Another Epic tonight, along with a rare Czech movie with a hotsy-totsy reputation.
No real news on METROPOLIS yet; I've talked to one of the restorers but won't print his response until he has a chance to review it. There's a nice thread at The Mobius Home Video Sci Fi Forum debating the topic and I've put my two cents in on the subject there for now. I've gotten a number of nice Emails about this, one today from a European fellow named Guido. He reports that "the French-German tv-channel arte will broadcast the restored version tomorrow (?) night, and that it's listed with a running time of 148 minutes. It will be accompanied by the other newly-recorded score, by Bernd Schuldheis. It was for the screenings at last year's Berlin film festival" - where the Deutches themselves saw fit to show METROPOLIS at 20 fps.
The reviews: MGM's DVD of The Pride and the Passion isn't as wonderful as the others in the series, but the overblown Stanley Kramer production does have a goofy appeal through the glorious miscasting of Frank Sinatra, and the stiff characters assigned Cary Grant and Sophia (yabbadayabbada) Loren.
Image Entertainment's Ecstasy is the German version of a notorious Czech movie from 1932, which stars Hedy Lamarr (then Kiesler) as a lovestruck runaway bride who meets the man of her dreams while skinny dipping. It's sexy as all getout, but mostly because the movie is an almost-silent 'symphony of love' directed very expressionistically in the style of Murnau's SUNRISE. No wonder Lamarr was such a dream girl - she's much more animated and emotional here than in her later MGM films.
Let's see, this is Thursday ... be back on Saturday. Glenn Erickson
Posted by gkleinman at June 04, 2002 10:37 AM