Burton’s First Encounter with Taylor

by Kimberly Lindbergs | September 13, 2008

Categories | Books, Actors, Actresses, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton

I recently stumbled across this fascinating description of Richard Burton’s first meeting with Elizabeth Taylor written by Burton himself and borrowed from his book Meeting Mrs. Jenkins (1966). I enjoyed reading it so much that I just had to share it. Not only is it an amazing read but it’s also a great showcase for Burton’s wicked sense of humor and his wonderful way with words. Besides acting, directing and producing, Richard Burton was also an avid writer and he kept journals for most of his adult life.

“It was my first time in California and my first visit to a swank house. There were quite a lot of people in and around the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners – Bloody Marys, boilermakers, highballs, iced beer. I knew some of the people and was introduced to the others. Wet brown arms reached out of the pool and shook my hand. The people were all friendly, and they called me Dick immediately. I asked if they would please call me Richard – Dick, I said, made me feel like a symbol of some kind. They laughed, some of them. It was, of course, Sunday morning and I was nervous.

I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. I didn’t, of course, which was just as well. The girl was not, and, quite clearly, was not going to be laughing back. I had an idea that, finding nothing of interest, she was looking right through me and was examining the texture of the wall behind. If there was a flaw in the sandstone, I knew she’d find it and probe it right to the pith. I fancied that if she chose so, the house would eventually collapse.

I smiled at her and, after a long moment, just as I felt my own smile turning into a cross-eyed grimace, she started slightly and smiled back. There was little friendliness in the smile. A new ice cube formed of its own accord in my Scotch-on-the-rocks.

She sipped some beer and went back to her book. I affected to become social with the others but out of the corner of my mind – while I played for the others the part of a poor miner’s son who was puzzled, but delighted by the attention these lovely people paid to him – I had her under close observation. She was, I decided, the most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen. She spoke to no one. She looked at no one. She steadily kept on reading her book. Was she merely sullen? I wondered. I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in the divine face. She was a Mona Lisa type, I thought. In my business everyone is a type. She is older than the deck chair on which she sits, I thought headily, and she is famine, fire, destruction, and plague, she is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the on lie true begetter. She is a secret wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery, I thought with a mental man-to-man nod to Churchill. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered. Indeed, her body was a miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius. It needed nothing but itself. It was true art, I thought, executed in terms of itself. It was smitten by its own passion. I used to think things like that. I was not long down from Oxford and Walter Pater was still talked of and I read the art reviews in the quality weeklies without much caring about the art itself, and it was a Sunday morning in Bel Air, and I was nervous, and there was the Scotch-on-the-rocks.

Like Miniver Cheevy I kept on drinking and, in the heady flow of the attention I was getting, told story after story as the day boozed slowly on. I went in swimming once or twice. So did she, but, lamentably, always after I’d come out. She swam easily and gracefully as an Englishwoman would and not with the masculine drive and kick of most American girls. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me. I became frustrated almost to screaming when I had finished a well-received and humorous story about the death of my grandfather and found that she was turned away in deep conversation with another woman. I think I tried to eavesdrop but was stayed by words like – Tony and Janet and Marlon and Sammy. She was not, obviously, talking about me.

Eventually, with half-seas-ed cunning and with all the nonchalance of a traffic jam, I worked my way to her side of the pool. She was describing – in words not normally written – what she thought of a producer at M.G.M. This was my first encounter with freedom of speech in the U.S.A., and it took my breath away. My brain throbbed; I almost sobered up. I was profoundly shocked. It was ripe stuff. I checked her again. There was no question about it. She was female. In America the women apparently had not only got the vote – they’d got the words to go with it.

I was somewhat puzzled and disturbed by the half-look she gave me as she uttered the enormities. Was she deliberately trying to shock me? Those huge violet-blue eyes (the biggest I’ve ever seen, outside those who have glandular trouble – thyroid, et cetera) had an odd glint in them. You couldn’t describe it as a twinkle…. Searchlights can not twinkle, they turn on and off and probe the heavens and so on.

Still I couldn’t be left out. I had to join in and say something. I didn’t reckon on the Scotch though. I didn’t reckon that it had warped my judgment and my sense of timing, my choice of occasion. With all the studied frenzy of Dutch courage I waded into the depths of those perilous eyes.

In my best chiffon-and-cut-glass Oxford accent I said: “You have a remarkable command of Olde-Englishe.”

There was a pause in which I realized with brilliant clarity the relativity of time. Aeons passed, civilizations came and went, brave men and cowards died in battles not yet fought, while those cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon. I reached up with a casual hand to cover up the right-cheeked evidence of my acne’d youth. Halfway up I realized my hand was just as ugly as my face and decided to leave the bloody thing and die instead. But while contemplating the various ways of suicide and having sensibly decided, since I had a good start, to drink myself to death, I was saved by her voice which said, “Don’t you use words like that at the Old Vic?”

“They do,” I said, “but I don’t. I come from a family and an attitude that believe such words are an indication of weakness in vocabulary and emptiness of mind…. Despite Jones’s writing that in times of acute shared agony and fear, as in trench warfare, obscenities repeated in certain patterns can at times become almost liturgical, almost poetic….” I ran out of gas.

There was another pause; more empires fell. Captains and kings and counsellors arrived and departed. She said three four-letter words. These were, I think, “Well! Well! Well!”

Somebody laughed uneasily. The girl had turned away. I had been dismissed. I felt as lonely as a muezzin, as a reluctant piano lesson on a Saturday afternoon, as the Last Post played on a cracked bugle.

I went home and somebody asked, when I told them where I’d been, what she was like. “Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. She probably,” I said, “shaves.” To nobody in particular I observed that the human body is eighty percent water.”

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End of the Summer Reading

by Kimberly Lindbergs | August 28, 2008

Categories | News, Books, Television, Science Fiction, John Phillip Law, Nikkatsu

Summer is coming to an end and I thought I’d make mention of a couple of new and upcoming book releases that I’m looking forward to reading.

First up is John Phillip Law: Diabolik Angel written by Carlos Aguilar and his wife Anita Haas. They worked closely with John Phillip Law on the book before his unfortunate death this summer and it promises to be one of the most interesting biographies of the year. Carlos has written many wonderful books that I admire on directors like Sergio Leone and Jess Franco. He was kind enough to send me some information about his latest book as well as a wonderful picture of himself and his wife with John Phllip Law so that I could share it with my readers.

Above: Carlos Aguilar, Anita Haas and John Phillip Law.

Here’s a brief blurb about the book from the back cover that should grab your attention:

“John Phillip Law is one of the most cosmopolitan and charismatic actors of his generation. He is best remembered for his fantasy cult films Barbarella, Danger: Diabolik and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the European western Death Rides a Horse, and the American classic The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! and Von Richthofen and Brown. But apart from that, his novelesque personal and artistic journey bears a unique intercontinental link between diverse phenomena, both inside and outside cinema: from Hollywood in the 50s to Broadway in the 60s; love affairs with actresses Faye Dunaway, Barbara Parkins, Marisa Mell and Barbara Bouchet; the world of the hippies, with its free love and drugs; the Playboy empire; la dolce vita in Rome, Almeria of the spaghetti westerns and European co-productions of all kinds; Spain’s dictatorship, the beginning of the West’s fascination with martial arts, Asia’s economic awakening and Dracula in the theatre. John Phillip Law has, in one way or another, been part of all these phenomena. This extensive interview, in which he shares his memories with straightforward honesty, is accompanied by an exceptional collection of photos. An extraordinary work about an extraordinary life.”

At the moment John Phillip Law: Diabolik Angel is only available from SciFiworld in Spain but hopefully this bilingual book will get a wider release in the future.

Another interesting upcoming release is Midnight Eye contributor Jasper Sharp’s new book Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema. According to the publishers at FAB Press it’s based on extensive interviews with many of the leading figures in the field and offers to take readers on “a wild joy ride deep into the hinterlands of Japanese culture, society and radical politics.”

From the FAB Press website:

“Just how close are the links between the arthouse and the grindhouse in Japan? Read about the ins and outs of Japanese censorship from the wartime onwards, and how topless deep sea diving girls came to woo local audiences in the ’50s. Learn how a TV nature documentary maker ended up helming nude female Tarzan movies, and how ’60s mavericks Kôji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi met up with John and Yoko at Cannes while on the way to the Golan Heights to make a film about Palestinian revolutionaries. How Deep Throat’s Harry Reems wound up in Tokyo starring in a zany sex comedy about a penis transplant gone awry, and how one of Japan’s most famous literary figures ended up the subject of the country’s first gay porno movie. How one of Nikkatsu’s leading directors went it alone to make a film about powerboat racing and ended up in the bad books of the yakuza, and how the anti-Bush sex farce Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice came to be re-titled as The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai and became one of the most talked-about Japanese films of recent years, playing at over twenty international film festivals.”

Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema is available from Amazon.

Last but not least, is Marcelo Abeal’s new book The Legend of Time Tunnel which is a tribute to Irwin Allen’s terrific television series of the same name. Abeal’s book includes detailed chapters on all the main actors involved with the production such as Robert Colbert, James Darren, Lee Meriwether, Whit Bissell, John Zaremba, Sam Groom and Wesley Laus as well as Irwin Allen himself. The book also boasts a special introduction by Robert Colbert, an episode guide and detailed information about the stunts performed on the show. I briefly wrote about Irwin Allen’s contributions to television last year and I’m happy to see that his television work is getting more attention.

Marcelo Abeal is an Argentinian actor and professional stuntman himself and his book seems to be a limited release. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy please email Bob Frassinetti at: admin@frassinetti.com and tell him I sent you!

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Annie Nightingale’s Wicked Speed

by Kimberly Lindbergs | May 9, 2008

Categories | Books, Rants & Raves

Top: Annie Nightingale in 1964

The very groovy Richard Harland Smith over at Turner Movie Classics much admired Movie Morlocks Blog invited me to participate in a sort of “meme” with the following rules attached to it:

) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing…
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I tend to dislike these sorts of things but the meme was easy enough and didn’t require much thinking on my part so I took Richard up and his offer and in the end I was happy to be invited to participate.

At the time that I got Richard’s email the nearest book laying next to me was an autographed hardback copy of Annie Nightingale’s biography Wicked Speed that I bought at a Tower Records store when I was in London in 2000. Annie Nightingale was Britain’s first female DJ and she’s a fascinating woman who has mixed and mingled with many of Britain’s best bands. After writing my recent post about The Mod Musicals of Lance Comfort I’ve had the early days of British pop music and radio on my mind so I had recently been revisiting Nightingale’s book. From the book description:

“Britain’s first female DJ. A suburban schoolgirl whisked into the world of music, whose passion led her to the world of the Beatles, the Yarbirds, the Rolling Stones and the Who. As a young journalist she put herself on the line for young bands - and she’s still at it with Shaun Ryder, Primal Scream and Daft Punk, just to name a few.

Annie Nightingale became one of the hardcore “birds” of London’s growing Sixties pop-art scene. She got married, was a Cosmopolitan columnist, and had kids. She also had parties. But more than anything, she wanted to become a DJ on Radio 1 - hard in the days when the BBC was a male-dominated environment. Yet she won out in the end - and for years was alone in her field.”

Three sentences from page 123 of Wicked Speed:
“I’d be interviewing the Minister of Nuclear Procurement, say, and I’d address him by his first name, which would throw him completely, and ask him if he believed in God. Both Margret Thatcher’s children appeared on the show as guests; Carol was preferable of the two. French and Saunders, who were just starting out at the time, were also guests on Mailbag, in their newest guise as Duranies.”

When I bought Wicked Speed eight years ago I had no idea who Annie Nightingale was but I needed a quick read for the plane trip home and the book description sounded fascinating. I’ve been a fan of sixties era British rock and pop since I was just a kid (the first concert I ever attended was a Rolling Stones’ show when I was only 13 years old). I also briefly worked as a DJ myself in the late ’80s spinning dance music and popular club hits at a local nightspot so I was curious to learn more about “Britain’s first female DJ.”

Annie Nightingale is not a great storyteller and if you’re bothered by run-on sentences you should probably avoid it. The book also lacks an index, which is especially annoying if you’re someone like me who wants easy access to her entertaining stories about interviewing a bored Sean Connery after he had just completed the first James Bond film or driving Scott Walker’s Mini Cooper. But if you enjoy all the name dropping Nightingale does and are interested in what life was like for the first female DJ in Britain, Annie Nightingale’s Wicked Speed is an entertaining and quick read.

I hate the idea of “tagging” anyone but if the following people would like to participate please feel free to!

Tagged:
Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter
Jonathan Lapper at Cinema Styles
Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, coffee and more coffee
Tenebrous Kate at Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire
Robert Monell at I’m in a Jess Franco State of Mind

Now on to Cinebeats’ irregular scheduled programming . . .

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The Good, the Bad, and Godzilla

by Kimberly Lindbergs | April 19, 2008

Categories | News, Books, Japanese Cinema, Tokusatsu

I’ve been enjoying August Ragone’s writing on Japanese cinema for many many years. I first discovered his work thanks to a terrific zine he first produced in the 80s’ called Markalite: The Magazine of Japanese Fantasy and since then I’ve read numerous articles he’s written for magazines such as G-Fan and Asian Cult Cinema over the years. Most recently he wrote the wonderful book Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, which was published in association with Chronicle Books.

August Ragone has also just started his own blog called The Good, the Bad, and Godzilla and if you’re a fan of Japanese fantasy and science fiction films I highly recommend giving his new blog a look. You’ll finds news and information about his upcoming book signings and various events there as well as interesting bits and pieces about Japanese cinema.

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Nikkatsu Action

by Kimberly Lindbergs | April 14, 2008

Categories | Books, Directors, Japanese Cinema, Joe Shishido, Seijun Suzuki, Yasuharu Hasebe, Toshio Masuda, Nikkatsu

Tetsuya Watari and Joe Shishido

Last week the Nikkatsu Action Film Series made its way to San Francisco and the nice guys over at the Outcast Cinema site who manage the event were kind enough to remind me with a friendly email. Unfortunately due to my current work schedule, ongoing apartment maintenance and various family obligations, which are leaving me with very little free time lately, I wasn’t able to see any of the films scheduled to play. I rarely make it into the city for film events anymore due to the high cost of gas, bridge fares, parking fees and ticket prices. A night out at the movies with my guy in the Bay Area can easily cost us $50, but I had really hoped to see two of the Toshio Masuda films that were scheduled to show at the Nikkatsu Action series (Gangster V.I.P. and Red Handkerchief) since they were two films I’d never seen before and I’ve become fascinated with the director’s work over the last couple of years.

Last year I picked up a copy of a wonderful Japanese book called Toshio Masuda - Films - Complete Guide which contains over 500 pages covering the director’s long career and accomplishments. It’s an amazing looking book obviously packed with many details about the director’s 80+ films and it also includes lots of lovely still shots from various productions. Naturally it’s written in Japanese and since I can barely read a word of Japanese myself and often have to rely on family and friends for minimal translations, I haven’t been able to fully appreciate the book. I highly doubt that there will ever be an English translation of the entire text made available, but the book has still managed to widen my understanding of Toshio Masuda ’s amazing directorial career and I’ve been making an attempt to try and see as many of his films as possible lately, which is why I was so disappointed that I missed the Toshio Masuda films shown during the Nikkatsu Action series.

Here’s a brief blurb about Toshio Masuda from the only English text featured on the cover of Toshio Masuda - Films - Complete Guide. It’s written in broken English so don’t be surprised if you find it a little hard to follow:

“Action, Romance, Comedy, Animation, The War. A Giant in the field of Japanese program pictures. Toshio Masuda was born in Kobe City, October 5th 1927. There was a year his 16 films have reached the TOP 10 in the yearly charts. It is the second highest record in the history of Japanese movies. He also has been in the chart from the 1950’s through until 1990’s, for about 5 decades. This is a miracle and a marvelous thing. His films themes are not only about action but comedy, romance, animation and the war. And every theme relates to the bloom of youth.”

It’s really astonishing and extremely sad that the work of such an important Japanese director like Toshio Masuda is almost completely unavailable to western audiences and has often been totally overlooked by western critics and film scholars. Thankfully due to the hard work of some people such as the fine folks at Outcast Cinema that is slowly changing and I’m extremely grateful for all their efforts.

Since I’m on the topic of Nikkatsu Action cinema, I also wanted to mention that I recently finished reading Mark Schilling’s latest book No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema, which is a quick read and well worth picking up if you’re interested in Japanese cinema. I’ve enjoyed many of Mark Schilling’s books over the years such as The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture and The Yakuza Movie Book so I was looking forward to reading his latest effort and I think it’s probably his best book yet because it limits its focus to one topic and provides readers with some interesting tidbits about the genre. No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema is somewhat light on content but it easily makes up for that with lots of fascinating interviews with important directors and stars, as well as beautiful still shots and incredible poster art reproductions. I don’t always agree with Schilling’s interpretations of Nikkatsu Action cinema that he puts forward in the book or his opinions regarding particular films and directors. And occasionally while reading the interviews he conducted with directors I desperately wished I could have jumped in with my own questions, but I’m very grateful that Schilling is making a much needed effort to research the work and careers of talented filmmakers like Toshio Masuda who is featured in his book along with Seijun Suzuki, Yasuharu Hasebe and Koreyoshi Kurahara. Since so little English language information is available about Nikkatsu’s Action cinema Mark Schilling’s book is a very welcome addition to the slowly growing body of Japanese film criticism and history that’s trying to forge ahead and follow uncharted paths that were often neglected by other well-known Japanese film critics and scholars in the past.

Here’s a few brief paragraphs from Mark Schilling’s Forward to No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema:

“The label said it all: Nikkatsu Akushon. Nikkatsu was a studio that had been around since the silent days and Akushon was “Action,” written in the katakana syllabary for foreign words. During their peak, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Nikkatsu Action films evoked a cinematic world neither foreign nor Japanese, but a mix of the two, where Japanese tough guys had the swagger, moves and long legs of Hollywood movie heroes. Where Tokyo streets, Yokohama docks and Hokkaido plains took on an exciting, exotic aura, as though they were stand-ins for Manhattan, Marseilles or the American West.

. . .

“Foreign critics long ignored Nikkatsu Action. Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson’s seminal 1959 history The Japanese Film: Art and Industry passed over the entire genre in silence, as did its 1982 revised edition. Joan Mellen’s 1976 study The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema does not mention Nikkatsu or its films and stars even once. The rise of Seijun Suzuki to cult fame in the West in the 1980s brought the genre more attention abroad, but often in a negative way, with critics hailing Suzuki as an overlooked and discarded master, while dismissing the films of his colleagues as studio hack work (despite having seen few of them.)”

Mark Schilling’s book No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema retails for $15.95 and it’s currently available at Amazon for only $10.85. The Japanese book Toshio Masuda - Films - Complete Guide was published last year by Hotwax in association with Shinko Music Entertainment Co. LTD and it should be available at better Japanese book stores such as Kinokuniya. You can also purchase the book online at places such as YesAsia.com, but it costs a lot more there. The original retail price is about $37 and YesAsia is selling it for $50 plus shipping and handling costs so potential buyers should be aware of the considerable price hikes by some retailers.

The Nikkatsu Action film series is still going strong and many films will be shown across the country in various U.S. locations throughout April and May. For more information about the event please visit the Outcast Cinema Blog for locations and showtimes.

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Bits & Pieces

by Kimberly Lindbergs | March 22, 2008

Categories | News, Books, Rants & Raves, French Cinema, Blogathons, William Klein

Elke Sommer and her bunny want to wish everyone
a happy holiday weekend!

Real world responsibilities, job hunting and a bad cold have been interfering with my writing and blog updates lately. I’m also going on a brief vacation tomorrow and I won’t return until Tuesday next week, but by then I should be feeling a lot better and you can expect me to start regularly updating Cinebeats again.

During my downtime I have been catching up on some reading. I got some interesting books for Christmas last year including Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s and Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, which have been keeping me busy. Both books make for some fast, fun and fascinating reading.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how I write about film and the way I approach viewing and analyzing the movies I watch after the film critic Adrian Martin was kind enough to consider my blog in a brief piece he wrote for de Filmkrant which you can read here:

- World Wide Angle - March 2008, nr 297

I’ve admired Adrian Martin for awhile and I find his writing and interviews very inspiring so I was extremely surprised and deeply flattered when Girish kindly pointed out Adrian’s piece in his own blog, which led to an interesting conversation there. I tend to get a little intimidated by all the wonderful and extremely thoughtful conversations that take place at Girish’s blog and I get nervous about jumping into the fray, but Girish has always made me feel very welcome there even when the other commentators occasionally seem to be twisting themselves up in small knots trying to talk around me and over me

I must also say that I’m really happy to be considered an ‘enthusiast’ by Adrian since it was really my love, appreciation and interest in unusual films that have often been maligned in the past or overlooked such as Boom! and Blood and Roses, which really motivated me to start writing about cinema and I find the original Cahiers du cinéma writers extremely inspirational.

Before I disappear for a few days, I thought I’d share a few links to various things of possible interest…

My buddy Kate has started her own film blog called Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire. If you enjoy horror films and unusual subgenres like nunsploitation, please stop by Kate’s blog and tell her I sent ya!
- Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire

Ferdy on Films is putting together a blogathon May 4th - 10th called Invitation to the Dance that will focus on various forms of dance found in films. I have a serious weakness for musicals that makes me drop everything I’m doing and watch them if I ever come across one playing on TV so naturally I plan on excepting Marilyn’s invitation and I hope other film bloggers will as well!
- Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon

And last but not least, Tim Lucas recently offered up a sneak peek at the upcoming Criterion - Eclipse 3 Disc DVD Box Set of The Delirious Fictions of William Klein, which has me super excited since it promises to be one of this years most interesting DVD releases. I’ve only seen Klein’s wonderfully surreal and fantastic film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, 1966) myself, but the print I saw many years ago was from a horrible multi-generation VHS tape that was barely watchable so I’m really looking forward to this release. Now I’ll finally be able to enjoy Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? in all its glorious widescreen splendor, along with two of Klein’s other films that I haven’t had the opportunity to see yet.
- The Delirious Fictions of William Klein

You can experience a little bit of William’s Klein’s magic in the following clip from his film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966)

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Good News for Soundtrack Enthusiasts

by Kimberly Lindbergs | November 14, 2007

Categories | Books, Soundtracks, Composers, Ennio Morricone, Maurice Jarre

Cinedelic Records has released a terrific series of Book & CD packages this year called Musical and Visual Tributes, which include collections devoted to the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and another devoted to the films of Mario Monicelli. On November 20th soundtrack enthusiasts can look forward to two new Musical and Visual Tributes from Cinedelic Records that focus one the films of Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento.

Each of these new collections comes with a handsome 130 page hard-cover book covering the work of each director that contains rarely seen photos, reproductions of vintage poster art and publicity materials, as well as complete filmographies. Also included with each book is a terrific compilation CD with music from some of the director’s most celebrated films.

Bernardo Bertolucci: A Musical and Visual Tribute features the work of a lot of great composers such as Piero Piccioni, Ennio Morriocone, George Delerue, Augusto Martelli and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Musical selections from La Commare Secca (1962), Before the Revolution (1964), Partner (1968), The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), 1900 (1976), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), The Last Emperor (1987), Little Buddha (1993) and The Dreamers (2003) are all included on the accompanying CD.

Dario Argento: A Musical and Visual Tribute seems a bit more complete because Cinedelic Records was able to include an interview with Argento in the book that details his working relationship with composers he has collaborated with including Ennio Morricone, Claudio Simonetti and the band Goblin. The CD that accompanies the book features music selections from many of Argento’s films including The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971), Four Flies On Grey Velvet (1971), Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Phenomena (1985), Opera (1987), Trauma (1993), Sleepless (2001) and The Card Player (2004), as well as a new tribute track performed by Signor Wolf.

For more information visit the official Cinedelic Records site.

Soundtrack enthusiasts should also keep an eye and ear out for the outstanding new DVD/CD package Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean, which I recently reviewed for Cinedelica. This new release features Jarre’s tribute concert for David Lean shot in 1992 and an interesting interview with the composer about his creative collaborations with the director.

For more information please see my recent review of Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean.

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