F a S T E N Y O U R S E a T B E L T S W I L L I a M W Y L

2016 24th season

F A S T E N Y o u r S E A T B E L T S It’s Bette Davis at her best

including... Four Films by W i l l i a m W y l e r

1 12th Annual Northumberland Film Sundays Weekend Film Festival Rainbow Cinemas Cobourg Northumberland Mall January 20- 22, 2017 Program details and tickets on sale early December 2016

Help us help others while enjoying TIFF films

www.northumberlandfilm.ca

2 M e s s a g e from MARie DresSLer FounDATION

hen a serious fire in 1989 nearly destroyed Marie Dressler’s birthplace, operating Was a restaurant at the time, the Community responded: “…we must save the herit- age home of Hollywood’s best loved actress of her day.” Marie Dressler Foundation, a not-for-profit registered charity, was created in 1990 to lead the fundraising efforts to save and restore the building. Of the many fundraising initiatives of the day, one of the most popular was a film festival showing vintage films. Thus began the Vintage Film Festival (originally named Cobourg Film Festival). In a few short years, with the strong support of the community, Marie Dressler House was re-opened and the Foundation created a small memorabilia room dedicated to the life and achievements of Marie Dressler. Now in its 24th year, the Vintage Film Festival has evolved into an important fund-raising event for the Foundation’s charitable activities, specifically awarding bursaries to graduating high school students pursuing post-secondary studies in the performing or visual arts. Recently, the Foundation has also raised funds from government agencies and the community at large to create a new interactive exhibition “From Cobourg to Hollywood: The Story of Marie Dressler” in the newly opened Marie Dressler Museum. For more information, please see page 8. On behalf of the Board of Directors of Marie Dressler Foundation, and all of the many volunteers and recipients of bursaries, thank you so much for your continued patronage. And, while you are in the area, take some time to enjoy lovely Port Hope, Cobourg and Northumberland County.

Rick Miller, President & Chair

Marie Dressler Director Marg Baily Director Alma Draper Foundation Board Ex-officio Director & Webmaster John Draper President & Chair Rick Miller Ex-officio Director & Chair of Vintage Corporate Secretary Terry Foord Film Festival Cathie Houston Treasurer Bill Patchett Honourary Chair Delphine Patchett www.mariedressler.ca Foundation Historian & Director Barbara Garrick Box 880, Cobourg, ON Chief Financial Officer K9A 4S3 Sharron Wharram-Spry

3 This year I PLEDGE to Shop LOCAL Spend LOCAL Eat LOCAL Enjoy LOCAL and support the local businesses that support me and my community

334 Spring Street • Cobourg, ON K9A 3K4 t: 905.372.8888 • f: 905.372.9104 www.readyprint.ca

Toronto silent film Festival

APRIL 6 - 11, 2017 torontosilent lmfestival.com

Design & Advertising www.nashnash.com

4 M e s s a g e from the Vintage Film Festival Chair

ast year’s Vintage Film Festival was the best attended in our history. So when our Lcommittee was tossing around ideas for this year’s event, we wanted to be sure to build on our success with a special theme. We quickly thought of Bette Davis. After all, she was—and still is—larger than life: one of Hollywood’s biggest stars ever. And as we considered which movies to show, another name kept coming up: William Wyler, the acclaimed director with whom Davis worked on several occasions. And then the light dawned: wouldn’t it be fun to see some of their best remembered collaborations—Jeze- bel, The Letter—and then see examples of their work independent of each other? So that’s the logic behind many of our selections this year, but that’s just part of the fun as we present 13 movies sure to appeal to all you cinemaphiles. As usual, we have two silent films—one a grim social commentary, the other a laugh-filled lark—and both will be presented as silent movies should be: with live piano accompaniment. We also have some landmark films, such asGrand Hotel, Carmen Jones and Roman Holiday, each of which made history in its time. And maybe best of all, we have Alfred Hitch- cock’s Psycho. Made in 1960, it’s the newest film we’ve ever featured—believe me, it has stood the test of time and will surely jolt you out of your seat! Between movies, be sure to check our silent auction, with lots of goodies for you to bid on. In the theatre lobby, you’ll also find a desk where you can buy this year’s souvenir T-shirts and posters. And if you have a weekend pass, you should attend our Brown Bag Lunch on Sunday, where guest speaker Thom Ernst will offer his thoughts on women in cinema. You can be sure Bette Davis will be part of this talk. Before the lights go down, let me take this opportunity to sincerely thank all the donors, sponsors, advertisers, film festival patrons and volunteers, whose generosity, patronage and efforts have all been critical in putting this festival together. We trust this year will be an even bigger success than last.

Cathie Houston, Chair

Vintage Film Festival Promotion & Publicity Chris Worsnop, George Atto, Alma Draper, Ross Pigeau Committee Members Program Editor Tom Cruickshank Editor Emeritus Michael Hanlon Chair Cathie Houston Reception & Venues Lynn Hardy Correspondence Leslie Benson Silent Auction Phyllis Hendry Fund-raising Phyllis Hendry, Alma Tickets Rick Miller Draper, Cathie Houston Treasurer Sharron Wharram-Spry Film Programming Terry Foord, Chris Webmaster/Secretary John Draper Worsnop, Michael Hanlon www.vintagefilmfestival.ca

5 Brown Bag Lunch with

T h o M E R n s t Sunday at noon

hom Ernst knows movies. Once the host of TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies and Tstill a respected film critic and broadcaster, we are thrilled once again to present him as our lunch -time speaker this year. He’ll be on hand at the Sculthorpe Theatre (upstairs at the Capitol) on Sunday to offer his take on the power of women in Hollywood (no doubt Bette Davis will be part of the conversation) as well as lots of other observations on the golden age of cinema. Learn more about Thom at reelthomernst.com. Brown bag lunches are available this year at a cost of $8.50, which includes tax. Please order (and select the sandwich of your choice) at the reception desk in the lobby of the Capitol Theatre. The deadline for ordering is 1:00 p.m. on Saturday.

Space is limited! This event is for Festival (weekend) passholders only.

The Capitol Theatre

here isn’t a venue in Canada better suited to the Vin- Ttage Film Festival than the Capitol Theatre right here in Port Hope. Not only is it the right size, the theatre—like the movies we show—is vintage, too. Built in 1930 specifically for talkies, it is, in fact, an architectural treasure and one of only a handful of “atmospheric” theatres in Canada. Just as the movies promise patrons an escape from the everyday, an atmospheric theatre is itself part of the show, an architectural fantasy as creative as anything you’ll see on screen. The Capitol adopts the theme of a “Norman castle” with medieval cues throughout, accented Archival photo circa 1930 by plenty of decorative novelties. The fun starts outside, where the marquee suggests a drawbridge, while the lobby lures you into the castle keep. Inside, garden motifs adorn the wall, while twin turrets watch over the auditorium. There’s even a twinkling twilight sky on the ceiling above. Earlier in 2016, the Capitol was designated a National Historic Site by Parks Canada. In a town known for architectural treasures, the theatre is a jewel in its crown.

6 MARIE DRESSLER

B u r s a r y W i n n e r s

ne of the reasons the Vintage Film Festival exists at all is to raise funds toward the OMarie Dressler Bursaries, which are awarded annually to one or more local high- school grads as they embark on further education. Among the criteria for the award are high academic standing, a record of volunteerism and a demonstrated interest in a career in the arts. Each award is worth $1,500. From all the applicants, the four 2016 winners were:

• A resident of Castleton, Christian Hodge graduated from East Northumberland Secondary School. He’s a pianist, composer and playwright who has been active in any number of local theatrical productions. He has also been a tireless volunteer at the Westben theatre and deserves special accolades for being accepted at the the prestigious Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts in Toronto.

• Amy Scott is off to Western University for studies in Media Production. In high school, she was a dedicated volunteer, eager to do any job if it meant she would learn something about theatre production. She performed with Northumberland Players and even directed a version of Arsenic and Old Lace when only in Grade 10. Last year, she won the Town of Cobourg Civic Award for Arts.

• David Robert of Cobourg played the Cowardly Lion in a local production of The Wizard of Oz and took improv training at the Second City in Toronto. An accom- plished writer, he should do well as he strives to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production at York University.

• Carlie White from Cobourg decided to focus on film at an early age and has been active in theatre ever since. She played leading roles in the Northumberland Players Aladdin, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White. She is now enrolled in Film & Media Production at Humber College.

7 A N N O U N C I N G...

Who... ? • starred in the first full length comedy film with Charlie Chaplin? • starred with Greta Garbo in her first talking role in a film? • was Tugboat Annie? • won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931? • was the top grossing actor in Hollywood in both 1932 and 1933? • was the first Canadian on the cover of Time magazine? • was the best loved comedienne of her time?

Why, of course, who else but our own Cobourg-born Marie Dressler?

Marie Dressler Foundation proudly presents

Visit Canada’s newest museum featuring state-of-the-art interactive technology, and discover why Marie Dressler was one of the best loved actors of her time. Watch Marie perform in a clip from the first full length comedy film with Charlie Chaplin. Listen to Marie sing Broadway hits of the early 1900’s. Explore interesting details about Marie’s life and achievements. Take a pose with Marie. Open weekdays 9 am – 4 pm at Marie Dressler House 212 King St W, Cobourg

For more information visit www.dresslermuseum.com

8 The Board of Directors of Marie Dressler Foundation wishes to thank the following donors and sponsors for their generous support in the creation of Marie Dressler Museum:

Presenting Donors Cameco Corp. Rotary Club of Cobourg

Museum Design Donor University of Toronto, Faculty of Information

Corporate Donors CIBC Woodlawn Inn New Amherst Homes

Government Donors Canada 150 Infrastructure Program Ontario Trillium Foundation Town of Cobourg

Supplier Donors Farrow & Ball, Dorset England Heather Cooper Staples Canada Inc. Sine’s Flooring Century Electric Closson Chase Vineyards

Supplier Partners Ganaraska Art & Framing Malcolm Pratt Keep On Rolling Northumberland Archives Kingsmill Kitchens & Baths Seastar Images LA Signs Matthew Kennedy Buttermilk Cafe Media Partners Classical 103.1FM Northumberland 89.7FM

Individual Donors Barbara Garrick Burnham Family Farms Cathie & Les Houston David & Gladys Leech Delphine & Bill Patchett George & Jenny Vukelich Jim & Penny Stanbridge John & Alma Draper Lynn Hardy Mark & Petra Rinas Murray & Marg Dillon Phyllis Hendry Rick & Betsy Miller Sharron Wharram-Spry Bonnie & Terry Foord

9 S p e c i a l S A L U T E Bette Davis & William Wyler

he was known for being headstrong and often combative. In her career—which Sspanned six decades and almost 100 movies—Bette Davis rose to the top from sheer ambition, extraordinary talent and a feistiness that was often displayed in the characters she portrayed on screen. On the set of Jezebel in 1937, she met her match in William Wyler, “I did it his way… Yes, I lost a a director not known to suffer battle, but I lost it to a genius… fools gladly. Hardly an actor’s director, “90-Take Wyler” So many directors were such weak was notorious for demanding sisters that I would have to take perfection while offering little direction. He is said to have bul- over. Uncreative, unsure of them- lied Henry Fonda, Davis’ Jezebel selves, frightened to fight back, co-star, through dozens of takes of a mundane scene, his only they offered me none of the security guidance being “Again! Again!” that this tyrant did.” Fonda couldn’t wait to put Jezebel behind him, but Davis —Bette Davis on working with William actually revelled in Wyler’s Wyler on The Letter perfectionism. Certainly, sparks flew on the set, as Wyler repeatedly browbeat his star for her overt mannerisms, even threatening to clamp a chain around her neck in an effort to hold her head still. Sparks flew off the set, too, as Wyler and Davis embarked on a notorious affair. Davis was the biggest star of her “She was difficult in the same way that I generation. Wyler was a prolific director whose was difficult. She wanted the best.” career went from the —Director William Wyler at the American Film silents to Funny Girl. Institute tribute to Bette Davis Hollywood legends both, they are fascinat- ing choices for a retro- spective film festival like ours. This year, we present two of their collaborations—Jezebel (page 16) and The Letter (page 24)—each considered among their best work today. For the sake of comparison, we also offer samples of their work without the involvement of the other: Davis in All About Eve (page 28) and The Catered Affair (page 34); Wyler’s Dead End (page 32) and the romantic Roman Holiday (page 26). See for yourself how well each fared together and apart.

10 Ruth Elizabeth Davis April 5, 1908-October 6, 1989 American actress, born in Lowell, Massachusetts 4 husbands, 3 kids

• First Film: Bad Sister (1931) • Breakthrough Film: Of Human Bondage (1934) • Oscar Nominations: Dangerous (1935—awarded); Jezebel (1938— awarded); Dark Victory (1939); The Letter (1940); The Little Foxes (1941); Now, Voyager (1942); Mr. Skeffington(1944); All About Eve (1950); The Star (1952); Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Claims to Fame • Highest paid actress of her time • First actress to earn 10 Oscar nominations • First female president Academy of Wilhelm Weiller Motion Picture Arts & Sciences July 1, 1902-July 27, 1981 Swiss-American director, born in Alsace, then part of Germany 2 wives, 5 kids

• First Film: The Crook-Buster (1925, silent) • Breakthrough Film: Hell’s Heroes (1929, sound) • Oscar Nominations: Dodsworth (1936); Wuthering Heights (1939); The Letter (1940); The Little Foxes (1941); Mrs. Miniver (1942— awarded); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946—awarded); The Heiress (1949); Detective Story (1952); Roman Holiday (1953); Friendly Persuasion (1956); Ben Hur (1959—awarded); The Collector (1965)

Claims to Fame • More Oscar nominations (12) than any other director • Directed more Oscar-nominated actors (36) than any other director

11 Silent Film M u s i c i a n s

piano accompaniment adds immeasurably to the enjoyment of a silent film, setting the mood and adding thrills to the action. Rarely do they follow a score, but are Acomposed and improvised by the musicians themselves. On hand at this year’s festival are two talented pianists:

•Bob Milne (The Last Laugh)— Bob clocks about 80,000 kilometres a year as he tours North America to give piano concerts. At ease in any number of genres from ragtime to boogie-woogie to the classics, he’s also a gifted composer. His most renowned work is Concert for America, which he wrote in the after- math of 9/11. Moreover, he is no stranger to silent cinema, having composed accompaniment to several Buster Keaton films as well as the 1924 version of Saint Joan. We can’t wait to hear what he has in store for Murnau’s classic The Last Laugh. Bob is s such a musical mastermind that he has attracted the attention of a group of neuroscientists studying the human brain. Honest. Pianist Sponsors: Langhorne Irwin Wharram-Spray LLP; Instant Shade Tree Experts, Jerad Spry

• Jordan Klapman (Speedy)— This is Jordan’s fourth year as an accom- panist here at the VFF, having previously shown his talents during our showings of Bucking Broadway, Battleship Potemkin and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. He is a bandleader, music director and recording producer whose musical interests span jazz, show tunes, klezmer, pop and Dixie- land. As a lecturer, Jordan gained renown for his “edutaining” observations on 20th-century pop music. His subjects range from The History of Tin Pan Alley; Simply Brill: Great Songs of the ’60s; and Broadway’s Greatest Composers. Pianist Sponsors: Les & Cathie Houston

12 2016 P r o g r a m

Friday, October 14

4:00 p.m. Registration 4:15 p.m. Born Yesterday (1950) with Judy Holliday, William Holden & Broderick Crawford 6:00 p.m. Gala Reception 6:45 p.m. Welcome/Announcements/ Bursary Presentation 7:00 p.m. Marie Dressler Presentation 7:15 p.m. Jezebel (1938) with Bette Davis, Henry Fonda (William Wyler, director) 9:00 p.m. Break 9:15 p.m. Carmen Jones (1954) Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte 11:00 p.m. Program concludes Saturday, October 15 8:30 a.m. Registration 9:00 a.m. Hue and Cry (1946) with Alastair Sim 10:25 a.m. Break 10:40 a.m. Speedy (1928) by Harold Lloyd; Silent film with live piano accompaniment 12:10 p.m. Lunch 1:30 p.m. The Letter (1940) with Bette Davis (William Wyler, director) 3:05 p.m. Break 3:20 p.m. Roman Holiday (1953) with Audrey Hepburn (William Wyler, director) 5:20 p.m. Dinner 6:45 p.m. All About Eve (1950) with Bette Davis, Anne Baxter 9:05 p.m. Break 9:20 p.m. Psycho (1960) with Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins 11:10 p.m. Program concludes

Sunday, October 16

9:00 a.m. Registration 9:30 a.m. Dead End (1937) with Humphrey Bogart (William Wyler, director) 11:05 a.m. Break 11:20 a.m The Catered Affair (1956) with Bette Davis & Ernest Borgnine 12:55 p.m. Brown Bag Lunch withThom Ernst (Weekend Pass holders only) 2:05 p.m. The Last Laugh (1924) by F. W. Murnau; Silent film with live piano accompaniment 3:20 p.m. Break 3:35 p.m. Grand Hotel (1932) Greta Garbo, John Barrymore 5:45 p.m. Program concludes

• Headsets for assisted hearing available • Program subject to change without notice

13 Cast Broderick Crawford, Judy Holliday, William Holden Director George Cukor Producer S. Sylvan Simon Cinematography Joseph Walker Play Garson Kanin Screenplay Albert Mannheimer Studio Columbia

B O R N Y e s t e r d a y

4:15 p.m. • Friday, October 14 USA • 1950 • 103 minutes • B&W Sponsor: Lynch Rutherford Tozer

eorge Cukor’s reputation as a “woman’s director” certainly rings true in this beloved comedy-drama, whose focus is clearly squeaky-voiced Judy Holliday, Gdespite the solid presence of co-stars Broderick Crawford and William Holden. In fact, the movie—which traces the transformation of a not-so-dumb blonde who gradually realizes she should set her sights higher than her gangster boyfriend—belongs to Holliday, who reprises the role that shot her to stardom on Broadway. Rita Hayworth was first considered for the movie version, but ultimately Holliday won the Oscar for this role, despite stiff competition from favourites Bette Davis (in All About Eve—see page 28) and Gloria Swanson (in Sunset Boulevard). Forgettably remade in 1993 with then-Hollywood couple Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson.

Academy Award Nominations Best Actress (Judy Holliday—awarded), Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Costume Design (B&W)

14 Reviews • Pleasant film version of a cast-iron box office play. Subtle and intelligent in all departments, yet with a regrettable tendency to wave the flag.—Leslie Halliwell, 1980

• A very simple idea, but enlivened by a sharp, witty script and by Cukor’s effortless handling of the brilliant performances; especially fine are Holliday, as the dumb blonde who makes good, and Crawford, as the confused sugar-daddy, nowhere more so than in the marvellous scene where her mindless singing disturbs his concentration over a game of gin rummy.—Geoff Andrew, Time Out

• Just in time to make itself evident as one of the best pictures of this fading year is Columbia’s trenchant screen version of the stage play, Born Yesterday. More firm in its social implications than ever it was on the stage and blessed with a priceless performance by rocketing Judy Holliday, this beautifully integrated compound of character study and farce made a resounding entry at the Victoria yesterday. On the strength of this one appearance, there is no doubt that Miss Holliday will leap into popularity as a leading American movie star—a spot to which she was predestined by her previous minor triumph in Adam’s Rib as the tender young lady from Brooklyn who shot her husband (and stole the show). For there isn’t the slightest question that Miss Holiday brings to the screen a talent for characterization that is as sweetly refreshing as it is rare. Playing the wondrous ignoramus that she created on the stage—the lady to whom her crude companion rather lightly refers as a “dumb broad”—this marvelously clever young actress so richly conveys the attitudes and the vocal intonations of a native of the sidewalks of New York that it is art. More than that, she illuminates so brightly the elemental wit and honesty of her blankly unlettered young lady that she puts pathos and respect into the role. But it must be said in the next breath that Miss Holliday doesn’t steal this show—at least, not without a major tussle—for there is a lot of show here to steal. Not only has the original stage play of Garson Kanin been preserved by screenwriter Albert Mannheimer in all of its flavorsome detail—and that, we might add, is a triumph of candor and real adapting skill—but George Cukor has directed with regard for both the humor and the moral. And Broderick Crawford has contributed a performance as the merchant of junk who would build himself up as a tycoon that fairly makes the hair stand on end. Where this role was given some humor and even sympathy on the stage, in the memorable performance of Paul Douglas, Mr. Crawford endows it with such sting—such evident evil, corruption, cruelty and arrogance—that there is nothing amusing or appealing about this willful, brutish man. He is, indeed, a formidable symbol of the menace of acquisitive power and greed against which democratic peoples must always be alert. And that’s why his thorough come-uppance, contrived by his newly enlightened “broad” amid the monu- ments of serene and beautiful Washington, is so winning and wonderful. In short, a more serious connotation has been given the role on the screen and Mr. Crawford plays it in a brilliantly cold and forceful style. As the Washington correspondent hired to cultivate the junkman’s girl—an enterprise which leads directly to her enlightenment and revolt—William Holden is tuned to perfection. He has dignity, diligence and reserve and gives a romantic demonstration of tolerance and amorous regard. It might be added in this connection that Miss Holliday, while frankly gotten up in the most absurdly tasteless outfits, is not a repulsive dish. —Bosley Crowther, the New York Times, December 27, 1950

15 Cast Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Margaret Lindsay, Fay Bainter Director William Wyler Producer Henry Blanke Screenplay Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, John Huston Play Owen Davis Music Max Steiner Cinematography Ernest Haller Studio Warner Brothers

J e z e b e l

7:15 p.m. • Friday, October 14 USA • 1938 • 104 minutes • B&W Sponsor: Lynn Hardy, RBC Wealth Management

ezebel tells the story of a headstrong Southern belle who loses her man because of her Junladylike behaviour. Sounds like a rip-off of Gone with the Wind, but in fact, Jezebel came first. Indeed, it is often credited with establishing the Civil-War-era drama as a kind of movie sub-genre unto its own. But that’s not its only feat. Jezebel is also cited as an early proto-feminist film, for portraying a heroine struggling for her independence. It is also noted for innovative camerawork, lingering on close-ups that allow the actor to better express emotions. The latter was just one of the techniques attributed to director William Wyler, a notorious perfectionist. Despite frustrations with him, star Bette Davis praised him for encouraging her sublime performance, which earned her an Oscar. There would be other collaborations—professional and romantic—between them, but Jezebel was their first. Even so, the film is best remembered today more as Davis’ triumph, launching her from mere stardom to even greater fame as a cinema icon. From then on, she was the undisputed “first lady of the American screen.” After all that, who needs Scarlett O’Hara?

16 Academy Award Nominations Best Actress (Bette Davis—awarded), Best Supporting Actress (Fay Bainter—awarded), Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Score

Reviews • A really outstanding screen triumph for Bette Davis. She plays an emotional role that calls for running the gamut of emotions, and she handles the part with consummate artistry.—Film Daily

• Superb star melodrama, tossed to Davis in compensation for losing Gone with the Wind and dealt with in high style by all concerned.—Leslie Hallowell, 1984

• Its excellences come from many sources: good plotting and writing, a director and photographer who knows how to make the thing flow along with dramatic pictorial effect, and a cast that makes its story a record of living people.—James Shelley Hamilton

• Something went wrong with Jezebel, possibly nothing more than the plot, and all its rich dressing-up can’t make it alive... No scene quite comes off, and at the end, when the she-devil suddenly turns into a saint and a martyr, one isn’t even interested. This Jezebel just seems daffy.—John Mosher, The New Yorker

• It would have been considerably more effective… if its heroine had remained unregenerate to the end. Miss Davis can be malignant when she chooses, and it is a shame to temper that gift for feminine spite. It is still an interesting film, though, in spite of our sniffs at its climax.—Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times

• Director William Wyler’s Jezebel is a magnificent production from top to bottom. The impressive and meticulous attention to detail in the costumes and sets are impeccable. The screenplay is beautifully constructed. Characters, themes and conflicts are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the story. Davis, who won an Academy Award for this role, delivers an amazing performance. Watch how she fiddles with her purse when confronting Fonda at the bank. There is not a false note in her actions from start to finish. Fonda has been criticized in the past for being too weak in his role, but that is simply not true. As Preston, he bends but he never breaks. And when the time comes to stand up to Julie there is no sterner backbone in the entire movie. Finally, it is through the painstaking efforts of Wyler that everything comes together. From the nuanced direction of his actors and the steady build-up of the story to its riveting conclusion, it is flawless.—Michael Ballard, examiner.com, 2012

• Without the zing Davis gave it, it would have looked very mossy indeed.—Pauline Kael, 1968

17 Cast Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams Director/Producer Otto Preminger Screenplay Harry Kleiner Music Georges Bizet Lyrics Oscar Hammerstein II Cinematography Sam Leavitt Studio 20th Century Fox

C a r m e n J o n e s

9:15 p.m. • Friday, October 14 USA • 1954 • 105 minutes • CinemaScope Sponsors: Greg & Harriet Binkley

nly in Hollywood could a bizarre concept like Carmen Jones take flight. Start with Oa Broadway musical, which itself was adapted from Bizet’s famous opera, Carmen; set it in the present; write it specifically for an all-African American cast; tweak the characters a little and shoot it in CinemaScope. Not everyone agrees that it works, but there’s no denying Carmen Jones’ place in history, as it was one of only a handful of mainstream movies to feature black actors in anything but supporting roles as servants. The brains behind Carmen Jones was none other than director Otto Preminger (Laura, Stalag 17, Exodus), who took a fancy to the Broadway version, but had a hard time selling the project to a studio. Ultimately, he produced it himself. To this day, reviewers lampoon it for being stagey, despite the innovative use of the wide-screen CinemaScope, but most of their criticism is reserved for the manner in which black life in the World War II-era was sugar-coated for a mass audience. Carmen Jones may not have told us anything new about the black experience in America, but it gave us Dorothy Dandridge, the first African-American sex symbol.

18 Academy Award Nominations Best Actress (Dorothy Dandridge); Best Score

Reviews • Black American updating of Bizet’s opera. Not really satisfactory but given full marks for trying, though the main singing is dubbed and the effect remains doggedly theatrical.—Leslie Halliwell, 1984

• Underneath its obvious charms—slinky Dorothy Dandridge, brawny Harry Belafonte and a handful of memorable numbers relocated from Bizet’s original—the 1954 film version of Oscar Hammerstein’s all-black Broadway musical now feels like a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks. It was, however, laudable in its desire to showcase the talents of African-American performers who were denied opportunities in Hollywood.—Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, 2007

• Carmen Jones, the opera Carmen of Bizet in an American Negro translation, which made quite a hit when it was tumbled onto a Broadway stage in 1943, is again a big musical shenanigan and theatrical tour-de-force in the giant-sized motion picture version that Otto Preminger delivered last night to the Rivoli. Crowded with more Negro talent than you could catch on a Saturday night at the Harlem Apollo, turned out in colors that nearly blind you and splashed across the CinemaScope screen, this lot of bamboozling by way of Bizet and Oscar Hammerstein II is a sex melodrama with longhair music and a mad conglomeration of bizarre show. Do not go to it expecting to hear a fully integrated opera sung or see a particularly sensitive or intelligent Negro drama performed. Mr. Hammerstein’s job of transferring the Bizet music and the story of Prosper Mérimée into an American locale and idiom was a sheer stunt of carpentry, and the product betrays from every angle its jerry-built incongruities. The tale of the cigarette-maker Carmen and the Spanish cavalry soldier Don José is now a modern-day story of a parachute factory worker in the South and a stalwart G. I.—named Joe, naturally—who is about to go to flying school.And the Spanish toreador, Escamillo, is now Husky Miller, a prize-ring champ, who captures the favor of the Southern Carmen after she has seduced Joe and caused him to go A.W.O.L. In essence, it is a poignant story. It was in the opera of Bizet, and it is in the rich nostalgic folklore of the American Negro in the South. But here it is not so much poignant as it is lurid and lightly farcical, with the Negro characters presented by Mr. Preminger as serio-comic devotees of sex. Carmen, performed by Dorothy Dandridge, is the most notable devotee—a slinky, hip-swinging, main-drag beauty with a slangy, come-hither way with men. And, far from the desperate, tragic hunger for possession that Bizet’s Carmen has, this cool, calculating little siren seems interested mainly in a good time. Likewise the Joe of Harry Belafonte is an oddly static symbol of masculine lust, lost in a vortex of confusion rather than a nightmare of shame. He is the hero, but he is oddly unheroic in this noisily ridiculed role. Olga James as his ever-loving sweetheart is a wistful little comic figure, too, and Joe Adams as the arrogant Husky Miller is virtually a caricature of a bully-boy. Pearl Bailey’s performance as Frankie, a roadhouse gal, is unrestrainedly broad, and around the fringes there are numerous and assorted Amos ‘n’ Andy characters.—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, October 29, 1954

19 Cast Alastair Sim, Jack Warner, Harry Fowler, Valerie White Producer Michael Balcon Director Charles Crichton Screenplay T. E. B. Clarke Cinematrography Douglas Slocombe, John Seaholme Music Georges Auric Studio Ealing

H u e a n d C r y

9:00 a.m., Saturday, October 15 UK • 1946 • 82 minutes • B&W Sponsors: David & June Chambers; Chris & Brenda Worsnop

ecause Alastair Sim is so well remembered for his priceless portrayal of Scrooge in Bthe 1951 movie version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it is sometimes forgotten that he was a major star in British cinema in the 1940s and ’50s and made over 50 films. The story of a group of East End London boys—and one girl—who foil a gang of petty crooks, Hue and Cry shows Sim in a different light, but it is best remembered today for its location shooting. Indeed, in setting the story in the bombed-out, rubble-strewn streets of London, it is almost as good as documentary footage as a reminder of the damage wrought by the war. Ostensibly a comedy, the film is best described as a thriller for kids.

Reviews • Refreshing, blood-tingling and disarming.—Richard Winnington

• The first “Ealing comedy” uses vivid London locations as background for a sturdy comic plot with a climax in which the criminals are rounded up by thousands of boys swarming over dockland. —Leslie Halliwell, 1984

20 • It is possible that scenarist T. E. B. Clarke, director Charles Crichton and producer Michael Balcon were unduly influenced by the biblical phrase, “and a little child shall lead them.” At any rate, they have corralled as curious a covey of cockney kids as can be found on any side of the Thames and put them to work leading and misleading their el- ders. The result, as apparent in Hue and Cry, the British-made comedy-melodrama which arrived at the Art Theatre on Eighth Street yesterday, is a welcome amalgam of farce, preposterous coincidences and juvenile melodramatics. The fact of the matter is that those adept film makers are obviously poking fun at the cheap serials that shock and enthrall youth on both sides of the Atlantic, and, it appeared to this viewer, that they are slyly ribbing the film medium as an ever-bubbling font of shoddy cops-and-robbers adventures. No matter what the inspiration may be, this item, deviating from the norm, is amusing and briskly paced as its London Dead End kids, led by an imaginative teenager, discover that the thriller they’re ecstatic about is not only a lurid comic-book tale but also is being used as a set of directions between a big-league crook and his gang. The efforts of the juvenile sleuths to prove that the Trump magazine series contain bits of horrible fact as well as flamboyant fiction is, naturally, met with derision by both the police and the adults with whom they come in contact. But, as has been noted, truth, with quite a hefty assist from the scenarist, does finally prevail. Not, however, before the boys are involved in scrapes which take them on a fairly graphic and complete tour of London from the West End down through the docksides and the bombed-out area that serves as their own preserve. The cameras give mute evidence to London’s wartime scars, and also serve to capture some highly comic moments in such locales as a department store in which they are trapped by the police, the sewers by which they escape, and in the razed block where the climactic capture of the criminals is effected. As the wide-eyed youngster endowed with an uncanny flair for deduction, Harry Fowler heads a company of comparatively unknown moppets, including Joan Dowling, Douglas Barr, Ian Dawson and David Simpson, through their strenuous paces with professional ease. That company, it should be noted, takes it all in stride and, despite a profu- sion of accents that might confuse American moviegoers, their intent and performances are neat and comic. Jack Warner, as the Covent Garden produce wholesaler who is conducting a thriving business on the side in gangland, contributes a broad but sturdy portrayal, as does Jack Lambert, as the police inspector who is revealed as the gang chief. And Valerie White adds her bit in a caricature of a gang moll. Although Alastair Sim has only a pair of scenes in which to exhibit his brand of humor he acquits himself admirably. As the timorous author of the blood-and-thunder tales, which the lads divulge are being warped without his knowledge, he is genuinely funny as he mutters, “Oh, how I loath adventur- ous-minded boys.” Chances are the customers won’t feel the same way. Despite the fact that this film was turned out in 1946, it is a fresh and entertaining antic.—The New York Times, January 9, 1951

21 Cast Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff, Babe Ruth Producer Harold Lloyd Director Ted Wilde

S p e e d y

10:40 a.m. • Saturday, October 15 Pianist: Jordan Klapman USA • 1928 • 82 minutes • B&W • Silent Sponsor: Barbara Garrick

ondly remembered in the same league as fellow silent stars Charlie Chaplin and FBuster Keaton, Harold Lloyd likewise relied on a persona, namely a dapper dandy who wore round-rimmed spectacles and a straw bowler hat. In Speedy, his mission is to save the last horse-drawn streetcar in New York, which sets up a series of physical gags and pratfalls, but also presents a certain nostalgia for days gone by. Just as Hue and Cry (page 20) is known today for inadvertently documenting war-ravaged London, the location shooting in Speedy is renowned among historians for the way it captures the street life and architecture of New York at the height of the roaring ’20s. Speedy was Lloyd’s last silent film. Look for baseball superstar Babe Ruth in a cameo as one of the hapless passengers.

Academy Award Nomination Best Director of a Comedy

22 Reviews •Harold Lloyd’s effervescent comedy, Speedy...is a film with quite a strong whimsical touch, in as much as the theme is devoted to the last horse car in Little Old New York. The introduction of the city itself is done in a fashion that will make every New Yorker proud of the Empire City. And for that matter, wherever Mr. Lloyd takes you in this film he rather makes you regret that you haven’t been there for some time. There’s Coney Island, for instance. This chapter on the greatest amusement resort in this country is done so well that despite the crowds, the jammed subway trains, the “hot-dogs,” the temporary structures, it gives something equivalent to the spirit of youth. It is pictured so well that elderly gentlemen and their spouses may find themselves tripping over to the place at which they had turned up their noses for a couple of decades. Mr. Lloyd has parceled out his comic stuff in a clever fashion. There is continuity to the whole story, the time that elapses is brief and each episode wins hearty rounds of laugh- ter. This comedian shows his knowledge of dogs just as he does of human beings. He brings in baseball cunningly just as the baseball season has commenced. And, moreover, he shows himself driving none other than Babe Ruth in a rickety old taxicab to the baseball ground. Incidentally this race, through what seems to be miles and miles of the city streets, is the best thing of its kind that has been put on the screen. It may not be filmed any better than in other cases, but having Babe Ruth in a taxi that is whisking its way through a maze of traffic at breakneck speed is, of course, more interesting than having Mr. Jones. The big Babe does some excellent acting, for if ever a man looked nervous as the vehicle in which he was riding shaved by other cars, it is the illustrious King of Swat. Mr. Lloyd also looks as if he enjoyed having Mr. Ruth as a passenger. Even the soda fountain is not neglected by Mr. Lloyd. He begins his career in this film as a soda-fountain “swisher.” His ability as a juggler is far above the average vaudeville expert. Glasses are twisted until you become nervous, cherries pop on cream and oranges fly through the store. He has his own way of signaling the result of each in- ning of a baseball game, using pretzels and doughnuts for his improvised scoreboard. There is many a chuckle and guffaw in the series of scenes in Coney Island, for there the comedian does a great deal with an “ice-cream” suit. He calls upon a crab to assist him in his comic activities and works out its bites so that they come to a really clever conclusion. When he has to pay out all his ready cash through tying a dog to a table of china, he hails a friend, the driver of a motor van. He and his girl, Jane Dillon, work out in the van with the furniture, a really comfortable living room, and all on the way from Coney to Manhattan, to “Pop” Dillon’s. “Pop” is the owner of the last gray mare that pulls a street car and also of the car and the line. Nothing succeeds like daring, and this young “Speedy” who can’t keep a job more than a few days, eventually does something reminiscent of Aubrey Piper’s trick in The Show Off. Mr. Lloyd, who was on the scene last night, was said to be a very nervous man. He decided that he was exhibiting his picture to a hypercritical audience, but he was probably not disappointed at the many outbursts of merriment. The comedian is a pound or two heavier than he was in his last picture and this time he permits his character to have a little more of that je ne sais quoi—or ginger.—Mordaunt Hall, The New York Times, April 7, 1928

23 Cast Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Gale Sondergaard Producer Hal B. Wallis Director William Wyler Screenplay Howard Koch Play Somerset Maugham Cinematography Tony Gaudior Studio Warner Brothers

T h e L e t t e r

1:30 p.m.• Saturday, October 15 USA • 1940 • 95 minutes • B&W Sponsors: Joan & Paul Macklin; Meet at 66 King East

ritics are notorious for disliking even the best of movies, but they had a hard time Cfinding something wrong with The Letter, the third collaboration between Bette Davis and William Wyler. Indeed, they tripped over themselves with superlatives—even Leslie Halliwell, who hated everything, had to gush (see “Reviews” below). Today, The Letter still holds up for its masterful performances, deliberate pacing and intelligent script. Set on a rubber plantation in exotic Malaya, the film is a clever whodunit, although we know who did it right from the opening sequence. What keeps us guessing is the question of whether that “who” will be discovered. However (and there has to be a “however”), there was justified criticism about the ending, which was stitched together to appease Hollywood censors, who insisted that an evil character must be punished. Had it been allowed to stick to Somerset Maugham’s original play, Bette Davis might have gotten away with murder.

Academy Award Nominations Best Picture; Best Director; Best Actress (Bette Davis); Best Supporting Actor (James Stephenson); Best Original Music Score; Best Editing; Best Cinematography (B & W)

Reviews • The writing is taut and spare throughout…the unraveling of Maugham’s story is mas- terly and the presentation visual and cinematic.—James Agate

24 • Excellent performances and presentation make this the closest approximation on film to reading a Maugham story of the Far East, though censorship forced the addition of an infuriating moral ending.—Leslie Halliwell, 1984

• Director William Wyler was remarking recently that the final responsibility for a picture’s quality rests solely and completely upon the shoulders of the man who directs it. His, said he, is the liability if an actor’s performance is at fault; he is the one to cen- sure—or to thank—for the finished effect, since it is the director, after all, who makes the picture and okays it. Mr. Wyler spoke at a most propitious moment. For seldom has this theory been more clearly and more flatteringly supported than it is by his own screen version of Som- erset Maugham’s play, The Letter, which was delivered yesterday at the Strand. Indubita- bly Mr. Wyler must be grateful to Bette Davis, James Stephenson, Herbert Marshall and an excellent cast for doing as he told them; obviously Mr. Maugham supplied him with a potent play, out of which Howard Koch fashioned a compact script. But the ultimate credit for as taut and insinuating a melodrama as has come along this year—a film which extenuates tension like a grim inquisitor’s rack—must be given to Mr. Wyler. His hand is patent throughout. For the story told in The Letter is not an especially bold or novel one. Theatre- goers who saw Katharine Cornell [a famous stage actress, who incidentally, knew Cobourg well—ed] perform it a dozen years ago on the stage or Jeanne Eagels play it in 1929 on the screen will agree. It is the morbid tale of the wife of an English rubber planter in the Malay States who kills a man, presumably in defense of what is known as her honor. As the tedious inquest proceeds, however, it becomes known to her lawyer that a letter is in existence—a letter written by the woman to the dead man on the day of the deed—which fatally incriminates her. And thus the desperate and degrading task of the woman and her lawyer is to get this letter away from the native girl who owns it, the widow of the murdered man, and thereby to prevent complications. The manner in which this is done and what happens after fill out the substance of the story. It is an evil tale, plotted with an eye to its torturing effects. And Mr. Wyler has directed the film along those lines. With infinite care, he has created the dark, humid atmosphere of the rubber country. At a slow, inexorable pace, he has accumulated the details. His camera generally speaks more eloquently than any one in the picture—when, for instance, it finds a dead body lying in a rubber-curing shed or picks up the lacquered face of the native woman or focuses significantly upon the tinkling decorations in a Chi- nese room. The tensile strength of Mr. Wyler’s suspense is incredible. And his actors, too, have been directed for the distillation of somber moods. Miss Davis is a strangely cool and calculating killer who conducts herself with reserve and yet implies a deep confusion of emotions. James Stephenson is superb as the honest lawyer who jeopardizes his reputation to save a friend—a shrewd, dignified, reflective citizen who assumes a sordid business with distaste. He is the strongest character in the film. Gale Sondergaard cryptically conveys the enigmatic menace of the native woman. Only the end of The Letter is weak—and that is because of the postscript which the Hays office has compelled. The play ended with the freed wife returning to her poor husband, who knows that she doesn’t love him. But they must go on living together. The Hays office demand for “compensating moral values” makes Miss Davis pay for her criminal deed with her own violent death. It is a feeble conclusion. But, never mind—the picture as a whole is insured against even that. It is fine melodrama, in short. Postman Wyler has rung the bell—several times.—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, November 23, 1940

25 Cast Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Ed- die Albert, Hartley Power Producer & Director William Wyler Screenplay Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton Cinematography Henri Alekan, Franz Planer Costume Design Edith Head Studio Paramount

R o m a n H o l i d a y

3:20 p.m. • Saturday, October 15 USA • 1953 • 118 minutes • B&W Sponsor: Horizon Plastics International Inc.

fter seeing Jezebel (page 16) and The Letter (page 24), you’ve already seen why AWilliam Wyler earned a reputation for delivering high drama. Roman Holiday is different—it’s a lark, set in an exotic locale and brimming with romance. It stars Audrey Hepburn in her starmaking performance, as a princess who breaks away from her regal routine to enjoy a carefree fling in exotic Rome. Nothing could be further from the brood- ing Bette Davis. Roman Holiday earned ten Oscar nominations and won three. One of these— Best Original Story—proved controversial as it was awarded to Ian McLellan Hunter, who had little input into the script but was merely a front for the actual author, Dalton Trumbo. One of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted for Communist sympathies, Trumbo worked uncredited on this and several other 1950s films. His work wasn’t officially rec- ognized until 1960.

Academy Award Nominations Best Actress (Audrey Hepburn—awarded), Original Story (Ian McLellan Hunter— awarded), Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Photography, Best Support- ing Actor (Eddie Albert), Best Costume Design (Black & White—awarded); Best Art Direction (Black & White)

26 Reviews • Wispy, charming, old-fashioned romantic comedy shot in Rome and a little obsessed by the locations; one feels that a studio base would have resulted in firmer control of the elements. The stars, however, made it memorable. —Leslie Halliwell, 1984

• While Capra, or in a different way Lubitsch, could have made something wholly enjoy- able from it, it would seem that Wyler’s technique is now too ponderously inflexible for such lightweight material.—MFB

• Call Roman Holiday a credit to William Wyler’s versatility. The producer-director, who has been expending his not inconsiderable talents on worthy but serious themes, is herein trying on the mantle of the late Ernst Lubitsch and making it fit fairly well. He certainly is dealing with the formal manners of ultra-high society and, if the unpolished common man is very much in evidence, too, it does not matter because his cast and the visually spectacular backgrounds of Rome, in which this romantic excursion was filmed, also are necessary attributes to this engaging story. A viewer with a long memory might recall some plot similarities between Roman Holiday and It Happened One Night. This is not important. Mr. Wyler and his as- sociates have fashioned a natural, tender and amusing yarn about the heiress to the throne of a mythical kingdom who is sick unto death of an unending schedule of speeches, greet- ings and interviews attendant on her goodwill tour and who suddenly decides to escape from these bonds of propriety. Her accidental meeting with Joe Bradley, the American journalist, and the night she spends in his apartment are cheerful, untarnished and perfectly believable happenstances in which romance understandably begins to bloom. The director and his scenarists, Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton, have sensibly used the sights and sounds of Rome to dovetail with the facts in their story. Since the newspaper man is anxious to get the exclusive rights to the princess’ adventures in the Eternal City, and since he is also anxious to keep her in the dark as to his identity, a Cook’s Tour of the Eternal City is both appropriate and visually edifying. This is not a perfunctory trip. Mr. Wyler and his camera crew have distilled chuckles as well as a sightseeing junket in such stops as the Princess getting a new coif- fure; a perfectly wild motorscooter ride through Roman streets, alleys and market places winding up with a session in a police station, and an uproarious dance on one of the barges on the Tiber that terminates with the princess and her swain battling and escap- ing from the sleuths sent to track her down. The cameras also have captured the raucous sounds and the varied sights of a bustling, workaday Rome; of sidewalk cafes; of the Pantheon; the Forum; and of such various landmarks as the Castel Sant’ Angelo and the rococo, mirrored grandeur of the Colonna, Brancaccio and Barberini Palazzi. Although she is not precisely a newcomer to films,Audrey Hepburn, the British actress who is being starred for the first time as Princess Anne, is a slender, elfin and wistful beauty, alternately regal and childlike in her profound appreciation of newly-found, simple pleasures and love. Gregory Peck makes a stalwart and manly escort and lover, whose eyes belie his restrained exterior. And it is altogether fitting that he eschews the chance at that exclusive story considering the circumstances. Eddie Albert is excellent as the bewildered, bewhiskered and breezy photographer who surreptitiously snaps the unwitting princess on her tour.. It is a short holiday in which they are involved but an entirely pleasureable one.—A.W., The New York Times, August 28, 1953

27 Cast Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, Marilyn Monroe Producer Darryl F. Zanuck Screenplay/Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz Novel The Wisdom of Eve by Mary Orr Music Alfred Newman Cinematography Milton Krasner Costume Design Edith Head Studio 20th Century Fox

A l l A b o u t E v e

6:45 p.m. • Saturday, October 15 USA • 1950 •138 minutes • B&W Sponsor: Lynn Hardy, RBC Wealth Management

arly in this film comes one of Bette Davis’ snappiest lines ever: “Fasten your seat Ebelts! It’s going to be a bumpy night!” It’s such pure Davis, that it’s hard to believe she wasn’t the first choice to play Margo Channing, the aging Broadway star whose career is undermined by a not-so-naïve young understudy. The nod was to go to Clau- dette Colbert, who injured her back prior to shooting. Nevertheless, Davis owned the role and it rejuvenated her career. Nominated for 14 Oscars (a record that held until Titanic in 1997), All About Eve won six, not to mention other high honours from the British Acad- emy of Film Awards, Cannes, the Golden Globes and the Director’s Guild of America. A real cinemaphile’s film, known for witty dialogue and well-drawn characters. Look for Marilyn Monroe in a bit part.

Academy Award Nominations Best Picture (awarded); Best Director (awarded); Best Actress (Bette Davis, Anne Bax- ter), Best Supporting Actor (George Sanders, awarded); Best Supporting Actress (Thelma Ritter, Celeste Holm); Best Screenplay (awarded); Best Comedy or Drama Score; Best Sound Recording (awarded); Best Art Direction (B&W); Best Cinematography (B&W); Best Costume Design (B&W—awarded); Best Film Editing

28 Reviews • The wittiest, the most devastating, the most adult and literary motion picture ever made that had anything to do with the New York stage.—Leo Mishkin

•The dialogue and atmosphere are so peculiarly remote from life that they have sometimes been mistaken for art.—Pauline Kael

• The good old legitimate theatre, which has dished out a lot of high derision of Hol- lywood in its time, had better be able to take it as well as dish it out, because the worm has finally turned with a venom and Hollywood is dishing it back. InAll About Eve, a withering satire—witty, mature and worldly-wise — which 20th Century-Fox and Joseph Mankiewicz delivered to the Roxy yesterday, the movies are letting Broadway have it with claws out and no holds barred. Mr. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed it, had been sharpening his wits and his talents a long, long time for just this go. Obviously, he had been observing the theatre and its charming folks for years with something less than an idolater’s rosy illusions and zeal. And now, with the excellent assistance of Bette Davis and a truly sterling cast, he is wading into the theatre’s middle with all claws slashing and settling a lot of scores. If anything, Mr. Mankiewicz has been even too full of fight—-too full of cutlass-edged derision of Broadway’s theatrical tribe. Apparently his creative zest was so aroused that he let himself go on this picture and didn’t know when to stop. For two hours and eighteen minutes have been taken by him to achieve the ripping apart of an illusion which might have been comfortably done in an hour and a half. It is not that his characters aren’t full blown, that his incidents aren’t brilliantly conceived and that his dialogue, pithy and pungent, is not as clever as any you will hear. In picturing the inside story of an ambitious actress’ rise from glamour-struck girl in a theatre alley to flinty-eyed winner of the Siddons Prize, Mr. Mankiewicz has gathered up a saga of theatrical ambition and conceit, pride and deception and hypocrisy, that just about drains the subject dry. Indeed, he has put so many characters — so many vivid Broadway types— through the flattening and decimating wringer of his unmerciful wit that the punishment which he gives them becomes painful when so lengthily drawn. And that’s the one trouble with this picture. It beats the horse after it is dead. But that said, the rest is boundless tribute to Mr. Mankiewicz and his cast for ranging a gallery of people that dazzle, horrify and fascinate. Although the title character—the self-seeking, ruthless Eve, who would make a black-widow spider look like a lady bug—is the motivating figure in the story and is played by Anne Baxter with icy calm, the focal figure and most intriguing character is the actress whom Bette Davis plays. This lady, an aging, acid creature with a cankerous ego and a stinging tongue, is the end-all of Broadway disenchantment, and Miss Davis plays her to a fare-thee-well. Indeed, the superb illumination of the spirit and pathos of this dame gives her merits an Academy award. Of the men, George Sanders is walking wormwood, neatly wrapped in a ma- hogany veneer, as a vicious and powerful drama critic who has a licentious list towards pretty girls; Gary Merrill is warm and reassuring as a director with good sense and a heart, and Hugh Marlowe is brittle and boyish as a playwright with more glibness than brains. Celeste Holm is appealingly normal and naive as the latter’s wife and Thelma Rit- ter is screamingly funny as a wised-up maid until she is summarily lopped off..—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, October 14, 1950

29 Cast Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam Producer/Director Alfred Hitchcock Screenplay Joseph Stefano Book Robert Bloch Music Bernard Hermann Cinematography John L. Russell Studio Paramount

P s y c h o

9:20 p.m. • Saturday, October 15 USA • 1960 • 109 minutes • B&W Sponsor: Patrick Houlihan, RBC Wealth Management

opes weren’t high when Psycho was first released. After the critical and financial Hsuccess of director Alfred Hitchcock’s previous effort, North by Northwest, his new black-and-white horror film looked cheap and sensational. The studio was relieved when he agreed to finance it himself, and even allowed him to take home 60 percent of any profits. But the studio wasn’t counting on that landmark shower scene, in which Janet Leigh is stabbed to death in a cheap motel. That one sequence, accompanied by some of the most heart-stopping music ever dubbed into a movie, remains one of the most masterful and most studied expressions of the director’s art. Psycho set new standards for its genre and is considered the progenitor of today’s slasher flick, although it is much smarter than many of its descendants and likewise, the body count is modestly low. It was a major smash and Hitchcock died a very rich man. Curiously remade—frame by frame—in 1998 by Gus Van Sant.

Academy Award Nominations Best Director; Best Supporting Actress (Leigh); Best Cinematography (B&W); Best Art Direction (B&W)

30 Reviews • Probably the most visual, most cinematic picture he ever made.—Peter Bogdanovich

• After enormous commercial success, it achieved classic status over the years; despite effective moments of fright, it has a childish plot and script and its interest is that of a tremendously successful confidence trick. Made for very little money by aTV crew. — Leslie Halliwell, 1984

• You had better have a pretty strong stomach and be prepared for a couple of grisly shocks when you go to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which a great many people are sure to do. For Mr. Hitchcock, an old hand at frightening people, comes at you with a club in this frankly intended blood-curdler, which opened at the DeMille and Baronet yesterday. There is not an abundance of subtlety or the lately familiar Hitchcock bent toward significant and colorful scenery in this obviously low-budget job.W ith a minimum of complication, it gets off to a black-and-white start with the arrival of a fugitive girl with a stolen bankroll right at an eerie motel. Well, perhaps it doesn’t get her there too swiftly. That’s another little thing about this film. It does seem slowly paced for Mr. Hitchcock and given over to a lot of small detail. But when it does get her to the motel and apparently settled for the night, it turns out this isolated haven is, indeed, a haunted house. The young man who diffidently tends it—he is Anthony Perkins and the girl is Janet Leigh—is a queer duck, given to smirks and giggles and swift dashes up to a stark Victorian mansion on a hill. There, it appears, he has a mother—a cantakerous old woman—concealed. And that mother, as it soon develops, is deft at creeping up with a knife and sticking holes into people, drawing considerable blood. That’s the way it is with Mr. Hitchcock’s picture—slow buildups to sudden shocks that are old-fashioned melodramatics, however effective and sure, until a couple of people have been gruesomely punctured and the mystery of the haunted house has been revealed. Then it may be a matter of question whether Mr. Hitchcock’s points of psychology, the sort highly favored by Krafft-Ebing, are as reliable as his melodramatic stunts. Frankly, we feel his explanations are a bit of leg-pulling by a man who has been known to resort to such tactics in his former films. The consequence in his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair. Mr. Perkins and Miss Leigh perform with verve, and Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam do well enough in other roles. The one thing we would note with disappointment is that, among the stuffed birds that adorn the motel office of Mr. Perkins, there are no significant bats.—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, June 17, 1960

• Seeing the shower scene today, several things stand out. Unlike modern horror films, Psycho never shows the knife striking flesh. There are no wounds. There is blood, but not gallons of it. Hitchcock shot in black and white because he felt the audience could not stand so much blood in colour (the 1998 Gus Van Sant remake specifically repudiates that theory). The slashing chords of Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack substitute for more grisly sound effects. The closing shots are not graphic but symbolic, as blood and water spin down the drain, and the camera cuts to a close-up, the same size, of Marion’s unmoving eyeball. This remains the most effective slashing in movie history, suggesting that situation and artistry are more important than graphic details.—Roger Ebert, December 6, 1998

31 Cast Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Claire Trevor Director William Wyler Screenplay Lillian Hellman Play Sidney Kingsley Music Alfred Newman Cinematography Gregg Toland Studio Samuel Goldwyn

D e a d E n d

9:30 a.m. • Sunday, October 16 USA • 1937 • 93 minutes • B&W Sponsors: Ross Pigeau & Carol McCann

oday, Dead End is remembered for two things: it features Humphrey Bogart in a Tsupporting role before Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon made him a star; and it marks the introduction of the Dead End Kids, who were spun off into dozens of serious movies and later emerged playing for laughs as the Bowery Boys. But there’s more to recommend it. Dead End was written by the renowned Lillian Hellmann (based on a contemporary play) and although its two leads aren’t household names any more, both were in good form and more famous than Bogey. Truth to tell, the supporting cast steals the show, including Bogart, Claire Trevor (pre-Stagecoach) and of course, the Kids. As for director Wyler, who was fresh off his first Oscar nod, Dead End reveals that his masterful touch was already well established. So was his reputation as a relentless perfectionist. Indeed, Hollywood lore has it that Bogart warned Bette Davis against working with him on the upcoming Jezebel. In its day, Dead End was considered a well-crafted social commentary on class relations and juvenile delinquency in contemporary New York City. Its premise—rich and poor living side by side on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—still rings true today.

Academy Award Nominations Best Picture; Best Art Direction; Best Cinematography; Best Supporting Actress (Claire Trevor)

32 Reviews • Samuel Goldwyn’s screen transcription of Dead End, as it came to the Rivoli Theatre last night, deserves a place among the important motion pictures of 1937 for its all-out and well-presented reiteration of the social protest that was the theme of the original Sidney Kingsley stage play. As a picture of life in an East River dead-end street, where hopeless squalor rubs daily against Sutton Place elegance with no more salutary effect on either than mutual irritation, it is again an arresting, inductive consideration of the slum problem, a prima facie case for a revision of the social system. As a motion picture, however, it has technical faults, mainly its rigid adherence to the physical form of the play (seemingly a much too frugal use of so mobile an instrument as the camera), and its reshaping of the play’s pivotal character to make him conform to the accepted cinema hero type. But in spite of these relatively unimportant failings (both can be convincingly defended), the story of the frustrations and rebellions of the underprivileged people of Dead End has been brought smoothly and forcefully to the screen by an admirable cast. Without ever moving off its one magnificent set, a disturbingly accurate conception of a typically contrasty block in the East Fifties, the camera seeks out Drina Gordon, her young orphan brother, Tommy, and his playmates: Dave Connell, sucked back into the environment after six valiant years of study to become an architect; Baby Face Martin, returning to visit the street after ten years as a marauding killer; Kay Burton, seeking retreat from unwholesome luxury in the fashionable apartment that towers above the tenements on the riverfront; and the other people of the teeming block. The show undoubtedly belongs to the six incomparable urchins imported from the stage production whenever they are in view, but the camera occasionally leaves them to their swimming or to their boisterous horseplay to discover Drina, footsore after a day on the picket line, patching her worn shoe with paper; Dave and Kay, longing together for release from their respective imprisonments; Baby Face snarling at life after his mother’s hateful denunciation and his disillusionment on finding that the girl, Francey, hadn’t waited. The character Dave, conceived in the original as an introspective cripple, is altered for Joel McCrea and simplified for the film audience in Lillian Hellman’s adaptation. Here the conflict between the opposed products of the street, Dave and Baby Face, is physical and personal. There is an exchange of dissembled cunning for frank and right- eous hatred, which is more suitable to McCrea’s personality as the film audience knows him, and the film’s climax is staged accordingly. Dave kills off the killer in a remorseless personal combat, instead of merely informing on him. The salty street jargon of the noted youngsters, a feature that perhaps brought more people to the Belasco Theatre in the last two seasons than did the basic theme of the play, has necessarily been purged of its vulgarities, but it is still authentic New Yorkese and the highlight of the play. Curtain calls are in order for all the principals, with as many as they’ll answer to for the youngsters. Of the smaller parts, Claire Trevor’s moment as Francey and Mar- jorie Main’s flat-voiced hate as Martin’s mother are memorable.–John T. McManus, The New York Times, August 25, 1937

• Highly theatrical film of a highly theatrical play, more or less preserving the single set and overcoming the limitations of the script and setting by sheer cinematic expertise. It is chiefly remembered, however, for introducing the Dead End Kids to a delighted world. —Leslie Halliwell, 1984

33 Cast Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie Reynolds, Barry Fitzgerald. Rod Taylor, Robert Simon Screenplay Gore Vidal TV Play Paddy Chayefsky Director Richard Brooks Producer Stan Zimbalist Cinematography John Alton Music Andre Previn Studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer

T h e C a t e r e d A f f a i r

11:20 a.m. • Sunday, October 16 USA • 1956 • 92 minutes • B&W Sponsor: Carlyle Inn & Bistro

ette Davis was 48—that’s positively ancient in Hollywood years—but still go- Bing strong when she starred in The Catered Affair, a feature adaptation of a play originally written for television. Her role as a dowdy housewife was yet another in which she wasn’t afraid to be shown in a less than glamourous light. Here, she plays the frumpy mother of a working class family in the Bronx, who insists her daughter has a fancy, catered wedding despite the cost. Despite Davis’ solid performance, the movie didn’t win the accolades that her earlier work did; moreover, the movie lost money. Reminiscent of Father of the Bride, but definitely not played for laughs. An interesting turn for starlet Debbie Reynolds, after Singin’ in the Rain, and a credible follow-up for Ernest Borgnine after he won an Oscar for 1955’s Marty.

34 Reviews • Rather heavy-going comedy with amusing dialogue from the period when Hollywood was seizing on TV plays like Marty and Twelve Angry Men.—Leslie Halliwell, 1984

• Forgettable… Paddy Chayefsky’s TV drama, adapted by Gore Vidal, of whom there is no detectable trace—Pauline Kael

• The sketch of a poor Bronx family’s bickerings over plans for a wedding that Paddy Chayefsky wrote for television in The Catered Affair has been expanded into a full-length motion picture, with additional bickerings and scenes. It arrived yesterday at the Victoria, with Bette Davis in the key role of the mother of the bride. Unlike Mr. Chayefsky’s previous Marty, which also made the transition from television to the theatre screen, this tale of crabbing and wanting in the Bronx is without great compassion or appeal. And that is partly the fault of the writing, partly the fault of the film and partly the fault of the direction, which is uneven in compass and style. Mr. Chayefsky’s drama was a vignette, at best, as Marty was and Gore Vidal’s screenplay from it only puts a few more whorls on the design. It is simply the story of a mother who decides that her daughter must have a formal wedding reception at a popular Bronx hotel, despite the fact that the family can’t afford it and the daughter doesn’t want it, anyhow. It is essentially a low-income playback of the old keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, thin in subject matter and scant in its probe of character. Furthermore, the performance of Miss Davis as the mother who discombobu- lates the lives of her daughter, her husband and her brother just to gratify her vanity and whims is uncomfortably complicated and alien to the lowly locale. Though made up to look a middle-aged slattern, Miss Davis gives the role the air of a gentlelady who has come down a little in the world and deliberately uses bad grammar, with some effort and considerable shame. Underneath her rolls of fat and dowdy dresses beats the heart of a peevish grand dame. Alongside of her, Ernest Borgnine gawks gargoylishly as her Bronx mate, and Debbie Reynolds is a wisp of delicate beauty and incongruity as the daughter who is about to wed. Such a daughter of such mismatched parents is hard to understand. And Barry Fitzgerald as the Irish brother of the distinctly un-Hibernian Bronx hausfrau is the picture’s most glaring contradiction, albeit its one unquestioned charm. Mr. Fitzgerald’s farcical shows of indignation and boozy blustering give a Dublin overlay to the patches of Bronx and Hollywood qualities that are all mixed up in this film. The addition of a predatory widow, whom Dorothy Stickney plays, to wheedle and catch this Irish bucko is one of the uneven conceits of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Richard Brooks directed in a sort of free-wheeling way that carries the action jumpily from poignancy to farce and from moments of frowsy frustration to scenes of vulgar squawling en famille. The Catered Affair is an unsuccessful gilding of what amounts to a plain, low- down, drawn-out family brawl.—Bosley Crowther, the New York Times, June 15, 1956

35 Cast Emil Jannings, Max Hiller, Maly Delschaft, Hans Unterkirchen Director F. W. Murnau Cinematography Karl Freund Screenplay Carl Meyer Studio UFA

T h e L a s t L a u g h

2:05 p.m. • Sunday, October 16 Pianist: Bob Milne Germany • 1924 • 73 minutes • B&W • Silent Sponsors: David & Dianne Halliday

he story focuses on the humiliation that a once-proud doorman suffers when he is de- Tmoted to a lowly job in a luxury German hotel. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like much to base an entire movie on, but The Last Laugh was a landmark film and is still revered as one of the great achievements of the silent era. Not only is it a movie that deals with the social issues of its time—indeed, the doorman is sometimes considered a metaphor for post-World War I German society—but it is also a technical triumph. While so many early films seem to be mere books illustrated with moving pictures,The Last Laugh turned cinema into a visual medium with a language all its own.

36 Reviews • It definitely established the film as an independent medium of expression. Everything that had to be said was said entirely through the camera.The Last Laugh was cine-fiction in its purest form, exemplary of the rhythmic composition proper to the film.—Paul Rotha

• It is probably the least sensational and certainly the most important of Murnau’s films. It gave the camera a new dominion, a new freedom...It influenced the future of motion picture photography all over the world, and without suggesting any revolution in method, without storming critical opinion as Caligari had done, it turned technical attention towards experiment, and stimulated a new kind of camera-thinking with a definite narrative end.—C. A. Leujeune

• F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh is one of the most famous of silent films, and one of the most truly silent, because it does not even use printed intertitles. Silent directors were proud of their ability to tell a story through pantomime and the language of the camera, but no one before Murnau had ever entirely done away with all written words on the screen (except for one sardonic comment we’ll get to later). He tells his story through shots, angles, moves, facial expressions and easily read visual cues. The film would be famous just for its lack of titles, and for its lead performance by Emil Jannings, which is so effective that both Jannings and Murnau were offered Hollywood contracts and moved to America at the dawn of sound. But The Last Laugh is remarkable also for its moving camera. It is often described as the first film to make great use of a moving point of view. It isn’t, really; the silent historian Kevin Brownlow cites The Second-in-Command, made 10 years earlier. But it is certainly the film that made the most spectacular early use of movement, with shots that track down an elevator and out through a hotel lobby, or seemingly move through the plate-glass window of a hotel manager’s office Murnau’s technical mastery makes all of his films exciting to see. In the vam- pire movie Nosferatu, in the fiendish visions ofFaust, in the imaginary city of Sunrise, he created phantasmagoric visions that seemed to define his characters:They were who they were because of what surrounded them. This is a key to German Expressionism, the influential silent style that told stories through bold and exaggerated visual elements—re- ality slipping over into nightmare and back again. In the case of The Last Laugh, however, Murnau’s story is more of a traditional narrative than usual. He follows the old doorman in almost every shot, cutting away only to show what the doorman sees. And he exaggerates the scale of the hotel and the city to emphasize how important it seems to the doorman; the opening shot, coming down in the elevator and tracking across the lobby (the camera was in a wheelchair), peers out through revolving doors into the rain, showing elegant people and glittering surround- ings; the doorman is full of himself as he whistles for cabs and salutes arriving customers. In those early scenes Murnau shoots the doorman from a low angle, so that he seems to tower over other characters. Much of the doorman’s happiness in life depends on the respect paid to his uniform by his neighbors around the courtyard of his apartment building. Murnau built this enormous set (most of the film, including rainy exteriors, was shot on sound stages) and peopled it with nosy busybodies who don’t miss a thing. Ashamed to be seen without his uniform, the doorman actually steals it from a locker to wear it home. Later, when his deception is revealed, there is a nightmarish montage of laughing and derisive faces.

37 His tragedy “could only be a German story,” wrote the critic Lotte Eisner, whose 1964 book on Murnau reawakened interest in his work. “It could only happen in a country where the uniform (as it was at the time the film was made) was more than God.” Perhaps the doorman’s total identification with his job, his position, his uniform and his image helps foreshadow the rise of the Nazi Party; once he puts on his uniform, the doorman is no longer an individual but a slavishly loyal instrument of a larger organization. And when he takes the uniform off, he ceases to exist, even in his own eyes. Murnau was bold in his use of the camera, and lucky to work with Karl Freund, a great cinematographer who also immigrated to Hollywood. Here he liberated the camera from gravity. There is a shot where the camera seems to float through the air, and it literally does; Freund had himself and the camera mounted on a swing, and Abel Gance borrowed the technique a few years later for his Napoleon. There are shots where superimposed images swim through the air, the famous shot that seems to move through the glass window, and a moment when the towering Hotel Atlantic seems to lean over to crush the staggering doorman. I mentioned the one place in the film where a title card is used. It is not necessary, and the film would make perfect sense without it. But Murnau seemed compelled to use it, almost as an apology for what follows. We see the pathetic old man wrapped in the cloak of the night watchman who was his friend, and the movie seems over. Then comes the title card, which says, “Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.” Improbable, and unsatisfying, because a happy ending is conjured out of thin air. The doorman accidentally inherits a fortune, returns to the hotel in glory and treats all his friends to champagne and caviar, while his old enemies glower and gnash their teeth. It is this ending that inspires the English language title. The original German is Die Letzte Mann, or “the last man,” which in addition to its obvious meaning may also evoke “the previous man”—the doorman who was replaced. The dimwitted practice of tacking a contrived happy ending onto a sad story was not unique with Murnau (who had the grace to apologize in advance for it), and has only grown more popular over the decades. As for Emil Jannings (1884-1950), he made The Last Laugh at the top of his form; considered one of the world’s greatest stars, he specialized in towering figures such as Peter the Great, Henry VIII, Louis XVI, Danton and Othello. The doorman’s fall from grace was all the greater because the audience remembered the glory of his earlier roles. Jannings came to America at the same time as Murnau, won the Academy Award for The Last Command (1928), was rendered unemployable by the rise of the talkies, returned to Germany and found one of his most famous roles, as Marlene Dietrich’s erotically mes- merized admirer in The Blue Angel (1930). Jannings embraced the rise of the Nazis, made films that supported them, was appointed head of a major German production company, and fell into disgrace after the war. The coat no longer fit.—Roger Ebert, March 5, 2000

38 Cast Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt Director Edmund Goulding Producer Irving Thalberg Screenplay William A. Drake, based on his play (1930) Book Menschen im Hotel by Vicki Baum (1929) Cinematography William H. Daniels Music William Axt; Charles Maxwell Studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer

G r a n d H o t e l

3:35 p.m. • Sunday October 16 USA • 1932 • 115 minutes • B&W Sponsor: David McCaig, The Taunton Block

rand Hotel is the original anthology film: several unrelated plot lines and disparate Gcharacters whose common link is their setting, in this case a Berlin hotel. Likewise, it was the first time a studio assembled all its top talent in a single movie. It’s a formula that has been revisited so often that we sometimes forget what an expensive gamble this was for MGM. But it paid off handsomely: Grand Hotel was a surprise hit; it won Best Picture at the Oscars; and everyone connected with it went on to even bigger and better things, including Joan Crawford in a breakthrough part. Even so, the movie belongs to Greta Garbo, who delivers her signature line, “I want to be alone.” Remade in 1945 as Weekend at the Waldorf with Ginger Rogers in the Garbo role.

Academy Award Nominations Best Picture (awarded)

39 Reviews • It’s a little faded now, but much of the magic still works in this first of the portmanteau movies. The production is opulent yet somehow stiff and the performances have survived with varying success.—Leslie Halliwell, 1984

• Vicki Baum worked as a chambermaid in two well-known Berlin hotels to gather the material that resulted in the writing of Grand Hotel, first as a novel and then as a play, according to Frank Portos, Hungarian writer. No one was aware of her identity while she was employed there, Portos ex- plains, and she was able, unhampered, to round out the situation and characters, which, for a number of years, had been shaping themselves in her mind. Miss Baum had been a harpist in a concert orchestra before she turned to writing and to editing Die Dame, a German magazine, Mr. Portos said. “Her husband was, and still is, a very well-known operatic conductor.” It was this association and experience that created the central character of Grusinskaya, the temperamental Russian ballet dancer. The characters of Preysing, the industrial magnate, and Flaemmchen, the stenographer, also came from life. Indeed, the situation was taken from the Berlin newspapers which told of the scandal that brought them to light. Of course they had different names, but the relationship was the same. The situation was practically as Miss Baum has written, with the exception of the murder. Because of the scandal, the real Preysing lost everything. ’Working as a chambermaid, Miss Baum discovered many interesting things that helped her with her novel. I don’t know where she found Kringelein. There are many Kringeleins in Germany, but the character she drew is so vivid and real that I am sure she must have studied him during her toil in the hotel.’’ The cast of Grand Hotel includes Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Craw- ford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Hersholt and Lewis Stone.Edmund Gould- ing directed Grand Hotel from a motion picture script prepared by Hans Kraly with the assistance and supervision of Vicki Baum. In Grand Hotel Miss Garbo, of course, has the part of Grusinskaya, the Russian dancer, portrayed on the stage by Eugenie Leontovich. John Barrymore acts Baron von Gaigern, and his brother, Lionel, appears as Kringelein, the invalid out for a final fling. Joan Crawford plays Flaemmchen, and Wallace Beery is seen as Preysing, the textile magnate. Mr. Goulding’s avowed intention in bringing the new picture to the screen was to use the camera as a ‘’walking personality,’’ letting it follow the tangled destinies of the central characters of the Continental setting as an invisible onlooker. The stage play, it is said, has been followed substantially in the screen adaptation, with one or two incidents added from the novel. Several mechanical innovations are said to have been utilized in photograph- ing Grand Hotel, with music used for supplementary dramatic motivation throughout the picture—that is, orchestral or radio music emanating naturally from parts of the hotel. —The New York Times, March 27, 1932

40 Thank You to Our Major Sponsors

Northumberland Film Sundays Classical 103.1 FM Herma’s Ready Print Nash + Nash Lynn Hardy, RBC Wealth Management, Dominion Securities Patrick Houlihan, RBC Wealth Management, Dominion Securities

Thank You to our Film Sponsors, pianist sponsors and Major Festival Supporters Toronto Silent Film Festival Toronto Film Society Lynch Rutherford Tozer Barbara Garrick Ross Pigeau & Carol McCann Carlyle Inn & Bistro Horizon Plastics International Inc. David & Dianne Halliday David McCaig, The Taunton Block Meet at 66 King East Harriet & Greg Binkley Joan and Paul Macklin Langhorne Irwin Wharram-Spry Ross Pigeau & Carol McCann David & June Chambers Chris & Brenda Worsnop Les & Cathie Houston Instant Shade Tree Experts, Jerad Spry

41 42 Friends of the Festival

Leslie Benson Clay & Carol Benson, Smith’s Creek Antiques Bonnie & Terry Foord The MacKechnie House B&B, Cobourg

MacKechnie House B&B www.mackechniehouse.com (905) 372-6242

Thank You to Festival Supporters

Amy Rappl, Municipality of Port Hope Lara Scott, Town of Cobourg Diane Flesch, Community Liaison, Cameco Don McKechnie & Marjorie Cass Paul Archambault Brian Kinmond, Cobourg Innovation Centre Our friends and followers on social media

Thank You to our Creative Suppliers

Queenies, Port Hope—for catering Friday’s gala and for providing the Brown Bag lunches on Sunday Cobourg Internet—for design and maintenance of the Vintage Film Festival website PR Computer Services, Cobourg & Port Hope—for technical assistance on all aspects throughout the festival Ready Print—for printing this program, posters and promotional materials

Thank You to the following Festivals and Theatres for Promotional Assistance

TIFF’s Cinematheque’s Restored! Capitol Theatre, Port Hope Cinefest Durham, Oshawa Song, Sounds of the Next Generation Northumberland Film Sundays, Cobourg Northumberland Players Community Theatre Co.

44 S h o p p i n g

ometime between movies, take a stroll Sthrough the Capitol bar area. There, you’ll find lots of keepsakes and other things to buy. Take home a souvenir of the Vintage Film Festival. Bid in the silent auction. Proceeds go directly to our bursary program. • T Shirt She’s got Bette Davis eyes, all right. —in various sizes...... $20

• Poster This year’s limited-edition poster—by renowned Co- bourg artist Betsy Miller— captures the elusive Miss Davis. A former banker turned full-time artist, Betsy doesn’t follow a plan and she limits her choice of colours until the image takes just the right form. —Poster only...... $20 —T-shirt & Poster...... $35

• Silent Auction Make an offer on great items provided by local businesses, artists and donors.

• 2 theatre passes, courtesy Capitol Theatre • 2 Nights at MacKechnie House B&B • Rustic wooden lazy-susan by Kahley Gallagher • Afternoon tea basket • Handcrafted weathervane by Fircliff Inspirations • Handmade cement wall sconces • Kitchenware courtesy The Cultured Kitchen • Acrylic painting of Bette Davis by • Global Pet Foods Cobourg goodie basket Betsy Miller (above) • 2 Passes to Northumberland Film Sundays,

Bids open Saturday at 8:30 a.m.and close at 5:45 p.m.. Winners will be announced at cash-out table. (Winners not present at the time will be notified by phone.) Cash or cheque only.

45 T r i v i a Q u i z based on this year’s VFF movie selection

Questions 1.Twelve years after Roman Holiday, Eddie Albert starred in a sitcom in which he played a Manhattan lawyer who takes up farming. Name the TV show. 2. Which came first:Jezebel or Gone with the Wind? 3. Who sang Bette Davis Eyes? In what year was it a hit? 4. What was Alfred Hitchcock’s next big smash after Psycho? 5 Are John and Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel) related to Drew? 6. Which actresses toppled Bette Davis’ record for the most Oscar nominations? 7. In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock gives us a visual clue that his protagonist, Marion (Janet Leigh), has crossed the line from good to evil. How? 8, If you didn’t know Ernest Borgnine (The Catered Affair) for his award-winning performance in 1955’s Marty, you might recognize him from which 1960s sitcom? 9. What cheeky comment did William Wyler allegedly make when cast and crew com- plained about meddling interference from newcomer Barbra Streisand when he directed her in Funny Girl, her first movie, in 1968? 10. Bette Davis met her fourth husband while shooting All About Eve. Who was he? 11. Which came first: Harry Belafonte’s signatureBanana Boat Song (Day-O) or his star- ring role in Carmen Jones? Answers 1. Green Acres, which ran from 1965 to 1971. 2. Jezebel was on the back-burner for years, but only got the green light when GWTW (the novel) hit the best-sellers list. The movie version appeared in 1939, a year after Jezebel. 3. Bette Davis Eyes was recorded by Jackie DeShannon in 1974, but it was Kim Carnes’ 1981 cover that topped the charts. Davis reportedly loved the song and thanked Carnes for making her “a part of modern times.” 4. The Birds 5. Yes. Brothers John and Lionel were part of the Barrymore theatrical dynasty. Drew Barrymore is John’s granddaughter via his third wife, Dolores Costello. 6. Davis earned 10 nominations, but Katharine Hepburn eventually had 12. Meryl Streep holds the current record with 19, so far. 7. Early in the movie, Leigh is shown getting dressed, wearing a white slip and under- garments. Once she has decided to go through with stealing her boss’ payroll, Hitchcock dressed her in black underwear. It’s a kind of play on the old convention in westerns that suggests white hats are worn by the good guys, black by the bad. 8. McHale’s Navy, which aired for four seasons starting in 1962. 9. “You’ll have to forgive Barbra. This is the first film she’s ever directed.” 10. Gary Merrill. They named their daughter Margot, after the character Davis played in the movie. 11. Belafonte earned his role in Carmen Jones on the strength of his recording career. Ironically, his voice was dubbed for the movie. Day-O came two years later in 1956.

46 Herm’s is onderlan o marelous gifts& ﬁn foods

Cheese & fine foods Gifts for everyone on your list Gorgeous free gift wrapping

5km north of Port www.hermas.ca Hope on Hwy 28 905·885·9250

Patrick Houlihan Investment Advisor RBC Wealth Management Dominion Securities Inc. 204D Division Street, Cobourg, Ontario K9A 3P7 T. 800-263-1187 | D. 905-372-5092 Fax 905-372-2286 Email: [email protected] Website: www.patrickhoulihan.ca

47 Bette Davis in Jezebel Sponsored by Lynn Hardy

“I have been a long-time supporter and volunteer with the Vintage Film Festival and the Marie Dressler Foundation and remain an unabashed lover of old films –and of course Bette Davis!” —Lynn Hardy Cobourg, Ontario

Lynn Hardy Investment Advisor RBC Wealth Management Dominion Securities Inc. 204D Division Street, Cobourg, Ontario K9A 3P7 T. 800-263-1187 D. 905-372-4364 Fax 905-372-2286 Email: [email protected] Website: www.lynnhardy.ca