Rushes out to get the Chabrol . . .
Back on the Poundstore beat. I picked up a disc of Barbara Stanwyck in Lady of Burlesque, a 1943 thriller, once regarded as very daring as it was based on a novel by the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It turns out it was ghosted for her. There are lots of warnings online about how bad the PD prints of this film are, however the Poundstore version, from Dynamic DVD turns out to be strikingly good. Maybe it has been derived from the Image version, which is the only print to receive any praise.
The Delta Chaplin issues are turning up all over the place. There are ten volumes in all. Typically for Poundshop fare, you will need to shop around to get the set. There are better prints around of the two-reelers but this is a cheap way to acquire copies of a lot of the Keystone pictures. These have not been well preserved generally and the Delta copies are fully down to expectations. Still, they may fill a few gaps.
The Delta print of His Girl Friday comes with a biography of Cary Grant and represents very good value as the quality is far better than other PD prints I have seen. I guess, from the restored Columbia logo that it may simply have been ripped from the official studio version. While it often called a Screwball Comedy, the tone is ultra-dark as Press and Politicians compete to execute a murderer.
Whistling Jack has mentioned the Felix the Cat cartoons on Delta. There are two colour cartoons from the thirties but most of the material on this disc comes from the early twenties. One title is transferred from a shortened home-cinema version but the quality elsewhere is not bad. These silent pre-code cartoons are inventive and often weird. I especially enjoyed the early strobing psychedelia of Felix Find Out, where the curious cat gets stoned on moonshine. If you only remember the rather annoying Trans-Lux telly Felix, then this disc could be an eye-opener!
There are also two Delta volumes of Betty Boop cartoons also but these concentrate on the post-code material which is rather tame. Still it is nice stuff to have on the shelf if you like to preface old fillums with some contemporary shorts.
Finally the weirdest cartoon of them all, Krazy Kat, turns up on a Hollywood DVD double-sider coupled with a pretty but bland Canadian feature-length version of the Nutcracker Prince from 1990. There were some very early animated versions of the surreal Krazy Kat strip but this disc gives us eleven colour cartoons made for King Features in 1963. The sado-masochistic antics and perverse relationships survive nearly intact surprisingly. Not so suprisingly, Krazy is referred to as a female throughout, losing the full force of the gay mouse-loving original. The disc does begin with a bizarre orgasmic sigh which might alarm cheapskate parents who pick up this odd little disc for the kiddies!
