ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 2, 1996 TAG: 9611050117
SECTION: EXTRA EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
Eva Marie Saint says Alfred Hitchcock gave her three specific instructions for her role in "North by Northwest":
"Don't use your hands when you talk.
"Lower your voice.
"Look into Cary Grant's eyes at all times."
She followed Hitch's orders, and the picture is one of the best comic-romantic thrillers anyone ever made.
Eva Maria Saint and Ernest Lehman, who wrote the film, are special guests of this year's Virginia Film Festival. On Thursday night, they introduced a newly restored print of the film to a sold-out Culbreth Theater audience.
This year's festival, the ninth, takes place in Charlottesville through Sunday. It's a smaller, more subdued production than it's been in previous years. Changes in funding and organization have made the festival part of the University of Virginia Drama Department. Director Richard Herskowitz says it's now "decentralized," with other Charlottesville institutions taking part of the responsibility for its many activities. "It's a relief that the festival has managed to make a huge transition," he said. "We've gotten the participation of local groups and organizations."
The Bayley Art Museum, for example, was host for the opening-night reception. Getting into the spirit of this year's theme, "Wild Spaces Endangered Places," i.e. road movies, the buffet menu included buffalo tenderloin and rattlesnake sausage.
Not surprisingly, when he talked about "North By Northwest," after the screening, Lehman dismissed the popular auteur theory that gives virtually all of the credit for a film to the director. "I don't think any director is better than the script that is written for him," Lehman stated flatly. He then went on to describe the chaotic process that brought that particular story to the screen.
It began with a vague idea from Hitchcock. He said he wanted to film a chase across Mount Rushmore. Lehman started working backward from there, creating the dapper adman Roger Thornhill played by Cary Grant (though Jimmy Stewart, who'd just made ``Vertigo'' with Hitchcock wanted the role, too), and Eve Kendall, "the sexy spy lady," as Eva Marie Saint calls her.
As Lehman remembers it, "Two weeks before shooting started, we didn't have a semblance of a third act. I had no idea how they were going to Mount Rushmore."
On the restored print, those Mount Rushmore scenes are dramatically improved. Where the nighttime action has been muddy and hard to see, even on the best laserdisc version, the colors are now more distinct and the figures moving across the huge faces are easier to follow. The famous crop-duster scene, though, still has a harsh, sun-bleached quality that sets it apart from the rest of the film.
Such distinctions may sound trivial, but they're the stuff that serious festivalgoers thrive on. Unlike most major festivals that stress early looks of new works, the Virginia festival has always been more interested in displaying the best older films as they were meant to be seen on full-sized screens.
That's why the last-minute cancellation of the rarely seen "Two Lane Blacktop" is such a disappointment. It's been replaced on this afternoon's lineup by "Easy Rider." Director Herskowitz cites a scheduling conflict at Universal, the film's distributor, and the fact that there are only two good prints as the reasons for the last-minute change.
The festival continues through the weekend and ends (officially) on a more serious note Sunday with another facet of Eva Marie Saint's career. She and her husband, Jeffrey Hayden, produced "Children in America's Schools," a documentary recently broadcast on PBS about public education.
Their film shows how wide the gulf is between relatively wealthy suburban schools and poorer rural and inner-city schools. The reason is simple: In most states, schools are funded through local property taxes. The rich do well; the rest have little to work with.
Hayden, who was inspired by Jonathan Kozol's book, ``Savage Inequality,'' found that in Ohio, the poor schools were in horrifyingly bad shape, with leaking roofs, bad wiring and out-of-date text books.
He said in an interview that ``in each district, an architectural firm did thorough on-site investigations of the schools in 1990. They determined that it would cost the state of Ohio $10.2 billion - not to make the schools pleasantly habitable, but to bring the schools up to the building codes.''
Since then, nothing has been done.
The film will be shown at the Omni Hotel on Sunday at 1 p.m., followed by an open discussion and town meeting to talk about education in Virginia.
But that's not the real end of the festival. Vinegar Hill Theatre and the Women's Center are co-sponsoring a series of women's road movies that will be shown throughout the next week. Those begin with ``Thelma and Louise'' on Sunday night and continue with Russ Meyer's bizarre ``Faster, Pussy Cat, Kill! Kill!,'' Percy Adlon's cult favorite ``Bagdad Cafe'' and last year's ``Tank Girl.''
So, even if the Virginia Film Festival isn't the glittering star-studded affair it has sometimes been in the past, it has lost none of its diversity or imagination.
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Jeffrey Hayden and Eva Marie Saintby CNB