My parents took me to see Rear Window when I was seven years old:In this movie, based on the Cornell Woolrich short story “It Had to Be Murder,” James Stewart is wheelchair-bound with a broken leg and out of boredom takes to spying on his neighbors. He comes to suspect that one of them is a killer, engages in flirtatious double-entendre with the glamorous Grace Kelly, and then has his life threatened by the villain (played by a pre–Perry Mason Raymond Burr). Although I was too young to appreciate the way Hitchcock (and his ace screenwriter, John Michael Hayes) used sly humor to provide an entrée into the story, I was part of the rapt audience Hitchcock had in mind as he used all his skills to make us gradually identify with Stewart’s predicament. It’s said that at the premiere, Hitchcock was sitting with Gloria Stewart, James Stewart’s wife. Grabbing the director’s arm at a certain crucial point, she frantically whispered, “Do something!!”
I was eleven when our family went to see The Horse’s Mouth:
Here was a very different Guinness performance. He played Gulley Jimson, a visionary William Blake–quoting artist who cannot see a blank wall without imagining a heroic mural. This Guinness was neither the bright young man nor the timid bank clerk. He was a scruffy and conniving scamp, with a gruff voice and little patience for anyone who couldn’t understand his art. Whether making prank phone calls, bossing his worshipful young assistant, or quoting William Blake, Guinness channeled the colorful and volatile Jimson. He set a new standard for acting in my growing awareness of that mysterious craft that so resembles alchemy.
In those days, I was so impatient for a film to begin that I didn’t pay much attention to opening credits (and there were opening credits in those days). I noticed that Alec Guinness was the star but did not register that the screenplay was his as well. He had adapted Joyce Cary’s 1944 novel of the same name. Guinness first read the novel while serving on a Royal Navy ship during World War II. Though he was at first put off by Cary’s stream of consciousness style, he later read it again at his wife Merula’s suggestion. He saw the filmic possibilities, and his enthusiasm led producer John Bryan and director Ronald Neame to sign on to this long-gestating labor of love.
My father urged me to watch Citizen Kane when it was on Million Dollar Movie:
It’s always dangerous to build up a film too much, but in this case, Leon was right. I watched at least a part of it every night. By the end of the week, I knew it quite well, loving Welles’ bravura touches. Citizen Kane didn’t look like any other film from that era that I had watched on television. I was captivated by its montages that captured the passage of time, the way one scene gave way seamlessly to another, the striking use of light and shadow, and the use of sound to convey a sense of cavernous space. I was also fascinated by the progression of Charles Foster Kane from idealistic journalist to power-mad manipulator, with dire consequences for the people closest to him.
With repeated viewings over the years, I came to understand that Citizen Kane was an experimental masterpiece, as Welles and his collaborators (like cinematographer Gregg Toland, editor Robert Wise, and art director Perry Ferguson) broke new ground. There is no better teaching tool for introducing students to the many aspects of filmmaking. When I introduce it to young students, I stress that there are several ways to approach the film: just for starters, it’s a mystery, a technical marvel, a character study, and a slice of turn-of-the-century American history. There is still always something new to notice in this monumental work of art.
I saw the wacky comedy Million Dollar Legs as a kid at Buck’s Rock Camp:
The film’s release was timed for the Olympics, held in Los Angeles that year. Fields plays the president of an imaginary republic called Klopstokia, where all the inhabitants are naturally gifted athletes—hence the “legs” of the title. The men are all named George and the women Angela (“Why not?” someone offers). Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie), a stranded traveling brush salesman, falls in love with the president’s daughter Angela, played by Susan Fleming. To win her father’s favor (and to put Klopstokia on the map), Migg recruits a team that will be sure to win at every event in the Olympics.
The bad girl to Susan Fleming’s heroine was the femme fatale named Mata Machree, played by Lydia Roberti. The sign on the irresistible Mata Machree’s door reads, “Not Responsible for Men Left After 30 Days.” This character’s name was both a clever nod to the Irish folk song “Mother Machree”and a knowing reference to Greta Garbo’s portrayal of the notorious spy in the 1931 film Mata Hari. It was only many years later that I understood the Irish reference or the erotic implications of Mata’s torch song, “When I Get Hot in Klopstokia.” That song might not have gotten past the censors just a year later in 1933, when the prudish Production Code was established in Hollywood: “It’s terrific when I get mean / I’m just a woman made of gelatine / I have a torso like a tambourine / Oy oy oy, when I get hot!”
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) has remained my favorite film:
There were several films selected by Parker Tyler in his Classics of the Foreign Film that went to the top of my wish list. One was Les Enfants du Paradis, a French film better known in the United States as Children of Paradise.In his characteristically luxuriant style, Tyler wrote, “It has the opulence that comes only with worldly experience, the feeling that men and women—and only men and women—have created the world of health and joy, grief, mishap, disaster and revelation that entwines them and utters their direction as if from a stage.” Those were heady words for someone who didn’t have any worldly experience yet, but they certainly made me eager to see for myself what Tyler may have meant.
Fortunately, living near Manhattan meant that I was bound to have a chance to see the film, at either the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Thalia, or the New Yorker. It immediately became a touchstone for me. I was fascinated by the milieu (the theater world of 1830s Paris) and moved by the full-bodied characters and their deeply romantic story. It’s a three-hour film that I’m always sorry to see end.
I saw The Testament of Dr. Mabuse when I was a senior at UC Berkeley:
Fritz Lang did not direct the first German sound film: that was a 1929 filmed performance of the Berlin Philharmonic performing Richard Wagner’s Der Meistersinger.But his brilliant 1931 crime drama M (which made an international star of Peter Lorre) established Lang as the preeminent German director of the new sound era. M is perhaps Lang’s best-known film, a longtime requirement in many film classes. However, it was his second sound film that captured my attention. Watching The Testament of Dr. Mabuse remains one of my most thrilling and visceral moviegoing experiences.
In this sequel to his silent film made nearly a decade earlier (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler), the mad doctor is now locked up in an asylum, but the director of the hospital has been carrying out the doctor’s nefarious plots. As the film begins, we are plunged into mystery: we are in an industrial workshop and there is no dialogue, just the infernal sounds of machinery. Someone—whether a good guy or not, we don’t know—is hiding there, fearing for his life. If there was ever an opening scene to capture the audience’s attention, this was it.
Sullivan’s Travels was on my first Lightning Ridge program:
Like many of the New York City channels from my youth, Channel 8 (technically WMTW-TV) had both a late-night schedule to fill and access to old Hollywood movies. It wasn’t Million Dollar Movie, but it was something. One night I came home from Plainfield just in time for the start of Preston Sturges’ inside-Hollywood comedy Sullivan’s Travels, from 1941. The title was vaguely familiar to me. US Camera,an annual photography book that my parents bought each year, featured a production still in the 1942 edition. But that was all I knew. Preston Sturges was an unfamiliar name to me, unlike his contemporaries John Huston, Billy Wilder, and John Ford. That night I was dazzled by the wit, the headlong pace, and the general high spirits of the film, which starred Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. McCrea, as John Sullivan, is a successful director of comedies who wants to make a serious film about the ills of the world. The name of that film-within-a-film: O Brother, Where Art Thou? In 2000, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen paid homage to Sturges by making a Depression-set film of that name, a film the fictional Sullivan might have made.
Our first Green Mountain Film Festival in 1999 featured David Riker’s stunning La Ciudad:
The trade newspaper Variety was an invaluable resource at the Savoy, no matter how off-putting its breezy style (“helmer” was its preferred synonym for “director,” and when people left their position at a studio, they “ankled”). For the theater’s purposes, we got a sense of what films might be available to us soon and whether they were worth pursuing. For the Green Mountain Film Festival, Variety was a must-read because it seemingly had a correspondent at every major and many minor film festivals (though not ours).
While I was programming our first festival in 1999, I noticed an excellent Variety review of an independent American film shown at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, La Ciudad (The City) was written and directed by a New York University film school graduate, David Riker. Through four discrete stories, La Ciudad, shot in black-and-white for about $500,000, chronicles the experiences of Central American immigrants living in New York City.
While the bombs fell in 2003, Blackboards got an enthusiastic reception:
No festival film that year captured this moment better than Blackboards, an Iranian film set during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The director was twenty-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf, daughter of two accomplished Iranian film directors. The film follows a pair of itinerant teachers who, blackboards strapped to their backs, wander the desolate mountains of Iran’s border with Iraq in hapless search of pupils. One falls in with a group of elderly Iraqi Kurds trying to get back to their bombed village; the other pursues a dozen Kurdish boys who ferry contraband across the border.
When Karen Durbin reviewed the film for the New York Times a few months earlier, she said the film “was anything but grim. If Ms. Makhmalbaf is a political filmmaker, she’s not a didactic one. Her hallmark is an inexhaustible curiosity. Here, a horrific situation yields pathos, absurdity and humor, as well as something rare: an eye-opening strangeness.” During that turbulent week, audiences did not avoid a film that dealt with the human consequences of Middle Eastern conflict. Instead, they sought it out.
Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last thrilled an audience of all ages:
Three popular music events at the GMFF were the silent films accompanied by my old friend Peter Tavalin. Peter brought his Kurzweil keyboard to play the scores that he composed for three classic, early films: D.W. Griffith’s melodrama Way Down East (1920), Buster Keaton’s Civil War–era comedy The General (1926), and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923). “My keyboard allows me to program sixteen different combinations of the ‘orchestra,’” Peter said. “I could do clarinet with pizzicato strings for a silly moment, flute with muted strings for a pastoral moment, or full orchestra with cymbals crashing, timpani rolling, brass blaring, for the battle scene at the end of Keaton’s The General.”
It was Lloyd’s Safety Last that was most vivid for me. The final nail-biting twenty minutes show Lloyd’s death-defying climb up the face of a multistory office building. The sight of Lloyd dangling from a clock face is one of silent film’s most iconic images. Peter had composed a virtuoso score for the occasion, as thrilling as what was on the screen. When I asked him about his technique, he replied, “I’m improvising every time I perform, even the same movie, and draw on all kinds of musical devices to match up with the action or the mood. I can guarantee you I never did the climb the same way twice and have performed Safety Last at least thirty times.”
We had a special guest for Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village:
Mazursky’s portrait of the Village in the early 1950s is bursting with energy, humor, and occasional pathos. Among the many denizens of Lenny’s local bar is an overbearing, womanizing sculptor named Barney, portrayed by the playwright John Ford Noonan.A month before the Savoy scheduled Next Stop, Greenwich Village, I read that Noonan was going to be nearby for most of the summer. I forget how I contacted him, but he was happy to speak at one showing of the film. A large man with a personality to match, Noonan had the audience laughing from the start of his introduction.
When the film started, he came out to the lobby and asked for a restaurant recommendation. “What time do I have to beback?” he asked me. I told him, adding that he could come back any time before that. He could sit in the audience and see how the audience was appreciating the film. He shocked me with his answer: “I’ve never seen the film.” I must have appeared stupefied, since he quickly explained, “I had such a good time shooting it, I want to keep those memories fresh.”
Into the deep end: showing my Community College students The Seventh Seal:
I was gratified by my students’ willingness to engage with Bergman’s vision. One student’s response to the film has stayed with me. She identified herself as a devout Catholic and noted that although the Bergman film did not deal with Catholicism, it treated religious faith as something to take seriously—unlike what she called the dismissive treatment of religious people in most mainstream films. The characters in The Seventh Seal grappled with profound questions, giving her a moviegoing experience that was fresh and meaningful.
I have noticed that some contemporary critics take a disdainful view of Bergman as a relic of a certain period when art-house cinema carried a “more-intellectual-than-thou” cachet. David Thomson, in his Bergman entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Film, called The Seventh Seal “pretentious and calculating.” He added, “Its medieval-ism and the wholesale allegory now seem frivolous and theatrical diversions from true seriousness.”
On the contrary, my experience introducing the film to young students only increased my appreciation of Bergman. As Andrew Sarris wrote in a 2007 column in the New York Observer, “We are reminded of what even the more skeptical among us have always loved and admired about Bergman’s movies: humanity, humility, insight, intelligence and a heroic seriousness of purpose.”