Articles by Glenn Erickson

The Ipcress File

  It’s finally back on Blu in Region 1, the ‘sixties spy movie beloved by enthusiasts that yearned for something a bit more substantial & nutritious than James Bond. This first Harry Palmer adventure seems even more perfect than when it was thanks to a great espionage recipe and quality ingredients. Michael Caine is sensational…

Brute Force

If you have to name ONE movie that’s not likely to ever be screened in a prison, this one’s a good bet. In his sophomore starring outing Burt Lancaster leads a group of rebel convicts on a do-or-die bust-out against Hume Cronyn’s utter Nazi of a warden Captain. Richard Brooks’ script and Jules Dassin’s direction…

The Secret Ways

Producer-star Richard Widmark may have thought he was inventing a new kind of spy film but his adaptation of an Alistair MacLean novel just grinds the Cold War grist, mixing good atmosphere with unconvincing action derring-do. The handsome production makes good use of Austrian and Swiss locations and the unfamiliar cast is a big assist….

A Place in the Sun

  A bona fide film classic, George Stevens’ movie is less revered as an excellent adaptation of Theodore Dreiser than for its intense, almost hallucinatory romantic scenes between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. A guileless poor boy tries to succeed above his economic background and entangles himself between two very different women. I guess the…

S.O.S. Titanic

  TV’s 1979 Titanic movie comes to Blu in two versions. We liked it when new but didn’t care for the cut-down theatrical version that hit DVD in 2002. Kino’s disc completes a set of various film versions of the infamous 1912 disaster, and allows us the chance for a Titanic ‘battle of the bands’…

Sergeant York

  Ya like quality pro-intervention propaganda?  Warners’ filmic call to arms inspired America’s reluctant warriors via a superhuman feat by a highly decorated WW1 veteran… and promptly got into hot water with the United States congress. Howard Hawks’ highly effective load of sentiment and sanctimony makes Tennesseans look like denizens of Dogpatch, U.S.A.. But America…

The Face at the Window

  And now for something we had read about but never before saw: Tod Slaughter’s highly entertaining murder thriller is stylized in a vintage theatrical format, the Victorian blood & thunder barnstorming drama, originally from 1880 or thereabouts. Slaughter’s refined gentleman is also a crazed killer with a bizarre modus operandi. Everything that happens is…

Warning from Space

  Sci-fi alert!  New classic science fiction discoveries are rare these days, which makes Arrow’s rejuvenation of Japan’s first science fiction tale in color a special item. Fans may need both hands to count the ‘copycat’ elements but Kôji Shima’s epic improves on many of its American predecessors. Despite the star-shaped arts ‘n’ crafts aliens,…

Curse of the Undead

  Ride ’em, rope ’em, bite ’em? Is this ‘Dracula Goes West,’ or ‘Fangs of the High Chapparal?’ The fading Universal-International house of horrors squeaks out a bizarre horror item that one sits through just out of curiosity… are these people serious?  We respect the professionalism of Michael Pate, Kathleen Crowley and Bruce Gordon as…

Eve

  Is Joseph Losey’s elusive, maudit masterpiece really a masterpiece?  Stanley Baker’s foolish lout of a writer ruins his life pursuing the wanton Jeanne Moreau, and it’s hard to tell if she’s punishing him or he’s punishing himself. Losey’s directing skills are in top form on location in Venice and Rome for this absorbing art…

The Elephant Man

  Why is it that, when a horror film achieves something special, both the critics and the public tend to elevate it above and beyond the ‘lowly’ horror genre?  David Lynch’s most humane and sympathetic film still makes our heads spin, and this new 4K remaster renders Freddie Francis’s great cinematography at its best. Lynch…

Christ Stopped at Eboli

  It’s a perfect movie for a dark time: Carlo Levi’s famed novel about a political undesirable became a major Italian miniseries by the great Francesco Rosi, starring the now-legendary Gian Maria Volontè. In Mussolini’s most popular years of make-Italy-great-again Fascism, a dissident is given an indefinite ‘time out,’ an exile to a small town…

Lord Love a Duck

  This mid-‘sixties black comedy from the mischievous George Axelrod defines and dissects ‘crazy California culture’ just as West Coasters were being slandered as godless weird-oh hedonists. It’s partly a sarcastic put-down, citing anecdotal extremes like drive-in churches (how 2020 can you get?), perverse youth encounter groups and mindless beach party movies. But Axelrod’s paints…

The Carpetbaggers

  It’s lurid, it’s soapy, it’s forbidden: where does the line form?  Joseph E. Levine made hay from Harold Robbins’ best seller, with prose that The New York Times said belonged more properly “on the walls of a public lavatory.” So why is the picture so much fun?  When the performances are good they’re very…

Love Me Tonight

  Does a musical have to have big dance numbers, glorious cinematography and stereophonic sound?  I agree with a consensus of critics and fans that this 1932 pre-Code marvel is the best musical romance of all. Maurice Chevalier may be ‘nothing but a tailor’ yet he steals the heart of Jeanette MacDonald’s princess and shocks…

Five Graves to Cairo

  It’s smart, it’s funny, it has a touch of romance… it’s Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett’s entertaining espionage thriller set between the battle lines of the North Africa campaign. Franchot Tone must impersonate a double agent, when the command staff of General Rommel (Erich von Stroheim!) takes over a half-bombed hotel run by the…

I’ll Get You + Fingerprints Don’t Lie

  Witness one Robert Lippert, an American independent producer who flourished in multiple eras of Hollywood. We discuss his adaptation to changes in the movie biz in conjunction with a double bill DVD of two typical Lippert shows from the very early fifties, one produced in Hollywood and another in England. Robert Lippert is the…

The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection 4K Ultra HD

  Universal’s top-of-the-line Alfred Hitchcock classics make the jump to Ultra HD in a worthy update. We’ve seen these before but they’re always different in a theatrical setting… and the quality is so amazing here, a big home theater setup can duplicate a theatrical experience. It might as well be a Robert Burks / John…

When Worlds Collide

  George Pal’s second science fiction classic has conceptual imagination and visual wonder to spare, along with a million awkward and dated details. When rogue planets threaten to obliterate the Earth, a super-Ark spaceship is built to spirit forty ‘chosen ones’ to safety. The Ark passengers have the right stuff, but you may be enraged…

Flash Gordon 4K

  Arrow jumps into the 4K Ultra HD bracket with a knockout 40th anniversary presentation of this campy, music-filled and incredibly colorful Dino De Laurentiis spectacle. The impressive package has an endless catalog of extras, plus a second Blu-ray disc with a full-length feature about the film’s one-hit-wonder star Sam J. Jones. Buyers beware —…

The Naked City

  Jules Dassin’s most popular pre-exile crime thriller is many things: a cracking good police tale, a drama of human struggle and weakness, and an amazing cinematic time machine of New York’s distinctive hustle and bustle circa 1948. Mark Hellinger’s final production bristles with a ‘these are the facts’ narration, a voiceover personifying a city…

Flying Leathernecks

  John Wayne, Robert Ryan and some thrilling color combat footage grace this Howard Hughes WW2 aviation epic, that’s famous for being the odd-title-out in the filmography of Nicholas Ray. Just how did the politically diverging Ray and Hughes get along so well?  The WAC’s sensational Technicolor restoration does the real combat footage a big…

Attack of the Crab Monsters

Roger Corman began his boom year of 1957 with a marvelous bit of ‘way-out’ sci-fi — a ‘Tidal Wave of Terror’ no less. This note just arrived from Donald J.’s Seafood Emporium:     “You puny, dunderheaded humans, don’t let the campy title fool you!  Soon you will be ‘absorbed’ into our crabby super-mentalities, heh heh heh….

Black Gravel

When they dig it up, what will they find?  Fans will want to see this forgotten Deutsch-noir masterpiece. Helmut Käutner’s tale of trouble on an American air base in West Germany is a swirl of romantic, political and criminal complications — all down & dirty. A tiny burg that serves as a brothel for U.S….

Airplane!

Most people smile just at the mention of this show … nothing is more healthy than an old fashioned laugh. Zucker, Zucker & Abrahams’ non-stop joke fest finds good fun in movie spoofery without malice, and is populated by a squadron of old pros that once made the originals fly right, no matter how clunky…

Black Test Car + The Black Report

For vintage Japanese classics Arrow is the place to be this summer. Yasuzô Masumura’s complicated tale of industrial espionage is an attack on the free enterprise system — even good people will do terrible things to get ahead, to prevail over the competition. It’s Tiger Car Company against the Yamato Car Company, winner take all….