A BOLOGNA DIARY - IL CINEMA RITROVATO DAY 4 - Daisuke Ito, Henry King, Paule Delsol - Updated critics' chart

Kinuyo Tanaka, Masahiko Tsugawa, Shishi No Za/ The Lion's Throne 

And finally a Daisuke Ito movie that justifies in spades all the attention...and that was notwithstanding a false start when it turned out the 35mm had been laced into the projector back to front. Record minimum time to get it fixed and we sat enthralled by Shishi No Za/ The Lion's Throne (Japan, 1953). Set in the 1850s it's a drama about a family who present a classic Noh play once every generation. The young son who has a crucial part, is shaking with nerves and isn't helped by his mother, played by the luminous Kinuyo Tanaka, whose attempts to get him ready involve, basically, child abuse. Finally a reason to see why Ito is admired and another reason to regret missing the three silent films in the retrospective, the period when Ito was apparently at his peak.

But the day began with a viewing of a film it's taken me my lifetime to see, Henry King's Tol'able David (USA, 1921) starring Richard Barthelmess and presented as part of a strand curated by Tamara Shvediuk devoted to "Matinee Idols: Women's Male Stars". Not all sure of the syntax there but we get the idea as we are offered silent movies starring Rudolph Valentino, Wallace Reid, Thomas Meighan, and the aforementioned Barthelmess. I recall missing the movie at a MUFS Classic night and its taken  60+ years to make up the oversight. It's a wonderful movie, made even more wonderful here by Tamara's excellent intro and John Sweeney's fine piano accompaniment.

Then there was Paule Delsol's La Derive/Drift from 1964, an early post-New Wave movie, a rarity in being directed by a woman in the male-dominated French industry. (What national indutry wasn't male dominated when you come to think of it?). The film was apparently not appreciated even by the French censors who slapped ban on it for under 18s. Dick Prowse would have banned it back in the day if Erwin Rado or David Stratton had attempted to bring it in for an MFF or SFF screening. The ubiquitous "low moral tone" category which was employed to ban films where people had a lot of casual sex would have been activated. Its a terrific little movie and the crowd in the Arlecchino loved it.

Updated opinion chart below.

Film	Geoff Gardner	Spiro Economopoulos	Ross Barnard
L’Innocente (Luchino Visconti)		****
Kuroi Junin No Onna/Ten Black Women (Kon Ichikawa)	*	***
Ten Seconds to Hell (Robert Aldrich)		***	***
Osho /The Chess Master(Daisuke Ito)	*
Amma Ariyan (John Abraham)	*
Geru No Kobi/The Servant’s Neck (Daisuke Ito	***
Oborokago/The Inner Palace Conspiracy (Daisuke Ito)	***
Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra)			***
Sunrise (F W Murnau)			****
Night Nurse (William A Wellman)			***
The Overcoat (Grigory Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg)			*
La Bugiarda (Luigi Comencini)			***
Putney Swope (Robert Downey)			***
Eight Girls in a Boat (Richard Wallace)	*		***
The Devils (Ken Russell)			****
Mirages de Paris (Feodor Ocep)	**
The Cycle (Darish Mehrjui)	****
Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher)			***
La Derive (Paule Delsol)	***		**