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A few days ago, as the election results were becoming clearer, movie lovers started to circulate relevant scenes and images—for instance, the dueling Inquirer headlines in Citizen Kane, “KANE ELECTED” and “FRAUD AT POLLS!” A few days earlier, when we saw the footage of the Biden campaign bus almost run off the road in Texas, some of us were reminded of another film reference: the carload of young Jeff Smith supporters sideswiped by the Taylor machine truck that brings the furious “David and Goliath” montage in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to a stirring close.

Today, I’m thinking of a different moment from another Frank Capra movie. It Happened One Night, which The Film Foundation helped MoMA to restore, is one of Capra’s most popular and successful films and also one of his greatest. It’s a poem of the open road. It’s a romantic comedy of enlightenment in which the man and the woman learn from each other and come together on a level playing field. And it’s a film of unparalleled warmth. The interlude on the night bus, from the singing of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” through the moment when Colbert and Gable give all their money to the starving boy and his mother, is one of the most moving passages in American cinema.

“Something that kind of disappoints me is that most of the new technology from the ’80s onwards has been about the atomization of society,” said Brian Eno in a recent Times interview. “It’s been about you being able to be more and more separate from everybody else…To be alive now is to see the possibilities of ever-increasing separateness.” The last four years have embodied some kind of culminating point in this commerce-fueled and social media-facilitated drift away from the frequently maddening but potentially creative messiness and intimacy of common life. Right now, it feels like the helium is leaking from the balloon—after all, there’s a limit to the number of ways and times you can declare your own difference. This sequence from It Happened One Night embodies a spirit directly opposed to ever-increasing separateness: human solidarity.

- Kent Jones

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IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934, d. Frank Capra)
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with funding provided by The Film Foundation. 

In her autobiography “On the Other Hand,” Fay Wray says when director Merian C. Cooper offered her the role of Ann Darrow in King Kong opposite “the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,” she thought her co-star would be Gary Cooper. Of course, he turned out to be the best-known monster in cinema history, star of the 43rd film on the AFI’s list of the 100 greatest American films ever made and listed with the National Film Registry in 1991.

The film was sold to the public with this tagline: “They said it couldn't be filmed – but it was! See it and ask – what if such a thing could happen?” Most of the posters have a giant Kong clutching a tiny Wray, sometimes with a plane in the other hand. British mystery writer Edgar Wallace’s name is also featured prominently on them – he is billed this way: “from an idea conceived by Edgar Wallace [and, in tiny type,] Merian C. Cooper.”After a four-minute overture by composer Max Steiner, the movie opens with unusual credits. On the title card, only Executive Producer David O. Selznick is named, followed by the co-directors Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Technical credits follow, given pride of place, followed by every other above-the-line talent except the cast. The cast, listed as “The Players” is next, headed by Wray, all on the same card. King Kong is listed last on his own card as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”, leaving no doubt he is the star of the film. Indeed, “The Eighth Wonder” was one of the working titles of the screenplay.

Jungle films were popular at the time, Tarzan films were the rage, and Cooper and Schoedsack had made a previous animal film in 1927 called Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness about monkeys. At Selznick’s RKO, Cooper made The Most Dangerous Game, another animal picture starring Wray, directed by Schoedsack, and then used those sets to shoot King Kong. Edgar Wallace was hired to write the script with a view to capitalizing on his name. He passed away after turning in a first draft, and a number of other writers, including Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose, finished the shooting script. The budget was allocated as $500,000.

In the film, producer Carl Denham (played by Robert Armstrong) having heard of a monster that lives on an unmarked island, decides to charter a ship to go film it. Being very closemouthed about his plans, he manages to find an impoverished actress, Ann Darrow (Wray), willing to go along with his secret plans on faith. Once the ship arrives on the island, the natives capture Ann to sacrifice her to the giant ape Kong. Kong seizes her and takes her back to his lair. The crew, led by love interest Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) goes to rescue her, losing many in the fight, but Kong is eventually captured and brought back to New York where he escapes and ends up on the Empire State Building with Ann, in one of the most famous scenes in cinema history.

Borrowing the stop-motion animation technology from a scrapped movie called Creation, Cooper hired that picture’s chief technician Willis O’Brien (who gets third billing in the opening credits) to create Kong. Three months of research were devoted to creating the location, fauna and indigenous people of the mythical Skull Island, and models, drawings and illustrations were made studying photos and films of gorillas. Using techniques such as rear projection and the Dunning and Williams Travelling Matte Processes allowed the directors to shoot the foreground and background separately. Previously shot footage was projected onto a cellulose acetate screen and the live-action in front of it was filmed. Wray spent many, many hours sitting in a tree and screaming at the screen. Miniature projection was another technique used in the scenes in which Wray sits in Kong’s hand. The Kong model had rubber skin and muscles built onto a steel frame, which was then covered with latex and fur. An 18-inch model was used for most of the scenes on the island.

A 20-foot head was also created, in which three technicians could sit and manipulate Kong’s ‘expressions’ with levers. A giant foot to crush his victims and a giant hand were also built separately. Wray also spent a whole day of recording screams in a sound studio which she dubbed “the aria of the agonies.”

For her scenes with Kong, Wray was put in the mechanical hand which was raised by a crane ten feet. She explained in her autobiography how those scenes were shot. “The big arm, about six feet long, was attached to a lever so it could be raised or lowered. I would stand on the floor while a grip ... would place the flexible fingers around my waist in a grip secure enough to allow me to be raised to a level in line with an elevated camera. There was a wind machine to give motion to my clothes, and I struggled to give the illusion that Kong was a fearsome forty feet tall.”

Even though the production took eight months with long stretches off for the cast as the producers worked on the special effects, Cooper and Merian shot fast, often with 20-hour filming days. The scene of the islanders’ sacrifice to Kong involving hundreds of extras, flaming torches and tens of crew, shot on a Culver City backlot, was done in one night. The wall on the island separating the village from the jungle set was repurposed from Cecil B. deMille’s 1927 King of Kings. The gate was reused from D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance.

The theater scene where Kong is displayed to the New York audience was shot at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, and the Empire State Building’s spire was replicated at the RKO lot for the final scene, using plane models that “shot” at Kong, and then cutting in footage of actual planes. Kong’s roars were lion and tiger roars recorded at a zoo and then played backward in slow motion. The film went $270,000 over budget. Wray made $10,000 for ten weeks’ work.

Cooper paid Max Steiner $50,000 out of his own pocket to compose an original score for the film with a 46-piece orchestra, one of the first films to do so. Till then, movies used background music for scores. The score was recorded on three tracks for sound effects, music and dialogue. Steiner would go on to a successful career writing scores for movies such as Casablanca (1942) and Now, Voyager (1942). His use in the score of themes for characters in the films was also innovative.

The picture opened at Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy Theater in New York City simultaneously, and 50,000 people saw it on the first day. There were ten shows daily. In Los Angeles, it premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater with the Kong head displayed in the lobby. King Kong saved RKO which had gone into receivership on the day of its New York premiere. That weekend’s grosses alone, just in NYC, were $90,000, and RKO earned $1,761,000 in its initial year of release. A sequel, The Son of Kong, was released that same year.

King Kong is a pre-Code movie, released in 1933 one year before the restrictions of the Hays Code went into effect. For subsequent releases of the film, starting with the one in 1938, several scenes were censored. One was when Kong peels off Ann’s clothes, another was when he bites off a woman’s head and stomps a villager into the ground, and yet another was grabbing a woman from a hotel room and throwing her when he realizes she’s not Ann. Another was a scene where men thrown down a ravine by Kong were eaten by giant spiders. (Most of these edits were eventually restored in 1971 except for the last one. We know that one existed from photographs.) The film was even colorized in 1988.

The film was restored in collaboration with Warner Bros. with additional funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation. WB had the surviving elements on hand – a dupe negative from an RKO studio print. The print was scanned at 4K resolution on a Northlight scanner at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. Restoration and color correction was completed at 2K resolution.

In 1983, on the 50^th anniversary of the film, a New York theater held a Fay Wray scream-a-thon contest in its lobby. And in 2004, the lights of the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in honor of Wray’s passing. 

The first title that was restored under the banner of The World Cinema Project in 2007 was Ahmed El-Maânouni’s Trances, or El Hal, from Morocco. The film had a very particular meaning for Martin Scorsese, who caught it for the first time in 1981 on the USA Network. It was part of a then brand new show called “Night Flight,” which ran through the late night hours and mixed music documentaries, regular segments like “New Wave Theater,” early rock videos and episodes of old Monogram movies with Bela Lugosi and cartoons from Fleischer Studios and Ub Iwerks—in the old rock clubs, the DJs used to put segments together between bands that were often comprised of films of that vintage together with music by, say, The Residents or Pere Ubu. Marty was cutting The King of Comedy by night with Thelma Schoonmaker when he saw Trances that first time, and it really obsessed him—the sound and the image.

The classification of Trances as a documentary doesn’t quite do it justice. Because the film doesn’t just document the music of the legendary band Nass El-Ghiwane, but actually responds to it: one artistic form generates another. This is broadly true of any good music documentary, but the hallucinatory flow of El-Maânouni’s images is an intimate response to the flow of the music, itself a response to the collective spirit of the nation during the first years of independence. The band, which became known as “The Rolling Stones of Morocco,” began in theatre: the band members were part of the Municipal Theatre of Casablanca in the early 70s, and their first songs were created for the company’s stage productions. Laarbi Batma, Boujemaa Hagour, Omar Essayed and Allal Yaala (Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri joined later and Maalem Abderrahmane Baca joined in 1974 following Boujemaa’s death from lung cancer) came from all over Morocco, and they sang of everyday life, the hardships of men and woman trying to make a living—no small thing in a de-colonized monarchy. The name they gave themselves roughly translates as “disciples of the Ghiwanes,” a brotherhood of Sufi storytellers, and they drew from Berber rhythms, Melhoun sung poetry and Gnawa dances. They played only traditional acoustic instruments: bendir, sentir, frame drums, ghimbri, tambourines, derbouka, and, from the west, a fretless banjo. But as Scorsese says, the sound of their trance music is so big and powerful that you’d swear you’re hearing electric guitars. As you can see in the film, the connection between Nass El-Ghiwane and their audience ran so deep that the authorities stepped in to contain and often shut down the concerts—they’d never seen anything remotely comparable.

If you don’t know this film and the music that inspired it into being, you should sit down and watch and listen: it sings the spirit of common life at an exalted level.

- Kent Jones

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TRANCES (1981, d. Ahmed El-Maanouni)
Restored in 2007 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Ahmed El-Maanouni, and Izza Genini. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority. 

When Eddie Muller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, introduced a screening of The Breaking Point on TCM, he told the story of Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks on a fishing trip in 1939 when Hawks told Hemingway he could make a decent movie from his worst book. When Hemingway asked him which book that would be, Hawks answered, “That piece of junk, To Have and Have Not.”  Hawks did make the movie in 1944 with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in her debut performance, but Hemingway would be forgiven if he didn’t recognize his story onscreen – aside from the title and the protagonist’s name, the film had nothing to do with the book.

1950’s The Breaking Point, however, is faithful to Hemingway’s book, using a different title as Hawks had already used To Have and Have Not. This version was directed by Michael Curtiz, specifically requested by star John Garfield who got the lead role of Harry Morgan, a WWII veteran scratching out a living in Balboa Island (the location was moved from Key West) as the owner of a boat he charters out to fishermen and tourists. Curtiz had been responsible for Garfield’s debut in Four Daughters in 1938 and had gone on to great success with Casablanca in 1942 and White Christmas in 1954, among many others. Garfield, who had left Warner Bros. to form an independent production company, had found his career on the downswing. This was his return to WB and an attempt to regain his former popularity.

In the story, Harry needs money desperately to support his wife (played by Phyllis Thaxter) and two little girls. He agrees to take a client and his mistress Leona (Patricia Neal) to Mexico where the man skips out on him without paying, leaving Harry to fend off Leona’s advances and figure out how to get home. An encounter with a shady lawyer called F.R. Duncan (Wallace Ford) who offers him a deal to smuggle some Chinese immigrants into the US ends badly. Then the Coast Guard impounds his boat. Increasingly frantic because of the huge debt he still carries on the boat, Harry takes up Duncan’s offer of another dubious deal when Duncan gets him his boat back. This time he is the getaway driver for a gang of thieves. Once again, things go sideways ending in a spectacular gunfight on the boat.

The Breaking Point is film noir at its best, with outstanding performances by the cast, especially Thaxter’s in the less glamorous role as Harry’s wife. Despite having to keep the family together on a shoestring and the stubbornness of her husband who refuses to find other work, their domestic scenes together show a chemistry and even a sensuality that is unusual for the era. “I can think about you any time and get excited,” she tells him. There is one heartrending scene in which she dyes her hair blond just like Leona’s to appeal to Harry. He is stunned and stammering; her humiliation is complete.

Garfield always maintained that this was his favorite performance, and indeed he makes the most of the charismatic but broken captain who makes terrible choices for the right reasons, struggling to adjust to a post-war world. Neal is the quintessential femme fatale, probably the most beautiful one in all of film noir, a character not in the novel. But the heart of the film is Juano Fernandez’s character Wesley Park, a Black man, and Harry’s first mate and friend. A composite character from Hemingway’s novel, the film eschews the novel’s casual racism and turns Wesley into a dignified and faithful friend at a time when the South was still segregated. The Breaking Point has one of the best last shots of any film – a visual of one person whose life has shattered through no fault of his own alone and bewildered – it lacerates your heart and makes you forget to breathe. There is no question the movie is better than the book. Hemingway himself said it was the best adaptation of any of his books. The film’s poster is headlined by “Screaming off the pages of the Hemingway story!!”

The Breaking Point never got the credit it deserved when it was released. Garfield’s name had appeared on a list of communist sympathizers because his wife Roberta Seidman had been a member of the Communist party. Garfield was summoned to testify before the U.S. Congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and refused to name names. His career effectively ended. Jack L. Warner would not publicize the movie and there would be no more movie offers for Garfield. Despite excellent reviews, The Breaking Point faded. Garfield would make one more movie after this which he produced himself; he died of a heart attack in 1952 at age 39.

Warner Bros. worked with YCM Laboratories to restore The Breaking Point, and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation provided an additional set of preservation elements for deposit at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The new elements consist of a duplicate picture negative made from Warner’s fine-grain master positive, a duplicate track negative made from Warner’s track positive, a composite print made from the new duplicate picture and track negatives, and an answer print from the original nitrate picture and track negatives. 

Preservation funding was provided by Warner Bros., the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and The Film Foundation.