Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
OVERDUE: DELMER DAVES
May 10 – May 16
May 10-16, 2013
In May the peripatetic film series OVERDUE, programmed by critics Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold, comes to Anthology for a weekend devoted to rare gems from the neglected Delmer Daves, one of the finest Hollywood filmmakers of the 40s & 50s.
In olden times, back when people gave a hoot, video stores would set aside certain movies on an altar to refined, idiosyncratic expertise called ‘Employee Picks’. In that spirit, Pinkerton and Rapold present their very own secret history of cinema – genre gems, misunderstood art, music movies – leading with torches of knowledge into the catacombs of culture.
Special thanks to Caitlin Robertson & Joe Reid (20th Century Fox), Lynanne Schweighofer & Rob Stone (Library of Congress), and Marilee Womack (WB).
PRIDE OF THE MARINES
1945, 120 min, 35mm. With John Garfield.
Belying its generic war-effort title, Daves’s superior 1945 feature stars Garfield as a brash Philly welder who enlists with the Marines only to get blinded in the Pacific. With semi-documentary detail and a feel for day-to-day dramas and crushing challenges alike, PRIDE follows Al Schmid as he’s fixed up with a woman (Eleanor Parker), then ships out to the jungle gun nests of Guadalcanal, surviving yet reluctant to leave the hospital. Daves and Garfield sensitively portray Schmid’s bonds with his tough-willed girl, wisecracking buddies, and, touchingly, a Red Cross letter-writer. Featuring typically eloquent visuals – from the claustrophobic night battle to the pinpricks of Garfield’s eyes in darkness at the hospital – and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by Albert Maltz, later a blacklistee like Garfield.
Fri, May 10 at 6:45, Sun, May 12 at 5:00, and Tues, May 14 at 9:00
THE RED HOUSE
1947, 100 min, 35mm. Preserved by the Library of Congress. With Edward G. Robinson.
Anticipating Daves’s Freudian Westerns of the 50s, THE RED HOUSE displays the filmmaker’s ability to express a variety of (mostly troubling) interior states through landscape. Patriarch farmer Pete Morgan (Robinson) maintains the status quo with his daughter and spinster sister, until a hired hand starts challenging the various taboos that Pete has set into place. A sort-of rural noir, the film combines noir’s smothering foreboding – and Robinson’s anguished gargoyle mask – with fresh outdoor photography and a keen sense of life as lived in remote places, where everything is measured in terms of daylight and distance. Once seen, its air of sexual unease, fell wind blowing through trees, and secrets hiding in bright, open spaces is not easily forgotten.
Fri, May 10 at 9:15 and Mon, May 13 at 7:00
BROKEN ARROW
1950, 93 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With James Stewart & Jeff Chandler.
“I learned things that day… Apache mothers cried about their sons, Apache men had a sense of fair play….” A landmark Western due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Native American, BROKEN ARROW is even more remarkable for never overcompensating by ennobling the Other into an inhuman abstraction. Thanks to Daves’s mastery, this is one of the rare ‘issue’ movies that backs up its vaunted, important content with exquisite, evocative form, a film composed of quiet sylvan interludes and massed, surging movement. Against vistas of a Technicolor Arizona, James Stewart’s ex-prospector Tom Jeffords tries to parlay peace with Jeff Chandler’s Apache chief Cochise, working together against both a renegade Geronimo and white Indian-haters, the “terrible cruelty from both sides” never sugar-coated.
Sat, May 11 at 5:00 and Tues, May 14 at 7:00
COWBOY
1958, 92 min, 35mm. With Glenn Ford & Jack Lemmon.
“You haven’t gotten tough. You’ve just gotten miserable.” Following the wrenching one-two of JUBAL (1956) and 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), Daves and Glenn Ford re-teamed for this shrewd story of cattleman and clerk that’s both slice-of-life tale from the trail and psychological dialectic. Betting losses lead old hand Tom Reece (Ford) to take on Chicago hotel tenderfoot Frank Harris (Lemmon), who’s sweet on a Mexican girl, for his latest drive down south. Instead of simplistic culture clash, Daves’s treatment only deepens as the journey proceeds, with a clear-eyed feel for rough, even deadly play on the trail (aided by a fine supporting cast) and an often stunning pictorial sense (care of favored Daves DP Charles “Buddy” Lawton). The screenplay by Edmund H. North and blacklistee Dalton Trumbo takes flight from the memoir of Frank Harris (perhaps best-known for his dirty chronicles MY LIFE AND LOVES). Titles by Saul Bass.
Sat, May 11 at 7:00, Mon, May 13 at 9:15, and Thurs, May 16 at 9:15
THE LAST WAGON
1956, 98 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With Richard Widmark.
Another study in race-hate the Old Western way, this worthy follow-up to BROKEN ARROW has Daves returning to Arizona’s Martian valleys and mesas, this time filming in overwhelming, hallucinatory CinemaScope. George Mathews’s swinish Sheriff Bull Harper is bringing Richard Widmark’s ‘Comanche’ Todd to justice for the murder of the other three Harper brothers. But when the wagon train of settlers that they’re traveling with is attacked by Apaches, the despised Todd, who has lived most of his life with the Indians, becomes the last line of defense for the few surviving youths of the party, leading them through the “Canyon of Death” in a wagon made from the remaining wreckage.
Sat, May 11 at 9:15 and Thurs, May 16 at 7:00
