"A miraculously literate script whose every line deservedly became a quotable classic and the film boasts a once-in-a-lifetime combination of perfect performances from Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant". - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
As a tribute to Richard Griffiths, who sadly died on Friday 29 March, we are showing the great British comedy in which he so memorably starred.
London 1969 - two out-of-work actors, fed up with the damp, the bad drugs, and the terminal state of their careers, decide to leave their squalid Camden flat for some much needed r & r in the countryside.
A hilariously poignant look at the nature of friendship and failure, Withnail & I is quite simply one of the finest British films ever made - with career-defining performances from Richard E Grant, Paul McCann &, of course, Richard Griffith - absolutely unforgettable as the predatory Uncle Monty.
*postponed from 2 April due to Richard Griffiths tribute screening of Withnail & I.
“You can see the joy with which these actors get their teeth into these great lines, after living through movies in which flat dialogue serves only to advance the story.” - Roger Ebert
David Mamet’s most quotable play about the travails of a group of Chicago real-estate salesman who start to feel the pressure when the bosses send in a manager who threatens all but the top two with the sack.
An all-star cast includes an Oscar-nominated Al Pacino, as well as Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce.
Tuesday 19 March 8pm at The Star, 47 Chester Road, N19 5DF
“Not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary.” - Vincent Canby, New York Times
Alfred Hitchcock’s first colour film was adapted from Patrick Hamilton's play Rope's End by no less than Hume Cronyn.
Their heads filled with Nietzschean philosophy by their kindly professor James Stewart, two young men strangle their "inferior" classmate just for the thrill of it. The pair hide the body in their apartment, and invite his friends and family to a dinner party as a means to challenge the "perfection" of their crime.
Rope is one of Hitchcock's most experimental movies. Aside from the establishing shot the film takes place in a single room. Each shot runs up to 10 minutes in length and are edited to give the impression that the film was actually filmed in a single take.
Michel in Pickpocket justifies his crimes by defining himself as one of Friedrich Nietzsche's “supermen”. In Rope Jimmy Stewart's Professor Cadell inspires his muderous students with Nietzschean philosophy.
Tuesday 5 March 8pm at The Star, 47 Chester Road, N19 5DF
“Ultimately inexplicable, this concentrated, elliptical, economical movie is an experience that never loses its strangeness.” - J Hoberman, Village Voice
Robert Bresson’s incomparable tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsion grows, however, so too does his fear that his luck is about to run out. Tautly choreographed and crafted in Bresson’s inimitable style, Pickpocket reveals a master director at the height of his powers.
There are lots of incredible things about this film but the most remarkable is its lead actor Bruno S who plays Kaspar Hauser. Bruno never knew his father, his mother was prostitute and at the age of three he was sent to an institution for children with learning difficulties. After that, with almost no education, he spent the next 23 years in various institutions and prisons.
Herzog discovered Bruno after seeing him in a documentary about his life. At the time he was street musician and forklift truck driver.
He says, “Bruno was so unbelievably good on screen. He has such depth and power, and he moves me so deeply like no other actor in the world.”
If you’re taken by Bruno in this film then you really must watch Stroszek, his second collaboration with Herzog.
If there are any Krautrock fans in the audience Florian Fricke who was in the band Popul Vuh, played with Tangerine Dream plays a pianist in the film.
In The AV Club’s Werner Herzog primer they list The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser under ‘Advanced Studies’ and I think it probably is the most challenging film we’ve shown so far.
The film is based on a true story. In 1828 a young man suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in barely able to speak or walk and claiming to have spent his entire life held captive in a dungeon.
So what’s the film actually about? This is what Herzog says about The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in Paul Cronin’s book Herzog on Herzog.
“What really interested me was the story of someone who had not been influenced or contaminated in any way by society and outside forces, someone with no notion of anything whatsoever...Kaspar was, in the most purest sense, a being without culture, language and civilisation, an almost primeval human being.
As such he suffered greatly from his contact with people and society. Not an idiot, rather a saint like Joan of Arc, something that I feel really comes in Bruno’s performance. So for me the story of this boy is really almost a science fiction tale that takes in the age-old idea of aliens who arrive on our planet... They have no human and social conditioning whatsoever and walk around confused and amazed.
The real question is perhaps anthropological: what happens to a man who has crashed on to our planet with no education and no culture? What does he feel? What does he see? What must a tree or a horse look to such an arrival? And how will he be treated?”
You'll have to watch the film to find out.
Watch the trailer >>
Why Did We Pick It?
As in Zelig another film in which the cenrtral character is considered a freak by society.
Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning? It's the classic set-up to the most enduring romantic comedy of the last 30 years.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal play the two college friends whose story is told via a series of chance encounters in New York City over a dozen or so years.
Nora Ephron, who died last year, wrote the cracking script and the film not only features the greatest ever scene set in a diner but also terrific supporting parts for Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby.
“The tone is quick-witted and appealing, with some of the smartest dialogue this side of Billy Wilder...” - Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Tootsie is the second film we’ve shown that both stars Dustin Hoffman and is set in New York City (Midnight Cowboy was the first). It’s also easily the most commercial film we’ve shown so far. In 1982 it was the second highest grossing film at the US box office after ET.
The film was a critical as well as commercial success and nominated for 10 Academy Awards including Dustin Hoffman and Teri Garr. In the end it only won one - Jessica Lange for Best Supporting Actress.
Another actor you’ll recognise is Bill Murray who plays Hoffman’s flatmate. Also keep your eye out for Geena Davis in her first film role.
On the 80s front, viewers should be warned that the film features some truly atrocious songs.
The film was very much Dustin Hoffman’s own project. He’d been working on a story with the playwright Murray Schisgal that would allow him to play a woman in some way or other. More than 20 writers eventually worked on the script, including Barry Levinson and Elaine May.
Hoffman’s first choice of director was Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude) who couldn't commit due to another project. The studio suggested Sydney Pollack, who’d never directed a comedy before. As you’ll see Sydney Pollack has a role in the film as Dustin Hoffman’s agent. He took the acting job on Hoffman’s suggestion as Dustin saw elements of their personal relationship in what was in the script.
The production was, by all accounts, a nightmare. Pollack and Hoffman didn't get on at all. You can read Hoffman’s side of the story in an interview I’ve linked to on our website. The production went 23 days behind schedule because of unforeseen difficulties with Hoffman’s make-up.
“The make-up didn't work. It took three hours to apply and it started to disintegrate from the moment it was applied. So by the time I go out, Owen Roizman, the director of photography, looks at it and says, "It looks okay here, but the left side is a little... Go fix that." While we're fixing that, another part is disintegrating. We were shooting the woman stuff first, and after a month, we're a month behind. We would get one shot a day. That caused consternation, which built to the point that I saw rushes - and I looked green. I looked looked like something out of a John Carpenter film.
That was a terrible day. I turned to Sydney and said, "We're fucked." And Sydney says, "Clear the room, please." And the whole crew leaves except for Owen, and he says to Owen, "What do you think, Owen?" and Owen was honest to a fault and said, "It doesn't work." And then there was just a fight and words were exchanged. I mean, it got nasty. I said, "I'm not shooting any more 'til this is fixed." I'm sure I was a bit hysterical. And I'm not sure Sydney and I ever recovered from it.”
That said, Dustin Hoffman is also on the record as saying, “I have great gratification and satisfaction on the finished product of Tootsie”.
Tootsie is the sort of film, looking at it 30 years after it was made, that you can imagine scholarly essays written about its sexual politics and so on. This article from the time criticised the film's "implicit sexism and the mixed 'feminist' message".
Negative reviews were very rare when the film came out though and Tootsie was a huge critical as well as commercial success. In his review Roger Ebert wrote, “Tootsie is the kind of Movie with a capital M that they used to make in the 1940s, when they weren't afraid to mix up absurdity with seriousness, social comment with farce, and a little heartfelt tenderness right in there with the laughs.”
Personally I think that’s the spirit in which the film can be most enjoyed.
“This is a nearly flawless little film, a cheerful nightmare that knows just where it wants to go and uses precisely calibrated comic effects to get there.” – Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
Reese Witherspoon is terrific as the go-getting Tracy Flick who’ll stop at nothing to get elected as High School president. Matthew Broderick is equally brilliant as the teacher who has other plans.
Election was released while Bill Clinton was still in the White House but it’s not hard to imagine Tracy Flick getting a job with George W Bush. In fact, this is probably not too far removed a vision from what Sarah Palin was like in High School.
“Brilliantly directed by Raoul Walsh, an old master of cinema hoodlumism, it returns a more subtle James Cagney to the kind of thug role that made him famous”. - Time
Unhinged gang leader Cody Jarret (James Cagney) is a little bit too devoted to his ‘Ma’. After springing from prison things take a chaotic turn in what’s perhaps the last of the great gangster movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
"It's hard to think of an American film about the criminal life that is less sentimental or more impressive." - David Thompson
Martin Scorsese was originally set to direct The Grifters. Perhaps we should be grateful that he didn’t. A few months before The Grifters came out, the film Scorsese made instead was released - Goodfellas!
The Grifters is adapted from a 1963 novel by Jim Thompson. Thompson wrote some of the best pulp crime novels in the 1950s and 60s. Quite a few have been adapted for the screen including The Getaway starring Steve McQueen and Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer lnside Me, which came out last year and caused a fair share of controversy.
Someone wrote of Thompson that he’d “given Greek tragedy to the underclass”. That’s certainly true of The Grifters where the Fates hover over the shoulders of all three main characters. There’s also something on an Oedipal relationship going on between Anjelica Huston and John Cusack's characters.
The novel was adapted by Donald E Westlake who was a prolific novelist and screenwriter. He wrote under more than a dozen pseudonyms and Frears actually wanted him to be credited under his pen-name Richard Stark. As Stark, Westlake wrote the 1962 novel The Hunter, which John Borman later adapted as the Lee Marvin classic Point Blank.
The film does update the story to the late 80s but one of the film’s great achievements is that it retains a period feel both in terms of look and style. The opening title sequence with a great jazzy score introduces a sun-baked, washed out Los Angeles that could be the setting for a Chandler mystery. The locations certainly don’t all look modern and Frears also uses split screen early on in the film - a technique that was very common in the 60s but rarely seen in the 90s.
The old-school B-movie feel also comes from casting Anjelica Huston as the manipulative mother in the film. Her dad, John Huston, made one of the greatest Hollywood film noirs - The Maltese Falcon. The other woman in the film is played by Annette Bening in one of her early breakout roles. Frears encouraged her to look at films starring Gloria Grahame like The Big Heat and The Bad & The Beautiful and there’s clearly a 1950s moll feel to her performance.
This was a big film for John Cusack too. Before The Grifters he was really famous for romantic comedies like Say Anything and The Sure Thing and became known more as serious actor after The Grifters. It’s also worth noting that he reunited with Stephen Frears 10 years later for High Fidelity.
Beyond the stars you might also recognise some great American character actors: Stephen Tobolowsky, J T Walsh and Pat Hingle as a really fearsome mob boss. And finally if any of you are fans of the TV show Entourage, keep an eye out for a very young Jeremy Piven as a young sailor in a scene on a train.
Watch the original trailer >>
Why did we pick it?
Simple. Our previous film Paper Moon is about a pair of con-artists and this is a great con-artist film too.
Following the sad death of Tony Scott over the weekend, we are squeezing in a special tribute screening of his 1993 Tarantino-scripted masterpiece, True Romance, on Tuesday 28 August.
Starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette and featuring scene-if-not-film-stealing cameos from the likes of Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken and an almost-svelte James Gandolfini, True Romance is, quite simply, FUN! from start to finish and the best film Quentin Tarantino never made.
When Sight & Sound launched its critics poll to determine to the 50 Greatest Films of All Time in 1952 Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves topped the list. Six decades later it’s only dropped 33 places. It won an Oscar in 1949 and filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Ken Loach have claimed the film as a direct influence on their own.
This simple story is set in Rome suffering from a depressed economy (sound familiar?). Desperate for work and with a wife and two children to support long-unemployed Antonio Ricci gets a job pasting up movie posters.
On Antonio’s first day of work a young thief steals his bike. Antonio gives chase, but to no avail. He goes to the police, but there is little they can do. The only option is for Antonio, his young son Bruno, and his friends to walk the streets of Rome themselves, looking for the bicycle. But amid a sea of other bikes and without proof the search is fruitless.
Bicycle Thieves tells us as much about the position of Italians in post-War, post-Fascist Italy as well as the relationship between father and son, told through the labyrinth of the cinematic city with De Sica’s visual poetry. With pared down minimalism, eschewing studios and famous actors for real locations and non-professional actors who lived the lives they were playing, Bicycle Thieves defined the neorealist period, a small period of filmmaking that focused on simple, humanist stories, of which Bicycle Thieves was one of the most captivating and moving.
Be warned – it’s a tear-jerker – so bring some tissues.
Here's the trailer >>
Why did we pick it?
In The Player Griffin Mill tracks down the screen-writer he thinks is sending him death threats to a Los Angeles cinema showing Bicycle Thieves.
Alongside dozens of well-known faces in cameo roles Tim Robbins stars as Hollywood studio executive Griffin Mill who murders an aspiring screenwriter he believed was sending him death threats.
Best known for 1970s classics MASH and McCabe & Mrs Miller, the critical and commercial success of The Player really put Altman back on the map.
Here's the trailer >>
What's next?
We've chosen three films thematically linked to The Player - now you tell us which one you'd prefer to see:
Touch of Evil - like The Player, Orson Welles' Mexican caper also starts with a stunning, long tracking shot.
The Bicycle Thief - the Italian neo-realist classic features in a key scene in The Player.
Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder's 1950s classic is another film in which the Hollywood screenwriter's lot is not a happy one.
