From Russia With Love (Young, 1963): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm
This is the first night in the exciting 'Last Movies' season at the ICA Cinema. Full details of all the screenings in the five-month long repertoire can be found here. Subsequent evenings include tributes to John Dillinger, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurt Cobain and the Heaven’s Gate religious group, with live guests including Chris Petit, Elena Gorfinkel and CM von Hausswolff.
Last Movies remaps the first century of cinema according to what a selection of its key cultural icons saw just before dying. Conceived and created by Stanley Schtinter to enable an audience ‘to see what those who see no longer saw last,’ the ICA hosts a five-month programme to coincide with the publication of his book of the same title, described by Alan Moore as ‘Profound and riveting . . . a remarkable achievement,’ and by Laura Mulvey as ‘deeply thought-provoking.’
According to Erika Balsom, Last Movies ‘abandons all those calcified criteria most frequently used to organise cinema programmes ... period, nation, genre, director, star, theme: nothing internal to these films motivates their inclusion, their ‘quality’ least of all ... Last Movies embraces chance.’
Balsom will be in conversation with Schtinter to launch the programme and publication tonight, the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death. Kennedy tethered his image to that of James Bond’s; United Artists produced From Russia with Love due to the President’s affection for the book. This film will screen alongside a fifteen-minute fragment of War is Hell, the ‘lost’ movie that the President’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was in the cinema watching at the time of his arrest.
The
press reviews of the Bond films don't capture the excitement of them and I recommend the Blogalongabond
series by Neil Alcock (aka @theincrediblesuit on Twitter). Here is his take on From Russia With Love.
Chicago Reader review:
For my money, From Russia With Love is still the best Bond, with a screwball plotline that keeps
the locales changing and the surprises coming—even when reason dictates
that the picture should be over. Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw make a
creepy pair, and Daniela Bianchi embodies the essence of centerfold sex,
circa 1964.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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