Chicago, IL | Until May 11, 2010
Inside Hollywood
Continuing at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center at the moment is the series Inside Hollywood, which combines weekly screenings with lectures by Virginia Wright Wexman, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and also the author of A History of Film. Already gone are perspectives on early American filmmaking such as Singin’ in the Rain and Nickleodeon (as well as early oddities such as von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly). But ahead there are treats such as a recently rediscovered version of the Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Baby Face (1933) which features footage subsequently cut by prudish censors. There are some very well-known movies here that examine the way that Hollywood sees itself (the 1937 version of A Star is Born, Robert Altman’s The Player), but there are more interesting leftfield choices here such as Joseph B. Lewis’ 1949 B-movie noir Gun Crazy, Otto Preminger’s neglected 1954 Western River of No Return starring Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe, and – most interestingly – Mike Figgis’ bizarrely ignored Timecode (2000), an early digital movie shot in one take in a four-way split screen which is both a monumental technical achievement and a brilliant, entertaining piece of narrative filmmaking.
Los Angeles, CA | March 5 to April 10, 2010
Here's Looking At You, Humphrey Bogart
Put bluntly, Humphrey Bogart was rough-looking, and definitely not handsome in any traditional sense. Nor was he suave, and he mumbled and lisped. But despite – or was it because? – of all of that, he was unquestionably a movie star. He first hit it big as a gangster in Petrified Forest in 1936, the tough guy role suiting his appearance, and his success in more mobster roles in Dead End and Angels With Dirty Faces (both opposite James Cagney) almost had him typecast. However, playing a principled gumshoe in The Maltese Falcon showed more of his range, and an unexpected romantic lead in Casablanca (as a different kind of principled man’s man) made him an unlikely matinee idol. Currently being celebrated in UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Here's Looking At You, Humphrey Bogart season, Bogey was a man for those arduous times of the 30s and 40s, when the Great Depression was followed by World War II: he was strong, no-nonsense, stuck to his guns, worked for the greater good but sought no personal glory. The season collects together 15 movies, from Petrified Forest through to 1955’s The Desperate Hours (in which he plays an aging gangster), and taking in along the way all of Bogart’s collaborations with his wife and co-star Lauren Bacall. As part of the series, Hugh Hefner picks his Essential Bogart titles, and the Playboy mogul will be in attendance at the March 25 screening of The Maltese Falcon.
Berkeley, CA | March 5 to April 16, 2010
Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation
Josephy Losey is often considered a British director, although in truth he was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and made his first works in Hollywood. But when the House UnAmerican Activities Committee came knocking in the 50s, Losey packed up and moved to Britain. Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation, the 15-film retrospective considers the director’s career, from M, his American remake of Fritz Lang’s classic crime drama, to such sixties fare as Boom, his 1968 Tennesse Williams collaboration with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Losey, who traveled to Berlin to study with Bertolt Brecht as a youth, had originally worked in the theater. So it only makes sense that many of his finest films would be with playwright Harold Pinter. Their first film, the 1963 The Servant, pits the downstairs against the upstairs as Dirk Bogarde plays a butler who bullies his master (James Fox). The series also contains many of his lesser-known works, like the terrifying 1959 Blind Date, a sort of psychological whodunit that moves back and forth in time. (The film is also famous for its controversy. The lead, being played by one-time member of the Hitler Youth Hardy Kruger, inspired Variety’s red-baiting headline, “Alleged REDS, in partnership with EX-NAZI sell BLIND DATE to Paramount,” thus ending its American run.)
Nashville, TN | Until March 11, 2010
Noir Fest 2: French & Brit Crime Thrillers
For whatever reason, noir seems a quintessentially American genre. In fact, there's a case to be made that the Western and noir are the two great American genres. On the flipside, however, one has to acknowledge that the Western got a little stale until foreigners like Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone injected their own style into it - a style which American movies then adopted. And, equally, though the roots of noir lie in the hardboiled fiction of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Thompson, what could be more universal than crime, betrayal and nihilism? Showing that the noir import is just as good as its homegrown equivalent is the currently running season at Nashville's Belcourt Theatre, Noir Fest 2: French & Brit Crime Thrillers. Sadly such gems as Carol Reed's The Third Man, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique and Jules Dassin's Rififi have already screened, but still ahead are many more unmissable movies from both sides of the English Channel. Melville is arguably the father of the Gallic film noir and there are two more from him to savor, Le Samouraï (featuring Alain Delon as a hermetic hitman) and Le Cercle Rouge (in which Delon teams up with Yves Montand to pull off an improbably heist), in addition to Julien Duvivier's 1937 proto-noir Pépé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin as the titular supercriminal. On the British side, there is less sartorial style and more irredeemable souls: James Mason's doomed IRA man goes on the run in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, Carl Boehm plays a murderous filmmaker in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, and Michael Caine is out to wreak horrible revenge on the death of his brother in Mike Hodges' Get Carter.
Cambridge, MA | Until March 29, 2010
Classic Ford: A John Ford Retrospective, Part I
There are few filmmakers who have shaped both American cinema and the American psyche as much as John Ford. Born and raised in Portland, Maine, the son of Irish immigrants, Ford moved to Hollywood at the age of 20 to pursue a life in film. Three years later, in 1917, he directed his first film, and cut his teeth churning out a number of short silent films, mostly westerns. Interestingly, while Ford is often thought of as the great Western director, from 1930 to 1945, he directed only one––the 1939 classic Stagecoach. While Classic Ford: A John Ford Retrospective, Part I includes many of his great Westerns––like his epic The Searchers (1956), Fort Apache (1948) and My Darling Clementine (1946)––the series also highlights the range of films Ford made in the 30s. Though the 1935 thriller The Informer focuses on his Irish homeland, much of his other work reworked American history. His mythic 1939 biopic Young Mr. Lincoln, his 1939 Revolutionary War adventure Drums Along the Mohawk, and one of his undisputed classics, the 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, all gave shape and story to the American saga. Employing many of the same actors (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara), Ford created as much as represented the myth of America.