UCLA Festival Shows Restored Film Classics

The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s second annual Festival of Preservation at once calls attention to the archive’s invaluable, ongoing contributions toward retrieving and protecting our endangered film heritage and provides delightful summer entertainment as well.

The festival gets off to a roaring start at 8 p.m. Friday in Melnitz Theater with one of Hollywood’s truly legendary movies, Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels” (1930), which restores the film to its full running time of 127 minutes, re-creates its tinted portions and incorporates a long-missing, eight-minute, two-color Technicolor sequence that represents the only color footage of Jean Harlow.

On the ground, “Hell’s Angels” is pretty corny, following two brothers--one weak and cynical (Ben Lyon), the other strong and virtuous (James Hall)--as they are swept away by a shallow society girl (Harlow) and swept up by the outbreak of World War I, which prompts their enlistment in the Royal Flying Corps. (The film’s three stars make no real stab at British accents, merely sprinkling their conversation with rathers and rightos. )

In the sky, however, the film remains one of the most exciting examples of aerial warfare, thrilling and unnervingly personal. Almost as suspenseful is whether Harlow will fall out of her gown. (In the late ‘40s, as executive talent director for Fox, Lyon would be instrumental in launching the career of another dynamite blonde, Marilyn Monroe.)

The archive’s preservation expert, Robert Gitt, and his team had an easier job with John Ford’s “The Quiet Man” (1952), which screens after “Hell’s Angels.” However, a fresh print reveals how subtle three-strip Technicolor could be in this glorious romantic comedy set in Ireland and starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, whose red-haired beauty was perfect for color.

Wayne plays a retired boxing champ who returns to the birthplace he left as a small child. He has his reasons for avoiding a donnybrook with O’Hara’s comically stubborn brother (Victor McLaglen), who won’t allow O’Hara to have her rightful dowry. Ford’s pace is appropriately leisurely, matching the tempo of rural Irish life, and the film is resonant with the director’s wise and compassionate humor. Wayne is splendid and understated, as he always was under Ford’s direction, and it’s gratifying to be reminded that O’Hara was not merely “fiery” but delightfully varied as she alternates between pride and dismay. This is an adult film in the best sense.

Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Sign of the Cross” (1932), which has had its suggestive (rather than explicit) pre-code sex and violence restored, isn’t as much fun as you would expect. In this ponderous extravaganza of Christian martyrdom in Nero’s Rome, there’s something queasy in DeMille’s patented prurience-and-piety formula: The Christians, led by a pallid and insufferably noble Elissa Landi, are hard to take and so are the Romans, an unappetizing, sadistic crew, led by Charles Laughton’s campy Nero. Fredric March seems too cerebral for Marcus, prefect of Rome, who falls for Landi. The film’s bright spot is Claudette Colbert, as Poppaea, who takes what was a highly publicized milk bath and who has the wit to make wickedness seem chic. Lots of Deco-influenced Mitchell Leisen costumes.

“The Sign of the Cross” is screening Sunday at 8 p.m. Also screening Sunday at 2 p.m.: “The Line-Up at Police Headquarters” (1914) and the long-lost Jackie Coogan picture, “Daddy” (1923).

The preservation festival, which runs weekends through July and includes many rarities, continues July 13 at 8 p.m. with the recently rediscovered Roland West silent “The Bat” (1926), which West remade (in 65 millimeter) only four years later as a talkie, “The Bat Whispers.” With William Cameron Menzies’ stark, vast sets and cinematographer Arthur Edeson’s dramatic play of light and shadow, “The Bat” is almost as striking a triumph of the visual as its remake.

It is one of the pioneer “old dark house” mysteries and adapted from the Mary Roberts Rhinehart-Avery Hopwood play, based in turn on Rhinehart’s novel. The big deal is to guess the identity of The Bat as he--or she--terrorizes a mansion in the country that has been rented for the summer by a formidable New York aristocrat. The film is of special current interest as a clear inspiration for “Batman” creator Bob Kane, even though the Bat was a villain. Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.