Savant's new reviews today are
Five fast reviews today, including the new Criterion disc of Night and the City for which Savant did a commentary for last October, ta-dah! I have some days off from editing work, an intense regimen that I love but that leaves little time for other activities. I'll soon be caught up with reviews and ready to take on the big February releases everyone's looking forward to, while trying to cook up other non-reviewing assignments.
Thanks for all the support, especially those people as excited about the rejuvenation of Major Dundee as I am. It's an odd turn of events and I'm dying to write about it. I should have worked harder to get published on Dundee or Peckinpah long ago. Some writers have asked why I'm not incensed that Sony is messing around with the 1965 original movie at this late date. Here was my answer to one of them:
"I put Dundee in a very special category, as a broken, unfinished, abandoned and screwed up movie. What it always needed was a full re-cut. The editing job is abominable and there were tons of slow motion action scenes that were unused - in the rush back then to hack together a quick release, nobody took the time to check them out. The dialogue tracks are raw garbage right from the cutting room with a few cheap wild lines thrown in where needed. Richard Harris didn't redub his badly pronounced Spanish and one laugh from Dub Taylor is repeated about 5 times.
The music was always awful, although I certainly grew used to some of the themes. The music defeats the mood of almost every scene. Especially now when the picture looks so good, the music just drags it all down. I was shocked when Grover Crisp stated his intention to rescore; I'd never heard of anyone doing that.
The new score may or may not be wonderful (Sony will be keeping the old score right next to it on the disc) but I don't think it will be any less correct than the old one. Peckinpah didn't have anything to do with the original finishing of the film, a terrible rush job. The movie is really a sloppy rough cut, left unfinished.
So I'm happy this is happening ... Dundee might be reborn as a movie with some respect."
Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at January 29, 2005 08:16 PM