Tenth Festival of Preservation

THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK
(1984) Directed by Robert Epstein

The Academy Award-winning film that documents the life and assassination of San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk, makes clear from its title that Milk's era is as much the subject as Milk himself. From the stirring footage of the candlelight march after the murders of Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone to the heartfelt testimony of a straight union member who worked with Milk, the martyred supervisor's catalytic effect as the locus of a broader energy pervades every moment of the film. In a fitting parallel to its theme of the rise of the gay movement, the film's credits read today as a veritable who's who in independent film and politics.

Black Sand Productions. Producer: Richard Schmiechen. Cinematography: Frances Reid. Editor: Deborah Hoffmann, R. Epstein. Music: Mark Isham. Narrator: Harvey Fierstein. With: Harvey Milk, Anne Kronenberg, Tory Hartmann, Tom Ammiano. 35mm, 88 min.

Preservation funded by the Ahmanson Foundation in association with the Sundance Institute.

The Archive gratefully acknowledges the sponsorship of the Mondrian Hotel for the Opening Night of the Festival of Preservation.

Special thanks to: New Yorker Films, OUTFEST: The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

In person: Robert Epstein, Tom Ammiano

While NORA MORAN's plot–victimized woman descends into a life of degradation–is a pre-Code standard, its audacious telling elevates it into a class all its own. The film unfolds as a series of flashbacks, flash-forwards and flashbacks-within-flashbacks so complex the entire narrative structure quickly ceases to make sense, assuming a free-form, dream-like quality. Haunting, hallucinatory, artistic, exploitive–THE SIN OF NORA MORAN may be the best B-picture of the '30s.

Producer: P. Goldstone. Screenplay: Frances Hyland. Based on a play by Willis Maxwell Goodhue. Cinematography: Ira Morgan. Editor: Otis Garrett. With: Zita Johann, Alan Dinehart, Paul Cavanagh, Claire DuBrey. 35mm, 65 min.

Preservation funded by The Packard Humanities Institute.

Preceded by
THE HARD GUY
(1930) Directed by Arthur Hurley. With: Spencer Tracy, Katherine Alexander. 35mm, 8 min.
Preservation funded by the AFI/NEA Film Preservation Grants Program.

DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON
(1931) Directed by Lloyd Corrigan

Fu Manchu surfaces in London, where his undying lust for vengeance is again unleashed on the Petries. Not only is Sir John Petrie shot in his own home, his son Ronald is at risk of succumbing to the seductive charms of the archvillain's equally malevolent daughter (Anna May Wong). "Yellow peril" tropes are full-blown in this fantasy of Eastern threat: wafting incense, luxuriant silks, subterranean tunnels, the knife clutched under ample Chinese sleeves. But ironically the film is best remembered today for its Asian American actors Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa who bring mitigating grace, subtlety and gravity to their stereotyped roles.

Screenplay: L. Corrigan, Monte M. Katterjohn, Sidney Buchman. Based on the novel Daughter of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. Cinematography: Victor Milner. With: Anna May Wong, Warner Oland, Sessue Hayakawa, Bramwell Fletcher. 35mm, 79 min.

Preservation funded by Hugh M. Hefner.

Preceded by
THE FOY FAMILY IN "CHIPS OF THE OLD BLOCK"
(1928) Directed by Bryan Foy. 35mm, 8 min.
Preservation funded by Dudley Heer.

Like most silent stars, Harold Lloyd was under great pressure to make the transition into sound films. FEET FIRST, his second talkie, proved that Lloyd was among the few who could be successful in the new medium. Lloyd plays Harold Horne, an ambitious clerk in a Honolulu shoe store who dreams of moving up the ladder at work and in his social circle. A mishap lands Harold on a boat bound for the mainland. While at sea, he falls for Mary (Barbara Kent) and convinces her he is a big businessman, then struggles to make good his boast after they land in San Francisco.

Dialogue: Felix Adler, Lex Neal, Paul Gerard Smith. Based on a story by John Grey, Al Cohn. Cinematography: Walter Lundin, Henry Kohler. Editor: Bernard Burton. With: Harold Lloyd, Barbara Kent, Robert McWade, Lillian Leighton. 35mm, 90 min.

Preservation funded by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

While live TV grew from the efforts of hundreds of dedicated men and women, the person most responsible for the artistic brilliance of the dramatic anthology program was Fred Coe, who guided his signature series PHILCO-GOODYEAR PLAYHOUSE from its inception in 1948 until 1955, becoming in the process the preeminent television producer of his era. Coe believed that the tube could be a fount of great drama, and his "electronic theatre" produced some of TV's most enduring and entertaining classics, including Paddy Chayefsky's poignant MARTY and Horton Foote's tender TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL, to name just two.

UCLA holds kinescopes of many Fred Coe productions and in recent months has transferred a number of them to digital videotape. Utilizing excerpts from these and from kinescopes kindly supplied by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the Archive has assembled a tribute that features clips from a host of Coe-produced programs, including PHILCO-GOODYEAR PLAYHOUSE, PRODUCERS' SHOWCASE, MR. PEEPERS and PLAYHOUSE 90. The clip show will be followed by an episode of GOODYEAR TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE, unseen by audiences since its original broadcast almost 50 years ago.

Jon Krampner, author of Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television, will host the evening and moderate a discussion among some of Coe's collaborators, including director Delbert Mann and writers Bo Goldman, David Shaw and David Swift. The program will be introduced by Dan Einstein, UCLA Television Archivist.

Shot on a shoestring and conceived as an indictment of American bourgeois hypocrisy, THE NAKED KISS is a bombastic, idiosyncratic but wholly original hybrid–the B-movie as social critique. Constance Towers plays a reformed hooker, pure of heart, who finds renewed purpose as a small-town orthopedic nurse. Courtship with the dashing, local philanthropist promises to cement her integration into mainstream society, but her romantic fantasy is dashed in a shocking plot twist. Brilliantly uneven, THE NAKED KISS courts narrative banality only to be enlivened with tart dialogue, stylistic bravado and startling pulp violence.

Producer/Screenplay: S. Fuller. Cinematography: Stanley Cortez. Editor: Jerome Thoms. With: Constance Towers, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey, Patsy Kelly. 35mm, 90 min.

Preservation funded by the Ahmanson Foundation in association with the Sundance Institute.