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Twofer Tuesday: A Paul Newman Double Feature of COOL HAND LUKE (1967) and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962) on October 3rd!

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a tribute to Oscar-winning actor Paul Newman with the latest installment in our popular Twofer Tuesday program.

Newman received one of his nine Oscar nominations for the landmark prison drama, COOL HAND LUKE, released in 1967. He reprised his acclaimed stage performance in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ steamy melodrama, Sweet Bird of Youth from 1962.

Enjoy these two films for the price of one on Tuesday, October 3rd at your choice of three Laemmle locations—the Royal in West LA, the NoHo in North Hollywood, and the Playhouse in Pasadena.

COOL HAND LUKE received a total of four Academy Award nominations in 1967, and George Kennedy won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, an award that invigorated the career of one of Hollywood’s most well liked character actors.

Newman plays a rebellious prisoner on a Southern chain gang who eventually wins the support of all his fellow convicts even though he infuriates the prison officials.

The warden’s rebuke to Newman—“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”—became one of the most quoted lines in cinema history, and many scenes, including an egg-eating contest and an unexpected song that Newman sings after learning of his mother’s death, have also entered the lexicon.

The supporting cast includes a number of other acclaimed actors—Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Strother Martin, and Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet.

Stuart Rosenberg directed the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson.

The Saturday Review’s Hollis Alpert called Luke “a film as beautifully executed as any made this year.” Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times added that the film was “a triumph for Paul Newman.”

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH received three Oscar nominations in 1962, and Ed Begley won the award as Best Supporting Actor for his vivid portrayal of a tyrannical Southern political boss.

Lead actress Geraldine Page and supporting actress Shirley Knight also earned nods from the Academy. Page and Newman had both starred in the Broadway production of Williams’ play, and they revisited and deepened their performances in the screen version, which despite a few compromises dictated by the Production Code, was generally regarded as superior to the play.

Richard Brooks, who had also adapted Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Newman, wrote the screenplay and directed.

The heart of the film lies in the provocative bedroom scenes between Page and Newman, playing a gigolo slightly past his prime and a has-been movie star happy to pay for his sexual favors.

The cast also includes Rip Torn, Mildred Dunnock, and Madeleine Sherwood.

Newsweek praised Sweet Bird as “a forceful, often devastating piece of work.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “Newman is the almost perfect Williams hero, sensitive, vulnerable, but undeniably masculine.”

Click here to get tickets to the 4:40pm show of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, admission to the 7pm COOL HAND LUKE is included. Click here to buy tickets to the 7pm show of COOL HAND LUKE, admission to the 9:30pm SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH is included.

TWO FOR THE ROAD 50th Anniversary Screening with Co-stars William Daniels and Jacqueline Bisset In-person on September 27 in West LA.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of one of the most delightful and innovative romantic comedies ever made, Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road.

TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967)
50th Anniversary Screening
Q & A with Co-stars William Daniels and Jacqueline Bisset
Wednesday, September 27, at 7:00 PM
At the Royal Theatre in West L.A.
Click here for tickets

 

Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney star as a couple trying to come to terms with the changes in their marriage over a 12-year period.

Screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who had won an Oscar for writing Darling two years earlier, received another nomination for Best Original Screenplay for his groundbreaking, time-traveling script for Two for the Road.

Donen, the director of such films as Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, and Charade, here created one of his most provocative works.

This excavation of a marriage centers on half a dozen trips through the south of France taken by Mark and Joanna Wallace (Finney and Hepburn).  But these trips are not presented in chronological order.  In fact, the different time sequences are intercut breezily throughout the film.  This experiment in non-linear storytelling was clearly influenced by some of the movies of the French New Wave during the 60s.  But this was the first major Hollywood film to try to translate that innovative approach to a more mainstream commercial picture.  Reactions were mixed at the time, but the film’s reputation has grown in later years, and many now cite it as one of their all-time favorite romantic films.

Life magazine’s Richard Schickel was one of the few to appreciate it in 1967.  As he wrote, “Mr. Donen has always been one of the truly stylish directors of light comedy, but here he has surpassed himself and in the process made it clear that the commercial filmmaker no longer has to be bound by the traditions of the past.”  Leonard Maltin calls it a “perceptive, winning film… beautifully acted.”

The supporting cast includes William Daniels, Eleanor Bron, Claude Dauphin, Nadia Gray, and Jacqueline Bisset in one of her very first screen roles.  Other key contributors to the film include cinematographer Christopher Challis, whose glorious images of the French Riviera dazzle the eye, and multiple Academy Award-winning composer Henry Mancini, who regarded this lyrical score as one of his personal favorites.


Co-star William Daniels, who portrays a hilariously finicky American tourist, had a busy year in 1967.  In addition to this film, he co-starred in The President’s Analyst and also played Dustin Hoffman’s father in The Graduate.  His other films include A Thousand Clowns, The Parallax View, Oh God!, and Warren Beatty’s Reds.  He played John Adams in the acclaimed stage musical, 1776, and reprised his role in the 1972 movie version.  Daniels played John Quincy Adams in the TV miniseries, The Adams Chronicles, and also had major roles in the series St. Elsewhere, Boy Meets World, and Grey’s Anatomy.

Two for the Road was one of her very first movies. Her many other films include Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac, Bullitt, Airport, The Grasshopper, Murder on the Orient Express, The Deep, George Cukor’s Rich and Famous, John Huston’s Under the Volcano, and Francois Truffaut’s Oscar-winning classic, Day for Night. Tickets are available here.

Lesley Ann Warren In-person for VICTOR/VICTORIA 35th Anniversary Screening September 19th at the Ahrya Fine Arts

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the 35th anniversary of Blake Edwards’ gender-bending musical comedy VICTOR/VICTORIA from 1982.

It will screen on Tuesday, September 19 at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills, with special guest Lesley Ann Warren, Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress for her role. Presented on DCP. Click here for tickets.

Julie Andrews, who was celebrated as Broadway’s My Fair Lady in the 1950s, and Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins in the 1960s, emerged from a decade long career slump in the 1970s to some of the best notices of her career in 1982’s Victor/Victoria, written and directed by her husband, Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther).

Andrews put a whole new spin on her musical sweetheart persona by playing a down-on-her-luck singer in 1930s Paris who finds fame, fortune and romance disguised as a man pulling off a female impersonator act.

A skillful supporting cast added to the merriment, including James Garner as a Chicago gangster who falls for Andrews, Alex Karras as his bodyguard, Robert Preston as a gay cabaret performer who coaches Andrews in the masquerade, and Lesley Ann Warren as Garner’s moll.

Nominated for 7 Academy Awards, including Andrews as best actress, Edwards for best screenplay adaptation, and Preston and Warren in the supporting acting categories. Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse won the Oscar for their delightful Original Song Score.

 

Roger Ebert applauded it as “a classic movie sex farce…not only a funny movie, but a warm and friendly one.”

Vincent Canby in The New York Times heaped praise on the entire cast, especially Andrews, Garner, and Preston, “each giving the performance of his and her career in a marvelous fable about mistaken identity, sexual role-playing, love, innocence and sight gags.”

Canby also had kudos for Warren (“squeaky-voiced Norma is enchantingly self-possessed and very comic.”) and for Edwards (“His chef d’oeuvre, his cockeyed, crowning achievement.”)

Our special guest Lesley Ann Warren began her lengthy show biz career on the stage, debuting on Broadway in 1963, which led to her being cast in the title role of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Cinderella in 1965. Following her work as Walt Disney’s main ingénue (The Happiest Millionaire) et al, she graduated to more mature roles in television movies in the 70s before being cast in Victor/Victoria, and played the archetypal dumb blonde with such aplomb that Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic was impressed that Warren “plays her as if the character had just been invented.”

Warren is also known for playing Miss Scarlet in the cult movie Clue, and for recent recurring TV guest roles in series such as Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Blunt Talk.

The 35th anniversary screening of Victor/Victoria, with a Q&A with Lesley Ann Warren, plays Tuesday, September 19 at 7:30 pm at the Ahrya Fine Arts theatre in Beverly Hills.  Click here for tickets.

55th Anniversary Screening of GYPSY and Q&A with Carla Malden September 12th in West LA

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GYPSY (1962) 55th Anniversary Screening
With Carla Malden, Daughter of Karl Malden In-person
Tuesday, September 12, at 7:00 PM at the Laemmle Royal
Presented on Blu-ray. Click here for tickets.

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 55th anniversary screening of GYPSY, the 1962 film adaptation of one of the masterworks of the American musical theater, with its triumphant Stephen Sondheim-Jule Styne score.

The film version stars Natalie Wood as burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, Rosalind Russell as Momma Rose, the ultimate stage mother, and Karl Malden.

The screening takes place on September 12, 7:00 pm at the Royal theatre in West LA, with guest Carla Malden, daughter of Karl Malden, and co-author of his memoir, When Do I Start?

In 1962 Natalie Wood was at the peak of her career, having been Oscar nominated as Best Actress for Splendor in the Grass (1961) and co-starring in that year’s Best Picture, West Side Story, when she was cast to portray the queen of the striptease, Gypsy Rose Lee. Rosalind Russell was cast as Momma Rose by Jack L. Warner, who bought the film rights, and the vibrant star of Auntie Mame took considerable critical heat for displacing Broadway legend Ethel Merman in the role. Malden’s part was built up for the Oscar-winning actor, and he doubled as Uncle Jocko and boyfriend-manager Herbie in the film. Other alterations included the trimming of one song, but these slight modifications did not detract from the success of the film.

Written for the screen by Leonard Spiegelgass from Arthur Laurents’ libretto, and directed by Mervyn Leroy, (Little Caesar, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and co-producer The Wizard of Oz), Gypsy remains a faithful, brassy celluloid version of one of the greatest musicals ever staged.

The public didn’t seem to miss Merman, as the movie was a box office smash. Critics were divided at the time, but veteran scribe Joe Baltake (Philadelphia Daily News, Sacramento Bee) later wrote that Russell, “whose line readings are flawless …fleshed out the character of Rose as no one else ever has.” And as noted by Leonard Maltin, “(You) can’t lose with that Stephen Sondheim-Jule Styne score.” Nominated for 3 Academy Awards (Cinematography, Costume Design and Music Scoring).

Gypsy will screen Tuesday, September 12 at 7:00 pm at the Royal; Q&A with Carla Malden who will reminisce about her father and the making of the film, accompanied by a rare showing of the musical number cut from the film, after the screening.

65th Anniversary Screening of SUDDEN FEAR Starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance, August 29th in Beverly Hills

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SUDDEN FEAR (1952) 65th Anniversary Screening
With Introduction by film historian Jeremy Arnold
Tuesday, August 29, at 7:30 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre
Presented on DCP. Click here for tickets.

One of the dominant series in this year’s Emmy competition is Feud: Bette and Joan, which earned a near-record total of 18 nominations, and the top contender for Best Actress is Jessica Lange for her multi-dimensional portrayal of screen icon Joan Crawford.

During this Emmy season, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 65th anniversary screening of one of Crawford’s most memorable performances in the film noir favorite, SUDDEN FEAR.

The film earned four Oscar nominations in 1952, including one for Crawford as Best Actress, one for Jack Palance as Best Supporting Actor and another for Charles Lang’s moody black-and-white cinematography.

The ingenious screenplay by Lenore J. Coffee and Robert Smith, adapted from a novel by Edna Sherry, casts Crawford as a highly successful New York playwright who rejects an aspiring young actor when he auditions for the leading role in her latest play. Crawford insists that he lacks the charisma to be convincing as a romantic lead.

Ironically, when she later meets the actor on a train heading back to her home in San Francisco, she finds him more compelling and begins to fall in love with him. But this is only the beginning of a romantic melodrama with some startling and frightening twists ahead for both characters.

Film noir historian Spencer Selby called the film ”undoubtedly one of the most stylish and refined woman-in-distress noirs.” Leonard Maltin agreed that the film is a “solid suspense thriller with many neat twists.”

Gloria Grahame, who made four movies in 1952, including The Bad and the Beautiful (which won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress), has a juicy supporting role as Palance’s secret lover.

David Miller (Midnight Lace, Lonely Are the Brave, Captain Newman, M.D.) directed.

The screening will be introduced by film historian Jeremy Arnold, author of TCM’S The Essentials, who provided the audio commentary on the recent Blu-Ray edition of SUDDEN FEAR.

Click here for tickets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9GHtPQ7DNA

45th Anniversary Screenings of Louis Malle’s MURMUR OF THE HEART on Wednesday, August 16th in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest installment in our Anniversary Classics Abroad series, Louis Malle’s irreverent and often uproarious comedy, MURMUR OF THE HEART, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay of 1972.

During the course of his career, Malle proved himself one of the most astonishingly versatile of all international directors. His movies ran the gamut from the influential French noir, Elevator to the Gallows to the sexually daring drama, The Lovers, which was charged with obscenity and eventually cleared by the United States Supreme Court; the dark screwball comedy, Zazie dans le Metro; two piercing World War II dramas, Lacombe Lucien and Au Revoir Les Enfants; and the documentary Calcutta.

In America, Malle made the controversial Pretty Baby, which introduced Brooke Shields; the scintillating two-character talkathon, My Dinner with Andre; and the bittersweet comedy classic, Atlantic City, which earned five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and another for Malle as best director.

Murmur of the Heart was an autobiographical memoir from Malle, a coming-of-age story told with candor and exuberant wit. Set in 1954, the year that France lost control of its colonies in Indochina, the film focuses on a chaotic bourgeois family headed by a wild, taboo-breaking mother, played to perfection by Italian actress Lea Massari.

The cast also includes Benoit Ferreux as her 14-year-old son, Daniel Gelin as her gynecologist husband, and Michel Lonsdale as a somewhat hypocritical priest.

Pauline Kael called the film an “exhilarating high comedy about French bourgeois life,” and she added, “Massari is superb as Clara, the carelessly sensual mother.”

Leonard Maltin praised the picture as a “fresh, intelligent, affectionately comic tale” that builds to “a thoroughly delightful resolution.”

MURMUR OF THE HEART screens at 7pm on August 16th at the Royal in West L.A., the Town Center in Encino, and the Playhouse in Pasadena. Presented on DVD. Click here for tickets.

Second Annual WESTERN WEEKEND August 18-20 at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills!

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present our second annual tribute to the cowboy genre, Western Weekend, a six-shooter collection of vintage sagebrush films.

This year’s round-up includes John Ford’s late masterpiece, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, Fred Zinnemann’s venerated HIGH NOON, Sam Peckinpah’s early landmark, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, John Sturges’ influential GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL, and rediscoveries of revisionist oaters from Martin Ritt, HOMBRE, and Philip Kaufman, THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID.

The star-studded line-up of legendary cowboys, lawmen and outlaws features John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Paul Newman, James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Fredric March, Robert Duvall, and Grace Kelly, among others. So saddle-up for a retro Western weekend August 18-20. Hitching posts available at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills.

Special guests: THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID Director Philip Kaufman, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY Co-Star Mariette Hartley, and HOMBRE Actress Barbara Rush.

Admission is $13 per film. Laemmle Premiere Card holders pay only $10 per ticket. A six film series pass is available for $60 at the Fine Arts box office.

HIGH NOON (1952) – 65th Anniversary
Introduction by Karen Sharpe-Kramer, widow of producer-director Stanley Kramer and president of the Stanley Kramer Library
DCP presentation

This seminal film in the Western canon, deftly directed by Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity, A Man For All Seasons) won 4 Oscars, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper in one of his best roles as a small town sheriff, abandoned by fearful townsfolk, who must face a desperado and his gang sworn to kill him.

The film had political undertones of the era, and screenwriter Carl Foreman (The Bridge on the River Kwai) was blacklisted after taking the Fifth amendment at the HUAC hearings.

The New York Times praised the film and its anti-McCarthy sentiments with a timely note still resonating 65 years later, “It bears a close relation to things that are happening in the world today, where people are being terrorized by bullies and surrendering freedoms out of senselessness and fear.”

The hit theme song won Dimitri Tiomkin two Oscars (Song and Score). The film was notable for having its running time match the story countdown to high noon, and that editing effort won Elmo Williams an Oscar. Also nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay. With Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, and Lon Chaney. New York Film Critics’ Best Film of the Year; included in the National Film Registry at its inception (1989). Shows August 20 at 4:30 pm. Click here for tickets.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957) – 60th Anniversary
35mm presentation

A popular and influential oater that recreated the legendary 1881 shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, notable for its inspired casting of Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday and Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp, who give solid performances as the iconic figures of the Old West.

Well-directed by John Sturges (Bad Day at Black Rock, The Great Escape), and written by Leon Uris (Exodus), the film scored big at the box-office. Its success paved the way for the Western super-productions of the 60s, including Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven and Best Picture Oscar nominee How the West Was Won.

The sharp color cinematography is by Charles B. Lang; Music by Dimitri Tiomkin. Nominated for 2 Academy Awards (Sound and Film Editing).

The strong supporting cast includes Rhonda Fleming, Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland and rising actors Dennis Hopper, Earl Holliman and Deforest Kelley. Shows August 19 at 5:30 pm. Click here for tickets.

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962) – 55th Anniversary
DCP presentation

The penultimate Western of director John Ford, re-teamed with frequent collaborator John Wayne, and joined by James Stewart, who had found major success in the 50s in saddles and spurs for director Anthony Mann. By this time Wayne had become a cultural icon, symbolizing the cowboy-soldier hero both on and off the screen. Stewart gives perhaps his greatest Western performance as an idealistic lawyer who brings civilization to the primitive frontier, but rises to national recognition ironically through a gunfight showdown.

Shot in black and white, and using mostly studio interiors, Ford and company (producer Willis Goldbeck co-scripting with James Warner Bellah) spin a yarn of archetypes and myths, but with new self-awareness of the lies that perpetrated the Western mythology (“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”).

Kenneth Turan applauded, “Told with a simplicity that feels almost like ritual…Liberty Valance unfolds seamlessly, without a frame wasted or out of place.”

Added to the National Film Registry in 2007. With Vera Miles, Edmond O’Brien, Woody Strode, Andy Devine and Lee Marvin as the snarling varmint, Liberty Valance. Shows August 19 at 8:00 pm. Click here for tickets.

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962) – 55th Anniversary
Actress Mariette Hartley in Person
35mm presentation

This autumnal Western dealt with many of the same themes of a changing West that John Ford explored in Liberty Valance. But young director Sam Peckinpah brought an edgier perspective to his examination of the closing of the frontier.

Western film veterans Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea play aging gunfighters confronting a new world at the start of the 20th century. Laced with irreverent humor and sometimes startling sexual candor, the film turns into a deeply moving elegy for its upright cowboy heroes. Despite a haphazard release by the studio, the film was named by Newsweek as the best film of 1962, and in his four-star review, Leonard Maltin called it a “literate, magnificent Western.” It was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1997.

This screening will be followed by a Q & A with actress Mariette Hartley, who made her film debut in the role of an innocent but spirited frontier woman. The cast also includes Warren Oates, Ron Starr, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong, and Edgar Buchanan. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. Shows August 19 at 3:00 pm. Click here for tickets.

Mariette Hartley (right) made her film debut in this early Western by Sam Peckinpah which is still regarded as one of the director’s best

HOMBRE (1967) – 50th Anniversary
Actress Barbara Rush in Person
DCP presentation

This was one of the first of a new breed of Westerns of the 1960s and 70s that challenged the negative portrayals of Native Americans perpetrated in many earlier films. Paul Newman plays a white man raised by the Apache and embittered by the mistreatment of his adoptive tribe.

The film was created by the same team that made the Oscar-winning modern Western, Hud, four years earlier: director Martin Ritt, screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., and cinematographer James Wong Howe, in addition to Newman.

Adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard, the plot owes a debt to John Ford’s classic Stagecoach, retooled with anti-Establishment bite. The extraordinary ensemble cast includes Oscar winners Fredric March and Martin Balsam, Oscar nominee Diane Cilento, Richard Boone, Barbara Rush, Cameron Mitchell, and newcomers Maggie Blye and Peter Lazer.

As Roger Ebert wrote, “The performances are uniformly excellent.” The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther said, “Savor it for its fine ingredients…this is a first-rate cooking of a western recipe.” Shows August 20 at 2:00 pm. Click here for tickets.

THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID (1972) – 45th Anniversary
Writer-director Philip Kaufman in Person
35mm presentation

Of all the revisionist Westerns made during the late 1960s and early 1970s, this may be one of the least heralded and most inventive. The story of the last bank robbery perpetrated by the James and Younger gangs stars Oscar winners Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger and Robert Duvall as Jesse James.

Duvall’s witty portrayal of the iconic outlaw as a sly, loony psychopath is one of the most original additions to Western film lore. New writer-director Philip Kaufman mixes humor, lyricism, and breathtaking action set-pieces.

Jay Cocks of Time magazine called Northfield “the kind of first movie so rich in texture and invention that we can look forward to a lot more from Philip Kaufman.”

Indeed, Kaufman went on to direct the first remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers, The Right Stuff, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The supporting cast includes film veterans R.G. Armstrong, Elisha Cook Jr., Royal Dano, Dana Elcar, and Donald Moffat, along with newer faces Luke Askew, Matt Clark, and Mary-Robin Redd. Photographed by Bruce Surtees, with a musical score by Oscar winner Dave Grusin. Kaufman will make an in-person appearance on the opening night of our Western Weekend. Shows August 18 at 7:30 pm. Click here for tickets.

Twofer Tuesday: Robert Mitchum Centennial on August 1st in Beverly Hills, NoHo, and Pasadena

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series celebrate the centennial of Hollywood icon Robert Mitchum (b. August 6, 1917) with two of his best roles, OUT OF THE PAST (1947, 70th anniversary) and CAPE FEAR (1962, 55th anniversary). The two acclaimed film noirs will be shown as a double feature on August 1 as part of the popular Twofer Tuesday (two for the price of one) program at a choice of three locations: the Ahrya Fine Arts, NoHo 7, and Pasadena Playhouse 7. Presented on blu-ray.

Click here for tickets to the 5:10pm OUT OF THE PAST and 7:15 CAPE FEAR
or
Click here for tickets to the 7:15 CAPE FEAR and 9:30 OUT OF THE PAST

Mitchum was a contract player at RKO when he starred in Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur with a script by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring), adapting his novel, “Build My Gallows High.” Mitchum plays an ex-private eye entangled in a web of double-dealings by former criminal associates (gangster Kirk Douglas and old flame Jane Greer). Mitchum, described in the New York Times review of the day as “magnificently cheeky and self-assured,” entrenched his cynical, antihero image in this film.

Out of the Past, as author Jeremy Arnold notes in TCM’s The Essentials: 52 Must-See Movies and Why They Matter, “is the quintessential film noir. It has a tough hero, a supremely alluring femme fatale, hard-boiled dialogue, a commingling of sex and violence, expressionistic lighting…all set in an ominous world where death and double-cross are the norm.” The movie has been added to the National Film Registry.

Cape Fear came at the end of the classical black-and-white film noir period (1942-62), and stars Mitchum in his most memorable villainous role, Max Cady. In this adaptation by James R. Webb of James D. MacDonald’s novel, “The Executioners,” an ex-con plots insidious revenge on the lawyer (Gregory Peck) whose testimony sent him to prison. Director J. Lee Thompson was an admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and paid homage to the Master of Suspense with camera angles and the use of his frequent collaborator, composer Bernard Herrmann, who provided a superbly menacing score. Mitchum was so convincing in the role that co-star Polly Bergen (as Peck’s wife) said she was genuinely frightened in an improvised scene with him. Leonard Maltin calls Mitchum’s performance “believably creepy,” and the American Film Institute cited his portrayal of Cady as one of the top 30 “All-Time Screen Villains.” Martin Balsam, Lori Martin, Telly Savalas, and Barrie Chase co-star.

Barrie Chase had other memorable roles in films of the 1960s, including Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix. She was a dancer in many hit musical films of the 1950s and co-starred with Fred Astaire in several of his top-rated TV specials.

Actress Barrie Chase will introduce the 7:15 CAPE FEAR at the Ahrya Fine Arts. Film historian Jeremy Arnold will introduce the 9:30 OUT OF THE PAST, only at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills.

Out of the Past screens at 5:15 & 9:30; Cape Fear screens at 7:15, at all three locations.