Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

The image is from Georges Franju's Judex, now out in region 2 only, on a double bill with Franju's Shadowman. I haven't gotten permission to use his name, but a friendly reader made the image by pasting together three video frames from a dramatic tilt up, the one that introduces Maurice Jarre's great title theme. I think I may just have to track this one down. A friend and I have a joke -- any rarity we buy is guaranteed to come out on region one within six months. So we're really providing a public service!

A quiet weekend for Savant E-mail. I drove to San Diego and back yesterday, to pick up a carload of old film books from a professor-scholar friend who is retiring and leaving the country. Not only does he have dozens of books I've always wanted to read and scores of useful reference volumes, he has entire runs of 70s film magazines specializing in progressive film theory, the kind of stuff I wasn't ready to absorb at UCLA. That was when I quietly switched from critical studies to film production -- without telling anybody on the faculty. Just try that one in a film school now.

I had second pick of the books but the person ahead of me -- a Savant correspondent who nominated me for the honor -- was interested in other subjects. The professor had a really obscure rarity called L'Erotisme au cinema by Lo Duca -- a notorious early sixties' volume, basically a French photo book on high-quality paper that gathered stills in remarkable quality of seemingly every salacious and provocative scene ever to grace a European film. You might have heard the book mentioned in critical essays from the sixties. People placed Lo Duca on their coffee table, as American film freaks once placed Kenneth Anger's books. We had a copy in UCLA's Theater Arts Reading Room. I remember my boss deciding that I was too young to read it (I was 22!) Fellow librarian Jim Ursini got a good laugh out of that one.

Anyway, I quietly moved L'Erotisme au cinema to my stack of books. A few minutes later it was back up on the shelf. My benefactor was no fool and I immediately congratulated him on the wisdom of hanging onto it!

On the way back I passed Disneyland. Foreign readers might not know that one can see the Matterhorn mountain and the Space Mountain attractions from the freeway. Big brushfires in Palos Verdes had the air thick with smoke and ash, and I couldn't help but think of all the Disneyland tourists trying to enjoy themselves with stinging eyes and ashes raining from the sky. Los Angeles is like Pompeii again, with white ash everywhere. I live miles from any of the fires, not far from downtown in the middle of the city. But hundreds of houses have been lost this time and the devastation is really enormous. I hope they get it all under control post haste. What with all the disturbing economic news, this a really shaky time. Thanks for reading! -- Glenn Erickson