What I'm trying to say, Recs, is we need a new kind of relationship...
No, this really isn't a critique - you're beautiful, wonderful, lovely... All the kids say so. Really. It's just that you're so damn long -- I was giving you 65% of my life. I somehow became possessed by the strange notion that I'd been charged by the Film Gods to provide an honest evaluation of every film in the Bay Area rep scene worth seeing, and this was my undoing. As Marilyn and Georgie coulda told us, somethin' had to give. But now I'm back, and ready more than ever to give you the good sprucing up you so desperately need, ready to coach you into a new, Recs Mach II (or some such) phase...
This is what I see for you, Recs baby -- you will provide shorthand ratings for each worthy entry at the bottom of the page, allowing your many fans to quickly scan to the chase, and giving them many more hours for actual picture-show viewing. No longer will they have to wade into your gaseous swamps -- er, make that mysterious depths -- to get at the goods -- they'll just have to scroll down the page, where they'll find your gnomic suggestions, and a handy key to explain all your Delphic clues. No, this isn't "going commercial", Recs -- really. When you've done your stuff, I'll come in at the end and provide some of my patented fancy footwork to discuss "featured selections", or whatever, at the top. Believe me, the kids'll eat this s**t up! What do ya say, Recs? Let's give it a try. C'mon, take my hand -- don't worry, I know you've grown a little shy. Who could blame you? Especially after an unbidden fellow of Giwont-sized proportions brusquely dipped his over-sized mitts into your delicate, well-cultivated furrows? Of course, it was an act probably meant as provocation to force me to once again take up and wield the hoe against both weeds and interlopers. His efforts may have been clumsy and untidy, but he's a clever bearded one -- he knows to encourage the truly green-thumbed so that he can sneak back when his much-beloved cabbages have matured... Enjoy your hopes, furry one!
And now, how 'bout some "Featured Selections" of the week?
The latest, greatest, most exciting news this season is that long-time Roxie programming great Elliot Lavine has confirmed his semi-reentry into curatorial efforts with his second Noir series in only four months. Some might fear for a glut on the Noir market, some kinda inflation/deflation scenario which will cause this dark bubble to burst, leaving us all besmirched and besmeared with an oily ooze, and set adrift in a cinematic depression of untold bounds... I'll have no truck with this theory! Noir is like sex and potato chips -- once you get a taste for it, you're stained, doomed to a half-existence caught between cross-hatched shadows... It's a slippery slope -- Noir leads inevitably to more Noir. No one can ever get enough, and Lavine's latest line-up of 22 restored Columbia Pictures titles is enough to lure any Noir-hound to the Mission to line up to purchase a series pass. All prints are new, 35mm, and not digitally mucked-with -- I've been guaranteed by those in the know there will be no pixels on the Roxie screen for two whole weeks! (This'll make a new record for the Roxie of recent years.) The series began a couple of days ago, and yes, I do feel guilty for leaving you all un-Reced wrecks, but those days are finally over. We pass over Johnny O'Clock, Blind Spot, The Whistler, and The Soul of a Monster to quickly plunge into the first week's remaining offerings...
Haven't seen Convicted, but what a cast! Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford, Millard Mitchell, and Dorothy Malone! I'd cross the desert for a little tête-à-tête with a vintage Malone, and Mitchell's just the side-kick I'd want alongside me for the ride... I don't remember Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door being any great shakes when I saw it twenty-somethin' years ago, but the intervening years have deepened my Ray appreciation to all-out obsession, and I'm ready for another day in its court. Of course, Bogie and the Noir-era John Derek also exert profound lures... With Pushover and Drive a Crooked Road we are deep into the heart of Richard Quine territory, a realm I know none too well, but which has offered increasing delights with every infrequent foray. Haven't seen Crooked Road (written by top-candidate for greatest living American film director, Blake Edwards), but Pushover's one of the great under-sung masterpieces of Noir. As luscious a vision of chiaroscuro claustrophobia we are ever likely to receive, this work features that icon of the underplay, Fred MacMurry, in seductive interplay with a Kim Novak so astonishingly fresh, creamy, and purring, that it can only be experienced to be believed. There will be lead in every pencil -- I'll leave it at that... The next evening (Monday), Lavine delivers us yet another purist auteurist platter, this time from the one and only Joseph H. Lewis... Lovers of Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, heads up! These are two further major works from the minor maestro. My Name is Julia Ross is one of those exquisite gothic B flowers in the cracks of the studio system which validates its glory. So Dark the Night -- certainly the most decadently lyrical title in all film history -- is a work I've waited 24 or so years to see... There have been times when I've meditated on a description I read of its opening moments many years ago, lost in some sweetly melancholic state between longing and frustration, but now the long years draw to a tender close. Thank you, Mr. Lavine... What we have here with Framed and Human Desire is a Glenn Ford double-bill -- no surprise, as he was a Columbia star. Ford was certainly of limited range, but he captured an element of the male psyche with indisputable force -- the nexus of charm and aggrievement in the adult male Narcissist. Each time I encounter one of his uniformly excellent performances, I'm struck by how over the top his self-righteousness is, and yet I'm pulled in every time. All the smugness is drained out of this mode of perception, leaving only an intensely felt need for things to be right and just, expressed poignantly thru eyes, vocal tone, and embittered jaw... He's the Marlon Brando of main street, and deserves our attention and respect. Framed is both quite good, and a quintessential example of Ford doin' his stuff. Human Desire features more of this, and, as it's directed by Fritz Lang, is an unqualified masterpiece, from its opening shots of trains intersecting as they determinedly scoot down their rails one of the great examples of Langian determinism. And then there's Miss Grahame -- yes, Gloria. How can we not be taken? She broke Nicholas Ray's heart -- why not yours or mine? Like some Aztec-esque goddess, she has them all, strewn at her feet... Finally, we have Edward (San Francisco native, and traitor to the cause) Dmytryk's The Sniper, which I haven't seen, but which sounds charming, and Don Siegel's The Line-Up, a magnificent not-so-minor masterpiece of that worthy sub-genre, San Francisco Noir, which we nativists so cherish. Eli Wallach delivers likely his greatest charmingly psychopathic performance as Dancer, a pit-bull-like gunsel unleashed to lethal effect as he rampages thru the City in search of elusive contraband. More than a warm-up to Siegel's more famous Dirty Harry, of some thirteen years later, The Line-Up rips open the City's streets to reveal the chaos and terror ever-lurking underneath our oh, so lovely cobble-stones and ginger-bread houses...
And now,
to
Roxie: The Soul of a Monster OI The Whistler OI
Stanford: Suspicion MW Notorious PM
Plays thru Mon.
PFA: She Played with Fire OI Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther QG
Orinda: The Birds (w/ talk, CA Indie Film Festival) TM
Roxie: Convicted OI Knock on Any Door OI
PFA: Mr. Freedom (w/ short: Broadway by Light) OI Brighton Rock OI
Roxie: Pushover PM Drive a Crooked Road OTI
Castro: The Hurt Locker OI
PFA: The Long Haul OI
Red Vic: Z QG
Plays thru Mon.
Victoria (SF Cinematheque): ere erera baleibu icik subua aruaren OI (with live music)
Roxie: My Name is Julia Ross MW So Dark the Night JBDTST
Roxie: Framed QG Human Desire M
Stanford: Rope MW Spellbound MW
Plays thru Thurs.
Castro: Taxi Driver TM After Hours QG/MW
Roxie: The Sniper OI The Line-Up PM
Castro: The Color of Money MW Casino MW
UA Berkeley 7: Dr. Strangelove MW/PM
SFMOMA: Contemporary Japanese Avant-Garde Film OI