Blu-Ray Review: Stooge-O-Rama.

I find The Three Stooges not only hysterically funny but totally fascinating. So I’m the perfect consumer for the three-disc Blu-Ray set from Kit Parker Films, Stooge-O-Rama. It’s a video grab bag of glorious Stooges “unseen rarities.”

Stooge-O-Rama offers up hours and hours of fun. First, there’s the documentary The Men Behind The Mayhem, which has some nice interview stuff with family members, Adam West and others.

From there, it’s two more discs loaded with Stooge-errific stuff, from home movies to trailers for their features to Dickies work clothes commercials to savings bond films — and on and on. My favorites were color home movies of a quite dapper-looking Curly (inset) and the promo film for the Moving Picture Machine giveaway (up top). I want one of those machines really bad!

This thing isn’t going to convince you of The Three Stooges’ brilliance or anything like that. (If you haven’t figured that out already, I feel sorry for you.) But if you’re a fan, it’s a real hoot. Of course, as you’d expect, picture quality is all over the place, but for the most part it all looks good. A tip of the hat to Kit Parker for the hard work and obvious care that went into this. Highly, highly, Stooge-ily recommended.

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Oh, and next time you’re in Roanoke, Virginia, stop by The Texas Tavern for a hot dog or hamburger. They say The Stooges once ate there. You can’t get a much better recommendation than that.

Another Fine Memorial.

Every so often, something reminds me how great Laurel and Hardy are.

Time to put some more miles on Kit Parker’s Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray News #340: Stooge-O-Rama.

Kit Parker Films and Cinemuseum LLC have joined forces to put together a three-disc collection of Three Stooges archival rarities. It’s called Stooge-O-Rama, and it sounds terrific.

It gives you over eight hours of material — unreleased outtakes, color home movies, rare television appearances and commercials, theatrical trailers, unseen archival interview footage, forgotten audio recordings from live appearances, family photo galleries, and more!

A lot of this Stooge-i-ness has never been released on home video. And it’s all been done from the best material available. A few highlights:
• The documentary Stooges: The Men Behind The Mayhem
• Long unseen short subject Everybody Likes Music (1934) with Shemp
• Lost theatrical featurette Surprise, Surprise (1937) with Moe, Larry and Curly
• Audio recordings of Larry and Moe’s college appearances from the 70s 

Why I oughta… recommend this thing very, very highly! Coming in July!

DVD News #320: Crazylegs (1953).

Directed by Francis D. Lyon
Written & Produced by Hall Bartlett
Starring Elroy ‘Crazylegs’ Hirsch, Lloyd Nolan, Joan Vohs, James Millican, The Los Angeles Rams

Seems like everybody’s talking about football these days (sure hope Damar Hamlin’s OK). Well, here’s something for us old movie nuts to talk about — Kit Parker has brought Crazylegs (1953) to DVD. It’s the story of Elroy ‘Crazylegs’ Hirsch, a football star at the University Of Wisconsin and the University Of Michigan — and later with the LA Rams.

Hirsch plays himself and does a fine job. He’d go on to have a pretty solid, if short-lived, run in the movies. Hall Bartlett wrote and produced the picture, with Republic handling distribution.

Kit Parker has loaded the DVD with some nice old extras — and a new featurette on Bartlett from Ballyhoo. I’m a big fan of Ballyhoo’s work and got to work on the script for their piece here. It’s a cool little movie and a very nice presentation. Recommended.

Blu-Ray Review: Laurel & Hardy – The Definitive Restorations (1929-1942).

Laurel & Hardy boxes from Blackhawk Films, similar to the one on the left, were a real fixture of my youth. Watching Stan and Ollie’s funny, sweet, brilliant films was just something you did — kinda like eating, breathing and going to school, only a lot funnier.It was from watching movies like this that I learned to appreciate how much sharper 16mm was than 8mm, and that Super 8 was a step up from 8 — though I prefer the sound of standard 8 running through a projector. (Come to think of it, it was from these pictures that I learned how to thread a projector in the first place!)Lucky for us, there’s never been a time that these movies weren’t around in some format — film, tape, laserdisc, DVD.And now there’s Blu-Ray. Kit Parker has shepherded a collection called Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations, presenting many of the team’s finest work in absolutely stunning quality. With any film, one of the things we gain from Blu-Ray is texture, and it can really boost the whole experience. First, there’s the grain of the film itself. While it bothers some people, we’re watching movies here — and grain is a big part of it. Accept it, make peace with it, come to love it.Next, there’s the texture of what’s in the film, of maybe an actor’s jacket or an actress’s hair. Seeing these Laurel & Hardy pictures in 16mm, such texture was simply not there, no matter how good the print was. Now, we can see the grain in the wood of the piano crate in The Music Box (1932) or the bristles in the brush glued to Ollie’s chin in Busy Bodies (1933).Then there’s the contrast levels. We’ve had to accept these films over the years with contrast that was all over the place. Washed out and flat in one, blown out in the next. There’s none of that here, they’re almost perfect, and better yet, they’re consistent from one feature or short to the next.The remarkable clarity here, which is where the texture comes from, opens these films up in a terrific way. You can really study the early ’30s Los Angeles behind Stan and Ollie as they drive their old Ford through town. What a beautiful place it was.The sound is better, too. It’s clean, and there’s an actual range to it. The music is as buried in the mix as ever, but since the audio is so much better overall, we can hear it, and appreciate it, so much better.I never thought we’d see these things like this, not in a million years.Beyond the presentation, the films themselves are a real treasure. They’re hysterically funny in spots, and the brilliance of Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and everyone who worked on these things has never been more obvious. The cinematography can be studied. The art direction can be fully appreciated. And the subtleties of so many wonderful facial expressions aren’t lost. Hardy’s little looks into the camera are so funny, so perfect, so brilliant. While fans of Laurel & Hardy surely have their individual favorites, many of the team’s most celebrated features and shorts are here. Here’s what you get—Features:
Sons Of The Desert (1933)
Way Out West (1937)Shorts:
The Battle Of The Century (1927)
Berth Marks (1929, original VitaPhone track)
Berth Marks (1936 re-release track)
Brats (1930, original VitaPhone track)
Brats (1937 re-release track)
Hog Wild (1930)
Come Clean (1931)
One Good Turn (1931)
Helpmates (1932)
The Music Box (1932)
The Chimp (1932)
County Hospital (1932)
Scram! (1932)
Their First Mistake (1932)
Towed In A Hole (1932)
Me And My Pal (1933)
The Midnight Patrol (1933)
Busy Bodies (1933)
Twice Two (1933)
That’s That (1937)
The Tree In A Test Tube (1942)They all look incredible. A splice here or there doesn’t take away from the brilliance and enjoyment of these movies one bit. And the many extras, from galleries to interviews, offer up all hours and hours of pleasure. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of all the riches here.

One of the things we obsessive movie collectors have to wrestle with is how many times can we be expected to upgrade one movie? When does the format-to-format progression get to be just too much? (For instance, I’ve purchased The French Connection at least eight different times since Magnetic Video Corporation.) When the improvements are as substantial as those here, and they have the incredible affect on the overall experience as these restorations do, then that argument, that number, really means nothing. These wonderful little movies are absolutely essential, in any form. And this upgrade, from whatever you have to Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations, is just as essential. And a big thanks to Kit Parker, Sabucat, the folks at UCLA and everyone else who had a hand in making this set, and these restorations possible. You did us all a huge favor.

Blu-Ray News #288: Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations.

If you’ve gone through life without seeing a Laurel & Hardy short like Big Business (1929) or The Music Box (1932), I feel really sorry for you. Luckily, Kit Parker is ready to help you exit that world of darkness with Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations, a four-disc Blu-Ray set full of terrific shorts and features from Stan and Ollie.

Shorts
The Battle Of The Century (1927, making its video debut)
Berth Marks (1929)
Brats (1930)
Hog Wild (1930)
Come Clean (1931)
One Good Turn (1931)
Helpmates (1932)
The Music Box (1932, Oscar winner for best short)
The Chimp (1932)
County Hospital (1932)
Scram! (1932)
Their First Mistake (1932)
Towed In A Hole (1932)
Twice Two (1933)
Me And My Pal (1933)
The Midnight Patrol (1933)
Busy Bodies (1933)

Features
Sons Of The Desert (1933)
Way Out West (1937)

Restored from the best 35mm to be found on the planet (thanks to the efforts of Jeff Joseph/SabuCat, UCLA Film & Television Archive and Library of Congress), this set will also include commentaries, interviews, stills and The Tree In A Test Tube (1942), a color short produced by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. It’s coming in June. Essential stuff.

Blu-Ray Review: The Shadow On The Window (1957).

Directed by William Asher
Screen Play by Leo Townsend & David P. Harmon
Based on a story (“Missing Witness”) by John & Ward Hawkins
Cinematography: Kit Carson
Music by George Duning
Film Editor: William A. Lyon

Cast: Phil Carey (Tony Atlas), Betty Garrett (Linda Atlas), John Barrymore, Jr. (Jess Reber), Corey Allen (Gil Ramsey), Gerald Sarracini (Joey Gomez), Jerry Mathers (Petey), Sam Gilman (Sgt. Paul Denke), Paul Picerni (Bigelow)

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This tough little gem from Columbia can be found in Kit Parker’s nine-movie, three-disc Blu-Ray set Noir Archive, Volume 3 (1956-1960). These sets offer up a real wealth of riches — and I hope they keep coming.

A little boy (Jerry Mathers) sees his mother (Betty Garrett) getting roughed up by some punks as they rob and kill an old man. He wanders off, in shock, and is picked up on the side of the road by a couple of truckdrivers. Turns out he’s the son of police offer Tony Atlas (Phil Carey). With very little to go on (Mathers is able to tell them a few things), the cops race against time to find her.

Of course, we’ve seen this kind of thing before — crooks hiding in a house with a witness or two that can’t be allowed to live to rat ’em out. (There’s even an episode of Little House On The Prairie like that.) And while we’re sure the police procedural stuff will lead to the creeps before it’s all over, there are some good performances (Betty Garrett and Jerry Mathers are very good), some over-the-top menace from John Barrymore, Jr. and a great parade of 50s character actors to keep me happy — Sam Gilman, Paul Picerni, Norman Leavitt, Angela Stevens, Mel Welles and so forth. William Asher’s direction is tight and assured — a long way from his loose-as-a-goose Beach Party movies.

But what gets me about movies like this is the unshakeable craft of the crew. From the sets to the cinematography, what you see is a well-oiled machine powered by people who knew what they were doing and, despite the budget, came through every single time. Cheap studio movies from the 50s usually look very good. Kit Carson’s cinematography on this one was never going to win him an Oscar, but he creates mood where he needs to and helps conceal the pictures’s limited budget. Carson did a lot of TV and only a handful of features.

So far, this series has given us 27 features, and every one of them looks terrific (some a bit better than others, as you’d expect). The Shadow On The Window is one of the nicest of the bunch — nice 1.85 framing, superb contrast and the kind of grain that reminds you that this used to be on film. This movie’s easy to recommend — and these sets are essential stuff.

Blu-Ray Review: The Crooked Web (1955).

Directed by Nathan Hertz Juran
Produced by Sam Katzman
Story & Screenplay by Lou Breslow
Cinematography: Henry Freulich
Film Editor: Edwin H. Bryant

Cast: Frank Lovejoy (Stanley Fabian), Mari Blanchard (Joanie Daniel), Richard Denning (Frank Daniel), John Mylong (Herr Koenig), Harry Lauter (Sgt. Mike Jancoweizc), Steven Ritch (Ramon ‘Ray’ Torres), Lou Merrill (Herr Schmitt)

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With some movies, you can smell the next plot point, or even the rest of the picture, a mile away. The experience is then reduced to just waiting around to see if you were right — unless you just give up on the whole thing. Then there are movies that make a point of not only zigging when you expect them to zag, but doing it so frequently you can’t possibly get ahead of them. The Crooked Web (1955) is one of those movies.

As a favor, you’re not going to get much of a synopsis out of me. Stan (Frank Lovejoy) owns a drive-in restaurant and he’s sweet on Joanie (Mari Blanchard), one of his carhops. One afternoon, Joanie’s brother Frank (Richard Denning) pulls up to say hello.

The Crooked Web makes great use of Stan’s Drive-In at the corner of Sunset and Highland in Hollywood. Giving Mark Lovejoy’s character the name Stan lets them show us all that wonderful signage. As soon as the movie was over, I hopped online to see if Stan’s was still around. Sadly, it’s not.

All these twists and turns are the work of Lou Breslow, who gets credit for both the story and screenplay. He takes this one way beyond what you expect from Sam Katzman’s unit. Breslow’s credits stretch back to the silents and he worked on pictures like W.C. Field’s masterpiece It’s A Gift (1934), Charlie Chan At The Race Track (1936), Mr. Moto Takes A Chance (1938), Shooting High with Gene Autry (1940), Blondie Goes To College (1942), Abbott & Costello In Hollywood (1945) and My Favorite Spy (1951). The Crooked Web was his last feature, though he did lots of TV.

Before trying his hand at directing, Nathan Juran was an art director — one of the gaggle of geniuses behind the Oscar-winning designs for John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941). Juran directed a handful of pictures, mostly Westerns at Universal-International, before taking on The Crooked Web. He found his sweet spot in horror/sci-fi/fantasy stuff, and he’d go on to do 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957), The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad (1958), The Brain From Planet Arous (1957) and Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (1958). His Western Good Day For A Hanging (1958) starring Fred MacMurray is really terrific.

A picture like The Crooked Web can’t really work if its cast isn’t up to snuff. And the three leads here are top-notch — pros going about their business. Beginning with Lovejoy being head over heels for Blanchard, everybody’s believable enough to escort us from one plot twist to another. Frank Lovejoy is excellent in this one. Richard Denning was so good as a creep in both Hangman’s Knot (1952) and Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) that I have a hard time seeing him as anything else.

I’ve always liked Mari Blanchard, especially in Rails Into Laramie (1954) and Stagecoach To Fury (1957). She’s very good here, though she was probably hired primarily for her eye-candy-ness. She had a pretty incredible life, overcoming polio as a child — look her up sometime. Her last feature was McLintock! (1963). Cancer took her in 1970.

The Crooked Web is part of Kit Parker’s Noir Archive, Volume 2 (1954-1955), a nine-movie, three-disc Blue-Ray set. It looks terrific — all nine pictures do. I’ve covered this before, but it’s worth repeating: seeing B movies like this on Blu-Ray can be a real revelation. The craft that went into these things has been obscured by washed-out TV prints and sorry-looking VHS tapes. People like cinematographer Henry Freulich certainly deserve to have their work seen in the best possible condition. And that’s exactly how you see The Crooked Web here. The movie comes highly recommended — and the Blu-Ray set, well, it’s essential.

One Quick Thing.

The second volume of Kit Parker’s Noir Archive series showed up yesterday. In a year filled with really great stuff coming out on Blu-Ray, this might be my favorite so far.

Four of my favorite B directors are here: William Castle, Nathan Juran, Phil Karlson and Fred F. Sears. Some of my favorite actors, too — John Agar, Robert Blake, Mari Blanchard, Timothy Carey, Richard Denning, Faith Domergue, Vince Edwards, Beverly Garland, Brian Keith, Guy Madison, Kim Novack and more.

All nine pictures look terrific — the Columbia transfers are almost flawless. Proper reviews will follow, but I can’t recommend Noir Archives Volume 2: 1954-1956 highly enough.

Blu-Ray Review: The Miami Story (1954).

Directed by Fred F. Sears
Produced by Sam Katzman
Story and Screenplay by Robert E. Kent
Director Of Photography​: ​Henry Freulich
Film Edit​or: ​Viola Lawrence

Cast: Barry Sullivan (Mick Flagg AKA Mike Pierce), Luther Adler (Tony Brill), John Baer (Ted Delacorte), Adele Jergens (Gwen Abbott), Beverly Garland (Holly Abbott), Dan Riss (Frank Alton), Damian O’Flynn (Police Chief Martin Belman), Chris Alcaide (Robert Bishop), Gene Darcy (Johnny Loker)

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Here’s looking at a solid little noir/crime picture from producer Sam Katzman and director Fred F. Sears — The Miami Story (1954). It’s featured in Noir Archive, Volume 1 (1944-1954), a nine-movie, three-disc Blue-Ray set Kit Parker Films.

The Miami Story has ex-mobster Mick Flagg (Barry Sullivan) lured out of retirement (he’s now a farmer) to help snag some of his old “co-workers” in Miami. Flagg’s approach to his task isn’t hampered by the kinds of things cops or the Feds have to contend with, and he turns out to be very effective at stirring up the hoods. Along the way, he gets to threaten, beat up or at least talk smack to about everybody else in the cast. A couple of examples —

Teddy (John Baer): How much of this am I supposed to swallow?

Mick Flagg (Barry Sullivan): You better take a full dose of it, kid, if you wanna stay alive.

Gwen (Adele Jergens): Don’t give me that holier-than-thou stuff, Holly. You could hoof. All I could do was shake on top and wiggle on the bottom in crummy burlesque joints.

Mick Flagg (Barry Sullivan): Big sister just told you there’s no Santa Claus and you’re all beat up about it. Relax, things’ll look a lot worse tomorrow.

The picture is filled with dialogue like this. And Sullivan is terrific at delivering it, as is Adele Jergens. Jergens gives any movie a boost, and this one is no exception. Tired of playing these kinds of tawdry parts, she’d leave the picture business a few after The Miami Story. What a shame. She’s in one of my favorites, Armored Car Robbery (1950), along with Sugarfoot (1951), Abbott & Costello Meet The Invisible Man (1951) and a couple of the Blondie movies.

The performances are solid, to be sure, but I give a lot of credit for The Miami Story‘s success to Fred F. Sears and screenwriter Robert E. Kent. Sears proved himself to be a master craftsman, churning out a string of Katzman pictures like this that are far better than they probably have any right to be. Like Sears, Robert Kent worked a lot for Katzman’s unit at Columbia, churning out scripts for stuff like Fort Ti (1953), Jesse James Vs. The Daltons (1954) and The Werewolf (1956). He also came up with the story for Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947). They made so many pictures, they can’t all be great, but when their best are well worth seeking out.

The Miami Story looks like a million bucks on Blu-Ray. DP Henry Freulich, another craftsman, is well-served here. It’s sharp, with nice-looking grain and solid blacks. As the only picture in the set from 1954, The Miami Story is the only title in 1.85. This movie, and the Blu-Ray collection, come highly recommended. If this becomes your gateway to the joys of Columbia B movies, you’re in for a real treat.