I have received an excellent education in film at MoMA, having seen thousands of movies there, many of them memorable; my favorites would include Citizen Kane (the film that first awakened me to the possibilities of movies), D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in a beautiful nitrate print (with live piano accompaniment) and The Searchers, in a gorgeous Vistavision print, with Harey Carey, Jr. in attendance. But I have also had strange and unpleasant experiences there: a riot that broke out during a screening of Chabrol's La Rupture when a woman in the movie hit her husband over the head with a frying pan and some people laughed and offended other members of the audience; a tribute to Blake Edwards that included a scanned-and-panned print of The Party, causing a near-riot; a screening of Oshima's Diary of a Shijuku Thief missing the color sequences, and a screening of Lang's The Woman in the Window, with Joan Bennett herself in attendance, in which the reels were projected in the wrong order! Add to this my experience this past Wednesday at MoMA, where they showed Bergman's The Magic Flute with the overture missing! No explanation was given and some members of the audience were confused, because one member of the opera's audience who had been shown in the overture was also used for reaction shots during the film and only those of us who had seen the film previously knew who she was. At least this print was shown in the proper aspect ratio -- 1.33:1 --which was not the case when I saw the film in the 70's at Manhattan's Festival Theatre. I like Bergman's film but the opera seemed quite abrupt without the overture and there were perhaps too many close-ups, not surprising since the film was made for Swedish TV. Generally I don't think opera can be successful on film or TV; one misses too much whether the shot is close-up or long shot (this is even more true of attempts to put ballet on film or television, though Balanchine had some success in doing studio versions of his ballets for TV broadcast.) The only other two operas I know of that were made specifically for film are Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Parsifal: the Losey I thought was a disappointment, with arbitrary camera angles, but I liked the Syberberg, which was somewhat successful in using a pre-recorded soundtrack with lip-synched actors (opera singers can't necessarily act and actors can't sing opera).
On some levels a minor and even routine film, it (Man to Man) is executed with deep conviction and with the stylistic intricacy befitting a masterpiece.
Frederic Lombardi, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (McFarland and Company, 2013)
One of the first series I ever saw at MoMA was the Dwan series in 1971, to celebrate Peter Bogdanovitch's book-length interview of the director, who also appeared in person. Dwan had a long career -- his first movie was made in 1911, his last in 1961-- and his output is uneven, though even his weaker films have beautiful moments. I recently saw Man to Man (1930) on Turner and was impressed with how much style it had; many of the directors who started during the silent era were skilled at telling stories with minimal dialogue. There is an extraordinary sequence at the beginning of the film when Michael Bolton and his girlfriend are parked near a train track at sunset as a train goes by, cut to a newpaper headline of Bolton losing a college election and then cut to Bolton in a train, on the same track, seeing his former girlfriend in a roadster with another man. The flimsy plot of Man to Man is an excuse for Dwan to show the details of small town life, complete with elegant tracking shots through the town, as well as the pettiness and bigotry underneath.
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