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.
This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real
is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in
their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which
aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of
classic film.
Chicago Reader review: John
Boorman's modernist, noirish thriller (1967) is still his best and
funniest effort (despite the well-phrased demurrals of filmmaker Thom
Andersen regarding its cavalier treatment of Los Angeles). Lee Marvin,
betrayed by his wife and best friend, finds revenge when he emerges from
prison. He recovers stolen money and fights his way to the top of a
multiconglomerate—only to find absurdity and chaos. Boorman's treatment
of cold violence and colder technology has lots of irony and visual
flash—the way objects are often substituted for people is especially
brilliant, while the influence of pop art makes for some lively 'Scope
compositions—and the Resnais-like experiments with time and editing are
still fresh and inventive. The accompanying cast (and iconography)
includes Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, and Carroll O'Connor; an
appropriate alternate title might be "Tarzan Versus IBM," a working
title Jean-Luc Godard had for his Alphaville. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm presentation is part of the 'The Devil Finds Work' season based on the critic James Baldwin's work with the same title. You can find the details here.
Chicago Reader review: A
handsome black widower (Alex Descas) and his lovely college-age
daughter (Mati Diop) inhabit a self-contained world of tranquil
domesticity and affection in a gray suburban high-rise outside of Paris.
A goodhearted but insecure woman down the hall (Nicole Dogué) lives in
the abject hope of winning the widower's heart, and a sweetly
melancholic young man upstairs (Grégoire Colin) harbors similar feelings
for the young woman. It's a given that the father-daughter bubble must
eventually burst, but the smart writer-director Claire Denis (Beau Travail)
has other, subtler things on her mind than Electra-complex melodrama.
This 2008 feature is beautiful but very quietly so, and definitely not
for the ADHD set. Cliff Doerksen
This 35mm screening is part of the Lindsay Anderson season (full details here) at BFI Southbank. Information about other screenings of if.... on May6th, 24th and 28th throughout the season can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: Lindsay Anderson indulges his taste for social allegory with a tale of a
repressive boys’ school rocked by student revolutionaries who listen to
African music. Though clearly about Mother England and her colonies,
the film found its popular success, in that distant summer of 1969, in
being taken quite literally. Anderson deserves credit for sniffing out
the cryptofascist side of the student movement, and his presentation of
oppression—sexual and social—is very forceful. Yet the film finally
succumbs to its own abstraction with an ending that satisfies neither
symbolism nor wish fulfillment. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Josef von Sternberg's 1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the
Great into a study of sexuality sadistically repressed and reborn as
politics, thus anticipating Bernardo Bertolucci by three decades. Marlene
Dietrich's transformation from spoiled princess to castrating matriarch
is played for both terror and sympathy, surface coolness and buried
passion, with weird injections of black humor from Sam Jaffe's
degenerate grand duke. Sternberg's mise-en-scene is, for once,
oppressively materialistic, emphasizing closeness, heaviness,
temperature, and smell. Dave Kehr
This 35mm screening os part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday strand.
Chicago Reader review: Another of Henry Jaglom’s let-it-all-hang-out gabfests, this one set in a
beautiful, about-to-be-destroyed Los Angeles theater, where Jaglom
invites his friends on Valentine’s Day. It certainly has its
moments—most of them provided by Orson Welles (in one of his last
extended film performances), his vivacious long-time companion Oja
Kodar, and the venerable Sally Kellerman—but most of this largely
improvised movie, as critic Elliott Stein has pointed out, is pretty
much the equivalent of the Donahue show, with all the strengths
and limitations that this implies, and Jaglom’s own earnest inquiries
about what makes so many people lonely can get a bit cloying after a
while. However, Welles, as the equivalent of a talk-show guest, is very
much in his prime, and his ruminations about feminism, loneliness,
drama, and related subjects certainly give the proceedings an edge and a
direction that most of the remainder of this floundering movie sadly
lacks. Among the other participants in this encounter session are
Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil, Andrea Marcovicci, Ronee Blakley, and
Monte Hellman. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 35mm screening. There will be an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.
Time Out review: Director Roger Vadim kicks off his adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic
strip by stripping Jane Fonda starkers. From there on it's typically vacuous
titillation as Barbarella takes off for the mysterious planet Sorgo in
40,000 AD, there to survive attack by perambulating dolls with vampire
fangs, receive her sexual initiation from a hairy primitive, fall in
love with a blind angel, be whisked off to an alarming Lesbian encounter
with the tyrannical Black Queen, etc. But Terry Southern's dialogue
occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude
Renoir, look really splendid. Tom Milne
This is a 35mm presentation at the Prince Charles Cinema. Chicago Reader review: 'What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were? The first time I saw Kane
I discovered the existence of the director; the next dozen or so times
taught me what he did—with lights and camera angles, cutting and
composition, texture and rhythm. Kane (1941) is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take Ambersons, Falstaff, or Touch
of Evil), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking
about Welles—or for that matter about movies in general.' Dave Kehr
This film, presented in a 4K restoration, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank, and is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.
I haven't seen this since my post-graduate days at Derby Lonsdale
College in the mid-1980s but found it a real eye-opener at the time and
wouldn't disagree with this ecstatic review in Chicago Reader. Director Roberto Rossellini was a pioneer and this film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, brought the attention of the world to the development of the hugely influential neorealism era in Italian cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Roberto Rossellini's 1946 story of a group of workers and a priest in
1943-'44 Rome, declared an “open city” by the Nazis, was begun only two
months after the liberation. Its realistic treatment of everyday Italian
life heralded the postwar renaissance of the Italian cinema and the
development of neorealism; the film astonished audiences around the
world and remains a masterpiece. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, and
Maria Michi. Don Druker
This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real
is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in
their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which
aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of
classic film.
Time Out review: Bernardo Bertolucci’s beautiful, idea-laden and
thrilling film noir, released in post-événements 1970, opens with a
Paris hotel sign flashing on a man with a fedora, a gun and a naked
woman. But Bertolucci’s late-’30s-set adaptation of Albert Moravia’s
novel examining Italy’s fascist past was no exercise in black-and-white
nostalgia. The noir elements – the complex flash-back structure and the
out-of-kilter ‘Third Man’-syle camera angles framing its anti-hero,
volunteer assassin Jean-Louis Trintignant – are a mere frame, pencil drawings on which cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paints his Freudian washes of blue and red.
Even at the time of the ‘The Conformist’, with its poison-penned
quotations of Godard, Bertolucci was already showing himself the
greatest pleasure seeker of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’
agit-prop school. Trintignant’s classically-educated Marcello Clerici –
he quotes Emperor Hadrian and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – is the
epitome of the repressed bourgeois, so ashamed of his ‘mad’ father and
opium-addicted mother to be delighted, in shades of Sartre’s Daniel, to
be married to a ‘mediocre’ wife ‘full of paltry ideas’ and prepared to
commit murder to follow the flow of fascist political fashion. Until
that is, he claps eyes on the beautiful, decadent wife (Dominique Sanda) of his old tutor and present target, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). It’s a dazzling film, dated only in its sense of passionate
intellectual engagement, which seductively balances its seditious
syllabus of politics, philosophy and sex with a serio-comic tone,
exemplified by Gastone Moschin’s near pantomimic Blackshirt and Georges Delerue’s delightful score. Wally Hammond
This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.
Chicago Reader review: Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of
the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat
theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't
handle success. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Nicholas
Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put
it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence,
this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest
statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature,
reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town
saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her
aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but
well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly
deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With
Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as
well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano,
Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper. Dave
Kehr Here
(and above) is the trailer.
New Yorker review: One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely,
that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing,
the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor,
the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the
humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the
young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an
audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to
short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind,
achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her.
Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical,
dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible
spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women,
when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more
openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New
York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open
hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional
activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded,
perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its
intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and
a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that
Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in
the same way. Richard Brody Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.
This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Half
the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great
wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on
it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was
generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the
incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid
Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from
near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd
years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist
subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’
morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger
viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French
chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid
is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney
Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally
shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still
amounts to some hill of beans. Wally Hammond
This evening (in the Experimenta strand at BFI Southbank) is a collection of films celebrating underground filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger titled 'Cinema Is Evil: Welcome to the World of Legendary, Queer Occult Filmmaker Kenneth Anger'.
BFI introduction: Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, agitational, visionary voice in
independent, underground film, whose stunningly shot, magick-inspired
movies disrupted experimental film and influenced the darker elements of
counterculture and punk. A year to the day since Anger’s death, we pay
homage to this cinematic magus and his contention that, ‘the day cinema
was invented was a dark day for mankind’. Programme includes early
cinema title When the Devil Drives (1907), Arena special Hollywood
Babylon (1991), about Anger’s infamous book, and his psychodramas
Fireworks (1947) and Rabbit’s Moon (1972).
This classic Howard Hawks movie, which also screens on May 19th and 23rd, is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done
first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby
stereo. (The film, in fact, often circulates in extremely poor
public-domain prints that smother the glories of Hawks's sound track.)
It isn't a matter of speed but of placement—the dialogue almost seems to
have levels in space. Hawks's great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page
and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly
celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways. Cary Grant's
performance is truly virtuoso—stunning technique applied to the most
challenging material. With Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, a genius
in his way too. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: Lindsay Anderson’s capacity for drawing out extraordinary performances hits full
flight in this tight, tense domestic drama starring Brian Cox, James
Bolam and Alan Bates. The powerhouse trio play three successful brothers
returning home to celebrate their working-class parents’ 40th wedding
anniversary. As the actors hit their stride, it’s not long before old
secrets, suppressed bitterness and quiet sadness resurface.
Here (and above) is Alan Bates talking about the making of the film.
