Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
OVERDUE: DELMER DAVES REDUX
December 12 – December 17
December 12-17, 2013
ALL ON FILM!
Last May Anthology welcomed the peripatetic film series OVERDUE, programmed by critics Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold, for a mini-retrospective devoted to neglected Hollywood auteur Delmer Daves, with a focus on his extraordinary 1940s & 50s Westerns and noirs. At the very end of the 50s, Daves made a sharp turn into lavish melodrama, and we’re thrilled to team up once again with Pinkerton and Rapold for this sequel to the earlier retro. This follow-up series will highlight the transitional film, THE HANGING TREE, and four of Daves’s remarkable, undervalued later films.
In olden times, back when people gave a damn, 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.
“The virtues of Daves’s late romances are essentially the same as those of his adventure films: characters composed with the utmost integrity and respect; a gift for creating a detailed and convincing social background; and a strong, clear narrative style that allowed him to manage a large cast of characters and several simultaneous levels of dramatic events. –Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES
Special thanks to Nicki Woods & Kristie Nakamura (WB Classics).
THE HANGING TREE
1959, 107 min, 35mm. With Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, and Karl Malden.
Widely considered one of the director’s very best, Daves’s magnificently shot 1959 picture rounded out his “composite of the West” with a Montana wildcat mining settlement ominously dubbed Skull Creek. A late-career Gary Cooper digs into the thornily complex character of Doc Joe Frail, a gunslinging doctor who installs himself in a lone overlook cabin. Kind and controlling, gentle and brutal, Frail is a force to be reckoned with, as Daves sets into motion a series of tense dynamics with Rune, a would-be thief Frail forces into servitude; Elizabeth, a Swiss settler (Maria Schell) Frail nurses back to health after an ambush; and rude, crude prospector Frenchy (Karl Malden). With George C. Scott as a doomsday preacher.“A film that eschews moral oversimplification throughout, opposing complex, conflicted characters.” –Bertrand Tavernier, FILM COMMENT
Thurs, Dec 12 at 6:45, Sat, Dec 14 at 9:15, and Tues, Dec 17 at 9:15
A SUMMER PLACE
1959, 130 min, 35mm. With Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Sandra Dee, Arthur Kennedy, Troy Donahue, and Constance Ford.
In one of the more stunning career moves among filmmakers, Daves dove with a splash into Technicolor melodrama after THE HANGING TREE and a string of Westerns. With warmth, sincerity, and candor, Daves orchestrates twinned romances on a Maine vacation island: first love between teenagers Molly and Johnny (Dee and Donahue), and adultery between Molly’s dad Ken and Johnny’s mother Sylvia (Egan and McGuire). Since Ken grew up an errand boy on the island, class tensions still simmer, with Arthur Kennedy sniping as Johnny’s sarcastic drunk of a father and Constance Ford vicious as Molly’s repressive mom. The seal of approval? The New York Times found Daves’s film “laboriously and garishly sex-scented.” Cinematography by Harry Stradling; score by Max Steiner.“A full-throttle melodrama […] Daves’s film opened the way to ‘adult’ themes in Hollywood films, just as the sexual revolution was breaking in popular novels and magazines.” –Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES
Thurs, Dec 12 at 9:00, Sat, Dec 14 at 6:30, and Sun, Dec 15 at 3:45
SUSAN SLADE
1961, 116 min, 35mm. With Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, Dorothy McGuire, Lloyd Nolan, and Brian Aherne.
From the collection of George Eastman House.Naïve 17-year-old Susan Slade (Stevens), raised abroad in Chile, arrives in her new California home knocked up after a shipboard fling with Grant Williams. After the baby is born quietly in Guatemala, Susan’s parents pass the child off as their own, and San Francisco is deceived – especially the young bachelors who come to court on Susan, a scion of wealth played by Bert Convy and a horse doctor played by Troy Donahue. Daves wrote the screenplay and directed, and the result is a film with all of the bathetic emotional excess of Douglas Sirk but none of the after-the-fact intellectual self-justification or escape-hatch irony.
Fri, Dec 13 at 6:45 and Mon, Dec 16 at 9:15
SPENCER’S MOUNTAIN
1963, 118 min, 35mm. With Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara, James MacArthur, Donald Crisp, and Mimsy Farmer.
Henry Fonda stars as Clay Spencer, a poor-but-decent Wyoming farmer who dreams of building a dream house for his enormous family and wife, Olivia (O’Hara), atop the mountain where they live. Meanwhile, eldest son James MacArthur aspires to go to college, learning Latin from Wally Cox’s preacher. (His sweetheart is played by none other than future exploitation mainstay Mimsy Farmer.) Shooting on-location in Grand Teton National Park and Jackson Hole, Daves and cinematographer Charles Lawton render the anecdotal and the prosaic luminous. With its essential generosity and faith in the restorative power of nature, SPENCER’S MOUNTAIN is the sort of work that prompted Kent Jones to declare Daves “an absolute rarity in cinema, an artist of the good.” Adapted from Earl Hamner, Jr.’s autobiographical novel of the same title, which later became the basis for the television series THE WALTONS.
Fri, Dec 13 at 9:15, Sun, Dec 15 at 9:15, and Mon, Dec 16 at 6:45
YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE
1964, 137 min, 35mm. With James Franciscus, Suzanne Pleshette, Geneviève Page, Eva Gabor, and Mary Astor.
Blonde God James Franciscus stars as a truck driver from Kentucky who lights out for NYC to make a success as a novelist. The dashing Youngblood does this, spectacularly, with the aid of a helpful editor (Pleshette)…then steps over her en route to the heights of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, which will be the scene of his precipitous downfall. The last of Daves’s potboilers was adapted from Herman Wouk’s doorstop-sized bestseller, with a screenplay by Wouk and Daves. Critics disdained its soapy excess, but today its merits are glaring: coolly-beautiful black-and-white photography, Max Steiner’s march-like score, and Geneviève Page, excellent as the seduced wife of Youngblood’s publisher.
Sat, Dec 14 at 3:45, Sun, Dec 15 at 6:30, and Tues, Dec 17 at 6:30
