This 35mm screening, which is part of the Ida Lupino season (full details here), is also being shown on Wednesday June 27th. You can find the full details by clicking on the link here. This is a rare screening of a film highly rated by French cinephiles.
New Yorker review:
There are plenty of fictional artists in movies, but few whose very presence is as haunting and inspiring as the jazz pianist played by Bruce Bennett in Raoul Walsh’s 1947 musical crime drama, “The Man I Love.” Bennett is the man of the title, a character actor in many notable movies (including “Mildred Pierce” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”), but his frozen gaze in Walsh’s film—joined to his flat, blank voice, similar to Gary Cooper’s—gives him the air of a deep but broken person. Strangely, the hardest thing about a fictional artist for a director to convey is the sense of depth; it’s strange because actors are themselves artists, often of great depth, so it ought to suffice for them to be, as much as possible, themselves—but that’s the hardest and most elusive role to play. It’s also a role that was by and large unavailable in classic Hollywood, except by ricochet, and Walsh knew how to bank those shots. As Petey Brown, the woman who loves him, he cast Ida Lupino, who delivers a streetwise, life-worn hardness that comes packed with the wisdom to know the rules and the limits of love. And Walsh, a master of sarcastic and tight-lipped stoicism, submerges the tragedy of their affair in a few quietly anguished glances. Bennett’s monosyllabic distraction hints at unfathomable pain, a pain so vast and raw that it couldn’t be channelled into art. When Martin Scorsese made his own musical melodrama “New York, New York,” he drew inspiration from Walsh’s film (here are Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro performing the title song, by George and Ira Gershwin)—converting the silent suffering into full-throated agony.
Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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