On Blu-ray - David Hare is not happy with the Criterion edition of MIDNIGHT (Mitchell Leisen, USA, 1939)

 A few screens from Criterion's new Blu-ray of Mitchell Leisen's Midnight.

I won't comment at length but there's no doubt this should have been served up as a fully fledged 4K UHD disc. The Blu-ray runs with a healthy bitrate of ca.40 kbps which is usually enough to give a good theatrical 2k standard to a 35mm 1.37 B&W movie transfer with plenty of grain and detail. But this just doesn't. The image manages to display good nitrate shimmer and sparkle (of highlights and wardrobe designs) and the dynamic range (SDR of course) gives nice jet blacks and a good wide light exposure.

But there's just no fucking grain. I don't know how they've done this but if it wasn't actually de-grained at some level pre-mastering I suspect Criterion have gone into their now notorious filtering, a process which makes it "easier" to deliver a 2K encode without straining the grading process. They are now notorious for this.

As it stands this is very, very disappointing Blu-ray gets only part of the way towards replicating the 4K master which was itself derived from a long "hidden"/aka mislabelled deposit entry at Library of Congress as a dupe pos which in fact turned out to be a nitrate fine grain. Hence the gorgeous step across from the original to 4K scan is only one step off a nitrate O-neg.

I can only assume Criterion figures the sheer dollar return on this would not be enough to justify doing even a bare bones SDR 4K. I just hope the rights are not once again restricted so that someone else, and more reliable for quality mastering like Indicator in the UK can do this justice.

CINEMA REBORN UPDATE - SESSIONS ON THE BIGGEST SCREEN - AUSTRALIAN CLASSICS

ON THE BIG SCREEN AT THE RITZ

 

Most of Cinema Reborn’s screenings will take place in the Ritz’s Cinema 5. It has over 200 seats and includes a stalls and a balcony section. It offers excellent viewing.

 

However, three sessions of our 2024 season will be screened in the Ritz’s pride of place the 700 seat Cinema 1 with its huge screen and excellent sightlines both upstairs in the balcony section and downstairs in the stalls.

 

The three sessions in Cinema 1 are:

 

MIDNIGHT 7.00 PM ON WEDNESDAY 1 MAY.

 

Our opening program (regular ticket prices) is the World Premiere of Mitchell Leisen’s classic 1939 screwball comedy starring Claudette Colbert, John Barrymore and Don Ameche. “One of the liveliest, gayest, wittiest and naughtiest comedies of a long hard season” wrote Frank Nugent in the New York Times way back in 1939. To that you can add David Thomson just a year or so ago who said “yes it’s a great script (by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett) but it’s a great script rendered with terrific feeling and panache (by Mitchell Leisen). 

 

Bookings for this session at this link

 

DAYS OF HEAVEN 8.15 PM ON MONDAY 6 MAY

 

Terrence Malick’s 1978 story of migrant workers fleeing west in 1915 has been called by Michel Ciment of Positif  ‘one of the most original, complex films in the contemporary cinema”.  Those who have seen the 4K restoration are still marvelling at the extraordinary qualities of Nestor Almendros’s Oscar-winning golden hour photography.

 

Bookings for this session at this link

 

LE SAMOURAI 8.15 PM ON TUESDAY 7 MAY

 

John Woo is one of many directors in awe of this film. He called it “the closest to a perfect movie I have ever seen.”  It has taken Cinema Reborn several years of asking before we finally got the rights to screen the superb 4K restoration. Seeing it on the biggest screen possible will be a fitting finale to our 2024 season.

 

Bookings for this session at this link

 

A FINAL SHOUT OUT FOR OUR AUSTRALIAN CINEMA SELECTION FOR 2024.

 

All told we are screening four Australian programs – two classic documentaries LIGHT YEARS from 1991, Kathryn Millard’s superb portrait of the great photographer Olive Cotton (above), a session which will include a post-film conversation and Q&A with Kathryn and eminent photographer Sandy Edwards at the session at 2.30 pm on Sunday 5 May. The second doco is Peter Tammer’s JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT, from 1982 described by Phillip Adams as “vivid as any chronicle of war you will ever see”.  Melbourne film-maker Philip Brophy will be introducing the film at 4.45 pm on Friday 3 May.

 

Then we have two rather divergent titles from the national film heritage. First up is the World Premiere of the restoration of THREE TO GO a remarkable portmanteau from 1971 of three short films by then young directors Peter Weir, Oliver Howes and Brian Hannant. Also screening is an early short by Peter Weir 3 DIRECTIONS IN AUSTRALIAN POP MUSIC. Both films have been preserved by the National Archives of Australia. Richard Brennan who worked as Production Manager on THREE TO GO will do the introduction

 

Finally there is the cult classic and maybe the most overlooked Australian movie of the 90s BODY MELT, Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Oz movie of the time. BODY MELT is having its first screening in Sydney in over 30 years, in our first Friday Night Fright slot. Director Philip Brophy is coming up from Melbourne especially for the screening and will introduce the film along with scholar, critic and cinephile Jane Mills.

 

Click on the film titles to go through to the Ritz booking page or just roll up at the door.

 

AND IN THE MEANTIME

The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here

CINEMA REBORN ANNOUNCES ITS 2024 PROGRAM AT THE RANDWICK RITZ AND HAWTHORN LIDO

 

For its sixth edition, Cinema Reborn will screen 17 classics on the big screen at Ritz Cinemas in Randwick (1-7 May) and Lido Cinemas in Hawthorn (9-14 May). It will be the first time that Cinema Reborn’s program will be presented in Melbourne after five seasons in Sydney, where its audience has grown every year. 

 

Since 2019, when Cinema Reborn was first presented at the Ritz Cinemas Randwick, a tremendously supportive relationship has developed between the Ritz Cinema’s management and staff and the remarkable team of film-makers, critics, archivists, scholars and cinephiles who devote themselves to presenting Sydney’s annual season of restored classics. The expansion to the Ritz’s sister cinema in Melbourne, the Hawthorn Lido, is a natural outcome of the audience growth in Sydney and the clear interest to bring Cinema Reborn’s program to a new audience in Australia’s second largest city.

 

On behalf of Lido and Ritz Cinemas, Head of Marketing Jaymes Durante said, “It has been a privilege to help present Cinema Reborn at the Ritz over the years, and it brings us immense pride to bring the festival to Melbourne for the first time in 2024. Through Cinema Reborn, our audiences will be treated to a world-class offering of important restorations and rarely screened cinema treasures which will enrich our city’s cultural offering and will surely become a milestone event in the annual film calendar.”

 

The vast majority of Cinema Reborn’s films are restored in 4K Ultra High Definition, the current pinnacle for film restoration. This year’s selection comes from Italy, France, the UK, USA, Mali, India, Syria, South Korea, Belgium and Australia.

Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)

International classics include Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967); The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1952); La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000); I Know Where I’m Going! (Powell/Pressburger, 1947) and Il Grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957).

 

From Hollywood, Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959); Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978); and The Suspect (Robert Siodmak, 1944).

 

There are two World Premiere restorations at Cinema Reborn 2024: Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939),and Australia’s own Three to Go (Brian Hannant, Oliver Howes, Peter Weir, 1971).

 

Also from Australia, Body Melt (Philip Brophy, 1993); Journey to the End of Night (Peter Tammer, 1982) and Light Years (Kathryn Millard, 1991).

 

 

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

From South Korea, Sopyonje (Im Kwon-taek, 1993); from Syria, The Dupes (Tewfik Saleh, 1972); from Mali, Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987); and from India, Ishanou (Aribam Syam Sharma, 1991).

Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)

For more information 

Cinema Reborn's website already contains a set of pungent and insightful short notes on the entire program. Over the next few weeks, the website will publish essays on each of our 2024 titles, written by some of Australia’s best known film scholars, critics and cinephiles. As well, a number have been written by highly regarded international critics and commentators. Bookmark https://cinemareborn.com.au and keep checking for newly-posted pages on each of our titles. Regular news updates will be posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

 

Information about Cinema Reborn’s program is also now available in a 16-page booklet free on the shelves of the Ritz Cinemas Randwick and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn. 

 

Venues

The Ritz Cinemas’ and Lido Cinemas’ websites each contain pages devoted to Cinema Reborn, with comprehensive notes on each film we are screening and ticketing links. 

 

Admission Prices

Cinema Reborn charges standard cinema ticket prices for all sessions, including opening and closing night selections. Ritz and Lido Movie Club Members are eligible for member’s discount. Details of Club membership and the concessions on offer are at the Ritz Club Membership Page and at the Lido Club Membership Page

 

Bookings Now Open

To make a booking at the Ritz Click here and to make a booking at the Lido Click here.

 

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn’s work over the years has long been sustained by the generosity of our donors who help us make up the shortfall between our income and the costs of obtaining and screening our program. The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here

Streaming - John Baxter explores the later career of Mitchell Leisen - BRIDE OF VENGEANCE (Paramount, USA, 1949)

         THE CHALICE FROM THE PALACE
It’s hard to know how seriously to take Bride of Vengeance. Faced with the need to recreate the pomp and pageantry of 16^thcentury Italy on some poky Hollywood sets, and with a cast from the Paramount second string to impersonate the Borgias, Mitchell Leisen must have been tempted to throw up his hands, particularly after the scheduled lead, Ray Milland, preferred two months of unpaid suspension rather than play the lead role of Alfonso D'Este, Duke of Ferrara. Milland claimed to dislike both the film’s original title, “A Mask for Lucretia”, and the script, and would rather ski and sail for eight weeks; manly pursuits that didn’t require him to appear in....well, frocks. (Milland couldn’t carry off robes and hose, and never played in anything set earlier than the Regency.) 

John Lund (centre), Paulette Goddard

         One can see why they cast Milland. Alfonso is not too far from the superficially effete lawyer he played in Reap the Wild Wind. Under its tesselated floors, omnipresent statuary, staircases and velvet hangings, Bride of Vengeance is a sex comedy, with elements of The Scarlet Pimpernel andZorro.  Convinced by Cesare Borgia that Alfonso killed her husband, Lucretia is married off to him with the sole aim of murdering him and surrendering Ferrara to her brother. Playing the fop and fool, Alfonso neglects her to sneak off to his secret foundry, where he’s building an enormous cannon. His first few tries are duds -well, he’s new to this - but once Lucretia adds her expertise, the two experience a highly satisfying explosion.

MacDonald Carey, Paulette Goddard

What probably irked Milland more than the schmutter was the presence front and centre of Paulette Goddard as Lucretia Borgia. Eyes wide, teeth bared, and made up like a wicked sister in a pantomime Cinderella, she’s in almost every scene, and goes for the jugular in all of them. At times, the inoffensive John Lund as Alfonso, switched, after Milland’s defection, from his role as Cesare Borgia (John Lund - as Cesare Borgia??) looks in fear of his life. Maybe it’s only the contrast, but Macdonald Carey as Cesare is almost convincing, mostly because his political persona is submerged in some incestuous clinches with his sister. 

At 38, however, Goddard is simply too old for this foolery. The film terminated her time at Paramount. Within a few years she’d be reduced to Babes in Bagdad and Vice Squad, before disappearing into television – the fate also of Macdonald Carey, shortly to become a king in daytime drama. 

         That the script derives from a story called Chalice called instantly to mind Norman Panama and Mel Frank’s classic “Chalice from the palace” routine from The Court Jester. For those who haven’t seen it, the characters use a mnemonic to remind them which is the fatal cup (“The vessel with the pestle/Has the potion with the poison”), only to become confused when plans change (“It’s the flagon with the dragon...”) Incidentally, Panama and Frank first wrote it in 1948 for Red Skelton in A Southern Yankee, where something is secreted in a jacket with the placket. No doubt it appears first in a rip-off of Ralph Roister Doister and a rhyme about “Ye firkin with a jerkin” recited by the brothers Bollocks to Scrotum, a wrinkled old retainer.

         There’s so little to involve one in Bride of Vengeance that such random thoughts are unavoidable. One automatically recalls how much Orson Welles did with even fewer resources in Othello. An opening like his silhouetted funeral on the battlements would have lifted this one immeasurably. (And let’s not forget how imposing a Cesare Welles made in Prince of Foxes.) But Leisen is a director of interiors, so except for an occasional cut-away the film hasn’t a single scene set outside. Instead, he expends his energies on staging, and on the costumes, for the design of which he receives co-credit. Everything in the film looks back to his early career as Cecil B. DeMille’s costumier, a history that elicited from Billy Wilder the sneering insult “Window dresser!” Well, perhaps. Though with Leisen it’s not so much the windows as the bizarre nature of the life glimpsed through them. 

Editor's Note: John Baxter first wrote on the career of Mitchell Leisen in Film Digest, published by the WEA Film Group in Sydney in the sixties. The essay drew an approving letter to the editor from Leisen himself. The edition is now a collector's item though it is always possible a copy may be held by Sydney's best kept secret bookshop Badger Books

Editor's Further Notes: John Baxter recently published a piece on Leisen's 1934 Murder at the Vanities. You can read it if you click here A very good quality copy of Bride of Vengeance can be viewed free on a streaming service if you click here

Streaming - John Baxter recalls the Pre-Code revelries of MURDER AT THE VANITIES (Mitchell Leisen, USA, 1934)

NAKED AS NATURE INTENDED. 

Kitty Carlisle

My sister-in-law headed the Paris branch of a large American college, and occasionally asked me to help with the social heavy lifting when alumni groups visited. With some it was harder than with others. Facing twenty retired graduates and their wives regarding suspiciously the Michelin-starred restaurant’s amuse bouche of pigeon liver confit on brioche (“Howda ya eat this anyway?”), they seemed unlikely to enjoy stories of the establishment’s early history as a bordello.

Something was needed to break the ice. Fortunately, I recognised a lady in the group. My sister-in-law confirmed she was indeed a Mrs. Hart, though the name didn’t ring the bells it did for me. In imagination, I still saw her, a lissom twenty-four-year old, posed in photogenic rags on Hollywood’s version of a desert island while a regiment of showgirls waved ostrich feather fans in imitation of the surf. 

Rising to greet the guests, I told them how glad I was to confirm something that had tantalised me for decades. Watching Mitchell Leisen’s Murder at the Vanities on Australian TV, I’d noted the sign over the stage door entrance to Earl Carroll’s theatre claiming that “Through These Portals Pass the Most Beautiful Women in the World.” At last, I told the group, I could confirm that this was true, since the still-beautiful star of Murder at the Vanities was among us.

Kitty Carlisle Hart responded like a trouper to this barefaced lie, and invited me to sit with her throughout the meal - probably to avoid having to eat it. Instead, she beguiled me with gossip about her brief Hollywood career, her marriage to author/producer Moss Hart, her subsequent appearances on TV, radio and the stage, as well as her friendship with, it seemed, every showbiz luminary of the century. A year later, in her vast apartment on Manhattan’s upper east side, she led me through a collection of paintings executed by some of these people. Graphic art clearly lost nothing when Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harpo Marx and Noel Coward chose different professions.

Victor McLaglen, Toby Wing, Jack Oakie

Mme Hart’s film career, culminating in a stint as the Marx Brothers’ foil in A Night at the Opera,was entirely consistent with the remaining cast of Murder at the Vanities. That one of its most recognizable names today, excepting that of bandleader Duke Ellington, is giggling blonde showgirl Toby Wing tells us something about the rest. Danish male lead Carl Brisson faded after a handful of roles. Gertrude Michael’s sultry torch-song voice came with a sullen manner that, along with her alcoholism, condemned her to roles as a bitch, that in Vanities being the best.  

Among non-singers, Victor McLaglen as a blustering cop and Jack Oakie as the harassed stage manager hog the limelight, edging out Charles Middleton, who would shortly trade in this film’s white spangled tail-coat for the no less gaudy outfit of Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. For connoisseurs of celebrity cameos, director Mitchell Leisen can be glimpsed as the pit-band conductor. Also in the chorus are Alan Ladd, Denis O’Keeffe, Anne Sheridan and Lucille Ball, though anyone who spots them has better eyes than mine.

It’s by decor and ensembles that such shows stand or fall, and those for Vanities are impressive. As Dick Powell sang for Paramount’s down-market competitor, Warner Brothers, “What do we go for?/ Go see a show for?/ Tell the truth-you go to see/ Those beautiful dames.” Earl Carroll, whose stage spectacles earned him the title “The Troubadour of the Nude,” boasted that the women in his trademark “Curtain of Girls” were both more numerous and more naked than those of rivals Florenz Ziegfield and George White.

Murder at the Vanities confirms this claim as accurately as the censor, even in those pre-Code days, would allow. In particular, the Human Powder Box number (right) features a succession of art deco perfume bottles, nude-festooned, and powder boxes that open on mirrored interiors reflecting near-naked girls inside. 

Gertrude Michael, Sweet Marijuana

Nothing, however, earned as much notoriety as Sweet Marijuana, crooned by Gertrude Michael with a group of guitar-playing Mexicans in sombreros and serapes. (Kitty Carlisle insisted she’d never heard of marijuana when they recorded the number, and believed it was a Mexican musical instrument. It’s unlikely Gertrude Michael was so innocent.) Why Mexicans, you ask? This is explained when a backdrop of cactuses produces a crop of giant cactus flowers, nestled inside each of which is a topless girl. At the climax of the number, one girl screams, since blood is dripping onto her breast from a murdered woman in the flies.

Leisen, who began as costume designer for Cecil B. DeMille, had an exceptional eye for design, but because of his bisexuality frequently clashed with such directors as Billy Wilder, who derided him as “a window-dresser.” Hollywood gossip asserts that Leisen managed the very private parties CB threw at his Paradise Ranch. That male guests were issued at the door with loose satin tunics of the kind worn in their lighter moments by Russian grand dukes suggests a refined sense of style. (Dress for ladies was more casual, and, indeed, optional.) Not so much Pre-Code as no Code at all.

Cactus Flower

Editor's Notes: For some other recent thoughts on Mitchell Leisen by David Hare click here .
A copy of Murder at the Vanities is streaming on OK.ru if you click here