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Festival Reviews
Topic Started: Jul 20 2010, 07:26 AM (551 Views)
panzer the great & terrible
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Mouth Breather
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On the last day of the festival offered nothing famous, but it may have been the best day of all.

Things got jump-started with William Wyler's great boxing feature, The Shakedown, released as both a silent and a part talkie in, I think, 1928. When you think about it, there are lots of great boxing movies -- The Champ, Body and Soul, and Raging Bull for three -- but this one's my new favorite.

Wyler was born in Alsace and came to Universal in 1920 as one of "Uncle" Carl Laemmle's many nephews. You might remember Ogden Nash's "Uncle Carl Laemmle / has a large faemmle." Wyler's absent-mindedness got him known known as "Worthless Willy" for a couple of years, but then he became useful on Western serials, herding extras and then assistant directing. He was 22 when he directed his first two-reeler, "Crook Busters." Then came 21 two reelers and eight five-reelers, and then Wyler got promoted to Universal's big-budget Jewel series.

Our picture was his third Jewel. It came from a Damon Runyon wrestling tale, and Wyler was at first reluctant to do it. Saying "If you play ball, I will," Universal's general manager Henry Henson got some rewrites and the film turned into a boxing picture, the first non-comic one of any importance, and was a hit even though the transition to sound was hurting business. Now Wyler was an up-and-comer, the youngest on the lot, and his name was used to promote the film: "Another Willie Wyler Winner."

It's hard to write about this kind of picture without spoilers; it's kind of like The Champ, but the pug is an impossibly handsome James Murray, the kid is older than Jackie Cooper, and the sentimentality is kept to a bare minimum. The kid worships the fighter but is disillusioned overhearing plans to throw an important fight. Yeah, that movie, but this is the original that movie, and fresh as paint.

A happy surprise. Panzer's highest recommendation -- A+. The print was from George Eastman House and I don't think a DVD release is coming soon.

Second up was Dziga Vertov's The Man With the Movie Camera, an elaborately-edited hour-long Ukrainian ancestor of cinema-verité magnificently photograped by Boris Kaufman's brother David. A third brother, Michael, played the lead. The idea was to portray a cameraman-as-typical-Soviet-worker: Kaufman carries his lightweight camera all over the place, up to the tops of the steeples and down into the factories and mines, and it's all just about as deadly as it sounds, but don't tell anybody I said so. It's one of those sacred cow movies, suppressed by Stalin and all that good stuff.

There was a brilliant score by the Alloy Orchestra. The three should still have been exhausted from their three-hour workout on Metropolis two nights before, but this was an even more athletic performance. One of the three told me he couldn't have played five more minutes to save his life.

For the movie, C+. For the music, A. There is a DVD with the Alloy score, and it's the kind of movie that's better if you watch it in little pieces, so DVD may be the way to go.

Next up was the real stinker of the festival, The Woman Disputed. Directing credit went to two men, Henry King and Sam Taylor, and, as usual, that's a bad sign. The movie is best remembered for its theme song "Woman Disputed, I Love You."

Norma Talmadge, though the most beautiful of the Talmadge Sisters, was not the most talented, owing at least some of her success to a marriage with Loews' Theatres honcho Nicholas Schenck. The marriage gave the world her elaborate, profitable melodramas but is better-known to us for a side-effect, the elaborate Buster Keaton features (he was married to Natalie Talmadge). In any case, by the time this film was in production, the Schencks' marriage was shaky. Talmadge was, um, dating Gilbert Roland, so what did Schenck do? Put 'em in three pictures together. Ah, Hollywood!

Shearer is an Austrian girl forced into prostitution. She meets two soldier buddies, one an Austrian, played by Roland, the other a Russian. Both want her, but she picks Roland, the friends split, and the Russian blackmails her into doing the deed with him "for her country" Girls in the silent era had a lot of influence on history.

You can see the Henry King influence in his patented huge, mouthwatering close-ups, but he seems to have disliked the production so much that he actually bailed, and Sam Taylor came in to finish.

Steven Horne's sensitive piano playing almost rescued the film. Almost. C-.

L'Heureuse Mort closed the festival, and it was a delight from start to finish. It's a delicate farce made in Paris by White Russians escaped from the Soviets.

Theodore Larue is a mediocre French playwright who falls off a ship and is presumed drowned. He makes it home to find that death has given him the reputation of a genius, so he starts writing like mad to cash in, and posing as his own brother back from the colonies so he can go out in public. Then guess who returns from the colonies?

The whole deal was the brain child of its star, Nicolas Rimsky, but was directed as the next-to-last of Serge Nadjedine's five French films. It was a success, but soon thereafter the Russine emigré community splintered, and Nadjedine went to America where he was director of the Russian Imperial Ballet School in Cleveland, became an American citizen in 1942, and died in Cuyahoga Falls in 1958. His obit in the Plain Dealer barely mentions his film career.

The Matti Bye Ensemble provided a splendid accompaniment, and I'd give the whole thing a solid A+.

I can't say enough about this beautiful festival. Even the posters and the vendors were world class.


OK, folks, I said I would do it and I did. Now it's on to the John Ford project, which should take at least a year. See you over there.

Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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The Batman
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Thanks, Mr P, I will definitely look into that Kino release.

As for PANDORA'S BOX, thanks for the recommendation, but I already have the excellent Criterion release for this title.

Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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