Yearly Archives: 2012

WELLMAN: THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

Harry Morgan and Henry Fonda are caught up in frontier justice in William Wellman’s searing OX-BOW INCIDENT

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (William A. Wellman, 1943)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, February 17, 1:00, and Saturday, February 18, 2:00, 6:00, 9:20
Series continues through March 1
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

In 1885 Nevada, members of a small town hear that one of their own has been murdered and his cattle stolen. Led by Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), his son, Gerald (William Eythe), and Jeff Farnley (Marc Lawrence), an angry posse sets out to find the killer thieves. They are joined by a pair of drifters, Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) and Art Croft (Henry/Harry Morgan), who don’t like what they’re seeing. The posse soon comes upon the trio of Donald Martin (Dana Andrews), Juan Martínez (Anthony Quinn), and Alva Hardwicke (Francis Ford), determining that they did the dirty deeds and must pay for their actions, leading to a heated debate over whether they should bring the three men in or hang them right there. Based on the 1940 novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, William Wellman’s harrowing classic is one of the greatest films ever made about frontier justice and mob vengeance. The scene in which the bold Martínez takes a bullet out of his body by all by himself is one of the most powerful moments you’re ever likely to see on-screen. In many ways, Fonda and Morgan play characters who are stand-ins for the audience, forcing viewers to examine what they would have done if ever put in similar circumstances. The Ox-Bow Incident is screening as part of Film Forum’s Wellman festival on February 17 at 1:00 by itself and three times on February 18 as part of a double feature with 1948’s Yellow Sky, a Western starring Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark.

LEVYdance: ROMP

ROMP invites the audience to be part of the show at the Joyce SoHo

Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer St. between Houston & Prince Sts.
February 17-19, $24, 8:00
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.levydance.org

There has been a recent slew of dance productions that involve ticket holders becoming part of the experience, from being invited onstage to dance to David Dorfman’s Prophets of Funk at the Joyce and Alvin Ailey’s version of Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16 at City Center to having two dancers weave their way through the crowd on the floor in Maria Hassabi’s SHOW at the Kitchen. San Francisco–based company LEVYdance will employ a different method of bringing audience and performer together this weekend in its latest evening-length piece, ROMP. The dancers and audience members congregate at banquet tables on the stage, everyone immersed in the action. Thus, things can unfold immediately in front of you, under you, or on top of you as the company goes from floor to chair to table and back again, with the crowd encouraged to walk through the space as the show continues. The February 17 performance will be followed by a discussion with the cast and creators, while the February 18 performance will be videotaped by roaming cameramen, so be prepared to be in the picture if you go that night. Choreographer, dancer, and artistic director Benjamin Levy, who founded LEVYdance in 2002, is also holding ROMP classes in New York through February 23 at such locations as Dance New Amsterdam, Peridance, 100 Grand, and the Broadway Dance Center.

WELLMAN: NIGHT NURSE

NIGHT NURSE, involving child endangerment, alcoholism, murder, and Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell frolicking in their undergarments, is a great example of pre-Hays Code Hollywood

NIGHT NURSE (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, February 16, 1:00 5:15 9:30
Series continues through March 1
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Film Forum’s excellent William A. Wellman festival continues with one of the best examples of a pre–Hays Code film, the rarely screened 1931 doozy, Night Nurse. The first of five collaborations between Wellman and Barbara Stanwyck, Night Nurse, based on Dora Macy’s 1930 novel, stars Stanwyck as Lora Hart, a young woman determined to become a nurse. She gets a probationary job at a city hospital, where she is taken under the wing of Maloney (Joan Blondell), who likes to break the rules and torture the head nurse, the stodgy Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis). Shortly after treating a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound and agreeing not to report it to the police, Lora starts working for a shady doctor (Ralf Harolde) taking care of two sick children (Marcia Mae Jones and Betty Jane Graham) whose proudly dipsomaniac mother (Charlotte Merriam) is being manipulated by her suspicious chauffeur (Clark Gable). Wellman pulls out all the stops, hinting at or simply depicting murder, child endangerment, rape, alcoholism, lesbianism, physical brutality, and Blondell and Stanwyck regularly frolicking around in their undergarments. It’s as if Wellman is thumbing his nose directly at the Hays Code in scene after scene. Although far from his best film — Wellman directed such classics as Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — Night Nurse is an overly melodramatic, dated, but entertaining little tale with quite a surprise ending. Night Nurse is screening at Film Forum on February 16 as part of a triple feature with 1932’s The Purchase Price, starring Stanwyck and George Brent, and 1929’s The Man I Love, Wellman’s first all-talkie.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS

Jeremy Lin might have the Knicks linning at the Garden, but he has a long way to go to match the record posted by the most successful basketball team ever. The Harlem Globetrotters are back in town for their annual Black History Month visit, appearing at the Izod Center http://www.meadowlands.com/ in New Jersey on February 17 (7:00) and 20 (1:00), Madison Square Garden on February 18 (7:30), the Prudential Center in Newark on February 18 (1:00), and the Nassau Coliseum on February 19 (1:00 & 5:00). Founded back in 1926 by Ape Saperstein and originally called the Savoy Big Five, the Globetrotters have won more than 22,000 games while losing fewer than 400; they haven’t been on the short end of a score since 2006. Be sure to get their early to catch the team perform its Magic Circle pregame warm-ups, where you can marvel at the massive skills displayed by such current players as Airport, TNT, Cheese, Hacksaw, Dizzy, Click, Hi-Lite, Scooter, Tiny, Stretch, Too Tall, and Jacob “Hops” Tucker.

OTHER LIVES

Other Lives will hit the Bowery Ballroom before joining Radiohead later this month (photo by James Rhodes)

Bowery Ballroom
6 Delancey St. between Bowery & Christie St.
Friday, February 17, $15, 9:00
212-533-2111
www.otherlives.com
www.boweryballroom.com

Before joining up with Radiohead at the end of the month, U.S. band Other Lives are going on a whirlwind tour of North America, hitting fourteen cities in eighteen nights. The quintet is on the road in support of their second disc, the lovely Tamer Animals (TBD Records, May 2011), a lush suite of songs that swirl and flow into one another effortlessly. Recorded over a span of sixteen months in their hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, Tamer Animals consists of eleven carefully constructed soundscapes that evoke Ennio Morricone and Pink Floyd while delving into Western balladry, Asian traditional music, and medieval epics. The songs combine lofty, existential poetic lyrics with lilting, ethereal background vocals that reach to the heavens. “Solitary motion, in the wake of an avalanche / Deer in the headlights, there goes a weaker one / He’s listenin’ in the fast gaze, I don’t care now to see the way / Do you hear the silence? I was far too late,” Jesse Tabish sings over a haunting minimalist piano on the title track. “We’re on our way,” he adds in the acoustic “Dust Bowl III.” Featuring Tabish on piano, guitar, and lead vocals, Josh Onstott on bass and organ, Jenny Hsu on cello and piano, Colby Owens on drums, and Jonathon Mooney on piano, violin, and guitar, Other Lives are indeed on their way. You can catch them at the Bowery Ballroom on February 17 with Sydney-based five-piece WIM and Brooklyn duo Lucius.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS

Mike Daisey takes on Steve Jobs and Apple in his latest one-man show at the Public (photo by Kevin Berne)

Martinson Theater at the Public
425 Lafayette St.
Extended through March 18, $75-$85
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org
www.mikedaisey.blogspot.com

Less than a week before Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was set to open at the Public Theater this past October, its title subject died. “This moment is an opportunity to peel back the surface and get at the secret heart of our relationship with Steve Jobs,” Daisey explained in a statement that announced that the show would still go on as scheduled. After its successful run in the fall, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is back through March 4, with Daisey exploring as only he can America’s love-hate relationship with Apple — and Apple’s disturbing relationship with China. Seated behind a desk with only a glass of water, yellow lined sheets of paper filled with scribbled notes, and a black cloth to regularly mop his face, Daisey (The Last Cargo Cult, How Theater Failed America) is an entertaining mix of Spalding Gray, Lewis Black, Sam Kinison, and Michael Moore. First gaining prominence with 21 Dog Years, his monologue about working at Amazon.com, Daisey now turns his attention to one of Amazon’s chief rivals, Apple. With gleeful delight and no shame whatsoever, Daisey proudly proclaims himself to be a major techno-geek obsessed with every new gadget Jobs, Wozniak, and company come up with, particularly the latest world-changing sensation, the iPhone. But he also reveals the dark underside of Apple, detailing his trip to Shenzhen, China, where the enormous Foxconn facility makes half of the Earth’s electronic products, including Apple’s. Posing as a journalist, Daisey spoke with Foxconn employees who were quick to discuss horrific working conditions that result in so many suicide attempts that the factory has put nets up to catch the jumpers. For much of the two-hour show, Daisey marvelously balances humor and pathos, gesturing with his hands and pausing for just the right effect, but when he turns into more of an activist, not only pointing out Apple’s questionable decisions regarding its association with Foxconn but insisting that the public needs to get involved and do something about it, the play goes overboard into a didacticism that would be better left on the cutting-room floor by director Jean-Michele Gregory. And at one point, Daisey seems to stop the play in its tracks to yell at the audience when describing the ridiculous size of the Foxconn complex, creating an unnerving moment that detracts from an otherwise masterfully told tale. But being an activist is part of what Daisey is all about, as shown by his recent appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher and other television programs, his comments on the New York Times finally delving into the Apple-China connection, and a hand-out distributed to the audience on their way out of the theater. To spread the word, Daisey will even be releasing a free PDF transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs on his website, encouraging people to put on the play themselves, in any format they want. Steve Jobs was a genius who changed the world; Daisey continues to show that in his own way, he is a genius as well, albeit one with a very different agenda.

VIDEO OF THE DAY — SLEIGH BELLS: “COMEBACK KID”

“Comeback Kid,” the brand-new video from Brooklyn-based duo Sleigh Bells, blows out of the speakers like machine-gun fire as vocalist Alexis Krauss, clutching a rifle, gleefully bounces up and down on a bed. Krauss and her musical partner, Derek E. Miller, are about to release their second LP, Reign of Terror (Mom + Pop, February 21, 2012), the follow-up to their hit debut, 2010’s Treats. The new disc ranges from poppy dance anthems to heavy guitar-driven blasts to slower, moodier songs, influenced by family tragedy that has struck Miller in a big way; since the first record, his father died in a motorcycle accident, and his mother contracted cancer. But there’s still plenty of fun to be had on Reign of Terror, which is highlighted by such tracks as “Born to Lose,” “Demons,” “Road to Hell,” “Never Say Die,” “D.O.A.,” and “Leader of the Pack,” which begins with the revving of motorcycle engines in a tribute to the girl-group classic. Sleigh Bells will be at Terminal 5 on February 17 ($25.20, 8:00) with Black Bananas and Wet Witch (which includes Krauss’s fiancé, Tyler Mate). You can watch the live stream for free as part of the new Bowery Presents Live series; in addition, you can check out a full stream of the new album for a limited time here.