JamesWhitehead
Piffle Prospector
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- Aug 2, 2001
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Poundshop Movies
Poundshop Movies, revised and updated Sunday, 17th October
Some of these movies are Fortean and downright weird but my main motive for posting this very lengthy screed is to point out some great bargains in the Public Domain movies which are now flooding the market in DVD format.
Wearing my film anorak, I gather that at one time Copyright in movies needed to be renewed at twenty-seven year intervals, otherwise they lapsed into the public domain. Most studios protect their rights jealously so PD status mainly affects independently-produced films. Work as recent as the zombie flicks of George Romero has landed in the PD and some films never seem to have been registered. On the Web you can find the sites of many companies which sell libraries of PD material to anyone who wishes to exploit it. This is a one-off fee so if you can get the packaging right, you may turn a fast buck.
You may expect the sources of these movies to be dodgy and there are cases where the DVDs have been mastered from videos of broadcasts - complete with ghosting. However, most seem to have come from further up the chain and in many cases the quality suggests that the source has been a studio-produced digital version, probably produced for laser-discs. Though laser-discs were an expensive niche-market in the UK, they were quite popular in America and Japan so many thousands of movies were digitized in the eighties and nineties long before the DVD format arrived.
[This is actually piffle, I confess. I never had a laser-disc machine or I might have learned that they were an analogue medium. Duh!]
You can find some of these titles in the major stores, seldom for less than around £6. I have seen one Wayne compilation at £12 in HMV - the exact same version they sell in publishers' remainder shops for £1.25!
Most of the ultra-cheap series I have seen are of straight to video z-films and soapy made-for-tv stuff or schlocky kung-fu style piffle. However the Classic Entertainment series of themed triple bills has hit Poundland. You may have to visit two or three stores to assemble the complete series of 28 but most of them are well worth the asking price and some are splendid bargains.
Classic Entertainment DVDs at the Poundland chain
All numbers prefixed CE-
001: Blue Steel. Winds Of The Wastelands. The Trail Beyond. Vol.1 John Wayne
Most of Wayne's Lone Star B-Westerns feature in the series. These are widely available in other compilations, usually with added synthesizer music which is dreadful. I have been able to compare some of these prints with those in the John Wayne Collection triple bills and these are far superior! Other Lone Star Westerns are sprinkled throughout the series but the first two discs are entirely devoted to them.
The John Wayne Lone Star westerns on these Classic Entertainment DVDs run longer than the versions on some other discs. The Star Packer is 1.5 minutes longer, Lawless Frontier some three minutes longer and Riders of Destiny go on riding for an extra five minutes in this version. More important, however is the fact that the prints are generally superior and the apalling synthesized music isn't used. That leaves long action sequences with nothing but sound effects. Even the fisticuffs do not get loudly amplified blows as we are used to - so the pulled punches tend to be noticed. I gather that the trimmed versions with the synthesizer were used on cable television in the US.
Blue Steel - don't look for relevance in the title - is the first movie on the first of these discs. Quality wise it sets a pretty high standard for this is about as good as seventy-year-old B-Westerns ever look. The cinematography is often strikingly good with some bold compositions in the chase sequences. I loved this one. This print runs 54 mins - the same as the version in The Most Wanted Collection. The allmovie guide gives an rt of 59 minutes. I sure do hate to lose even a minute or two of these darn horsey operas! Good to report that this is free of any synthesized soundtrack.
Winds of the Wasteland is a 1935 John Wayne Western. They spent a bit more money on this than on the Lone Star series - it even has a lush symphonic score! With his partner, Wayne buys a franchise for a stagecoach line to a ghost town. Bit by bit he revives the town and vanquishes the baddies in a stagecoach race to gain the mail subsidy. Good fun. The print runs three minutes longer than some in circulation - probably mainly extra footage of the race. A line of ceefax-type dots at the top of the screen suggest a telly source for this.
The Trail Beyond ends with an exciting siege at a Canadian trading post. Wicked French Canadians with dodgy accents have stolen the ammunition. Throw in a treasure map, a pair of skeletons, canoes and two Noah Beerys and we have a busy fifty-five minutes for John Wayne. On the grounds of waste-not, want-not even a failed stunt was left in the finished print, to show that not even Big John could transfer from horse to wagon first time every time, even when he was doubled by Yakima Canutt.
002: Paradise Canyon. The Dawn Rider. The Desert Trail. Vol.2 John Wayne
Three more Lone Star entries.
003: Call It Murder. Great Guy. The Lucky Texan. Vol.1 Tough Guys
Call it Murder was an early Bogart movie - this is the retitled re-release print which promotes him to the star in the titles, though he was merely a supporting player in 1934. Call it Murder is not strictly a Hollywood movie at all - it was independently produced in New York from a successful play called Midnight, its alternative title. Its stage origins are obvious but the first half is very gripping. After the midnight deadline passes, the tension slackens and we see the end coming way before they finish. This print is not a thing of beauty with some moments of lost sound and jumps. However, I'd guess that it was only Bogart's subsequent fame and the movie's reissue which assured its survival in any form.
Great Guy features Jimmy Cagney as a Deputy Weights & Measures Inspector in one of the unsuccessful movies produced by Cagney's own company. So not much chance of him turning yellow on the way to chair, alas! Probably the best scenes are those in which he exposes the daily small-time scams of the High Street. It is all quite watchable and Cagney is fine. This picture seems to have been hacked about quite a bit during its lifetime. Maltin gives 75 minutes but the Allmovie Guide says it is just 50 minutes. This Poundland cut runs the promised 66 minutes on PAL. Take that to Weights & Measures to work out!
The Lucky Texan is a Lone Star Western. In this one, Big John with his old-timer step-daddy George Hayes strike gold. Some slicker types cheat them with false contracts out of their property. The solution turns out to be a man donning a dress! Oh Lordy!
004: Vengeance Valley. The Big Trees. The Man fron Utah. Vol.2 Tough Guys
Man from Utah is another Lone Star picture made up mainly from old rodeo footage but the other two are lush colour pictures from the early fifties.
Paternity and illegitimacy were not issues which Hollywood like to tackle head on in a contemporary setting. The Western genre had a long history of exploring issues of masculinity and survival but also by implication their opposites. This handsome Technicolor picture was thought very daring in its day and is still very watchable. Vengeance Valley has its soapy moments and Burt Lancaster was the star but Robert Walker steals the show as his camply wicked brother - from the same year as his rôle in Strangers on a Train.
The Big Trees is an example of fifties mainstream weirdness - a Technicolor adventure which throws a heap of exotic ingredients into the pot and still emerges tasting of a wet Saturday afternoon. Land-grabbing Kirk Douglas gets involved with a tree-hugging Quaker widow. A history lesson spoken over the cross-section of a giant redwood was lifted by Hitchcock for Vertigo. The colour print is in a reasonable state but the transfer suffers the same kind of pitch-waver on the soundtrack as on Behave Yourself. As there is a lush soundtrack, this is very uncomfortable.
005: Fathers Little Dividend. Nothing Sacred. Ghosts On The Loose. Vol.1 Leading Ladies
The ladies concerned are Liz Taylor, Carole Lombard & Ava Gardner.
Father's Little Dividend. In his sequel to Father of the Bride, mad Hollywood director Albert Q. Fegg decided to change a few things. Grouchy Spencer Tracy's mood swings are attributed to cocaine and we gather that he has impregnated his daughter - a skinny Liz Taylor. She keeps assuring herself that having bitten the pillow, she cannot be pregnant. In the notorious glass toilet scene, filmed on closed sets, we see the hideous anal birth of a monster-child. The husband, played by Charles Hawtrey, knows he cannot be the father of this monstrosity so he lures Tracy to a dockside tavern and pays some thugs to emasculate him. Cunningly, his father-in-law has turned up in a dress and seduces the three assassins, before murdering them in cruel and unusual ways. Meanwhile, Liz cannot face the screaming little alien and has hallucinations of a fat-cheeked woman in her radiator - surely not her future self! As the face of Spencer Tracy begins to appear on the back of the child's head, she saws the poor little mite in two. Her father then arrives with the famous freeze-frame line, his bloodstained hand on the bannister as he climbs the stairs, "Honey, I'm home!"
Needless to say, MGM had their doubts about this version of the movie and hired husband-of-Dorothy Vincente Minelli to remake it. Sadly that is the version usually seen today and on this disc. It retains much of the horror of the Fegg version but is a tad short of its lightness of touch.
Now a classic Ben Hecht comedy: Nothing Sacred is in very bad taste throughout. Carole Lombard is determined to enjoy a free trip to New York curtesy of a newspaper. They think she is dying so she becomes the sentimental toast of the city. As the truth threatens to unfold, she decides on suicide. Meanwhile reporter Frederick March has fallen for her. They end up slugging it out in a very incorrect finale. This print is slightly hazy but for 1937 Technicolor not so bad. A few local bursts of scratching occur but mostly the picture does not look distressed at all. Deliciously wicked fun this one and worth far more than the measly sum asked!
Ghosts on the Loose is a turkey from William (One-Shot) Beaudine: here sold as starring Ava Gardner but neither she nor Lugosi are on screen long. The full horror is revealed in its alternative title: The Eastside Boys Meet Bela Lugosi. Oh dear, the unlovely boys had started as a touch of social realism in pictures such as Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces but by this time they had sunk into empty farcial comedy. This weak film has Nazi spies but no spooks. Even so, it is useful to be made aware of some of the workaday fare to which audiences of the time were subjected. It wasn't Maltese Falcon on the menu every day!
006 Of Human Bondage. Behave Yourself. Home Town Story. Vol.2 Leading Ladies
Home Town Story was a pro-business lecture wrapped in a thin fictional coat. It was funded by General Motors and would have been forgotten years ago if Marilyn Monroe hadn't featured in an early supporting rôle. Her assets are outstanding though her accent is very odd - she is onscreen for a couple of minutes only. The theme music suffers from terrible pitch waver. A Left-leaning Senator is thrown out of office and continues his anti big business campaigns from the editorial desk of the local paper. When his kid sister is rescued by big machines, he rethinks his attitude and is welcomed back into mainstream with the love of a good woman and a puppy. I suppose everyone took the GM money and ran, before they could view the finished product, which resembles an episode of Thunderbirds without such convincing puppets!
Behave Yourself is a surprisingly black comedy to come out of fifties Hollywood. The print is badly affected by vile pitch-waver on the music soundtrack - there is a lot of music. This kind of pitch-black comedy requires a more subtle touch but what a handsomely-mounted production this was with top cinematography from James Wong Howe. Maybe Billy Wilder could have done something with it. The plot is a complicated one - advertisements for a lost dog lead to an increasing pile of corpses. Shelley Winters and Farley Grainger are upstaged by a formidable mother-in-law.
The real gem here is the 1934 version of Somerset Maugham's grim romance. This was the first major rôle of Bette Davis. She plays the sluttish Cockney waitress who makes poor crippled Lesle Howard's life a misery. This is a dork fillum indeed with a startlingly pessimistic view of sexual relations as inevitably blighted by power-games. What adds to the film's curiosity value is the way it was thought lost, the negatives having been destroyed when a new and lesser version was made in the forties. So DVDs are all from prints and not of top quality. This version I have not yet seen to compare it with that on GMVS - it looks very similar. Both these DVDs feature the 83 minute version which omits some background about Philip's childhood - the fuller version runs about 90 minutes. Howard and Davis are both brilliant so this is a real bargain.
007 His Private Secretary. His Girl Friday. The Amazing Adventure. Vol. 1 Silver Screen
Two of these films are Depression era Cinderella tales in which a millionaire enters the real world of work and finds a bride. His Private Secretary stars the youthful John Wayne cast as a dissipated playboy. Some sources give a running time of 68 minutes for this, so this 60 minute print may well be abridged. This 1930 movie is the earliest on these discs and the print is not in good condition.
The Amazing Adventure is a young Cary Grant as a millionaire trying to survive in the real world of work as a bet. It has its moments but this UK-made movie was drastically trimmed for the US and runs only just over an hour with a very abrupt ending. Even so, the young Grant is worth seeing - he seems to arrived in movies with a full bag of tricks which held him in good stead for several decades.
One of his best films makes this DVD is a must: His Girl Friday – is the Howard Hawks comedy which rewrote The Front Page for Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. The fast-paced dialogue is here scored in a near-musical way and the comedy is pitch black with a death-row prisoner's fate in the balance. Many different prints of this classic are available, some probably better than this one, however it appears to be uncut and is very watchable.
008 My Favourite Brunette. Crosby-The Road To Hollywood. Suddenly. Vol.2 Silver Screen
The Road to Hollywood was a cash-in movie, reissuing early Bing Crosby shorts in a compilation with a title designed to confuse audiences who had flocked to the successful series of comedies he made with Bob Hope & Dorothy Lamour. Crosby's film career was essentially based on his phenomenal success as a radio and recording artist. The films promoted his laid-back persona, which now seems complacent and dull. The plots revolve around his celebrity or his being mistaken for someone without it. There are some inventive routines here - I enjoyed the lion! The black-face stuff will raise eyebrows today though.
Crosby puts in a brief guest appearance at the end of My Favourite Brunette. This is a film noir spoof, starring Bob Hope as a baby-photographer with aspirations to be a detective. When mysterious Dorothy Lamour hires him, can Peter Lorre be far behind? You could count the Fortean pre-echoes of Hitchcock in this one. It is well made but neither very funny nor very thrilling. Films with a hyphen in their genre never are.
Suddenly was withdrawn by television companies after the Kennedy assassination. A tense siege-type thriller, it stars Frank Sinatra as the boastful war veteran who has been hired to shoot the President. Eerie prefigurings of the LHO case abound, including the shooting of a policeman. Some sort of confused message about the need for guns is implied but the film works very well and makes this particular triple bill well worth having.
009 The Woman In Green. Young and Innocent. The Man Who knew Too Much.Vol.3 Silver Screen
The Woman in Green was a one of the Basil Rathbone Holmes series. The other two are both Hitchcocks, no less, from his early UK years.
This 1934 version of The Man who Knew Too Much is wonderful entertainment, though I always boggle at the idea of a Temple of the Sun in Wapping! Take a look at the user comments on the IMDB to see how this one divides the sheep from the goats. Anyone who thinks this a routine thirties movie or technically unsophisticated should be forced to watch Star Wars until their eyes bleed.
It is fast-moving and very subtle. Compare the dysfunctional family here with the fifties remake which featured Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day. The languid style of Leslie Banks, tucking into cheese and pickles with his daughter's kidnappers has to be seen as a comment on the complacency of the International Set in the face of the rise of Nazism. I also find the final scene of the distressed Nova Pilbeam carries quite a charge. The emotions are mainly masked in this film but when they burst out it is very telling. The final siege, based on the Sydney Street siege of 1912, caused the censors a great many headaches as the script had originally featured the police with guns.
This print is rather tired-looking. The version on Carlton Silver Collection is much better, though it has some scratches. However this cheap version - obviously from a UK print - has a longer running time. Without running them side-by-side yet, I think the extra minutes are mainly in the better structured build-up to the siege, as the army take over the surrounding streets.
Young & Innocent is less often seen and I am looking forward to it.
010 A Fare Well To Arms. The Groom Wore Spurs. Indiscretion Of An American Wife Vol.4
A strange medley of movies on this disc! Gary Cooper in the earlier and better version of Hemingway's 1929 novel.
A forgettable Ginger Rogers comedy is the centre of the sandwich. At one point she wonders out loud why she is sharing a bed-sit with a crypto-lesbian chum. The rationale seems to have been that Ms. Rogers was getting a little long in the tooth by 1951 so they should pair her off with an ageing and paunchy Hollywood cowboy. The jokes revolve around such revelations as the fact he doesn't do his own stunts or sing his own songs. Ginger is meant to be a smart city lawyer, hired to dig him out of a poker-game debt. You can tell things were desperate when the director resorts to speeding up the film for an aeroplane sequence finale. Neither movie nor 'plane ever get off the ground.
Finally a real curio: Montgomery Clift in a 1954 movie directed by Vittorio di Sica, no less! Well a bit less - the movie was re-edited by David Selznick to remove the other story lines to focus on the central couple - Jennifer Jones is the straying wife. The result is said to use footage which does not appear in the Director's own version, called Terminal Station. What we get on the disc, needless to say, is that Selznick cut, running a mere 64 minutes. I have since learned that though Selznick and di Sica did fall out during the filming, it had always been planned to produce two versions - source David Robinson's biography of Selznick.
011 Blood on The Sun. Lawless Frontier. Lawless Range . Vol. 5 Silver Screen
Blood on the Sun is a Cagney vehicle set in prewar Japan, where he plays an honest newspaperman seeking to inform the world about Japanese expansionist plans. Sylvia Sydney is the half-Chinese love interest. This must have been in production during the last year of the war so it isn't too surprising to find a full range of evil Jap. stereotypes. It isn't exactly a deep film but its surfaces are very alluring with some fine sets and cinematography. Cagney and Sydney are each excellent, though there is a lack of any real chemistry between them. So it isn't quite Casablanca. The score is by Miklos Rozsa.
The other two titles are John Wayne cowboy pictures. Lawless Frontier runs about three minutes longer than that in John Wayne The Most Wanted collection. Most of the missing minutes occur early on when there is a nocturnal cattle-rustling scene. I guess this was excised for being too murky. Neither of my prints of this curious movie are very good - but it is a wonderfully strange film!
012 Pot O' Gold. Something To Sing About. Riders of Destiny Vol.6 Silver Screen
Described by James Stewart as his worst movie, Pot o'Gold is the only film I know which was produced by the son of an American President. Yup, this was the first and last film produced by James Roosevelt. I have seen some very favourable User Comments from viewers online who have enjoyed this feel-good picture alot. But there is no reasoning with people who like musicals. It all concerns a lot nof noisy hateful people who set out to convert a grouchy music-hating tycoon. You'll be rooting for the music-hater way before the end of this one! The print is adequate and the soundtrack mainly loud and clear - alas!
Something to Sing About is Cagney in song and dance mode - though he gets to throw a punch or two. It was another self-produced Cagney vehicle, this time a musical, made when he had fallen out with Warner Brothers. The best sequence is a bizarre dance routine on the deck of a ship. This is a Hollywood behind-the-scenes story with a glitch in Cagney's true romance caused by a gossip-writer. That is all the plot. It is never seriously boring, however and the print here is reasonably good - even the high notes of the loud female singer don't distort. This was originally issued at 93 mins in 1936 or 1937 but was reissued at 82 or 84 minutes (depending who you read) at the height of Cagney's fame in 1947. This Poundland DVD claims a running time of 82 mins on the case. In fact it runs nearly five minutes longer than that, so we have something near to the complete version.
Riders of Destiny is another John Wayne Lone Star Western.
013 Our Town The Star Packer. Rocket Ship XM Vol.7 Silver Screen
The print of Our Town is less dire than I had imagined from viewing just the start. What is bad is the soundtrack which is hissy and unpleasant. There are a number of good historical reasons for seeing this but it is very slow. About an hour in, things lurch into much darker territory and for several minutes a woman haunts her own life. This is a brilliant sequence and the play ends that way. The happy Hollywood ending here spoils the effect almost completely. Our Town was adapted by Thornton Wilder from his successful play. The production was designed by William Cameron Menzies and the score was by Aaron Copland.
The Star Packer is not as gay as it sounds - the only rusty sherrif's badge on display is John Marion Wayne's!
Rocket Ship XM is a low-key sci-fi from 1950. Slow and talky by today's standards, the special effects are pretty simple. Even so, it has a real pioneering feel and it takes us on a journey to Mars with a glacial Nordic maiden melting on the way. There are Martians to see and a message to take home as well as a startling ending. This print seems to be the authentic original version, without special effects which were added for its video release in 1976. It was pleasant to find that the print preserves the red tinting which was used for the
scenes on Mars.
014. Gung Ho. West Of The Divide. 'Neath The Arizona Skies. Vol.8 Silver Screen
Gung Ho! we are told comes from two Chinese words meaning working together. It's the patriotic story of an elite company of Marines who volunteer for a special duty after Pearl Harbour. Their task turns out to be the taking of Makim Island from the Japs with six against one against. It isn't exactly subtle - the war was still raging in 1943. It is, however, a very professional piece of work and holds the attention from first to last. The young Bob Mitchum has a supporting rôle. Randolph Scott is the Colonel.
The other two movies are Lone Star Westerns with Big John.
015 The Flying Deuces. Africa Screams. The Abbot & Costello Show.
Laurel & Hardy only take to the air in the final minutes of this episodic Foreign Legion romp. It has its moments - I like the laundry sequence which contains some very expensive-looking shots of miles of clothes-lines! No CGIs in those days and it looks like they actually built the set!
Africa Screams is said to contain much that is now thought politically incorrect. Yes, they do get to spend some time in cooking pots. The ending has some mythic resonances: Costello ends up inside a penthouse with a gorilla - an inversion of King Kong who stayed outside on the ledge - while Abbott drifts down river on a raft, attacked by chimps, anticipating the fate of Herzog's Aguirre! A shame they never got to meet Klaus Kinski.
Finally the Abbott & Costello Colgate Comedy Hour from 18th April 1954. Effectively a very weird variety show hung on the weakest of South American hooks. Hard sells for Ajax and Colgate toothpaste come as something of a relief at fifteen minute intervals. Between the ads we get a so-so magic sketch from the stars, a sickly medley of Christian songs, a dwarfish percussionist dancer act and an evil little six-year old xylophonist in Mozartean dress who plays the Poet & Peasant Overture. Not for the faint hearted!
016 Horror Hotel. The Terror. The Corpse Vanishes. Vol.1 Classic Horror
Horror Hotel was made in the UK but is set in New England. As in Psycho, the heroine seems to be bumped off early on. Here the horror genre requirements prove reactionary. Still, there is some atmospheric photography and two classic scenes of Phantom Hitch-hiking, Worth a look. Valentyne Dyall was Britain's answer to Vincent Price. His name was synonymous with ghostly matters for early tv audiences and he edited a volume of Unsolved Mysteries, or at least allowed his name to go on the cover. Horror Hotel is presented on this DVD in 1.85:1 non-anamorphic widescreen. It was filmed in b & w.
The Corpse Vanishes is a weird and wonderful offering about a wisecracking female journalist on the trail of Lugosi who is poisoning brides on their wedding day to obtain their body fluids. A wicked dwarf is also involved. This one is good fun
The Terror matches a very young Jack Nicholson with a very old Boris Karloff. Filmed in colour, on the set of The Raven, it was Directed by Roger Corman and Produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Here Corman abandons home ground for an imagined and colourful European setting. As much a fairy-tale as a horror, this features a witch in the wood, a water-spirit and a dried-up Baron in his castle on the hill. The young Jack Nicholson is miscast as a Napoleonic soldier while the Polish servant is played by Jonathan Haze with the same accent he used as Seymour in The Little Shop! Some striking moments and some glaring continuity lapses make this a curious three-day wonder. The location photography on the beach is quite poetic. The colour print is bearable but scanned and panned with some curious framing anomalies early on.
You could, I suppose, watch Edward D. Wood's Bride of the Monster in a double-bill with Lugosi's earlier The Corpse Vanishes. Wood seems to have known this one well - he lifts a few scenes of monster-flagellation and hair-fetishism from the 1942 Monogram picture. Only in Wood's version the brute takes a fancy to a girl's angora beret! This earlier picture is amusing high camp throughout. The mad Doctor is under the strange impression that the best place to look for virgins is at the altar on their wedding days. So he sends them poisoned orchids and steals their corpses. Somewhere behind it all is the story of the Bathori woman who bathed in virgin's blood. Dreadful but very funny in places - intentionally so, I guess.
017 A Bucket Of Blood. House On Haunted Hill. The Ghoul. Vol.2 Classic Horror
Roger Corman's Bucket of Blood is an amusing enough satire on the artistic beatnick culture of 1960.
The House on Haunted Hill is the one with the acid vat in the cellar. The outside shots are of Frank Lloyd Wright's striking Mayan House but the interiors are more mundane with Vincent Price chewing every curtain in sight. The cast are largely wasted as the Director William Castle placed his faith in Emergo - a wonderful 1958 technology which featured a skeleton on a string! This is not included on the DVD but you could make your own I suppose - it will be something to do while the film is running. Incidentally the print - for those who care about such things - is in 1.77:1 widescreen.
The Ghoul does turn out to be a fully restored version by MGM. It runs over eighty minutes and offers the opportunity to see a lavishly mounted British horror from 1933. Never mind the often stilted drama, just soak in the amazing Production Design - seen here in splendid detail. Touches of expressionism enliven the solid craftsmanlike sets. Karloff stars but I rather think Ernst Thesiger steals the show as a dour Scots retainer. Incidentally this picture was long thought to have been lost - another victim of commercial suppression in favour of a later and inferior version. It turned up in rough Eastern European prints during the nineteen seventies but clearly this print derives from an archive negative.
018 Little Shop Of Horrors. The Bat. Bride Of The Monster. Vol.3 Classic Horror
The Little Shop of Horrors is good fun and played throughout with straight faces. True, there is a lot of overlap here with the earlier Bucket of Blood - the final chase seems to lead to the same junk-yard! Neither the print nor the soundtrack sound too healthy but somehow that seems appropriate. This famous talking plant movie was remade later as a musical. This original version features a lot of Jewish humour. Jack Nicholson is said to be the star but his is just a bit part as a masochist.
The Bat was a 1959 remake of the The Bat Whispers, directed by Crane Wilbur. The print is 1.77:1 but suffers from a form of ghosting - not multi-path double imaging but a sort of pixellated trail which follows any rapid moving character. The print also has synchronisation problems which get better or worse during the movie, without ever being solved. An unfortunate fault as the image itself is very clean and clear. I should say that the Bat in question is the killer and not an unflattering reference to Agnes Moorehead.
Bride of the Monster aka Bride of the Atom is a 1955 specimen of the work of Edward D. Wood, starring Lugosi. This is said to be the only film for which he had something like a normal B-picture budget. I don't get the Edward Wood thing at all. His stupidity could have been an advantage, had he possessed any visual sense. He didn't so it's a sad thing to sit through his movies as wholes. I think this is where Republic's giant squid ended up - referred to above. The actors here have still to animate its tentacles themselves. Bride of the Monster is a thrill-free laugh-free zone. A number of features were from Lugosi's earlier The Corpse Vanishes, where they are better enjoyed.
019 Carnival Of Souls. The Ape Man. Mesa of Lost Women. Vol 4 Classic Horror
Herk Harvey's 1962 independent Carnival of Souls has become a cult classic. Rightly so, though its zombies have not worn well. There is, however, something off-kilter about everything in this movie - and the man across the hall is terrifying! It owes quite a lot to Psycho, but Janet Leigh never got to play the organ. This is a superior print to the other I had, whch suffered from a muffled and distorted sound-track. There will never be a fully clean reproduction of that weird organ music - but maybe that adds to the atmosphere. The film was inspired by the abandoned carnival which features.
The Ape Man was directed by William Beaudine and starred Lugosi. It is generally regarded as a complete lame duck. It has nothing to do with Tarzan and is more of a loose variation on Jekyll & Hyde. Lugosi is a madly experimenting Doctor trapped in his ape-like form and needs glandular secretions to restore him to normal. Medical ethics prevent his colleague from murdering donors so the ape goes bananas. No one seems to have taken the film very seriously at Monogram. It has a bizarre figure loping about who finally identifies himself as the author of the story, "Screwy, isn't it?" is his parting, direct-to-camera line.
Mesa of Lost Women is another film which features on lists of the world's worst pictures. It was cobbled together from an abandoned film called Tarantula and features some ridulously portentous voice-overs. A case could be made that such black holes of film-making have nothing to do but illustrate their own emptiness. Here there are several minutes of footage in which the entire cast wander around in a dark forest, linked in a chain, the blind leading the blind. There are times when sheer incompetence can mimic expressionism and I sometimes wonder if these mad films could have worked better as silents. Jackie Coogan plays the mad professor here. He had been The Kid, for Chaplin and would be Uncle Fester in television's Addams Family. The other name-check here is even sadder: cinematographer Karl Struss had won an Oscar for his work on Murnau's silent classic Sunrise! To be involved in what some regard as the greatest movie of all time and one of the very worst is quite an achievement!
020 Fighting Caravans. Randy Rides Alone. Man Of The Frontier. Vol.1 Classic Westerns
The fighting in Fighting Caravans is between the sexes chiefly. Gary Cooper is the love-object split between the masculine Old West - represented by two old, gay ( they die with their arms around each other, for heaven's sake!) scouts - and the feminine "civilising" influence of Lila Damita as Felice. For those who think we read too much into the gender issues in those old movies, it is interesting to note that a woman - Agnes Brand Leahy - contributed to the screenplay of this 1930 Zane Grey adaptation. It has a rather striking Red Indian war dance in the title sequence.
Randy Rides Alone is probably the most famous of John Wayne's Lone Star Westerns. The opening scene in which Wayne arrives at a saloon full of corpses with the pianola playing away, a pair of eyes watching from a portrait on the wall, is celebrated. Thankfully this print, though far from perfect, is a great improvement on the dire one in The John Wayne Collection. Now whenever people ask what's so good about old John Wayne movies, I can only answer that at least he wasn't Gene Autrey. This squat, pasty-faced, fussily preening little cowboy was you might suppose cut out to be a villain. Not a bit of it! We were supposed to cheer him on. Oh there is something else you should be warned about - he sings.
There were any number of singing cowboys in the nineteen thirties - incredibly, Gene Autrey was Republic's most popular star and cinema managers bought that studio's movie packages just in order to obtain his movies! Even non-singer John Wayne was billed as Singing Sandy in some of his Lone Star releases. For the sake of authenticity, presumably, his singing voice was dubbed by another non-singer. Sample the baleful ditty at the start of Man from Utah - a very strange film made up mainly of old rodeo footage. I suppose the idea was to vary the pace and tone of movies which were otherwise all action. The plots did not require much dialogue so the song was brought in - if a twerp like Gene Autrey wrote his own songs, so much the cheaper. You will have gathered that Man of the Frontier aka Red River Valley stars Gene Autrey. You have been warned. Some references say that he sings five songs in this picture but I think he seems to sing the same title song several times. Be afraid.
021 Painted Desert. Texas Terror. Hell Town.
Painted Desert is a painfully slow 1931 Western in which the actors say their lines like something in Dreyer. There is an absence of music on the soundtrack which seems to slow things further. The plot begins with two old cowboys falling out over who should care for an abandoned baby - incredibly they both want the job! This was an early Clark Gable movie. It improves somewhat as it goes on with some spectacular shot of a mine being blown up but it is no masterpiece.
The other two movies on this triple bill are also John Wayne Westerns. Texas Terror is one of the Lone Star variety but Hell Town is a bit later. I have not seen this particular DVD but have all these movies in other versions.
022 Invisible Ghost. Scared To Death. White Zombie. 3 Bela Lugosi
The Invisible Ghost stars Bela Lugosi in relatively subdued mode as he has repeated visions of his dead wife. The most remarkable thing about the film is the unusually grave and serious black servant played by Clarence Muse. It was directed by Joseph H. Lewis, famous for the innovative and compelling Gun Crazy but this is a stage-bound affair.
Scared to Death, made for the poverty row Golden Gate Films, is a real turkey. It appears to have been scripted by a disturbed and not very bright child. Much of the film is taken up with the unfunny antics of a dense cop and a shrill maid. However the repeated appearances of a green mask have a touch of the surreal about them, especially in the distorted cheap two-strip colour process used. There are signs of strong multi-path ghosting on the titles in both the versions I have seen, suggesting a common source.
For a quality horror, we go back to 1932 and Victor Halperin's White Zombie. Much admired and less often seen than I Walked with a Zombie. This is far from being a perfect print but it is not so bad. I wish this had been a silent picture. Try to see this one. Ignore the script and bathe in the poetic visuals. Yes I know they could be better but this version is costing you 33p dammit!
023 Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon Terror By Night. Dressed To Kill.
These are all Basil Rathbone pictures from the Sherlock Holmes franchise. The setting was contemporary rather than Victorian so the villains in the Secret Weapon can be Nazis. It has a scene in which Holmes is drained of his blood. These occasionally show up on television.
I was astounded to see that HMV Manchester were selling a tranche of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films at a knock-down £15.99 each. Some of them the same titles as on these bargain DVDs. Yup that's a full sixty to seventy minutes on each DVD. I can't imagine that any restoration work has been done to justify the hike in cost betwen these and the bargain versions at three for a quid. I think it is a grave mistake to buy anything at HMV, except when there's a sale!
024 Dick Tracy's Dilemma. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. Dick Tracy V. Cueball.
The Dick Tracy disc is a curate's egg. It may be hard to resist a movie with a Filthy Flora among the screen names but Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is resistable comic-strip stuff. Fair enough, you may think, given the source. However take a look at Dick Tracy's Dilemma, where the hook-handed villain is invested with surprising emotional depth by Jack Lambert. The persuit of the blind man is classic noir movie-making. True, this film is only half good but the best parts are brilliant. I also enjoyed DT Meets Gruesome. Karloff is a mad gasser who paralyses bank-staff. This entry benefits from the absence of the dreadful effete actor side-kick. DT himself is merely a man in a macintosh as ever.
025 Bulldog Drummond's Bride. Bulldog Drummond Comes Back. Bulldog Drummond Escapes
"Sapper's" snobbery-with-violence tales were set in the UK but the series was filmed in the States with American actors. The production values were surprisingly high - some expensive looking sets in Bulldog Drummond's Bride must surely have been built for another movie. It climaxes in a rooftop chase.
026 The Beverly Hillbillies. 4 Classic Episodes- Vol.1
The corny comedy of the sixties will be a nostalgia trip for many, though these episodes don't include the Ballad of Jeff Clampett which ritually opened the show. Possible copyright problems? These are four Christmas themed shows which first went out Xmas & New Year 1962 - 63 in the US. I guess we got them a year or so later. Ellie May gets to share her bed with Grannie and a skunk - among other things. All good fun with lots of blatant product placement - witness Grannie's demonstration of her swanky new gas hob - the gas company thanked for their cooperation in the end titles. As were TWA in the first show. Innocent fun and if the comedy gets dull you can play Spot-the-Lesbian! Yes she was!
027 Krazy Kartoons. 2 Hours of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig
Now here is a real curio and one that might cause a few raised eyebrows, despite the U Certificate on the spine. These Looney Toons have fallen into the public domain for a reason - they were pulled by the studios in the sixties when their political incorrectness became an embarrassment. Some were trimmed of racist stereotypes and others lost some of their crueller and more dangerous moments, such as Bugs Bunny kicking a dog in the jaw. At least one of the cartoons on this disc was totally withdrawn by United Artists in 1968, when they acquired the WB catalogue. It is the Bugs Bunny cartoon All This And Rabbit Stew, directed by Tex Avery in 1941, one of eleven cartoons which were regarded as beyond redemption. In this Bugs is stalked by a grotesque and stupid black man. Some other bad taste moments included Bugs in lingerie in The Wabbit Who Came To Supper. The man-eating lion in Who's who in the zoo. Probably as startling as the black caricatures are the Arabs in Ali Baba Bound. This features a suicide bomber - a dense Arab with a shell strapped to his head. Oh to add further insult to Arab sensibilities it's a Porkie Pig cartoon. I wonder how many Black or Muslim parents will buy this brightly packaged little treat for their sprogs?
I suspect that each and every one of these cartoons has something to offend somebody somewhere. What made my jaw drop was a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1943 called Falling Hare. It's a wartime story in which Bugs battles an evil Gremlin at an airfield. Naturally they take to the skies. Where do they head for but twin skyscapers, the Gremlin in charge. At the last moment, the plane tilts on its side and passes in a tiny gap between the towers.
028 Popeye 75th. Anniversary 2 Hours.
Thirteen cartoons on this disc but three of them are two-reelers. The Fleischer Brothers produced three of these showcase animation in 1936, 1937 and 1939. They used a new process which employed miniature sets to give a 3-D effect. Much admired by cartoon buffs, at least one of these received an Oscar nomination. The remainder of the cartoons are from the nineteen fifties are were directed by I. Sparber & Seymour Kneitel. All are in Technicolor. Prints are mainly of passable quality but have not, needless to say, been remastered.
These Classic Entertainment discs have also been noted here:
http://www.avforums.com/frame.html?...ad.php?t=145551
The GRVS & Instant Vision Series etc. at The Works
The Mysterious NL Make
The GRVS & Instant Vision series can be found in The Works and maybe other remainder-type bookstores along with another make identified only by the prefix NL and a Herts. postcode on the back. This last make seems to deal in TV movies and straight-to-video fare. Ian Richardson starred as Sherlock Holmes in two well-mounted but dramatically stodgy versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. The Grade Z horrors include Boggy Creek II and The Amityville Curse. Priced about right, then. You mainly get just one movie per disc but the store usually sells them at 4 for £5.
Instant Vision
Most of the Instant Vision titles seem to duplicate the classic Entertainment Series, notably John Wayne and Bela Lugosi. For the record the Lugosi titles are:
DVDIV 053: The Invisible Ghost; DVDIV 054: The Corpse Vanishes; DVDIV 055: Scared to Death.
Prints seem no better or worse than the CE versions, probably from the same sources.
The exception to the one work per disc rule is the Most Wanted series of John Wayne Lone Star Westerns. There seem to be six volumes numbered DVDIV 046 to 051. A few of these titles are not featured in the Classic Entertainment series but probably only the determined completist will miss them. In general, the Classic Entertainment prints are better - often much better and they preserve the original title music, not the horrid synthesized version. These Instant Vision versions seem to have been prepared for US cable tv and are trimmed by several minutes in some cases.
Three Rudolph Valentino silents are worth looking out for. The soundtrack music isn't so wonderful but you can put on your own choice of music for these delicious old silents. The prints are not what collectors would choose and this version of Blood & Sand has been cobbled together so that it has continuity issues. The best is The Eagle but all three offer enjoyable journeys into the past:
DVDIV 060: The Eagle; DVDIV 061: Blood & Sand; DVDIV 081: The Sheik.
GMVS
This label is also distributed through normal trade channels but you will see it for around £5 or £6 in HMV. I don't know if separate inventories exist for different outlets. I have not yet seen The Lodger or Sabotage in the bargain shops but they may just be more recent titles. If the numbering system is consecutive and without gaps, this is a very extensive list of over 300 discs. I will only be looking at the things which have caught my eye.
GMVS 1012: The Stranger. A good Orson Welles-directed picture starring himself and Edward G. Robinson. It's the one with the clocktower ending. Quite a good print though it seems to vary in quality.
GMVS 1138: Said to have been VistaVision's finest and more or less final two and a half hours, One Eyed Jacks was Marlon Brando's only outing as a Director. This over-long Western is much admired by Scorscese and other film buffs. Worth a look for £1.25, even if this scanned and panned version will give no hint of the original quality.
GMVS 1180: Of Human Bondage. The 1934 version again with Bette Davis as discussed above. Not much to choose between the prints.
GMVS 1176: Penny Serenade: Cary Grant & Irene Dunne star in a 1941 women's picture. Very dated but well made with a terrific Japanese earthquake scene. Features the most obnoxious girl child actor in screen history. Happily she dies.
GMVS 1197: Vengeance Valley. Discussed above. My copy of this briefly froze during a fight sequence - the only moment of trouble I've had with any of these cheap discs.
GMVS 1201: Cary Grant again in the misnamed Amazing Adventure. Despite having the whole disc to itself here, this is the same 62 minute version as above. Similar print.
GMVS 1213: The Painted Desert. Early Clark Gable discussed above.
GMVS 1226: Three Came Home: Claudette Colbert suffers under the Japanese and we under her. But a well made movie. Features the third most obnoxious child actor in screen history. There seem to be a plethora of Public Domain features which feature wartime Japan. Presumably the copyrights were allowed to lapse as their international appeal was now felt to be limited.
GMVS 1227: The Big Lift: Montgomery Clift in quasi-documentary about the Berlin air lift. Long and sometimes dull but very well done.
GMVS 1241: Home Town Story, discussed above. A 61 minute picture on a whole disc.
GMVS 1245: The Lodger. Hitchcock's early chiller with Ivor Novello as the lodger who might be a Jack-the-Ripper like killer. Not exactly a pristine print. Mysteriously, a BBFC Board intrudes after the titles. As this carries the X certificate, it must have been reissued some time after 1951, but why it is where it is, God knows! The soundtrack is a peculiar mixture of classical tracks of dubious relevance. Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony is played complete. Very odd. £6 in HMV so try to find it for less.
GMVS 1246: The Lady Vanishes. Acceptable print of Hitchcock's delightful train-set thriller. Snap it up, if you see it for about a quid - it's a fiver in HMV for the same disc exactly.
GMVS 1270: The Four Deuces. I got this one only to fill out my quota of 4 for £5 on a thin pickings day. Two words of doom are missed off the cover of this 1975 Jack Palance gangster period picture - Golan & Globus! The Israeli moguls were a solid guarantee of seventies schlock. From the dreadful theme music to the seventy-year old Palance in a naked love scene, this alleged comedy is one to avoid. I did like the cheeky use of a much younger Palance for the cover and the strap-line, "There are no aces in this pack!!" How true!
GMVS 1304: Hitchcock's Sabotage - not to be confused with The Saboteur - is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent. Confusingly, Hitchcock also made a film called The Secret Agent, which isn't! Features the most obnoxious boy child actor in screen history. Happily he dies. I think this is a much underrated picture with lots of reflexive jokes about cinema - it is set in one. Hitchcock later used to say he had regretted his explosive climax. When you consider the nervousness of the public at this time of pre-war tension, together with the suspicion of foreigners, Hitchcock's audacity seems rather cruel. Once you have adjusted to its period feel, this picture still carries an amazing ability to shock. As a treatment of terrorism, only the surfaces have dated.
Filling in the Background
Don't expect bells and whistles on these Public Domain DVDs - they are dumped on the market as fodder and you will have to sort out their context to enjoy them fully. They don't have stereophonic sound, closed captions or even Chapters, just a single Chapter for each movie. Needless to say, there is no surround sound or anamorphic widescreen. However, given the dates of the pictures, most are naturally 4:3. I have checked all mine to see that they actually load and play. They have all passed that test.
For backgrounds, synopses, reviews and full cast and production credits, I find the allmovie.com site loads faster and is less plagued with advertising than the IMDB - it also presents all its information on a single page for each movie. Worth printing this stuff out as the presentation of these cheapies is basic.
Don't miss this French site, where you can download movie posters as JPEGS for some smart covers for your DVDs and Vids:
http://www.moviecovers.com/
There are over 13,000 movies featured, many of them US and British titles. Some of the posters are for the French language versions but many are international. There are some great ones for the Wayne Lone Star Westerns. Warning: It's a site you can browse for hours. Amazingly, it's entirely free!
Notes about running times
Alternative Versions Fever has taken hold under the anorak. Faced with musical questions, we can always consult the score but only in the case of classic movies can we consult the script. Running times are not hard to establish but how do we know what is missing? Classic movie reference books do their best but often cite nominal running times. They may or may not be that length in the cinema or on US telly but we should deduct 4% for PAL. Discrepancies on silent movies can be wild: but I have seen prints of Shub's pioneering documentary The Fall of The Romanovs which run stupidly fast, so maybe the 63 minute version contains no fewer scenes than the 80 minute version.
Before the days of DVD, cuts were often made to the original materials and no one filed the cut scenes for later reconstruction. The most famous case is The Magnificent Ambersons but something similar befell Visconti's The Leopard. Some anti-clerical scenes were excised soon after the première and have never been seen since - not even in the "fully restored" version.
Reissued films were often far shorter than original versions, trimmed to fit the double bill format of programmes. It isn't always easy to find out whether original versions still exist. Helpfully, Maltin's Guide assures us that 113 minute prints still exist of Things to Come. For years only ninety minute versions have been shown. And Maltin fails to mention that the film premièred at 132 minutes! The authorized DVD version does not restore any of this missing footage. Now stretches of that movie are dull already - it seems unlikely we have lost any of the special effects and thirties-futurist set pieces. The missing scenes are probably windy sermons on progress but wouldn't it be nice to be certain!
PD Movies Online for Free!
For those without a pound in the world - I know, I've been there - there is an even cheaper way to see old movies. True, you need a fairly recent computer and Broadband is recommended - though I managed tonight to see a 100 minute movie without a glitch on dial-up at 56kbs. If you are limited to dial-up and find the picture quality just too swimmy and murky try clicking on the Broadband option. You will no longer get moving pictures but a slide-show of stills from the picture. Meanwhile the soundtrack is unaffected.
http://www.movieflix.com/
I registered with this site many years ago but could not use it with my kit of the time. Plenty of free movies here. Not that the quality is terribly good. But if you have ever had a yen to see The Triumph of the Will and been reluctant to pay for it, here is your chance.
I got to see a film that had scared me as a kiddie - The Red House! Well I think I can understand why it did. Can't wait for this to turn up in the Poundshop and no reason why it shouldn't as it's a PD movie.
There is also the following site, based in Holland, which seems to offer some remarkable movies all free. Sadly, so far, I have not been able to get any of them to load:
http://welcome.to/watchmovies
Suffice it to say that for the outlay, I don't think many of these discs will disappoint. The poor ones are part of Holllywood history and help to fill in our knowledge of its routine quality. Even the worst are good for a giggle. Go on, brave those Poundstore demons. You can't lose much except self-respect!
That's All Folks!
Poundshop Movies, revised and updated Sunday, 17th October
Some of these movies are Fortean and downright weird but my main motive for posting this very lengthy screed is to point out some great bargains in the Public Domain movies which are now flooding the market in DVD format.
Wearing my film anorak, I gather that at one time Copyright in movies needed to be renewed at twenty-seven year intervals, otherwise they lapsed into the public domain. Most studios protect their rights jealously so PD status mainly affects independently-produced films. Work as recent as the zombie flicks of George Romero has landed in the PD and some films never seem to have been registered. On the Web you can find the sites of many companies which sell libraries of PD material to anyone who wishes to exploit it. This is a one-off fee so if you can get the packaging right, you may turn a fast buck.
You may expect the sources of these movies to be dodgy and there are cases where the DVDs have been mastered from videos of broadcasts - complete with ghosting. However, most seem to have come from further up the chain and in many cases the quality suggests that the source has been a studio-produced digital version, probably produced for laser-discs. Though laser-discs were an expensive niche-market in the UK, they were quite popular in America and Japan so many thousands of movies were digitized in the eighties and nineties long before the DVD format arrived.
[This is actually piffle, I confess. I never had a laser-disc machine or I might have learned that they were an analogue medium. Duh!]
You can find some of these titles in the major stores, seldom for less than around £6. I have seen one Wayne compilation at £12 in HMV - the exact same version they sell in publishers' remainder shops for £1.25!
Most of the ultra-cheap series I have seen are of straight to video z-films and soapy made-for-tv stuff or schlocky kung-fu style piffle. However the Classic Entertainment series of themed triple bills has hit Poundland. You may have to visit two or three stores to assemble the complete series of 28 but most of them are well worth the asking price and some are splendid bargains.
Classic Entertainment DVDs at the Poundland chain
All numbers prefixed CE-
001: Blue Steel. Winds Of The Wastelands. The Trail Beyond. Vol.1 John Wayne
Most of Wayne's Lone Star B-Westerns feature in the series. These are widely available in other compilations, usually with added synthesizer music which is dreadful. I have been able to compare some of these prints with those in the John Wayne Collection triple bills and these are far superior! Other Lone Star Westerns are sprinkled throughout the series but the first two discs are entirely devoted to them.
The John Wayne Lone Star westerns on these Classic Entertainment DVDs run longer than the versions on some other discs. The Star Packer is 1.5 minutes longer, Lawless Frontier some three minutes longer and Riders of Destiny go on riding for an extra five minutes in this version. More important, however is the fact that the prints are generally superior and the apalling synthesized music isn't used. That leaves long action sequences with nothing but sound effects. Even the fisticuffs do not get loudly amplified blows as we are used to - so the pulled punches tend to be noticed. I gather that the trimmed versions with the synthesizer were used on cable television in the US.
Blue Steel - don't look for relevance in the title - is the first movie on the first of these discs. Quality wise it sets a pretty high standard for this is about as good as seventy-year-old B-Westerns ever look. The cinematography is often strikingly good with some bold compositions in the chase sequences. I loved this one. This print runs 54 mins - the same as the version in The Most Wanted Collection. The allmovie guide gives an rt of 59 minutes. I sure do hate to lose even a minute or two of these darn horsey operas! Good to report that this is free of any synthesized soundtrack.
Winds of the Wasteland is a 1935 John Wayne Western. They spent a bit more money on this than on the Lone Star series - it even has a lush symphonic score! With his partner, Wayne buys a franchise for a stagecoach line to a ghost town. Bit by bit he revives the town and vanquishes the baddies in a stagecoach race to gain the mail subsidy. Good fun. The print runs three minutes longer than some in circulation - probably mainly extra footage of the race. A line of ceefax-type dots at the top of the screen suggest a telly source for this.
The Trail Beyond ends with an exciting siege at a Canadian trading post. Wicked French Canadians with dodgy accents have stolen the ammunition. Throw in a treasure map, a pair of skeletons, canoes and two Noah Beerys and we have a busy fifty-five minutes for John Wayne. On the grounds of waste-not, want-not even a failed stunt was left in the finished print, to show that not even Big John could transfer from horse to wagon first time every time, even when he was doubled by Yakima Canutt.
002: Paradise Canyon. The Dawn Rider. The Desert Trail. Vol.2 John Wayne
Three more Lone Star entries.
003: Call It Murder. Great Guy. The Lucky Texan. Vol.1 Tough Guys
Call it Murder was an early Bogart movie - this is the retitled re-release print which promotes him to the star in the titles, though he was merely a supporting player in 1934. Call it Murder is not strictly a Hollywood movie at all - it was independently produced in New York from a successful play called Midnight, its alternative title. Its stage origins are obvious but the first half is very gripping. After the midnight deadline passes, the tension slackens and we see the end coming way before they finish. This print is not a thing of beauty with some moments of lost sound and jumps. However, I'd guess that it was only Bogart's subsequent fame and the movie's reissue which assured its survival in any form.
Great Guy features Jimmy Cagney as a Deputy Weights & Measures Inspector in one of the unsuccessful movies produced by Cagney's own company. So not much chance of him turning yellow on the way to chair, alas! Probably the best scenes are those in which he exposes the daily small-time scams of the High Street. It is all quite watchable and Cagney is fine. This picture seems to have been hacked about quite a bit during its lifetime. Maltin gives 75 minutes but the Allmovie Guide says it is just 50 minutes. This Poundland cut runs the promised 66 minutes on PAL. Take that to Weights & Measures to work out!
The Lucky Texan is a Lone Star Western. In this one, Big John with his old-timer step-daddy George Hayes strike gold. Some slicker types cheat them with false contracts out of their property. The solution turns out to be a man donning a dress! Oh Lordy!
004: Vengeance Valley. The Big Trees. The Man fron Utah. Vol.2 Tough Guys
Man from Utah is another Lone Star picture made up mainly from old rodeo footage but the other two are lush colour pictures from the early fifties.
Paternity and illegitimacy were not issues which Hollywood like to tackle head on in a contemporary setting. The Western genre had a long history of exploring issues of masculinity and survival but also by implication their opposites. This handsome Technicolor picture was thought very daring in its day and is still very watchable. Vengeance Valley has its soapy moments and Burt Lancaster was the star but Robert Walker steals the show as his camply wicked brother - from the same year as his rôle in Strangers on a Train.
The Big Trees is an example of fifties mainstream weirdness - a Technicolor adventure which throws a heap of exotic ingredients into the pot and still emerges tasting of a wet Saturday afternoon. Land-grabbing Kirk Douglas gets involved with a tree-hugging Quaker widow. A history lesson spoken over the cross-section of a giant redwood was lifted by Hitchcock for Vertigo. The colour print is in a reasonable state but the transfer suffers the same kind of pitch-waver on the soundtrack as on Behave Yourself. As there is a lush soundtrack, this is very uncomfortable.
005: Fathers Little Dividend. Nothing Sacred. Ghosts On The Loose. Vol.1 Leading Ladies
The ladies concerned are Liz Taylor, Carole Lombard & Ava Gardner.
Father's Little Dividend. In his sequel to Father of the Bride, mad Hollywood director Albert Q. Fegg decided to change a few things. Grouchy Spencer Tracy's mood swings are attributed to cocaine and we gather that he has impregnated his daughter - a skinny Liz Taylor. She keeps assuring herself that having bitten the pillow, she cannot be pregnant. In the notorious glass toilet scene, filmed on closed sets, we see the hideous anal birth of a monster-child. The husband, played by Charles Hawtrey, knows he cannot be the father of this monstrosity so he lures Tracy to a dockside tavern and pays some thugs to emasculate him. Cunningly, his father-in-law has turned up in a dress and seduces the three assassins, before murdering them in cruel and unusual ways. Meanwhile, Liz cannot face the screaming little alien and has hallucinations of a fat-cheeked woman in her radiator - surely not her future self! As the face of Spencer Tracy begins to appear on the back of the child's head, she saws the poor little mite in two. Her father then arrives with the famous freeze-frame line, his bloodstained hand on the bannister as he climbs the stairs, "Honey, I'm home!"
Needless to say, MGM had their doubts about this version of the movie and hired husband-of-Dorothy Vincente Minelli to remake it. Sadly that is the version usually seen today and on this disc. It retains much of the horror of the Fegg version but is a tad short of its lightness of touch.
Now a classic Ben Hecht comedy: Nothing Sacred is in very bad taste throughout. Carole Lombard is determined to enjoy a free trip to New York curtesy of a newspaper. They think she is dying so she becomes the sentimental toast of the city. As the truth threatens to unfold, she decides on suicide. Meanwhile reporter Frederick March has fallen for her. They end up slugging it out in a very incorrect finale. This print is slightly hazy but for 1937 Technicolor not so bad. A few local bursts of scratching occur but mostly the picture does not look distressed at all. Deliciously wicked fun this one and worth far more than the measly sum asked!
Ghosts on the Loose is a turkey from William (One-Shot) Beaudine: here sold as starring Ava Gardner but neither she nor Lugosi are on screen long. The full horror is revealed in its alternative title: The Eastside Boys Meet Bela Lugosi. Oh dear, the unlovely boys had started as a touch of social realism in pictures such as Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces but by this time they had sunk into empty farcial comedy. This weak film has Nazi spies but no spooks. Even so, it is useful to be made aware of some of the workaday fare to which audiences of the time were subjected. It wasn't Maltese Falcon on the menu every day!
006 Of Human Bondage. Behave Yourself. Home Town Story. Vol.2 Leading Ladies
Home Town Story was a pro-business lecture wrapped in a thin fictional coat. It was funded by General Motors and would have been forgotten years ago if Marilyn Monroe hadn't featured in an early supporting rôle. Her assets are outstanding though her accent is very odd - she is onscreen for a couple of minutes only. The theme music suffers from terrible pitch waver. A Left-leaning Senator is thrown out of office and continues his anti big business campaigns from the editorial desk of the local paper. When his kid sister is rescued by big machines, he rethinks his attitude and is welcomed back into mainstream with the love of a good woman and a puppy. I suppose everyone took the GM money and ran, before they could view the finished product, which resembles an episode of Thunderbirds without such convincing puppets!
Behave Yourself is a surprisingly black comedy to come out of fifties Hollywood. The print is badly affected by vile pitch-waver on the music soundtrack - there is a lot of music. This kind of pitch-black comedy requires a more subtle touch but what a handsomely-mounted production this was with top cinematography from James Wong Howe. Maybe Billy Wilder could have done something with it. The plot is a complicated one - advertisements for a lost dog lead to an increasing pile of corpses. Shelley Winters and Farley Grainger are upstaged by a formidable mother-in-law.
The real gem here is the 1934 version of Somerset Maugham's grim romance. This was the first major rôle of Bette Davis. She plays the sluttish Cockney waitress who makes poor crippled Lesle Howard's life a misery. This is a dork fillum indeed with a startlingly pessimistic view of sexual relations as inevitably blighted by power-games. What adds to the film's curiosity value is the way it was thought lost, the negatives having been destroyed when a new and lesser version was made in the forties. So DVDs are all from prints and not of top quality. This version I have not yet seen to compare it with that on GMVS - it looks very similar. Both these DVDs feature the 83 minute version which omits some background about Philip's childhood - the fuller version runs about 90 minutes. Howard and Davis are both brilliant so this is a real bargain.
007 His Private Secretary. His Girl Friday. The Amazing Adventure. Vol. 1 Silver Screen
Two of these films are Depression era Cinderella tales in which a millionaire enters the real world of work and finds a bride. His Private Secretary stars the youthful John Wayne cast as a dissipated playboy. Some sources give a running time of 68 minutes for this, so this 60 minute print may well be abridged. This 1930 movie is the earliest on these discs and the print is not in good condition.
The Amazing Adventure is a young Cary Grant as a millionaire trying to survive in the real world of work as a bet. It has its moments but this UK-made movie was drastically trimmed for the US and runs only just over an hour with a very abrupt ending. Even so, the young Grant is worth seeing - he seems to arrived in movies with a full bag of tricks which held him in good stead for several decades.
One of his best films makes this DVD is a must: His Girl Friday – is the Howard Hawks comedy which rewrote The Front Page for Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. The fast-paced dialogue is here scored in a near-musical way and the comedy is pitch black with a death-row prisoner's fate in the balance. Many different prints of this classic are available, some probably better than this one, however it appears to be uncut and is very watchable.
008 My Favourite Brunette. Crosby-The Road To Hollywood. Suddenly. Vol.2 Silver Screen
The Road to Hollywood was a cash-in movie, reissuing early Bing Crosby shorts in a compilation with a title designed to confuse audiences who had flocked to the successful series of comedies he made with Bob Hope & Dorothy Lamour. Crosby's film career was essentially based on his phenomenal success as a radio and recording artist. The films promoted his laid-back persona, which now seems complacent and dull. The plots revolve around his celebrity or his being mistaken for someone without it. There are some inventive routines here - I enjoyed the lion! The black-face stuff will raise eyebrows today though.
Crosby puts in a brief guest appearance at the end of My Favourite Brunette. This is a film noir spoof, starring Bob Hope as a baby-photographer with aspirations to be a detective. When mysterious Dorothy Lamour hires him, can Peter Lorre be far behind? You could count the Fortean pre-echoes of Hitchcock in this one. It is well made but neither very funny nor very thrilling. Films with a hyphen in their genre never are.
Suddenly was withdrawn by television companies after the Kennedy assassination. A tense siege-type thriller, it stars Frank Sinatra as the boastful war veteran who has been hired to shoot the President. Eerie prefigurings of the LHO case abound, including the shooting of a policeman. Some sort of confused message about the need for guns is implied but the film works very well and makes this particular triple bill well worth having.
009 The Woman In Green. Young and Innocent. The Man Who knew Too Much.Vol.3 Silver Screen
The Woman in Green was a one of the Basil Rathbone Holmes series. The other two are both Hitchcocks, no less, from his early UK years.
This 1934 version of The Man who Knew Too Much is wonderful entertainment, though I always boggle at the idea of a Temple of the Sun in Wapping! Take a look at the user comments on the IMDB to see how this one divides the sheep from the goats. Anyone who thinks this a routine thirties movie or technically unsophisticated should be forced to watch Star Wars until their eyes bleed.
It is fast-moving and very subtle. Compare the dysfunctional family here with the fifties remake which featured Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day. The languid style of Leslie Banks, tucking into cheese and pickles with his daughter's kidnappers has to be seen as a comment on the complacency of the International Set in the face of the rise of Nazism. I also find the final scene of the distressed Nova Pilbeam carries quite a charge. The emotions are mainly masked in this film but when they burst out it is very telling. The final siege, based on the Sydney Street siege of 1912, caused the censors a great many headaches as the script had originally featured the police with guns.
This print is rather tired-looking. The version on Carlton Silver Collection is much better, though it has some scratches. However this cheap version - obviously from a UK print - has a longer running time. Without running them side-by-side yet, I think the extra minutes are mainly in the better structured build-up to the siege, as the army take over the surrounding streets.
Young & Innocent is less often seen and I am looking forward to it.
010 A Fare Well To Arms. The Groom Wore Spurs. Indiscretion Of An American Wife Vol.4
A strange medley of movies on this disc! Gary Cooper in the earlier and better version of Hemingway's 1929 novel.
A forgettable Ginger Rogers comedy is the centre of the sandwich. At one point she wonders out loud why she is sharing a bed-sit with a crypto-lesbian chum. The rationale seems to have been that Ms. Rogers was getting a little long in the tooth by 1951 so they should pair her off with an ageing and paunchy Hollywood cowboy. The jokes revolve around such revelations as the fact he doesn't do his own stunts or sing his own songs. Ginger is meant to be a smart city lawyer, hired to dig him out of a poker-game debt. You can tell things were desperate when the director resorts to speeding up the film for an aeroplane sequence finale. Neither movie nor 'plane ever get off the ground.
Finally a real curio: Montgomery Clift in a 1954 movie directed by Vittorio di Sica, no less! Well a bit less - the movie was re-edited by David Selznick to remove the other story lines to focus on the central couple - Jennifer Jones is the straying wife. The result is said to use footage which does not appear in the Director's own version, called Terminal Station. What we get on the disc, needless to say, is that Selznick cut, running a mere 64 minutes. I have since learned that though Selznick and di Sica did fall out during the filming, it had always been planned to produce two versions - source David Robinson's biography of Selznick.
011 Blood on The Sun. Lawless Frontier. Lawless Range . Vol. 5 Silver Screen
Blood on the Sun is a Cagney vehicle set in prewar Japan, where he plays an honest newspaperman seeking to inform the world about Japanese expansionist plans. Sylvia Sydney is the half-Chinese love interest. This must have been in production during the last year of the war so it isn't too surprising to find a full range of evil Jap. stereotypes. It isn't exactly a deep film but its surfaces are very alluring with some fine sets and cinematography. Cagney and Sydney are each excellent, though there is a lack of any real chemistry between them. So it isn't quite Casablanca. The score is by Miklos Rozsa.
The other two titles are John Wayne cowboy pictures. Lawless Frontier runs about three minutes longer than that in John Wayne The Most Wanted collection. Most of the missing minutes occur early on when there is a nocturnal cattle-rustling scene. I guess this was excised for being too murky. Neither of my prints of this curious movie are very good - but it is a wonderfully strange film!
012 Pot O' Gold. Something To Sing About. Riders of Destiny Vol.6 Silver Screen
Described by James Stewart as his worst movie, Pot o'Gold is the only film I know which was produced by the son of an American President. Yup, this was the first and last film produced by James Roosevelt. I have seen some very favourable User Comments from viewers online who have enjoyed this feel-good picture alot. But there is no reasoning with people who like musicals. It all concerns a lot nof noisy hateful people who set out to convert a grouchy music-hating tycoon. You'll be rooting for the music-hater way before the end of this one! The print is adequate and the soundtrack mainly loud and clear - alas!
Something to Sing About is Cagney in song and dance mode - though he gets to throw a punch or two. It was another self-produced Cagney vehicle, this time a musical, made when he had fallen out with Warner Brothers. The best sequence is a bizarre dance routine on the deck of a ship. This is a Hollywood behind-the-scenes story with a glitch in Cagney's true romance caused by a gossip-writer. That is all the plot. It is never seriously boring, however and the print here is reasonably good - even the high notes of the loud female singer don't distort. This was originally issued at 93 mins in 1936 or 1937 but was reissued at 82 or 84 minutes (depending who you read) at the height of Cagney's fame in 1947. This Poundland DVD claims a running time of 82 mins on the case. In fact it runs nearly five minutes longer than that, so we have something near to the complete version.
Riders of Destiny is another John Wayne Lone Star Western.
013 Our Town The Star Packer. Rocket Ship XM Vol.7 Silver Screen
The print of Our Town is less dire than I had imagined from viewing just the start. What is bad is the soundtrack which is hissy and unpleasant. There are a number of good historical reasons for seeing this but it is very slow. About an hour in, things lurch into much darker territory and for several minutes a woman haunts her own life. This is a brilliant sequence and the play ends that way. The happy Hollywood ending here spoils the effect almost completely. Our Town was adapted by Thornton Wilder from his successful play. The production was designed by William Cameron Menzies and the score was by Aaron Copland.
The Star Packer is not as gay as it sounds - the only rusty sherrif's badge on display is John Marion Wayne's!
Rocket Ship XM is a low-key sci-fi from 1950. Slow and talky by today's standards, the special effects are pretty simple. Even so, it has a real pioneering feel and it takes us on a journey to Mars with a glacial Nordic maiden melting on the way. There are Martians to see and a message to take home as well as a startling ending. This print seems to be the authentic original version, without special effects which were added for its video release in 1976. It was pleasant to find that the print preserves the red tinting which was used for the
scenes on Mars.
014. Gung Ho. West Of The Divide. 'Neath The Arizona Skies. Vol.8 Silver Screen
Gung Ho! we are told comes from two Chinese words meaning working together. It's the patriotic story of an elite company of Marines who volunteer for a special duty after Pearl Harbour. Their task turns out to be the taking of Makim Island from the Japs with six against one against. It isn't exactly subtle - the war was still raging in 1943. It is, however, a very professional piece of work and holds the attention from first to last. The young Bob Mitchum has a supporting rôle. Randolph Scott is the Colonel.
The other two movies are Lone Star Westerns with Big John.
015 The Flying Deuces. Africa Screams. The Abbot & Costello Show.
Laurel & Hardy only take to the air in the final minutes of this episodic Foreign Legion romp. It has its moments - I like the laundry sequence which contains some very expensive-looking shots of miles of clothes-lines! No CGIs in those days and it looks like they actually built the set!
Africa Screams is said to contain much that is now thought politically incorrect. Yes, they do get to spend some time in cooking pots. The ending has some mythic resonances: Costello ends up inside a penthouse with a gorilla - an inversion of King Kong who stayed outside on the ledge - while Abbott drifts down river on a raft, attacked by chimps, anticipating the fate of Herzog's Aguirre! A shame they never got to meet Klaus Kinski.
Finally the Abbott & Costello Colgate Comedy Hour from 18th April 1954. Effectively a very weird variety show hung on the weakest of South American hooks. Hard sells for Ajax and Colgate toothpaste come as something of a relief at fifteen minute intervals. Between the ads we get a so-so magic sketch from the stars, a sickly medley of Christian songs, a dwarfish percussionist dancer act and an evil little six-year old xylophonist in Mozartean dress who plays the Poet & Peasant Overture. Not for the faint hearted!
016 Horror Hotel. The Terror. The Corpse Vanishes. Vol.1 Classic Horror
Horror Hotel was made in the UK but is set in New England. As in Psycho, the heroine seems to be bumped off early on. Here the horror genre requirements prove reactionary. Still, there is some atmospheric photography and two classic scenes of Phantom Hitch-hiking, Worth a look. Valentyne Dyall was Britain's answer to Vincent Price. His name was synonymous with ghostly matters for early tv audiences and he edited a volume of Unsolved Mysteries, or at least allowed his name to go on the cover. Horror Hotel is presented on this DVD in 1.85:1 non-anamorphic widescreen. It was filmed in b & w.
The Corpse Vanishes is a weird and wonderful offering about a wisecracking female journalist on the trail of Lugosi who is poisoning brides on their wedding day to obtain their body fluids. A wicked dwarf is also involved. This one is good fun
The Terror matches a very young Jack Nicholson with a very old Boris Karloff. Filmed in colour, on the set of The Raven, it was Directed by Roger Corman and Produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Here Corman abandons home ground for an imagined and colourful European setting. As much a fairy-tale as a horror, this features a witch in the wood, a water-spirit and a dried-up Baron in his castle on the hill. The young Jack Nicholson is miscast as a Napoleonic soldier while the Polish servant is played by Jonathan Haze with the same accent he used as Seymour in The Little Shop! Some striking moments and some glaring continuity lapses make this a curious three-day wonder. The location photography on the beach is quite poetic. The colour print is bearable but scanned and panned with some curious framing anomalies early on.
You could, I suppose, watch Edward D. Wood's Bride of the Monster in a double-bill with Lugosi's earlier The Corpse Vanishes. Wood seems to have known this one well - he lifts a few scenes of monster-flagellation and hair-fetishism from the 1942 Monogram picture. Only in Wood's version the brute takes a fancy to a girl's angora beret! This earlier picture is amusing high camp throughout. The mad Doctor is under the strange impression that the best place to look for virgins is at the altar on their wedding days. So he sends them poisoned orchids and steals their corpses. Somewhere behind it all is the story of the Bathori woman who bathed in virgin's blood. Dreadful but very funny in places - intentionally so, I guess.
017 A Bucket Of Blood. House On Haunted Hill. The Ghoul. Vol.2 Classic Horror
Roger Corman's Bucket of Blood is an amusing enough satire on the artistic beatnick culture of 1960.
The House on Haunted Hill is the one with the acid vat in the cellar. The outside shots are of Frank Lloyd Wright's striking Mayan House but the interiors are more mundane with Vincent Price chewing every curtain in sight. The cast are largely wasted as the Director William Castle placed his faith in Emergo - a wonderful 1958 technology which featured a skeleton on a string! This is not included on the DVD but you could make your own I suppose - it will be something to do while the film is running. Incidentally the print - for those who care about such things - is in 1.77:1 widescreen.
The Ghoul does turn out to be a fully restored version by MGM. It runs over eighty minutes and offers the opportunity to see a lavishly mounted British horror from 1933. Never mind the often stilted drama, just soak in the amazing Production Design - seen here in splendid detail. Touches of expressionism enliven the solid craftsmanlike sets. Karloff stars but I rather think Ernst Thesiger steals the show as a dour Scots retainer. Incidentally this picture was long thought to have been lost - another victim of commercial suppression in favour of a later and inferior version. It turned up in rough Eastern European prints during the nineteen seventies but clearly this print derives from an archive negative.
018 Little Shop Of Horrors. The Bat. Bride Of The Monster. Vol.3 Classic Horror
The Little Shop of Horrors is good fun and played throughout with straight faces. True, there is a lot of overlap here with the earlier Bucket of Blood - the final chase seems to lead to the same junk-yard! Neither the print nor the soundtrack sound too healthy but somehow that seems appropriate. This famous talking plant movie was remade later as a musical. This original version features a lot of Jewish humour. Jack Nicholson is said to be the star but his is just a bit part as a masochist.
The Bat was a 1959 remake of the The Bat Whispers, directed by Crane Wilbur. The print is 1.77:1 but suffers from a form of ghosting - not multi-path double imaging but a sort of pixellated trail which follows any rapid moving character. The print also has synchronisation problems which get better or worse during the movie, without ever being solved. An unfortunate fault as the image itself is very clean and clear. I should say that the Bat in question is the killer and not an unflattering reference to Agnes Moorehead.
Bride of the Monster aka Bride of the Atom is a 1955 specimen of the work of Edward D. Wood, starring Lugosi. This is said to be the only film for which he had something like a normal B-picture budget. I don't get the Edward Wood thing at all. His stupidity could have been an advantage, had he possessed any visual sense. He didn't so it's a sad thing to sit through his movies as wholes. I think this is where Republic's giant squid ended up - referred to above. The actors here have still to animate its tentacles themselves. Bride of the Monster is a thrill-free laugh-free zone. A number of features were from Lugosi's earlier The Corpse Vanishes, where they are better enjoyed.
019 Carnival Of Souls. The Ape Man. Mesa of Lost Women. Vol 4 Classic Horror
Herk Harvey's 1962 independent Carnival of Souls has become a cult classic. Rightly so, though its zombies have not worn well. There is, however, something off-kilter about everything in this movie - and the man across the hall is terrifying! It owes quite a lot to Psycho, but Janet Leigh never got to play the organ. This is a superior print to the other I had, whch suffered from a muffled and distorted sound-track. There will never be a fully clean reproduction of that weird organ music - but maybe that adds to the atmosphere. The film was inspired by the abandoned carnival which features.
The Ape Man was directed by William Beaudine and starred Lugosi. It is generally regarded as a complete lame duck. It has nothing to do with Tarzan and is more of a loose variation on Jekyll & Hyde. Lugosi is a madly experimenting Doctor trapped in his ape-like form and needs glandular secretions to restore him to normal. Medical ethics prevent his colleague from murdering donors so the ape goes bananas. No one seems to have taken the film very seriously at Monogram. It has a bizarre figure loping about who finally identifies himself as the author of the story, "Screwy, isn't it?" is his parting, direct-to-camera line.
Mesa of Lost Women is another film which features on lists of the world's worst pictures. It was cobbled together from an abandoned film called Tarantula and features some ridulously portentous voice-overs. A case could be made that such black holes of film-making have nothing to do but illustrate their own emptiness. Here there are several minutes of footage in which the entire cast wander around in a dark forest, linked in a chain, the blind leading the blind. There are times when sheer incompetence can mimic expressionism and I sometimes wonder if these mad films could have worked better as silents. Jackie Coogan plays the mad professor here. He had been The Kid, for Chaplin and would be Uncle Fester in television's Addams Family. The other name-check here is even sadder: cinematographer Karl Struss had won an Oscar for his work on Murnau's silent classic Sunrise! To be involved in what some regard as the greatest movie of all time and one of the very worst is quite an achievement!
020 Fighting Caravans. Randy Rides Alone. Man Of The Frontier. Vol.1 Classic Westerns
The fighting in Fighting Caravans is between the sexes chiefly. Gary Cooper is the love-object split between the masculine Old West - represented by two old, gay ( they die with their arms around each other, for heaven's sake!) scouts - and the feminine "civilising" influence of Lila Damita as Felice. For those who think we read too much into the gender issues in those old movies, it is interesting to note that a woman - Agnes Brand Leahy - contributed to the screenplay of this 1930 Zane Grey adaptation. It has a rather striking Red Indian war dance in the title sequence.
Randy Rides Alone is probably the most famous of John Wayne's Lone Star Westerns. The opening scene in which Wayne arrives at a saloon full of corpses with the pianola playing away, a pair of eyes watching from a portrait on the wall, is celebrated. Thankfully this print, though far from perfect, is a great improvement on the dire one in The John Wayne Collection. Now whenever people ask what's so good about old John Wayne movies, I can only answer that at least he wasn't Gene Autrey. This squat, pasty-faced, fussily preening little cowboy was you might suppose cut out to be a villain. Not a bit of it! We were supposed to cheer him on. Oh there is something else you should be warned about - he sings.
There were any number of singing cowboys in the nineteen thirties - incredibly, Gene Autrey was Republic's most popular star and cinema managers bought that studio's movie packages just in order to obtain his movies! Even non-singer John Wayne was billed as Singing Sandy in some of his Lone Star releases. For the sake of authenticity, presumably, his singing voice was dubbed by another non-singer. Sample the baleful ditty at the start of Man from Utah - a very strange film made up mainly of old rodeo footage. I suppose the idea was to vary the pace and tone of movies which were otherwise all action. The plots did not require much dialogue so the song was brought in - if a twerp like Gene Autrey wrote his own songs, so much the cheaper. You will have gathered that Man of the Frontier aka Red River Valley stars Gene Autrey. You have been warned. Some references say that he sings five songs in this picture but I think he seems to sing the same title song several times. Be afraid.
021 Painted Desert. Texas Terror. Hell Town.
Painted Desert is a painfully slow 1931 Western in which the actors say their lines like something in Dreyer. There is an absence of music on the soundtrack which seems to slow things further. The plot begins with two old cowboys falling out over who should care for an abandoned baby - incredibly they both want the job! This was an early Clark Gable movie. It improves somewhat as it goes on with some spectacular shot of a mine being blown up but it is no masterpiece.
The other two movies on this triple bill are also John Wayne Westerns. Texas Terror is one of the Lone Star variety but Hell Town is a bit later. I have not seen this particular DVD but have all these movies in other versions.
022 Invisible Ghost. Scared To Death. White Zombie. 3 Bela Lugosi
The Invisible Ghost stars Bela Lugosi in relatively subdued mode as he has repeated visions of his dead wife. The most remarkable thing about the film is the unusually grave and serious black servant played by Clarence Muse. It was directed by Joseph H. Lewis, famous for the innovative and compelling Gun Crazy but this is a stage-bound affair.
Scared to Death, made for the poverty row Golden Gate Films, is a real turkey. It appears to have been scripted by a disturbed and not very bright child. Much of the film is taken up with the unfunny antics of a dense cop and a shrill maid. However the repeated appearances of a green mask have a touch of the surreal about them, especially in the distorted cheap two-strip colour process used. There are signs of strong multi-path ghosting on the titles in both the versions I have seen, suggesting a common source.
For a quality horror, we go back to 1932 and Victor Halperin's White Zombie. Much admired and less often seen than I Walked with a Zombie. This is far from being a perfect print but it is not so bad. I wish this had been a silent picture. Try to see this one. Ignore the script and bathe in the poetic visuals. Yes I know they could be better but this version is costing you 33p dammit!
023 Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon Terror By Night. Dressed To Kill.
These are all Basil Rathbone pictures from the Sherlock Holmes franchise. The setting was contemporary rather than Victorian so the villains in the Secret Weapon can be Nazis. It has a scene in which Holmes is drained of his blood. These occasionally show up on television.
I was astounded to see that HMV Manchester were selling a tranche of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films at a knock-down £15.99 each. Some of them the same titles as on these bargain DVDs. Yup that's a full sixty to seventy minutes on each DVD. I can't imagine that any restoration work has been done to justify the hike in cost betwen these and the bargain versions at three for a quid. I think it is a grave mistake to buy anything at HMV, except when there's a sale!
024 Dick Tracy's Dilemma. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. Dick Tracy V. Cueball.
The Dick Tracy disc is a curate's egg. It may be hard to resist a movie with a Filthy Flora among the screen names but Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is resistable comic-strip stuff. Fair enough, you may think, given the source. However take a look at Dick Tracy's Dilemma, where the hook-handed villain is invested with surprising emotional depth by Jack Lambert. The persuit of the blind man is classic noir movie-making. True, this film is only half good but the best parts are brilliant. I also enjoyed DT Meets Gruesome. Karloff is a mad gasser who paralyses bank-staff. This entry benefits from the absence of the dreadful effete actor side-kick. DT himself is merely a man in a macintosh as ever.
025 Bulldog Drummond's Bride. Bulldog Drummond Comes Back. Bulldog Drummond Escapes
"Sapper's" snobbery-with-violence tales were set in the UK but the series was filmed in the States with American actors. The production values were surprisingly high - some expensive looking sets in Bulldog Drummond's Bride must surely have been built for another movie. It climaxes in a rooftop chase.
026 The Beverly Hillbillies. 4 Classic Episodes- Vol.1
The corny comedy of the sixties will be a nostalgia trip for many, though these episodes don't include the Ballad of Jeff Clampett which ritually opened the show. Possible copyright problems? These are four Christmas themed shows which first went out Xmas & New Year 1962 - 63 in the US. I guess we got them a year or so later. Ellie May gets to share her bed with Grannie and a skunk - among other things. All good fun with lots of blatant product placement - witness Grannie's demonstration of her swanky new gas hob - the gas company thanked for their cooperation in the end titles. As were TWA in the first show. Innocent fun and if the comedy gets dull you can play Spot-the-Lesbian! Yes she was!
027 Krazy Kartoons. 2 Hours of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig
Now here is a real curio and one that might cause a few raised eyebrows, despite the U Certificate on the spine. These Looney Toons have fallen into the public domain for a reason - they were pulled by the studios in the sixties when their political incorrectness became an embarrassment. Some were trimmed of racist stereotypes and others lost some of their crueller and more dangerous moments, such as Bugs Bunny kicking a dog in the jaw. At least one of the cartoons on this disc was totally withdrawn by United Artists in 1968, when they acquired the WB catalogue. It is the Bugs Bunny cartoon All This And Rabbit Stew, directed by Tex Avery in 1941, one of eleven cartoons which were regarded as beyond redemption. In this Bugs is stalked by a grotesque and stupid black man. Some other bad taste moments included Bugs in lingerie in The Wabbit Who Came To Supper. The man-eating lion in Who's who in the zoo. Probably as startling as the black caricatures are the Arabs in Ali Baba Bound. This features a suicide bomber - a dense Arab with a shell strapped to his head. Oh to add further insult to Arab sensibilities it's a Porkie Pig cartoon. I wonder how many Black or Muslim parents will buy this brightly packaged little treat for their sprogs?
I suspect that each and every one of these cartoons has something to offend somebody somewhere. What made my jaw drop was a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1943 called Falling Hare. It's a wartime story in which Bugs battles an evil Gremlin at an airfield. Naturally they take to the skies. Where do they head for but twin skyscapers, the Gremlin in charge. At the last moment, the plane tilts on its side and passes in a tiny gap between the towers.
028 Popeye 75th. Anniversary 2 Hours.
Thirteen cartoons on this disc but three of them are two-reelers. The Fleischer Brothers produced three of these showcase animation in 1936, 1937 and 1939. They used a new process which employed miniature sets to give a 3-D effect. Much admired by cartoon buffs, at least one of these received an Oscar nomination. The remainder of the cartoons are from the nineteen fifties are were directed by I. Sparber & Seymour Kneitel. All are in Technicolor. Prints are mainly of passable quality but have not, needless to say, been remastered.
These Classic Entertainment discs have also been noted here:
http://www.avforums.com/frame.html?...ad.php?t=145551
The GRVS & Instant Vision Series etc. at The Works
The Mysterious NL Make
The GRVS & Instant Vision series can be found in The Works and maybe other remainder-type bookstores along with another make identified only by the prefix NL and a Herts. postcode on the back. This last make seems to deal in TV movies and straight-to-video fare. Ian Richardson starred as Sherlock Holmes in two well-mounted but dramatically stodgy versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. The Grade Z horrors include Boggy Creek II and The Amityville Curse. Priced about right, then. You mainly get just one movie per disc but the store usually sells them at 4 for £5.
Instant Vision
Most of the Instant Vision titles seem to duplicate the classic Entertainment Series, notably John Wayne and Bela Lugosi. For the record the Lugosi titles are:
DVDIV 053: The Invisible Ghost; DVDIV 054: The Corpse Vanishes; DVDIV 055: Scared to Death.
Prints seem no better or worse than the CE versions, probably from the same sources.
The exception to the one work per disc rule is the Most Wanted series of John Wayne Lone Star Westerns. There seem to be six volumes numbered DVDIV 046 to 051. A few of these titles are not featured in the Classic Entertainment series but probably only the determined completist will miss them. In general, the Classic Entertainment prints are better - often much better and they preserve the original title music, not the horrid synthesized version. These Instant Vision versions seem to have been prepared for US cable tv and are trimmed by several minutes in some cases.
Three Rudolph Valentino silents are worth looking out for. The soundtrack music isn't so wonderful but you can put on your own choice of music for these delicious old silents. The prints are not what collectors would choose and this version of Blood & Sand has been cobbled together so that it has continuity issues. The best is The Eagle but all three offer enjoyable journeys into the past:
DVDIV 060: The Eagle; DVDIV 061: Blood & Sand; DVDIV 081: The Sheik.
GMVS
This label is also distributed through normal trade channels but you will see it for around £5 or £6 in HMV. I don't know if separate inventories exist for different outlets. I have not yet seen The Lodger or Sabotage in the bargain shops but they may just be more recent titles. If the numbering system is consecutive and without gaps, this is a very extensive list of over 300 discs. I will only be looking at the things which have caught my eye.
GMVS 1012: The Stranger. A good Orson Welles-directed picture starring himself and Edward G. Robinson. It's the one with the clocktower ending. Quite a good print though it seems to vary in quality.
GMVS 1138: Said to have been VistaVision's finest and more or less final two and a half hours, One Eyed Jacks was Marlon Brando's only outing as a Director. This over-long Western is much admired by Scorscese and other film buffs. Worth a look for £1.25, even if this scanned and panned version will give no hint of the original quality.
GMVS 1180: Of Human Bondage. The 1934 version again with Bette Davis as discussed above. Not much to choose between the prints.
GMVS 1176: Penny Serenade: Cary Grant & Irene Dunne star in a 1941 women's picture. Very dated but well made with a terrific Japanese earthquake scene. Features the most obnoxious girl child actor in screen history. Happily she dies.
GMVS 1197: Vengeance Valley. Discussed above. My copy of this briefly froze during a fight sequence - the only moment of trouble I've had with any of these cheap discs.
GMVS 1201: Cary Grant again in the misnamed Amazing Adventure. Despite having the whole disc to itself here, this is the same 62 minute version as above. Similar print.
GMVS 1213: The Painted Desert. Early Clark Gable discussed above.
GMVS 1226: Three Came Home: Claudette Colbert suffers under the Japanese and we under her. But a well made movie. Features the third most obnoxious child actor in screen history. There seem to be a plethora of Public Domain features which feature wartime Japan. Presumably the copyrights were allowed to lapse as their international appeal was now felt to be limited.
GMVS 1227: The Big Lift: Montgomery Clift in quasi-documentary about the Berlin air lift. Long and sometimes dull but very well done.
GMVS 1241: Home Town Story, discussed above. A 61 minute picture on a whole disc.
GMVS 1245: The Lodger. Hitchcock's early chiller with Ivor Novello as the lodger who might be a Jack-the-Ripper like killer. Not exactly a pristine print. Mysteriously, a BBFC Board intrudes after the titles. As this carries the X certificate, it must have been reissued some time after 1951, but why it is where it is, God knows! The soundtrack is a peculiar mixture of classical tracks of dubious relevance. Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony is played complete. Very odd. £6 in HMV so try to find it for less.
GMVS 1246: The Lady Vanishes. Acceptable print of Hitchcock's delightful train-set thriller. Snap it up, if you see it for about a quid - it's a fiver in HMV for the same disc exactly.
GMVS 1270: The Four Deuces. I got this one only to fill out my quota of 4 for £5 on a thin pickings day. Two words of doom are missed off the cover of this 1975 Jack Palance gangster period picture - Golan & Globus! The Israeli moguls were a solid guarantee of seventies schlock. From the dreadful theme music to the seventy-year old Palance in a naked love scene, this alleged comedy is one to avoid. I did like the cheeky use of a much younger Palance for the cover and the strap-line, "There are no aces in this pack!!" How true!
GMVS 1304: Hitchcock's Sabotage - not to be confused with The Saboteur - is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent. Confusingly, Hitchcock also made a film called The Secret Agent, which isn't! Features the most obnoxious boy child actor in screen history. Happily he dies. I think this is a much underrated picture with lots of reflexive jokes about cinema - it is set in one. Hitchcock later used to say he had regretted his explosive climax. When you consider the nervousness of the public at this time of pre-war tension, together with the suspicion of foreigners, Hitchcock's audacity seems rather cruel. Once you have adjusted to its period feel, this picture still carries an amazing ability to shock. As a treatment of terrorism, only the surfaces have dated.
Filling in the Background
Don't expect bells and whistles on these Public Domain DVDs - they are dumped on the market as fodder and you will have to sort out their context to enjoy them fully. They don't have stereophonic sound, closed captions or even Chapters, just a single Chapter for each movie. Needless to say, there is no surround sound or anamorphic widescreen. However, given the dates of the pictures, most are naturally 4:3. I have checked all mine to see that they actually load and play. They have all passed that test.
For backgrounds, synopses, reviews and full cast and production credits, I find the allmovie.com site loads faster and is less plagued with advertising than the IMDB - it also presents all its information on a single page for each movie. Worth printing this stuff out as the presentation of these cheapies is basic.
Don't miss this French site, where you can download movie posters as JPEGS for some smart covers for your DVDs and Vids:
http://www.moviecovers.com/
There are over 13,000 movies featured, many of them US and British titles. Some of the posters are for the French language versions but many are international. There are some great ones for the Wayne Lone Star Westerns. Warning: It's a site you can browse for hours. Amazingly, it's entirely free!
Notes about running times
Alternative Versions Fever has taken hold under the anorak. Faced with musical questions, we can always consult the score but only in the case of classic movies can we consult the script. Running times are not hard to establish but how do we know what is missing? Classic movie reference books do their best but often cite nominal running times. They may or may not be that length in the cinema or on US telly but we should deduct 4% for PAL. Discrepancies on silent movies can be wild: but I have seen prints of Shub's pioneering documentary The Fall of The Romanovs which run stupidly fast, so maybe the 63 minute version contains no fewer scenes than the 80 minute version.
Before the days of DVD, cuts were often made to the original materials and no one filed the cut scenes for later reconstruction. The most famous case is The Magnificent Ambersons but something similar befell Visconti's The Leopard. Some anti-clerical scenes were excised soon after the première and have never been seen since - not even in the "fully restored" version.
Reissued films were often far shorter than original versions, trimmed to fit the double bill format of programmes. It isn't always easy to find out whether original versions still exist. Helpfully, Maltin's Guide assures us that 113 minute prints still exist of Things to Come. For years only ninety minute versions have been shown. And Maltin fails to mention that the film premièred at 132 minutes! The authorized DVD version does not restore any of this missing footage. Now stretches of that movie are dull already - it seems unlikely we have lost any of the special effects and thirties-futurist set pieces. The missing scenes are probably windy sermons on progress but wouldn't it be nice to be certain!
PD Movies Online for Free!
For those without a pound in the world - I know, I've been there - there is an even cheaper way to see old movies. True, you need a fairly recent computer and Broadband is recommended - though I managed tonight to see a 100 minute movie without a glitch on dial-up at 56kbs. If you are limited to dial-up and find the picture quality just too swimmy and murky try clicking on the Broadband option. You will no longer get moving pictures but a slide-show of stills from the picture. Meanwhile the soundtrack is unaffected.
http://www.movieflix.com/
I registered with this site many years ago but could not use it with my kit of the time. Plenty of free movies here. Not that the quality is terribly good. But if you have ever had a yen to see The Triumph of the Will and been reluctant to pay for it, here is your chance.
I got to see a film that had scared me as a kiddie - The Red House! Well I think I can understand why it did. Can't wait for this to turn up in the Poundshop and no reason why it shouldn't as it's a PD movie.
There is also the following site, based in Holland, which seems to offer some remarkable movies all free. Sadly, so far, I have not been able to get any of them to load:
http://welcome.to/watchmovies
Suffice it to say that for the outlay, I don't think many of these discs will disappoint. The poor ones are part of Holllywood history and help to fill in our knowledge of its routine quality. Even the worst are good for a giggle. Go on, brave those Poundstore demons. You can't lose much except self-respect!
That's All Folks!
