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THE METHOD ON FILM: WANDA / FIVE EASY PIECES

BAM series kicks off with a double feature with Method man Marlon Brando

THE METHOD ON FILM
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Series runs July 22-28
www.bam.org

“Acting is a curious thing,” Isaac Butler writes in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. “Practically anyone who watches Hollywood movies — which is to say pretty much everyone — spends a staggering amount of talking and thinking about actors. We know intimate details of their private lives. We look to them to speak out about the issues of the day. We evaluate them constantly and festoon the better ones with a trunkload of different prizes. Yet when pressed to explain what good acting actually is, we usually struggle.”

BAM provides plenty for cineastes to struggle over with the one-week series “The Method on Film,” featuring works starring some of the greatest movie actors ever, famous for their discipline and dedication to their craft. It all begins with a double feature with Method man Marlon Brando, playing Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, then being profiled in the 1966 documentary Meet Marlon Brando. Butler will be at BAM for a prescreening reading and postscreening book signing.

The series continues with Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Eartha Kitt, Warren Beatty, John Garfield, Kim Stanley, Jack Nicholson, Joanne Woodward, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Rod Steiger in such classics as The Pawnbroker, The Graduate, A Raisin in the Sun, and Humoresque in addition to a handful of lesser-known works, including two early, influential Russian silent versions of The Queen of Spades. There will also be discussions before the screenings of Arnold Laven’s Anna Lucasta (with dramaturg, director, and archivist Arminda Thomas on July 23) and Edgar G. Ulmer’s American Matchmaker (with Columbia Yiddish professor Jeremy Dauber on July 24). Below is a deeper look at two of the highlights, a pair of unique road movies.

Barbara Loden wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Wanda

WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Tuesday, July 26, 9:30
www.bam.org

“If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, then you’re as good as dead,” Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) tells Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) in Wanda. The first theatrical feature written, directed, produced by, and starring an American woman, Wanda, named Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival, is a raw, naturalistic road-trip movie about an emotionally vacant woman who walks through life in a kind of stupor, wandering into situations to avoid being alone yet still trapped in an unrelenting alienation. Loden, who won a 1964 Tony for her portrayal of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall — the play was directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan, whom she would marry four years later and remain with through her tragic death in 1980 — doesn’t try to turn Wanda into a feminist antihero, but she does take all the power away from her, making her completely dependent on other people, primarily men, an excellent counterpoint to Loden herself, who has all the power. Staying on her sister’s (Dorothy Shupenes) couch in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country, Wanda is almost zombielike as she slowly heads to court in curlers and a housecoat and lets the judge award custody of her two children to her soon-to-be-ex-husband (Jerome Thier). “I’m just no good,” she mumbles. Broke and apparently with no faith or hope in her future, she proceeds to get involved with some sketchy losers, including Mr. Dennis, who takes her on a minor crime spree that is a far cry from Bonnie and Clyde. All along the way, she rarely has anything of any interest to say to anyone; the only time she speaks clearly and definitively is when she explains that she likes onions on her hamburgers.

Shot in a cinéma vérité style by documentary cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes, Wanda is a riveting and infuriating exploration of the death of the American dream as the 1960s come to an end and the country reexamines itself, not necessarily liking what it sees. Apathy competes with melancholy as Wanda is unable and unwilling to take control of her life, dressed in the same white outfit and carrying the same white pocketbook throughout nearly the entire film, but she is more disconsolate than angelic. Much of the film is improvised and most of the characters are portrayed by nonprofessional actors or people who just happened to be in the area, like the scene in which Mr. Dennis and Wanda encounter a family flying a remote-control model airplane. (Higgins would go on to make more than fifty films, including The Conversation, The Stepford Wives, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan.) Coming on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, Wanda is about a pouty sad-sack who barely ever changes emotion, always wearing the same blank stare. It’s not that she’s promiscuous, adventurous, or even unpredictable; she just is. You desperately want her to take action, to care about something or someone, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s almost as if Loden is setting the groundwork for such future films as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which feature such strong, decisive female characters as Alice (Ellen Burstyn) in the former and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the latter, who at least attempt to take matters into their own hands; elements of Wanda can also be found in Aki Kaurismäki’s Match Factory Girl and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Wanda would end up being Loden’s only film as writer and director; she died in 1980 of cancer at the age of forty-eight.

Jack Nicholson places the most famous sandwich order in film history (Sony Pictures Repertory)

FIVE EASY PIECES (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
Tuesday, July 26, 7:00
www.bam.org

A key film that helped lead 1960s cinema into the grittier 1970s, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is one of the most American of dramas, a tale of ennui and unrest among the rich and the poor, a road movie that travels from trailer parks to fashionable country estates. Caught in between is Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), a former piano prodigy now working on an oil rig and living with a well-meaning but not very bright waitress, Rayette (Karen Black). When Bobby finds out that his father is ill, he reluctantly returns to the family home, the prodigal son who had left all that behind, escaping to a less-complicated though unsatisfying life putting his fingers in a bowling ball rather than tickling the keys of a grand piano. Back in his old house, he has to deal with his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), a onetime violinist who can no longer play because of an injured neck and who serves as the film’s comic relief; Carl’s wife, Catherine (Susan Anspach), a snooty woman Bobby has always been attracted to; and Bobby’s sister, Partita (Lois Smith), a lonely, troubled soul who has the hots for Spicer (John Ryan), the live-in nurse who takes care of their wheelchair-bound father (William Challee).

Rafelson had previously directed the psychedelic movie Head (he cocreated the Monkees band and TV show) and would go on to make such films as The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, and Black Widow; written by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces fits flawlessly in between them, a deeply philosophical work that captures the myriad changes the country was experiencing as the Woodstock Generation was forced to start growing up. The film suffers from some unsteady editing primarily in the earlier scenes, but it is still a gem, featuring at least two unforgettable scenes, one that takes place in a California highway traffic jam and the other in a diner, where Bobby places an order for the ages. And as good as both Nicholson, who earned the first of seven Best Actor Oscar nominations, and Black, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, are, Helena Kallianiotes nearly steals the picture as a crazy woman railing against the ills of the world from the backseat of Bobby’s car.

“1962 . . . 1963 . . . 1964”

“1962 . . . 1963 . . . 1964”
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 22 – August 11
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

The years 1962, 1963, and 1964 were like no others in the history of America, and that evolving zeitgeist was captured on celluloid as the Hollywood studio system faded away. Film Forum is celebrating those three years with “1962 . . . 1963 . . . 1964,” a three-week series consisting of thirty-five cinematic works that, together, form a fascinating time capsule of the era. There are films by François Truffaut, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, John Ford, Agnès Varda, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Sergio Leone, and many others, in multiple genres, with superstars ranging from Clint Eastwood, Marcello Mastroianni, and Sean Connery to Peter Sellers, Paul Newman, and the Fab Four.

The July 22 screening of Lolita will have a special prerecorded introduction from film critic and historian Stephen Farber. Below are select reviews from the festival, which is being held in conjunction with the Jewish Museum exhibition “New York: 1962-1964” and Film at Lincoln Center’s “New York, 1962-1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema.”

A young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) throws a kink in a couple’s sailing plans in Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water

KNIFE IN THE WATER (NÓŻ W WODZIE) (Roman Polanski, 1962)
Saturday, July 23, 5:10, and Monday, July 25, 6:20
filmforum.org

“Even discounting wind, weather, and the natural hazards of filming afloat, Knife in the Water was a devilishly difficult picture to make,” immensely talented and even more controversial Roman Polanski wrote in his 1984 autobiography, Roman by Polanski. That is likely to have been a blessing in disguise, upping the ante in the Polish filmmaker’s debut feature film, a tense three-character thriller set primarily on a sailboat, filmed on location. Upper-middle-class couple Andrzej (theater veteran Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (nonprofessional actor Jolanta Umecka) are on their way to their sailboat at the marina when a young hitchhiker (drama school grad Zygmunt Malanowicz) forces them to pull over on an otherwise empty road. Andrzej and the unnamed man almost immediately get involved in a physical and psychological pissing contest, with Andrzej soon inviting him to join them on their sojourn, practically daring the hitchhiker to make a move on his wife.

Once on the boat, the two men continue their battle of wills, which becomes more dangerous once the young man reveals his rather threatening knife, which he handles like a pro. Lodz Film School graduate Polanski, who collaborated on the final screenplay with Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout, Moonlighting) after initially working with Jakub Goldberg, envelops the black-and-white Knife in the Water — the first Polish film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and winner of the Critics’ FIPRESCI Prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival — in a highly volatile, claustrophobic energy, creating gorgeous scenes intimately photographed by cinematographer Jerzy Lipman, from Andrzej and Krystyna in their small car to all three trying to find space on the boat amid the vast sea and a changing wind. Many of the shots are highlighted by deep focus in which one character is shown in close-up in the foreground with the others in the background, alerting the viewer to various potential conflicts — sexual, economic, class- and gender-based — all underscored by Krzysztof T. Komeda’s intoxicating jazz score featuring saxophonist Bernt Rosengren.

Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) and Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) need to clear their heads in The Manchurian Candidate

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
Tuesday, July 26, 5:30, and Wednesday, August 10, 2:35
filmforum.org

John Frankenheimer’s unconventional Cold War conspiracy noir, The Manchurian Candidate, is, quite simply, one of the greatest political thrillers ever made. Ten years after fighting in Korea, Maj. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) remains in the military, working in intelligence. He is haunted by terrifying nightmares in which his unit, led by Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), is at a woman’s gardening club lecture that turns into a Communist brainwashing session orchestrated by the menacing Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dheigh) of the Pavlov Institute. Meanwhile, the decorated but clearly tortured Shaw has to deal with his power-hungry mother, Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury), who is manipulating everyone she can to ensure that her second husband, the McCarthy-like Sen. John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), becomes the Republican vice presidential nominee. As Marco gets to the bottom of the mystery, the clock keeps ticking toward an inevitable crisis with lives on the line and the very future of democracy at stake.

Written by George Axelrod based on the book by Richard Condon (Winter Kills, Prizzi’s Honor), The Manchurian Candidate is a tense, gripping work that feels oddly prescient when seen today. Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May, Seconds) keeps the suspense at Hitchockian levels, particularly as the finale nears, while throwing in doses of dark satire and complex romance. Shaw tries to reconnect with his lost love, Jocelyn Jordan (Leslie Parrish), daughter of erudite Democratic Sen. Thomas Jordan (John McGiver), while Marco is intrigued by Eugenie Rose Cheyney (Janet Leigh); their meeting scene in between cars on a train is an offbeat joy, thought to be impacted by Leigh’s real-life breakup with Tony Curtis that very day. Sinatra, whose previous films included From Here to Eternity and Suddenly — he played a presidential assassin in the latter — once again gets to show off his strong acting chops, especially in a long, uncut scene with Harvey (Room at the Top, Darling) and a fierce fight with Harvey’s servant, Chunjin (Ocean Eleven’s Henry Silva).

Oscar nominee Lansbury relishes her role as Shaw’s villainous mother (in reality, she was only three years older than he was), manipulating her blowhard husband like a puppet. The dramatic music is by composer David Amram (Pull My Daisy), the moody cinematography by Lionel Lindon (All Fall Down, I Want to Live!), with narration by Paul Frees, who went on to voice such cartoon characters as Burgermeister Meisterburger in Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town and Santa Claus in Frosty the Snowman, in addition to many others. Among the New York City landmarks featured in the film are Central Park and the old Madison Square Garden. And you’ll never look at the Queen of Diamonds or play solitaire quite the same way again. The film’s cultlike status was enhanced because it was out of circulation for a quarter of a century until Sinatra, claiming he hadn’t known that he had owned the the rights since 1972, rereleased it in 1988.

Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is in a bit of a personal and professional crisis in Fellini masterpiece 8½

8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Friday, July 29, 6:00, and Monday, August 1, 8:00
filmforum.org

“Your eminence, I am not happy,” Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) tells the cardinal (Tito Masini) halfway through Federico Fellini’s self-reflexive masterpiece 8½. “Why should you be happy?” the cardinal responds. “That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy?” Well, film makes people happy, and it’s because of works such as 8½. Fellini’s Oscar-winning eighth-and-a-half movie is a sensational self-examination of film and fame, a hysterically funny, surreal story of a famous Italian auteur who finds his life and career in need of a major overhaul. Mastroianni is magnificent as Guido Anselmi, a man in a personal and professional crisis who has gone to a healing spa for some much-needed relaxation, but he doesn’t get any as he is continually harassed by producers, screenwriters, would-be actresses, and various other oddball hangers-on.

He also has to deal both with his mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), who is quite a handful, as well as his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée), who is losing patience with his lies. Trapped in a strange world of his own creation, Guido has dreams where he flies over claustrophobic traffic and makes out with his dead mother, and his next film involves a spaceship; it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out the many inner demons that are haunting him. Marvelously shot by Gianni Di Venanzo in black-and-white, scored with a vast sense of humor by Nino Rota, and featuring some of the most amazing hats ever seen on film — costume designer Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for all the great dresses and chapeaux — 8½ is an endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining exploration of the creative process and the bizarre world of filmmaking itself.

Brigitte Bardot shows off both her acting talent and beautiful body in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt

CONTEMPT (LE MEPRIS) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
Saturday, July 30, 8:00, and Tuesday, August 9, 8:15
filmforum.org

French auteur Jean-Luc Godard doesn’t hold back any of his contempt for Hollywood cinema in his multilayered masterpiece Contempt. Loosely based on Alberto Moravia’s Il Disprezzo, Contempt stars Michel Piccoli as Paul Javal, a French screenwriter called to Rome’s famed Cinecittà studios by American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance ) to perform rewrites on Austrian director Fritz Lang’s (played by Lang himself) adaptation of The Odyssey by ancient Greek writer Homer. Paul brings along his young wife, the beautiful Camille (Brigitte Bardot), whom Prokosch takes an immediate liking to. With so many languages being spoken, Prokosch’s assistant, Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll), serves as translator, but getting the various characters to communicate with one another and say precisely what is on their mind grows more and more difficult as the story continues and Camille and Paul’s love starts to crumble. Contempt is a spectacularly made film, bathed in deep red, white, and blue, as Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard poke fun at the American way of life. (Both Godard and Coutard appear in the film, the former as Lang’s assistant director, the latter as Lang’s cameraman — as well as the cameraman who aims the lens right at the viewer at the start of the film.)

Bardot is sensational in one of her best roles, whether teasing Paul at a marvelously filmed sequence in their Rome apartment (watch for him opening and stepping through a door without any glass), lying naked on the bed, asking Paul what he thinks of various parts of her body (while Coutard changes the filter from a lurid red to a lush blue), or pouting when it appears that Paul is willing to pimp her out in order to get the writing job. Palance is a hoot as the big-time producer, regularly reading fortune-cookie-like quotes from an extremely little red book he carries around that couldn’t possibly hold so many words. And Lang, who left Germany in the mid-1930s for a career in Hollywood, has a ball playing a version of himself, an experienced veteran willing to put up with Prokosch’s crazy demands. Vastly entertaining from start to finish, Contempt is filled with a slew of inside jokes about the filmmaking industry and even Godard’s personal and professional life, along with some of the French director’s expected assortment of political statements and a string of small flourishes that are easy to miss but add to the immense fun, all set to a gorgeous romantic score by Georges Delerue.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders is a different kind of heist movie

BANDE À PART (BAND OF OUTSIDERS) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
Tuesday, August 2, 8:10, Wednesday, August 3, 12:30, and Tuesday, August 9, 6:10
filmforum.org

When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent.

Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie get close in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar

BILLY LIAR (John Schlesinger, 1963)
Wednesday, August 3, 2:40 & 6:00
filmforum.org

Based on the novel by Keith Waterhouse (which he also adapted into a play with Willis Hall and which later became a musical), John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is a prime example of the British New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, which features work by such directors as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Karel Reisz. Tom Courtenay stars as William Fisher, a ne’er-do-well ladies’ man who drudges away in a funeral home and dates (and lies to) multiple women, all the while daydreaming of being the president of the fictional country of Ambrosia. Billy lives in his own fantasy world where he can suddenly fire machine guns at people who bother him and be cheered by adoring crowds as he leads a marching band. Reminiscent of the 1947 American comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which Danny Kaye dreams of other lives to lift him out of the doldrums, Billy Liar is also rooted in the reality of post-WWII England, represented by Billy’s father (Wilfred Pickles), who thinks his son is a no-good lazy bum. Shot in black-and-white by Denys Coop (This Sporting Life, Bunny Lake Is Missing), the film glows every time Julie Christie appears playing Liz, a modern woman who takes a rather fond liking to Billy. The film made Christie a star; Schlesinger next cast her in Darling, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress.

The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night gets back to Film Forum for 1962-63-64 series

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (Richard Lester, 1964)
Friday, August 5, 2:35 & 9:25, Saturday, August 6, 12:30 & 4:35
filmforum.org

The Beatles recently invaded America again with Peter Jackson’s three-part documentary Get Back, about the making of Let It Be. The Film Forum series takes us back to their debut movie, the deliriously funny anarchic comedy A Hard Day’s Night. Initially released on July 6, 1964, in the UK, AHDN turned out to be much more than just a promotional piece advertising the Fab Four and their music. Instead, it quickly became a huge critical and popular success, a highly influential work that presaged Monty Python and MTV while also honoring the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and the French New Wave. Directed by Richard Lester, who had previously made the eleven-minute The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film with Peter Sellers and would go on to make A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Petulia, and The Three Musketeers, the madcap romp opens with the first chord of the title track as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are running down a narrow street, being chased by rabid fans, but they’re coming toward the camera, welcoming viewers into their crazy world. (George’s fall was unscripted but left in the scene.) As the song blasts over the soundtrack, Lester introduces the major characters: the four moptops, who are clearly having a ball, led by John’s infectious smile, in addition to Paul’s “very clean” grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell, who played a dirty old man in the British series Steptoe and Son, the inspiration for Sanford and Son) and the band’s much-put-upon manager, Norm (Norman Rossington). Lester and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Repulsion, Star Wars) also establish the pace and look of the film, a frantic black-and-white frolic shot in a cinema-vérité style that is like a mockumentary taking off from where François Truffaut’s 400 Blows ends.

The boys eventually make it onto a train, which is taking them back to their hometown of Liverpool, where they are scheduled to appear on a television show helmed by a hapless director (Victor Spinetti, who would star in Help as well) who essentially represents all those people who are dubious about the Beatles and the sea change going on in the music industry. Norm and road manager Shake (John Junkin) have the virtually impossible task of ensuring that John, Paul, George, and Ringo make it to the show on time, but there is no containing the energetic enthusiasm and contagious curiosity the quartet has for experiencing everything their success has to offer — while also sticking their tongues out at class structure, societal trends, and the culture of celebrity itself. Lester and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Alun Owen develop each individual Beatle’s unique character through press interviews, solo sojourns (the underappreciated Ringo goes off on a kind of vision quest; George is mistaken by a fashion fop for a model), and an endless stream of spoken and visual one-liners. (John sniffs a Coke bottle; a reporter asks George, “What do you call your hairstyle?” to which the Quiet One replies, “Arthur.”) Oh, the music is rather good too, featuring such songs as “I Should Have Known Better,” “All My Loving,” “If I Fell,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “This Boy,” and “She Loves You.” The working name for the film was Beatlemania, but it was eventually changed to A Hard Day’s Night, based on a Ringo malapropism, forcing John and Paul to quickly write the title track. No mere exploitation flick, A Hard Day’s Night is one of the funniest, most influential films ever made, capturing a critical moment in pop-culture history and unleashing four extraordinary gentlemen on an unsuspecting world. Don’t you dare miss this glorious eighty-five-minute explosion of sheer, unadulterated joy.

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE

It’s not exactly love at first sight for Hallie (Stephanie Craven) and Ransome Foster (Leighton Samuels) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (photo by Joshua Eichenbaum)

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
Gene Frankel Theatre
24 Bond St. at Lafayette St.
Wednesday – Sunday through July 31, $15-$25
www.genefrankeltheatre.com
www.theonomatopoeiatheatrecompany.com

“The hairs on your arm will stand up / At the terror in each sip and in each sup / Will you partake of that last offered cup / Or disappear into the potter’s ground? / When the man comes around,” Johnny Cash warned on the title track of his 2002 American IV album. The song is one of many by the Man in Black that echo in the Gene Frankel Theatre before the start and during intermission of Onomatopoeia Theatre Company’s stirring New York premiere of Jethro Compton’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In this case, the man coming around is Liberty Valance.

British playwright Compton’s 2014 play is based on the 1953 short story by Dorothy M. Johnson; the twenty-two-page tale was turned into a popular 1962 John Ford film packed with an all-star cast — John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O’Brien, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Jeanette Nolan, Woody Strode, Denver Pyle, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef — but Compton’s adaptation brings the play into the twenty-first century, twisting many of the movie’s genre clichés inside out as he takes on social and racial injustice while toning down the movie’s political rhetoric, general Hollywood misogyny, and freedom of the press blather.

The two-and-a-half-hour show begins in 1910, as Sen. Ransome Foster (Leighton Samuels) and his wife, Hallie (Stephanie Craven), arrive in Twotrees for the funeral of Bert Barricune (Samuel Shurtleff), who seems to have been an insignificant forgotten man in an insignificant one-horse town. Young reporter Jake Dowitt (Jeff Brackett) wants an exclusive with the senator, leading to a flashback to 1890, when a severely injured Foster is brought into the Prairie Belle Saloon by Barricune. After he is tended to by Jackson and Jim “the Reverend” Mosten (Daniel Kornegay), who works for her, he explains that he was beaten by three men who turn out to be the villainous murderer Liberty Valance (Derek Jack Chariton) and his henchmen.

Foster is a peaceful man from New York, a law scholar traveling not with a gun but with legal texts, Shakespeare sonnets, Greek tragedies, and a Bible. When Marshal Johnson (Scott Zimmerman) refuses to arrest Valance, Foster considers going up against the feared gunslinger himself. “I am no law man, sir,” Foster admits. The marshal responds, “Seems from what I’ve heard you ain’t much good at defending yourself, let alone a town.”

Soon Foster is teaching some residents of Twotrees to read, which angers others, especially since Jackson is a woman and Mosten is the only Black man around; book learning is not for the likes of them. Much of the strength of the play comes from the power Compton invests in the two characters; in the short story and movie, Jackson is a restaurant employee, while Mosten is Barricune’s loyal helper and doesn’t even appear in Johnson’s tale. In the play, Jackson speaks her mind with a razor sharpness, while Mosten is a well-respected man who has the ability to memorize whatever anyone says or reads to him.

Barricune is not happy when he sees Foster and Jackson spending a lot of time together; Bert believes he is destined to marry her. “She’s always been my girl,” Barricune says. “Does she know that?” Foster replies.

After Valance and his two sycophants commit a horrific act, Foster is more intent than ever to face him down and let the chips fall where they may.

Ransome Foster (Leighton Samuels) and Liberty Valance (Derek Jack Chariton) are headed to a final showdown in Onomatopoeia production (photo by Joshua Eichenbaum)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance takes place primarily on Nino Amari’s intimate set, a small Western saloon with a bar in the far corner, one table, two windows on either side of a piano, and swinging wooden doors in the back (which audience members must walk through to use the restrooms, but not during the performance). Most of the action occurs at the angled bar, including two sizzling scenes with Valance, the first between him and Mosten, the second him and Foster. Neither scene is in the short story or film, so the suspense is ratcheted up.

In his New York stage debut, Charlton is a magnetic force, his every word and move electrifying. He knows exactly who Valance is and what he wants, a villain who has no veneration for the law or for Blacks. When Foster raises the possibility of his defeating him in a showdown, the cocky Valance says, “Unless the hand of God comes down and strikes me dead there ain’t much chance of that.” Foster, knowing he doesn’t really have a shot, responds, “Or the earth opens up and the Devil takes you under.” Valance retorts, “No. We have an agreement, me and him.” When those words are spoken by Charlton, you don’t doubt it.

The rest of the cast holds up its end of the bargain; Samuels and Craven have a sweet chemistry, Shurtleff portrays Barricune with an inner loneliness, and Zimmerman’s marshal is neither coward nor buffoon. (Assistant director Chandler Robyn ably portrays numerous small roles.)

The play is expertly helmed by Onomatopoeia artistic director Thomas R. Gordon, maintaining a thrilling tension throughout. Susan Yanofsky’s period costumes are effective, while Reid Sullivan’s lighting hints at a danger always lurking, although the changing colors in the two windows are sometimes confusing. The narration occasionally gets in the way of the plot, explaining what we already know or making a point that is better left for the audience to decide for themselves.

Compton has also adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button into a Celtic musical and Jack London’s White Fang into Wolf’s Blood; his Frontier Trilogy is set in the American West in the mid-nineteenth century, while The Bunker Trilogy delves into Arthurian legend, classical Greek tragedy, and Shakespearean drama. In Liberty Valance he has created a stage Western for our times, cleverly referencing the conflicts of contemporary America, as red states battle blue states over jobs, immigration, and education; rights for women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ are in serious jeopardy; gun control is being hotly debated; and liberal urban elites and the conservative south and Midwest seem immersed in an endless duel. The arguments the citizens of Twotrees are having are not unlike what we see every day on social media and partisan news outlets.

In the play, Foster teaches his class Shakespeare’s seventy-first sonnet, which reads in part: “No longer mourn for me when I am dead / Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell / Give warning to the world that I am fled / From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell.” Johnny Cash couldn’t have said it any better.

twi-ny talk: BARBARA POLLACK / MIRROR IMAGE

Barbara Pollack first visited China in 2004 (photo courtesy Barbara Pollack)

MIRROR IMAGE: A TRANSFORMATION OF CHINESE IDENTITY
Asia Society Museum
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through December 31, $7-$12
Artist Talk July 21, free, 7:00
Brooklyn Rail talk Tuesday, August 9, free, 1:00
asiasociety.org

In a 2010 twi-ny talk, Barbara Pollack noted, discussing her book The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China, “Until the late 1990s, the art world was extremely narrow-minded and unwilling to think that a major talent could come from somewhere other than Europe or North America. That has changed forever, good riddance.”

Pollack spent the following decade meeting with, writing about, and researching these major talents, in China and other countries, leading to her next book, 2018’s Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise.

Right before Covid-19 forced the lockdown of restaurants, theaters, museums, and other businesses in March 2020, Pollack’s “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity” had been scheduled to open at Asia Society but had to be put on hold. Pollack, a writer, teacher, curator, and visual artist with a law degree, pivoted immediately and formed, with Anne Verhallen, Art at a Time Like This, a nonprofit that presents sociopolitical art, both on- and offline. Finally, after a more than two-year delay, “Mirror Image,” curated by Pollack with guest curatorial assistant Hongzheng Han, opened at the Park Ave. institution in June and has just been extended through the end of the year.

The exhibition, which Pollack sees as a kind of follow-up to Asia Society’s seminal 1998 show “Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” features multimedia works that explore the idea of “Chinese-ness” by seven artists who were born on mainland China in the 1980s, six of whom are still primarily based there. In her curatorial statement, Pollack explains, “These artists continue to push forward. We no longer view them as ambassadors from an exotic land but as representatives of a world we share.”

Pixy Liao, who lives and works in Brooklyn and was born in Shanghai in 1979, contributes intimate digital chromogenic still-lifes of parts of her and her partner’s bodies. Cui Jie creates futuristic cityscapes with hints of the past in large acrylic paintings. Tianzhuo Chen invites viewers into one of his ecstatic theatrical performances in the five-minute two-channel video Trance. Liu Shiyuan, who divides her time between Beijing and Copenhagen, combines found images with original footage in dizzying prints. Miao Ying, who lives and works in Shanghai and New York City, incorporates online gaming into her computer-animated film Surplus Intelligence, while Pilgrimage into Walden XII is a live simulation that learns over time. Tao Hui’s Similar Disguise Stills is accompanied by QR codes that take visitors into digital TikTok soap operas with nonbinary characters. And Nabuqi’s How to Be “Good Life” is a living room installation, influenced by Martin Heidegger and Richard Hamilton, that questions how popular culture invades personal spaces.

Tao Hui, Similar Disguise Stills, archival pigment prints mounted on aluminum panels, 2021 (photo courtesy of the artist, Kiang Malingue, Esther Schipper, and Macalline Art Center, Beijing)

On July 21, Pollack will moderate a conversation with Pixy and Miao at Asia Society and Nabuqi and Tao participating remotely; the talk can be viewed in person as well as online here.

Pollack is an old friend; her second book was represented by Stonesong, my wife’s literary agency. Pollack recently discussed the impact of the internet on Chinese art, putting together an exhibition during a pandemic, the Chinese art market, Chinese identity, and more in her latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: The exhibition includes a timeline that goes back to President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and Mao’s death in 1976. I know this could take a book – and you’ve written several on the subject – but, in a nutshell if possible, what have been some of the biggest changes in Chinese art and the perception of Chinese artists since then?

barbara pollack: I begin the timeline with Nixon’s visit and Mao’s death, basically the end of the Cultural Revolution, the most repressive period in modern Chinese history. The artists in this show were mostly born five to ten years later and had no experience with that kind of scary attitude toward intellectuals and creatives. In fact, they grew up in a world where there was an art infrastructure including auction houses, galleries, and, finally, new contemporary art museums. This all happened really quickly.

In the 1990s, art was still kind of underground, but by 2000, China hosted a major biennial, several official auction houses, and a few galleries. By the time these artists were exhibiting, China had an art market that rivaled that in the U.S. Most people here don’t realize that Shanghai now has a dozen contemporary art museums and there are several hundred galleries between Shanghai and Beijing and other cities. That creates an incredibly rich environment for artists to exhibit their works, despite censorship and other drawbacks.

twi-ny: The internet came to China in 1994, and much of the art in the show incorporates elements of AI, high-tech social media, and online gaming. How did the internet impact the work Chinese artists were creating?

bp: In 1994, China was still a pretty isolated, agrarian society. The internet changed everything for everyone, but mostly the generation born in the 1980s, as are the artists in this show. Suddenly you no longer had to smuggle in catalogues or merely read about shows of contemporary art elsewhere in the world. It took a while for the internet to improve, but soon you could get information directly. Artists in China learned rapidly how to have their own websites and how to email international curators. I know this firsthand by those who contacted me early on. But more importantly, before the establishment of the Great Firewall — China’s surveillance of all internet activity — people in China could learn about Chinese history not included in domestic textbooks. It was an eye-opening period and one of the reasons that this younger generation is so enthralled with the liberation that came from this technology.

twi-ny: In our 2010 twi-ny talk, you pointed out that Chinese artists were able to produce without the interference of the Ministry of Culture and that restrictions rarely impeded their output. Is that still true? That was two years before Xi Jinping took over as general secretary.

bp: I have no idea what has happened in the last two years, but it should be noted that in 2014, Xi Jinping gave a speech exhorting media, television, films, and art producers to “serve the people” and uphold Chinese culture. That’s a return to Mao’s rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, there has been a rise in self-censorship for sure. I need to return to China to see how this has had an impact on cultural institutions and art making.

Miao Ying, Surplus Intelligence, single-channel film with sound, 2021-22 (courtesy of the artist)

twi-ny: Speaking of going to China, what was it like putting “Mirror Image” together during the pandemic? You’re used to traveling there often, but I imagine that because of Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and other political situations, that is not possible.

bp: “Mirror Image” was supposed to open in the spring of 2020, just as Covid took over New York City and museums and galleries were closed. I was devastated that the show was canceled at that point. In fall 2021, Asia Society came to me and revived the show. By then, I knew we could not ship works from China — not because of Covid but because of shipping tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. So we used “virtual shipping,” with artists sending photo works and videos digitally.

Even Nabuqi’s great installation — originally created in Beijing with elements bought at the local IKEA — was completely assembled in NYC. The artist sent us a “shopping list.” We ordered from IKEA here and then she directed the installation via Zoom with a translator in the museum. I think that’s a perfect example of how globalization can impact — even facilitate — art making in the twenty-first century. Also, several galleries — Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong, Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, Pilar Corrias in London, and Chambers Fine Art downtown — were incredibly helpful in sourcing works in the U.S. I really have to thank the team at Asia Society for an extraordinary effort to pull this together.

twi-ny: The exhibition includes a wild video installation by Tianzhuo Chen; a few years back, you attended one of his performances here in the city. What was it like to experience it in person?

bp: Tianzhuo’s work is the most visceral experience I have ever had in an art institution. It’s like watching wild animals refusing to get back in their cages. The tension between the space and the performers is absolutely riveting.

Pixy Liao, Play Station, digital chromogenic print, 2013 (courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art)

twi-ny: Another highlight of the show are ten digital chromogenic prints by Pixy Liao. How did you get introduced to her work?

bp: I met Pixy early in her career, around 2010, when she came to New York. She and her partner, Moro, have their own quirky band and I saw them perform at Printed Matter. I may have known her even before that. I love working with Pixy because she has no ego and comes off like a cutie pie but is actually quite brilliant and powerful. That’s the tension that comes through in the photographs. Her images really speak to people about the state of relationships in today’s gender-fluid world, not just in China or Chinese communities.

twi-ny: For people who might not know that much about contemporary Chinese art, what do you think will most surprise them about this show?

bp: Everything! Many Americans have such a limited view of China that they don’t even believe that creativity is possible in such a repressive society. It is repressive, but that is the framework that Chinese artists push against and test the limits of. Almost all of the work in the show has been shown in China without problems. Many of these artists have major markets with a new generation of young Chinese collectors, and internationally. But this may change. I’m worried about the future. Very worried.

twi-ny: On July 21, you will be moderating a conversation with four of the artists. What are some of the main topics you will be discussing?

bp: We will start with a discussion of how being born in China has influenced their choices as artists and whether that still guides their work. Then I will allow the artists to guide the discussion more or less. But this issue of identity will obviously recur throughout the evening. Most of the artists have told me they are citizens of the internet, not China. We’ll see where that leads us.

[You can watch a recording of the panel discussion here. Pollack will also be participating in a free Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment discussion on Zoom on August 9 at 1:00 with artists Liu Shiyuan and Miao Ying, moderated by Lilly Wei and featuring a poetry reading by Abby Romine.]

twi-ny talk: RUSSELL MALTZ: PAINTED / STACKED / SITE

Visual artist Russell Maltz monitors the load out for installation on Jay St. in DUMBO (photo by Matthew Deleget)

RUSSELL MALTZ: PAINTED / STACKED / SITE
Minus Space
16 Main St., Suite A, Brooklyn
Saturdays through July 30, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
www.minusspace.com
www.russellmaltz.com

When I first arrived at Minus Space in DUMBO to see “Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site,” I thought that the final phase of the Brooklyn-born visual artist’s multipart four-month retrospective had spilled out of the gallery and into the street. Since the mid-1970s, Maltz has been creating works using a wide range of materials, from concrete cinder blocks, glass, and pegboards to found wood panels, PVC pipes, paper, and a swimming pool; he has collaborated with construction companies, and he enjoys photographing artlike industrial detritus. There’s a lot of construction going on outside the gallery, some of which evoked Maltz’s use of color and materials.

Minus Space first showed his “POOL” project beginning in April, followed by “Stacks,” and now concludes with “Needles,” consisting of long, narrow vertical works of acrylic and polyurethane on glass plate and wood, suspended from a galvanized nail, each at a different height on the wall, forming three-dimensional palimpsests. Depending on where the viewer stands, they’ll experience varying depth of space in the works, including reflections of what is happening on Main St. — in this case, bringing the outside construction inside. In the main gallery each piece is a shade of blue, creating unique shadows on the walls. (There are additional works in other colors in the office.)

In conjunction with the exhibit, Maltz put up a temporary installation in a storefront at 28 Jay St., and his Scatter sculpture is part of a group show in Hillman Garden at 100 Broome St. in Luther Gulick Park this summer.

Maltz is a relaxed, easygoing guy who loves discussing art; below he talks about color, material, Brooklyn, and working during the pandemic.

twi-ny: You’re a Brooklyn boy, like me.

russell maltz: Yes, I am.

twi-ny: What do you think about how Brooklyn has changed over the years? I can’t imagine a place like Minus Space existing when I was a kid.

rm: I was born in Brownsville. My family moved to Canarsie when I was two or three years old. We lived in the Bay View Housing Project down by the Belt Parkway alongside Jamaica Bay.

twi-ny: I was born in Flatbush.

rm: Many different types of people lived [in Canarsie], mostly working class and from many ethnic and religious backgrounds. I’ve always regarded Brooklyn as a place where there is an ever-changing community of people. I think that the essence of any community and its value is all about the neighborhood. It seems that what is changing and what is inevitable is that in many places the need for development and the changes to a neighborhood that the development brings has priced out many of its current and historic residents from living in that particular neighborhood — the folks who made it what it is. Development should enrich a neighborhood and should be community-based so that the people who live there can continue to contribute to its identity and culture.

twi-ny: I couldn’t agree more. Since April, Minus Space has been showing a retrospective of your career in different phases, going back five decades. What has it been like putting together each individual section? Were you flooded with memories?

rm: Always — although, there was a prequel to the Minus Space exhibition in 2017 at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in Saarbrücken, Germany, that was accompanied by a monograph that covered work from 1976 through 2017. The work shown in Saarbrücken was mostly done in Europe during these years. The Minus Space show gave me the opportunity to build from the Saarbrücken show in that [Minus Space owner] Matthew Deleget and I decided to make this show in three phases. Each phase would represent a different period of my work and identify the common threads within the work that continue to identify the work to present.

The “POOL” project (1976–79) explored the origins of my ideas and philosophies, the “Stacked” works (1983–2022) explored works made as sites and examined how color transforms material, and the third phase, “Needles” (2018–22), explores my concerns with painting on glass. Combined with other simultaneous activities, such as at 28 Jay St., the installation of construction materials in a vacant storefront, and the “Yardbirds” installation at the Hillman Houses on the Lower East Side, painted wooden elements used by gardeners in their everyday gardening activities. All of these venues gave me a chance to exhibit the many forms that my work can take and elevate the question of what a painting can be.

twi-ny: How did Scatter come about?

rm: The Hillman Garden came about as an invitation from a good friend, the artist David Goodman. David along with sculptor Bruce Ostler invited several artists to install their work in the garden. A garden to me exudes the energy of change: changing seasons, changing growth, and changing habit. I decided to do a work that comprised numerous wooden stakes used by the gardeners (mostly people who live at the Hillman Houses) to stabilize the trees. I painted the stakes Day-Glo yellow. It started in early April as a pile of painted material leaning against the garden shed and was transformed, evolving into a work that was scattered and used by the gardeners for its original purpose. The yellow color enhanced the daffodils, complemented the daylilies, and spread a smattering of color throughout the garden in a natural and random way, creating yet another way to see a painting.

“Russell Maltz: Painted / Stacked / Site” continues Saturdays through July 30 at Minus Space in DUMBO (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: This month at Minus Space you’re showing your more recent fragile “Needles.” What were some of the main considerations when hanging the show?

rm: The “Needle” works began in 2013. I had been developing a series of works using glass because of my ongoing explorations with transparency. For this phase of the exhibition I wanted to install the most recent pieces on glass and give the work the space to breathe to establish a presence in the site and give the viewer time to experience each work as a unique one.

twi-ny: How do you decide what materials to work with?

rm: The “Needles” are a result of a serendipitous event that occurred while working in my studio. I was cutting long lengths of plywood for another piece I was working on. When the cutting was complete and as I was doing my cleanup, I saw a bunch of sawn-off strips lying in a pile on the floor; the results of one action can be the beginnings of another action — and — Aha! Well, the rest and what was to follow came quickly in that these long narrow strips evolved into the exploration of color, form, and presence with various materials in yet another way to make a painting.

twi-ny: Your use of color is striking, particularly bright yellow and green and bold red. In a recent Minus Space talk, you said that “color is the glue that holds it all together.” What comes first — material or color, and how do they come together for you?

rm: Most, if not all of my inspirations and ideas about what I make, come from everyday life, both locally and when I travel. This is a great question because the answer is not always identifiable for me, in that the order of a thing that is inspirational or evokes me into the process of making has a sequence. However, if there is one thing that might be identifiable, it would most likely be light. It is the light that is the identifier to action, and the color that is the glue that transforms and holds the work in place.

twi-ny: The show also features two red stacks (ACCU-FLO Bundled #1 & #2) in the side window that are visible to passersby. There’s a lot of construction going on in the street, so it makes for a fascinating juxtaposition. You were a carpenter and a house painter, but I can imagine your having been a construction engineer in a previous life. Do construction sites really get your juices flowing?

rm: Yes. Not so much in that the sites are there but in the sheer energy of focus, coordination, and human power and coordination that it takes to engage in the process of making.

twi-ny: How did the pandemic lockdown affect your work? Were you able to spend productive time at your Crosby St. studio, or was creating difficult?

rm: I was in New York City for the entire run of the pandemic. It was for me one of the most productive times I can remember. It gave me the time I needed to do what I want and love most to do . . . the work.

MOVIETOWN: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF AND OTHER LA VISIONS

Los Angeles Plays Itself looks at LA as a character in the movies

MOVIETOWN: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF AND OTHER LA VISIONS
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 15-28, $17 per film, 3-pack $42, 5-pack $60
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“This is the city: Los Angeles, California. They make movies here. I live here,” Thom Andersen says in his groundbreaking 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city. I know it’s not easy — the city’s big; the image is small. It’s hard not to resent the idea of Hollywood, the idea of the movies as standing apart from and above the city.”

The nonfiction work is the centerpiece of the two-week IFC Center series “Movietown: Los Angeles Plays Itself and Other LA Visions,” consisting of two dozen films in which LA plays a major role — and are included in Andersen’s nearly three-hour video essay and love letter. The wide-ranging festival features noir classics, satires, futuristic thrillers, low-budget indies, and teen rom-coms, from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Todd Haynes’s Safe, Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts to James Cameron’s The Terminator, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, and Alex Cox’s Repo Man in addition to films by John Cassavetes, John McTiernan, Ridley Scott, Amy Heckerling, and Peter Bogdanovich.

Maybe there’s more to LA than what Alvy Singer argues in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”

Below are select highlights from this fourteen-day cinematic sojourn to the West Coast.

The Dude will abide at IFC Center as part of LA festival

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
Friday, July 15, 11:45 pm
Saturday, July 23, 11:40 pm
www.ifccenter.com/films/the-big-lebowski

One of the ultimate cult classics and the best bowling movie ever, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski has built up such a following since its 1998 release that fans gather every year for Lebowski Fest, where they honor all things Dude, and with good reason. The Big Lebowski is an intricately weaved gem that is made up of set pieces that come together in magically insane ways. Jeff Bridges is awesome as the Dude, a laid-back cool cat who gets sucked into a noirish plot of jealousy, murder, money, mistaken identity, and messy carpets. Julianne Moore is excellent as free spirit Maude, Tara Reid struts her stuff as Bunny, and Peter Stormare, Flea, and Torsten Voges are a riot as a trio of nihilists. Also on hand are Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Huddleston, Aimee Mann, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, David Thewlis, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazzara, Jon Polito, and other crazy characters, but the film really belongs to the Dude and his fellow bowlers Jesus Quintana (John Turturro, who is so dirty he is completely cut out of the television version), Donny (Steve Buscemi), and Walter (John Goodman), who refuses to roll on Shabbos. And through it all, one thing always holds true: The Dude abides.

THE LONG GOODBYE (Robert Altman, 1973)
Friday, July 15, 5:30
Saturday, July 16, 1:20 & 10:00
www.ifccenter.com/films/the-long-goodbye

This is one odd detective story. King of the ’70s Elliott Gould stars as a mumbling Philip Marlowe who reluctantly becomes enmeshed in a murder case involving a friend of his played by former Yankee Jim Bouton. Marlowe lives next door to a harem of naked brownie-loving women, and he spends most of his time worrying about his cat. In fact, the opening fifteen minutes, in which he has to go out in the middle of the night to get cat food and then trick his cat, is absolutely priceless, one of the best cat story lines ever. The detective stuff plays second fiddle to director Robert Altman’s ’70s mood piece, which is fun to watch even at its most baffling and senseless.

Rowdy Roddy Piper tries to save the planet from an alien conspiracy in John Carpenter’s They Live

THEY LIVE (John Carpenter, 1988)
Saturday, July 16, 11:45 pm
Friday, July 22, 11:50 pm
www.ifccenter.com/films/they-live

How can you possibly not love a movie in which wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper, brandishing a shotgun and standing next to an American flag, declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass . . . and I’m all out of bubblegum.” In John Carpenter’s tongue-in-cheek Reagan-era cult favorite, the goofy 1988 political sci-fi thriller They Live, Piper, who passed away in 2015 at the age of sixty-one, stars as John Nada, a drifter who arrives in L.A. and gets a job working construction, where he is befriended by Frank Armitage (Keith David), who is otherwise trying to keep to himself and away from trouble as he makes money to send back to his family. Frank invites John to stay at a tent city for homeless people, across the street from a church where John soon finds some disturbing things happening involving a blind preacher (Raymond St. Jacques), a well-groomed man named Gilbert (Peter Jason), and a bearded weirdo (John Lawrence) taking over television broadcasts and making dire predictions about the future. John then discovers that by using a pair of special sunglasses, he can see, in black-and-white, what is really going on beneath the surface: Alien life-forms disguised as humans have infiltrated Los Angeles, gaining positions of power and placing subliminal messages in signs and billboards, spreading such words and phrases as Obey, Consume, Submit, Conform, Buy, Stay Asleep, and No Independent Thought. John seeks help from Frank and cable channel employee Holly Thompson (Meg Foster), determined to reveal the hidden conspiracy and save the planet.

Aliens use television and billboards to send subliminal messages to humanity in prescient sci-fi satire

Loosely based on Ray Nelson’s 1963 short story and 1986 comic-book adaptation “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” They Live is a fun, if seriously flawed, film that takes on Reaganomics, consumerism, the media, and capitalism and doesn’t much care about its huge, gaping plot holes. Carpenter, an iconoclastic independent auteur who had previously made such other paranoid thrillers as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and a remake of The Thing, wrote They Live under the pseudonym Frank Armitage (the name of David’s character as well as a reference to H. P. Lovecraft’s Henry Armitage from “The Dunwich Horror”) and composed the ultracool synth score with Alan Howarth. The movie is famous not only for Piper’s not exactly brilliant performance but for one of the longest fight scenes ever, as John and Frank go at each other for five and a half nearly interminable minutes, as well as the influence They Live had on activist artist Shepard Fairey, who admitted in 2003 that it “was a major source of inspiration and the basis for my use of the word ‘obey.’” The film is all over the place, a jumble of political commentary and B-movie nonsense, but it’s also eerily prescient, especially with what is going on in America today. Keep a watch out for such recognizable character actors as Sy Richardson, George Buck Flower, Susan Blanchard, Norman Alden, Lucille Meredith, and Robert Grasmere, whose names you don’t know but whose faces are oh-so-familiar.

Billy Wilder takes audiences down quite a Hollywood road in Sunset Boulevard

SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Sunday, July 17, 10:40 am & 3:40 pm
Tuesday, July 19, 11:15 am & 5:20 pm
www.ifccenter.com/films/sunset-boulevard

“You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) remarks to an older woman in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” the former star (Gloria Swanson) famously replies. It doesn’t get much bigger than Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest Hollywood movies ever made about Hollywood. The wickedly entertaining film noir begins in a swimming pool, where Gillis is a floating corpse, seen from below. He then posthumously narrates through flashback precisely what landed him there. On the run from a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, the broke Gillis ends up at a seemingly abandoned mansion, only to find out that it is home to Desmond and her dedicated servant, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They initially mistake Gillis for the undertaker who is coming to perform a funeral service and burial for Desmond’s pet monkey. (You’ve got to see it to believe it.) When Desmond discovers that Gillis is in fact a screenwriter, she lures him into working with her on her script for a new version of Salome, in which she is determined to play the lead role. “I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” Gillis says. “I hate that word,” Desmond responds. “It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” But just as Desmond was unable to make the transition from silent black-and-white films to color and sound pictures, getting Salome off the ground is not going to be as easy as she thinks. Hollywood can be a rather vicious place, after all.

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) keeps a close hold on screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard

Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of three — for the sharp writing, the detailed art/set decoration, and Franz Waxman’s score, which goes from jazzy noir to melodrama — Sunset Boulevard wonderfully bites the hand that feeds it, skewering Hollywood while making references to such real stars as Rudolph Valentino, Mabel Normand, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Wallace Reid, and Tyrone Power and such films as Gone with the Wind and King Kong. Actual publicity stills and movie posters abound, in Paramount offices and Desmond’s spectacularly designed home, which was once owned by J. Paul Getty and would later be used for Rebel without a Cause. Cecil B. DeMille, who directed Swanson in many silent films, plays himself in the movie, seen on set making Samson and Delilah. Desmond’s fellow bridge players are portrayed by silent stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. Meanwhile, before Swanson fired him, von Stroheim directed her in the silent film Queen Kelly, which is the movie Max shows Gillis in Desmond’s screening room. (Swanson herself would go on to make only three more feature films; she passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-four.) John F. Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography and inventive use of camera placement, from underwater to high above the action, makes the most of Hans Dreier’s sets and Swanson’s fabulous costumes and makeup. Sunset Boulevard is the thirteenth and final collaboration between writer-director Wilder and writer-producer Charles Brackett, who together previously made The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. Wilder and Holden would go on to make Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Fedora together. Finally, of course, Sunset Boulevard concludes with one of the greatest quotes in Hollywood history.

Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep examines black life in postwar America

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Wednesday, July 20, 2:30 & 7:00
Tuesday, July 26, 4:05
www.ifccenter.com/films/killer-of-sheep
www.killerofsheep.com

In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s.

The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context.

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck get caught up in murder and deception in Double Indemnity

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Saturday, July 23, 11:15 am
Tuesday, July 26, 11:15 am & 6:15 pm
www.ifccenter.com

IFC Center is offering three chances to catch Billy Wilder’s endlessly romantic noir classic Double Indemnity. Three years after a brunette Barbara Stanwyck tried to swindle Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a blonde Stanwyck is looking for a way out of her loveless marriage when opportunity knocks in the form of acerbic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Stanwyck plays alluring, tough-talking femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who falls for Neff and soon convinces him that they should do away with her husband (Tom Powers). They’re both in it “straight down the line,” as she repeats throughout the film, but insurance fraud investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) isn’t so sure that Mr. Dietrichson’s death was an accident.

John F. Seitz’s inventive black-and-white cinematography — watch for those Venetian blind shadows — set the standard for the genre. MacMurray, who had to be convinced by Wilder to take the part because he thought he’d be awful in the role, is sensational as Neff, oh-so-cool as he recites his cynical dialogue and lights matches with one hand. He might think he’s tough, but he’s no match for Stanwyck, who rules the roost. Both Stanwyck and MacMurray would go on to successful careers in television in the 1960s, he in My Three Sons, she in The Big Valley. Directed by Wilder from a script he wrote with Raymond Chandler based on a pulp novel by James Cain, with music by Miklós Rózsa — how’s that for a pedigree? — Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Oscars and won none.

The Exiles is screening as part of Los Angeles celebration at IFC Center

THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
Monday, July 25, 11:30 am
www.ifccenter.com/films/the-exiles

Founded in 1990 by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller as a way to preserve great orphaned works, Milestone Films first restored Charles Burnett’s wonderful Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Kent Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale The Exiles, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The Exiles follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment.

As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving The Exiles a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up The Exiles with the documentaries The Teenage Revolution (1965) and Saturday Morning (1971) before his death in 1980 at the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society.

QUEENS ON SCREEN: SWERVE / ENTRE NOS

Lynne Sachs’s poetic short Swerve moves to the rhythm of Queens

ENTRE NOS (Paola Mendoza & Gloria La Morte, 2009) / SWERVE (Lynne Sachs, 2022)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, July 15, 7:15, and Sunday, July 17, 1:30, $15
718-777-6800
movingimage.us

The Astoria-based Museum of the Moving Image’s monthly “Queens on Screen” series — which is not about royalty or LGBTQIA+ issues but comprises films set in one of the most diverse areas on the planet — continues July 15 and 17 with two works set in the borough. Up first is Lynne Sachs’s seven-minute Swerve, in which artist and curator Emmy Catedral, blaqlatinx multidisciplinary artist ray ferreira, director and cinematographer Jeff Preiss, film curator and programmer Inney Prakash, and actor Juliana Sass recite excerpts from Pilipinx poet Paolo Javier’s O.B.B. (Nightboat, November 2021, $19.95).

Illustrated by Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion, the book, which stands for Original Brown Boy, consists of such sections as “Aren’t You a Mess,” “Goldfish Kisses,” “Restrained by Time,” and “Last Gasp.” New Yorkers Catedral, ferreira, Preiss, Prakash, and Sass share Javier’s words as they wander around Moore Homestead Playground and Elmhurst’s HK Food Court. “The words each operate on their own swerve, from music that would play in the background and from overheard conversation outside my window, on the subway, at the local Korean deli,” Javier says at the beginning, writing in a notebook.

The film was shot in one day in August 2021, during the Delta wave of Covid-19, so many people are wearing masks, and the food court is nearly empty; when Prakash orders, a plastic sheet separates him from the employee. The performers recite the poems as if engaging in free-flowing speech; words occasionally appear on the screen, including “free emptiness,” “unknown thoroughfare,” and “hum your savage cabbage leaf.”

Experimental documentarian Sachs (Film About a Father Who, Investigation of a Flame), who was the subject of a career retrospective at MoMI last year, captures the unique rhythm of both Javier’s language and the language of Queens; Javier and Sachs will be at the museum to discuss the film after the July 15 screening.

Swerve will be followed by Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s Entre Nos, a deeply personal semiautobiographical story in which Mendoza stars as a Colombian immigrant whose husband deserts her, leaving her to raise two children in Queens. The film is shot by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Arrival, Selma), who makes the borough its own character.

In a director’s note, Mendoza explains, “Throughout my childhood my mother worked countless double-shifts at the toilet bowl cleaners business and flipping burgers at local fast food restaurants near me. We never talked about the roaches in the house or the yearning to see our family back in the country and culture of Colombia. Instead we had to learn to smile through the grit, the trial of tears, and dealing with heartache. As the years passed, I came to a sublime new realization that our story was not unique. Thousands of immigrant mothers, for hundreds of years, have endured problems when trying to adapt to their new immigration in the USA. My mother, like those before her, have overcome all that remains for exactly the same reason, to build the foundation for a better life for their children.”