Two Eyes: Michael Hawley

In the San Francisco Bay Area, moviegoing is not just for the newest releases. In 2013 there were more theatrical opportunities to see films spanning the history of cinema than any one person could take advantage of. Therefore, I've asked a sampling of local moviegoers to select a few favorites seen in cinemas last year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Michael Hawley, who blogs at film-415.

10 Favorite Bay Area Repertory/Revival Screenings 2013

The Joyless Street (1925, Germany, dir. G.W. Pabst, Castro Theatre, SF Silent Film Festival, live accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble)

The Weavers (1927, Germany, dir. Friedrich Zelnik, Castro Theatre, SF Silent Film Festival, live accompaniment and vocalizations by Günter Buchwald)

Inferno (1953, USA, dir. Roy Ward Baker, Castro Theatre, Noir City)

The Thief of Bagdad (1924, USA, dir. Raoul Walsh, Castro Theatre, SF Silent Film Festival Winter Event, live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra)

Cleopatra (1963, USA, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Castro Theatre)

Medea (1969, Italy, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Castro Theatre)

F.T.A. (1972, USA, dir. Francine Parker, Castro Theatre)

Fear of Fear (1975, Germany, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Roxie Theatre)

Safe in Hell (1931, USA, dir. William Wellman, Roxie Theatre, Hollywood Before the Code: Deeper, Darker, Nastier!)

Pursued (1947, USA, dir. Raoul Walsh, Pacific Film Archive, A Call to Action: The Films of Raoul Walsh)

Border Incident (1949)

WHO: Anthony Mann directed this.

WHAT: I shall quote the opening sentence from the beautiful Noir City 12 program guide which I just received upon arrival at the Castro yesterday evening:

Two cops -- one from Mexico (Ricardo Montalban) and one from the U.S. (George Murphy) -- put their lives on the line as they go undercover to bust up ruthless gangs on both sides of the border that prey on undocumented Mexican braceros. 

WHERE/WHEN: High noon today at the Castro Theatre, and 8:40PM Friday, February 21st at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: I'm not going to be putting up posts about films featured in this year's Noir City festival every day between now and next Sunday when it ends (I have another project planned for this space, not wholly unrelated to Noir City), but I just can't resist sharing the above DVD screen capture. This is John Alton cinematography at simultaneously its most picturesque and threatening, and if it doesn't make you want to see it projected in 35mm I don't know what's wrong with you.

I don't talk much about Border Incident in my recent Fandor article about this year's Noir City, which I know I linked here yesterday but will urge you once again to read if you haven't yet. Other Noir City articles that I've not yet linked on this blog include Dennis Harvey's SF Bay Guardian article, and another interview with festival founder Eddie Muller. Anyway, I think Border Incident is an ideal way to kick off a day of five (rounding up when you count the small Mexico-related portion of Too Late For Tears) Mexico-themed noir films including two made within that country's industry. Anthony Mann made quite a number of films involving Mexico and Mexican-Americans, from his 1956 drama Serenade to Westerns like The Furies and Man of the West, to the Mexico City-set noir The Great Flamarion, which screened a few years ago at a Hollywood-goes-to-Mexico noir series at the Pacific Film Archive.  But Border Incident contains elements of all these genres and perhaps one more, the "semi-documentary" subgenre of noir that was popular in the late 1940s. 

Last night's pairing of Journey Into Fear and The Third Man was a Castro sell-out. I'm curious to see if the numbers will hold up throughout the week. I hope they will, but do wonder if more than a few fans wish the festival featured more Hollywood noir along the lines they're used to. Perhaps they'll come out instead for the Castro's February 9th double-bill of famous Rita Hayworth noirs set at least partially in the Latin American countries Noir City is showcasing: Lady From Shanghai, with its famous scenes set in Mexico, and Gilda, set in Argentina. I hesitate to tell them about the seven-title Anthony Mann crime film series coming to the PFA next month. It includes Border Incident and six others, including three more shot by Alton.

HOW: Border Incident screens on a triple-bill with Roberto Gavaldón's In The Palm of Your Hand and Emilio Fernández's Victims of Sin at the Castro today, and will screen the same day as Mann's He Walked By Night (though as a separate admission) at the PFA next month.

The Third Man (1949)

WHO: Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for this film.

WHAT: As Imogen Sara Smith recently wrote,

The Third Man possesses intoxicating style and at the same time dissects the ease with which style can trump substance in the movies—the way, in film noir especially, glamour and aesthetic bliss can set one’s moral compass spinning. In the film’s tilting, labyrinthine world, beauty and corruption, cruelty and charm blend as smoothly as coffee and cream. It’s a world of splendor and rubble, leprous baroque apartments in half-gutted buildings, bleak fairgrounds and tired gypsy cafes. Anton Karas’s famous zither score, jaunty and wistful, imbues a mood of wry detachment and haunting nostalgia.

WHERE/WHEN: Screen tonight only at 9:00 at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Of all the films screening at this year's Noir City film festival running tonight through Sunday, February 2nd at its traditional Castro Theatre home, The Third Man is the most widely-known and critically-regarded. At least in the English-speaking world it is, that is. For the first time in the festival's history, it's showing a majority of foreign-language noirs among its program, fulfilling the wishes of cinephiles who have long hoped that films from France, Mexico, Japan, etc. might find a place under the festival's spectacular tent. I doubt I'm alone in hoping that this year's Noir City edition is at least as successful as ever with audiences, in the hopes that future editions might find more room for more noir from more countries. (Italy? Egypt? Finland? Thailand? I know they're out there.)

I've written about this year's festival and the international history of noir in an article published at Keyframe yesterday (other articles on the festival so far include Smith's, Sura Wood's, preview, and G. Allen Johnson's interview with festival director Eddie Muller), but my efforts to drum up interest in this year's festival won't stop there. Though I've sen The Third Man countless times (including a 35mm Castro screening less than two years ago) I plan to go again tonight. I imagine there will be folks attending who are excited to see the Third Man but may be on the fence about attending the rest of the festival because they're unsure about their interest in foreign-language films they may not have heard of before. I'm hoping my enthusiasm for favorites like Stray Dog, Quai des Orfèvres a.k.a. Jenny L'Amour, etc. might rub off on some of these fence-sitters and encourage them to take a chance on the rest of the program. The Third Man seems an ideal choice to open this international edition of Noir City, not only because it's a great movie that's never screened previously at Noir City, but also because Graham Greene is a perfect bridge to European noir for the Hollywood noir fan. Influential American films like This Gun For Hire and Ministry of Fear were based upon his novels, and are quite consistent with the British noirs he was responsible for once becoming a screenwriter: Brighton Rock (also screening at Noir City this week), The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man.

HOW: On a double-bill with Journey Into Fear, both screening from 35mm prints.

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.

Kid Auto Races At Venice, Cal. (1914)

WHO: Charlie Chaplin starred in this.

WHAT: The second film featuring Chaplin ever to have been released, and the first in which he wore the outfit he's been best known for ever since. As I wrote in a new piece on Chaplin published at Fandor (where it and Chaplin's other Keystone films are available to stream) yesterday,

This was the first audience for Chaplin in what would soon be known as his Little Tramp costume, which he’d put together just days prior to film the first shots of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, and we see the crowd reacting to his wanderings on the track, near-misses with racers, and battles with Lehrman and others to get closer to the camera so he can mug more effectively. Most of them appear delighted by his antics, although some shield their own faces from the machine’s stare. They realize just as much as Chaplin’s “odd character,” as he is called in a title card, that the camera can document them for a certain amount of posterity (surely nobody guessed a hundred years), and have an opposite reaction.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at the Castro Theatre at 4PM, and at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Today is the precisely 100th anniversary of the day when a small movie crew including Chaplin and director Henry Lehrman went to a racetrack at the popular resort town of Venice, California, and shot this film. Chaplin's "Little Tramp" character had already been captured on film by now, in a few shots for Mabel's Strange Predicament probably taken the day before. But the "Little Tramp" had never been seen by the public until January 11th, 1914. And since Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. was shot in a single day it beat Mabel's Strange Predicament to the screen by a couple of days.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is screening Kid Auto Races At Venice, Cal. as one small part of its day-long Chaplin event today. For more reading on Chaplin produced for the festival, check out the link round-up on the SFSFF blog, and another Keyframe piece, Jonathan Marlowe's interview with Timothy Brock, who will be leading a small orchestra for two of today's three programs. You can also hear him speak about that on this podcast.

Meanwhile, the Niles screening tonight is the second installment in a year-long project to show every one of Chaplin's 1914 films in chronological order, in 16mm, at that venue.

HOW: Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. screens in 35mm at the Castro, before a DCP showing of The Kid with live music by Timothy Brock and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. It screens along with two more shorts, Ghost Town: the Story of Fort Lee and Crazy Like A Fox, as well as a feature film also celebrating its centennial, The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England , a 2012 inductee to the National Film Registry directed by Maurice Tourneur. All the Niles films will screen on 16mm with piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb.