Mr. Arkadin on DVD soon

[jaime marzol]

along with the cuckoo clock? you put me in high company indeded.

it didn't strike me till a few hours after i posted that, how funny it would be, rasputin with a hair cut, in the royal palace, chasing chicks and honking the horn. i find that whole period of history, the last czar, lennin, and stalin fascinating in a grotesque way, like hitler.

has any one seen FANNIE AND ALEXANDER? is that the title?

[Jeff Wilson]

FANNY AND ALEXANDER is the Bergman film, and it's superb. Do you mean NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA? Haven't seen that one. There's also the ANASTASIA movie with Ingrid Bergman covering that period.

[Terry]

rasputin with a hair cut, in the royal palace, chasing chicks and honking the horn

Sounds like Harpo Marx!

[Le Chiffre]

Do you mean NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA? Haven't seen that one. There's also the ANASTASIA movie with Ingrid Bergman covering that period.

There's also 10 DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, A 1967 docu about the Russian Revolution narrated by Orson Welles. Haven't watched my tape of it in a while, but I think it deals with Rasputin too. It combines real footage with Eisenstein recreations, all mixed together F FOR FAKE style, which has always made me wonder if Welles had a hand in the editing.

[Christopher]

Just wanted to add this nugget of information about the forthcoming Criterion DVD release of MR. ARKADIN. One of the extras will be Simon Callow talking about the interview he conducted with Robert Arden before Arden died. It was not possible to use the original tape because there was too much background noise (the interview took place in a noisy London restaurant); so the solution was to have Callow reconstruct what Arden said while recalling his experiences during the filming of MR. ARKADIN. Should be interesting!

[jaime marzol]

thanks for those titles jeff, i'm going to look those up. after being captivated by eisenstein's oktober, and an incredible documentary called, STALIN, MAN OF STEEL, i have become very interested in that period.

i saw, HEINRICH REINHARDT; PORTRAIT OF EVIL. a fabulous documentary. looked him up in www.imdb.com, and found branagh made a movie about the wannassee conference, he played reinhard, called CONSPIRACY, i found it at netflix, it's great.

a series of documentaries about hitler's last days led me to the best film about that topic i've ever seen, DOWNFALL. incredibly good.

any one have OPERATION DAYBREAK? it's about the plot to kill reinhardt.

[jaime marzol]

NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRIA is the one i meant, but will love to see bergman's. i loved WILD STRAWBERRIES.

last night i rewatched a felini documentary/essay film, called ENTREVISTA. what an exciting film to watch. till we go to anita ekberg's house and she's the size of a buffalo, and mastroiani looked embalmed, but it didn't matter because of how great they captured the crazyness of a felini production, and how musical the screaming italians are in felini movies.

for ENTREVISTA fellini had everything, and i mean everything. poor welles made his essay film, F-FOR-FAKE, with gum and string. when the 2 films are considered side by side it really drives home the extreme state of poverty welles had to work in, and i dare say F-FOR-FAKE is as exciting as ENTREVISTA.

[tonyw]

:) For those of us who do not have access to the French DVD of the AMBERSONS perhaps mteal may want to provide us with another fascinating transcription concerning Welles's comments about Cortez and Costello?

[tonyw]

Just wanted to add this nugget of information about the forthcoming Criterion DVD release of MR. ARKADIN. One of the extras will be Simon Callow talking about the interview he conducted with Robert Arden before Arden died. It was not possible to use the original tape because there was too much background noise (the interview took place in a noisy London restaurant); so the solution was to have Callow reconstruct what Arden said while recalling his experiences during the filming of MR. ARKADIN. Should be interesting!

I really dread this in view of THE ROAD TO XANADU. Surely an experienced interviewer would have been able to place the microsphone in a better position? Brett Halsey did this for me in Memphis some years ago and I had no problem interviewing George Romero five years ago over breakfast. The "explanation" sounds highly suspicious. I hope this is not going to be another excuse for Callow to engage in Welles bashing

[The Night Man]

Surely an experienced interviewer would have been able to place the microsphone in a better position?

I imagine the interview was recorded for Callow's print biography and not with any notion of reproducing it as a DVD-extra. So what may have been perfectly acceptable for documentation purposes was probably not "clean" enough to reproduce on a commercial DVD release.

[jaime marzol]

the tapes bogdanovich did with directors, and with welles were bad, or atmospheric, depending on what part of the fence you stand, but they are used in every documentary. have any of you noticed how those great tapes have made it to the shelves? i just got STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and bogdanovich's recordings with hitch are there. i don't think classic film fans are put off by stuff that is bad quality. i'm used to the dirty original.

[R Kadin]

any one have OPERATION DAYBREAK? it's about the plot to kill reinhardt

Jaime, FYI..
Reinhard Heydrich ("The Butcher of Prague") and his assassination were also covered by none other than Fritz Lang and (Welles connection, folks) Bertholt Brecht in a 1943 Hollywood film, Hangmen Also Die. Apparently, this was Brecht's only Hollywood script. Evidently, this title is also available via Netflix.

[jaime marzol]

r kadin, super, thanks for the lead. i also now have on my list the bergman film FANNY AND ALEXANDER, which jeff said is superb, and it comes with a seperate bonus disc! i also have on my list, NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRIA, the director of this film has made a few decent films so this might be OK. and ANASTASIA is on their 'soon to arriver' list.

will get the lang film in my list.

what a great title for a film about reinhardt, HANGMEN ALSO DIE! this guy was burning f*ckin evil. talk about the beady eyed tutor, how are you reinhardt.

r kadin, about 20 years ago i caught the last 20 min of OPERATION DAY BREAK, it left such and impression on me, that 20 years later when i saw the reinhardt documentary, i knew that this timothy bottoms film was about the the guys that killed reinhardt.

also, at netflix, very worth seeing is the leni reifenstahl film, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, and a documentary about her. she's great, she denied everything contradicting goerbel's diary, which was quoted to her in the documentary.

[jaime marzol]

did you guys see the documentary on ANASTASIA? they found the mass grave of nicholas and family, they'd all been shot in the head, and indeed 2 bodies were missing.

they got dna from the skeletons, they exumed the body of the woman who claimed she was anastasia, and got her dna.

she was lying. she came close to pulling off the hoax of the century. some speculate that the reason she knew all the intimate details about the family was that she was a servant's daughter

[Jeff Wilson]

Make sure you watch the full length version of FANNY AND ALEXANDER, which is superior to the shortened theatrical version. Criterion put out both versions for completeness' sake, but the full version is the one to see (it runs about 312 minutes, compared to the shorter version's 188).

Getting back to ARKADIN, the Callow bit about Arden should be interesting, given our discussion of a while back about how no one had really seemed to talk to him about his work with Welles on the film. This could honestly be the best DVD package put together for a Welles film, from the sound of it. Who would have thought it, for ARKADIN of all films?