Scarface (1932)

Screen shot from Universal DVD

WHO: Howard Hawks directed this.

WHAT: I believe this is the first Hawks film I ever watched as a Hawks film, (I'd seen Bringing Up Baby long before I'd heard the word auteur, or at least known what it meant). It still informs my ideas of that director's interest in men and women and the spaces they inhabit more than any other film, probably. Which makes sense, as it was usually cited by Hawks himself as his own favorite of his films. Richard Brody has collected a salient quote from a Joseph McBride book, while himself calling the film

by far the most visually inventive and tonally anarchic movie that Hawks made. Among other things, it’s a tribute to the freedom that independent producers afforded directors then—and still do today. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 7:45 PM.

WHY: Scarface is the ideal opening salvo in Elliot Lavine's I Wake Up Dreaming series of so-called "pre-code" films released before the enforcement of the a censorship code for Hollywood films began in 1934, which morphed into the MPAA rating system in 1968 (still in place and constantly obsessed over in certain quarters today). Lavine earned a reputation as one of Frisco Bay's most creative film programmers in part by putting together week-long or longer binges of these films to the Roxie Theatre beginning in the 1990s. Now, following on bringing last summer's successful series of film noir to the largest repertory screen in town, the Castro, Lavine launches a 14-title pre-code series in that venue, reserving each of the next six Wednesday nights for double- and triple-bills of films featuring sex, violence, political content and other subjects that would be taboo on American movie screens just a few years after they were made. I was able to interview Lavine briefly last week, and here is a transcript of part one of our discussion. Expect more of the interview in this space in coming weeks.

Hell On Frisco Bay: I noticed that this festival is focused very narrowly on films released during a twenty-two month period: November 1931 to September '33.

Elliot Lavine: Yeah. It's the center of the apple. Especially '32. '32 is a ground-breaking year, actually. Some of the best films were made in '31. My personal favorite was made in '31, which is Safe In Hell. But '32 is endless. You could do a whole festival. It's to pre-code what 1947 is to film noir.

HoFB: I think New York's Film Forum did a 1933 festival at one point.

EL: Not a shabby year either. You even find some good ones in 1934 before the boom came down. The Black Cat is one that came out that year.

HoFB: Why is this the center of the apple?

EL: Maybe because in '31 they were perfecting things. Getting away with murder. A code that nobody chose to enforce. And I'm sure they were feeling really frisky. Like European artists, they could do whatever they wanted. People in bed together, smoking opium, getting away with shit. It was really kind of unbridled. It was like the Wild West in the 1880s or something. I think at some point you have to peak. There's a zenith. Call Her Savage came out in 1932. The Story of Temple Drake. One after another, and all of them are just phenomenal. It's wide-ranging. It's not just sex shows; it's things like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Two Seconds- that's 1932. So it's film after film after film after film. And I think it was like the Alps, right up there at the peak. Which is not to say that '33 slipped off, but by '34 it was gone, so it gave you a very short window to measure. And you could almost get a micrometer in there and say, 'when did it peak'? 'Well, September 1932.'

HoFB: Do you have any theories on what was the impetus for making these kinds of films in the first place?

EL:  I would say it was a combination of knowing that they could get away with a lot; that nobody was going to enforce any kind of censorial nonsense on them, up to a point. I mean they can't have people fucking in them but they can allude to it.

HoFB: Or saying 'fuck.'

EL: Right, but they didn't care about that. They just wanted to be able to deal with adult themes in a way that translated to an audience, especially an audience that was being kicked to death by the Depression. That is a big component to why the films work so incredibly well. That layer of doom and despair. It's like World War II's relationship to film noir- a horrible crisis that is complicating everybody's lives. It's a dominant motif of the world. So many of the stories reflect that. Wild Boys of the Road more than any- now that's 1933. Probably more than any film of that generation. I think it's a combination of smart directors who are artistically valid and interesting guys, in an environment where people felt desperate and in need of stories that reflected their own reality. Who the fuck wants to see happy-go-lucky musicals all the time? That crowd was being taken care of. But the other people who were making hardly any, or no money, and they would try to scrounge to keep things going. Scrape together that nickel, you know. They wanted to see something that makes sense. They didn't want an escapist fantasy.

HoFB: Of course some of the best happy-go-lucky musicals had a lot of sex in them too.

EL: That was de rigeur. It probably never occurred to these writers and directors that it would be any other way, ever. They probably thought, 'this is the way it's gonna be. It's gonna get better and better and better. By the forties we'll be showing everything, like Sweden.' Obviously that was not meant to be. There had to be a way of mollifying the great middle crossroads of America. People dug it in New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Everywhere in between, exhibitors were feeling the pinch because people just weren't coming. They were boycotting the movies. They were saying "we're fed up. We don't like all the sex and the murder, and it's not what we want to see. We're gonna stop coming to your theatre unless you start showing more wholesome entertainment." So [exhibitors] would say "Okay Warner Brothers, this is your friend Bob in Ohio, and I'm telling you my patrons are clamoring for cleaner entertainment." When you start hearing it from thousands of exhibitors, "we won't go to your shows." "We will boycott Warner Brother films." They had to listen. That was the sole motivating principle behind enforcing the code.

HoFB: Some of the histories indicate the provocative material was a desperate grab for box office.

EL: Yes because the marketing department of every studio was looking for hooks to hang everything on. What's gonna get people in New York interested about this movie. People have seen everything. They've done everything. Let's promise them a movie that will measure up to that level of recognition. They're gonna see people having sex, taking dope, committing murder, all kinds of fun stuff that you only get in the movies. It's a shame because censorship in any form is not welcome. It's not a good thing. However it did drive the industry in a slightly different way. I think we had a greater gravitational pull for directors who could work within those restrictions and still turn out interesting films. They may not have been as provocative or real as the pre-code films but they achieved some different artifice.  I guess we should, just because it's what we wound up with, feel grateful for that.

HoFB: Speaking of directors, I want to talk about Howard Hawks and Scarface, because although it was released in 1932, it's the one film you're showing that was made before the others. I read it was originally slated for release in 1931.

EL: Ready to go in '30.

HoFB: And it was held up precisely for some of the things you've been talking about.

EL: It went farther than most other films were going at the time, and most films were going pretty far. But he kept running into problems. Censorial problems, essentially around sex. The violence was pretty extreme. Really casual. People were dispatched very routinely. That went against what would ultimately be deemed the moral tempo of the film- that people could just murder people casually! And kids in the audience are cheering.

HoFB: Do you think people in Hollywood found ways to see this film? Did it have a reputation before its release?

EL: Insiders probably saw it.

HoFB: Do you think it had an influence prior to its actual release?

EL: It's funny because when people talk about classic gangster films of the 1930s they'll immediately bring up The Public Enemy and Little Caesar- well, actually Little Caesar was made in '30 as well if you look at the release date [January 9, 1931], but nevertheless Scarface, by people only looking at the numbers printed on the pages, "well that was in the aftermath" But that was the predecessor. Had it gone out in '30 or even '31 it would probably be a better known film. It's not that it's not known. To be honest with you a lot of people who come to Little Caesar and Public Enemy, while they're impressed by certain things about it, they don't really enjoy the films that much. And they think, "I don't need another one. I don't need to see Scarface. I'm done with that. Show me a musical now, or a prostitute movie." So I think it suffered a little bit. It also had sketchy ownership issues for a while. You couldn't see the film, even after it had been released. I can't think of a single time, growing up, that I ever saw it listed on television. Maybe it did sneak in here and there but I was glued to the TV Guide. I was a nine-year-old kid with a subscription to TV Guide. So it comes as a big, pleasant surprise, because it wipes the floor with those other movies. Public Enemy, if you were to excise maybe 10 minutes...

HoFB: It doesn't exist in its original form anyway.

EL: Hardly any of them do. Freaks- can you imagine seeing a 90-minute version of that? Which is what people did see in a preview setting.

HoFB: Is that why so many of these films are so short?

EL: Many of them. They probably lose at least five minutes because they've gone too far somewhere. Someone says, "oh the hand is going under the dress..." Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was re-released in the mid-'30s, heavily cut. Seven or eight minutes were cut out. They're back in the 97-minute version that Warner Brothers now has the print of.

HOW: Scarface screens on an all-35mm double-bill with another pre-code crime picture, Two Seconds.

O. Henry's Full House (1952)

Screen shot from 20th Century Fox DVD.

WHO: Five different directors, three named Henry (King, Koster and Hathaway) and two others (Howard Hawks & Jean Negulesco) each directed a different short story by O. Henry.

WHAT: I haven't seen this film yet; I somehow missed it the last time it screened locally, at the Stanford Theatre's 2012 Howard Hawks festival. I love the idea of Hawks adapting "The Ransom of Red Chief"- putting him in the excellent company of Yasujiro Ozu. I also am tickled picturing Henry Koster directing Marilyn Monroe and his It Started With Eve star Charles Laughton in "The Cop and the Anthem". I don't remember O. Henry's stories "The Clarion Call" or "The Last Leaf" well enough to imagine Henry Hathaway directing Richard Widmark, or Jean Negulesco directing Anne Baxter, as they did here.

But the O. Henry story that's been most deeply-ingrained in me is of course the heartbreakingly ironic Yuletide tale "The Gift of the Magi", which in this film was helmed by Henry King and featured Farley Granger and Jeanne Crain (pictured above). Like "The Clarion Call" and "The Cop and the Anthem" it had been filmed previously in 1909 by D.W. Griffith (I have not seen these versions either). Unlike those, it had also been planned to be made into a Technicolor musical by Otto Preminger in 1945. That film was shelved however, making King's version the best-known made in Hollywood.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, as part of the annual Noir City Xmas double-bill.

WHY: When Eddie Muller decided to use the announcement of the 2011 Noir City Film Festival as a fancy excuse to screen Remember The Night and Mr. Soft Touch in December 2010, I wonder if he realized he'd be creating a tradition that would stretch out for five Christmas seasons, providing excuses to show 35mm prints of ten holiday-related feature films to eager Castro audiences. Some of the selections have been more Xmassy (Remember the Night, last year's Christmas Eve) than noir, and others have been vice versa (Christmas Holiday in 2011 and Blast of Silence in 2013) but they've all been occasions to see mid-century motion pictures in a movie palace, and that's really all that matters. Tonight's screening pairs the O. Henry anthology with the wintry Curse of the Cat People, which I saw in a beautiful 35mm print at the Stanford last year. Between the two films there are seven different Hollywood directors, as Curse... was started by Gunther Von Fritsch in the director's chair, but finished by Robert Wise (his career-making promotion from the editor's booth) midway through production.

Even if you're not as excited as I am to see this double-bill, you may want to attend just to see a short documentary on the Noir City festival promised as part of the program, and to get the first eyeful of the full 2015 line-up. We already know that next year's festival is a week earlier than usual in recent years, running from January 16 to 25th, and that it will show the Film Noir Foundation's latest 35mm restorations, The Guilty and Woman on the Run (the latter a San Francisco-set Noir City rediscovery) at some point during the week and a half.  I'm dying to know if last year's "international" edition (which brought me to the Castro for every single film screened, for the first time in festival history) will have some world-class ripples into this year's program, and to find out if "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller is planning anything special for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which has for the past couple years been an occasion for a Castro screening of Wattstax, which seems likely to be a tradition no more with Noir City back in that weekend slot (as it had been when it was founded).

The Castro does have all its remaining December screenings planned out (including some more Christmas-themed programs: Muppet Christmas Carol, Die Hard and Scrooged this Sunday and It's A Wonderful Life Monday), as well as a number of its January ones as well. Those who love SF Sketchfest and Noir City equally will be glad to see that they overlap much less than in previous years, and that it's easy to filter all film events on the comedy festival's redesigned website.

Meanwhile, the Roxie, in addition to being a Sketchfest venue (screening a Preston Sturges film for, I think, the first time ever!) along with the Castro, is currently winding down the third iteration of its own international (specifically French) film noir series. I attended last night's screening of Witness In The City, an impressively atmospheric thriller based on a story written by the duo from where the ideas for Diabolique and Vertigo originally sprang (it repeats tonight) and I'll Spit On Your Graves, an imagining of American racial dynamics in the late 1950s that seems positively inept (unless I have a far worse understanding of history than I think I do) and that while watching made me feel far more forgiving of Hollywood attempts to depict foreign countries than usual. Maybe the hackers that have just encouraged James Franco to cancel his participation in this weekend's all-Coppola celebration, and made last month's Castro screening of The Interview seem a like an absolute must-see in hindsight should take a look at this one too. (It repeats at the Roxie tomorrow.)

HOW: O. Henry's Full House and The Curse of the Cat People both screen in 35mm prints.

To Have And Have Not (1944)

Screen shot from Warner DVD

WHO: Lauren Bacall made her first on-screen appearance in this film, playing Marie 'Slim' Browning.

WHAT: This Casablanca-esque romantic adventure is perhaps not quite as purely entertaining as its 1942 predecessor, but it's arguably "greater", and endlessly more analyzable, as a quintessential Howard Hawks directorial project, as an Ernest Hemingway adaptation (co-written by no less than William Faulkner!), as an expression of American wartime philosophy, and as the genesis of the long romance between its stars Bacall and Bogart, who met on the picture. Here's Manohla Dargis writing in the New York Times about one very memorable moment:

If the movie’s political backdrop tends to go missing in the mists of the Bogart and Bacall legend — they fell in love during its making — it’s understandable given how they steam up the joint. Before teaching him how to whistle, Slim slides into Steve’s lap and leans down to kiss him. “Whaddya do that for?” he says, as if the question needed asking. “Been wondering whether I’d like it,” she says. He asks her verdict. She murmurs “I don’t know yet” before going in for another try. This time, he pulls her close, his hand circling her neck, and they kiss deeper and longer. She stops, pulls back and stands, taking the camera with her, and delivers the film’s other great line: “It’s even better when you help.”

WHERE/WHEN: 7:50 PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: The Castro yesterday revealed the front page of its full October calendar, just in time for the month to begin. It's a typically eclectic mix of Halloween-ish favorites of various kinds, new restorations of classics, 2014 hits in one-night-only "second-run", and memorial tributes to recently deceased film personalities. The latter includes not only Bacall, who stars in six films playing the venue this month (all but one, How to Marry a Millionaire, showing in 35mm prints), but also Richard Attenborough, who directed Gandhi, which screens (digitally) Sunday October 5th. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Harold Ramis already have received Castro tributes this year, but they show up again in October as well; Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man October 22 and Ramis in Ghostbusters October 24th. James Garner has yet to have an official screen tribute in San Francisco this year, but we can look ahead to November 7th when Jesse Hawthorne Ficks screens The Notebook (along with John Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz) for an at-least-unofficial one.

For October, Ficks's MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS series brings a Christian Bale double-feature of Reign of Fire and The Dark Knight on Friday the 17th. Naturally both will be screened on 35mm; the latter being an opportune time to revisit the signature hit by Hollywood's perhaps most powerful film-on-film proponent (with apologies to Quentin Tarantino) Christopher Nolan in advance of his 70mm IMAX release Interstellar (rumored to be the last "real" IMAX film in the pipeline).

As of now the Castro website has not revealed the formats for most films screening after the 17th; we know that Carrie, The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, Spartacus, Sunrise, and The Fugitive Kind will screen from 35mm prints while Vertigo and Rome: Open City will see their Castro debuts in 4K digital projection, but I'm unsure as yet whether film is involved in the Alphaville/Orpheus double bill October 21st (I suspect no), The Black Cat/The Raven October 23rd (I suspect yes) or 2001: A Space Odyssey/The Tree of Life October 26th (I don't want to speculate). The Bay Area Film Calendar and the Castro seem to be oddly at odds over the October 18th Bernardo Bertolucci marathon; the former indicates only the Italian master's Last Tango in Paris and The Sheltering Sky will be in 35mm, while the Castro's Special Events page adds The Conformist to that pool. The new, seemingly-unnecessary-but-I-suppose-I-should-keep-an-open-mind 3D version of The Last Emperor will screen digitally of course. Joan Chen is expected to be in attendance.

Finally, looking ahead again to November (in this case the 6th), SF Cinematheque is presenting its first Castro event in quite some time, a dual-16mm screening of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls with the hugely-entertaining former "Factory Girl"  Mary Woronov in person, as she will be the following night with Warhol's Hedy at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. I'm preparing for those screenings by attending tonight's Pacific Film Archive presentation of another Warhol dual-16mm film called Outer and Inner Space; otherwise I'd surely be at the Castro tonight for To Have and Have Not.

HOW: 35mm print, on a double-bill wih Dark Passage, another Bacall/Bogie team-up, but one particularly dear to Frisco Bay hearts as it was actually filmed here.

Casablanca (1942)

WHO: Michael Curtiz directed it. Conrad Veidt, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Dooley Wilson star in it. Oh yeah, and there's the love triangle too: Paul Heinreid, Ingrid Bergman and a guy called Humphrey Bogart.

WHAT: One of the most famous movies of all time. It's almost impossible to pay attention to film without hearing someone make mention of it. Just the other day I heard a podcast interview with Cissy Wellman, who relates Howard Hawks's commonly-told and well-refuted story of a swap Hawks and Curtiz (who according to the story was the originally assigned director to Sergeant York) made between their directing projects. I think it says a lot that Hawks would tell this story in the mid-1960s after he'd begun being celebrated by critics as an auteur, a status denied him during the first few decades of his career. It's as if to say that by walking away from making Casablanca he denied himself the chance at a competitive Oscar and the kind of immortality that came from having made one of the most beloved classics ever, but that perhaps the kind of immortality Hawks was starting to enjoy as a developer of a career worth poring over might be preferable to being thought of as a relatively anonymous if highly competent workman like Curtiz.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at 1:30 & 7:00 at the Kabuki, or at 2:00 & 7:00 at Cinemark Theatres around the nation, including the Bay Area. Also screens at 2:30 & 7:00 on April 28th at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Both the Kabuki and the Castro will be venues for the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival April 25-May 9th. Tickets, now on sale to members, become available to the general public this Friday. I'm not going to draft a typical festival announcement piece when there are others to read. I'll undoubtedly be devoting a good deal of attention to this event over the coming weeks, though not to the exclusion of others. Michael Fox opens his article on April's screenings with an interesting perspective about the usual role of a big international film festival in the film culture of a city. With presentation of new works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kim Longinotto, Bernardo Bertolucci, Andrew Bujalski, Sophie Fiennes, Olivier Assayas and scores of other established and up-and-coming international filmmakers, there's no question but that this year's SFIFF is a crucial event for those of us who try to keep reasonably current with trends in world narrative and documentary cinema-making.

But what does the festival provide for those of us interested in keeping current with trends in restoration and re-evaluation of cinema from the past? The festival's repertory selections must provide quite a bang if they're going to be worth a ticket-buyer's bucks, especially with this year's price increases. For a San Francisco resident, a trip to a typical repertory film at the Pacific Film Archive or the Stanford Theatre (which has just released its next calendar) is about the same cost as a non-member SFIFF ticket- but only if you factor in the cost of public transportation.

There's potential here. I'm thrilled that the SFIFF is offering rare chances to see great films from the sixties, seventies and eighties, like Marketa Lazarová, To Live and Die in L.A. and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and reputedly-great films like The Mattei Affair, Eight Deadly Shots, and Downpour. What I don't know is whether any of the above will be presented in the film formats that they were originally made for, rather than via a digital delivery system. So far the festival has only made available the screening format information on one retrospective program: a 16mm showing of three rarely-seen early documentaries by Les Blank. This will be one of the first tickets I purchase. The others, I may hold off on until I hear whether they'll be shown on 35mm or not. I know this almost certainly mean I won't be able to get a ticket to To Live and Die in L.A., as that screening will include a live appearance by its legendary director, William Friedkin, and is being held in cinema (New People) with less than 200 seats. But that's okay; I saw a 35mm print of it last fall at the Roxie, and am  in no way going to allow myself to miss the other revival that it takes place on the same night as: the Castro showing of Waxworks. Again, I don't know if this will be a digital or film screening, but I do know I want to be there to find out what Mike Patton and his cohort of three percussionists plan to pull off as a musical accompaniment for the Paul Leni film starring Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt.

Conrad Veidt! Oh yeah, I knew there was a reason I wanted to talk about this stuff under a post about Casablanca. Why see Casablanca tonight? To get in the mood for another Veidt film coming your way.

HOW: I know that the Castro showing of Casablanca will be sourced from DCP, and I believe the Kabuki & Cinemark showings will be sourced that way as well.

The Two Eyes Of Brian Darr

Thanks for indulging my annual round-up of Frisco Bay cinephiles' favorite repertory/revival screenings of 2012. I hope you've enjoyed reading what I've posted here so far. The full list of contributions can be found here. 

I'm not quite done; this year, I'd asked respondents to name one brand-new film that they saw in a local venue in 2012, in which something about the venue conspired with the film to make for a particularly memorable and enjoyable experience. Not every contributor responded to this request, and  I decided to collect all the responses to this question into a single post, which I'll be putting up soon. 

But for now, here is my own list of ten favorite films from our cinematic past, revived on Frisco Bay cinema screens in 2012, in the order I saw them:

Underworld USA
2012 started off like gangbusters, literally, with the 10th Annual Noir City festival at the Castro Theatre, and particularly with this late (1961; some would say post-) noir by the iconoclastic Hollywood figure Sam Fuller. It immediately became my new favorite Fuller film, as it expresses both his cynical view of the connections between American crime and business, and his tabloid-headline expressionist approach to cinematic language extremely authentically. I now have the perfect starting recommendation for anyone wanting to explore the black-and-white precursors to Scorsese's & Coppola's gangland epics.

Four Nights Of A Dreamer
At the Pacific Film Archive's near-complete Robert Bresson retrospective I was able to plug several of the most yawning gaps in my experience with the French filmmaker. Undoubtedly, his films are challenging and I must admit I've in the past had better luck approaching an initially satisfying comprehension of them in the home video arena, with its pause and rewind buttons, than in cinemas. But these films were made for theatres, and for the first time I finally felt I had a cinematic communion with a Bresson print, truly sensing myself on the right wavelength with the film's every move. Perhaps it's because this 1971 film is Bresson's most impressionist work, or perhaps because I was previously familiar with his source material (Dostoyevsky's White Nights.) At any rate, I'm especially likely to treasure this rare screening as Four Nights of a Dreamer is reputedly troubled with rights issues holding up a proper DVD release. 

Wagon Master
When Quentin Tarantino made recent comments about hating John Ford, both the man and the filmmaker, for his racism, I instantly thought of the Ford films which (unlike, say, Stagecoach), present a far more complicated picture of his racial attitudes than is often acknowledged. Consider Fort Apache, which illustrates the folly of the U.S. Cavalry treating Chiricahuas as nothing more than an enemy army, or The Searchers, in which John Wayne portrays a racist as a kind of victim of his own psychotic, narrow hatred of The Other. Having seen it as recently as March at the Stanford Theatre, I thought of Wagon Master as a vessel for Ford's most explicitly anti-racist statement of them all. The scene in which a Navajo (played by the great Jim Thorpe) is translated (by the late Harey Carey, Jr's character) to proclaim that white men are "all thieves", might not be so remarkable if it weren't for Ward Bond's sympathetic character's agreement with the sentiment. But race is only a part of what this grand, lyrical, often heartbreaking 1950 film is about. Its band of travelers, each holding diverse values and goals but all sharing in the hardships of the road, is a beautiful microcosm for the tolerance and compromise we must learn to cultivate to exist harmoniously in this world.

Napoléon
Insiders have been indicating for a couple years, that we are now seeing the final days of film-as-film screenings. Some people have suggested that the film reel might make a resurgence as did the vinyl record did even after tapes, compact discs and ultimately mp3s threatened to wipe it out. I'm not sure if that's possible, but if it's going to happen we may need to see more creative uses of the film projector in order to realize that its operator (the projectionist) can be an artist equivalent to a great DJ. 2012 was a big year for me to experience multi-projector performances, from seeing the cinePimps and (full disclosure: my girlfriend) Kerry Laitala at Shapeshiters in Oakland, to a dual-projector ephemera duel between Craig Baldwin and Stephen Parr at the Luggage Store, an event poignantly held on the day Andrew Sarris died. Though this face-off had me imagining a beguiling future in which curator, performer and auteur become fused into one role, even it couldn't hold a candle to the Silent Film Festival's Paramount Theatre presentation of (to my knowledge) the first film foray into multi-projector "performance" spectacle: the final reel or so of Abel Gance's Napoléon, which I wrote about here. Though the three projectionists involved in this event were performing an act of 85-year-old reproduction and not new creativity, the precision of their coordination is something any performer might aspire to if they want to truly set audience's eyes agog. 

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Too many of the locations for these "best of 2012" screenings sadly sit dormant already in 2013. New People/VIZ Cinema is one; the year saw the end of the San Francisco Film Society's experiment with turning it into a year-round screening venue. A week-long engagement of this delightful Eric Rohmer film was a real highlight of the year for me; the fact that it's gone unmentioned by other "I Only Have Two Eyes" contributors helps me understand that the state-of-the-art venue never was able to catch on as a repertory venue. Surely I'm not the only one who would consider this 1987 comedy about two young Frenchwomen with opposing but somehow complimentary backgrounds (made piece-by-piece while Rohmer was waiting for the right weather/light conditions for The Green Ray, which SFFS double-billed it with) to be among his high-water-marks, despite its episodic nature. Can't we consider the collections of A.A. Milne to be masterpieces? Mightn't The Martian Chronicles be as great a work as Fahrenheit 451? 

Land of the Pharaohs 
Here's where I really go out on a limb- or do I? I saw a lot of very great Howard Hawks films last year, thanks to hefty retrospectives at the Pacific Film Archive and the Stanford Theatre, but none made such a surprisingly strong impression as this film maudit did on the latter screen. It's the director's 1955 take on Ancient Egypt and the building of the Great Pyramid. I cannot help but wonder how many of the critics, historians, and cinephiles who continue to perpetuate its reputation as the one time the versatile Hawks took on a genre he couldn't handle, have seen it projected in 35mm on a big screen, as it was clearly made to be seen. Though the director was reportedly none-too-fond of it, his frequent screenwriter Leigh Brackett once went on record calling it one of Hawks's greatest films. Whether or not I'm willing to go quite that far on only a single viewing, I feel certain that seeing this visually stunning story of hubris and political machination unfold in Cinemascope above my eyes was one of my greatest film-watching experiences of the year.

Five Element Ninjas
"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film." I don't wholly endorse this quote by Werner Herzog, as I love Godard (on most days, more than I do Herzog), but I can't deny that I got even more pleasure and maybe even more intellectual stimulation from watching this 1982 Chang Cheh tale of vengeance for the first time at the Roxie than I did from rewatching Week End at the Castro earlier in the year. Chang's output is more uneven than Godard's but his best films, and this is one of them I reckon, are as excited about the possibilities of cinema (here he gets some very eerie effects out of fish-eyed pans, and has a simple but brilliant solution to emphasizing ninjas' skills at silence) and steeped in complicated codes (in this case numerology and Chinese-style alchemy) as any canonized art film. I hope hope hope that collector Dan Halsted makes very many future visits to town with more of his rare Hong Kong 35mm prints in hand.

La Cérémonie
Another screening of a brutal masterpiece by a director with the monogram CC. Here it's Claude Chabrol directing Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert to the hilt in a slow-boiling tale of (mostly) quiet class warfare in a French village. There's a methodicalness to Chabrol's depiction of wounded psyches in a feedback loop hurtling toward catastrophe that makes this 1995 film seem like a model for the clinical works of Michael Haneke or Bruno Dumont. But nothing I've seen from either of those mens' ouevres quite approaches what Chabrol is able to coax out of Bonnaire and Huppert here. Like many local cinephiles I frequently find Mick LaSalle infuriating, but I'm so glad his recent book publication created the excuse to play this as part of a Roxie (and Rafael) series of actress-centric French films.

Only Yesterday
It was with great pleasure and a bit of wistfulness that I took nearly-full advantage of the Studio Ghibli series that played this fall at Landmark's Bridge and California Theatres, catching up with all the films that I'd never seen before (except one, My Neighbors the Yamadas) and revisiting most of those I that had. The pleasure is obvious to any fan of Hayao Miyazaki and his cohort; nearly all of these films are wonderful, unique blasts of color in motion, with not-too-saccharine stories that stick with you for days and weeks and months after viewing, even when in such a near-marathon viewing situation. The wistfulness comes from the fact that the Bridge seemed already on its last legs as a viable Frisco Bay venue, and in fact announced its closure a couple months later, and that Berkeley's California Theatre was on the verge of decommissioning its 35mm projection equipment in favor of all-digital equipment shortly after the series ended. Also from the fact that I knew that with this series I no longer have any more unseen Miyazaki features to view for the first time (until his next one anyhow). But to mitigate this, this series turned me into a fan of fellow Ghibli director Isao Takahata (who also has an upcoming film), largely on the basis of my admiration of his 1991 adaptation Only Yesterday, which I saw at the Bridge. As much as I love Miyazaki's fantasy mode, Takahata's realistic approach here is in some ways more impressive; he creates two totally distinct yet believable palettes with the lush rural setting of its lead character's personal awakening, and the more subdued watercolor-style of her extensive childhood memory flashbacks. He even bucked anime tradition in his voice casting, built around the decision to record dialogue before animating rather than post-dubbing as is Japan's animation norm. The result is a film reminiscent in beauty and theme of Kenji Mioguchi's lovely 1926 Song of Home.

Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler 
Last but not least, another kind of animation seen in a (less-sadly) decommissioned venue, the Exploratorium's McBean Theatre, a shiny-ceiling-ed dome inside the Palace of Fine Arts that hosted a wonderful array of screenings over that museum's long stay in that cavernous venue. The Exploratorium is gearing up to move to a new location on Pier 15, and promises to have a made-to-order screening space. But no matter how wonderful it is, I know I'll miss certain aspects of the old McBean, and I'm so thankful that the museum's Cinema Arts department hosted a short series of Canyon Cinema films during its last few months open, as a kind of goodbye. I was able to catch the first and third of these programs, and loved getting a chance to see rarely-shown pieces by Alan Berliner, Gary Beydler, Stan Vanderbeek, John Smith (whose films I also got to see at PFA in 2012) and more. But the most astonishing of these was in the December program: Barry Spinello's 1968 Sonata For Pen, Brush and Ruler. Spinello is a painter and experimental musician, but the 16mm film strip serves as his canvas and master-tape. I'd been impressed by a few of his later works before (one of them, Soundtrack, screens at the PFA shortly with the artist in attendance) but Sonata is so exhilaratingly expansive, so joyfully elaborate, and so recognizably the product of one artist's immense effort that I now have a clear favorite of his films. As he once wrote: "It is my brain, and for ten minutes I expect (I hope, if the film is successful) that the viewer's brain functions as my brain." I think it does.

There Haven't Been Any Quiet Moments

Welcome to 2012 and a New Year of Frisco Bay cinephilia! Rumors of the Castro Theatre's demise were greatly exaggerated, and it's running repertory and festival screenings, now with newly-hired general manager Keith Arnold at the helm. After largely avoiding Japanese films in the first months of programming their year-round venue New People, the SF Film Society, its identity as an exhibitor of varied, cutting-edge from around the globe now established at the venue, brings samurai classics back to that screen in January. Yerba Buena Center For the Arts begins a promising Spring season this week with the local premiere of a new restoration of Nick Ray's We Can't Go Home Again; check Max Goldberg for an excellent recent article (complete with comment by one of Ray's former student-filmmakers!) The Rafael Film Center hosts its annual For Your Consideration series of Oscar-contending foreign films for a week starting Friday; first looks at new films by Béla Tarr, Ann Hui & Nuri Bilge Ceylan are among the most tantalizing of those considered.

Perhaps most excitingly of all, on Thursday Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive opens up again for a new semester featuring, among other offerings, retrospectives for Henri-Georges Clouzot, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Bresson and Howard Hawks. The latter, though not complete, is a hearty mixture of the consummate classic-era Hollywood director's best-known and least-known films, including four rarely-seen silents, and the pair of important pre-code action dramas that open the series: The Crowd Roars and Monterey Bay-shot Tiger Shark (pictured above). It's on the occasion of this Hawks series that I introduce a new guest contributor to Hell On Frisco Bay, one of my longest-standing cinephile friends, moving image archivist and philatelic blogger Sterling Hedgpeth. He previews the series through the prism of the film aptly chosen to play the PFA on February 14th.

Here's his article.

The Curious Case of Bringing Up Baby

written by guest blogger Sterling Hedgpeth, a.k.a.The Filmatelist:

As both a film lover and a stamp collector, I was thrilled when the US Postal Service announced that they’d be honoring four directors from the Golden Age of Hollywood in 2012. And when I heard who they were going to be—Ford, Capra, Wilder, Huston—my first reaction was a simple one:

“Where the hell is Howard Hawks?!?”

Because for me, Hawks embodies a seamless, no frills style of classic American filmmaking, while at the same time transcending that deceptive simplicity. Suspended between the sentimentality of Ford and Capra and the cynicism of Wilder and Huston, Hawks mastered a variety of genres with a clarity of vision and perspective that makes his films feel, 70+ years later, still quite contemporary. And fortunately for us, the Pacific Film Archive on the U.C. Berkeley campus will be holding a months-long retrospective of his work, starting on Friday, January 13.

Much has been written about the masculine ethos of Hawks’s world—a world with men of will and stoic action, motley crews united by an unspoken moral compass, women who give as good as they get, and conflicts that require solidarity and resourcefulness. It’s a recurring motif in all his films, to the point that critic David Thomson wrote “Like Monet forever painting lilies or Bon-nard always re-creating his wife in her bath, Hawks made only one artwork. It is the principle of that movie that men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.”

But of his most revered films, one stands apart from the rest. For Bringing Up Baby (1938), while perfectly Hawksian in its wit, sexual sophistication, and breezy tone, is unusual for a couple of interesting reasons.

The first is that while most of his films either take place in the urban jungle (His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep) are on outposts far from civilization (Red River, Only Angels Have Wings), Baby bridges the two, for in the telling of David Huxley (Cary Grant) and his search for his intercostal clavicle, we move from the city and its social trappings to the Connecticut backwoods and then back again. This is done not only to point out the humorous incongruities of a leopard being walked down a busy thoroughfare, but to have the unpredictability of the outdoors be the vehicle by which the stifled David can discover himself.

Hawks’s cowboys and adventurers find a natural affinity with their surroundings, but for David, nature is something new and uncomfortable. Still, it’s the perfect place where a butterfly (as his even more uptight fiancée describes him) can take wing—and quite literally get caught in the net of Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). Hawks rarely indulged in flights-of-fancy, keeping the tone of his films very grounded, but there’s something almost mystical about the moonlit excursion of David and Susan in search of her leopard. You almost expect Mickey Rooney’s Puck to pop his head out—a Midsummer Night’s Fever Dream. And what better place to abandon pretenses and your own senses?

Hawks’s classic women (Slim in To Have and Have Not, Feathers in Rio Bravo) can hold their own amidst the insular brotherhoods of his films, but Susan is unique by being the most masculine presence in Baby. For who else is there? The effete Charlie Ruggles with his animal calls? The plastered Barry Fitzgerald or clueless Fritz Feld? Nature abhors a vacuum, and Susan fills the testosterone void, be it sinking that impressive putt on the golf course, or pretending to be the quick-talking toughie and gang member. Hawks usually has his men shepherd each other through this rite of redemption, but lacking any other male role model, David steps up to the plate with Susan as his guide. It’s the Rising of Mr. Bone (which David is also called in the film).

But the film is still fundamentally a romance, and the film revolves around how the unlikely pairing of the mismatched duo is still a perfect fit. This is not a new conceit to the genre, but Hawks gets plenty of mileage out of finding simple ways of demonstrating this. When Hepburn rips the back of her party dress, the two walk in perfect lockstep, him behind her, as if they were a single unit. When singing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”, their serenade consists of deft, spontaneous two-part vocals. Harmony. Synchronization. Balance.

Well, given that last remarkable stunt back in the museum—maybe there’s room for improvement on keeping balance. But that’s the moment when David realizes he loves Susan. So equilibrium between city/country, male/female, order/chaos are all on display in a way that we rarely see in Hawks. Hawks has been criticized for indulging in his Boys Club too often, a bromance ethos that has its own internal rules and memes. But Baby shows he can be just as brilliant at undermining those tropes while still having it feel perfectly at home in his body of work.

Sadly, Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964) is not part of the PFA series, because 25 years later, he updates this sensibility without ever losing his sense of humor or irony. Essentially a loose remake of Baby, it has cityboy Rock Hudson also return to nature, a faux fisherman and himself a fish out of water, with Paula Prentiss the most irresistible steamroller you might find. Like Baby, it has its flights of fancy, with slapstick sequences which emulate Looney Toons cartoons perfectly (a high comedic compliment indeed)—very atypical for Hawks, yet still fitting right in.

And with the exception of Sirk and Frankenheimer, nobody ever used Hudson quite so knowingly. For in his Doris Day vehicles, Rock played the rabid lothario who felt obliged to fake a sensitive side to get to first base with his object of pursuit. But in Sport, his entire existence consists of pretending to be someone he’s not, putting on a false image for the world, his fear of being outed a constant one. The premise (as well as Rock’s ritual humiliation throughout the film) is a cutting metaphor for Hudson’s career. All that’s missing is him putting on a female bathrobe (as Cary does in Baby)…”because I just went gay all of a sudden!”

Between them, Ford, Capra, Huston & Wilder earned over a dozen competitive Oscars. Hawks had to settle for a single nod (for Sergeant York) and a Lifetime Achievement kudo from the Academy decades later. The USPS will probably be the same way; Hawks will get his stamp eventually. But even for this Hawks veteran, the PFA offers some golden opportunities for films rarely screened. It’s a chance not to be missed. Hope to see you there.

For more discussion on Baby and postage stamps, come visit my blog here.