Noir City: Los Angeles vs. New York

The Noir Festival at the Egyptian Theatre is back again and LA noir is dukin' it out with New York. Though they're showing a great collection of films, my prejudice leans to the films set in Los Angeles, especially those featuring location shots in downtown neighborhoods. I've been writing my senior thesis on the relationship between booster rhetoric and downtown narratives in fiction and film so, of course, this is right up my street. Two films in particular, fit the bill: Sam Fuller's 1959 Crimson Kimono set in Little Tokyo and Robert Aldrich's Hollywood noir The Big Knife (1955). The Big Knife screened on April 14 (woops!) but you can rent it from Netflix, contrary to what American Cinematheque says and Crimson Kimono is showing on Friday April 20 at 7:30 pm.

Check out their website for a complete list of what's showing here.

Joan Crawford: They called her a scar-faced she-devil!

Not really. That's just the tagline for A Woman's Face. Today is Joan Crawford's birthday and in honor of that fact what could be better than a film that pairs her with Conrad Veidt? Directed by George Cukor, A Woman's Face (1941) stars Joan Crawford as Anna Holm, a scheming con woman shut off from society because of a disfiguring facial scar. When a plastic surgeon (Melvyn Douglas) removes the scar, Anna is determined to start over but a chance at love from dashing playboy Torsten Barring (Conrad Veidt) draws her into a murder plot and a return to her criminal past.

Though I must confess I'm not a huge Crawford fan, I do have several favorites. Here's a short list:
The Women (1939)
Joan is Crystal Allen, a shopgirl having an affair with husband of society matron Mary Haines (Norman Shearer). When Haines hears the gossip around town she hops a train for a Reno divorce and Crystal marries the ex, but when Crystal steps out on her meal ticket with cowboy singer Buck Winston its back to the perfume counter for her!
Mildred Pierce (1945)
After her cheating husband leaves her, Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) proves she can become independent and successful with her own chain of restaurants, but in order to please her money hungry daughter she must sell out and marry a man she doesn't love. Blackmail, murder, revenge!
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Joan is Vienna"Gun-Queen of the Arizona frontier." When four men hold up a stagecoach and kill a man, the town officials come to Vienna's saloon to grab four of her friends. Vienna stands strong against them and is aided by the presence of old acquaintance Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), who is not what he seems.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Joan plays Blanche Hudson a crippled actress living as a recluse in a Hollywood mansion with her aging child star sister Jane (Bette Davis). A combo psychological thriller, black comedy, and all out camp melodrama. Watch Crawford and Davis duke it out!

TO DO IN LOS ANGELES: Some Like It Hot

Is it your fondest dream to watch the greatest American comedy on the big screen and in the presence of an appreciative audience? If it is, you're in luck because Wednesday night Some Like It Hot is showing at the ArcLight. Written by I. A. L. Diamond and directed by Billy Wilder, Some Like It Hot (1959) stars Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Joe E. Brown, and George Raft in one of the greatest of all screwball comedies. A spoof on 1920s gangster films and slapstick, Some Like it Hot plays with gender, identity, and disguise and was condemned by the Catholic League of Decency (a heck of a recommendation in itself) for challenging the production code with its use of innuendo and controversial sexual and social themes.

Two struggling musicians, Joe and Jerry (Curtis and Lemmon), are on the run from a Chicago mob boss after witnessing the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Spats Columbo (Raft) orders their execution but they escape and in desperation join an all-girl band on their way to Florida. "Brand new" girls Josephine and Geraldine, er...Daphne, run into "Sugar" Kane Kowalczyk (Monroe), the band's Polish-American ukelele playing singer and it only gets more improbable from there.

Some Like It Hot will be shown at 8 pm on Wednesday March 21 at the ArcLight Theatre in Hollywood. Tickets are $11, $10 for ArcLight, AFI and Skirball members, on-site parking is $2 for four hours with validation. To order advance tickets, go to www.arclightcinemas.com, call 323.464.4226 or visit ArcLight Hollywood's box office at 6360 W Sunset Blvd. (at Ivar). Admission prices may vary depending on event.

Conrad Veidt as Ivan the Terrible in Waxworks

Paul Leni's 1924 film Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett) stars Emil Jannings as The Caliph, Conrad Veidt as Ivan the Terrible, and Werner Krauss as Jack the Ripper in a story about a young writer (William Dieterle) who is hired by a carnival promoter to write stories about each of his wax figures. The first story about the Harun al Raschid and a young Baker's wife is wonderful, primarily for its set design, which depicts a fantasy Arabia of mushroom-shaped houses connected by miniature stairways and catwalks. The second story is about Ivan the Terrible who, habitually sentencing his enemies to death, orders the execution of the court chemist. The chemist decides to get his revenge by poisoning the Czar, but is interrupted after writing his name on an hourglass. Seeing his name there, Ivan is driven insane by the idea that he is about to die. The final story is not written by the young writer, but dreamt by him. Having fallen asleep while writing he dreams that the carnival promoter's beautiful daughter is being pursued by Jack the Ripper.

I rented this movie primarily to see Conrad Veidt's performance as Ivan the Terrible since I've been on this jag lately to see everything he ever made. You may have noticed this. The film itself is not bad. Like many silents it's a little slow in spots, but Veidt's performance as Ivan the Terrible is really extraordinary. The scene where Ivan finds his name written on the chemist's hourglass is fascinating. You can see him going mad as he keeps turning the hourglass over and over in an attempt to prolong his life. It's the kind of thing lesser actors would have turned into satire, but in Veidt's performance it is truly magnificent.

THIS JUST OUT: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

A great example of British kitchen sink realism, Tony Richardson's 1962 "angry young man" film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, has just been released on DVD. Colin Smith (Tom Courteney) is a bitter young man from a working class family. Uninterested in school and determined not to follow his father into factory work, Colin and his friend Mike (James Bolam) make their pocket money through petty crime. When they're arrested for the robbery of a bakery and sentenced to reform school, the Governor of the school (Michael Redgrave) takes a keen interest in Colin, but he cares less for his rehabilitation than his gifts as a broken-field runner. Colin finds himself torn between the need to please his captors and play the game and his determination not to participate in what he sees as a corrupt system.

Considered an example of British New Wave filmmaking, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner owes a lot to the innovations and themes of French New Wave films (The 400 Blows especially), such as long tracking shots, jump cuts, and the use of handheld cameras, but it also shares its focus on themes of individual angst. Having watched his father work for the local factory all his life only to die of a work-related illness, Smith has a clear understanding of working class oppression. Smith expresses a Marxist view of class inequity. As a member of the working class he feels that whether by working or by spending money his actions only go toward enriching the powerful and assisting his own oppression. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a thoughtful film, socially engaged, artistically skillful, and extremely relevant in today's corporate/consumer culture.

Douglas Sirk: The Far Side of Paradise at American Cinematheque

Imitation of Life, All I Desire, Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, melodrama never got any better than in the hands of "weepies" master Douglas Sirk. In celebration of Sirk's "ability to transform often ludicrous material into sublime, multi-layered narratives" American Cinematheque will be showing nine of his films from March 1through March 4 at the Egyptian in Hollywood and from March 15 through 21 at the Aero in Santa Monica. Though they're showing all of Sirk's most famous melodramas, they're also showing several of his earlier and lesser known films as well, many of them not available on DVD. Bring your hanky!

Series Schedule at the Eqyptian Theatre
Series Schedule at the Aero

"…the word ‘melodrama’ has rather lost its meaning nowadays: people tend to lose the ‘melos’ in it, the music…Most great plays are based on melodrama situations, or have melodramatic endings…but craziness is very important…This is the dialectic – there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art." – Douglas Sirk

Imitation of Lifelessness at Bright Lights Film Journal
All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind at Images
Weepies at GreenCine
Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film

The Further Adventures of a Conrad Veidt Devotee: Contraband

Contraband (1940) was the first movie Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger fully collaborated on after making The Spy in Black the year before. A comic thriller set in a London blackout, Conrad Veidt plays Captain Andersen, a stern, imposing man who has a taste for adventure and a liking for smart, “troublesome” women. Captain Andersen commands the Helvig, a Danish freighter that's been delayed in port by British customs agents on the lookout for military contraband. While the ship is docked, two passengers slip ashore, though they've been ordered to stay aboard, Mrs. Sorensen (Valerie Hobson) and Mr. Pidgeon (Esmond Knight). The Captain has already had trouble from Mrs. Sorenson, a willful Englishwoman who believes that rules are made for other people, and his blood is up. Affronted by his passengers’ disobedience and, by law, responsible for his passengers while in port, Captain Andersen goes ashore to find them. After catching up with Mrs. Sorenson in London, circumstances reveal that she’s a British spy who, with Andersen, falls into the hands of a Nazi cell operating out of the basement of a Soho nightclub.

While the plot is reminiscent of early Hitchcock, the style and tone of the film is pure Powell. Rather than take itself seriously, Contraband’s thriller plot is constantly lightened up by tongue-in-cheek humor and romantic badinage (as well as a fair amount of what Ken Russell has called "bondage overtones"). Though it's not as developed visually as some of his later films, you can see the beginnings of certain stylistic tendencies in the film. Contraband contains several shots and sequences that appear in his later films, such as the eerie, fog enveloped men working on ships in the harbor, for instance, and the combination of a rapid close up of a clock face and the blaring of a train whistle from I Know Where I'm Going!.

Contraband seems to be overlooked by most viewers, even fans of Powell and Pressburger, as a pale imitation of a 1930s era Hitchcock thriller, but though it may be one of their lesser films, I thoroughly enjoyed its humor and felt it had all of the elements, whether fully developed or not, that one expects of an Archers film.

Senses of Cinema Review by Alexander C. Ives

Get Your Art House On: Fifty Years of Janus Films at LACMA

From March 2 to April 7 LACMA will be showing new 35 mm prints of 23 of Janus Films' essential art house collection. All your favorites from film studies are here: Rashomon, The 400 Blows, The Seventh Seal, L'Avventura, and Knife in the Water as well as some films you may have missed. The selection focuses mainly on films from the 1950s and 60s, but also includes films from beyond, such as The Rules of the Game and, oddly, Pygmalion. Double Features on Friday and Saturday evenings start at 7:30 pm at LACMA's Leo S. Bing Theatre.

Tickets & Information
$9; $6 for museum and AFI members, seniors (62+), and students with valid ID. Price includes both films in a double bill, except where noted. $5 for the second film only with no advance purchase.

Please note: many programs sell out. Tickets are on sale now and may be purchased at the museum box office. For information call the box office at (323) 857-6010. Purchase of a film ticket includes entrance to the galleries.

Conrad Veidt in The Indian Tomb

In answer to your question...No, I haven't tired of Conrad Veidt yet. I'm still enthralled. My most recent experience was the 1921 epic The Indian Tomb written by Fritz Lang, but directed by Joe May. Conrad Veidt stars as the vengeful but brooding Ayan III, the Maharajah of Bengal, who has a diabolical plot against his unfaithful wife (Erna Morena) and her British lover (Paul Richter). Ayan vows to build a tomb to his dead love and hires English architect Herbert Rowland (Olaf Fonss) to build it for him. Sworn to secrecy Rowland leaves abruptly, but his fiancee Irene (Mia May) follows him to India where danger and adventure begin.

At 3 1/2 hours long, I was somewhat hesitant to start watching this film, but it's like a good, old fashioned serial full of chases, danger, and women in distress and since it's set in India tigers, pythons, and yogis. And the key here is to treat it like a serial and watch it over a period of days. There is simply no way to watch it all at one sitting, you'll go mad. That being said, once you get used to the tempo and style of the film it really draws you in. One of the most expensive films of the 1920s, The Indian Tomb has impressive special effects and elaborate and beautiful sets that seem to go on forever.

The best thing about The Indian Tomb, however, is Conrad Veidt. Easily the best actor in the film, his portrayal of Ayan is fascinating and complex. Though clearly the "villain," Veidt imbues his character with pathos, eliciting our sympathy and our interest. Veidt's performance is highly stylized, using slow, almost dance-like movements, making him mysterious and otherworldly in comparison to those around him. With his piercing eyes, almost skeletal frame, jewels, velvet and satin clothes, Veidt portrays Ayan as the western image of a feminized oriental, emotional and irrational, and subject to cruel whims and desires. Though Ayan is never "manly" in the western sense, the scene where he suddenly appears masquerading as an androgynous temple deity emphasizes this representation.

Some reading to complicate your fun:
Orientalism by Edward Said
The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha

Love Gone Wrong for Valentine's Day

I love a theme and apparently the folks at Kino Video do, too. In order to celebrate the "romance and heartbreak" of Valentine's Day they're taking 30% off their series of "Love Gone Wrong" films. Included are the G. W. Pabst/Louise Brooks classic Diary of a Lost Girl, Fritz Lang's 1945 noir Scarlet Street, and the 1924 Carl Dreyer silent Michael, as well as more contemporary films, such as Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, Rajiv Menon's I Have Found It, and Claude Chabrol's Betty. So if Valentine's Day soppiness leaves you feeling bitter and mildly ill, at least you know that the understanding film hounds at Kino Video are thinking of you.

All Through the Night

All Through the Night (1941) is a delightful romp through wartime propaganda. A comedy thriller with Bogart as a wisecracking New York gambler who stumbles onto a group of Nazi fifth colmunists who are planning to sabotage a battleship anchored in the harbor. Bogart rallies his small group of lovable underworld gangsters in a sudden burst of patriotism to overthrow a rather large group of Nazi operatives. All Through the Night is a rather generic wartime film that relies almost completely on its major characters playing parts they'd played in many films before. Conrad Veidt is the suave, almost friendly, but dangerous Nazi leader, Bogart plays his usual fast talking tough guy slightly more tongue in cheek than usual, and Lorre is a somewhat scummy lower echelon bad guy in the vein of Joe Cairo or Senor Ugarte. Likewise, Judith Anderson, Jane Darwell, Frank McHugh, and William Demerest all play parts we've all seen them play in better films. As a result, All Through the Night is a very comfortable, familiar experience, along the lines of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movies they used to show on Tom Hatten's Family Film Festival when I was a kid. There are several good lines in the film, mostly spoken by Bogart and his cronies, which taken with the performances themselves make the film worthwhile.

My obsession with Conrad Veidt continues

In an attempt to deny the fact that school has started again I have provided myself with a pointless obsession, the films of Conrad Veidt. Between those crazy kids at netflix and the used VHS tapes to be found on amazon, I am racking up quite a number of wasted hours watching movies no one even seems to know exist. So far, since The Man Who Laughs, I have seen Different From the Others (Germany, 1919) and All Through the Night (US, 1941). There's a contrast for you! Different From the Others is about a gay concert violinist Paul Korner (Conrad Veidt) who falls in love with one of his students and is blackmailed by a predatory criminal (Reinhold Schunzel) who threatens to expose him to the police. (Under Paragraph 175, Germany's anti-gay legislation, homosexuals could by imprisoned for up to five years) A sort of sex hygiene film, the well meant but didactic lecturing of "Dr. Magnus Hirschfield of the Institute for Sexual Science" tends to interfere with the storyline, being, as it is, only halfheartedly integrated into the plot. It's an interesting film, however, primarily because it reflects that brief moment of openness in Weimar Germany before Hitler came to power. The acting tends to be rather melodramatic by today's standards (Veidt spends rather a lot of time looking woebegone and lost with a hand to his head) and the makeup is a scream (I think we are supposed to intuit from the dark circles around his eyes that Reinhold Schunzel is the bad guy) but there are aspects of the film which make it worth seeing. Censored by the German government and later burned by the Nazis as "degenerate," a print of the film was found in the Ukraine and restored by the Filmmuseum Munchen. Missing sections of the film have been replaced with explanatory intertitles and still photos.

Tomorrow: All Through the Night

Conrad Veidt: The Man Who Laughs

If you’re like me, you’ve only seen Conrad Veidt in a couple of films: as the sleepwalker in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), as the mean, nasty Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942), and the equally evil Jaffar in The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Until now, I had never seen any of the films he’d made in the twenty years between making a groundbreaking German Expressionist silent and playing smug bad guys in British and Hollywood movies. I had some recollection that he’d made some spy flicks for Michael Powell at some point, but I’d never seen them. So while looking for silent horror movies to watch on Netflix, I found the 1928 American silent horror classic The Man Who Laughs.

An adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel, Veidt plays the role of Gwynplaine, a nobleman's son, who is kidnapped by a political enemy and mutilated by a gypsy "surgeon" who carves his mouth into a hideous grin. Left behind by the gypsies as the flee the country, Gwynplaine wanders through a landscape of hangman’s gallows and snowy cliffs surrounding by poor people freezing to death in the snow. After rescuing a baby from her dead mother’s arms, he finds shelter with an old man who takes pity on him and his charge. Years later, Gwynplaine and his “family” have become a traveling circus act, in which he plays a clown, laughed at and taunted by the audience. He and the blind girl (Mary Philbin The Phantom of the Opera) fall in love, but they almost lose each other when Gwynplaine is drawn back into the world of political intrigue. He becomes the plaything of a jaded duchess (Olga Baclanova Freaks), and his enemies renew their efforts to control him.

If silent movies are too remote and melodramatic for you, this film may change your mind. Like many films of the time, it does seem to move rather slowly since we are used to a faster pace and more action, but The Man Who Laughs is visually quite beautiful in the way that German Expressionist films always are and Veidt’s portrayal of Gwynplaine is impressive. Considering that the only tools a silent actor really had were his facial expressions and his body language, Veidt managed to convey a great emotional expressiveness through only his eyes and hands, much of his face maintaining a continuous smile throughout the film. (From the photo, you can see how Veidt’s Gwynplaine must have been the origin for the Batman character The Joker).

Created in the same vein as other Universal successes like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera (adaptations of other French novels in which a disfigured man looks for love from a sympathetic woman), Carl Laemmle hired two influential artists of the German Expressionist School: actor Conrad Veidt and director Paul Leni (Waxworks). German Expressionist aesthetics, as seen in The Man Who Laughs, laid the foundation for several popular American film genres such as noir and Universal horror films like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man.

The Kino DVD has several extras, but for me the most intriguing was a German short entitled “Filmstadt Hollywood” which contains home movies of Conrad Veidt relaxing with fellow European emigres Greta Garbo, Emil Jannings, Paul Leni, Carl Laemmle, and Camilla Horn.

The German Hollywood Connection

THIS JUST OUT Ballet Russes

Dayna Goldfine and David Geller’s 2005 documentary about Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo and the subsequent “ballet wars” is out on DVD. Good news for all of you who (like me) weren’t able to go see it when it played last year for fleeting moments in far flung and obscure theatres across the country. (Honestly, it wasn’t that far away, but cross basin traffic made it seem so).

After briefly acquainting the viewer with the history of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Goldfine and Geller detail how the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo was created as a continuation of the Diaghilev ballet and endured in various forms for over 30 years. The ballet companies encouraged some of the most unique artistic collaborations in the twentieth century and brought ballet to countries that had no previous exposure to it. Without Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the two companies that followed, there would be no ballet tradition in the U.S. nor would the talents of such genius as George Balanchine be known today. Through interviews with surviving members of the ballets and archival photos and film footage, the film captures a fascinating time in the history of dance. I’m sure Ballet Russes would have been even more enjoyable on the big screen, but you take what you can get.

Ballet Russes Site
Diaghilev Ballets Russes Season by Season
Frederic Franklin: 30 Years of Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo
A Ballet History
Danilova Collection at the Library of Congress

Books of Interest:
Irina: Ballet, Life and Love by Irina Baronova
The Ballets Russes: Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo 1932-1952
Leonide Massine and the Twentieth Century Ballet
Massine: A Biography
Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina

On DVD:
Ballets Russes
Balanchine
Picasso and Dance
Gaite Parisienne

TO DO IN LOS ANGELES “Where were you in ’82?” American Hardcore at the ArcLight

Feeling nostalgic? Longing to go back and revisit your punk rock past? Well, pull the docs out of the closet and head on over to the Arc Light because American Hardcore is showing tonight at 8pm. Directed by Paul Rachman from a screenplay by Stephen Blush (from his book of the same name) American Hardcore covers the history of the first generation (or only generation, depending on your viewpoint) of American punk, from 1980 to 1986, and charts the rise of bands like Black Flag and The Misfits. The film uses archival footage interspersed with interviews with members of 7 Seconds, The Adolescents, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, and DOA. Rachman and Blush explore how Reagan-era conservativism created a tribe of disaffected youth who saw no hope in government institutions, leftist politics, or any global ideologies.

I feel compelled to warn you, however, this film does contain interviews with Henry Rollins, self-appointed expert-on-all-things-punk, and prolonged exposure to Rollins Pontification can be hazardous to your health. I know it is to mine.

Q&A after screening with filmmakers Paul Rachman and Steven Blush, Keith Morris of The Circle Jerks, and Jack Grisham of TSOL.

ArcLight Hollywood is located at 6360 W. Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 8:00 PM
Tickets are $11, $10 for ArcLight, AFI and Skirball members, on-site parking is $2 for four hours with validation. To order advance tickets, go to www.arclightcinemas.com, call 323.464.4226 or visit ArcLight Hollywood's box office at 6360 W Sunset Blvd. (at Ivar). Admission prices may vary depending on event.

View Trailer

TO DO IN LOS ANGELES Strange Dreams of Present and Future

On Saturday, September 23 at 7:30pm, American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre will be showing a group of film shorts that deal with life in the near future. While I have not seen the majority of the films, I am pleased to see that James Oxford’s “Smartcard” (US, 16 min) is among them. I had the privilege to see this film last January at Smogdance Film Festival where I was “working” as one of the festival’s judges and consider it one of the best films screened there.

Smartcard is about a world in which every aspect of life is integrated by the smartcard, a sort of credit card, keycard, and personal information record in one. Not only do you use your smartcard to get into your car and have it drive you, but to purchase goods, record your medical history, and every other sort of personal information. Your card knows the quickest way to drive you home, what food is lacking in your refrigerator, and what is best for you. In short, smartcard manages you, helping you to make decisions that enrich your life and make you a better consumer, I mean person. Tired from work and want to put off going to the market? Smartcard has decided that it would be better for you to do it now. Craving a candy bar at the minimart, smartcard knows that your doctor has determined that junk food is bad for you. While the smartcard starts by being annoyingly “helpful” and manipulative, by the end "Smartcard" suggests that there are more troubling reasons to be wary of integrated computer information systems.

Other films being shown are Jonathan Joffe’s "Cost of Living" (Canada, 10 min), which examines how much a man is willing to pay for possible immortality. Christopher Leone’s "K-7" (US, 18 min), in which an ordinary job interview becomes a battle for life or death when Vincent Kincaid rates a high score on his psychological profile. Jeremy Haccoun’s "Paradox" (UK, 19 min). Are the two gentlemen in a well? Are they in the present or in medieval times? Michael Lucas’ "Turn" (Australia, 11 min) a surreal comedy about love, traffic and survival.

Films will be screened in the Spielberg Theatre (the smaller one in the Egyptian, not the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre) at the Egyptian with a discussion with directors Christopher Leone (K-7) and James Oxford (Smartcard) to follow.

Grauman’s Hollywood Egyptian Theatre is located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard between Las Palmas and McCadden, just east of Highland Avenue in Hollywood.
Tickets are General Admission $9.00 (unless otherwise noted), Cinematheque Members $6.00, Seniors 65+/Students w/valid ID $7. 24-HOUR PROGRAM INFO: 323.466.3456

American Cinematheque
Program Information

Celebrate the Swedish Sphinx’s Birthday on September 18

"I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is a whole world of difference."

With her breathtaking beauty and enigmatic persona, Greta Garbo remains the ultimate Hollywood icon. As MGM’s highest-paid star, Garbo had approval of story, costar, director and cinematographer, often closing the set to visitors and crewmembers. For fifteen years, Garbo wielded power that few could match—yet she was often at odds with the system that made her a phenomenon. She was famous for her reclusive lifestyle, which became part of the Garbo mystique. Except at the very beginning of her career, she granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres, and answered no fan mail.

While Greta Garbo made over 25 films in Hollywood, many of them are unfamiliar to contemporary audiences due to a prejudice against silent films. But these are the films that made her famous and established her legendary association with John Gilbert.

THE TORRENT (1926) Garbo’s first film in the U.S. Directed by Monta Bell, Garbo plays Leonara, a Spanish peasant girl who is sent to Paris and becomes an opera singer.

FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1926) Directed by Clarence Brown and costarring John Gilbert. This marked Garbo’s first collaboration with director Clarence Brown as well as her first film with John Gilbert. This story of fallen love broke box office records across the country and established Garbo and Gilbert as great lovers of the silver screen.

LOVE (1927) Directed by Edmund Goldberg. The tagline for this film read simply, “Garbo and Gilbert in Love.” Garbo’s first version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, made with two endings, happy and sad.

THE KISS (1929) Directed by Jacques Feyder. This was the last film MGM made without dialogue (it used a soundtrack with music and sound-effects only), and marked the end of an era. A courtroom drama in which Garbo is tried for the murder of her jealous husband.

If you can’t sit through silent films, Garbo successfully transitioned into talkies to make the following films:

ANNA CHRISTIE (1930) Directed by Clarence Brown. Garbo Talks! Garbo’s low, husky voice was heard on screen for the first time in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. The movie was a huge success, but Garbo personally hated her performance. Audiences waited 16 minutes for her entrance to hear her say, “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.”

ROMANCE (1930) Directed by Clarence Brown. Garbo plays prima donna Rita Cavallini in this period drama. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for this film as well as Anna Christie, but lost to Norma Shearer in The Divorcee.

QUEEN CHRISTINA (1934) Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. A historical drama that takes considerable liberty with fact. Christina inherits the Swedish throne in 1632 at the age of 6 after her father’s death on the battlefield. When she refuses to marry and produce an heir, she is forced to abdicate at the age of 28. This film tones down Christina’s lesbianism, but portrays her as a progressive woman of intelligence and sophistication who could not bow to the limitations placed on women of her time. One of my favorites.

CAMILLE (1936) Directed by George Cukor. Her performance as the doomed courtesan in Camille was called the finest ever recorded on film. Garbo was nominated for Academy Award for Best Actress again.

NINOTCHKA (1939) Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Garbo in her first comedic role, Ninotchka was one of her favorite films and for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress again. Garbo plays a Soviet agent in Paris who falls in love with a French nobleman. Another favorite.

"Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera." —Bette Davis

TO DO IN LOS ANGELES AFI at ArcLight Presents Auntie Mame

"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death."

On Wednesday, September 6 at 8 pm AFI at the ArcLight will be showing the classic Hollywood comedy Auntie Mame. Starring Rosalind Russell, Forrest Tucker, Coral Browne, Fred Clark, and Roger Smith, Auntie Mame (Rosalind Russell) is a free-spirited socialite from the Roaring ‘20s forced to settle down and raise her nephew Patrick (Roger Smith) when her conservative brother dies. Mame immediately sets forth to expose her sheltered charge to all the wonders of New York, but a stuffy executor appointed by Patrick's father tries to protect the boy from experiencing too much of Mame's unconventional lifestyle. Despite his father’s preparations, Patrick and Mame quickly become devoted to each other and journey through the Great Depression collecting madcap adventures.

Tickets are $11, $10 for ArcLight, AFI and Skirball members, on-site parking is $2 for four hours with validation. To order advance tickets, go to www.arclightcinemas.com, call 323.464.4226, or visit ArcLight Hollywood's box office at 6360 W Sunset Blvd (at Ivar). Admission prices may vary depending on event.

Experience the irrepressible Mame in the original Patrick Dennis novels: Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade and Around the World with Auntie Mame

Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis
But Darling, I'm Your Auntie Mame!

FILM REVIEW Hour of the Furnaces Part 1

El Grupo Cine Liberacion’s 1968 film, The Hour of the Furnaces, directed by Fernando Solanas, is an overview of how colonialism and neo-colonialism have disenfranchised the Latin American people from the Spanish conquest to the contemporary period as seen from a radical left perspective. Broken into sections in which it discusses different effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the final section provides a solution for the entire range of issues at work in Argentina: the transfer of power from the ruling class to the people through armed revolution.

Subtitled "Notes on Neo-Colonialism, Violence and Liberation," The Hour of the Furnaces juxtaposes quotes by writers and political figures such as Jean Paul Sartre, Aime Cesaire, Juan Peron, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Simon Bolivar, Frantz Fanon, and others, with documentary footage, archival stills, and voiceover narration in a Soviet montage-style agitprop piece. The Hour of the Furnaces focuses its attention largely on the various forces that work to impoverish and oppress the Argentinean people and sites the agrarian oligarchy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the military, and a corrupt government as the contemporary forces of neo-colonialism that maintain power over the wealth of the entire nation in the form of land, industry, and labor. While the oligarchy owns the overwhelming majority of farmland in the country, the bourgeoisie control trade and industry centered in Buenos Aires. The interests of both are served by the government and its military that legalize their policies and financial interests at the expense of the workers.

In addition to the economic system of oppression is the ideological oppression created by the triumvirate of church, mass media, and the importation of imperialist cultural products. The film makes a comparison between the church and faith healers, mind readers, and charlatans to show how the church benefits the ruling class by “sowing confusion” and replacing indigenous cultural practices with western culture through missionaries working in rural communities.
Likewise, the mass media serves to distract the people from a true understanding of their powerlessness in society by disseminating the ideology of the ruling class while suppressing discontent and dissent among the people. In the most arresting section of the film, graphic shots of cows being led through a slaughterhouse are interspersed with shots of advertising stills and young people dancing and buying records. American popular music is played continuously in this scene while the narrator echoes the ideas of Theodor Adorno, namely, that all mass media serves to keep the masses obedient to market forces as well as distracting the people from their oppression and exploitation. While the people think they are making their own decisions about what to buy and what cultural products to enjoy, they, like the cows in the slaughterhouse, are being led by a manipulating force to act against their own interests in favor of those of the ruling class. The film’s attitude toward this behavior is not entirely sympathetic, however. It suggests that by accepting the products of the mass media, Argentinean people have become complicit in the system of economic and cultural imperialism.

All of these sections taken together lead the filmmakers to their concluding section, The Choice. In this section, the filmmakers proclaim that the only way to correct the false history of colonialism and neo-colonialism is to “replace imperial violence with revolutionary violence” and suggests that martyrdom to the revolution will free not only future generations, but the one martyred as well. After the voiceover narration ends, a still of their ideal revolutionary martyr, Che Guevara, is shown in death.

While the statistics and much of the other specific information provided in this film now function only historically, aspects of The Hour of the Furnaces are perhaps more accurate today that they were in 1968, especially in its exploration of the effects of American cultural hegemony and its economic dependence upon cheap foreign labor. In addition, its indictment of the United States’ policy of supporting repressive governments through material and economic means shows the filmmakers’ tremendous foresight considering the events that would take place in Central America and elsewhere over the next twenty years. The film’s main importance lies, however, in its detailed explication of the causes and effects of neo-colonialism in Argentina and in the dramatic ways in which Solanas delivers its meaning.

Though this film is not available on DVD, one can sometimes find it in university a/v departments or collections and it is occasionally shown in film festivals around the country. Should it ever be shown at a festival in your area, I urge you to see it.

Vincent Canby's 1971 NY Times Review

THIS JUST OUT: The Jayne Mansfield Collection

This newly released DVD set collects three of Jayne Mansfield’s late 1950s films: The Girl Can’t Help It, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and the lesser known and lesser quality Sheriff of Fractured Jaw. Why they didn’t include Kiss Them for Me instead only God and the marketing execs at Twentieth Century Fox could ever know.

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) co-stars Tom Ewell and Edmond O’Brien in a comedy about a down-and-out gangster who hires an alcoholic press agent to make his blonde bombshell girlfriend a recording star in 6 weeks. But what is he going to do when he finds out that she has no talent? And what is going to happen when the two fall in love?

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) co-stars Tony Randall, Betsy Drake, and Joan Blondell in a spoof of the TV advertising industry. Rockwell Hunter has found the perfect spokesmodel for Stay-Put lipstick, his big account. When Rita Marlowe, the famous actress with the oh-so-kissable lips, comes to New York he knows it’s his big chance, but in order to secure the account, Rock has to pretend to be Rita's "Lover Doll." Is Rock cut out to be a high power executive after all?

Sheriff Of Fractured Jaw (1958) A proper English gentleman, traveling in the American West, inadvertently stops an Indian attack on the stagecoach in which he is a passenger. When the stage gets to the nearest town, the raucous Fractured Jaw, it is being plagued by unruly cowboys, bandits, and marauding Indians. Our English gentleman quashes the mayhem and is appointed sheriff.

In addition to these three movies the DVD includes a 2001 documentary on Mansfield’s life as well as bonus extras on the constructed nature of Hollywood celebrity in the '50s and a discussion of how the Tashlin/Mansfield films reflect the concerns and ideas of 1950s America.

Official Jayne Mansfield Website
Jayne Mansfield on Find A Death
Jayne Mansfield Made a Career Being A Girl