It is easy to forget that Marilyn Monroe was a human being before the combination of her “dumb blonde” movie persona, unapologetic curvaceous sex appeal, and tragic early death transformed her from actress/sex symbol into a clichéd cultural phenomenon, with the proliferation of her image on everything from bed linens to trash baskets. Just a partial listing of the authors and artists who have delivered posthumous homages to Monroe includes Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Lindsay Lohan, Anna Nicole-Smith, and Elton John.
Perhaps part of our ongoing fascination with the legendary blonde bombshell has to do with the fact that while Monroe is largely known for playing blonde as stupid, in reality she was neither blonde nor stupid. Her persona, however, helped to establish both of these traits as ideals for women during her lifetime. The actress herself recognized the irony of the fact that she was often expected to be her persona: “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” Thanks in part to the posthumous dissection of every aspect of Monroe’s life and career, we seem as a society to have figured out, in the decades since her death, that women (and men), even blondes, can be both smart and attractive, not to mention talented. Sadly, there seem to be fewer and fewer such types in contemporary Hollywood. This is why we’re remembering the fabulous, but all too short, career of Marilyn Monroe on Wednesdays during July and August with a series of her best dramatic and comedic work.
Despite Monroe’s loyalty to her husbands—namely Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller—she manages to evoke a convincing adulterer and aspiring husband murderer in Niagara—three guesses to how she plans to get rid of Joseph Cotten—(hint: it doesn’t involve a wooden barrel and/or suspenders). Also screening as part of our Monroe series is Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night, in which the actress stars as perhaps the sexiest cannery worker in the history of cinema—apologies to Laverne and Shirley. Monroe stars with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, featuring the classic “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”—for those who haven’t seen the film, picture Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. How to Marry A Millionaire’s stellar cast pairs Monroe with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable. Also screening is Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, featuring the iconic image of Monroe’s dress blowing upward—the shooting of which reportedly fueled the dissolution of her marriage to DiMaggio. Of course, any retrospective of Monroe’s body of work must include her genius comic timing in Some Like it Hot. The series concludes with Monroe’s last completed film The Misfits. Based on a screenplay written by Arthur Miller while he procured a quickie divorce in Reno, Monroe plays a divorcee who becomes involved in a romantic quartet with a cast of characters named Gay, Perce, and Guido, played by Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach. The film would be both Gable and Monroe’s last. –Dinah Holtzman, Assistant Film Programmer, Motion Picture Department
An electrifying bolt of new cinema, director Steve McQueen’s Hunger has become one of the most critically lauded first features in recent memory since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to thunderous acclaim. The story of the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands, Hunger uses spellbinding widescreen visuals and an elliptical narrative pattern to captivate its viewers and transplant us back to early-1980s Belfast, a troubled time and place if there ever was one. It will have its only local theatrical screenings in the Dryden on July 17.
Also showing exclusively in the Dryden this summer, Valentino: The Last Emperor (July 3–5) takes us into the daily life of haute couture icon Valentino, a man whose fabulous gowns have graced the bodies of the world’s most glamorous women for nearly five decades. From Kazakhstan comes Tulpan (July 11), a charmingly eccentric comedy about work, love, and desert animals. The Girlfriend Experience (August 8 & 9) is director Stephen Soderbergh’s newest look at relationships. On August 21 & 23, we’ll offer two screenings of Three Monkeys, a suspenseful thriller and dysfunctional family study from Turkey’s pre-eminent filmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
There’s no denying it, 3-D movies are back in a big way. While the current crop of digitally enhanced horror films or computer-animated family entertainments are attempting to show audiences something they can’t get in their home theaters or watch on their cellphones, this is far from the first time that the film industry has tried to put customers into seats with the promise of added depth and objects and characters “comin’ at ya” off the screen.
During the final four nights of August, the Dryden will present seven complete features from the first era of 3-D, the early 1950s. Made at a time when the dawn of television presented a serious threat to studio ticket revenue, these films run the gamut in terms of budgets and genres. Each will be shown in beautiful archival prints that require the simultaneous use of two projectors. This left-eye/right-eye system provides a voluminous amount of light and a vibrant image, captured on our specially constructed silver screen. Complimentary viewing glasses will be provided with every ticket purchased.
The series (and screams) begin on August 28 when we present Vincent Price in Warner Bros. still-shocking chestnut of big-screen 3-D horror, House of Wax. Also made at WB, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (August 29) might still be the classiest 3-D movie ever made.
Then, we’ll bring you two programs of terrific “B” entertainments from Columbia Pictures. First, you’ll get dizzy dodging all of the arrows and bullets at our August 30 triple feature of low-budget Westerns: Jesse James vs. the Daltons, The Nebraskan, and Fort Ti. On August 31, enjoy an evening of 3-D film noir and Technicolor® period adventure with a double feature of Man in the Dark and Drums of Tahiti.
No Take-10 tickets or passes will be accepted for these screenings.
As we try not to dwell on our current economic recession, enjoy our throwback salute to the films of an era when times were really tough: the Great Depression. While generally upbeat, the ’30s movies selected for this series aren’t strictly escapist; rather, the breadlines and vast unemployment almost always provide the motivational force for snappy characters and stories.
Carole Lombard, perhaps the finest comedienne of Depression-era cinema, appears in three movies in this series. First, as the fiancée of a spoiled soap fortune heir who must look for a real job in It Pays to Advertise (August 2), co-starring Rochester’s own Louise Brooks in a rare sound-era appearance, and screening as part of a double bill with White Woman, which features a desperate, out-of-work Lombard who agrees to marry a whacked-out Charles Laughton and starts to regret it when he crowns himself “King of the Jungle.” On August 6, it’s a wealthy Lombard who learns a little something about the common man when her screwy family adopts homeless William Powell as My Man Godfrey.
Another pair of iconoclastic leading ladies, Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson, are teamed up in a pre-code double feature of Possessed and The Trespasser on August 9. Crawford and Swanson both play women from the wrong side of the tracks who find love and happiness on their own terms. Unequal distribution of wealth, and city living versus country living, are the themes from which great romantic comedy emerges in two other classics of the screwball comedy, Frank Capra’s Oscar®-winning It Happened One Night (August 13) and the underrated Theodora Goes Wild (August 20).
You won’t find any signs of economic blight in Cecil B. DeMille’s positively loopy musical Madam Satan (August 16). A moralistic yet lighthearted story of infidelity among the filthy rich, DeMille concludes Madam Satan with a visually spectacular set piece: an orgiastic costume ball set aboard a crashing zeppelin. Also dazzling to the eye is 42nd Street (August 27), the best-known of the Busby Berkeley-choreographed Warner Bros. musicals, whose ostensible heroine is played by Ruby Keeler, a hard-working chorine looking for her big break in a Broadway show.
This summer, take a crash course on international cinema as we present two films each by a quintet of master directors from Europe and Asia. The series begins with Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro on July 7 & 14, respectively. This action-packed diptych features the iconic Toshiro Mifune as an uncanny swordsman-for-hire in feudal Japan. Back by popular demand on July 21 is Costa-Gavras’s elegant suspense piece The Sleeping Car Murders, which will be complemented by two screenings of the Greek director’s most famous film, the Oscar®-winning Z on July 24 & 26. Both French productions feature several of the same actors, including Yves Montand and Jean-Louis Trintingant. [Costa-Gavras’s American thriller Music Box will screen as part of our Jessica Lange series on July 16 (see above).] Another master of the French thriller, Jean-Pierre Melville will be represented by his prototypical heist classic Bob Le Flambeur (screening July 28), and a very atypical drama, Leon Morin, Priest (July 31 & August 1). The most contemporary filmmaker in this lineup is Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-Liang. A creator of his own surreal and deadpan comic universe, Tsai’s complete “Hsiao-kang Cycle” will be revealed when we present What Time is it There? along with the short film The Skywalk is Gone on August 4, and The Wayward Cloud on August 11. Finally, experience firsthand what “Felliniesque” means when we screen I Vitelloni (August 18) and Fellini Satyricon (August 25). Perhaps Italy’s best-known auteur, these two films provide two glimpses of Federico Fellini in different phases of his career, first as a personal, autobiographical storyteller, and then as the ringmaster of eye-popping spectacle.
