Pordenone 2024

The Lubitsch Three Women

 I've now spent a lifetime on film - watching them, buying & selling them, documenting and making them. I'm often told that I've neglected most everything else to do that but, by and large, one lifetime has not proved enough. Silent movies are particularly elusive. Most sound material was still circulating when I was active. Not all of it reached me but the bulk of what was significant did come to my attention. However, the silents looked like vanishing.  That had provided the incentive to set up the French Cinémathèque. I had to rely on chance to deal with those first three decades of movie activity.  The Pordenone Silent Film Week comes in there. It's the problem they set out to solve and they proved to have a set of priorities remarkably close to mine - seasons on Michael Curtiz, William Cameron Menzies, Ivan Mozjoukine, William S. Hart, Victor Fleming and my old mentor Maurice Elvey. They even homed in on Anatol Litvak's first steps in the movies. It's like they were reading over my shoulder.

Gish and Gilbert - La Boheme.

Checking the current event online - quality new copies of the first year of D. W. Griffith, Ben Carré's designs, Anna Mae Wong - it's frustrating not to have been there, though I already knew a lot of the material they featured. The Mating of Barbara Worth is as dull as Henry King's other westerns (Chad Hannah I enjoy) Robert Wiene's Raskolnikov, the Ford Three Bad Men, Protezanov's Sorok pervvy/The Forty-First, Charles Burguetand's La sultana dell’amore, King Vidor's so-nice La Boheme which I once backed with Morricone's Alonsanfan music. It would have been good to see Victor Schertzinger's Forgotten Faces or the Gerlach Vanina. The YouTube copy on that one is foul. 

Of course over the forty years Pordenone has been about, the game has changed. Priorities have shifted. Home Video has retrieved material that might have molded away in attics or archives. Pordenone's audience is generally determined enough to have found those.  Now this one and the Silent Movie Festivals, which have appeared in its wake, have to compete and are under pressure to air restorations that suppliers have invested in. This of course ignores material which has been hidden in plain sight down the years. Think the superior Herbert Brennon - Ronald Colman Beau Geste which has, to my knowledge, had only one screening in Australia, on a bootleg 16 mm.,  since its first release. The (second) Elvey Hindle Wakes sat on the shelf unloved for decades, until the discovery of The Life of David Lloyd George fired up interest in its creator. His excellent 1926  A Woman Tempted is still there.

The material chosen to stream this year was mainly unfamiliar, possibly selected on that basis. 

First up  Louis Mercanton's 1919 L'apel du Sang / The Call of the Blood, an adaptation of the novel by Robert Hitchins who wrote "The Garden of Allah" & "Bella Donna", was an immediate reminder of what this was all about. The film itself was a curiosity but the tinted copy was breath catching,  (outside of brief Nitrate rot) a demonstration of advances in restoration techniques. 

The production's major claim to fame was as Ivor Novello's screen debut. Unfortunately, it is a formula infidelity melodrama and the film adaptation's appeal is pretty much limited to movie history enthusiasts. By those standards, it rates respectable.

White-haired novelist Charles Le Bargy has formed a bond with younger Phyllis Neilson-Terry (an early Trilby). Her Rome flat overlooks the Colosseum. The privileged characters are not short of change in this film. While Nelson-Terry holidays in her St. Almo Sicilian villa with shepherds playing the bagpipes to their flocks and the Taormina festival offering donkey races and tarantella dancing ("the Englishman pays for all"), More age-appropriate suitor Novello wins her hand before LeBargy, off in Africa, can declare an interest.

The Call of the Blood - Novello

After sharing target practice, nocturnal spear fishing (effective scarlet tint) and other interests, Ivor befriends servant Gabriel de Gravone, who warns him about unpopular local fisherman Fortunio Lo Turco, the light from whose island home can be seen from the manor. (think Gatsby) Neilson-Terry races to Africa to care for her ill old friend, who is deeply grateful that new groom Ivor accepts her departure.

However in his wife's absence, Ivor had discovered the fleshly charms of Lo Turco's big-haired daughter Desdemona Mazza – some enthusiastic making out and praying to the madonna. Locking the girl in the house, Lo Turco plots revenge at the foot of stairs cut into the cliff face. After finding letters sent by the guilty pair (he compares copies shown as inset titles – very post-WW1 movie) Le Bargy has to sort out the imbroglio in the best interests of Neilson-Terry. The piece has historical value but it's still hard to become involved in something with such a dim-witted plot line.

The technical work is assured. – an argument at the villa gate can be seen continuing in the background of a wider shot from the house, a kiss is silhouetted in the cave mouth, a body floats in the ocean, the ending fades in on a two-tint sunset. - matching edits and lots of Folklorico. Director Louis Mercanton occasionally surfaced on later duel language productions and is up with the filmmaking of his day.

Clara Kimball Young was ranked Hollywood’s leading female star in 1914 but, after decades of raking over this material,  if you ignore the B movie bit parts from the end of her career, the only time I’d seen her was in husband James Young’s forgettable Hearts in Exile of the next year, so I dialed up Pordenone’s 1918 For the Love of Rafael with some anticipation

This is a reasonably substantial effort by Harry Garson another of the husband-directors who dotted her declining career. Garson delivers the formula scenario without flourishes.

We open with convent girl Clara, who looks every day of forty, out West “when the only songs of old California were songs of Spain.” As the other novitiates ply Clara with birthday presents, dying Eugenie Besserer has her vow to marry her scapegrace nephew Bertram Grassby, in the hope of making him straighten up and fly right. Grassby gives the film’s most animated performance and is rewarded with the most colorful costumes.

Uninteresting additional characters pile in with uninteresting subplots. Implausible Redskin retainer Paula Merrit, sporting an obvious tan line, takes Clara to a tribal ceremony, where they are about to do in roving cowboy J. Frank Glendon. He has already taken an arrow hit. Clara rescues him with her Indian friendship ring, a piece of indigenous lore I hadn’t previously encountered. The pair become an item but she has the problem of affianced Grassby who is busily staging his bachelor revel orgy at the family hacienda, so Besserer palms off Clara with the story that Glendon has died. Gassby is plagued by a local girl clutching a baby and a Zorro bandit who passes himself off as an itinerant monk but is actually Grassby’s cousin who he has never met. Meanwhile, Glendon shows up again in the company of rapacious British widow Helene Sullivan, who pairs with Grassby, having an eye on the Ortega family jewels, which our heroine generously shares with her. Throw in a fiesta with cockfighting and a confrontation at prayers in the private chapel. Titles like “I swear by the cross on this dagger to send your soul to judgment if you ever come to me like this again!” Got all that?

Young suffers nobly, clutching bundles of flowers to her bosom as she faces the camera. She occasionally manages a bit of business that suggests the qualities her fans must have admired but the material is beyond redemption. Master cameraman Arthur Edeson (Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca) gets the odd striking shadow out of Ben Carré’s curved iron window bars.

For the Soul of Rafael makes it into this event as part of a study of designer Carré whose work is better showcased in the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera or as head of MGM's backcloth division – think Night at the Opera. Programmer Thomas A. Walsh was up to speed on his subject studying Carré's unpublished journal and continuing the research past acknowledged credits, including work on The Wizard of Oz and  An American in Paris. 1909's fixed camera short  Le mort de Mozart on show, offered Carré’s canvas cut-out scenery while anticipating Amadeus strikingly. Similarly the Feuillade-era comedy La course aux potirons takes on more significance when we notice that its cumulative chase follows runaway pumpkins through a sewer that anticipates Phantom and the ingenious reverse action and jump-cut staging uses wicker vegetables (presumably loaded with ball bearings) which prefigure the boulders that chase Buster Keaton in 7 Chances and do service again in the gag Keaton re-cycled for Red Skelton in the nice but now forgotten A Southern Yankee.

Extensive Ben Carré screenings included The Pride of the Clan, Stronger Than Death and The Red Dancer all new to me though I've always been interested in his work. It made me even more sorry not to be there in person 

Santa - Valenzuela

More authentic and right on mission, Pordenone homed in on South American pre-sound film - something known from a few Mexican titles - if at all.  They aired Luis Peredo's 1918 Santa. One of the first Mexican feature films. The direction of the country's cinema to come is already visible in this scaled-down "Carmen" or "Blood & Sand", the first of four filmings of Federico Gamboa's then scandalous novel, presented if you get the idea, in episodes labeled Purity, Vice, Martyrdon and Epilogue, originally introduced by ballerina Norka Rouskaya, who is only glimpsed in the cut down surviving copy.

The elements pile on – fallen woman, arrogant officer seducer, low life setting, bullfighter, and tearful finale. Disgraced Chimalistac village girl Elena Sánchez Valenzuela is thrown out of the family home by her mother and brothers, with much arm waving. Making her way to a Chaputlepec brothel she bonds with Alfonso Busson, their blind black pianist with white contact lenses. ("I know neither light nor my father") He's guided by his small boy keeper who occasionally turns and grins at the camera. Dissolution advances in an affair with Matador Ricardo Beltri ("The voluptuous attraction that danger exercises on the female temperament") His botched corrida means Beltri gets back early and finds her deceiving him with understandably alarmed lover Adolfo Fernández Bustamante, who abandons her to the crazed, knife-wielding bullfighter. She now has only the devoted Busson to turn to, though she longs for "her family, the flowers, the birds." Devine retribution shows up in the form of a rare cancer requiring an expensive (and passably convincing) operation. Faithful Busson is reduced to having her name cut deep in the grave marker, where he can trace it with his fingers – like Lesley Howard in Berkley Square.

Santa - Valenzuela, Busson & friend

The piece is not without ambition and Valenzuela is already a presentable lead, beginning a star career which continued into her organising Filmoteca Nacional, the country's first film archive. However the performers are nowhere to be seen in the Mexico City locating scenics and these never match the canvas flat studio interiors. Even for the WW1 Era, this one lacks sophistication (why does a blind man have pictures on his wall?) with an uneven cast further undermining impact. Verbose intertitles and a restoration, funded by Brett Ratner, that shows visible shrinkage and multiple frame lines, doesn't help. 

Latin America was also represented by Ramón Peón's 1930 La  virgen de la caridad/The Virgin of Charity, the last and sole surviving Cuban silent movie. It starts as if it will provide a lively picture of the Island’s life but finally settles into a formula devotional melo.

Filming in the El Mundo newspaper building introduces a narrative which won their short story competition. At Bijirita farm, Gran is dusting the picture of her son, who was killed fighting in the revolutionary war (flashbacks) to hang below the one of the Virgin of Charity, when grandson Miguel Santos gets back, cheered at the prospect of the upcoming picnic because wealthy landowner Francisco Muñoz’s daughter Diana Marde will attend.

There the fat comic is plucking chickens in boiling water but fortunately we don’t see much more of him. The idea for entertainment is “Let’s watch them herd cattle.” That's an excuse to introduce some more local colour before dancing to a gramophone record.

However brilliantined heir Guillermo de la Torre soon comes back from the city and not only does he have eyes for Marde but a sidekick prompts that records of the purchase of Santos’ farm will have been destroyed in the fire that wiped out the Municipal building and de la Torre can claim that his dad never parted with it. A visit to a pliable notary provides bogus documentation. Unaware, Muñoz sees de la Torre as suitable son-in-law material and Marde has to accept the dastard's ring. However when all seems lost, with Santos and his gran evicted and having to move in with a neighbor, hammering a nail into the wall causes the framed picture of the virgin to fall, revealing the legal documents concealed behind it.

The engaged couple are already at the Zugalo Mucipal to make their union official when Santos bursts in proving the would-be groom to be a swindler. That’s for the law to settle but the only thing that will stop the marriage is the girl’s father withdrawing his permission – which he promptly does, recognising his error. “I will not have a scoundrel in my family.” Clearly not fate but divine intervention! The film ends with the couple kissing as the camera films into the sun.

The film’s look is more 1930s Hollywood than silent movie – fluid groupings, frequent dissolves suggesting an optical printer and diffusion on shots favoring heroine Marde. Even at this stage, it's possible to see satellite national film industries taking on the shape of their more powerful neighbors. In this way, Soviet influence showed up in the Uzbek films in Pordenone's program.  

Vyacheslav Viskovsky's 1925 Minaret Smerti /The Minaret of Death from the Bukhara Republic has genuine novelty value. It's the first Uzbek silent movie I ever encountered. That is a point in its favor along with its large-scale staging and Sixteenth Century folklorico detail, generated we are told by looting the holdings of a deposed Sultan. Direction has characterisation come in second to the costumed crowds and exotic locales. Another dupey looking copy.

In this one, people keep on abducting Nadezhda Vendelin's hair-platted Dzhemal. The caravan with which she is traveling is attacked by Kur Bashi "the Terror of Bukhara" and she's carried off   – disappointing wide-shot coverage. The Terror lays gifts at her feet but a jealous woman from his entourage enables our heroine and her handmaiden to escape, trading the horses provided for camels. The pursuit is unforgiving. "Kill her and let the jackals celebrate today!" However, Knight Oleg Frelikh comes to her rescue, returning her to her home.

Even so, it's not long before Alexei Bogdanovsky's emir of Bukhara is lowering the girls in a basket into the cellar of his palace to be the prize in the goat throwing contest, another of the film's spectacles. Though victorious, the knight is sewn in a bag and dragged off behind the horses at the orders of heir Iona Talanov, who has eyes for Vendelin, which is rather surprising when the court entertainment runs an extensive bikini girl contortionist chorus, along with its sword dancer and a few other local specialty acts. Talanov tires of The Emir, disposing of him with the comment "Your place in paradise has been awaiting for some time" and propositions his caged prisoner "You will become the jewel of my harem – flies die without sun and women without love." Despite his penchant for flowery language and precious stone gifts, Vendelin rejects the low life, pinning her hopes on the recovered knight who, outraged at Talanov's conduct, has fomented a revolution among his fellows. In his stronghold, new ruler Talanov is contemptuous. "I am a great Emir. I will not be sent off by some poor farmers" and flings a defiant peace emissary off the minaret - with an iris to black. However Vendelin's servant lowers ropes from the battlement enabling the outraged knight to storm the palace and, facing defeat, Talanov hustles our heroine off to the minaret (cf, Cairo Conspiracy) only to meet his own doom at the hands of her admirer - "As a flock of eagles take flight." The action here is spectacular and sustained, payback for the skimpy opening raid.

This one suggests that the state of Uzbek filmmaking was advanced but unsophisticated. Soviet authorities finding Minaret Smerti popular, allowed this one through to the keeper but the nationalistic content or possibly its promotion of insurrection were not well received and no further production in this tradition was permitted.

Director Viskovsky made some sixty films, including a couple of Boccacio adaptations but his dream of a Hollywood career got no further than staging a Maurice Swartz "The Inspector General" for Jewish theatre audiences in the 'States.

All Pordenone's scores were excellent but I was particularly impressed by Günter Buchwald's work on this one.

Oleg Frelikh, the hero of Minaret of Death, was back, directing this time, on 1928's Moxov Qiz/ Prokazhennaia/The Leper, showing the advance of filmmaking and great earnestness, surprisingly skewering both the Russian occupation of Chechnia and Muslim values, complete with a ridiculous Sharia Law trial.

The Leper kicks off with one of the film's Soviet-style montages - nature in a small Chechnian town,  birds and flowers, men doze in the shade and children fly a kite which becomes snagged in a tree. Grigol Chechelashvili, the local translator's daughter, who will become the heroine, frees it drawing the attention of a well-off local in a town where they believe "Allah divided the people into poor and rich." Her life of playfully gathering flowers with her mother, in the garden with its peacock, is about to end.

Having the support of Russian Colonel V. Lyubshkin and the matchmaker mullah, along with the groom's family wealth, the wedding goes ahead (coins montage) Fade in on a cat among the next morning's leftovers. The women  beating cotton intone  "What else can a young girl bring to the home but children."

However things don't go well. The groom, who dresses in the Russian (westernised) manner considers his new wife's attempt to follow his lead as sluttish ("Have you forgotten you are a Muslim?") and beats her. She daubs a protest on a cloth which she sends to the officer and this, instead of aiding her, is seen as a come-on. ("Ah, a bird has been caught in the net") Faking an injury in the Ruskie mounted column's falconing day, a seducer doubles back and has his will of the girl while her husband is away.

The seasons change and the Russian leaves our heroine to be beaten with the tongs used to put hot coals in the coffee maker. Her loving father, who quotes the Koran's "Your women are your garden" appeals to the mullahs who reproach him and return the girl to his house, making him a pariah. He has to leave the village and, in his new position as an estate overseer, he is ridiculed over his wayward daughter by the workers, when he tries to arrest one of them for diverting water.

Our heroine's mum dead, her father's new wife turns out to be an evil stepmother and the now-married officer ignores her, leaving her only the leper village as refuge – and when she flees this, the passing riders drive her off with whips, as a leper.

The film has all the techniques of mature Soviet silent film, effective tempo, well-chosen angles and vivid characters. It is clearly a work of high seriousness, juxtaposing idyllic nature with venomous scorpions and the advance of (Russian) order with the superstition of the locals.  It adds conviction with disturbing actuality (falconing, the leper community) Atmosphere is exceptionally vivid as agony and indignity are piled on the appealing heroine without respite. The Soviets appear to have been full bottle on the status of women. However the message content that they put forward with such force, now needs more vigorous contextualisation so far from its original time and place. This would have been a good spot to come up with the early actuality shorts featured in other programs.

The copy was a bit dim but sharp and   had a good range of tones. Oleg Frelikh's actor career also included playing Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Stalin era Padenie Berlina.

1924's The Folly of Vanity is notable as the first movie Maurice Elvey, then Britain's leading filmmaker, made in Hollywood at Fox during the twenties downturn in English production. Pordenone didn't offer any insights into the Elvey connection and without the British setting that he explores determinedly in his best work, the film is dispiritingly impersonal.  

It starts off like one of those Reginald Denny domestic comedies of the day but soon subsides into moralising, endorsed by Henry Oto's inserted underwater dream sequence with cliff divers and decorously filmed mermaids.

The Folly of Vanity - Mulhall, Blythe, St. Polis

The fetching Billy Dove is in the bath with coy staging of new husband Jack Mullhall fetching the soap and kissing her round the door - discord when he finds she's spent the profits of selling off household items on a string of false pearls. This is intensified when celebrity jewelry collector John St. Polis is their guest and she insists on wearing the necklace. St. Polis invites them to his yacht party. Jack has heard about those – the misleading possibility of risqué comedy or De Maupassant complications when St Polis lends Billie real pearls and the marrieds are given separate cabins. Once Theda Bara competitor Betty Blythe swans about among the revelers who offer champagne toasts. Jack knew what he was on about "Do you see what the lust for jewels turns these women into?"

Complications introduce Dove into the vision of The Temple of the Winds in Neptune's kingdom. The aquatic royal takes a dim view of the necklace too "It's a symbol of vanity!"

The film is brisker than Elvey's English work and has good production values but he's still shooting square-on to the back wall of the no-roof sets. A shortage of exteriors also disturbs and the disapproving stance on the Jazz Age is no fun. Finally, the film's only serviceable asset is Dove being winning, though publicity emphasises the Betty Blythe Connection

Another stream featured Anna May/Mae Wong, become trendy six decades after her death. Hope centered on 1928's Schmutziges Geld /Song (UK) /May Song /The Shanghai Doll/ Show Life /Wasted Love, a film featuring Wong and Heinrich George, evoking the now forgotten pre-WW2 esthetic of the UFA circuit, 9.5 libraries and The Film Society.

European silent filmmakers saw Wong as the one Chinese film star recognisable to their public, her value neglected in Hollywood, partly through censorship constraints or plain old prejudice. Producer-Director Richard Eichberg placed her in this substantial production opposite George, the bulky leading tragedian pretender to the throne of Emile Jannings. 

In Istambul ("the ancient beauty of the mosques and palaces is reflected in the quiet waters of the eastern harbor") the wind blows Heinrich's cap down the beach to where Anna is getting stuck into the raw lobster she's caught spearfishing. A couple of toughs attempt to take advantage of her and after the nicely staged brawl, where her joining in evens the odds, he sees them off, producing the clasp knife which he drops. She follows him to his studio-built back alley lodgings to return this and he sees her potential as a target in his bar knife thrower act. Anna is not too keen on that but becomes devoted, imagining bulky Heirick's face reflected when she polishes his boot (think The Sentimental Bloke visualising his Doreen in a cut market cabbage).

Anna fights the street kids for a mounted "Tourné Gloria Lee" poster advertising the visiting ballerina and who should she turn out to be but our hero's lost love Mary Kidd, (previously leading lady of Michael Curtiz' Austrian unit) whose function here is mainly to be pale skinned - which she does rather well. Bored, Mary has companion Hans Adalbert (von) Schlettow (Cottage on Dartmoor, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler) take her to a low dive and ("Of all the gin joints...") who should be performing there but Heinrich and Anna – flashback to the drowning that set our hero on the run.

Turns out that Heinrich still has the hots for Mary and the only way he can aspire to the riches needed to compete with Hans is to rob a (gleaming black steam locomotive) train in the company of Paul Hörbiger's gang  - great cast!

His eyes blinded by steam ("a light, a light!") Heinrich needs another one of the event's surgeries and the Karl (The Blue Angel) Vollmöller story needs an assist from Fool's Paradise to sustain sagging interest. Things limp along to a tragic conclusion as Anna performs her sexy dance in Von Schlettow's society nightclub – lights dim to show the silhouette profile.

The film is handsomely mounted, with designer Willi Herrmann's contrasted studio slum back streets and luxury world, spaced by location insets. Performances are superior to the material. Anna Mae never looked better and she pounces on chances that her American films never offered. Technically the work is as good as silent cinema got, even with the shonky effects of the drowning and the train passing over George. Both his knife throwing and Kidd's ballet are doubled. Eichberg however was, like Richard Oswald, someone who had gained prestige by association, working with the greats of the Erich Pommer era without producing results that were as impressive. George would have a better innings opposite Betty Arman in the similar Schleppzug M 17/ Tugboat 17. 

The copy in simulated sepia is splendid. It's worth tracking this one down and the other Ana Mae movies on YouTube, though the German films there are not subtitled.

When Pordenone did their Karel Lamac retrospective I felt they stopped just when things were getting interesting and that idea is confirmed by 1929's Suzy Saxophone/Saxophone Susi which bubbles along showcasing Mrs. Lamac, Anny Ondra with bee-stung lips in a character whose ebullience here overshadows her straight played Hitchcock leads.

Theatre janitor Paul Biensfeldt's showgirl daughter Mary Parker craves the education that her family can't afford to give her, while titled Anny is stage-struck. Why not? Her dad, Duvivier regular Baron Gaston Jacquet, spends all that time backstage with chorus girls. When both young women ship for England, they compare notes and switch identities as with "Naughty Marietta" or "Die Fledermaus" which Lamac also filmed. Mary goes off to the expensive finishing school while Anny joins the Tiller Girls Dance troop as Susi Saxophone. Meanwhile, Lord Malcolm Tod, egged on by his fellow stage door Johnies puts moves on Anny, driving her on a round trip of London when they disembark from Southampton - passing the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square and the other landmarks animated on their map.

Saxophone Susi - Ondra & Tiller girls

Trouble looms when severe manager Mira Dore has a doorman, experienced in seeing off bogus deliverymen and relatives trying to reach the girls, and Tod is sent on his way, while it looks like the fake Susi will be exposed when Dore demands she perform her Vienna chorus routine. The film takes off after her initial awkward moves, with Anny/Susi picking up the music and going into a great comic dance routine catching the school and the audience by surprise.

Following some ballet training and plotting by Tod, the characters converge on dim stock footage Piccadilly, where Anny partners tuxedo-wearing eccentric dancer John Franklyn in his impressive monkey routine and dances on the seat cushions held by the toffs. However she overhears that Tod has won a bet by getting her there and won't have a bar of him – until the happy ending of course. Proving to be the daughter of the lecherous baron removes the social barrier that Tod's hapless friend bet would destroy their union, after some bad taste byplay with Tod cultivating Mary's working-class mother while still believing the substitution. The surviving copy is minus a half hour so we never do see what becomes of Mary. Big chorus number with Anny among the girls in black rim glasses and top hats before she establishes her bona fides. This one is a surprise, a silent movie in which the musical numbers are the highlights. Lamac had now hit form, along with his regular cameraman fellow Czech Otto Heller, who was later to notch up an extraordinary German, French and British filmography including I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name and the dreaded Peeping Tom. Spot Hans Albers in black lip rouge doing a top hat playboy with enough energy to disguise the insignificance of the part.

This one was widely accepted as the highlight at Pordenone. The Lamacs did it over as Baby in 1932 with sound and Anton Walbrook. There's a copy on YouTube. Watch this space.

The event's big finale was the Harold Lloyd Girl Shy backed by a live orchestra. The film is a nice reminder of the level of accomplishment already visible in Lloyd’s work by 1924. He makes his stuttering bumpkin wholly admirable and charming Jobyna Ralston (out of luck to be upstaged by Clara Bow in Wings) matches him step for step.

Harold’s a Stuttering tailor’s assistant in Rural Little Bend, where they hold the Saturday night dance in the open and the train to the city runs at the end of Main Street. Though he’s tongue-tied in the presence of local girls, he’s put all his effort into writing a seducer’s manual. Small-town boy (Harold was already a bit middle-aged for that) is too much of a boob to court the girl but rushes to the city to save her from one of those already-married bounders who inhabit these films.

Girl Shy

The great gag of saving her little dog by scooping it up with a walking stick from the departing train observation platform sets the tone nicely and the final dash to prevent Ralston's wedding is full of great pieces of comic stunt staging - Harold chasing a train down the wrong track, leaping into a succession of cars with one full of cork popping bootleg hooch chased by the cops and traded for a black man’s jalopy facing him on a one-way road. He crashes this immediately without anyone worried about its owner. Soon Harold or stuntman Harvey Parry does a car-to-horse transfer with a wagon pulled by a racing pair through the LA streets until one of the animals breaks away and our hero rides a fire truck hanging onto the unraveling hose, (Parry without glasses clearly visible)  We get Harold on the purloined trolley car's roof when the power connection comes away.

Finally bursting into the church just as the minister is about to pronounce the couple married, our hero halted by his stammer, throws the girl over his shoulder and exits - very The Graduate. 

Though this was Lloyd’s most elaborate work at the time, the contrast between bustling twenties L.A. and the sleepy town could have been sharper and Lloyd hasn’t hit the right balance between stupid and smart yet.  His character will evolve. By the time we get to 1934's The Cat's Paw, the plot nicely pivots on local people failing to recognise the skill set he developed in China, which will save the day.  However here filmmaking is already assured and the leads are sufficiently characterised to involve, with the inventiveness of the gags more than adequate to carry action forward.  

Running Girl Shy was recognisably an attempt to bolster the audience. It's a disappointment that, after forty years, the established Hollywood comics remain the drawcard in this epicenter of movie history enthusiasm. The event is changing. Maybe it needed to. Their magazine and free internet are history and the no repeats policy seems to have gone. Besides the Griffith shorts, I've seen Abwege there twice now. I notice that, since I’ve been following Pordenone, this is the first of their events that didn’t feature an effort from their poster boy Ivan Mozjoukine. I know we’re canceling Russian culture now but there is still all his German-French material to re-cycle. I didn't catch anything that impressed me as much as previous hits like The Life of David Lloyd George, To the Last Man, the Henri Fescout Les Miserables, Alf Sjöberg's Den starkaste. John Stahl's Memory Lane or the Shanghai Wild Rose and I must wonder whether that's a matter of taste (theirs or mine) or the well running dry. In an era dominated by streaming increasingly disposable entertainment, this is a genuine issue. 

Barrie Pattison 2024

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More Italian Film Festival 2024.

I didn't get to all the likely material in the Italian Film Festival but the films I caught up with after my first report were a disappointment.

 Paola Cortellesi's C'è ancora domani / There's Still Tomorrow was prominent in the event after its whopping great success on home turf. The film offers a plausible Immediate Post WW2 setting with black and white images, Jeeps of U.S. MPs in the Travestere location streets and people wearing clothes we remember from the Neo Realist movies.

  There's Still Tomorrow - family.

They begin as they mean to go with husband Valerio Mastandrea (Bellochio's Fei bei sogni) waking in the morning and taking a swipe at wife Cortellesi, here pulling double duty as star and director. Just in case we haven't got the idea, he's been made a lookalike for Pietro Germi, when he was doing his macho man leads like Il ferroviere and L'uomo di paglia. 

Cortellesi's life is made miserable by the domestic violence, a couple of bratty boys who evaluate any development as a chance to get a separate room and a bed-ridden father-in-law who tells Mastranddrea his mistake was not marrying a cousin, in the family tradition. The one bright patch is twentiesish daughter Romana Maggiora Vergano, who is rapturous at being courted by the son of the local cafe owners, rumored to have made their bundle by selling out neighbors to the Germans during the war. That's even if Dad won't bankroll her education and wants Romana to go up the aisle in her mum's tattered old wedding dress, surrounded with flowers from the church's last funeral.

Paola does find support in the company of the neighborhood women, a friendly black G.I. with chocolate bars and the nice Autofficinia mechanic who missed his chance at marrying her and offers escape sharing his new job up North. There's also a mysterious envelope which, exceptionally, came addressed to her in person. The set piece is the tension-packed lunch meeting with the potential in-laws, which totters on the brink of calamity. Turns out the film's development is not however what we expect.

Cortellisi at work.

In the black comedy scheme of things, each one of Cortellisi's hopes is dashed until the ending. By that time it's become clear that what the film's supporters are embracing is content rather than entertainment value. Disturbing implausibilities mount. How is Paola able to conspire with the soldier when they don't have a common language? Did she really accumulate the cost of years of schooling with bank notes skimmed off her side hustles on clothing renovations and home injections and shoved in a biscuit tin? Will enfranchisement achieve instant reform? Stylistic choices are also dodgy. The beatings become slowmo ballet and, as the film continues, the small screen Academy Frame opening slowly expands to 'scope proportions for no particular reason. By that time a film that had started like a promising departure from what we are used to seeing has stretched viewer patience.

I'm clearly not the target audience for this one and it has found its public. Cortellisi, conspicuous in Come un gatto in tangenziale, again registers – so bona fortuna!

Paolo Sorentino’s success being the new Fellini is mixed, varying from the ponderous and pretentious La grande bellezza to occasionally imposing pieces like Youth or his Pope TV serieses. Somehow they never fill the promise of his 2004 Le Conseguenze dell'amore but he takes Tony Sevillo and bunga bunga girls along and homes in on things that are imposingly Italian - Catholics, high fashion, Roman ruins, pop music - so hope persists.

The new Parthenope is more of the same (switching Silvio Orlandi for Servillo) and merits the same mixed reception. Starting in 1950 with the delivery of a Golden Coach that would have done Anna Magnani proud, we get the open-air pool birth of our protagonist, who grows to be well-built Celeste Dalla Porta in a variety of revealing outfits.

 Parthenope - Dalla Porta & Sandrelli

By 1975, she has somehow become identified with Parthenope, the spirit of Sorentino’s Neapolitan home, which gives her an excuse to spend time in the bay in her swimmers as well as digressions into a threesome with her siblings, instruction from disfigured (botched plastic job) acting coach Isabella Ferrari and interacting with celebrities like Gary Oldman’s inexplicably top billed John Cheever or influencer (topical) Luisa Ranieri. Ah, but Dalla Porta’s not just a pretty face, acing Professor Orlandi’s anthropology course so that he clears a path for her to take over his position – surreal finale with the concealed progeny. Silvio warned her about dye-haired devil bishop Peppe Lanzetta but that doesn’t seem to deter her from letting him bring her on in gemstones (only) after his Miracle of San Genaro show and we end up in the present, where her character has morphed into Stefania Sandrelli sharing her lifetime of wisdom with her associates.

The dialogue is peppered with lines which it is hard to take as seriously as the makers do – “I don’t need anything but I like everything” “You don’t take advantage of beauty.” “Anthropology is seeing.” Put this together with the scenics and sex and it’s been compared to a long perfume commercial. I'm not about to spring to its defense. I’d rate it middle-range Sorentino.

 The event was into inclusivity, finding space for the English-speaking Conclave and Christophe Dans Paris Honoré's French language Marcello Mio, a peculiar piece where Chiara, Marcello Mastroiann's now middle-aged star-daughter (with Catharine Deneuve) does a makeover that makes her look like dad, to which real-life celebrities get to react.

Best thing about it is the succession of self-caricatures. While directing a scene where she wants Chiara to perform "more Deneuve than Mastroianni" harassed Nicole Garcia triggers an identity crisis. Mum Deneuve is nonplussed, which gives us a chance to see how she has developed as a performer. Fabrice Luchini gets into the spirit of things by embracing a fantasy where he becomes the star's buddy. His wife is as puzzled as the audience. Benjamin Biolay and Melvil Poupaud have to readjust their dealings with the newly transvestite Chiara ("cela me rend heureux")  Hugh Skinner (Falling for Figaro) has a particularly inexplicable subplot re-staging Le notti bianchi and Stefania Sandrelli picks our heroine out of a TV show line of imitators. Of course, action moves to the Trevi Fountain where the cops who take her away have to decide which gender cell she gets shoved into. Then they all go to the seaside.

Craft aspects are adequate but the revelation that would make all this embarrassing posturing legitimate never arrives. The impulse that drives the filmmaker is finally no clearer than the one for on-screen Chiara Mastroianni, last seen swimming out to sea topless. This one is disturbing and not in a good way.

Barrie Pattison 2024

ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2024

 

A  new Italian Film Festival is usually a highlight of the year's moviegoing. This year suggests we are coming to the end of one of the most interesting periods in the country's production - not De Sica, Rossellini & the Post-War Realists shading into festival favorites like Fellini and Antonioni but the work of a more approachable set of individualist directors who commentators seem to be reluctant to put in the man hours to explore - the great Etorre Scola (C'eravamo tanto amato, Le bal), Gianni Amelio (Porte aperte, La tenerezza), Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo, Quo Vadis Baby?) Giuseppe Tornatore (Nuevo cinema paradiso, La sconosciuta) and Gabriele Luchetti (Domani accadrà, La Nostra vita) who is the only one to have a film in this event.

I don't like his new Confidenza/Trust as much as Luchetti's earlier work. It pivots on that old-style art movie standard - enigma. The film kicks off with the always attention-getting man on a ledge, here the window sill of his distinctive yellow-painted medium-rise city apartment block and it moves into one of those calamity struck – or it didn't - routines which they use to unsettle the viewer throughout the film.

Turns out that our protagonist is a respected academic who has drawn Ministerial approval for his secondary school "pedagogy of love" theory which we see him explaining in a classroom, where the green board is divided into two lists – love and fear. How this works out is dramatised in a flashback structure that shows him among devoted ex-pupils who tell him one girl, (Federica Rosellini outstanding in a strong cast) someone he particularly encouraged, has dropped out of further education and become a waitress. Pretty much instantly he has sought her out and moved her in, to the ire of her grabby Villa Totosa cafe employer, and we get a glimpse of her mentor's educational technique in action using wall charts and homeschooling to inject her back into the system. However, he goes along with her urging to participate in the truth game (never a good idea in movies - La loi, Er piú ) and, after his revelation, she packs up and leaves.

The film weaves back and forward in time, revealing the lead to be Elio Germani shedding a great, inobvious age make-up job. We follow the parallel careers of the pair as she becomes an achiever while Germani marries fellow teacher Vittoria Puccini, whose own attempt at self-improvement gets no further than contact with a lecherous professor, deciding her to live in Germani's shadow. The shape of the piece clarifies with their grown daughter Pilar Fogliati recruiting now famous Rossellini as a reference for Germani's prestigious award candidature - tension from the risk of her spilling the beans on his old revelation.

Trust - Germani & Rossellini

Germani and Luchetti are the Italian A team and money has been spent on this one, dignified by it offering elaborate observation on education, family recognition and (a bit of) sex. Craft aspects and performance are superior. Unfortunately, this comes deliberately engulfed in a cloud of non-sequiturs, confusing omissions and misleading film form, which leaves the viewer struggling to construct their own version of the back story, distracted by questions like do the oranges rolling down the palace steps relate to those moldy lemons from Germani's fridge? The stamp of quality is firmly upon the piece – like one of George Stevens' failed serious films – and while Confidenza has imposing passages and effects, it unfortunately also outstays its welcome, never providing the moment of truth that would justify its pretensions.

If there’s been a movie like Margherita Vicario’s Gloria!, I haven’t seen it – think a kind of Napoleonic Mean Girls, except don’t. This one musters the servile orphans of La Pupille and a more skillful version of the dim colour of the Caravaggio’s Shadow cycle.

The opening is the most familiar element – a symphony of sound in the old Mamoulian Porgy & Bess – Love Me Tonight manner as the orphan girls of the 1800 Sant’Ignazio Institute outside Venice go about the yard chores that take up the time when they are not working under their tyrannous, played-out choir master/chaplain Paolo Rossi. Bottom-rung participant Galatéa Bellugi is bound by a kind of blackmailed vow of silence.

However this round of drudgery is to be disturbed by a Papal Coronation, the first in Venice, simultaneous with the donation of one of the then unfamiliar new pianofortes to the Intsitute’s girl orphans called upon to perform for the Papal Dignitary despite the fact that whatever talent their maestro custodian may have once possessed has been rung out by a life as turnkey for the underaged. His many guilty secrets are going to be exposed and his supporters among the local officials shamed.

Gloria - Paolo Rossi.

The film’s great innovation is that characterisation is done with the girls' music - Bellugi’s gift of the tree branch flute to the little boy raised by the Governor’s lady and her mastering the keyboard’s decidedly modern music after a simple instruction on a Mbira. Her traditionalist rival impatiently turning the hourglass by which they share the hidden piano, proves to have a surprise skill comparable to our heroine’s. One apparently minor character suddenly bursts out in an impressive singing voice.

Despite the notion that the liberty promised by the new French Revolution will fail to save the girls and indeed their miserable masters from retribution, events push forward, more by musical arrangement than narrative, to the scheduled performance, the climax with calls of excommunication and a chorus of cheering kids.

Well, we do get female solidarity and priest-bashing but the gay characters are dissolute and the film manages to hustle up a couple of defensible males for the Swiss finale, when we are getting uneasy about the substantial political correctness quota. They even provide a nice historical justification for the apparent anachronisms in the score.

Gloria! (not a character’s name but a religious citation) has the kind of charge that makes coming back for more at the movies worth the effort. I wonder whether it will achieve recognition.

Another title that they are pushing offers current heavyweight star Francesco Favino in a new major release, Edoardo de Angelis' Comandante, an accomplished production filmed in an imposing studio realist style. This one is spun off the Atlantic WW2 war incident where Royal Italian Navy submarine "Cappellini" recovered the personnel of a freighter they had sunk and ferried them to safety. Italians are big on the notion of its chivalrous WW2 Navy. It crops up in the Italian-English co-production Torpedo Bay. Dulio Colletti's 1953 I sette dell'orsa maggiore had Italian frogmen at Gibraltar tip off the British before their charges blew, to save lives. The shadow of that story can also be glimpsed in the revisionist British The Valiant.

Camandante - Favino

Comandante gives Favino a chance to shine.  We first see his captain Salvatore Todaro, abusing the doctor, who has fitted him with a steel brace to resume his duties as Comandante of the "Cappellini"  - rather than staying home soaking in the tub with bare-assed wife Silvia D'Amico. Like Coleti's film, bruta bestia Gibraltar is the target. The confronting scene of the volunteer diver among floating jellyfish, cutting the mine cables, which bar their passage, is an early highlight.

The variety of imagery they manage to put into the film's confined setting impresses. It takes a while to get the core statement –  "We are at war." "We are at sea!" With instruction to sink shipping with anything mounted on the deck, Favino's lot spots the gun on the Belgian freighter "Kabalo", which opens up on them. The Italian sub's cannon sends it to the bottom, putting its crew into fragile lifeboats,  "The Nazis would leave them in the water." 

Surprisingly the anti-fascists turn out to be the bad guys - not too much of that in current movies. 

Works out that the imposing giant submersible comes back twice for the survivors, creating extraordinary hardship on board and a further tension when only Flemish officer Johannes Wirix is able to communicate between the two crews.  Favino decides to land the Belgans and has to sail through the British fleet, who open fire as they come within range. Diving would drown the men packed into the conning tower.  We get an exceptional tension. The film's imagery is a great match for this.

Another of  Comandante's craft skills is the dramatic use of music, an interesting comparison with Gloria! Repeated cutting back to D'Amico in her slip at the piano is a motif and we have the on-board song. In particular, a scene that gets our attention early has Comandante Todro/Favino at the head of his crew at night, joining their ship. Picking up the marching rhythm, they break out in their naval anthem. Three of their women watch mute on the pier. Favino orders one man to not sail with them. He has saved the sailor's life, increasing a sympathy with Favino's character who joins his current gallery of imposing heavy men - Il traditore,  L'ultima notte di Amore. 

The final captions saying that we are seeing a true account makes what has been a naval movie action adventure more compelling. 

Scrape away routine submarine movies – Deep Six, Torpedo Alley, We Dive at Dawn, Submarine Command, Ice Station Zebra and we get to a layer that's substantial and diverse – Morgenrot, Morning Departure, The Bedford Incident, Das boot. This one is not outclassed among them.

Comandante - De Angelis with Favino

Fans of Alba Rowacher's attempts to turn around our expectations of what a film star should be - what a film star should look like - will add director Roberta Torre's Mi fanno male i capelli/In the Mirror to the Rowacher gallery with some interest. Anyone coming at it cold will probably not be so sure.

Korsakoff Syndrome clouds Alba's mind as she is found wandering on the remote beach that fronts the reduced-by-debt home husband Filippo Timi has set up. Old format home movies of a 2009 Thailand holiday, falling flower petals or a shot of a peach with one bite missing gradually add in the details of her life, as she identifies with Monica Vitti (mainly) characters in the old films they print up in black and white clips with Alain Delon and Marcello Mastroianni and inserting mirror reflections of Alberto Sordi. Those elegant glimpses of Vitti's Anonioni movies contrast with Sordi's 1973 Polvere di stelle where the on-screen lion which terrifies the star merges with the stone statue in her yard and TV coverage of a zoo escaper. The ridiculous fantasies and the menace of sold-up property and repercussions for taking away the kid in the cafe to see the composited beast crowd in. Alba transcribing the stars' dialogues into a note book (the title is a Vitti quote about tearing her hair out) joins enacted scenes with Timi and disconcerted diner guests, which now take the place of her memories.

Rowacher - In the Mirror.

Intermittently interesting and another out-of-whack part for the star, this one has minimal connection with Angela and Tanno da morire, the Palermo crime pieces which have represented established writer-director Roberta Torre's work in screenings here. A score by Wong Ka-wai musician Shigeru Umebayashi effectively integrates the nostalgia and realist crazy lady elements. We are curiously close to I Saw the TV Glow where the movie experience invades the world of the lead again.

Simone Godano's Sei Fratelli / Family Matters is a lucky dip film. The reviews are in Italian and the most familiar face has the craggy features of Riccardo Scamarcio (Nanni Moretti's Tre piani). This one proves to be another one of those family reunion pieces we keep on getting from European directors like Arnaud Desplechin

Patriarch Giole Dix is on a hospital morphine drip and, rather than cling to a miserable life, he disconnects it and throws himself over the upper floor railing, bringing to an end his first-person narration which was our best chance of working out what is happening. Turns out he's fathered six – no, seven – now mature offspring from different women and, coming from the European locations they've made their homes, his extended family turn up for the cremation and reading of his will. Old antagonisms surface (of course) and new bonds are forged. Oldest son Scamarcio tries to mediate, only to be rebuked for bad advice. Flakey fry cook Gabriel Montesi is particularly stroppy. Valentina Bellé, the daughter they didn't know about is fresh out of jail after a drug bust and young Mati Gali faces a Scarlatti audition for his crucial music scholarship. The mood isn't lightened by finding out their inheritance is a debt-ridden oyster lease, where the staff are owed nine months back pay. The grown children plan a reconciliation, spreading Dix' ashes on his favorite beach but that isn't a great success, even with spontaneous skinny dipping. Things end up as a drunken night on the town with a turn at the Lazer game parlor.

The most telling touch is their final resolve that the scattered family will reunite.  We learn they will never gather again.

Individual scenes and performances, spaced by glimpses of the Bordeaux setting, get attention but the piece goes on too long and impetus wilts because there's too much now-who-is-this-one-again?  Family Matters ends up being another glimpse at the sea of unknown movie product out there.

More to come...

Barrie Pattison 2024

I Saw the TVs Glowing.

My generation was stiffed for fantasy horror. Lon Chaney and Conrad Veidt didn't mean much to my olds but they did have Hollywood European masters like James Whale and Karl Freund batting out long-life monster classic movies, with Val Lewton as a chaser. We on the other hand were protected by career civil servants proudly boasting on media that they had purged our screens of the corrupting horror films destroying overseas youth - like The Catman of Paris! The salaried custodians hung on into the era of those tacky British Hammer films, which topped up the Gainsborough costume melo formula with dabs of Technicolor gore. 

Eddie Cahn & J. Lee Wilder snuck into the outlets that encouraged us to believe this stuff was transgressive. It was only thanks to furtive industry pressures and a bit of not wanting to look too ridiculous that the Seigle Invasion of the Body Snatchers got two bookings in greater Sydney. The generation who came along after us did better. They were the Fantasy Film Festivals lot, getting Paul Naschy and Dario Argento on their way to the drive-ins. 

Action moved from cobweb castles through a line of visions of contemporary U.S. weird - cloaked Bela Lugosi looming in the mist next to the family refrigerator, The Fly escaping its B movie world into Cronenberg land. A dancing dwarf dominated  Twin Peaks or Bodysnatchers went big  close up on Dana Wynter's eyes.

Well, we have since gone through a period of respectability for monster movies and lackluster it was. Think Coppola's Dracula, Ken Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Tom Cruise as The Mummy. However, there's a new player. U.S. indie producer A24 has been batting out a string of budget shockers which have been filling the void that is engulfing theatrical distribution.  In the wake of their airing Ari Aster films Midsommar onwards, we could see Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow coming - festival bookings follow Sundance and sympathetic notices from writers who normally consider these beneath them.

This one echoes the phosphorescent make-ups and spooky nighttime settings of  Schoenbrun's admired 2021 debut We're All Going to the World's Fair. Black teenager Ian Foreman is found wandering Void High's already surreal school celebration - a billowing rainbow parachute silk dome, a light-up Fruitopia machine in the gloom. Who should Foreman find there but equally alienated Brigitte Lundy Paine, who relates, though she's two years his senior. The thing that makes her conspicuous is that she's engrossed in an episode guide for "The Pink Opaque" TV program which he's never been able to watch because it comes on after his bedtime, in the young adult zone that precedes late-night black and white movies for old people. The Pink Opaque becomes central to the film, more intense than the drabness that is the kids' small town reality. 

Commentators home in on the pair's rule-setting dialogue. Complete with a hint of mustache, she prompts "I like girls. What do you like?" That out of the way they hit on having him do a secret sleep-over at her home to watch the forbidden program, which is a low fidelity old-format piece. She takes to leaving pirate VHS copies in the school Dark Room (where else?) for him.  He has to scrub off the reproduction of the show's spook symbol that she's drawn in pink marker on his back. Observers seem to recognise their own viewing - Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the most common nomination. Stranger Things gets a nod. Curiously no one mentions Meliés and the Tarot Deck whose Man in the Moon and Mr. Punch duo are strikingly rendered in the on-screen series. 

... and we're only starting.  With diversions like a downed wire setting fire to the Pink Opaque guide or glowing coloured chalk graffiti on the roads, Lundy Paine vanishes and the kid, grown to be Justice Smith, becomes gopher in the local mall Fun Center, where the manager is lewdly abusive. Ten years later, she makes an abrupt reappearance - in the after-hours frozen goods division of course. She claims to have left this joyless life and really entered The Pink Opaque, through being buried alive, and has prepared a plot near the sports oval, for him.

 Such is the film's hallucinatory strength that we are drawn to her morbid vision rather than his oppressive reality. This goes with Smith's shaking off the alternative worldview as a useful member of society. The Pink Opaque comes back on streaming - the episode he saw in her lounge room. "The whole thing had become cheezy and cheap." We've got to the film's most disturbing concept. Nostalgia and fandom are on the operating table.

Ian Foreman,  Brigitte Lundy Paine

Using real locations, the set-up is done with basic characterisation, muttered straight-faced dialogue and voice-over and staged with a minimal supply of support players. Isolation is the film's key element.  It also cuts costs. Fear doesn't rise from the tomb anymore.  Now it comes out of the TV - Poltergeist, Harlequin, Videodrome, The Ring. 

What I Saw the TV Glow is saying is up for debate. The film's solemnity makes it ridicule proof. I can only wonder how the passage of years will leave it. It seems crass to believe that Jane Schoenbrun is just jerking our chain. All we are lacking for the full experience is the protection of professional moralists to tell us how dangerous it is. I now understand they were part of the show. 

Barrie Pattison 2024