This week two DVDs arrived. Wonderful purchases, we’re just as pleased as punch.
Firstly.. is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ~ the 2-Disc Special Edition.
This is a gorgeous DVD package. Couldn’t be happier. Enclosed is perhaps the best “Making Of” documentary I’ve ever seen, as told by Kirk & Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Bo Goldman, Louise Fletcher, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd. Had me welled-up more than once. What a cast, what a set, what a director, producer[s], writer/writer/writer.
Secondly.. is Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night.
Beautifully remastered Black & White. Capra wrought the best out of Gable, we’ve seen the lot and this one leaves them all in the dust. We laugh our asses off all the way through this flick. But the main reason I wanted to include it here is the special features: Cool vintage trailers, a “Making Of” commentary, as told by Frank Capra, Jr. which is well worth the cost. AND get this, Reg, the complete original 1939 Lux Theatre Radio Broadcast, It Happened One Night, with Gable, Colbert, etc., and introduced by Cecil B. DeMille. You boot it up & an old radio appears onscreen to create the ambiance. I’m not old enough to have had radio shows in my childhood, but the imagery is a deep cerebral garden of detail that I cannot explain.
Both classics were made on shoestring budgets---says a lot about creative devotion to a project and inspiration & perspiration.
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Just out of curiosity, I went looking for a website for Lux Theatre and found this! Automatic shows galore. Turn down the lights, get naked under the covers n click go: http://www.otr.net/?p=luxr
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One other small addition:
Except for the manifest-fact that the past couple o decades attached a really bad smell to anything (even the root wildcat beginnings) concerning oil business, Maya & I have been enjoying one of our favorites, BoomTown (Gable/Tracy). The DVD looks & sounds great. BoomTown is still a very cool flick that has stood the test of time. Maya turned me on to Clark Gable films in the mid-‘80s when I went back out West to further pluck upon her heady heartstrings.
>>>> Something just dawned on me with last night’s viewing, so I told Maya and she agrees. Yes it’s subtle and there's no way I can figure the two are connected, but: …The late Spencer Tracy & the late Chris Penn had the same gaze on their face sometimes, ...the exact same looks. Only an observation, but check out BoomTown, in particular, and see just how apparent it is. <<<<
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One grumble: Even a Clark Gable fan might be outright appalled by the last line of (an otherwise decent loose adaptation) Call of the Wild: Where’d you get it? I won it in a crap game. (That in reference to the [probably] Gwich'in Indian woman hauling all the gear.) Even then, the arrogance and contempt of native peoples was so ripe for a boot up the ass.
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