Golden oldies

The HFA's alphabet soup

At a video store recently I saw Ed Mark, retired minister of Cambridge's Harvard Epworth Church, and I told him how much he's missed in the Boston movie scene. For years, Mark offered 16mm screenings of classic movies Thursday and Sunday nights in his church, and his special interest was "auteurist" American filmmakers: Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller. The more obscure the film, the better; most were made in the 1940s and 1950s.

My lament to Ed was that, these days, American film history seems to be losing out in Boston. The various arthouse venues have established other priorities: the Museum of Fine Arts for national cinemas and local filmmakers, the Harvard Film Archive for European modernism, the Kendall and the Coolidge for the newest American indies and foreign movies. Only the Brattle shows its share of old American films, but even here there's a tendency to recycle the most popular titles: a few Hepburns and Hitchcocks, Citizen Kane, Casablanca.

Is New York better off for American film classics? Absolutely, with the Walter Reade Theatre, the Film Forum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the Living Image all pumping out ambitious programs of golden-age Hollywood oldies. There was a Howard Hawks retrospective that went all around America, including New York, but never got to Boston. Imagine a Beantown venue daring to import the Film Forum's almost complete retrospective of "B" director Edgar G. Ulmer, the obscure filmmaker of The Black Cat and Detour?

Not all is hopeless: I'm grateful for the MFA's recent showing of Max Ophuls's Hollywood pictures, to the Coolidge for its Sinatra flicks, to the Brattle for reviving Nightmare Alley and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. And I want to praise especially the flushing-of-the-vault "Cinema A to Z: Treasures from the Harvard Film Archive," a July selection from the HFA's 5000-film library that includes an outspill of choice American cinema.

Some of the films at Harvard are long-time Boston revival favorites: Monsieur Verdoux (1947; July 14), Ninotchka (1939; July 16), The Night of the Hunter (1955; July 17), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928; July 22), Sullivan's Travels (1941; July 23). But a quartet of top-rate American features are being shown for the first time in years.

Medium Cool (1969; July 15). Left-wing cinematographer Haskell Wexler (Bound for Glory, Coming Home) directed, wrote, and shot this Godard-influenced take on America in political crises in the middle of the Vietnam War. It's the story of a disaffected TV cameraman (Robert Forster) who finds his humanity when he becomes involved with a West Virginia woman and her 13-year-old boy. The volatile backdrop for the story is the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where anti-war protesters are met by a police riot of Mayor Richard Daley's finest. Wexler's film became a heady combination of narrative and documentary, as he thrust his actors and technicians into the streets while amazing things were going down. There's a famous movie moment when actual police tear-gas canisters exploded at the feet of the Medium Cool crew; what was blurted out survives on the soundtrack: "Look out, Haskell, it's real!"

A New Leaf (1970; July 16). Elaine May steals Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks with her lovably brain-ditsy cousin-to-Gracie-Allen. Thirty years ago, May starred in this very funny movie, which she also directed, as a nerdy, clumsy botanist suddenly courted by a dapper gent of dashing manners (the recently deceased Walter Matthau). He wants to marry immediately. What's the catch? We know, but she doesn't, that this grumpy misanthrope has run out of dough. He wants to wed her, then kill her and collect. Can she win his heart before he throws her from a cliff or allows her to drown? Matthau is fabulously acerbic, and there's a wonderful turn by Mike Nichols as a slow-burning befuddled tax consultant.

The Naked Spur (1953; July 17). James Stewart plays a brooding, neurotic bounty hunter in filmmaker Anthony Mann's arresting variant on The Treasure of Sierra Madre where three men vie for the $5000 reward on the head of an alleged killer (swaggering Robert Ryan). This very weird Western climaxes with Stewart, seemingly victorious, breaking down and bawling before new girlfriend Janet Leigh.

Show Boat (1936; July 22). This is probably the best of the pre-Oklahoma! Broadway musicals, with tunes by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, several bona fide showstoppers sung by Helen Morgan ("Bill," "That Man of Mine"), and something you certainly won't see in the cut-for-TV version: Irene Dunne doing a blackface number backed by a blackfaced Caucasian chorus. Two melodramatic plots are intertwined: one has a masochistic father watching his daughter's success from afar, the other a woman trying to pass despite "Negro" blood. The rampant racism, conscious and unconscious, is contravened by Paul Robeson's stirring, transcendent version of "Old Man River," wherein its woeful tale of black oppression by the white man is foregrounded and the song, usually depoliticized, becomes a valiant African-American anthem.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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