Norman Frizzle, Author at DVD Review & High Definition

The Man Who Knew Too Much

March 29, 2001 // 0 Comments

Hitchcock had already achieved extensively in a wide range of capacities during the silent era of the movies. The British film industry’s silent era produced no talents remembered principally for this medium, so Hitchcock pretty much had the field to [...]

The Garden Of Allah

February 21, 2001 // 0 Comments

"A man who refuses to acknowledge his God is unwise to set foot in the desert. The Arabs have a saying, Madam, that the desert is the garden of Allah." Just what Count Antioni (Basil Rathbone) means by this is fuzzy, but it is not the first or [...]

Semiramide

January 16, 2001 // 0 Comments

Voltaire’s "Sémiramis" was already almost a century old when librettist Gaetano Rossi adapted it relatively faithfully for Rossini’s 1823 opera to debut at La Fenice in Venice. Voltaire’s own source was antiquity, a trace of history and [...]

White Christmas

December 15, 2000 // 0 Comments

"White Christmas" defined the mindset of the time in which it was made. And while the specific appeal it had when first released served its purpose and then expired, associations that successive generations have had with the movie have [...]

Treasures From American Film Archives

November 13, 2000 // 0 Comments

There’s no more familiar artwork than "The Last Supper." But Leonardo daVinci’s fresco has long since ceased to represent either the artist’s own hand or the surface of color he created. A risky technique daVinci tried failed disastrously. [...]

Annie Get Your Gun

November 13, 2000 // 0 Comments

Broadway’s decline in new musicals has been our gain in revivals of some of the true classics. One of the most successful of recent years has been "Annie Get Your Gun, " reworked to give more substance to the real-life tale of famed frontier [...]

Xerxes

October 20, 2000 // 0 Comments

"Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived. I would bare my head and kneel at his grave." – Beethoven Handel was a German immigrant to England who never became fluent in the language of his adoptive country. Thankfully, this didn’t [...]

Good News

October 9, 2000 // 0 Comments

From Broadway in the Twenties came the ’college musical, ’ a genre unto itself. "Good News" (1927) was a prime example of it. The plot posed two burning questions: will the home football team win? and will the paths of true love run smooth? [...]

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

September 29, 2000 // 0 Comments

"Corn!" Was this title ever in the running for this retelling of the Bible story of Joseph? Probably not, although that’s precisely what this story’s all about. Joseph is the one who has a dream about corn stalks. He tells his family his [...]

Don Giovanni

September 15, 2000 // 0 Comments

In opera, if the second half of the 20th century were dominated by any single conductor, it would be Herbert Von Karajan. Principal conductor for life of the Berlin Philharmonic, Von Karajan was also a mainstay at both the Vienna State Opera and the [...]