Episode Two: GRVS & IVL-Instant Vision
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2004
revised and expanded version, 20th July, 2006
This piece originated in posts I submitted to the Fortean Times Message Board between September 2004 and November 2005, when an avalanche of old Hollywood movies started to appear in UK bargain outlets. Even before the Classic Entertainment Triple Bills appeared in Pound Shops, there were some suspiciously cheap discs available in The Works, a familiar High Street name which dealt mainly in dubiously "discounted" books and art materials. Officially and occasionally priced at around three pounds, the titles are habitually reduced to little more than a pound. Mostly the shelves are stuffed with things which are worth exactly nothing. However, I set out to pan for gold in these unpromising waters.
The GRVS & Instant Vision Series etc. at The Works
The Mysterious NL Make
NL I41: The Amityville Curse
NL 028: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues
NL 168: The Sign of Four
NL 090: T. Hooper: Spontaneous Combustion
Image IPD 10608: The Hound of the Baskervilles
A make identified only by the prefix NL and a Herts. postcode on the back. They seem to deal in TV movies and straight-to-video fare. Ian Richardson starred as Sherlock Holmes in two quite well-mounted if dramatically stodgy versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. The Grade Z horrors include Boggy Creek II and The Amityville Curse - a Canadian enterprise which muscled in on the franchise when it was discovered that you can't copyright the name of a place. Priced about right, then. You get just one movie per disc but the store usually sells them at 4 for £5.
Instant Vision or IVL
Most of the Instant Vision titles seem to duplicate the Classic Entertainment Series, notably John Wayne and Bela Lugosi. For the record the Lugosi titles are:
DVDIV 053: The Invisible Ghost; DVDIV 054: The Corpse Vanishes; DVDIV 055: Scared to Death.
Prints seem no better or worse than the CE versions, probably from exactly the same sources.
DVDIV 046 to 051: John Wayne Most Wanted Collection
An exception to the one work per disc rule. There are six volumes, each featuring three films. To the sixteen Lone Star titles are added Winds of the Wasteland, a Republic picture from 1936 and Hell Town aka Born to the West, which came from Paramount a year later. Rainbow Valley, the 1935 Lone Star film which is missing from the Classic Entertainment set is included here on disc DVDIV 051. As if to balance things up, the CE series features Lawless Range, a Republic Western from 1935 which is not on IVL. In general, the Classic Entertainment prints tend to be better and they preserve the original title music, not the horrid synthesized version. These Instant Vision versions seem to have been prepared for US cable tv and are trimmed by a few minutes in some cases.
DVDIV 060: The Eagle; DVDIV 061: Blood & Sand; DVDIV 081: The Sheik.
These three Rudolph Valentino silents are worth looking out for. The soundtrack music isn't so wonderful but you can put on your own choice of music for these delicious old silents. The prints are not what collectors would choose and this version of Blood & Sand has been cobbled together so that it has continuity issues. The best is The Eagle but all three offer enjoyable journeys into the past.
DVDIV 066: John Ford: Judge Priest, 1934
I gather this Southern tale is often trimmed on US telly for its racial stereotypes. The running time on the cover suggested this was such an abridged print. In fact this version runs nearly ten minutes longer than the 71 minutes claimed and is probably complete. The sing-song voice of stereotype black servant Step 'n' Fetchit is recognizably the original for the Bugs Bunny cartoon which is now out of bounds - at least officially.
GMVS aka Waterfall Home Entertainment
This label is also distributed through normal trade channels but you will see it for around £5 or £6 in HMV. I don't think they keep separate inventories for different outlets and lately they have turned up in great numbers in Pound Shops. If the numbering system is consecutive and without gaps, this is a very extensive list of over 300 discs. I will only be looking at the things which have caught my eye.
The GMVS label is the UK incarnation of Waterfall, whose US titles are thought unlovely. They usually retail at around £6 in HMV but the PoundWorld chain sells them for a quid each, which seems fairer value. A good range of material exists on this label, though it is often dumped on stores willy-nilly so that a hundred copies of a single title make the racks a boring browse.
I concentrate on the old Hollywood titles so these seem of some interest:
GMVS 1012: The Stranger. A good Orson Welles-directed picture starring himself and Edward G. Robinson. It's the one with the clocktower ending. Quite a good print though it seems to vary in quality.
GMVS 1138: One-Eyed Jacks. Said to have been VistaVision's finest and more or less final two and a half hours, One Eyed Jacks was Marlon Brando's only outing as a Director. This over-long Western is much admired by Scorsese and other film buffs. Worth a look for £1.25, even if this scanned and panned version will give no hint of the original quality. I understand that passable widescreen versions have surfaced in the States but not over here yet.
GMVS 1180: Of Human Bondage. The 1934 version again with Bette Davis as discussed on the Classic Entertainment page. Nothing to choose between the prints. If you have the other issue, this is no better. Worth acquiring if you don't.
GMVS 1176: Penny Serenade: Cary Grant & Irene Dunne star in a 1941 women's picture. Very dated but well made with a terrific Japanese earthquake scene. Features the most obnoxious girl child actor in screen history. Happily she dies.
GMVS 1197: Vengeance Valley. Discussed on the Classic Entertainment page. My copy of this briefly froze during a fight sequence - the only moment of trouble I've had with any of these cheap discs.
GMVS 1201: The Amazing Adventure. Cary Grant again in the misnamed Amazing Adventure. Despite having the whole disc to itself here, this is the same 62 minute version. Mentioned above. on the Classic Entertainment page. Exactly the same print, I'm sure.
GMVS 1213: The Painted Desert. Early Clark Gable again noticed on the Classic Entertainment page. Similar quality.
GMVS 1226: Three Came Home: Claudette Colbert suffers under the Japanese and we under her. But a well made movie. Features the third most obnoxious child actor in screen history. There seems to be a plethora of Public Domain features which feature wartime Japan. Perhaps the copyrights were allowed to lapse when their international appeal was felt to have become limited.
GMVS 1227: The Big Lift: Montgomery Clift in quasi-documentary about the Berlin air lift. Long and sometimes dull but very well done. Worth a look for a pound.
GMVS 1241: Home Town Story: Discussed above where it appears as part of a Classic Entertainment triple bill . Here the 61 minute picture has a whole disc to itself. Quality no better with exactly the same unsteady sound-track.
GMVS 1245: The Lodger. Hitchcock's early chiller with Ivor Novello as the lodger who might be a Jack-the-Ripper like killer. A poor print. Mysteriously, a BBFC Board intrudes after the titles. As this carries the X certificate, it must have been reissued some time after 1951, but why it is where it is, God knows! The soundtrack is a peculiar mixture of classical tracks of dubious relevance. Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony is played complete. Very odd. £6 in HMV so try to find it for less.
GMVS 1246: The Lady Vanishes. Murky print of Hitchcock's delightful train-set thriller. Snap it up, if you see it for about a quid - it's a fiver in HMV for the same disc exactly. There are superior prints in existence but avoid the one on Sun, which gives up about an hour into the picture. This one at least is complete.
GMVS 1270: The Four Deuces. I got this one only to fill out my quota of 4 for £5 on a thin pickings day. Two words of doom are missed off the cover of this 1975 Jack Palance gangster period picture - Golan & Globus! The Israeli moguls were a solid guarantee of seventies schlock. From the dreadful theme music to the seventy-year old Palance in a naked love scene, this alleged comedy is one to avoid. I did like the cheeky use of a much younger Palance for the cover and the strap-line, "There are no aces in this pack!!" How true!
GMVS 1304: A. Hitchcock: Sabotage, 1936, b & w, 75'52" Sabotage - not to be confused with Saboteur - is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent. Confusingly, Hitchcock also made a film called The Secret Agent, which isn't! Features the most obnoxious boy child actor in screen history. Happily he dies. I think this is a much underrated picture with lots of reflexive jokes about cinema - it is set in one. Hitchcock later used to say he had regretted his explosive climax. When you consider the nervousness of the public at this time of pre-war tension, together with the suspicion of foreigners, Hitchcock's audacity seems rather cruel. Once you have adjusted to its period feel, this picture still carries an amazing ability to shock. As a treatment of terrorism, only the surfaces have dated. The print is not great but watchable enough. Perhaps the best poundsworth I've ever had in the DVD line.
Underrated, perhaps on account of its unsatisfactory wrappng-up, this was the picture in which Hitchcock thought he had gone too far. Stretching the nerves of the audience was one thing, threatening to offer up an innocent victim was good theatre but actually daring to perform the sacrifice was diabolical. The full cruelty of Sabotage may depend on recent events to hit home. Assassins may change their colour but the banal mysteries of terrorism remain oddly reliable. Yesterday a cinema, today a mosque. Certain scenes stand out: the dissolve from aquarium-tank to cinema screen; the scene in which Sylvia Sydney briefly seems to lose herself in cinema, after she has killed her husband, the accidental way in which the kindness of a conductor allows a dangerous package onto a bus. Conrad's novel was wickedly retooled to play on the nerves of pre-war audiences. The dialogue is partly credited to Helen Simpson, who was joint-author of the novel from which Hitchcock derived Murder six years before. About this time, she would have been working on the novel Under Capricorn, published in 1937, which Hitchcock brought to the screen in 1948 - 49, by which time she had been dead nine years.
GMVS 1223: G. La Cava: My Man Godfrey, 1936, b & w, 93'
A highly regarded Carole Lombard screwball comedy. She is teamed with William Powell as a deadpan butler. Both are as excellent as ever but I didn't laugh a lot - it is very weird and very thirties.
My Man Godfrey is sometimes cited as the quintessence of Screwball comedy. Certainly it features William Powell and Carole Lombard with a whole family of eccentrics and every scene is worth watching. Yet I didn't much laugh. Maybe because the picture sems to promise a social comment or two beyond what it dares to deliver. The dysfunctional rich are assumed to be automatically interesting - to make that work, the last thing you need is any social perspective! Still Gregory La Cava is regarded as one of the great forgotten men of Hollywood and everything about this picture makes it a quality production. Certainly a piece of history worth picking up if you find it in your local bargain bucket.
GMVS 1186: J. Cromwell: Made for Each Other, 1939, b & w, 91'
Lombard again, teamed with Jimmy Stewart in a luxury soap opera with Selznick production values. Print soft but watchable. If you like babies, you may even manage to enjoy the film.
GMVS 1013: R. Whorf: Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946, colour, 135'
This lavish 1946 MGM musical purports to be the Jerome Kern story. Big cast, Technicolor, 135 minutes long. The musical numbers are fine, if that sort of thing floats your Showboat, though Robert Walker looks uncomfortable in the lead. The story has to be the least dramatic ever told - anodyne stuff, entirely invented in the wake of the composer's death.
Jerome Kern put through the musical biopic mill in a lavish MGM colour musical. It has lapsed into the public domain so the film costs a pound. The musical numbers are all well staged but the drama is fluffy and Robert Walker is miscast. Still, it is a very good way to acquire a crop of vintage Hollywood corn.
GMVS 1014: H. Hughes: The Outlaw, 1941, b & w, 117'
This was Howard Hughes' astonishingly gay Western, misleadingly sold on the size of Jane Russell's tits. It provokes admiration and scorn in about equal measure. I'm inclined to think the lovely Jack Beutel was way ahead of his time, with an insolent-innocent persona way before James Dean or Brando were around. Warning this is the same print as used by 23rd Century. The picture is affected by curious wavering pixellation. It is less obvious if you watch the movie on a computer and limit the size of the window - this is like viewing a movie from the back of a small cinema. If anyone knows of a decent DVD version of this movie, let me know.
GMVS 1225: F. Feist: The Big Trees, 1952, colour, 90'
Yes it's that old woody one again! It's Kirk Douglas versus the tree-hugging Quakers. There are said to be decent Scope prints of this in circulation but the GMVS version is that dismal scan and pan again. Nodding during this so it was resumed next day. This was an alternative version, bought in the hope it might preserve the original ratio. It doesn't - looks much the same as that on the Classic Entertainment Triple Bill.
What an unbearable character Kirk Douglas plays in this woody drama! The history lesson over a giant redwood's rings is taken over in Vertigo. Not necessarily a lift from this movie - I imagine any California tourist could seize the idea from any National Park there. Douglas is given a sort of catch-phrase, which he repeats whenever he is being especially obnoxious, "But you like me, don't you?" No! is the short answer. Douglas is said to have done the film for nothing to be rid of his onorous Warner Brothers contract. It can be found for next to nothing in bargain bins all over. I guess it has been seen by more people in the last few years than it ever was on first release. There are a lot of ingredients swimming around in the pot - some of them seem familiar from Abilene Town, where the town Sherriff is similarly torn between sacred and profane girls. That was Randolph Scott, long in the tooth but opting in the end for vice. It's a much better movie than this one.
GMVS 1200: H. King: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952, colour, 114'
Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck star in this lavish Hemingway adaptation, set in Paris and Africa.
A man, as it were, suspended between life and death, loses the love of his life. On the streets of the city, he sees her everywhere, rushing after women with some resemblance. He thinks he sees her again in the figure of a woman who is entering a car . . . Later, this other woman becomes his lover but she complains of not being loved for herself, only for her resemblance to a dead woman. This drama is played out at considerable length to the accompaniment of a lush romantic score by Bernard Herrmann.
Only it isn't Vertigo, which lies some six years in the future. The man is not played by Jimmy Stewart but by Gregory Peck and the women are Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. The city isn't San Francisco but Paris and the traumatised man isn't a cop but a writer and big-game hunter, lying near to death on The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
The presence of Leo G. Carroll in the cast creates more diverse Hitchcockian echoes. His name may not immediately mean much but the patrician or avuncular manner made him a favourite character actor for Hitch - he appeared in Spellbound, Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Suspicion, North by North West and - with Peck - in The Paradine Case. After North by North West, he appears to have become something of a fixture on US television. Did anyone else appear in so many Hitchcock films, apart from Hitch himself? The product of a wealthy English Catholic family, he was named after Pope Leo XIII.
For all its once greatly-admired second-unit cinematography, The Snows of Kilimanjaro has faded in every sense. It has slipped into the Public Domain and can be picked up on DVD for a pound in the UK. Its pre-echoes of Vertigo might not be so noticable but for the Herrmann connection. The score is very similar to that he was to produce for Vertigo - high divided strings for the lingering love-theme, a motif he had swiped from the first act of Die Walküre, where it delineates the forbidden love of a brother and sister.
That love theme has another close relation born within a year. Another epic remembered, if at all, for its spectacular second-unit work. This time we go Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef to show off Cinemascope and stereophonic sound. Herrmann scored the underwater scenes for nine harps and his familiar love-motif accompanies a soggy Romeo & Juliet tale of rival sponge fisherfolk. The young lovers meet in an edenic orchard and the tendrils of the theme wind around them. Another one that has found its way into the bargain bins - surprisingly, some PD prints maintain the original aspect ratio and stereo sound.
Now the music from Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef was a property which 20th Century-Fox appreciated - it was added to their music library and excerpted for other productions over a long period. It is not surprising that even so creative a composer as Herrmann should have borrowed extensively from himself in scoring love music. Even so, Vertigo seems to be one of those iconic productions which creates its own precursors and sheds its light retrospectively on some films which are less often taken down from the shelf. Once sucked into the vortex, the viewer is doomed to be cruising the streets of cinema, forever seeing some resemblance to Vertigo in the frowsy old faces he surveys.
A glance at the credits for Mr Herrmann on IMDB throws up some curious facts about his posthumous career. We thought we knew his last film was Taxi Driver but his music was used with and without permission in many subsequent productions. A lot of the credits on the IMDB are for understandable purposes such as Making of documentaries. However I was startled to discover that the watery associations of Vertigo were revisited in a manner of speaking when parts of the score were filched for a little movie called Water Power. This horrid item is otherwise known as The Enema Bandit! And no, I haven't seen it!
GMVS 1144: O. Preminger: The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955, b & w, 119'
Preminger's drug story was thought ground-breaking in the fifties but is these days watched for the sake of full-blooded performances from Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. This print looks OK.
Sinatra made a lot of films but his reputation as an actor rests on three or four. He certainly did not hold out for cuddly rôles. As a drug-addicted musician and card dealer here and as a deranged war vet and would-be presidential assassin in Suddenly, he seemed to be intent on scum-bagging. He is certainly effective in both. The Preminger film is over-long but this Public Domain DVD is cheap and of reasonable quality.
ILC
GLD 011: The Invisible Man, 1958 ATV television series.
The "2 Movies in 1 Box" series from ILC Ltd is usually devoted to unsaleable rubbish but this double-sider seems very good value and the prints are OK. I dimly recall this series - it was repeated for many years as a filler. All terribly British but with goodish effects - a splendid scene in the first episode has the Invisible Man unwrapping his bandages to show his hollow head to his niece! As is common, the makers don't seem to know what is on the discs and here claim there are twelve episodes. In fact there are just eight: episodes one to four on side one and episodes seven to ten on the flip side.
IPD 10702: Driller Killer.
Gore hounds might be tempted by Abel Ferrara's 1979 video-nasty Driller Killer. Again the cover is uninformative and claims only a fullscreen print. In fact this DVD contains the widescreen 96 minute version which the bbfc allowed through uncut in 2002. There is also a full length commentary track from the director - something of a collector's item in itself as he seems to be stoned out of his tree. Quality wise, this is a notoriously murky picture, blown up from a 16mm negative. I caught a telly version of this some years ago and was rather bored but for a quid the DVD is just the thing to send to an unloved aunt.
Suffice it to say that for the outlay, I don't think many of these discs will disappoint too badly. The poor ones are part of Holllywood history and help to fill in our knowledge of its routine quality. Even the worst are good for a giggle. Go on, brave those Poundstore demons. You can't lose much except your self-respect!
Filling in the Background
Don't expect bells and whistles on these Public Domain DVDs - they are dumped on the market as fodder and you will have to sort out their context to enjoy them fully. They don't have stereophonic sound, closed captions or even Chapters in some cases. Needless to say, there is no surround sound or anamorphic widescreen. However, given the dates of the pictures, most are naturally 4:3. I have checked all mine to see that they actually load and play. They have all passed that test.
For backgrounds, synopses, reviews and full cast and production credits, I find the allmovie.com site loads faster and is less plagued with advertising than the IMDB - it also presents all its information on a single page for each movie. Worth printing this stuff out as the presentation of these cheapies is basic.
Don't miss this French site, where you can download movie posters as JPEGs for some smart covers for your DVDs - better than the ones they come in usually.
http://www.moviecovers.com/
There are over 13,000 movies featured, many of them US and British titles. Some of the posters are for the French language versions but many are international. Collectors have a high regard for Belgian posters with their intense romantic images. I also like the brightly coloured ones for the Wayne Lone Star Westerns. Warning: It's a site you can browse for hours. Amazingly, it's entirely free.
Running Times
Alternative Versions Fever has taken hold under the anorak. Faced with musical questions, we can always consult the score but only in the case of classic movies can we consult the script. Running times are not hard to establish but how do we know what is missing? Classic movie reference books do their best but often cite nominal running times. They may or may not be that length in the cinema or on US telly but we should deduct 4% for PAL. Discrepancies on silent movies can be wild: but I have seen a terrible print of Shub's pioneering documentary The Fall of The Romanovs which run stupidly fast, so maybe that 63 minute version contains no fewer scenes than the 80 minute version.
Before the days of DVD, cuts were often made to the original materials and no one filed the cut scenes for later reconstruction. The most famous case is The Magnificent Ambersons but something similar befell Visconti's The Leopard. Some anti-clerical scenes were excised soon after the première and have never been seen since - not even in the "fully restored" version.
Reissued films were often far shorter than original versions, trimmed to fit the double bill format of programmes. It isn't always easy to find out whether original versions still exist. Helpfully, Maltin's Guide assures us that 113 minute prints still exist of Things to Come. For years only ninety minute versions have been shown. And Maltin fails to mention that the film premièred at 132 minutes! The authorized DVD version does not restore any of this missing footage. Now stretches of that movie are dull already - it seems unlikely we have lost any of the special effects and thirties-futurist set pieces. The missing scenes are probably windy sermons on progress but wouldn't it be nice to be certain?
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006