It’s Cecil Parker’s Film Festival, We Just Live In It

A very young, very fat Cecil Parker was a highlight in BECKY SHARP, he injects life into UNDER CAPRICORN (which we missed) and accompanies Ingrid Bergman again in Stanley Donen’s INDISCREET, where he gets most of the laughs during the long first half of setting-up. Then there’s some business with a fellow named Cary Grant — and then David Kossoff, of all people, got a spontaneous round of applause from the Bologna audience — TWICE. For entering and exiting.

That was today, when I had a lie in. Yesterday I saw:

IN OLD CHICAGO (Henry King) and WAY OF A GAUCHO (Jacques Tourneur) in the morning, two films in which cows cause death. In the Tourneur, a startling matte effect enables a horse and rider to disappear under a stampeded of cattle. The King is like a bovine version of THE BIRDS, with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow incinerating the windy city single-hooved, and a herd busting out from the stockyards to trample a major character.

The Tourneur, which looks great but was not a major hit with the public here, did feature the festival’s most quoted line: “He’s a fool, but he’s very gaucho.”

My own favourite exchange was from MOULIN ROUGE. Zsa Zsa: “Others find love and happiness, I find only disenchantment.” “Jose: “But you find it so often.”

I walked out of THE SEA WOLF — not the Curtiz classic, but an earlier Fox version by the worthless Alfred Santell. I would have stuck it out but my foot needed ointment so I stuck that out instead. Then I interviewed a very special person — haven’t been able to check the audio yet so we’ll have to see about that…

Fiona stayed in the Cinema Jolly, whose air-con has shown the most distinguished service this fest, until today when it let us all down rather badly during THE BRAVADOS, and she saw Felix E. Feist’s TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY. I’m going to have to catch up with the Feists I missed after the fest. He seems feisty.

The Piazetta Pier Paolo Pasolini is where showings are held with the carbon arc projector in the open air, so at 10.15 pm we ingested an Aperol Spritz (me) and a peach juice (Fiona) and washed them down with a one-reel fragment of Rupert Julian’s CREAKING STAIRS — the stairs weren’t all that creaked — a tinted Fleischer OUT OF THE INKWELL cartoon, a couple of travelogue-type things, and best of all, three episodes of ZIGOMAR PEAU D’ANGUILLE, a proto-FANTOMAS serial with a chunky master-criminal, a slinky female sidekick in a catsuit, and various capers including a robbery using an elephant accomplice (“La Rosaria” whispering detail directions into the pachyderm’s massive ear — intertitle ZIGOMAR AND LA ROSARIA WAIT IN THE GUTTER FOR THE ELEPHANT) and dive-bombing on Lake Como.

I’d been wanting to properly see some ZIGOMAR since I saw my first clip of the hooded desperado, possibly in the BBC series The Last Machine. He did not disappoint me, though most of his heists seemed to leave him out of pocket.