Time Out review: Oppression, guilt, blackmail and murder in turn-of-the-century London's quiet Laburnum Terrace - the plot specifics of The Suspect inevitably evoke Alfred Hitchcock's world, even if the studio choice of noirspecialist Robert Siodmak as director suggests a more darkly labyrinthine
atmosphere. As it turns out, the generic common denominator of
psychological suspense proves stronger than the auteurist imprint, and
if any individual has a right to 'sign' the film, it is Charles Laughton in one
of his most engaged and engaging roles, as a sympathetic wife-killer and
victim of blackmail, whose fatal flaw is eventually revealed to be his
sense of simple decency. Between the characters of Laughton, his
shrewish wife (Rosalind Ivan), innocent femme fatale (Ella Raines), a
suspicious detective (Stanley C Ridges), and a wife-beating good-for-nothing
neighbour (Henry Daniell), are etched some intricate moral shadings; and some
teasing reflections on manipulation emerge from within the narrative,
echoing the virtuoso audience manipulation. Paul Taylor
Here (and above) is a trailer for a Robert Siodmak season at New York's Lincoln Centre.
This is a 'The Machine That Kills Bad People' screening.
Programme Barbara Rubin, Christmas on Earth (1963), double 16mm projection, 29 min. Jackie Raynal, Deux fois (1968), DCP, 66 min.
ICA introduction: A double bill of films that double. Barbara Rubin’s underground classic Christmas on Earth (1963) possesses a spirit of riotous, orgiastic anarchism. Made when Rubin was still a teenager and inspired by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,
this sexually explicit work sought to challenge the social mores of its
time – an attitude captured in its working title, “Cocks and Cunts.” Christmas on Earth is a double 16mm projection that incorporates live performative
elements, such as the use of coloured gels and a radio soundtrack, to
create a singular and spectacular cinematic experience. Deux fois (1968) is the directorial debut of Jackie Raynal, a figure renowned not
only as a filmmaker, but equally for her work as Éric Rohmer’s editor
and as a programmer at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema. Made under the
umbrella of the Zanzibar Group, with the patronage of Sylvina
Boissonnas, Deux fois deconstructs cinematic conventions through a
series of discrete episodes. In the words of Noël Burch, the film is
"an intentionally elementary meditation on certain primary functions of
film, that could be said to be at the roots of film editing as such –
expectations, exploring the picture, perceptual memory, relationships
between on-screen and off-screen space – all explored in a series of
free-standing sequence shots of perfect simplicity."
Time Out review: Dismissed by Robin Wood in his monograph on Hawks as 'tired' but championed by the French, Man's Favorite Sport? is in many ways the quintessential Hollywood auteur movie. Seen in isolation from the rest of Hawks' work, it seems to be merely an out-of-time slapstick comedy. Seen in context, it effortlessly demonstrates the auteur's ability to stamp his artistic identity on anything - in this case, the travails of an armchair expert (Rock Hudson) forced to enter a fishing contest and confronted with a typically Hawksian superior woman (Paula Prentiss). A marvellous film.
Chicago Reader review: A thwarted caper film in the vein of Melville’s Bob le flambeur and Kubrick’s The Killing,
Henri Verneuil’s 1963 feature stars Jean Gabin, the avatar of
world-weary criminality, in one of his finest roles. Fresh out of
prison, he enlists a former cell mate (Alain Delon) in a daring plan to
rob a casino on the Riviera. Though the film was an international hit,
Verneuil’s conventional narrative style attracted the scorn of the
French New Wave. Forty years later it stands as a well-crafted noir with
a long, tautly executed heist and a protracted denouement that’s even
more engrossing. Joshua Katzman
Chicago Reader review: If this 1984 film really cost $60 million, producer Dino De Laurentiis
must be the greatest patron of avant-garde cinema since the Vicomte de
Noailles financed Buñuel's L'Age d'Or. Director David Lynch
thoroughly (and perhaps inadvertently) subverts the adolescent inanities
of Frank Herbert's plot by letting the narrative strangle itself in
unnecessary complications, leaving the field clear to imagery as
disturbing as anything in Eraserhead. The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't
rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The
real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum;
its passage through the shopping malls of America was a
once-in-a-lifetime anomaly. Kyle MacLachlan is the pallid hero who
becomes a messiah to an oppressed desert tribe. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm presentation, also screening on December 26th at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Observer review: The gangster movie began in the silent era with DW Griffith’s primitiveThe Musketeers of Pig Alley(1912), but it was the talkies and their vibrant soundtracks of chattering machine guns, screeching tyres, hardboiled dialogue and thudding fists on yielding flesh that ushered in the first great cycle of gangster flicks. The enforcement of the Hays Office Production Code in 1934 tamed this first wave, but the gradual relaxation of censorship in the 1960s led to a grand revival of the genre focusing on the celebration of crime waves in the past (Bonnie and Clyde) and the criminal underworld of the present (The Godfather). From the beginning of his film career, Martin Scorsese has been at home with crime both period and contemporary, starting with Boxcar Bertha(1972), a true story of outlaws in the depression, andMean Streets (1973), which drew on his personal knowledge of Italian-Americans embarking on a life of crime in New York’s Little Italy. I predicted in my 1990 review that GoodFellas“will take its place among the great gangster pictures”, a judgment confirmed by a special two-disc Blu-ray version published to mark its 25th anniversary. Neither glamorising nor moralising, the film is closely based on Nicholas Pileggi’s chilling biography of career criminal Henry Hill (a compelling performance by Ray Liotta). In 1980, to save his neck, Hill gave evidence that convicted several dozen mafiosi and then went into hiding under the federal witness protection programme. A peculiarly brutal pre-credit sequence of a 1970 underworld murder strips the euphemistic shroud off the phrase “taken for a ride”. It’s followed by Hill’s unrepentant declaration: “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.” The picture observes his progress over some 25 years in a New York mafia family that has taken him under its wing, and twice he goes to jail without betraying his lethal comrades Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, but finally, after getting involved with drugs and sniffing too much of his own merchandise, he cracks. The film is accompanied by a series of excellent documentaries in which his collaborators explain how Scorsese made crucial decisions about freeze-frames, long takes, voiceovers, the evocative use of popular music and so on to create the film’s elaborate texture.GoodFellas is a great auteur’s masterpiece. Philip French
Times review:“Is it safe? Is it safe?” The centrepiece torture scene, in which Laurence Olivier’s Nazi dentist Dr Szell drills the truth out of Dustin Hoffman’s innocent patsy, is iconic. Hoffman’s expression of dawning dread as the dental instruments are revealed matches that of the audience. Yet everything else here — the gritty supporting players (Roy Scheider, William Devane), the conspiracy theories and the Central Park finale — marks the pinnacle of 1970s paranoia thrillers, as Hoffman’s Jewish graduate student is sucked into a shadowy world of postwar spooks and power politics by his CIA agent brother (Scheider). Olivier, who was having cancer treatment during filming and taking painkillers to get through it, was nominated for an Oscar.Kevin Maher
Chicago Reader review: This 1946 domestic epic about three World War II veterans returning to
civilian life, 172 minutes long and winner of nine Oscars, isn’t
considered hip nowadays. Its director, William Wyler, and literary
source, MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (adapted here by
Robert Sherwood), are far from fashionable, and the real veteran in the
cast, Harold Russell, who lost his hands in the war, has occasioned
outraged reflections from critic Robert Warshow about challenged
masculinity and even sick jokes from humorist Terry Southern. But I’d
call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I’ve ever
seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its
times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg
Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever
did. The rest of the cast—including Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa
Wright, Fredric March, Cathy O’Donnell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael,
and Ray Collins—is strong too. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of the Funeral Parade strand at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here.
Welcome
to the reason this blog exists. In December 2010 I watched this film, a
movie I went to see when restored and re-released in cinemas in 1983,
on television. I thought afterwards how much I would love to see this
movie on the big screen again and that prompted an idea to write a daily
blog picking a film to see in London. The purpose of starting the blog
was to highlight to film lovers the best movies on the capital's
repertory cinema circuit.
What
writing the blog has also done is reinvigorate my moviegoing. The act
of putting this small contribution to the London film scene together has
resulted in encouraging me to go and see more movies. I hope the blog
has had that impact on others too. This brilliant restoration of one of
the greatest Hollywood films of all time comes highly recommended. Many
believe Judy Garland gave her greatest performance in this film and one
critic has called Mason's the best supporting performance by a male
actor in modern Hollywood. Try and get to see A Star is Born where it
should be seen - in a cinema.
Chicago
Reader review: Even
in this incomplete restoration George Cukor's 1954 musical remake of
the 1937 Hollywood drama is devastating. Judy Garland plays a young
singer discovered by aging, alcoholic star Norman Maine (James
Mason), who helps her to fame as "Vicki Lester" even as his
career slips. Garland gives a deeply affecting performance--halting,
volatile, unsure of herself early on and unsure of Norman later--and
her musical numbers are superb. Yet the film's core is its
two-character scenes, in which small shifts in posture subtly
articulate the drama's essence. Cukor gives his preoccupation with
self-image a surprisingly anti-Hollywood spin: despite the many
industry-oriented group scenes, the characters seem fully authentic
only when they're alone with each other. The scenes of Lester acting
seem tainted with artifice, and her a cappella performance of her
current hit for Norman on their wedding night further separates the
public from the private. Later, reenacting the production number shot
that day, she uses a food cart for a dolly and a chair for a harp;
Cukor's initial long take heightens the intimacy between her and
Norman, just as the household props implicitly critique studio
artificiality. All that matters, Cukor implies, is what people can
try to become for each other. The film was badly mangled when Warner
Brothers cut a half hour shortly after its release; this 1983
35-millimeter restoration replaces some footage, offering stills when
only the sound track could be found. Fortunately these slide shows
are confined to early scenes, giving some sense of what was
lost. Fred
Camper
No 2: Moss Rose (Ratoff, 1947): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pmA 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank introduced by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator.
BFI introduction: We mark the centenary of Peggy Cummins with a film from her Hollywood
period – one of three collaborations with director Ratoff. Marjorie
Bowen’s 1934 source novel was itself based on an unsolved Victorian
murder and this adaptation features Cummins as a Cockney chorus girl who
blackmails a rich gentleman she suspects of being the killer. Despite
the excellent cast and crack screenwriting team, the film didn’t enhance
Cummins’ stateside career. Nevertheless, it remains an entertaining
mystery thriller set against the backdrop of foggy Victorian London,
Hollywood-style.
This 35mm presentation (introduced by season programme assistant Sean Atkinson), also screened on January 29th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Richard
Linklater's delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second
feature (1991) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture
of Austin, Texas; it doesn't have a continuous plot, but it's brimming
with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised,
though it's all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some
of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime.
“Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,”
remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and
in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply
illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and
assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists,
college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and
layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of
narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly
evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of
60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm presentation, also screening on January 16th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the
French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account
of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and
philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of
world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters—a
student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company
rehearsing Pericles—as the student tries to recover a tape of
guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed
suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu;
Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room
flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s
title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy:
“Paris belongs to no one”). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out film review: Martin Scorsese's magnificent film, taken from Edith Wharton's novel, is set in
1870s New York and centres on lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose
plans to wed the impeccably connected Mary Welland (Wynona Rider) are upset by
his love for her unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer).
The performances are excellent, while the director employs all the
tools of his trade to bring his characters and situations vividly to
life; from the start, it's clear from the speedy cutting and sumptuous
mise-en-scène that Scorsese and his team are intent on drawing us into
the heart of Archer's perceptions and the world around him (this is,
most certainly, an expressionist film). Decor reflects and oppresses
characters; posture, gesture and glance (like the witty, ironic
narration) convey not only individual psychology but the ideals of an
entire, etiquette-obsessed elite. Everything here serves to express an
erotic fervour, imprisoned by unbending social rituals designed to
preserve the status quo in favour of a self-appointed aristocracy.
Scorsese's most poignantly moving film. Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: That old formula, handcuffed captor and captive who become buddies on
the run, gets an injection of new life from the playing of the cast.
Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) captures bail-jumping accountant Jon
Mardukas (Charles Grodin) in New York, but his problems really start when he
tries to deliver him to the bail bondsman in LA. Mardukas, learning that
his employer was a Mafia mobster, stole millions which he distributed
among the poor, and Walsh has to run the gauntlet of the FBI, the Mob
and a rival bounty hunter (Ashton), besides putting up with his
captive's concern about smoking and morality. Both actors get off on
each other, improvising routines and inhabiting the standard Odd Couple
teaming so interestingly that at times the film touches a profundity.
Here and there, director Brest succumbs to the car chase, but overall
the movie is way above average for the genre. Brian Case Here (and above) is the trailer.
This is a 35mm presentation also screening on December 9th, plus January 31st and February 14th. You can find all the 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 Here (and above) is the trailer.
An
appropriate annual New Year's Eve screening of this re-released
crowd-pleaser, the Prince Charles Cinema showing the movie on 35mm. The film is also being shown on
February 14th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Too
often dismissed as the bland, cutesy, cakey-bakey face of the modern
romcom, the late Nora Ephron was an unacknowledged genius when it came
to screenplay construction – and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ remains her
finest work. This is a film where everything works: Billy Crystal and
Meg Ryan’s just-this-side-of-smug central couple, the gorgeous
photography of New York through the changing seasons, even Harry Connick
Jr’s jazz-lite soundtrack. And it’s all rooted in that flawless script.
The story is simple: Crystal and Ryan meet after college, and loathe
one another on sight. As the years pass the random meetings pile up, and
dislike turns to reluctant friendship. But, as the film insistently,
infamously asks, can men and women ever really be just friends? It’s not
just that Ephron poses these kinds of obvious-but-important questions.
It’s that she does so while circumventing romantic clichés left and
right, creating unforgettably loveable characters and throwing in some
of the most fluid, insightful and witty set-piece conversations ever
written (the diner orgasm is the most famous, but it’s the tip of a very
large iceberg). ‘Perfect’ is a big word to use about any film, but in
this case no other will do. Tom Huddleston
Chicago Reader review: Released in 1975, near the end of Arthur Penn's most productive period (which began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde),
this haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack
post-Watergate burnout in American life. Gene Hackman plays an LA
detective tracking a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith in her screen
debut) to the Florida Keys while evading various problems of his own
involving his father and his wife. The labyrinthine mystery plot and
pessimistic mood suggest Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, and like
them screenwriter Alan Sharp has more than conventional mystery
mechanics on his mind. One of Penn's best features; his direction of
actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout. With Jennifer Warren,
Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars and James Woods. Jonathan Rosenabum
This is a 35mm presentation also screening on January 7th, 16th and 30th. Details here.
Time Out review: Paul Thomas Anderson's
meandering multi-story megasoap with a message is over-ambitious,
self-conscious, self-indulgent, self-important and clumsy into the
bargain. But it's also one of the most enthralling and exhilarating
American movies in ages. Much in the style of Nashville and Short Cuts
(though lacking Altman's light touch), this intimate epic charts the
various fortunes, over a day or so, of various individuals living in the
San Fernando Valley - including the dying Earl (Jason Robards), his
young wife Linda (Julianne Moore), and his nurse Phil (Philip Seymour
Hoffman); Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), prophet of machismo; and numerous
people associated, past or present, with a TV quiz show - whose paths
cross by design, destiny, chance or coincidence. Insofar as the film is
about 'story', little happens save that Anderson initially conceals
information, and then slowly scatters snippets so that we can piece the
jigsaw together. For all the humour, it's a dark portrait of loss,
lovelessness and fear of failure in contemporary America, and not a film
that trades in understatement. As the lost souls make their way towards
- what? - redemption? - a deus ex machina plot development occurs, as
contrived, ludicrous, bold and grandly imaginative as any Biblical flood
or plague. Geoff Andrew
This 16mm presentation in the Never on Sunday season at Close-Up Cinema is introduced by strand curator Ehsan Khoshbakht
Close-Up Cinema introduction: Hester (Vivien Leigh), a middle-aged woman's suicide attempt at the
beginning of the story sparks off two flashbacks, one from the point of
view of the upper-class husband she has abandoned and the other from the
view of the younger, capricious ex-RAF pilot for whom she has left her
husband. Back to the present, the film revolves around her desperate
attempt to win back her lover, only to realise she is yearning for
something she can’t have. Adapted from a play of the same name by
Terence Rattigan who also wrote the script under director Anatole
Litvak’s supervision, Litvak conveys a stifling world of failed dreams
(a doctor who has turned bookie, a jobless and meddlesome actress) with
an emotional impact somehow stronger than Terence Davies’s 2011 version.
Litvak shows unconstrained impulses without making them look pathetic.
There's no malice of intent in the way characters hurt each other, but
things always fall in the wrong places. When hope wanes, the dust of
memories obscures it beyond recognition. There’s a profound sadness to
the sense of love ebbing away, scene after scene. Ehsan Khoshbakht
BFI introduction: Set on a secluded island, Boom introduced a new, minimal ‘music box’
sound that composer John Barry frequently used in the years immediately before his
move to the US. The powerhouse combination of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their
most florid propels Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Wonderfully camp, it bombed in
1968. But time has been kind to it. And Noël Coward has a star turn as
Bill Ridgeway, ‘the witch of Capri’. Indeed. dubbed ‘The Angel of Death’, Burton’s wandering-poet-cum-gigolo washes
up on the isolated Sardinian isle of Taylor’s ailing widow, in this
visually stunning, alcohol-drenched adaptation. Compellingly miscast, the pair face off in the sort of
unhinged register best relished with an enthusiastic audience. Devoted
fans include John Waters, who opined, ‘If you don’t like this film, I
hate you’.
This film, being shown from 35mm and 70mm, is on an extended run at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: On a visual level, Interstellar is an exceptionally well-crafted
Hollywood entertainment. Director Christopher Nolan, art director Dean
Wolcott, and their effects artists render the imaginary settings in
stunning detail. The film is rife with brilliant imagery: a horizon of
frozen clouds, an ocean wave as tall as a skyscraper, the flashing
interior of a wormhole through which the principal characters fly their
spacecraft. The most striking thing about these images is that we’re
rarely encouraged to ooh and aah over them; unlike most ambitious space
operas since 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Interstellar
inspires not wonder but a cool contemplation. Nolan and his brother
Jonathan, who cowrote the script, advance a hard-science perspective,
incorporating such concepts as the theory of relativity and placing
dramatic emphasis on research and problem solving. Ben Sachs
This film screens at JW3 Cinema from December 21st to 25th. Details here.
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
Chicago Reader review: The
film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his return
to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for the
government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James Stewart
stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who believes his
life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him how wrong he
is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he never been
born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna Reed, Beulah
Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame) and told with a
sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant)
that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of movie sentiment and
a transcendent experience. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the trailer.
Guardian review (full five-star write-up here): Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are renowned for small-screen comic
masterpieces such as Porridge and The Likely Lads, but in 1971 they
scripted the deadly serious and horribly gripping London crime picture
Villain,. It’s an extremely lairy and tasty piece of work in which Richard Burton gave one of his best, most lip-smackingly gruesome performances: this film’s easily as good as the far better known Get Carter with Michael Caine, released that same year. Peter Bradshaw
Time Out review: A companion piece to the William Dieterle/David O. Selznick Love Letters, also
starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten; but where the earlier film remained rooted in
superior romantic hokum, this one takes wing into genuine romantic
fantasy through its tale of a love that transcends space and time as
Cotten's struggling artist meets, falls in love with, and is inspired by
a strangely ethereal girl (Jones) whom he eventually realises is the
spirit of a woman long dead. Direction and performances are superb
throughout, but the real star is Joseph August's camera, which conjures
pure magic out of the couple's tender odyssey, from the gravely
quizzical charm of their first encounter in snowy Central Park (when she
is still a little girl, strangely dressed in clothes of bygone days)
through to the awesome storm at sea that supernaturally heralds their
final parting. Buñuel saw it and of course approved: 'It opened up a big
window for me'. Tom Milne
This 35mm screening of this superb Billy Wilder film is part of the 'David Lynch Stole Christmas' season at Curzon cinemas. Full details here.
Time Out review: Re-teaming actorJack Lemmon, scriptwriter Iz Diamond and directorBilly Wildera
year after ‘Some Like It Hot’, this multi-Oscar winning comedy is
sharper in tone, tracing the compromises of a New York insurance drone
who pimps out his brownstone apartment for his married bosses’ illicit
affairs. The quintessential New York movie – with exquisite design byAlexandre Traunerand
shimmering black-and-white photography – it presented something of a
breakthrough in its portrayal of the war of the sexes, with a sour and
cynical view of the self-deception, loneliness and cruelty involved in
‘romantic’ liaisons. Directed by Wilder with attention to detail and
emotional reticence that belie its inherent darkness and melodramatic
core, it’s lifted considerably by the performances: the psychosomatic
ticks and tropes of nebbish Lemmon balanced by the pathos of Shirley MacLaine’s put-upon ‘lift girl’.
BFI introduction: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s children inspired his acceptance of the role of
Special Ops’ Major Smith in this gripping comic-book caper. There is,
though, a brutality to Burton and Clint Eastwood’s action-hero antics as they
attempt to rescue, via jaw-dropping Austrian alpine stunts, an American
General held prisoner in a mountainous Nazi fortress. Eastwood was
reportedly happy to do the machine-gunning, wisely leaving the talking
to Burton.
Chicago Reader review: Everybody seems to hate this movie, and not without good reason. But
John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s shocker is a much
more interesting film than the original, and Boorman deserves credit for
trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually,
it’s fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian
absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible,
and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is
preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only
out of curiosity. Dave Kehr
This screening, one of the final ones before Curzon Mayfair closes, is part of the 'David Lynch Stole Christmas' season at Curzon cinemas. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: If what you know about this exuberant, self-regarding movie comes from
its countless inferior imitations (from Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland
and The Pickle to Allen’s Stardust Memories to Fosse’s All That Jazz),
you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini’s exhilarating,
stocktaking original... It’s Fellini’s last black-and-white picture, and
conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he’s ever made —
certainly more fun than anything he’s made since. Jonathan Rosenbaum
