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Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival will celebrate the centennial of Columbia Pictures with an expansive retrospective titled The Lady with the Torch, mounted in collaboration with the studio’s parent company, Sony.

Organized in partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse, The Lady with the Torch will be curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato, an annual festival in Bologna dedicated to film history and film restoration. The official unveiling will take place at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Locarno has said the retrospective will present the studio in “all its glory,” shining a light on lesser-known genre filmmakers like Max Nosseck, Seymour Friedman, and William A. Seiter, as well as celebrating auteurs like Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, George Stevens, and John Ford. After launching at the 77th Locarno Film Festival, running August 7-17, the retrospective will tour the world. The Retrospective will...

Guest reviewer Matt Rovner delves into the cultural riches of ethnic films specially made for speakers of the Yiddish language. Some were filmed in Poland and others in New Jersey (according to Edgar Ulmer!)… and if they seem obscure they’re nevertheless culturally significant as a record of a language that’s fast disappearing. Among the gems is a significant folk-horror tale and an original non-musical drama about Tevye the Milkman’s problems with his daughter and the oppressive laws of the Czar.

The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema

Blu-ray

Kino Lorber Repertory

The Dybbuk, American Matchmaker, Her Second Mother, Mir Kumen On, Tevya, Overture to Glory, Eli Eli, Jewish King Lear, Motel the Operator, Three Daughters

1935-1940 / all B&w / 1:37 Academy

750 min. / Street Date November 24, 2020

available through Kino Lorber

Starring: Avrom Morewski, Leo Fuchs, Moishe Oysher, Maurice Schwartz, Maurice Krohner, Chaim Tauber, Max Badin, Charlotte Goldstein,...

Igo Kantor, whose Hollywood career took him from Howard Hughes’ projection room to supervising post-production on “Easy Rider” and producing B-movies like “Kingdom of the Spiders” and “Mutant,” died Oct. 15. He was 89.

Kantor, who was born in Vienna and raised in Lisbon, met “Dillinger” director Max Nosseck on the ship to New York. Nosseck gave him an intro to his projectionist brother while Kantor was studying at UCLA, leading to a job screening screened movies for Hughes at a private theater while he was secretly dating actress Jean Peters, whom Hughes later married.

In the early 1960s, Kantor opened post-production house Synchrofilm, becoming the post-production supervisor on “The Monkees,” which led to Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson hiring him to head post-production on “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens.”

He received Emmy nominations three years in a row for his work on the Bob Hope Christmas specials.

Paulette Dubost, known as the "Dean of French Cinema," and an actress in films directed by Jean Renoir, Marcel L'Herbier, Jacques Tourneur, Julien Duvivier, Max Ophüls, Preston Sturges, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, and Marcel Carné, died of "natural causes" on Sept. 21 in the Parisian suburb of Longjumeau. The Paris-born Dubost had turned 100 years old on October 8, 2010. Dubost's show business career began at the age of seven, performing various duties at the Paris Opera. Following some stage training, her film debut took place in 1931 in Wilhelm Thiele's Le bal, which also marked the film debut of Danielle Darrieux (who's still around and still active). Ultimately, Dubost's film career was to span more than seven decades, during which time she was featured in over 140 movies. She is probably best remembered as the adulterous chambermaid Lisette in Jean Renoir's 1939 comedy-drama La règle du jeu / The Rules of the Game, considered by...

It's the Fourth of July weekend, and what better way to celebrate America's independence than by watching a John Dillinger decide taxation with representation wasn't nearly as much fun as the patriots made it out to be. Public Enemies has gone wide this week, brandishing their tommy guns in the hopes of stealing some of Transformers' box office thunder. If anyone can do it, it might just be Johnny Depp, who does appeal to a crowd that Optimus Prime just can't reach.

Jeffrey Anderson was full of praise for Michael Mann's film, likening it to earlier crime classics such as Max Nosseck's Dillinger or Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson. "... it equals them, capturing some of their raw energy and allure and clocking in as a longer, but equally fast-moving and adrenaline-pumping example Somehow Mann only manages to use the extra time for flash and spectacle, and hardly any for depth or detail,...

Essentially there are two kinds of gangster movies: those made during the time when men wore hats in real life and those made during the time when men wore hats that came from wardrobe. The first type are usually in black-and-white, punchy, nervy and full of wisecracks. The second type are usually longer and more violent, but slower-paced and nobler of purpose, as if the hats suddenly carried an extra weight, an extra sadness. What Michael Mann has achieved with the new Public Enemies is an often fascinating, striking combination of the two.

I walked into the new film, convinced that it could never top lean, mean B-movie classics like Max Nosseck's Dillinger (1945) or Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson (1957) in which these gangsters were initially immortalized. But it equals them, capturing some of their raw energy and allure and clocking in as a longer, but equally fast-moving and adrenaline-pumping example.

The B Noir festival is a hit! It's always a delight to hear about retrospective programming doing well. There are still people out there interested in and trying out old movies in theaters. Or maybe the San Francisco noir crowd is just that strong. I'd written about "I Wake Up Dreaming" a couple of weeks back (read it here); I have since went and saw some of the movies they're playing.

If you're in the Bay Area and you haven't spared the time, there's good news. The festival was supposed to end this Thursday, but I have just been informed that since it is selling out so well, they've decided to add another week of showings!

The list of extra screenings is at the bottom, but before that, I want to recommend trying to get to this Friday's showing of The Devil Thumbs a Ride, which I managed to catch on the fest's opening night.