My second day at Il Cinema Ritrovato and I was for sure going to make it into town in time to see THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE — a serial represented by one tantalising still in Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Sadly, the two episodes screened, fun though they were, did not include the Jekyll-and-Hyde sequence Gifford depicted, so I can’t altogether chalk that one off my list.
Still, the bits shown, two full episodes with some sequences spliced in from elsewhere (those wacky Belgians!) were jolly good fun.
Like a lightweight, I gave myself 45 minutes of daylight before plunging into TEODORA, IMPERATRICE DI BISANZIO (THEODORA, SLAVE EMPRESS), part of the too-brief Riccardo Freda season. This was campy, sword-and-sandal fun, showing signs of the amoral and unsympathetic eye Freda would later turn on his characters. One character, a prison guard is seduced by the vamp-heroine so she can escape her bonds. He’s blinded with a red-hot poker for his troubles (the sadism of the giallo and the spaghetti western is fully present in the peplum). Later, he turns up as a kind of monster, stalking towards Teo in his fur-trimmed barbarian/s&m costume, only to get speared by the hero. Shouldn’t he merit a little sympathy? Apparently not.
The movie also features the best beast attack I’ve ever seen — scores of wild cats of all breeds leaping upon and devouring Roman soldiers. Freda uses the standard formula — shot of real big cat jumping, shot of extra being walloped with stuffed lion — but he cuts so frenetically and does it so many times that the sequence attains a kind of ludicrous, drunken conviction. Hilarious and breath-taking.
The feature screened with a short, I MOSAICI A REVENNA, in which Freda artfully films the religious art of the early Byzantine Empire — and he interpolates a few shots from the doc into his feature to bolster the production values.
On to the big screen at the Arlecchino, for OKLAHOMA! which I could only justify on the grounds that a Todd-AO restoration is an unusual event, and I wanted to see what it looked and sounded like. Well, pristine, for starters. I kind of resented the way the intro was all about the difficulty of the restoration — the challenge seems to have been the main motivation — with no mention of Fred Zinnemann and his achievement, mixed though it may be. On the big screen, with the six-track magnetic stereo sound remastered and the image taken from the decaying negative ten years ago and digitally restored at 50fps 30fps, the film is overwhelming. Rarely have I seen so much of the great outdoors indoors. The micro detail allows you to spot tiny flies and butterflies (and water-snakes) wafting through frame, sometimes to dramatically fortuitous effect. Note also Zinnemann’s innovative direct cutting, achieved without the guiding influence of the nouvelle vague. When Gordon MacRae sings of his putative surrey with a fringe on top, we just cut to the damn thing, on the beat, rollicking along against a massive sky, just as if it had existed all along.
If I started to list the things I missed while watching this jolly 148 minute roadshow pic, complete with intermission, I might start to cry. That’s the curse of the film festival. Oh, very well — Cagney’s debut in OTHER MEN’S WOMEN — a 1935 Mizoguchi and a Takashima of similar vintage — something called IN THE LAND OF THE HEAD HUNTERS — NIGHT NURSE with Stanwyck and Blondell in their scanties — a conference on film restoration — a film by Henny Porten’s sister — Chaplin’s THE VAGABOND and EASY STREET — Giuseppe Tornatore talking about Francesco Rosi’s SALVATORE GIULIANO — Guru Dutt’s PYAASA… and the same impossible choices are offered up from 9am to 9.45pm every day!
By simply remaining in my seat I could catch MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, so I did. Later, Dave Kehr told me about the earlier cut, the authentic Ford cut, which alas does not seem to have been restored. But Linda Darnell on the big screen, even playing a character called Chihuahua ffs, was possibly the most impressive sight of the fest.
In the massive Piazza Maggiore, the public gets in free along with the guests — to watch SALVATORE GIULIANO, in this case, with Tornatore introducing. The restoration makes it look new. It’s a very impressive film, but after 12 hours of screenings I am not taking it in as well as I might — though the film’s unconventional structure (a bit like a CITIZEN KANE in which we see Thompson but don’t see KANE) certainly comes across — when you’re dog-tired and have no idea how far from the end of the movie you might be, you certainly notice.
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