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So Ends Our Night, directed by John Cromwell, is based on the 1939 novel Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque. It was shot in 1940 and released by United Artists in early 1941. Like Christian Petzold’s recent Transit, it is about the particular plight of the refugee. What is it like to be stateless, wrenched away from everything familiar, permanently unsettled, and under the constant threat of absolute crushing force? Those are the questions that shadow every moment, every second, every frame. The characters played by Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan, a very young Glenn Ford, Leonid Kinskey (the bartender in a more famous refugee film, Casablanca) and Alexander Granach who meet up along the European trail of displaced persons, the trail taken by Arthur Koestler and Walter Benjamin, warm themselves with the elemental gifts of life: a roast chicken, a bottle of wine, laughter, and each other’s company. And every moment of camaraderie and good cheer is haunted by the memory of home and loved ones lost or scattered. The film builds to an extraordinary passage in which you can really feel the presence of production designer William Cameron Menzies. March’s character returns to Vienna and wants to say a fugitive goodbye to his wife, played by Frances Dee. They take alternate routes to a designated spot, turning corners and making their way through crowds, and the sequence reaches a visual and emotional crescendo as they each get one last look at each other in a breathless succession of close-ups before they part forever.

So Ends Our Night, which was restored by George Eastman House (and now needs further attention), was independently produced by David Loew and Albert Lewin. No major studio would have touched it at the time. Hollywood was painstakingly careful, to a point well beyond moral cowardice and until the last possible moment, to neither offend German audiences nor advocate for American intervention in Europe. Films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Brothers) and The Mortal Storm (MGM) were extremely rare exceptions to the rule. So Ends our Night is a courageous film, and it’s sad to think that some of the people who made it would later face the horrors of the Red Scare (March was hounded by HUAC early on and Cromwell was blacklisted through most of the 50s). It’s also a film that moves me deeply because, like The Big Country, it manages a rare feat: to dramatize and truly embody the good in people.

- Kent Jones

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SO ENDS OUR NIGHT (1941, d. John Cromwell)
Preserved by George Eastman Museum with funding provided by The Film Foundation. 

THE BIG COUNTRY (1958, d. William Wyler)
Restored by Academy Film Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation.

In 2017, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association asked Christopher Nolan to choose a film that the HFPA helped restore for a screening to celebrate our 75^th anniversary.  His choice was The Red Shoes. At his introduction of the film at the Egyptian Theater, he said, “The restoration of a film like The Red Shoes is only possible thanks to the pioneering work of organizations like the one set up by Marty.” He was referring to Martin Scorsese and the Film Foundation on whose board he serves. “You need money, you need support. And the HFPA has been one of the most important backers of his work for decades.”

It is no surprise that The Red Shoes was his choice. It is regarded as one of the best films of the partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger who wrote, directed, and produced it. It was voted the ninth greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute in 1999.

The restored version was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 after three years of painstaking effort. Robert Gitt, Preservation Officer at the UCLA Film & Television Archive explained the process in a booklet distributed at the Cannes premiere. 

Here’s how he described the shape of the film when he received it. “We were provided access to over two hundred reels of 35mm nitrate and acetate materials, including vintage Technicolor dye transfer prints, nitrate and acetate protection master positive copies, original soundtrack elements, and – most important of all – the still extant three-strip Technicolor camera negatives. For quality reasons, we chose these original negatives as our starting point even though they were afflicted with a daunting number of problems: 65% of the film had bad color fringing caused by differential shrinkage and sometimes by misadjustment of the camera during shooting; 176 shots contained color flickering, mottling and “breathing” because of uneven development and chemical staining; 70 sequences contained harsh optical effects with excessive contrast; and throughout there were thousands of visible red, blue and green specks caused by embedded dirt and scratches. Worst of all, mold had attacked every reel and begun to eat away the emulsion, leaving behind thousands of visible tiny cracks and fissures.”

579,000 individual frames were scanned directly from the three-strip camera negatives. Removal of the mold required the hand-cleaning of the negative frame by frame. The dirt and scratches had to be repaired, color correction and contrast issues had to be solved. The shrinkage had to be corrected so that it no longer looked like a 3-D movie without glasses. 4K resolution was employed at every stage of the digital picture restoration work, including the soundtrack, to remove “pops, thumps, crackles, and excessive background hiss.”

After watching the restored film, the New Yorker’s critic Anthony Lane wrote: “A blindingly rich and refulgent print ... you will not just be seeing an old film made new; you will have your vision restored.”

The story of the film is based on a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale about a dancer who wears magic ballet shoes that force her to dance until she dies. Norma Shearer plays Victoria Page, a ballerina with the Ballet Lermontov. The company is run by Boris Lermontov, an autocratic impresario played by Anton Walbrook, a character based on Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Marius Goring is Julian Craster, a composer who has a romance with Victoria. Victoria finds her dedication to her art tested by her romance until she is forced to choose between love and career.

In 1948, when the film premiered, post-war films were primarily concerned with realism. Therefore, the heightened reality of the story was something that audiences rarely saw. Also, the film was filmed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff in spectacular Technicolor, and its visual beauty enhanced the heartbreak of Victoria’s yearning for her lover but still longing for her art. After all, when she was asked by Lermontov early in the film, “Why do you want to dance?” she answers, “Why do you want to live?” That answer comes back to bite her when Lermontov tells her later, “The dancer who relies on the comforts of human love will never be a great dancer. Never.” The sacrifices that artists make for their art is at the heart of the film.

The highlight of the film is a 17-minute dance sequence in which the Anderson tale is interwoven with the conflicted love story of the ballerina, and includes manifestations of hallucinations from the dancer’s splintered mind. It took six weeks to shoot.

Not only was it unheard of to break up the narrative of a film by such a long sequence, but the filmmakers also insisted on using a real ballet dancer for the lead role instead of a movie star. Shearer, from the Sadler’s Wells Ballet company, got the part. Powell and Pressburger were flying high after the success of Black Narcissus, so they pretty much had carte blanche to do what they wanted. However, the financers cut £10,000 out of their salaries as the budget ballooned from £300,000 to £500,000 as they were convinced the film would never make money. Powell wrote many years after, “Twenty years later, when The Red Shoes was one of the top-grossing box-office films of all time and was included in Variety’s ‘Golden Fifty,’ we were glad to have made the sacrifice.” The film received the Golden Globe for Best Score and the Oscar for Best Score and Best Art Direction. It made over $5 million at the box office, the first British film to ever do so.

In The Red Shoes Revisited, Adrienne L. McLean writes that Shearer declined the role at first, afraid it would hurt her ballet career. She quotes Shearer as saying: “Red Shoes was the last thing I wanted to do. I fought for a year to get away from that film, and I couldn't shake the director off.” After the success of the film, she gave up the ballet corps voluntarily in order to continue acting and had a successful Hollywood career.

The film premiered at the Bijou Theater in New York City in 1948, and ran for two years, earning $2.2 million in the US alone.

A Broadway adaptation based on the film opened in 1993 at the Gershwin Theater; it was directed by Stanley Donen with music by Jule Styne and book and lyrics by Marsha Norman. A ballet based on the film, choreographed by Matthew Bourne, opened in London in 2016.

The Film Foundation has facilitated the restorations of five films by William Wyler, including one of his greatest (and one of the greatest, by anyone anywhere), Dodsworth. I wanted to focus on The Big Country because I’ve always found it underrated and because the circumstances of its creation provide a vivid snapshot of big-budget American moviemaking in the late 50s, as well as an equally vivid contrast with the world of cinema as it is now. Wyler had just directed live television for the first and last time, and he and his friend/star/co-producer Gregory Peck were eager to create a big screen movie epic. They shot in Technirama, a sort of anamorphic version of VistaVision. They developed a story about a liberal, educated easterner landing in the world of rival ranching families in a state of perpetual war—a meditation on manhood and the stark contrast between reason and inner fortitude on the one hand and blood-fueled and grievance-driven action and reaction on the other. Wyler and Peck chose locations that allowed them to shoot on an immense scale. As it sometimes happened in Hollywood, they went into production without a finished script, which meant a swelling budget and mounting tensions of all shapes and sizes on the set. Jean Simmons remembered learning her lines, then being given all new pages that she had to stay up all night memorizing, then arriving on location the next morning to find that the scene had been re-written once again. Carroll Baker’s Actor’s Studio training was sometimes at odds with Wyler’s method of directing. Peck insisted on retakes that Wyler refused to execute and they stopped speaking. In the end, Wyler left for Rome to make Ben-Hur and turned over all of post-production and even the shooting of a new ending to his editor Robert Swink. When the film was released it did moderately well, but it was thought of as something of a letdown. Looking at the Academy restoration today, within the context of this moment, when the difference between cinema and episodic television and all kinds of other audiovisual stuff has to be clarified and proudly proclaimed once more, and when blind passions and willful ignorance of scientific fact have put the country in real danger, The Big Country seems movingly grand and eloquent, kind of imperfect but generous, ample, and grounded in a belief in the very best in us.

- Kent Jones

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DODSWORTH (1936, d. William Wyler)
Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with the Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

THE BIG COUNTRY (1958, d. William Wyler)
Restored by Academy Film Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation.

Point of Order, released in 1964 and restored by UCLA with the help of The Film Foundation, is a 97-minute distillation of 188 hours of the Senate Army-McCarthy Hearings, which were nationally televised from April to June of 1954. The film began as an idea in the head of Dan Talbot, the proprietor and programmer of the New Yorker Theater and later the founder of New Yorker Films. Dan had been mesmerized by the original broadcasts and wondered about the possibility of running kinescopes of the hearings at the New Yorker and charging a dollar an hour. He brought up the idea with his friend Emile de Antonio and they decided to make a film. Through a process of trial and error and the help of a young editor named Robert Duncan, they created a documentary without commentary, whose force—the film has the relentless momentum of Full Metal Jacket or There Will Be Blood—and considerable dramatic tension emerge from a grounding in character, body language, and emotional conflict. In other words, the filmmakers looked at the footage, they saw the drama, and they extracted it. And they created a dynamically political film, a clarifying vision of the politics of one historical moment—McCarthy’s populism, fueled by the craven Roy Cohn, coming head to head with the liberalism of Boston lawyer Joseph Welch and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. It’s the same drama that has played out, in different forms and with different characters, over and over again in this country since the end of World War II—the latest version is raging at this very moment. Point of Order is a riveting film, and it is essential viewing. I look forward to the day when it will serve not as a reminder of an earlier iteration of a conflict that we keep reliving, but as a document of a time gone by.

- Kent Jones

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POINT OF ORDER (1964, d. Emile de Antonio)
Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation.