This article appeared in the August 23, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2002)

It’s an industry truism that if you want to see the best films at a festival, you watch the old ones. Not because films were better then, or that there aren’t any good ones now, but because it’s easier to yield a bumper crop when you have all of film history to harvest from. Such was the case at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, where, playing hooky from my day job as an exponent of contemporary artists’ films, I dedicated myself to offerings from the 20th century.

The centerpiece of the 2024 festival’s repertory programming was “The Lady With the Torch: The Centenary of Columbia Pictures,” which curator Ehsan Khoshbakht introduced as representing an era of “commies, lesbians, and Jews” in front of and behind the camera. The program spanned a relatively short period in the studio’s 100-year history. The earliest film in the lineup was Roy William Neill’s rarely screened drama Wall Street, released in 1929, and the most recent was Budd Boetticher’s 1959 picture Ride Lonesome. Between these years, Hollywood saw the enforcement of the Hays Code and the terror of McCarthyism; several of the talents featured in the series were later blacklisted.

Many of the films screened on immaculate 35mm prints normally held under lock and key by Sony, which now owns Columbia’s catalog. (If I may lodge a practical complaint: the otherwise excellent GranRex theater in which almost all of this took place, like the cinemas at Cannes, inexplicably lacked masking—the black curtains that would’ve concealed the empty space on either side of the Academy-ratio images—so the picture was winged with a bright sheen instead of floating in darkness.)

Khoshbakht, co-director of the all-repertory festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, punctuated his series with heavies like Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), but largely, and wisely, made plenty of room for lesser-known titles by some of Columbia’s journeyman directors. Even auteurs like Nicholas Ray and John Sturges were represented by relative obscurities—Bitter Victory (1957) and The Walking Hills (1949), respectively. Each day’s titles, culled from across the series’s three-decade span, betrayed a more or less obvious motif. Particularly fun was the bad-girls grouping of Girls Under 21 (Max Nosseck, 1940), Under Age (Edward Dmytryk, 1941), and Women’s Prison (Lewis Seiler, 1955).

Seiler’s film stood out as an unexpectedly anti-carceral provocation about the conditions in a women’s prison overseen with psychopathic relish by a tragically sadistic warden (Ida Lupino). The ensemble cast includes Audrey Totter, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, and Vivian Marshall, whose talent for impersonations is put to delicious use when the collective overtakes the prison. Juanita Moore, who later starred in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), and the other Black actresses in the film also deserve special mention for making the most of the minor roles afforded them.

Watching these films back-to-back revealed a number of subtle, amusing resonances. Take, for example, mirrored Depression-era meet-cutes on a Central Park bench between Loretta Young and Spencer Tracy in Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933) and Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall in William A. Seiters’s If Only You Could Cook (1935). In one case, an unemployed woman mistakes a poor man for a rich one, and in the other, an unemployed woman mistakes a rich man for poor. Seiters’s film, a discovery to me, was a laugh-a-second screwball delight about Arthur and Marshall’s characters getting jobs as a cook and butler in an altruistic gangster’s manor. The gags come so hard and fast that there’s no time to be hamstrung by the plot’s absurdities.

Outside of the Columbia program, Locarno’s robust repertory slate included Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo’s rollicking man-on-the-run fable Samba Traoré (1992), a tribute to Stan Brakhage, and guest of honor Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). Also screening were a selection of newly restored Swiss films, including Alain Tanner’s 1976 classic Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, introduced by Cuarón, who claimed to have named his child after the title character. A whimsical examination of the post-’68 capitulation to capitalist life, Tanner’s film shows a group of aging idealists attempting to maintain their values in a world where the passage of time is marked by the rising cost of everyday commodities (notably Gauloises cigarettes). Co-scripted by visionary English writer John Berger, the film is ultimately hopeful, as it gradually reveals many opportunities for its characters to subvert their tedious jobs and lives, and places faith in the future generation alluded to in the title—Jonah, the offspring of one of the central characters, is conceived during the film and appears in an epilogue set five years later. (In 1999, Tanner followed up with a film called Jonah and Lila, Till Tomorrow, checking in on 25-year-old Jonah and his childhood sweetheart as they navigate their own values in the first six months of the new millennium.)

The one festival repertory pick I saw from this century was Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002), which extravagantly reenvisions the famous, much-adapted 1917 novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay about a lovelorn drunk torn between a forbidden amour and a courtesan. The film stars the recipient of Locarno’s 2024 career achievement award, none other than Shah Rukh Khan. It’s difficult to communicate how famous Khan is to someone who hasn’t heard of him; I for one can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who he was. He occupies my earliest memories—illuminating the screen with his boyish smile as I drift in and out of sleep on my mother’s lap—and seeing him in person was pleasurably surreal. Herein lies another element of the repertory allure: the nostalgia and memories we bring to work we’ve encountered before, and that we haven’t, through familiar textures, sounds, and aesthetics. Do old movies seem better to us because they are old? I admit that’s sometimes part of it, though of course, there are also those that age terribly.

It’s rare to see a Bollywood film at a European festival—Devdas felt like an outlier among mostly Western, arthouse-certified titles—and Khan’s presence evidently attracted the attention of people who might not have otherwise known about or traveled to Locarno. “We came all the way from Washington to see you,” said one adoring fan during the Q&A following the actor’s public talk (one of the few sold-out events I attended at the fest). Ever the consummate movie star, Khan received his fandom with exaggerated humility, and generously sang along when the crowd launched into a spontaneous rendition of the title tune from his 1998 box-office hit Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. “I wish you lives as happy as mine has been,” he said as he left them.

Inney Prakash is a film programmer and critic based in New York City.