Bamcinématek Presents Tuesdays with Elliott, a Weekly Tribute to Film Critic and Longtime Cinemachat Host Elliott Stein, Tuesdays Feb 26—Apr 23
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BAMcinématek presents Tuesdays with Elliott, a weekly tribute to film critic and longtime Cinemachat host Elliott Stein, Tuesdays Feb 26—Apr 23 Nine films, eight in 35mm! Special guest hosts at every screening, including Howard Mandelbaum, Eric Myers, Jake Perlin, and Clark Frederick The Wall Street Journal is the title sponsor of BAM Rose Cinemas and BAMcinématek. Brooklyn, NY/Feb 4, 2013—On Tuesdays from February 26 through April 23, BAMcinématek presents Tuesdays with Elliott, a nine-film tribute to Elliott Stein. Film critic, historian, script writer, and host of more than 120 monthly Cinemachats at BAMcinématek, BAM’s beloved friend passed away last November at the age of 83. This spring, we pay tribute to the incomparable raconteur with a trove of “Cinemachat classics” and rarities from his near-bottomless wish list—each presented by a different guest host. Opening the tribute series on Tuesday, Feburary 26, is Robert Wise’s frontier psychodrama (and atypical Robert Mitchum vehicle) Blood on the Moon (1948), which completes the “late 40s noir Western trilogy” Elliott began with his final two chats, Pursued and Ramrod. Lensed by crack cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (Out of the Past, The Locket—another noteworthy Cinemachat in 2011) and based on a novel by Luke Short (who also wrote Ramrod), Blood on the Moon follows a roving cowboy (Mitchum) embroiled in a turf war between feuding ranchers and homesteaders in what The New York Times called a “stand out from run-of-the-range action dramas…just about everything that can and should happen in a Western.” This screening of a rare archival 35mm print will be followed by a panel discussion with some of Elliott’s colleagues and collaborators, including Howard Mandelbaum, Eric Myers, Jake Perlin, and Clark Frederick. Screening on Tuesday, March 5, is the Boulting brothers’ eccentric British wartime drama Thunder Rock (1942), a film that had always been at the top of Elliott’s Cinemachat wish list. This unclassifiable mash-up of oddball propaganda, atmospheric ghost story, and psychological drama starring Michael Redgrave and James Mason, is a quintessential Elliott pick, and its thematic concern with the lasting legacies of those who are gone fits the elegiac mood of this series. Former BAMcinématek programmer Jake Perlin will host the screening. The following week, Elliott’s friends Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers (co-authors of Screen Deco) present a Michael Curtiz pre-Code double feature with The Mad Genius (1931—Mar 12), starring John Barrymore as a Svengali-esque puppeteer-cum-ballet instructor who becomes entangled in his favored male student’s budding romance with a fellow dancer (newly-contracted WB starlet Marian Marsh), and Alias the Doctor (1932), a medical melodrama—also featuring Marsh—about a surgeon who assumes his brother’s identity to save his patients’ lives. Anton Grot, an Academy Award-nominated art director and a longtime collaborator with Curtiz, lends his dramatic style to both films, imbuing the sets with bizarro expressionism and arch-modernist design. Other series highlights include: the gonzo nudie-cutie omnibus Bizarre (aka Secrets of Sex) (1970—Mar 19), which Stein co-wrote and appears in as both “The Strange Young Man” with a surprising fetish and a mummified narrator; Don Siegel’s hypnotic Civil War-era psychodrama The Beguiled (1971—Mar 19), one of his greatest collaborations with Clint Eastwood; Siegel’s Academy Award-winning propagandistic short Hitler Lives (1945—screens with The Beguiled, a reprisal of a vintage 2005 Cinemachat double bill of one of Elliott’s beloved B-list auteurs); and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960—Apr 23), which Elliott championed early-on as the director’s greatest film. Born December 5, 1928 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Elliott Stein fell in love with movies at a very young age. He ended up studying film at NYU at age 15 in the 1940s, before cinema studies was an established course of study. He moved to Paris in 1948 and lived there for more than two decades, an experience that shaped a sensitivity and knowledge of film that was original then for an American writer and critic. Over the years, Elliott wrote for The Village Voice, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Sight and Sound, Film Comment, The Financial Times, Opera, and many other publications, and he had an incredibly storied career in New York and Paris arts culture: he rented Giovanni’s Room from James Baldwin, taught Yves Montand English, and in part inspired Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “Notes on Camp.” Elliott saw the original King Kong (screening on Apr 9) in first run in 1933 at Radio City Music Hall. It was the film he saw more than any other in his life, way into the many hundreds of times. Decades later, on the eve of the 1976 remake, he wrote an article for Rolling Stone called “My Life with Kong,” which to this day is considered the definitive story on the original film and one of the most evocative writings on the moviegoing experience. This “story of an abiding love affair” spans 43 years of his viewings around the world and under the wildest of circumstances, from movie theaters in Brooklyn, Paris, Italy, and Israel to a screening on the 21st floor of the Empire State Building and finally, back at Radio City in 1974: “I was back home with the King in the vast theater where I had first had my mind blown by him 41 years earlier. The popcorn I held made Proust’s madeleine seem like a moldy bagel.” It was by far his favorite film; he even expressed a desire to have his ashes scattered on the ostensible Indonesian island where Kong was born. Kong will screen “in 35mm, the way he was made to be seen,” followed by a panel discussion where acclaimed filmmaker, programmer, and Nouvelle Vague film editor Jackie Raynal will present exclusive footage of Stein shot during his later years. Since BAMcinématek’s inception in 1999, Elliott programmed, hosted, and presented more than 120 Cinemachats at which he would host a post-film talk peppered with his one-of-a-kind erudition. His first chat, in December 1999, was for John Brahm’s Hangover Square, and his last, on October 8, was for André De Toth’s Ramrod, presented with friend and fellow film historian Howard Mandelbaum. Elliott defined eclectic taste, programming silent classics (Hitchcock’s The Lodger), 30s rough-and-tumble pictures (Lang’s Fury), mid-century art-house hits (De Santis’ Bitter Rice), recent auterist work (Cronenberg’s Spider), and everything in between. Elliott also presented Gertrud, Dreyer’s film maudit, which he championed resolutely in a seminal review in Sight and Sound upon its original 1964 release in Paris. Elliott Stein was a true film lover, a remarkable story teller, a walking encyclopedia, a living Zelig, and one of the warmest and kindest people we’ve ever known. It was an honor to work so closely with him. Press screenings to be announced. For press information, please contact Gabriele Caroti at 718.724.8024 / [email protected] Lisa Thomas at 718.724.8023 / [email protected] Tuesdays with Elliott Schedule Tue, Feb 26 7*, 9:45pm: Blood on the Moon *Panel discussion Tue, Mar 5 7*, 9:45pm: Thunder Rock *Guest host Jake Perlin Tue, Mar 12 4:30, 7:30pm*: The Mad Genius + Alias the Doctor *Guest hosts Howard Mandelbaum & Eric Myers, authors of Screen Deco Tue, Mar 19 4:30, 9:45pm: Bizarre (Secrets of Sex) 7pm*: The Beguiled + Hitler Lives *Guest hosts Clark Frederick and Judith Kass, author of The Hollywood Professionals: Don Siegel Tue, Apr 9 4:30, 7*, 9:45pm: King Kong *Panel discussion Tue, Apr 23 4:30, 7, 9:45pm: Peeping Tom Film Descriptions The Beguiled (1971) 105min Directed by Don Siegel. With Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page. This haunting and elegant movie combines elements of the Western, the grand guignol chiller, and the gothic black comedy. Eastwood brings his exploration of the male dynamic front and center, giving the most physical performance of his career as a wounded Union soldier who takes refuge in a southern girls’ school and unleashes the repressed libidos of the ladies. 35mm. with Hitler Lives (1945) 17min This Academy Award-winning, propagandistic short, also directed by Siegel, calls for vigilance in the wake of World War II’s end. 35mm archival print courtesy of Academy Film Archive. Tue, Mar 19 at 7pm Guest hosts Clark Frederick and Judith Kass, author of The Hollywood Professionals: Don Siegel Bizarre (Secrets of Sex) (1970) 91min Directed by Anthony Balch. With Richard Schulman, Janet Spearman. An exhumed mummy narrates a gonzo psychedelic journey through “the extremities to which mankind— and more particularly, womankind—go in the pursuit of, shall we say, satisfaction.” Stein co-wrote this nudesploitation omnibus, stuffed with outrageous Swinging Sixties antics: cat burglar role play, a photographer’s studio-cum-S&M dungeon, and Stein himself as “The Strange Young Man” with a slimy fetish! Digibeta. Tue, Mar 19 at 4:30, 9:45pm Blood on the Moon (1948) 88min Directed by Robert Wise. With Robert Mitchum, Barbara Bel Geddes. Completing the “late 40s noir Western trilogy” Elliott Stein began with his final two Cinemachats, Pursued and Ramrod, Wise’s (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Set-Up) superlative psychological Western stars Mitchum as a roving cowboy who becomes embroiled in a turf war between feuding ranchers and homesteaders. Submerged in expressionist noir shadows courtesy of crack cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People, Out of the Past), the film’s centerpiece is a lengthy, shockingly brutal barroom brawl in near-total darkness.