Some Came Running (Minnelli, 1959): Riverside Studios, 6.15pm
Jean Luc-Godard was a huge fan of this movie (read Jonathan Rosenabum here
on the influence of the film and Vincente Minnelli's 1950s melodramas on the
French director). Director Richard Linklater named this movie as the film that changed his life.
Chicago Reader review:
'Some
Came Running (1959) is arguably the greatest of the extraordinary
series of 'Scope and color melodramas that Vincente Minnelli directed
over the span of a decade, beginning with The Cobweb (1955). Minnelli,
known for his handling of decor (he got his start in Chicago designing
window displays for Marshall Field's), used his camera to weave
character and setting into intense, sometimes garish fabric. In Some
Came Running, Frank Sinatra plays a writer who returns to the midwestern
town where he was reared, setting in motion a series of struggles
between family members and lovers in which everyone seems to be running
in place, trapped in patterns of cyclical repetition that are mirrored
in carefully arranged, almost entrapping wide-screen images. Finally a
carnival scene explodes the screen into a cacophony of colors as
characters struggle between selfishness and selflessness, passion and
freedom. Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine give superb
performances that matter most for how they function in the film as a
whole, and the script includes some wonderfully cynical comments on
small-town America.'
Fred Camper
Here is an extract.
And here is the trailer.
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