Elmer Gantry poster

The Telluride Film Festival has always taken place on Labor Day weekend, beginning on a Friday and ending on a Monday night. But any regular attendee knows that the festival “unofficially” begins on that Wednesday night before with an outdoor screening at the Abel Gance Cinema, the town’s intimate amphitheatre-like park, and is followed by another one on Thursday night. There is always a secret connection between the outdoor screenings prior to the festival and the special tributes and/or honored guests and it becomes a fun guessing game up until the mysteries are revealed on Thursday in the Film Watch magazine which announces the festival highlights. 

Burt Lancaster, Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry

The Wednesday Abel Gance screening for the 35^th festival was ELMER GANTRY (1960) and among the surviving cast and crew members, I wondered who the special honoree might be. Possibly Shirley Jones, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her cast-against-type role of the prostitute who takes revenge on the so-called evangelist who led her astray? Or maybe the composer, Andre Previn, who created such a memorable, dynamic score? Or could it be the British actress Jean Simmons, whose performance as Sister Sarah Falconer is one of her most memorable American film roles?  

Having not seen ELMER GANTRY since my high school days on a black and white television, I was surprised and happy to see it projected on a giant outdoor screen in a beautiful 35mm print and noticed that it was photographed by the great John Alton (a previous honoree at Telluride) who was instrumental in designing the look and visual style of numerous film noirs, many directed by Anthony Mann (T-Men, Raw Deal, Border Incident). As for the actual film, it’s hard to imagine any actor other than Burt Lancaster as Gantry and he gives a larger-than-life performance that is completely appropriate for the driven, overzealous Bible-thumper hero of Sinclair Lewis’s novel. Jean Simmons - who, it turns out, is one of the special honorees this year - is equally impressive as a creation of her own making, with a background not much different from Gantry’s, but with a much more sophisticated veneer. Is she a true believer or someone with delusions of grandeur? Simmon’s radiant performance, waxing between the prim and the passionate, is a tour-de-force and the much needed contrast to Gantry’s overt hucksterism. And Richard Brooks’ film adaptation still stands as a literate and easily accessible entertainment that wasn’t such a rarity in 1960 but seems like a lost art form now.   

Betty Boop in "Snow White"

On the following evening, the guessing game of the mystery film connection continued with a program of shorts (1 Daffy Duck and 2 Betty Boop cartoons, Dean Parisot’s kooky 1985 NYC indie short TOM GOES TO THE BAR) and the documentary, En Frusen drom (A FROZEN DREAM, 1997), an account of the ill-fated polar expedition of Swedish explorer S.A. Andree and his two-man crew in 1897. It was directed by Jan Troell and featured several actors reading from the diaries and letters of the explorers, one of whom was Max Von Sydow. Was it possible that the actor so identified with the films of Ingmar Bergman would be making an appearance? No, the connection here is Troell was is the second honoree of this year’s festival (David Fincher, showing his director’s cut of ZODIAC, is the third honoree). Troell is probably best known in the U.S. for his two companion epics, both of which were Oscar nominated - THE EMIGRANTS (1971) and THE NEW LAND (1972). A FROZEN DREAM, which clocks in at barely over sixty minutes, uses archival footage, reinactments, and actual artifacts and photographs of the tragic Andree mission, one in which the three men team strived to become the first explorers to reach the North Pole by balloon! It’s a meticulously detailed documentary, rich in period detail, that finds inventive ways both visually and aurally to tell its story since there was no actual film footage to draw on. On that level, it’s a success but for those unfamiliar with the historical facts - I wasn’t - there are too many unanswered questions that would be better addressed in a definitive non-fiction book. Interestingly enough, Troell had already made an epic 145-minute historical drama about Andree’s expedition in 1982 entitled Ingenjor Andrees luftfard (In the U.S. it was called FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE, named after the explorers’ balloon). 

Swedish director Jan Troell

Flash forward to Friday and the “Show” schedule has been released. The first film of the festival, shown in conjunction with this year’s Guest Director choice Slavoj Zizek, was A PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA (2006), an exhilarating take on some 43 movies by Zizek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia. Directed in a unique and mesmerizing visual style by Sophie Fiennes, sister of actors Ralph and Joseph, the documentary is a frequently funny and thought-provoking dissection of such important films as Blue Velvet, Stalker, Vertigo, the 1931 version of Possessed starring Joan Crawford, The Great Dictator, The Piano Teacher, The Conversation, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, Ivan the Terrible Part II, even the mind-warping cartoon short “Pluto’s Judgment Day.” Zizek zeros in on sexuality, politics, fantasy vs. reality and countless other topics in a way that will make you think differently about some of these movies and send you back to Netflix or your own DVD shelves to watch them again. 

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Other highlights of the 35^th Telluride Film Festival promise to be Mike Leigh’s new work, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, Paul Vester’s WALTZ WITH BASHIR (fresh from its success at Cannes), a beautifully restored version of Max Ophuls’ LOLA MONTES, Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 silent masterpiece THE LAST COMMAND with live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, a last minute addition of Danny Boyle’s new movie SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, the sprawling, unglamorized Mafia epic from Italy GOMORRAH and much more that I hope to cover in another post.

Gomorra