Isabelle Rossellini plays mother Ingrid Bergman in Guy Maddin’s 16-minute tribute to Roberto Rossellini, My Dad Is 100 Years Old
Guy Maddin’s 2005 16-minute short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, in which Isabella Rossellini pays “a unique personal tribute to her father, director Roberto Rossellini, in observance of the centenary of his birth,” will be shown on the Sundance Channel. Roberto Rossellini was born on May 8, 1906, in Rome.
“Far from a conventional documentary tribute,” explains the Sundance Channel website, My Dad Is 100 Years Old “is a stylized, witty meditation on Roberto Rossellini’s cinematic aesthetic and his belief in cinema as a moral art.”
Isabella Rossellini plays every role in My Dad Is 100 Years Old, including that of her mother, three-time Oscar winner Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight, Anastasia, Murder on the Orient Express); Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Bergman in three movies (Spellbound, Notorious, and Under Capricorn); and Federico Fellini, Rossellini’s collaborator on Rome, Open City and L’amore. Roberto Rossellini, however, is represented by an oversized belly. Clearly, My Dad Is 100 Years Old is a must-see. (See also Ingrid Bergman-Roberto Rossellini affair & political fallout.)
Rome, Open City
Additionally, in celebration of Roberto Rossellini’s centenary, the Sundance Channel will show his most famous work, the landmark 1945 neo-realist war drama Rome, Open City / Roma, città aperta, featuring Aldo Fabrizi and Rossellini’s pre-Ingrid Bergman lover, Anna Magnani. Shot on a tight budget while the Nazis were leaving Rome, Rome, Open City suffers from some dated directorial choices and creaky editing. Yet, certain scenes carry tremendous power, and both Fabrizi and Magnani are outstanding.
Isabella Rossellini movies
Among Isabella Rossellini’s most notable movie appearances are those in Taylor Hackford’s White Nights (1985), starring Mikhail Baryshnikov; David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), with Kyle MacLachlan; Joel Schumacher’s Cousins (1989), with Ted Danson; and Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her (1992), playing opposite Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis. Rossellini was also featured in a movie starring Ingrid Bergman: Vincente Minnelli’s 1976 drama A Matter of Time, costarring the director’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, and Bergman’s costar of decades past, Charles Boyer.
Brief obit: Broadway producer Cy Feuer, whose credits include Cabaret and A Chorus Line
Broadway producer Cy Feuer died this morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 95. In addition to producing a number of award-winning Broadway musicals during his fifty-plus year career, Feuer also worked as a director, composer, musician, and was a longtime president of The League of American Theatres and Producers.
His feature film credits include coproducing with his Broadway partner, Ernest H. Martin, the 1952 film version of their musical Where’s Charley, starring Ray Bolger, and the monumental 1985 flop A Chorus Line, directed by Richard Attenborough. In 1972, Feuer produced by himself the film version of Cabaret, winner of 8 Academy Awards. Additionally, in the late 1930s he worked as a composer – and at one point was head of the music department – at Republic Pictures.
With Martin, the Brooklyn-born Feuer produced several hit musicals that later became motion pictures – though the transfer to the screen was not always successful. Among the film adaptations are Guys and Dolls (1955, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and Jean Simmons), Silk Stockings (1957, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse), Can-Can (1960, directed by Walter Lang, with Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, and Sinatra), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967, directed by David Swift, with Robert Morse), and The Boy Friend (1971, directed by Ken Russell, with Twiggy and Christopher Gable).
One of the plays Feuer directed, I Remember Mama, was adapted for the screen in 1948, with George Stevens directing Irene Dunne and Barbara Bel Geddes.
Feuer was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning three: one for Guys and Dolls and two for How To Succeed in Business. In 2003, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.
That same year, he published his memoir, I Got the Show Right Here: The Amazing True Story of How an Obscure Brooklyn Horn Player Became the Last Great Broadway Showman, written with Ken Gross.
In his honor, the marquee lights on Broadway and at other theaters throughout the U.S. will be dimmed for one minute tomorrow night at 8 p.m.
Jane Birkin reportedly to direct, write, and star in autobiopic
According to London’s Sunday Times – for some time a Rupert Murdoch rag – Jane Birkin, “has decided to make her own biopic in which she is writing, directing and starring as herself. For good measure Birkin, whose marriage to the louche French performer-director Serge Gainsbourg made her an icon of the late 1960s and 1970s, has signed a cast of friends and relatives for the movie, entitled Boxes.”
In the last four decades or so, Jane Birkin has been featured in more than 60 titles, notably Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, in which, in the film’s oddest sequence, she gets to frolic with photographer David Hemmings and fellow aspiring model Gillian Hills; Roger Vadim’s Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Were a Woman), frolicking with Brigitte Bardot; and Bertrand Tavernier’s Daddy Nostalgia (1990), costarring veteran Dirk Bogarde.
Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter is actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, among whose big-screen credits are Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), and Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door (2006).
notes
Isabella Rossellini My Dad Is 100 Years Old image: Jody Shapiro | Zeitgeist Films.
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