Happy Thursday from DVD Savant ... I'm back in harness with three new reviews. It's cool and moist outside this morning, which I hope will translate into conditions better suited to firefighting in the calamitous fires that ring Los Angeles.

Kino's The Man Who Laughs is the best silent film Savant's seen in ages. It's a hybrid costume picture/horror film with Conrad Veidt in one of the most bizarre makeups ever attempted, and is supremely directed by Paul Leni. A much better film than The Phantom of the Opera, this is one neglected silent that will communicate well to modern audiences.

Columbia TriStar has come out with a great disc of Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde, starring knockout stars Loretta Young and sexy Jean Harlow. The pre-code dialogue is racy and provocative, and Harlow and Young take turns with their contrasting sex appeal.

Paramount gives us a bare-bones but solid presentation of John Frankenheimer's odd thriller Black Sunday; Savant tries to fathom why all its excellent qualities don't result in a completely satisfying show. The basic plot is more chilling now than ever, as it in some ways is a blueprint for the events of 9/11. With Robert Shaw, Marthe Keller and Bruce Dern as a Vietnam Vet who's (guess what) emotionally disturbed.

Savant's expecting a bit of a break which should allow him to get back to the reviews with renewed vigor ... there's a backlog right now, but I expect it to break up. For the record, and to let you know which titles I've got in the hopper (some have been out for weeks), here they are: WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?, OLEANNA, LIANNA, THE NIGHT EVELYN RETURNED FROM THE GRAVE, THE STEPHEN SONDHEIM COLLECTION, SU EXCELLENCIA, STORYVILLE, DRAGONSLAYER, DICK VAN DYKE SEASON ONE AND TWO, THE MARRYING KIND, THE GENERAL/STEAMBOAT BILL, JR., HELL'S HIGHWAY, BROADWAY'S LOST TREASURES, THE SOLID GOLD CADILLAC, A CHRISTMAS WISH (THE GREAT RUPERT), THE WORLD OF APU, KANAL, ASHES AND DIAMONDS, THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, TOKYO STORY, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG, SCHIZOPOLIS, LE CERCLE ROUGE, MARY CASSATT, I.M. PEI. I don't know what the order will be but it'll be a mix of old and new. A few might only show up in the DVD Talk index, if I don't have much to say about them, or they're awful transfers.

As Savant approaches 1,000 reviews, I'm also entertaining format changes for the site, especially on the front page with its repetitive information. I know the back archives of reviews are good to peruse, but my old articles need pruning or reorganizing: the practical value of a 1999 piece discussing why a bunch of titles haven't come out has lapsed, when almost all of them have by now. Also my links are way out of date and the site has a search engine can't handle the volume. You know, typical reader-unfriendly glitches that I should be apologizing for. Thanks for reading, for all the corrections and all the help - Glenn Erickson

Happy Friday! Savant's taking an enforced break, and won't be launching any more reviews this weekend - it's a full diet of editorial onlines and recording sessions. Here's promising a glut of reviews as soon as the mad rush to finish my present project wraps up!

Home Vision Entertainment knocks us out with 2 early Peter Weir films, The Cars that Ate Paris & The Plumber. They're together on one disc, and the television movie The Plumber is considered an extra, but it's the classic keeper of the two. The first film, about a town of murdering pirates in the middle of Australia, now plays like a prequel to George Miller's Mad Max movies.

Sofa Entertainment brings us The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring The Beatles, a two disc set containing the full four shows where the Beatles appeared on network TV. It's a terrific historical artifact, with the context of other performers and Tea commercials showing us how special and transcendent the Beatles really were.

Image and Blackhawks David Shepard give us a disc of Max Linder amusements, in Laugh with Max Linder, featuring the 1921 comedy Seven Years' Bad Luck. The tuxedoe'd Linder makes a unique silent clown, comparing well with our American breed of Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

See you next Tuesday! Glenn Erickson

It's plenty hot in California tonight - you can bet the air conditioner got a workout today. Three Savant favorites reviewed :

Warners' The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a doozie of a monster movie and probably the first radioactively-revived threat to mankind invented to put a science fiction spin on a story about a big lizard that goes to town. Ray Harryhausen's first solo effort is a winner, and so is Warners' disc.

Columbia TriStar has a classy offering in Bernard Girard's Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, a caper film with a very quiet message. James Coburn cons Camilla Sparv, but is he just conning himself? Also starring the Los Angeles International Airport circa 1966.

Warners' The Black Scorpion is for hard-core monster fans only, as it's one of the derivative copycats of the Beast above, in this case made by one of the same producers. Stop-motion fans will call it a must-buy, for Willis O'Brien and Pete Peterson's jittery animated scorpion menaces.

This is a crunch weekend. I have help from my friends, but what gets reviewed depends on how much sleep I get. I'm giving it my best ... thanks for the friendly letters and corrections! Glenn Erickson

We're getting by with some help from an author-friend this week, and are dipping both into the new discs available and the Savant backlog:

Warners' The Valley of Gwangi is a personal favorite that everyone admits is a turkey of movie graced with some of the best stop-motion dinosaurs in history. James Franciscus is a dud, but Gwangi the Great uses his razor jaws to show his opinion of the human actors. With a nice interview featurette with Ray Harryhausen.

Stuart Galbraith throws Savant a lifesaver with a trim look at the Brit teleseries Danger Man, The Complete First Season. This is the first incarnation of the Patrick McGoohan spy series, when it was a half hour long and had to do without Johnny Rivers' finger-snapping theme song.

MGM stumbles forward with the Hemdale drama The Boost starring James Woods and Sean Young. Savant has issues with the ideas in and behind the movie, which blame drugs for the failure of a corrupt lifestyle choice, by a person so unstable he would have crashed on lemonade instead of the white powder.

Am looking at a bunch of early Dick Van Dyke episodes - I have Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in but am waiting a little closer to street date to watch it - while trying to catch up with some typical quirky independent product and some slick new HVe and Criterion offerings! Thanks, Glenn Erickson

It's hot here tonight ... but I have four new reviews to round out the week:

Error Correction: I've amended the Prizzi's Honor review, in which I got the specs for the disc wrong and probably misled a bunch of buyers. The disc does NOT have a 16:9 encoded version, only a pan-scan and a flat letterbox transfer. Readers wrote me asking for clarification, and I repeated my wrong information to at least one of them .... many apologies, and a promise to be more careful. GE

Columbia TriStar's Men With Guns is the keeper this week. John Sayles' journey into the lost reaches of the countryside is social comment on the Latin American holocaust combined with great artful storytelling. A doctor goes in search of his student medics, only to find that they've been killed along with untold numbers of Indians and campesinos ... an invisible genocide.

Pioneer's The Kids are Alright is a great revival/restoration/5.1 blowout version of the 1979 compiliation performance film. The Who are here in all their instrument-busting, earsplitting glory, and the picture and sound are far better than they were in the theater.

Home Vision surprises us with the fanciful Carol Reed A Kid for Two Farthings, a strange ensemble piece in a London market street written by Wolf Mankowitz. A boy takes a weakling goat with one horn as a Unicorn, and is convinced it will grant wishes to his needy friends. With Celia Johnson and Diana Dors.

Columbia TriStar is back again with a Fred Astaire/Rita Hayworth musical, You'll Never Get Rich. The story's dopey but the stars carry it like pros, and there's never too long to wait before a superior dance number to a Cole Porter song.

Savant is doubling back to get discs I should have reviewed weeks ago, but I also won't be forgetting expected zowie titles like the 3 Warners monster discs, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Welcome back to DVD Savant, for those AOL subscribers who two days ago received the newsletter for the first time in months. Savant's been chugging along all that time, and you'll find a wealth of reviews you've missed. Here's what's new:

Fox's Classic offering this month is The Mark of Zorro, the nifty Tyrone Power swashbuckler with the razor-sharp fencing scenes and the good sense of humor. Too bad about Laura, which was pulled from the schedule a couple of days ago; I hope it's so they can remaster it, and not because of a legal problem, or an abandonment of the series.

MGM's offering of John Huston's Prizzi's Honor is a fine disc of an odd black comedy that forgot to be funny but remains a major gangster fascination. Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner star, and Anjelica Huston won an Oscar.

Columbia's Cromwell can't be faulted technically, but the film is a weak epic that limped in just as the whole British film industry was collapsing. Alec Guinness holds up his end of the talky script, and Richard Harris sulks and snaps like an irate woodchuck through the whole enterprise. From the auteur of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

It just occurred to me that Newsletter readers often never see this page, so I'd be best off advising them to start doing so in the Newsletter itself. Having DVD Savant's reviews split between this home site and the regular DVD Talk review logs is already somewhat confusing; I often amend and correct mistakes on my site, but not on the DVD Talk über-site. Whatever the remedy, I'm just glad to have part of my readership back. Thanks again, Glenn Erickson

Well, Savant's in a big rush, but wanted to get these reviews out ... see you again on Thursday ...

Warners' The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a great classic of a movie in a fancy package, with a second disc packed with goodies on both the show and director John Huston. Bogart's at his best, and Walter Huston is even better.

Paramount's The Italian Job - 1969 is a pristine version of the original Mini-Cooper armored car heist, this time actually taking place in Italy. It's a stylish comedy caper with Michael Caine that's rather simpleminded but a technical achievement and a pleasure to watch. With Benny Hill and Noel Coward.

Lee Broughton of the UK checks in with a pair of fantastic Japansese fantasy films that, by their descriptions, sound pretty darn weird. Separate Region 2 releases Hiruko the Goblin (live action) and Blue Remains (animated) sound as if they have a surfeit of suspense and fantastic monsters.

Hopefully, this will be the week that AOL starts accepting our newsletter once again ... the spam and porn mass mailings get through fine, along with the hundreds of offers from African crooks to launder millions in my bank account .... so why not an abusive Savant Newsletter? Thanks, Glenn Erickson

Sunday cooks along here in the California heat ... three reviews up, right on schedule:

Columbia TriStar's Nowhere in Africa impressed me as few new films have ... I can't wait to see it again. Columbia's 2 disc special edition presents this great picture in an excellent transfer.

MGM's Some Like it Hot is an older transfer recycled for inclusion in the Billy Wilder Collection released last July. It's a superlative comedy, but could use a new transfer.

The independent docu Mau Mau Sex Sex was a hot theatrical ticket; it's an unhinged look at the lives and careers of jolly sex & smut movie exploiteers David F. Friedman and Dan Sonney that bursts with incredible clips of their 30 years of trashy sleaze, an output often decried as sleazy trash. Very entertaining and illuminating, especially when we find out just how ordinary their home lives are.

Savant just got in some great new pix, and will be doing an early review of the 1969 The Italian Job, a movie I've never been able to resist. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

It's a happy Friday night, and things are cooling off and going well in Los Angeles, if you don't count the insane recall election we're having. To quote Billy Wilder, the situation is Hopeless, but not Serious. The three reviews today have only their variety in common:

MGM's To Live is a great-looking version of Yimou Zhang's intimate epic, a narrative saga of the kind that Hollywood forgot how to tell a long time ago. A very emotional and rewarding film.

New Video's Victory at Sea is a boxed set of the entire 1952 TV series rightly described as 'legendary' on the cover. With great symphonic music, tons of wartime newsreel clips and lots of footage sneaking in from all kinds of non-fiction films, this is a fascinating show. Leonard Graves' commanding voiceover seems extreme now, but is hard not to listen to.

MGM's Tough Guys Don't Dance is another flawless presentation of one of the most gawd-awful films of all time, a clueless, trashy murder mystery that doesn't even begin to know how to be outrageous. Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini star, but don't let the 'Love Story' box illustration fool ya - this ain't no romance. I say we deep-six their heads.

More goodies coming and more on the way - movies good, bad, and too bad not to enjoy, along with some great old titles. Thanks again, Glenn Erickson