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," I I \ I Emlyn Williams, Robert Newton, and Charles Laughton in a scene from Josef von Sternberg's abortive 1937 film I, Claudius. Fragments of this doomed endeavor have been preserved in a fascinating BBC documentary narrated by Dirk Bogarde, The Epic That Never Was. The film also includes interviews with survivors of the project: Williams, Merle Oberon, Flora Robson, Claudius author Robert Graves, and the subsequently deceased Von Sternberg. It will be shown at the Seattle Art Museum as the first installment in this year's Vernal Equinox Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, with (no fooling!) Fritz Lang's Siegfried (1924). Other vernal treasures include: Carne and Pr~vert's Les Vislteurs du soir (1943), on April 8; judex, Georges Franju's 1965 tribute to the poetic serial adventures by Louis Feuillade, on April 15; and Cocteau's La Belle etla B~te (1946), April 22. Admission to each Program is $1.50. No reserved seats, and the auditorium holds 250, so ... YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE FILMS IN SERIES "The American Dream" is the title of Spring Quarter's Lectures & Concerts Film Series at the University of Washington-and if you think you've heard this one before, hold on a sec. Series coordinator R C Dale's very interesting notion is that certain American film classics not only provide an evocative index of the historical period in which they were made but also serve equally well to typify key developments 24 in the American cinema of that day, as well as essential characteristics of the directors who made them. He has selected ten films-to be presented in nine separate programs-to exemplify what he has in mind, and the list is enticing: March 30: Way Down East (DW. Griffith, 1920). Lillian Gish's performance as Anna Moore, the country girl wronged by a big-city rake and left to bear the burden of her
"dishonor" alone, belongs on any responsible list of the screen's great portrayals. Griffith's-and cameraman Hendrik Sartov's-pastoral images remain ravishingly beautiful, the more so for our realization that such countrysides now exist largely in our memory. The basis of Way Down East's story was a creaky stage piece ludicrously out of fashion even in Griffith's day, but that liability evaporates like late frost in the glow of spirituality surrounding Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess. But Griffith was more than merely a director blessed with a sensitive cameraman and an inspired cast (and don't discount Lowell Sherman's superb work as, of all unlikely 1920 things, an ambiguous lounge lizard). There are moments of cinematic possibility that remain unequalled by any contemporary filmmaker: for instance, the scene when Anna Moore, still a stranger, simply passes the gate of the Bartlett farm, and she and David Bartlett (Barthelmess) register one another's presence without realizing that they've done so. Sound confusing? It's breathlessly lucid on film-lucid, and mystical at the same time. Piano' accompaniment for this nearly-three-hour silent film will be provided by Dan Grinstead. April 6: The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925). The first installment of King Vidor's projected American trilogy on "War, Wheat and Steel" (Our Daily Bread, 1934, and An American Romance, 1944, completed it in token if not in full spirit), The Big Parade fairly surges off the screen with the idealistic passion and bitter rage that marked Vidor as a primary spokesman of the post-World War I era. John Gilbert and Renee Adoree star. (At this time it is not clear whether Dale plans to run a music-tracked print or provide on-the-spot accompaniment once more; but at any rate, the film will not play dead-silent.) April 13: Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) and Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933). Two hyperkinetic celebrations of "making it" as the Twenties highballed into the Thirties: Scarface remains the greatest of all gangster films (pre- or post-Godfather, it doesn't matter) and Footlight Parade' looks more and more like the finest Busby Berkeley musical comedy of them all-partly because Lloyd Bacon's non-musical sequences are as dynamic in their comic realism as Berkeley's celebrated show-stoppers (but not this show!) in their surreal perversity. Paul Muni, George Raft and Boris Karloff are featured in the Hawks film; James Cagdey, Joan Blondell, Frank McHugh et al. in the Bacon-Berkeley. If it's possible to be exhilarated and exhausted at the same time, that's how the audience will be after this double bill. April 20: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939). James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold Thomas Mitchell, and a characteristically handpicked 'cast down to the most "insignificant" political hac~ help make this one of the very best films tn, Frank Capra s filmography. At every level of production It s a triumph of Hollywood craftsmanship, whether you glance mto SI?ney Buchman's beautifully detailed script or scrutimze Lionel Banks' utterly convincing reconstruction of the U.S. Senate Chambers or time any of Gene Havlick's precision cuts. But it's still a' one-man, one-film show from the most pragmatic idealist of them all. If you harbor a received opinion that Capra made simplistically optimistic films, here's an excellent opportunity to find out how inaccurate that one is. April 27: The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940). Unfortunately all of Ford's greatest films fall outside the pale of this series by virtue of the need to fit contemporaneity to chronological progression. But an American Dream series withouta John Ford movie would look silly indeed, and this official masterpiece more than holds its own. The subject, of course, is the Okies and their migration westward after the Dust Bowl catastrophe. Gregg Toland's pre-Kane cinematography is stunning and some of the performances-those of Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine-have virtually become folklore in their own right. May 4: No film because of a school holiday. May 11: Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944). There are worse ways to represent the Forties and World War II than to show this scathingly funny Sturges comedy about wartime heroism and civic virtue, and maybe there aren't many better. Eddie Bracken is fine as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, the manic flipside of a Capra smalltown hero; Ella Raines may be even truer to the mark as a smalltown girl who mixes loyalty and calculation in shrewd proportions; and of course there are those magnificent Sturges regulars-venal, pompous, raging, kvetching; smarrning, defiant,jubilant-the character player in excelsis: William Demarest, Franklyn Pangborn, Raymond Walburn, Al Bridge, Harry Hayden, Georgia Caine ... May 18: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958). Welles' last American masterpiece (at least until' we get a gander at the new one) does double duty, representing film noir and the deviously ferocious Fifties. Dale has booked the restored, long version described in MTN 47 by John Belton. With Welles himself, Charlton Heston, Joseph Calleia, Janet Leigh, Akim Tamiroff. May 25: Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah, 1971). Everything we read about it made it sound as if Junior Bonner just had to be a major bummer: the Old West is dead, baby, and ain't nothin' fit to take its place. But in fact Junior Bonner proved to be one of the quietly joyous films of the Seventies, an unlikely scenario of unlikelier survivals. Steve McQueen is Jay-Are, a rodeo rider just nudging middle age, with a father (Robert Preston) who wants to run off to Australia, a mother (Ida Lupino) who doesn't want to run off at all, a brother (Joe Don Baker) who's demolishing the old homestead to make room for a trailer park, and a bull named Sunshine that damn well is going to be rode. People who get so angry about Peckinpah's violence that they want to break things can put their objections away on this one. Nobody pulls a gun and nobody dies. But there is this fight in a saloon, and you might like to know that it's just about the most rapturously well-edited sequence since those Cossacks came down the Odessa steps. June 1: Fat City (John Huston, 1972). Dale wanted to do a film series that would end with the last scene of Fat City. A good place to start. Another good place is Kris Kristofferson's song "Help Me Make It through the Night." Kristofferson isn't in the movie, a tale of tank town boxers, but Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Nicholas Colasanto, Art Aragon, Candy 25
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