Cinemaventure

Way back in the Dark Ages when I first started collecting movies the only format was film. The serious collectors concentrated on 16mm prints which could be projected on a really large screen. Those of us on a budget had to settle for 8mm and, a bit later, Super 8mm. Castle films offered digest editions of Universal movies and Paramount titles controlled by Universal. Best sellers tended to be the digests of the classic Universal horror movies. Columbia got into market and Ken Films which was heavy on Warner Bros and United Artists titles. Later 20th Century Fox and Disney also offered excellent quality prints. For feature films and classic short subjects Blackhawk was the industry standard. Mack Sennett shorts, Hal Roach (silent and sound) D. W. Griffith and more came from Davenport, Iowa, the home of Blackhawk. My first acquisition was The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case , a silent edition of the 1930 sound comedy. Later I added more L&H, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton&#

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened here in the U. S. yesterday after an eight-month delay when Warners wanted to save a "blockbuster" for summer release. A blockbuster it is and I was not disappointed by this latest installment of the Harry Potter saga. The previous two films, Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix played fast and loose with the books and missed a number of opportunities to create some real feeling. Especially missed was the book's scene (Phoenix) at St. Mungo's Hospital when Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny encounter Neville Longbottom visiting his parents, tortured into madness by Belatrix Lestrange, a Death Eater who makes Voldemort seem a pleasant person. Of course time constraints force a lot of a book's content to be scrapped, but the writers seemed to make some poor choices in films four and five. Phoenix (again) fails to explain why the Dementors attacked Harry in the opening scenes. One line could have done it. That's a

Today, 20 June, 2009, is the 100th birthday of the greatest of all screen Swashbucklers, Errol Flynn. Born in Hobart, Tasmania Flynn's early life was filled with all sorts of adventures. He was chosen to play Fletcher Christian in the 1933 Australian film In The Wake of the Bounty . The film was dreadful but Flynn showed charisma as Christian (an ancestor) and he got bitten by the acting bug. He made his way to England and eventually to Hollywood. A few small parts gained him notice and he wound up replacing Robert Donat in the Warner Bros production of Captain Blood (1935). This was his first teaming with the lovely Olivia de Havilland and the chemistry was perfect. More roles followed and in 1938 Flynn and de Havilland starred in the best (in my not-so-humble opinion) Swashbuckler to ever reach the theater screens. Seventy-one years later it still has not been topped, nor equalled. The Technicolor film captured Medieval England (transplanted to California) and Eri