Il Cinema Ritrovato - Five highlights and surprises and sometimes both

Nora Aunor, Philip Salvador, Bona

BONA (Lino Brocka, Phillipines, 1981) Little known film by the best known Philippine director. Brocka collaborated with the actress Nora Aunor who also produced the film. A young women breaks every taboo and convention in a Catholic society, hurling herself at a preening film extra who treats her like dirt. Apparently the negative had been deposited by Pierre Rissient with a French lab back in 1981 when the film played in the Quinzaine at Cannes. Nobody was alerted to its existence until 2017 and it's taken that long to get the film back.

Charles Boyer, Claudette Colbert, Tovarich

TOVARICH (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1937) I know plenty of people will tell you its hardly a discovery but if you are seeing a film starring Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert as impoverished Russian aristocrats reduced to servant status for the first time....then it is a treat of some dimension....

Cronos

CRONOS (Guillermo Del Toro, Mexico, 1992). Only saw this once before and cant remember where but a lush new 4K is now out and about and it stands up to scrutiny very well. Del Toro was already setting himself down a career path of sophisticated fantasy...

Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Gladys George
The Roaring Twenties

THE ROARING TWENTIES (Raoul Walsh, USA, 1939). Yet another movie from 1939. My goodness the creative juices were flowing. Not seen by me for decades but I think it may have leapfrogged a lot of other movies into pole position as the best movie Walsh ever made....

Emlyn Williams, Vivien Leigh, Kenneth More
The Deep Blue Sea

THE DEEP BLUE SEA (Anatole Litvak, UK, 1955) Virtually forgotten Litvak screened her in a less than perfect 35mm print. Vivien Leigh has run off with alcoholic test pilot Kenneth More, leaving behind a sober life as a judge's wife. Super-literate dialogue by Terence Rattigan with never an um or an ah to be heard. Leigh's first film in four years proved to be one of the great comebacks...I suspect those who saw it are now hunting down the 2011 Terence Davies version for a fresh/refresh look.

....and just to prove that Il Cinema Ritrovato does not ignore Australian cinema, or maybe it's the other way round, there were two films by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill in the very specialised selection called 'The Colours of Experimental Cinema'. The films were Warrah  (1980) and Printer Light Play (1978). The copies of the films were supplied by the Arsenal in Berlin.

The Road to Bologna (6) - Feuillade, Litvak, Marva Nabili and Bresson set things alight

Rene Creste, Judex

It's raining in Bologna....has been for three days, throwing the Piazza Maggiore screenings into chaos even though the eventuality is catered for to a degree.... 

First there was Feuillade and, as has been stated over and over, the first director for whom no allowances need to be made, no excuses for primitivism, no resort to 'in its day'. Feuillade was always modern and the magnificent restoration of Judex, screening in daily bite size pieces is a reminder of his mastery. Goodness knows how much it cost the French Government for the work to be done but for the French people they should feel that this is something of considerable value produced by their taxes at work. It may be a bridge too far for any venue in Australia to screen it. Even in Bologna less than a couple of hundred turned out for the Prologue and numbers started to fall thereafter. Probably for the rest of the world they will have to make do with seeing it on Blu-ray and Ultra HD but boy is it worth spending the hours and watching it oin the biggest screen you can find. Some 95% of the material scanned and restored was taken from the original negative. It helps, it was observed, that Feuillade himself was the head of the company's production and no doubt looked after his own work very meticulously...

Annabella, Charles Vanel, L'Equipage

The next Litvak, and the first of the non-American films on the schedule, was L'Equipage a rousing WW1 story of a team of aviators defying death every day and the woman ( the stunningly beautiful Annabella) who loves two of them, the young recruit (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and the old lieutenant (Charles Vanel). The story may be hackneyed but Litvak's mise-en-scene in all the group scenes is remarkable and there were tears flowing at the end. Beautiful 4K by Pathe from the original negative, no doubt another piece of French taxpayer funded patrimony that really does set a pace...

The Sealed Soil

Khak-E Sar Be Mohr/The Sealed Soil from Cecilia Cenciarell's Cinema Libero strand is quite a remarkable find. One of very few films made by women directors in Iran . Marva Nabili made the film virtually clandestinely and when she bolted from the country took the negative out in a false-bottomed suitcase. The film remained virtually unseen until now. It is a series of single shot tableaux which slowly uncovers the life of a young woman of marriageable age who is basically doing the hard yakka of providing for her family's domestic needs. Her indolent father, prone to much praying and mouthing "god will provide" as a solution to any problem, is the least of her problems. Her mother and younger sister are also nagging at her to find a husband. Restoration work by UCLA Film Archive has rescued the original 16mm material and the film's only former life being seen on what curator Ehsan Khoshbakht called  'ghastly VHS tapes" is now over.

Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forets
Four Nights of a Dreamer

Then there was Bresson...at last after being unsighted for decades yet again the French Government has provided the funding for a 4K restoration of Four Nights of a Dreamer that glows and brings back the remarkable Dostoyevsky story of the young man and the young would be suicidal woman who meet on the Pont Neuf.  One thing I had forgotten about the film is the constant diegetic musical interludes that punctuate proceedings and give a sense of the street life buzzing around these two lost souls...

It has to be said that the French Government of funding restoration work, where producers themselves apply for money out of a pot, their applications, no doubt scrutinised by some tough minded people with genuine knowledge of French film culture, seems to me a model way of going about this activity. Then the restoration work itself is undertaken by private laboratories. It is certainly not the way it is gone about in Australia where decisions and budgets remain very mysterious and fim-makers themselves often undertake the task of doing restoration out of their own pocket. Budgets for this work are also very modest indeed at home and nothing like the tens of millions of Euro that the French have spent in recent times...and the French have a lot more film heritage to play with as well.

Here's a snap of the Bologna high life...that's Angelica Waite of Cinema Reborn and the esteemed New Yorker Geoffrey O'Brien enjoying dinner at Trattoria Tony, just across the street from the Tre Vecchi Hotel.

The Road to Bologna (5) - CAFE ELECTRIC (Gustav Ucicky, Austria, 1927), THE AMAZING DR CLITTERHOUSE (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1938), BONA (Lino Brocka, Phillipines, 1981) and ITSUWARERU SEISO (Kozaburo Yoshimura, Japan, 1951)

Marlene Dietrich, Willi Forst, Cafe Electric

There was prolonged applause at the end of Cafe Electric but it may have had something to do with the crowd's acknowledgement of the virtuoso accompaniment on piano, piano accordion and flute by Stephen Horne and less to do the morality movie included in the Marlene Dietrich strand. The programme notes focussed on Dietrich's turn, a rather minor and far from compelling contribution. The notes also failed to mention in any way that the film was missing its last reel and the abrupt ending with some words describing what happened caused more than a bit of "Whaaat!" throughout the Arlecchino Cinema. Superb digital restoration of the remaining seven eights of the film by the Austrian Film Museum

Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart
The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse

But on to better things and a smart move by the programmers not to do Anatole Litvak chronologically but to start with one of his best American films The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse  with Edward G Robinson as a pyschiatrist study the criminal mind whose research takes him into the heart of gang where he orchestrates a brilliant series of robberies. "A film and three quarters" said a companion. John Huston's name as the second scriptwriter suggests he was brought in to put the polish on an adaptation of a play by Barre Lyndon. A packed house watched a very good 35mm print.

Nora Aunor, Bona

Bona by Lino Brocka is almost unknown outside the Phillipines but Carlotta Films in Paris have managed to retrieve the materials that were in France after Pierre Rissient placed the film in the Quinzaine back in 1981. The driving force may have been the lead actress Nora Aunor who plays the title role and produced the picture. She is the quintessential oppressed young woman in a Catholic patriarchal society where fathers and brothers whip and beat women who step out of line. Bona has made the mistake of becoming infatuated with Gardo, a preening philandering film extra, and she runs away from home and moves herself into his 'house' as a servant prepared to suffer all manner of indignity just to be near her idol. The applause at the ending was seriously well-deserved and you felt it wan't just the movie itself but Bona's final violent action which abruptly concludes proceedings that was being strongly endorsed. Superb 4K restoration.

Machiko Kyo, Clothes of Deception

Kozaburo Yoshimura is almost unknown outside Japan and curator Alex Jacoby suggested some of the titles in the strand will literally be having their first ever screenings outside Japan. The Kyoto set story , variously titled Clothes of Deception, Under Silk Garments  and on the 35 mm print itself The Disguised. The story of rival families who operate  geisha houses tips into modernity as the youngest children of the families fall in love with each other and run into snobbery before things are settled. Standout is Machiko Kyo as Kimicho, the smartest and most cynical of the young geisha women and her increasing efforts at keeping ridiculous male admirers at bay.

On Blu-ray - David Hare finds irresistible the new 4K scan of CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1939)

The screens above and below are from the irresistible Confessions of a Nazi Spy directed by Anatole Litvak and released by Warner First National in 1939, just a short time before Borzage's comparably anti-Nazi film for Metro, Mortal Storm which he was only barely able to complete and release under the unspeakable Louis B Mayer later in 1939. Interestingly this might be the first American feature movie to run the credits at the end of the picture.

First screen above is George Sanders sporting an extremely short buzzcut, albeit kinkily fetching, but a look that features heavily these days in the current Australian White Supremacist meetings and Biker gang revivals. Second screen below is the sublimely named Hans von Twardowsky, here an active Nazi in New York, and just a few years down the road from his brief but unforgettable turn as one of the screaming nelly queens in the court of Sternberg's Scarlet Empress. Twardowsky was one of the genuinely bad boys of American cinema, and here he looks it.

The new Warner Archive Blu disc is another 4K scan from a nitrate O-neg and you can feel the image breathing on the screen.

They don't get any better than this.