Wednesday, August 28 at 7pm
Shallow Hal
Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly(2001, U.S.) 114 min. 35MM. With Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black.
Nearly a quarter of a century since its release , the Farrelly brothers’ romantic comedy “has retained a revealing currency. It has expanded its reach through streaming services, where it is popular and even beloved. And it speaks to a culture that still interprets fatness as a condition that deserves whatever mockery it might get” (The Atlantic). Directors of one of the biggest popular hits of the 90s (There’s Something About Mary), the Farrellys excel at humor so puerile that some can’t decide whether it really is (or should be) hilarious – indeed, its tastelessness begs the question of whether it is still daring (for better or for worse). As for Shallow Hal, “the most shocking thing about it may be its unabashed sincerity. There are enough moments of demented comedy to make you aspirate your popcorn, but by the end you may find yourself, with some amazement, sniffing back tears” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).
Wednesday, September 4th at 7pm
STELLA DALLAS – New Print!
King Vidor (U.S. 1937) 105 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley.
In Stella Dallas, Barbara Stanwyck created one of the most indelible heroines of Hollywood’s Golden Age: a rough-around-the-edges millworker’s daughter who, even after she schemes her way up a peg on the social ladder, can’t quite shake her working-class ways as she does whatever it takes to give her daughter (Shirley) a better life. This is 100-proof melodrama in its purest, most undistilled form, ruthlessly wringing pathos from its nerve-touching themes of class, motherhood, and self-sacrifice. Through it all, Stanwyck is a miracle, pouring every ounce of Brooklyn brass and just-below-the-surface vulnerability she’s got into the endearingly crude Stella, before going in for the kill with the titanic heartbreak of the impossible-to-forget ending (Film at Lincoln Center program notes). New print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Wednesday, September 11th at 7pm
GASLIGHT
George Cukor (U.S. 1944) 114 min. 35MM. With Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten.
A young opera singer haunted by the memory of her aunt’s murder marries a handsome pianist and settles down in her relative’s long-abandoned, overstuffed London mansion, where footsteps echo in the attic, gaslights dim, and secrets come to light… George Cukor’s celebrated noir-melodrama is a deeply ambiguous study of psychological abuse, anchored by a terrific cast (including an 18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her first film role) and suffused with a sense of creeping dread. At its famous last-act reversal of power, Gaslight transforms from a masterful woman-in-trouble melodrama into something much more haunting: a reflection on the origins of emotional violence, marked by a rare degree of sympathy for the abuser as well as the abused (Film at Lincoln Center program notes).
Wednesday, September 25th at 7pm
SORRY, WRONG NUMBER
Anatole Litvak (U.S. 1948) 90 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards.
Heiress Leona Stevenson (Stanwyck), bedridden by psychosomatic symptoms, hears through crossed telephone wires of a murder being planned. She tries to alert the police, to no avail, and grows frantic as she gradually realizes she is the intended victim. Stanwyck gives a tour de force, Oscar-nominated performance in this engrossing and densely layered extension of Lucile Flectcher’s legendary 22-minute radio drama. Too often dismissed as a gimmicky “women’s picture,” the film is a pitch-black noir, tracking an ill-fated romance that spirals into bitterness, deceit, and death. Featuring Burt Lancaster in one of his earliest roles, mesmerizing direction by Anatole Litvak, and astoundingly atmospheric camerawork by the great Sol Polito. Famous … yet still underrated (Music Box notes). Presented in 35mm courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Wednesday, October 9th at 7pm
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH
Billy Wilder (U.S. 1945) 105 min. DCP. With Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes.
With the dog days already melting the asphalt, Tom Ewell packs the wife and kid off to Maine, while he holds the fort in sweltering NYC to work at his publishing job, turning literary classics into vintagely lurid 25-cent paperbacks. But when the summer widower’s next project, “Repressed Urges in the Middle-Aged Male,” coincides with the arrival of a new upstairs neighbor — TV toothpaste pitchwoman and “art” photo model Marilyn Monroe (!) — it’s time to scratch that old “seven year itch.” If Rachmaninoff doesn’t do the trick (“That’s classical music, isn’t it?” she asks. “I can tell because there are no vocals”), at least there’s the thrill of watching her cool off over a subway grate on a sultry summer night. And when klutzy would-be Casanova Ewell confesses “Nothing like this ever happened to me in all my life, Marilyn ingenuously replies, “That’s funny. Happens to me all the time.” This Eisenhower era sex comedy is the apotheosis of Marilyn Monroe, and, in her white-dressed pose above the subway, not only her own most iconic moment, but one of the most enduring images in movie history (adapted from Film Forum notes).
Wednesday, October 23rd 7pm
A Sixth Part of the World
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R. 1926) 60 min. Silent.
When the Soviet Union’s State Trading Organization commissioned Vertov to make a promotional film about its operations, he dispatched expeditions of cameramen to points as distant as the Russian Far East and Western Europe. Vertov crafted from his material a Walt Whitmanesque ode to the diversity of his country, a development of his theory of Kino-Pravda (film truth) and a poetic visualization of the revolutionary filmmaker’s quest for a cinema that was at once a “Communist decoding of world relations,” and the means of establishing “a visual bond between the workers of the whole world”. Presented in connection with the Bucknell Humanities Center themed programming, “Narrating Russia’s Empires: Eurasian Resistance/s.”