The Lady with the Torch

Fell maps crucial turning points between the studio’s founding by brothers Harry and Jack Cohn and Joe Brandt in 1924 and the surprising runaway success earlier this year of Will Gluck’s Anyone but You, a romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, The Lady with the Torch: The Centenary of Columbia Pictures focuses on the three decades between the releases of Roy William Neill’s Wall Street in 1929 and Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome in 1959. It was during this period that the aggressively ambitious Harry Cohn—“I don’t have ulcers,” he once said, “I give them”—led Columbia from Poverty Row to the Oscars.

Khoshbakht spent months honing his selection of forty films as a representative showcase of this fecund period. As he tells Christina Newland in Locarno’s Pardo Daily, what he’s come up with is a program “a bit like the studio itself.” About a quarter of these films are “canonical classics,” such as Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), starring Gary Cooper as a backwoods poet who inherits a fortune and clashes with big-city folks who have their own ideas about what he should do with it. Deeds is “the film that first established what’s popularly taken to be the Capra formula,” according to the Notebook, or as Don Druker puts it in the Chicago Reader, this is “Capracorn at its best.”

Another quarter of the program, says Khoshbakht, is made up of “lesser-known films by masters,” such as Raoul Walsh’s newly restored 3D western Gun Fury (1953). The “great action director largely conducts his business as usual, creating the carefully articulated compositions in depth that had been a defining feature of his style since the early 1930s,” wrote Dave Kehr in the New York Times in 2010.

Harry Cohn may have run Columbia with an authoritarian zeal, but he also placed more trust in talent, especially directors, than most other studio heads. “The biggest lesson I have learned, which should make auteurists very happy,” says Khoshbakht, “is that at the end of the day, it is the director’s style—good or bad, original or imitative—that stands out at Columbia.” What also stands out for Khoshbakht is “the blurred line between A and B films in their output, the hybridity of the genres they worked in, and the remarkable reliance on outside talents and independent productions. Experiments were allowed. Leftists and Communists were tolerated. All as long as things were kept under budget. The budget was Cohn’s eleventh Commandment.”

Films “by and about women” make up another quarter of the program. “Ironically,” Khoshbakht tells Arta Barzanji at Swiss Info, “the studio that had the misogynist Harry Cohen at the top was, at the same time, fertile ground for many female talents as producers, writers, and at least one director, Dorothy Arzner.” Rosalind Russell stars in Arzner’s Craig’s Wife (1936), for example, as a woman who has married not for love but for money.

The quarter of the program given over to “unseen films” includes Edward Dmytryk’s Under Age (1941), which the festival describes as an “unusually gritty B-movie” tackling “the twin perils of teen hitchhiking and implicit prostitution.” David Cairns has contributed an essay on Dmytryk to The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959, a collection published by Les éditions de l’œil on the occasion of the retrospective named for the woman lighting up the studio’s logo.

Cairns notes that the handsome volume includes Chris Fujiwara on Joseph H. Lewis and Robert Rossen, Haden Guest on Phil Karlson, Kim Newman on William Castle, Geoffrey O’Brien on Howard Hawks, Farran Smith Nehme on John Sturges, Imogen Sara Smith on Boetticher, and Christopher Small on Capra. Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted his essay on André de Toth, whose None Shall Escape (1944) is “a powerful, visionary piece of wartime agitprop” that speculatively depicts a postwar international tribunal focusing on war crimes committed by a Nazi officer.

“As Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville would do two decades later,” writes Rosenbaum, “None Shall Escape—its title derived from a Franklin Roosevelt speech about Nazi crimes—plants a sharp look at the recent past inside the recent (or soon to materialize) future. One might even say it mixes tenses in order to address the present.”