Death Game (Traynor, 1977): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm
This is a 35mm presentation.
Movies Are Dead film club introduction:
We are proud
to present another little-seen genre classic on 35mm: the ultimate
1970s psychological thriller, Death
Game. John Cassavetes
and Wes Anderson favourite Seymour Cassel stars as George Manning, a
family man whose perfect life is turned into a nightmare of sex and
torture when he allows himself to be seduced by two beautiful young
women, played by Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, who show up at his
door on a rainy night with mysterious intentions. A heady combination
of Věra Chytilovás's Daisies
and Michael Haneke's Funny
Games run through the
sleaziest of 42nd Street grindhouse filters, this remake of the 1973
sexploitation flick Little
Miss Innocence was
itself remade twice, including by Eli Roth with Keanu Reeves and Ana
de Armas in 2015's Knock
Knock. But the unhinged
and superbly made Death
Game is the definitive
version of this lurid tale – don't miss this ultra-rare opportunity
to catch it at the Prince Charles Cinema!
Here (and above) is the trailer.
********************
No 2: Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 12noon
Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini's first filmic encounter with Ingrid Bergman, made in
the wilds in 1949 around the same time the neorealist director and the
Hollywood star were being denounced in the U.S. Senate for their
adulterous romance. Widely regarded as a masterpiece today, the film was
so badly mutilated by Howard Hughes's RKO (which added offscreen
narration, reshuffled some sequences, and deleted others) that
Rossellini sued the studio (and lost). The Italian version, which
Rossellini approved, has come out on video, and this rarely screened
English-language version is very close to it. A Lithuanian-born Czech
refugee living in an internment camp (Bergman) marries an Italian
fisherman (Mario Vitale) in order to escape, but she winds up on a bare,
impoverished island with an active volcano, where most of the locals
regard her with hostility. The film is most modern and remarkable when
the camera is alone with Bergman, though Rossellini wisely shows neither
the wife nor the husband with full sympathy. Eschewing psychology, the
film remains a kind of ambiguous pieta whose religious ending is as
controversial as that of Rossellini and Bergman's subsequent Voyage to Italy
(though its metaphoric and rhetorical power make it easier to take).
Rossellini's blend of documentary and fiction is as provocative as
usual, but it also makes the film choppy and awkward; the English
dialogue is often stiff, and Renzo Cesana as a pontificating local
priest is almost as clumsy here as in Cyril Endfield's subsequent Try and Get Me!
Nor is the brutality of Rossellini's Catholicism to every taste; Eric
Rohmer all but praised the film for its lack of affection toward
Bergman, yet the film stands or falls on the strength of her emotional
performance—and I believe it stands.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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