Tag Archives: walter reade theater

LET THERE BE LIGHT — THE FILMS OF JOHN HUSTON: FAT CITY

Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges fight for a better life in and out of the ring in FAT CITY

Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges look for a better life in and out of the ring in John Huston’s FAT CITY

FAT CITY (John Huston, 1972)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, January 1, 4:00, Sunday, January 4, 8:30, and Monday, January 5, 3:30
Festival runs through January 11
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

Genre master and onetime boxer John Huston returned to the ring in Fat City, a gritty 1972 drama about a group of has-beens and never-will-be’s struggling to survive in Stockton, California. Stacey Keach stars as Billy Tully, a down-on-his-luck fighter looking to make a comeback at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. He spars at the local Y with eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) and likes what he sees in the kid, telling him to meet his old manager, Ruben (Cheers’ Nicholas Colosanto), who decides to take on the unseasoned youngster. While Ruben lands Ernie — who seems more interested in bragging about having scored with his girlfriend, Faye (Candy Clark), than training properly — his first few bouts, Tully gets day work picking vegetables and hangs out at a local gin joint with a seedy, whiskey-voiced barfly named Oma (an Oscar-nominated Susan Tyrrell). Legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall, who shot such wide-ranging gems as Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and American Beauty, casts a gray pall over the proceedings as dashed hopes and dreams come falling down on these disillusioned perennial losers. In many ways Fat City, based on the novel by Leonard Gardner — who also wrote the screenplay — is an update of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, but moved to the hard times of early ’70s America, when so many people had no way out. You do not have to be a fight fan to fall in love with this film. A clear influence on such auteurs as Martin Scorsese, Fat City is screening January 1, 4, and 5 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston,” which runs through January 11 and consists of forty films directed by Huston, in addition to a handful of other works he either appeared in or that demonstrate his lasting influence.

LET THERE BE LIGHT — THE FILMS OF JOHN HUSTON: HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON

A marine corporal (Robert Mitchum) and a Catholic novitiate (Deborah Kerr) are stuck on a deserted island in John Huston’s HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON

HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON (John Huston, 1957)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Tuesday, December 30, 3:45, and Saturday, January 3, 3:45
Festival runs December 19 – January 11
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

In 1944, a marine corporal (Robert Mitchum) washes up on an island that has only one other occupant: a Catholic novitiate (Deborah Kerr) preparing to take her final vows, stranded there because of the war and the death of an aged priest. When the Japanese first bomb the island, then occupy it, the rugged Mr. Allison and the demure Sister Angela are forced to hide out together in a cave as they face both starvation and enemy capture. Adapted by director John Huston and John Lee Mahin (No Time for Sergeants, Show Boat) from Charles Shaw’s 1952 novel, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is a charming character study, a different kind of love story that develops within a lush, gripping Cinemascope WWII drama. Connecticut native Mitchum (Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter), who is often shown bare-chested, and Glasgow-born Kerr (From Here to Eternity, Separate Tables), mostly hidden within her white habit (which stays remarkably clean through most of the film), are at their best as they reveal details of lives that are more similar than they initially imagine. (Kerr was nominated for an Oscar for the film, one of her six Best Actress nods, earning an honorary Academy Award in 1994, while Mitchum’s lone nomination was for Best Supporting Actor in 1945’s The Story of G.I. Joe.)

Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, and crew members on the set of HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON on the island of Tobago

Huston draws numerous parallels between the institutions they have dedicated themselves to, the military and the church, each involving a strict set of rules and behavior, along with specific uniforms. But while Mr. Allison puts his belief in himself and his fellow marines, Sister Angela relies on a higher authority. Mitchum and Kerr, who evoke Humphrey Bogart’s resilient Mr. Allnut and Katharine Hepburn’s prim Rose Sayer in Huston’s The African Queen, went on to make three more films together, The Sundowners (another Oscar nod for Kerr) and The Grass Is Greener in 1960 and the 1985 British TV movie Reunion at Fairborough. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is screening December 30 and January 3 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston,” which runs through January 11 and consists of forty films directed by the master, from Across the Pacific and The Barbarian and the Geisha to Fat City and In This Our Life, from The Kremlin Letter and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean to Moulin Rouge and The List of Adrian Messenger, in addition to a handful of other works he either appeared in (Tentacles!) or that demonstrate his lasting influence (There Will Be Blood).

LET THERE BE LIGHT — THE FILMS OF JOHN HUSTON: THERE WILL BE BLOOD

A desperate man (Daniel Day-Lewis) goes on a dark journey in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic THERE WILL BE BLOOD

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, December 27, 5:45
Festival runs December 19 – January 11
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.miramax.com

In the fall of 2007, Paul Thomas Anderson talked to Directors Guild of America Quarterly about his latest film, There Will Be Blood, explaining how it was influenced by John Huston’s classic Western The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. “I was trying to find something that was one-hundred percent straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling. I definitely tried to mimic that approach. My natural instincts as a writer may be more scattered, so in an effort to be more traditional I used a book, just like they did. Sierra Madre is as direct as you can get — nothing clever, nothing structurally new or different — and I mean that as a high compliment. It’s harder than anything else to be completely straightforward.” There Will Be Blood has been called a lot of things since its release, but “traditional” and “completely straightforward” are probably not among them. But it does explain why Anderson’s film is one of only a handful of works not directed by Huston in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston.” In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis, in remarkable voice (“I drink your milkshake!”), gives a spectacular, Oscar-winning performance as an independent oil man, absolutely embodying Daniel Plainview, a determined, desperate man digging for black gold in turn-of-the-century California. His first strike comes at a heavy price as he loses one of his men in a tragic accident, so he adopts the worker’s infant son, raising H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his own. The growth of his company leads him to Little Boston, a small town that has oil just seeping out of its pores. But after not allowing Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the charismatic preacher who runs the local Church of the Third Revelation, to say a prayer over the community’s first derrick, Plainview begins his descent into hell.

Paul Dano and Daniel Day-Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) face off in THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Using Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! as a starting point (and employing echoes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in addition to the obvious reference, George Stevens’s classic 1956 oil flick, Giant), writer-director Anderson (Boogie Nights, The Master) has created a thrilling epic about greed, power, and corruption as well as jealousy, murder, and, above all, family, where oil gushes out of the ground with fire and brimstone. Robert Elswit’s beautiful, Oscar-winning cinematography is so gritty and realistic, audiences will be reaching for their faces to wipe the oil and blood off. The piercing, classically based score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, builds to a mind-blowing crescendo by the end of the film — a finale that is likely to be much talked about and widely criticized. Filmed in the same location — Marfa, Texas — where Giant was set, There Will Be Blood is an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of one man’s soul. The film is screening December 27 at 5:45 at the Walter Reade Theater; “Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston,” which continues through January 11, consists of forty films directed by the master, from The African Queen and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison to The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The List of Adrian Messenger, from The Red Badge of Courage and Victory to A Walk with Love and Death and The Kremlin Letter, in addition to a few movies Huston either appeared in (Chinatown, Tentacles!) or that demonstrate his lasting influence, as is the case with There Will Be Blood. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre will be shown December 23, 25, and 27.

LET THERE BE LIGHT — THE FILMS OF JOHN HUSTON: BEAT THE DEVIL

Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones star as would-be married lovers in film noir parody

BEAT THE DEVIL (John Huston, 1953)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, December 20, 4:00, Thursday, December 25, 10:15, and Friday, December 26, 4:45
Festival runs December 19 – January 11
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

Oscar-winning director John Huston pokes fun at some of his previous films in the sly, dry crime noir parody Beat the Devil. Written by Huston and Truman Capote, who furiously typed out pages every day on set, the 1953 black-and-white film teams Huston with Humphrey Bogart for the sixth and final time, following such successes as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, elements from all of which can be found in this jumbled tale of a gang of crooked men looking to score big in the uranium mines of Kenya. Bogart stars as Billy Dannreuther, a cool customer married to Italian firebomb Maria (Gina Lollobrigida). They are stranded in an Italian port town while waiting for a ship to take them and his associates — Peterson (Robert Morley), O’Hara (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tulli), and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard) — across the Mediterranean to Africa. Also along for the ride is the prim and proper Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) and his hotsy-totsy wife, Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones), who quickly falls for the smooth, confident Billy. Throw in a murder, a drunk captain (Saro Urzi), and some neat twists and turns and you have yourself an amusing little exercise, even if it does have its share of plot holes, story jumps, and inconsistencies.

Robert Morley and Humphrey Bogart get down to business in BEAT THE DEVIL

Morley (subbing for the late Sydney Greenstreet), Lorre, and Tulli are like the Three Stooges of film noir, while Bogart riffs on himself as a leading man and Jones has a ball chewing the scenery as a blonde beauty. It’s a confusing film, randomly mixing humor with pathos, but even if it’s the least successful of the Huston-Bogart canon, it’s still more than just an interesting trifle. Beat the Devil is screening December 20, 25, and 26 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston, which runs December 19 to January 11 and consists of forty films directed by the master, from The Maltese Falcon and The Night of the Iguana to Key Largo and Moby Dick, from Prizzi’s Honor and Sinful Davey to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The List of Adrian Messenger, in addition to a handful of other works he either appeared in (Tentacles!) or that demonstrate his lasting influence (There Will Be Blood.)

MONK WITH A CAMERA

Monk Nicholas “Nicky” Vreeland shares his unique view of the world in engaging documentary

MONK WITH A CAMERA (Tina Mascara & Guido Santi, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater / Howard Gilman Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
November 21-27
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.monkwithacamera.com

In 1977, Nicholas “Nicky” Vreeland, the playboy grandson of fashion legend Diana Vreeland and the son of U.S. ambassador Frederick “Frecky” Vreeland, began studying Buddhism with Khylongla Rinpoche. He eventually moved to India, became a monk, and led the rebuilding of the Rato Monastery. He shares his life story in the curious, deeply engaging documentary Monk with a Camera. “I don’t know what led me to wish to pursue a spiritual path,” he says early on, dressed in his red Tibetan monk’s robes. “Was I unhappy? No more unhappy than anyone else. I did feel that there was a way, a life outside the sort of normal life. I had some kind of belief that there was something beyond material satisfaction and things like that.” Born into privilege and living life to the fullest, he was a talented amateur photographer experiencing carnal pleasures, speeding down the Champs-Élysées, and using his connections to work with such photographers as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, But he gave it all up, eventually moving to India to undertake a more philosophical, self-reflective, and celibate existence — in the film he playfully refers to one of his cameras as his girlfriend. Vreeland fell in love with photography at a young age, and he struggles with the attachment he still has with the medium, understanding that it might be a worldly indulgence that goes against his renunciation of earthly delights. But it turns out that his photography ends up playing a major role in the expansion of Rato Monastery.

Nicky Vreeland finds his true calling in MONK WITH A CAMERA

Directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, who previously collaborated on Chris & Don: A Love Story, maintain a calm, meditative pace throughout Monk with a Camera, matching Vreeland’s calm, meditative demeanor. Vreeland, resembling a bald, older Steve Carell, walks and talks in carefully measured tones, adding bits of sly humor with his naturally infectious smile. Among those sharing insight into his life are his brother, Alexander Vreeland, who urged him to keep taking photos even after becoming a monk; his stepbrother, writer Ptolemy Tompkins; writer John Avedon, keeper of the Richard Avedon archives; photographer Priscilla Rattazzi; New York magazine design editor Wendy Goodman; his longtime friend and fellow Buddhist, Richard Gere; and his father, who says, “What it was that drove him to spirituality? I’m a person who doesn’t believe that there’s ever one cause for any effect, that there were multiple causes,” before telling a wonderful anecdote about Nicky’s first visit to Dharamsala. The film also includes playful comic-book-style animation by Joe Rothenberg and a lovely scene in which Nicky, Khylongla Rinpoche, and Richard Gere meet with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who chuckles as he delivers some seriously funny lines. Monk with a Camera is a lovingly told story about one man’s unique relationship with the world, a tale that will have audiences considering their own relationship with such central Buddhist ideals as attachment and impermanence. Monk with a Camera begins a one-week run November 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; the 7:20 screenings on Friday and Saturday will be followed by a Q&A with producers, editors, and directors Mascara and Santi and subject Nicky Vreeland, and there will be a Q&A with Vreeland and Gere in the Furman Gallery after the 5:20 screening on Saturday for ticket holders only.

NYFF52 REVIVALS: HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) examine their Hiroshima affair in Alain Resnais classic

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Alain Resnais, 1959)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Friday, October 10, Walter Reade Theater, 6:00
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

In July 1959, Cahiers du cinéma published a roundtable discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and others about Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which Rohmer said, “Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything. . . . Perhaps Hiroshima really is a totally new film. . . . I think that, in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema. . . . In any case it is an extremely important film, but it could be that it will even gain stature with years.” Some four and a half decades later, Rohmer’s prediction has come true, as a stunning new 4K digital restoration reveals Hiroshima Mon Amour to indeed be one of the most important films in the history of cinema, redefining just what the medium is capable of, as fresh and innovative today as it was to Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, et al. upon its initial release. As the black-and-white film opens, two naked, twisted bodies merge together in bed, first covered in glittering ashes, then a kind of acid rain. The woman (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress who is in Hiroshima to make a movie about peace. He (Eiji Okada) is a Japanese architect, a builder working in a city that has been laid to waste. Both married with children, they engage in a brief but torrid affair; as her film prepares to wrap, she gets ready to leave, but he begs her to stay. Theirs is a romance that could happen only in Hiroshima.

Director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, Same Old Song) was meticulous with every detail of the film, from the casting to Marguerite Duras’s stirringly poetic, Oscar-nominated script and dialogue, from Georges Delerue’s and Giovanni Fusco’s powerful, wide-ranging score to crafting each shot as a work of art in itself, using two cinematographers, Michio Takahashi in Japan and Sacha Vierny in France, to emphasize a critical visual difference between the contemporary scenes in Hiroshima and the woman’s past with a German soldier (Bernard Fresson) in Nevers. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a haunting experience, examining love and loss among the ruins of war as two people, at least temporarily, try to create something new. Riva (Three Colors: Blue, Thomas the Impostor) is mesmerizing as the confused, unpredictable woman, her eyes so often turned away from the man, unwilling to face the future, while Okada (Woman in the Dunes, The Yakuza) can’t keep his eyes off her, desperate for their romance to continue. Riva bookended her long career by starring in two of the most unusual yet beautiful love stories ever made, as more than fifty years after Hiroshima she would be nominated for an Oscar for her hypnotizing performance as an elderly woman debilitated by a stroke in Michael Haneke’s Amour. The glorious restoration of Hiroshima Mon Amour,, supervised by Renato Berta, who was Resnais’s chief cameraman on four projects, makes it, to use the words of Eric Rohmer, feel like a totally new film, like we’re experiencing it for the very first time all over again. Hiroshima Mon Amour is screening October 10 at 6:00 as part of the Revivals section of the 52nd New York Film Festival in advance of its October 17 opening at Film Forum and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Resnais, who passed away on March 1 at the age of ninety-one, is also represented at the New York Film Festival with his final work, Life of Riley. In addition, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will host the series “By Marguerite Duras” October 15-22.

NYFF52 MAIN SLATE: THE BLUE ROOM

Mathieu Amalric stars as a husband and father in deep trouble in film he also directed and cowrote

THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Monday, September 29, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00 pm
Tuesday, September 30, Francesca Beale Theater, 9:00 pm
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.lachambrebleue-lefilm.com

Real-life partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau strip Georges Simenon’s short 1955 novel The Blue Room to its bare essentials — and we do mean bare — in their intimate, claustrophobic modern noir adaptation, which makes its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival September 29 and 30. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented actors, starring in such films as Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Christmas Tale, and Venus in Fur, Amalric has directed several previous works, including On Tour, which earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes. In The Blue Room, Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, a successful agriculture equipment salesman whose passionate affair with a local pharmacist’s wife, Esther Despierre (Cléau, who cowrote the script with Amalric), appears to have ended in murder. The film opens with Grégoire Hetzel’s lush, sweeping music as the camera makes its way to a blue hotel room where Julien and Esther have just made love offscreen. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. “No,” he responds. “You’re angry,” she says. “No,” he repeats as she laughs and a drop of blood falls on a creamy white sheet. Only then do we see the naked, sweaty couple, whose lurid tale has been succinctly revealed by this highly stylized, beautifully orchestrated scene. Next we hear Julien being interrogated by a magistrate (Laurent Poitrenaux) about a suspicious death, and soon we see Julien in handcuffs in the police station. We don’t know exactly what crime he has been accused of, nor do we know the victim — it could be Julien’s wife, Delphine (Léa Drucker), Esther’s husband, Nicolas (Olivier Mauvezin), or maybe even Esther herself. But as director Amalric, cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, and editor François Gedigier cut between the past and the present, the details slowly unfold — although that doesn’t mean they ever become completely clear.

Amalric fills The Blue Room with bold splashes of color amid all the darkness and muted skin tones, from the red towel that signals Julien and Esther’s illicit rendezvous to Delphine’s blue bikini to the strikingly red hair of Nicolas’s mother (Véronique Alain) and the shiny green and yellow John Deere equipment he sells. Amalric and Cléau trim so much out of the original story that it too often feels overly cold and calculating, the manipulation too clear and obvious. The nudity also lacks subtlety; Amalric and Cléau might be comfortable with each other sans clothing, but it seems to be a bit of an obsession with Amalric the director. Nonetheless, The Blue Room, shot in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of 1:33 and running a mere seventy-six minutes, is a gripping yarn, a lurid tale of sex and murder, pain and passion, and femmes fatale, told from the point of view of a relatively quiet, reserved man who never thought his world could just fall apart like it does. With such plot elements as adultery and murder and even the presence of a young daughter (Mona Jaffart), the story cannot fail to call to mind French author Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel of provincial France and misplaced passion, Madame Bovary, but the near-echoes never become too loud, merely adding a somewhat puzzling flavor to the film, like a dream half remembered. Amalric will participate in a Q&A following the September 29 screening at 9:00 at Alice Tully Hall; in addition, he will sit down for a free HBO Directors Dialogue that same day at 6:00 in the Walter Reade Theater, where he’s sure to discuss such influences as Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Otto Preminger, and Fritz Lang.