Amazons and Auteurs

	.	by Richard Armstrong
		he spring 1963 issue of Film Quarterly ran a piece by Pauline Kael entitled Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris. Responding to Andrew Sarris’ Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, Kael’s article is not merely a notorious moment in her own glittering reputation, but put the movie director-as-auteur squarely at the heart of American film criticism. American film criticism, the American film industry, and film culture generally have never recovered. Slightly over 40 years on from the Kael-Sarris spat, Quentin Tarantino’s name has been plastered over the bus shelters of England as Kill Bill opens, testimony to the kudos of the auteur throughout the land. This week the 47th London Film Festival (LFF) opens at London’s National Film Theatre. Representing the British Film Institute’s commitment to the world’s archives, the Treasures from the Archives strand reiterates its obligation to bygone auteurs. Bringing the latest image renovation technologies to bear upon lost or neglected repertory works also enables the gradual expansion and consolidation of the canon. Print restorations are a key element in the festival as they have become in arthouse exhibition everywhere. Among the retouched and renovated this year are works by Ford, Ophüls, Lumet, Boetticher, early Wyler, late Wyler, and Mack Sennett. Decision at Sundown completes a cycle of Budd Boetticher restorations at recent LFFs. This 1957 revenge western is one of the darkest of the famed collaborations with Randolph Scott. In it the lonely stranger rides into town to avenge the violation of his wife, only to discover the extent of her perfidy. Western historian Phil Hardy compares Scott’s deranged performance with those of James Stewart in the string of westerns he made with Anthony Mann. Shot by Burnett Guffey and bearing the ambiguous little moments so peculiar to Boetticher, Decision at Sundown comes courtesy of Sony-Columbia’s preservation team. It is an extremely rare and exciting thing when a movie by an old master comes to light. In 2000 some reels of nitrate were discovered in a Paris suburb with the title À l’assaut du boulevard. On inspection they turned out to be the 1917 Harry Carey comedy western Bucking Broadway, directed by John Ford. Playing the “Cheyenne Harry” character he adopted in over 20 Ford horse operas, Harry arrives in New York in pursuit of his girl. As historian Tag Gallagher writes, this is archetypal Ford: “There is the same love for vigorous action, painterly compositions, an underlying stream of oxymoronic humor, and a warmth: a sense of communal sharing.” Although automobiles, telephones and fast ways tell of an America changing before the cowboy’s eyes, Bucking Broadway ends with a characteristically Fordian mass fistfight on a hotel terrace. Digitizing the nitrate before transferring it to 35mm, the French state film body Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie (CNC) did cameraman John W. Brown’s original tinting proud. (See Senses of Cinema for some fine stills and Gallagher’s commentary—Ford Rises from the Dead. Again). William Wyler’s career ran from two-reel westerns in the ’20s to everyone’s idea of the prestige star vehicle in the ’50s and ’60s. From the UCLA Film and Television Archive comes The Love Trap, a risqué 1929 bedroom comedy and part talkie featuring winsome girl-next-door Laura La Plante (she of 1927’s spoof Gothic The Cat and the Canary). La Plante is said to have been at her best in social comedy, and here she is a dancer cornered by a womanizer and evicted from her apartment before being rescued from the rain by a wealthy young businessman. Cue for complications… If there is a theme to this year’s archive offerings, it is perhaps the prospect of damaged but intrepid women lighting out into an uncertain world. Wyler’s name has been associated with some historic moments in American cinema. Minor but deeply pleasurable just the same was that time when Audrey Hepburn got her hair bobbed in Roman Holiday (1953). Actually not unlike the plot of The Love Trap, Audrey Hepburn’s first Hollywood film put that postwar archetype, the gamine at large, on the cultural map. Following a single day in the fortunes of a headstrong European princess at liberty in a Rome somewhere between vacation fairytale and neo-realist clamor, Roman Holiday is key to Hepburn’s career, and nicely commemorates the late Gregory Peck. Paramount has embarked on a major effort to enhance and revive its back catalogue and this charming confection is going to look great for its 50th birthday. Wyler and cinematographer Franz Planer brought a genuine sense of presence to the whirring Fiats and scurrying bambini of postwar Rome that would have endeared them to André Bazin. Dalton Trumbo wrote the story treatment, but lost his credit owing to the McCarthy blacklist. Trumbo’s name has now been restored. Sony-Columbia have also produced a restoration of Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment. Joan Bennett plays Lucia, the middle-class mother whose daughter has fallen in with the wrong kind of man. When her shady boyfriend is found dead, a mysterious but sensitive Irishman, played by James Mason, tries to blackmail her. Replete with Ophüls’ trademark shadows and graceful tracking—see that unusually sustained close-up of Lucia’s writing spilling out on the page—the film enmeshes the vexed woman in a panoply of bars, objects, and familial obligation. Finally she discovers a side to herself that she never knew existed. As the Irishman says: “We’re all involved with each other one way or another.” nother woman out of her depth is Katharine Hepburn’s Jane in David Lean’s Summertime (British title: Summer Madness). In this Bfi National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA) restoration, a middle-aged secretary, disappointed but still passionate, succumbs to love while on vacation in Venice. Classically composed, Summertime was Lean’s first film shot on foreign locations, and has all the feeling for the environment we find in the widescreen epics. Again, brimming with the ambient soundscape of Italy, this is a microphone hung on a hotel balcony, a window on the piazza. Catch that aerial shot of Jane running through the crowds in St. Mark’s Square. And the scene in which she sits at a café table while in the distance Rossano Brazzi roves towards her like that black figure on its way to the oasis in Lawrence of Arabia. In the age of CGI it’s refreshing to find yourself in a real setting again. Summertime will be playing a variety of UK venues as part of the LFF regional tour (7-23 November. Details at www.lff.org.uk). “Taking as its setting real-life America of the years surrounding the First World War, Keystone evolved a surreal and anarchic comic universe, peopled by curious creatures who were in every way larger and wilder and more vivid than life.” So wrote historian David Robinson of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops. Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) is reckoned to be the first feature-length comedy and finds Charlie Chaplin in pre-Little Fellow garb as a wicked swindler out to fleece the trusting country girl of her inheritance. Originally the victim of multiple cuts and revisions, Tillie’s Punctured Romance has been returned to its intended six-reel running time by the UCLA Archive and the NFTVA. See those expertly staged chase antics on the Venice Beach pier. Eventually proclaiming her solidarity with the fat girl, Mabel Normand’s scheming minx declares the end of Charlie the rascal: “He ain’t no good to neither of us.” Among other treasures in this year’s festival is the CNC’s revival of French master Marcel L’Herbier’s 1920 L’Homme du Large, meticulously transferred from nitrate and featuring Charles Boyer in his debut role. Associated in the history books with the French experimental impulse of the period, L’Herbier here makes striking play with superimposition and frame compositions in a chronicle of a fishing family riven by misfortune. Approaching its 40th anniversary is Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964), reckoned by many to be the director’s finest work. A nail-biting account of Cold War brinkmanship and an antidote to the satire of 1963’s Dr Strangelove, this is the result of a collaboration between Sony-Columbia and the Museum of Modern Art. The Cold War may be history, but Fail Safe still speaks to a daily life perhaps ten times as likely to end in bloodshed. By way of tribute to the indelible stamp of the old studios, a double bill of ’30s programmers from Warner Brothers. In Two Seconds (1932), Edward G. Robinson relives his odyssey from laborer to killer in the two seconds it takes him to die in the electric chair. In Taxi! (1932), a pugnacious cabby played by Jimmy Cagney protects his patch from the Mob: brawling, dancing, speaking Yiddish yet! Preserved from camera negatives at the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center, at a crisp 140 minutes between them, here is a punchy bouquet to the genius of the system. And finally, courtesy of the South East Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association comes My Love, a Filipino musical romance from 1939 in which country girl Guia is seduced by Hollywood and American dance music before returning to her Filipino roots. It all goes to show that the lost and the prodigal are seldom lost forever.