Wednesday, August 18, 2021

50 Years Ago Today... New In Cincinnati Theaters

 

As you can see, the Cincinnati ENQUIRER had a problem with running the full title of Jess Franco's EUGENIE ... THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION, and it also looks like they had a stab at censoring the tagline for Mac Ahlberg's NANA ("The modern making of Emile Zola's master piece" - at least it looks like an added space there). Yes, this look (below) at the film's one-sheet confirms my suspicion... This double feature shows that Swedish sexploitation was still a box office draw five years after Ahlberg's I, A WOMAN was released in the States, partly due to Marie Liljedahl's arrival in Joe Sarno's INGA in 1968. I don't always load up a movie on its 50th anniversary but in the case of EUGENIE, I just might have to.

And then we have this nifty little sequel...

As you can see, they really had to squeeze mention of this new release into the paper - Dan Curtis' NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS. No Jonathan Frid in this one, which focuses instead on the characters of Quentin (David Selby) and Angelique (Lara Parker), who are here shoehorned into a brazen retelling of Roger Corman's THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963), itself based on H.P. Lovecraft's 1941 tale "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." It could have been much better than it is; Curtis signed a contract with MGM to deliver a 90 minute picture and went way over length, and the studio punished him by giving him literally 24 hours to deliver what was promised. So the movie, as it finally plays, is like scenes from a larger canvas, and the music score hits a brick wall every time the film cuts from one scene to another. An attempt was made to restore the film to its original length some years back, but it didn't come off.   


In light of the recent success accorded to Questlove's SUMMER OF SOUL, this unjustly overlooked documentary, covering a concert held in Ghana in March 1971 on the anniversary of its independence, deserves rediscovery. James Brown was invited but didn't attend; Wilson Pickett with a powerful horn section steals the show. Directed by Denis Sanders (ELVIS - THAT'S THE WAY IT IS), it was restored (insomuch as it could be - Roberta Flack requested that her performances be removed) and given a DVD release back in 2004.  


This G-rated (yawn) Russian/Italian co-production about the attempts to rescue the survivors of a crashed zeppelin near the North Pole was finally arriving in the States two years after its world premiere, after sacrificing more than half an hour of its running time. Ennio Di Concini (Bava's BLACK SUNDAY) was credited with the screenplay, and the score was by Ennio Morricone.  It had the peculiar distinction of being nominated for a Golden Globe Award for "Best English Language Foreign Film," which it lost to SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY.


(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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