Films

By the late 1940s, two of Universal-International’s biggest franchises, Frankenstein and Dracula, were on the wane. After a series of team-ups ending with House of Dracula (1945), the studio couldn’t come up with any fresh ideas for their monsters. The comic team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were declining in popularity. So, the studio…

75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Billy Wilder brought a heavy dose of European cynicism to his work in Hollywood. It may have seemed like strong medicine for the movie capital at times, but some of his most biting works have grown in critical estimation over the years. His ACE IN THE HOLE was considered too edgy by…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION | 75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION When it debuted 75 years ago, Walt Disney’s version of the Lewis Carroll classic understandably sent audiences for a loop with its eye-popping visuals and trippy vibes. The voice cast included noted character stars like Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn, and Jerry Colonna, and Disney stalwarts Verna Felton, Sterling…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION | 50TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Robert Redford was obsessed with the Watergate investigation the moment he read Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s first articles implying that members of the Nixon administration had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s Washington headquarters. Redford and director Alan J. Pakula worked hard to make the movie as…

70TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION An impressive array of international talent came together to film the story of a mental patient who claimed to be the sole surviving member of the Russian royal family. Ukrainian-born director Anatole Litvak shot locations in Copenhagen and Paris along with studio work in England, where the world of exiled Russian royalty…

60TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Sixty years ago, Stanley Donen was looking to repeat the success of his 1963 romantic thriller Charade. While several writers struggled with the script for this tale of a hieroglyphics expert (Gregory Peck) pursued by an array of unsavory characters wanting him to translate a coded text, Donen set out to make…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Like life, this film is a banquet, particularly for movie audiences starving for sophisticated laughs. Patrick Dennis’ best-selling 1955 account of a glamorous, unconventional woman charged with raising her nephew caught the eye of Broadway producers, who immediately saw the title character as perfect for Rosalind Russell. She scored a huge hit…

70TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Female-oriented melodrama seems out of character for he-man director Robert Aldrich. He took on this 1956 Joan Crawford vehicle partly in response to criticism of the violence in earlier films like Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Yet the violence remains within the characters. Crawford is an aging woman who thinks romance has passed…

50TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION If you were casting a role based on athletic actor Burt Lancaster, one of the last people you’d think would be grizzled, overweight Water Matthau. When Bill Lancaster wrote a comedy inspired by the years his father coached the son’s little league team, he created a hit. For the film, the coach…

One might not instantly associate Anthony Mann with a dizzying rom-com set during World War II, but the acclaimed director of Westerns, epics, and noirs did an impressive job with this RKO B-picture that paired Frances Langford with Russell Wade, the latter typically a bit player for the studio. Wade plays Captain Patrick Ransom Jr., who gets mixed up…

OFFICIAL OPENING NIGHT GALA SCREENING | WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Robert Redford was ready to give up acting and had taken a year off to travel when he returned—some say under contractual obligation—to Hollywood to re-create his leading role in Neil Simon’s hit 1963 Broadway comedy. The part of an uptight businessman who feels naked without…

80TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Producer Samuel Goldwyn correctly judged that post-World War II audiences would be interested in the struggles of veterans re-adjusting to peacetime life. The result was a powerful tale of three veterans: bank president Fredric March, soda jerk Dana Andrews and wounded Navy man Harold Russell (a real-life double amputee). Director William Wyler, a World War II veteran himself, kept the picture as realistic…

Josef von Sternberg brought a Viennese sophistication to Hollywood. His films combined a florid pictorial sense and a fascination with sexuality that came to a head when he directed his personal discovery, Marlene Dietrich, in a series of seven films unparalleled in their creation of a dream world in which to explore the star’s sexual…

Born in Belgium to a Dutch mother and British father, Audrey Hepburn had one of her most iconic roles as Holly Golightly, winning an Oscar nomination and, with designer Hubert de Givenchy, making the little black dress a wardrobe staple. She also introduced “Moon River,” one of the biggest hits of the 1960s. Her Holly…

It was difficult to sell all-black films during Hollywood’s golden age. Many theaters in the South and even the North refused to show them. When Arthur Freed set out to produce this musical fable based on the 1940 Broadway production, it was only the fourth all-black film distributed by a major studio. He filled the…

90TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION When Swedish ingénue Greta Garbo came to Hollywood more than a century ago, she couldn’t speak English, but that was no obstacle to her stardom. Finally, Irving G. Thalberg cast her as an exotic temptress in Torrent (1926) and her career took off. It was clear from the start that Garbo was…

Australia gave Hollywood its biggest action star of the sound era when Errol Flynn came out of the blue as a replacement for Robert Donat (who was dealing with chronic asthma) in this classic swashbuckler. He stars as a doctor unjustly sold into slavery after treating a rebel. When he and his fellow prisoners escape,…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION | 30TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Filmmaker Alexander Payne burst on the scene 30 years ago with this scathing satire of both sides of the abortion debate, premiering here in a new restoration. Inspired by a true story, Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor’s script focuses on Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern), a drug addict who…

Famous pairings like MGM’s Tracy and Hepburn or Powell and Loy were undoubtedly great screen teams, but they never brought audiences “all the forbidden wonders and dangers of the tropics!” That fell to Universal Pictures and one of the screen’s most unique leading threesomes, Dominican-born Maria Montez, South Asian Sabu and Jon Hall, whose mother…

While the rest of Hollywood ignored the rise of the Third Reich for fear of losing their German market, Anatole Litvak, the son of Jewish immigrants born in the Ukraine, tackled the subject head on. The script was inspired by an actual investigation, the 1938 Rumrich Nazi Spy Case, and Litvak shot in a near-documentary…

The sexual machinations of the bored aristocracy have never been so delectable as in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of the play and novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Set in pre-Revolution Paris, Glenn Close earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress starring as Marquise de Merteuil, a noblewoman who seeks revenge on her ex-lover by disgracing his fiancée, the virginal Cécile de Volanges (Uma…

75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Seventy-five years ago, an alien from Great Britain delivered a message of peace and hope as a visitor from another planet. Executives at 20th Century-Fox originally considered Spencer Tracy or Claude Rains to star as Klaatu before deciding the role needed a less familiar face. With his cultured diction and tall, slender…

It took a Spanish cinematographer with roots in French New Wave to capture some of the most distinctive images of rural America ever filmed. After working with Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut, Nestor Almendros made his U.S. debut with DAYS OF HEAVEN and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. To capture writer-director Terrence Malick’s tale…

Long before there was Undercover Boss, Charles Coburn starred as a wealthy department store owner who creates a new identity to get a job in his own store to learn what all this union business is about. With Jean Arthur as the clerk who befriends him, Robert Cummings as her labor organizer boyfriend and Spring…

Elia Kazan honed his skills with the Group Theater, a politically motivated performance company that explored the acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky. As a result, most of his films are both fiercely devoted to social issues and grounded in realistic, lived-in performances. In A FACE IN THE CROWD, the focus was the media and political…

One of the greatest upsets in Oscar history took place March 20, 1948, when Loretta Young beat out the projected shoo-in for Best Actress, Rosalind Russell for Mourning Becomes Electra. The outcome seemed so certain Russell was out of her seat before Fredric March called Young’s name. Only Young’s producer, Dore Schary, had predicted the…

Forty-one years after Spencer Tracy walked Elizabeth Taylor down the aisle in Vincente Minnelli’s original FATHER OF THE BRIDE, Steve Martin showed the timeless nature of a father’s consternation about his daughter’s upcoming nuptials is timeless. In Charles Shyer’s version with a screenplay co-written by Nancy Meyers, Martin plays George Banks, the successful owner of a sneaker company who’s stunned to learn that his daughter…

40TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Forty years ago, writer-director John Hughes captured the hearts of movie-goers with a simple philosophy: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” His teen comedies broke the mold by treating their teenaged protagonists as complex humans with real problems. The…

60TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Teamwork was the driving force behind this satirical comedy. It was the fourth of seven films in which German immigrant Billy Wilder directed his ideal leading man, Jack Lemmon, the seventh of twelve films Wilder co-wrote with Romanian-born I.A.L. Diamond, and the first of multiple pictures Lemmon with his perfect foil, Walter…

An international cast came together to create one of the screen’s most glamorous thrillers in GASLIGHT. Sweden’s Ingrid Bergman plays a young bride being systematically driven mad by her husband (French heartthrob Charles Boyer) as he tries to convince her that what she’s seeing isn’t really there. Adding to her troubles are the new maid…

Sometimes box-office flops have more life in them than instant hits. The sequel to Grease (1978) received mixed reviews with some claiming it as just a retread of the original without the star power of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Yet it survived as a cult favorite on the strength of director-choreographer Patricia Birch’s well-staged…

TRIBUTE SCREENING | 40TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Although Barbara Hershey’s career started in the mid-‘60s with television guest shots, the TV series The Monroes, followed by acclaimed early films like Last Summer (1969), it wasn’t until the mid-‘80s that she was acknowledged as one of the screen’s best actresses. This film, now celebrating its 40th anniversary,…

MGM star Robert Montgomery resented being loaned to Columbia, one of the lesser majors, for this romcom with supernatural overtones. But he came out a winner in the end. This tale of a boxer sent to heaven before his time and given a return visit in the body of a murdered millionaire was a box-office…

Producer Ross Hunter had Sandra Dee and three singers — Andy Williams in his only credited film role, Robert Goulet in his second on-screen appearance and veteran Maurice Chevalier — vying for attention in this gender-flipped remake of Deanna Durbin’s 1941 hit It Started with Eve. Ailing tycoon Chevalier wants to meet his granddaughter’s fiancé…

TRIBUTE SCREENING By the time ISHTAR premiered in 1987, critics had already been sharpening their knives for it. Stories of cost overruns, on-set feuds and the large salaries paid to stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman alienated the media and audiences alike. The result was a box-office disaster that ended Elaine May’s directing career. Yet,…

30TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Thirty years ago, Cameron Crowe’s romantic dramedy about an idealistic agent had us at hello. In search of a new project after the modest success of Singles (1992), Crowe created the story of a man discovering his idealism in a world fueled by money. Over the course of several years, Crowe researched…

The verbal wit of Oscar Wilde might seem like the last choice for the silent screen, but in the hands of a master like Ernst Lubitsch, this adaptation of his first play becomes a sophisticated comment on society and its morals. It’s a romance, but not a traditional one. Lady Windermere (May McAvoy) is a…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Madeleine Smith’s murder trial for the poisoning of her lover in 19th century Scotland inspired several books, two plays and three films. The first screen treatment, LETTY LYNTON, stars Joan Crawford in a contemporary story about a woman who flees her possessive paramour (Nils Asther) in South America and falls for American tycoon…

Kirk Douglas cited this 1962 Western as his favorite among his own work. In addition to starring, Douglas produced the feature after reading Edward Albey’s 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy, and reteaming with his Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to pen the script. Douglas plays John W. “Jack” Burns, a cowboy drifter who bristles against the confines of modern life and goes on the run after attempting to break an old friend…

A year before he moved to MGM and shot to stardom, Spencer Tracy made this comic crime film, his only time working with director William A. Wellman. Where Wellman would enjoy solid relationships with stars like Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck and John Wayne, he and Tracy clashed repeatedly. They even got into a fistfight at…

Yul Brynner had one of his biggest box office hits when he brought Japan to Hollywood with this spirited remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai (1954). With John Sturges directing, it was sure to be a top-notch action film, but the filmmaker never lost sight of the original’s pathos. Kurosawa’s tale of a small…

After immigrating to the U.S. in 1934,  Austrian director Fritz Lang got his first shot at one of his specialties, the spy thriller, when John Ford turned down this suspense film. Walter Pidgeon stars as a big game hunter whose failed attempt to hunt and kill Hitler puts him on the run. Back in his…

THE MISFITS has more to offer than just the last screen appearances by Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Under John Huston’s guidance it became an elegy for the old West. Monroe is in Nevada waiting out a divorce when she meets aging cowboy Gable. With no other prospects in sight, he agrees to capture mustangs…

90TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Charles Chaplin was Hollywood’s greatest holdout against the coming of sound. He didn’t want dialogue to destroy the universal appeal of his comedy. When audiences finally heard his voice 90 years ago, he was singing a nonsense song at the end of this primarily wordless comedy. Inspired by his distaste for the…

The 1950s 3D fad came and went so quickly that some films shot in the process were never or only sporadically screened that way. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ 11th feature, and first in color, was shot in 3D and three-strip Technicolor, but because of technical problems premiered in 2D. Only two percent of the…

In only his second year at Warner Bros., Warren William shot to stardom playing an unscrupulous lawyer in this adaptation of Frank J. Collins’ play, inspired by the career of mob lawyer Bill “The Great Mouthpiece” Fallon. He’s a district attorney whose faith in the system is shattered when he discovers he’s sent an innocent…

Italian-born Frank Capra won Oscars for directing It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can’t Take It With You (1938), comedies that exalted the American little man at the expense of the powers that be. As long as those powers were represented by spoiled heiresses or corrupt businessmen, nobody…

TRIBUTE SCREENING Fans still remember their delight at seeing Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle in the film that launched The Muppets’ eight-picture franchise (to date). Over two decades since their introduction in 1955, Jim Henson’s spirited creations finally hit the big screen with — what else? — an origin story. The film traces Kermit’s…

When this remake of MGM’s Oscar-winning classic first appeared, critics tended to review it in terms of star Marlon Brando’s off-screen behavior, and fans stayed away. The first director, Sir Carol Reed, was fired from the  production after three months of fighting with Brando. His replacement, Lewis Milestone, simply let the star call the shots,…

Some films get a new life from being restored. For Charles Burnett’s second feature, restoration was the kiss of life. When he completed this study of clashing classes in Los Angeles’ black communities, the distributor rushed it to the New York Film Festival while still in rough cut. The critical response was so mixed, they…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION | 50TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION People were as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore long before Peter Finch gave them a voice 50 years ago in this searing satire of televised political media. But this film became a rallying cry for a discontented public. Some critics as well as…

90TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Ninety years ago, James Stewart achieved leading man status in only his third feature thanks to Margaret Sullavan. The two had become friends working in the theater, but she rose to stardom first on stage and in films. By 1936, MGM had only cast him in two supporting roles, so Sullavan insisted Universal…

ROBERT OSBORNE TRIBUTE AWARD SCREENING Hailed by many as one of Federico Fellini’s finest features, this 1957 tragicomedy grew out of a character his wife, Giulietta Masina, had played in The White Sheik (1952). She only had one scene as the prostitute Cabiria, but it stuck with him. While working on another film, he was…

80TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Fans and critics may be divided over which is Alfred Hitchcock’s best film, but this post-World War II thriller is easily among his sexiest as it celebrates its 80th anniversary. You start with a love affair between government agent Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, the daughter of a Nazi war criminal. He…

75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Warner Bros. already owned the rights to Booth Tarkington’s Penrod novels about a mischievous young man in a small Indiana town. The studio had previously filmed them with the twins Billy and Bobby Mauch, so 75 years ago it only seemed natural to do a musical remake starring…Doris Day? The studio shifted…

The Hollywood musical hit the streets — the real streets — for the first time when debut directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly took their cast to New York for location work for this film’s opening number. It was a logistical challenge. They had to hide cameras so they could grab a shot quickly and…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Often hailed as one of the definitive film noirs of the 1940s, this tale of murder and betrayal benefited from the direction of French-born Jacques Tourneur and Italian-born cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. They created a world of shadows, the perfect home for screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring’s duplicitous characters. Chief among them is one of…

Although they sometimes took decades to reach Western audiences, the films of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) have come to be regarded as some of the greatest ever made. His simple focus on minute details of human behavior as they relate to family dynamics and changing times have made films like Tokyo Story (1953) among…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Frank Sinatra scored a major hit when Columbia Pictures spent 17 years trying to bring Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and John O’Hara’s caustic tale of a show-biz opportunist to the screen. That’s how long it took the studio to come up with a screenplay (eventually by Dorothy Kingsley) that would pass the…

Marion Davies was a fun-loving young woman who had the mixed fortune of having an ongoing love affair with publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who pushed her into epic productions designed to make her a dramatic great actress. But she was really a naturally skilled comedienne, arguably at her best in three films directed by…

After working as a secretary, assistant, and screenwriter for Alfred Hitchcock, Joan Harrison broke out to become one of Hollywood’s first female producers of the sound era with this classic film noir. She convinced Universal Pictures to pick up the rights to Cornell Woolrich’s novel and assign the German-born Robert Siodmak as director. Together, they…

75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION For 75 years, audiences have swooned as Elizabeth Taylor pulls Montgomery Clift to her and croons, “Tell Mama…tell Mama all.” George Stevens turned Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 An American Tragedy into a study of the American love affair with success. After an impoverished childhood, Clift’s George Eastman uses family connections to land a…

90TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION As a child growing up in Indiana, Carole Lombard used to entertain friends by imitating their favorite film stars. When she got the chance to spoof Greta Garbo in this screwball comedy, now celebrating its 90th anniversary, she jumped at the opportunity. She’s a chorus girl stranded in London, who pretends to…

It took a Dutch director to create one of the screen’s most nightmarish visions of American social decay. In a future Detroit, crime is running rampant and corporations are slowly taking over public services. When the OCP corporation takes charge of the police, they introduce their latest innovation: a cyborg cop made using the body…

When British director Alfred Hitchcock reached Hollywood, his trenchant wit, often finding the humor in quite deadly situations, was a relief from more sentimental pictures. For this 1948 thriller, his first independent production, he stages a long dinner scene bubbling with clever conversation among guests who don’t know there’s a dead body in the room….

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION The Western took a more adult turn in the 1950s with films like High Noon and the James Stewart-Anthony Mann collaborations. The characters gained more texture and nuance, and the films asked us to consider the nature of violence. George Stevens treated those issues on an epic scale with his tale of…

40TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Two of the best adaptations of Stephen King’s works—STAND BY ME and 1990’s Misery—were directed by Rob Reiner. The keen sense of character he brought to both films helped make them classics. His first foray into King territory took place 40 years ago, when he filmed the semi-autobiographical novella The Body. In…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Often cited as the birth of film noir, this low-budget feature is considered the first to take the tools of German Expressionism and apply them to the crime genre. The story follows a reporter (John McGuire) who witnesses one murder and finds himself charged with another. A dream sequence in which he’s…

75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION In the 75 years since Alfred Hitchcock was the first director to bring a Patricia Highsmith novel to the screen, there have been 21 big screen adaptations of her work. Yet the first remains among the best. Its intriguing plot — two men jokingly agree to murder each other’s worst enemies, only…

90TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION With a score by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, including their Oscar-winning “The Way You Look Tonight,” and graceful direction by George Stevens, it’s little wonder the sixth pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is often hailed as their best. The plot is the usual romantic roundelay. He’s out to make…

30TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Thirty years ago, a scripting exercise turned into one of the best L.A. films and a career-boosting hit. Jon Favreau’s father had given him a screenwriting software program, so the young actor decided to see if he could write a movie. Taking off from his own experience of having moved to L.A….

Debbie Reynolds was a natural for the romantic comedy role of a backwoods girl suddenly transplanted to the home of a wealthy pilot (Leslie Nielsen) she nurses back to health after a plane crash. She was a Texas girl who always felt slightly out of place hobnobbing with Hollywood big wigs. The film initially fared poorly at the box…

30TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Tom Hanks escaped the repetitiveness of the Forrest Gump (1994) press tour by writing the script for this sweetly captivating tale of a ‘60s rock one-hit-wonder. Two years later, it became his feature directing and screenwriting debut. The picture captures a time when a local band could make it big through pluck…

70TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Although best remembered for lush Technicolor melodramas like Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1959), producer Ross Hunter and German-born director Douglas Sirk also teamed for some more intimate black-and-white films in the same genre. Seventy years ago, they made one of their best, reuniting Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray for…

75TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTATION Seventy-five years ago, “Keep watching the skies” became the watch cry for a nation obsessed with stories of flying saucers and little green men. Howard Hawks tapped into the UFO craze with this still-chilling tale of an Arctic science outpost laid siege by one very large alien (played by future Gunsmoke star…

The disaster film reached new heights with this 1974 mega-hit. The saga of a 138-story San Francisco building that catches fire the night of its grand opening required two directors, four camera crews, two top box-office stars (Paul Newman and Steve McQueen) and two major studios. It also required the construction of 57 studio sets…

WORLD PREMIERE RESTORATION Critics first started talking about German born director Ernst Lubitsch’s distinctive style, aka “The Lubitsch Touch,” as early as his silent picture. But with the move to talkies, the “Touch” gained a new dimension with a flirty, pre-Code sexual innuendo. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins are thieves so adept they can pick…

Freedom was the central issue in many of the counter-culture films released in the wake of the surprise success of 1969’s Easy Rider. Kowalski (Barry Newman), the enigmatic figure at the center of this road picture, lives for speed as he delivers cars for a living, with his run from Denver to San Francisco in…

Germany and Great Britain came to Hollywood for this spirited musical comedy of sexual politics. The tale of an out-of-work singer (Julie Andrews) who becomes a cabaret star by pretending to be a female impersonator in 1934 Paris had started out as the German film Viktor und Viktoria (1933). That was remade in England as…

Joseph Cates was drawn to stories combining psychology and sexuality. His first feature, Girl of the Night (1960), starred Anne Francis as a prostitute seeing a psychiatrist. For this 1965 follow-up, he let the characters’ impulses run wild. Juliet Prowse works as a hostess and DJ at a disco. She’s beautiful and talented, and has…

TRIBUTE SCREENING Made six years before the end of Apartheid, screenwriter Shawn Slovo’s account of her parents’ fight against South Africa’s racist government had to be filmed in Zimbabwe. Its international success helped foster further films dealing with the issue. Slovo’s on-screen stand-in, Molly (Jodhi May), at first doesn’t understand what’s going on in her…