if he
helps track down his confederates. Rem refuses and does his time in
prison. Upon release, he begins his mission vengeance and tracks Rankin,
Ralph and Jan to a one-horse town where Rankin has used his ill-gotten
gains to open a profitable saloon. Upon discovering Rem is in town,
Rankin hires a notorious gunslinger, Billy Deal (Michael Emmet), to
assassinate him. Jan has a tense reunion with Rem and seeks his
forgiveness but her pleas fall on deaf ears. Rem emerges victorious over
Billy Deal and Rankin, Ralph and Jan flee town with Rem in pursuit.
Their final confrontation takes place in a remote canyon with tragic
consequences.
Given the film's meager production budget, "Gun the Man Down" is a
surprisingly mature and engrossing Western with intelligent dialogue and
interesting characters. (In addition to those mentioned, there is a
fine performance by Emile Meyer as the town sheriff). Arness projects
the kind of macho star power that Wayne had and Dickinson acquits
herself very well as the stereotypical saloon girl with a heart of gold.
The film, ably directed by McLaglen, runs a scant 76 minutes and was
obviously designed for a quick playoff and fast profit. It has largely
been lost to time but the film is currently streaming on Screenpix, which is available through Amazon Prime, Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV for an additional monthly fee of $2.99 The movie is also available on Blu-ray through Olive Films.
There
are two types of people in the world, and I don’t refer to young and old, rich
and poor, or me and everybody else.The
divide I have in mind is wider and deeper.On one side are those who would rather chew broken glass than watch Hollywood’s
old costume dramas about noble knights, evil viziers, and beautiful Tahitian
princesses.On the other side are those
like me who enjoy such fare in the same way we gravitate to Mac ’n Cheese and
other comfort food.It’s a soothing
callback to our childhoods when we devoured such movies on TV and the big
screen, in less strident and less cynical times—at least, they were less
strident and less cynical if you were ten years old.In the 1940s, two of the reigning luminaries
of the genre were Maria Montez and Jon Hall, who starred together in six
Technicolor productions for Universal Pictures, 1942-45.Three of the films have been released by Kino
Lorber Studio Classics on one disc, the “Maria Montez and Jon Hall Collection.”If you haven’t had occasion to discover what
movie escapism looked like in the era before today’s Middle Earth, planet
Tatooine, and Wakanda, the Montez/Hall triple feature provides a good
introduction.
In
“White Savage” (1943) directed by Arthur Lubin from an early script by future
Academy Award winning writer-director Richard Brooks, commercial fisherman
Kaloe (Hall) wants to harvest sharks off mysterious Temple Island.Health enthusiasts will pay well for shark
liver, “a great source of Vitamin A,” he says, sounding like today’s late-nite
pitchmen for dubious dietary supplements.After a meet-cute scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a 2022 romantic
comedy, the island’s ruler, Princess Tahia (Montez), falls for the handsome
adventurer and grants him access to the waters, only to turn against him later
when she’s duped by Sam Miller (Thomas Gomez), the sleazy owner of a gambling
den in nearby Port Coral.Miller has
learned that the titular temple on Temple Island includes a golden pool inlaid
with jewels.To plunder the treasure, he
first has to get Kaloe out of the way.Given Kaloe’s name, we assume that the shark hunter is Polynesian (Hall,
born Charles Felix Locher, was said to have had a Tahitian mother in real
life), but he wears a generic charter-captain outfit and skipper’s cap, not a
sarong.Montez, born Maria Gracia Vidal in a well to do Colombian family,
doesn’t look any more Polynesian than Hall.But old movies like this are more notable for oddball charm than
authenticity.This becomes even more
apparent when you think about a golden, gem-encrusted pool in the South Seas.Where did the gold and the jewels come
from?It’s further underlined when
Kaloe, framed by Miller for murder, is imprisoned on a platform guarded below
by African lions.Why not polar
bears?Not that audiences in 1943 would have
cared, as long as dad could ogle Maria Montez in vivid Technicolor, mom could
dream about Jon Hall, and the kids could identify with third-billed Sabu as
Kaloe’s mischievous younger sidekick, Orano.
“Gypsy
Wildcat” (1944) shifts locale to medieval Europe, exactly the kind of setting
and story parodied by Rob Reiner’s beloved 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” minus
Billy Crystal and Andre the Giant.When
a traveler is murdered near the castle of ruthless Baron Tovar (Douglas
Dumbrille), Tovar imprisons a band of Gypsies camped nearby.The Gypsies harbor another stranger, Michael
(Hall), who witnessed the murder and holds an important item of evidence sought
by the baron.The caravan’s dancing
girl, Carla (Montez), an orphan who was adopted by the Gypsies at infancy,
falls in love with Michael, to the displeasure of the Gypsy chief’s son, Tonio
(Peter Coe), who had hoped to marry her.Tovar, in turn, is smitten with Carla, who looks uncannily like a woman
in an old portrait that hangs in his private quarters.Well toward the end of the movie, the
characters in the story find out why; you’ll probably put two and two together
long before then.Of the three movies on
the Blu-ray disc, “Gypsy Wildcat” may be the purest example of Universal’s
genius in recycling and repurposing its contract actors, directors, and sets
from one film to the next across different genres in its movie-factory
heyday.The director, Roy William Neill,
was borrowed from the studio’s popular Sherlock Holmes series, as were Nigel
Bruce and Gale Sondergaard.Bruce plays
Tovar’s bumbling lackey in much the same spirit as he portrayed Dr. Watson to
Basil Rathbone’s Holmes.Sondergaard,
here the wife of the Gypsy king, is better remembered as “The Spider Woman” in
Neill’s 1943 Holmes mystery of the same name.Neill and producer George Waggner were also associated with Universal’s
iconic Wolf Man horror series, and the wagons driven by the Gypsies were
probably the same ones used for Maria Ouspenskaya’s Gypsy caravan in “The Wolf
Man.”Leo Carrillo, from Universal’s
B-Westerns, plays Anube, the Gypsy chief; he, Sondergaard, Coe, and the rest of
the troupe reflect producers’ venerable tradition of choosing ethnic-looking
but non-Romani actors to play Gypsies.The script was written by James M. Cain, a surprise if you know Cain
strictly as a giant of classic noir fiction with “The Postman Always Rings
Twice” and “Double Indemnity.”However,
it isn’t so startling when you remember that Cain was one of many celebrated
novelists who made good money on the side, writing or doctoring Hollywood
scripts.I met the late James M. Cain in
passing in the early 1970s, when he was guest speaker one night at a public
library in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, near where he lived in retirement at
the time.At eighty-one, he was
formidably tall, burly, bushy-haired, and bespectacled.When he amiably chatted with members of the
audience, he answered several questions I asked about his career—none of which
dealt with “Gypsy Wildcat,” I should note.
“Sudan”
(1945), Montez’s and Hall’s final film together, is set in ancient Egypt, where
the benevolent king of Khemis is murdered.The crime appears to be the work of an elusive rebel leader, Herua, who
has eluded all attempts to catch him through the usual means.The grieving Princess Naila (Montez) has a
better (or worse) idea.She will
disguise herself as a commoner, find Herua at a fair in Sudan where he
customarily buys horses for his band, and have him arrested.Here, Sudan is a colourful whirl of dancing
girls and camels, not the grim wasteland of starving children we now see on the
TV news.Naila doesn’t realise that her
grand vizier, Horadef, who schemes to seize power, was the actual
murderer.That fact is disclosed ten
minutes into the story, although most of us will already have caught on, given
that a) grand viziers in movies like this are always secretly masterminding
palace coups, and b) Horadef is played by the great George Zucco, who filled
similar roles in Universal’s horror series about the Mummy.Horadef pays slavers to kidnap Naila when she
goes undercover.Two horse thieves,
Merat and Nebka, come to her rescue.Merat is played by Hall, and Nebka by Andy Devine.Devine provides the same nasal-voiced comedy
relief that he did in countless Westerns, only wearing robes this time instead
of suspenders.When a handsome stranger
shows up (Turhan Bey), he and Naila fall in love with each other, before the
princess discovers that the stranger is Herua.Ably written by Edmund L. Hartmann and directed by John Rawlins, the
film could almost serve as a G-rated modern sequel to “Disney’s Aladdin,” except
for a scene where Naila is branded on the arm by the slavers, and another where
she and Herua retire to his tent for a night of passion.The Egyptian sets were ported over from two
earlier Middle Eastern fantasies starring Montez and Hall, “Arabian Nights” (1942)
and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” (1944).It hardly mattered that the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Baghdad of Ali
Baba were two separate historical periods a thousand years apart, since
audiences’ apathy to such details “made little practical difference where the
story was set,” as critic Ian Cameron noted in his 1973 book, Adventure in
the Movies.1945 was a pivotal
moment in Universal Pictures’ history as the year it dropped the Montez and
Hall series, along with its B-horror films and Sherlock Holmes pictures.When the studio returned to the genre in the
early 1950s as Universal-International, it did so with a new generation of young
contract players like Rock Hudson and Yvonne de Carlo.Montez appeared in a few more pictures and
died in 1951 at 39.Hall had a long
career of Westerns, period adventures, and TV guest appearances through the
early 1960s, including baby-boomer fame as television’s “Ramar of the Jungle” in
the ‘50s.
Although
the Montez and Hall movies ran widely on TV during the same era as “Ramar of
the Jungle,” they were broadcast in grainy black-and-white, robbing them of
their lustrous big screen Technicolor.The
Kino Lorber Blu-ray restores their original sharpness and rich palette,
supplemented by engaging audio commentary from Phillipa Berry for “White Savage”
and “Sudan,” and David Del Valle for “Gypsy Wildcat.”Theatrical trailers and subtitles for the deaf
and hearing-impaired are also included.
“Maria
Montez and Jon Hall Collection” can be ordered from Amazon HERE.
Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)
Louis B. Mayer’s MGM was not a preeminent fright-movie
factory in the 1930s.In a 1935
interview with London’s Picturegoer,
C.A. Lejeune, managing director of MGM in Great Britain, boasted the studio
didn’t “specialise in any single type of production,” whether they be “musicals,
or comedies, or horror films.”That
said, following the successes of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein,
and the still-in-production The Bride of
Frankenstein, MGM wisely chose to dip their toe into the horror pool.In doing so, they managed to release a couple
of eerie 1930 classics of their own.In
1935-1936 MGM delivered to the big screen The
Devil Doll with Lionel Barrymore and Mad
Love with Peter Lorre.But the
studio was also interested in capitalizing on Universal’s success of Dracula.So much so they even sought out that film’s director, Tod Browning, to
do so.It was Browning, an earlier collaborator
on multiple silent-film classics starring Lon Chaney, chosen to helm the
production of MGM’s The Vampires of
Prague.
Mayer was not particularly enamored of horror pictures,
but business was business and he recognized Universal was doing good box office
with their string of chillers. MGM did insist writers tapped to scribe The Vampire of Prague should draw upon
an earlier property of theirs:Tod
Browning’s silent feature London after
Midnight (1927).Though only a relatively
few short years separated release dates of London
after Midnight and Mark of the
Vampire (as The Vampires of Prague
would be re-titled), it didn’t seem a large number of critics (circa 1935)
recognized the latter as a re-make of the earlier Lon Chaney film - an effort now
sadly lost for examination and contrast.
So it wasn’t too surprising that MGM brought Tod Browning
on.Though Lon Chaney was dead and gone,
the director had an ace-in-the-hole, an actor holding current high attention.Bela Lugosi had come to Browning’s attention
with his casting in the director’s cinematic adaptation of Bayard Veiller’s 1916
three-act stage mystery of The Thirteenth
Chair (1929).Though Lugosi’s role in
that film was relatively minor – he was only the seventh-billed of the cast – his
subsequent popularity as Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula on stage productions
cemented Browning’s decision to cast the actor in the title role of the iconic
Universal film of 1931.
With this bankable asset in place, Variety reported in December of 1934 that Sam Ornitz and Hy Kraft
had been conscripted to write the screenplay for The Vampires of Prague: but this news was not only late arriving,
but incorrect.When production commence
directly following the New Year (January 12), Guy Endore and Bernard Schubert were
handling screenplay chores. Endore was something of an anomaly among
horror-writers.The author of such works
as The Werewolf of Paris (1933) and Babouk (1934), Endore was a devout
leftist who dressed mysteries with subliminal doses of theoretic Marxism.
That said, the most controversial aspect of Endore’s scenario
was not necessarily political, though its inclusion was completely excised from
the finished film.It’s never explained
why Lugosi’s Count Mora (a virtual mirror-image of his Count Dracula persona) displayed
a visible bullet-hole in his right temple.Actress Carol Borland, playing Mora’s daughter Luna, later reminisced Endore’s
script was envelope-pushing in its construction.In a scene excised from the film, the actress
recounted the original screenplay explained it was an act of incest that caused
Mora to strangle to death his daughter and take his own life with a bullet to
the head.
It was this ghastly act that caused the restless souls of
Mora and Luna to solemnly walk the earth in perpetuity.Endore’s plot device, needless to say,
conjured a scenario far beyond any sort of supernatural hokum: MGM, not without
cause, demanded its exclusion from the finished film.If such a scene was actually filmed, it was
likely excised along with fourteen other minutes reportedly trimmed from the
final cut.In any event, Mark of the Vampire clocks in at a tidy sixty-one
minutes which, all things considered, is probably for the best.
The production was allotted a twenty-four day shooting
schedule and budget of some 305,000 dollars, $3000 of which went to Lugosi for his
(mostly) silent walk-through role.For
those cineastes who complain Lugosi was under-used in Mark of the Vampire – given that the actor’s only speaking lines consisted
of only one or two sentences uttered at the film’s end – such fans should enjoy
the film’s trailer (included here on this new Blu-ray from the Warner
Archive).Lugosi serves as the trailer’s
singular narrator, spookily warning - in his Slavic trademark style, of course
- cinemagoers “Shall be the judges of
this eerie conspiracy!”It was nice
to see the trailer included with the set, however misleading its vampiric content.
In Mark of the
Vampire, Browning and MGM borrow generously from Universal’s established horror
film tropes:cinematographer James Wong
Howe’s photography is atmospheric and moody, particularly in scenes where Luna
stoically skulks the graveyard in her “cemetery clothes.”The film’s exterior setting is a quaint
eastern European village, peopled by superstitious residents who enjoy a bit of
folkloric dancing in the daylight hours - but who wouldn’t dare travel at night
should they encounter such ghouls as Mora and Luna.No string of garlic cloves or wolfs bane are
used to protect the villagers from evil.They prefer a regional botanical they refer to as “Bat’s Thorn.”
In the unlikely scenario someone reading this is not
already conversant with the plot of the film, I don’t want to give too much
away.So I’ll just say elements that
work best and prove memorable are the ghostly mute walk-throughs of Lugosi and
Borland.The latter’s swooping entrance
on a set of animated bat wings during one scene is particularly cinematic.The performances of the cast are all up to
par, though one gets the feeling Lionel Barrymore regards his leading role as unworthy
of his talent.
There are stories of Browning carping on Barrymore’s diffident
performance while the film was in production. Which is surprising as the two were certainly familiar
with each other’s work habits.Though
Browning earned a reputation as a stern taskmaster on set, the director had
worked with Barrymore earlier:on the
Lon Chaney Sr. silent West of Zanzibar
(1928).Though Barrymore is tasked to
play only one-half the character Lon Chaney played in London after Midnight, it is obvious Browning would have preferred
Chaney in the lead role – if only the silent-screen legend had not tragically
already passed in 1930.
Browning’s opinion of Chaney bordered on the
worshipful.In 1928 he enthused the “Man
of a Thousand Faces” famous make-up appliances and grotesqueries were hardly “Chaney’s real secret.He could put the same make-up on the face of
another man and that man would fail on the screen.There is a personality, a something about the
man that grips one.” Even accepting Browning’s
preferences, Barrymore’s performance is not the crux of the problem plaguing Mark of the Vampire. The main weakness of the film is the
implausibility of its red-herring scenario.
Based on Browning’s own short story, The Hypnotist, both London
after Midnight and Mark of the
Vampire are atmospherically disguised as genuine “horror” pictures, but in
truth they’re simply routine mysteries dressed as ghoulish entertainment.While I actually enjoy Mark of the Vampire, I concede the picture might otherwise be regarded
a middling whodunit without the presence of Lugosi and Borland.The actress – who had earlier worked with
Lugosi on a stage production of Dracula,
acknowledged neither she nor Bela were made aware they were merely red
herrings; the final “reveal” page of the script had been withheld until the
final day of production.Universal’s
lawyers tried to get an injunction to stop production of the MGM film,
believing MGM’s use of Lugosi’s Dracula-persona in the film seemed an
uncomfortable infringement of their intellectual properties.But threatened legal action against MGM was dropped
when Universal’s lawyers deemed the case unwinnable.
Universal needn’t have worried: the film doesn’t really
work as a great mystery, much less a gripping vampire tale.One doesn’t need to wait breathlessly until
the closing minutes for the murderer’s reveal.Instead, we’re only given insight into how the perpetrator is entrapped
into confessing.Which doesn’t make for
a particularly exciting climax.The
film’s other weakness is its parlor-room staginess – a plodding element also plaguing
Browning’s otherwise iconic staging of Dracula.
With that said, it wouldn’t be fair to
throw the baby out with the bathwater.Mark of the Vampire is still a classic –
albeit a somewhat minor one – from Hollywood’s Golden Age of Horror.
Previously issued in 2006 on DVD as part of the six-film Hollywood Legends of Horror set, Mark of the Vampire makes its first U.S.
appearance on Blu-ray via this Warner Archive Collection release.Ported over from that earlier set is the
audio commentary supplied by film historian’s Kim Newman and Stephen Jones as
well as the film’s original trailer.“New” to the Blu-ray release are two items of tangential interest to
people interested in circa-1935 cinema: the 8 minute-long The Calico Dragon (a 1935 MGM cartoon) and an episode from MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series of film shorts
A Thrill for Thelma (1935).
Be warned neither bonus has really anything to do with Mark of the Vampire though there’s a slight connection to the latter bonus.The Crime
Does Not Pay series served as both a long-running film and radio series.On December 12, 1949, Lugosi was a featured
player on the series’ radio broadcast of Gasoline
Cocktail.This arguably might have
been a more interesting audio supplement to include on this archive release,
but interested fans can listen to the Lugosi program easily via You Tube should
they desire.In any event, the release
from Warner Archive looks great: 1080p High Definition 16x9 1.37.1 DTS-HD
Master Audio.This Blu-ray should be on
the shelf of any fan of classic horror film fan or enthusiast of Browning’s
work.
(The following press release pertains to the U.K. release)
STUDIOCANAL have announced the brand new 4K restoration of John Guillermin’s (Blazing Inferno, Death on the Nile)
Academy Award® Winning remake of iconic Hollywood classic, KING KONG (1976).
Starring Jeff
Bridges (The
Big Lebowski, Crazy Heart, True Grit) and Jessica Lange (Tootsie, American Horror Story),
and produced by Hollywood legend Dino
de Laurentiis (Flash
Gordon, Nights of Cabiria, Barbarella), this retelling of the
classic monster adventure film went on to jointly win the Academy Award® for
Best Visual Effects (Carlo Rambaldi, Glen Robinson and Frank Van der Veer), as
well as receiving Academy Award® nominations for Best Cinematography (Richard
H. Kline) and Best Sound (Harry W. Tetrick, William McCaughey, Aaron Rochin and
Jack Solomon). Jessica Lange was also honoured as Best new Actress for her role
at the Golden Globes that same year.
Now restored in 4K for the first time, STUDIOCANAL will re-release
the film across 4K
UHD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital as well as a 4K UHD Steelbook from December 5.
New artworks have been created for the Home Entertainment releases
by graphic designer Sophie
Bland, and for the 4K UHD Steelbook release by Francesco Francavilla.
The 4K UHD will include a limited-edition poster of Sophie Bland’s artwork.
SYNOPSIS
Fred Wilson (Charles
Grodin), an employee of a large American oil company, has been
charged with a mission to find new oil wells. With a chartered boat, he sets
off on a journey to an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. On board is
also a stowaway: the palaeontologist Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges) has
smuggled himself onto the ship, as he hopes to examine a rare species of monkey
on this island. On the way, after a violent storm, the expedition also takes on
board the shipwrecked Dawn (Jessica
Lange), who is floating in a lifeboat at sea. When the ship
anchors off the island, however, it turns out not to be as uninhabited as
everyone once thought. The natives of the island perform a strange ritual to
worship a larger-than-life ape named "Kong". As soon as they
catch sight of the blonde Dawn, they decide they have found their perfect offering.
ABOUT THE RESTORATION
This 2022 restoration is presented by STUDIOCANAL and Paramount
Pictures. The 35mm original negative was scanned in 4K and colour graded by
Paramount. The restoration and mastering was then carried out at L'Immagine
Ritrovata, under the supervision of STUDIOCANAL. The purpose of this
restoration was to give a new lease of life to the film for audiences to enjoy
on the big screen, and eventually on the smaller screen. A 4K DCP was created,
as well as a UHD HDR Dolby Vision master, to enhance the sharpness and
brightness in cinemas which is not usually possible with a standard HD master.
In addition there is a new, improved and cleaned up 5.1 audio.
STUDIOCANAL owns one of the largest film
libraries in the world, boasting nearly 7000
titles from 60 countries. Spanning 100 years of film history.
20 million euros has been invested into the restoration of 700 classic films
over the past 5 years.
SPECIAL FEATURES
· Extended TV
broadcast cut (unrestored)
· Audio commentary
with film historian Ray Morton
· Audio commentary
with actor and makeup artist Rick Baker
· Interview with
Barry Nolan
· Interview with
Bill Kronick
· Interview with
Scott Thaler and Jeffrey Chernov
· Interview with
David McGiffert and Brian E. Frankish
The British iconic
comedy actor Leslie Phillips had died aged 98 after a long illness. He appeared
in more than 200 films, TV and radio series over an eight-decade career, and
will be forever remembered for his appearances in the Carry On and Doctor
comedies. The actor was awarded an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II in 1998, and was
promoted to CBE in the 2008 New Years Honours. He was also well known for his
catchphrase "Ding dong" - a reference to his character Jack Bell in
1959's Carry on Nurse. Younger fans will
remember him as the voice of the 'Sorting Hat' in the Harry Potter films. Phillips' talents weren't confined to comedies. He also played dramatic roles in films such as "The Jackal", "Scandal", "The Longest Day" and "Empire of the Sun". For more, click here.
“Wagon Master” (1950), a Blu-Ray release from the Warner Archive, is
director John Ford’s film about the first wagon train of Mormons to cross miles
of treacherous desert and mountain terrain in order to settle in Utah’s San
Juan Valley. It opens, however, with a short, almost incongruous prelude, in
which an outlaw family known as the Cleggs robs a bank. They kill a bank
employee and, after family patriarch Uncle Shiloh (Charles Kemper) takes a
bullet in the shoulder, they run off into the desert with the money. They are
pursued by the sheriff and his posse but we don’t see much of them again for
another 40 minutes. But you know they’re out there.
Ward Bond, one of Ford’s “stock company” players, is Elder
Wiggins, the Mormon leader, who started out for San Juan without exactly
knowing how to get there. He runs into a couple of wandering cowboys, Travis
Blue (Ben Johnson) and Sandy (Harry Carey, Jr.), who’ve just come from the San
Juan River area. At first they resist his offer of a job, until Sandy meets
Prudence Perkins (Kathleen O’Malley), daughter of Adam Perkins (Russell
Simpson) one of the Mormon Elders. He convinces Travis to accept the job as
Wagon Master.
The next half hour shows us the hardships they had to
endure during the desert crossing, while Sandy and Prudence start a romance,
and the laconic Travis whittles a stick and plays with his lariat. On the way,
however, they encounter a broken down medicine show wagon belonging to Doctor
A. Locksley Hall (Alan Mowbray), who is accompanied by two showgirls, Denver
(Joanne Dru) and Fleuretty Phyffe (Ruth Clifford). Mowbray plays almost the
same character he played in Ford’s “My Darling Clementine” and Denver is one of
Ford’s typical Shady Ladies, similar to Dallas (Claire Trevor) in “Stagecoach”
(1939). Travis falls for her.
The wagon train starts to run out of water at one point
but they make it to a river and that night everybody’s happy and they do what
all John Ford pioneer do in that situation. They have a hoe down—in the middle
of which, who should show up, looking like a pack of mangy coyotes? You guessed
it. The Cleggs. They come in out of the night carrying rifles and have the
Mormons at their mercy. The Cleggs must have been close relatives of the
Hammonds, the subhuman gold miners who would show up some 12 years later in Sam
Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962). Surely Peckinpah was “inspired” by
Hank Worden’s imbecilic Luke Clegg when he cast Warren Oates as the degenerate
Henry Hammond, who never took baths and wanted to share his brother Billy’s new
bride on their wedding night. The whole Hammond clan look, talk, and act
exactly like the Cleggs. But that’s a topic for another discussion.
At any rate, they force Doc Hall to take the bullet out
of Uncle Shiloh’s shoulder and decide to stick with the Mormons until such time
as they can be sure the sheriff and his posse have stopped looking for them. Next
some Navajos show up. But they are friendly, because, while they don’t like
white men “because they’re thieves,” they do like Mormons because they are only
“little thieves.” But when one of the Cleggs molests a Navajo woman, Wiggins is
forced to order the offending Clegg tied to a wagon wheel and whipped. When
Uncle Shiloh protests, Wiggins tells him a whipping is better than a scalping.
But the incident creates resentment in Uncle Shiloh that will result in a final
showdown later on.
“Wagon Master” is classic John Ford, filmed on location
in Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, with Ford’s iconic imagery and the usual thematic
statements about the indomitability of the human spirit, and the development of
a community in an unfriendly wilderness. But it differs from most of his other
films in two ways. First of all, although it was filmed on Ford’s favorite
location, it was shot by cinematographer Bert Glendon in black and white
instead of color. He eschewed the gorgeous hues of Monument Valley, and instead
created a backdrop that seems more fitting the grim life and death struggle of
the Mormons trying to reach the Promised Land. Second, unlike the other films he
shot there, whether in color or black and white, there is no larger- than- life
hero, no John Wayne, or Henry Fonda, to take on the heavies and save the day. In
“Wagon Master” the main characters are all average people. Travis and Sandy are
simply drifters. Elder Wiggins is a man of strong character, but neither he,
nor Sandy or Travis are gunmen. They admit to themselves and each other they’re
scared of the Cleggs, but Wiggins says he’ll never let them know it. Nor will
he let his people know it. Without the Duke, the little people have to stand up
for themselves.
The Warner Archive has provided a clear, sharp 1080p high
definition transfer of the film to disc, as well as a terrific audio commentary
track, featuring director Peter Bogdanovich and cast member Harry Carey, Jr.
talking about the film as they watch it. Carey tells what it was like, and how
he felt, working with Ford. His comments are priceless. In one scene where Ford
tilted his hat to one side, Carey gripes to Bogdanovich: “Why did he have me
wear my hat that way? I look like a village idiot!”
Bogdanovich and Carey’s commentary is interspersed with
audio clips of Bogdanovich’s 1966 interview with Ford himself, in which he
presents his own view of his work. He tells Bogdanovich he never thought of his
films in terms of them being art. “I am a hard-nosed director,” he says. “I’m
not carrying any messages. I have no personal feelings about the pictures. If I
liked the script, I shot it. It was nothing earth-shaking. It was a job of
work.”
It may have been just a job as far as Ford was concerned,
but it was a job he did extremely well and sometimes a job of work can be a
work of art. Highly recommended.
Cinema Retro has received
the following press release. Since our magazine is edited in New Jersey, we look
forward to seeing this ultimate “Jersey Guy” documentary.
Banded Together:
The Boys From Glen Rock High
Reunite on Hometown New Jersey High School Stage
50 Years Later
You Never Know
What Those Crazy Kids May Grow Up to Be!
Feature Documentary Makes World Premiere Oct. 29th
& 30th at Montclair Film Festival;
Featuring: Lee Shapiro, Jimmy Vivino, John Feeney, Jerry Vivino, Frank
Pagano, Uncle Floyd Vivino, Doug Romoff, Jeff Venho, Joe Sielski & Conan
O'Brien.
LOS ANGELES — Oct. 21, 2022 — For Immediate Release: Having
all established high-profile careers in the music industry, eight men reunite
50 years later to jam on their high school auditorium stage in idyllic Glen
Rock, NJ, and look back on what a strange ride it’s been in Banded Together: The Boys From Glen
Rock High.
Directed, produced and edited by Academy Award-nominated
and Emmy Award-winning documentarian Barry Rubinow (Red Grooms: Sunflower in a
Hothouse, Beakman’s World), this full-length documentary is an official
selection of the Montclair Film Festival (Oct. 21-30). Moved to a bigger
theater to accommodate demand, the film will make its world premiere Saturday,
Oct. 29 at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday Oct. 30 at noon.
About Banded Together: The Boys From Glen Rock High ...
Once upon a time, in the small, Mayberry-esque town of
Glen Rock, NJ, 25 miles and a world away from New York City, a group of friends
from high school joined the music department—some commanded to do so by their
parents or in lieu of receiving detention—with adolescent dreams of making it
in “the
biz.”
From the launch pad of their garage band gatherings and
unassuming high school auditorium, each of them today—Lee Shapiro, Jimmy Vivino,
John Feeney, Jerry Vivino, Frank Pagano, Uncle Floyd Vivino, Doug Romoff and Jeff
Venho—perform at the highest levels of the music industry ... from the main
stage of the Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien (who appears in the film) to hosting
their own show to writing some of the industry’s most successful songs to performing in
arenas with such iconic artists as Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, The
Allman Brothers, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Donald Fagen and Jimmy Buffet, to
name a few. [short bios, pg. 2]
The remarkable story of a true band of brothers, a group
of close friends who bonded through music, reuniting for a concert in the same
auditorium where they wowed their teachers and fellow students 50 years ago.
Along the way, we learn about their individual journeys and their remarkable
successes, all heavily influenced by their time at Glen Rock High School, under
the tutelage of their beloved music teacher and bandleader, Joe Sielski.
The film explores the importance of music and arts
education for all students and is a touching testament to the value of teaching
and promoting the arts. The love and respect that these musicians have for one
another and their teachers is on full display, as well as their drive,
discipline, humor and sheer talent. Though their careers have taken them
all around the world, performing in front of thousands, there is no greater joy
than returning to the hometown stage that defined them.
Documentary, Music / Running Time: 77 Minutes / Not Rated
Featuring Lee Shapiro, Jimmy Vivino, John Feeney, Jerry
Vivino, Frank Pagano, Uncle Floyd Vivino, Doug Romoff, Jeff Venho, Joe Sielski
and Conan O’Brien.
Directed by Barry Rubinow. Produced by Barry Rubinow and Doug Romoff. Editor
Barry Rubinow. Director of Photography Patrick Cone. Production Designer Richard
Gardner.
About the Musicians ...
JIMMY VIVINO is a guitarist, keyboard player, singer,
producer and music director. He began playing in NYC clubs in the early 1980s
and started producing and arranging music for such artists as Phoebe Snow,
Laura Nyro, John Sebastian, and Donald Fagen. Blues legend Al Kooper considers
Jimmy one of his “discoveries”
and he worked as Kooper’s
musical director for 15 years. Jimmy performed with the house bands for The
Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien
as well as Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
Jimmy led the house band for the late-night program Conan called Jimmy Vivino
and the Basic Cable Band. Jimmy has recorded and played live with renowned
musicians Johnnie Johnson, Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm.
LEE SHAPIRO is a keyboardist, arranger and music
director. He was studying at the Manhattan School of Music when he was
discovered playing at a club in New Jersey by the manager of the band, Frankie
Valli & The Four Seasons. Lee was age 19 at the time he was asked to join.
He was the arranger on the hit songs, “Who Loves You” and “Oh What a Night.” Lee also worked with Barry
Manilow on Copacabana, The Musical before starting Lee Shapiro Music, a company
that created music for the media and advertising. He also created the “must have” toys of 2000, ‘Rock N Roll Elmo’ and ‘Rock N Roll Ernie’ for Fisher-Price. Lee formed the classic rock
band The Hit Men with former Four Seasons bandmates Gerry Polci and Don
Ciccone. The band has evolved over the past 12 years and is touring with band
members who perform with the legends of classic rock.
JOHN FEENEY, principal double bass of the Orchestra of
St. Luke’s,
the American Classical Orchestra and Opera Lafayette, is a chamber musician and
soloist of international renown. John has performed as a guest bassist with the
Vienna Philharmonic. An avid Viennese violinist, in 2010 he co-founded The
Serenade Orchestra and the Serenade Quartet, performing many dozens of concerts
featuring the music of 18th and 19th century Vienna. John has recorded
extensively for most major record labels and holds bachelor and master degrees
from the Juilliard School where he was a scholarship student of David Walter.
He began his bass studies with Linda McKnight.
UNCLE FLOYD VIVINO is a legendary comedian, musician and
entertainer. He created and starred in The Uncle Floyd Show, a comedic variety
show that can be equally read as a children’s program or a parody of a children’s program. The show aired
for over two decades and featured character comedy, puppetry, audience
participation, Floyd’s
vaudevillian piano playing and a puppet sidekick named Oogie. The Uncle Floyd
Show had musical guests including such renowned performers as The Ramones, Bon
Jovi, Blue Öyster Cult, Joe Jackson and Cyndi Lauper. Uncle Floyd continues to
perform his one-of-a-kind act around various northern New Jersey venues. Check
out his
radio show every Sunday at 9 a.m. EST on WFDU-FM 89.1 and
WFDU-FM.
FRANK PAGANO is a drums and percussion musician and
teacher. He graduated from the Manhattan School of Music to go on to work with
Phoebe Snow and Concord Jazz recording artists Jackie and Roy. Frank has played
music in Broadway shows since 1985. His performing and recording credits range
from Smokey Joe’s
Cafe and Escape to Margaritaville, to Darlene Love and Bruce Springsteen and
the E Street Band. Frank is currently recording drums, percussion and vocals
with prog-rock band Renaissance. He also performs with theJon Herington Band and The Harmonious Five.
JERRY VIVINO is a multi-talented reed player who attributes
his mastering of seven woodwinds to his high school band director Joe Sielski.
After graduating in 1972 he attended Manhattan School of Music aspiring to
become a full-time musician. For 25 years he was the featured saxophonist for
Conan O’Brien
on NBC’S
Late Night, The Tonight Show and the TBS cable TV show Conan. As a sideman,
Jerry has shared the stage or recorded with the likes of Tony Bennett, Donald
Fagen, Johnny Mathis, Darlene Love, Dion DiMucci, Stanley Clark, Franki Valli,
Keely Smith, The Allman Brothers, Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen to name a few.
Jerry also performs with his brother Floyd’s The Uncle Floyd Show, brother Jimmy’s Blues Revue and as a
leader with his own jazz quartet.
DOUG ROMOFF is a professional bassist, entrepreneur and
film producer. He performed music in many Broadway shows as well as movie
scores and commercial jingles. Doug founded Harmony 534, a full-service music
production and video editing facility with clients such as Sesame Street and
Criterion Films. Doug also founded the Paradiso Group, an advertising agency
that creates multi-media presentations, live television broadcasts and classic
TV, radio and print advertising. Doug was the executive producer and creator of
Beyond the Crush, a docu-series about wine owners in Napa Valley. He is the
co-owner and creative director for
Adrenaline Films, a creative services company with clients such as
Universal Studios and Xfinity.
JEFF VENHO attended the Juilliard School as a scholarship
trumpet performance major, graduating with a master’s degree. Jeff has performed with the NYC
Opera, the American Symphony, the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and numerous
Broadway Shows. In addition to his freelance activities, Jeff is currently
employed as Trumpet Professor at Hofstra University and is the Winds Department
Chair at the Rudolf Steiner School in Manhattan.
About the Mentor ...
JOE SIELSKI was the music teacher and band leader at Glen
Rock High School from 1963 to 2003. In 1968, he started the orchestra program
at the school, and served on the Middle Atlantic States High School Evaluation
Committee. In 1976, Joe got his M.A. degree in conducting from Columbia
University TC. He also served as Glen Rock High School Fine Arts Department
Chairperson. Joe has been married to his wife, Carolyn, for more than 50 years.
They hosted the reunion of the Boys From Glen Rock High and Joe played/ conducted
at the reunion concert at Glen Rock High School.
About the Filmmaker ...
BARRY RUBINOW grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey, and made
his first film in eighth grade at Glen Rock Junior/Senior High School. With
early aspirations to be a filmmaker, he moved to Los Angeles and attended the
University of Southern California’s
acclaimed school of cinema. The first documentary he edited, Red Grooms:
Sunflower in a Hothouse, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best
Documentary Short Subject. His career as a producer, director, editor and indie
filmmaker has included winning an Emmy Award for editing the CBS science show, Beakman’s World. He was also a
founding member of the Documentary Channel, which was in 25 million homes on
Dish Network and DirecTV, and ran all creative endeavors of the channel,
overseeing the branding and on-air IDs and promos. He produced over 100
episodes of the channel’s
flagship original show, DocTalk, interviewing acclaimed documentary filmmakers
from Werner Herzog to Alex Gibney to Errol Morris. Rubinow brings his unique
background and experience and love of his hometown, to this powerful project.
Cinema Retro
readers probably already know about Joe Caroff’s unique contribution to James Bond and film history, but
outside of serious movie fan circles, he’s less well known. Several years ago,
former HBO producer (and CR writer) Mark Cerulli and editor Paul C. Rosen set
out to change that by putting together a documentary about his remarkable life –
growing up in the Great Depression, fighting in WWII and being part of the Mad
Men advertising scene in the 1960s and 70s. Along with way, Joe designed a
number of iconic film logos including West Side Story, 007, Rollerball, A Hard
Day’s Night, Orion Pictures and many others. If you’re expecting a Bond
documentary, this ain’t it; rather it’s a portrait of a true American success
story that delves into his troubled relationship with his father, finding the
girl of his dreams and conquering Hollywood, one brilliant logo at a time.
Also in the
cast is legendary film executive Mike Medavoy (who commissioned Joe to design
the Orion Pictures logo) and top Hollywood poster artist Dan Chapman.
"By Design:
The Joe Caroff Story" premiered last night on TCM (North America) and is now available on HBO Max.
The year 1967 marked the high point of Sidney Poitier's screen
career. He starred in three highly acclaimed box office hits: "To Sir,
With Love", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "In the Heat of the
Night". The fact that Poitier did not score a Best Actor Oscar
nomination that year had less to do with societal prejudices (he had
already won an Oscar) than the fact that he was competing with himself
and split the voter's choices for his best performance. "In the Heat of
the Night" did win the Best Picture Oscar and immortalized Poitier's
performance as Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia detective who finds himself
assigned to assist a redneck sheriff (Rod Steiger, who did win
the Oscar that year for his performance in this film) in a town in the
deep south that has experienced a grisly unsolved murder. When Steiger's
character, resentful for having to work with a black man, refers to
Tibbs as "boy" and asks what they call him back in Philadelphia, he
replies "They call me Mister Tibbs!", thereby uttering
what would become one of the cinema's most iconic lines of dialogue. In
the film, Poitier plays Tibbs as a man of mystery. Little is unveiled
about his personal life, which adds immeasurably to his mystique. He
proves to be highly intelligent, logical and courageous, though
refreshingly, not immune from making mistakes and misjudgments. The
reaction to the movie was so good that, Hollywood being Hollywood,
United Artists became convinced that Tibbs could be brought back to star
in a "tentpole" series of crime thrillers. These have previously been released as individual Blu-ray titles by Kino Lorber and they are now available as a double feature set.
First up is the 1970 release, "The Call me MISTER Tibbs!" Aside from
Poitier's commanding presence as the same character, there is virtually
no connection between this Virgil Tibbs and the one seen in the previous
film. The screenplay by Alan Trustman, who wrote the winners "The
Thomas Crown Affair" and "Bullitt", softens the Tibbs character to the
point that he resembles one of those unthreatening TV gumshoes. When we
first see him, he is now in the San Francisco Police Department, though
Trustman doesn't provide even a single line of dialogue to explain how
he got there. He's apparently been there for some time, too, because
Tibbs has suddenly acquired a wife (Barbara McNair) and a young son and
daughter. The movie opens with the brutal murder of a call girl who
lived in a pricey apartment. Evidence points to Tibbs' old friend Logan
Sharpe (Martin Landau), a firebrand street preacher and activist who
enjoys a wide following and who is galvanizing the community to vote in a
politically controversial referendum. Sharpe professes his innocence
and Tibbs sets out to acquit him and find the real killer. The trail
quickly leads to a confusing mix of motley characters and red herrings,
among them Anthony Zerbe and Ed Asner. Poitier is never less than
impressive even when playing a watered-down version of a once gritty
character. However, his impact is diminished by the sappy screenplay
which allocates an abundance of time showing Tibbs dealing with
day-to-day family living. He flirts with his wife and offers life
lessons to his son that border on the extremes of political
incorrectness. When he catches the lad smoking, Tibbs decides to teach
the pre-teen a lesson by inviting him to join him in smoking Churchill
cigars and drinking some scotch. (Most of our dads would probably have
employed methods that were slightly more "conventional".) This domestic
gibberish reduces the character of Tibbs to a big screen version of
Brian Keith's Uncle Bill from the "Family Affair" TV series. Director
Gordon Douglas, normally very underrated, handles the pedantic script in
a pedantic manner, tossing in a few impressive action scenes including
one in which Poitier chases Zerbe on foot seemingly through half of San
Francisco in the movie's best sequence. The scenes between Poitier and
Landau bristle with fine acting but they only share a limited amount of
screen time. Quincy Jones provides a lively, funky jazz score but the
film never rises above the level of mediocrity.
Poitier returned to the screen for the last time as Virgil Tibbs in 1971
in "The Organization". Compared to the previous outing, this one is
superior on most levels. The script by James R. Webb is just as
confusing but there is a grittiness to the production and the character
of Tibbs is toughened up a bit. Thankfully, the scenes of his home life
with wife and kids are kept to a minimum. The film, well directed by Don
Medford (his final production), begins with an inspired caper in which a
group of masked men stage an audacious and elaborate infiltration of an
office building owned by some shady mob characters. They abscond with
millions in cocaine. Tibbs is assigned to the case and is shocked when
the culprits secretly approach him and admit they stole the drugs. Turns
out they are community activists who wanted to prevent the cocaine from
hitting the streets. However, they want Tibbs to know that they did not
commit a murder that occurred on the premises of the office. They claim
someone else did the dirty deed and is trying to pin it on them. Tibbs
believes their story and goes against department protocols by keeping
the information secret from his superiors while he works with the
activists to crack the case. At some point the plot became so tangled
that I gave up trying to figure out who was who and just sat back to
enjoy the mayhem. Tibbs' withholding of information from the police
department backfires on him and he ends up being suspended from the
force. Predictably, he goes rogue in order to take on organized crime
figures who are trying to get the drugs back. "The Organization" is
fairly good Seventies cop fare capped off by a lengthy action sequence
imaginatively set in a subway tunnel that is under construction. The
supporting cast is impressive and includes reliable Sheree North,
scruffy Allen Garfield and up-and-comers Raul Julia, Ron O'Neal and a
very brief appearances by Max Gail and Damon Wilson. Barbara McNair
returns as Mrs. Tibbs but her sole function is to provide attractive
window dressing. Gil Melle provides a hip jazz score.
Both films boast fine transfers but the only bonus features are the original trailers.
This featurette from Turner Classic Movies is a "celebration of song and dance from Hollywood's most iconic Black performers of the 1940s-1950s." Features some marvelous performers displaying some equally marvelous talents.
In his collection of 1997, Who the Devil Made It?: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors,
Peter Bogdanovich, trumpeted that no one in the film industry, “had ever made
good pictures faster or for less money than Edgar Ulmer.What he could do with nothing (occasionally
in the script department as well) remains an object lesson for those directors,
myself included, who complain about tight budgets and schedules.”Bogdanovich, who befriended Ulmer when the
latter was in his seventies, reminded readers the director of such gems as Detour (1945) and The Black Cat (1934) was rarely given more than six-days to shoot
any of his features.
Ulmer was an interesting character, an oft-cited ego-centric
with high aspirations and boundless energy.Indie Hollywood producers found Ulmer a dependable craftsman who made
the most of what he was given – which too often was a pittance.He occasionally made great films.To his credit, he never delivered anything
less than an efficient film.In a 2014 study,
Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the
Margins, biographer Noah Isenberg, conceded his on-set mission of seeking
“clear-cut answers” was futile: Ulmer’s personal and professional life was nothing
if not a bewildering “straddle [of] truth and fiction.”
Though Isenberg exhumed every interview with the director
he could find, he acknowledged one couldn’t “accept without qualification what
Ulmer himself presented as the truth when he was still alive.” According to
film historian Gary D. Rhodes, Robert Clarke, the actor/producer of Beyond the Time Barrier – one of a trio
films included here on Kino’s new Blu ray issue of the Edgar G. Ulmer Sci-Fi Collection - considered the writer-director
“something of a genius, but also a troubled, difficult person.”
Ulmer was, inarguably, partly responsible for some of his
travails.Working at Universal as an art
director and set designer in the early ‘30s, Ulmer was given the opportunity to
direct the studio’s art-deco atmospheric horror The Black Cat with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.But opportunities to helm future pictures for
up-market Hollywood studios were derailed.Though married, Ulmer entered into a scandalous affair with a studio script
supervisor – one already married to the nephew of Universal’s c0-founder, Carl
Laemmle.The retribution for Ulmer’s
affair-of-the-heart was his blacklisting from working at any Hollywood major.But as a filmmaker Ulmer was nothing if not
resilient.He worked for the next
thirty-odd years as a director-for-hire by independent producers and
poverty-row studios.
As Bogdanovich noted, Ulmer was an able craftsman.He was a utilitarian director, successfully
cranking out films in nearly every popular-market genre: westerns, gangster
films, mysteries, adventure yarns - even the occasional comedy.Though the film noir classic Detour might be his greatest achievement,
he is also beloved by fans of classic horror and sci-fi for a string of
engaging pictures.He never approached
films in the horror genre as toss-a-ways, stories unworthy of his talent.Though none of his subsequent horror pictures
would ever match the iconic status anointed to The Black Cat, his occasional dabbles in “fantastic films” were solid
efforts.
Some films were better than others.One especially well done was Bluebeard (1944, featuring John
Carradine).Sometimes the films were
simply off-the-charts exploitation fare as was Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957 with John Agar).His films tended to be, whatever their budgetary
shortcomings, memorable.This new set
from Kino offers fans a trio of his best sci-fi efforts: a well-regarded effort
and two of the last films directed before his departure from the film business.
The “pick” of the set is, arguably, Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X (1951), a very
early entry into the Silver-Age sci-fi film sweepstakes. It’s September 1950 and astronomers are
puzzled by the sudden surfacing of “a strange astronomical phenomenon” which
they describe as “Planet X.”The problem
with Planet X is that its trajectory suggests it might be on a collision course
with earth.The space craft lands
somewhere in the gloomy, foggy moors of Scotland, not too far from the ancient,
spooky watchtower where scientists Dr. Elliot and Dr. Mears (Raymond Bond and
William Schallert, respectively) and journalist Jack Lawrence (Robert Clarke) just
happen to be tracking Planet X’s path.Dr. Elliot’s daughter Enid (Margaret Field) is the unlucky first one to
come face-to-face with the Man from Planet X, describing the alien as having a
“ghastly caricature” of a human face. But now that he’s arrived on earth the
question is why he’s here – and whether he’s friend or foe.
The Man
from Planet X received a modicum of press interest in the
last months of 1950.There were reports writer-producers
Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen’s modest Mid-Century production company was
taking on a David vs. Goliath challenge.They were, after all, competing against a Hollywood big dog studio with
their modest upstart picture.One month
prior to the start of the filming of Planet
X at Culver City’s Hal Roach Studio, Howard Hawk’s production of the iconic
‘50s sci-fi thriller The Thing was
already in mid-production at RKO.Though
tackling the same sort of space-invader subject matter, Planet X was scheduled to be shot – Ulmer-style – in six scant days
with a budget of less than $50,000.As
one Los Angeles daily noted the threadbare budget allotted “wouldn’t rate you a
thing at RKO or any other film factory.”Perhaps not, but the hasty shooting schedule ensured The Man from Planet X would hit cinema
screens long before than The Thing.
The producers of Planet
X didn’t deny they had proceeded with budgetary economic caution since -
they were two of the film’s principal investors and had a lot to lose.“As writers,” Wisberg defended to the L.A.’s Daily News, “we recognized and
anticipated the time and budget limitations in our script in advance and are
now able to cut corners on the set.”One
such frugal measure was their re-using the “standing scenery” left erected of
Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc (1948)
featuring Ingrid Bergman. (Much of the background scenery and effects in the
film are comprised of impressionistic matte paintings and miniatures).
Following the film’s release, Pollexfen conceded while
the film’s script was laden with a lot of scientific jargon, there was probably
more fiction than science embroidered within.For starters, there was never a mention of exactly how far the visitor from Planet X had traveled to get his spaceship
to earth.“We did it on purpose, he
admitted.“If we had mentioned the
distance some 12-year old with a slide rule would prove we were bums.”With its tight, seventy-one minute running
time, The Man from Planet X proves to
be a very serviceable thriller.
The scenario of the second film of this collection, Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) exploitatively
springboards off the popularity of George Pal’s version of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine.The film was scripted by Arthur C. Pierce who
brought us such other 50s and 60s low-budget sci-fi fare as The Cosmic Man (1959), Invasion of the Animal People (1959) and
The Navy vs. the Night Monsters
(1966).I really wasn’t expecting much
from this film, but was surprised that, all things considered, it was actually
a pretty decent futuristic adventure.
On March 5, 1960 Major William Allison (Robert Clarke), a
research test pilot for the USAF, sets off on a jet that will straddle the
border of earth’s atmosphere and outer space.The craft accidentally strafes the speed of light, catapulting Allison
through the time barrier to the Citadel, a fortress protecting the inhabitants
from a mutant population.The non-mutant
population of the Citadel are all deaf and dumb – with the exception of the
grandfatherly supreme leader (Vladimir Sokoloff) and his belligerent Captain (Boyd
Morgan).Most of communication of the residents
of the Citadel is done telepathically – a bit of bad luck for the bewildered
test pilot trying to plot an escape.
Allison learns the year is now (gasp!) 2024.The residents are survivors of a plague
brought on by cosmic radiation from too many nuclear explosions on earth.They are also part of a dying race.There have been no newborns in the Citadel in
twenty-years since the plague left all of the men sterile.Among the last born were the supreme leader’s
granddaughter Trirene (Darlene Tompkins), a nicely-formed ingénue.There’s a sort of cockeyed plan for Trirene
to mate with Allison to promulgate the species.But that idea goes bust when double-crosses and carnage follow in the wake
of the scheming scientists and rampaging mutants.There’s also a bit of a Twilight Zone twist to keep things interesting in the end.Despite the film’s low budget, Ulmer’s
talents in art direction allows the film’s futuristic sets – all triangles,
diamond-shapes and inverted pyramids – to give the film a glossy, moneyed
appearance.
Clocking in a little more than 58 minutes, the final film
of the set, The Amazing Transparent Man
(1960), ties things up in perfunctory fashion – the running time adequate, I
suppose, to tell its slim story.In 1959
the film’s screenwriter, Jack Lewis – whose previous scripting work was mostly
of adventures and westerns – decided to try his hand at writing a
science-fiction tale.His script,
originally titled Search for a Shadow, was
initially picked–up by indie Pacific International Pictures.Ulmer was tapped to direct the film – this
time involving a master safe-cracker who is “sprung from prison by a ring of
international spies.”
The spies are seeking copious amounts of atomic material X-13
so they can develop a ray that will transform an army invisible for the purpose
of military supremacy. To that end Major
Paul Krenner (James Griffith) and Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman) orchestrate
the escape of safe-cracker Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) to – under the cloak of
invisibility - break into the government’s highly protected stores of
fissionable material.Krenner is an
unlikeable sort, manipulative and cold.It’s not clear whether he’s acting on behalf of a secretive U.S. agency
or as a double-agent for a foreign power.
He’s assisted, under duress, by Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan
Triesault), an “eminent nuclear scientist” and developer of the special X-ray
machine that turns both guinea pigs and escaped convicts invisible.Ulof is acutely aware of Krenner’s dark intentions,
but is unable to do anything about it: his reasons for dutifully assisting in the
Major’s schemes becomes evident as the film unspools.In the meantime, Faust incurs Krenner’s
ill-will by enjoying an unsanctioned - but predictable – return to bank robbery
– a side-benefit of his now being invisible.There are a few hand-to-hand combat tussles but little suspense as the
tale unfolds.The story hastily wraps
with Ulof’s breaking of the “third wall” with an earnest morality plea/request.
Lewis’s conjured invisible man/spy-ring scenario was
intriguing but not without precedent.Curt
Siodmak had already written a more successful variant of the idea for Universal
during WWII.That film, Edwin L. Marin’s
Invisible Agent (1942), didn’t cheat
on the special effects as would The
Amazing Transparent Man.Universal’s
especial effects team (including the illustrious John P. Fulton) earned an
Academy Award nomination for their work on this earlier project.The invisibility tricks as provided by
special effects supervisor Roger George in Transparent
Man are passable but not breathtaking.
To be fair, the script would undergo numerous
tweaks.Ulmer and producers John Miller
and Robert L. Madden liked the premise, but were not enamored with the script’s
original title.Lewis reportedly offered
them no fewer than twenty-three alternate titles, the filmmakers initially settling
on The Invisible Invader.But this title too was tossed when Edward L.
Cahn’s Invisible Invaders (1959, with
John Agar and John Carradine) beat them to market.Other titles were bandied about (“The
Invisible Thief,” “The Invisible Gangster”) until the whole “invisible”
campaign was dropped in favor of The
Amazing Transparent Man.Lewis’s
script called for Faust’s character to - intriguingly - cast no shadow even
when not in his invisible state.The
screenwriter contended this element was quickly – and sadly - dropped when the
filmmakers ordered him to “Take out the shadow part.The budget won’t stand all that special
effects work.”
This new Kino Lorber Blu-ray set will obviously be of
great interest to fans of Ulmer and 1950s/early 1960s vintage sci-fi.If you are a fan or collector of commentaries
in particular then this release provides you with a bonanza of them.There are no hoary hack commentators present,
these are folks who know what they’re talking about.The Man
from Planet X features no fewer than three separate commentaries featuring
the likes of Tom Weaver, David Schecter, Dr. Robert J. Kiss, Joe Dante, Gary D.
Rhodes, Richard Harland Smith and Ulmer’s Daughter Arianne Ulmer Cipes.Weaver, Schecter and Rhodes do double-duty on
Beyond the Time Barrier, with David
Del Valle going it alone on The Amazing
Transparent Man.
All three films are presented in their original
black-and-white in 1920 x 1080p with DTS audio, Planet X in 1.37:1 and Time
Barrier and Transparent Man in
1.85:1.The set also features the theatrical
trailers for all three of the films and an option for removable English
sub-titles. The films generally all look great, The Amazing Transparent Man looking a bit soft-focused in parts,
but still better than anything we’ve seen so far of this title.Totally recommended.
Classic movie lovers have long been acquainted with the fact that some of the industry's finest performers of stage and screen perfected their unique styles of acting through their association with The Actors Studio, which has locations in New York and Los Angeles. The roster of alumni reads like a "Who's Who" of Hollywood legends. As the Actors Studio celebrates its 75th anniversary, we reached out to Beau Gravitte, Artistic Director of the New York Studio to get some insights into the Studio's history, mission and legacy.
Cinema
Retro: How was the formation of the Actors Studio inspired by the legendary
Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski?
Beau Gravitte: The
roots of The Actors Studio go back to the Group Theatre (1931-1941) whose work
was inspired by the discoveries of the great Russian actor and director
Konstantin Stanislavski and his best student Eugene Vakhtangov as revealed in
the legendary productions that the Moscow Art Theatre toured in America in
1923. Techniques based on a variety of methods were developed here by Lee
Strasberg from the Stanislavsky System and reformations from the Vakhtangov
acting processes. Within the Studio, actors are free to develop privately
without the glare of commercial pressures. Since its founding in New
York City in 1947 by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Bobby Lewis, The Actors
Studio has become renowned worldwide as ‘the home of method acting.’
CR: Kazan's name remains known to most classic movie lovers. Can you give us a bit of background on the co-founders Bobby
Lewis and Cheryl Crawford?
BG: Bobby Lewis
was an accomplished actor, director, teacher and author. He was an
original member of the famous Group Theatre, and then, in 1947, he became a
co-founder of the Actors Studio, along with Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford. Bobby directed several plays, including, in 1947, the Broadway
production of “Brigadoon.” He later became the Chair of the Yale School
of Drama, in the 1970’s, where he shaped the careers of many successful actors,
including Meryl Streep.
Cheryl Crawford
was the only co-founder of both the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio.
She was a very influential producer, involved in many iconic productions,
including “Awake and Sing,” “Porgy and Bess,” “Brigadoon,” “The Rose Tattoo,”
“Paint Your Wagon,” “Sweet Bird of Youth,” and many others.
A bit of a cipher,
her incisive mind, and her connection to the Broadway pipeline seems to have
been integral to the Studio’s early successes.
Actors Studio legends Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan on the set of the 1954 Oscar winner "On the Waterfront".
(Photo: Columbia Pictures.)
CR: "The
Method" was a new style of acting that tremendous influence on a new
generation of actors, many of whom would go on to gain esteemed reputations.
How would you describe the Method and in what ways did it differ from the
traditional styles of acting?
BG: The “Method”
is simply that - a method, a series of techniques to train the imagination to
respond to imaginary circumstances. Before this, acting was much more
formulaic, exterior, and largely unconnected to anything personal. This
new method taught actors to use their own experiences, their memories, their
subconscious in creating a character.
CR: The Actors Studio
was founded in 1947. Was it an immediate success or did its reputation build
slowly?
BG: By the time
the Actors Studio was created, in 1947, this new kind of work was already
catching on. That same year, “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on
Broadway, and the film in 1951. Word was out - something new was
happening in American acting.
CR: The Actors
Studio is free of any membership charges. Has it always been free for those
artists who are accepted?
BG: Membership at
the Actors Studio is lifetime, and free. And always has been.
CR: Those who studied
at the Studio are said to be given a great deal of latitude in terms of
developing their acting skills. How crucial is the ability to improvise
relevant to a student's ultimate success?
BG: I’m not sure
if “latitude” is the correct word. The Studio is like a gym, for
actors. And like a gym, you have to create your own workout. The
actor shapes whatever exercise they feel they need, so I guess there is
latitude in that. It is a very self-motivated place. And
improvisation is simply another tool at an actor’s disposal.
CR: How and when did
Lee Strasberg become affiliated with the Studio and how can you describe his
influence?
BG: Lee Strasberg
became Artistic Director of the Studio in 1951, at the request of Elia Kazan -
a position he held until his death in 1981. The list of actors that he
trained is simply a “who’s who” of American film and theatre. He was,
undoubtedly, the most influential teacher of acting in American history. And his legacy lives on in the Studio leadership, including presidents Ellen
Burstyn and Al Pacino.
Two more Actors Studio legends, Lee Strasberg and Al Pacino, co-starred in "The Godfather Part II" in 1974. Both actors received Oscar nominations for their performances.
(Photo: Paramount Pictures.)
CR: The Studio
remains relevant today for a new generation of actors who follow in the
footsteps of legends. Can you name some of the more prominent artists who came
to fame after attending the Studio?
BG: This year
marks the 75th year of continuous operation for the Actors Studio. Since
that day in 1947, the members of the Studio have met, twice weekly, to deepen
their understanding and mastery of the craft of acting. That’s pretty
remarkable, for a non-commercial theatrical enterprise, located in the heart of
what is probably the most commercial theatre district in the world. The
Studio continues because of its very high standard of work, and because of the
caliber of artists who make up its membership. Just to name a few:
Bradley Cooper, Melissa Leo, Stephen Lang, Nicholas Braun - all lifetime
members of the Actors Studio.
CR: How would
you describe the continuing mission of the Actors Studio?
BG: The mission of the
Actors Studio is to provide a private, safe place for its members to work, to
stretch, to try things they would not normally be allowed to do - all in the
service of deepening their understanding of the work. As the world
changes, so does the artist, in response. And the Studio is a place
where that focus can evolve - which keeps us relevant in these turbulent times. The Actors Studio is in session, twice a week, every week - hopefully
for the next 75 years, and beyond.
(Special thanks to Brett Oberman.)
(Al Pacino will be appearing at a benefit screening of "Dog Day Afternoon" for the Actors Studio in New York City on October 27. Click here for details.)
Cinema Retro has received the following press release from Time Life:
FROM ELVIS PRESLEY TO THE BEATLES AND THE ROLLING STONES, THE
TEMPTATIONS AND THE SUPREMES, THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW BROADCAST THE MUSIC
REVOLUTION INTO LIVING ROOMS
ACROSS AMERICA…
THIS OCTOBER, TIME LIFE PRESENTS A SPECTACULAR DVD COLLECTOR’S
SET FEATURING TWO DECADES OF HISTORIC MUSIC PERFORMANCES FROM THE
LONGEST-RUNNING AND MOST ICONIC PRIME-TIME VARIETY SHOW IN TELEVISION
HISTORY
ED SULLIVAN’S ROCK & ROLL CLASSICS
Street Date: October 11, 2022
SRP: $119.96
This 10-Disc Collector’s Set Features
128 Live, Uncut Performances from
Legendary Artists Including The Band, The Beach Boys, Bee
Gees, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Herman’s Hermits, Buddy
Holly, The Jackson 5, Janis Joplin, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and
ManyMore!
`
This Incredible Collection Also Includes Never-Before-Released
Full Interviews from The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll Documentary Series,
a 36-page Collector’s Book and The All-Star Comedy Special,
a Bonus DVD Which Features Performances from Top Comedians on The
Ed Sullivan Show including George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Phyllis
Diller, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Flip Wilson and More!
Fairfax, VA (September 7, 2022) –
From the late ‘50s through the early ’70s -- families across America
gathered around their television every Sunday night to watch The Ed
Sullivan Show. And while the country and its music underwent an
enormous evolution over the course of those years, the show not only kept
up with the times, but it informed them -- evidenced by the wide variety of
acts fortunate enough to perform live on the stage of Studio 50. From
slick-haired snarlers to soulful singing groups to rebellious rockers from
across the Atlantic, Ed Sullivan’s musical guests were a who’s who of the
era’s popular culture. And today, they’re regarded as some of the greatest
artists of all time. The long and winding road of music history is full of
forks, but from the 1950s through the early ’70s, one stop was essential: The
Ed Sullivan Show.
This October, the acclaimed TV DVD archivists at Time Life
invite music lovers and classic TV aficionados to experience the excitement
of these once-in-a-lifetime performances in one spectacular DVD collection:
ED SULLIVAN’S ROCK & ROLL CLASSICS. From rock ‘n’ roll legends
to shimmering soul superstars, The British Invasion to Folk Rock,
psychedelic pop, and so much more, Ed Sullivan showcased them all on his
Sunday Night variety show, week after unforgettable week. This set
brings the very best of these performances together in one memorable
10-disc set, featuring 128 live, uncut performances from the greatest
performers and musical icons of the 20th century including The Beatles, The
Rolling Stones, Elvis, The Supremes and so many more. This special DVD
collection will be available to add to every home entertainment library for
$119.96.
Sullivan filled his weekly showcase with something for
everyone, and he was so successful at it that he became America's most
respected and powerful cultural arbiter. Probably best remembered for
introducing America to Elvis Presley across three appearances in the mid-1950s,
and the Beatles’ earth-shattering appearances less than a decade later,
Sullivan had an uncanny ability to spot top-notch talent and feature them
on his show. The performances on this set include chart-toppers and
all-time classics such as (in alphabetical order):
Bee Gees:
“Words”
Buddy Holly:
“Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day”
Creedence
Clearwater Revival: “Proud Mary,” “Down on the Corner”
Dusty
Springfield: “Son of a Preacher Man”
Elvis
Presley: “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” “Too Much,” “Ready Teddy,”
“Don’t Be Cruel”
Gladys
Knight & the Pips: “If I Were Your Woman”
Herman’s
Hermits: “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely
Daughter”
Janis
Joplin: “Maybe,” “Raise Your Hand”
Jerry Lee
Lewis: “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” “What I’d Say”
Neil
Diamond: “Sweet Caroline (Good Times Never Seemed So Good)”
Sly &
the Family Stone: “Dance to the Music”
Smokey
Robinson & The Miracles: “I Second That Emotion,” “Doggone Right”
Stevie
Wonder: “Fingertips – Pt. 2,” “For Once in My Life,” “You Met Your
Match”
The Animals:
“Don’t Bring Me Down,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “The House of
the Rising Sun”
The Band:
“Up on Cripple Creek”
The Beach
Boys: “I Get Around,” “Good Vibrations”
The Beatles:
“Help!,” “She Loves You,” “Twist and Shout,” “I Want to Hold Your
Hand”
The Byrds:
“Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” “Mr. Tambourine
Man”
The Ike
& Tina Turner Review: “Proud Mary,” “Bold Soul Sister”
The Jackson
5: “I Want You Back,” “The Love You Save”
The Mamas
& The Papas: “Monday, Monday,” “California Dreamin’,” “Dedicated
to the One I Love”
The Rolling
Stones: “Paint it, Black,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction,” “Time is on My Side”
The
Supremes: “My World is Empty Without You,” “The Happening,” “Someday
We’ll be Together,” “Love is Like an Itching in My Heart,” “You Can’t
Hurry Love”
The Young
Rascals: “Groovin’,” “Good Lovin’”
Tom Jones: “It’s
Not Unusual,” “Delilah”
And many
more!
Aside from these legendary performances, ED SULLIVAN’S ROCK
& ROLL CLASSICS also features never-before-released full interviews
from The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll documentary series,
including David Crosby, Felix Cavaliere, Gladys Knight, James Brown, Jerry
Lee Lewis, Michelle Phillips, Peter Noone, Roger McGuinn and more, a
collectible, full-color 36-page booklet, packed with archival photos and
fascinating facts, along with The All-Star Comedy Special, a free bonus
DVD which includes performances by the top comedians on The Ed
Sullivan Show including Alan King, Flip Wilson, George Carlin,
Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, Rich Little, Richard Pryor, Rodney Dangerfield
and many more.
ED SULLIVAN’S ROCK & ROLL CLASSICS is like taking a ride
in an unforgettable time machine, zapping you back to the past for front
row seats to live performances from a mind-blowing collection of musical
legends in a singular set as only Time Life can assemble!
About Time Life
Time Life is one of the world's pre-eminent creators and
direct marketers of unique music and video/DVD products, specializing in
distinctive multi-media collections that evoke memories of yesterday,
capture the spirit of today, and can be enjoyed for a lifetime. TIME LIFE
and the TIME LIFE logo are registered trademarks of Time Warner Inc. and
affiliated companies used under license by Direct Holdings Americas Inc.,
which is not affiliated with Time Warner Inc. or Time Inc.
About SOFA Entertainment
In 1990, Andrew Solt founded SOFA Entertainment Inc. and
acquired The Ed Sullivan Show from the Sullivan family. In 2020 Josh Solt
left Google to lead SOFA as CEO of the company. The Ed Sullivan Show is the
most revered variety show in American television history. SOFA
Entertainment is the copyright holder of the original Ed Sullivan programs
and over 150 hours of newly created programming.
Six-time, undefeated world karate champion
Chuck Norris made his film debut in 1972’s Way
of the Dragon; a marvelous movie in which Norris played a villainous
character who battled the immortal Bruce Lee in a scene that is now considered
to be one ofthe greatest cinematic
fights of all time. In 1974, Norris did another villainous turn in the low-budget
martial arts film Slaughter in San
Francisco by portraying a powerful drug lord. He would then go on to
headline 1977’s Breaker! Breaker!
wherein he played the hero for the first time. When the higher budgeted and
more ambitious Good Guys Wear Black
was released the following year, it scored big and suddenly everyone took
notice of this rising new talent.
Vietnam vet John T. Booker (Norris) is now a
political science professor at UCLA who gets wind of the fact that someone very
powerful is killing off the remaining members of his old Special Forces team,
the Black Tigers. With the help of a young reporter named Margaret (Anne
Archer), Booker attempts to find out who’s responsible for the slaughter while
simultaneously trying to stay alive.
Very well-directed by Ted Post, Good Guys Wear Black was written by
Bruce Cohn and Mark Medoff (from a story by Joseph Fraley),and released by
American Cinema Releasing on June 2, 1978. The entertaining action film, which Norris
considers his breakthrough movie, is a post-Watergate/ post-Vietnam story, but,
in some spots, also feels very much like a James Bond film.
Much has been said about Norris’s performance
in this film. Norris himself doesn’t love his acting in this one. After Good Guys was released, Steve McQueen,
who was one of Norris’s karate students at the time, told the rising star that
it would be better if, from now on, he let some of the character actors handle
the heavy exposition while, much like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, Chuck
only uttered the most important lines. Great advice, but still, I don’t think Norris’s
performance in this film is nearly as bad as everyone has said and he has nothing
to be ashamed of. If you watch his movies in order of release, you will see an
actor who worked hard on his craft and improved with each film.
To help support Norris in this early film
effort, the filmmakers cast Good Guys
Wear Black with an amazing array of acting talent the likes of Anne Archer,
James Franciscus, Lloyd Haynes, Dana Andrews, Jim Backus, Lawrence P. Casey and
Soon-Tek Oh (who would later appear in two more Chuck Norris films). The film
also features 9th degree black belt Pat E. Johnson, the first screen
appearance of Chuck’s brother (and fight choreographer) Aaron Norris, and a
cool musical score by composer Craig Safan.
Good Guys Wear Black has been released on
Blu-ray in anamorphic (1.85:1) widescreen from a brand new 2K transfer. The Region
1 disc also contains an interesting audio commentary by action film historians Mike
Leeder and Arne Venema, the featurette “The Making of Good Guys Wear Black”, an interview with director Ted Post, the
original theatrical trailer, reversible sleeve artwork, TV spot and several radio spots. There are also
trailers for five other Chuck Norris films as well as the trailer for Narrow Margin which stars Anne Archer.
Australia-based ViaVision's Imprint video line is taking pre-orders for a limited edition (1500) Blu-ray release of "The Avengers: The Emma Peel Collection".The set will be released on 30 November.
This set is Region-Free, which is good news for fans worldwide.
Here is the relevant information:
Number of Blu-ray
Discs
16
Rating
PG
Release Date
30
November 2022
Runtime (in
minutes)
2255
Product Code
IMP3065
Mrs.
Peel… We’re needed!
Extraordinary
crimes against the people and the state have to be avenged by agents
extraordinary. Two such people are John Steed, top professional, and his
partner, Emma Peel, talented amateur. Otherwise known as The Avengers.
With lethal bowler hat and umbrella, killer fashion and kung fu, the secret
agents investigate bizarre and colourful adventures with nonchalant efficiency,
sophistication and charm.
Whilst
every era of the long-running, enduringly popular and trend-setting British
series has its own unique style, charm and wit, it is the Emma Peel years that
have become the programme’s most iconic and recognisable, with Diana Rigg’s
portrayal of Mrs. Emma Peel ushering in a new era of excitement, fashion and
iconology, coupled with Patrick Macnee’s continuing depiction of the urbane and
sublime John Steed.
Now,
this 16-disc Blu Ray set brings together every episode from the Emma Peel era
in stunning high-definition encompassing the complete Series 4 and 5, plus a
copious collection of vintage and new Special Features celebrating this peak
era of The Avengers.
Special
Features and Technical Specs:
1080p
high-definition presentation from the original 35mm elements
Collectable
double-sided Hardbox packaging LIMITED to 1500 copies
120-page booklet
featuring essay by Dick Fiddy of the British Film Institute and Story
Information for every episode taken from the original studio files
Original ‘as
broadcast’ mono audio tracks (LPCM)
Original ‘as
broadcast’ “The Avengers in Color” opening slate on Series 5 episodes
Audio Commentary
on “The Town of No Return” by producer / writer Brian Clemens and director
Roy Ward Baker
Audio Commentary
on “The Master Minds” by writer Robert Banks Stewart
Audio Commentary
on “Dial A Deadly Number” by writer Roger Marshall
Audio Commentary
on “The Hour That Never Was” by director Gerry O’Hara
Audio Commentary
on “The House That Jack Built” by director Don Leaver
Audio Commentary
on “The Winged Avenger” by writer Richard Harris
Audio Commentary
on “Epic” by guest actor Peter Wyngarde
NEW Audio
Commentary on “The Joker” by filmmakers Sam Clemens and George Clemens
(sons of writer/producer Brian Clemens) (2022)
Audio Commentary
on “Return of The Cybernauts” by Diana Rigg’s stunt-double Cyd Child
Audio Commentary
on “Murdersville” by producer / writer Brian Clemens
Filmed
introductions to eight Series 5 episodes by producer / writer Brian
Clemens
Filmed
introduction to “The ?50,000 Breakfast” by guest actress Anneke Wills
Brief audio
recollection from guest actor Francis Matthews on filming “The Thirteenth
Hole”
“THE AVENGERS
AT 50” – Footage captured from the 50th anniversary celebration
of the series, held at Chichester University in 2011. Includes: video
message from Patrick Macnee, interviews with producer / writer Brian
Clemens, director Don Leaver (never before released), director Gerry
O’Hara (never before released), stunt co-ordinator Raymond Austin, guest
actress Carol Cleveland, guest actress Anneke Wills, writer Roger
Marshall, and Patrick Macnee’s biographer Marie Cameron
“Dame Diana Rigg
at the BFI” – 2015 on-stage interview and Q&A held at the British Film
Institute in London to celebrate 50 years of Emma Peel
“The Series Of
No Return” – audio interview with actress Elizabeth Shepherd, who was
originally cast as Emma Peel
Granada Plus
Points featuring actor Patrick Macnee, composer Laurie Johnson, writer
Roger Marshall and stunt-double Cyd Child
Bonus Series 6
episode “The Forget-Me-Knot” – Emma Peel’s final story and the
introduction of Tara King
“K Is For Kill”
– excerpt from The New Avengers episode featuring appearances by
Emma Peel
ARCHIVAL
MATERIAL
Armchair Theatre episode “The
Hothouse” starring Diana Rigg (the performance that led to Rigg’s casting
as Emma Peel in The Avengers
Chessboard
Opening Title sequence used on US broadcasts for Series 4
German and
French title sequences
Series 4 UK
Commercial Break Bumper slates
Alternative
titles / credits / end tag of select Series 4 episodes
Series 4
Commercial Break Bumpers
Production trims
from select Series 5 episodes
“The Strange
Case Of The Missing Corpse” – Series 5 teaser film
German
television interview with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg by Joachim
Fuchsberger
Colourisation
test footage for “Death At Bargain Prices” and “A Touch Of Brimstone”
Reconstructed
John Stamp Series 4 trailer
“They’re Back”
Trailers, Series 5 Trailer and Series 5 German Cinema Trailer
Extensive Photo
Galleries from the studio archives
1973 Interview
with Diana Rigg discussing her US sitcom Diana, and leaving The
Avengers
Original Aspect
Ratio 1.33:1, b&w / colour
Audio English
LPCM 2.0 Mono
English
subtitles for the Hard of Hearing (Series 4 & 5 episodes only)
BONUS
DISC 1: ADDITIONAL SPECIAL FEATURES
More interviews
from “THE AVENGERS AT 50” including composer Laurie Johnson, writer
and guest actor Jeremy Burnham, stunt-double Cyd Child, and a
screenwriters’ panel discussion featuring Brian Clemens, Richard Harris,
Richard Bates and Terrance Dicks
“Brian Clemens
In Conversation” – on-stage interview at the British Film Institute in
London discussing his early writing career
Extensive Photo
Gallery from The Avengers Fashion Show
Diana Rigg Photo
Gallery
BONUS
DISC 2: THE ORIGINAL EPISODES FILE
Featuring the 4
original episodes from the Cathy Gale era of the series which were remade
in Series 5: “Death Of A Great Dane”, “Don’t Look Behind You”, “Dressed To
Kill” and “The Charmers” (Standard Definition)
Audio Commentary
by writer Roger Marshall on “Death Of A Great Dane”
Audio Commentary
by actress Honor Blackman and UK presenter Paul O’Grady on “Don’t Look
Behind You”
Filmed
introduction by Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman to “Don’t Look Behind
You”
“Tunnel Of Fear”
– a full-length, previously lost episode from Series 1, recovered in 2016
“THE AVENGERS
AT 50” – interview with Honor Blackman by Paul O’Grady
Writer/Producer Mark Cerulli with the homicidal “Ruby Rose” (Matthew Lucero). (Photo copyright Mark Cerulli).
(Cinema Retro's Mark Cerulli provides an update on his initial report that took readers inside the making of an indie horror film.)
By Mark Cerulli
My
first Cinema Retro report was just after we had wrapped our first shoot for Area
5150, a sci-fi/horror comedy I co-wrote with director Sean Haitz.It was 6 days filled with
warmth, laughter and moments of terror in the high desert outside Palm Springs,
California.But we got it done, movie in
the can, premiere on the horizon, right?
Not
so fast.
Haitz,
an intense storyteller (who also fronts a rock band), wanted to do a “Cold
Opening” to the film, launching the audience right into the action.He had a vision of a terrified young woman,
babbling in a foreign language, running down a deserted highway, trying to get
away from… something.Several
weeks later, damn if Sean didn’t have Kati Rausch, a young Finnish actress,
running down an empty highway in a bloody hospital gown at 7 AM on a
Sunday.She gets recaptured – ‘natch - and
then we meet our villain, Dr. Izar (an amazing character actor named Jed Rowen)
in a prison cell that would have done Hannibal Lecter proud.
Director Sean Haitz lining up a shot in Morongo Valley, CA.
(Photo copyright Sean Haitz.)
A
few months later Sean landed Felissa Rose – the “it girl” of Sleepaway Camp,
now a well-known genre star with over 100 credits including Victor Crowley,
Terrifier 2 and the upcoming Dark Circles.We had her for only one day, so Sean and I pounded
out some scenes where she played a crazy desert rat mom with two feral kids – local
desert residents who brought a menagerie with them including a tarantula,
snakes and scorpions!(In a very un-Bondian
manner, this writer declined the opportunity to have the tarantula crawl up his
arm.) Felissa went all out and delivered an outstanding performance, getting
applause from the sleep-deprived crew.
“No thanks, kid.” writer/producer Mark Cerulli with a cast member and her pet Tarantula. (Photo copyright Mark Cerulli).
That’s
a wrap, right?Well… we realized the
film needed more.In came a
brilliant young producer named Ryan James who had us write some
character-building scenes and stayed on for the duration.The entire cast was brought back for a new
shoot in March ’22.Like the previous year, we made use of every last
minute of daylight, especially during the fabled “Golden Hour” which seemed to
go by in minutes. Once again, we shot
scenes in an abandoned crack house – now even MORE vandalized than on our
previous shoot.Somehow, we managed to
get our new scenes shot both in the desert and in a soundstage in LA that had
very realistic standing sets which we used for the interiors of Area 51.
There
is still more to do – a few more scenes (possibly with an iconic genre actor)
and Sean has an epic attack on Area 51 by our lead mutant, Ruby Rose in mind.
There’s also hiring a skilled editor and funding the maze of post-production –
mixing, scoring, color correcting, etc.But we’re getting there…
For more on Area 5150 or to get involved on the
film, click here.
The year 1979 was a good one for vampires, cinematically speaking. John Badham's version of "Dracula" premiered starring Frank Langella in the film version of his Broadway hit, George Hamilton had a surprise success with the spoof "Love At First Bite" and German director Werner Herzog unveiled his remake of the classic German silent horror movie "Nosferatu: The Vampyre". The original version by director F.W. Murnau is still regarded by many as the greatest horror movie ever made. Indeed, the mere sight of the film's star Max Schreck (who was as eerie in real life as he was on screen) is enough to give you nightmares. Herzog's version was not only the best of the vampire films released in 1979, it is a fitting homage to the Murnau classic. Working with a relatively extravagant budget, Herzog produced a film that is eerie and unsettling. He refrains from going for quick shocks, relying instead on the overall unnerving atmosphere that resonates throughout the production. Perhaps the most iconic aspect of the film is Klaus Kinski's remarkable resemblance to the character played in the original by Schreck, who embodied what is perhaps the most unnerving movie monster of all time. Kinski's appearance mirrors that of Schreck but the actor brings his own persona to the role.
The film, based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, opens with Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) leading an idyllic life with his beautiful young wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani). His boss, Renfield (Roland Topor), induces him to make an arduous journey to Transylvania to visit the eccentric but rich Count Dracula, who has expressed interest in buying a house in Harker's town. Harker is enthused about the mission because of the financial rewards but Lucy has a premonition that the journey will have disastrous consequences. She pleads with him not to go but to no avail. Harker sets off over mountain roads that lead through deep forests. The nearer he gets to the Count's castle the more unnerved the local peasants are. They blatantly warn him to turn back, citing eerie disappearances and deaths associated with Dracula. Harker dismisses their concerns as the superstitions of unsophisticated people. However, upon arrival at Dracula's castle he immediately has second thoughts. The Count is a corpse-like, sinewy figure with almost impossibly long fingernails who talks in a whispery voice that is more menacing than comforting. In the cold dank castle, Dracula serves Harker a meal then becomes obsessed with sucking the blood from a small cut Harker has suffered from a kitchen knife. The Count assures him that's all just a homespun way of treating the wound. Harker, increasingly unnerved, realizes he has made a mistake in visiting the castle but it's too late to escape. Dracula notices a locket with Lucy's photograph in it and makes inquiries about her, much to Harker's distress. In the morning, Harker awakens to find he has been imprisoned in the castle- and worse, he has been the victim of a vampire. Having arranged the sale of the house to Dracula, he realizes he is in a race against time to return to his village before the Count arrives there. He is desperately ill, however, and fails in his quest. Meanwhile, Dracula has stowed away inside a coffin on board a cargo ship headed towards the town of his destination. Along the way, crew members begin to die mysteriously. By the time the vessel arrives in port, it is a ghost ship, devoid of any human life with only the captain's log hinting at the horror he has witnessed. Accompanying Dracula on board the ship were thousands of rats who now run amok in the town, spreading the plague. Harker is returned to Lucy by some kindly peasants, but he is very ill and in a zombie-like condition. Lucy is then threatened by the appearance of Dracula in her own bedroom and she realizes that the town is being victimized by a vampire, though no one believes her. As the plague takes its toll on the citizenry, the town falls into chaos- and Lucy becomes determined to kill Dracula even if she must do so by herself.
Herzog, who also wrote the screenplay, has fashioned a film that oozes menace to the extent that even before the appearance of Dracula, the movie has a sense of foreboding. It is a rather cold and emotionless film, more visually interesting than moving. Herzog seems to intentionally present his protagonists in a dispassionate manner. He provides cursory details of their lives but seems to be far more interested in making almost every frame a work of art. To a great degree he succeeded. There are images in Nosferatu that will haunt the viewer, but there's no getting around the fact that there isn't anyone the audience can truly relate to. Neither Harker or Lucy are ever seen as anything more than one dimensional characters. The silly eccentric Renfield is largely wasted in the latter part of the story. He does become a servant of Dracula but this plot device is disposed of rather quickly. Prof. Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast), who is generally presented as the hero in Dracula films, is shown here to be a half-senile old fool who realizes too late that a vampire may be running amok. Herzog provides plenty of memorable moments, among which are scenes of the town's rapid decay into death and disaster because of the plague. As Lucy walks through the town square, she witnesses doomed people acting out their final fantasies, whether it is indulging in a last sumptuous feast, dancing wildly or illogically stealing furniture from vacant stores. Composer Popul Vuh provides an appropriately eerie score throughout.
Herzog's Nosferatu is a poetic experience in many ways. It's leisurely pace and low-key tone make it one of the more unusual horror films you'll ever see. However, it can be deemed a success by virtue of the fact that he and Kinski brought relevancy to this remake of what many people believe is the greatest German film ever made.
The excellent Shout! Factory Blu-ray features both the German and English language versions of the film and a commentary track by Herzog, whose soothing, rather monotonous tone becomes somewhat mesmerizing. He provides interesting insights into the making of the film and this is complimented by the inclusion of a vintage "making of" production short that shows fascinating footage of Herzog and Kinski during production, including Kinski's rather arduous daily makeup sessions. Also included is a photo gallery showing great behind the scenes shots of Herzog at work. There are also a selection of superbly designed original trailers that truly convey the menace of the titular character.
Kino Lorber has releaseda Blu-ray edition of "The
Secret War of Harry Frigg", a long overlooked and largely forgotten 1968
WWII comedy starring Paul Newman. The film''s release was sandwiched in
Newman's career during a particularly productive time following the
releases of "Cool Hand Luke" (which gained him an Oscar nomination), the
critically acclaimed western "Hombre", his directorial debut with
"Rachel, Rachel" (4 Oscar nominations) and his mega-hit "Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid". "Frigg" is a completely lightweight affair done
on the cheap with California locations substituting for Italy. The film
casts Newman in his trademark role as an anti-Establishment wiseguy.
When we first see him, he's a lowly private serving in Italy at the
height of the Allied invasion. Frigg is a malcontent whose rebellious
nature results in him spending most of his time in the brig. He's gained
a reputation as an escape artist but never succeeds in staying free for
very long. Frigg is summoned to meet General Homer Prentiss (James
Gregory), who offers him an audacious deal. Seems that five Allied
generals were captured by Italian troops in a Turkish bath. The Allies
can't afford them to be interrogated for long and Prentiss wants Frigg
to parachute behind enemy lines posing as a general in the hopes that
he, too, will be captured. The scheme is to have Frigg imprisoned with
the other generals and then develop an escape plan for all of them.
Frigg agrees after working out some perks he will get from carrying out
the high-risk plot. Upon landing in Italy, he is summarily captured as
planned. He is taken to a lavish country villa where the other generals
are being held. Frigg is pleasantly surprised to find that the Italian
officer who serves as a warden, Col. Ferrucci (Vito Scotti), is a
likeable, charming man who treats his prisoners as honored guests and
lavishes them with amenities. Still, the real generals impose upon
Frigg, who they think is their superior officer, to orchestrate an
escape plan. However, Frigg becomes accustomed to Ferrucci's constant
supply of gourmet food, fine wine and expensive cigars. He is even more
enamored when he meets the owner of the villa, a beautiful countess
named Francesca (Sylva Koscina). Frigg discovers a secret passageway
that leads outside the compound but which also conveniently goes into
Francesca's bedroom. Before long, he's also enjoying plenty of sexual
perks. By the time Frigg is motivated to actually plan an escape, it's
too late. A German officer (Werner Peters) arrives at the villa to
announce that Italy has just surrendered and that German troops will now
occupy positions formally held by Italian troops. He summarily takes
charge of the prisoners and also arrests the hapless Ferrucci, who
ironically had just been promoted to the rank of general. The group is
taken from luxurious surroundings to a harsh prison camp where they are
monitored constantly and deterred from escape by an electrified fence
and a mine field. Nevertheless, Frigg is unfazed and sets about planning
his most ambitious escape.
"The Secret War of Harry Frigg" was directed by Jack Smight, a competent
if workman-like director whose best film was the 1966 crime flick
"Harper" which starred Paul Newman in one of his signature roles. Alas,
their reunion doesn't present the same kind of payoff the first movie
did. Aside from a weak screenplay, much of the blame for the film's
failure to work lies with Newman himself. Instead of playing Frigg as a
sophisticated con man, Newman portrays him as a blue collar simpleton
from New Jersey whose only talents are conning the military brass and
seducing women. The role of a virtual idiot does not suit Newman well.
He was able to play a rough-around-the-edges protagonist as boxer Rocky
Graziano in the 1956 film "Somebody Up There Likes Me" because the
character wasn't cartoonish. By 1968, however, Newman was an iconic
screen presence and it was simply impossible to accept him as a lovable
moron. The first half of the movie is pretty tepid but the second
chapter improves significantly when Frigg and his companions are
imprisoned by the Germans. With Newman giving a rare dud performance,
the supporting cast carries the show and fortunately it includes some
first rate second bananas: Charles Gray, John Williams, Tom Bosley and
Andrew Duggan among them. The scene stealers are Vito Scotti and Werner
Peters, both of whom deliver deft comedic performances. Sylva Koscina,
one of the most charming Italian imports to Hollywood during this
period, is largely used as window dressing and her character's reunion
with Frigg at the film's finale seems as forced as it is absurd. "Frigg"
is not without its modest pleasures but it never reaches the genuine
laughter level found in the average episode of the similarly-themed
"Hogan's Heroes".
The Kino Lorber Blu-ray is a vast improvement over Universal's previous bare bones DVD release. It includes a fun commentary track by film historians by Nat Segaloff and Daniel Kremer as well as the original trailer.
In the 1960s,
Hollywood studios were ingenious in retooling foreign B-movies for American
drive-ins and double-feature bills.For a perfect case study in their techniques, you would have to look no further
than “Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World,” which American-International
Pictures released here in 1962.The
original Italian version was called “Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan,” or
“Maciste in the Court of the Great Khan” (1961), directed by Riccardo Freda.To some extent, it was already
made-to-order for small-town U.S. ticket-buyers.The star, Gordon Scott, was
well known from his iconic role as Tarzan in five popular films from 1955 to
1960.His co-star, the
French-born Japanese actress Yoko Tani, had recently been top-billed in “The
Savage Innocents” (1960), “First Spaceship on Venus” (1961), and “Marco Polo”
(1962).Moreover,
although critically scorned, strongman epics like this one had a reliable
market among eleven-year-olds and undemanding adults.On the other hand, although
beloved in Italy, the character “Maciste” had no brand-name value on these
shores, and at 98 minutes, the film was too long to fit into its designated
position as half of a thrifty double-feature.No problem.As it had done in acquiring an
earlier Maciste production, known here as “Son of Samson,” AIP substituted
“Samson” for “Maciste,” and replaced the original title with one more likely to
resonate on drive-in marquees.Twenty-two
minutes of footage were removed, eliminating some colorful but tedious back
story, and a pulpy, dramatic lobby poster was commissioned.The graphics were classic.As a muscular, loin-clothed
Gordon Scott pushes over a pillar, a winsome beauty in a harem costume watches.
The girl looks only vaguely Asian and not at all like Yoko Tani.
In the film, Samson
turns up in medieval China where the Mongols have taken over the royal court.The young Chinese prince Tai
Sung is emperor in name only, and his sister Lei-ling has been banished to a
Buddhist convent.The
real power behind the throne is Garak, the tyrannical Great Khan of the
Mongols, who rules as regent, with ruthlessly astute guidance from his mistress
Liu Tai.When rebellious
Chinese peasants mount a feeble resistance, Garak decides it’s time to up his
game.Tai Sung will
“accidentally” die during a tiger hunt, and Mongol soldiers masquerading as
rebels will attack the Buddhist convent and kill the princess.Enter Samson to rescue the
prince from the tiger (as Scott gamely wrestles with an actual, drugged tiger
in some shots, and with a life-sized, stuffed replica in others), while
Lei-ling escapes the massacre at the convent and finds refuge with the freedom
fighters.If this sounds
like the usual playbook for the Samson, Hercules, and Goliath epics of the
1960s, it could also describe any of the “Star Wars” movies.Ditch the tiger, insert a
Wampa or a Rancor instead.George
Lucas’ original trilogies and their sequels from Disney may be more to the
tastes of modern audiences but they’re just as simplistic at heart, when you
come right down to it.
A new Blu-ray edition
from Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents the movie in both its original,
98-minute Italian version and its 76-minute AIP edit, both in the widescreen
2.35:1 format.One
caveat: purists may be disappointed by the soundtrack for the Italian version.It’s an intermediate
English-language track where the hero is still called “Maciste,” perhaps from
the 1964 U.K. release, and not the original Italian voice track.Opening and closing credits
for the AIP edit are inserted from what appears to be an old VHS or television
print.In either version,
attention should be paid to Hélène Chanel as the Khan’s mistress Liu Tai.We may commend the Italians
for casting Yoko Tani as the captive princess Lei-ling at a time when it was
rare to find Asian characters actually played by Asian actors in prominent
roles, but Chanel has the more dynamic female role, and she makes the most of
it with her slinky costumes and icy beauty.The AIP edit features audio
commentary from Tim Lucas, who unpacks a bounty of information about the film
in both iterations.Helpfully
for those of us who might be hard-pressed to identify any of the miracles
promised by American-International, he lists all seven.
The Kino Lorber
Blu-ray also features captions for the deaf and hearing impaired, several
trailers (although oddly, none for “Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World”
itself), and a reversible sleeve.The wonderful AIP poster art appears on one side, and alternative art
from the Italian poster on the other.
Singer/actress Olivia Newton-John has passed away peacefully at her home at age 73, according to a statement from her family. Newton-John was British by birth but her family moved to Australia when she was five years old and rose to international fame there. Her talents were noticed when she performed in high school and she would go on to become an iconic international pop singer. In 1978, she made her screen debut opposite John Travolta in the blockbuster big screen adaptation of the stage musical "Grease". Other film roles would follow, but it was her singing career that never waned. Over the decades, she would sell over 100 million albums. In 1992, Newton-John was diagnosed with breast cancer. She became a symbol of hope by going public with her struggle and raising many millions of dollars to combat the disease. The cancer would reoccur two more times over the years. For more about her life and career, click here.
There will be an official James Bond concert held at the Royal Albert Hall on 4 October. Here is the press statement:
Celebrate 60
years of the James Bond film franchise with a charity concert that will
showcase the iconic music of Bond, headlined by the legendary Dame Shirley Bassey.
Curated by
five-time Bond composer David
Arnold and produced by EON Productions,
the concert will feature Bond soundtrack artists including Garbage, as well as
special guests including Celeste,
putting their own interpretation on classic theme songs, backed by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra,
conducted by Nicholas
Dodd.
The date
marks the anniversary of the world premiere of the first 007 film, Dr. No held on 5 October
1962.
Author
and film historian Dana Polan has
recently written a book titled Dreams of
Flight: ‘The Great Escape’ in American Film and Culture that analyzes
director John Sturges’ WWII classic. Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief Lee Pfeiffer conducted this interview with
Polan regarding his book.
Q:Tell us about your book overall:
Dana Polan: Combining unique
archival research, close analysis, and first-person accounts by viewers, Dreams
of Flight traces multiple histories around the 1963 POW classic The
Great Escape: production history of the film itself but also the history of
the original event (an actual breakout in 1944 that led to the successful
escape of three men, recapture of seventy-three with fifty of those summarily
executed on Hitler’s orders), as well as the trajectory of POW Paul Brickhill’s
written account as it evolved into the bestselling page-turner book The
Great Escape. I also chronicle my own viewing history of the film, starting
as a Sixties adolescent, along with accounts by other viewers who also saw the
film around then and found that its blend of the buoyant and the downbeat
stayed with them over the years. I had long wanted to revisit the film, ever
since first seeing and being so strongly impacted by it. I feel so lucky to
have been given the chance to engage with the film in a book-length study that
could go into much detail about the film and its reception history.
Q:When and where did you first see the film?
DP: I wish I could be
more precise about the exact date but I started researching and writing the
book during Covid quarantine and that limited a wee bit of my research. I know
I saw it at my town’s one drive-in and it was likely about 1965 since that is
when we moved to the area. If so, I would have been 13 years old or so, and it
would have been a re-release. I’d have loved to track down microfilm copies of
the local newspaper to see the dates the film was playing and also to determine
if it was on a double-bill or not. The Great Escape is a long film but
our drive-in generally showed two films and I imagine would only have had one
presentation per night of the double-bill. Although The Great Escape was
not road-showed in its original release in 1963 — no symphonic overture over a
static opening title, no intermission, and so on — I persist in thinking there
was a break half-way through so viewers could be encouraged to go to the
concession stand. In fact, the film has a logical place for a pause just at the
halfway mark — when the first character we care about gets killed and the hitherto
individualist Hilts (Steve McQueen) declares his commitment to the collective
cause of escape. There’s a consequential fade-out and then fade-in as the POWs
resolutely return to their cause. If indeed the drive-in showed The Great
Escape on a double-bill, that would have made for a long evening, and the
intermission might have been essential for concession-stand sales.
An
amusing anecdotal detail: I was away for the weekend when the film opened at
the drive-in and my mom and stepdad went without me on Saturday evening
to see it. I had desperately been wanting to see it as, as I’ll explain in a
moment, it seemed to promise exactly that sort of action entertainment I loved
as a kid. When I got home by Sunday, I was so distraught that they hadn’t
waited that my stepdad ended up having to take me that evening and sat through
this long epic a second time in two days. He dozed off here or there while I
was enthralled by every moment of the film even as I ultimately found it very
disturbing.
Q:What impressed you most about it?
DP: Like, I imagine,
many young American boys of the time, I went to the film for the gungho promise
of its canonic poster, “The great adventure, the great entertainment, the great
escape.” Instead, I was blown away by a narrative that seemed to me to be a
deflation of adventure — a transformation of rousing entertainment into
something questioning and quite bleak.
The
Great Escape’s
downbeat turn from a fun romp into fatalism left a lasting impression on me. As
I write in Dreams of Flight, this unexpected narrative turn was a theme
I began to notice in other films of that historical moment — one that is
telling of American culture in the 1960s.
I
have always imagined that my experience of movies is not mine alone but is
likely representative of my demographic currents (gungho adolescent boy, in
this case) and may be shared strongly by others in the same demographic. At the
time, as I say, I was a pre-teen American boy who especially liked “manly”
action cinema and expected from the trailers and that iconic poster that The
Great Escape fit that mold. I know from other fan accounts that I tracked down
for the book that I was not alone in feeling something disturbing and
consequential was going on instead — in the film and in the times themselves.
In my research for Dreams of Flight, I reached out to other viewers who
first saw The Great Escape in the 1960s and found many had comparable
reactions.
(Photo: Courtesy of the author.)
Q:Where does it stand in relation to Sturges' other films?
DP: John Sturges made
over 40 films in a career that started with B-movies with a graduation to A-films
in the 1950s, some of which combined strong narrative drive with a degree of
artistic ambition — on the one hand, an entrapment drama like Bad Day at
Black Rock (Sturges’s one nomination for Best Director) where thematic
resonance (the topic of racial prejudice) is overlaid with taut suspense and
moments of explosive action; on the other hand, the pretention of literary adaptation
with, for example, the barebones Hemingwayesque allegory of The Old Man and
the Sea. Even though he was thought of most as a manly man’s director,
Sturges even did so-called women’s films, melodramas of love and emotional
turmoil, such as A Girl Named Tamiko or By Love Possessed. But
his forte was films of masculine fortitude and he found apt embodiment,
literally so, for the trials and travails of men under pressure in a visual
fascination with strong, sometimes stocky guys filmed as upright or coiled up bundles
of vitality just itching to burst out. For example, the first time we see James
Garner in The Great Escape (as Hendley, the forger), he’s filmed,
perhaps curiously, from a distance that not only cuts off his feet but hisneck and head as well so that the emphasis is on his torso, taut and
tough as he confronts the fact of incarceration. Throughout the film, there are
long pauses to paint a pent-up male energy that then passes over into scenes of
vibrant action. I suggest in my book that The Great Escape not merely
divides into three parts — planning of the escape, enactment of the escape, the
outcome (as noted, a generally bleak one with most of the men rounded up and
summarily executed) — but finds an overall distinct visual style for each of
these: from coiled up men constrained by the fences that surround the camp and
by the very confinement of the barracks they are walled up in, to the open
expanses of seeming freedom beyond the camp, and back again to the camp for
those POWs who are rounded up but escape execution (with the last shots showing
even greater confinement for Hilts, who once again merits his moniker, “The
Cooler King”).
For
me, The Great Escape shows Sturges at the pinnacle of his dramatic form,
although some fans prefer the tighter professionalism of The Magnificent
Seven. Later Sturges films have their moments but the pauses get longer
(and more talky as in the very sodden The Satan Bug) and the
professionalism turns into long scenes of planning for action that actually
defer that action (for example, the slowly unfolding Marooned and the
overblown Ice Station Zebra which keeps delaying a violent confrontation
that actually never comes for symphonically scored scenes of the submarine
crashing through the ice and men pushing buttons and yelling orders). I find
perfection to the pacing of The Great Escape: men talk out their plans
at length but the suspense never lets up and, as I argue in the book, Sturges
films dialogue scenes in a variety of forms (classic shot/reverse shot,
wide-screen confrontation between men, long takes with a moving camera, and so
on) that keep everything moving forward in thrilling fashion.
Critics have long cited John Sturges' 1955 thriller "Bad Day at Black Rock" as the epitome of lean, no-nonsense filmmaking. There isn't a wasted frame in the film and there isn't an actor who doesn't thrive under Sturges' inspired direction. Here is the original trailer that features some unusual billing. Lee Marvin, then not yet at leading man status in his career, is billed first while the iconic Spencer Tracy, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, is billed last, perhaps for dramatic effect.
“Way
down in the jungle deep, the lion stepped on the signifyin’ monkey’s feet.” Anyone
who is familiar with that poem’s first line, most likely heard it from
comedian/actor/singer, the late, great Rudy Ray Moore. Influenced by legendary
comedians Red Foxx and Richard Pryor, Moore, who worked nightclubs throughout
the 1960s, became popular through a series of hilarious and racy party albums
he released in the early 70s, some of which featured Rudy Ray as a character
named Dolemite; a sharply-dressed, supercool, humorous and loquacious, rhyming
pimp-poet whose incredible strength and expert martial arts ability are equaled
only by his sexual prowess. The albums and his live stand-up routine were so
popular that, in 1975, the charismatic Moore took all of his earnings and
decided to turn this larger-than-life urban hero into a kick-ass, comedic
movie.
Bad-ass pimp Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore, Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law),
who was framed, incarcerated and had his club, The Total Experience, stolen
from him by his evil rival Willie Green (D’Urville Martin, Black Caesar), is released from prison and, with help from the FBI,
the loyal Queen Bee (Lady Reed, Disco
Godfather) and Dolemite’s all-girl army of Kung Fu killers, sets out to
bring Willie Green to justice and retake his rightful place as king of the
streets.
Co-written (with actor Jerry Jones who
appears in the film as an FBI agent) and produced by Rudy Ray Moore, Dolemite was directed by D’Urville
Martin for the paltry sum of $100,000, but went on to gross $12 million. Rudy
Ray not only capitalized on the popularity of his own adult party albums and
the Dolemite character, but he smartly cashed in on the now legendary “Blaxploitation”
craze started by wonderful films such as Shaft
(1971), Super Fly (1972) and Three the Hard Way (1974) as well as
the Kung Fu phenomenon that was sweeping the country, mostly due to the
immortal Bruce Lee and his iconic 1973 film Enter
the Dragon in particular.
The entertaining Dolemite not only features plenty of comedy and very quotable
dialogue, but also, Kung Fu, adult language and liberal doses of sex and
violence; not to mention a great musical score by Arthur Wright (The Human Tornado, The Crying Game) and
the Filmore Street Soul Rebellion as well as a fun and memorable title song composed
and sung by Ben Taylor. It also contains loads of unintended laughs which,
along with Rudy Ray’s enjoyable ghetto poems, give the extremely low-budget
film much of its charm. Some wonderful examples of Dolemite’s unintentional hilarity are visible boom mics,
character’s talking over one another (“Flo!”),
wooden line deliveries (“Another
frame-up, hmm?”), a cop who attacks Dolemite and falls on his ass (no
second takes), a lip-synching nightclub singer who is way out of synch, Rudy
Ray almost falling asleep during a scene and D’Urville Martin saying to him, “Don’t get excited!”, and a character
named Creeper who is also known as the Hamburger Pimp and is played by a real-life
junkie (Vainus Rackstraw). Naturally, the film is also a fantastic early 70s
time capsule featuring funky fashions (the ginormous, furry hats are my
favorite) as well as wonderfully gaudy décor. For those who may turn their
noses up at the film, Dolemite and
the work of Rudy Ray Moore (who has rightly been dubbed “The Godfather of Rap”)
has gone on to influence many; most notably a plethora of Rap artists including
Snoop Dogg and the 2009 comedy classic Black
Dynamite.
Dolemite has been released on
Blu-ray/DVD by Vinegar Syndrome. The extremely fun film, which has been
restored in 2k from its 35mm negative, is presented in its original 1.85:1
aspect ratio and is extremely sharp and beautiful looking. We are also treated
to a lovingly included full frame version (the VHS version everyone’s used to)
which not only shows the boom mic in frame even more than the 1.85 version, but
sometimes the sound guy too. Special features include a very informative
making-of documentary by Elijah Drenner (That
Guy Dick Miller) which contains remembrances from many of Dolemite’s cast and crew including Rudy
Ray Moore, Jerry Jones and Ben Taylor; an entertaining interview with Lady
Reed; a “Locations: Then & Now” featurette and a very thorough audio
commentary by Rudy Ray’s biographer, Mark Jason Murray. Amongst many other
interesting things, he talks about Rudy’s early days in show business, how the
character of Dolemite came to be, the trials and tribulations that came with
making the film and Rudy Ray’s life after his amazing 1970s reign (interspersed
between Murray’s commentary are a few audio interviews with Rudy Ray, Jerry
Jones and martial arts champion Howard Jackson (who appears in the film).
Although cool and informative, some of these interviews are a bit muffled and
somewhat hard to fully hear). There are also trailers for Dolemite and its hilarious sequel The Human Tornado (also released on Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome)as well as a reversible sleeve with the
fun, eye-catching, original poster art. There’s also some cool new artwork,
too. Both images are also featured on the discs themselves. If you’re a fan of Dolemite, Rudy Ray Moore or the 1970s “Blaxploitation”
genre in general, this Blu-ray is a must have. Can you dig it?
Composer Monty Norman has passed away. He was one of the last remaining major contributors to the first James Bond film, "Dr. No", released in 1962. Norman had a humble childhood, growing up in East London as the son of a cabinetmaker. His mother sewed in order to provide additional income for the fiancially-strapped family. When WWII broke out in 1939, Norman was initially evacuated from London along with countless other children, but later returned to the city just in time to endure the terrors of Hitler's Blitz. The son of the family's landlord used to play the guitar and it had a mesmerizing effect on young Norman. His parents scrimped and saved to buy him his own guitar. It proved to a good investment. Following a stint in the army, Norman became a proficient musician and entertainer. He started his
career in show business as a singer, following in the footsteps of his
uncles who were amateur opera performers. He later began to host jazz-related radio broadcasts that caught the ear of top band leader Cyril Stapleton, who signed Norman as a singer for his band. There would be no looking back. Soon, Norman was touring with future superstar Benny Hill as a comedy/singing act and he also performed with Ted Heath's band. He later worked with the famed comedy troupe the Goons, which included Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan.
Although Monty Norman found success as a big band singer, he chose to concentrate on composing music. His first song, "False Hearted Lover", was a hit. He then turned his attention to composing shows for London's West End, working occasionally with the likes of director Peter Brook and and actor Paul Scofield. He adapted a hit French musical comedy, "Irma La Douce", for an English-language run and it was a smash hit both on the West End and on Broadway. He also found success with an original show, "Expresso Bongo", which would inspire the acclaimed feature film that would be a major career stepping stone for young Cliff Richard. His 1959 show, "Make Me an Offer", also won acclaim. Norman later took a chance by launching the show "Belle", a musical that was based on the notorious murderer Dr. Crippen. The show was his first major failure, but it had unforeseen positive aspects. One of the investors in the production was film producer Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, who along with his partner, Harry Saltzman, had recently acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels for their production company, Eon. Broccoli had liked Norman's score for "Belle" and hired him to compose the score for the first Bond movie, "Dr. No". The year was 1962. Norman based the famed signature theme for agent 007 on a previous composition, "Bad Sign Good Sign", that he had written for a musical that was never produced. He also contributed some innovative other tracks for the film including the song "Underneath the Mango Tree", "Jump Up Jamaica" and a reworking of "Three Blind Mice" that was used for nefarious purposes in the opening of the movie. Broccoli and Saltzman were not entirely satisfied with Norman's arrangement of "The James Bond Theme" and hired up-and-coming composer John Barry to rework the track. The result was one of the most recognizable pieces of pop culture music in history but it also led to some hard feelings. Norman, who went on to score the Bob Hope comedy "Call Me Bwana" for Broccoli and Saltzman, had a bit of a falling out with Saltzman over a contract, and was never employed by Eon Productions again. As the Bond juggernaut took off, the Barry became the go-to composer for most of the films and Norman seethed, as Barry was often credited with composing the Bond theme. The matter would finally be settled in a London courtroom many years later when Norman was legally confirmed to be the composer of record of the theme, even though Barry's orchestrations were undeniably pivotal in its success and longevity.
(Note: in the above video interview, the photo of Harry Saltzman is incorrectly designated as Albert R. Broccoli)
In 1989, Norman received the Gold Badge of Merit, for Services to British Music from from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors. Over the years, Norman embraced his association with the Bond films and appeared at numerous 007-related events and premieres, taking satisfaction at his enduring contribution to the world's longest-running film franchise. He told interviewer Sandra Kessell, "‘Well, I hope when the time comes people will remember that I’ve done quite a few things, but the fact that James Bond is so iconic in everybody’s mind - you can’t argue with that and nor would I want to."
(For more about Monty Norman's life and career, visit his official web site.)
Every career starts somewhere.In 1948, Rock Hudson’s began
under contract at Universal International Pictures with bit roles like “second
lieutenant” and “detective.”By
1953, thanks to his good looks, ambition, an influential agent, and shrewd
beefcake publicity, he progressed to star billing in the studio’s assembly line
of budget-conscious but colorful Westerns and costume adventures.By and large those productions
are little remembered today, but they served two immediate purposes as they
were designed to do.For
Universal International, they made modest profits in movie theatres where weary
working-class families flocked on weekends for splashy Technicolor
entertainment. For
Hudson, a novice actor, they provided valuable on-the-job training and popular
visibility—prerequisites for better paying, more prestigious film credits to
come.
Three of those
journeyman films were “Seminole,” “The Golden Blade,” and “Bengal Brigade,”
available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, in a boxed set as a
“Rock Hudson Collection.”If
you’re a younger viewer who wonders what Grandma and Grandad did for movie
escapism before Marvel Comics and Tom Cruise, these will give you a good idea.Viewers with the time and
stamina may decide to watch the entire set in one binge sitting of 255 minutes.If so, one thing will become
apparent.Even spread
across three genres, the storylines and casts don’t differ much.In the studio system of the
early Eisenhower years, Universal International could make its B-movies quickly
and cheaply by rushing its contract players like Hudson from one backlot set to
another in formulaic scripts.
In “Seminole” (1953),
the actor stars as Second Lt. Lance Caldwell, an Army officer who hopes to
avert a war with the Seminole Indians of 1835 Florida.But his superior officer,
Major Degan (Richard Carlson, effectively cast against type as a bristly
martinet), has other ideas.When
Degan and Caldwell lead an expedition into the swamp to confront the Indians,
the troop is ambushed.Captured,
Lance finds that the Seminoles have their own split between pacifists and
war-mongers.Lance’s
friend, Chief Osceola (Anthony Quinn), wants to sign a treaty even if it means
uprooting the tribe.An
influential warrior, Kajeck (Hugh O’Brian), won’t settle for anything less than
armed victory over Degan and his troops.With the Army routed, the
territory’s white settlers will clear out fast.
Like most 1950s
Westerns, the plot is generic.Except
for the Everglades setting, the Seminole might as well be Apache, Cheyenne, or
Sioux, played by white actors in body paint.Indian wars are the fault of
hot-heads on both sides, not the result of orchestrated land-grabs by the U.S.
government as was usually the case in real life.The swamps are a combination
of on-location footage in the Everglades and a backlot set where Hudson
dutifully slogs through bogs and creeks with supporting players James Best,
Russell Johnson, and another actor who started small and ended big, Lee Marvin.Those scenes give director
Budd Boetticher and his cast a chance to flex some macho muscle, even though
the studio swamp looks about as sweltering and nasty as a Magic Kingdom theme
park.Hudson and
Boetticher would go on to better Westerns, Hudson with Robert Aldrich’s “The
Last Sunset” and Boetticher in five iconic pictures with Randolph Scott.
“The Golden Blade”
(1953) puts Hudson in familiar Arabian Nights
surroundings as
Haroun, a merchant’s son from Basra who travels to Baghdad to avenge his
father’s death in an attack by bandits.In fact, the “bandits” were
assassins secretly dispatched by Jafar (George Macready), the caliph’s scheming
vizier, to provoke a war between the two cities.This is part of a scheme by
Jafar that also includes promoting a marriage between his loutish son Haji
(Gene Evans), the captain of the palace guard, and Princess Khairuzan (Piper
Laurie).Once Haji
becomes regent, agents from “Basra” will murder the caliph and the princess,
and Haji will inherit the throne as Jafar’s puppet.Haroun is under-matched
against Haji, the greatest swordsman in Baghdad, until he finds a magic sword
in the medieval Baghdad equivalent of a Goodwill thrift shop.
Given that Piper
Laurie had recently made two almost identical films with Tony Curtis, “The
Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951) and “Son of Ali Baba” (1952), “The Golden Blade”
was already familiar material by 1953.Some scenes were lifted from an even earlier Universal production,
1944’s “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” a common cost-saving tactic by the
studio in the early 1950s.Minus
the sword fights, there isn’t a lot of difference, either, between “The Golden
Blade” and your eight-year-old's favourite, “Disney’s Aladdin”; even the
villainous viziers in both movies are named Jafar.It’s easy to make fun of
old-fashioned B-level swashbucklers like this, but the director, Nathan Juran,
mounts the action scenes well, and the Technicolor reds, greens, purples, and
blues are sumptuous in their hi-def clarity.Casting Gene Evans as the
secondary bad guy may seem like an odd call, since most of us fondly remember
the veteran character actor for scores of Westerns and war dramas, but Evans’
bullish persona gives the character a knowingly humorous edge.When Piper Laurie’s spirited
princess complains, “Men are able to roam freely, while we women are trapped in
the harem,” the harried housewives of 1953 probably agreed.
Hudson landed the
starring role in “Bengal Brigade” (1954) after Tyrone Power turned down the
part; Power had already played a similar character in 20th Century Fox’s “King of
the Khyber Rifles.”At a
siege of a rebellious native fort in 1856 India, British Captain Jeffrey
Claybourne disobeys an order by Colonel Morrow (Torin Thatcher) to retreat
under heavy fire, attacking instead.Claybourne’s company of native Indian soldiers had walked into an
ambush, and the captain’s action saves their lives at the cost of his military
career and his engagement to the colonel’s daughter (Arlene Dahl).Claybourne resigns and knocks
around India as a big-game hunter (on a jungle set likely repurposed from the
swamp in “Seminole”), when he’s approached by a devious Indian rajah (Arnold
Moss).The rajah is
gathering a private army for an uprising against the British, and he offers the
disillusioned Claybourne a well-paid commission to train his recruits.
Although British rule
in India ended in 1947, the movies continued to celebrate the “sun never sets”
colonial tradition into the 1950s and even beyond.If you expect that “Bengal
Brigade” will cue the opening notes of “Rule Britannia” from the studio’s stock
library of music, you’ll be right on the money, and you won’t have to wait
long.Given today’s wide
availability of Indian actors, the old practice of hiring whites to play native
Indians seems outdated and demeaning, but you’d have come up empty in 1953 to
find a Priyanka Chopra or Irrfan Khan in central casting.The only exceptions here are
performers Sujata and Asoka Rubener in a brief, non-speaking dance routine.At that, Arnold Moss as the
rajah and Michael Ansara as Claybourne’s native sergeant offer more nuanced
performances than the Rule Britannia music might suggest.Anyway, before you attack old
Hollywood for its insular ways, just remember that even today, few Steven
Spielberg fans wince at the unvarnished chauvinism of “Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom.”
The “Rock Hudson
Collection” includes theatrical trailers for all three films and fine audio
commentary on two of them by Nick Pinkerton (“Seminole”) and Phillipa Berry
(“The Golden Blade”).
Joe Dante's "Trailers from Hell" enlists filmmaker Adam Rifkin to pay tribute to the 1966 Universal family comedy favorite "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" starring Don Knotts in his first starring role in a feature film after leaving his iconic role as Deputy Barney Fife in "The Andy Griffith Show". Knotts enlisted plenty of talent from that show to bring "Chicken" to the screen. Andy Griffith helped write so much of the screenplay that he was entitled to a screenwriter credit, but he selflessly refused to do so. The film stands the test of time with Knotts in top form as the nervous wreck reporter who has to spend a night in a supposedly haunted house, a scenario inspired by a particularly memorable episode of "The Andy Griffith Show".
James
Bond is almost surely the franchise that we here
at Cinema Retro have been the most closely associated with, with many of
our contributors having written Bond books, not forgetting our editors-in-chief
and Bond experts Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall’s many tomes including the The
Essential James Bond. There are so many other books about the James Bond
films out there as well that one might be forgiven for thinking that there
can’t possibly be anything left to say about them, but Llewella Chapman’s new
book Fashioning James Bond is proof that there is life in the old spy
yet.
This is the first
book to study the costuming of the Bond franchise, from Dr No (1962)
right through to Spectre (2015), drawing on material from many different
archives, looking at, amongst other things, scripts, correspondence, call
sheets and publicity materials, as well as new interviews with the families of
tailors and shirtmakers who made clothing for Bond, and of course the films
themselves. Clothing was always so important to Ian Fleming, who would
regularly take time out from the action to describe what characters were
wearing in perfect detail, and this was translated over to the films
themselves.
Chapman goes through
each film and analyses the iconic outfits in detail. The measurements of the
stars are supplied (have you always wanted to know Sean Connery’s collar size?
17”), the budget allowances for costuming and how much each outfit cost, and
call sheets provide details as to which costumes were needed at which
locations. Specific costumes such as Dr No’s famous Nehru suit are discussed at
length – it’s historical significance, what kind of shirt would need to be worn
underneath it, and the significance of its Asian stylings as a signifier of the
‘cultural politics of Bond villainy.’
George Lazenby’s sole
effort as Bond is also discussed, with plenty of information about the
different costumes he needed: twenty, more changes than any other Bond actor in
one single film. When Roger Moore came on the scene, his keen interest in
fashion (he had a credit on The Persuaders! for designing his own
costumes) was a big influence on the look that his James Bond would establish
in Live and Let Die (1973) and develop over the next decade. Timothy
Dalton also had some input when he arrived on the scene, preferring that Bond
wore more casual clothing such as a leather jacket, to be more in keeping with
the times.
When Pierce Brosnan
was chosen as Bond and the news got out that he would wear Italian suits there
was an outcry in the press, something which Chapman details. The Independent
claimed that ‘Fleming would be doing somersaults in his grave’! Daniel Craig
also wore Italian suits, before moving on to suits designed by Tom Ford, which
was deemed to suit his grittier, more edgy Bond.
Of course, it’s not
just the various Bonds whose clothing is put under the microscope by Chapman. The
costumes worn by the various ‘Bond Girls’ are also examined in great detail,
from Ursula Andress’ iconic bikini (totally improvised on set using her own bra
and a utility belt from a passing sailor), to Jill St. John’s fabulously
seventies outfits (and wigs), always being sure that the collars and cuffs
match. Again we get details of measurements and designs, and designers, and it
is fascinating to see just how much work goes into this aspect of the
filmmaking process, one which is often easily overlooked in favour of the more
bombastic elements of your average Bond film.
This review has only
really scratched the surface of Fashioning James Bond. There is such a
wealth of insight and information in here that it will keep any Bond fan happy
and will ensure that the next time you watch any of the films your eyes will
linger just that bit longer on the designs and the stitching.
In the summer of 1975,
a much-anticipated film adapted from a bestselling novel called Jaws,
directed by a little-known newcomer named Steven Spielberg, was unleashed on
the public- and visiting the beach would never be the same again.
The stories about the
making of Jaws have been told many, many times: the shark didn’t work, they
ran over budget and schedule because just a few seconds of usable footage was
shot each day, the studio wanted to fire its young director, etc. The myths and
legends around Jaws have become almost as popular as the film itself,
with dozens of books and documentaries, as well as the three sequels, serving
to keep Jaws firmly lodged in the public consciousness.
So what else can
there possibly be to say about this legendary film? Well as this book’s
subtitle suggests, new perspectives have been found and reveal new ways of
thinking about Jaws and its place in popular culture and film history. The
contributors to the book take several different approaches, questioning myths
(was Jaws really the first summer blockbuster? Cinema Retro’s own
Sheldon Hall tackles that one), analysing themes and looking at its legacy, or
‘cultural footprint’.
Verna Fields rightly
won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, and one chapter here focuses
specifically on the editing, highlighting technical innovations and analysing
why some of those classic scenes work so well. A similar level of in-depth
analysis is applied to John Williams’ iconic score. It may well be one of the
most well-known scores in cinema history, but musicologist Emilio Audissino
brings his understanding of music theory here to explain exactly why the music
works so well.
Another chapter sees
a consideration of the influence of Steven Spielberg’s Jewishness on Jaws,
whilst Linda Ruth Williams looks at the way children are often used as bait in
his films. Matthew Leggatt focuses specifically on that Indianapolis
speech from Quint, exploring the atomic legacy as evidenced in Jaws. Is
it a coincidence that the shark is killed with a massive explosion?
The ongoing influence
and legacy of Jaws is delved into in the fascinating final section of
the book, which, as well as exploring the sequels, also looks at the many
documentaries about the making of the film, the ‘Sharksploitation’ edit of Jaws
(a strictly unofficial fan-edit which incorporates footage from Jaws and
its sequels as well as from deleted scenes and shark documentaries, and also
replaces the score with contemporary rock songs), and even a discussion of The
Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week.
This is a terrific
collection of essays that genuinely brings new insight, and with a foreword
provided by Jaws’ screenwriter and supporting actor Carl Gottlieb
himself, The Jaws Book is highly recommended for any fan of Jaws,
or for anyone with even a passing interest in this crucial moment in film
history.
In our latest printed edition of Cinema
Retro, I featured the original soundtrack Vinyl release of John Carpenter’s
classic Escape from New York in Blue Vinyl. Speaking to my Vinyl contact at
Silva Screen this morning I have since learnt that the Blue edition is
virtually close to sold out. It seems that this iconic score is still very much
in demand. However, it’s not all bad news, as Silva Screen has also released a
superb transparent RED version (Catalogue Number: SILLP1493R) of the vinyl.
Silva Screen’s press release states: “Originally
released on the 31st of July 2015, the vinyl edition of John Carpenter’s
classic 1981 thriller mirrored the expanded CD release from 2000, with over 20
minutes of previously unreleased music plus music from scenes deleted from the
final print and original dialogue highlights.The masters for that CD were re-mixed from the original multi-track
session tapes by long-time Carpenter associate Alan Howarth. This is the first
time the expanded edition has appeared on vinyl in its complete form, including
original dialogue highlights.”
If the demand for the Blue edition is
anything to go by, I’m sure this red version will not be around for too long
either, so I wouldn’t think to long about it…
Almost
30 years ago, Jurassic Park thundered into theaters, forever changing
the cinematic landscape. Steven Spielberg’s iconic film was based on Michael
Crichton’s best-selling novel that brilliantly channeled people’s endless fascination
with dinosaurs. It was beyond a box
office hit, grossing close to a billion dollars during its 1993 release. It
also revolutionized visual effects, leaving old-school stop motion dinosaurs in
its dust.
Jurassic
World: Dominion
ain’t your father’s Jurassic Park…This 6th and “final” instalment in the JP franchiseis
a huge, loud, expansive spectacle that brings together the original cast (including
dinosaurs) and the franchise’s 2nd generation stars for one last
scaly hurrah.
The
film opens with a cable news clip that tells us that dinosaurs have escaped
from the ruins of Isla Nublar and are now everywhere. Once that has been
established, director Colin Trevorrow puts the cinematic pedal down and doesn’t
let up for two hours and twenty-seven minutes. The somewhat muddied plot involves Biosyn, the
shady corporate heir to John Hammond’s InGen, run by Lewis Dodgson (Campbell
Scott), a Jeff Bezos type who is using dino DNA to “benefit mankind”. Uh huh. (If
Dodgson’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the original bagman who
handed Dennis Nedry the infamous can of shaving cream/bio-sample tubes in the
original film.)
Luckily,
Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is onto Biosyn, corralling her reluctant former
colleague Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to visit their remote headquarters where
the third member of the original Jurassic team, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)
is a visiting scholar in residence.The
Biosyn retreat is also a world sanctuary for… dinosaurs.The OTHER parallel-running plot involves the
genetically-engineered child (the wonderful Isabella Sermon) of an original
Jurassic Park scientist who is in hiding with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and
Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). Her unique genetic makeup makes her a
very valuable commodity and a target for kidnappers. The two Jurassic Park
worlds - old and new - collide when she is
kidnapped and Owen and Claire follow her trail from the Pacific Northwest
to the alleyways of Malta and, the futuristic Biosyn complex itself.There are breathtaking man v. dinosaur chases
that rival any James Bond or Jason Bourne pursuit. Jurassic World Dominion
also drifts into Indiana Jones territory with a knock-down, drag-out fight in a
seedy dinosaur smuggler’s market, complete with a dino fighting pit, of course!
Trevorrow,
who ably helmed the previous two Jurassic Park movies, really hits his
stride with this film – from a dino roundup on horseback in a vast prairie to
stunning mountain photography in the Italian Alps and dino-mayhem in the dense
forests of the Pacific Northwest.The
film brings back old favorites like the T-Rex and the raptor “Blue”, and
introduces new ones like the Quetzalcoatlus, a huge, feathered dinosaur and the
Dreadnoughtus, which resembles a Brontosaurus on steroids – 27 dinosaur species
in all. According to the production materials, each creature was grounded in
reality under the strict supervision of a leading paleontologist. The film’s visual effects are rivalled only by
its audio effects – every crash is bone-jarring and the various dino roars are
teeth-rattling.
While
Pratt and Howard are great performers and have developed a wonderful onscreen
chemistry, it’s the return of the original cast members – Neill, Dern and
Goldblum that really got the preview audience clapping.Even original JP scientist Henry Wu (BD Wong)
is on hand to try to rectify his mistakes. They all step back into their roles as
easily as you’d pull on a favorite shirt; and Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm patois is
as wry and quirky as it was in 1993.Time has been kind to them all.
For
this epic conclusion to the cinematic Jurassic era, Universal has pulled out
all the stops and is seeing their cash cowasaurus off with a bang.
Give Dad
the Gift of Adventure in Stunning 4K Ultra HD on June 14, 2022
The epic search
for the perfect Father’s Day gift ends on June 14, 2022 when Raiders of the
Lost Ark arrives in a Limited-Edition 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray SteelBook from
Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount Home Entertainment.
Relive all the
edge-of-your-seat excitement in director Steven Spielberg’s cinematic classic
starring Harrison Ford as legendary hero Indiana Jones. Also starring
Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, and Alfred
Molina, Raiders of the Lost Ark continues to delight audiences of all
ages with its thrilling, globe-trotting adventure.
Available
individually on 4K Ultra HD for the first time, the Raiders of the Lost Ark
SteelBook is the first of four planned limited-edition releases of each Indiana
Jones movie. Fans of the franchise can look forward to collecting Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom on July 12, Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade on August 16, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull on September 20. With exclusive packaging celebrating the iconic
original theatrical artwork, these collectible releases are sure to be a hit
with fans. The films are presented in 4K Ultra HD with Dolby Vision® and
HDR-10 for ultra-vivid picture quality and state-of-the-art Dolby Atmos®
audio*. Each SteelBook also includes access to a digital copy of
the corresponding movie, as well as a mini-poster reproduction.
Synopsis
Get
ready for edge-of-your-seat thrills in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy
(Harrison Ford) and his feisty ex-flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) dodge
booby-traps, fight Nazis and stare down snakes in their incredible worldwide
quest for the mystical Ark of the Covenant. Experience one exciting cliffhanger
after another when you discover adventure with the one and only Indiana
Jones.
“Son of Samson,” an Italian
production from the wave of sword-and-toga or “peplum” movies in the early
1960s, has been released by Kino Lorber Studio Classics in aBlu-ray edition. When you hit “play,” don’t be
alarmed when a different title,“Maciste
nella Valle de Re,” appears instead.It’s the same picture.“Maciste
nella valle de Re” or “Maciste in the Valley of the Kings” was the original
title in Italy, where director Carlo Campogalliani’s production opened on Nov.
24, 1960.There,
“Maciste” had a nostalgic fan base among older filmgoers who fondly remembered
the super-strong defender of justice and freedom from an iconic series of
silent movies (1914-1927).The
75-year-old Campogalliani had directed three of the original Maciste pictures,
and rebooting the character had long been his pet project.The recent success of Steve
Reeves’ first muscleman epics, “Hercules” (1958) and “Hercules Unchained”
(1959), finally provided the go-ahead.
Since
“Maciste” carried no brand-name value here, “Son of Samson” became the title
for the dubbed, slightly edited version that opened in New York on June 2,
1962.The new title
shrewdly reminded ticket-buyers of Cecil B. DeMille’s popular “Samson and
Delilah” (1950), from which the script lifted a couple of incidental
situations.Also, with
its biblical connotation, “Son of Samson” was designed to placate moralist
watchdogs in conservative small towns.It was okay to ogle a sexy leading lady in skimpy, navel-baring harem
outfits and an oiled-up, nearly naked hero, as long as the Good Book somehow
fit into the scenario. DeMille
had virtually pioneered the same tactic.Never mind that “Son of
Samson” had no narrative connection to the DeMille picture.For that matter, it really had
no religious elements at all.With
its second-unit visuals of the pyramids and other desert monuments, It might
just as easily have been retitled “Samson Meets Cleopatra” to exploit current
publicity around Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra,” which was still a year
away from release.The
“new” Maciste was so popular in Italy that more films followed, in which Mark
Forest was followed in the role by Kirk Morris and Gordon Scott, among others.Later, several of the pictures
were packaged with other peplums for syndicated TV broadcast in America as
“Sons of Hercules” and “Gladiator Theatre.”
In
Campogalliani’s movie, Maciste (Mark Forest) wanders through Egypt in the 5th
Century B.C. looking for good deeds to perform.When he’s attacked by lions,
he kills one with his bare hands (like Victor Mature’s Samson in the DeMille
picture) and is saved from the other by an archer who turns out to be Kenamun,
the Pharaoh’s son.Kenamun
and his father Armiteo try to keep their cruel Persian vizier from oppressing
the common folk, but Armiteo’s trophy wife Smedes (Chelo Alonso) secretly
throws in with the vizier.They
murder the Pharaoh, put Kenamun under a spell, and dispatch their troops to
round up unoffending peasants for brutal slave labor.Maciste steps in to rescue the
villagers, including pretty sisters Tekaet and Nofret, and break Smedes’ spell
over Kenamun.Unlike the
heroes in today’s movie franchises, Maciste doesn’t brood over a tortuous
back-story involving daddy issues, murdered parents, or remorse over past
misdeeds.Asked why he
spends his time helping poor people for no personal gain, he simply answers,
“It is my destiny.”In
that more innocent era of movie entertainment, no further explanation was
required.When Maciste
and Smedes meet in the palace, she tries to seduce him with a slinky belly
dance, and we visit an ingenious execution chamber known as “The Cell of
Death.”There, if you
somehow escape being crushed between two closeable walls, you’ll fall into
a pool of crocodiles.The
script by prolific screenwriters Oreste Biancoli and Ennio De Concini
faithfully observes Chekhov’s famous dictum.If a Cell of Death appears in
the story, someone must perish there before the final credits roll.
The print
of “Son of Samson” presented by Kino Lorber is the Italian version with a
dubbed English voice track.It
includes a fleeting glimpse of a woman’s bare breasts (full disclosure, in case
you’re curious . . . not Chelo Alonso’s) that was censored out of the American
print.Even here, it
speeds by so fast it seems to be optically blurred.Older fans will be glad to see
hunky Mark Forest and super-hot Chelo Alonso again in peak trim, although the
simplistic plot is a reminder that the Italian sword-and-toga movies (even a
better-budgeted one like this, seen in proper Totalscope and Technicolor
presentation after years of abysmal “Gladiator Theatre” prints) tend not to
live up to our youthful memories when we revisit them many years later. The Marvel Studios generation
may squirm at the old-fashioned pace of the script, and wonder why the laconic
hero doesn’t brush off various perils with a stream of clever quips.
Nevertheless,
if you can get your 12-year-old kid brother, son, nephew, or grandson to sit
still long enough, he’ll learn that the basics for luring audiences to the
ticket booth haven’t changed all that much since 1960, whether the buffed-up
guy in the poster is Mark Forest, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Dwayne “The Rock”
Johnson. Millennial
sword-and-toga dramas like the “300” movies (2006 and 2014) and cable’s
“Spartacus” series (2010-13) have more nudity and graphic carnage, but still,
at the end of the day, it’s all about the abs.
The Kino Lorber
release includes captioning and an excellent, insightful, spirited audio
commentary from movie guys David Del Valle and Michael Varrati.
Village
of the Damned is the cinematic moniker of John Wyndham’s
far less exploitative titled 1957 novel The
Midwich Cuckoos.Wyndham’s writing specialty
was science-fiction: he graduated from contributing short stories to such
colorful genre magazines as Wonder
Stories and Amazing Stories to publishing
full-fledged novels.Though his stories
were occasionally adapted for such television dramas as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his cinematic credits were relatively few.Village
of the Damned is perhaps his best remembered movie tie-in, but a 1951 novel
was also filmed and subsequently released as Day of the Triffids (Allied Artists, 1962).
Village
of the Damned was originally conceived to film in
Hollywood, and American writer Stirling Silliphant was tapped to compose the
screenplay for the movie – which was to be, more or less, a faithful adaptation
of Wyndham’s novel.Though Silliphant
had accrued a few film credits, he was primarily regarded as a television
writer, having contributed a score of 1950s teleplays to a variety of programs
ranging from The Mickey Mouse Club to
Perry Mason to Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Wolf Rilla, a German-born novelist but long-time a
resident of London, was tapped to direct Village
of the Damned.Rilla’s background
too was mostly in television production, having written or directed a score of
TV comedies and dramas over the span of a dozen years.Rilla was approached to direct Village when studio accountants deemed
it far more economical to film in England rather than Hollywood.Rilla thought Silliphant’s scenario was
workable.But he also thought the Yank’s
grasp of contemporary British customs and vernacular was lacking.So Rilla and the film’s British producer Ronald
Kinnoch (the latter writing under the pseudonym of “George Barclay”) reworked
the original script to better authenticate and Anglicize.
The rewrite was successful in that regard.The atmosphere surrounding Village of the
Damned is nothing less than stiff-lipped British in tone.In 2022 looking back, one could easily
mistake Village as a Hammer Film Production
(ala the Quatermass series).
Several prominent cast members of Village,
including Barbara Shelley and Michael Gwynn, would be familiar to Hammer Films devotees,
their faces having graced screens in such productions as The Camp on Blood Island, The
Revenge of Frankenstein, Quatermass
and the Pit, Dracula, Prince of
Darkness, Rasputin, the Mad Monk,
Scars of Dracula and The Gorgon.The venerable British actor George Sanders,
the former star of The Saint film
series, is fittingly at the center of the mystery.And there’s plenty of mystery about…
The tiny, sleepy hamlet of Midwich is the “village”
referenced in the film’s title. Nothing much ever happened in Midwich
until, for an odd four-hour interval, time not only stops but is seemingly lost.The townspeople, for reasons unknown, all
fall into unconsciousness. Initially there doesn’t appear there was any
significant fall-out from this strange time-warping aberration, but several
months later every village woman of childbearing age - married, courting or
celibate - finds themselves pregnant. This collective simultaneously give
birth to children unusual in both manner and appearance.The children, whom some suspect are the
product of some strange “impulse from the universe,” are uniformly uber-intelligent,
gifted beyond their years.While polite
to their parents and other adults, the children also strangely distant, unusually
formal and unemotional in manner.
The children are also endowed with several peculiar special
gifts – not the least of which is the ability to read the minds of the adults.This ability has unnerved those members of
the community who are forced to interact with these mysterious
youngsters. It’s soon revealed these children are, as suspected, the
offspring of alien beings.They have
been imbedded in the village to study the minds and culture of their
earth-bound galactic neighbors.For what
purpose? Well, no one is sure, but the
worst is feared. Once the British military gets involved their
intelligence agents report the residents of Midwich are not alone.
Reports are coming in of similar alien birth-takeovers amongst rural Eskimo
populations as well as countries sitting behind the Iron Curtain.
Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) and his wife Anthea (Barbara
Shelley) are the parents of one such “special” child, David (Martin Stephens).David seems to be the spokesman of the
children.He also is not shy in
demonstrating the bad habit of telepathically coercing those he perceives as
enemies to take their own lives. The situation worsens when the school-age
alien brood make the decision to abandon Midwich to imbed more widely among the
populace. The town elders and military realize they can’t allow these
aliens, semi- contained in Midwich, to spread further afield. But how
does one plot against those with the ability to read every thought that crosses
the minds of those wishing them destruction?
It’s a neat premise and Village of the Damned was a surprising hit for MGM, the B-film’s appeal
amongst cinemagoers and critics alike having caught the studio off guard.When studio brass realized they had a
commercial steamroller on their hands, the publicity department was free to go
full throttle.MGM began to take out
full page ads in the trades, boasting that “Village of the Damned Saturation
Openings” were rollin-up “Sensational Grosses!”This wasn’t mere ballyhoo, it was the truth. So it wasn’t terribly
surprising when MGM announced a follow-up feature was already in consideration.
Anton Leader was chosen to direct this sequel Children of the Damned.Similar to Rilla, Leader was best known for
his directorial work on television, not in motion pictures.In fact, following a successful career in the
1940s as a producer of radio dramas, Leader had worked almost exclusively on
the small screen.He would subsequently
helm an episode or two of practically every iconic television series of the
1950s and 1960s. Leader had left the U.S. for Europe in February 1962, hoping
to set up his own production company on the continent. This dream was deferred
when Leader was asked to direct Children
of the Damned and given a nifty $400,000 budget to do so.
Having worked almost exclusively in the penny-pinching television
industry, Leader gladly accepted.He
would tell a journalist from Variety
that it had been good to get away from TV since a big screen filmmaker was “more
respectfully regraded” and given more time and latitude to do a “respectable
job.” The problem was Leader envisioned Children
of the Damned as an “art picture.” The brass at MGM Britain was less
interested in making a profit, not a point.They wanted Children of the Damned
be a coattail-riding horror film, which wasn’t the film as delivered.
Variety
recorded Leader’s chagrin when the director was first made aware of the
“advertising campaign mapped out by MGM […] lurid billing as an exploitation
special.”Indeed, the poster art played
up only a ghastly sensationalism:“They
Come To Conquer the World… So young, so innocent, so utterly deadly!”A second ad mat was no more constrained (nor
honest) in its carnival-barking: “Beware the Eyes that Paralyze!All-New Suspense Shocker… even more Eerie and
Unearthly than Village of the Damned!”
In truth there’s very little eeriness and only a bit of suspense
in the film.Children isn’t a bad film, but it is a curious follow-up, one that
wildly detours from the premise of the original.There’s only a smattering of sci-fi elements.The “children” number only six in this sequel
and their provenance is multi-national.The
children are, again, borne by unwed women “never touched.”All six are brilliant, each possessing
“intellect beyond belief.”It’s this reason
that makes them of great scientific interest to Dr. Tom Llewellyn (Ian Hendry),
a psychologist and Dr. David Neville (Alan Bader), a geneticist.They suggest a UNESCO program should be
commissioned to study the children.
The problem is that the children do not wish to be
studied.They escape from their
respective embassies to gather inside the bowels of an old church.There was no need for them to proactively discuss
this decision amongst each other – or, at least, not in the usual oral method.Since they communicate with one another
through telepathy, they already share a communal knowledge base.They have no separate nor distinct
personalities and mostly, if not exclusively, communicate their wishes to be
left alone through an intermediary they control through hypnotism.
A sector of both the scientific establishment and
military believe it would be best to “destroy” the children, believing them to
be the spearhead of an invasion of aliens.But the army discovers the children are well-equipped to defend
themselves against any aggressive action.Unlike the Village children,
this new group of moppets choose only to use their telepathic energies towards
their own defense.They’re not
interested in causing harm to anyone, even as the bowels beneath their church
sanctuary are wired with explosives.
Children is,
without doubt, a different animal than Village.John Briley, the U.S. born screenwriter would
contribute an original screenplay for the sequel, one only loosely based on the
premise of the Wyndham novel.Though
early in his career, Briley was no hack merely trying to get along by writing
B-pictures.In 1983, as the writer of Ghandi, Briley was awarded an Oscar for
Best Original Screenplay.
But the folks going to the cinema to catch Children of the Damned wanted a horror
film, and no doubt felt cheated upon exiting.This film was more of a preachy “co-existence not no-existence”
exercise.Most reviews of the film were
critical of the movie’s high-minded and obvious aspiration as being experienced
as a “message film.”One critic thought
the concocted scenario was simply too precious.The filmmakers were attempting to endow the film “with moral
significance […] heavy-handed, unnecessary and too pretentious an aim for so
relatively modest a production venture.”
Although Children of the Damned was Leader’s last
feature film of significance, the British trades were reporting the
novelist/director had already reworked Christopher Monig’s 1956 mystery novel The
Burned Man into a screen treatment, pitching the idea of bringing it to the
screen to Hammer’s James Carreras. That project would not happen, for
better or worse, and Leader soon returned to TV directing.Children
of the Damned is more of a curio today, but Village of the Damned has enjoyed lasting notoriety, even having
been remade by Horror-film maestro John Carpenter in 1995.But while Carpenter’s film easily bests any
of the antiquated optical effects of the 1960 version, Rilla’s original remains
the more iconic.
Village
of the Damned and Children
of the Damned are made available as BD-ROMS through the Warner Archive
Collection.Village is presented in 1080p High Definition 16 x 9 1:78.1 and in
DTS HD Master Audio Mono.Children has been made available in
1080p High Definition 16 x 9 1:85.1 and in DTS HD Master Audio Mono.Both films are relativity sparse with extras,
though both offer each film’s theatrical trailer and removable English
subs.The only true “special features”
is Steve Haberman’s commentary track on Village
and screenwriter John Briley’s commentary on Children.
Click here to order "Village of the Damned" Blu-ray from Amazon
Click here to order "Children of the Damned" Blu-ray from Amazon
We’re told the expression “Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold” had origin in
seventeenth-century France.I’ve no idea
if this is accurate, nor convinced it matters.What is unquestionable is that in life, literature and art, the subject
of revenge remains constant.Interestingly,
the avenging of injustices, real and perceived, is common to both heroes and their
adversaries.Sometimes motivations
combine so the separation between heroism and evil becomes muddied.As the iconic and deranged fiend Dr. Anton
Phibes, the great Vincent Price adroitly manages to move his audience to cheer as
his character carries out a series of brutal and theatrical murders.
Price appears as the titular Dr. Phibes in two of what
are, inarguably, the actor’s three best recalled films of the 1970s.The cycle was kicked off by Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Dr. Phibes Rises Again! (1972), with
Douglas Hickox’s Theater of Blood
(1973) – a similar film in style to the two-pic Phibes’ franchise – serving as
an unofficial third act.Truth be told,
only Vincent Price could manage to successfully pull off such sadistic and dark
malarkey as presented above.Price’s
reputation for playing gloomy, sinister characters with a sense of self-parodying
gallows-humor whimsy made him a perfect cast.
The early to mid-1970s may not have completely signaled
the end of old-school horror films, but it was the end of an era for those
players still carrying the torch.It was
primarily the British who kept the familiar tropes alive through the bloody, and
often Gothic, productions of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and late-to-the game Tyburn.Though Hammer was reviled in the 1960s for
allowing Technicolor on-screen bloodletting, such crimson exploitation was
nothing to what was to follow.American
independents had already pushed the envelope to the extreme with such disturbing
drive-in fare as Wes Craven’s Last House
on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper’s The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
Overnight, the performances and films of such polished, academy
trained actors as Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were made antiquated
and unhip.Empty-headed teenagers were
the new principal players, and with the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), old-school horror was
relegated to the annals of film studies as a flood of imitations flooded movie
screens.While Vincent Price didn’t
disappear from movie-house screens, he was seen less often.You were more likely to catch Price on
television in a TV-movie, drama, situation comedy or as a guest on Hollywood Squares.Or, perhaps, you might have been fortunate
enough to catch the veteran actor trotting the boards in a traveling theatrical
production.
Price was, understandably, not a great fan of the
so-called “slasher” film genre.Such
disgruntlement was, no doubt, partly the result of a loss of big screen offers
and opportunities.Price considered the slasher
film “with all their blood and violence […] a different genre from the
wonderful Edgar Allan Poe films we used to make for Roger Corman.”In interviews from that period Price insisted
the recent trend on splashing explicit real-life violence onto the big screen
was a worrying trend.“When you have the
chain saw at the very beginning of the picture that knocks off about fifteen
people, where have you got to go?, he sighed to one journalist.“There’s no humor,” he continued.“They’ve just become too violent for me.”
There’s certainly no absence of humor – dark as it may be
- present in The Abominable Dr. Phibes
and Dr. Phibes Rises Again!.Price is directly responsible for innumerable
murders, most often in devilishly amusing methods.I feel that, in some manner of speaking, the
Phibes films had a measure of stylized influence on the slasher film
genre.The body counts left in the wake
of the subsequent slashers are, generally speaking, no greater nor less than
those in the Phibes or Theater of Blood
exercises.
In terms of thin plotting the Phibes and early slashers
are similar in construction.Both
substitute logic and a compelling storyline for a fast flowing series of voyeuristic
grim executions.The raison d’etre of both enterprises was to
deliver an entertaining, sadistic mix of idiosyncratic killings both inventive
and amusing.The big difference is that
a slate of seasoned actors are summarily dispatched in the Phibes films.In the slashers we tend to cheer on the fates
of the teenage-victims due to their visibly painful absence of acting skills.
In the Phibes films Vincent Price isn’t breaking new
ground.He’s merely diligently following
the established vengeful tradition of preceding movie ghouls.In the nineteen thirties and forties, Boris
Karloff and Bela Lugosi carried out all sorts of vendettas, nearly all the
result of some professional slight.Their targets, deserving or not, were always getting trapped behind
locked doors and no-escape rooms.This
was usually due to their tormentors having had their scientific research
purloined or reputations sullied.
There is one key difference between the old-school and
new-school horrors.Karloff and Lugosi
were crossed men with personalities - as anti-social and vengeful as those
personalities might be.Too many of the
slasher films, in my view anyway, featured successions of masked killers who killed
in cold, robotic-fashion.Often motivations
were not explained (or explained without satisfaction) until a movies’
end.The impersonality of such killings,
arguably, might have contributed to the mystery – as in a, “Why is this
happening?”But such detachment allowed for
too many of the best-remembered slashers to serve as little more than an assembly-line
cinematic abattoir.Which brings us back
to Dr. Phibes.
In The Abominable
Dr. Phibes, the titular character is not a medical doctor at all.A once-celebrated organist, Dr. Anton Phibes
(Vincent Price) holds a curious combination of PhDs in Musicology and
Theology.He uses his knowledge of the
latter to unleash a series of murders fashioned from ancient biblical curses.He unleashes his wrath on the medical team he
holds responsible for the April 1921 death of his wife Victoria Regina Phibes
(Caroline Munro, more or less).Drawing
the final curtains on those of he holds responsible, Phibes – with the
assistance of the mysterious and beautiful Vulnavia (Virginia North) -
methodically executes a series of Old Testament plagues as outlined in the Book
of Exodus.He grimly works his way to
his most loathed and final target, Chief of Surgeons Dr. Vesalius (Joseph
Cotton). Having planned the biblical killing of Vesalius’s son, the firstborn, Phibes
and Vesalius clash over the boy’s gurney in a tense, feverish confrontation at an
extravagant manor house on London’s Maldine Square.
While the casting of The
Abominable Dr. Phibes is perfect, it was an odd gamble that Price, the
film’s star player, was essentially given no interactive dialogue:the actor’s voice is only heard as a
filtered, somewhat robotic, voiceover throughout and even then only sparingly.Actress North, Phibes accessory-in-crime,
admitted to frustration when she read the script and learned her role too was
an unspeaking one. In July of 1971, North,
a former model, sighed to an Associated Press journalist, “I don’t know why
they don’t let me speak.” But she conceded “Not speaking is more sinister I
suppose.”It certainly was in Phibes
case, allowing Price’s disdain for his victims to be projected through his
sneering countenance.
One would have thought it we saw the last of The Abominable Dr. Phibes at that film’s
conclusion.But since American International
had raked in a not inconsiderable profit on investment, a Phibes resurrection
was quickly arranged.The first Phibes
film was often paired in cinema’s with A.I.P.’s Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), a modern-day spin on the old legend.Count
Yorga was very successful in in own right, spawning a sequel of its
own.That series success led to rumors
that A.I.P. might be grooming Yorga
star Robert Quarry as a potential horror film successor to the aging
Price.
What is obvious is that A.I.P. was interested in bringing
to the screen a collaboration of Price and Quarry.This was made plain in December of 1971 when
Louis M. “Deke” Heyward, A.I.P.’s Head of European Production, told reporters, “Bringing
the ‘abominable’ Phibes and the ‘insidious’ Yorga together was something that
just had to happen.The chemistry was too good to miss.”Heyward’s remarks were recorded as shooting
was getting underway at Elstree, the producer crowing, “It’s no secret that
when we were making the first ‘Phibes’ we were so sure we had a hit on our
hands that we took the trouble to shoot the opening scenes of the sequel that
was bound to come.”
Dr.
Phibes Rises Again! reunites several members of the original,
though North was out: Valli Kemp now filled the role of Price’s murderous
assistant.Peter Jeffrey is back as the
frustrated Scotland Yard detective who invariably arrives on the scene too late
to save anyone from their gruesome, if amusing, fates. Another horror icon, Peter Cushing, also appears in the film. As the U.S. and Western Europe was in the
throes of King Tut fever due to public interest in the touring display of
ancient Egyptian artifacts, co-screenwriters Fuest and Robert Blees moved the action
and ensuing mayhem from London to Egypt.
If not as satisfying as its predecessor, Dr. Phibes Rises Again!, is still great
fun.Yes, the sequel simply delivers
more of the same, but this is not necessarily a bad strategy as formula films
go.If anything, the film might be even
lighter in tone than the original, Price camping up the villainy to
preposterous proportions.Though teased
that a third film would follow – a script was commissioned – alas, the
cinematic run of Dr. Phibes was (excuse me) “Phinished.”
This two disc Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu ray issue
of The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again! offers both films
in 1.85:1 widescreen and with 1920 x 1080p resolution and DTS-audio.The set offers no fewer than four isolated
audio commentary tracks.The primary
commentary comes directly from director Robert Fuest who shares his production
memories of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.Secondary commentaries on both The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again! come courtesy of
film historian Justin Humphreys, the author of The Dr. Phibes Companion (Bear Manor Media, 2018), the definitive
work on all things Phibesian.Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas also shares thoughts
on Dr. Phibes Rises Again!. The set
rounds out with a collection of radio and television spots and theatrical
trailers.There’s also a colorful
slipcover for collectors and Phibes wonks, like myself, to fawn over.
I will admit to a degree of bias up front.I’ve never been particularly enamored of
MGM’s 1941 interpret of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famed novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.And it occasionally bothers me that I’m
not.The so-called “Golden Age” of the
Horror film (1931-1948) has long been, and will likely always remain, my
favorite cinematic era.Since the start
of the home video revolution I dutifully acquired (and subsequently upgraded)
practically every monochrome classic – OK, and some not-so-classic – genre films
issued from that era to hold in my private collection.It was of little concern to me if a film was
the product of a major studio (Universal, Columbia, MGM, Warner Bros. et. al.)
or of a low-rent independent (Monogram, Republic or PRC).Practically every U.S and British film – as
well as few from the continent – would find its way into my home archive.
So it’s telling that prior to this Blu ray debut of
Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
recently issued as part of the Warner Bros. Archive Collection, the only copy
I’ve held in my collection is the old Laserdisc of the title. Published in 1986
as part of MGM’s “Great Books on Video” series.I simply never had the desire to channel any additional discretionary
income into an upgrade of the film.So
in some way the arrival of this High-Def edition by WAC was welcome.It has allowed me the opportunity to reassess
long-held opinions or prejudices.
Similar to Stoker’s Dracula
(1897) and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
monster, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr.
Jekylland Mr. Hyde (1886) stands
as the third point of the immortal crown of literary monsters: the trio of
select ghouls to have made a seamless transition from written page to the stage
to the silver screen.Though the most
celebrated earliest cinematic adaptation was the 1920 Paramount silent classic
featuring John Barrymore as the titular rogue, even that film version wasn’t
the earliest.Stevenson’s novella had
been brought to the silent screen on a number of earlier occasions (1908-1914),
though several of those earliest efforts are now thought forever lost in time.
Of the sound films, my favorite big screen adaptation of
the novella will forever be Rouben Mamaoulian’s 1931 Paramount remake featuring
Fredric March.In some manner of
speaking, Mamaoulian’s version is a bit more faithful to Stevenson’s original
work than MGM’s 1941 version, in other ways not.Stevenson’s conception of Mr. Hyde presents him
not as physical monster with deformities, but merely a compassionless, selfish
human whose heart has grown cold and actions sadistic.Hyde is described by Jekyll’s lawyer friend,
Gabriel John Utterson (a major character of the novella completely missing from
the Fleming version), as a sinister fellow with a “displeasing smile,” one who
appeared “pale and dwarfish.” Stevenson’s Hyde gave off “an impression of
deformity without any nameable malformation.”
But following in the wake of Universal’s box-office
success in 1931 with Tod Browning’s Dracula
and James Whale’s Frankenstein, it
was in Paramount’s interest to portray Fredric March’s Mr. Hyde as a feral
beast in a physical as well as psychological sense.The applied iconic make-up conjured by Wally
Westmore for March’s Hyde was certainly appealing to the “monster kid” in
me.When I was first introduced to
images of March’s Mr. Hyde first in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland and later via the (very) occasional
television broadcast, I was left duly impressed.As I was with the imaginative camera-trickery
rigged by Mamaoulian and cinematographer Karl Struss.The sight of March’s mirror-reflected
transformation from Jekyll into Hyde remains a stunning and impressive optical
effect to behold even in 2022.It must
have been mind-blowing to audiences some ninety-one years prior.
It’s not entirely clear why MGM chose to move forward
with their own version of the Stevenson work, but in November of 1940 the
trades were reporting that MGM was planning their own version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to feature actor
Spencer Tracy in the lead role.The
following month it was announced in Box
Office that veteran screenwriter John Lee Mahin (who had earlier adapted
Stevenson’s Treasure Island for MGM
in 1934) had been assigned scripting duties.In an interesting example of casting against type, the Pin-Up model and
screen vixen Lana Turner was contracted to play the role of a good girl done
wrong, with Swedish good girl Ingrid Bergman signed to portray a Cockney barmaid.It must be said, both actresses pull off their
respective challenges rather admirably.Production on Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde was to commence on Wednesday, February 5, 1941.
Despite the overall gloss of the MGM remake, Spencer
Tracy’s Jekyll and Hyde is not nearly as enigmatic nor tortured a character as
March’s was.Tracy’s a great actor of
course, no one is contesting that.And
I’m certainly not knocking his performance in the film; I’m sure he does all he
can in role with the material given him.But as the most essential component of cinema is in its visuals, Tracy’s
Hyde falls short - even if his presentation is more aligned with Stevenson’s original
descriptions.Tracy’s Hyde is violent
and malignant and an unpleasant suitor to both fiancé Beatrix Emery (Turner)
and Ivy Peterson (Bergman), the maligned barmaid he uses and abuses.But Tracy’s Hyde remains a decidedly human
monster in his appearance.Yes, he’s
sadistic and manipulative but his soul conceivably,
at least, might still be saved with a bit of religion, a session of drug
counselling, or an anger-management class or two.
David Hanna, a drama critic and entertainment writer for
the Los Angeles Daily News was hardly
the only critic who, upon the film’s release, registered disappointment with
Tracy’s physical non-transformation into the villainous Mr. Hyde.There had been a lot of Hollywood press
ballyhoo that the sound stage was to be closed to all visitors when Tracy’s
Jekyll-to-Hyde scenes were to be lensed.So the eventual ho-hum big reveal of the new “Mr. Hyde” was a crushing
disappointment. Hanna sighed, “The first time Tracy changed character the
make-up looked as though he just needed a brace on his teeth and a little
filling to make him appear a most respected member of society.”
This opinion was shared by London’s Picturegoer magazine. Their critic offered, the “scenes when Tracy
assumes a grotesque make-up are included to make one smile, rather than creep.”It’s true that Tracy’s Hyde is an
underwhelming sight to behold.No
physical personification of evil flashes before us.Tracy looks like someone who merely awoke
from a night’s bender: mussed hair, sagging dark bags under crowfeet lined
eyes, slightly askew, bushy eyebrows and a leering countenance.
Though Fleming’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was far from a box-office disappointment, it certainly
wasn’t the impressive, timeless effort his two most recent pictures, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, had been – and would
forever remain. Most critics seemed to agree Paramount’s 1931 was by far the better
film.Though some argued Tracy was so
capable an actor that he required “no gargantuan make-up to denote his
transformation from the good Dr. Jekyll into the evil Mr. Hyde,” others countered
this 1941 remake had problematic issues beyond make-up expectations.Mahin’s script offered a sprinkled layer of Freudian
psychoanalysis into the mix, a reinterpret sure to offer cinemagoers a lesser experience.As the critic from Picturegoer noted, “March’s ape man make-up, crude though it was”
managed to convey “a stronger sense of horror than Tracy’s milder conception,
which comes as sheer anti-climax.”
There is an interesting “art against expectation” side
note to all this.With the box-office of
Hyde underperforming, Variety reported in September of 1941
that MGM had chosen to “revise its national campaign on the picture.”The original campaign (“A Good Woman – A Bad Woman.He
Needed the Love of Both!”) hyped the film’s romantic elements at the
expense of its (admittedly minor) horrific elements.A new campaign was struck, the “too
prettified” and posh original publicity stills withdrawn. Replacement images
were ordered, MGM choosing to “slice into the film for a blowup of Spencer
Tracy’s face in the ‘Mr. Hyde’ impersonation.”This tactic and a new accompanying blurb (“It CHILLS you!Half-Man!Half-Monster!”) proved so successful in such
markets as Detroit, that subsequent regional exhibitors were requesting use of
the same ad mats used in that city’s exploitation campaign.
It’s possible there’s a gaggle of English professors who
prefer the 1941 version above all others, but neither this version nor the better
1931 film is faithful to the original source material.Mahin script is interesting as it mines and mixes
elements of both Stevenson’s work with ideas conjured by Oscar-nominated ’31
screenwriters Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein.This is an “actor’s film.”There’s lots of long and drowsy oral discourses
that take place in tony parlors, but as an adventure of any sort it’s exciting only
in the smallest of episodes.Fleming and
Mahin’s version might have made for a compelling, intimate stage show, but as a
film it’s overlong and not terribly involving.
In its review of July 1941, a scribe from Variety hit the nail on the head:“It may be that Fleming, keeping closer to
the literal than spirit of the text, missed some of the more subtle points.”’31 Director Mamaoulian would likely agree with
that assessment.He boasted a few years
hence that his version of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde remained the “best one ever made.”“Spencer Tracy is a very competent actor,” Mamaoulian mused to the St. Louis Post Democrat.“But the man who plays Jekyll has to be
superbly handsome.As Fredric March
was.Then the changeover to Hyde is
gripping.Tracy was miscast.”‘Tis true in MGM’s 1941 version the potion
brewed by Dr. Jekyll this time out was, at best, a weak tea.
This Warner Archive Collection Blu ray edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is presented
here in a pristine 1080p High Definition 16x9 1.37.1 and DTS-HD Master 2.0 Mono
Audio.There’s hardly a visual blemish
throughout, and it is doubtful admirers of the film will find any fault with
this transfer.This is a bare bones
release, the set’s only special features are the film’s original trailer and
removable English subtitles.
On this clip from "American Bandstand", the iconic American TV show that featured teenagers dancing to the latest hit songs, host Dick Clark takes an unusual detour from the world of rock 'n roll to promote ABC-TV's newest sensation, "Batman"- after which there is a countdown of the top ten songs on the charts and everybody rocks to the sounds of Gary Lewis & the Playboys!
I confess to having difficulty understanding Corinth’s curious
repackaging of three monochrome 1950’s science-fiction films. Pulling together this
triad of films – all previously issued as single disc releases from the label’s
Wade Williams Collection - seems to
make sense on one level.We’ll discuss later on.But for the record this DVD of Drive-In Retro Classics: Science Fiction
Triple Feature brings together such disparate Silver Age favorites as Kurt
Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950),
Nathan H. Juran’s The Brain from Planet
Arous (1958) and Robert Clarke’s The
Hideous Sun Demon (1959).
Though he didn’t have anything to do with the production
of any of the films listed above, Wade Williams has served as curator of the
analog and digital legacy of many ‘50s sci-fi and horror titles.Though Williams would aspire as a filmmaker
himself, the titles appearing in the “Wade Williams Collection” are exactly
that – films in his collection.Williams
had prudently purchased the rights to a mostly moribund package of ‘50s sci-fi
movie and TV shows from estates, from studios, or from producers/others holding
ownership. The latter category would include films produced by such names as George
Pal, Jack Broder, Harry M. Popkin and Richard Rosenfeld.
This decision to sell off their interests was an
understandable (but ultimately bad) business decision on the part of the original
rights holders.But it was the early 1970s
and television stations – now the only outlet still providing a trickle of revenue
for these old films – were abandoning their creaky old black-and-white
libraries for color-TV programs.Few in
Hollywood could have anticipated the stream of monies to be afforded by the home-video
revolution only a few short years down the line.
To be fair, Williams was an enthusiast of these old
sci-fi films, not simply a speculator who got lucky.Burgeoning consumer interest in home video product
allowed opportunity for Williams to capitalize on his prudent purchases.The first of the “Wade Williams Collection” VHS
videocassettes were issued as early as the late 1970s, mostly through such
companies as Nostalgia Merchant and Starlog Video.In the 1999 Williams partnered with Image
Entertainment, the latter dressing the new DVDs in bright-color slipcovers.These sleeves partly disguised the fact the movies
contained within were black-and-white oldies.Sci-fi newbies unfamiliar with the histories of atomic age sci-fi films might
have felt shortchanged by this creative - if somewhat duplicitous – bit of
marketing.
But for those of us in the know, the Williams releases were
a Godsend.We were the aficionados of
old-school sci-fi, semi-aging folks who first caught the films during
theatrical matinees in the 50’s or through fuzzy late-night TV broadcasts in
the ‘60s.We no longer had to order
wonky prints sourced from aged television screenings peddled by bootleg vendors
advertising in the back pages of cult film magazines.When Laserdisc and DVD releases would supersede
VHS cassettes in quality of presentation, Williams’ catalog was similarly
trotted out in new formats.
It must be noted that Williams has also been, somewhat
ungraciously, a target of criticism – often painted as a proverbial villain - over
the last two decades by some collectors.As the rights holder to so many treasured classic – and not so classic –
vintage sci-fi films, the just shy of eighty Williams has been reluctant in
recent years to issue the films on Blu-ray.His reasoning for not doing, while disappointing, is sound.Answering critics of the handling of his
catalog, Williams offered to contributors on the on-line Home Theater Forum
while physical media sales
remained important, “streaming, downloading, Amazon Prime, Netflix and TCM are
the remaining outlets from classic films.”
He would also note that restorations
were expensive undertakings.Factoring
in public domain issues, the problem of outright bootlegging and copy-and-paste
YouTube piracy, there was no longer any chance to break-even - much
less garner a profit - from such an enterprise. It was a practical and understandable
real-world estimate – but a response disappointing for those who preferred to
stock their home video libraries with physical media.
Which brings us back, in a roundabout manner, to Drive-In Retro Classics: Science Fiction Triple
Feature. Taking the series’ format history
into account, the natural progression would have been to see these films
released on Blu ray; to revisit them in spruced-up remasters with a dollop of
bonus special materials tagged on.But,
alas, this isn’t the case.Instead Drive-In Retro Classics: Science Fiction
Triple Feature offers up a total of three films, running 222 minutes
collectively, all crushed on a single disc.There are no special features, no new scans from better elements, no new
bells or whistles of any sort.So buyer
beware.
OK, with all this history out of the way I offer, for the
uninitiated at least, a brief overview of the films in the Corinth set:
In The Brain from
Planet Arous, Steve Marsh (John Agar), a technician of the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission, becomes the unwilling host of alien being named Gor. Gor is
an evil levitating cerebellum with half-moon eyes who desires rule as “Master
of the Universe.”He aspires to make all
the people of the earth his slaves.The
alternative is “death by intense radiation.”The earth is merely one stop on this quest… and he makes the most of the
visit. Through his manipulation of his hypnotized subjugate Marsh, Gor unleashes
a rash of attacks on military-bases and martial aircrafts.
Gor convinces the cowered American Generals to convene a
summit with the earth’s six other nuclear powers, demanding all nations submit
to his terms… or else. All seems lost until Vol, a second and far friendlier
levitating brain from Arous, arrives at Indian Springs to offer advice.Vol explains the only way to stop the
renegade Gor is by attacking the creature’s one weak spot, striking at the brain’s
fissure of Rolando.But can Marsh’s
girlfriend Sally (Joyce Randolph) and George the dog get this important info to
Marsh in time?
The
Hideous Sun Demon is the tour de force brainchild of
actor/writer/producer Robert Clarke. Clarke plays Dr. Gilbert McKenna, an
“obscure scientist” exposed to a type of radiation “far more dangerous than
cosmic rays.”This turns out to be an
unwelcome turn of events as such exposure has triggered a reverse evolution of
his DNA, turning him into the Hideous Sun Demon, a half-human half-reptile
biped.The movie is sort of a reversal
of werewolfism.Clarke’s transformation
is not triggered by the rising of the full moon but by exposure to the sun’s rays.When not lurching about Los Angeles and Santa
Monica at night, McKenna sulks, drinks a lot of whiskey and hangs out a dingy
nightclub where he listens to a buxom blond tickle the ivories and sing such moody
jazz numbers as “Strange Desire.”Perhaps Little Orphan Annie desires for the sun to come out tomorrow,
but its bad news for McKenna.
In Rocketship X-M,
America is readying a sleek spacecraft for blast-off.The rocket is to carry a team of scientists –
including a thirty-year old Lloyd Bridges – on a mission to the moon.Unfortunately, a combination of bad
scientific calculations and an untimely meteor shower forces the craft off course.The space travelers instead land on Mars
where, to their surprise, discover the ruins of an ancient civilization.They are received unwelcomingly, made targets
by a gaggle of rock throwing Martian Neanderthals. Though they quickly and
wisely abandon the Red Planet for a trip back home, they encounter yet another problem.Is there enough fuel left in the craft’s
supply tanks to get them home safely?
Of the three films in this set, only Rocketship X-M aspires to loftier visions and high production values.Theobold Holsopple’s production designs are
imaginative and iconic.The
special-effects work of Don Stewart, I.A. Block and Jack Rabin is of similar high-caliber,
especially when considering the era in which the film was produced.
To wrap up: the best thing I can say about this new DVD release
is that it brings these films back into print, making them more easily
available to new consumers.No more
scouring through second hand shops or paying fifty dollar “collector” prices
for the now rare original single-disc DVDs released twenty-odd years ago.But when one learns the MSRP of the Corinth
release is $29.95… well, that price seems a bit stiff.But I’m confident the MSRP will likely not be
the actual asking price when the disc hits online outlets.
I’d be remiss without at least mentioning one title, The Brainfrom Planet Arous, is reportedly being readied for Blu-ray release
by another home video company, one known for bring loving attention to neglected
films.This prospective Blu issue,
slated for release in summer of 2022, promises a new restoration, an audio
commentary, a booklet, and a special-features documentary as bonuses.So some may choose a wait-and-see approach
before gambling on Drive-in Retro
Classics.
Like many boys who grew up in the 1960s, I was addicted to Mad magazine. It's sarcastic satires of politicians and pop culture figures were all the rage and the magazine was a showcase for some truly impressive writers and artists. Mad pushed the envelope in some regards but publisher William Gaines still maintained a family-friendly facade. In 1970 (I assure, that is A.D.), I entered high school a few months after another satire magazine, National Lampoon, published its premiere issue. The first issue I saw featured a striking cover by artist Frank Frazetta that spoofed those old jungle movies. It depicted a courageous white guy saving a scantily clad white woman from a hoard of African natives. It was titled "White Man's Wet Dream". I was hooked before I opened the magazine. National Lampoon became a "must-read" for young people of the era. Unlike Mad, there were no holds barred when it came to off-limits subjects. Anyone and anything was fair game for the team of talented writers and artists, many of whom would go on to notable careers. The sexual content was presented in a humorous manner but it broke barriers in terms of what was depicted. Even the official line of National Lampoon souvenirs were hawked by topless young women. The success of the Lampoon was such that, by 1978, the company entered the movie business. The first release, "National Lampoon's Animal House" made John Belushi into a big screen star and elevated John Landis from obscurity into one of the industry's hottest directors. The film was a sensation so it seemed inevitable that more Lampoon films would emerge- and they did, though none of them were related to the original movie. Chevy Chase starred in some of the popular "Vacation" movies that bore the banner of the Lampoon, but most of the other attempts to blend the magazine concepts to the big screen resulted in rather nondescript productions that had little theatrical exposure before going to home video. By 1998, the magazine itself had run out of steam and ceased publication after a glorious and influential run, although the company name is still actively linked to various TV, video and big screen projects.
One of the more obscure feature films is "National Lampoon's Movie Madness", a 1982 collection of unrelated comedies stories linked by nothing other than the Lampoon name. As the old joke goes, "the movie wasn't released- it escaped!", as indicated on IMDB, which lists the film's theatrical gross as $63,000, which was probably due to tickets sold to just the people involved in making it. The movie marked the debut of director Bob Giraldi, who promptly left feature films to become one of the top music video directors in the industry. One segment of the film was directed by Henry Jaglom..yes, that Henry Jaglom, the acclaimed director of indie films who has developed a loyal international fan base. It's telling that while Jaglom continued making feature films, he has never worked for a major studio again. The mess of a feature film consists of three separate stories. In "Growing Yourself", Peter Riegert is Jason Cooper, a rich New York Yuppie with a wife (Candy Clark) and two small kids. One day, on a whim, he tells his wife that they should leave each other in order for both them to find the space to "grow". Without batting an eye, she promptly leaves. Jason adopts an increasingly bizarre lifestyle that includes turning his apartment into a jungle of sorts. He pursues unsuccessful relationships with women, including a 14 year-old temptress played by young Diane Lane. At one point, he gives away custody of one of his children to a stranger without batting an eye. When his wife returns later, she informs him that she has gone from housewife to running Union Carbide. The entire scenario is weird but occasionally amusing because the characters simply accept mind-boggling developments with barely a shrug - and Peter Riegert plays the smarmy, self-absorbed Jason with just the right touch.
The second tale is "Success Wanters" and features Ann Dusenberry as an aspiring stripper, Dominique, who makes the ill-fated decision to appear at a convention of executives for the butter industry. Within minutes, the horny, tuxedo-clad, cigar smoking middle-aged execs decide to gang rape her--- and use some handy sticks of butter as useful novelties. This was the early 1980s and group sexual abuse could still be shown to comedic effect, although fortunately, we aren't treated to seeing the dirty deed itself. Instead of going after the rapists legally, she decides to bring down the entire butter industry by making Americans more addicted to margarine (I'm not making this up, folks.) This she achieves by becoming the mistress of a margarine magnate (such people must exist) played by Robert Culp. While he's on his death bed, she gets him to sign his empire over to her and she wields her new powers to mortally wound the butter industry, a strategy that sees her seducing the President of the United States (Fred Willard) and the First Lady. Despite the outrageous scenario, the entire segment is more absurd than funny.
The last, and least, of the segments is "Municipalians",which finds young Robby Benson as a rookie L.A. cop partnered with a season veteran played by Richard Widmark. The entire scenario centers on us watching the hopelessly innocent, naive and perpetually smiling Benson become corrupted by the system and the dehumanizing crimes he's forced to deal with, all unfolding as Widmark sits in the squad car ignoring the violence around him as he counts the days until his retirement. Eventually, Benson becomes a raging lunatic himself. The segment had possibilities in terms of satirizing the cliched scenario of the young cop teamed with the grumpy veteran, but the result is awful in a mind-boggling way. Benson is game to try anything under Jaglom's misdirection but we can assume he was happy that virtually no one saw the film. Only Widmark emerges with his dignity intact. Jaglom later blamed the studio for compromising his segment but if they cut any footage, it was probably considered to be a humanitarian gesture.
Code Red has released "National Lampoon's Movie Madness" on Blu-ray to the joy of bad movie fans and the probable disgust of anyone still alive who was involved in it. The Zucker brothers had the right touch for these types of theatre of the absurd premises but directors Giraldi and Jaglom have heavy hands and are working with pretty awful scripts. The only saving grace is the abundance of veteran actors and up-and-comers who make appearances. They include Elisha Cook, Jr, Rhea Perlman,Tito Vandis (a rare performance that clicks), Joe Spinell, Olympia Dukakis, Dick Miller, Christopher Lloyd, Julie Kavner and even porn superstar Harry Reems. The only one who makes an impression is Henny Youngman, whose 30 seconds of rapid-fire old jokes makes you wish they would have simply used his stand-up act to close out the latter part of the film. From a sociological view, however, it's interesting how audience's tastes have changed over the ensuing years. At times it appears the primary reason for the film's existence was to exploit each of the actresses who appear topless at length in the first two segments, despite the fact that it certainly wasn't essential to the script. Giraldi's cameras linger on the undraped actresses who engage in small talk to justify the exploitation. For those viewers of a certain age, there may be pangs of nostalgia for an era in which no one was overly-concerned about such practices, but judged by today's industry standards, it would be largely unthinkable to film segments such as these.
The Code Red video looks reasonably good and the only bonus feature is a trailer. In viewing it, I came to the conclusion that the studio should have released only the trailer and called it a day. The movie poster artwork depicted on the sleeve seems to be an homage (or rip-off) of Jack Davis's iconic campaign for "Its' a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World". Sadly, the comedic analogies end there.
Of
all the actors to emerge in the 1970s, there are few, if any, as captivating,
unpredictable and exciting as James Woods. He began the decade, and his on
screen career for that matter, for legendary director Elia Kazan in The
Visitors (1972), and in the next few years established himself as one of
American film's most promising young performers. He turned up as villains in
such classic TV shows as Kojak and Streets of San Francisco, but he also
appeared in some major 70s movies too, such as 1973's The Way We Were, Arthur
Penn's Night Movies (1975) and The Gambler (1975). But it was his performance
in The Onion Field (1979) which really signalled his arrival, as the
sociopathic cop killer Greg Powell. The film, based on Joseph Wambaugh's best-selling
non-fiction book, was a critical smash and earned Woods his first wave of
acclaim. It was a stunning performance, equally charismatic and frightening,
and it brought in a new face for cinema, an actor so convincing in his
intensity that you would have been scared of him had you met him in the street.
Of
course, it was really only the beginning. Into the next decade he proved
himself to be one of American cinema's most reliable, quirky, and appealing
character actors, appearing in such classics as Eyewitness (1981), David
Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in
America (1984), Against All Odds (1984), Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986), for
which he received his first Oscar nomination, Best Seller (1987), Cop (1988)
and True Believer (1989). It was one of the most remarkable runs for any actor
of the era.
Woods
went on to appear in more than his fair share of stand outs in the following
decades, in such films as Chaplin (1991), The Hard Way (1992), The Specialist
(1994), Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), for Oliver Stone again in both Nixon
(1995) and Any Given Sunday (1999), in Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicides (1999)
and John Carpenter's Vampires (1998). His filmography reveals an almost
faultless body of work.
I
first had the idea to write a book about Woods' filmography in May 2021. I had
interviewed James in 2020 for a book I had written about Once Upon a Time in
America and, somewhat unexpectedly, we had stayed in touch. After I put
together a retrospective article for a vintage film magazine I sometimes put
out (Scenes), I presented the idea of a full book. He said he was OK with that,
but I presumed I would just write it and that would be it. No, he was happy to
do interviews- and we certainly did. For months in fact, we would speak every
week for hours on end, going over his many classics, from his early career days
in the 1970s, through his iconic films, right up to the most recent work. I got
the chance to interview the likes of Sharon Stone, Debbie Harry, Oliver Stone
and Jim Belushi, not to mention having Dolly Parton herself write the foreword
(she and Woods made a film together, Straight Talk). However, for the most part
the book is a journey through the career of James Woods, with Woods himself
acting as a sort of tour guide through his canon, and in the process, a part of
film history itself; beginning in the early Seventies with his experiences with
such directors as Sydney Pollack, Kazan, Harold Becker and others, through his
turbulent but rewarding work with Oliver Stone and numerous other legendary
filmmakers.
Woods
said to me at one point that the book was turning into a conversation between
two film lovers, one of whom just happened to be James Woods. And that, I
believe, sums it up rather well. This is a film lover's book, and it has the
distinction of having its subject as a kind of co-author. The resulting book,
The Films of James Woods, is a journey through a film career, yes, but it is
also a relaxed, freewheeling chat between two men, one in the UK, one in America,
and one who just happens to be a cinema legend. There is no gossip in the book,
no tell-all tattle, but a lot of movie talk. A hell of a lot, in fact.
Mill Creek Entertainment is releasing "Magnum P.I: The Complete Series" on Blu-ray. The set contains 30 discs, so if you're a fan, you'd better add another shelf to your video library. Here are the details:
"Buckle up
and take a ride with Magnum, P.I. in all 8 seasons of the iconic series that
are available for the first time on Blu-ray! Explore beautiful and exotic
Hawaii with television's most beloved and charismatic private investigator
(Emmy® Award winner Tom Selleck) as he tackles baffling mysteries and tracks
down the bad guys with the help of T.C. (Roger E. Mosley), Rick (Larry Manetti)
and Higgins (John Hillerman) plus his four-legged pals, Apollo and Zeus.
Packed with
non-stop adventure and featuring iconic guest stars, Magnum P.I. is an
unforgettable thrill-ride. Own the legacy today!"
Cinema Retro has received the following press release from The History Press.
THE ART OF FILM
Designing James Bond, Aliens, Batman and More
24 March 2022 | 9780750997423 | HB | £25
TERRY ACKLAND-SNOW WENDY LAYBOURN
Legendary
Art Director Terry Ackland-Snow lifts the lid on his extraordinary career in
cinema.
Features
many unpublished images and production sketches, and a wealth of amusing and
revealing anecdotes. Terry Ackland-Snow has been a legendary figure in the film /
TV industry for more than 40 years. Having worked on over 80 feature films,
including two James Bond (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and The Living
Daylights), Aliens, Batman, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Labyrinth and The Rocky
Horror Picture Show, he reveals in The Art of Film the stories behind the
making of these iconic productions. With behind-the-scenes photographs and
Terry’s own production sketches, many of which are published here for the first
time, this is an essential read for lovers of classic cinema.
Terry
Ackland-Snow has been in the film and television industry for more than 50
years. Having worked on over 80 feature productions, he has amassed a wealth of
knowledge and experience, all of which he now teaches on his art direction
training courses based at Pinewood Studios.
Wendy
Laybourn has worked in the film industry since the early 1970s and has spent
the past few years helping the future generation of filmmakers to understand
the skills and crafts involved.