Screen: Old Movies Never Die: They Just Fade Away
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen OLD MOVIES NEVER DIE THEY JUST FADE AWAY I USED to go to the movies three nights a week, often to double bills, and about half of what I saw were repertory films. These weren't all...
...It gave me a certain perspective, I felt...
...It was a pity, to be sure, but many works of man have been lost in time...
...It's how the two men pass the time while waiting to shoot down Charles Bronson when he steps off the afternoon train...
...Even the first of several retrospective films shown, Roberto Rossellini's Europa 51, which hasn't been seen here in over a quarter of a century, didn't revive my faith in movies...
...The film was little more than a meditation on Ingrid Bergman...
...What I liked about seeing all those old films, even the ones I'd already seen before umpteen times, was the illusion of having been a moviegoer for seventy-five years...
...Sometimes history was a little jumbled in my mind, but at least the present didn't get out of proportion as much as it usually tends to for weekly reviewers...
...Then the house lights went down and the screen lit up, and for the next day and a half the festival, which had seemed such a dud, exploded like a skyrocket...
...These weren't all classics...
...I felt a resignation to the loss of all past, present, and future color films coming over me...
...Very magnificent...
...Now, six years later, with more time, greater resources, and Ingrid Bergman, he was indulging in sentimental claptrap, fantasies about the capacity of the poor to inspire social and spiritual uplift in the rich...
...The film clips made Scorsese's point so repetitiously and the young assistant he sent to do the presentation was such a laid-back California type—in between rambling anecdotes and shuffled notes he kept reminding himself aloud, "Marty's gonna kill me if I leave anything out'' —that we could feel the preservation campaign, like the color stock itself, fading right before our eyes...
...All the films I looked forward to because of their directors' work at earlier festivals seemed not to pan out...
...What did it matter, what effect on the course of the world could it have, compared to, say, the destruction of the library at Alexandria...
...Last year Wajda showed two films of extraordinary beauty, Without Anaesthesia and The Young Girls of Wilko, each of which had a commercial run of exactly one day in America after the festival closed...
...The first of two parts...
...More disappointing still was Andrzej Wajda's The Orchestra Conductor starring John Gielgud...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Maybe, it occurred to me, I wasn't as ready as I thought to see movie history disappear from the face of the earth...
...It made me a witness to history, someone like the unseen interviewer on the old You Are There television series who went to the Battle of Concord one week, the eruption of Vesuvius the next, and the discovery of the Easter Islands the week after that...
...Having lost track of their past, I find myself thinking of movies as having no future...
...The first of the three films that so suddenly and unexpectedly brought the movies back to life, just when I thought all had been lost, was Sergio Leone's 1968 color epic, Once upon a Time in the West, which may well be the greatest Western ever made...
...The whole business seemed to me just another exercise in futility of the sort I so often see in this country, where personal films of great merit go unseen and consequently tempt their directors to do inferior work with more commercial appeal...
...In the opening scene, Woody Strode puts on his hat to keep water from dripping on his head, and Jack Elam traps a pesky fly in the barrel of his gun...
...The effect has sometimes been to make me despair of movies...
...The low point came with the presentation Martin Scorsese sent to the festival as part of his campaign to get Eastman Kodak to develop a more permanent color movie film...
...With Gielgud in the title role this year, Wajda's work seemed to have a better chance, except that this film is a rather weak and bombastic one because of the title role...
...Despite the promise of Handle with Care several years ago, for instance, Jonathan Demme's two subsequent films, and especially his new Melvin and Howard, have been very routine...
...It is still very much in circulation, and I'd seen it myself a couple of times (though always in a cut version...
...This takes five minutes...
...The reason is partly that I've been doing research in another field, and partly that I've been going to more new releases...
...But Scorsese had sent his own print to the festival to remind us just how magnificent a color, widescreen movie in mint condition can be...
...It was in this frame of mind that I dutifully showed up again this year for the press screenings at the New York Film Festival, which, at least at first, did very little to cheer me up...
...With this one scene, Leone has us totally in his power for the rest of the film's two-hour-plus running time...
...Since the mid-fifties most color films have been made on Eastman stock which, unlike the more expensive and now obsolete Technicolor, fades away to pink within a generation or less...
...Maybe movies were just an ephemeral and dispensable part of man's history anyway...
...Watching the film immediately made me want to see A Fistful of Dollars and Leone's other spaghetti Westerns again, until I realized with some panic that there might not still be unfaded prints available...
...Commonweal: 624...
...But many were just routine films of the past that happened to fill a gap in my knowledge of a genre I liked, such as film noir, or otherwise brought me up to date...
...Recently, however, I haven't been seeing so many old movies...
...On the contrary, it seemed to confirm the pattern suggested by Wajda's recent career...
...The use Rossellini had made of the city in the earlier film allowed him to raise political questions without even trying to do so...
...Having had to work almost covertly to make Open City in 1944, splicing together stock from rolls of still-camera film and improvising locations in the wake of the German withdrawal from Rome, Rossellini had made a tight, spare masterpiece, a seminal film...
...Some were...
...Now that sense of the reality of the city was gone, the drama reduced to a melodrama among a few, cliche characters, the political questions turned into a lot of waffling...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
