Your most-wanted candidates for Fox's Studio Classics in 2004? (1 Viewer)

[Joel Vardy]

I'm sorry if it was already mentioned...but since the push out of The Grapes of Wrath this would be on top of my list for Fox Classics in '04.

Joel

 

[Herb Kane]

I'll second Walter's request; Noir.

Call Northside 777 (1948)
Cry of the City (1948)
Dark Corner, The (1946)
Fallen Angel (1945)
House of Bamboo (1955)
House on 92nd Street, The (1945)
Kiss of Death (1947)
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Night and the City (1950)
Nightmare Alley (1947)
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Road House (1948)
Street with No Name, The (1948)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

Plus many others....

 

[Paul_Scott]

Fox should start a "cult/camp" type collection, similar to MGM's Midnite Movies, for fare that doesn't really fall into the "classic" category.

yes, absolutely!

and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry & Vanishing Point should be among the first.

i wonder how well the sales are for MGMs budget MM line?
i generally hate MGM and cringe whenever i realize a favorite film is under their domain, but i have to admit they have done an exceptional job with their MMs.

 

[Walter Kittel]

Herb - Nice list. I'd purchase every one of those titles.

I've listed numerous noir titles in a multitude of wish lists on the HTF in the past, hence my initial terse post. The reluctance of the various studios to release noir titles has been a source of much frustration to me. ( Because this is a Fox wish list thread I'll leave it at that vs. belaboring the point. )

Since Studio Classics was the initial criteria I'll only list a few titles:

Kiss of Death - Is this even still on the schedule?
Night and the City
House of Bamboo
Pickup on South Street
Leave Her To Heaven

- Walter.

 

[Jeff_HR]

The Three Faces of Eve

Formerly released on VHS as a Studio Classic, and such a great film.

Don't forget that it was released on Laserdisc too. (I own the LD)

A great many of the titles mentioned would be finding a home in my library if released.

 

[Craig Beam]

JANE EYRE!!!!!!

 

[Doug Bull]

My Fox Classic wants would be,

"The Bravados"
"The Diary of Anne Frank"
"The Sun also Rises"
"Bernadine"
"The Revolt of Mammie Stover"
"The Girl Can't Help It"
"The Tall Men"
"Daddy Long Legs"
"Three Coins in the Fountain"
"Garden of Evil"
"Prince Valiant"
"New Faces"
"Broken Lance"
"Beneath the 12 Mile Reef"(not a bootleg)
"Viva Zapata"
"State Fair" (1962)
"The Best Things in Life are Free"
"Rawhide"
"Yello Sky"
"That Lady in Ermine"
"Mother Wore Tights"
"The Shocking Miss Pilgrim"
"Captain from Castile"
"Three Little Girls in Blue"
"Centenial Summer"
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"
"Wilson"
"Hello Frisco Hello" ( please, please)
"Son of Fury"
"Tales of Manhattan"
"My Gal Sal"
"That Night in Rio"
"The Riders of the Purple Sage"
"Moon Over Miami" ( please, please)
"Belle Star"
"Down Argentine Way"
"The Blue Bird"
"Jesse James"
"Drums along the Mohawk"
"Kentucky"
"In Old Chicago"
"Wake up and Live"
"On the Avenue"
"Ali Baba goes to Town"
"Romona"

and any other Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Shirley Temple, June Haver, Sonja Henie flick, also not to mention other Westerns and action features as well as any Historic Short Subjects, like those mentioned in a previous Post above and of course a revisit to remaster the previous Rogers and Hammerstein disasterous DVDs.
PHEW!!

 

[Bill Burns]

Steve wrote:

Hate to break it to ya, but Oklahoma and South Pacific weren't actually made by Fox.

Well, don't beat yourself up about it.

Magna Theatre Corporation produced Oklahoma! (they "raised money (to produce the film)" as a banner project for the Todd-AO process), and it appears they also distributed the film in its original 70mm runs, with RKO handling the 35mm CinemaScope version (this according to the IMDB). At some point rights were transferred to 20th Century Fox. To call it a "Fox Studio Classic" might be a stretch, granted, but Fox owns the rights, and they've retired their "Five-Star" line ... I think they could include it as a Fox Studio property, particularly given that they themselves produced some of the later Rodgers and Hammerstein films. Oklahoma! belongs to them, so calling it a "Fox Studio" film really isn't all that different from calling it a "20th Century Fox" film, which would be done for theatrical re-releases and is, of course, implied on the current DVDs. If they own it, it's theirs, and it's far from uncommon for a studio which now holds the rights to the films of another studio to market the picture under their own banner (in fact this is de facto policy). Warner Bros. has added their company logo as the lead-in to the DVD of Citizen Kane, for instance. The picture itself opens with the proper RKO label. "RKO" doesn't appear on the cover or spine; "WB" is on the spine, and the RKO label (or rather a spiffy new version of their logo) appears on the back amidst a slew of logos, also including WB.

I don't know if any 20th Century Fox assets were used in making Oklahoma!. An original theatrical poster for South Pacific, however, credits it as "a MGM/UA production" which was "produced at 20th Century Fox." This might naturally cause a bit of head scratching; I assume they're using the word "produced" to mean financed and overseen in the first instance, and "physically shot" in the second.

I'd have no objection to Fox calling Oklahoma! and South Pacific "Fox Studio Classics" if that gets them remastered and presented in definitive DVD editions (particularly Oklahoma!). Fox has stated in the past that poor sales of their current editions have kept such remasters unlikely; if putting them into the successful "Fox Studio Classics" line gets it done, I'm all for it, and you won't hear a peep of protest from my quarter.

Greg: those are great ideas for supplements on The King and I and South Pacific. Enthusiastically seconded.

 

[Douglas R]

If they own it, it's theirs, and it's far from uncommon for a studio which now holds the rights to the films of another studio to market the picture under their own banner (in fact this is de facto policy). Warner Bros. has added their company logo as the lead-in to the DVD of Citizen Kane, for instance.

Actually the Warner Bros logo appears before the menu screen as is the case with all their DVDs. There's no implication that Warner Bros are saying KANE is a Warner production; the film itself starts, as it should, with the RKO logo.

 

[Bill Burns]

Which I went on to say in my very next sentence, Douglas:

policy). Warner Bros. has added their company logo as the lead-in to the DVD of Citizen Kane, for instance. The picture itself opens with the proper RKO label.

When you first place your DVD in the player, the first logo to greet you, before you ever see a menu screen, is WB's.With their logo also on the spine and right alongside RKO's on the back, this seems part and parcel with the notion of calling a classic film Fox acquired, rather than made, a "Fox Studio Classic." Such a declaration is only by inference, as this label is simply the name of a series of discs of which it would be a part, a banner at the top of the front cover. The opening credits for the studio and production entities that actually made the film would undoubtedly remain in front of the film itself (though this has not, by a long shot, always been the case in the history of film acquisitions and re-releases).

 

[Jon Robertson]

If anyone damaged The King and I's camera negative by printing directly off of it in 1996, it was a dramatic error of judgment by no means necessary in properly mastering from 55mm. A restoration of those elements could now be duplicated to negative for printing and this duplicate element used for creating the positive element used in a video master. 55mm to high definition tape to downconverted DVD -- the best path for King and I fidelity.

I'm extremely hesitant to accuse you of any kind of error, Bill, but did you mean 65mm or is 55mm an actual printing format?

 

[Bill Burns]

No, no, I make 'em all the time, Jon. But not in this case. The King and I and Carousel were both shot in CinemaScope 55, a 55mm negative large format process. All release prints would have been 35mm CinemaScope reductions (The Widescreen Museum explains that the 55mm format was used to increase the overall quality of 35mm prints -- a better 35mm by virtue of large format reduction, in other words). To preserve the fullest character of the films as shot, I advocate returning to the 55mm original materials and using these as the source for any video master (dupe 'em as 55mm and master 'em, in other words; you potentially diminish the gain intended by the format when you master from a reduction, as a video master, even at high definition, loses further definition and fidelity from its 35mm source; returning to 55mm allows the master to preserve as much of the original film's character as possible. A copy of a copy is never as good as a copy of an original, to grossly generalize the point).

 

[Derek_McL]

Too few people wanting the musicals of the 30s/40s instead of reissues of the over-rated (IMHO) Rodgers/Hammerstein magnum opuses ! South Pacific is probably the best of the 50s ones but I have to admit that as I 've grown older I'm becoming a big Sound of Music fan !

The Alice Faye (I particularly love her 30s'films),Betty Grable ones and a few others (like The Gang's All Here with Carmen Miranda and her big banana hat) haven't been seen on UK TV in years.

I was watching the 20th Century Fox : The First 50 Years DVD last week and seen some lovely colour footage of some of these and it leapt of the screen.

Perhaps the lightweight nature of some of these doesn't merit full Studio Classic rating so I propose a series of Fox Musical Classic DVDs. There might also be limited extras for some of these so why can't we have Alice Faye/ Betty Grable Double Features along the lines of Universal's Bing Crosby and Bob Hope discs.

 

[Art_AD]

My picks:
Zoo in Budapest
Dante's Inferno (1935)
State Fair (1933) would be nice to have all three versions
The Bowery, The (1933)
The Mighty Barnum (1934)
Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934)
The Late George Apley(1947)
O. Henry's Full House (1952)
We're Not Married(1952) Restored
Tales of Manhattan (1942)restored
Holiday for Lovers (1959)
and many of the greats listed by others

 

[oscar_merkx]

my pick would have to be Grapes of Wrath and more John Ford

 

[Deane Johnson]

I'll put in another vote for Night People. It was the first CinemaScope movie I saw back in the mid 1950s and now I'd like to own it.

Deane

 

[Agee Bassett]

Heaven Can Wait
Unfaithfully Yours
The Grapes of Wrath
My Darling Clementine
The Innocents
Nightmare Alley
Les Miserables
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Jane Eyre
Zoo in Budapest

Would make a lovely addition to my shelf.

 

[Paul_Scott]

i would love to see the Grable movies especially MOM and DAW.
was I Wake Up Screaming a Fox pic? i'd love to see that too.

also, i would very much like to see the war-time homefront opus Since You Went Away. i don't know if it still belongs to them or not, but the LD i have from the early 90's was issued by Fox.


as far as the R&H musicals, i don't think Oklahoma, King & I, or Carosuel are over-rated. they are top quality productions that live and breathe as major films- not tv material presented in a widescreen AR.
because of the history and medium translations, i would think there would be a significant amount of supplemental avenues to pursue as well, if thats what the studio classic line is supposed to entail.
of course i'd just be happy to see these films large in my HT in the best possible condition.
maybe someday Fox will have a change of heart and really give these their due, and be proud enough of their efforts to actively promote the new remasters to people who would otherwise not be concious of these films.

maybe we'll finally see them around the same time as Season 2 of MTM.

 

[AlanP]

"PEYTON PLACE"
"RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE"
"THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT"
"VALLEY OF THE DOLLS"
"KISS THEM FOR ME"
"WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER"
"BEST OF EVERYTHING"
"VALLEY OF THE DOLLS"
"DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
"MOVE OVER DARLING"
"ISLAND IN THE SUN"
"CALL ME MADAM"
"THE EGYPTIAN"
"STATE FAIR"-62
"STORY OF RUTH"
"BERNADINE"
"APRIL LOVE"

 

[Larry Sutliff]

I'll add my vote for THE INNOCENTS and THE EGYPTIAN.