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Apparently, it's official - Criterion has announced George's Franju's Eyes without a Face among their upcoming releases. The movie means a lot to me personally, as I spent most of the 1970s desperately trying to see it along with The Seventh Victim and Vertigo, two other dream pictures that were unavailable for a long period in those pre-video years. All three were movies that appeared in my dreams and became enlarged beyond their actual dimensions, so when I write about Eyes I'll try to keep in mind that others won't be starting from the assumption that it's a classic. It's slow and quiet and chilling in a way that hasn't been seen in a while. It's got an eerily naturalistic texture and a visual design derived from Jean Cocteau. The theme is hard to decipher: Mad surgery and atrocious medical ethics evoke fascism and the abuse of power, but like many older classic horror films, there's an element of beauty to the horror. It has one of Maurice Jarre's first and best musical scores, that was described by Raymond Durgnat as cruelly elegant, like "black ice." The disc will probably be my favorite of the year.

I'm back editing again, but this time I have stockpiled a few reviews so maybe the pace won't appear to drop as I start putting in longer hours. Enjoy the Oscars! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Hello. The Mel Gibson movie about Jesus is sure monopolizing the airwaves today. I'll be very curious to see if all the notoriety translates into huge attendance figures. I've been watching more network programming than usual, and really noticing how movie promotion is weaved into news programs to an alarming degree. I think it's because the news organizations are owned by corporations that also own movie companies. How reliable can our news be when promoting a product is more important than journalistic truth? I think our channels of information - TV news, newspapers - should be independently owned and managed, but I don't hear that kind of thinking. We're kept too busy listening to non-debates about Janet Jackson.

Sam Fuller's old movie Park Row is a wonderfully patriotic movie that addresses this problem perfectly. It celebrates the rough & tumble days in 1880 New York when scores of cheap tabloids fought for circulation, and is an emotional argument for the free competition of ideas and information. Many of the papers were yellow rags but the choice they offered made a difference. The title sequence for the movie is backgrounded by hundreds of newspaper mast-heads from all over the country. Fuller says right up front that the free press is what makes us free, and as long as we have all these independent voices to cry out when injustices are done, then America will be all right. It almost makes you want to cry, knowing that almost all of the papers shown are gone or organized into lock-step with a few major syndicates, all drawing their news from the same handful of sources. Now the business is tidy and manageable, but I'm not sure it can be independent when a few big corporations have so much power. Sam Fuller made an obscure little movie, but it's like a beacon of truth. I wish people were talking about Park Row instead of the latest manufactured media sensation.

What happened? ... There was this soapbox there, and after that I don't remember. Pardon.

My first Ingmar Bergman review goes up today. Two of the five films have been recalled so the full boxed set won't be released until April 20. I'll review the other three titles earlier, as they're already out individually. Thanks! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Well, howdy again from a wet Los Angeles, where people never learned to drive in anything but perfect weather. I understand the rest of the country is still freezing and snowed in, so I'm not asking for sympathy here.

Some powerful pictures in the review list today. The Chase and Wisconsin Death Trip are entertainments easy to recommend. Criterion's Salvatore Giuliano was a big Huh? to me two days ago, but after seeing it I've formed a completely different attitude to the way 'real' events old or new are presented in movies. The film takes a highly contentious piece of (then-recent) Italian history and presents it in a way that reveals the truth behind the official story - but it doesn't invent anything. There are no invented scenes where characters recite authors' messages, and no 'personal' background on people nobody reliable ever got close to, like the bandit hero of the title. After years of insufferable docudramas that trivialize big issues and muddy the real meanings of events, this was quite a revelation. It wasn't entertaining in any conventional way. I was fascinated, and rather humbled ... I'd never heard of this picture. Criterion's disc convinces me that there are still great treasures to be discovered in movies unseen.

In addition to the Savant reviews above, I've added a couple of short notices to the DVDTalk review database only:
Hamilton Mattress, Corvette: The Fastest 50 Years and The Statue of Liberty (The History Channel).

Thanks for reading ... stay warm, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Some helpful readers have pointed out to me that two titles I hoped were on the way, actually have hard street dates. The 1960 seminal Eurohorror Mill of the Stone Women is due out on March 16 from Ventura, and Bob Clark's Vietnam War ghost story Deathdream should be here on May 25 from Blue Underground.

Equally exciting is Fox's April 20th release announcement of Alexander Mackendrick's A High Wind in Jamaica starring Anthony Quinn, and James Coburn in the role that got him his big Fox contract. It'll be an opportunity for most of us to see it in Cinemascope for the first time. I like Master and Commander even better now ... as High Wind has been released clearly to tie-in with it. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Hope you had a pleasant Valentine's day, and if any of it involved watching DVDs I hope they were romantic ones. Today I have one blockbuster that some sites accuse of double-dipping (I think not), a Paul Verhoeven gore-fest uncut, and four plays from the American Film Theater. Correspondent Robert Spuhler adds an extra with a look at a colossal eight disc set that contains twenty hours of poker .... yikes. Thanks for reading. Glenn

Savant's new reviews today are

It's a nice mix today. I remember showing the Beatrix Potter movie at the UCLA dorms in about 1973, and making a hit with young women sick of male programmers booking Westerns and action films. Love at Large is a perfect Valentine's day film ... it's a trifle soft-headed but has a sweet perspective on romance that fits the bill. And Le Corbeau near knocked me down. Encountering something this special is like discovering a new favorite.

Not a lot of web board feedback discussion on the Star Wars issue. The movies are still as good as they ever were, but I do think it is a case of consumer burnout. It's like never getting that toy you wanted, and discovering in the process that, yes, you don't need everything you want. Or maybe it's like the rather sad story behind Annie Get Your Gun - I saw lots of mail from senior citizens written in the 80s, begging to have it on video. By the time the Betty Hutton movie finally became available, I fear a big chunk of its prime audience had passed away.

But never fear, the moment a film becomes less-than-essential for the average fan, Savant's radar picks up on it for some reason (this accounts for the rarified readership around these pages). Star Wars was the last big phenom Savant experienced like a 'kid' and I'll have plenty to say. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Savant usually doesn't go in for announcing most upcoming discs, as there's too many to keep track of and I'll just make mistakes. And then there's the titles I hear about from unofficial sources, and must keep mum about.

For instance, for a week I've known something was cooking with the INGMAR BERGMAN box, yet couldn't say anything. The set's been shoved back a couple of months to fix two of the transfers. This is a good thing, I suppose. I was just catching up with the reviews on these, and will now review them separately, putting off covering the affected discs until the new set comes out. HOUR OF THE WOLF and SHAME are simple substitute-the-master fixes, but PERSONA seems to have cropped in a bit, which would require a new transfer and would take months. That one's not being re-done.

Lucas announced his special edition versions of the first three STAR WARS movies, which is five years too late for his loyal fans. I was 25 when these movies originally started coming out, and they were the last big 'youth pictures' that I felt were aimed straight at me & my generation. At the time, I even saw some of the special effects work being done. So I'll be covering them for sure. I'll just have to pretend I'm seeing the originals, through Lucas's 1997 digital screwing-around.

No matter how Lucasfilm presents his franchise, it's altogether possible that time has finally caught up with it. Between the dismal quality of the second trilogy, and the general eclipsing of the STAR WARS craze by the LORD OF THE RINGS phenomenon, for Luke Skywalker and company the parade may have already gone by. I got this feeling last fall when the INDIANA JONES discs came out. Five years ago, the web was visibly shaking with demand for that series as well. Last Xmas it was greeted with a "that's nice" lack of excitement. I got the set, and only watched parts of the films. I sort of got them for my college-age kids. They didn't watch any, preferring to study the LOTR special editions for the umpteenth time. I think Messrs. Lucas and Spielberg outfoxed themselves.

Spring has a bounty of Savantish library faves - some sensations, but lots of the kinds of stuff I love to dissect. Here's a quickie list of stuff that grabbed my attention:

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (silly, but pretty), The Dresser ("Hold That TRAIN!"), Going in Style, The Grapes of Wrath, Umbrellas of Cherbourg (hopefully remastered), A Room With a View (ditto), Sweeney Todd (the full-play version), The Last of Sheila (missing forever), Jack the Giant Killer (comes with a built-in format controversy), I Could Go On Singing (but I died), Helter Skelter (uncut), Three Women (Criterion out of Fox), Helen of Troy (yay, a good old epic), Dracula has Risen from the Grave (so-so), Taste the Blood of Dracula (ehhh), Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (superb), Dawn of the Dead, The Molly Maguires (snooze), Battleground (yay), Walt Disney on the Front Lines & Walt Disney's Tomorrowland (finally), The Good, The Bad & Ugly (oh boy), The Great Escape (more oh boy). MGM just announced a ton of titles formerly released by Anchor Bay; I hope some of them get new transfers: Custer of the West, Duel in the Sun, Hell in the Pacific, The Last Valley (!!!), and Too Late the Hero.

Without dates but keenly awaited are The Legendary Curse of Lemora, Deathdream, The Mill of the Stone Women and (still a hope) Until the End of the World and Eyes without a Face. I've already talked all of those titles into the ground!

Thanks all. See you in a couple of days, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Hello again. Savant just celebrated a nice birthday with some friends, 12 year-old style - Chocolate cake! Candles! And had a fine time. I'm a day late because of that and some review scrambling. I wrote up a Warners DVD that doesn't come out for four weeks, and therefore have to hold it off for at least two. I also got halfway through a certain boxed set, the reviews of which might want to be delayed pending more information from the publicity people.

Author Brendan G. Carroll has written me an interesting correction for an error in my Robin Hood review of a while back; Mr. Carroll is a biographer of composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the informative letter is there should you care to check it out. Other readers had attempted to clue me to my mistake before, but I didn't catch on.

In Los Angeles, UCLA is holding a screening series of 70s and 80s horror films called Going to Hell this month; it features some Savant faves or wanna-sees like The Vampire Lovers, Bob Clark's Deathdream (planned for DVD release from Blue Underground), Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire, the countercultural zombie film Messiah of Evil (an early effort from the writing the creatives behind American Graffiti) and The Legendary Curse of Lemora, also slated for DVD.

I'm assured that all prints are 35mm in good physical condition. There'll be some guest appearances as well. More info about Going to Hell for Savant readers in the area can be found at the UCLA Film and TV Archive's website calendar. Thanks, Glenn Erickson.

Frequent Savant correspondent Dick Dinman, a sharply opinionated industry veteran with a keen interest in old movies, has initiated a review site of his own called the DVD Classics Corner. It's nicely laid-out with samples of his poster collection. His reviews are compact and well-written, and he backs them up with shorter notices for other discs. He's a real stickler for detail, as I've found out from his many corrections! I'm going to be watching frequently. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Happy Groundhog day, a day late! I had a great Groundhog Day joke about Janet Jackson's shadow and six more weeks of winter, but I couldn't get the update done quickly enough ... Savant's new reviews today are

Another influx of discs brings two huge boxed sets to Savant's attention, and it will take a bit to wade through them ... thanks for all the helpful corrections this week, especially as concerns my ignorance of classical music! Glenn Erickson