Capital Celluloid 2020 — Day 73: Fri Mar 13

Peter Ibbetson (Hathaway, 1935): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm


I first saw it in a hole-in-the-wall cinema in Paris’, remembers Tilda Swinton. ‘Henry Hathaway is best known as a Hollywood western director who made the original True Grit. But his romantic fantasy fable, based on George du Maurier’s 1891 novel, and starring Gary Cooper and Ann Harding, is a total jewel and was the film fetish of the Surrealists.’

Tilda Swinton introduces this 35mm presentation of a remarkable film in the ‘Screen Epiphany’ strand at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
Two childhood sweethearts separate, reunite in tragedy, and finally consummate their love in the afterlife. The last person in the world you'd expect to film this gauzy romance is Henry Hathaway, that solid old master of middling westerns and pseudorealism (Call Northside 777). But something apparently clicked: this 1935 drama is a stunner, a complete anomaly in Hathaway's career. With Gary Cooper, Ann Harding, Ida Lupino, John Halliday, and cinematography by Charles Lang (which helps a lot).
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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