|
|
|
September 29, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: A Woman's Secret & Born to Be Bad 
Two early directing efforts from Nicholas Ray see him dealing with a murder mystery with Maureen O'Hara, Gloria Grahame and Melvyn Douglas, and managing the gripping tale of a scheming social climber starring Joan Fontaine, Joan Leslie, Robert Ryan and Mel Ferrer. Ray's direction makes all the difference in these 'women's pictures', guaranteeing terrific performances from all concerned. The Born to be Bad disc includes studio head Howard Hughes' long-unseen alternate ending as an extra. Separate Releases from The Warner Archive Collection.
9/29/12
Blu-ray 
William Faulkner's celebrated novel is more 'reconstituted' than adapted for the screen, and turned into a standard coming-of-age tale for star Joanne Woodward. Margaret Leighton is the shameful mother back for charity while guardian Yul Brynner seems to have walked in from The Brothers Karamazov. The Woodward-Brynner relationship is completely flubbed but the picture is packed with interesting characterizations. Also starring Jack Warden, John Beal and Ethel Waters. In Blu-ray from Twilight Time.
9/29/12
Blu-ray 
A new full film restoration is the basis for a new release of this all-time French classic about lust and love in the theater starring Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand and Mária Casares. The three-hour epic was produced and partly filmed during the German occupation of Paris. A two-disc set with some new extras. In Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
9/29/12
and Blu-ray 
José Ferrer's delightfully hammy performance as the swordsman with the long nose won an acting Oscar and firmly established producer Stanley Kramer and writer Carl Foreman on the Hollywood map. Ferrer is the emotional poet who helps another man woo the love of his life, played by Mala Powers. Looks better than ever before in an HD presentation derived from 35mm elements. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/29/12
Hello! I have a couple of friends attending the Cinerama Festival at the fab Cinerama Dome this weekend, and if I get some reports on the experience in I'll relay them through Tuesday's column. I know that I'll hear about The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and Search for Paradise, but they're also showing everything from the one-strip Cinerama It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and 2001 to the rare The Golden Head. I was fortunate to see How the West Was Won back at the Dome around 2003; although the theater wasn't designed for 3-panel Cinerama the presentation was excellent. Oh for the days when I could run out to every screening opportunity that came up! 
The web buzz this week has all been about Universal's new Classic Horror Blu-rays. Frame grabs from the discs make the old Karloff and Lugosi classics seem newer than new. Also, after hearing rumors to the contrary (and I didn't spread said rumors around!) Uni's flat and 3D presentations of The Creature from the Black Lagoon are both properly formatted at 1:85. This is great! The framing looks sensational: no more telephone poles poking through in the backwaters of the Amazon. Not only that, but the (correct) choice made by the wise folk at Uni's in-house restoration department pretty much vindicate my position in a couple of web "differences of opinion" I had a number of years back with some pretty well established web experts. That never hurts. I'm also told that Twilight Time's Facebook page reports that they're aiming for a Blu-ray release of Sony's Major Dundee for next April. TT honcho Nick Redman is probably the original Sam Peckinpah fan and will surely do his best to make the presentation special. The fact that Sony's restoration department is putting more work into the HD master of Dundee is a very welcome sign. Thanks for reading! Glenn
September 26, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: Blu-ray 
The most popular French film during WW2, this dark fairy tale was passed by the German political censors, yet embraced by Parisians as an allegory for the Occupation, with The Devil standing in for Hitler. Minstrels Arletty and Alain Cuny are The Devil's Envoys, come to break hearts and spread disaster in a peaceful kingdom. By the makers of Children of Paradise; in Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
9/25/12
An Allied Artists noir with excellent Los Angeles location work, about a T-Man (Don DeFore) who must take up with a shady hotel manager (Andrea King) to get the goods on a counterfeiting ring. Produced by the King Brothers, who frame their story with a barely relevant Cold War prologue that labels Korea as a fight to the death and criminal counterfeiters as saboteurs in the war on Communism. From The Warner Archive Collection.
9/25/12
and Blu-ray 
Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin and George Cukor's superb backstage mystery is one of the most realistic movies about life among Broadway greats. Ronald Colman is the famous star who so identifies with his work that he takes on the murderous qualities of the character he plays -- Othello. The terrific supporting cast includes Signe Hasso, Edmond O'Brien and Shelley Winters in a career-making role. In a nigh-perfect Blu-ray presentation from Olive Films.
9/25/12
Hello! It's shaping up as a 3D week here at DVD Savant. On Monday I was fortunate to attend a Warner Home Video screening at Grauman's Chinese of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial "M" for Murder. It's being released on 3D Blu-ray on October 9 but I haven't heard of any theatrical screenings so this was a big opportunity. George Feltenstein gave an enthusiastic, informative introduction, explaining that a similar 3D festival in New York in the early 1980s led to a brief 3D revival, the one that included Jaws 3D. Back in 1979 I had been fortunate to see a two-projector Polaroid screening at the Tiffany Theater on the Sunset Strip, which was my best experience ever with old-style 3D. They projected the restored digital Dial "M" in the modern Real D format, which ironed out all the potential flaws. The alignment and convergence of the images is now perfect. The color restoration is quite good as well -- only opticals looked a bit less sharp. Hitchcock's conservative use of the 3D process is still marvelous, with foreground objects (particularly a table lamp) lending depth to the '3D stage' without asking us to strain our eyes. Even more than usual, Hitchcock directs our attention to exactly the right part of the frame, and focuses and converges the effect for that plane. He really can't afford distractions, for the screenplay is almost two solid hours of drawing room mystery exposition. Miraculously, the unobtrusive 3D provides a sort of hyper-spatial context, not a distraction. Our concentration is not broken. Other 3D pictures, even the new ones, are constantly "billboarding" the depth effect. After the main titles, Hitchcock does this maybe only four times. This was also the first time I've seen Dial "M" displayed at its proper aspect ratio, 1:85. It mattes off very cleanly. I fully understand why earlier 3D film festivals didn't show it this way -- aligning a two-projector system involved hours of work, so they just left the screen unmatted and showed everything full frame. 
It may have been wishful thinking, but George Feltenstein said he'd like to see all of Warners' 3D titles converted this way. The plan is to prep House of Wax for Home Video 3D in 2013. The other 3D news is yet another 3D booking, Joe Dante's teen horror-adventure thriller The Hole. I caught it at what was perhaps the only 3D screening here about a year and a half ago, and pronounced it the most creative of the new batch of 3D attractions. The story is good, and a little scary at times, and Dante really gives the 3D a workout, looking for spooky effects. The Hole 3D is screening for one week at the Downtown Independent Theater starting this Friday. Showtimes, location and the official trailer are at This Link. Recommended! Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson
September 22, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: 
The famed George Cukor directs four female stars -- Claire Bloom, Jane Fonda, Glynis Johns and Shelley Winters -- in a soap built around a sex survey that happens to find four neurotic upscale housewives engaged in highly exploitable sexual activity! Lots of screwy flashbacks, adultery, frigidity, nymphomania and just plain silliness in a supposedly serious exposé that now plays as a camp classic. From The Warner Archive Collection.
9/22/12
The House of Exorcism Blu-ray 
Yes, this is the one in which Kojack's Telly Savalas plays The Devil. Mario Bava's most original horror effort is so consistently dreamlike and bizarre that it failed to find a distributor, so its producer threw in a bunch of ersatz Linda Blair + vomit scenes and released it as an Exorcist knockoff. Both versions are here, in terrific HD transfers. With Elke Sommer, Alida Vallii, Sylva Koscina. In Blu-ray from Kino Classics.
9/22/12
and Blu-ray 
Orson Welles' last stab at conventional Hollywood studio work before exiting to Europe is a fascinating stylized version of Shakespeare's tale of ambition and murder, filmed on stark sets and delivered in a tangle of heavy Scots accents! Perhaps the most artistic release ever from Republic Pictures, this is the original uncut version, restored in 1980 by the UCLA Film Archive. With Welles, Jeanette Nolan and Dan O'Herlihy. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/22/12
Hello! Had a great time at lunch on Larchmont yesterday... just after noon, people started gathering in the street, and then the waitresses and everyone else spilled outside to see the Space Shuttle Endeavor fly over. They must have cleared the airspace over Los Angeles, for the giant carrier jet and its wing escorts crisscrossed the city from Pasadena to plenty of other points. The piggy-backed spaceship made two passes over Hollywood, one of them West-to-East at a really low level, as if buzzing down Hollywood or Sunset Blvds. It looked more or less just like the image I reproduce here, only bigger -- like watching a plane land from the end of a runway. The spirit on the street was amusing. I'm a "Turn the channel quick, a rocket is taking off" kind of guy, but I was never able to get much of a rise from my family for shuttle launches... I guess they didn't spend their childhoods staring at spaceship models and dreaming about voyages into the cosmos. Yesterday you would have thought every Angeleno was a genuine NASA space cadet -- fifteen minutes of smiles and jubilation. I think I waved my restaurant napkin. I've added a stack of Savant reader notes to the end of the End of the Road review from last Tuesday. I must have been asleep that week in 1970 because other people DID see this picture on first release. Musician, writer and film programmer Chris D. grew up in Riverside, just a few miles from me in grungy San Bernardino. He reports that he saw it there in an almost empty theater even though it was rated "X" and he was underage. Chris was clearly a more dedicated filmgoer than I -- he must have been a tot when The Flesh Eaters hit town, yet he had the nerve to go see it and 15 year-old me stayed home. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson
September 18, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: 
Perhaps the most bizarre mainstream release of 1970, this elusive feature was directed by Aram Avakian and co-written by Terry Southern from the novel by John Barth. Stacy Keach (terrific) is taken to an asylum called The Farm by a mad (?) doctor played by James Earl Jones (more terrific). The doctor's Mythotherapy cures make the place look like the Caligari asylum overrun by sex perverts. From there, the cured (?) Keach drops into an academic setting, where conditions are almost more disturbing. Co-stars Harris Yulin and Dorothy Tristan. High-quality weirdness all the way. A very unusual standard DVD release from Warner Home Video.
9/18/12
Blu-ray 
Savant's first 3D review covers the fancy depth conversion job James Cameron has given to his incredibly successful 1997 disaster epic / dippy romance. The new 3D Blu-ray encoding comes on two discs, a flat 2D Blu-ray on a third and all the old extras plus two new and lengthy documentaries on a fourth. The HD really makes a difference with this one -- every third shot is a "wow, that's impressive" exercise in the lost art of grandiosity. In Blu-ray 3D and Blu-ray 2D from Paramount.
9/18/12
and Blu-ray 
Survivors from the Titanic sinking, if they lived three more years, may have been thrilled by this audacious Louis Feuillade serial about a gang of anarchist criminals called The Vampires. This is the French epic (over six hours) with the legendary villainess in the black tights (oo la la!) known as IRMA VEP. Shootings, stranglings, poisonings, bombs, nooses, hidden passages, secret identities, slinky lady murderesses -- every pulp thriller idea is in place to exite filmgoers of 1916! In Blu-ray from Kino Classics.
9/18/12
Hello!
I've been getting more than my share of friendly reader mail this week, and I'm proud to say that some of it was in response to my 'editorial' policy about inflammatory disc rumors and rants on the web. I thoroughly enjoy and recommend web boards like the Classic Horror Film Board but avoid others (even some of the best-attended)
That said, (thanks again) here's a little bit of disc news ... Warner Home Video just announced three Blu-ray releases for January 8 -- Driving Miss Daisy, Grand Hotel (1932) and Mrs. Miniver. Criterion's December line-up was released yesterday, and it's great: Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Rene Clément's Purple Noon with Alain Delon, Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy Koyaanisquatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi; and Christopher Nolan's Following. Thanks for reading ... I'll be back on Saturday with new reviews from The Warner Archive Collection, Criterion, and Olive Films! --- Glenn Erickson
September 15, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: Blu-ray 
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon have come up with the best horror thriller in a long spell, a tale of five young adults on a holiday that quickly expands into a no-holds-barred battle for survival against an alternate world of terrifying monsters. Modern horror doesn't get much more clever than this; the concept is so good that explaining would be a cruel spoiler indeed. A great picture and even better audio experience, in Blu-ray (+ a digital version + Ultraviolet version) from Lionsgate.
9/15/12
Blu-ray 
Italian maestro Mario Bava's first horror triumph arrives in an impressive HD transfer. Bava introduced to the horror experience grisly shocks that even Hammer couldn't get past the censor -- indeed the picture was banned in England for eight years. Imported by AIP, the fright-show made a horror icon out of Barbara Steele. Stare into these eyes... they will hypnotize you with fright! In Blu-ray from Kino Classics.
9/15/12
and Blu-ray 
One of Buster Keaton's most enjoyable comedies is also one of his personal favorites. A clueless wealthy bachelor finds himself (and his sweetheart) cast adrift on an enormous ship. Their absured adventures in this unusual setting are the stuff of surreal dreams -- cooking in a kitchen scaled to serve hundreds, and fighting a horde of savage cannibals. With Kino's expected selection of interesting extras. In Blu-ray from Kino Classics.
9/15/12
Hello! Here's an Indiewire article forwarded by Gary Teetzel, about a major problem with some modern audiences attending screenings of vintage classics: Matt Zoller Seitz's From Russia with Love is not unsophisticated. You Are. People laugh at movies, of course, and not always in the spirit intended by the filmmaker. Back in college I would foolishly let my feelings be hurt when I'd show a '50s horror film or western and people laughed and made jokes (we were much more sophisticated smartasses back then). I can't say that the problem was all with the audience, because they were kids out to have a good time, not be enlightened. I guess I'm lucky that I haven't experienced too many screenings like this one... I have no desire to sit through something like Horror of Dracula with an audience laughing uproariously throughout. 
Old associates Alain Silver and James Ursini have a new book out that I proofread for them a number of years ago. It's an art book packed with color reproductions of Film Noir poster art, with descriptive and critical text. I've been through it one more time to take another look at all the arcane domestic and foreign posters, several of which I've seen nowhere else. It's called Film Noir Graphics: Where Danger Lives (that's a link to a descriptive site with sample pages) and is available online here. By now most everybody knows about the credits mishap with Universal's new Blu-ray of Frenzy, and a couple of reviews of the unreleased UK Hitchcock Blu-ray Set that have criticized the quality of some of the transfers. I started reading about this issue over a week ago and have had at least twenty readers asking for my thoughts. The reason I didn't react in print is that since my information wasn't first-hand, I'd just be repeating somebody else's opinion, i.e.,fanning the flames of gossip. I'm thoroughly fed up with commercial sites in search of a few thousand extra hits going ballistic over every misinterpreted aspect ratio 'outrage' that comes along. When the studios screw up, they screw up, I guess, and even when I point out problems it's not my function to get up a consumer lynch mob. The disc set has been moved back to October 30. When the US release is out, should I get a chance to review it, I'll give the films a closer going-over than my usual "it looks fine!" or, "It has problems!" Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson
September 11, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: Complete 6-Film Blu-ray Collection 
Little Diagoro points them out and Ogami Itto cuts 'em down! The best-known Japanese Samurai series arrives in a full set of stunning Blu-ray transfers. This is the subtitled Japanese language version of the insanely violent, utterly beautiful Japanese epic about the demoted executioner who wanders the roads with his baby boy in a bamboo cart, fighting any and all comers. All six "Baby Cart", "Sword of Vengeance" films on Blu-ray from AnimEigo.
9/11/12
Volume 5 
Entry number five is an all-star round up of Pre-Code attractions with a comedic appeal: Hard to Handle has James Cagney as an unprincipled promoter, Ladies they Talk About Barbara Stanwyck as a tough chick in a women's prison, The Mind Reader has Warren William as a fake swami and Miss Pinkerton Joan Blondell as a nurse playing amateur detective in a spooky house. Plenty of risqué dialogue, deep-Depression references and illicit relationships! From The Warner Archive Collection.
9/11/12
and Blu-ray 
Elaine May's first feature is a wonderfully funny critique of how far the idle rich will go to hang on to their inherited wealth. Forced to realize that he's lost his fortune, obnoxious snob Walter Matthau makes the ultimate sacrifice and romances a ditzy, clumsy, adorable young heiress -- with the twin objects of matrimony and homicide. Elaine May is the fern-loving botanist who changes his ways. The picture is uproarious, insightful and ultimately endearing. It also has the funniest gag about a rich man's sports car ever set down on film. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/11/12
Hello! A couple of interesting links that have come to light ... A Video Watchdog correspondent named Harry Roat sent VW editor and publisher Tim Lucas a link to a remarkable Italian newsreel from 1950 that contains a couple of ultra-brief shots of Mario Bava on the Film Set of a movie starring Aldo Fabrizi. Blink and you'll miss him, but Bava is indeed in two shots, the first being the very first angle of a man behind a movie camera, facing right. After decades of research and writing that enormous Mario Bava book All the Colors of the Dark, Tim has finally seen Bava "in motion" -- if only for a few frames. According to a poster on the Classic Horror Film Board (home of the Rondo awards), the Warner Archive Collection has some desirable Halloween offerings this year: Vengeance of Fu Manchu with Christopher Lee; My Demon Lover; the inescapably weird Confessions of an Opium Eater with Vincent Price; and Michael Reeves' interesting The Sorcerers with Boris Karloff. I hope these rumored titles do indeed surface. Meanwhile, fans are wondering where then un-announced The Beast with Five Fingers might be. It's a Warners title plain and simple. And the busy people over at Monstrous Movie Music have released the Vincent DiFate artwork for their upcoming CD of the score for that timeless classic Missile to the Moon (pictured). This has to be the most 'optimistic' rendering of that movie ever --- the images are reasonably correct but nothing in the movie looks remotely as interesting! Thanks for reading --- Glenn Erickson
September 08, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: Blu-ray 
Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah and Olympia Dukakis form a tight-knit group of women that support one another through good times and bad; Ray Stark's production is a winner from top to bottom. 23 years later, the comedy-drama-soap hasn't dated either. With Tom Skerritt and Sam Shepard; music by Georges Delerue. In Blu-ray from Twilight Time.
9/08/12
Master filmmaker Robert Bresson's penultimate feature presents a sticky problem: rigorously focused and disciplined, the director has found a style that deadens most of the ways by which a film can appeal to an audience. A disaffected student drifter breaks from his alienated friends, deciding that suicide is the only rational response to a relentlessly destructive and hateful humanity. Incredibly unpopular film on its first release, Bresson's film is now lauded by a fair number of film critics. From Olive Films.
9/08/12
and Blu-ray 
Sidney Lumet directed this promising tale of cult-ish violence in a moody Catholic boys' boarding school. New teacher Beau Bridges lands in the middle of a faculty feud between the suspiciously popular Robert Preston and the paranoid James Mason, while the student body turns against its own. A creepy, somewhat murky mystery that comes up short a few important answers: a very impressive performance by James Mason. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/08/12
Hello! The balance of September isn't going to give the disc collector much of a break, as the desirable product seems to pour out each new Tuesday. On the 11th arrive Twilight Time's Blu-rays of The Sound and the Fury and Steel Magnolias and Kino's educational film collections Rules for School and Troubled Youth. The 18th sees the prolific Olive Films loosing The Devil, Probably, Police, Love Exposure, and Blu-rays of Orson Welles' MacBeth, Cyrano de Bergerac, A Double Life and Man-Trap, while Kino begins its Mario Bava offerings with Blu-rays of Hachet for the Honeymoon, Lisa and the Devil/The House of Exorcism and Black Sunday (with Barbara Steele, left). Criterion hits us on the same date with new Blu-ray restorations of Children of Paradise and Les visiteurs du soir, and Warner Home Video delves into shock territory with Terry Southern's notorious theater-of-the-absurd oddity End of the Road. The month finishes up in good form on September 25: Criterion will premiere Blu-rays of Eating Raoul and The Game while the quality import company AnimEigo unleashes a Blu-ray set of Lone Wolf and Cub, the Complete 6-Film Blu-ray Collection, a concentrated dose of samurai violence and sensuality. And on the same date Flicker Alley will bring out (finally) full Blu-ray restorations of the Cinerama classics This Is Cinerama and Windjammer, in the trademarked "Smilevision" screen process that mimics the impact of original Cinerama. Meanwhile I want to make note of some TCM items that will be screened on the cable channel in the next three weeks or so. Items that grabbed my interest, either because I haven't seen them or I'm hoping for better quality, are Val Lewton's Youth Runs Wild and Budd Boetticher's Killer Shark (9/12), Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman (9/14), Jules Dassin's La Loi (The Law) (9/16), Gregory La Cava's The Half-Naked Truth (9/18), Robert Rossen's Johnny O'Clock (9/22), Three Stripes in the Sun (9/25), and the Nazi Titanic from 1943 (9/30). I was inspired to dig out these titles because TCM showed a real shocker last week, 1943's Behind the Rising Sun, an extreme anti-Japanese propaganda drama produced by RKO, starring Tom Neal in yellowface makeup. Thanks for reading! -- Glenn Erickson
September 04, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: Blu-ray 
Director Vittorio De Sica brought the curtain down on formal Italian neorealism with this unsparing, sentimental tale of a pensioner who can no longer afford his rent, or even feed his one companion, a small dog. The old man has a touchingly observed relationship with an uneducated young maid. Beautifully filmed and uncompromised by commercial demands, this remains one of the most revered of classic Italian movies. In Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
9/04/12
Blu-ray 
Fritz Lang and actress Joan Bennett teamed for the third time in this intense, visually fascinating but far too over-psychologized drama about a new bride and her possibly murderous husband. Michael Redgrave is the disturbed architect who maintains a set of 'felicitous rooms' in his mansion, each a perfectly reproduced copy of a famous murder scene. With terrific imagery that belongs in a horror film, including a bizarre animated opening. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/04/12
Blu-ray 
Ex O.S.S. agent Alan Ladd returns to Northern Italy to dish out retribution to the traitors that betrayed his girlfriend Wanda Hendrix to the Nazis, and finds an even bigger conspiracy afoot. Director Mitchell Leisen makes this postwar intrigue tale a smooth concoction, with the likes of Francis Lederer skulking around an island palazzo that belongs in a fairy tale. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/04/12
and Blu-ray 
The Rankin/Bass company jumped on the mid-'sixties kids 'n' monsters bandwagon with this colorful stop-motion puppet musical featuring designs by Jack Davis and voices by Boris Karloff, Alan Swift, Gale Garnett and Phyllis Diller. A gathering of monsters on a mad doctor's island plays like a Universal class reunion, with a special 'guest' visit from King Kong. In Blu-ray from Lionsgate.
9/04/12
Hello! Good news from DVDtalk, which is sending me the new Blu-ray releases of Cameron's Titanic (I'll turn off my brain and enjoy the spectacular visuals) and Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods. I've been hearing about Cabin for three years now and trying to avoid spoilers. (You've surely noticed that "Savant" is often the last reviewer to catch up with exceptional new movies, a fact that bothers me not one whit.) And what a great poster graphic, a house that appears to be folding like a Rubic's Cube. I'm ready for something special. 
Also, I'm in the running for a review copy of the big Blu-ray set Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection. After seeing a sample (The Invisible Man) at THE REEL THING and hearing what a great job Universal has been doing from old associate Wade Hannibal my love of the Uni Monsters has been officially re-kindled. Give studio restoration departments half a chance and they can really perform miracles. This is a punishing year for Blu-ray collectors that love old movies -- I'm also lobbying hard to review Uni's upcoming Universal Hitchcock set and will have to see if I get a crack at it. One's thoughts do change about movies one has 'internalized' over the years. It would be fun to see if the Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat texts that initially got me interested in film are just as profound as they seemed back in the 1960s. I'll bet the answer is yes. Next up should be more Forbidden Hollywood Volume 5 Pre-code madness from the Warner Archive Collection, and a review of a fantastic disc set from AnimEigo -- the full Japanese-version Sword of Vengeance/Baby Cart/Lone Wolf and Cub series, in dazzling Blu-ray (image above). Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson
September 01, 2012
Savant's new reviews today are: The Complete Shorts Collection 
This six-disc set contains MGM's entire short subject series, that ran from 1935 to 1947. "Your MGM Reporter" alerts the viewer to a full spectrum of cheats, crimes, rackets and dirty dealing. Robbers, insurance fraud, counterfeiting, labor racketeering, juvenile delinquency and other ills proliferate until the war starts, when subjects begin to include spies and traitors. Over seventeen hours of great stuff, with acting appearances by future stars and excellent episodes by directors like Fred Zinnemann, Joseph M. Newman, Joseph Losey and Jacques Tourneur. From The Warner Archive Collection.
9/01/12
Blu-ray 
Robert Mitchum is an orphan in the old West with a life made violent and hostile by forces he doesn't understand in this key psychological western, often cited as a film noir in western garb. Dark secrets, recurring nightmares and an unrelentingly vindictive one-armed villain add up to a moody, fatalistic Freudian nightmare. Teresa Wright, Judith Anderson and Dean Jagger co-star in what has come to be one of most respected westerns of the 1940s, written by Niven Busch, directed by Raoul Walsh, photographed by James Wong Howe and scored by Max Steiner. In Blu-ray from Olive Films.
9/01/12
and Blu-ray 
Euro-trash '70s horror 9/01/12
Hello! A couple of links today, the first courtesy of Gary Teetzel: The Academy here in Los Angeles will be screening hi-res restorations of a number of scary movies as a Halloween promotion in October, including things like Hitchcock's The Birds but also selections from their remastered monster series (Bride of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon 3D) and even a couple of Sci-Fi greats not yet slated for Blu-ray release (The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tarantula). The full schedule is up at this link, A Monstrous Centennial. A while back, correspondent Tim Rogerson sent me a detailed breakdown & versions comparison of the old and new video versions of The Blood Beast Terror, the movie with Peter Cushing, Robert Flemyng and a giant moth-girl. I've finally gotten around to amending the review with Rogerson's findings, here. And another call-out tonight for readers to wander over to the Greenbriar Picture Shows website: writer John McElwee has been running mini-reviews of shows that have grabbed his attention of late, and his opinions are always interesting (and cleverly written). Stepping into his recent back pages accesses information about a new Bela Lugosi book and a great article on Paul Fejos' Broadway, with details even Criterion didn't pick up on. Greenbriar is always a good place to visit. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson
Review Staff
| About DVD Talk
| Newsletter Subscribe
| Join DVD Talk Forum
|
|
| |||||||||
because of the level of anger, finger-pointing and (sometimes) self-promotional opportunism that crops up. So it's good that readers understand when I don't automatically jump on the latest perceived screw-up, or demand blood when my favorite films don't always come out on disc like I wish they would.
