FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL - Barrie Pattison pays his once every 15 years visit to LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (Marcel Carne, France 1945)

Curiously, around WW2 classic cinema peaked simultaneously internationally, with a group of master crafted costume films which had a common aesthetic. Gone with the Wind in the U.S. achieved enduring fame. World events and the laziness of critics meant the German Romanze in Molle never attracted that kind of attention outside its home language territories but the French Les enfants du paradis was, in the years after its 1945 post-armistice release, touted as the greatest film of all time.

I’ve been re-visiting it at fifteen year intervals over my adult life. It’s disturbing to consider that my viewing at this year’s French Film Festival is likely to be my last. 

 

More than any other film I watch, it is different each time. I once saw the Paris Cinémathêque’s first run copy, struck when war time shortages meant that the laboratory chemicals needed to give it a full range of tones were not accessible. The copy was pin sharp but used only shades of gray. The new digital restoration has been darkened, presumably in an attempt to provide a supposed film noir look. Detail is lost. A lighting flash gives a glimpse of the original texture. Arletty here just seems odd, commenting that the Roger Hubert’s studio moonlight streaming through the Trauner decor’s window makes everything beautiful. 

 

However, it’s not just that the film physically changes but the audience response also shifts. Fifties commentators detected a grim war time defeatism. Now that no longer resonates when it comes out of a history most of its audience never lived through. The precision with which it is crafted was, and to an extent still is, the quality I admire in it, though watching the film now, I can see that contemporary Hollywood directors like Victor Fleming and Lewis Milestone exercised even surer control … and this left no room for spontaneity, triggering the freewheeling antagonism of France’s subsequent Nouvelle Vague film makers.

 

Le Boulevard du Crime

Nothing can destroy the imagery. The on-screen curtains open on an extraordinarily elaborate, vivid panorama which immediately amazes viewers who now know the war time shortages that dogged production – making it the most expensive French film them made. Costumed extras leave their already busy side street to join the thronging Boulevard du Crime, named after the lurid melodramas played in the row of theatres there, with performers front of house touting for passer by customers.

Straight into the establishing scenes - Arletty’s Garance, is the star tent show attraction, where punters pay to see her naked but find her decorously holding up a mirror in her barrel of shoulder deep water. She visits murderous dandy Pierre-François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand, a celebrated classic stage actor who doubled as a1947 Fantomas) in the shop-front where he writes letters for his illiterate customers, one in progress for a begging wife beater. Arletty seeks out the place because (clue) it’s like Theater. 

 

Arletty as Garance

On the street, white face mime Baptiste Deburau  (Jean-Louis Barrault)  is the subject of abuse from his spruiker father Anselme (Étienne Decroux) and Lacenaire picks the watch pocket of fat, rich spectator (André Numès Fils), with a gendarme (Louis Florencie) all set to take Garance away for the crime, when (first and most frequently cited of the set pieces) Baptiste springs to life miming the actual theft to exonerate Garance. His brilliant performance and its context would be enough to make any film exceptional and we’ve just started.

 

Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste

The film moves from the street into the Théâtre des Funambules mime theatre, taking us further into director Marcel Carné’s world of romantic grotesques. A pair of bird head men, like the ones in author Jacques Prévert’s collages, mill about back stage where Albert Rémy’s stroppy  performer quits, abandoning his tacky lion skin outfit and creating an opportunity to enter the troop for Pierre Brasseur’s wannabe actor Frédérick Lemaître. We don’t see their performance.

Théâtre des Funambules

 

Meanwhile the film has other worlds on display – Jeanne Marken’s rooming house, where the proximity of Brasseur and Arletty means Barrault misses his chance with her and the night time streets, where he wanders encountering bogus blind beggar Gaston Modot. There’s also a fake blind man in Sacha Guitry’s 1939 Ils étaient neuf célibataires and Guitry himself starred in his own Deburau film in 1951. It’s disconcerting to find the famous actor there in a role that will always be associated with Barrault. Les enfants ...is probably consciously threaded through French movie culture. Francis Girod also put the original historical characters on screen in the 1990 Lacenaire.

 

Marcel Herrand as Pierre-François Lacenaire 

Here Modot, his sight miraculously recovered, leads Barrault back to the Red Breast Inn, a low dive named after the previous owner’s throat was cut. The actor confronts Herrand’s henchman Fabien Loris, who throws him through the window, with Barrault turning his head so we can see it’s him actually doing the stunt. Loris is surprised to see Jean Louis re-appear, dusting himself off, like Daniel Craig after the train wreck in Skyfall. Barrault drops the heavy with a sabat kick, from which he is unable to recover. Awed, Arletty now can’t get enough of the mime.

 

However, the action moves ahead, the company, now also comprising Brasseur and Arletty, have achieved prominence, though actor Brasseur chafes at being unable to speak. We see their newly celebrated performance - in stage decors created by celebrity French animator Paul Grimault, for whom Prévert scripted their great cartoon, Le petit soldat.

 

Maria Casares, Jean-Louis Barrault

Barrault marries proprietor Marcel Pérès’s daughter Maria Casarés who, while on stage, sees Barrault and Arletty together in the wings. She calls out, shocking the Children of the crowded Gods seating at hearing a performer’s voice. Casarés will shortly star in Cocteau’s Orphé. These two roles are so prominent that is comes as a surprise to find she made another thirty films. I want to see her TV lady Macbeth.

A further complication is introduced when lecherous nobleman Louis Salou declares his interest in Arletty with a grotesquely enormous floral basket. Meanwhile Herrand has his eye on a bank messenger’s pouch and uses Marken’s rooms to strike and she, jealous of the actress, fingers her as an accomplice. It’s time to ring down that animated curtain for the end of part one.

 

There’s another mime theatre performance but Brasseur, having lost Arletty has found the emotion to realise his dream role as Othello. “Jealousy belongs to all if a woman belongs to none.” Brasseur’s idea of Shakespeare actually seems kind of tame from the excerpt we see. Herrand, dagger concealed under his frock coat, plans on robbing the famous actor but is stunned to find him casual about splitting his recent lottery winnings. Brasseur’s high jinx with the authors of the proposed bandit Robert Macaire melodrama (Jean Angelo, Jean Marais and Robert Hirsch made Macaire films) gets him into a duel.

 

"...an elegant veiled woman..."

Meanwhile an elegant veiled woman takes a box each night to watch Baptiste perform. In relache, Lemaitre discovers it is Garance/Arletty, who has survived her association with Salou retaining her values where he expected to find her corrupted – “embetisée par l’argent.” In another lavish setting, the theatre metaphor is extended when, surounded by elegant socialite play goers goers, vengeful Herrand pulls back the balcony curtain to reveal Arletty and Barrault together, to the violent Salou, who made the mistake of dismissing the underwold character (“he does not duel”). Casarés sends their child, young Jean-Pierre Belmon, to Barrault, only to have the boy confront Arletty, as the intertwined plots converge.

 

The structure recalls Carné’s first major film, Drôle de drame, where another Barrault character makes his way among a gallery of grotesques. Again here the name stars – Marken, Modot and maybe Pierre Renoir get to register. The final scene is as imposing as the opening – giant set, mob of costumed extras showered with confetti while Kosma(?)’s score drives the action.

 

Is Les enfants du paradis still exceptional? Has it had an extraordinary impact on the perception of film? I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. The production’s ambition and craft skill are astounding, particularly in the context of the WW2 Occupation where the decorated studio floors had to be made of papier maché and replaced each time the heavy studio camera tracked over them. A tiled passage way is built for the single shot where Turkish Bath operator Habib Benglia leads Herrand and Loris.

 

Marcel Carné (top centre) on the set of Les Enfants du Paradis

Is it the greatest film of all time? I don’t think so. I don’t even feel it’s Marcel Carné’s best work. It is flawed by miscasting, where everyone seems to be the wrong age. Only the extraordinary Maria Casarés is able to convince us. Arletty had been a gifted comedienne. You don’t know French film if you haven’t seen her as a blonde but she was now just about rusted on to the Carné Productions after her roles in Hotel Du Nord, Le jour se leve and Les visitors du soir, where she already presents elements of the Garance character, which would become the most famous in French film. (when Langlois opened an auditorium in the Pompidou center he called it Salle Garance) However approaching fifty, it’s a big ask to believe the four key male characters are obsessively in love with her. But Garance is not just the actress’ physical presence. I could see Micheline Presle, then at her zenith, in the Mayo costumes and delivering Jacques Prévert’s dialogue under Carné’s direction but it was Arletty who became the face of foreign language film post WW2.

 

However, anyway you look at it Les enfants du paradis still deserves its landmark status. Knowledge of the cinema is incomplete without it. Not too many films you can say that about.

AT CINEMA REBORN - Margot Nash introduces THE GOLDEN COACH (Jean Renoir, Italy, 1952)

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we meet on today. The Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to elders past and present. Always was always will be Aboriginal land. 

 

A big thank you Geoff Gardner for asking me to introduce Renoir’s The Golden Coach. Thanks also to Adrian Danks for his excellent catalogue notes. 

 

Jean Renoir (photo from his role in La Regle du Jeu)

I first saw The Golden Coach in the late sixties in Melbourne.  I was in my late teens and trying to make my way as a young actress. I had landed a bit part in a Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible.  I only had a couple of lines and I had to scream a lot, but it gave me access to a series of actors’ workshops George Ogilvie was running for the company. 

 

George had trained in Paris with Jacques Lecoq and the workshops covered mime, comedy and improvisation. He was laying the groundwork for his production of Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters, a play which drew on the tradition of commedia dell’arte, with its stock characters like Pantelone, Harlequin and Columbine, its acrobats and slapstick comedy, and its large sections reserved for improvisation. 

 

Commedia dell’arte is also at the heart of The Golden Coach, so I assume it was through George’s workshops that I heard about the screening. 

 

I didn’t know that Renoir was the son of the famous Impressionist painter and I knew nothing of the European post-war new waves of film production offering alternatives to the Hollywood films on offer in Australia.  And I had never heard of, much less seen, Anna Magnani. 

 

I have a vivid memory of climbing the rickety stairs of the International Bookshop in Elizabeth Street Melbourne where the film was screening. It was run by a socialist cooperative and there were overflowing tables of no doubt radical texts, but I was looking for the film screening. It turned out to be in a room above the bookshop, where rows of single wooden chairs faced a screen and there was a 16mm projector up the back.

 

I had never seen a woman like Anna Magnani on the screen before. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, she didn’t defer to men, and she had a very loud laugh. In the film she plays the tempestuous Camilla, a member of an Italian commedia dell’arte troupe fresh off the boat in 18^thcentury Spanish colonial Peru. As Columbine, she could command the stage. As Camilla she was larger than life, passionate and outspoken. When a man hit her, she hit him back. I wanted to be her. 

 

Renoir claimed the film was not about commedia dell’arte. He had just ‘attempted to follow its style, with its involved complicated situations.’[i]

  

Graeme Blundell, who also participated in the workshops with George Oglivie, describes commedia dell’arte in his memoir as:

 

…a form of theatre descended from the performances of tightrope walkers, tumblers and acrobats, daubed with soot and adorned with phalluses, of ancient Rome’s Attellanae Fabulae. Troupes of popular comediennes roamed the fairs and carnivals of Italy carrying with them a simple portable stage, packed into a cart together with curtains, props, costumes and their immortal masks. The improvised dialogue from a plot line of scenario decided on in advance. Any actor at a loss for words or in any other predicament usually resorted to slapstick. [ii]

 

"...tightrope walkers, tumblers and acrobats..."

Left free to improvise, actors would spice things up by weaving in references to political scandals and intrigues in the cities and villages they visited. It was a ribald and satirical form of comedic theatre and hugely popular. 

 

Adrian Danks refers to the ‘porous boundaries between performance and reality, tradition and modernity, theatre and everyday life’[iii] in The Golden Coach. 

 

Renoir said

… it was a film in which I tried to enclose one performance inside another. I tried, if you like, to erase the borders between representation of reality and the reality itself. I tried to establish a confusion between acting on a theatrical stage and acting in life. I don’t know whether I achieved my goal, but in any case, it was interesting to try it.[iv]

Janet Bergstrom argues that Renoir …constructed the entire film (…,) as if it were a commedia dell’arte performance.' [v]

 

Made in 1952, the film was a French/Italian co-production and, unlike Renoir’s earlier films, it is in English. It is also in dazzling Technicolor. As the film opens, we see the arrival of the coach as well as the arrival of the raggedy commedia dell’arte cart and troupe. We meet Camilla, who, along with the coach, has travelled five months by boat from Italy in order to reach the ‘New World’.  It is a colonial multicultural world where many different languages and accents can be heard. Magnani didn’t speak English, but she learnt to say her lines in English and while Renoir wanted to do an Italian and a French version, he liked the English version and had no part in dubbing the other versions. 

Camilla's lovers - the soldier, the viceroy and the bullfighter

When the Spanish Viceroy falls in love with the tempestuous Camilla, we become privy to the disgruntled political rumblings below the surface that threaten the imperial power of the Viceroy to do whatever he likes. In this case to give the coach to Camilla, a lowly actor. Complicating the story are a handsome soldier, who is Camilla’s lover, and a Spanish bullfighter who also becomes besotted with her. 

 

The question of what the coach symbolises is raised more than once by characters in the film. Looking at the coach, I think of Queen Elizabeth bedecked in precious jewels (no doubt from colonial plunder) riding in a golden coach to her coronation. The coach a symbol of great wealth and imperial power. In the film it is gold that has fed the Spanish colonization of Peru and it is the Spanish Viceroy who has ordered the coach for his own private use as a symbol of imperial prestige. 

 

Some of my favourite shots in this film are the expressionless faces of the Indigenous South American Indians watching the troupe perform. They are almost documentary images of ‘witnessing’ the colonial appropriation of culture and of land, something which continues to this day in the Amazon.

Camilla  onstage
 

While the coach, like money, is, as Danks suggests an ‘object of exchange’, I suggest it is also erotized in this film as a powerful symbol of desire. Desire for wealth and power, but underneath it all the desire for something more, for a better life, and for love. Renoir loved flawed characters and the characters are all flawed and conflicted in the face of the power of gold to satisfy their desires either by acquiring it or by giving it away. 

 

The coach itself was found by the producer, Prince Francesco Alliata, who did actually have royal blood, although he didn’t use his title in the credits.  It had been created for the First Lord of the Kingdom of Sicily, but abandoned two centuries before in a stable in Palermo when Alliata found it and restored it for the film. [vi]

 

Alliata was a young filmmaker and lawyer, and, at one stage, it looked like the film would go spectacularly over budget and not get made.  Visconti had originally been attached and had been paid handsomely for a year to develop the screenplay. Then Renoir took over. He wanted to film the exteriors in Sicily, but seven years after the war the streets had been modernized and there were electric lights and telephone wires. They decided to shoot the entire film in the famous Cinecittà Studios just outside of Rome, which meant the Viceroy’s Palace and the exterior of the Cathedral had to be built, at great cost. 

 

As the production ran into more and more financial trouble, Alliata had a bright idea. Cinecittà had 16 sound stages and a massive area to construct sets. He would produce two low-budget swashbuckling cheapies at the same time, which he did. These films were very successful and paid the bills. It meant The Golden Coach could be finished, but it finished Alliata as a film producer too. 

 

In the opening sequence Camilla asks if the two hours each night on the stage entertaining an audience are enough? If the power to transport an audience, to transform daily life into magic are enough. Her question is answered by her actions at the end of the film. 

 

If you are ever in Sicily and want to see the restored coach, it is on display at the foot of a grand staircase in the palace of the President of the Sicilian Parliament, formerly the royal palace of Palermo.

 

The Coach today. Below is nearby museum description. Click to enlarge

I hope you enjoy the film. It‘s a romp, a comedic farce and made to entertain you the audience and to give you pleasure.

 

Thank you

---

[i] Phillips, James, E. A commedia dell’arte The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1954), pp. 16-24 University of California Press, Autumn

[ii] Blundell, G The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, Hachette Australia, 2008

[iii] Danks, A. The Golden Coach Film Notes, Cinema Reborn Catalogue pp. 13-17 2024

[iv] O’Rawe, D. The Cinema of Masks: Commedia dell’Arte and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach in Clowns, Fools and Picaros, Brill, The Netherlands, 2007

[v] Bergstrom, J. Genealogy of The Golden Coach, Film History: An international Journal, Vol 21, Number 3, 2009, pp. 276-294 Indiana University Press 2009

[vi] Bergstrom, J. ibid.

AT CINEMA REBORN - A Filmic Postcard -Janice Tong responds to a fresh viewing of LE SAMOURAÏ (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1967)

Poetics of an empty branch: Melville’s Le Samouraï

 

The superb 3 minute opening sequence is a masterclass of film-making

An empty interior in semi-darkness, two large rectangular windows with its curtains drawn wide cast an eerie pre-dawn light into the room, its ghostliness reflected on the ceiling; in between the two windows in the drab light, is a birdcage, we can hear the bell-like chirp of a bird. Oh, but the room is actually not empty at all; we detect a brief movement from the lone figure who is lying on the bed on the right hand side of the screen. They proceed to light a cigarette and a cloud of smoke rises from where they lay. The small bird keeps up its lonely singular cry; the traffic outside continues to pass.

 

We have arrived: at a world where life and death is thinly disguised as a choice on the edge of a blade; and death, as well as life, can only be experienced in solitude.

 

the enigmatic stoicism of Delon's Jef Costello

This poetic neo-noir lures us into its milieu without the need of dialogue; like the end sequence of Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990), we find ourselves deeply invested in the life of this lone figure within the first few minutes of the film’s opening. His silence continues as we watch him get up, put on a raincoat and fedora with a practised motion that is cat-like, balletic. He then goes out into the street and steals a car, drives it to a grimy garage in an isolated part of town; number plates changed, a gun and money exchange hands – all without its characters uttering a word. 

 

There is an ontological fatalism at the core of this film that saturates Alain Delon’s character, Jef Costello – indifference oozes out of him. He is a magnificent animal who hunts as absolutely as he loves – magnetic and rare. So rare that, in fact, he may be a lone specimen in this jungle of crime. Paired with Melville’s eye, the lithe rhythm of the film and its monochromatic palette, seems to indicate that Costello’s world was already exsanguinated at birth. Although we will soon find out that not all his exchanges are bloodless affairs. 

 

Jean-Pierre Melville, dubbed as the spiritual godfather of the French New Wave – you can see him in Godard’s Breathless (1960), where he has a cameo as a renowned author. In Godard’s film, he was asked the question “What is your ambition in life?” Where he answers: “I want to be immortal and then die.” It seems Melville has lived up to his fictitious dream – his films have immortalised him – and over the years, he has a developed a huge following especially from latter day directors, the likes of Tarantino, Scorsese, Bertolucci, Frankenheimer, as well as Johnnie To, and Takeshi Kitano; well-loved by film students and cinephiles alike. His films have the ability to indoctrinate any filmgoer with a sense of the charismatic, through his stylised cinematic universe. And this film, Le samouraï, made when the director was 50 years old and only 5 years before his untimely death in 1973, is one of his best. 

Melville as Parvulesco in Godard's Breathless

One man lineup

 

Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, he had a penchant for all things American and kept his pseudonym of Melville, (after his beloved American writer Herman Melville) coined during the resistance. His noir and neo-noir films are stylistically sparse; in fact, Melville’s “dream is to make a colour film in black and white, in which there is only one tiny detail to remind us that we really are watching a film in colour.” So much so that he photocopied bank notes in black and white for Delon to use in the film; and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Henri Decaë refused to even give a hint of colour detail in the opening scene.

 

In the book Melville on Melville by Rui Nogueira, the director described the fateful moment when he was at Delon’s apartment reading the script out loud to the actor. This was their exchange: “You’ve been reading the script for seven and a half minutes now and there hasn’t been a word of dialogue. That’s good enough for me. I’ll do the film. What’s the title?” “Le samouraï,” I told him. Without a word, he signed to me to follow him. He led me to his bedroom: all it contained was a leather couch and a samurai’s lance, sword, and dagger.” It seems that the Gods had deemed this role to be made for Delon. And so began their partnership that led to two other films, Le cercle rouge (1970) and Un flic (1972); the former, just like Le samouraï, has little to no dialogue; preferring the kind of laconic existentialism of Hitchcockian’s pure cinema – to stage a scene visually without dialogue.

 

Despite the stars aligning that evening, the pair had a stuttering start to their relationship, After the success of Le doulos (1962), Melville had wanted to adapt another Pierre Lesou novel with Delon as the lead. But Delon turned down this offer in order to pursue other international and US roles instead. It wasn’t until years later until Delon reconnected with Melville and asked for a chance to work together. At that time, the rights to Lesou’s novel, Main pleine was no longer available (it had already been adapted into a film two years previous), so instead, Melville decided to pitch something different to him: said to be a script he had written for Delon that combines a remake of the American noir film This Gun for Hire (1942) and Joan MacLeod’s novel The Ronin. Of course, the latter book never actually existed. You see, Melville has a fondness for inventing fictive novels and quotes. Famously, the epigraph at the start of Le samouraï: “There is no solitude greater than a samurai's. Unless perhaps it is that of a tiger in the jungle. – The Book of Bushido". Sure enough Bushido, or the way of the warrior exists as a text, but the quote is entirely fictional, made up by Melville. Similarly, the quote attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, at the start of Le cercle rouge was another of his inventions.

 

Nathalie Delon as Jane Lagrange

Fiction aside, moments of the ‘real’ surfaced during the making of this film. Melville cast Delon’s wife, Nathalie, for his lover and standing alibi, Jane Lagrange, because he thought they looked like brother and sister (and this is especially true. My husband actually commented on how symmetrical her features were and upon seeing her surname ‘Delon’ in the credits, immediately drew the conclusion that they were siblings). In the scene where they bid each other goodbye, Costello kisses her hair with his eyes closed; a wordless gesture that ended his relationship with his lover – that same evening, Melville came to learn that Alain and Nathalie have actually agreed to separate; so the intensity captured on camera was in fact, their intimate parting of ways. Another haunting farewell was by André Garet, a previous collaborator with Melville in Bob le flambeur (1956), he was the garage mechanic. Garet was incredibly ill at the time, and only took the role to please Melville. He ended his last scene with the words “I warn you Jef, it’s the last time.” It really was his last time – as Garet only had time to dub this voice over before he went into the hospital to die. And Delon’s reply “All right”, dubbed after he learnt of Garet’s passing, was also spoken like a farewell to Garet.

 

Even with the great reception of the film, with 1.9 million tickets sold in France; Le samouraï has had a troubled existence. During the shoot, Melville’s Studio Jenner, a studio he had built himself in the 13th arrondissement, burnt down to the ground on the 29th June 1967. This incident destroyed all of Melville’s archives and also killed the little bird – a female bullfinch – the sole companion of the assassin, that was also the symbol of his solitude and confinement. Melville’s untimely death and the confusion over who owns the rights to his films, meant that Le samouraï, completed in 1967, was only able to get a release, in a badly edited and dubbed-to-English version in the United States in 1972; ridiculously renamed The Godson, in order to ride on the success of Coppola’s The Godfather (1972)

 

Cathy Rosier

The ending (spoiler alert), for me, carries a certain existential stoicism of the samurai. (And yes, two endings were shot – a ‘smiling’ Jef, and the one that was kept in the film). For a samurai, suicide means a chance to be redeemed, preferring the choice of an honourable death rather than bring shame to his clan or family if captured by the enemy. Here, Costello chooses to give up one’s own life for another’s. His seppuku takes the form of a bullet to the heart; and this sacrifice was made for the nightclub singer, Valérie (Latin root for valiant) (Cathy Rosier) who did not give him up at the lineup; which in turn, makes her a target if Costello continues to escape capture by men who hired him, or by the police. For him to choose death over life perhaps also means that finally, he is able to escape solitude and the confines of his existence. 

 

Le samouraï  is currently screening as part of the Cinema Reborn 2024 program. There is one more screening in Melbourne of  the film before it leaves these shores for possibly quite a long time.  The newly restored 4K version is at the Lido Cinemas In Melbourne on 14th May 2024 at 6.00 pm. Go and get a ticket – you will be in for a treat! Click on the link to book.

CINEMA REBORN UPDATE - MIDNIGHT, PLAN YOUR PROGRAM, WHO'S DOING THE INTRODUCTIONS

John Barrymore, Claudette Colbert, MIDNIGHT

People are still talking about the magnificent occasion in Ritz Cinema One watching Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight after hearing another of CJ Johnson’s  rousing introductions. That intro had the assembled audience spinning… 

Expat David Hare who has timed a visit to Australia to coincide with this year's Cinema Reborn season posted this on Facebook yesterday and it has to be shared.  "A huge tick for last night's opening screening for Cinema Reborn in Sydney of MIDNIGHT.

"After all these years since a slim DVD release in 2008 it's been a long wait for a more substantial premium release. The new 4K DCP which has been derived from original nitrate elements including the OCN is astonishingly beautiful. The deep blacks shine and glimmer and film grain abounds lusciously. Even the actors' wardrobe has never looked so tailored and literally tactile. The image quality is absolutely peak level Universal restoration team. Needless to say, watching this masterpiece with a near full-house was an additional pleasure after so many decades of personal viewing. The picture still remains my top film of 1939. So flawless is the cast, Wilder and Brackett's screenplay, Charles Lang's sumptuous B&W photography and Leisen's effortless control of tone. This and Remember the Night are the director's untouchable masterpieces

"Bravo Cinema Reborn 2024"

There is one more screening in Sydney Book here for  the Ritz on Monday 5 May at 10.30 am 

Biggest thanks of course to Universal Pictures who put in the hard yards and the money to restore this screwball comedy gem from 1939.

 

Brooke Adams, DAYS OF HEAVEN

Meanwhile there is a massive weekend of premieres and special occasions coming up. The Saturday night screenings of Le Samourai  and Days of Heaven  are selling fast  but there are plenty of tickets for the repeat screenings on Monday and Tuesday evening, both of which will be on the big screen of the Ritz’ Cinema One.

 

If you want to see the lineup and plan your Friday to Sunday viewing we’ve put up a page on the Cinema Reborn website which sets out the program day by day and hour by hour. A click on each film takes you through to the comprehensive program notes and links to bookings.

 

Finally we have to mention that today and over the weekend each of the films will have an introduction to set the scene. Here’s who will be doing the honours.

 

Philip Brophy will introduce JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT

Helen Grace will introduce LA CAPTIVE

Jane Mills and Philip Brophy will introduce Philip’s classic shocker BODY MELT

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur will introduce via video ISHANOU

Russell Edwards and Professor Kim Hong Joon by video will introduce SOPYONJE

Noa Steimatsky will introduce IL GRIDO       

Lynden Barber will introduce DAYS OF HEAVEN

Bruce Beresford will introduce LE SAMOURAI

Bruce Koussaba will introduce YEELEN

Lucia Sorbera will introduce THE DUPES

Kathryn Millard will introduce LIGHT YEARS and do a follow on Q&A with Sandy Edwards

John McDonald will introduce I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!

Margot Nash will introduce THE GOLDEN COACH

 

We hope you’ll find something to like amongst this year’s collection of restored classics.

Next week it's Melbourne's turn at the Hawthorn Lido. More details to follow...