David Chute

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Hollywood 001100110

David Chute
SINCE THE DAWN OF THE VIDEO age, when the forgotten old cans of film rotting in studio vaults began to look like precious corporate assets, the preservation of motion pictures has become a high-profile crusade. Everywhere you look in April, the art and science of preservation and (increasingly) restoration is......

All Singing! All Belly-Dancing!

David Chute
IT NEVER FAILS. JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE SAMPLED every last treat that the groaning board of world cinema has to offer, it serves up a startling new sensation -- or an exotically altered version of an old standby, a tongue-tickling new blend of the familiar and the bizarre. Each......

Greed Is Good

David Chute
The reports that appeared in the Hollywood trade papers seemed almost miraculous: The Holy Grail of butchered movies, Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent masterpiece Greed, is on the verge of being restored to at least a flickering shadow of its former glory. This was startling news, because the scenes excised......

Shanghai Gestures

David Chute
The UCLA Film and Television Archive's eye-opening retrospective "Pre-Revolution Chinese Classics" marks the first time in more than 10 years that mainland movies from the '30s and '40s, a Golden Age for the Mandarin-dialect film capital of Shanghai, have screened here in Los Angeles. New movies from Hong Kong, Taiwan......

Lather

David Chute
There is no niche in the marketplace today for the kind of movies Radley Metzger used to make: glossy softcore erotic films that built up a head of steam. "There was a view in the business," says the director of Carmen, Baby and other light classics shot in the '60s......

Ace in the Hole

David Chute
Jose Giovanni has been a convict, a novelist, a screenwriter and a film director, specializing in the French policier and crime genres since 1958. But he's been a movie actor only once, when a producer decided that the performers in a certain picture didn't look "noir" enough. "Put Jose in......