BACK PAGES:The Cork Film Festival was the only one in the country when it began in the mid-1950s. Séamus Kelly, aka Quidnunc, was there in 1965 to write this Irishmans Diary.
WEARING AN impeccable dinner jacket, a bucolic complexion, and just the most delicate trace of a black eye, Mr Trevor Howard rocked a Cork Film Festival audience with a few of the harsher facts of a film star’s life at the Savoy Cinema here on Monday night.
Asked if he ever went to see his own films, Mr Howard said yes, but it was usually painful. He recalled shooting Roots of Heaven, in Africa with John Huston directing, under pretty difficult conditions. "The final sequence," he said, "showed me, beaten up after a long trek. I had a broken arm and I had lost my hat. Entering a settlement where I expected to be arrested, instead, I was given a sort of civic reception. I acknowledged by saluting with my remaining arm – military style. Huston thought it the best thing in the film. So did I, but when the film came on screen this bit was cut out – because the man who edited the stuff knew that it was improper to salute when you are not wearing a hat."
Howard had a couple of other similar stories: Of how, in the same film, he was required to shoot at native Africans in some sequences, and found on location that he had to fire live ammunition since there were no blanks. "Huston thought that I was not aiming near enough," he said. He also spoke with some bitterness about the remake of Mutiny On The Bounty. "The original script showed Bligh as he was – a humane but fuddled man. When we got to Tahiti they threw it away and played by ear, so that my Captain Bligh was quite inconsistent – and the critics were quite right to say so, but who got the blame? Not the director or producer, but Joe Q Sucker . . ."
Howard said that where some years ago film-makers only wanted villains, because villains are box office, they now accepted the filmic existence of saints, and more intelligent films were being made.
Having got off to a good start on Sunday night, the 10th Cork Film Festival kept up to standard on Monday with short films from France, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Holland, and a cosmopolitan feature from Mexico with the most clumsy English title of the week: The Boy And the Ball and the Hole in the Wall(it's simpler in Spanish – El Nino Y El Muro). A joint Spanish-Mexican effort, directed by Ismael Rodriguez, the film is set in Berlin and the main theme revolves on the determination of a small boy from West Berlin to recover a football which has been lost over the wall. I was talking to Paddy Carey, the Dublin director whose Yeats Country, the documentary sponsored by External Affairs and made on a shoe-string, has been highly acclaimed everywhere in the film festival world. Carey's film won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Festival in the teeth of top world competition, and at the Moscow festival, where it was shown though not eligible to compete, it was the most commented-on work at the festival.
A slight shadow has been cast by the fact that the Indian delegation at Cork have asked Dermot Breen and his council to have their entries brought forward since their concern about the India-Pakistan war makes them feel that they should return home urgently. For the rest of the delegates, however, it’s “On with the dance, let joy be unconfined”, and yesterday most of them toured Cork Harbour and afterwards attended an open air reception at Bunny Connellan overlooking the Atlantic.
http://url.ie/2duh