A don’t-miss classic from Blighty

If you live in NYC or have plans to be here in the next two weeks, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to Film Forum for a screening of the fully restored Technicolor marvel The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Blimp, which stars Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesay, ranks as one of the best pictures ever turned out by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and given the stellar lineup of movies they were responsible for—The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, among many others—that’s saying something.

In fact, it’s one of the greatest pictures ever made in Great Britain. Film critic Andrew Sarris wrote of the picture, “When I first saw the badly butchered American release version of Colonel Blimp more than 40 years ago, I never imagined I’d live to see the day when I would have the effrontery to write that I preferred it to Citizen Kane.”

We’d hate to have to choose between Blimp and Kane, but you get the point. Blimp is a must-see.

The curtain is drawn on a great director

In February 2008, NYC’s Film Forum held a tribute to director Sidney Lumet, who died today at the age of 86. The celebration of Lumet’s life and career took the form of a two-hour Q&A, interspersed with clips from some of his most memorable films. We were lucky enough to be on hand, and we are pleased to offer, as a tribute to a very talented movie maker, our account of the evening.

Lumet shared in the early part of the discussion that his father, Baruch, was an actor in the Yiddish theatre, and Sidney himself got his start there at a very early age.

Lumet went on to appear in a number of Broadway shows, among them a Max Reinhardt production, before slipping behind the camera as a television director in the 1950s.

So it was fitting that the evening opened with a clip from One Third of a Nation (1939), which boasts Lumet’s only film acting appearance. The then-14-year-old director-to-be starred as the nephew of Sylvia Sidney.

The next clip shown was from the first movie he directed, Twelve Angry Men (1957). Asked if he’d made a specific effort to make the film in a cinematic style, so as to prove to the industry bigwigs that he could direct as well for the large screen as for the small, Lumet admitted with a laugh, “I was too arrogant. It never occurred to me that I might need to convince anyone.”

Asked later about working with Henry Fonda, Lumet said Fonda was constitutionally unable to make a false or dishonest move as an actor. “I don’t think he could’ve done it if I’d asked him to,” Lumet said. “He could only play the truth.”

Lumet said that filming on Twelve Angry Men was completed in 19 days. He said he shot the film in a very particular way. There were three levels of lighting in the film—sunlight through the windows, cloudy skies, as a storm approached outside, and with the overhead lighting in the jury room illuminated once the storm is underway.

Lumet shot the film entirely out of sequence, rotating around the room, getting each shot he needed from each actor under that particular lighting. Once he’d shot all of his sunlit shots, Lumet had the set relit to suggest cloudy conditions and slowly worked his way around the room again, going from character to character, getting every shot he needed.

Finally, he had the set relit once last time, with overhead lighting lit, and made the rounds again.

Lumet said he never used storyboards, as Alfred Hitchcock was famous for doing. Instead, he preferred to rehearse his actors for two weeks, as if they were mounting a play, and when he had all the blocking down, then he considered where to place the camera in each scene.
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Five dazzling divas

Any movie buff in the tri-state area with even the slightest interest in classic Japanese cinema should plan on spending a good deal of time on Houston Street the the next three weeks.

Beginning Friday, April 1, Film Forum will be presenting a don’t-miss opportunity to immerse oneself in pictures made by the greatest Japanese film directors of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s and starring five of Japan’s most acclaimed actresses: Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine.

This quintet of amazing actresses are being feted by Film Forum with a retrospective that features films by such giants as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Mikio Naruse.

The festival’s highlights are too numerous to cite, but we are especially fond of Takamine’s work, and she was best known for her work with the great Naruse, who, along with Kurosawa, ranks as our favorite Japanese director, but honestly, you could make your way to Film Forum on a daily basis throughout the retrospective and experience no regrets.

But if you can make only a few bills, we recommend the Naruse double-bill of Yearning (1964, Takamine) and Repast (1951, Hara) on Tuesday, April 5; Naruse’s Okaasan (Mother, 1952, Tanaka), the double bill on Saturday, April 9, of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950, Kyo) and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953, Tanaka); Ozu’s Tokyo Story on Sunday, April 10, and Monday, April 11 (1953, Hara); Naruse’s Flowing (1956, Yamada, Takamine, Tanaka) on Tuesday, April 12; and … well, honestly, it’s a pointless exercise to try to recommend particular highlights. The entire retrospective is worth experiencing.

Clear your schedule, buy a Film Forum membership (you’ll save on admission), and save us a seat on the aisle, please.

Fritz Lang, posterized

Film Forum‘s two-week retrospective, Fritz Lang in America, comes to an end today. We didn’t get to attend as many of the bills as we’d hoped, but we made more than our share.

We thought an apt way to mark the end of the retrospective would be to link to Mubi.com‘s tribute to Lang in movie posters.

As Adrian Curry writes in his introduction to the collection of posters, “To search through Lang’s American posters (and the foreign posters for his American films) is to skulk through a world of fisted revolvers, prison cell bars, street corner shadows, knives, nooses, and dames in various stages of manhandled distress; a world of heightened emotions and febrile desperation with barely a smile to be seen.”

We’ve included three of the posters below, just to whet your appetite. But be sure you make your way over to see the full collection. It includes some beauts.

Film Forum fetes Fritz's hits

If you’re anything like us and you happen to reside in or around New York City, you plan to make an almost daily pilgrimage to West Houston over the two weeks for “Fritz Lang in Hollywood,” a two-week retrospective at Film Forum.

The GermanAustrian-born Lang would be a revered figure in cinematic history even if he’d never set foot in Southern California. Such influential classics as Metropolis (1927), Spione (Spies, 1929), the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, and M (1931) ensure that.

But Lang became a very important director in the United States, too, beginning with his first Hollywood feature, Fury (1936), starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney, which closes the Film Forum series as the 22nd of Lang’s 29 Hollywood pictures to be shown.

While in Hollywood, Lang showed a penchant for cinematic takes on pulp fiction—films noir, westerns, thrillers and espionage adventures—but he never settled for by-rote takes on these familiar genres. He gave his pictures a very particular look and dark mood, with the Expressionism of his making films in Germany clearlly influencing his American efforts.

You can’t go wrong with any of the bills during the series, but we especially recmommend the aforementioned Fury on Feb. 10; You Only Live Once (1937), starring Sidney and Henry Fonda, which is paired on Feb. 9th and 10th with Lang’s gangster musical (!) You and Me (1938), and three terrific noir double-bills: The Woman in the Window (1944)/Scarlet Street (1945 on Jan. 30, House by the River (1950)/The Blue Gardenia (1953) on Feb. 8, and the series-opener, The Big Heat (1953)/Human Desire (1954) on Jan. 28-29, both of which star noir royals Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame.

If you’re familiar with Lang’s work, you’ve no doubt already got this great retrospective marked in your calendar. If you’re not, clear your calendar now and check out the series’ full line-up to plan which pictures you intend to see. You can thank us later.