The San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens its four-day run on Thursday.
The Big Uneasy, Elmwood, opens Friday; Rafael, Monday, 7:15. We associate 
comedian Harry Shearer with mockumentaries (Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind), but now he’s made the real thing. In his first true documentary (which I haven’t yet seen), Shearer examines the causes of New Orleans’ disastrous flooding, and shows how the human errors that allowed such destruction are still being made. Shearer will attend the Rafael screening.
A Babe, Red Vic, Sunday and Monday. I didn’t see the recent documentary Forks Over Knives, so I still consider Babe the greatest work of vegetarian propaganda in the cinema. It’s also a sweet, funny, and charming fairy tale about a pig who wants to become a sheep dog. This Australian import helped audiences and critics recognize character actor James Cromwell’s exceptional talent, and technically broke considerable ground in the category of live-action talking-animal movies. Warning: If you take your young children to this G-rated movie, you may have trouble afterwards getting them to eat bacon.
A+ Sunrise, Castro, Thursday, 9:15. Haunting, romantic, and impressionistic, F. W. Murnau’s first American feature 
turns the mundane into the fantastic and the world into a work of art. The plot is simple: A marriage, almost destroyed by another woman, is healed by a day of reconciliation and romance in the big city. But the execution, with its stylized sets, beautiful photography, and talented performers, makes it both touchingly personal and abstractly mythological. Basically a silent film, the 1927 Sunrise was one of the first films released with a soundtrack (music and effects, only). But the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will skip the recorded score and present this masterpiece with live accompaniment by Giovanni Spinelli on electric guitar. That will upset the purists!
A The Conformist, Pacific Film Archive, Thursday, 7:00. It takes more than good men doing nothing to create fascism. According to Bernardo Bertolucci’s haunting character study, it also takes mediocre men with career ambitions. Jean-Louis Trintignant is chilling as a bland cog in the machine, ready to use his honeymoon in homicidal service to Mussolini. With Stefania Sandrelli as his not-too-bright bride and Dominique Sanda, in a star-making performance, as the object of everyone’s desire. Part of the series Bernardo Bertolucci: In Search of Mystery.
A Red Beard, VIZ Cinema @ New People, Saturday, 2:00. Akira Kurosawa never stated his central theme–the importance of kindness and charity in an otherwise 
cruel universe–more powerfully or directly than in this three-hour, 1965 epic. A samurai movie without sword play (but with one fantastic judo fight), Red Beard concentrates on human suffering and what must be done to relieve it. Toshiro Mifune, in his last performance for Kurosawa, plays a doctor in a mid-19th century slum clinic, desperately fighting corruption and exploitation as well as disease. The story is told through the eyes of an arrogant young intern (Yuzo Kayama), shocked to discover that he’s been assigned to work with patients he views as beneath him. Read my Kurosawa Diary entry.
A+ Double Bill: Casablanca & The Maltese Falcon, Stanford, Saturday through Thursday. What can I say? You’ve either already seen Casablanca or know you should. Let me just add that no one who worked on Casablanca thought they were making a masterpiece; it was just 
another entertaining propaganda movie coming off the Warner assembly line. But somehow, just this once, everything came together perfectly. Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, had been filmed twice before, but screenwriter and first-time director John Huston did it right this time with the perfect cast and a screenplay that sticks almost word-for-word to the book. The ultimate Hammett picture, the second-best directorial debut of 1941, an important precursor to film noir, and perhaps the most entertaining detective movie ever made.
The Hippie Temptation, Red Vic, Thursday. I saw this already aging CBS news special in a club not too far from the current location of the Red Vic, probably about 1977. At the time, I thought it was hilarious (unintentionally, of course). I have no idea how I would react to it today.
F Scandal, VIZ Cinema @ New People, Sunday, 2:00. After opening credits that promise a fast-paced film noir, we get a preachy, dull, and utterly predictable story about a semi-famous painter who innocently meets a beautiful, much more famous singer, only to find their names and photos splashed together by the 1949 Japanese equivalent of the National Enquirer. Although the protagonist is a) an artist, b) rides a motorcycle, c) considers himself something of a rebel, and d) is played by Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa still manages to make him dull, lifeless, and as annoyingly virtuous as Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. See my Kurosawa Diary entry.
Bayflicks 