The Keep (Mann, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm
Those of you who weren't with us at the 35mm Cigarette Burns screening in 2016 can catch up as this bona fide cult movie makes its way back to the Prince Charles Cinema, this time in a 4K restoration. The film also screens on April. 23rd. Details here.
Prince Charles Cinema introduction:
The
Keep contains
all of Mann’s signature visual style, with its moody lighting,
dreamlike cinematography, and an eerie, hypnotic electronic score by
Tangerine Dream. However, the film was plagued by production issues,
including extensive studio interference, drastic cuts to its
runtime, and lost footage. Add in that two weeks into
post-production, visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers died,
causing massive amounts of problems because no one knew how he
planned to finish the visual effects scenes in the movie. All this
lead to a final version that feels disjointed and incomplete. The
original cut was reportedly over three hours long, but Paramount
forced Mann to trim it down to just under 100 minutes, resulting in a
film with significant narrative gaps and abrupt character
developments. Despite
its troubled history and lukewarm reception upon release, The Keep has
developed a cult following over the years. Fans appreciate its unique
atmosphere, ambitious blend of horror and fantasy, and its haunting,
dreamlike aesthetic. After years of seeming unlikely, the film has
finally been restored. This is lovely news for us here at the Prince
Charles Cinema, where the film has been largely absent from our
screens lately, as the 35mm print has sound issues.
Chicago Reader review:
This supernatural thriller has the look of a doomed project—one of those movies, like Lucky Lady or Catch-22,
where something went irretrievably, inexplicably wrong, but the results
had to be released anyway. At least that’s a more charitable assumption
than blaming it all on the writer-director, Michael Mann (Thief),
whose work as displayed here wouldn’t cut the mustard on a Saturday
morning kids’ show. The film—about a squad of Nazi soldiers who
accidentally unleash a diabolical force in a remote Romanian village—is
almost absurdly uncentered in terms of plot, structure, and character;
none of it makes dramatic—or even temporal—sense. There is some nice art
direction—particularly on the title structure, a kind of Dracula’s
castle by Frank Lloyd Wright—but it only serves to shelter an utterly
forlorn cast; Scott Glenn, Jurgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Ian McKellen.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trrailer.
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