Who: Libba Bray, Michael Buckley, Annabel Monaghan, Anthony Schneider, David C. Martin, and Emmy Laybourne
What: “Spine Out: Novelists Read Personal Essays”
Where: Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St., 212 219-0736
When: Thursday, January 21, $15-$18, 7:30
Why: Dixon Place’s quarterly literary series, “Spine Out,” returns on January 21 with a fab lineup of YA authors and others reading intimate personal essays: Libba Bray (the Gemma Doyle trilogy), Michael Buckley (the Undertow trilogy), Annabel Monaghan (the Digit series), Anthony Schneider (Repercussions), and television news journalist David C. Martin (Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism), hosted by Emmy Laybourne (the Monument 14 series).
The twenty-fifth annual New York Jewish Film Festival gets under way January 13 with a look at a little-known part of the U.S. propaganda effort during WWII. In Projections of America, director Peter Miller details how the U.S. Office of War Information used specially made short documentary films to show the rest of the world the positive aspects of the American way of life, particularly as U.S. soldiers helped liberate many cities and countries in Eastern and Western Europe. “The films were idealized versions of what America could be, created by politically engaged filmmakers who, while fighting tyranny abroad, wanted also to fundamentally change America itself,” narrator John Lithgow explains. At the center of it all was Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin, who had written eight Frank Capra films, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe. Riskin, fellow scribe and chief of production Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and FDR speech writer Robert E. Sherwood (The Petrified Forest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) enlisted such directors and producers as John Houseman and Josef von Sternberg and such stars as Ingrid Bergman in making such short propaganda films as Swedes in America, Cowboys, Steel Town, The Valley of the Tennessee, and Watchtower over America, which people flocked to in Europe, North Africa, and even Germany. “It all came together as the greatest collection of filmmakers working toward one common goal that we will ever see,” notes film historian Cecile Starr.
The spectacularly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve and the ruggedly handsome Yves Montand play it for outrageous laughs in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s screwball romantic comedy, Le Sauvage, aka Lovers Like Us. Deneuve is mesmerizing as Nelly, an unpredictable woman who lives by her wits, as if she is a feral child raised by wolves. She acts out instantly on her id, without concerning herself with the consequences and effects on other people. She is engaged to marry Vittorio (Luigi Vannucchi), a hot-blooded Italian who is none too happy when she bolts in the middle of the night. In need of money, Nelly goes to the nightclub where she worked for a year without getting paid, demanding her salary, but when slick manager Alex Fox (Tony Roberts) refuses to give her a dime, she takes off with his prized possession, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge.” She tries to sell the painting to the stranger in the hotel room next to hers, Martin (Montand), but when Vittorio wrongly assumes he is his fiancée’s lover, Martin gets caught up in the middle of some crazy silliness as well as legitimate danger. Soon Martin and Nelly are living on a deserted island, she on the run from Vittorio, he hiding from his mysterious past.
