Such Good Friends (Preminger, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.45pm
This rarely screened Otto Preminger film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
Tonight’s film will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.
Full details of the season can be found here.
New Yorker review: One of the more effervescent—yet nonetheless scathing—films in a season on ‘The New York Woman’, “Such Good Friends”, from 1971, by the triumvirate of the novelist Lois Gould, the screenwriter Elaine May, and the director Otto Preminger, presents a sheltered young stay-at-home Park Avenue mother (Dyan Cannon), who learns that her husband (Laurence Luckinbill), a prominent art director and author, has been unfaithful. The ironic action, blending flashbacks and fantasies, dispels her comforting illusions on the path to self-reliance. Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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