Festival-goers will be able to enjoy director's 'own subtle, spectral presence' through his playful choice of films
Martin Scorsese's four specially chosen double bills at the Port Eliot Festival is another reminder of his reputation as someone committed to preserving movie history. It's also part of the new curatorial fashion in film festivals: a big name will be asked to curate (sometimes at long-distance) a strand by personally selecting a number of films with a unifying idea or theme and then putting their name to the resulting event, perhaps with some well-chosen words for the programme. The local organisers do the legwork, locating the actual cans of film, or DVDs, and scheduling the projections.
Scorsese's choices here are droll, and the presence of a railway viaduct at Port Eliot is significant. Murder On The Orient Express is about a murder on a train. Hitchcock's North By Northwest has legendary train scenes. Richard Fleischer's Narrow Margin is about bad guys attempting to whack a prosecution witness on a train, and Fritz Lang's Human Desire (based on Émile Zola's La Bête Humaine, and also filmed by Jean Renoir) is about a railwayman committing a murder. I wonder if the Port Eliot organisers expected Scorsese to suggest his own railway-themed film, Boxcar Bertha from 1972. Maybe he thought it too obvious.
As for the others, All About Eve is a classic beloved of all cinephiles. The choice of Jean Renoir's The River is perhaps playfully related to the proximity of a river to Port Eliot's outdoor cinema. Scorsese is passionate about preserving Luchino Visconti's great masterpiece The Leopard, and Michael Powell's The Red Shoes is a favourite of his. His longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker was married to Powell and Scorsese supervised its recent restoration.
Festivalgoers at Port Eliot may well savour Martin Scorsese's own subtle, spectral presence in this selection.
Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic