This is part of an Alfred Hitchcock season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Cary Grant, a martini-sodden advertising director, awakes from a
middle-class daydream into an underworld nightmare when he's mistaken
for a secret agent (1959). A great film, and certainly one of the most
entertaining movies ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock at his peak.
With Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Leo G. Carroll. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: This often-overlooked neorealist work reconstructs a tragic accident
that occurred in Rome in 1951, when 200 women queuing for a low-paying
typist job were injured. Combining scathing social comment with
meticulous research, this kaleidoscope of stories portrays the lives of
those afflicted by unemployment in the city. De Santis’ efforts to
promote social reform resulted in the film being boycotted by both the
government and the media.
This is a 16mm presentation from the fabulous Cine-Real team. Enjoyment is guaranteed. And don't miss the chance to enjoy one of their always entertaining screenings in a fabulous new venue, the Mildmay Club on Newington Green, one of the few surviving working men's clubs in London and host of a series of great artistic and social activities.
Chicago Reader review: 'Billy
Wilder's searing, funny, morbid look at the real tinsel beneath the
phony tinsel (1950). Aging silent-movie vamp Gloria Swanson takes up
with William Holden, a two-bit screenwriter on the make, and virtually
holds him captive in her Hollywood gothic mansion. Erich von Stroheim,
once her director, now her butler, is the other figure in this
menage-a-weird. A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder's better
efforts.' Dan Druker
Screen Slate review: Anthony
Franciosa plays Peter Neal, an American mystery writer who
travels to Rome in promotion of his latest novel, but must confront the
influence his lurid fiction has when a black-gloved murderer begins
mutilating people. Genre film actor John Saxon (Enter the Dragon, Black
Christmas) and frequent Dario Argento collaborator (and former spouse)
Daria Nicolodi (Deep Red, Phenomena, Opera)
also star as Neal's agent and assistant who become embroiled in the
investigation — Nicolodi in particular gives an impressive performance
(with an even more impressive scream) that elevates an admittedly thin
role. Tenebrae is often regarded as a giallo comeback for the
filmmaker, a return to the subgenre he helped define, following his
foray into supernatural horror with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).
However, it is also a self-reflexive examination of his own career, and
the accusations of misogyny often directed at him. Argento was never
one to conceal his more perverse preoccupations; if there is an
opportunity to capture the strangling of a beautiful woman on screen, he
will not only take it but provide the grip of his own hand in front of
the camera. At the same time, the technical focus in Tenebrae —
from rather majestic (and now infamous) crane shots to the general
construction of the plot itself (essentially a way to move from one
intricate and gorgeous murder set-piece to another) feels like an
acknowledgment of responsibility: like pulling back the curtain on the
machinations in place that not only punish women, but turn such
punishment into spectacle. Tenebrae is essential Argento: perhaps the
auteur's clearest
articulation of his own psychological and stylistic obsessions, but
with a more critical eye. We long to see men who dehumanize and kill
women eventually fall on the sword themselves. In Argento's world those
glimmers of hope are there if you look: the impalement will just most
likely involve a stiletto. Stephanie Monahan
The Runner (Naderi, 1984): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm
This film is part of the Restored strand at BFI Southbank.
Time Out review: An astonishing piece of film-making in which Amir Naderi's harsh account of
modern poverty supports passages of extravagant but unsentimental
lyricism. Amiro (Nirumand) is an illiterate ten-year-old orphan living
in a rusting tanker hulk, beached in a Persian Gulf shantytown. Life is a
struggle, and garbage-picking and peddling water just about pay for a
watermelon diet. Bigger boys try to steal his empty bottles, a man
snatches the block of ice he needs to cool the water he sells. Amiro
learns to fight back. He's a runner, and he wants to run with the best
of them. Young Nirumand gives a performance to make Rossellini weep, and
the soundtrack is a joy. Pierre Hodgson
Movies Are Dead film club introduction: We are proud
to present another little-seen genre classic on 35mm: the ultimate
1970s psychological thriller, Death
Game. John Cassavetes
and Wes Anderson favourite Seymour Cassel stars as George Manning, a
family man whose perfect life is turned into a nightmare of sex and
torture when he allows himself to be seduced by two beautiful young
women, played by Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, who show up at his
door on a rainy night with mysterious intentions. A heady combination
of Věra Chytilovás's Daisies
and Michael Haneke's Funny
Games run through the
sleaziest of 42nd Street grindhouse filters, this remake of the 1973
sexploitation flick Little
Miss Innocence was
itself remade twice, including by Eli Roth with Keanu Reeves and Ana
de Armas in 2015's Knock
Knock. But the unhinged
and superbly made Death
Game is the definitive
version of this lurid tale – don't miss this ultra-rare opportunity
to catch it at the Prince Charles Cinema!
No 2: Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 12noon
Chicago Reader review: Roberto Rossellini's first filmic encounter with Ingrid Bergman, made in
the wilds in 1949 around the same time the neorealist director and the
Hollywood star were being denounced in the U.S. Senate for their
adulterous romance. Widely regarded as a masterpiece today, the film was
so badly mutilated by Howard Hughes's RKO (which added offscreen
narration, reshuffled some sequences, and deleted others) that
Rossellini sued the studio (and lost). The Italian version, which
Rossellini approved, has come out on video, and this rarely screened
English-language version is very close to it. A Lithuanian-born Czech
refugee living in an internment camp (Bergman) marries an Italian
fisherman (Mario Vitale) in order to escape, but she winds up on a bare,
impoverished island with an active volcano, where most of the locals
regard her with hostility. The film is most modern and remarkable when
the camera is alone with Bergman, though Rossellini wisely shows neither
the wife nor the husband with full sympathy. Eschewing psychology, the
film remains a kind of ambiguous pieta whose religious ending is as
controversial as that of Rossellini and Bergman's subsequent Voyage to Italy
(though its metaphoric and rhetorical power make it easier to take).
Rossellini's blend of documentary and fiction is as provocative as
usual, but it also makes the film choppy and awkward; the English
dialogue is often stiff, and Renzo Cesana as a pontificating local
priest is almost as clumsy here as in Cyril Endfield's subsequent Try and Get Me!
Nor is the brutality of Rossellini's Catholicism to every taste; Eric
Rohmer all but praised the film for its lack of affection toward
Bergman, yet the film stands or falls on the strength of her emotional
performance—and I believe it stands. Jonathan Rosenbaum
For Pride Month, Funeral Parade Queer Film Society are presenting Blue, Derek Jarman’s deeply personal swansong. The film will be intoduced by Sarah Cleary.
Time Out review: The screen is a perfect blue throughout as Derek Jarman
faces up to AIDS, the loss of loved ones, the breakdown of the body,
blindness, his own approaching fall into the void. The film embodies the
spiritual transcendence which Cyril Collard sought to convey in the
last reel of his anguished melodrama Savage Nights, crucially in
the serene contemplation of the screen itself, but also in Jarman's
beautiful poetry. Extracts from the film-maker's diary supply an ironic
commentary on the 'progress' of his illness so that the movie becomes a
juxtaposition between the finite and the infinite, the sublime and the
ridiculous. Greatly helped by Simon Fisher Turner's soundtrack. Moving beyond words. Tom Charity
Chicago Reader review: Written and directed by Harmony Korine, who wroteKids,
this poetically disjointed narrative (1997) also follows young people
engaged in nihilistic activities and has an ambiguous relationship to
both documentary and fiction filmmaking—but none of the earlier movie's
prurience or condescension. Killing cats is a pastime and source of
income for two boys (Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton) who sniff a lot of
glue in a town identified as Xenia, Ohio. Much of their behavior and the
behavior of other people in the movie was surely guided if not
predetermined by Korine, yet few of the performers appear to be actors
in scripted roles. In one scene a woman (who was previously shown
mothering a doll) shaves off her eyebrows. Filling one hand with shaving
cream and trying to use the other to keep her bangs out of the way as
well as wield a razor, she exhibits a startling absence of intelligence.
Crooned ballads and metal music enhance scenes of perversely enchanting
power, and a voice-over tells us in gory detail how a tornado
devastated Xenia years before, as if to explain the strangely passive
violence in a town where everyone's reason for existence seems to be
breaking taboos. The director of photography is Jean Yves Escoffier. Lisa Alspector
La Terra Trema (Visconti, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8pm
This presentation, also screening on May 26th, is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.
Time Out review: Luchino Visconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione in 1942)
was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party, filmed with and
among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza. An
overwhelmingly stark chronicle of a family which strives but fails to
break out of the poverty trap - they try to cut out the middlemen by
embarking in what one might call 'free enterprise', with disastrous
results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a masterpiece of neo-realism,
a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means. Yet, despite
this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later decadent
melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is
distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'.
(Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as
assistant directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of
his mother's jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his
breeding, he brought home one of the boys from the film and installed
him as his butler. Tom Charity
This 35mm presentation, also screening on May 22nd, is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.
New Yorker review: The early-generation genre mashup “Bitter Rice,” from
1949, fuses the class-based politics—and the on-location authenticity—of
neorealism with a smoldering romantic melodrama. It’s centered on the
seasonal employment of migrant farmworkers—all women—in the rice paddies
of northern Italy. A jewel thief and housemaid named Francesca (Doris
Dowling), who’s hiding a stolen necklace, takes refuge with a crew of
farmhands, working alongside them and living with them in requisitioned
military barracks. Francesca is befriended by a younger laborer named
Silvana (Silvana Mangano), but tension arises when they both fall for an
earnest army officer (Raf Vallone). Then a sharp operator named Walter
(Vittorio Gassman)—Francesca’s partner in crime, lover, and
employer—shows up at the farm. The film’s team of six screenwriters
reveal, with journalistic avidity, details of the landowners’ predatory
chicanery, conflicts between union and non-union workers, farmhands’
secret communications by way of song, and the women’s day-to-day lives
and grim backstories. The director, Giuseppe De Santis, films the
turbulent action with a blend of intimacy and spectacle, in
exhilaratingly spontaneous dance scenes and shocking outbursts of
violence alike. Richard Brody
This film, a masterpiece by any standards, is also screening at Cine Lumiere on May 26th when it will be introduced by Academy Awards-nominated composer Gary Yershon. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A baroque masterpiece by Max Ophuls, his last film (1955) and his only
work in color and wide-screen. The producers were expecting a routine
melodrama with Martine Carol (a bland French star of the period); when
they saw what Ophuls had made—with its exquisite stylization, elaborate
flashbacks, and infinite subtlety—they cut it to ribbons. The film was
restored in the 60s and impressed some critics, including Andrew Sarris,
as "the greatest film ever made," and certainly this story of a
courtesan's life is among the most emotionally plangent, visually
ravishing works the cinema has to offer. With Peter Ustinov, Anton
Walbrook, Ivan Desny, and Oskar Werner. Dave Kehr
This film, here screened in the Restored strand at BFI Southbank, is a new BFI National Archive restoration for the most underrated work in the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger canon. Tonight's presentation will be introduced by the BFI conservation team.
Chicago Reader review: Cut to ribbons by its original American distributor, this
1949 film remains the most elusive of Michael Powell's mature works.
David Farrar stars as a crippled, alcoholic bomb expert who tries to
solve the secret of a new Nazi device—small bombs made to look like toys
that explode when children pick them up. With Kathleen Byron, memorable
as the mad nun of Powell's Black Narcissus, and Jack Hawkins, Anthony Bushell, and Michael Gough. Dave Kehr
This presentation is part of the Lindsay Anderson season (full details here) at BFI Southbank. Information about the other screenings of this film on May 12th and 18th can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: The
gradations of sham and corruption and the quirky contours of modern
society, as revealed in the epic wanderings of Lindsay Anderson's modern
Candide/Everyman (Malcolm McDowell). Mick Travers (now Travis), the
vicious public school of If . . . behind
him, learns the bitter lesson of how to play the game for all it may
(or may not) be worth in this valiant, comic, yet quietly sad three-hour
journey to a kind of wisdom. Fuzzy in its particulars, the film makes
up for it with standout performances from Ralph Richardson, Rachel
Roberts, and Arthur Lowe. Don Druker Here (and above) is the trailer.
This rarely screened film is part of the excellently programmed 'Never on Sunday' strand at the Close-Up Cinema. Full details here. The film will be introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Close-Up Cinema introduction: This crowning jewel of American cinema, nearly as good as the best of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, is one of the least known masterpieces of the 1950s. Imagine Ray Milland’s alcoholic in The Lost Weekend
rehabilitated, seasoned, married with two kids and holding down a
nine-to-five job in advertising. Yet something is missing in his life,
which has now come to resemble an advertisement. Serving a good cause in
his spare time, when an Alcoholics Anonymous rescue call comes in, he
rushes to help the troubled drinker only to discover it’s a she: Joan Fontaine
as a has-been actress. He saves her, they fall for each other, she
brings back the vitality to his life, which according to his own wife
(played by Teresa Wright)
has become far too sober. Afterwards their lives improve but the pain
and loss remain. Dwight Taylor’s sensitive script, originally titled Mr and Miss Anonymous, was based on his mother, an actress and alcoholic. Stevens got on board when he was still editing A Place in the Sun.
The direction, in its accomplished sense of cluttered space,
entanglement and inescapabilty, is full of artistry. The vulnerable
characters are trapped in bars, hotel rooms, offices, and elevators,
searching for a romance that is lost before it’s found. The romantic
dream fails but the stage show with which the film ends is just
beginning. Is this a triumph for artificiality and conformity? Stevens’s
dark and tender film leaves you with this thought as no other film
does. Ehsan Khoshbakht
This 35mm presentation is part of the Lindsay Anderson season (full details here) at BFI Southbank. Information about the other screening of Britannia Hospital.... on May 14th can be found here.
This is an extract from Jonathan Coe’s article on Lindsay Anderson in the Guardian in 2005. You can read the full article here: Britannia
Hospital was the film that almost killed off Anderson's directorial
career in the UK. Released in 1982, just as the Falklands War triggered
an unexpected wave of British jingoism, this venomous
state-of-the-nation movie ran counter to the mood of the times just as
emphatically as If ... had caught it 14 years earlier. I have a vivid
memory of seeing it at the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue during its (extremely
short) London release. Sitting with my then-girlfriend in an almost
empty auditorium, I realised after about 10 minutes that I had brought
her to the date movie from hell. The
film spares nobody: neither the hospital management who will stop at
nothing (even murder) to ensure the smooth running of a ludicrous royal
visit, nor the petty, self-interested trade unionists who are bent on
disrupting it. Private health care, the delusions of science, the
complicity of the media and the fantasy of Empire are all
comprehensively dumped upon. Coaxing Brechtian, anti-realist
performances out of his cast - and using that cast to collapse the
stifling distinction between high and low culture (Robin Askwith shares
the screen with Joan Plowright) - Anderson produced a shockingly
truthful caricature of Britain on the cusp of the Thatcher revolution.
This is a Women and Cocaine presentation at the Cinema Museum and here is their introduction:
This May we celebrate Tallulah Bankhead, a star whose outrageous
behaviour inspired her good friend Marlene Dietrich to declare she was
“the most immoral woman who ever lived”. Devil and the Deep (1932) follows a Naval commander as he
sets out for revenge after learning of his wife’s affair. The film was
marketed with the tagline “Twenty men sent to the bottom of the sea-for
one woman’s sin!” Tallulah stars alongside a stellar cast that features Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton in his first American role.
The film will be preceded by a short introduction, and followed by a raffle. Women and Cocaine Presents is a film night at The Cinema Museum to
celebrate the Fierce and Liberated women of Pre code cinema. From the
period of 1930 to 1934, before the introduction of censorship, women
were depicted in roles with a frankness and sex-positivity that remains
rare even today. These newly independent women pushed gender boundaries
as they pursued their own economic freedom and excitement, defying the
previous Victorian ideals of domesticity, sexual purity and religion.
Hollywood soon caught on and began to represent these women on screen,
and each month we celebrate a different woman from that era.
“My father warned me about men & booze, but he never mentioned a word about women & cocaine” – Tallulah Bankhead.
