this week in film and television

ORSON WELLES 100: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI & THE THIRD MAN

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth get caught up in romantic intrigue in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (Orson Welles, 1947)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, January 23, and Saturday, January 24, 2:40, 6:35, 10:30
“Orson Welles 100” continues through February 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Film Forum’s “Orson Welles 100” festival, a wide-ranging celebration of the centennial of the iconoclastic auteur’s birth, continues with another terrific double feature on January 23-24. In 1947, Welles followed up the creepy black-and-white Holocaust thriller The Stranger with The Lady from Shanghai, a colorful, in-your-face noir about a rogue Irish sea captain and the gorgeous wife of a crippled rich man. Welles plays the shifty seaman, Michael O’Hara, with an in-and-out Irish accent; his estranged wife, Rita Hayworth, is simply breathtaking as the femme fatale, Elsa “Rosalie” Bannister; Everett Sloane is terrifically annoying as Elsa’s husband, wealthy lawyer Arthur Bannister; and Glenn Anders shows off one of the great all-time voices as Grisby, Bannister’s unsuspecting partner. Like The Stranger, the film suffers from awkward moments — Welles famously fought with studio head Harry Cohn over the editing and various stylistic touches — but even as minor Welles it’s an awful lot of fun. Columbia wanted Welles to make sure to show off Hayworth’s beauty, which had recently been on display in such hits as Gilda and Cover Girl, so he goes way overboard here, changing her hair color and zooming in far too close far too often. Based on Sherwood King’s novel If I Die Before I Wake, The Lady from Shanghai is a wicked tale of crime and corruption, lust and revenge. “Talk of money and murder,” O’Hara says at one point. “I must be insane, or else all these people are lunatics.” In another scene, Elsa says to him, “I’m not what you think I am. I just try to be like that.” The film is worth seeing for the spectacular ending alone, which takes place in a funhouse hall of mirrors.

Orson Welles makes one of the greatest entrances in film history in THE THIRD MAN

THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, January 23, and Saturday, January 24, 12:35, 4:30, 8:25
“Orson Welles 100” continues through February 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Carol Reed’s thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film you’re ever likely to see, the best Orson Welles film not directed by the man who gave us Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Set in a divided post-WWII Vienna amid a thriving black market, The Third Man is heavy in atmosphere, untrustworthy characters, and sly humor, with a marvelous zither score by Anton Karas. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of Western paperbacks who has come to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime (Welles), but he seems to have shown up a little late. While trying to find out what happened to Harry, Martins falls for Harry’s lover, Anna (Alida Valli); is told to get out of town by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and Sergeant Paine (Bernard “M” Lee); meets a stream of Harry’s more interesting, mysterious friends, including Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and is talked into giving a lecture to a literary club by old Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Every scene is a finely honed work of art, filled with long shadows, echoing footsteps, dripping water, and unforgettable dialogue about cuckoo clocks and other strangeness. SPOILER: The shot in which Lime is first revealed, standing in a doorway, a cat brushing by his feet, his tongue firmly in cheek as he lets go a miraculous, knowing smile, is one of the greatest single moments in the history of cinema. “Orson Welles 100” continues through February 3 with such other gems as Othello, Macbeth, Chimes at Midnight, and A Man for All Seasons as well as such rarities as It’s All True and Too Much Johnsons.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN — JOHN ZORN ON JAPANESE CINEMA: MATANGO

Sherwood Schwartz must have seen MATANGO before creating GILLIGANS ISLAND

MATANGO is a kind of Japanese postwar nuclear GILLIGAN’S ISLAND

MATANGO (aka ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE) (aka FUNGUS OF TERROR) (Ishirō Honda, 1963)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 23, 7:00
Festival runs monthly through February 20
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

How can you go wrong with a Japanese monster movie with such alternate titles as Attack of the Mushroom People and Fungus of Terror, directed by the man who gave us Godzilla, Rodan, Destroy All Monsters, and The Human Vapor? Well, you can’t. Ishirō Honda’s 1963 cult classic, Matango, is a postwar apocalyptic tale that evokes Lord of the Flies, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Antonioni’s L’Avventura while predicting Lost and, yes, Gilligan’s Island. Written by frequent Honda collaborator Takeshi Shimura based on William Hope Hodgson’s 1907 short story “The Voice in the Night” (which was included in the 1958 compilation Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 12 Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV), Matango also has its fair share of social commentary, as seven characters on a yachting outing end up stranded on a seemingly deserted island: the first mate, Senzô (Kenji Sahara), the skipper, Naoyuki (Hiroshi Koizumi), the wealthy Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya), the writer, Yoshida (Hiroshi Tachikawa), the sultry singer, Mami (Kumi Mizuno), the professor, Kenji (Akira Kubo), and the mousy Akiko (Miki Yashiro). Mushrooms are thriving on the island, but it’s best not to eat them, because they are not exactly the psychedelic fungi beloved by hippies in the mod movies of the ’60s. The film touches on jealousy, resentment, loneliness, hunger, and sanity in the nuclear age, with special effects (courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya) that make the early years of Doctor Who — and Gilligan’s Island itself —seem like a technological marvel.

Matango is not so much scary these days as just an absolute hoot, a kind of minor time capsule treasure that you can check out on January 23 at 7:00 when Japan Society screens it as part of its monthly film series “The Dark Side of the Sun: John Zorn on Japanese Cinema,” which concludes in March with the U.S. premiere of the made-for-television Nagisa Oshima’s It’s Me Here, Bellett, preceded by eight shorts by Osamu Tezuka. “I had been a huge fan of Japanese music, art, and film since the early 1960s, but late night Tokyo TV provided a peek into an entirely different world outside the classic art film masterpieces of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Inagaki,” experimental musician and composer and downtown fixture Zorn explains in his curator statement. “It was a revelation to discover that Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun’s Burial were not so much an isolated vision but actually two examples of an entire cinematic genre, and that directors like Seijun Suzuki, Kinji Fukasaku, Toshio Masuda, Yasuzo Masumura, Teruo Ishii, and others had made incredible and uncompromising films that spoke as much about the Japanese psyche as origami, noh theater, or the tea ceremony ever had. . . . For me, the experimental, adventurous, and uncompromising side of any society is often the home of the deepest truths, and these films each hold their truths to an often uncomfortable extreme. I hope you enjoy the (occasionally blinding) intensity of ‘The Dark Side of the Sun.’”

RAOUL PECK: APRÈS THE EARTHQUAKE

Raoul Peck’s MOLOCH TROPICAL kicks off four-day examination of the state of Haiti five years after the earthquake

MOLOCH TROPICAL (Raoul Peck, 2009)
Maysles Cinema
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Thursday, January 22, $10, 7:30
“Après the Earthquake” runs January 22-25
212-582-6050
www.maysles.org

On January 12, 2010, a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti, setting in motion a global relief effort. Five years later, there’s still a whole lot more to be done, as well as many questions to be answered. “Après the Earthquake” is a four-day examination of the state of Haiti and the Haitian people in 2015 organized by the Haiti Cultural Exchange and the DDPA (Durban Declaration & Programme of Action) Watch Group, who have teamed up with the Maysles Institute and Port-au-Prince–born filmmaker and activist Raoul Peck. The series begins with Peck’s Moloch Tropical, which was selected as the centerpiece of the 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival; the work of fiction follows the sad decline of democratically elected Haitian president Jean de Dieu (Zinedine Soualem) as power corrupts and overwhelms him. A combination of nineteenth-century Haitian leader Henri Christophe, twentieth-century president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, any of several Shakespearean kings, the protagonist of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Nazi drama Molokh, and General Vargas from Woody Allen’s Bananas, de Dieu lives in a mountain fortress where he takes advantage of the female servants, gets all excited when a Hollywood film crew shows up to meet him, and tries to prevent his mother from visiting because he is ashamed of the poverty he came from. In the beginning of the film, he steps on a piece of broken glass, so he limps through the rest of the movie, symbolic of his shaky regime. Although the film does suffer from an overabundance of clichés, it’s still a compelling portrait of the downfall of a powerful man. Moloch Tropical is being shown January 22 at 7:30 at the Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) and will be followed by a Q&A with series curator Michelle Materre and Dowoti Desir of the DDPA.

Documentary reveals that there’s still a whole lot to be done in Haitian recovery effort as organizations fight over details

FATAL ASSISTANCE (ASSISTANCE MORTELLE) (Raoul Peck, 2012)
Friday, January 23, Maysles Cinema, $10, 7:30
Saturday, January 24, Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian Church, 15 Mount Morris Park West, $10, 4:00
www.maysles.org

Moloch Tropical is followed the next night by Peck’s Fatal Assistance, which starts by posting remarkable numbers onscreen: In the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit his native country on January 12, 2010, there were 230,000 deaths, 300,000 wounded, and 1.5 million people homeless, with some 4,000 NGOs coming to Haiti to make use of a promised $11 billion in relief over a five-year period. But as Peck reveals, there is significant controversy over where the money is and how it’s being spent as the troubled Haitian people are still seeking proper health care and a place to live. “The line between intrusion, support, and aid is very fine,” says Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister at the time of the disaster, explaining that too many of the donors want to cherry-pick how their money is used. Bill Vastine, senior “debris” adviser for the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH), which was co-chaired by Bellerive and President Bill Clinton, responds, “The international community said they were gonna grant so many billions of dollars to Haiti. That didn’t mean we were gonna send so many billions of dollars to a bank account and let the Haitian government do with it as they will.” Somewhere in the middle is CIRH senior housing adviser Priscilla Phelps, who seems to be the only person who recognizes why the relief effort has turned into a disaster all its own; by the end of the film, she is struggling to hold back tears.

There’s a lot of talk but not nearly as much action in Haitian recovery from devastating earthquake

A self-described “political radical,” Peck doesn’t play it neutral in Fatal Assistance, instead adding mournful music by Alexei Aigui, somber English narration by a male voice (Peck narrates the French-language version), and a female voice-over reading melodramatic “Dear friend” letters that poetically trash what is happening in Haiti. “Every few decades, the rich promise everything to the poor,” the male voice-over says. “The dream of eradication of poverty, disease, death remains a perpetual fantasy.” Even though Peck attacks the agendas of the donors and NGOs while pushing an agenda of his own, Fatal Assistance is an important document that shows that just because money pours in to help in a crisis situation doesn’t mean that the things that need to be done are being done properly. The centerpiece selection of the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Fatal Assistance will screen at MDC on January 23 at 7:30, followed by a Q&A with Materre and Peck, a two-time Human Rights Watch Lifetime Achievement Award winner, in addition to a reception with food and live music from the Haitian Diaspora. The film is also being shown on January 24 at 4:00 at the Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian Church as part of the public health forum “Haiti: Five Years Later,” a panel discussion with Peck, Materre, and others, followed by a reception at the nearby MDC. The series continues January 25 at 4:00 at MDC with Peck’s 2001 film, Profit and Nothing But!, followed by a Q&A with Materre and Darrick Hamilton, then concludes with Peck’s most well known work, 1992’s Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, screening at 6:30, followed by a Q&A with Materre and others.

CHELSEA CLASSICS: STRAIT-JACKET

Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) doesn’t take kindly to marital infidelity in STRAIT-JACKET

STRAIT-JACKET (William Castle, 1964)
Chelsea Bowtie Cinemas
260 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Thursday, January 22, $8, 7:00
212-777-3456
www.bowtiecinemas.com

One of the posters for William Castle’s 1964 camp classic, Strait-Jacket, screams out, “Warning! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts ax murders!” accompanied by a lurid illustration of an ax swinging down and spraying blood. Indeed, when Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) comes home early one night and catches her younger husband (Lee Majors) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest), she grabs an ax and gives them each a nasty whack. After twenty years in an asylum, she returns to her farm to find her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker), engaged to Michael Fields (John Anthony Hayes), whose parents (Howard St. John and Edith Atwater), don’t particularly approve of the union. Soon heads are rolling, and no one is safe. The first of a handful of low-budget exploitation films made by Crawford at the end of her career — which also included Castle’s I Saw What You Did, Jim O’Connolly’s Berserk! and Freddie Francis’s Trog — Strait-Jacket has quite a pedigree, written by Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of Psycho; produced and directed by Castle, who had previously made House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler; photographed in black-and-white by two-time Oscar nominee Arthur E. Arling (The Yearling, I’ll Cry Tomorrow); a Theremin-heavy soundtrack by bandleader and composer Van Alexander; and costarring future Oscar winner George Kennedy, Six Million Dollar Man Majors, WWII navy hero Leif Erickson, and Pepsi vice president and nonactor Mitchell Cox. (Crawford was the widow of former Pepsi president Al Steele and was still on the board of directors of the company, resulting not only in Cox’s appearance but also in overt product placement in the movie.)

But most of all, Strait-Jacket has Crawford, who chews up the scenery with relish, living up to Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of her in Mommie Dearest. Just wait till you see her light a match using a record on a turntable and her reaction to a bust of her that her daughter has made — an actual bust of Crawford from her time at MGM in the 1930s. And be sure not to miss the Columbia Pictures logo at the end. Strait-Jacket is being shown January 22 at Chelsea Bowtie Cinemas as part of Hedda Lettuce’s weekly Chelsea Classics series, in which the self-described “eco-friendly drag queen” hosts screenings of popular movies; the long-running series continues in January and February with Thelma and Louise, Titanic, All About Eve, It Happened One Night, and From Here to Eternity, so Strait-Jacket finds itself in some pretty good company.

TWI-NY TALK: STEPHEN BELBER

Patrick Stewart, Matthew Lillard, and Carla Gugino star in Stephen Belber’s MATCH

MATCH (Stephen Belber, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Through January 20
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

In 2001, Stephen Belber turned his 2000 play, Tape, into a feature film starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, directed by Richard Linklater. He has now adapted his 2004 Broadway debut, Match, into a feature film starring Sir Patrick Stewart, Carla Gugino, and Matthew Lillard. The beautifully told story takes place in New York City, where married couple Lisa (Gugino) and Mike (Lillard) are interviewing dance teacher and choreographer Tobi Powell (Stewart) purportedly for her thesis, but their ulterior motives bring the three of them together in uncomfortable, unexpected ways, dredging up a long-buried past. Belber’s second film as writer and director — in 2009 he made Management, a romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston, Steve Zahn, and Woody Harrelson — is an intimate, involving tale about family and the choices we make, led by superb performances by Stewart and Gugino, who are magical together. Belber discussed the film and other aspects of his career with twi-ny shortly after it opened at the IFC Center.

twi-ny: Nearly fifteen years ago, you adapted your play Tape into a film, directed by Richard Linklater, who just won a Golden Globe for Boyhood. Now you’ve adapted your 2004 play, Match, into a film. How did the transference of the two plays onto the big screen differ? Why did you choose to direct this time around?

Stephen Belber: Up to the point when I adapted Tape, I’d written exactly one screenplay, and so I basically just put the text into final draft. (In fact, I didn’t even do that; someone else did; I’m not even sure final draft was around then) Rick Linklater and I briefly talked about breaking it out of the motel but decided it would diffuse the necessary claustrophobic feel. When I adapted Match, I’d just finished directing my first film and so I was able to approach the whole thing more globally, knowing more of what it takes to make a film, yet I also specifically wanted to reduce the scope of my next project to almost pure character interaction; I was less interested in more classic film “splendor.” That said, I did try to open up the screenplay a bit, but only when it felt justified and organic; otherwise I just doubled-down on my actors, who I was more than confident were strong enough to convey the “cinematic landscape” of emotion that I was going for. I think the reason I decided to direct was due to my memory of having watched Tape amidst a crowd at Sundance in 2001 and thinking to myself, “There is a thirst for this kind of small, ‘emotional thriller’ movie” — and wanting to try that for myself.

twi-ny: When it debuted on Broadway, Match starred Frank Langella, Ray Liotta, and Jane Adams. How did you approach casting for the film version?

Stephen Belber: Frank was attached to play the role of Tobi for a while, but when we finally found the financing, he was unavailable for our time window, so the fortune of then being able to find Patrick was immense. I couldn’t have been happier. I also knew that I wanted the movie to be different from the play. I wanted it to be more of an even three-hander; I wanted the role of Lisa to be almost the strongest of the three, in terms of her ability to force these two semi-blinded individuals together. I’d long known and admired Carla for her dominant stage work in New York, so she was an early choice of mine. Matthew I knew less well, but when I met him and perceived his rare mix of strength and vulnerability, as well as the simply excellent person that he is, I knew I’d found the type of actor I love to work with.

twi-ny: The film depicts the deep bond between Tobi and New York, echoing the bond that has clearly developed between Patrick and the city. When he and Carla go up to his Inwood rooftop, I immediately thought of the video that went viral a few summers ago of Stewart and his soon-to-be wife, Sunny Ozell, goofing around on their Brooklyn rooftop. Can you talk about that connection, and its importance to the film? You were born in DC; what are some of your favorite things about New York?

Stephen Belber: Well, to begin with, I do love New York City, but specifically, when I discovered the uniqueness and beauty of Inwood, it was one of those moments when New York reveals itself to you in a lovely and unexpected way. (Granted, the roof scene is technically Washington Heights and we shot the rest of the film in Crown Heights.) But more so, the character of Tobi, perhaps not unlike Patrick, has decamped to New York relatively late in life — and fallen in love with its excitement and ever-present vivacity. Funnily enough, my father recently moved back to NYC after forty years in DC, and he now goes on incessantly about how great a place it is to be old, and not just because of all the food delivery services. There’s something about the constant life of the city that surrounds you, ambushes and assaults you, but undeniably keeps you in the present; it fills you with a sense of aliveness, awareness, and acute feeling. It’s very different than Phoenix.

twi-ny: Stewart’s character is inspired by dancer, choreographer, and longtime Juilliard ballet teacher Alphonse Poulin, who attended the opening night of the play on Broadway. Has he seen the film? What has been his reaction to your exploration of at least part of his life, first onstage, then in the movies?

Stephen Belber: Alphy has been incredibly supportive of this entire project. I think the play made him happy, and yet it was a broader comedy than the film; it had a heightened, almost farcical reality, theatrically speaking, and I think that I, as the writer, consequently short-changed some of the complexity and humanity of the Tobi character. On film, heightened reality tends to be harder to pull off; the intimacy of a film close-up almost insists on a naturalism and dramatic “realness,” in which farce doesn’t fly. At the same time, I’d become aware of wanting a more dramatic and grounded version of this character and this story.

twi-ny: You are a Juilliard grad yourself, and the play begins at the beautiful Glorya Kaufman Dance Studio there. What was your Juilliard experience like? How has it helped shape your career?

Stephen Belber: My two years as a writer at Juilliard were vital and extremely happy ones. It’s the first time I truly took myself seriously as a writer. I feel at home there to this day. (Even if everyone else looks at me like an odd guy peering into piano rehearsal rooms.)

twi-ny: On February 6, Matthew Shepard Is a Friend of Mine is being released in theaters, in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Hate Crime Statistics Act, which was modified in 2009 by the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act. You examined the murder of Matthew Shepard in The Laramie Project Cycle, which played at BAM two years ago. What kind of progress, if any, do you think has been made in America in regard to hate crimes?

Stephen Belber: Not enough. Certainly there’s progress, legislatively as well as in a national “moral” sense. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who continue to misunderstand why these laws are important. This, to me, implies a lack of ability to put one’s self in another person’s shoes, to truly feel what it is to be “other” in this country. We are still coming up way short in that regard.

twi-ny: Do you have any plans to bring any of your other plays to the big screen?

Stephen Belber: Myself and Matthew Lillard are discussing a screen adaptation of my 2008 play, Fault Lines. Matt would direct. I would love this to happen.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL — WAR AGAINST WAR: THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS

Members of the FLN hide from French paratroops in Gillo Pontecorvo’s neo-Realist classic THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, January 21, 6:15
Festival runs January 14-29 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

In Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s gripping neo-Realist war thriller The Battle of Algiers, a reporter asks French paratroop commander Lt. Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin), who has been sent to the Casbah to derail the Algerian insurgency, about an article Jean-Paul Sartre had just written for a Paris paper. “Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?” Mathieu says. “Then you like Sartre?” the reporter responds. “No, but I like him even less as a foe,” Mathieu coolly answers. In 1961, French existentialist Sartre wrote in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the seminal tome on colonialism and decolonialism, “In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it,” referring to European colonization. “There are those among [the oppressed creatures] who assert themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against the guns; these are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts the terrified masses. Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity. Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.” Sartre’s brutally honest depiction of colonialism serves as a perfect introduction to Pontecorvo’s film, made five years later and then, unsurprisingly, banned in France. (In 1953, the Martinique-born Fanon, who fought for France in WWII, moved to Algeria, where he became a member of the National Liberation Front; French authorities expelled him from the country in 1957, but he kept working for the FLN and Algeria up to his death in 1961. For more on The Wretched of the Earth, see the new documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense.)

Terrorism and counterinsurgency take to the streets in Oscar-nominated THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS

In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo (Kapò, Burn!) and screenwriter Franco Solinas follow a small group of FLN rebels, focusing on the young, unpredictable Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) and the more calm and experienced commander, El-hadi Jafar (Saadi Yacef, playing a character based on himself; the story was also inspired by his book Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger). Told in flashback, the film takes viewers from 1954 to 1957 as Mathieu hunts down the FLN leaders while the revolutionaries stage strikes, bomb public places, and assassinate French police. Shot in a black-and-white cinema-vérité style on location by Marcello Gatti — Pontecorvo primarily was a documentarian — The Battle of Algiers is a tense, powerful work that plays out like a thrilling procedural, touching on themes that are still relevant nearly fifty years later, including torture, cultural racism, media manipulation, terrorism, and counterterrorism. It seems so much like a documentary —the only professional actor in the cast is Martin — that it’s hardly shocking that the film has been used as a primer for the IRA, the Black Panthers, the Pentagon, and military and paramilitary organizations on both sides of the colonialism issue, although Pontecorvo is clearly on the side of the Algerian rebels. However, it does come as a surprise that the original conception was a melodrama starring Paul Newman as a Western journalist. All these years later, The Battle of Algiers, which earned three Oscar nominations (for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967 and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in 1969), still has a torn-from-the-headlines urgency that makes it as potent as ever. The Battle of Algiers is screening on January 21 at 6:15 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the War Against War sidebar program of the twenty-fourth annual New York Jewish Film Festival, which focuses on antiwar films from the 1950s and 1960s; the schedule also includes Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire with Peter Watkins’s The War Game, Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, Konrad Wolf’s I Was Nineteen, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers, centered by a panel discussion on January 19 at 3:00 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (free with advance RSVP) with Kent Jones, Martha Rosler, Harrell Fletcher, and Trevor Paglen, moderated by Jens Hoffmann.

ORSON WELLES 100: COMPULSION & THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

Will Varner (Orson Welles) runs just about everything and everybody in THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (Martin Ritt, 1958) & COMPULSION (Richard Fleischer, 1959)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Tuesday, January 20
Series continues through February 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Upon first look, it might seem that there is little in common between two of the movies Film Forum is screening together in its ambitious and exhaustive “Orson Welles 100” series other than the involvement of Mr. Welles himself. But it turns out that the double feature is somewhat of a genius pairing of two 1950s pictures that echo each other in more ways than one. In order to finance his career as a director (and pay off tax debts), Welles acted in numerous films, from the sublime (A Man for All Seasons, The Third Man, both of which are part of this month-long tribute to the centennial of his birth) to the ridiculous (Casino Royale, Butterfly, both of which are not). Between 1958 and 1961, he appeared in or narrated nearly a dozen and a half films; two of the best, Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion, are playing Film Forum on January 20. In both, the big, blustery Welles, his sweat practically dripping off the screen, takes center stage though primarily a supporting character. Welles claimed that he hated making The Long, Hot Summer, a fiery Tennessee Williams-like melodrama based on several works by William Faulkner, although clearly inspired by Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Welles plays Will Varner, a wealthy plantation magnate who essentially owns a small southern town. He is grooming his son, Jody (Anthony Franciosa), to take over his empire, but when ambitious drifter and rumored barn burner Ben Quick (Paul Newman, who played Brick in Cat the same year) shows up looking for work, Will decides to set him against Jody, with the winner capturing the spoils, which in the case of Quick might also include Will’s young but already spinsterish daughter, Clara (Joanne Woodward, who married Newman during production). Shot in blazing CinemaScope, the film, which also stars Angela Lansbury as Will’s girlfriend, Lee Remick as Jody’s shopping-loving wife, and Richard Anderson as Clara’s momma’s boy beau, boils over with sexual energy that lives up to the original trailer’s declaration that “nothing — but nothing! — will be withheld!” The Long, Hot Summer earned no Oscar nominations and was not a box-office hit, but Newman became an international superstar by being named Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, while the film was in competition for the Palme d’Or.

Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles) meets with clients Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) and Artie Strauss (Bradford Dillman) in COMPULSION

The next year, Welles and costars Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman shared the Best Actor award at Cannes for Compulsion, a searing exploration of crime and punishment in the guise of a teen exploitation flick. (Dig that crazy opening credit sequence!) Based on the novel and play by Meyer Levin that fictionalized the Leopold and Loeb case, Compulsion explores the nature of good and evil as it follows wealthy Chicago law school students Artie Strauss (Dillman) and Judd Steiner (Stockwell) on their mad rampage of murder and rape, determined to commit the perfect crime and get away with it because of their superior intellect. But when fellow student Sid Brooks (Martin Milner) finds a pair of glasses that might be the key to discovering who killed little Paulie Kessler, it’s going to take a lot more than understanding Friedrich Nietzsche to keep Artie and Judd from the hangman’s noose. Fleischer, who had a diverse career that ranged from Violent Saturday, The Vikings, Fantastic Voyage, and Doctor Dolittle to The Boston Strangler, Red Sonja, and Amityville 3-D, adds Hitchcockian flourishes to Compulsion, evoking the homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train and Rope (which was also a fictionalized retelling of the Leopold and Loeb story) while having most of the violence occur offscreen. (Fleischer’s cinematic use of the pair of glasses is also a direct reference to the glasses in Strangers on a Train, while Judd’s study of ornithology, highlighted by the stuffed birds in his bedroom, foresees Norman Bates’s taxidermy obsession in Psycho, made a year later.) Like The Long, Hot Summer, Compulsion boasts a strong — and familiar — supporting cast, including E. G. Marshall (The Bold Ones) as clever DA Harold Horn, Gavin MacLeod (The Love Boat) as one of his assistants, Diane Varsi (Peyton Place) as Sid’s girlfriend, Edward Binns (12 Angry Men) as a crack reporter, and Anderson (Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man) as Judd’s older brother. But it is Welles’s presence that takes over the film in its later stages; playing larger-than-life defense attorney Jonathan Wilk, a character based on Clarence Darrow, he enters the film in a grand manner, as Fleischer opens up a space for him to come through a door and dwarf everyone else. Wilk’s eloquent closing argument about capital punishment is one that should be studied by lawyers, actors, directors, and death penalty proponents — even if Welles required the use of a teleprompter to get him through the powerful speech in a single take. Like The Long, Hot Summer, Compulsion received no Oscar nominations and was a box-office failure. Seen back-to-back, the two films work extremely well together, with smoldering story lines, expert cinematography (by Joseph LaShelle in the former, William C. Mellor in the latter), intense acting, and, yes, Orson Welles.