Columbia Pictures to celebrate 100th anniversary at 2024 Locarno Film Festival

From war films and westerns to film noir, screwball comedies and musicals — Sony’s Columbia Pictures For the first 100 years, they were there. Version 77 of Locarno Film Festival The Swiss town is celebrating the centenary of Hollywood films, with organizers emphasizing online that it is “paying tribute to the beloved classics and undiscovered treasures produced by the Hollywood studio from the dawn of talkies to the late 1950s.”

this Sony The studio previously had a 100th Anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival In May, by Tom RothmanChairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group.

The Locarno Film Festival reviewed 40 films, most of them in black and white, highlighting the studio’s importance to Hollywood history. “In 1924, the relatively small film company Cohn-Brandt-Cohn renamed itself Columbia PicturesThe festival explained On its website“The new studio would eventually take as its logo the lady holding a torch, draped in the American flag like the Statue of Liberty, an icon that has become familiar to moviegoers around the world. As Columbia Pictures, the studio was wildly successful, producing a string of major hits and becoming an integral part of the Hollywood ecosystem over the next decade.”

“Colombia offers the best professional opportunities for women and gives Dorothy Arzner the chance to make her debut behind the camera,” emphasizes Locarno’s artistic director Giona Nazaro.

The festival promises a “major, multifaceted retrospective” curated by documentary directors, film critics and film curators Ehsan Koshbachtwhich will “attempt to unravel the complex mysteries surrounding Columbia Pictures and present a richer, more complex image of the studio that deserves to be celebrated.”

Koshbacher himself vowed to show “fast-talking crazy-comedy career women,” “existential cowboys,” “prophetic anti-fascist fast food,” and “disturbing ‘problem pictures.'”

So which Columbia Pictures Golden Age classics will be showing at Locarno77? The full lineup includes screen legend Rock Hudson (Gun Fury1953), Spencer Tracy (Man’s Castle1933) and William Holden (picnic1955) It can be found here.

Below, enjoy 11 works selected from the retrospective to suit your interests.

Wall Street
No, this is not the 1987 film directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, starring Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah and Martin Sheen, and distributed by Fox.

Directed by Roy William Neill and starring Ralph Ince, Aileen Pringle, Philip Strange, Sam De Grasse and Freddie Burke Frederick, this 1929 film is the oldest Columbia Pictures film in the Locarno Festival’s tribute lineup.

At 68 minutes, it’s also shorter than the other tributes. It tells the story of a steelworker-turned-ruthless tycoon whose hard-line business methods drive his rival to suicide. The widow believes she can destroy the tycoon and conspires with her husband’s former partner.

Bitter Victory
Harvard Film Archive director Haden Guest will present the war film, starring Richard Burton and Curd Jurgens, about two British Army officers who are sent on a commando mission in North Africa, at the Locarno Film Festival.

The film is an American-French adaptation of René Hardy’s novel of the same name, and also stars Ruth Roman and Raymond Pellegrin.

This film, directed by Nicholas Ray, not only brought an exotic location to the screen, but he also went abroad to shoot it himself and premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1957.

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This 1944 film noir drama was directed by William Cameron Menzies and adapted from the 1938 novel of the same name by Claesman Taylor. Cinematographer Rudolf Matte is often praised for his creative use of shadows and camera angles.

The 72-minute film tells the story of two families during the rise of Nazism in Germany before the start of World War II. The cast includes Paul Lukas, Karl Esmond, Peter van Eyck, Maddie Christians, Maurice Karnovsky and KT Stevens.

The film, which screened at the Columbia Film retrospective in Locarno, was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Original Score and Best Art Direction.

Gunner’s Trip
As the title suggests, it’s a Western. Locarno Film Festival audiences will be treated to a special presentation by Grover Crisp, the master of film restoration and digital mastering at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Directed by Phil Carlson, the film stars Van Heflin, Tab Hunter, Katherine Grant and James Darren. Heflin plays a powerful rancher who protects his hot-tempered adult son (Hunter) by paying for damages and bribing witnesses until his crimes become too serious. Grant plays a beautiful half-French, half-Sioux woman who the hot-tempered man makes unwanted advances towards.

Quentin Tarantino later said that the film inspired cobblerhis fictional film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Gunner’s Trip Premiering in 1958, a year before the other Western, it is also the latest film in the Columbia Pictures retrospective at Locarno. Lonely ridingDirected by Budd Boetticher, starring Randolph Scott, Karen Steele, Pernell Roberts.

Craig’s Wife
This 1936 melodrama, based on George Kelly’s play of the same name, is a rare film in retrospective history to have been written by a female creator.

Dorothy Arzner, one of the few female directors in early Hollywood to have long-term success and later the focus of film and human relations students, directed the film from a script by Mary C. McCall Jr. The Locarno Film Festival introduction will come from another woman, freelance writer, critic and film historian Pamela Hutchinson.

Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billy Burke, Jane Darwell and Dorothy Wilson star in this film that tells the story of Harriet, who marries a man because he can provide the kind of lavish lifestyle she wants. But her lifestyle is threatened when her husband is terrorized by the police.

You Naziti spy!
This 1940 comedy short directed by Jules White stars the famous slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Finn and Curley Howard). It is the 44th of 190 shorts released by Columbia Pictures with the comedians between 1934 and 1959.

The 18-minute film is often considered Hollywood’s first anti-Nazi comedy, as it predates Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator A few months later. The title mixes comedian Joe Pena’s catchphrase “You scoundrel!” with the 1939 Warner Bros. film Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

Here’s the plot: Three ammunition manufacturers are unhappy with the drop in profits caused by King Hermann 6+⁷⁄₈pacifist policies. So they plotted to overthrow him and establish a dictatorship. The unwitting puppets were wallpaperers, chosen to be puppets of the new regime.

Hot Topics in Town
Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman star in this romantic comedy/drama directed by George Stevens and first aired in 1942.

Grant plays Leopold Dilger, who is accused of arson and murder but escapes from prison during his trial and hides out in a remote cabin owned by his former classmate Nora, who he has had a crush on for years. Nora rents the cabin to a law professor (Coleman) who is writing a book for his summer vacation. When Lightcap and Dilger arrive within minutes, Nora hides Dilger in the attic and things start to develop from there.

Several elements of the film were unusual for the time. One was the use of two male leads. Another was the role of the manservant, played by Rex Ingram, which was a rare example of a black actor in an atypical role at the time.

Lady from Shanghai
Orson Welles. Rita Hayworth. Everett Sloan. Noir thriller. Need we say more?

Well, we can. Wells starred in, directed, and wrote the 1947 film based on the novel If I wake up before I die Directed by Sherwood King. Also starring Glenn Anderson and Ted De Corsia. Also photographed by Charles Lawton Jr.

This classic film tells the story of Michael (Wells), an Irish sailor who falls in love with Elsa (Hayworth) after he rescues her when her coach is intercepted in Central Park. But Elsa and her husband (Sloane), a disabled criminal defense attorney, have just arrived in New York from Shanghai and are en route to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Michael agrees to sign on as a sailor on her husband’s yacht.

Hot day
This 1953 film noir is equally thrilling and has a stellar cast. Directed by “Master of Darkness” Fritz Lang, it stars Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Jocelyn Brando.

The plot is simple and straightforward: a policeman fights the criminal syndicate that controls the city he works in. The film opens with a homicide detective being asked to investigate the suicide of a fellow police officer.

As far as the production story goes, Columbia wanted Marilyn Monroe to star, but was unwilling to pay the high fees that 20th Century Fox had to its competitor.

Orange Is the New Black
The cast list for this 1955 Columbia Pictures classic is full of girl power: Ida Lupino, Jane Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter.

Of course, it’s men who are in charge behind the scenes.Lewis Seiler directed the film from a screenplay by Crane Wilbur and Jack DeWitt.

Part of the plot can be guessed from the title. A sadistic warden takes out her sexual frustration on female inmates, while a doctor tries to improve the prison’s brutal atmosphere. A pair of rebellious inmates might take matters into their own hands.

Mr. Deeds Comes to Town
Can’t get enough of Cary Grant and Jean Arthur? Well, here’s another romantic comedy/drama, this time from 1936. Plus, it was directed by Frank Capra.

Robert Riskin, in his fifth collaboration with Capra, wrote the screenplay based on Clarence Budington Kelland’s short story “Opera Hat.” During early principal photography, the project continued to use the title of the short story, but was later renamed after the winning entry in a competition held by Columbia Pictures’ publicity department.

Grant plays a humble greeting card poet from a small town who travels to New York after inheriting a fortune, only to be entangled by those who seek to take advantage of him.