Movies: Festival

...Cannes is the Ur-Festival, thirty years old and overwhelming with an earth mother's suffocating excess of film: a trip there can take years off your viewing life...

...The great joy of Telluride, this year and apparently in years past as well, is its great feeling for, almost reveling in, film's past...

...Places like New York, San Francisco, London, and Berlin are more orderly, almost too orderly, more like a series of illustrated lectures than anything that might be considered festive...

...I couldn't live with myself if I accepted, all the money in the world wouldn't make up for it...

...The festival's closing film was Barbet Schroeder's Maitresse, a disturbing look at a love affair between a humble burglar and a woman who is a professional sadist: chains, boot-licking, leather, whips, you name it, you got it...

...MOVIES Festival KENNETH TURAN Telluride, Colorado Film people who dabble in festivals are like surfers seeking the perfect wave or neurotics diligently checking out therapy after therapy, looking for the one that "works...

...Organ-accompanied screenings are held in the vintage Sheridan Opera House and the main exhibit this year, courtesy of James Card, was Blue Jeans, a 1917 epic starring Viola Dana, a major film star of the time who showed up in person at Telluride, the kind of unexpected delight the place specializes in...

...The Tenant— Roman Polanski stars as well as directs this male version of Repulsion, wherein a Timid Soul slowly goes mad in his own little apartment...

...At an altitude of 8,745 feet in southwestern Colorado, surrounded by mountains of the 13,000 to 14,000-foot range, Telluride looks like a Western movie set spruced back to life...

...Two of the most charming — Jeanne Moreau's directing debut, a romantic roman a clej called Lumiere, and Eric Rohmer's elegant, precise historical gem, La Marquise D'O...

...For Telluride is like the meeting of Kenneth Turan, a staff member of The Washington Post, reviews movies regularly for The Progressive...

...Telluride's mountains yielded billions of dollars in gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc...

...There's not one value in that script," said Fay Wray, Kong's original paramour, who spurned a role in the remake...

...Telluride is the name whispered to you as you sit' shivering from celluloid overdose in a cafe in Cannes...

...Limiting tickets to the 400 range, the festival was organized in 1974 around a sprinkling of new films, archival material, and retrospective tributes...

...James Card, head of Eastman House in Rochester, New York, one of the world's major film archives, visited and loved the place, as did Tom Luddy, who runs the prestigious Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley...

...It is a fine place to be...

...Unfortunately, they look it, and the film, ritualistic to the point of tedium, resembles, despite Herzog's obvious and considerable talent, nothing so much as / Walked with a Zombie Revisited...

...K.T...

...Germany's highly regarded Werner Herzog provided the world premiere of his Heart of Glass, a film in which all the actors are under hypnosis...

...From Oberhausen to Tashkent, Thessaloniki to Cracow, festival goers end up in the world's oddest corners, hoping to duplicate Brigham Young's contentment when he happened upon that desolate spot in Utah and said, "This is the place...

...And, on a philosophical level, it is disturbing to find that pain is now in, that explicit sado-masochism is prestigious, explicit sex outrageous...

...Go to Telluride, the voices say, only a few years old and already the most respected small film festival in the world...

...Don't look for it at the neighborhood drive-in...

...Filled with episodes of great beauty, it is perhaps too slow for most audiences, the type of film that shows up best at festivals and in fact won the Grand Prize at Moscow as well as an Oscar as the best foreign film of 1976...

...Laced with weird...

...a club, informal, buddy-buddy, a college reunion where the people you want to see show up...

...Bingo Long— the Entertainment Factory lives again in ttits'enormously good-humored 1930s tale of a barnstorming black baseball team...

...It is difficult to write about Telluride, difficult to expound on its graces without running the dual risks of sounding like a doltish Pollyanna while simultaneously attracting an excess of people to something which must remain small to survive...

...Among the people captivated enough to move to Tel-luride was Bill Pence, a film distributor, and hi| wife., Stella...

...Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964, it is a town with an unsettling past reincarnated into an equally provocative present...

...had already been seen in Cannes, and the others were unfulfilling in varying degrees...

...Telluride's two strangest offerings were by foreign directors...

...Though the charms of Telluride are its setting, the ambience, and the retrospectives, there was a fair number of new films to be seen...

...Then there is Telluride...

...The tributes this year were to Chuck Jones, director of about 250 Roadrunner, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Hits and Misses Gator—starring and directed by Burt Reynolds, these further adventures of Gator McKlusky, "meanest man ever to come out of a swamp," give new dimensions to the word simple-minded...

...We have come a long way, haven't we...

...At its peak, Telluride's population topped 5,000, but as mining declined the town itself went into a kind of sleep until discovered within the past ten years by young, wealthy folk the town calls "trust funders...

...Grand Guignol nightmares, but ultimately self-indulgent, artificial, and disappointing...

...Probably the least appealing film was Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight, the plotless new work by Robert Downey {Putney Swope, Greaser's Palace), who seemingly has yet to realize that being outrageous, irrational, and illogical is hardly a guarantee of being funny...

...The Kong tribute was the most eagerly awaited as well as the most disappointing, turning into a disconcerting love feast in which all the participants still alive told each other what geniuses they were...

...King Vidor, a more conventional director whose silent Wild Oranges was shown, and the makers of King Kong, substituting for an ailing Jeanne Moreau...

...Why not have a film festival here, someone suggested, and it was done...

...Perversely fascinating and helped by excellent acting by Gerard Depardieu and Bulle Ogier, the film is hampered by an impossibly romantic ending and by more detail to S-M affairs than most people probably care to witness...

...Now, organizers say, they turn away almost ten times the number of ticket-seekers they accept...

...William Jennings Bryan and Sarah Bernhardt stayed at its hotel, Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank here, and a far-seeing engineer made it the first city in the world to be lit by alternating current...

...Nuff said...

...Telluride was founded in the 1870s and named after tellurium, an element often found combined with valuable ores...

...The first year's hon-orees included Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a Third Reich propagandist caused enough of a publicity uproar to put Telluride on the world film map...

...An archetypal mining community, it supported a score of bordellos and liked to call itself, who knows why, "The Town without a Belly Ache...

...Telluride is different, the voices say, and for once the voices are right...

...One of the most calculated-to-please films imaginable, a fairy tale in which no problem is without a solution, it is impossible to resist, almost despite itself...

...Slowly, the character — if not the old Western facade — of the town changed...

...If ever a community was "nestled in the foothills," this is it...

...Start with the town itself...

...A slide show from Kong production work went on interminably, "like seeing the film frame by frame," someone said, and the only redeeming features were a beautiful print of Kong and the panel discussion the next day, when everyone ripped the soon-to-be-released Dino DeLaurentis version...

...When anyone attempts to make an R-rated film out of Kong, it's an unholy project...

...Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, a Russian production and the great Japanese director's first film in six years, was the best of the lot, a stately, evocative film about a Russian surveyor's turn-of-the-century friendship with a migratory hunter...

...The result is a pleasant, if slightly unreal, fantasy town, where 70 per cent of the population is thirty-five or under, a live-in Disneyland for people who never want to go home anymore...

...friends cartoons...

...Population rose to a thousand, hang gliders — not miners — climbed its mountains, restaurants of epicurean quality opened in old bordellos, Dijon mustard appeared in hamburger palaces, the bookstore started burning incense, American Express cards were taken almost every place in town...