Cinemaventure

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...