Tag Archives: Cinerama Holiday

Vincent Price

Home Video: The Best of 2013

Despite continued dire assertions that “DVD is dead” and that Blu-ray is a fading niche market in an era of downloadable movies, from our vantage point we’re seeing more desirable titles premiering on DVD and Blu-ray than ever before, even if some of these best new releases require a region-free player to see them, or are titles increasingly farmed out to independents charging higher prices than we’ve gotten used to. This year we give a particular round of applause to labels like Olive Films, Inception Media Group, Cohen Film Collection, and Flicker Alley, places run but dedicated, film-savvy entrepreneurs who clearly love these movies as much as we do.

And so, in ascending order, here’s our list of the best of the best of 2013:

Paul Williams

10. Paul Williams – Still Alive (DVD only; Virgil Films)
The past decade has been great for documentaries about singers and songwriters: Anvil: The Story of Anvil (2008), Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everyone Talkin’ About Him?), Ain’t In It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (both 2010). Paul Williams Still Alive (2011) is yet another funny, moving and ultimately revelatory portrait of the ubiquitous if diminutive songwriting superstar, who seemed to vanish into thin air after the early 1980s. Director Stephen Kessler’s unusual approach makes the show as much about his mostly awkward personal relationship with his reluctantly willing subject, who now seems much happier living in comparative obscurity than he did at the height of his celebrity. A profoundly entertaining film about a supremely talented artist whose intimate, confessional songs about loneliness and depression always seemed negated by the clownish, cocky media star far more complex than anyone imagined.

Damned

9. The Damned (Cohen Film Collection)
Submarine movies come in all shapes and sizes, but René Clément’s The Damned (1947) is the most authentic submarine movie we’ve ever seen, more so even than Wolfgang Petersen’s celebrated Das Boot (1981). And it is by far the most immediate. Told in flashback by a French doctor, Guilbert (Henri Vidal), the film follows a German U-boat loaded to the gills with VIPs: fervent Nazis, Nazi collaborators, and their lovers, all fleeing from Oslo hoping to reach South America in the last days of the war. Considering when it was made, the film is a technical marvel, accomplishing many of the same kinds of innovative claustrophobic camerawork usually credited to the much later Das Boot. It seamlessly blends new footage shot aboard a submarine with studio sets and wartime stock footage, while the jumble of fast-changing political (and economical and sexual) loyalties aboard this underwater bunker is equally fascinating, eventually becoming a microcosm of Europe during those chaotic last days of the Third Reich. This Gaumont title distributed by Cohen Media Group looks nearly perfect in high-def. Good extras include an audio commentary and hour-long Clément documentary.

Right Stuff

8. The Right Stuff (Warner Home Video)
“They were called test pilots, and no one knew their names.” The Right Stuff (1983) is the best American movie of the 1980s. Based on Tom Wolfe’s book and adapted and directed by Philip Kaufman, the movie essentially tells two stories: Chuck Yeager’s exploits as a test pilot, in particular his attempt to break and go beyond the sound barrier; and the earliest days of NASA, as seen through the eyes of its seven Mercury Program astronauts (and their wives). The material is by itself compelling, but what makes The Right Stuff so special is in the telling. It tells its familiar story of heroic American pioneers in unusual and unexpected ways. Some see it as a modern variation of John Ford’s last masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), an apt comparison. In Ford’s film, a cowboy and gunfighter emblematic of the Old West, played by John Wayne, essentially steps aside so that an aspiring attorney, James Stewart, symbolizing a tamer, civilized West, can take his place. The lawyer becomes a celebrated political figure while the once-famous gunfighter dies in total anonymity, completely forgotten except by his closest friends. In The Right Stuff Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) is the Wayne character (even if Shepard plays him like Gary Cooper), while the seven Mercury astronauts are Stewart’s. In some ways it’s the last great movie epic with, among other things, the subsequent CGI revolution and Ron Howard’s obscenely overrated Apollo 13 making not the slightest dent in its lasting impact. It simultaneously satirizes Cold War politics and mass media hyperbole with its prefabricated American heroes yet, almost indescribably, this only serves to make each act of personal bravery all the more awe-inspiring. In a way, the Mercury astronauts are also Wayne’s character, outwardly enjoying the benefits and pitfalls of celebrity, with the public oblivious to or simply not interested in their genuine but mostly private and personal heroism. The Blu-ray has been among the most anticipated releases of the last few years, and from a technical standpoint it does not disappoint, offering a near-perfect video presentation supported by spectacularly good audio. There are numerous extra features, though nearly all are ported over from a 2003 DVD release.

 

Fighting Kentuckian

7. Olive Films
More than any other home video label in recent years, Olive Films has been a movie-lover’s dream come true. Culling mainly from Paramount’s long-neglected library holdings, they plucked from obscurity movies never before released to home video and have presented them with dazzlingly good high-def transfers. Neglected films, particularly from Republic Pictures’ B-movies, previously available on VHS and DVD with awful, ancient video transfers, have been revelations as Olive Blu-rays. From Betty Boop to ‘50s sci-fi to classic and recent French thrillers, Olive Films is the home video label of the year.

Vincent Price

6. The Vincent Price Collection (Shout! Factory)
American International Pictures releases licensed from MGM, this Halloween release containing House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Witchfinder General (1968), and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) brought back fond memories of the NuArt Theater’s glorious AIP film festival of 20 years ago, when these movies, available then only in the murkiest of panned-and-scanned video transfers, could be experienced as they were meant to be seen: good 35mm prints on a big, wide screen. These high-def transfers, with their rich color, gorgeous cinematography and extraordinarily good art direction, reveal riches lost when they were played to death on TV throughout the seventies and eighties. Shout! also went the extra mile combining MGM’s preexisting featurettes with some wonderful new material, including introductions to most of the films by Mr. Price himself, videotaped for Iowa Public Television back in the 1980s!

Puppetoons 2

5. The Puppetoon Movie (Inception Media Group)
A contemporary and in many ways equal of Walt Disney but minus Walt’s business acumen, producer-director George Pal is best remembered today for his pioneering efforts in the sci-fi/fantasy genre: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), tom thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) among them. But before all that, Pal made his name with the Puppetoons, one-reel shorts mostly employing the rare form of three-dimensional replacement animation. Unlike stop-motion, in which a single model is articulated one frame at a time, Pal’s Puppetoons involved carving and painting dozens upon dozens of heads and legs for a single character, reportedly upwards of 9,000 separate carvings in all for a single short. Replacing various body parts for each frame of film, the result was uncannily smooth and expressive facial reactions and motion, something like “liquid wood.” The new 2-disc Blu-ray of The Puppetoon Movie, released independently and limited to 3,000 copies (available at www.b2mp.net), is really two feature films and bonus shorts all in high-def, plus The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal presented in standard-definition, along with myriad extra features. In addition to The Puppetoon Movie, featuring ten unabridged Puppetoons plus newer material, the set also includes the high-definition premiere of The Great Rupert (1950), Pal’s first live-action feature. Bonus Puppetoon shorts included on The Puppetoon Movie’s original DVD release are present, but the real treat are seven additional bonus shorts being released for the first time in any home video format, shorts in high-definition licensed from Paramount and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archives and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Nashville

4. Nashville (Criterion)
For once the tag lines were accurate: “Wild. Wonderful. Sinful. Laughing. Explosive.” Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), one of the best films of the 1970s, is a divisive, inarguably indulgent film, but also one uniquely experimental and prophetic, especially so when it was new. The epic, 160-minute has no single protagonist and instead is a tapestry cutting among 24 major characters and numerous minor ones. It has no plot to speak of, despite an undercurrent of political maneuvering and a vague exploration of professional ambition and fame set against Nashville’s country music scene. Altman had been evolving toward this kind of storytelling beginning with M*A*S*H (1970) and, after crystalizing the form in Nashville would return to it again in the underrated A Wedding (1978), the somewhat overrated The Player (1992) and a few others. But in 1975 Nashville was quite daring, the work of a supremely confident, in some ways self-destructive filmmaker to whom ordinary movie-making rules did not apply. Nashville had previous been released by owner Paramount as an okay if no-frills DVD in 2000. Criterion’s Blu-ray offers vastly improved picture and wonderfully immersive sound, the latter vitally important in fully appreciating the work’s complex sound design. The new Blu-ray-plus-DVD combo also includes scads of extra features, including an original making-of documentary featuring some of the film’s key participants.

pierre-etaix

3. Pierre Étaix (Criterion)
Though we like to think we’re well-versed in the art of film comedy, we confess we had never even heard of circus clown-turned-actor-director Pierre Étaix until Criterion’s revelatory boxed set of this delightful disciple of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Included are three charming short films and all five of his ‘60s/early ‘70s features: The Suitor, As Long As You’ve Got Your Health, Le grand amour, and Land of Milk and Honey. The transfers of these long-unavailable films (due to legal problems) all look and sound great and, happily, the 85-year-old Étaix is on-hand to introduce each film.

Zatoichi

2. Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (Criterion)
One of Criterion’s best-ever home video releases, Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman is also an incredible value. Smart shoppers were able to purchase the set at one point for less than $100, but even at its suggested retail price of $224.95, for 25 feature films plus the many valuable extra features it’s still quite a bargain. Most readers are probably unaware that a near-simultaneous release in Japan, but covering only the first 18 movies, retails for a wallet-busting¥ 56,700, or about $550. That’s more than twice Criterion’s SRP yet minus the last seven films. The movies, all starring Shintaro Katsu as the eponymous wandering masseur and gambler, represent Japanese genre filmmaking at its finest. Though popular, the original films, released between 1962 and 1973, are a bit less highly regarded in Japan than in America, where Japanese film scholars have been quicker to acknowledge their visual and aural virtuosity, to say nothing of Katsu’s unforgettable characterization. Directed by such genre masters as Kenji Misumi, Kazuo (not Issei) Mori, Tokuzo Tanaka and, occasionally, offbeat outside talent like Satsuo Yamamoto and Kihachi Okamoto, and backed by outstanding cinematography and marrow-penetrating scores by composers as varied as Akira Ifukube and Isao Tomita, taken as a whole the Zatoichi series is one of the great epic stories of World Cinema. At the center of things, naturally, is Shintaro Katsu, a fascinating figure who gradually took full control of the film series and later continued it on Japanese network television when the domestic film market could no longer support it or much of anything else. The series began at Daiei Studios but as that company teetered toward bankruptcy Katsu began producing them himself, under the aegis of his Katsu Productions. When Daiei finally succumbed he move the series to Toho for its last handful of entries, so today ownership of the films is divided between Toho and Kadokawa Pictures, inheritors of the Daiei film library. That Criterion was able to negotiate a licensing agreement for all 25 films into a single boxed set is an achievement all by itself. That the films can now be enjoyed sequentially in consistently gorgeous transfers is yet another.

Cinerama South Seas Adventure

1. Cinerama Holiday/Cinerama South Seas Adventure (Flicker Alley)
Let me say this right up front: you’re going to want to get these. The original Cinerama travelogues were never exhibited in conventional movie theaters, never shown on television, and until now, never before released to home video. Indeed, after about 1963 they weren’t shown anywhere. Restoring these once hugely-popular but virtually lost films has been a personal crusade of many film buffs, historians, and preservationists, but it took the tenacity and ingenuity of Cinerama reconstructionist David Strohmaier to get the job done, aided by innumerable craftsmen and technicians. Via distributor Flicker Alley, the first two Cinerama Blu-ray releases, This Is Cinerama (1952) and Windjammer (1958) were issued last year to much-deserved acclaim. These discs were beautifully packaged, compromised only by the lesser elements available: 70mm film. These next two releases, Cinerama South Seas Adventure and Cinerama Holiday (1955) have gone back to the original three-strip, six-perf high original camera negatives, replacing unusable bits and pieces with three-strip material deposited with the Library of Congress. The results are, in a word, glorious, and Strohmaier’s exacting recreation of the original road show experience comes as close as possible to replicating the Cinerama experience. It’s still not quite true Cinerama: a large, deeply curved screen is essential in order to experience the “audience participation” effects of the process, but it’s darn close. Further, the Blu-ray (a DVD version of the film is also included, but you’ll definitely not want to watch the film in that format) comes with many invaluable extra features including, appropriately, a reproduction of the original theater programs.

Cinerama Holiday

Blu-ray Review: “Cinerama Holiday” (1955)

Cinerama Holiday Art

About 25 years ago I became fascinated with Cinerama after reading Robert E. Carr and R.M. Hayes’s book Wide Screen Movies. I began doing my own original research on the process and eventually I crossed paths with an eccentric former Cinerama projectionist by the name of John Harvey. Harvey lived in Dayton, Ohio, and through the years he spent a small fortune acquiring old Cinerama projectors and prints. He essentially gutted the interior of his modest ranch home to fulfill his dream of recreating the long-dead Cinerama process, a remodeling job that, he joked, had cost him his marriage.

In the early 1990s I was invited to several screenings there, to what was then one of only two places on the planet the public could experience Cinerama, the other being in the backyard of a like-minded Australian. From the outside, Harvey’s house looked like any other, but inside was a professional screening room that could seat no more than about 10 people; the rest of the house all but consumed by three tiny projection booths, sound equipment, wagon wheel-sized reels of films, and Cinerama memorabilia. The 146-degree deeply curved screen, curtained, of course, was about 10 feet in height, floor-to-raised-ceiling and more than twice as wide. There, on that initial drive down from my then-home in Ann Arbor, Michigan I first experienced How the West Was Won (1962), an unforgettable viewing experience.

The next time I went down there was to see Cinerama Holiday (1955), the second of Cinerama’s five original travelogues. The film follows the adventures of two couples: Swiss-born Fred and Beatrice Troller as they visit America, and Kansas City’s Betty and John Marsh on their journey to Europe. As if seeing this virtually lost film in its original form wasn’t enough, there was to be, one might say, an extra added attraction: Betty Marsh, since divorced from John, had come to Dayton to see Cinerama Holiday again for the first time since its original release. And else how could she have?

Seated next to the barely-changed Betty as the film unfolded, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must be like for her to see her younger self in this manner. It wasn’t exactly like pulling out the old Super-8 projector and looking at home movies projected on a kitchen wall. Watching Cinerama Holiday, even for me, was like stepping into a time machine and vicariously experiencing these couples’ Cinerama Holiday.

It takes about three-and-a-half hours to drive from Ann Arbor to Dayton, but if had taken 13-and-a-half hours I wouldn’t have hesitated. Cinerama Holiday, along with the other travelogues, effectively hadn’t been seen in their original form since the early 1960s and at the time the odds were heavily stacked against any chance that they’d ever be revived theatrically or released to home video.

A lot has changed in the more than 20 years since that screening. Several commercial venues in America and England occasionally show the original three-strip Cinerama process, and historian and reconstructionist David Strohmaier is seeing to it that the best surviving film elements are preserved and the original movies made available on Blu-ray, in high-definition.

Cinerama Holiday 2

Cinerama Holiday, along with Cinerama South Seas Adventure (1958), are the latest Blu-ray releases from Flicker Alley. Last year the company released This Is Cinerama (1952), the first film, along with Windjammer (1958), made in the rival Cinemiracle process that was so similar to Cinerama the latter company eventually bought all rights to the film and released it in that format, too. Those first two releases, otherwise splendid, were a bit compromised because only 70mm conversion elements were available.

Fortunately, for both Cinerama Holiday and South Seas Adventure, Strohmaier had access to the original 3 x 35mm, six-perforations tall camera negatives, and thanks to computer technologies that didn’t even exist ten years ago, the results are staggeringly good. These results still aren’t quite true Cinerama, even on big screen TVs – the format can really only be fully appreciated in a properly equipped Cinerama theater – but it’s still an astoundingly good approximation, and the movies have untold values beyond their audience participation effects.

Like This is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday begins with a black-and-white, standard 35mm prologue setting up the artificial but enjoyable premise: the Cinerama cameras follow the Marshes on their vacation to Europe and the Trollers on theirs in America. The curtains open (ingeniously recreated here) as the Marshes fly over the Swiss Alps and visit St. Moritz and enjoy winter sports their beautiful resort offers, later they ride the funicular railway to the Parsenn ski runs, travel to Paris where they visit the Louvre, visit with Art Buchwald, see a performance of l’Opera de Paris and visit the Lido nightclub, returning to America via Washington, D.C. and New York.

Meanwhile, the Trollers visit the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, ride the California Zephyr through the Rockies, are guests at the Absinthe House in New Orleans and go to a traditional New England fair in Deerfield, New Hampshire. Spectacularly but incongruously, the picture climaxes with a demonstration of the Navy’s famed Blue Angels jet pilots as they show off their aerial choreography and land on the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain. (A concession to ‘50s Cold War tensions, no doubt.)

This is no boring travelogue. Aesthetically a big improvement over the content-with-long-takes This Is Cinerama, producer Louis de Rochemont offers more visually spectacular eye candy in Cinerama Holiday while its contrived but effective premise, of inviting viewers to vicariously experience the adventures of the two couples, this at a time when international travel of prohibitively expensive for most Americans, gives the film a narrative through-line missing in the episodic This Is Cinerama.

Cinerama Holiday

As expected, there are numerous armchair-grabbing audience participation effects: a bobsled run, skiing the Alps and, course, riding along with the Blue Angels in their supersonic jets. But for me the real appeal of Cinerama Holday lay in how it captures 1950s America and Europe in ways more familiar black-and-white newsreel footage never could. The late Bob Carr used to compare watching conventional movies as looking through a window, while Cinerama was like sticking one’s head out a window, with one’s peripheral vision surrounded by the outside air. In this way the footage of a burgeoning Las Vegas and jazz-infused New Orleans are particularly thrilling. One gets a real sense of what those places were like back then and it’s almost like experiencing them for real. The European scenes capture the allure of foreign travel, 1950s-style, in places not so far removed from the previous century and certainly not gentrified and overrun with Starbucks and Pizza Huts like today.

All this was possible because Cinerama was unique even among wide screen technologies both technically and aesthetically. The process used three modified, synchronized 35mm cameras during production and three projectors during exhibition to produce an extraordinarily wide, wraparound image on screens curved at 146-degrees. The effect is often likened to the present-day IMAX process, but Cinerama was much more than a large, super-sharp image with outstanding directional sound. Because Cinerama’s cameras used short lenses approximating the human field of vision the impact was extraordinarily, disorientingly lifelike. “Cinerama puts YOU in the picture” said the ads.

Cinerama Holiday 4

Cinerama Holiday‘s transfer is impeccable. The image is exceedingly sharp with startlingly rich color. The Smilebox formatting approximates what 1955 audiences saw and suggests the audience participation effects that wowed audiences then and which are still pretty impressive as presented here. (I found myself wishing I could have seen this via an HD projector on a really big screen.) Strohmaier’s restoration (in which all parties involved are generously credited and highlighted) expertly minimizes the join lines between the three panels, matching the color while eliminating unsteady panels, blemishes and other issues. The full roadshow version is here, with the original film’s overture, intermission break, entr’acte and exit music intact. The 5.1 STS-HD Master, adapted from the original 7-channel magnetic sound mix is extremely impressive. The disc is region-free.

The supplements are terrific, headlined by Strohmaier’s brief but extremely interesting overview of the restoration process. A Cinerama Holiday “breakdown reel,” exhibited when the extraordinarily complex system of exhibiting Cinerama went awry, is included. There’s also a brand-new documentary called “Return to Cinerama Holiday” featuring Betty Marsh and Beatrice Troller who, also with their husbands, appear in 1997 cast interviews. Betty Marsh looks at a 50-year-old scrapbook in another featurette, while co-director Robert L. Benedict’s 8mm home movies from the production are also offered. From Strohmaier’s Cinerama Adventure documentary are deleted scenes from the film, and a 28-page full-color reproduction of the original roadshow program caps the terrific extra features.

Given that this release marks the home video premiere of a film virtually unseen in more than half a century, that the transfer is stupendous and supported by great extra features, and that this is an entirely independent, independently-financed release, Cinerama Holiday stands one of the year’s major viewing events. Don’t miss it.

The Film (out of ****): ***1/2
Film Elements Sourced: ***1/2
Video Transfer: ****
Audio: ****
New Extra Features: ****
Extra Features Overall: ****

Flicker Alley
1955 / Color / Cinerama / 129 min / $39.95

 

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features. He’s written nearly 2,000 reviews for the website DVD Talk.