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.
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
