Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
FRED WARD: WARD TO THE WISE
January 13 – January 22
January 13-22, 2023
The world of screen acting became a much poorer place this past summer with the death of Fred Ward. Ward was a textbook example of a character actor who never quite made the leap to leading-man status. But while he was unquestionably talented and charismatic enough to have become a major star, it’s perhaps not entirely unfortunate that mainstream recognition eluded him, since the result was a career spent delivering performances whose shagginess, eccentricity, and adventurousness may not have been possible under the glare of stardom. In any case, Ward’s immeasurable gifts were recognized – and utilized – by some of the period’s finest American filmmakers, including Don Siegel, Robert Altman, Walter Hill, Philip Kaufman, Beth B. and others, and he graced the big and small screens alike with a succession of indelible performances.
Strangely enough, thanks to his time studying acting in Italy, Ward’s earliest screen appearances came in two of Roberto Rossellini’s early-1970s made-for-television “history films” (THE AGE OF THE MEDICI and CARTESIUS). Back in the U.S., he embarked on a career that soon found him landing significant roles in films like Don Siegel’s ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (1979), Walter Hill’s SOUTHERN COMFORT (1981), Mike Nichols’s SILKWOOD (1983), and Philip Kaufman’s THE RIGHT STUFF (1983). These memorable performances led to his major brush with stardom, when he was chosen to headline what was to be the first film in a new franchise based on the Destroyer series of pulp paperbacks, REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS. The film’s disastrous critical and commercial reception ensured that the rest of Ward’s career was devoted to character roles in a wide variety of films, as well as more prominent roles in a slew of fascinating, relatively under-the-radar works like Philip Kaufman’s HENRY & JUNE (1990), George Armitage’s MIAMI BLUES (1990), and Beth B.’s TWO SMALL BODIES (1993).
Ward’s greatest gift was for fashioning performances that both embodied and parodied (though never in a mean-spirited or condescending way) particularly American mannerisms and forms of masculinity. Whether bringing to life American icons such as astronaut “Gus” Grissom (THE RIGHT STUFF) or writer Henry Miller (HENRY & JUNE), or more ordinary, unexceptional figures like UFORIA’s ultimately well-meaning huckster Sheldon Bart in UFORIA or the long-suffering, repeatedly humiliated cop Hoke Moseley in MIAMI BLUES, Ward demonstrated an unparalleled ability to zero in on both the absurd delusions and the underlying dignity of the characters he played, and to embody these characters in a way that was at once comically exaggerated and yet ultimately authentic.
Special thanks to Chris Chouinard (Park Circus); Jack Durwood (Paramount); Jason Jackowski (Universal); Andrew Lampert; and George Schmalz (Kino Lorber).
John Binder
UFORIA
1984, 93 min, 35mm
“Director John Binder was inspired to write the script for this warm-hearted character study on small-town hucksters, evangelical revivalism, and UFOs after a chance encounter with a human interest newspaper article about a couple in Waldport, Oregon, who had started their own religion. Only superficially inspired by the mid-’70s exploits of Heaven’s Gate founders Marshall “Bo” Applewhite and Bonnie “Peep” Nettles, the film follows drifter Sheldon Bart (Fred Ward, in one of his most resourceful roles) and revival tent faith healer Brother Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) as their paths cross with a supermarket clerk with a religious affinity towards UFOs (Cindy Williams). With a rollicking country music soundtrack and deft performances all around, Binder spins a rather sympathetic portrayal of mass hysteria – as if ELMER GANTRY were told with the gentle, home-spun touch of early Jonathan Demme, with a dash of the psychotronic absurdism of REPO MAN thrown in for good measure.” –Tyler Maxin
Fri, Jan 13 at 6:45, Tues, Jan 17 at 7:00, and Fri, Jan 20 at 9:00.
Don Siegel
ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ
1979, 112 min, 35mm
“Based on true events, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ focuses almost entirely on the story of one Alcatraz inmate Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) as he plans and executes his escape from what was once the most secure prison in America. Starting from the moment when Morris is escorted into “The Rock,” the film immediately constructs an environment of closure and constraint, and, with quick sequences lacking any exposition, it ingeniously avoids drawing meaning out of the circumstances of imprisonment and instead simply points to the act of escape as a natural response.” –Evelyn Emile
Fri, Jan 13 at 9:00, Sat, Jan 14 at 9:00, and Mon, Jan 16 at 6:30.
Guy Hamilton
REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
1985, 121 min, 35mm
“Based on THE DESTROYER, a long-running series (149 titles so far!) of pulp novels created by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir concerning the exploits of super-agent Remo Williams, the movie version roped in BOND director Guy Hamilton and sometime BOND screenwriter Christopher Wood. But the magic didn’t happen; it seemed that the world…didn’t really see the need for what was described on the film’s release as a ‘red, white and blue-collar’ version of 007. […] The tone of the film is relentlessly tongue-in-cheek, much of it is played for laughs and too much time is spent focusing on Remo’s training. He’s paired up with inscrutable Korean martial arts guru Chiun (played, uncomfortably, by famously non-Korean actor/dancer Joel Grey). […] But despite its stodgy pace and idling, unhurried narrative, there’s plenty to recommend in THE ADVENTURE BEGINS. Craig Safan’s fabulously 1980s synth-drenched score is instantly memorable and the [film] is worth the price of admission just for the breathtaking action sequence set on and around the Statue of Liberty, covered in scaffolding at the time of the filming. Years before CGI and green screen took much of the real skill out of this type of big set-piece, the sequence is all the more impressive because it’s done with real stuntmen on a real location taking what look like insane risks for the sake of a motion picture.” –Paul Mount, STARBURST MAGAZINE
Sat, Jan 14 at 3:45 and Wed, Jan 18 at 9:00.
Walter Hill
SOUTHERN COMFORT
1981, 106 min, 35mm-to-digital
“Seen from a 40-year remove – when Donald Trump’s presidency has again inspired many Americans to regard their country with shame and dismay – [SOUTHERN COMFORT] seems courageous, even cathartic in its blunt critique of all-American hubris, aggression, and paranoia. It takes place in the Louisiana bayou sometime in 1973. A squad of National Guard soldiers, almost all of them hot-headed jerks, get assigned to weekend maneuvers in an endless stretch of swamp. They soon get lost, and, during a stand-off with a bunch of Cajun hunters, one soldier opens fire on the strangers with a round of blanks. The Cajuns, reasonably taking this as an act of aggression, declare war on the Guardsmen; over the next couple days, the soldiers’ situation goes from bad to worse, with nearly all of them falling prey to the backwoods trappers and their own in-fighting. SOUTHERN COMFORT exhibits the same economical storytelling and fine-calibrated suspense as Hill’s earlier THE DRIVER and THE WARRIORS, but the abstract quality of those films is replaced here by a concrete sense of anger. More impressively, Hill delivers his anti-American anger through narrative elements familiar from countless American action movies, making the film a genuinely subversive one.” –Ben Sachs
Sat, Jan 14 at 6:30 and Tues, Jan 17 at 9:15.
Beth B.
TWO SMALL BODIES
1993, 88 min, 35mm-to-DCP
“A single mother (Suzy Amis) comes home one day to find her suburban house in disarray and her two young children missing; a police lieutenant (Fred Ward) turns up and, convinced she murdered the children, proceeds to question her at length. These are the only two characters in this playlike, rather ritualized chamber piece with sadomasochistic overtones, which never strays from the house and its immediate environs. Written and precisely directed by Beth B and shot in Germany, this independent effort is sustained by the talented actors, though how much one warms to the ambiguous goings-on will depend a great deal on one’s own psychosexual predilections.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
Sun, Jan 15 at 4:45 and Sun, Jan 22 at 6:45.
Philip Kaufman
THE RIGHT STUFF
1983, 193 min, 35mm
“THE RIGHT STUFF condenses the early history of America’s space program – from the moment that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 to the various solo missions by astronauts undertaken in the early 1960s. The story is structured as a mosaic of characters, fragments and vignettes. We see teams of proud, professional pilots confront, time and again, a sea of ‘suits’: politicians, engineers, bureaucrats. We see the generally disintegrating marital and family lives of the astronauts. We see the entire circus of media coverage of the space flights. And we see the top-level machinations of White House officials as they look at smuggled footage of Russian technological achievements, and then plot the next frantic counter-move in the space race. […] THE RIGHT STUFF is Kaufman’s most perfectly achieved film, and also his most eloquent, since it creates a precarious but superb equilibrium between patriotic belief and ironic disbelief, between vulgarity and sublimity, between experimental filmmaking and the Lucas-Spielberg blockbuster. […] I rate it among the great American films of the 1980s.” –Adrian Martin
Sun, Jan 15 at 7:00 and Sat, Jan 21 at 2:45.
Ron Underwood
TREMORS
1990, 96 min, 35mm
“One of the great cult movies of its era. A genuine mix of horror and comedy – where the horror elements are still quite scary, and the comedy witty and fast – this tale of an attack by wormlike monsters that burrow and travel underground did okay business theatrically, but became a massive hit on video, even spawning some sequels. As a hybrid genre effort, it really is quite rare – the kind of picture where no element overpowers the others. And Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon are terrific as the two wisecracking handymen who find themselves having to battle these mysterious creatures.” –Bilge Ebiri, VULTURE
Mon, Jan 16 at 9:15, Fri, Jan 20 at 6:45, and Sat, Jan 21 at 9:15.
George Armitage
MIAMI BLUES
1990, 97 min, 35mm
A rare example of a perfect novel leading to an almost equally perfect film, MIAMI BLUES is an adaptation of the first of the Hoke Moseley books by the peerless writer Charles Willeford, a national treasure if ever there was one. Filming a novel as singular and flawless as MIAMI BLUES would seem to be a project doomed to failure, but veteran filmmaker George Armitage achieves the near-impossible, capturing the book’s sublime mixture of black comedy, random violence, quasi-existential absurdity, disarming charm, and deglamorized feel for American lives, whether law-abiding or otherwise. Armitage is immeasurably aided by indelible performances by Alec Baldwin, as the blithely psychopathic Fred (“Junior”) Frenger, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his impossibly innocent pick-up, Susie, and, above all, Fred Ward, who is perfectly cast as the long-suffering, quasi-ridiculous, yet paradoxically dignified cop Hoke Moseley.
Wed, Jan 18 at 6:30, Sat, Jan 21 at 6:45, and Sun, Jan 22 at 9:00.
Philip Kaufman
HENRY & JUNE
1990, 136 min, 35mm
“HENRY & JUNE is daringly, heroically sexy. Its subject is the relationship between the American writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and his wife, June (Uma Thurman), and their friend and lover, Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros), in the Paris of the 1930s. But beyond that, the film is about sex itself, and it’s bold in the sense that, like Kaufman’s previous film, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, it expresses its themes of liberation and the quest for identity in erotic terms, seriously and uncompromisingly and for adults. […] As Miller, Ward gives a hilarious rendition of burly American bravado, but he keeps the character’s vulgarities in balance with his artistic drives. This is a star performance with a character actor’s authenticity. It’s a driving, impassioned piece of comic acting.” –Hal Hinson, WASHINGTON POST
Thurs, Jan 19 at 7:15 and Sun, Jan 22 at 3:45.
