Every once in a while a movie studio would ruin what might have been a masterpiece — and Preston Sturges’ last-released Paramount comedy suffered exactly that. “Triumph Over Pain” was supposed to be something new, a daring blend of comedy and tragedy. Studio politics intervened and tried to turn it into a straight comedy. Disc producer Constantine Nasr oversees two extras that explain what happened in full detail; it’s a fascinating story of a brillant and successful writer-director at odds with his studio bosses. Joel McCrea, Betty Field and William Demarest star — and the show is still entertaining despite its problems.
The Great Moment
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1944 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 83 min. / Great without Glory, Immortal Secret, Morton the Magnificent, Triumph over Pain / Street Date February 1, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Joel McCrea, Betty Field, Harry Carey, William Demarest, Louis Jean Heydt, Julius Tannen, Edwin Maxwell, Porter Hall, Franklin Pangborn,...
The Great Moment
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1944 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 83 min. / Great without Glory, Immortal Secret, Morton the Magnificent, Triumph over Pain / Street Date February 1, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Joel McCrea, Betty Field, Harry Carey, William Demarest, Louis Jean Heydt, Julius Tannen, Edwin Maxwell, Porter Hall, Franklin Pangborn,...
- 1/18/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Once again CineSavant becomes intrigued by a minor genre opus normally dismissed in a sentence or two; this Roger Corman production may fall short of his other early efforts because it tried to be too cerebral and then ran afoul of the Hollywood Guilds. David Kramarsky is listed as director but it’s hard to know how many of the credits are accurate — or simply bogus. Monstermaker extraordinaire Paul Blaisdell apparently came to the rescue with 11th-hour special effects to give the ambiguous, invisible alien menace more substance. Scorpion’s release has a new transfer and a commentary by Tim Lucas.
The Beast With a Million Eyes
Blu-ray
Scorpion Releasing
1955 / B&w / 1:37 full frame open aperture / 75 min. / Region A locked / Street Date November, 2019 /available through Ronin Flix (not Amazon) / 29.99
Starring: Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, Dona Cole, Dick Sargent, Leonard Tarver, Bruce Whitmore, Chester Conklin.
Cinematography: Everett Baker + Floyd Crosby,...
The Beast With a Million Eyes
Blu-ray
Scorpion Releasing
1955 / B&w / 1:37 full frame open aperture / 75 min. / Region A locked / Street Date November, 2019 /available through Ronin Flix (not Amazon) / 29.99
Starring: Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, Dona Cole, Dick Sargent, Leonard Tarver, Bruce Whitmore, Chester Conklin.
Cinematography: Everett Baker + Floyd Crosby,...
- 12/7/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
'Amazing Tales from the Archives': Pioneering female documentarian Aloha Wanderwell Baker remembered at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival – along with the largely forgotten sound-on-cylinder technology and the Jean Desmet Collection. 'Amazing Tales from the Archives': San Francisco Silent Film Festival & the 'sound-on-cylinder' system Fans of the earliest sound films would have enjoyed the first presentation at the 2017 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, held June 1–4: “Amazing Tales from the Archives,” during which Library of Congress' Nitrate Film Vault Manager George Willeman used a wealth of enjoyable film clips to examine the Thomas Edison Kinetophone process. In the years 1913–1914, long before The Jazz Singer and Warner Bros.' sound-on-disc technology, the sound-on-cylinder system invaded the nascent film industry with a collection of “talkies.” The sound was scratchy and muffled, but “recognizable.” Notably, this system focused on dialogue, rather than music or sound effects. As with the making of other recordings at the time, the...
- 6/28/2017
- by Danny Fortune
- Alt Film Guide
Really, I mean Preston Sturges' Hotel Haywire, because nobody's too interested in George Archainbaud, a Paramount contract director who had been directing for 20 years without helming a really memorable film (Thirteen Women, an uncomfortably racist pre-Code with Myrna Loy, is as exciting as it gets, and even that one is remembered chiefly for featuring the girl who threw herself off the Hollywood sign), He would continue for another 20, moving from B-westerns into TV westerns, without making anything else of particular note.Sturges wrote the script as part of his plan to get a long-term contract at Paramount. To particularly appeal to the suits there, he filled the story with roles for Paramount stars such as Mary Boland, Charles Ruggles, Fred MacMurray and Burns & Allen, none of whom were necessarily famous enough to carry a movie, but whose combined star-power might make an attractive investment for studio or future ticket-buyers.
- 5/11/2017
- MUBI
'The Beast with a Million Eyes': Hardly truth in advertising as there's no million-eyed beast in Roger Corman's micro-budget sci-fi thriller. 'The Beast with a Million Eyes': Alien invasion movie predates Alfred Hitchcock classic Despite the confusing voice-over introduction, David Kramarsky's[1] The Beast with a Million Eyes a.k.a. The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes is one of my favorite 1950s alien invasion films. Set in an ugly, desolate landscape – shot “for wide screen in terror-scope” in Indio and California's Coachella Valley – the screenplay by future novelist Tom Filer (who also played Jack Nicholson's sidekick in the 1966 Western Ride in the Whirlwind) focuses on a dysfunctional family whose members become the first victims of a strange force from another galaxy after a spaceship lands nearby emitting sound vibrations that turn domestic animals into aggressive killers. Killer cow First, the lady-of-the-house is pecked by a flock of chickens and,...
- 5/12/2016
- by Danny Fortune
- Alt Film Guide
It's the final Hollywood film by the legendary Ziegfeld star Marilyn Miller, and it's also a terrific talkie feature debut for W.C. Fields -- with one of his dazzling juggling bits. But the real star is director William Dieterle, whose moving camera and creative edits rescue the talkie musical from dreary operetta staging. Her Majesty, Love DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1931 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 75 min. / Street Date January 19, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Marilyn Miller, Ben Lyon, W.C. Fields, Leon Errol, Ford Sterling, Chester Conklin, Clarence Wilson, Ruth Hall, Virginia Sale, Oscar Apfel. Cinematography Robert Kurrie Film Editor Ralph Dawson Songs Walter Jurmann, Al Dubin Written by Robert Lord, Arthur Caesar from story by Rudolph Bernauer, Rudolf Österreicher Directed by William Dieterle
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
The Warner Archive Collection has been kind to fans of early talkies. We've been able to discover dramatic actresses like Jeanne Eagels...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
The Warner Archive Collection has been kind to fans of early talkies. We've been able to discover dramatic actresses like Jeanne Eagels...
- 3/15/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Jean Arthur films on TCM include three Frank Capra classics Five Jean Arthur films will be shown this evening, Monday, January 5, 2015, on Turner Classic Movies, including three directed by Frank Capra, the man who helped to turn Arthur into a major Hollywood star. They are the following: Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; George Stevens' The More the Merrier; and Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night. One the most effective performers of the studio era, Jean Arthur -- whose film career began inauspiciously in 1923 -- was Columbia Pictures' biggest female star from the mid-'30s to the mid-'40s, when Rita Hayworth came to prominence and, coincidentally, Arthur's Columbia contract expired. Today, she's best known for her trio of films directed by Frank Capra, Columbia's top director of the 1930s. Jean Arthur-Frank Capra...
- 1/6/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Review by Sam Moffitt
I love the silent era of movie making. I’ve written of this before and will again, many times I’m sure. Roger Ebert, on his website, made the observation (accurately I’d say) that silent films are not just movies without sound; they are a different medium altogether from the movies we are used to seeing now. Silent films are as different to sound films as radio is to television.
Hollywood Cavalcade was one of the first movies to look back at Hollywood history, and managed to involve several artists who were instrumental in making films that are still enjoyable today.
Hollywood Cavalcade tells the story of Mike Conners (Don Ameche) and his partner, ace cameraman Pete Tinney (Stu Erwin) and their trip to New York City to find a stage actress they can take back to Hollywood and make into a star of moving pictures.
I love the silent era of movie making. I’ve written of this before and will again, many times I’m sure. Roger Ebert, on his website, made the observation (accurately I’d say) that silent films are not just movies without sound; they are a different medium altogether from the movies we are used to seeing now. Silent films are as different to sound films as radio is to television.
Hollywood Cavalcade was one of the first movies to look back at Hollywood history, and managed to involve several artists who were instrumental in making films that are still enjoyable today.
Hollywood Cavalcade tells the story of Mike Conners (Don Ameche) and his partner, ace cameraman Pete Tinney (Stu Erwin) and their trip to New York City to find a stage actress they can take back to Hollywood and make into a star of moving pictures.
- 5/23/2014
- by Movie Geeks
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Probably the single most influential piece of film criticism in my life is Manny Farber's piece on Preston Sturges, and in particular his paean to the Sturges stock company ~
"They all appear to be too perfectly adjusted to life to require minds, and, in place of hearts, they seem to contain an old scratch sheet, a glob of tobacco juice, or a brown banana. The reason their faces--each of which is a succulent worm's festival, bulbous with sheer living--seem to have nothing in common with the rest of the human race is precisely because they are so eternally, agelessly human, oversocialized to the point where any normal animal component has vanished. They seem to be made up not of features but a collage of spare parts, most of them as useless as the vermiform appendix."
There are things I don't love about Farber—his insistence upon virility as a...
"They all appear to be too perfectly adjusted to life to require minds, and, in place of hearts, they seem to contain an old scratch sheet, a glob of tobacco juice, or a brown banana. The reason their faces--each of which is a succulent worm's festival, bulbous with sheer living--seem to have nothing in common with the rest of the human race is precisely because they are so eternally, agelessly human, oversocialized to the point where any normal animal component has vanished. They seem to be made up not of features but a collage of spare parts, most of them as useless as the vermiform appendix."
There are things I don't love about Farber—his insistence upon virility as a...
- 5/15/2014
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
Cinema Circus is clearly a product of the great, yet under-reported MGM peyote-poisoning of 1937—how else to explain its baffling, surreal, Technicolor, grotesque yet undeniable existence? It is a chilling documentary record of some things that were performed in front of a camera, once upon a time.
A man in a gruesome Joe E. Brown mask is helped from his leering false-face, revealing another leering false face, that of Lee Tracy, who attempts to justify what we are about to see as the realisation of a long-cherished dream, although the exorcism of a recurring nightmare would be at least as plausible.
Big top performers will trot out their tricks in brief visual bits, watched by earnestly faking-it movie "stars," few now recalled in the contemporary pantheon: Olsen & Johnson, the Ritz Brothers, Leo Carillo...
Meanwhile, more hideous outsized masks are sported, embodying movie stars too authentically famous to be roped into...
A man in a gruesome Joe E. Brown mask is helped from his leering false-face, revealing another leering false face, that of Lee Tracy, who attempts to justify what we are about to see as the realisation of a long-cherished dream, although the exorcism of a recurring nightmare would be at least as plausible.
Big top performers will trot out their tricks in brief visual bits, watched by earnestly faking-it movie "stars," few now recalled in the contemporary pantheon: Olsen & Johnson, the Ritz Brothers, Leo Carillo...
Meanwhile, more hideous outsized masks are sported, embodying movie stars too authentically famous to be roped into...
- 4/19/2012
- MUBI
Due to the “Historically Disastrous” weather conditions scheduled for the St. Louis area, Super-8 Movie Madness has been rescheduled for next Tuesday, February 8th (it was originally to be held tomorrow, Feb 1st).
Super-8 Movie Madness at the Way Out Club will be held on Tuesday February 8th from 8pm to Midnight. These are Super-8 Sound films condensed from features (they average 15 minutes in length) and will be projected on a large screen at the Way Out Club. Admission is only Three Bucks!!!!
The Lineup this month: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Werewolf, Alien, The Three Stooges in Studio Snoops, Abbott And Costello Meet The Keystone Kops, Star Wars, Animals And Kids, Boris Karloff in Son Of Frankenstein, Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, a Jerry Lewis Trailer Reel, Beast Of Blood, Christopher Lee in Scream Of Fear and Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
There will be lots of posters and T-Shirts and stuff given away.
Super-8 Movie Madness at the Way Out Club will be held on Tuesday February 8th from 8pm to Midnight. These are Super-8 Sound films condensed from features (they average 15 minutes in length) and will be projected on a large screen at the Way Out Club. Admission is only Three Bucks!!!!
The Lineup this month: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Werewolf, Alien, The Three Stooges in Studio Snoops, Abbott And Costello Meet The Keystone Kops, Star Wars, Animals And Kids, Boris Karloff in Son Of Frankenstein, Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, a Jerry Lewis Trailer Reel, Beast Of Blood, Christopher Lee in Scream Of Fear and Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
There will be lots of posters and T-Shirts and stuff given away.
- 1/31/2011
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
1914, U, BFI
This important, instructive, hugely enjoyable four-disc set contains painstakingly restored and attractively scored prints of 34 of the 35 films Charlie Chaplin made at Mack Sennett's Keystone studio between January and December 1914. They introduced Chaplin to the cinema, turning him in the process from an admired music hall artist into an accomplished film-maker, who ended the year on the threshold of becoming the most famous man in the world and its highest-paid entertainer. In the course of this astonishing 12 months, he worked with silent stars Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle and Chester Conklin, and we see a great artist evolve, appearing first as a silk-hatted pseudo-toff in his debut film, Making a Living, competing for work at a Los Angeles newspaper. In his second film, the seven-minute Kid Auto Races at Venice, he discovered his tramp persona complete with bowler and cane, delighting and puzzling the crowds at a children's...
This important, instructive, hugely enjoyable four-disc set contains painstakingly restored and attractively scored prints of 34 of the 35 films Charlie Chaplin made at Mack Sennett's Keystone studio between January and December 1914. They introduced Chaplin to the cinema, turning him in the process from an admired music hall artist into an accomplished film-maker, who ended the year on the threshold of becoming the most famous man in the world and its highest-paid entertainer. In the course of this astonishing 12 months, he worked with silent stars Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle and Chester Conklin, and we see a great artist evolve, appearing first as a silk-hatted pseudo-toff in his debut film, Making a Living, competing for work at a Los Angeles newspaper. In his second film, the seven-minute Kid Auto Races at Venice, he discovered his tramp persona complete with bowler and cane, delighting and puzzling the crowds at a children's...
- 1/30/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Super-8 Movie Madness at the Way Out Club will be held on Tuesday February 1st from 8pm to Midnight. These are Super-8 Sound films condensed from features (they average 15 minutes in length) and will be projected on a large screen at the Way Out Club. Admission is only Three Bucks!!!!
The Lineup this month: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Werewolf, Alien, The Three Stooges in Studio Snoops, Abbott And Costello Meet The Keystone Kops, Star Wars, Animals And Kids, Boris Karloff in Son Of Frankenstein, Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, a Jerry Lewis Trailer Reel, Beast Of Blood, Christopher Lee in Scream Of Fear and Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
There will be lots of posters and T-Shirts and stuff given away. The Way Out Club is located at 2525 Jefferson Avenue in South St. Louis (corner of Jefferson and Sydney). There are yummy Way-Out pizzas available for only $8.00.
The Lineup this month: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Werewolf, Alien, The Three Stooges in Studio Snoops, Abbott And Costello Meet The Keystone Kops, Star Wars, Animals And Kids, Boris Karloff in Son Of Frankenstein, Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, a Jerry Lewis Trailer Reel, Beast Of Blood, Christopher Lee in Scream Of Fear and Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
There will be lots of posters and T-Shirts and stuff given away. The Way Out Club is located at 2525 Jefferson Avenue in South St. Louis (corner of Jefferson and Sydney). There are yummy Way-Out pizzas available for only $8.00.
- 1/28/2011
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Greed (1924) Direction: Erich von Stroheim Screenplay: Erich von Stroheim, June Mathis; from Frank Norris' novel McTeague Cast: Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller, Chester Conklin, Sylvia Ashton Gibson Gowland, Jean Hersholt in Erich von Stroheim's Greed Erich von Stroheim's masterpiece and one of the best silent films ever made, Greed remains a powerful indictment against the deadly sin of the title. Based on Frank Norris' novel McTeague, Greed revolves around the misdeeds of a California dentist (Gibson Gowland), his miserly wife (comedienne ZaSu Pitts magisterially cast against type), and her former lover (Jean Hersholt), all of whom sacrifice everything — and I mean everything — to the almighty god of dollar bills. Stroheim's initial cut had 47 reels, which the director wanted to release as two films. Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg's Metro-Goldwyn (and its parent company, Loews, Inc.), which inherited the out-of-control project from...
- 10/16/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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