Dreams and Pomp

If you have access to Turner Classic Movies, make sure to catch the Monday, January 23 program Max Ophuls in Hollywood, a rare opportunity to see all four feature films that Ophuls completed in the late Forties. The films are:

8:00 PM EST: The Reckless Moment (1949)
9:30 PM EST: Caught (1949)
11:15 PM EST: Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
1:00 AM EST: The Exile (1947)

Amazingly, none of these films has an official DVD release yet in the US. The Reckless Moment and The Exile are receiving their TCM broadcast premieres. I haven’t seen The Exile in its entirety, but the opening sequence of the film showcases Ophuls’ and the cinematographer Franz Planer’s expressive camera movements.

A source at Turner Broadcasting System has kindly provided the following information:

THE EXILE was the first film that Ophuls was able to make after some seven years of residence in the U.S. .Ophuls had fled Europe in the wake of Hitler’s rise, and it took him that long to get a project completed after he had settled in Hollywood. Ironically, it was the publicity garnered by Ophuls’ firing from a project for Howard Hughes that prompted another expatriate director, Robert Siodmak, to recommend the director for a film at Universal that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was planning to write, produce and star in: the story of Charles II’s exile in the Netherlands, in hiding from Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads, the latter led by a villain played by Henry Daniell. The film was to be Fairbanks Jr’s tribute to the swashbuckling epics of his celebrated father.

Rejoined with his cinematographer Franz Planer, with whom he had last worked 15 years prior to THE EXILE in Germany, Ophuls was able to revel in the resources of top Hollywood studio craftsmen and technicians. The camera was able to track, swoop and crane effortlessly over the studio sets, utilizing to the fullest extent the director’s signature technique. Far from being a rousing swashbuckler, although it has all the requisite elements, the overall tone, befitting an Ophuls project, is a bittersweet one, as embodied by the romance between the exiled king and a farmer’s daughter, the latter played by Paule Croset (Rita Corday). Surprisingly, Universal contract siren Maria Montez also makes an appearance, and in just a couple of memorable scenes becomes part of the illustrious roster of Ophuls heroines, far from the camp appeal she embodied in films like COBRA WOMAN.

TCM’s showing of THE EXILE is unique and quite special for a couple of other reasons. The film transfer utilized by TCM is sourced from archival elements deposited at the Library of Congress by Universal, so pictorially the film will look its best. Additionally, after the film is shown, Robert Osborne will return to introduce the film’s alternate “European” ending which was also in the Library of Congress’s Universal materials. The alternate ending to THE EXILE (some 90 seconds) is basically appended to the existing ending of the domestic version of the film, followed by a close up of a commemorative plaque with which both versions of the film begin & end, bringing things full circle.  This “alternate” was the way the film was originally scripted to end – and is the way Ophuls preferred the film to end – but as it wasn’t considered an “essential” scene, the script pages were on the shooting schedule’s chopping block. Ophuls prevailed upon Fairbanks to let him shoot the scene anyway, and he did so, although it ended up not being seen by very many, even in Europe, where it was originally intended to be part of the foreign-release prints. Now, thanks to TCM, we get to glimpse this extremely rare footage. The ending, brief as it is, makes the film’s tone even more bittersweet and adds immeasurably to its overall impact.

Finally, a note on the director’s credit on the film: “Max Opuls.” This is not a misspelling, but a revision suggested by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and it was used as the credit for all the films Ophuls completed in Hollywood.

The only thing I can add is that the other broadcast premiere, The Reckless Moment, is also essential viewing. This smaller scale, tautly directed crime thriller features one of Joan Bennett’s finest performances, as a mother attempting to cover up her daughter’s possible involvement in a murder. The film was remade in 2001 as The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton.

One of the most eagerly sought pre-Code films, Stephen Roberts’ The Story of Temple Drake (1933), is showing tonight on TCM at 8:00 p.m. An adaptation of William Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary, it stars Miriam Hopkins and features atmospheric cinematography by Karl Struss.

According to a source from Turner Broadcasting, “TCM paid for a broadcast master from MoMA’s print materials – which were in great shape, as the film has essentially remained unseen for so long.  Although it’s a Paramount film, Fox owns it, as they bought the underlying property, Faulkner’s SANCTUARY — & the original film – for a remake in 1960.”

I saw a poor-quality print several years ago and remember the film as an especially jaw-dropping pre-Code drama. I have not, however, seen the remake directed by Tony Richardson and starring Lee Remick as Temple Drake and Yves Montand (!) as Candy Man.

This week the 3D version of Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams continues its run in Atlanta at the Regal Hollywood 24. Having seen it now in its proper 3D format, I can testify to the huge difference it makes to see the artwork in its original spacial context on the cave walls. The Upper Paleolithic artists made astonishingly sophisticated use of the cave wall contours; in at least one case, they extended the legs of an animal over a curved wall so that they looked normal when viewed from the proper angle. In another instance, the effect of a bison turning its head toward the viewer is enhanced by the curve in a wall. Effects such as these come across far more clearly when viewing the film in 3D. In general, the 3D works to give you a better sense of the space within the cave.

To be sure, not all of the 3D works equally well. At one point we see a couple of scientists standing in front of a wall painted with handprints, and the odd seams around them suggest that the 3D effect in this particular shot was created digitally, after the fact. But on the whole the format adds greatly to the emotional impact of the film.

On this second viewing I was even more impressed with Ernst Reijseger’s haunting score–I want to become more familiar with his work.

If you haven’t seen the retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs at the High Museum (Atlanta), you must go. Now. This touring retrospective, which originated at the Museum of Modern Art, runs in Atlanta until May 29.

This is the most impressive museum exhibit of any kind that I have seen in the past few years, and one of the most impressive that I have ever seen, period. During his very long life (1908-2004) Cartier-Bresson visited practically every country on the planet, some of them more than once. His works range from Surrealist-influenced work during the Thirties to photojournalism and portraits. What I found amazing is that using mainly a single kind of camera–a Leica with a 50mm lens–and almost exclusively black-and-white film, he demonstrated as much artistic range as a great painter. He also had a rare gift for capturing life as a series of spontaneous but expressive moments, his subjects seemingly oblivous of his presence. Exhibit highlights include the photo-essays on the daily operations American bank (depressingly familiar today) and the Great Leap Forward in China; photos taken during two separate trips to the Soviet Union; the Mexican photos; the celebrity portraits. I was so overwhelmed by almost every image that I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite. Another aspect which I found fascinating was observing how photographic paper and printing styles changed over the years. 

Plan to spend at least four hours for the entire exhibit, or break it up over two days. You won’t regret it. I’d like to go back for a second viewing.

I just returned from a special screening of the restored Taxi Driver (1976) at AMC Phipps Plaza: a very unusual opportunity–in Atlanta, at least–to see a 4k digital restoration of a film projected in its native format. (The Blu-ray disc downsized from the same restoration streets on April 5.)

The fifty-odd spectators looking forward to a spiffed-up tour of Scorsese’s cinematic Inferno barely escaped getting dragged by thousands of gleeful imps into a Hell of an entirely different, more terrifying sort: the Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston comedy Just Go With It. It seems that an inattentive projectionist forgot to boot up the correct file. One person sitting next to me pointed out, this wouldn’t have happened if it were a 35mm print. At least it didn’t take very long to fix the problem.

Still, after tonight’s viewing I think that 4k digital projection is a viable alternative to 35mm prints for films originally shot on 35mm. I didn’t spot any of the burnt-out highlights that crop up from time to time in HD video-originated material, and the film’s original grain structure was very much apparent. The restoration itself properly maintained the look of Seventies film stock, but since Sony went directly to the original negative for the digital restoration, the image had greater density and especially had better color–those infernal reds!–than the other versions I’ve seen over years. The main exception is the final shootout, which is still heavily desaturated as it looked during its initial theatrical release.

Paul Schrader’s script, with its voiceover diary entries, is a dark and perverted mirror of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. (In case you doubt this, Schrader even tosses in a throwaway reference to stomach cancer.) The film as a whole remains a brilliant tour-de-force, but there is one thing that continues to bug me: if Travis Bickle is really so uneducated and out of touch that he doesn’t know the word “moonlighting,” then why does he use the word “venal” in his diary? Still, Robert De Niro is so convincing that he makes the role come painfully alive. Harvey Keitel is also indelible as the pimp–I would go so far as to say that his insidious slow dance with Jody Foster represents his absolute best work as an actor aside from Mean Streets. I’ve seen Taxi Driver many times on video, but that scene stood out unexpectedly on the big screen.

For more about the film’s restoration, see Grover Crisp’s interview on The Digital Bits.

Subir Bannerjee as Apu in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955).

As anyone familiar with Sir Salman Rushdie’s works must know by now, he is a great cinephile in addition to being a great writer. As the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory, this semester he is curating a series entitled “Great Works of Fiction Made Into Great Films,” sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of Media Studies, and the Office of the Provost at Emory. Monday night’s film (Feb. 21) was Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), in a restored 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive.

After the screening Rushdie commented that one important difference between the film and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel was that the novel went further in its depiction of the brutal conditions of life in rural Bengal. Among other things, the film left out the pervasive domestic violence which many women characters suffered. Rushdie argued that Ray’s film adaptation was ultimately even better than the novel, which is a literary masterpiece in its own right; one aspect in particular that he singled out is the film’s extraordinary visual lyricism.

I have to agree: seeing the film in 35mm confirms that Pather Panchali surely stands among the greatest films ever made, together with the other two films in Ray’s trilogy. The ending is almost unbearably heartbreaking–it never fails to reduce me to tears no matter how often I see it. But the film’s visual lyricism is also critical to the cumulative effect of the trilogy as a whole: in the first film, the lyrical passages don’t just soften a story that would have been otherwise too bleak for most viewers. They’re important because they help us share Apu’s emergence into consciouness and the development of his poetic sensibility as a future writer. Although it is a very different kind of film, its treatment of a poet’s childhood impressions–or rather, its depiction of how the world shapes a poet’s consciousness–reminds me a bit of Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. The other aspect I find astonishing is Ray’s handling of nonprofessional actors, which at least equals or possibly surpasses similar efforts by Renoir and the Italian neorealism movement. There is not a single false note in the entire cast.

The other screenings in the series are John Huston’s The Dead (February 28), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (March 14) and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (March 21). The screenings are free and open to the public, and the venue (White Hall 208 on the Emory campus) benefits greatly from a pair of newly installed 35mm projectors.  The image positively gleamed Monday night.