the hills are alive...

Ingrid Bergman made one of the most memorable comebacks in screen history. While making "Stromboli" in Italy in 1950, she fell in love with her married director, Roberto Rossellini, becoming pregnant by him. Times were different then. The American public, provoked by religious groups, ostracized an actress it once adored (Sister Benedict of "The Bells of St. Mary's"!) and, consequently, no Hollywood studio would touch her.

But six years later, she returned to American filmmaking with Anatole Litvak's "Anastasia," winning her second Academy Award. (The first was for "Gaslight.") It was obvious: All was forgiven. In 1958, she struck box-office gold with two hits - Stanley Donen's silky-smooth "Indiscreet" and Mark Robson's hugely popular "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness," the latter based the life of Gladys Aylward, a determined British woman who, most unlikely, became a missionary in China just prior to World War II.

The highlight of the film is its big finale when Bergman's Aylward escorts hundreds of Chinese children across mountain terrain while the kids sing the British traditional, "This Old Man." It's the greatest Rodgers and Hammerstein moment that had nothing to do with Dick and Oscar. Given the team's penchant for singing kids ("The King and I" and "The Sound of Music"), it's odd they never musicalized Aylward's story for the stage.

"The Inn of the Sixth Happiness," which runs an epic 158 minutes, is also noteworthy for the unusual participation of the fine German actor Curt Jürgens and the British Robert Donat in Chinese roles. While such casting would be eschewed today, considered politically incorrect and insensitive, the fact is both actors deliver solid, convincing performances, particularly Jürgens, who with little make-up, convincingly gives the appearance of the half-Chinese officer Colonel Lin Nan. (His father was Dutch.)

Mark Robson received the film's only Oscar nomination, which was more than well-deserved.

Turner Classic Movies, which has aired several difficult-to-see Fox films lately (Nunnally Johnson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," Henry King's "Tender Is the Night" and Henry Koster's "Good Morning, Miss Dove," for examaple - all with Jennifer Jones), will screen "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" at 5:15 p.m. (est) on Sunday, 20 February.

betty garrett, 1919-2011

magnificent minnelli

It's no secret that Vincente Minnelli is my second-favorite filmmaker (running a close second to Hitchcock, natch), so it should be no surprise that I am beside myself that Dave Kehr elected to devote his New York Times DVD column to Warner Archives' decision to release four Minnelli titles - "The Cobweb” (1955), “Tea and Sympathy” (1956), “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958) and “Two Weeks in Another Town” (1962) - on discs.

For the first time.

All of this gives me a legitimate excuse to weigh in on Minnelli's rich mid-to-late-career as a filmmaker.

His last two films were the 1970 movie version of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," a film which begs to be restored (there are musical numbers by Jack Nicholson and Larry Blyden waiting to be reinstated) and the severely compromised "A Matter of Time," released in 1976 and also primed for a restoration (that's if the deleted footage even still exists).

But for all intents and purposes, Minnelli's final films were the dozen or so titles that he breathlessly made for MGM (plus one minor gem for Fox) during a quick ten-year period - from 1955 to 1965.

Few of them are considered classics, but all of them are good - very good - companionable films that share a master's sense of storytelling as Minnelli went from genre to genre to genre. Such variety!

I don't know about you but I find this list utterly fascinating:

1955 - "The Cobweb" and "Kismet"

1956 - "Lust for Life" and "Tea and Sympathy"


1957 - "Designing Woman"


1958 - "Gigi," "...Some Came Running" and "The Reluctant Debutante" (a banner year)


1960 - "Bells Are Ringing" and "Home from the Hill"

1962 - "Two Weeks in Another Town" and "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"


1963 - "The Courtship of Eddie's Father"


1964 - "Goodbye, Charlie" (the lone 20th Century-Fox title)


1965 - "The Sandpiper" (after which he would not make a film for another five years)

The films themselves are an amazing collection, but think about the wide array of on-screen talent that participated, and the generations spanned - from Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Widmark, Anthony Quinn, Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum, to Shirley MacLaine, Dean Martin, Richard Burton, Tony Curtis, Judy Holliday, Shirley Jones, Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds, to ... Ronny Howard.

Roger ♥ Susan

Roger Ebert, a Facebook friend, has generously posted my Susan Sarandon façade entry (below) on his wall. Thank you, Roger.

façade: Susan Sarandon

The 13-film Susan Sarandon retrospective that kicks off Thursday (10 February) at The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has made me wildly nostalgic.

Suddenly, I experienced a rush of - for lack of a better expression - "Susan Sarandon moments."

Specifically, my mind wandered to those films from her past that have been forgotten and to those more recent titles that have been seen by only a limited audience.

Sarandon made an auspicious debut as Dennis Patrick's out-of-control daughter in John G. Avildsen's "Joe" in 1970, but her film career didn't take flight until trhe mid-'70s, starting with good roles in two 1974 TV films - George Schaefer's 1974 TV film, "F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'The Last of the Belles,'" opposite Richard Chamberlain and Blythe Danner, and Glenn Jordan's "Benjamin Franklin" miniseries, playing the wife of the young Ben Franklin, essayed by Beau Bridges. (Lloyd Bridges took over the Franklin role in his later years, and Sheree North, a great match-up for Sarandon, played his wife in middle age.)

Before long, she was back on the big screen, seguing into such titles as Sidney Lumet's bucolic "Lovin' Molly," also starring Danner and Bridges (plus Anthony Perkins); Billy Wilder's "The Front Page," playing Peggy Grant, Jack Lemmon's fiancée; George Roy Hill's criminally underseen "The Great Waldo Pepper," in which she and Margot Kidder vyed for daredevil Robert Redford; Gilbert Cates' "Dragonfly" (aka "One Summer Love"), an N. Richard Nash script starring (again) Beau Bridges, and John Leone's "The Last of the Cowboys" (aka, "The Great Smokey Roadblock"), with Henry Fonda and Eileen Brennan.

These promising titles went nowhere. Only Jim Sharman's 1975 "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," which must have seemed like a throwaway project at the time, is the one Sarandon film that managed to stick.

It was followed by two high-profile titles (Charles Jarrott's hugely commercial "The Other Side of Midnight" and Louis Malle's arty "Pretty Baby") and one in which she arguably gave her best performance of that period (Frank Pierson's "King of the Gypsies").

Sarandon entered the 1980s with Jack Smight's "Loving Couples," with Shirley MacLaine, James Coburn and Stephen Collins; Malle's superb film of a John Guare story, "Atlantic City," opposite Burt Lancaster, and Joanthan Demme's TV film "Who Am I This Time?," based on a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. story and co-starring Christopher Walken. Her most disarming performance at this time came in Frank Perry's "Compromising Positions" (1985), a nimble comedy-mystery based on the Susan Isaacs novel.

Prior to her belated breakthrough in Ridley Scott's "Thelma and Louis" in 1991, Sarandon bided her time in such variable films as Paul Mazurksy'a "Tempest," opposite John Cassavetes; George Miller's "The Witches of Eastwick"; Tony Scott's "The Hunger" (in which she famously got naked with and kissed Catherine Deneuve); Ron Shelton's "Bull Durham"; Robert Greenwald's "Sweet Hearts Dance," a pleasing relationship film about two intersecting couples, co-starring Don Johnson, Elizabeth Perkins and Jeff Daniels - definitely worth checking out - and, with less success, Pat O'Connor's "The January Man," Glenn Jordan's "The Buddy System," Luis Mandoki's"White Palace" and Euzhan Palcy's "A Dry White Season," each of which had a Sarandon moment.

Lately, Sarandon's career is best described as adventurous, as she's jumped from Paul Haggis' politically charged "In the Land of Elah" to Craig Gillespie's low-down "Mr. Woodcock" to John Turturro's experimental musical, "Romance & Cigarettes" (pictured above) to Kevin Lima's fanciful "Enchanted" to Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" to Barry Levinson's HBO biopic on Jack Kevorkian, "You Don't Know Jack."

She found time in 2010 to make two titles with Michael Douglas - Oliver Stone's "Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps" and Brian Koppelman and David Levien's "Solitary Man."

Two of Sarandon's most recent films which remain nearly unseen are Paolo Barzman's "Emotional Arithmatic," co-starring Max Von Sydown, Gabriel Byrne and Christopher Plummer, and Ann Turner's Australian-made "Irresistible," in which Sarandon and Emily Blunt knock heads over Sam Neill, their shared romantic pursuit.

Hard to believe that this 2006 film has yet to see the light of day in an American movie house.

The titles included in BAM's much-deserved Sarandon celebration are Paul Schrader's "Light Sleeper," Robert Benton's "Twilight," Stanley Tucci's "Joe Gould's Secret" and her Oscar-winner, Tim Robbins' "Dead Man Walking," plus the aforementioned "The Front Page," "Thelma and Louise," "Romance and Cigarettes," "Pretty Baby," "Atlantic City," "The Witches of Eastwick," "The Hunger" and "Bull Durham"; the location of the retrospect is the BAM Rose Cinemas, located in the Peter Jay Sharp Building at 30 Lafayette Avenue.