Excessive.

Excessive.

Tropa de Elite/ Elite Squad  & Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro/  Elite
Squad 2: The Enemy Within

So I skimmed through the SBS program for the week and they had something Brazilian called Elite Squad as the late, late film. Well, being a curious insomniac movie completist I am the target audience for such presentations. I tuned in and it wasn’t long before my jaw was hanging open.

In contrasty colour José Padilha (previously director of the festival hit documentary Bus 174) offers grim faced star Wagner Moura narrating as commander of the elite Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE, the Special Police Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police). He wants to spend time with his wife and new baby and is  searching for his replacement as the Pope’s nearing visit dictates a clean up of the hill top favellas made no go areas by murderous drug gangs.

Moura - Tropa de Elite

 We’ve seen this juxtaposition of the prosperous ground level privileged and the desperate slums in South American film before, as early as Bruno Barreto’s 1978 Amor Bandido or in City of God. Here the film  flash backs contrast police recruits hard head Caio Junqueira and glasses wearing law student André Ramiro. The fact that Ramiro is black is never an issue. They find law enforcement seething with corruption bankrolled by kick backs from the drug dealers.

Ramiro’s law degree studies compromise him when his fellow students are smoking the dealers’ pot and the privileged class white girl from the charity NGO he makes it with turns out to be a dope runner’s mistress.

The breaking point comes for Junqueira when a distraught mother can’t bury her dead drug look-out son because the body can’t be located while the cops shift cadavers out of their jurisdictions to stop the murders appearing on their unit statistics.

The two room mate cops have been put to work in the police garage, which is near inoperable because corrupt officers sell the motors out of new cars and replace them with old clapped-out ones. Junqueira hits on the plan to buy the spare parts they need by putting the commander’s car out of action, so that his usual pay off collection is delayed and the duo send in their own vehicle to get the cash. What’s the commander going to do - call the police?

This ends up with the pair transferred to canteen duties and their master mechanic peeling potatoes. Part time brothel owner police lieutenant Wilhelm Cortaz is sure the cops, who want him to go with them on the next pay off pick up, plan on doing him in over taking the bribe money, so the pair set off to cover him with sniper fire from the opposite hill, only to find themselves out gunned.

At this point - flash back to the opening - the  Elite Squad arrive and save them with their own merciless attack. The boys are hooked and sign up for the BOPE selection process which makes marine training in Officer and A Gentleman or Vietnam boot camp in Tigerland seem genteel. The brutal recruitment procedure  usually eliminates all but eight of the hundred applicants. This time it goes down to three. The instructors deliberately target corrupt trainees, crushing Cortaz. Their preparation includes abseiling the cliff face and live fire exercises in the real favella alley ways, where Junqueira proves too gung ho.

They move on the slums and the retaliation takes out Junqueira when he delivers the glasses Ramiro had promised a local kid. Finding  the BOPE skull  tattoo on Junqueira’s body, the gang bangers realize they are doomed - securing the danger area  for the Pope now forgotten.

The dope gangs are equally appalled to find the NGO had a cop among them. They shoot and burning tyre necklace a NGO couple, causing a protest march. The girl friend tries to help, getting their promise that they won’t injure the fugitive killer’s girl - cut and the squad have a blood filled plastic bag over her face to get his whereabouts. The unit raids the favella and takes down the dealer, who lies on the ground pleading not to be shot in the face so that his body can be shown in an open casket.

Twisted time structure, high contrast greenish colour, maximum violence and cynicism. This is rivetting.

I’m still digesting it when next week SBS slap on the sequel in the same small hours time slot. We pick up seven (?) years later with hero Moura again narrating as the BOPE methods (“a police force with a skull for it’s symbol”) are the subject of a condemnatory lecture theater session by liberal reformer Irandhir Santos.

The situation is even worse now that armed raids have all but cleared the slum areas of the drug gangs, leaving the corrupt police militia to take over the rackets. There’s now an  alliance of the populist media, the governor going for re-election and the bent coppers. Maura’s ex-wife Maria Ribeiro has married Santos and they are raising Moura’s son.

Shift to Bangui prison, controlled by the murderous street gangs who continue their feuds inside. One lot revolts, finds an opposing leader and sets on fire the cell full of bedding where they have him. The prisoners demand Santos as negotiator and he goes in without a Kevlar vest and manages to stabilize the situation but the Skulls have been called (“BOPA doesn’t give a shit”) with Ramiro in charge and the CCTV shows them waiting guns leveled behind the door the prisoners tried to smash to get more weapons - very Fritz Lang. When the door is opened there is  a massacre leaving the armed prisoners dead and Santos with blood spatter all over his "Human Rights" shirt.

Outraged Santos is on about social cleansing but the public love the TV coverage of the jail shoot-out, stoked by the fat rabble rousing news commentator who does dance steps on his show, so the governor promotes Moura (“I fell upwards”) to sub-commander of intelligence, where he is given control of ‘phone intercepts.

Meanwhile he is growing away from his son, who accepts the outlook of Santos, Moura’s biggest critic. However Moura is called in to retrieve the boy and his girl friend from jail for a marijuana offense for which the kid takes the blame to spare the girl. Father and son get to bond in a judo work out.

The police station in the uncontrolled area of Tanque is held up and their weapons taken. The Tanque station commander has spotted the fact that the raiders’ knowledge of procedure - and their boots - indicated rogue police rather than drug gangs. In retaliation Ramiro and his men secretly replace the bought police at a station in an area where the heavies expect no resistance and gun them down. The captured gang leader reveals the truth to Ramiro who vows vengeance, so he is shot in the back by the crooked cop, in front of Commander Cortaz, who considered him the friend who had saved his life - surprise twist disposes of the central character of the first film. Think of him as a Brazilian Han Solo.

The poor’s most valuable asset is not the protection money they pay out for police monopoly cable TV and bottle water but their vote in the coming election. The girl journalist on the case tracks down the house where they heavies have stored the stolen weapons and election material together. She is ‘phoning Santos when the bad hats come back and rape and murder her - grim scene of an impatient heavy pulling the teeth out of her charred skull.

Moura gets the copy of her last ‘phone call off the illegal intercept he has placed on Santos’ phone and takes the recording away before his superiors come for it.

He realizes that they will try to off Santos, who is with Moura’s ex wife and his son, and he waits for them taking out the hit man’s car with his pistol, though the boy is shot in the exchange of fire. The scene of reduced-to-a-Suit Moura picking up the machine gun brought by the skulls and blasting rounds into the nasties is cheer worthy.

The resulting publicity returns Santos to parliament and he gives the rostrum in the House of
Representatives to Moura, who declares two third of the members he is speaking to be corrupt.

Same gritty hi-con look with even better production values. Imposing visuals - the chopper over flying the kids playground or the final airials of Brazilia as still corrupt survivor whore monger Cortaz flies in.

I’ve gone into surprise killing detail on these because they are unlikely to get any real distribution. I can’t find them on SBS on Demand but, for the determined, they are on You Tube in good English sub-titled copies.

We can see that José Padilha’s admiration goes out to the skulls, glimpsed drilling impeccably in their black uniforms and advancing under fire, leaving the regular police to cower behind them. Pot smoking do gooders are going to be burned alive by the impoverished mob they believe they are helping. Ramirez  notes contemptuously when the population turns out in the street over their deaths. “There are no demonstrations when policemen are killed.” The free press is a clown TV newsman and and an editor who refuses to follow up when one of his own is killed. Padilha’s solution is a not all that plausible parliamentary alliance between the shoot ‘em up lot and the reformers.

I was feeling superior about discovering these outstanding, gritty, obscure action pieces. Not indicated as a repeat, this must be presumed to be the local premier. Then I found they were the most successful Brazilian films of all time, the monster hit in the Spanish language market and Berlin Grand Prix winner. Here they  just sink into the void as most of the outside the festival net material does. It’s disturbing but not surprising that the pair reached us without  promotion, turning up as small hours movies on SBS the week that Australia's multi cultural broadcaster was busy trailering it’s series on Walt Disney. The Sydney Morning Herald TV Guide for the day featured Will Ferrel in Elf.  This was the week Star Wars 7 opened in the multiplexes and The Bélier Family was in the art cinemas. What kind of film is going to be made in an environment where this is the frame of reference? Answer - the kind that gets made in Australia.

In the real world the Elite Squad films were reviewed widely, usually by people who called them fascist & cited The Godfather.  The movie characters themselves dismiss the comparison with Mafia, the hoods saying the Italians eat lasagna while their lot chow down on rice and beans. This one is very ethno specific, complete with samba street carnivals.

Place the films instead in  a sequence where the answer to disorder is to send in the troops. Think President Walter Huston having the army stand gangsters against the wall in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and shoot them in  the 1933 MGM Gabriel Over the White House. Phil Karlson’s 1955 Phenix City Story ends in martial law but it introduces the caution against vigilante-ism. Elio Petri’s 1970 Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Investigation of  Citizen Above Suspicion  is a caution against the excesses of state control and the military, as is Daniele Vicari’s splendid 2012  Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood (title in English).

I have no way of knowing how accurate the two Padhilha films are. Brazilians I asked endorse them but, whether it is sensationalized fiction or documentary actuality, the sure crafted, savage indignation of the production gives them plausibility. Tropa de Elite 1 & 2 make the movie product we are offered here insipid by comparison.

Films of 2015.

 Below are the films which I saw for the first time in 2015 which most impressed me. Each year I think that the crop is getting thinner and each year I end up chopping off a dozen titles that I feel really should get get in, on the don't be greedy principle. Don't ask me what need it all serves.

Cooper: American Sniper

BOYHOOD - now there's determination, INSIDE OUT (Pete Docter) which was playing on every second seat back when I looked round the plane. To the Last Man (Victor Fleming 1923) amazing that something so accomplished could vanish for the best part of a century. LOIN des HOMMES/ Far from Men (David Oelhoffen), RELATOS SALVAJES (Wild Tales Damián Szifrón), RICKI & THE FlASH (Demme), Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko (The Dancing Girl of Izu Gosho 1933) on U-Tube with sub titles. Potop/ The Deluge (1965) Extended but still incomplete, FOXCATCHER  (Bennett Miller),The DESCENDANTS (Alexander Payne), Les misérables (Henri Fescourt 1925), BRIDGE of SPIES,

Dancing Girl of Izu

DIPLOMATIE (Diplomacy Schlöndorff), PHOENIX (Christian Petzold) Resurrectio (Blasetti 1930) first Italian talkie , In the HEART of the SEA great in 3D,  WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED (Gillian Armstrong's Orry Kelly doc.)  KISHIBI NO TABI (Journey to the Shore Kiyoshi Kurosawa) LISTEN TO ME MARLON (Stevan Riley) Le TOUT NOUVEAU TESTAMENT (The Brand New Testament  Jaco Van Dormael), where Benoît Poelvoorde strikes again, Mr. Holmes (Condon) Musarañas (Shrew's Nest Roel & Andrés for De Iglasea) American Sniper (Eastwood),  Prologue (Richard Williams short), The 50 Year Argument (Scorsese & Tedeschi documentary on the NY Review of Books), Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor), Tigers (Danis Tanovic), Alles inklusive (The Whole Shebang -  Doris Dörrie),  Kiga kaikyô  (Straits of Hunger Uchida 1965).

That's 21 in theatres, including one off events, four on broadcast TV, one on You Tube and two on DVD.

I compared this with the Sight and Sound poll which netted 288 titles. Even given that they have better access than someone in Australia, there is remarkably little relation. Their people of course see different films and like different films and some of the difference will be ironed out as the material finally gets to me. A few of mine were on their last year's list and a few of theirs, surprisingly, on mine. Both lists include in re-issues.

Still I find it curious that twenty of the films I've singled out don't figure in their three hundred.

B.P.

FILM FREAK ABROAD '15.

 Going back to Europe was confronting. It’s become more sinister. I never even saw a Libyan refugee, let alone got to interact with one but traveling over night on the Thello train was a was a disturbing experience. Last time I did that was an extended fun conversation with a Paris family and a regular who pointed out that the rats in Venice outnumbered the people, probably the longest time I’d ever had to speak French.    

Now I walked past the line of single black men that the police had lined up at the rail station to get into a compartment where an African couple decided to giggle in Wolof all night, despite my suggesting it was time to get some rest. When I finally did go to sleep, the door flew open and there was a Glock automatic six inches away from my face as the French border cops came in, threatening to deport the girl who had been breast feeding her baby. I was glad to get out of there.  

The street musicians seem to have vanished, though Chatelet Metro managed a Russian choir in full voice.  The spectacle of entire beggar families sleeping on the street in the rain was an off-puter but they can be a surprisingly up beat element.  One clochard was stretched out absorbing the warm air from a Metro grating while he made calls on his cell ‘phone. Another had paper streamers anchored to the grating providing a twirling display round his spot. 

In Paris, the Institute of Arab studies did one of the several Omar Sharif retrospectives running there. This time it was the films he made with Youseff Chahine at the start of his career. I had to go through metal detectors, which were turned off fortunately, because I still had the blister pack with my new Opinel knife in in my bag . The films were so so but that was an important gap filled.

 Movies are still all around. I was walking along the barge mooring area and found a German Graffiti artist doing a Flip the Frog themed painting on the wall. He was intrigued to learn that the character existed in colour and we had a conversation about purloined imagery.  The time I turned on French radio, someone, who had made a study of Leni Reifenstahl, dismissed the idea that she got it on with Adolph Hitler. Goebels did put the hard word on her and was speedily dismissed, which made relations icy. Leni was into physical
types. The Olympics film gave her access to stud athletes. Screen Tarzan Glenn Morris was apparently one of the recipients of her favors. 

All the old ambiance remained spaced by Greek Sandwiches eaten on the Seine Bank but  film-going was not as good as it had been. The rue Champollion still comes up with screenings of vintage Gary Cooper. Cloak & Dagger has been running there for sixty years, though it hardly scores a footnote in English language film writing. However  appealing one day  screening outfits seem to be always canceling sessions. My beloved Le Desperado announced a Belmondo season but Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine couldn’t be found and démons de l'aube didn’t show for their Simone Signoret retro, though they did locate a warming Eastmancolor copy of Michel Drach's grim 1981 Guy De Maupassant, a truly bad movie mixing  high culture references and T&A. Miou Miou proves to have had a great build, as does (who would have believed it?) a young Catharine Frot. 

 Which brings us to Gaspar Noé’s new, English language Love, the most explicit movie to get mainstream showing that I’ve seen . If you like close ups of penises coming in  3D, it's certainly better than Last Tango on which it's modeled. I figured that it was unlikely to push through Oz attitudes and regulation but I understand the Underground Film Festival did a run while I was away. I’d seen Tsui Hark’s Zhì qu weihu shan/ The Taking of Tiger Mountain in the same theater earlier in the week and chatted with the manager about its great scene of the digital tiger chasing the hero up an ice covered tree. On the way out I suggested to him that the Noé film could have used a tiger.

Last time the Cinémathèque provided Conrad Veidt in Le  Jouer des Echecs, Maria de Medeiros’ first movie, a beautiful surtitled copy of Helmut Käutner’s Unter den Brücken and Sylvie as a teenager in André Antoine’s Le Coupable. 

 

This trip their only rarity was a Reginald Barker from the teens that I missed. They were doing a Sam Peckinpah season. Ho Hum I thought (been there, done that) but it did include a large selection of his TV work - good news bad news. A lot of the showings were  from old murky VHS tapes. After a few of these, I told the desk that I had better copies on film. They said come back when the program department was there. I did and was referred to a young woman who said down the ‘phone they were prepared to accept them as a gift. The suggestion of a deal meant the end of that conversation. I never cease to wonder at the way people who are paid to deal with serious film expect other people to give them things for free and couldn’t help thinking that Henri Langlois would have been into the foyer like a flash, thrown an arm round my shoulder and starting working on a plan to steal them from me. I miss Langlois.

Chevalier

 The competing Forum des images did it’s Fantasy Movie and Korean seasons, which certainly provided unfamiliar material. Best thing I saw was Girls' Night/ Out/ Chunyudleui jeonyuksiksah, a nicely handled 1998 skin flick along the lines of the Hong Kong Erotic Nights. It was  the first film by Sang-soo Im, who did the Housemaid re-make. I would have liked to put in more time on these.

The price of a ticket to a movie there also gets you into their Mediatheque which currently has nine thousand allegedly Paris related items. I watched Kurt Bernhadt’s Le Vagabond Bien Aimé, the parallel French version of the Maurice Chevalier Beloved Vagabond, which was minor for a film with the talents of Darius Milhaud, Franz Planer, and André Andrejew, and Portraint d’un assassin another disappointing  use of celebrities - Maria Montez, Erich Von Stroheim, Pierre Brasseur, Aletty, Jules Berry & Dalio no less, in a  noirish post war French circus drama.

Fondation Jérome Sedoux

They are actually still building cinemas in Paris and Pathé, who now seem to own all the movie houses in Amsterdam, have moved into the serious movie business in a big way.  They set up their The Fondation Jerome Sedoux auditorium in a Building with an Auguste Rodin entrance near Place d’Italie to run silent archival movies and show a permanent exhibition of photo materials. With four hundred films running in Paris on a Sunday, I and a colleague I hadn’t seen in years met when we both homed in on same showing of a Lev Kuleshov serial there. Across the way Pathé are finishing a new main street cinema which will run seasons of Archival hits. Interesting to see how that goes.

I did see a bit of film making - hand held with a man walking through the Luxembourg Gardens and in the restaurant where they still have a photo of Woody Allen shooting Midnight in Paris, down stairs from the Hotel.  That was a big production - seven trucks including a generator van for the make up trailer on it’s own. Couldn’t work out what the films were because we don’t have the clapper board which gives the information any more. I saw a unit shooting in Milan and hopped out of the tram to watch. Turned out to be a Bollywood crew filming five shivering playback dancers in skimpy outfits between bursts of rain.

 

New French film was uneven. Pick of the batch was Benoît Poelvoorde in Le Tout Nouveau Testament. Benoît is a cranky old God (capital G) living in Brussels and tyrannizing his wife and child by confining the TV watching to the sports channel. Jesus is a one foot devotional statue who animates to give his sister advice. She revolts, steals the key to Benoît's computer and sends everyone in the world a text message giving them the date of their death, before escaping through linked washing machines. When Benoit follows indignantly, he arrives during a wash cycle and the alarmed house wife maces him.  On the record of Poelvoorde's great Le Boulet and Nouveau Monde this one is unlikely to surface here.

The Michel Gondry Microbe et Gasoline  is a fun departure with the kids taking their home built car on the road disguised as a timber shack; The Arnaud Despechin Trois Souvenirs de Ma Jeunesse/My Golden Days is also substantial, with Mathieu Amalric (himself currently getting a Cinematheque retro) remembering his youth. Yves Angelo's new Sylvie Testud movie Notre Fils takes a while to assert as it shifts between soap and issues. The Joann Sfar 2015 The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun (as well as the Anatole Litvak film made in France in 1970, there is a Baltic version) is mainly a voyeurist exercise with  leading lady Freya Mavor in various stages of undress, though the Japrisot plot occasionally asserts.

Marco Bellochio introduced his new Sangue Del Mio Sangue in person and I understand it even less well after he explained it. Great Carravagio styled images, a deliberately disorienting change of tone, terrific performances (Alba Rowacher does a walk on - just to be perverse). Attention grabbing stuff, but ultimately frustrating as all this significance loaded material proves to mean something only to Marco and his mates. I was tempted to be one of the people he went on talking to outside the Lumina but I figured I'd look doubly dumb not understanding the movie and not understanding the language.

My last night the Belmondo film didn’t show so I watched the new Jean Pierre Mocky Tu es si jolie ce soir in it’s place. The cashier was surprised I took on that. It turned out to be a barely competent slasher film.

 Rather that let that be my final impression I caught the last session of Kuroshi Kurosawa’s Kishibe no tabi/Journey to the Shore/Vers l’autre rive  which proved to be atmospheric and intriguing. The release of that had been supported by a retrospective of the director’s work.  

So I arrived at Pordenone after a battle with  cut price Ryanair who bring a full force to the term cattle class. It's really no faster than  the train or bus, with all the traveling to their chicken wire depots and waiting time. This was to be followed by another struggle with Trennitalia who specialize in making things not work. The flat share I was booked into proved to be a mile out of town, as the accommodation people explained indicating a point about a foot outside the map they gave out, and when I got there (after the taxi had left) there was no one home. That meant I was stranded somewhere I didn't know in a country where I didn't speak the language with a pile of luggage and rain looming. I thought things couldn't get worse and then I dropped my glasses and the lens fell out.

I guess I rose to the occasion because I got it all sorted out in time to catch the two O’clock session. Alessandro Blasetti's life's work in DVD was spread out on the dealer table at twenty five bucks a time. Being in terror of running out of cash I only bought one and the next day they were all gone - shades of the Sydney Ethnic Video hire store whose Blasettis all got stolen on their first week?

Anything after Pordenone was going to be an anti-climax but Milan was an abrupt return to movie goer reality. The DVD business, which was a major incentive to hit Italy, has shrunken out of all recognition. Ricordi Galleria had the best selection I ever saw but they have sold out to Feterinelli, who filled the space with (!) books. There was one shelf of familiar title discs. Feterinelli did have a more substantial selection in their store in the Stazione Feroviere but all the rare and unexpected material has vanished along with most of the outlets. There goes Salvatores, Tornatore and Aldo Giacomo and Giovanni from my understanding.  Whether movie enthusiasts have died out or shifted into the Internet ether I can't tell.

The so elegant Odeon Space Cinema has reverted  to the old Primo Tempo routine, inserting a sales interval arbitrarily into the middle of their movies. Subbura was the pick of what I saw, playing a pre-9/11 plot in a scenario of excesses - naked B girls O.D'ing on smack (I think), name stars, elaborate production and a victim hit by vehicles in two opposite traffic lanes. They were doing a red carpet gala while I was in the building. I left a movie early and found my only way out was UP the red carpet among the glittering celebrities. I wonder whether I made it into the TV coverage. Well L'Arlechinno around the corner is also a beautifully appointed auditorium, despite it's unassuming street level foyer and they didn't feel the need to flog Pop Corn and Coke in the middle of the movie but in both theaters I found myself sitting next to people who were texting through the show and couldn't be persuaded to stop.

When my wheelie bag (I felt that made me one of the people I always felt like hitting with their selfie sticks when they trundle the things down marble stairs)  rumbled round the luggage Carousel at Kingsford Smith, I had the sensation that I'd survived. By that time I had advanced disentery (again) hadn't slept for thirty hours, been on three trains and  three planes being directed to five different departure lounges in Jakarta, so I wasn't accentuating the positive.

 

Barrie Pattison

Pordenone 2015.

It’s not hard to see why I keep on wheeling back to Pordenone. The organizers’ range of enthusiasms is a remarkably good match with my own - Maurice Elvey, Michael Curtiz, Ivan Mozjoukine, the complete David Wark Griffith and silent films from Victor Fleming. They even came up with 1924’s Serdsya i dollarri/ Hearts and Dollars, the first known film where Anatol(i) Litvak gets a credit (for editing), with him clearly visible among the comic clerks.  They were even going to do a retrospective on William Cameron Menzies but couldn’t put it together in time for this year, so there’s the prospect of another trip.

About three days in the Teatro Verdi, as the screen filled with another correct paced, tinted copy, forty foot across and backed by more of their exceptional live musicians, it hit me that there’s nowhere else in the world, certainly not in Australia, where I could be doing this and nowhere I could do it knowing whoever was in the seat next to me realized what a privilege it was, even if my chance of sharing my enthusiasm might be limited by them only speaking Bulgarian.

Best in show was Victor Fleming’s majestic To the Last Man. How unjust that a film, which should have established him as one of the world’s leading directors, has been lost for the better part of a hundred years. Unlike revered directors like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, the work on show suggested that Victor Fleming’s silent period output was as impressive as his sound (Gone with the Wind) films and as neglected.

Of course we’ll never know about that as the greater part of his silents are lost, unlikely to be recovered. That’s it for his Lord Jim with Percy Marmont or Flemming’s then large scale 1927 The Rough Riders. We have to mentally composite his admired Emil Jannings vehicle Way of All Flesh from brief extracts on show and the Akim Tamiroff re-make. Fleming's Call of the Canyon was represented by short, washed-out clips of an opening  where Richard Dix (like Glenn Ford in  The Violent People) is told his chance of survival is the dry air of the Arizona desert.

In To the Last Man, Dix is totally in his element as the Rough Rider come back to his home valley to find the a blood feud (derived from the Grahams and the Tewksburys, not the Hatfields and McCoys this time) which he is reluctantly drawn into. The notion that the confrontation will continue to the last man is a great, sober plot dynamic. The film continually out guesses us. Normally jolly Eugene Pallette is a nasty who’s mean to heroine Lois Wilson’s pet lamb. The “frightful” bad man is the prototype of Shane. The shoot-out gets interrupted by the widow with the shovel who won’t leave her man’s body to be picked over by the critters.

Parallel with the great cowboy action material, we get a romance with Lois Wilson, who’s “good name”  as the only woman in the bad hat’s camp is a surprising, dominant plot theme. The kiss on the mountain peak with the western landscape spread out below the leads is an iconic image copied many time over but never equaled. The Tonto Basin avalanche is also the most impressive thing of it’s kind.

The film is a succession of great cowboy movie scenes rendered in great images (James Wong Howe on camera), which had no need for sound. The presentable 1933 Randolph Scott - Henry Hathaway re-make is obliterated in any comparison.

To the Last Man  slots in between The Covered Wagon, again starring Lois Wilson, and the Gary Cooper The Virginian, directed by Fleming, making the Paramount westerns one of the movies’ great cycles. Think The Vanishing American with Dix, Union Pacific, California, the Alan Ladd Whispering Smith and Shane.

I found a surprisingly large number of people who agreed it was the best film running at Pordenone.

Under the heading of hostile fate, note that, while To The Last Man was represented by a murky Russian copy with jumps, the other unfamiliar Fleming feature on show, the 1929 Wolf Song turned up in a sharp, full-range-of-tones print. Here Gary Cooper is one of those moving on heroes who eyes glamorous, mantilla wearing Lupe Velez. Her father, grandee Michael Vavich, takes a dim view of that, warning Coop “Speak to my daughter again and I will kill you. ” The titles by Julian Johnson (Wings, Docks of New York) are particularly adept. Lupe of course rides off double with Gary. The story is romance novel silly but you can see later Fleming lust-driven plots like Red Dust in it and there are a couple of brief, effective bursts of violence showing the director’s hand - Louis Wolheim taking advantage of the bottle on the bar in his fight scene and Cooper downing the two Indians. He also gets to do a bare assed scene, washing on the river bank.

The most significant thing about Wolf Song is that it shows Gary Cooper was a star personality before he ever said a word for the microphone.

Fleming was also represented by his first two credited films as director, the Doug Fairbanks When the Clouds Roll By and The Mollycoddle. A beautiful copy of the first made me up-grade my assessment as it became clear that what we were watching was the point where Fairbanks transitioned from athlete comedian to spectacle super hero. Plot has evil shrink Herbert Grimwood trying to make his point by psyching Doug into doing himself in, with digressions like shots of indigestible vegetables dancing in his stomach, human fly activity and the first (?) use of the rotating set we get again in The Navigator and Royal Wedding. The Buster Keaton connection is re-enforced by finding the word “saphead” in the titles (the name of the play with Fairbanks, redone as a movie by Keaton) and the ambitious flood finale clearly anticipating Steamboat Bill Jr.

The Mollycoddle was equally a departure, with Doug as the Europeanized Yankee restored to his pioneering ancestors tradition by work in the steamer stoke hold and foiling diamond smuggler Wallace Beery - a Fleming regular from this point on.

The director’s Mantrap had been seen before. Presentable enough, it’s trashy presentation of the Clara Bow character makes an interesting contrast with Frank Lloyd’s later, remarkable Hoopla.

Other program streams included the Russian Comedies, which Pordenone has been investigating. Hearts & Dollars was a bit on the incoherent side as a couple of those Americans lost in Russia (think Kulseshov‘s Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) are shuffled between the wrong relatives before finding romance and opportunity. Alexei Popov’s Dva Druga, Model I Podruga/ Two Friends, A Model & a Girl Friend is more approachable and an agreeable enough first run through for Volga Volga, when the evil box factory capitalist attempts to sabotage the young inventor duo as they take their prototype to the planner bureaucrats in the big city. Star Russian actors we don’t know featured.

 

Popov’s 1930 Krupnaia Nepriyatnost/ Big Trouble is more of the same with the Revolutionary Speaker sent to  the worker’s meeting getting switched with the priest arriving to address the Church across the square. The satire is surprisingly gentle if not particularly funny. Ivan Pryev, later to handle imposing Dostoievsky productions contributed Gosudstvennyi Cinovnik/The State Official 1930, a compromised morality where the clerk who hides a recovered a bag of state cash stolen from him, becomes a local hero and is elected to the Soviet only to achieve a comeuppance.

Victor Shestakov’s Nelzia Li Bez Menia/ Delicious Meals from still silent 1932 is more of the same, with the disgruntled husband going off to eat at the newly established state canteen, part of the first five year plan, and unwittingly becoming an element of it’s reform and triumph. Throw in the 1934 children’s film Razbudite Lenochku about late school attendance and we’ve more than filled our work quota on these.

The Japanese Chuji Tabonikki of 1927 was irritatingly fragmentary but did show the great Daisuke Ito making a striking effort to reproduces traditional painting in his three part account of warrior Denjiro Okochi’s rise and fall. A couple of German silents provided some curiosity value. William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel proved to be an earlier filming of the Bernard Kellermann story with one Frederich Kayssler in the role in which we would later see Jean Gabin, Paul Hartmann and Richard Dix. The narrative content was pared down and uninvolving but, as in the later sound films, the scenes of panic and disaster had a striking, stark quality,  here anticipating Metropolis. It's early Herman Warm design. 1920’s  Romeo & Juliet im Schnee was a new (to me) Lubitsch comedy in the unappealing lumpen style of much of his already familiar work, shifting the familiar plot into the snowy Alps for a happy ending.

Complementing the Fleming material were several programs of early western shorts. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about the sessions of  lackluster silent city actuality movies, unremarkable even when issuing from the hands of people as diverse as Eugene Deslaw, animator Anson Dyer,  Boris Kaufman (later to shoot On the Waterfront) or celebrity Constructivist artist Moholy Nagy. Their admirers were also being subjected to this barrage of  primitive movie cowboys which I find intriguing. Nice to have endorsed the conviction that Broncho Billy Anderson was leading the pre- William S. Hart field. His films like A Mexican’s Gratitude (1909) Under Western Skies (1910) or A Pal’s Oath (1911) had stronger narratives and more connection to the western movie ethos to come.

You had to study the Catalogo when dealing with these or you’d miss the unrecognizable presences of Ben Turpin playing a Mexican for Anderson, J. Warren Kerrigan doing one for Alan Dwan, Tom Mix as a horse breaking express rider for Sellig or director to be George Melford as a variety of authority figures. Lots of noble red men and heroines in drag made up a couple of streams in this selection.

Such material was not to far from Enrique Rosas’ celebrated Mexican serial El Automovil Gris of 1919, though the use of real events separates the film from other contemporary serial movies. Like the French anarchist Bonnot gang, the criminals wearing military uniforms here pioneer the use of a motor vehicle in the robberies and kidnappings they commit. The film follows the exploits of individual gang members and characters, like a victim who joins law enforcement to pursue them, or real life Police Chief Juan Manuel Cabrera appearing and working on the script. Undercharacterised and short on action or dramatic highlights at a reconstructed fuzzy pink four hours, it remains an intriguing artifact when you consider it’s enduring popularity on it’s home turf. Companion piece Gabriel Garcia Moreno’s El Tren Fantasma from 1927 mimicked the form of the American B western (punch outs on moving trains etc.) haltingly.

One-off  Hollywood contributed a routine 1923 China-set Tod Browning called Drifting which only picked up when Wallace Beery and a plausibly teenage Anna Mae Wong were doing the drifting, Edwin Carewe’s by the numbers 1928 Ramona, with Dolores del Rio and Warner Baxter, and, rather better, Al Santell’s lively 1928 Dixie Dugan movie Show Girl, with Alice White at her peak, in its quite presentable mute version.

Pagano in Maciste Alpino

Another program stream dealt with Italian body builder heroes and featured the most famous in Luigi Maggi’s Maciste Alpino of 1916 where Bartolemeo Pagano still in his Cabiria spray tan gets involved in the war with the Austrians. At one point a sentry is about to shoot him and Pagano demands “Are you mad? I’m Maciste!” and presents his Torino Film business card. The film is better crafted and more entertaining than most of what was being done in it’s day and for some time after and leaves one hoping to see more of the burly hero’s series of adventures.

Several of these muscle men moved to Germany and Pordenone aired Luciano Albertini as Nunzio Malasomma’s Mister Radio, an eccentric electronics genius who does feats of daring in the Alps and Luciano Albertini in Max Obal’s Der Unuberwindliche as a Circus Rossi escapologist battling jewel thieves. These remain entertaining curiosities.

 More ambitious and much longer was Manfred Noa’s lavish Helena - Der Unterdang Trojas with Aldini among the shirtless leads that also included Wladimir Glaidarow, Carl de Vogt and Karel Lamac. Albert Basserman unrecognizable in crepe hair beard and Adele Sandrock also showed. The familiar plot line - Aldini/Achilles’ “I do not race for women’s flowers” - is undermined by the dated notion of beauty Edy Darclea’s Helen represented. Jokes about a face that couldn’t launch a row boat from all sides.

Similarly centering the film in Georgette Leblanc’s aging diva undermined any interest generated by the striking decors of the L’Herbier 1924 L’inhumaine, that kitschy cornerstone to French twenties culture, with its high art connections - Fernand Leger no less. Not hard to see where Marienbad came from.

Can’t help feeling that it belongs in the been there seen that basket along with Graham Cutts’ grotesque The Rat with Ivor Novello and Mae Marsh (“Just a couple of kids. They’re in a bad way”) and yet another run on Eisenstein's October in a copy that wasn’t even as good as the one that had our attention wandering fifty years ago. Pordenone is clearly showing that so called montage classics like this and Arsenal have already had more than their share of attention. Have we really run out of  Dita Parlo, Alan Crosland, Frtiz Rasp and Maria Jacobini to the point where these merit another go round?

The celebrated Bert Williams’ output couldn’t avoid evoking indignant Spike Lee and Melvin Van Peebles bristling at the depiction of black America in movies, not helped by the fact that the selection of his material on show just wasn’t funny.

Screenings of WW1 actuality material produced On the Firing Line with the Germans of 1915, where Henry Durghborough and Irving Ries (later to direct King of Chinatown & The Fourposter) can be seen as prototype imbedded journalists filming the war against the Russians. It’s a switch to see the German side of WW1 and the team were skillful, though the production is of specialized interest. More intriguingly however, the showing produced a background of the largely forgotten Peace Movement of the day and it’s delegates forbidden access to the Versailles Treaty discussions.

Pordenone tends to look after it’s own, inviting applause for members of the archive community and screening Tatiana Brandrup’s Cinema: a Public Affair about the ousting of the genial Naum Kleiman from the Russian film museum, with Nikita Mikhalkov in the real life role of villain. Paolo Cecchi Usai got a run on his sixties style abstract feature Picture and  Richard Williams aired his striking new short Prologue. One fun development was that the accompanists took to scoring Williams’ festival trailer in their sessions. The Japanese using wood blocks and flute was particularly arresting.

Gabrio

Attention focused on the restored seven hour 1925 Henri Fescourt Les Miserables surfacing in a beautiful tinted copy and backed for the entire event by Neil Brand with a side drummer. After seven hours I was on a music high but I couldn’t have hummed one of the motifs he had been using if my life depended on it.  Whether or not it’s a great film, this was a great show, with the audience spontaneously leaping to their feet to give Brand a sustained standing ovation. That’s not the first time I’ve seen that happen and I rate Brand as one of the great phenomena of the serious movie scene, even more so than the other gifted musicians that Pordenone attracts. His accompaniment turned the pedestrian Fred Niblo-Fairbanks Mark of Zorro, also on show, into a fun interlude.

Les Miserables itself is pretty impressive though the Harry Baur - Raymond Bernard version or even the Depardieu TV series are really better movies. Gabriel Gabrio is the stand out element,convincing in all the different Valjeans the story presents. The program book writes off Gabrio’s other work, ignoring his confrontation with Charles Vanel in Maurice Tourneur’s splendid Au nom de la loi, his Cesare Borgia and God knows what else among his inaccessible titles. The film’s kids are OK but of the rest only Sandra Milovanoff in her oppressed Fantine rather than her youthful Cosette, registered among all the wardrobe department outfits and crepe hair. Building tension on the barricades is particularly effective (a striking contrast to the growing tedium of similar material in October) and the film’s one departure from the more familiar versions rings, where Cosette/ Milovanoff sees the spitting condemned prisoners on their way to the galleys and asks “Are they still human?” to have Gabrio, now Fauchelevent, answer “Some of them.”

Even with further cut backs (the free computers have joined their magazine and full size movie market as happy memories) Pordenone remains the epi-center of  movie enthusiasm and we wait nervously to see what effect the departure of  respected twenty year director David Robinson will have.

It's kind of like making the Haj. You're not a true believer unless you've been.

Anthony Mann

When I first became interested in movies Mann was a North Star. His Bend of the River was model Technicolor entertainment and, unlike the makers of others like San Antonio, Scaramouche or Halls of Monteczuma, all of who tried, he was able to do it again - four terrific colour westerns with Jimmy Stewart, in with their other collaborations.

More than that, his taste would mature in step with my own - The Tin Star, Man of the West, God’s Little Acre and Fall of the Roman Empire. Anthony Mann turned into a life time project. The interview Chris Wicking and I did with him in the sixties is on the way to being my most re-printed and most cited piece of journalism, probably because Mann died shortly after, just at the point where his work was becoming trendy but before all those other carpet baggers got around to him. It may be the only time he spoke to people who had actually seen his films.

Well most of his films ... there remained the dozen movies he’d made before T-Men and the collaboration with cameraman John Alton made him conspicuous.  The early B movies were hard to find, to be picked off one at a time in 16mm. or late night TV.  Now three of the most elusive have finally come my way.

Sing Your Way Home turned up as a  Barcelona (!) DVD - problems getting rid of the Spanish voice track and Castillian subtitles but there it was.

A musical with overtones of I Was A Male War Bride, it offers egotistical War Correspondent Jack Haley needing to be repatriated from immediate post war Paris. The only way he can get an SS Arcadia berth is as chaperone to a kid entertainer group going back to the ‘States. Predictable complications, as he tries to keep the boys away from the girls (“I don’t want fifteen fathers with shot guns after me”). It’s breezy, efficient and quite enjoyable and it turns out to be the lightest - and most uncharacteristic - of Mann’s films, totally unlike the other new arrivals.

Buried on You-Tube in an excellent copy for once, I finally found 1944’s  Strangers in the Night.  It precedes his equally twisted Erich Von Stroheim The Great Flamarion also made by poverty row’s Republic Studios. The film has aspirations to be grouped with noir standards like Woman in the Window, Experiment Perilous, Rebecca and My Name Is Julia Ross.  There is a menacing mansion with a portrait of a glamorous girl (serial queen Linda Stirling posed for it) in the big room.  However the script by thriller writer Philip McDonald, whose work Hitchcock, Michael Powell and Jacques Tourneur all filmed, lurches into preposterous.

Sustained by letters from a girl from a Californian cliff top mansion,  Marine William Terry recovers from un-scarring Pacific War injuries and back stateside again takes the train to her home town, wanting to meet her. However in the dining car, he runs into doctor Virginia Grey, whose services are in demand because of war time male labor shortages and who happens to be reading the same book that Terry’s pen pal had shared with him (why?). He gets to the mansion to find limping matriarch Helen Thimig (wife of Berthold Brecht, in the largest of her series of forties Hollywood movie parts). She explains that her daughter is due back soon. The mother takes a murderous antipathy to his blooming romance with Grey.

Thimig’s performance is the best element, though Mann does manage a couple of quite starting moments, a train wreck and Terry’s unexpected reappearance at the climax. The director’s style has matured, covering the action in sustained, mobile, deep focus three  quarter length shots and giving Thimig a long, diopter-split monologue. The film looks like a production which cost more than the cheese paring Republic budget would have allowed. It is however unconvincing, dull and nasty.

Much the same can be said of Mann’s Strange Impersonation also made for Republic a couple of years later and curiously anticipating Dark Passage.  Brenda Marshall is a scientist injured in a laboratory accident engineered by jealous assistant Hilary Brooke. A blackmailer, who has stolen her engagement ring, is killed falling off Brenda's high rise balcony. She lets everyone believe it’s her and leaves town for plastic surgery that so changes her face that fiancé William Gargan in a silly mustache can’t recognize her. It all goes pear shaped however, when an ambulance-chasing lawyer has her accused of  murdering herself.  More atmospheric and more noirish, this is still a ponderous forties B movie.

Strange Impersonation: Brooke, Marshal and Gargan

Insignificant in themselves, these film are fascinating in the way they show Mann’s development. One of the all time most imposing film makers took twelve Hollywood fiction features to hit his stride. Makes you wonder about all the people who only got to do one or two - or eleven.

... and I’ve still got My Best Gal, Nobody's Darling, Moonlight in Havana and his pioneer pre WW2 TV production to find.

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2015

As always I’ll never really know about this lot. Fifty titles at those prices makes an

impossible target. There are times when you wonder are these really the pick of the year’s

offering? I was well on the way to regarding the event as a way to throw fifteen dollars a

movie into the void. Then it came good. I got two exceptional films in the same day.

Loin des hommes/ Far from Men starts off predictably with Vigo Mortensen as the Post WW2 Algerian school teacher saddled with the job of taking murderer local Reda Kateb (Zero Dark Thirty) to the gendarmerie, a day’s march down the desert road. Oh no - more growing mutual respect! Well they do go that way but, as they fill in the two central characters and the pair get involved with local militias and the French army, it becomes clear that this is something more thoughtful and impressive than we are used to. Great‘Scope images. Angela Molina doing a walk-on.

Then they slapped on Diplomatie/ Diplomacy, the enduring Volker Schlondorf’s film of the hit play about the Swedish Consul Nordling talking General Dietrich von Choltitz, German occupation commander, out of leveling Paris, as the Krauts lose WW2. This delivers two great parts to André Dusolier and Niels Arestrup, who come through brilliantly. Factually suspect but dramatically superior, introducing elements like the story of Abraham and Dusolier’s rousing hypothetical. All the reviewers seem to have forgotten René Clement’s 1966 version Is Paris Burning? The actual “Paris brûle-t-il?” ‘phone call doesn’t even figure here.

Arestrup: Diplomatie

Benoit Jaquot’s 3 Coeurs/ Three Hearts looked like a safe bet with Benoît Poelevoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg , Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve but it’s a mis-judged and uninvolving account of frustrated passion. Mlle Deneuve struck out again in the once great André Techiné’s equally ambitious L’Homme qu’on aimait trop/ French Riviera treating a celebrated, inconclusive murder trial. Guillaume Cantet and Adele Haenel get involved in Casino politics at ponderous length and, making Catharine zero for three, we get the glum Dans la cour/ In the Courtyard from Pierre Salvadori  trying to revive the Crime de M.Lange, Du Haut en bas apartment block cycle.

Melanie Laurent is staking out relationship cinema with her second feature as director Respire/Breathe covering a teenage school girl friendship that goes South in soft ‘scope close-ups. David Bailey, Les amitiés particulières and the current stressed family cycle swirl around. It takes a while for any narrative to form and the ending is a lurch into melo but Laurent is feeling her way towards something substantial.

Someone must have thought that if people were prepared to watch decadence for 142 min. in La grande bellezza, they could take a hundred and fifty of Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, glamor with a sprinkling of nudity and luxury historical reconstruction - actuality and fashion in a split screen.  You’ve got to wonder about a film where the clothes are the best element. Gaspard Ulliel and Jeremy Renier deserve better.

Loin des hommes; Kateb & Mortensen

The Intouchables team of  Olivier Nakache &  Eric Toledano's new Samba fielded that movie's imposing Omar Sy opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg, a winning combination tied to the promising plot of her freaked-out Parisian social worker processing his illegal Senegalese immigrant.  This pair register (love Charlotte dancing shoeless) but they get buried in a welter of complications and sub-plots which makes the film outstay it's welcome.

Le Dernier Diamant/ The Last Diamond is probably the best of Eric Barbier's glossy thrillers. Bérénice Bejo demonstrates that she can do the whole glamor star thing to the point where we feel someone more charismatic than the glum Yvann Attal should be squiring her through this twisty, polished heist piece about stealing a legendary cursed yellow diamond. Pretty good and would be better without the limp ending.

Bejo's The Artist co-star magistrate Jean Dujardin and gangster Gilles Lelloche compete in being lantern jawed as opposing hard men in La French/The Connection  big budget, long crime piece in an attractive seventies Marseilles setting.  At regular intervals someone gets whacked loudly but that only momentarily gets back wandering attention.

Lisa Azuelos’ elegant Une rencontre/ Quantum Love /Chance Meeting is determinedly female &  determinedly escapist. Mature author Sophie Marceau and lawyer Cluzet get along a treat, leading to a variety of fantasies of which the most striking has them naked together in the bed he is sharing with Azuelos, doing double duty playing his wife. Beautiful people, beautiful homes and locations - the Paris bridge with the lovelocks, London red busses. After you realize it’s all froth, attention wanders.

Tonie Marshall has done better than Tu Veux out tu veux pas/ Sex Love & Therapy where relations councilor Patrick Bruel hires Sophie again to sit in on his sessions and we get a lot of will they or won’t they.  I was thinking of setting up cloud funding to buy her new underwear after she showed up a second time in those same black scanties.

The cast made Anne le Ny's On a failli être amies/Almost Friends seem like a good proposition. Nice titles, sharp bright colours, attractive settings and personable players deserve better.  Emanuelle Devos and Roschdy Zem are pretty much indestructible but the good living fantasy they are involved in is unworthy of them. Divorced Karin Viard is a Skills Assessment officer handling a batch of new unemployeds from the closed local factory. Uneasy among them is Devos, who turns out to own an epicure restaurant  with husband Roschdy.  She keeps on breaking out in an unexplained rash. The two women involve each other in webs of deceit which aren't all that amusing, involving or plausible.                  

Welcome relief came with a germphobic (think Danny Kaye in Up in Arms) Danny Boon

in his own Superchondriac, a very funny farcical piece placing him again opposite Kad

Merad and our first glance of the winning Alice Pol. Think The Interview without the

edge but funnier gags.

It will be interesting to see which of these return for a theatrical run at popular prices and which ones spiral off into movie limbo.

Boob Tube.

There’s an Episode of Parks and Recreation where Amy Poehler’s Leslie wants the council to subsidise the local video store, which looks like closing, while Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson opposes government in the arts at any level and Poehler’s claim that the shop is the community window into culture is undermined by the owner shifting to porn because that’s what his customers want. Every time that she cites something like Rashomon, Adam Scott’s Nick Wyatt interjects “That’s on YouTube.”

Forget about news and current affairs. It’s sitcom where all the great issues are debated.

I always thought of You Tube as source of murky pop music clips and  Stupid Pet Tricks. I however now discover it’s where movies go when they die - a doorway into the lost (to Australians) world of Archives and Cinematheques. It seems likely there’s a lifetime of serious movie viewing there.

This is good news - bad news. With trembling fingers, I put Brigitte Helm’s name in the search bar and up came screens of icons for profane dance clips from Metropolis.

However it didn’t alert me to her presence in  the Karl Hartl/ Walter Reisch Die Gräfin von Monte-Christo with Gustav Mephisto Gründgens and Rudolf Die Driegroschenoper Forster or Carl Grune (now there’s a lost auteur) doing Am rande der welt, where she partners Wilhelm Dieterle. Both films have English captions though the second one looks like it came off a reject 8mm dupe.

If you try Florence Marly (with Ray Milland in Sealed Verdict, Von Stroheim in l'Alibi and Denis Hopper in Queen of Blood or as the Princess in Krakatit) you discover she also did a run of movies in the post war Argentine.

Without any navigation guide, it’s hard to work out just how much material there is - particularly as it’s like the ocean. You should never turn your back on it. The pieces that you click “watch later” frequently aren’t there next day. I had to go through fourteen screens of film noir (!) before I came upon the history-making Peter Cushing-Rudolf Cartier 1984.

The bulk of the foreign language material comes without sub-titles. A lot of it is misidentified and irretrievable. Quite a bit appears to be duped off the tackiest VHS copies in the world. When you get a dissolve, it looks like someone poured soup over the image. This traces back to the suppliers. Watch the trailer for Bicycle Thieves to see the sharpness and range of tones the system is capable of delivering.

This Above All - Tyrone Power & Joan Fontaine

Here is a selection of the feature titles I located. It’s not any kind of best list. It is however a very good match with my wants - just about all pre 1950, because I’ve had better access to anything made since.

Du Haut en bas French G.W.Pabst with Jean Gabin, Michel Simon & Peter Lorre, Myamoto Musashi  WW2 Mizogchi, Mail Train/ Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It Walter Forde with Alistair Sim and Gordon Harker, Ladro Lei, Ladro La  Luigi Zampi, Louise Brooks BBC Doc., Mask of Diijon  Lew Landers/Von Stroheim, Mesalina 1924 silent voice dubbed,  The Guilty Generation - Helen Twelvetrees 1931 sharp, Gyurkovicsarna  Nils Asther 1920, English captions, I’ll Give a Million Hollywood re-make of pre war De Sica, The Love River - Egyptian Omar Sharriff with S/Titles, Strange Impersonation - Anthony Mann B movie anticipates “Dark Passage”, New York Nights - Lewis Milestone 1929, Little Rita in the Far West Rita Pavone/Baldi - good copy, Kiki - Mary Pickford /Cameron  Menzies,  Circonstances Actuantes Arlety 1950, Seas Beneath 1931 John Ford with George O’Brien, Ettore Fieramosa  Blassetti, Svegliati e uccidi  Lizzani, Gloria Brigitte Helm & Gustaf Froelich (use Stummfilm Fan copy), Volga Volga - Grigori Alesandrov, soso quality but English sub-titles, Un Revanant Xtian Jacques/Jouvet scored by Honneger,  This Above All Litvak, O Tesoro/ Der Schatz - Pabst’s first movie, Devdas India 1935 Eng. S/Titles, Little Old New York  King Vidor soso quality, El día que me quieras last and reputedly best of the Spanish speaking Carlos Gardel films made at Astoria, Brothers Karamazov - Fritz Kortner/ Otzep 1931 Eng. S/titles,  Meet Me in St Louis - David Susskind TV version, Le Destin Fabuleux de Desirée Clary Sacha Guitry fair, The Cossacks John Gilbert silent, George Hill-Clarence Brown, Irgendwo in Berlin Post WW2 Fritz Rasp/Lamprecht, Woman to Woman Victor Saville 1929, Albuquerque Randolph Scott & Gabby Hayes in Cinecolor, Crossroads great Kinugasa silent,  Frauennot - Frauenglück  Eisenstein/ Alexandrov, Up the River Humphry Bogart’s first movie, Spencer Tracy/John Ford, Hitlerjunge Quex Nazis 1933 S/Titles.

Of course these are not the only thing the site offers. I find myself following John Stewart, who’s been regrettably missing from our local TV, but the real buzz remains finding access to the history of the movies that traditional coverage omits - think of that  drear British series which takes four hours to reach a screen filling close up of the word “Sound” - without ever a glimpse of a cowboy.

Equally disturbing is the lack off any professional or peer documentation on this You Tube material. Because there is no promotion of the kind for theatrical, broadcast or DVD exploitation of movies, no money changing hands, there’s no incentive to discuss a You Tube discovery.

The question remains why local enthusiasts should have to fossik through the Internet for the privilege of huddling alone over miserable copies of  the output of major movie makers, when it’s taken for granted that big screen presentation of this material is only a Metro ride away in the real world.

Barrie Pattison 2020