Film Restoration

When Martin Scorsese was nine-years-old, his father took him to see Jean Renoir’s film The River. He said later that it would turn out to be one of the formative film experiences of his life.

When Martin Scorsese was nine-years-old, his father took him to see Jean Renoir’s film The River. He said later that it would turn out to be one of the formative film experiences of his life.

In the wake of a series of unsuccessful movies like Quintet, A Perfect Couple, and Health, culminating with the tanking of Popeye in 1980, director Robert Altman sold his film company to Lions Gate, pulled up stakes in Los Angeles, and moved to New York with the idea of working in the theater and adapting plays for films. He vowed never to work with big film studios again.

When Cecil B. deMille released his silent movie The Cheat in 1915, his villain was a Japanese ivory merchant called Hishuru Tori played by Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa.

Henry Fonda. Charles Bronson.

In an op-ed in the New York Times upon her death in 1995, Martin Scorsese wrote this about Ida Lupino: “I never met Ida Lupino, but I always wanted to. Her tough, emotional acting is well remembered, but her considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker are largely forgotten.

Hailed by critics as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi started his career making silent films in the 1920s with remakes and adaptations of classic writers like Tolstoy and O’Neill. In the 1930’s he moved on to films that commented on the social upheavals that Japan was going through at the time.

* An occasional series on films restored with the support of the HFPA. Alfred Hitchcock had made nine silent films before Blackmail, and this thriller started production in 1929 as a silent film as well.

A Face in the Crowd was the film Steven Spielberg selected to present at the film restoration event for the HFPA’s 75th-anniversary celebrations at the Egyptian Theater in 2017. At our special screening, he called Elia Kazan’s film “way ahead of its time” in depicting our obsession with celebrity and power “with the nightmare scenario of an Arkansas drifter who turns folk hero who turns demagogue.

In 2017, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association asked Christopher Nolan to choose a film that the HFPA helped restore for a screening to celebrate our 75th anniversary.   His choice was The Red Shoes.