this week in film and television

CINÉMA TUESDAYS: LINO VENTURA, MONSIEUR GANGSTER

Lino Ventura’s long career will be celebrated at FIAF in January with screenings of ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS and other New Wave gangster classics

ASCENSEUR POUR L’ECHAFAUD (ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS) (Louis Malle, 1957)
French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 11, $13, 12:30 & 7:30
Series continues January 18 & 25
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

Born in Parma in 1919, Angiolino Giuseppe Pascal Ventura began his unexpected film career after suffering an injury as a Greco-Roman wrestler, becoming a close friend of Jean Gabin’s and quickly establishing himself as one of the great character actors in French gangster pictures, appearing in more than seventy-five movies before his death in 1987. Over his career, he worked with such stars as Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Annie Girardot, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Danielle Darrieux and for such directors as Jacques Becker, Julien Duvivier, William Dieterle, Vittorio de Sica, Claude Lelouch, and Terence Young. FIAF will be paying tribute to the cool-as-a-cucumber actor with a two-brief three-week, six-film festival that begins January 11 with ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (Louis Malle, 1957) and ARMY OF SHADOWS (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) and continues January 18 with THE BIG RISK (Claude Sautet, 1960) and SECOND BREATH (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966) and January 25 with MONSIEUR GANGSTER (Georges Lautner, 1963) and THE GRILLING (Claude Miller, 1981).

Louis Malle’s first feature-length fiction film, following THE SILENT WORLD (made with Jacques Cousteau), ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS is a classic French noir that comes with all the trimmings — and can now be seen in an excellent 35mm print with new subtitles. Jeanne Moreau stars as Florence Carala, who is married to ruthless business tycoon Simon (Jean Wall) but is carrying on an affair with Simon’s right-hand man, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet). Julien plans the perfect murder — or so he thinks, until he has to go back to retrieve a crucial piece of evidence and gets trapped on the elevator. While he struggles to find a way out and Florence waits for him anxiously at a neighborhood bistro, young couple Louis (Georges Poujouly) and Veronique (Yori Bertin) take off in Julien’s convertible and get into some serious trouble of their own, with tough police inspector (Lino Ventura) on the case. Mistaken identity, cold-blooded killings, jealousy, and one of the greatest film scores ever — by Miles Davis, recorded in one overnight session — make ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS a splendid debut from one of the world’s finest filmmakers.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS is part of Lino Ventura celebration at FIAF (courtesy Rialto Pictures)

L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES (ARMY OF SHADOWS) (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 11, $13, 4:00
Series continues January 18 & 25
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

Based on the novel by Joseph Kessel (BELLE DE JOUR), Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 WWII drama ARMY OF SHADOWS got its first theatrical release in America a few years ago, in a restored 35mm print supervised by the film’s cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, who shot it in a beautiful blue-gray palette. The film centers on a small group of French resistance fighters, including shadowy leader Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), the smart and determined Mathilde (Simone Signoret), the nervous Jean-François (Jean-Pierre Cassel), the steady and dependable Felix (Paul Crauchet), the stocky Le Bison (Christian Barbier), the well-named Le Masque (Claude Mann), and the unflappable and practical Gerbier (Lino Ventura). Although Melville, who was a resistance fighter as well, wants the film to be his personal masterpiece, he is too close to the material, leaving large gaps in the narrative and giving too much time to scenes that don’t deserve them. He took offense at the idea that he portrayed the group of fighters as gangsters, yet what shows up on the screen is often more film noir than war movie. However, there are some glorious sections of ARMY OF SHADOWS, including Gerbier’s escape from a Vichy camp, the execution of a traitor to the cause, and a tense MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE–like (the TV series, not the Tom Cruise vehicles) attempt to free the imprisoned Felix. But most of all there is Ventura, who gives an amazingly subtle performance that makes the overly long film (nearly two and a half hours) worth seeing all by itself.

MILESTONE FILMS: 20 FOR 20 — THE EXILES

THE EXILES is screening as part of continuing Milestone celebration at the IFC Center

THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
January 7-9
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.coms
www.exilesfilm.com


Founded in 1990 by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller as a way to preserve great orphaned works, Milestone Films is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a series of Weekend Classics screenings at the IFC Center. The festival began in November with Luchino Visconti’s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS and Michael Powell’s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and continues this weekend with Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film THE EXILES. Having restored Charles Burnett’s wonderful KILLER OF SHEEP and MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. THE EXILES follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment. As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving THE EXILES a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up THE EXILES with the documentaries THE TEENAGE REVOLUTION (1965) and SATURDAY MORNING (1971) before his death in 1980 at the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society. THE EXILES is being screened at IFC with Mackenzie’s rarely seen 1956 short, BUNKER HILL.

VOYAGER: THE FILMS OF PETER WEIR

Peter Weir will be at Lincoln Center to talk about his latest work, THE WAY BACK, as well as his vaunted, varied career

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
January 6-9, $12 per film, three-film pass $27
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Australian New Wave auteur Peter Weir has compiled quite a diverse resume since his 1974 debut, THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, directing such well-regarded films as the creepy PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975), the mysterious THE LAST WAVE (1977), the heartbreaking GALLIPOLI (1981), the action-packed THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (1982), and the thrilling WITNESS (1985). He’s been a little more hit and miss since then, having helmed such fare as THE MOSQUITO COAST (1986), DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989), GREEN CARD (1990), FEARLESS (1993), THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998), and MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003). But after seven years, he has found his way back with THE WAY BACK, a WWII prison escape drama starring Colin Farrell and Ed Harris. In celebration of his latest work, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is honoring Weir with a ten-film salute January 6-9 that includes most of the above pictures (as well as his 1979 made-for-television academic-class satire THE PLUMBER). Rosie Perez will be on hand for the January 9 (8:30) screening of FEARLESS, while Weir himself will be at the Walter Reade Theater for a Q&A following the January 7 (6:00) sneak peek of THE WAY BACK. In addition, Weir, who has been nominated for one Best Picture, one Best Writing, and four Best Director Oscars (with no wins), will sit down with Scott Foundas on January 8 at 6:00 for An Evening with Peter Weir, talking about his life and career in Australia, Hollywood, and many of the far-off locations he’s used in his work.

CULTUREMART ’11

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya's FLOATING POINT WAVES is part of HERE's annual Culturemart festival

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 7-23, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

Culturemart, the annual festival of workshop productions by HERE’s resident artists, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year with another slate of diverse experimental shows incorporating theater, dance, film, music, and audience interaction. Things get under way January 7-8 with Laura Peterson’s GROUND, the second part of her Wooden trilogy, in which a dance quartet performs within living grass and trees. Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, artistic directors of the New York Butoh Festival, will present the immersive, multimedia FLOATING POINT WAVES. Betty Shamieh makes the murdered Arab from Albert Camus’s THE STRANGER the main character in the mysterious THE STRANGEST. A community of artists — as well as the audience — are all part of the interactive LUSH VALLEY, which seeks to reclaim the American dream. THE VENUS RIFF riffs on the Venus Hottentot. Democracy takes center stage in Aaron Landsman’s participatory CITY COUNCIL MEETING. Deborah Stein and Suli Holum investigate a woman who is her own twin in CHIMERA. Kamala Sankaram’s chamber opera MIRANDA mixes reality television with hip-hop and Hindustani classical music. And Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith uses puppetry to look at the sacred in EPYLLION, among other shows running through January 23, with all tickets a mere $15.

DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER)

DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER is an epic document of its time

WEIMAR CINEMA, 1919-1933: DAYDREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER) (Fritz Lang, 1922)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Monday, January 3, 7:30
Saturday, January 8, 7:00
Tickets: $10, 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
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Fritz Lang’s 1922 expressionist epic, DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, is one of the most thrilling crime dramas ever made. Written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, based on the popular novel by Norbert Jacques, the film focuses on the title character (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a criminal mastermind who is a sort of Nietzschean superman able to control his victims using hypnosis and psychoanalysis. Putting his evil gaze on such easy prey as the wealthy Edgar Hull (Paul Richter) and Count Told (Alfred Abel), Mabuse tries to ruin them through a series of card games he manipulates, with the help of nightclub singer Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen) and a motley crew of assistants that includes Spoerri (Robert Forster-Larrinaga), Georg (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), Hawasch (Charles Puffy), and Pesch (Georg John). Meanwhile, steadfast prosecutor Norbert von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) is on the case, attempting to track down and capture the mystery man who is leaving a trail of death and destruction behind him. Divided into two sections, “The Great Gambler, a Picture of Our Time” and “Inferno — A Play of People in Our Time,” DR. MABUSE is indeed a story of its time, a document of the state of mind of the German populace between the two world wars. Mabuse, representing both chaos and tyranny, is a master of disguise, portraying numerous middle-class figures fighting against the upper class and authority. The film is not only about one evil man’s grab for power but the power of cinema itself; just as Mabuse can change characters within the film, all of the characters are merely actors in costume, performing a fiction on stunning sets created by production designer Karl Vollbrecht and photographed by cinematographer Carl Hoffmann. In fact, at one point Mabuse stares directly into the camera, his face hurtling toward the viewer, attempting a kind of mass hypnosis that, presciently, can be said to predict the rise of Nazism in Germany. But most of all, DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, which was followed by THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE in 1933 and THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE in 1960, is a film about fear — fear of the unknown, fear of technology, fear of psychoanalysis, and fear of what the future holds. The film is screening as part of MoMA’s Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares series, comprising eighty-one films made between World War I and World War II; upcoming screenings include G. W. Pabst’s PANDORA’S BOX, Richard Eichberg’s THE MASKED MANNEQUIN, Wilhelm (William) Dieterle’s SEX IN CHAINS / SEX IN FETTERS, Walther Ruttmann’s IN DER NACHT and MELODY OF THE WORLD, Ernst Lubitsch’s MADAME DUBARRY (PASSION) and THE OYSTER PRINCESS, and Slatan Dudow’s WHITHER GERMANY?

JOHN BALDESSARI: PURE BEAUTY

John Baldessari, “The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building / Person on Ledge of Tall Building / Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building,” digital prints with acrylic on Sintra, 2003 (Ringier Collection, Switzerland / © John Baldessari)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 9 (open Monday, September 6)
Recommended admission: $20 adults, children under twelve free
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

California-based artist and teacher John Baldessari helped put the capital “C” in Conceptual art. For more than half a century, the seventy-nine-year-old Baldessari has been creating a fascinating mélange of visual and text-based imagery, a vaunting vocabulary all his own incorporating paintings, found objects, photographs, videos, and an anarchistic philosophy into collages and installations that examine popular culture, sociopolitical ideology, and the making and perception of art itself. “Pure Beauty,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 9, is an engaging retrospective of more than one hundred works from throughout Baldessari’s continually evolving career. “Cremation Project” houses the ashes from early paintings that he purposely destroyed in a mortuary. In the short film “I Am Making Art,” Baldessari repeats the title over and over as he rearranges himself in different positions, while in “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” he writes the title statement again and again, and the exhibition supports both declarations. He appropriates images from the news and Hollywood and adds unique touches in such pieces as “Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich),” “Heel,” and “The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building / Person on Ledge of Tall Building / Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building.” In such works as “Kiss/Panic,” “Man and Woman with Bridge,” and “Pelicans Staring at Woman with Nose Bleeding,” Baldessari juxtaposes images from different sources, resulting in brand-new noirish narratives filled with Hitchcockian delight. He often adds color elements to black-and-white photographs and collages, as in “The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event),” while color becomes the primary subject in such works as “Six Colorful Inside Jobs” and “Prima Facie (Fifth State): Warm Brownie / American Cheese / Carrot Stick / Black Bean Soup / Perky Peach / Leek.” Even when Baldessari comes off as simply cheesy or silly, as in a series of framed pictures intentionally hung unevenly, it’s still fun to look at. “Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time,” Baldessari once said. There are a lot worse ways to kill some time by immersing yourself in this beguiling survey at the Met.

OSCAR WATCH: THE KING’S SPEECH

Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush excel in Tom Hooper’s thrilling THE KING’S SPEECH

THE KING’S SPEECH (Tom Hooper, 2010)
www.kingsspeech.com

Britain’s Royal Family is notoriously protective of their personal lives, and for many years they were somehow able to keep from the public the fascinating story of Prince Albert’s difficult battle against a severe stammer. A serious stutterer himself as a child, screenwriter David Seidler (TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM), who looked to the man known as Bertie as a role model, uncovered the dramatic tale and even got permission from the Queen Mum herself to pursue a cinematic version, as long as it came out after her death. So after gestating for decades, THE KING’S SPEECH is now a reality, a thrilling film that follows the prince’s (a marvelously vulnerable Colin Firth) struggle to find his voice as his aging father, King George V (Michael Gambon), falls ill and the prince of Wales (a wonderfully snide Guy Pearce) jeopardizes the possibility of his wearing and keeping the crown by falling in love with flirtatious, twice-divorced socialite Wallis Simpson (Eve Best). After having explored numerous ways to cure him of his debilitating and embarrassing stutter, Bertie and his loyal wife, Elizabeth (the resplendent Helena Bonham Carter), turn to an odd, failed actor, Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (a pitch-perfect Geoffrey Rush), who uses extremely unusual methods that eventually force Bertie to reexamine his childhood while also preparing for a future that could put him on the throne as the country goes to war. Director Tom Hooper (THE DAMNED UNITED, HBO’s JOHN ADAMS miniseries) keeps the tension mounting as Bertie gains more and more public responsibility and his stage fright grows; the scenes between Firth and Rush in Logue’s rather low-rent basement office are thoroughly mesmerizing, a pair of bravura performances built around the slightest mouth twitch from Firth and knowing looks from the craggy-faced Rush. The strong cast also includes Derek Jacobi as Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Jennifer Ehle as Logue’s wife, Myrtle, Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Anthony Andrews as Stanley Baldwin, and Claire Bloom as Queen Mary. The only drawback is Alexandre Desplat’s overly melodramatic score, which insists on squeezing unnecessary, treacly emotion from a story where words take center stage.