As one of its sidebars this year, the New York Film Festival is presenting a near-complete retrospective of the features helmed by the great Hollywood writer-director, Joseph Mankiewicz. Unfortunately, many of the films are being presented in digital versions while some of the 35-millimeter films are being presented in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center where, to my knowledge, the projection is inadequate, and, to add insult to injury, it's impossible to see all the films anyway since some titles are being projected simultaneously on different screens.

 

Happily, one film, the magnificent, moving The Barefoot Contessa, the tragic story of a beautiful dancer — played by screen-goddess, Ava Gardner — who becomes a Hollywood star, was screened at the excellent Walter Reade Theatre in 35-millimeter. This work boasts an impressive cast, including Humphrey Bogart, above all, supported by Edmond O'Brien, Marius Goring, Rossano Brazzi, Valentina Cortese and Franco Interlenghi. The print was a UCLA restoration although it was inadequate as a reproduction of the original Technicolor process which must have looked extraordinary in initial release, given that the film was photographed by the legendary Jack Cardiff.

 

A few premieres of new feature films by major directors are being screened outside of the main slate of the festival — one that is as beautiful as almost any work in the main slate is the unexpectedly affecting For Queen and Country by the masterly John Boorman. A sequel to his celebrated autobiographical film, Hope and Glory, this new work picks up the story a few years later with his protagonist conscripted into the army in the early 1950s. The visionary streak and exalted high romanticism of some of Boorman’s earlier features is absent here, with the filmmaker working in a more nostalgic, largely comic vein. If For Queen and Country does not quite reach the pinnacle of the director’s oeuvre —it is not of the eminence of, say, Point Blank, Deliverance, or Beyond Rangoon —it is nonetheless an entrancing film. The cast here is outstanding, including Caleb Landry Jones (in a bravura performance), David Thewlis, Richard E Grant, Brian F. O’Byrne, and Sinead Cusack, among others. Boorman’s handling of the digital format is beyond criticism.