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| Les Vampires; Gaumont Edition | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Sep 22 2010, 03:23 AM (305 Views) | |
| panzer the great & terrible | Sep 22 2010, 03:23 AM Post #1 |
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Mouth Breather
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Riddle Rider complained about the tinted version of Les V, so I thought I'd check out the untinted version. You can get it pretty cheap at Amazon U.K., but you'll need an all-region player and a TV that accepts PAL, which fortunately most do. I like this untinted version, though some night sequences play better with tinting, especially the scene with the Grand Vampire on the rooftops in the first chapter -- the deep blue tinting is what makes it cool. As for RR's claim that tinting was adopted to cover up the flaws of a dupe print, I don't know enough to make a final pronouncement, but the Gaumont version is duped, too, so it's not like there's any major difference in quality. It's just my peculiarity that I don't much care for tinting, authentic though it sometimes is. I like the movie more than I did before. It beats the Fantomas pictures. The hero is more fun to watch than Juve and there are more bad guys in black hoods, but remember, I'm the guy who thinks The Alligator People would be a better picture with more alligator people. I'll stick by my earlier statements that Les Vampires is poorly directed, but it is fascinating in a dumb way. and I can see why the Surrealists loved it. Still, my favorite Feuillade pic is Judex. There's a lot to be said for a coherent story, and Judex at least copies a good one (The Count of Monte Cristo). As for Musidora as Irma Vep -- there's a reputation hard for me to fathom. Terrible, terrible actress. A good cross-reference would be Miriam Cooper in Intolerance, but then, Griffith knew how to direct actors and Feuillade didn't have a clue. It's part of his charm I guess... |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| The Batman | Sep 22 2010, 05:56 AM Post #2 |
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Charter Member
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I have the tinted LES VAMPIRES and like it a lot. Tinting don't bother me none. |
| Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman! | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Sep 22 2010, 07:38 AM Post #3 |
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Mouth Breather
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Since my pal Dave did the tinting I thank you. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| The Batman | Sep 22 2010, 10:30 AM Post #4 |
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Charter Member
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Well, please thank Dave for me, Mr P. I highly enjoyed his effort (and those that made the darn thing, too!). |
| Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman! | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Sep 24 2010, 09:16 AM Post #5 |
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Mouth Breather
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It is a lot of movie. The first time I saw it, at the New York Film Festival, we watched the whole thing in one day. Those who made it to the bitter end were drunk on the feeling we shared knowledge of a thing we knew nothing about a few years before. Feuillade was impossibly exotic in those days. I'm pretty sure I hadn't yet seen even the most common still from Fantomas. I only knew the word Fantomas because of a photo of a marquee in Deems Taylor's Pictorial History of the Movies in which management claims the picture they are showing is "better than Fantomas." I know I hadn't heard of Judex before that day. Think how obscure Tih Minh still is; that's how obscure Fantomas was. (I actually saw my first still ever from Tih Minh yesterday.) |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Sgt Saturn | Sep 24 2010, 11:41 AM Post #6 |
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Charter Member
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Is this Deems Taylor the composer? Or someone else with the same (rather uncommon) name? |
| The Ol' Sarge | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Sep 25 2010, 06:23 AM Post #7 |
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Mouth Breather
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No, the same guy. The book was my first contact with the silent movie universe. I found it at the library but didn't have the nerve to steal it. Martin Scorsese did: he confesses in the first episode of one of his educational TV series on movies. There are three editions out there: the original from 1939 (which sells for prices a famous director can afford when he can find it), the "Armed Services Edition" from 1943 (a cheapo version you can get for $10-$20, the one I now have), and the 1949 edition (which goes for $100 or so). The reproduction of stills is much better in the first edition. The third throws out a lot of silent material to make room for newer pictures, and isn't really worth having since the official 1949 version of the best pictures made between 1939 and 1949 doesn't include most of the ones we now call classics. I plan to write soon on this dramatic change of taste. The copy I found at the library was a first edition. It changed my life. Here I am, director of the Shasta Silent Film Festival 55 years later, all because of that book. Life takes some strange bounces. Speaking of the festival, Melissa Talmadge Cox, the granddaughter of Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge, will be on hand at 1:30 on Saturday Oct. 23 to introduce the film they made together, Our Hospitality. I'm so stoked! We're also showing The Primitive Lover, a rare film starring her great-aunt Constance, and I'm hoping she'll tell a few tales of the charmer everybody remembers from Intolerance. Ms. Cox calls her "Aunt Dutch." Her other great-aunt was Norma Talmadge. She was a huge star in the Twenties but alas, not many of her films survive. The one I saw, Woman Disputed, does her no service despite being directed by King Vidor and Clarence Brown (having two such famous directors is a sign that something went wrong during production). The movie is best known for the song that promoted it, which contains the deathless line "Woman disputed, I love you." Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Sep 25 2010, 06:34 AM.
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| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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