Sabu, Satan, and Sleeping Beauty

Varied weekend viewing:

1) Song of India, a jungle adventure from 1949. Sabu, the eternal jungle boy (his career more or less peaked before he was 20 in Thief of Bagdad and The Jungle Book), is an Indian prince who lives like, yes, a jungle boy. His village is threatened by the modernized Army officer who arrives with an entourage to hunt and capture animals in a part of the land that has always been considered forbidden for such activities. Single-handedly, Sabu manages to stop the desecration and win the heart of a modernized Indian princess. Turhan Bey, another "exotic other" who hit it big in Hollywood in the 40's, plays Sabu's enemy. Poor Sabu was losing his looks by this film, though he was only 25. For a Saturday matinee movie, it was fun, though it would have been even more interesting if it had been shot in color.

2) The Omen, the 1976 occult thriller about the birth and early childhood of the Antichrist. The film spawned sequels and a 2006 remake, but, although Damien: Omen II isn't bad, the first remains the best (I have not seen the remake, which is included on this new DVD package from 20th Century Fox). It's a lot like a slasher film, in the sense that people keep dying in varying spectacular or grotesque ways, and half the fun is guessing who's next and how they'll meet their maker. The film mostly still holds up over 30 years later, thanks to the creepy plot and the non-campy acting of Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, and especially Billie Whitelaw as the Satanic nanny. Visually, it has an ugly, murky look, which was largely, I think, part of the original production design. We tried to listen to the commentary by director Richard Donner and his film editor, and it was one of those in which the speakers did no prep work and wind up yakking a lot but imparting little of educational or entertainment value.

3) Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I missed out on much of the Disney movie canon when I was a kid, so I first saw this during a theatrical reissue in the late 70's. It's gorgeous looking, but from an adult point of view, rather slow-moving, and lacking memorable songs except for "Once Upon a Dream," with a melody adapted from Tchaikovsky. This newly released DVD features the film in the widescreen Technirama format for the first time since its initial release, and the pristine print is indeed full of glowing colors, mostly pinks and greens and blues, the colors of the dresses of the tiny fairy ladies who are basically the main characters in this retelling. OK, but not quite up to the highest Disney cartoon standards.