For nine years running, MoMA’s To Save and Project international festival of film preservation has showcased the latest celluloid surgery jobs by archives the world over. It’s the one place where film stock is still a fetish, each new print ogled with the entitled leer of a sozzled Miss Universe judge. So I was sent to my oft-used fainting couch when it was announced that a digital restoration would open this year’s fest (which runs through Nov. 25th).   This prestigious pole-position was granted to Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy (1968), a delirious mash-up of pop culture detritus, from psychotic b-movies to baffling Bufferin commercials.

Dante and Jon Davison edited the entire feature by hand, splicing in new scenes when intriguing material passed their way. Eventually the project ballooned to 7 hours, but with its broad humor, broads, and critique of the military-industrial complex, it toured college campuses under a Schlitz beer sponsorship. By the end of its run the print had more stitches than Frankenstein’s monster, without the salve of Karloff’s soulful stare. It would be unlikely to survive another trip through a projector. So Dante shoved the benighted thing through a film-to-tape transfer, and after some screenings on the West coast has finally brought his beast to the East. Now at a svelte 4 1/2 hours, it’s a marvel of gonzo editing. It contains an actual narrative, collapsing the apocalypses  of a bunch of sci-fi/teen rebel/horror cheapies into one mega-Armageddon, while finding time for mini-comedies and grace(less)-notes in between.

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Take a look at this poster and tell me what you think this movie is about:

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One of the things that can be fun about watching remakes is the insight it gives into what constitutes directing.  Take two movies with essentially the same script, and the differences between them become more clearly the work of the different directors and actors interpreting that script.

Having said that, it’s pretty much impossible to evaluate the directorial style of Rudolph Maté from his work on 1948’s The Dark Past, because the film is a virtual clone of an earlier Columbia thriller, Charles Vidor’s Blind Alley (1939).  Maté’s choices = Vidor’s choices.  Where The Dark Past does differ, it differs by being a deracinated and miscast work of mimicry.  Which isn’t to say it lacks its own merits—The Dark Past has an interesting meta-irony that deserves some notice, and we’ll come to it in due course.

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This Wednesday, September 15, TCM presents “The Stars of Prohibition,” an evening of gangster movies set during the Roaring 20s. The “Stars” are not movie actors from the 1920s but gangsters, who became rich and powerful by providing liquor to the millions of Americans left parched by the 18^th Amendment.

Part of the fabric of the hedonistic Jazz Age and the tumultuous Depression era, gangsters such as Louis Lepke, Arnold Rothstein, Frank Nitti, Dutch Schultz, and Al Capone were both condemned and sensationalized in newspaper headlines, parlaying their notoriety into celebrity. Photos of gangster-related violence in the streets shared space with snapshots of famous athletes hobnobbing with Capone at the ballpark. These urban criminals, who were the product of big-city ghettoes where various immigrant groups struggled to survive, differed from outlaws like Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde. Outlaws hailed from small towns or rural back roads, robbed banks or other business for quick cash, and were 20^th-century versions of mythic Wild West figures such as Jesse James or the Dalton Gang. Gangsters controlled vice crimes like gambling, prostitution, illegal liquor operations, and later drug trafficking. The gangster organizations had been operating in major urban areas for decades, but they became powerful, financially sound, and politically connected during Prohibition. Often mentioned in the same breath, the gangsters of the Roaring 20s and outlaws of the Depression actually have little in common, save for being pursued by the FBI and mythologized in popular culture.

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In the late ’60s many aging American actors were finding it hard to get good roles in Hollywood. The old studio system was collapsing and younger audiences wanted to see films featuring new faces and fresh blood. During this transitional period the Italian film industry was thriving and European directors expressed interest in working with Hollywood performers that they had admired from afar. This led actors like Woody Strode to start accepting roles in Italian genre films such as spaghetti westerns as well as giallo (thrillers) and poliziottesco (crime) movies where they often received top billing and were treated like stars. As an African American actor Woody Strode had other strikes against him in Hollywood where race relations were still extremely complicated and by 1968 he had grown increasingly frustrated by the racism he was experiencing in the US. At the time Europe was much more progressive in the way that it was handling race relations and many black performers found that very liberating.

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I recently got back from extended travels to face a backlog of queries from Colorado friends and neighbors regarding the belated start of my 16mm backyard cinema program. Using FaceBook I asked if people had a preference for either Preston Sturges, Richard Fleischer, or Billy Wilder. The latter got a big shout-out, and then I promptly ignored all feedback (not to mention my own question) and, instead, screened William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971). One viewer asked me “Why The French Connection?” I was tempted to simply answer “Why not? It’s my party, and I’ll peel rubber if I want to.” But the longer response was the one I employed when introducing the film to the first audience of my summer film program. It went something like this: READ MORE

The New York Asian Film Festival (June 25th – July 8th) is more essential than ever. With distribution companies shutting their doors to Asian cinemas of all types,  there are very few outlets to watch the continent’s resourceful, often brilliant genre cinema on the big screen. For nine years programmer Grady Hendrix and his crew have been filling the void, and for the past few has joined forces with the Japan Cuts Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema (July 1 – 16th)  to provide the most eclectic and revelatory overview of Asian film in the U.S. It’s a heady mix of spectacle, grotesquerie, slapstick and resolute artistry. Every year you’ll see something you’d never seen the likes of before.

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I see that 1967′s Bonnie and Clyde is tomorrow night’s selection for TCM’s “The Essentials” movie slot, and I couldn’t agree more.  B&C is one of those select few movies about which I can honestly say it changed my life and the way I think about everything.  I have such clear memories of watching this movie in the theater when it first came out — I was thirteen — and of the way it blew me away and captured my intellect and my imagination.  It’s remained one of my favorite movies, frequently revisted and never forgotten, and I’ll be watching tomorrow night if I’m home.  We all know that movies seen when you’re younger often take hold in mysterious ways, and boy, did Bonnie and Clyde have that effect on me.

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The top image is from High Sierra (1941), of Humphrey Bogart slugging Alan Curtis in the jaw with his pistol. The bottom image is from the same scene in its remake, Colorado Territory (1949), of Joel McCrea knocking out James Mitchell with a meaty right hand. Both films were directed by Raoul Walsh – the first a gangster movie, the second a Western. Historically speaking, High Sierra is more important for its crystallization of the Humphrey Bogart persona: mulish, bitter, doomed. His good-bad guy Roy Earle was originally slated to be played by both Paul Muni and George Raft, until their queasiness with the script paved Bogart’s way to stardom. And so, it receives a fine DVD transfer and continuous play on TV and at repertory theaters.  Colorado Territory has no such claim to history, except as a superior piece of genre filmmaking, so it receives a beat-up, fuzzy transfer in the Warner Archive. So it goes.

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