a highly-opinionated selection of things happening around town, and sometimes out of town. this month's page here.

tue. mar. 31

pit stop, little big top @ new beverly theatre
mia doi todd @ the echo


wed. apr. 1

johnny cash presents the everly brothers show FREE @ ucla film archive
ochberg's orphans 7 PM, the rape of europa FREE @ ampas linwood dunn theater
battling butler 8 PM, go west @ silent movie theater
white denim @ spaceland
the apartment, one two three @ aero theatre
clive chin @ dub club @ echoplex


thu. apr. 2

post-punk junk mix night 8 PM @ silent movie theater
autolux @ detroit bar
white magic @ el rey
out of the past, the company she keeps @ egyptian theatre
frank fairfield @ spaceland
trying the hand of god FREE 7 PM @ moca grand avenue


fri. apr. 3

dr. lonnie smith @ the mint
the rules of the game, smiles of a summer night @ new beverly theatre
sunday, point of order! @ ucla film archive
cruising 7:30 PM, windows @ silent movie theater
deadly sweet MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theater
jon brion @ largo
alias nick beal, fly-by-night @ egyptian theatre
terminator 2 MIDNIGHT @ fairfax regency
the decameron, salo @ aero theatre
kinski @ echoplex
the howling 8 PM @ steve allen theater


sat. apr. 4

the rules of the game, smiles of a summer night @ new beverly theatre
lobster man from mars MIDNIGHT @ new beverly theatre
popular science vol. j7-5, secret beyond the door @ ucla film archive
day of wrath @ silent movie theater
roses are red, smooth as silk @ egyptian theatre
the canterbury tales, arabian nights @ aero theatre
journey from darkness into light: some films by kerry laitala 8 PM @ la filmforum @ echo park film center


sun. apr. 5

andrei rublev 5 PM @ new beverly theatre
six bridges to cross, nocturne @ egyptian theatre
may, smiley face @ aero theatre


mon. apr. 6

andrei rublev 8 PM @ new beverly theatre
cinemad's short film almanac 8 PM @ silent movie theater
mike watt & the missingmen @ spaceland
thee make out party FREE @ silverlake lounge


tue. apr. 7

andrei rublev 8 PM @ new beverly theatre
observe and report (sneak preview) @ aero theatre
the postman always rings twice 1 PM @ lacma
greg proops, harland williams, todd glass @ echoplex


wed. apr. 8

amps for christ @ the smell
minnie and moskowitz, love streams @ new beverly theatre
the general 8 PM @ silent movie theater
confidential report, journey into fear @ aero theatre
the lady from shanghai 8 PM @ arclight hollywood


thu. apr. 9

minnie and moskowitz, love streams @ new beverly theatre
european punk night 8 PM @ silent movie theater
two o'clock courage, desperate @ egyptian theatre
the trial, macbeth @ aero theatre
mirah @ the echo


fri. apr. 10

the thin man, after the thin man @ new beverly theatre
reservoir dogs MIDNIGHT @ new beverly theatre
jeanne dielman 23 quai du commerce 1080 bruxelles @ lacma
jon brion @ largo
l'urlo MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theater
enforcer, convicted @ egyptian theatre
casablanca MIDNIGHT @ fairfax regency
touch of evil, the lady from shanghai @ aero theatre
riding the bullet 8 PM @ steve allen theater


sat. apr. 11

the thin man, after the thin man @ new beverly theatre
eliminators MIDNIGHT @ new beverly theatre
jeanne dielman 23 quai du commerce 1080 bruxelles @ lacma
ordet 7 PM @ silent movie theater
the racket, woman on pier 13 @ egyptian theatre
citizen kane, the magnificent ambersons @ aero theatre
the cognomi theory of the antarctic interior: opening @ velaslavasay panorama


sun. apr. 12

faust (w/ live score by cabeza de vaca arkestra) 8 PM @ silent movie theater
while the city sleeps, beyond reasonable doubt @ egyptian theatre


mon. apr. 13

animated documentaries 8 PM @ silent movie theater


tue. apr. 14

wendy and lucy, old joy @ new beverly theatre
the loved one 7 PM, gates of heaven, blinky FREE @ hammer museum
becky stark @ largo little room


wed. apr. 15

black lips @ detroit bar
wendy and lucy, old joy @ new beverly theatre
run tecato run @ ucla film archive
college 8 PM @ silent movie theater
the servant @ aero theatre


thu. apr. 16

julie darling, poor pretty eddie, psycho from texas @ new beverly theatre
crash 'n' burn 8 PM, breaking glass @ silent movie theater
deadline u.s.a., chicago deadline @ egyptian theatre
woman next door, read my lips @ aero theatre
budos band @ the echo
the garden 8 PM @ arclight hollywood


fri. apr. 17

foot village @ the smell
surf ii, carnival magic @ new beverly theatre
gamperaliya @ ucla film archive
gertrud @ silent movie theater
the october man, sleep my love @ egyptian theatre
jon brion @ largo
the thomas crown affair, against all odds @ aero theatre
the fall MIDNIGHT @ nuart theatre
8 1/2 @ ampas samuel goldwyn theater
in the heat of the night 9:15 PM @ lacma


sat. apr. 18

red scorpion, universal soldier, rocky iv, the punisher, i come in peace @ all day dolph lundgren film fest @ new beverly theatre
ruthless @ ucla film archive
dr. zarkov have the robots fetch my zeppelin 2 PM, things to come @ egyptian theatre
the prowler, chance meeting @ egyptian theatre
witness, the mosquito coast @ aero theatre
delirians @ ram jam club @ trip
abe vigoda @ spaceland


sun. apr. 19

spartacus (uncut version) 5:30 PM @ new beverly theatre
the buccaneer 2 PM @ ucla film archive
vampyr 8 PM @ silent movie theater
passage to suez FREE 1:30 PM, my winnipeg @ egyptian theatre
walk softly stranger, chicago syndicate @ egyptian theatre
julia, the english patient @ aero theatre


mon. apr. 20

spartacus (uncut version) 8 PM @ new beverly theatre
joanna priestley: fighting gravity 8:30 PM @ redcat
squirrel nut zippers @ el rey


tue. apr. 21

taxi driver, hardcore @ new beverly theatre


wed. apr. 22

taxi driver, hardcore @ new beverly theatre
steamboat bill jr. 8 PM @ silent movie theater
homemade hollywood FREE 7 PM @ hammer museum
the barefoot contessa 8 PM @ arclight hollywood


thu. apr. 23

european film movements seminar 7 PM @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian theatre
in the realm of the senses, empire of passion @ egyptian theatre
red dawn @ aero theatre
16mm night: gems from the archives 8 PM @ echo park film center


fri. apr. 24

all about eve, the big knife @ new beverly theatre
silent light @ lacma
pleasures of the flesh, japanese summer double suicide @ egyptian theatre
jon brion @ largo
the big lebowski MIDNIGHT @ nuart
the changeling 8 PM @ steve allen theater
chen shaoxing & lucy raven outdoor screening @ telic


sat. apr. 25

the time machine (1960) 2 PM, 8PM @ alex theatre
all about eve, the big knife @ new beverly theatre
angus MIDNIGHT @ new beverly theatre
silent light @ lacma
dangerous men MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theater
festival of books @ ucla
cruel story of youth, shiro from amakusa @ egyptian theatre
the grapes of wrath 5 PM @ echo park film center


sun. apr. 26

lost horizon, the train @ new beverly theatre
neil hamburger @ spaceland
festival of books @ ucla
sunday afternoon with chazz FREE 3 PM @ hammer museum
violence at noon, diary of shinjuku thief @ egyptian theatre
neil hamburger @ spaceland


mon. apr. 27

lost horizon, the train @ new beverly theatre
zoe beloff: conjuring specters 8:30 PM @ redcat


tue. apr. 28

lost horizon, the train @ new beverly theatre
the cameraman 8 PM @ silent movie theater


wed. apr. 29

stray dog, thunderbolt and lightfoot @ new beverly theatre
sweet smell of success @ egyptian theatre


thu. apr. 30

target video tribute night 7:30 PM @ silent movie theater
wye oak @ silverlake lounge
bob odenkirk @ largo little room
dino's drive-in: horror fest 8 PM @ echo park film center


fri. may 1

king kong (1933), TBD @ new beverly theatre
black lips @ el rey
urgh! a music war MIDNIGHT @ nuart
fright night 8 PM @ steve allen theater


sat. may 2

king kong (1933), TBD @ new beverly theatre


sun. may 3

winchester '73, bend of the river @ new beverly theatre


mon. may 4

winchester '73, bend of the river @ new beverly theatre


tue. may 5

winchester '73, bend of the river @ new beverly theatre
museum of jurassic technology's david wilson lecture 7 PM @ hammer museum


wed. may 6

waltz with bashir, TBD @ new beverly theatre
day of wrath FREE @ hammer museum


thu. may 7

waltz with bashir, TBD @ new beverly theatre


fri. may 8

sunset blvd., queen kelly @ new beverly theatre
it's alive 8 PM @ steve allen theater


sat. may 9

mika miko, the soft pack @ the smell
sunset blvd., queen kelly @ new beverly theatre
rear window 7 PM @ angel city drive-in


wed. may 13

shadows of forgotten ancestors, color of pomegranates @ new beverly theatre
haxan: witchcraft through the ages FREE @ hammer museum


thu. may 14

shadows of forgotten ancestors, color of pomegranates @ new beverly theatre


fri. may 15

200 motels MIDNIGHT @ nuart


sat. may 16

danse macabre FREE @ hammer museum


fri. may 22

the texas chainsaw massacre 8 PM @ steve allen theater


sat. may 23

smash up: the story of a woman, the lost weekend @ starlight studio screenings
ferris bueller's day off 7 PM @ angel city drive-in


wed. may 27

the thermals @ troubadour
mia doi todd @ el rey
restoring the los angeles avant-garde: thom anderson and morgan fisher FREE @ hammer museum
the sting @ last remaining seats @ orpheum theatre


fri. may 29

city of lost children MIDNIGHT @ nuart
king khan and the shrines @ the echo
restoring the los angeles avant-garde: things are always going wrong FREE @ hammer museum


wed. jun. 3

buck privates @ last remaining seats @ million dollar theatre


fri. jun. 5

the thing MIDNIGHT @ nuart
king of the ants 8 PM @ steve allen theater


fri. jun. 12

remo williams: the adventure begins MIDNIGHT @ nuart


mon. jun. 15

a camp @ troubadour


wed. jun. 17

macunaima @ last remaining seats @ million dollar theatre


fri. jun. 19

a hard day's night MIDNIGHT @ nuart


sat. jun. 20

foot village @ the smell
the mad genius, the mad doctor @ starlight studio screenings
mike watt @ redwood bar


sun. jun. 21

femi kuti @ hollywood bowl


wed. jun. 24

a streetcar named desire @ last remaining seats @ los angeles theatre


fri. jun. 26

brazil (uncut) MIDNIGHT @ nuart


wed. jul. 1

pandora's box @ last remaining seats @ orpheum theatre


fri. jul. 3

ema & the ghosts @ mr. t's bowl


sat. jul. 4

the great gatsby, citizen kane @ starlight studio screenings


sun. jul. 5

bipolar bear @ the smell


sat. jul. 25

shanghai express, the bitter tea of general yen @ starlight studio screenings




WHAT IT IS:



AGAINST ALL ODDS, 1984, Sony Repertory, 128 min. Director Taylor Hackford reinvents film noir by taking it out of the shadows and setting it in the blinding Southern California sun in this sexy riff on OUT OF THE PAST. Jeff Bridges is a washed-up pro football star who gets in over his head after he takes a job going after James Woods’ fugitive girlfriend. When Bridges finds the woman -- the beautiful Rachel Ward -- sparks fly, and the ex-athlete’s desire quickly leads him into a complicated web of lies, betrayal, and murder. Michel Colombier’s innovative score was one of the first to employ synthesizers extensively and effectively, a technique that would influence many 1980s movies to follow.


ALIAS NICK BEAL, 1949, Universal, 93 min. Finally -- a stunning, brand-new 35mm print of what might be director John Farrow’s  masterwork! A Faustian fable given full noir treatment by Farrow, scripter Jonathan Latimer and cameraman Lionel Lindon. The devilish Nick Beal (a mesmerizing Ray Milland) materializes out of the fog to "assist" a crusading district attorney (Thomas Mitchell) who has declared that he’d "give anything" to convict a local mobster. Soon, the D.A. begins a miraculous campaign for governor, bolstered by Beal’s connections and the encouragement of his most enticing acolyte (Audrey Totter). A supernatural fable that in style and theme is a logical extension of the era’s best noir films. NOT ON DVD.  New 35mm Print!


ALL ABOUT EVE
Six Oscars were awarded this cynical and entertaining examination of life as it exists on the Broadway theatre scene. Bette Davis glows as the aging star being undermined by her protege Anne Baxter, as Eve Harrington. With George Sanders, Celeste Holm, and Marilyn Monroe. A gem.


ANDREI RUBLEV
The dazzling and harrowing tale of the 15th century icon painter who survives the cruelties of medieval Russia to create works of art. As bloody Tartar raids, religious brutality, and pagan rites work to quell Rublev's desires and needs, he undertakes a spiritual odyssey that affirms man's ability to transcend adversity.  Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966.  205 min.


ANGUS
In this comic coming-of-age story, Angus is a teen terror who cuts up on the football field but still can't manage to fit in at high school. Luckily, his geeky friend Troy and his chess-playing grandfather are there to help Angus turn a practical joke into an evening of magic. With Kathy Bates, George C. Scott and Rita Moreno, and introducing Charlie Talbert as Angus.


Animated Documentaries
Tonight we’ll look at a dense and entertaining assortment of films in which animation serves to represent “the facts.”  Breaking through the bounds of vérité, animated documentaries excavate the minds of real people in real situations, conceiving of visuals for events that weren’t documented, raising issues of perception and experience, often weaving in conventions of kids' films in the service of exceptionally dark content.  The evening's program covers many bases, from the winsome and rough tales of virginity in Never Like the First Time to the bouncy audio-fragmentation of British farmers in Success with Sweet Peas, from The Velvet Tigress, which deconstructs the scandal behind a 1930s murderess, to the vintage Windsor McCay piece The Sinking of the Lusitania from 1918, which blurs the countless lines between documentary and propaganda.  We’ll also be including the fantastic “Men in Black” segment of the Oscar-nominated documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing The Wartime Experience, and more!


ARABIAN NIGHTS, 1974, MGM Repertory, 130 min. One of Pasolini’s greatest achievements, ARABIAN NIGHTS is a shimmering, golden dream of a film, drunk on its own beauty, where story after story unfolds like leaves in an ancient Persian manuscript. Equaled only by Wojciech Has’ THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT in its exquisite, otherworldly tone and intricate, puzzle-box structure, ARABIAN NIGHTS is simply unforgettable. With Tessa Bouche, Ines Pellegrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti, Franco Merli. 


THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA
1954 128 MIN 35MM
DIR: Joseph L. Mankiewicz SCR: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
CAST: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Rossano Brazzi
With THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wittily skewered the New York theatre set in ALL ABOUT EVE, takes on Hollywood behind the scenes and on location, with a cast of characters that are arrogant, demanding, cruel, beautiful and rich. Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Dawes, the recovering alcoholic film director who plucks simple nightclub dancer Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) out of obscurity and turns her into an international movie star. In one breathtaking segment, Gardner performs a sensual barefoot dance at a roadside Gypsy camp that fulfills the promise of the film's tagline "The World's Most Beautiful Animal!"


Battling Butler
Based on the popular stage play, Battling Butler, while being one of the most-low-key of all Keaton's films, was also the most successful upon its release, despite being a departure from his usual habit of dense, complicated gags.  Buster plays the twittish millionaire Alfred Butler, who, while wooing a girl, pretends to be the champion boxer "Battling" Butler.  Of course, the real "Battling" catches wind of this, and challenges Buster to step in the ring.  What's unusual here is that the film's climax takes a surprise dramatic turn, with Buster getting pummeled within an inch of his life until he gains the courage to go ape and gruesomely turn the tables.  This ending did not appear in the original play, but rather was inserted by Buster and his team of screenwriters, and eerily resembles the real-life situation he sometimes faced at the hands of his alcoholic father during on-stage vaudeville performances by The Three Keatons, when he had to respond to sudden violence with violence of his own. Dir. Buster Keaton, 1926, 35mm, 71 min.


BEND OF THE RIVER
A compelling study of a man divided between his questionable, hidden past and his new life, set in 1840's Oregon. James Stewart stars as the former outlaw who now works as a wagon train scout. He comes into conflict with his one-time friend (Arthur Kennedy) who hijacks the settlers' supplies in order to turn a profit. Features beautiful Technicolor landscapes. With Julia Adams and Rock Hudson.  New 35mm print!


BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, 1956, Warner Bros., 80 min. Fritz Lang’s final American film offers the ingenious notion of a writer (Dana Andrews) framing himself for murder in order to prove the fallibility of the justice system and inhumanity of capital punishment. Well, it seemed like a bright idea at the time… Lang’s once-overwhelming visual style is sublimated to the clockwork mechanics of Douglas Morrow’s dense but brisk script, which the director brings to life despite a bargain-basement budget. Co-starring Joan Fontaine as Andrew’s long-suffering high-society girlfriend. The remake, starring Michael Douglas, is due out this spring, Here’s your chance to see the original before it’s deep-sixed. Print courtesy of George Eastman House. NOT ON DVD


THE BIG KNIFE
Clifford Odets' fall from Golden Boy of the leftist New York theatre scene to an underutilized studio contract writer (his last screen credit was for an Elvis movie) is one of the classic stories of squandered Hollywood talent. The Big Knife was his return to the stage, and a fantastic excoriation of the Hollywood rot and corruption. It's the story of a failing actor stuck making wrestling movies, who just wants to retire in peace, but....they keep pulling him back in. Adapted for the screen by director Robert Aldrich, The Big Knife features some of Odets' best trademark poetic dialogue this side of Sweet Smell of Success, and an unforgettable, overheated performance by Rod Steiger (in a hilarious parody of Columbia head Harry Cohn, known to manipulatively weep crocodile tears in negotiations) as the manipulative blowhard studio head who pulls all his strings. Written with a brilliant poison pen, and directed with a harsh full-frontal style that jabs the points home, there are few Hollywood Gothics as cutting as The Big Knife.   Dir. Robert Aldrich, 1955, 35mm, 111 min.


Blinky
A video collaboration by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto and Jeffrey Vallance. In the novella Blinky the Friendly Hen (1979), Vallance documented the purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption. Ten years later, questions of the true cause of Blinky’s death continue to swirl. (1988, 15 min.)


The Blood Spattered Bride
The title alone made this Spanish entry into the '70s lesbian vampire craze an instant grindhouse favorite, but its beautiful, heady imagery and visceral nastiness established this one of the most brutal adaptations of J. Sheridan LeFanu's oft-filmed "Carmilla" (vampyro lesbo template extraordinaire). Susan, an unstable young bride, hallucinates rape attacks while her chauvinist husband is out of the hotel room. Ditching the lodging, the unhappy couple ends up at an ancestral home connected to the husband, and Susan has violent dreams involving a strange woman in white--Mircalla, who turns up in the bosomy flesh not long after. Repelled by her husband's macho demands, Susan falls under Mircalla's spell and embarks on a spree of bloody mayhem. Whether viewed as an audacious feminist parable or sick macho trash, it's overflowing with spurting gore and full frontal, and is a fascinating horror fantasy that moves at a speedy clip all the way to its queasy, unforgettable final shot.
Dir. Vicente Aranda, 1972, 35mm, 100 min.


Breaking Glass
British new wave star Hazel O'Connor rose to fame through her role in Breaking Glass--a tale of a singer's tumultuous rise to fame! O'Connor plays Kate, a plucky youth hungry for a recording contract, who hooks up professionally and personally with an equally ravenous young manager (Phil Daniels of Quadrophenia).  After seedy gigs across London, it's big-break time, but in the process Kate gets swallowed by record company machinery and emerges as an ashen, Numanesque pop robot in a startling, Tron-tinged finale.  Director Brian Gibson keeps the film crisp with several original post-punk numbers (written by O'Connor), grimy widescreen neon and a realistic portrait of the Winter Of Discontent, the late '70s moment in time when the British government was in total upheaval.  Dir. Brian Gibson, 1980, 35mm, 104 min.


THE BUCCANEER
(1938) Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
One of the rarest of Cecil B. DeMille's sound films, The Buccaneer mines a little tapped vein of American history--the War of 1812--for a rousing bit of homegrown spectacle. Fredric March stars with devilish swagger as Jean Lafitte, the French pirate transformed into an American folk hero for his exploits at the Battle of New Orleans--all for the love of an American aristocrat (Margot Grahame), as DeMille tells it. Alongside March, Hollywood newcomer Hungarian actress Franciska Gaal stars as Gretchen, a shipwrecked waif plucked from the sea by Lafitte, while Akim Tamiroff steals the show as Lafitte's lovably brusque cannoneer.
Paramount Pictures. Based on a novel by Lyle Saxon. Screenwriter: Edwin Justus Mayer, Harold Lamb, C. Gardner Sullivan. Cinematographer: Victor Milner. Editor: Anne Bauchens. Cast: Fredric March, Franciska Gaal, Akim Tamiroff, Margot Grahame, Walter Brennan. 35mm, 124 min.


Buck Privates
(Universal, 1941, 84 minutes, black/white)
Comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello rocketed to box-office stardom with this immensely popular slapstick comedy about a couple of con men who inadvertently join the Army while trying to hide from the police. The crowd-pleasing Andrews Sisters perform four musical numbers, including the Academy Award-nominated "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B."


The Cameraman
Keaton's first feature for MGM turned out to be the final film of his own which he had creative control.  The Cameraman finds Buster as Luke Shannon, a lowly portrait photographer smitten with a girl who's an assistant in the newsreel biz--so he buys a motion picture camera of his own, and bungles several attempts at becoming a freelance shooter for her company, before turning things around in his favor both professionally and with his beau.  MGM was wary of letting its new contract star put his neck on the line for the kind of  hair-raising stunts he was known for, so what The Cameraman lacks in sheer physical spectacle (although it does contain two wholly smashing action sequences), it makes up for in the romantic comedy department, with a sweet love story played out with the help of the dashing Marceline Day.  A massive success in its day, the film is widely considered to be Keaton's last significant feature.
Dirs. Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton, 1928, 35mm, 70 min.


THE CANTERBURY TALES, 1971, MGM Repertory, 109 min. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. On a pilgrimage to Canterbury, a group of travelers agree to share stories to ease the journey – and we’re treated to a riotous carnival of lecherous old merchants, deceitful young wives, naked satyrs, houses of prostitution, a handsome devil in rent collector’s clothes and much more. With stunning production design by Dante Ferretti (GANGS OF NEW YORK) and a haunting score of period music selected by Pasolini and Ennio Morricone. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival. With Hugh Griffith, Laura Betti, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti and Pasolini himself as Geoffrey Chaucer. The print is the English dubbed version.


CARNIVAL MAGIC
(from IMDB)
A magician in a carnival--who actually can read minds and levitate people and objects--works with a superintelligent chimp named Alex, who can also talk. The magician and the chimp soon become the stars of the carnival, drawing in big crowds. However, the wild-animal trainer, who has been displaced by the team as the carnival's top act, decides to kidnap Alex and sell him to a medical laboratory for experimentation, thereby getting rid of his competition.  Dir. Al Adamson, 1981.


CHANCE MEETING (aka BLIND DATE), 1959, Paramount, 96 min. Dutch painter Hardy Kruger gets thrown in the deep end when his elegant French paramour Micheline Presle turns up a corpse. Police inspector Stanley Baker  deduces Kruger must be the culprit until he hears the artist’s convincingly detailed back story of the affair. When Baker’s superior (Robert Flemyng) informs him a high-ranking diplomat in the House of Lords also was sleeping with Presle, the mystery deepens. Per usual, director Joseph Losey deftly investigates the inner workings of the human libido and demonstrates that slimy things are often found under rocks in upper-class gardens. "…This intelligent thriller from Joseph Losey is one of the director’s more underrated films." Britmovie NOT ON DVD


THE CHANGELING
George C. Scott is a recently widowed musician who moves into an old house inhabited by the spirit of a child who lived there 70 years ago. Genuinely eerie, with some good shocks and--as you might expect from the cast--top-notch performances all around. With Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas and John Corlicos.  DIRECTOR PETER MEDAK IN PERSON!


CHICAGO DEADLINE, 1949, Universal, 87 min. Dir. Lewis Allen. A long-missing noir resurrected! Not as easy to resurrect is the woman star reporter Ed Adams (Alan Ladd) finds dead in a dingy skid-row brothel. Like any ace reporter, he pilfers her address book and starts piecing together the life story that brought Rosita Jean D’ur (Donna Reed) to such a bitter end. Gradually, the cynical newsie falls in love with the dead girl. Tiffany Thayer’s 1933 novel One Woman provides the source for a detective story with a heart more tender than the typical noir. We’re proud to present the only known 35mm print of this film in existence, courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. NOT ON DVD.  Ultra-Rare!


CHICAGO SYNDICATE, 1955, Sony Repertory, 83 min. Director Fred F. Sears was known for churning out celluloid reams of timely drive-in fare (EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, TEENAGE CRIME WAVE), and this taut tale of going undercover in the underworld is one of his more memorable. Accountant Dennis O’Keefe is convinced by the D.A. to infiltrate slick and oily mobster Paul Stewart’s organization after the gangster’s previous bursar is whacked. Songbird Abbe Lane (playing with her real-life hubby bandleader, Xavier Cugat) at Stewart’s nightspot is the head hood’s voluptuous squeeze who has taken out her own insurance policy with a bit of microfilm. Rising to the top of Stewart’s racket, O’Keefe encounters statuesque Allison Hayes (ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN), the murdered accountant’s daughter who may throw a spanner in the works with her plans for vengeance. Great shot-on-location Chicago ambience highlights the exteriors, including an exciting breakneck-paced finale. NOT ON DVD


Cinemad's Short Film Almanac
Avant-garde. Cult. Experimental. Indie. Underground. Sticks and stones. Since 1998, Cinemad has been covering films thrown into the avant gutter, interviewing unusual filmmakers that don’t fit neatly into academics or preconceived genre terms. First as a photocopied zine and now as a website, Cinemad tries to spread the word about great films that are ignored by traditional distribution and magazines. And, out of all Cinemad covers, shorts may be the most ignored. This almanac of past Cinemad short subjects is a mix of wild styles and unusual atmospheres, from the frenetic lesson in heroic cinema in Virgil Widrich's animated wonder Fast Film, to a nuanced look at reality by Sam Green and the stark desolate worlds of Jake Mahaffy or Jennifer Reeves. Watch first, think second. 


College
The epic struggle between athlete and intellectual is hardly a laughing matter, but College delivers one of the funniest, earliest examples of the jock vs. nerd story. His character Roland is an intelligent buffoon who must adapt to the athleticism of Clayton University, where he hopes to win the favor of a former high school classmate (Anne Cornwall).  Keaton's subsequent disastrous attempts to become a star athlete are so breathtakingly executed with perfect childlike attitude; the track-and-field mishap sequence, filmed on the USC track, exemplifies the stunning degree of Keaton's physical control, as does his character's transformation from dispassionate stumbler to ace athelete.  College is a necessity for fans of sports films, jocks, nerds, and anyone who wants to learn a thing or two about comedic filmmaking at 1/200 of the unit cost (the film was significantly lower-budgeted than usual, due to the box-office disappointment of The General).
Dirs. Buster Keaton & James W. Horne, 1927, 35mm, 66 min.


THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES
Paradjanov's mosaic on the life, art and spiritual odyssey of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova. The film is a collection of images and tableaux that interweaves landscapes, villages, costumes, props and music to form a metaphorical history of the Armenian nation. The film "achieves a sort of visionary para-surrealism through the most economical means of gesture, props and texture...A sublime and heartbreaking film" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).  With Sofico Chiaureli, M. Aleksanian and V. Galstian.  Dir. Sergei Paradjanov, 1969.


THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS, 1951, Warner Bros., 82 min. Dir. John Cromwell. This lesser known sleeper is a virtual sequel to CAGED, the more high-profile women’s prison picture helmer Cromwell lensed the year before. Cynical ex-con Jane Greer, released to nice, understanding parole officer Lizabeth Scott, walks a tightrope, keeping the rest of the cast, as well as the audience, guessing whether her parole will be rescinded for her behavior and thrown back in stir. She’s a gal with man issues and impulsively makes a play for Scott’s fast-talking reporter beau, Dennis O’Keefe. Soon she’s just as interested in the man as she is in getting Scott’s goat. Throw in another female parolee with a drug problem employed at the same hospital as Greer, and you have the makings of a potential disaster. Walking a fine line between a women’s weepie and hardboiled noir, director Cromwell and screenwriter Kettie Frings don’t let genre strictures rein them in from telling a refreshingly different story. Watch for a particularly nightmarish police line-up in the last third of the film, as well as the debut of Jeff Bridges! (He’s the baby Greer cradles for a moment while on the lam at the train station.) NOT ON DVD


CONFIDENTIAL REPORT (aka MR. ARKADIN), 1955, Janus Films, 99 min. Dir. Orson Welles. "One of Welles’ most inventive and resonant films" -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice, The film retains the investigative structure of CITIZEN KANE – the life of a rich and powerful man is recounted by several people who knew him – but replaces KANE’s tragic romanticism with a sordidness that is so far over the top as not to be believed. A ruthless financier (Welles) hires a sleazy young cigarette smuggler to write a "confidential report" on his past, hoping to erase the last traces of his infamy so that his beloved daughter will never find the truth about him. Welles decks out this mock-tragic "chronicle of a death foretold" with down-and-dirty rococco effects and tall tales, including that epitome of cynicism, the fable about the frog and the scorpion. There are several distinct versions of the film – we will be screening a print of the CONFIDENTIAL REPORT version. (Program notes courtesy James Quandt/Cinematheque Ontario.)


CONVICTED, 1950, Sony Repertory, 91 min. Dir. Henry Levin. A tough remake of Howard Hawks’ THE CRIMINAL CODE, which was produced in 1931 and also based on the same play by Martin Flavin. Familiar noir scribe William Bowers adapted the original screenplay by Fred Niblo and Seton Miller. Glenn Ford stumbles into a bar fight when cornered by an aggravated drunk and, in the process, accidentally kills the man. Because the victim is a political hotshot’s son, Ford gets the book thrown at him, despite sympathetic D.A. Broderick Crawford  trying to give him a break. Sentenced to the pen for manslaughter, things keep going wrong, including his friendship with uncompromising tough guy Millard Mitchell. Co-starring a great supporting cast that includes Dorothy Malone, Carl Benton Reid, Ed Begley, Frank Faylen, Martha Stewart and Will Geer.


Crash 'N' Burn
Crash 'N' Burn, a fierce half-hour doc covering the Toronto punk club of the same name, photographed in '77 by Ross McLaren. In addition to Cleveland gods The Dead Boys, the film also documents local thrashers The Diodes and Teenage Head.  Dir. Ross McLaren, 1977, 16mm, 28 min.


CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH (SEISHUN ZANKOKU MONOGATARI), 1960, Janus Films, 96 min. Dir. Nagisa Oshima. The BREATHLESS of the Japanese New Wave follows two teenage lovers as they lounge in bars, make love and roar through Tokyo on a motorcycle, striving for freedom but finding only its opposite. With Yusuke Kawazu. "...as lurid and full-fistedly tabloid as anything by Sam Fuller." -- Chuck Stephens, Film Comment


Cruising
For equal opportunity skank in queer cinema, you can't get much nastier than this incendiary pair of thrillers from 1980 which delve deep into the underbelly of New York's post-disco gay scene and come up covered in grime. William Friedkin's Cruising sparked a storm of protests as rookie cop Al Pacino goes undercover as a leather-clad bar boy hunting down a serial killer who knifes his hogtied victims in the back. Al learns how to sniff poppers and thrash around hilariously on the dance floor before finally getting his man... or does he? In depicting the underground gay bar scene in the most raw and uncompromising fashion, and in piling on layer after layer of claustrophobic red herring twists to deliberately make the audience as confused as Pacino's character, Friedkin created a masterwork of ill ease, one of his greatest films to stand alongside The Exorcist and The French Connection.  Dir. William Friedkin, 1980, 35mm, 106 min.


DANSE MACABRE
This program features a compilation of short films focusing on the occult, sorcery, and the macabre, with works ranging from the silent era through the 1960s, including Carl Dreyer’s haunting road safety film, They Caught the Ferry (1943), and avant-garde master Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), a mesmerizing brew of sex, Magick, and rock and roll. (Total running time: approximately 80 mins.)


Day of Wrath
Returning to some of the themes of his earlier masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer made one of his strongest humanist statements with the controversial Day of Wrath. Set in a 17th-century village where allegedly wicked women are tortured and burned alive for witchcraft, Day of Wrath follows Anne, the beautiful young bride of an aging local pastor. By giving in to her passion for her husband’s grown son, she seemingly wills the death of her betrothed--a sin synonymous with witchcraft in the eyes of the brutal village elders. Produced at the height of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Denmark, the crystal-clear political parallels between fascism and witch-hunting were not lost on Danish society at the time. Despite the allegorical content, however, Dreyer’s subject is the frightening and uncontrollable power of human emotion; always a master of the close-up, Dreyer conducts his performers in an overwhelming symphony of conflicting sentiments.
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943, 35mm, 97 min.


DEADLINE USA, 1952, 20th Century Fox, 87 min. Amazingly, the greatest newspaper movie ever made is just as relevant today as when writer-director (and former reporter) Richard Brooks made it. Veteran managing editor of the New York Day, Ed Hutcheson (Humphrey Bogart at his absolute best) suffers a one-two punch: His paper is being sold to its chief competitor, and the ex-wife (Kim Hunter) for whom he still carries a torch is about to remarry. What’s a guy with ink in his blood to do? Break open the front page for a daring exposé of the city’s biggest mobster, of course! A film guaranteed to have all out-of-work veteran journalists crying in their post-film cocktails. Co-starring Ed Begley, Warren Stevens, Paul Stewart and the great Ethel Barrymore.


Deadly Sweet
What happens when Tinto Brass at the peak of his wildly experimental period tackles a crime thriller inspired by Italian comic books with the aid of legendary cartoonist Guido Crepax ("Valentina")?  The answer is the ultra-rare Deadly Sweet (aka Heart In His Mouth), a mad pop-art stew featuring European heartthrob Jean-Louis Trintignant and short-lived '60s "it" girl Ewa Aulin--a Miss Teen Sweden who headlined the notorious screen version of Candy and co-starred with Trintignant a year later in the equally explosive Death Laid An Egg. The threadbare story follows Trintignant and a string of inconvenient corpses through swinging 1967 London, as he and Eva tangle with blackmailers, gangsters and a malicious dwarf, all accompanied by delirious comic-inspired visual effects and editing decades before Sin City.  An unsung treasure full of beautiful excess and directorial virtuosity, the film takes the standard giallo formula and flips it completely upside down, with utterly delicious results.
Dir. Tinto Brass, 1967, DigiBeta, 107 min.


Debt Begins At Twenty
Debt Begins At Twenty, a half-fiction, half-documentary look at the emerging Pittsburgh scene in 1980.  Dir. Stephanie Beroes, 1980, 16mm, 40 min.


THE DECAMERON, 1970, MGM Repertory, 111 min. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Based on Giovanni Bocaccio’s classic novel, the first film in Pasolini’s "Trilogy of Life" established the raw, visceral feeling of the series, using gorgeous period locations, mixing professional and non-professional actors, and combining equal parts poetry, social satire, slapstick and bawdy sexuality into a unique living tapestry. Pasolini himself appears as a Renaissance artist, "one of Giotto’s best students," hired to paint an enormous fresco on the wall of a church. With Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti, Angela Luce.


DESPERATE, 1947, Warner Bros., 73 min. Helming what would be his final B film, Anthony Mann unleashes a visual style that in its nightmarish nocturnal passages exploded the limitations of B-unit filmmaking. Working from a simple story he co-wrote, about a newlywed trucker (the always reliable Steve Brodie) coerced into the criminal underworld by a former pal (Raymond Burr, at his heaviest), Mann and DP George Diskant forge a series of visceral and violent scenes that are among the strongest in noir. Where Mann’s prior films hinted at a major talent behind the camera, DESPERATE declared it loud and clear. NOT ON DVD


DIARY OF A SHINJUKU THIEF (SHINJUKU DOROBO NIKKI), 1968, Oshima Productions, 94 min. Oshima's study of sexual frustration and political subversion begins with a young man chased by a crowd as a thief. The youth inspires an onlooker, called Birdey Hilltop, to his own larceny in a bookstore, and soon Birdey and his girlfriend are led into "the labyrinth of the world of sex.” Tender, funny, moving, it's unspeakably wonderful. With Tadanori Yoko. In Japanese with English subtitles.


DINO’S DRIVE-IN: HORROR FEST
Rock and roll archivist Dino Everett is back with an 80's Film On Film Horror Fest! Art house/cult director Gorman Bechard's (Psychos in Love, Galactic Gigolo) first feature was the slasher Disconnected (1983). It delivers twins, bad mullets, pumping new wave music and a respectable body count. Oh, and did I mention this is the only film print of this in existence? Preceded by a horrifically cheesy 80's educational Etiquette starring a pre-Hollywood Cuba Gooding Jr. and a silent German expressionist stab at Cinderella (1923) on the uber rare 9.5mm format backed by bad 80's music. Oh the horror!


Dr. Zarkov, Ask the Robot to Fetch My Zeppelin: Art Deco Era Imagines the Future
Co-Presented with the Art Deco Society Los Angeles
In this lecture (approx. 45 min.), delivered in Walter Nelson's usual witty style, Nelson examines the future as it was viewed in the past. The lecture is followed by a screening of THINGS TO COME. The 1920s and 30s were a time of rapid technological change, and those who experienced it expected that change would continue at the same hectic pace into the future.  In extrapolating from their own time, they foresaw a time of mega-cities, robot servants, space ships, giant aircraft and any number of other scientific wonders.   They also generally saw the future as a better place than the present (especially during the Great Depression) and the Art Deco style of design embraced that optimistic view.


8 1/2
Often described as one of the most personal and self-analytical films ever made, Fellini’s masterpiece “8½” is a powerful meditation on the relationship between dreaming and the process of filming.  Marcello Mastroianni is cast as Guido Anselmi, a celebrated director struggling to find inspiration for his new movie.  Needing to escape his wife, his mistress, and industry peers, Anselmi retreats into the world of the subconscious, discovering personal recollections, dreams and fantasies.  In Fellini’s own words, the film is the story of “a film director who is trying to put together the pieces of his life…and to make sense of them, to understand what they mean.”
“8½” won Oscars® for Best Foreign Language Film and Costume Design, and was also nominated for Directing, Writing and Art Direction.  The central conflicts of the film reflect Fellini’s own tensions – religion vs. sexuality, intellect vs. sensuality and dreams vs. reality.  Like Anselmi, Fellini dedicated himself to the exploration of his own dreams in order to become more self-aware; these explorations can now be experienced in the exhibition of Fellini’s two-volume Book of Dreams, on display through April 19 in the Academy’s Grand Lobby Gallery. 


ELIMINATORS
(from IMDB)
As part of their experiments in time travel, Drs. Reeves and Takada construct a cyborg "Mandroid" with the body of a downed pilot. After the success of the initial experiments, Reeves decides to have the Mandroid scrapped. Not wishing to be taken apart, Mandroid flees with the help of Dr. Takeda, who is killed for his disobedience. Distraught by the death of his one friend, the Mandroid goes north to America in search of someone who can help him in getting revenge and stopping Dr. Reeves in whatever evil plan he intends to use his time machine for.


EMPIRE OF PASSION
Oshima follows up his notorious In the Realm of the Senses with the story of a peasant woman who, with the help of her lover, kills her husband. Their future hopes wither, however, when the injured party returns from the dead to haunt and endlessly torment them. This sad tale of two lovers devoured by the very passion that they seek is presented to the viewer amidst a somber landscape of embattled moods and emotions, tragic cruelty and overwhelming calm--and the forceful performances and superb photography of this gripping film are unified under Oshima's remarkable lyrical style. Empire of Passion earned him the award of Best Director at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Starring Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Tatsuya Fuji, and Takuzo Kawatani.  Dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1978, 105 mins.


THE ENFORCER¸1951, Warner Bros., 87 min. Dir. Bretaigne Windust. Crusading prosecutor Humphrey Bogart builds a case to nail the head of Murder, Inc. (startlingly vicious Everett Sloane) but has the rug pulled out from under him when his star witness, Ted de Corsia (THE KILLING, NAKED CITY), "falls" from a highrise window. Bogart and his cohorts piece together the back story of Sloane, de Corsia and the murder racket by listening to hours of tapes, presented as a patchwork of flashbacks. Ted de Corsia’s character is based on real-life enforcer Abe Reles, who died a similar death, and this remains de Corsia’s most impressive role. Look for Zero Mostel as in-over-his-head hood Big Babe Lazick. Raoul Walsh (WHITE HEAT) reputedly directed the majority of the film uncredited as a favor to his buddy, Bogart, when noted Broadway director Windust fell ill several days into shooting and did not recover for months. 


EUROPEAN FILM MOVEMENTS SEMINAR
WHAT INSPIRES AN ARTIST: EUROPEAN FILM MOVEMENTS 1920 - 1990
What inspires the visual and narrative construction of a Scorsese, Yimou, Lynch, Miyazaki, Coen or Dardenne Brothers film?
Whether it is Surrealism and German Expressionism of the 20s, French Poetic
Realism of the 30s, Italian Neo Realism of the 40s, the French New Wave and
the Italian Renaissance Cinema of the 50s and 60s, the New German Cinema of
the 70s or even Dogma 95 Cinema of the late 90s, European Film Movements have often been sighted as focal points to understanding and appreciating the work of our reigning, contemporary masters of cinema.
For most of us, it is easy to find the surrealist impulses in a David Lynch film. That is easy.
But did you know that the masterworks of Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Paul
Thomas Anderson, David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh (to say nothing of Hitchcock,
Sayajit Ray, John Cassavetes, and Akira Kurosawa), owe a heavy debt of
gratitude to French Poetic Realists, the Italian Masters of the 60s, and the New German Cinema artists of the 70s? What exactly can be said about the current American Independent scene with out acknowledging its ties to Dogma 95 and Neo Realism?
In this artistically empowering seminar, film consultant Thomas Ethan Harris will define what film movements are, how and why they come to exist and why certain film movements continue to inspire film artists today.
Close attention will be place on the tenants that define each European Film Movement before boldly demonstrating on how these traditions have been so uniquely and creatively embraced and integrated into the work of so many of today¹s most acclaimed filmmakers.
Film clips will be used to inspire an open dialogue with the audience.


European Punk Night
Two films celebrating the early '80s European punk rock diaspora! Considered to be a "lost" film until its very recent re-discovery, La Brune Et Moi is a whizz-bang tour through the Parisian punk underground, co-starring Pierre Clementi (The Conformist, Belle De Jour) and a long list of energetic Gallic bands like Metal Urbain, the Go-Go Pigalles and Astroflash. In 1980, director Philippe Puicouyoul "borrowed" the production gear being used on a separate film he was working on, in order to clandestinely knock out this paean to one of the high points in the history of French rock 'n roll. While it has the most threadbare of plotlines, the film is really an effervescent excuse to showcase the best 'n brightest of the scene at the time, which it does in a seriously fun way. Second on the evening's bill is possibly the rarest and coolest film of the entire fest--one that we still can't announce the title of, since we're unsure of the condition of the print we'd like to show--but rest assured, once you've seen it, you'll thank us for having shown it.
La Brune Et Moi Dir. Philippe Puicouyoul, 1980, MiniDV, 50 min.
second film TBA Dir. ??, 198?, 16mm, 90 min.


Faust
w/ live score by Cabeza De Vaca Arkestra
A landmark of German Expressionism, Faust was Murnau’s final film in Germany, impressing Fox Studios so much that they lured him to the U.S. immediately afterwards. The most expensive UFA film to date–taking six months to film, and costing over two million marks--Faust is full of bravura effects, including the magnificent signature visual of Mephistopheles towering over a miniature of Faust’s village like an enormous Angel of Death. Faust was also the final collaboration with Emil Jannings (who also played the fired doorman in Murnau’s Last Laugh, and the title role in Tartuffe). Jannings’ chameleonic performance is typically excellent, and, along with the film’s expert Rembrandt lighting and Bruegelesque imagery, makes Faust a complete cinematic experience never to be forgotten. The evening's live score is provided by Cabeza De Vaca Arkestra, an all-star L.A. ensemble featuring Nora Keyes, and members of Dios Malos.
Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1926, 35mm, 106 min.


FLY-BY-NIGHT, 1942, Universal, 74 min. Don’t miss this undiscovered gem, one of the first Hollywood efforts of noir maestro Robert Siodmak! Shifting with Hitchcockian aplomb between suggestive light comedy and thickly shadowed suspense, Siodmak stuffs two features worth of stylish set pieces into the film’s sprightly running time, making it as good as wartime B pictures got. Richard Carlson’s and Nancy Kelly’s romance-on-the-run chemistry, laced with witty innuendo (and plenty of Kelly’s fine gams!) is reminiscent of Donat and Carroll in THE 39 STEPS. Great fun, and surprisingly sexy for its time. NOT ON DVD


FRIGHT NIGHT
This horrific howl stars Chris Sarandon as a seductive vampire named Jerry and William Ragsdale as Charlie, his frantic teenage neighbor trying to keep Jerry's deadly fangs out of his neck. Only Charlie knows his bloodcurdling secret, but he can't get anyone to believe him. He turns to TV-horror host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), who used to be the "Great Vampire Killer" of the movies. Can these mortals save Charley and his sweetheart, Amy (Amanda Bearse, Married with Children), from the wrathful bloodsucker's toothy embrace?  WRITER/DIRECTOR TOM HOLLAND IN PERSON!


FUTURE-KILL
With a title that's anything but deceptive, Future-Kill is overflowing with low-budget sci-fi violence. Edwin Neal and Marilyn Burns of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre star as nuke-protesting mutant punks. Burns plays a benevolent freak, and Neal an evil, ironclad, mohawked killer (think Robocop meets Wez from Road Warrior) poetically named Splatter. When prankster frat boys enter the big city in which the mutant activists dwell, the frats are framed for a mutant's murder. The actual killer, Splatter, goes on a murderous rampage in order to kill the Greek brothers before his mutant-on-mutant crime is discovered. Though the story is actually much crazier than can be described, rest assured that prostitutes get killed, someone is tarred-and-feathered, and there's fire.


GAMPERALIYA
(1964) Directed by Lester James Peries
A seminal work in Sri Lankan cinema, Gamperaliya launched "a revolution, not only in the way films were made, but also in the content," according to producer Anton Wickramasinghe. Based on the novel by Martin Wickramasinghe, the film focuses on Piyal, a teacher and member of the new rising middle class, who falls in love with the daughter of his village's leading aristocratic clan. Defensive positions are assumed and the girl's parents insist upon a marriage to a stuffed shirt of her own class. For its elegant style, Gamperaliya has been compared to Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy."
Cinelanka Ltd.. Based on a novel by Martin Wickremasinghe. Producer: Anton Wickremasinghe. Screenplay: Regie Siriwardena. Cinematographer: William Blake. Camera: Gamini Fonseka. Editor: Sumitra Gunawardana. Cast: Punya Heeendeniya, Henry Jayasena, Wickrema Bogoda, Trelicia Gunawardena. Presented in Sinhala dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 120 min. 


THE GARDEN
2008 80 MIN 35MM
DIR: Scott Hamilton Kennedy
FEATURING Danny Glover, Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, Daryl Hannah, Dennis Kucinich, Zak de la Rocha
THE GARDEN is an engaging and powerful look at the famous political and social battle over the largest community garden in the US located in South Central Los Angeles.
A follow-up to Kennedy's award-winning documentary, OT: OUR TOWN, the film shows how the politics of power and greed (backroom deals, land developing, green politics, money) tragically intersect with working class families who rely on this communal garden for their livelihood. Equal parts THE WIRE and HARLAN COUNTY, USA, THE GARDEN, exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
THE GARDEN was a 2008 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Feature.
A Q&A with director Scott Hamilton Kennedy will immediately follow the screening.


Gates of Heaven
Funny, inspiring, and bizarre, Gates of Heaven is an unorthodox look at life through the eyes of pet cemetery proprietors, embalmers, pet owners, and those who hope to be them.  (1978, 85 min., Dir. Errol Morris)


The General
At the high point of his career, Keaton's turn as a hopeful Confederate soldier set the stage for one of his most impressive, action-packed comedies.  The General  is based on the book "The Great Locomotive Chase," and throws Keaton into a situation where he must protect the only two loves in his life: his train and the beautiful Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack).  One of the most expensive films of its time, The General boasts hundreds of extras, burning bridges, train chases (one falls into a gorge where it is said to still lie in ruin), and a neverending stream of Keaton stunts, all performed with the deadpan expression iconic of the "Great Stone Face."  One can't help but succumb to Keaton's charm as he leaps from one physical impossibility after another, whether running the length of a train or precariously riding its cowcatcher.  The stoic grace with which Keaton pulls off these feats not only places him amongst the great comedians, but also makes him the coolest "everyman" action hero of the silent screen.
Dirs. Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1927, 35mm, 106 min.


Gertrud
Dreyer’s elegant final film finds the director at the crossroads of romantic longing, memory and regret. Over several decades, we follow Gertrud, an alluring, strong-willed singer who demands a certain kind of impossible love from her men, none of whom can live up to the expectations they themselves help to set. In drawing room and boudoir interiors, Gertrud and her men hash out their passions, failures and compromises. Marked by a sensational, restrained performance by Nina Pens Rode, who fully embodies the figure of the embattled ingenue, Gertrud is, like its protagonist, many things to many people: obscure, witty, caustic, remote, brilliant and absolutely one of a kind. Perhaps the quietest of Dreyer’s masterpieces, Gertrud is also the most psychologically acute, and the most stylistically daring.
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964, 35mm, 116 min.


GO WEST
In Go West (a parody of Chaplin's "Tramp" persona, and his brand of sentimental "personal" comedies), Keaton plays "Friendless", a depressive chap who gets a ranching job and meets his soulmate: a pluckish milk cow who quickly becomes Buster's only friend in the world.  When she and her herd are shipped off to the slaughterhouse, and when the train is held up by thieves in a gun battle, it's up to Buster to lead the herd to safety--straight through a bustling downtown Los Angeles!  Dir. Buster Keaton, 1925, 35mm, 69 min.


THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Hardluck Potluck:  A new monthly series dedicated to celebrating films of the last Great Depression! This month join us for the classic The Grapes of Wrath. “The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is director John Ford's most famous black and white epic drama - the classic adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning, widely-read 1939 novel. This film was the most popular left-leaning, socialistic-themed film of pre-World War II Hollywood.” [filmsite.org] $1 admission or bring some food to share and get in free! 


HARDCORE
A conservative, Calvinist businessman from the midwest travels to Los Angeles to search for his missing daughter. When he discovers that she has been appearing in underground, pornographic films, he begins to investigate the seedy industry in an effort to find her and bring her home. Paul Schrader's exploration of morality and obsession features a commanding performance by George C. Scott as the tormented father. Also starring Peter Boyle and Dick Sargent.


Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages
Benjamin Christensen’s notorious pseudo-documentary about the history of witchcraft is a beguiling blend of animation, fiction, fantasy, and “re-enactments,” with satanic rituals, witch trials, and medieval torture devices.  (1922, 77 min., Dir. Benjamin Christensen) 


Homemade Hollywood
How did three nobodies blow Steven Spielberg’s mind with an Indiana Jones flick they made as teens in the 1980s? Clive Young, author of Homemade Hollywood: Fans behind the Camera (2008), traces the fan film movement from the 1920s, when con men made fake Little Rascals movies, to the Internet video sensations of today. Young will play clips from some of his favorites and will be joined by special guest fan filmmakers Sandy Collora (Batman: Dead End) and Trey Stokes (Pink Five).


THE HOWLING
Frightening, funny, and filled with references that movie buffs will love, Joe Dante's The Howling is one of the best werewolf films ever made. A TV news reporter goes on what is supposed to be a therapeutic retreat at an unusual "encounter group" community. It's hard to get your head together, however, when some of your neighbors want to tear it apart. Dee Wallace stars and, as usual, Dante populates the cast with plenty of B-movie favorites, such as John Carradine, Dick Miller and Kevin McCarthy. Co-written by John Sayles, who also has a brief cameo.  JOE DANTE IN PERSON!


IT'S ALIVE
Cult director Larry Cohen delivers the ultimate parental nightmare. John Ryan and Sharon Farrell find that not only is their newborn a physical monstrosity, it is also capable of catching and killing its own lunch. With Michael Ansara, Andrew Duggan, and Guy Stockwell. This one is creepy.


JAPANESE SUMMER: DOUBLE SUICIDE
Among Oshima's least-known films, JAPANESE SUMMER: DOUBLE SUICIDE is a darkly comic romance about a couple on the run--a sex-crazed young woman and her suicidal boyfriend who are drawn into a band of violent gangsters. Declared by Oshima to personify the "death drive" in Japanese culture, the irrationally violent and unsympathetic gangsters in the film suggest a more pessimistic and absurd dimension of the outlaw antiheroes so central to Oshima's films.
DIR/SCR Nagisa Oshima; SCR Mamoru Sasaki, Takeshi Tamura. Japan, 1967, b&w, 98 min.


Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
1975/color/201 min. | Scr/dir: Chantal Akerman, w/ Delphine Seyrig.
A groundbreaking work of art cinema, Chantal Akerman’s sharply observed and compellingly restrained masterpiece recounts the seemingly innocuous household chores of single-mother Jeanne Dielman (Seyrig). But beneath the surface of her modest Belgian petit bourgeois behavior, recorded in real time by cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Akerman uncovers a feminist tragedy. ”A majestic movie! Akerman fills her movies with patterns and textures of ordinary life, the stuff other films never even notice. Today the film’s observational strategies—its long takes and scrupulous framing—practically amount to a lingua franca of international art film.”—Dennis Lim, The New York Times.


Joanna Priestley: Fighting Gravity
Los Angeles premiere
"The exquisite animated world of Joanna Priestley has been one of the best-kept secrets of the toon community... Undeniably original and hard to forget." Animation Magazine
Dubbed "the queen of independent animation" by Bill Plympton, Joanna Priestley unveils her new short Missed Aches (2009, 4 min.), a humorous rant about the need for proofreading. This can't-miss program for animation buffs also includes a series of animated gems representing the range of the artist's techniques: Voices (1985, 4 min.), Grown Up (1993, 7 min.), All My Relations (1990, 5 min.), Streetcar Named Perspire (2007, 6:30 min.), Utopia Parkway (1997, 5 min.), Candyjam (1988, 7 min.), She-Bop (1988, 8 min.), Pro and Con (1993, 9 min.), and Dew Line (2005, 4:30 min.). Mentored by Jules Engel at CalArts, Priestley had previously made 19 award-winning films about subjects as varied as relationships, plants, magic, menopause, abstraction and prison. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at The Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque, among other venues.
In person: Joanna Priestley 


JOHNNY CASH PRESENTS THE EVERLY BROTHERS SHOW (ABC, 7/8/70-9/16/70)
(1970) Directed by Marty Pasetta
The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, had guested on many music and variety shows by the time they became TV headliners with this summer-replacement series in 1970. Though it lasted only three months, "Johnny Cash Presents The Everly Brothers Show" rides high on the Everly's engaging personalities, gorgeous harmonies and rapport with fellow musicians. The Archive has compiled a selection of highlights from seven of the show's 10 broadcasts, including musical numbers by Don and Phil, Johnny Cash, Linda Ronstadt, Tina Turner and Stevie Wonder. This program also includes a compilation of the Everly Brothers pre-1970 TV appearances, featuring many of their early hits.
Executive Producer: Harold D. Cohen, Joe Byrne. Producer: Bernie Kukoff, Jeff Harris. Writer: David Pollock, Elias Davis, Mike Settle, Jeff Harris, Bernie Kukoff, Allyn Ferguson. Music: Jack Elliott. Host: Don Everly, Phil Everly. Beta-SP, A Halcyon Productions Presentation, 90 min.
IN PERSON: Dan Einstein, Television Archivist, UCLA Film & Television Archive. 


JOURNEY FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT: SOME FILMS BY KERRY LAITALA
This “spooktacular” program includes nine short 16mm films from visiting Bay-area filmmaker Kerry Laitala. “For every work [Laitala] produces, she places her fingers on the pulse of the piece and allows it to grow organically without a script or prescribed plan. She prescribes to the concepts laid down by Germaine Dulac, maker of surrealist films in the 1920’s, that cinema should not be enslaved by narrative and theatre, and is interested in expansive forms of media production. Laitala is deeply invested in the process of working directly with the film medium basically is involved in all aspects of production: shooting, developing, editing and sound design as well as optical printing much of material to further re-work it into another form.“  FILMMAKER KERRY LAITALA IN ATTENDANCE!


JOURNEY INTO FEAR, 1943, Warner Bros. 68 min. Dirs. Norman Foster and Orson Welles. American arms engineer Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) gets mixed up with gunrunners, Nazis and exotic women in WWII Turkey in this thrilling espionage drama. Although RKO executives interfered with this film almost as much as they did with Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, the wit of Welles’ and Cotten's script permeates every atmospheric frame. Co-stars include Welles favorites Agnes Moorhead, Everett Sloane and Ruth Warrick.


JULIA, 1977, 20th Century Fox, 117 min. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Jane Fonda plays Lillian Hellman in this autobiographical tale of Hellman’s friendship with Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), a radiant woman who indoctrinates Hellman into the 1930s European resistance movement. Jason Robards is superb in an Oscar-winning performance as Dashiell Hammett, as are Maxmillian Schell, Hal Holbrook and Meryl Streep in her feature film debut. Georges  Delerue’s lyrical score was nominated for an Academy Award.


JULIE DARLING
(from IMDB)
Isabelle Mejias, an under-recognized talent who deserved better material than she received in her brief acting tenure, performs strongly as Julie, a socially disunited young lady with a ravenous Electra complex who harbors malicious and dangerous resentment for anyone who threatens to compete for her father's affections in her delusional fantasy world. Hapless victims-to-be are her new step-brother and step-mom.  Dir. Paul Nicholas, Maurice Smith.  1983. 100 min.


KING OF THE ANTS
Ray needs somebody dead. Sean will do anything for money. A double-cross was never part of the deal. Bent on keeping Sean quiet after the killing. Ray's thugs hold him prisoner in the desert, ruthlessly beating him to destroy his memory. But with each blow, Sean is becoming a killing machine hell-bent on payback. The game is about to change. From Stuart Gordon, the director of Re-Animator. Starring Daniel Baldwin, Kari Wuhrer, and a film-stealing George Wendt (Norm from TV's Cheers).  DIRECTOR STUART GORDON IN PERSON!


THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI,  1948, Columbia, 87 min. The camera is the star in one of director Orson Welles’ most phantasmagorical films, a dazzling noir thriller about a seaman, a crippled lawyer and his homicidal wife pursuing each other through a "bright, guilty world" of infidelity, deception and murder. The hall of mirrors climax is riveting. With Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane.


LOBSTER MAN FROM MARS
(from IMDB)
Young film student tries to sell his weird movie to a desparate film producer who is in need of a tax write-off. The producer screens the film "Lobster Man From Mars". What follows is one of the most bizarre and funny film within-a-film sendups: Mars suffers from an air leakage, and send the dreaded Lobster Man to Earth to steal its air. The plot is foiled by a mad scientist, a girl, and an army colonel. The producer buys the movie, but it makes a huge profit and the producer is sent to jail, with the film student taking his place as the studio hot shot.


LOST HORIZON
Frank Capra's hypnotic and perversely appealing adaptation of James Hilton's novel.  Though the material seems foreign to Capra's style and sensibility, it is a work of lost innocence and spiritual redemption. A plane fleeing revolutionary China is highjacked to a mysterious valley in the Himalayas known as Shangri-La. Ronald Colman stars as a British diplomat who falls for Jane Wyatt. The expansive, post-modern sets and art direction were inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.


THE LOST WEEKEND
(from IMDB)
Don Birnam, long-time alcoholic, has been "on the wagon" for ten days and seems to be over the worst; but his craving has just become more insidious. Evading a country weekend planned by his brother Wick and girlfriend Helen, he begins a four-day bender. In flashbacks we see past events, all gone wrong because of the bottle. But this bout looks like being his last...one way or the other.  Billy Wilder drama w/ Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Philip Terry, Howard da Silva.  1945-Paramount


The Loved One
Savage and macabre, this funeral parlor satire, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh, is billed as “the movie with something to offend everyone.” With a screenplay by Terry Southern and starring James Coburn, Liberace, Roddy McDowell, James Gielgud, and Milton Berle.  (1965, 122 min., Dir. Tony Tichardson)


LOVE STREAMS
Underrated and impossible to see (except on a French import DVD), John Cassavetes’ LOVE STREAMS, based on a play by Canadian Ted Allan, confirms the unflagging auteurism that made his body of work one of the most unique and unified of post-Fifties cinema. A thematic summation of his twenty-five-year career, LOVE STREAMS is a rough and raw examination of love: its limits and falsities, its teetering into delusion, its power to destroy and to set free. Robert Harman, played with remarkable strength by Cassavetes (when Jon Voigt pulled out of the project mere weeks before shooting he was forced into the role, though suffering from the cancer that was to take his life) is a high-rolling, perpetually inebriated romance novelist with wildly unorthodox research methods living up in the Hollywood Hills in a house filled with a bevy of babes and a cross-section of Noah’s Ark. Gena Rowlands, preternaturally enthralling, is Sarah Lawson, Robert’s loopy sister whose recent divorce (from Seymour Cassel, in a re-casting of MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ) results in her estrangement from her daughter, and a lunacy that is equally tragic and absurd (note the GREED-like epic expansion of her hair). The depths of desperation are mined and contrasted through Robert’s ambivalence towards love and Sarah’s embarrassingly juvenile surfeit of affection. The performances are so naked that their fragility cuts through the film’s fiction, making LOVE STREAMS “a movie that gets better with every viewing” (Dennis Lim, The Village Voice). Not to be missed. – Andréa Picard 


L'Urlo
Drawing its title and a dash of inspiration from Allen Ginsberg's famous beatnik work of the same name, L'Urlo (aka The Howl) is easily the most freewheeling and unjustly ignored title in the Tinto Brass canon.  Tina Aumont (Torso) stars as Anita, a woman escaping the oppression of modern-day society in a globe-hopping travelogue that rivals anything by Alejandro Jodorowsky for sheer strangeness.  Mixing anti-war sentiments with a flurry of rapid-fire pop culture references, atrocity footage, abundant nudity, and even oddball comedy, this oft-censored psychedelic madhouse will blow away anyone ready to groove along with its unique, inspirational rhythms. With plenty of the auteur's own obsessions and stylistic flourishes, L'Urlo congeals into an avant-garde snapshot of late '60s global unrest that still resonates today. Groovy.
Dir. Tinto Brass, 1970, DigiBeta, 93 min.


MACBETH, 1948, Paramount, 107 min. Dir. Orson Welles. We’re very pleased to present this painstakingly restored (to its original form) version, led by the UCLA Film & TV Archives preservation officer Robert Gitt. The film had been cut by 21 minutes, re-recorded to "Americanize" the dialogue, and then rarely shown. Gitt tracked down the missing footage and original, Scottish-accented soundtrack, plus the Jacques Ibert overture and exit music. Critic Stanley Kauffman wrote about the restoration: "Whatever the details of Gitt’s job, Welles’ MACBETH is now a bold, exciting, innovative film." The innovations cannot be overstated. Longtime Welles collaborator Richard Wilson considered MACBETH "the greatest experimental American film ever made under the Hollywood studio system," and the restored footage includes a reel-long take. The studio was driven mad by the many retakes the 10-minute sequence required. Eight parts Welles to two parts Shakespeare, MACBETH was shot around Salt Lake City and features low-budget grandiosity, plus Welles in an intense, towering performance as the tormented Scots king, "one of the best elements of the film, thrilling and a bit poignant … In every one of the big moments, Welles rises to the heroic." (Kauffman) (Program notes courtesy James Quandt/Cinematheque Ontario.)


Macunaíma
(Brazil, 1969, 105 minutes, color, in Portuguese with English subtitles, MPAA rating: R)
Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the award-winning Brazilian classic based on the famous novel by Mario de Andrade. This farcical, irreverent satire follows anti-hero Macunaíma from the jungle to the city and back again. Not for the young or the faint of heart, the film uses mature themes, and sometimes graphic visuals, to poke fun at certain myths of Brazilian identity while critiquing the military regime in power at the time. 


THE MAD DOCTOR
(from IMDB)
A crazed physician marries a wealthy women and, with the help of his demented assistant, murders them for their money.  Tim Whelan thriller w/ Basil Rathbone, Ellen Drew, Martin Kosleck.  1941-Paramount


MASK
Based on a true story, Bogdanovich's account of a courageous teenager (Eric Stoltz) who suffers from a rare disease that enlarged and disfigured his head, and who searches for love and tries to get his mother (Cher) off drugs. Also stars Sam Elliott.


MAY, 2002, Lionsgate, 93 min. May (Angela Bettis) is a shy misfit who works at an animal hospital with extrovert Polly (Anna Faris). Polly seems interested in May, but May’s romantic feelings are directed at Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a local mechanic and horror buff who’s intrigued by May’s weirdness. When she gets a little too weird, however, Adam backs off -- and then the trouble really starts. Director Lucky McKee’s moving, and ultimately horrifying, character study combines elements of TAXI DRIVER, THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED and CARRIE but has a voice all its own.


MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ
A lonely museum curator (Gena Rowlands) finds unexpected bliss with an eccentric parking lot attendant (Seymour Cassel) in this highly original take on the romantic comedy from John Cassavetes. Quite different in tone from most of the director's work, though still consistent with the intensity and deeply personal quality that marks all his films. With Timothy Carey and Val Avery. "Cassavetes demands that comedy be played as passionately as drama" (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader).  Dir. John Cassavetes, 1971.


THE MOSQUITO COAST, 1986, Warner Bros., 117 min. Working from a Paul Schrader script adapted from the Paul Theroux novel, Peter Weir directs an uncompromising, complex character study of spiritual crisis teetering over the brink into madness. Harrison Ford gives one of his finest performances as an egocentric inventor determined to realize his utopian ideal in the backwaters of Central America, even if it destroys his family (Helen Mirren is his wife, River Phoenix his eldest son). A harrowing journey into a modern heart of darkness. 


MY WINNIPEG, 2007, IFC Films, 80 min. Ann’s last film role as filmmaker Guy Maddin's "mother" in the eclectic director's critically acclaimed "docu-fantasia." The Academy may have forgotten you on the Oscar telecast, Ann – but we haven't! Come celebrate the life of a unique actress and remarkable person! FREE ADMISSION!


NOCTURNE, 1946, Warner Bros., 88 min. Dir. Edwin L. Marin. Rumors of a remake have been swirling for years, and it’s obvious why: Jonathan Latimer’s script -- about the search for the murderer of a Hollywood composer -- is one of his best. George Raft gives one of his cannier (if one-note) performances as a mama’s-boy detective searching for mystery woman "Dolores," upstaged at every turn by terrific supporting players Joe Pevney, Lynn Bari, Virginia Huston and Mabel Paige (as his wiseacre mother!) A clever whodunit ripe with evocative 1940s Los Angeles ambience. NOT ON DVD Discussion between films with actress Julie Adams (SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS).


THE OCTOBER MAN, 1947, MGM Repertory, 98 min. British director Roy Ward Baker (DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK), working from a script by Eric Ambler (MASK OF DIMITRIOS), turned out this suspenseful and atmospheric psychological noir as his helming debut. Accident victim John Mills is released from the hospital after rehabilitation but still occasionally has blackouts. Given the green light to return to work by his doctor (Felix Aylmer), he goes to live in a weird, rambling old rooming house but remains wary of the other tenants. When a young girl (Kay Walsh) he loaned money to is found strangled in the nearby park, Mills becomes the prime suspect. Genuinely frightened that he might have done it in one of his "spells," Mills tries to resolve the mystery before the steel jaws of justice clamp shut. Joyce Greenwood is his loyal girlfriend, and Edward Chapman plays an officiously nasty neighbor who may know more than he lets on. NOT ON DVD.  New 35mm Print! 


OLD JOY
Beautifully minimalist film about two old friends (indie folkster Will Oldham and Daniel London) who reunite for a camping trip in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. They share a nostalgia for radicalism past, but London's father-to-be reality upsets the tenuous balance. Echoing Easy Rider, Old Joy plays like filmed transcendentalism, as the pair struggles to find freedom and a sense of identity in post-9/11 America. "Literate but not literary, crafted without ostentation, rooted in a specific place and devoted to small sensations...this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic" (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). Original score by Yo La Tengo. Based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond. An Official Selection at Sundance and an Independent Spirit Award nominee.  Dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2006, 76 mins.


Ordet
A profound and timeless inquisition into the powers and perils of spiritual faith, Ordet is a film only Carl Dreyer could make--seemingly simple in subject, yet enormously complex and fulfilling in its style and execution. Morten, a pious yet simple farmer, has three sons, each of whom represents a different point in the spectrum of religious belief. His eldest son is a thoughtful agnostic, while his second is a madman who has come to believe he is Jesus after suffering a breakdown in the seminary. When Anders, the third child, wishes to wed the daughter of a local fundamentalist, the two families collide in a debate about the role of religion and the nature of salvation. Though the drama is purely intellectual, Dreyer’s deliberate, sensitive treatments of performance, gesture and movement are almost ecstatic in their originality.
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955, 35mm, 126 min.


OUT OF THE PAST, 1947, Warner Bros., 97 min. Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas vie for the honor of being betrayed by Jane Greer, the most desirable of devil-dolls, in this quintessential noir masterpiece. A grubby private eye (Mitchum) is hired by a sleek gangster (Douglas) to rein in his fugitive frail. Complications ensue when dick falls for dame, hard. The serpentine plot is spiced with some of the wittiest wisecracks of the 1940s, rendered in the highest noir style by director Jacques Tourneur and cameraman Nicholas Musaraca. Co-starring Rhonda Fleming, Steve Brodie. Equal measures of poetry, poignancy and hardboiled fatalism seamlessly meld. The definitive film noir? You be the judge.


Pandora's Box
(Germany, 1929, 109 minutes, black/white)
Considered one of the greatest silent films ever made, Pandora’s Box tells the story of Lulu, a basically sweet-natured but amoral woman whose flirtations and affairs with a number of men (and at least one woman) lead to devastation. Beautiful and mesmerizing, Louise Brooks gives a complex and iconic performance as Lulu. Lushly photographed, with compelling performances from the entire cast, the film was directed by German master G. W. Pabst based on plays by Frank Wedekind. Co-starring Francis Lederer.


PASSAGE TO SUEZ, 1943, Sony Repertory, 72 min. André De Toth's great finale to the string of Lone Wolf spy thriller films, with Ann Savage as the femme fatale to Warren Williams eponymous series hero, in a new 35mm print!


PIT STOP
Overlooked among the slew of car and motorcycle films of the 1960s and early '70s, this low-budget action picture is one of the better drive-in films of its era. Brian Donlevy and a young Ellen Burstyn (credited here as Ellen McRae) star in a story of rivalry on and off the race track. "B" movie veteran Jack Hill (Switchblade Sisters) enlivens the film with some truly exciting racing footage.


PLEASURES OF THE FLESH (ETSURAKU), 1965, Janus Films, 104 min. On Martin Scorsese's list of essential Nagisa Oshima films. This bizarre satire of Japan's "economic miracle" follows a college grad pining for a woman for whom he has committed murder. In a twist, he ends up entrusted with money by a corrupt official and squanders it on prostitutes, planning on suicide when the cash runs out. With Katsuo Nakamura.  In Japanese with English subtitles.


POINT OF ORDER!
(1963) Directed by Emile de Antonio
Point of Order! is at once a landmark in political cinema and an incendiary aesthetic statement. Constructed entirely from CBS kinescopes of the controversial 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, the film famously eschewed both expert testimony and narration. Said a characteristically blunt Emile de Antonio, narration is "inherently fascist and condescending." But like the best of the concurrent direct cinema works, Point of Order!'s attitudes are constructed in its edit: a surface-level "objectivity" that is, in reality, brilliantly fabricated. The result is not just a searing indictment of McCarthyism, but an exposé of the fissures in American democracy as filtered through the new medium of television.
Point Films. Producer: Emile de Antonio, Daniel Talbot. Screenwriter: Emile de Antonio. Editor: Robert Duncan. 35mm, 97 min. 


POOR PRETTY EDDIE
(from IMDB)
In a decade full of memorable exploitation films, its a shame "Poor Pretty Eddy" doesn't have a larger cult following. Its really a lost gem from that great period of film-making. Its hilarious, demented, bizarre, and actually a disturbing portrait of racism. Whether it was included just to turn in a profit or not, the portrayal or racism in this film is much more disturbing than anything offered by Hollywood today. Its more effective than either "Crash" or "Monsters Ball" in my mind, because it refuses to manipulate the audience. Maybe I'm looking a bit too much into this however. For exploitation fans, it offers plenty of sleazy and depraved delights.
The film is much more well made than any other hicksploitation film. The acting in particular is great and all the characters are memorable. Leslie Uggams makes a great heroine, both strong and sympathetic. Shelley Winters, Slim Pickens, and especially Michael Christian (playing the Elvis impersonator from Hell) are all over-the-top and campy yet fascinating and completely fitting to the material. Ted Cassidy is also a standout as the one likable redneck of the bunch, offering a strong performance (one of the films few flaws is that it doesn't develop some of the characters to their fullest potentials). The dialog is hilariously politically incorrect. "Poor Pretty Eddy" is one of the 70s best exploitation films.  Dir. Chris Robinson, David Worth.  1975, 92 min.


POPULAR SCIENCE, VOL. J7-5 (1948)
Subjects include the influence of airplane design on cars, the use of flying discs to illustrate aerodynamics and the completion of the "Big Eye" at Caltech's Mt. Palomar observatory.  Preservation funded by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.  35mm, 10 min. 


Post-Punk Junk Mix Night
Here, we present a cornucopia of clips from the best of the rest, the stuff we didn't have enough time to show in the fest: Acceleration: Punk, the lost French take on the goings-on in England; Shellshock Rock, a snapshot of the rough-and-tumble scene in Belfast, Ireland; Under Underground, a late-'70s Kansas City document; classic performances from "So It Goes", the Granada TV culture program hosted by future Factory Records chief Tony Wilson; D.O.A., the snarling 1980 film that chronicles the British scene as if it were already dead; the vintage TV special The Year of Punk, a reactionary UK news report from '77; forgotten music videos, spiky-haired ephemera, and more.


THE PROWLER, 1951, 92 min. Dir. Joseph Losey. A perverse, provocative film about a corrupt cop (Van Heflin) who sexually dominates a married woman (Evelyn Keyes) for material gain. Oh yeah, he murders her husband in the process -- then marries her. And she ends up giving birth in a Nevada ghost town. Hands down, Keyes’ best performance. Heflin’s desperately pathetic pursuit of his skewed vision of the American Dream lingers in the memory – potent, haunting and disturbingly all-too-similar to headlines we see in the news today. A rediscovered masterpiece and not to be missed. "…a bawdy, daring story…builds to an exciting climax." – Variety NOT ON DVD.  Newly Restored 35mm Print!


PSYCHO FROM TEXAS
(from IMDB)
A drifter/hitman is hired by a local business man to kidnap the local oil baron. The hitman had been reared in squalor, suffering the abuses of his whoring mama. When the baron escapes his assistant must chase him while the hitman takes care of a few loose ends.  Dir. Jack Collins, Jim Feazell.  1975, 89 min.


QUEEN KELLY
With its restoration in 1985, Erich von Stroheim's eighth and final silent film emerged from over 50 years of obscurity to its first official release and worldwide acclaim. As such, it now ranks as one of the great treasures of film history. The collaboration of Gloria Swanson, then Hollywood's greatest star, and financier Joseph Kennedy, the film was near completion when, after three months of production, Swanson closed it down enraged by von Stroheim's excesses. The story, a gothic romance in which a convent girl is seduced by a Prince and inherits a brothel in Africa, is told with stunning visual effect.


THE RACKET, 1951, Warner Bros., 88 min. Dir. John Cromwell. Robert Ryan gives a ferocious performance as out-of-time gangster Nick Scanlon, squeezed between the cops (Robert Mitchum, as the most laconic police chief ever) and his own newly-dry-cleaned bosses who no longer do things "the Chicago way." Samuel Fuller’s original script, which stressed the commonality of crook and cop, was jettisoned by producer Howard Hughes, who’d made the original silent version of the film in 1928. William Wister Haines’ simplified storyline doesn’t distract from the fire (Ryan) and ice (Mitchum) battle between two of film noir’s biggest studs. Co-starring Lizabeth Scott, William Talman, William Conrad and Robert Hutton. 


THE RAPE OF EUROPA
Directed and produced by Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham, Bonni Cohen
“The Rape of Europa” tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II. 35mm. 117 mins.


READ MY LIPS, 2001, Magnolia Pictures, 115 min. Dir. Jacques Audiard. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos, winner of the Cesar 2001 Award for Best Actress for her performance here) is an intelligent but lonely and sexually frustrated secretary who suffers from loss of hearing. She hires unsophisticated ex-con Paul (Vincent Cassel) as her assistant, and soon the two start using each other’s particular talents for much more dangerous and criminal enterprises. A splendid thriller of passion and double-crossing that revives the noir spirit of Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville!


RED DAWN, 1984, MGM Repertory, 114 min. When the Soviets invade America and start World War III, a group of high school students (including Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, and Lea Thompson) pick up arms and wage guerrilla warfare against them. With a style that’s more Hemingway than RAMBO, writer-director John Milius uses his comic-book premise to explore very real notions of heroism and courage -- as Dave Kehr put it in the Chicago Reader, the film is a mystical and poetic "celebration of the moral victory of the noble warrior in defeat."  Discussion following with production designer Jack De Govia.


REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
(from IMDB)
An NYPD cop is 'killed' in an accident. The death is faked, and he is inducted into the organization CURE, dedicated to preserving the constitution by working outside of it. Remo is to become the enforcement wing (assassin) of CURE, and learns an ancient Korean martial art from Chiun, the Master of Sinanju. Based on the popular pulp series "The Destroyer," by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy.  Dir. Guy Hamilton, 1985, 121 min.


RESTORING THE LOS ANGELES AVANT-GARDE: Things are Always Going Wrong
This screening will showcase a broad range of work made between 1963 and 1980 by key L.A. artists. Featured works include two of Gary Beydler’s moving recompositions of local landscapes, David Wilson’s rarely seen Stasis, and Bruce Lane’s masterwork unc. Including films by Fred Worden, Chris Langdon, Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren, Diana Wilson, and Pat O’Neill. All films will be shown in their original 16mm format.


RESTORING THE LOS ANGELES AVANT-GARDE: Thom Andersen and Morgan Fisher
Perhaps best known for his acclaimed Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen also produced a vital body of work in the 1960s. His longtime friend, filmmaker and painter Morgan Fisher, has explored many facets of the film medium. Both filmmakers will be in attendance for a discussion.


RIDING THE BULLET
Based on a short story by Stephen King, this tale of the macabre stars Jonathan Jackson as Alan Parker, a University of Maine art school student who gets word that his mother (Barbera Hershey) has suffered a debilitating stroke. Hitchhiking more than 100 miles to visit her, Alan doesn't realize that it's Halloween and that the first driver to pick him up (David Arquette) is withholding a terrible secret.  DIRECTOR MICK GARRIS IN PERSON!


ROSES ARE RED, 1947, 20th Century Fox, 67 min. Dir. James Tinling. What happens when a newly elected D.A. (Don Castle) is kidnapped and replaced by an identical ex-con in league with a slimy political boss? The pace becomes frenetic with a host of terrific character actors –- Joe Sawyer, Charles McGraw, Charles Lane, Douglas Fowley, Paul Guilfoyle -- dictating the action. Also starring Peggy Knudsen and Patricia Knight with future stars Jeff Chandler and James Arness. An overlooked Sol Wurtzel-produced B gem located in the nether regions of the Fox vault by the Film Noir Foundation and the American Cinematheque! NOT ON DVD


THE RULES OF THE GAME
One of the great films of all time, a satirical anatomy of polite society, with a mixture of farce and bitterness. Set at a weekend party at the chateau of the rich Marquis de la Chayniest, the story concerns the complicated love intrigues among the aristocrats and the servants. But, one guest's refusal to play by society's rules sets off a tragic chain of events. "A single scene gives us more for our senses, emotions, and intellect than most whole movies do" (The New Yorker).  Dir. Jean Renoir, 1939.


RUN, TECATO, RUN (A.K.A. RUN, JUNKIE, RUN)
(1979) Directed by Efraín Gutiérrez
Run, Tecato, Run is the last of three low-budget social problem films by Efraín Gutiérrez--all restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Gutiérrez--the first Chicano feature director--not only starred in these films, but developed a grass-roots distribution strategy that allowed him to outperform Hollywood releases in several cities. Based on true incidents, Run, Tecato, Run depicts a junkie's efforts to get off heroin in order to reclaim and raise his daughter. Produced for $60,000, the film explores the connections between the Vietnam War, drug addiction and crime--juxtaposing these against Mexican American family, culture and spirituality.
Chicano Film Enterprises. Producer: Josephine Faz. Screenplay: Efraín Gutiérrez. Cinematographer: Josephine Faz, Efraín Gutiérrez. Editor: Efraín Gutiérrez. Cast: Efraín Gutiérrez, Arturo Castillo, Josie Gutierrez. 35mm, 86 min. 


RUTHLESS
(1948) Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Director Edward G. Ulmer's complex psycho-melodrama Ruthless is undoubtedly worthy of rediscovery. A flashback-structured tale of a sociopath's remorseless drive for station and wealth, Ruthless (often referred to as Ulmer's Citizen Kane) employs a relentless undercurrent of emotional violence. As relayed in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ulmer envisioned his feature as "a Jesuitic morality play… a very bad indictment against 100 percent Americanism--as Upton Sinclair saw it." The film's chilling, malevolent tone is personified in a starkly muted performance by lead--and frequent screen cad--Zachary Scott.
IN PERSON: Arianne Ulmer Cipes, daughter of director Edgar G. Ulmer.
Eagle-Lion Films. Based on a novel by Dayton Stoddart. Producer: Arthur S. Lions. Screenwriter: Alvah Bessie, S.K. Lauren, Gordon Kahn. Cinematographer: Werner Janssen. Editor: Francis D. Lyon. Cast: Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, Diana Lynn, Sydney Greenstreet, Lucille Bremer. 35mm, 104 min. 


SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR
(1948) Directed by Fritz Lang
Like many Hollywood woman's melodramas, Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond The Door begins with a plot twist: a young woman marries a man she barely knows and soon suspects he's trying to drive her insane. Gothic themes of madness, mixed with Freudian psychoanalysis were particularly en vogue in the late 1940s and the story here affords Lang the opportunity to indulge in expressionist shadowscapes as well as his long-standing interest in architecture and its metaphoric connotations. Ultimately, however, the film is less about psychoanalysis, than about Stanley Cortez's beautifully photographed post-modern pastiche of gothic and expressionist imagery.
Diana Productions, Inc. / Universal. Based on a novel by Rufus King. Producer: Fritz Lang. Screenplay: Silvia Richards. Cinematographer: Stanley Cortez. Editor: Arthur Hilton. Cast: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, Anne Revere, Barbara O'Neil, Natalie Schafer. 35mm, 99 min.


THE SERVANT, 1963, Stuart Lisell, 112 min. Director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter masterfully adapt Robin Maugham's novel into an unnerving and darkly humorous look at the dissolution of Britain’s upper class. A rich young playboy, Tony (James Fox, in a star-making role) decides he can’t get along without a valet when he strikes out on his own and makes the mistake of hiring Barret (Dirk Bogarde), a seemingly obsequious "gentleman’s gentleman." But Tony gets more than he bargains for when Barret slowly starts to exert his decadent, sinister influence, first installing his "sister" Vera (Sarah Miles) in an upstairs bedroom, then gradually usurping mastery of the household. With Wendy Craig. "…Bogarde, Losey and Pinter each stamp their personalities on this deliciously nasty film…Decades on from its release, THE SERVANT has lost none of its strangeness, nor its capacity to startle." – Channel 4 Film (U.K.) Film Critic Kevin Thomas will introduce the screening. 


SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
Sergei Paradjanov's masterpiece, a brilliant, operatic story of starcrossed lovers set against the ethnographic panorama of the Carpathian Mountains. The film is a visual tour-de-force of symbols, metaphor, lyrical photography and active camera, interweaving myth and narrative into an elliptical, seamless work of art. "...a deeply psychological film...one whose sophistication makes the Pavlovian tactics of Eisenstein's montage seem almost primitive by comparison" (David Cook, A History of Narrative Film). With Ivan Nikolaichuk and Larisa Kadochnikova.  Dir. Sergei Paradjanov, 1964.


SHANGHAI EXPRESS
(from IMDB)
Many passengers on the Shanghai Express are more concerned that the notorious Shanghai Lil is on board than the fact that a civil war is going on that may make the trip take more than three days. The British Army doctor, Donald Harvey, knew Lil before she became a famous "coaster." A fellow passenger defines a coaster as "a woman who lives by her wits along the China coast." When Chinese guerillas stop the train, Dr. Harvey is selected as the hostage. Lil saves him, but can she make him believe that she really hasn't changed from the woman he loved five years before?  Josef von Sternberg drama w/ Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook.  1932-Paramount


SHIRO FROM AMAKUSA (AMAKUSA SHIRO TOKISADA), 1962, Toei, 100 min. Hired to make a vehicle for star Hashizo Okawa, Nagisa Oshima settled on a true story: a 1637 rebellion of Christian peasants, oppressed by landowners and samurai alike, led by a teenage boy called Shiro. No surprise that Oshima fashioned a comment on contemporary rebellious Japanese youth. With Rentaro Mikuni. In Japanese with English subtitles.


Silent Light (Stellet Licht)
2007/color/136 min./Scope | Scr/dir: Carlos Reygadas
One of the most critically acclaimed films of the last year, Carlos Reygadas’s spellbinding third feature is set in rural Mexico where a small, agrarian Mennonite community who speak a medieval form of German (Plautdietsch), are suffering from a crisis of faith. An immersive, sensual, and ultimately haunting experience, Silent Night recalls the redemptive dramas of Carl Theodor Dreyer, though the film’s extraordinary widescreen images and hypnotic rhythms are unmistakably Reygadas’s own. “I was amazed by Silent Light—the setting, the language, the delicacy of the interactions between the people on screen, the drama of redemption. And most of all by Carlos Reygadas’s extraordinarily rich sense of cinema, evident in every frame. A surprising picture, and a very moving one as well.”—Martin Scorsese.


SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS, 1955, Universal, 96 min. The factual story of Boston’s legendary Brink’s heist is given its first cinematic treatment by director Joseph Pevney in this character-driven caper. Noir maestro Sydney Boehm’s screenplay delves into the psychology of the perpetrators, as well as the intricate mechanics of the hold-up. Tony Curtis heads a terrific cast that includes Julie Adams, George Nader, J.C. Flippen and, in his movie debut, Sal Mineo. NOT ON DVD


16mm NIGHT: GEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES
Film collector Russell Harnden is back with another screening of GEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES, a film series devoted to obscure, outdated, and orphaned films drawn from his personal collection of cartoons, educational films, industrial films, and other footage. Once again, a sampling of those wonderful educational films from the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s will be pulled from the vault and screened for an evening that’s sure to stimulate your mind and make you laugh at the same time. Join us and watch as sex, drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll lead to disaster (“Seduction Of The Innocent”), you’ll marvel as go-go dancers peddle the newest diet soft drink (“TAB Marketing Film”), and you’ll be shocked as an old-fashioned family stands in the way of a young girl’s fun (“You And Your Family”). There will be many more great titles as well. Beneath the unbelievably campy surfaces, these vintage films encapsulate the collective attitudes and convictions of past generations. Taken VERY seriously when these films were made, today they now serve as nostalgic reminders of our simpler, carefree school days. So please join us for a fun and “educational” evening! COLLECTOR/CURATOR RUSSELL HARNDEN IN ATTENDANCE!


SLEEP, MY LOVE, 1948, 97 min. Ever hear the title of the obscure album by eccentric musician Roy Harper, "Flat Baroque and Berserk"? Well, that about sums up director Douglas Sirk’s (LURED, SHOCKPROOF) bizarre psychological thriller-cum-Claudette Colbert vehicle (produced by silent film star Mary Pickford, no less). Colbert awakens on a speeding train unaware of how she got there, only remembering she had a heated argument with her hubby (Don Ameche) the night before. A strange, menacing psychiatrist (George Coulouris) seems to be stalking her, but no one else believes the man exists. Enter family friend Robert Cummings  (THE SABOTEUR, THE CHASE) who is slowly falling in love with the damsel in distress. Yet another cinematic riff in the GASLIGHT vein, Sirk employs his trademark subversion of bourgeois values and sexual mores. A rococo guilty pleasure that often comes off as a subtle spoof of the wife-driven-crazy subgenre. Look for Hazel Brooks as one of the most hilariously mercenary femmes fatales this side of Marie Windsor in THE KILLING. (Screened from a digital source.) NOT ON DVD


SMASH UP: THE STORY OF A WOMAN
(from IMDB)
Angie Evans, fast-rising nightclub singer, interrupts her career to marry struggling songwriter Ken Conway. When Ken lucks into a career as chart-topping radio crooner, Angie is forced into idle luxury which proves her downfall. Her potential alcoholism burgeons and Ken remains clueless concerning his responsibility for her problems.  Stuart Heisler drama w/ Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Eddie Albert, Marsha Hunt.  1947-Universal-Intl.


SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT
Ingmar Bergman's liveliest work concerns the sexual and romantic roundelay of four couples invited to a country mansion for a summer weekend. "The film is erotic and lyrical, full of blithe spirits brilliantly evoked" (James Monaco). With Gunnar Bjornstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson and Harriet Andersson.  Dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1955.


SMILEY FACE, 2007, First Look International, 88 min. Dir. Greg Araki. Struggling actress Jane (Anna Faris) makes the mistake of snacking on some cupcakes left behind by her shady roommate. Before long she realizes there was more in the cakes than just sugar, and she sets out on a bizarre day that includes dealing with an ill-tempered drug dealer, auditioning for a new part and bumming a ride from a guy (John Krasinski) who is utterly obsessed with her. Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy is the perfect showcase for Faris’ talents, as she embarks on a darkly hilarious odyssey reminiscent of AFTER HOURS. Discussion in between films with director Lucky McKee.


SMOOTH AS SILK, 1946, Universal, 64 min. Dir. Charles Barton. Treacherous thespian (Virginia Grey of HIGHWAY 301 and THE THREAT) manipulates her way upward through a whirl of multiple men until her bitchiness backfires. Did she dump one lover too many? An object lesson in the risks of boudoir career-climbing with overtones of ALL ABOUT EVE, complete with a slam-bang ending! Produced by Jack Bernhardt (DECOY, BLONDE ICE). Co-starring Kent Taylor, Milburn Stone, John Litel  and Jane Addams. NOT ON DVD


Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Steamboat Bill, Jr., equipped with a finale Keaton originally felt was shoehorned in by his producer, happens to provide the most memorable and thrilling climax of any of his pictures.  In a set-up similar to Our Hospitality, Buster plays a city boy moving back to the country to follow in family footsteps and become a steamboat captain.  Keaton fumbles his way through learning the job (of course), and in the process catches the eye of the daughter of his father's business rival.  The original planned ending had Keaton piloting his way through a Mississippi River flood, but due to a real-life flood tragedy that year, Keaton was forced to change it to a cyclone finale, and he used the sudden shift in plans as divine inspiration, concocting a barrage of expensive, inspired bits involving a town getting ripped in half, including the single most dangerous of his stunts: a building's facade falling down perfectly around him, as he emerges unscathed through a open window.  As Mark Bourne of DVDJournal.com says, it's "Keaton's signature image--a man alone, making the most of whatever the hell's going on around him".
Dirs. Charles Reisner & Buster Keaton, 1928, 35mm, 71 min.


STRAY DOG
A first-rate thriller in which Kurosawa has acknowledged his debt to Georges Simenon. Toshiro Mifune plays rookie Detective Murakami, who loses his gun only to discover that it has fallen into the hands of a killer. Terrified of losing his job, his search takes him into the Tokyo underworld, full of postwar shortages, "divinely hellish under Kurosawa's odd-angled lensing and staccato editing...Stray Dog is a Dostoevskian saga of guilt, and expiation, by association" (Pacific Film Archive).  Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949.


SUNDAY
(1961) Directed by Dan Drasin
Preservation funded by The Film Foundation
A stunning document of the police crackdown on a peaceful demonstration of folk singers in Washington Square Park in 1961.
35mm, 17 min.
IN PERSON: Dan Drasin (director of Sunday), Robert Duncan (editor of Point of Order!) and Douglas Kellner (UCLA professor and author of "Media Spectacle").


Sunday Afternoon with Chazz
Selected by Charles Irvin
In his drawings, videos and paintings, Charles Irvin takes absurdity to the extreme. For this special screening, Irvin presents his new video, Membrane Lane. Adopting the style of conspiracy theory documentaries such as Loose Change and Zeitgeist, Membrane Lane explores the origins and agenda of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a support group for individuals who claim to have been falsely accused of perpetrating child sexual abuse. Irvin mixes found footage with live action scenes, moving from highly-authoritative moments to silly and rebellious characters and scenarios, keeping everything slightly off balance. Irvin will also show a selection of earlier shorts, and the screening will be followed with an informal Q&A with the artist.


SURF II
(from IMDB)
Evil Nerd Menlo wants to get revenge on some surfers by selling a bad batch of soda called Buzz Cola which turns people into mutant zombies. Its up to Jocko, Chuck, Bob and their surfer buddies to save the day.  Dir. Randall M. Badat, 1984, 91 min.


SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, 1957, MGM Repertory, 96 min. Tony Curtis gives his greatest performance as cutthroat press agent Sidney Falco, willing to sell his soul to syndicated columnist Burt Lancaster for a few lines of copy, in director Alexander Mackendrick’s  dark, glittering gem of a movie -- one of the most frightening and seductive films of the 1950s. Brilliantly scripted by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, with stunning, mood-drenched B&W photography by the legendary James Wong Howe. 


Target Video Tribute Night
In 1977, San Francisco-based artist Joe Rees founded Target Video.  Target taped bands in its studio space, in clubs, at parties and on the streets of the world when music television was nonexistent.  With a vision and love for underground music and art, Target documented a truly explosive era, and in the process created a massive archive of punk rock performance footage that captured the scene in all its raw clumsiness and exuberance.  Joe Rees and Target co-conspirator Jackie Sharp will be in-person at the Cinefamily to present an epic, two-part program drawing from the seemingly bottomless Target library.  The first half is a Los Angeles- and California-centric program featuring classic footage of local heroes (The Screamers, Black Flag, TSOL) alongside lesser-known-but-equally awesome acts (Nervous Gender, BPeople, The Plugz).  The second half mines the Target library for its rarest nuggets, and features footage of bands that will make music nerds squeal with glee.  Ever heard of the Tuff Darts?  Silence Hospital?  Nash The Slash? This may be your one and only chance to ever see these clips, so this night is not to be missed.


THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
Tobe Hooper's cult film is a frightening piece of Americana, and one of the most influential and effective horror films created. This strange subversion of the slasher movie concerns five friends traveling through a flat, nondescript Texas wasteland who encounter a bizarre family of cannibals and are forced to struggle for their lives. With Marilyn Burns, Allen Danzinger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail and Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface.  DIRECTOR TOBE HOOPER IN PERSON!


THINGS TO COME, 1936, 100 min. Director William Cameron Menzies (INVADERS FROMMARS) directs H. G. Wells' apocalyptic sci-fi novel, with input from Wells himself. A World War that begins in 1940 lasts until 1966 when a plague hits the planet and destroy's half the population. Isolated primitive communities struggle through, but it soon becomes apparent a pocket of humanity has not only survived war and disease but has made enormous strides in techonological achievement and design. With Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson. (Screened from a digital source).


THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, 1968, 102 min. MGM Repertory, Dir. Norman Jewison. One of our favorite guilty pleasures from the 1960s: Steve McQueen stars as bachelor supremo Thomas Crown, who’s just pulled off the perfect multi-million-dollar bank heist -- until he runs into mondo-chic insurance investigator Faye Dunaway, who can’t decide whether she wants to make love to him or throw him in the slammer! Features some of the grooviest split-screen images ever, courtesy of director Jewison and co-editor Hal Ashby, with beautiful cinematography by Haskell Wexler. Academy Award winner for Best Song, the haunting "The Windmills of Your Mind," by Michel Legrand and Alan & Marilyn Bergman.


THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT
Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate) made his directorial debut with this unusual crime caper about a veteran thief (Clint Eastwood) who takes a young drifter (Jeff Bridges) under his wing as he joins up with some misfit colleagues to retrieve the loot from a daring robbery committed years earlier. A well-made "buddy" film with unexpected moments of lyricism and melancholy. Bridges' performance earned him an Oscar nomination.  Dir. Michael Cimino, 1974.


The Time Machine (1960)
H.G. Wells' classic novel was adapted in this enduringly popular film directed by George Pal. Rod Taylor is the time traveler who guns his machine into the distant future only to find a civilization enslaved by subterranean mutants. The Oscar winning special effects and finely detailed set design make this film a joy to view. Also starring Yvette Mimieux and Alan Young.


TOUCH OF EVIL, 1958, Universal, 111 min. Orson Welles’ hallucinatory, off-kilter masterwork stars Charlton Heston in one of his finest roles, as a Mexican policeman trapped on the wrong side of the border, where a corpulent, corrupt cop (Welles) tries to stop him from digging into the past. Janet Leigh  co-stars as Heston’s newlywed wife, menaced by leather-clad Mercedes McCambridge  and her gang of juvenile delinquents. Co-starring Akim Tamiroff, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Calleia. We’re screening the restored version, reconstructed in 1998 according to Welles’ original notes.


THE TRAIN
Director John Frankenheimer delivers a World War II drama about an effort to stop retreating Nazis from leaving France with stolen art treasures in 1944. Burt Lancaster stars as a courageous French railroad inspector and member of the French Resistance who is determined to thwart the latest mission of Col. Von Waldheim (Paul Scofield). With Jeanne Moreau, Albert Remy, Wolfgang Preiss and Michel Simon as the stubborn engineer Papa Boule. No models or processed shots were used in the making of this exciting film in which several camera units were destroyed in crashes and explosions. Frankenheimer replaced original director Arthur Penn at Lancaster's request.  Dir. John Frankenheimer, 1964, 140 mins.


THE TRIAL, 1962, Milestone Films, 118 min. Franz Kafka’s classic novel of paranoia and conspiracy seems tailor-made for Orson Welles’ direction. A labyrinthine, deliciously satiric, nightmare vision of a man (Anthony Perkins) accused of an unspecified crime that emerges as a subtle allegory of Welles’ seven own Catch 22-tribulations working in the film industry. With a dream cast that includes Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Akim Tamiroff and Welles himself.


TRYING THE HAND OF GOD
For the second event of their three-month Engagement Party
residency, Knifeandfork explores the nature of the media-perpetuated
chance moment. “Trying the Hand of God” is a carefully choreographed
continuous reenactment of the infamous illegal, but not penalized,  “Hand
of God” soccer goal from the 1986 International Federation of
Associated Football (FIFA) World Cup. The performance will be staged
on a recreation of Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium, constructed
within the confines of the MOCA Sculpture Plaza. A limited number of
audience members will have the opportunity to play the role of Diego
Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend who scored the controversial
goal against England during the quarterfinals, eventually leading his
team to win the match and the tournament. 
Live announcing by Enrique Gutierrez of KMEX/Univision 34 
Performance and video direction by Mike Cahill 
Performances by Josh Anderson, Scott Davis, Kenny Garay, Oscar
Garay, Elmer Garcia, and Brian Shim 
DJ set by Wendy Yao 
Blogging by Guthrie Lonergan
Tacos by Kogi
Cash bar  


200 Motels
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention get inventive in this free-for-all film that features Ringo Starr as Frank's twin. Theodore Bikel wears an impressive uniform, and an animated featurette on proper dental hygiene is presented along with lots of music and bizarre humor. Made for those who haven't got the money for drugs.  Dir. Frank Zappa/Tony Palmer, 1971, 98 mins.


TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE, 1945, Warner Bros., 68 min. A taxi-driving dame (Ann Rutherford) gets more than she bargained for when she picks up a foggy fare (Tom Conway) who can’t remember where he’s going or where he’s been. Wouldn’t you know it: He turns out to be the prime suspect in a sensational murder! And, like all good cabbies, she helps him hunt the real killer! Pure B-movie hokum, injected with vim and verve by a terrific supporting cast, including a gorgeous 20-year-old Jane Greer. Director Anthony Mann shows flashes of the brilliance to come while conforming to the cornball constraints of the B-movie universe. NOT ON DVD.  Discussion between films with actress Ann Rutherford.


Urgh! A Music War
The legendary concert film Urgh! A Music War is the cinematic equivalent of a tried-and-true mixtape: a non-stop whirlwind of great bands spanning the new wave/punk gamut. In 1980, director Derek Burbidge filmed jam-packed bills in L.A., NYC, London and France, to capture in a Woodstock-ian presentation the bands on the cutting edge of rock and synthpop: Devo, Dead Kennedys, X, The Cramps, Oingo Boingo, Gang of Four, The Police, Wall of Voodoo, Klaus Nomi, Gary Numan, OMD, Pere Ubu, Magazine and more. Rarely were these bands--some of whom lasted a very short time--afforded the full lavish film shoot treatment, so Urgh! is a rare close-up peek at some of the most furious bands of the era at the peak of their powers, as well as an intriguing time-capsule snapshot of the era's rock fans, decked out in period gear and acting extra-wacky for the camera. Dir. Derek Burbidge, 1982, 35mm, 122 min.


Vampyr
Though Hitchcock called it “the only film worth seeing twice”, the mysteries of Vampyr couldn’t be untangled in a thousand viewings. Dreyer’s first sound film set a precedent for psychological horror, deploying mood and technical wizardry to render the strange logic of a nightmare on the screen. The threadbare narrative follows Allan Grey, a wandering explorer type, whose stop in the countryside turns into a mystery of shadowy murders, beautiful madwomen, and supernatural possession. Paced at the speed of pooling blood and seemingly shot in Ghost-O-Vision (Dreyer and his cinematographer intentionally fogged their images), Dreyer’s camera explores the uncanny crannies of its old French manse setting with a ghoulish fluidity. Like a dream, the images often dislodge the plot entirely, as Dreyer’s camera wanders away from the immediate action to explore a world of impossible sights and sounds, impeccably realized glimpses of a strange and horrifying dimension just outside our field of vision.
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932, 35mm, 75 min.


VIOLENCE AT NOON (HAKUCHU NO TORIMA) 1966, Janus
Films, 99 min. Dir. Nagisa Oshima. "One of Oshima's greatest." -- Noël Burch. A chilling crime film based on a true story about a serial killer who terrorized 1950s Japan. After a youth commune collapses, a psychotic drifter encounters a co-worker from the collective who is now
working as a maid. She falls under his spell, with the police hot on his trail. With Kei Sato. In Japanese with English subtitles.


WALK SOFTLY, STRANGER, 1950, Warner Bros., 81 min. Dir. Robert Stevenson. Charming gambler Joseph Cotten hides out in a cozy rooming house in a small town after absconding with a great deal of mob money. Cotten grows fond of his maternal landlady (Spring Byington) in spite of himself, and his softening of character accelerates after he meets and falls for wheelchair-bound Alida Valli (THE PARADINE CASE). But just as things start to get idyllic, Cotten’s weaselly partner Whitey (Paul Stewart) shows up wanting his share of the dough. The pair’s disintegrating, dysfunctional friendship exacerbates Cotten’s predicament, and it soon becomes clear the mob knows where he is. "…evokes the atmosphere of disillusionment and cynicism intrinsic to so many American films of the period." – Alternative Film Guide NOT ON DVD


WENDY AND LUCY
Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is driving to Ketchikan, Alaska, in hopes of a summer of lucrative work at the Northwestern Fish cannery, and the start of a new life with her dog, Lucy. When her car breaks down in Oregon, however, the thin fabric of her financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and Lucy. Wendy and Lucy addresses issues of sympathy and generosity at the edges of American life, revealing the limits and depths of people's duty to each other in tough times. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, 2008, U.S.A., 35mm, 80 mins.


WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, 1956, Warner Bros., 100 min. Dir. Fritz Lang. An all-star cast literally boozes its way through this prescient tale of newspaper office politics. When a young comic-book-crazed delinquent (John Drew Barrymore -- yes, Drew’s dad) starts molesting and murdering women, the new head of the Kyne media empire (Vincent Price) offers the post of editorial director to the underling who catches the killer. The race is on between Dana Andrews, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell and James Craig. But never count out Ida Lupino. A quirky, off-kilter film that dismisses the manhunt for the murderer to focus on the backstabbing among "friendly" colleagues. The star-studded rogue’s gallery also includes Rhonda Fleming (as Price’s adulterous wife) and Howard Duff. Warning: There is so much drinking in this film you may later dream up a hangover. NOT ON DVD


WINCHESTER '73
A major western with James Stewart involved in hunting down a man and his stolen gun through a series of inter-related episodes. With a great shootout among the hills at the end, Leonard Maltin credits this film with reviving the popularity of Westerns during the 1950's. With Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea.


Windows
Cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather trilogy, Manhattan) got his one shot at directing and inadvertently ended up appalling an entire minority with Windows. This nihilistic guilty pleasure stars a confused-looking Talia Shire as a single gal living in a NYC tenement, and velvety-throated Elizabeth Ashley as her scary dyke neighbor who's so obsessed with her that she hires a scumbag cabbie to rape Talia and tape record the whole ordeal--in the hopes that Talia will crack up and seek a little lovin' consolation. Things go from sick to worse when Talia starts doing the nasty with the policeman helping her out, turning our villainess into a full-blown psycho. Basic Instinct ain't got nothin' on this one, baby. Nominated for five Razzies during the award's inaugural year, Windows is a slick, sick lesbian chick flick.  Dir. Gordon Willis, 1980, 35mm, 96 min. 


WITNESS, 1985, Paramount, 112 min. Dir. Peter Weir. Harrison Ford shines in one of his best dramatic roles as a Philadelphia cop who hides out in an Amish community – and finds himself falling in love with widow Kelly McGillis. The film also sports the feature film debut of actor Viggo Mortensen in a small supporting role. "The visual look [of WITNESS] comes very much from Flemish and German painting." – Peter Weir.


WOMAN NEXT DOOR (LA FEMME D’Á CÔTÉ), 1981, Janus Films, 106 min. Dir. François Truffaut. Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) was living happily with his wife Arlette and his son Thomas. One day, a couple, Philippe and Mathilde Bauchard (Fanny Ardant), moves into the next house. This is the accidental reunion of Bernard and Mathilde, who had a passionate love affair years ago. The relationship revives... A somber study of human feelings.


WOMAN ON PIER 13, 1949, Warner Bros., 73 min. Dir. Robert Stevenson. Howard Hughes developed this oddity (originally entitled I MARRIED A COMMUNIST) as a litmus test to sniff out Reds in the ranks of RKO. Robert Ryan, sympathetic for a change (and in real life an ardent lefty), stars as a San Francisco businessman whose past association with the "party" threatens his success and life. With Thomas Gomez and William Talman as commie comrades, the "party" looks like a gaggle of garden-variety gangsters straight out of a 1930s Warner Bros. melodrama. Laraine Day (THE LOCKET) is Ryan’s harried spouse. An amazing example of the anti-Communist propaganda of the early 1950s, although Hughes’ incessant tinkering led to the film being released too late to catch the wave of Red hysteria -- hence its title change and subsequent re-release. NOT ON DVD.  New 35mm Print!


Zoe Beloff: Conjuring Specters
"Beloff exists as the consummate time traveler, floating between the two eras of cine-technology." Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film
New York artist Zoe Beloff's unique and mesmerizing films are philosophical toys-objects with which to think. Her work has especially focused on "phantoms," on images that are "not there," and on a precinematic version of the virtual-created by means of a stereoscopic Bolex camera that produces spectral 3-D images. Shadowland Or Light From The Other Side (2000, 32 min., 3-D 16mm, b/w), starring Kate Valk of The Wooster Group, locates a link between Victorian spiritualism and the birth of cinema in late-19th century "Ghost Shows," where actors interacted with magic lantern slides and stereoscopic views. Charming Augustine (2004, 40 min., 3-D 16mm film, b/w) is an experimental narrative inspired by one of Charcot's most famous patients at the Salpétrière in turn-of-the-century Paris. It explores connections between photographic documentation of hysteria and the prehistory of narrative film: Augustine captivates the doctors with her theatrical and photogenic hysterical attacks and in the process becomes a star-the "Sarah Bernhardt" of the asylum.
In person: Zoe Beloff