Orson Welles makes one of the greatest entrances in film history in THE THIRD MAN
THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
The Celeste Bartos Theater
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
December 14-16, 1:30
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
Carol Reed’s thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film you’re ever likely to see. 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 (Orson 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. The Third Man is screening December 14-16 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon December 21-23 and John Ford’s Wagon Master December 28-30.
Livia Bloom’s “Documentary in Bloom” series at the Maysles Cinema usually introduces new nonfiction films, but it has something a little different in store for December: the U.S. theatrical release of a thirty-six-year-old French work. It’s hard to believe that Daguerreotypes, Agnès Varda’s absolutely charming look at her longtime Parisian community, has never had a theatrical run in America, so it is exciting that her wonderful little tale is finally being shown on the big screen. In Daguerreotypes, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the seventy-five-minute film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerreotypes will surely have a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The film will be proceeded by the 1965 short Elsa la Rose, a twenty-minute documentary directed by Varda and Raymond Zanchi and narrated by Michel Piccoli that explores the loving relationship between French writers and communists Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet.
We really wanted to like Bad Santa a lot more than we did. Terry Zwigoff, who brought us the delightful Crumb (1994) and the terrific Ghost World (2000), reaches for the bottom of the toilet in this foul-mouthed, dingy, and dirty holiday tale of a drunk, debauched Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) and his curse-spewing sidekick elf (Tony Cox) who go to different malls each year and rob them after Santa mistreats the kids who line up to ask for presents. Hey, we love our comedy as low grade as the next person, but we have to admit it bothered us when Thornton let loose with a torrent of filthy language in front of kid actors. The story was devised by executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen, who had good intentions that go awry in the end. Bernie Mac, Lauren Graham, and especially John Ritter add fun support. And although Brett Kelly as the Kid, Norman Thurman, is funny at first, eventually the maudlin aspects of his developing relationship with Santa get overplayed and bring the movie down a few notches. Bad Santa is screening just past midnight Friday and Saturday at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, where a few drinks before going in should help a whole lot.
