Review: 'The 7th Voyage of Sinbad' Blu-ray set

In 1958, Ray Harryhausen stretched himself beyond pictures menaced by a single big octopus or space monster for a greater challenge and a huge leap into pure fantasy. With The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a whole menagerie of stop-motion creatures were required, and the master outdid himself with the film's towering cyclops, horned dragon, two-headed Roc, four-armed cobra lady, and swashbuckling skeleton. Perhaps the work wasn't quite a refined as it would be five years later in Jason and the Argonauts, and one skeleton is no substitute for a whole regiment of them, but with his first stop-motion-showcase mythological swashbuckler, Harryhausen virtually created a new genre of film that he and he alone would continue to master with Jason, Sinbad's two returns in the seventies, and Clash of the Titans.  If 7th is a bit primitive compared to those later entries, it is no less charming. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 366

The Date: September 30

The Movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

What Is It?: Space Jesus comes to Earth and warns that if we don’t quit the warring we’re going to get a serious, intergalactic spanking. Screenwriter Edmund H. North and director Robert Wise fashion the most intelligent and one of the most restrained science-fiction movies of the fifties, and Bernard Herrmann’s theremin-heavy score delivers classic sci-fi sounds. The open-ended ending is also refreshing. What will become of the Earth? Are we doomed? Or will we curb our war-like ways. Klaatu barrada nikto, daddy-o!

Why Today?: The Day the Earth Stood Still may chronicle the end of times for us earthlings. Today marks the end of times for 366 Days at the Drive-In. See you in Valhalla, folks.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 342

The Date: September 6

The Movie: Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

What Is It?: François Truffaut does a fine yet icy job with Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel about a society in which all books are banned and burned. Although the film has received mixed reactions throughout the years, I continue to admire it as an interesting marriage of sixties style-design and conscience, and Bernard Herrmann’s score is one of the best things he didn’t do for Hitchcock.

Why Today?: Today is National Read a Book Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 273

The Date: June 29

The Movie: Vertigo (1958)

What Is It?: Fear-addled Jimmy Stewart is made to believe that Kim Novak has been possessed by the ghost of a woman named Carlotta Valdes. This proves a ruse, but it allows Hitchcock to indulge in a sort of California-Gothic sensibility. Stewart’s acrophobic episodes (his vertigo doesn’t seem as acute, but I guess Acrophobia isn’t a very catchy movie title) are made horrific with Hitchcock’s distorted camera effects. His psychedelic nightmare is like something from one of Roger Corman’s Poe pictures and Bernard Herrmann’s score is disorienting and romantic.

Why Today?: On this day in 1911, Bernard Herrmann is born.

Review: 'Mysterious Island' Encore Edition Blu-ray

The secret to the success of Universal’s classic monster movies was, obviously, its monsters, which tended to be more interesting than the humans with which they shared the screen. The exception that proves this rule is the first Mummy sequel, The Mummy’s Hand, one of the very rare Universal horrors in which the people are considerably more sympathetic, compelling, and likable than the monster. Think of Mysterious Island as the Mummy’s Hand of Ray Harryhausen movies. The stop-motion master limits himself to a few giant animals that occupy ten minutes of screen time, allowing the humans to entertain us, and it’s a testament to the swift and elegantly choreographed direction of Cy Endfield; the writing of John Prebble, Daniel Ullman, and Crane Wilbur (loosely adapted from Jules Verne’s novel); the music of Bernard Herrmann; and the acting of Michael Craig, Dan Jackson, Joan Greenwood, Herbet Lom, and the rest of the cast that Mysterious Island never leaves us whining, “Enough talk... bring on the giant chicken!”

Craig is a union captain captured with two of his soldiers during the Siege of Richmond Virginia in 1865. Joined by a union war correspondent and a confederate stowaway, Captain Harding and his guys escape their captors in an observation balloon. That two sides of one of history’s bitterest wars are represented aboard a tiny vessel is barely an issue, nor is the fact that one of the soldiers is black (something that probably would have at least earned an impolite mention from a confederate). Mysterious Island is not particularly interested in exploring the issues it puts on the table. Its number-one concern is action at all costs, and it delivers that as the balloon lands on a Pacific island where the crew play Robinson Crusoe, battle and feast on extra-large crabs and poultry, rescue a couple of posh British ladies (one of whom has a genuine personality!) who’ve survived a shipwreck, shoot at pirates, and meet the legendary Captain Nemo, played with all-due gravitas by Herbert Lom.

Nemo is the only heavy thing in Mysterious Island, which plays as ultra-swift fun, even when a devastating volcano bears down on our octet of heroes (yes, we are expected to accept the confederate as a hero). Twilight Time’s new blu-ray represents that fun well with a picture a bit heavy with grain but almost completely devoid of blemishes. That grain can actually be of assistance during special effects shots as it homogenizes the multiple elements a bit, keeping the various mattes that comprise so much of the island’s landscape from jumping too far off the screen. There’s a decent selection of extras too, led by an eleven-minute on-screen commentary from Harryhausen and a vintage five-minute featurette (dig the narrator’s pronunciation of “reptiles” and the attempt to make a gentle giant tortoise seem menacing with scary music). There are also a bunch of trailers and commercials and a commentary by a trio of film historians. While the transfer is apparently the same as Twilight Time’s 2011 edition of Mysterious Island, the extras are almost entirely new to its latest one. Get it on screenarchives.com here.

Review: 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' Blu-ray

Entering theaters in the last weeks of the decade, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a fifties sci-fi picture with credentials that set it apart from most of its matinee peers. It is an epic-length movie with gorgeous, jewel-like sets, a brilliant score by cinema’s top composer, Bernard Herrmann, and A-lister James Mason leading the cast. It was a massive box-office hit, nominated for three Oscars, a major influence on filmmakers from Irwin Allen to Steven Spielberg (who lifted more than one of its scenes for Raiders of the Lost Ark), and is still critically lauded today.

As much as there is to recommend this adaptation of Jules Verne’s scientifically off-the-wall trip to the Earth’s core, it has issues that leave it wanting in comparison to cousins like The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Mason is certainly among the great actors of his generation, but he’s not exactly an effective action hero, nor is his assistant, Pat Boone, who breaks from the action every once in a while for some bland crooning. Like First Men in the Moon, which I recently reviewed here on Psychobabble, Journey to the Center of the Earth dawdles way to too long before getting to its otherworldly destination. Unlike that H.G. Wells adaptation, there’s at least a bit of intrigue to sustain interest during the film’s first fifty minutes on the Earth’s surface. Also unlike First Men, its effects don’t quite work. The climactic madness of Verne’s book is that the Earth’s core is populated with dinosaurs. Instead of cool, stop-motion creatures, we get some very real iguanas with pasted-on fins and lizards painted red. Monstrous roaring effects do make them fairly horrible and over-cranked photography make their movements appear adequately lumbering, but this kind of thing really only works in a movie like Shrinking Man in which enlarged animals are not standing in for other creatures. Plus the facts that the animals are clearly being mistreated and killed make these centerpiece scenes impossible to enjoy on any level. In his audio commentary, historian Steven C. Smith says, “We don’t want to know how this was done” before one of the poor things is riddled with arrows and gnawed on by other iguanas. Easy for him to say.

Journey to the Center of the Earth returns to Twilight Time blu-ray looking excellent without a single scratch, speck, or shoddy element worth mentioning. The grain may be a tad on the heavy side in a few special effects shots, but the picture is still sharp and the colors still vivid. Herrmann’s score, which recalls some of the work he was currently doing for “The Twilight Zone”, gets its own audio track, while another is reserved for Smith, actress Diane Baker (who actually has very little screen time as Mason’s niece), and Twilight Time’s resident mediator Nick Redman. Get it on Screen Archives.com here.

Ten Genuinely Great Classic TV Themes

A TV theme has a job to do and that is to set the tone for the show that follows. Unfortunately, most twentieth-century TV shows were pretty goofy and got the catchy/crappy themes they deserved. Hey, I can remember all the words to the “Brady Bunch” theme song as well as the next asshole, but it isn’t exactly my idea of good music.

On occasion shows ended up with legitimately good themes, either because they were extraordinary pieces of television that deserved complimentary music or…err… by accident, I guess. I’m not talking about programs that cheated by using pre-composed music or classic pop songs as themes, otherwise the following list would be loaded with classics such as “Paint It Black” (“Tour of Duty”), “Reflections (“China Beach”), “Bad Reputation” (“Freaks and Geeks”), “Rock Around the Clock” (“Happy Days”), “Five O’ Clock World” (“The Drew Carey Show”), “Having an Average Weekend” (“The Kids in the Hall”), “And Your Bird Can Sing” (“The Beatles” Cartoon), “Falling” (“Twin Peaks”), and “For Pete’s Sake” (a way better song than the cutesy “Monkees Theme”). Instead I selected ten songs specifically created for specific programs that I wouldn’t feel ashamed to blast with the TV turned off.

1. “Twilight Zone Theme” by Bernard Herrmann

The discordant tune that instantly conjures memories of gremlins, murder dolls, and pig doctors is Marius Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”, a piece of music recorded for CBS’s library of stock cues but not necessarily “The Twilight Zone”. Eugene Feldman edited it with Constant’s “Milieu No. 2” to serve as the series’ theme in the second season, probably because the music that opened the show’s first one simply isn’t very catchy. It is, however, an eerie scene setter composed by perhaps the greatest composer of cinematic thriller scores, Bernard Herrmann. If Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”/“Milieu No. 2” delivers the skin-crawling shocks of “Eye of the Beholder” then Herrmann’s theme is more in line with the haunting subtlety of “Mirror Image”…

2. “Route 66 Theme” by Nelson Riddle

Review: 'The Bride Wore Black' Blu-ray

Francois Truffaut was one of cinema’s key filmmakers and one of its key students and critics. He had already showed off that first hat with The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and Fahrenheit 451 and the second and third ones with his work for Cahiers du Cinema, in which he posited the auteur theory, by the time he made The Bride Wore Black in 1967. Here Truffaut’s art and his obsession with the art of another—namely Alfred Hitchcock—gel in a film that begins as winking homage before developing into something more personal.

When The Bride Wore Black (based on a novel by William Irish, who also wrote “It Had to Be Murder”, which Hitch adapted into Rear Window) begins by showing generally mundane images set to Bernard Herrmann’s overwhelming and overwhelmingly recognizable score, it’s as if Truffaut is trying to shove a signifier of Hitchcock’s most melodramatic scenes into scenes nearly devoid of melodrama despite the fact that the woman on screen tries to kill herself at one point.

That woman is Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau), who soon sets about her own obsessive mission by insinuating herself into the lives of various men and killing them. Her motive remains a mystery for a quarter of the film, but since the title of the movie is The Bride Wore Black, I don’t feel like I’m spoiling too much by saying she’s on a mission of revenge against the creeps she blames for her groom’s death.

While Truffaut seems to drop clues about his movies’ apparent main influence (we see such locations of iconic Hitchcock scenes as a schoolyard, a speeding train, and a concert hall), Julie differs from the mass of Hitch’s charming main characters because she is a husk (it is telling that she shares a surname with the similarly emotion-drained title character of Shoot the Piano Player). She carries on with her grim mission devoid of emotion, something that could not be said of even sketchy characters like Norman Bates and Marnie Edgar. This means The Bride Wore Black is not as fun to watch as your average Hitchcock movie, but maybe revenge, murder, and soul-destroying grief are not supposed to be fun (or maybe they are—just see how Quentin Tarantino reshaped this movie’s premise into Kill Bill). It is, however, a suspense film worthy of the master when obstacles such as an unexpected visit from a redheaded model, a sweet little boy, and even the possibility that she may have found a new love fall into Julie’s vengeful path. These are the film’s most powerful moments.

I’ve been wanting to see The Bride Wore Black ever since I saw Kill Bill ten years ago. It’s finally available on blu-ray via Twilight Time, and in a beautiful transfer with strong blacks, strong color (though this is not a strikingly colorful movie), and strong grain. Supplementing the film (presented in both subtitled and English dubbed versions—the dubbed one contains different musical cues) is a commentary by film historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman and Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith. Smith’s presence puts a lot of the focus on the score, and he discusses the clashes between Hermann and Truffaut over the director’s choices in this film—as well as Herrmann’s clashed with Hitchcock. Kirgo tries to pull the focus away from Hitchcock, whose influence she does not see as strongly in the film as a lot of other commentators do, and discusses the more meaningful role gender dynamics play in the film. There is also a supplementary CD featuring a 79-minute interview with Bernard Herrmann that spotlights the composer’s short temper. The blu-ray disc’s isolated score track spotlights his art.

Get The Bride Wore Black on Screenarchives.com here.

13 Spine-Tingling Horror Scores

Strings that scream and synthesizers that growl, menacing orchestral music and spooky jazz, from the funereal to the phantasmagoric, the cacophonous to the melodious, great scores are often essential ingredients in great horror movies. In honor of the 100th birthday of one of the cinema’s greatest composers— Bernard Herrmann— Psychobabble surveys 13 of horror’s greatest scores.

1. White Zombie by Abe Meyer (1932)

Sound horror was still a new thing in the early ‘30s, and the genre’s first films were short on non-diegetic music. Universal’s Dracula and The Mummy both settled for brief passages from Swan Lake over their opening credits sequences. Bernhard Kaun provided the overture to the otherwise music-devoid Frankenstein. Over on Poverty Row, Abe Meyer of the Meyer Synchronizing Service put together a feature-length, newly recorded score for the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie. Meyer chose a superb selection of compositions by Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Modest Mussorgsky, Hugo Risenfeld, and Leo Kempenski. Particularly memorable are the excerpt from Gaston Borch’s Incidental Symphonies that swoops through the gloom while Lugosi casts a voodoo spell over Madge Bellamy and Guy Bevier Williams’s percussive “Chant”, which opens the film. Aside from Bevier Williams’s piece and a jota by Xavier Cugat, White Zombie does not feature original music, but its use of background music, orchestral and otherwise, broke new ground for sound horror.

2. King Kong by Max Steiner (1933)

King Kong was one of the most lavish productions to pummel the early sound era. There was no skimping on its special effects, sets, or globe-spanning scope. RKO had pumped so much money into Kong that studio president B.B. Kahane schemed to cut corners in post-production by asking Max Steiner to create a composite soundtrack of existing music. Producer/director Merian C. Cooper hadn’t copped out on any aspect of Kong so far, and he wasn’t going to start with anything as important as its score. Unable to convince Kahane to compromise, he paid the $50,000 cost himself, and Steiner created one of cinema’s most magical, memorable scores. The composer enhanced onscreen action with pieces that worked as both music and sound effects: booming brass blasts along with each blow from Kong’s mighty fists. The harp laced piece that sets the tone for the crew’s foggy journey toward Skull Island— and the entire picture when it unfolds during the “overture”—is groundbreaking in its eerie subtlety.

3. Bride of Frankenstein by Franz Waxman (1935)

For its sequel to the smash success Frankenstein, Universal sprang for a lush score to accompany its most lush monster movie. Director James Whale recruited Franz Waxman after meeting him at a Christmas party and explaining how much he liked the composer’s work in Fritz Lang’s Liliom. Waxman outdid himself, creating the instantly recognizable leitmotifs that electrify the picture. For Karloff’s Monster, Waxman wrote a raspy, four-note brass grunt. Ernest Thesiger’s charmingly nefarious Dr. Pretorius is introduced by shuddering strings, while his drunken escapades in a crypt are accompanied by a loopy rattle inspired by Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. Elsa Lanchester’s Bride is signified by a swooning ellipsis that serves as her shorthand whether she’s on screen or merely discussed by other characters. Elsewhere Waxman discharges what Scott MacQueen describes as a “charming period-style minuet” that devolves into an ominous fugue when Shelley and Byron recount the story of Frankenstein, a clangor of church bells when we first see The Bride in her wedding gown, and an orchestra rush that heightens the already apocalyptic destruction of Frankenstein’s laboratory to utter hysteria.

4. The Night of the Hunter by Walter Schumann (1955)