Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) offers the experience of a lifetime to young Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) in classic family film
WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Mel Stuart, 1971)
Nitehawk Cinema
144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
November 24-25, 11:45 am
212-875-5601
www.nitehawkcinema.com
Based on a 1964 Roald Dahl novel, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a fanciful frolic through a children’s wonderland, filled with fear, trepidation, love, and lots of candy, both sweet and sour. Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum, in his only film appearance) lives with his dirt-poor family in a ramshackle room, where Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) can’t even get out of bed. But when goodhearted Charlie finds one of the golden tickets that will allow him to join a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, Grandpa Joe is suddenly up and about, singing and dancing, and so will you be. Among the other kids with the golden tickets are the spoiled Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole), the selfish Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson), the tube-loving Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen), and the rather sloppy Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner). As they are led through this dreamland by the unpredictable Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), they encounter chocolate rivers, bubble machines that make people float, and small Oompa Loompas who are quick to clean up any messes. The soundtrack of this thoroughly entertaining, charming family film includes “The Candy Man Can,” “(I’ve Got a) Golden Ticket,” “Pure Imagination,” and, of course, “Oompa Loompa, Doompa-Dee-Do.” Directed by Mel Stuart, who passed away in August after a career that also included Wattstax, Four Days in November, and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, the film was remade by Tim Burton in 2005 starring Johnny Depp as Wonka with mixed results, but you can catch the original at the Nitehawk Cinema this weekend, with special family screenings at 11:45 am Saturday and Sunday.
In 2006, Toby Jones portrayed Truman Capote in Infamous, but he had already been upstaged by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had won the Best Actor Oscar earlier that year for playing the social gadfly in the 2005 biopic Capote. Well, history is likely to repeat itself; Jones can currently be seen on HBO playing Alfred Hitchcock in Julian Jarrold’s The Girl, which follows the Master of Suspense as he obsesses over Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) while making The Birds and Marnie, under the careful watch of his wife, Alma Reville (Imelda Staunton). It’s a slight film, but Jones does a fine job as the creepy Hitch. However, his performance is liable to get lost with the theatrical release of Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, in which the great British director is played by the inimitable Sir Anthony Hopkins, with Helen Mirren taking on the role of Alma as they struggle to make what would become their biggest success, Psycho. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible for the audience to separate Hitchcock from Hopkins, a central failing that, compounded by a lifeless subplot involving a potential romance between Alma and writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), leaves the film rather dry and boring. It is fascinating to watch Hitch battle the studio (and the censors) over the financing and distribution of what was an extremely controversial film at the time, but the imaginary scenes with serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) are forced and unnecessary, and while James D’Arcy does a good job playing the quirky Anthony Perkins, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel are wasted as Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, respectively. And yes, that’s Ralph Macchio as writer Joseph Stefano. Based on Stephen Rebello’s well-received 1990 book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Gervasi’s feature debut — he previously wrote and directed the 2009 documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil — is like a fair-to-middling Hitchcock flick or an average episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, containing interesting tidbits but never really achieving the captivating sense of mystery and romance (and fun!) that made his films and himself so special. It’s a shame that with two pictures tracing Hitchcock’s unique working process during a seminal period in his career, both fall relatively flat.
Nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and winner of six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, All About Eve is one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest movies, a searing depiction of naked ambition set on the Great White Way. Based on Mary Orr’s 1946 short story “The Wisdom of Eve,” writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s flawless drama stars Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, who is not exactly the mousey wallflower she at first appears to be. She quickly worms her way into an inner circle of Broadway vets populated by superstar Margo Channing (Bette Davis), her younger lover, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), playwright and director Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), and Richards’s wife, Karen (Celeste Holm), who takes Eve under her wing. Joining in on all the fun is powerful theater critic Addison DeWitt (Oscar winner George Sanders), who marvels at all the manipulation and backstage drama, much of which he wickedly orchestrates himself. “There never was, and there never will be, another like you,” DeWitt tells Eve in one of the film’s most poignant moments. All About Eve is filled with classic quotes, including the iconic “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” boldly proclaimed by Davis. In a movie about acting and the theater, Mankiewicz never shows anyone onstage; instead, he focuses on the characters and the intrigue with a sly flair that is deliciously entertaining. All About Eve is screening November 23 & 25 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “The Cinema and Its Doubles,” consisting of films that involve physical, fantastical, or psychological doppelgängers; the festival continues through December 16 with such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert Mulligan’s The Other, and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.
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