On July 2nd, 1980, AIRPLANE! was released in the United States. For its 30th anniversary, the Film Society at Lincoln Center held a screening and a Q&A last night with directors and writers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (hereafter known as ZAZ). Ever since I stumbled out of THE NAKED GUN (1988) as a giddy seven-year-old, the ZAZ initials have been emblazoned in my consciousness, their screenplays replacing large chunks of my grey matter. I am not an impartial observer. But it wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that ZAZ’s peak equaled those of the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks in the density of quality jokes-per-minute. Their approach was unique in that these comedies didn’t use comedians. Their laughs came from the cognitive dissonance of watching handsome leading men spout intricate absurdities. All of the performers play the straight man, while the writing is the star.

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Like a herd of cattle ready to run down a restive kidnapper, Olive Films bursts into stores today with a phalanx of five DVDs licensed from Paramount Pictures: Union Station (1950), Appointment With Danger (1951), Dark City (1951), Crack in the World (1965, our Richard Harland Smith wrote about it here), and Hannie Caulder (1971, which Kimberly Lindbergs dealt with here). A wholesale distributor and retailer of independent and art-house releases, Olive is now expanding its own acquisitions slate, starting with this brawny group of  genre titles. With multiple studios now experimenting with the mixed blessings of burn-on-demand technology (more releases, but higher prices and less quality control) for their library titles, it’s encouraging that a company is still willing to put out fully authored discs, in strong new transfers.

With the forthcoming, and essential, Josef Von Sternberg collection coming from Criterion, it’s clear that Paramount is becoming more aggressive in licensing its material.  Olive will release 27 Paramounts over the next year or so, including Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents, Otto Preminger’s legendary and fascinating flop Skidoo, and Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face. I spoke with the Director of Acquisitions and Sales at Olive, Frank Tarzi, and he confirms that much more is on the way. Olive has closed deals with multiple studios, and their future slate shows off adventurous and eclectic taste, with Tarzi confirming the following: Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Billy Wilder’s Fedora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, The Stationmaster’s Wife (uncut), and I Only Want You to Love Me (uncut), Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, Claude Chabrol’s Ophelia, and, most exciting of all, Jean-Luc Godard’s complete Histoire(s) du cinema.

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The Warner Archive continues to empty out WB’s library onto their premium-priced burned-on-demand DVDs, and it’s impossible to keep up. I currently have my wavering cursor over the buy button on Sam Fuller’s Verboten (reviewed in this Sunday’s NY Times by Dave Kehr), and the double-feature disc of Hell’s Heroes (1930) and Three Godfathers (1936, Boleslawski, not Ford). But one of the releases I have nabbed is of Robert Aldrich’s final film, …All the Marbles (1981). Released in a strong transfer, which faithfully reproduces Joseph Biroc’s elegiac grey-blue photography of industrial decline, it is, without hyperbole, the greatest women’s wrestling movie of all time. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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Quick! What could bring the talented, the powerful and the famous together in studio era Hollywood? Not a movie. Not a premiere. And not a high stakes poker game, though plenty of those went on regularly. What brought the likes of Jimmy Gleason, Walter Wanger, Spencer Tracy, Leslie Howard, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Walt Disney, Paul Kelly, Frank Borzage, Johnny Mack Brown, Hal Roach, Robert Montgomery, Clark Gable, George O’Brien, Darryl F. Zanuck and even Joan Crawford together in the same places week after week when their work was done?

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Please note: Some plot points of various movies are discussed in detail below

Hollywood has made over twenty films from Edna Ferber‘s stories, novels and plays. When TCM aired the third feature film version of Ferber’s  Pulitzer Prize winning 1924 novel, So Big (1953-Robert Wise) last month on Mother’s Day, I wondered if anyone read this author’s works anymore.  Once upon a time, Ferber, was a 5′ 2″ titan of publishing, with novels, short stories, and plays pouring from her pen and selling like today’s iPhones. The world seems to have passed her work by, without the respect accorded the work of other female American novelists, such as Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, while her contemporaries, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, are still read and appreciated, thanks to the universality of their themes and their incisive voice.

By contrast, Ferber’s prose, once likened by one of today’s more droll critics, John Lahr, to that of “a teenager on diet pills,” may have dated a bit, but her engaging stories, often dealing with thorny issues such as feminism, economic hardship and individual, racially diverse characters, gave classic movies the raw material for several memorable films. Though Ferber later dismissed her earlier efforts, I suspect that many people, even the gifted Mr. Lahr, might enjoy some of Ferber’s lively short stories, some of which are online here).  Along with the critically neglected Fannie Hurst and Zane Grey, a pair of other writers whose mass market appeal and lack of literary pedigrees never seem to garner them much respect, Ferber‘s snapshots of a time and place in American life may have been among the most ubiquitously adapted tales during the studio era.

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“Forgive me for being profound, but it’s good to be alive,” mumbles Troy Donahue to his date, Suzanne Pleshette, as Italian singer Emilio Pericoli warbles the reverberating “Al-Di-La,” in Rome Adventure (1962-Delmer Daves).  Well, forgive me for being a goof, but this girl’s fancy, (and questionable taste) finds such fare pretty irresistible as the days are getting longer and Spring melts into Summer. Besides, this movie, filmed in Roma, Firenze, and Lago Maggiore is a cheap, vicarious way of visiting Italy without having to stand in line at the airport or mispronouncing this beautiful language myself.  The fact that it also features two actresses I’ve always loved–Suzanne Pleshette and Constance Ford–was icing on this Italian ciambella.

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Color me green with envy after reading all those positive reports from all over about the recent TCM Classic Film Festival. While giving friends who attended the third degree to extract every droplet of vicarious enjoyment from their accounts of that long, delirious weekend in LA, one of the things that stands out in their reporting is the mention of the large number of young people in the audience, as well as the “lifers,” (aka those of us who have been movie-mad since childhood).  Recently, I was delighted to make the acquaintance of a youthful filmmaker who could be representative of this fresh wave of classic film lovers on the horizon.

From the viewpoint of most of us, Rebecca Bozzo, a twenty-something graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is already a working film professional, but her ebullient enthusiasm for what she describes as  the  “collaborative energy” of movie making has an infectious quality that blends real knowledge and a joyous passion, even as she describes the sometimes arduous but invigorating process of collaboration with diverse people. Growing up in a household where her supportive parents exposed her to great films from Hitchcock, Cukor, Stevens, and Minnelli, her father was particularly involved in the National Film Society efforts to preserve films. With this cinematically aware family background, a growing desire to be a part of the film industry as a director and producer almost seems inevitable.

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Asking Elliot Lavine to talk about his favorite film noirs is a little like asking a parent of many different children to describe what he loves about his babies. If you are anywhere near San Francisco in the next few weeks, you may want to hightail it over to the newly remodeled Roxie Theater in the Mission district for a chance to admire some of his neglected favorites–Elliot‘s nearly forgotten, “cheap, lowdown and tawdry” stepchildren, consisting of 28 rarely screened B noirs from the Poverty Row Studios. These movies will be on display from Friday, May 14th through Thursday, May 27th in a program entitled I STILL Wake Up Dreaming: Noir is Dead! / Long Live Noir! A complete list of these movies is posted at the end of this blog with links to the Roxie for times and ticket information.  A few days ago, Elliot was kind enough to submit to a grilling from me about all things film noir…

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