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Of Mice and Men
The 50^th London Film Festival
Treasures from the Archives
by Richard Armstrong

s a result of the decline in UK terrestrial television’s film provision in recent decades, movies I remember seeing regularly have disappeared albeit completely; from the TV schedules, and seemingly from the public consciousness. Meanwhile, amid the glitz of blockbuster releases, the marketing of  DVD “classics“ forlornly appeals to a generation raised on richer TV schedules. The London Film Festival (LFF) is fifty this year and I recall attending my first LFF screenings in 1979, as Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and media deregulation saw the BBC, long the curators of the national cinephilia, working harder, and pitching lower. Over the ensuing decades there would be fewer director seasons and no more world cinema. Documentary profiles of William Wyler, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles were becoming a thing of the past. The LFF’s Treasures from the Archives strand this year will be resurrecting more than one memory from this dimly recalled pre-video pre-DVD era.
     It is always tricky to discern themes and similarities between individual films in this slot, but certain traditions make this LFF archive showcase special. Recent festivals have seen restorations of pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck releases courtesy of Sony-Columbia, adding to our perception of that star’s image. This year the Frank Capra melodrama Forbidden (1932) looks a treat. In it Stanwyck plays a mousy librarian beneath whose plain carapace lives a red-blooded woman who raids her savings, takes off on a luxury cruise, and takes up with Adolphe Menjou’s wealthy lawyer. Another of Capra’s feisty Depression gals, the opening scene finds Stanwyck uncharacteristically late for work. Asked what time it is, she replies “Springtime!” But every silver lining has a cloud, and Babs suffers beautifully. Time it was when these little-known Stanwycks fetched up on rainswept English afternoons on BBC2. Not anymore… Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was filmed in 1939 by Lewis Milestone and its rich sepia look has been lovingly restored by the UCLA Film and TV Archive. Replete with Aaron Copland’s sonorous first film score and as the simple Lennie and his faithful buddy Lon Chaney Jr. and Burgess Meredith at the top of their game, I remember Of Mice and Men was a patient painful account of men and dreams ill-suited to a radically unfair life. Appearing in the same year as Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, this portrait of migrant bunkhouses and dusty Depression lives carries all the conviction of a WPA photograph. Also restored is Milestone’s populist war saga A Walk in the Sun (1946). Written by Robert Rossen, whose liberal sentiments led to political sanction during the McCarthy years, this account of dogfaces hitting the beaches at Salerno in 1943 is steeped in the music of ordinary men in extraordinary times. The folkloric tone lends the film an allegorical mood: “came across the sea to Italy, and took a little walk in the sun”, while the psychological intimacy foresees Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Dana Andrews and Richard Conte star. I remember seeing this shortly after catching The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) in 1978, and thinking what a great double bill they would make. One of the last war movies of the poetic pre-nuclear age.

till in this year’s populist vein is Henry King’s 1921 Tol’able David, a difficult film to see on this side of the Atlantic. Brought back to us via the Museum of Modern Art’s restoration of star Richard Barthelmess’s own nitrate copy, according to the LFF program the film is the “masterpiece” of King’s career. Consonant with a penchant for rustic melodrama sweeping the studios at the time— Griffith’s Way Down East (1920)—unusually this momentous stand-off between Barthelmess’s Virginia farm boy and some ruthless outlaws was shot on location in Virginia, King’s home state. Its aesthetics stand somewhere between the industry paradigm of Griffithian storytelling and Russian experiment. It even caught Russian montagist Pudovkin’s eye. There was a major season of King’s films on BBC2 in 1978 in which the British audience caught extracts from this early masterpiece. I recall being surprised to hear of the high repute in which Tol’able David was held among pre-war critics. Maybe this screening will lead to its resurrection and King’s revival in Europe.
     In a line-up marked by literary adaptation, David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) stand out. Coming back to us courtesy of the British Film Institute’s National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA), Great Expectations is a strikingly dark rendition of the Dickensian tale of a young man’s rise. The film is usually lauded  for its great performances - John Mills, Alec Guinness, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt as the decaying Miss Havisham—but coming when it did, it is difficult not to see Lean’s version as a strange collision of austerity Britain with the memory of Universal Gothicism. There are moments which remind me of Robert Siodmak’s mid-’40s thrillers. The opening sequence in the graveyard is peculiarly demented, while Miss Havisham is surely the missing link, given Billy Wilder’s admiration for Lean, between Universal’s old dark houses and Norma Desmond’s rambling ruin in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Also restored this year by the NFTVA in collaboration with the David Lean Foundation is Oliver Twist, with Guinness as Fagin, Robert Newton, Hattie Jacques and Diana Dors. Guy Green’s cinematography is a textured vision of Victorian London, giving the lie to rehearsals of British film history which overlook the visual in favour of the literary.
     Lean’s film opens with Oliver’s pregnant mother heroically battling a storm. In D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), Lillian Gish plays a star-crossed lover torn from her loved one in time of war, offering the waiflike actress ample opportunity to emote for “Mr Griffith”. Restored by MOMA with its original tints and intertitles intact, this propaganda piece strove to encourage America into the Great War but comes down to us as the missing masterpiece of Griffith’s oeuvre. Generations later, Stanley Kubrick made an antiwar statement for a very different era. Dr Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a characteristically ’60s satire full of cartoonish conceits yet more than aware of the gravity of the times. Released in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and sporting compelling performances from such as George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers, in another age of brinkmanship Kubrick’s message has lost none of its relevance.

here are two great postwar films noirs on the bill this year. UCLA graciously enabled the showing of a sound-corrected print of Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955), which does John Alton’s spare resourceful cinematography proud. In his 1995 Bfi documentary A Personal Journey through American Movies, Martin Scorsese was an eloquent advocate of Alton’s look for this film. There was a major Lewis season at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1980 where The Big Combo played to startled audiences as “neo-noir” loomed in first run houses and daytime screenings of little left-field Hollywood fare like this fell into decline. Don Siegel’s The Lineup (1958) was shot on location in San Francisco and charts a heroin heist which goes vividly wrong in the tautly directed pre-credits sequence. Steely, dark and bitter, this Sony-Columbia restoration plots another chapter in the fraught evolution of film noir from Lang to Mann.
     William Wyler seems like a favorite of the Treasures programmers, witness screenings of Roman Holiday and Wyler’s early westerns in recent years. I haven’t seen The Big Country (1958) since it was still playing first-run houses here in the ’60s. Memory suggests a rather well-meaning but dull frontier dispute over water rights between Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. But the Academy Archive’s restoration has gone back to the original Technirama negative and should be worth checking out. What I have never forgotten is Jerome Moross’s great score. At the time, critic Bosley Crowther overlooked the good intentions: “Peace is a pious precept, but fightin’ is more exciting’.”

ther highlights of the 50th LFF’s rep lineup include the F.W. Murnau Institute’s new print of the obscure German silent film The Tower of Silence (1924). A richly-conceived meld of medieval allegory, modernism and sci-fi, this generational melodrama receives its world premiere at the LFF and helps to nuance our idea of German silent cinema. There are always some one-shots and oddities in this strand and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973), financed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, seems utterly surreal. Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) was a visionary account of growing up in Liverpool in the postwar decades filtered through Davies’s extraordinary imagination. Featuring one of Pete Postlethwaite’s early turns and brought to us by the NFTVA, it is easy to forget how much truly experimental work got done in ‘80s British cinema.

ot to be confused with the more well-known Vittorio de Sica, it is surely time to praise Vittorio De Seta. Recently resurrected at Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato film festival, his Bandits of Orgosolo (1961) is the tale of a shepherd, unjustly accused of a crime and driven to a criminal life, is shot in neo-realist style and steeped in the look and cadences of its Sardinian locations, Martin Scorsese describing De Seta as “an anthropologist who spoke with the voice of a poet.” Ten of De Seta’s shorts accompany the screening, reminding us of the simple struggles of ordinary men and women which dominated the Treasures from the Archives in 2006.