Movie music maestro Bernard Herrmann scored dozens of classic cinema scenes, including Cary Grant on the run in Alfred Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST (courtesy Photofest)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Through November 3
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www.filmforum.org
www.thebernardherrmannestate.com
Taking the art of the film score to a whole new level, composer extraordinaire Bernard Herrmann had an innate sense of how to make movies better through music. He wrote scores for more than fifty films in his too-brief thirty-five-year career (he died in 1975 at the age of sixty-four), including nine by the figure he is most often identified with, suspense master Alfred Hitchcock, whom he also had a well-known falling out with. Herrmann worked with a diverse range of directors, scoring classic outings by Orson Welles, Henry Hathaway, François Truffaut, Michael Curtiz, Martin Scorsese, William Dieterle, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh, Brian De Palma, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry King, Nicholas Ray, Nunnally Johnson, and others. Oddly, the New York City-born maestro, whose career began with Citizen Kane and concluded with Taxi Driver, was nominated for only five Oscars, winning for his second film, 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. He also composed concert pieces and scores for radio, television, and the stage in addition to his more famous film work, which is on display in a two-week series at Film Forum that continues through November 3. It’s an impressive body of work, including Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (October 23-24), Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (October 24), Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (October 25 in a double feature with Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry), Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (October 26-27 with John Brahm’s Hangover Square), and Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (October 30 with Hitchcock’s The Birds). On October 28, Film Forum will be screening the inspired double feature of Taxi Driver and J. Lee Thompson’s original Cape Fear (in which Robert Mitchum shows Robert De Niro how it’s done), while the psychological suspense will be turned up a notch on Halloween with the pairing of Psycho with De Palma’s Obsession. The oddest double feature is November 1’s stop-motion duo of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, attesting to Herrmann’s range. “Herrmann would have been delighted, though perhaps not surprised, at the growing amount of attention attracted by his music in recent years,” his widow, Norma, writes on the estate’s official website. “There has been interest from a whole new generation who were not even born during his lifetime.” The series at Film Forum offers that generation a great opportunity to experience Herrmann’s work for the first time, as well as allowing those who’ve grown up with his genius another chance to see it (and hear it) on the big screen.
When brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko first entered the boxing arena in the 1990s, they were each like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, seemingly unbeatable Russian machines. But both of them ended up facing tremendous adversity and rising up again, as depicted in the surprisingly intimate German documentary Klitschko. Director Sebastian Dehnhardt was given unlimited access to the brothers, their parents, Vitali’s wife, and other members of Team Klitschko, revealing the two skyscrapers to be much more than just a couple of great fighters. Both Vitali and his younger brother, Wladimir, are shown to be intelligent, well-spoken men (each with PhDs) who had one goal when they left kickboxing for professional boxing — to be heavyweight champions of the world. On their remarkable journey, Dehnhardt captures them training together, carefully watching each other’s performances in the ring, and playing chess. At one point Wladimir bans Vitali from his training camp, evoking the separation between “Irish” Micky Ward and his brother, Dicky Eklund, as seen in David O. Russell’s Oscar-nominated The Fighter, but the Klitschkos handle it very differently. The film features plenty of original fight footage in which Dehnhardt zooms in and slows things down to get breathtaking action shots from such contests as Vitali’s epic battle with Lennox Lewis, in which Klitschko got a horrifically deep gash over his left eye; Wladimir’s dizzying loss to Lamon Brewster; and both brothers taking on Corrie Sanders and Samuel Peter. Sharing their thoughts on the Klitschkos are longtime manager Bernd Bonte, Wladimir’s trainer Emanuel Steward, Vilati’s coach Fritz Sdunek, former champions Lewis, Brewster, and Chris Byrd, and boxing announcer Larry Merchant, none of whom have anything bad to say about the brothers, who come off as calm, thoughtful souls who love their mother dearly and rarely get riled up outside the ring. The film is disjointed, with an often hard-to-follow time line, and background information seems haphazard at best, but Klitschko is still a knockout of a film.
For nearly thirty years, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Man Without a Past) has been making existential deadpan black comedies that are often as funny as they are dark and depressing. Has there ever been a film as bleak as 1990’s The Match Factory Girl, in which a young woman (Kati Outinen) suffers malady after malady, tragedy after tragedy, embarrassment after embarrassment, her expression never changing? In his latest film, the thoroughly engaging Le Havre, Kaurismäki moves the setting to a small port town in France, where shoeshine man Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a self-described former Bohemian, worries about his seriously ill wife (Outinen) while trying to help a young African boy (Blondin Miguel), who was smuggled into the country illegally on board a container ship, steer clear of the police, especially intrepid detective Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who never says no to a snifter of Calvados. Adding elements of French gangster and WWII Resistance films with Godardian undercurrents — he even casts Jean-Pierre Léaud in a small but pivotal role — Kaurismäki wryly examines how individuals as well as governments deal with illegal immigrants, something that has taken on more importance than ever amid the growing international economic crisis and fears of terrorism. Through it all, Marcel remains steadfast and stalwart, quietly and humbly going about his business, deadpan every step of the way. Wouter Zoon’s set design runs the gamut from stark grays to bursts of color, while longtime Kaurismäki cinematographer Timo Salminen shoots scene after scene with a beautiful simplicity. Winner of a Fipresci critics award at Cannes this year and Finland’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Le Havre is another marvelously unusual, charmingly offbeat tale from a master of the form. A selection of this year’s New York Film Festival, Le Havre opens October 21 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center, which is also hosting a Kaurismäki festival on weekends through December 18, showing nine of the director’s works; up next is The Match Factory Girl (October 28-30), followed by Leningrad Cowboys Go America (November 11-13), Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (November 18-20), and The Man Without a Past (November 24-27).
Screening at 92YTribeca as part of the third annual Doomsday Film Festival — which promises “Deserted streets! Blood-red skies! Total social breakdown!” — Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is one of the grandest satires ever made, the blackest of black comedies. With the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over the United States and the Soviet Union, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has a meltdown, becoming obsessed with protecting the country’s “precious bodily fluids” and threatening to launch the bombs. While President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) tries to make nice with the Soviets, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) gets caught up in all the military excitement, Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) defends the Coca-Cola company, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) can’t get anyone to listen to him, and Major T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) prepares for the ride of his life. Based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert and written by George, Kubrick, and Terry Southern, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is hysterically funny and wickedly prescient, an absolute hoot from start to finish, featuring razor-sharp dialogue, inspired slapstick, and just enough truth to scare the hell out of you. (Be sure to watch for Peter Bull not being able to stop laughing as Sellers goes crazy in a wheelchair at the end.) The screening will be followed by a “Doomsday on the Brain” panel discussion with Joseph Le Doux, Dr. Mark Siegel, Lee Quinby, Keith Uhlich, and Mark Asch, moderated by Paul W. Morris from, of course, BOMB magazine. The Doomsday Film Festival also includes Steve De Jarnatt’s 1988 WWIII flick Miracle Mile, followed by a Q&A with star Anthony Edwards and the director; Don McKellar’s 1999 Y2K nightmare Last Night; Joseph Sargent’s classic Colossus: The Forbin Project, followed by “The Singularity Is Nigh,” a panel discussion with Maggie Jackson, Joshua Rothkopf, Jason Zinoman, Chris Bregler, and Roger Schank, moderated by Michael Byrne; Tobe Hooper’s 1985 exploitation fave Lifeforce, preceded by complimentary sexy alien zombie makeup; a collection of short films; and schlockmeister Larry Cohen’s 1976 cop drama God Told Me To, followed by a Skype Q&A with Cohen. If the end of the world is coming, this is a fine way to say goodbye.