February 21st 2013. Pick Of The Day.

The Film Forum's tribute to Hollywood's transitional year 1933 continues apace. And this mug sez that's swell! The day in classic screenings begins with the wild Loretta Young vehicle ZOO IN BUDAPEST, which finds our waifish heroine hiding from the civilized world in the eponymous facsimile of the wild with the zoo's caretaker, a half-feral Gene Raymond. Sounds like clean stuff. Next up is an offering from the other end of the moral spectrum, Mitchell Leisen's CRADLE SONG, in which a young orphan raised by nuns in a convent approaches adolesence and men suddenly become a problem again. What else is new? Both promising offerings but not today's Pick.

The second of MOMA's three screenings of THE DEFIANT ONES unspools today as part of their Auteurist History of Film series. Stanley Kramer had one of the most impressive and important runs of any writer/producer/director in the studio era and is one of the reasons I fell in love with the art form as a kid. Yep, I'm that 14 year old who dug repeated VHS viewings of ON THE BEACH. DEFIANT was one of his best and most commercially succesful, a quintesential example of his "message" film ouvre, and cemented the star status of leads Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, who would just kinda go on to represent the modern Hollywood star in the turbulent 60's and beyond. Tempts, but not my Pick.

Master troublemaker and father of the indie film movement John Cassavetes is repped tonight in IFC Center's screening of FACES, as part of their Modern School of Film series. The seemingly plot barren proceedings concerning a tempestous & crumbling marriage and the lovers complicit in its doom serve as backdrop for raw and bold perfs from the filmmaker's stable of friends and cohorts; John Marley, Seymour Cassell, Val Avery, and the luminous wife of the director, one Gena Rowlands. A seminal flick in the postwar cinematic underground/indie movement centered in NYC, tonight's screening will be intro'd and discussed by the no less controversial James Toback. Tough call, but I pass.

Bette Davis will do absolutely fucking ANYTHING to retrieve THE LETTER tonight at the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas. Just try her. G'wan.

BAM's Richard Pryor retrospective screens its last this day with the comic actor's lone directorial effort, a semi-autobiographical flick that loosely borrowed the structure of Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ. JO JO DANCER YOUR LIFE IS CALLING was filmed in the aftermath of Pryor's near death burning as a result of a freebasing gone wrong. Pryor was notoriously unhappy, even at the height of his success which is so often the case, but where JAZZ seems to be Fosse's unrepentant examination of an artist's moral design DANCER seems a genuine attempt to retrace and perhaps redeem. His raunch was what sold tickets but his heart was what made him the beloved icon he came to be. That heart is fully on display at BAM tonight and if you've unfortunately missed the rest of this tribute you could do worse than catch this final entry. Just not my Pick.

No, my Pick today is reserved for one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers who ever graced the medium, and one of my personal heroes. The guy who told Hitler to fuck off. Well, not to his face, but clandestinely escaping the country after being commanded to head the Nazi film propaganda department took stones regardless. Especially if you were considered a national treasure up to that point and had nothing to lose. Oh, and did I mention he left his Third Reich-loving wife behind to do so? Yeah, my Pick today is reserved for one of the absolute heroes of cinema, who influenced everyone from Murnau to Hitchcock to Freidkin, and who only introduced the cinema's first super-villain, its earliest SciFi masterpiece, and one of the first iconic music cues of the sound era. Read on...

Merry little Fritz Lang was born in Austria in 1890, which was not then considered a crime. Much like his later contemporary Howard Hawks he started out in engineering before he applied the same skills in assembling a film. He acquitted himself succesfully in various lower level assignments before seizing the chance to direct, debuting with the breezy post-WW I two-reeler HILDE WARREN AND DEATH. His first indelible stamp was felt in the quasi-adap of the French FANTOMAS serials, THE SPIDERS. The enormous success of these films coupled with the burgeoning filmmaker's increasingly Nietzschean world view, as well as a romance and marriage to scenarist Thea Von Harbou, resulted in his first masterpiece, and the introduction to cinema of the aforementioned first cinematic super-villain. DR. MABUSE THE GAMBLER centers on the preternaturally gifted criminal mastermind, whose plots run the gamut from intricate to presumptive, but seemingly always work toward his nefarious end; civilization's ruin and his wielding of ultimate power. Perhaps the first time the mega-villain was offered up onscreen as prime character to identify with, it was insanely popular and remains incredibly influential to this day. Just watch THE DARK KNIGHT if ya doubt me.

Lang became the face of the film industry along side cats like F. W. Murnau and G. W. Pabst, even surviving one of the grand debacles of the silent era which has also come to be recognized as one of the greats and most influential, METROPOLIS. When sound film was finally forced on him he responded by having Peter Lorre whistle one of the film world's most recognizable cues to this day, Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt, in the landmark film M, a film that scholars have read as an early anti-Nazi scribe. His views on mob justice took celluloid root with this masterpiece, and would return in films like FURY, but his first real anti-Nazi screed followed M and would be his last German film, last collaboration with his wife (of any kind), and perhaps the filmmaker's last word on the so-called Furher. There are those who specualte Lang contemplated a partnership with Hitler. One need only look at the film screening tonight, hated and banned by the very Goebbels who offered Lang the UFA facilities on a platter, which resurrected his vainglorious super-villain for perhaps the sole purpose of putting Hitler's words in the manipulative scoundrel's mouth, for evidence of where the director's heart lay in 1933. All I know is Lang buried Hitler onscreen and in real life. And his grand creation survives onscreen to plot world domination another day...

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE screens tonight at the Film Forum as part of their tribute to the year 1933. I will see you there.

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-Joe Walsh