Valerie Hegarty, “Still Life with Peaches, Pear, Grapes and Crows”; “Still Life with Watermelon, Peaches and Crows”; and “Table Cloth with Fruit and Crows,” canvas, stretcher, paper, acrylic paint, foam, papier-mâché, wire, glue, gold foil, epoxy, fabric, thread, dimensions variable, in “Dining Room, Cane Acres Plantation, Summerville, South Carolina” (photo by Brooklyn Museum)
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, July 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
For its free First Saturday program during the July 4 weekend, the Brooklyn Museum looks back at American history through dance, music, art, literature, and film. “Remixing the American Story” includes live performances by the Hungry March Band, Michael Hill’s Blues Mob, Frankie Rose, the Brown Bag All Stars, and the Redhawk Native American Arts Council, pop-up gallery talks, a dance workshop, a Forum Project discussion on current events, a poetry slam with the Nuyorican Poets Café, a photo booth, sketching of live models based on portraits in the “American Identities: A New Look” exhibition, and screenings of Michael and Timothy Rauch’s StoryCorps’ animated shorts, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the organization that is collecting an oral history of the country. In addition, artist Valerie Hegarty will give a talk about “Alternative Histories,” her fascinating interventions into three of the museum’s period rooms, which have been seemingly destroyed by a murder of crows. The galleries will remain open late so visitors can also check out “John Singer Sargent Watercolors,” “The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy,” “LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital,” “Käthe Kollwitz: Prints from the ‘War’ and ‘Death’ Portfolios,” “‘Workt by Hand’: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts,” “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” “Raw/Cooked: Caitlin Cherry,” and other exhibitions.
The fate of an eighteen-year-old boy charged with the murder of his father is at stake in Sidney Lumet’s first film, the gripping, genre-defining 12 Angry Men. After a series of establishing shots, a judge sends a dozen New Yorkers into the jurors room, where they need to come to a unanimous verdict that could lead to the execution of the teen. Over the course of about ninety minutes, an all-star cast examines and reexamines the case — and their own personal biases — as the heat increases, both literally and figuratively. At first, the nameless dozen men make small talk, trying to be friendly, but it’s not long before some of them are at others’ throats, primarily the gruff Lee J. Cobb, who has it in for the calm and thoughtful Henry Fonda, who is ready to stand alone if necessary for what he believes in. The other uniformly excellent actors playing a very specific cross-section of white, male America are John Fiedler, Martin Balsam, Robert Webber, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, Joseph Sweeney, and George Voskovec. “I tell you, we were lucky to get a murder case,” Webber tells Fonda, but he won’t feel the same as the tension reaches near-violent proportions. 12 Angry Men is a searing examination of the criminal justice system as well as basic human instincts, behavior, and common decency. The Philadelphia-born Lumet, whose parents were both in the Yiddish theater, is able to tell the story in cinematic ways despite its taking place mostly in one small, sweaty room, letting the intense acting drive the narrative; the director, who was nominated for an Oscar for the film, would go on to make such other classic New York City dramas as The Pawnbroker, The Anderson Tapes, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City. Nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin, 12 Angry Men, based on an original teleplay by Reginald Rose, will be presented in a DCP restoration at Film Forum July 5-11.
Controversial Sixth Generation director Lou Ye, who scored an international hit with 2000’s Suzhou River but whose work is regularly banned by Chinese authorities, officially returns to his homeland with Mystery, a complex tale that weaves together two main stories in the centrally located city of Wuhan. The dark film opens with a young woman, Xiaomin (Chang Fangyuan), getting mowed down by a car racing down the highway on a rainy night. Meanwhile, the married Sang Qi (Qi Xi) tells her new friend, single mother Lu Jie (Hao Lei), that she thinks her husband, Yongzhao (Qin Hao), is having an affair, but both women soon have more surprises in store for them as an intricate web of infidelity, betrayal, obsession, lies, class, cover-ups, and payoffs slowly reveals itself. Written by Lou (Purple Butterfly, Summer Palace) with Mei Feng and Yu Fan, Mystery, a selection of the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and Best Picture, Best Screenwriter, and Best Newcomer (Qi Xi) winner at the Asian Film Awards, is a moody, often uneasy work that tries too hard to confuse the viewer yet still manages to be compelling as things eventually come into focus. Inspired by three stories Mei found on the internet about changing social structures on the mainland, the film ends with unexpected violence that Lou was forced to edit for the Chinese release, leading him to remove his name from that version. Mystery is having its North American premiere July 3 & 11 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, which continues through July 15 with works from China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, the Philippines, and other countries, including Jang Cheol-Soo’s Secretly Greatly, Hideo Nakata’s The Complex, Jeong Byeong-Gil’s Confession of Murder, Johnnie To’s Drug War, Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil, and a retrospective of Taiwanese director Tsai Yang-Ming. 
Loosely based on a Noël Coward play that was recently made into a film starring Colin Firth, Jessica Biel, and Kristin Scott Thomas, Alfred Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue is another of the Master of Suspense’s cleverly told melodramas, a risqué tale of a woman unfairly placed in a lurid situation. Isabel Jeans stars as Larita Filton, a loving wife whose husband, Aubrey (Franklin Dyall), has commissioned her portrait by painter Claude Robson (Eric Bransby Williams). Just as Claude makes a play for Larita, she fights him off and Aubrey walks in. He misinterprets the scene, shots ring out, the artist is dead, and Claude files a highly publicized divorce case in which Larita is found guilty of misconduct. Trying to put her notorious past behind her, she heads for the Mediterranean, where she meets John Whittaker (Robin Irvine), a wealthy mama’s boy who falls instantly in love with her and brings her back to his parents’ country estate. But once there, Whittaker’s nasty mother (Violet Farebrother) and conniving sisters (Dacia Deane and Dorothy Boyd) do everything they can to ruin the relationship, seeking to uncover Larita’s history while also attempting to put her son back together with longtime family friend Sarah (Enid Stamp Taylor). Easy Virtue, which features yet another Hitchcock blonde, is a gripping film about honesty, reputation, individuality, and character as an innocent woman is forced to face undeserved consequences in the superficial world of high society. Hitchcock, who makes his cameo holding a walking stick, gliding past Larita while she sits by a tennis court, includes several wonderful touches involving circles and ovals, from a close-up of a judge’s wig to a shot through a tennis racket’s strings to a dining room dominated by a group of elongated, haloed saints on one wall. Easy Virtue is also one of Hitchcock’s dourest silent melodramas, lacking any comic relief as a wronged woman desperately tries to right her life. A DCP restoration of Easy Virtue is being screened July 2 at 7:30 in the BAM Harvey Theater as part of “The Hitchcock 9,” with live piano music by Stephen Horne. The series continues through July 3 with such other rarely shown Hitchcock silents as The Farmer’s Wife, Downhill, Champagne, and The Pleasure Garden, Sir Alfred’s debut, which has been restored with an additional twenty minutes that have been missing since its initial release.