Cinemascope
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Posts posted by Cinemascope
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That's a great list, Arkadin. Wish TCM would play He Who Gets Slapped again soon, haven't seen it in ages! And it's probably one of Lon Chaney's best!
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Yes, I think it was mentioned in the audio commentary. There's also scenes where you can see his face clearly during the action scenes.
And he was born in 1913, so he'd have been around 51 at the time!
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In case you forgot about the release date --
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/movies/homevideo/06dvd.html
March 6, 2007
Critic?s Choice
New DVDs: The Prisoner(s) of Zenda
By DAVE KEHR
THE PRISONER(S) OF ZENDA
Anthony Hope published his swashbuckling romance ?The Prisoner of Zenda? in 1894, and it took all of a year for it to reach the London stage. Hope?s boys-own adventure has held its place in popular culture ever since. It offers a rousing tale of a tweedy Englishman, Rudolf Rassendyll, who finds himself taking the place of his distant cousin and double, Rudolf V of Ruritania (a fictional Mittel-European country), who is threatened by a palace coup. It inspired two sequels, countless stage productions, an operetta (with music by Sigmund Romberg), a musical (with music by Vernon Duke) and quite a few movies.
The two best-known film versions, the David O. Selznick production of 1937 starring Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and the 1952 MGM version with Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr and James Mason, are out today on a double-sided disc from Warner Home Video, and it?s surprising how resilient the familiar and much-parodied material, with its preposterous coincidences and unshaded characterizations, continues to be. (The most recent unofficial version is probably Ivan Reitman?s ?Dave? of 1993, with Kevin Kline as an average American drafted to replace a comatose president.)
Perhaps the secret of its lasting appeal lies in the myth of rebirth it so satisfyingly embodies; the great moment in most versions arrives when Princess Flavia, the king?s intended, realizes that he is not the drunken, immature lout she has long assumed him to be, but has mysteriously become an Oxford-educated gentleman whose erudition and athleticism are matched only by his decency and courage. That?s a makeover that even Oprah would have a hard time engineering.
By the time Selznick signed up Ronald Colman for the part, Mr. Colman had already appeared in a ?Zenda? knockoff called ?The Masquerader? (1933), as a journalist who takes the place (and the wife) of his look-alike cousin, a member of Parliament with a secret drug addiction.
That ?Zenda? could no longer be played straight must have been obvious to everyone, and so Selznick and his principal director, John Cromwell, approached it with just enough irony and self-awareness to pull the material into the 20th century without losing its Victorian charm. (Selznick being Selznick, he insisted on rewrites and reshoots, bringing in, among others, the writers Donald Ogden Stewart, Ben Hecht and Sidney Howard, and the directors George Cukor and W. S. Van Dyke).
Hollywood legend holds that Stewart Granger, the strapping Englishman whom MGM was grooming as its swashbuckling star of the ?50s, saw the Selznick film and immediately insisted that MGM buy it for him. Selznick, it is said, asked so much for the remake rights that MGM had no money left for a new script, so the director Richard Thorpe simply reshot the Cromwell version, practically scene for scene and line for line. (Even Alfred Newman?s score was recycled, though in a new orchestration by Conrad Salinger.)
Watching the two films back to back is a little like returning to Gus Van Sant?s notorious remake of ?Psycho? (1998), in which everything is the same but somehow hideously different. The advantages the remake does hold are the Technicolor photography of Joseph Ruttenberg and the Technicolor-friendly red tresses of Deborah Kerr, who is this version?s Flavia. But this is one double-sided disc that probably will not be flipped more than once. $19.98, not rated.
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I'm tempted to wait until I can rent the Criterion DVD but I might just give in and watch it this Sunday.
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I'm not doubting what you're saying about "Christmas Holiday"or any of the others, it's just that I can't see MU putting their reputation on the line by selling grey market items.
Well the copy they have of A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) (1946) seems to me to be a "grey market" item. That film has never been officially released on DVD in the US, only in the UK.
The last official release was done on VHS by Columbia TriStar Home Video. Not sure if they still have the rights.
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And what a great month it's going to be! :x
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What a great start to the first SOTM tribute after the Oscar season!
That doc they showed certainly explains a lot about the bad blood between GK and Louis B. Meyer.
For Me and My Gal is a terrific choice for the first movie, GK and Judy Garland looked sooo young in that one! It sure makes you yearn for those early days of the 1940's!
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Any hotel that refuses Cheney's request is alright in my book!
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Yeah that's the remake that they included in the new special edition of the original. Always heard it was bloody awful!
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> > I liked him a lot in While the City Sleeps.
>
> That's a great film with a great cast (Directed by
> Lang too!). It's coming up soon.
Good to know, I'm dying to watch it again!
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He played the same part in every role he ever had
Funny, many people think the same of Cary Grant, Clark Gable, John Wayne, etc.
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Did they letterbox it? That movie has a great widescreen cinematography!
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Sometimes suspension of disbelief goes a long way!
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That's not a bad analysis of Kubrick's technique.
As for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, well, I'm not the world's biggest fan, but it does have a few moments and you have to give it credit for trying out the concept of the "epic comedy". The fact that I know so many people really enjoy it tells me it should be showcased because there's a good chance many more people who haven't seen it will enjoy it.
And the other movie, well, haven't watched it recently, but I'll watch anything with Alan Arkin!
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It happens to everyone!
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We are such wonderful people.
Yes we are!
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Yea, all those $1. movies at the check out stand PD and many of the titles that sell for under $5. there so cheap cause they dont have to pay fees.
Actually I thought they were cheap because they'll use the first source material they use, never investing anything in looking all over the world for better source to use for a video transfer, never spending a dime on film restoration, etc.
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I remember that!!!! And the Pabst Blue Ribbon special! :0
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I haven't even tried to listen to the audio commentary.
On a disappointment scale of 1 to 10, a bad transfer of a Technicolor musical that messes up the colors is like a 12. That's why I am still fuming over that.
I just hope they fix it at some point in a future edition.
Did you see the Busby Berkeley doc in the same DVD? At least the colors in those clips look great -- and the bananas and strawberries look so yummy!
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Danny that's a great list, but I'm wondering why you didn't consider Lady and the Tramp to be more of a classic film, since it came out in 1955 and was in fact the very first animated movie in Cinemascope.
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To me a Hollywood star is someone who becomes a star doing Hollywood movies.
Johnny Carson in my view was a celebrity, but not a Hollywood star. Yes he did have a show in Los Angeles and he interviewed a lot of Hollywood stars. Yes he hosted the Oscars, but so did David Letterman (well at least once!
)And yes, he was recognizable, but as someone you see on TV, not in the movies.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a TV celebrity, at least not the way Carson did it.
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Brazil is very much like the kind of picture you'd expect from Terry Gilliam.
I guess that's just another way of saying if you like some of his other movies, there's a chance you might enjoy this one. He has a nice way of coming up with sometimes amazing imagery and often takes you by surprise narratively, or at least tries not to be too predicatable.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen or Time Bandits might have given you some idea of what to expect, if you've seen them. If not, well, it is a weird blend of some Orwellian dystopian future with some very beautiful "mind-over-matter" allusions, although the end result strikes many as somewhat in the bleak side.
Of course, his vision was so original and offbeat that Universal Pictures butchered the movie upon its original release, cutting out I think half an hour and ending it with a conventionally happy ending.
There was another longer cut, but Gilliam's cut of Brazil (originally released on home video by the Criterion Collection) is far more challenging and in some ways unsettling. (The Criterion box set includes all 3 cuts of the movie).
Jonathan Pryce, Robert DeNiro and Bob Hoskins are engaging and Kim Greist seems to strike the right note as the enigmatic angel-like figure that Pryce falls in love with.
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Wow, I wasn't familiar with that title! Thank heavens it is on DVD, probably will check it out soon.
Thanks for posting Genevieveannabelle!
I have a confession to make
in General Discussions
Posted
Those are good PS comedies. One that I think most people will want to avoid is The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, which most would probably not find all that funny. Sadly, it was his last movie.
There is also an interesting biopic made for cable a few years back, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, with Geoffrey Rush doing his best to capture the bizarre nature of PS. It's got a fairly good cast and should be of interest to anyone who has enjoyed PS's movies.