Orson Welles' film “Too Much Johnson” discovered

Arlene Francis with a photo of Joseph Cotten in a scene from "Too Much Johnson."

"Early Film by Orson Welles Is Rediscovered"

by

Dave Kehr

August 7th, 2013

The New York Times

In 1941, Orson Welles made his debut as a feature film director with “Citizen Kane,” a fact well known to everyone who has ever taken Film 101.

Less well known is that “Kane” wasn’t Welles’s debut as a filmmaker. That distinction belongs to “Hearts of Age,” an eight-minute parody of an avant-garde allegory that Welles, as the world’s most precocious teenager, codirected with a friend, William Vance, at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill. Amazingly, that 1934 effort, in which Welles wears old-age makeup that anticipates the elderly Kane, has survived, and can even be seen on YouTube.

But neither was “Kane” Welles’s first professional encounter with the cinema. That happened three years before his Hollywood debut, in the form of about 40 minutes of footage intended to be shown with “Too Much Johnson,” a revival of an 1894 farce that Welles intended to bring to Broadway for the 1938 season of his Mercury Theater.

The cast of “Too Much Johnson” included several members of his Mercury troupe: Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Howard Smith, Edgar Barrier, Mary Wickes and Welles’s wife at the time, Virginia Nicholson, billed under her stage name, Anna Stafford. The music was composed by Paul Bowles (who later wrote “The Sheltering Sky”); legend has it that an aspiring comedian named Judith Tuvim, later Judy Holliday, was one of the extras.

For generations, Welles scholars have been intrigued by “Too Much Johnson,” which would seem to represent Welles’s first real experience composing a film to be seen by a paying public, with the support of a professional cast and a professional crew. But for over 50 years, no print had been known to exist.

Welles never quite finished editing the large amount of footage he shot for “Too Much Johnson,” and when the show folded out of town, after a disastrous preview in Stony Creek, Conn., he set the film aside and forgot about it.

Sometime in the 1960s, as Welles told Frank Brady for an article in the November 1978 issue of American Film, he came across the material again, in his villa in Spain. “I can’t remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was,” Welles recalled. “I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present.”

Regrettably, while Welles was away for an acting job, a fire destroyed the villa and most of its contents. “Too Much Johnson,” which had been shot on highly inflammable nitrate stock, had apparently been lost to the ages.

But things have turned out otherwise. “Too Much Johnson” has reappeared — discovered not in Spain but in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s. Old films turn up with some regularity under similar circumstances — independent filmmakers aren’t always known for promptly paying their storage bills — but because nitrate becomes even more dangerously unstable as it ages, the usual practice is to junk it as quickly as possible.

This time, though, the movie gods were smiling. Pordenone happens to be home to Cinemazero, a cultural organization that regularly screens classic films, and which each fall partners with the Cineteca del Friuli to present Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, a gathering of scholars and cinephiles with a special dedication to the shadowy corners of film history.

The Cinemazero staff realized what they’d found and turned the footage over to George Eastman House in Rochester, where the work of stabilizing the film and transferring it to modern safety stock is proceeding with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. “Too Much Johnson” is scheduled to have its premiere in Pordenone during this year’s festival, which begins on Oct. 5, and will be screened at Eastman House on Oct. 16. If the financing can be found, the foundation will offer the film over the Internet later in the year.

In the meantime, the frame enlargements from “Too Much Johnson” that have been released suggest a young filmmaker — Welles was all of 23 at the time — with a striking command of his medium. The images are unmistakably his, with their strong, close-cropped compositions, powerful diagonals and insistent, ironic use of the “heroic angle” — the positioning of the camera to look up at the actor as if he were a statue posed on a pedestal.

There are no heroes in “Too Much Johnson” — only a frantic womanizer from Yonkers named Augustus Billings (played by Cotten). Billings has been carrying on an extramarital indiscretion under the invented identity of the owner of a plantation in Cuba named Johnson — a figure who, inconveniently enough, actually exists, as Billings discovers when he arrives in Santiago, Chile, in the company of his wife (Nicholson), his mother-in-law (Wickes) and a jealous husband (Barrier).

Each act of the play — written by the celebrated actor William Gillette as a vehicle for himself — was to begin with a film segment. The first (and most nearly completed in the rediscovered print) was a chase across Lower Manhattan shot in the style of a silent comedy, complete with Keystone Kop-like pursuers, a suffragist parade to barrel through and Cotten tottering on the edge of a skyscraper like Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last.”

Working with Paul Dunbar, a cameraman with Pathé News, Welles shot a large amount of footage for “Too Much Johnson” — some 25,000 feet, nearly four hours’ worth — and apparently had a good time doing it. Home movies of the shoot, taken by a Mercury Theater investor and preserved in the Pacific Film Archive, show Welles wearing a battered straw hat and bellowing orders to his actors, who are splashing around in a flooded Hudson Valley rock quarry meant to represent the Caribbean. Laughing and animated, the slim, young Welles is clearly already under the spell of the apparatus he would call, at the time of “Kane,” “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.”

For Simon Callow, the British actor, director and Welles biographer (“The Road to Xanadu”), the most important development came next, as Welles sequestered himself with an editing machine in his suite at the St. Regis in Manhattan in a frantic attempt to assemble the film in time for the play’s out-of-town tryout.

“The great thing that happened to him on ‘Too Much Johnson’ was that he discovered editing, and began to see the possibilities,” Mr. Callow wrote in an e-mail from London. “I suspect that at that point he suddenly lost interest in the production altogether and would have loved to have continued his celluloid self-education.”

The education ended abruptly. For reasons that remain unclear — perhaps because a few cast members complained to Actors Equity that they weren’t being paid enough to appear in a film; perhaps because the Connecticut theater couldn’t accommodate a movie projector — the prologue footage was scrapped. The play didn’t make much sense without it, and the decision was made not to take it to Broadway, much to Welles’s disappointment.

“He was a complete tyro,” Mr. Callow wrote, “discovering a new medium and unsure how it would work.”

Come October, we’ll at last be in a position to know if it did.

Also, see...

An early Alfred Hitchcock film discovered in New Zealand

Quintessential trashy Mars movie...still want to go to Mars?

I still think the movement towards a trip to Mars is premature. Maybe a viewing of the 1960 film, The Angry Red Planet, would convince one to wait a bit longer.

Not much positive to write about the movie's content though it has gathered a number of cult followers. Despite several silly moments of dialogue such as...

The ship has returned to Earth.

Control: "Stand by to check interior radiation."
Treegar: "Hold it, look!"
Control: "Recovery squads, hold!"
Treegar: "Someone's alive!"
Guy: "The girl!"
Treegar: "To hell with radiation, let's go!"

Audio

Treegar will regret that statement in the future.

...the film is marked with some filming curiosities.

First, here is the plot...

Wikipedia...

The rocketship MR-1 (for "Mars Rocket 1"), returns to Earth after the first manned flight to Mars. At first thought to have been lost in space, the rocket reappears but mission control cannot raise the crew by radio. The ground crew land the rocket successfully by remote control. Two survivors are found aboard: Dr. Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden) and Col. Tom O'Bannion (Gerald Mohr), the latter's arm covered by a strange alien growth. The mission report is recounted by Dr. Ryan as she attempts to find a cure for Col. O'Bannion's arm.

While exploring Mars, Ryan was attacked by a carnivorous plant, which was killed by O'Bannion. They also discover, after mistaking its legs for trees, an immense bat-rat-spider creature, which is later repelled by a freeze ray fired by weapons officer Jacobs. When they return to their ship, the crew finds that their radio signals are being blocked and the MR-1 is grounded by a force field. O'Bannion leads the crew to a Martian lake with a city visible on the other side. They cross in an inflatable raft, only to be stopped by a giant amoeba-like creature with a single spinning eye. The creature kills Jacobs and infects O'Bannon's arm. The survivors escape to the MR-1 and commence liftoff. The survivors then return to Earth, where O'Bannon's infected arm is cured using electric shocks.

When all of the data brought back by the expedition is examined, the mission scientists find a recorded message. An alien voice announces that the MR-1 crew were allowed to leave so they can deliver a message to Earth. The Martians are watching human development and believe its technology has outpaced cultural advancement. They warn humanity to never return to Mars or Earth will be destroyed in retaliation.

Now the curiosities...

Director Ib Jørgen Melchior was given just 10 days with a budget of $200,000 for filming and post production work.

Creative filming had to be employed i.e., the Cinemagic process.

IMDb...

The much-touted Cinemagic process which was used for the scenes set on Mars was actually the result of a film-developing mistake. The budget was slashed mid-production so the producers considered turning the film into black and white to keep costs down. However, one reel became accidentally double-exposed which produced a shimmering, vaguely psychedelic glare that director Ib Melchior latched onto, thinking it would suit his purposes for the Mars scenes. (It also helped to camouflage the cheap Martian monsters and scenery.)

Wikipedia...

CineMagic is the name of a film process invented by Norman Maurer and 3-D movie producer Sid Pink for the 1959 science-fiction film The Angry Red Planet to cast a red glow over scenes depicting the surface of Mars. The low-cost process made the actors look similar to cartoon drawings so they would fit in with low-budget, less realistic sets and props.

To achieve this effect, a black and white film negative was first processed with solarisation (a process which partially reverses the negative making some areas of the image appear positive). The resulting film was then tinted red. Making a film positive was not necessary. At the time The Angry Red Planet was produced, black and white film cost less than color film and processing. The combination of using black and white film for all scenes depicting Mars and not needing to produce a film positive lowered production costs for the film.

I remember viewing this film during the Summer in a non-airconditioned theater. The Martian scenes were too much: Heat, stuffy air, and hot-looking Martian surface. Despite all the drawbacks, it is an entertaining film. The "rat-spider" is still pretty cool.

The Angry Red Planet

Directed by Ib Jørgen Melchior

1960

Trailer

The "experts" need a reality check

Carrie Fisher out of mothballs and ready for a sequel

Prequels, sequels, remakes--whatever...they usually fail.

"Carrie Fisher says she's signed up to Star Wars sequel"

More than four decades after first playing Princess Leia, actor says she will be returning for the seventh film in the blockbuster series

by

Ben Child   

March 7th, 2013

guardian.co.uk

Carrie Fisher has said she will reprise her role as Princess Leia in the new series of Star Wars films being planned by Disney, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Fisher, Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), and Harrison Ford (Han Solo), have all been tipped to return to the long-running space opera ever since the studio announced its $4.05bn (£2.7bn) purchase of all rights from creator George Lucas in October. However, the writer, actor and comic's comments in an interview with Palm Beach Illustrated are the first indication she is confirmed to star. Asked if she would be returning to the saga, Fisher replied simply: "Yes". She then joked that Leia would these days reside in "an intergalactic old folks' home", adding: "I just think she would be just like she was before, only slower and less inclined to be up for the big battle."

However, the actor's comments have since been described as "a joke" by her representative, who said; "Nothing has been announced."
Fisher becomes the first member of the iconic trio of actors who headlined the first three Star Wars films between 1977 and 1983 to claim involvement in Star Wars: Episode VII and its successors. The new movie is being directed by Star Trek's JJ Abrams and is written by Toy Story 3's Michael Arndt. Hamill recently said he had discussed returning to play Luke with Lucas, while Ford has been heavily tipped to return despite keeping tight-lipped on the subject.

Fisher, who was just 19 when she began filming 1977's debut Star Wars movie, joked in November that she would love to marry Harrison Ford's Han Solo but was not sure the relationship would last. "I like the idea of being Mrs Solo, and we've just fought and fought and I killed him – but I'm sorry," she told host Aisha Tyler on US TV show The Chat. "I probably had an affair with some general."

Fisher went through a well-publicised period of addiction during the late 70s and has admitted taking cocaine of the set of 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. She documented her experiences in the semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1990. The actor revived her career in the late 80s with comedies such as The Burbs and When Harry Met Sally, but has since worked mostly as a comedian and Hollywood script editor. Her one-woman play Wishful Drinking ran on Broadway in 2009 and she has voiced the character Angela in TV comedy Family Guy.

Disney confirmed last month that it will make a number of spinoff films to sit alongside its previously announced sequel trilogy. Rumours have suggested some could be set within the timeline of the original trilogy and feature characters such as Yoda, Solo, Darth Vader and bounty hunter Boba Fett.

Weimar Republic, cinema, Hollywood

Fritz Lang

"Hollywood's German Influence"

by

A. J. Goldmann

March 4th, 2013

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

They don't make them like they used to. But while the most recent Berlin Film Festival was filled with largely mediocre competition fare, luckily one could seek refuge in the festival's sidebar retrospective, "The Weimar Touch." Co-curated by the Deutsche Kinematek and the Museum of Modern Art—it will be shown in New York with slight modifications from April 3 through May 6—the series used the works of such celebrated directors as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder to make a compelling case for the lasting influence of Weimar-era cinema on Hollywood and beyond.

It is hard to overstate the amount of technical innovation and sheer talent that characterized the German film industry between 1918 and 1933. Today this golden age is best remembered for Expressionist masterpieces such as Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu." But Weimar filmmaking was much more than just sinister lighting and jagged camera angles. The industry also produced comedies, musicals, melodramas and thrillers that were among the most popular and inventive movies of the era.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, many of Germany's most gifted directors, actors, cinematographers, production designers and composers were forced out of its film industry. All told, the country lost more than 2,000 professionals, many of Jewish descent. And Germany's loss was Hollywood's gain. The themes, techniques and sensibilities that a generation of émigré filmmakers carried with them to Hollywood brought a new degree of sophistication and know-how to American cinema.

"We wanted to examine the richness and the deep influence on film culture—not just in the States, but around the world as well," explained Laurence Kardish, former senior curator of film for MoMA and one of the retrospective's architects. "Don't forget that Hitchcock's first two films were made in Munich, so there's a deep influence at least in terms of professional techniques that he learned here and a certain cynicism and skepticism." The master of suspense is represented at the MoMA retrospective with 1953's "I Confess!" about a priest who is the prime suspect in a murder case.

But "The Weimar Touch" urges viewers to discover more to the Weimar influence than long shadows and claustrophobic ambiance. For instance, one of the most delightful entries is Hollywood's beautiful 1935 version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" directed by Max Reinhardt, legendary director of the Deutsches Theater, and starring Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney and Mickey Rooney. Lubitsch was one of Weimar's most successful directors when he came over to Hollywood in 1922. His elegant wit was on display in a string of romantic comedies that were marked by dazzling performances and perfect comic timing. He is represented in the series with "To Be or Not to Be," his once-controversial 1942 Nazi satire set in occupied Warsaw.

In addition to American productions, the retrospective contains little-known works from other countries that served as stops for directors in exile. Kurt Gerron's "Het mysterie van de Mondscheinsonate" (Mystery of the Moonlight Sonata), a 1935 Dutch thriller shot using only natural light, bears the clear influence of both Weimar music-hall films and thrillers. Gerron was trapped in Holland and killed at Auschwitz, but Max Ophüls, whose rare 1936 comedy "Komedie om Geld" (The Trouble with Money) is another of the series' rediscoveries, went on to have a celebrated career in the U.S. and France.

Films by American-born directors Orson Welles and John Ford in the retrospective attest to the influence of Weimar cinema on generations of American directors. "Ford acknowledged Murnau's influence and we know that Welles saw all these films," Mr. Kardish said. Discussing Welles's 1958 film-noir classic "Touch of Evil" he notes that it "also says something that Marlene Dietrich is the star."

Film noir is the genre that perhaps most clearly bears the traces of Weimar cinema, and MoMA has selected two of the genre's finest representatives for screening, Welles's "The Stranger" (1946) and Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter" (1955).

"Casablanca" (1942) can be seen as the crowning achievement of Los Angeles's émigré community in the 1940s. The plot focuses largely on the existential concerns of European refugees hounded by the Third Reich. Not only were director Michael Curtiz and the majority of the cast European born; many of the actors, including Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt, were themselves refugees with firsthand knowledge of the ordeals many of the film's characters undergo.

Some émigré directors used film to raise public awareness of Hitler's threat. Mr. Kardish mentioned that Anatole Litvak's "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" (1939), which will screen at MoMA, the first studio film to feature Nazis as villains, was heavily condemned by those who opposed a U.S. entry into World War II. "There was a whole hullaballoo about it. A lot of people didn't want to see the film made. The film industry itself warned Warner Brothers not to make the film," he said.

Directors who fled Germany also helped introduce themes of social justice to American cinema. For example, Lang's first Hollywood film, "Fury," also on the program, takes aim at small-town vigilante justice. "These directors started to bring questions about how American society works, and I think it made American society healthier for it," Mr. Kardish said.

While Weimar cinema continues to inspire filmmakers, the festival covers films only through 1959. "That's when the language of cinema changed with Godard and Antonioni," Mr. Kardish explained, pointing to the innovations of the French New Wave auteurs and other filmmakers who rewrote the rules in the 1960s.

The youngest film in the retrospective is "Some Like It Hot" (1959), directed by the Austrian-born Billy Wilder. Freshly arrived in Hollywood in 1933, after a stint in Paris, he wrote screenplays for Lubitsch and roomed with Lorre in Los Angeles. Wilder introduced to American film an element of subversive humor and high jinks that his Hollywood movies would continue to deliver for decades; his acerbic wit and penchant for envelope-pushing material was a defining feature of his filmmaking.

"For me, 'Some Like it Hot' is one of the great Weimar films," Mr. Kardish said. "That film could not have been made without a certain sensibility. That sensibility, I believe, was deeply informed by Berlin in the '20s." The film did not receive Production Code approval, due to its sexual innuendo and gangster bloodshed. As Mr. Kardish noted in introducing the picture at its packed Berlin screening: "This film is a pure joy, but it owes a lot to the concerns of Weimar society, in terms of very black humor, cynicism, questions of identity, violence. And cross-dressing."

Pathé studios releases a wonderful 1908 hand colored film..."The Fairies and the Faun"

 The Guardian...

The success of Martin Scorsese's Hugo has reignited interest in the very earliest forms of cinema, and the French company Pathé was at the forefront of the new art form at the dawn of the 20th century. This four-minute short, Le Faune (The Fairies and the Faun), was shot in 1908 by the Pathé brothers. It takes the form of a ballet filled with trick photography and beautiful hand-tinted colours. The music is composed and performed by Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Pathé [Wikipedia]

Hugo [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Koji Wakamatsu

Koji Wakamatsu
April 1st, 1936 to October 17th, 2012

"Koji Wakamatsu, Self-Taught Movie Director, Dies at 76"

by

Bruce Weber

October 20th, 2012

The New York Times

Koji Wakamatsu, a Japanese director and provocateur who flung sex, violence and politics on the screen in more than 100 films, died on Wednesday in Tokyo, two weeks after he was named Asian filmmaker of the year at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. He was 76.

His production company confirmed the death in a statement. News reports said he died of injuries sustained when he was hit by a taxi in Tokyo on Oct. 12.

Mr. Wakamatsu, a self-taught director who never finished school, made some of his most admired films in his last years. Perhaps his most ambitious, “United Red Army,” a work of more than three hours long released in 2007, melds documentary and fictional techniques to examine the rise and implosion of Japan’s radical left and his own disillusionment with anti-authoritarian militancy.

“Caterpillar” (2010), an antiwar drama, tells the story of a highly sexualized marital struggle between a Japanese villager and her husband, a soldier returned from the Chinese-Japanese wars deaf and disfigured. In “11.25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate,” released this year, Mr. Wakamatsu examined the final years of the novelist Yukio Mishima, the evolution of his ultranationalist views and his ritual suicide in 1970.

Mr. Wakamatsu began his career in the 1960s, working in the exploitative genre of soft-core pornography known in Japan as pinku eiga. But even his early films had rage-against-the-machine elements of political and social commentary. “The Embryo Hunts in Secret” (1966), a representation of class struggle shot in one room with just two actors, tells of a woman held captive and molested by her boss, though the clear implication is that psychologically the woman is the more powerful of the two and controls the relationship.

Mr. Wakamatsu may be best known in the United States for a film for which he served as executive producer, “In the Realm of the Senses” (1976). Directed by Nagisa Oshima, the film is an explicit, kinkily erotic tale of an obsessive love affair set in the 1930s.

Mr. Wakamatsu may have been less known in the United States as a director because the State Department had refused to grant him a visa, owing to his early radical political affiliations.

An outsider in the mainstream movie world in Japan who relished the freedom of independent filmmaking, Mr. Wakamatsu regularly worked with small budgets. But he believed in the power of film to influence the world.

“The reason I became a filmmaker was to talk to the country,” he said in Busan.

Information about Mr. Wakamatsu’s survivors was not immediately available.

Koji Wakamatsu was born in the Tohoku region of Japan, north of Tokyo, on April 1, 1936. He was expelled from school for fighting and left home for Tokyo, where he became a low-level gangster and was introduced to movie making while working for organized-crime gangs that collected payments from film crews working on their turf. He was arrested and spent six months in prison, where he was tormented by guards, an experience that fueled an enduring distrust of authority.

“When I got out, I really wanted to get back against the authorities,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in Busan, “but I thought if I used violence, I’d end up in prison again. So I decided to use another weapon: film.”

After working briefly in television, he was about to give up, return home to Tohuku and become a farmer when an actor friend encouraged him to write and direct his own film, he recalled in a 2011 video interview. The film was “Sweet Trap,” a sort-pornography feature. He directed it by cutting photographs out of magazines and newspapers that depicted different camera perspectives; for each shot he showed a different photo to the cameraman to indicate what he wanted.

Soon he was hired to direct other films and did so until later in the decade, when, chafing under the restrictions of working for others, he started his own company.

“Filmmaking isn’t something you need to learn in school; it’s about imagination,” he said. “The best place to learn about it is on a set, not by studying. If a person has got no talent, it doesn’t matter what you teach them. It’s the same for stuff like crafting things with your hands, cooking or architecture: you either have a sense for it or not.”
  
Koji Wakamatsu [Wikipedia]

Pink film [Wikipedia]
 

Ecstasy of the Angels 

1972

Deceased--Chris Marker [Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve]

 Chris Marker

[Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve]
July 29th, 1921 to July 29th, 2012

"French film-maker Chris Marker dies"

 
The controversial Left Bank Cinema director scored an arthouse hit with Sans Soleil and made the brilliant, haunting, highly influential La Jetée

 
July 30th, 2012

 
guardian.co.uk

Chris Marker, the enigmatic master of left-field French cinema, has died at the age of 91. The artist and film-maker was best known for his award-winning documentary Sans Soleil and for his haunting drama La Jetée, charting the quest for memory in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, Marker fought for the French Resistance and then cut his teeth as a journalist and a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. He made his film debut with Olympia 52, a documentary on the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and went on to become a leading light of the Left Bank Cinema movement alongside his friends Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais. In 1961 he sparked controversy with the documentary Si Cuba, a film that praised Fidel Castro, denounced America and was promptly banned in the US.

Marker's other notable pictures include 1985's AK, an essay on the work of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and 1977's A Grin Without a Cat, charting the socialist struggle in the period before and after the 1968 Paris uprisings. He scored an arthouse hit with 1983's Sans Soleil, his elliptical meditation on travel and memory that darted from Japan to Africa via an appreciation of the 1958 thriller Vertigo. Hitchcock's movie, said the director, was the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory".

Yet Marker's most influential production remains 1962's La Jetée, a 29-minute drama composed almost entirely of still images and tracing one man's attempt to reclaim an image from his past. Marker's poetic, provocative meld of global catastrophe and human frailty went on to inspire the 1987 drama The Red Spectacles and Terry Gilliam's 1995 blockbuster 12 Monkeys.

The teasing, elliptical nature of Marker's work was reflected in the man himself. He refused to give interviews, hated being photographed and claimed to have born in Mongolia despite contradictory sources that suggested he was a native of Paris. All of which, wrote the critic David Thomson, fostered the notion of Marker as "some mysterious if ideal figure, a hope or a dream more than an actual person". He was, Thomson added, "the essential ghost".
 

"Chris Marker dies at 91; avant-garde French filmmaker"

Marker directed 'La Jetee,' a short film that travels between past and future. Pauline Kael called it ' very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made.'

by

Elaine Woo

July 31st, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Chris Marker, an enigmatic figure in French cinema who avoided publicity and was loath to screen his films yet was often ranked with countrymen Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godardas an avant-garde master, died at his home in Paris on Sunday, his 91st birthday.

His death was reported by Agence France-Presse, but the cause was not given.

Marker, who worked well into his 80s, made more than two dozen films during a six-decade career. Known as a pioneer of the film essay, he was most admired for "La Jetee" (1962) and "Sans Soleil" (1983), which explored time, memory and history in an unconventional and evocative style.

"La Jetee" ("The Jetty") was a 28-minute movie made almost entirely of stills that focuses on a man who travels between the past and the future to understand a haunting image from his childhood.

The most startling moment in the film is when, for a brief few seconds, the stills give way to moving images of a sleeping woman opening her eyes, staring at the camera and blinking. For British film scholar Janet Harbord, who wrote the 2009 book "Chris Marker: La Jetee," the motion causes "a gasp close to an experience of the erotic or the religious or possibly both," and conveys in an instant the magic and mystery of the medium.

Critic Pauline Kael called "La Jetee" "very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made." Film critic and historian David Thomson went further, declaring in a 2002 article in the British newspaper the Guardian that "La Jetee" could be "the one essential movie ever made."

Its theme may sound familiar to contemporary audiences because it inspired a Hollywood remake, "12 Monkeys." Directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, the 1995 film was generally viewed by critics as less essential than the original.

Marker's other masterpiece, "Sans Soleil" ("Sunless"), is narrated by a woman who reads aloud the letters she receives from a nomadic cameraman during his travels in Japan, Iceland, Africa and other far-flung destinations. The letters describe wondrous sights, such as a blindingly white desert, a musical staircase and a temple dedicated to cats.

Cats appear throughout Marker's films and are named in two of them: the documentaries "A Grin Without a Cat" (1977) and "The Case of the Grinning Cat" (2004). The first film examines the New Left movement from the Vietnam War era to the ouster of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. The latter film documents the political mood in France after the Sept. 11 attacks and incorporates images of smiling cat graffiti that began to appear in Paris then. Rare photographs of the filmmaker usually show a thin, balding man behind a camera with his cat, Guillaume.

Marker's politics were clear in other works, as well, such as "Cuba Sí" (1961), about Castro's Cuba; "Le Joli Mai" (1963), made from 55 hours of interviews with French citizens about their attitudes toward the French-Algerian War; and "The Last Bolshevik" (1993), conceived as a series of letters to Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin.

He also produced "Far from Vietnam," a 1967 documentary made in collaboration with Godard and Resnais that opposed American involvement in Vietnam.

One of Marker's later works, from the late 1990s, was an interactive CD-ROM called "Immemory" that consists of more than 20 hours of stills, film clips, music, text and sound bites divided into several sections, including poetry, cinema, travel and photography.

Little is known about Marker's life, which apparently was just as the filmmaker, who called himself "the best-known author of unknown movies," wanted it.

Most biographies say he was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in Neuilly sur Seine, France, on July 29, 1921, and studied philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre in the late 1930s. It may be apocryphal, but some sources say his affection for the Magic Marker felt-tipped pen inspired him to change his last name.

Doubts also surrounded his birthplace. Marker told film historian Thomson during a meeting in Berkeley in the 1980s that Thomson's "Biographical Dictionary of Film" was in error and that he actually was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Thomson said he accepted the eccentric filmmaker's Mongolia story, explaining in the Guardian that it was "a part of Chris Marker's thinking that no place is actually farther away, more extreme or less plausible than another."

In Marker's view, history was fluid and a playful view was sometimes important. "Look what happened to dinosaurs," his narrator says in "The Last Bolshevik" as a child on screen hugs a stuffed version of the TV character Barney. "Kids love them."

"Chris Marker, Pioneer of the Essay Film, Dies at 91"

by

Dennis Lim

July 31st, 2012

The New York Times

Chris Marker, the enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 91.

His death was announced by the French Culture Ministry.

A transmedia artist long before the term was coined, Mr. Marker resisted categorization throughout his career; he once referred to “career” as “that despicable word.” His sprawling and constantly evolving body of work, which ranged from books to installations to CD-ROMs and included more than 50 films of varying length, was at once fragmentary and cohesive, united by an abiding interest in the nature of time and memory and by a strong physical and intellectual wanderlust.

Mr. Marker’s best-known film, the 1962 short “La Jetée,” about a man haunted by a childhood memory, was the basis of the 1995 Hollywood movie “12 Monkeys” starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Whether taking the form of time-warp science fiction like “La Jetée” or archive-rich historical surveys like “A Grin Without a Cat” (1977), about the fate of the New Left after the pivotal year 1968, most of his films involve a kind of time travel.

A lifelong leftist and perennial globe-trotter, he documented almost every political hot spot of the mid- and late-20th century: the Soviet Union, China, the new state of Israel, Cuba after the revolution.

In his later works — like the installation “Silent Movie” (1995) and the feature “Level Five” (1997) — he was also an early explorer of video, digital technology and cyberspace.

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. He granted few interviews and typically refused to be photographed. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. But in his work, at least, Mr. Marker was not anonymous so much as he was playfully evasive.

His films often feature a first-person narrator, a device he once called “a sign of humility.” They abound with avatars and alter-egos, including his own cat, Guillaume-en-Egypt, which sometimes appeared, in the flesh and in cartoon form, as his surrogate.

The pseudonym Chris Marker — which originally appeared in print as “Chris. Marker” — dates from the late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction, including a novel, “Le Coeur Net,” set in Indochina.

After his first directorial effort, “Olympia 52,” about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, Mr. Marker wrote the narration for the documentary “Statues Also Die” (1953), which he directed with Alain Resnais. Ostensibly about African art, the film doubled as a critique of French colonialism. It received the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo but was banned by French censors for more than 10 years because of its political content.

Mr. Marker refined his signature approach to voice-over narration, at once intimate and quizzical, in the early works “Sunday in Peking” (1956) and “Letter From Siberia” (1957). The latter film’s provocative rethinking of the relationship between word and image — one sequence replays the same shots with vastly different commentaries — prompted the critic André Bazin to use the term “an essay documented by film.”

Borrowed from the poet Henri Michaux, the opening words of “Letter From Siberia” — “I write to you from a far-off country” — could serve as Mr. Marker’s motto. He had a foreign correspondent’s drive to “capture life in the process of becoming history,” as he put it, but there was also a science-fiction strangeness to many of his travelogues.

He retained his outsider’s perspective, his taste for oddity and digression, even when shooting at home. The ambitious “Le Joli Mai” (1963) was an attempt to map the national psyche as the Algerian War drew to a close, culled from dozens of man-on-the-street interviews in Paris. The film is often called an early example of the documentary mode known as cinéma vérité. But Mr. Marker rejected the term and proposed a more modest alternative: “ciné, ma vérité” (“Cinema, my truth”).

On days off from “Le Joli Mai,” Mr. Marker embarked on a photography project that became the half-hour “La Jetée.” Composed almost entirely of still images, this recursive loop of a film was both an homage to a beloved movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and a self-reflexive testament to cinema as a time machine.

Like many of his peers, Mr. Marker became increasingly politicized in the 1960s. In 1967, he formed a film collective called SLON (Russian for “elephant” and also an acronym for Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelle, or Society for the Launch of New Works).

SLON’s documentaries include “À Bientôt, J’espère,” about a strike at a French textile factory, and “The Sixth Side of the Pentagon,” about an antiwar march on the Pentagon. One of the collective’s major initiatives was the omnibus film “Far From Vietnam,” a protest against American involvement in Vietnam, with contributions from Mr. Marker, Mr. Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, among other filmmakers.

“Sans Soleil” (1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Mr. Marker’s late works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan, a favorite destination of Mr. Marker’s since “The Koumiko Mystery,” which he shot in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics. A bar in Tokyo’s famous Golden Gai district is named for “La Jetée” — an honor that Mr. Marker once said was “worth more to me than any number of Oscars.”

Mr. Marker also turned his attention to fellow filmmakers. He made two essays on Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander Medvedkin (“The Train Rolls On,” “The Last Bolshevik”), one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky (“One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich”) and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the 1985 film “Ran” (“A.K.”).

He remained active into his 70s and 80s. His last film appears to have been a short about the history of cinema, commissioned as a trailer for the 50th anniversary of the Viennale Film Festival in October. The film is scheduled to be shown at the Locarno Film Festival on Saturday.

Mr. Marker gave one of his final interviews — in 2008 to the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles — through the virtual medium of Second Life. In response to a question about pseudonyms as masks, he said: “I’m much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling. No need to delve further.”

"In Memoriam: Chris Marker"

by

Richard Brody

July 30th, 2012

The New Yorker

The very subject of Chris Marker’s work is memory; his death today, at the age of ninety-one (indeed, the day after his ninety-first birthday), elicits a simulacrum of memory, in tributes such as this one, where the contrast between the immediate significance (to the protagonist in the drama and to those who know and love him) and its public reflection is stretched to absurdity. For Marker, memory isn’t passive; it’s an act of resistance—the edge that cuts a path into the future—and the effective work of memory is the very definition of art. Marker was a master of film editing—the part of the filmmaking process that Jean-Luc Godard, another master editor and memory-artist, defined as holding past, present, and future in one’s own hands—and the very possibility of remembering Marker demands a little editing, a splicing-in of excerpts from a surprising and crucial document.

Marker gave few interviews and hardly ever allowed himself to be photographed; in one of the few interviews that he did grant—in 2003, to Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire, for Libération—he explained his reticence, calling himself “publiphobic”:

    At the beginning of the sixties, that was well-thought-of, now it has become literally inadmissible. I can’t help it. That way of putting the mechanism of calumny in the service of praise has always rubbed me the wrong way, although I recognize that this diabolical sponsorship sometimes offers the most beautiful images one can see on a small screen (have you seen David Lynch with blue lips?).

In this remarkable text, he provides several signal examples of what he considered abuses of the press: the silence surrounding the 2002 reissue of a 1945 book by the novelist François Vernet, a friend of his who died at Dachau; the lack of discussion of a recording of songs by Viktor Ullmann of poems by Hülderlin and Rilke (“one is seized by the truly vertiginous idea that, at that moment, nobody glorified true German culture more than this Jewish musician who would soon die at Auschwitz”). Marker defined the problem:

    The exponential progress of stupidity and vulgarity, everyone’s aware of it, but it’s not just a matter of a vague feeling of disgust, it’s a concrete fact, it’s measurable (it can be measured by the volume of the “Woof!”s that greet talk-show hosts, which has risen by an alarming number of decibels in the last five years) and which constitutes a crime against humanity. Not to mention the permanent assault on the French language.

It’s strange to hear (virtually) Marker speak for himself; in the interview, he describes his own ambition—in particular, regarding his longtime championing of lightweight and low-cost equipment: “Trying to give the floor to people who haven’t got it, and, when possible, to help them to find their means of expression. They’re workers at the Rhodia factory in 1967, but also the Kosovars I filmed in the year 2000, who had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking for them….” He spoke of teaching the editing of “Battleship Potemkin” to filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau and of the use of television equipment by Bosnian refugees, in 1993. But he distances himself from the label of “political” filmmaker: “What I’m passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.”

In his 1978 film “A Grin Without a Cat“—his vast and rueful look at what the events of 1968 actually were, and why they proved to be of so little consequence—Marker gathers an extraordinary set of documentary film clips and, assembling them along with his trenchant, provocative text on the soundtrack, brings them back from the dead. He infuses them—and, through them, history itself—with a shocking new energy. It’s as if his memory-piece—a memorial for dreams that died—actually reanimated the dreams and, by locating their traces in largely forgotten actions, offered a surprisingly practical map for making a glimmer of a stifled utopia burst forth with a new brilliance.

And as for the voice: as much as Marker masks his own—whether, literally, in Agnès Varda’s “The Beaches of Agnè” or virtually in his own distinctive reticence as a movie essayist who doesn’t speak of himself—he has made one of the greatest films about the use of the voice, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer” (scroll down) in which he follows Yves Montand in the rehearsals leading up to a return to the stage after a six-year hiatus. Montand’s natural talent, his relentless practice and rigid self-discipline, his tightly-focussed and highly-principled purpose, and his charismatic presence all contribute to an art that is centered on the body, its presentation, its projection. Marker’s modesty is that of a devoted craftsman and an exquisite aesthete: a nonperformer, a nonsinger, a nonathlete, a former writer who didn’t continue—he did the one thing that he cultivated with an unyielding devotion. In so doing, he left on the history of cinema, and on history as such, a mark more enduring and decisive than that of mere personality. He made his own conscience, of the cinema as the living embodiment of history, into the conscience of his time—and, now that he’s not here, of future times already.

Chris Marker [Wikipedia]

 La Jetée

1962

La jetée [Wikipedia]

Sans Soleil1982

Sans Soleil [Wikipedia]

Documentary

Deceased--Bingham Ray

Bingham Ray
October 1st, 1954 to January 23rd, 2012

"Bingham Ray dies at 57; leading force in independent films"

Ray, who co-founded October Films, one of the top independent distribution firms in the '90s, suffered a stroke at the Sundance Film Festival.

by

Dennis McLellan

January 24th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Bingham Ray, the co-founder of October Films, one of the top independent film distribution companies of the 1990s, and a former president of United Artists who was a leading force in independent films for more than two decades, died Monday. He was 57.

Ray, who was named executive director of the San Francisco Film Society in November, died in a hospital in Provo, Utah, after suffering a stroke last week while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, said Sarah Eaton, a spokeswoman for the family.

"We lost a true warrior for independent voice today with the passing of Bingham Ray," Sundance founder Robert Redford said in a statement. "He was a valued member of the Sundance family for as long as I can remember, and he is responsible for mentoring countless seminal storytellers and bringing their work to the world."

A onetime manager and programmer at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York's Greenwich Village in the early 1980s, Ray co-founded October Films in 1991 with Jeff Lipsky in Lipsky's garage in Sherman Oaks.

Six months after its first release, Mike Leigh's "Life Is Sweet," the company had raised capital and opened its doors in New York City. Ray served as co-president until the company's sale to USA Networks in 1999.

During his years with October Films, Ray distributed films such as Leigh's "Secrets & Lies," Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves," John Dahl's "The Last Seduction," Robert Duvall's "The Apostle," David Lynch's "Lost Highway," Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune" and Jim Jarmusch's "The Year of the Horse."

"He was very beloved by the filmmakers he worked with and very dedicated to preserving their vision in bringing their films to the marketplace," John Schmidt, one of Ray's former partners in October Films, said Monday.

"He was a man whose passion for film just embodied everything good about our industry," Schmidt said. "He did it with tremendous drive and passion, not because he wanted to become a millionaire and not because he wanted to be a big shot, but because it was in his heart and soul."

After leaving October Films in 1999, Ray continued to be a familiar presence at film festivals, where he served on judging panels. But after nearly dying in a traffic accident in 2000, he later told the New York Times, "I realized where my place really is."

In 2001, after six months as president of New York-based Crossroads Films, Ray was named president of United Artists, the specialty films division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

During his nearly 2 1/2 years at UA, Ray bought Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," which won the Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2003.

In a Twitter message on Monday, Moore said he would "deeply miss" Ray. "He bought & distributed Bowling for Columbine when no one else would. He stood by me all the way."

Among other films the company acquired/and or produced during Ray's tenure are Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land," an Oscar winner for best foreign language film; "Nicholas Nickleby," "Jeepers Creepers" and its sequel, and "Pieces of April."

When Ray resigned from UA in 2004, the Hollywood Reporter reported that sources close to the situation said that he and MGM executives "often clashed over the types of films that Ray chose to champion, with the studio regarding his taste as too esoteric and arty."

Independent producer Jonathan Dana described Ray on Monday as being "one of a kind."

"I don't think there is anybody more passionate or dedicated or more courageous than Bingham in terms of what he believed in and what he would fight for and who he would challenge if it meant moving something forward that he believed in," Dana said.

"He's a true testament to what we all do in the independent film world."

Ray, who was born Oct. 1, 1954, in Bronxville, N.Y., told the San Francisco Chronicle in December that his father, a civil engineer, taught him to love movies in elementary school: His reward for finishing his homework was being allowed to watch movies on TV with his dad.

His film education continued at Scarsdale High School, where he took a film class that introduced him to foreign films and prompted him to make his first film with a Super 8 camera provided by the teacher. He graduated with a degree in theater arts and speech from Simpson College in Iowa.

After his stint at the Bleecker Street Cinema, Ray worked for New Yorker Films, the Samuel Goldwyn Co. and Alive Films before co-founding October Films.

He joined L.A.-based production company Sidney Kimmel Entertainment in 2007 and over the next three years served as president of Kimmel Distribution and president of creative affairs.

Before being named executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, he served as the first-run programming consultant to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, executive consultant to the digital distribution company SnagFilms and adjunct professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Ray is survived by his wife, Nancy King; their children, Nick, Annabel and Becca; and his sisters, Susan Clair and Deb Pope.

"Bingham Ray, Executive Who Championed Independent Films, Dies at 57"

by

Brooks Barnes

January 23rd, 2012

The New York Times

Bingham Ray, a colorful indie-film executive who helped steer art-house movies like “Bowling for Columbine” and “Hotel Rwanda” to the masses, died on Monday in a hospice in Provo, Utah. He was 57.

The cause was a series of strokes, according to the San Francisco Film Society, where he had only recently become its executive director, an appointment he described in October as “too good to be true.” He was in Utah to attend the Sundance Film Festival.

Volatile and blunt, Mr. Ray championed stylized, intellectually challenging films, buying distribution rights to movies that few believed had a box-office prayer. “The words ‘fearless’ and ‘brave’ are tossed around a lot in our world, but that’s the only way to describe Bingham,” said Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures.

Mr. Ray helped create a business model in which art-house movies grew into a powerful economic and cultural force. He co-founded one of the first major indie distributors, October Films, in 1991, working with Jeff Lipsky in a house in suburban Los Angeles.

October Films, along with Miramax Films and Sony Pictures Classics, was designed to snap up indie gems from festivals like Sundance and distribute them broadly, relying on guerrilla marketing campaigns and the Oscars to get them noticed. “Secrets & Lies,” directed by Mike Leigh, and Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves,” both from 1996, were two of October’s biggest successes. October Films was also responsible for David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and one of the first widely seen Iranian movies, “The White Balloon,” directed by Jafar Panahi.

Mr. Ray left October Films in 1999, when it was sold to USA Networks. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company emerged in 2002 as Focus Features, which remains an art-house leader. “If you draw a line back to the rise of independent film, you find Bingham,” Mr. Bowles said.

Born on Oct. 1, 1954, Mr. Ray grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was fascinated with movies from an early age; one of his first jobs was as a projectionist in a Greenwich Village theater. He started his formal career in 1981 in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s New York office, where he sold library titles to hospitals, colleges and ships at sea.

He worked at five other distribution companies, including New Yorker Films and Avenue Pictures, where he oversaw the release of Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy” in 1989 before founding October Films.

From 2001 to 2004 Mr. Ray was president of United Artists, working to revive its reputation for serving up top-notch specialty films. “Bowling for Columbine,” a Michael Moore documentary on the American gun culture, and Terry George’s “Hotel Rwanda,” starring Don Cheadle in a fact-based tale set during the Rwandan genocide, were two United Artists films released under Mr. Ray’s watch. His subsequent jobs included running Sidney Kimmel Entertainment.

He was also a consultant to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, IFC Films and Snag Films, which focuses on documentaries, and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Mr. Ray is survived by his wife, Nancy King; their children Nick, Annabel and Becca; and his sisters, Susan Clair and Deb Pope.

Peter Biskind’s book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film” (2004), captured the excitement Mr. Ray felt about art-house movies. “We’re not as well-heeled as some of these other companies, but we’re hungrier, because it’s me, and I’m really, really hungry,” Mr. Biskind quotes him as saying during a Sundance bidding war. “This film, I’m drooling. I would chop my left arm to do it.”

Deceased--John Howard Davies

John Howard Davies and Robert Newton

John Howard Davies
March 9th, 1939 to August 22nd, 2011

"John Howard Davies, the quintessential Oliver Twist, Dies at 72"

by

Mark Wallace

August 23rd, 2011

Classic Films

John Howard Davies took the title role in David Lean's classic 1948 Oliver Twist, and later directed such comedy classics as Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.

John Howard Davies, the screen's most memorable Oliver Twist, died yesterday 22 August 2011 aged 72. David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) was Davies's first film, and he was discovered when an exhaustive search for a suitable Oliver proved fruitless, and Jack Davies, a scriptwriter and friend of Lean's, told the director that his son, then aged eight, would be ideally suited to the role. And he was. Pale, blonde, and thin, with sensitive features and a timid expression, Davies fitted the bill of the character who is described in the novel as: "A very good-looking boy. There's an expression of melancholy in his face which is most interesting." (by the undertaker Mr Sowerberry (Chapter 4)).

Davies’s performance in Oliver Twist was particularly naturalistic, partly because some of the time he wasn’t even aware the cameras were rolling, according to the revealing documentary “A Profile of Oliver Twist” found on recent editions of Lean’s film. Lean also kept Davies’s dialogue to a minimum, allowing his expressive face to do the acting. The result was a film still acknowledged as one of the greatest Dickens adaptations cinema has seen – in terms of critical prestige, its only rival for best Dickens film is Lean’s other effort, 1946’s Great Expectation.

Davies also gave a notable performance in The Rocking-Horse Winner, a very interesting 1949 adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence short story. As an actor, though, that was his peak. There was only a lead in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, in which the frail, delicate Davies was somewhat miscast, and a few minor appearances before Davies left the business altogether while still in his teens. The pressure of being a leading child star following his star turn in Oliver Twist didn’t sit well with him, and in a 2008 interview with BBC Radio 4 he candidly stated that he felt at the time that he was neither a talented enough for a character actor nor good-looking enough for a lead.

John Howard Davies [Wikipedia]