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25th Anniversary Screenings of BELLE EPOQUE September 18 in Glendale, Pasadena, and West LA.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest offering in their monthly Abroad program with 25th anniversary screenings of the American release (and Oscar winner) of the delightful Spanish comedy BELLE EPOQUE. The Academy Award winner for foreign-language film will play at three Laemmle locations: West Los Angeles, Glendale, and Pasadena on September 18.

Starring Penelope Cruz (Oscar winner for Vicky Christina Barcelona) in only her second film, the period pastorale is set in 1931 with the beginning of the disruptive Spanish Civil War, chronicling the amorous adventures of a young Army deserter, Fernando (Jorge Sanz), who seeks refuge in the country house of a reclusive old anarchist painter, Manolo (Fernando Fernan Gomez). After finding employment as the household cook, Sanz also finds his carnal appetites stimulated by Gomez’ four daughters, played by Maribel Verdu, Ariadna Gil, Miriam Diaz-Aroca, and Cruz. As the youngest of the siblings, Cruz impatiently awaits her turn as the amorous partner of Sanz. As the sexual games seemingly reach a climax, the return of the opera singer family matriarch from a world tour with her manager-lover brings the plot to a boil.

Writer-director Fernando Trueba (co-scripting with Rafael Azcona and Jose Luis Garcia Sanchez) concocts the right recipe of food and sex, with a soupçon of political commentary, and the result charmed the Academy, audiences, and critics of the day.

Roger Ebert noted how the film celebrated sensuality and the human body: “Here is a film so inviting you would love to sit in the sun with old Manolo and his friend the priest and talk about the great matters of life.”

Leonard Maltin found the film a “delightfully earthy, cheery comedy.”

The Washington Post enjoyed the “sun-soaked lyricism” and found the performances ingratiating, extolling the film as a “recipe for sensual self-expression.”

Upon receiving the Oscar, Trueba paid tribute to his inspiration in his acceptance speech, “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him, but I just believe in Billy Wilder, so …thank you, Mr. Wilder.”

Our 25th anniversary presentation of BELLE EPOQUE screens on Wednesday, September 18th at 7pm in Glendale, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP

EASY RIDER 50th Anniversary Screening and Tribute to Peter Fonda

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a tribute to the late Peter Fonda with a screening of his landmark movie, EASY RIDER on Saturday, September 7th at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills.

When the movie opened to huge grosses in the summer of 1969, it changed the course of Hollywood, setting the entire industry on a quest for films that would appeal to the same younger generation that had embraced the ultimate motorcycle movie made by Fonda and director Dennis Hopper. It is a film that many have cited as their inspiration for getting their own motorbike, some going as far as to get it transported to them across the country with CarsArrive Auto Relocation and similar services. That’s the sway that the movie has. Easy Rider, produced and co-written by Fonda, was made for less than $400,000 and grossed $60 million, a feat that no other youth movie was ever able to match. It also earned two Academy Award nominations, for the original screenplay by Fonda, Hopper, and Terry Southern, and a best supporting actor nod for Jack Nicholson, an actor in B-movies who was propelled to the A-list as a result of Easy Rider.

Fonda, Hopper, and Nicholson knew each other from the low-budget movies made by Roger Corman and American International Pictures in the late 1960s. Hopper co-starred with Fonda in Corman’s The Trip, a movie about an LSD trip which was written by Nicholson. Peter had the idea of taking the character of the motorcycle-driving outlaw that he had played in Corman’s The Wild Angels and inserting him into a major studio film. Nevertheless, Columbia Pictures was nervous about financing Easy Rider and only got fully behind the film after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and began to generate box office heat.

The picture is essentially a road trip movie, in which Hopper’s Billy and Fonda’s Wyatt (also known as Captain America) ride their motorcycles from California to New Orleans, where they hope to celebrate Mardi Gras. They finance the trip by selling cocaine, a detail that suggests the film was far from an idealized portrayal of rebellious American youth. On their travels they spend time on a Southwestern farm as well as a hippie commune. They meet a young lawyer played by Nicholson when they are all jailed in a Southern town. He agrees to join them on their motorcycle journey, which takes a darker turn as they encounter Southern bigots who disapprove of the young heroes’ freewheeling style.

The supporting cast includes Karen Black, Toni Basil, Luke Askew, and Robert Walker Jr. Up-and-coming cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs helped to create the vivid images of rural Americana, and the groundbreaking rock score incorporated songs by The Band, the Byrds, Steppenwolf, and Jimi Hendrix. Editor Donn Cambern had put together the rough cut of the film to many of those songs, and the filmmakers retained many of them in the final cut.

Although the film enshrines the young heroes, it is not uncritical. Their use of marijuana and LSD is honestly depicted, and when Fonda’s Wyatt sums up their journey near the end of the film, he offers a memorably hard-edged judgment: “We blew it.” Nevertheless, the darkest forces in the film are the rednecks who resent the freedom of these easy riders. Writing at the time, John Mahoney of The Hollywood Reporter said, “Easy Rider is very likely the clearest and most disturbing presentation of the angry estrangement of American youth to be brought to the screen.” Writing several decades later, Chuck Bowen of Slant drew a connection to the present: “This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosis of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed.”

Most reviews in 1969 were enthusiastic. Life magazine’s Richard Schickel called the film “a loose, lovely-to-look-at, often laughing, often lyric epic.” Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times added, “Fonda and Hopper give immense performances.” The film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1998.

Join us for our 50th anniversary screening and tribute to Peter Fonda at 7:30pm on Saturday, September 7th at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Special guests to be announced. Tickets are available here.

Format: DCP

Philippe de Broca’s THAT MAN FROM RIO 55th Anniversary Screenings in Glendale, Pasadena, and West LA.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present this month’s installment in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program: one of the most popular and entertaining foreign films of the 1960s, Philippe de Broca’s action romp, THAT MAN FROM RIO.

De Broca, the director of intimate, character-driven films like The Five-Day Lover, shifted gears with this bigger-budget comic thriller. Two top stars of French cinema, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Francoise Dorleac (the sister of Catherine Deneuve who died tragically in an auto accident just three years later), added to the film’s allure.

The action begins when Dorleac is kidnapped as part of a museum heist of a valuable statuette, and Belmondo follows her kidnappers to Brazil to save her life and find the treasure. There he battles international criminals, assassination attempts, and even a hungry crocodile on the Amazon.

The film was designed in part as a spoof of the James Bond movies that were catching fire all around the world. De Broca’s tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre, along with a series of spectacular action set-pieces, led to box office success wherever the film was shown. The film was also nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. De Broca wrote the script with Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Daniel Boulanger. Veteran actors Jean Servais and Adolfo Celi co-star.

Along with the wit of the script and the skill of the performers, the film benefited from lush cinematography (by Edmond Sechan) of Paris, Rio, Brasilia, and other South American locations. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther acknowledged the film’s homage to silent comedy: “Jean-Paul Belmondo is dandy as a fast, fearless modern-day Harold Lloyd.” He added that de Broca “uses the actual locations so vividly and artistically that they generate a kind of excitement that blends superbly with the dazzle of the plot.”

The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann also praised de Broca: “he has wit, tenderness, dexterity, a superb eye for composition and color, a prodigious sense of rhythm and movement, a perfect command of the medium.” Time magazine noted that the film was “shrewdly calculated to make the customer laugh out loud at all the lousy movies he has ever seen and at the same time have a wild and wonderful time watching them again.”

Join us for a perfect piece of lighthearted summertime entertainment with two of the most engaging international stars ever to grace the screen. Belmondo remained at the center of French film culture for decades, and de Broca went on to direct one of the most popular of all arthouse movies, King of Hearts.

Our 55th anniversary presentation of THAT MAN FROM RIO screens on Wednesday, August 21st at 7pm in Glendale, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP

Pop Culture Humorist Charles Phoenix Presents the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Classic THE LONG, LONG TRAILER.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series, partnered with retro pop culture humorist Charles Phoenix, present a 65th anniversary screening of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz comedy classic THE LONG, LONG TRAILER, directed by Vincente Minnelli.

The Special Event evening features Phoenix with his retro slide show tribute to the film, its iconic stars, and the colorful history of travel trailers.

THE LONG, LONG TRAILER (1954) is a comedy showcasing the talents of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz at the height of their popularity. MGM studio executives questioned the box office viability of a movie with the married couple since they could be seen every week in the highest-rated show on television, I Love Lucy.

Veteran producer Pandro S. Berman enlisted director Minnelli (Meet Me in St. Louis, Father of the Bride, An American in Paris, Gigi) and screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (The Thin Man, It’s a Wonderful Life, Father of the Bride, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) to concoct a movie from the best-selling memoir-novel of Clinton Twiss about his trailer travels with his wife.

The filmmakers lightly satirized the mid-century American ethos, marriage, and conspicuous consumption, offering American audiences what they couldn’t get at home on their black-and-white TV sets – Lucy and Desi in glorious Technicolor in essentially a travelogue of California.

The film about newlyweds Nicky (Arnaz) and Tracy (Ball) on their honeymoon trip trailer-adventures utilizes reliable character actors Marjorie Main, Keenan Wynn, and Moroni Olsen along the way, and saturated color cinematography by multiple Oscar winner Robert Surtees. The film was a box office smash in its day, vindicating the commercial instincts of the filmmakers. Leonard Maltin calls it “an enduringly popular slapstick comedy…almost an I Love Lucy episode on wheels.”

Charles Phoenix, the “Ambassador of Americana,” is known for his live comedy retro slide show performances, JOYRIDE videos, field trip tours, “test kitchen” concoctions and colorful coffee table books (Addicted to Americana, Southern Californialand, Americana the Beautiful), all celebrating America’s classic and kitschy pop culture past and present.

This Special Event of the Anniversary Classics Series is presented on Saturday, August 17 at the vintage jewel box theater, the Ahrya Fine Arts, a perfect showcase for retro humorist Phoenix. Come join the celebration of this mid-twentieth century comedy, its iconic stars, and the history of travel trailers in Kodachrome. Festive attire is encouraged!

Click here for tickets.

Sixtieth Anniversary Screening of THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS with Actress Barbara Rush In Person

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a rediscovery of a juicy melodrama from 1959: THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS, which boasted a vibrant cast headed by Paul Newman and our special guest, Barbara Rush. As Leonard Maltin wrote in his review, “Newman and Rush have memorable roles as poor lawyer who schemes to the top and society girl he hopes to win.”

Newman was rising to major stardom at the time he made this film. He was coming off acclaimed performances in Somebody Up There Likes Me and The Long Hot Summer and had just earned his first Oscar nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As the Motion Picture Herald observed in its review of The Young Philadelphians, “Newman demonstrates once again that he stands in the forefront of the crop of young players who have come to the screen in recent years.”

The film was adapted by James Gunn from the best-selling novel by Richard Powell that many compared to the enormously successful Peyton Place in exposing the sexual shenanigans and professional rivalries among a tight-knit community surrounding Philadelphia’s Main Line. Newman plays an ambitious young man with a shady past who is determined to rise to the top ranks of society. He becomes a lawyer who learns how to inveigle a number of wealthy clients but rediscovers his principles when he defends an old friend on a murder charge.

Robert Vaughn, in a breakthrough performance of his own, plays the murder suspect, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his compelling performance in the film. But the entire cast was strong. As Film Daily observed, “The story is given life and fire through an imposing array of performances.” Rush plays Newman’s love interest, though he also has a dalliance with a married socialite played by Alexis Smith. The supporting cast includes established actors Billie Burke, Otto Kruger, and John Williams, along with newer faces Brian Keith, Diane Brewster, and Adam West (later to play TV’s Batman) in his film debut.

Vincent Sherman (All Through the Night, Old Acquaintance, Mr. Skeffington, The Damned Don’t Cry) directed, and The Hollywood Reporter declared, “The direction by Vincent Sherman is the best in his long and able career.” The film received two additional Oscar nominations, for black-and-white cinematography by veteran Harry Stradling and black-and-white costume design by Howard Shoup.

Barbara Rush also co-starred with Newman in Hombre, and her many other film credits include Magnificent Obsession with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, Bigger Than Life with James Mason, Strangers When We Meet with Kirk Douglas, Come Blow Your Horn and Robin and the 7 Hoods with Frank Sinatra, along with two early sci-fi classics, When Worlds Collide and It Came From Outer Space. Rush had a co-starring role on the Peyton Place TV series of the 60s, and she later starred in the series Flamingo Road and 7th Heaven. Just in the last year, she was discovered by a whole new audience portraying a wealthy widow in a series of witty commercials for Wilshire Coin.

Our 60th anniversary presentation of THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS plus Q&A with Barbara Rush screens on Wednesday, August 7th at 7 PM at the Royal in West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: DVD

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS 50th Anniversary Screening with Stars Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw and Director Larry Peerce In-Person

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a screening of one of the landmark comedies of the 1960s and perhaps the best screen rendition of the work of Philip Roth: the adaptation of his National Book Award-winning novella, GOODBYE, COLUMBUS.

The movie launched the careers of its two stars, Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw, who will both join us for this reunion screening, along with the film’s director, Larry Peerce.

Roth was a master chronicler of the Jewish-American experience, and this film version dealt forthrightly and sardonically with the author’s favorite milieu. In focusing on a doomed love affair between a young working-class man and a spoiled Jewish-American princess, the film caught many of the tensions in affluent American society during the postwar years. Its sexual candor also reflected changing mores of the late 60s.

Arnold Schulman was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, and he also won the Writers Guild award for best adapted screenplay of the year. Stanley Jaffe (Kramer vs. Kramer, Fatal Attraction) produced the picture. The Association provided the musical score.

Benjamin plays Neil Klugman, who meets Brenda Patimkin when his cousin invites him to swim at her ritzy country club. Neil is immediately attracted to Brenda, and she finds him intriguing, especially as a way of goading her snobbish, nouveau riche parents, expertly played by Jack Klugman and Nan Martin. When Brenda invites Neil as a house guest, they begin an affair right in the family mansion.

The film includes a number of sharply defined characters, especially Brenda’s affable but dim jock brother, played by Michael Meyers, whom Peerce discovered at a wedding. It turned out to be the only screen performance by Meyers, who went on to have a successful career as a doctor and later wrote a book about his journey from Hollywood to hospitals.

The film climaxes with a scene of Meyers’ garish and gargantuan wedding reception, which was somewhat controversial because of the gusto with which it satirized Jewish conspicuous consumption. In this wedding sequence, director Peerce’s father—the noted tenor, Jan Peerce—makes a sly cameo appearance.

The film scored at the box office and received enthusiastic reviews. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby declared, “Goodbye, Columbus is so rich with understanding… that it is a thing of real and unusual pleasure.” Variety called the film “a joy in striking a boisterous mood” and added that Benjamin and MacGraw “offer fresh portrayals seasoned with rich humor.”

Indeed the film catapulted both actors to the top ranks in Hollywood. MacGraw earned an Oscar nomination the following year for the smash hit Love Story, and she starred in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway with her husband-to-be, Steve McQueen. She also starred in Sidney Lumet’s satire, Just Tell Me What You Want, and in the enormously successful TV miniseries, The Winds of War. Benjamin played in such films as Diary of a Mad Housewife, Westworld, The Last of Sheila, The Sunshine Boys, as well as the adaptation of Roth’s most controversial novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. Later Benjamin became an acclaimed director of such films as My Favorite Year, Racing with the Moon, and Mermaids.

Peerce made his feature directorial debut with the groundbreaking 1964 film about an interracial romance, One Potato Two Potato, and followed up with a gritty urban thriller, The Incident. His other films include The Sporting Club, A Separate Peace, The Bell Jar, and the uplifting female sports movie, The Other Side of the Mountain.

Our 50th anniversary presentation of GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1969) followed by a Q&A with stars Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw and director Larry Peerce screens Friday, August 2nd at 7:30 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Click here for tickets.

Format: DVD.

Ang Lee’s EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN 25th Anniversary Screenings on July 24 in West LA, Pasadena, and Glendale.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present this month’s installment in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program, Ang Lee’s delectable 1994 comedy, EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN. Lee had directed two previous films that earned acclaim, but this 1994 film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and propelled his career to a new level of esteem and success.

Made in Taipei, the film centers on a widowed master chef, Mr. Chu (played by Sihung Lung), who has weekly feasts for his three unmarried daughters (Kuei-Mei Yang, Chien-Lien Wu, Yu-Wen Wang), during which he tries to oversee their personal lives along with their eating habits. An ensemble piece in the spirit of movies like Love, Actually and The Joy Luck Club, the film interweaves the personal and professional stories of the three daughters, along with the issues facing their father, who also embarks on a new romantic adventure during the course of the movie. Winston Chao (who starred in Lee’s earlier film, The Wedding Banquet) and Sylvia Chang co-star.

The script by Lee, James Schamus, and Hui-Ling Wang etches all the characters with wit and finesse. Equally important to the film’s success are the lovingly photographed scenes of an abundance of Chinese delicacies, which led the movie to be compared to other memorable movies about food, including the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, and Like Water for Chocolate. Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “Like the cuisine it celebrates, this movie is tart, sweet, generous and subtle.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin called the film “wonderfully seductive, and nicely knowing about all of its characters’ appetites.”

Variety’s Leonard Klady summed up the film’s achievement: “The overall result is a cinematic feast that will have audiences returning for Lee’s next movie meal.” Those words proved to be prophetic. Lee’s next film, Sense and Sensibility, released in 1995, was nominated for Best Picture, and over the next several years, he produced an extraordinary body of work, including the international blockbusters Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi. Lee won two Oscars for Best Director — for Brokeback Mountain as well as Life of Pi — and is now universally regarded as one of the leading auteurs of our time. His remarkable journey was prefigured by his early achievement with Eat Drink Man Woman.

EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN screens Wednesday, July 24, at 7 PM in Glendale, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.

Format: Blu-ray.

GREMLINS 35th Anniversary with Director Joe Dante on Sunday, July 14 in Beverly Hills

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“Don’t expose him to bright light. Don’t ever get him wet. And don’t ever, ever feed him after midnight.”

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the delicious horror comedy, GREMLINS, which demonstrated the dire consequences of ignoring those three simple rules. Chris Columbus (the writer or director of such hit films as ‘The Goonies,’ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ ‘Home Alone,’ and the first two Harry Potter movies) conceived the story, and Steven Spielberg acted as executive producer, but it was director Joe Dante who set the distinctive tone of “malicious madcap mischief,” in the words of Newsweek’s David Ansen.

Dante had already brought wit to the underwater monster movie (‘Piranha’) and the werewolf movie (‘The Howling’), but ‘Gremlins’ took his talents to a new level. Kenneth Turan, then writing for California Magazine, declared, “’Gremlins’ is Dante’s most accomplished film, a paradigm of zesty, ghoulish fun.” Dante loved to pepper his movies with sly references to other films, and ‘Gremlins’ is set in the idyllic small town of Kingston Falls, meant to recall Bedford Falls from Frank Capra’s classic, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (glimpsed on TV in a scene in Dante’s movie). ‘Gremlins’ is also set at Christmas, but the holidays are anything but festive in this vision of Norman Rockwell’s America turned upside down.

The story begins when a father (Hoyt Axton) purchases a lovable furry creature called a mogwai for his son Billy (Zach Galligan). The shopkeeper offers a few admonitions but neglects to say that if the mogwai is drenched or fed after midnight, it will turn into a spiteful, malevolent gremlin. Soon the entire town is overwhelmed with these miniature monsters determined to destroy. The other characters in the story are played by an engaging ensemble, including Phoebe Cates, Frances Lee McCain, Keye Luke, Glynn Turman, Dick Miller, Corey Feldman, Judge Reinhold, and Polly Holliday, with cameo appearances by Chuck Jones, composer Jerry Goldsmith, and Spielberg himself. But perhaps the biggest star was designer Chris Walas, who created the puppets who perform their own delirious dance of death.

The film incorporates several classic sequences, including one in which a small-town mom (played by McCain) battles the gremlins with her trusty kitchen appliances and the climactic nightmare in which the gremlins take over a movie theater presenting a holiday screening of Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ The movie was one of the biggest hits of 1984 and also earned many excellent reviews. Gene Siskel called ‘Gremlins’ “a wickedly funny and slightly sick ride…playfulness abounds.” Screen International added, “The sight gags are deliriously inventive and frequently devilishly sick.”

Dante went on to direct such films as ‘The Burbs’ with Tom Hanks, ‘Explorers’ with Ethan Hawke, ‘Innerspace’ with Dennis Quaid and Martin Short, ‘Matinee’ with John Goodman, and of course ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch.’ For this special matinee screening, feel free to bring the kids—at least the older kids with a taste for macabre thrills.

Our 35th anniversary screening of GREMLINS (1984) followed by a Q&A with Director Joe Dante and film critic Stephen Farber plays on Sunday, July 14, at 3 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP