A Hole in the Head (Capra, 1959): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm
This film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
Full details of the season can be found here.
BFI introduction:
Returning to feature filmmaking after an exile making educational
documentaries, Capra directed this CinemaScope vehicle. Sinatra plays a
broke Miami motel owner whose rich brother offers a financial lifeline –
if he gives up his preteen son and marries a melancholy widow. The
movie is cynical, but theme song ‘High Hopes’, appropriated by the JFK
campaign, became the soundtrack of Camelot-era optimism.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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