Cinemaventure

UNDER THE SEA      The year was 1914. Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States. George V sat on the throne of Great Britain; Franz Joseph was the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Wilhelm II was the Kaiser of Germany; and Nicholas II was the Czar of Russia. It was the end of an age and by 1918-1919 Franz Joseph, Welhelm, and Nicholas would be gone. The government of France was too much of a confused mess to bother with here.      The modern age was in the process of sweeping away the old. In the world of entertainment feature films were becoming popular as audiences warmed up to the longer films. Universal Picture Corp. jumped onto the bandwagon with several productions. Among these was a film of Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . This is possibly the first Science Fiction feature film, although the term had not yet been coined. The generally accepted term was " Scientific Romance" with romance meaning " a novel or other ...

 Quo Vadis and I go back a long way.  About the middle of the last century MGM released two recordings from this film.  One was a dialogue highlights album in which, I admit, I have no interest.  I want Rozsa's score.  MGM also released a 10-in LP, long out of print.  It also came out as a 78RPM album.  I found one at a sale back around 1972 or 1973.  Sadly, the first disk had a small chip on the edge, but the others were in pretty good shape so I was able to make do. An new recording conducted by Miklos Rozsa with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus released in the seventies or early eighties was, to me, a disappointment.  The poor mixing made it impossible to catch any of the lyrics sung by the chorus and, I seem to recall, the tempo was too slow.   Quo Vadis was based on a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz set during the reign of the Emperor Nero.  Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Genn, and Peter Ustinov.  Genn, as ...

  Kriemhild's Revenge is the second of Fritz Lang's films dealing with the Niebelungen.  Kriemhild seeks justice for the murder of her husband Siegfried but her brother King Gunther (who gave the order for Siegfried's killing) protects his loyal henchman Hagen Tronje.  Spurned, she accepts an offer of marriage from Attila the Hun (also known as Konig Etzel in some prints).  This sets the stage for Kriemhild's plan to avenge Siegfried.      It sounds like a soap opera, but grand opera is closer.  Richard Wagner used the original legend as the plot source for his Ring Opera cycle.  Fritz Lang used it as an example of just how costly revenge can be.       As in Siegfried this film moves slowly, or deliberately.  It begins in King Gunther's court in Burgundy which represents Civilization and grandeur in the midst of the Dark Ages.  When it moves to Attila's court we are treated to Lang'...

Back in Ancient Times when I collected movies on honest-to-goodness film one that always proved to expensive for me was Fritz Lang's 1924 epic Siegfried , the first part of Die Nibelungen .  This ancient Germanic story featured an almost invulnerable hero, dwarfs, heroics, treachery, and, best of all, a dragon.      Elements of the original story appeared through the centuries in various forms.  The original myth served as the basis of Wagner's Ring Cycle or operas.  A sword broken was made whole again and appeared in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings .  There was an invisibility cloak (more like a head cover) that enabled the hero to win over opposition and used by boy wizard Harry Potter a few centuries later.       The second part was called Kriemhild's Revenge , but more on this later.      Finally this long sought treasure came within my grasp thanks to its release on DVD by Kino.  Their catalo...

I had hoped to be in San Antonio this weekend for the annual Alamo Symposium and other events commemorating the fall of the Alamo, March 6, 1836.  I did make the trip in 2011 and had a wonderful time.  The dawn ceremony on the sixth of March was very moving and inspiring.  For people interested in the subject of the Alamo and its defenders the Alamo Society is the place to go.  For information, please click on this link:  http://www.alamosociety.org/  .   The Alamo has featured in a number of movies since the 1911 film The Immortal Alamo , which told the story of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto in one reel, a little over ten minutes, depending on projection speed.  Although this is a lost film photos exist.  Information on this and other movies may be found in the book Alamo Movies by Frank Thompson.   Like most of my generation I first encountered the Alamo courtesy of Walt Disney and the television program Disne...

Part of the excitement (yeah, sure) of aging is when you realize just how long ago it was when you first encountered something.  Last year (2012) was the fiftieth anniversary of the momentous day I discovered James Bond, not as a book, or a movie, but as a comic book.  DC, which was not known for adapting movies into comic books, released a comic adaptation of the upcoming thriller Dr. No .  I was in the eighth grade, finishing junior high, getting ready to leap into high school.  The comic intrigued me and I anxiously awaited the movie.  Distribution must have been spotty in Knoxville, or for some other reason, I missed it at first.  But I convinced my mother to take me to see Dr. No in Harriman, a small town west of Knoxville where my father operated his dental lab.  He preferred the 35-mile commute instead of having to deal with dentists at all hours of the night.  But, I am going astray here. My mother drove me to Harriman to see the movie...

There are movies that are so bad they are fun to watch.  I have to admit the movies of Ed Wood do not fit this category for me.  They are so bad they are painful.  Fortunately Sam Katzman sometimes fills the bill.  Katzman (1901-1973) was a producer and director whose career started in 1933.  He worked in Westerns, serials such as Columbia's Superman (1948), Jungle Jim movies with Johnny Weismuller (earning the nickname "Jungle Sam"), and even produced an Elvis Presley movie.  Reportedly he did not care for the experience because the large budget made him uncomfortable.  He worked cheap and fast but usually delivered watchable product.  But even a low-budget mogul such as Katzman could pinch pennies in the wrong area.  In this case it was special effects that suffered. The Giant Claw (1957) is a comedy riot, which is not what was intended.  A good cast of professionals including Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum, and Edga...

Once upon a time in a magic land called Hollywood there were entities called "Studios". They came in all sizes, from giant (MGM) to mite (PRC). The biggest Little Studio was called Republic Pictures and was home to stars such as John Wayne and Roy Rogers. The ruler of this studio was Herbert Yates whose talent involved getting a lot of product for a small amount of money. However, he was not as cheap as PRC and made motion pictures that looked good. Herbert Yates had one fatal flaw; he fell in love with former Olympic skater Vera Hruba Ralston and married her. He also made her the star of many motion pictures (hereafter called pictures because your scribe is getting lazy). He had hoped to make her another Sonja Henie, but there was just so much you could do in a picture wearing ice skates, so he placed her in other movies. There were many actresses prettier and more talented than Vera, but there were also those much worse, but they tended to work for even smaller st...

This is certainly a sad day for us Baby Boomers. Fess Parker who played Davy Crockett has passed away, March 18, 2010. For those of us of a certain age Fess WAS Davy Crockett. Later he played Daniel Boone but we always considered him as Davy using another name. I remember he first impressed me with a small role in my favorite Big Bug Movie, Them! (1954). He portrayed Alan Crotty, a pilot who had an encounter with the giant ants. It was a small role, but Fess Parker made the most of it. I am sure I also saw him in some of his other pre-Davy roles. I watched Dragnet and Stories of the Century (he played Grat Dalton), but it was as Davy Crockett that he became an important part of my young life. "Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter" was broadcast on my sixth birthday and I became a lifelong fanatic on David Crockett of Tennessee. By the time "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" was broadcast I was a confirmed history buff. Fess Parker played other roles at Disney. He was...

Walt Disney's Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier was my introduction to History, a subject I still read a lot. It was on my sixth birthday that I caught the first installment, Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter . Here was a story about people from East Tennessee, barely one hundred miles from my home. Let's face it. Tennessee just was not the setting for much of anything on TV at the time. What's more some of the episode was filmed in my home state, something else that was almost unheard of. Walt Disney turned to American History for subjects to film, either for the theaters or for the Disneyland television series. Fess Parker appeared in a total of five episodes about Crockett. Fess Parker played another historical character, Union spy James Andrews in The Great Locomotive Chase . This was based on a incident from 1862 when Yankee spies stole a train and attempted to sabotage the rail line between Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Walt also filmed incidents fr...

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...

Yep. I'm a Monster Kid. Have been for almost 50 years since I first discovered a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine around 1959 or 1960. Before that my sister and I would catch as many horror flicks as possible. Rodan, Earth vs. the Spider, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Horror of Dracula and The Mummy are only a few that come to mind. Anything by Ray Harryhausen we would see twice. It was a fun time to grow up. And then I discovered Famous Monsters and Forrest J. Ackerman. Uncle Forry introduced me to the people behind the movies. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi became real people and not just faces on the big screen. I was introduced to Lon Chaney, Sr. and his wonderful movies and learned about James Whale and Karl Freund. I learned how Ray Harryhausen made saucers fly and monsters walk. The success of Famous Monsters brought other monster zines. Charlton offered a couple of titles for instance. Cheaper paper and fuzzy pictures, but they sometimes had so...

Moonraker should have been the best entry in the Bond series to date, but unfortunately it was sabotaged by the script. There is often a fine line between witty and witless and Christopher Wood's screenplay was mostly on the wrong side of the line. The jokes were unusually tasteless and the handling of the character "Jaws" was like something out of a bad comic book. Visually Moonraker was gorgeous, but, unfortunately, the sound mixing made it easy to hear the dialog. The idea of a madman wanting to kill off Earth's population, except for certain "genetically superior" specimens was old hat in Science Fiction but offered possibilities. The visual effects of the space station and battle in space were stunning. So you definitely had the good and the bad here. "Jaws", introduced in The Spy Who Loved Me and played by Richard Kiel was another of the almost superhuman henchmen loved by the fans, but here he walked away from events that no human could s...

I always enjoyed going to the monster and horror flicks as a kid. For about four years we lived a block away from a neighborhood movie theater, the Park, in east Knoxville. This is where I first saw House of Wax , in 3D, no less. I was introduced to the wonderful world of Ray Harryhausen through Earth Vs The Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles To Earth and, my favorite, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad . On occasion my sister and I would catch the bus downtown and see Rodan, Earth Vs the Spider and even turkeys such as The Viking Women . I did have some standards and refused to watch the bargain basement losers like King Kong Vs Godzilla for example . And then we discovered Hammer Films and the great team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. A new world in glorious color opened up. Even today I enjoy watching these old movies when I get the chance. I would like the opportunity to see some of Bert I. Gordon's movies again. They were low budget, but fun. I watched The Viking Women ...

"Sean Connery Is James Bond!" was the slogan that attempted to draw audiences away from Casino Royale (1967) which claimed "Casino Royale is too big for one James Bond" The folks at Eon had nothing to worry about with the competition. Casino Royale was a costly fiasco and offered no real competition or entertainment value. On the other hand Eon tied in its fortunes with a star who wanted to leave the series. You Only Twice began the silly season for the James Bond films. So far gadgets were not overly intrusive and there was still some basis in the real world. But Raold Dahl's script changed that, resulting in the silliest moments to date in the series. For example we have James Bond trying to pass as Japanese. It doesn't work and Connery doesn't seem to be working hard at it, either. Also, the attempt to kill Bond by some inept thugs in a car chase indicates the bad guys are going to be pushovers and lack any subtlety at all. The last thing they woul...

Indiana Jones is back and it's worth going to the theater to see a movie. I always loved going to the movies when I was younger. Of course the only options we had available were to see the movie at the theater or wait several years for it to show up on TV. The options for collectors were limited (in the US at least) to 8mm or 16mm films. When home video was introduced the quality was iffy and prices were high. Video stores could charge, and get, $10 a pop. As a kid fifty cents would bet me in the movie, a bag of popcorn, a coke and maybe a small box of candy. I still remember the sticker shock when tickets went up to a dollar. Even that was affordable enough to catch several movies in a week. For that matter, most movies didn't play over a week at any one theater unless it was a special like West Side Story for example. Now, I still enjoy seeing movies on a large screen, but the multiplex screens aren't that big and ticket prices are disgraceful. I only go to barg...

Another chapter in Hollywood's history is closed. Charlton Heston, who epitomised larger-than-life characters on screen has now joined the greats like Cecil B. De Mille, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. There are now only a handful left who took part in Hollywood before it was taken over by the film school graduates and the Hate-America-First crowd. Charlton Heston played a wide range of characters, historical, mythical and archetypal. Moses, El Cid, Judah Ben-Hur, General Gordon of Khartoum, and even the greatest pirate of them all, Long John Silver. He worked in epics, westerns, science fiction, crime dramas; any genre that offered a part, because as an actor, work was the breath of life. There are no actor's in today's Hollywood capable of leaving such a vivid impression long after the movie has ended. For Moses, the best they could come up with recently was Dougray Scott. (Dougray?) As Norma Desmond said, it is the pictures that got small. Like John Wayne Charlton Heston l...

The Alamo (pictured to the left) is a four-CD set from Silva Screen Records devoted to the music of Dimitri Tiomkin. Like most Silva releases it is a mixture of the good and the bad (and in one case downright ugly). It also combines new material with tracks from earlier releases. Still, it is worth getting. Disc One is devoted to the Westerns and is primarily instrumentals and most tracks, performed by the City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, are excellent. The first track is "Follow The River" from Night Passage an excellent film with James Stewart and Audie Murphy. Unfortunately the tempo is too fast, rushing through the lovely theme. Tension At Table Rock is represented next then High Noon, an instrumental arrangement of the song. The Wild Wild West is next, the two tracks being composed for an earlier proposed version of the television series. The tracks are the Main Theme and The Ballad Of Jim West. Gunfight At The OK Corral is represented by a suite. Unfortunatel...