Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948)

WHO: Joan Fontaine, who died last month at the age of 96, stars in this.

WHAT: An exquisite masterpiece. Read Farran Nehme (a.k.a. the the Self-Styled Siren)'s wonderful article on it.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at the Stanford Theatre at 3:45 and 7:30.

WHY: Bless the Stanford for its flexibility; it was able to put together a four-film program of Fontaine films as a quick fill-in between the end of its last Preston Sturges/Marx Brothers program, and it's next program, and this is the final day to see her incredible face in close-up on their big screen.

The next Stanford series begins Friday, and is devoted to Frank Capra. For about seven weeks the theatre will run multiple-night stands of all of Capra's 1930s and 1940s features except for four (Rain Or Shine, Broadway Bill, and the recently-screened Lady For A Day and It's a Wonderful Life are the only no-shows from this period). The venue will also spend two nights apiece showing his top-notch Why We Fight documentaries from his World War II service (February 12-13) and his Bell Telephone Science films including Hemo the Magnificent and more (February 19-20). Best of all, the venue will hold six screenings of two of Capra's silent films, with live musical accompaniment by Dennis James on Wurlitzer organ. Both That Certain Thing (January 24-26) and The Power of the Press (January 29-30) are very rarely revived, and were not part of the last, silent-heavy, Capra retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive in 2010.

Dennis James will be returning to the South Bay March 14th to accompany Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac at the California Theatre in San Jose, as part of the Cinequest Film Festival.

HOW: Letter From An Unknown Woman screens on a double-bill with Fontaine's own favorite role in The Constant Nymph, both in 35mm.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

WHO: Edith Head designed the costumes for this film.

WHAT: The last film Preston Sturges wrote and directed while at Paramount is one of my favorites. It starts in a San Francisco saloon called the Dog Watch, where a group of six busted marines just back from Guadalcanal make the acquaintance of a legacy Marine (born the day his father died at Belleau Wood) named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith. Truesmith (played by Eddie Bracken) has just spent a year pretending to be overseas after a medical discharge (hayfever) cut short his military career after just one month. Soon all seven men are heading to his hometown of Oakhurst, California, where he'll finally reunite with his mother (Georgia Caine) and former sweetheart (Ella Raines) while the other six eagerly perpetuate the fiction that he was a hero among their company- especially since it gives them an opportunity for free food and lodging during their five-day leave. Things only get more and more out of hand from there, and somehow Sturges is able to walk a tightrope between portraying portraying military men as noble and patriotism as a form of insanity.

WHERE/WHEN: 3:30 and 7:30 today and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre.

WHY: Although I mention Edith Head above, this is probably not one of the top ten or twenty or fifty or maybe even one hundred films that fans of classic Hollywood would point to as one of her most significant career milestones. But Sturges stuffs his frames with huge numbers of bodies, each character and extra representing perfectly an aspect of American society, and each of them needing just the right outfit to quickly express that aspect. Bracken's own costuming (in uniform or out) is a crucial element of the plot, and the attractive dresses Head is best known for are certainly on display on the Dog Watch's tap dancer and chanteuse, and on the lovely Raines.

Head's several hundred credits as costumer could make a fine introduction to Hollywood "A-pictures" from the 1930s to 1970s. The prolific Head worked in just about every genre and every studio, and with many of the classic era's top stars and directors. A complete Edith Head retrospective sounds like the punchline to a film programming in-joke, but it really would be a thing to behold, even if it took a year or more to unfold. Since it'd never happen, I'll just point out the films with her credit that are screening in the coming weeks. After Hail the Conquering Hero, the next film bearing her imprint to screen locally will be Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn, at the Castro on New Year's Day. The following week on January 9th the New Parkway screens King Creole to celebrate its star Elvis Presley's birthday the day before. And just last night the Paramount Theatre in Oakland announced its next three 35mm classic film screenings, and two out of three of them are among Head's most famous among her thrity-five Academy Award-nominated films. January 17 the venue will show To Catch A Thief with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, and February 28 it will screen Roman Holiday, another film starring Hepburn, that won Head her fifth of eight Oscars. The odd film out on the Paramount schedule is Dirty Harry which screens January 31st; its costumes were picked out by Clint Eastwood's regular wardrobe man until 1992, Glenn Wright.

HOW: Hail the Conquering Hero screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races.

It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

WHO: Frank Capra directed, produced, and co-wrote the screenplay for this film.

WHAT: You'd have to be living under a lump of coal not to know about this film, by now probably the most widely-loved Hollywood movie made before 1950 with the possible exception of Casablanca. You may have heard that it was a flop on its initial release in 1946, which is not exactly true, as it was nominated for several Oscars including Best Picture, and sold enough tickets to place it in the top 30 box office draws of the year. Just not enough to turn a profit on its unusually high (for its time) production cost. 

You may also have heard that it was forgotten for decades until someone realized its copyright had not been renewed, thus making it a cheap buy for television stations which soon began broadcasting it frequently, turning it into a classic. I'm not sure how truly forgotten it was (as a former Best Picture nominee it must have been known to some people), but it apparently was unknown enough that a classroom of film students including my favorite classic film podcaster Frank Thompson had never heard of it when Capra himself came to screen it in Boston in the early 1970s.

But It's A Wonderful Life has never really let up its grip on our collective cultural memory loosen since those days. Now annual screenings in cinemas and on television stations are joined by annual internet articles about the film's history as a target of anti-Communist investigation, about its surviving cast, and more. My favorite new-for-2013 piece of It's A Wonderful Life effluvia is a newly re-cut trailer put together by the Cinefamily (formerly Silent Movie Theatre) in Los Angeles for its current week-long 35mm run of the film. Enjoy!

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at 2 & 7 today only at Century Theatres around Frisco Bay (and beyond). It also screens at 9PM at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, but this annual showing is, as always, sold out. I warned you!

WHY: Merry Christmas!

HOW: 35mm at the Stanford and digitally elsewhere.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

WHO: Robert Dudley has a very memorable supporting role in this.

WHAT: John Pym writes quite a bit about Dudley's character The Wienie King, a processed-meat tycoon who encounters a low-on-cash Gerry (played by Claudette Colbert) early in the film. A sample:

Why does the Wienie King give Gerry the rent money? Partly to best his wife, to be sure, but partly because he simply has a mind to. He likes the look of Gerry in her pink wrap. He likes birds, and there just happens to be a bird embroidered on the wrap. He knows what it is like to be poor. He just does it. It's in his nature.

WHERE/WHEN: 4:10 and 7:30 today at the Stanford Theatre, and 7:00 on January 29, 2014 at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: I knew I had to post about Robert Dudley this weekend after seeing him for a split second on the Castro Theatre screen last Wednesday during the 4th annual Noir City Xmas screening that has become the traditional way to announce the next ten-day Noir City festival in January (2014's is taking a bold new approach, making it my most-anticipated program yet! But more on that in a future post.) He plays a small role in the 1947 film Christmas Eve a.k.a. Sinner's Holiday which gave a belly-of-Hollywood finish to a double-bill that began with the bleak, New York underground cinema standout Blast of Silence, which somehow feels like the midway point between an Anthony Mann and a John Cassavetes movie.

Christmas Eve, a story of an eccentric spinster trying to reunite with her long-lost wards (George Brent, George Raft and Randolph Scott) is one of those Hollywood oddities that doesn't quite conform to any genre conventions, but rather combines and stirs together elements from several seemingly disparate genres: screball comedy, political thriller, Western. I can't help but think that Robert Altman's involvement, very early in his film career, is in part responsible for this stew. It's an unexpectedly effective mix, especially as the middle segment of the film involving Raft and a Nazi-in-hiding unfolds coldly and powerfully. This is perhaps the only truly noir-ish element of Christmas Eve, and justification enough for it to be programmed at Noir City Xmas, especially one that announces a Noir City line-up that will be kicked off January 25th with a double-bill of Journey Into Fear and the Third Man. 

 The Stanford shows The Palm Beach Story as the penultimate of its selection of Preston Sturges-directed films to wind down its 2013 programming. Already the venue has begun announcing its 2014 line-up, starting with a quickly-organized four-film tribute to Joan Fontaine, the 96-year-old star who died a week ago. All three of Fontaine's Oscar-nominated performances will be highlighted: Rebecca and Suspicion (for which she won) on a Hitchcock/Fontaine double-bill January 2-5, and The Constant Nymph, paired with her turn for the great Max Ophüls Letter From An Unknown Woman January 9-12.

Then, the PFA will show The Palm Beach Story as part of a series called Funny Ha-Ha: American Comedy, 1930–1959 that kicks off with My Man Godfrey the night that venue reopens after the Winter break, January 16th, and speeds through some of the humorous highlights of Hollywood from Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin, and more. It's called "part one of a three-part series" in the now-online program but it's a little unclear what parts two and three will be: more comedies from the same period? (Either more American ones, or else focuses on other countries' comedies?) More comedies from later periods? Perhaps a set apiece devoted to American Drama and American Romance? Or American Tragedy and American Histories? Stay tuned.

Whatever this large-scale series precisely is, it's not alone. 2014 will evidently see at least two other retrospectives that last more than just a couple of months at the PFA. A Satyajit Ray series begins with the Bengali master's first film Pather Panchali January 17, and will continue through August, expecting to include nearly all of his films. From what we've seen of the PFA's schedule for its year-long Jean-Luc Godard retrospective, it appears that it may be even more complete. Every feature film the master made up through 1967's Weekend will screen in chronological order this Spring, starting with 35mm prints of Breathless and Le Petit Soldat January 31st (unfortunately in the midst of Noir City). Programs of early short films and anthology contributions threaten to make this a complete accounting of Godard's pre-1968 work. A Fall series is promised to cover his post-1968 career.

These three big PFA presentations will still be accompanied by smaller series in 2014; the January-February calendar brings us Anthony Mann crime films, the annual African Film Festival, an in-person appearance by Pennsylvania documentarian Tony Buba, and more.

HOW: The Palm Beach Story screens via a 35mm print at both venues; on a double-bill with A Night At the Opera only at the Stanford.

Duck Soup (1933)

WHO: This is the last film starring the "Four Marx Brothers": Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo; it's also the only Marx Bros. film directed by a truly world-class auteur, in this case Leo McCarey.

WHAT: This film contains what must be the Marx's most brilliant single-scene contribution to the history of screen comedy: the "mirror" scene in which Groucho and Harpo (dressed as a doppelganger of his brother) encounter each other on opposite sides of a frame. So much has been said about this scene, and so much more can be, but there's nothing like watching it in the midst of fellow appreciators of Marxian comedy. Here's one article on the scene. Here's another.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today & tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 & 9:20, at the Castro Theatre December 30th (at 2:20, 5:30 & 8:45), and at 3:00 on January 18th, 2014 at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: Whether you've been attending the weekly Marx Brothers/Preston Sturges double-bills at the Stanford this season, or just following along at home, I highly recommend you read an article published on the theatre website by local critic Richard von Busack on both. He focuses a bit more attention on Sturges, who left a signature on the Paramount Studio of the early 1940s as deep as that the Marx team did on that studio in the early 1930s, but has not stayed quite as present in popular culture for various reasons. But the article has some excellent insight into Groucho and his kin as well.

HOW: All of these screenings are on 35mm. The Stanford shows are double-bills with The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and the Castro shows are double-bills with A Night At The Opera.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

WHO: Preston Sturges wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Can an artist who has only known privilege make art that speaks to the experiences of people without privilege? This is the question at the heart of Sullivan's Travels, a laugh-out-loud comedy made in the early 1940s, when the Great Depression had officially ended but poverty continued. A pompous but good-hearted movie director, tired of making studio fluff, determines to experience the "real" America by going out on the road, and ends up farther from his Hollywood mansion than he'd ever expected. Filled with the romance, adventure, witty dialogue, and wonderful character actors that typify classic-era movie-making at its best, this film is frequently cited as one of the best comedies ever. Has the Hollywood myth machine ever been subject to more hilariously honest satire?

WHERE/WHEN: Only at the Stanford Theatre tonight through Sunday at 7:30, with additional matinee screenings tomorrow and Sunday at 4:10.

WHY: It's a pretty weak weekend for 35mm film screenings in Frisco Bay, believe it or not. The Castro is given over to the all-digital Good Vibrations Erotic Short Film Competition tonight and digitally-projected Sing-A-Long Sound Of Music the rest of the weekend. The Pacific Film Archive is screening its own 35mm print of the Hong Kong New Wave landmark The Arch Sunday and an imported print of Fassbinder's Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? tonight, but the latter is surely the same moderately scratched, extremely color-faded print I saw at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts last month. Otherwise it's showing Fassbinder's Despair on Blu-Ray and turning over the rest of the weekend to 2K & 4K digital presentations of classic films known for their great photochemical-era cinematography. At least Sony archivist Grover Crisp will be on hand to defend DCP as a format for the Saturday showings of Louis Malle's Alamo Bay and Scorsese's Taxi Driver. I hope he's asked some pointed questions.

But there are bright spots for 35mm-goers besides The Arch: YBCA is showing Querelle on 35mm Sunday (quality of print unknown), the 4-Star is giving the brand-new, shot-on-film 12 Years a Slave what I believe to be it's first local 35mm showings, and there's always the Stanford, which is wonderfully old-fashioned enough not to have the capability of screening anything digitally. Nor does it have the capability of selling advance tickets online or by phone, so if you want to ensure a seat at its annual, always-sold-out Christmas Eve screening of It's A Wonderful Life, you'll have to make your way to the theatre box office sometime shortly after tickets go on sale tomorrow. While you're there, why not catch a great film or two? Preston Sturges's closest-to-canonized classic Sullivan's Travels screening with my personal favorite Marx Brothers picture Horse Feathers? You can't go wrong.

HOW: Both films on the double-bill screen in 35mm as always at this venue.

Monkey Business (1931)

WHO: Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo Marx star in this.

WHAT: When people talk about the pre-code gangster films Hollywood brewed out of the early-1930s confluence of Prohibtion, the Depression, and the sudden celebrity status of the likes of Al Capone and John Dillinger, they always seem to leave out this film. The first Marx Brothers movie conceived of for the silver screen (as the prior The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers has been based on stage shows) is perhaps more often thought of as "the one on a ship" than "the one with gangsters" but the latter form a key part of the film's completely unimportant plot. Just because it's an absurd comedy doesn't mean it shouldn't go down with other 1931 films like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy as important films made before the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping turned Hollywood away from  on-screen gangster depictions for a while. It' not for nothing that the illustrious Dave Kehr once decribed the comic aspects of Howard Hawks's Scarface by invoking the image of "Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun."

WHERE/WHEN: Today through Sunday at the Stanford Theatre at 6:00 & 9:15.

WHY: Happy Thanksgiving and Hannukah. You've probably already heard about how an unusually late-in-month Thanksgiving and an unusually early-in-Gregorian-year Hannukah have converged today for the first time since the nineteenth century, making for a once-in-lifetime double holiday. Being a goy myself, I'm not one to proscribe holiday traditions, but if a rabbi says watching Marx Brothers movies is a good way to celebrate Hannukah, I'm happy to pass it along.

Thanksgiving being a big moviegoing day to begin with, there's few classic comedy masterpieces that seem as well-suited to the holiday as The Lady Eve, with its uproariously funny banquet set piece. The pairing of Monkey Business on a double-bill with an equally ship-board and crook-filled comedy  seems so perfect that I almost wonder if the Stanford noticed the Thanksgiving/Hannukah collision on the calendar and decided to build its current Preston Sturges/Marx Brothers series inspired by it.

HOW: 35mm as always at the Stanford.

Christmas In July (1940)

WHO: Preston Sturges wrote and directed this.

WHAT: For my money, Christmas In July has as much as a claim on the title of "Sturges's greatest film" as any of his others. Perhaps it doesn't usually get such respect because it's at just over an hour long the shortest of the director's films, or perhaps simply because it was only his second film after his promotion from screenwriter into the director's chair. But at least one major critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, seems to agree it's among his best, and has called the film "a riotous satire of capitalism that bites so deep it hurts" and placed it on his 100-film deep counter-canon to the 1997 AFI 100 list which included no Preston Sturges films at all. (The 2007 update saw Sullivan's Travels added to the list.)

WHERE/WHEN: Today and tomorrow at 4:20 and 7:30 at the Stanford Theatre

WHY: Relax. I know it's still not even Thanksgiving (or Hanukkah- or indeed Thanksgivukkah), so it's arguably too early to watch Christmas movies. But this is not a Christmas movie despite having the word in the title; it's set in the middle of a New York summer (hence the "July" part of the title), and the "Christmas" moniker refers only to the bounty associated with the season.

But though it may still be to early in the year to see Christmas movies, it's not too early to make plans to see them. The Stanford will start selling tickets to its annual December 24th 35mm screening of It's A Wonderful Life on December 7th, only at the theatre box office (nice extra incentive to see a terrific double bill of Sullivan's Travels and Horse Feathers that day or the next.) Tickets always sell out in advance for this event.

The Castro will be showing It's A Wonderful Life in December too this year, though it's not yet been announced whether this will be in 35mm or not. At any rate that happens December 22nd. Other X-mas-related films to play that theatre next month include Gremlins and Lethal Weapon on the 19th and Love Actually on the 20th courtesy of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS (billed with the Thanksgiving-themed Home for the Holidays and an unnanounced Roxie midnight show)

HOW: Christmas in July screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Four Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers.

The Great McGinty (1940)

WHO: Preston Sturges wrote and directed this.

WHAT: Almost ten years ago I dove into a project of watching almost every Preston Sturges-credited film I could get my hands on, in order to write a short piece on this film of Senses Of Cinema. I still like most of what I wrote, but a more recent revisitation of the film made me wonder why I left out certain key aspects of the film that make it more complex than my 1200 words (including footnotes) got across. The framing story involving Louis Jean Heydt and Steffi Duna, for instance, got completely overlooked, for instance, when in fact it's one of Sturges's most fascinating disruptions to the Hollywood formula.

Though I wouldn't call The Great McGinty one of Sturges's very best films, it's too-frequently dismissed as a substantially inferior first stab at directing, when in fact it's really just about as well-constructed and at least as thematically rich as any of his other films. Its humor is perhaps not as pushed to the center as in a more canonized film like The Palm Beach Story, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. It's certainly one of my sentimental favorites of Sturges's films, and a fine introduction to the filmmaker for anyone who hasn't experienced his work before.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight through Sunday at the Stanford Theatre at 7:30, with additional Saturday and Sunday afternoon matinees at 4:10.

WHY: Tonight's screening of The Great McGinty is on a double-bill with the very first Marx Brothers feature (and the one from their first ten years in Hollywood that I've seen least recently) The Cocoanuts. The Stanford's new series screens each of the first seven feature Marx Brothers films along with the first seven films Sturges directed each weekend through the rest of 2013, nearly in chronological order. The only modification to this scheme is the swapping of the 1942 Palm Beach Story with the 1944 Miracle of Morgan's Creek, presumably so that the World War II-themed latter film can be paired with the Marx Brothers' takedown of war Duck Soup.

HOW: All films in this Stanford series screen on 35mm.

In A Lonely Place (1950)

WHO: Nicholas Ray directed this

WHAT: A top contender for the title of "best movie about Hollywood ever made in Hollywood". Noir City honcho Eddie Muller put it at the top of the list of his all-time favorite films noir and who am I to argue with that? (In fact I think I'd come to the same or at least a very similar conclusion independently.)

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today and tomorrow only at the Stanford Theatre at 4:05 and 7:30 PM.

WHY: Speaking of Eddie Muller and Noir City, there's already a good deal of online speculation about the possible programming at the 12th edition of that beloved Frisco festival, which will occur at the Castro Theatre January 24th through February2nd, 2014. There are rumors that the Film Noir Foundation, the non-profit that grew out of the festival, should finally be ready to premiere its long-promised restoration of Byron Haskin's Too Late For Tears starring Lisabeth Scott and Dan Duryea, for instance. And since the reveal of the festival poster, some (yes, including yours truly) have been wondering if the next Noir City might be the first edition to expand its focus to include noir filmed in languages other than English. I've heard a rumor that seems to confirm such guesswork: that Noir City 12 will include a film directed by Mexico's Golden Age auteur Roberto Gavaldón. I've only seen one Gavaldón film before, the excellent but only somewhat noir-ish Macario. I wonder if this means we'll be seeing The Other One starring Dolores Del Rio at the Castro in a few months? Or perhaps another title- I don't really know how many noirs Gavaldón made. To what extent might the full program be spiced up (don't any of you Hollywood purists dare say diluted in front of me) with some international depictions of desperate criminals?

At least we know when we'll know the answer: December 18th, 2013, when the Castro will host Noir City's fourth annual Noir City Xmas double-bill, this time of the only known projectable 35mm print of the 1947 George Raft vehicle Christmas Eve and of a 35mm print of the 1961 independently-produced Blast of Silence. Way better than a press conference as a method of revealing a festival line-up, Noir City X-Mas has quickly become one of my favorite holiday traditions.

HOW: 35mm screening, on a double-bill with Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

WHO: Orson Welles wrote, directed and starred in this (that's him racing along a Portsmouth Square path as Rita Hayworth looks on in the above screen capture).

WHAT: Whether or not you consider this one of the great films of the classic film noir era (and I certainly do; I consider it an unjustly overlooked but key element to the towering Welles filmography) you have to admit that it's second half includes some of the best glimpses of of late-1940's San Francisco ever captured by a major Hollywood studio camera. I could name all of the great locations in which Welles and cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. (later a specialist in shooting Westerns in the Alabama Hills and other desert locales) set up terrific shots, but it's more convenient just to link the pages devoted to The Lady From Shanghai on Brian Hollins's great Reel SF site of classic San Francisco-location films; he completed an online tour of the film in 2012, and is currently working his way through The Man Who Cheated Himself, Born To Kill and Los Angeles film The Exiles.

WHERE/WHEN: Final screenings today at 5:50 and 9:25 at the Stanford Theatre

WHY: The Stanford's current series pairing Humphrey Bogart vehicles with film noir classics (often but not always making for a double-dose of noir, naturally) has just a few more programs to go; and Orson Welles is featured both tonight and next weekend, when he appears on-screen and behind-the-camera in Touch of Evil (on a "power-mad official" double-bill with the Caine Mutiny). The good news is that the Stanford has already announced its final film series of 2013. The bad news is that the venue will continue to be closed three nights a week, only showing films Thursday through Sunday nights for the rest of the year, with the exception of the annual December 24 showing of It's A Wonderful Life (this year falling on a Tuesday.) 

But the weekends will be pretty wonderful; each one from November 14th through December 29th will  feature one of the seven films made with the Marx Brothers during their years at Paramount (1929-1933) or under producer Irving Thalberg at MGM (1935-1937), in chronological order, as well as one of the seven great comedies directed by Preston Sturges at Paramount between 1940 and 1944, in nearly-chronological order.

Segueing from Welles to Sturges seems appropriate because it was only after the sealing of the unprecedented (in the talkie era) agreement to allow Welles to write and direct his own films at RKO, that a writer even of Sturges's stature was able to make the leap to directing his own scripts. That he saw three of them (The Great McGinty, Christmas in July and The Lady Eve produced and released before Citizen Kane hit the screen must have been both gratifying and infuriating to Sturges.

HOW: 35mm on a double-bill with Key Largo.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart stars in this.

WHAT: If you go to the corner of Bush Street and Burritt Alley, you'll find a plaque that reads: "On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaunghnessy". It must be the only plaque in San Francisco that memorializes not a historical event, but a key moment in fiction, namely the Dashiell Hammett detective novel template known as The Maltese Falcon. At least, the only one that bears no indication of its fictionhood, or that it constitutes a "spoiler" for anyone who might not have read the book or watched one of the movie versions made from it. Such as the 1941 version written and directed by John Huston.

Other versions (the 1931 one sometimes called Dangerous Female, or the 1936 Satan Met a Lady) have their points of interest, but the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the one that became a cultural sensation and launched (with High Sierra) Humphrey Bogart's career as a leading man, Huston's as a director, and film noir as a powerful cinematic thread through the 1940s, 50s and beyond. San Francisco movie lovers are proud that their city plays such a key role in such a key film in such a key genre of Hollywood filmmaking, even if they know that apart from a few library-footage shots of the Bay Bridge and the city skyline, Huston's film does not feature actual footage of their city. As Nicola Balkind wrote in the recently-published book World Film Locations: San Francisco:

The camera descends and we are introduced to an office announcing 'SPADE AND ARCHER' where Sam Spade is working as the Bay Bridge gleams through a large window. The office interior was shot in LA but the location is estimated to be 111 Sutter Street at the corner of Montgomery in the heart of the Financial District - not far from neo-noir's favorite location: Chinatown. Although The Maltese Falcon was made in Hollywood, we're never allowed to forget it is set in San Francisco.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens daily at the Stanford Theatre at 5:40 and 9:25.

WHY: World Film Locations: San Francisco is starting to get a few reviews, such as this one in the Bay Area Reporter. It's available online and at stores such as City Lights, Moe's and even the DeYoung Museum gift shop. I'm proud to have contributed an essay on film noir in the city for the book, in which I quickly trace film noir history from Hammett and Huston to Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, to the post-war vogue for on-location shooting and into the ways noir was transformed in the mid-to-late fifties and ultimately found expression in the still-vibrant neo-noir genre.

That's just two pages of the book's 1928, however, most of which are devoted to individual films from the silent era to relatively recent history (Steven Soderbergh's 2011 Contagion being the most current entry). Forty-six films are matched with forty-six of their most iconic San Francisco locations and presented fully-illustrated and even mapped. The pages for Greed show us the Cliff House in 1924 and today, while The Conversation is represented by One Maritime Plaza and Raiders of the Lost Ark is an excuse to show us City Hall, for example. 

San Francisco moviegoers can hardly get enough of seeing our own city on cinema screens, and there are many opportunities to do so in the coming months. The Stanford's current "Best of Bogart and Film Noir Classics" series gives us one almost every weekend in late September and October. After The Maltese Falcon this week, the venue brings Out of the Past (with the Caribbean-set To Have and Have Not) September 26-29, and Dark Passage (Oct. 10-13 with The Blue Dahlia), The Lady From Shanghai (Oct. 24-27 with Key Largo) and The Caine Mutiny (Oct. 31-Nov. 3 with Touch of Evil) each have their own entries in World Film Locations: San Francisco as well.

Two of the three features playing at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its fall movie classics series are also featured in the book: Bullitt, which screens this Friday, and All About Eve, which was set in New York and Connecticut but had a key scene shot at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, screens there October 15th. (The third Paramount movie classic this fall is Huston and Bogart's Uganda-shot adventure film The African Queen on November 18th). Both of the films screening at the Pacific Film Archive's free outdoor movie series in the coming weeks also get WFL:SF entries: Harold and Maude and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And Vertigo (of course also in the book) screens November 1st at Davies Symphony Hall, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann's incredible musical score live.

Perhaps the most unexpected upcoming showcase of Frisco Bay films comes courtesy the San Francisco Film Society, which is hosting at New People Cinema October 18-20 an event called Zurich/SF, which is a cinematic celebration of the ten-year anniversary of San Francisco's sister-city partnership with Switzerland's largest city. This mini-festival collaborates with the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective coming to the PFA, YBCA and Roxie this fall to plug the Autumn's German-language cinematic gap caused by the Berlin & Beyond festival's move back to a January timeslot after a few years having a go in the Fall, by showing films such as Kurt Früh's rarely-seen The Fall and Andrea Štaka's Fraulein (both in 35mm) as well as five other films by Swiss filmmakers. But it also brings four showings of films in which San Francisco is more than mere backdrop to action but a major element of character and theme. Of these, The Conversation and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (the latter of which will screen on 35mm) merit entries in WFL:SF, while Medicine For Melancholy is discussed in one of the other contextualizing essays in the book. As for 1970s buddy-cop oddity Freebie and the Bean, it will have to wait and see if sales on the book merit a sequel.

HOW: The Maltese Falcon screens on a 35mm double bill with Casablanca.

It Started With Eve (1941)

WHO: Deanna Durbin and Charles Laughton star in this.

WHAT: Though it doesn't reach the sublime emotional heights of His Butler's Sister (directed by the masterful Frank Borzage) or the Amazing Mrs. Holliday (which Jean Renoir directed for the most part, though ultimately writer Bruce Manning received his sole directing credit for the film), It Started With Eve is nonetheless one of the most satisfying of the string of class-conscious romantic comedies mid-1930s child star Deanna Durbin starred in after graduating to young woman roles. As in other films made in this stage in her career (also including First Love and Hers To Hold), Durbin's character  is romantically pursued by a handsome man outside her station, and plot points frequently turn around her desire to show off her singing voice to skeptical-to-the-point-of-unwilling audiences. But in It Started With Eve, the narrative mechanisms are complicated and commented upon by the character played by Charles Laughton. He's an uber-wealthy businessman with a deathbed wish to meet the fiancée of his reformed-playboy son (Robert Cummings from Saboteur) who is having long-before-cellphone-era trouble contacting her, so he plucks Durbin out from behind a hotel coat-check counter and brings her home to meet his dying dad.

If you've seen a screwball comedy before you know what happens next. Durbin's luminous presence gives Laughton a new burst of life, and she and Cummings conspire to conceal her true identity from the smitten old man while placating the real fiancée and her perpetually outraged mother (Margaret Tallichet and Catherine Doucet) once they arrive on the scene. The young anti-couple grow increasingly at odds in their attempts to delicately break the truth to Laughton, creating plenty of grist for comic exchanges with each other and with the supporting cast (also including Guy Kibbee as a clergyman and Walter Catlett as the family doctor). But the moment when paterfamilias realizes the deception unbeknownst to the deceivers, and immediately turns matchmaker, takes the proceedings to another level of intrigue and insight. Laughton joins the audience in observing and enjoying the lengths to which Durbin and Cummings will go to maintaining their fantasy romance, but unlike us is able to intercede when the fiction crumbles as they begin to realize how much more right they are for each other than apart. The second half of It Started With Eve reveals the architecture of the romantic comedy genre without disintegrating any of its fundamental charm.

WHERE/WHEN: Today and Tuesday at the Stanford Theatre at 7:30.

WHY: This is the final progam of the Stanford's summer calendar, and since I've already talked about the Humphrey Bogart and film noir titles arriving on the Fall calendar starting this weekend, let me iris out a bit. This program is an appropriate end to an Academic year of programming at the vital Palo Alto theatre. Last September the venue began a tribute to the century-old Universal Pictures, programming that studio's films almost exclusively during for the last months of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, when the venue showed every single feature film ever to star Durbin. She was one of the biggest box-office draws of her era, and the savior of a financially troubled studio when she hit the screen in the mid-1930s, but had fallen into near-obscurity when compared to her contemporaries, in part because she retired from acting and recused herself from the limelight in 1948, retiring to France after twelve years in the business.

Getting a chance to see her films on the big screen where they belong has been a highlight for the Frisco Bay audiences who've taken advantage of the unique opportunity. A friend who was able to attend every program last Fall was very pleased to be able to return for second helpings of six of her films over the past couple weeks. He wondered if Durbin was made aware of the Stanford's retrospective before she died at age 91 this past April. I don't suppose we'll ever know the answer to that, but I do hope her films will continue to make perennial appearances at the venue. I'd especially like another shot at seeing Spring Parade, which Jan-Christopher Horak recently wrote about in advance of a recent Hollywood screening. Although Durbin's appeal transcends Hollywood. Perhaps we could have double-bills of Durbin pictures and pictures directed by Satyajit Ray, the Bengali director who spoke of his appreciation for Durbin when receiving his Honorary Academy Award in 1992, and one of two foreign-language directors (the other being Akira Kurosawa) whose films have semi-regularly graced the Stanford screen since David Packard took it over in 1987.

As noted at The Film Experience blog, this week is the final week for the public to submit nominations for films to be considered in the next round of selections for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Anyone can suggest up to 50 titles per year for inclusion on the list of (so far) 600 "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films"; each year 25 film titles are added, usually a mix of silent and sound, black and white and color, narrative, documentary, animation and experimental, independent and studio, short and feature-length, well-known and relatively obscure. There are fan campaigns to push films like Die Hard and The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring into the Registry. I'm not sure if there's been a concerted campaign to get a Deanna Durbin film ont the list though. Yes, after 600 selections, not a single one of her films has been included. I definitely plan to include several of her films including It Started With Eve as contenders for possible inclusion, along with titles involving other not-yet-in-the-registry figures like Lupe Velez, Friz Freleng, Christopher MacLaine, Curtis Harrington, William R. Heick, Brian De Palma and Barbara Hammer, in my e-mail to Donna Ross (dross@loc.gov) this week.

HOW: Screens in 35mm on a double-bill with One Hundred Men and A Girl, also starring Durbin.

Lady For A Day (1933)

WHO: Frank Capra directed this film starring May Robson and Warren William.

WHAT: The first film made at then-tiny Columbia Pictures to receive any Academy Award nominations, it was in the running at the 1934 Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Actress (for Robson as "Apple Annie", a an aged peddler who is remade into a high-society matron for the benefit of her visiting daughter). It won none of the above awards, although Capra thought he had won the directing award when host and presenter Will Rogers called from the stage, "Come and get it, Frank!" when announcing the award. He meant his fellow Fox Studio employee Frank Lloyd for Cavalcade, however, leaving Capra embarrassingly standing in front of the stage speechless as he realized on his way to the podium he'd made a (perfectly understandable) mistake. 

The next year Capra found redemption when his It Happened One Night swept the major awards, but I think Lady For A Day is in most respects a superior picture than the slightly-later classic. Joseph McBride describes its uniqueness in his biography Frank Capra: the Catastrophe of Success:

It was not so much that the story had a seventy-year-old heroine but that it was not a conventional star vehicle. It was a truly democratic story. Each character was equally important. Even the nominal lead role of Apple Annie was merely the centerpiece of a fragile fairy tale that to an unusual extent depended for its credibility on the interaction of an entire community of characters.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 7:30 at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto.

WHY: The Stanford's Summer calendar is winding down now that it's September, with only four pictures to go, all starring Deanna Durbin, who was subject of a full retrospective last Winter and died at age 91 this past Spring. These four include Durbin's most uncharacteristic picture and one of her very best (along with His Butler's Sister and The Amazing Mrs. Holiday, in my opinion), the Robert Siodmak noir Christmas Holiday. It sounds like a charming film but goes to far darker places than even Capra's It's A Wonderful Life in its depiction of Durbin as a prostitute and Gene Kelly as a... but no, I won't give it away.

This film is something of a premonition of the next Stanford series, a dual focus on Humphrey Bogart and film noir running September 14 through November 10. Unfortunately, the theatre will go back to a four-day screening schedule after the initial nine-day run of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon (Sep. 14-22). But the good news is everything will be shown in 35mm prints, and that every Thursday-to-Sunday weekend will pair one of Bogie's most popular pictures with a top-quality crime picture from approximately the same era. The two bookending bills in this pattern are knockouts: Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not arrives with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past September 26-29, and my very favorite Bogart vehicle In A Lonely Place is paired with one of the all-time great noirs Gun Crazy November 7-10. In between are a number of other strong pictures (The Third Man, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Touch of Evil, etc.) as well as a few I've never gotten around to seeing (namely, The Blue Dahlia, Key Largo and The Caine Mutiny). I'll be tempted to go every week!

HOW: Lady For A Day screens in 35mm on a double-bill with another Warren William film called Emploees Entrance

The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

WHO: Val Lewton produced, and contributed quite a bit to the screenplay of, this picture.

WHAT: This is a beautiful film with a terribly inappropriate title. Though it is a sequel to Lewton's 1942 atmospheric horror picture Cat People in that it shares characters from that film (including Irena, again played by the always-luminous Simone Simon), it does not involve them in a horror situation this time out, and instead focuses on the inner life of a little girl, played by child actor Ann Carter. The picture has been annoying genre purists and enchanting more open-minded audiences ever since.

Among the first to be enchanted was the great critic James Agee, who declared it one of the best films of 1944 despite its flaws (it was completed on an incredibly low budget and time-frame, re-using sets from A-pictures like the Magnificent Ambersons as Lewton's productions were wont to do.) Agee particularly singled out the performances of Simone and, though unnamed in his review, Carter and another actor, Sir Lancelot (also seen in Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie and The Ghost Ship), whose role was re-fashioned by Lewton from that of a "middle-aged female Down Easter housekeeper" found in DeWitt Bodeen's original written treatment. Here's an excerpt of Agee's article as re-published in Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism:

I wish that the makers of the film, and RKO, might be given some special award for the whole conception and performance of the family servant, who is one of the most unpretentiously sympathetic, intelligent, anti-traditional, and individualized Negro characters I have ever seen presented on the screen. And I hope that producer Val Lewton, and rest of the crew may be left more to their own devices; they have a lot of taste and talent, and they are carrying films a long way out of Hollywood.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 and 8:55 PM.

WHY: Sequels are always better than originals, right? Okay, maybe not. But in a summer in which nearly all the top moneymakers have been sequels, reboots, or sequels to reboots, and in which even a nigh-upcoming film that shares cast and crew but not setting or character with two other features, is being promoted (at least jokingly, to fans) as the third part in a trilogy, it seems clear that moviegoers like sequels.

I generally don't, I must confess. I usually feel like, if I wanted to get enjoyment out of recurring characters, I'd watch television shows instead of movies. But who am I kidding? I know I love to see my favorite classic film stars portray the same sorts of roles again and again, even if they don't reuse the same character names and back-stories. And I love to watch recurring characters in short cartoons. Anti-sequel snobbery would shut me out from watching The Godfather Part II (at the Castro this Sunday, for instance) or Gods of the Plague (part of the Pacific Film Archive Fassbinder series in October) or next week's Stanford Theatre offering Three Smart Girls Grow Up. And it would blind me from an appreciation of a magical little film like The Curse of the Cat People as surely as horror fans have been blinded by their preference for one genre over another.

HOW: The Curse of the Cat People screens from a 35mm print, on a double-bill with Cat People.

The Wicked Lady (1945)

WHO: Margaret Lockwood, so excellent as the heroine in The Lady Vanishes, plays a delicious anti-heroine in this.

WHAT: Secret passageways, highway robbery, disreputable inns, cross-dressing disguises, and midnight horse rides all factor prominently in this meticulously-constructed but deliriously romantic web of betrayals shot by Jack Cox in the expressionist-influenced style laid down by Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith in the silent era. No actual bodices are seen to be ripped, in part because of the British censors (who were thankfully less restrictive than the American ones who reportedly forced reshoots of many scenes but with higher necklines before the hit could be imported), but also because Lockwood's Barbara Worth is a woman who for most of the film wields complete control over her own sexuality, even when this agency threatens to destroy the lives of the men and women around her. Her charisma is overwhelming even when her self-awareness is not. The film benefits greatly from the fact that she's in every scene, and it seems appropriate that it ends not with a bang but with a fizzle ignited by her disappearance from the diegesis.

WHERE/WHEN: A three-day run beginning yesterday continues 7:30 tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre.

WHY: After I wrote about another Gainsborough melodrama Madonna Of The Seven Moons two weeks ago, a friend commented that the title made it sound like a giallo - something like Mario Bava's Five Dolls For An August Moon or Dario Argento's The Cat O' Nine Tails. (An Argento title from a more simpler era of nomenclature, Tenebre, screens at the Roxie August 16th). It got me thinking how the gothic tendencies of these films might have influenced horror filmmakers of subsequent generations. And so it wasn't much of a surprise for me to look in the credits of The Wicked Lady to see Hammer horror master Terence Fisher's name as the editor of this picture (he also edited . The period costuming and sets, the moody painted backdrops and lighting, and the wonderfully wicked performances by Lockwood and James Mason must have served as an inspirational training ground for the man who'd graduate to the director's chair only a few years later.

Hammer films screen in Frisco Bay cinemas far too irregularly for my liking, and I'm sure the Stanford is one of the least likely local repertory venues for them to make an appearance. But it's great that the theatre plays even more rarely-unspooled British films like this one on occasion. After this week we won't see another British film at the Stanford at least until its current calendar runs out in early September.

HOW: On a 35mm double-bill with another Lockwood picture, Carol Reed's Bank Holiday.

Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)

WHO: Judy Garland starred, and met her second husband Vincente Minnelli while being directed by him, in this film.

WHAT: The movie that earned an Oscar nomination for a song including these lyrics sung by Garland:

"Clang, clang, clang," went the trolley,
"Ding, ding, ding," went the bell,
"Zing, zing, zing," went my heartstrings,
From the moment I saw him I fell.  

"Chug, chug, chug," went the motor,
"Bump, bump, bump," went the break,
"Thump, thump, thump," went my heartstrings,
When he smiled, I could feel the car shake.

WHERE/WHEN: Today through Tuesday at the Stanford Theatre at 7:30, with an additional screening today at 3:35.

WHY: Perhaps this isn't the best week (or the best summer) to sing about public transportation. If a less optimistic film about American transportation, The Magnificent Ambersons, was playing on a Frisco Bay cinema screen somewhere tonight I'd surely highlight that instead. But Meet Me In St. Louis is a wonderful film to see in a glorious Technicolor 35mm print, if you can get to a theatre showing one.

The Stanford is one Frisco Bay film venue that isn't near any BART station, though that doesn't mean transit there and back won't be impacted by a probable strike. I'm crossing my fingers that BART management will be swayed by public pressure and pay serious attention to the (from what I've come to understand) sensible demands of its workforce, and make a reasonable counteroffer that can avert another strike. Since that doesn't seem likely to happen, I like many other car-less cinephiles may find myself privileging screenings at my local neighborhood theatre over those at more far-flung venues for a while.

HOW: 35mm print, on a double-bill with Apartment for Peggy.

Footlight Parade (1933)

WHO: Busby Berkeley choreographed the dance sequences in this film.

WHAT: The first two thirds of the movie are fine. A fast-paced backstage drama about the aspirations and Depression-era struggles of a dance company trying to make a name for itself as the top provider of live-on-stage "prologues" to accompany movie screenings at grand downtown movie palaces in New York and across the country. It's a story about the upheaval from silent films to "all-talking" and more importantly "all-singing, all-dancing" pictures, and its ripple effect on live entertainment, made in a moment when the topic was still in the daily papers, as many Warner Brothers pictures of all genres were. With James Cagney, Joan Blondell and Ruby Keeler in key roles, there's a streetwise, hard edge to the acting performances lacking in certain other Busby Berkeley-associated features with plots that evaporate off the screen and are barely worth sitting through to get to the lavish musical numbers. (I'm looking at you, Gold Diggers of 1935!)

If you've never seen the last thirty-five minutes of Footlight Parade on the big screen, however, you've missed out on some of the most spectacular reels of cinema ever sent through a projector. Even the largest of televisions can't capture the unreal scale of Berkeley's final three, back-to-back-to-back musical numbers in this film, each one representing one of his three major varieties of productions as identified in David E. James's book on experimental filmmaking in Los Angeles, The Most Typical Avant-Garde. "Honeymoon Hotel" is not identified by James as such but seems to fit in his first category of "sophisticated versions of stage show set design and ensemble dancing, unfolding in theatrical space and continuous time", although in content this sex farce is as pre-code bizarre as just about anything dreamed up by the Fleischer Brothers.

"By A Waterfall" (pictured above) is among the most elaborate of Berkeley's numbers of James's second type, where "film-specific devices and effects are used to elaborate complex orchestrations of dancers into abstract patterns". These are commonly Berkeley's most celebrated productions; they include "Young and Healthy" from 42nd Street and "I Only Have Eyes For You" from Dames, for instance. In the case of Footlight Parade and "By A Waterfall", the transportation from the theatre stage into the realm of the impossible is marked by Dick Powell's slumber as a kind of dream state. The aquatic theme of this sequence makes it stand apart from all Berkeley's other achievements. The term "synchronized swimming" hadn't even been used yet at the time: it would make its first recorded appearance a year later according to Dawn Pawson Bean.

Finally, "Shanghai Lil" representing James's third category of Berkeley production: "quasi-narrative compositions, again dependent on film-specific procedures and essentially autonomous". He notes that these number differ from the other two categories in combining the "largely dystopian narrative" whose echoes are basically banished from the "entirely utopian interludes" of category 1 & 2. But "Shanghai Lil", like "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935  and "Remember My Forgotten Man" from Gold Diggers of 1933 in James's words "contains a noir countermovement, a recognition of violence, class difference, and exploitation that interrupts the saccharine bliss". Indeed, with its themes of prostitution, militarism, colonialism and substance addiction (whether the explicit alcohol or the coded heroin), "Shanghai Lil" must be the most disturbing of the musical numbers Berkeley ever created, even before taking account the discomfort of seeing Ruby Keeler in yellowface makeup.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight & tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 5:35 & 9:10.

WHY: I've always thought that the Castro should have a Busby Berkeley retrospective annually, and that Footlight Parade should be included. It's been two and a half years since the Castro's last such retro (a mini-retro featuring four films in fact), so this Palo Alto booking has to be the next best substitute.

HOW: 35mm on a double-bill with Flying Down To Rio

Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945)

WHO: Jack Cox, who shot for Maurice Elvey before making eleven films with Alfred Hitchcock (more than any other cinematographer other than the great Robert Burks) was director of photography on this.

WHAT: Saying too much, or even anything, about the plot of this film does it a great disservice. So I'll keep mum, other than to say that although it's usually tagged with the term "melodrama" it's likely to appeal strongly to fans of Hollywood film noir, or at least to those for whom the word noir doesn't just summon up images of Bogie or Mitchum in a trenchcoat, but also of Stanwyck or Crawford fighting personal demons.

Though it doesn't feel like a heavy-handed "message picture" Made near the very end of World War II, the film contains content that may have been reassuring to men and (perhaps particularly) women awaiting reunification with their sweethearts after a long separation, which helped make it become a hit. A gypsy woman in the film has remarkable advice about the double standard, which might have been taken as permission for war wives to forgive their husbands - and forgive themselves- for any wrongs inflicted during a period away from each other.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight through Friday, July 26th at the Stanford Theatre

WHY: As the last holdout among major Frisco Bay repertory venues in refusing to supplement its regular 35mm screenings with digital presentations, the Stanford's uniqueness becomes ever more evident. But even it has begun to prepare its loyal audiences for some kind of transformation. The introductory text on its current summer calendar (reproduced here) says it all, in the venue's typically succinct house style:

Whatever happens in the future, history will surely recognize that a major new art form was created in the twentieth century and that the traditional movie theatre was an essential part of it. At the Stanford Theatre you can still experience this in its original form. Our theatre has been here since 1925. It has nearly 1200 seats, with a balcony. We still show beautiful 35 mm prints. We still use carbon arc projectors. We even have an organ that plays before and after the 7:30 show. 

This too will pass. But in the meantime you have something in Palo Alto that is almost extinct everywhere else. Come often. Let your friends know about it. They'll probably thank you.

It's not the Stanford's way to say much more than "This too will pass." Which is why it sounds so ominous- I've never seen an acknowledgment from the theatre that its model might not be sustained forever into the future (though it's no great secret that the Silicon Valley wealth of its owner David Packard has more to do with its continued operation than ticket sales do). No hint of when (this year? next? twenty years from now?) change might come, much less how (the purchase of DCP projectors? closure?), but sometime, somehow, it's coming.

Let's enjoy the venue while it lasts.

Madonna of the Seven Moons is one of four British-made films on the current calendar, and not the only one shot by cinematographer Jack Cox. The Wicked Lady is also one of his, and it screens August 7-9 with the early Carol Reed picture Bank Holiday. Five other Jack Cox-shot films will also screen at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive in August, albeit via DCP. Of course I speak of the five Gainsborough Pictures titles among the Hitchcock 9 silent series, including The Ring (Cox's first collaboration with Hitchcock), Blackmail, and the three made between those two in 1928 & 1929.

HOW: Madonna of the Seven Moons screens via 35mm print, on a double-bill with another film featuring the lovely Patricia Roc, called The Brothers.

To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

WHO: Ernst Lubitsch directed this.

WHAT: Though it was a critical and commercial flop in its day, over the years To Be Or Not To Be has grown to join just about everyone's short list of Ernst Lubitsch's greatest comedies. Though its subject matter of a Polish theatre company contending with Hitler's invasion would seem to suggest a comic arena in which the Jewishness of its characters would be integral to the plot and the humor. And it is. But thanks to Hollywood protocols during World War II, the word "Jew" is never uttered in the film, and the characters' religions are identified only by cues such as star Jack Benny's widely-known Jewishness and lines like Felix Bressart's "What you are I wouldn't eat." Bressart plays a character actor named Greenberg, whose greatest wish is to portray Shylock in a production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. His character is fascinating from a perspective of seeking the Jewish essence of To Be Or Not To Be. There's a terrific essay on this topic by Joel Rosenberg which I shall excerpt the concluding paragraph of:

Lubitsch's aim of creating a film that would capture the complexity of the era and be remembered long after other films of the period were forgotten was, in a sense, perfectly realized. "What is the only picture," Lubitsch asked, "that is still remembered from the last war? It is not Griffith's Hearts of the World, or any of those sad ones. It's Chaplin's Shoulder's Arms." Lubitsch knew that laughter expressed the health of a society, and that the task of the filmmaker was to create a reality that violated the neat boundaries we tend to draw between comedy and high seriousness. And in offering us (or, I should say, offering up) Greenberg, Lubitsch made telling allusion to the doubly vanished Jew: the Jew who was then disappearing from Europe, and the Jew who, in that otherwise noble era of classic Hollywood cinema, ad all but disappeared from the American screen.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight's 7:30 PM screening ends a short run at the Stanford Theatre.

WHY: To Be Or Not To Be is far too infrequently revived on Frisco Bay cinema screens. It's played at the Stanford a few times over the years, but I can't recall it playing other venues for quite some time. It was even left out of a otherwise-substantial 2007 Lubitsch retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive for some reason. The most recent screening I can think of outside of Palo Alto was in 2004, when it screened as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Unfortunately I missed it then.

The 2013 SFJFF doesn't include any films from the classic Hollywood era, but it does have an expansive program of films (and television) by and about Jews from all over the world. Lincoln Spector has already previewed a few of the selections, but he hasn't seen the three films I'm most excited about, all of which coincidentally screen on the same day at the Castro Theatre, July 29th. These are Jerry and Me, an Iranian filmmaker's essay film on her personal connection to the comedy of Jerry Lewis over the years, which screens with another documentary about Jews in Iran Before the Revolution (not to be confused with the Bertolucci film from 1964.) And The Last Sentence, a drama about Sweden's shameful neutrality during World War II, directed by one of the most respected veterans of that country's filmmaking scene, Jan Troell, who is expected to be on hand for the Castro screening of the film- an event the auteur's fans will want to take a Monday afternoon off in order to catch. Last but not least, First Cousin Once Removed, an exploration of Alzheimer's made by one of America's most under-appreciated documentarians, Alan Berliner (his insomnia doc Wide Awake is tremendous, and what I've seen of his early experimental collage films are great as well). Berliner will also be at the Castro in person to receive the SFJFF's annual Freedom of Expression Award, and it's hard to think of a more deserving man.

HOW: To Be Or Not To Be screens via a 35mm print, on a double-bill with Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.