DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson's Review Column at DVD Talk

Savant's new reviews today are:

Hard Times
Blu-ray

Charles Bronson is the hard-as-nails pickup fighter in 1933 New Orleans and James Coburn his unstable promoter in Walter Hill's debut directing assignment. A sleeper hit that grabbed both the martial arts audience (the fights are that good) and the fans that made Bronson one of the biggest stars of the '70s. With Jill Ireland, and Strother Martin as a predictably colorful gent named Poe, who even gets an opportunity to quote Edgar Allan. In Blu-ray from Twilight Time.
6/15/13

Safety Last!
Blu-ray

Restored and remastered, comedian Harold Lloyd's biggest silent hits are coming back to go shoulder to shoulder with Chaplin and Keaton. Harold plays his patented ambitious go-getter, who go-gets himself into hot water inflating his image for his best girl and his best friend. The famous climax is the extended climb of the face of a tall building, with a new hazard appearing at each floor. The extras include an excellent Kevin Brownlow documentary and a new featurette with location expert John Bengtson visiting the actual rooftops where parts of the daredevil climb were (partially) faked. In Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
6/15/13

and

Blowing Wild
Blu-ray

Oil man Gary Cooper can't shake the lustful attentions of Barbara Stanwyck, who doesn't care that she's married to Coop's old buddy Anthony Quinn. Ruth Roman is potentially Cooper's new girl, if they can scrape together enough cash to escape the South American hellhole where they're stuck. And if this is South America, where did all those Mexican bandits come from? This big-scale but blatantly plagiaristic adventure-western baldly lifts whole chapters of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The Wages of Fear; redeeming it is a delirious Dimitri Tiomkin music score and a wholly demented title tune, sung in top form by none other than Frankie Laine. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
6/15/13

Hello!

Congrats to Video Watchdog for publishing Allan MacInnis's interview with French director Bertrand Tavernier in their issue number 173. Allan gets illuminating answers from Tavernier about the diverging versions of his amazing science fiction film Death Watch, while also discussing the cut and uncut versions of the director's murder mystery In the Electric Mist.

And Sam Peckinpah expert Mike Siegel contributes a comprehensive twelve-page making-of article on Straw Dogs to the Volume 9, number 26 issue of Cinema Retro magazine, the colorful large format "essential guide to the movies of the '60s and '70s". The collectors and experts that helped me with Sergio Leone issues put me in touch with Siegel, who really knows the works of director Peckinpah.

Finally, I'll preview my upcoming review of Criterion's Things to Come Blu-ray with a note inspired by disc commentary track speaker David Kalat, who caught an amazing discontinuity in the film that I'd never seen. I'll only hint that it happens when the young space travelers actually enter the space capsule to be shot 'round the moon by the film's absurd Space Gun.

I had a chance to study the film more closely, and found another odd editing / continuity puzzle. At 44:37 into the picture, the warlord called The Boss (Ralph Richardson) returns on horseback from fighting the "Hill People". He and his consort Roxana dismount. After a quick cutaway, we see the same wide shot of the front of the Great Hall, but the crowd is grouped differently and there are no horses or troops present. The film dissolves into a scene in which The Boss berates his scientists to get his ancient airplanes flying.

At 49:07 there's a ragged cut from The Boss shouting, "I want those planes!" to the same exterior angle of the Hall. The cut drops us right into the middle of a music cue, which ends in less than five seconds. Look quick and you'll see the horses ridden by The Boss and Roxana two scenes ago, being led away to the left. The shot would seem to be the real transition from the arrival scene, earlier. In fact, although The Boss has just finished trouncing the Hill Tribe, a couple of dialogue lines in the scene with the scientists suggest that the job is perhaps not quite yet done: "Victory approaches!" Was the 'bully the scientists' scene meant to come earlier, perhaps? Was this editing snafu incorporated into the (unseen, as yet lost) long cut, or something that cropped up during later, hasty cut-downs?

Things to Come shows so much hasty cutting to shorten dialogue scenes, that a single glitch like this one barely makes a ripple. But I thought I'd mention it anyway, just in case. My review of the Criterion disc should be up here at DVD Savant in about a week.

Thanks for reading! -- Glenn Erickson