Film festival is evidence of UCLA’s saving grace

Walt Whitman wasn’t referring to the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s biennial “Festival of Preservation” when he wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” but he might as well have been.

Beginning Thursday and lasting for a month, the festival is notable not only for its 24 separate programs but for the staggering diversity of its choices, films that run the widest possible emotional, aesthetic and temporal gamut.

The breadth of the films preserved and restored by UCLA is remarkable. This year it includes acknowledged classics such as Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” and Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” as well as lesser-known films ranging from silent shorts circa 1910 to “Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive!” (1977), considered to be the first Chicano-directed feature film.

In fact, it’s almost as if the UCLA group, led by preservation officer Robert Gitt, has taken a blood oath never to restore anything ordinary, uninteresting or insignificant. Which is why there is no film event in this city -- or likely anywhere in the world -- that shows as many hard-to-see but fascinating films spread over so wide a spectrum.

We are fortunate to have it in our town, fortunate indeed.

The festival begins this year with one of its most exciting restorations, Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 antiwar classic “Paths of Glory.”

The film stars Kirk Douglas in one of his strongest roles as a World War I French officer horrified at the hypocrisy of his superiors. Its message of official duplicity is presented so effectively that the film was banned in France for 18 years.

But don’t mistake “Paths of Glory” for a dry message picture. As restored by UCLA largely from cinematographer George Krause’s original camera negative, it is brilliant visually as well as thematically, filled with the darkest blacks and most dazzling whites.

At 6 feet wide, the trenches built for filming were 2 feet wider than the World War I originals, but they allowed for bravura tracking shots that Max Ophuls, one of Kubrick’s heroes, would have appreciated.

“Paths of Glory” will be screened at the Directors Guild on Thursday, one of only two films to be shown outside of UCLA’s Melnitz Hall. The other one couldn’t be more different in tone.

“Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” which will show at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on July 29, is a 1914 Mack Sennett slapstick comedy that gave Marie Dressler her film debut, made Charlie Chaplin a star and allowed the gifted and beautiful Mabel Normand a chance to shine. But that’s only part of what makes it significant.

With a length of six reels, “Tillie” was the first feature-length comedy. But it’s been so re-cut and shortened over the years that it’s been forever since anyone saw it in anything close to that original form.

Restorer Ross Lipman looked at prints from 30 sources, took footage from a dozen of them and came up with an 82-minute version that’s nine minutes longer than anyone had seen in decades. To mark the event, live musical accompaniment will be provided by Tillie’s Nightmare, a five-piece ensemble featuring Ken Winokur of the Alloy Orchestra.

The most breathtakingly satisfying silent film of the festival is 1926’s “The Scarlet Letter,” director Victor Seastrom’s version of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, adapted by Frances Marion and starring Lillian Gish in what contemporaries considered one of her greatest roles.

As shot by Hendrik Sartov, one of Gish’s favorite cameramen, and restored by UCLA, this “Letter” turns out to be a film of great delicacy and poise, filled with scenes of notable emotional intimacy between Gish and costar Lars Hanson. Its pictorial qualities, its use of light and shadow, are a knockout, and they look as good as they do because 60% to 70% of the film’s original camera negative, thought junked in 1975, was discovered in the vaults of the George Eastman House. On the same bill is an intriguing 1934 sound version of the novel, using some of the same costumes but starring Colleen Moore, who’d made her name a decade earlier playing a succession of flappers.

Another memorable double bill features Mary Pickford in two of the films that turned her into America’s sweetheart: 1917’s “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and 1927’s “My Best Girl,” starring future husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers. Both show the energy, the mischievousness, the ability to out and out have fun on camera that made her so beloved for so long.

Screen gems to discover

Of the preservation festival’s sound films, three are especially noteworthy for being unusual, of high quality and not nearly as widely seen as their virtues would have you believe.

William Wyler’s 1933 “Counsellor-at-Law” all but crackles with the trademark energy of 1930s Hollywood. Its combination of snappy patter, rat-a-tat pacing, continuous camera movement and skillful acting keeps us so absorbed that we barely notice the entire film takes place within the confines of a Manhattan law office.

Star John Barrymore, in one of his best screen roles, does so well we don’t question that he’s cast against type as an up-from-poverty Jewish lawyer (Paul Muni played the role on stage) who married a high-society wife and is so involved defending the wealthy and well-connected that he’s reached a crossroads in his life without even knowing it.

The cast features in supporting roles future directors Vincent Sherman (who is scheduled to attend the July 30 screening) and Richard Quine, as well as Humphrey Bogart’s first wife, Mayo Methot, and Thelma Todd, who died in one of Hollywood’s unsolved mysteries just two years later.

Also characterized by casting against type is George Stevens’ 1941 “Penny Serenade,” starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as a couple whose collapsing marriage is viewed through a series of flashbacks. Potentially overly sentimental but pulled back from the brink by Stevens’ even-handed direction, the film also features a charming performance by Edgar Buchanan, known to later generations as TV’s Judge Roy Bean.

But it is Grant’s acting that is most noteworthy. It’s a more serious role than was usual for him, and featured perhaps the most emotional speech of his career as his character pleads with a judge to approve an adoption.

Grant apparently considered it his best work, and it was one of only two Oscar-nominated performances of his long career.

Also a change of pace, but this time for director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was 1950’s socially conscious “No Way Out.” The debut feature for Sidney Poitier, who was selected from a group of finalists by the director, it costarred Richard Widmark as a virulent racist who causes all kinds of trouble when he and his brother are treated by the newly certified doctor Poitier plays.

Released in the same year as “All About Eve,” this still-relevant film gave voice to anti-black rhetoric that might not be allowed on the screen today and had scenes of race riots that caused queasiness in some parts of the country. As one contemporary wrote, “Vicious epithets that betray the ignorance of the abuser, but sting nevertheless, are spoken bluntly and with a pertinence that makes a shocking impression in ‘No Way Out.’ ”

Not everything in the preservation festival, thankfully, is of high seriousness. There is, for instance, 1940’s Rouben Mamoulian-directed “The Mark of Zorro,” in which Tyrone Power plays the masked hero of early Los Angeles with Basil Rathbone as his oily nemesis. The sizzling swordplay of the finale is great fun, and proves the truth of Rathbone’s comment that “Power was the most agile man with a sword I’ve ever faced before a camera. Tyrone could have fenced Errol Flynn into a cocked hat.”

Also on the bill is an amusing gag reel from Power’s personal collection. It has the actor in full costume slashing not his trademark “Z” on a cushion but the more pointed “D.Z.” which causes an aghast witness to cry out the name of the feared studio head, “Zanuck!”

A feature of every preservation festival is a program of wonderful Vitaphone shorts dating from the late 1920s that allows us to travel back and experience popular musical acts of the day. Among the most entertaining this time are “The Night Court,” in which a whole vaudeville show is put on in a courtroom, and a look at the redoubtable Sol Violinsky, who manages to play the piano and the violin at the same time.

Of special local interest is “Police Quartette,” a fine barbershop quartet of four genuine Los Angeles police officers in full uniform. Sample lyrics run from the benign to “If I ever get the guy who stole the chicken from my backyard, I’ll hit him pretty hard.” Words to the wise.

Splicing past to present

“Remains to Be Seen,” in some ways the most intriguing program of the festival, focuses not on preserved films but on the dazzling artistic uses to which unpreserved, unsalvageable footage in various stages of decay can be put.

Bill Morrison, whose “Decasia” was an art house hit a few years back, returns with two beautiful shorts, “Light Is Calling” and “The Mesmerist,” both employing footage from a 1926 silent called “The Bells.” Peggy Ahwesh’s “The Color of Love” makes similar use of a Super 8 porno short, and the feature-length “From the Pole to the Equator” works with the early 20th century ethnographic work of Luca Comerio.

As the disintegrating footage in all these films bubbles, cracks and writhes across the screen, it almost feels like the last silent scream of cinematic ghosts, begging to be brought back to life, or at least noticed and remembered. Which is what the entire preservation festival does so well.

Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic.

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UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ‘Festival of Preservation’

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA at 7:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted.

Contact: (310) 206-FILM or (310) 206-8013 or www.cinema.ucla.edu

Schedule

“Paths of Glory,” Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Thursday, 7 p.m.; “The Scarlet Letter,” 1926 and 1934, Friday; “Witness for the Prosecution,” “A Foreign Affair,” Saturday; “Penny Serenade,” Sunday, 7 p.m.; silent short film sampler, July 28; “Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., July 29, 8 p.m.; “Counsellor-at-Law,” “True Confession,” July 30; “In the Year of the Pig,” “The Connection,” July 31; silent animation, Aug. 1, 2 p.m.; “A

Night in Casablanca,” “Pursuit to Algiers,” Aug. 1, 7 p.m.; “Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive,” “La Onda Chicana,” Aug. 4; “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” “My Best Girl,” Aug. 5; “The Mark of Zorro,” “Sherlock Holmes in Washington,” Aug. 6; “No Way Out,” “The Dark Mirror,” Aug. 7; “Peggy Leads the Way,” “Up the Road With Sallie,” Aug. 8, 7 p.m.; “A Sailor-Made Man,” “The Roaring Road,” Aug. 11; “Classic Jazz on Television,” Aug. 12; Sid Laverents’ shorts, Vitaphone shorts, Aug. 13; “The Diary of a Chambermaid,” “Winterset,” Aug. 14; “The Second Floor Mystery,” “The Bat Whispers,” Aug. 15, 7 p.m.; “Welcome Danger,” “My Lady of Whims,” Aug. 18; “Remains to Be Seen,” Aug. 19; “A Face in the Crowd,” Aug. 20; “Love Me Tonight,” “A Farewell to Arms,” Aug. 21.