This screens as part of the Eye-Popping Colour season at the Barbican. Time Out review: Deliriously playful yakuza pic, in which Suzuki lets logic hang.
Basically just another tale of gang warfare, it's kitted out with plot
ellipses, bizarre sets and colour effects, inappropriate songs, absurd
irrelevancies (nice hair-drier gags!), action scenes that verge on the
abstract, and some visual jokes tottering precariously between slapstick
and surrealism. Somehow, it still just about works as a thriller, with
(very, very faint) echoes of Melville and Leone. Inspired lunacy. Geoff Andrew
Actor and writer Mark Gatiss will be on hand for a rare midnight screening of Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria as part of the Phoenix Nights season.
Time Out review:
In 1957, Fellini was still as indebted to neo-realism as to surrealism,
and this melancholy tale of a prostitute working the outskirts of Rome
is notable for its straightforward depiction of destitution. It may come
as a surprise to those who know only Fellini's later work. It's easy to
appreciate how Bob Fosse, Neil Simon and Peter Stone found a musical in
it (Sweet Charity): Fellini orchestrates his story in waves of simple, pure emotion, telegraphed with silent screen gusto by Giulietta Masina.
With her Noh eyebrows and white bobby socks, Masina is the missing link
between Charlie Chaplin and Shirley MacLaine. One of life's eternal
optimists, Cabiria one day meets the man of her prayers (Périer), and
what follows is scarcely unexpected, but heartbreaking for all that.
This new (1999) print features a seven minute sequence not seen since
the film's Cannes premiere - Cabiria's encounter with a stranger
delivering food parcels to the poor. Censored apparently at the behest
of the Catholic Church, it underlines the severity of the social
context, deepens Cabiria's character and serves as a poignant harbinger
of things to come. Tom Charity
Chicago Reader review: Howard Hawks's 1932 masterpiece is a dark, brutal, exhilaratingly
violent film, blending comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico
Marx let loose with a live machine gun. Paul Muni gives his best
performance as the simian hood Tony Camonte, whose one redeeming virtue
is that he loves his sister (Ann Dvorak, of the limpid eyes and jutting
limbs). Hawks reverses the usual structure of the gangster tragedy:
Camonte doesn't hubristically challenge his world so much as go with the
flow of its natural chaos and violence. The supporting actors—Osgood
Perkins, Karen Morely, Boris Karloff, Vince Barnett, George Raft
(flipping his coin)—seem to have been chosen for their geometric
qualities; the film is a symphony of body shapes and gestures,
functioning dynamically as well as dramatically.
Dave Kehr
This is screening on a double-bill with Cold In July. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: James M. Cain's pulp classic (1944), as adapted by Raymond Chandler and
directed by Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck is perfectly cast as a Los
Angeles dragon lady burdened with too much time, too much money, and a
dull husband. Fred MacMurray (less effectively) is the fly-by-night
insurance salesman who hopes to relieve her of all three. Wilder trades
Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the
atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives. With Edward G. Robinson. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader: A runaway hit in Hong Kong, this 2002 crime thriller reinvigorated the genre with its airtight script, taut editing, and sleek cinematography (Christopher Doyle served as visual consultant). Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) plays an undercover cop who's spent three years infiltrating a local triad, and Andy Lau (Days of Being Wild) is his doppelganger, a triad mole rising through the ranks of the police department's organized crime unit. Neither man knows the other's identity, but after a while neither seems entirely sure of his own either. Their only reference point seems to be the mutual antagonism between their respective father figures, a steely police superintendent (Anthony Wong) and a scheming triad boss (Eric Tsang). In Cantonese with subtitles. JR Jones
The Alibi Film Club continue their excellent run of movies with this Cronenberg cult classic.
Chicago Reader review: 'This 1983 shocker by David Cronenberg comes about as close to abandoning
a narrative format as a commercial film possibly can: James Woods plays
the programmer of a sleazy Toronto cable channel who stumbles across a
mysterious pirate emission—a porno show called “Videodrome” that
features hideous S and M fantasies performed with appalling realism.
Knowing a ratings winner when he sees one, Woods sets out to find the
producer and quickly becomes involved with a kinky talk-show hostess
(Deborah Harry), expanding rubber TV sets, a bizarre religious cult,
and—almost incidentally—a plot to take over the world. Never coherent
and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to
place obsessive personal images before a popular audience—a kind of
Kenneth Anger version of Star Wars.' Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Joseph Losey's film of Mozart's opera (1979) has redundant trappings of Freud and Marx, as if Losey felt the need to make the material more personal. He shouldn't have bothered, because it already plays straight to his concerns: Giovanni, with his self-destructive idealism, stands in the line of Losey heroes fromThe Boy With Green HairtoMr. Klein. The visual context is ravishing, with a lighting scheme that builds from the understated and naturalistic to shocking contrasts of black and white. Meanwhile, the camera moves with a preternatural grace, drawing clean, curving lines through the romantic confusions. If the film has a fault, it is a common one in Losey: the absence of an emotional support for his piercing intellectual observations. Dave Kehr
