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At least these were incendiary devices; elsewhere one found soporifics. Here was the spectacle of an art form looking back in envy on its younger, more beautiful self. Sometimes the retrospective mood was seductive, as in Paul Newman's sensitive filming of The Glass Menagerie, with top turns by Joanne Woodward, Karen Allen and James Naughton. Faye Dunaway rekindled her old incandescence as a dipso sexpot vamping Mickey Rourke in the scuzzy, enjoyable Barfly, based on the life of Poet-Derelict Charles Bukowski. The festival's one unqualified hit was yet another cheeky evocation of teens in the 1950s, David Leland's Wish You Were Here. Because the British writer- director has a tart, original voice -- and because Emily Lloyd, 16, was perfection as the tart -- the film earned cheers and smiles every time it played.
Usually, though, the movie theaters were mortuaries. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Good Morning Babylon records, in the brothers' patented super- realist style, the making of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance. The film provided Cannes with its handsomest white elephant. Lillian Gish, who rocked the cradle in Intolerance, showed up 71 years later to co-star with Bette Davis in Lindsay Anderson's wan The Whales of August, a kind of On Gilded Pond about two aged sisters reliving old rivalries in a Maine summer home. Gish is lovely brushing Davis' long white hair; Davis, reduced by a stroke to giving inane line readings, is cruelly used in a movie that exploits memories of two great stars.
Intervista, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2th remake of his own life in art, continues the trend of filmmakers' feeding off their early successes. The director offers the familiar manic tap dance -- wistful guys and gargoyle gals and the ache of nostalgia -- all to the calliope crank of old Nino Rota tunes. Then Marcello Mastroianni drops by with an Amazonian Anita Ekberg. He waves a wand, a movie screen appears, and from out of the past flash images of a young Marcello and a gorgeous Anita in the fountain scene from La Dolce Vita. This, at least, is cannibalism with affection; everyone, stars and viewers included, joins in the self-mocking fun.
Mastroianni put himself to fuller use in Dark Eyes, based on three Chekhov stories; it should snare the actor an Oscar nomination next year. The film -- pushy in its eagerness to charm, yet irresistible -- is the work of Soviet Director Nikita Mikhalkov, whose brother Andrei Konchalovsky was represented at Cannes with an American melodrama called Shy People. In the spirit of the cultural thaw in East-West relations, each of the brothers' films snared an acting prize: Mastroianni for best actor, Shy People's Barbara Hershey for best actress. And with Tengiz Abuladze's long suppressed Soviet satire Repentance winning Cannes' runner-up jury prize, the festival resembled one big glasnost menagerie.