February 20th. Pick Of The Day.

If you are reading this I can safely assume that your ability to point and click is intact, and therefore the dreaded scourge of frostbite has not cost you any of your digits. Well played so far, Stockers. Still, we are not yet free of Winter's cold and deadly grip, so I advise you to duck into the safe and heated environs of your local movie theater to keep warm and catch up on some classic film screenings. As luck would have it some excellent choices are offered this crisp day.

That's my nice way of sayin' BRRRRRR it's freakin' freezin' and I'm waitin' February out at the Film Forum!

MOMA unspools Stanley Kramer's classic "message" flick THE DEFIANT ONES as this week's three day screening in their Auteurist History of Film series. Perhaps the quintessential example of Kramer's mission to make timely sociopolitical melodrama he knew the audience craved, and always with a liberal bent that wasn't so welcome in the Joe McCarthy years, it also cemented the star status of leads Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, and remains a work by which both men's careers are measured. Loves me some S-Kray, but not my Pick.

BAM's tribute to Richard Pryor screens for a penultimate day, offering the rare Walter Hill comedy BREWSTER'S MILLIONS and the Michael Schultz helmed WHICH WAY IS UP? The former was the eighth film incarnation of a story that had once seen Fatty Arbuckle essay the lead role, and the latter a remake of a Lina Wertmuller (I can't find the umlaut key) film directed by the rare working African American studio director whose career merits a bit more discussion. Both lesser efforts from one of Hollywood's most dynamic comedic talents but HEY, even his mediocre flicks are worth a viewing. How exactly did WHOLLY MOSES escape this retrospective? Loves me some R-Pry, not my Pick.

And the aforementioned Film Forum isn't even CLOSE to being done with their tribute to the transitional Hollywood year 1933, kicking off the day with the Spencer Tracy vehicle MAN'S CASTLE. Directed by Fox's artist-in-residence and F. W. Murnau disciple Frank Borzage, the film follows Depression era cast-offs Tracy and Loretta Young as they follow their wits and moral codes compromised in order to insure survival on a day to day basis. Tough, beautiful stuff. Narrowly misses as my Pick, but I'm taking sides with Tha Cagz today in one of his patented gangster-with-a-heart gigs that foreshadows the masterpiece ANGLES WITH DIRTY FACES. The two flicks even share a director. Kinda. Read on.

Jimmy Cagney was that none-too-rare Irish-American lad who could woo a lass with quick repartee or nimble footwork. Y'know like all of us. UNlike all of us he began his career dancing in drag onstage and 12 years later defined the Warner Brothers gangster in THE PUBLIC ENEMY and works beyond. Probably as payback to the prick who put him in a dress. I digress.

James Cagney resides in a unique corner of the screen acting world. In that transitional period when film actors from a theater background learned to disregard their lines in order to play to the silent cinema's "cheap seats", then reversed to attend to the dialogue and tone down the theatricality, street mugs like Cagney and George Raft and Humphrey Bogart were, perhaps unwittingly, early practicioners of The Method, drawing on their own unique personalities to play various characters whose traits orbited theirs. No matter the quality of the work in which they appear, there is a genuine interest from any film fan for flicks featuring Cagney or Bogart or Raft. For Flynn and Grant and Tracy. For the naturals, especially the ones who caught fire onscreen. Today Cagney portrays a racketeer awarded the soft gig of overseeing a boys reform school, and then finds himself in danger of becoming a swell egg, as it were. After a foolish criminal relapse Cagney takes it on the lam, and is replaced by a fascistic headmaster. And the boys don't like that. They don't like it at all.

THE MAYOR OF HELL screens today at the Film Forum. Co-directed by Archie Mayo and ANGELS' Michael Curtiz, it remains one of the great meldings of Warner's social message and gangster genres. This is what happens when you put a Irishman in a skirt. Beware.

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-Joe Walsh