My marathon running days are over, but having run about a dozen of them, the premise for Samurai Marathon intrigued me.
If not a truly great movie experience, Samurai Marathon is only a couple steps away from being one, due to the weak scenes portraying Commodore Perry. It’s available for free on YouTube Movies & TV, with commercials.
Note: The subtitles are out of sync and get progressively worse later in the video.
The MAGA crowd may prefer to imagine that books are being burned in this video, but it’s my semi-annual burning of bills that have been paid and receipts that aren’t needed. I shred some things, but this makes it more of a primal ritual, besides being easier on the ears.
Something I featured recently deserves to be mentioned more on Turner Classic Movies — Old Time Radio shows that were adapted from movies of the time.
In 1950, Alfred Hitchcock introduced a radio play of his 1944 film Spellbound. The Theramin sound gets to be a bit much, but it’s an interesting adaptation. Five years later, the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents began its long run.
For now, there is a complete copy of Spellbound available on YouTube. The movie includes the famous dream sequence that was created in collaboration with Salvador Dali. In the finished film it was directed not by Hitch, however, but by William Cameron Menzies, who has been the subject of some recent posts.
https://youtu.be/lNThFiBh7Ck
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol14_2018_king
On a related note, Donald Spoto died a couple of weeks ago. I read Spoto’s Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of Genius, as soon as it came out in paperback, 39 years ago. I remember reading it on airplanes and in hotels while traveling on business. I was halfway through the book when I accidentally left it in the seatback pocket of a plane while in a rush to catch a connecting flight. Realizing my mistake, I had just enough time to buy another copy at an airport bookstore to continue my reading on the next flight. That copy I didn’t lose.
To me, Spoto’s take on Hitch smacked of him having a thesis that was more like an agenda, and force-fitting some facts to back it up. I had a similar reaction to David Michaelis’ biography of Charles Schulz.
Watching live, as Andrew Sandoval interviews legendary song writer and producer Jeff Barry.
60°F was the low for today.
Casablanca in less than 25 minutes, as presented on The Screen Guild Theater, CBS Radio, April 26, 1943.
