Daleks’ Invasion Edinburgh: 2013 AD

Having been a Doctor Who fan for many years, it seems something has now seeped into my DNA, a “fan gene” as it were, which means I have to go and see anything Who related when it’s nearby. Whether that’s a Doctor Who Roadshow, Doctor Who Live or screenings of TV episodes in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I’m usually there.

In the last few weeks that’s meant taking myself along to two screenings of the 1960s Doctor Who (sorry, Dr. Who?) films at Filmhouse, with the second screened this weekend to an appreciative audience.

William Hartnell was still the Doctor in blurry black and white on BBC One in 1965, but it was decided that a bigger name was required for the transition to cinema screens. Peter Cushing, already a household name from his work in the Hammer horrors, was drafted in as scientist Dr. Who, along with granddaughters Susan (Roberta Tovey) and Barbara Who (Jennie Linden).

No longer a crotchety alien, this version of the Doctor is an old buffer who has built Tardis (it’s not the Tardis anymore) in his back garden and has little grasp of the complexities of space and time travel. When Barbara’s new boyfriend, Ian (Roy Castle) pops round to visit, he’s soon whisked off to the planet Skaro so that Dr. Who can have a wander.

What must have appealed to fans at the time was a chance to see the Daleks in colour, their evil schemes played out upon a more visually exciting canvas than a BBC budget could ever hope for. This reworking of the very first Dalek TV adventure from 1963 retains many of its plot points and as such isn’t a particularly rewarding watch.

That’s not to say director Gordon Flemyng fails, it just might have been better if writer Milton Subotsky had made the rather dull Thals, whom Dr. Who spends quite a bit of time helping, more, well, cinematic.

Things righted themselves somewhat for 1966′s sequel, Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, based on the 1964 TV serial, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Immediately there’s a feeling that everyone involved has more confidence in what they’re doing and that they simply want to give the audience a bit of a romp.

Sadly, Dr. Who hasn’t learned from his antics of the first film and he’s once again happy to send his time machine into the unknown, this time with Susan, niece Louise (Jill Curzon) and hapless policeman, Tom Cameron (Bernard Cribbins) aboard.

Tardis lands in, you’ve guessed it, 2150 AD, where the time team soon find themselves caught up in (you’ve guessed it) a Dalek invasion. In typical Doctor Who fashion, the Tardis crew are split up, captured and rescued multiple times, all the while trying to get themselves to the most important place on Earth, a mine in Bedford.

Daleks’ Invasion holds up well almost 50 years down the line. Bernard Cribbins’ Tom is an improvement on the first film’s Ian character; Andrew Keir makes a strong impression as Wyler, though a bit of back story might have been nice; some welcome moral ambiguity is introduced in the shape of Philip Madoc’s Brockley and Sheila Steafel’s spinster; and the whole thing looks like a few quid has been spent on it, with dozens of Daleks and a shiny new spaceship interior on show.

Gordon Flemyng adds some lovely flourishes to the picture, particularly in the scene where the Doctor is imprisoned and the camera circles him within a confined space. There’s also a longer sequence in the Dalek control room where Flemyng takes the camera behind various girders and handrails, lifting what would otherwise be a fairly bog standard scene into something more interesting.

It’s actually Cushing who comes out worst here. He does the job fine but is rarely the focus of the script, with so many characters vying for attention around him. I’m still not sure how I actually feel towards his Doctor, whether his casual attitude to time travel and the safety of his companions is something to be celebrated. OK, so he’s willing to do what he can to save them once they’re in trouble, but if he’d just settled down to a quiet retirement back in 1960s Earth they would have been fine.

Overall, it was a treat to see both films at the cinema in newly restored DCPs, meaning I probably won’t be buying the new Blu-ray sets that are out in the next few weeks. These aren’t films I can watch regularly, but perhaps in another 10 years there’ll be a chance to see them at the pictures again and I’ll be there.

Maybe I’ll feel differently towards Dr. Who and his ways by then.

Going Mad for 3D

I’ve never been a fan of 3D. It doesn’t do anything for me, no matter how much Martin Scorsese claims Hugo is better in the format or James Cameron trumpets advances in the technology for Avatar and its sequels.

The fact that I found Avatar about as exciting as being poked in the eye with one of those vines in Cameron’s CGI rainforests probably didn’t help. If the story isn’t up to much then having to effectively wear sunglasses to dull the image isn’t going to impress me.

All that changed in March (yes, it’s taken me a while to get around to this post) when I sat down to enjoy a 3D spectacular from 1954 at my local indie cinema, Edinburgh’s Filmhouse. It was a film which had the audience laughing at the ridiculousness of the plot and the perfectly pitched performance of its leading man.

The Mad Magician stars Vincent Price as Gallico the Great, the inventor of elaborate stage tricks for magicians who decides he wants to become a performer himself. Gallico is about to debut his new buzz saw act when he’s forced to stop by Ross Ormond (Donald Randolph), who Gallico has an unfortunate agreement with regarding ownership of his tricks.

Gallico isn’t too fond of Ormond for other reasons, mainly that he stole his wife from him, so this latest slight tips him over the edge and our “hero” ends up using the saw on Ormond.

From here, Gallico is forced to cover his tracks in various gruesome ways as he attempts to forge a stage career for himself.

The plot may be pretty thin but Crane Wilbur’s witty script is brought to life by Price, who once again manages to walk the fine line between sanity and lunacy where many of his characters seem to dwell. Admittedly most of those characters end up in the latter camp, but it’s always a joy watching Price teeter on the brink.

This newly restored version of the film looked sharp in black and white, with the 3D reduced to some gimmicky moments of water being sprayed at the audience, a saw spinning towards the screen and other “terrifying” moments which caused more laughter than scares.

Still, it’s the best use of 3D I’ve seen in a long time – 2010′s How to Train Your Dragon is perhaps the only time I’ve really found the 3D actually effective – and I’d happily sit and watch classic movies like this with specs on. It also helps that it’s in black and white, meaning the dull nature of 3D is offset somewhat.

I see there’s now a restored version of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) returning to cinemas in 3D. I’ll be looking out for this at Filmhouse.

Revisiting Ealing with new book and DVDs

George Nader as Paul Gregory in Nowhere to Go

It’s buildings may still be in use, housing productions such as Downton Abbey and the upcoming Bridget Jones’ Baby, but it’s fair to say that Ealing Studios heyday was back in the 1940s, when its output included titles such as Whisky Galore! (1949) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951).

Numerous films from the Ealing archive have found there way to DVD and Blu-ray in recent years, with rarer titles finally being awarded pride of place on collectors’ shelves, while a major celebration at London’s BFI in 2012 raised awareness of its output even more.

Over the last few months I’ve been trying to brush up on my Ealing, starting with one piece of lasting evidence from the BFI season, Ealing Revisited. The book aims to reassess the studio, its films and its people through a number of essays curated by editor Mark Duguid.

Beginning with George Formby and Gracie Fields’ films which were made at Ealing but which could hardly be called “Ealing films”, the book takes us through the studio’s formative years as Michael Balcon took over as studio head and things started to take shape behind and in front of the cameras.

Whether you’re interested in the people behind Ealing’s promotional material, costumes, scripts or actors, Ealing Revisited wends its way through the years offering insight into the success and failures of each.

Joseph Botting’s take on Ealing’s more fantastical films and Andrew Moor’s look at “queerness” in films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets widens the discussion from the standard topics, though there’s still much to find of interest in chapters such as Catherine A Surowiec’s look at Anthony Mendelson’s costume designs.

Surowiec notes that expensive ballgowns were just as likely to feature in an Ealing film as a Cockney spiv’s wide lapelled suit or a working man’s bunnet.

Don’t expect an exhaustive encyclopaedia of Ealing as some films receive a sentence or two if they’re lucky. While the regular change in contributor between essays does mean there’s little continuity in style, the end result is still a fascinating overview of the inner working of Ealing which may lead readers to head off in search of more in-depth books on the subject, or at the very least some of the films themselves.

Two such titles recently made it to DVD from StudioCanal, namely Nowhere to Go (1958) and Dance Hall (1950), the former set in a London of low morals and high crime rates while the latter looks at the love lives of young people shortly after the war.

Adapted from Donald Mackenzie’s novel and scripted by film critic Kenneth Tynan, Nowhere to Go stars George Nader as Paul Gregory, a smarter-than-most thief who has back-up plans for back-up plans but who one day finds his luck running out.

When he’s broken out of prison by accomplice Sloane (Bernard Lee), Gregory sets about retrieving the cash he hid from the police a few years earlier, only for his world to spin out of control.

Eschewing the perceived characteristics of a typical Ealing – a cosy community, the little man against the odds – Nowhere to Go instead borrows heavily from film noir as Gregory attempts to see his plan to the bitter end.

With fine support from Lee and a young Maggie Smith as his potential love interest, Nowhere to Go may not quite be a classic British thriller but it’s a welcome return for a film which has been, like Gregory, out in the cold for too long.

Another exhumation from the vaults is Dance Hall, director Charles Crichton’s diversion from the Ealing norm which focussed on the relationships of a group of young woman whose main link is their love of the local Palais.

The cast includes Natasha Parry and Petula Clark as Eve and Georgie, two dance hall regulars with personal issues that affect their leisure time. While Eve’s husband (Donald Houston) doesn’t want his wife dancing with other men (namely Bonar Colleano’s Alec), Georgie must try to convince her parents that she can triumph in a dance competition.

Though some other stories are weaved into the story, including that of Diana Dors who shines in a smaller role, it’s not a film which encourages much emotional investment from the viewer. Dance Hall does depict the era well, a time when women were about to be given more opportunities in the workplace, meaning it’s a valuable snapshot of a Britain fast disappearing.

More lesser-known Ealing films are about to be released into the world with the release of Network’s Ealing Rarities Collection Volume 1, a collection of four titles on two discs which are rarely discussed in overviews of the studios output.

Basil Dean’s Escape! (1930) is the tale of a toff (Gerald du Maurier) who is imprisoned in Dartmoor following the death of a policeman, only to find himself on the run across the moors when the opportunity arises. Harry Watt’s West of Zanzibar (1954) finds the white man interfering in the lives of native Africans as Bob Payton (Anthony Steel) doles out advice to anyone who’ll listen.

A young Betty Driver, many years away from The Rover’s Return, stars in 1938′s Penny Paradise from director Carol Reed, a slight tale of tugboat captain Joe Higgins (Edmund Gwenn) who believes he’s won the pools and the reaction from those around him to his news. Finally, 1936′s Cheer Up! is from director Leo Mittler and finds two hapless composers trying to drum up support for their work, with hilarious consequences.

Of the four films, Penny Paradise is perhaps the most Ealing-like, with typical working class folk muddling through and helping each other when the going gets tough. Escape! is very much of its time, a slow and stagey production which is nevertheless an important example of post-silent era filmmaking as actors and crew find their feet.

With its location filming giving it a much needed gloss, West of Zanzibar stands out on this set as the only colour production. It also stands out because it’s the film that says the most about the time it was made, with Bob Payton seemingly a saviour of the black man in their own country. The problems caused by colonialism were never likely to be overtly stated by a British film of the era, meaning there’s something rather uncomfortable about the whole thing, even if one does try to take it as simply an adventure film.

Finally, Cheer Up! takes Ealing off into another direction entirely, with song and dance routines liberally sprinkled through the film, coming across like a kind of extended Morecambe and Wise sketch at times.

These four releases have been bundled together into a low-cost package designed to appeal to the completist and Network should be applauded for their efforts. While it’s only fair that Ealing’s higher quality ventures are remembered fondly, it’s difficult to put them into their proper context without books such as Ealing Revisited or titles such as these.

Look out for future volumes in the Ealing Rarities series, with sets two and three now listed on the Network site.

Chinatown Q&A at TCM Classic Film Festival 2012

Robert Evans, Robert Towne, and Robert Osborne discussing Chinatown on Friday at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, California

In another post on this site I mentioned that Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema is about to embark on a season of Roman Polanski films, featuring around a dozen of his films including 1974′s Chinatown.

I also mentioned that I was fortunate to attend a screening of Chinatown in Hollywood in April 2012 as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival. In attendance were the film’s writer, Robert Towne, and producer, Robert Evans, who spent around fifteen minutes discussing the evolution of the film with TCM host, Robert Osborne.

Towne explained that Evans had originally requested he adapt F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the screen, but that he didn’t want to do it. “We were having dinner at Dominick’s on Beverly Boulevard and Evans was trying to figure out why I didn’t want to do Gatsby,” noted Towne. “I told him [about Chinatown]. Bob said ‘I don’t understand a goddamned thing but I do like the title’. He got all of us in there who knew each other and cared about each other so that we could fight and have a good time.”

I captured the audio on my iPhone from a number of rows back in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre before settling back to enjoy the film. The file has been sitting gathering virtual dust on my phone since then.

As far as I know there was no ban on recording audio and no intention has been made to infringe any sort of copyright, so hopefully the lovely team at TCM won’t mind me publishing it here for Polanski/Chinatown fans to listen to….

Listen to the Q&A on Audioboo

Roman Polanski season at Filmhouse

Last year I attended a screening of Roman Polanski’s 1974 crime classic, Chinatown, at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre, an event which found an audience of a thousand or so film lovers enraptured by Jack Nicholson’s performance and a suitably complex plot.

Set in the Los Angeles of 1937, Chinatown centres on Jake Gittes’ (Nicholson) investigation into the extra-marital affair of Evelyn Mulwray’s (Faye Dunaway) husband. The investigation soon spirals into other directions involving corruption and family issues involving Mulwray’s father, played by the towering John Huston.

At the time I decided to see more Polanski films at the cinema but the opportunity hasn’t arisen until now, with Edinburgh’s Filmhouse about to screen a number of them from this weekend.

Filmhouse begins its Polanski season tomorrow with eight of his short films before going on to show Knife in the Water (1962), Cul-de-sac (1966), Macbeth (1971), Repulsion (1965) and Dance of the Vampires (1967).

That’s only the start however, with the print programme noting that next month we’re getting Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Tenant (1976), Death and the Maiden (1994), Chinatown (1974), Tess (1979), The Pianist (2002), Oliver Twist (2005), The Ghost (2010) and Carnage (2011).

Hopefully I’ll be able to make it along to a few of these and I’d recommend watching out for Chinatown if nothing else – full details can be found on the Filmhouse website.

Watch the Chinatown trailer on YouTube

Vintage Sundays at Edinburgh’s Cameo Cinema

Vintage Sundays: Alfred Hitchcock

Edinburgh’s Cameo Cinema is attempting once again to appeal to a wide variety of cinema-goers with its programming, with a new strand of Vintage Sundays currently boasting a season of Alfred Hitchcock films through January and February.

The season began with Vertigo (1958) and continues this weekend with The Lady Vanishes (1938) before continuing with Rebecca (1940), The Birds (1963), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960).

The only downside is that the films are being screened in the smaller Screen 2 rather than the grander Screen 1, but if you want to see these films away from your TV then it’s worth heading over to the Cameo website for full details.

Book Review: All About Bond

For James Bond fans still reeling from last week’s release of the 22-film, extras-laden 50th anniversary Blu-ray collection, stuffed with rare footage, images and nuggets of information, it’s hard to believe that there’s still more to be discovered about Her Majesty’s favourite employee.

That’s exactly what we get with ‘All About Bond’, a sumptuous new addition to the ever-growing library of titles dedicated to 007 which earns its place with the same effortless grace Dame Diana Rigg displays on page 91.

You see, while the closest most Bond fans ever got to their hero was the front row of the local cinema, photographer Terry O’Neill was on location with Connery, Moore, Lazenby et al, effectively the man with the golden lens. O’Neill captured the boredom and the thrill of being on a Bond set, snapping Connery taking a nap on a shag pile carpet during the filming of Diamonds are Forever or Lazenby lounging by the pool with girlfriend Jill St John (Tiffany Case), post-On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (I didn’t know Lazenby and St John had even met before seeing these photos).

Across 192 pages we’re taken on a trip through the films and the decades, with some famous shots, such as Connery playing golf on the set of Diamonds, presented at a slightly different angle alongside some never before seen images of the actor pulling faces between takes. We also see Connery playing the slot machines in Vegas and meeting some rather scantily clad dancers behind the scenes of the casinos.

The many faces of Sean Connery

The Bond girls also get a look in, with new photos of Britt Ekland, Maud Adams and Joanna Lumley some of the most striking. Some of the actresses also contribute their memories of working on the films in short essays, Lumley recalling that her work on OHMSS lasted longer than the other actresses as she did some dubbing back in England.

Names such as Maryam d’Abo and Honor Blackman join Lumley in reminiscing about their time in the spotlight alongside 007, while names perhaps less known to fans, such as GQ editor Dylan Jones and journalist Godfrey Smith, muse on Bond’s fashion sense and who the real Ian Fleming was. Sadly, the quality slips slightly in these text sections, with one page offering two spellings of the name ‘Blofeld’, both of them wrong.

Honor Blackman on the beach

Unsurprisingly, the photos are the real stars here, the large format of the hefty tome offering insights into a world that the rest of us can only dream of entering. It may be a cliché to suggest that ‘All About Bond’ would sit perfectly on any coffee table, but the Bond films are so rife with their own clichés that I can perhaps get away with it this once.

All About Bond is out now in hardback from Evans Mitchell Books

DVD Reviews: The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity and Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis

Powerful! Terrifying! Unforgettable! Superb! Brilliant! No, I’m not describing the quality of the upcoming reviews but quoting from the trailer for Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945), recently unleashed onto Blu-ray by Masters of Cinema here in the UK.

Ray Milland stars as Don Birnam, a New York author whose life is ruled by the bottle. We’re introduced to Don as he and his brother, Wick (Phillip Terry), are packing for a weekend away following weeks of sobriety for the former. Don’s girlfriend, Helen (Jane Wyman), is convinced he’s turned a corner in his alcoholism and is rooting for him to come back the man she wants him to be.

Don’s inability to avoid alcohol for a day leads to his brother abandoning him and his life spiralling into the gutter, his world becoming a kind of hell.

If all that sounds a bit heavy for an evening’s entertainment, well, it is. From the opening moments, as we see a bottle of whisky hanging out of Don’s bedroom window, it’s clear that our “hero” is a troubled and very ill man surrounded by people who don’t seem to know how to handle him.

Wick’s attempts to make Don go cold turkey are laudable, as is Helen’s determination to love him no matter what, but they all seem to be doing him more harm than good, something that becomes apparent when he winds up in an institution, cared for by the less-than-tactful Bim (Frank Faylen).

Wilder’s direction ensures Don’s world is suitably shadow-filled and claustrophobic, his tiny apartment hardly the kind of place likely to inspire recuperation. The script, co-written by Wilder with Charles Brackett, manages to make Don a sympathetic character, mainly becuase it is so clear that his alcoholism can’t be cured by talking or wishful thinking.

Milland manages the character’s descent well as he’s called on to portray various states of anguish and guilt. Wyman gets the raw deal here, Helen’s inability to grasp the severity of the situation making her appear more stupid than saintly.

Still packing a punch today, The Lost Weekend will hopefully find a new audience on Blu-ray, particularly for those who want to see another side to Billy Wilder.

Some exemplary extras on this release include a three-part Arena special from 1992, featuring a three-hour interview with Wilder in which he discusses his lengthy life and career, a radio adaptation of the film and an introduction from director Alex Cox.

Joining The Lost Weekend on Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema’s is Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), the archetypal film noir starring Fred MacMurray as insurance salesman Walter Neff, who finds himself caught in a web of deceit when he meets the beautiful Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck).

Determined that her husband should die so that she can claim his inheritance, Dietrichson convinces Neff to collude with her and to ensure a plan is formed that will mean the new insurance policy is paid out to her.

Although the plan seems to be foolproof, the pair don’t reckon of Neff’s boss’ interference, Keyes (Edward G Robinson), who finds the death suspicious.

Told in flashback by an injured Neff, Double Indemnity is an ingenious tale of deception, lust and greed that has more twists than the roads above Los Angeles. MacMurray’s switch from upstanding citizen to lowly murderer is believable thanks to the chemistry between the two leads. Stanwyck sets the tone from her first appearance, adding a touch of glamorous sleaze that the film never loses.

Wilder again shows his skill at keeping the main narrative moving forward while dropping in interesting camera angles and drawing fine performances from his cast, including Robinson who seems to be a template for Lieutenant Columbo some 30 years later.

Extras include the trademark Masters of Cinema booklet, a commentary from film historian Nick Redman and screenwriter Lem Dobbs, a 2006 documentary on the making of the film and more.

Any subtlety or class evident in the above films is long forgotten in Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 take on Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic, Metropolis, out now on DVD.

Lang’s story of a dystopian future ruled by the nasty piece of work that is Joh Frederson (Alfred Abel) and a love story between his son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), and a poor factory worker, Maria (Brigitte Helm), is given a novel twist with the addition of a tinted film stock and a rock score.

Moroder’s controversial decision to impose his own vision upon Lang’s work has been both criticised and praised over the years, the naysayers arguing that Queen, Adam Ant and Bonnie Tyler aren’t exactly sympathetic to the film’s style (for more on the debate, head over to the Movie Morlocks site for David Kalat’s view).

What hampers Moroder’s Metropolis more than the jarring soundtrack is that the version he had to work with wasn’t the complete one we can enjoy elsewhere in the Masters of Cinema library. The recently restored 150 minute version we can now access was only 83 minutes long in 1984, meaning we have the bare bones of the story but none of the meat.

We’re left with a kind of ‘beginner’s guide’ to Metropolis that could either intrigue new viewers and send them off in search of the newer edition or put them off for life. In fairness to Moroder, the music isn’t as offensive as some claim and he should be applauded for bringing the film to the attention of 1980s audiences who had perhaps forgotten Lang’s legacy.

Today the film is a diverting curio that can’t be said to be essential viewing, particularly for those who perhaps can’t afford to buy both versions of the film, but it’s still nice to finally have it looking and sounding so good.

The solitary extra on this DVD is a documentary from 1984 following Moroder’s mission to restore Metropolis.

Hitchcock leads a killer August line-up at Filmhouse

One of the joys of living in Edinburgh is the huge amount of films I can choose to watch on any given day of the week.

From the latest blockbusters in our multiplexes to smaller independent and international titles that are regularly shown at the Cameo and Filmhouse, not forgetting the Edinburgh Film Guild and numerous special monthly film groups and events, the city is a movie buff’s paradise.

Then there are the classic film screenings which inspired this very blog.

Helping to justify the blog’s existence for another month is Filmhouse, Scotland’s finest independent cinema which presents a more varied programme than any other in the country and which has just published its August line-up.

Read it and weep. I almost did.

The new programme is spearheaded by a season of Alfred Hitchcock films, The Genius of Hitchcock, ported over from London’s BFI, which will run over an impressive three month period. Starting with the newly restored version of 1926′s The Lodger on 10 August, we’ll be served up a total of 16 slices of murder and mystery before another batch are offered up in September and into October.

Elsewhere, there’s a full week’s worth of Marilyn Monroe films, including Some Like it Hot (1959), The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and All About Eve (1950), to mark the 50th anniversary of her death.

Gregory Peck pops up in both the Hitchcock season’s The Paradine Case (1947) and in 1962′s To Kill a Mockingbird, the latter given a spit and polish and restored to its original glory.

J Lee Thompson’s 1957 melodrama, Woman in a Dressing Gown, arrives from 31 August until 6 September and stars Anthony Quayle and Yvonne Mitchell in a story that tells of the “impact of adultery on the psyche of three desperate characters” – I’m quoting from the website as I’ve not seen this one but will add it to the list.

In association with the Edinburgh International Book Festival there’s a screening of 1979′s Stalker on 7 and 8 of August, the Tarkovsky drama set in a totalitarian society.

Apologies if I’ve missed any more golden oldies, I only have so many hours of the day that I can spend perusing the programme.

Finally, I recommend booking a place at The Lost Art of the Film Explainer, a special event that takes place on Sunday 19 August in Screen One. I’ll once again quote from the Filmhouse website as it sums the event up better than I could:

“During the silent era, the live musician was an essential part of the cinema experience, but some audiences were also treated to the finely honed craft of the Film Explainer. Part narrator and part actor, the Film Explainer stood next to the screen enriching the movies with an entertaining combination of background information, unique interpretation and theatrical storytelling. Often more celebrated than the screen stars for whom they spoke, the art of the Film Explainer has since been largely forgotten.”

I managed to miss the first staging of this event at this year’s Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema so I’m glad to see it in the programme. Andy Cannon, Wendy Weatherby and Frank McLaughlin will present this and I’d urge every reader of this blog who can make it along to please do so.

What will you be going to see?

La Cava set to sparkle at Edinburgh International Film Festival

Please note: This post was originally published on The Cinementals classic film blog on Friday 8 June, a few weeks before the site sadly ceased to exist. I’ve republished it here with their agreement.

Carole Lombard and William Powell in MY MAN GODFREY

It may be 60 years since Hollywood director Gregory La Cava passed away but it seems the time is finally right for him to make a comeback.

A director who straddled the silent era and the talkies, working with actors such as WC Fields, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard and William Powell, leading eight of them to receive Academy Award nominations, La Cava remains something of an enigma to modern audiences, certainly those in the UK starved of a decent fix of TCM.

This could soon change thanks to the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), the world’s oldest continually running film festival which runs from 20 June – 1 July. On browing the newly launched 2012 programme, six titles stood out for this film fan, all part of a Gregory La Cava retrospective starting on Tuesday 26 June: UNFINISHED BUSINESS (1941), FEEL MY PULSE (1928), GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933), SHE MARRIED HER BOSS (1935), MY MAN GODFREY (1936) and PRIVATE WORLDS (1935).

The season then hands over the cinematic-baton to Scotland’s leading independent cinema, Filmhouse, on Saturday 7 July as they screen a further six La Cava titles: THE AGE OF CONSENT (1932), BED OF ROSES (1933), FIFTH AVENUE GIRL (1939), THE HALF NAKED TRUTH (1932), PRIMROSE PATH (1940) and STAGE DOOR (1937).

If reading the above has exhausted you, just think what it’s going to do to me as I head along to see (almost) every one of them as God intended, on the the big screen.

Intrigued to discover how the season came about, I spoke to the EIFF’s new Artistic Director, the film writer and journalist Chris Fujiwara, about his decision to programme 12 La Cava films and the practicalities of bringing those prints to Edinburgh this June and July.

Jonathan Melville: This is your first year as Artistic Director of the EIFF. Did you set yourself any challenges or goals before you began selecting films?

Chris Fujiwara: The main goal I set myself was to build the kind of programme that I would find interesting if I were a visitor to the festival.

How important was it for you to have a retrospective as part of your programme?

Retrospectives are essential to film festivals. It’s part of the core mission of festivals to delve into the unexplored riches of the past and draw connections between the past and the present.

How did you come to choose Gregory La Cava as the focus for a retrospective? Why those 12 films?

La Cava has fascinated me for a long time, among other reasons because of the scope he gave to improvisation in making his films. I’ve felt for a long time that he has been severely neglected. He’s probably the most underrated director of 1930s Hollywood. The twelve films in our retrospective are twelve of his best and most personal films.

La Cava successfully moved from the silent era to sound, how did his style change from one to the other?

For someone with such a powerful visual imagination, which was formed in the discipline of newspaper cartoons and silent animation, La Cava adapted to sound remarkably successfully. He was excited by the possibilities of film dialogue, and in his best films there is an amazing abundance of really great dialogue. In films such as PRIVATE WORLDS and STAGE DOOR, he also experimented with the soundtrack, approaching it with the same creativity he brought to the image.

What was the process involved in securing the rights to screen the films and locate the prints? Do they all reside in the UK?

James Rice, our Programme Manager, made a monumental effort of tracking down the prints for these films, some of which are very rare. Some come from the UK, some from elsewhere in Europe, and some from the United States, and they come from both archives and private collectors.

Do you have any particular stance on the “film vs digital” debate?

We’ll be showing all but one of the La Cava films in film prints, and that’s out of necessity: high-quality digital copies of these films do not exist, with a handful of exceptions. In general, archives do not have the resources to make digital copies of their film prints, and rights holders do not have a compelling financial motive to digitise most of their older films. With the disappearance of cinemas capable of projecting film, it’s inevitable that we’ll see further erosion of the infrastructure needed to manufacture, maintain and operate film projection equipment. There is a real danger that there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to see films from the past under ideal conditions: in good copies well projected on a big screen. This danger needs to be taken into account in the film-vs-digital debate.

Joel McCrea and Ginger Rogers in PRIMROSE PATH

Unusually for a film festival, half of the season will be shown at the EIFF and half at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema post-EIFF. Why did you choose to split the films like that?

Rod White [Filmhouse programmer] and I both felt it was a good chance to link the festival with the regular Filmhouse programme. Also it allows local cinephiles to see some of the La Cava films during a time when there’s not as much competition for their attention as during the festival.

For anyone who can perhaps only make it along to one or two La Cava films, which would you say are unmissable?

If you’ve never seen MY MAN GODFREY or STAGE DOOR, which are his two most famous films, or even if you’ve seen them but only on DVD, you shouldn’t miss them. Among the lesser known La Cavas we’re screening, I’d especially recommend his risqué pre-Code films THE AGE OF CONSENT, BED OF ROSES, and THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH, and his late masterpieces PRIMROSE PATH and UNFINISHED BUSINESS, which hint at the kind of work he might have done had he lived to make films during the more liberal period of the late 1950s.

You’ve written books on Otto Preminger and Jacques Tourneur, two figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood. What is it about this period of cinema history that interests you so much?

I see the Golden Age of Hollywood as a structure that made possible the making of some very personal films that broke the rules of that structure. Preminger and Tourneur, like La Cava, and also like Jerry Lewis, whom I also wrote a book about, worked with success within the Hollywood studio system but pushed the limits (stylistic and thematic) of what that system could comfortably tolerate, and sometimes crossed those limits. Put simply, they were innovators who anticipated the transition from the studio system to a system of independent auteur filmmakers.

Are there any directors you’d like to see celebrated with a retrospective on the big screen, either here in Edinburgh or elsewhere?

It would be an extremely long list. Among classic-Hollywood directors, some names that came to mind are Raoul Walsh, Ida Lupino, Robert Parrish, Robert Aldrich, and Richard Fleischer, but that would be just for starters.

Thanks to Chris Fujiwara.

Full details of the Gregory La Cava season can be found on the Filmhouse website.