Episode Five: The Mysterious 23rd Century Make
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2005
revised and expanded version, 21st 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. The 23rd Century make was soon to be found everywhere in the Manchester area and beyond. Distinguished by slimline cases with lurid cover-art, there appeared to be several hundred titles ranging from old Hollywood movies to chop schlocky and extreme Italian cannibal fare. Some of the Classic Entertainment Triple Bills also turned up to compete with the originals. Whispers on the Internet included assertions that it was completely legal and paid to licence all its material - a claim that seems unlikely given that not a single 23rd Century DVD has ever been passed by the bbfc. Sold to dealers by the pallet-load for 59p a disc, it is clear that dealers can still make a 40% profit on sales at £1 or 99p. If people buy them by the handful - as they are tempted to do, the economics make more sense than you might expect. However, even a quid might be too dear for some things . . .
I will leave specialists in horrors and kung-fu and cannibals to treat their things if they want to. I might be dabbling in the gutters of the Poundstores but my eyes are fixed on the stars! Eh? Well I might just peek at one or two nasty ones. The trouble is they are never really nasty enough for me. Anyway there are some more temptingly musty things on offer, like Cukor, Capra and even D. W. Griffith. We can find cult Westerns by Monte Hellman and Bud Boettcher. There is Shakespeare with an Austrian accent, Tostoy starring Scarlett O'Hara and a whole lot of hippies getting stoned on some phallic red flowers. Welcome to the 23rd Century!
I have read conflicting things about this label, which has offices in Manchester and distibutes its slimline cased lines through bargain outlets. Some insist that all the material is legitimately licenced from copyright owners while others claim it is bootlegged. While I would hate to point a finger unjustly, I am very dubious whether anyone would have licenced them to distribute the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, especially as it is a botched transfer from a scope DVD.
EL 1642: G. Cukor: A Star is Born, 1954, widescreen, stereo, 168'
In lieu of Triple Bills, I have picked up a fair number of bargains on the bootleg 23rd Century label. These have garish packaging and come in slimline cases. If you can adjust the geometry of your screen, you could get a surprisingly good picture from A Star is Born. This is the 1954 Cukor musical with Judy Garland. The sleeve promised only 90 minutes, so I expected this to be a mutilated panned & scanned print. Far from it! The print runs 168 minutes and is letter-boxed with stereo soundtrack, suggesting a source post-1983, when the film was restored to nearly its original length. Cheapskate Friends of Dorothy rejoice! However the aspect ratio is wrong, displaying distorted and skinny figures at 16:9. Adjusting the screen geometry of the computer, however, took care of this and the picture looked pretty good when squished down to 2.5:1 or thereabouts. I doubt if either the movie or many of the songs are actually in the Public Domain, so this seems a dodgy issue in many respects. I suspect that some twerp has glimpsed the title on a list of PD movies without realising that it was the Janet Gaynor version from the 1930s which was meant!
The version of A Star is Born which is in the PD is the 1932, non-musical, black and white version starring Janet Gaynor. Seeing the title on lists of Public Domain movies, someone seems to have gone bananas and ripped the 1954 musical, starring Judy Garland & James Mason. Someone somewhere will be very cross with the mysterious 23rd Century poundstore label. Though the font of the logo suggests an Asian source, I am informed the duplication is done in Eastern Europe. These are sold at 59p each to dealers so they can still make a 40% mark-up on the sale.
There is something badly wrong with the 23rd Century DVD, however. In ripping the content from a legitimate disc, the aspect ratio has been mangled. It is presented as 16:9 but this was a Scope picture so the figures are stick-insects unless you adjust the screen-geometry to suit the disc. Something similar happens to the schlocky horror The Devil's Rain. Once you have done that and if your conscience will let you enjoy it, you have a very good version of the movie. Stereo soundtrack too.
Ignore the running time of c 90' cited on the slimline case too, for this is the 168 minute version with partial reconstruction of all the lost scenes.
Despite the great cinematography and big budget, this is really a very claustrophobic musical. The only thing that matters is the central relationship and if you think that's essentially rot, you are stuffed - for nearly three hours.
Still, here is a piece of cinema history, like it or not. It belongs with Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve as one of the quintessential showbiz myths.
EL 0016: H. Koster: The Inspector General, 1949, colour, 102'
Danny Kaye's career now seems entirely unnecessary but he was big in his day. David Thomson recalls that he was once considered a genius but now looks frantic and alien. He belongs to the era of family entertainment and some kids might still respond to his energetic look-at-me style. To grown-up audiences, he is simply exhausting. He sang, he danced, he was acrobatic, he specialized in the tongue-twisting songs written by his wife Sylvia Fine. Though he isn't exactly dull, he soon becomes a crashing bore; there is an obsessive narcissism which insists on him running the gamut. He must go through all the emotions in a song and not only that but divide himself into four parts and sing a quartet with himself while wearing monacles, doing various accents and drink a glass a water at the same time. The Inspector General, based on a Gogol story, has grim implications but it becomes a rags to riches tale here. Handsomely staged with rich Technicolor photography, it is a bit like entering a children's book. The pages keep turning, the story goes on and before you know it you are sound asleep. This 23rd Century DVD has a splash sceen which reveals it to be from a version by Elstree Entertainment. Licenced or ripped?
DV 427: B. Boetcher: A Time for Dying, 1969, colour, 70'
Bud Boetcher's career as a hell-raiser, bull-fighter and part-time film-maker is legendary. The films themselves are variously unsatisfactory and he seems rarely to have had the power of energy to see a project through. This is his last elegaic Western in which the phantoms of the old West arise to teach a lesson to a green young man. It was the last film of Audie Murphy, who plays Jesse James. Worth a look in this tolerable print.
EL 3103: J. Richard: Berserker, 1987, colour, 82'
Routine slasher antics out in the woods with men who turn to animals. Teenage sex and violence stuff with a daft back-story. Nothing unexpected here. Strictly for collectors of the genre, which now seems redolent of the dust in an eighties video rental outlet.
EL 1666: D. W. Griffith: Abraham Lincoln, tinted, 93'
His penultimate movie, this was Griffiths revisiting the assassination of Lincoln, which had also featured in The Birth of a Nation, some fifteen years before. This tinted and extensively-restored version is almost certainly taken from the Eureka issue, which retails at around £16. The soundtrack suffers from a noise-gate, which is set too high. Even so, this 1930 movie is well worth your £1 - or 88p if your tastes tend to the historical. Note that the original length of the picture was nearly two hours but this 93 minute version seems to be the longest now in existence.
EL 2610: Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, 1941, b & w, 122'
A two hour feature from 1941, this stars Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwick, no less. Darker than your average Capra. By the look of it, the transfer isn't great but if there's nothing on telly again . . . I watched the Capra movie last night. It's a soft transfer with a line of dots at the top, suggesting a telly source. The actual quality isn't bad at all for a sixty-four year old film. Capra was hardly the person to go for a gloves-off assault on populism and it would be idle to pretend that every one of the 122 minutes are absorbing. Still, it is very well played and admirers of Stanwyck and/or Cooper should find it tasty. I see that lots of folks on the imdb give it 10 out of 10. It has a lot in common with It's A Wonderful Life, another picture which owes its popularity to its fall into Public Domain, when it became a fixture on US Christmas television.
EL 1611: H. Hughes: The Outlaw, 1941, b & w, 117'
This was Howard Hughes' notorious and 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.
EL 1857: M. Hellman: The Shooting, 1967, colour, 76'
EL 2564: M. Hellman: Ride in the Whirlwind, 1967, colour, widescreen, 82'
Conoisseurs of terrible transfers should try to find the 23rd Century edition of Monte Hellman's cult Western, The Shooting. It is utterly dire. The film features a youthful Jack Nicholson but most of the acting honours belong to Warren Oates. This is very curious picture with what are described as existential or even Fortean dimensions but this horrid print has missing sections and holes on the soundtrack so there may be more mysteries than the director intended.
It was the machinery of film-making which demanded that where one rock-bottom budget Western was to be shot in the Philippines, they might just as well make two. Opinions differ as to which of Monte Hellman's 1967 twins is the finer. The Shooting seems to be an exercise in mythic generation, taking a party of mysterious characters into the desert and leaving them there. A Ride in the Whirlwind on the other hand seems to wish to deconstruct the myths and imagine a more uncomfortable reality - one which may well strain the patience of some traditional audiences.
The 23rd Century label is very cheap but The Shooting is one of the worst DVDs ever made. Clearly from a sub-standard video source, there are jumps in continuity, missing titles and horrible faults on the soundtrack. the picture exhibits tracking errors, blurred colour etc. It all adds a kind of Blair Witch level of a film found in a bottle to the mysteries of this picture.
EL 0928: R. Faenza: Corrupt Lieutenant, 1981, colour, 101'
Diving down into the depths of the 23rd Century catalogue, I fished out Corrupt Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel. This is not the notorious Abel Ferrera sleazefest but an opportunistic retitling of a 1981 Italian straight-to-vid flick called Corrupt originally - among other things. The co-star was punk-rocker Johnny Rotten and we are promised sado-masochistic homo-eroticism according to the imdb. Can't wait! I am actually more intigued to know if the very aged lady is the same Sylvia Sydney who starred in Hitchcock's Sabotage way back in 1936! I think she could well be. Wow.
EL 5037: A. Rudolph: Premonition, here retitled Head, 1971, colour, 80'
A real period piece, Head is a drug-addled nightmare but it isn't the one you expect. No Monkees here. This is another retitling, this time of a film called Premonition, directed by Alan Rudolph way back in 1971. A group of musical hippies get stoned on some strange red flowers and have premonitions of death. The flowers look to be those horrid phallic things that were suddenly briefly fashionable some years back. I didn't know the idea was to eat them!
Head probably gives a better idea of its druggy content. To call it a druggy horror flick would be to create expectations which this gentle, character-led picture would disappoint. Three hippy blokes, trying to make it as musicians, take a cabin in the woods. When the weed gives out, they take to smoking an evil local herb with fatal consequences.
The drama comes and goes. At times an ominous sense of doom stalks them but the tension is dissipated in trippy sequences. There is a Prologue, which paints in the bad trip undergone by the eldest of the hippies some years before. His prickly relationship with a tippling college professor is a story recapped later but to no very evident purpose. We keep expecting that someone might explain the mysterious phallic red flowers but they don't. Are there hints of homo-eroticism in the difficult relationship between the male leads and their shared dreams? Possibly.
This being the seventies, a babe turns up on horseback for no very good reason except to make a pretty picture. Though his part is poorly concieved, the third, black member of the team has the best screen presence yet remains marginal to the drama. No one could say this is a good film but it might leave traces of unease for longer than most cabin-in-the-woods features since. One unusual shot, where the camera appears to have been strapped to the front of the actor recalls a similar scene in Scorsese's Mean Streets - but that was three years or so in the future!
EL 1673: R. V. Lee: Captain Kidd, 1945, b & w, 89'
Charlie Laughton chewing the scenery as a Pirate King. Is it my imagination or was that accent modelled on Hitchcock's? I was going to suggest a double-bill with Jamaica Inn but that would be a bit too much. Anyway this is good fun with some nice table-top battles at sea and a wonderful establishing shot of London, 1599 with Tower Bridge! Lots of copies of this one around - the print here is pretty rough but watchable. Look out for Randolph Scott in a decidedly gay rôle.
EL 2472: R. Feust: The Devil's Rain, 1975, colour, widescreen, 82'
Stars John Travolta - who has the sense to hide - William Shatner, Queen of the Bs, Ida Lupino, Ernest Borgnine and Satanist Anton Le Vey. Publicity stories circulated that the film had been cursed, though it does not seem to feature on any internet list of such things. Famous for its prolonged melty finale. Utterly mad experience and probably worth the quid asked for this. Beware that the transfer is botched with regard to the ratio. Altering the screen geometry on a computer will correct this, otherwise you get distorted figures.
EL 1703: J. Duvivier: Anna Karenina, 1948, b & w, 134'
Lavish Korda-produced British made epic starring Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson as the stuffy husband of an emotionally-neglected woman. It looks very handsome here and is presented in a complete print. It was hacked about for its American issue and the original full-length version surfaced on television much later. The rights to this are probably owned by Carlton who may or may not have licenced its release on this mysterious 23rd Century label.
EL 0012: R. Danton: Crypt of the Living Dead, 1972, colour, mixed ratios, 82'
Some scenes widescreen others full screen - this was a Turkish film with additional scenes filmed later. Starts like a Wicker Man variant - a man goes to a Greek island to investigate the death of his father. Oh dear, there is then some plot. By the end the pot has been stirred so the vampire is whizzing around. One good late moment is sort-of worth waiting for. I gather this was a Turkish movie with some additional footage for American audiences. It is very well suited to those occasions when a good movie just won't do!
EL 2656: P. Czinner: As You Like It, 1936, b & w, 96'
Czinner cast his Austrian wife Elisabeth Bergner as Rosalind in this slightly neglected Shakespeare film from the thirties. Shakespeare's text is heavily abridged in this version credited to J. M. Barrie. It lacks the frankness of the original but there are some teasing moments of ambiguity as the heroine assumes male attire. Charming in a slightly faded way. The print, identified at the end as from Black Hawk Films - a story in itself - is adequate.
EL 5014: M. G. Gilhuis: Bloody Wednesday, 1985, colour, 89'
Bloody Wednesday was scripted by Philip Yordan whereby hangs a tale: it seems likely he was a front for writers who had fallen foul of HUAC. This one is mainly a cheap re-run of The Shining. The prolonged bloody massacre at the end has been massively abridged by the bbfc in this cut, though I suspect this was the selling point but least interesting part of the film. Belongs in the bad-good category.
The screen-writer Philip Yordan has a curious history. Associated since the nineteen fifties with marginal and exploitaton cinema, he had one major film to his credit. It looks likely he was used as a front as his own work has been . More about this odd figure here [link] The story may be more interesting than the movies he has made. I usually find that this kind of fringe material can be made to sound enticing but actually watching the stuff can be a chore. This one is certainly odd - the story of a man who suffers a nervous breakdown, goes to live at his brother's expense in a derelict urban hotel. A bathtub murder and a burger-joint massacre ensue. To add to the murk, the massacre was based on a real event but the film's events seem to owe a lot to Kubrick's The Shining. As it is most unlikely to turn up on any mainstream television channel, the poundstore DVD might be worth investigating, though the quality is fully down to expectations and the final over-the-top massacre is hacked to shreds.
EL 4007: M. A. Simpson: Impure Thoughts, 1985, colour, 81'
Catholic guilt explored in this curious made-for-tv affair. Four men find themselves in Hell and have to find out why. The answer lies in their shared past or something like that. Brad Douriff stars with his usual brand of routine intensity but the rest of the cast are unknowns. Unusual to find a Catholic picture from the American South. The relevance of that becomes thumpingly obvious as the significance of a certain date in the sixties . . . snooze
EL 2182: A. C. Gannaway: Daniel Boone, Trailblazer, 1956, colour, 73'
Odd Western can't make up its mind whether to be a family musical or a bloodbath. Cheap and nasty colour process does not help. Made entirely on location in Mexico. Not really necessary at all, except to collectors of slightly preachy oddities.
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006