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October 30, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Astaire and Rogers Ultimate Collector's Edition (Volume 2):
Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Carefree, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
 Warner DVD
Icons of Horror Collection: Boris Karloff:
The Black Room, The Man They Could Not Hang, Before I Hang, The Boogie Man Will Get You
 Sony
and
Hands Over the City  Criterion

Halloween is upon us, although it's not felt in my neighborhood any more: The street stays dark and the Trick-or-Treaters stay away, probably an indication of the heightened sense of fear and distrust of our own neighbors that has come with the times. I'm sure the tradition is healthy and alive most everywhere else, but something's changed around here. I'll probably be tucked away in an upper room somewhere, burning up a keyboard.

Not much else to say except that Savant will have Gary Cooper and Tarzan movies on the way very soon. Am reading up on Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead and have decided that a short movie review is no place to figure out all the crazy things that are happening in that movie .... Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson



October 27, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

 
Who Wants to Kill Jessie?  Facets Video
Alfred Hitchcock Presents - Season Two  Universal
Marie Antoinette  Warner
David Copperfield  Warner and
A Tale of Two Cities  Warner

With a double dose of reviews this week, it's more fun from Savant ... I take keyboard in hand to heartily recommend the oddball Who Wants to Kill Jessie?, although you may never have heard of it. It's a Czech attempt to make the world of comic books invade our own, and it works. It's also sexy and funny.

Back to woik ... Astaire & Rogers and Boris & Karloff, next on the agenda. Glenn Erickson



October 25, 2006

Greetings! Something a little different this week .. a midweek update. Here are some reviews that are burning a hole in Savant's schedule:

Sólo con tu pareja  Criterion
Murder à la Mod and The Moving Finger  Something Wild / Image
The Devil and Daniel Johnston  Sony and
The Bollywood Horror Collection, Volume 1:
Bandh Darwaza & Purana Mandir  Image

How has this happened? Well I've come up with only three new titles on a number of update days lately, while I keep accepting new material to review. I have to tell you that pure unadulterated greed plays a role in this. I am sometimes asked how I can write so many reviews, and my response (cleverly deflecting attention away from the issue of quality) is that writing has simply taken over time wasted watching television. Don't ask me about the latest shows or what's happening on NBC; I haven't a clue. And I understand something called The World Series is underway.

I can dispel the flattering rumors that two or three writers are held captive in my basement churning out reviews. No, I'm sorry to say, every misspelling, inappropriate modifier and mangled instance of syntax is my very own. I am proud of a number of 'correspondents' who catch my worst grammatical crimes ... and I'm grateful for every correction.

More reviews on Saturday, two days from now ... Glenn Erickson



October 23, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

 
The Addams Family Volume 1  MGM / Fox
Treasure Island  (1934) Warner DVD
Forgotten Noir 2: Loan Shark & Arson, Inc.  VCI / Kit Parker and
Schultze Gets the Blues  Paramount

Hello again ... Harry Medved tells me of a unique Bronson Caverns activity this Sunday in Hollywood to promote his new book, Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer's Guide to Exploring Southern California's Great Outdoors. Here's his official News bulletin:

Sunday, Oct. 29, 2006 @ 4:00 pm (Remember: Daylight Saving ends the night before!)

PACK YOURSELF A PICNIC SUPPER & MEET AT BRONSON CAVES AT 4 pm (at the very end of Bronson Avenue/Canyon Drive, above Franklin, Hollywood); Bring a flashlight! See the Caves, eat your sandwich, go to the Barn for the 6 pm screening.

We will be showing a compilation of creature feature clips, some depicting the cave as a monster lair, on a DVD screen in the cave itself - everything from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS to the immortal Golden Turkey Award winners ROBOT MONSTER, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD and EEGAH! We will also display the Bronson Canyon plot plan of the original "Bat Cave" for the 1966 TV series BATMAN.

Then ...

6:00 PM at HOLLYWOOD HERITAGE MUSEUM (across from the Hollywood Bowl)

Join us for a slide show of historic clips of Bronson Canyon in the movies (like I AM A FUGITIVE IN A CHAIN GANG), and more clips from fantasy films like THE SCORPION KING and THE SWORD AND THE SORCEROR. Harry will sign books at intermission.

Finally after a brief intermission, director Larry Blamire will introduce his 2001 Bronson-based horror movie spoof, THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA (we'll show the film in its entirety).

It sounds like fun and a safe way to go see the caves ... I haven't been there in years, and don't know what it's like up there anymore. The full info is at Hollywoodescapes.com .

It's been a heavy weekend of writing. I was pleased to find so many 'rocket movie' fans writing in mirroring my own level of enthusiasm to 'discover' a seventy year-old Russian Space Movie. I've written to the author of that excellent (let's just say miraculous) French website on Kosmitcheskiy Reys but haven't received an answer as yet.

A lot of reviews are coming. I have screeners for the rest of the Motion Picture Classics Collection, The Astaire-Rogers Collection Part 2, Alfred Hitchcock presents Season Two and Icons of Horror Boris Karloff, as well as such interesting oddities as Lotna, The Most Beautiful Wife, Red Angel, The Clay Bird and Forgotten Noir 3. That's not to mention The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Who Wants to Kill Jessie?, A Tale of Two Cities, Hands Over the City and Body Heat, which are already written. And I'm told that the Tarzan Collection Starring Johnny Weismuller Vol. 2 is on the way. So I'm going to be plenty busy.

Coming soon, spy movies from Fox, Oh! What A Lovely War! and Forbidden Planet! Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson



October 20, 2006

Savant's new reviews today are

Pride and Prejudice  (1940)Warner DVD
Prisoner 13  Facets /Cinemateca
Bad Santa Director's Cut  New Line and
Tickets  Facets Video

Greetings from Los Angeles! Big Doings in Science Fiction Land:

This amounts to something of a news flash in the Sci-Fi-centric world of Savant. I braved the traffic and parking nightmare of Hollywood last night (a huge resurgence of nightclubs, I kid you not) to attend the American Cinematheque, there to catch a screening of 1935's Kosmitcheskiy reys (Cosmic Voyage), a.k.a. in the IMDB as Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella, a space voyage movie from Stalin's Soviet Union. It's a major missing link between Fritz Lang's 1929 Woman in the Moon and George Pal's 1950 Destination Moon. It's much more technically advanced than Lang's film, especially when the Cosmonauts (an old professor, his young female assistant and a friendly 'boy scout' type) reach the moon. Two colossal two-stage space ships are prepared for launch on a gigantic inclined ramp, an enormous miniature set reminiscent of the next year's Things to Come. One rocket is named Joseph Stalin, and the other Marshal Kliment Voroshilov -- after a major Stalinist general who figured heavily in purges to come. To buffer the acceleration of takeoff and the impact of the hard moon landing, the Cosmonauts enter chambers filled with liquid, a weird precursor to the various tube-transformations of This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet and by extension Star Trek. They explore the moon and rescue the cargo -- a housecat -- from the wreck of a previous unmanned probe rocket. The old professor is trapped under a fallen boulder but saves himself by using the boy's homemade pellet gun to signal for help. While all Earth telescopes focus on the moon, the Cosmonauts spread out reflective patches (or flares? We never see them ignite) that spell out "CCCP." We don't get a good look at the flag that the old professor plants, but this Soviet expedition does not claim the moon for all mankind.

Although premiered in 1936, Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella is a silent movie with inter-titles and a synchronized score made of classical music. The print is slightly cropped on the left and the top, indicating that it was filmed with a silent aperture and then reprinted with a soundtrack covering the left extreme of the frame. The special effects by Fodor Krasne are done on a colossal scale, with wide views of the Cosmodrome and long trucking shots around the giant rockets lying horizontally on their cradles. All of these scenes appear to have been done with stop-motion animation, as both the camera and tiny vehicles do not always move smoothly. The full-sized sets are also vast, with the entrance to the rocket establishment looking like a giant hotel lobby. The only plot involves a stuffy bureaucrat's attempt to keep the old genius Pavel Ivanovich Sedikh (Sergei Komarov) from taking the first moon flight. Pavel ends up going (his old wife is upset because he leaves a useless pair of boots behind) and taking his secretary Marina (K. Moskalenko), a beauty who gives forth with a lot of healthy-looking collectivist smiles. The kid (Vassili Gaponenko) stows away but proves to be a crackerjack Cosmonaut and saves the day.

The ship interior is much like the one for Woman in the Moon, except that it is so roomy, it resembles one of the fancy interiors in a Toho spaceship from the late 1950s. Small details like Pavel's spacesuit radio appear to have been made from carved wood.

The moon landing is accomplished in a crater scored with deep crevasses. In excellent stop-motion animation (with Harryhausen-like aerial bracing), the Cosmonauts leap between giant rock formations and do flips in the air, like the adventurers in H.G. Wells' novel First Men In The Moon. Their suits look like diving gear, but with more flexible tubes coming from the helmets. Many details are present -- air locks, strap-holds on the ship interior, the low gravity on the moon -- that are not fully explained to the audience. The main technical problem is the loss of the Joseph Stalin's oxygen supply, but Pavel finds frozen oxygen (it's -270° out there) left over from the moon's ancient atmosphere, so the Cosmonauts are saved after all.

Just as the MIIT (Moscow Institute for Interplanetary Travel) prepares to send the second rocket on a rescue mission, the Joseph Stalin returns by parachute, landing right in front of the Academy's main entrance. Congratulations, speeches and general merry-making follow.

It turns out that Kosmicheskiy reys is from a novel by, and was technically supervised by the Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935), who died before the film was finished. Tsiolkovsky is credited with the idea for the Space Elevator featured in Arthur C. Clarke's book The Fountains of Paradise, and even now being studied as a practical possibility. Tsiolkovsky contributed to the earlier space film Aelita; in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Naked Now, a starship is named after him! He is considered the teacher of the generation that made the Russian space program into a reality twenty years after his death.

As it took this long for Kosmicheskiy reys to be shown here, I have no idea if it could possibly have inspired other science fiction films or influenced the genre outside of the Soviet Union. The only reference to it I have seen before Phil Hardy's Science Fiction Film Encyclopedia is a title mention in a Japanese book ... that I couldn't read. But less than one month ago a stunning French website about the film by Claude Mettavant showed up on the internet, with plenty of original research and pictures and even some frame grabs from a previously unheard-of 1958 Russian movie called Doroga k zvezdam (Russian Rocket to the Moon). There are no doubt even more amazing Soviet-Bloc productions to be found. Savant directs all curious readers to the rewarding site and offers thanks to Mr. Mettavant for his research. Some web info indicates that a Japanese DVD of Kosmicheskiy reys exists under the title The Space Voyage ... perhaps an expert like Stuart Galbraith IV knows about it. -- Glenn Erickson



October 16, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 2-Disc Ultimate Edition  Dark Sky
A Prairie Home Companion  New Line and
Gwendoline: Unrated Director's Cut  Severin


Hello again. No great volume of notable DVD news for this Tuesday. Media Blasters has announced two more Toho fantasy pictures for early next year, the original Japanese versions of Latitude Zero (March) and Frankenstein Conquers the World (February). The Frankenstein film, originally called Frankenstein vs. Baragon is quite different from the Henry G. Saperstein American version, which most viewers have only seen pan-scanned on television. Latitude Zero has been a no-see title for ages, so it will be interesting to find out what it's really like: Joseph Cotten, Cesar Romero, Richard Jaeckel and Patricia Medina co-star. Media Blasters seems to be getting these titles from Toho one by one, as their legal status is disentangled from 40 year-old distribution deals. Hopefully the few remaining Wild Card titles will soon appear, like 1962's Gorath, arguably Ishirô Honda's best movie next to the original Gojira.
Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson



October 13, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Humphrey Bogart The Signature Collection Vol. 2  Warner
The Maltese Falcon, All Through The Night, Across The Pacific, Action in the North Atlantic, Passage To Marseille and
The Fall of Fujimori  Cinema Libre

Once again we have only two entries that represent multiple reviews, in this case six, or actually eight titles reviewed. Savant has a lot of reviews on his plate but will continue to give each its due.

It's been reported that a Warner Robert Mitchum collection is on its way late in January, with Angel Face (Preminger), Home from the Hill (Minnelli), Macao (Von Sternberg, sort of), The Sundowners (Zinnemann), The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (Kennedy) and a Savant favorite, The Yakuza (Pollack). It's probably too much to ask, but The Yakuza supposedly was ten minutes longer in its first run; it would be great to see what was taken out.

Saw THE DEPARTED a couple of nights ago, and although it might not be top-notch Scorsese, it's a riveting cops and robbers story with wall-to-wall violence and swearing that make one appreciate one's own dull life. All the actors are terrific and the complicated plot is just accessible enough to follow ... knowledge of the intricacies of cell phones is a must. A little slick and perhaps not a classic, but it's the best movie I've seen so far this year and one of the two or three that actually engaged my full attention.

Reader Galen Young has drawn my attention to an encoding error in the new Criterion Jigoku disc. On his missing scene web page, Young points out that although the entire movie is encoded on the disc, a flaw causes the playback to skip the first 2 minutes and 8 seconds of one of the chapters, resulting in a jump cut. Reader Jeff Krispow reports that the problem occurs exactly at point of the disc's layer change at 65:45 (the beginning of Chapter 16). Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson



October 09, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection  Warner DVD
The Mask of Fu Manchu, Doctor X, Mad Love,
Mark of the Vampire, The Devil-Doll, The Return of Doctor X

Hello again ... just one review today, or depending on how you look at it, six. I know how I look at it, with eyestrain. Fans of classic era horror are going to be happy.

Various news to report, some bits fresher than others. Both Gary Teetzel and Michael Bjortvedt clued me into a pair of strange new DVD releases of the 1935 She and Things to Come. Ray Harryhausen's name is attached to both as 'personally supervising' the coloration process, something I wouldn't have expected from him. We are assured that both titles will also be encoded in B&W, an alternative that makes some Legend discs like The Little Shop of Horrors quite desirable. Both films are also rumored to be restored versions, which is a further enticement. According to Gary, She needs the reinstatement of an eight-minute chunk right in the middle, while I've written quite a bit about missing scenes from Things to Come. The old Image/Wade Williams disc is a passable copy of the short 96-minute American cut, but the Amazon listing says 100 minutes. There is said to be a slightly longer variant with only a couple of scenes restored: The Boss' banquet during Rowena's interview with John Cabal in the dungeon. Maybe that's what we'll get. Savant will try to find out as much as he can; perhaps a publicist will contact me. We aren't reassured by the Amazon notice, which also says the film is in Wide Screen!

Other not-yet-tepid news is that Dark Sky will be bringing out the once-lost imitation Hammer film Blood of the Vampire, from the English Baker-Berman team. Their pictures were notorious for having spicer continental versions, as we saw with Image's disc of Flesh and the Fiends five years ago. Blood is on a double bill with The Hellfire Club; hopefully Jack the Ripper won't be far behind.

In January Criterion is bringing out its remaining four Richard Gordon acquisitions in a pair of double bills: The cheesy Sci-Fi pictures First Man into Space and The Atomic Submarine will be followed by the Boris Karloff chillers The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood. We're sure they'll look good and be as complete as possible; Corridors has suffered bewildering censor cuts since time began. Criterion stumbled with its disc of Gordon's Fiend without a Face (that's six years ago) by making a half-hearted attempt to claim that the film was an 'important Sci-Fi classic', as if it had to be to come out on the Criterion label. I'm sure they'll do better this time ... the two Karloff movies have some of the actor's best late-career work.

Stefan Anderson wrote to tell me that Robert Gitt at UCLA has restored the Joseph H. Lewis noir gem The Big Combo, which is good news; Savant's old review of the Image disc is here. It's only a film restoration at the moment and we've seen no DVD announcements.

Finally, I got a look at the big Casino Royale issue of Cinema Retro, the large format film fan magazine specializing in 60s and 70s attractions. They've got a rundown of cut and missing scenes from the spy spoof, together with photos that sometimes add to the mystery. In that final shot of Peter Sellers in a Scottish kilt outfit, he's actually wearing scuba swim fins. Cinema Retro's website is here.

That's it! Thanks for reading, Glenn



October 06, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Magdalena's Brain  Heretic
Storm the Skies  Facets and
The Big Animal  Milestone/New Yorker

Here's a mini review of THE DEVIL WITH HITLER, from the rare TCM showing last Monday. The Hal Roach-UA movie tops out at 43 short minutes and is in general a purposely non-PC opportunity to let wartime audiences have an easy laugh at our Axis of enemies -- the old axis, the one that invaded other countries. The show plays like an extended Three Stooges short, with caricatures ripped off from Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR. Bobby Watson does a good Hitler impersonation, actually halfway between Adolf and Moe Howard. Joe Devlin's Mussolini is firmly based on Jack Oakie's lampoon in the Chaplin film. George E. Stone is an unconvincing (even for a gross stereotype) buck-toothed generic Japanese diplomat named Suki Yaki. He's probably meant to represent one of the 'treacherous' envoys that delivered Japan's declaration of war a couple of hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The plot is a fairly formless succession of gags ribbing Hitler as a lousy painter and showing the three villains' attempts to assassinate each other with bombs. Douglas Fowley is a frustrated life insurance saleman who books three policies with the bad guys (all on each other) but is turned down by Lloyd's of London with an offhand "Are you kidding?" Holding the picture together is a rather suave Alan Mowbray as Satan. He's going to lose his job in Hell to Hitler ("He's better qualified!") and is sent to Earth to try and get Adolf to do one good deed. The film's only point is that Hitler is a complete stinker and should be banished to Hell at the earliest opportunity, and THE DEVIL WITH HITLER gave its audiences license to have a raucous laugh at his expense. The film's supposedly ribald humor turned out to be one sound-alike "I lost my Ass!" pun, and Hitler showing that he can paint "changing hands without missing a stroke." I guess I wasn't sufficiently crude to get that last one without having it explained to me.

With Forest Whittaker's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND getting rave reviews (even from picky Savant confidante Gary Teetzel), Criterion wants us to remember that Barbet Schroeder's chilling first-person docu on the real GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA is still in print. Savant's 2002 review is here. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson



October 02, 2006

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Look Both Ways  Kino
Madmen of Mandoras (+They Saved Hitler's Brain)
& The Devil's Hand
 BCI and
Phantom  Flicker Alley

Hello again! If I've caught you in time, today (actually, Monday the 2nd) is the day that TCM will be showing the rare THE DEVIL WITH HITLER, at 3pm Pacific Time. It's supposed to be a burlesque-style comedy, with the plot description "If he wants to keep control of Hell, Satan has to get Hitler to perform a good deed. " Can't wait.

I probably won't have the Warner Horror set review up until the weekend, or maybe even next Tuesday. DVDTalk has only now received both it and the new Humphrey Bogart Box, and they just can't get here instantaneously. That's too bad, as when the studios send the screeners out for such desired titles, I try very hard to get the reviews up in a timely manner.

I did receive Criterion's Sólo con tu pareja and will be reviewing it soon; it's a funny Mexican farce from Alfonso Cuarón that's remniscent of Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Have a good week! Glenn Erickson


Don't forget to write Savant at [email protected].

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