haineshisway
Senior HTF Member
Is it coincidence or just serendipity that the two latest Wild Side releases from France, Curse of the Demon and Gun Crazy, two completely different kinds of films, both star the wonderful Peggy Cummins?
Gun Crazy the little Blu-ray is inside of a great big box that houses a gorgeous hardcover book by American noir expert, Eddie Muller, which is in French. However, it is loaded with script excerpts, incredible photos and a poster gallery so it's fun to look at and it's just a shame that the text couldn't be in English and French, although the actual photocopied script excerpts and the various production letters are in English. It's very expensive, but, like Curse of the Demon, I love the film so much that I just bought it anyway.
I first saw Gun Crazy at some point in the mid-1970s when I got a 16mm print of it and I instantly fell in love with everything about the film - the brilliant direction, script, photography and the performances. I watched it quite often. At either the first or second Telluride Film Festival I went because Joseph H. Lewis was there to talk about Gun Crazy, which they were showing. That was an amazing experience, because at that festival was the first time I ever saw Sunrise by Murnau, which they showed outdoors. I remember being huddled under a blanket with some young woman I'd just met - believe me, it was fun.
I can't find my DVD of Gun Crazy at the moment. But watching the new Blu-ray from Wild Side I was immediately struck by how many opticals are in the film. Of course, watching for that sort of thing is a by-product of the Blu-ray age and discussion boards - certainly it would never have occurred to us to watch that sort of thing in the old days when we just watched movies. It is wall-to-wall opticals, rather like Giant in that regard - one after another, with very long scenes playing completely as optical dupes. When you finally cut out of those shots to the few non-optical shots in the film, then you get wonderful clarity, that looks quite fetching in this transfer. The detail is really nice as is the contrast in all those shots. The opticals, of course, don't look as good. If I could find the DVD I could tell you better whether there's been an attempt to clean up the grain in the opticals - with the exception of a few of them, they don't have much grain, but that wasn't bothersome to me, and that may just be the way they look. I'll keep trying to find the DVD which is here somewhere and then I can compare.
But I'm happy to have this and watching it again was very pleasurable and Miss Cummins is absolutely brilliant. There are some extras, and since most of the participants in them are American (or English in the case of Miss Cummins, who I was rather surprised to see is still with is, as her segment was taped at the Castro Theater in San Francisco this past summer - she's still beautiful and still feisty), you can watch and enjoy them. The film has removable English subtitles (via remote) and despite the Region B listing, it plays fine in my region A player, just as Curse of the Demon did. Again, some of the detail in this transfer is rather breathtaking, but the many opticals are not as sharp, which is as it should be. If you love the film, I can't imagine you wouldn't be pleased with this package, presuming you want to pay the price.
Gun Crazy the little Blu-ray is inside of a great big box that houses a gorgeous hardcover book by American noir expert, Eddie Muller, which is in French. However, it is loaded with script excerpts, incredible photos and a poster gallery so it's fun to look at and it's just a shame that the text couldn't be in English and French, although the actual photocopied script excerpts and the various production letters are in English. It's very expensive, but, like Curse of the Demon, I love the film so much that I just bought it anyway.
I first saw Gun Crazy at some point in the mid-1970s when I got a 16mm print of it and I instantly fell in love with everything about the film - the brilliant direction, script, photography and the performances. I watched it quite often. At either the first or second Telluride Film Festival I went because Joseph H. Lewis was there to talk about Gun Crazy, which they were showing. That was an amazing experience, because at that festival was the first time I ever saw Sunrise by Murnau, which they showed outdoors. I remember being huddled under a blanket with some young woman I'd just met - believe me, it was fun.
I can't find my DVD of Gun Crazy at the moment. But watching the new Blu-ray from Wild Side I was immediately struck by how many opticals are in the film. Of course, watching for that sort of thing is a by-product of the Blu-ray age and discussion boards - certainly it would never have occurred to us to watch that sort of thing in the old days when we just watched movies. It is wall-to-wall opticals, rather like Giant in that regard - one after another, with very long scenes playing completely as optical dupes. When you finally cut out of those shots to the few non-optical shots in the film, then you get wonderful clarity, that looks quite fetching in this transfer. The detail is really nice as is the contrast in all those shots. The opticals, of course, don't look as good. If I could find the DVD I could tell you better whether there's been an attempt to clean up the grain in the opticals - with the exception of a few of them, they don't have much grain, but that wasn't bothersome to me, and that may just be the way they look. I'll keep trying to find the DVD which is here somewhere and then I can compare.
But I'm happy to have this and watching it again was very pleasurable and Miss Cummins is absolutely brilliant. There are some extras, and since most of the participants in them are American (or English in the case of Miss Cummins, who I was rather surprised to see is still with is, as her segment was taped at the Castro Theater in San Francisco this past summer - she's still beautiful and still feisty), you can watch and enjoy them. The film has removable English subtitles (via remote) and despite the Region B listing, it plays fine in my region A player, just as Curse of the Demon did. Again, some of the detail in this transfer is rather breathtaking, but the many opticals are not as sharp, which is as it should be. If you love the film, I can't imagine you wouldn't be pleased with this package, presuming you want to pay the price.
