" Is your friend with the tattoos coming back? He's a very nice man." said Tomas the Tre Vecchi waiter and cappuccino maker at our breakfast reunion. "Sadly no" we had to say. Still the staff at the Tre Vecchi are an amazingly friendly bunch and they remember their guests and their coffee requirements with perfect recall.
A quick trip to the Cinema Ritrovato registration desk to sort out some booking problems lo and behold led to my showbag and pass being presented. The catalogue this year is a heavyweight 470 pages, another couple of kilos to go in the luggage all the way back home.
Otherwise, some explorations for gelato, a quick bite of lunch at the deli cum cafe next to the Arlecchino Cinema, quiet today with only locals on hand but no doubt expecting the usual huge surge in business that accompanies a week of early morning to late evening screenings at the cinema next door.
Then onto reading the catalogue and working out whether to make changes to bookings. It now becomes the major task. First up is how determined should I be to see Berthold Viertel's 1930 Man Trouble or stick with Lino Brocka's Bona which clash on Saturday afternoon. The Viertel seems to be booked solid for its two screenings in the very small Sala Scorsese.
The program note for Man Trouble by Jillian Borders tells us how rare these screenings are. "Austrian-born director Berthold Viertel is best known for his Berlin output, but was brought over to work for the Fox Film Corporation in 1928. Here, he has uncredited technical assistance from Fred Zinnemann. ... Due to the loss of pre-print material in the Fox vault fire in 1937, this film survives only as a 35mm nitrate workprint and has been virtually unavailable to view since that time. The audio has been restored, and the film has been photo-chemically preserved."
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