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In the wake of a series of unsuccessful movies like Quintet, A Perfect Couple, and Health, culminating with the tanking of Popeye in 1980, director Robert Altman sold his film company to Lions Gate, pulled up stakes in Los Angeles, and moved to New York with the idea of working in the theater and adapting plays for films. He vowed never to work with big film studios again.

The first project he took on was the direction of the Broadway production of Ed Graczyk’s play Come Back to the 5 and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. The play starred Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, Kathy Bates, Sudie Bond, Marta Heflin, and Mark Patton. It closed after 52 performances.

Undeterred, Altman decided to make a movie version with the same cast.

The film is set in 1975 in the fictional town of McCarthy, Texas, 62 miles from Marfa where Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean shot Giant. In the story, a reunion of the Disciples of James Dean, a fan club, marks the 20th anniversary of Dean’s death in a dime store that is set up as a shrine to the late actor. Juanita (Bond) runs the store; Cher plays the gregarious Sissy who works with her; Mona, played by Dennis is the fragile leader of the club; Bates is Stella Mae who married a rich man and moved away, and Edna Louise is played by Heflin, permanently bullied and pregnant with her seventh child. As the women catch up on their lives, the narrative changes when glamorous Joanne (Black) walks in, unrecognized by them until the dramatic denouement: she is their old friend Joe after a sex change operation.

Altman shot the film in 19 days. In a series of ingenious flashbacks interspersed with the present-day action, using two-way mirrors built especially for the purpose, he moved the action back and forth twenty years, relying on the actors to convince the audience of the time changes, eschewing all makeup and costume changes to do so (he used the same stage set from the movie adapted for filming.) And so through the flashbacks, the story becomes more about the lives of the women in the past twenty years, and the secrets and lies they have lived with, than a tribute to Dean. As Mona describes the facades of Giant on which she was an extra, it becomes clear that the theme of the movie is the facades that the women have built for themselves and the lengths they go to preserve them till they crumble.

Cher, in only her third movie role, is a standout and got a Golden Globe nomination as Best Supporting Actress for playing Sissy. Altman was planning to cast Shelley Duvall in the role, but auditioned Cher on her request and ended up casting her. The rest of the cast is wonderful as well, though Heflin’s and Bates’ characters are rather underwritten, despite the very talky script that was also written by Graczyk. The whole action is still confined to the dime store as in the stage play, and every so often a character will step outside of the store’s entrance to shout to unseen people, enhancing the staginess of the piece. Altman’s roving camera helps to mitigate that somewhat, as do the closeups, mostly on Dennis, who arguably has the most dramatic scenes. His direction and the ensemble acting rescues the film from the inherent soapiness of the storyline.

One has to make special note of the handling of a transsexual character at a time when not one was seen in mainstream cinema, let alone treated sympathetically. It is easy to forget the shock value of Joanne’s place in the story back in 1982 when seen through the prism of today’s times. While it received a ten-minute standing ovation at the Chicago Film Festival in 1982 and won the Gold Hugo Award for Best Feature, contemporary movie critics were not kind. Vincent Canby writing in the New York Times was savage: “Ed Graczyk's screenplay, based on his flop play as directed by Mr. Altman on Broadway this year, is small, but less likely to be salvaged in the near future than even the Titanic. It’s a sincerely preposterous, pathetic, redneck comedy-drama that sounds as if its author had learned all about life by watching ‘Studio One’ at his mother's knee.” With that kind of notices and a limited release in art-house theaters, the film grossed $840,958 domestically, then aired on Showtime the following year.

Critical perceptions have since changed as the experimental and even radical staging by Altman – as well as the performances – have come to be better appreciated. Come Back was restored in 2011 by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, with funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.

Working in collaboration with Paramount Pictures, Cineric Laboratories created a 35mm blow-up color internegative directly from the Super 16mm original camera negative, which was scanned and digitally cleaned up to remove the excess dirt which marred the original. Title sequences and additional pickups were scanned directly from the 35mm CRI (color rendering index) material. NT Picture & Sound output the restored picture and track negative to 35mm film.

The restoration premiered at the Billy Wilder Theater as part of the UCLA Festival of Preservation in March 2011 and was introduced by its director, Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak.

When Cecil B. deMille released his silent movie The Cheat in 1915, his villain was a Japanese ivory merchant called Hishuru Tori played by Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa. Japanese Americans rose up in arms protesting the casting. The director simply re-released the film three years later, changing the Tori character to a Burmese, renaming him Haka Arakau, and switching the title cards. In his book “Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood,” author Robert Birchard writes that the change was made because there were “not enough Burmese in the country to raise a credible protest.”

It’s worth noting that The Cheat made Hayakawa a star. There were almost no Asians in Hollywood at the time and a lot of White actors were given Asian roles, so it’s interesting that deMille cast a real Asian. Despite the stereotypical character he played, Hayakawa, with his fallen angel looks, became a sex symbol for the mostly White women who made up the audience.

In the story, a pampered socialite, Edith Hardy (played by Fanny Ward) embezzles $10,000 of a charity’s money to play the stock market, loses it, and in desperation borrows the sum to replace it from the aforementioned ivory merchant, Tori/Arakau. His price is sex for the loan. When her husband (Jack Dean, Ward’s real-life husband) comes into a windfall and Edith goes to return the money, Tori/Arakau refuses to take it, demanding she sticks to their agreement. He then brands her as his property after which he assaults her in a horrifying scene. High drama ensues, and in the courtroom denouement that follows, Tori/Arakau gets his comeuppance in another horrifying scene where a racist mob comprising of the spectators rise up to lynch him, and the husband and wife walk out arm in arm, hailed as heroes. 

According to Stephen Gong, the executive director of San Francisco's Center for Asian-American Media, “It [the film] caused a sensation. The idea of the rape fantasy, forbidden fruit, all those taboos of race and sex – it made him a movie star. And his most rabid fan base was White women.” Though Japan denounced Hayakawa as a ‘national traitor’ and never released the film there, Hayakawa, undeterred, set up his own production company and earned $7,500 a week on subsequent pictures. After a fall from grace a few years later at the time of the ‘yellow peril’ paranoia, he went on to get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1957s The Bridge on the River Kwai.

It is useful to know that 1915 was the year D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was released as well.

A couple of noteworthy things about the film. The poster has the following words in tiny type under the picture of Ward sitting on a bench, Hayakawa standing next to her – “The Jap’s after the bargain.”  deMille has the smallest credit of all at the bottom of the poster. And in the film, he doesn’t get directorial credit. It’s now in the public domain and can be seen on YouTube.

One of the things critics admire about the film is deMille’s pioneering use of ‘Rembrandt lighting’ in an enclosed space where the lights were arranged so the actor’s face would be partly lit, partly in shadow. In his autobiography, deMille talks of his partner Sam Goldfish’s (later Goldwyn) reaction to seeing the film where he used this technique the first time, The Warrens of Virginia.

“... a very disturbed Sam Goldfish wired me to ask what we were doing. Didn’t we know that if we showed only half an actor’s face, the exhibitors would want to only pay half the usual price for the picture? ... Jesse [Lasky, producer] and I wired back to Sam that if the exhibitors did not know Rembrandt lighting when they saw it, so much for the worse for them. Sam’s reply was jubilant with relief ... for Rembrandt lighting, the exhibitors would pay double!”

Hayakawa particularly benefits from this lighting, but there are other scenes with silhouettes and shadows that effectively forward the narrative as well. The camera doesn’t move much, and scenes are rapidly cut together to move the story along. There are very few intertitles. Coming in at under an hour, The Cheat cost about $17,000 to make and grossed over $140,000 worldwide, making it deMille’s most successful movie up to that time. Ward, already in her 40s (with paraffin injected into her wrinkles) provides the expressionistic acting that was prevalent in those days with much handwringing and languishing. But it is Hayakawa’s more restrained and naturalistic acting that stands out.

Despite its overt racism, when seen in the context of the times, The Cheat is an important film in deMille’s oeuvre and was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1993. It is now restored to the 1915 original version from the 1918 re-issue with funding provided by The National Endowment for the Arts, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and The Film Foundation. Several titles were created and others were changed based on the original continuity as part of the restoration. It was released in DVD form in 2002.

The film was remade with Pola Negri and Jack Holt in 1923, directed by George Fitzmaurice. It was again remade in 1931 with Tallulah Bankhead in the title role directed by George Abbott. In France it was remade as Forfaiture in 1937 with a few changes to the storyline, again starring Hayakawa as the Asian would-be rapist.

It’s impossible to overestimate the effect of Jean Renoir’s films, presence, and approach to cinema for generations of filmmakers, film critics and film lovers. Like Robert Bresson, Renoir was more than just a director. His films, his writings, his public statements amounted to an inspiring spiritual force, a bulwark against vulgarity, compulsive intellectualizing, pretentiousness and self-destruction. To a certain extent, Renoir anticipated Italian neorealism with his 1935 film Toni, and the French New Wave would have been unthinkable without his example and his encouragement. If his presence is not invoked as constantly as it once was, that’s simply because things change over time and new generations find new touchstones and new orientations. Renoir’s greatness now has a different hue, and his voice speaks to us in another register from a more distant past.

My ambition, he once wrote, is to float through life like a cork on a stream. There are many ways to interpret such a statement, some more flattering than others, but it does get right to the heart of the most extraordinary aspect of Renoir’s art. In The River, his 1950 adaptation of Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel about a girl named Harriet growing up with her family in India—and his first film in color (and what color!…every frame of it beautifully restored by Mike Pogorzelski and his team at the Academy Film Archive, with support from The Film Foundation and Janus Films)—there is a little passage comprised of nothing more (or less) than images of members of the Harriet’s household taking their afternoon naps. Renoir took a particularly long time with Jane and Jennifer Harris, the girls who played Harriet’s twin sisters, getting them into the right physical positions in the frame (the image has a direct link with the paintings of Renoir’s father Auguste) but also into the right state of being, so that they become more than just two little girls pretending to be asleep. In other words, he took the time he needed to create the conditions for the filmed moment to escape any frozen notions or preconceptions, his own above all. There’s another moment later in the film that never ceases to amaze me. Harriet’s fearless little brother Bogie has been bitten by a cobra and died. There is a shot of Harriet’s father and the family friend played by Arthur Shields carrying Bogie’s coffin out onto a dock to the river. As Shields turns, the coffin knocks against the bamboo post. Shields pivots in distress, composes himself and goes on. It’s a stunning moment, a stark and eloquent reminder that life never stops.

One more word about Renoir. He once wrote that he believed advertising to be the cancer of western civilization. At this very moment, when so many are so consumed with “branding” and “messaging” and “shaping” and “categorizing” every conceivable aspect of experience, his words resound more deeply with every passing second.

- Kent Jones

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THE RIVER (1951, d. Jean Renoir)
Restored by Academy Film Archive, in association with the BFI and Janus Films, with restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.

W. Somerset Maugham was, for the first half of the 20^th century, a central figure in our culture, a writer whose novels, stories, and travelogues were read by millions. Movie history would have been very different without Maugham, whose writing is extremely “filmable.” The short story and play The Letter, the short story “Rain” and the novel Of Human Bondage were all adapted multiple times. The author’s years as a British intelligence agent inspired his 1928 collection of short stories about a spy named Ashenden, which in turn inspired Ian Fleming when he conceived the character James Bond (the stories were adapted by Hitchcock for his 1936 film Secret Agent). Other works have been made into films as diverse as The Circle by Frank Borzage, Christmas Holiday by Robert Siodmak, and Istvan Szabo’s Being Julia with Annette Bening, not to mention the three lovely English omnibus films comprised of Maugham stories, introduced onscreen by the author himself. The Razor’s Edge, one of my favorite Maugham novels (I’m not alone), has been adapted twice. The Film Foundation worked with Fox to create a stunning restoration of the 1946 version, a Darryl Zanuck super production with Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb and, in the role of Maugham himself, Herbert Marshall (Marshall had also played the Maugham figure in Albert Lewin’s The Moon and Sixpence). The Razor’s Edge anticipated a powerful movement in the culture two decades later: the eastern-facing search for spiritual enlightenment undertaken by men and women whose faith in the western world had been shaken or shattered. Maugham based many of his characters on real individuals, and Tyrone Power’s Larry—a WWI vet who leaves his comfortable life in Chicago and embarks on a journey that leads him to the shelter of a holy man on a Himalayan mountaintop—appears to be a composite of different men whose paths Maugham crossed: an American engineer and WWII Navy vet named Guy Hague; Lewis Thompson, the English poet who left his homeland for India in the 30s; and Krishna Prem, born as Ronald Nixon, who had also been a pilot. In the context of 40s Hollywood, Larry is an anomaly, an uncompromising spiritual seeker, and Power (who had himself just come back from a stint in the Marines) is as affecting in the role as he would be a year later in Nightmare Alley, also directed by Edmund Goulding. Maugham worked on a draft of the script at the request of the original director, George Cukor, but none of it was used, and his experience in Hollywood was not a happy one. I don’t know what the author thought of the finished product, but the film is quite true to the spirit of Maugham’s novel and his writing in general.

- Kent Jones

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THE RAZOR'S EDGE (1946, d. Edmund Goulding)
Restored by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with The Film Foundation.