Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Asia - 6 (42) Japan - Part one

 

6 (42) Japan

Akira Kurosawa (66) b.10, Keisuke Kinoshita b.12, Kon Ichikawa (70) b.15, Masaki Kobayashi (77) b.16, Kirirō Urayama b.30   

New Wave:  Seijun Suzuki b.23, Yasuzo Masamura b.24, Shōhei Imamura b.26 Hiroshi Teshigahara b.27, Kaneto Shindo b.28, Susumu Hani b.28, Masahiro Shinoda.b.31, Nagisa Oshima (71) b.32, Toshio Matsumoto b.32, Yoshishige Yoshida b.33   Figure in parenthesis  indicates year nominated as one of International Film Guide’s ‘5 Directors of the Year’  

***************************

Part 1 : Political modernism and the New Wave:         

Audie Bock's classification of periods in Japanese cinema was taken up and further explicated by David Desser in 1988 to describe the ideological purpose of his introduction to the New Wave, as conceived and written. It “is to try and bring historical specificity to Japanese New Wave cinema and to place it within the wider discourses of historical, political, social, and cultural studies” without claiming it to necessarily be “the best and only way to study the Japanese New Wave movement” (p 2).  

Yasujiro Ozu

Three periods are identified. The first period from 1930, and the period leading up to it, Desser identifies as the classical paradigm, best exemplified by Ozu and the more diverse oeuvre of Mizoguchi. From 1945-60 is the modern period with Kurosawa the paradigmatic modern director “the dynamism [of whose]  method of storytelling through images [had] always gone hand in hand with a humanist treatment of his subjects” (Komatsu 716). From  around 1960 to the early 70s is the modernist paradigm with Oshima the paradigmatic director.

“The terms classical, modern, and modernist need to be associated with their ideological underpinning. The classical paradigm is linked to the classical arts of Japan and subscribes to a “transcendental” schema. The 50s modern paradigm, postwar humanism and individualism exemplified by Kurosawa, had its roots in the theatrical mode of Shingeki (see below) and individualism.  The modernist includes a “metahistorical” model.” (16).  The salient features of each paradigm are set out below, summarised in tabular form, based on Desser’s outline (pp 15-22) “that throughout the course of Japan’s long history, the culture did experience significant shifts under the impetus of various forces; and that the New Wave movement in cinema, itself part of a larger cultural movement, represents one such shift” (15).

 Classical:       chronological/episodic/cyclical/mythic/transcendental/Ozu   

 Modern:        chronological/causal/linear/historical/individual/Kurosawa

 Modernist:     achronological/episodic/acausal/anti-mythic/metahistorical/anti-psychological/Oshima                                                                                               

Akira Kurosawa

It should be noted that in adopting Bock’s classification periods David Desser (pp15-24) acknowledges that he also uses terms adopted from David Bordwell's book 'Narration in the Fiction Film' (see ‘forms of narration’ in part 4 of the introductory essays) in what he identifies as the four major modes of narration. Desser replaces Bock's “the early masters” with “classical” and Bock’s “the post-war period” with the “modern” paradigm, the New Wave becomes “modernist” but as modes they do not correspond to Bordwell's “transcending genres, schools, movements and entire national cinemas.”  Except in name, in this instance, Desser puts Bordwell's modal specifications aside not in disagreement but to consider the Japanese cinema as part of a system: self-contained modes isolatable across Japanese film history, at least from the late 1920s through to the 70s. His stated intention is to demonstrate how Japanese cinema connects with Japanese culture.  

The classical nature of Ozu's narrative style can be linked to many of the classical arts of Japan. Following Desser's schema, in the shift from the classical to the modern paradigm, is a shift in the attitude to the status quo. From acceptance of life's problems we find the emergence of the individual who fights against his circumstances, in short, the emergence of bourgeois individualism from which follows causal, linear and historical thinking in constructing a narrative. This is the Hollywood mode. In Japan, however, post-war humanism and individualism had its roots planted by the theatrical mode of Shingeki, meaning “new theatre,” which originated in the Meiji period (1868-1912) as part of an overall attempt to “modernise” Japan. Inspired by the plays of Ibsen et al, theatrical troupes, instrumental in fostering a new theatre, modelled themselves on the European naturalist theatre of psychological realism and representationalism. The late twenties saw the rise of a left-wing, socially conscious theatre within Shingeki which had a profound influence on cinema through tendency films (keiko eiga), part of the overall move to greater representationalism and psychologism (condensed from Desser pp15-24).

Desser concludes that since traditional Japanese art is already formally subversive, a genuinely radical, political art must move beyond the kind of radical content apparent in the pre-war left-wing socially conscious “tendency” films or the postwar humanist left-wing cinema of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Ichikawa, Kinoshita et al. In the theatre there was also an attempted radicalisation of forms which had much in common with the New Wave cinema's rejection of humanism and old-left Communism.

******************************

Shohei Imamura

In 1961, following the bankruptcy of Shin Toho which had produced only sensationalist films for a limited market, there were five major film companies in Japan: Nikkatsu, Daiei, Toho, Toei, and Shochiku,.  Fifties classics had been produced by Daiei, such as Kurosawa's Rashomon, Yoshimura's Night River (1956), Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, Naruse's Lightning (1952) and Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain (1959). Toei had been attracting audiences since 1957 with rapidly produced genre films such as jidigeki  (period drama) on the widescreen, to become by 1960 the most profitable film company. Toei also produced artistic films directed by masters from the pre-war era like Daisuki Ito and Tomu Uchida but did not offer places for new young talent. The same was true of Toho where pre-war directors like Mikio Naruse and Shiro Toyoda were employed but young directors were not offered the same scope to further their careers.

Shohei Imamura joined the then re-established Nikkatsu in1954 to produce his early 'black comedies' which appealed to the younger market. Kiriō Urayama, who had earlier been Imamura’s assistant, directed realistic films with a social message at Nikkatsu that differed from Nikkatsu’s stereotyped genre films in that they contained political elements. Both Imamura and Urayama developed a metaphysical quality in their films culminating in subjective hallucinatory shots in Urayama’s last film, scripted by Imamura, The Girl I Abandoned (Watusi ga suteta mona 1969) was too abstract for Nikkatsu’s executives. After making Intentions of Murder (Aka satsui), in 1963 Imamura left to found his own company.  Nikkatsu which had tried to establish a new genre aimed at the younger generation in the 50s, increasingly maintained its viability through the 60s with soft core pornography, Toei with gangster films.  

Seijun Suzuki

Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017) who had made a series of eccentric yakuza and “pink” genre movies at Nikkatsu between 1956-63, turned to adapting novels with the increasing complexity of his “Brechtianism” standing just to the side of the New Wave in beginning to really assert Suzuki’s own voice in a “wonderfully eccentric work of art.” Fighting Elegy / a.k.a. The Born Fighter and Kenka Ereji (1966) is a perversely comic condemnation of the way war robbed young people of their youth, a script by Kaneto Shindo based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki. Gate of Flesh / Nikutai no Mon (1964) based on a best selling novel by Taijiro Tamara that sparked off an entire genre of fiction, the film’s dialectic between social realism and a lurid phantasmagoria of nightmare, “so powerful, so Bunuelian” (Rayns). Suzuki’s “last word on the yakuza genre” Branded to Kill / Kuroshi no Rakun (1967) drew company executive accusation of “incomprehensibility to the public” leading to Suzuki’s forced break with Nikkatsu in 1968.

At Shochiku, the most conservative of the companies, before his death in 1963, Ozu directed a film each year but otherwise only Keisuke Kinoshita was given any autonomy and even that was limited. The studio executives’ conservatism prevented them from exploiting new genres like Nikkatsu and Toei. Faced with declining box office in 1960 as a result of the effect of television, however, they changed their policy. Young directors were given the opportunity to make the films they wanted with a degree of freedom. They were termed ”the Ofuna new wave” after the studio where the young directors - Oshima, Yoshida and Shinoda - were located.

Oshima's first “Ofuna film,” Cruel Story of Youth (1960), was a success but he left Shochiku when the company withdrew Night and Fog in Japan (1960) from circulation after four days in release.  Oshima set the trend for independent production by establishing his own production company Sozosha (Creation) which did not start producing films until the mid sixties at the time Yoshida and Shinoda left Shochiku. The films they directed with the “Ofuna flavour” focusing on the lives and problems of their own generation, failed to generate sufficient box office returns. Shochiku survived with the phenomenally successful Tora-san series 1969-97 directed by Yoji Yamada, and also from the distribution of anime.

During the 1950s most independent companies had been organised by groups with socialist sympathies. Directors like Tadashi Imai and Satsuo Yamamoto produced films with a political message.  The independent sector then, was not interested in the development of film form and could not be considered avant-garde. However, in the 1960s the situation changed. New independent companies began to be established to produce films that could not be made by the major studios but were primarily concerned with extending the boundaries of Japanese filming and not just with political messages from a specific party. Out of such newly founded independent companies the so-called New Wave was born.                                                                                                                              Hiroshi Komatsu  (714)

Yasuzo Masumura

“Leaving behind the universal humanism of the earlier decade what [the New Wave filmmakers] sought was to make a different kind of film that was only for the Japanese.” Desser notes that the most immediate influence was the debut film of Yasuzo Masumura (1924-86), Kisses (1957), in which the youthful hero is from the masses, poor, alienated and angry, seeking immediate thrills. Masumura achieves a freshness of style through location shooting and hand-held camerawork anticipating the first features of the French New Wave. Of the film, Oshima said he “felt that the tide of a new age could no longer be ignored by anyone.” (42-3)

David Desser defines the Japanese New Wave as “films produced and/or released in the wake of  Oshima’s  Ai to kinono machi/ A Town of Love and Hope (1959), films which take an overtly political stance in a general way or toward a specific issue, utilising a deliberately disjunctive form compared to previous filmic norms in Japan” ( 4). Desser takes up the term “ avant-garde  movement” as defined by Renato Poggioli in ‘The Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (1968) as ”being constituted primarily to obtain a positive result, for a concrete end” (25 quoted Desser), or at least “concerned with creating a film content and form capable of revealing the contradictions within Japanese society and with isolating the culture’s increasingly materialist values and its imperialist alliances […] The avant-garde component [is] in the vanguard of a new social movement…utilizing artistic strategies of a new and challenging nature.” This is “within the context of a relatively liberal, mostly censorship - free society” (4). Desser adds that “the notion that the New Wave is a movement is important in defining it against the idea of being a school which was implicitly rejected by the ideology of the New Wave, quoting Poggioli that, “the [term] school presupposes a master and a method, the criterion of tradition and the principle of authority […] pre-eminently stoic and classical, while the movement is essentially dynamic and romantic” (20 quoted Desser 5).   

Nagisa Oshima

The assumption that an avant-garde artistic movement already has a political dimension was, Desser suggests, as crucial to the Japanese New Wave as it had been to the Russian Revolutionary cinema of the 1920s, the theatrical theories of Bertolt Brecht, and the French ‘nouvelle vague’, especially after 1968, with Godard entering the “Dziga-Vertov” collective. Desser shares Poggioli’s basic mistrust of the facile equation of formal radicalism being equal to political radicalism. Oshima insisted that he did not make political films but films on political subjects, free of ideology; the style depends on the theme, always trying to deny the style used in the previous film.

The radical individualism of the New Wave filmmakers was not a bourgeois individualism which posited a transcendental subject outside culture; rather it was the assertion of a will already formed by culture struggling with that culture. The form of rebellion this assertion of will took was often “spectacular,” a rebellion in the realm of spectacle, most typically in the realm of sexuality.                                                                                                                                 David Desser (p.77)

At the Sydney Film Festival - Tom Ryan considers the films of Palme d'Or winner Jafar Panahi and his retrospective at the SFF - THE SPIRIT OF REBELLION & THE NOT-FILMS

Jafar Panahi

Editor's Note: After this post was published, Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or  at Cannes. The film also screens at the Sydney Film Festival. The final para of Tom's piece below has been edited to reflect this.

****************************

The 2025 Sydney Film Festival has programmed a welcome retrospective of the work of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, an artist who has always gone his own way against overwhelming odds. 

 

Regular festival goers will need no introduction to the work of Jafar Panahi. Others might, for his films rarely make it on to local screens or streaming services. Which is why this year’s Sydney Film Festival’s honouring of his continuing career is an event worth celebrating. 

 

The White Balloon

In his quiet way, the 64-year-old Iranian writer-director-editor (and, relatively recently, actor) has long exuded the spirit of rebellion. Following his studies at Tehran’s College of Cinema and TV, his career began with a few short documentaries made for TV and work as an assistant director for Abbas Kiarostami (on 1994’s Through the Olive Trees). Then came two remarkable neorealist-inclined features about children, Panahi citing the Italian neorealist movement, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (1948) in particular (“It is the most important film of my life”) as key influences. 

In line with De Sica’s film, and with the inclination of a number of his contemporaries’ work, both The White Balloon (1995, co-written by Kiarostami) and The Mirror (1997) are essentially stories of the street. Filtering everyday events through the eyes of a child, Panahi adopts a story-telling strategy which immediately, and classically, sets his youthful protagonists’ innocence in contrast to a world of brutal experience. 

 

For Panahi and his colleagues, it was a way of slipping social critiques past the constraints imposed by their government’s oppressive censorship policies. As the affable filmmaker told me over a dinner shared with his Farsi interpreter during his visit to the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2006, it was a case of direction through indirection. “In Iran, it’s always been difficult to make films that deal with the real circumstances of adults. But you can create situations and put words into the mouths of children that speak indirectly about the problems of their elders.” 

 

Unspoken was the implication that such an approach allowed him to argue to the authorities that he didn’t mean it like that. And he didn‘t need to add that such a method is also irresistible to audiences. Who wouldn’t empathise with lost and homeless children fending for themselves in unforgiving surroundings? Who wouldn’t discover, in their struggle with oppressive circumstances and their ability to adapt to them, a metaphor for humankind’s experience of the world? Or of life in Iran? 

 

The White Balloon was greeted enthusiastically both inside his homeland and beyond its borders. After winning the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, it even became Iran’s official entry at the Oscars for the Best Foreign Language Film in the following year. Soon afterwards, though, the country’s rulers had second thoughts. They tried to get the nomination withdrawn, and, when that move was unsuccessful, prohibited Panahi’s travel to the US and forbade him from doing interviews with the American press.

 

The Circle

The battle lines were now clearly marked and Panahi’s career has effectively become a cat-and-mouse game with his government that has continued to the present day. By 2000, his social commentaries were no longer camouflaged and his third feature, The Circle, directly and brilliantly examines the plight of women in contemporary Iran. Revising the merry-go-round structure of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play, La Ronde (inadvertently, for Panahi says he was unfamiliar with it), the film moves from incident to incident and character to character as his female protagonists cross paths in the street. Most of them don’t know each other, but they’re linked by the situations in which they find themselves. Each has recently been released from prison and the suggestion is that their confinement was the result of their having challenged the carefully regulated rules of an oppressively patriarchal society.

 

“It was so difficult making The Circle,” Panahi recalled. “They (the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance) just rejected it without any explanation. It was humiliating. Nobody would ever tell me anything. The reason I eventually got to make it was that the independent Iranian press got behind me. But it took me nine months to get permission to make the film and then it was officially banned in Iran.” That ban remains in place, a fate that has befallen much of his subsequent work and he has long been, at least as far as officialdom is concerned, a persona non grata in Iran.

 

Further humiliation followed, although its source lay elsewhere. After the San Francisco Film Festival invited him to accept its Freedom of Expression Prize for The Circle, he’d flown direct from Hong Kong and was in transit at JFK airport in New York when it was made clear to him that he wasn’t welcome. Given his ongoing criticisms of the oppressive Iranian regime, it was impossible to miss the irony of the situation. 

 

After refusing customs officials’ demand that he be fingerprinted, he was arrested. “I showed them my invitation, but they threatened to put me in jail. They refused to allow me an interpreter or a phone-call. Then they chained me together with other women and men from different countries like prisoners from medieval times and refused me entry. It was a nightmare.” He was denied entry to the US and ended up back in Hong Kong.

 

Offside

But the affront only succeeded in adding fuel to the heroically irrepressible filmmaker’s fire. The two films that followed were again direct in their critiques of Iranian society. The engrossing Crimson Gold (2003) deals with an impoverished pizza man, a jewellery heist gone wrong and the trials of class division in Iran. And the simple but compelling Offside (2006) is a story inspired by his daughter about a group of young girls who’ve been denied entry to a World Cup-qualifying match in Tehran and who conjure their own quiet revolution. 

 

Following this, Panahi struggled to get projects off the ground while making very public his disapproval of the ruling regime. After Iran’s 2009 presidential election, he was a vocal supporter of the so-called “Green Movement”, protesting the disputed result that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Then, on March 1, 2010, he was arrested on charges of colluding to commit crimes against the Islamic Republic, leading to headlines around the world. 

 

This Is Not A Film

He was sentenced to six years in prison (subsequently commuted to house arrest) and banned from filmmaking or travelling outside the country for 20 years. After which began his involvement in a series of not-films, beginning with This Is Not A Film (2011), a mischievous masterpiece of allusion ruminating about what a film might be and who might be deemed responsible for its creation. International audiences gained access after it was smuggled out of Iran in a USB stick hidden inside a birthday cake.

 

Soon afterwards, along similar lines, came the cleverly reflexive Closed Curtain (2013), choreographing an interaction between Panahi himself and two other characters – a writer and a young woman – who might or might not be figments of his imagination. It was followed by Taxi (2015), in which Panahi plays a Tehran taxi driver whose passengers ponder their circumstances and (via Panahi’s niece playing one of them) the state of filmmaking in Iran. 

 

Then came 3 Faces (2018), a road movie which finds Panahi literally and metaphorically behind the steering-wheel again in a situation that, like his earlier work, draws attention to the place of women in Iranian society. And No Bears (2022), set in a village near the Turkish border and dealing with a filmmaker (Panahi once more) trying to find a way of telling a story about a couple’s efforts to escape Iran. Something which he has persistently declined to do. 

 

It Was Just An Accident 

Panahi’s travel ban was finally lifted in 2023 and he was at Cannes this year with his latest work, It Was Just an Accident (2025), which has just won the Palme d’Or there and is also screening in competition at the SFF.  But during the years since his initial arrest almost 15 years ago, his not-films have effectively served as a report card to the world that he’s not only alive and well, but that the fire inside still burns bright. They’re also evidence that, even if the style of his filmmaking has changed, his career has continued along the same path he laid out for himself at the start. By way of drawing our evening in 2006 to a close, he declared, “I always wanted to make films that matter.” And he has.

 

A key highlight of this year’s Sydney Film Festival, the complete retrospective of Jafar Panahi’s features screens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from June 7 – 15 

At Cinema Reborn - Adrian Danks' introduction to the Melbourne screening of TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, USA, 1958)

Throughout his career, Orson Welles remained preoccupied with notions of power, exile, corruption, old age, the loss of innocence, the betrayals of friendship, and the indelible nature or essence of character. Arguably at war with a filmmaking establishment – wherever it was found – that sought to contain him, Welles, ever the maverick, struggled to make films with the money he earned as an actor working on a mindbogglingly diverse slate of projects in various parts of the world. Nevertheless, also freed from many restrictions, Welles managed to create a remarkably cohesive, if somewhat piecemeal body of work across the United States and various parts of Europe that consistently explored his favourite themes, and that, although often through necessity, pushed the boundaries of filmmaking practice.

 

Many of the films Welles made after his initial stint in Hollywood – ostensibly launched by the celebrated but divisive Citizen Kane in 1941 and ending with the relatively low budget Macbeth made for Republic Pictures in 1948 – were pieced together over extended periods of time, favour a collagist, almost experimental approach to pulling a film together, and often exist in multiple versions or were never fully completed. But, as critic David Thomson claims, Welles’ “is the greatest career in film, the most tragic, and the one with the most warnings for this rest of us”.

 

This is all true, to a degree, but we also need to fully celebrate what Welles did produce – and it is an extraordinary body of work across the fiction feature, shorts, television, documentary, the essay film and various other forms – and what this often artisanal, adaptive, opportunistic and cumulative approach to filmmaking enabled Welles to achieve. We often think of Welles as a great symbol of American showmanship, inventiveness and hubris – and also inevitable ruination (both of career and physical being) – but we also need to recognise that much of Welles’ creative life was spent outside the United States and takes in many of his greatest films like The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and F for Fake (1973). In many ways, he is amongst the greatest of international filmmakers, but one who moves in the opposite direction of filmmakers like Lubitsch, Wilder, Lang, Forman, Polanski, and many others.

 

So where does Welles’ baroque, late film noir opus, Touch of Evil (1958), fit into this career and his incessant movement between the United States and Europe? Although Welles had worked as an actor in American films and television throughout the 1950s, he was largely situated in Europe during that decade, and Touch of Evil was the first film he had directed in Hollywood for 10 years. He was initially contracted to only appear as the truly outsized Hank Quinlan in a film set to star Charlton Heston, to be made by Universal Pictures and to be produced Albert Zugsmith, a figure largely known for making highly successful genre exploitation films – one of which, Jack Arnold’s Man in the Shadow (1957), had recently featured Welles in a lead role. Zugsmith had also produced Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece, Written on the Wind in 1956, an equally baroque and fetid film that holds many parallels with Touch of Evil, including its incessantly pumping oil wells, corrupt and decadent setting, and bravura cinematography by Russell Metty. The tracking shots in both films are indeed extraordinary.

 

Of course, you’ll be introduced to this aspect in the famous opening shot of Touch of Evil. This long take dextrously crosses the porous border between Mexico and the US and helps stake the film’s claim as the greatest of all border noirs (a particular subgenre which also takes in films like Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse [1947] and Anthony Mann’s brutal Border Incident [1949]) as well as its status, in some ways, as a film for our time. But watch out also for the later, more gently extraordinary long take, captured in an interior interrogation scene that never draws attention to itself but highlights the equally claustrophobic potential of this technique.

 

Touch of Evil is a film of lonely open spaces and fetid, detritus strewn streets and sewers, but it is also marked by a sense of paranoia, claustrophobia and the deeply embedded racism of such heightened and routinely corrupt and corpulent, swollen border towns. In this regard, it is very much ahead of its time even though it features Charlton Heston, Mercedes McCambridge (in a fully committed, uncredited performance by the fortysomething actor as a youth gang leader), and Marlene Dietrich (brilliantly and indelibly) playing Mexican characters. In the process, it leans into many pungent and confronting stereotypes. The sad, melancholy, brilliantly written and endlessly quotable scenes between Dietrich and Welles also give the film the sense of a farewell to a certain kind of cinema. You can see and feel the existential toughness and battle-weary camaraderie of the two actors that is never completely weighed down by the highly prosthetic roles they have to play. Also, watch out for one of Welles’ greatest essays on male friendship and betrayal in the relationship between Welles’ Quinlan and his fellow cop, Menzies, movingly played by Joseph Calleia.

 

Welles was subsequently brought on to also direct and rewrite the film – according to several reports – at the suggestion of Heston, though he certainly didn’t demand control over the final cut and plainly didn’t get it. In later life, Welles suggested that Touch of Evil could have been the start of a second stint in Hollywood and that he deeply regretted this missed opportunity – particularly in light of Touch of Evil’s elevation to the status of one of the great American films of the 1950s – but it’s hard to see him successfully working within such a system while trying to balance his restless creativity and mercurial stardom (which kept him on the move for much of his career). If this had happened, we may also never have had such brilliant subsequent films as The Trial and Chimes at Midnight, and the legend of a Touch of Evil itself might have been diminished (and who would want that).

 

Although set on the Mexico-US border – probably inspired by Tijuana where Welles wanted to shoot – the film was shot between mid-February and early April 1957 in Venice, California. This was supposedly at the suggestion of Aldous Huxley, although the lack of clear distinction between fact and legend is another key aspect of the film and its legacy. Welles initially worked on the complex editing of the film, but was pulled away by acting commitments and initial work on his never to be completed Don Quixote in, somewhat ironically, Mexico. Despite the producers initially being very happy with the dailies they were reportedly dismayed by the form the film had taken and its squalid, even rancid portrait of environment and character (despite fairly clear moral lines). As with many of Welles’ most feted films, it was re-edited several times, new expository scenes were shot (clearly not filmed by Welles and/or Metty) and Welles was dismayed by the results. Before being locked out of the studio – essentially – he fired off a 58-page memo that identified changes he thought needed to be made to this “preview version, “save” the picture, and bring it back closer to his initial vision. 

 

These were ignored and, unsurprisingly, the film was further edited down from what is now called the “preview version” and unceremoniously released as a 96-minute “potboiler” as part of a double feature (at least initially in the US). It did achieve some success on international release and was, of course, unleashed into the growing cult of Welles admirers who were rapidly elevating Citizen Kane to its status as the “greatest film of all time” and putting forward the director as the great symbol of the crucified artist at the hands of base commerce, often known as Hollywood (though even the more sober initial critical response in the US often noted its bravura elements).

 

In the years since in its initial release – and that lean version at 96 minutes was the one I fell in love with when first seeing the film on TV, initially, sometime in the 1980s, and I still like the most (I know that’s “wrong”) – Touch of Evil’s reputation and circulation has grown. Often seen as one of the “holy grails” for film archivists, the compromised “preview version” was discovered and distributed in the 1970s before the studio decided – with some persuasion, in the late 1990s – to attempt to re-edit the surviving materials using Welles’ 1957 memo as a guide. This version went on to become regarded as the definitive version of the film – as Welles never completed his own cut – and restored many elements that the director thought essential (although I miss Henry Mancini’s wonderful score over the opening shot, Welles’ intention to use ambient sound and various found music sources is equally brilliant if not exactly culturally precise). In some ways, Touch of Evil is the model and example for so much film archaeology that has followed and is a perfect illustration of the need for film history and stellar events like Cinema Reborn. It also feels like a clear inspiration for movies as diverse as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night(2014), Psycho (1960) and Chinatown (1974). Seep into Orson Welles’ wonderfully decadent, often darkly comic, a little rancid, brilliantly lived in, and always extraordinary, Touch of Evil.

At Cinema Reborn - Barrie Pattison's introduction to the Sydney screening of STELLA DALLAS (Henry King, USA, 1925)

Editor's note: This post was first delivered by Barrie Pattison as the introduction to the Sydney screening of Henry King's 1925 silent Stella Dallas  at the recent Cinema Reborn season. In Melbourne the film was introduced by critic Jake Wilson. Jake later expanded his piece and posted it on his Substack blog MOVING TARGETS. Click on the link to read Jake's thoughts (and consider taking out a modestly priced paid subscription). Barrie has now slightly expanded his thoughts on the film and they are published below.

*************************

Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Lois Moran, Stella Dallas

I’ve been curious to see how today will go, because we have an odd situation now. Streaming has put more money into recovering early film than ever before. Outfits like Turner, René Chateau and the Warner Archive, along with national organisations have recovered titles that we never thought we’d see again, besides some we didn’t know existed. There is more vintage film available now than there’s ever been during my life time but the traditional ways of accessing it are going away. TCM, Home video and Film Societies are all fading and, of course, Australia hasn’t had a National Film Theatre for fifty years - a scandal in its own right.

YouTube is a great resource but it has not been embraced by opinion makers. Movies still don’t exist unless they are launched with free liquor and press books or at least tea and a biscuit. However old judgments are being challenged. Veteran Hollywood directors like Leo MacCarey and Norman Taurog, who were thought old fashioned and ham-fisted, turn out to have been the lively young men of their day.

 Henry King, who made today’s film, was associated with snooze fests like his stodgy Song of Bernadette or Love Is a Many Splendored Thing but, when I finally made it to the ground zero for all this activity - the the Pordenone Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, which Google translates as a “festival of dumb films”, the first thing I saw was a young Henry King doing action hero in a World War One serial.

As a director, King pulled away from the pack with his 1921 Richard Barthlemess Tol’able David, whose groupings and pace suggest a departure point for the So-Called “Golden Years of Hollywood” - and a milestone in the Americana dramas that are still today one of their productive streams.  

 Five years later, when Sam Goldwyn wanted to prove the value in his new association with United Artists, he recruited Henry King for his prestige production of Stella Dallas, from a best-seller by a woman named Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote Now Voyager,  another dysfunctional mother- daughter relationship piece.

Goldwyn’s strategy of recruiting the best people for his productions asserts here. His masthead performer Ronald Colman would get top billing. Colman would be the only silent movie leading man to remain an A-Lister into the fifties. However Belle Bennett was not a star though she had been a featured player in some ambitious productions. Bennett campaigned for the key role, Stella Dallas, making herself over, putting on weight and dressing cheap - not unlike Shelley Winters promoting herself for A Place in the Sun. This was Bennett’s own place in the sun, her one remembered performance. She's billed below Colman and elegant Alice Joyce. Following this she did have the lead in a few similar films. She comes well out of The Woman Who Was Forgotten, of which I have a copy, but Belle Bennet would die young in 1932.

 The support cast is notable -  Doug Fairbanks junior still a teenager, the appealing Lois Moran, who had been an item with Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Hersholt from Von Stroheim’s Greed, later to become the forties’ The Courageous Dr. Christian and young writer-to-be Winston Miller. You’ll see his credit on My Darling Clementine. The script of Stella Dallas itself is by the prestigious Frances Marion,  one of the most important women in Hollywood as a result of her work with Mary Pickford. She would be given one of the first writing Oscars for Norman Taurog’s The Champ. Stella Dallas is shot by the great Arthur Edison, who filmed Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca and cut by Stuart Heisler, later director of the admired Storm Warning, one of the first screen treatments of the Ku Klux Klan.

Their combined efforts returned Goldwyn’s over-spend and a handsome profit, along with enthusiastic notices even with the perceived resistance to these “women’s picture” melodramas. Stella Dallas  is more a “weepy” than any comment on division in what was claimed as a classless society. 

It was definitely state of the art for 1925, though the film never became a film studies favourite. 

 This substantial success must have factored into getting Henry King his Fox Corporation contract, which would run thirty years and make him one of the most influential - and richest - people in Hollywood. He’d make the Will Rogers State Fair, the Dionne Quintuplets movie with Jean Hersholt again and Tyrone Power films including Americana hit Jesse James. King’s most notable work was a run with Gregory Peck, starting with The Gunfighter and 12 O’Clock High. 

 Delmer Daves, one of the next generation directors on the Fox pay-roll, told me he always found himself tongue tied, going into Henry King’s office and seeing a photo of Lillian Gish in The White Sister on the wall. "What could you say to someone like that?" Delmer quit Fox because he could see all the best projects would be given to people Studio Head Darryl F. Zanuck had been working with for twenty years - like John Ford & Henry King.

Among the later Henry King films, I rate the neglected David and Bathsheba the most interesting and revealing. Zanuck expected another nice Sunday school production like The Robe or Song of Bernadette but King had become a determined Catholic, after a conversion while making The White Sister with Colman in Italy. He double crossed Zanuck and delivered a film for grown-ups  -  incorporating all that Biblical scholarship that gets re-cycled in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and Bruce Beresford’s King David. 

 A wealthy Hollywood Studio employee and Catholic - it’s easy to see why Henry King was never canonised by Marxist commentators.

 Stella Dallas itself also had an afterlife. Goldwyn produced a terrible sound do-over with Barbara Stanwyck directed by King Vidor and there’s a 1990 Bette Midler film, along with rip-off versions. In one, it’s Al Jolson standing in the rain, as the grief-stricken parent, watching the daughter’s wedding through a window.

None of these have the resonance of Henry King’s film. Like other repeatedly re-cyled properties - think Beau Geste, Ben Hur or Rain - all pieces anchored in the attitudes and values of the silent period, subsequent filmmakers have their effort cut out to time-shift them

 Well, I don’t know whether you’ve thought about it, but we are among the first few people in history who are able to experience one hundred year old drama in pretty much the form of its original presentation. Myself, I rate that a great privilege. 

Rediscovering CAPTAIN THUNDERBOLT - A free webinar conducted by Michael Organ - 25 May - Sign up details

David Donaldson, who inspired the search for the complete version of the 1951 film Captain Thunderbolt for some decades, has sent through this invitation regarding a conversation to be conducted via webinar by historian Michael Organ. Michael located the long-lost print in 2023. Hear his story on Zoom. 

Produced by a radio, hoping for television, Sydney group with direction by Cecil Holmes and cinematography by Ross Wood, the film is milestone in the history and development of the Australian cinema. 

Ross Wood, Cecil Holmes shooting Captain Thunderbolt The webinar will take place on 25 May 2025 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM AEST

TO REGISTER CLICK HERE HERE ARE SOME BACKGROUND LINKS TO GET YOU PREPARED FOR WHAT SHOULD BE A FASCINATING CONVERSATION. Just click on each... Original print Captain Thunderbolt full length in 35mm! Report from NFSA 27 Sep 2024 Discover Michael Organ’s comprehensive blog News pieces on Michael's blog 2010 article by Graham Shirley David Donaldson's analysis of a key moment in Australian cinema