The Screengrab : busby berkeley

The Rep Report (February 6 - 13)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Forum's lollapallooza four-week series "Breadlines & Champagne" lays out an awesome spread of 1930s Hollywood entertainments that might come in handy if you're looking to get some tips on how to handle the death of your stock portfolio with a little grace. In Guy Maddin's nostalgia-drenched The Saddest Music in the World (2003), a brash player in the contest to select the titular song promises to deliver "sadness with some sass and pizazz", and that's how the best early talking pictures responded to hard times, whether it took the form of mixing romance with wisecracks and slapstick (as in My Man Godfrey and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living), hard-boiled tabloid melodrama (such as Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Three on a Match with a coke-crazed Ann Dvorak), and such varieties of escapism as the Mae West vehicle I'm No Angel and the bug-eyed Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933. Say hello to the bad guy with Little Caesar and the original Scarface; proclaim Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with an exuberant Al Jolson, and show up every Tuesday to participate in the free drawings as Film Forum revives the Depression tradition of Bank Night. These movies are reminders of a time when Americans saw themselves as all being in the soup together and managed to shave enough off the hard-won grocery money to come out to see movies that addressed their problems, both personal and societal, with an insouciant, nose-thumbing attitude and a can-do spirit. Of course, those Americans never dreamed that their great-grandhildren would someday queue up to pay twelve dollars for a movie ticket.

From February 6 through the 19th, Film Society of Lincoln Center remembers "Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema". Long a forgotten and even much-mocked figure, Micheaux has been unearthed in recent years as a pioneering African-American movie mogul and showman, a writer turned filmmaker who began his career with a film based on his own successful novel, The Homesteader. "Unhappily," the theater notes, "few of the films by Micheaux or his contemporaries—Spencer Williams, Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, William Alexander, and many others—have survived in pristine condition. The scratched, sometimes faded copies we’ll be showing are, for the moment, all that is available." But the fact that watching some of these movies now is like seeing something freshly recovered from a tomb may only enhance the alternative-universe-eye view that is part of their incalcuable historical value. Mixed in are some of the earliest attempts by white Hollywood to utilize the talent of black performers, including King Vidor's Hallelujah and Vincente Minnelli's endlessly enjoyable 1943 Cabin in the Sky, a pedestal to the sky-high talent of such entertainers as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the peerless song and dance man John W. Bubbles.

The Rep Report (January 9 - 15)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A. has long been one of the best-hidden features from the director's '60s golden age. Godard claimed the "Richard Stark" (i.e., Donald Westlake) novel The Jugger as the credited basis for the script, but nobody bothered to get Westlake's permission or cut him a check, with the result that the writer managed to get a proper release of the film in the U.S. squashed. So its appearance at Film Forum for two weeks starting today counts as big news even for the Forum, which has taken to showcasing Godard's color classics from his Pop Art phase at the rate of about one a year. The funny thing is, the movie's connection to Westlake might be just another admiring reference point in a movie that features characters named "Donald Siegel" (for the veteran b-movie director who would ultimately hit paydirt with the original Dirty Harry and "David Goodis" (for the crime novelist whose Down There provided the basis for Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player), as well as villains named "Richard Nixon" and "Robert McNamara", and that Godard claimed was his attempt to remake The Big Sleep with his then-wife and muse Anna Karina in the Bogart role. (Her male co-star is Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Don Siegel.) This splashy affair, described by J. Hoberman as "more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-20th-century pop than any movie Godard made before or would make after," also features a cameo by Marianne Faithfull, singing "As Tears Go By" in the first full bloom of her misspent youth. It's being shown in a gleaming new 35-mm. print.

The first half of Film Society of Lincoln's Center' annual "Dance on Camera Festvial" is underway and runs through this weekend, with the usual invaluable collection of performance shorts and features and documentaries, including a tribute to Busby Berkeley that makes room for a screening of his 1943 surreal choreography classic The Gang's All Here. The series concludes next weekend with the Indian musical The Chosen One/Ishanou and an American Masters documentary profile of Jerome Robbins.

Related Stories: Donald Westlake, 1933 - 2008

DVD Digest for September 16, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week is a busy one for lovers of classic cinema- to say nothing of the folks at Warner Home Video.

DVD(s) of the Week: Continuing their ongoing commitment to spotlight film history’s greatest filmmakers, the good folks at Criterion fill a glaring hole in the DVD market with this week’s release of three classics by Max Ophüls- La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame De…. These three films, all made at Ophüls’ artistic and commercial peak, make a lovely introduction to the man’s work, with all the continental sophistication, exquisitely-wrought melodrama, and lavish production values that made his reputation. And stars? You bet- between the three films, you’ll find Jean Gabin, Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, and Simone Simon. If you can only shell out for one disc, go with Earrings, whose DVD features not only scholarly commentary and a number of featurettes (including an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, whose complex camera movements were clearly inspired by Ophüls’ work), but also a new printing of the source novel, Louise de Vilmorin’s Madame De…. But really, they’re all worth your money. Now all we need is a Region 1 DVD of Letter From an Unknown Woman…

In addition, this week is a banner occasion for musical fans, led by a double dose of Oscar-winning Vincente Minnelli titles, An American in Paris and Gigi (both Warner), each presented in snazzy new Two-Disc Special Editions. There’s also Warner’s The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, which includes Gold Diggers of 1937, Gold Diggers in Paris, Hollywood Hotel and Variety Show. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner); young Tom Cruise and his Ray-Bans in Risky Business 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Ryko Distribution), which was spotlighted last week by our very own Phil Nugent; Glenn Close in the live-action 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians (Disney); and The Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 (Fox).

This week’s roster of recent releases on DVD is headed up by The Wachowski Brothers’ financial and critical bomb Speed Racer (Warner, also Blu-Ray), which I believe is still the most underappreciated movie so far this year. Other recent titles coming to DVD include: Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Al Pacino in 88 Minutes (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Mike Myers making an ass of himself again in The Love Guru (Universal, also Blu-Ray); the surprisingly affecting Young@Heart (Fox); David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels (Warner); the acclaimed documentary Constantine’s Sword (First Run); and two direct-to-DVD titles, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (Disney) and Another Cinderella Story (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s new TV on DVD titles include: Chuck Season 1 (Warner); Criminal Minds Season 3 (Paramount); Dirty Sexy Money Season 1 (Disney); My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox); Private Practice Season 1 (Disney); and Pushing Daisies Season 1 (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only titles, this week brings 1408 (Weinstein), Hulk (Universal), Madagascar (Paramount), The Mist (Weinstein), and Shrek the Third (Paramount).

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent