Movies that have just disappeared

Cafe Society
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Every so often I remember a movie from the past that I found interesting at the time I saw it, and then it just disappeared off the face of the earth:

Candy (Ringo Starr was in it!)
The Family Way (Hayley Mills, an English slice o’ life, and there were a few others starring Hayley Mills, too, that I’ve only read about)
Fortune and Mens Eyes (saw this prison flick on a double bill with Midnight Cowboy)
Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Langella and Carrie Snodgrass)
Pretty Poison (Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld)
Fellini Satyricon

I know some movies are shown on TCM, once in a blue moon, and some movies aren’t even available on VHS or DVD. Maybe on Netflix?

What movie do you wonder “why did it just disappear”?

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I’m sorry, maybe I put this question in the wrong category? Should go in MPSIMS?

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Bill Nye (the Science Guy) narrated a documentary called “Astronauts”, which followed a space shuttle crew throughout preparation and their flight.

I saw it in a hotel once, thought it was amazing, and intended to buy it. But it’s now nowhere to be found. Never released on DVD - only a few old VHS copies floating around the internet. Very hard to search for also, having such a generic name. Would love to see it again.

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Pretty Poison and Satyricon are both still taught in film classes. Also, when you’re done snickering at Carrie’s last name, it’s spelled “Snodgress.”

Candy is a dreadful, self-indulgent adaptation of a wonderful book.

I always thought that Being There and Breaking Away would forever be considered part of the pantheon of great films, but I never see them on cable or referred to by film critics anymore.

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Here’s a list of some of mine: Great but Forgotten: movies

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There are a lot of great films that are still considered “great films” but don’t necessarily pop up in discussions all the time.

P.S. I thought Being There was dull. But then, I rarely care for “idiot savant” or “idiot as truth” stories. Breaking Away was really good (a young Dennis Quaid, what more can you say?) and it was certainly very popular with both audiences and critics, but I don’t know that it had enough heft to be a film for the ages. How many coming-of-age stories does one culture need?

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missed the edit window to add this:

As to why films “disappear,” meaning they’re not broadcast nor available on VHS/DVD/whatever, there can be many reasons. For very old films, it could simply be that there are no copies of it left – they’ve all been lost or destroyed. That’s why organizations like The National Film Preservation Foundation and the Library of Congress National Film Preservation Boardare important. For other films, often it boils down to disputes over rights. Might be rights to distribute the film itself – a studio folds and someone buys the back catalog, but has no interest in distributing all the films, for example – or it could be something like music rights. That’s why a lot of older TV shows never make it to DVD, or when they do it’s in some “best of” format, or the original-artist pop music used for broadcast has been replaced by something else, often something generic. WKRP is probably one of the most notorious cases of this. Also can happen with online mediums like Netflix Instant – why you might be able to watch most, but not all of the episodes of a series online. Those missing eps may be on DVD, but music rights disputes or incomplete negotiations prevent streaming online. When music rights are negotiated, the contracts specify how and when the music is used and under what circumstances. If the original contract wasn’t broad/generic enough, renegotiating to allow use on VHS/DVD/online/whatever might not be possible, or there could just be a disagreement about what an appropriate fee is, and that never gets resolved. When you obtain rights to use music, you have to negotiate not only with the publishing company(s) representing the songwriters, but the record company & performers themselves. Catalogs and rights get split and sold and consolidated and split and split again, so while there might have been two songwriters and one publishing company, plus one record company/performer to start with, there might be 8 publishing companies plus the others now. One naysayer can sink the whole thing, and the naysaying happens for lots of reasons besides just money. Although, money is the most common.

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I saw ‘Candy’ on TNT or AMC one Sunday morning about 5 years ago. So it was shown once. Although it is probably better forgotten as the hippie shit that it is.

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Like ‘The Point’ - 1971 - animated, music by Harry Nilsson - gone without a trace! Not that anyone is clamoring to see it, but my brothers and I had loved it.

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Calling it “hippie shit” would be a compliment. If anything, it’s *faux *hippie shit which is even worse. Along with Skidoo and Myra Breckinridge, it’s part of the unholy trinity of wretched big-budget movies that the old guard in Hollywood turned out in a desperate attempt to show how “with it” they were and attract younger moviegoers.

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Hey, I’ll admit to wantong to see it again. Oblio and Arrow banished to the Pointless Forest, where they meet the Rockman and the Three Fat Sisters–great stuff! I think I still have the LP of the soundtrack buried somewhere.

I recall many films from the local drive-in theatre I went to years ago that you just don’t hear about any more: Fuzz, Electra-Glide in Blue, They Came to Rob Las Vegas, Chato’s Land, and The Cheyenne Social Club, among many others. They were usually drive-in filler, I guess. They’d be on nobody’s list of classics, but they were great fun. I haven’t seen these out on DVD–it doesn’t mean that they haven’t been released in that medium, but if they have been, they sure weren’t for long. :frowning:

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As far as Candy is concerned, see the wonderfully abrasive review on Jabootu:

http://www.jabootu.com/candy.htm

It not only had Ringo, it had Walter Matthau, Richard Burton (!!),and Marlon Brando (!!!). I know for a fact that it came out on DVD – I saw the box.

There are plenty of movies that have completely, utterly disappeared – many of them deservedly (consider The Magic Christian, which, like Candy, had Ringo in it and resulted from the workj of writer Terry Sothern. This one, unfortunately, I have seen. As Frankenstein’s monster said at the end of The Bride of Frankenstein, “We belong dead”.

Movies I haven’t seen in a long time, if ever:

**Moon Zero Two

Countdown

The Time Travellers

Not of This Earth** (any of the three versions)

**World Without End

Five

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

Charly

The Brain from Planet Arous

The Manster (AKA The Split)

Target Earth

UFO:Target Earth

Woman Times Seven

What a Way to Go!

The Art of Love

Gigot

Demon Seed

Fitzwilly

The Last of the Secret Agents

Birds Do It** (starring Soupy Sales!)

Most Jerry Lewis Movies

Most Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin Movies

Most Elvis Presley movies

Most “Beach” movies

**Invasion of the Saucermen

The Curse of the Faceless Man

The Lost Missile

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake

The Monster of Piedras Blancas

The Hideous Sun Demon

Beware! The Blob!

The Blob ** (either version)

**Planet of Vampires

The Silicates

Island of the Burning Doomed

Caltiki – the Immortal Monster

X- the Unknown**

All the Quatermassfilms

All the Howling films

**The Animal People

The Cosmic Monsters

The Terminal Man

**

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Coincidentally I have run across Breaking Away on basic cable a half a dozen times in the last 4 months or so. No idea what channel has been showing it, though.

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Spitfire (U.S. title. aka The First Of The Few.)

This one is impossible to find in any decent condition. I picked up a VHS copy in the '80s, and the quality was poor. I did track down a DVD, but it was poorly packaged and appeared to have been copied from the VHS tape. Spitfire features David Niven, and Leslie Howard in his last on-screen performance.

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In Chicago we are blessed by having Weigel Broadcasting headquartered here. One of its many stations carries Svengouli, who shows crap like The Brain from Planet Arous with comic interludes and cut-ins. On the other hand, Weigel has also partnered with MGM to create This TV, which shows unutterable crap like Fitzwilly, Elvis, and, since MGM seems to own AIP’s library, beach and biker movies. (It’s especially sad because MGM no longer owns most of its pre-1986 catalog, but boy, do they have Samuel Z Arkoff and Roger Corman covered.) This evening they showed Devil’s Angels with John Cassavetes, but my pleas that my kids not turn on America’s Funniest Videos because that guy was one of the great American directors fell on deaf ears.

I never heard of the Quatermass films or series, or their influence on Doctor Who, until earlier today. Now I need to see them all.

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You forgot to mention **The Magic Christian **starred Peter Sellers as Sir Guy Grand, featured Raquel Welch as a dominatrix, and was co-written by Graham Chapman and John Cleese (who both had small roles in it). It was even paid homage by “The Simpsons” in the “Homer vs. Dignity” episode. (Of course, since this is the infamous “panda rape” ep that many fans consider to be the series’ low point, that may not be such a good thing.)

In any case, I think your assessment is a bit harsh. It’s pretty uneven but there are some real laugh-out-loud moments in it. It certainly doesn’t belong in the same class as Candy, Skidoo, and Myra Breckinridge.

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How about The Seduction of Joe Tynan, written by and starring Alan Alda? I guess it was not that successful at th box office, not on DVD or videotape, and never, ever shown on TCM, because it has pretty much disappeared.

Oddly, I remember it as a pretty good movie.

There’s a movie called The Journey with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. Really hard to find, although it was on TCM a few months ago.

A movie called When You Coming Back, Red Ryder featured a lot of actors who seemed to make unfortunate career choices, including that movie. Candy Clark, Marjoe Gortner. Hal Linden? Leon Russell?

Based on a play, and the play was kind of interesting. Even without that, I’d love to see a movie with Candy Clark and Leon Russell in it. But apparently, I’m out of luck.

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I have that one on DVD (as part of a 50 war movies pack) and you’re right. The sound quality is extremely poor.

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OMG…The Point! I had forgotten all about that one, and I loved it! Would love to see it again.

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Then go watch it! :slight_smile: