Rich and Famous (Cukor, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 5.45pm
This rarely screened George Cukor 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 (on 35mm) will be introduced by season curator Karina Longworth.
Full details of the season can be found here.
Chicago Reader review:
Feelings of great depth and poignancy surface unpredictably in this film
by George Cukor, though they have little to do with the ostensible
subject: the director seems to be responding to the material in private,
wholly personal ways completely divorced from the concerns of his
collaborators. The screenplay, an old rewrite of Old Acquaintance by Gerald Ayers (Foxes),
is one of the worst Cukor has had to work with in his long career,
redolent of strained staircase wit and false sophistication. The lead
performances, by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two college
friends who become competing novelists in later life, have the Cukor
audacity without the Cukor grace, and his visual expressiveness is in
evidence only sporadically. Yet the film stays in the mind for its dark
asides on aging, loneliness, and the troubling survival of sexual needs.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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