Treasure hunting
Mar. 19th, 2012 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tilly_stratfordI remember a time when to me, a hard-to-find movie meant having to buy it off Amazon. I used to assume that just about any professionally made movie was - or was very soon going to be - commercially available on DVD. Particularly if it said MGM or Paramount or Warner Bros. on the cover.
And then I got into old films. And suddenly I dicovered that not only were there certain big-studio movies that hadn't been released on DVD - some weren't even to be found on video, or they'd been edited, or they were lost forever. Frustrating. But oh so rewarding when you finally, at long last, years into the search, get your hands on a colourized (ugh, I hate colourization) blurry TV bootleg.
I'm talking about Three Strangers (1946), one of those legendary Lorre-Greenstreet movies. You know how I am with Lorre and Greenstreet.
And what an odd little movie. It's about three strangers - one more morally reprehensible than the other - making a wish on a sweepstakes ticket in front of an ancient Chinese idol at the stroke of midnight and - well, you can tell it's a B movie. But what a B movie!
To me the plot is just a minor detail of course, I was mostly just marveling at seeing scenes like these. Where else am I ever going to see Sydney Greenstreet as a crooked lawyer selfconciously trying to seduce an eccentric rich widow? Or Peter Lorre as a cheerful drunk with a Cockney girl mooning over him? And Lorre more or less repeating my favourite bit in Arsenic and Old Lace, grinning apologetically and admitting "...I was intoxicated."
Not as good as something like The Mask of Dimitrios, but ah, it was worth the wait!
And then I got into old films. And suddenly I dicovered that not only were there certain big-studio movies that hadn't been released on DVD - some weren't even to be found on video, or they'd been edited, or they were lost forever. Frustrating. But oh so rewarding when you finally, at long last, years into the search, get your hands on a colourized (ugh, I hate colourization) blurry TV bootleg.
I'm talking about Three Strangers (1946), one of those legendary Lorre-Greenstreet movies. You know how I am with Lorre and Greenstreet.
And what an odd little movie. It's about three strangers - one more morally reprehensible than the other - making a wish on a sweepstakes ticket in front of an ancient Chinese idol at the stroke of midnight and - well, you can tell it's a B movie. But what a B movie!
To me the plot is just a minor detail of course, I was mostly just marveling at seeing scenes like these. Where else am I ever going to see Sydney Greenstreet as a crooked lawyer selfconciously trying to seduce an eccentric rich widow? Or Peter Lorre as a cheerful drunk with a Cockney girl mooning over him? And Lorre more or less repeating my favourite bit in Arsenic and Old Lace, grinning apologetically and admitting "...I was intoxicated."
Not as good as something like The Mask of Dimitrios, but ah, it was worth the wait!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 04:27 am (UTC)I know that a couple of film noir festivals showed a preserved print in San Francisco and Seattle. Did you see it there?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 01:54 pm (UTC)It's TCM I have to thank for the priviliege, as the telltale mark in the corner of the screengrab indicates :-) But it's lovely to know there's a preserved print out there, I'd love to see it in the original black and white one day (I dearly wish some day the remaining Lorre-Greenstreet movies might see proper DVD releases, maybe as a box set even).