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“Forever Looking for Love.” Kenneth Turan on the Newly Restored PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN in the L.A. Times.

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From Kenneth Turan’s February 14, 2020 Critics Choice column in the Times:

“Independent films were not an invention of Sundance, they existed in the golden age Hollywood as well, and one of the most unusual, and the most gorgeous, was 1951’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It was directed by Albert Lewin and starred James Mason and, looking especially beautiful, Ava Gardner in a pleasantly surreal supernatural tale of a cursed sea captain and a heedless young woman who lives only for pleasure. Or so she thinks.

“Gardner looked as photogenic as she did because Pandora’s cinematographer was the great Jack Cardiff, famous for works like Black Narcissus, and because the film was shot in the knockout process known as three-strip Technicolor.

“Restoring Pandora to its original glory has taken more than a dozen years, with the Cohen Media Group ultimately funding a glorious 4K version, which included more than 700 hours of digital restoration lavished on 177,120 frames of the film. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

“Begins Feb. 21 at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles.”

Cohen commissioned several terrific new posters for Pandora by New York-based key art designer, illustrator, and art director Mark McGillivray:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcnLjk-hyP8&feature=youtu.be

 

Ava Gardner and James Mason in a scene from “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.” (Cohen Media Group)

Q&A with Actress Angie Dickinson at Our RIO BRAVO Anniversary Screening on February 25th in West L.A.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present one of the best-loved westerns of all time, Howard Hawks’ 1959 action romp, RIO BRAVO. Actress Angie Dickinson will participate in a pre-show Q&A on February 25th at 7PM.

As many modern critics have observed, the film was a box office hit in its time but wasn’t really taken seriously. Leonard Maltin wrote, “Quintessential Hawks Western, patronized by reviewers at the time of its release, is now regarded as an American classic.”

John Wayne, the star of several Hawks films, led the cast, but the director put together an eclectic group of players. In addition to veterans Walter Brennan and Ward Bond, the director cast singer and comedian Dean Martin, young TV personality and pop singer Ricky Nelson, along with Angie Dickinson in a vivid, star-making turn.

The story by B.H. McCampbell (Hawks’s eldest daughter Barbara) presents a fairly simple tale. Wayne plays a sheriff in a small Texas town who is holding a murderer (Claude Akins) in the town jail until the marshal can move him to a nearby penitentiary. But the killer’s brother, a wealthy rancher with a large gang of confederates, intends to break the prisoner out of jail. Wayne’s character is vastly outnumbered, but he turns to an unlikely posse—a drunken deputy (Martin), a helpless cripple (Brennan), and a young greenhorn (Nelson), along with a visiting lady gambler (Dickinson).

The story is fleshed out by two superb screenwriters who worked frequently with Hawks—Jules Furthman (Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep) and Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, Hatari!, El Dorado). Brackett was one of the pioneering female writers of an earlier era, and she went on to work on such classics as The Long Goodbye and The Empire Strikes Back.

Brackett surely contributed to the vitality of Angie Dickinson’s character, Feathers, a tough, sassy woman who more than holds her own in confrontations with Wayne. The Los Angeles Times took special note of Dickinson, saying, “starmaker Howard Hawks has worked some of the same kind of magic as he did with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not.” Indeed, some of the memorable repartee between Bogart and Bacall in that film was recycled effectively in Rio Bravo.

In addition to sharp dialogue and fine performances, the film incorporates several suspenseful and exciting action sequences, masterfully orchestrated by Hawks, cinematographer Russell Harlan (Oscar-nominated for both To Kill a Mockingbird and Hawks’ Hatari! in 1962), and aided by the rousing score of Dimitri Tiomkin (High Noon, The High and the Mighty, Giant).

At the time of its release in 1959, Variety called Rio Bravo “a big, brawling western with enough action and marquee voltage to ensure hefty reception at the box office.” It did strong business and reviews in later years were even more glowing. Writing in The New York Times in 2012, Dave Kehr called it “one of the most purely pleasurable films ever made.” Roger Ebert raved, “To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong.” The film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2014.

When we launched our Anniversary Classics series in 2013, Angie Dickinson was our very first guest, appearing at a 50th anniversary screening of Captain Newman, M.D. She joined us again for a 50th anniversary screening of John Boorman’s neo-noir classic, Point Blank, in 2017. Her other films include Ocean’s Eleven, Don Siegel’s The Killers, The Chase (opposite Marlon Brando), Big Bad Mama, and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. She also made history as the first female star of a TV action series, Police Woman, in the 1970s.

RIO BRAVO screens Tuesday, February 25, at 7PM at the Royal Theater in West L.A.

Click here for tickets.

141 minutes * USA * 1959 * DCP

Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE Screens February 19th in Glendale, Pasadena, and West L.A.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present Jean-Luc Godard’s cult favorite from 1965, the sci-fi neo-noir satire, Alphaville.  This screening is part of our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program; this is our first tribute to the controversial but always provocative French auteur, one of the founders of the French New Wave and still something of an enfant terrible at the age of 89.

Our screening is dedicated to the memory of the incandescent star of the film, Anna Karina, who was married to Godard during the 60s and starred in many of his most popular and influential movies, including A Woman Is A Woman, Band of Outsiders, and Pierrot le Fou.

American-born Eddie Constantine plays the character of Lemmy Caution, a hard-boiled detective who had been featured in a series of European B-movies.  Godard borrowed the actor and the character for his vaguely futuristic portrayal of a mechanized society in thrall to a giant computer.

Working with the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who photographed many films of Godard and Francois Truffaut), Godard evoked a future world utilizing modernist glass and concrete buildings that already existed in Paris in the 1960s.

The film was compared by many critics to George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, with allusions to Orwell’s Big Brother and misinformation campaign, Newspeak.  The dictatorial computer, Alpha 60, prefigured the sinister HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Other dark-tinged sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and The Terminator also demonstrated a debt to Alphaville.

In addition to Constantine and Karina, the cast included Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff, with cameo appearances by Christa Lang and Jean-Pierre Leaud, a key figure in the French New Wave.

The film won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin Film Festival.  Reviews were mixed at the time, with some critics bewildered and others praising the film’s style and originality.  Over the years it has been recognized as a prophetic work in its protest of the growing dehumanization of modern life.  As the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr wrote, “Alphaville moves closer to relevance with every passing year.”  The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it “one of the great cinematic works of romanticism.”  Time Out’s Keith Uhlich added, “Karina proves to be the beating heart of the movie.”

Our 55th anniversary presentation of ALPHAVILLE screens Wednesday, February 19 at 7pm in Glendale, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.

99 minutes * NR * DCP * 1965

WOMEN IN LOVE (1970) 50th Anniversary Screening February 5th at the Laemmle Royal.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series celebrate the Academy Awards with the 50th anniversary of WOMEN IN LOVE starring Best Actress winner Glenda Jackson.

The film, adapted from the 1920 novel by D.H. Lawrence, was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director for Ken Russell, Best Adapted Screenplay for Larry Kramer, and Best Cinematography for Billy Williams. Jackson won the first of her two Best Actress Oscars for her performance as a “sexually curious, perversely independent, and emasculating heroine” in the British period drama.

In post-World War I industrial Midlands, England, Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden are sisters who are courted by the son (Oliver Reed) of a coal mine owner and a school inspector (Alan Bates), respectively. The two couples (Reed and Jackson; Bates and Linden) embark on exploratory love affairs that reveal the sexual politics of the era. Lawrence’s story celebrates women as “strong, independent and complex,” and the film heightens that dynamic as the nonconformist female characters take center stage. Jackson would go onto four additional Oscar nominations and a second Best Actress win (A Touch of Class, 1973) before becoming a member of Parliament in the 1990s; she returned triumphantly to acting at the age of 80 in 2016, and won a Tony two years later.

Director Ken Russell, best known for his “flamboyant and controversial style,” in such subsequent films as The Music Lovers, The Devils, The Who’s Tommy, Lisztomania, and Altered States, is notably more restrained in WOMEN IN LOVE. He did, however, connect with the sexual revolution and bohemian politics of the late 1960s, when the film was made, in notorious scenes such as the nude wrestling match between Reed and Bates, the first display of full-frontal male nudity in a mainstream movie. WOMEN IN LOVE represents his sole Oscar nod for directing.

In 1989 he and Jackson revisited this familiar terrain in his film version of Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, a prequel to WOMEN IN LOVE, with Jackson appearing briefly in a key supporting role as the mother of her WOMEN IN LOVE character. Screenwriter Larry Kramer, who streamlined Lawrence’s novel in his adaptation, his first feature script, later achieved renown as a novelist, pioneering AIDS activist, and playwright (The Normal Heart). Co-star Alan Bates had been previously nominated as Best Actor for The Fixer in 1968; Billy Williams would collect an Oscar for photographing 1982’s Best Picture winner, Gandhi.

D.H. Lawrence challenged conventional ideas about art, politics, gender, sexual experience, friendship, and marriage in his novels, and Russell and Kramer realized his erotically charged prose on film. Critic J. Hoberman wrote an assessment in the New York Times for the film’s 4K restoration in 2017, calling the film “a robust, entertaining, tastefully vulgar celebration of Lawrence’s philosophy.”

Upon the film’s original release in 1970, Pauline Kael described the film as “a gothic sex fantasy based on themes from D.H. Lawrence’s novel…a highly colored swirl of emotional impressions, bursting with intensity.”

Author Stephen Tapert worked for eight years at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a museum researcher. He currently teaches film studies at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. There will be a sale and signing of his newly published book, Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women, after the screening. In collaboration with Creating Conversations Bookstore.

Our 50th Anniversary presentation of WOMEN IN LOVE with film critic Stephen Farber and author Stephen Tapert screens Wednesday, February 5 at 7pm at the Laemmle Royal. Click here for tickets.

129 minutes * Rated R * DCP * 1970

LAEMMLE LIVE presents: Mixtape Quartet February 16 in Santa Monica

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RSVP ON EVENTBRITE
This is a Free Event

LAEMMLE LIVE puts a fresh spin on chamber music this month and proudly introduces Mixtape Quartet.

Mixtape Series draws inspiration from how friends share music. We curate our favorite musical moments to share a feeling. And to tell a story. We love the nostalgic and intimate quality of personalized cassettes. And we value the abundant diversity of music available on today’s streaming platforms. Mixtape combines the best of both. But Pandora and Spotify are no match for human instinct. Our handcrafted playlists connect pieces in ways no algorithm could hope to think up! We seamlessly thread together selections of the best moments in the classical repertoire (and beyond!) into themed concerts. The audience experience is akin to leaving all your music on shuffle, except somehow, no matter how diverse the pieces are, the music always fits together perfectly. Watch their video here.

Juan-Salvador Carrasco, Michael Siess, and Misha Vayman, Co-Artistic Directors Email: mixtapechamber@gmail.com

Artists:

Misha Vayman & Michael Siess – Violins

Nao Kubota & Hyemi Choi – Violas

Juan-Salvador Carrasco & Sarah Kim – Cellos

Program:

Sun selections

Ysaye Violin Sonata No. 5, “L’aurore”

Beethoven String Quartet in A major, Op. 132, mvt 3

Janacek String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters,” mvt 1

Debussy Quartet, mvt 3

Moon selections

Bartok String Quartet No. 4, mvt 3

Schoenberg Verklarte Nacht

Borodin String Quartet, mvt 3

Clair de Lune

Sunday, February 16, 2020
11:00 AM
Monica Film Center
1332 Second Street
Santa Monica

 

Our Filmic Cup Runneth Over: Drink Deep of the Oscar-Nominated Foreign Features and Documentaries.

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Now is the time to enjoy fantastic films from around the world. All five of the Oscar-nominated documentary features — THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY, THE CAVE, FOR SAMA, AMERICAN FACTORY and HONEYLAND are in theaters now, before the awards show on February 9. Four of the five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature — LES MISÉRABLES, PAIN AND GLORY, PARASITE and HONEYLAND (deservedly, it’s nominated twice!) are now in theaters.

We hope to open the Polish drama CORPUS CHRISTI, the fifth foreign film nominee and the dark horse in the race, on March 6 at the Monica Film Center, Playhouse and Town Center.

The film is about 20-year-old Daniel, who is released and sent to a remote village to work as a manual laborer after spending years in a Warsaw prison for a violent crime. The job is designed to keep him busy, but Daniel has a higher calling. While imprisoned he became deeply religious and now aspires to join the priesthood, but his criminal record makes it impossible. When Daniel arrives in town, one quick lie allows him to be mistaken for the town’s new priest, and he sets about tending to his newfound flock. An international sensation with an electrifying lead performance by a previously unknown actor, CORPUS CHRISTI is the twelfth Polish film to earn an Oscar nomination. Only one of them has taken home the prize, IDA in 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27ORUHlp6E&t=4s

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT 55th Anniversary Screening with Co-Star Paula Prentiss.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present one of the most delightful comedies of the 1960s, THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT, produced by a top-flight group of filmmakers and actors. We will be joined by one of the film’s stars, Paula Prentiss, one of the most gifted comediennes to emerge during that era.

HENRY ORIENT is a rare example of a female-centric movie that takes on added relevance at a time when critics are clamoring for more movies that reflect women’s experiences. The film had its origins in a novel written by Nora Johnson and based partly on her own experiences at a posh girls’ school in Manhattan.

The main characters are two of the girls at the school, played by charming newcomers Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth in their film debuts. The two heroines develop a crush on a second-rate pianist, the flamboyant Lothario Henry Orient, played to the hilt by the brilliant Peter Sellers. Johnson admitted that the plot was based in part on her own teenage infatuation with real-life pianist and wit Oscar Levant.

Sellers broke through to full-fledged stardom in 1964. The acclaimed anti-war satire, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ opened early in the year, with Sellers cast in three different roles. In the spring of that year he introduced the character of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the comedy classic, ‘The Pink Panther,’ and that film was so successful that he brought back the character in ‘A Shot in the Dark later that year.’

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT premiered as the Easter attraction at Radio City Music Hall, and it was the official American entry at the Cannes Film Festival in May. In addition to Sellers and Prentiss, the adult cast included Angela Lansbury as Walker’s imperious mother, Tom Bosley (a Broadway veteran who would go on to win new audiences in popular TV series like ‘Happy Days’ and Lansbury’s ‘Murder, She Wrote’), Phyllis Thaxter, and Bibi Osterwald.

The behind-the-scenes talent was equally impressive. Nora Johnson wrote the screenplay with her father, acclaimed writer-director Nunnally Johnson, whose credits include the Oscar-winning ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ‘Roxie Hart,’ ‘The Three Faces of Eve,’ and ‘The Dirty Dozen.’ HENRY ORIENT was the first film produced by Jerome Hellman, who won an Academy Award five years later for producing ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ The picture was the third directed by George Roy Hill, who went on to make ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ ‘The Sting’ (Oscar winner for Best Picture and Best Director), ‘A Little Romance,’ and ‘The World According to Garp.’

Cinematographers Boris Kaufman (an Oscar winner for ‘On the Waterfront’) and Arthur J. Ornitz (‘A Thousand Clowns,’ ‘Serpico’) brought lyricism to their depiction of Manhattan, and the great composer Elmer Bernstein (‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘The Great Escape,’ ‘True Grit,’ ‘Airplane!,’ and ‘Far from Heaven’) contributed one of his most memorable scores.

All of this talent impressed the critics. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther hailed “one of the most joyous and comforting movies about teenagers that we’ve had in a long time…a juicily tart and sassy go-round.” Time magazine called it “bright, breezy, and brimming with fun.”

The picture was named one of the year’s ten best by the National Board of Review. It was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical of the Year, and it also received a nomination from the Writers Guild of America as Best Written American Comedy.

Over the years the movie has turned into a cult favorite. Writing in The New Yorker in 2012, almost 50 years after the film’s release, John Colapinto called HENRY ORIENT “one of the most enduringly funny and moving American movies ever made.” Leonard Maltin described it as a “marvelous comedy of two teenage girls who idolize eccentric pianist Sellers and follow him around N.Y.C.”

Prentiss plays one of the women pursued by Sellers, whose trysts are constantly interrupted by the two girls. Prentiss made her screen debut in the enormously successful spring break comedy, ‘Where the Boys Are,’ in 1960. She went on to star with Rock Hudson in Howard Hawks’ ‘Man’s Favorite Sport,’ and she appeared with Sellers again in ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ She also co-starred in such films as ‘In Harm’s Way,’ Mike Nichols’ ‘Catch 22,’ ‘The Parallax View,’ and the chilling feminist thriller ‘The Stepford Wives.’ In the late ’60s she starred with her husband, Richard Benjamin, in the acclaimed TV sitcom ‘He & She.’

Our 55th anniversary screening of THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT with co-star Paula Prentiss in-person, screens Tuesday, January 28, at 7pm at the Royal in West L.A. Click here for tickets.

FELLINI SATYRICON 50th Anniversary Screenings January 22 in Glendale, Pasadena, and West L.A.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series launch 2020 and the new decade with the 50th anniversary of the American release of FELLINI SATYRICON, the first installment of our monthly Abroad program.

The provocative adaptation of Petronius’s Satyricon, written in the first century AD during the reign of Nero in imperial Rome, is our fourth presentation of the films of Federico Fellini, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the history of cinema. Fellini garnered the third of four directing Oscar nominations for this effort; the Anniversary Classics Series has now showcased all of these nominated films, including La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Amarcord.

FELLINI SATYRICON, written by the Italian director with frequent collaborators Brunello Rondi and Bernardino Zapponi, is a freeform adaptation, emulating the fragmentary nature of Petronius’s work that survived. Petronius retold “degenerate” versions of Roman and Greek myth, and Fellini was fascinated by the gaps in the narrative, choosing a style that simulated hallucinatory dreams.

In the fevered tale, two students, Encolpius (Martin Potter) and Ascyltus (Hiram Keller), pursue the love of their young slave Giton (Max Born) through nine episodes of lurid hedonism. Petronius was a sensualist who celebrated and mocked decadence simultaneously, and Fellini matched that vision in the students’ travels and adventures in “grotesque drama and lurid fantasy,” as noted by Roger Ebert. Fellini achieved that effect through the vivid use of color, which was an ironic embrace of a medium the director disdained earlier in his career, preferring black-and-white hues in the 1950s and early 1960s in masterpieces like La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita.

Another frequent collaborator, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, fully realized Fellini’s vision; as described by TV Guide, “The masterful cinematography and stunning use of color, achieved through the use of deliberately artificial light sources, lend the film an almost hypnotic sheen.”

Fellini was questioned why he employed non-Italian actors to play the leads, and he elaborated on his casting choices, “They looked innocent…with Italians there is always a feeling of morality, but the Anglo-Saxon face has something detached, something crazy, something elegant.”

Critical reception varied from measured appraisals such as Rex Reed, who saw it as an “explosion of madness and perversion, designed like grand opera of the absurd,” to full endorsement from the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, calling it “the quintessential Fellini film, a travelogue through an unknown galaxy, a magnificently realized movie of his and our wildest dreams.”

In a retrospective review in 2001, Roger Ebert wrote, “It is so much more ambitious and audacious than most of what we see today that simply as a reckless gesture, it shames these timid times.”

See it Wednesday, January 22nd at 7pm in Glendale, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.

Format: Blu-ray