Restored by HFPA

Aiming to follow in his father’s swashbuckling footsteps, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. bought the rights to the 1926 book “His Majesty, the King: A Romantic Love Chase of the Seventeenth Century” by Cosmo Hamilton in 1941.

As part of its significant philanthropic effort over the last three decades, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has helped to endow the restoration of over 138 classic films. The latest beneficiary is Federico Fellini’s 1954 film La Strada, restored by the Film Foundation with funding from the HFPA.

“This unruly, unclassifiable film – perhaps the sole entry in the hybrid genre of radical-lesbian-feminist sci-fi vérité – premiered two years into the Reagan regime, but its fury proves as bracing today as it was back when this country began its inexorable shift to the right,” wrote Melissa Anderson of The Village Voice about Born in Flames in 2016 after the film’s restoration premiered at the Anthology Film Archives. Indie director Lizzie Borden, in her feature film debut, made a radical film that took five years to shoot and cost $40,000.

“Eighty percent of silent movies were lost before anyone realized how important they were,” Sandra Schulberg, president of IndieCollect in Los Angeles stated at the May 25th Hollywood Foreign Press Association Napoleon restoration event in Cannes. “Half of all movies made before 1950 have been lost.

The HFPA, through their well-established grants work announced a donation to help restore the 1927 film Napoleon by Abel Gance and celebrated with international filmmakers on the Croisette where legendary Greek-born director Costa-Gavras sat down with our reporter Herve Tropea to talk about the importance of film restoration work. .

In Photoplay magazine of July-December 1924, an article by A. Chester Keel appeared entitled “The Fiasco of Ben Hur.

Alfred Hitchcock made two attempts at directing before his first wide release, The Pleasure Garden, was made in 1925. 1922’s Number 13 stopped in mid-production because of budget problems after he had shot only two scenes, and that footage is lost.

The poster for director Jean Renoir’s 1946 film Diary of a Chambermaid shows a large photo of Paulette Goddard wearing a (very short) maid’s uniform and a knowing smile, holding up a key and resting her arm on a very large book (the diary) against a bright yellow background. Elsewhere on the poster are pictures of her embracing three different men.

Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) concludes the Apu Trilogy, director Satyajit Ray’s magnum opus. The three Bengali language films, based on the books by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, tell the coming of age story of Apu – Pather Panchali (1955, Song of the Road) is about Apu’s childhood growing up in the village of Boral in rural Bengal; in Aparajito (1956, The Unvanquished) the story moves to his adolescence in the holy city of Benares; and Apur Sansar concludes the story in Calcutta with Apu facing the challenges of adulthood.

Director Satyajit Ray had no thought of making a sequel to Pather Panchali until the rapturous reception the film received, both critically and financially. Aparajito (The Unvanquished) would become the second in the Apu Trilogy, followed by Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) in 1959.