Featuring an original solo musical production by composer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Johnston. Introduced by Paolo Cherchi Usai. Special Admission: $12 general, $10 UAM/PFA Members, Students, Disabled Persons and Seniors. Adrian Johnston is the brilliant, British one-man-band (15 instruments!) who was commissioned by Le Giornate del Cinema Muto to compose and perform the score for Lucky Star's Pordenone premiere. His composition is at once lyrical and intensely modern, his accompaniment a performance in itself. Johnston has devised music for silent films since 1984, both in solo performances and ensemble work, playing to wide acclaim at festivals around the world. If you can imagine discovering Murnau's Sunrise for the first time, you have an inkling of what curators in the Nederlands Filmmuseum Archives must have felt when they uncovered this lost film by Frank Borzage. The restored Lucky Star, unseen for sixty years, was the undisputed highlight of the 1991 Pordenone Festival, at Telluride, and the first non-contemporary film ever to be voted Best Film at the Rotterdam Festival. As Kevin Brownlow noted, "From the opening scene you know you are in the hands of a master." It does in fact begin with a sunrise, wonderfully lit through fog and the steam of a kettle in the hovel of the Widow Tucker and her several children. The film will take us all the way to a battlefield in World War I France but it always returns to this rural American village, a kind of sparklingly lit fairytale landscape where Grant Wood meets German Expressionism. The popular romantic duo of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell give unfancy yet sophisticated performances as the surreptitious lovers Mary Tucker and Tim Osborne. She is a bumpkin, plain and not-so-simple, he a disabled veteran whose wheelchair acrobatics and emotional grace offer one of the most extraordinary images of disability in cinema, notwithstanding a plot resolution typical of its day. All the restoration work done on the film's intertitles might almost not have been done, so rooted are these performances in gesture and nuance. The way Mary and Tim transform each other through love makes a wondrous twist on the Pygmalian legend at the very least. At best this is a portrait of l'amour-fou for the down-to-earth set, one that in many ways looks forward to Borzage's A Farewell to Arms.