BY LEE PFEIFFER

Catlow is a fun MGM Western from 1971 with broad comedic overtones in addition to some fairly brutal violence. The film was directed by Sam Wanamaker and produced by Euan Lloyd, an old hand at bringing good action movies to the big screen (i.e. Shalako, The Wild Geese). The film is based on the novel by Louis L'Amour. Yul Brynner plays the titular hero, a charismatic, free spirit who travels with an entourage of vagabond cowboys and sex-crazed hot number, Rosita, played by Daliah Lavi, who is cast against type as a wild, unsophisticated character. The somewhat meandering plot has Catlow accused, perhaps erroneously, of stealing cattle. He is pursued half-heartedly by Marshall Cowan (Richard Crenna), an old army buddy who spends more time socializing with Catlow than making any real attempt to bring him back to a kangaroo trial. The scenes of the two men engaging in endless attempts to outwit each other are quite amusing. Leonard Nimoy's bounty hunter Miller poses a more realistic threat, relentlessly hunting Catlow and his men down to the wilds of Mexico where everyone ends up facing both the army and Apaches.

There are some solid, suspenseful action sequences such as when Cowan finds himself wounded and surrounded by Indians. There is also a neat double cross that results in Catlow and his men having their guns stolen just as they are about to face off with the Apaches. The inspired supporting cast includes Jeff Corey as the requisite sidekick that was played by Walter Brennan and Gabby Hayes in earlier Westerns. Jo Ann Pflug provides some glamour as a sexy upper class seniorita. The chemistry between Brynner and Crenna is the main pleasure of the film but Nimoy scores well in his limited role as a ruthless villain- and the site of him bare-assed fighting with Brynner beside a bathtub is one for the books.

The Warner Archive region-free DVD includes the original trailer.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM THE CINEMA RETRO MOVIE STORE

BY LEE PFEIFFER

I have a passion for Westerns of the 1960s, especially those mid-range productions that weren't designed to win awards but, rather, produce a decent profit on a modest budget. A typical example is director Burt Kennedy's 1969 film "The Good Guys and the Bad Guys" starring Robert Mitchum and recent Oscar winner George Kennedy.  Burt Kennedy had no pretensions of being placed on the same pedestal as John Ford and Howard Hawks, but when it came to making fun, whimsical Westerns, he was among the top talents in the industry. Kennedy was coming off the recent success of "The War Wagon" and "Support Your Local Sheriff!", two fun-packed Westerns that proved to resonate very well indeed with the intended audiences. "Good Guys" doesn't work as well due to a weaker script that sees it play out like a TV Western. Still, it has the central ingredients to make for an enjoyable romp: the presence of two popular leading actors, a supporting cast peppered with marvelous players, plenty of scenery of the great outdoors and even an intentionally hokey ballad sung by Glenn Yarbrough that is played throughout the film to serve as a narrative device. (Shades of "Cat Ballou"!). The film was originally developed by Kirk Douglas and director Martin Ritt but they could never bring it to fruition in a manner that was mutually satisfactory.

The story opens in the booming town of Progress, New Mexico. The local, long-serving marshall is Jim Flagg (Robert Mitchum), who is all-too aware of the fact that he's nearing the end of his career. Yet, he still remains devoted to serving the citizenry with honesty and dedication. He learns that his old nemesis, Big John McKay (George Kennedy) has been seen in the area with his gang and they are planning to rob a train that's due to arrive in a few days that is carrying $100,000 in  bank funds. Flagg notifies the town mayor, Wilker (Martin Balsam), who dismisses the concerns by saying train robberies are a relic of the distant past. Wilker is consumed with running for re-election and is bribing the population with free drinks and closing down the bordello, which delights the local women. (However, he privately assures the men that it will reopen right after the election.) He's also devoting his time to seducing a local, married beauty (Tina Louise). The unscrupulous mayor lures Flagg to a podium at one of his campaign rallies and shocks him by announcing Flagg will be retiring.  The mayor summarily appoints his right hand "yes man" to take over as marshal. He gives Flagg a gold watch and a pension then sends him off to a round of applause. Ever-dedicated to his profession, however, Flagg tracks down McKay and is shocked to find that the once-notorious outlaw is now being bullied by the cutthroats in his gang. Flagg manages to put handcuffs on McKay and bring him to town with the intention of delivering him to a federal marshal in a different territory, given Mayor Wilker's indifference to the train robbery plot. You can predict where this is all going. Flagg and McKay wax nostalgic about the good old days when there was some honor and respect between lawmen and thieves. Flagg enlists his aid to help him prevent the train robbery which leads to a chaotic conclusion with the new partners boarding the train and being mistaken for gang members, the townspeople forming a massive posse in pursuit of the out-of-control train and everyone fighting each other in comic shoot-outs.

There's a lot of violence in "The Good Guys and the Bad Guys" but none of it is gory. In fact, there's only one dramatic shootout in which a sympathetic character is murdered. There are plenty of women of loose morals but they all have the requisite heart of gold. The byplay between Mitchum and Kennedy is fun but it's Martin Balsam who steals the film in a rare comedic role. Among the familiar faces who contribute to the yucks: young David Carradine and his father John (though they don't share a scene together), Marie Windsor, Kathleen Freeman, Douglas V. Fowley and Lois Nettleton as a widow with a young son who is in a flirtatious relationship with Mitchum. Harry Stradling,Jr.'s cinematography is a quite impressive, capturing the grandeur of the New Mexico and Colorado mountain locations and the miniature work seen in the spectacular train crash is also very good. Critics were anemic at best when it came to reviewing the film. The New York Times dismissed it as "a dinky prairie oyster" while a few other outlets at least acknowledged it was fun family entertainment. Mitchum would later say he regretted being in the film, stating ""How in hell did I get into this picture, anyway? I kept reading in the papers that I was going to do it, but when they sent me the script I just tossed it on the heap with the rest of them. But somehow, one Monday morning, here I was. How in hell do these things happen to a man?"

The Warner Archive region-free DVD features the original trailer (which gives away some spoilers) and a lengthy featurette which covers the making of the film in the small railroad town of Chama, New Mexico through the eyes of a local young boy who gets to meet the stars and director and appear as an extra in the film.

"The Good Guys and the Bad Guys"  didn't rank high on the list of career achievements for anyone involved in it but it provides enough fun moments to merit recommending.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM THE CINEMA RETRO MOVIE STORE

We always get a laugh out of the "conventional wisdom" that the Western film genre was all but dead in the 1970s. In fact, the decade produced some great Westerns including Clint Eastwood's hit "The Outlaw Josey Wales", which boasted a great score, impressive locations and a terrific supporting cast. Here is the original theatrical trailer. 

BY DOUG OSWALD

Jeff Chandler leads a group of 3,000 American soldiers on a real life “Men on an Impossible Mission” in “Merrill’s Marauders,” available on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection. I say ‘real life” because this movie is based on actual events with soldiers sent on what even they saw as an impossible feat. Crossing through Burma from India and taking out first one, then three Japanese bases. They march through hundreds of miles of thick jungle and swamps in order to accomplish their impossible mission lead by Brig. General Frank D. Merrill.

Following the opening credits, the film opens with an introduction narration over newsreel footage. In 1942 it was feared the Japanese would link up with the Germans who might defeat the Russians and make their way through Russia toward British- controlled India and connect with the Japanese to form a common front. The Japanese did push the British out of Burma, but the Allies quickly began to fight back. 3,000 American soldiers, a precursor to U.S. Army Special Forces, entered Burma through India. They were veterans of Guadalcanal, New Guinea and Bougainville. The 5307th Composite Unit (provisional), under the command of Brig. General Frank D. Merrill, started their trek on January 4th 1944. Their mission is to take the main Japanese supply base in North Burma, Walawbum. It took them three months to get there in three columns. After this success, they continued to take other strategic locations which are depicted in the movie as the men grumble and hope for the end to come soon.

While successful in winning each objective, the campaign was won at a high cost, as only 130 combat ready soldiers survived out of the original 2,997. The unit was disbanded on 10 August 1945, about a week after the final campaign in the town of Myitkyina, Burma. Some would call the jungle campaign a Pyrrhic victory and even Merrill was never the same after suffering several heart attacks while pushing his men to the breaking point, fighting not only the Japanese, but heat, hunger and disease. Was the invasion worth the huge loss of life? We have the advantage of hindsight and history buffs can argue the point. Merrill survived the war and retired from the Army 1948. He died in 1955.

The movie is a very entertaining military drama depicting Pacific theater jungle warfare the likes of which most of us can only imagine. Chandler is terrific as Merrill,who pushes his men relentlessly. Equally at home in Westerns, war movies, thrillers, adventure movies and dramas, Chandler had rugged good looks and the charm and charisma to match. He would play Cochise in three movies starting with “Broken Arrow” in 1950 with James Stewart. He was initially cast in supporting roles, but would soon move to leading man status.

Joining Chandler in the cast is Ty Hardin as 2nd Lieutenant Lee Stockton, one of Merrill’s key officers. Hardin serves as Merrill’s conscience and questions the value of continuing to fight at such a high cost in lives. Hardin gives a good performance in a key role, balancing orders and the lives of his men. This was Hardin’s first big movie role after working for several years in television. He would work steadily throughout the Sixties, appearing in other big screen war movies such as “PT 109,” “Battle of the Bulge” and “Custer of the West.” He never quite achieved big star status and the acting parts began to fade away in the late Sixties. His anti-government and anti-Semitic politics probably didn’t help as he became known more for his extremist political views.

Andrew Duggan is the unit’s doctor, Captain Abraham Lewis Kolodny, M.D. Claude Akins is a welcome addition as Sergeant Kolowicz in an early film role after years in television. Interestingly, Vaughan Wilson appears in his only screen appearance as Bannister, Merrill’s assistant. Lt. Colonel Samuel Vaughn Wilson was a surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders and was Merrill’s deputy during the campaign. He also served as technical advisor for the production and introduces the trailer. Other cast members include John Hoyt as General Joseph Stilwell, Will Hutchins as Chowhound and Peter Brown as Bullseye. The cast is good and believable throughout the film as the men are pushed to their limits and then asked to give more as they take one Japanese outpost after another. There are a few light moments involving Eleanor the pack mule and her handler Muley played by Charles Briggs.

Based on the book by Charlton Ogburn Jr., the movie was directed by Samuel Fuller, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Milton Sperling. Fuller is best known for directing crime thrillers, but he was also a veteran of WWII and would later direct one of the last great WWII dramas, “The Big Red One” which is based on his personal experiences as a soldier during WWII in North Africa and Europe.

The movie was filmed on location in Pampanga, Philippines, which stood in for the Burmese jungle sequences, and also at Clark Air Base, Philippines, all in the early part of 1961. This was, sadly, Jeff Chandler’s final film. While in production in the Philippines, Chandler suffered a back injury while playing baseball with soldiers stationed at Clark Air Base. He had several surgeries in California shortly after production was completed. Jeff Chandler died on 17 June 1961 due to a blood infection and pneumonia. His children received a settlement in his death due to medical malpractice.

Released in May of 1962 by Warner Bros., the movie was filmed in widescreen with a score by Howard Jackson. The image quality and sound is terrific on the Blu-ray by the Warner Archive Collection and clocks in at swift 98 minutes. The only extra is the trailer for the film. The movie is a worthy upgrade from the previous DVD and is sure to entertain fans of WWII movies and history.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY FRED BLOSSER

A Dino De Laurentiis production starring Charles Bronson, John Sturges’ “The Valdez Horses” opened in Italy in 1973 and kicked around markets in Europe and the Far East over the next two years under various alternative titles. In 1975, it finally limped onto a handful of U.S. screens as “Chino.” By then, Bronson was already a cultural sensation here in the wake of “Death Wish,” but “Chino” didn’t have much of a push from its American distributor, and it didn’t last long in the movie houses. The Bronson vehicle that made a splash in 1975 was Walter Hill’s “Hard Times,” featuring the star as a hardscrabble street fighter during the Great Depression. If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember “Chino,” if at all, as a VHS release from the Neon Video budget label in the 1980s, gathering dust at your local Blockbuster or Suncoast.

In the film, young Jamie (Vincent Van Patten), traveling alone across the wide open spaces, is stranded miles from the nearest town as night begins to fall. Is he a runaway or an orphan? That’s never clarified, an element that may bother those who tend to pick at loose ends, although it doesn’t greatly matter in terms of the story. Seeing a lonely ranch house in the distance, the boy meets Chino Valdez (Charles Bronson), a half-Indian stockman who tames horses and lives by himself. The taciturn Chino gives Jamie shelter for the night, in return for the kid pitching in with the chores. Next morning, in a scene nicely underplayed by Bronson and Van Patten, Chino offers the boy a job as his hired hand, and Jamie eagerly accepts. The work includes mentoring on how to tame and ride mustangs. When Jamie asks if taming means “busting” a wild horse, Chino emphatically says no: “ . . . that takes all the spunk out of a horse. It breaks him. And I'm not gonna bust a Valdez horse.” It’s the first of several scenes in which, not very subtly, Chino is likened to his wild stallions.

Chino’s neighbor is Maral (Marcel Bozzuffi), a wealthy rancher whose sister Catherine (Jill Ireland) comes from the East to visit. In case any sticklers in the audience wonder why Maral has a French accent and Catherine a British one, the real answer is simple. If you wanted Charles Bronson for a picture in those days, his wife Jill Ireland was part of the deal. In context of the story, it’s because the siblings had different mothers, as quickly noted in passing. Trouble develops when Chino and Catherine fall in love with each other and decide to marry with the help of a friendly padre. Learning of the plan, Maral confronts Catherine in the chapel as she waits in her wedding gown for Chino to arrive. If his sister marries the rough-hewn, penniless horseman, “I will kill him,” Maral tells her. It’s a complication straight out of the 1950s B-Westerns. Except there, the hero and the overbearing cattle baron would have settled their differences with a friendly fist fight, and wedding bells would ring. This being a 1970s Western, and a Charles Bronson vehicle to boot, it isn’t too much of a spoiler to suggest that things won’t go that smoothly for Chino.

Even Bronson fans are likely to concede that “The Valdez Horses” is a mess dramatically speaking, although an interesting mess for those of us who fondly remember how the international co-productions in the 1970s, like this one, were often patched together. Quiet, family-friendly scenes of Chino and Jamie bonding as surrogate father and son are punctuated by a saloon brawl in which Chino bashes a bully in the crotch with a whiskey bottle, a protracted showdown with a high body count, a whipping, and a scene in which the Spanish actress Diana Lorys, in brown makeup as a Cheyenne woman, bares her breasts. In audio commentary for a new Blu-ray edition from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, film historian and Bronson specialist Paul Talbot notes that Sturges filmed on Spaghetti Western locations in Almeria, Spain, in 1972 with an Italian and Spanish crew and supporting cast. Although the Europeans’ relaxed approach jarred with his studio-honed sensibilities for running a tight set, Sturges gamely wrapped on schedule. But once they previewed the finished product, De Laurentiis‘ investors decided that the director’s low-key, 1960s-style Western would disappoint Bronson fans. So Italian filmmaker-for-hire Duilio Coletti was brought in to film additional scenes, accounting for the more exploitative content. Even so, “Chino” squeaked by in the U.S. with a PG rating, bare breasts and all. Some of us will be less embarrassed by Diana Lorys‘ nudity than by the inane romantic scenes between Bronson and Ireland. For what it’s worth, the script was credited to veteran novelist and screenwriter Clair Huffaker from a book by Lee Hoffman. Stephen Geller and Elmore Leonard also made unofficial contributions along the way, according to Paul Talbot’s research.

The Kino Lorber Blu-ray includes two versions of the movie, a 1.85:1 print from the U.S. release and a windowboxed 1.37:1 version with French opening titles. In color and clarity, the 1.37:1 version is superior to the other, but the nostalgically minded may prefer the 1.85:1, blemishes and all, as the one they watched on VHS back in the day. In a new interview, Vincent Van Patten fondly remembers Bronson, Sturges, and the shoot in Almeria. Between scenes, the young actor asked the fifty-year-old Bronson how he maintained his “ripped” physique, on display twice in the movie. “Push ups,” Bronson answered. “Push ups?” Van Patten said. “Push ups,” Bronson repeated. Van Patten’s affectionate Bronson impression is spot-on. From Talbot’s minute reconstruction of the picture’s bumpy history and Van Patten’s affable memories, you’ll conclude that a docudrama about the making of “The Valdez Horses” would be more engaging than the movie itself.

Other extras on the Blu-ray include a silent 8-millimeter home movie shot by Van Patten and his brother Jimmy in Almeria, the American TV spot for “Chino,” alternate title openings, trailers for other Bronson movies on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, and a reversible cover sleeve with poster art for “The Valdez Horses” on one side and “Chino” on the other.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)

BY ADRIAN SMITH

When film fans hear the name of Italian director Lucio Fulci, it almost inevitably brings to mind his oft-quoted moniker as the “Godfather of Gore,” thanks to the films made towards the end of his career that caused so much trouble with the British film censors; Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980), The Beyond (1981) New York Ripper (1983) being some of the most notorious. To view him as such however is to miss out on what was an extraordinarily prolific career which also included musicals, comedies, westerns, historical dramas, fantasy films, science fiction and thrillers. This new Blu-ray and digital release of The Psychic, out now in a 2K restoration from Shameless Films, is an opportunity to reassess one of his less well known films, which is only now being released in the UK for the first time.

The Psychic tells the tale of a woman who has visions of murder and death. These visions cause her to break through a wall in her rich new husband’s old farmhouse, where she discovers the skeleton of a woman murdered four years earlier. Naturally her husband is under suspicion, and with the help of a doctor friend with an interest in parapsychology she tries to replay the memories of these visons in her head over and over again, looking for clues that might prove her husband’s innocence. As pieces of the puzzle fail to add up however, she begins to realise that some of what she has seen may in fact be a premonition of murders yet to come, possibly her own.

The original Italian title was Sette note in nero, or “Seven Black Notes.” The seven notes in question refer to the tune that is played each hour on a watch worn by our heroine, gifted to her by the husband’s sister. This sister has dozens of lovers who give her gifts, and the watch apparently came from someone in the Vatican. This is just a sly hint towards illicit goings on in the Catholic Church. In some of Fulci’s other films, such as Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), the criticism would be far more overt.

With its amateur detective attempting to solve a crime by constantly revisiting distorted memories, The Psychic sits squarely within the tradition of the giallo, the sub-genre of Italian thrillers that often featured bizarre murders, unreliable witnesses, amateur detectives and red herrings galore. Described as an “elegantly constructed murder mystery” by historian Stephen Thrower (who wrote the definitive book on Fulci’s career), this is an entertaining thriller that leads the audience down dark paths and blind alleys before finally delivering an exhilarating ending straight out of Edgar Allan Poe.

This new Shameless Blu-ray edition includes both the original Italian and English dubs, and a wealth of new interviews. Sadly, Fulci himself is no longer with us, but his daughter Antonella Fulci appears in two separate interviews, one focused on the film and the other on her father. Put together, she speaks in these interviews for almost an hour, and it is fascinating to get insight into both her personal relationship with her father as well as her own analysis of his career. Also appearing on the disc is the writer Dardano Sacchetti, who also speaks for around an hour, and with almost a hundred different credits, he has had a rich and diverse career and is full of great stories. The final interview is with the film’s composer Fabio Frizzi, who discusses how he got started in composing for film as well as his relationship with Lucio Fulci. Frizzi was a frequent collaborator with Lucio Fulci, and several years ago went on tour performing music from these films around the world (something this writer was lucky enough to see one Halloween). And if you are wondering why The Psychic score sounds familiar, that’s because it is yet another Italian score pinched by Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill!

The Shameless Films Blu-ray, in a distinctive yellow case, comes with a collectible O-ring featuring the iconic American poster art, and also includes a reversible sleeve which uses the original Italian artwork which made the Edgar Allan Poe connection even more explicit.

The Psychic deserves to become better known as a fine example of the 1970s European thriller, and this new restoration is the perfect way to see it.

(Note: this release is currently available in Region 2 UK format only.)

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON UK

BY  HANK REINEKE

Lesley Selander’s Flight to Mars (1951) was one of the earliest offerings of cinematic science-fiction’s Silver Age. The film is not one of the best of that era’s productions, and not even the best of 1951 – that honor would arguably go to Rudolph Maté’s When World’s Collide due to that film’s ground-breaking animation of George Pal. But the stage was already set for science-fiction to replace door-creaking Gothic horror as more dependable, bankable product. Moviegoers of 1945 through 1950 had already been primed for space-travel and alien-enemy films through such entertaining Republic serials as The Purple Monster Strikes, King of the Rocket Men and Flying Disc Man from Mars. The 1947 crash near Roswell, New Mexico, also made a lot of folk’s look up to the skies to ponder – and fear – what might be floating above them in the cosmos. So the time was right.

There were several delays in the start of the production of Flight to Mars. In mid-January of 1951, the Hollywood trades reported that Monogram production was scheduled to commence on 12 February. When that date passed without cameras rolling, the production start date was pushed forward, amended to 23 March. When March passed by, a third date was announced (5 April), only to be pushed forward again to 30 April. When these dates passed by as well reports came in that production of Flight to Mars was to officially commence on 12 May, 1951 with Walter Mirisch producing.

There was no announcement as of 5 May of who might be helming Monogram Picture’s very ambitious project. But, at long last, on 19 May 1951, the film was put on Hollywood’s current in-production schedule with the notice that Lesley Selander had signed on to direct with Harry Neumann serving as Director of Photography. Selander was an odd choice to direct. He was a well-regarded and dependable figure at Monogram, but his stock-in-trade was knocking out scores of inexpensive westerns with breakneck rapidity.

The Monogram Pictures Corporation was now under the umbrella of Allied Artists. The President of Allied, Steve Broidy, had been promising as early as October of 1951 that both studios would lens no fewer than forty-five feature films in 1951-52, a half-dozen of those efforts being “high budget” films produced under the Allied banner. Monogram, as was its reputation, would knock off its usual run of low-budget westerns, detective films, Bowery Boys comedies and “fantasy” films – the latter being a generous euphemism for their string of bargain basement horrors with a dash of science-fiction.

In truth, even Monogram’s threadbare production values were on the rise, Broidy promising that several of the studio’s planned features would be shot in Cinecolor, a two-color film process that brought out a striking and vibrant – if occasionally unnatural in appearance - pallet of saturated hues. If nothing else, Flight to Mars would appear a relatively bright and lavish production by Monogram standards. The film’s production’s designs were actually pretty well-done all things considered. The space-traveling animation, mattes and Mars “location” shooting effects (California and Nevada’s Death Valley was used as backdrop of the dying planet) were, at best, disappointing as little would be splashed on-screen in any memorable fashion. On the other hand, there was no shortage of skimpily-dressed women milling about.

One gossip North Hollywood gossip columnist teased that Mirisch and Selander – abetted by the film’s wardrobe department - seemed to have come to agreement on the “astounding fact that women on Mars do not wear skirts.” It is true that all of the women featured on screen were not-so-immodestly dressed. Such space-age fashion, the columnist determined, might prove testing to the “squinting eyes” and morality standards set forth by the industry’s Johnson Office. Another news sheet from this same period described the costuming of the film’s female players as “nothing but hip-length tunics and the scantiest of scanties.” Piling on, still another news item described the female Martian outfits as rating “hotter than even an H-bomb, making Bikini-wearers looking over-dressed!”

Such prurient ballyhoo, of course, would understandably arouse – in a matter of speaking – interest to male filmgoers of Saturday matinees. Upon the film’s release, even the critic of the Los Angeles Times conceded should reality mirror the Martian “femme beauty” as seen on-screen in the course of Flight to Mars, “there’s going to be an awful scramble even among scientists to find a way to the distant planet.”

The publicity machine went to work in earnest in July of 1951, noting that while production on Flight to Mars had recently wrapped (shooting lasted only four to six weeks, depending on the report), actress Marguerite Chapman had become so intrigued by art director David Milton’s stage dressing, she commissioned him to re-do her Beverly Hills apartment in a “Martian manner.” Though Chapman would receive top billing, she was merely part of a genuine ensemble cast that would include Cameron Mitchell, Arthur Franz, Virginia Huston and John Litel. Since none of the above players were box-office names of any particular renown, there wasn’t a terrible amount of fanfare accompanying the film’s release in November of 1951. The cast was described a non-distinguished manner in the press as “a rather unknown but able cast of Thespians.”

The scenario of the film itself (“The Most Fantastic Expedition Ever Conceived by Man!”) was not terribly original. A meteor shower diverts a group of space-travelers from their mission and forces them to crash land on Mars. There they meet a group of white, Anglo-Saxon looking, English-speaking Martians who currently survive underground thanks to a mineral called Corium. They seem friendly enough at first, even offering to help the Earthlings rebuild their space craft for a trip home. What they’re not letting on is that their supply of life-supplying Corium is fast dwindling and thus threatening their existence. So they plan on hijacking the repaired space craft to launch an invasion of Earth.

The scenario is actually less exciting as it might sound. The premise is OK, but this is a studio-soundstage bound production with lots of people talking about things and not enough of action or on-screen intrigue or cool space-matte paintings to balance such loquaciousness. Still, there was some enthusiasm amongst studio accountants in 1951 that Flight to Mars might fare pretty well at the box office. So much so that on the very week of the film’s release, producer Mirisch announced he had once again engaged Flight to Mars screenwriter “Arthur Straus” [sic] to adapt an original story conjured up by Kenneth Charles.

It’s unclear - but certainly possible - that screenwriter Arthur Strawn was not so much misidentified in the news item as he was purposely misidentified. Strawn, the child of emigres from Romania, had been blacklisted by the right-wing Red Channels publication in 1950, suspected of Communist sympathies. His writing of the screenplay and his association with the film Hiawatha had postponed that particular film of getting into production. Monogram president Broidy thought it best to shelve the Hiawatha project due to the screenplay’s alleged Moscow-aligned pacifist taint.

Strawn’s political affiliations shouldn’t have mattered, of course. But sci-fi cinema historians have long debated if the creative genesis of Flight to Mars was, at least in part, a thematic mimic of Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 space-traveling silent-era Soviet flicker Aelita (aka Queen of Mars), a film based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita: the Decline of Mars). Flight to Mars seems to share a few tenuous ties to this early Soviet film. The most damning and oft invoked of these is the purloining of the name “Aelita” for Marguerite Chapman’s female lead character. Sci-fi film fans who wish to decide for themselves how many ideas were lifted, can view the original Soviet film on any of a number of DVD or DVD-R issues… or simply visit youtube for a peek if only passingly curious.

In any case, Mirisch’s proposed follow-up to Flight to Mars, Voyage to Venus, was to bring a crew of space-travelers to the planet second from the sun. That this second film was never put into production is a shame and a great loss: if for no other reason that moving the cast to a planet even closer to the sun’s heat would have likely caused the Venusian women to wear even less clothing…

This Blu-ray of Film Detective’s Flight to Mars, licensed from Wade Williams, has been sourced from original 35mm elements of the Cinecolor separation negatives and restored with assistance of the Paramount Pictures archives. The Blu-ray features several bonus supplements. These include two “exclusive” documentaries, both directed by Daniel Griffith: the first is Walter Mirisch: from Bomba to Body Snatchers, a thirteen-minute feature where film historian C. Courtney Joyner examines the stewardship of Mirisch and Broidy as transformative to the rise of Monogram and Allied as an industry player. The second is Interstellar Travelogues: Cinema’s First Space Race where famed space-art illustrator Vincent Di Fate narrates a ten-minute feature on the earliest bits of cinematic interest in space travel from the influences of early German rocketry to the novels of Robert Heinlein.

The set also rounds out nicely with a commentary track by Justin Humphreys, the film historian and author of the recently published The Dr. Phibes Companion: The Morbidly Romantic History of the Classic Vincent Price Horror Film Series. There’s also a twelve-page booklet that features the essay Mars at the Movies, written by journalist/author Don Stradley. While Stradley briefly touches on some aspects of the production of Flight to Mars, the essay mostly offers a brief history of the role the red planet has figured into film history. In all, a very impressive release that will delight fans of the genre.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

"WHEN SHERMAN MET FRANKENSTEIN" 

BY MARK CERULLI

To celebrate the release of producer Sam Sherman’s memoir, When Dracula Met Frankenstein (Murania Press) Cinema Retro presents this exclusive interview with the man himself. In our two-hour conversation, the filmmaker demonstrated a virtual photographic memory when discussing his remarkable 60 plus year career. Our interview was a time capsule of the drive-in era where creative marketing, distribution and production exemplified the true spirit of independent filmmaking.

Sam Sherman grew up a horror and western film fan. The first horror film Sam ever saw was Universal’s classic monster comedy, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) which captivated his imagination at a very young age. Following his dream, he attended City College of New York to study filmmaking. Like most CR readers, he was also an avid collector – in his case, horror stills, which one imagines were almost given away in the 1950s. Those black and white photos, picked up in the small memorabilia stores that used to dot Manhattan, led to a career – “In 1958, I wrote to Famous Monsters and to my surprise, got a call back from Jim Warren and asked if they’d be interested in renting my stills,” Sherman recalled.

“I produced ads for Captain Company (FM’s merchandising division) and I also acquired product for them.” (As one who spent a lot of hard-earned teenage cash on Captain Co products - including a Dr. No movie poster for all of $4.99 - that was a part of Sam’s long career I could instantly relate to.)

While ghostwriting articles for FM and working on other Warren publications like Spacemen, Screen Thrills Illustrated and Wildest Westerns, Sherman frequently found his enthusiasm for horror looked down upon by Help! magazine art director, Terry Gilliam. Years later, Gilliam took an obvious jab (and inspiration) from Sherman’s climactic battle of the monsters in Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971) with his own comedic dismemberment scene in Monty Python & The Holy Grail (1975). “I made it a point never to see anything he’s done,” Sam adds.

In the 1950s and 60s, New York was the center of the film universe and Sherman found himself making the rounds of small distributors trying to find films to license for his own fledgling company, Signature Films. Sam later got in with an independent film company called Hemisphere Pictures which specialized in movies shot in the Philippines, including the Blood Island horror cult classics directed by Eddie Romero. Sherman honed his exploitation skills by creating the theatrical, television, radio and print ad campaigns which established Hemisphere as The House of Horror with unforgettable gimmicks and marketing promotions like “The Oath of Green Blood” for the first audience participation film, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969).

Sam’s book is full of photos from that era – from snapshots of early visits to LA, to on-set stills and “ballyhoo” photos of theater displays, lurid posters and marquees. One image that jumps out is of a young Sam standing behind the iconic Boris Karloff on A.I.P.’s The Raven set. “Forry Ackerman (Famous Monsters’ longtime editor) took me to the last day of shooting and we spent the whole day with Peter Lorre and Vincent Price, which was wonderful. I had a nice chat with Karloff. He finished up for the day and (director) Roger Corman took him away to do The Terror, which was non-union, somewhere else.” Talk about maximizing your star!

In 1968, Sherman and several partners – including longtime friend, filmmaker Al Adamson, formed Independent-International Pictures Corp. (a riff off the very successful American International Pictures). “Al just wanted to make movies, he left it to me to figure out how to market them and make money,” Sam recalls.

Their first production for the new company was a raw biker film, Satan’s Sadists starring Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story fame and directed by Adamson. The film tapped into the national shockwaves reverberating from biker gang violence as well as LA’s horrific Manson murders. The female lead was a statuesque California blonde, Regina Carrol, who became Adamson’s girlfriend, later his wife and star of his films. Wanting to give her a little extra exposure, Sherman labeled her “The Freak-Out Girl”. As the film contained nudity, the then-new movie ratings board wanted to slap an X on Satan’s Sadists. Sam went to the mat to contest it, even advising the theatre circuits to rate the film themselves based on regional tastes vs the Motion Picture Board’s inconsistent classifications for independent films.

Sam’s book is full of similar throw out the rulebook tales – like licensing an odd Filipino caveman film named Tagani which was shot in black & white. To modernize it, Adamson shot some new scenes with veteran horror star John Carradine but the film still didn’t look right, so Sam suggested using various tints (“Like they did in silent movies”). He wrote MORE new scenes (including computer sex!), added an eye-catching title - Horror of the Blood Monsters and they now had a releasable film!

At Independent-International, Sam and Al shrugged off the industry’s notoriously unforgiving deadlines: “We released an imported German picture called Women for Sale which had been a big hit and I said ‘We can’t find anything like it to follow up with, so let’s make a picture like this’, it’ll be called Girls for Rent…” Sam hired an industry friend to write it, months went by without a script. “We’re getting closer to the key summer playdates, and we were really in a jam” Sam recalled. “I got another writer and we knocked the picture out fast, doing the campaign fast, ordered prints and got it into release by the end of the summer. Sixty days, I couldn’t believe we could do it but we did and it was a pretty good film!”

Of course, there’s a chapter on Independent-International’s biggest picture – Dracula vs Frankenstein, which actually started out as Blood Freaks (aka Blood Seekers). “The script was not much of anything but I was working on it… we wanted a name actor so Al went to agent Jerry Rosen who said ‘You can have Lon Chaney, Jr. and J. Carrol Naish for a week for $6K.’” They booked them sight unseen – and when they reported for work, both were in ill health. “Naish had a bad eye and Chaney had throat cancer. (Dracula vs Frankenstein would be his final horror film.) “Ya gotta meet the people,” Sam adds knowingly. Diminutive Angelo Rossitto rounded out the cast as the carnival barker Grazbo. The resulting film was so bad, backers recommended it just be shelved. Sam lives by the motto “Waste not, want not” and since he was an editor himself, he went to work watching the film repeatedly until he found a line of dialogue he could use to expand the storyline to include the last surviving Frankenstein… and the monster. “And once I thought that I said, ‘Let’s bring in Dracula for good measure.’” Scraping together $50K for reshoots they hired a tall, dark-haired record store employee, Rafael Engel (named “Zandor Vorkov” by Forry) to play the Count and 7’4” accountant, John Bloom, to play the monster. “I left it to Al to make the picture, but as the president of Independent International, I made the final decisions,” Sam adds. Sam also tapped Famous Monsters’ Forry Ackerman who not only acted in the film, but also secured the electrical equipment and props of special effects wizard Kenneth Strickfaden for the production. Strickfaden’s crackling electrical contraptions were originally used in Universal’s Frankenstein film 40 years earlier. Against the odds, Dracula vs Frankenstein was a monster hit! Ahead of his time, Sam even released the film on TV AND in theaters/drive-ins “day-and-date” at the same time. “Nobody cared”, Sam says, chuckling, “I did what I wanted to do.”

Naturally, Sam devotes a chapter to his creative partner and “the brother I never had”, Al Adamson, who was tragically murdered by a contractor renovating his desert house in 1995. Incredibly Sam still had a connection with him because one night after Al had been declared “missing”, Sam silently asked his friend to give him a sign of where he was… the word “Cement” popped into his mind. He communicated that to police and sure enough, when they investigated, Al’s body was discovered underneath a cement floor. The contractor was apprehended in Florida and is now serving decades in prison but the pain of Sam’s loss is palpable. He still keeps Adamson’s name alive with drive-in screenings and special DVD and Blu-ray releases of their work.

Now 81, Sam feels the time is ripe for his story to be told. His oversize book is full of industry lore and life lessons. “I hope readers get that if they want to be in the picture business, they can… and people who aren’t filmmakers but want to know the history of Al and myself, the whole story is there – how we did it, why we did it and what really happened.” Summing up, Sam says, “We did what we had to do.”

CLICK HERE TO ORDER BOOK FROM AMAZON

BY LEE PFEIFFER

The Warner Archive has released a Blu-ray edition of director John Sturges' "Escape from Fort Bravo", a 1953 Western that serves that combines several different aspects of the action/adventure film genre: traditional cowboy elements, Mescalero Apaches on the warpath and key elements pertaining to the Civil War. This "everything but the kitchen sink" approach makes the film the equivalent of celluloid jambalaya but it somehow works. The movie was originally set to be a 3-D production but MGM ultimately settled on making it an early venture in widescreen presentation format, filmed in a color process known as Ansco. It was heavily promoted and became a major boxoffice hit.

The story is set in Arizona when the area was a territory in the days before statehood. Fort Bravo is a remote desert outpost that protects a small town in the midst of hostile Indian country. The fort's commander, Colonel Owens, (Carl Benton Reid) is sitting on a powder keg. His troops are standing guard over a large contingent of Confederate prisoners that outnumbers the Union troops, who are regularly reduced in numbers when Apaches attack their patrols. (It's not satisfactorily explained how the Reb prisoners arrived in Arizona, since the territory saw only one minor battle/skirmish fought on its soil.) To keep order, Owens treats his prisoners with a light touch and extends all respect and courtesies to the Confederate senior officer, Captain John Marsh (John Forsythe). The Rebs resent the fort's second-in-command, Captain Roper (William Holden) for his often brutal treatment of recaptured prisoners who have attempted to escape into the brutal environment surrounding the fort. The dynamics of the situation at Fort Bravo take a dramatic turn with the arrival of a stagecoach that had been under attack by Apaches. A passing cavalry patrol intervenes and brings the stage safely to the fort. The most prominent passenger is Carla Forester (Eleanor Parker), a stunning beauty who alights from the stagecoach dressed to the nines and looking as though she just stepped off a fashion show runway in Paris. (As in many such scenarios in Hollywood Westerns of this era, she has endured a brutal journey in excruciating discomfort but her hair and makeup aren't any worse for the wear.) Upon seeing her, Roper is immediately smitten. He learns she has come to Fort Bravo to see the wedding of Colonel Owens' daughter Alice (Polly Bergen) to one of his senior officers (Richard Anderson). Carla and Alice are old friends but the wedding serves as decoy for Carla's real reason to visit the fort. Seems she is a Southern sympathizer who is secretly engaged to Captain Marsh. She intends to serve as a crucial conspirator in helping Marsh and a few other prisoners escape with the help of a local merchant who will hide the escapees and Carla in his wagon after he leaves the festivities for the wedding. Meanwhile, she strings Roper along by acting flirtatious and somewhat sexually suggestive. Roper becomes so head-over-heels in love with her, that he ends up proposing they get married.

Up to this point, "Escape from Fort Bravo" is fairly routine horse opera stuff. However,  after Marsh, Carla and a few others manage to escape, the film switches into high gear and affords director Sturges the opportunity to show off his skills at directing a big budget action movie, something that would become his trademark as his reputation in Hollywood became elevated in status. Humiliated by being cuckolded by Carla, Roper and a few troopers track down the escaped prisoners and recapture them. Predictably, Carla has been pining away for Roper, realizing that she no longer loves Marsh. Upon heading back to Fort Bravo, the small group is surrounded by Apaches and forced to abandon their horses in the midst of the harsh desert. The Apaches use inspired military-like strategies to isolate the group and pick them off one-by-one. Sturges cranks up the suspense and makes the most of this highly engrossing sequence, which serves as the heart of the film. The performances are all fine, with Holden in particularly good form and the movie benefits from a good supporting cast of welcome character actors including William Demarest as an aged Confederate prisoner and Howard McNear as the conniving local merchant.

The new Warner Archive Blu-ray looks sensational and does justice to cinematographer Robert Surtees' impressive shots of the Death Valley landscapes where much of the movie was filmed. If you like the movie and own the previous DVD release, it's worth investing in the Blu-ray upgrade.The only bonus feature is the original trailer.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY GIACOMO SELLONI

You may be aware of the fact that Christopher Columbus was not the first European to reach the Americas. Do you also know that he was not Italian? He couldn't read, write or even speak the language. He was either a "Converso" - a Jew who converted to Christianity to avoid Ferdinand and Isabella's Inquisition, or hid his Judaism. He spoke Spanish among other languages including Greek, Latin and, most telling, Ladino - the Spanish equivalent of Yiddish. Letters to his son were written in this language, and the pages contained coded Jewish references. He also knew the world was spherical (most sailors, by his time, were aware of this), his first voyage had calm seas, not dangerous ones and the crew weren't mutineers. [See: Lies My Teacher Told Me - James W. Loewen, The New Press 2nd Edition ©2007 and https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Christopher-Columbus-Secret-Jew.html]

You may be asking "what does this have to do with a review of a film documentary?" The reason is most historians are lazy and habitual plagiarists. When adding something new to the historical record they often reprint the same falsehoods that were disseminated generations earlier. Not unlike many superstitions, tall tales, and mistaken attributions. Cary Grant never said: "Judy, Judy, Judy..."

And thus were the accomplishments of Alice Guy-Blaché, arguably the first storytelling film director of all time, were glossed over, ignored or attributed to someone else; to all men, by the way. Her story is told in the documentary “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché”, directed by Pamela B. Green and narrated by Jodie Foster. The film is now available on DVD from Kino Lorber.

Yes, Edison and the Lumière Brothers made the first moving pictures but what did they give us?

Edison: The Sneeze - a four second film starring assistant Fred Ott. The Kiss - an 18-second long reenactment of the kiss between May Irwin and John Rice from the final scene of the stage musical The Widow Jones.

The Brothers Lumière: - Their first films were of such exciting subjects as: "The exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon," "The disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyon," and the riveting "Jumping onto the Blanket." Along with seven other films, all lasting between 38 and 49 seconds (approximately what a filmstrip of 17 meters long would run hand cranked through a projector) they were screened before a paying public in December of 1895 in Paris. Were these pioneers’ first efforts "Films" as we know them? Not to this reviewer. Moving pictures are not FILMS. They can be called films only by the fact that film was the medium they were created and distributed upon.

Nine months earlier, on March 22, 1895, The Lumières demonstrated their new invention, the Cinématographe, beating Edison to the market with the first reliable method to project motion pictures, in front of a small audience of friends and colleagues.

Among those in attendance were Léon Gaumont, then director of the company the Comptoir Géneral de la Photographie and his 22 year-old secretary Alice Ida Antoinette Guy (later Guy-Blaché). "Something better can be done than documenting daily life. Why not tell stories through film?" she thought at the time.

With the approval of her boss, in 1896 she writes, directs and produces what is generally thought to be the first narrative film ever made – “La Feé Aux Choux" or "The Fairy of the Cabbages" that brought to life the story parents told their younger children about where babies come from. The success of this film led to her becoming the lead director and Head of Production for Gaumont Studios. She was one of the first to use many film techniques such as close ups, hand-tinted color, stop action, reverse cranking of the camera and synchronized sound. Her success as a filmmaker helped add to Gaumont's success which enabled them to build the biggest studio stage in the world.

Alice Guy produces and directs the first film shot in the new studio. “La Esméralda”, based on Victor Hugo's “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”. While hiring new directors and set designers for the company she continues to write and direct her own takes on fashion, children, parenthood, even child abuse. She wrote roles for children when no one else was doing so.

She made comedies of seduction, chase films, utilizing methods she had learned at Gaumont from her mentor, Frédéric Dillaye.

Writer/Director Peter Farrelly on “The Gamekeeper's Son” - "I was tense watching it, afraid for the kid. The father died, it was heartbreaking, and that she could tell that kind of story in four of five minutes and get you at the edge of your seats was incredible."

Alan Williams, film historian/author - "She was the first great comic director. Most of her comedies have just absolute perfect comic timing. The timing on “The Drunken Mattress” is really astonishing." "Whoever that was who kept picking up that mattress should get an Academy Award. I've never seen anybody fall down so much." - Peter Bogdanovich.

Many of her comedies were "raunchy films," especially for the times. See “The Sticky Woman” for example. Her 1906 “The Consequences of Feminism” is described by Bogdanovich: "I think is very witty. It's a satirical comment on male fear of feminism." Julie Taymor: "Still to this day I haven't seen anything like that, where she has women in women's clothes and men in men's clothes, these men are acting like women and the women are acting as men. It's revolutionary." She was making great comedies more than a decade before anyone heard of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or the Keystone Cops.

In his memoirs, Sergei Eisenstein recalls that he saw this film at eight years old. "The women rebelled. They started frequenting cafes. talk politics, smoke cigars, while their husbands sat at home doing the washing." Eisenstein named it his main influential film which can be seen in his 1928 film, “October”.

Guy uses the Tissot Bible as reference material for her largest production to date, “The Passion”. She creates 25 episodes with about 300 extras to tell the story of the life of Christ. The series contained some very early special effects. In one case Jesus rising out of the cave.

BY JOHN M. WHALEN

In “Wings of the Hawk” (1953), Van Heflin stars as Irish Gallagher, an American mining for gold down in Mexico. He and his partner Marco (Mario Siletti) are ripped off by local military ruler Coronel Paco Ruiz (George Dolenz), who takes over the mine and kills Marco. Irish barely manages to escape on horseback and is rescued by insurrectionists led by Raquel Noriega (Julia Adams), who gets a bullet in the shoulder for her trouble. Irish patches her up in exchange for his freedom and romance rears its ugly head. Jealousy also flares when revolutionary leader Arturo Torres (Rudolpho Acosta), who had been her lover, sees what’s going on. Enter Pascual Orozco (Noah Beery, Jr.) who asks for Arturo’s help in taking Ciudad Juarez. They’ll need $5,000 to buy 200 rifles but the revolutionaries have no money. However, they come up with a brainstorm. They’ll steal $5,000 in gold from Irish’s mine, which is now under Coronel Ruiz’s control. Irish must be gaga over Raquel because he agrees to go along with it, “as long as I get my money back later.” There’s a lot of shooting after that, chases on horseback, and a firing squad kills some villagers.

It’s all crammed in to a fast-paced 81 minutes, leaving little time for reflection or character development for that matter. Julia Adams, most famous as Kay, the beauty who lures the Creature out of the Black Lagoon, is always a delight to see on screen, but her performance as Raquel goes no deeper than the Mexican makeup painted on her face and the black hair pieces tacked on her head. Heflin gives his usual solidly rugged performance as the Irish miner-turned-revolutionary, and George Dolenz (father of Monkee Micky Dolenz) is sufficiently snide as the local gendarme, but there is little heat generated by any of them in the on- screen proceedings.

This is not to say that “Wings of the Hawk” should be dismissed as just another run-of-the-mill fifties western. Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray is noteworthy for several reasons. First of all, historically, it was only the second feature film to be released by Universal International in 3-D, and the first to adopt the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which became the standard for all non-Cinemascope films made since then. It’s also one of the first “Mexican Westerns,” that is, a western about an American cowboy caught in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Other such include “Vera Cruz,” “Viva Villa,”, “The Professionals” and the most notable of them all, “The Wild Bunch.” It was also the last of nine films that Cult Director Budd Boetticher did under contract for Universal between 1952 and 1953. Boetticher achieved his cult status for a series of seven westerns he did later for Columbia shortly after that, between 1956 and 1960. Known as the “Ranown Cycle” of films, because they starred Randolph Scott and were produced by Joe Brown. “Seven Men from Now”(1956), “Ride Lonesome” (1959), “The Tall T” (1957), and “Comanche Station” (1960), among others, are some of the greatest cinematic achievements of this or any other time. Not just films, they are truly works of a certain kind of art.

“Wings of the Hawk,” is not filmmaking on that level. Boetticher had not yet perfected his vision, nor achieved the clout to make films his own way. But as the jumping off point from turning out formulaic studio fare to creating individualistic masterpieces, glimmers of what was to come are evident. Most prominent are the relationships between the three male characters. In all of Boetticher’s best films there is a contest between what can best be described as “men of stature. In “The Tall T” Randolph Scott is pitted against Richard Boone. The two stand out against the weaker men in the story, including Boone’s outlaw gang, and the cowardly fiancé of one of the female passengers on a stagecoach. In “Seven Men from Now” Scott faced Lee Marvin, the baddest of the bad. In “Comanche Station” Scott faced off against Claude Akins, who stood taller than either of the two gunmen who rode with him. As film historian Jeremy Arnold notes in his audio commentary provided on a separate audio track, in all of these films, the Randolph Scott character could just as easily switched places with his antagonist. They’re both the same kind of man. Arnold says the difference is that one is weak and the other strong. I disagree with that assessment. I think the difference is that one has maintained his stature as a man to be looked up to, and the other has let himself down somewhere along the way.

In “Wings of the Hawk,” Boetticher did not really develop the conflict between Irish, Ruiz and Arturo as fully as he would with the antagonists in the later films, but elements of it are there, if you look close enough. It’s interesting to see the embryonic Boetticher at work.

Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray contains both 2-D and 3-D versions of the movie from 2K Scans of the left and Right Eye Interpositive. The picture is generally good, but some scenes are too dark, and others a bit too grainy. Color is by Technicolor and the transfer goes a good job preserving the original look of the film. Clifford Stine’s 3-D cinematography is rather stunning in the way it emphasized picture depth over the gimmicky hurling of stones, and bodies at the 3-D audience. Many action shots feature deep focus of riders on horseback coming toward the camera from a great distance, while actors and stunt men move about at various distances in between riders and camera. Another impressive shot has a knife being lowered slowly on a rope from a skylight. Even at 2-D the knife almost seems to float out from the screen.

Frank Skinner’s soundtrack has a lot of Mexican flare, and is presented on the disc in what is described by KL as “High Dynamic Range Theatrical Mix plus 5.1 Surround Sound.” Bonus features include the audio commentary by Jeremy Arnold (which I can’t recommend highly enough, for all the detailed information he imparts), and a 3-D Woody Woodpecker cartoon. “Wings of the Hawk,” is another important film restoration by Kino Lorber of a bygone era of filmmaking, the likes of which we’ll never see again.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

(John M. Whalen is the author of "Vampire Siege at Rio Muerto". Click here to order from Amazon.)

BY MATT DAVEY

Released in 1971, ‘Red Sun’ is an enthralling Western starring Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Alain Delon and Ursula Andress. Bronson and Delon lead a group of bandits to rob a train, but get more than they bargained for as they discover the train is transporting a Japanese delegation featuring Mifune, who is guarding a priceless ceremonial sword, a gift from the Emperor of Japan meant for the President of the United States. Delon steals the sword and leaves co-conspirator Bronson for dead. Mifune and Bronson team up to make an unlikely alliance in search of Delon and the stolen sword.

“For the disgrace of failure, he will rip his abdomen and kill himself” roars the Japanese ambassador as he tries to solder Link (Bronson) and Kuroda Jubei (Mifune) into the unlikeliest good cop/bad cop routine you’re ever likely to witness. “Well, that’s something I’d like to see!” retorts the eagled eyed, moustached loner Link, who moments earlier had been left for dead after the left-handed gun Gauche (Delon) fancied a bigger share of the riches from the robbery. ‘Red Sun’ may display many of the conventional Western characteristics – robbery goes wrong and a manhunt ensues – but its international flavour is unlike any other film of this genre that’s been put on screen to date.

It’s very rare that the co-lead of an American Western is a stoic Japanese sword and sandal figure, but the very fact that Bronson and Mifune should appear on screen together at all has more meaning than the average cinephile might think. Mifune appeared in the 1954 classic ‘Seven Samurai’, directed by Akira Kurosawa – and Bronson appeared in the Western remake ‘The Magnificent Seven’ directed by John Sturges, who had recently enjoyed success with genre hits ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral’, ‘The Law and Jake Wade’ and ‘Last Train from Gun Hill’. Both Bronson and Mifune played their parts in two of the most influential films of the era, so the fact that they appeared on screen together is significant. ‘Red Sun’ is a totally original story that might have seemed too bizarre to succeed, but given the two leads’ history, it’s a perfect film to showcase their combined talents.

Director Terence Young captures with ease the hostile and unforgiving landscape of the tactile terrain (filmed in Andalucía, Spain), as Maurice Jarre’s musical score transports you into the picture. Throughout Young’s filmography, ranging from the early Bond films to his transition to Hollywood working with commanding lead actors like Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn and Lee Marvin, he gives lower-budget B movies gravitas. (He had collaborated with Charles Bronson a few years earlier on ‘The Valachi Papers’.) The plot of ‘Red Sun’ feels deliberately engineered for Bronson and Mifune and has something of a fantasy cast list. However, it never feels detached from reality and the resulting consequences of the characters’ actions feel meaningful, even though on the printed page, the scenarios might have appeared to be ludicrous.

Link and Jubei are chalk and cheese; Bronson is witty and Mifune is much more strait- laced, amusingly so when trying to comprehend the comedic dialogue just served to him on a plate by Bronson. The most memorable scenes of film occur when Link and Jubei are reluctantly travelling together in search of the Japanese ambassador’s ceremonial sword as they squabble like children and engage in some comedic faux fighting. Bronson’s character Link accompanies Jubei to retrieve the ceremonial sword with his own agenda in mind. After being left for dead by Gauche (Delon) and his men, Link aims to find his share of the train robbery proceeds, but in order to do that he needs to find Gauche and take him alive. However, Jubei wants him dead due to the dishonour and trouble he’s caused. All of this reaches a boiling point in the film’s final act. If you know your Bronson movies, you know it’s never a good idea to leave him for dead…it’s just not going to end well for the antagonist.

Legendary director and actor John Huston claimed that ‘Red Sun’ was among the three best Westerns ever made, alongside 1948’s ‘Red River’ and John Ford’s ‘Stagecoach’. Huston certainly has an interesting take. Would ‘Red Sun’ finish anywhere my own personal list of the top 10 Westerns ever made, let alone top three? No. I enjoy the film very much and find it particularly re-watchable, as there’s simply nothing else like it. Huston’s choice of placing ‘Red Sun’ on such a high pedestal isn’t completel unworthy, however. It’s an inclusive Western, well-loved in the genre’s fandom, but its appeal outside of that isn’t extensive.

The three main players involved in the project – Young, Bronson and Mifune – had already produced their best work inside their respective filmographies. That being said, ‘Red Sun’ still has a unique appeal over 50 years after its theatrical release. Bronson has the same low-key magnetism that he displays in mostl of his films whilst Mifune is suitably memorable as a samurai who finds himself in the Old West. All the more impressive about his performance is the fact that ‘Red Sun’ was his first feature film role in the English language. (Where he has dialogue, at any rate.) As for the rest of the main cast, Ursula Andress is commanding as Cristina in what is the only main female character in the film. Although Andress receives second billing, she doesn’t appear until an hour into the film. That being said, Andress is worth the wait. She displays a certain exterior swagger that is reminiscent of her breakout role as Honey Ryder in ‘Dr. No’ more than a decade previous. Alain Delon is every inch the perfect villain as Gauche in his black attire, a dress code that could be compared with that of Henry Fonda in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ or Jack Palance in ‘Shane’. Delon is just as likely to shoot someone down with his menacing blue eyes as he is with his pistol, as he’s an outlaw with no ethical compass.

‘Red Sun’ is the pinnacle of the Eastern/Western crossover and has to be seen to be believed.

"Red Sun" is available for streaming on YouTube. 

Click here to order DVD from Amazon USA

Click here to order Blu-ray from Amazon UK

BY FRED BLOSSER

“Man of the East,” a comedic Italian Western starring Terence Hill and directed by Enzo Barboni as “E.B. Clucher,” opened in U.S. theaters on May 1, 1974, as a release through United Artists. I saw it at the old Turnpike Cinema in Fairfax, Va., now long gone. Come to think of it, United Artists is long gone too, at least in its 1974 form. The poster outside the theater carried comic artwork of Hill in a goofy pose on horseback. The tagline read, “The Magnificent One!,” an abbreviated version of the original Italian title, “. . . E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico,” which translates more or less as, “Now They Call Him the Magnificent.” The advertising team at UA didn’t have to look far for a catchy phrase that might remind fans, however subliminally or satirically, of “The Magnificent Seven.” Most devotees of Italian Westerns look down on the comic offshoots of the genre like “Man of the East,” but on its own terms, Clucher’s picture is a better-than-average example of its type. It even holds its own against Hollywood’s feeble comedy Westerns of the same era, like “something big” (1971), “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” (1972), and “The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday” (1976).

In “Man of the East,” now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Hill’s character, Sir Thomas Moore, travels to Arizona in 1880 at the final behest of his wealthy, free-spirited father, recently deceased after fatally suffering “a stroke in a bawdy house.” The elder Moore had rejected the conformist life of a peer in Queen Victoria’s Court to drift through the American West in company with three rambunctious pals, Bull, Holy Joe, and Monkey (Gregory Walcott, Harry Carey Jr., and Dominic Barto), as “The Englishman’s Gang.” Tom intends to homestead on the land where his father built a cabin, and wants to retain Bull, Holy Joe, and Monkey as his ranch hands. The three galoots have their own marching orders from their deceased friend: “Tom is still a green kid. Make a man of him, and then -- hit the saddle.” The trio feel civilization crowding in on them as the frontier shrinks, the dominant theme of Westerns in the 1970s, American and Italian alike. They agree to stay around long enough to toughen up their friend’s soft-spoken son by teaching him to fight, shoot, trade his bicycle for a horse, and change out his tweeds for his father’s old cowboy outfit. Then they’ll keep drifting West, trying to stay one step ahead of the railroad, which for them embodies the unwelcome idea of “progress” as it did for the characters in various Sergio Leone movies. Leone had sufficient budget to include real trains in his films; Clucher makes do with stock footage of the Rio Grande Scenic Railroad under the opening credits.

Tom’s plans run afoul of domineering cattle baron Austin, who wants the newcomer’s property. The big rancher employs his gunslinging foreman, Clayton (Riccardo Pizzuti), to intimidate the tenderfoot into selling out and leaving. Clayton has ambitious eyes on his boss’s fortune through Austin’s pretty daughter Candida (Yanti Somer), but she and Tom become romantically attracted to each other. This gives the rancher and his henchman added incentive to drive the greenhorn out of the territory. These elements in the script (written by Clucher) lift a little of this and a little of that from several John Ford classics, including Ford’s sentimentality. Harry Carey Jr., billed here simply as Harry Carey, had appeared right before “Man of the East” in Clucher’s “Trinity Is Still My Name” (1971), but not coincidentally, he was also one of Ford’s famous stock company of players. Clucher magnifies the slugfests from “Donovan’s Reef” (1963) and other Ford pictures into two big, extended saloon brawls where dozens of stuntmen crash through windows and have their heads slammed into breakaway tables. As in most American Westerns, the fights end with the participants stretched out on the floor or staggering away woozily, but not critically injured. Hospital ERs probably wish that drunken bar fights ended that harmlessly in real life.

The movie’s violence is strictly PG, going no further than the hammy melees. Although the characters occasionally draw and fire their guns, the only things that get riddled with bullets are a hat and a tin can. “This is the first Italian Western I’ve seen, the first Western I’ve seen, where no one gets killed -- no one gets shot!” Alex Cox marvels in his audio commentary for the Kino Lorber Blu-ray. This would have been a selling point on movie night in 1974, when parents searched the listings for a family-friendly Western that they could watch with their nine-year-olds. Nowadays it may be a moot point. The nine-year-olds I know are busy competing against each other on Fortnite, to see who can rack up the highest body count in simulated search-and-destroy missions. Still, small kids may be amused by Clucher’s broad humor, including Hill’s daffy faces, longjohns, and hop-frog jumps during Tom’s morning exercises. If you think Steve Martin and Will Ferrell invented the gimmick of a normal-looking guy who gets laughs by acting wacky, meet Hill and Clucher. There’s a gag about horse poop, ongoing verbal confusion where the unsophisticated characters misunderstand long words, and a fleeting gay joke. The latter is so benign that anyone inside or outside the LGBTQ community would be hard pressed to take offense. Even Spaghetti Western enthusiasts who disdain comedies like this may smile in a scene where Clucher pokes fun at Leone’s theatrics. Two bounty hunters in black (genre regulars Sal Borgese and Tony Norton) ride up to the ominous cello chords of Ennio Morricone’s showdown theme from “A Fistful of Dollars.” Then, straight-faced, the two slowly dismount in perfect unison like synchronized swimmers.

BY DOUG OSWALD

A Japanese Naval officer and an American Marine Corps aviator are marooned on a Pacific island during WWII in “Hell in the Pacific,” available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. The film is a virtual silent movie with the exception of the Pacific island sounds of surf, wind, birds and the occasional words spoken by the co-protagonists portrayed by Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin. However, neither understands the other’s language. The film opens with Mifune scanning the horizon for any signs of rescue when he spots a deflated life raft. The rubber raft belongs to Marvin who is hiding in the thick jungle growth nearby. Marvin is able to elude discovery by Mifune, but eventually thirst forces him to reveal himself on the beach.

Mifune captures Marvin after several attempts are made by Marvin to take water from Mifune’s water supply as well as other general mayhem like stealing fish from Mifune’s fish trap. Mifune ties him to a stock and Marvin is forced to drag a piece of driftwood up and down the beach. Mifune also blindfolds Marvin because he doesn’t want Marvin looking at him. Later, Marvin tricks Mifune and the tables are turned. Mifune is now forced to drag the log while tied to a stock and blindfolded. The island is not so much Hell, but a sort of Purgatory where each man takes turns harassing the other. Eventually, Marvin tires of this and releases Mifune, much to Mifune’s befuddlement. The men form a grudging alliance and focus their efforts on building a raft to escape the island. They do escape, only to arrive at a larger bombed out island once occupied by both sides. Perhaps this is their fate, to repeat the cycle.

Although the setting is World War II in the Pacific, the movie could just as well be set in a post apocalyptic or alien world. The 1985 science fiction film “Enemy Mine” offers an alternate version of “Hell in the Pacific” and was clearly partially inspired by that film. Although based on a 1977 novella, “Enemy Mine” is a unique, but maintains the basic plot of two enemies forced to work together in order to survive. This story concept served as a template used in countless television series from “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek” to “The Rat Patrol” and “Battlestar Galactica.”

Directed by John Boorman, “Hell in the Pacific” was released four years before his 1972 box office hit, “Deliverance.” He previously worked with Marvin on the 1971 thriller “Point Blank.” While not a prolific director, Boorman directed several high profile movies such as “Zardoz” (1974), “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977), the ultimate Arthurian epic “Excalibur” (1981), “The Emerald Forrest (1985), the autobiographical “Hope and Glory” (1987), “Beyond Rangoon” (1995) and “The Tailor of Panama” (2001). I have no doubt Boorman put his heart and soul into every production.

Released by Cinerama Releasing Corporation in December 1968, the movie under- performed at the box office. This was probably due to the unusual nature of the film with sparse dialogue, no subtitles, bleak setting and downbeat ending. The original ending as directed by Boorman was scrapped in favor of the ending fans are familiar with as seen in the theater, on television and on the initial home video releases. The DVD release by MGM was the first release to include the original ending as does this Blu-ray release. Making great use of the wide screen lens, the movie was filmed on location in the Palau Islands which are located north of New Guinea and east of the Philippines where the WWII Battle of Peleliu took place from September to November 1944.

Both Marvin and Mifune served in the Pacific during WWII. Marvin was a Marine wounded during the Battle of Saipan in 1944. Mifune was in the Japanese Army Air Service. Mifune was the most famous actor from Japan at the time and Marvin had recently received an Oscar for “Cat Ballou” (1965) and was in one of the biggest box office hits of 1967, “The Dirty Dozen.” Both men featured in many now classic movies in a variety of genres from detective thrillers, dramas and comedies to samurai films (Mifune) and westerns (Marvin). “Hell in the Pacific” is a must-see movie if, for no other reason,n than to experience the result of the creative triumphant of John Boorman directing Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin. Both Marvin and Mifune deserve praise for their performances.

The Kino Lorber Blu-ray looks and sounds terrific and is a worthy upgrade from the early DVD releases by Anchor Bay and MGM. Extras on the disc include an insightful audio commentary by Travis Crawford and Bill Ackerman, in-depth discussions by director John Boorman and another by Art Director Anthony Pratt. The disc also includes subtitles which reveal the dialog spoken in Japanese by Mifune and the dialog spoken by Marvin. The real treat comes in the form of an option to view the movie as originally seen upon release in theaters or with the alternate ending. The alternate ending is more accurately Boorman’s original filmed ending. As for me, I prefer Boorman’s version, but I’m pleased both are offered. The previous MGM DVD release only offered the Boorman ending as an extra on the disc and did not edit it back into the movie as this release does. The disc also includes reverseable sleeve artwork and the trailers for five other Kino releases. Unfortunately, a trailer for this movie is not included. This is a movie which needs to be watched multiple times; with the original ending, with the theatrical release ending, with the subtitles and also with the audio commentary. Well worth it for fans of this outstanding movie. It’s a terrific Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY JOHN M. WHALEN

At the opening of “Taza, Son of Cochise,” (1954), it’s 1875 and the great Apache Chief Cochise (Jeff Chandler) is dying. At his side are his two sons, Taza (Rock Hudson) and Naiche (Rex Reason, billed here as Bart Roberts). He asks them to continue the peace he made with the White Eyes after his death. Naturally, if the two sons were in agreement the movie would have ended right there. But in fact, they don’t agree. Taza wants to do as his father said. But Naiche hates the white man and intends to side up with Grey Eagle (Morris Ankrum) and Geronimo (Ian MacDonald) and start the war up again. If that isn’t enough complication to make a movie out of, writers George Drayson Adams and George Zuckerman add in a rivalry between the two brothers over the affections of Oona (Barbara Rush), Grey Eagle’s beautiful daughter.

It’s a good set-up for a story and Universal International intended the film as another of the westerns being produced at that time with the purpose of showing Native Americans in a favorable light. “Taza” is in fact a follow-up to “Broken Arrow,” which featured Chandler as Cochise, another movie about “good” Apaches who’d rather get along with the white man than lift his scalp . Yet, despite the studio’s noble intentions, as you probably already noticed, there is a total lack of any Native Americans in any of the lead roles. That’s how it was in 1954. In that era, Hollywood did not hire many Native Americans for big movie parts. Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in The Lone Ranger TV series, was a rare exception. As a result, you had some really hard-to-swallow casting of Native American characters back then. Rock Hudson’s Taza is one example, although not as bad as blonde and blue-eyed Chuck Connors in “Geronimo” or Burt Lancaster in “Apache.” Victor Mature played the title character in “Chief Crazy Horse,” and his high cheek bones and Italian good looks almost let him get away with it, except, well, you know, it was big hammy old Victor Mature.

Watching these films today it’s pretty hard to maintain your “suspension of disbelief” at the sight of these Hollywood hunks running around on the warpath with tomahawks and bows and arrows. Hudson himself was more than aware of the problem and said later, according to commentary provided on a separate audio track, he considered this to be his worst film. I wouldn’t go that far. At over six feet tall, with his dark hair and brown eyes, he maintained a certain amount of gravitas in the role and at least had the physical presence to convincingly vault onto his Indian pony’s back with ease and he handled himself pretty well in action scenes involving knives and rifles.

“Taza, Son of Cochise,” was director Douglas Sirk’s second time working with Hudson, and his first and only shot at making a western. He never made another, perhaps realizing it just wasn’t his métier. There is dramatic potential in a story about a man who sides with his enemies, wears an Army blue coat and forms a police force to arrest those of his own people who break the peace. But if Taza ever felt any inner conflict, it’s never dealt with. Instead Sirk focuses on Taza’s desire to prevent needless suffering by his people when they are forced by General Crook (Robert Burton) to move to the dreaded San Carlos Reservation. He convinces Captain Burnett (Greg Palmer) to talk Crook into at least letting him form a reservation police force made up of Apaches in order to police themselves, rather than suffer brutality and humiliation at the hands of white soldiers. Taza must have been a believer in the old saying: “When you’re stuck with lemons, make lemonade.”

“Taza” was one of the last of the movies made during the “golden age of 3-D.” Between 1952 and 1954, 48 films were shot that way. The 3-D process, which was used to lure movie goers away from their television sets, faded quickly because of the many technical problems encountered both in shooting the films and in projecting them in theaters. In “Taza,” however, cinematographer Russell Metty put it to good use, capturing the mountain and desert scenery around Arches National Park in Utah, where the movie was filmed. It also, of course, features the obligatory 3-D scenes with actors and stunt doubles hurling rocks, firing arrows, hurling spears, and men falling directly into the audience’s lap.

I hate to admit it, but I’m old enough to have seen “Taza” in a theater as a kid, and frankly back then I didn’t care about who played what. I didn’t know Rock Hudson from Chief Red Cloud or how historically accurate any of it was. Did Taza actually lead his band to attack Geronimo and kill other Apache warriors in order to save Cavalry Captain Burnett (Gregg Palmer) from certain death? Sounds far-fetched, but maybe they did. I don’t know. And who cares? I had a good time watching “Taza, Son of Cochise” back then and, if you’re willing to make allowances for the time in which it was made, you probably will too. it’s worth catching if only as an authentic artifact of the film making of its time.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray presents “Taza, Son of Cochise” in both 2-D and 3-D in its correct theatrical aspect ratio of 2.00:1 from a 2K Master. The picture is very good, with a soft Technicolor pallet accurately capturing the reddish hues of the mountainous desert country. Frank Skinner’s score sounds good, a typical Universal soundtrack of the fifties with tom-toms added. Bonus features include commentaries on separate audio tracks by film historians David Del Valle author C. Courtney Joiner, and 3-D expert Mike Ballew. Also included is the original theatrical trailer, and English subtitles.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

(John M. Whalen is the author of "Vampire Siege at Rio Muerto". Click here to order from Amazon.)

BY HANK REINEKE

If you had been reading the Hollywood trade paper Variety in the early winter of 1942, you would have expected that the screen rights to the popular Inner Sanctum radio series had gone to 20^th Century Fox. In early March of ’42, the paper reported “20^th Century Fox was assuring itself of a mystery story backlog by closing a contract with the Inner Sanctum publishing outfit.” On 22 March, the paper reported that Fox would shoot three Inner Sanctum films a year. The studio’s deal with the publishers of Inner Sanctum, Simon and Schuster, was a cool $100,000. Variety reported that Ralph Dietrich – a reliable producer with no directing credits - was set to helm the first Fox feature “The Creaking Door.” It all sounded pretty exciting… except, of course, for the fact that none of this would actually happen. It wasn’t until a year later, March of 1943, that Variety would make small mention that Universal Studios would be producing a series of Inner Sanctum films. What happened to 2oth Century Fox’s involvement would be, much like the tales spun on the popular radio show, a mystery.

If Lon Chaney Jr. wasn’t the star of the six Inner Sanctum films that Universal churned out between 1943 and 1945, I doubt the series would have ever received the white-glove Blu ray treatment they have received on Mill Creek’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries: The Complete Film Collection. It’s mostly the devoted fans of Golden Age Horror movies that have embraced this rickety series as part of the studio’s canon. Few could deny that all six of the films fall far short of classic status, but there’s still a lot here for one to enjoy. That is, as long as you keep your expectations relatively modest. If you’re a fan of Universal’s second-tier monster movie franchises from this same time period, you will undoubtedly find comfort in watching a score of familiar faces parade across the screen: Lon Chaney, Evelyn Ankers, Ramsey Ames, Fay Helm, J. Carrol Naish, Acquanetta, Martin Kosleck, Anne Gwynne and Ralph Morgan, just to name a few. The names, if not the faces, of the folks working behind the camera will also be familiar to fans of low-budget 1940s films, horror and otherwise: Reginald LeBorg, Ben Pivar, Edward Dein and Wallace Fox.

For my part, I personally get a kick out of seeing the ever-lovely - and often victimized - Evelyn Ankers slip easily into the role of villainess in one episode. Ankers had been famously terrorized by Chaney Jr.’s cursed Wolfman and his foot-dragging Mummy Kharis. Here in Weird Woman (1944), the second Inner Sanctum mystery, the actress shines as Ilona Carr, a manipulative, conniving and jilted ex-lover of Chaney’s. On one level, one can understand her jealously-fueled rage. Prior to setting off on a research expedition to an island in the South Seas, Chaney’s Professor Reed and Ankers’ college librarian Carr had been romantically engaged. Upon his return to the U.S. with sultry and exotic child-bride Paula (Anne Gwynne) at his side, Chaney coldly dismisses Ankers feelings for him. Chaney probably had it coming when he dismisses his and Ankers’ earlier romantic entanglement as a mere “pleasant flirtation.”

Though one could hardly describe Weird Woman as a lost cinematic gem – nor a surviving one - it might very well be the most fun entry of Universal’s Inner Sanctum series. It’s not a great film by any means, but it’s a mystery chock full with superstitious nonsense. The film’s South Seas scenes are memorable – if, perhaps, for all the wrong reasons – as the setting is decorated with carved spooky totems, drum-thumping tribal dances, death chants, enchanted medallions, witchcraft and voodoo practices.

Technically, describing this film as a mystery might be something of a stretch: the audience is oddly allowed to follow each step of Carr’s bitter plan of revenge as it unfolds. Much as in the case with Calling Dr. Death (1943), the first Inner Sanctum, the movie is not so much a whodunit? but rather an obvious exercise in “Who else could have done it?” There’s no reason to involve Sherlock Holmes to unravel the mysteries presented in this series. The clues are all but telegraphed.

So where did the series go wrong? There have been no shortage of criticisms in scholarly journals and film books that hulking Lon Chaney was ill-suited to be cast as such cerebral types as doctors and college professors. Upon the release of Calling Dr. Death, even the critic from Variety noted that the brooding actor, “from a marquee standpoint isn’t ideally cast.” There’s more than a kernel of truth to the charge. But in Chaney’s defense I’d submit that - in some manner of speaking - the actor was perfectly cast. Like his anguished Lawrence Talbot, Chaney is left completely unsettled by mysterious circumstances (mostly) not of his own doing. In the case of the Inner Sanctum, Chaney’s troubles are not brought on by an unforgiving cycle-of-the-moon calendar nor by an ancient Egyptian curse. In all honesty, it’s mostly the crazy women in his life that bring him to the brink of mental and emotional collapse.

I’m sorry, ladies, but it’s true. The sultry women featured in the series are, on four occasions at least, the root cause of Mr. Chaney’s angst. And, boy, does he suffer at their hands: In Calling Dr. Death he’s a neurologist who suffers the ignominies of a selfish, cold-hearted and unfaithful shrew of a wife. In Weird Woman, he’s a member of Monroe College’s Department of Ethnology, an esteemed author of the ground-breaking sociological work Superstition vs. Reason and Fact. Following that expedition to the South Seas, Chaney’s suffering balloons twofold: he now must contend with both an unreasonable child-bride who clings to her native occult superstitions and, secondly, from a jealous ex-paramour with plans to derail both his marriage and his career. In Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), he’s a gifted portrait artist blinded by the carelessness of his female modeling subject who inadvertently switches bottles of eye wash and acid on the studio’s shelf. In the series sixth and final entry, Pillow of Death (1945), Chaney plays the unfaithful married lawyer Wayne Fletcher… who may or may not have murdered his spiritual medium of a wife.

BY JOHN M. WHALEN 

Kino Lorber, in its relentless effort to make forgotten, hard-to-find films available in superior, like-new condition, has released a Blu-Ray edition of the 1959 Weird Western, “Curse of the Undead,” the first movie ever to mix cowboys and vampires. The Weird Western, in case you’re not aware, is a sub-genre that combines the traditional western with elements of the supernatural, horror, or science fiction. They’ve been around for about 90 years, first appearing in print in the 1930s when Robert E. Howard, a pulp fiction writer from Texas, best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, wrote several short stories for Weird Tales and Argosy magazine that combined the traditional western with supernatural horror. Today a number of authors including Joe Lansdale, Heath Lowrance, Jonathan Mayberry, David West and even yours truly, have turned out Weird Western novels and short stories, creating a Neo-Pulp Revolution of sorts.

In films, one of the earliest examples of the Weird Western, surprisingly, was a serial starring singing cowboy Gene Autry. “Phantom Empire” featured Gene battling the strange inhabitants of Murania, a city hundreds of miles below the surface of the earth. It’s a wild combination of western and sci-fi, with Gene contending with robots and Tika, the mysterious queen of Murania. Other Weird Western movies have since followed, including “The Beast of Hollow Mountain” (1956), “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” (1966), “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter” (1966), “The Valley of Gwangi” (1969), “Alien Outlaw” with Sunset Carson (1985), Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark” (1987), “Jonah Hex” (2010), “Cowboys and Aliens” (2011), and others.

In 1958, writer/director Edward Dein and his wife Mildred decided, almost as a joke, to collaborate on a screenplay called “Eat Me, Gently,” a horror/western combo about a vampire out west. Ed Dein had already established himself as a B- movie director with works that included “Shack Out On 101,” (1955) and “Seven Guns to Mesa” (1958). Earlier he had written screenplays for “The Soul of a Monster,” (1944), “The Cat Creeps” (1946), and “Jungle Woman” (1944), among others. Word got out that the Deins had a script they wanted to sell and Universal International’s music director Joseph Gershenson, trying his hand at being a producer, bought it. The first thing he did, of course, was change the title. It was first retitled “Affairs of a Vampire,” then “Mark of the West,” and finally “Curse of the Undead.”

Australian character actor Michael Pate, who appeared in hundreds of television shows in the 1950’s and 60’s, and as Chief Vittorio in John Wayne’s “Hondo,” (1953), plays Drake Robey, a mysterious gunman who offers his services to ranch owner Dolores Carter (Kathleen Crowley), after her father and brother are killed. Her father, Doctor Carter (John Hoyt), died mysteriously, perhaps the victim of a plague that had already killed others (mostly young girls) in the area. Her brother, Tim (Jimmy Murphy) is gunned down by a land baron named Buffer (Bruce Gordon), who dammed up a stream, leaving Dolores with no water for her livestock.

There’s some weird connection, between all the deaths and Robey’s sudden arrival in town, but the only man in town who appears suspicious of the stranger is preacher Dan Young (Eric Fleming), who warns Dolores to stay away from Robey. Fleming who had just begun filming the “Rawhide” television series for CBS has a thankless role in “Curse of the Undead.” As film historian Tom Weaver notes in his audio commentary for the disc, Fleming’s part is written in such a way that he seems like either a total bore or a complete idiot. For instance, when Robey tells Dolores he’s going to protect her and put a stop to the evildoings going on ‘round here (wink, wink), the sanctimonious preacher pipes up, saying he’ll do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t! So who’s side is he on?

The Deins seem to have drained the script of all logic almost as efficiently as Robey drains the blood out of his helpless victims. For example, despite the preacher’s protests, Dolores invites Robey to spend the night in her home in a spare bedroom. She tells the preacher she’ll be chaperoned by the ghosts of her dead father and brother! That night Robey gets into her room and does the Fang-dango on her neck (despite the fact that Robey’s fangs are never shown—maybe they couldn’t afford them in the budget). The next day, after having fought with the preacher over Robey the night before, Dolores sweetly acquiesces to the reverend’s request to send the vampire packing. Makes no sense. After Robey’s sunk his bicuspids into her jugular, she should be more unwilling to resist him, not less, and more antagonistic toward the Preach, wouldn’t you think?

Dein’s plodding direction is another problem, with too many scenes shot in one take that seem to go on forever, leaving the viewer feeling nearly as trapped and helpless as Robey’s victims. A scene where Robey enters a mausoleum and lifts the lid on Dr. Carter’s coffin, is either unintentionally hilarious or hilariously intentional, when it ends with Robey lowering himself down out of sight behind the lid, and letting the lid close, presumably with him inside the box lying on top of the deceased physician. So what’s going on there, huh, booby? According to Weaver, the original script contained a lot of inside gay jokes. Most of them were excised by Gershenson. But apparently some of them got through.

Also in the cast is character actor Edward Binns (“12 Angry Men”), another familiar face to TV watchers of the sixties. Binns plays the town Sheriff who tries to talk sense to everybody but keeps getting ignored. In another one-take scene following a battle for survival with Robey, he becomes the heaviest-breathing corpse in movies.

Kino Lorber’s 2K transfer of “Curse of the Undead” is flawless. Ellis W. Carter’s black and white cinematography presented in 1.85:1 aspect ratio looks sharp and clear, with excellent black levels for the many night scenes. The mono soundtrack provides a full-bodied presentation of Irving Gertz’s film score. The use of an electric violin, instead of the Theremin usually employed in horror movies, is another unique distinction. Extras on the disc include Tom Weaver’s excellent commentary and trailers for other KL releases.

While “Curse of the Undead” is no classic, it is unique and worth a look at least as the first of its kind. The fact is there haven’t been too many vampiric westerns made over the years. Maybe it’s time for someone to turn out the classic we’ve been waiting for. There are some good stories that have been turned out by the writers listed at the beginning of this review just waiting to be adapted for film. Just saying.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

(John M. Whalen is the author of "Vampire Siege at Rio Muerto". Click here to order from Amazon.)

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

BY DOUG OSWALD

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s rarely been a bad submarine movie. The typical film in this peculiar genre has a little something for every movie fan: action, adventure, suspense, drama, claustrophobia, torpedoes, mine fields, depth charges and silent running. The plot structure is similar to that of aircraft disaster movies except submarines have to navigate the aforementioned mine fields and depth charges and get to fire torpedoes.

“Torpedo Run” is no exception to my rule. The movie features Glenn Ford as skipper of the Greyfish, Lt. Cmdr. Barney Doyle, and Ernest Borgnine as his executive officer and best friend, Lt. Archer “Archie” Sloan. Like most submarine movies, the action takes place within the narrow passageways of the sub and we get to see a few underwater model shots of the Greyfish diving, navigating a mine field and surviving depth charges.

We do get a change of scenery throughout the movie, primarily in flashbacks of the two friends during happier times just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. They’re stationed in the Philippines when Ford receives orders to set sail. Ford’s wife and daughter are captured by the Japanese a short time later and sent to Japan on a POW transport ship.

The transport ship travels along side the aircraft carrier Shinaru, a fictional stand-in for one of the Japanese carriers that launched the air attack on Pearl Harbor. Ford receives word of the Shinaru’s location as well as word that his wife and daughter are being used as human shields along with 1,400 other allied prisoners onboard the transport ship. Sinking the Shinaru will be a huge propaganda boon and moral booster, but launching torpedoes is tricky business and one may hit the transport ship.

Ford fires on the carrier, but hits the transport ship, killing everyone on board including his wife and daughter. Ridden with guilt and filled with vengeance, he’s obsessed with the single minded purpose of destroying the Shinaru. The rest of the movie takes a Melvillian turn with Ford as Ahab seeking out his white whale, the Shinaru.

Ford is terrific as the Greyfish skipper. He’s earnest and believable as Barney Doyle and calls upon his trademark ability to play tough, yet compassionate good guys, as he had in scores of westerns, dramas and light comedies as well as grittier fare such as “Blackboard Jungle,” “Gilda” and “The Big Heat.”

Speaking of earnest, Ernest Borgnine is equally good as Archie Sloan. Borgnine and Ford play off each other rather well in what would be an otherwise routine action movie. Borgnine is one of the great Hollywood character actors known primarily for playing heavies, tough guys and nut-burgers in scores of movies on the big screen. However, he was versatile enough to play the occasional lead and the rare nice guy such as in his Oscar winning turn in “Marty” from 1955.

Retro TV fans will undoubtedly be slightly distracted- as I was- seeing Borgnine in naval uniform. It’s a minor and unintentionally humorous issue because Borgnine is so closely identified as Lt. Cmdr. Quinton McHale, a role he would make his own a few years after the release of this movie in the popular TV comedy series, “McHales’s Navy,” from 1962 to 1966 and in one spin-off movie. I’m almost expecting Borgnine to say, “Okay you guys, knock it off!” and, “Stall ‘em! I don't care how you do it but stall ‘em!” Fortunately, Capt. Binghamton does not turn up shouting, “What is it McHale, what do you want? What, what, what?”

Diane Brewster appears in the only major female role as Ford’s wife Jane Doyle in the flashback scenes. Dean Jones appears as a young officer, Lt. Jake “Fuzzy” Foley. LQ Jones and Don Keefer play crew members and Robert Hardy is on hand as a Royal Navy liaison officer observing the use of the sub’s new sonar equipment.

According to IMDb, there are a couple of uncredited “blink and you’ll miss them” appearances in the movie by retro TV stalwarts Frank Gorshin and Robert Reed who appear as sub crewmen. Virginia Gregg, Maj. Edna Heywood RN in “Operation Petticoat,” provides the voice of Tokyo Rose.

While “Torpedo Run” is not of the same caliber as genuinely classic submarine movies such as “Das Boot,” “Destination Tokyo,” “The Enemy Below,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “On the Beach,” “Operation Pacific,” “Run Silent, Run Deep” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” However, it is very watchable and features all the typical submarine movie clichés in addition to great effects and fine performances by Ford and Borgnine.

The movie was produced and released by MGM in CinemaScope making good use of the widescreen, with nice model sequences and well integrated stock footage. The movie is based on stories by Richard Sale who co-wrote the screenplay. A prolific writer and sometimes director, Sale is best known as the author of “The Oscar” and “White Buffalo,” both of which were adapted as movies.

Released in October 1958, “Torpedo Run” also oddly played on a double bill with “Fiend Without a Face” in November of that year. March 1958 saw the release of the similarly themed submarine movie, “Run Silent, Run Deep,” with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. While “Torpedo Run” is a good WWII drama, Ford and Borgnine can’t quite compete with the performances of Gable and Lancaster and Robert Wise’s gritty direction.

“Torpedo Run” is a burn to order region-free DVD released as part of the WB Archive Collection. The movie looks terrific and sounds good. The only extra on the disc is the theatrical trailer. This is a movie that rarely made the rotation on local TV in my area when I was a kid, so it was very refreshing to watch it again after so many years. The film is a welcome addition for any fan of military adventure movies.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY FRED BLOSSER

Philip Borsos’ “The Grey Fox” (1982) has been released on Blu-ray in a 4K restoration by Kino Lorber Studio Classics. The film opens with good news and bad news for its protagonist, Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth). Good news first: Bill emerges a free man from San Quentin in 1901 after serving twenty years for armed robbery. The bad news? Nearing sixty, Bill has one expertise- holding up stagecoaches. Illegality aside, it’s now a useless specialty because stagecoaches have become obsolete. Then, watching “The Great Train Robbery” at a nickelodeon, he has an epiphany. Although stagecoaches may be a thing of the past, holding up trains that carry express shipments can’t be that much different, he reasons. His first robbery goes sour, but he experiences better success after he crosses the border into British Columbia to prey on the railroads there with his junior associate Shorty (Wayne Robson). Needing a base of operations, he finds a new name and cover identity in the remote town of Kamloops as “George Edwards,” a mining engineer, thanks to local businessman Jack Budd (Ken Pogue), a former associate in crime. Budd doesn’t do the favor out of the kindness of his heart. He has his eye on a herd of horses that he wants Bill and Shorty to rustle for him. But the arrangement proceeds smoothly enough that Bill begins to feel at home in Kamloops. He even finds romance with Kate Flynn (Jackie Burroughs), a self-employed photographer in her forties. She is as fiercely independent as he is. She has to be, she argues: “In this country, you’re not taken seriously unless you’re Caucasian, Protestant, and most of all, male.” He admires her spirit and she is charmed by his modest, respectful demeanor. Like everybody else in Kamloops, including the friendly resident lawman Fernie (Timothy Webber), she’s unaware that “George Edwards” is actually the notorious Bill Miner, “The Gentleman Bandit.” Unaware that is, until a tenacious Pinkerton detective (Gary Reineke) shows up in town on Bill’s trail from the botched robbery in Washington.

“The Grey Fox,” a Canadian production, was Philip Borsos’ first feature film. The production is distinguished by the striking compositions, assured pace, and keen sense of time and place that you’d expect to see from an older, more seasoned filmmaker. In fact, Borsos was only 29. The director’s promising career encompassed only four more movies, including an ambitious but troubled Canadian-Chinese co-production, “Bethune” (1990), before leukemia claimed him at age 41. After “The Grey Fox” became a hit in Canada, it was distributed by Zoetrope in the U.S. on the art-house circuit, a wise strategy for Borsos’ low-key, character-driven Northwestern. Richard Farnsworth, in his first starring credit, was the only U.S. actor on the marquee. A veteran Hollywood stunt man and bit player, Farnsworth had won acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for a supporting role in “Comes a Horseman” (1978). While a star like Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, or Lee Marvin would have given the production a higher profile at neighborhood theaters, it’s difficult to imagine that any of them could have bettered Farnsworth’s quietly sly, believably weathered presence. Farnsworth was nominated for a Best Actor Golden Globe and a Best Performance by a Foreign Actor Canadian Genie Award. He also received the London Critics Circle Film Award for Actor of the Year. The rest of the cast is comparably good.

The Kino Lorber special edition of “The Grey Fox” is packed with special features, including audio commentary by Alex Cox, interviews with producer Peter O’Brian and composer Michael Conway Baker, a featurette about the 4K restoration, and a theatrical re-release trailer. Fans of Westerns and flavorful period dramas will welcome the opportunity to revisit the movie they may have seen long ago on home video in the VHS era, or to encounter it here for the first time.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

(Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)

“THE BEAUTY OF DECADENCE”

By Raymond Benson

The year 2020 is the 100th anniversary of Federico Fellini’s birth, and the home video world is seeing many restored and re-released titles from the maestro’s catalog. The Criterion Collection has just released a 14-movie box set, for example, but that exquisite package does not contain many of Fellini’s post-1973 titles because of rights issues.

Enter Kino Lorber. Their Kino Classics imprint has released on Blu-ray a gorgeously restored edition of Fellini’s Casanova (1976; released in the U.S. in early 1977). It was a big budget extravaganza capitalizing on the success of Fellini’s masterpiece, Amarcord (1973; released in the U.S. in 1974), which won the Oscar for Foreign Film of 1974 and was nominated for Best Director for ’75—yes, those eligibility rules are complicated.

Casanova was immediately a curiosity because Fellini cast none other than Donald Sutherland in the role of the notorious womanizer, artist, and writer. The film is loosely based on Giacomo Casanova’s Story of My Life, his autobiography published posthumously in, it is believed, 1822 in a censored version. Between then and today, the book has been published numerous times with additions and deletions.

Casanova lived between 1725 and 1798 and was well known in Italian society as a libertine and adventurer, but he was more infamous as a lothario. The film is an episodic journey through some of the more interesting escapades that we know about, although these are, of course, filtered through the visionary lens of Fellini. In many ways, Casanova is a film that resembles Fellini Satyricon (1969), a picture that could be called “Ancient Rome on Acid.” It’s rather obvious that Fellini was attempting to duplicate that picture’s success with the same kind of surreal, grotesque, and decadent—but beautiful—imagery. Once we get to the point when Casanova is bedding a female automaton who becomes the one “woman” who satisfies him more than living ones, we know we’re deep within Fellini’s universe.

Suffice it to say that the movie is breathtaking to look at. The sets and costumes (the latter won an Oscar) are marvels. The whole thing feels like a dream-story, and Sutherland, as the protagonist, floats through the picture with an uncomfortable presence. Fellini probably cast the actor because he does resemble the real man (from paintings). Sutherland is good enough, although he might be the first among many to wonder why he was cast.

That said, Casanova is a mixed bag. It’s at least a half-hour too long (it clocks in at two hours and thirty-five minutes), and it depends entirely too much on the visuals to keep an audience in seats. The story, as it is, is nothing too compelling. Nevertheless, Nino Rota’s musical score is lovely, as always, and other technical aspects are top-notch. Is it sexy? Yes, in a weird Cirque du Soleil kind of way. The depiction of Casanova “doing it” is more like an acrobatic circus-act than any resemblance to actual lovemaking.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray looks darned good. You have a choice whether to view the film in English with no subtitles (as it was released in the West), or in the original Italian with subtitles. It was filmed with Sutherland and certain other English-speaking actors reciting dialogue in their native language. If you go with the English version, you’ll hear Sutherland’s real voice, and the Italian actors are dubbed. In the Italian version, Sutherland’s voice is dubbed by an Italian actor. While normally this reviewer would champion viewing a film in its original language, for Casanova I recommend the English version. It’s like the Sergio Leone westerns with Clint Eastwood—we’d all rather view the dubbed versions so we can hear Eastwood’s voice (or Van Cleef’s or Wallach’s). The same is true for Casanova.

There are no supplements save for an audio commentary by film critic Nick Pinkerton and the theatrical trailer. The accompanying booklet contains an essay by film scholar Alberto Zambenedetti, PhD.

Fellini’s Casanova is for the Fellini completists and enthusiasts who want to celebrate the filmmaker’s centenary and for anyone looking for a surreal trip into an 18th Century European never-never land.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY HANK REINEKE

On 14 April 1940, W. Ray Johnston, the President of Monogram Pictures Corporation, was resting at the Baker Hotel in Dallas, Texas. On the following day he was to meet with MPC’s company shareholders in the hotel’s ballroom. The New York Herald Tribune would report that Monogram, later lovingly christened the most famous of Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” studios, was to announce their ambitious 1940-1941 program of fifty films: twenty-six features and twenty-four westerns. One of the films announced for imminent production was The Ape, an adaptation of the Adam Hull Shirk 1927 stage play.

Johnston announced that big screen’s preeminent boogeyman, Boris Karloff, was to star in their horror new vehicle. Karloff would be cast as an obsessed scientist driven to madness and murder in pursuit of an otherwise noble goal. For Karloff’s fans, there was something familiar with this scenario. The actor was, once again, cast as a generally well-meaning, good-hearted soul whose medical ethics would be expeditiously abandoned in the course of research. If you’ve already screened The Man They Could Not Hang (Columbia, 1939), Black Friday (Universal, 1940), The Man with Nine Lives (Columbia, 1940), or Before I Hang (Columbia, 1940)… well, then you’ll know what to expect here. Except this time we also get an escaped and possibly murderous circus ape for diversion.

1940 had been a busy year for Boris Karloff, the actor having already appeared in several far more polished productions for the bigger studios: Universal, Warner Bros., Columbia and RKO. The Ape would the last of the films Karloff would make for the more austere Monogram in the 1930s and 1940s: his previous entries were all in the studio’s “Mr. Wong” series of atmospheric detective mysteries. The Ape, which the Hollywood Reporter would report was scheduled to commence shooting on 15 July 1940 was to be something of a summer vacation for Karloff. The film’s production was planned to be wrapped in a mere week’s time.

That start date was apparently delayed. As the date of shooting neared, it was obvious that production would have to be pushed back. On 10 July 1940 the Reporter scribed that “Kurt” Siodmak (who would soon pen Universal’s iconic The Wolfman) had been signed “yesterday.” If true, then that “yesterday” was a mere six days prior to the original announced first-day-of-shooting allotted to Siodmak to actually write the script. The newssheet also promised that the latest thriller from Monogram would “carry a top budget,” that being a “top budget” if measured by Monogram’s parsimonious standard. Shortly following the Siodmak announcement, the Hollywood papers would report that actress Maris Wrixon had been “borrowed from Warners” to appear as the film’s wheelchair-bound heroine, actor Gene O’Donnell also signed to play her romantic paramour. Sadly, The Ape mostly wastes Wrixon’s talent - and her arresting physical attributes - as she’s mostly confined to a wheelchair throughout the film, a blanket draped over her no doubt elegant legs.

Though Siodmak had already shown talent for writing the scripts on such screen-thrillers for Universal’s Invisible Man series, Monogram wasn’t terribly enthused with the draft turned in. It’s likely the producer’s balked at some of the “too-expensive-to-reproduce-on-the-cheap” foreign location settings that Siodmak’s draft would call for. So a second writer was quickly brought onto the project to tighten things up. A New York Daily News gossip columnist wrote on 22 July that he had recently enjoyed a luncheon with the writer Richard Carroll who “has just finished a Boris Karloff script. Something about an ape.” In the film’s credits, Siodmak was credited for his adaptation of Shirk’s play, and perhaps more generously as co-writer of the screenplay. Siodmak would later rue that little of his original story was brought to the screen.

Box Office would further report on 29 July that William Nigh was hired onto the project as the film’s director. Tom Weaver, who would write the definitive study on these low-budget horror films, Poverty Row Horrors!: Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties (McFarland, 1993) suggests filming did not actually start until early August… which was really pushing things: theater programmers planning on booking The Ape were given a hard release date of 13 September 1940. Weaver, who along with Richard Harland Smith, provides a commentary to Kino Lorber’s Blu ray of The Ape, is one of the principal reasons to purchase the disc. This musty old film, more sci-fi than horror really, has been kicking around the public domain almost since the beginning of home video, but has never looked better than it does here.

If you’re a fan of Karloff or of these old Monogram horror films of the 1940s, this Kino Lorber Blu-rayis certainly the edition to get. Aside from a few emulsion scratches here and there, this film has never appeared looking as fine, having been sourced from a 2K master held by the Library of Congress. The print used in the transfer is from the British release, distributed in 1940 by England’s Monarch Film Corporation. It’s presented here complete with the British Board of Censors title card on the film’s front end.

As much as I love Boris Karloff, this is, in all honesty, one of his less memorable films. Upon its release in 1940 the Los Angeles Times was kind to Karloff’s performance if not thrilled with the film in general. Of Karloff, the review conceded, “No matter how farfetched the story, he always makes it believable.” The Hollywood Reporter thought Shirk’s original stage play was far more thrilling as a horror vehicle: “In wise realization that horror, as such, no longer holds its former popularity on the screen, most of the obvious chills have been removed from the screen version.” Variety thought the resulting film totally dire, with the “Ultimate weight of the flick as a suspenser is nil and most of the footage is extremely boring.”

The sixty-two minute film didn’t make much of public splash upon release, curiously playing first on co-bills alongside non-genre efforts as Gene Autry westerns. Occasionally, The Ape was, on its second and third turns, more fittingly paired with another Monogram effort The Revenge of the Zombies (1943, featuring John Carradine) on programmed midnight “Spook Frolics.” Such midnight screenings were probably the best setting in which to enjoy The Ape. While I personally love these sort of horror-cheapies of the 1940s, they are, admittedly, not everyone’s cup of tea. Most fans of vintage-classic horror much prefer Bela Lugosi’s poverty-row efforts for Monogram as – by intention or not – they all seem to have a deliriously looney vibe about them that rackets up the entertainment value. The mad scientist in The Ape might be crazed, but compared to Lugosi’s madder-than-Hell and far more sinister Dr. Paul Carruthers in The Devil Bat (1940), Karloff’s Dr. Adrian comes off as bland and dangerous as… well, as television’s Dr. Marcus Welby M.D.

This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Ape is presented here in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio and in 1920x1080p with a monaural DTS sound and removable English sub-titles. The set also includes several bonus features including two separate audio commentaries: the first by author Tom Weaver, the second by film historian Richard Harland Smith. The set also features a Poster and Image Gallery, and the theatrical trailers for Black Sabbath, The Crimson Cult (both featuring Karloff) and The Undying Monster.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY FRED BLOSSER 

Thanks to cable and digital TV channels, Yvonne de Carlo (1922-2007) is probably best known today, even and maybe especially among youngsters, from endless reruns of “The Munsters.” As Lily Munster, it’s a safe bet that de Carlo will outlive all the rest of us for decades to come, if not centuries. But long before Lily, de Carlo was a sultry, exotic leading lady in dozens of costume epics, film noirs, and Westerns from the late 1940s through the 1950s. One such vehicle, the 1950 Universal-International picture “Buccaneer’s Girl,” is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics. De Carlo plays Deborah McCoy, a singer and dancer who stows away in boy’s clothing on a ship out of Boston, owned by a wealthy New Orleans businessman, Narbonne (Robert Douglas). Narbonne’s archenemy is the pirate Baptiste (Philip Friend), whom she meets when the buccaneer attacks and seizes the ship. Debbie presently slips away from the pirates and makes her way to New Orleans, where she’s given room, board, and job leads at a “School for Genteel Young Ladies” run by Madam Brizar (Elsa Lancaster). Entertaining at a soiree, Debbie again encounters Baptiste, this time in his respectable secret identity as the dashing Captain Robert Kingston, who has been commissioned to capture Baptiste. It’s been a long chase. “He’s always one step ahead of me,” Kingston says wryly. “Maybe you should try standing still,” Debbie rejoins. As Baptiste, Kingston’s motives are pure in the honored tradition of Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. To avenge his late father, who was bankrupted by Narbonne, he preys only on Narbonne’s ships. The stolen booty is laundered into a fund to support unemployed mariners who were forced out of their jobs by the ruthless businessman when he bought their ships and installed his own crews. Thanks to his weaselly spy Patout (Norman Lloyd), Narbonne secures evidence to identify and arrest Kingston as Baptiste. In the meantime, Debbie’s fledgling romance with the pirate metaphorically hits rough waters when she learns that Kingston is engaged to the socially prominent and snooty Arlene (Andrea King), the governor’s daughter.

Directed by Frederick de Cordova, who later became Johnny Carson’s longtime confidant and producer, “Buccaneer’s Girl” is the sort of harmless, old-time escapism that Johnny and his Mighty Carson Art Players would eventually lampoon on the “Tonight Show.” Today, in a similar set-up, you’d wait to see when or if the woman, once discovered, will avoid rape. But Debby is befriended by Baptiste’s salty crew much like the new kid on the block who wanders over to the playground and gets accepted into the other 10-year-olds’ softball team. The leader of the crew is first mate Jared- no relation to Kushner-played by Jay C. Flippen, who’s given to exclamations like “Well, lower me jib!” Jared’s last name might be but probably isn’t Kushner. The movie is so family-friendly that nobody is killed in the brawls and sword fights, and Madam Brizar’s business seems to be a combination finishing school and talent agency for real, and not a euphemism for . . . well, you know . . . as we might expect in our more cynical era. As film historian Lee Gambin remarks on his audio commentary for the KL Studio Classics Blu-ray, de Carlo invests her role with “great gusto and flair.” She’s equally adept at taking pratfalls, romancing Kingston, bopping bad guys on the head, and exercising her claws in a catfight when Debbie finally puts up with enough from Arlene. Action fans may wish her three musical numbers had been reduced to one to make more room for pirate-type stuff, especially since the old-school FX for the battles between Baptiste’s ship and Narbonne’s are nicely done, but then again, the movie is designed as a showcase for de Carlo, and the title is ‘Buccaneer’s Girl” and not “Buccaneer.” As Baptiste, Philip Friend engagingly looks and sounds a lot like Rex Harrison at a fraction of Harrison’s going rate, even in 1950.

The Kino Lorber Studio Classics disc frames the movie at its proper 1.37:1 aspect ratio and delivers Russell Metty’s Technicolor cinematography with gorgeous clarity and richness. Besides Lee Gambin’s informative commentary, extras include a theatrical trailer and clear SDH subtitles.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

(Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)

“DANGER, DARKNESS, AND DAMES IN HIGH DEFINTION”

By Raymond Benson

Ding ding ding! Attention all lovers of film noir! The Warner Archive has released an outstanding 4-film Blu-ray collection of some of the best titles in this cinematic movement that ran from (approximately) 1941 to 1958. While author James Ellroy states in the included supplemental documentary, Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light, that noir began in “1945,” this is obviously incorrect. It would leave out such classics as one of the titles in the collection (Murder, My Sweet), as well as Double Indemnity and Laura. Film noir is generally accepted by most film scholars as beginning in 1941 with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon.

Much debate and discussion proliferate among film historians and scholars about what film noir is. Foremost, it is NOT a genre! It is mostly a style, along with thematic elements that define a group of American motion pictures that were made throughout the 1940s and 50s that share these qualities. They are most always crime movies, although there are some instances of other genres—westerns, science fiction, horror—that were made in a style associated with film noir.

Generally, these crime pictures are in black and white, shot in a style akin to German Expressionism (highly contrasting dark and light, with lots of shadows); are usually told from the point of view of the criminals; feature cynical, hard-boiled protagonists; include the presence of a femme fatale (a bad woman who causes the downfall of “good” man); and are shot in urban locations, among them seedy bars, shabby motels and hotels, alleys, and streets. There may be many scenes at night and/or in the rain. Characters smoke and drink as if their lives depend on it. There are betrayals and double-crosses, and a heavy focus on past events (lots of flashbacks). Voiceover narration is a common attribute. Because the plots often deal with taboo subjects (according to the Production Code), the filmmakers had to be clever with the dialogue—thus, the movies contain witty, crisp dialogue with innuendoes and quotable one-liners. A “pure” film noir has no happy ending. There is more, but you get the idea.

The Warner Archive’s new collection combines four titles that are also available separately. In chronological order (according to when they were originally released), these gems are in the package.

Murder, My Sweet (1944) is based on Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely and is the first appearance of the Philip Marlowe character. Here, though, he’s not portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, but is embodied by Dick Powell. This casting was controversial at the time because Powell was known mostly as a singer/dancer in musicals. Powell surprised everyone with his tough, sardonic performance. He’s terrific and certainly gives Bogart a run for his money in the part. The plot is confusing and all over the place, which is typical of most of the films adapted from Chandler, but it’s still entertaining to boot. Claire Trevor is the femme fatale of the piece and delivers a fine, heightened characterization. It’s violent (for the era), tough, and hard-boiled. It’s a worthy example of film noir. The high definition transfer is gorgeous with its natural grain appearance—assuredly a step up from Warner’s original DVD release. There are no supplements on the disk aside from an audio commentary by author and film noir expert Alain Silver. Oddly, there is no mention of Silver’s name on the packaging or the disk menu!

Out of the Past (1947) is easily one of the better film noir entries and is often cited as a favorite among aficionados. Based on the novel Raise My Gallows High by Daniel Mainwaring, the picture features Robert Mitchum as a man who is haunted by his past, of course, and beautiful femme fatale Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas (as the villain!) are instruments of his affliction. Beautifully shot by Nicholas Musaraca, and moodily directed by Jacques Tourneur (Cat People), Past also has a complex plot, but it is much easier to follow than the previous title’s tale. It’s a landmark picture that probably could be dropped in a bucket containing the “five most important films noir.” The high definition transfer is breathtakingly good. Again, there are no supplements except for an audio commentary, this time by author and film noir authority James Ursini. Yet again, the Warner Archive dropped the ball and does not list Ursini’s name on the packaging or on the Blu-ray disk menu.

The Set-Up (1949) is directed by the versatile Robert Wise, who was a master craftsman in every genre. Another milestone in the film noir catalog, the movie is based on a poem by Joseph M. March. It stars Robert Ryan as Stoker, a washed-up boxer who is hoping to win big in one last fight. His wife, played by Audrey Totter, has wanted him to give it up for a long time. However, the boxer’s crooked manager has arranged a “dive” with the mob without Stoker knowing it. Surprising the manager and the mob, Stoker gives the fight his all. To reveal more would be a spoiler. Hard-hitting and cynical as hell, The Set-Up apparently was a big influence on Scorsese’s Raging Bull; in fact, Scorsese himself appears as an audio commentator on the disk along with director Wise! This audio commentary is the only supplement, but at least this time both Scorsese and Wise are listed on the packaging and on the disk menu.

Gun Crazy (1950) is based on a short story by MacKinlay Kantor, who co-wrote the screenplay with none other than master movie scribe Dalton Trumbo, who, because of being blacklisted at the time, was forced to use a pseudonym in the credits. It’s a picture in the film noir sub-genre known as “lovers on the run.” Peggy Cummins and John Dall star as Annie and Bart, gun enthusiasts who begin to commit armed robberies. Their affection for each other drives the movie, and in many ways Gun Crazy could also be called a great romance picture. For a low-budget effort, though, Crazy is also one of the essential films noir—well-written, acted, and directed. The audio commentary here is by author and film noir historian Glenn Erickson. An additional supplement on the disk is the previously mentioned 2006 documentary, Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light, which features many talking heads and film clips. It’s quite good. Erickson’s name doesn’t appear on the packaging, but this time his name is on the Blu-ray disk menu.

The Warner Archive has done a slam-bang job on the presentation of these four upgrades to Blu-ray from their original DVD releases. The transfers are fantastic and the movies themselves belong in any cinephile’s collection. Aside from the oversights of leaving off documentation of the first two audio commentators’ names, this is a superb package… and buying the collection is less expensive than buying the four titles in their separate Blu-ray editions. Highly recommended.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM THE CINEMA RETRO MOVIE STORE

BURT LANCASTER IN "ULZANA'S RAID": WATCH THE ORIGINAL TRAILER

REVIEW: "WON TON TON, THE DOG WHO SAVED HOLLYWOOD" (1976) STARRING BRUCE DERN AND MADELINE KAHN; BLU-RAY RELEASE

REVIEW: "WESTERN CLASSICS 1" BLU-RAY SET FROM KINO LORBER

REVIEW: "ffolkes" (1980) STARRING ROGER MOORE; BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION

ENNIO MORRICONE, LEGENDARY FILM COMPOSER, DEAD AT 91

BOOK REVIEW: "SONS OF RINGO: THE GREAT SPAGHETTI WESTERN HEROES" BY FRED BLOSSER

REVIEW: "PLAY DIRTY" (1969) STARRING MICHAEL CAINE; TWILIGHT TIME BLU-RAY RELEASE

REVIEW: "THE TALL MEN" (1955) STARRING CLARK GABLE, JANE RUSSELL AND ROBERT RYAN; TWILIGHT TIME BLU-RAY RELEASE

REVIEW: “CANYON PASSAGE,” (1946), STARRING DANA ANDREWS, BRIAN DONLEVY, SUSAN HAYWARD; A KINO LORBER BLU-RAY RELEASE

SHOUT! FACTORY TO STREAM GENE AUTRY MOVIES

REVIEW: "MY COMIC SHOP COUNTRY", A FILM BY ANTHONY DESIATO

REVIEW: "THE RARE BREED" (1966) STARRING JAMES STEWART, MAUREEN O'HARA AND BRIAN KEITH; KINO LORBER BLU-RAY RELEASE

REVIEW: SERGIO CORBUCCI'S "THE HELLBENDERS" (1967) STARRING JOSEPH COTTEN; KINO LORBER BLU-RAY RELEASE

REVIEW: "HUDSON RIVER MASSACRE" (1965) STARRING GEORGE MARTIN; MVD BLU-RAY RELEASE

REVIEW: "KILL THEM ALL AND COME BACK ALONE" (1968) STARRING CHUCK CONNORS; KINO LORBER BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION