Skidoo Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Let's imagine Tony Soprano in one of his 3 am near-comas. Rich food and stress is keeping him awake, as the rest of his family sleeps soundly in their Jersey mini-mansion. Having just loaded an extra-extra large hot fudge sundae into his gut, he's half-awake on the sofa, watching television. This is a scene that happened repeatedly during The Sopranos, when Tony would sometimes see an old movie that would cut him to the quick, or else plant a seed of doubt in him, tipping him off to some unsuspected treachery in his world. Tonight's screening is a weird, weird film from 1968...so damned weird that the next day, Tony wouldn't be sure if he didn't doze off during it, adding plot details from his own dream-life.

Skidoo by Otto Preminger--a resounding, loathed failure in its time--has a cult, like almost all failures do. It includes the first appearance by the reliable character actor and acting teacher Austin Pendleton. Also making her debut was the famed pioneer African-American model and Warhol star Donyale Luna (memorable from this photograph you've seen in every beauty salon, in which Luna's leanness and sinew is visually contrasted with a line of elephants). (here's a famous photo of her) Unique casting compliments a really one-of-a-kind musical/satire that shows how beyond "good" and "bad" some films are.

The Library of Congress' National Film Registry isn't the only place working to preserve the world's films, and Martin Scorsese isn't the only one concerned with keeping film prints of lost classics handy. According to a new story in the Guardian, there exists an entire subculture of devoted souls who scrounge, scavenge and otherwise dig up all kinds of rare and forgotten films.

The ultimate film scavenger story is the one about the man who found an complete print of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in the broom closet of a sanitarium. Though modern-day collectors can't hope for a find of that magnitude, they can at least be proud of the forgotten gems that they have launched back into circulation. Many of today's finds come from videotapes of old television broadcasts. Otto Preminger's notorious Skidoo (1968) -- with images of Groucho Marx toking up -- for example, has been unavailable for years, and now it can be had from Don Hicks' Subterranean Cinema.