Preserve, Protect, No Need to Defend : UCLA’s fifth Festival of Preservation opens Friday with its biggest gun--’Navarone’--and closes with a Ronald Reagan curiosity

No, it’s not the most exciting title on the face of the Earth, and Robert Rosen knows it. “When I decided to call it the Festival of Preservation, everyone said I was out of my mind,” recalls the director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. “Call it classics, treasures, anything. Preservation smells like dust.”

But titles, as well as smells, can be deceptive, and while UCLA’s fifth annual Festival of Preservation (which opens a monthlong run Friday night with “The Guns of Navarone”) may not sound like the acme of excitement, it is just that, the most surprising, stimulating and invigorating celebration imaginable. If you like films, that is.

For if you are a movie fan, the idea of seeing a whole range of motion pictures in as close to pristine condition as modern technology can provide is the keenest of thrills. Viewing vintage films the way they were supposed to be seen, without scratches, fading or discoloration, is a revelation. To experience how crisp and bright a print can be, to understand how much subtlety of shading and tone can go into black and white, how much unimaginable richness color can provide, is to weep for the sad condition most of our movie heritage has fallen into.

The uncomfortable truth is that fully half of the 21,000 feature-length films produced in this country before 1951, including 90% of all silent films, have been either lost, destroyed or deteriorated beyond repair. And since UCLA, the largest film archive west of the Library of Congress, is one of the world leaders in restoration and preservation (an elaborate business that can involve delicate technical skills plus painstaking detective work), one of the purposes of this festival is to call attention both to how much needs to be done and how wonderful the results can be.

And given that film is the most populist of the arts, preservation is done not only to rarefied classics but also to rousing audience pleasers. “The Guns of Navarone,” 1961’s box-office champion and a sprawling action-adventure epic that is Friday night’s 7:30 opener at the Directors Guild Theater, is a case in point.

A kind of forebearer of “The Dirty Dozen,” “Navarone” (a joint restoration project of UCLA and Sony/Columbia) follows six surly and reluctant heroes as they attempt to silence a pair of the biggest pieces of artillery the dread Nazi war machine ever dreamed up.

Starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, David Niven and the best special effects money could then buy, “Navarone” manages to fit men who pull out hand-grenade pins with their teeth, women who kill without mercy, sadistic Nazis and an elaborate Greek wedding and village sing-along into its bombastic 2-hour, 37-minute length. Time magazine called it “the most enjoyable consignment of baloney in months,” and no one seeing it Friday with its soundtrack remastered, its colors restored and brought back into balance, and negative damage repaired, will have any less of a good time.

Equally enjoyable is “To Each His Own” (May 1), a quintessential weepie that won Olivia de Havilland a best actress Oscar in 1946 for a performance in which she ages 30 years, from a love-struck ingenue to a cranky middle-aged battle-ax, before our tear-filled eyes. An epic of self-sacrifice and unrequited mother love, “To Each His Own” combines the most improbable elements of “Stella Dallas” and “Random Harvest” and ends up as a monument to kitsch emotionalism. They certainly don’t make them like this anymore.

Among the other well-known films showcased in the festival (taking place at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, except for “Navarone” and a May 7 DGA screening of Jacques Tati’s 70-millimeter “Playtime”) are Howard Hawks’ “His Girl Friday” (April 15), the Ronald Colman-starring “A Double Life” (April 16) and Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Express” (May 6).

One of the festival’s sharpest prints belongs to 1941’s celebrated “That Hamilton Woman” (April 24). The story of Lord Nelson and his beloved Emma, this film, reportedly the favorite of the unlikely troika of Winston Churchill, critic Andrew Sarris and Joseph Stalin, features Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at the height of their physical attractiveness and taking an obvious delight in playing off each other.

With a series this broad, however, there is much more to do than merely revisit acknowledged classics. One can, for example, enter a cinematic time machine, reliving bygone and often forgotten periods of moviegoing just the way the original audiences experienced them.

Those who want to sample the good old days of Saturday matinees, for example, can spend the afternoon of April 24 watching not only a 1929 early talkie version of “The Virginian” but a totally winning 1936 Western mixture of comedy, action and romance called “The Last Outlaw.”

Starring Hoot Gibson and the legendary (and thoroughly charming) Harry Carey as an old-time outlaw released after 25 years behind bars into a West modern enough to make his head spin, “The Last Outlaw” was based on a story co-written by John Ford who, so the story goes, hankered to make a version of this himself one day.

To see the very different 1931 double bill of George Cukor’s “Girls About Town” and Mervyn LeRoy’s “Tonight or Never” (April 27) is to taste a totally separate reality, that of the pre-Production Code talkies of the early 1930s, racy films with risque dialogue and more lingerie shots than a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

Though “Tonight or Never” has a certain reputation as one of Gloria Swanson’s last films before the hiatus that led to “Sunset Boulevard,” “Girls About Town,” the story of party girls who attempt to go straight, has all the effervescent freshness and youthful high spirits that characterized Hollywood when the movies were discovering just how much fun it was to talk.

For those who want to know more about the fascinating history of sound, the extremely knowledgeable Robert Gitt, the archive’s preservation officer, will give a lecture titled “A Century of Sound” on April 17, a comprehensive presentation that includes clips from films ranging from “Citizen Kane” to obscurities like “The Terror” and “The Godless Girl.”

What the movies were like before they could talk is another area the festival explores, showing non-scratchy, musically accompanied 35mm silent films at the correct projection speed and revealing how much sensitive acting and beautiful photography took place before the coming of sound.

One of the best silents showing is “The Divine Lady,” (May 2 matinee), an earlier version of the Nelson-Lady Hamilton story starring Corinne Griffith. One of the three films that won Frank Lloyd the second-ever given best director Oscar for 1928-29, “Lady” was considered a lost film and was reconstructed with the help of a nitrate print with Czech intertitles found in an archive in Prague and the redoubtable UCLA restoration crew, who had to use their best penmanship to re-create the letters and documents that appear on the screen.

Available for viewing only at archive events like this are earlier versions of color technology, everything from the hand-applied stencil color of early Pathe silent shorts to the delicate, almost otherworldly palette of two-color Technicolor (on view April 18 in 1930’s film version of the hit Broadway musical “Follow Thru”) to the wonders of the never-duplicated three-strip Technicolor.

Those used to today’s razor-sharp but somehow bloodless color will be amazed at the rich, deep tones three-strip Technicolor provided. “Life With Father” (Saturday), the 1947 version of the long-running Broadway play, may be politically incorrect in its portrait of a domestic tyrant of a father (William Powell) and his timid, flighty wife (Irene Dunne), but its use of color obliterates all that. The three-strip process enables you to see the grain of the wood, to almost feel the texture of the broadcloth, not to mention experiencing a whole range of vivid colors that seem to have disappeared off the screen. This is one film where applauding the scenery is very much in order.

More than the cinematic past is represented in the Festival of Preservation; cultural history gets a shot as well. Fans of the behemoth Zeppelin dirigibles, for instance, those majestic lighter-than-air ancestors of today’s puny blimps, can ride along on the Graf Zeppelin’s historic 1929 around-the-world flight. The hourlong Hearst newsreel (April 13) shows passengers dining on squab and green turtle soup and then dancing to jazz records.

Speaking of jazz, one of the treats of this year’s fest is the collection of Vitaphone sound-on-disc shorts that plays on April 18 with “Follow Thru.” Employing an early method of marrying sound to film, these Vitaphone shorts were synchronized with simultaneously recorded discs, giving them an exciting sense of immediacy.

Though the visual part of the shorts have long been in the Library of Congress, it was not until 1987 that a cache of thousands of matching discs were found in a vault hidden behind a screen at Warner Bros.’ Burbank studio. To watch Red Nichols and His Five Pennies blast into some hot numbers or experience the Ingenues, a 20-piece all-female orchestra, roar through tunes like “Tiger Rag,” complete with tuba solo, is to have the jazz age come to life in front of you with a vividness F. Scott Fitzgerald would envy.

For the die-hard film buff, however, the ultimate lure of preservation festivals is the chance to sample true oddities.

This year’s prime curiosities include 1949’s Soviet-made “The Fall of Berlin” (April 21), a fairy-tale deification of Stalin filmed in Sovocolor with a Shostakovich score, and the 1935 silent “Legong, Dance of the Virgins” (April 25), one of the last films shot in two-strip Technicolor and perhaps the only picture ever to combine the sensibility of an ethnographic documentary about the culture of Bali with enough topless nudity to horrify the puritans of the time.

Also on tap is a tribute to Edgar G. Ulmer, a director who made a career out of being the odd man out. Showing on April 18 are his “Damaged Lives,” a 1933 cautionary tale about the dangers of venereal disease made with the cooperation of the American Social Hygiene Assn., and the 1945 “Strange Illusion,” a reworking of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” into a crime thriller set in a typical American suburb.

Ulmer’s presence notwithstanding, perhaps the oddest film of the entire series is the May 8 closing-night screening of 1943’s “This Is the Army.” One of the highest-grossing musicals of all time, earner of more money than director Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca,” this medley of Irving Berlin tunes was made with servicemen in front of the camera, including Joe Louis as himself and George Murphy as Ronald Reagan’s father.

A truly bizarre curiosity, featuring performers in drag and in black-face, “This Is the Army’s” melange of weepy patriotism, male chauvinism and closet racism even finds time to have Kate Smith sing “God Bless America.” Like the rest of the films in this vivid series, you have to see it to believe it, and if you do you’ll be more than grateful to the archive for making it all possible.

The Festival of Preservation runs from Friday to May 8. “The Guns of Navarone” (Friday) and “Playtime” (May 7) screen at the DGA Theater, 7920 Sunset Blvd. Tickets ($7, $5 for students and senior citizens) will be available in the lobby one hour before showtime. Free parking under the building.

All other programs are at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue in Westwood. Tickets ($5, $3 for students and senior citizens) are available at the box office one hour before showtime. Parking at the adjacent Lot 3 is $5.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.