***MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15***
STRAY DOGS, Tsai Ming-Liang
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In the newest film from Tsai Ming-liang, a single father (Tsai mainstay Lee Kang-sheng) makes his meager living holding up an advertising placard on a traffic island in the middle of a busy highway. His children (Lu Yi-ching and Li Yi-cheng) wait out their days in supermarkets before they eat with their father and go to sleep in an abandoned building. As the father starts to come apart, a woman in the supermarket (Chen Shiang-chyi, also a Tsai regular) takes the children under her wing. There are real stray dogs to be fed in Tsai’s everyday apocalypse, but the title also refers to its principal characters, living the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world. Stray Dogs is many things at once: minimal in its narrative content and syntax, as visually powerful as it is emotionally overwhelming, and bracingly pure in both its anger and its compassion. One of the finest works of an extraordinary artist. A Cinema Guild release.
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THE COBWEB, Vincente Minnelli
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Grand Hotel in a psychiatric hospital, with MGM lavishing its legendary gloss on Minnelli’s star-studded melodrama. Adapted from the novel by playwright William Gibson (The Miracle Worker), The Cobweb details a deluxe clinic whose disturbed patients are no match for its dysfunctional staff. Richard Widmark is the dedicated psychiatrist tasked with putting out the fires of philandering doctor Charles Boyer. When Widmark’s wife (Gloria Grahame) orders new drapes for the library—a typically Minnellian focus on set design—everyone from administrator Lillian Gish to artist-patient John Kerr (in a role meant for James Dean) is thrown into turmoil. Bacall affectingly co-stars as Widmark’s widowed colleague and possible love interest, an oasis of sanity in this colorful and eccentric CinemaScope soap.
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TWO ENGLISH GIRLS, François Truffaut
BAM
Something of a more mature, reflective variation on the story of Jules and Jim, Truffaut’s bittersweet romance stars the director’s alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud, as a turn-of-the-century Parisian caught up in a 20-year-long love triangle with two English sisters. Graced with a typically lovely score by the “Mozart of cinema” Georges Delerue, Two English Girls is one of Truffaut’s wisest and most charming films.
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TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, Howard Hawks
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
With these words, 19-year-old Betty Joan Perske became screen legend Lauren Bacall, entrancing America and Humphrey Bogart in equal measure. The result of a bet between Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks that a good film could be distilled from the author’s worst novel, To Have and Have Not stands as one of the greatest, if least faithful, treatments of Hemingway’s prose. The story concerns a fishing-boat captain (Bogart) persuaded to smuggle French resistance fighters into Martinique, but the Bogart/Bacall chemistry (inspired by Hawks and wife Nancy Keith, whose pet names “Slim” and “Steve” are appropriated) accounts for its immortality. With piano-man Hoagy Carmichael accompanying Bacall’s memorable rendition of “How Little We Know.”
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THE SINISTER URGE, Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Anthology Film Archives
Detectives Kenne Duncan and Duke Moore attempt to smash “the smut picture racket” run by real-life stripper Jean Fontaine, in her only known screen role. With Dino Fantini as the sex psycho and Ed Wood in the “Jake’s Pizza Joint” sequence, which was from his unfinished ROCK & ROLL HELL. This print has a sequence cut from all subsequent prints in 1961, with two young women in a high school cafeteria, one of whom enthuses about going to Hollywood to become a star. It was replaced a year later by newly shot scenes of a woman attacked by the sex psycho in Griffith Park.
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GLEN OR GLENDA, Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Anthology Film Archives
Wood stars as Glen/Glenda in his first feature film. Originally planned by exploitation producer George Weiss to capitalize on the (then-current) Christine Jorgensen sex-change story, changes had to be made when Jorgensen turned down the role. Glen has a problem: should he tell his fiancée Barbara (Dolores Fuller) about his transvestism before he gets married, or after? With Lyle Talbot and Timothy Farrell, and starring, as the overseeing, string-pulling ‘spirit’ God in the sky, Bela Lugosi!
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ROME OPEN CITY, Roberto Rossellini
Film Forum
Rome, winter 1943: as screeching-tired Gestapo dragnets blanket the “open city,” Resistance leader Marcello Pagliero escapes from his apartment by running across the rooftops (as did co-screenwriter Sergio Amidei in real life), as pregnant widow Anna Magnani prepares for her wedding, parish priest Aldo Fabrizi uses the “frying pan method” to hide the local boys’ bomb brigade’s hardware, and effete Major Harry Feist riffles through his collection of incriminating ID photos – but betrayal, a broad-daylight machine-gunning, a Partisan ambush, blowtorch torture, and death by firing squad loom… Based on actual people and all-too-recent incidents (Magnani’s electrifying final scene was inspired by her enraged pursuit of her boyfriends’s escape by truck); written in a week in Federico Fellini’s kitchen (the only place with heat); shot on a number of the real locations, and cast mainly with non-pros (Fabrizi and second-choice Magnani were already famous, albeit for comedy), Open City’s documentary look and still hair-raising violence rocked audiences and critics around the world, making Neo-Realism, Rossellini, and Magnani world-famous, sharing the top prize at Cannes, and running twenty-one consecutive months at a single New York cinema. For years seen only in beat-up copies with hopelessly inadequate subtitles, this new restoration conveys the full meaning (and even the humor) of the dialogue for the very first time.
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CHICAGO, Frank Urson & Cecil B. DeMille
Film Forum
Ripped from the headlines! - for once pretty true. Straight-from-Broadway filming of the play based on the real lover-shooting Beulah Annan case, hitting the screen three years after her sensational Windy City trial (only years later spawning a remake, Roxie Hart, with Ginger Rogers in the title role, and, much later, the Broadway musical smash and Oscar-winning film). In this first and most authentic version, marvelously blousy Phyllis Haver is Roxie, with future screwball comedy great Eugene Pallette as her victim. Long thought lost, but now restored from a pristine 35mm nitrate print discovered by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in DeMille’s private collection.
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GROUNDHOG DAY, Harold Ramis
Cinefamily, Los Angeles
Greg Proops (one of the most mind-warpingly quick-draw improv comics on earth) records the latest episode of his monthly Film Club podcast live — and then it’s time for the late Harold Ramis’ masterpiece of existential comedy Greg sez: “It asks all the big questions: How would you live if you only had one day? Could you ever toast to world peace with a straight face? Would you want to end it all? What does Andie Macdowell look like in a stripey ‘90s vest? This is the reverse of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which poses “What if you were never here?” Groundhog Day asserts here don’t need you, till you can bring something to the world. Bill Murray is genius as Phil, in his best role till Rushmore. Brash, surly, smart, selfish, morbid and terrifically snarky, he drives this picture. See it on the big screen, where you can groove on all the delightfully dense small-town characters. Warning: you may feel your heart warmed, even if you are in show business.”
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***TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16***
EAST OF EDEN, Elia Kazan
BAM
Elia Kazan’s masterful adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel—the Cain and Abel story transposed to WWI-era Northern California—features an explosive performance by James Dean, in his breakout role, as the tormented Cal Trask. Leonard Rosenman’s tempestuous score ramps up the psychological intensity, while the beautiful ’Scope cinematography is “breathtakingly cinematic…Kazan’s widescreen compositions are often as expressive as the performances themselves” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).
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BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Anthology Film Archives
Originally “Bride of the Atom,” this could be considered Wood’s ‘homage’ to the Monogram horror-melodramas of the 40s, and features Bela Lugosi’s last speaking role, as the supercilious Dr. Eric Vornoff. His goal? To rule the world! Lugosi loved the long rant he has in the film so much that once, walking down Hollywood Boulevard with Wood, he recited it aloud to startled onlookers, who broke into applause when he finished. With Tor (“The Super Swedish Angel”) Johnson as Lobo, who has a fetish for the heroine’s angora beret.
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BURT REYNOLDS, FOOTBALL PRO, Michael Richie
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
One of New American Cinema’s great satirists, Michael Ritchie elaborates on the theme of winning explored inThe Candidate and Smile in this unlikeliest of romantic comedies: a send-up of the self-improvement “human potential movement” set in the world of professional football, adapted from Dan Jenkins’s 1972 novel by veteran screenwriter Walter Bernstein. NFL stars Billy Clyde (Burt Reynolds) and Shake Tiller (Kris Kristofferson) find their friendship increasingly complicated when their team manager Big Ed (Robert Preston) forces them to accept his independent daughter Barbara Jane (Jill Clayburgh) as their new roommate. While Billy Clyde is all macho, Shake is exploring his sensitive side through a new self-realization therapy, but when Shake and Barbara Jane get together, will three be a crowd? Featuring a pre-10 Brian Dennehy and a post-Rocky Carl Weathers.
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NIGHT OF THE GHOULS, Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Anthology Film Archives
Previewed in Hollywood as “Revenge of the Dead,” this is a semi-sequel to BRIDE OF THE MONSTER. Tor Johnson as Lobo the giant returns, somewhat the worse for wear. Kenne Duncan is Dr. Acula, a role written for Bela Lugosi. With Bela’s PLAN 9 double, Tom Mason, Jeannie Stevens (the Black Ghost), Valda Hansen (the White Ghost), Duke Moore, and Criswell. The film was never released, due to unpaid lab bills, and was found 25 years later by Wade Williams. Take note of several camera shots that are direct references to WHITE ZOMBIE.
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LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, Thom Anderson
Cinefamily, Los Angeles
As a YouTube culture, we’re inundated with the “supercut”: the cutting together of disparate clips to observe a trope, a theme or an overwhelming feeling. The sugar rush of a great supercut can be fantastic, but nothing compares to the seismic, stimulating and lasting wave of brainfood that is Thom Andersen’s legendary 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, comprised entirely of clips from films shot on location in our fair city. This is a trip that ALL Angelenos, whether you’re new to the Southland or whether you’re born-and-raised, should absolutely take. Over its three-hour running time, Andersen (a long-running faculty member of CalArts’ cinema studies program) zig-zags from classics to (then-)new releases, from forgotten obscurities to iconic list-toppers, from foreign viewpoints to local heroes — all tied together by the themes of how our city’s surroundings are portrayed as background, as character and as subject. Previously only the province of special anniversary screenings and bootleg downloads, Los Angeles Plays Itself comes to the Cinefamily screen in a brand-new HD remaster, ready to be enjoyed for generations to come.
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***WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17***
20,000 DAYS ON EARTH, Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Film Forum
Rock musician and international cultural icon Nick Cave, “resembles nothing so much as a postmillennial hybrid of bookie and peer of the realm…(with) a face that has been described both as ‘angelic’ and ‘hideous to the eye’” (John Wray, The New York Times Magazine). Since the late 1970s, Cave’s bands The Birthday Party, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Grinderman have set the standard for literate post-punk virtuosity. 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH is no conventional profile or talking-head hagiography. Filmmakers/visual artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard frame the movie through one imagined day in his life – blending fact and fiction, songwriting, encounters with collaborators (Kylie Minogue, Ray Winstone, former and current bandmates Blixa Bargeld and Warren Ellis), therapy sessions, rehearsals, and other stimuli that feed his creative process – all capped off by a smoldering live performance.
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JEFF, EMBRACE YOUR PAST, Roger Teich
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In 1992, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art put on the first major museum retrospective of the work of Jeff Koons, who, at a boyish 37, was already an art-world sensation. His series “Made in Heaven,” a set of photorealist paintings depicting himself and his wife Ilona Staller—a famous porn star—in various acrobatic coital poses, had premiered the past year to enormous controversy, and his collected body of work, with its heavy use of readymades and its assembly-line style production methods, was already inspiring a question that continues to stoke debate: is Koons a canny media critic, or a cynical market-reader trading in repurposed junk? Roger Teich’s compelling, keen-eyed short documentary, filmed on 16mm at and around the exhibit, leaves that question tantalizingly open. The result is a multi-sided portrait of a man whose work continues to raise difficult, probing questions about the role of the artist in society.
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THE BAD SEED, Mervyn LeRoy
BAM
Eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark’s (McCormack) blonde pigtails and perfect curtsy mask a budding sociopath, as her hysterical mom (Kelly) discovers with horror that her baby may be responsible for a string of grisly deaths. The film that launched a dozen “demon child” movies, this chilling cult classic reaches deliriously demented melodramatic heights, with help from Alex North’s appropriately crazed score.
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***THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18***
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Anthology Film Archives
Wood never cared for the PLAN 9 title, preferring his “Grave Robbers from Outer Space.” His planned star, Bela Lugosi, died with only silent footage shot in a graveyard, a funeral scene, and a sequence outside of Tor Johnson’s house completed. Maila Nurmi (Vampira), unemployed and broke, relented and did her (mute) role for a “few hundred dollars.” Tor Johnson returns and even has a few lines as Inspector Clay: “I’m a big boy now, Johnny.” With television psychic Criswell, Lyle Talbot, Tom Keene, and, in a touch of casting genius, the flamboyant John “Bunny” Breckinridge as the ruler of outer space. Some of the soundtrack music (by Trevor Duncan) was later used in Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE.
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THE CRUISE, Bennett Miller
Nitehawk Cinema
Whether you’re an auteurist, a completist, or simply an enthusiast, NYFF Opening Acts takes you deep into the back catalogs of today’s foremost talents to whet your appetite with a sampling of past triumph from these luminaries. So before you see Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (also director of Moneyball and Capote) at the 52nd New York Film Festival, (September 26–October 12), watch his compelling documentary The Cruise. His 1998 film chronicles the humorously irreverent and painful reflections of Timothy “Speed” Levitch, an eccentric New York City tour bus guide with an archive of beautifully distorted information about the city.
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