A BOLOGNA DIARY - IL CINEMA RITROVATO DAY 7 - Pictures at the Exhibition

 

Molly Haskell and Ross Barnard

Geoff Gardner, Simon Taaffe, Grace Boschetti, Neil McGlone
at Donatello

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)	***

A BOLOGNA DIARY - IL CINEMA RITROVATO DAY 5 - Nostalgia - Vittorio Cottafavi - Asta Nielsen - Updated critics' chart

OK here are a couple of photos  that came to light as dinners were consumed and nostalgia reigned. They both feature my friends Ross Barnard and Tony Rayns. One was taken in 1986 at the Sydney Film Festival  and the other last night after a splendid Cantonese noshup at Chung Fai just off Via Dell Independenza in Bologna, where we were welcomed back with open arms. 

Today featured more Mitchell Leisen, his frenetic Swing High, Swing Low and a repeat of one of the lesser Daisuke Ito's. Treasures were found elsewhere and each had a full house. Vittorio Cottafavi first came to attention way, way back. I reckon it was an out of the blue notice in an early edition of Movie. "Who is Vittorio Cottafavi" rang out when it became known he had directed a number of those Italian sword and sandal epics that were briefly a thing. Il Cinema Ritrovato unearthed a 57 minute TV film apparently made as part of a TV series called "Racconti dell'Italia di oggi". The catalogue comes up with the title The Cutting of the Forest. The film itself simply says "Woodcutting". It's about a widowed 35 year old played by Gian-Maria who wins contracts to cut down forests. His two kids are hardly ever seen, looked after by his sister. His crew of workers are articulate about the ills of society. Rivetting and a model of a kind of state-sponsored filming of society that is rarely seen. 

Die Fremde Vogel 

Then there was Asta Nielsen in a beautifully restored copy of her Die Fremde Vogel. The catalogue tells us that the film was backed by an unprecedented promotional effort, Urban Gad's Der fremde Vogel was released simultaneously in several German cities on November 11, 1911. Part of the first "Asta Nielsen series," the film marked a radical departure in early cinema, establishing the star system as the foundation for a new production model in Germany based on feature films. Produced by Deutsche Bioscop GmbH for Projektions-AG Union (PAGU), the internationally successful series and its pioneering promotional campaigns helped establish Nielsen as one of the first stars of European cinema. Mashe Matzke's overlong intro gave a lot of detail already in the printed catalogue. The film gripped from the start - very subtle for its time. 

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 (Joseph Losey )		**
The Damned (Luchino Visconti)		***
Die Fremde Vogel (Urban Gad)	***
Senso (Luchino Visconti)		****
Lenny (Bob Fosse)		***