Appearing in person at a screening of her surprisingly moving film, “This is the Life” (Fox, 1935, dir: Marshall Neilan), Withers approached the microphone at Cinecon, the connoisseur’s festival of rarely screened films, with a characteristic bubbly, “Howdy, everybody!”

There’s not a shy bone in the 84-year-old former child star’s body. She gabbed in delight: “I’ve been coming to the Egyptian Theater since it opened. I used to go to the movies in 1932-33 with the kids I did extra work with. They sat us up in the balcony because the audience would cause a ruckus if they saw me.”

“I have a pretty heavy schedule at 84. And I’m the luckiest lady. I have had more fun. Not everyone started working at age 3.”

“This is the Life,” an oddly affecting backstage drama about a child actress, stars the utterly guileless Withers. She plays Geraldine Rivier, exploited by foster parents who heinously milk her high-earning talent for profit. In a heartbreaking opening scene, young Gerry watches forlornly as street urchins frolic outside her hotel room window. With minimal action, she conveys the tedium and dull repetitions of being a stage kid. Her abusive foster mom keeps her more or less captive to practice her song-and-dance routine. Eventually, Gerry runs away from home, glomming onto a vagabond, Michael. This Depression-era archetype is delivered with great cinematic fluidity by a debonair, extremely handsome actor named Johnny McGuire.

Like most Cinecon feature films, “This is the Life” tantalizes for several reasons. The film provides an extraordinary anthropological tour through an American cultural and physical landscape that no longer exists. When Withers and Michael head out for California, they stow away in a railroad freight car. He has second thoughts about taking on his young charge, and abandons Withers while she sleeps. Discovering that he’s left, she races after him, accusing him in fervent, direct confrontation:

Michael: “This isn’t the sort of life for you.”
Geraldine: “Yes it is, and I’m going with you. That was a dirty trick running out on me!”

The moment packs maximum emotion. When Michael later sacrifices his freedom on her behalf, and the police cart him away, she turns to her keeper, bursting into tears, lamenting, “You don’t understand. I love him.”

The tender attachment of an 8-year-old girl to a grown man — wouldn’t get started today.

What a triumph for Jane Withers to witness a theater full of wizened cinefiles hanging on her skilled performance of 75 years ago.

We passed the Labor Day weekend inhaling the Egyptian Theater’s popcorn-soaked oxygen during  the 46th annual CINECON — a festival of the weird, the wonderful, and the rarely viewed.

Cinecon is a connoisseur’s festival; and the key word is rare — movies that for whatever reason haven’t been screened in decades. Many get unearthed from vaults, stored after their initial commercial releases in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Cinefiles travel from across the country to enjoy 35mm  prints of extraordinarily pristine condition projected on the Egyptian’s broad, tall screen.

A highlight of the five-day vintage flick-fest was a wonderful guest appearance by all-American dramatic actor Don Murray following FROM HELL TO TEXAS (dir: Henry Hathaway, 1958). The psychological western was filmed in CinemaScope in the beautiful rugged landscapes of Death Valley and Lone Pine, California. It was the second cowboy role for Murray, a self-proclaimed Long Island suburban kid.

His first was BUS STOP (dir: Josh Logan, 1956), filmed two years prior. Cinecon interviewer Stan Taffel, chatting with Murray, tapped the grey-haired, slender actor’s memories of playing romantic lead to Marilyn Monroe at the height of her stardom.

“When you worked with Marilyn Monroe,” recalled Murray, “there was press around all the time. And everyone was so up tight. Like: ‘Is she gonna know her lines? Is she gonna show up on time?’”

“And she didn’t know her lines, and she didn’t come on time. But there was kinetic energy [during the shoot] from all of this.”

“We were all theater people and we knew our lines. She couldn’t put three sentences together. She did her scenes over and over, like, up to twenty takes. You had to be at your best, because, whenever she did it right, they might use that take. It was all start, stop, start, stop. We thought the film was a disaster, but the big impression came at a preview  – it was thanks to [director] Josh Logan and [writer] George Axelrod how good the film was.”

“Marilyn was experienced by then, she had done about 20 films. But she was missing her marks all the time. You know, there are marks — places to stand where the lighting, sound, camera angle are all correct. So the director [Logan] told me, every time [she wanders], put your hands on her hips and move her back into her marks. I was doing this the whole film!”

You can see Murray grasp Monroe in the photos. It’s a tough job but someone had to do it.

_{Don Murray/Stan Taffel photo: courtesy Michael Schlesinger}

• Marilyn dances
• Girl power

The first two on this list (in descending order of magnitude), have functioned relatively adeptly in the market economy. Why? Because entrepreneurs recorded them on celluloid and disc, then packaged, promoted and distributed movies and records. Poor modern dance, existing only in real time and space, has never generated revenue apace. The U.S. has a film industry and a music industry, but where’s the dance industry?

What beautiful news, then, our underfunded, under appreciated art form will be recognized in a Dance at the White House performance series. The first event, September 7, honors the elegant former dancer and artistic director emeritus of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Judith Jamison. Fitting and somehow fascinating that it took two women of color to give American modern dance its due.

Bravo, and thank you, Michelle Obama!

Cagney was “one of the nicest persons in Hollywood,” so unlike Cody Jarrett, the homicidal psychopath with a mother fixation that he plays in Raoul Walsh’s violence-riddled 1949 film.

Wagner believes Cagney “didn’t get his real due. He was overlooked. He was probably the finest actor to hit Hollywood. He became his roles.”

The kind of peppy old lady only California can produce, Wagner has lived to share her memories of Cagney with whom she worked in the ’30s.

“Many of the stars would go over and watch Cagney work,” the unflappable centenarian recounted. “He always took me aside and made sure I knew my lines. He would say, ‘If you’re good, that makes me good.”

“White Heat” capped the Academy’s marvelous, 15-part summer series, “Oscar Noir.”

In the photo above, Wagner, 23, rehearses a scene with Jimmy Cagney from “Ladykiller” (1933). The scene is a sound-stage recreation of L.A.’s Coconut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel, which was demolished to a pile of rubble in 2006.

“In one day at Warner’s, I remember, I worked on eight films. [We were so overworked that] we decided to form a guild. Cagney came over to me and said, ‘Sign this.’”

Along with  Cagney, Wagner was an early member of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Read about other early guild members.

“It was a shame,” she noted, “that the guilds broke up the studio system. But we had to have a guild.”

Polly, who still drives and uses the internet, is writing a book about her life in Hollywood.

• Daughter Julie remembers John Garfield
• Alan Ladd’s son reminisces
• Lizbeth Scott, live at the Academy
• Jane Russell remembers Jack Cole
• Norman Lloyd, still a bon vivant

A under appreciated director who mines the nexus of the lofty and the lusty, DeMille fits well with the Egyptian Theater’s ornate aesthetic. His influence was ingrained in mainstream American culture by the time Sid Grauman built Hollywood’s house of hieroglyphics in 1922.

This coming September 22, following a screening of DeMille’s naughty Claudette Colbert vehicle, “Cleopatra,” (1934), Leonard Maltin will interview author Scott Eyman, author of the new biography, “Emperor of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille.”

Film information here.

• Fashion historian Heather Vaughn writes about Travis Banton’s experience costuming this film. (Travis is a big favorite on arts·meme.)

Based on that idealistic credo — the legacy of the civil rights movement and ’60s egalitarianism — Richard and Jean Patterson, an interracial couple who are the subject of a brilliant new play, “Neighbors,” marry. He’s black, she’s white. The two spawn a beautiful biracial daughter, and dwell in the suburbs near the university where Richard, a professor, pursues an academic career. Jean’s a stay-at-home mom, having long abandoned her dream of being a poet.

An uncouth set of new neighbors moves next door. It’s a mundane event — who among us hasn’t gone through it? But in playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ brazen imaginings, what’s landed next door is Richard Patterson’s worst nightmare. It represents everything he believes he has left behind in his quest for upward mobility.

The dramatic impact of this event on the Patterson marriage is the stuff of ”Neighbors,” now at the Matrix Theatre Company on Melrose Avenue. It comes to L.A. after workshop development at New York’s Public Theater.

If you take the characters at face value (and I don’t), the new neighbors, the Crows, are a family of thespians. That’s putting it mildly. In fact they’re an audacious gang of minstrel performers. Each member of this band of gypsies conjures a hugely offensive black stereotype that director Nataki Garrett delivers to her audience with just the delicacy and nuance minstrelsy deserves: none.

Mammy (the kerchief-headed, hilarious Baadja-Lyne) bosses and smacks her irrepressible offspring into submission. They include daughter Topsy (Daniele Watts) her nappy Afro tempered by raggedy braids, her killer performance spanning dance and mime, the gentle brother Jim (James Shippy), pressured to inherit the clan mantle, he’d rather avoid the family business, and Uncle Zip (an oily Leith Burke) who zips with little resistance under Jean’s (white) skin, rocking her shaky world.

The Brooklyn-based playwright, precocious at 26, now works in Berlin on a project about black soldiers stationed in Germany. Every element of his vivacious play is fresh, alive, and communicates. It’s wildly intelligent, unafraid, and wickedly funny.

Does “Neighbors” put an end to the liberal fantasy that race doesn’t matter? Or, does it give idealism new urgency? One wonders if Jacobs-Jenkins is visionary or cynic. My hunch is that through “Neighbors,” he’s working it out.

There’s a line in the play where one of the characters muses, “I wonder where that memory went.”  Jacobs-Jenkins seems to pose this question to us all concerning two centuries of hateful cultural baggage Americans would rather avoid.

At left: This songbook, published in Ithaca, New York, in 1839, shows an early depiction of a minstrel-show character named Jim Crow. By the 1890s the expression “Jim Crow” was being used to describe laws and customs aimed at segregating African Americans and others.

Neighbors | Matrix Theater | thru October 24 | highly recommended

The big event at this year’s festival is the screening of a previously lost Charlie Chaplin film, “A Thief Catcher” from Keystone Studios, 1914.

Film collector Paul Gierucki found a 16mm film print in a trunk at a Taylor, Michigan, antique store last year.

“I could tell it was a Keystone comedy, so I haggled and got it for $100.”

When he put it on a projector, he was astonished when Chaplin appeared as a cop about six minutes into the film for an extended two-minute cameo.

“My heart stopped,” Gierucki recalls. “I recognized him immediately.”

“A Thief Catcher” was in production between January 5-26, 1914, soon after Chaplin arrived at the Keystone studio, and it represents the second or third screen role for the soon-to-be world famous comedy star.

Robert Birchard, Cinecon’s president and author of multiple tomes on Hollywood history, reminds us that this film was shot in Edendale, L.A.’s nascent boulevard of filmmaking, now Glendale Avenue in Echo Park.

• Before Hollywood came Edendale

Read my L.A. Times article here.

This Russian television broadcast shows Osipova’s unearthly technique, particularly her jumps, and the exquisite way her arms taper in the proper romantic ballet line.

Osipova’s Albrecht, the South Dakota-born David Hallberg, performs port de bras while doing foot batterie at the beginning of this clip. I never saw that done before, and I love it.

Like this? Me too! Read more here:

• David Hallberg, King of the Dance

There we could see Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Le Amiche” (“The Girlfriends,” 1955), the great Italian director’s refined social melodrama.

The film depicts the world of Clelia, a Rome-based fashionista sent by her employer to open a boutique in the smaller, northern city of Turin. Clelia soon falls in with an arty group of architects, artists, models, and one determined suicide candidate.

Across the pond (and over the river and through the woods), Hollywood was churning its own version of the genre. Ladies of the ’50s certainly had their cat fights, but they also enjoyed strong sisterhood. The values, feelings, and behavior of women seemed to fascinate male screenwriters then.

Beautifully shot in black and white, “Le Amiche” represents an early example of the maestro’s oeuvre. Doug Cummings of filmjourney.org notes the film’s “extremely elegant visual structure” and how its “themes foreshadow Antonioni’s more mature works.”  It’s also a personal favorite of LACMA film curator, Ian Birnie, who shares with us:

“I love LE AMICHE. The storytelling is brilliant; the characters are amazing.

It’s way ahead of its time. My favorite moment is when Ferzetti comes out of the restaurant after the brawl — Cortese follows him and they lean, without speaking, against a wall in the rainy street, with the lamp silhouetting their overcoats. It’s a shot that epitomizes classic Italian cinema.

Our screenings were very successful. Over 1,300 people attended and the distributor did well too, which pleased me.”

Read A.O. Scott’s wonderful “Le Amiche” review in the NYT.

The reversal of the usual post-screening Q&A set-up also seemed fitting. The actor and the white-haired cinema maestro sat not before the audience, on a stage, but amidst it in the top rows of the house. This forced an arrangement in which cinefiles, dazzled by the exuberant color film that had just splashed the Aero’s football-field-sized screen, paid homage to Russell from below, like beseeching courtiers. Words like “radical,” “influential,” and “groundbreaking” got attached to Russell’s slew of ’70s movies.

The feisty, rotund Russell seemed to enjoy his royal roost; he’s British, after all. Piercing any pomposity with flattening sarcasm, he sputtered in response to some blather about movie-making being a “collaborative process.”

“It is?” Russell nearly howled. “No one told me that!  I did everything!”

As for Richard Chamberlain, who delivered miracles as the tortured genius composer (and what a career, from Dr. Kildare to basically coming out of the closet through the surrogate role of Tchaikovsky), is there a lovelier or more gentlemanly movie actor? Still looking terrific while posing patiently for photos — including this one for arts•meme —  Chamberlain noted that he just finished shooting a film in New York.

Said Chamberlain: “Ken creates a feeling on the set that is very intense. He’s a little scary. He’s dripping with passion.”  Playing the role, he remembered, “I was scared, really scared. I was frightened by Tchaikovsky, but Glenda’s [Jackson, his co-star] riches never ceased to surprise me.”

He admitted: “I was a gay man in the closet. I was hiding it at that time. I suppose it did flavor what I did in the film because he [Tchaikovsky] was really in agony.”

“After the film was released, a Russian approached me and asked ‘How could you?’” [depict Tchaikovsky as a gay man].

Modestly explaining his exceptionally emotional performance, which includes realistic pounding of keyboards in a gorgeously filmed concert-hall sequence, Chamberlain said, “It’s all Tchaikovsky. I went for Tchaikovsky all the way.”

_{Photo: Gregory Weinkauf}