The highlight of the week, the month, no the year ... without a doubt. The three films that make up the triogy, Children
(1976), Madonna And Child (1980) and Death And Transfiguration (1983)
are a fictional account of Davies’s life follows his alter ego from
birth to death and examine the clash between his strict Catholic
upbringing and his masochistic sexual fantasies. A remarkable
achievement by one of Britain's greatest directors and a
landmark film in post-War British cinema. Highly recommended. Tony Paley
Time Out review*: Unusually for a horror director, Ari Aster knows the real world is awful
enough. Life doles out plenty of pain. ‘Hereditary’, his 2018 feature
debut and one of the scariest movies in a decade, basically went: My
grief over a family tragedy is so unbearable, it must be caused by
witches. (When that turned out to be the case, you weren’t shocked so
much as relieved.) ‘Midsommar’, Aster’s ruinous, near-psychedelic
latest, goes something like this: My grief over a family tragedy is so
unbearable, it’ll make me cling to a bad boyfriend. If that doesn’t
sound like horror to you, allow me to introduce you to many toxic
relationships. And if you’re still unconvinced, Aster will hit you over
the head with a giant hammer wielded by Swedish pagan cultists. Joshua Rothkopf
Time Out review: Sidney Lumet's origins as a director of teledrama may well be obvious here in his first film, but there is no denying the suitability of his style - sweaty close-ups, gritty monochrome 'realism', one-set claustrophobia - to his subject. Scripted byReginald Rosefrom his own teleplay, the story is pretty contrived - during a murder trial, one man's doubts about the accused's guilt gradually overcome the rather less-than-democratic prejudices of the other eleven members of the jury - but the treatment is tense, lucid, and admirably economical. Henry Fonda, though typecast as the bastion of liberalism, gives a nicely underplayed performance, while Lee J Cobb, E G Marshall and Ed Begley in particular are highly effective in support. But what really transforms the piece from a rather talky demonstration that a man is innocent until proven guilty, is the consistently taut, sweltering atmosphere, created largely byBoris Kaufman's excellent camerawork. The result, however devoid of action, is a strangely realistic thriller. Geoff Andrew
BFI introduction: A cult film for all lovers of Algerian cinema, Beloufa’s first and only
feature paints a magnificent portrait of a star caught up in the turmoil
of the war in Lebanon. Yasmine Khlat, later to become an acclaimed
writer, won Best Actress at Moscow Film Festival 1979 for her portrayal
of the eponymous singer.
This great film, which also screens on June 2nd, is part of the Pan-African film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: This extraordinary film, the first Cuban feature by a woman, has been
celebrated as feminist by some critics, partly for its story but also
for its narrative style. It follows the relationship between
schoolteacher Yolanda (Yolanda Cuellar) and factory worker Mario (Mario
Balmaseda), but instead of imposing a patriarchal authorial voice,
director Sara Gomez provocatively combines fiction sequences with
documentary footage, and her playful use of form is both startling and
purposeful. The film begins abruptly, as if in midscene, with a
documentarylike record of a workers' meeting; the credits are followed
by an actual documentary segment on housing development in the early
60s, complete with didactic voice-over. Sections that seem to be
dramatic are later revealed to be documentary, while other apparently
dramatic scenes are interrupted by discursive sequences. The film's form
questions itself, as do the characters: Mario, torn between machismo
and his growing revolutionary commitment, turns a malingering worker in
to the group, but then worries that doing so was “womanly.” Most
importantly, the editing encourages an active viewing process—when the
lovers meet a man named Guillermo, a title asks “Who is Guillermo?” and
the film then cuts to a slightly closer shot of the same title—just as
the overall film encourages us to seek wider interpretations. Sadly,
Gomez died in 1974 while the film was being edited, and it wasn't
completed until three years later.
Fred Camper
Cinema Museum introduction: Wonder Reels return to the Cinema Museum with their unique events
featuring live performances from outstanding London musicians followed
by a 35mm screening of a full feature film chosen with the artist in
mind. The event will start with British-Italian producer Nathalia
Bruno, who will be playing one of her haunting experimental art pop sets
as DRIFT. The concert will be followed by a 35mm projection of Joseph Losey’s
1962 Eva, in which Jeanne Moreau appears as the ultimate femme fatale
wandering through the ghostly streets of Venice. Doors open at 18.30, live performance from 19.00, film from 20.00.
Time Out review: The film is set in Venice, in the season that most suits that city
(winter), shot in Jospeh Losey's characteristic baroque style of the period,
and features Stanley Baker as the upstart Welsh novelist, engaged to an empty
marriage but gradually ensnared into an amour fou by the
ferocious, loose temptress Eve. Love hardly enters into it; it is
corruption by power, money and bad faith that are Losey's obsessions,
and they are dwelt upon insistently with more sheerly scathing disaste
than he allowed himself subsequently. The film undoubtedly belongs to
Jeanne Moreau who, in one of her finest performances, gives a portrait of
terrifying honesty - the heartless self-possession of a woman who does
nothing unless for money or whim. The figures of alienation wandering
through an elegant landscape may be familiar from the Antonioni trilogy
of the period, but the pessimism, energetic misanthropy and
disenchantment with the world are all Losey's own. Chris Peachment
This is a 16mm presentation of a great Don Siegel film.
Time Out review: Reuniting the team of Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and ace-scriptwriter Daniel Mainwaring after the classic noir-romance Out of the Past,
this takes a typical thriller situation (for that matter, a common
Don Siegel motif: society's outsider up against authority) and turns it into
a fast-moving, witty parody. Mitchum is the GI framed for a payroll
robbery, on the run from dumb officer William Bendix, falling in love with the
delectable Greer, and in pursuit of the real culprit. Dialogue sparkles,
the Mexican locations are atmospherically shot by Harry Wild, and
Siegel handles the action with characteristic pace and vigour. The
numerous plot twists are in themselves an exhilaratingly tongue-in-cheek
exaggeration of noir conventions, while remaining central to the
excitement of the film. Vigorous, playful stuff. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader review: One of the best contemporary war films I know is this singular 1988
feature, the first by Guinea-Bissau filmmaker Flora Gomes (Po di
sangui). The first half, as elemental and as unadorned as Samuel
Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, concentrates on women fighting alongside
guerrillas at the end of Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence in 1973,
attacked by Portuguese helicopters as they travel on foot close to the
border. The second half, more diffuse and at times more rhetorical,
deals with the ambiguous conditions of the war’s aftermath. The title
means “those whom death refused,” and true to that notion the heroine
(Bia Gomes) has been fighting for about a decade. Gomes (no relation to
the director) manages to convey the loss of her children in a wordless
and underplayed moment that shook me to my core. Flora Gomes appears in a
cameo as president of a postwar sector. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This Elaine May-directed film is so rarely seen that it's not to be missed. The Heartbreak Kid is a melancholic tale that turns the rom-com genre on its head and also gets a screening at the cinema on June 22nd. Details here.
The screening on Thursday 20 June, will be introduced by Julie Lobalzo Wright. The matinee screening on Monday 17 June, will be introduced by Darren Richman. Afterwards, he and Devorah Baum will hold a post-screening discussion.
Julie Lobalzo Wright is
an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University
of Warwick. She has taught and researched film and television stardom,
animation, and Hollywood musicals. Her next project is a book length
study of Barbra Streisand that will focus on the authorship of her star
image throughout her career.
Devorah Baum is
the author of a number of books including On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton)
and The Jewish Joke (Profile). With Josh Appignanesi she is co-director
of the films The New Man and Husband. Her writing has appeared in The
New York Times, the Guardian, Granta, Tate Etc and the Financial Times.
She is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of
Southampton.
Darren Richman is
a writer and journalist. He has a monthly column in The Jewish News and
his writing has appeared in The Guardian, Little White Lies and The
Daily Telegraph. Between 2014 and 2018, he had a regular column for The
Independent in which he championed obscure or forgotten films. He
co-wrote My Life as Pat Sharp, a spoof memoir published in November 2020
by Little Brown.
Time Out review: Set in l'Estaque, an impoverished, industrialised area of Marseilles,
this funny, tender, enchanting film starts as if it's going to be a
familiar misfits-meeting-cute romance. Soon after her feisty temper
costs her her supermarket job, single mother Jeannette (Ariane Ascaride, the
writer/director's wife) embarks on a relationship with the equally wacky
Marius (Gerard Meylan), a taciturn security guard at a disused cement works.
He's accepted by her kids and friends, but when he disappears for a few
days, Jeannette suspects his no-show is simply another example of male
unreliability, and it's left to her neighbours to investigate. In fact,
while the faltering central romance gives the film a semblance of
narrative structure, Robert Guédiguian's prime concern is how community and
friendship make economic and emotional hardship bearable. That Marius is
called 'Marius' is probably no accident, since the celebratory account
of working class life in all its variety recalls Pagnol's classic
Marseilles trilogy, albeit without the overheated theatricality and
pathos. Less love story than love letter to a particular, Mediterranean
way of life, this is peopled with credible individuals as proud,
perverse and needy as they are brave, tolerant and likeable. Geoff Andrew
This film is screening as part of the Pan-African film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: Dikongué Pipa’s masterpiece of subversive modernity, a non-linear tale
of a love made impossible by social and economic pressures, was
Cameroon’s first feature film. Awarded the top prize at FESPACO 1976,
its haunting images revealing the devastating consequences of a
community’s refusal to deviate from tradition resonated strongly with
audiences.
This Howard Hawks masterpiece is my favourite film. Indeed, I wrote about the movie in the 'My favourite film' season in the Guardian. My conclusion was: 'Over the course of Rio Bravo we are treated to an entertainment
masterclass, a high watermark of Hollywood cinema in its heyday. I may
not go as far as Quentin Tarantino, who declared that he would show the film to any new girlfriend and end the relationship if she did not declare her undying love for
Hawks's classic, but it is the movie I return to again and again, to
revisit old friends and remind myself what form optimism takes in a work
of art.' Chicago Reader review: Howard Hawks's finest western (1959), and perhaps his finest film—but
who wants to quibble on this level? John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky
Nelson, and Walter Brennan hole up in a sheriff's office, there to
protect a prisoner from a band of hired guns outside. But the subtly
stylized setting soon becomes an arena for a moral battle, as the
characters discover and test their resources of trust, skill, and
courage, values poised against encroaching chaos. It's American
filmmaking at its finest—clean, clear, and direct—and it's also the most
optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against
human ruin. Superb in every respect, from Wayne's performance to Russell
Harlan's brilliant night photography. With Angie Dickinson. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Vittorio De Sica’s 1951 follow-up to The Bicycle Thief welds a
Rene Clair-inspired social fantasy to the precepts of neorealism. Based
on a novel by Cesare Zavattini, the film tells of the fight between a
band of shantytown poor and the industrialist who wants to explore for
oil beneath their village. The leader of the revolutionaries is a
visionary young man armed only with his ideals and, for a while, a magic
dove. Though the fight proves hopeless, they all fly off on broomsticks
to a better life—implying that magic is the only means of rectifying
social ills. Don Druker
This 35mm screening is also being shown on July 9th. Details here.
Time Out review: Jean-Pierre Melville's hombres don't talk a lot,
they just move in and out of the shadows, their trenchcoats lined with
guilt and their hats hiding their eyes. This is a great movie, an
austere masterpiece, with Alain Delon as a cold, enigmatic contract
killer who
lives by a personal code of bushido. Essentially, the plot is about an
alibi, yet Melville turns this into a mythical revenge story, with Cathy
Rosier as Delon's black, piano-playing nemesis who might just as easily
have stepped from the pages of Cocteau or Sophocles as Vogue.
Similarly, if Delon is Death, Francois Périer's cop is a date with
Destiny.
Melville's film had a major influence in Hollywood: Delon lying on his
bed is echoed in Taxi Driver, and Paul Schrader might have remade Le
Samourai as American Gigolo. Another remake is The Driver, despite
Walter Hill's insistence that he'd never seen it: someone on that movie
had to have seen it. Adrian Turner
Chicago Reader review: This rarely shown early film by Roberto Rossellini (1948), one of his
few comedies, anticipates with remarkable prescience the conceits of
Godard and others about photography in the 60s. A professional
small-town photographer finds that he has the power to kill his subjects
by taking their picture, turning them into statues of themselves.
Rossellini left this project before it was finished, and it was edited
and released a few years later without his approval—but it still comes
across as a remarkably suggestive fable. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Luchino Visconti’s early films is
this hilarious 1951 comedy, tailored to the talents of Anna Magnani,
about a working-class woman who is determined to get her plain
seven-year-old daughter into movies. A wonderful send-up of the Italian
film industry and the illusions that it fosters, delineated in near-epic
proportions with style and brio. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: Scripted and photographed by Charles Burnett and directed by his former
film-school classmate Billy Woodberry, this wonderful neorealist look at
a working-class black family in South Central LA (1984) is worthy of
being placed alongside Burnett's Killer of Sheep. Passionately recommended. Jonathan Rosenbaum
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.