Grant transforms into Dirty Cary in Stanley Donen’s CHARADE
Cary Grant 2, BAMcinématek, July 9-29
The Complete Clint Eastwood, Film Society of Lincoln Center, July 9-29
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It’s the battle of the big men this month, the fight for the heavyweight championship, as two of Hollywood’s all-time hunksters, the machoest of movie stars, go mano a mano in Brooklyn and Manhattan. From July 9 to 29, the Walter Reade Theater will be hosting “The Complete Clint Eastwood,” screening every single one of the Man with No Name’s directorial efforts, from 1971’s PLAY MISTY FOR ME and 1973’s HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and BREEZY (with William Holden as an old lech!) to 2008’s CHANGELING and GRAN TORINO and last year’s INVICTUS. Lincoln Center is upping the ante — and cheating more than a bit — by throwing in three of Eastwood’s Sergio Leone Westerns, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965), and THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1966), in addition to the first DIRTY HARRY (Don Siegel, 1971). The eighty-year-old Eastwood will participate in a live conversation and Q&A via Skype following the 2:30 screening of FISTFUL on July 10.
Clint Eastwood is ready for action in THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES
Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, British-American film legend Archibald Alexander Leach will be flexing his muscles in nineteen of his finest works, the second part of a tribute BAM began last year. Grant, who died in 1986 at the age of eighty-two, can be seen in such unforgettable classics as CHARADE (Stanley Donen, 1963), the best Hitchcock film not directed by Sir Alfred; Howard Hawks’s 1938 screwball comedy BRINGING UP BABY, alongside the Great Kate and a tiger; George Stevens’s 1939 epic, GUNGA DIN, one of the grandest adventure movies ever made; and the romantic heartbreaker AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (Leo McCarey, 1957), with Deborah Kerr. While Eastwood does most of his talking with his eyes, rifles, and a carefully placed expectoration here and there, Grant almost never shuts his mouth, words tumbling out at a frantic pace that would challenge the Gatling gun. But while Eastwood is still starring in and directing pictures as an octogenarian, Grant called it quits near the top of his game, retiring from the industry while in his mid-sixties after appearing in Charles Walters’s WALK, DON’T RUN in 1966, just when Clint was moving along from western cowboy to eastern cop and military man. Although they didn’t make any films together, the five-time-married Grant, who also had flings with many a starlet, did appear with the twice-married Eastwood, who kept himself rather busy as well, fathering numerous children with multiple women, in the 1986 television special ALL-STAR PARTY FOR CLINT EASTWOOD; no fisticuffs ensued.
Love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in David Grieg’s searing adaptation of August Strindberg’s CREDITORS, running at BAM through May 16. The Donmar Warehouse production, wonderfully directed by Alan Rickman, had a hugely successful run in London in the fall of 2008 and arrives at the Harvey Theater with the original cast intact: Tom Burke stars as Adolph, a deeply troubled painter and sculptor losing faith in his art and his life while suffering from a mysterious debilitating illness that requires him to use crutches; Anna Chancellor plays his flirtatious wife, Tekla, a successful novelist who is gallivanting around town while Adolph has remained in their island vacation villa; and Owen Teale is Gustav, a well-spoken stranger whose carefully chosen words first help then confuse Adolph.
While GLOW was an intimate gathering in the Kitchen, where the small audience sat on four sides of the dance space, a tiny vinyl rectangle on the floor, MORTAL ENGINE turns out to be a much larger spectacle, performed on an steeply raked white platform at center stage of the vast Howard Gilman Opera House, where dancers walk, crawl, twist, turn, and hang on as the lights and sounds react to their movements, in a dazzling display. Two of the floor panels occasionally tilt up vertically, creating walls against which, at one point, two dancers wriggle, as if attached by a sticky substance, accompanied by a fascinating oozy sound. Unfortunately, at times the vastly talented crew gets caught up in the spectacular technology, as long patches of the piece abandon the dancers and simply show off amazing computer-generated interactive lighting and sound design that takes the audience away from the compelling narrative of duality and interconnectedness. But then smoke machines unleash a dense fog that becomes otherworldly as green lasers shoot out across the theater, involving the spectators in the gorgeous maelstrom, the bands of light manipulated onstage by two dancers. Even though a passing random thought of Laser Floyd is hard to avoid, it’s an unforgettable scene, the highlight of a choppy but fascinating night of dance theater.