Columbia Footage 100 Years Celebrated at Locarno Movie Competition 2024

From struggle motion pictures and westerns to noir movies, screwball comedies all the best way to musicals – Sony-owned Columbia Footage has had them throughout its first 100 years. The 77th version of the Locarno Movie Competition is celebrating the centenary within the Swiss city with “a tribute each to beloved classics and unheralded gems produced on the Hollywood studio between the daybreak of sound and the late Nineteen Fifties,” as organizers spotlight on-line.

The Sony studio had beforehand had a One centesimal-anniversary bash at Cannes in Could, co-hosted by Tom Rothman, chairman & CEO of Sony Footage Leisure’s Movement Image Group.

Locarno unveiled its retrospective of 40, largely black-and-white, titles by emphasizing the significance of the studio for Hollywood historical past. “In 1924, the comparatively small-scale movement image firm Cohn-Brandt-Cohn rebranded itself as Columbia Footage,” the fest explains on its web site. “This new studio would finally characteristic, as its masthead, the Woman with a Torch, the Statue of Liberty-like feminine determine draped within the American flag that has develop into recognizable to movie lovers in every single place. As Columbia Footage, the studio struck gold, producing a serious string of successes and changing into, over the subsequent decade, an integral a part of the Hollywood ecosystem.”

And Locarno creative director Giona Nazzaro highlighted: “It was Columbia that supplied the best skilled alternatives to ladies and allowed Dorothy Arzner to make her debut behind the digital camera.”

The pageant guarantees a “massive, multi-faceted retrospective,” curated by documentarian, movie critic, and movie curator Ehsan Khoshbakht, that “will try to disentangle the knotty myths that encompass Columbia Footage and current a richer and extra advanced portrait of a studio price celebrating.”

Khoshbakht himself vows to showcase “fast-talking profession ladies of screwball comedies, “existentialist cowboys,” “prophetic anti-fascist quickies,” and “unsettling ‘downside footage’.”

So what Columbia Footage golden age classics will Locarno77 unspool? The complete lineup, together with such silver-screen legends as Rock Hudson (Gun Fury, 1953), Spencer Tracy (Man’s Citadel, 1933), and William Holden (Picnic, 1955), will be discovered right here.

Under, see a choice of 11 of the titles featured within the retrospective to whet your urge for food.

Wall Road
No, this isn’t the 1987 film directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, which stars Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, and Martin Sheen and was distributed by Fox.

That is the one directed by Roy William Neill and starring Ralph Ince, Aileen Pringle, Philip Unusual, Sam De Grasse, and Freddie Burke Frederick from 1929, making it the oldest Columbia Footage film within the Locarno homage lineup.

At 68 minutes, it is usually shorter than different fare within the tribute program. The story focuses on a steelworker-turned-ruthless tycoon whose robust enterprise strategies lead a rival to suicide. The widow believes she will be able to damage the tycoon and conspires along with her husband’s former companion.

Bitter Victory
This struggle movie, starring Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens as two British Military officers despatched out on a commando raid in North Africa, can be launched at Locarno by Haden Visitor, the director of the Harvard Movie Archive.

Based mostly on the novel of the identical title by René Hardy, the French-American co-production additionally options Ruth Roman and Raymond Pellegrin.

The film, directed by Nicholas Ray, not solely featured overseas lands on display but in addition traveled itself, debuting on the Venice Movie Competition in 1957.

Tackle Unknown 
The 1944 movie noir drama, directed by William Cameron Menzies, is primarily based on Kressmann Taylor’s 1938 novel of the identical title. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté’s artistic use of shadows and digital camera angles has usually been lauded.

The 72-minute film tells the story of two households caught up within the rise of Nazism in Germany earlier than the beginning of World Warfare II. Its solid consists of Paul Lukas, Carl Esmond, Peter van Eyck, Mady Christians, Morris Carnovsky, and Ok.T. Stevens.

The movie screening in Locarno’s Columbia Footage retrospective acquired Oscar nominations for greatest unique rating and greatest artwork route.

Gunman’s Stroll
Because the title suggests, it is a Western. The Locarno crowd can be handled to a particular introduction from Sony Footage Leisure’s movie restoration and digital mastering guru Grover Crisp.

Directed by Phil Karlson, this one stars Van Heflin, Tab Hunter, Kathryn Grant, and James Darren. Heflin performs a robust rancher who all the time protects his hot-tempered grownup son (Hunter) by paying for damages and bribing witnesses – till his crimes develop into too critical. Grant performs a lovely half-French, half-Sioux girl towards who the hothead makes undesirable advances.

In an indication of its affect, Quentin Tarantino later stated that the movie was an inspiration for Tanner, the fictional film in his As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Gunman’s Stroll premiered in 1958, one 12 months earlier than one other Western, and the most recent movie within the Columbia Footage retrospective at Locarno, Trip Lonesome, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, Karen Steele, and Pernell Roberts.

Craig’s Spouse
Based mostly on the eponymous play by George Kelly, this 1936 melodrama is a uncommon film from feminine creators within the retrospective.

Dorothy Arzner, one among just some ladies administrators who managed to have a protracted and profitable profession in Hollywood in its early days and later turned a spotlight for college students of movie and relationships, directed the movie from a screenplay by Mary C. McCall Jr. The introduction at Locarno will come from one other feminine voice, particularly freelance author, critic, and movie historian Pamela Hutchinson.

Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billie Burke, Jane Darwell, and Dorothy Wilson star within the movie about Harriet, who has married a person as a result of he is ready to present the type of posh life-style she wishes. However when her husband will get a scare involving the police, her lifestyle is threatened.

You Nazty Spy! 
The 1940 comedy brief, directed by Jules White, stars the well-known slapstick comedy staff The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fantastic, and Curly Howard) and was the forty fourth of the 190 shorts launched by Columbia Footage with the comedians between 1934 and 1959.

The 18-minute movie is usually acknowledged as Hollywood’s first anti-Nazi comedy as its launch predated that of Charles Chaplin’s The Nice Dictator by a number of months. The title mixes parody of comic Joe Penner’s catchphrase “You Nasty Man!” with the 1939 Warner Bros. movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

Right here is the plot: Three ammunition producers are sad a couple of revenue decline because of King Herman the 6+⁷⁄₈‘s pacifist insurance policies. So that they conspire to overthrow him and arrange a dictatorship. The unwitting Stooges are wallpaper hangers who get chosen as figureheads for the brand new regime

The Discuss of the City
Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Colman star within the romantic comedy/drama, directed by George Stevens, that debuted in 1942.

Grant performs Leopold Dilg who’s accused of arson and homicide however escapes from jail throughout his trial and appears to cover in a distant cottage owned by his former schoolmate Nora, on whom he has had a crush for years. Nora rented the cottage to a legislation professor writing a e-book (Colman) for the summer season. When each Lightcap and Dilg arrive inside minutes of one another, Nora hides Dilg within the attic, and issues take their course from there.

A few the weather of the film have been uncommon for the time. One was the usage of two main males. The opposite was the position of a valet, performed by Rex Ingram, which again then was a uncommon instance of a non-stereotypical half for a Black actor.

The Woman From Shanghai
Orson Welles. Rita Hayworth. Everett Sloane. Noir thriller. Do we have to say extra?

Properly, we might. Welles stars in, directed, and wrote the screenplay for the 1947 film, primarily based on the novel If I Die Earlier than I Wake by Sherwood King. Glenn Anderson and Ted De Corsia additionally star. Plus, Charles Lawton Jr. dealt with the cinematography.

The basic is about Michael, an Irish sailor (Welles), who rescues Elsa (Hayworth) when her coach will get waylaid in Central Park and falls for her. However Elsa and her disabled prison protection legal professional husband (Sloane) simply arrived in New York Metropolis from Shanghai and journey on to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. Michael agrees to signal on as a seaman aboard the husband’s yacht.

The Massive Warmth
This 1953 movie noir additionally packs a punch and star energy. Directed by the “Grasp of Darkness” Fritz Lang, stars Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, and Jocelyn Brando. 

The story is shortly defined: a cop takes on the crime syndicate that controls his metropolis. The film begins when a murder detective known as on to analyze the suicide of a fellow cop.

So far as the story of the manufacturing goes, Columbia needed Marilyn Monroe to star however didn’t wish to pay the quantity that twentieth Century Fox demanded for loaning a rival their star.

Girls’s Jail
The solid checklist for the 1955 Columbia Footage basic is filled with feminine energy: Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter.

Behind the scenes, in fact, males have been in cost. Lewis Seiler directed the movie primarily based on a screenplay from Crane Wilbur and Jack DeWitt.

The plot can partly be guessed from the title. A sadistic jail warden takes out her sexual frustration on her ladies inmates, whereas a doctor tries to enhance the brutal environment within the jail. And a pair of rebellious inmates could take issues into their very own fingers.

Mr. Deeds Goes to City
Can’t get sufficient of Cary Grant and Jean Arthur? Properly, right here is one other romantic comedy/drama, this time from 1936. Plus, it’s directed by Frank Capra.

Robert Riskin wrote the screenplay in his fifth collaboration with Capra, primarily based on the brief story “Opera Hat” by Clarence Budington Kelland. Throughout early principal pictures, the mission nonetheless used the brief story’s title it was renamed primarily based on the profitable entry of a contest held by the Columbia Footage publicity division.

Grant performs an unassuming greeting card poet from a small city who heads to New York Metropolis after inheriting a fortune, solely to be hounded by folks attempting to make the most of him.