The Extras - Warner Archive 2022 Year in Review and January 2023 Release Highlights Part 1

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

George Feltenstein takes a "look back" at some of the challenges and highlights of 2022 for the Warner Archive in this "Year in Review."  Then we discuss the first two Blu-ray releases of January 2023.  We start off with the 1928 MGM classic silent film "Our Dancing Daughters" starring Joan Crawford in a star-making role.  The music and dancing in this film are a wonderful representation of the era of the flapper and the new restoration from the best elements available now means viewers can see and hear the film in the best condition since its original release.  Next, we have a Fritz Lang directed noir western, "Rancho Notorious" (1952), starring Marlene Dietrich as the matron of a criminal hideout called "Chuck-a-Luck."  Costars Arthur Kennedy and Mel Ferrar are rivals for her attention in this murder mystery revenge story.  These are just the first two of 5 new Blu-rays coming in January from the Warner Archive.  We will discuss the other three in an upcoming episode.Purchase:Our Dancing Daughters Blu-rayRancho Notorious Blu-rayAlso available:Wife Versus Secretary Blu-rayGoodbye, Mr. Chips Blu-rayThe Long, Long Trailer Blu-ray Warner Archive Store on Amazon Support the podcast by shopping with our Amazon Affiliate linkDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and they're released on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. and they're released on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Allard, your host, and today George Feltenstein joins the show for an end-of-the-year review for the Warner Archive,

and then we'll review the first two releases of 2023. Hi, George. It's good to talk with you today. It's great to be with you, Tim, as always. It is such a pleasure. Well, it's been a different year for the Warner Archive for a variety of reasons, but it's good to kind of look back at the end of the year. What are your thoughts looking back over 2022? Well, the struggle this year really was to do the best we could under constantly changing conditions. under constantly changing conditions.

And it was particularly disappointing to me that after such a robust year in 2021, that our release schedule was highly constricted. We still had many releases that I'm extremely proud of. And a lot of them were exceptionally well embraced by our customers. But now I can speak with it being public knowledge. And as I indicated would be the case, that we're going to be pretty much back to normal in 2023. And our five titles for January are indicative of what the year will be like. And there'll be lots of surprises for various different fan bases because there are so many different groups that all want their favorite film or films or television programs or cartoons or whatever it is.

They all want what they want. And we're trying to please everybody. But that's basically impossible. You can't make everybody happy at the same time. But I'm hoping that with what we have planned, that there's going to be a lot of incredible happiness that will be helpful among the people who've been supporting us all these years. I'm very grateful for that. Now, looking back at the year, George, I was just thinking about the response on the podcast and two just huge titles, even though, you know, it was a different kind of year,

two titles just really stick out to me. But one of them I wanted to kind of revisit was The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. People have just really enjoyed that podcast, The Story of the Restoration, and I think really embraced that release on Blu-ray. story of the restoration, and I think really embraced that release on Blu-ray. Without question, it was a huge seller, incredibly successful for us, and equally successful to salute the work that Dave Strohmeyer and Tom March put into the restoration. Everybody was so grateful to Dave and Tom for having dedicated basically two years of

their life to this restoration that would have not been possible without the advent of technology, new scanners and such. It's all explained in the restoration documentary that appears on the disc. But I'm also happy to say that a couple of weeks ago, I was delighted that TCM honored the 70th anniversary of Cinerama and showed Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and the Rescuing of Fantasy Classic documentary. And I know Dave was incredibly happy about that.

So this has made the people at Decurion Corporation, which owns Cinerama, very happy. They're our partners in the movie. They have owned the movie with us. All of my colleagues at MPI who were so meticulous in their scanning of all the different film elements that had to be brought in for that. And then to have it be so embraced, so wonderfully reviewed, so appreciated by the audiences. This was really a special event. But amidst, you know, we may have had a very condensed, reduced schedule last year,

but many of the titles were special events. I think Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was an enormous physical restoration success that kind of sets it apart from almost anything else. But at the same time, we completed our remastering and restoration of all six Thin Man movies. We started the year out with Song of the Thin Man, which meant that all six films were available. And, you know, two years earlier, when we released the first movie, we had spent so much money on that,

I didn't know if we'd be able to release all six. And we were. And then we were able to release another Busby Berkeley film with Gold Diggers of 33, another Hitchcock film with Stage Fright. And we had more of our Technicolor restorations. And most importantly, I have to shout out to what MPI was able to do with The Stars Born with Janet Gaynor and Frederick March, because this is a film that looked awful for decades because it was so overshown in terrible versions.

And our restoration was absolutely mind-blowing to me and to everybody who saw it. But we applied our same technological approach to dealing with Technicolor in our release of The Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly and Lon Turner and our release of Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn. These movies burst off the screen with color. And anytime we can do a Technicolor film and do it justice, that is extraordinarily gratifying. And then we had the Judy Garland Centennial in June. We released three of her films that were deserving of restoration. And in May, we released Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Spencer Tracy. And all the time we were continuing our work on the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Frederick March,

which the fans went absolutely ballistic over in terms of their disbelief at how great it looked. And it wasn't that long ago that we talked about it. Yeah. But I'm still, even this morning, I got an email from somebody who had just gotten the disc and was saying, I can't believe what you guys were able to do with that. I thought that was kind of fun, George, that in the same calendar year, you got both of the Dr. Jekyll and Hyde movies out for fans of those two movies.

And of course, the response has been terrific for both of them, but especially the one that just came out in October. Yeah. So that was great. And, you know, right as we record this podcast, people have gotten to see, because they've been out for over two weeks now, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and The Night of the Iguana, which were our December releases. And they've been received with incredible enthusiasm. Some people are fans of both movies. Some people are fans of one and not the other.

But everybody appreciated that. When we go to release a movie, we want it to be done with the best possible quality, both in terms of picture and sound. And I'm very proud of all of my colleagues and their dedication to that commitment to excellence, that the end product that the consumer buys is something we can stand by and to be proud of. And I think that sets a good tone as we get ready to enter 2023. Well, it looks like the start of 2023 is very promising.

And we were going to talk about a couple of the releases because they come very soon out of the gate here in January. And I know a lot of people have been asking for a silent movie, and that's one of the first ones, Our Dancing Daughters. I want you to tell us about that one. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. well this is particularly exciting for me because i thought this film was beyond repair for lack of a better word i have never seen this film look good and it's a very important film not in terms of the history of cinema but it's very important in terms of reflecting the time period in which it was made. It's very important in the history of MGM. It's important in the era of the jazz age and the flappers and all that came, you know,

we're talking almost 100 years ago. And this film is excerpted in so many documentaries. And it always looked horrible. There were big hairs and dirt, scratches. It looked like it had been run over by a tractor. So I was astounded when I saw what Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging was able to do from the film elements that we had, which are not first generation, I actually found files in the MGM historical files going back to the 1950s, where they were talking about how several reels of the original negative had already deteriorated due to nitrate decomposition.

So that's 70 years ago that the original negative was already deteriorating. Wow. So the best materials that they had were protected onto safety film, and that's what MPI worked from. And what's interesting about Our Dancing Daughters is that Joan Crawford had been under contract to MGM for about three years and had made, I think, about anywhere from 15 to 20 films before that, some of which she starred in. But she didn't mean anything at the box office. She didn't really have a following. This is the film that suddenly made her a big star at MGM. And it was quite successful. It had two follow-up films, not sequels, but there was Our Modern Maidens after this and Our Blushing Brides, which was an early talkie. And from our Dancing Daughters forward, Crawford was considered one of the big MGM leading ladies,

along with, of course, Garbo and Norma Shearer, which they were, you know, the tip top. And Crawford was fighting for her opportunity to be in that league. And as a matter of fact, she heard about the script of this movie. You know, it was written for the screen. It wasn't adapted from a book. And Crawford knew about the screenplay and really campaigned for the role, got it. And it was a very wise career move.

And it is so representative of 1928. And I find it really, really fascinating. It's also very entertaining. And it's also a film that was made in the transition from silent to talkies. This is a silent film, but it was released with synchronized music and sound effects because MGM was the last of the major studios to embrace that sound had arrived. embrace that sound had arrived. And they were, you know, dipping their toe in the water a little bit by releasing short subjects that were sound and then releasing their features, some of them with synchronized orchestral music and sound effects. And as I was doing my research on this, I even found the sheets where they had recorded the orchestra and how primitive the technology was and how little they were able

to get recorded in a day. And it's just fascinating. And this film has been around. It wasn't something that was hard to see. It was available on videocassette. It's been available on Laserdisc. It is available on DVD. But it's always looked and sounded awful. And I never thought this was possible. But with the tools we have today,

it's amazing that they were able to make it absolutely meticulous, which is not how most people see silent films. When they see them, with rare exception, there's dirt, there's scratches, even the ones that have been, quote-unquote, restored. People are very forgiving with silent films in, you know, not having a pristine image. But we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want it to be pristine.

We want it to look as good, if not better than it did when it came out. And I think we've achieved that with this. when it came out and I think we've achieved that with this. I'm excited for the fans of Silent Film who wanted us to release more of them to let them know that this is not the only one.

There will be more coming and I'm very excited about that because I've wanted to do more and now it's happening and hopefully there'll be more things happening next year that we haven't even thought about yet, or certainly I've thought about them.

But going from the conception in my brain to the end is, is a very long journey. So that's exciting for me. Well, I'm not that familiar with silent films or this film, but I've seen clips from the movie and trailers and things of that nature. And the thing that I thought was so interesting was the music was fabulous and the dancing is just really terrific. And it's so entertaining.

The film starts out like a skyrocket of energy. And I find that really fascinating because it doesn't feel like it's not there to be funny. And it isn't funny. It just is representative of, I don't necessarily think that it's that different in a way than what you see in Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby. You know, I mean, these just outrageous parties. And, you know, this really captures the age in a very, you know, it was a contemporary movie of the time, not a movie made now looking back.

And it reflects the mores of the time Crawford plays a girl who is a jazz baby and wants to be the center of attraction by her dancing and her flirting when in truth she's a good girl you know it's very, I would say, very sentimental and old fashioned in that respect, in that you learn that she's really not this party monster. She's really a good girl who wants to get married and have a family and live a clean, wholesome American life. But her two friends that she goes partying with are of different temperaments. And one of them in particular, played by Anita Page, is kind of a backstabbing friend. It's very well written. And it moves in a clip. And the music is very much the music of the time some of it was originally

written for the film and some of it is containing popular melodies of the era so you're seeing it exactly as people saw it in 1928 it probably looks better than

it ever did in a release print. And yes, there's film grain, folks. That's the way films were made. Film has grain, but the grain is not anything that distracts from the film in any way. It's organic, and it looks very much like a film that was made in 1928, but it doesn't have the ravages of age and wear anymore. It's immaculate. And that's what's exciting about it. Well, that's the first of two for January. The next one kind of skips a few decades. Did you want to take us into the review and Rancho Notorious. And then two weeks later, we'll have Wife vs. Secretary with Gable,

Arlo, and Merloy, and Goodbye Mr. Chips with Robert Donat and Greer Garson, and last but certainly not least, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in the Long, Long Trailer, which I'm particularly excited about. And so that's five releases for the month of January, and that brings us back to our cadence of hopefully having at least one release a week and will be indicative of what's to come as the year progresses.

But talk about the other title that's streaming on January 10th, Rancho Notorious. This is a very unique film, and it's shot in Technicolor, and it's gorgeous. The new master is. We went off the original nitrate Technicolor negatives, and recombine them with our specific process, which yields incredible registration sharpness. And I've never seen this film look good. It's always been muddy and soft, and this is the first time it's been remastered in over 25 years. And I was,

my mouth was agape at how good it looked. And this is directed by Fritz Lang, who's one of the greatest film directors of all time. And having arrived in the United States in the 1930s to flee Hitler, he started working at MGM on Fury with Spencer Tracy, which I think we talked about last year. That's right. And he ended up working at many studios doing many different genres. But he was very notable, of course, for his film noir. And this is kind of like a neo-noir inspired Western. And it's got a very dark plot involving crime and sex and seduction and so forth.

And it stars Marlena Dietrich in probably was one of her last like leading lady roles, if you will. Not the last, but she was approaching middle age or was middle age at this time. And she couldn't be the young Bemp anymore. You know, I don't really think Bemp is the right word to describe what she was when she really sprang to fame in Germany. The Blue Angel in 1929 was what really catapulted her to success. And that German film was also shot in English.

And Paramount had gotten the rights to the film to distribute in the United States and brought Dietrich and the director Joseph von Sternberg over from Germany. And they started making several films together at Paramount, all of which were quite successful. They're true classics today. And, you know, the combination of Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich, together with some really terrific supporting actors, two of which are in leading roles, Arthur Kennedy, who a lot of people don't know who he is anymore,

and yet the man was nominated for the Academy Award five times. He was in the original production on stage on Broadway of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He did several Arthur Miller plays on Broadway, and nobody knows who he is today, which is really a shame. And I'm hoping that seeing this film, people will discover not only how great he is in the movie, but also they'll say, Oh,

I know him from such and such film because his filmography is very substantial. And then the other male lead is Mel Farrar, who most people, when they think of him, they either think, oh, he was married to Audrey Hepburn for such a long time, or they think of him from being the puppeteer in the movie Lily with Leslie Caron. But he was also a director. And he, in later years, as an older gentleman, appeared frequently on television. He was an actor and then he was a dancer. And then he got into being a dialogue director in Hollywood and doing screen tests and all sorts of things. And this was, I think, only his second or third movie as an actor. And I think he's terrific.

I think everybody's terrific in this movie. And I think he's terrific. I think everybody's terrific in this movie. And it's a murder mystery in the sense because out west, Marlena Dutrick has a ranch where the cowboys all hang out. looking for the criminal, basically, who murdered his bride, or soon-to-be bride. I can't remember if they were married or they were about to get married. It's been a while since I actually watched it. But he's there to avenge her death and find the guy that killed her. And what goes on at the Shuckaluck, that's the name of the ranch, that was going to be the name of the movie, actually. And the studio said, well, we can't call the movie that.

That makes no sense at all. Doesn't sound like an Oscar necessarily. Yeah. But you hear them sing the ballad over the main title. And there was a lot of jokes about that but this this was really an independently produced and made movie that ended up being distributed and eventually owned by rko it was supposed to be originally released through 20th century fox and then something happened with the financing and it ended up going to RKO.

So that's how it ended up in our library through our ownership of the RKO library. And RKO did not release a lot of films in Technicolor, but the ones that they did do, it's our responsibility to restore them and make them look great. And this is no longer muddy and dark if the colors are beautiful. And given that it's a dark film noir set out in the West, you know, it has a unique look to it. And you can even feel the underpinnings of Fritz Lang's German expressionist influence in the imagery.

And it's quite amazing. So I think we're starting the year off with two completely diverse films that are, you know, for the Western fans and the film noir fans, they'll want Rancho Notorious and the classic silent movie enthusiasts and golden age Hollywood enthusiasts will want Our Dancing Daughters. And we go on from there. And it's a great way to start the new year, in my opinion. Well, George, this is a good way to wrap up 2022 and kickstart 2023. So now I know there are three more films being released, as you mentioned, later in January. So you and I will be recording another podcast to talk about those in January. So George, thanks for coming on the podcast again

and filling us in on what looks to be a terrific 2023. As always, it's my pleasure, Tim. Thank you so much for having me. It's always great to have George Feltenstein on to talk about the Warner Archive releases. So I'm looking forward to a robust release schedule coming in 2023. releases. So I'm looking forward to a robust release schedule coming in 2023. One thing we didn't mention during our discussion is that there are no extras for these two releases. So I did want to clarify that. And for those of you interested in purchasing the films we discussed today, there are links in the podcast show notes and on our website at www.theextras.tv. So be sure and check those out.

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