45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival: Mexican Superstars Maria Felix and Pedro Armendariz in Enamorada (1946)

Before I put SIFF to rest for another year, I wanted to share one more film I enjoyed at the festival. It is the Mexican drama Enamorada (1946), starring María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz. For years I’ve admired the Mexican superstar Félix’s laser-focused gaze in photos from the forties and fifties and wondered about her films. I was delighted to finally see why she is a legend in her home country. I’d seen and enjoyed Armendáriz in the Hollywood films Fort Apache and 3 Godfathers (both 1948), but here I saw him for the first time in a leading role.

Félix is the staunchly feminist daughter of the richest man in her town and Armendáriz is a revolutionary who kidnaps him to try to force him to give him money before he kills him. When he also falls in love-at-first-sight with Félix, he decides call off the firing squad in the hopes that returning the old man will give him a chance with his daughter. Of course that is a ridiculous plan. Of course it works.

In his introduction to the film, SIFF programmer Marcus Gorman mentioned that Félix had only done European films outside of Mexico. She understandably felt that the roles available to her in Hollywood would be too demeaning. While Armendáriz found essentially dignified roles in American films, he rarely had the chance to star. One starring role Armendáriz did win in Hollywood was in The Torch (1950), a remake of this film, opposite Paulette Goddard. It is likely that Félix would not have had the opportunities he did, and that at best she would probably have ended up in supporting roles similar to those Katy Jurado did if she wanted to keep her dignity as well.

Enamorada is light on plot, focusing more on the fireworks between Armendáriz and Félix. For the most part this is satisfactory, though occasionally the pace slackened and I wished for something a little meatier. It is a gorgeous film though, with several beautifully-shot scenes in a cathedral that are effectively filmed to show the all-encompassing power of the church in this conservative community.

Armendáriz and Félix are the true draw of the film and they are a lively pair. They both have eternally raised left eyebrows and fire in the belly, but other than that, they are contradictory in a novel way. This is because in a way they switch traditional gender roles. With his long eyelashes and tender eyes, Armendáriz is almost pretty; as ruthless as he can be, he tends to lead with his heart in a traditionally feminine way. On the other hand, Félix is more handsome than pretty and with the liberal use of slaps and firm determination to have things her own way; she is somehow vigorously feminist in a time and culture where that was rare and her behavior would have been seen as masculine.

This odd juxtaposition gives the film its energy. The pair has great chemistry in their comic bits and the subtle role reversal adds an extra layer of interest in these scenes. When they inevitably connect, it makes sense, because in thoroughly irritating each other, they have also awakened themselves to new possibilities.

I’m glad I finally got the chance to see Félix in action. It was amazing to see her for the first time on the big screen. I would love to see more of her and Armendáriz’ work in the films they made in their home country. Maybe another screening next year SIFF?

45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival: The Remarkable Recovery of the Homegrown Spec-fi Flick As The Earth Turns (1938/2019)

One of the most exciting discoveries in the archival offerings of Seattle International Film Festival 2019 is a silent spec-fi film that has been out of circulation for eighty years. Made in Seattle by director, producer and star Richard Lyford, As the Earth Turns (1938) is an innovative, exhilarating independent production. This Friday, a restoration of the film with a new score will screen at SIFF Uptown with restoration producer Kim Lyford Bishop and restoration producer/score composer Ed Hartman scheduled to attend.

As the Earth Turns opens in a conflicted world, where Europe is at war. Young, ambitious American reporter Julie Weston (Barbara Berger) begs her editor for better opportunities, and gets it when he sends her to a Naval radio station to look for stories in the flood of messages constantly streaming into the base. She gets a big one: the mysteriously named Pax sends a wire demanding peace, or else he while increase the length of the day five minutes.

Pax isn’t taken seriously at first, but when he does successfully change time, and then follows up on his promises of earthquakes and weather changes (shades of climate change); government officials begin to take him seriously. However, it is the clever Julie and her associates who ultimately uncover the mystery of Pax and his ironically destructive approach to seeking peace.

Lyford was only twenty-years-old when he made As the Earth Turns, and by that time he’d already written 50 plays and made nine unreleased films. He clearly had a remarkable knack for filmmaking; while the film is clearly low-budget, the production is far from cheap. Lyford combines sleek, innovative effects work with a lively story, able cast, and intertitles that have a pleasing touch of wit. His fascinating model work (including a gorgeous “high-tech” airplane) anticipates the great sci-fi flicks of the 1950s, while his camera work is off kilter and inventive in an Avant garde way.

In a uniformly appealing cast, Berger is the stand-out. Unlike the glamour girl reporters in Hollywood productions of the time, she is refreshingly natural and straightforward. It’s a shame this was her only film role.

Lyford is also magnificent in a slightly campy, but ultimately touching performance as Pax. With a raised eyebrow and shaking fist, he is enormously entertaining, but never excessively cartoonish. He clearly had the ability to master any aspect of filmmaking and embraced the indie spirit of doing whatever it took to get the job done.

Hartman’s new score is a fine complement to this new release. It is period appropriate, but with a modern feel, which is appropriate for the forward-thinking tone of the film.

Seattleites will enjoy the extensive location shooting amidst Pacific Northwest greenery. There are also scenes set on the streets of Seattle, on Boeing Field, and at Gasworks Park when it was still a functioning gas plant.

Lyford would eventually move to Hollywood, where he would direct documentary shorts for Disney. He is perhaps most famous for his television documentary Island of Allah (1956) and the short The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950), a film which won the Academy Award for documentary feature.

This is a festival must-see for fans of classic film. It’s a marvelous discovery. Tickets for the 6/1 screening can be purchased here.

45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival: A Norwegian Biopic of Ice Skating Star Sonja Henie

Sonja: the White Swan (2019) is a biopic of skating star Sonja Henie, who made records as an athlete and sparkled briefly, but potently as a movie queen in Hollywood musicals. I don’t know enough about this phenomenally successful athlete/actress to be able to say whether it succeeded in telling her story, but it does reveal a fascinating character. Starring as Henie, Ine Marie Wilmann portrays a complex, passionate woman. The film around her doesn’t always rise to the level of her performance, but it is magical when it does.

Sonja moves around in time, showing the origins of Henie’s skating passion and occasionally dipping back into the past to shed light on her present. From the beginning, she possesses a ferocious belief in herself. She summons success as much as achieving it. When athletic fame brings her to Fox Studios, she will take no less than a four picture deal, thwarting studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s efforts to try her out in small parts before taking a real financial risk.

Henie is the same in her relationships, demanding that her family move from Norway to be with her in California and then molding their lives to her satisfaction. When she hires an assistant, she expects the same fealty, having her move in so that her employee’s life is in service to her. At first, this behavior is mildly disturbing, but as the story progresses, her ruthless nature reveals itself more fully and it is chilling.

While it is undeniable that the Henie portrayed here was capable of horrific behavior, just as often the things she did that caused scandal would hardly inspire a raised eyebrow if done by a man. Driving a hard bargain or indulging in free love and afternoon champagne were not the domain of women then, and to this day can be the cause of scorn.

In the end, I didn’t recognize the Henie I’d seen in the movies here. Even the gorgeous scenes where her film production numbers are reproduced with magnificent glamour don’t capture the button-nosed sweetness of the star. Wilmann does much with the material she is given though, portraying a woman capable of great cruelty, but also delightfully indulgent in the pleasures of life.

The film as a whole played unevenly for me. In her rise to fame, we see her successes in great detail. As she declines, much of the action plays off-screen, sometimes related in voiceover, which made her fall difficult to engage with on an emotional level. The early scenes pop with an almost sensual energy, buoyed by a punchy modern soundtrack full of electronic beats and upbeat soul and hip hop that instead of seeming anachronistic, does much to express Henie's passionate drive. That feeling devolves into a bland second act, where some scenes are lit so dimly that it is hard to make out what is happening.

In a coda with a sequence of film clips featuring the real Henie, the star is presented in her later years, happily married and apparently thriving. We see where she ended up, but precisely how she got there remains a mystery.

This is worth a view based on Wilmann’s remarkable performance and the punch of the early scenes and movie sequence reproductions.

Tickets for the final SIFF screening of the film on 5/27 can be purchased here.

45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival: A Collage of James Mason Clips in Invest in Failure (Notes on Film 06-C, Monologue 03) (2018)

While I think that it is usually best to go into a film cold in order to enjoy it fully, the work of Austrian filmmaker Norbert Pfaffenbichler benefits from some explanation. His experimental works are accessible, but require preparation. Invest in Failure (Notes on Film 06-C, Monologue 03) (2018), which features clips from 160 James Mason films is a riot if it catches you in the right frame of mind.

The film is the final installation in Pfaffenbichler’s Monologue Trilogy, a series of films in which he has compiled clips of male movie stars in surreal juxtapositions of moods, ages, and situations. In the first two films, which featured Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff, his stars interacted with themselves in different roles. I had the opportunity to watch the Karloff film, A Masque of Madness (2013) at SIFF 2014 and found it mesmerizing to watch the actor performing with himself across time, even chasing himself at one point.

This time Pfaffenbichler shakes things up by adding women to the mix. Mason is shown loving, beating, berating and romancing his leading ladies in seventeen thematic episodes. Unlike the Karloff film, Mason disappears from the screen for lengthy periods as the women in his cinematic life regard him with disappointment, fear, and very occasionally admiration. It is in essence a violent portrait with a sprinkling of lust and romance to make it a shade more palatable.

Pfaffenbichler uses sound and music to challenge the emotions evoked by these clips, placing lushly romantic music with grim imagery or adding repetitive clicks and the like to increase the tension of a sequence. It is this editorial hand that makes the film more compelling than the strictly-themed collection of clips it first appears to be.

I hate to say that a film is not for everyone, but I have to admit this might move too slowly and erratically for those who prefer a conventional narrative. It’s worth a look for fans of classic film though and especially Mason fanatics. While firmly advancing through its structured themes, it is also curiously freeing, because it releases the viewer from narrative storytelling and allows somewhat untethered exploration of all the feelings, images, and sounds that make movies, and their stars, so thrilling.

The SIFF screening of this film includes Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich’s amusing short Copy Shop (2001).


Tickets for the May 30 screening of Invest in Failure (Notes on Film 06-C, Monologue 03) can be purchased here.

45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival: Picks for Classic Film Fans

The schedule for the 45th Annual Seattle International Film Festival is out, and it is a jawdropper. SIFF is going to be an especially happy place for classic film fans this year. With restorations, rediscoveries, and a diverse array of voices, the selection is especially tantalizing.

This year’s festival runs from May 16 to June 9, and I’ll be writing about several screenings in more detail as the month progresses. For now, here are my recommended flicks. All film titles link to schedule and ticket purchase information:

Silent

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) with Live Soundtrack by the Invincible Czars
This is the third time the Austin, Texas-based indie band The Invincible Czars have provided musical accompaniment for a silent at SIFF. I loved the knowledge of music history, creativity, and craft that went into their score for John Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), which they performed at SIFF 2017, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with for another horror silent.

As the Earth Turns (1938)
Shot in Seattle, this newly remastered sci-fi thriller has been out of circulation for 80 years. Seattle native Richard Lyford directed and starred in the film, which includes location footage of Boeing Field and Gasworks Park. I love that even the new score has been composed by a Seattle composer, Ed Hartman.

Spies (1928)
Fritz Lang’s take on the thriller is his penultimate silent film. Of epic length, but fast-paced, there are many elements which would eventually become genre tropes and spy gadgetry in this mixture of intercultural agent romance and intrigue. SIFF will be screening a 2K restoration.

Documentary

Barbara Rubin & the Exploding Underground (2018)
A brisk portrait of the brief life of Barbara Rubin, an experimental filmmaker who boldly established herself in the primarily male arenas of  movies and Orthodox Judaism in 1960s New York. The story of the woman who introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground is bound to be interesting.

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019)
Via recordings he made while writing his autobiography, Miles Davis himself gets to narrate much of this straightforward and thorough documentary about the legendary jazz trumpet player. Former loves, family, bandmates, and experts present a justifiably critical, but empathetic portrait of an artist, who had a reputation for being difficult, but whose impact on and complete adoration of music is undeniable. Movie fans will love the in-depth segment on the unorthodox way Davis created the soundtrack for the Louis Malle film Elevator to the Gallows (1958).

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018)
The polarizing, long-time New Yorker critic Pauline Kael gets the documentary treatment in a film that alternates her own words and life with clips of the films she reviewed.

Storm in My Heart (2018)

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) director Mark Cousins examines race and privilege in Hollywood by comparing the lives of stars Susan Hayward and Lena Horne. Born in the same year, on the same day in Brooklyn, these talented women had dramatically different careers. The film primarily consists of the Fox musicals Stormy Weather (1943) and With a Song in My Heart (1953) , which starred Horne and Hayward respectively, playing side-by-side on two quarters of the screen, while text with trivia about the women and their lives occasionally appears on the other half of the screen. At first I found the presentation headache-inducing and the comparison not as compelling as I'd hoped, but the story gradually builds and deepens. You begin to understand the exhaustion both actresses felt as women in Hollywood, but how much more profoundly draining it was for Horne as a black woman. A tonal shift in the final ten minutes of the film firmly establishes that divide.

International

Enamorada (1946)
I have been dying to see the films of Mexican movie star María Félix for years. After being limited for so long to admiring her in stills, I’m excited that I will be seeing her in action for the first time on the big screen,costarring with Pedro Armendáriz (From Russia with Love [1963]). The restoration of the print was overseen by Martin Scorsese, who has done so much to bring classic international film to a wider audience.

I Am Cuba (1964)
A gorgeous film that is notorious for its Soviet propaganda, but celebrated for magnificent cinematic technique. Whatever you think of the politics of these four stories of Cubans struggling under the Batista dictatorship, Mikhail Kalatozov’s long, climbing tracking shots are a baffling wonder.

Directed by Women

The Bigamist (1953) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Kino Lorber will present restorations of two of the best films Ida Lupino directed. Both broke new ground: The Bigamist covered sensational subject matter with a sympathetic approach while The Hitch-Hiker was unusually brutal subject matter for a female director at the time.

Between the Lines (1977)
Director Joan Mickin Silver’s (Chilly Scenes of Winter [1979]) joyful and devastating film about a group of journalists working for an underground newspaper in Boston touches on the same takeover anxiety that plagues the industry today, but is for the most part about the lives of these difficult, but intriguing people. Baby faces abound in this flick that came early in the careers of Bruno Kirby, Jeff Goldblum, John Heard, Lindsay Crouse and Jill Eikenberry.

Sonja: The White Swan (2019)
Norwegian filmmaker Anne Sewitsky directs this biopic of skating star Sonja Henie, who was all smiles in her Hollywood movies and apparently the exact opposite off-screen.

Cult

The Legend of the Stardust Brothers (1985)
Every description I see of this Japanese new wave musical about a manufactured pop duo compares it to another movie: Rocky Horror Picture Show, A Hard Day’s Night, The Apple. All of these comparisons are apt, but insufficient to appropriately describe this silly, chaotic, and immensely entertaining movie. With zombies, manga, inventive slapstick and wall-to-wall music, there’s always something interesting, and sometimes astounding, happening. While there will be three screenings of the film at varying times of day, this is definitely a Midnight must-see.

DJ NicFit Presents Fantastic Planet (1973)
DJ NicFit returns to SIFF (last year’s production: spinning sounds to Highlander[1986]) to parallel the sounds of The Flaming Lips with this beautifully bizarre French animation sci-fi classic.

I’m not a big fan of Billy Wilder’s Cold-War comedy 1,2,3(1961), but I did want to mention the festival screening. It’s a good opportunity for fans of the director and star James Cagney to see the film on the big screen.