Green-Wood Cemetery is among the many historic locations opening its doors and gates to visitors for free during openhousenewyork Weekend (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Multiple venues in all five boroughs
Saturday, October 6, and Sunday, October 7
Admission: free (advance reservations required for some sites)
OHNY Passport: $150
212-991-OHNY
www.ohny.org
The fabulous openhousenewyork Weekend celebrates its tenth anniversary by once again offering people the opportunity to experience the nooks and crannies of many of New York City’s most fascinating architectural constructions. Among this year’s special programs, some of which require advance reservations even though admission is free, are Designers’ Open House, with such interior designers as Thomas Jayne, Ali Tayar, Paul Ochs, Aizaki Allie, Christopher Coleman, and Lea Ciavarra inviting guests into their private homes; the Peace Bike Ride led by Nadette Stasa of Time’s Up!; a treasure hunt for kid explorers at the Park Avenue Armory; “Dance on the Greenway,” with Dance Theatre Etcetera performing site-specific pieces by four emerging choreographers in Erie Basin Park behind the Red Hook IKEA; “Paseo,” consisting of short works by choreographer Joanna Haigood and composer Bobby Sanabria that take place on fire escapes and stoops at Casita Maria in the Bronx; “Spirits Alive,” with actors in period costumes portraying famous people buried in the Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens; “Wilderness Plan,” in which costumed dancing creatures lead people through the Elevated Acre in the Financial District; and “Frost Court,” a performance installation featuring dancers Jon Kinzel, Silas Riener, Stuart Shugg, Saul Ulerio, Enrico Wey, and Aaron Mattocks. Although some of the special tours are already booked, plenty of others have vacancies or are first come, first served (unless you buy a $150 front-of-line Passport), so you can still check out the Fading Ads of New York City with Frank Jump, the Manhole Covers of Fourteenth St. with Michele Brody, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Spaces, the Harlem Edge: 135th St. Marine Transfer Station, the Bronx River Right-of-Way, the Kings County Distillery Tour, Historic Richmond Town, the Noguchi Museum, the New York City Photo Safari for shutterbugs, the Lakeside at Prospect Park Construction Tour, the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden, the Tenriko Mission New York Center, the Alice Austen House Museum, Fort Totten, the Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, the Grand Lodge of Masons, the New York Marble Cemetery and the New York City Marble Cemetery, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, Scandinavia House, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Merchant’s House Museum, the Jefferson Market Library, the Little Red Lighthouse, the High Line, the African Burial Grounds, and so many, many more. The annual opendialogue series features talks and tours at such locations as the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92, Runner & Stone, UrbanGlass, the East Harlem School, the Horticultural Society of New York, the Museum of the Moving Image, New York City Center, and the TWA Flight Center at JFK. Keep watching the official website for late changes, additions, sell-outs, and other updated information.
Steeped in 1970s Vietnam War-era angst, Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens examines nothing less than the impending demise of the American dream. Rafelson’s follow-up to 
The Rubin Museum’s Cabaret Cinema series “Happiness Is . . .” continues with one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most multilayered, complex tales, the 1951 psychological double-murder thriller Strangers on a Train. Shortly after introducing himself to amateur tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train, mama’s boy Bruno Anthony (an appropriately creepy Robert Walker) concocts a supposedly foolproof plan in which Bruno will kill Guy’s unfaithful wife, Miriam (Laura Elliott), so Guy can marry his socialite girlfriend, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), one of the daughters of a U.S. senator (Leo G. Carroll). In return, Guy will kill Bruno’s father (Jonathan Hale). Bruno believes he has devised the perfect crisscross murder, with neither man having a clear motive and nothing for the cops to find to link them together. While Bruno is serious, Guy thinks he’s just a loon (Walker had in fact been recently released from a psychiatric clinic after suffering a nervous breakdown and died at the age of thirty-two before the film even opened), but after the psychopathic Bruno actually does kill Miriam — photographed in an unforgettable way by cinematographer Robert Burks, shown in a pair of broken eyeglasses — he starts shadowing Guy, insisting he keep his part of the bargain and kill Mr. Anthony, something Guy never intended on doing. Soon the cops are involved, along with a broken alibi, a key, and a critical cigarette lighter, leading to a spectacular conclusion on a merry-go-round. Loosely based on Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel and featuring an early screenplay written by Raymond Chandler (whose name was kept in the credits for marquee value despite Hitchcock’s famous — and literal — trashing of his contribution), Strangers on a Train is a powerful, tense mystery built around the idea of the double; from the opening scene of two pairs of shoes — immediately equating, and differentiating between, the two protagonists, as if they were two parts of the same person — to Hitchcock’s appearance carrying a double bass, to Anne’s younger sister, Babs (Patricia Hitchcock, Alfred’s daughter), wearing the same glasses as Miriam, to Bruno’s declaration, upon ordering two double scotches and relating them to tennis, “The only kind of doubles I play,” the film is filled with mirroring or directly opposing elements. As with Hitchcock’s Rope, which also starred Granger, Strangers on a Train also has a clear homosexual subtext; in real life Walker was straight while Granger was bisexual. Shot in a dark black-and-white that adds to the chilling effects, Strangers on a Train is one of Hitchcock’s best, a fully realized, frightening film that ends in a big way. The Rubin Museum screening on September 29 will be introduced by chef and musician Molly Neuman. “All in all,” Granger wrote in his 2007 autobiography, Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway, “working on Strangers on a Train was my happiest filmmaking experience,” giving it extra reason to be included in this series that looks at different kinds of happiness in the movies.