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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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| Stella Dallas - Colman, Moran & Joyce. Barrie Pattison 2025 |
Leila and the Wolves.
