The Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of recently restored international films, To Serve and Project, runs in January and features an array of silent films, Hollywood talkies, independent personal projects, and titles from around the world. PopMatters has already covered the initial week of programming of this film restoration celebration. Many films are being repeated for those in the New York area who missed them.
As of 16 January 2025, there are still 16 programs left on the agenda. These include James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971), a dreamlike, colorful, avant-garde abstraction of queer fantasy shot in Bidgood’s apartment over several years; Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (1952), one of his several Technicolor westerns starring James Stewart; Yevgeni Cherviakov’s My Son (Moi Syn, 1928), a silent Soviet drama of infidelity thought lost until it was discovered in Argentina in 2008; Paul Fejos’ Broadway (1929), an early talkie with Technicolor sequences restored by Universal Pictures; and Rendezvous of the Docks (Le Rendez-vous des quais, 1955), Paul Carpitta’s long-banned French drama set against the backdrop of a historic dockworkers’ strike.
One special event is the showing of the controversial Dutchman (1966), which takes place in a subway car as a white woman (Shirley Knight) teases an uptight black man (Al Freeman Jr.), overturning then-dominant clichés about sexually aggressive African-Americans. Amiri Baraka wrote the script from his play, and the film was directed in England by Anthony Harvey, who went on to The Lion in Winter (1968) and The Glass Menagerie (1973).
Dutchman runs under an hour and is paired with Billy Jackson’s We Are Universal (1971), a short documentary celebrating Black artists with interviews from Nikki Giovanni, Quincy Jones, Hugh Masekela, and others. For those who miss it, this program returns for a regular run at MoMA from 13 to 19 February.
Between screenings, you might try getting into Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a 24-hour film assembled from about 12,000 film and television clips in which characters look at clocks or watches or otherwise refer to what time it is. The result is a monumental, star-studded meditation on how time is used as a plot device, a form of measurement, and an existential reality.
These clips are in clockwork order and synched up to real-life time. The full 24 hours were shown only once in December; otherwise, you can access it during gallery hours until 17 February.
PopMatters has screened four more films from MoMas To Serve and Project international film festival. These titles are premiering from Saturday, 18 January, through Tuesday, 21 January. Happy viewing.
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Adventures of Casanova (1948) – Director: Roberto Gavaldón
Is Adventures of Casanova a Hollywood swashbuckler? Is it a Mexican film? It’s both, thanks to Eagle-Lion Studios’ decision to produce it at Mexico’s Churubusco Studios. Therefore, the cast and crew are divided about evenly. The director is Mexico’s prolific Roberto Gavaldón, and national heartthrob Arturo de Córdova stars as the titular hero, both a lover and a fighter. De Córdova frequently crossed the border to star in Hollywood films throughout the 1940s, but here, he gets to show off his English while staying home.
Adventures of Casanova begins by telling us that in the 1790s, Sicily was oppressed by foreign rule from Spain and France, and the people were in a tizzy of repression and rebellion. Into this ferment comes an avenging Casanova, first seen playing musical drawing rooms with two lovely sisters on the island of Malta. When one sister’s husband arrives in a lather, Casanova discreetly exits by a window, and there’s quite a lot of this balcony-climbing throughout the story. The dashing rogue’s bedroom-hopping is presented discreetly, so you’d think all that ever happens is a bit of musical appreciation culminating in a kiss.
Casanova’s love interest is played by glamorous ex-Rockette Lucille Bremer, best known for MGM musicals. As the governor’s independent-minded daughter, she rejects a forced marriage to an oily French count representing both personal and national tyranny, a convenient shorthand. She dresses up like a pageboy (not very convincingly) to escape house arrest and join Casanova’s rebels. She and Casanova play games of one-upmanship that continue even after she has broken him out of prison and snared him in marriage, perhaps a frying pan into the fire situation.
Casanova’s best friend is played by pencil-mustached Turhan Bey, a brooding “exotic” fixture in 1940s Hollywood who now plays a working-class Italian patriot. Also in the cast are John Sutton as the evil Count, Fritz Leiber as the aging leader of the freedom fighters, George Tobias as a hard-drinking spy dressed up as a jolly friar, Lloyd Corrigan as the useless governor, and Noreen Nash as the handmaiden who masquerades as her royal mistress.
Adventures of Casanova boasts all kinds of classy production value, including huge sets, dozens of extras, and chases on stage and horseback. It’s reasonable to assume all this could be had on a tighter budget than in Hollywood. The hills and forests of Mexico probably don’t look much like Sicily, but few viewers will care. Except for the swordplay and costumes, the story frequently looks and acts like a western advocating guerrilla warfare. Hollywood loved rousing tales of rebels and revolution and preferred that such stories be set far away and long ago to keep their politics safe.
Mexico’s industry was embarking on what historians have termed its Golden Age. Churubusco was one of its major studios, operating below Hollywood’s border and under most Americans’ radar while producing Latin-inflected versions of many of the same genres: westerns, comedies, adventures, and melodramas, all with equivalent professionalism. This excellent film restoration is courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Gunman’s Walk (1958) – Director: Phil Karlson
If Adventures of Casanova is a pseudo-Western way of looking at colonized people responding to oppressors, Phil Karlson’s Gunman’s Walk is a genuine Western founded on 1950s Hollywood’s growing exploration of the subjugated status of native peoples, in this case, the Sioux, and the problems of Western frontier mythology. The central father and two sons are created to represent the rough-and-tumble arrogance of white patriarchs with guns.
Van Helfin stars as Lee Hackett, the wealthy ranch owner who insists on wearing a gun into town, which is against the law, because he “was here before the law” and regards himself an original settler who fought for the land and resents late arrivals who want to “take it over”. The script’s ironies are deliberate on these matters. His oldest son is tall blond Ed (Tab Hunter), an angry, surly, competitive, chip-on-shoulder individual molded by his dad’s attitudes and combining them with spoiled entitlement.
Ed Hackett is so different from Hunter’s standard heartthrob roles that Hunter’s memoir referred to it as one of his career’s proudest moments. The character is so casually brutal he makes you rethink Hunter’s clean-cut boys-next-door. The subversion of tropes in Gunman’s Walk includes having the fair-haired boy be the “dark” character while the dark-haired son is the positive.
Younger, dark-haired Davy (James Darren) is the sensitive lad embarrassed by his brother, especially when he sees Ed behave disrespectfully to pretty clerk Clee Chouard (Kathryn Grant), identified as the “half-breed” daughter of Sioux mother and French father. Her brother Paul (Bert Convy) is hired to work the Hacketts’ ranch with a couple of Sioux, one of whom is played by an actor identified as Chief Blue Eagle. That goes badly, and events build to an almost mythical tale of violence and tragedy.
Gunman’s Walk is a handsome picture shot in Technicolor and Cinemascope by Charles Lawton Jr. The most significant contributor besides Karlson is writer Frank S. Nugent, famous for inserting complex, historically aware attitudes to Native Americans in John Ford’s films, such as The Searchers (1956), and making racism a conscious plot element along with generational changes in the West and the problems of overweening power. Nugent’s approach to conflicts makes them spring from within his characters’ psychology and their historical context instead of simple us/them binaries.
Karlson made his reputation with tough, violent crime films like Kansas City Confidential (1952), The Phenix City Story (1955) and, much later, Walking Tall (1973). He brings that dangerous noir edge to the wide open spaces, and the results are chilling. Gunman’s Walk is from Colombia, and the film restoration is by Sony.
Will (1981) – Director: Jessie Maple
Will (1981) opens with its title character (played by Obaka Adedunyo) thrashing in sweaty agony on his bed as he goes through heroin withdrawal. These shots are intercut with memories of himself playing basketball, for we’ll learn he was once a promising athlete. This rapid cutting between images is one of the international film’s organizing ideas, and another is a documentary quality that stages the action in real places with ordinary citizens as extras.
When Will goes to buy more dope, he stops himself when he sees Little Brother (Robert Dean), a short 12-year-old with a tall afro. They instantly bond, as Will invites the streetwise orphan to stay with him and his wife Jean (Loretta Devine) to keep the boy straight and narrow. While the melodrama of Will’s main story is a standard warning about drugs complete with a couple of elevating sermons, its heart is in the naturally played scenes between Little Brother and his new mentor, whose coaching of girls’ basketball allows him to find his feet.
Will, whose title refers both to the hero and the concept of personal determination, is a New York indie directed by Jessie Maple, an African-American woman who broke racial and gender barriers as a network news camerawoman and member of both the Film Editors Union and Cinematographers Union, a struggle she detailed in her book How to Become a Union Camerawoman (1976).
She and her husband, Leroy Patton, who shot Will in 16mm, self-financed the feature through their company and distributed it to community venues, such as churches and youth centers. It’s one of Maple’s two features, and it’s been drafted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. The film restoration is by Indiana University’s Black Film Center & Archive as a landmark of Black independent film.
The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932) – Director: Lowell Sherman
“Always together, thicker than thieves, out for no good. I call them the three musketeers of Riverside Drive” is how one character introduces the three heroines of The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), a spicy pre-Code comedy based on a play by Zoë Akins.
The down-to-earth Schatzi (Joan Blondell), the glamorous Polaire (Madge Evans), and the shameless scheming gold-digger Jean (Ina Claire) are ex-showgirls who live by their wits, or in Jean’s case, by men’s wallets. The musketeer remark isn’t quite true, as they’re not exactly “all for one and one for all”, but more three in a free-for-all. One plan after another is dished by Jean’s jealous determination to hog every man for herself, yet they always manage to hang out together as they discard one beau after another. The actresses play off each other fast and funny.
Director Lowell Sherman casts himself as a would-be sugar daddy who’s a famous concert pianist. He makes a play for Madge, promising to make her a star, and then is instantly distracted by the fact that Jean has apparently stripped nude under her fur coat. That’s the kind of element found in pre-Code movies, along with lines like the one a waiter delivers to a drunk: “There’s a room over there marked Gentlemen, but don’t let that stop you. Just walk right in.” Such witticisms are courtesy of Akins’ play and another prolific playwright who wrote the screenplay, Sidney Howard.
Akins’ hit play of 1930, which had the slightly different title, The Greeks Had a Word for It, may be the template for all subsequent films about three saucy gals in the city. It was partly remade as Jean Negulesco’s How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall. A crucial difference is that the 1950s film safely finds everyone a husband, while the pre-Code film leaves them safely single, although one marriage might be in the cards.
Polaire’s boyfriend is played by David Manners, a handsome leading man who is having his heyday, but his character is no more important than his wealthy father (Phillips Smalley) or Sherman’s pianist. Indeed, no man in The Greeks Had a Word for Them is more important than Coco Chanel’s gowns, which are draped all over the place. Film restoration of this United Artists comes by Library of Congress and The Film Foundation.