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Hello - The heat's broken a bit here so I'm giving the air conditioner a day off. Four foreign films today, three French (although one of those is primarily in English) and one a BBC Television show. As a gesture toward good discs I had to skip earlier in the year, Savant is presently backtracking to write up Anchor Bay's five-title British War Boxed Set from back in March.

As promised, here's a report on the Autry Museum's new Sergio Leone career exhibit.

The Autry museum is a fairly large venue with several upstairs changing galleries and a large permanent downstairs exhibit. Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy is the new attraction upstairs. It's based on several years worth of research trips to Italy to visit Leone's family and associates. Curator Estella Chung brought back a sizeable quantity of original memorabilia and relics for the exhibit, enhanced by key items from local collector-experts Don Bruce, Tom Betts, Ernest D. Farino and many others. Bruce provided an original camera slate from Once Upon a Time in the West and pinpointed the location of the exhibit's elusive 'holy grail,' Clint Eastwood's original poncho from the Dollars Trilogy.

Noted Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling is the guiding co-curator and many of the exhibits are from his personal collections.

The show's concentration is the Dollars trilogy and OUATITW, featuring Leone artifacts from his childhood onward, literally including the comic books he read as a child. The walls are covered with extremely rare movie posters (the name 'Bob Robertson' shows up a lot), scripts and documents, Carlo Simi scene drawings and blueprints, and large photographs. The exhibit is 'narrative': One walks through it and it tells a story from one point to the next. There are many large projection video screens, some showing clips, others interviews (I noticed Joe Dante and John Carpenter in a couple) and others clips from associated movies, like Ben-Hur. From across the room I saw Robert Mitchum in a clip I couldn't identify (Pursued?) so Savant can't claim it was all old hat, even after a couple of years of working with the Leone westerns on tape.

For actual artifacts there are original Winchesters and Colts, etc.; costumes, (many from OUATITW) and Clint Eastwood's entire original rig - the previously-mentioned poncho and his .45 Colts with snake-grips.

Giù la testa and Il mio nome é nessuno are represented by one poster each and a couple of photos.

I read some captions and all were carefully written and of good general interest - only those who have memorized the Frayling books would learn nothing new.

I'd say the exhibit is very good. It's billed as the largest ever on a single director but there's really no precedent that I know of. The gallery is laid out with considerable visual interest - full-sized sculptures of Frank's Cattle Corner gang are at its center - but it is not overwhelmingly large. I've heard of no plans to tour the exhibit, as the arrangements to display the artifacts just for Los Angeles were complicated enough. Friends and Leone fanatics have asked me to advise if it warrants taking a trip from some other part of the country and even from Europe. That I honestly couldn't say. It depends on how much of a fanatic one is, and that's completely subjective.

Thanks, Glenn Erickson

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Reviews are still lean, but September and October are going to be jam packed ... I've backed up tonight and taken a look at Jubal, a western I had to skip a couple of months back.

Tonight I'll be attending an opening ceremony for an elaborate Sergio Leone exhibit at the Gene Autry museum in Griffith Park -- I'll report on what I find out. Doing four large Leone special editions put Savant in contact with the Autry over a year ago, and we saw their preparations as well as making a preview short subject about the exhibit. It sounds like it should be something special.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

I've reviewed the new movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory just because the flow of DVDs is slowing up and I thought the film very enjoyable. Although I filed my mini-review of the new theatrical War of the Worlds at DVDTalk a couple of weeks ago, I've just added it to my main page now ...

A slightly depressing note - the opening promo on the Mike Hammer: Private Eye disc from Tango has clips of other company product, and one was a shot of Burt Lancaster from Zulu Dawn, which is to Savant a very important release. The movie played one theater out in the Simi Valley when released in 1979, and Savant has never even seen it in Panavision, let alone Dolby Stereo sound. The short clip on the Mike Hammer DVD was flat, grainy and looked just as ragged as the old pan-scanned and squeezed Image laserdisc, the one I still play even though it's a snow-blizzard of laser rot. Let's hope that if Tango is indeed behind the release, that it has something better in mind for the DVD premiere of Zulu Dawn.

I've gotten a lot (exactly 14) emails approving of the last chapter of my The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit review, a paragraph where Savant vented a bit on the crummy Anti-Piracy spots that keep showing up. So even haters of gray flannel can get the benefit, I hereby proudly reprint it here:

Hear, hear .... Thanks, Glenn Erickson

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Another toasty, hazy week in Los Angeles. Savant will be seeing some new movies and hopefully getting early copies of some of the more desirable August releases. I have a preview review of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit up today, and it's over three weeks early. That means doubling back on some (not maliciously) skipped titles and digging into a fat TV compilation of Stacy Keach Mike Hammer episodes. Savant's choices have been more eclectic than usual lately, which is probably a good thing; but come September and October we're going to be up to our gills in Halloween-themed horror films and film noir from Warners and Fox. I hope to stay on top of the majority of it all.

I'm also tempted to head for UCLA next week to see a particular show in their Don Siegel series. I've read about Baby Face Nelson for thirty years, but in all that time have never seen it show up on television, tape, laser or DVD. This is the one with Mickey Rooney as manic killer Nelson and Carolyn Jones as his equally dangerous girlfriend; Leo Gordon plays Dillinger and Elisha Cook is Homer Van Meter. Originally a United Artists release, unless I've missed it it's become much more rare than other independent pix from the time.

Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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It's a fast Saturday this week ... three reviews, and one of them a disc that got passed over a month ago. I hope to follow with a review of Fury as well ... it's a title that I wanted to say a lot about, but it escaped me. Really interesting vintage discs are going to be on the scarce side for a few weeks, but we should have enough to keep Savant going ... Thanks, and please forgive the terrible typos - missing words seem to be the biggest culprit these days --- Glenn Erickson

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Not much to report here; had a rant prepared but decided against it, as it wasn't a big enough deal and wasn't worth all the attention. Finally saw the last STAR WARS movie tonight and liked the storyline but not the dialogue script .... and the terrible acting by the leads - not that my opinion means much at this late date. Probably showing my age, but with the way big-budget CGI movies are going, I'm really in favor of the old adage that More is Less. Nice lizard, though, always liked lizards ... Thanks! Glenn Erickson

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A happy Hot July to you, well at least if you happen to be somewhere warm. Not much to report from the slightly hazy Hollywood (Smog? What's that?) but you'll be able to sleep better knowing that Savant is watering his lawn like a good taxpayer, while awaiting the second half of an editing job. When life becomes so intolerable that you need to read DVD reviews, DVD Savant will be here, never fear. Thanks for reading - Glenn

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Hello, and happy day after the 4th, although this is being written on the 4th, and ... you get the idea.

Savant joined the multitudes yesterday, took in Spielberg's War of the Worlds and was very pleased by it. Although not a bounty of surprises, it was very surprising to see Tom Cruise play a genuine ordinary guy instead of his usual obnoxious persona. Kenneth Turan's review worried me because he said the movie was excellent yet only praised its character interaction - Savant feared another Spielberg bonding movie wherein an alien invasion became a pretext for a father to heartwarmingly re-connect (sniff!) with his kids. That happens but thankfully is not the whole show.

Spielberg and writer David Koepp do a minimal update to the 1899 original, retaining most of the novel's setpieces intact and slipping in only a few key lines and visuals from the bravura 1953 George Pal version (itself set to be reissued in November, according to authority Bill Warren, in a remastered superduper special edition DVD). Just as in the book, we're limited to what Cruise's main character sees and hears. That sometimes seems disappointing, as when an entire military assault happens offscreen, just over a hill. I think the only legit complaint from some audience members is that although we get many chilling scenes of the towering alien war machines (here called Tripods) in action, there are no rousing battles per se, only a repetitive series of staggering defeats that properly reflects the tone of the book: "The rout of humanity, the massacre of mankind."

The machines are curiously old-fashioned metal monsters, but good CGI makes them into terrifying juggernauts, often seen massing on horizons while thousands of people flee in terror. The Tripods give out with scary klaxon-like horns before pressing their attacks, and what we see of them is all shown in nervous impressionistic splashes - whatever details Cruise might pick up as he scrambles for safety.

When we finally see the actual monsters, they aren't as scary as was the 1953 xenomorph cooked up for Pal by Albert Nozaki, and many viewers are going to wish that Cruise could just park the kids somewhere and find out if an axe or a sharp stick might send an alien running. WOTW is like a real-life war in that one can't pick personal fights in the middle of a hostile invasion. The movie actually has the guts NOT to do anything for an effect ... a serious attitude in Spielberg's approach that puts War of the Worlds among his best work.

Spielberg goes lightly on the politics, making several references to invasion-occupation stragegies - a school report about France and Algeria, for starters. The film in general implies that the alien's overpowering weaponry is much like using helicopters and smart bombs against third world populations that can't defend themselves. Spielberg is wise to put the line "occupations never work" into the mouth of a borderline lunatic - few viewers are going to come away with the notion that WOTW is an anti-Iraq statement.

War of the Worlds is satisfying because it doesn't pander with a political message or press too heavily with Spielberg's frequent audience sap: "Life will find a way," etc.. H.G. Wells' original gave God full credit for slaying the vermin from Mars and the pious George Pal soaked his version with churchy sentiments, but Spielberg drops most all of the religious context as well. No need to give some pundit ammunition to decide that War of the Worlds is covertly telling us to ban abortions or stop stem cell research.

Savant hasn't seen a satisfactory Science Fiction movie of this kind in ages (this doesn't count the Science Fantasy-Buck Rogers world of Star Wars, etc.) and hopes that Spielberg's film encourages others to make classy versions of genre classics - or better yet, bring forth movies based on untouched SF works. What we could use is a kind of Merchant-Ivory approach to classic genre tales.

I think I wanna see it again, like, right away. That hasn't happened since I saw Crack in the World.

- Glenn Erickson

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A happy weekend to all ... Savant actually has the weekend off but might not be using all of it to write, so we'll just have to see what reviews are available for next Tuesday. Thanks for all the corrections and notes. Perhaps I'll have to break down and go see a movie in a theater again ... War of the Worlds is tugging at my elbow, saying to give it a shot. Take care -- Glenn Erickson