Category: GETREEL

GetReel 9.27.19

ON THE BIG SCREEN

The 57th New York Film Festival kicks off tonight, featuring two series which will be of interest to classic film fans: “Retrospective” and “Revivals.” Retrospective honors the American Society of Cinematographers on its centennial with a selection of “historically significant and brilliantly photographed films shot by some of its most notable members past and present.” Revivals “showcases important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved.”

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Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell

RETROSPECTIVE begins on Saturday with Frank Borzage’s melodrama Street Angel (1928), shot by Ernest Palmer and Paul Ivano. Janet Gaynor won the first ever best actress Oscar, and Palmer was nominated for his cinematography. Charles Farrell co-stars. This film is also of interest as an example of the transitional silent/sound hybrid, with no dialogue track, but a recorded track of sound effects and music.

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Dorris Bowdon, Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda

Also on display on Saturday is Gregg Toland’s gritty cinematography on John Ford’s adaptation of  The Grapes of Wrath (1940). John Steinbeck’s classic story of the Joad family, forced to take to the road during the depression, won two Oscars-Jane Darwell for supporting actress and Ford for best director-and was nominated for five more. Amazingly, none of these was for Toland’s effort, which is recognized today as one of his signal achievements.

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Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie

Rounding out Saturday’s Line-up is Vincent Sherman’s 1943 musical/melodrama The Hard Way. Ambitious but frustrated housewife Ida Lupino sees her sister’s (Joan Leslie) emerging stage career as the vehicle to escape her drab coal town reality. Shot by the great James Wong Howe.

 

Other films in the series this week include:

  • Leave Her To Heaven (1945) September 30
  • He Walked By Night (1948) October 1
  • America America (1963) October 2
  • The Passion Of Anna (1969) October 2 
  • McCabe And Mrs. Miller (1971) October 3

REVIVALS features the North American premiere of a new restoration of Luis Buñuel’s 1930 comedy L’age d’or on Sunday.

Also playing in this week:

  • At the Metrograph, Frank Tashlin’s Artists And Models (1955). Saturday and Sunday 
  • Anthology Film Archives offers a Robert Flaherty double feature on Saturday: his extraordinary 1922 documentary Nanook Of The North about an Inuit family’s life in the frozen landscape of northern Quebec, and Man of Aran (1934), depicting the traditional lifestyle of the occupants of the Aran Islands.
  • The Marx Brothers go academic in Horsefeathers (1932) at the Lafayette Theater in Suffern, N.Y.

For a complete listing of theaters showing classic films in the greater metro N.Y. area, check out Where To Find the Flicks

 

BLU-RAY

The big news in Blu-Ray is the release of The House of Hitchcock Collection. This set includes fifteen films from Universal Studios from 1942 through 1976, and includes classics like Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rear Window (1944), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and ten more. Look for it October 1.

House of Hitchcock

For a complete listing of upcoming Blu-Ray releases, check out blu-ray.com

GetReel 9.20.19

ON THE BIG SCREEN

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Irving Bacon, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy and Rosalind Russell

Down at Film Forum, catch the movie that’s been called “the fastest-talking screen comedy” ever: Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940). Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell try to out-talk each other as she tries to escape her past as an ace newspaper reporter, as well as her former marriage to her editor, Cary Grant. Just so she can move to Albany and marry Ralph Bellamy. Not bloody likely. Not when there’s a big story breaking, and Cary Grant has other ideas.

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Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant face The Politicians: Billy Gilbert, Clarence Kolb and Gene Lockhart

This all began with the 1928 Hecht and MacArthur play The Front Page, about a reporter who wants to leave the newspaper business to write a novel, and the editor who schemes to prevent him. Both characters are male. The 1931 film adaptation starring Adolph Menjou and Pat O’Brien as well as the 1974 Lemmon and Matthau version are both called The Front Page, and both, obviously, have male co-stars. Adding the love interest to complicate the relationship between the principals not only adds a great comic dimension, but it fits snugly into the Hawks universe, where much of the dramatic interest is centered on a female incursion into a male fraternal group-in this case the gaggle in the press room.

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The members of the Fourth Estate

Saturday Sunday at brunchtime: 11:00 AM.

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Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman

Every time one of these 25th Anniversary Celebrations is announced, I find myself thinking the same cliché: “I can’t believe….” Well, now Fathom Events and TCM Big Screen Classics are celebrating a quarter of a century of The Shawshank Redemption (1994) with screenings nationwide on Sunday, as well as next Tuesday and Wednesday, September 24-25.

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Claude Rains and James Stewart

Village East Cinema will be screening Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939) as part of their IN 35MM series. Jimmy Stewart takes on Claude Rains, Edward Arnold, and the rest of the Taylor political machine on Monday, September 23.

 

 

In nearby Pennsylvania, The County Theater in Doylestown will be showing A Fistful of Dollars (1964)  on Thursday, September 26. This was the first of the “spaghetti westerns”  trilogy produced in Italy for Sergio Leone, and the film that really put Eastwood on the board after his years on television. As part of their New Horizons series, they will screen The Kurosawa classic Rashomon (1950) on Wednesday

For a complete listing of theaters showing classic films in the greater metro N.Y. area, check out Where To Find the Flicks

BLU-RAY RELEASES

Several good choices in the Blu-Ray department. My pick is Robert Wise’s The Set-Up SetupPoster(1949). It’s a first-rate entry into the sub-genre of boxing-noir, starring Robert Ryan as Stoker Thompson, a washed up pug who still believes that he’s just “one punch away.” Unfortunately, his aspirations conflict with his manager Tiny’s small-time reality. Tiny takes 50 bucks to fix the fight, tells Red the corner man he only got 30, gives Red five, and pockets the rest. But he says nothing to Stoker. After all, “The guy’s blowed a hundred fights already without anybody’s help and he ain’t gonna need none tonight.” Winning could be quite a losing proposition. Also starring Audrey Totter

Most classic film fans know that, in addition to being a terrific actress, Ida Lupino was a talented director. This week we’ll see the release of Ida Lupino: Filmmaker Collection Blu-ray collection, which includes Not Wanted (1949), Never Fear (1949), The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and The Bigamist (1953)

Other classic releases include Going My Way (1944) and The Letter (1940).

For a complete listing of upcoming releases, checkout: CLICK HERE