The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
CANCELLED: We regret to inform you that this Sunday’s Laemmle Live concert featuring Samohi Chamber Orchestra has been cancelled. This is in line with the school’s decision to cancel other large public gatherings. We appreciate your understanding of the situation.
LAEMMLE LIVE proudly welcomes back our hometown band – Samohi Chamber Orchestra. Orchestra Directors are Joni Swenson and Jason Aiello. Santa Monica High School, fondly referred to as Samohi, is a large urban public high school. Founded in 1891, Samohi has an enrollment of 3,000 diverse students and is situated on a twenty-six acre campus just a short walk from the Pacific Ocean.
The Santa Monica Orchestra was founded in 1903, making 2020 its 117th anniversary. During this time, the program has grown to include seven orchestras at Samohi. The Santa Monica High School Chamber Orchestra is comprised of twenty-two talented and dedicated young musicians who are leaders in the Samohi Symphony Orchestra. In past years, the Santa Monica High School Chamber Orchestra has performed in Carnegie Hall in 2009, at the American String Teachers Association National Orchestra Festival in Kansas City, Kansas in 2011; at the Northwest Orchestra Festival in Portland, Oregon in 2013 and in 2017, and in Vancouver, British Columbia in 2015. Last year, the Samohi Chamber Orchestra performed in New York City at the National Orchestra Cup Festival held at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center where they received the best string ensemble in the festival. The Chamber Orchestra is delighted for its fourth performance in the Laemmle Live Concert Series.
1st Violin
Rubani Chugh
Kielor Tung
Gina Kim
Ryan Lee
Sarah Michlin
2nd Violin
Anouk Jouffret
Emily Taylor
Chloe Schwartz
Isabella Miele-Okada
Lily Rafat
Janet Yang
Viola
Layla Shapouri
Dyllan Zhou
Grace McFalls
Naomi Villafana
Cello
Kaya Ralls
Lily Stern
Giulia Trevellin
Shoshanah Israilevich
Bass
Weston Kerekes
Alec Raymond
Silas Garcia-George
Samohi Orchestra Parents Association
Ann Raziel, President
Santa Monica High School
Dr. Antonio Shelton, Principal
Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District
Sunday, March 15, 2020
11:00 AM
Monica Film Center
1332 Second Street
Santa Monica
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:
It was an unprecedented Oscars for foreign language cinema, with “Parasite” taking not only Best International Film but Best Director and Picture. Laemmle Oscar Contest participants who correctly guessed the Academy would break with tradition and choose a foreign film over an English-language film won our contest. First place garnered a Laemmle Premiere Card worth $150 and the two second place winners get Laemmle Premiere Cards worth $100. The winners’ prizes are on the way.
23 correct: 1st Place) Jared N. of Pasadena.
22 correct: (205 mins) 2nd Place tie) So Jin C. of L.A.
22 correct (205 mins) 2nd Place tie) Megan M. of Pasadena.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all for playing!
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.
141 minutes * USA * 1959 * DCP
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
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
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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