This film is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. This very rare screening will feature an introduction by season curator Elena Gorfinkel.
BFI introduction: Made on the rocky Moab set of the Terence Stamp western Blue, Fade In
concerns a budding and unlikely city-country romance between a film
editor (Loden’s first leading role) and a Utah rancher. After editorial
meddling by Paramount, this film became the first pseudonymous ‘Alan
Smithee’ vehicle, shelved until a TV debut in 1973. Due to its unusual
production history, this is a rare opportunity to see this film on the
big screen.
Time Out review: Francis Ford Coppola's fourth feature, a fascinating early road movie made entirely
on location with a minimal crew and a constantly evolving script. Never
very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it
suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth
and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure
thriller. Shirley Knight is outstanding (in a superb cast) as the pregnant woman
who runs away in quest of the identity she feels she has lost as a Long
Island housewife, and finds herself increasingly tangled in the snares
of responsibility through her encounters with a football player left
mindless by an accident (James Caan) and a darkly amorous traffic cop
(Robert Duvall). Symbolism rumbles beneath the characterisations (Caan as the
baby she is running from and with, Duvall as the sexuality and
domination she is trying to deny) but it is never facile; and the
rhythms of the road movie (leading through wonderfully bizarre locations
to a resonantly melodramatic finale) confirm that Coppola's prime
talent lies in choreographing movement. Tom Milne
Garden Cinema introduction: A
treasure of Mexico’s cinematic golden age, this deliriously plotted
blend of gritty crime film, heart-tugging maternal melodrama, and mambo
musical is a dazzling showcase for iconic star Ninón Sevilla. She brings
fierce charisma and fiery strength to her role as a rumbera - a
female nightclub dancer - who gives up everything to raise an abandoned
boy, whom she must protect from his ruthless gangster father. Directed
at a dizzying pace by filmmaking titan Emilio Fernández, and shot in
stylish chiaroscuro by renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa amid
smoky dance halls and atmospherically seedy underworld haunts, Victims of Sin is
a ferociously entertaining female-powered noir pulsing with the
intoxicating rhythms of some of Latin America’s most legendary musical
stars.
Time Out review: Vincent Gallo's
directorial debut is one of a kind, an eccentric, provocative comedy
which laces a poignant love story with both a sombre, washed-out
naturalism and surreal musical vignettes. Throwing out the standard
repetitions of shot/reverse shot, Gallo brings an individual film
grammar to the screen, a beguiling mix of formal tropes and
apparently impetuous conceits. If not autobiographical, then at least
deeply personal, the film follows one Billy Brown (Gallo) out of
prison and back to his hometown, Buffalo, NY. There he kidnaps a
girl, Layla (Christine Ricci) a busty, blonde in two-inch skirt and
dazzling fairy tale slippers, and entreats her to play his loving
wife for his parents' benefit. The homecoming goes a long way to
explain Billy's aggressive insecurity: his indifferent mom (Anjelica
Huston) is a rabid football obsessive, while his dad (Ben Gazzara) is
taciturn and hostile, though taken with Layla. The cruel caricature
of this sourly funny episode is tempered by Layla's sweetness.
Billy's turmoil is redeemed in her simplicity. You may scoff at such
blatant male wish-fulfilment, but when Billy finally opens himself to
the threat of intimacy, it's a heart-rending moment. A brave, honest,
stimulating film, this reaches parts other movies don't even know
exist. Tom Charity
This 35mm presentation (also screening on June 8th) is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: A tale of unfulfilled teenage desire set in Kansas circa 1928, Elia
Kazan’s hothouse parable (with an Academy Award winning screenplay by
playwright William Inge) examines the toll of Puritanical social
propriety and sexual repression on high-school sweethearts: Bud Stamper,
the child of oil wealth (Beatty’s Hollywood debut) and the fragile
Deanie. Loden’s tempestuous role as Bud’s wild flapper sister Ginny
provides a prominent foil for the film’s critique of judgmental
small-town mores.
Adrian Martin introduction: From the first notes of David Amram’s intense score and the
opening image of Bud (first-timer Warren Beatty) and Deanie (Natalie Wood)
kissing in a car by a raging waterfall, Splendor in the Grass sums up
the appeal of Hollywood melodrama at its finest: the passions repressed by
society (the setting is Kansas 1928) find a displaced expression in every
explosive burst of colour, sound and gesture. Repression is everywhere in this movie, a force that twists people
in monstrous, dysfunctional directions. Men are obliged to be successful and
macho while women must choose between virginity and whorishness – as is the
case for Bud’s unconventional flapper sister, indelibly incarnated by Barbara
Loden. Director Elia Kazan, like Arthur Penn, worked at the intersection
of studio-nurtured classical narrative and the innovative, dynamic forms
introduced by Method acting and the French New Wave. Here, collaborating with
the dramatist William Inge, he achieved a sublime synthesis of both approaches. The film offers a lucid, concentrated analysis of the social
contradictions determined by class, wealth, industry, technology, moral values
and gender roles within the family unit. At the same time, it is a film in
which the characters register as authentic individuals, acting and reacting in
a register that is far from the
Hollywood
cliché. Full review here.
This is part of the Reiner Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Time Out review: One of Fassbinder's excellent melodramas. The director himself plays a
working-class man who wins a small fortune on the lottery and is
destroyed by men who befriend him on Munich's gay community. It's his
usual vision of exploitation and complicity hidden under the deceiving
mantle of love, but Fassbinder's precision, assured sense of milieu, and
cool but human compassion for his characters, make it a work of
brilliant intelligence. And the director himself is superb as the
none-too-intelligent hero. Geoff Andrew
I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here when it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2011. This 35mm screening is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will include an extended introduction to the season by Elena Gorfinkel.
Time Out review: A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up
to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a
semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her
soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even
heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she
becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches
everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting
lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road,
being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its
refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's
good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing
else before her untimely death from cancer. David Pirie
