The annual screening in 3-D has been our tradition since we first joined the film festival. The old 3-D movies are usually pretty bad in comparison to today’s film making or highbrow art-cinema, but they still have a very enjoyable quality with all these 3-D gimmicks. Just like screenings in drive-in theaters, the annual 3-D screenings at the Maryland Film Festival take you back in time, preserve a bit of Hollywood history and allow you to experience cinema how it once used to be enjoyed–except for the smoke of course.
This year’s screening in 3-D opened with Pardon My Backfire. In this 16 minute 3-D slapstick short the Three Stooges are auto mechanics who manage to capture some escaped convicts who visit their garage with a damaged fender. The 3-D gimmicks in this film were fun: the knives, tools and oil really seemed to fly into the audience. I was especially amused by how you could see the strings attached to the items or how the wire did not really move through his nose but along its side and then behind the ear–things you probably wouldn’t notice on a television screen at all. I wonder can I really rate a film like Pardon My Backfire? None of the criteria that normally help to a rating decision will work here. But it was silly but fun and had some nice 3-D gimmicks. [imdb]
Miss Sadie Thompson followed next. I didn’t know this film before, and I also didn’t know much about Rita Hayworth. I have heard the name before, but I didn’t know that she was the leading sex symbol of the era and known as “The Love Goddess”. But no wonder I was so uninformed: when I looked at the list of her filmography I noticed that I hardly know any of her movies, and that I’m very unfamiliar with the 40s era in general. I probably know no more than just a hand full of films produced in the 40s.
The film started with a lot of Marine rah-rah, over-the-top excitement about a woman coming to the island, a lot of partying, drinking, smoking, dancing, laughing and singing. I thought so typical for a lot of comedic musical films in the 50s. But it dramatically turned its direction when the religious zealot started to give her a hard time and confronted her with her past as a nightclub singer, breaking her and driving her into desperation, so much that she eventually became very internal and sublimated, vulnerable and ready to fall prey to him. Parallel to this line there also was a little love story between her and the Marine sergeant who couldn’t wait for his military time to end, get married to her and move to Australia. He was the Marine, the decent, gallant, helpful, well-spirited, well-built, excited, energetic, reasonable, the perfect match for sexy Miss Sadie, who supported her in her desire to leave her past behind and the struggle with the moralizer who tried to ruin her plans to move to a different place and work a different job.
This film in many ways fit to the movie-spirit of its time and ended with a happy end, but I was surprised by some of the directions this film took. I thought some of it was quite daring and on the edge of what must have been acceptable at the time in terms of sex or sexiness, moral standards and religion. I read that her character was originally a prostitute and changed to a nightclub singer to conform with the production code of this era. The morally corrupt and sadistic reverend was changed into an unaffiliated religious zealot. Even with the changes to conform with censorship dictates the film was called “filthy, rotten, lewd, immoral, just a plain raw dirty picture” and that it should be banned. It was actually banned by several state censorship boards. I can hardly imagine how difficult it must have been to deal with censors.
This film turned out to be more interesting than I expected it to be. It was in 3-D but not at all as strong and gimmicky as other 3-D movies. Which I think was good, because extensive gimmicks just would have subtracted from the story’s tone and flow. [imdb]
A quarantine strands Sadie (Rita Hayworth) on an exotic island with a love-sick Marine and a self-righteous religious zealot. While one man has his mind on romance, the other has his suspicions about Sadie.
Miss Sadie Thompson was released as a 3-D film in 1953, but with declining interest in the format at the time, the 3-D version was pulled off screens after two weeks and the title was re-released as a “flat” movie — making this 2008 screening a rare opportunity to see the film projected in its original, eye-popping format! The film survived censorship and went on to be one of the highest-grossing films that year, receiving an Oscar nomination for the song, “Blue Pacific Blues. (Skizz Cyzyk)” (from the filmfest-guide)
