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MR. SATURDAY NIGHT

Buddy Young Jr. (Billy Crystal) needs to prove to everyone he’s still got it in Mr. Saturday Night (photo by Matthew Murphy)

MR. SATURDAY NIGHT
Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, $69-$179
877-250-2929
mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com

Don’t get me started. So I’m sitting in a theater a few weeks ago, waiting for a play to begin, when I overhear the three people next to me, who are from Toronto, discussing what else they want to see while they’re in New York. “What about Mr. Saturday Night?” the oldest one asks. “Oh, I love Billy Crystal, but I’d rather see a musical,” his grown daughter says. “Who’s Billy Crystal?” her twentysomething son says, as if he could not care any less. What are they, meshugeneh?

In 1984, burgeoning superstar William Edward Crystal got his own HBO special, A Comic’s Line, in which he created Buddy Young Jr., an aging, antiquated comedian with a gruff voice and an even gruffer manner. Crystal, who played the barrier-shattering gay character Jodie Dallas on Soap from 1977 to 1981, further developed Buddy on Saturday Night Live (1985-85) and then in the 1992 film Mr. Saturday Night, which he also cowrote (with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) and directed. By then Buddy was a fully fledged, long-out-of-date Borscht Belt has-been whose outsize ego continually results in lack of success.

Crystal, who won a Tony for his 2004 one-man autobiographical show, 700 Sundays, has now turned Mr. Saturday Night into an utterly charming and fun Broadway musical — yes, Toronto friends, a musical, with plenty of shtick — reteaming with Ganz and Mandel (Splash, Parenthood, A League of Their Own), who also worked with Crystal on the two hit City Slickers flicks and the forgettable Forget Paris. In addition, David Paymer, who won an Oscar as Buddy’s long-suffering brother and agent, Stan Yankleman, in the movie, is back in the same role onstage. For the film, Crystal, who was in his early forties at the time, had to go through nearly six hours of makeup every day to play the seventy-three-year-old comedian; for the Broadway show, which runs through September 4 at the Nederlander, Crystal, now seventy-four, requires very little makeup to play the younger Young.

A onetime television star in the 1950s, Buddy has been reduced to telling lame jokes at retirement homes to less-than-enthusiastic audiences. “So, the other day, my wife says, ‘Buddy, come upstairs and make love to me.’ So I said, ‘Make up your mind — I can’t do both.’” Met with crickets, he adds, “Hey, come on. I know you’re out there — I can hear you decomposing.”

Watching the Emmy Awards in his New York City apartment, Buddy is shocked when he sees himself highlighted at the end of the in-memoriam segment that lists all the famous people who died in the previous year. “Look! They killed me!” he tells his wife, Elaine (Randy Graff). “I’m not dead, you bastards!”

But instead of wallowing in self-pity, Buddy decides he can turn the mistake into his last chance to prove to the world what he’s got before he really dies. He sings, “No more playing brises and bar mitzvahs, / Sundays at the Szechuan buffet, / All that starts changing tomorrow when I’m on Today!” After going on the morning show, Buddy is a hot commodity again, taking meetings at the Friars Club and getting a movie offer but, as flashbacks reveal, the hardheaded comedian can’t stop getting in his own way on the road to fame and fortune.

Meanwhile, he tries to reestablish a connection with his forty-year-old daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean), who has a history of drugs and arrests and is excited that she is up for a PR job. Buddy: “What’s it pay?” Susan: “Okay, you see?! I’m leaving.” Buddy: “That’s a normal question about a job. What does it pay?” Susan: “It pays ten cents a year, okay?! That’s what it pays. Ten cents a year!” Buddy: “Okay, that’s something. That’s ten cents more than last year.”

Buddy Young Jr. (Billy Crystal) keeps Jordan Gelber, Brian Gonzales, and everyone else laughing in hit Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Scott Pask’s set smoothly moves from the Youngs’ home to the Friars Club to a talk show to Young’s good old days, with costumes by Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser and video and projections by Jeff Sugg, taking us back and forth between past and present. Generously directed by Tony winner John Rando (Urinetown, On the Town), Mr. Saturday Night is great fun. Ganz, Mandel, and the endlessly irresistible Crystal — the most delightfully appealing comedian of the last fifty nears — never miss an opportunity to go for the quick laugh but without sacrificing the narrative. The show is all about Crystal; it’s unlikely to be remembered for its cast album, although three-time Tony winner Jason Robert Brown’s (Parade, The Last Five Years) music and orchestrations and Tony nominee Amanda Green’s (Hands on a Hardbody, Bring It On) lyrics are a fine match for the players.

Crystal and Paymer are not there for the singing or dancing; the more intensive numbers are left for Tony winner Graff (City of Angels, A Class Act) and Bean (Hairspray, Wicked), who are both superb. Choreographer Ellenore Scott keeps it mostly simple, not trying to give Crystal and Paymer too much tsuris. Jordan Gelber, Brian Gonzales, and Mylinda Hill excel as multiple characters, serving up, of all things, comic relief. Chasten Harmon (Hair, Les Misérables) is agent Annie Wells, who at first has no idea who Buddy Young Jr. is but is doomed to find out. I hope the same happened to the guy from Toronto. To use one of Young’s catchphrases, did you see what I did there?

Early on, Young declares, “Sure, I’m old but look, my mic hand is steady, / Still upright and I’m ready, / Do I pack away the tux and tie / and lie here growing fungus? / That’s what they want me to do!” And Crystal’s singing as much about himself as Young when he adds, “I got to hear them saying: / He’s still got it! / He’s still got it! / Balls you can’t lift with a crane.”

BETWEEN WORLDS — MOKUHANGA

“Between Worlds” explores the specialized ancient art of mokuhanga (photo courtesy Kentler International Drawing Space)

BETWEEN WORLDS — MOKUHANGA
Kentler International Drawing Space
353 Van Brunt St., Red Hook
Thursday – Sunday through July 31, free, from 12:00 – 5:00
Tour and flute performance July 24, free, 1:00
kentlergallery.org
mokuhangasisters.com

After meeting at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Kawaguchi-ko, Japan, during shared residencies from 2017 to 2019, nine woman artists formed the Mokuhanga Sisters, a collective dedicated to the centuries-old ukiyo-e woodblock printing technique known as mokuhanga. The Mokuhanga Sisters — Katie Baldwin, Patty Hudak, Mariko Jesse, Kate MacDonagh, Yoonmi Nam, Natasha Norman, Mia O, Lucy May Schofield, and Melissa Schulenberg — are showing modern examples of the art form in the lovely exhibition “Between Worlds – Mokuhanga,” on view through July 31 at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook. In addition, each artist has invited either a teacher or a student of theirs or a community member (Matthew Willie Garcia, Hidehiko Gotou, Kyoko Hirai, Shoichi Kitamura, Terry McKenna, Brendan Reilly, Louise Rouse, Ayao Shiokawa, Chihiro Taki, Katsutoshi Yuasa) to show work as well, making it an intergenerational, multigender show.

In their curatorial statement, the Mokuhanga Sisters explain, “‘Between Worlds’ explores the technical innovations of mokuhanga and contemporary themes of identity, place, environment, and gender from artists working around the world. As a medium, mokuhanga is versatile and sustainable. Its subtle applications of color and the tactile surfaces create space for contemplation. Its connection to the past and its potential for innovation give it continued relevance for international art making in the twenty-first century.”

Katie Baldwin, Meeting Place (Garden), mokuhanga, 2021 (photo courtesy Kentler International Drawing Space)

The centerpiece of the exhibit is the more than twelve-foot-long scroll Borderless, comprising panels by eight of the Sisters. On the walls surrounding the scroll are more than four dozen individual works on paper in black-and-white and multiple colors, featuring various geometric shapes and patterns and landscapes. McKenna’s Water from Heaven and Linden Falls use the same blocks but are printed in very different hues; similarly, Yuasa’s VR Tokaido series boasts three versions of its scene of Mt. Fuji. Several artists incorporate gradations of an alluring blue, including Baldwin (Meeting Place [Garden]), Gotou (Blue Breath), Schofield (The Way You Look at Me), Norman (Woven Water), and MacDonagh (Diptych).

Circles play a prominent role in works by Hudak, Mia O, Ayao Shiokawa, and Norman. Baldwin’s Tornado Shelter (Practice Evacuation) evokes Edvard Munch’s In the Brain of Man and On the Waves of Love, a white face drawing attention in an otherwise dark outdoor scene. Yuasa’s Making your own paper, printing by hand, and seeing through the light recalls several oil paintings of woods by Paul Cezanne. Hudak’s stunning Two Trees hangs over the gallery’s inner entrance; it was inspired by W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Two Trees” (“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, / The holy tree is growing there; / From joy the holy branches start, / And all the trembling flowers they bear”) and the forest canopy behind her home.

On July 24 at 1:00, Hudak will be leading a tour of the show, followed at 2:00 by a Japanese flute performance. Don’t miss the tour if you can help it: Hudak’s deep love for and knowledge of the form and its history, stretching back to the seventh century, were delivered with a light touch and engaging enthusiasm on the tour we went on a few weeks ago, and her information about the particular papers, inks, wood carving, and inking techniques of mokuhanga added immeasurably to our understanding and appreciation of the works. While there, be sure to check out “Focus on the Flatfiles: Between Worlds,” a cabinet of affordable prints by Annie Bissett, Takuji Hamanaka, Keiko Hara, Jennifer Mack-Watkins, Florence Neal, Yasu Shibata, and April Vollmer.

MY OLD SCHOOL

Alan Cumming stars as Scottish hoaxer Brandon Lee in My Old School

MY OLD SCHOOL (Jono McLeod, 2022)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 22
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“To rewind your life and be someone different — what would possess someone to do that?” Nicola asks at the beginning of Jono McLeod’s brilliantly eccentric hybrid documentary, My Old School.

Sam adds, “Anything’s possible here. I’m telling you, this guy is a charmer. He’s not what you think he is; he never was.”

In 1993, a new student named Brandon Lee entered prestigious Bearsden Academy in Scotland. Although he appeared to be significantly older than the rest of his classmates, some of whom initially assumed he was a teacher, he continued going to school and even starred as marine lieutenant Joseph Cable in Bearsden’s production of South Pacific. But it turned out that Brandon was not who he said he was, leading to a major scandal.

Jono McLeod uses animation flashbacks to tell strange tale in hybrid documentary

In 1995, it was announced that Scots actor Alan Cumming would portray Brandon in a movie, but it never got made. Instead, nearly thirty years later, Cumming is finally playing the man who eventually got caught pulling off a hoax of epic proportions. But Cumming doesn’t speak a word in the film; Brandon agreed to tell his story to McLeod, who was one of his Bearsden classmates, but he refused to appear on camera. So, sitting in a school desk, Cumming expertly lip syncs Brandon’s extremely strange tale of ambition, deception, and just plain weirdness.

It’s a bravura performance, reminiscent of Deirdre O’Connell’s Tony-winning role in Dana H., in which she portrayed playwright Lucas Hnath’s mother, sitting in a chair as she lip synced the story of an abduction from an interview Hnath conducted with the real Dana. Cumming, a Tony-winning stage actor himself (Cabaret, Macbeth), uses small gestures and movements and his alluring eyes to convey Brandon’s state of mind without ever getting out of his seat; George Geddes’s camera is as curious as we are, exploring his face and body in extreme close-ups as if looking for cracks in his armor.

In his debut feature film, McLeod, a former reporter and current television documentarian, uses multiple ways to share the bizarre chronicle: In addition to interviewing the main subject, McLeod speaks with more than a dozen of Brandon’s classmates, who also sit at school desks as they relate what happened from beginning to end. They do so with both humor and wonder, laughing and smiling as they describe the details of Brandon’s subterfuge; McLeod gets several teachers to go on the record as well.

McLeod presents their testimonials in playful animation (courtesy Rory Lowe), inspired by MTV’s Daria, interspersing real news reports and other archival footage, all seamlessly edited with quirky delight by Berny McGurk. Some of the cartoon characters are voiced by actors, including Clare Grogan as Mrs. Ogg, Joe McFadden as Mr. MacLeod, Juliet Cadzow as Brandon’s grandmother, Michele Gallagher as Mrs. Thomson, Camilla Kerslake as Brandon’s opera-diva mother, Gary Lamont as Mr. MacKinnon, Carly McKinnon as science teacher Miss MacKichan, Brian O’Sullivan as Mr. Gunn, Dawn Steele as Mrs. Nolan, Wam Siluka Jr. as Stefen (who lovingly admits how Brandon changed his life), and, most notably, the one and only Lulu (To Sir, with Love) as mean Mrs. Holmes. Lulu also sings the cover version of Steely Dan’s “My Old School” over the closing credits, during which McLeod pairs childhood photos of the students and teachers with their animated versions.

It’s a tour de force of storytelling, and what a story it tells. The less you know going in, the better, but regardless, it’s one hundred minutes of utter fun and amazement, particularly potent in 2022, when personal identity is at the forefront of so much discussion. My Old School opens July 22 at Film Forum; there will be Q&As with McLeod after the 7:50 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.

SEX, GRIFT, AND DEATH

A group of grifters plans a heist in Caryl Churchill’s Hot Fudge

SEX, GRIFT, AND DEATH
PTP/NYC: Potomac Theatre Project
Atlantic Stage 2
330 West Sixteenth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 31, $21.50-$31.50
ptpnyc.org

The Potomac Theatre Project (PTP/NYC) is celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary with two programs running in repertory at Atlantic Stage 2 through the end of July. I saw “Sex, Grift, and Death,” which begins with the New York premiere of Steven Berkoff’s 1983 Lunch and continues with two short works by Caryl Churchill, 1989’s Hot Fudge and the New York premiere of 2015’s Here We Go. The other program, “Reverse Transcription,” consists of Robert Chesley’s 1989 Dog Plays and the world premiere of Jim Petosa and Jonathan Adler’s A Variant Strain, one-act plays that thematically link the AIDS crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

PTP/NYC presented a prerecorded virtual production of Lunch last summer, starring Bill Army as Tom and Jackie Sanders as Mary, two strangers who meet at the beach. They engage in absurdist conversation and share their thoughts directly with the audience as they explore their loneliness and contemplate hooking up. He is a salesman who sells “space, acres of nothing”; she is a married woman who can’t decide whether she minds being bothered by him. Oddly, the forty-minute play, directed by PTP/NYC cofounder Richard Romagnoli with the same cast, lacks the dramatic impact it had online. Mark Evancho’s set features a bench, a garbage can, and a lamppost in front of a screen on which video of a calm shore repeats; the projection, by Courtney Smith, is accompanied by the soft, soothing hums of the sea, courtesy sound designer Sean Doyle.

Jackie Sanders and Bill Army star as two strangers meeting at the beach in Steven Berkoff’s Lunch

“What do you want?” Tom asks. “Nothing,” Mary replies. A moment later he asks, “What were you waiting for?” She answers, “No one — I just like sitting here — alone.” Not giving up, he says, “Don’t you ever want something else?” She insists, “You’re not looking for me — you’re looking for it! Any it.” During the pandemic, we were all waiting, not necessarily sure what we wanted. One thing we did ache for was live, in-person theater; however, this live, in-person Lunch feels strained; it never quite hits its stride, lacking the passion and humor of the virtual edition.

However, things get much better after intermission with a compelling pair of Churchill works, beginning with Hot Fudge. The four-part play follows Ruby (Tara Giordano) as she gathers with friends and lovers (and others) during one long, wild night. First she joins Matt (Gibson Grimm), Sonia (Molly Dorion), Charlie (Chris Marshall), and June (Danielle Skraastad) at 7:00 at a pub, where they are planning a unique series of robberies. “You have to be quite brave to lie so much,” Ruby says at one point, a line that is central to the narrative.

Two hours later Ruby is at a winebar with her stylish new boyfriend, Colin (David Barlow), who appears to be some kind of international businessman, while Ruby has untruthfully told him that she owns a travel agency. Ruby and Colin continue the partying at a club at 11:00 with Hugh (Marshall), Grace (Wynn McClenahan), and Jerry (Teddy Best), where they discuss connections, global industry, ecology, and tennis. The play concludes at 1:00 at Colin’s place, where an unexpected visitor (Skraastad) interrupts the festivities and threatens to uncover some harsh realities they’ve been dancing around all evening.

Caryl Churchill’s Here We Go is a three-part meditation on death

Hot Fudge was originally paired with Churchill’s Ice Cream, but PTP/NYC extremely successfully replaces that with Here We Go, a three-part meditation on death. In the first section, eight characters (Marshall, Skraastad, Army, Sanders, Maggie Connolly, Meili Huang, Annabelle Iredale, Charlie Porto) are at a funeral, talking about the deceased while, one at a time, they take center stage and share how they will depart from this mortal coil. After that, a man (Barlow) delivers a complex monologue, trying to figure out his place in the universe as he realizes, “I’m on my own.” Hot Fudge ends with an ailing man (Barlow) being attended to by a caregiver (Keith) in a harrowing, silent finale that is nearly overwhelmed by an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that questions whether any of us, or all of us, can really exist on our own.

Directed by Cheryl Faraone, who is married to Romagnoli and cofounded PTP with him and playwright-director Jim Petosa in 1987, Hot Fudge and Here We Go flow seamlessly into each other, as if they were meant to be together. They feel tailor made for this precise moment in time, as America is clouded by ever-increasing dishonesty, led by the Big Lie, and the citizenry emerges from two years of a pandemic, reevaluating their lives and careers while dealing with so much death, including more than one million Covid-19 victims in this country alone.

Evancho’s set design consists primarily of a variety of chairs that are moved on- and offstage by the cast after each scene under a shadowy darkness. There’s a lot of sitting and standing, culminating in the poignant finale that puts it all into illuminating, and frightening, perspective.

PTP/NYC has been presenting works by Churchill for nearly thirty years, beginning with The After-Dinner Joke in 1993 (and again in 2002 and 2018) and continuing with Mad Forest in 1998, Serious Money in 2012-13, Vinegar Tom in 2015, and a virtual Far Away in 2020, all directed by Faraone, who knows just what to do with Churchill’s complex dialogue and story lines. The eighty-three-year-old British writer has penned more than fifty plays and radio dramas, so I can’t wait to see what PTP/NYC has in store for us in the future, particularly since the company is reconfiguring its annual format going forward.

MONTHLY ANIME: PRINCESS MONONOKE

Japan Society will host special twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Princess Mononoke this week

PRINCESS MONONOKE (もののけ姫) (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, July 22, $15, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

In his April 1995 project proposal for Princess Mononoke, Japanese animator, director, and Studio Ghibli cofounder Hayao Miyazaki explained, “There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans. However, even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.”

Released in 1997, Princess Mononoke is one of the greatest anime adventures ever made. The environmental story about cursed warrior Ashitaka (voiced by Yōji Matsuda), the warrior princess and forest protector San (Yuriko Ishida), Irontown ruler Lady Eboshi (Yūko Tanaka), and mercenary monk Jiko-bō (Kaoru Kobayashi) is having a special twenty-fifth-anniversary 35mm screening July 22 at 7:00 at Japan Society, concluding the institution’s “Monthly Anime” series, which began in April with Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and continued with Peter Chung’s The Animatrix in May and Masaaki Yuasa’s The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl in June.

Thankfully, they are showing the original Japanese version with English subtitles; the dubbed version features an all-star lineup of familiar voices that distracts from the narrative (including Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, Billy Bob Thornton, Gillian Anderson, and Keith David). Anime master Miyazaki has also made such classics as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, and Spirited Away, all with soundtracks by Joe Hisaishi. Although the screening is sold out, there will be walk-up tickets available at the door; it should be quite an experience watching the film in person with a devoted crowd of Miyazaki maniacs, of which I am certainly one.

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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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.