Sternberg Dietrichs in various regions

[jsteffe]

Has anyone seen the Spanish DVD of SHANGHAI EXPRESS? (Universal Pictures, release date Sept. 21, 2007.) If so, what do you think?

I own it, and it's rubbish, like an old vhs turned into dvd (that's exactly what it is), it has burnt-in spanish subtitles and the image looks awfully greenish.

It is weird because at the same time they released some decent transfers of other films by Sternberg (except this one and the scarlet empress if my memory serves me well).

That's shockingly a bad transfer! I really appreciate you taking the time to post a screen cap.

I guess I'm holding on to that double laserdisc set (BLONDE VENUS/SHANGHAI EXPRESS) that I purchased years ago.

[jsteffe]

Considering how hard it is to find a decent DVD of SHANGHAI EXPRESS, I should mention that it's showing this week on TCM: Thursday, June 5, late night. I'm curious to see how this transfer will look compared to the old laserdisc I own.

[foggy eyes]

For the sake of comparison, here are a handful of caps from the R2 UK release of...



This was supposed to be coming out as an individual release (separate from the 18-disc boxset) last month but has been delayed for some reason. The transfer looks the same as the French disc to me, and will probably be a cheaper option for those in the UK when it comes out.

[HerrSchreck]

Clearly the same transfer as the French disc, no surprises there. All from the same HD pedigree of telecine, no reason to expect them to spend all that money to redo it for each country, rather than just come encode menu languages and manf a new box!

Surprised you even expended the effort on such a given! Most of the titles overlapped between R1 (Devil Izza, Morrocco, Blonde V, etc) are all from the same digitapes, just preconverted to Pal/Ntsc depending...

[HerrSchreck]

This is what confused me a bit about the posts above-- isn't Shanghai Express just relatively recently released in the Six Discer for region 2,4,5? The beevcaps are here.

Or has this flown under the radar?

Edit: I just checked Amazon UK's listing for the title, and it's available, in stock. and starting at 18 pounds. And "relatively recently" equates in this case to a late summer 2006 streeting.

[HerrSchreck]

So what are jsteffe and "Trelkovsky" talking about above re how hard it is to find the film, and flirting with that awful analog SPanish dvd? If I weren't holding out viz the hunch that the CC is going to be announced before the summer's up, I'd have grabbed the restored pal Shanghai a yr ago.

[HerrSchreck]

Imagine their Empress finegrain and digibeta burned in the print/tape fire?

(Whapping facepalm with ring turned backwards for bonus unconsciousness because the agony is too great).

No doubt the digibeta for the 90's vhs/LD of Island of Lost Souls burned too, along with the safety positive, too. Smart cookies will pronto throw a run on those Universal vhs tapes while they're still cheap...

[jsteffe]

Imagine their Empress finegrain and digibeta burned in the print/tape fire?

(Whapping facepalm with ring turned backwards for bonus unconsciousness because the agony is too great).

No doubt the digibeta for the 90's vhs/LD of Island of Lost Souls burned too, along with the safety positive, too. Smart cookies will pronto throw a run on those Universal vhs tapes while they're still cheap...

Maybe someone has more recent information, but as far as I know the prints that burned were theatrical prints that Universal rented out for the repertory circuit (via Universal Classics). In fact, I had an October booking of The Scarlet Empress that was cancelled since the print was supposed to come from that facility. But if Universal possessed a fine grain print that was suitable for video transfers, why would they rent it out for theatrical--and non-theatrical--bookings?

Perhaps part of all the confusion surrounding the fire is that various people have been using the term "archive" very loosely, when perhaps "warehouse" or "depot" might better describe what the facility actually was? Universal has a separate archive where they house the negatives and presumably other early generation film elements. There should be no reason why they can't strike a new print of The Island of Lost Souls. Mind you, this fire is still disastrous since it means we won't be seeing most of those films on the big screen again for a long time, and some titles maybe never.

I can't speak for the videocassette collection, though, but I'd like to think we can take the Universal executives at their word that "nothing lost is irreplaceable."

UPDATE: Someone in the thread about the Universal fire kindly linked to this article in Variety. Depending on what kind of print was housed there for any given title, the situation could indeed be very serious. For instance, was it an IB Technicolor print? But it's still too early to tell anything for sure. I'm happy to hear that Universal has at least made a initial committment to replace the prints.

[Felix]

This is what confused me a bit about the posts above-- isn't Shanghai Express just relatively recently released in the Six Discer for region 2,4,5? The beevcaps are here.

Or has this flown under the radar?

Edit: I just checked Amazon UK's listing for the title, and it's available, in stock. and starting at 18 pounds. And "relatively recently" equates in this case to a late summer 2006 streeting.

Schreck, I covered all this in my earlier post and the UK 6-Disc set is even cheaper at Play.com for £13 with free post.

I'm having great fun right now doing covers for all the Von Sternberg ones to get them out of that awful box and into a little series of their own... "Von Sternberg and his Muse", corny, I know...

[HerrSchreck]

This is what confused me a bit about the posts above-- isn't Shanghai Express just relatively recently released in the Six Discer for region 2,4,5? The beevcaps are here.

Or has this flown under the radar?

Edit: I just checked Amazon UK's listing for the title, and it's available, in stock. and starting at 18 pounds. And "relatively recently" equates in this case to a late summer 2006 streeting.

Schreck, I covered all this in my earlier post and the UK 6-Disc set is even cheaper at Play.com for £13 with free post.

I'm having great fun right now doing covers for all the Von Sternberg ones to get them out of that awful box and into a little series of their own... "Von Sternberg and his Muse", corny, I know...

Ah, there we go!

Sorry, I was responding to the posts immediately below yours, with that vomitous spanish disc, followed shortly thereafter by--

Considering how hard it is to find a decent DVD of SHANGHAI EXPRESS, I should mention that it's showing this week on TCM: Thursday, June 5, late night. I'm curious to see how this transfer will look compared to the old laserdisc I own.

[Felix]

Sorry, I was responding to the posts immediately below yours, with that vomitous spanish disc, followed shortly thereafter by--

Right. I'm with you.

I was surprised by how little there is about Von Sternberg out there, either online or in my cosmopolitan mix of books on film, some good quotes from Time Out for my covers but not a lot else. What gives? Is his stock pretty low except for those of more esoteric tastes? He seems pretty much written out of history.

[foggy eyes]

The prime text is his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry.

Absolutely - this is an amazing book. There's some valuable writing on Sternberg centred around Dietrich too - I'd recommend Mulvey's seminal/notorious article Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema and Naremore's chapter in Acting in the Cinema as good places to start.

[Ivy Mike]

Re: davidhare's caps of Shanghai Express: You say those are from the German disc - do you mean this one? I'm just confused because above that, you said you would be posting UK shots (and those shots look identical to the transfer shown on DVDBeaver's UK Dietrich set review).

Regardless, I finally saw this on TCM last night and was thoroughly impressed (My first foray into the Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations, apart from seeing a clip of The Blue Angel).

[Zazou dans le Metro]

The prime text is his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry.

Then the seminal English language text, although only a monograph is Sarris' The Films of Josef von Sternberg.

Herman Weinberg and John Baxter have both written books on him niether of which I've read. And many many other writers like Fred Camper, Chris Fujiwara, Jack Smith and Robin Wood have written pieces on his films, including the latter with an excellent analysis of visual form and meaning in Scarlet Empress in his Personal Views.

There is also a 1980 BFI collection edited by PETER Baxter collecting essays as diverse as Jack Smith, Siegfried' Crackpot' Kracauer, Arnheim, Luc Moullet, Barry Salt and Von Sternberg himself.

[Felix]

The prime text is his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry.

Then the seminal English language text, although only a monograph is Sarris' The Films of Josef von Sternberg.

Herman Weinberg and John Baxter have both written books on him niether of which I've read. And many many other writers like Fred Camper, Chris Fujiwara, Jack Smith and Robin Wood have written pieces on his films, including the latter with an excellent analysis of visual form and meaning in Scarlet Empress in his Personal Views.

And that's about it in English I'm afraid.

There is also a 1980 BFI collection edited by PETER Baxter collecting essays as diverse as Jack Smith, Siegfried' Crackpot' Kracauer, Arnheim, Luc Moullet, Barry Salt and Von Sternberg himself.

Thanks to you both, I will get looking.

I recall him having a certain appeal in this country amongst very non-cine folk when I was growing up, in part because of the "Epic That Never Was" documentary, if that is what it was called, about his direction of Laughton as Claudius, and which showed on BBC several times.

[HerrSchreck]

Yes Joe von is a giant, a problem of course is his sound masterpieces are subject to the idiocies of Universal. But he's got the problem of extreme self-reflexivity in his masterpieces, the kind that many people (including Ehrenstein, disappointingly) mistake for camp. They have difficulty processing exactly why something like Empress or Devil Izza is as oddly, artificially performed and structured.

But for me it just makes it better. To me he's like the Frank Zappa of the sound era... pushing human absurdity right under people's noses with unmatched wit invention style and genius. Read the thread for Empress here and you'll get clues to how even some relatively seasoned cineastes can read one of von Sternbergs greatest works..

[HerrSchreck]

Right. And vonS simply suffered from what many other geniuses suffer from, (like FZ), which is seemingly total industrial aloneness in the outer reaches of his brilliance.

It's not an arrogance, but an honesty. The alternative would have been to dumb himself down, and those films simply didn't work for him in cinematic terms or within the terms of him finding life worthwhile. Though I tend to think he's hard on Tragedy, and Crime &P.

But yes Empress & Devil are absolutely comedies, but in a very unique sense-- packed with genuine comment on their characters and surroundings. The surface gleams with it.

[Felix]

In fact the "secret" is simply regular reacquaintance with his films. The more you watch them the more and more seductive they are in pulling you into his "invented" hyper real worlds of poetic imagination. The opportunity is always there to join Sternberg and submit yourself totally to his will - if you like - like one of his hapless males struggling with the eternal paradox of pleasure and pain. But the pleasure to be gained from this is life changing. And endlessly humorous I should add.

Scarlet Empress and Devil is a Woman are, apart from being multilayered masterpieces, comedies. At the highest imaginable level.

OK, OK, you guys have convinced me, if convincing I needed, which I don't think I did, though having seen Docks of New York last week, I would put Last Command some way above it. I do like your idea of

invented" hyper real worlds of poetic imagination.

That one sounds really cool. Blaue Angel next then...

[HerrSchreck]

It amazes me how folks can resist this material. Just such a perfect marriage of image and content, these films just levitate which such livid electricity.. just on the surface alone, every corner of every shot seems fraught with life, every shadow loaded with potential, vibrating with significance and electricity, as if, as in something like Joyce's Ulysses, there are mysteries to be uncovered every time you pass thru the work.

Joe was probably the greatest visual artist of the sound era. The only guy who could set up a shot with such visual orgasm (though in a much different fashion though deep in the chiaroscuro as well) is Alton, particularly w Mann.

[Felix]

Joe was probably the greatest visual artist of the sound era

Yes, and he was also one of the greats of the late silents. I was surprised to hear our friend was not so crazy for Docks of NY. Certainly I have to count myself very lucky to have seen the MOMA nitrate prints of this (and Underworld and Last Command) albeit 40 years ago. The simple visual experience of Docks in particular is prime Sternberg (THIS is the picture that must have wiped out Mizo and Ozu and Ophuls) and the sheer silvery gelatinous luxury of the image literally brings you to tears of pleasure.

VERY large Group Karmic Chant for Paramount reissue this year.

A little clarification (and a little backtracking as well, to be fair...) It was by comparison relative to The Last Command, which really blew me away, and while I did indeed appreciate the look of Docks, and that is usually more than enough for me, I found the story less satisfying than The Last Command. (My tape went a bit naff for the last 20" and lost the sound which did not help either, though the print on both tapes looked very good otherwise.) Am I right in seeing Betty Compson as a prototype Dietrich? I certainly saw Dietrich in her. I also found it very homoerotic but that is hardly a surprise I guess.

Expectations played their part as well, of the three I have now seen, I expected Docks to be way ahead of Last Command and Der Blau Engel, whereas those two proved very pleasant surprises (I really did not expect to like Der Blaue Engel but it too impressed me, even if I found some of the humiliation of the professor hard to take. Jannings does humiliation so well though, doesn't he?). I suspect that when the weight of expectation is removed and I go back to these films Docks may come over better. I often find that I get so much more out of a film, especially a "big" film, i.e. a film I have longed to see, second time round. (Lordy, more than enough backtracking...)

Is there any word of a Paramount reissue, or Eclipse or similar? If not, should I take a chance on one of the PD versions of Underworld?

[Trelkovsky]

Crime and punishment has just been released in Spain, if anybody wants I can post some screencaps.

[Trelkovsky]

O.K., here they are.

[foggy eyes]

Looks great - thanks for posting the caps. I can't find anything on fnac.es - where can one order a copy?

[Trelkovsky]

here or here for instance, but it is not an exclusive, so fnac should have it eventually.

I realize now that the release date is the 27th, but they already had it today at 'el corte inglés'.

[HerrSchreck]

Looks fantastic-- but that was to be expected viewing the state of the elements in the boot floating around from the source-VHS.

I'm a definite fan of this film. Lorre makes a fine Raskolinow-- embodies rather well all the contradictions & eccentricities of character.