Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, August 19, through Tuesday, September 13, $14
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, you could pay one single admission and see two professional baseball games, called a double header. “Let’s play two!” Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, famously said in July 1969. And you could stay and watch both games for one regular price, without having to clear out after the first contest. Also in that magical land of long ago, you see two movies for the price of one, known as a double feature. As Richard O’Brien sings in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “I wanna go — oh oh oh oh / to the late night, double feature, picture show.” Film Forum, which often hosts double features, is now honoring the two-pack with “Return of the Double Feature,” twenty-six pairings of fifty-two classic movies, brought together by director, star, theme, writer, or other reason. Master programmer Bruce Goldstein gets things going with the Alfred Hitchcock / Jimmy Stewart duo of Vertigo and Rear Window, followed by Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Breathless, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and The Killing, and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Nosferatu. After that, the double bills become more conceptual, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo with Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place with Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, and, perhaps best of all, Hitchcock’s Psycho with Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.
You can catch Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude and Where’s Poppa?, Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s The Third Man and his own The Lady from Shanghai, and Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Laura and John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven. There are double features by Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Terrence Malick, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel; based on novels by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler; and starring Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Toshiro Mifune, and Cary Grant. Among the other dynamic duos are Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief with Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s Ed Wood with Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder with André de Toth’s House of Wax, both shown in 3-D. Instead of bingeing on Netflix, you might as well just settle in for the long haul at Film Forum and take in as much of this superb master class in cinema as you can, presented two flicks at a time, just like in the good old days.