This is a heavy week, festival-wise. Another Hole in the Head and LOL-SF both run through the week. And the San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens Thursday night. I’m devoting an entire section of the newsletter to LOL-SF. Unfortunately, I don’t have links to specific films on the schedule.
The Iron Horse, Castro, Thursday, 7:00. This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens with John Ford’s first big-budget, epic western. I saw it on TV long ago, and it didn’t leave much of an impression. But I’m happy to give it another chance, especially since they’ll be screening the only existing 35mm print of the American cut, with Dennis James accompanying on the Castro’s Wurlitzer pipe organ.
A- Leave Her To Heaven, Castro, Wednesday. Gene Tierney’s “woman who loves too much” isn’t the typical film noir femme fatale, seducing men to their doom in her 
quest for material ends. She doesn’t need material things, but she needs her man (Cornel Wilde) so desperately she can’t bear the thought of sharing him with friends or family. And she’s willing to do anything to keep him to herself. Tierney gets top billing, but the real star of Leave Her to Heaven is Technicolor. Set mostly in scenic locations (New Mexico, rural Maine, and others), the film shows three-strip Technicolor at its best.
A Harakiri, VIZ Cinema, Sunday through 
Tuesday. Absolutely the best samurai film not made by Akira Kurosawa. A samurai (Kurosawa regular Tatsuya Nakadai) comes to a fort and asks permission to kill himself, then tells a harrowing tale of poverty made unbearable by the strict samurai code. Director Masaki Kobayashi had no love for feudal Japan’s social structure, which he shows as cruel, arrogant, and hypocritical. Part of the series Samurai Saga Vol.1.
F(?) Double Bill: The Most Beautiful &The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, Pacific Film Archive, Wednesday, 7:00. Akira Kurosawa’s second film, The Most Beautiful, is pretty much pointless. A wartime home-front propaganda movie, it paints a dull picture of teenage girls working in an optical factory making bombing sights for the brave bomber pilots. However, since I’ve only seen it on a wretched Hong Kong DVD with a horrible transfer and worse subtitles, it may not be quite as bad as I remember it. The other feature, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, is now the only Kurosawa film that I’ve never seen. I intend to rectify it on Wednesday night. Part of the PFA’s summer-long Akira Kurosawa Centennial series.
A King Kong (1933 version), Oakland Paramount, Friday, 8:00. The first effects-laden adventure film of the sound era still holds up. It’s not just Willis O’Brien’s breathtaking special effects–technically crude by today’s standards but still awe-inspiring. 
It’s the intelligent script by Ruth Rose, the evocative score by Max Steiner, and the wonderful cast headed by Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong. But most of all, it’s the complex title character. Kong is the stuff of nightmares, utterly terrifying as he grinds people into the ground or bites them to death, but also confused, loving, majestic, and ultimately doomed. Pretty good for an 18-inch model covered with rabbit fur. Sure, the story is silly, but so are dreams. Part of this summer’s Paramount Movie Classics series.
B+ Stray Dog, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 8:30. This 1949 police procedural follows a young, rookie detective (Toshiro Mifune) who loses his gun to a pickpocket. Tortured by guilt, he becomes obsessed with finding the stolen Colt. Stray Dog works best as a straight-up thriller, and doesn’t work at all when it tries to say something meaningful about the relationship between the police and the criminals they chase. See my Kurosawa Diaries entry. Part of the PFA’s summer-long Akira Kurosawa Centennial series.
D Vertigo, Stanford, Saturday through Tuesday. What? I’m not recommending 
Vertigo? Everyone else thinks it’s a masterpiece, but it tops my short list of the Most Overrated Films of All Time. Vertigo isn’t like any other Alfred Hitchcock movie; it’s slow, uninvolving, and self-consciously arty. On a double bill with Destry Rides Again, which I saw once long ago and, if memory serves, liked.
B The Bad and the Beautiful, Castro, Friday. The same year he made The Band Wagon, Vincente Minnelli used a Citizen Kane-like multiple flashback structure to tell the story of a talented, outwardly nice Hollywood producer who only seems evil to those who get close enough to become a former friend. As realistic a look at how Hollywood changes and corrupts those who serve it as tinsel town has ever dared to make. On a double bill with The Big Knife, which I’ve never seen.
LOL-SF screenings:
Why Comedies Aren’t Taken Seriously, Vogue, Sunday, 5:00. Former Chronicle columnist Gerald Nachman moderates a discussion on comedy’s lack of artistic respect.
A Duck Soup, Vogue, Sunday, 2:00. A blatantly corrupt politician (Groucho 
Marx) becomes the country’s all-powerful leader on the whim of the wealthy elite (Margaret Dumont). Once in office, he cuts benefits for the working class, fills important positions with unqualified clowns, and starts a war on a whim. Enemy spies (Chico and Harpo Marx) terrorize the good citizens with puns and scissors. All very silly, of course, but how could a comedy made in 1933 be relevant today? “We got guns. They got guns. All God’s chillun got guns!” The Marx Brothers at their very best.
A Groundhog Day, Vogue, Sunday, 7:00. Is Groundhog Day a deep, spiritual meditation on the nature of human existence and the power of redemption? Or is it simply the best comedy (although not quite the funniest) of the 1990s? It’s hard to say, but as weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) relives the same day over and over again, with no changes except the ones he makes himself, there appears to be something profound going on along with something profoundly entertaining. Introduced by comedian Bob Sarlatte.
A- Chicken Run, Vogue, Saturday, 2:00. The Great Escape with chickens, and all made out of clay. The first (and best) feature from the Wallace and Gromit gang has a group of very British chickens and one cocky rooster (Mel Gibson) bound to escape the farm before they’re all turned into pies. Animated in clay, it’s a remarkable feat of ingenuity, technical savvy, and pure patience. More importantly, it’s hilarious. Introduced by standup comic W. Kamau Bell.
A- Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Vogue, Tuesday, 7:30. Men are jerks and women are crazy. At least that’s the view of Pedro Almodovar’s comedy of infidelity. 
The picture starts like a reasonably serious comedy, sprinkling a few laughs in with the character study. But it keeps suggesting something broader. The décor is just a little over the top, and some of the jokes (consider the detergent commercial) are in the stratosphere. Those outrageous bits are a harbinger of things to come. By the half-way point, the movie is as wacky as classic American screwball comedy–and considerably bawdier. Carmen Maura stars as the woman wronged (well, the main woman wronged), with an impossibly young Antonio Banderas playing the son of the man who wronged her.
B The Pink Panther (1963 version), Vogue, Monday, 7:30. The original Pink Panther was never intended to be an Inspector Clouseau movie, or a Peter Sellers vehicle. It was meant to be a charming European comedy of manners starring David Niven. But when Peter Ustinov dropped out at the last minute, Sellers was cast in the supporting role of the bumbling detective. It’s a tribute to Sellers’ performance that we now think of him as the star. But the scenes without him, which are most of the movie, are only okay.
Bayflicks 