What do Andrei Tarkovsky, Edward G. Robinson, Clara Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Audrey Hepburn have in common? Easy. They’ll all be featured in some form or other at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, in May.
Andrei Tarkovsky will be represented by the classic sci-fier Solaris (1971), billed as the Soviet Union’s answer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by the classic period drama Andrei Rublev (1969), a meditation on art, religion, spirituality, and human brutality and stupidity. A technicality: Solaris will actually be screened on April 27.
Edward G. Robinson stars in The Little Giant (1933), a pre-Code crime comedy featuring Mary Astor. The (at the time) energetic Roy Del Ruth (The Maltese Falcon, Taxi!, Employees’ Entrance) directed.
Clara Bow is the star of Mantrap (1926), a fluffy romantic comedy of interest chiefly because of Bow and because neither of her two leading men – Percy Marmont and Ernest Torrence – could qualify as potential George Clooney rivals. A pre-Gone with the Wind, pre-The Wizard of Oz Victor Fleming directed. (I should add that Torrence always played either meanie brutes or kind-hearted ones; Marmont was a[n unlikely] romantic leading man. Sensibly, the actor didn’t take the plot of his movies at all seriously, later on referring to them as “stupid” or “silly,” according to film historian Anthony Slide.)
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, made into a movie in 1925. The film features wild beasts, miniature dinosaurs, future Oscar winner Wallace Beery (as a professor/explorer, no less), The Broadway Melody’s Bessie Love, and Bull Montana as an ape-man. Not to be missed.
Audrey Hepburn, alongside Rex Harrison, stars in George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964). The reputation of this opulent musical has diminished somewhat in the last four decades; personally, I find it the best Hollywood musical of the 1960s. Hepburn – who replaced Broadway’s Julie Andrews – had her voice dubbed by Marni Nixon, but she’s highly enjoyable all the same. Harrison, for his part, almost got replaced by Cary Grant. Although Harrison is flawless as diction-master Professor Higgins, I wish Grant, mid-Atlantic accent and all, had starred in an alternate version.
For more information, check out the Packard Campus website. See remaining April and May schedule below. All screenings begin at 7:30 p.m., unless otherwise noted.
Friday, April 20
ADAM’S RIB (1949)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Holliday, David Wayne, Tom Ewell, Jean Hagen.
101m
Husband-and-wife lawyers argue opposite sides in a sensational women’s rights case.
National Film Registry 1992.Saturday, April 21 – 2:00 p.m.
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1939)
Director: Richard Thorpe.
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Walter Connolly, Rex Ingram, Lynne Carver.
91m
Mark Twain’s classic story of a rambunctious boy adventurer who escapes his abusive father by sailing a raft down the Mississippi River, accompanied by his friend Jim, a runaway slave.Thursday, April 26
SALT OF THE EARTH (1954)
Director: Herbert J. Biberman.
Cast: Will Geer, Rosaura Revueltas, Juan Chacón, David Wolfe.
94m
Latino mine workers in New Mexico go on strike in spite of the tremendous hardships it causes.
National Film Registry 1992.
Friday, April 27
SOLARIS (1972)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky.
Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis.
167m
An alien intelligence infiltrates a space mission.
Saturday, April 28
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962)
Director: Robert Mulligan.
Cast: Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, Brock Peters, Robert Duvall.
129m
A Southern lawyer defends a black man wrongly accused of rape, and tries to explain the proceedings to his children.
National Film Registry 1995.
Thursday, May 3
THE LITTLE GIANT (1933)
Director: Roy Del Ruth.
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Mary Astor, Helen Vinson.
76m
A Chicago beer magnate about to lose his business with the repeal of Prohibition, moves to California and tries to join society’s upper crust, but his gangster origins prove tough to shake.
New print from the Library of Congress Packard Campus film lab.
Friday, May 4
ANDREI RUBLEV (1966)
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky.
Cast: Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Nikolai Sergeyev.
185m
The 15th-century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev struggles to reconcile his faith in God and the brutality of his country.
Saturday, May 5 – 2:00 p.m.
THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)
Director: Nathan Juran.
Cast: Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant, Richard Eyer.
88m
Sinbad undertakes a quest to an island of monsters to find a cure for a princess who has been shrunken by an evil wizard.
Thursday, May 10
DONOVAN’S BRAIN (1953)
Director: Felix E. Feist.
Cast: Lew Ayres, Gene Evans, Nancy Davis.
83m
A scientist keeps an unscrupulous tycoon’s brain alive and falls under its influence.
Friday, May 11
MY FAIR LADY (1964)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Gladys Cooper, Jeremy Brett.
170m
A phonetics instructor bets that he can pass a street urchin off as a lady.
Saturday, May 12
MANTRAP (1926)
Director: Victor Fleming.
Cast: Clara Bow, Percy Marmont, Ernest Torrence.
86m
A vivacious young manicurist married to a backwoods he-man flirts with a vacationing divorce lawyer who has sworn off the fair sex.
New print from the Library of Congress Packard Campus film lab.
Live musical accompaniment by Andrew Simpson.
Thursday, May 17
AN EVENING OF TV DETECTIVES
Columbo (1968–1978)
Cast: Peter Falk.
90m
Baretta (1975–1978)
Cast: Robert Blake.
60m
Friday, May 18
SHAFT (1971)
Director: Gordon Parks.
Cast: Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn.
100m
Private eye John Shaft enlists the help of gangsters and African nationals when he is hired by a crime lord to find his kidnapped daughter.
National Film Registry 2000.
Saturday, May 19
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)
Director: William Friedkin.
Cast: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider.
104m
Two New York narcotics cops set out to bust a French drug smuggling ring.
National Film Registry 2005.
Thursday, May 24
THE LOST WORLD (1925)
Director: Harry O. Hoyt.
Cast: Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Hughes, Wallace Berry.
100m
George Eastman House restoration of silent science-fiction adventure.
Live musical accompaniment by Andrew Simpson.
National Film Registry 1998.
Thursday, May 31
CHICAGO CALLING (1952)
Director: John Reinhardt.
Cast: Dan Duryea, Mary Anderson, Gordon Gebert.
75m
New print from the Library of Congress Packard Campus film lab.
Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino, and Pearl White: Niles Essanay
You want action? Movie-movie action? Then forget The Avengers, which opens in the US on May 4. The following day, head instead to the Niles Essanay Film Museum in the northern Californian town of Fremont, where they’ll be screening two action-packed flicks: Laughing at Danger and “The Tragic Plunge,” episode 7 of the serial The Perils of Pauline.
Haven’t heard of either one? Well, Laughing at Danger was an independent production released in 1924. It stars Richard Talmadge (no relation to sisters Constance Talmadge and Norma Talmadge), who, according to some sources, was quite popular in the Soviet Union, of all places.
As for the serial The Perils of Pauline, it was a humongous success in 1914, turning Pearl White into a major screen star. Actually, more than that. White became a near-legendary movie icon, one whose adventures have been copied, remade, and rebooted ever since. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if The Avengers features some bit or other taken from another movie, which had been taken from a previous movie, taken from another movie and another and another and so on going all the way back to the original copycat, which imitated – as an homage, of course – some moment from The Perils of Pauline.
More May action will follow on May 12, with a screening of the Tom Mix Western The Untamed and “The Snake in the Flower,” episode 8 of The Perils of Pauline. The lovely Pauline Starke (no relation to the imperiled Pauline) is Tom Mix’s leading lady.
May 19 will be comedy-short night, featuring the likes of Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
And finally, on May 26 the Niles Essanay Museum will present one of the greatest silent films ever made: Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), a monumental blockbuster that catapulted Rudolph Valentino to superstardom. In terms of box office appeal, Valentino was sorta like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Robert Pattinson combined. A superstar if ever there was one. Valentino’s leading lady in The Four Horsemen is director Rex Ingram’s wife, the invariably excellent and very modern-looking and -acting Alice Terry.
For more information on the May schedule, check out the Niles Essanay Museum’s website.
Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980
Los Angeles Filmforum continues its film series “Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980” with The Alternative Projections Marathon on May 18. As per the Filmforum press release, “for the penultimate experience, we celebrate with an incredible range of films and videos that we haven’t squeezed into other screenings, with frequent breaks for socializing!”
Among the screening films are those by Pat O’Neill, Louis Hock, Chick Strand, Susan Mogul, Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren, Gary Beydler, Michael Scroggins, Beth Block, William Hale, Amy Halpern, Morgan Fisher, Diana Wilson, Curtis Harrington, and others.
Among those, the best-known filmmaker is Curtis Harrington, among whose credits are more mainstream fare such as Games (1967), with Simone Signoret, James Caan, and Katharine Ross; What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971), with Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters; a couple of Charlie’s Angels episodes; and several episodes from Dynasty. Harrington died in May 2007.
The press release adds that “lots of folks (schedules permitting)” will be in attendance, but who those folks might be is unclear. The screenings will take place at 8:00 pm Friday, May 18 – 2:00 am Saturday, May 19, at the Echo Park Film Center, 1200 N. Alvarado St. Tickets cost $10 general, $6 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members.
For more details, head here.
Clara Bow / Mantrap via The Bioscope.