Twilight Time Discussion Thread

[Page14]

Originally Posted by jayembee

Yeah. Too many sales recently, and too many choices for Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales.

I took a look at what's in this sale, and I realized that all of the titles that are in low quantities I already have. And most of what I need are relatively recent releases that probably aren't in jeopardy since, with all the sales they've been having the last couple of years, folks probably aren't too quick to pull the trigger on new releases.

So, I figure I'll sit this sale out, at least until after Christmas. I might be willing to splurge on some then.

I'm right there with you. Although I'm not sure I have the willpower to totally ignore this sale. There are sooo many TT titles that I don't have but would love to ... too many to be able to afford right now.

[lilboyblu]

Just went with these from the sale for now:

[Russ44]

Count me among those disappointed in this sale. I've not done a title-by-title comparison with their previous one, but not a single one of my wanted titles has dropped into the 14.95 bracket. I have supported this company since day one and each month, until two years ago, I ordered whatever they offered. I had no complaint about doing that, but when their sales became so frequent, I realized that I was essentially throwing money at a product (admittedly a very good product) that was in no danger of selling out and could be purchased at a much lower price in a very short period of time. I may be obsessive/compulsive, but I'm not stupid. So, I wait. I need 46 more titles to be up-to-date on their releases, 29 of those among their last 30 offerings. It's going to take considerable pressure for me to pay more than 14.95 for any of those.

I hope that Twilight Time can reorganize and continue to offer quality product to us. Their basic much-maligned business model, with which I have had no problem, probably needs to be revamped and brought up to current conditions. It's a different world than 2012; Arrow, Indicator, Kino Lorber, etc. provide, on the whole, excellent product at a very attractive price point. I would be willing to purchase personally-desired titles somewhere in the 22.95 - 24.95 range. If they were to institute some manner of subscription service, whereby you take all of each month's offering at 19.95 each, they would have me back in the fold for as long as they want to do business.

Maybe they can rename their company Dawn's Early Light and service our rabid little niche community for years to come. I certainly hope so.

[nitin]

Some of the titles I wanted were 19.95 rather than 14.95 but grabbed them anyway because want to see them soon rather than wait another few months.

[koberulz]

It's difficult not knowing if there's going to be a better sale down the road. Especially as an international customer, where just ordering one or two movies isn't really as feasible.

[SeanJoyce]

Originally Posted by koberulz

It's difficult not knowing if there's going to be a better sale down the road. Especially as an international customer, where just ordering one or two movies isn't really as feasible.

Of course there's going to be a better sale, they're not going to just sit on all this inventory...especially if they're going out of business.

It's a no-brainer to grab something if the stock is low, but people panic-buying may regret it in the near future.

[bruceames]

I too was hoping for a better sale, but if they don't plan on going out of business yet, then there is no rush to clear out inventory by having a fire sale. Storage space is a sunk cost (costs the same whether the shelf are full or half full) and they have no new titles to make room for.

Most of the titles (Fox, for now) are in the $19.95 bracket, with some of them released 2-3 years ago. So I am hesitant to buy any of those, knowing there will likely be a better price down the road, and I have plenty of unwatched movies as it is. As an example I panic-bought American Buffalo over 3 years ago because they claimed low quantity. And now I see it at $4.95 with no low quantity warning.

What is confusing is that, in the past, all their titles sold from SAE, so when a low quantity update came, it was legit, and it usually sold out pretty quickly. But now TT will give a low quantity update for their inventory, all the while hundreds if not thousands are sitting in the SAE warehouse. It's really rather deceptive, IMO.

But, since this sale runs through December, I have plenty of time to decide which I should jump on, and which can wait. But probably will only order a handful of movies. Plenty of BF sales going on now and already have ordered over a dozen 4K titles.

[RCRochester]

I don't know, I don't think it's that bad of a sale. I'm probably going to sit it out because most of the ones I really want are in the $19.95 range at the moment, I haven't really decided yet, but there's still some good films in the $14.95 and below range. The Front going for $4.95 is an absolute steal, and despite it's reputation as a "bad" movie, I thought Che! was pretty good. Certainly worth picking up that price.

[KJones77]

Originally Posted by koberulz

It's difficult not knowing if there's going to be a better sale down the road. Especially as an international customer, where just ordering one or two movies isn't really as feasible.

Honestly I'm just waiting for the inevitable fire sale next year.

[StarDestroyer52]

It's not a bad sale by any means, but many of the titles I want are in the 19.95 bracket. I'll probably place an order after the Holidays for 3-4 of those titles but right now there is way too many other sales and pre-orders I have on my plate at the moment to place an order now.

[marblearch]

Have not bought from TT for ages. Interested in Quiller as the German and UK blus are rubbish but it is too costly esp being stung with customs charges. Saw a couple of others of interest but searched elsewhere and found cheaper alternatives. One of which was Morituri from Explosive media in Germany ,bought this with Night of the Running Man, total cost 25 pounds inc post from Amazon Germany.

[cropduster]

Originally Posted by Dailyan

Went with:

From the Terrace is excellent. One of my favorite TT blind buys.

[Aclea]

Originally Posted by RCRochester

The Front going for $4.95 is an absolute steal, and despite it's reputation as a "bad" movie, I thought Che! was pretty good. Certainly worth picking up that price.

Che's a lot more interesting than its reputation would have you expect even though it's very obviously compromised - it's certainly worth five bucks:



Back in 1994 I interviewed Richard Fleischer, and he briefly spoke about Che!:

"I think probably Che! is the most disappointing picture that I've made. We started out with a very good screenplay and high principals on that story, but while we were shooting it the studio got cold feet about the picture because they were afraid it was too anti-American and they kept insisting that certain anti-American scenes come out.

"That was the whole point of my making the picture, to show, yes, we do a lot of very stupid things and Che was right in a lot of ways. Che was also wrong in a lot of ways and we wanted to show that too. Well, it just ended up that by the time they got through making all their requests to take out the scenes they didn't like it was just an anti-Che movie, and that's not what I started out to make.

"I was gonna quit the picture, but I was under contract to the studio and in all the many years I've made films I've never walked off a picture and I wasn't about to do that for Che! It wasn't worth it. Maybe a bigger principle sometime. But why get into a mess like that and make a lot of enemies when it really didn't matter? Whether I stayed on it or didn't stay on it, somebody'd finish it anyhow."

Yet despite the director's disappointment, Che! is neither the disaster nor the comedy classic of its lamentable reputation. True, it is the film of the T-shirt and often simplistic in its motivation - Omar Sharif's Che Guevara has to literally choose between tending the sick or passing the ammunition in one scene while in another fate lands a Molotov cocktail at his side at a crucial moment - but the film is an attempt at a minor revolution in epic biopic standards with its (staged) vox pop interviews and contrasting perspectives. Like Salvatore Giuliano, the drama is framed by the body of its dead protagonist and like Rossi's film it simplified and occasionally rewrites history. Unlike Steven Soderbergh's two-part epic, it's not obsessed with pseudo documentary trivia but opts more for an overview written in broad strokes - but then, with a running time little over an hour-and-a-half, it has to be. As a result, we are kept at a distance from Che for much of the first half of the film, the Cuban Revolution is rushed and not overly convincing and at times it turns into a typical studio picture shot on unconvincingly lit soundstages and at the Fox ranch backlot familiar from a hundred Westerns. Parts of it just don't work on any level, with the moment a Bolivian general talking to the camera excuses himself to go back into the scene seeming like an outtake from Woody Allen's Bananas. The film is at its best when dealing with the failure of Che's Bolivian adventure as he tries to impose his idea of salvation on a hostile population that neither seems to know or care it's oppressed as his followers and his ideals abandon him.

Sharif was an almost impossible to cast star - Genghis Khan, a Nazi officer (!!!) in Night of the Generals, a Jewish gambler in Funny Girl, a German schoolteacher in The Last Valley, a Spanish Catholic priest in Behold a Pale Horse, a cowboy in McKenna's Gold - but is for once quite well cast here. Palance's Castro certainly isn't the Yosemite Sam cartoon figure contemporary reviewers painted him as either, though there's not much depth in the writing. The characters don't quite seem to know what to make of Che and you get the feeling the filmmakers weren't that sure either. Yet there's just enough leftfield (rather than left wing) ambition in this flawed would-be epic to hold the attention. It would certainly make an interesting double-bill with the equally despised (but, unlike Che!, subsequently partially rehabilitated) Walker.

Never released on DVD in the US, Twilight Time's Region-free Blu-ray release offers a fine 2.35:1 widescreen transfer with decent extras - a vintage behind the scenes short, TV spot and trailer (both showing 20th Century Fox's uncertainty over how to sell the picture or even what kind of picture they had made), a booklet and offers Lalo Schifrin's score on an isolated track.


And The Front is excellent:



"Take care of yourself. The water is full of sharks."

The McCarthy-inspired Blacklist in the late 40s and 50s is such a shameful incident in America's history that film and TV has largely steered clear of the subject altogether: you can count the films dealing with it directly on the fingers of one hand, so it sounds like damning with faint praise to say that the rarely revived The Front is the best of them all. That it's the `Woody Allen film' that time forgot hasn't helped it's reputation, but in truth, although many regular Allen collaborators from co-star Michael Murphy to producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe are involved, this isn't an Allen film: some of the wisecracks may be tailor-made for him, but this is Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein's film and Allen's just playing a role, that of a cashier and small-time bookie who finds himself `fronting' for blacklisted writers for 10% of whatever they get for their scripts.

Kicking off with a superb scene-setting montage of the 50s at its best and worst, from baseball and apple pie to the Korean War and the execution of the Rosenbergs while Frank Sinatra sings Young at Heart on the soundtrack, it's a film that certainly speaks from personal experience. Along with writer Walter Bernstein and director Martin Ritt (who had both touched upon the blacklist more obliquely in 1970's The Molly Maguires) many of the cast - Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Lloyd Gough, Joshua Shelley - were blacklisted, while the daughter of one of the blacklist's most tragic victims, John Garfield, also appears. Yet surprisingly it's not a whitewash: the blacklisted writers make it clear that they weren't put on the list by mistake but because they are communists, while Allen's front may start out on his new career as a favor to a friend but quickly shows his true opportunistic colors. No sooner has he seen how much money he can make than he's taking on more writers at higher rates, seducing Andrea Marcovicci's production assistant who is really in love with the words that aren't even his own rather than the man himself and getting ideas above his station, refusing to hand in scripts he thinks aren't up to his standards because "It's my name that goes on the script." In that he's really no different from anyone else in a world where club owners take advantage of the blacklist to get performers like Mostel's increasingly suicidal Hecky Green at bargain rates and then still knock them down even further after a sell-out show. But it's not long before he becomes a political suspect himself...

Set in the fledgling TV industry where gas company sponsors insisted on rewriting concentration camp dramas to avoid giving their product a bad image and where businessmen who only owned a couple of stores could demand - and get - the right of veto over any cast members they thought are `too red' for their customers' liking by threatening to withdraw a single commercial (both true incidents), it doesn't really need to resort to comic invention, but it's more of an absurd yet dry black comedy that's often too dark NOT to laugh at. The final scene where Allen comes up against the committee and tries to bluff his way out of a contempt charge is really just a piece of wish fulfilment, the kind of thing you wish you had said long after the moment has passed, but it's hard to begrudge Ritt and Bernstein their moment: they earned it. Running a tight hour-and-a-half and with great photography by Michael Chapman, it's well worth investigating.

[BenOswald]

Went for these 4x, all blind buys:
10 Rillington Place
A Prayer For The Dying
Best Of Everything, The
Wuthering Heights

[brainofj72]

Originally Posted by Dailyan

Went with:


I'll probably place another order in December.

If people need a title for their cart at SAE then nab "The Boston Strangler". It's such an excellent, thrilling, film with great 'scope cinematography, editing, and performances from Fonda and Curtis. The price at 14.95 is a steal as well.

Thanks for posting this; I'd never taken any notice of The Member of the Wedding but I just looked it up after seeing the cover and it looks right up my alley.

[oildude]

Originally Posted by brainofj72

Thanks for posting this; I'd never taken any notice of The Member of the Wedding but I just looked it up after seeing the cover and it looks right up my alley.

It is a marvelous film. Here is the review I posted over two years ago.....




Writer Carson McCullers was born and spent her youth in Columbus, Georgia, coming of age during the Great Depression and absorbing all the rich milieu of character, traditions, sights, sounds, and textures of life in the South that would elevate the Southern Gothic genre to the heights of literary excellence in the hands of William Faulkner and others, including her own. After graduating from Columbus High School in 1934, Carson (whose birth name was Lula) caught a ship to New York City in search of a writing career. A whirlwind of talent, she saw her first novel published at the age of 23. Also by age 23 she had suffered her first stroke. She would go on to write more novels, live life on her own terms as she dealt with early onset rheumatism, and die at the young age of 50.

Those unfamiliar with the name Carson McCullers may have heard of her novels, four of which later became films: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (her first novel), Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and The Member of the Wedding. Of these, the most personal was The Member of the Wedding, a semi-autobiographical work based on her Georgia childhood that she filled with her demons, dreamy aspirations, and fictional constructs to create an extraordinary layered story of troubled 12-year old tomboy Frankie Addams, her family, and the loneliness and alienation of an intelligent but awkward girl on the edge of puberty.

McCullers herself adapted The Member of the Wedding into a successful Broadway play that ran for over 500 performances for two years. Hollywood came calling and made the correct decision to cast the play's three leads as the stars of the 1952 film version: Julie Harris as 12-year old Frankie, Ethel Waters as housekeeper Bernice, and second-grader Brandon De Wilde as little cousin John Henry. Watching this film 65 years later, I am thankful to producer Stanley Kramer for his keeping the play's cast together, and for bringing on board Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity, High Noon, The Day of the Jackal) to direct what I consider to be some of the most phenomenal 93 minutes of acting ever captured on celluloid.





Like its source novel, The Member of the Wedding is told from the perspective of Frankie. Taking place over a few days in August, the story revolves around Frankie's anxiety over what appears to be her permanent lot in life - to be forever a 12-year old tomboy freakishly tall for her age, socially awkward, filled with self-loathing over her appearance, wanting more out of her existence than to be stuck in a small Southern town over summer break with no prospects of change and no recognition of the fact she is a child and the world is waiting for her to grow up. Her mother has recently died and her father doesn't understand her or know how to relate to her; that is, when he is home from the long hours he spends at the jewelry shop he owns. Her best friend moved away earlier in the summer, leaving as her only companions her seven year old cousin John Henry, who lives next door, and Bernice, a one-eyed African-American housekeeper who is her caretaker and her conscience. She pines for acceptance from the older teenage girls in the neighborhood, but is too young and angry for them to want to include her in their girl's club.

Into the emotionally combustible kindling of Frankie's young psyche, fate flicks a match. Her older brother comes home on leave from nearby Fort Benning with his fiance. They are to be married in a few days at Frankie's home and Frankie suddenly projects her dreams and source of salvation onto her brother and his bride-to-be. What results is a series of darkly comic and sad events, all too real and relatable. Frankie so desperately wants to be a woman of the world, and it is up to Bernice to navigate the troubled youngster through the storms and darkness of childhood alienation.





Julie Harris owns the role of Frankie. A 26 year old playing a 12 year old seems absurd at first glance, but it works here. Harris is small and youthful looking, freckled, her hair cut into a shag bob as physical evidence of Frankie's self-loathing and determination to careen down a path of self-destruction. Harris gives a fierce performance, bringing a complex character to life as a ball of explosive energy. She supplies Frankie with all the sturm and drang and pathos that makes the other characters in the story - and the audience - witness with futility the girl's emotional backflips from semi-psychotic ravings to sympathetic paens of desperately wanting to be loved.

Ethel Waters is amazing as Bernice. She is a strong central character to the drama, its emotional anchor, and near the end of the film we begin to understand that this is her story as much as it is Frankie's. Her life is also filled with failures, disappointments, and a desperate search for love to replace that which she once had and lost.

Little Brandon De Wilde is stellar also. A child prodigy, his Broadway debut at the age of seven as John Henry was hailed as a national phenomenon before he translated the character to the film version. John Henry represents the other side of Frankie, the childhood she so desperately seeks to leave behind and yet cannot completely divorce from within herself. It was this role that led to the casting of Brandon the next year in what would be his most memorable role, that of Joey Starrett in one of the greatest American films ever made....George Steven's Shane.





To characterize The Member of the Wedding as a coming-of-age story is to simplify it beyond recognition and not do it justice. It is so much more than that. Ultimately it is about searching for acceptance and finding one's place in the world. It is a drama of amazing grit, beauty, and detail. A tour de force of acting, it will leave the viewer stunned at the powerful performances, the terrifically well-written dialogue, and the timeless and universal themes of the story. It is not an expansive film; in fact, with most of the scenes taking place in the kitchen and backyard of Frankie's home and rarely venturing out into the streets and town itself, it is almost claustrophobic in how it wraps the viewer into the world of the small and the intimate, forcing us to focus on the characters themselves. Many of the scenes take place at night or at sunset with growing darkness, where the play of shadows and light accentuate Frankie's increasing alienation and loneliness.

The gorgeous black and white cinematography by Hal Mohr (Woman on the Run, Destry Rides Again) makes us aware of all the textures we are seeing onscreen with such clarity and detail of purpose that the viewer can feel the heat of a Georgia August in the beads of sweat that constantly envelope the characters day and night, smell the cornbread fresh out of the oven that Bernice sets on the table, contemplate the fluttering of moths against the window screens as they seek the light within, and lounge in the haunting notes of a trumpet played under a shade tree in the humid air. To that must be added mention of the highly listenable music score by Alex North, a languid jazzy montage that underscores the visuals with dreamy melodies and currents of background sound that feels as right at home in the South as crickets on a still summer night.

All photos above are taken from the internet. The PQ on the disc is a gorgeous transfer from Sony.

[ptb2010]

Really upset to discover Paypal credit os only available to US customers! So no sale items for me.

[senseabove]

Nthing the love for The Member of the Wedding. It and The Happy Ending are two absolutely stellar films that I can't imagine I'd've ever seen were it not for Twilight Time sales.

Throw in The Best of Everything with those two and you have probably the best bang for your $25 you could get this round.

[The Great Owl]

Over the years, I've racked up a huge Twilight Time collection that will likely take me years to catch up on watching, but I always seem to find a couple of straggler purchases during each of these sales.

I placed an order for...

Wuthering Heights (1970)
The Member of the Wedding

[octobercountry]

Stuck to a handful of the lower-priced sale items this time around. While there are quite a few titles that I wouldn't mind picking up that are currently priced $19.95 and up, those will have to wait for a later sale. I really am expecting a "going out of business" sale in the not-too-distant future.

It's an odd mix, and four of the five are blind buys, so I may end up pleased with my purchases, or perhaps not terribly thrilled at all!