Weekly Round-Up – 25/04/10

EACH WEEK Wiped will be bringing you the best of the rest: smaller stories that might have passed you by, but are worth checking out all the same.

So to begin…

OPRHANED OUT OF THE UNKNOWN CLIPS ON YOUTUBE

The only remaining clips from an otherwise-missing episode of 1960s’ BBC sci-fi anthology series Out of the Unknown have been uploaded to YouTube for our viewing pleasure:

Clips from ‘LIAR!’ (tx 14/01/69) TX.14 14th January 1969TX. 14th January 1969

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFJAMiJCQkg

Also posted are the few remaining clips from ‘The Caves of Steel’ (tx 4/5/64), a BBC adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novel of the same name. Broadcast as part of BBC2’s anthology strand Story Parade, this 75-minute production was adapted by Terry Nation and starred Peter Cushing. It’s success led story editor Irene Shubik to devise Out of the Unknown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nleL8IJxyUU

For a full list of surviving OOTU material, visit this highly informative Out of the Unknown Clips Guide.

RARE TV PLAY FEATURING JAMES DEAN AND RONALD REAGAN ‘DISCOVERED’

Last week, news sites were awash with a story concerning the ‘discovery’ of a 1950s’ American TV show featuring tragic Hollywood icon James Dean and future American president Ronald Reagan.

To cut to the chase, this is a non-news story. The “newly discovered” 23-minute drama ‘The Dark, Dark Hours (broadcast on CBS network’s General Electric Theatre on Dec 12, 1954 is already available on DVD! (see this post on excellent forum Britmovie.co.uk).

I guess it boils down to the same old story of semantics and strong headlines getting in the way of the facts. Still, if you bear that in mind, it is a good yarn.

You can read The Telegraph news story (22/4/10) here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/7620342/Tape-of-James-Dean-and-Ronald-Reagan-brawling-found.html

…and see a condensed (six-minute) version of ‘The Dark, Dark Hour’ over at The Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/the-dark-dark-hours-rare_n_546170.html

WEBSITE FOR THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS GOES LIVE

Kino International has launched a website for The Complete Metropolis, which is coming to theatres in the US this summer ahead of home release.

The newly extended version of Fritz Lang’s seminal 1927 sci-fi film follows the discovery, in 2008, of 25 minutes’ worth of lost footage in a film museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Kino’s comprehensive site includes restoration clips and trailers for The Complete Metropolis along with articles on the long journey to reconstruct the silent masterpiece.

You can find the site here: http://www.kino.com/metropolis/

Advertisement

The Art Of Deduction That Put Silent Sherlock Back Together

A Sherlock Holmes movie from the silent era that was feared lost for many years is to be released on region 1 DVD this July.

American video distributor Kino International will be releasing a reconstructed version of Sherlock Holmes (1922) on its own and as part of a four-disc John Barrymore collection alongside Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), The Beloved Rogue (1927) and Tempest (1928).

The film, titled Moriarty in the UK, was believed completely lost until, in the mid-1970s, a number of negative reels were located at the George Eastman House film archives and pieced back together by film historians Kevin Brownlow and the late William K. Everson, with the aid of director Albert Parker.

The task required deductive powers the great detective would have been proud of, as William K. Everson explained in program notes for the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society back in September 1975:

“Far more astounding than the film itself  are the conditions under which it was preserved. A few years ago all that existed of this film were rolls and rolls of negative sections, in which every take – not every sequence, but every take – were jumbled out of order, with only a few flash-titles for guidance, and the complications of Roland Young with a moustache in some scenes, without in others and a script that in many ways differed from the play, adding to the herculean task of putting it all together.

“However, with the limited help of director Albert Parker, who remembered but little of the film and who died while the reconstruction work was in progress, Kevin Brownlow… did piece it together, replaced titles and generally made sense out of an impossible jigsaw.”

Kino’s release, mastered from the 35mm George Eastman House Motion Picture Department restoration, is still incomplete – an estimated one and a half reels of footage are still missing – but the gaps are plugged by intertitles and production stills.

Click here to pre-order Sherlock Holmes from Amazon.com, or here for the John Barrymore Collection. N.B. These DVD releases are Region 1 only.