One of Hollywood’s sexiest and skilled actresses, Gloria Grahame, and novelist, playwright, activist, and critic James Baldwin (1924-1987), will be highlighted in upcoming series “Gloria Grahame: Blonde Ambition” (September 4–8) and “The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film” (September 11–14).
“It seems that of all the American film stars,” François Truffaut wrote in 1952, “Gloria Grahame is the only one who is also a person.” Indeed, Grahame’s reputation as a human movie star—vulnerable and imperfect—was her calling card. Born in Los Angeles to an architect father and a mother who had acted for years on the British stage, Grahame did nearly all of her finest work for RKO, where she specialized in playing worn-out, sympathetic fallen women who turn on their sleazy, criminal lovers and husbands. As early as her brief role for MGM in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), she was playing spirited women leaning toward—or trapped in—ill repute. Grahame’s range as an actress, however, extended well beyond bar hostesses and lounge singers. She could be flighty and naïve (The Bad and the Beautiful), cooped-up and frustrated (The Cobweb), or inelegant and clumsy (Oklahoma!). It was her second husband, Nicholas Ray, who directed what might have been her finest performance. Over the course of In a Lonely Place, her character evolves from a stock seductive-woman-next-door into something much richer: a woman in an unstable relationship struggling to unravel a complex web of affections, doubts, hopes, commitments, and fears. Grahame could project desire, suffering, and vengeful anger, but she was also distinctly gifted at projecting ambivalence. Perhaps this is what made her appear onscreen so sharply like a—for lack of a better word—person. We are excited to revisit the burning works of one of Hollywood’s most alluring stars—almost all in 35mm!
In a Lonely Place
From September 11-14, we spotlight novelist, playwright, activist, and critic James Baldwin, in a series titled “The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film.” This survey is an attempt to assemble and reflect on Baldwin’s early and lasting fascination with American cinema—powerfully dissected in his 1976 book-length essay, The Devil Finds Works, which explores the seductive and distorted power of American cinema and the complex racial politics that inform such cultural production. From his intriguing identification with Bette Davis, to piercing analyses of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and The Exorcist, to an extended discussion of The Defiant Ones, Baldwin lays bare our subconscious investments and confirms that “cinema is the language of our dreams.”
The series will feature his numerous appearances on television; film documents of his sojourns in Paris, Istanbul, San Francisco, and London; film adaptations of novels that preoccupied Baldwin, with their themes of racial and class differences, such as A Tale of Two Cities, The Defiant Ones, Native Son; and a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s The Naked Night (aka Sawdust and Tinsel), which Baldwin singled out for praise. Documentaries in which he played a significant part or of which he was the subject, such as I Heard It Through the Grapevine, James Baldwin’s Harlem, Take This Hammer (screening in an extended “director’s cut”), and the newly remastered The Price of the Ticket, will also be featured. The survey will close with never-before-seen raw footage from Baldwin’s 1987 funeral service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (only portions of which were seen in The Price of the Ticket), with stirring eulogies from Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka. We are proud to present many of these rare prints and is keen to situate this major writer as an astute film critic wholly unafraid to throw off the veil and excavate the deep and often troubling nature of the national fascination with celluloid.
Programmed by Rich Blint and Jake Perlin, co-presented with Columbia University School of the Arts Office of Community Outreach and Education
A Tale of Two Cities
Special Thanks for The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film:
Pat Hartley; Lynanne Schweighofer (Library of Congress); Chris Chouinard (Park Circus); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Ron Simon (The Paley Center for Media); Jack Hazan; Fleur Buckley and George Watson (British Film Institute); Seday Pakay; Ashley Clarke; Elena Rossi-Snook and Johnny Gore (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts); Brian Graney (The Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University); Jennifer Bertani (WNET); Gloria Miles; Kristie Nakamura (Warner Bros. Classics); Alex Cherian (San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive); Marcia Sells (Columbia University School of the Arts); Christina Rumpf (Columbia University School of the Arts); and Karen Thorsen.
Tickets for Gloria Grahame: Blonde Ambition will go on sale Thursday, August 20. Special holiday weekend pricing: $10; $7 for Film Society members, students, and seniors. Tickets for The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film will go on sale Thursday, August 27. Single screening tickets are $14; $11 for students and seniors (62+); and $9 for Film Society members. See more and save with the All Access Pass or 3+ film discount package. Visit filmlinc.org for more information.
GLORIA GRAHAME: BLONDE AMBITION (September 4-8)
FILMS, SCHEDULE & DESCRIPTIONS
The Bad and the Beautiful
Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1952, 35mm, 118m
Vincente Minnelli supposedly drew on the lives of a handful of notorious, iconic Hollywood producers, including Val Lewton and David O. Selznick, to create the caustic figure at the center of The Bad and the Beautiful, one of his richest melodramas. But the film is less an inside-Hollywood exposé than a grim tragedy about a man driven to appalling ends by a mixture of hubris and sheer malice. We learn, across three extended flashbacks, why three prominent Hollywood figures, including an actress (Lana Turner) and a writer (Dick Powell) detest the famous producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), who both made their careers and ruined their lives. Grahame won an Oscar for her unforgettable supporting role as Powell’s flighty Southern belle wife.
Friday, September 4, 4:00pm
Monday, September 7, 6:00pm
The Big Heat
Fritz Lang, USA, 1953, 35mm, 90m
Grahame spends much of Fritz Lang’s bleak, thrilling noir with half her face hidden behind a bandage or a layer of prosthetic makeup, yet she is unmistakably the film’s center of gravity. Her role as a gangster’s moll caught between her luxurious life of crime—“most of the time, it’s a lot of fun”—and her affections for a rigidly honest cop (Glenn Ford) confirmed and deepened her reputation as a sinister seductress, beyond giving her some of the finest lines of her career. (“You’re about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs.”) But this reputation never fully captured the scope of Grahame’s emotional range in films like The Big Heat, where she projects a magnificent combination of pride, fear, restlessness, confidence, and doubt.
Saturday, September 5, 6:00pm
Monday, September 7, 4:00pm
The Big Heat
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Joan Micklin Silver, USA, 1979, 35mm, 92m
The third of Joan Micklin Silver’s criminally under-seen features includes one of Grahame’s final screen performances as an eccentric matron given to sudden outbursts and occasional gusts of affection. The mood of the rest of Chilly Scenes of Winter, which took three years to find a theatrical release in its current version, is gentler and more melancholic: a dissatisfied Salt Lake City civil servant (John Heard) goes to desperate, threatening lengths in his attempts to recover the love of his life (Mary Beth Hurt) after she returns to her husband. It’s a tonally deft, sensitive, and wise movie that launched the careers of its two stars, even as it set the closing note for Grahame’s.
Tuesday, September 8, 6:30pm
The Cobweb
Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1955, 35mm, 134m
MGM spared none of its legendary gloss on Vincente Minnelli’s star-studded melodrama, a sort of Grand Hotel variant adapted from the novel by playwright William Gibson (The Miracle Worker) and set in a psychiatric hospital. The patients of the deluxe clinic where The Cobweb takes place are more stable, on the whole, than its dysfunctional staff. Richard Widmark plays the dedicated psychiatrist tasked with putting out the fires of the philandering medical director (Charles Boyer), while his wife (Grahame), whose choice to order new drapes for the hospital library—in a typically Minnellian focus on set design—throws everyone from the administrator (Lillian Gish) to an artist-patient (John Kerr) into turmoil. Lauren Bacall, as Widmark’s widowed colleague and possible love interest, is the movie’s sole oasis of sanity, but Grahame is among its most electric presences.
Sunday, September 6, 6:30pm
Tuesday, September 8, 8:30pm
Crossfire
Edward Dmytryk, USA, 1947, 35mm, 86m
Grahame and Robert Ryan both launched their careers—and earned their first Oscar nominations—with supporting roles in this absorbing whodunit: a sequence of piecemeal testimonies surrounding the murder of a Jewish war veteran by a fellow former soldier. Adapted from Richard Brooks’s novel The Brick Foxhole, which dealt with an even riskier controversy of the time (homophobia instead of anti-Semitism), Crossfire set off a wave of “social problem” noir films in its wake. But it is stranger and more visually daring than most of the films it inspired: a sinister, claustrophobic chamber drama filled with intimations of buried traumas and unspoken desires. That atmosphere is largely the result of performances like those of Grahame, as an embittered bar hostess, and Paul Kelly as the troubled man who calls himself her husband.
Friday, September 4, 2:00pm
Monday, September 7, 8:30pm
Crossfire
Human Desire
Fritz Lang, USA, 1954, 35mm, 91m
Fritz Lang was the second master filmmaker—after Jean Renoir—to film Émile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bête humaine. Transposing the book’s story of murder, infidelity, seduction, and revenge from the world of French engine drivers to that of New Jersey railroad workers, he clearly relished the chance to stage complex action scenes in cramped train corridors and darkened rail yards. The film’s centerpiece, however, is Grahame’s towering performance as the dissatisfied, vengeful wife of a brutish conductor she aims to have killed—preferably by his co-worker, an upright war veteran played by Glenn Ford. Shrill, desperate, savvy, imploring, ferocious: Grahame may have never dominated a movie the way she dominates Human Desire, which further cemented her image as a doomed, tragic femme fatale.
Friday, September 4, 8:30pm
Saturday, September 5, 4:00pm
In a Lonely Place
Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950, 35mm, 94m
Grahame began one of her finest performances, in Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece of moral and psychological ambiguity, with one of her most memorable entrances. “I noticed him because he looked interesting,” she tells a police captain to explain why she had her eyes on cynical screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) the night he’s alleged to have committed a murder. “I like his face.” His character, she discovers over the course of the film, is cloudier and more sinister than she initially sensed, not to mention—possibly—murderous. One of the eeriest and most suspenseful products of noir’s golden age, In a Lonely Place is also a masterful takedown of Hollywood politics and a deeply affecting depiction of a romantic relationship too intense for either partner to bear.
Friday, September 4, 6:30pm
Monday, September 7, 2:00pm
Macao
Josef von Sternberg/Nicholas Ray, USA, 1952, 35mm, 81m
Nicholas Ray was brought on to finish this atmospheric crime yarn after the movie’s producer, Howard Hughes, forced Josef von Sternberg off the project. But Macao still shimmers with its initial director’s signature textures and tones: dresses and gloves sheathed in glitter; an Escher-like casino; a pier-set finale that recalls The Docks of New York. It was, by all accounts, an unpleasant, tumultuous production. The final movie, though, is surprisingly buoyant—a shimmering cinematic vacation. As a gangster’s moll entangled in the lives of an American runaway (Robert Mitchum) and a singer (Jane Russell), Grahame circles around the edges of the movie, occasionally sending off a flash of light from the shadows.
Saturday, September 5, 8:00pm
Tuesday. September 8, 4:30pm
Macao
Naked Alibi
Jerry Hopper, USA, 1954, 35mm, 86m
At the time of its French release, François Truffaut wrote that Naked Alibi “perfectly corresponds to the need for a drug that any lover of American films irresistibly experiences.” Much of the narcotic allure of this stripped-down, hard-hitting B-noir about a virtuous police officer (Sterling Hayden) heading off-radar to catch a psychotic cop killer (Gene Barry) is due to Grahame’s magnetic performance as the killer’s put-upon bar-singer mistress. As in Crossfire and The Big Heat, Grahame finds surprising, unexpected emotional registers in what could have been a stock role—whenever she appears onscreen, the film seems to rearrange itself around her.
Sunday, September 6, 4:30pm
Odds Against Tomorrow
Robert Wise, USA, 1959, 35mm, 96m
A castaway from the police force (Ed Begley) recruits two men (Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte), one white and one black, to help carry out a bank robbery. The tagline of this acutely socially conscious noir about the perfect heist gone wrong—“Money brought them together. Racism tore them apart”—suggests what happens next. Odds Against Tomorrow was among the last of a certain stripe of hard-boiled, rough-edged film noirs (it was shot on location in New York City and Hudson, New York), and it’s fitting that it also contains one of Grahame’s last great performances—as a lonely, alluring neighbor of Ryan’s character intrigued by his aggressive cool.
Sunday, September 6, 9:15pm
Oklahoma!
Fred Zinnemann, USA, 1955, DCP, 145m
A plastic surgery fiasco, a mishap at the Academy Awards, stirrings about a possible affair with her husband’s teenage son: by the time she was cast as the simple-minded, unfashionable Ado Annie in Fred Zinnemann’s massive screen adaptation of Oklahoma!, Grahame’s public image was battered. Not a trained singer, she gave the role an awkward hesitancy miles away from the commanding presence of her femme fatales, but entirely appropriate to her farm girl worked over by baffling new passions. In a film full of wide, graceful gestures and panoramic visual effects, her clumsy performance of “I Can’t Say No” strikes the surest emotional note.
Sunday, September 6, 1:30pm
Oklahoma!
A Woman’s Secret
Nicholas Ray, USA, 1949, 35mm, 84m
It was during the production of this genre-blurring murder mystery that Grahame became close with Nicholas Ray, whom she would go on to marry soon after the film wrapped. The couple’s first collaboration is hard to peg: Is it a whodunit? A backstage performance melodrama? A glamorous Pygmalion riff? Whatever else it might be, A Woman’s Secret is definitely a showcase for magnificent performances by Maureen O’Hara, as a famous singer cast out of the spotlight after losing her voice early, and Grahame, as the struggling young singer she insists on molding in her own image. Herman Mankiewicz’s screenplay made enough of an impression on his brother Joseph that the latter used an eerily similar story as the basis for All About Eve.
Saturday, September 5, 2:00pm
Tuesday, September 8, 2:30pm
THE DEVIL FINDS WORK: JAMES BALDWIN ON FILM (SEPTEMBER 11-14)
Films, Schedule & Descriptions
The Defiant Ones
Stanley Kramer, USA, 1958, 35mm, 96m
A huge hit when it was released, The Defiant Ones stars Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as escaped convicts from a chain gang in the South who are literally yoked together. In The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin states that this domestic drama about race during the middle of the last century “is being offered as a metaphor for the ordeal of black-white relations in America, an ordeal, the film is saying, that has brought us closer together than we know.” It is this effort “of the most disastrous sentimentality to bring black men into the white American nightmare” that the author suggests caused Harlem audiences to resent the film while white liberal viewers applauded.
Screening with: My Childhood Part 2: James Baldwin’s Harlem
Arthur Barron, USA, 1964, digital projection, 30m
James Baldwin narrates how his early years in Harlem made him alive to the forces at work in the city and American society to manage the black population. Describing the economic and visual disparity of New York’s famed Fifth Avenue that runs through Manhattan and Harlem, Baldwin reminds us that the “avenue is elsewhere the renowned and elegant Fifth,” but venturing north “we find ourselves on wide, filthy, hostile Fifth Avenue, facing a project which hangs over the avenue like a monument to the folly, and cowardice of good intentions.”
Friday, September 11, 6:00pm
The Defiant Ones
The Devil Finds Work Program:
An illustrated discussion and presentation of clips of films discussed by Baldwin in The Devil Finds Work, including The Birth of a Nation, The Exorcist, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Defiant Ones. A sustained and animated engagement of the text, this panel and selected screenings will take up Baldwin’s aesthetic analysis of the films and commentary on how these works operate in American culture and spectatorship. Panelists include: Michele Wallace, Sam Pollard, Trey Ellis, and others to be announced.
Saturday, September 12, 12:30pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Stan Lathan, USA, 1984, 16mm, 96m
This poignant adaptation of James Baldwin’s first novel restages the conflict of religion, sexuality, race, and poverty in 1920s and 1930s Harlem that shaped so much of the author’s political, spiritual, and moral convictions.
Sunday, September 13, 5:00pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Pat Hartley & Dick Fontaine, USA/UK, 1982, digital projection, 95m
James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham, and Atlanta, to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, with Chinua Achebe, and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post–Civil Rights America—wondering “what happened to the children” and those “who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.”
Screening with: James Baldwin from Another Place
Sedat Pakay, Turkey, 1973, 35mm, 13m
This short finds James Baldwin in Istanbul musing about race, the American fascination with sexuality, insights into his interrupted writing decade in the country, the generosity of the Turks, and how being in another country, in another place, forces one to re-examine well-established attitudes about modern society.
Friday, September 11, 9:00pm
I Remember Harlem
William Miles, USA, 1981, 16mm, 240m
Baldwin is interviewed for William Miles’s landmark epic documenting the early settlement of the Village of Harlem in the 17th century, to the specter of urban renewal and redevelopment in the 1970s. The film chronicles the centuries of change and political and artistic expression that has made this complex hamlet the capital of urban America.
Sunday, September 13, 12:00pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
I Remember Harlem
James Baldwin Funeral Service – Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Karen Thorsen, Bill Dill & Gregory Andracke, USA, 1987, digital projection, 45m
Never-before-seen raw footage from Baldwin’s 1987 funeral service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (only portions were seen in The Price of the Ticket), featuring eulogies from Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka and powerful drumming led by Nigerian master Babatunde Olatunji.
Monday, September 14, 9:00pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
James Baldwin in Paris
Terence Dixon, UK/France, 1971, digital projection, 31m
An extremely rare film document [del.] photographed by Jack Hazan (Rude Boy, A Bigger Splash) in several symbolic locations, including the Place de la Bastille. As Hazan recounts: “Things don’t go to plan for him and the film crew when a couple of young black Vietnam draft dodgers impose themselves on the American. Baldwin wrestles with being a role model to the black youths, denouncing Western colonialism and crimes against African Americans while at the same time demonstrating his mastery and understanding of the culture he supposedly despises.”
Screening with: Baldwin’s Nigger
Horace Ové, UK, 1968, 16mm, 46min
James Baldwin, alongside Dick Gregory, speaks and responds to questions at the West Indian Student Centre in London about race and identity in America as he draws correspondences between the situation in the U.S. and the UK.
Saturday, September 12, 7:15pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket
Karen Thorsen, USA, 1989, DCP, 86m
For years the authoritative film biography of James Baldwin, this newly restored and remastered documentary gathers together scores of rare archival footage of Baldwin and his contemporaries to shape this remarkable account of his life and work. Film Restoration and Digital Remastering made possible by The Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Maysles Documentary Center, Stan & Joanne Marder, Goldcrest Post.
Monday, September 14, 6:30pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
James Baldwin Speaks Program:
A selection of clips featuring Baldwin in discussion and debate with his contemporaries, including William F. Buckley, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte, along with speeches and commentary documented for television—both inside the studio and out—over his long career as America’s foremost insightful and prescient public intellectual. Discussants include Darryl Pinckney and others to be announced.
Saturday, September 12, 4:45pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
The Naked Night (aka Sawdust and Tinsel)
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1953, 16mm, 95m
Swedish with English subtitles
Considered by Baldwin as “one of the very few genuine artists now working in film,” Bergman was the subject of intense interest from the American author who flew to Stockholm to meet and interview him, culminating in his essay “The Northern Protestant.” For Baldwin, Sawdust and Tinsel was Bergman’s best film, which he characterized as “moving” and “uncannily precise and truthful.” We will screen an original release print of the film under the original U.S. title, The Naked Night.
Saturday, September 12, 2:30pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
The Naked Night
Native Son
Pierre Chenal, Argentina/USA, 1951, 35mm, 104m
Based on the terrifically successful 1940 novel by Richard Wright and shot in Argentina, this striking work tells the story of the accidental death of a white Chicago heiress at the hands of a young black man from the South Side. It stars the author in the lead role of Bigger Thomas, the “horror” of which Baldwin suggested [del.] “was later abundantly justified.” In his first major essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin speculated that “below the surface of his novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a compliment of that monstrous legend it was intended to destroy.”
Friday, September 11, 3:30pm
Take This Hammer – FREE SCREENING
Richard O. Moore, USA, 1963, digital projection, 58m
James Baldwin’s devastating 1963 tour of San Francisco, filmed and released by KQED, documents the struggle to shield black children in the city from the almost universal message of dispossession and despair that at the time engulfed communities already under siege by the forces of gentrification and urban renewal: “What precisely do you say to a Negro child to invest him with a moral which the country is determined he shan’t have … To insist that he know that he can do anything he wants to?”
Screening with: The Negro and the American Promise
WGBH, USA, 1963, digital projection, 59m
This is a series of three interviews for Boston public television, with Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X speaking individually with Kenneth Clark, commenting on one another’s ideas and philosophies, just after the now-infamous meeting with Robert Kennedy. The New York Times characterized Baldwin’s powerful segment as “a television experience that seared the consciousness.”
Saturday, September 12, 9:15pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
A Tale of Two Cities
Jack Conway, USA, 1935, 35mm, 128m
“I did not believe in any of these people so much as I believed in their situation.” In the beginning of The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin extensively discusses A Tale of Two Cities, recalling how “haunted” he was by Dickens’s novel, reading it “over and over and over again,” seeing himself and his family’s lives and struggles mirrored in the quest for freedom that characterized the French Revolution. As Baldwin reflects: “The guillotine was going to chop off Sydney Carton’s head: my first director was instructing me in the discipline and power of make-believe.”
Sunday, September 13, 8:00pm*
*Venue: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
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