February 23rd 2013. Pick Of The Day.

Kate Hepburn gets the day started as part of Film Forum's tribute to Hollywood 1933 with George Cukor's LITTLE WOMEN and Lowell Sherman's MORNING GLORY. The former was a response to the then new Production or "Hays" Code, a safe-bet adap of the Louisa May Alcott novel that co-starred Jean Parker, Francis Dee and the always welcome Joan Bennett. The latter featured our star as an cloying, annoying actress who wears down everyone around her in pursuit of thespian glory, and bagged Hep the first of four little gold men. Early method acting, methinks. Not my Pick.

Anthology Film Archives' trib to the late great Andrew Sarris continues today with screenings of Allan Dwan's THE RIVER'S EDGE, Tay Garnett's THE SPEILER, and Andre De Toth's DARK WATERS. EDGE concerns Ray Milland's theif who fights with border guide Anthony Quinn over Debra Paget. Chicks, man. The silent SPEILER finds Alan Hale and Clyde Cook joining up with and then fighting over carnival owner Rene Adoree. Rubes, man. And DARK's southern gothic noir finds Merle Oberon's submarine wreck survivor recuperating with shady in-laws who have their own plans for her inheritance. The south, man.

Also screening separate from this series is Leni Riefenstahl's epic and influential TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. One of the most important and regrettable films ever made still merits a big screen viewing to fully appreciate what the director accomplished. Just sorta forget it's Nazi propoganda. Somehow.

Museum of the Moving Image screens the sophmore effort from groundbreaking indie auteur Charles Burnett, MY BROTHER"S WEDDING. Focusing on a lower middle class African-American family in L.A.'s South Central the film delves into crises both socioeconomic and existential that was and is rare for black cinema. Edited against his wishes and then shelved, the version screening tonight is the new 2008 Director's Cut. Good stuff, but not my Pick.

Midnight at IFC Center brings us competing screenings of Speilberg's JAWS and Hal Ashby's HAROLD AND MAUDE, two benchmarks of the New Hollywood of the 70's. Face it, you've seen these both a hundred times, so the only real choice is between John Williams or Cat Stevens. How's THAT for a steel cage death match?

Yesterday's Pick also screens for a second midnight at the Landmark Sunshine Cinemas, the exquisitely creepy WHITE ZOMBIE, in a stunning new 4K restoration after years suffering the ravages of public domain hell. One of the few star turns Bela Lugosi would be afforded in the wake of his typecasting at DRACULA's hands is also one of the great rediscoveries of the early sound era. If I hadn't already chosen it it would be today's Pick, but I got rules, and I also haven't shown a particularly favored venue in Journal Square, NJ, some love for a little while. So I turn my attention westward in service to this temple of cinema and the two great stars they fete this eve. Read on.

The Humphrey Bogart vehicle BEAT THE DEVIL is a famous example of a production run amok. Meant to be a semi-remake of his earlier MALTESE FALCON he hired that film's director, John Huston, to bring James Helvick's novel to the screen. and then all Hell broke loose. Helvick, hired to adapt his novel, quit the production in a furor and was replaced. By Truman Capote! Semi-remake turned to camp parody, Huston's focus famously wavered from the film he was elisted to helm to the nightlife shenanigans cast and crew caught themselves up in, and the resulting hijinks fared badly at the box office, although its rep has vastly inproved in the interim and the stories that sprang from its making are now the stuff of legend. Lastly, the cast is rounded out by Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Gina Lollobrigida and Jennifer Jones. It's a fucking trip and would rate today's Pick, especially as it too has survived mostly in terrible public domain prints and the venue it screens in has a reliable history of screening good to perfect prints. But I've been on something of a kick over the last couple of weeks for a different star from the early sound era, who sparked like a firecracker onscreen during a 30-plus year career, and who walked away from it finally, the story goes, after a uniquely exhausting role that marked the only time he would work with one of the medium's greatest directors. The filmmaker took advantage of his star's renowned and seemingly endless well of energy to drive the pace of the film, a Cold War corporate creep farce concerning a Coca-Cola exec's efforts to open new markets in Soviet Russia, and the young lovers who complicate matters impossibly. To top things off the Berlin Wall was constructed in the middle of the film's production, forcing a move to Munich to complete. The star would return for a small screen role thirty years later, and a TV movie shortly after that, and just before his death. But had this truly been his exit from the screen he shone so brightly on none would deny that he literally left it all up there with this perf. I've just happily rewatched THE PUBLIC ENEMY, ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, THE ROARING TWENTIES and caught THE MAYOR OF HELL for the first time at the Forum this week. So I'm heading out to Jersey to see the man close out his studio era career in one of the best barnburners he ever bestowed upon the movie loving world.

Jimmy Cagney stars in Billy Wilder's ONE, TWO, THREE at the Landmark Jersey Loews tonight at 8:20pm. Bogie's DEVIL can be seen in the same venue at 6:30pm. Try to catch 'em both, but if you've only got one in ya I advise you to go with my Pick.

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Be safe and sound Stockahz and make sure the next guy is too! Catch ya next week with the month's final Picks and the March calendar update! And wear yer galoshes today, Knucks!

-Joe Walsh