Columbia Pictures 100 Years Celebrated at Locarno Film Festival 2024

From battle films and westerns to noir movies, screwball comedies all the best way to musicals – Sony-owned Columbia Photos has had them throughout its first 100 years. The 77th version of the Locarno Movie Pageant 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 Fifties,” as organizers spotlight on-line.

The Sony studio had beforehand had a One centesimal-anniversary bash at Cannes in Might, co-hosted by Tom Rothman, chairman & CEO of Sony Photos 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 Photos,” the fest explains on its web site. “This new studio would ultimately function, as its masthead, the Woman with a Torch, the Statue of Liberty-like feminine determine draped within the American flag that has turn into recognizable to movie lovers in every single place. As Columbia Photos, the studio struck gold, producing a significant string of successes and turning into, over the following decade, an integral a part of the Hollywood ecosystem.”

And Locarno inventive director Giona Nazzaro highlighted: “It was Columbia that supplied the best skilled alternatives to girls 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 and disentangle the knotty myths that encompass Columbia Photos and current a richer and extra advanced portrait of a studio value celebrating.”

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

So what Columbia Photos golden age classics will Locarno77 unspool? The total 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.

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

Wall Avenue
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 Photos film within the Locarno homage lineup.

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

Bitter Victory
This battle 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.

Primarily based 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 international lands on display screen but additionally traveled itself, debuting on the Venice Movie Pageant 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 Conflict II. Its forged contains Paul Lukas, Carl Esmond, Peter van Eyck, Mady Christians, Morris Carnovsky, and Okay.T. Stevens.

The movie screening in Locarno’s Columbia Photos retrospective obtained Oscar nominations for greatest unique rating and greatest artwork path.

Gunman’s Stroll
Because the title suggests, it is a Western. The Locarno crowd can be handled to a particular introduction from Sony Photos 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 strong rancher who all the time protects his hot-tempered grownup son (Hunter) by paying for damages and bribing witnesses – till his crimes turn 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 latest movie within the Columbia Photos retrospective at Locarno, Trip Lonesome, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, Karen Steele, and Pernell Roberts.

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

Dorothy Arzner, one in every of only a few girls administrators who managed to have an extended and profitable profession in Hollywood in its early days and later grew to become a spotlight for college kids 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 sort of posh life-style she needs. However when her husband will get a scare involving the police, her lifestyle is threatened.

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

The 18-minute movie is commonly 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 as a result of King Herman the 6+⁷⁄₈‘s pacifist insurance policies. In order 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 guide (Colman) for the summer time. 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 had been uncommon for the time. One was the usage of two main males. The opposite was the function 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?

Effectively, we may. 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 through the Panama Canal. Michael agrees to signal on as a seaman aboard the husband’s yacht.

The Large 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 rapidly defined: a cop takes on the crime syndicate that controls his metropolis. The film begins when a murder detective known as on to research the suicide of a fellow cop.

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

Girls’s Jail
The forged record for the 1955 Columbia Photos basic is stuffed with feminine energy: Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter.

Behind the scenes, in fact, males had 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 girls inmates, whereas a doctor tries to enhance the brutal ambiance 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? Effectively, 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 quick story “Opera Hat” by Clarence Budington Kelland. Throughout early principal pictures, the undertaking nonetheless used the quick story’s title it was renamed primarily based on the successful entry of a contest held by the Columbia Photos 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 individuals attempting to reap the benefits of him.