Remembering Robeson

The UCLA Film Archives’ fascinating “Paul Robeson: Star of Stage and Screen” continues Saturday with a 1 p.m. symposium in Room 1422, Melnitz Hall, which will include a discussion of Robeson’s career as a performer in the context of his life and times. The retrospective of his films, which concludes this weekend, resumes Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “Jericho” (1937).

The second half of the series confirms what the first half suggested: that Robeson never really got projects worthy of him, but all of them reveal his status as a great African American artist of his generation. He himself is never less than impressive, ever prepared to transcend material and circumstance.

That is the case with the enjoyable if preposterous “Jericho,” released in the U.S. as “Dark Sands.” Robeson made most of his films in the ‘30s, in Britain, where he enjoyed immense popularity and was afforded the leading roles unavailable to him in Hollywood. Directed by Thornton Freeland, “Jericho” starts out starkly, with Robeson as a World War I U.S. Army corporal whose act of heroism aboard a torpedoed battleship gets him wrongly accused of murder. When an officer (Henry Wilcoxon, longtime DeMille leading man and production associate) not only leads a protest but also inadvertently provides the corporal with a chance to escape a Bordeaux jail cell, Robeson flees. He steals a boat--with a stowaway who’ll become a sidekick (Wallace Ford) and winds up a chief of a Bedouin tribe, revered because he also happens to be a skilled physician and surgeon.

By then the film has turned into a typical desert epic adventure, with Robeson good-naturedly managing drastic shifts in tone, abrupt plot developments--and numerous instances when he bursts into song.

It will be followed by “The Proud Valley” (1940), in which Robeson plays a wanderer who winds up a miner in Wales, where his fellow workers are eager to win a singing competition. You can take it from there. Robeson campaigned to better the Welsh miners’ working conditions, and is seen visiting the mines in a 1949 short that precedes “The Proud Valley.”

Sunday concludes the retrospective with the two very different films with which Robeson concluded his career. “Tales of Manhattan” (7 p.m.) is one of his best films along with “Show Boat,” yet you can understand Robeson’s disgust that caused him to give up on the movies permanently. In its first four star-laden episodes, it is the epitome of sleek Hollywood wit and sophistication in which Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Cesar Romero, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester and especially Edward G. Robinson glow under the elegant, knowing direction of Julien Duvivier, one of the most successful of the World War II emigre directors.

Then comes the final sequence in which a tail coat passed hand to hand, linking each vignette, drops from a plane over a transparently back-lot rural South, where farmer Robeson, his wife, Ethel Waters, and their entrepreneurial minister, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, debate over the proper distribution of the $43,000 found in the garment. The film’s simplistic view of blacks, who are poor but happy--that the community is populated almost entirely by members of the Hall Johnson Choir ensures that they sing a lot--is joltingly in contrast to the urbanity of the rest of the film.

Robeson narrated but did not appear in the most important film of his career, Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand’s “Native Land,” which begins like a series of Norman Rockwell illustrations in celebrating America as the land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness only to segue deftly into a series of stunning vignettes reenacting--in those same nostalgic settings--the terrible violence spawned by the enemies of the labor movement. “Native Land” is a major yet obscure American film. Not surprisingly, many of the people who participated in the making of this independent venture, including composer Marc Blitzstein, later faced the blacklisting of the McCarthy era. The timeless protest of “Native Land” was muffled when it had the misfortune of opening just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. (310) 206-FILM.

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The second annual Latino Film Festival closes Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at Paramount’s Studio Theater with David Riker’s sensitive, beautifully expressive “La Ciudad” (“The City”), composed of four vignettes mostly involving the bitter struggle for survival among the most vulnerable of New York City’s wave of Latin American immigrants. The first tells of a young laborer, scavenging for bricks with other workers, who is severely injured when an old factory wall collapses on him and speedy aid proves impossible; the second finds a young man (Piriano Garcia) newly arrived from Puebla, Mexico, who meets a young woman (Leticia Herrera), coincidentally from his neighborhood back home, only to lose track of her.

The third deals with a homeless puppeteer (Jose Rabelo), who has contracted tuberculosis from staying in a shelter; he tries to enroll his beloved little daughter (Stephanie Viruet) in school only to be refused because he cannot produce either a phone bill or a rent receipt. And the final, and strongest, sequence, chronicles a sweatshop seamstress who hasn’t been paid in weeks in her struggle to gather $400 to pay for her daughter’s hospitalization in her native country.

Shot in black and white, “La Ciudad” has a poetic, flowing quality combined with superbly composed images that attest to Riker’s training as a photographer. Inevitably, “La Ciudad” recalls the films of Italian Neo-Realism not only in style but also in Riker’s ability to elicit the most natural portrayals from nonprofessionals. The screening will be followed by a closing night gala. (323) 469-9066.

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Marc Smith, a construction worker who founded the National Poetry Slam 12 years ago, describes the annual Portland, Ore., competition as when “the art of performance and the art of poetry come together.” Judging from Paul Devlin’s dynamic documentary, “SlamNation,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex, the delivery counts more than the message, urgent and eloquent as it may be.

Even so, this intense competition certainly does show how alive and potent poetry can be. To be sure, certain personalities dominate, starting with Taylor Mali, a terrific actor who could easily pass as a Matt Damon-Ben Affleck buddy. Then there’s Saul Williams, a lean, intense African American, whose poetry really does sear; he’s so riveting it’s scarcely surprising that he’ll soon be seen as a rapper/poet in “Slam,” winner of the grand jury prize at Sundance. Wittiest is Beau Sia, a Chinese American film student who imagines a collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. It could happen. (213) 617-0268.

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In connection with its “Confrontations, Crossings and Convergence: Photographs of the Philippines, 1898-1998” exhibition, the UCLA Fowler Museum of Culture will screen today at 4 p.m. Marlon Fuentes’ strikingly original, deeply provocative 1995 “Bontoc Eulogy.” The film draws on archival materials to explore the question of Filipino American identity in the light of the historic U.S. colonial exploitation of Filipinos during the Spanish American War.

An experimentalist blurring the line between the documentary and fiction forms and skilled at playing with myth and irony, Fuentes places events in a context that makes the racial, cultural condescension of whites toward such “little brown people” truly horrifying. Fuentes will be present. Screening at the same hour Oct. 22 will be Doroteo Ines’ “A Filipino in America” (1938) and on Dec. 3, Lino Brocka’s “Orapronobis.” (310) 825-2974 or (310) 443-7000.

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No wonder Quentin Tarantino, through his Rolling Thunder company, is re-releasing Friday at the Magic Johnson Theaters “Detroit 9000,” which could well be the best of the ‘70s blaxploitation pictures. Written with a complexity and scope unusual for the cycle by the late Orville Hampton and directed with efficiency and energy by Arthur Marks, who collaborated with Hampton on the film’s original story, this taut 1973 low-budget production effectively captures the growing racial tensions that had begun to grip the fading Motor City as its population became increasingly black.

Nonetheless, when a bold hold-up of a gala event occurs, seasoned white cop Alex Rocco and glamorous African American athlete-turned-policeman Hari Rhodes join forces to investigate the robbery, which plunges them into an intricately interwoven series of connections between black and white Detroit through all levels of society.

The cast is uneven, but Rocco and the late Rhodes are stalwart, and Vonetta McGee shines in the pivotal role as a tragic black prostitute. Marks and his first-rate cinematographer Harry May make superb use of Detroit locales, and “Detroit 9000” concludes on a strong note of ambiguity and irony. (213) 290-5900.