On the other hand, a guy was openly smoking weed on the train from Zurich to Locarno on Wednesday morning, and someone else was publically turning on later that night while sitting in the middle of a big crowd watching an open-air screening of Vincente Minelli's THE BAND WAGON. (Watching Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant stoned...hmmm.) On top of the fact people seem to be whooping it up in bars and clubs here as much as they do anywhere else. Plus Jett says Swiss MTV is more sexually brazen than the American version, with the occasional bare breast or ass popping through.

We arrived after an all-night train ride from Paris in a second-class compartment -- six bunks in a space the size of a large foot locker. (We had to shine the rental car at the last minute -- don't ask.) It's 9:30 am Friday as I write this, and all I can say for certain is (a) it's scenically beautiful here, (b) the pizzas taste better here than in Paris, (c) black and yellow leopard-skin motifs have been printed on every exploitable object and surface here in Locarno (that breed of cat being the festival's theme) and (d) the festival looks, smells, walks and talks like a class act.

I could tell an hour after arriving that the Locarno organization is tip-top and well-funded. The festival headquarters is located smack dab in the heart of town, and the staffers are as helpful and gracious as any I've ever dealt with. (Special thanks to staffer Anna Gabutti, who took care of us like a total pro when we first arrived.) It's also apparent after looking over the different issues and themes explored within the festival's program, and after reading through the smartly- written program guide (printed in four languages), there's a highly intelligent, film-culture sensibility anchoring the whole shebang.

You can probably put this down, fundamentally, to the input of festival president Marco Solari and artistic director Irene Bignardi, both of whom spoke to assembled throngs at the opening-night party and just before the BAND WAGON screening in the Piazza Grande, both on Wednesday.

Noting that VARIETY "has rated [us] among the top five," Bignardi writes in her festival program remarks that "several years ago someone described the Locarno Film Festival as the biggest of the small festivals, or the smallest of the big ones." When I hear a festival is "big" or whatever, I usually take this to mean it's in the game of landing hot films that will send out ripples.

But spotlighting issues of social concern is also a Locarno priority. Festival president Marco Solari states in the program he hopes Locarno "can establish itself as a [place] where cinema works...for the fundamental values of human rights and human dignity."

That's a little high falutin', but fine. Journalists are generally supportive of human rights and dignity. But what we really want out of a festival like this (apart from the freebies) is to catch some cool, nervy movies we can tell everyone else about, and by doing so maybe help in some small way to make a distribution deal happen.

New York Nutter

My Locarno viewing got off to a lewd, boisterous start with ABEL FERRARA: NOT GUILTY, a video documentary by French filmmaker Rafi Pitts.

It doesn't attempt an in-depth probing of a filmmaker's career and aesthetics by the usual means -- searching questions put to the director, a comprehensive array of clips, talking heads offering insightful assessments, etc. Pitts just follows Ferrara around New York -- shooting the shit, filming some kind of music video, visiting and hosting friends, talking to women on the street, tossing off anecdotes about Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe (the stars of Ferra's BAD LIEUTENANT, KING OF NEW YORK and NEW ROSE HOTEL) -- and lets him be himself.

"I knew that an interview situation wasn't going to give us any new information about Abel," Pitts told the PARDO NEWS, the local festival rag. "The best way to portray him was to show him how he is. The film is always from his point of view. He's always in the shot." And it's a cool ride. A wonderfully messy, slipshod, organically alive New York hoot.

The festival program notes on this film describe Ferrara as "deranged," which I think is a little harsh. He comes off as a nutter, all right, but one deserving of respect. What comes through is a portrait of an anarchic creative teenager with the soul and finesse of a 51 year-old.

A gnomish, stooped-over figure with longish graying hair in a leather jacket and a pink New York Yankees baseball cap, Ferrara is full of hyper, rambunctious energy. He plays guitar and piano (not too badly) and he loves to tell stories in one of those fuck-this, fuck-that Manhattan voices we're all familiar with. An actor friend observes at one point Ferrara tends to do four or five things at the same time, and each one with distinction. It's clear he likes to solve creative problems by immersing himself in chaos and sorting things out as he goes along.

It's also clear he knows from movies, and precisely what's good and what's not. He's goes into a kind of frenzy when he's working, and you can see why certain films of his (BAD LIEUTENANT and KING OF NEW YORK, certainly) work as well as they do and why, at the same time, constipated producer types might feel a little intimidated by him.

But he's great with actors and catching excitement on the fly. Bronx-born and quick with a quip, Ferrara loves taking cabs all over town and talking shit with people he runs into. There's a great moment when he spots a long-legged brunette walking nearby and starts walking after her, making cracks like "tall...and that's not all!" and "those boots were made for walkin'!"

I have one beef about the film. Ferrara was one of the eleven filmmakers hired by Canal Plus to shoot a short film for 11.9.01, the compilation piece about reactions to the World Trade Center attacks, but was fired, he says, because the producers "thought my ideas about the piece were dangerous." He doesn't explain what these ideas were, and I think Pitts should have gotten him to cough up.

Ferrara is a funny, charismatic, fascinating guy. He doesn't hide his tendency to drink beer all the time from the camera, and he's probably going to have a lot of friends tell him he should invest in some dental work after this film gets around. But that's the honesty of this thing. This is who I am, exuberance and all, and fuck it if it's not what you'd prefer. Ferrara tells a woman he meets on the street he's being followed around by a video crew because it's his last day on earth, and it occurred to me this is precisely the attitude he seems to bring to living his life.

16 YEARS OF ALCOHOL is Richard Jobson's partly autobiographical piece about a young Scottish man's trials with booze and violence from the late '60s to the mid '80s. It feels honest and sensitively told, but it struck me as a bit too precious and on-the-nose. To judge by an article in the PARDO NEWS, it seems as if Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, not Jobson, is the principal culprit.

The film is based on Jobson's book of the same name, which uses elements of his own life as well as his older brother's, whose violent death inspired Jobson to translate his book into cinema.

Traumatized by a violent and alcoholic father, Frankie Mac (nicely portrayed by Kevin McKidd) evolves into a thuggish gang leader in the vein of Malcolm McDowell's Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. An affair with an art student he meets in a record store (Laura Fraser) seems to inspire Frankie to turn over a new leaf, but old habits die hard. He eventually goes into A.A. and takes up acting lessons, and meets and falls in love with another spiritually-nurturing type (Susan Lynch), but again we're told that the grooves in a violent person's psyche run deep.

I didn't care for Robson's decision to highlight the turning points in Frankie's story with a heavy hammer. I was especially uncomfortable with his decision to use intrusive voice-over narration, which I presume came from the book. The PARDO NEWS piece says that "potential financiers recoiled" at this aspect of the script.

But Wong, who told Robson his book could make a great film after the author slipped him a copy after the London premiere of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, insisted that the voice-over was crucial. The general feeling was that it was poetic and not real enough," Jobson is quoted as saying, adding his opinion that the film "is a dreamscape where love and tragedy connect in a very violent and sad way."

Fair enough, but I'm with the financiers. I respected 16 YEARS OF ALCOHOL, but I just didn't buy it.

What can you tell about a film without English subtitles after watching it for fifteen minutes? Something, I think. The same way you can tell if a script is any good or or not after reading ten pages. Anyway, I got a very intriguing whiff off of Tom Barman's ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS, a character-driven, patchwork-quilt piece about eight characters in Antwerp, Belgium, going through various ins and outs over a 18-hour period (or something like that).

I missed the Wednesday night press screening, mainly because I hadn't done my homework and figured out my road map. I tried again Thursday night when it showed at the Piazza Grande, only to make the discovery about the missing English subtitles. There don't appear to be any other screenings. Too bad.

Barman is primarily a rock musican (i.e., frontman for the Belgian alternative group dEUS), but says he "wanted to make a film before I even touched a guitar." He directed all of the band's videos as preparation for making ANYWAY THE WIND BLOWS, and there is definitely something musical, rhythmic and visually alive about the film's opening credits, and something real and undressed about the performances I saw, however briefly.

"I started with the characters rather than a storyline," Barman told the PARDO NEWS. "I wasn't too interested in creating a dramatic denouement. In fact, I pulled away from drama." That line alone is a closer. I'll see this film somehow. Maybe it'll play Toronto.

Leopard Spots

All we did on Wednesday was the usual first-day, getting-credentialed, figuring-out-the-town, attending-the-opening-night-party stuff. We also rented one of those little plastic pedal-crafts and went out on the big lake (Lago Maggiore) and took a swim.

The opening-night party was held at the ancient Castello Visconteo. We got there exactly at 8 pm, when the invitation said things would start, but it was wall-to-wall bodies regardless, and it was a very hot night. Everyone listened respectfully through three speeches -- by Solari and Bignardi and Pascal Couchepin, the President of the Swiss Confederation -- and introductions of the juries for the international competition and the video competition. It was a very stifling and sweaty occasion.

The Locarno Film Festival has been going for 56 years, which makes it almost as old as Cannes. I don't know how many years they've been using the leopard motif, but it's everywhere -- in ads all over town, and on bicycles, festival cars, T-shirts, concession stands, sugar packets...you name it. This year's recipient of the Leopard of Honor award is British filmmaker Ken Loach. His 1993 film RAINING STONES is being shown here.

There's a huge media-only internet salon on the third floor of an old office building off the Piazza Grande. It's a good idea to try and snag a terminal near one of the large windows on the far side because there's no air conditioning or fans, even, which makes it feel like a large sauna. I still prefer the heat here to the heat in Paris. Walking on Paris streets around 1 or 2 pm during this sweltering heat wave make you feel like you're inside a huge oven. Here, at least, it's just hot. An occasional slight breeze from the lake helps, and there's always the option of jumping in.

Forget Lauterbrunnen

Lauterbrunnen is a picturesque Swiss village nestled inside a big canyon with towering cliffs on either side. It's located roughly 60 miles northwest of here. I ran across some photos of it online last week, and read that it has some great hiking trails and one of the highest waterfalls in Europe. Film festivals are about seeing movies, of course, but you're selling your life short if you don't take a day off to drive somewhere nearby and take in the local splendor.

So I developed a notion last week of tooling up to Lauterbrunnen on a slow day and having fun, but nein. No car, no buses, no Lauterbrunnen. I'm just running this to torture myself and remind the world that there's more to this hermetic racket than staring at movie screens all day long. If any readers have ever been to Lauterbrunnen (or if they plan on visiting down the road), please write and tell me how it was.

Gangsta Scarface

"My favorite illustration of SCARFACE's popularity among the underclass: Elmore Leonard said once in an interview that there isn't a hood in Miami jail who can't do a note-perfect Tony Montana." -- Sam Adams, Movies Editor, Philadelphia City Paper, Philadelphia, PA.

Duke vs. Commie Killers

"How about the Wayne vs. KGB as a slapstick comedy? The hitmen are constantly falling off things, getting attacked by livestock and incurring general West Coast mayhem. Their pratfalls get them attention. In the end, the one who saves Wayne's life gets a job being a stuntman. The big final scene will be a jail break from deathrow. The audience thinks it's real, but it's a scene from the movie featuring the defector doubling for Wayne." -- Joe Corey

"I'm amused that you -- not to mention THE GUARDIAN, for heaven's sake -- lend any credence at all to this yarn about Stalin's KGB henchmen sent to murder John Wayne, credited as it is to such impeccable sources as Orson Welles and a writer (Munn) whose previous books include X-RATED: THE PARANORMAL EXPERIENCES OF THE MOVIE STAR GREATS. Actually, I don't doubt that Stalin was capable of initiating such a bizarre plot. What makes no sense is the FBI giving Wayne carte blanche to take on the Reds himself.

"There is indeed wonderful comic potential in the story, though I think steering it in the direction of a touchy-feely relationship between the Duke and the Commie would in fact rob it of its humor (although I'm sure, given the heart-grilling bent of today's filmmakers, that's exactly where it would be taken).

For that reason, I don't see Hanks as Wayne at all, at least if what you're going for is a characterization actually reminiscent of Wayne. Hanks' appeal lies to a great extent in his unguarded quality, the sense that he's constantly available to the audience, whereas Wayne was the most guarded, mysterious, and unavailable of performers. Whether that reserve was an outgrowth of his personality or simply a function of limited acting ability doesn't matter; it's an essential element of his appeal. I see Dennis Quaid.

"Personally, whatever plot is spun out of this, I would love to see a coda in which Uncle Joe's inner circle, wanting to appease the old megalomaniac, contrive to convince him that Wayne actually has been assassinated. And if nothing else, there's potential here for a great new superhero franchise: THE LEAGUE OF LOYAL STUNTMEN." -- Ira Hozinsky, New York, NY.

"You wrote, 'Then he gets wind from the guy he came over with of the communist cell plot to kill Wayne on the HONDO set, and this is when he turns (I haven't worked this out yet, but let's just say he's been softened up by this and that, and he decides he doesn't want to go back to the sadness of his life in the Soviet Union) and helps Canutt stop the would-be killing.' How about this? He falls in love with Geraldine Page, a dead-ringer for his late wife. He was a bad husband before -- all work and no play, all KGB and no wife. Doesn't realize how much he needed her until she died. Then he meets Page, sees his second chance, etc. etc. Fuckin' hysterical idea." -- Matt Fraction

"Why don't you write the Wayne-Stalin flick?" -- John Bland

Wells to Bland: If I were serious about wanting to write it myself, I wouldn't have written it up as a column piece and handed it off to every Tom, Dick and Harry. But I may do it anyway. It's a great story, a great idea. Thanks.

Franken vs. Reilly: The Return

"If you want to post an update for all the Al Franken/Molly Ivins/Bill O'Reilly book confab that works, I got this from the BuzzFlash website, along with a good interview with Franken himself: http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/06/02_franken.html. The link you posted last week does not work anymore, but this one, which is from C-SPAN directly, does as of this writing. I wrote an email to let you know the old link was down, but never got a reply. I so badly wanted to see this for myself that I bugged the guys at Cinephile about tracking down a copy to offer in their free section." -- Steve Coppick, Los Angeles.