This is part of the Garden Cinema's Screwball Comedy season. Full details here.
Time Out review: An enchanting comedy which starts with Claudette Colbert, as an American chorine
on the make, stranded in Paris in a gold lamé evening gown (what else?).
She is befriended on the one hand by a poor taxi-driver who is really a
Russian count (Don Ameche), and on the other by a wealthy socialite
(John Barrymore) who 'introduces' her to society so that she can oblige by
luring a gigolo away from his wife. Uncanny coincidental parallels with La Règle du Jeu
abound, and although the film echoes Renoir's bark more than his bite,
it has a superbly malicious script by Brackett and Wilder, gorgeous sets
and camerawork, and a matchless cast. All in all, probably Mitchell Leisen's
best film. Tom Milne
Chicago Reader review: A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections,
coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a
former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere
black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it
for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are
and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders
situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional
pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is
dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect
Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted
characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience.
With David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer (1979). Dave Kehr
Cinema Museum introduction: July
2026 marks eighty years since the formation of Martin and Lewis, and
seventy years since their break up, exactly a decade later. It’s
difficult to overstate their success in this period; at the height of
their fame in the early fifties, the pair were a showbiz phenomenon
who incited levels of hysteria reserved in popular memory for fans of
Elvis or The Beatles. The Martin and Lewis empire spread everywhere:
from the nightclub scene where they originated into television,
radio, comics and, of course, Hollywood. The
Caddy remains
one of the better works for understanding their volatile, magnetic
chemistry. It was their ninth of sixteen films together, one of three
Martin and Lewis films released in 1953 alone. The film was a massive
commercial success and became the fourteenth highest grossing film of
the year. But it also marked the beginning of the end for the pair,
as Lewis grew increasingly egotistical and controlling and,
emboldened by the commercial success of That’s
Amore,
Martin became convinced of his ability to go it alone. By the summer
of 1954, whispers of a rapidly fracturing partnership, even a feud,
began to spread through Hollywood like wildfire. Martin and Lewis
went on to release seven more films after The
Caddy,
and in the three years after its release, they remained a mainstay of
popular television and film until their acrimonious split in 1956,
after which both went on to enjoy successful solo careers. The film
will be preceded by an introduction reflecting on the shared career
and legacy of Martin and Lewis.
This film was famously buried by Fox studios and there was just one late
press screening in Britain.
I wrote about the tortured pre-release history here.
But Kenneth
Lonergan's follow up to the excellent You Can Count On Me gained a
second life thanks to critics enthused by one of the best American film
in recent years championing this superb movie.
Here the film screens in the full extended version.
This is Peter Bradshaw's review from the Guardian to the time of release: Since 2000, when he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count
on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar as a
director. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio
argument over the length of his followup project, a post-9/11 New York
drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting.
Originally conceived as a three-hour movie, it has been allowed into
cinemas in a two-and-a-half hour cut. Perhaps Lonergan is content with this and perhaps not, but
the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling
neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, with something of John
Cassavetes and Tom Wolfe, and rocket-fuelled by a superbly thin-skinned
performance by Anna Paquin. Its sheer energy and dramatic vehemence,
alongside that raw lead performance, puts it way ahead of more
tastefully formed dramas.Paquin plays Lisa, the daughter
of divorced parents: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private
school, sexy but emotionally naive, self-absorbed and scarily
hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. She may
have inherited drama-queen tendencies from her mother Joan (J
Smith-Cameron), a Broadway stage star, with whom she lives in New York.
One day, after an encounter of pouting defiance with her exasperated
mathematics teacher (Matt Damon), Lisa takes it into her head to buy a
cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes: he is played by
Mark Ruffalo.
With a teenager's heedless disregard for the consequences, she
flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got
it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible
results.Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at
having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup,
and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a
whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion
guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a
huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against
her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a
man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at
the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult,
queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly
unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically
compelling to watch.
Chicago Reader review: In 1969 Ken Loach took time out from an acclaimed television career to
direct this quietly powerful narrative feature, a classic of British
social realism. Based on a novel by Barry Hines but shot like a
documentary, with a hardscrabble industrial setting and a cast that
blends professionals and amateurs, the film tracks an introverted
Yorkshire lad (David Bradley) who's abandoned by his father and bullied
by his coal-miner brother (Freddie Fletcher). A failure in the classroom
and on the soccer pitch alike, the boy finds his wings when he adopts
and trains a fledgling kestrel. Working in the style of cinema verite,
cinematographer Chris Menges captures the petty tyrannies of the
provincial working class and the inchoate joys of a youngster stumbling
toward the greater world. Andrea Gronvall
This is the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of one of John Ford's early magnificent westerns. The screening features an introduction by Bryony Dixon, Rosie Taylor and Makeda Doyal and a live accompaniment by Ashley Valentine.
MOMA review: John Ford’s first epic western, the 1925 The Iron Horse, helped
to establish Fox as a major studio and Ford as Fox’s most prominent
director. Granted an even larger budget and creative independence for
his 1926 return to the genre, 3 Bad Men, Ford created perhaps
the most fully achieved of his silent features, a historical pageant
that never overwhelms its foreground characters. Establishing the theme that would define his work for decades to come –
the outsider who sacrifices himself for the good of the group that has
excluded him – Ford creates three lovably eccentric outlaws (played by
the early western star Tom Santschi; Allan Dwan regular Frank Campeau;
and the first of Ford’s elfin Irishman, J. Farrell MacDonald) who
resolve to protect a young homesteader (Olive Borden) and her fiancé
(George O’Brien) from the violence surrounding the opening of the Dakota
Territory. Villainy, in the form of the territory’s gambling boss, is provided by
the colorful Lou Tellegen, a Dutch-born actor who made his film debut
opposite his romantic partner Sarah Bernhardt in the 1912 Film d’Art
production La Dame aux camelias. Ford costumes Tellegen against
convention in dazzling white with a 20-gallon hat, likely a sly
reference to the extravagant costumes of Fox’s reigning cowboy star, Tom
Mix. A cascading series of action climaxes – including a land rush filmed
with (or so the studio claimed) 2,400 extras, 1,800 horses and 450
covered wagons – leads to the first of Ford’s haunting diminuendo
endings, which finds the young couple settled into an Edenic ranch with
their first child, still protected by the spirits of the baby’s three
godfathers. Paradoxically, 3 Bad Men would prove to be Ford’s last western until he returned to the genre, with far greater self-consciousness, with Stagecoach in 1939. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: The film that introduced Yasujiro Ozu, one of Japan's
greatest filmmakers, to American audiences (1953). The camera remains
stationary throughout this delicate study of conflicting generations in a
modern Japanese family, save for one heartbreaking moment when Ozu
tracks around a corner to discover the grandparents, alone and
forgotten. A masterpiece, minimalist cinema at its finest and most
complex. Dave Kehr
