Sundays may be a “wan, stuff shadow of a robust Saturday” or a day of “forced leisure for folks who have no aptitude for leisure,” but a weekend is still a weekend. We wait for the pleasure of a Friday night, knowing the burdens of the work week have a brief respite, and what better way to indulge than seeing some great films—be it new-to-you treasures or your favorite classics. This weekend from BAM and MoMA to The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Nitehawk Cinema there are more than enough wonderful films showing for you to happily disappear into. Here are 33 films to see in New York this weekend that have us running straight to the theater.
***FRIDAY, JUNE 5***
HOUSE, Nobuhiko Obayashi
IFC Center
At once absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE is steeped in the imperturbable illogic of a child’s dreams. And no wonder—the director fashioned the script after the eccentric musings of his eleven-year-old daughter, then employed all the tricks in his analog arsenal (mattes, animation, collage and more) to make them a visually astonishing, raucous reality. Never before released in the United States, and a bona fide cult classic in the making, HOUSE is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years.
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THE GARDEN OF ALLAH, Richard Boleslawski
MoMA
Dietrich, a disillusioned heiress with a seemingly endless supply of chiffon gowns, and Boyer, a fallen Trappist monk, are star-crossed, soul-weary lovers making their way across the Sahara. With its earnest eroticism and use of color for dramatic emotional effect, The Garden of Allah was a breakthrough critical success for Technicolor’s three-strip color process and for John Hay Whitney and David O. Selznick’s newly incorporated Selznick International Pictures. The film’s cinematographers, W. Howard Greene and Harold Rosson, received a special Academy Award for their refined color work in the bleached sand dunes of Buttercup Valley, Arizona, and on Sternberg-inspired Orientalist sets. Dietrich later maintained that “Selznick was the greatest perfectionist I have ever known, and The Garden of Allah was the most beautiful color film ever made.” Selznick and “Jock” Whitney, a Technicolor stakeholder and the President of MoMA’s Film Library, would go on to produce Nothing Sacred, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Gone with the Wind, andDuel in the Sun (all shown in this exhibition). 35mm restoration by The Museum of Modern Art, with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation; courtesy Walt Disney Studios.
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SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, Francois Truffaut
BAM
This exhilarating ode to American crime dramas stars the great chanteur Charles Aznavour as a former classical pianist, now reduced to playing in a shabby Paris bar, who gets mixed up with gangsters. Truffaut delights in channeling the moody stylistics of film noir, helped considerably by Georges Delerue’s haunting cabaret piano score.
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THE LAST WAGON, Delmar Daves
Anthology Film Archives
“A study in race-hate the Old Western way, this worthy follow-up to BROKEN ARROW finds director Delmer Daves returning to Arizona’s Martian valleys and mesas, this time filming in overwhelming, hallucinatory CinemaScope. George Mathews’s swinish Sheriff Bull Harper is bringing Richard Widmark’s ‘Comanche’ Todd to justice for the murder of the other three Harper brothers. But when the wagon train of settlers that they’re traveling with is attacked by Apaches, the despised Todd, who has lived most of his life with the Indians, becomes the last line of defense for the few surviving youths of the party, leading them through the ‘Canyon of Death’ in a wagon made from the remaining wreckage.” –Nick Pinkerton
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EL TOPO, Alejandro Jodorowsky
IFC Center
Jodorowsky’s legendary, notorious cult hit essentially created the genre of the midnight movie — a spectacle so stunning and bizarre that normal hours couldn’t contain it. Incorporating influences from tarot to the Bible to surrealism into a mind-blowing western, Jodorowsky cast himself as the leather-clad gunman, El Topo (‘the mole’), who wanders through a desert strewn with mystical symbols on an unnamed quest, leaving blood and carnage in his wake. Declared a masterpiece by no less than John Lennon himself, EL TOPO tops even the most outrageous aesthetic experiments of its radical era and remains unmatched in its provocations and strange beauty. Long unavailable, EL TOPO is presented in a gorgeous new restoration personally overseen by Jodorowsky.
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ENAMORADA, Emilio Fernández
Film Forum
During the Mexican Revolution, General Pedro Armendáriz takes the town of Cholula and starts to shake down the rich, but also falls for Señor Moneybags’ staunch conservative, spitfire daughter, played by legendary diva María Félix. And then the federales start moving in. The Gone with the Wind of Mexican classics, it swept the Ariels (Mexico’s Oscars), winning for Best Film, Director, Actress, Editing, and Figueroa’s cinematography.
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SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, John Ford
Anthology Film Archvies
“Of all John Ford’s lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER
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THE WIZARD OF OZ, Victor Fleming
MoMA
The Wizard of Oz is cinema’s ultimate escapist fantasy (“What can one say about a girl who trips on a yellow brick road?,” film historian Vito Russo once quipped). By the late 1930s, Technicolor’s advanced three-strip process made deep color saturation possible in a wider range of hues, andThe Wizard of Oz is widely remembered, and cherished, for this dazzling rainbow palette (audiences looking for a way out of Kansas will still get chills at the film’s momentous transition from Dust Bowl sepia). But in truth, the film’s original release prints were less garish; under the supervision of Technicolor consultant Henri Jaffa, Baum’s Oz was rendered in dreamy shades of yellow, green, and red, most especially with Dorothy’s ruby slippers and the tantalizingly jewel-like Emerald City. 35mm print from George Eastman House; courtesy Warner Bros.
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SCANNERS, David Cronenberg
Nitehawk Cinema
In Scanners, David Cronenberg introduces a new advancement in human evolution: a race of telepaths with the ability to ‘scan’ other humans, reading their thoughts, controlling their movement and even taking over their consciousness. Most Scanners are harmless, purposefully withdrawn from society, driven to the brink of insanity because of the constant stream of outside thoughts streaming through their minds. However, there’s one Scanner who’s none too nice, and becomes hellbent on building a psychic army to take over the world. The fate of the world rests on the powerful mind of a Scanner on the fringes, which kicks off a psychic battle of wills that will Blow. Your. Mind. (Get it? Because it’s Scanners.)
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MARÍA CANDELARIA, Emilio Fernández
Film Forum
In the floating gardens of Xochimilco in 1909, Dolores del Río’s flower seller is shunned by the locals as the child of a prostitute, loved by peasant Pedro Armendáriz, and coveted by the local big shot. Co-Grand Prize winner and Best Cinematography prize to Figueroa at Cannes.
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JULES AND JIM, Francois Truffaut
BAM
Truffaut’s third feature charts a 25-year love triangle comprising two friends (Werner and Serre) and a free-spirited woman (Jeanne Moreau, in a truly unforgettable performance). Bursting with nifty stylistic tricks—freeze frames, wipes, and dolly shots abound—this exuberant French New Wave masterpiece is giddy with the possibilities of cinema.
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I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW), Vilgot Sjöman
Nitehawk Cinema
Starring Sjöman and Lena Nyman, I Am Curious (Yellow) is a landmark film from and about Swedish society during the sexual revolution. It was seized by customs in the United States, igniting a heated court battle, influencing censorship laws while being banned in numerous cities. You may also remember the film from Don Draper being “scandalized” by it on Mad Men.
In his book, Scandinavian Blue, Jack Stevenson says, “…this film was about more than creative freedom or nudity. It was an experiment in form and content, an attempt to break down the barrier between reality and fiction and a bid to demystify the filmmaking process. It would be a lot of different things all at once; a rumination on modern youth, a take on the state of Swedish society and a check-list of Sjöman’s own personal hang-ups. And not least it was an occasionally poignant story about a confused and conflicted teenage girl who, armed with a tape recorder, youthful indignation and a yen to fantasize, goes out onto the streets to find answers.”
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LAUGHTER IN HELL, Edward L. Cahn
MoMA
Responding in the African American weekly newspaper The New York Age to the controversy surrounding Laughter in Hell, a pre-Code chain gang melodrama from Universal Pictures, the Jamaican-born columnist Vere E. Johns wrote, “I journeyed all the way to the little Morningside Theatre at 116th street and Eighth avenue [sic] to see it. The complaint was that nine colored convicts were hanged in the picture…. The whole thing in my opinion…is intended to be an exposé of the appalling cruelty of Southern chain gangs, and with the known attitude to the Negro in the southern states, if such a picture did not show the colored convicts getting a rawer deal than the whites, then it would be faulty. Any picture that will tend to lessen the brutality in the South should be encouraged. I haven’t heard of any white people complaining about the brutality meted out to Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or to Richard Dix and Tom Brown in Hell’s Highway, and I can see no reason for objection in this case.”
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***SATURDAY, JUNE 6***
MISSISSIPPI MERMAID, Francois Truffaut
IFC Center
“Francois Truffaut stepped out of his autobiographical comfort zone for this 1969 film, a romantic thriller set on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean and based on the novel ‘Waltz into Darkness’ by Cornell Woolrich (writing under his William Irish pseudonym). Jean-Paul Belmondo is a tobacco planter who writes away for a mail-order bride; when Catherine Deneuve shows up at his doorstep, things seem a bit too good to be true, and so they are. (MISSISSIPPI MERMAID) returns, ripe for re-evaluation.” – Dave Kehr, The New York Times, 2009
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THE BLOOD OF JESUS, Spencer Williams
MoMA
Film scholar Jacqueline Najuma Stewart has described the films of Spencer Williams as being “vastly underappreciated despite his unique ability to capture Black religious and cultural practices while experimenting with film style.” Williams made this debut feature film in Texas on a miniscule budget, and it became, according to Stewart, “probably the most popular movie made for African American audiences before World War II.” A morality tale about a woman who is accidentally shot by her husband and forced, in limbo, to choose between heaven or hell, the film is indeed formally daring. Its animating tensions between the urban and the pastoral also provide a counterpoint to Jacob Lawrence’s own juxtaposition of Jim Crow agrarian experience and northern city life in his Migration Series. Courtesy G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University.
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ANNIE HALL, Woody Allen
Nitehawk Cinema
New York neurotic tendencies run rampant in Annie Hall where Woody Allen shows us the beginning, evolvement, and ultimate ending to one couple’s relationship. It’s a deep film with a range of humor (the scenes of Singer’s childhood in Coney Island with his family are particularly funny) that has become a portrait of a 1970s couple who, despite loving each other, can’t make it work. This story, full of laughter and tears, is relatable to any generation and like Allen says, we stick with relationships because, well, we need the eggs.
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MOONFLEET, Fritz Lang
Anthology Film Archives
Though it’s rarely identified as such, MOONFLEET is in the very top tier of Fritz Lang’s oeuvre: a work of profound emotional resonance and conviction, it’s among the greatest of all films on the subject of childhood. Based on an 1898 novel by J. Meade Faulkner, it tells the story of John Mohune, a young orphan thrust into a perilous, cutthroat world of smugglers, pirates, and other criminals. Left with no family, John presents himself to his mother’s ex-lover, the shady Jeremy Fox, who at first considers his unexpected charge an unwelcome burden but gradually forms a bond with the child. A gothic melodrama with the flavor of a fairy tale, MOONFLEET is both a rousing adventure and a deeply moving chronicle of innocence and sacrifice in a cruel world.
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LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, Alain Resnais
BAM
As the camera glides endlessly through the corridors of a luxuriously baroque hotel, impossibly chic figures freeze like statues, conversations and events loop repeatedly, and a man (Albertazzi) tries to convince a woman (Seyrig) that they have had an affair she can’t recall. What happened last year at Marienbad? Alain Resnais’ sumptuously hypnotic investigation of time and memory ushered in a new era of cinematic modernism.
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ANOTHER DAWN, Julio Bracho
Film Forum
Pedro Armendáriz, on the run with incriminating documents after his labor leader boss has been assassinated, gets help from now-married old flame Andrea Palma – a tough cookie, she pumps lead into an axe-wielding thug. Beginnings of Mexican Film Noir.
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THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED, Oscar Micheaux
MoMA
The critic J. Hoberman has described Micheaux as the “Black Pioneer of American film—not just because he was a black man, or because in his youth he pioneered the West, or because he was the greatest figure in ‘race’ movies and an unjustly ignored force in early American cinema. Micheaux is America’s Black Pioneer in the way that André Breton was Surealism’s Black Pope. His movies throw our history and movies into an alien and startling disarray.” One of Micheaux’s earliest surviving films, The Symbol of the Unconquered is a stirring melodrama about the westward migration of a young African American woman from her native Selma, Alabama, to the Pacific Northwest town of Orison. Micheaux provided a dramatic rebuttal to the racism of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation: as one advertisement for the film read, “See the Ku Klux Clan in action—and their annihilation.” Silent, with Max Roach score courtesy Turner Classic Movies. Silent.
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HOPPITY GOES TO TOWN aka MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN, Dave Fleischer
Anthology Film Archives
Originally released as MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN, HOPPITY is one of only two feature films created by the great Dave and Max Fleischer who, thanks to their work on Betty Boop, Popeye, and other peerless animation classics, are among the giants of American pop culture. Made two years after their first feature, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, HOPPITY was a financial disaster for the Fleischers – the costly production (as well as the brothers’ fraying relationship) helped hasten the demise of their studio, and the timing of the film’s release, which happened to fall two days before the cataclysm of Pearl Harbor, further doomed it. Nevertheless, the Fleischers’ fecund imagination and their brilliant, highly distinctive style of animation are fully in evidence. HOPPITY is a woefully neglected work from these American masters.
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BLUE VELVET, David Lynch
IFC Center
“Jeffrey (MacLachlan) is the contemporary knight in slightly tarnished armour, a shy and adolescent inhabitant of Lumberton, USA. After discovering a severed ear in an overgrown backlot, he embarks upon an investigation that leads him into a hellish netherworld, where he observes – and comes to participate in – a terrifying sado-masochistic relationship between damsel-in-distress Dorothy (Rossellini) and mad mobster Frank Booth (Hopper). Grafting on to this story his own idiosyncratic preoccupations, Lynch creates a visually stunning, convincingly coherent portrait of a nightmarish substratum to conventional, respectable society. The seamless blending of beauty and horror is remarkable – although many will be profoundly disturbed by Lynch’s vision of male-female relationships, centred as it is on Dorothy’s psychopathic hunger for violence – the terror very real, and the sheer wealth of imagination virtually unequalled in recent cinema.” – Time Out
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INTO THE NIGHT, John Landis
Nitehawk Cinema
In John Landis’ tinsel-town caper INTO THE NIGHT, Jeff Goldblum plays a baggy-eyed depressive who just found out that his wife is cheating on him. With little else to do, he ventures off aimlessly into the Los Angeles twilight and has a run in with a beautiful jewel smuggler who snags him in her plot make off with the Shah of Iran’s emeralds.
Mostly known for its B.B. King soundtrack (RIP!), Into the Night also boasts a murderer’s row of Hollywood cameos, keep an eye out for the likes of: David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, Amy Heckerling, Lawrence Kasdan, Don Siegel, Jim Henson and more.
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LOLA, Jacques Demy
BAM
Jacques Demy’s dazzling debut is a both a valentine to classic cinema (from Max Ophüls to Hollywood musicals) and a thrilling burst of New Wave inventiveness. Sublimely shot by the legendary Raoul Coutard, Lola charts a charming romantic roundelay as a cabaret singer (the effervescent Aimée) fends off advances from two suitors while secretly awaiting the return of her long-lost love.
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THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH,
Anthology Film Archives
Made with a (slightly) bigger budget and longer shooting schedule than the previous films in his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, MASQUE found Corman (with the help of cinematographer and future director Nicolas Roeg) enjoying greater freedom to explore new stylistic paths, resulting in one of the most visually striking of the Poe films, and arguably Corman’s masterpiece.
“[A] work of consummate imaginative power and originality. In medieval Italy, the devil-worshipping Prince Prospero (Price) abducts an innocent village girl (Asher) and tries to interest her in his diabolical goings-on while the plague rages outside his castle. This is both beautiful and horrifying, with a fine sense of ambiguity and a wealth of subtleties.” –Don Druker, CHICAGO READER
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***SUNDAY, JUNE 7***
OUR MAN IN HAVANA, Carol Reed
BAM
It’s high jinks in Havana as a vacuum cleaner salesman (Guinness, in typically brilliant form) unwittingly becomes a spy for the British government, recruited to keep tabs on the pre-revolutionary Cuban regime. Shot on location in Cuba, Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s third collaboration following The Third Man adapts Greene’s own novel into a sparklingly witty satire of Cold War espionage.
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THE TOLL OF THE SEA, Chester M. Franklin
MoMA
A variation on Madame Butterfly, The Toll of the Sea holds an important place in film history. It features Anna May Wong in her first starring role (her pathos-rich performance enchanted audiences, including Variety’s critic, who praised her as “an exquisite crier without glycerin”). And as the second two-strip Technicolor feature ever made—as well as the first that could be played through a standard projector—it is the earliest film in this exhibition. (The Gulf Between, produced five years earlier by Technicolor, in 1917, seems only to survive as three single frames.) 35mm restoration courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive.
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BILLY LIAR, John Schlesinger
BAM
This richly imaginative British New Wave classic chronicles the exploits of an incurable dreamer (the captivating Courtenay) who escapes the drab reality of his blue-collar existence through vivid flights of fancy—much to the dismay of the three women he strings along. Moving seamlessly between realism and fantasy, Billy Liar is an alternately hilarious and poignant portrait of post-war British society.
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LILIOM, Frank Borzage
Anthology Film Archives
Ferenc Molnar’s 1909 play LILIOM has been well served cinematically – the 1934 adaptation by Fritz Lang was preceded just four years earlier by a version directed by the somewhat more obscure but no less masterful Frank Borzage. The play concerns the relationship between a working-class young woman named Julia and Liliom, a carnival barker who loves but abuses her. After Julia becomes pregnant, Liliom is killed in a robbery intended to finance their future life. Doomed to spend his afterlife in purgatory, he’s eventually given one day to earn entry to heaven by doing a good deed for Julia and their daughter. It’s hard to imagine two directors whose sensibilities were further apart than Borzage and Lang, and true to form, Borzage’s LILIOM is the more deeply felt of the two. Focusing on Julia at least as much as Liliom, Borzage creates a typically luminous, frankly emotional paean to the transfiguring power of love.
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NIAGARA, Henry Hathaway
MoMA
A publicity still for Hathaway’s atmospheric and chromatically charged noir served as the inspiration for one of the most famous images in 20th-century art: Andy Warhol’sMarilyn. Set against the roaring backdrop of Niagara Falls, the film revolves around Monroe, a femme fatale with secret, murderous plans for her older husband (Cotten), and a honeymooning young couple who become entangled in her ill-fated scheme. “Its color is alive,” wrote Eric Rohmer in Cahiers du Cinéma, “it speaks, even if it is a shade on the vulgar side.” For Rohmer, color processes like Technicolor had the power to “reveal an iridescence that has become imperceptible to the human eye after a hundred years of responding to a world put together by photography.” 35mm print courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.
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THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, Michael Curtiz & William Keighley
MoMA
Michael Curtiz’s Robin Hood is the definitive film version of this classic tale—Errol Flynn was born to play the folk hero—and is vital to the history of three-strip Technicolor. Although the Warner Bros. publicity machine crowed that “only the rainbow can duplicate its brilliance,” Sol Polito and Tony Gaudio’s visual design and color palette were in fact far more subtle and complex, as MoMA’s restoration painstakingly reveals. “That the movie stands up to such regular inspection is not just because of rippling action, the stained-glass Technicolor, or the fabulous Korngold score. It is because of Errol Flynn,” David Thomson writes. “Flynn does not deal in depth, but he has a freshness, a galvanizing energy, a cheerful gaiety (in the old sense) made to inspire boys.” 35mm restoration by The Museum of Modern Art, with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation; courtesy Warner Bros.
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M, Joseph Losey
Anthology Film Archives
It’s impossible to imagine improving upon Fritz Lang’s legendary M (1931), which contains one of the greatest performances of all time courtesy of Peter Lorre. But a film by Joseph Losey is nothing to sneeze at, especially one from his fascinating American period (before he was blacklisted and relocated to the UK). And comparisons to Lang/Lorre aside, his version of M is a terrific, tightly constructed work, and a prime example of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking. Boasting incredible LA location work, with unforgettable sequences set in the now-vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood and in the famous Bradbury building (whose highly picturesque atrium has been utilized in films including BLADE RUNNER and D.O.A.), M is a remarkable achievement in its own right.
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THE CRANES ARE FLYING, Mikhail Kalatozov
Anthology Film Archives
“One of the most acclaimed Soviet films of all time. Set during WWII, it is a tragic story of the shattering of love and youthful ambitions by war. Two young sweethearts, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), are certain they will marry and live happily ever after. Then, Boris volunteers for the army. Kalatozov employs the kind of visually extravagant style that had been prohibited by Stalinist dogma since the silent era. With its unusual angles, huge close-ups, and bravura editing techniques, the film recalls the best of the Soviet masters Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Eisenstein. It is also distinguished by extraordinary performances, especially that of Samoilova, and by a sense of personal intimacy unique in the Soviet cinema of its time.” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
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