this week in film and television

FIAF OPEN HOUSE

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma will be presenting an exhibit of drawings as well as episodes 4.5 and 5 of LIFE AND TIMES at FIAF this fall

French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall and Tinker Auditorium, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Le Skyroom and FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, September 10, free, 6:00 – 8:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

The French Institute Alliance Française is getting ready for the fall season, highlighted every year by its multidisciplinary Crossing the Line festival, with a free open house on September 10. From 6:00 to 8:00, visitors will be able to sample French wine and cheese in Tinker Auditorium, check out the Nature Theater of Oklahoma drawings exhibit “10fps” in the FIAF Gallery, receive beauty treatments in Le Skyroom, explore the new digital library Culturethèque, meet author-artist Gwenaëlle Gobé (The Diary of Stephanie: Electoral Surge) in the Haskell Library, watch Ruben Toledo’s short animated film Fashionation in Florence Gould Hall (with Toledo introducing the 7:00 screening), and take mini-French classes in the sixth-floor Language Center. Look for twi-ny’s preview of the 2013 Crossing the Line Festival next week.

AN AUTEURIST HISTORY OF FILM REPRISE: TO CATCH A THIEF

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly turn up the glamor quotient in Hitchcock thriller set on the French Riviera

TO CATCH A THIEF (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, September 8, 2:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Is he or isn’t he? In Alfred Hitchcock’s glamorous thriller set on the French Riviera, Cary Grant stars as John Robie, a famous burglar known as the Cat who has supposedly retired but is suddenly believed to be responsible for a rash of new jewelry thefts. Determined to prove his innocence and catch the real thief, he enlists the help of Lloyd’s of London insurance agent H. H. Hughson (John Williams), who supplies him with a list of women on the Riviera who have expensive baubles ripe for the taking. At the top of the list are the Americans Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis) and her gorgeous daughter, Francie (a radiant Grace Kelly), who teases Robie, hinting that she might in fact be the Cat — if he isn’t. As Robie avoids the cops and looks to his old friends in the French Resistance for further help, the tension heats up, leading to a climax that takes place on the rooftops of the French Riviera. Grant’s third of four outings with Hitchcock and Kelly’s third and final turn with the suspense master is an exciting “who’s doing it” featuring the dream pairing of two of Hollywood’s most beautiful and talented superstars, filled with just the right amount of comedy and romance in a glorious setting. Look for Alfie to make his appearance early on, causing Grant to do a double take in the back of a bus. To Catch a Thief is screening September 8 at 2:30 as part of MoMA’s “An Auteurist History of Film Reprise,” which gives film enthusiasts a second chance to catch works that have previously been shown at MoMA during weekday afternoons, when many people cannot see them.

THE COMPLETE HOWARD HAWKS: TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogard fall in love onscreen and off in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (Howard Hawks, 1944)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, September 7, free with museum admission, 2:00
Series runs September 7 – November 10
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Bogie and Bacall’s first film together is a ripping WWII yarn liberally adapted from the Ernest Hemingway novel by Hemingway, director and producer Howard Hawks, longtime screenwriter Jules Furthman, and future Pulitzer Prize winner William Faulkner. In To Have and Have Not, Humphrey Bogart stars as Captain Steve Morgan, a man’s man who owns a fishing boat in Martinique, which is under Vichy rule. Morgan is determined to avoid getting involved in the war and its complex politics, but when hotel owner Frenchy (Marcel Dalio) offers him some much-needed cash in exchange for making a secret middle-of-the-night ocean pickup of French Resistance fighter Paul de Bursac (Walter Surovy) and his wife, Helene (Dolores Moran), Morgan relents, bringing along his perpetually drunk sidekick, Eddy (Walter Brennan). Morgan is being closely watched by police captain Renard (Dan Seymour) and his small gangster-like crew, but he decides this time to take the risk and heads out to sea. Meanwhile, he is spending more and more time with the mysterious young woman across the hall, Marie “Slim” Browning (Lauren Bacall), who can be both tender and alluring and as tough as nails. If a lot of this sounds like Casablanca, that’s because it is, with Warner Bros. trying to repeat the success of their Oscar-winning hit. The similarities are many, from Morgan’s reluctance to get involved helping an important married couple in the Resistance movement to his potential romance with a beautiful blonde, from Vichy police captains named Renard and Renault to actors such as Seymour and Dalio, who appear in both pictures, and the inclusion of a piano player serenading the locals (Dooley Wilson in Casablanca, Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not.)

Marie Browning (Lauren Bacall), Frenchy (Marcel Dalio), and Steve Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) get immersed in a dangerous situation in Vichy-run Martinique in Hawks classic

It is perhaps the two films’ parallelism that prevented To Have and Have Not from receiving even a single Oscar nomination, especially considering Bacall’s spectacular debut, a bold, confident performance filled with nuance, whether she’s singing with Carmichael, lifting a bar patron’s wallet, lighting a cigarette with Bogart (with whom she started a long romance), or teaching him to whistle. Even with the Casablanca comparisons, To Have and Have Not works on its own, a thrillingly entertaining noir that also features wonderful cinematography by Sidney Hickox, especially one marvelous scene that casts ominous shadows from louvered blinds across Bogie and Bacall. To Have and Have Not is screening September 7 at the Museum of the Moving Image, kicking off the two-month series “The Complete Howard Hawks,” comprising more than three dozen works by the legendary Hollywood director and producer who conquered multiple genres; the films range from the famous (Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep, Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, Ball of Fire, Sergeant York, His Girl Friday, The Thing from Another World, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) to the more obscure, including his silent films (Trent’s Last Case, Fig Leaves, A Girl in Every Port, Fazil).

CONTEMPT

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

CONTEMPT (LE MEPRIS) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 6-19
Series runs through September 5
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

French auteur Jean-Luc Godard doesn’t hold back any of his contempt for Hollywood cinema in his multilayered masterpiece Contempt, which is being shown September 6-19 in a fiftieth-anniversary restoration at Film Forum. 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.)

Producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) doesn’t always have the kindest of words for director Fritz Lang in CONTEMPT

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.

THE COMPLETE HOWARD HAWKS: RIO BRAVO

Dean Martin and John Wayne have their hands full in Howard Hawks’s RIO BRAVO

RIO BRAVO (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, September 7, free with museum admission, 4:30
Series runs September 7 – November 10
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Howard Hawks’s anti-High Noon is a surprisingly sensitive, extremely clever exploration of interpersonal relationships disguised as a Western genre picture. John Wayne stars as Sheriff John T. Chance, a big, bold small-town Texas lawman who arrests local bully Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) for committing cold-blooded murder. The cocky Burdette doesn’t expect to be in jail long, not with his brother, Nathan (John Russell), being the most powerful — and potentially dangerous — man in Rio Bravo, and what with Chance’s deputies being useless drunk Dude (Dean Martin) and an old cripple known as Stumpy (Walter Brennan). Despite offers of help from such friends as businessman Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond), Chance is determined to go it with just Dude and Stumpy as they attempt to hold Joe until the federal marshal arrives. But Nathan and his hired band of bounty hunters are just as determined to free Joe, whatever the cost. Chance is not so foolish as to think that he can take Burdette’s crew on just by himself; he actually doesn’t want anyone else to die for something he considers his responsibility. Meanwhile, he is keeping his eyes on Feathers (Angie Dickinson), a tough-talking young woman with a sordid past, and Colorado (Ricky Nelson), a sharpshooting young stud only out for himself. The set-up is merely an excuse for Hawks to delve into some serious male bonding and potential romance as Dude, called Borrachón (“Drunk”), tries to put down the bottle, Feathers attempts to prove that she’s not all bad, and Colorado eventually replaces his guns for a few minutes with a guitar to sing with Dude and Stumpy. Wayne plays it all marvelously, portraying Chance as a complex individual who understands the fears and desires, limitations and possibilities inherent in everyone he meets, yet always remaining cool. Appropriately enough, the local hotel, run by the always helpful Carlos (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez) and his wife, Consuela (Estelita Rodriguez), is named the Alamo, not boding well for Chance and his meager team. Even at its 141-minute running time, Rio Bravo feels far more intimate than epic. Rio Bravo is screening September 7 in a restored 35mm print at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the two-month series “The Complete Howard Hawks,” comprising more than three dozen works by the legendary director and producer, from the famous (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, Ball of Fire, Sergeant York, His Girl Friday, The Thing from Another World, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) to the more obscure, including his silent films (Trent’s Last Case, Fig Leaves, A Girl in Every Port, Fazil).

I DON’T KNOW: KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS

Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is sick and tired of being bossed around by the D’Ascoynes (Alec Guinness in multiple roles) and decides to take extreme action in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS

CABARET CINEMA: KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (Robert Hamer, 1949)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, September 6, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org

After being spurned by their aristocrat family and watching the wealthy D’Ascoynes turn their back on his mother even in death, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) decides that he is not going to let them get away with such awful treatment. So Louis, the tenth Duke of Chalfont, comes up with a plot to get rid of the eight D’Ascoynes standing between him and the dukedom. In Robert Hamer’s wickedly funny black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, each one of those haughty D’Ascoynes is played by Alec Guinness, young and old, male and female, to deservedly great acclaim. The film is told in flashback as an elegant, distinguished Louis is writing his memoirs in prison on the eve of his execution. He eloquently describes the details of his multiple murders, as well as his unending yearning for the questionably prim and proper Sibella (Joan Greenwood), who continues her flirtations with him even after she marries Louis’s former schoolmate Lionel (John Penrose), as well as his relationship with Edith (Valerie Hobson), the wife of one of the D’Ascoynes he kills on his march to power, glory, and revenge. But his hubris leads to his downfall — and one of the most delicious twist endings in film history. Based on Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, and adapted by Hamer (The Spider and the Fly, School for Scoundrels) and cowriter John Dighton (The Barretts of Wimpole Street), Kind Hearts and Coronets takes on British high society, class conflict, royalty, and hypocrisy with a brash dose of cynical humor and more than a hint of eroticism, pushing the sexual envelope amid all the laughter. Price is terrific as the dapper Louis, but it’s impossible to steal the show from Guinness, who is a riot as the succession of doomed D’Ascoynes. Guinness was originally asked to play four of the roles but suggested that he do them all, and thankfully Ealing Studios agreed; one of the key shots in the film is when six of the D’Ascoynes are seen together. Kind Hearts and Coronets is screening September 6 at the Rubin Museum, introduced by Vanity Fair contributing editor John Heilpern, kicking off the Cabaret Cinema series “I Don’t Know,” held in conjunction with the “Ignorance” festival of talks, films, and live music.

THE GRANDMASTER

Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) and Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) battle it out in Wong Kar Wai’s THE GRANDMASTER

THE GRANDMASTER (Wong Kar Wai, 2013)
In theaters now
www.thegrandmasterfilm.com

Hong Kong Second Wave grandmaster filmmaker Wong Kar-wai once again chooses style over substance in his latest work, the visually sumptuous but ultimately confusing martial arts drama The Grandmaster. Wong regular Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love) stars as Ip Man, the real-life Wing Chun master who eventually taught such students as Bruce Lee. The film follows Ip Man from his early days in Foshan, where he is chosen to defend the south against the more famous masters of the north, through the Second Sino-Japanese War and his move to Hong Kong. Along the way there are gorgeously filmed fight scenes (shot by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd and choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping) involving “The Razor” Yixiantian (Chang Chen), Ma San (Zhang Jin), and, most intimately, Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), daughter of retired master Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang), as challengers to Ip Man display their martial arts disciplines in attempts to defeat Wing Chun. An early battle in the rain is particularly breathtaking, bathed in alluring silver tones. But the screenplay, written by Wong with Zou Jingzhi and Xu Haofeng, never really delves deep enough into Ip Man’s character, giving especially short shrift to his relationship with his wife, Cheung Wing-sing (Song Hye-kyo), and children.

Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) defends Wing Chun against all comers in martial arts drama

The choppy narrative makes it feel like The Grandmaster was supposed to be a much bigger, more expansive historical epic, and indeed the Chinese version is twenty-two minutes longer, so the 108-minute U.S entry seems lacking. It also comes at a time when the story of Ip Man has been experiencing a major revival, as there have been numerous productions about him over the last few years, including the theatrical releases Ip Man and Ip Man 2 starring Donnie Yen, Ip Man: The Final Fight with Anthony Wong, and The Legend Is Born — Ip Man with Dennis To as well as the television series Ip Man starring Kevin Cheng, so it’s possible that Wong’s film will ultimately get lost in the mix. Although there is still much to admire about The Grandmaster, it follows his disappointing 2007 English-language My Blueberry Nights and the head-scratching 2004 futuristic drama 2046, so it’s been quite a while since the masterful Wong’s heyday of the 1990s, which included such dazzling works as Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and Happy Together before concluding with the lush, unforgettable In the Mood for Love in 2000. Here’s hoping his next film will be more than a series of stunning set pieces that make the story secondary.

Nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Cinematography (Philippe Le Sourd), Best Costume Design (William Chang Suk Ping)