UCLA Festival 2009: New Creative Work

CMS/MIAS Vault Series

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Introduced and moderated by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies Program students and alumni will present a selection of short films preserved as part of their class work, with live musical accompaniment. The films include studio promotional reels touting stars and films of the day, a documentary about the Hoover dam and several “twisted” tales.

Film Screenings

PARTED (35mm, silent) Amanda Bradshaw
HOLLYWOOD ON PARADE (35mm, optical sound) Lindsay Seidel
TAMING THE GIANT OF THE SOUTHWEST (35mm, silent) James Gamble
FIRST NATIONAL FAMILY OF STARS (35mm, silent) Steven Hill
HOW IT HAPPENED (35mm, silent) Doron Galili
CINEMA STARS (35mm, silent) Jillian Borders
HIS FATAL MISTAKE (35mm, silent) Dino Everett

Live musical accompaniment for all silent features provided by Michael Mortilla

Students from the UCLA Cinema and Media Studies program will screen the the noir crime drama Knock on any Door starring Humphrey Bogart as an attorney on the rise from life in the slums.

“Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse,” spits out juvenile delinquent Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano (John Derek), a line that reflects Knock on Any Door’s gutsy depiction of urban criminality. When the wayward Romano is accused of murdering a cop, he finds a sympathetic defender in lawyer Andrew Morton (Humphrey Bogart), himself, once a delinquent. Bogart is in rare litigious form and Derek’s acting debut pops on screen as he plays a character at once charming and dangerously reckless. Through these two characters and a series of intricate flashbacks, the film elegantly explores the argument that crime is the fault of a negligent society.

Made in 1949, just one year after director Nicholas Ray’s noir classic and directorial debut They Live By Night, his third film Knock on Any Door infuses the social problem genre with a noir sensibility. The film’s interest in juvenile delinquency would be revisited by Ray in later years, most famously in his Rebel Without a Cause.

Knock on Any Door was the first film for Humphrey Bogart’s independent production company Santana Films. It was also based on the debut novel by African American writer Willard Motley and set in the Chicago streets, where he lived. The film’s raw tone is due in part to the lived experiences and legacy of the original novelist. While some critics at the time of its original release claimed that the film did justice to Motley’s novel, others remained offended by the film, which, to them, “glamorized the unpardonable hoodlum and thief.” Seen from today, the glamorization of the hoodlum seems to provide the moral ambiguity that allows Knock on Any Door to be a great work of complexity and energy.

Knock on Any Door is unavailable on DVD. Fortunately for us, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has beautifully preserved the film.

DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray
PRODUCER: Robert Lord
WRITERS: John Monks, Jr., Daniel Taradash, based on the novel by Willard Motely
CAST: Humphrey Bogart, John Derek
A Columbia Pictures release
98 min.

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