BANQUET FEASTS ON FILM’S PAST

There are late afternoons when the idea of going to another banquet is more than the soul can tolerate. Struggling into that foolish black uniform, fighting the traffic, the parking, the ticket table, the cocktail hour at which host or no-host reminds you how much humans have in common with sardines, the dinner with the food whistling past your shoulders while you sway as if on a subway. All that, and then the speeches.

I wonder how society chroniclers do it night after night. My wars with the elusive cuff links don’t average one a month. Still I complain: Still I go. And the other night I realized I go partly out of journalistic duty, yet partly because the banquets are a lottery and you may come away with a prized experience you would have been sorry to miss. (Not the table favors, those miniaturized flacons of scent for which no peacetime use has yet been found.)

Friday night at the American Cinema Awards Foundation dinner at the Beverly Wilshire, for example, Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell did a reprise on “Bye Bye Birdie,” singing and dancing and carrying on with an easy and graceful charm that was worth a long wait in traffic.

The performers, choreographed for the occasion as in the movie by Onna White, looked as if they should be singing “Why Don’t We Do This More Often,” as well as “Put on a Happy Face” and the title song.

Van Dyke, very collegiate in gray sweater and slacks, performs now as ever with a loose-jointed elegance that is the envy of the flat-footed and flat-voiced among us. There must be a new series concept lurking around somewhere that is equal to his engaging presence.

There was more to the evening. Robert Goulet was emcee and did some songs from “Camelot.” Nancy Kwan and Keye Luke (the very same, from the Charlie Chan films) did songs from “Flower Drum Song,” and Yvonne de Carlo delivered her hit, “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies.” It could have been the theme song of the evening.

The message of the evening was in fact that nostalgia is what it used to be. The organization, founded by a young entrepreneur named David Gest, aims, it would seem, to be the Rolls-Royce of nostalgia vehicles, celebrating the stars of Hollywood’s golden age and in time building what sounds to be a temple of movie memory on some donated land in Malibu.

The crowd, which included Gov. George Deukmejian and his wife, was divided between stars and star-worshipers. Cesar Romero was there, and Ruby Keeler, Virginia Mayo, Paul Henreid, Glenn Ford, Jane Wyatt, Joseph Cotten and Patricia Medina (who were honorary co-chairmen) and, as the posters say, a host of others.

There was a silent auction of memorabilia, including a couple of Yvonne de Carlo’s costumes and dozens of signed photographs and posters as well as donated albums and videocassettes.

Reflecting a younger generation of performers, Susan Howard and Ken Kercheval were Goulet’s co-hosts.

My only complaints about nostalgia are that it tends to be totally uncritical (whatever was was wonderful, just because it was ) and that it becomes a kind of refuge from all that is real and present, notably including the real and present world of motion pictures.

Then as now, fan enthusiasms are almost exclusively performer-oriented, and I cheer all the performers who worked or attended the other night and who are part of the memory boards of my life as well.

But the performers might be the first to admit that they didn’t write the words they said or the lyrics they sang, or invent the things they did or the characters they played.

There were writers and directors and producers, production designers and moguls. The names on the long crawls fore and aft were not without meaning.

The fans might argue that the serious interest in film history that has grown during the last several decades has actually slighted the performers in favor of those other creative types, who were sometimes unglamorous and generally strangers to the pages of Photoplay. The nostalgists are correcting the balance. Maybe. The film past as a collectible has appeal and some value, although there seems no end to the making of museums of memorabilia.

Meantime, the real work of retrieving the film past lies in finding and preserving the lost movies, doing oral histories with the diminishing band of survivors, seizing the dusty documents before they are tossed out.

The American Film Institute and several other organizations are doing prime work in those fields. What function Gest’s American Cinema Awards serves beyond the satisfying of nostalgist sentiments is not clear. But in its area, it can at least create moments that give the banquet a good name.