Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Tuesday 13 November 8pm

"Superb performances and a compelling script have made this film a strange mix of Oscar-winner and cult classic." - Empire

In Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jon Voigt plays Joe Buck, a country-boy convinced the streets of New York City are paved with beautiful rich women - just waiting to be swept off their feet and hustled into bed. Dustin Hoffman is Ratso Rizzo, his self-appointed pimp.

A touching portrayal of friendship and failure, with love blooming in the unlikliest of places.  

Watch the trailer >>

Why Did We Pick It?

Like Sweet Smell of Success, Midnight Cowboy is another New York set film directed by a Brit.

Related Links

Mark Kermode plays the Midnight Cowboy Theme song - highlight from BBC Radio 5 live special with BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton, 1983)

Halloween Special! Tuesday 30 October 8pm

"A lively, entertaining tale combining boyishness and grown-up horror in equal measure." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times

One October ("a rare month for boys") a travelling carnival pulls into a quiet mid-western town. Led by the mysterious Mr Dark, the carnival promises to fulfil your heart's desire - but at what cost? As the whole town gets swept up in the carnival's diabolical charms the lives of two adolescent boys are changed for ever. 

Based on the Ray Bradbury novel, directed by Jack 'The Innocents' Clayton, and staring Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards and Diane Ladd, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a not only a great lost gem of a movie but, as a Walt Disney production, something of a curio (how this film got a PG rating beggars belief). Quite simply, a Halloween film par excellence. 

Watch the original trailer >>

Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

Tuesday 16 October 8pm

“The film is a masterpiece, intelligent Hollywood cinema at its best”. – Philip French, The Observer

JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), the most powerful newspaper columnist in New York, is determined to prevent his sister from marrying Steve Dallas, a jazz musician. He therefore covertly employs Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a sleazy and unscrupulous press agent, to break up the affair by any means possible.

The film's director, Alexander Mackendrick, rose to fame for making the Ealing comedies Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955).

Despite not being a hit on its initial release, Sweet Smell of Success has grown in stature over years to gain classic status, particularly for its brilliant dialogue. 

Watch the trailer >>

Why Did We Pick It?

Like Cody Jarrett in White Heat, Burt Lancaster's character JJ Hunsecker, is also driven by a wildly psychotic ego.

Update on 2012-10-17 09:29 by Tufnell Park Film Club

Related Links

A Movie Marked Danger - brilliant Vanity Fair article about the making of Sweet Smell of Success

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

Tuesday 2 October 8pm

 

“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.

Watch the trailer >>

The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)

Tuesday 18 September 8pm

"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!

In the end Scorsese produced the film and asked a Brit, Stephen Frears, to direct it. This was Frears’ first American film. He’d just made Dangerous Liaisons and had also won critical acclaim for My Beautiful Laundrette and his biopic of Joe Orton Prick Up Your Ears.

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.

True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)

Tuesday 28 August, 7.30pm for 8pm start

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.

Yes, Top Gun, yes, Crimson Tide, yes, - if you must - Beverly Hill Cop II. But we prefer to remember Tony Scott this way...

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

Tuesday 21 August, 7.30pm for 8pm start

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.

The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)

Tuesday 7 August, 7.30pm for 8pm start

Our first film is Robert Altman's extremely entertaining Hollywood satire The Player.  

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.