This is a 35mm presentation at the Prince Charles Cinema. Chicago Reader review: 'What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were? The first time I saw Kane
I discovered the existence of the director; the next dozen or so times
taught me what he did—with lights and camera angles, cutting and
composition, texture and rhythm. Kane (1941) is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take Ambersons, Falstaff, or Touch
of Evil), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking
about Welles—or for that matter about movies in general.' Dave Kehr
This film, presented in a 4K restoration, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank, and is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.
I haven't seen this since my post-graduate days at Derby Lonsdale
College in the mid-1980s but found it a real eye-opener at the time and
wouldn't disagree with this ecstatic review in Chicago Reader. Director Roberto Rossellini was a pioneer and this film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, brought the attention of the world to the development of the hugely influential neorealism era in Italian cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Roberto Rossellini's 1946 story of a group of workers and a priest in
1943-'44 Rome, declared an “open city” by the Nazis, was begun only two
months after the liberation. Its realistic treatment of everyday Italian
life heralded the postwar renaissance of the Italian cinema and the
development of neorealism; the film astonished audiences around the
world and remains a masterpiece. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, and
Maria Michi. Don Druker
This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real
is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in
their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which
aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of
classic film. The film is also being shown on May 19th. Details here.
Time Out review: The
hard-boiled private eye coolly strolls a few steps ahead of the
audience. The slapstick detective gets everything wrong and then
pratfalls first over the finish line anyway. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson)
is neither - instead he's a hard-boiled private eye who gets everything
wrong. Jake snaps tabloid-ready photos of an adulterous love nest
that's no such thing. He spies a distressed young woman through a window
and mistakes her for a hostage. He finds bifocals in a pond and calls
them Exhibit A of marital murder, only the glasses don't belong to the
victim and the wife hasn't killed anyone. Yet when he confronts
ostensible black widow Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) with the
spectacular evidence, the cigarette between his teeth lends his voice an
authoritative Bogie hiss. Throughout, Gittes sexes up mediocre snooping
with blithe arrogance and sarcastic machismo. It's the actor's default
mode, sure, but in 1974 it hadn't yet calcified into Schtickolson, and
in 1974 a director (Roman Polanski), a screenwriter (Robert Towne) and a
producer (Robert Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump
it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. 'You see, Mr Gits,' depravity
incarnate Noah Cross (John Huston) famously explains, 'most people never
have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place,
they're capable of anything.' As is Chinatown. The last gunshot here is
the sound of the gate slamming on the Paramount lot of Evans' halcyon
reign, and as the camera rears back to catch Jake's expression, the
dolly lists and shivers - an almost imperceptible sob of grief and
recognition, but not a tear is shed. Jessica Winter
This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.
Chicago Reader review: Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of
the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat
theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't
handle success. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Nicholas
Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put
it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence,
this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest
statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature,
reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town
saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her
aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but
well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly
deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With
Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as
well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano,
Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper. Dave
Kehr Here
(and above) is the trailer.
New Yorker review: One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely,
that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing,
the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor,
the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the
humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the
young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an
audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to
short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind,
achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her.
Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical,
dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible
spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women,
when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more
openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New
York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open
hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional
activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded,
perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its
intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and
a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that
Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in
the same way. Richard Brody Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.
This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Half
the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great
wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on
it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was
generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the
incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid
Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from
near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd
years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist
subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’
morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger
viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French
chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid
is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney
Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally
shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still
amounts to some hill of beans. Wally Hammond
