Presenting our weekly guide to must-see movies in New York: from Luis Buñuel at FIAF and Joseph Losey at Anthology Film Archives to Satyajit Ray at Film Forum, here are 22 films to see in New York this week.
***MONDAY, JUNE 1***
APARAJITO, Satyajit Ray
Film Forum
As death depletes the family, Apu (now played by Smaran Ghosal) and his mother move to Benares, and the now-young man discovers electricity, the working of the heavens, the delights of poetry, and his entrance to University—as well as his own growing sense of responsibility for the mother who has always cared for him.
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PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, Samuel Fuller
Film Forum
“Are you waving the flag at me?,” sneers pickpocket Richard Widmark at cops and Feds on the trail of that microfilm he’s lifted on the subway from Jean Peters’ purse — after all, she was messengering it, albeit unwittingly, to the REDS! But then, in Widmark’s world, “Who cares? Your money’s as good as anybody else’s”; while professional snitch Thlema Ritter thoughtfully pulls out a price chart when called on for a fingering. (This was Ritter’s fourth straight Supporting Actress Oscar nomination —her sixth was for Birdman of Alcatraz; she never won.) Peters herself — soon to be Mrs. Howard Hughes in real life — is everybody’s patsy, blackmailed into the mule deal by sweaty ex-“boyfriend” Richard Kiley with promise of a clean final breakup, robbed twice, cold-cocked, hit with a beer-in-the-face wakeup call, and rag-dolled around an apartment; and shot. But finally, as Ritter says, “Even in our crummy line of business, you gotta draw the line somewhere.” Vintage Fuller hard-boiled pulp, with final chin-bouncing-on-each-step subway station showdown. (Released the year Stalin died, Pickup’s Cold War attitudes horrified Gallic Fuller fans; in the French dubbing, the whole thing was changed to a drug deal.)
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SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, John Ford
Anthology Film Archives
“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.”
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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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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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MOVIES OF LOCAL PEOPLE (CHAPEL HILL), Lee Waters
MoMA
Between 1936 and 1942, the itinerant photographer and filmmaker H. Lee Waters travelled throughout North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina to produce his Movies of Local People: 252 extraordinary film portraits of ordinary small-town America during the Great Depression. The entrepreneurial Waters encouraged local audiences to “See Yourself in the Movies,” convincing local theaters to screen his “home” movies as an added attraction before the Hollywood feature (and, naturally, taking a cut of the profits). The selection presented here was made for the Hollywood Theater, a segregated cinema in Chapel Hill reserved for African American moviegoers. Courtesy H. Lee Waters Film Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 29 min.
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THE RED AND THE WHITE, Miklos Jancso
BAM
Titan of Hungarian cinema Miklos Jancso’s visual tour-de-force follows the fates of Hungarian revolutionaries who join the Communists (the red) in the fight against government forces (the white) during the Russian Revolution. The director’s wondrously unchained camera is a perpetual motion machine, ceaselessly prowling the CinemaScope frame in which characters are trapped in a senseless ritual of violence and death.
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***TUESDAY, JUNE 2***
HEUREUX ANNIVERSAIRE & THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISE
FIAF
HEUREUX ANNIVERSAIRE, Pierre Etaix and Jean-Claude Carriere
This Oscar-winning comic short about an anniversary celebration gone awry is Carrière’s first foray into filmmaking, and his only directorial venture.
tTHE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISE, LUIS BUNUEL
A comically bizarre parade of events constantly thwarts the best-laid plans in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Revolutionaries come storming through a door, a wall disappears to reveal a theater full of disappointed spectators, and a country walk leads nowhere; the protagonists’ privileged reality dissolves into absurdity in this Oscar-winning satire.
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APU SANSAR, Satyajit Ray
Film Forum
Struggling writer Apu — now an adult and played by Ray’s perennial star Soumitra Chatterjee — ends up substituting in an arranged marriage with Sharmila Tagore — then 14, and a distant relative of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, an important Ray influence — but even as love comes, tragedy looms; but Apu finds in his son the promise of new life.
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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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TAZA, SON OF COCHISE, Douglas Sirk
Anthology Film Archives
Among his most rarely-screened films, Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor western TAZA, SON OF COCHISE features Rock Hudson as Taza, a young Apache who believes in peace but whose brother thirsts for war. Originally shot in 3D, but never released in that form, TAZA remains a visually stunning work, replete with masterful widescreen compositions and lyrical location photography. And while the casting of Hudson as an Apache is all too easy to ridicule, Sirk elicits a performance from his leading man that, in its sensitivity and soulfulness, points towards their work together on masterpieces such as MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, and WRITTEN ON THE WIND.
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SOUL POWER, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
BAM
Jeff Levy-Hinte’s (When We Were Kings) revelatory verité documentary chronicles Zaire ’74, the three-day African music festival held in advance of the legendary Rumble in the Jungle, the historic fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Comprised entirely of footage from the fest—shot by a crew including late doc titan Albert Maysles—this paean to live performance features electric sets by James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Sister Sledge, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners, Big Black, the Crusaders, Celia Cruz, and more. Offstage sparks fly as Ali, a kinetic performer in his own right, provides vigorous commentary on the Black Power movement and imperialism in America.
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MARKET LAZAROVA, Frantisek Vlacil
BAM
The crowning achievement of the Czechoslovak New Wave is this epic celluloid hallucination of savagery and mysticism in the Middle Ages. Centered around a violent feud between two 13th-century pagan clans, Marketa Lazarova is a riddle that’s not to be cracked (at least not on first viewing). Featuring a hypnotic dreamscape—hooded figures wandering through stark, barren landscapes and black wolves prowling virgin snow—and set to a thunderous, primordial soundtrack of clanging bells and liturgical chanting, the film’s lustrous, monochrome ’Scope cinematography gleams in this 35mm print.
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***WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3***
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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PATHER PANCHALI, Satyajit Ray
Film Forum
In a poor Bengal village, Mom tries to hold things together while dreamy Dad looks for work, daughter Durga is accused of stealing, aged “Auntie” (82-year-old former actress Chunibala Devi) eats more than her share, while the young Apu (8-year-old Subir Bandopadhyay) drinks it all in — including the memorable run through the field of waving grasses for his first sight of a train.
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RAMONA, Edwin Carewe
Anthology Film Archives
“Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel RAMONA, about the mixed-race ward of a California sheep rancher and her tragic love affair with a full-blooded Indian, had long haunted the American imagination, inspiring a stage adaptation and at least two previous films (two more would follow) before this visually stunning 1928 interpretation directed by Edwin Carewe, a rare Hollywood filmmaker of Native American descent. The Mexican actress Dolores del Rio stars as the title character; her tortured lover is the somewhat less convincing Warner Baxter.” –MoMA
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FIRES ON THE PLAIN, Kon Ichikawa
BAM
One of the most intense anti-war films ever made, this shattering WWII drama follows a Japanese soldier, sick with tuberculosis, as he wanders the wasteland of a battle-scarred Philippine island. Along the way he encounters a grisly landscape where starving men have resorted to the ultimate taboo in order to survive. “No other film on the horrors of war has gone anywhere near as far.” — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
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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.
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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.
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***THURSDAY, JUNE 4***
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, Roger Corman
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.
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WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS, Mikio Naruse
BAM
One of Japanese melodrama maestro Mikio Naruse’s crowning achievements, When A Woman Ascends the Stairsstars Hideko Takamine as a Tokyo bar hostess determined to retain her dignity in the face of crushing personal and socioeconomic setbacks. That it’s all rendered with such exquisite understatement makes this quietly devastating study of the subjugation of women all the more heartbreaking.
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