Three Women in Search of Respectability (Cinema Ritrovato 2024, Day 1)
A musical, a class-passing comedy, a gothic haunted house/spooky sisters mystery, a sick-soul-of-the-decadent-rich melodrama, and a minstrel show -- all in one movie.
I'm spending a week at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy. Though this festival is known for their outdoor screenings of popular classics (including, this year, Amadeus and The Searchers), their program is vast and deep, and I made the decision going in to prioritize movies that I had never seen before. I'm particularly excited about their sidebar of Anatole Litvak films, as well as the opportunity to see movies by international filmmakers, such as Sergei Parajanov and Kozabura Yoshimura, with English subtitles (a rarity in Paris). Here is a dispatch from my first day in Bologna; future posts will depend on how much time I have free between screenings, sleeping and, maybe most importantly, pasta.
My first day in Bologna brought on an unintentional triple feature about "fallen" or "damaged" women in search of respectability, all with surprising takes on their fates. The first two films of the day were particularly counterintuitive, given that one was a deep pre-Code love triangle starring pre-codiest of actresses, Dorothy MacKaill, and the other was made nearly a decade post-Code and features one of the biggest male stars of the 20th century/an icon of American patriarchal values.
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