[US, 1925, 75 MIN. JOSEPH HENABERY]

One year before his death, Rudolph Valentino went independent with this picture about a modern day Don Juan who beomes mesmerized by his bosses wife. Only Valentino could hold his own against the lavish sets of William Cameron Menzies [Gone With The Wind] and the costuming of ledgendary fashion mavin Adrian. But he does with aplum.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY

[US, 1927, 81 MIN, PAUL LENI]

In his first American production [Dave, check that] Director Leni [Waxworks] brings the gothic sensabilities of his native Germany to bare on this, one of the best and most influencial this genre, clearing inspiring Todd Browning's 1930 adaptation of Dracula , James Whale's Frankensteinand most obviously his brilliant reductive Old Dark House. It's a pity Jon Debolt wasn't made to watch this before his overblow and bombastic travisty The Haunting: Leni hides his freights in the half seen shadows, and the slowly sliding trap door, not through computer tricks. Included is a good Harold Lloyd short , 1920's "Haunted Spooks".

THE BELLS

[US, 1926, 67 MIN, JAMES YOUNG]

Lionel Barrymore stars in this Crime & Punishment varient as a man haunted by the vision of his murder victum after a fatefull run in with a carnival hypnotist [a pre Frankenstien Boris Karloff, looking every inch like Dr, Caligari.] Rounding out the bill: Rene Clair's The Crazy Ray.

THE PENALTY

[US, 1920, 93 MIN, WALLACE WORSLEY]

Legendary horror star Lon Channey Sr gives a star making performance as the insane criminal mastermind Blizzard who became twisted in youth when an incompitant doctor amputated the boy's legs. Now that he is a man with the power of the underworld in his hands, he plans his revenge and it involves the doctor's daughter....

Stella Maris

[USA, 1918,]

America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford, plays two orphans in this Dickensian melodrama about a crippled girl, adopted by a loving, well off, family who shield her from the sorrows of the world -- a world that her doppelganger Unity Blake knows in all its ugliness. While Pickford gives her usual endearing performances as the title character, at times being coyingly annoying by acting annoying coy, she manages to loose herself in the role of Unity, creating one of her most vivid characterization of childhood lost.

In an industry known for its shortsightedness, it is fortunate for us that the one Hollywood studio that made the best musicals also had the best archival habits. Not only did MGM save the original soundtracks from the recording sessions from such classics as "Singing in the Rain", "Meet Me In Saint Louis", "Kiss Me Kate", but they saved a good number of the alternate "stems", or angles, as well, allowing Turner Classics in collaboration with Rhino Records to generate true stereo recordings of some very famous music. Fortunately by 1952 MGM wasrecording all their musicals in stereo on 35 mm magnetic stock so anything from that date forward is in pretty good shape.

One of their best rescue efforts was released last year: Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's "Gigi", the only musical they ever wrote together expressly for the screen. Indeed for the first time they were basically hired hands, to put it too crudely -- but the man doing the hiring was producer Arthur Freed, who had also garnered the services of director Vincent Minnelli for this A team. Talent in front of the camera was also top shelf: Leslie Caron [second choice after a disinclined Audrey Hepburn], Louis Jourdan, [second choice after an unavailable Dirk Bogarde!], and Maurice Chevalier [first and only choice -- and soon to have a new signature song, "Thank Heavens For Little Girls"]. And one cannot forget Hermione Gingold!  

Too long overshadowed by the tremendous success [and, obviously, superior] musical My Fair Lady, which was continuing its Broadway run at the time, Gigi is still a charming confection, as light as an eclair, a bubblelly as the champagne they serenade. Oddly, Gigi made for a better film, a nice quiet little bit of froufrou compared to the overblown pretence that could wound, if not kill, even a piece of musical theater as indestructible as "My Fair Lady". It is great to be able to hear the score to "Gigi" again in true stereo; for years the only available sound track was marred by an impenetrable patina of reverb and truncated numbers. Indeed be careful to look for the Turner/Rhino version as CDs of the old Lp still turn up in many record stores and the Turner CD includes all the musical cues, a few demo recordings and many extended songs later tightened up for the film.

Two classic musicals by Vincent Minnelli, 1944's "Meet Me In Saint Louis" and 1946's "Ziegfeld Follies" both appear in stereo for the first time, and one would swear that they were recorded just yesterday, the sound is so clear and full and spacious. Here's hoping that some day soon someone at the studio will decide to marry the stereo tracks to a newly strucked IB technicolor prints of these to musical masterpieces and rerelease them theatrically.

Oh, one can dream....

Another fun soundtrack from Turner is the Deluxe edition of "The Wizard Of Oz" containing two CDs of music and a full color 50 page book. Again many truncated numbers are restored to their original length and several entire tunes dropped from the film are presented in their proper context. While this version of "The Wizard Of Oz" is in mono, rumor has it that Turner Films might re-release the film next year theatrically with a true stereo music track, thanks to the discovery of all those different recording "stems"! Also promised for next year: the score from Stanley Kubrick's version of "Lolitta", and a recently discovered recording of Max Steiner's "Casablanca", conducted by the composer and featuring all the cues.

To a culture that no longer respects the bifurcation of Life into its public and private sectors, Robert DeNiro's loud silences seem oddly quaint -- an affectation akin to an effrontery. So it is of no surprise, then, that Andy Dougan has trouble in formulating a totally unified portrait of the man in his new biography entitled accurately enough "Untouchable" [Thounder's Mouth Press, $24.95]. Born during the Second World War to bohemian artists whose Greenwich Village loft knew the likes of every painter and poet, every theorist and thinker, this side of NYU, DeNiro was soon [to quote Dougan] "largely responsible for his own upbringing"; his parents busy enough with their own.

Uninterested, undisciplined, unexceptional at school, DeNiro left to study with Adler and Strasberg where his genius was quickly realized, nurtured, and developed. In short order his intense, heavily mannered technique found critical favor in "Glamour, Glory And Gold", a bit of camp fun from one Jackie Curtis and it soon proved to be the perfect accoutrement to the revolution in styles that was the touchstone of the nascent underground cinema movement in New York. It was through his work with Brian DePalma in "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom", that he came to the attention of Francis Ford Coppula, then casting the first of his Godfather films, and, most importantly, to Martin Scorsese.

Renoir had Gabin, Fellini, Mastroianni. Now Scorsese had found his cinematic surrogate in DeNiro. Together they would make films that defined their time and redefined the art of film. A fuller examination of this partnership is to be had in Mary Pat Kelly oral history of our most talented active director entitled "Martin Scorsese, a Journey" also just out on Thunder's Mouth Press [a great marketing gimmick was missed here by not packaging the two in a slip case and including a joint index!] In some three hundred pages Kelly collects quotes from every important collaborator of Scorsese's, tracing his career up to and including 1991's "Cape Fear". As taciturn as is DeNiro, Scorsese is effusive; always the engaging professor desperate to share his insights as if their sheer energy gives him pain until expelled. Where it becomes clear in Dougan's biography that DeNiro is intuitive, consumed with a fear of not finding that one insight which will make his performance come alive [explaining to some degree his mania for research and his passion for staying in character once he finds it], Scorsese, it is equally evident, is a man in total control of his medium, able to explain every shot, every camera move, every cut. And since so much of corsese is in his films, Kelly's biography may lack surprises, but catalogues details. Both books are marred by an inability to address directly the effects that cocaine may have had on both men's work in the Disco Seventies. One wonders about 1977's New York, New York, with its wonderful bombast, like some Simpson/Bruckheimer Art film, all sound and fury, and yet still managing to signify plenty. Some directors -- and some actors -- just can't helprevealing things about themselves. They are the good ones. It should not surprisingly, then, that the book that best gets into the heart of this man -- and therefore his art -- is by the man himself. Published here in 1989 by Faber & Faber, "Scorsese On Scorsese" is just that -- excerpts from the director's writings, lectures, and conversations organized chronologically by editors David Thompson and Ian Christie, designed as a companion to the Nation Film Theatre of London's retrospective of Scorsese's career.

When one is ones own Boswell, one is destine to stand in good light. So it should come as no surprise as to who stand in the shadows, who lingers in the shade in Mia Farrow's new autobiography "What Falls Away" [Doubleday]. Mia had only a moderately interesting story to tell before the nightmarish collapse of her twenty-"odd" year relationship with one Woody Allen. For its first two hundred pages "What Falls Away" is just another of those generic celebrity tell-all destined to be quickly relegated to the remainder table: an easy read with its breezy style, trafficking in those mildly interesting antidotes that are the coin of the talk show circuit. Even her years with Frank [Sinatra] are chronicled with a quiet civility that, if accurately reported, would have earned him the moniker "Chairman of the Boring" rather than "Chairman of the Board". Farrow has too little to say about most of her pre-Allen film work, "A Dandy In Aspic", "Rosemary's Baby", "John & Mary", and perhaps rightly so: it is not an impressive body. Even "Secret Ceremony" is disposed of in less space than I get for this throwaway column --and she was writing first hand about working with Elizabeth Taylor and Joseph Losey. Only her time with Allen gets covered in any sort of detail, and of course it is her time with Allen that we are most interested. She does not disappoint: Allen comes off as a man even more neurotic than his film persona. Unfortunately, Farrow maintains the same even-handed tone that mars the entire tome indelibly. Her feeling seem more chronicled than felt, and when she comes across the pornographic pictures of her daughter that her lover had left lying around for her to discover, well, one doesn't really expect such objective journalism. I guess, conceivably, that was the only way she could handle the retelling of such a heinous betrayal from a man who's most cogent explanation for his child abuse was the rather lame aphorism "the heart wants what it wants."

Julian Fox has the unenviable distinction of being the first to write about the art of Allen since the scandle in "Woody, Movies From Manhattan" [Overlook Press]. As film scholarship the book falls short, only lightly touching on themes and motifs in a ouevra that presents a really consistent world view. In its stead we get a fascinating glimpse at the production histories of the over thirty films Allen has directed or been involved. It has been well known for some time that Allen has always planned for reshoots several months after principle photography has been completed -- a throwback to the old Hollywood Studio days that ended when stars became free agents and not full time employees. But I was amazed to learn how much Allen rewrites and reconceptualizes, how much is undiscovered until that first rough cut. The themes and even the narrative of a film like "Annie Hall", according to Fox, did not appear until Allen and his editor removed many hours of extraneous plotlines and digressions, like a sculpture chipping away marble until the statue is revealed. And while Fox does not ignore the effects the scandal has had on Allen's career [none, apparently], he does his best to overlook the tawdry autobiographic strains that run through all of Allen's mature films. It is these very elements that make his films so unique, him one of the great filmakers of all time, and "Husbands & Wives" so uncomfortable to watch today.

Even friends and family found it hard to say very many nice things about the man who brought to life such characters as Inspector Clouseau, and Dr Strangelove. Indeed even Peter Sellers seemed highly critical of Peter Sellers the man, often stated that he saw himself as just another acting job: "I know him well" his most recent biographer, Roger Lewis, quotes him a saying about himself. "Sometimes he bores me, sometimes he frightens me. Frequently he bewilders me. Occasionally he astonishes me, and sometimes I think he's mad." An unparalleled mimic who wanted to be the next Alex Guinness, a brilliant character actor who starved himself into becoming a romantic lead, Sellers's tale is one of an egocentric's decent into dementia, a psychosis so severe that it could only go unnoticed in Hollywood. Somehow Roger Lewis manages to make sense of it all in "The Life And Death of Peter Sellers", as much an essay as it is a conventional biography. "He became whoever he was playing", Mr Lewis told me in a recent interview. "And that's what determined the sort of films he made." --And the sort of films he unmade, for the books is a compendium of projects ruined by Seller's whims, abandoned by him half way through, or disowned and vilified when pasted together by others. The most tantalizing project that died a-borning was from the pen of the great Indian director Satyajit Ray who found a core of truth inside Sellers' often crude portrayals of "wily oriental gentlemen". To be called "The Alien" it finally did appear on screen after many a rewrite, and many years in "turn around", deformed and disfigured beyond recognition, retitled "ET, The Extra Terrestrial". In Ray's version, Sellers was to have played a rich Indian whose adopted western ways makes him as much an stranger as the titular visitor from the stars. It sounds like a role that would have been as challenging -- perhaps more so -- as Chauncey Gardener in "Being There."

While the abandonment of "The Alien" might have been a great loss, not so, one suspects, of "The Day the Clown Cried", Jerry Lewis' attempt to one up Chaplin in the pathos department. Here he plays a circus clown sent to a Nazi concentration camp to entertain the children on their way to the gas chambers. After viewing a rough cut of this never released film, satirist Harry Shearer branded it "a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz." How someone could be so blind, and pigheaded, and insensitive becomesclear in "King Of Comedy, the Life and Art Of Jerry Lewis", a surprisingly even handed biography by Shawn Levy. I say "surprisingly", because the book started out with Lewis' participation until one day he took umbrage at something and attacked the author. It's all in the book -- how a poorly educated borscht belt comedian became big, really big, when accidentally teamed with a lounge singer, how he soon became addicted to adulation of the French and soured by the disinterest at home. Now there appears some sort of repoucmoun: he can be our comedic elder statesman as long as he promises never to release that film.

Anthony Perkins, "it seems, was fighting typecasting in every aspect of his life" when at 41 he suddenly married long time groupie Berry Berenson and became a father after years of being a very active homosexual. That's how author Charles Winecoff tells it in "Split Image" [Dutton], the first major biography of the conflicted star, best remembered -- and typecast -- as the title character in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho". Like many celebs of his era Perkins' secret "other" life was a secret well kept from the public and yet to few of his co-workers who seemed to accept it much better then Perkins himself. Dominated by his stage mother, haunted by his father's early death, Perkins was determined to cauterize this "monosexual isolation" from his heart. And perhaps he did manage to do so, but only after years of brutal psychotherapy. A feckless charmer in public, yet really a closet misanthrope, Perkins was the true victim here, a casualty to his fractious soul which asserted itself in so many memorable performances -- and undermined many others. Winecoff traces his thesis monomaniacal, at the expense, unfortunately, of delving deeply into the roles that made Perkins famous.

Surprising, Hitchcock and Perkins got along famously during the making of Psycho and remained lifelong friends. Perhaps the great director only got his kicks by tormenting his blonde leading ladies. Unfortunately this is about the only subject that "Hitch" never addressed in his writings, recently collected by Sidney Gottlieb in a enlightening little tome entitled "Hitchcock on Hitchcock" [University Of California Press]. Few other directors were so much in control of their medium -- and none were able to write as well about it -- as Alfred Hitchcock.

With more and more Tv programs being released on home video, it is fun to read David Bianculli's "Dictionary Of Teleliteracy, Television's 500 biggest Hits, Misses, and Event" [Continuum Press]. For