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DVD addicts with their noses to the web have been gabbing about the news regarding a number of Paramount titles. Often criticized for sitting on their library, Paramount has licensed a number of its older catalogue items to Legend Films, the company most noted for its controversial colorized releases. Little official information has come out yet, but reliable websites such as The Home Theater Forum and Movies Unlimited have reported that a large number of titles will appear in June and July. I'm told that Legend will be selling some of these titles directly from their website, starting today, April 1.

Here's the overall list, compiled from the web: The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Skull, Phase IV, King of the Gypsies, Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies, Student Bodies, The One and Only, The Optimists, The Possession of Joel Delaney, The Whoopee Boys, ZPG (Zero Population Growth), Some Kind of Hero, Jekyll and Hyde Together Again, Houdini, Mandingo, Villa Rides!, Hitler: the Last Ten Days, Almost an Angel, Blue City, Rhubarb, The Busy Body, Papa's Delicate Condition, Serial, Partners, Daniel and Desperate Characters.

There are definitely some interesting titles in that group, and I hope to be able to review a few. Let's also hope that someone steps up to license some of Paramount's other outstanding no-shows, assuming that the studio still holds the rights: The Atomic City, Blood and Roses, The Colossus of New York, Monte Walsh, Twisted Nerve and Crack in the World.

An offhand look at this week's Turner Classic Movies schedule shows a couple of interesting titles: Fool's Parade (Tuesday the 1st) is the one with James Stewart as an ex-con terrorist (yep!) wrapping himself in dynamite to cash a check owed him by a crooked southern state. It's from the author of Night of the Hunter Davis Grubb, although nowhere near as dark. Mr Arkadin (with Mr. Welles' 'usual bombast') shows on Wednesday the 2nd). TCM continues to spice its schedule with occasional surprises, like Michael Powell's great Age of Consent, later this month -- I understand that Sony has restored a slightly longer version than the one I saw in 1969. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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I guess it pays to have friends; I got tipped off to Turner Classic Movies' showing of The Tunnel (Transatlantic Tunnel) at the last minute yesterday, and finally caught up with a good copy of a film I've wanted to see for at least forty years. The 1935 The Tunnel is an English remake of a German film, that had been made in both German and French versions. The expensive Michael Balcon production stars Richard Dix and Leslie Banks, with George Arliss and Walter Huston in for cameos as the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States. At some unstated time in the future, when tunnels from England to France and Nassau to Miami have already been completed, a consortium gets together to finance Dix' 3500-mile tunnel from England to the United States. A giant 'radium drill' bores through the earth's interior below the ocean (I hope they cut straight through, ignoring the curvature of the earth). The job takes over fifteen years with crews digging from both ends. The special effects scenes are very much like the next year's Things to Come. Many of them are excellent, especially views of art deco electric 'supercars' flying down twin rails on completed parts of the tunnel.

The object of the tunnel is to provide peace and security; Dix and investor C. Aubrey Smith believe that with such a perfect way of moving defense materials between 'the world's two English-speaking countries', war can be averted. But one of the major investors is an arms dealer who plans to hold up the project, let it fail and then buy up abandoned shares before re-starting. Much of the acting is overstated, especially Dix, and Curt Siodmak's script contains a series of real howlers. Mrs. Dix thinks her husband is straying with an American socialite, so she takes a dangerous job as a tunnel nurse. Catching a 'disease' brought on by gases from the radium drill, she goes blind but never tells her husband. Instead, they separate for fifteen years. Their boy grows up and joins dad when labor unrest (the men are worried about little things like drilling into an active underground volcano) slows the digging. Meanwhile, the American socialite compromises herself with one of the crooked investors, just to keep Dix's project in gear. Nothing much happens in the tunnel until that volcano becomes a problem. Giant blast doors seal off the drill head to protect thousands of workers -- but over a hundred are trapped behind the doors, including Dix's son. As the finale nears, the melodramatics reach really absurd levels.

The director of The Tunnel, Maurice Elvey, also did an early UK Sci Fi film called High Treason. I've seen a so-so tape of the British version of Floating Platform 1, but would like to see the German original as well as the German original of The Tunnel. There's also Gold, a fantastic film that had its conclusion stolen to make The Magnetic Monster, and several German films by Harry Piel, about robots and men who can walk through walls. These 1930s Sci Fi obscurities need to be restored! I'll try to be a bit quicker with announcements when something this rare shows on TCM again ... this copy was from MGM's UK NTSC-converted PAL master and looked terrific. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.

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Easter came and went with beautiful weather in Hollywood, which is apparently not the norm across the nation. Here's hoping that those large areas of flooding dry out as soon as possible.

Bonnie and Clyde is the lead-off film this week, and it's gotten a pretty big media push, what with Warren Beatty granting all those interviews for the newspapers, etc. I remember it as a BIG high school experience and along with The Graduate was the first movie that EVERYONE had to see. I think that Bonnie and Clyde reached San Bernardino only in its second release, which may actually have been in 1968 ... I recall driving to see it and I wouldn't have had a license the previous fall. I also remember a novelty song playing constantly on the Top 40 radio, that hasn't been heard in ages. The movie was probably a negative influence, with its message of fated doom and hardship. That ending also gave me a first inkling of real mortality. It felt very, very good to be alive and on the right side of the law.

Savant's been up to his eyeballs in Bette Davis movies all weekend, and no, I didn't need to use any Kleenex. Reviewing movies here has put me in contact with a lot of pictures I'd normally not have seen -- musicals, dramas -- because I tend to spend my discretionary DVD funds on the genre movies that please me the most, westerns and science fiction. Studying the Crawford and Davis-type pictures as an outsider has been fascinating, perhaps because of the objectivity I can bring to them. I read a critic like Pauline Kael on something like The Old Maid and realize that she seems to be reacting with a personal prejudice for or against the actresses' personalities -- sometimes, for a snide put-down, fixating on what they choose to wear. Anyway, when my take on the Davis pictures shows up next week, give them a look -- if nothing else, the set is chock-full of vintage Bob Clampett Porky Pig cartoons, WB's best. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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What? The two reviews this week are for films no older than 11 years? Savant's been replaced by some kind of sinister imposter! Just so you won't be worried about the future direction of this irreplaceable (cough, choke) addition to American culture, here's what's on this site's plate for the immediate future: Bonnie & Clyde (Blu-ray), Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema, Don't Drink the Water, Sweeney Todd, The Bette Davis Collection Volume 3, There Will be Blood and The British Empire in Color. Not quite in my clutches but expected shortly are The Delirious Fictions of William Klein (including Mr. Freedom), The Nanny, Classic Musicals from the Dream Factory 3, Blast of Silence and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Blu-ray).

In other interesting news, Warners' Merrill's Marauders is no longer an online exclusive; Sam Fuller's biggest war movie will hit normal availability on April 22, a full month before the traditional onslaught of Father's Day combat & gunslinger mayhem movies.

As a side note, Savant is re-reading a favorite he's read at least five times, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. Clarke was truly a progressive thinker, and the 1953 book has more ideas in it than twenty years of Science Fiction movies. It even encapsulates, more or less, the concept of the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Savant was saddened to hear of Mr. Clarke's passing -- his long and active retirement in Sri Lanka sounds like a personal dream come true. The artist-citizens of Childhood's End eventually retreat to an island paradise, in much the same way that Clarke himself did. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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It's a quiet evening ... Criterion has announced its titles for June, which include a promising French gangster film I've never heard of called Classe tous risques, the Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Anthony Mann's weird western The Furies with Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston, as a megalomaniac rancher who declares his own 'kingdom', prints his own currency and commits mass murder. I'm eager to see The Furies because the disc commentator is Jim Kitses, from whom I took a class on the Western genre back in 1973. Kitses was a big influence -- I first saw Ride the High Country and Major Dundee in that class!

I've added this information to the 2008 Savant Wish List, and further enhanced that page with an overall change. 'New' discs that are announced are in Red, and ones that have already come out are in Bold Black. Thanks for writing, Glenn Erickson

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Another busy week. Savant perused more Blu-ray discs (five whole discs - what a collection!) and wrote his first review, which will be up shortly. As my reviews rarely go into technical detail, my comments about the added resolution of Blu-ray will probably be limited to subjective differences as they appear. For instance, in 20 Million Miles to Earth, original photography is razor sharp, while Ray Harryhausen's rear-projected elements now stick out as if they had been isolated with a grain filter. It's a surprise picking out individually colored blades of grass in The Wild Bunch. As I think I said before, the best improvement is in character's eyes, which with the added detail have more life and focus ... you can tell when Jaime Sanchez' eyes are tearing up in one scene.

Gary Teetzel forwarded this link to a cute music video clip, Rick Baker's Monster Mash, from the Monster Kid Online Magazine. It's apparently a less-finished version of a goofball project that Baker accidentally lost to the gods of computer malfunction and crashed hard drives. I think it's quite accomplished .. i especially like Mad Doctor Baker's crazy eye.

This prompts me to offer a personal memory ... losing an edited cut reminds me of what I think was my best gag promo, done at Cannon in 1987. My boss Richard Smith loved irreverent creativity: when he ran the Univeral trailer department he once made (and showed) a bogus exhibitor promo that combined I Want to Hold Your Hand and Gray Lady Down into a piece for a film called "I Want to Hold Your Gray Lady Down", complete with voiceover narration from the guy who did Jaws, Percy Rodriguez.

I took the track from a promo for one of Cannon's awful 'Lemon Popsicle' movies, which had lots of silly foley sounds combined with screams, grunts, squeaks and other scatalogical vocals done by my fellow Cannon editors, to illustrate the totally unfunny slapstick of the movie's oversexed Israeli teens. I covered this track with footage of fighting, monsters and awful special effects nonsense from Ruggero Deodato's The Barbarians, starring the musclemen The Barbarian Brothers (surely you remember... no?)

The funny teen-comedy noises now coincided with hacking blades, Richard Lynch's maniacal laughter and other bits of muddy sadism. Backed by purloined rock music, the cheerful narration ("Hey -- Billy and Bobby are back!") now went over shots of two gruesome monsters doing a double-take. You get the idea. I thought the gag promo the funniest thing I ever did, an impression easy to mantain by the fact that I only saw it once or twice. I walked the only 3/4" tape across the hall and showed it to Richard, who laughed his tail off (victory!). But when I returned from lunch, I found that Mo and Yo (Golan and Globus) had fired the occupant of the office on some absurd prextext, and he was being escorted from the building by Cannon security -- big ex-Sabra guards. The entire contents of the office were sealed and hauled away, and the tape with it.

There are a million stories in Naked Hollywood, and this isn't exactly an important one. Nobody needs to believe that the gag promo meant anything, but this sort of nonsense kept things lively while working in an oddball job in movietown. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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Hello! Just trying to get my reviews out on time, so I'll make this brief! An interesting item from UK correspondent Lee Broughton: A Guardian Article about restoring color to old B&W BBC Kinescopes of color videotape shows. I'm not sure I understand all of it, but it's fascinating anyway. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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Good afternoon ... after being enlightened by several readers, I've posted a short footnote to my The Last Emperor review; it seems that Criterion and Vittorio Storaro have reformatted the movie from 2.35 to 2.1, in keeping with a Storaro philosophy about aspect ratios. True to his ever-discerning nature, Savant did not notice. I'd say I was asleep at the switch, except that I enjoyed the film too much, and was never aware of any chopped-off compositions.

Savant has seen and written up Warners' Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2 -- an even better collection than the first -- but my review won't be up here for another week, due to contractual obligations. Sounds shady, doesn't it? No, it's just a case of not getting a screener until a day before street date. I also have the Warners Gangster Collection Volume 3 in my hot little hands, and it's arrived comfortably early. Now, to hope that Bonnie & Clyde shows up in Blu-ray, which will help a lot of Savant plans begin to work out!

Savant has the following on his immediate radar: Love in the Time of Cholera, Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2, The Dragon Painter, The Ice Storm, NOVA Missing in MIG Alley and Warner Bros. Gangster Collection Volume 3. I'm concerned about discs from MGM and Fox, and to a lesser extent Sony; as screeners from these companies have been late, sporadic or not at all. And that's with more Fox Noir titles coming just next week.

I have been updating the 2008 Savant Wish List, so take a look as well. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

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Hello, not a whole lot of news this weekend. The Los Angeles Marathon is presently running a block away, so Savant is locked down for a few hours and getting more writing done than usual.

The new Blu-ray player seems to be functioning fine; I'm just getting used to the new level of detail. Eyes now seem more watery and alive, and close-ups are more dramatic. It's no joke; watching a film on DVD sometimes rivaled the average theatrical experience, perhaps, sadly, because the moviegoing experience ain't what it used 'ta be. HD is even better -- as long as one has someone special to watch it with, to replace the missing audience.

Interested in astronomy? Savant correspondent Mel Martin has a beautiful Astronomical Images Gallery taken with his own telescope. He has some sort of computerized tracking device that allows him to make crystal-sharp digital exposures, operating his 'scope by remote control from inside his house. However his pictures are taken, they're pretty amazing.

Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson