C'mon a My House

HOUSE / Hausu
(Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japan, 1977, 35mm, 87 mins.)

Chocolate, candy, bread, love, and dreams!

Infamous Japanese whatsit House is the quintessential 1970s artifact. The animated opening recalls The Rocky Horror Picture Show before introducing fresh-faced schoolgirls Fantasy (Kumiko Ohba) and Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami), who take pictures of each other while planning for summer vacation as H.R. Pufnstuf-style music plays in the background (in some translations, Gorgeous becomes Angel). It's all so...innocent. Think high-school horror classics like Carrie. Sada director Nobuhiko Obayashi even shoots in soft focus, just like Brian De Palma before him.

But you can tell you're in fantasyland when Gorgeous's widowed father (Saho Sasazawa), a film composer just returned from Italy, tells her, "Leone said my music was better than Morricone's." (Yeah, right.) Then she meets his new bride, Ryôko (Haruko Wanibuchi), who enters the scene like Joan Crawford--or the Bride of Frankenstein--in high dudgeon: eerily erect posture, flowing white gown. Used to being Daddy's favorite, Gorgeous doesn't take the news well. Obayashi extends the bizarro-world impression through freeze frames, colored gels, fake exteriors, sepia-toned flashbacks, silent-movie title cards, and additional animations.

Bulldog Drummond meets The Mountain Girl

Her Night of Romance (1924)

Wednesday July 28, 7:30pm, The Colorado Chautauqua Auditorium, Boulder

"What do you think of my pulse?"

An American businessman, Samuel Adams "The Scrub Brush King" and his frightened mouse of a daughter, Dorothy (Constance Talmadge) travel to England for her health and buy the estate of penniless lord, Paul Menford (Ronald Coleman). Boy meets girl, light-hearted deception and silliness ensues and mighty whoppers from tiny fibs do grow!

Produced by Joseph M. Schenck (husband of Norma Talmadge) and directed by Sidney Franklin for First National Pictures, Her Night of Romance is a farcical bon-bon that starts with a little-white-lie (Paul masquerades as a doctor to see Dorothy) and spirals upward with everyone caught in the absurd, far-fetched shenanigans until the entire village believes they are married. A first-rate supporting cast features Jean Hersholt as Paul's business cohort and Sydney Bracey as the butler.

I'm a Believer

LEON MORIN, PRIEST / Lèon Morin, Prêtre
(Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1961, 35mm, 117 mins.)

There's not a trace of doubt in my mind.
-- Neil Diamond

Lèon Morin, Priest provides persuasive evidence that French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville didn't just make movies about men, like Bob le Flambeur and Le Samouraï, but about women, too. And from a female perspective.

For a director responsible for some of the best tough-guy films ever made, he had a sensitive--but not sentimental--side for which he still doesn't receive due credit, as exemplified by La Silence de la Mer, which also takes place during wartime.

Arriving in American theaters 49 years after its debut, his adaptation of Béatrix Beck's semi-autobiographical novel centers on Mrs. Barny (Hiroshima, Mon Amour's soulful Emmanuelle Riva), instructor at a correspondence school. In her opening narration, the widow describes the Italian soldiers descending on Saint-Bernard during the Occupation, noting how silly they look in their feathered caps.

Jumpin Jupiter!

The Iron Horse (1924)

Thursday July 15, 7pm, The Castro, San Francisco

"In the heart of one man there is no rivalry"

Set amid the romance and mythology of the American West, construction of the Transcontinental Railroad is recounted in cinematic splendor by Hollywood's master of the genre. Bestowing an almost religious patriotism to the story, central characters Dave Brandon (George O'Brien) and Miriam Marsh (Madge Bellamy) are introduced as the childhood neighbors of Abraham Lincoln. Years pass, expansion progresses and they reacquaint when he leaps aboard her moving train to escape a band of Indians. The pioneers fight harsh conditions, crooked businessmen and each other as the rails push toward May 10, 1869 and the Golden Spike.

Fun with Barbells

The Strong Man (1926)

Saturday July 17, 4pm, The Castro, San Francisco

"...if you don't stop following me I'll turn you over to a truant officer!"

A baby-faced boob immigrates to America after The War to search for his pen-pal sweetheart. As the hapless assistant of The Great Zandow a travelling strongman, Paul (Harry Langdon) eventually finds Mary (Pricilla Bonner), the blind daughter of a crusading minister and inadvertently chases all the riff-raff out of town.

Preservation and Performance

The 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival

July 15-18, 2010

The Castro Theatre

San Francisco, CA

In the visually stunning film The Fall (2006) (Dir. Tarsem Singh), set during the golden age of silent film, one scene is jarringly unattractive. A young girl watches a film print that a major studio has provided for a special screening. The film stock is grainy, the movement of the film jerky, the print damaged, the blacks and whites reduced to monochromatic grays. In reality, a film print directly from a studio at that time would have looked nothing like this. Unfortunately, the director made that aesthetic choice because a modern audience expects a silent film to look, well, old: technically primitive and dated. The non-profit organization The Silent Film Festival has made its mission to fight that perception, not only by supporting film restoration but also by screening silent films the way they were presented at the time and meant to be seen, up on the big screen with live musical accompaniment and an audience.

This year's 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, presented July 15 through July 18 at San Francisco's historic Castro Theatre, solidly delivers on that mission. The keystone event at this year's festival is the digital screening of the recently-restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) on Friday night. The original distributors of the time brutally cut Lang's seminal futuristic political allegory down from 153 minutes to a more standard running time of 90 minutes, rendering the plot almost incomprehensible. The cut footage had been presumed lost forever by generations of filmgoers. However, in 2001 the Munich Film Archive created a 124-minute version by compiling additional footage from four different archives, a prodigious feat. Miraculously, in 2008 the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires found an even longer 16mm dupe negative. They have created a print now running at 148 minutes, which is nearly definitive. At the festival, The Alloy Orchestra will provide live musical accompaniment for this lovingly restored version. Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller will interview on stage the archivists who found the footage, Paul Felix-Didier and Fernando Pena.

Fire in the Sky

The Flying Ace (1926)

Saturday July 17, 2pm, The Castro, San Francisco

"Bad news travels fast."

A railroad agent disappears under suspicious circumstances and former detective, World War Aviator Billy Stokes (Lawrence Criner) is enlisted to solve the crime.

The paymaster for the M. N. and Q. Railroad and the $25,000 Eastern Division payroll he is carrying vanish from the Mayport station and the stationmaster is questioned. Rendered unconscious during the incident, the old man offers Billy only clues. A mysterious local flyer and rival for the affections of the stationmaster's daughter Ruth (Kathryn Boyd) clashes with Billy's investigation. Assisted on the ground by 'Peg' his mechanic, Billy apprehends the crooks as the film concludes with a mid-air rescue from a burning plane and a song.

Deafening Silence

Metropolis (1927)

Friday July 16, 8:15pm, The Castro, San Francisco

The son of a powerful industrialist discovers a grim subterranean world that exists to support his privileged life. After witnessing a terrible accident and hearing Maria (Brigitte Helm), a prophet from the depths, Freder (Gustav Frohlich) believes saving the workers is his destiny. His father enlists a scientist with duplicitous intentions and an evil robot to subvert the movement.

Few works from the Silent Era have survived within our cultural consciousness without focused reintroduction. In her epic study of cinematic expressionism The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner refers to the "...noisy visual orchestration" of Metropolis as, "... a silent film - we can almost hear."