Revival: 42nd Street

Happy New Year! This week's revival film: 42ND STREET (1933)


SHOW TIMES:
Saturday, January 2 at Noon
Monday, January 4 at 7 PM
Thursday, January 7 at 9 PM


42ND STREET 1933 Dir. Lloyd Bacon. Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, George Brent, Guy Kibbee, Una Merkel, Ginger Rogers. Choreography by Busby Berkeley. 89m. bw. 35mm.


"42ND STREET's charm and fascination lie in director Bacon's fast-paced and vivid backstage atmosphere, crammed with exhausted chorus kids and sudden hysterics. The great cast is in fine fettle....The real star, though, is the master of kaleidoscopic imagery, Busby Berkeley. Backed by the ebullient songs of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, Buzz unleashed his startling creations on an escapism-hungry public. The dizzying combination of sexuality and abstraction in such numbers as "Young and Healthy," "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," and the title tune remains potent to this day. A film that returned it's $400,000 investment ten times over, inspired dozens of imitations and a Broadway reprise in the 1970s, 42ND STREET, "that avenue I'm takin' you to," remains hard to beat."
-- TV Guide

Some photos from Lost & Found reception

Featuring work by Greglan Ward, Kristin Tata, Annie Gray Robtrecht, Sarah Matson, Antoinette Suiter, Andrew Hegele, Alex Russel, Melody Often, and Heather Boaz.

Revival: A Night at the Opera

The Charles' revival for this week is A NIGHT AT THE OPERA.



Show Times:
Saturday, December 26 at Noon
Monday, December 28 at 7 PM
Wednesday, December 30 at 9 PM
No Thursday Show.


1935. Dir. Sam Wood. Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kitty Carlisle, Margaret Dumont. 96m. bw.

"Two beautifully stuffed American targets - grand opera and high society - are left dismantled, flapping like scarecrows. (If you ever could listen to Il Trovatore with a straight face, you can never do so again.)...This comedy has its classic sequence: the stateroom scene, which is widely regarded as the funniest five minutes in screen history. It will sustain you through the dreadful duets."
(Pauline Kael)

Revival: Manhattan

This week's revival: Woody Allen's MANHATTAN.


Show Times:
Saturday, December 19 at Noon
Monday, December 21 at 7 PM
Wednesday, December 23 at 9 PM
(No Thursday Show)

1979 Dir. Woody Allen. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep. Cinematography, Gordon Willis. 96m. bw. CinemaScope. 35mm.


"Woody Allen's 1979's bittersweet mash note to the city features gorgeous widescreen black-and-white photography from Gordon Willis and a fabulous cast. TV writer Isaac (Allen) chases love and sex with teenaged Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), but it's the neurotic Mary (Diane Keaton) who comes between him and his best friend. Hopelessly romantic, unabashedly nostalgic, and comically self-reflexive, at this point Manhattan is the most quintessentially Woody Allen of his career, being explicitly about relationships--to each other, to movies--and how they shape the self. It remains an entertaining treat." (City Paper)



"Woody Allen's great leap forward into character development and dramatic integrity (1979). The story is La Ronde with a thrown cog, as Allen's Isaac Davis, a television writer with serious aspirations, turns among three women (Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton, and Meryl Streep), his spin impelled by best friend Michael Murphy. The script is funny and observant, full of shocks of recognition..." (Dave Kehr)

"The only truly great American movie of the 1970s. A masterpiece that has become a film for the ages by not seeking to be a film of the moment." (Andrew Sarris)


"The Woody Allen movie where it all came together. The city is gorgeously rendered by cinematographer Gordon Willis; the apartments are lovingly cluttered with cultural detritus; the mainly East Side locations have been fastidiously selected. Every line is a one-liner, but the dialogue flows擁t's not only funny but also seamless." (J. Hoberman)

"Stunningly Beautiful! Woody's supreme masterpiece!" (Time Out New York)


"ABSOLUTELY PERFECT!
The most refined distillation of Woody Allen's sensibility and his best film." (NY Magazine)

Interview with cinematographer Gordon Willis

Revival: Trouble in Paradise

A new print of Ernst Lubitsch's TROUBLE IN PARADISE is the revival for this week.


Showtimes:
Saturday, December 12 at Noon
Monday, December 14 at 7 PM
Thursday, December 17 at 9 PM


1932 Ernst Lubitsch. Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, Charles Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig, Leonid Kinskey. 86m. bw.

"...the most Lubitschian Lubitsch. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins are a pair of professional thieves who fall in love while plundering the Riviera, but when Marshall falls under the spell of the wealthy Parisienne he intends to fleece (Kay Francis), their perfect relationship falters. The bons mots fly and an elegant immorality abounds, while beneath the surface the most serious kinds of emotional transactions are being made." (Dave Kehr)

“One of the gossamer creations of Lubitsch's narrative art...it would be impossible in this brief notice to describe the innumerable touches of wit and narrative skill with which it is unfolded.” (Alexander Bakshy)

“A shimmering, engaging piece of work...in virtually every scene a lively imagination shines forth.” (NY Times)


"I have played Trouble in Paradise to three different generations over the past forty years or so, to the delight of all of them." (Alistair Cooke)

"A masterpiece of light comedy, with sparkling dialogue, innuendo, great performances and masterly cinematic narrative...the masterpiece of American sophisticated cinema." (Leslie Halliwell)

"This movie seemed to have everything: the grace and elegance of the twenties, the egalitarian conscience of the thirties, the visual wit of the silent cinema, and the verbal wit of the talkies." (Andrew Sarris)


"Trouble in Paradise has none of the single-entendre tawdriness or salacious Puritanism that gives pre-Code Hollywood its carnival flavor. Style is substance in Lubitsch's instantly recognized masterpiece: "As close to perfection as anything I have ever seen in the movies," the young Dwight Macdonald wrote in a little literary magazine. Indeed, style is morality....
Never equaled, Trouble in Paradise twinkles like the polestar in the sky above the comedies of Billy Wilder, George Cukor, and (less brightly) Otto Preminger; it anticipates the banter of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest." (J. Hoberman)

Next CTWU Art Exhibit

Opening Thursday, December 10 from 7-9 pm. Be there!

Revival: Breakfast at Tiffany's

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S is the Charles' revival film for this week.



SHOWTIMES:
Saturday, November 28 at Noon
Monday, November 30 at 7 PM
Thursday, December 3 at 9PM



1961 Blake Edwards. Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Balsam, Mickey Rooney. Cinematography by Franz Planer. Oscar for Best Original Song "Moon River" (Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer) 115m. Technicolor.


Audrey Hepburn brought a bounty of spontaneous humor and emotion to her signature roles, and it's all on slapstick-sophisticated display in 1961's "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Except for Mickey Rooney's controversial comic caricature of a Japanese expatriate, it's a soft, romantic variation on Truman Capote's novella of the same name. But it creates its own goofy glamour and casts its own warming glow. (Michael Sragow)

Revival: Duck Soup

Don't miss DUCK SOUP at the Charles-- Saturday and Monday showings only.


Showtimes:
Saturday, November 21 at Noon
Monday, November 23 at 7 PM
No show Thursday.

1933 Leo McCarey. Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern, Edward Arnold. 68m. bw. 35mm.


"A Marx Brothers revival has long been overdue. Let's hope the Charles' presentation of their masterpiece "Duck Soup" helps kicks one off. It's a good thing that the Charles plays old movies more than once a week. The punning effrontery of Groucho and the dialect comedy of Chico come so fast and mock-furious that even their target audiences in the 1930s had to attend the films several times to catch all the jokes. Each brother of the brothers (except game, banal Zeppo) could also be a sight gag unto himself. And each had his comic force multiplied when he played off another Marx or two. Chico's piano-playing, for example, could be a drag, but the group knew how to mine it for laughs.


They had already annihilated college life in their 1932 burlesque "Horse Feathers," and the next year, in "Duck Soup," they took on an even larger institution than academia - statehood - as Groucho (here the president of the struggling nation of Freedonia) and Chico and Harpo (as secret agents) aim fusillades at every aspect of war with an abandon unmatched until Kubrick made "Dr. Strangelove" 40 years later. And even Kubrick backed off from ending his film with a custard-pie fight, while the Marx Brothers merrily sling slimy fruit at Freedonia's patroness while celebrating a meaningless victory over the country of Sylvania. It makes most other parodies of nationalism taste like thin broth, indeed." (Michael Sragow)

"A few years ago I was asked what films I would like to see again just for my own pleasure, and without a second's thought I replied Duck Soup." (Pauline Kael)

Crispin Glover screening It Is Fine! at the Charles Theatre

On Thursday, November 19th, Crispin Hellion Glover will appear at the Charles Theatre to present his Big Slide Show and a screening of his film “It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE” (2007. Part 2 of the "It" Trilogy). The screening will be followed by a question and answer session and a book signing.


... But first, get in the spirit before he arrives with a screening of River's Edge at The LOFT (120 North Ave) on wednesday night the 18th at 8pm. First 20 people through the door get free tickets for the events at The Charles.
and let rumors of an after party circulate freely.


Tickets avaiable now at the Charles Theatre box office and at Brown Paper Tickets.
For more information (347) 247 3921
Show Time: 7:30
Tickets are $20 and are available now at the Charles Theatre box office. Buy your tickets early!


Charles Theatre
1711 N. Charles Street
Baltimore
(410) 727-FILM

The LOF/t
120 North Ave
410-914-7878

crispinglover.com/slideshow

Revival: The Hustler

This week the Charles presents an archival print of THE HUSTLER starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason.



Showtimes:
Saturday, November 7 at Noon
Monday, November 9 at 7 PM
Thursday, November 12 at 9 PM

1961 Robert Rossen. Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Murray Hamilton, Myron McCormick, Michael Constantine, Stefan Gierasch, Jake LaMotta (bartender), Art Smith (uncredited). 134 m. bw. Cinemascope.


Robert Rossen's 1961 feature is a somber morality play postulating as existential hero a pool hustler perfecting his craft (Paul Newman at his best). It makes wonderful use of its seedy locations (memorably filmed in black-and-white 'Scope by Eugen Shuftan, who won an Oscar for his work) and its first-rate secondary cast (Piper Laurie, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, and Murray Hamilton). Adapted by Rossen and Sidney Carroll from a Walter Tevis novel, this picture is so much better than Martin Scorsese's belated sequel The Color of Money that they don't even belong in the same category. A postnoir melodrama with metaphysical trimmings, it does remarkable things with mood and pacing, and the two matches with Gleason as Minnesota Fats are indelible. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)


watch trailer