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Wings on Blu-Ray
The restoration work on this 1927 film (first winner of a "Best Picture" Academy Award) is very well done, and the updated musical score, along with sound effects, makes an exceptional presentation, particularly considering the terrible shape most films from this era are in (if not actually "lost"). Picture clarity is very good, and many nice touches with stereo sound augment the story onscreen. (I've not seen this film before, only read about it in various film histories, so I have no previous impressions to compare this Blu-ray release to.)
The aerial sequences are the central element in this story of two airmen from the United States thrust into the cauldron of World War 1, and a secondary plot featuring Clara Bow as a love interest crops in and out between the flying. A young Gary Cooper has a few memorable minutes onscreen as a veteran flyer. The stunt work is amazing, with the airplanes moving almost like kites, performing incredibly tight turns, falls and rolls. There are many innovative camera-angles (apparently many of these planes had cameras strapped to them) and once we get into the air, there are many surprises and unexpected sights.
Generally, the packaging of this silent production is getting very positive reviews (for example, see Nitrateville.com) though I've seen a number of complaints about the color tinting and a few other minor color touches to the film. There are few extra features and a Gaylord Carter organ score on the disc.
Available from amazon.com as Blu ray and DVD for approx $20
New Barbara Stanwyck Biography now out.
Classic Universal films coming to Blu-Ray
January 11, 2012: As part of the program of celebrations at Universal ("A Comcast Company") to highlight the film company's 100th anniversary, they've got scheduled a 13-movie list of classic films that are going through a restoration process and transfer to the high definition Blu-Ray format, with a release date starting January 31, 2012, with To Kill A Mockingbird the first to hit retail. Here are the 13 classics on the way:
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Dracula (1931) [Both the Lugosi and the Lupita Tovar Spanish version)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates (1941)
Pillow Talk (1959)
To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
The Birds (1963)
The Sting (1973)
Jaws (1975)
Out of Africa (1985)
Schindler's List (1993)
Brief Review: Hugo
Dec 10, 2011: The film is about an orphaned boy living in the Paris train station who keeps the enormous clocks working, moving about behind the walls and in the ceiling. Incidentally, the movie is also about George Melies and the beginning of movies as an art form, with asides in many directions (for example, silent comedien Harold Lloyd, see pic below).
The best film I have seen in a theatre since Winter's Bone. It isn't Disney, Pixar or anything I can quite categorize: it's perhaps simply a children's book brought to (cinematic) life, with the dilemmas of adults threaded through the story in an unobtrusive way, so the tale moves on several levels, and ends right where it started, with children.
Review: Contraband (1940, aka 'Blackout')
Aug 26, 2011: Conrad Veidt in an infrequent hero role as a Danish sea captain thrown into a mess of Nazi spies in London while he pursues after a kidnapped passenger (Valerie Hobson) from his ship. Read more
75 "lost" silent films found in New Zealand
July 21, 2011: In 2010, 75 previously thought "lost" American silent era films were found in a Wellington, New Zealand archive, including work by director John Ford ("Upstream" 1927) and a lost Clara Bow drama ("Maytime" 1923). Many of the films are being restored by the Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. The films are generally all in a shrunken state, with a quarter of them in a stage of advanced nitrate decay. See a list of the films at the Preservation Film Board web site
[Below: Actress Pearl White, famous for the "Perils of Pauline" serial, has a work now found among the cache of 'lost' American silent film from a New Zealand archives, i.e., The Woman Hater, 1910.]
Katherine Hepburn estate for sale
July 19, 2011: $28 million is the asking price for the actresses family home in Saybrook, Connecticut. The 3.5 acre, 8300+ square foot home (6 bedroom, 8 bath) has been in the Hepburn family since 1913, and was rebuilt in 1939 after it was destroyed in "The Great Hurricane of 1938" which flattened part of New England. See pix and more info, or make an offer at realtor.com
Updated Ann Sothern Page
July 6, 2011: Updated the page, corrected the "Southern" spelling in many instances (how confusing that must have been back in the beginning of her career); added much more written info, photo images and book info. Read More Ann Sothern
Suddenly, Last Summer
June 20, 2011: New page on the Joseph Mankiewicz / Elizabeth Taylor / Katherine Hepburn / Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer from 1959.
Cinematical, adios
June 29, 2011: Though chiefly occupied with whatever was coming out next from Hollywood, the Cinematical web site was thorough and reliable. Owned by AOL, it's now merged into 'Moviefone' and is now following the Huffington Post model, which means writers don't get paid: therefore the Cinematical staff has dispersed and I guess is being replaced by new fingers on the keyboards. For a repudiation of the whole affair, there is this piece by Sean P. Means.
Film Critic Wars!
June 18, 2011: Seattle film critic N. D. Thompson was rejected for publication in the online journal Slate, and the result has been a frenzy of blog posts around the internet defending that film critics actually still serve a function (and that the critics at Slate are failing in this capacity) with the backdrop of a world where their services are no longer needed at innumerable newspapers. Get a look at the wordy warfare at mediatbistro.com.
Classic Hollywood Memorabilia Auction
June 26, 2011: The Bonham's auction company will be presenting a Hollywood "Entertainment Memorabilia including Animation Art" at 10:00 auction on June 26 at 7601 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. Besides the usual signed photos and props 
(for example, the bullwhip from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark) there are many personal items that belonged to various classic Hollywood film stars, correspondence, and private papers.
For example, Bonham's is auctioning a signed Lon Chaney photo from The Unknown, the 1927 silent film which also starred Joan Crawford and John Gilbert.
Included in the auction are vintage publicity portrait collections from various sources, with photographs by photographers like Ted Allan, Russell Ball, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Irving Lippman, Eugene Robert Richee, WM. E. Thomas, William Walling Jr., Vandamm, Russell Ball, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Irving Chidnoff, De Forrest, Elmer Fryer, Ruth Harriet Louise, Alber J. Kopec, John Miehle, Frank Powolny and Bert Si, among others.
Examples of some of the pieces at this auction: a group of six black albums containing a collection of over three hundred film stills from the earliest of Norma Shearer films, and Norma Shearer's personal film dupe of her 1936 Romeo and Juliet. A photo album that belonged to Irving Thalberg. A seven page handwritten filmography by Barbara Stanwyck on her stationary stapled together with a note to publicist Helen Ferguson reading in part: "My goodness that's an awful mess of pictures isn't it - and some were 'a mess' too." Various Marilyn Monroe items are included in the auction, too.
The Printed Catalogue from Bonham's is #19045 and costs $40. A complete illustrated, internet-friendly version of the auction lots are online here.
Dim Movies: Digital Projection Woes
May 26, 2011: Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times Blog) unloads on the rush of digital projectors going into movie theaters, and how poorly they are being used, with lighting on screen being cut by 50% to even 85% from what was actually filmed:
"Driven by a mania to abandon celluloid in favor of digital, increasing numbers of chains are installing 3D-ready digital projectors. As everyone can tell simply by taking off their 3D glasses, the process noticeably reduces the visible light from the screen. I got emails from readers saying the night scenes in "Pirates of the Caribbean" were so dim they were annoying.
...Digital projectors have been force-fed to theaters by an industry hungry for the premium prices it can charge for 3D films. As I've been arguing for a long time, this amounts to charging you more for an inferior picture. The winners are the manufacturers of the expensive machines, and the film distributors. The hapless theaters still depend on concession sales to such a degree that a modern American theater can be described as a value-added popcorn stand."
The digital future is being trailed by a nagging doubt. There are genuine and significant cost savings in the digital world of virtual artists tools, but what will be the judgment in the future if a majority of consumers and artists alike compare the old analog images/sound with digital and find the latter lacking?
New Deborah Kerr Essay
May 12, 2011: There is a new 3,000 word essay about the career of Deborah Kerr at Bright Lights Film Journal. The article is by Penelope Andrew and is a shorter version of an 8,000 word piece by that author. Our Deborah Kerr page is here.
Lament for the California Beach Movie
April 2011: Writer Terrance Rafferty has written a history and lament for the "Beach Party" movies of the 1960s, with some dead-on descriptions and mixed affection for what was once such a popular genre in American celluloid. Titled Oh, Kahuna, What Became of That Endless Summer?, the essay questions what caused the death of the genre, and where it is now, surviving in documentaries.
"By 1963, when “Catch a Wave” was recorded, the image of California as a paradise of leisure, especially for the young, had reached a kind of peak. Or perhaps a nadir, because that was the very year in which American International Pictures, an independent studio that specialized in low-budget exploitation fare for drive-ins, kicked off a series of California beach-party movies starring Frankie Avalon, a second-tier teen idol from South Philadelphia, and Annette Funicello, a buxom young songstress who had made her pop-culture bones as the cutest, perkiest cast member of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” The first of these films, directed by William Asher and called, imaginatively, “Beach Party,” featured a handful of terrible songs, some excruciatingly broad comedy (mostly supplied by veteran television comics like Robert Cummings, Morey Amsterdam and Harvey Lembeck) and a few truly risible surfing sequences, in which Frankie and his pals grin and bob in close-up in front of rear-projected waves.
It was awful, and its sequels — “Muscle Beach Party” (1964), “Bikini Beach” (1964), “Beach Blanket Bingo” (1965) and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965), all directed by Mr. Asher — were, if anything, worse. In the last two, the comic relief is provided by the great Buster Keaton, whose characteristically melancholy expression seems, in this context, fully justified. He’s a trouper, but it’s impossible to watch his antics with any pleasure unless you’re totally unaware of who he is. The filmmakers’ assumption, of course, is that their youthful audience will in fact be blissfully ignorant of Keaton’s place in film history. And, cynical though that calculation may be, it is also weirdly appropriate, because ignorance of history was, after all, part of the idea of California too. "
[Below: Illustration from the NY Times piece, Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon from "Muscle Beach Party" 1964, American International.
Karloff Stamp
Postal stamp featuring Boris Karloff.
From the "Behind the Scenes" USPS stamps released in 2003
In March 2011 a new Boris Karloff "Authorized Biography" was released from Tomahawk Press with a 598 page count.
Amazon.com : Boris Karloff More Than A Monster
Citizen Kane at Seventy
The Atlantic Magazine online has an article by D. B. Grady on the importance and longevity of Orson Welle's first film.
The contract that gave birth to Citizen Kane was an unthinkable gamble by RKO, but the studio had good reason to bet on Orson Welles. At 20, he lorded over Broadway, first with Voodoo Macbeth, a reworking of the "Scottish play" set in the Caribbean and starring an all-African American cast. He followed triumphant reviews by establishing the Mercury Theatre and rewriting Julius Caesar, setting it in Mussolini's Italy. The curtain rose to universal acclaim. In a 1938 cover story, Time magazine wrote of Welles, "If the career of the Mercury Theatre, which next week will be six months old, seems amazing, the career of Orson Welles, who this week is 23, is no less so. Were Welles's 23 years set forth in fiction form, any self-respecting critic would damn the story as too implausible for serious consideration."
Usually listed in critics top ten lists for best (or most influential) films in Hollywood history, Citizen Kane has some detractors who question it's fame and quality. The plot holes have been pointed out and examined, the heavy-gothic tone transported to modern biography and then mixed with a documentary approach has been knocked for it's melodramatics; nonetheless the film endures as "America's Greatest FIlm" and continually stirs the pot on what is (or is not) a 'great' Hollywood movie.
[Below: Screenshot of the Atlantic article about Citizen Kane.]
Some significant personalities from the world of film have recently passed on:
JANE RUSSELL 1921-2011:
The daughter of a US Army lieutenant who took his family to Canada after leaving the service. Howard Hughes put her under contract and built a publicity platform for his film The Outlaw (1941) by concentrating on Russell's voluptuous figure. She eventually graduated to films that included not just her physical appearance but her sardonic attitude, such as the film His Kind of Woman (1951) and The Las Vegas Story (1952).
Read obit/bio online here.
TONY CURTIS 1925-2010: Star of many late 1950s films that featured his comedic skills and handsome looks, but probably most revered for his portrait of a self-destructive (and ethically-challenged) publicity agent trying to take on the infinitely more corrupt newspaper columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) in the 1957 SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. Father of Jamie Lee Curtis and former husband of Janet Leigh, Curtis turned out several books on his Hollywood experiences and his Bronx childhood. Read obit/bio online here.
Director IRVIN KERSHNER: Considered to be the best film of the George Lucas Star Wars films, Kershner's "The Empire Strikes Back" stands out from the other films for its darker themes and psychology. Kershner also directed the last Sean Connery "James Bond" film: Never Say Never Again, in 1983. Altogether Kershner had 15 film directorial credits, his first being Stakeout on Dope Street, in 1958. Irvin Kershner April 29, 1923 – November 27, 2010, from lung cancer.
Actor LESLIE NIELSEN was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The son of a Canadian Mountie, he pursued being a radio disc jockey, but when offered a scholarship to a New York City actors theatre, he reluctantly left Canada. He worked regularly in television in the early 1950s, and eventually got a long-term contract with M-G-M after the success of the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet. It was his role in the 1980 film Airplane! which catapulted him to his greatest fame as a comedian, and many films (and the TV series Police Squad!) followed, particularly the three-film series of Naked Gun films. Leslie Nielsen February 11, 1926 - November 28, 2010, from pneumonia.
Actress INGRID PITT (born Ingoushka Petrov) starred in many well known Hammer horror films, maybe the best known being Countess Dracula from 1971. She also starred in Where Eagles Dare and appeared in the David Lean directed Dr. Zhivago. Her experiences as a child imprisoned by the Germans in a concentration camp during World War 2 is in production as a short film for 2011 release, which will include her voice-over narration. Ingrid Pitt November 21, 1937 – November 23, 2010.
[Below: Photo of Ingrid Pitt, publicity promo for Where Eagles Dare.]
Scarlet Pimpernel coming back to the big screen
Empire Online has a news story that the Scarlet Pimpernel is coming back to the screen again (they say "it's the Sherlock Holmes effect" referring to the success of the 2009 film starring Robert Downey, Jr.). Probably the most popular version of the literary character onscreen was the Leslie Howard version from 1934, available in innumerable public domain copies, and shown on television via Turner Classic movies frequently.
New Jean Harlow book
I've not seen a copy of the book yet, but simply put, the Vieira Hollywood picture-books are the best albums on Hollywood, bar none, for well over a decade now. No one puts as much attention to the production aspects, design, picture choices, and then ladles the whole affair with affection and admiration in the text. Classic Hollywood has not had a modern explainer and admirer like Vieira for decades now, and the taste and skill brought to bear on his books make them both readable-fun and collectible (some of his past books are out of print and instead of dropping down to the remainder pricing so many used Hollywood books seem to end up at, his instead get harder to find and buy).
Book is by Darrell Rooney and Mark Vieira, 240 pages, Angel City Press. Available from amazon.com
New Book: Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars
This is a collection of 23 original interviews with stars of the silent screen, with biographical information and a filmography included for each.
Interviewed are Lew Ayres, William Bakewell, Lina Basquette, Madge Bellamy, Eleanor Boardman, Ethlyne Clair, Junior Coghlan, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks, Dorothy Janis, George Lewis, Marion Mack, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lois Moran, Baby Marie Osborne, Muriel Ostriche, Eddie Quillan, Esther Ralston, Dorothy Revier, David Rollins and Gladys Walton.
About the Author Michael G. Ankerich is a writer whose work focuses on the silent film era of Hollywood. A former newspaper reporter, he has written extensively for Classic Images, Films of the Golden Age, and Hollywood Studio Magazine, which featured his interview with Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) on the 50th anniversary of the release of Gone With The Wind.
Book is 319 pages, McFarland. Available from amazon.com
New Busby Berkeley book
Maybe the most revered of musical directors was the extreme-stylist of the golden era of Hollywood movies, Busby Berkeley, a man who changed what a stage-production meant on film by taking the camera and making it move like a winged-eye that could see the motion of actors from every angle. Whether they were underwater, behind glass, or below a skyward lense, Berkeley made synchronized motion more than a filmed reproduction of a Broadway play.
Book is by Jeffrey Spivak, 408 pages, University Press of Kentucky. Available from amazon.com
JANE RUSSELL 1921-2011: Noted primarily for her statuesque figure and her wit expressed through sarcasm, Russell starred with friend Robert Mitchum in two well-liked films, and made a blockbuster musical with Marilyn Monroe. She got her start in Hollywood with a seven year contract with Howard Hughes who was obsessed with her physical appearance. Read obit/bio online here.
TONY CURTIS 1925-2010: Star of many late 1950s films that featured his comedic skills and handsome looks, but probably most revered for his portrait of a self-destructive (and ethically-challenged) publicity agent trying to take on the infinitely more corrupt newspaper columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) in the 1957 SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. Father of Jamie Lee Curtis and former husband of Janet Leigh, Curtis turned out several books on his Hollywood experiences and his Bronx childhood. Read obit/bio online here.
WHAT WE'RE WATCHING: Miss Pinkerton, 1932: A simple crime drama from director Lloyd Bacon with a very young Joan Blondell and George Brent. Blondell played a nurse in a number of films, and this includes the customary disrobing scene when she heads off to bed in a negligee, similar to a scene in the Stanwyck/Blondell 1931 NIGHT NURSE. Blondell in her undergarments must have been quite a draw for a pre-code 1932 film, though would hardly register in the modern era of film or television. Story springboard is also similar to NIGHT NURSE, complaining of the boredom of routine nursing, Blondell's character ("Nurse Adams") is suddenly called to stay at a large home where an elderly patient requires care after the death of her son. Was it a suicide or murder? The house staff scamper about in suspicious ways, and newly promoted police inspector Patten (George Brent) who is looking into the matter finds a natural ally with the energetic and wise-cracking Blondell character. Lloyd takes time to put together some nice scenes and they use the house to create a shadow-enshrouded set piece. View a gallery of screenshots from the film Miss Pinkerton 1932. Read more.
WHAT WE'RE WATCHING: Bride of Frankenstein, 1935: The James Whale production which bounces back and forth between a farcical take on the Mary Shelley tale (even putting Mary into the movie - see above, Elsa Lancaster portraying the 19 year old author competing with her litarary luminary husband Percy and poet Lord Byron for 'spookiest story') and of course the film aslo features Boris Karloff cementing his version of the Frankenstein creature which begain in the 1931 Universal film. The question arises, why hasn't Universal released a 75th anniversary DVD (and Blu-Ray!) version of the film from the reported fine print they are rumoured to have on hand? The DVD releases of the last decade are now outdated and the film is due for a remastering and restoration from whatever superior elements Universal has in 'the vault.' At the TCM film fest in April, supposably a version of Bride was shown with a remastered audio - - hopefully the visuals will also be getting attention soon.. Read more.