IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Frank Borzage, Katharine Hepburn, Lewis Milestone, David lean

"Can you tell me what are those badges are you are wearing? We've had a lot of people through today with them." Said the waitress at the rather nice restaurant Va Mo La, way down near the  university as we sat down for dinner. She said it in perfect English too. So we explained about our accreditation lanyards for Il Cinema Ritrovato  and she said "Ah yes I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the Piazza Maggiore last night. Spielberg is one of my favourite directors" A cinephile waitress no less. "Who is your favourite?" "Maybe Ettore Scola. I saw lots of his films with my parents on TV." Wow.... "Who else do you like?" "I like Toto" ...."And Alberto Sordi?" One of us prompted. "Oh yes. He's Roman and so am I"

Local favourite Ettore Scola

Not sure you'd have that conversation in Sydney...

But you may get a chance to see classic Hollywood... Till We Meet Again (Frank Borzage, 1944) has been given a magnificent makeover by Universal and the packed house loved every second of it, notwithstanding rather a lot of religious sentimentality and a continuing subtext about the obligations placed on those who serve the Lord not to lie. It's not an obligation always honoured, as the case of George Pell and his accompanying miscreants demonstrated, but here it's the foundation of a story of trust and betrayal involving Ray Milland as a shot down airman trying to get back home and of course carrying  documents that will win the war. Borzage had a great feel for war movies about trust and this one, while not in the same class as his masterpiece, Three Comrades, digs into the subject with a lot of grip.

Barbara Britton, Ray Milland, Till We Meet Again

Not sure Hollywood covered itself with glory with Lewis Milestone's Rain, restored but also restoring all the censorship cuts made after the Code came to be enforced (and on view in the YouTube and public domain copies that have been all we had to rely upon). Farran Smith Nehme's intro tried to sell us on the idea that this was a much better film than most people thought but I think I'm in the most people camp.

Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Summertime

Then there was a 35mm print of Summertime,  the only David Lean film which had eluded me, despite countless showings late night on the ABC over the years. It was part of Molly Haskell's Hepburn strand and although Molly didn't do an intro for this one, she has battled out lots of others despite taking a tumble on Bologna's cobblestones on the day of her arrival. Hepburn's Akron Ohio 45 year-old spinster being wooed by a supersmooth Rossano Brazzi on her first, likely only, trip to Venice has a timeless fascination. She acts every scene and it made me wonder if Lean had any control of her...Brazzi is mostly almost immobile but delivers his lines brilliantly. The fireworks display may have passed muster as a metaphor back in the 50s but it looks a bit quaint. I headed into the theatre having inadvertently found myself walking and chatting with Ian Christie. Ian's view was that I was in for a treat and that Lean had been given a hard time of it back in the sixties, the pack being lead by Andrew Sarris and the boys from "Movie". Ian was heading off to see a silent version of Les Miserables...

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

Streaming and on DVD - John Baxter revives memories of KEEPER OF THE FLAME (Dir: George Cukor, Sc:Donald Ogden Stewart, USA 1942)

       

Donald Ogden Stewart

      When people talk about films starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, they seldom mean the 1942 Keeper of the Flame. One might think that its stars, with George Cukor as director and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart of Philadelphia Story fame, would rate at least a small measure of respect. So complete has been its eclipse, however, that not even the most engagé Australian critics have risen to the fact that Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, author of the original novel, was Melbourne-born, and enjoyed a prominent public profile as both lesbian and suffragette. 

          The message of Keeper of the Flame was timely. In June 1941, twenty thousand people assembled at the Hollywood Bowl to hear isolationist Charles Lindbergh urge that America keep out of the war. Don Stewart, then president of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the American League of Writers and the Anti-Franco League (“I loved being president,” he confessed once, with one of his cat-like smiles),was easily persuaded to join closet leftists Tracy and Hepburn in suggesting that a heroic figure like Lucky Lindy might become the figurehead of a Fascist takeover of the United States. In December of that year, Pearl Harbor rendered the argument irrelevant but in certain quarters commitment to the war remained grudging.

Katharine Hepburn

Wealthy, feted, the epitome of trivial humour, Stewart made an improbable leftist. He dated his transformation from 1936. That spring, he came, as usual, to London to refresh his wardrobe. He also did a little work. “I was writing a play and it had a Communist in it,” he said. “I didn’t have any idea of how tall Communists were, so I asked the doorman at Claridge’s, where we were staying, if he knew anything about Communism. He said ‘No, sir,’ but directed me to a book shop. I bought John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and read it going back on the boat. It was a revelation to me. When I got back to America, I started boring friends about Socialism. I knew I was boring them because I didn’t get invited to as many parties as I once had.”

At Hawes and Curtis, London’s best formal-wear shop, he had bought a dozen stiff shirts, a dozen soft evening shirts, and six black bow ties, in expectation of a lively season. “You know,” he told me, a little forlornly (and without, I’m sure, a grain of truth) “I still have a few of those shirts? They’re a bit yellow, but mostly unworn.”  

         The premiere of Keeper of the Flame at New York’s Radio City Music Hall didn’t go well. “I’m told Louis B. Mayer stormed out,” Stewart said. “I certainly hope it’s true.” Those who stayed were troubled by a niggling sense of déjà vu. After a newsreel documenting the death of a significant figure in American public life, reporters gather for the funeral at his grim walled estate, while a lone journalist sets out to investigate his secret life. Hadn’t they seen all this before?  For once, Hedda Hopper seemed to have got it right when she called it “Citizen Kane with all the art scraped off." 

         There’s still plenty of art to go around, though not of the Wellesian variety. Cinematographer William Daniels shuns the flamboyance of Gregg Toland, opting for the high-key formalism he did so much to perfect in his films for Garbo. Shot entirely on interiors, Keeper of the Flame is MGM precision incarnate, investing its characters with the same immobility as the furniture that fills the mansion’s vast rooms. 

Spencer Tracy

         Tracy as the reporter, Hepburn as the widow and Richard Whorf as the dead man’s secretary navigate the decor as formally as chess pieces, with Hepburn, often dressed in soft draped white, as the omnipotent queen.  If she’s the queen, the treacherous Whorf, oleaginous and peremptory by turns, is a side-sliding bishop, while Tracy, hat brim so sharply turned down as to resemble a visor, and tending always to the awkward and oblique move, must be the knight.  In that capacity, he woos the widow into a confession that she let her husband drive over a demolished bridge rather than let him take the first steps in a coup d’etat.    

Richard Whorf, Katharine Hepburn  

         Cukor directs in Gaslight mode, but rather than Charles Boyer lowering over a shuddering Ingrid Bergman, Tracy, soft-eyed and low-voiced, sits at the knee of Hepburn as she stares over his head, eyes glowing with the receding glory of her dead hero. Bronislau Kaper’s discreet score is no match for such images. They demand Wagner. 

          RKO owned the novel first, and planned a modest thriller more in keeping with its discreet political subtext; something for Robert Mitchum or Joel McCrea perhaps, and Laraine Day. With memories, however, of Citizen Kane, the rock that sank the regime of George Schaefer, they willingly relinquished it to MGM, where folie de grandeur stalked the halls. Producer Victor Saville, recently arrived from Britain, had less to do with the film than Tracy, Hepburn and Stewart, who seized the reins and confidently directed it to the left.  

         Cukor didn’t argue. The film was made, he said later, "during a period of undercover Fascism in the country. Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open. I suppose, to draw attention to them, we exaggerated." He, like Tracy and Hepburn, could afford to, since his value to MGM rendered him fireproof, but Stewart’s career never recovered. In 1950, he fled, blacklisted, to England – “not caught,” he said with rueful precision, “but caught up with.” Among his numerous credits, this was the one of which he was most proud. A keeper of the flame to the last.