This series supports a course tracing the history of two intense modes of film spectatorship: the surrealist pleasure in the contingencies of cinema, and the auteurist attribution of deliberate personal touches within the commercial enterprise of classical Hollywood filmmaking. In order to engage Jean-Luc Godard and Andrew Sarris’ notion of the auteur, screenings will focus on two favorite directors of Cahiers du Cinéma: Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray. Professor: Ken Eisenstein. Screenings are free and open to the public.
LAURA
Otto Preminger (U.S. 1944) 88 min. 35MM. With Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price.
The closer detective Mark McPherson (Andrews) gets to the truth about the beautiful, murdered Laura (Tierney), the harder he falls for the dead woman. Though the motives of the men who surrounded her (her coldly effete mentor’s obsession, her fiancé’s affair with her aunt) all come to light, there’s still something about Laura that nobody knows. Who is Laura? What is she? Nothing is as it seems in Otto Preminger’s stylish and hypnotic noir, his first major hit stateside.
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Tuesday, January 26 at 1:30pm
BRINGING UP BABY
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1938) 102 min. 35MM. With Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, May Robson, Charles Ruggles.
Screwball antics and zingers reach sublime heights in Howard Hawks’ comedy classic. David (Grant) is a New York paleontologist due to be married in a day. Susan (Hepburn) is the curious, quick-quipping woman he can’t seem to stop running into, who is always courting disaster (and him). Susan convinces David to come with her to Connecticut, where her wealthy aunt could be the key to funding his museum. A weekend in the country goes wild when Baby, the pet leopard, gets loose, David dresses in drag to meet the distinguished donor, and everybody – even the cat – ends up in jail. A zany masterpiece, in which the dialogue’s surface humor doubles as risqué Hays Code subversion.
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Tuesday, February 2 at 1:30pm
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1940) 92 min. 35MM. With Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy.
Hildy Johnson (Russell) is a former reporter who traded a promising career for a new fiancé (Bellamy). Walter Burns (Grant) is her former editor and ex-husband, and he’s desperately scheming to win her back on both fronts. When an execution goes awry a block down from the newsroom, Hildy might be just the newspaperman for the job. Gender parity and parody are at play among the mile-a-minute dialogue in director Hawks’ return to romcom hijinks.
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Tuesday, February 9 at 1:30pm
KNOCK ON ANY DOOR
Nicholas Ray (U.S. 1949) 100 min. . 35MMWith Humphrey Bogart, John Derek, George Macready.
Humphrey Bogart stars as Andy Morton, a lawyer who grew up in the slums and made it out. He is set to defend Nick Romano (Derek), an accused cop killer and estranged friend, whose father’s trial Morton had botched years earlier, sending the innocent man to jail and starting his son’s life of crime. To save his client, Morton damns the world and puts the system itself on trial in this bold, affecting courtroom drama
cum social commentary. Sandwiched between the director’s celebrated debut, They Live by Night, and the sublime noir In a Lonely Place, this lesser seen work shares a fixation on corruption and the unlikelihood of change. 35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
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Tuesday, February 16 at 1:30pm
A SONG IS BORN
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1948) 113 min. 35MM. Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong.
For the Technicolor musical remake of his previous hit Ball of Fire (1941) Hawks assembled a throng of stellar musicians, spotlighting the greatest names of the Big Band era. Danny Kaye plays a professor of highbrow music, working with colleagues on a dictionary of musical terms. They hire Virginia Mayo’s torchy saloon singer to show them what jazz is all about, and the hapless Kaye becomes involved with the moll, who is hiding out from the police chasing her criminal boyfriend.
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Tuesday, February 23 at 1:30pm
ON DANGEROUS GROUND
Nicholas Ray (U.S. 1951) 82 min. 35MM. With Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond, Ed Begley.
Increasingly violent and desensitized to the grit and brutality of his city beat, Robert Ryan’s detective is reassigned to a case in a rural town, far away from the mean streets. When a young woman is murdered, her enraged dad (Bond) and the disillusioned cop team up to track down the suspect. Chasing him through a famous sequence of sublime snowy landscapes, they come to a cabin where Mary (Lupino) lives alone in the wilderness, a literal and figurative beacon of hope in a blizzard of despair. Ray’s aesthetic resonates in a transcendent visual tension between the dark, claustrophobic downtown and the bright, barren north.
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Tuesday, March 1 at 1:30pm
MONKEY BUSINESS
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1952) 97 min. 35 MM. With Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe.
Howard Hawks subjects Cary Grant to more animal antics, switching Bringing Up Baby’s leopard for Monkey Business’ titular primate. Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Grant) is hard at work developing an elixir of youth for Oxley Chemicals, when Esther, the mischievous office chimpanzee, mixes up the perfect formula and pours it in the water cooler while no one’s looking. Soon, everyone’s immaturing: Barnaby spends a day goofing off like a teenager with Mr. Oxley’s secretary, Lois (Monroe), while Barnaby’s wife (Rogers) drinks until she becomes a bratty kid. Regression’s all fun and games until Barnaby turns into a baby (maybe), and scientists must step in call a time-out.
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Tuesday, March 8 at 1:30pm
HOT BLOOD
Nicholas Ray (U.S. 1956) 85 min. 35 MM. With Jane Russell, Cornel Wilde, Luther Adler.
Coming between two of Ray’s enduring masterworks (Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life), Hot Blood is an odd, undersung entry in its creator’s oeuvre. Ray’s interest in subcultures and reckless youth manifests itself in the story of Stephano (Wilde), the youngest scion of an American Roma royal line who wants to turn his back on the dynasty to become a dancer. His older brother, the current king, is dying, but Stephano tries to dodge the crown–and an arranged marriage to a gypsy princess (Russell) who has designs on her fiancee’s sizeable dowry. Spectacular and strange, Hot Blood is some kind of ethnographic Technicolor musical.
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Tuesday, March 22 at 1:30pm
BIGGER THAN LIFE
Nicholas Ray (U.S. 1956) 95 min. 35 MM. With James Mason, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau.
Ed Avery (Mason) is a dedicated schoolteacher, husband, father, friend and addict. Prescribed cortisone, the stress response hormone, Ed seems to make a miracle recovery after a diagnosis of a rare, life threatening arterial inflammation but the little pills are too good to be true. Soon Ed is in the throes of wild and dangerous mood swings, and his wife (Rush) and friend (Matthau) watch him spin out of control. Tense and psychologically terrifying, Bigger Than Life was critically and commercially ignored upon release; a decade later, French New Wave critic-filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard declared it one of the ten greatest American films ever made–today many call it Ray’s finest feature.
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Tuesday, March 29 at 1:30pm
BITTER VICTORY
Nicholas Ray (France/U.S. 1957) 82 min. 35 MM. With Richard Burton, Curd Jürgens, Ruth Roman.
Set during the North African Campaign of World War II, Bitter Victory concerns top secret missions and clandestine love behind enemy lines. Veteran Captain Jimmy Leith (Burton), volunteers to lead a dangerous operation in Benghazi alongside the booksmart but inexperienced Major David Brand (Jürgens). Soon, the Major realizes he and Captain Leith share more than just the mission: his wife Jane, an RAF Flight Lieutenant, seems to share a mysterious past with the Captain. Bitter Victory accents its taut emotions with the horror and glory of war, set against a desert landscape.
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Tuesday, April 5 at 1:30pm
PARTY GIRL
Nicholas Ray (U.S. 1958) 99 min. With Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse, Lee J. Cobb.
Ray’s crime film amplifies the saturated possibilities of Technicolor to stylize an exotically violent vision of Depression-era gangsterdom. Taylor’s gangland lawyer and Charisse’s lounge singer rebel against an underworld overseen by the formidable mobster Lee J. Cobb. In the process a strange love affair blossoms.
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Tuesday, April 12 at 1:30pm
HATARI!
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1962) 157 min. 35 MM. With John Wayne, Elsa Martinelli, Red Buttons.
The routine of John Wayne’s team of trappers (adventurously ensaring wild animals in Africa for export to zoos) is upset when a photojournalist (Martinelli) sent by a Swiss zoo to document the chase joins the crew but can’t stop adopting orphaned baby elephants. Nature doc style long shots show herds of beasts and their hunters in scenes of pursuit, while the romance and madcap human adventure are pure Hawks. Print courtesy of the ConstellationCenter Collection at the Academy Film Archive.
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Tuesday, April 19 at 1:30pm
MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT?
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1964) 120 min. 35 MM. With Rock Hudson, Paula Prentiss.
Roger Willoughby works at a sporting goods store and is the author of a best-selling guide to fishing, even though he has never fished. Mayhem ensues when pushy press agent Abby inveigles him to enter a fishing tournament. Showcasing an adversarial relationship constantly teetering on the edge of romance, Man’s Favorite Sport? was Hawks’ loving homage to his own 1938 screwball classic, Bringing Up Baby. (Notes courtesy of The Museum of the Moving Image)
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Tuesday, April 26 at 1:30pm
EL DORADO
Howard Hawks (U.S. 1966) 126 min. 35 MM. With John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan.
Part of a thematic trilogy with two other Hawks/Wayne titles, El Dorado finds its director and star back in the Western saddle again after Rio Bravo. Hired to help defend a rancher’s water rights, Cole Thornton (Wayne) had no idea taking sides meant fighting his longtime friend, the now drunken and disgraced Sheriff J. P. Harrah (Mitchum). Both comedy and the requisite violence of saloon shootouts ensue.