While the Biennale is going at full (or at least semi-full) throttle in security-tight Venice, Los Angeles is currently offering its own lesser-known but surely no less fascinating — and considerably more relaxed — film festival. As per the description found on its website, Cinecon is a film convention-cum-festival where "cinephiles from across the nation and around the world come to . . . over Labor Day weekend to celebrate the movies."
And there will be plenty of quirky and rare old movies — most of them American productions, with a couple of English flicks thrown in — and quite a few celebrity guests, film memorabilia stands, discussion panels, and movie-buff-filled banquets over the upcoming extended weekend.
Apart from any calamitous last-minute changes and cancellations, Cinecon-men and -women will be able to watch the recently restored print of the touching 1927 melodrama Sorrell and Son, a father-love tale that was a Best (dramatic) Direction Academy Award nominee (for Herbert Brenon) in the period 1927-28, the first year of the awards.
The film stars a superb H. B. Warner (Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings, made that same year) as the father who sacrifices it all for the love of his son (Mickey McBan as a boy; a much-too-powdered Nils Asther as a young man).
Also in the all-star cast are Alice Joyce, Mary Nolan, Louis Wolheim, and two great Bitches from Hell, Carmel Myers, as a mean-spirited married woman who has the hots for the chaste Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson, highly effective as the ex-Mrs. Sorrell, a selfish, money-hungry gal who loves her grown-up son just a little too much.
In addition, attendees will have the chance to watch the reconstructed — and scandalous — Baby Face (1933), now in its full amoral glory, with an outstanding Barbara Stanwyck (above, with John Wayne) as the girl who knows what she wants, and who has the determination, the brains, and the hot body to get it.
Also, Ladies Should Listen (1933), about a romance between a switchboard operator (Frances Drake) and a businessman (a young Cary Grant), with the added bonus of future Warner Bros. star Ann Sheridan in a bit part; and the rarely seen Norma Talmadge vehicle The Wonderful Thing (1920).
Norma who? you ask. Well, merely one of the biggest box-office stars Hollywood has ever had. The pretty and capable Norma Talmadge was a much-admired film goddess from the mid-teens to the late 1920s, starring in numerous glossy melodramas of the period.
The Wonderful Thing, however, directed by the aforementioned Herbert Brenon, is hardly one of her best-liked vehicles. In the film, Talmadge plays the daughter of a millionaire hog raiser, ending up married to a poor — though titled — Englishman (Harrison Ford, no connection to the star of Raiders of the Lost Ark). The problem is, does the British nobleman love her or her father's money-making hogs?
Either way, the New York Times was unimpressed, asserting that The Wonderful Thing "might be the work of almost any of the many mediocre actresses and directors in the numerous studios between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts." Be that as it may, in 2005 a screening of a Norma Talmadge vehicle, no matter how "mediocre," is something to be cherished by any silent-film lover worth his nitrate.
And there's more. . . Another long-forgotten top star of the 1910s and 1920s, Thomas Meighan can be found in William Beaudine's The Canadian (1925), while cool and elegant Florence Vidor can be seen in her last film and only talkie, William A. Wellman's Chinatown Nights (1929), co-starring Wallace Beery and Warner Oland.
A screening of the longer (by about three minutes) version of the 1955 Best Picture Academy Award winner Marty, starring Ernest Borgnine (above), will be followed by a Q&A session with the film's Oscar-winning director, Delbert Mann. Academy Award winner Patricia Neal (for Hud) will also be on hand for a Q&A session after a screening of the politics & romance tale Washington Story (1952), co-starring Van Johnson.
Other titles include Alfred Hitchcock's British-made Downhill (1927), starring West End heartthrob Ivor Novello; the slow-moving Peggy Leads the Way (1917), a romantic melodrama set in Northern California, with Mary Miles Minter (left, with Allan Forrest), possibly Mary Pickford's biggest rival in those days, playing the cute little waif who fights big (and heartless) business; and the rarely seen (and only mildly amusing) Loretta Young who-done-it (if something has indeed been done) The Second Floor Mystery (1930), a romantic (thrill-less) thriller co-starring Young's then husband, Grant Withers.
And finally; the 1928 gangster melo Dressed to Kill, directed by Irving Cummings (the director of the first "outdoor talkie," In Old Arizona), and starring Edmund Lowe and Mary Astor (right); the futuristic (and pacifist) 1927 British drama High Treason, directed by the renowned Maurice Elvey;plus the boogie-woogieing Andrews Sisters singing about Moonlight and Cactus (1943).
As so often in the past, Cinecon 2005 will be held in the heart of Hollywood, with most screenings taking place at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The five-day film marathon kicked off Thursday evening with the showing of one episode from the 1934 serial Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which, according to the online schedule, was followed by the 1937 B-film Hideaway and a Q&A session with that film's leading lady, Marjorie Lord.
Dozens of movies later, this cinematic smorgasbord will come to a close on Monday afternoon, with a screening of the Baby Face-ish 1951 melodrama I Can Get It for You Wholesale, with a screenplay by blacklisted writer-director Abraham Polonsky, and starring Susan Hayward as a fashion designer ruthlessly making her way to the top in a man's world.
If you appreciate old and rare films, be equally ruthless and make your way to the front line of the Egyptian's box-office to buy either a full-day or a festival pass.
For more information on Cinecon, visit the festival's official site.
The New York Times quote was found in Greta DeGroat's excellent Norma Talmadge website