‘Seamen’s Wives’ finally gets a voice

In a remarkable feat of restoration and reconstruction, Henk Kleinman’s landmark 1930 film “Seamen’s Wives” will take on a new life when it screens tonight as the kickoff to the UCLA Film Archive’s series “Human Dutch: Films From the Netherlands.”

“Seamen’s Wives,” a poetic melodrama of the Amsterdam waterfront, was intended to be the first Dutch talkie but ultimately was released as a silent. Last year, Henny Vrienten not only restored the film from its last nitrate print but also reconstructed the dialogue with the aid of lip readers. So precise is the dubbed dialogue that it comes as a surprise that the voices are not the actors’ own. Vrienten also composed a new score, as evocative as the film is itself.

“Seamen’s Wives” is so visual that surely it must be as effective -- or nearly as effective -- as a silent. It opens with a montage of the city lights at night to set up a contrast with the hustle and bustle of Amsterdam coming to life the next morning. After a lyrical, documentary-like flow of images of the city’s busy open market near the waterfront Kleinman settles his camera on Leen (Josephine Schetser), a sturdy, plain young fishmonger. She supports her alcoholic father (Jos Pasch) and lives over a nearby saloon with her boyfriend, Lau (Rass Luijben), a beefy, hard-drinking lout. She is also loved by Willem (Harry Boda), a kindly seaman, and a deft interplay of fate, circumstance and character create a daunting series of obstacles to Leen and Willem finding happiness together. This painstakingly resurrected film can now takes its rightful place in the pantheon of world cinema.

The series continues Friday with Paul Verhoeven’s “The Fourth Man” (1983) and a discussion afterward with cinematographer Jan de Bont.

This sly, dark delight stars Jeroen Krabbe as a popular novelist, a gay, alcoholic, death-obsessed Catholic who travels to the inviting beach town of Flushing to speak before its literary society. He allows himself to be seduced by its beautiful treasurer (Renee Soutendijk), a young widow with a luxurious seaside villa and a thriving beauty salon. He accepts an invitation to stay on when he sees a snapshot of her hunky lover (Thom Hoffman) in skimpy bathing trunks. While intent on seducing the lover, a plumber, he becomes convinced that his hostess, who has buried three handsome young husbands, is a black widow and that the plumber’s life is in danger.

“The Fourth Man” is a hilarious comedy that has fun with the heavy religious symbolism that invades the writer’s boozy fantasizing and with his unapologetic sexual conniving. Krabbe’s writer is an outrageous, skilled charmer and manipulator, and Soutendijk’s hostess is lovely, sophisticated and intelligent. Verhoeven cleverly keeps his audience guessing as to whether Soutendijk really is a black widow or the novelist is just imagining things.

Heddy Honigmann’s warm and engaging 1993 documentary “Metal and Melancholy” takes its title from one of the 15 Lima taxi drivers interviewed in the course of the film. A strong-featured, silver-haired man with a poetic streak, he remarks that poverty makes his countrymen hard as metal yet they possess a melancholy that makes them also tender. The film portrays a nation whose middle class has been virtually destroyed by economic woes brought on by a corrupt government. Many of the taxi drivers Honigmann encounters were once well-paid professionals.

Honigmann’s drivers display amazingly resilience and resourcefulness, often in the face of myriad hardships. Most would likely agree with the observation of a driver whose infant daughter is stricken with lymphatic leukemia: “Life is hard, but beautiful.”

Intrigue

The premiere Wednesday of Masahiro Shinoda’s epic “Spy Sorge” is the centerpiece of Pomona College’s Pacific Basin Institute’s ongoing Asian Film Festival. It stars Iain Glen as legendary spy Richard Sorge, who was both confidante of the German ambassador in Tokyo and a dedicated Communist. In 1930 he met a soul mate in fellow newspaperman Hidemi Ozaki (Masahiro Motoki), a determined pacifist and eventual press secretary to Japan’s prime minister. The vast amount of intelligence they provided Stalin’s government boggles the mind.

Against a vividly evoked Tokyo of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Shinoda tells a complex and ironic story about two idealists overtaken by history. British actor Glen’s Sorge emerges as a dashing romantic, a lady-killer with a busy private life. Shinoda, who has said this film will be the valedictory to his extraordinary career, will introduce his film.

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Screenings

UCLA Film and Television Archive

“Human Dutch: Films From the Netherlands” series

* “Seamen’s Wives,” today, 8 p.m., Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

* “The Fourth Man,” Friday, 7:30 p.m., followed by “The Vanishing,” James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

* “Metal and Melancholy,” Saturday, 7:30 p.m., James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

Info: (310) 206-FILM or www.cinema.ucla.edu

Pomona College

Pacific Basin Institute

Asian Film Festival

* “Spy Sorge,” Wednesday, 7 p.m., Rose Hills Theater, 170 E. 6th St., Pomona

Info: (909) 607-8065