December 7th 2013. Pick of the Day.
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It's 60 degrees, it's 30 degress, it's clear and sunny, it's misty and foggy, it's NYC, it's Glasgow. YO! Make up yer mind, Ma Nature! We got film skeds to keep to, and coats and umbrellas are sorta important to our commutes, ya dig Mamz?!?
Ahem. New and continuing series include Film Forum's massive month-long Barbara Stanwyck trib, IFC Center's The Way He Was: Early Redford, Moving Image's See It Big! Great Cinematographers, and the Film Society's last Ozu trib of 2013. The monkeyshines as follows;
IFC Center
THEY LIVE (1988) Dir; John Carpenter
JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972) Dir; Sydney Pollack
THE SHINING (1980) Dir; Stanley Kubrick
TAXI DRIVER (1976) Dir; Martin Scorsese
Nitehawk Cinema
MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971) Dir; Robert Altman
BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) Dir; Bob Clark
Film Forum
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) Dir; Billy Wilder
THE LADY EVE (1941) Dir; Preston Sturges
Museum of the Moving Image
MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S (1969) Dir; Eric Rohmer
Film Society of Lincoln Center
AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962) Dir; Yasujiro Ozu
EQUINOX FLOWER (1958) Dir; Yasujiro Ozu
Anthology Film Archives
THE GENERAL (1927) Dir; Buster Keaton
Today's Pick? I'm going with the first of what will surely be many selections from Film Forum's excellent Barbara Stanwyck retrospective as my choice today, or shall I say choices. The 2-fer of Billy Wilder's noir masterpiece DOUBLE INDEMNITY and Preston Sturges' screwball comedy exemplar THE LADY EVE are simply unbeatable today, even by the likes of Buster Keaton's masterpiece THE GENERAL, John Carpenter's unsubtly subversive THEY LIVE, and what I deem one of the two tolerable films from Robert Altman's CV (MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER). The Film Society's equally wonderful George Cukor trib begins this coming Friday, and the duelling retrospectives are so much candy to a Cinegeek like myself, but for the coming week at least my gal Babz stands alone.
There are many movie stars who thrived in the sound era due to their dulcet tones and way with the dialogue, when others waned because of their lacking. There are many who embodied the terms moxie and sex appeal and were able to serve equal portions of both. Only a select few, however, could rep all these attributes under a distinct collective appelation; a broad. Tough, knowing, even cunning, and not remotely demure when it came to employing their sexuality to get what they wanted. Never, however, capable of betraying their hearts, so ulitmately (with few exceptions) endearing to the audience. Among these count the great Jean Arthur, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, actually count pretty much every actress who worked with Howard Hawks (because I apparently can't have a film discussion without dropping the Grey Fox's name). And then count one more. Sugarpuss O'Shea on screen, Ruby Stevens from the hard streets of Brooklyn before then, and somewhere betwixt these two women emerged the equal parts legit and artificial Barbara Stanwyck. Hollywood legend. Modern for her era, surviving the Hays code by seemingly transforming scripted text to visual, physical subtext. A glance from Stanwyck, to borrow a cliche, was worth a thousand words. That's now a million words, adjusted for inflation. This month you get all seven digits worth of that persuasiveness and passion courtesy of chief programmer Bruce Goldstein and the crew at the Forum. Pre-Code sin and three-Kleenex weeper, femme fatales and hookers with hearts of gold, screwball comedies and noirs and westerns, the entire spectrum of her talents are fully on display for a month. She could and did do it all, and I can't even begin to think who her modern equivalent might be. I'd be shocked to discover there is one.
For more info on these and all NYC's classic screenings in December '13 click on the interactive calendar on the upper right hand side of the page. And be sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter! Back tomorrow with a new round of listings and a fresh Pick. Til then stay off Santa's naughty list and recommend the other kids do likewise. Excelsior!
-Joe Walsh
