Joel Grey will introduce CABARET at Rubin Museum screening on October 4
CABARET CINEMA: CABARET (Bob Fosse, 1972)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, October 4, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org
There’s nothing ignorant about this presentation from the Rubin Museum. In conjunction with the Rubin’s impressive “Ignorance” series of talks, films, live music, and more, the museum will be screening Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as part of, well, its weekly Cabaret Cinema program. And to up the ante, the one and only Joel Grey, who won a Tony for playing the Emcee in the original Broadway production, followed by an Oscar for the 1972 film, will “Willkommen” everyone, serving as emcee at the Rubin, introducing the film. Winner of more Academy Awards (eight) than any other non-Best Picture honoree, Cabaret is set in 1930s Berlin, where American singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) is trying to establish a career and a relationship with a British writer (Michael York) while Germany is preparing for major changes. The film includes such classic Kander and Ebb tunes as “Willkommen,” “Maybe This Time,” “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” and “Money, Money.” You actually won’t need much money, money on Friday night, as admission to the museum is free starting at 6:00, and a seven-dollar bar tab gets you into the film as well. The “I Don’t Know” series — “about what we don’t know, or choose not to know” — continues October 11 with Pam MacKinnon introducing Sidney Lumet’s Network, October 18 with the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, and October 25 with Michael Mayer introducing Otto Preminger’s Laura.
Douglas Sirk would surely be proud of Otto Preminger’s wickedly obsessive 1958 melodrama, Bonjour Tristesse. Based on the 1954 novel by eighteen-year-old author Françoise Sagan, the film, whose titles translates as “Hello, Sadness,” stars Jean Seberg as Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, a child-adult living the good life while beginning to enjoy the pleasures of drinking, smoking, and sexual desire. She and her wealthy father, Raymond (a dapper David Niven), have moved into a posh villa on the French Riviera for the summer, where the widowed Raymond attempts to balance his time with serious fashion queen Anne Larsen (Deborah Kerr) and flighty young blonde Elsa (Mylène Demongeot). A selfish cad who considers only himself, Raymond is soon in deep water when the two women find out about each other. Meanwhile, Cécile tosses aside her studies in order to flirt with twenty-five-year-old neighbor Philippe (Geoffrey Horne) and other older men who quickly fall in love with her relatively carefree lifestyle, one that seemingly can only end in trouble. Written by Arthur Laurents (Anastasia, The Way We Were), beautifully photographed in color (in Saint-Tropez) and black-and-white (in Paris) by Georges Périnal (Rembrandt, The Fallen Idol), and featuring costumes by Givenchy and jewelry by Cartier, Bonjour Tristesse examines love, lust, power, style, and jealousy, directed with an iron fist by Preminger, who often yelled at and embarrassed Seberg on-set in order to influence her performance. But at the heart of the film is the risqué relationship between Raymond and Cécile, one that more than hints at incest. Bonjour Tristesse is screening December 28-30 in DCP as part of the continuing Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big!”