Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960 | Variety Interview

"August’s Locarno Film Festival will go British with its latest retrospective: Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960. 

The retrospective forms a major strand of the film festival’s programming and for many festival goers is a standout and popular attraction. Boasting fresh restorations and rare screenings of difficult to get prints, past seasons have been devoted to filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk or studios such as last year’s retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, which celebrated the centenary of Columbia Pictures. 

Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960 is organized by the LOcarno Film Festival in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of Studiocanal. The film curator responsible for the last program, Ehsan Khoshbakht, returns this year with Great Expectations. He spoke exclusively with Variety about the lineup and the rules dictating his selection."

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE

Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

Written for Sight & Sound, December 2023. – EK

If Raoul Walsh's action films are imbued with poetry, his comedies are charged with anarchy. A prime example of the latter is Me and My Gal, a pre-Code delight in which a New York cop (Spencer Tracy) fights both to bring order to the waterfront and win over a blonde (Joan Bennett). It's a madcap, riotous affair with a contempt for the rich - a proletarian air runs through its deep focus cinematography (easily lost on the eye, if not viewed on 35mm). Walsh turns vulgar jokes into unassuming art and mocks the world. It is as much about the joy of cinema as it is about the artistry of it.

Demetrius and the Gladiators (Delmer Daves, 1954)

A very Scope film

Note on Demetrius and the Gladiators, in the occasion of the new restoration of the film premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. It was restored in 4K by The Walt Disney Studios and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Academy Film Archive at Cineric and Audio Mechanics laboratories from the 35mm original negative, a 35mm interpositive and a 35mm internegative. – EK

The trials and tribunals of Demetrius (Victor Mature), from a freed slave to the protector of the robe of Jesus, to gladiatorship and the illicit relationship with Claudius’s wife, Messalina (Susan Hayward). Straying away in a life of debauchery, Demetrius is reawakened to Christian values thanks to Peter the Fisherman while there is a good dose of lust, blood and tiger-fighting in between. This Bible pulp (“I never thought of Jesus being so tall”) culminates in the assassination of Caligula and a return to reason after Claudius becomes the new Caesar. Sequel to the first CinemaScope film The Robe (1953), this is the 1950s “muscular Christianity” that the late Terence Davies, who saw this film when he was nine, described as “dazzling and profane” and belonging to a time when God was in every cinema, “like a drug." Muscular indeed as Mature fights three tigers at once and profane as the film’s campy theology takes him to sermon a lascivious Hayward lying down in her designer dress.

How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting – A Film NOT by Abbas Kiarostami

How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting (1977), a short educational documentary widely credited to and distributed as a film by Abbas Kiarostami, has nothing to do with him. He is not the director of this film.

Currently, MK2, which holds the international rights to the Kiarostami catalogue owned by Kanoon, rents this film as a Kiarostami work. Who first misattributed it, and why—whether intentionally or by mistake—is unclear. But here’s my guess:

Lewis Milestone Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025

Milestone (left) on the set of Rain with Joan Crawford

Lewis Milestone: Of Wars and Men

A milestone of visual flair and virtuosity in American cinema, the career of Lewis Milestone – a Russian Jewish émigré – bridged silent cinema and the 70mm spectacles of the 1960s. Renowned for having one of the most distinctive and eclectic styles of his generation, his popular and dazzlingly original work ranged from the anti-war magnum opus All Quiet on the Western Front to the popular-front musical Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!. As dense, dark, and daunting as his films could get, they were often laced with wit, camaraderie, and bravery amid mass atrocities. Yet, he barely survived the Hollywood blacklist, which forced him to drift into mediocre assignments. This programme, covering his silent films up until the blacklist, features new restorations and archive prints, aiming to recover the artistry of a man who fought many battles of humanity in the 20th century with a sense of wisdom and poetry that can still shake us.

Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)

Originally titled Jerry and Joan during production, this charming and exquisitely directed pre-code melodrama was later renamed to the slightly controversial Merrily We Go to Hell. The film features Sylvia Sidney as a wealthy woman who marries a journalist (brilliantly portrayed by Fredric March), only to struggle with her husband’s alcoholism and his unexpected reunion with an old flame. Typical of its studio of production, Paramount, and reflective of some of the bolder pre-code films, the marriage—which quickly deteriorates—is depicted in an open, sophisticated manner, set against the backdrop of lavish art deco sets.

Ebrahim Golestan and the Restoration of Iran’s Cinematic Heritage [A free evening of film and discussion at V&A]

Ebrahim Golestan and the Restoration of Iran’s Cinematic Heritage at Victoria & Albert Museum

Ebrahim Golestan (1922–2023) is widely regarded as one of Iran’s most significant filmmakers and a pioneer of the movement later dubbed the Iranian New Wave. Join us for a screening of three of his ground-breaking documentary films, produced prior to the 1979 revolution and recently restored to their original brilliance:

• Yek Atash (A Fire, 1961)

• Teppeh-ha-ye Marlik (The Hills of Marlik, 1964)

• Ganjineh-ha-ye Gohar (The Crown Jewels of Iran, 1965)

While exploring Iran’s history, geography, and the arts, Golestan’s documentaries are both politically subversive and visually striking.

La dama de la antorcha. 100 años de Columbia Pictures

The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures, 1929-1959 travels to Filmoteca Española in Madrid. My essay, in Spanish, here.

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

Otto Preminger with Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington

Otto Preminger concluded the 50s – a decade already marked by some of his most audacious work – with this courtroom drama about a country lawyer called on to defend an army lieutenant accused of murdering a bar owner who has allegedly raped the lieutenant’s wife. It is widely celebrated as one of the greatest American films.

Based on a real case, Anatomy of a Murder was adapted from a 1957 book by former prosecutor John D. Voelker, which was still a “New York Times” bestseller when the film went into production. Aside from the superb central cast, which includes James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara and George C. Scott, the role of the judge went to real-life judge Joseph N. Welch (who is also seen calmly upbraiding Senator Joseph McCarthy in the documentary Point of Order). The film is shot entirely on location, where the actual crime and trial had taken place. The court scenes that make up the majority of the film were shot in sequence, providing the actors with an enriching sense of realism. The result is perfection.

Cinema is a Machine of Empathy

The Stranger and the Fog

“CINEMA  IS  A  MACHINE  OF  EMPATHY”:  RESTORING  AND CURATING IRANIAN’S CINEMATIC HERITAGE.

An interview with Ehsan Khoshbakht  

By André Habib (Université de Montréal)

The  international  recognition  of  Iranian  cinema  parallels  its  presence  on  the  world  festival  circuit,  from  Gaffari’s  1963  Night  of  the  Hunchback,  through  Kiarostami’s  Palme  d’or  for  The  Taste  of  Cherry  to  Rossoulof’s  in  extremis  addition to the 2024 Cannes Festival selection. These last few years, festivals (in particular  Cannes,  Venice,  Berlin,  Locarno)  have  been  pivotal  in  diagnosing  the  “state  of  affairs”  in  the  Islamic  Republic  of  Iran,  the  ongoing  creative  struggle  and resistance filmmakers have opposed to the regime. We could also add that, over the past ten years, it is also via festivals, and particularly those specialized in showcasing film restorations, that we have witnessed a reappraisal and renewed appreciation  for  works,  mostly  shot  before  the  revolution,  that  had  fallen  into  relative  oblivion  and  which  all,  in  some  respect,  display  eloquent  forms  of  politic  and  poetic  resistance.  It  is  safe  to  say  that  nowhere  is  this  truer  than  at  the  Cineteca  di  Bologna,  via  its  now  world-renowned  Cinema  Ritrovato  festival and through the work of the Immagine ritrovata laboratory. Crucial to this new wave  of  rediscoveries  is  Ehsan  Khoshbakht,  who  has,  since  2018,  worked  as  co-director of the Cinema Ritrovato festival, apart from curating many ambitious programs  across  the  world  (notably,  recently,  the  October  13th  to  November  27th MoMA program, Iranian Cinema Before the Revolution, spanning fifty years and  presenting  close  to  70  feature  and  short  films).  He  is  also  a  filmmaker,  an  architect and an essential figure, with others, of the contemporary reassessment of the importance and richness of the history of Iranian cinema. Shortly before the launch of the Fall of 2023 MoMA cycle, we had a chance to interview him for this special issue of Regards.