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Umm...is anyone else getting confused by Moe Dickstein and repeat having similar avatars? There's only one sunset avatar allowed at a time on this forum!

Lol I claim dibs on mine! It's from a film I made.

Clearly you win, as repeat has already changed his. Now I really feel like I accomplished something today.

Moe Dickstein wrote:Lol I claim dibs on mine! It's from a film I made.

Fuck, I wish I could say that about mine!! Been meaning to change it for a while anyway - this slight adjustment will have to serve for now

Back on topic, did Guillermin ever do anything in a similar vein with Rapture, or was that basically a one-off? What other films of his might be worth finding? I'm under the impression that he did a lot of standard fare, and that the Blue Max has something of a good reputation, and Towering Inferno of course, but is there anything in this artsy-fartsy style?

Nice sunset out today, don't you guys think?

Just to be pedantic, mine is actually a sun RISE. I know because I was there.

Since TT will be releasing Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia later this year, I assume that they will be importing the commentary track from the old MGM DVD, which actually includes Nick Redman of TT himself.

I just finished watching the film for the first time. Overall, I liked it very much. I have some nitpicks though, particularly that the plot surrounding Benny's love interest wasn't as developed as properly as I think it should have been (that Kris Kristofferson scene didn't quite work for me). But, otherwise I really liked it. I'll probably pick up TT's release, assuming that it is better than the Italian (?) Blu-Ray.

As Redman is one of the founding members of the "Peckinpah Posse" I'm sure he'd have no problem talking the others and MGM into authorizing use of their commentary track. In fact I'm sure he has his sights on doing the same for JUNIOR BONNER, KILLER ELITE and possibly even STRAW DOGS. JUNIOR already has a commentary and I'm sure they'd all love to chime in on one for KILLER. I believe they also did one for the Freemantle edition of STRAW DOGS which they might get authorization to port. All four of these titles are MGM so I'm sure he has them in mind. For that matter I'm also sure he (they?) would love to nab OSTERMAN WEEKEND (for which they also did a commentary) from Anchor Bay and whoever/whatever controls CROSS OF IRON. In fact I believe it's a lead pipe cince they'd love to corner the market on all Peckinpah outside the Warner umbrella!

Straw Dogs is ABC, so I think MGM/Fox have the license on it right now, they may not be able to further sub-license things, but then again they might - but it's not a simple situation of "MGM owns that"

I'll throw in with zedz and david hare as a Rapture hater.

To paraphrase the Stanley Kramer brigade, it strains mightily to be Cinemah, but lacks the soul and audacity of the European films it emulates. Also, Dean Stockwell gives perhaps his worst performance as James Dean in a cardigan.

Back to criterion10's original question about blind-buying TT releases - I've done it with quite a few (usually whenever they have a spend $100 and get a signed ___ promotion - I sold my signed Christine and payed for the rest of the releases).

Of the TT releases I own, the ones I consider essential (and are still available) are Picnic, Leave Her To Heaven, and Hard Times. All 3 are great films, and marked improvements over the SD versions. Renoir's Swamp Water and Edwards' Experiment In Terror are also very good. Richard Brooks' Bite The Bullet is an entertaining, if unessential, western. Both Huston's The Roots of Heaven and Quine's Bell, Book & Candle are gorgeous transfers, but merely sporadically interesting films. Pony Soldier is an inferior western with an awful transfer.

It's a shame it's sold out now, but I'd put Lang's The Big Heat in the absolute top tier of TT must-haves.

matrixschmatrix wrote:It's a shame it's sold out now, but I'd put Lang's The Big Heat in the absolute top tier of TT must-haves.

Yeah, I'm pissed that I missed that one.

Moe, you're absolutely correct regarding ABC and STRAW DOGS. The same applies to JUNIOR BONNER as well due to the fact they were both originally produced and released by ABC/Cinerama Releasing Corp. ALFREDO GARCIA and KILLER ELITE are the only titles owned outright by MGM by virtue of their United Artists origins. My overall point remains though as I'm sure Redman et. al. would love to corral as much of old Sam as possible.

Rapture makes my top 15 out of the 1,000+ movies I've seen made in the nineteen-sixties so I'll go ahead and carry the torch here seeing as there's a bit of a pile on it now. It's not quite as wonderful as Sundays and Cybele, though, which has the other big Patricia Gozzi performance and actually shares some of Rapture's thematic territory.

Regarding other John Guillermin movies, looking over his filmography I haven't seen any of the twenty-one movies he made prior to Rapture. Skimming the IMDB listings for these films, most of them are dramas and comedies so I'm thinking that Rapture may represent the kind of film he was working toward before he became (more or less exclusively) a Hollywood action director. I have every intention of seeing some of his early work at some point.

From what I have seen, some of the same directorial flourishes are on display in Guillermin's 1968 House of Cards, which was a Charade/To Catch a Thief/Arabesque knock-off, but still kind of fun. It has lovely widescreen photography and a really great Francis Lai score, both of which demonstrate the more "European" style as seen in Rapture. However, with House of Cards also failing with critics and at the box office, it was the last time I know of where this side of Guillermin was expressed.

While I'm surprised zedz didn't think much of Rapture (given that our tastes often seem to be very similar), I understand why it's a divisive movie. To me, it has a certain ramshackle beauty, some roughness around the edges of its ambition, that I admire. I love its kind of unabashed, windswept adolescent romanticism (Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is a recent addition to the genre).

If you want an authentically true American director who also had a deeply European bent try Arthur Penn

I will agree that The Miracle Worker, which I count among the truly greatest films ever made, is better than Rapture (which being rather gothic doesn't strike me as very Truffaut-esque or all that New Wave like - but it does have a Georges Delerue score). But let's not forget that Guillermin was British, not American.

The only Guillermin film that I think is pretty good is Death on the Nile, but Peter Ustinov could have carried anyone.

Thanks for all the Guillermin recommendations/viewpoints (and the Penn digression - Night Moves has been sitting in the kevyip for waaaaay too long over here!)

Maybe Guillermin was a hack, and I'm not equipped to defend his career as a whole - but of course even workaday directors might turn out, maybe not Great Art, but at least original and enduring work when all the pieces happen to click together. I could definitely see those particular potential irritants all over Rapture, but for some reason they didn't spoil it for me, almost on the contrary; like Matt said, I think there's a sort of a rough, desperate, sleepwalking beauty in it that comes exactly from what the haters perceive as overstraining for greatness and annoying performances - in fact I feel it would've been nowhere near as touching without Ms. Gozzi's divisive histrionics.

I guess it's a matter of personal sensitivity thresholds - compared to the REALLY bad cases of "overstraining for Art", I just didn't get that familiar squirmy feeling of embarrassment here; the city sequence threw me off a bit, but by that point I was fond enough of the film to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. (It does feel like a misstep, almost like he ran out of time/budget and had to squeeze 30 minutes of storyline into ten minutes, covering it up with the hysterical stylization)

I'm afraid I have the same response to Patty Duke in Penn's Miracle Worker as I would have to Pia Zadora in Diary of Anne Frank

Well, that second-to-last scene in The Miracle Worker may be the best acted, best scored, most thrilling moment in all of cinema so we're going to have to agree to disagree there too. And while I love that film and have an endless amount of adoration for Penn's direction, I would find it hard to believe that Guillermin made a worse film than Penn's Four Friends (has a film ever had a more disastrous second half than that one?). They were both hit and miss in my opinion.

even a complete miscalculation like Mickey One

I like this film, but it peaks with the title sequence.

in fact I feel it would've been nowhere near as touching without Ms. Gozzi's divisive histrionics

Gozzi's work in Rapture and Sundays and Cybele are my favorite performances of the sixties. That said, I don't believe one can really give Guillermin a fair assessment without seeing his earlier work (which so far as I can tell nobody posting here has unless they didn't mention it), which I plan to do at some point.

Dylan wrote:I don't believe one can really give Guillermin a fair assessment without seeing his earlier work, which I plan to do at some point

If you get around to that, please report back! There's no discussion at all even in the BFI Crowded Day / Song of Paris thread, but antnield's review offers something of a reappraisal - Olaf Möller has also been championing Guillermin as of late, which fact along with the general enthusiasm for Rapture over here initially piqued my interest in the man. Now to rewatch The Towering Inferno and get hold of that BFI set...

Body Double booklet art:

Does anyone know if Twilight Time has said anything about whether they're sourcing their Body Double BD from the new 4K restoration, and what, if any, extras will be included?

Still trying to talk myself out of buying this release. I used to be fairly ambivalent towards TT's approach to their releases, but more and more, they're inspiring avoidance of the label.

Adam Grikepelis wrote:Does anyone know if Twilight Time has said anything about whether they're sourcing their Body Double BD from the new 4K restoration, and what, if any, extras will be included?

It is from the new restoration, and will include the four featurettes from the previous Sony DVD plus the isolated score.

Thanks Jeff.