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Greetings! Well, heh, heh, I had two reviews ready to go, until I realized that the one I worked on all Sunday is committed to the Turner Classic Movies website (bless 'em). I also spent two days watching the 9.5 hour Japanese epic The Human Condition (a new Criterion release), which is such a monumental work that I'll need to let it percolate a day or two more before even daring to review it.

That wouldn't be so bad, but the title I am reviewing today is one that isn't even for sale. Reader response to my DVD Savant Revival Review of Try and Get Me! a few weeks back was very positive, with more than a few readers encouraging me to do more. So I got out an old laserdisc and warmed up the player -- which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't -- and had fun writing about a picture that I really admire, a film noir that takes a hard look at American marriage in the immediate postwar years. Not a whole lot of the older films Savant loves are being released these days, what with everyone proclaiming that the DVD market for Library Titles is kaput. When desirable discs do come out screeners aren't consistently available, either - as with Sony's two impressive Columbia Screwball Comedy disc sets released earlier this summer.

What's coming up that revs Savant's brain cells? Paramount has a Blu-ray of Deep Impact (Sept. 15), a sci-fi I admire and haven't yet written about. There's Fox's M*A*S*H, out today and very likely not coming as a screener. Warners will have a Blu-ray of the moody thriller Dead Calm on September 8, the same day that Sony is releasing a Silverado Blu-ray. All would make excellent review subjects.

On October 20 AnimEigo is bringing out a particularly fascinating Japanese film. I bought a disc of Shohei Imamura's Black Rain back in 1998 when few really interesting DVDs had yet been released. The film begins with the bombing of Hiroshima, seen and witnessed from the viewpoint of the civilians on the ground, and then goes in a completely unexpected direction. A young survivor of the blast is victimized a second time, by a Japanese culture that assigns shame to those with radiation effects. When her prospective in-laws discover that she's "damaged goods" they cancel the marriage, insuring that the girl's future is as good as destroyed. My memory isn't too clear but much of the rest of the story has her dealing with hospitals and social workers: they'd prefer that victims just die and stop causing trouble.

The original disc was bare bones and poorly encoded; it was difficult to read the subtitles, which were confusing anyway. I'm glad AnimEigo is the new distributor of record because they put add so much contextual background to the viewing experience. Their epic Japan's Longest Day had extras that explained and discussed that film's complicated historical issues. Black Rain is certainly in the same category, as the subject matter and Imamura's treatment of it are almost completely unfamiliar to me. I'm looking forward to learning something new.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! I think I'm the last to know, but helpful reader Stefan Andersson has forwarded a link to a new Columbia Classics website with information and restoration news about the Sony/Columbia library. This will be very helpful for keeping straight the influx of classic boxed sets coming from Sony.

Gary Teetzel has brought a web controversy to my attention, about the Warner Archives release of the worthy Hammer Films / Ursula Andress epic She, the one with the beautiful James Bernard score. The new disc appears to be an older transfer, which is something of a disappointment, but web "experts" are making silly charges that the movie has been improperly mastered. Based on close-ups of a round medallion that looks markedly ovaloid, one poster claims that a 1:85 transfer has been stretched to fill a 2:35 AR ... that sort of thing.

The answer is in the anamorphic 'scope cinematography of the original filming. She was advertised in CinemaScope but filmed in Hammerscope, and looks like many productions that used older, less refined lenses. I watched sections of the disc with Teetzel and experienced film transfer expert Wayne Schmidt, and saw that many shots had marked barrel distortion, scenes in which straight lines are slightly curved. All of the shots that stretch out the image are close-ups -- inserts of medallions, some close-ups of the characters. These suffer from the common malady known as the "CinemaScope Mumps" -- when focused at close range, the image field distorts horizontally. We noted that Ursula Andress was excluded from almost all choker close-ups, and looks just fine. The Warner Archives' disc of She is not guilty of gross transfer negligence; the culprit is the limitation of the original lens system.

The wheels of film restoration turn slowly: although we were told a year ago that work was beginning on the rediscovered long version of Metropolis, only now is the real work commencing. The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation has awarded the task of restoring the newly discovered film material to Alpha-Omega digital GmbH of Munich. Alpha Omega did the terrific restoration work on the previous 2001 Metropolis, as reported to Savant by Thomas Bakels and H. Peter Kiechle in earlier articles. I hope we'll hear more updates from F-W-M soon.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! The Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood have finally posted full information about the Cinerama screenings I mentioned earlier this month: new presentations of This is Cinerama and How The West Was Won and faded but intact prints of the ultra-rare The Golden Head and Holiday in Spain. Dave Strohmaier forwarded an elaborate flyer that I'll keep posted for a couple of weeks, should you wish to take a look! Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! A busy week, which is why I worked ahead to get these reviews up early.

What's happening? My article on the unreleased-to-disc Try and Get Me! has been picked up by Steve Eifert's impressive Noir of the Week Page, for those who might want to see it with blog-style formatting and a new image or two.

Feedback from the Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection reviews and the Steve Ryfle & Ed Godziszewski interviews have been brisk, with almost every reader reporting a renewed desire to grab the 3-disc set. I wish there were a way to plunk these positive reactions onto some desk over at Sony Home Entertainment!

Readers are also expressing excitement over Criterion's upcoming set of original TV plays from the Golden Age of Television, that is said to contain the original versions of classics like Marty and Patterns. Most of these shows were performed live, and I've always wanted to catch up with them myself.

Last week I reported on a German Blu-ray release of the Bronson epic El Cid; thanks to info from Mel Martin, I can now confirm that The Fall of the Roman Empire will be coming in HD on the same date, August 21. I'm going to be disappointed if the discs turn out to be viewable only on European machines.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! DVDtalk's ace webmaster John Sinnott taught Savant a needed HTML lesson over the weekend. I found out that not all of my readers can see the photos and other images I carefully upload to some of my Savant reviews and articles. Even after I found out, I figured it wasn't "my" problem. Well, whaddaya know, I was wrong all along. If you go back to the Steve Ryfle & Ed Godziszewski Toho Interview, the graphics therein should now be visible to everybody!

The following is only routine writing for the wordsmith David Cairns over at his Shadowplay blog (entry date August 15): writing about a Joan Fontaine murder potboiler called Ivy, Cairns knocks off a one-paragraph description of Fontaine's character that belongs in classic fiction:

"(Ivy) is really too entertaining, and if you haven't seen it, you must, even though it's hard to get. Write to your MP or something. Any movie where Joan F. gets to play a bitch-goddess is tops in my book, and it's even better here since she plays the role with all the shy, shrinking mannerisms of her roles in Rebecca and Suspicion, the flipside of those characters being the passive-aggressive succubus virago. Her shoulders go up as if trying to shield her ears from the wicked world, her head tilts slightly to one side as if she's trying to wriggle out through a crack in the universe, and her eyes roll up just very slightly, escaping contact with those terrible people who want things from her, and consulting with the fiendish little brain concealed beneath that bland and beautiful brow."

Just as good is Cairns' one-line description of Henry Silva from Roger Corman's Secret Invasion a few weeks back, where he wrote something to the effect that Silva's hit-man character had recently killed four unarmed men -- with his cheekbones. I doubled up with that one ...

Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new review and article today are

Greetings! I was very happy to snag Ed Godziszewski and Steve Ryfle for this interview ... I found out about the Toho Collection audio commentary long before it could be openly discussed, and was excited that they'd gotten the job. Three years ago my interest in Godzilla movies was at a low ebb, but Ed & Steve's informative commentaries on the Gojira double-disc made the subject interesting again.

The full Savant review of the Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection disc set will definitely be up this coming Monday.

Craig Reardon pointed me to an El Cid Blu-ray being sold by Amazon Germany starting August 21; I hope it isn't region coded! Mel Martin tells me that a foreign BD of The Fall of the Roman Empire may be in the works as well.

And Dave Strohmaier wrote to tell me that Hollywood's Cinerama Dome will be showing another festival of rare Cinerama prints early in September. Dave says that they're planning on screening This is Cinerama and How The West Was Won in the full original process, along with the only surviving Cinerama prints (faded to magenta) of the rare Holiday in Spain and a rare-as-hen's-teeth narrative feature never shown in the United States, The Golden Head. Dave gave me some tentative scheduling plans but I prefer to link to the official Arclight site when it posts official info -- so as to not make a mistake and confuse the issue. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! Here's something fun: I haven't talked with friend and accomplished producer Perry Martin in a while, but I just caught up with an extended montage he's placed on the web. Perry calls it Atomic Monster Theater and it's a polished piece of work.

A treat located by Savant correspondent Shaun Chang ... Eight minutes on the set of Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 in 1960. Brush up on your Italian if needed, but it's not necessary to enjoy Fellini's stars -- Anouk Aimee, Claudia Cardinale, Barbara Steele. The English Steele blanches at speaking in Italian but then turns into a regular motormouth -- my wife said she did fine, minus an agreement error or two. The link is here.

What's coming up? DVD reviews of Icons of Science Fiction: The Toho Collection, Nikkatsu Noir Eclipse 17, Bardeleys the Magnificent /Monte Cristo, Husbands and Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913. Right now for unreviewed Blu-rays I only have The Last Starfighter in hand, but I'm hoping for Duplicity, Deep Impact, Sex, Lies and Videotape and Gojira.

Thanks for reading! ... Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! A few interesting details today. Correspondent Michael Bjortvedt forwards this YouTube link to a complete encoding of a rare Soviet science fiction film from 1968, The Andromeda Nebula. It's mainly for completists, as the dramatics and especially the direction are simply ... terrible. But it may have been filmed in 65mm and the copy is very good! The nearly incomprehensible English subtitles must have come from a translating program set to "scramble".

Lee Broughton tells me that the latest issue of Tom Betts' online 'zine Westerns All'Italiana is ready for download. It's the world's oldest (1983) fanzine dedicated to the Italian western.

And finally, over at the Warner Archives website, they're taking orders and preorders for new releases, which include the very good Hammer epic She with Ursula Andress, Michael Crichton's wobbly The Terminal Man with George Segal and From Hell It Came, the immortal Allied Artists epic about a haunted, walking tree stump. "Tabonga!" does not mean "surf's up!"

Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Greetings! A quick question? Have any writers to DVD Savant ([email protected]) been getting emails refused? One long-time reader who informs me (through a third party) that he's tried multiple times, and keeps getting Undeliverable notices. Is this a fluke, or a nefarious paranoid conspiracy?

For readers within striking difference of Hollywood, Joe Dante's Dante's Inferno 2 film series screens at the New Beverly Cinema starting on August 5 -- with treats like Matinee, the original Not of This Earth (with Roger Corman in person), and another showing of the incredible, marathon-length The Movie Orgy ... only longer this time. Details can be found on the main page of the Trailers from Hell website and at the New Beverly Cinema Page.

Whoa! UK correspondent Lee Broughton's links to the animated horror short Harpya brought several responses that I'm happy to pass on. Robozol offers a bit of Ladislas Starevich magic, and Edward Sullivan forwards two creepy animated items, The Cat with Hands and Emily and the Baba Yaga. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson