No 1: The Ruling Class (Medak, 1972): Garden Cinema, 2pm
Garden Cinema introduction:
For this edition of Composing Cinema, we are delighted to welcome Academy Award nominated composer John Cameron who will be joining fellow Oscar-nominee Gary Yershon to discuss his score for Peter Medak's satirical epic, The Ruling Class. John and Gary will be in conversation before the screening. Based on Peter Barnes's irreverent play, this darkly comic indictment of Britain’s class system peers behind the closed doors of English aristocracy. Insanity, sadistic sarcasm, and black comedy - with just a touch of the Hollywood musical - are all featured in this beloved cult classic directed by Peter Medak.
Criterion Collection review (in full here):
This will never be a film for purists, but its ripeness and excess, its alert self-parody and breadth of cultural reference, mark it out as one to be cherished—and also appreciated, as an avatar of the renewed interest in high-voltage performance that runs through much distinctive cinema of the '80s and '90s, from Russell and Gilliam to Greenaway and Jarman. Above all, it’s a great, disturbing black comedy, and deservedly now a cult classic.
Ian Christie
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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No 2: Prime Cut (Ritchie, 1972): Nickel Cinema, 6.15pm
Time Out review:
Michael Ritchie's inexplicably underrated second feature is a superb amalgam of pulp gangster thriller and fairytale, in which white knight/Chicago syndicate enforcer (Lee Marvin) visits recalcitrant black knight/Kansas boss (Gene Hackman), rescuing damsel in distress (Sissy Spacek, making her debut) while there. Underneath a surface that constantly juxtaposes opposites, Prime Cut concerns a curious, fundamental naiveté underlying America's corruption: that allows Hackman to give the country the dope and flesh it wants; that permits Marvin to attempt to live out his Beauty and the Beast romance; that implies, in the fairground shootout, an America totally oblivious to what is going on in front of its eyes. In his round-trip of bars, hotels, flophouses, ranches, cities and countryside, Ritchie demonstrates a truly fine handling of locations, best realised in two classic Hitchcock-like chases, through the fairground, and across a cornfield pursued by a combine harvester.
Chris Peachment
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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