Basic cable classic JUST ONE OF THE GUYS will reveal itself as part of 92YTribeca series
JUST ONE OF THE GUYS (Lisa Gottlieb, 1985)
92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Tuesday, August 16, $12, 7:00
212-415-5500
www.92y.org
We all have those basic cable movies that we can’t turn off when we find them while channel surfing. For some of us it’s Point Break, others The Beastmaster. Some can’t help but watch Highlander yet again, while others are compelled to follow Night of the Comet through to its always thrilling conclusion. For some reason, we’ve been obsessed with Just One of the Guys since we first saw it many moons ago. It’s the standard, overused story of a person so desperate to get something that they pretend they’re the opposite gender; think Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria, but on a rather different plane of existence. All of those films and more are at least partially responsible for the birth of Lisa Gottlieb’s Just One of the Guys, in which onetime Bruce Springsteen flame Joyce Hyser plays Terry Griffith, a well-endowed high school lassie who thinks she has a better chance of winning a journalism contest if she’s a boy, so she tapes down her breasts and temporarily switches genders, with only her wacky brother, Buddy (Billy Jayne), and best friend, Denise (Toni Hudson), privy to the old switcheroo. The soundtrack is a hoot, populated by the likes of Shalamar, Berlin, Billy Burnette, Lindsey Buckingham, and Midnight Star. The big reveal is a genre classic — and one you actually can’t see in full on basic cable, but you will be able to see it in all its glory on August 16 at 7:00 as part of 92YTribeca’s “Basic Cable Classics” series, followed by a Q&A with director Gottlieb and Irin Carmon, better known as blogger and journalist Jezebel.
Warner Bros. and First National brought out the big guns for their 1941 gangster picture High Sierra, with Raoul Walsh directing a script by W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar) and John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. Bogart (the part had been previously been offered to George Raft and Paul Muni) plays hardcore criminal Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, called in the trailer “the strangest of men in the strangest of stories,” recently released from prison and already caught up in a casino heist. He is joined by Louis (Cornel Wilde), Red (Arthur Kennedy) and Babe (Alan Curtis), with Babe having brought along femme fatale Marie (Lupino), who Roy knows is going to be trouble — with a capital T. Meanwhile, Roy has fallen for Velma (Joan Leslie), a pure and innocent young woman with a medical problem Roy is generously trying to help cure. He’s also taken a liking to a mutt, revealing that he might actually have a softer side in there somewhere. But when things don’t quite go as planned, Roy finds himself on the run, heading toward the Sierra Nevadas, willing to do whatever it takes to get away from the police, who are hot on his trail. Bogart gives one of his finest performances as the Dillinger-esque Earle, continually offering just the slightest twist on his character, adding depth not always found in murderous gangsters. Barring inclement weather, High Sierra is screening Monday night as part of the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival; the series concludes August 22 with the Clint Eastwood cop classic Dirty Harry.
Shortly after the Civil War, bounty hunter Howard Kemp (James Stewart) is determined to bring in wanted murderer Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) and claim the reward. Joined by grizzled old prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) and dishonorably discharged Union lieutenant Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker), Kemp gets his man, along with Ben’s companion, the young Lina Patch (Janet Leigh), the daughter of Ben’s dead best friend. They tie up Ben’s hands, put him on a burro, and head out on the long, arduous trail to turn him over to the federal marshals. But the smug, wisecracking outlaw has other plans, continually planting various seeds to try to set Howard, Roy, and Jesse against one another. Directed by Anthony Mann (Winchester ’73, The Man from Laramie) and shot in the Rocky Mountains, The Naked Spur is not just another Western; it is a multilayered exploration of lust and greed, love and sexuality, with Lina at the center of it all. When Ben needs his sore back rubbed, he asks her, “Can you do me?” Roy thinks he can do anything he wants with any woman. And Howard can’t get over a part of his past, suffering from nightmares that haunt him. Unfortunately, the complex story is dragged down by overly conventional music — “Beautiful Dreamer”? Really? — and some ridiculously staged, hard-to-believe action scenes, but it’s still worth saddling up your horse and going along for the ride. The Naked Spur is screening August 14 with John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) as part of Film Forum’s “Robert Ryan” series, which continues with such pairings as Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948) and Beware, My Lovely (Harry Horner, 1952); Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959) and Lonelyhearts (Vincent J. Donehue, 1958); Caught (Max Ophüls, 1948) and Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952); and such single presentations as The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), God’s Little Acre (Anthony Mann, 1958), and The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973), which taken as a whole display Ryan’s Jimmy Stewart-like ability to shift between genres with grace and ease. A Dartmouth grad who was born in Chicago, Ryan was an outspoken civil rights activist who made more than fifty films during his thirty-plus-year career, which ended when he died of lung cancer in 1973 at the age of sixty-four.
As America slowly recovered from the Great Depression and headed toward the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin also found himself trapped between the past and the future. Talkies had started in 1927 with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, but the British-born actor, writer, director, producer, and composer had not crossed over yet, still favoring the silent cinema that had made him an international star. But his 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times, tackled the coming of the modern era in myriad ways, both public and personal, in the world at large as well as in cinema itself. Chaplin stars as an assembly line worker who literally gets caught up in the cogs of machinery, suffers a nervous breakdown, gets sent to prison for leading a Communist march he was not a part of, accidentally dabbles in a little nose candy, and falls in love with a homeless gamin who lives by her wits on the docks, played by his real-life lover, Paulette Goddard. He tries to fit in to the ever-changing society, without much luck; he even has trouble getting himself arrested again, thinking that jail is a better option than what’s out there. The unemployed former factory worker and the gamin move into a run-down shack and try to pretend that they are a happy, successful married couple, but the harsh reality of their poor existence continually thwarts them. Modern Times is a brutally funny, honest, and insightful examination of the socioeconomic conditions of America in the 1930s. As corporations began to grow, workers became nameless automatons; in fact, neither of the film’s protagonists is given a name. For the first time, Chaplin uses sound, but always in ingenious ways: the factory owner, who watches his workers like a hawk, using surveillance cameras that are remarkably prescient, talks only via a screen as he yells at his employees; music, which Chaplin previously utilized only on the backing soundtrack, now comes from bands seen on camera, as if they’re playing live; and the Little Tramp himself gets into the act as a singing waiter, although it’s not exactly like Garbo breaking her on-screen silence. Chaplin’s choice to include some sound while still avoiding even a single strand of actual dialogue between characters is a brash commentary on the technological revolution that was taking hold of the country and, of course, impacting the film industry. Chaplin’s previous movie, the 1931 classic City Lights, was a more traditional silent film, but with his next work, 1940’s The Great Dictator, he finally made the transition to a full talkie, albeit still finding himself trapped between two worlds, playing both a poor ghetto barber and the Fascist Hitler-like leader of Tomania. Modern Times is screening August 13 and 21 as part of Symphony Space’s “Chaplin” series, which is presenting many of his works on the big screen in HD for the first time ever, which is rather ironic, especially in the case of Modern Times; the series continues with such films as Monsieur Verdoux on August 14, The Great Dictator and City Lights on August 21, The Circus on August 27, and Limelight offering a fitting conclusion on August 28.