‘Smash-Up,’ ‘Force of Evil’ Highlight Preservation Festival

The UCLA Film Archives second annual Festival of Preservation continues splendidly this week at Melnitz Hall.

On the schedule are the charming Mitchell Liesen-Preston Sturges comedy, “Remember the Night “ with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck as district attorney and shoplifter on a romantic yuletide (Thursday); the much-copied reincarnation fantasy “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” (Saturday); George S. Kaufman and Charles MacArthur’s ribald political satire, “The Senator Was Indiscreet” (Sunday); the vigorous Mamoulian-Kern-Hammerstein Western musical--and “Oklahoma!” precursor--”High, Wide and Handsome” (Friday), and one of the best of all the Crosby-Hope stooge-and-smoothie travelogues, “The Road to Utopia” (Saturday).

All these films have been restored to top condition by preservation officer Robert Gitt and his staff. (As more and more movies are lost--including 50% of all films produced in the United States before 1950--it’s obvious that few activities in the film world right now are more essential than theirs.)

“The Moon’s Our Home” (Friday), for example, is a medium-level romantic comedy from 1936, with Henry Fonda as a globe-trotting novelist and Margaret Sullavan as a temperamental high-society movie star. It’s no more than a minor example of the genre that blossomed with “Bringing Up Baby” or “It Happened One Night.” The situations are silly, the lines are arch (even though Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell touched them up), director William Seiter stages too broadly, Sullavan is too frenetic and Fonda looks uncomfortable as an effete adventurer--though, five years later, he was sensational in a similar part: Charles (“Snakes Are My life”) Pike of Sturges’ “The Lady Eve.” But, in this sparklingly refurbished print, a 1936 also-ran looks more entertaining than 90% of the clubfooted, tongue-tied, concept-soggy tries at sophisticated romantic movie comedy today.

“Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (Sunday) followed Billy Wilder’s 1945 “The Lost Weekend” by two years, with another serious movie treatment of dipsomania. Wilder’s movie has more than a touch of black humor and paranoid comedy; “Smash-Up,” scripted by John Howard Lawson of the Hollywood Ten, is soberer, with a relentless class analysis.

The characters, pop musicians risen from hard times to Manhattan’s heights, are now surrounded by wealth, leisure, empty values and gleaming, omnipresent bars. There are no villains here--not even the secretary who is Susan Hayward’s rival for crooner-hubby Lee Bowman. It’s the system that imprisons them; Hayward’s illness, alcoholism, enslaves her. Director Stuart Heisler gets a smooth, sinuous feel into Lawson’s grim didactics. But what makes “Smash-Up” special are two performances: Eddie Albert, with another of his great, gum-chewing best buddies, and Susan Hayward, absolutely magnetic as an alcoholic. It’s a knockout job: Hayward moves with a real star’s vibrant beauty, fiery grace and spirit through the lacquered sets and shiny sermons.

The 1948 “Force of Evil” (Sunday)--adapted from Ira Wolfert’s “Tucker’s People” and starring John Garfield as a slick mob lawyer trying to save his idealistic brother (Thomas Gomez) from a numbers racket takeover--is one of the most remarkable directorial debut films of the ‘40s.

Like Lawson, writer-director Abraham Polonsky was a leftist, whose above-ground career vanished during the ‘50s blacklisting. But Polonsky’s writing is far superior. The dialogue here is an extraordinary example of common speech, or vernacular, stylized until it reaches the concentrated power and rhythm of poetry. Rapid-fire bursts of gutter eloquence and cynical aphorisms spill out from the sides of everyone’s mouths; above it, Garfield’s terse, angry narration provides the lacerating keynote.

“Force of Evil” also has a dry, hard visual lyricism: with its sinister, angular rooms swimming in shadows and spills of harsh light, and the terrible gray East River the hell into which Garfield finally descends. The film suggests two later classics, Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly” and Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” and one that preceded it, “Body and Soul”--which Polonsky wrote for Garfield and director Robert Rossen. But it’s unique, an unmitigated masterpiece.

Even though he wrote constantly through the ‘50s using “fronts,” Polonsky--who did not direct again until 1969 and the brilliant, partially miscast Western “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here”--proves here that he was a major casualty of the blacklist era.

Also at Melnitz Hall tonight are two premieres from a first-class Indian writer-director, a sensitive social realist who works in the vein of Vittorio De Sica and Satyajit Ray.

Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s 1986 “Phera” (The Return) is a moving study of the moral dilemma of an actor-playwright who, refusing to serve what he regards as the “smutty” tastes of the times, retreats to his decaying mansion where he is forced from his malaise by the intrusion of his sister-in-law and her young son, and, more tragically, by a servant’s liaison with a mute girl.

Dasgupta shows human insight, quiet compassion and a wonderful sense of atmosphere. Bird song and forest noises accentuate the mood of quiet desperation, erotic fear; the actors play with absolute integrity, deep feeling. Another Dasgupta film, the 1982 political melodrama “Grihajuddha”--about a murdered union leader--plays with “Phera.”

REVISITING NEWSREELS

Newsreels are still shown in a theater at the University of South Carolina. Page 6