Page 73 – Establishing Shot

Festival Recap: Il Cinema Ritrovato

Posted on August 9, 2021 by Jack Miller

An outdoor screening at Piazza Maggiore, the historic city center of Bologna.

For the last 35 years, a wonderful event has happened in Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato, meaning “the cinema rediscovered,” a unique film festival that does not showcase new films competing for prizes or distribution, but rather one that’s dedicated to preserving and sharing the classic and lost treasures of film history. Film culture remains alive and well in Bologna year-round thanks to the programming efforts of the Cineteca di Bologna, the local cinematheque which organizes the festival, and L’Immagine Ritrovata, a film laboratory that carries out many wonderful restorations of vintage films each year. Together and with the help of many knowledgeable film scholars and curators, these great libraries put together an extraordinary program of films in the city each year. I was able to attend the festival this year, my first time in Bologna, and I was like in a kid in a candy shop the whole time: seeing between four and five movies each day, hopscotching between different eras and countries in cinema’s history. It was a remarkable experience. (more…)

100 Years of Esther Williams

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Michaela Owens

For the past eight years, I have been trying to explain the sheer joy that is Esther Jane Williams. From the moment I first laid eyes on the champion swimmer-turned-actress in Thrill of a Romance (1945), I was transfixed. As I sighed over her delicious chemistry with Van Johnson and marveled at the film’s Technicolor dreamscape, which enveloped my senses unlike anything else I had experienced from a film before, a million questions came into my head. Where did Esther and her films come from? How did such a unique star fit into classic Hollywood? Why did her swimming feel so empowering to me? And why wasn’t she someone whose career was better known? That last question is still something I think about all the time. Here was someone who broke records as a competitive swimmer, reluctantly came to Hollywood on her own terms, helped create a genre of swimming musicals that literally no one else could replicate, and became one of Hollywood’s brightest stars and yet she remains underrated and underdiscussed – a fate that I cannot bear to let happen, especially since August 8 will mark the centennial of this remarkable woman. (more…)

Physical Media Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny: Blu-ray Reviews for June 2021

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Aja Essex

Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber and Criterion.

Summer is here and that means things are gonna wind down around here at the blog for the month of July, but I had one more round-up of Blu-rays to bring the people while we try and get some rest before the pandemonium of August brings us out of our sleep. This month, we’re rollin’ with Kino and Criterion to bring you an underseen “cops and robbers” film from across the pond with Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp, while Criterion’s on a welcomely humanist kick in June with their releasing of the seminal Seattle-set documentary about unhoused and abused youth Streetwise and its follow-up, Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell. Criterion has also finally brought Masaki Kobayashi’s towering achievement, The Human Condition, to Blu-ray (about time!). We then wrap things up with some comedy double features in the form of Tamra Davis’s cable staples CB4 and Half Baked and I talk about a couple of Mae West comedies with my *tries to think of something nice to say* great editor, Michaela Owens! We chat about My Little Chickadee and She Done Him Wrong, and get into what makes Mae West and her leading men so interesting. (more…)

Melodramatic Spaces in Smooth Talk

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Laura Ivins

a man in sunglasses points menacingly at Connie, a blonde teenager played by Laura Dern — Laura Dern and Treat Williams in *Smooth Talk*

In the classic teen melodrama Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961), the central conflict arises because Wilma (Natalie Wood) is torn between her desire and social mores. She knows what she wants — she wants sex with Bud (Warren Beatty). But society, represented most strongly in the film by the voice of Wilma’s mother, tells her that not only should she not do what she wants, but she shouldn’t even want it in the first place. She’s a bad girl for wanting.

Twenty-four years later, after the sexual revolution and in the midst of the Reagan era, Smooth Talk (Joyce Chopra, 1985) features another teen girl (Connie, played by Laura Dern) experiencing conflict around her emerging sexuality. Only this time, the divide between the central character’s desire and social repression are not so clear. Connie owns her desire, but it is tangled in a mass of uncertainty and contradictory social messages. (more…)

In Dreams: Sternberg / Dietrich

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Jack Miller

Marlene Dietrich as X-27 in Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored (1931) — Marlene Dietrich as X-27 in Josef von Sternberg’s *Dishonored* (1931)

Between 1930 and 1935, Josef von Sternberg directed seven movies starring the German actress Marlene Dietrich. This extended collaboration represents one of the most fruitful and dazzling creative partnerships in film history, a director-actor pairing that rivals Yasujirō Ozu & Setsuko Hara or John Ford & John Wayne. The films they made together (one in Germany, six in Hollywood) are a series of glittering, almost nauseatingly stylized objects. One gets the sense that the initial idea behind each plot was Sternberg’s desire to dress Dietrich up and place her in a new, exotic setting: she becomes a cabaret singer (Morocco, The Blue Angel), an international spy called X-27 (Dishonored), a sex worker (Shanghai Express), a destitute mother (Blonde Venus), Catherine the Great of Prussia (The Scarlet Empress), and a femme fatale in turn-of-the-century Spain (The Devil Is a Woman). Rarely has Hollywood’s reputation as the “dream factory” been so potently fulfilled. (more…)

Rita Hayworth’s Quiet Rebellion in You Were Never Lovelier (1942)

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Michaela Owens

Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire in You Were Never Lovelier — Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire in *You Were Never Lovelier*

How do you solve a problem like Maria? That’s the question on many people’s lips in You Were Never Lovelier, a stellar 1942 musical about an American dancer (Fred Astaire) who is mistaken for the secret admirer of Maria Acuña (Rita Hayworth), an Argentinian hotelier’s daughter. As embodied by Hayworth, Maria is a clever and vivacious woman blessed with stunning good looks, and yet her family is convinced that there is something wrong with her simply because she isn’t interested in hunting for a husband. While I enjoy You Were Never Lovelier for the enchanting escapism it so clearly offers, I’m also fascinated by its portrayal of Maria and what it means to watch her cling to her agency as she subtly transcends the misogyny of her environment while still conforming to the conventions of a traditional musical from Hollywood’s Golden Age. (more…)