The Extras - Warner Archive November Releases

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Film Historian and Warner Bros executive George Feltenstein reviews and provides background on the Warner Archive November releases. Titles include, Fury (1936) Blu-ray, The Last of Sheila (1973) Blu-ray, Ladies They Talk About (1933) Blu-ray, Some Came Running (1958) Blu-ray, National Velvet (1945) Blu-ray, Lullaby of Broadway (1951) Blu-ray, The Thin Man Goes Home (1944) Blu-ray, Party Girl (1958) Blu-ray, MOM Season 8 DVD, and HBO documentary releases TINA DVD & Blu-ray, and The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart DVD & Blu-ray .The Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify 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 their release on digital DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Lard, your host.

Today, Warner Brothers executive George Feltenstein joins the show to take us through the November releases from the Warner Archive. It's one of the biggest release schedules of the year, so let's dive right in. Hi, George. Hi, Tim. You have quite an amazing lineup for the Warner Archive in November. There's a lot of titles. So why don't we dive in with our very first one? It's really an incredible month because we've got probably one of the biggest months ever in terms of number of releases. releases. And on top of that, the diversity and the quality of the motion pictures and television programming itself is fairly significant, but the amount of restoration

that's gone into it, there's so much to it. When word of these titles leaked out, people were saying they think it was a killer month. So I think that's a pretty good description. The first thing that we're putting out is on the 2nd of November, and it's the eighth and final season of Mom with Allison Janney. And that's one of Chuck Lorre's great Warner Brothers television sitcoms. And it's been with Warner Archive on DVD since the second season. So we've kind of grown with it as it's been on the air for so long. And the eighth and ultimately final season, you know, had differences to it becausena faris had left the show right but i think fans

are really sad to see it go but like so many others it will live on you know in reruns and and of course that's the best thing is buying the dvd and owning it having it on the shelf whenever you want to watch it yeah i worked in television and I worked on all the Chuck Lurie comedies while I was there at Warner Brothers. And when Mom started, I was working on that. We released some featurettes the first year or two, and then you and I started talking

as it moved over to the Warner Archive release. It's a really great show. Allison Janney, I mean, she is just fabulous. So if you have all the other seasons you definitely want this last season to finish your collection yeah she's remarkable and of course you know my my introduction to her was through the west wing right so this is quite a change but it just shows the diversity of her or i should say the versatility of her acting ability.

And everybody in the cast is great. And it's rare that I'm not hooked into a show that Chuck Lorre comes up with. Especially, you know, when it comes to like Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men. I can watch them endlessly. Yeah. And now I'm just fixated on Young Sheldon. Right. Because that's heading into season five already,

and the kids are growing up. Oh, my goodness. It's kind of amazing. Yeah, I worked on that show because it was a Chuck Lorre. And just seeing them, they were first cast at age eight and nine, which is the age of my daughter right now. And I think, wow, that seems so young when I look at my daughter and there they were doing a full TV show comedy and being so good. It's just an excellent And it's grown from basically a pseudo kind of spinoff from Big Bang, but it's not a sitcom. It doesn't fit traditional definitions.

It's just incredibly well written. And I don't mind talking about it when we're talking about Warner Archive, because from season one, we made sure it was on Blu-ray because I thought it was of that quality. There aren't a lot of television shows that succeed on Blu-ray unless they're super performers like Big Bang or some of the DC series. But Young Sheldon was a great choice for us to release. And we've been very happy with it. So season five just started on the air and we'll look forward to releasing season five on Blu-ray next year. Meanwhile,

we say goodbye to mom with this DVD release on the second. And then on the ninth, we have three remastered films all off the original negative spanning from the 30s to the 70s. And then we also have an HBO spectacular biographical documentary special about Tina Turner, appropriately titled Tina. And that's on Blu-ray and DVD. The other three feature films are Blu-ray premieres, but have been on DVD before, the difference being that these have all been restored and remastered. So I'll talk about each of the films, starting with the earliest, which is called Ladies They Talk About. Now, this is one of the films that when we released it on DVD, it was part of our Forbidden Hollywood pre-code series of films. And this stars Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster and Lyle Talbot.

But it's really one of those ripped from the headlines. Barbara Stanwyck, you know, working her charms as a woman who ultimately is sent to prison. And a lot of the prison scenes are very pre-code. There are things they could never get away with once the production code was put into place. So we had released this on DVD when we started doing Forbidden Hollywood releases. I think it was on volume four, but at the time it was not a restored remaster. It was just remastered for DVD. This is going back to the original camera negative

and given a full restoration. And it is stunning. It's a knockout. And it's so beautiful. And yet, you know, the thing about the Warner Precog movies are that they're very much realistic in their portrayal of things. And it just also shows, you know, the diversity and versatility of Barbara Stanwyck. So it's a tremendous picture. I was also reading that, you know, it's based on a play by Dorothy McKay and Carlton Miles. And McKay had spent 10 months in prison in San Quentin, actually. That's pretty interesting to have as well from a woman who was actually in prison in that era. Well, absolutely. And also, we added a couple of extra things to this. We added both in high definition. We added a Looney Tunes black and white cartoon called I Like Mountain Music. And we also have a short with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy called Pure Feud. So it's like a Warner night at the movies. Very great deal of fun

and a lot to talk about because Lillian Roth is in the film and she would later go on to be the subject of an autobiography. She was a singer with a drinking problem in real life, and she went to Alcoholics Anonymous and rehabilitated herself, and Susan Hayward played her in a movie in 1955. But this is at the beginning of her career. She was a very young girl. So it's a very diverse cast. And Stanwyck did a lot of pictures for Warner in the mid and early 30s.

And this is certainly one of my favorites. And we're hoping to bring more of these out. So the more fans support it, the more we can bring more out. So the more fans support it, the more we can bring more out. The next film going chronologically is, I consider, a masterpiece that has incredible relevance today as it did when it first came out in 1936, and that's Fritz Lang's Fury. This is Fritz Lang's first American film, made it at MGM. And Fritz Lang was one of the most renowned directors in Germany. And he fled Germany because of Hitler, as so many great artists had to do, and those that were able to escape that were fortunate enough to do.

And this is a socially conscious film about a man who's wrongly accused of a crime. And there's a bloodthirsty lynch mob out to get him out of the jail cell. And they want to take the law into their own hands. I was shocked when I first saw this movie. I couldn't believe how powerful it was. Spencer Tracy is the leading man. He's great in it. You see the influence of the German expressionism from Fritz Lang,

who directed films like Metropolis and M. It's just marvelous. Sylvia Sidney is leading lady. She's terrific. And the disc comes with a commentary that Peter Bogdanovich recorded. And aside from being a great film director, Peter Bogdanovich is also a great film scholar. On more than one occasion, he has worked with us in creating commentaries. When he was a very, very young man, he was writing about film for Esquire magazine.

was writing about film for Esquire magazine. And a lot of the great directors from the 30s and the 40s and so forth were still around. And he recorded those interviews. So the commentary interspersed clips Bogdanovich had of his talks with Prince Lang about the making of Fury, along with his commentary. So it's really, really terrific. I also saw that Graham Greene really strongly praised this film in a review he wrote back for The Spectator. And to quote, he wrote, The only film I know to which I have wanted to attach the epithet of great.

And as a big Graham Greene fan, I thought that was pretty compelling. 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 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. Yeah, and these are the kinds of films that we desperately want new audiences and young audiences to discover. And one of the things that helps make that happen is by having a stellar, pristine presentation. And Fury existed only in standard definition on DVD

and the masters are very, very old. And unfortunately, this is one of the many MGM films where the original negative perished in an archival fire in the 1970s. But the preservation elements that were made in the 60s served as our best source. So we scanned that at 4K and created a brand new master, first new master in like 30 years. The net result is just a knockout. It's Spencer Tracy really at the beginning of his MGM career. Because he had been at Fox where he wasn't particularly happy with the roles he was getting. And he was on the rise at MGM, and this helped boost his visibility among the talents that were working there. So I highly

recommend that. The last film of November 9th that we're releasing thrusts us four decades ahead to the 1970s. And it's a wonderful whodunit murder mystery with lots of witty comedy attached to it and an all-star cast. It's called The Last of Sheila, and it's a Warner Brothers release from 1973. And the screenwriters were not your average screenwriters. This film was written by Anthony Perkins, the actor, best known, of course, for being Norman Bates in Psycho,

but he was so much more than that. And one of his best friends, probably the greatest composer for the musical stage of the second half of the 20th century, Stephen Sondheim. It's his only attempt to write a screenplay, and he did so with Perkins, with whom he was great friends. And Sondheim is a fanatic about puzzles and mysteries. So it was a perfect amalgam of talent. And directing the film was Herbert Ross, who also directed The Turning Point, The Goodbye Girl, and so many other films. The cast that they assembled for this film was terrific. And it included Richard Benjamin, Diane Cannon, and Raquel Welch.

And the three of them provide a commentary on the disc. Also among the stars are James Mason, Ian McShane, who has achieved fame more recently in his elder years. He was a young man when he made this movie in 1973. But, of course, on Deadwood and in the John Wick movies. He's had this renaissance of his career, but he's in this film and is wonderful in it. Then you have the incredible James Mason, who is one of my favorite actors. You also have James Coburn in here. the incredible James Mason, who is one of my favorite actors. You also have James Coburn in there.

I was going to say, James Coburn is really, I would say, one of the centerpieces of the activity. And can't mention the cast without mentioning Joan Hecate, who passed away decades ago at a very young age. And I believe she had some kind of cancer. And she was a beloved actress among not only audiences, but actors loved working with her. The film has lots of twists and turns and is really among the most requested films from the library that people

really wanted to see on Blu-ray. So when the announcement came out that we were doing this, people were completely jazzed. The film has always had a cult following and the Blu-ray is beautiful and this too comes from the original negative we found that is preferable for us from a budgetary standpoint to work off an interpositive which is a second generation element in order to keep costs down But the interpositive on this film was just not cutting the mustard. And we're very picky about our standards. So we went back to the camera negative. And the film really looks terrific and captures the whole feeling of being on a sleek yacht. And suddenly there's a murder mystery and how do you handle it and i think people are really going to enjoy that yeah and then as i mentioned before um

we courtesy of our friends at hbo are releasing both the dvd and the Blu-ray of the recently made documentary about Tina Turner, aptly titled Tina. And it really tells her story very honestly with great retrospective clips and interviews. And interviews, people became so aware of her life and really the two phases of her life, the phase of her life when she was part of the Ike and Tina Turner Review and then very dysfunctional marriage. And then her second life, which began in the 80s, life, which began in the 80s when she struck out on her own and became a superstar on her own terms and living the kind of life that she always dreamed of, but was restricted from. And I think they really captured her story very well. A lot of people are familiar with it because of the biographical film that came out in the 90s,

What's Love Got to Do With It. But this is the real thing. And HBO documentaries are always amazing. I've never seen one that didn't blow me away. And this is really terrific. So I think people are really going to like it. And the Blu-ray has the benefit of lossless audio. So the 5.1 track really pops. She's so iconic. And of course, the movie brought her story out to those who didn't know. But to get the actual factual elements all correct

and in chronological order, I think is a real treat for the fans here. correct and in chronological order, I think is a real treat for the fans here. And she's amazing. She is so on it. You can't believe, you know, that she's the age. I mean, I believe she's in her late 70s or maybe even close to 80. Wow. It's remarkable. And God bless her. She's just wonderful. It's remarkable. And God bless her. She's just wonderful.

The following week, we have another HBO documentary. And this one really, really blew me away. We're putting it out on Blu-ray. The DVD will be available at retail. And this is called How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? And it's about the Bee Gees. And if you're only familiar with the story of the Bee Gees through their music, this will be revelatory. It's an amazing film. And of course, of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb, the oldest brother, is the surviving brother. And there's so much poignancy because there was so much tragedy along with the triumph. But I found it was very personal, very well done.

And I can't recommend it enough. It's just terrific. And then when it comes to the movies that were releasing that day on the 16th, we have two out-and-out all-time classics. The first of them is a film that should have been restored and remastered probably close to 20 years ago. it was crying out for it. This film hasn't been upgraded in over 30 years. And the results show this is National Velvet, the film that cemented Elizabeth Taylor's childhood stardom.

And it also co-stars Mickey Rooney, who's wonderful in it. Everybody's wonderful in it. Very, very young Angela Lansbury playing Elizabeth Taylor's older sister. Donald Crisp plays her father. And Anne Revere in an Oscar-winning supporting actress performance plays her mother. And this is directed by the magnificent Clarence Brown, who directed so many wonderful films at MGM. And it was filmed in Technicolor. And the Technicolor cameras were so heavy and hard to use in an outdoor setting, especially a film about horse racing and whatnot, that they had to use multiple photographic systems in order to film the outdoor sequences. And this is a restoration of the original Technicolor negatives.

And the results are outstanding. And it is beautiful. For the last couple of decades, it's been a muddy mess. And now it looks beautiful. And I'm so delighted that this has finally happened. And I know that a lot of people will join me in feeling that way. And it's perfect for gift giving at the holidays. George, what was the reason why it took so long to bring it to Blu-ray? Was it the preservation process and just what it took? Or was it more of just a financial?

It's both, actually. What we needed to do was to go back to the original negatives. And when you're talking about old three strip technicolor, you're not dealing with one negative, you're dealing with three because the three layers, the yellow, cyan, and magenta are all built on one another. And that's something that requires basically three times the amount of work. The nitrate negative is stored at George Eastman Museum, as all of the surviving MGM nitrate negatives are. And we developed a process in the earliest art of the new millennium that we called ultra resolution. And we first used it on the adventures of Robin Hood, then singing in the rain and basically taking the three technicolor negatives and aligning them

in such a way that there is a sharpness and a perfection that wasn't even possible in the laboratory making prints. And that process was profusely expensive. And that process was profusely expensive. As the years have gone by and technology has improved, we're now able to do this. It's still expensive, but it is not a seven-figure minimum cost. your minimum cost. And we didn't know how it was going to turn out, especially with the outdoor sequences that used basically what we call monopack Eastman color film, which is kind of the same film that was used from mid fifts on until everything went digital. It all came out just perfectly. And this is a tribute to our talented colleagues at Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging

because they are masterful at being able to match everything down to the pixel. and being able to match everything down to the pixel. And these were 4K scans of each of the three Technicolor negatives. And the net result is just stunning. I don't think it looked this beautiful in the theater when it opened. How long does that take as well in terms of once you start that process from beginning to end? It depends on the movie for the process. But I think this has been in the works for two years. Two years. Okay. And there was a delay because of COVID. We couldn't get the negative when we wanted it because the facility where it's stored was shut down for quite some time.

And it's still an issue right now. We're still in the middle of this pandemic, and it is making it difficult to get our work done in normal fashion. So how great is it that we were able to get the negative? all working at this and scrubbing each frame manually to remove any detrius and film damage. And it looks wonderful. And one of the things that's always a hallmark is when a film is very, very, very popular, and this film was re-released many, many times. re-released many, many times. First time I saw it was when I was a child and they were re-releasing MGM classic movies for kiddie matinees. So I saw it as a very young child in a movie theater

and just loved it. But when a film is that popular, usually the elements are so beat up But when a film is that popular, usually the elements are so beat up that it makes for just a nightmare in terms of getting it to that level of perfection that we insist upon for our Blu-rays. But fortunately, everything came together very nicely here. And I think people are going to be delighted with the way the film looks. And it's really also a testament to so many talented actors and actresses in this film. And Elizabeth Taylor, I think, even now, is still underappreciated for what a great actress she was. And despite the fact that she earned two Oscars for Best Actress, her life in the public eye and the tabloids and everything else took kind of public precedence over the greatness of her talent.

And when you see a young girl, I think she was 12 years old when she made this film, it's just remarkable. Yeah. Because she's really, I would say, equivalent to a great adult actress in the dimension of her performance. So this is a wonderful film that people can share with their families and to bring it to Blu-ray and have it look so great because the DVD is the same DVD we've been selling since 1997 when DVD was first launched as a format.

So this has really been in need of some TLC, and that's what Warner Archive is here to do. This is the second. I mean, we've only gone through a few films here for November, but this is the second one already that is in the National Film Registry. So you've got quite a powerful lineup here this month. Yeah, and the beat goes on. The next film for November 16th is the first film that starred Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin together. It is a Rat Pack movie that would follow, but another member of

the Rat Pack is in the movie, but the only female member of the Rat Pack, Shirley MacLaine. So this is Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine starring in Some Came Running, directed by Vincent Minnelli, based on the novel by James Jones, who wrote From Here to Eternity, which is the book upon which the film that Frank Sinatra played a supporting role in that revitalized his acting career, and he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it. It's a very, very brilliantly acted, well-written film. And Minnelli is one of my favorite directors. I keep no secret about that because he's one of the few that could master any genre well. And this was a big hit when it came out. Shirley MacLaine, I believe this was the first of her many, many Oscar nominations. She didn't actually win until I think 25 years later for terms of endearment when she got her Best Actress Oscar.

And I think she'd been nominated six times before that. But this was her first nomination. And she loved the character she portrayed. And she's terrific in it. And God bless her. She's still with us, still acting, still giving great performances. But this is really a treasure of a movie. And of course, Sinatra and Dean Martin would go on to work together in many movies together. But this is a very heavy drama. And this is also a 4K scan off the camera negative. We had a high definition

master of this film that we put together about, I'd say 12, 13 years ago. But it is really our policy to create something that is state-of-the-art, best that it can be, and those old masters just don't cut it. So what we have here is a masterful presentation of a wonderful film, and there's a little featurette on there about the making of the film and it gives you some really good background into the dimensions of the film and the impact it had and what's interesting about it is sinatra was known for only wanting to do one take of any scene. Right. And he didn't like to rehearse. And he made a lot of movies in a very short period of time and then stopped making movies. But when he was making them,

he was kind of going from one to the other. And I don't think he was particularly happy with his performance when the film was released. But in his older years, I've been told that he watched the film again for the first time in like 20 years. And he looked at it and said, wow, this is really great. And I was good in it. You know, he had a totally different take on the work. And Minnelli was able to bring that out in him. And everybody in the cast is just terrific. So that's just November 16th, and we're only halfway through the month. The following week, we have the penultimate entry in the six-film Thin Man series. This is The Thin Man Goes Home from 1944.

This is William Powell and Myrna Loy in their fifth Thin Man film. The last one was Song of the Thin Man, and that came out in 1947. This is 1944, and they hadn't made one since 1941, Shadow of the Thin Man, which we released several months ago. And all of these Thin Man movies are so beloved by audiences. And this is a little bit different because it kind of takes William Powell and Myrna Loy and Asta, the dog, you know, out of Manhattan and out of the sophisticated whirlwind world that they usually are in and puts them basically next door to Andy Hardy. Not literally, theoretically.

It's just a lot of fun and it's a delight. But it's just a lot of fun and it's a delight. It's the first of the films in the series that wasn't directed by W.S. Van Dyke II, who directed the first four. He passed away at a very young age. That was a great tragedy. The film quality didn't suffer without Van Dyke. It was certainly a huge success, as all of the films were, and then we will have achieved our mission of getting all six out on Blu-ray, which we're very happy about. There's kind of an interesting note, because of the wartime liquor rationing, that it prompted the producer to eliminate the heavy drinking that had been integral in the previous movies in this iteration.

Absolutely. This is Nick Charles without his signature martinis. But they relied on different plot points. And both Myrna Loy and William Powell were getting a little bit older. And it just felt right to make the changes. It didn't make the films any less entertaining. And they're all wonderful. And we're delighted to be bringing this one forth. This is another one of those films where we did a 4K scan

from our best preservation elements because the original negative had been destroyed in that vault fire that took so many films. But thanks to the preservation program that started at MGM in the 60s, we had wonderful materials to work with. And I think people are going to be very, very happy with this disc. There's also some special features. You have the classic MGM, Robert Benchley short, Why Daddy? And then the classic MGM Tex Avery cartoon, Screwball Squirrel. Yes. That's always something that we tried to do was to, you know,

recreate what it was like to go to the movies in those days. We have more substantial programs of that nature on some releases where we do the Warner Night at the Movies. if we're not doing that, we try to add either a short or cartoon that has a thematic relationship to the feature or is just from that same period. In this case, these are MGM short and cartoon from the same period and what you would likely have seen if you had seen this in a Lowe's theater back in 1944. So it's a delight. And then the other release on November 23rd is a film I remember seeing at a very young age on television, but I've never seen it look this beautiful.

The technicolor just explodes off the screen. And this is Lullaby of Broadway starring Doris Day, along with Gene Nelson and Gladys George, S.C. Zakaal, and Billy DeWolf. Doris had been under contract to Warner Brothers by this time. I think this was her fourth year. I think they were making like three pictures a year with her. She was just basically a workhorse. But she loved what she was doing.

She loved being at Warner Brothers. This is one of those films that takes advantage of the fact that Warner Brothers owned a music publishing company, Warner Brothers Music, that controlled the rights to a lot of great compositions. Some written for older Warner Brothers movies and some written for the stage by the likes of Gershwin and Porter so you've got an incredible score in this movie and her leading man, Gene Nelson I think he was underrated he really never got the appreciation he deserved as a dancer. He was really quite remarkable. And Doris Day does a great deal of dancing in this film too. And the interesting

thing about that is that Doris Day's dream as a youngster was to grow up and be a dancer. She didn't ever think about being a singer. And she was in a very bad car accident that I believe shattered her leg, if that's exactly what happened. I'm not certain, but I know she either broke her leg or shattered her leg. And she was told she would never be able to dance again. And so she started to steer her ambitions and her thoughts toward singing. And that's when she started singing. And of course, she is a naturally amazing voice and became a big singing star with big bands, most notably Les Brown's band, which he had the hit record of Sentimental Journey.

But dancing was kind of out of the question. The big band era eventually led to her getting discovered and getting a Warner contract. And we've put out a lot of the films on Blu-ray that Doris made when she first came to Warner Brothers, including Romance in the High Seas and My Dream is Yours and on Moonlight Bay. I would say it's not a masterpiece of a screenplay, but it serves as a good story bed for phenomenal song and dance numbers. The payoff is that Doris had to do an enormous amount of dancing in this film, and she didn't think she could do it. Now, she had already been dancing a little bit in some of the other films, but not like what was required in this. And one of the aspects involved dancing up and down very large flights of stairs.

And she never thought she could do it. And she never thought she could do it. And of course she could do it perfectly. And with Gene Nelson by her side, they're just great. And there's a wonderful performance in this film. That's kind of poignant because she plays the daughter of a Broadway has been star who's become kind of down in the dumps and performing in Greenwich Village nightclubs of ill repute. And Doris Day plays the daughter who's been

growing up in Europe, not knowing that her mother has fallen upon alcoholism and hard times. And needless to say, all of these plot lines come together with a happy ending and a big production number at the end. And of course, the big production number at the end is the title song, Lullaby of Broadway, which first was heard in Gold Diggers of 1935, which we hope to bring to Blu-ray someday. This is also a beautiful, first-time-ever-in-high-definition Technicolor presentation, and I think the fans are going to be thrilled with it. That song won the Oscar, Lullaby of Broadway,

and has been redone by many others, Andrew Sisters, Tony Bennett over the years. So the music is just fabulous. Oh, I think there are so many phenomenal renditions of it. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the Tony Bennett one because his Carnegie Hall concert album, I think that was close to his opening number, and he just blew the roof off of Carnegie Hall singing that song. And of course, the original production number itself was probably one of Busby Berkeley's best.

So I do hope we can get that to Blu-ray sometime in the future. Our last November release is a film from Nicholas Ray, the director of Rebel Without a Cause, the director of many great film noir. He could do really almost anything, and he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. And he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. And you've got the combination of stars, Robert Taylor, Sid Cherise, Lee J. Cobb, who's so well-known for having been Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, and John Ireland. And this is a gangster picture set in Chicago in the 1920s. But it has this strange combination of cinemascope and metro color. Usually you picture those

pictures in black and white and academy aspect ratio. Nicholas Ray just brought something unique to this movie. And Century surprises playing a leading role in a film that isn't a musical. She and Robert Taylor have great chemistry together. The film's called Party Girl. It was released in 1958. This, again, it comes from a time when the film stock being used in the films, the Eastman Color film stock from the late 1950s, is very susceptible to color fading. And it's very hard to get a good, crisp color image off the negative. Now, for some came running, we didn't know if we'd be able to do it or not,

but we did. For Party Girl, we did a comparison between the original camera negative, which was badly faded, and the safety preservation separations, which would be far superior in terms of getting us a really, really excellent presentation. So it's the same year, same studio, but every film is going to react differently in the film stock and eliminated this problem where the yellow layer kind of collapses and elevates the fading and the grain and so forth and so on. So we go back to the safety separations, which are the backup so that you can rebuild the film. And we did this, we've done this several times. We did it most recently with Curse of Frankenstein last year, and the results were spectacular. And we did an A-B test,

and the best way to make Party Girl look the best that it could be was to go back to the separations. So again, it lengthens the amount of time that it takes to do these things, but the results are worth it. And Party Girl is not the most famous of Nicholas Ray's movies, but he's got a cult following. And if you haven't seen it before, you're in for a real treat, a real surprise. It's a color cinema scope gangster noir, and it's directed by Nicholas Ray, and it's from MGM. And those are very strange combinations. Well, this was also since Charisse's last film for MGM after 14 years. It was her last acting role after having been there so long. in 1994 when she was one of the hosts of That's Entertainment 3, which I had the pleasure of

shepherding into production. So you're correct in that this was her last MGM regular performing role. And it was a very high note to leave on. She was a very lovely lady and so talented. There are two dance numbers in this film because she plays a dancer, but it's the acting opportunities that she was seeking that really made this special for her. And then you, of course, have Robert Taylor as the male lead. And he had been at the studio 23 years by this time. He was, I think, the longest contract player at MGM. I think he made his last MGM movie right before he died. MGM movie right before he died. He died in, I think, 1967. He died of lung cancer. He's a very heavy smoker. And his death at such a young age came as quite a shock. And this is when people were just waking up to the dangers of cigarette smoking. And in this film, he was a lot younger than he looks, because he looks a lot

older than he really was, because he smoked a lot. And that isn't good for your skin. I also saw there was a note about the musical numbers, you know, that were choreographed by Robert Sidney, that there was a musician strike, which interrupted some of the filming and rehearsals for the dance numbers. So Citrus had to she had to kind of perform, you know, without the musicians there, which was different. Yeah. Fifty eight was the huge music strike. And that was the year that all the studios had staff musicians. And after the strike, the staff studio on occasion, but it wasn't the same. It was just part of the changing time. So as you can see, it's quite a unique and diverse lineup of movies.

And there's really something for everyone. And we're very excited about what November is going to bring to the fans of the Warner Archive. It's an amazing light up. And I think just in time, like you said, for the holidays, so that people can order some of these Blu-rays of their favorite films. And thanks for coming on the show and telling us all about it. It's so much fun to hear from you directly about what's going on in the Warner Archive. about it. It's so much fun to hear from you directly about what's going on in the Warner Archive. You're just a wealth of information. You know everything, you know, all the work that went into the preservation of these films. And I know we're all grateful for that. Well, it's my pleasure. And I look forward, if we can do it again, I'm ready, willing and able.

I want to thank George Feltenstein for joining the podcast today to take us through the loaded November release slate from the Warner Archive. And for those looking forward to part two of George's interview about the history of the Warner Archive, that will be available later this week. Be sure and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast provider so that you don't miss any of George's episodes. For those of you interested in learning more

about the Warner Archive releases discussed in the show today, there will be detailed information on the website at www.theextras.tv. Also, follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheExtrasTV or Instagram at TheExtras.tv to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images

and behind the scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. And if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. Until next time, you've been listening to The Extras with Tim Millard. Stay slightly obsessed. The Extras is a production of Otaku Media, producers of podcasts, behind the scenes extras, and media that connects creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals at www.otakumedia.tv or look for the link in the show notes.