By Dan Callahan
Like most people, I assume, I've generally watched YouTube in dribs and drabs. I would type in a name and see what turned up under, say, Anita O'Day, or Katharine Hepburn, or Bruce Springsteen. It was only when I was commissioned by the Sydney Film Festival to write a piece about Deborah Kerr that I began to discover just how useful YouTube could be as a resource for hard-to-see films. I typed in "Deborah Kerr," and was surprised to see entire Kerr movies on the site: Hatter's Castle (1941), an early British film she made with James Mason, and The Proud and Profane (1956), a key Kerr picture that goes much further with the sexuality she only hinted at in From Here to Eternity. Most importantly, a Kerr fan had uploaded several of her television movies from the eighties, like Reunion at Fairborough (1985), which re-united her with her best co-star, Robert Mitchum, and even her last feature film, a modest vehicle called The Assam Garden (1985), which I'm not sure ever got a proper release in America.
To read the rest of the article at the L Magazine, click here.
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1 comments:
In the course of trying to find source material for video essays, I've been pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised to discover that an awful lot of notable movies aren't commercially available, and that the only easy way to see them is on YouTube. You'd think that'd be impetus for rights holders and distributors to get their acts together and perhaps come up with some kind of plan to bring rarely-seen or obscure titles into plain view again, maybe online.
Apparently Scorsese has had the same thought.
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