THE LOST LAND

AT A TIME WHEN COMMERCIAL MOVIES COST astronomical sums to produce and rely on elaborate campaigns of hype and buzz, it is refreshing to think about Republic Pictures, the studio that occupied the summit of Hollywood’s Poverty Row, like the eagle on its logo perched atop a puny mountain peak. There is no equivalent today to Republic’s economy line of well-crafted B-movies, which appeared in theaters with minimal fuss. They didn’t often have big stars, budgets, or concepts, but they had a streamlined classicism and concentrated focus on action and narrative. Watching a lot of Republic films is, to summon B-movie imagery, like discovering a lost, mythic country, stumbling into a ghostly boomtown or the ruins of a city in the jungle. Everything is alien yet vaguely familiar, like a remembered dream. These genres—singing-cowboy movies, Saturday-morning serials, quick-and-dirty noirs—are ingrained in our cultural memory, living on in spoofs and loving thefts, representing an era when movies were movies.

The Republic library is now owned by Paramount, which is restoring many of the films and returning them to theaters in collaboration with the Film Foundation. In February and August of last year, the Museum of Modern Art presented “Republic Rediscovered,” a two-part showcase of dazzling new prints with titles selected by Martin Scorsese, who has a long-standing passion for the studio. In a conversation with Paul Schrader reprinted in some editions of Faber & Faber’s published screenplay for , the two dwell on how profoundly they’ve been shaped by movies, and Scorsese summons a primal cinematic memory of being taken to see a Roy Rogers Western as a child: “And there was this beautiful horse and this guy with fringe jumping and flying in the air like an angel. Ever since I always wanted to be a cowboy and never was.” This comment evokes the strain of nostalgia strongly associated with Republic, but it also hints at an unexpected afterlife for the studio’s wholesome fare. That image of an