By Todd Garbarini

As a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining, which I saw at the age of fifteen and was completely terrified by, it is a daunting task indeed to watch any other (excuse the pun) incarnation of this fantastic story as seen through the eyes of another filmmaker without being drawn back to Mr. Kubrick’s much-maligned interpretation that was initially criticized but subsequently revered by some as the greatest horror film ever made. The Shining is a film that has affected me profoundly in ways that only a handful of other films ever have. I felt a compelling obsession with it that was nearly impossible to verbalize. It was my second Jack Nicholson film, and it made me a lifelong fan of his; it introduced me to pre-existing music and its use in a contemporary film; and perhaps, most significantly, it was my introduction into the world of Mr. King’s writings. Having read the novel a mere two months after seeing the film for the first time, I was completely surprised to see how much Mr. Kubrick altered the source material. Much has been written about his decision to jettison nearly all but the bare bones plot of a former alcoholic schoolteacher-turned-writer taking on the position of the caretaker of a Colorado hotel during the winter months with his wife and young son. The film’s most vocal critic is perhaps the author himself who, while acknowledging Mr. Kubrick’s genius as a film director, has never held back his disdain for The Shining for which he wrote a screenplay that was subsequently rejected by the director in favor of his own collaboration with novelist Diane Johnson. Mr. King’s disappointment in the film made him vow to make his own version one day, and The Shining, as presented in a three-part mini-series on ABC in April and May of 1997 and directed by Mick Garris, is the result.

Jack Torrance (Stephen Webber) is a recovering alcoholic who has been fired for beating up a student following the latter cutting the former’s car tire after an argument. To say that Jack is skating on thin ice would be an understatement, even after many AA meetings. His marriage is on the rocks with his wife Wendy (Rebecca De Mornay) following him breaking their son Danny’s (Courtland Mead) arm after a drinking bout. All he really wants is quiet time to write his play. Taking care of the remotely located Overlook Hotel during the brutal winter months is his opportunity to do just that. Stuart Ullman (Elliott Gould), the stern and surly hotel manager, has been apprised of Jack’s past and is not too pleased to have to offer him the job as a favor. Dick Halloran (Melvin Van Peebles), the Overlook’s head chef, gives Wendy and Danny a tour of the kitchen, and discovers that he shares the gift of the Shining with Danny, a force described as a “psychic ability to see visions of the past, present, and future, as well as communicate telepathically with others who possess similar abilities.”

Once on their own following the hotel’s seasonal shutdown, the Torrances spend time acclimating themselves to the quiet solitude of the hotel and their quarters. It does not take long for them, however, to realize that strange things are going on in their midst. Unfortunately for Jack, there are evil forces at work that threaten to unravel the very fabric of his family unit as well as his sanity. Evidence of past horrors that occurred within the hotel begin to emerge in the form of an undead and decaying woman in room 217, an anthropomorphized topiary, a hornet’s nest of not-quite-dead wasps, and a scrapbook of news articles providing evidence of the hotel’s sordid history. Wendy’s attempts to seduce her husband into a night of lovemaking while dressed seductively are spurned multiple times by a distracted Jack who is thinking of incorporating elements of the Overlook into his play while also dealing with the demons of his alcoholism. In the midst of this is their seven-year-old son Danny who plays referee between them while trying to make sense of all that conspires to destroy his family. It isn’t long before the ghosts of the Overlook’s past begin to show up in their evening gowns and Jack loses his grip on reality, attempting to destroy his family while Danny telepathically summons Mr. Halloran who comes to their rescue.

At four-and-a-half hours, this version of The Shining is highly faithful to Mr. King’s story and, except for the genuinely frightening woman in Room 217, there is little in the way of tension and scares. Steven Webber does an admirable job of portraying a man modeled after Mr. King himself who is trying to go sober and keep his temper in check. Rebecca De Mornay, who was just twenty years-old when she was cast in late 1980 as an understudy in Francis Ford Coppola’s extravagant One from the Heart (1982) and found overnight fame as Lana in Paul Brickman’s highly successful Risky Business (1983) opposite Tom Cruise, plays Wendy much closer to Mr. King’s original vision in his novel. She is a strong-willed mother fiercely protective of her young charge against the adversity unfurling within the family unit. The film is ultimately undone by the not-ready-for-prime-time computer-generated imagery effects (CGI) that come off as silly and unfinished.

It is impossible to avoid comparisons between this and Mr. Kubrick’s film, the scariest film I have ever seen and which has only become more revered, iconoclastic, studied and analyzed in the years since its original release, so I will tread lightly. There are many areas that make Mr. Kubrick’s version, which was faked on backlots and massive sets at Elstree Studios in England, a standout. In his film, the Overlook, as represented by Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, became a character of its own. The Torrance’s, as played by Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall, and Danny Lloyd, felt as though they were really and truly snowbound and had absolutely no recourse from the outside world. The same cannot be said for the hotel in this version which, ironically, is the very hotel that inspired the story: the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.

The one area that neither film version touches upon that is a big fear of Danny’s in the novel of the notion his parents will divorce, which is further italicized to emphasize innate fear. The other words that do make their way into both films are, of course, REDRUM and MURDER.

The miniseries is now available on a double disc Blu-ray from Scream! Factory. Blu-ray Disc One contains Parts One and Two, and Blu-ray Disc Two contains Part Three and additional scenes that were cut from the film. The film begins with a disclaimer: “To provide the most complete version of the film, a few scenes have been upgraded from the best available, non-Interpositive source.” This verbiage will go over the heads of the uninitiated, and as such it merely states that the folks at Scream! Factory did their best to locate the best available film elements for this high-resolution transfer. I must admit that even to my trained eyes, I had difficulty differentiating between the best film elements and whatever less-than-stellar footage was used in the transfer, which is excellent. There is a highly enjoyable audio commentary by author Stephen King, director Mick Garris, actor Steven Weber, actress Cynthia Garris, visual effects supervisor Boyd Shermis, makeup supervisor Bill Curso, and cinematographer Shelly Johnson that is worth the price of the movie alone. They give great insight into how the film came to be, especially author King who discusses staying at the Stanley Hotel in October 1974 with his wife. He explains that, had the concierge not asked the Kings if they could pay cash to stay overnight, the book would never have come to be. Talk about a fortuitous exchange. He also talks about his own experiences and struggles with alcoholism and his relation to Jack Torrance.

Director Garris discusses how his version is not intended as a remake of Stanley Kubrick’s film (which would have been a fool’s errand) but instead a filmed representation of author Mr. King’s novel, and discusses the challenges of making a film of a beloved book and working with a child actor, made easier thanks to Dawn Jeffory-Nelson, an acting teacher. She appears as an unwitting victim in David Schmoeller’s ultra-creepy Tourist Trap (1979), and worked extensively with young actor Mead. Steven Weber provides his insights into working with Ms. De Mornay and how the most difficult scene they did consisted of nine pages of dialog and had to be in the can in one day.

The film was originally released on DVD in 2003 and the commentary and additional eleven scenes that run a total of sixteen-minutes appear to have been ported over from that release. The image quality of this new double-disc Blu-ray, however, easily bests that DVD so if you are a fan of this film this is a worthy upgrade. 

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By Todd Garbarini

Woody Allen’s Chekhovian-titled Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) is reportedly only twenty percent of what he actually wrote for the film on his Olympia SM-3 typewriter, which he has owned for decades and written all of his films on. Given how extraordinary this outing is, one can only wonder what the remaining projected film would have looked like. Conceived of as his answer to Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) which ran three hours theatrically and nearly five-and-a-half hours on Swedish television as a mini-series, Hannah is considered by many to be Mr. Allen’s finest hour, although I am in the minority as I view Another Woman (1988) as his best film, with Hannah coming in at a very close second.

Hannah is a sumptuous film, the first Woody Allen outing to be photographed by the late great cinematographer Carlo Di Palma who would go on to work on eleven more films with Mr. Allen. He captures the visual splendor of New York and all its beauty and ugliness over a two-year period between Thanksgiving holidays. It is also a family affair. Hannah is a housewife/actress and is played wonderfully by Mia Farrow. Her parents are her real-life mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, and actor Lloyd Nolan, who used to be actors as well. Hannah is married to businessman Elliot (Michael Caine) and they have a good number of children who are all played by Ms. Farrow’s and Mr. Allen’s real-life adopted offspring. Hannah’s sisters consist of the emotionally adrift Lee (Barbara Hershey), who is in a relationship of sorts with the hermetic painter Frederick (Max von Sydow) and the actress-wanna-be Holly (Dianne Weist) who always appears to be on the verge of a breakdown between bouts of ingesting nicotine and alcohol following auditions. As with previous Allen outings, especially his 1979 film Manhattan, Hannah revolves around myriad romantic entanglements, but it is not all fun and games. Elliot is intensely attracted to Lee who is a lost soul and is pulled to him thanks to Frederick’s older age and insouciance. Holly and her actress friend April (Carrie Fisher), with whom she runs a catering company to make ends meet, battle it out for the affections of David (Sam Waterston), an erudite architect who uses opera and fine wine as his tools of choice to woo them both.

As if this were not enough, Mickey (Woody Allen) is a television producer/hypochondriac and is Hannah’s ex. He has a near-death experience when he becomes convinced that he has a brain tumor and ponders the meaning of life, questioning his parents and his co-worker played by Julie Kavner while also looking to religion for answers, but stopping short after speaking with a Hare Krishna, confirming the absurdity of shaving his head, wearing long robes, and dancing around at airports. Though most of the action is that of a serious theme (Crimes and Misdemeanors would take this to even further horrific heights in 1989), the film also balances it with outright hilarity. The ending is perhaps one of the most hopeful and positive in all the Woody Allen filmography.

Hannah boasts two celebrated cinematic moments. The first occurs in a restaurant among the sisters as Lee tries desperately to hide her affair from Hannah who simultaneously attempts to talk Holly off the ledge when she announces her decision to take off a year to try and find herself. The camera circles the triumvirate in a 360-degree maneuver that illustrates Lee’s increasing discomfort with the situation at hand as the tension mounts.

The second comes near the film’s end when Mickey notices Holly perusing titles in Tower Records and engages in a humorous and heartfelt exchange with her. The scene is done in one take and is a highlight.

Among Woody Allen fans the question has usually been which do they prefer: Annie Hall (1977) or Manhattan (1979). They can add Hannah to the mix. This was Ms. Farrow’s fifth outing with Mr. Allen and she does a wonderful balancing act of being the confused wife of an adulterer and the sister of a neurotic.

After being lensed in the fall of 1984, Hannah opened nationwide on Friday, February 7, 1986 to near universal acclaim, leaving Mr. Allen wondering how had he failed, the idea being that if you make something that just about everyone loves, you must be making something that fails to be interesting or challenging!

Hannah won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay for Woody Allen, Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine (who will never live down his unavailability to accept the Oscar in person as he was away filming Jaws IV), and Best Supporting Actress for Dianne Weist. It is one of his best-scored films, boasting a soundtrack of both upbeat and melancholic tunes.

The film is available in a Region B Blu-ray from Fabulous Films, the fine company that released Manhattan. The source material is terrific and the film’s warmth shines through.

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By Todd Garbarini

I have never understood religious cults, and I still don’t. How someone can permit themselves to be brainwashed into following a self-appointed “religious leader” and hang on their every word represents, to me, a soul searching for acceptance or love that they believe has been denied them. My initiation into the existence of cults was in the December 4, 1978 issues of both Time Magazine and Newsweek Magazine. Their reports about the Jonestown murders in Guyana, which completely shocked my sensibilities with images of dead adults and children lying face down in filth, were the stuff of nightmares. This horrific event has spawned books, documentaries, and jokes about “drinking the Kool Aid” when referencing one’s blind commitment to a ridiculous situation. An article two months later in my local newspaper about “witches,” pagan practices, bowls of blood and animal ribcages in the woods less than ten miles from where I lived did little to assuage my fears about them. David Koresh, the leader of the religious sect referred to as the Branch Davidians, led his followers into the Mount Carmel Center, a compound in Waco, Texas, which culminated in a standoff with law enforcement in April 1993 with most of them dying in a storm of bullets and fire. NXIVM, the organization founded by Keith Raniere five years later masquerading as a self-help and personal development program group, came under fire for being a cult following reports of sex trafficking of branded women.

Hollywood is no stranger to films about such subjects. Most of them are cut from the cloth of genre and horror films. Split Image (1982) is a bit of a different take on this terrifying subject as seen through the eyes of suburbanites and therefore is far more relatable. Directed by Ted Kotcheff between April and June in 1981 just before he unleashed John Rambo on the world with his phenomenal First Blood, also released in 1982. Split Image was originally reported on under the title of Captured when it was featured in the wonderful but short-lived bi-monthly movie magazine published in 1982 called “Coming Attractions.” I saw the film on CED Videodisc nearly 40 years ago and was amazed at how little I recalled of it.

Danny Stetson (Michael O’Keefe of Lewis John Carlino’s 1978 film The Great Santini) is a parallel bars athlete eyeing college. He lives with his parents Kevin and Diane (Brian Dennehy and Elisabeth Ashley) and younger brother Sean (Ronnie Scribner of Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV-Movie Salem’s Lot) in a sprawling house like the killer’s in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (1982), complete with large see-through windows and a built-in pool. By chance he meets a beautiful young woman named Rebecca (Karen Allen of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981) who engages in small talk about big subjects. Accompanying her to a weekend outing, he is introduced to scores of people at a retreat called Homeland who welcome him with open arms – literally – and who all chant and engage in reciting positive affirmations while discussing Jungian archetypes such as the duality of man. The happy and joyous atmosphere completely rubs him the wrong way when he meets the group’s leader, Neil Kirklander (played wonderfully by Peter Fonda), but he stays and sleeps on the premises and one night makes a break for freedom. Bill Conti’s score here is recognizable as the precursor to his wonderful score to Robert Mandell’s thriller F/X (1986). Confronted by Kirklander, he eventually falls under his spell and informs his mother that he will not be coming home. He undergoes a ritual whereby he renounces his identity as Danny and is reborn as “Joshua,” prompting a visit from his parents that results in a near donnybrook precipitated by his temperamental father.

Split Image, which opened in New York on Friday, November 5, 1982, does a decent job of exploring the practice of capturing and “deprogramming” an individual who has fallen under the spell of a cult and this is done by Charles Pratt (played by the incomparable James Woods) who, somehow, makes his living “deprogramming” people. After kidnapping “Joshua” with his parents’ permission, he forces him to undergo “treatment” to bring “Danny” back to life. Many of these scenes look as though they came out of a horror film, and it makes one wonder how much of this was imagined by the writers and how much is based on factual circumstances such as this. The film looks at the ethics of “interventions” and how it can alter a person’s free will and their ability to make their own choices. Like Irwin Winkler’s At First Sight (1992), it waivers between being compelling and occasionally feels a little “TV Movie of the Week”-ish by today’s standards.

The film is now available from Kino Lorber on standard Blu-ray. Some of the shots within the house appear to be a little darker than they should be, but it is probably just how the film was shot. Mr. Kotcheff does an expert job of framing the film for 2.35:1 anamorphic photography, which is a huge step up from the pan-and-scan transfer of the early 1980’s.

This is a sparse disc in the way of extras, however the major one is the feature length audio commentary by film historian and filmmaker Daniel Kremer who mentions his own movie, Raise Your Kids on Seltzer (2015), which is about retired “deprogrammers”. When I was in middle school, Ralph L. Thomas’s 1981 film Ticket to Heaven appeared in my Weekly Reader issue and I had a much different idea of what that film was about. It turns out that deprogramming is the theme, and Mr. Kremer also mentions Blinded by the Light, which was released in 1980, and starred both Kristy and Jimmy McNichol, directed by cinematographer John A. Alonzo. This is a very entertaining and informative commentary which also touches on Mr. Kotcheff’s other films and placing him into the auteur category.

The Blu-ray also comes with the following trailers: Split Image, Gorky Park, 52 Pick-Up, The Bedroom Window, The Wanderers, and The Hard Way. 

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By Todd Garbarini

After the dramatic, Ingmar Bergman-esque directorial turn he took with Interiors (1978) which came unexpectedly on the heels of his masterfully hilarious Oscar-winning film Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen turned back to contemporary New York for a daring film that was shot in black-and-white and scored with the music of George Gershwin. Proclaimed as the only truly great American film of the 1970s by film critic Andrew Sarris, Manhattan is a joy to behold from start to finish and is quite simply one of the most romantic-looking films of all-time (though its subject matter in the era of the MeToo movement will indubitably raise more than a few eyebrows with the allegations of sexual molestation launched against Mr. Allen). Gordon Willis’s beautiful photography married with the sumptuous Gershwin music makes me wish that filmmakers would make black-and-white films today. There are some who do, admittedly, but they appear to only do it within avant-garde and independent circles.

Manhattan, released on Wednesday, April 25, 1979, stars Mr. Allen as Isaac Davis, a television writer who is unfulfilled with his life as a comedy writer. His second ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) has left him for another woman and is writing a book about their marriage. Isaac is 42 and is dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) who is 25 years younger than he is and is still in high school. He feels very guilty about this, but genuinely cares for her (this plot point was reportedly inspired by Mr. Allen’s affair with actress Stacy Nelkin on the set of Annie Hall which was shooting in 1976, though her part was eventually cut from that film). His friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is writing a book about Eugene O’Neill and is married to Emily (Anne Byrne) but has started an affair with high-strung and neurotic Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) whom Isaac initially cannot tolerate but increasingly grows fond of. Throughout the film we are confronted by these characters who cannot seem to put their finger on what they want and stick with it. They are not inherently bad people. They just keep making questionable decisions. By the end of the film, the only person who seems to have their head on straight is Tracy and the film ends, like Mr. Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), on a very positive and upbeat note.

The real star of the film is Manhattan itself, with its pulsating and bustling people and automobiles. Rarely has the city looked so luminous and beautiful onscreen (if ever). Gordon Willis, the revered cinematographer of The Godfather films and a good number of Mr. Allen’s early works, captures Gotham in all its beauty even during an era when the city was beset by social decay. For the first time in his career, Mr. Allen forgoes the relative constraints of the 1.85:1 flat ratio to the far more accommodating 2.35:1 anamorphic Panavision vista and the results makes one ache for further use of this format.

Manhattan was penned by Mr. Allen and Marshall Brickman, who also co-wrote Annie Hall. The dialogue in Mr. Allen’s films has always been a strong point, but here it really shines. His use of long, uninterrupted takes that first surfaced in Annie Hall shine here Rarely have onscreen walks and chats been so fascinating.

Manhattan was also one of the first movies to appear on home video in the widescreen format, which retained much (but not all) of the film’s original image. I have owned Manhattan on letterboxed VHS, letterboxed laserdisc with a gatefold, letterboxed DVD, and I must say that this Region B anamorphically-enhanced Blu-ray courtesy of Fabulous Films is beautiful.

It would be wonderful if Mr. Allen would be open to providing commentary tracks on his older films, specifically this one which, unbelievably, he reportedly was so displeased with that he imposed on United Artists to shelve it and offered to do another movie for free.

Thankfully, they did not take him up on it.

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By Todd Garbarini

Would you go see a horror film billed as “Makes Night of the Living Dead Look Like a Kids’ (sic) Pajama Party! Scream so they can find you!!!” Somebody did. Released in New York City on Wednesday, March 7,1973 as the second feature on a double bill with Mario Bava’s R-rated 1971 film Twitch of the Death Nerve (the U.S. title of A Bay of Blood), Amando de Ossorio’s The Blind Dead actually was given a theatrical release in a watered down, PG-rated version minus blood, gore and nudity. It is also a tighter cut of the original (known as Tombs of the Blind Dead) as it also dispenses with some prolonged meandering that gets old real fast. Does the truncated Stateside version triumph over the longer original Spanish cut of the film? That depends on the viewer. As a purist who prefers a director’s original vision, I applaud the efforts of the uncut version.

Lensed in 1971 in Spain and Portugal at some truly creeping locales, Tombs of the Blind Dead, clearly influenced by George A. Romero’s aforementioned highly successful Night of the Living Dead (1968), is one of the better Spanish horror films to come out of the 1970s, so much so that it spawned no less than three follow-ups all written and directed by the original’s writer/director: Return of the Blind Dead (1973), The Ghost Galleon (1974), and Night of the Seagulls (1975). The madness begins when Virginia White (María Elena Arpón) encounters her old college lover Betty Turner (Lone Fleming) at a public pool. Their congenial attitude quickly becomes strained when Virginia’s friend Roger Whelan (César Burner) shows up and immediately takes a more-than-platonic liking to Virginia, inviting her on a train ride that he is taking with Betty. Female resentment ensues and Virginia takes it upon herself to jump off the train midway, baggage in hand, and goes off into the ruins of a town named Berzano that the train deliberately bypasses due to an unsavory past. Making creepy and effective use of the Monasterio de Santa Maria la Real de Valdeiglesias, Pelayos de la Presa, Madrid, Spain, the director follows Virginia through the decrepit structures and, unbelievably, camps out solo overnight! Her presence awakens the buried corpses of the Knights Templar from their crypts who attack and kill her, her body found by the train conductor the next morning when on the return trip. Betty and Roger look for Virginia in Berzano, and out of nowhere, two police detectives emerge to question them about their relationship to Virginia. It’s a peculiar entrance into the scene, as though they were standing “stage left” and issued in front of the camera by the offscreen director. Betty and Roger make their way to the requisite know-it-all, The One who comes in at the eleventh hour to explain the goings-on to them, in this case Professor Candal (José Thelman), who explains to them (and the audience) who manipulates them into finding his son, and the this leads to a showdown with the Knights and sets up the film for a continuation.

Spanish horror films of this era were on a par with their Italian giallo counterparts as both genres flourished with exemplary outings from both countries. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La Residencia (1969), aka The Finishing School and The House That Screamed, while not a zombie film, is beautifully lensed and ends with a creepy and original denouement. Francisco Lara Polop’s La Mansión de La Niebla (1972), known here as Murder Mansion, boasts beautiful artwork that belies an otherwise pedestrian thriller. Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974), known also as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and here in the States as Don’t Open the Window, is, on the other hand, a key zombie film from this era and is generally regarded quite correctly as one of the best, and has received stunning Blu-ray treatment from Synapse

By Todd Garbarini

If Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), Sir Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Simon Wincer’s D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), and the television show Small Wonder (1985 – 1989) are all about anything that we can be absolutely sure of, they are about prescience and the coming of “Artificial Intelligence.” Following Stanford University professor John McCarthy’s 1955 Dartmouth workshop and his introduction of the term “Artificial Intelligence,” or “AI” as it is generally referred to now, AI means many things to many different people today. When these outings reached audiences, they were merely regarded as science fiction, though today there is an argument to be made that they should be reappraised as science fact. AI was not a term used when those films were released and has only come into universal parlance with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. One wonders how Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon, the four men all regarded as the “founding fathers” of Artificial Intelligence in the early 1950s, would have regarded these stories and if they were in line with their notions of AI.

Richard Colla’s The Questor Tapes is a made-for-TV movie that was largely ignored by audiences despite its interesting premise of a scientist named Emil Vaslovik (Lew Ayres) and his desire to build a superhuman android named Questor, expertly portrayed by veteran actor Robert Foxworth. Filmed in 1973 and intended to be the pilot for a projected NBC series, Questor was the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, a television screenwriter and producer who is best known for both being confused with author Ray Bradbury as well as being the creator of the initially unsuccessful but later wildly popular sci-fi television series Star Trek. Broadcast on Wednesday, January 23, 1974, Questor begins with a team of scientific and electronic experts who, following the disappearance of Vaslovik, attempt to bring his vision to fruition despite being unable to decode the programming tape while also accidentally erasing most of the tape’s contents – a nod to the Watergate scandal of the time?

Geoffrey Darrow (John Vernon) is the new head of the project, and he butts heads with Vaslovik’s assistant, Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell), who interrupts the data transfer and insists that the programming should be done with the partially erased tapes. When the android fails to respond, the “experts” leave the facility, dejected. While alone, Questor, bald and naked, whirrs to life and, in a positively ridiculous sequence, begins to transform itself from an “it” to a “him” (wait until you see how it adds hair to its chrome dome), managing to dress itself in clothing that perfectly fits. Questor sets off on a journey to search for Vaslovik and hopes to understand his purpose while attempting to fill in the blank spots due to the erased portions of his memory tapes. To do this, he enlists the help of a reluctant Robinson. Questor begins by talking the way that a robot would be perceived to speak, but through his travels with Robinson he begins to sound more and more human. There is a humorous sequence after the duo make their way to London and need to obtain more money. Questor solves this issue by using programmed intelligence to gain the upper hand in a casino sequence that would be later used by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) and by Jessica Alba in the “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” episode from October 2000 of the James Cameron-created series Dark Angel.

They make their way to a wealthy Lady Helena Trimble (Dana Wynter) who worked with Vaslovik and he gleans more info from her as to his creator’s whereabouts, though he is shot in a park by a soldier and is summarily returned to the laboratory. Following his repair, Questor sets off to Mount Ararat, allegedly the location of Noah’s Ark, and locates Vaslovik in a cave thanks to some nifty matte work by the late great Oscar-winning artist Albert Whitlock. Vaslovik, as it turns out, is also an android – shades of Blade Runner? Who can forget the revelatory stuttering of Felix Flankin at the end of Jules Bass’s 1967 outing Mad Monster Party? I will leave it up to you, the reader, to have a look at the film to explain the rather involved denouement but suffice it to say Mr. Roddenberry had a knack for creating projects that initially went nowhere, then revisiting them and turning them into hits. While Questor was initially conceived of as a series, with the movie intended as the series pilot, creative differences between Mr. Roddenberry and NBC forced it to be nixed and promoted as a one-off movie-of-the-week (known in the industry as an MOW) which, I feel, explains the film’s abrupt ending. Many of the ideas touched upon, including the notion of automatons and androids, made their way into the highly successful Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994).

Questor explores themes common to other films of a similar ilk: What gives us our identity and what constitutes humanity? How do we, as humans, quench our thirst for knowledge and curiosity? Both Mr. Foxworth and Mr. Farrell possess good chemistry and it would have been nice to see where the series went.

The laboratory portions of the film were shot at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. While the technology of 1973 was considered to be “state-of-the-art” and then destined to become “soon-to-be-obsolete” as all technology inevitably does (at least according to Moore’s Law), it’s a kick to see how the experts reach their conclusions as to how Questor will react to the environment. The special effects are, as you can well imagine, dated, however the ideas are just as thought-provoking and visionary and never more topical than when viewed now in an era when robots are poised to man 18-wheelers, serve customers at fast food joints, and perform minimum wage tasks deemed repetitive and boring.

Kino Lorber has released the film on Blu-ray, and it looks great. There is an informative and spirited commentary track by film historian and screenwriter Gary Gerani. Extraordinarily knowledgeable and enjoyable to listen to, I will seek out other films that he speaks on. His commentary encompasses brief but thorough bios of the leading performers and makes comments on much of the onscreen action, how the sequences were accomplished, while also delving into matters of the plot and how they relate to the here-and-now. A first-rate commentary that easily lends itself to repeated playback.

Rounding out the extras are trailers for the film, as well as for Fear No Evil (1969), Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973), Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1979), The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), The Black Marble (1980), and Fuzz (1972).

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By Todd Garbarini

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

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

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

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

Will this venue become a mecca for future bands?

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

See the press release below for more information:

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

FILM DOCUMENTS THE FIRST CONCERT EVER PERFORMED AT HOOVER DAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Todd Garbarini

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

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theatrical Trailer

50th Anniversary "Redband" Trailer

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

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

Pet Sematary (1989)

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

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

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

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

Feature-length commentary by director Mary Lambert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smile (2022)

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

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

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

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

Bonus Content (on 4K Ultra HD Disc):

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

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

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

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

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

By Todd Garbarini

I hated William Friedkin’s 1985 police thriller, To Live and Die in L.A., when I first saw it. The mixture of Eighties-style pop music by Wang Chung and the disreputable characters were, I felt, meretricious and off-putting. Even the car chase seemed lackluster. I also hated Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972), James Toback’s Fingers (1978) and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) during my first viewings. Revisiting these titles soon afterwards made me realize that I failed to fully appreciate or understand them. My ignorance of film was evident!

To Live and Die in L.A., which opened nationwide on Friday, November 1, 1985 to lukewarm notices and underwhelming box office despite being championed by a four-star review by Roger Ebert, is a highly stylized, dark, and uncompromising crime thriller that boasts a then-unknown cast with a story and a pace that feels more suited to the 1970s. It also contains what I consider to be the greatest car chase ever filmed and edited for a major motion picture, which took no less than five weeks to plan and shoot.

Having seen Mr. Friedkin’s brilliant Oscar-winning East Coast police thriller The French Connection (1971), this West Coast-based yarn centers on a Secret Service agent, Richard Chance (William Petersen), whose best friend and partner Jim Hart (Michael Greene) has been murdered in cold blood by artist/currency counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe) just days prior to his retirement. This plot device occurred before it became a familiar film trope, and this is easily one of the best films of the 1980s. Chance has one goal: to put Masters away for life with no regard for how he has to do it. Truthfully, he would prefer to kill him. This causes many issues for his new partner John Vukovich (John Pankow) whose familial lineage of law enforcement officers and his “by the book” methodology conflicts with Chance’s no-bullshit headstrong attitude. Vukovich’s unwillingness to go outside the boundaries of acceptability is tested when: Chance surreptitiously removes crucial evidence from a crime scene in order to get to Masters; Chance, without Vukovich’s knowledge, springs a prisoner friend (John Turturro) of Masters to get him to testify; and most notably forces Vukovich to go along with a plan to obtain cash needed to get closer to Masters while nearly dying in what is arguably cinema’s most exciting getaway car chase sequence. What makes the chase work so well is that it’s physical, it’s possible (though highly improbable), and it’s not done in a Fast and the Furious, over-the-top sort of way. Nor is it perfunctory as it comes as a result of an important plot point, nearly besting the director’s own French Connection subway/car chase with a headlong ride straight up the 710 Long Beach Freeway while driving in the wrong direction against traffic.

Chance also beds a willing parolee (Darlanne Fluegel) who gives him information on current convicts in return for money to provide for herself and her son Christopher. Like the inexorable Popeye Doyle in The French Connection who will stop at nothing to put drug dealers and users away, Chance, like his surname, will stop at nothing to capture and punish Masters. The difference between the two films is that the former paints Brooklyn and New York City as gritty and almost despairing cities whereas the latter bathes the frame in a Los Angeles that we have not seen before or since. While also gritty, grimy and dark, this is a Lotus Land that is also highly glossy and enticing, with beautiful people who are about as real as the counterfeit bills that Masters manufactures. The overall theme and central conceit of To Live and Die in L.A. is fraudulence. People use each other for their own personal gains. Masters is an artist but hates what he paints and burns his work in frustration. Since he cannot find joy or satisfaction in his own originality, he resorts to copying others, in this case $20, $50, and $100 bills in a procedure that is painstaking, difficult, and now archaic.

Like The French Connection, To Live and Die in LA is also based on a book of the same name, this one a novel written by former Secret Service Agent Gerald Petievich. What makes the film remarkable is the opening sequence which features a martyr who shouts “Allahu Akbar” just before blowing himself up on the roof of a hotel where then-President Reagan is giving a speech. This scene made little sense to me upon my maiden viewing but is eerily prescient of the religious extremism that has made its way to America’s shores.

The performances are excellent all around. William Petersen, whose film debut was as a bar bouncer in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), is terrific as Chance and plays him as a daredevil whose cowboy nature seals his fate and makes him a dangerous person to be around. This is established in an early sequence wherein Chance bungee jumps off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA. In addition to the martyr sequence, this could also be one of the earliest instances of this now highly popular activity’s depiction in a film. John Pankow is also quite good as Chance’s conflicted partner. The stand-out is Willem Dafoe as Masters, fresh from Walter Hill’s 1984 outing Streets of Fire. His icy expressions and demeanor can change on a moment’s notice without warning. Darlanne Fluegel, who heartbreakingly left us far too soon following an early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease, is mysterious as Chance’s muse. I first saw her in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). Debra Feuer is striking as Masters’ girlfriend and confidante. The late Dean Stockwell is great as Masters’ lawyer - you can almost see him prepping himself for the role of Ben in David Lynch’s aforementioned and masterful Blue Velvet the following year. Steve James is an actor I always liked ever since I first saw him in the “Night Vigil” episode of T.J. Hooker in 1984. He started in the industry as a stunt man in films as diverse as The Wiz (1978), The Wanderers (1979), The Warriors (1979), Dressed to Kill (1980), and He Knows You’re Alone (1980) prior to onscreen acting. Here he plays Jeff, one of Masters’ clients and his performance, though small, shines. He also appeared in the William Friedkin TV-movie C.A.T. Squad in 1986, which was also written by Mr. Petievich. His premature death in 1993 from what is rumored to be the medical treatment that he received after a cancer diagnosis is a tremendous loss to the entertainment industry.

To Live and Die in L.A. has been released on home video many times in the United States and is now available on 4K UHD Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber. The extras, which are ported over from the 2016 SHOUT! Factory Special Edition Blu-ray and the 2003 MGM/UA Home Video DVD, are all included and are as follows:

Disc One:

- 4K UHD Blu-ray remastered from the original camera negative.

- Audio Commentary by Director William Friedkin from 2003 – this runs the full length of the film and is the only bonus to be included on both the 4K UHD disc and the standard 1080p Blu-ray.

Disc Two:

- Standard 1080p Blu-ray down-converted from a 4K remastering from the original camera negative.

- Audio Commentary by Director William Friedkin from 2003.

- Taking a Chance: Interview with Actor William Petersen (20:42, in high definition, from 2016) – Gary Sinise read for the role of Richard Chance with the casting director, but the role instead went to William Petersen after he read for it at William Friedkin’s New York City apartment. A second reading with actor friend John Pankow solidified their roles.

- Renaissance Woman in L.A. Interview with Actress Debra Feuer (14:56, in high definition, from 2016) – Ms. Feuer reminisces about how wonderful the experience was for her. Despite the sexual angle of the film which made her uncomfortable, the cast and crew made her receptive and accepted on the set. Her role is small but important and I would love to see her in more films.

- Doctor for a Day: Interview with Actor Dwier Brown (08:53, in high definition, from 2016) – Dwier Brown talks about his excitement over reading for the film. He would later go on to appear as Phil Sterling in Mr. Friedkin’s 1989 druid-horror film The Guardian, and humorously recalls how the director forgot that he was in To Live and Die in L.A.

- So in Phase - Scoring To Live and Die in L.A. Interview with Composers Wang Chung (12:44, in high definition, from 2016) – It’s amazing that Mr. Friedkin heard Wang Chung’s 1984 album Points on the Curve, in particular the song “Wait,” and explained that that was the vibe that he wanted from the album for the film score. While there is a soundtrack album available for this film, it’s incomplete, and I hope that one day a full soundtrack album, remastered from the original master tracks, will be issued. Wang Chung recalls some interesting anecdotes in this onscreen interview.

- Wrong Way - The Stunts of To Live and Die in L.A. Interview with Stunt Coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker (35:39, in high definition, from 2016) – The famous stunt man discusses the intricacies and challenges of filming one of the most dangerous car chases ever mounted for a film. The director was all about disorienting the audience, and that notion comes into play here in how the chase was staged and ultimately executed.

- Counterfeit World - The Making of To Live and Die in L.A. Documentary (29:52, in standard definition, from 2003) – This is a fun look behind the scenes with mini interviews from many of the cast and crew involved, with discussions regarding the characterizations as portrayed by the actors and actresses to filming the famed car chase.

- Deleted Scene and Alternate Ending with Introductions (13:07) – this is the ridiculous ending that the director shot to please the studio executives and thankfully was never used. You won’t believe it when you see it.

- Radio Spot (01:04)

- Trailer (2:08)

All in all, a great package of a great movie.

Click here to order from Amazon

By Todd Garbarini

Something happened to me while watching John Cassavetes’s film Gloria that, to my knowledge, has never, ever happened before and probably will never, ever happen again. Towards the end of the film, the titular heroine exits a cab and asks the cabbie for the time, and she replies, “It’s 9:20.” Unbelievably, this was the exact time of day that it was on my clock as I watched the film in the evening. In films, people give the time to others when asked (Charles Martin Smith is told that it’s “a quarter to twelve” when attempting to purchase alcohol in George Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti), but the phenomenon of the onscreen reel time being in synch with the offscreen real time is something that I have not experienced before, and it got me to thinking about how certain things happen by mere happenstance.

The cinema of John Cassavetes is an acquired taste as he was a maverick who made many films on his own terms. If the general audience loved his work, it would infuriate him and he would recut the film, as was the case with 1970’s Husbands, a film that was released, critically acclaimed, pulled out of release and re-cut into a completely different film, culled from roughly 240 hours of raw footage. Co-star Ben Gazzara stated that his favorite version of the film ran four-and-a-half hours. The director often employed members of a small but loyal acting troupe headed by his wife, Gena Rowlands, who portrays the titular heroine in this film, shot between July and September 1979 and released in New York on Wednesday, October 1, 1980. She received her second Oscar nomination for her performance here, the first being for A Woman Under the Influence in 1974, also under the direction her husband.

Gloria is a film mired in Manhattan, Harlem and the Bronx in New York. The film opens with nighttime establishing shots of the New York skyline to the music of Bill Conti best known for the theme to Rocky (1976). The Statue of Liberty and several bridges are luminescent and invoke Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie filmed there two years earlier. The daylight exposes the filthy streets and the people who inhabit them. A six-year-old Puerto Rican boy, Phil Dawn (John Adames), narrowly escapes being killed by the Mafia following his mob accountant father’s (Buck Henry of all people) involvement with them turned sour. Phil is saddled with a copy of the Bible, which in reality is incriminating evidence that the Mafia wants back in their hands. His parents and siblings all become collateral damage as he and the family friend, Gloria, bolt and attempt to get away. Gloria is part of the Mafia. She possesses street smarts and packs heat, unflinchingly firing upon her enemies in broad daylight, though no cops appear to be anywhere in sight. Like the interior of Marcellus Wallace’s suitcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), this Bible proves to be a MacGuffin to keep Gloria and Phil on the run.

Initially, Gloria and Phil cannot stand one another, and the former appears to be reluctant to be saddled with the latter despite her promise to Phil’s parents to take care of him. Eventually, they grow on one another and, dare I say it, even develop a mutual affection. John Adames proves himself to be a capable actor though, to my knowledge, this is his sole screen credit. The film, despite reportedly being disparaged by its director (who probably would have been happy to completely recut it), is a showcase for its leading actress, who is always fascinating to watch.

Gloria was released on Blu-ray in August 2018 by Twilight Time and that pressing contained an isolated musical score. There is a new pressing of the film, this time by Kino Lorber, and the results are unspectacular. This is not a carp about Kino,since they always do a bang-up job on their Blu-ray releases. The film image is dark at times, especially in the beginning scenes in the apartment building (look fast for Tom Noonan as a Mafia soldier), and it looks as though it was transferred from a theatrical print, minus the reel-change cue marks. I am only assuming this to be the case (though I am probably incorrect), or perhaps this was how it was either photographed or developed as the liner notes are absent of the usual declaration boasting a high-definition transfer from the film’s original camera negative.

The only extras to speak of on this pressing are theatrical trailers for Gloria, Sidney Lumet’s Gloria remake from 1999, Gorky Park (1983), 52 Pick-Up (1986), Code of Silence (1985), Number One with a Bullet (1987), and Lonely are the Brave (1962).

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By Todd Garbarini

The first time that I heard of the name Nat Segaloff was in 1990 when I purchased his new book at the time, Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin. I eagerly read through it in no time as The French Connection, Mr. Friedkin’s Oscar-winning film for Best Picture and Best Director among others, is my favorite film. It was his fifth feature as a director, and it put Mr. Friedkin on the map following the disappointing box office performance of his first four films. However, the critical praise and box office success of this real-life-inspired police drama which contains two of cinema’s greatest action set pieces would not truly prepare audiences for his follow-up film.

Mr. Friedkin’s The Exorcist, a film adaptation of the best-selling 1971 William Peter Blatty novel of the same name, opened theatrically on Wednesday, December 26, 1973 on no less than twenty seven theater screens, one of which was the Cinema 57 which was part of the Sack Theatre chain in Boston, MA. Mr. Segaloff was a publicist and was tasked with playing door guard to a top-secret pre-arranged screening of the film on Christmas morning to a handful of critics who were there to get their reviews in their respective papers earlier than usual. This incident is recounted in his preface to his latest book, The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear, the title of which brings to the forefront the shocking revelation of just how many years have transpired since Regan MacNeil’s head spun around. The film is something that I had heard about for years prior to becoming a fan of scary cinema and I was unsure how much of it was rumor or fact. I recall purchasing The Exorcist on VHS in February 1986 seven months before I saw The French Connection. It was in the oversized clamshell box by Warner Home Video and while I was impressed with it, it did not scare me in the slightest. However, I have spoken to other people who saw the film in their teenage years and refused to view it ever again. A September 1996 viewing of the film to a sold-out screening at Radio City Music Hall, introduced by both lead actress Ellen Burstyn and the director in-person, solidified the film’s stature as a masterpiece in my mind. The release of the film on DVD in a 25^th anniversary edition whetted the appetite of those who would see the film theatrically two years later when The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen was released which would include changes and additional footage. The Blu-ray of the film in 2010 in the extended director’s cut was by no means the final word, as in 2013 a 40th anniversary Blu-ray added a nice documentary and extended interviews with the author. Just in time for the 50^th anniversary, the film is now bowing in 4K UHD.

Following a foreword by John A. Russo of Night of the Living Dead fame, Mr. Segaloff begins his book, which is comprised of sixteen chapters and lasting just over three hundred pages in length, from the correct presumption that the film is a misunderstood classic. He agrees with the assessment by both Mr. Blatty and Mr. Friedkin that the film is many things except the horror film that it is widely revered as since the time of its release, though audiences have other opinions. We are treated to many interesting tidbits: the hilarious story of how Mr. Friedkin met Mr. Blatty and how the former’s honesty solidified a working relationship and lifelong friendship with the latter, with Mr. Friedkin being the sole director that Mr. Blatty wanted from the get-go; Warner Brothers’ initial reluctance to hire Mr. Friedkin until the release of his brilliant The French Connection in 1971 garnered sudden critical and financial success and changed the game completely; the original 1949 real-life case of a young possessed Maryland boy; Mr. Blatty’s writing of the novel; the making of the film; a multitude of issues that beset the film’s production giving way to the supposed “curse” on the set; the controversy surrounding the release of the film; in-depth looks at the much-maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and the superior The Exorcist III (1990), the latter both written and directed by Blatty; the prequels and television series, and the little-known The Ninth Configuration. If you’re even just a passing fan of the film, the book is a must read.

Mr. Segaloff was gracious enough to speak with me from his home in Los Angeles by phone regarding the book. Unfortunately, the day I contacted him about the interview was the same day that Mr. Friedkin had passed away, a fact that I was unaware of until an hour later. Mr. Segaloff wanted to press on with the interview, however, which amazed me as he knew Mr. Friedkin for nearly fifty years.

Todd Garbarini: Where are you from originally?

Nat Segaloff: I was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is a good long way from Cottage City, Maryland, where that little boy was possessed in 1949. We were not possessed in Silver Spring. Silver Spring was a very strange place. It was the nation’s largest unincorporated city, about one hundred thousand people, and nobody taking out the garbage.

I was able to leave and go to school in Boston, and there, I not only ran the major movie program on campus, I also insinuated myself into both the city’s professional film scene and the then-burgeoning underground film scene. Of course, we’re talking the 1960’s.

When I graduated from college, I started doing publicity for the film companies in town and, after a while, moved to New York to do it there, then moved back to Boston and became a critic. All of that served as fodder for the books I’ve written and for the people I’ve met because I’m a kind of a demimonde. A lot of people remembered me from when I was a publicist, but then when I became a reporter, they thought I was still a publicist, and they trusted me. It’s a very odd combination, and I sometimes had to tell people, “You know, I’m a reporter now.” I was able to keep close to a lot of people that I’d met doing publicity, like Robert Altman, James Bridges, Paul Mazursky, and John Milius.

TG: A lot of people I’ve spoken with who work in the film industry didn’t go to the movies or even see films on television until they were much older. Did you do the same thing, or did you get into them later?

NS: Back when I was a pod, the only way to see an old movie was on late-night television. I stayed up till one-thirty in the morning to view The Jazz Singer on Washington television because there was no way I was otherwise going to see it. There was no video, and you couldn’t even rent a 16-millimeter print of it. Later, there were revival theaters in Washington where I attended occasionally, but you still had to wait for something to appear. Only when I went away to school and ran the film program was I seeing movies every weekend, because I had to make sure people weren’t smoking in the theater. That was my job. I was managing the campus theater. I saw a lot of movies in class and in theaters, and it was wonderful. Between that and being a critic, I must have spent thirty years watching a couple of movies a week, and then I just burned out completely.

TG: As much as I love watching movies, I don’t know that I would be able to do that! Do you have an all-time favorite movie?

NS: The easy answer is Citizen Kane. It certainly is the source of so much inspiration and technique for everybody who makes movies. I don’t think it’s possible to cite one particular film. Whatever pleases you at the time that you’re open to, it’s a film that becomes your favorite. I also like His Girl Friday. No connection between those, except they’re both about newspapers.

TG: Are you drawn to movies about reporters and publicists?

NS: It turns out that I am drawn to movies about reporters. Certainly, Sam Fuller’s Park Row is a movie that makes me cry, not because it’s sad, but because it reminds me of the days when I was writing for real newspapers. No, I don’t find myself glomming onto any particular kind of film, be it science fiction, horror, drama, musical, or anything else. I just like a good movie.

TG: So, you don’t consider yourself partial to certain genres?

NS: I think that so many genres, particularly horror or suspense films, seem to have a playbook, and I don’t like films that go where you know they’re going to go. I remember something Jonathan Demme said about the script for his film Something Wild. He said you literally didn’t know from one page to the next what was going to happen. I like to see that on the screen. I like films that have what I call an “Oh, shit!” moment. The first one I remember was, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey, just before the intermission, when we realized that HAL was reading the astronauts’ lips, and that was the moment where the whole audience sort of exclaimed, “Oh, shit!” [laughs]. There are also other movies like A Beautiful Mind with that kind of moment, or a movie that very few people remember that Stephen Fears made called Dirty Pretty Things.

TG: Yes, that’s with Audrey Tautou from Amelie.

NS: Yes. I was watching it in a small theater, and not only did we all say, “Oh, shit,” but we all stayed through the credits and then stood up and congratulated each other after the movie for seeing that film.

TG: You’ve written and published a good number of books on The Towering Inferno, the Scarface films, the Hollywood Code, John Milius, William Friedkin and Harlan Ellison. Your latest book, The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear, is quite an accomplishment. It begins on Christmas Day in 1973. You were working for the Sack Cinema 57 on Stuart Street in Boston.

NS: Yes. I was their publicity director in 1973 when The Exorcist was scheduled to be released on Wednesday, December 26^th. One of our critics, Stuart Byron, who knew the industry really well, was able to inveigle William Friedkin to permit a day-before screening so that the weekly papers, which catered to the young audience, would be able to meet their deadlines. So, I hosted this greeting of The Exorcist on Christmas morning.

For some reason, the critics had no problem leaving the bosom of their families to come and see a movie about a little girl whose head spins around. I didn’t see the movie that day. I was standing in the lobby guarding the door so the people who weren’t invited couldn’t get in. Nobody got sick. We didn’t know we were supposed to throw up. Of course, the Technicolor yawns began the very next day.

TG: Did you have any inkling what that film was like? Based upon the lobby cards, the marketing of the film by Warner Brothers, did you have any idea what was going on behind those doors?

NS: I had no idea what was going to be going on, “on this street in that house in a little girl’s bedroom.” [laughs] I had read the book, of course. The only glimpse we had was a teaser trailer that went 30 seconds with the narration I just did for you. It was simply a shot of the poster of Max von Sydow standing outside of the house. That’s all anybody knew. There were no pictures, nothing. In fact, there was an embargo on anything from the film. I think it was either Time or Newsweek who ended up sued by Warner Brothers because somebody sneaked into the theater and got a picture of Regan in makeup and ran it. That was considered a breach of copyright, a very secret thing. The audiences, as you know, would file out ashen. The audiences waiting to get in would know that something weird was going on in there, and it became an emotional rollercoaster for them.

TG: Now, I of course, didn’t live through this. Was this a similar reaction like when Psycho came out? Psycho had been a novel first, and then the film was released and it was all hush-hush, “don’t give away the ending.”

NS: I wasn’t old enough to see Psycho when it came out. I do know, of course, that Hitchcock specified that nobody be allowed in once the film had started. That made a certain groundswell of public opinion. The film that was closest to The Exorcist when I was that age was Night of the Living Dead, which had a reputation for being gross, scary, and horrifying. The fact that it was shown at midnight to a bunch of kids who were probably high made additional impressions on people. A black and white film with blurry pictures from an indie source in Pittsburgh was not the same thing as a beautifully photographed color film from Warner Brothers. Incidentally, John Russo, who co-wrote Night of the Living Dead, wrote the forward to The Exorcist Legacy.

TG: What was your introduction to William Friedkin’s work? Had you seen any of his previous films?

NS: I had seen The Birthday Party. It was on a sneak preview where Walter Reade’s Continental Releasing was trying to get a booking for it, and I saw it in Boston. That wasn’t the film that I was there to see. The Birthday Party was just stunning. Robert Shaw, Patrick Magee, I mean, just a beautifully contained job. I’d also seen The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and thought it was lovely, but I didn’t really realize it was a William Friedkin film. I had missed Good Times with Sonny and Cher, which I’ve seen since then. Then of course, The French Connection came out. I was late seeing The Boys in the Band because I was in school at the time when it played in theaters. I caught it later. The French Connection naturally was the one that galvanized everybody. In fact, at the theater that showed it in Boston, which is where I was working at the time, people would come in early when they knew that the car chase was going to start, and they’d see the chase and stay through to watch the film all through again so they could get in and see the chase twice. We had to clear the theater. It was remarkable with that on a huge screen. The vertigo was just phenomenal. It was just a staggering effect because I don’t think anybody had ever mounted a camera on the bumper of a car before Billy did it.

TG: That’s what blows me away about his cinema. He did things that we had never seen before.

NS: Yes, including racing through the streets of New York without permits. Randy Jurgensen will tell you one thing. Sonny Grosso would tell another. Billy Friedkin would tell you something else. There’s no agreement. From what I understand, and I trust Randy, is that they simply ran the car. They didn’t have any siren on the car to warn people because, as Randy said, if you put a siren on the car, people look at the car and they don’t want people looking at the car. Billy sat in the back, Bill Hickman drove, and they just tore ass through Brooklyn. If anybody stopped them, Randy said he’d just flash his badge saying, “Fellow officer, let us go.” You could do that then. You could get away with it.

TG: So much of what you could get away with, you can’t do now because of small security cameras and the Internet.

NS: Yes. We’re living, as John Milius said, under the booted foot of the lifeguard state.

TG: How did this book about The Exorcist Legacy come about? When did you start thinking about it? Had it been something gestating in your mind for some years? Had you started writing it a long time ago in anticipation of the 50th anniversary?

NS: I could tell you my publicity line, which is that I’ve been possessed by The Exorcist for 50 years, but in fact, I’d acquired a wonderful new agent, Lee Sobel, at the end of 2020. We were thinking what kind of books we could possibly sell. Anniversary books seemed to work well. What film was having a 25th, a 40th, or a 50th anniversary? We figured, well, with a year and a half or two of lead time, that makes it 2023. I said, “The Exorcist is going to be 50.” Bang, he sold it in a matter of days.

TG: Did you approach John Russo specifically to do the forward?

NS: John Russo was approached by my editor, James Abbate, who knows him and has worked with him. He very graciously did the forward to the book.

TG: Yes, John is very nice. I go to horror conventions that they have and most of the cast of my favorite horror films come and speak about them. Night of the Living Dead was one of them. I got to meet John there and talk with him at length about the films and all. I just love the behind-the-scenes stories that you haven’t read and haven’t been published. It gives you a real look into the film, a new appreciation, of the movie, whatever that movie may be.

NS: There are some very good people out there. The great thing about writers is that we tend to help each other. Whenever I need an author’s query or information, it’s always the writers who come through first, like yourself.

TG: As far as The Exorcist Legacy is concerned, who was the first person you spoke to? Did you go straight to Billy?

NS: I didn’t go to Billy at all for The Exorcist Legacy. There was a reason for that, which is that I had all the answers I needed back in 1988 to 1990 when I wrote his biography. In those days, The Exorcist was merely a hit. It wasn’t a classic yet. The stories, I believe, were closer to the source. I also had the good fortune to speak to Ellen Burstyn, whom I adore, and who I believe is our finest American actress of our generation.

TG: I agree, she’s phenomenal.

NS: She’s amazing. I had spoken to William Peter Blatty at great length. We’d been friends and kept in touch over the years. A lot of his material in the book is material that I could not publish while he was alive. He was very frank about his relationship with film studios. As he hand-wrote on the side of a transcript that I sent him for approval, as you do, he said, “Nat, don’t print this. I’ve got enough problems.” He was a warm, funny, and wonderful man. I’ve become friends with his oldest son, Mike, since the book came out. In fact, I saw him at a signing the other day. He happened to be in town. I’m very happy to keep up my connection with the Blatty family.

TG: Oh, sure. Whom did you speak to at great length for the book?

NS: I did it two years ago and it was with Terry Donnelly, who was the first assistant director and unit manager. I had worked on a film with Terry years ago. We picked up where we left off and he was able to tell me about the behind-the-scenes facets. I spoke to Craig McKay, who is a film editor. He cut The Silence of the Lambs among other films. He’s very good. He was a kid when he was starting out on The Exorcist, there to pick up pieces. He had some wonderful stories. I did speak to Jeremy Slater, who was the showrunner for the Exorcist television series, and of course, David Gordon Green, who has a new Exorcist film coming out. I had a lot of the material from when I wrote Hurricane Billy (Billy’s biography). I was able to use that. What can I say, covering all these films, two sequels, two prequels, and each of them was recut? It was a lot to write about.

TG: How do you keep track in your head just of all these different versions of these movies? As much as I love films, I really find it so hard to be able to keep track of the director’s cut, or the original cut, and this one runs this number of minutes, etc. I’ve always admired Tim Lucas’s review of movies in Video Watchdog for that reason because it’s encyclopedic, the amount of information that he has on all these films and how he would do all the video comparisons. How did you find doing that? Was that something that came easily to you because you had seen the film so many times in different versions?

NS: Tim Lucas is one of the people in the book, as is Mark Kermode. We’ve known each other for so many years that we don’t even think about it. With the different versions of The Exorcist, which I’m not very happy with, I guess, three of them, or maybe four, depending on if you count one of them twice, I think the original is the best version, except for a couple of scenes that are put in “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” so it’s very hard. I would like to do my own fan edit, but I think I’ve watched The Exorcist enough by now.

TG: Was there anybody you wanted to interview for this book whom you weren’t able to interview because they either passed away or you were unable to contact?

NS: Linda Blair.

TG: What was the first Billy Friedkin film that you were on the set of?

NS: The Brink’s Job in the summer of 1978. I was there for Evening Magazine, which was the version of PM Magazine that was run on the stations that were owned by Westinghouse.

TG: Oh, I remember PM Magazine. That’s where I first saw Matt Lauer.

NS: Billy allowed our cameras on the set, which is funny because he just kicked the publicity cameras for Paramount and Universal off the set, and he let us on. We had wonderful footage of Peter Falk and the cast. Dean Tavoularis had done a reconstruction of the Brink’s system as it was in 1951 when the robbery took place. It was a magnificent set. There was an incident where some local tough guys broke into the editing offices, took footage, and wanted to hold it for ransom to shake down the production. As it happened, I had the only footage of Brink’s and I was with a TV station, but I couldn’t get my TV station to run their own footage because we had shot non-union. That was Westinghouse. That’s why they’re not around anymore. Westinghouse was the Pazuzu of television. I was also on the set of one of Billy’s films in Montreal when I was writing the book (the 1988 TV-movie C.A.T. Squad: Python Wolf). You don’t learn a whole lot on a set. William Goldman is right. The most exciting day of your life is your first day on a movie set, and the most boring day of your life is your second day on a movie set.

TG: I’ve seen a handful of films being shot. It’s fairly boring, I must say.

NS: I will correct you on one thing. Billy Friedkin didn’t allow chairs on his sets. You stand around.

TG: Christopher Nolan is like that. He doesn’t allow them either.

NS: He’s right! James Cameron has a nail gun (like in No Country for Old Men), and if anybody’s cell phone rings, he nails it to a prop.

TG: Holy Jeez! Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you wanted to say about the book?

NS: The book goes into not just the original Exorcist, but the sequels and prequels. That’s something that people don’t consider because nobody ever intended The Exorcist to be a franchise. It became a franchise when Morgan Creek bought the rights from Bill Blatty, and they are now trying to revive it, of course, with the October release of The Exorcist: Believer.

TG: Have you seen that?

NS: No, I haven’t seen it yet. I’m looking forward to it. I do know that I really like David Gordon Green, who was very kind to me. He probably shouldn’t have been talking about the film. He did because I had a year and a half lead time for the book, and it’s in there. I was disappointed in the prequel, both Dominion, which was Paul Schrader’s version, and Exorcist: The Beginning, which was Renny Harlin’s. Although I think there’s a lot in Paul Schrader’s version, I’ve been saying the difference between them is that Paul Schrader made a film where Renny Harlan made a movie. I think that both films had trouble because people expect an exorcism Exorcist movie and what they got was CGI. That’s not the same thing. CGI is not the real thing. That’s what distinguishes The Exorcist; what made The Exorcist work was that it was real. The things that happened in front of the camera actually happened. Linda Blair really floated, the bed really shook, doors really cracked, things really fell over. Curtains really blew on closed windows. They didn’t happen because anybody was possessed. They happened because Dick Smith created brilliant makeup and Marcel Vercoutere had incredibly complicated mechanical effects, but they all happened in front of the camera so that it looked real. That’s the documentary nature of Billy’s filmmaking and why he believes in reality. That, I believe, will be his ultimate legacy on film, which is that he made the movies look real. Of course, now most of the movies look like fantasy. We’ve lost that.

TG: Yes. Steven Spielberg would agree with that statement. He likes to see everything real in front of the camera. He does realize that in today’s day and age, you do have to use computer graphics, and that’s really came to fruition with Jurassic Park. Before that, he wondered how they were going to make the dinosaurs run.

NS: It’s true. He tried stop motion, but he didn’t want to make Jurassic Park until he could do it right. Not everybody has that. They’ll say, “Well, the audience won’t know.” No, no, they know. The audience doesn’t know what’s called the uncanny valley, but it is the uncanny valley.

TG: I want to thank you very, very much for taking the time to speak with me about the book.

NS: Thank you so much. I do want to say something about Billy who, as you know, died just twenty-two days shy of his 88th birthday. He was a friend for fifty years and an inspiration, not just for his films, but for his personality: he didn’t cotton to bullshit which, of course, is the coin of the realm in Hollywood. Billy was a very brave man because I can’t think of many other directors, except maybe Brian De Palma, who let somebody write a book about them while they were still working. He did that for me and launched my career as a writer. I love him and I miss him. And thank you, Todd and Cinema Retro, for giving me the chance to say that on the record.

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By Todd Garbarini

“Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…”

These four words…sorry, this single word spoken four times…by the inimitable Ben Stein in the late John Hughes’s highly popular teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off while reading off the attendance roster to his near catatonic high school class has worked its way into the American lexicon to the point that it has become recognizable to anyone even remotely familiar with the film. Like its predecessors, the “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” ad-lib from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), and Jack Nicholson’s quirky yet somehow terrifying “Here’s Johnny!” from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), one need not have seen the film to know from where it originated. The adults in this film are all depicted as somehow less smart than their adolescent counterparts and all seem to be easily duped and manipulated. Why are they depicted this way? Was the director, who was also the writer of Mr. Mom (1983), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986), simply not a fan of the adult world, a modern-day J.D. Salinger?

Ferris Bueller, the titular hero, is a Northbrook, Illinois high school student two months shy of his high school graduation and commits a crime that all students have at one time or another – he feigns serious illness to stay home from school. However, it is not for nefarious purposes: he wants to get his best friend, Cameron (Alan Ruck), out of the doldrums. His parents are complete dolts for believing him, though his sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) and Principal Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) both see right through this common ploy and the latter, whose small-mindedness and lack of stature outside of his role of an authoritarian, drives him to catch Ferris in the act at any cost. He goes to great lengths to catch Bueller, breaking the rules, and even some laws, that find him in the Bueller household, face-to-face with a vicious dog.

Playing hooky for the day with a reluctant Cameron and Ferris’s girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) whom he gets out of school posing as her father in a get-up not dissimilar from the accoutrements he would later don as the titular Inspector Gadget he would play in the 1999 film of the same name. The trio finds themselves in a series of misadventures throughout Chicago via Cameron’s upscale father’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder which occupies much of the film’s running time, the most significant of which is the film’s famous and highly celebrated moment when Ferris commandeers a float during a parade and leads the onlookers through an impromptu lip-synch of The Beatles hit “Twist and Shout.” It is not all fun and games, however, when we learn of Cameron’s contempt for his father’s car which the latter supposedly cares more about than his own son. He sublimates his anger in a highly volatile and emotional scene that proves cathartic for Cameron and, in a way, for Ferris as well. It would explain why Cameron is always uptight and unable to relax, something that the carefree Ferris hopes to change. In many ways, Cameron and Jeanie are not dissimilar from one another, as they both find teen life to be insufferable, and that makes them the most realistic characters in the film.

Ferris is unusual in that he is not only a free spirit, but just about everyone in his high school, regardless of their grade level, likes him. Why? He has proven that he can get away with just about anything. He’s also willing to help others out of their predicaments. This mindset is what makes him elusive from Principal Rooney, a self-appointed Truancy Officer determined to catch Ferris in the act of cutting school because Rooney’s identity outside of high school appears to be non-existent. He is the Coyote to Bueller’s Road Runner, and he takes the whole situation personally.

The film, which opened nationwide on Wednesday, June 11, 1986, differs from most comedies in that it breaks the fourth wall in the tradition of Woody Allen’s great Annie Hall (1977) when Ferris addresses the audience directly during much of the action. In the pantheon of teen comedies, Ferris Bueller is clearly de rigueur viewing and, given that it was lensed between September and November in 1985, feels very Eighties and inspired by Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman computer geek from John Badham’s entertaining 1983 film WarGames with Ferris’s ability to remotely change his sick days in the high school computer right before his principal’s very eyes. Ferris rigs his room and front door intercom with an ingenious array of general solutions anticipating most common eventualities that could undo his plan to keep his parents thinking that he is sleeping off illness.

Ferris Bueller did exceptionally well at the box office, easily becoming an iconic Eighties Comedy, the film that essentially made Mr. Broderick a star following his screen debut in Herbert Ross’s Max Dugan Returns several years earlier and playing opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke (1985). Cameos abound by a fifteen-year-old Kristy Swanson just before she became Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, Richard Edson, Charlie Sheen just before he made Platoon with Oliver Stone, and comedian Louie Anderson. With the exception of some on-set studio shots in Los Angeles and Ferris Bueller’s house location in Long Beach, CA (eight houses away from the home that Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko is set in), the film is shot nearly entirely in Illinois, the director’s home state.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has been released on 4K UHD Blu-ray by Paramount Home Video. This is the best that the film has ever looked on video, easily besting all previous releases. It also comes loaded with previously released extras:

There is a feature-length audio commentary by director Hughes, the only one that he ever recorded for his any of his films, ported over from the 1999 DVD release. Glaringly missing from subsequent DVD and Blu-ray editions of the movie (reportedly at the behest of the director who probably got tired of Hollywood and moved back to his home state to keep a low profile), its inclusion here is welcome, appreciated, and more than likely included for two reasons - a response to the director’s untimely demise and to compel die-hard fans to fork over their disposable income for this latest upgraded edition. It is pretty much scene-specific with very minor tangents. It stays on-topic, and Mr. Hughes had a very monotone and droll delivery.

The following are all ported over from the 2006 special edition DVD “Bueller…Bueller” and 2009 Blu-ray editions:

Getting the Class Together: The Cast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off – this piece runs 27:45 in standard definition and the interviews were shot in 2005. The film’s casting directors, Jane Jenkins and Janet Hirshenson, begin this piece feeling that Matthew Broderick or John Cusack would be great in the lead role. Mr. Broderick was in Biloxi Blues on Broadway with Alan Ruck when he was offered the role and their chemistry transferred over from real life to the stage, and then to the audition when the latter was offered Cameron. Mia Sara, Jennifer Grey, Lyman Ward, Cindy Pickett, Jeffrey Jones, Edie McClurg, Ben Stein (a very humorous tidbit), Richard Edson, Kristy Swanson, and Jonathan Schmock all add their two cents on their experiences.

The Making of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off runs 15:29 and really should be much longer and for what it is, it includes some footage shot during the filming in addition to recent interviews taking a look back at the film, such as Jeffrey Jones and Edie McClurg and their “Help, Hinder” game; Alan Ruck talks about the Ferrari and how three replicas were made for the film; Matthew Broderick talks about the parade sequence and how it was a one-shot deal and how knee surgery from years earlier affected him in the sequence.

Who is Ferris Bueller? runs 9:12 and collects cast members and their responses to the question from 1985-87 and 2005. Alan Ruck talks about the wardrobe fittings and how there was no chemistry between the characters and being put at ease by the director. Ferris is a guy who does whatever he wants and has the self-confidence that his friends lack.

The World According to Ben Stein runs 10:50 and is comprised of comments from Mr. Stein in 1986 and 2005 talking about his experiences following the success of the film, with funny tidbits about Kurt Cobain and even President Bush (the first one) having seen the film on Air Force One.

Vintage Ferris Bueller: The Lost Tapes runs 10:16 and provides outtakes from the expurgated restaurant scene of Cameron ordering pancreas that the director refers to in his commentary.

There was a Class Album gallery that appeared in the previous releases, but it is inexplicably dropped from this release.

The film’s original theatrical trailer is also missing for unknown reasons, though you can see it here and a later trailer to promote the Blu-ray at the time.

The ending of the film recalls Paul Brickman’s Risky Business from 1983 (think of Tom Cruise landing on his parents’ couch when they walk in from their trip) when Ferris makes it home just in time to get into bed as his parents head into his room. Ferris, addressing the audience, says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” This line, which is far more upbeat than the plaintive final sentences of J.D. Salinger’s classic novel of adolescent angst The Catcher in the Rye (1951), rings true for people more today than it did when it was filmed. Social media, computers, and cell phones all conspire to divert our attention from the meaningful things in life.

One can only imagine what sort of mischief Ferris would create today with the World Wide Web and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Perhaps a remake is in order?

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“The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear” by Nat Segaloff (Kensington Publishing, $28) 304 pages, Illustrated (B&W), Hardback, ISBN: 978-0-8065-4194-5

By Todd Garbarini

As long as there are films and film criticism, one of the most debated aspects of recent memory is whether or not film director William Friedkin’s 1973 masterwork The Exorcist is a horror film or not. The very question could perplex average readers who might feel that that the inquiry itself is completely ludicrous and make one ponder how the image of a young girl vomiting pea soup from her bed or the face of a white-faced demon flashing manically before our eyes could be considered anything but horror. Despite this, neither did the novel’s author William Peter Blatty, nor the film’s director set out to make a horror film at all. Instead, The Exorcist, largely considered by many to be one of the most (if not the most) terrifying films ever made, was fashioned to be a serious study about the mystery of faith.

Coming upon the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release – yes, you read that right – a new book entitled The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear is now available and places the story about the phenomenon of the novel, the controversial film and their inevitable sequels and prequels, definitively and squarely in our laps. Penned by longtime Friedkin champion and prolific author of many other film books Nat Segaloff, who wrote the excellent Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin (1990), The Exorcist Legacy is an absolute must-read for adherents of the novel and film. With a foreword by horror film writer John Russo of Night of the Living Dead fame, author Segaloff takes us back to the beginning on how a 1966 meeting between Friedkin and director Blake Edwards – and the former’s vituperative assessment of a Peter Gunn screenplay – led to an introduction to and lifelong friendship between Friedkin and Blatty; Warner Brothers and their initial reluctance to hire Friedkin until the release of his brilliant The French Connection in 1971 garnered sudden critical and financial success and changed the game completely; the original 1949 real-life case of an ostensibly possessed Maryland boy; Blatty’s writing of the novel; the making of the film; a multitude of issues that beset the film’s production giving way to the supposed “curse” on the set; the controversy surrounding the release of the film; in-depth looks at the much-maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and the superior The Exorcist III (1990), the latter both written and directed by Blatty; and the prequels and television series.

Segaloff, who was Publicity Director for the Sack Theater chain in Boston, provides personal insights into the marketing challenges pertaining to the film, as he worked with Friedkin and Warner Brothers to open the film at the showplace Cinema 57, one of only 22 theatres that initially played the movie nationwide. Writing in a very down-to-earth style with new interviews and meticulously researched details, The Exorcist Legacy is simultaneously entertaining and informative and is the new go-to reference book for all things related to the phenomenon with a fresh look from real life to reel life.

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By Todd Garbarini

Anyone going into Dutch film director Rene Daalder’s 1976 film Massacre at Central High might very well be expecting an all-out slasher film. While the poster art might give this impression, audiences will be sorely disappointed as it is essentially a variant of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Indians but with a much different tone. The opening credits and the strains of an inappropriate and perfunctory title song Crossroads (which is better suited to a made-for-television movie of the period) demanded by producer Harold Sobel to the consternation of the director immediately sends the wrong message to the viewer. Much of what has been written about the film over the years demonstrates the consensus that Massacre, the title of which appears to want to capitalize on the Tobe Hooper horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from two years earlier, is a political allegory, and one can certainly analyze the film from that perspective, though it is doubtful that audiences at the time, especially those seeing the film at a drive-in of all places, looked so deeply into a film that on the surface looks to be a story about simple revenge.

Set inside the battleground of Central High School in Southern California, David (Derrel Maury) is the new student and therefore automatically becomes a mark. He is no stud, but certainly not a pushover either. Mark (Andrew Stevens from Brian DePalma’s The Fury from 1977) is an old friend who owes David a favor from his past, one that we are not privy to, and appears to be willing to do whatever it takes to make David feel welcome. The ground rules for making it through Central High are simple: you’re either a somebody or you’re a nobody, to quote American Gangster’s Frank Lucas. Mark’s clique includes Bruce (the late Ray Underwood from Brice Mack’s Jennifer from 1978, another film about high school revenge), Craig (Steve Bond from Joel Bender’s Gas Pump Girls from 1979), and Paul (the late Damon Douglas of John D. Hancock’s Baby Blue Marine, also from 1976). These three bullies, for lack of a better word, essentially rule Central High which is presented as a seemingly insular world of jocks, jerks, and losers. For the first hour and a quarter of the film, adults are only spoken of and never seen onscreen. It is worth noting that Mark walks a tightrope in this film – his allegiance to David makes him hesitant to be included completely with this terrible triumvirate who harass pretty much anyone they want without fear of reprisal.

David is subjected to seeing other students mercilessly harassed by the bullies, especially Mary (the late Cheryl Lynn “Rainbeaux” Smith) and Jane (the late Lani O’Grady) who are practically raped in a despicable sequence. David comes to their rescue and beats up their harassers, only to be partially crushed under his car by the group in an “accident” soon afterwards. Enraged, David single-handedly kills all three bullies in a fantasy right out of today’s high school killer headlines by sabotaging one’s hang-glider, one’s Dodge Tradesman 300’s brakes, and exploiting an empty swimming pool in a sequence almost too ridiculous to believe.

This scenario creates an interesting situation at the school as the once oppressed and harassed “losers” see the existence of a power vacuum and seize it, becoming bullies themselves and embodying everything they hated about their tormentors, Apparently, David is also well-versed in the art of bomb-making! What a coincidence. There is no mention of how he developed these skills (The Anarchist’s Cookbook, perhaps?), but he manages to come up with some fairly ornate methods of blowing away the new bullies, and they all go off without a hitch: (spoiler alerts!) one is blow away while at his locker; another is blown to Kingdom Come a la Sam Rothstein at the start of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) but, unfortunately, no St. Matthew Passion for this guy; and last but not least Mary, Jane and their friend (Robert Carradine) are crushed by a rock in the middle of a threesome while in a tent (it comes out that police believe that they were involved in the killings – how convenient). I suppose this sequence gives new meaning to the term “die hard.”

Despite all this mayhem, the school still moves ahead with a dance(!), and now the adults and police show up. David gets the idea to blow up the school – until Mark and his girlfriend Theresa (Kimberly Beck of television series fame), whom David fancies, tell him they are going to the dance. When he gets wind of this, David retrieves the bomb from the boiler room and, straight out of a James Bond film, makes it to the front lawn to save the day, but not without paying a price for his actions.

There seems to be a need to prop the film up in a bright light and look at it for evidence of it being a highly political film that is making a commentary on society and the members who dwell in it. I am unsure if that was the real motivation behind the film, however if one chooses to view it that way, the film is an interesting social commentary on what creates a bully or an oppressor, and how the oppressed end up taking over the positions of the long-gone bullies. The script is schematic, and the film is not particularly well-acted, but to be fair the director and crew had a 20-day shooting schedule on a modest $400,000 budget, so he certainly had his work cut out for him. The fight scenes suffer from performer restraint and the bullies are so annoying that the audience can only hope for a miserable end for all of them but when they come, the releases are more of a whimper than an all-out rise out of the seats that one would experience at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) when the shark is finally killed.

Synapse Films released a steelbook edition of this film in November 2020 and now it is available in a Standard Edition from the same company. The following extras are included:

The Projection Booth Podcast Interviews with Cast Members (87:00) – this is an audio playback that needs to be selected on the audio menu to access it and it can be listened to through the entire length of the film. This is a great listen as I was initially disappointed to see the absence of a commentary, but this is the next best thing. It is hosted by Mike White who speaks to Derrel Maury, Andrew Stevens, Robert Carradine, and Rex Sikes over the phone.

Audio Interview with Director Renee Daalder (25:00) – likewise, this is an audio playback that needs to be selected on the audio menu to access it and it can be listened to through the first 25 minutes of the film, after which the film audio resumes. It is an audio interview with the director conducted by writer Michael Gingold and it is a wonderful record of their discussion as Mr. Daalder sadly passed away in 2019.

Hell in the Hallways (42:27) – this is a really nice look back at the making of the film, shot in high definition, with Derrel Maury, Tom Logan, Rex Sikes, Robert Carradine, Andrew Stevens, and Jeffrey Winner, in addition to some behind-the-scenes crew members who discuss how much fun and also how challenging it was to make. Tragically, Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith and Lani O’Grady both died way before their time. I recall seeing Lemora, A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) on October 24, 2002, as part of a “scary movies” retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, and wishing that I could interview Ms. Smith about her starring role in the film. Unbelievably, she passed away the very next day at age 47. Ms. Smith was 21 when she appeared in Massacre and is heartbreakingly beautiful, completely naked in her death scene that arrives 70 minutes into the film. She was a free spirit and appeared in some of the most interesting films of the 1970s and her presence brought something special to those films. Along with Candace Rialson, another performer from the 1970s who sadly died way before her time, they are two of my favorite actresses from this era.

Original Theatrical Trailer (2:23) – this is in full-blown high definition and looks culled from the new master. The same cannot be said for the TV Spot (00:33), however, which is framed 1.33:1 and looks its age, beat up and contrasty. There is also a great-sounding Radio Spot (00:27) as well as a nice Still Gallery (3:14).

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By Todd Garbarini

Film writer, producer and director Alessandro Michael de Gaetano, best known for the creepy 1977 horror film Haunted, passed away on Sunday evening, June 11, 2023, in Arizona at the age of 85 while surrounded by his family.

Bursting on to the scene with UFO Target Earth in 1974, with a style clearly inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), it’s a documentary format-film wherein interviewees discuss their “experiences” with UFO’s. An early entry in the history of computer-generated imagery (CGI) following Michael Crichton’s Westworld the year before, UFO Target Earth showcases the first time that CGI, albeit 8-bit, was used to create an alien for a motion picture, an accomplishment that Mr. de Gaetano was very proud of. The film also makes expert use of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “De Natura Sonoris No. 2” years before Stanley Kubrick employed it in The Shining (1980). UFO Target Earth is a nifty bit of Seventies nostalgia complete with rotary phones, telecommunications mechanical relay-switching equipment, AMPEX reel-to-reel recorders, and mainframe computers, all of which are arguably unidentifiable objects to members of Generation Z.

His second film was Haunted, which starred Virginia Mayo and Aldo Ray. It concerned the descendants of a woman’s accusers of her being a witch meeting a violent end after rumors abounded of her returning as an evil spirit. The comedy Scoring, featuring Laurene Landon about a female basketball team against a men’s team, was released in 1979. 1989’s Bloodbath in Psycho Town, 1995’s Project: Metalbeast, and 1996’s Butch Camp with Judy Tenuta followed.

At the time of his death, Mr. de Gaetano was developing a script for actress Vanessa Redgrave to star in called Red Gold.

CinemaRetro.com would like to extend to Mr. de Gaetano’s family our condolences upon his passing.

By Todd Garbarini

In honor of Al Pacino’s 83^rd birthday this past April, Cinema Retro looks at the new double-disc Kino Lorber 4K Ultra High Definition and standard Blu-ray release of Sidney Lumet’s 1973 police drama Serpico, a film that is based upon the real-life exploits of retired New York Police Detective Frank Serpico. Serpico is an early entry in Mr. Pacino’s film roles and also one of his most riveting. He got his start in feature films by playing a potential suitor to Patty Duke at a party in Fred Coe’s Me, Natalie (1969) and then played the lead opposite Kitty Winn in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971), a cautionary tale of heroin addicts in New York City. Following his transformation from a discharged military soldier into cold-blooded family head Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), he reteamed with Mr. Schatzberg for the heartbreaking Scarecrow (1973) -opposite Gene Hackman- as Lionel Delbuchi, a man who attempts to right past wrongs with his ex-wife. In Serpico, Mr. Pacino’s fifth film, he teams with veteran director Sidney Lumet to portray the real-life police detective who not only uncovers corruption in the ranks but takes the department to task for accountability and change.

Serpico begins at the end and is told in flashback leading right up to the start of the film when our hero is shot in the face by a small caliber pistol. Mr. Pacino gives a powerful and deeply nuanced performance of a man who knows right from wrong but feels trapped withing the workings of the police department and needs to proceed cautiously. As Serpico is rushed to the hospital and is met by Police Chief Sidney Green (John Randolph), the full weight of all he has been through shows on his face, his circumstance taking him back, in flashback, to his graduation from the police academy. In his early days, Serpico is an idealistic and happy young man who eschews donning the police department’s standard-issue plainclothes accoutrements in favor of dressing like a civilian to improve the relationship between police and the community. A burglary attempt nearly proves fatal when responding officers open fire on him in his unrecognizable getup. He meets and courts Leslie (Cornelia Sharpe), a ballerina, and her acquaintances back away when they learn of his profession. Their romance suffers, as does his superior’s (James Tolkan) perception of him.

Serpico comes face to face with police corruption and initially treads lightly as officers he works with take money from criminals to look the other way. From their behavior, it is just another day at the office. When he attempts to report this to his superiors, he is laughed off. Future busts with other officers results in him being offered his “take” which he refuses to the shock and dismay of his peers, especially Tom Keough (Jack Kehoe) who wants the gravy train to continue and does his best to ingratiate himself and warns Serpico to comply and not to go against the others. He begins to wonder who is worse: the rapists and robbers or his fellow officers?

Serpico entrusts the aid of an associate, Blair (Tony Roberts), who knows the right people. They go straight to the mayor’s office, but the initial meeting leads to more disappointment as the case is tabled, making life miserable for both Serpico and his new girlfriend who loves him and desperately wants children with him, but she eventually terminates their relationship. He then takes on a mobster, an unrecognizable Richard Foronjy who would appear opposite Mr. Pacino in Brian DePalma’s Carlito’s Way twenty years later in another elliptical narrative wherein the lead is shot and the story is told through flashback. The arrest and confrontation is Mr. Pacino at his most explosive in the film, his fury directed at both the mobster but more at his fellow officers who joke around with this man who was previously jailed for killing another police officer. Things take a dangerous turn when he goes outside of the department to report the corruption and brings his findings to the New York Times. Serpico finds himself transferred to a terrible neighborhood busting drug addicts, leading him to the near fatal shot to the face, after which he testifies before the Knapp Commission regarding the corruption.

Serpico opened in New York City on Wednesday, December 5, 1973, almost three years shy of the actual murder attempt in Williamsburg. It was Mr. Pacino’s first time working with producer Martin Bregman and he would collaborate over the next twenty years on Sidney Lumet’s Dog Dag Afternoon (1975), Brian DePalma’s Scarface (1983), Harold Becker’s Sea of Love (1989), and Brian DePalma’s aforementioned Carlito’s Way (1993). Serpico’s mother is played by actress Mildred Clinton. I have only seen her in one other film, Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) wherein she played Mrs. Tredoni. She is deeply affecting in her small but significant role. The remaining cast is a smorgasbord of players you will recognize from the terrific roster of New York character actors that includes Tracey Walter, Tom Signorelli, Kenneth McMillian, Tony LoBianco, Judd Hirsch, Sam Coppola, Sully Boyar, F. Murray Abraham, M. Emmet Walsh, and Sal Corollo. Cornelia Sharpe, who was producer Bregman’s girlfriend at the time (later his wife), is given less screen time than she deserves. She went on to play the role of Nancy Stillman in Peter Collinson’s 1974 film Open Season, a bizarre film that has never seen the light of day on home video in the United States (but is finally available to download on Vudu) reportedly because producer Bregman wanted it keep out of circulation, but that’s another story.

Serpico is an example of the great New York 1970s filmmaking style that I miss so much, and the film is an authentic product of its time. There is no way to fake 1970’s New York convincingly today. There are too many details to capture, although HBO’s The Deuce did an admirable job of it.

The new Kino Lorber release of the film contains the following extras:

Disc One: 4k Ultra High Definition (UHD)

The first disc is a triple-layered pressing of the film in 4K UHD with the film image scanned from the original camera negative and color-corrected.

Exclusive to this release is an audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson. This is an extremely informative and entertaining piece, including a discussion of great New York filmmakers (think Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Sidney Lumet). John G. Avildsen, who would go on to direct Rocky for United Artists and win the Best Director Oscar, was the original director, and he did not see eye-to-eye with producer Martin Bregman and Dino De Laurentiis, leading to his dismissal. The film was edited by the late great Dede Allen, who would also work with Mr. Lumet on Dog Day Afternoon (1975, one of her greatest accomplishments) and The Wiz (1979). Filmed on a low budget, scheduling was challenging as Paramount also needed Mr. Pacino to return for The Godfather Part II.

Disc Two: Standard Blu-ray

In addition to the new transfer and running audio commentary, there are the following extras:

Sidney Lumet: Cineaste New York – this piece runs 30:24 and is ported over from the special edition Studio Canal standard Blu-ray release from 2010. Mr. Lumet, in a 2005 interview, talks about his time growing up in New York City during the Depression; the changing nature of what the city has to offer; how safe the city was at the time of the interview; how he uses very little violence in his films; shooting on location in the city, and how his characters relate to their environment.

Looking for Al Pacino – this piece runs 30:38 and is also ported over from the special edition Studio Canal Blu-ray. It includes onscreen interviews with directors Jerry Schatzberg, Michael Radford, and Jack Garfein, who all speak very highly of Mr. Pacino and his method of acting.

Serpico Reel to Reel – this piece runs 09:58 and is ported over from the Paramount DVD from 2002 and includes onscreen interviews with Martin Bregman and Sidney Lumet and how the film came together once they were all onboard.

Inside Serpico – this piece runs 12:55 and is also ported over from the Paramount DVD and focuses on the astonishing way that the film was made. It began shooting in July 1973, was shot in reverse continuity, edited during principal photography, and premiered five months later. Absolutely unreal for a film of this caliber.

Serpico: Favorite Moments – this piece runs 2:37 and is also ported over from the Paramount DVD. Mr. Bregman talks about his favorite scene, which comes near the film’s end when Serpico refuses his gold shield. Mr. Lumet’s favorite scene is at the Hell’s Gate Bridge when Serpico unleashes on his superior about going to outside investigative agencies.

Photo Gallery with Commentary by Director Sidney Lumet (4:24) is also from the Paramount DVD. It focuses on Mr. Lumet’s desire to have no music in the film, something that Mr. De Laurentiis completely disagreed with. Mikis Theodorakis was then contracted to write a theme for the film that appears sporadically throughout the film but is never overpowering.

The following trailers are also included: Serpico, Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974), John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Richard T. Heffron’s Newman’s Law (1974), Peter Hyams’s Busting (1974), Stuart Rosenberg’s The Laughing Policeman (1973), Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957), Sidney Lumet’s The Group (1966), and Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us (1992).

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By Todd Garbarini

An old saying is that drama is easy, but comedy is hard. When comedy works, it is nothing short of a miracle. When it fails, it is a thundering disappointment. On New Year’s Eve in 1976, I attended a party at my mother’s aunt’s house. While the adults were ringing in the New Year in the small and cramped basement, I was on the first floor watching a television airing of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It was the first time I had ever heard of and seen this madcap, star-studded extravaganza that pits a Who’s Who of top-notch comedians in a quest to locate a suitcase containing $350,000.00, the equivalent of roughly $3.5 million dollars today. To say that I loved it would have been an understatement. To make a film on that scale with that number of people and actually make it hilarious is other worldly. I immediately became a fan of most of the cast, particularly Jonathan Winters in his role as Pike, the driver of the moving van who must get to Yuma, AZ and will stop at nothing to get his hands on $350,000.00 located under a “big ‘W’”.

James Frawley’s The Big Bus is a comedy that took its maiden voyage theatrically on Wednesday, June 23, 1976, nationwide. As a send-up of disaster films that made their rounds at the box office during the 1970s, it is a film similarly pitting an all-star cast in an inane situation that should be laugh out loud hilarious but falls a bit short in this department. The premise concerns a nuclear-powered bus designed to be driven from New York to Denver in record time while an iron lung-encased oil magnate (Jose Ferrer), in cahoots with a group of oil sheikhs, plot to sabotage the bus to protect their financial interests. They manage to take both the driver and co-driver out of commission with a bomb, necessitating their replacements with Dan Torrance (Joseph Bologna), a vilified former bus driver who crashed a previous bus and was accused of eating all the passengers to survive, and his narcoleptic co-driver “Shoulders” (John Beck), so named as he cannot keep the bus off the highway shoulder and in his own lane. Along for the ride are Kitty Baxter (Stockard Channing) as Dan’s former flame; Ned Beatty as one of the remote radio navigators; Ruth Gordon as a passenger who tells it like she sees it; Sally Kellerman and Richard Mulligan as a couple about to be divorced who cannot seem to keep their hands off each other (the bit is initially humorous but wears out its welcome); Lynn Redgrave as a staid fashion designer; a crazed Bob Dishy as a veterinarian; Richard B. Shull as a man whose time on planet Earth is coming to a close, and so on. The bus is even outfitted with an onboard swimming pool, if you can believe that such a thing would fit. For those of you unlucky enough to recall, in February 1979 NBC-TV launched an ill-fated television series as their answer to ABC-TV’s The Love Boat. Titled Supertrain, the most expensive television series ever produced up to that time, it was (surprise!) a nuclear-powered transcontinental New York to Los Angeles souped up ride that housed a swimming pool, a movie theater, a disco(!), and a cast of characters so bland one wonders how this train ever left the station. The pilot episode, directed by Dan Curtis, was an interminable two hours, with a catchy theme that I dug at the age of ten and was composed by Robert Cobert. Both shows were conceived of by Fred Silverman at different points in his career.

Bus made its television network premiere on Saturday, May 24, 1980 at the unorthodox time of 09:30 pm. The film runs 88 minutes, and while being placed in a 90-minute time slot, a good amount of footage must have been excised to accommodate commercials. Bus may have played out much funnier at the time of its release as a fair number of jokes are topical, though the 2001 theme accompanying the rollout of the titular vehicle is still very much in the minds of filmgoers decades later. The gags are amusing but are light-years away from what it could (and should) have been. An admirable attempt at humor, Bus cannot hold a candle to the absurdist wrongdoings of the stewardesses and passengers of 1980’s Airplane! Apparently, the Zucker Brothers, the brains behind Airplane!, worked on Bus as well. Bus can be viewed as the appetizer, with Airplane! served up as the main course – and dessert, to boot.

Kino Lorber has released the film on a beautifully transferred Blu-ray. I love this company and they do not disappoint. There is a feature-length commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson which is more fun to listen to than actually watching the film – at least for me. They discuss the location shooting and give short bios of the cast members as they appear onscreen, while also engaging in anecdotes about the big disaster films of the period. It is always a pleasure to listen to them.

The film’s trademark comedic key poster art was illustrated by the late great cartoonist Jack Davis, who also drew the key art for the aforementioned Mad World. It appears on the Blu-ray cardboard sleeve and the Blu-ray cover art in a slightly truncated and altered version to fit the dimensions and still be discernible.

Oscar-winning composer David Shire, who also scored The Taking of Pelham 123 (1973), The Conversation (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976), may seem like an unorthodox choice to score such material, but he makes the most of it with a rambunctious score that made its way to compact disc (remember those?) in 2011 via Film Score Monthly.

Rounding out the Blu-ray are a selection of trailers from the showcased title, John Schlesinger’s Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), Richard Fleischer’s Million Dollar Mystery (1987), Gus Trikonis’s Take This Job and Shove It (1981), Marty Feldman’s In God We Trust (1980), Michael Apted’s Continental Divide (1981), Joel Schumacher’s D.C. Cab (1983), and Neal Israel’s Moving Violations (1985).

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By Todd Garbarini

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining is one of the most written about, most celebrated, most loved, most hated, and most misunderstood motion pictures in the history of the medium. Its hypnotic effect is undeniable, and countless books and articles have been written in many languages about its purported hidden meanings and the on-set difficulties that were encountered by the cast and crew on the nearly year-long shooting schedule. One of the film’s biggest fans, film director Lee Unkrich and caretaker of http://www.theoverlookhotel.com, teamed with the late great author J.W. Rinzler on the ultimate book on the making of the film: a 2,200-page tome from Taschen appropriately entitled Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, now available on the company website, just in time for Jack Nicholson’s 86^th birthday. Cinema Retro recently spoke with Mr. Unkrich about the new book, twelve years in the making, and how it came about.

Todd Garbarini: How did you first hear about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining?

Lee Unkrich: Honestly, I had no awareness of it until my mom took me to see it. I had no knowledge or understanding of who Stanley Kubrick was. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and I may have seen it at the Randall Park Mall. I was 13 and I remember liking it. A few days after I saw the movie, my mom was driving me to summer camp, and we stopped at a gas station. They had a rack of paperback books, and they had the movie tie-in edition of Stephen King’s novel. It had Saul Bass’s yellow and black poster art on the front. I bought it, and I ended up reading it voraciously all summer at camp and beyond. I still have the copy to this day. I think I realized right away that the book was different in a lot of ways than the movie, but for me, it was more of an extension of the film. We got a Betamax at some point, and I had to wait until The Shining came out on video to see it again. I loved both the movie and the book. In the middle of the paperback, there was a collection of black and white film stills from the movie. One of the photos was from a scene that I didn’t remember. It was a shot of Wendy cooking in the kitchen, presumably making the breakfast that she then takes up to Jack who is just waking up. I saw that and I started thinking, wow, if that was a scene that was shot and cut, were there others?

TG: I saw The Shining on ABC-TV in May 1983 and became obsessed with it, too, watching it on home video shortly afterwards. When we went to Florida on vacation in July, I found a used copy of the movie tie-in, and saw the photo of Wendy that you mentioned and wondered what happened to the scene.

LU: Somewhere roughly around the same time, I read that there had been a hospital epilogue that Kubrick had cut out of the film after its limited release. Between those two things, I just started really becoming obsessed with trying to get my hands on a screenplay or any more information about the film. I would say that the idea of trying to track down ostensibly more of the movie that I loved was the beginning of this obsession that built and grew and morphed over the subsequent decades. It was the fact that I couldn’t find anything, frustratingly, because Kubrick held such tight reins over it all. I’d get little tidbits here and there. I found a few crumbs, but it honestly wasn’t until The Stanley Kubrick Archives book by Allison Castle was published by Taschen in 2005 that I had my first glimpse into the fact that there was a lot more material that existed in Kubrick’s own archives. Then subsequently his family established the Kubrick Archive after he passed away. It was when I was on a press tour for Toy Story 3 that I managed to visit the archive for the first time and really got to dive in deep for the first time and get answers to the questions I’d had for decades.

TG: Did The Shining scare you when you saw it?

LU: I don’t think so. It didn’t give me nightmares or anything like that, and I’m an only child. My parents both worked, so I was a latchkey kid. I was home alone a lot. I had a vivid imagination. I liked reading scary things. I liked scaring myself, but then that would extend into bad scaring where I’d be alone and think someone was in the house, or a statue that we had was alive, or all kinds of crazy stuff. My parents fought a lot. They ended up divorcing by the time I was nine, so I knew what it was like to be the child of an unstable marriage. All of that, there were just so many elements to the movie, coupled with its tone and its uncanniness, and how it gets under your skin, that I think it just really wormed its way into me in a way and just never left.

TG: Your new book looks beautiful and vast in scope, covering intimate aspects of the film’s production. It’s a book that could never have been published without the inclusion of the Kubrick family. How involved were they?

LU: They were very involved, and they were amazing. What I had that was the most helpful was Stanley’s daughter, Vivian, who made the documentary on the making of The Shining that has been available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra High Definition. She sat Jack and everyone down for interviews around the time the film was completed and I got my hands on the transcripts and those full interviews, including Jack’s, which is like a two-hour interview. That’s the most helpful because he’d just made the movie. He’s young and he remembers everything. I would have loved to have met Jack, of course. I know fully that the book itself wasn’t harmed in any way because he wasn’t involved. It’s just full of him through and through but very thoroughly. We sent him a few copies of the book that just got to his house within the past few weeks. I’m looking forward to hearing his thoughts about it.

TG: Did you talk to Steven Spielberg about The Shining? I know he said he wasn’t crazy about the film the first time he saw it because he felt that Jack was nuts from the word go.

LU: Yes, we spoke multiple times and he wrote the foreword. Kubrick was mostly interested in Steven because he was fascinated with how Steven had made such a huge blockbuster in Jaws. He was just constantly peppering him with questions about Jaws and the marketing. If Stanley was talking to you, usually it was because you had some information that he wanted, and that was true for Spielberg as well.

TG: Did you speak at length with Leon Vitali (Stanley Kubrick’s personal assistant)?

LU: I did, yes. I spent a lot of time with Leon. He was extremely helpful to me at many junctures throughout the making of the book. I was, of course, devastated when he died suddenly last summer, that he never got to see the finished book because he was really honestly the person I probably wanted to see it the most. He was just a very sweet, kind man. He had a very complicated relationship with Stanley, but it was loving. I just had enormous respect for him and how he just essentially gave his life over in many ways to Stanley. Then even in the decades after Stanley’s death, he did everything he could to fight the fight and make sure that everything was presented and handled in a way that Stanley would’ve wanted. Sitting down with Leon, especially in showing him photos, because I had hundreds that nobody had seen before, many of them I got from the Danny Lloyd family, it would instantly bring up stories that he probably never would’ve summoned or remembered.

TG: I’ve seen the film well over fifty times, and yet I’m still seeing things that I never noticed!

LU: I know! It’s because we’re in this digital age now where people can do frame grabs and overlay them. If you look at the Colorado lounge set throughout that movie, practically every scene, there are major differences from one scene to the next in terms of how the furniture is laid out, where lamps are, for example. It’s because Stanley didn’t care about continuity because he knew nobody would notice. What he did care about were individual compositions. If a lamp in the background was coming out of someone’s shoulder in a weird way, he’d say, “Get the lamp out of there.” He didn’t care.

TG: What did you stumble across that you had absolutely no idea about, that was revelatory to you?

LU: I saw lots of stuff in the Kubrick Archive that made me think, “What the hell is this?” An example of that would be, I found all these outtake frames, most of which are reproduced in the book. These are actual compositions, frames from set-ups, from shots and scenes that Kubrick shot that aren’t in the finished film. A lot of them I could figure out from drafts of the screenplay and shooting scripts, shot logs, all that I could figure out. Like the scrapbook, for instance. It used to play a big part in the movie (as it does in the novel). You can see it on Jack’s desk while he’s typing. No reference is made to it in the finished film, but there were lots of scenes about it. There was a whole scene where he found it. There were scenes of him becoming obsessed with it. There was a scene of him showing it to Wendy. There was a scene of him going back and looking at it again after he saw the old woman in room 237. There was a lot of stuff having to do with that. I saw all those frames, and I was able to figure out what they were. Then there were other things as well. One in particular, where I never found any reference to it anywhere, nor did I speak to anyone who remembered it. That was when Jack is wandering around the hotel with writer’s block where he’s throwing the tennis ball. He ends up in the lobby of the hotel, and he wanders over to the maze model. There’s a model of the hedge maze in the lobby. He looks down at it, and Kubrick cuts to this weird shot that’s almost like the maze in Jack’s mind. It’s like a maze that’s far bigger and more elaborate than the model sitting on the table in front of him. As you know, he slowly zooms in on that, and you see a tiny little Wendy and Danny walking around in the center of the maze. I found some footage of that same oversized maze model that had been completely redressed to be encrusted with snow. Sitting in the middle of it was a tiny frozen Jack. I found both the head and the tail of that shot. It was a slow zoom. I’m presuming it was a slow zoom-out from frozen Jack. I’m guessing that Kubrick had an idea and intended, possibly after the shot of him frozen in the snow, that he would cut to this God’s eye view of the maze and Jack frozen in it, and just slowly zoom out to reveal him just getting lost in this endless labyrinth before then presumably dissolving through to the hospital epilogue. I talked to Les Tomkins, the man who built that maze model, but he had no memory of the snowy version.

TG: How many people did you interview for the book?

LU: Seventy-two. I spoke with Kelvin Pike at his house, and he has the coffee table from room 237 in his living room. When I was over at Jan Harlan’s (Kubrick’s brother-in-law) house, Jan has a guest bedroom in the bathroom. He did a renovation right around the time they finished The Shining, and so the bathtub in his guest bathroom is the bathtub from room 237.

TG: That’s arguably cinema’s most famous (and peculiar) bathroom.

LU: I talked a lot with (assistant editor) Gordon Stainforth who was very helpful to me with the things that he was able to be helpful with, which is Vivian’s documentary and the cutting of music on The Shining, which he ended up doing most of. I met Greg MacGillivray a few times (whose company shot the opening in Montana). He ended up providing a lot of photographs as well for the book. He had a big archive. He went to visit the set twice, and Stanley allowed him to take photos. He had a whole bunch of photos from the second unit shoot, the helicopter stuff at the beginning of the movie. He graciously gave me access to his entire library of mostly slides. Some black and white negatives. It was mostly color slides. Greg is one of two people I spoke to who I really am convinced has a photographic memory. Vivian was very friendly. I spent two whole days with her down in Florida, but she was very selective about what she would talk about. She gave me an amazing artifact, this continuity script that the script supervisor, Joan Randall, had given her at the end of production. I was shocked that she’d entrusted me with it. She popped it in the mail, and it showed up at my office at Pixar. I opened it, and I just about died because it was this amazing working screenplay with notes all over it, and fragments of paper right out of Stanley’s typewriter on the set, taped in, and continuity Polaroids. It was amazing. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, it’s such a shame that no one is going to get to see this in its entirety.” But, as it worked out, as we figured out what this collector’s edition of the book was going to be, I ended up pitching the idea of doing an exact facsimile of this script and Taschen went forward with it after Vivian gave us approval. Everyone who buys this collector’s edition gets this. Other than it not having actual photos taped and glued into it, it’s an exact replica of that screenplay.

TG: Nice! I read that Vivian had shot roughly 45 to 50 hours on the set during principal photography.

LU: That’s exactly what it is. Yes, 50 hours.

TG: She keeps that close to her vest. She’s not releasing it. Did you see any of this footage beyond the widely available 30-minute documentary?

LU: No. There were little clippings, 16-millimeter clippings of it in the archive, all of which I scanned and used as stills in the book. Jan used some bits of it in his film Stanley Kubrick – A Life in Pictures. There are some bits from The Shining that are not in Vivian’s documentary. The family defers to Vivian on that footage because it was her film. Ultimately, I think Warner Brothers probably owns it, but in terms of the relationship with the family and the estate, everyone defers to Vivian, and she just is very adamant about no one ever seeing it.

TG: I know that a lot of viewers probably felt that Stanley really worked over Shelley Duvall on this film.

LU: Exactly, and nothing could be further from the truth. Was it a difficult shoot? Yes. Did Shelley have to summon hysteria and cry on a daily basis sometimes for a big stretch of the last part of the production? Yes. Was she abused? No, I don’t believe she was abused. When I talk about this, I really try not to have my own opinion, even though I do have my own opinion based on everyone I’ve talked to. At the end of the day, I think that the only person who can really speak on the subject is Shelley. I have interviews with Shelley, and I spent a whole day with her. We talked about this, and Shelley remembers Stanley warmly. Shelley is proud of her work on that film. Shelley will say, “Yes, it was difficult. Yes, it was taxing.” It was a taxing role and she knew what she was getting into in terms of what the role demanded, and she took the part. She’s proud of her work.

TG: I am eagerly looking forward to seeing this book. It looks astonishing. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication for making this a reality.

LU: It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining limited edition collector's edition (1,000) is available for purchase from Taschen. Click here.

(Lee Unkrich's credits as film director include Coco, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3 and as co-director of Finding Nemo.)

By Todd Garbarini

Dragonslayer was one of the many films that I looked forward to seeing as part of Hollywood’s roster of movies during the glorious summer of 1981 that was owned by Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. I distinctly remember seeing trailers for Peter Hyams’s Outland, Desmond Davis’s Clash of the Titans, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, and Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery and wanting to see them all, though I was only halfway successful. The 3-D gimmick resurgence from the 1950s kicked off with the R-rated Comin’ at Ya by Ferdinando Baldi and would continue for another few years. In those days, I subscribed to the notion that I had to have the tie-in paperback novelization of the film that I wanted to see. I am reminded of Woody Allen’s Isaac Davis in his 1979 film Manhattan bemoaning novelizations of movies as being another contemporary American phenomenon that is truly moronic. I disagree. Novelizations are often based upon the earliest drafts of a film’s screenplay and can therefore differ enormously from a finished film upon which it is based, making the novelization an interesting companion to a beloved film. I had the novelization of Dragonslayer. I read it forty-two years ago and while I barely remember it, I recall there being differences.

I saw Dragonslayer on Thursday, July 9, 1981 with my father and my best friend at the time. Bruce Springsteen was playing at the then-Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey that night and I recall hearing the disc jockey talking about it on the radio after we saw the film. The film that I saw was an adventurous tale that takes place in the center of England in the Sixth Century A.D. An enormous 400-year-old dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative, is holding the kingdom of Urland in a grip of deadly fear. In continuing efforts to assuage the dragon’s wrath and leave the villagers alone, King Casiodorus (Peter Eyre) holds a lottery twice a year containing the names of young female virgins who are sacrificed to Vermithrax in exchange for peace in Urland. This scenario does not sit well with Urland. An elderly sorcerer, Ulrich of Cragganmore (Sir Ralph Richardson), possesses a magical amulet and is visited by a young man named Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) who implores him for help to destroy the dragon. Tyrian (John Hallam), the Captain of the King’s Royal Guard, challenges and kills Ulrich, placing Ulrich’s apprentice Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol in his first film role) as the one to defeat the dragon. Hesitant, Galen is convinced to make the trek to Urland after Ulrich’s amulet selects him as his successor. During a brief respite, he joins Valerian in the lake while swimming, much to the latter’s consternation who, it turns out in a brief but explicit revelation of very obviously non-male anatomy, is exposed as a female traveling incognito to avoid the lottery. Once in Urland, Galen takes action that causes him to believe that he has sealed off the entrance to the dragon’s lair, however the King believes otherwise and imprisons Galen while confiscating his amulet. Galen has a brief conversation with Princess Elspeth (Chloe Salaman) and tells her that the lottery has been fixed and her name deliberately withheld from the commonfolk. Shocked by this revelation, the Princess fixes the lottery so that only her name is included, sealing her fate to being tossed into the dragon’s lair. Even in Medieval times, money talks. This leads to much conflict in the kingdom and a showdown between our intrepid hero and the feared dragon at the hands of the titular spear.

There was a slew of sword and sorcery films in the early 1980’s, among them Albert Pyun’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian (1982), Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster (1982), Jack Hill’s Sorceress (1982), Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, all in 1982, with Peter Yates’s Krull (the film that Columbia invested in while passing on Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial) and Giacomo’s Battiato’s Hearts and Armour coming out the following year. Dragonslayer, filmed on location in England, Scotland, and Wales, was released on Friday, June 26, 1981, two months after John Boorman’s Excalibur and two weeks after Desmond Davis’s Clash of the Titans. It has so much going for it that even author George R.R. Martin, the author of the novels upon which HBO’s Game of Thrones is based, proclaimed that Vermithrax is the best dragon ever seen in a film. This is a view shared by film director Guillermo del Toro, whose enthusiasm for the film compelled him to enlist Dragonslayer director Matthew Robbins writing talents on four films. There is much to admire here. Mr. MacNicol is wonderful in his first major screen role as a reluctant apprentice who becomes the kingdom’s only hope to defeat the dragon, with shades of Luke Skywalker going head-to-head with the Empire’s almighty Death Star in George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). Ian McDiarmid, best known as Palpatine in the Star Wars saga, appears briefly as Brother Jacopus, and the late Caitlin Clarke does an admirable job of appearing like a male (to avoid being placed in the lottery) at the film’s start. Composer Alex North provides a sinister score, much of it culled together from the original music that he wrote for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but was rejected by Mr. Kubrick in favor of the classical music he used as temp tracks. However, the real star here is the dragon as brought to life by the magicians of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), brought to glorious life by members of the team responsible for Star Wars. After forty- two years, the film is finally being represented properly on home video in both standard Blu-ray and 4K Ultra High Definition and the results make previous home video representations of the film pale in comparison.

The film comes with a wonderful audio commentary with director Robbins and film director Guillermo Del Toro who enthusiastically waxes nostalgic and extolls the virtues of the film, in particular the intercutting of the Go Motion technology that introduces blur into stop-motion action to create realism to match the shots of the mechanical dragon. Mr. Del Toro is a huge admirer of this film and rightly lauds the effects team for creating the de facto standard by which all future films of this ilk are measured. In addition to the commentary, the following extras round out the set:

The Slayer of All Dragons is the overall title of five smaller high-definition-lensed pieces that can be watched consecutively for a total documentary viewing of 63:24 in total which contains brand new interviews with those involved in the film’s special effects, in particular Phil Tippet, Dennis Muren, and Brian Johnson. First up is Welcome to Cragganmore (11:08) which takes a look at the effects work done for Star Wars in the parking lot of the Van Nuys, CA warehouse where ILM originally began, in addition to the creation of Dragonslayer from screenplay to screen. A Long Way to Urland (9:21) is a look at the film’s cinematography, production design, and ornate costumes as the principal photography began in the summer of 1980 in England. Vermithrax Pejorative (17:48) is the name of both the dragon and this piece that looks at the star of the film and the incredible amount of blood, sweat and toil that went into creating this creature. Truly impressive and feels like the issue of Cinefex Magazine #6 from October 1981 come to life. Into the Lake of Fire (13:34) illustrates how issues encountered during production required quick thinking and problem solving in order for production to continue. The Final Battle (13:45) is about just that – the final battle between the dragon and Ulrich, all accomplished in front of a blue screen.

An interesting section of screen tests (15:42) illustrates why Ms. Clarke and Sir Ralph were the correct choices. The requisite original theatrical trailer (1:58) is also included.

I am so thrilled and thankful to Paramount for restoring and making this gorgeous package available and for the wonderful memories I have of initially seeing the film.

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(For Todd Garbarini's exclusive interview with director Matthew Robbins, click here.)

To coincide with Paramount Home Video's new 4K release of the 1986 film Dragonslayer, Cinema Retro's Todd Garbarini caught up with the film's director, Matthew Robbins. 

By Todd Garbarini

Matthew Robbins is a film director whose experience in the industry goes back over fifty years. Born in New York City and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University in 1965 with a BA in Romance Languages, he formed friendships with Academy Award-winning film editor and sound mixer Walter Murch (The Godfather, 1972) and Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, 1979). While a student pursuing his MFA at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, he met future film director George Lucas who enlisted Mr. Robbins to work on his student film, Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967), which was later made into the feature film THX 1138 starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence.

Well into his mid-twenties when he came into The New Hollywood (aka the American New Wave or Hollywood Renaissance), his professional career began during one of the most original and fruitful decades in American Cinema, the 1970s. Along with his USC writing partner Hal Barwood, they scripted the real-life 1969 escapades of ex-convict Robert “Bobby” Dent, 22, and his wife, Ila Fae Dent, 21, into The Sugarland Express, hailed by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael as “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies,” as directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1974. Both Mr. Robbins and Mr. Barwood made brief appearances as two of the World War II pilots returning to Earth from the mothership in Mr. Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

After writing The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) and MacArthur (1977), Mr. Robbins made his directorial debut while co-writing Corvette Summer (1978), a comedy that pitted Mark Hamill and Annie Potts against a ring of car thieves. Next, he embarked on his most audacious outing yet – the fantasy film Dragonslayer, the second film made a co-production with Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney after Robert Altman’s Popeye in 1980. Starring Peter MacNicol as Galen, apprentice to the wizard Ulrich (Sir Ralph Richardson), who must battle the dragon Vermithrax Pejorative following Ulrich’s death, Dragonslayer has had a poor representation on home video over the decades. All that has changed now, thankfully, as Paramount Home Video has restored and released the film in native 4K Ultra High Definition on Blu-ray and Standard Blu-ray. The result is glorious. I spoke with Mr. Robbins recently about this new restoration.

Todd Garbarini: Dragonslayer is one of my favorite movies from childhood. I fell in love with Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong from 1933 and had seen a lot of the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion films prior to that. When I saw your film, I thought, “Wow, they really have come a long way.” I was so impressed with the almost seamless juxtaposing of the special effects and the live action and full-size dragon. In the years since, I’ve had the film on every conceivable home video format, but the picture always seemed very dark and murky, even the letterboxed laserdisc. The new 4K UHD Blu-ray is just so beautiful, you can now really enjoy the amazing production design, cinematography, gadgetry, matte paintings and the incredible Vermithrax Pejorative, a dragon so bad-ass that he has a surname!

Matthew Robbins: Yes! I have been very carefully avoiding seeing this movie for about forty years because it looked so wretched. They worked so many miracles with the new technologies of today to fix one egregious problem after another (on the new 4K release). So, the fact that you are so conscious of the difference here before and after, it means a lot.

TG: I would say it almost looks even better than it did in the theater. Any movie that requires this amount of visual design to create a world that does not exist, the intricacies and nuances, the optical effects, the matte paintings and the go-motion with blur, it is truly an art and collaborative effort. I am a real proponent of the real-world special effects. I have loved reading Cinefex, Cinefantastique, Starlog and Fangoria for decades and it is amazing how much time and effort goes into a film such as this. It is very gratifying to see these movies get their due as none of them have ever been properly represented on home video due to the limitations inherent in those technologies. It is wonderful that younger audiences can really benefit from seeing Dragonslayer in this new 4K ultra high definition. It is my understanding that this movie got the go-ahead because of the popularity of the Dungeons & Dragons imagination game.

MR: That’s right. When Hal Barwood and I drummed up this story, we had been very much present when George Lucas was creating ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) for Star Wars in 1976 when it was being set up at the warehouse in Van Nuys with John Dykstra. We were at that facility, and then he brought it up to Kerner Boulevard, here in Marin (County) where I live, and we specifically created Dragonslayer to get all that horsepower attached to something other than star fields and spaceships. So, it was like turning loose Phil Tippett! Dennis Muren was super charged up because he got a new sandbox to play in. In terms of what you mentioned before, we were aware of Dungeons & Dragons, but we weren’t playing the game.

TG: Neither was I! I have no idea why, either. I loved fantasy, and close friends of mine were very much into it, but I just was never asked by them. I did love the 1978 Ralph Bakshi cartoon of The Lord of the Rings with that wonderful score by Leonard Rosenman.

MR: Well, speaking of Lord of the Rings, Hal was very influenced by Tolkien. He was a fan of Lord of the Rings and got me acquainted, and I thought it was great.

TG: So many people have been influenced by Tolkien. George R.R. Martin credits him for his Games of Thrones novels.

MR: Exactly! I was a big fan of Fantasia with Mickey Mouse and the sorcerer. So, there’s that, and so we combined all those elements, and then we went out with our agent to find a buyer for this thing. While we were waiting, he came back with this news that both Paramount and Walt Disney were both interested. Our first meeting about the film was with Michael Eisner, who was the president of Paramount at the time. He pointed to his desk, and he had a stack of scripts about dragons that they had tried to develop based on their awareness of the Dungeons & Dragons game. So, the fact that people were playing that game in droves really helped us get the project off the ground. As far as I know, people still play it. That’s some of the origins of Dragonslayer.

TG: Was that a long process in your opinion, to your recollection, or did it all kind of come together fairly quickly?

MR: It came together fairly quickly compared to, say, (Guillermo Del Toro’s) Pinocchio.

TG: I had spoken to Robert Wise in February 1994 about my favorite film of his, 1963’s The Haunting, and he talked about Elliot Scott, his production designer. He did such wonderful work on that film, as well as Arabian Adventure (1979), The Watcher in the Woods (1980), Labyrinth (1986) and two of the Indiana Jones films. His work on Dragonslayer was no less stunning.

MR: Oh, I’m so pleased you’re asking about him. He was the dean of production designers. When we went over there to England to put together a crew, everybody was busy. I had actually met some of the people that George (Lucas) had used on Star Wars and Sir Ridley Scott had used on Alien. And so, we were very ambitious, and they were all busy, and they kept saying, “Why aren’t you in touch with Scotty?” I didn’t know who they meant! Everyone else had been kind of either directly his acolytes or had been influenced by him. He was a remarkably talented and experienced individual, and this was only my second picture. He was one of those people whom I relied upon and he helped me tremendously. He would say things like, “I’m gonna put this here for you, and you can do the thing,” or “It’s not attached to the rest of the castle, but then you have this here, and your transition is easy.” He took me in hand. He was a senior presence and a very lovely man. I was quickly sort of in awe of him, really. I remember when we had met and we talked about it, and then I’d had a meeting with him in the art department at Pinewood (Studios), where he was working, and he had a staff. He was a beloved figure and he came in with rolls of paper. He put them out on the desk, and he had drawn some preliminary ideas about how he thought we might have the interior of Ulrich’s Castle. But, I had something else in mind, something very different. So, I said, “Well, I don’t know if this is exactly what I want, because I thought maybe…” and before I could even finish, he took all the papers and he crumpled them up, and he threw them away. And he said, “All right, we’ll start over.” I was just appalled because these beautiful drawings, you know, had just gone to waste! I thought that we were going to discuss it! (laughs) He just scrapped them! I still have a vivid memory of that. I felt very much like what they call the imposter syndrome. How could I have done such a thing? He was one of my favorite people on that movie.

TG: How about cinematographer Derek Vanlint? He was a veteran of television commercials, just like Sir Ridley Scott and they had done Alien together. He brought a wonderful and original look to that film as well. Was he your first choice?

MR: Yes, and he had a cadre around him as well. He was hard charging, very demanding. His nickname for me was “Pet”. (laughs) He was a really gifted cinematographer. I was not experienced enough to know when I was asking for the impossible. He tried to tell me now and then, “We’ll get you as close as we can get.” He was remarkable. I had not had much experience with using more than one camera on set at once. So, I learned, sometimes to my dismay, that I wasn’t free to put the camera just anywhere, once the master was lit. I learned a lot. You can tell it was my second movie, as it was on a vastly bigger scale than my first film. I was running to keep up sometimes.

TG: Were you a fan of movies growing up, and do you recall the first movie you ever saw?

MR: I was afraid of movies when I was growing up! I was very easily frightened by not even scary movies, but films that had a lot of drama or suspense in them.

TG: I was, too. I remember hiding behind my grandmother’s chair while a documentary on Alfred Hitchcock was on and there was a scene playing from Dial M for Murder. My father had told me that the strangler gets killed by a pair of scissors and I was beside myself.

MR: It made me very anxious. I can remember when I was very little, my father was very interested in classical music, and he had a lot of classical LPs. He would put on classical music and I would get scared. They would say, “Well, what’s scary?” And I would say, “Well, this…,” and the fact that music could have things in a minor key, an orchestra music, it meant that it was a score to what was happening in the house! It was background music to what we were living. So, if we were in the kitchen and the music was in the living room, but my mother was at the stove or something in the kitchen, I just felt that something terrible was going to happen because Dimitri Tiomkin was behind this and it was portentous. I was very interested in movies, even though I was very scared of them. I can’t remember literally the first movie I ever saw, though. My neighbors had a television set, and I saw some movies there, such as the Bela Lugosi movies. They were scary. I would leave and then listen at the door. That’s what my grandson does today. One of my grandchildren is exactly like me with regard to being afraid of movies. He’ll flee from the room, and then he’ll linger because he can’t stop, you know?

TG: Are you going to show them Dragonslayer? Caitlin Clarke was my introduction to the female form. (laughs)

MR: (laughs) My grandchildren are too young to see Dragonslayer. (pauses) But one day, soon, they’ll see it!

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By Todd Garbarini

April Wright is a film director whose credits include the documentaries Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-In Movie (2013), Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace (2019) and Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story (2020), all of which can be viewed JustWatch.com. Like all of us cinephiles, Ms. Wright was not just a fan of movies but also a lover of the experience of going to see a movie, especially at the drive-in. Ms. Wright and I are similar in age and her enthusiasm for the drive-in dates back to her childhood, a familial outing which became a much-anticipated and frequent event during the summer months. I cannot make that claim, unfortunately, as I have attended the drive-in only a handful of times in my life.

Ms. Wright’s latest film, Back to the Drive-In (2023), looks at a dozen remaining drive-ins across the United States and the owners who are, quite honestly, struggling to keep them going. It’s a poignant look at an American pastime that has slowly become an endangered species.

Todd Garbarini: I loved your film. I’ve been a movie fan all my life and I love drive-ins, as well as big and beautiful movie theaters. Clearly you share my enthusiasm.

April Wright: Yes, absolutely. I had a movie family in a way. My dad had an 8mm camera and reel-to-reel editing equipment for that in the basement. I did understand a little bit of the nuts and bolts of filmmaking even when I was a kid. We watched lots of movies. There was a neighborhood movie palace down the street from my house in Chicago that my brother and sister ended up working at. I was able to see a lot of movies. I’ve been interested in movie palaces, just because they were so big and ornate. Now you watch movies at home or on your smartphone and that showmanship is changing and I just don’t really understand why. I like making movies to remind people about what a cool experience it can be seeing a movie as an event and an experience.

TG: Do you remember the very first movie you saw in either a drive-in or in a movie theater?

AW: I really don’t because it was just so commonplace that we saw a lot of movies, so I don’t have any “first-experience” memories. I kind of remember seeing Song of the South as a kid and I remember Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I’m sure I saw some of the Herbie the Love Bug films. Escape to Witch Mountain, I remember seeing that one at a drive-in. I love horror films and I saw them, too. One thing I remember vividly is when Carrie was on television, and my mom telling me I couldn’t come in the room. Of course, I really wanted to, and I snuck downstairs. I looked in right at the end where the hand comes out. It scared me, but it made me really curious. When I was older and I saw the whole movie, it’s one of my favorite films of all time. It intrigued me in a way, just planted that seed since she made it even more forbidden, like, “You can’t watch this!” (laughs)

TG: You’ve made a documentary about movie palaces.

AW: Yes! One of the interviews in that movie is shot at the Loew’s Jersey City. We shot that in 2017. That’s a gorgeous theater. I love it. When that reopens, it’s going to be really great. That theater’s interesting because at one point in time, they had split it into three theaters during the multiplex era.

TG: What?! Are you serious? I had no idea…

AW: Yes, so on the main floor, they split it right down the middle. You had half of the main screen on the left and the other half on the right. They covered the balcony so that they had a third screen up there and they took all that out, which is incredible that they were able to remove all that partitioning. Right down the street is The Stanley Theater which is now home to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We got to go in there during the Theater Historical Society tours that we were on. That one is gorgeous, too. It’s an atmospheric theater and they used to have a blue sky and twinkling lights on the ceiling in most of them. Then it would look like a little town around you as if you were outside. It’s impeccably maintained, it’s gorgeous, but they painted their ceiling white, so it looks like you’re up in the heavens or up in the clouds when you’re in there.

TG: I’m jealous because in my area, I had a handful of movie theaters that I went to over the years, and now they’re all gone. One of them was the Plainfield Edison Drive-In. They had a double feature of Black Christmas and Psycho, The Velvet Vampire, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, etc. It opened in 1957 and closed in 1984, the year before I obtained my driver’s license!

AW: I don’t know if you know this, but the very first drive-in ever was in New Jersey.

TG: Yes, that was Camden. The founder was Richard Hollingshead.

AW: Yes! His son is in my first documentary talking about how his dad invented it. It opened in 1933, so this year is the 90th anniversary of the drive-in, which is pretty cool.

TG: Hard to believe. In fact, what I liked about your new film, Back to the Drive-In, is that you have the Delsea Drive-In in Vineland, NJ, the only remaining drive-in in the state.

AW: Yes. I went down there. We shot more, but they said, “Oh, we don’t want to be in it that much.” Some people like being on camera and don’t. A lot of the drive-in owners are part of the United Drive-In Theater Owners Association, there’s a group. They have an annual conference in Florida. I went to it in February of 2020, which is right before COVID. I knew I wanted to do a follow-up (to my previous film about drive-ins), and at that point in time, I thought I wanted to just go really in depth with perhaps three families. I said to them there, “Does anybody want to be part of this film?” There were some other drive-ins that had wanted to be part of my next film that weren’t in my first one, and so I had a few potential ones. Then a month later, COVID hit, and even though drive-ins were open, I still felt like states were changing the rules and everything was still weird for a little while. I waited, but then the more that COVID was going on and then drive-ins started getting all this attention, I thought that this is a layer to my story that I never could have anticipated. It made me expand that instead of just showing a few families in depth and what they do. I wanted to show not only that, but what was COVID doing to it? It made me want to have a bigger cross-section. I needed to see what was going on and go to some really old and some fairly new drive-ins. I wanted to go to some big ones with seven screens, and I wanted to go to the single screens out in different states. I tried to just pick every type of factor to represent. The weird thing was, as soon as I got on the road and went to a few of them, I realized they were all telling me the same story. They were all struggling. Everybody was just trying to get through this period. They were small businesses, family-owned, and they were just trying so hard to keep them going because they really care about what it provides to their community. That’s how it came about. I was going to do it anyway, but then the way I decided to do it evolved because of COVID.

TG: What I find interesting is, in the movie, they say, “We ask you to keep your mask on while you’re in the car.” We forget how bad it really was back then during the height of COVID.

AW: Yes. I think that might have been a California drive-in, too, because California was more rigid than other places. California was definitely in a program wherein if the numbers were high, the rules were stricter. If the numbers went down, then it got released. That might have been at a moment when the numbers were high. I know because although I’m from Chicago, I live in Los Angeles.

TG: I haven’t been to LA since 2008. I have gone to more drive-ins as an adult while out on business than I ever did when I was a child. It just kills me to see this type of thing dying out. I look at the theaters that used to be around here on CinemaTreasures.org and there is no evidence that these places ever existed.

AW: I know. When you see a horror movie at a drive-in and you can look over to your right or left, and there’s a forest right next to you, that’s an extra layer of film! That’s like 4-D!

TG: Who are some of your favorite directors?

AW: One of my favorites is Brian De Palma.

TG: Oh, I love him. I just saw the new Dressed to Kill 4K Blu-ray and it’s beautiful.

AW: I really like pretty much all his films, just the way he shoots them. I like the split-screen stuff. I think they all hold up. He had great actors and all of them and just, yes, I think he’s a great filmmaker. Like even the Mission Impossible series, I still think the first one is the best one that he directed.

TG: Do you like William Friedkin?

AW: I do. Actually, we’ve met and chatted before because he’s also a fellow Chicagoan. I love The French Connection. That’s probably his best movie, my absolute favorite. I went to a screening of that at the Academy where he was there doing Q&A and just some of the stuff that he did because he came out of documentaries first. For him to do moving shots the way he did and just the grittiness of it, I mean that was something on the newer side when he shot something that way. Yes, I really love that. I love all John Carpenter’s stuff, for sure. Richard Linklater. I love (Steven) Soderbergh’s work because he’s just made such a wide array of movies, big movies but also small and experimental, some that he shot on videos cameras. He tries different things. I really like them as filmmakers as well. Amy Heckerling has such a great body of work and Penelope Spheeris. She started in documentaries. I actually just went to see her doc a few days ago, the first Decline of Western Civilization, about punk and she was there for Q&A. I love Nicholas Cage, too. Thrillers and horror are probably my number one. Of course, I do like documentaries as well, especially if they’re about subjects that you can learn something about. The Shining is one of my favorites of all time. Also, I love John Landis. I’m from Chicago, and he shot some things there like The Blues Brothers.

TG: How much footage did you shoot for Back to the Drive-In?

AW: Quite a bit. I had a crew to help me in Los Angeles when I was here, but the rest I actually did by myself. I had my primary camera, I had my drone, and then I had a GoPro, which I did time-lapses from empty daytime to evening. Between those three, it gave me enough to cut together, but I usually got to each drive-in in the afternoons, you would start maybe at three in the afternoon, capturing all their preparation, and then stay until late, usually two in the morning. It was basically almost twelve hours of footage for each one, because I would just get there and be shooting non-stop. Then the logical way to put it together, I thought it might be by subject, but once I looked at it, I realized, no, it’s got to be chronological. Just one big arc of the afternoon, the prep, and then opening the doors, and then the snack bar, and then getting the movie on screen, and then the breather once all that’s done became the way to tell it.

TG: I miss the aura and aroma of the theaters I went to as a child.

AW: Yes, it’s true. Movie theater smell. When I go to old theaters, too, a lot of times you walk into them and your reaction is, “Oh, there’s a good old movie theater smell.” Also in the projection rooms, if they’re where they have all that old equipment, that’s a certain smell because the film and the oil and all that had a smell, too. That’s almost gone now because they had to convert them to clean rooms for the digital projection. You must have a climate-controlled, very fancy environment for those. A lot of the drive-ins still have both projectors.

TG: Do you have an all-time favorite movie?

AW: Rocky.

TG: Did you see it in the movies when it first came out?

AW: I did. Even though I was a little kid, my mom saw it and she wanted to take us to see Rocky. That’s probably part of it. Also, I realized after I’ve been a filmmaker for a little while, some of the things I like or I’m drawn to – and Carrie falls into this, for sure – is that I really like underdogs and people who shouldn’t win but somehow do. That’s a theme in the films that I like. For Rocky, obviously, that is one of the best underdog stories. It’s not even the message of winning. It’s just going the distance, of course. The story of making it is an underdog story, too. The fact that Stallone can be a semi-nobody struggling actor and come up with this and write it and create such an iconic character that lives on is inspiring as well. I love that movie. It is my all-time favorite. If you want to talk horror, my all-time favorite is Carrie.

TG: I was sorry to see your film end because I just wanted to see so many other people talking. I’m sure you’ve probably seen The Last Blockbuster, the film about, literally, the last Blockbuster Video, which is in Bend, Oregon. In some ways, your movie reminds me of that film because I say, yes, there are no more video stores to go to. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

AW: Thank you very much. I’m glad you liked the movie!

Back to the Drive-In can now be seen streaming on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Vudu.

By Todd Garbarini

Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) is one of the director’s best and most entertaining works. It also appears to be ahead of its time in some ways while simultaneously paying homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), something Mr. De Palma also did to great effect with his excellent 1973 Staten Island-lensed thriller Sisters, a film that Stephen King loved so much that he championed Mr. De Palma to make his own novel Carrie into the 1976 film of the same name. His 1976 romantic thriller Obsession was also inspired by the Master of Suspense, specifically Vertigo (1958).

Filmed in the autumn of 1979 and released on Friday, July 25, 1980, Dressed to Kill pits Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) as a woman who is bored and sexually frustrated in the Big Apple as she looks to spice up her unexciting afternoons. Her teenage son Peter (Keith Gordon, who would play Arnie in John Carpenter’s Christine in 1984 before becoming a film director) is a computer geek at a time when being a computer geek meant being male and having zero sex appeal (he has built a computer that carries binary numbers; he is also adept with booby traps and other forms of technology). Kate is under the psychiatric care of Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) for her frustrations and attempts to seduce him during a session but is rebuffed.

An afternoon trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York results in the film’s most talked about scene wherein she is “picked up” by a stranger who never says a word, and playfully entices her in an extended and wordless “chase” in the museum which ends with illicit sex in the backseat of a taxi and climaxes (no pun intended, of course) with the quickest female orgasm in cinema history. Kate ends up spending the evening with her mystery man in his swanky Front Street apartment, only to discover surreptitiously that he has a venereal disease. This leads her to rush off in haste and be unceremoniously dispatched by a razor-wielding nut job in a carefully orchestrated elevator murder sequence that is intercut with the introduction of Liz Blake, a call girl played by Nancy Allen, who witnesses the murder.

Kate’s son is obviously shattered by his mother’s death, although we only see his stepfather very briefly – at the start of the film during a “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” sex scene with Kate, through the shower as he shaves, and later after Kate’s murder when Peter is at the police station. Detective Marino (played brilliantly by Dennis Franz) tries his best to get what info he can out of Liz and Dr. Elliott, but Peter teams up with Liz to find the killer themselves who appears to be a man dressed as a woman, with long blonde hair and dark sunglasses. The obvious tip of the hat to Psycho, complete with Ms. Dickinson’s death scene a third of the way through the film (making her a modern-day Janet Leigh), should give a clue to the killer’s real identity.

There is a great deal of sexual tension and graphic violence in Dressed to Kill, so much so that when the film was released 43 years ago it was initially given an X rating by the MPAA. Jack Valenti, who was president of the MPAA at the time, had stated prior to the film’s release that the political climate in the U.S. had been shifting to the right which in turn meant more conservative attitudes toward sex and violence (those of us who lived through the Meese Report days know this all too well). Interestingly Zombie (1979), the Italian Lucio Fulci gross-out film, was released the same day as Mr. De Palma’s film, unrated and with a similar caveat that appeared on the poster of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead two years earlier since newspapers would not run ads for X-rated films. So, violence was certainly still acceptable on the big screen, as long as it was rated accordingly. Some of the dialogue in the film was also sexual in nature and had to be altered, but the cuts that were made for the theatrical version have all been reinstated on the latest home video releases of the film. Currently, wherein XXX-rated hardcore pornography is just a computer mouse-click away, just about anything in Dressed to Kill seems tame in comparison.

Mr. De Palma has consistently received critical flak for “ripping off” Alfred Hitchcock, but this time he manages to create and sustain a visual style all his own. Even Vincent Canby liked the film, which is saying a lot! Had Bernard Herrmann still been alive (the great musical collaborator of Mr. Hitchcock), he no doubt would have been commissioned to write the score, having already delivered two excellent scores for Mr. De Palma’s Sisters (1973) and Obsession (1976), the latter of which is sumptuous and gorgeous, clearly one of his best. His successor proved to be quite formidable. Pino Donnagio, who wrote brilliant music for Don’t Look Now (1973) and Tourist Trap (1979), delivers another great piece here, and has gone on to work with Mr. De Palma on many other films.

Dressed to Kill has been released in many formats since its theatrical release. Warner Home Video released it on VHS in the big clamshell box at least twice; Image Entertainment released a somewhat letterboxed laserdisc; and MGM/UA released it on both DVD and Blu-ray in a special edition, as did The Criterion Collection. Now, Kino Lorber has added this title to their ever-expanding and impressive roster of classic titles. This new edition is loaded with new and exclusive extras while porting over some from the aforementioned MGM/UA releases:

Disc One is Dressed to Kill in 4K UHD. This is hands-down the best that the film has ever looked. I recall purchasing the Image Entertainment letterboxed laserdisc in 1990 and being very disappointed in the transfer. I would not have guessed that I would have to wait 33 years to see this vast improvement.

Disc Two is a standard Blu-ray that contains the following supplements:

Strictly Business runs 17:26 Nancy Allen talks about how the script came about and how an executive saw Suzanne Somers in her role! I would have loved to have seen that, with Mr. Roper (Norman Fell) as the killer.

Killer Frames with Fred Caruso runs 8:13 and is a look at the work of associate producer and production manager Fred Caruso who worked on Midnight Cowboy (1969), Husbands (1970), The Godfather (1972), and later on Blow Out (1981) and several other films for Mr. DePalma.

An Imitation of Life with Keith Gordon runs 14:15 and is an engaging discussion about how Mr. Gordon got cast in the film and played Angie Dickinson’s son who was originally envisioned as a sexually unaware ten-year-old. Mr. Gordon decided to play it as an older teenager who has been up all night, tired, etc. and to his credit, Mr. DePalma agreed. He also discusses how he saw them shooting the murder scene and it looking ridiculous, but the way that it was edited made all the difference.

Symphony of Fear, 2012 Interview with Gordon Litto by Fiction Factory runs 17:36 and the producer talks about how he saw Brian DePalma’s Sisters and began his professional relationship with the director.

Dressed in White, 2012 Interview with Angie Dickinson by Fiction Factory runs 29:53 and is an onscreen interview. Brian DePalma contacted her while she was promoting Claude Pinoteau’s Jigsaw in Canada in 1979. She talks about Michael Caine’s hilarious sense of humor; the celebrated museum sequence took four days to shoot; the subtlety of Bobbi’s first appearance onscreen (something that I missed over and over again); the difficulties of shooting the cab sequence; the elevator set; and suggesting to Ann Roth the costume designer that she wear a white coat.

Dressed in Purple, 2012 Interview with Nancy Allen by Fiction Factory runs 23:04. Ms. Allen discusses starring in Carrie following her early onscreen cameo opposite Jack Nicholson towards the end of Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973); the sensual movement of a camera being similar to a dance; working again with Keith Gordon (they had previously collaborated on Brian DePalma’s Home Movies the previous year); Ann Roth’s costuming on her; the editing of Jerry Greenberg, the Oscar-winning cutter on William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971); the uncomfortable lingerie outfit; and auditioning for Dario Argento’s Inferno in New York in 1979 and not wanting to shoot underwater (that role went to Irene Miracle)

Lessons in Filmmaking, 2012 Interview with Keith Gordon by Fiction Factory runs 30:46. Mr. Gordon discusses his experiences on the film and how it was an excellent course in film school with a master filmmaker. He watched the elevator murder sequence being shot and thinking how silly it looked, only to be blown away by the way it was cut together in the final film.

The Making of Dressed to Kill runs 43:51 and is a 2001 documentary shot in standard definition which includes recollections from the cast and crew.

Slashing Dressed to Kill runs 9:49 and is a 2001 look (shot in standard definition) at the changes that needed to be made to the film in 1980 in order to secure an R-rating.

Unrated/R-Rated/TV-Rated Comparison from 2001 that is exactly what the title implies.

An Appreciation by Keith Gordon runs 6:05 and is a 2001 featurette (shot in standard definition) wherein Mr. Gordon talks about the impressions that Kate’s character has as she is in the celebrated museum sequence and the subliminal images in the film.

1980 Audio Interview with Michael Caine runs 4:50, and he discusses how much he loves shooting in New York and his-then recent move to California.

1980 Audio Interview with Angie Dickinson runs 3:30 and she talks about how the film should receive a double “R” rating because of its sexual content. Fun stuff!

1980 Audio Interview with Nancy Allen runs 14:30 and she speaks at length of how much she prefers to work on smaller films with lower budgets than big, budgeted films, such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941, as the crew was too numerous in size for her to remember who worked on the film.

Dressed to Kill Radio Spots

Dressed to Kill TV Spots

Dressed to Kill Teaser Trailer and Theatrical Trailer

Trailers for Play Misty for Me, And Soon the Darkness, Eyes of Laura Mars, Happy Birthday to Me, and Not for Publication round out the package.

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By Todd Gararini

We are all faced with challenging situations in our lives, but one would hope that we face nothing like the scenario that Thomas Babington “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) does in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man, the film version of William Goldman’s novel of the same name and who was the film’s screenwriter. The movie opened in New York on Wednesday, October 6, 1976. Babe is a Ph.D. candidate selected to be in an exclusive class of five students at Columbia University taught by a professor (Fritz Weaver in a terrific cameo) who knows that Babe’s father committed suicide following his being investigated during the Joseph McCarthy-era witch hunts. He urges Babe not to turn his research into a personal crusade to clear his father’s name, something that Babe is wrestling with.

Babe is an avid runner and times himself daily while running through Central Park, presumably to compete in the New York City Marathon. He is verbally ribbed by the guys who live across the street from his apartment. His brother, Henry “Doc” Levy (the excellent Roy Scheider), passes himself off to Babe as an oil company executive, but in reality is a diamond courier for an infamous Nazi war criminal named Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier, who was nominated as Best Supporting Actor), who has been hiding in South America while living off of diamonds he stole from Jews during the Nazi occupation in Europe. Szell shares a safe deposit box with his brother who lives in New York, however the latter dies in an accident involving an oil truck. This complicates matters for Szell as he must come out of hiding to get his diamonds, running the risk of being recognized by Auschwitz survivors.

Babe meets and falls for a research student named Olga (Marthe Keller), who is fluent in German and French and they begin a romance which takes Babe deeper into the mystery of his brother’s affiliation with Szell. The overall film may not make one hundred percent sense, and there are plot holes large enough to drive an oil truck through, however it is terrifically entertaining and so far ahead of contemporary thrillers that I suggest one overlook these flaws. For a basis of comparison, its most obvious cinematic antecedent in terms of atmosphere is Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) with Warren Beatty. William Devane also is terrific as Janeway, Doc’s friend who comes to the rescue and needs to get pertinent information from Babe.

Marathon Man was the first Dustin Hoffman film that I saw when it aired on CBS in October 1980 and for a while Szell’s ominous inquiry to Babe when he is captured by Szell’s henchmen (Richard Bright and Marc Lawrence), the infamous “Is it safe?”, became part of the lexicon and a cultural reference that even appeared in Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) when one of the titular creatures jokingly brandishes a dental drill. The film requires active viewing for first-timers as there are double-crosses in abundance and if you blink you might miss them. Viewers may dig deeply with questions about the plot, but my only concern is where did Szell obtain that nifty killer wrist knife that he uses on Roy Scheider and Fred Stuthman (the survivor who recognizes him at the end of the film)? That is a nice device that can come in handy (sorry) during ponderous corporate meetings and heated disagreements with political adversaries.

Marathon Man has been released before on video cassette, laserdisc, CED (remember those?!), DVD, Blu-ray, and is now available in a two-disc set from Kino Lorber, which keeps releasing great movies in equally great special editions.

Disc One contains the film in 4K UHD, scanned in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative. I personally cannot see a noticeable difference between this and the standard Blu-ray on my 4K television, though it might be on a much larger screen. There are no extras on this disc.

Disc Two is a standard Blu-ray derived from the same 4K scan and down-converted to standard HD, and the disc has extras ported over from the original DVD release, with some exclusive extras this time around to add additional value. For the first time in any format, there is an audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson and it is feature-length. It is a joy to listen to and I am grateful that they took time to discuss the great contribution of composer Michael Small’s score for the film. A veteran of terrific film music for Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), Night Moves (1975), and an unused score to The China Syndrome (1979), his score for Marathon Man is characteristically icy, creepy and sinister. There is also a good deal of info regarding the cast and crew, particularly screenwriter Goldman and director Schlesinger. They also quite correctly point out that the original movie poster add campaign, which strangely consisted of simply the words, “A thriller,” would have benefitted greatly with “Is it safe?” instead.

The Magic of Hollywood…Is the Magic of People runs 21:14 and is a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film while it was in production, ported over from the 2001 DVD. Much of the footage is of Robert Evans talking about catching lightning in a bottle and getting his first casting choices to come along for the ride. Input from Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, John Schlesinger and Marthe Keller bookend footage of the final confrontation between Babe and Szell on a Los Angeles backlot set!

Going the Distance: Remembering Marathon Man runs 29:07 and is a 2001 piece from the DVD of the time and contains interviews with the cast and crew.

Rehearsal Footage runs 21:06 and is my favorite extra which includes Dustin Hoffman’s, Roy Scheider’s, and Marte Keller’s explorations of their characters. This is very interesting as much of it was shot before and during the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the blockbuster that Mr. Scheider starred in, before principal photography commenced in October 1975 and finished around February 1976. Marathon Man also has the unique distinction of being the second motion picture to employ the use of the then-new Steadicam.

Rounding out the extras are the theatrical trailer, ten TV Spots and two radio spots.

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By Todd Garbarini

The plot of Dario Argento’s much-maligned 1985 thriller Phenomena has long been the subject of ridicule and derision by critics and fans alike since its initial release. The inevitable complaints about the film range from the bad dubbing and stiff performances to the ludicrous notion that insects can be employed as detectives in a homicide investigation (this is true and has actually been done, providing the inspiration for the film. A November 1996 episode of television’s Forensic Files even featured an episode about this very method). If the film does not sound familiar, that could be attributed to the fact that Phenomena was severely cut by some 33 minutes and retitled Creepers when it opened in New York on Friday, August 30, 1985.

Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly) is a fourteen year-old student attending an all-girls school in Switzerland while her movie star father is away for the better part of a year shooting a film. Her mother, who left the family when Jennifer was a child, is merely mentioned but never seen. Unfortunately, her roommate Sophie (Federica Mastroianni) has just informed her that the school is beset by a killer who stalks girls their age and kills them. Well, that is unfortunate! You would think that someone would order the school closed and the girls sent away. As you can imagine, this does not sit too well with Jennifer who suffers from a bad case of sleepwalking and manages to find herself embroiled in the very murders she was hoping to avoid. She meets entomologist John McGregor, a wheelchair-bound Scot who lacks a Scottish accent but possesses an avuncular disposition that endears Jennifer to him and his chimpanzee Inga who doubles as his nurse. Fortunately for Jennifer, he is aiding the police in their investigation into the murder of a Danish tourist, Vera Brandt (Fiore Argento, the director’s eldest daughter) and the disappearance of McGregor’s former aid. Together with the help of McGregor, Inga (yes, the chimp!) and a very large fly, Jennifer sets off to locate the murderer. When she does, she has a very good reason to nearly regret it.

Phenomena is an unusual entry in the Dario Argento universe as it is a mashup of fantasy and giallo-esque murder mystery, effectively making some to refer to the film as a fairytale. Jennifer Connelly was chosen by Mr. Argento to play the lead as he had seen her in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and he thought she would be perfect for the film. His decision to set the film in the Swiss Alps is unorthodox but provides the perfect backdrop to the story as the scenery is utterly breathtaking. He also makes terrific use of the Steadi-cam and it never feels over-used. From a thematic standpoint, the film also deals with a subject I never would have thought of: female abandonment. Critic and devoted Argentophile Maitland McDonagh brought up this point when Mr. Argento discussed the film at the Walter Reade Theatre in June 2022 at a retrospective of his work. She is right: Vera is abandoned by the bus (accidentally), Sophie is abandoned by her boyfriend, Jennifer is abandoned by her mother (in an explanation left out of Creepers), and even Inga is abandoned by her keeper.

Phenomena has been released on home video more times than I can count, and I have personally owned it in the past as Creepers from the original Media Home Entertainment VHS release from 1986; as Phenomena in the form of the gatefold Japanese laserdisc pressing in 1997; the 1999 American laserdisc release from The Roan Group; the 2008 DVD pressing as part of a package of four other titles; the 2011 single Blu-ray from Arrow Films; the 2017 Blu-ray steelbook from Synapse Films; the 2017 Limited Edition Blu-ray from Arrow Films with newly commissioned artwork by Candice Tripp, and the 2023 4K UHD Blu-ray set from Arrow Films. Whew…Now, Synapse Films follows suit with their own release of the film in yet another 4K UHD Blu-ray edition, this time in a limited edition pressing with less-than-spectacular cover artwork design. However, there is a more cost-effective edition that has made me giddy with excitement. I must say that as a Dario Argento fan, and Phenomena being my favorite film of his, the new pressing of this standard edition from Synapse Films is a must-buy if only for the absolutely beautiful, gorgeous, and atmospheric cover artwork that has been newly commissioned by artist Nick Charge. As a purist, I generally shy away from artwork that is anything other than the key art used in the original exhibition of the film. I do not wish to sound stuffy or, heaven forbid, pretentious regarding this point, but it has been my experience that the key art used in promoting a film is generally the best and most effective artwork that has been used, regardless of the title in question, though there have been exceptions. The original style “B” poster for Dan Curtis’s 1976 thriller Burnt Offerings I have found to be infinitely more interesting and creepy than the lesser-used style “A” artwork; Conversely, Saul Bass’s beautiful mockup of the contorted face in the black lettering set against a yellow background in the style “A” for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) was, is, and always will be far more effective to me than the requisite and now tongue-in-cheek “Here’s Johnny!” image of Jack Nicholson’s crazed visage peering at his wife through the remnants of the bathroom door.

In the case of Phenomena, which was trimmed and altered significantly for its American debut and retitled Creepers, the original Italian key artwork by the late great artist Enzo Sciotti was discarded altogether in favor of a poster that focused on Jennifer Connelly holding flies in her hand, and the America video poster went even further to have the insects remove the flesh from half of her face! Nick Charge’s artwork is one of the most spectacular alternative promotional images of the film that I have ever seen.

Watching Phenomena again makes me realize just how much I miss Daria Nicolodi, Mr. Argento’s long-time girlfriend who appeared in six films for him. She brought so much to his work, and her absence is deeply felt more than ever now. In Deep Red (1975), she played the wonderfully sweet journalist, redubbed by Carolyn de Fonseca; in Inferno she’s the strange Elise Stallone Van Adler who keeps finding paint on her foot; in Tenebre (1982) she’s Peter Neal’s secretary Anne, redubbed by Theresa Russel of all people; here in Phenomena she’s the sinister Frau Bruckner, again redubbed by Carolyn de Fonseca; in Opera (1987) she is Mira, and this was the first time that her actual voice was used; and La Terza Madre (2007) she is Elisa Mandy (again with her own voice).

Donald Pleasence is also quite good as the entomologist. Some have complained about his performance, but I have never seen him give anything less than 100% in his roles, however off-beat. His presence in a horror film is always welcome. Check him out in Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972). He is unorthodox and brilliant.

The new 4K UHD Blu-ray standard edition from Synapse Films is gorgeous and only contains 4K UHD Blu-rays. There are no standard Blu-rays or DVDs in this package. Phenomena has more detractors than admirers if you believe what you read, and even staunch proponents of Mr. Argento’s vision (Maitland McDonagh and Alan Jones) have written off the film as silly. However, the amount of love and dedication that has been lavished upon this film restoring it to its former glory on Blu-ray says volumes about those who cherish it. This set is absolutely beautiful and definitely worth the price of an upgrade as it sports the following:

Two 4K UHD Blu-rays which consist of three (3) different cuts of the film, all available in high-definition for the first time ever in one collector’s edition package:

the 83-minute United States Creepers cut in HD

the 110-minute International Phenomena cut in HD

the 116-minute English/Italian hybrid audio Phenomena cut in HD

Extras:

Disc One includes the Italian language cut of Phenomena. There is a disclaimer: “No English audio exists for scenes unique to the Italian version of Phenomena. This full-length version can be viewed either entirely in Italian, or in a hybrid version which uses Italian audio in instances where English audio is unavailable.” You can choose from English / Italian Hybrid in 5.1 Surround, or Italian 5.1 Surround, or Italian 2.0 Surround.

There is an audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of Murder by Design: The Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento (on Italian Version). Mr. Howarth proves himself to be a fountain of knowledge about Italian horror and this film in particular.

There is a 2017 documentary produced by Arrow Films called Of Flies and Maggots, which runs two hours(!), including interviews with co-writer/producer/director Dario Argento, actors Fiore Argento, Davide Marotta, Daria Nicolodi and others. Much of the information presented here is already familiar to die-hard fans, but it is a welcome look at the film.

“Jennifer” is a music video of the Phenomena theme by former Goblin member Claudio Simonetti, directed by Dario Argento, and featuring Jennifer Connelly.

The promotional materials consist of: the Italian theatrical trailer, the International theatrical trailer, and a page-by-page replica of the Japanese pressbook.

Disc Two consists of both the international cut of Phenomena and the U.S. Creepers cut.

There is an audio commentary track on Phenomena (the 110-minute cut) moderated by film historian, journalist and radio/television commentator David Del Valle, who speaks exclusively with Argento scholar and Derek Botelho, author of the excellent book The Argento Syndrome. The discussion is both spirited and informative as Mr. Botelho clearly knows his stuff. I love listening to commentaries that tell me anecdotes that I either forgot about or never knew before, and there is plenty of interesting info here.

The Three Sarcophagi is a visual essay by Arrow Films producer Michael Mackenzie comparing the different cuts of Phenomena, and it is enough to make your head spin trying to keep track of the different versions. This piece runs 31 minutes.

Rounding out the extras are the U.S. theatrical trailer and two U.S. radio spots for Creepers.

Phenomena is not Mr. Argento’s best. IMHO, Deep Red (1975) holds that title, and it also could be argued that Tenebrae (1982) is a contender for that mantle as well. It is, however, a terrifically entertaining murder mystery with some great set pieces and a driving score by some members of Goblin among others, and the sort of gonzo film that the Italian Maestro has not made since Opera in 1987.

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By Todd Garbarini

In May 1977 my parents and I saw George Lucas’s Star Wars and my life changed forever. We saw it July with other family members and a third time in November prior to the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (henceforth abbreviated as CE3K). The trailer for CE3K was mysterious and intense to my young eyes and the prospect of seeing it again led me to turn down my parent’s offer to sit through Star Wars a second time after that afternoon’s showing. What frightened me about the trailer was not the chaotic scenes with Richard Dreyfus and Melinda Dillon, but rather the sequence wherein Bob Balaban and Francois Truffaut approach Richard Dreyfuss in a claustrophobic makeshift room to interrogate him about what he has seen, reminding me of my first trip to what I considered to be the Ninth Circle of Hell: THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE. In retrospect, I am amused by this memory and my initial impression of the film.

If you look at the history of Steven Spielberg’s work, his films are about many things, not the least of which is people’s impressions of the world around them. Additionally, a common theme that runs throughout much of his work is the notion of broken families or absent parents. Beginning with his film debut, The Sugarland Express (1974), and continuing with the father who is not around much for his young children in Jaws (1975), or a UFO-obsessed power plant worker who leaves his family for other worlds in the aforementioned CE3K, or a lonely young boy who feels a connection to an alien in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), or the broken family that needs to come together to survive in War of the Worlds (2005), to name a few, authority figures are often anything but authoritative. His latest film, the wonderful and semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, is a story that has existed in Mr. Spielberg’s mind all his life and finally needed to come out during the height of the coronavirus pandemic during worldwide downtime, if it was going to come out at all. Collaborating with writer Tony Kushner for the fourth time, Mr. Spielberg gives the audience a sense of what his turbulent childhood was like.

Although Mr. Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, OH, his family moved around due to his father’s position as an electrical engineer in the burgeoning computer industry. In The Fabelmans, Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano standing in for real-life father Arnold Spielberg) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams standing in for real-life mother Leah Adler) take their young son Sammy (Mateo Zoryan) to see his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, in Haddon Township, NJ in 1952. The spectacular train crash seen on screen both captivates and frightens him. Using his father’s 8mm camera with his mother’s secretive permission, he recreates it with his train set that he received for Hanukkah, and this gives Sammy the confidence to start shooting films involving friends and his three younger sisters.

Years later, Sammy is much older and now portrayed by Gabriel LaBelle. His father is offered a better job, and this takes them to Phoenix, AZ along with Burt’s friend and business associate Benny Loewy (played endearingly by Seth Rogen). Sammy shoots footage of them all on a camping trip, including a headlight-illuminated dance performed by his mother in her nightgown, which makes a deep impression on Benny. Following Mitzi’s mother’s passing and her subsequent sadness, Burt urges Sammy to create a little film of the camping trip to cheer her up, which he does begrudgingly while he is shooting a film with his fellow Boy Scouts. In the film’s most inspired moment, the family’s Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch in a wonderful performance) briefly visits, giving Sammy a spirited monologue about the discord between art and familial responsibility. The turning point in the film comes when Sammy sorts through the campfire footage, only to discover that “Uncle” Benny is showing more than a passing interest in Mitzi: they are caught holding hands and getting too close for comfort in the background images. Sammy is shellshocked. After more strife, the family is uprooted yet again, this time to Southern California, where he encounters both severe antisemitism at the hands of two school bullies and experiences first love with a devoutly Christian girl who puts Jesus first. More turmoil ensues, and Sammy ultimately learns to use his natural gift for filmmaking to deal with personal traumas and bending others to his will.

Steven Spielberg is my favorite director, and he shares the number one spot for me in a tie with Stanley Kubrick. Both men have made extraordinarily entertaining and mind-bending films. It was a constant joy to watch The Fablemans as it gives the audience a window into the person who would go on to become the creative genius who not only makes great movies but is also and deservedly financially successful at it.

I met Leah Adler in November 2008 when I was getting ready to come home from a horror film convention. She owned a restaurant called Milky Way, which opened in 1977, and when I walked in, she was there to greet me. I began gushing about her son, how CE3K was the first film of his that I saw and how it blew me away, what Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. meant to me, etc. She guided me over to a table and listened intently to my rambling, and when I thanked her for encouraging Steven to become a filmmaker, she paused and simply said, “I don’t know where the hell he came from.” This made me burst out laughing as I have always thought of her son as the best friend I never met (not entirely true: I waited outside the Ziegfeld Theater in June 2005 for eight hours the day of the War of the Worlds premiere and managed to get his autograph and snap a few photos of him). If he and I grew up together, we would have been inseparable – watching movies, talking about movies, making movies, you name it. My own parents were not movie fanatics by any means, and they could just as easily have said the same thing about me! The few times that my family went on vacation, I was enlisted to shoot the home movies. When I was fourteen on vacation in Florida, I began shooting our home movies from a cinematic perspective. This is due to Steven Spielberg.

The new 4K UHD Blu-ray and standard Blu-ray combo is now available from Valentine’s Day, appropriate as this film is a Valentine to Mr. Spielberg’s parents. It comes with some extras, and I had my fingers crossed that the director would have provided an audio commentary (something that he flatly refuses to do as he wants his films to speak for themselves and feels that it’s a way to lifting a curtain behind the magic), however he has stuck to his guns and I must respect his decision. It does feature some nice extras:

The first piece is called The Fabelmans: A Personal Journey and runs 11:00. It focuses on comments by producer Kristie Macosko Kriger, who is on board with the director for the ninth time; co-writer Tony Kushner, and how the film came about, the product of a conversation while the director was shooting Munich in Malta in 2005.

The second piece is named Family Dynamics and runs 15:28. Much of the cast of the film discusses their feelings and interpretations of the real-life people they portray in the film.

The third and final extra is called Crafting the World of The Fabelmans and runs 22:04. This is a bit more in-depth with input from Production Designer Rick Carter; Costume Designer Mark Bridges; Directory of Photography Januz Kaminski; Property Master Andrew M. Siegel; Editors Michael Khan (on his 30^th film with the director) and Sarah Broshar; Actress Chloe East; Actors Sam Rechner and Oakes Fegley; and Maestro/Composer John Williams.

The set also includes a digital version for streaming.

While the film is a no-brainer for Spielberg completists, being one is not a prerequisite as it can be enjoyed as a work of fiction for those who do not idolize the subject of the film.

The Fabelmans is an example of life not only imitating art, but art imitating life as well.

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By Todd Garbarini

Bigfoot was all the rage in the 1970s and it seemed as though you could not look anywhere without hearing about it. Alternately known as “Sasquatch”, Bigfoot is the description given to a large, man-sized hirsute creature reputed to live in the woods in the Pacific Northwest section of the United States. There have been many “sightings” over the years of this creature, with many people claiming they have photographed and even encountered it. The Loch Ness Monster off the coast of Scotland was yet another subject of mystification and intrigue which rebounded in popularity during the 1970s.

As a youngster, I recall not fully giving credence to the notion that this “monster” really existed but also being unnerved by the myriad docudramas that attempted to explain or hint at some sense of veracity when it came to discussing the subject. My favorite show at the time, The Six Million Dollar Man, pitted the titular hero Steve Austin (Lee Majors) against Bigfoot (an unrecognizable André René Roussimoff, better known as André the Giant) in early 1976, with its less successfully sister show, The Bionic Woman, continuing the storyline later that year, with Ted Cassidy now all dolled up for a fight. Leonard Nimoy’s episode of In Search Of…, which aired in New York on Monday, January 31, 1977, explored the possibility of the creature’s existence. Three months later we were subjected to the TV-movie Snowbeast, a fun film about patrons at a ski resort being terrorized by a rampaging killer beast, essentially Jaws set in the snow. Bigfoot even became a humorous throwaway line by Roberts Blossom in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, also from 1977.

In addition to docudramas, there have also been a good number of films about Bigfoot coming into contact with humans, but the results are never pretty. Joy N. Houck Jr.’s Creature from Black Lake (1976) is one of those low-budget, independently lensed thrillers that made the rounds throughout the Midwest but never seemed to make it to larger markets such as Los Angeles, Chicago or New York. Filmed during September and October of 1975 and released regionally on Friday, March 12, 1976, Creature begins with an image that could have just as easily been pulled from the ending of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) but gives way to two fishermen (one of whom is character actor Jack Elam) in a motorboat in the Louisiana swamps. The younger of the two gets pulled into the water by a creature that is mostly heard rather than actually seen. Meanwhile, two graduate students, Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) and Rives (John David Carson) head to Louisiana to look into the existence of this mysterious creature in the hopes of getting townspeople to talk. Joe Canton (Jack Elam, who I first saw in the ill-fated TV show Struck by Lightning, which co-starred Jeffrey Kramer, in September 1979) opens up about it in his own crazed way. However, Sheriff Billy Carter (Bill Thurman) not only refuses to speak about the subject but admonishes the students to leave.

Grandpa Bridges (lovable Dub Taylor) is another community member who is initially reticent about the creature since it terrified his wife. However, when money is waved in front of his face, he has a change of heart and permits the students to break bread with his family. All is well until Pahoo’s parapraxis sends Mrs. Bridges into a frenzy, incurring Grandpa’s wrath and sending them on their way to investigate on their own.

Dismissed by most critics at the time, Creature is an entertaining film that benefits immensely from stellar camerawork by future John Carpenter alumni Dean Cundey. The film has never been properly represented outside of a theater before having been shot anamorphically but cropped for its New York television premiere on CBS after midnight on Friday, November 30, 1979, while later finding its way into syndication on channel 9 in New York in the early 1980s. Unless you were one of the folks who caught up with the film under these circumstances or through one of its several DVD releases, the best way to see it now is on the excellent Blu-ray from Synapse Films which is mastered from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, a vast improvement over all previous airings and releases.

There is a feature-length audio commentary with writer Michael Gingold and film historian Chris Poggiali. They expound upon the film’s merits and detriments and speak enthusiastically about both the movie and the Bigfoot subgenre. Both men are erudite and articulate and it makes for an entertaining and informative listen.

There is also a 19-minute extra called Swamp Stories with Director of Photography Dean Cundey which is exactly what it says it is. If you are interested in Mr. Cundey’s background and a discussion of the technical aspects of the production, this piece is very interesting.

Lastly, we have the theatrical trailer and the radio spot!

Oh, how the radio spots for horror films freaked me out when I was a kid!

A very cool package indeed, topped off with reallynice cover art by the late great Star Wars alumni Ralph McQuarrie.

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By Todd Garbarini

My introduction to science fiction came in the form of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), though many would argue that this initial film in the first trilogy is a glorified western set in outer space. This was a point of view I would not have remotely considered the following summer when my father bought me a copy of the June 1978 issue of Space Encounters magazine featuring an article on and, best of all, photos of this glorious space opera. Among the other films showcased in this magazine that were new to me were Destination Moon (1950) and The War of the Worlds (1953), the latter of which was depicted in beautiful color, filling me with intrigue. When I think of science fiction now, the images of Douglas Trumbull’s slow-moving spaceships gliding through space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the mothership landing near Devil’s Tower in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), or the dystopian landscape of Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), come to mind. Back then, however, the effects were a lot more primitive but no less effective to a child’s eyes: something about the way these creepy-looking, Manta-shaped Martian ships with cobra-like heads that fire a deadly heat ray capable of incinerating just about anything in its path unnerved me. It is this film that is now available from Paramount Home Video in a gorgeous new 4K UHD Blu-ray, in a double feature set of two discs that also includes a standard Blu-ray of 1951’s When Worlds Collide, clearly the lesser of the two films.

Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is an atomic scientist who gets more than he bargains for when he stumbles upon a heated object that has crash-landed nearby. At the impact site, he meets Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and her pastor uncle, all confused by the scene before them. Later, Martian ships emerge from the site, and it is reported that similar scenarios are playing out in other parts of the country. The United States military finds their weapons (even atomic bombs!) to be of no use against the Martian invaders who employ the use of the heat rays. Clayton and Sylvia make their way to a farmhouse and encounter a strange looking electronic eye that the Martians use to investigate the premises, but Clayton hacks off the electronic eye and manages to collect a blood sample from the arm of a wounded Martian that we only see briefly. Their blood proves to be the key to understanding them, as well as their undoing: Earth’s bacteria is too much for the Martians and their supposed invincibility no longer is an issue when then germs bring about their demise.

The War of the Worlds has been around for over one hundred years in various forms, beginning life in the late 1890’s as a multi-part story published in Cosmopolitan if you can believe it, then as a novel and, most famously, as a notorious radio broadcast emceed by Orson Welles on the night before Halloween in 1938 that led to mass panic by those listeners unfortunate enough to miss not only the program’s beginning disclaimer, but the three mid-broadcast announcements emphasizing the play’s fictional nature. Listeners actually believed it to be a real news broadcast! The film opened in New York on Thursday, August 13, 1953 at the Mayfair on 7^th and Broadway on a panoramic screen with stereophonic sound. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: Film Editing, Sound Recording, and won by default for Special Effects on Thursday, March 25, 1954 because no other film was in the category. Steven Spielberg directed a very effective interpretation of this material following the 9/11 attacks; that version was released in the summer of 2005 and featured Gene Barry and Ann Robinson as Tom Cruise’s in-laws at the film’s end (love it!).

The new 4K Ultra High-Definition release contains the following extras that have been ported over from the 2005 Paramount DVD of the film:

There is a wonderful, feature-length audio commentary with Gene Barry and Ann Robinson.

There is a secondary audio commentary with Joe Dante, Bob Burns, and Bill Warren which is very funny, anecdotal and engaging.

The Sky is Falling: Making The War of the Worlds (SD – 29:59)

H.G. Wells: The Father of Science Fiction (SD – 10:29)

The Mercury Theater on the Air Presets: The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938 (HD – 59:30)

Original Theatrical Trailer (HD – 2:20)

When Worlds Collide (1951), released in New York on Wednesday, February 6, 1952 at the Globe on 46^th and Broadway, depicts the effects of a mob mentality when word gets out that scientists have accurately predicted the end of the world but are shrugged off as crackpot theorists. Dr. Cole Hendron (Larry Keating) is given photographs from a pilot, David Randall (Richard Derr), who has taken them on the sly. Along with his daughter Joyce Hendron (Barbara Rush), Dr. Hendron’s fears become a reality. A star by the name of Bellus is on a collision course with Earth and disaster is only eight months away, proving that aside from one’s own personal health the most important asset a human can possess is time. Young, healthy, and attractive people are singled out to make a future trip to a planet, Zyra, that is travelling in Bellus’s orbit for purposes of continuing the Human Race. First, however, a spaceship needs to be constructed to do this. Along the way, Joyce has to choose between her boyfriend Dr. Tony Drake (Peter Hansen) and her attraction to Randall while a wheelchair-bound wealthy businessman, Sidney Stanton (John Hoyt), demands to be saved in exchange for money and also wants the right to choose who goes on the ship. A mad dash is made to build the ship (other countries around the world follow suit) and miraculously the feat is pulled off in record time. Just as August 12^th arrives, the doubting Stanton berates the doomsday predictors until the world begins crumbling around them. He tries fruitlessly to make it to the ship until the door closes and it leaves Earth’s atmosphere, rocketing itself to Zyra, where the passengers make a smooth landing and are greeted with the prospect of a new life.

Both of these films are the brainchild of György Pál Marczincsak, better known as George Pal, who is also known to American audiences for his earlier colorful Puppetoons films, and the charming 1950 Jimmy Durante-Terry Moore outing The Great Rupert (1950). He would go on to direct Russ Tamblyn in both Tom Thumb (1958) and The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm (1962), the latter in Cinemarama.

The War of the Worlds was released on standard Blu-ray in 2020 on the Criterion Collection which had features different from the one provided here. Likewise, When Worlds Collide was released in a now out-of-print special edition from Imprint that included a handful of extras, although the sole extra on this Blu-ray is the film’s trailer.

Recommended for died-hard Pal fans!

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By Todd Garbarini

I did not see William Friedkin’s version of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men when it premiered on Sunday, August 17, 1997 on Showtime, although I wish that I had as it would not have seemed as dated as it does today. Like many other fine dramas, 12 Angry Men originated as a 1954 teleplay for Studio One and starred Norman Fell and Robert Cummings. The following year it was staged as a play and finally directed as a film by Sidney Lumet in 1957 in arguably its finest incarnation starring Henry Fonda as the lone juror out to debate the fate of a teenager who may have killed his father in a moment of rage. That star-studded interpretation bolsters excellent camera work and highly lauded acting and makes for gripping cinema as Mr. Fonda attempts to get eleven other jurors to reconsider their positions on whether the teen should be convicted of murder and potentially face capital punishment, or if he should be acquitted should there be reasonable doubt of his guilt. Forty years later, the most obvious changes are in the casting. This time around, the judge is a female (Mary McDonnell) and the jurors, unlike in Mr. Lumet’s version, are not all white. Several of them are African-American and they come to blows with each other at times. Jack Lemmon, who I loved as Shelley “The Machine” Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), is Juror #8 who decides to stand against the mob mentality that is comprised of Courtney B. Vance who I first saw in Fences on Broadway in 1988; Ossie Davis who was wonderful in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) as Da Mayor; George C. Scott who I loved in Patton (1970) and The Changeling (1979); Armin Mueller-Stahl who played the Nazi guard/grandfather in Music Box (1989); Dorian Harewood who played Eight-Ball in Full Metal Jacket (1987); James Gandolfini who appears to be auditioning his Tony Soprano accent; Tony Danza (yes, that Tony Danza!) who is amusing as the juror itching to get to a ball game; Hume Cronyn who was brilliant in The Gin Game (1981); Mikelti Williamson who I loved as Al Pacino’s sidekick in Heat (1995); Edward James Olmos who was creepy as Gaff in Blade Runner (1982); and William Petersen who was never better than when he played Rick Chance in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985).

For those who have seen the 1957 film, everything from the film’s opening to the poignant denouement are identical, so there are no surprise twists or changes. This version is nearly a scene-for-scene remake, and it is shot on video rather than film. The scenery is such that it replicates the deliberation room and gives the feeling of the audience watching a play up close and personal. For a remake, I would have thought that forty years hence would have made some considerable alterations in the way the jurors speak to one another. Aside from the inclusion of a few expletives to demonstrate the easing of social conventions that have, incredibly, branded the film with a PG-13 rating, the teleplay sticks almost verbatim to the 1957 film while managing to pad out the running time to 117 minutes, a full 21 minutes longer than Mr. Lumet’s version. Even 1976’s All the Preseident’s Men with its multiple F-bombs, dropped however casually, managed a PG-rating. The opportunity to update the story with discussions of murder and justice, especially coming on the heels of the explosion and proliferation of televised court proceedings and crime-based television shows, the Rodney King beatings, race relations and the burning of Los Angeles in 1992, and the O.J. Simpson trial, is all there for the taking but is blatantly and noticeably eschewed. The lack of cell phones and the absence of the then-six-year-old World Wide Web is also jarring as they were becoming prevalent at the time of filming.

12 Angry Men is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber and is the most bare-bones release that I have seen from them. The disc’s sole extra is the requisite trailer, this one for the VHS release of the film. Mr. Friedkin has provided some terrific commentaries in the past, most notably on The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), and the aforementioned To Live and Die in L.A., and I would have loved to have heard his thoughts on this release as he is such an entertaining and informative speaker.

The viewer has the choice of watching the film in either 1.33:1, which is the original analog television aspect ratio, or 1.78:1 for anamorphically enhanced high definition televisions.

It has been twenty-five years since this version originally aired, and we are in desperate need of 12 Angry Jurors comprised of men and women from diverse ethnic backgrounds with the inclusion of examples of and discussions regarding forensic science, computers, and DNA. The story needs relevance and a much-needed facelift so that a fitting update is truly possible.

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By Todd Garbarini

We have all had those days where nothing, literally nothing, ever seems to go right. As we leave the comfort of childhood and make our way into the battlefield of adolescence and then ultimately into the often-nonsensical world of the adult, the issues that we face grow daily and exponentially. Traveling during the holidays is a small albeit often infuriating annual torture that most of us put ourselves through (often begrudgingly) for purposes of keeping the peace with significant others or ensuring that our names are included in our relatives’ last wills and testaments or for other reasons too numerous to entertain.

One of the most traveled days of the year in the United States is indubitably Thanksgiving. Cinematic depictions of the Fourth Thursday of November tend to mirror the insanity of hosting a meal for family members while others are more innocuous. The fine Showtime series Brotherhood from the mid-aughts depicts the inner workings of a Rhode Island family embroiled in politics and organized crime, two areas they excel in, though in the twentieth episode of the series no one can seem to cook a Thanksgiving turkey to save their life. Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) is a rare outing that paints Thanksgiving the way that it should be (though I would have thrown in a TV somewhere on the set with a broadcast of March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934) for good measure).

A scenario that anyone who has traveled by public transportation prior to the holiday can easily relate to is the marathon run by Neal Page (Steve Martin) which begins innocently enough as he attempts to casually bolt from a soporific advertising meeting with a New York client to make his way back home to Chicago in the late John Hughes’s comedy Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which was released on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 1987. Neal manages to hail a cab, but it is commandeered by another passenger at the last minute. Making his way to JFK Airport, Neal sits opposite the very person who took the cab he wanted, a jovial and highly talkative shower curtain ring salesman named Del Griffith (John Candy). In true-to-life form, Neal and Del sit next to one another in the plane. Del chews Neal’s ear off because he loves talking, and this quality makes him an expert sales rep. Neal grimaces and does his best to hide his umbrage when Del removes his shoes and socks which, while comedic in the film, has now become a common breach of etiquette on flights to the point that airplane personnel should be given permission to discharge the offenders down the inflatable raft prior to take off. A snowstorm hijacks their plans, and the plane is rerouted to Wichita, KS wherein they share not only a motel room, but the same bed.

Del’s idiosyncrasies come to light and receives a hasher-than-expected tongue lashing from Neal who just wants to get home and whose intolerance for the situation at hand is slowly reaching a boiling point. A burglar swipes cash from both of their wallets limiting their options to get back home. Despite an amusing and understandable vituperative outburst laden with F-bombs that Neal suffers at the airport counter (the sole reason for the film’s unfair R-rating), Planes ends with a heartfelt and emotional denouement that anticipates Martin Brest’s best film, Midnight Run (1988), another great “road” comedy film that also has an emotional story at its center – to say nothing of both films’ uses of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”.

Planes has been released on home video a multitude of times in all recent formats. Its latest incarnation is in the form of a two-disc set. The first disc contains a 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) Blu-ray and presents the film in Dolby Vision and High Dynamic Range (HDR). Other reviewers have complained about the picture quality and its lack of color(?), but it looked fine on my 4K setup. For the subject matter and the age of the film, I believe that one could do much worse. Among the extras on this disc:

Getting There is Half the Fun: The Story of Planes, Trains and Automobiles – this piece runs about 17 minutes and is a panel discussion from the time of the film’s release with reporters and the stars and director, interspersed with comments from the supporting performers. Mr. Hughes was initially a writer for National Lampoon Magazine and his articles brought him to screenwriting.

John Hughes: Life Moves Pretty Fast – this is a roughly 54-minute piece that, unfortunately, is told in the past tense as Mr. Hughes tragically passed away in New York at the age of 59 while jogging in August 2009. Much of the interviews in this piece are reminiscences about working with him and are tinged with poignancy and sadness. It is comprised of two smaller pieces: John Hughes: The Voice of a Generation and Heartbreak and Triumph: The Legacy of John Hughes.

John Hughes for Adults – this piece is four minutes and discusses his transition from making movies about young adults (he hates the word “teenagers”) to films for adults.

A Tribute to John Candy – this is a three-minute tribute to this comic who brought out the best in those he worked with.

The second disc is where this release really shines. This is a standard Blu-ray disc (BD) in 1080p very cleverly titled Lost Luggage that contains a treasure trove of both deleted scenes and extended scenes that made their way on to the proverbial cutting room floor. Aside from one sequence that contains a hilarious visual gag that I refuse to spoil (it is HD quality and is in finished form), all the other presented scenes are taken from VHS cassettes found in director Hughes’ archives/estate. While the video quality is what you would expect from VHS, all the scenes seem to be mined from raw footage and lacks sound effects and are by no means a finished product. However, despite this drawback, the footage presented is entertaining and definitely worth seeing. It also includes Dylan Baker’s onscreen audition for Owen, as well as more extended blabbering from Del in Neal’s ear prior to takeoff. I wish that they had also included onscreen bloopers.

True fans of this film should splurge for the upgrade for this reason alone. John Candy was a treasure, and his absence is truly missed and still felt today.

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By Todd Garbarini

The summer of 1978 was one of the best summers that I can recall from childhood. My grandmother took my sister and I to see Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty's remake of 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan. I immediately took to Mr. Beatty’s interpretation of Joe Pendleton, despite not being an avid fan of football. Two years later I was introduced to Jack Nicholson's work when, in July 1980, I saw a broadcast of Mike Nichols’ 1975 film The Fortune on ABC-TV in which he co-starred with Mr. Beatty, along with Stockard Channing. It was not a particularly memorable film, but I enjoyed both of them in their respective roles.

In the winter of 1981, Paramount Pictures released Reds, a three-and-one-quarter hour long drama that Mr. Beatty wrote, produced, and directed. I had seen the ads for the film and while traveling to and from New York City with my Boy Scout troop to broaden our horizons of the world of art by visiting the Museum of Modern Art. We spent a significant amount of time in New York's Pennsylvania train station awaiting our journey home, which was an education in and of itself. Aside from the cross-dressers and drug addicts, there was a video playback system positioned near the rear of the terminal. This advertising mechanism the name of which completely escapes me, was sponsored by Paramount Pictures. It ran movie trailers on ¾” U-matic videotape for several films released by the studio. One of them was Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite film of that year, and another one was Reds. I never had the opportunity to see Reds theatrically, and my parents correctly figured that the film would have gone way over my head. The prospect of sitting in a theater for nearly three-and-a-half hours did not sit well with them, understandably so. Movie theater seats in those days were simply not comfortable. I did not catch up with Reds until many years later, but the film has finally found its way restored on Blu-ray for its 40^th anniversary. I’m finally getting around to review it.

If there is anything that can be said about this film, Reds is about many things. It is a love story, it is an ambitious work, it is the brainchild of a man who managed to pull off an extraordinary feat of filmmaking, and it is arguably the last of the big-budgeted sprawling epics of the time, following Michael Cimino’s failed Heaven’s Gate from the previous year. While I am not completely understanding of the ideologies in the politics involved, I can safely say that Reds is probably not the sort of film that would be green-lit today, as the climate of filmmaking now is completely different than it was four decades ago.

Reds opened on Friday, December 4, 1981 nationwide, however the story it depicts begins sixty-six years earlier in 1915 when Louise Bryant, expertly portrayed by Diane Keaton who had already appeared in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) and played opposite Woody Allen in six films, meets fellow journalist John Reed (Warren Beatty) at a Portland, Oregon lecture. She interviews him in an hours-long session that compels her to leave her stuffy husband (Nicolas Coster) and move with Reed to Greenwich Village in New York City where she is introduced to anarchist and author Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, who won an Oscar for her performance) and Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson), the playwright.

Following a move to Provincetown, Massachusetts, Bryant and Reed find themselves involved in the local theater scene. Bryant has realized that her writing is what makes her truly happy, and her ideologies begin to align with Reed’s, who is now involved in labor strikes with the Communist Labor Party of America. These people are called “Reds,” hence the film’s title. While Reed is off covering the 1916 Democratic National Convention in Missouri, Bryant becomes romantically involved with O’Neill, the truth of which comes to Reed’s attention when he returns to Massachusetts and finds a letter O’Neill wrote Bryant inside the pages of a book. Despite this, he still loves Bryant and after marrying, they move to upstate New York. However, a fight ensues when evidence of his own affairs comes to light, which causes Bryant to take a position of war correspondent in Europe, a role that Reed also follows despite his doctor’s admonitions to slow down. The Russian Revolution commences, and Bryant and Reed are reunited.

Following an intermission (possibly the last major American film to feature one, not counting Serio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America in 1984), Reed publishes his famous Ten Days That Shook the World and becomes inebriated on the ideals perpetuated by the Revolution and does his best to introduce the United States to the political theory of Communism, the antithesis of the beliefs espoused by Grigory Zinoviev (Jerzy Kosinski) and the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, the effects of typhus catch up with him following a prison stint in Finland. The film’s most celebrated sequence is Reed’s return to Moscow and his reunion with Bryant at a train station. His demise occurs shortly thereafter, while Bryant can only look on, helplessly.

The supporting cast is excellent and the transfer on this Blu-ray is beautiful. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro added this film to his Oscar collection following his win for his work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). He would later win again for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), although not having even been nominated for his stunning work on Signor Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972) or Luna (1979) makes one scratch their head in disbelief.

Reds was a boxoffice bomb despite the fact that the film was nominated for Best Picture and Beatty was named Best Director. Beatty’s sentimental look at a man who espoused Communism was ill-timed for the beginning of the Reagan era.

There is a second Blu-ray added which consists of the same extras that accompanied the 25^th anniversary DVD edition:

Witness To Reds:

The Rising (SD, 6:29)

Comrades (SD, 13:30)

Testimonials (SD, 11:58)

The March (SD, 9:07)

Revolution, Part 1 (SD, 10:18)

Revolution, Part 2 (SD, 6:55)

Propaganda (SD, 9:11)

The story of the making of this film and Paramount Pictures’ (which was owned by Gulf and Western at the time) willingness to make it is a fascinating one. While the film looks beautiful, I would have loved a running commentary from the major performers giving their insights and memories of the making of the film. A missed opportunity to be sure, but the film alone is enough to warrant the purchase.

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