Phantom of the Opera @ Charles Theatre

Showtimes: Saturday, September 26 at Noon. Monday, September 28 at 7 pm Thursday, October 1 at 9 pm 1925 Dir. Rupert Julian. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry, Gibson Gowland. 93m. bw. SIlent with music track.

...The Phantom is invested by the intense and inventive Lon Chaney with a horror and poignancy that is almost entirely created with body language. More of his face is covered than in modern versions (a little gauze curtain flutters in front of his mouth), but look at the way his hand moves as he gestures toward the coffin as the titles announce "That is where I sleep." It is a languorous movement that conveys great weary sadness. The Phantom's unmasking was one of the most famous moments in silent film. He is seated at his organ. "Now, when he is intent on the music," Sandburg wrote, "she comes closer, closer, her fingers steal towards the ribbon that fastens the mask. Her fingers give one final twitch -- and there you are!" There you are, all right, as Chaney, "the Man of 1,000 Faces" and a master of makeup, unveils a defacement more grotesque than in any later version, his mouth a gaping cavern, his nose a void, his eyes widely staring: "Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!" (Roger Ebert)

Human Foliage Opening

Annie Hall @ Charles Theatre

A new print of Woody Allen's Oscar-winning ANNIE HALL screens three times this week as the Charles' revival.

Showtimes:

Saturday, September 19 at Noon

Monday, September 21 at 7 pm

Thursday, September 24 at 9 pm

1977. Dir. Woody Allen. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken, Mordecai Lawner, Jeff Goldblum, Dick Cavett. 93m.

In a boy-has-already-lost-girl story, comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) reflects on his failed romance with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) and attempts to get her back. It's a slight story but what makes this film significant in Allen's long career is that it's really the first time he wrote adult characters. Previous movies such as the mock Russian literature epic "Love and Death" are funnier but are only really a sequence of gags. From here his writing (with Marshall Brickman) and directing make an unexpectedly subtle and involving movie. It's in "Annie Hall" that Allen first seems to have first learned the power of excision. Later he would re-shoot scenes, or once an entire movie ("September"), but here he deleted over an hour of footage. What's more, "Annie Hall" is really a murder-mystery but you'd never know it because that lost hour of footage included the murder and the mystery (this surplus plot became the basis of Allen's "Manhattan Murder Mystery"). Crime is a crutch in storytelling because it starts with the crime and ends with the inevitable unmasking of the villain, so it's a mark of greater sophistication that Allen chose to throw that away. This more intelligent film-making is rewarding because it hasn't dated as much as its 1970s fashions or focus on psychiatry. Its best sequence is still being ripped off, too: Allen and Keaton have a flirtatious chat that is subtitled with what each of them is really thinking. It's really no surprise that "Annie Hall" beat "Star Wars" to the Best Picture Oscar of 1977. (William Gallagher, BBC) "Arguably Allen's best film: a thoroughly winning examination of the relationship between the ditzy title character and Allen's standard neurotic loon. A seminal '70s movie, and it holds up beautifully." – Time Out New York "Recommended! Remains Allen's clearest, cleanest intersection of whimsy, riotousness, and angst. It's a film that lovers and would-be lovers bond over—a jumbled sketch of a romance from start to finish, with well-observed moments of what love is really like." – The Onion “An aggressively experimental fantasia in which he unleashed all the kung fu in his cinematic arsenal, Annie Hall leaves any other romantic comedy made since choking on its dust.” – Grady Hendrix, The New York Sun

Next CTWU Art Exhibit

LE DOULOS @ the Charles Theatre

Don’t miss Jean-Paul Belmondo in LE DOULOS directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (ARMY OF SHADOWS, BOB LE FLAMBEUR). LE DOULOS screens three times this week as the Charles’ revival.


Show times:
Saturday, September 12 at Noon
Monday, September 14 at 7 PM
Thursday, September 17 at 9 PM

LE DOULOS (1962 Jean-Pierre Melville) Jean-Paul Belmondo, Serge Reggiani, Jean Desailly, René Lefèvre, Marcel Cuvelier. 108 m. In French with English subtitles.


Jean-Pierre Melville's existentialized gangster films are one of the glories of the French cinema, American forms played out with European self-consciousness. This 1962 effort stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as an informer on the lam, but plot pales before Melville's detailed noir imagery of dingy hotel rooms, back alleys, and subterranean passages. Melville's love for American films (he was a man of taste as well as talent) was one of the most profound influences on the New Wave generation. In French with subtitles. 108 min. (Dave Kehr)



If you do only one thing this week, see LE DOULOS!
If you dug the re-release of his Army of Shadows...
it's time to catch up with this essential title from Melville's filmography.
– Time Out New York

For fans of classic hard-boiled crime cinema, nothing all summer will compete with the crystalline new black-and-white print of Le Doulos, the great Jean-Pierre Melville's most influential film… A masterful blend of economy and style.
– Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

A gripping and effective mood piece from one of the greats.
– Bilge Ebiri, New York magazine

A superbly-crafted film noir! Taut and Terrific!
-David Sterritt

Jean-Pierre Melville's Brutal and subtly brilliant policier...underscores why the French put the name to film noir.
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

The movie is a French neo-noir that comes from 1962. The setting is the Parisian underworld. The dodgy nightclub owner is Michel Piccoli. The snitch paranoid that a just released prisoner is out to get him is Jean-Paul Belmondo. The title refers to a type of hat, the kind worn by the informer, hence why "doulos" becomes slang for a criminal canary. The cinematography is black and white. Almost everybody smokes. And the director is Jean-Pierre Melville. Need we say more?
-Bret McCabe, City Paper

TOMORROW NIGHT!

Summer with Monika @ the Charles Theatre this week

Showtimes:
Saturday, August 29 at Noon
Monday, August 31 at 7 PM
Thursday, September 3 at 9 PM


1953 (Ingmar Bergman) Harriet Andersson, Lars Eckborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell. 96m. In Swedish with English subtitles.


When revived in Paris, then-critic Jean-Luc Godard hailed Monika in a frenzy of enthusiasm as "the cinematographic event" of 1958: "Ignored when it was first shown on the boulevards, [Monika] is the most original film of the most original of directors. It is to cinema today what Birth of a Nation is to classical cinema." In the U.S., the movie—with its 20-year-old star Harriet Andersson swimming in the nude—inspired another sort of excitement. Veteran exploitation distributor Kroger Babb cut the film to 62 minutes, dubbed the dialogue, added a Les Baxter score, and released it as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. Woody Allen claims to have camped out on the sidewalk the night before its Flatbush opening. Uneven and sometimes clumsy, Monika doesn't nearly justify Godard's claims, but it's easy to see what impressed him. Bergman's tale of heedless teenage love is a sort of neorealist Rebel Without a Cause—except that sex is acknowledged and the outlaw is a girl....(J. Hoberman)

A Place in the Sun @ Charles Theatre

This week's revival: A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951) directed by George Stevens.


Showtimes:
Saturday, August 22 at Noon
Monday, August 24 at 7 PM
Thursday, August 27 at 9 PM

A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951 George Stevens) Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Anne Revere, Raymond Burr. 122m.

Academy Awards for Best Director, Screenplay, Cinematography (William C. Mellor), Editing (William Hornbeck), Score (Franz Waxman), Costume Design (Edith Head).



Previously filmed in 1931 under its original title, Theodore Dreiser's bulky but brilliant novel An American Tragedy was remade in 1951 by George Stevens as A Place in the Sun. Montgomery Clift stars as George Eastman, a handsome and charming but basically aimless young man who goes to work in a factory run by a distant, wealthy relative. Feeling lonely one evening, he has a brief rendezvous with assembly-line worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), but he forgets all about her when he falls for dazzling socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). Alice can't forget about him, though: she is pregnant with his child. Just when George's personal and professional futures seem assured, Alice demands that he marry her or she'll expose him to his society friends. This predicament sets in motion a chain of events that will ultimately include George's arrest and numerous other tragedies, including a vicious cross-examination by a D.A. played by future Perry Mason Raymond Burr. A huge improvement over the 1931 An American Tragedy, directed by Josef von Sternberg, A Place in the Sun softens some of the rough edges of Dreiser's naturalism, most notably in the passages pertaining to George's and Angela's romance. Even those 1951 bobbysoxers who wouldn't have been caught dead poring through the Dreiser original were mesmerized by the loving, near-erotic full facial closeups of Clift and Taylor as they pledge eternal devotion. ~ Hal Erickson

Children of Paradise @ Charles Theatre this week

The Charles Theatre’s Revival Series will screen a new print of LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS this coming week. Don’t miss it.


Showtimes:
Saturday, August 15 at 11 AM (Please note the earlier-than-usual starting time);
Monday, August 17 at 7 PM;
Thursday, August 20 at 9 PM.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE Les enfants du paradis. (1945 Marcel Carné) Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoir, María Casares, Marcel Herrand, Louis Salou. In French with English subtitles. 190m.


A fresco conceived on a majestic scale, Children of Paradise sweeps its audience back to the 1820s, painting the detail of a world obsessed with both theater and crime. The original screenplay by Jacques Prévert drew its inspiration from such colorful personalities of the period as Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the innovative mime; Pierre-François Lacenaire, a murderer who went to the scaffold; and Frédérick Lemaître, a celebrated actor for whom both Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo wrote plays. Jean-Louis Barrault, fascinated by the character of Deburau (Baptiste in the film), urged Prévert to develop a story around him. The result was a tightly plotted narrative dominated by the fictional figure of Garance (played by the inimitable Arletty), a woman who arouses the passion and envy of the film’s four leading men....

Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement lies in its evocation of a vanished epoch, a “lost paradise” of Proustian proportions. The costumes and sets by Alexandre Trauner and the music of Joseph Kosma contribute to a vivid, teeming environment that enables Children of Paradise to transcend the theatrical circles in which it moves. Both men, incidentally, had to work anonymously to conceal their Jewish origins from the authorities.


One of the richest embodiments of romantic agony in 20th-century art, Children of Paradise still rules the seas of French cinema like some proud galleon, the ultimate exemplar of classical filmmaking, great acting, and a perfectly constructed screenplay. For many critics, it remains the finest French film ever made.
-Peter Cowie. Full Review

Children of Paradise is the high-water mark of the Golden Age of French cinema. -Brian Stonehill

Trailer

This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carné and written by Jacques Prévert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theatre and life. -Pauline Kael

Q and A with Director and Editor of Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg @ the Charles Theatre Friday

Friday, August 14th only.

Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Director Aviva Kempner and editor Judith Herbert will be on hand at the Charles Theatre for a Q and A. after the 6:45 show this Friday.

Aviva will also introduce the film at 6:45pm.