UCLA Festival of Preservation 2009
The UCLA Film & Television Archives‘ 2009 UCLA Festival of Preservation, which kicks off this evening and continues until April 26, leaves me at a loss. The problem is: I don’t know what not to recommend. (See full schedule below.)
Now, it’s not that I think every single one of the listed films are waiting-to-be-rediscovered masterpieces — or even that they’re mostly enjoyable fare. What makes me so excited about the Festival of Preservation is that it features films that for the most part are incredibly rare, thus offering audiences a unique chance to either get to know (or to get reacquainted with) our cinematic past.
Here’s some of what’s in store for you if you live in the Los Angeles area:
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Master of stylization Josef von Sternberg’s naturalistic (!) first film, the independently made 1925 drama The Salvation Hunters (above), which impressed Charles Chaplin so much he found distribution for it and ended up using the film’s leading lady, Georgia Hale, in The Gold Rush. - Master sentimentalist Frank Borzage’s Young America (1932), with a youngish Spencer Tracy and a latter-day Doris Kenyon (a lovely and capable silent-film actress who managed a relatively smooth transition to sound), plus Borzage’s Song o’My Heart (right, 1930), which stars Irish tenor John McCormack, a very young Maureen O’Sullivan, and veteran Alice Joyce in one of her last screen roles. Preservationist Robert Gitt will introduce the screening.
- A couple of Vitagraph productions: the featurette A Tale of Two Cities (1911), starring Maurice Costello and Florence Turner, and featuring a very young Norma Talmadge, who’d become one of Hollywood’s superstars of the 1920s; and Her Crowning Glory (1911), starring the comic duo of John Bunny and Flora Finch (best remembered for her supporting role in the 1927 version of The Cat and the Canary), and featuring five-year-old Helene Costello, daughter of Maurice and future leading lady of the first all-talking motion picture, Lights of New York (1928).
- Joseph Losey’s thriller The Prowler (1951), starring Van Heflin as a psycho cop and Evelyn Keyes as a lady in distress in what turned out to be the director’s last Hollywood film. (The following year, Losey was blacklisted. He fled the United States, later resuming his career in Britain. Curiously, fellow blacklistee Dalton Trumbo co-wrote the Prowler screenplay with Hugo Butler.)
- John Sayles‘ Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), which was later eclipsed by the similarly themed and more popular The Big Chill, and The Brother from Another Planet (1984), in which a space alien (Joe Morton) lands in mid-1980s Manhattan.
- Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), one of the seminal works in the early gay film movement, in which two former lovers renew a brotherly bond after one of them comes down with AIDS.
Fritz Lang’s absurd but highly entertaining psychological mystery-melodrama Secret Beyond the Door (1948), starring Michael Redgrave and Joan Bennett (right).- William Desmond Taylor’s melo He Fell in Love with His Wife (1916), one of the murdered director’s few surviving films. (Taylor’s still-unsolved 1922 murder was one of the biggest scandals in Hollywood history.)
- The early backstage musical Pointed Heels (1929), starring a pre-MGM William Powell, a pre-King Kong Fay Wray, and boop-boop-a-doopy Helen Kane, and featuring the super-handsome Phillips Holmes in one of his early film appearances.
- "Behind the Scenes in Hollywood," which features, among others, Ronald Colman doing a screen test in 1932, Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd in their respective home movies, Cecil B. DeMille speaking at Brigham Young University, and Charles Chaplin celebrating his 77th birthday.
- The only foreign entry in the series, Lester James Peries‘ 1964 Sri Lankan social drama Gamperaliya, in which a middle-class man falls in love with a girl belonging to the local aristocracy.
- Edgar G. Ulmer’s attack on the American obsession with wealth, Ruthless (1948), described as the director’s Citizen Kane, and starring two likable performers, Zachary Scott and Louis Hayward, who went on to develop a close relationship off-screen. The screenplay was co-written by one of the Hollywood Ten, Alvah Bessie.
- Among the Vitaphone Varieties, I particularly recommend the musical short The Opry House (1929), which manages to be both nostalgic and more hip than any current music video on MTV or VH1.
- And finally, the festival’s closing night entry, Edward S. Curtis‘ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), described as a "reflection of contemporary life among the Kwakwaka’wakw people of British Columbia as well as a fiction that combined melodramatic elements with tribal customs."
And what if I find John Cassavetes‘ A Woman Under the Influence (1974) a big bore? The 2009 Festival of Preservation opening night film was Cassavetes’ biggest box-office hit up to that point, earning him a best director Oscar nomination and leading lady (and Cassavetes’ wife) Gena Rowlands a best actress Oscar nod as well. Check it out … After all, there’s always a good chance you’ll totally disagree with me.
Note: Good news for those outside L.A. Twelve films from the Archive’s 14th Festival of Preservation will tour North America after the Los Angeles event. Some of the cities scheduled for the tour are New York; Washington; Chicago; Columbus, OH; Houston; and Vancouver, BC.
Photos: Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archives
Click on the photos to enlarge them.
2009 UCLA Festival of Preservation Schedule
Douglas Fairbanks’ THE THIEF OF BAGDAD and THE IRON MASK Screening
SARI’S MOTHER, SICKO: Contemporary Documentaries Screening
THE CAKE EATERS Sneak Preview at the Egyptian Theatre
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4 Responses to “UCLA Festival of Preservation 2009”
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I noticed that you will be screening TEX McLEOD “A ROPE AND A STORY” soon. That’s great! He was such an interesting man. I just wanted to mention to anyone who is a fan of Tex that I am writing a biography about him. More information can be found at http://www.texmcleod.com .
Best of luck with your film series.
Clark Gray
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!
Darn! Missed “The Salvation Hunters” last night!!!
The Return of the Secaucus Seven is a much better film than The Big Chill. It wasn’t as successful because it has little known performers whereas The Big Chill had lots of big names like William Hurt and Jobeth Williams. But don’t be fooled by big Hollywood stars. The Return of the Secaucus is the real thing!
What a wonderful film lineup!
I hope that The Sensation Hunters will make it to NY!