From Those Were the Days:

1942 - Suspense, known as radio’s outstanding theatre of thrills, debuted on CBS Radio. The program kept millions of loyal listeners in suspense for the next 20 years.
9:28:58 AM    comment []  trackback []  

DVD news

Sometime back in March, I mentioned in a review of a Gunsmoke episode called “Westbound” (1/3/53) that it was sort of a precursor to a 1959 movie western, Last Train From Gun Hill. (I also mentioned here that it was high time that someone released this Kirk Douglas-Anthony Quinn oater to DVD.) Well, it appears that my prayers have been answered—Paramount is planning for this DVD to hit the street November 9, and on that same day it will also release The Naked Jungle (1954), an adaptation of the classic Escape/Suspense play “Leinengen vs. the Ants.” (This just goes to show that one should always have faith in the DVD gods.) For my Orson Welles compadre, Pete M. , Paramount will also be giving us It’s All True, the 1993 restoration of Welles’ aborted 1942 film (the footage being recovered in 1985), on November 30th.

Jerry Lewis has been sort of underrepresented on DVD, with the exception of The Nutty Professor (1963), very few of his solo films have been released on disc but…Paramount will be rectifying that come October 12th with the releases of The Bellboy (1960), Cinderfella (1960), The Delicate Delinquent (1957), The Disorderly Orderly (1964-yowsah!), The Errand Boy (1961), The Patsy (1964), The Stooge (1953), The Family Jewels (1965) and The Ladies’ Man (1961). (A special edition version of Professor will also be released at that time—but what, no It’$ Only Money [1962]?)

Finally, some of the missing Hitchcock films will soon see DVD representation (no release date yet affirmed) in a nine-movie box set that will include Foreign Correspondent (1940-another yowsah!), Suspicion (1941), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), Stage Fright (1950), I Confess (1953), Dial M For Murder (1954), The Wrong Man (1957) and the previously released North By Northwest (1959). The set also contains a two-disc version of Strangers On a Train (1951), which will have both the original-release version and the preview version discovered in 1991. This one, too, has already had a previous release but the new disc features audio commentary with screenwriter Joseph Stefano, director Peter Bogdanovich (you can bet this commentary will be a talkathon), novelist Patricia Highsmith and biographer Andrew Wilson, plus a new documentary and a couple other goodies as well. The box set will retail for $99.95, but you can purchase each disc separately for $19.95 (the exception in Strangers, which retails for 26.95).

And now for the dessert: Paramount’s DVD releases of classic television shows have been so successful that they’ve got three biggies scheduled for a street date of October 12th—The Andy Griffith Show: Season 1, Hogan’s Heroes: Season 1, and Taxi: Season 1. Further details as this story develops.
9:26:17 AM    comment []  trackback []  

Welcome to the club!

Salon.com had an interesting article a week or two back about a writer’s experience with the online DVD rental service Netflix. I sent a copy of it to my sister Kat, and when I didn’t get a response I called her to see how she felt because she’s very much a Netflix patron.

Kat’s pretty much sold on the service; of course, she lives out in an area (what we West Virginians call “B.F.E”) where video or DVD rental places as are scarce as hen’s teeth. I don’t rent a lot of DVDs as a rule, partially because it’s a pain-in-the-tuchus to take them back to the store and the only store we have around here is Ball…I mean, Blockbuster. (I once worked at a Blockbuster franchise, and it was such an unnerving experience that I quit about 9 months later.) I was curious to test-drive Netflix (you know, kinda kick the tires a little) and so I signed up for their introductory trial offer.

Got my first three movies in the mail yesterday (a day earlier than Netflix’s E.T.A.), and I have to admit the set-up is pretty sweet. The movies come right to your door, you keep ‘em as long as you need ‘em, and they provide a postage-paid envelope for you to send them back. When you sign up at their website, you can browse through their various selections and if you see something you want to rent—you just click a button and it goes into what they call a rental queue. They send you up to three movies at a time, and when you’ve sent them back they send you up to another three. (This is what made me laugh—the website says “Some people have, on average, about 5 or 6 movies in their queue.” I have 230. You may now stop laughing and pointing and yelling “Movie Geek!”)

I watched the movies I rented last night, kicking off the evening with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), which is probably my very favorite Chaplin comedy. Now, technically, I already have this at the house—but I was curious to check out this copy because it’s the Warner Brothers re-release, and I’m anxious to know if the extras are any different. I compared both discs, and they’re pretty much the same—so I like to think I saved myself a little dough there. I do, however, need to get The Gold Rush (1925) and The Chaplin Revue (1958) DVDs; particularly since I didn’t buy the CBS-Fox/Image Gold Rush DVD on account of it's the 1942 re-release (with Chaplin’ narration). I hate that one. Fortunately, the Warners DVD has a restored version of the 1925 original, which I understand Kevin Brownlow and David Gill worked on.

After City Lights, I watched the 1960 suspenser Purple Noon (Plein soleil), based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. If you were unfortunate enough to pay good money to see the 1999 movie version (with Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow) you really need to check out the much classier original, in which the amoral Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) kills his friend Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) and assumes his identity. What I found fascinating about this film is that all the time I was watching it, I kept sympathizing with Ripley even though he’s supposed to be the bad guy; it's very similar to rooting for Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). I had always wanted to see this classic film (it was restored in 1996 by Martin Scorsese and had a limited release nationwide) and I wasn’t disappointed—great stuff.

I wrapped up the movie festival with Z (1969), director Costa-Gavras’ classic political conspiracy thriller—a film that I’ve seen before, but that had to be nearly fifteen years ago. (To be honest, I wasn’t even aware that it was available on DVD.) Yves Montand plays a pacifist politician who is killed in what appears to be an accident involving two apolitical drunks, but the magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) investigating the incident soon discovers that a conspiracy involving the officials of the right-wing government. The winner of the 1969 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the movie is rooted in fact; it’s taken from the novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos about the real-life assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, a Greek doctor and humanist whose murder in 1963 led to an abortive public scandal. (It hasn’t lost any of its gloss, by the way—it’s still as potent and politically relevant as it was in 1969.)
9:13:36 AM    comment []  trackback []