David Rayner

20th Century Fox Home Video have been doing very well indeed lately, issuing DVD’s of, for the most part, films previously unavailable even on video. Among the most recent releases have been Yellow Sky; The Last Wagon; These Thousand Hills; The Story of Ruth and even Five Weeks in a Balloon, with the CinemaScope films among them transferred to DVD in their original format. Can I now begin to hope that four of the Fox CinemaScope and Color by De Luxe pictures from my younger days will finally be issued?

These are The Deerslayer, a 1957 colonial era Western starring Lex Barker and Rita Moreno, beautifully photographed amid warm, sunlit woodland surroundings and a glistening river and lake and with an excellent score by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter.

These talented composers also figure in my next two choices. The first of which is A Dog of Flanders (1959) starring David Ladd and Donald Crisp and filmed on very picturesque locations in Holland and Belgium. This remains the finest and most tear-jerking version ever made of this classic story. Unfortunately, Fox seems to have let the rights to it lapse and it is only available in a pan and scan transfer on Paramount Home Video. The DVD version is merely the old pan and scan video release transferred to DVD. If ever a film deserved to be re-mastered on DVD in its original CinemaScope format, it is A Dog of Flanders.

My third choice is Irwin Allen’s 1960 version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, starring Claude Rains; Michael Rennie and Jill St John (if they can issue Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Five Weeks in a Balloon, there’s no reason why The Lost World cannot also be released on widescreen DVD).

My last choice is an unusual and offbeat Western from 1960. One Foot in Hell, starring Alan Ladd; Don Murray and Dolores Michaels. This has an excellent, haunting score by Dominic Frontiere, who also wrote the music for the television film series The Invaders (1967).

Of the four I’ve listed above, I think that commercially speaking, The Lost World has the most chance of being issued on DVD, but I would love to see Fox considering doing something about releasing the other three.

P.S. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot this one. The Lion (1962) made entirely on location in Kenya, East Africa in CinemaScope and Color by De Luxe and starring William Holden; Trevor Howard and 11 years old Pamela Franklin, the bravest child actress ever. She romps around with a full grown African lion as if it were Lassie (although what the audience can't see is the marksman with a high-powered rifle, standing beside the camera, ready to kill the beast if it turned on Pamela. Luckily for her, it didn't). Superb, warm, sunlit vistas of the East African landscapes set to one of Malcolm Arnold's most spectacular and exhilarating scores. This film was very popular in its day but now seems to have sunk without trace. It hasn't even been shown on television in the UK for over twelve years and even then, it was panned and scanned. Films like this really cry out to be shown in their original CinemaScope format.