Out of the Vault, Into the Theater

Despite all the sunshine, or maybe because of it, Los Angeles tends to be a hidden city, a place whose great treasures are not always the obvious ones. So it is that the city’s most surprising, most stimulating, most invigorating film event is not the Oscars, not even one of L.A.’s sprightly film festivals, but the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s splendid and irreplaceable Festival of Preservation.

This year’s festival, the 11th, kicks off tonight with a gala screening at the Directors Guild of a luscious three-strip Technicolor restoration of Joseph Mankiewicz’s “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), starring Humphrey Bogart and an intoxicatingly beautiful Ava Gardner.

It’s the first of more than 40 features, television and newsreel programs to be shown at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall in a monthlong festival that runs through Aug. 24 and showcases spectacular new prints of classic films like John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” (1959), Max Ophuls’ “Letter From an Unknown Woman” (1948), the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne “The Awful Truth” (1937) and Kirk Douglas’ unforgettable “Champion” (1949).

As impressive are the festival’s lesser-known lustrous gems, which involve stars ranging from Charles Laughton to Roy Rogers, featuring them as we’re not used to seeing them.

When the Festival of Preservation began life in 1988, it was not so grand an affair. In fact, then-archive director (now dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television) Robert Rosen remembers that “when I decided to call it the Festival of Preservation, everyone said I was out of my mind. Call it classics, treasures, anything. Preservation smells like dust.”

Dust, in fact, was more or less what a surprisingly large percentage of feature-length films (fully half of those produced before 1951, including 90% of silent films) were threatening to turn into. As the largest university archive in the country (second in size only to the Library of Congress) UCLA had taken the lead in restoration, in bringing films back to the way they were originally seen, without scratches, fading or discoloration. A festival seemed the ideal way to showcase what the archive--a 56-person organization that has preserved 346 features since 1977--had accomplished.

Key to making the UCLA fest as extraordinary as it’s become is the remarkably wide range of films it has put on display. No other event in the country has so consistently illuminated the irresistible hidden treasures of America’s movie history, putting a spotlight on drop-dead-fascinating items unseen in decades and difficult to see after the festival.

In years past, these have included:

An all-but-unknown alternate version of Howard Hawks’ “The Big Sleep” (1946), based on the Raymond Chandler novel and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Though few people were aware of it, much of the Bogart-Bacall byplay that is “Sleep’s” best-loved feature was added so late that 18 minutes of key exposition--recovered and preserved by UCLA--had to be cut, leading to the film’s famously confused plot, which even Chandler said he couldn’t follow.

A spectacular restoration of Budd Boetticher’s laconic western “Seven Men From Now” (1956), starring the granite-faced Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin as his outlaw nemesis and all-around leering miscreant. The film’s vivid color and lean story line made it the surprise success of the 2000 New York Film Festival, but the preservation fest had it months before.

A rare 1933 melodrama, “The Sin of Nora Moran,” that boasts one of the most unusual structures in American film, featuring an opium-induced dream state in which the past and the present are so intertwined that the heroine bargains with characters in her dream so certain real-life events won’t take place. To see “Nora Moran” on the big screen, where she belongs, you had to be at UCLA.

Some of the films UCLA has preserved have had as much of a story behind the screen as on it. That is especially true with one of the archive’s most significant restorations, a 1926 Vitaphone short--unseen in public for 70 years, and thought to be intentionally destroyed--in which a relaxed and confident Al Jolson says his trademark “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” a full year before he used it in “The Jazz Singer.”

Once “The Jazz Singer” became a sensation, the earlier, livelier short was withdrawn and made to disappear. Or so it was thought until the Library of Congress found a copy in a mislabeled can. Just as difficult to locate was the Vitaphone disc holding the soundtrack. Only one could be turned up, but it had been broken into four pieces and awkwardly glued back together. A record collector in the Pacific Northwest spent months dissolving the glue and refitting the pieces. Then UCLA preservation officer Robert Gitt transferred the contents to tape with the help of a tilted turntable and strategic blowing on the tone arm.

Given how many treasures the Festival of Preservation has unearthed in the past, the question with each new edition becomes, can they top themselves this time around? In 2002, at least, there’s no need to worry, with pride of place going to a once-in-a-lifetime Aug. 15 program called “Charles Laughton Directs ‘The Night of the Hunter’: A Presentation of Outtakes From the Film.”

Eager to save time and keep his cast in the mood, Laughton, contrary to typical Hollywood practice, kept the camera running as he instructed actors Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish between takes of his memorable 1955 film. Eight hours of these rushes, which also include different line readings and alternate camera angles, survive, and they are the basis for the program in which UCLA’s Gitt, who masterminded the restoration, walks us through two hours of the best of the trims.

To watch these outtakes is to feel almost present at the creation of a classic motion picture. We hear Laughton reading off-screen lines for his actors, calming them down when they flub things, being incredibly patient with child performers Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, and best of all, giving simple but incisive advice like “a little more lyrical, more personal” and “darling, it’s a little too firm” in his soothing voice. As an intimate portrait of a director fully on his game, these sequences are unmatched.

That these outtakes survived at all is something of a miracle. They sat untended for years, likely in a garage, until Laughton’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, decided she wanted the space. She donated the film to the American Film Institute’s Greystone campus in 1974, where students, not realizing what they were, began cutting them up for use as blank leader in their productions.

This was immediately stopped and the rushes eventually wound up at the UCLA archive, where Gitt and his team worked on and off for almost 20 years assembling, splicing and sound-syncing the footage, making it possible, as Gitt says, to view scenes “unseen since Laughton and editor Robert Golden left them on the cutting-room floor 47 years ago.”

For those who have never seen the finished film, called by the director “a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale,” or even for those who have, UCLA’s stunning new print (screening on Aug. 10) showcases cinematographer Stanley Cortez’s expressive visuals, including some of the most artistic black-and-white scenes ever recorded. As Francois Truffaut, writing in Cahiers du Cinema, accurately said, “it makes one fall in love with an experimental cinema that really experiments and a cinema of discovery that actually discovers.”

If “Night of the Hunter” whets your appetite for more Laughton, he can be seen in two other extremely different projects, “The Man on the Eiffel Tower” (1949), and “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd” (1952). The latter film has Laughton looking as if he’s having great fun coping with the lunatics of the title. “When the guys get through with him,” the trailer boasts, “he’s the only pirate ever to have a nervous breakdown.”

“Tower” is an early example of American independent filmmaking. Star Franchot Tone bought the rights to a Simenon novel and enlisted two friends to appear: Laughton, as phlegmatic Inspector Maigret; and Burgess Meredith (who also directed) as a prime suspect.

What “Tower” is most noted for today is its position as the first American color film shot entirely in Paris. Photographed by Cortez (who met his future “Hunter” director on this project), the city gets prominent fifth billing in the credits. It is charming to see how Paris looked just after the war, complete with ancient buses and massive Renault taxis, and the scenes of the actors clambering on the tower’s superstructure for the film’s climax are still remarkable.

Bogart also makes a second appearance in the festival, starring in “Knock on Any Door” (1949), only the third feature for director Nicholas Ray, already in possession of his gift for socially conscious melodramas that were character-driven as well as atmospheric. A passionate attack on the social causes of delinquency, “Knock” features Bogart as a top lawyer who fought his way out of the old neighborhood but ends up defending a young delinquent accused of murder.

Also in “Knock,” John Derek gets his first featured role as the delinquent, Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano, “the Skid Row Romeo” whose motto actually was “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.” Variety called Derek, later to be the husband of Bo, “a new bobby-soxer dream and a persona who will click with the femmes, motherly or otherwise.”

As always, some of the most offbeat viewing in the festival involves silent and early sound material. “Sideshow” (1928), for instance, stars real-life midget Little Billy Rhodes, as feisty as a miniature Edward G. Robinson, as the owner of a problem-plagued traveling circus. His co-star is Marie Prevost, who died a celebrated early death and was immortalized decades later in the Nick Lowe song that takes her name.

The festival is also featuring a series of Vitaphone shorts from the 1920s, early sound films that provide a faithful, window-on-the-past record of vaudeville acts of the period. Preserved this time are such performers as the all-girl band Harry Wayman and His Debutantes and Chaz Chase, billed as “The Unique Comedian” for his willingness to eat just about anything, from a ukulele to a lit cigar.

Very much in the low-budget department is “Vanity Fair” (1932), taken from the Thackery novel but shot in modern dress in 10 days, often until 3 or 4 in the morning, to save money for Allied Pictures, its Poverty Row studio. It stars a vivacious Myrna Loy, on loan from MGM, and quite a contrast to Miriam Hopkins, who played the same role in the gorgeous “Becky Sharp” (1935), a three-strip Technicolor feature showing on the same bill.

Equally highbrow is “The Private Affairs of Bel Ami” (1947), written and directed by Albert Lewin and based on a Guy de Maupassant story. It stars George Sanders in a prototypical role as a suave ultimate cad who is irresistible to the women of 1880s Paris, very much including Angela Lansbury. The film’s beautiful blacks and whites are matched on the same program by a fine new print of Ophuls’ romantic classic, “Letter From an Unknown Woman.”

Perhaps not quite as classy but irresistible is Roy Rogers, the ever-popular singing cowboy featured on a double bill that includes “Trigger, Jr.” (1950), a potboiler directed by William Witney, a prolific filmmaker lately championed by Quentin Tarantino and others.

Better still is the other Rogers picture, “Under Western Stars” (1938). Rogers only got the role after Gene Autry went on strike against Republic Pictures, and Rogers made the most of the opportunity. With the cleanest shirt west of the Pecos and a clear, lyrical tenor, the lithe and handsome Rogers got to ride hard and sing the mournful “Dust,” a song co-written by Autry that Peter Stanfield, author of “Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy,” calls “easily equal to any written by the great Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie.”

In fact, “Under Western Stars,” with its hostility to the privately owned Great Western Power and Water Co. and its insistence that government ownership of utilities was the answer to the West’s economic woes, is something unseen for decades, the kind of progressive, socially conscious western that Ralph Nader might have enjoyed as a boy. Chalk up getting it on the screen one more time as yet another victory for UCLA, the archive that always gets its man. Even the ones who sing.