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Film

Four Stars’ Bright Idea Still Shines 90 Years On

According to Hollywood lore the earth all but trembled that day in the spring of 1919, when four of the most popular figures in American movies — the director D. W. Griffith and the actors Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford — gathered to create their own distribution company.

But for The New York Times, reporting on one of the initial public pronouncements of that company, United Artists Corporation, on May 18, 1919, the most exciting aspect of this new company was not its celebrity stockholders but the company’s stated intention to eliminate the practice of “block booking,” which forced theater owners to take an entire program of pictures in order to get the handful they really wanted. “Open booking so far has been adopted by only a few companies,” The Times reported, “so the announcement that the United Artists will adhere strictly to the policy of dealing with exhibitors ‘by the single picture only’ is considered as something of an event in the motion-picture industry.”

Something of an event indeed. United Artists will turn 90 next year, having survived countless transformations and takeovers since the company released its first feature, Fairbanks’s “His Majesty, the American.” Although the first agreement called for the four principals each to release four films a year, they soon found it impossible to keep up that pace, and United Artists turned to other independent-minded creators to fill its schedule. Among them were Buster Keaton, Norma Talmadge, King Vidor, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, Samuel Goldwyn, Walter Wanger, Alexander Korda, David O. Selznick and many others who will be featured in a five-week tribute to United Artists that begins Friday night at Film Forum.

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Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film “Raging Bull,” about the life and hard times of the boxer Jake La Motta.Credit...Associated Press

Though it opens with two of the company’s most celebrated and ubiquitous releases, Woody Allen’s 1979 “Manhattan” and Martin Scorsese’s 1980 “Raging Bull” (to be shown in a new 35-millimeter print), the series, organized by Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programming at Film Forum, soon makes its way down less well-worn paths: a double bill of two important early films by Stanley Kubrick, “The Killing” (1956) and “Paths of Glory” (1957), on Sunday and Monday; a single performance of Raoul Walsh’s 1924 epic fantasy, “The Thief of Bagdad,” with Fairbanks, at 7:45 p.m. on Monday, with live piano accompaniment by the gifted and scholarly Steve Sterner.

As a service provider rather than a financial partner, United Artists did not end up owning many of the movies it distributed, as the rights returned to the original producers. The Chaplin and Pickford films reverted to the estates of their makers, but Film Forum has arranged for representative double bills of their work.

The 1926 “Sparrows,” in which Pickford rescues a band of orphans from a swampy labor camp, plays with the 1927 light romantic comedy “My Best Girl” on April 28. The series concludes, altogether fittingly, with a pairing of Chaplin’s perfect blend of comedy and melodrama, “City Lights” (1931), and his most socially engaged film, “Modern Times” (1936), on May 1. Griffith’s 1919 masterpiece, “Broken Blossoms,” is coupled with Charles Laughton’s sublime, heartfelt homage to Griffith, “Night of the Hunter” (1955), on April 13 and 14, and a few Keaton classics are scattered throughout.

United Artists was struggling in the early ’50s when two producers, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, came to Pickford and Chaplin, the surviving founders, with a proposal: If they could turn the troubled organization around in five years, they would earn an option to buy it. The aging stars agreed, and so began the busiest and richest period in the company’s history. Mr. Krim and Mr. Benjamin worked with a wide range of independent filmmakers, helping to finance their projects in return for certain rights.

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Ralph Meeker and Gaby Rodgers in “Kiss Me Deadly.”Credit...Photofest/Film Forum

Soon they had a studio of their own and a collection balanced between drive-in and grindhouse fair (like the classic ’50s noir double bill on April 26: Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly” and Phil Karlson’s “99 River Street”) and prestige productions from the likes of Otto Preminger (“The Man With the Golden Arm”), Stanley Kramer (“The Defiant Ones”) and Hecht-Hill-Lancaster — a production company Burt Lancaster founded with his agent, Harold Hecht, and the writer-producer James Hill — which gave United Artists its first best-picture Oscar with the 1955 “Marty” (screening April 23).

Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s. In those heady days it released films like Billy Wilder’s “Apartment” (April 6 and 7), Tony Richardson’s “Tom Jones” (April 24), and John Frankenheimer’s “Manchurian Candidate” (April 15), movies with a sexual and political edge that the more conservative majors could not equal.

The company carried on that tradition into the late ’60s and ’70s, with audacious films like the (formerly) X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” (April 9), Ken Russell’s sweaty adaptation of “Women in Love” (April 27 and 28), and Hal Ashby’s Vietnam melodrama, “Coming Home” (April 22), culminating in Bernardo Bertolucci’s sexually explicit “Last Tango in Paris” (April 25).

United Artists remained the maverick studio until the 1990s, when it became a financial football (its most precious assets were the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises), kicked around by various bankers, promoters and avaricious studios. It is now jointly owned by MGM, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. As we wait to see whether they will continue United Artists’ adventurous tradition, that tradition, at least, is on glorious display through May 1.

A correction was made on 
March 31, 2008

A film column on Thursday about a tribute to United Artists at Film Forum referred imprecisely to the ownership of the company. While Sony is a co-owner of MGM, United Artists is owned jointly by MGM, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. Sony has no direct ownership interest in United Artists.

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