This 16mm screening is introduced by Gregory La Cava researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith.
Chicago Reader review: With this 1935 film, Gregory La Cava turned his talent for ensemble improvisation (My Man Godfrey,Stage Door) to melodrama rather than comedy, and the result is a tearjerker of unusual sobriety and heft. The setting is a mental hospital, where the new director (Charles Boyer) is resented by the staff for his scientific detachment, while doctor Claudette Colbert tries to extricate herself from an overly warm working relationship with a married colleague (Joel McCrea). While the drama seeks to define precise emotional distances, La Cava’s camera adheres to his actors with a respectful mobility that still seems strikingly modern. Dave Kehr
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Full details of the strand can be found here.
Time Out review: Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy
middle-aged banker John Randolph
grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him
into hunky Rock Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in
Californian
beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting
prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify
Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title
sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something
bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting
camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.
After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels
like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the
jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in
all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be
cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee
who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture.
(This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose
'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate
and Seven Days in May). Trever Johnston
This 35mm presentation, also screening on May 11th, is part of the British Postwar Cinema (1945-1960) season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: "I hate you," goes the most explosive line in Carol Reed's
marvelously plotted murder mystery, all the more powerful for being
spoken by an adorable eight-year-old in short pants. We've already seen
curious Phillipe (Henrey) romping around the airy chambers of France's
ambassadorial mansion in London (his dad's the often-absent diplomat)
and bonding with his pet garden snake, MacGregor. Phillipe's true hero,
and the idol of the title, is affectionate butler Baines (Richardson),
whose stern head-maid wife nonetheless has it in for the boy to an
almost pathological degree. So empathic is the movie toward its young dreamer that when
complications arise, you wince on his behalf. Baines has a secret lover,
Julie (Morgan), whom he meets for a chaste rendezvous in a pub; after
Phillipe surprises them, Baines introduces the youngster to his "niece"
and to the concept of private confidences—many of which are to follow,
this being a thriller. Reed, of course, is better known for his next movie, The Third Man, also penned by novelist Graham Greene. But The Fallen Idol is
arguably the superior film; both deal with the seasoning of naive
innocents, but unlike Joseph Cotten's charmingly soused pulp novelist,
young Phillipe actually deserves his time in happyland, making his
awakening a true stab to the heart. And Reed's signature noirish side
streets work even better as the scary vistas of a boy outdoors long
after bedtime. Joshua Rothkopf
This is a 35mm screening which is also being shown at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 29th and June 18th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full
due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a
best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely,
willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and
convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that
Coppola hasn't achieved since. With Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert
Duvall, Sterling Hayden, and Diane Keaton. Dave Kehr
Here (and above) are some excerpts from the opening scenes.
This film (being shown on May 16th, 29th and 30th) is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here. Time Out review: Glauber Rocha's
first major film introduced most of the methods, themes and even
characters that were developed five years later in his Antonio das
Mortes. Set in the drought-plagued Brazilian Sertao in 1940, it explores
the climate of superstition, physical and spiritual terrorism and fear
that gripped the country: the central characters, Manuel and Rosa, move
credulously from allegiance to allegiance until they finally learn that
the land belongs not to god or the devil, but to the people themselves.
The film's success here doubtless reflects the 'exoticism' of its style,
somewhere between folk ballad and contemporary myth, since the
references to Brazilian history and culture are pervasive and fairly
opaque to the uninitiated. But Rocha's project is fundamentally
political, and completely unambiguous: he faces up to the contradictions
of his country in an effort to understand, to crush mystiques, and to
improve. Tony Rayns
The screening of We Are Also Brothers on Friday 1 May will be introduced by Dr Felipe Botelho Correa, King’s College London. This is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here.
BFI introduction: Two Black brothers opt for very different career paths in Rio. One
pursues education and respectability, while the other is drawn into
petty crime. Burle blends melodrama with social critique and uses his
characters’ stories as a platform to confront Brazil’s myth of racial
harmony.
Chicago Reader review: Despite its self-deprecating camp and convoluted plot, there is an
appealing honesty to Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 1/2. The director plays
Bruce, an over-the-hill porn star trying to restart his flagging career,
in part by acting in a documentary about him by an up-and-coming
lesbian filmmaker. We see footage from his porno loops and scenes from
the film in progress and hear comments on Bruce’s own “unfinished” epic,
“Super 8 1/2.” The title’s two obvious references are to Fellini’s
famous film about his problems making a film and to the low-budget
medium of Super-8. But a third meaning is supplied by a woman who
suggests that it’s Bruce’s own overoptimistic view of his own endowment.
In the explicit sex scenes, LaBruce moves beyond narcissism to its
opposite. As one “critic” suggests in a pretentious voice-over analysis
of one of the porn films, Bruce’s performances acknowledge the camera,
and his self-consciousness suggests a kind of emptiness that works
against any sex appeal he might have. The way the film constantly turns
back on itself, with its films-within-films and comments on them, leaves
the viewer without any firm ground, suggesting the void behind
self-absorption. Bruce’s agonized cries, heard after the final credits,
perhaps acknowledge the terror of that void. Fred Camper
