Cinema Reborn 2025

Cinema Reborn week is a welcome oasis in the desert of vintage film activity here, a timely reminder of the fifty-year absence of a National Film Theatre. This year's event was a useful mix in age and subject matter. Its purpose is to showcase restorations, which streamlines the work of locating and justifying material. Growing numbers indicate that it is finding its audience. I didn't try to work through the card, concentrating on unfamiliar material. That means that this report doesn't necessarily single out the best entries. Old favourites like Paisan, My Darling Clementine or Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors dip out.

However, opening night provided another look at George Cukor’s Holiday ( I keep on seeing it every twenty years) confirming that it is, with all its shortcomings, one of the most endearing films of its day.

Playwright Philip Barry was part of the between wars US theatre scene, the world of  Eugene O’Neill and The Theatre Guild. It’s his association with Katharine Hepburn that we now remember, though his plays were always being re-shaped for US TV in its first decades. Even if it wasn’t part of the Philip Barry cycle - Holiday 1930 with Robert Ames, this version, Philadelphia Story & High Society - this entry could still coast to a significant place in our attention on its ability to showcase the celebrity leads so nicely.

Columbia was working through a run of these dialogue comedies, regularly having George Stevens or Alexander Hall at the helm and this is one of their better examples. However, it does seem cut-price when you stand it up against Metro’s production values. We get lighting reflected on those marble pillars that are a plot point, showing they are obviously wallpapered. What was Franz Planer thinking? Doris Nolan and Henry Kolker do have something on the way to being the high points of their careers but they  are  never going to be competition for Mary Astor and Edward Arnold, who we’ve seen doing these characters in other films

Here, Cary Grant arrives at the Park Avenue mansion address of a fiancée he’s just met on a ski holiday. Convinced she must be a secretary there, he presents himself at the kitchen only to learn that she is the daughter of the house. He’s directed to the elevator and, instead of chic Doris Nolan, he faces her character-laden sister Katharine Hepburn, not quite settled into her movie personality but already irresistible. About now, Cary does the full Bob Fosse somersault from a standing position (audible audience gasp). Of course, the two are meant for one another, though the film’s strongest moments come from that weepy stand by, their misery-making loyalty to the sister. Kate sending off her soul mate to reconcile with her sibling chokes the viewers every time.

Really, there’s no question of which sister cheery Cary is going to pair with. Indeed it’s hard to understand why he ever got himself engaged to the mean blonde, who endorses her father’s rapturous account of the joy of making money, that just sets the man up as a target, even without any Miser Grandet resonance

The film adaptation, by Sidney Buchman (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)  and Cukor regular writer Donald Ogden Stewart hasn’t quite banished the theatrical form, which keeps breaking out with snatches of calculated dialogue. Some opening out filmed with Scotsmen and farmers has been deleted.  The act structure is still glimpsed showing the official engagement celebration in the area rimmed by the house’s grand stair case, simultaneous with broken hearted Kate, who had planned her own intimare gathering, upstairs in “the play room” become a shrine for the dreams that the children had when their mother set it up while she was still alive.  Alcoholic (another monologue) brother Lew Ayres, making his presence felt, began his uncompleted symphony on the piano there, before magnate father Kolker insisted he had to go to the family business and stay till six every day as an example to the staff.  There’s also a Marionette Theatre commandeered by Grant’s friend-academics Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton (he's a holdover from the 1930 version) to comment the action.

Holiday - Ayres, Hepburn & Grant

Turns out that raised-poor Cary has just made a killing in The Market and feels that’s enough money for him to have the life he wants while he’s still young, which horrifies Nolan and Kolker.  Won over by finding a now well-off suitor, dad has a place marked out for Cary at the company, where he can make more money than he needs. This is the point where the ideologies of the day get a nod - suffragettes, the fascist threat, organised labour.

Director Cukor uses the same device over. Dixon watches the dialogue with her partner, to come in for the final resonant lines in the way that snobby cousin Binnie Barnes is squired by Henry Daniel through their scenes without comment until he finally weighs in with the line that makes the audience detest them as much as Kate does.

Inevitable as it may be, the ending is irresistible. We get the common-for-the-day scene where the character we like looks like being trapped in the terrible home (compare Anne Revere in The Locked Room, Hobart Cavanaugh in Dark Hazard) giving Hepburn a chance to be even more winning, before the great timing of that last corridor scene, where Kate strolls in distracting Cary in the middle of another acrobatic turn - repeat of the gasp - though not wanting to spoil the fun - I think that prat fall is done by a stunt double. I’d have to see it again.

The festival circuit doesn't run to retentive memory. Names who were once hot tickets often produce blank stares now. Think Bimal Roy, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson or Gilles Carle. Don't try to find them in the Sight and Sound Poll.  An even more conspicuous example is Lino Brocka, once the recognition point with the booming Filipino film industry of the Marcos era. Brocka's Bona appeared here, prompting me that it was decades since I looked at his work seriously. A check of YouTube reveals a quite extensive selection, most of it without translation. I plan on exploring that and my own dust-covered pile of DVDs. I'll be back to this subject.

It’s hard to believe that critics saw Lino Brocka as a Filipino Ingmar Bergman, singling out individual works as masterpieces. A more talented Raffaello Matarazzo would be closer to the mark. Brocka himself had no such illusions, chatting about his “bold” (porn) films and participating in his country’s thriving production line, when their industry was rated an impressive number six in the world.

Brocka’s Bona dates from this boom and comes back to us through a curious chain of events, after enterprising enthusiast-entrepreneur Pierre Rissient had the original materials deposited in a French archive, now enabling this sharp, sub-titled digital restoration.

 Bona is a suitably lurid Latino melodrama pushed along with craft skill, which would have satisfied its target audience and adds to its curiosity value. It has two major assets. One is the lead performance by the winning Nora Anor, then leading Filipino star, who ran up a hundred and seventy-five movies. The other is Brocka’s detailed filming of Manila’s Tondo tenements, something Imelda Marcos opposed. They said “She doesn’t want the world to see the slums she herself never visits.” We get patching the rusting tin roofs on basic housing without running water, the idlers’ drinking drowning out the hymns of the church next door and kids playing with paper boats in streets flooded by rain - though the picture of community is supportive is not hostile.

The film opens with the Quiapo district roads thronged with worshipers throwing towels to the sweating men who are dragging the massive wooden religious statues of Manila’s Feast of the Black Nazarene. In the heaving crowd, we spot young Nora, expressing the same devotion that motivates her life as a groupie for movie extra Phillip Salvador. She brings snacks to him on locations, after getting her autographed fan photo.

When life in the family home becomes impossible, with dad Venchito Galvez taking his belt to her, Nora moves in with Salvador, who spends most of the picture in his Y Fronts. Nora shops, scrubs his floors and (significant detail) carries back tanks of water to heat for his bath. She nurses Salvador when the local yobos beat him up and tolerates his bringing back girls to the home - including a pregnant teenager whose abortion she has to help finance at the same rate as the last girl he took to the medico.

Nice young neighbour Nanding Josef comes on for Nora but she’s fixated on Salvador and ends up going to Josef's wedding to one of her friends. Though Salvador finally takes an interest in her, stretched out under the mosquito net on his floor, the situation of course deteriorates. Salvador’s one effective scene is his self-pitying monologue outlining his failure with movies - actor, voice dubbing, stunt man, extra. Nora can’t go home again and she finds that her man plans on selling the shack and migrating to the ‘States, married to mature new fling Marissa Delgado,  to whom he’s been passing Nora off as his sister.  Time for a suitably sadistic ending as befits one of these. 

Cenen Ramones’s script is delivered with reasonable craft skill. The camerawork looks pro even if one scene has the roll with Aunor’s close-ups just out of focus and the post-synch. voice track is irritatingly unvaried.

 The oldest film in the event, Stella Dallas was a Big Picture, state of the art for 1925. Sam Goldwyn (that’s the “G” in MGM) had struck a new Distribution Deal with United Artists and he was going to show everyone that he was an important producer. He acquired a best seller by a woman called Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote “Now Voyager” similarly dealing with a disfunctional mother-daughter relationship. Forget about divisions in a classless society. This one is a damp-eyed weepy. Goldwyn crewed it with prestigious Hollywood talent. The adaptation was by Frances Marion, one of the most powerful women in Hollywood after her association with Mary Pickford. Her titling here is particularly skillful.  Leading  Cameraman Arthur Edison would film Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca and editor Stuart Heisler, later directed the admired Storm Warning, one of the first screen treatments of the Klu Klux Klan.

Goldwyn’s masthead star Ronald Colman and dignified Alice Joyce (opposite George Arliss in both versions of The Green Goddess) are billed above the central Stella Dallas character, which went to Belle Bennett, not a star though she had filled featured spots in some ambitious films. Seeing it as her breakout part, Bennett had made herself over, gaining weight and dressing cheaply. Her success here did get her leads in similar sudsy material (The Woman Who Was Forgotten)  before her early death in 1932.

The big winner would have to be director Henry King, already celebrated for the Americana archetype movie, Richard Barthlemess’ Tol’able David.  Stella Dallas’ major success (it recovered Goldwyn’s over spend and showed a handsome profit) must have figured in awarding King the contract with the Fox Corporation which would run for thirty years, making him one of the richest and most firmly established Hollywood film makers - the Willl Rogers State Fair, the Dione Quintuplets movie with Jean Hersholt again, Tyrone Power films including Americana hit Jesse James, leading to King’s most notable work, a run with Gregory Peck, starting with The Gunfighter and 12 O’Clock High.       

After the disgrace of his magnate father’s financial failure, Colman’s Stephan Dallas is reduced to handling legal affairs at the small town mill and boarding with the white trash family whose daughter Stella/ Bennett sets her cap at him, distracting Ronald from her brat brother’s bare-assed antics framed in the porch window behind them.

They marry and have a daughter (the appealing Lois Moran, who had been an item with Scott Fitzgerald)  but Belle’s boisterous lifestyle puts a strain on the relationship, particularly when Colman finds Jean Hersholt (the Stroheim Greed) in the house using his horse trainer methods to fix Belle’s sore back. Colman impresses his employers and is transferred to the New York office - nicely handled moment when the three family members show different reactions in the same frame. 

Belle objects, using Moran’s up-market local schooling as an excuse for staying behind, and Colman goes off and re-encounters now widowed old flame Joyce, who is too virtuous to exploit the situation. With gossip about Hersholt as an excuse, the school ejects Moran. Escaping to a society tennis club holiday, the girl meets teenage Doug Fairbanks.  However Bennett’s grotesque appearance embarrasses her daughter and Belle hears about it through the train compartment wall.  Rather than destroy her daughter’s happiness, she leaves, sneaking back to watch her daughter's wedding to Fairbanks through the window.

A current viewer is likely to miss touches that place the film. Dallas snr’s demise is shown as the smoking pistol dropping on a newspaper headline, like Briggite Helm’s degenerate suitor in the Metropolis montage. The lovers are first seen on a long rope swing, as in Wings. Fairbanks grows a mustache to match his famous dad. However the distance from our time is one of the things that makes Stella Dallas still remarkable. As with other multiple-remake works, like Rain, Beau Geste or Ben Hur, the silent version is the one that carries conviction. The attitudes and situations belong to that era. Subsequent filmmakers have their time cut out time shifting the action, as demonstrated in sound versions of "Stella Dallas" with Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Midler - not to mention rip-offs like the one where it’s Al Jolson moved on in the rain outside the wedding.

The new transfer is handsome. Copied from an early generation, tinted and backed by an excellent Stephen Horne orchestral score, it will be the closest most of its audience come to the vintage movie experience.  How many consider that they are among the first people ever to watch hundred-year-old drama, pretty much in the form it was first presented?

After her working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  Fran Rubel Kuzui's 1988 Tokyo Pop turned out to be a nice change of pace, though it fell between the distribution cracks.

In this one. Punk-cut blonde Carrie Hamilton gets tired of being backup singer for no-talent groups in New York and, deciding that L.A. is as bad, she sets out for Tokyo without speaking any Japanese or having enough money. She gets as far as The Mickey House, a plausibly small & shoddy Tokyo hotel, decorated with Disney memorabilia. The receptionist calls “Shoes!” indicating she should go bare foot and the shower cuts out. Americans there try to bring her up to speed. Though she protests she's a band singer, the best she can find is being an escort in a Karaoke bar. The Mamasan with big red glasses leads the customers in encouraging her into the “Home on the Range” sing-along.

Stranded when the Taxis won’t take her back without a street map to guide them, she stops off at a street food stall where the boy idlers bet Yutaka Tadokoro that he can’t pick her up but, despite his limited English, he manages to get her into one of the numerous Love Hotels complete with censored porn videos. She resists his advances and sleeps in the bath. When they run into one another again and manage a better understanding, he takes her on a tour of the local colour - markets, roller skaters in the street, the pigs blood scarlet pillar open air passage way, the grill your own flapjacks cafe -  and they pair off with her interjecting “slow” into the make-out. No nudity.

Tokyo Pop - Carrie Hamilton, Yutaka Tadokoro

Turns out his mates make up a pop band, who push the idea of recruiting her as a Gajin (cf. Tokyo Vice) vocalist because blondes are then all the go in music groups. They get a spot introducing Sumo wrestlers but Yutaka won’t be in it,  even if it is National TV. The only way ahead seems to be with imperious producer Tetsurô Tanba (Suna no utsuwa/ The Sand Castle, The 5 Man Army - at last a familiar face), who dismisses bands who turn out to audition for him and refuses demo cassettes, even if they get delivered as a Gorillagram. Hamilton won’t settle for that and barges into his office, impressing him with her chutzpah. 

Success follows but she has to decide whether this is fleeting, with the alternative of heading back to the U.S.A. still wearing Tadokoro's red Band Shirt. 

Despite their lack of assurance, the leads become endearing and Kuzui manages to keep the locating business coming - Hamilton framed by Washington Square, the Tokyo neon streets,  Tadokoro fishing with grandfather Taiji Tonoyama in the concrete sluices provided, Hamilton entering through a tunnel exit packed with black-hair-and-suit pedestrians, become the one blonde patch in frame. Throw in his moving into the flat that their success has made possible, reflecting that most Japanese don’t leave the family home till they get married. Novelty with minimal technique make this one agreeable.

 

Probably the most challenging film in the event was Gibel Otrara / Fall of Otra, which last passed this way as a cut-down black and white single-showing item. 

The restored version has gotten back some of its original colour - sepia, which intermittently goes to as near to a full range of tones as unstable Ruskie-color could manage. Now it comes with information about the fall from grace of Russian director Aleksei Gherman, whose troubled career included Twenty Days Without War, My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Trial on the Road - all remarkable. Then under official disapproval, he was forbidden to make films but the script Fall of Otrar co-written with his wife Sverlana Karmelita went into 1991 production under then-student director Ardak Imirkulov, starting his career in the little-documented but imposing Kazak industry.

Fresh from seven years where he rose through the ranks of Genghis Khan's forces to the point of commanding a thousand men, Kipchak warrior Dohka Kydraliyev presents himself in Urzench, the capital of Khorazm, to Khan Tungishbai Dzhamankulov, as a deep cover agent, bringing with him the plans for the Mongols' wall-smashing machinery. More worried about conflict with neighboring Baghdad, the ruler sends him off to the Merry Tower of torture to be crucified. This one is a candidate as the most violent film of all time. Rescue takes the form of intervention by his loyal followers and the Khan's imposing Matriarch mother. Our hero gets an agreeable night (“I want a Chinese women with small feet”) but slips off, kitting himself with the sentry's weapons and outfit in recognisable Gherman pouring rain. 

It takes a while to get through the court intrigues, the unpardonable murder of the Mongol Emissaries and looting their caravan, which triggers invasion, where Otrar is the last of the kingdoms to crumble. The lead has changed his features by pushing his face into a hot coal brazier. The finale of Part 2 has the siege portrayed with further brutality - the machine for cutting out the tongue of a warrior who cries symbolism in the collapse of the mosque, as the invader captives face boiling water poured into their wall excavations. Probably best not to ask what happens to the horse they drive off the city wall to fall into the roof below. The climax is the execution of the defeated ruler, brought in a cage carried by naked prisoners to the presence of Genghis Khan, for execution by pouring molten silver onto the wax covered face - we had that (with less emphasis) in Andrej Roublev, which like Ivan the Terrible, prefigures this one. They even throw in True Grit's signaling the lead's escape by lighting a fire on the distant hill. The film continues with accounts of the later lives of survivors and a visit to the ruined mosque where the coloured panel chamber is now reduced to monochrome.  

A synopsis suggests that there was another now-deleted sex scene. The urge behind such extreme material is something on which we can only speculate. The Fall of Otrar is uneasy entertainment and we need to be prompted on the ideology it is meant to endorse. Like all Gherman's increasingly intense output, this one however remains indelible.

 

 Leila wa al ziap /Leila and the Wolves surfaced in 1984.  Sorbonne graduate Lebanese director Heiny Srour has status as the first woman director to have a film at Venice. She talks a great game -  filming in war zones, battling the rigours of desert conditions which destroyed film and equipment, the established attitudes of technicians clinging to feature film conventions and populations where her notions of female independence were often considered a shocking attack on family values, along with rulers who supported alliances hostile to Arab causes. Srour’s unit came under live fire on location - a journey from a comfortable middle class home to ferocious revolutionary. 

It's hard work to absorb the historical and agitprop content but the indignation burns through. What we get is a part narrative mixing historic footage, dramatisation and symbolic material. Filming extended over five years, with chasing finance taking a disproportionate amount of the time. The autobiographical element is obvious.  The cyclical account of women taking part in revolutionary struggle and then expected to return to traditional family roles becomes central.

On-screen lead Nabila Zeitouni’s concern is stirred by a 1980 London photo exhibition chronicling the Palestinian struggle, where there are no images of women. This is visualised/symbolized as a broken hand mirror. Zeitoun's character takes this as a challenge, herself filming reconstructions of conflict in Syria, Lebanon and the UK. Repeated scenes show men in their trunks frolicking in the surf, while black chador women sit in a circle on the beach under the sun.

We see archival footage of British soldiers, tropical kitted in their kaki shorts, interfering at gunpoint - a staple of the cinema we grew up with but this is not Sanders of the River. Here they are the colonial oppressors. It's not quite as jarring as the Genina 1942 Italian Bengazi where drunken Australian soldiers intimidate the innocent grape grower but offers the same brand of cultural dissonance. Current events in Palestine contribute alarming topicality. 

Leila and the Wolves itself is difficult, uneven and unequal to its pretensions but also sometimes impressive and disturbing.  Having been assured that it was a Socialist, Nationalist, Feminist work we damn well better like it.

This is one of several pieces on show, where the image quality of the original was degraded in working from original materials in sixteen millimeter. We get the impression that this format resists the efforts of current restorers. That puts at risk a large slice from our memory banks.

The same is true of David Noakes’ convincing How the West Was Lost, considered a highlight. It covers the 1946 strike of workers on the Strelley Station in the N. W. Western Australian Pilbara.

Conditions which can now be seen as shameful had been accepted after a Parliamentary enquiry ruled that native labor was necessary to the Pastoral Industries. Aboriginals on the stations had no option but to buy their needs from the company store. If they walked off, the police would bring them back over the store debts that they had no chance of repaying from the meagre wages. Their leaders were outraged that they were near slave labor on land given away by people who didn’t own it, land they had never ceded. They had no status as citizens and no vote. 

Similar conditions in the American South are widely documented. The 1932 Hollywood fiction film Cabin in the Cotton’s depiction of Planters and Pickers makes a striking comparison, though there the injustices are softened and the issue of race has less significance.

At great risk, the Strelley Mob walked off, often joined by the people from other stations. Some were able to survive in the desert, not returning and claiming that the strike has never been settled. Others went into mining. This is shown in dramatisations, interviews and official archival material. Disturbing footage shows strikers held in chains. These incidents were documented in the 1984  book “How the West Was Lost” by Don McLeod, a white prospector who took the part of the aboriginals and this is used along with spoken storytelling as the basis of David Noakes’ film. Strike participants and their families joined in the filming, checking staging and viewing rushes for accuracy.

The film was well received in event showings and as an informational tool, despite unpolished production.  This one was clearly on the wavelength of the Cinema Reborn audience, with a near-capacity attendance and sustained applause.

Stella Dallas - Colman, Moran & Joyce.





Barrie Pattison 2025

Leila and the Wolves.

Iron Fury & Aleksey Sidorov

 Rather surprisingly for the outfit that folded like a cheap suit when the local Hungarians told them to stop running their 1930s movies, SBS just put to air Aleksey Sidorov’s 2018 Russian military piece T-34/Iron Fury. The Ukrainians have already complained.

I wasn't going bother with this one but the opening is a bolter with WW2 Tank Commander Alexander Petrov (in Luc Besson’s Anna) evading German Panzer fire on his kitchen truck. (“The turret has to turn”) While it’s clearly all process work, the subsequent battle between the demoralised remnant Russian tank unit he takes over, asserting his authority as a freshly military academy graduated officer, and the German armor column that grossly out numbers it,  is as good as anything of its kind I’ve seen.  I felt like cheering the Ruskies and they don't demonise the Germans either.

Petrov gets to be P.O.W. ”The Tankman”, famous for seven escape attempts and refusing to give his name and rank, before his prison transport train rolls into the concentration camp where he’s scheduled for extermination. It is of course raining and I was waiting for a prisoner orchestra when, sure enough, a tracking revealed one. The new arrivals are ordered by the Stalag Commander to prostrate themselves in the mud, with only one one remaining erect, despite the threat of immediate execution relayed by bilingual translator girl Irina Starshenbaum (Michael Wintertbotham’s Shoshana) who anyone who has seen these knows is going to take off that head scarf before the end of the picture.

  T-34 - Alexander Petrov

However Petrov's German opposite number from the opening battle, Vinzenz Kiefer, (Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) now suitably scar faced and embittered, has been commissioned to mount a training exercise for the local junge soldier unit using a captured latest model Russian tank as target. With the prospect of Kiefer putting a round into the translator girl if he acts up, Petrov agrees to take command of the vehicle. Of course his old crew are in the inmate ranks when he has to recruit and he immediately picks them out, including the one that spits on him. However the trucked-in Russian tank, they can all smell from a distance, still has the rotting bodies of the operators. Demanding that they be permitted to give them a decent burial, Petrov’s lot discover that there is live tank ammunition inside the foul odored machine, which their captors refuse to enter.

Director  Aleksey Sidorov & Vinzenz Kiefer (Center)

We’ve already moved from suspense drama into Boy’s Own action but this one can more than hold its own with The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape, The Beast, Wolf Warrior or Fury all of which offer some of its elements. Forget The Treasure of Kalifa! The pleasure of watching several tons of armament gyrating to the strains of Swan Lake and crushing a yard of polished Mercedeses is to come. The final action material is as good as the opening and more than compensates for the slackening of pace in the camp material. We’ve got some bare assed bathing, which will look good in the trailer, computer simulated drone shots, some passable romantic material and a couple of nice bits of comedy with the tank petrifying German housewives waiting on a bus stop  and compliant local townspeople, before we get to the big action finale

The logistics, much humiliating of beastly Nazis and the tension in the expert action material all make this one superior, if enthusiastically violent, entertainment. The copy is excellent. I enjoyed T-34 and it makes me curious about the rest of Sidorov’s extensive filmography but then I’m not Ukrainian.

T-34 is a remake of Nikita Kurikhin & Leonid Menaker’s admired 1965 Zavoronok, which is available with dodgy subtitling at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9D0OMe3QiA&t=4928s

 

T-34 - Bus Stop, Irina Starshenbaum at right.

Barrie Pattison 2025

 

German Film Festival 2025 - Hildegard & Leni.

  The Sinner

Movie enthusiasm took a sudden upswing in the fifties. The London National Film Theatre occupied the South Bank site. The ”Version Originale” movement expanded from  Paris’ Le MacMahon, in a country where foreign films had traditionally been dubbed with the numbers cut out of musicals, meaning that there was a whole new audience of all the people who had only seen French versions. This new enthusiasm meant that subtitles copies briefly became the norm as other markets struggled to cash in. You could hear Louis de Funes’s voice!  Even in distant Australia, promoters woke up to the fact that there was an influx of people who wanted to experience the language of the old country and community businesses bought up abandoned suburban picture houses to show (usually untranslated)  foreign product.

Not to be left out, the two major circuits repurposed city fringe theatres to foreign speaking operations using the new wave of captioned copies and providing serious competition to the sleepy “Art” house industry. Brigitte Bardot would become a household name. There’s that scene in Newsfront where Old Cinesound hand Bill Hunter, looking at a foreign language venue, deplores losing what had been an outlet for their product -  to dirty movies.

However, before this German film production had resurrected and they had a hit,  Curt Maetzig’s 1946 Die Mörder sind unter uns/The Murderers Are Among Us (the original title of Fritz Lang’s M) starring a young beginner actress named Hildergard Knef. That one never made it to Australia but her scandalous (five seconds of nudity) Die suderein/ The Sinner hit Hoyts Paris, becoming the first German film I ever saw, even if it was dubbed - not the atrocity it sounds as the track was almost entirely voice over and played pretty much as well as the original, which half a century later made it to SBS.  Fraulein Knef also had the lead in Film ohne titel, produced by Helmut Käutner,  the first film made in the British Sector. It turned up here as a single, untranslated sixteen millimeter print. I had that one voice-overed for the Sydney Film Society, one of our successes.

Knef, re-birthed Neff for a short career after Anatol Litvak took her to Hollywood,  was big in my first contact with serious movies, so the documentary Ich will alles. Hildegard Knef / I Want It All about her life was a priority. I didn’t feel my expectations were met.

There are two major problems. Knef saw chanson as her strength and the film is largely made up of her husky voiced renditions of torchy songs taken from dupey TV Variety show kinerecordings, blown up in the wrong shape. Film clips (Murderers..., Decision Before Dawn and Fedora) are disturbingly brief, presumably to economise on royalty payments. Litvak and Käutner don’t rate a mention, though she does have a kind word for Julien Duvivier and Billy Wilder. English later husband actor manager David Cameron gets more attention. 

The film follows “The Gift Horse”, her best seller autobiography and flashes back to her teen aged exploit getting herself up in uniform to join her Tobis Executive  lover, conscripted to the front line in the final days of the WW2 - dramatic material but it does bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the old Henry King movie She Went to War. Neff coincidentally makes a brief, sexy, wasted appearance in King’s drear The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Ich will alles' comparison between her cosmetic surgery and the unmasking scene in Fedora is more telling.

I can understand her brushing her British films under the mat - including a Hammer piece with sea monsters but, in with the dross that wasted her talents, Hidgerdard Knef did notch up a Jenny in the Staudte Three Penny Opera, Marc Allegret’s Dedée Danvers, a nice role in Roy Baker’s Night Without Sleep, a TV Laura with Anton Walbrook and probably a quite a bit more in all those other inaccessible titles. I would have really enjoyed seeing her do “Silk Stockings” with Don Ameche on Broadway. She hung in there and went on displaying the talent that was attention grabbing in those first German rubble movies.

 As for  I Want It All, by and large I prefer Kai Wessel's 2009 fiction film Hilde with Heike Makatsch as Knef.

Veiel

When I saw that the German Film Festival had also come up with Andreas Veiel's new documentary about Leni Riefenstahl my first reaction was "Not again!" We've already got a couple by Ray Müller along with Annette Baumeister's  Eiskalte Leidenschaft - Leni Riefenstahl und Arnold Fanck zwischen Hitler und Hollywood but I felt duty-bound to investigate. 

White Hell

Leni was a great subject - glamorous young dancer, attracted to the silent mountaineering movies of Dr. Arnold Fank, by a metro poster for Berg des schicksals, she became their star in a succession of the most impressive German films of the nineteen twenties, a summit their cinema would never re-capture. Having the lead in Der wiesse holle von Piz Palu, where Fank was joined by Georg Willhelm Pabst, would alone give her prominence in film history but Leni was just starting. She directed her own mountain movie  Das blaue Licht - Eine Berglegende aus den Dolomiten and, with a change of government which you may have heard about, someone was needed to film the National Socialists' Nuremberg Rallies.  Leni got the gigs and her two-hour 1935 Triumph des Willens/ Triumph of the Will became one of the most expensive and ultimately most controversial non-fiction films of all time. 

Germany was up to host the 1936 Olympics and Leni, on a roll, got to film that one too. The new film finds her freshly accessible personal archive documenting the premiere as the high point of her life, where she clutched an armful of Roses expressed to her by Chancellor Adolf Hitler. She would later report back that first run audiences through Europe would cheer when he came up on screen.

However things were not going to be that simple. A stint as a WW2 war correspondent in Poland faced her with troops executing Jewish workers and she begged off to get back to her opera movie, where events caught up with her again as she used gypsies on their way to a death camp as extras. For the rest of her life, Leni Riefenstahl would be a celebrity fending off accusations of complicity in Nazi atrocities. Forget about Fank (who barely gets a mention here) Pabst, the Matterhorn, Piz Palu and the Dolomites. Forget about her technical innovations and massive organising skills. We want to know about Adolf Hitler. Leni Reifenstahl was paying the piper for the remainder of a remarkably long and conspicuous life, while litigating defamation cases or fighting off the allegations of TV hosts, whose invitations she was sufficiently unwary to accept. Her time-off to do imposing still photos in Africa and her underwater documentary were never going to compete with her status as the Fuhrer's favorite movie star.

I've never bought the notion of Leni as a great artist excused by her talent. That's the De Quincey was a drug addict ploy (does anyone still read Thomas De Quincey?) and it's being played out right now in the Gerard Depardieu trial. Veiel's  Reifenstahl isn't arguing that. It shows little sympathy for its subject, finding her at least guilty of naivety at a time when that was a capital offence. What it does show is how the judgment of history is formed. Leni Reifenstahl was doomed by being a glamorous celebrity who delighted in having herself filmed in the company of an infamous dictator, a man who compounded his offences by losing in the all-time most destructive military adventure. She was always going to be remembered in accounts like this as someone who danced bare assed in the Greek prologue of her Nazi games movie - even if they don't include that piece here, though we do see her, remarkably well preserved, directing the lighting of her own TV close up.

Veiel's 115 minutes provide space for support characters like Albert Speer outlasting his life sentence or Ernst The Devil's General Udet performing what looks like his famous airobatic, where he would do a flypast picking a handkerchief off the runway with a hook on his wing tip. There's a brief, informative sequence of Leni sitting at Arnold Fank's prototype editing table in a meticulously ordered cutting room - with lengths of inflammable Nitrate Film draped about her neck.

Personally I find the Rally and Olympics films monstrously tedious, though the footage can be impressive in other hands - William Hornbeck collaging sequences for Capra's The Nazis Strike, the downwards shot of the marching troops looped to a perspective-free title background for Project 20:The Twisted Cross and, in this film, where they break out her coverage of adoring women welcoming Hitler, or the slomo of the naked discus thrower backed briefly by the original score. I don't think that Leni Riefenstahl would be delighted to find that her achievement was in setting up the most impressive stock shot library of her time.

Despite my resistance, I came out of Andres Veiel's film feeling I had a better understanding of the Leni Riefenstahl phenomenon and the mechanism of entering history. I couldn't help comparing her Mountaineering Movie co-star Luis Trenker, here glimpsed only once unidentified in a wide shot. He was shafted twice. He missed out on Piz Palu when Pabst recruited lantern-jawed Gustav Diessl, his own regular leading man, and Trenker was turned down for the Olympics movie because he offended Joseph Goebbels. A Swiss National, Trenker went off to Italy and made adventure films for the rest of his career. He came out of WW2 without a stain on his character, though Leni would sue him because his autobiography said she made it with Hitler - something omitted from Veiel's movie, which also leaves out her more plausible pairing with decathlon champion and movie Tarzan Glenn Morris, when they shared their Olympics. 

Nobody under sixty now recognises Trenker's name. What happened to Ray Müller's proposed film about him?

Leni & Luis - The Holy Mountain.

Later Leni






Barrie Pattison - 2025

2025 French Film Festival

  Boris Lojkine’s Histoire de Souleymane/ Souleymane's Story is the film Donald Trump is warning us about. I can’t see it getting space at the repurposed Kennedy Centre though It has scooped up (mainly European) awards for a story about an unauthorised Guinean immigrant bike courier trying to keep it together without his papers. Well, Trumpy could always go off and watch Anora. I’m sure there’s something for him there.

Histoire de Souleymane/Sangare 

The way Souleymane's Story is made is remarkable. Following real deal illegal Abou Sangare on his run through Paris making fast food deliveries, the camera uses a specially built rig developed to keep up with his cycle weaving through traffic, largely blue tinted by nighttime available lighting.  The city never looked like this in any other film I’ve seen. The constant movement, between restaurant queues and apartments where he makes his drops, generates the desperation of the character’s circumstances.  If he has a problem, he has to double back to the home of the owner of the license he is using fraudulently, to have it verified by selfies on the iPhone which dominates his life. A manager orders him onto the pavement. One elderly customer is up seven flights and can hardly walk.  Delay means missing the last bus to the homeless shelter, where his few possessions are stored under a bunk bed and he gets a basic meal and a shower. Missing that means a night on the streets. A pause is a call to Keita Diallo the hometown girl who wants to marry him but has had another offer from an engineer.  Sangare ridicules the picture she shows and her screen image covers its face.

 Watching we begin to understand the mechanism that keeps his society in place. He scrapes together payments to one of the fellow immigrants, who is coaching him in his citizenship interview, berating Sangare for not retaining details of his fictional journey and imprisonments and not keeping up the payments for his services. At one point the delivery is to a parked van full of (Oh, Oh!) gendarmes who see through his story but send him on his way. None of the people who figure in this threatening environment are actually malicious, even the customer who refuses to pay him because the delivery bag is damaged.  

 Just as the routine is losing its impact, we get to the final interview section, which is extraordinary  - just two people sitting in a room but with all the suspense of defusing a bomb. The ordinariness of  Sangare and interrogator Nina Meurisse drives it and the abrupt ending can’t be faulted.

Well,  French TV News  ran an item on Sangare’s real-life accreditation and being given public housing (after winning a festival Grand Prix). That raises more questions than it settles but it would be a hard heart that didn’t welcome it. 

Souleymane’s Story is not the kind of film I seek out but I rate it the best thing I’ve seen in the event.

Sarah Bernhardt, la divine is a big Euro-culture movie which bombards us with Bel époque images, personalities, citations and music (Claude Debussy leading the hit parade). This is not new or even Infrequent. Think  Michel Ocelot’s winning animated 2017 Dilili  á Paris and Aurine Crémieux’  documentary Sarah Bernhardt - Pionnière du show business traveled this route as recently as last year. Yes it’s “Sigmund Freud would like to talk to you” time again. However, the determination with which this one piles on its references and the luxury of its imagery wears down resistance. 

Writer-director Guillaume Nicloux has come a long way in the twenty years since his Cette femme la & L’affaire privée thrillers.  His new Bernhardt life has the ambition to eclipse its predecessors. We kick off with titles in with flickering clips, mainly from the real Bernhardt 1912 Les amours de la reine Élisabeth and find ourselves watching the archaic surgery to remove her diseased limb. We never see  Kiberlaine performing with her wooden leg but there is a reference to the telegram from Phineas T. Barnum offering to put her leg on display.  Sandrine queries “Which one?”

That’s already into the distancing, which makes this one more digestible than most of these historical-romanticals. They are telling us about the most beautiful and famous woman of her time and casting Kiberlain, who not even her admirers, among whom I count myself, would describe that way, which means Sandrine has to act being gorgeous and magnetic - already interesting.

 Attention centers on Bernhardt’s relationship with actor Lucien Guitry (Laurent Lafitte). KIberlaine’s public confrontation with Mathilde Ollivier, who has taken her place with Lafitte, is on the way to being the high point.  The film unwinds backwards like Harold Pinter’s 193 Betrayal or Jane Campion’s l982 Two Friends so we get a chance to follow Lucien’s son Sascha Guitry back to his childhood, making him a welcome audience stand-in. Knowing the younger Guitry’s own work gives an odd perspective.

 The film overwhelms objections with its barrage of detail. A stage is showered in gold leaf.  Sandrine relaxes in her intensely decorated home, surrounded by her menagerie (relations with the mountain lion she shares a couch with, seem to be a bit nervous), approving a famous Art Deco poster and mixing with just about every celebrity and historical reference they can summon. We get normally glamorous Amira Casar doing austere Sapphic love interest Louise Abbéma, Sylvain Creuzevault’s Edmund Rostand trying to think of a name for his long nose character, Sandrine persuading Arthur Igual’s Emile Zola to intervene in the Dreyfus Case, recalling her youthful witnessing an anarchist guillotined in front of a blood-spattered crowd, appalled.

This one is a class act pulling away from the horse hair art films that we normally get.

Frank Dubosc has had a curious thirty-year career path, working on TV, including a run as continuing character on a reincarnation of Coronation Street, playing straight man in increasingly ambitious comedies that nobody felt like importing here and breaking out as writer-director-star with his Tout le monde debout, whose fake wheelchair-bound character made commentators uneasy. Un ours dans le Jura/ How to Make a Killing, his third try as auteur,  has been better received.  

Frank and Laure Calamy are nicely cast as the failing middle-aged tree farmer couple with a special needs son in the Jura village (faded welcome mural on the side of a house) where everyone has known one another since childhood. Frank went to school with Emmanuelle Devos, the Madam of the local Culpidon swingers club (“bang bang” “non-gang bang”) and Gendarme Major, the indestructible Benoît Poelvoorde finds himself competing with his ex-wife’s new husband, who used to be his dentist.

 The tone is immediately established when Frank swerves to avoid a black bear on the snow-covered road (well staged) creating a multiple pile-up and launching a growing body count. He suddenly finds himself loaded down with Drug Cartel cash, having Laure count out the six-figure sum on her pocket calculator. The migrant fugitive mules are to be detained in Poelevorde’s cell,  if they can find the key. Any kind of secret is doomed.

The film nicely balances the affable incompetence of the locals with the murderous crime syndicate and the big city cops who take the case away from Benoît. He however proves to have a handle on the situation, complete with his plan outlined to Laure and Frank out of earshot on the isolated highway  - practical but ruthless. Curé Christophe Canard trying to assert moral authority is rapidly put in his place by his one-time schoolmate Benoît.

 Dubosc is not always sure-handed with the edgy material and his technique is not in the class of the great European filmmakers that preceded him but he makes his characters real in a way that holds its own with the competition - the mature couple in their home closet finery for a last night out, the major’s (old enough to be legal) daughter Kim Higelin making a deposition to him about her make-out in a crime scene car,  nondescript deputy Joséphine de Meaux, who conducts a motherly language lesson for the prisoners but proves to be familiar with the Swingers Bar and not intimidated by the need for lethal force.  Poelvoorde gradually works himself into the intrigue’s center to remind us what a force he can be even when he’s not getting top billing. Our last glimpse of him is the film’s biggest laugh - and then there’s the bear. We were wondering what had happened to that.

I enjoyed this one the most of what I've seen.

Finalement / At the End of the Day is recognisably Claude Lelouch - great looking film with imposing cast, scenics, misleading developments, Nazis, Musical Numbers, May '68, (tame) porn, self citations & issues. Unfortunately, it keeps on going past the one-hour mark where the format runs thin.

Tramp Kad Merad announces himself as a fugitive defrocked priest-rapist to drivers he hitchhikes with, while picking up clues on caring for sheep. They promptly turn him in. However, he manages to complete his wanderings acquiring a bric-a-brac trumpet, which he proves able to play, from shop owner Clémentine Célarié. Sleeping rough in a barn he is given a breakfast by farm owner Françoise Gillard and they end up doing a trumpet/piano duo. Her husband takes a dim view of having a vagrant in the house even though Kad on his way out wrote them a cheque for the new tractor they need. He makes it to Mont Saint Michel, Le Mans and the Avignon festival, with the occasional fit before they put him into the care of Dr. Dominic Pinon and therapist Julie Ferrier. There is a genuinely disturbing scene of Kad blowing away his nice family.

The piece loses impetus when we start to hear about “frontotemporal lobar degeneration” and the glimpses of his fantasies are gradually pushed out by the reality of life and home, worried wife Elsa Zylberstein foreground. This runs to a second plot stream with Gad’s half sister Sandrine Bonnaire introducing herself to mum, aged Francoise Fabian, who is contexualised with poor quality clips of Heureuse Aniversaire  to match the beach number lifted from L’aventure est adventure. Turns out Sandrine is carrying on the work of her mother in protecting (glamorous women) sex workers and they slap a warrant on her for procuring. 

The film lacks the discipline it needs to keep the audience sympathy. Kad meets Jesus and the disciples including Judas, explained as “It’s wrong to hold a grudge.” OK but then he keeps on encountering scruffy God Raphael Mizrahi, which is milking it. The rant by the disgruntled visitor to the Theatre festival or the opening piece of stand-up do suitably disrupt expectation.

The action is broken up by musical numbers most featuring Eurovision finalist Barbara Pravi, one of those winning young women who inhabit Lelouch movies. In their final song together Merad, who had been carrying the piece effectively, proves to be a pro vocalist.

A companion veteran work is ninety one year old Constantine Costa Gavras’ Le dernier souffle / What Comes After. This one is unlike the thoughtful European and lesser Hollywood films that he rolled out after the massive success of Z - He Lives, not exactly tent tent-pole popular attraction cinema. The now senior citizen director contemplates not death but dying, with a palliative care specialist, Kad Merad again, here in the company of writer Denis Podalydès. 

Finding Merad, as the lead in this one too, is remarkable in itself. His two characters are totally distinct without any help from make-up and speech patterns. Merad is moving into the imposing place once occupied by Harry Baur, who he somewhat resembles, as their great French character-actor-star. Alain Jessua once told me they were going to be without one of those and all I could come up with was Rufus.

Le dernier souflfe/Before What Comes After is something different. While it has all the features of a Boulevard release - name stars, polished mobile camerawork, tight scripting, significance - this one curiously adopts the structure of one of those industrial movies where the outsider is shown the sponsor's activities.

Denis Podalydés is a celebrity author whose Boston Hospital MRI reveals a dark spot on his liver. Understandably disturbed, he flies back to Paris and gets a second opinion from Palliative Care Specialist Merad, again excellent. They discuss collaborating on a book and Kad suggests Denis put on one of the lab coats in the closet and accompany him as he deals with celebrity guest stars playing contrasted patients, kind of like Clifton Webb going about with Dana Andrews visiting suspects in the murder of the woman in the picture?

Haughty Charlotte Rampling attempts to manage her own demise. Endearing Francoise Lebrun (La maman & la Putain) chats philosophically with the white coats. In deep denial, Hiam Abbass demands they continue futile treatments for husband Frank Libolt. A daughter contemplates the scuffle with her stepmother, to come when the father dies without a will. The squad of bikies, who show up in formation to see a member off, tends to distract from the show-piece finale, where gypsy royalty George Coraface and Angela Molina arrive in a motorcade of their followers for her treatment, which proves to be less productive than having the colony's young girls sing her off with a Joseph Kosma-Jacques Prevert number. Using the once voluptuous Molina is a considered choice. It makes a point that I don't know I want to be reminded about.

Merad works in abundantly resourced hospitals where the staff have time to knock off and applaud patients taking their last ride home. There is a bit of distraction in recognizing the senior citizen movie stars in hospital gowns and movie technicians and the director's family doing bit parts - Andrew Litvak, Romain Gavras. Informational content occasionally breaks through - a quarter of the population is no longer contributing to society, one-third of prescribed drugs are of no value to the patient.

While it's a work of high seriousness and made with big-budget know-how, I'm not sure that I would recommend this one. I wonder if it's not a bit too close to home.

The effectiveness of the early passages manages to win out over the notion that Elyas is a French re-tread of the Denzel Washington  Man on Fire, even if we do get another hard man bodyguard (“pas soldat - guerrier”) looking out for the teenage girl put in his charge.

Elyeas/ Zem & Michel

The Iraq war opening shifts to face scarred, self-medicating veteran Roschdy Zem working out and stripping his sidearm against the clock. The clicking of his paratrooper knife will become significant. He’s recruited by a friend for a bodyguard gig at the palatial French villa of Arab millionaire Sherwan Haji. The magnate’s women are restive at being confined within the grounds, even with the pool that auto-fills when trim French TV star Laëtitia Eïdo in her two-piece steps in. Laëtitia wants to hit the shops and her young daughter Jeanne Michel snatches a chance to ride her bike out when the gates swing open, with Roschdy in pursuit, spotting the black helmet duo on their motorbike and striking the shooting from the knee pose though they took his Biretta away. In the angry recrimination that follows, there is no image of the bike on the CCTV. Everyone including our hero begins to wonder about him.

Driving the claustrophobic women folk results in a spectacular traffic incident and, while Roschdy is reclaiming his piece, a large-scale shoot-out erupts. Director Florent-Emilio Siri, who did the Algerian War piece l’ennemi intime and Bruce Willis’ Hostage is absolutely in his element on these, and the film rates top class as thick ear entertainment, with the body count staying just within the bounds of credibility. 

However, at one hour forty-five minutes, Elyas has ambitions. We get everybody’s back story. Gypsies, immigrant smugglers, mercenaries including a camper van load who we suspect are innocent bystanders and an Arab Royal heavy with five wives, thirty children, a private army, and a penthouse in the desert city needlepoint high rise, with its own museum of antiquities.  Some of this is spectacularly effective - parachuting down the urban tower, Roschdy bursting out of the blazing semi-trailer on a forklift. His friend advises the hired muscle “You messed with the wrong man” about the time they claim that they only found seventeen bodies. The ultra-violence must be aimed at convincing us that this is serious stuff but just reminds everyone that we are stepping up the Charles Bronson tradition. The film fared miserably in its home market.

Elyas / Zem

 The intensity undermines Elyas’ satisfactions as action entertainment without managing to convince us about the film’s seriousness of purpose. There’s the nagging suspicion that they are telling us something we are supposed take on board about nasty Arabs. Still, it’s always nice to see Roschdy Zem doing grim. The rest perform as well as they are allowed.

Romain & Maxime Govare‘s ‘scope & colour Heureux gagnants/Lucky Winners turns out to be a would-be outrageous four-part film á sketch providing wide spaced laughs.  

Lively Comédie Française redhead Pauline Clément has just had her millions-winning ticket photo taken, when she is hit in the street by dream boat cyclist Victor Meutelet, who rushes her to the Pharmacie. They make a date for that night. Our perception switches between her roommate’s downbeat take on him as a gigolo fortune hunter and his self-presentation as NGO founder digging Third World wells, who has turned his back on the rich family home he shows her. Next, overworked dad Fabrice Eboué is in the family car with wife Audrey Lamy and the kids, when they discover his winning ticket is about to expire. He has to make an auto stunt dash through Marseilles, racing against his Satnav deadline. Three jihadists, Sami Outalbali, Mathieu Lourdel and Illyès Salah have just fitted an explosive vest, when they discover their win and menacing police, who move on them in the Métro, turn into an escort until their cover is blown.  Anouk Grinberg’s medical team make off with the winnings of their elderly misogynist patient Gilles Fisseau, when he expires with the shock. Serial calamities strike leaving them believing the prize is cursed. What we are to make of fellow prisoner Michel Masiero’s uplifting monologue is just confusing.

Happy Winners/ Fabrice Eboué

This one is not as clever as it needs to be but the cast is expert and there are scattered laughs generated by some deliberately off-kilter moments -  the family photo removed to reveal one of smiling Arabs, a comic-grisly splatter effect between the automatically shutting doors, dragging away a body leaving a trail of blood just out of view of guests dancing at the out of doors disco pool party, after the one shot of doctor Sam Karmann’s new Slavonic trophy wife dabbing her eyes. 

 

A retrospective look at Jean Pierre Melville's L'armée des ombres, best film of an overrated director, is still to come.

Barrie Pattison 2025