23
Feb/15

CHARLES LAUGHTON

23
Feb/15
Charles Laughton series at Film Forum actually deserves a big thumbs-up

Charles Laughton series at Film Forum actually deserves a big thumbs-up

Who: Charles Laughton
What: Three-week retrospective
Where: Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
When: Daily through February 26
Why: We might have learned just a little too much about English stage and screen actor and director Charles Laughton from Scotty Bowers’s 2012 tell all, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, so it’s probably best to keep what we know about Laughton to his legendary career, which is being celebrated at Film Forum with a wide-ranging retrospective through February 26. The series continues Monday night with E. A. Dupont’s 1929 silent Piccadilly (with live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner), in which Laughton has a cameo as a nightclub diner, followed on Tuesday by Lewis Milestone’s Arch of Triumph, with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, and a double feature of Henry Koster’s romantic comedy It Started with Eve and Richard Wallace’s theater-set Because of Him. Wednesday pairs Robert Z. Leonard’s crime film The Bribe, which stars Laughton and Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Vincent Price, with Burgess Meredith’s The Man on the Eiffel Tower, in which Laughton plays George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. The festival concludes on Thursday with Laughton as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1932 epic The Sign of the Cross, as South Carolina senator Seabright Cooley in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent, Laughton’s last film, and his lone solo directorial effort, the gripping thriller The Night of the Hunter.