A FILM EXHIBITION OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE

From Friday through Feb. 27, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the County Museum of Art will present more than 300 films to mark the 75th anniversary of Paramount Pictures. (Nationwide, similar retrospectives honoring the studio will begin this summer.)

Calendar asked reviewer Thomas to look over the retrospective schedule and comment on his favorites.

Paramount has been the studio of DeMille and Eddie Murphy, of Lubitsch and Jerry Lewis, of Billy Wilder and Hitchcock and Preston Sturges. It’s been home to Gloria Swanson and Pola Negri, Marlene Dietrich and Alan Ladd, Mae West anC. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Crosby, Hope and Lamour.

What if you could see only 10 films among this treasure trove, much of which has been preserved by the UCLA archive? Which ones would they be? Why not all Hitchcock, whose greatest period was at Paramount? Or all the films of Preston Sturges, whose entire, subsequently aborted career was spent almost entirely at Paramount?

It’s an impossible question to answer, but here are my 10 Paramount favorites, not a 10-best list but a best- loved list, in order of affection.

1--”Sunset Boulevard,” 1950 (Oct. 9 at the museum). This is my favorite of all movies. It’s the definitive movie about Hollywood past, present and forever. Director Billy Wilder and his co-writers, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr., captured the grandeur of the silent era with wit and compassion and everyday life at Paramount just as TV was coming in and DeMille was nearing the end of his reign.

Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is unforgettable in her pretentiousness and vulnerability. Yet in her madness, as she descends her staircase for the newsreel cameras, directed one last time by Erich von Stroheim, her butler but once her husband and director, Norma sums up what the movies are all about: “There’s nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there.”

2--”I’m No Angel,” 1933 (Aug. 21 at the museum). This is the best Mae West movie, about a carny hootchy-kootchy dancer who graduates to circus lion tamer and in the process conquers high society (and Cary Grant) while remaining very much herself. It’s so fast and funny that you hardly notice the social commentary; this is the one in which Mae ad-libbed, “Beulah, peel me a grape.” Lots of low-down show biz atmosphere--contrasting later with white-on-white Art Deco elegance. The Mae West of this movie was very much the lady herself.

3--”Chinatown,” 1974 (Jan. 16 at the museum). No film has ever better captured the Los Angeles that many of us grew up in or better revealed the treacherous, corrupt undertow of the Southern California dream. Jack Nicholson captured perfectly the seeming shrewdness of the Hammett-Chandler private eye--only to reveal his essential naivete.

4--”Lady in the Dark,” 1944 (Aug. 16 at UCLA). A true film maudit , Mitchell Leisen’s stylish but aborted extravaganza from the Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin musical about a neurotic fashion-magazine editor (Ginger Rogers). It managed to delete some of their best songs--e.g., “My Ship”--and not permit Danny Kaye to re-create his star-making Broadway role (played here by Mischa Auer). But it’s so lavish, its dream sequences so fantastic, that at the time it was enough to make me--at age 8 or 9--fall in love with the movies for all time. Ginger Rogers’ fur gown lined with red sequins--designed by Leisen and Edith Head--in the big circus number remains one of the most fabulous costumes in the movies.

5--”Atlantic City,” 1981 (Feb. 6 at the museum). Another of my all-time favorites. Director Louis Malle and writer John Guare’s exquisite romantic fable and an affectionate satire of American pop culture, past and present. Burt Lancaster (never better) and Susan Sarandon are among those dreamers whose lives converge in an Atlantic City in the throes of renewal, thanks to legalized gambling. A sophisticated fairy tale, beautiful to behold and as funny as it is touching.

6--”Applause,” 1929 (July 22 at UCLA). This is the film in which Rouben Mamoulian showed how the camera could be moved despite the advent of sound, which threatened to turn movies into filmed plays thanks to the bulkiness and noisiness of primitive sound cameras. But “Applause” is memorable not just for its innovative style and resourcefulness with the new talkie medium but also for the electrifying performance of the legendary Helen Morgan as an aging, self-sacrificing burlesque star. At the time, she wasn’t yet 30.

7--”The Blue Angel,” 1929 (July 31 at the museum). Paramount didn’t release this UFA production until after it had safely launched newly streamlined star Marlene Dietrich in her first Hollywood movie, “Morocco,” also directed by Josef von Sternberg. Sternberg and Dietrich were to make film history in the increasingly stylized series of films, but their first was the best, a gritty Heinrich Mann tale about a plump music hall star who beguiles and then casually destroys a portly, middle-aged schoolteacher (Emil Jannings).

8--”Vertigo,” 1958 (Nov. 7 at the museum). Widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece--and with good reason. This is the most romantic of all Hitchcock movies--and surely the most romantic of all San Francisco movies. James Stewart, in one of his finest, most complex portrayals, is the vertigo-plagued detective who becomes infatuated with the beautiful blonde (Kim Novak) he’s been hired to tail. He’s devastated by her apparent suicide, only to come across a redhead who’s her virtual double. Hitchcock made Stewart’s obsession count for more than its convoluted plotting. (Too bad you can’t see it where I first saw it, at that great, barbaric poured-concrete pile, the Paramount Theater at 6th and Hill in downtown L.A.)

9--”The Nutty Professor,” 1963 (Sept. 8 at UCLA). Some day Jerry Lewis, member of France’s Legion of Honor, may get his due on his home turf. Although the Felliniesque “The Ladies’ Man” (1961) is a close runner-up, this is Lewis’ best picture, a darkly comic Jekyll and Hyde story with Lewis in dual roles (you weren’t expecting Dean Martin, were you?) and with a sexy and adorable leading lady, Stella Stevens.

10--”The Greatest Show on Earth,” 1952 (Oct. 16 at the museum). DeMille at last captured a best-picture Oscar with a subject, the circus, that meshed absolutely perfectly with his flamboyance and passion for gaudy spectacle. One of the screen’s undisputed master storytellers for all his grandiosity, DeMille had the whole roster of Paramount stars, headed by aerialist Betty Hutton and circus manager Charlton Heston, to draw upon for an intertwining of tales under the big top. This glorious piece of Americana has accrued invaluable documentary value, for only four years later Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey packed up its tents for good.

THE SCHEDULE

FRIDAY at 8 p.m.:

QUEEN ELIZABETH (1912) (County Museum of Art, Bing Theater, (213) 857-6010). A silent film, directed by Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton, screenplay by Eugene Moreau, based on the play by Emile Moreau. Starring Sarah Bernhardt, Lou Tellegen and the artists of the Comedie Francaise.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1923). A silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, screenplay by Jeanie Macpherson. Starring Theodore Roberts, Estelle Taylor and Rod LaRocque.

SATURDAY at 8 p.m.:

THE SHEIK (1921) (County Museum of Art, Bing Theater). A silent film directed by George Melford, screenplay by Monte M. Ketterjohn (based on the novel by E. M. Hull). Starring Rudolph Valentino, Agnes Ayers and Adolph Menjou.

JOAN THE WOMAN (1916). Silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, screenplay by Jeanie Macpherson. Starring Geraldine Farrar, Wallace Reid and Theodore Roberts.