DAVE KEHR PRESENTS RESTORED 
TREASURES FROM MOMA

One of America’s most authoritative film critics, and now a senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Dave Kehr comes to the Melbourne Cinémathèque to introduce two of MoMA’s most intriguing new restorations, a pair of Hollywood creations from the first years of the talkies. Presented in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

7:00PM – THE IRON MASK
Allan Dwan (1929) 95 mins

Dwan’s prolific oeuvre of over 400 films made over 50 years parallels the rise and decline of the Hollywood studio system. This Dumas adaptation, released two years after The Jazz Singer, stands on the epochal cusp of the sound era. The king of swashbucklers, Douglas Fairbanks plays D’Artagnan (as he had in 1921’s The Three Musketeers) in this lavish production, originally released as a part Vitaphone talkie. It represented the first time Fairbanks spoke on screen and the last time he would work with Dwan, with whom he made 10 films. It represents a final highpoint for Fairbanks whose career plummeted with the advent of sound.

New restoration courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

9:00PM – WILD GIRL
Raoul Walsh (1932) 78 mins

Largely filmed amongst the giant redwoods of California’s Sequoia National Park, Walsh’s exuberant and fond parody of the early silent Western is an often-vertiginous adaptation of a 1907 play, Salomy Jane, about a frontier tomboy (Joan Bennett) who falls for the ubiquitous stranger (Charles Farrell) who arrives in town. Following on from his widescreen epic The Big Trail, made in 1930, Walsh populates the frame with a remarkable depth of staging, action and character in one of his major works of the early 1930s.

New restoration courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (New York).