This is the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of this Iranian classic and includes an introduction by film curator Ehsan Khoshbakht.
BFI introduction: A boy who lost everything during the Iran-Iraq war flees his war-torn
village in southern Iran by hiding in the back of a truck. He reaches a
verdant farmland in the north and, despite struggling to be accepted for
his darker skin and unintelligible dialect, he attempts to find a
family and a new home. A quietly poignant story of displacement and
unspoken wounds, this is one of the finest examples of Beyzaie’s
mythical realism.
This is a Funeral Parade Presents presentation. Here's the full season of their screenings.
Venerable and adored film critic Roger Ebert crossed the line to become
scriptwriter in this collaboration with 1970s skin-flixster Russ Meyer.
An enduring camp cult classic, it follows three pneumatic wannabees who
come to Hollywood to make it big but find only sex, drugs and sleaze.
Sophisticate Ebert brings a touch of sly wit and class to this most
unlikely of projects.
From Kate Arthur, on BuzzFeed:
“…But always enhancing Ebert’s place as a seminal figure in movie
criticism was his hilarious contribution to movies themselves: the 1970
release Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He cowrote it with
shlocktarian Russ Meyer, and it’s just an unparalleled spectacle of
amazingness. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Ebert wrote about
the experience in Film Comment: “We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made.”
“The plot doesn’t make any sense, but if you want to try, Wikipedia has a good summary. And Louis Peitzman has written the “19 Reasons “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls” Is The Greatest Cult Film Of All Time.” As Louis points out, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
gave us many gifts, but my favorite (and I’m sure I’m not alone) was
the Z-Man character, who Ebert said was based on Phil Spector (“but
neither Meyer nor I had ever met Spector,” he wrote).”
Two thumbs up, Roger!
Time Out review: 'With his first movie for a major studio,
Meyer simply did what he'd been doing for years, only bigger and
better. That's to say, he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock
band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious
comedy melodrama, soused in self- parody but spiked with dope, sex and
thrills.' Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: Perhaps the most delightful of Yasujiro Ozu’s late comedies (1959), this very loose remake of his earlier I Was Born, But . . . (1932) pivots around the rebellion of two brothers whose father refuses to buy a TV set. The layered compositions of the suburban topography are extraordinary, as are the intricate interweavings of the various characters and miniplots. The title is Japanese for “good morning,” and the film’s profound and gentle depiction of social exchanges extends to the farting games of schoolboys. The color photography is vibrant and exquisite. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A love triangle set in a scruffy seaport town, with Barbara Stanwyck,
Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan. The script, adapted from a Clifford Odets
play, seems to have roused the realist in director Fritz Lang: the
backwater atmosphere is as authentic as it is oppressive. The naturalism
of this 1952 film, one of Lang’s most underrated, makes an interesting
contrast with the wild exaggerations of his Rancho Notorious, made the same year; for the buffs, there’s also an early starlet appearance by Marilyn Monroe. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Unusually seedy and small-scale for a Fox picture of 1952, this
black-and-white thriller is set over one evening exclusively inside a
middle-class urban hotel and the adjoining bar. The bar’s singer (Anne
Bancroft in her screen debut) breaks up with her sour pilot boyfriend
(Richard Widmark), a hotel guest. He responds by flirting with a woman
(Marilyn Monroe) in another room who’s babysitting a little girl (Donna
Corcoran), but the babysitter turns out to be psychotic and potentially
dangerous. Daniel Taradash’s script is contrived in spots, and the main
virtue of Roy Ward Baker’s direction is its low-key plainness, yet
Monroe—appearing here just before she became typecast as a gold-plated
sex object—is frighteningly real as the confused babysitter, and the
deglamorized setting is no less persuasive. With Jim Backus as the
girl’s father and Elisha Cook Jr. as Monroe’s uncle, the hotel elevator
operator. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: Peggy and her overprotective mother Mae work as chorus girls in a
burlesque troupe. When the star of their show quits, Mae hatches a plan
for Peggy to take the top spot. In her first major screen role, Monroe
elevates a low-budget, uneven b-movie musical. It’s fascinating to see
the then 22-year-old performing with her natural voice and building the
foundations of her future star persona. It showcases both her gift for
comedy and her musicality, culminating in the catchy, if somewhat
questionable, sugar-baby anthem Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy.
This film, also screening on July 11th and 16th, will be introduced by writer and season curator Kazuo Ishiguro and is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: More
action oriented than the other Dietrich-Sternberg films, this 1932
production is nevertheless one of the most elegantly styled. The
setting, a broken-down train commandeered by revolutionaries on its way
to Shanghai, becomes a maze of soft shadows and shifting textures,
through which the characters wander in a philosophical quest for
something—anything—solid. The screenplay, by Jules Furthman and an
uncredited Howard Hawks, has a quality of wisecracking wit unusual in
Sternberg's films: when someone asks Dietrich why she's going to
Shanghai, she retorts, "To buy a new hat." Dave Kehr
