"Look who's talking."

I've seen Total Recall--the original--a few times over the years, so I don't know it as well as, say, Predator or Commando.  So, it was only after very recently viewing the new "Mind-Bending Edition" Blu-ray that I noticed that Harvard-educated Dean Norris appears as mutant Tony, years before he became famous for playing Breaking Bad's "Joe Six-Pack" DEA agent Hank Schrader.

It is a pretty transformative make-up appliance as you can see above.  I haven't seen the current Recall iteration and, much as I love Bryan Cranston, casting Walter White as the new Cohaagen ain't as cool as spotting Hank stand up to Arnie in the original film (in the below trailer at the 1:28 mark).

It was fun watching a vintage 35mm trailer of the 1990 film at Film Forum, preceding a 35mm screening of The Thing, a couple weeks back.  It's too bad the actual film is being screened via "DCP restoration," albeit one approved by Paul Verhoeven.  Back in the '90s, it's a film I'd have never imagined one day getting one of Film Forum's now-standard special 1-week engagements.  Times change...the Film Forum calendar now devotes much ink-space to "New DCP Restoration!" in lieu of "New 35mm Print!" and they now play new-school fare like Total Recall alongside the umpteenth revival of The Third Man or some other Janus-licensed title in the Rialto catalog!

 "You gotta a lot of nerve showing yer face around here, Hauser."

"Thanks, Ward."

The gorgeous poster pictured above of 1931's Sob Sister can be had here for $1100 and that's on the lower end of the price scale...

Sometimes the cranky old-timers at Film Forum really get on my nerves with their loud shhssing of other moviegoers that tends to draw more attention than the initial chatter that prompted said outburst. That said, it's only at a theater like Film Forum, with its uber-knowledgeable constituency, that the biggest laugh in a comic film comes when an unbilled, very young Ward Bond, playing a cop, is referred to as "Ward" by the actor playing the police dispatcher. I guffawed like an idiot for a good 40 seconds after that line.

Apart from that, the film, Sob Sister, was a very enjoyable pre-Coder that straddles that interesting line between drama and comedy in the way that it seems only pre-Code films do. Stars Linda Watkins--where has she been all my life?--and James Dunn, an alcoholism casualty who won a late-career Academy Award, are a wonderful as dueling reporters, he, for a high-end rag, and she, the "sob sister" of the title, for a tabloid. She wants to get out of the racket and settle down with Dunn while he believes her to be an unrepentant sob sister who is only out to get a good story and who would quickly become bored with marriage.

One of my favorite parts of watching these early talkies is being introduced to the many fine and, often, gorgeous actresses who populated so many of them and then disappeared, for the most part, by the dawn of the '40s. Watkins was one who wasn't in too many films even in this "prime" period--she was a stage actress first. But, here she is delightful and shares one of those, "only in a pre-Code" moments with co-star Dunn, when they very matter-of-factly discuss their intimate time together the night before. Dunn accuses Watkins of sleeping with him only so should could get her hands on a diary, that Dunn has procured, which holds the key to a breaking front page story. In the past Dunn probably would have been right, but in this case Watkins gave herself to him out of love.

The print shown at Film Forum was advertised as a new 35mm print...sure would be nice if it became available on some home format, even a DVD-R program, if Fox ever develops its own Warner Archive-type enterprise.

One of the other films on the same bill was Columbia's Final Edition starring two of my favorites of the era, Pat O'Brien and Mae Clarke. Many in the audience were chattering after the show about the film's use of two drug references no one else seemed to remember in another pre-Code: "Heroin" and "coked-up." I heard one audience member theorize that things like this were more likely to fly at a lower-end studio such as Columbia than at an MGM.