A MOMA-supplied 35mm Technicolor print of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (‘46) screened this afternoon at the Lincoln Center Film Society’s Walter Reade theatre, and man oh man oh man…they got me.

The images were so dark and murky you could only see about half of what had been captured by dps Lee Garmes, Ray Rennehan and Harold Rosson. The rest, it seemed, was hiding in shadows, smeared with lentil soup, covered by a scrim.

Even the brightly lighted Technicolor Selznick logo sequence (the Gone With The Wind Bluray delivers a perfect rendering) looked like it was shot during a solar eclipse.

I was told by management that it wasn’t a case of poor illumination (the projectionist told a theatre employee that the image was lit by 16 foot lamberts) but a dark–ass print. Besides the lack of sharpness (the clarity difference between Duel and GWTW is like night and day), the cinematography had a generally thick and heavy quality. Nothing looked beautiful; it was horrendous.

I got up and left around the 40-minute mark. “Why am I watching this?” I muttered to myself. “I feel like I’m going blind.”

These DVD Beaver screen captures from a 2017 Kino Bluray simulate the difference between a properly illuminated Duel in the Sun image (above) vs. how it looked inside the Walter Reade (below) — the projected images actually looked worse than this.

The projected main title sequence looked dark and muddy — it didn’t pop in the slightest. This is how it should have looked (but didn’t):

I struck up an acquaintance with Michael Mann in the summer of ‘97, when I was working as an in-house People freelancer. He knew I was a fanatical longtime fan, etc. One afternoon Mann invited me over for a brief sitdown at his office (Olympic near Bundy), and it was strictly about feeling me out. No quotes or notes.

It was right in the first cautious blush of that relationship that Mann allowed me to look at a James Dean screen test that Leonardo DiCaprio performed in ‘93. It was filmed footage on a VHS cassette, and Leo was wearing a red Rebel Without A Cause jacket and ‘50s Brylcream pompadour hair.

The deal was that I couldn’t mention to anyone (not even my mother) that I’d seen it, and there could certainly be no filing of any kind.

I agreed, of course, but I was so knocked out by how well DiCaprio had captured Dean’s expressions during his big scene with Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden (‘55)…I was so turned around that it broke my heart to have to sit on my impressions forever. But now that Mann has discussed the DiCaprio-Dean thing in a chat with Deadline ‘s Michael Fleming, it seems okay to mention my quick peek.

Or more precisely, Christoph Waltz as Blofeld in No Time To Die. That was my first association. I’m sorry but the ogre-ish Cyclops vibe (i.e., not Gene Hackman in Superman) does something to me. Nobody has ever approved of Trump’s hair, but this proves he needs some kind of dramatic hair statement to make it all work. (I’d like to credit the CG guy who composed this but I’ve lost track of the original.)