CineSavant

Blu-ray 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 indelible...

The Cat and the Canary & The Ghost Breakers Bob Hope’s brand of comedy may have been extinct by the sixties but it was alive and kicking in the pages of God Save the Mark, Donald E. Westlake’s comic crime novel about a schnook on the run for a murder he didn’t commit. Published in 1967, Westlake’s farce resembles one of Hope’s own movies;...

Blu-ray 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 good,...

Blu-ray 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 her...

Dr. Who Double Feature—1965 & ’66 The story of Doctor Who turns on a distinctly British conceit; our hero, a grandfatherly type usually found puttering in the garden, is in fact an alien in human form who does his puttering in a time-traveling laboratory disguised as a police box—a notion Roald Dahl might have dreamed up during one of his rare...

Blu-ray 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 forlorn...

DVD 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 proof...

4K Ultra HD 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 L....

Blu-ray 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 by...

4K Ultra HD with HDR 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 -- no...

Blu-ray 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 'with...

Blu-ray 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 favor:...

Blu-ray 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....

Blu-ray 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....

The Paleface In 1934 Al Christie directed Going Spanish, a 19 minute farce billed as “An Educational Musical Comedy.” The movie is notable only for the film debut of Bob Hope whose wisecracks about the movie’s incompetence provoked Christie to cancel the comedian’s contract. Another filmmaker made his mark with the irascible producer too—Norman Z. McLeod got...

The Balcony When Jean Genet died in 1986, France’s Minister of Culture proclaimed “Jean Genet has left us and with him, a black sun that enlightened the seamy side of things… Genet was liberty itself, and those who hated and fought him were hypocrites.” “Liberty” was likely meant as an intentionally ironic description of the artist who...

Region B Blu-ray Mister Vampire Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with an assessment of Ricky Lau's Hong Kong comedy horror show-cum-mystical martial arts romp. Introduced to the vampire mythos are some novel ideas, like scary-looking vampires that get around by hopping on two legs. Effective horror scenarios include expertly choreographed martial arts routines. However, the score on the genre mash-up...

Blu-ray 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...

Blu-ray 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....

Blu-ray Night Visitor Hookers! Devil worshippers! A naughty teenage voyeur! A deadly knife, a lethal sedan and a chainsaw-wielding psychopath! Nasal Spray! CineSavant breaks with the disc-reviewing norm and abandons journalistic integrity. Well, not really, but it is a heck of a lot of fun to finally review a film I edited 32 years ago, on a happy...

Blu-ray Red Ball Express Trucks for victory! No deadheads on this run! Bald Tires for Adolf! Budd Boetticher's two-fisted teamsters haul General Patton's supplies through a France not completely cleared of German resistance, a gearshift in one hand and a buxom mam'selle in the other. The movie is not bad, especially in the casting department -- it least includes...

Blu-ray Toni Fans of Jean Renoir will rush to see something 'new' from the great director; this very different Renoir picture sees him filming in the South of France, among regional laborers that bring their Italian and Spanish customs with them. It's a tragedy about a crime of passion, all shot outside of a film studio, without...

Blu-ray Hiroshima (1953) Japanese cinema's earliest attempt to depict the full impact of the 1945 atom-bomb attack is one of the best anti-Nuke movies ever... yet it somehow stayed under the radar of American awareness for decades. The bombing is seen from only eight years' distance, when the nation was seemingly resisting coming to terms with its social...

Town Bloody Hall No matter the subject, Norman Mailer was the star of whatever he produced—in Advertisements for Myself, a mix of self-criticism and self-congratulation—he could have been talking to himself. He took to using the third person in The Armies of the Night. He sometimes adopted a new name—in Of a Fire on the Moon he was...

Blu-ray The Sign of the Cross The message of this ode to early Christian martyrs is overpowered by Cecil B. DeMille's indulgence of his sanctimonious/perverse instincts: although seldom lumped in with other pre-Code sex & sadism offenders, there's more salacious and violent content here than in a dozen ordinary 'discouraged' pre-Code pictures. Fredric March and Elissa Landi provide the pro-Christian idealism,...

Blu-ray Hollywoodland Is this a thrilling, Chinatown-like Hollywood mystery, or a semi-docu about the making of the first TV Superman show?  Or is it going to shed light on the mysterious death of actor George Reeves, the childhood hero we couldn't believe had died by his own hand?   Allen Coulter's well-crafted show has a lot to...