‘River’ to the Future

The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ninth annual “Festival of Preservation,” chock-full of fascinating rarities, continues tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “Weary River” (1929), a part-talkie in which you can actually witness one art form replacing another. It’s a sentimental gangster story (with some great Art Deco sets) in which slick bad guy Richard Barthelmess is framed by an underworld rival and sent up the river, where he becomes a radio singing star with the prison orchestra.

Once out of stir, however, he’s perceived as an ex-con first and an entertainer second, undermining his self-confidence and threatening to send him back to a life of crime. As directed by Frank Lloyd, the silent portions have plenty of pizazz whereas the talkie scenes lumber along, typical of most early sound sequences. Artistically, “Weary River” is a mess, yet its awkwardness underlines an almost painful sincerity Barthelmess brings to his role, as does Betty Compson as the fluffy blond good-time girl who loves him.

“Weary River” will be followed by some shorts and by Josef von Sternberg’s “Thunderbolt” (1929). Sternberg’s first talkie, which makes imaginative use of sound, is fascinating for what it portends rather than what it achieves. It has a trite, maudlin plot, an obstacle that Sternberg was to overcome many times. This time it’s Fay Wray who’s in thrall to George Bancroft’s gangster, but she’s fallen for handsome bank teller Richard Arlen. “Thunderbolt,” with dialogue by Herman Mankiewicz, no less, often seems silly and absurd, its pacing frequently as static as that of other early talkies. Yet Sternberg’s individuality and talent shine through, obsessed as he already is with the notion of the femme fatale and the importance of atmosphere.

Ida Lupino’s “The Bigamist” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) packed a jolt when it was released in 1953 that hasn’t diminished over the years. Lupino dared to tackle themes that were taboo at the time and she did it with admirable finesse on modest budgets. In essence, “The Bigamist” is a woman’s picture, but with a difference: It determinedly transcends the moralizing of its Eisenhower era. It extends compassion to all of its people but especially to a man whose innate decency inadvertently leads him to commit bigamy.

In the title role, Edmond O’Brien is married to Joan Fontaine, whose inability to have children has caused her to pour all her energies into their wholesale deep-freezerbusiness to the extent that O’Brien, a lonely traveling salesman, becomes involved with equally lonely L.A. waitress Lupino. “The Bigamist,” which was adapted from a Larry Marcus-Lou Schor story, was adapted to the screen by Collier Young, once married to both Lupino and Fontaine. It will be followed by Samuel Fuller’s often-revived “Shock Corridor” (1963). Four more rarities screen Saturday. (310) 206-FILM.

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Screening Friday at 9:30 p.m. at Raleigh Studios, 5300 Melrose Ave., as part of the American Cinematheque’s “Greatest Hits” summer series of repeats, is a dynamite double feature, Robert Wise’s “The Set-Up” (1949) and Vincent Sherman’s “The Hard Way” (1942), two of the veteran directors’ best pictures. (Wise and Sherman will appear after “The Set-Up.”)

Adapted by Art Cohn from a poem by Joseph Moncure March, “The Set-Up” is both a film noir classic and one of the best fight films ever made. Rangy Robert Ryan, in one of his most sympathetic portrayals, stars as a 35-year-old boxer who after 20 years in the ring keeps telling himself he’s “just one punch away from the top” while his devoted wife (Audrey Totter) has become convinced that if he takes one more hard blow he’ll be punch-drunk. For the first time, she refuses to watch him fight. His cynical manager (George Tobias) is so convinced that he’ll not break a seemingly endless string of losses that he doesn’t bother to tell him he’s supposed to throw his upcoming match--that way he can keep Ryan’s share of the payoff, amounting to something like 30 bucks, for himself.

The entire film is a miracle of economy, precision and emotional complexity, generating tension and suspense from the first moment and never letting up until it comes full circle amid busy yet shadowy urban settings--some of the picture seems to have been shot (brilliantly, by Milton Krasner) on sets, but key settings in downtown L.A. are deftly intercut.

Sherman considers “The Hard Way” his most personal film. It’s a cautionary tale, adapted by Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel from an Irwin Shaw story, about the perils of ruthless ambition--and inspired in part by Ginger Rogers, her ambitious mother Lela and Rogers’ first husband, fading vaudevillian Jack Pepper. (Rogers turned the role down, admitting, “That could be my life.”) Lupino stars as a young woman who, having failed in her own attempt to escape a dreary Pennsylvania mining town, uses her pretty younger sister (Joan Leslie), who has minor singing and dancing ability, to get them both out. Lupino encourages the 18-year-old Leslie to marry a sweet-natured, naive song-and-dance man (Jack Carson) whose shrewd, handsome partner (Dennis Morgan) has Lupino’s number from the start.

“The Hard Way” is in the best Warners tradition: brisk, punchy and tough-minded. And Sherman brought to Shaw’s story an extra dimension of humanity while eliciting four really remarkable portrayals.

Dan Zukovic’s “The Last Big Thing,” which the Cinematheque screens Saturday at 7:15 p.m., is a distinctly original and brilliant work, a corrosive skewering of the mediocrity swamping American life. Zukovic himself stars as Simon Geist, a wildly eccentric gadfly who lives with his devoted, frazzled girlfriend (Susan Heimbinder, very funny). He lives, by way of a comment on uniformity, in a house in one of those immense tracts 30 miles out of L.A. where all the structures, in the pink neo-Spanish style, are virtually identical.

It is Simon’s mission to interview people for his new magazine, the Next Big Thing, zeroing in on up-and-coming people in the arts and popular culture. Never mind that the magazine doesn’t exist; it’s but an excuse for him to tell the interviewees off in breathtakingly withering fashion. He figures that in this manner he will gain a reputation that will turn him into the “last big thing” of the 20th century, but will this Geist really have his Zeit after all?

It takes a while for Zukovic, who has been an actor, playwright and a maker of several short films, to develop a sense of pace, but “The Last Big Thing” hits its stride and heads in an unfalteringly imaginative and unexpected direction. (L.A. composer-musician Cole Coonce’s score contributes strongly to the film’s vitality.) Zukovic is not only a visionary but also a terrific director of actors, including himself. Mark Ruffalo, as a hunky struggling actor, and Pamela Dickerson, as a beautiful model, prove to be not nearly as stupid or as defenseless as Simon assumes them to be. For full schedule: (213) 466-FILM.

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Surely a dubious camp value can be the only reason why the Nuart is presenting “The Elegant Erotica of Radley Metzger,” a weeklong offering of films from a naughty ‘60s sexploitation filmmaker who was arty and boring more often than not and who invariably promised more than he delivered. A sampling includes “Therese and Isabelle” (Friday and Wednesday), “Carmen, Baby” (Sunday) and “Little Mother” (Wednesday).

“Therese and Isabelle” reminds us that there’s nothing quite so puritanical as a dirty picture. Be prepared to endure the ritual-like punishment of reels and reels of interminable dullness for an erotic thrill of split-second duration. When this moment finally arrives in “Therese and Isabelle,” it’s a cheat--not surprisingly. No sooner do the girls (Essy Persson and Anna Gael) embrace than does the camera discreetly look away, leaving the subtitles to provide the details.

“Carmen, Baby” (1966) is more bizarre than Bizet. With its stilted dubbed English and bed to worse plot, it veers between the hilarious and the prurient. The way Metzger tells it, Carmen is a tart in a Yugoslavian seaport town who ruins a young cop, progresses to a rock ‘n’ roll star and finally gets her comeuppance from her spurned lover. The plot is no more than a pretext to string together a series of provocative sex scenes in which a wide variety of pleasures are implied rather than actually shown. (Shooting through a deep purple brandy snifter will blur the most explicit love-making.)

“Little Mother” proves to be a thinly disguised, slightly altered account of the life of Eva Peron. This Yugoslav-German co-production, shot in Zagreb, and also in stilted English, opens with the idolized wife (Christine Kruger) of the dictator of a fictional Latin American country being told she is fatally ill. This news triggers a series of flashbacks outlining her rise to power from poverty and illegitimacy, which allows Metzger to work in some rather tepid sex and a smattering of sadism (Kruger sometimes resorts to the torture chamber to get her way). Ultimately, all that “Little Mother” has going for it are its well-photographed splendiferous Zagreb settings. (310) 478-6379.

Note: “The Scottish Tale,” which recently screened in “Dances With Films, Festival of the Unknowns,” and which is a relentlessly talky romantic comedy, resurfaces at the Sunset 5 Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. and Aug. 29 and 30 at the Monica 4-Plex. Sunset 5: (213) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.