One nice thing about streaming video is the chance to check out a movie instantly. Hear about a movie, star, writer, director, surf to streaming site, enter search term, find entry, click on ‘play’ – and you’re watching. This is not a substitute for seeing it in 35mm or high quality but at least you can get a good grasp of what it is all about. Another nice thing about streaming is the chance to see a movie unavailable to you by any other means. There is no home video version and it isn’t shown in any theater anywhere nearby.
That’s how i got to see Don Siegel’s The Gun Runners (pretty good, really) and Wolf Larsen (not directed by Siegel alas) – both indie remakes of 1940s Warner’s pictures set on the sea – To Have and Have Not (Gun Runners) and The Sea Wolf (Wolf Larsen) – and both from the same year 1958 – and both featuring Swedish hottie (and ‘jet setter’) Gita Hall (her only English-language pictures it seems). I doubt if either of these minor or forgotten pictures was deemed worthy of mastering onto VHS or DVD but long ago they were sold off for TV rights in some giant Late Movie package so why not toss them into the giant streaming video package?
As for checking something out, there was The Lickerish Quartet from Radley Metzger (whose career is pretty dam’ interesting in and of itself) – this is a flick I always wanted to see since I was a lad and saw the ad in the newspaper. So I watched it. Another good one. And so I checked to see what Netflix had for the rest of Metzger’s movies. They have The Image and others on DVD so I watched The Image. And oh, the shock (and the erotic shock value) when this softcore Euroflick, 30 minutes or so in, turns hardcore! Yeah, they are not supposed to be doing that in a softcore flick! I am not supposed to be seeing this either! Wow!
— Eartherean
2011.354
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