A BOLOGNA DIARY - IL CINEMA RITROVATO DAY 6 - Mitchell Leisen, Julien Duvivier, Josephine Baker - Updated critics' chart

Ruth Roman, Glenn Ford, Young Man with Ideas

You can get a surprise. I confess to never having heard of Young Man with Ideas, made by Mitchell Leisen at MGM  in 1952 and described in the catalogue as his "last significant film". Yet here it was in  what the catalogue also says was a 35mm copy but which I'm sure was a superb digital restoration. How do you sell a film with a title like that. Maybe that's part of the reason it sank below the radar. Sort of like Fassbinder's Despair... "Let's go the movies  and see Despair  ..wait a minute Young Man With Ideas is also on. You choose."

Glenn Ford plays a suburban lawyer, very dedicated and very smart, but his skills unappreciated by the partners in his law firm. After managing, without credit, a major victory in the courts he demands being made a partner or else he's off. The next thing we see is him fumbling his law text books into a cab. The family head for Los Angeles where he cant get admission to the Bar until he passes a tough State exam. Next thing he's inveigled into working as a debt collector. In the meantime his wife has taken a bet on a long shot at the races because the house they live in was formerly an SP bookie joint.

It's rich with melodrama and my summary leaves out the crucial role played by Ruth Roman as the sometimes supportive, sometimes a hindrance, wife and mother of Ford's three children. All the more impressive because you have no knowledge or expectations of the movie. But another demonstration of Leisen's craft in handling basically...well....anything. Any Leisen retro has to have this one....

Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Tales of Manhattan

Julien Duvivier's Tales of Manhattan  has had a restoration supported by Martin Scorsese and George Lucas. This Ben Hecht script plays to all of Duvivier's strengths as a story teller and here, modelling the movie on the tradition of French 'film a sketches', he gets half of Hollywood's royalty to play modest parts - Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Edward G Robinson and Paul Robeson play leads and a couple of dozen more play minor parts. Probably the best film Duvivier made during his Hollywood exile during WW2...beautiful new digital copy.

Josephine Baker, Zouzou

The Josephine Baker strand is relegated to one of the smaller cinemas in the Lumiere building at the Cineteca di Bologna. She's a coterie taste but a subject for endless curiosity not just for her modest movie achievements but her  pioneering spirit as a black woman in a white world, her role in the Resistance during WW2 and her later in life adoption of a bundle of children. Zouzou (Marc Allegret, 1934) is one of a small number of feature films she made and I sat there entranced by it all. The final 20+ minute show is a knockout and Josephine's songs indicate that she had an extraordinary voice to go with unrivalled skills as a dancer.

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)	***		**
Perfume of the Lady in Black (Francisco Barilli)		***
Accident (Jospeh Losey )		**	***
The Damned (Luchino Visconti)		***
Die Fremde Vogel (Urban Gad)	***
Senso (Luchino Visconti)		****
Lenny (Bob Fosse)		***
Zouzou (Marc Allegret)	**
Meren Kasvojen Edessa/By the Edge of the Sea (Teuvo Puro)			**
What Price Glory (Raoul Walsh)			***
L’Image Originelle – Wim Wenders (Pierre Henri Gibert)			***
Drakula in Istanbul (Mehmet Mutar)			**
Sa Dam Ying/Big Boss Sis (Chung Sun)			**
Clash By Night (Fritz Lang)			***
Tales of Manhattan (Julien Duvivier)	**		**
Young Man with Ideas (Mitchell Leisen)	***

CINEMA REBORN OPENING SCREENING WEDNESDAY 30 APRIL + PROGRAM FOR THURSDAY 1 MAY

 

Quick reminders of our programmes for the first two days.  Tickets for all sessions may be booked online or in person at the Ritz box office. Cinema Reborn charges regular Ritz prices and the lowest student concessions of any venue. Concessions for Ritz Movie Club members apply for all sessions https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/cinemareborn-2025 Some quotes from the extensive programme notes now posted on our website. HOLIDAY (George Cukor, USA, 1938) @ 7.00 pm on Wednesday 30 April and @ 2.30 pm on Thursday 1 May “Despite Cary Grant demonstrating that he could still do the back-flips and somersaults of his vaudeville days, Holiday is less a screwball comedy than a fable, in which, as in My Man Godfrey and Tovarich, a few principled individuals educate the decadent rich. …Whether frenetic with enthusiasm or languishing in despair, (Katharine) Hepburn dominates every scene in which she appears.” John Baxter For information on session times, full program notes and links to bookings https://cinemareborn.com.au/Holiday PÉPÉ LE MOKO (Julien Duvivier, France, 1937) @ 4.45 pm on Thursday 1 May and @ 1.45pm on Tuesday 6 May “Described as ‘one of the most exciting and moving films I can remember seeing’, by the writer Graham Greene at the time, Pépé le Moko (1937) remains Duvivier’s best-known work. It is set in the Casbah district of Algiers, a maze-like quarter where French police struggle to capture the elusive Pépé, a notorious Parisian gangster hiding from the law. Though he is safe in the Casbah, due to its protective community and his ability to avoid capture, Pépé feels trapped, yearning for his former life in Paris. That sense of imprisonment intensifies when he falls in love with Gaby, a glamorous Parisian tourist. Their romance stirs Pépé's longing for freedom but also seals his tragic fate. Duvivier’s film is about impossible desire and the implacable workings of fate, two themes that run deep in his work.” Ben McCann For information on session times, full program notes and links to bookings https://cinemareborn.com.au/Pepe-le-Moko THE SACRIFICE (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/France/UK, 1986) @ 7.00 pm on Thursday 1 May and @ 8.10 pm on Monday 5 May “The Sacrifice (1986), Andrei Tarkovsky's third and final film in exile, stands as a powerful testament to the director's enduring preoccupation with nature, spilt milk, rumbling silence, mute children, levitation, mysticism, spirituality and the long, long shot. This is a film about faith and hope and the (possibly) misguided belief that one person’s sacrifice can have a positive impact on others. It is a film worthy of watching and rewatching, as it is a parable that deserves discussion and reinterpretation, especially now that we are far closer to midnight on the Doomsday Clock than we were in 1986. And yet, the anxiety about an impending nuclear war seemed much higher then than now.” Greg Dolgopolov For information on session times, full program notes and links to bookings https://cinemareborn.com.au/The-Sacrifice

CINEMA REBORN 2025 - SOME PERSONAL FAVOURITES FROM JAMES VAUGHAN, BRUCE BERESFORD and ALENA LODKINA

James Vaughan recommends our closing film THE FALL OF OTRAR.

James is a Sydney-based writer and filmmaker. His debut feature, Friends and Strangers (2021) was named in Sight and Sound as one of the 50 best films of 2021. James is a member of the Cinema Reborn Organising Committee

James writes:  “Ardak Amirkulov's breathtaking 13th century epic is also an elegy to Kazakh history, depicting the annihilation of the Islamic East Asian civilization of Otrar by the advancing armies of Genghis Khan.

“The film was co-written and produced by Russian auteur Aleksei German, but its release was disrupted by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost forgotten but not lost, this recent 4K restoration was completed thanks to Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation, Cineteca di Bologna and The Hobson/Lucas Foundation. Both Sydney and Melbourne screenings will be introduced by Robert Hughes, Assistant Curator, Australian Cinematheque, QAGOMA.

“The Fall of Otrar is a film of mesmerising textural richness—a cinematic Bayeux Tapestry that engulfs the viewer with hypnotic intensity. Though not for the faint-hearted, its vision of state-sanctioned terror and sadistic violence resonates with grim urgency in 2025. Do not miss a rare chance to encounter this masterpiece on the big screen.”

Bruce Beresford recommends Pépé Le Moko:

Bruce received an Academy Award nomination for the script of Breaker Morant (1980) and was nominated as Best Director for Tender Mercies (1982). Driving Miss Daisy (1989) won four Academy awards including Best Film. His most recent film is The Travellers (2024-25)

Bruce writes:"I remember my first viewing of Pépé Le Moko . Although it is a fairly familiar tale, a gangster on the run, the treatment was strikingly different to the American and English films I’d seen in this genre. The romantic story, set in the exotic Casbah in Algiers (largely reproduced in atmospheric studio sets) was dominated by the charisma of Jean Gabin in the eponymous role…Duvivier’s deft visual handling of long dialogue scenes was a delight. I realised, all those years ago, that a real director has to choreograph the movements of his cast and choices of camera positions and lenses, just as dancing and fight scenes have to be meticulously planned. To explain – it’s often apparent to me, when I watch feature films or the now ubiquitous streaming series, that the director simply lets the actors work out a few moves as they deliver the dialogue; then the cameraman films the sequence in one or two wide shots, followed with close ups on the principle players. This mass of footage is turned over to the film editor and it will invariably result in a moderately effective scene. However, Duvivier (along with directors such as Jean Renoir, Martin Scorsese, Carol Reed, Luis Buñuel and quite a few others) evaluates every scene in the film for its place in the completed work, not as a sequence unrelated dramatically to what follows and precedes it.”

Alena Lodkina recommends The Sacrifice

Alena wrote and directed the feature films, Strange Colours (2017) and Petrol (2022), which screened Venice, Locarno, New Directors/New Films, MIFF and the Sydney Film Festival. 

Alena writes: “There is a diary-like quality to The Sacrifice.The camera careens through an alien, hostile world in a desperate attempt to find connections. There is no truth, Alexander despairs, and aTV soon announces the coming of a nuclear holocaust. The dead tree erected on Alexander’s whimsy and watered by his son Gossen (the Little Man) suggests it’s got more to do with innocence and faith.This deranged watering is crucially not Sisyphean, for we are asked to consider the possibility of miracles, that the tree really may bloom. An inversion, I think, of one ofAlexander’s other grandiose statements:there isn’t death, there is only fear of death. We can hear an echo of Tarkovsky’s poet father Arseny, as quoted in Mirror: ‘don’t be afraid of death’. Like the protagonist of Solaris, the son returns to the father, literal, artistic and metaphysical

Notes by Bruce and Alena are short extracts from essays to appear in the Cinema Reborn printed catalogue. For details of screening times, program notes and links to bookings in both cities click on this link for the Cinema Reborn website. https://cinemareborn.com.au/