Once, in an unguarded moment in the editing room, Hal Ashby related a story about how he attempted to commit suicide. He planned to swim out in the Pacific Ocean until he drowned, but first determined he should find the perfect bathing suit to do so. However, the search proved futile and Ashby couldn’t find trunks that he liked…so he scrapped the idea altogether.
In October, the Dryden will pay tribute to Hal Ashby with five tragicomic films from the 1970s. Being the perennial misfit himself, Ashby’s stories often follow characters excommunicated from some walk of life. The Landlord (October 1) stars Beau Bridges as an inexperienced businessman who becomes alienated from his well-to-do family after getting involved in a mixed-race and mixed-class relationship. The life of Woody Guthrie is celebrated in Bound for Glory (October 29), as the musician finds himself chafing not only against society, but also against the people who love him. The title characters of Harold and Maude (October 8) are only drawn together by their very inability to fit in anywhere else. Jack Nicholson and Otis Young portray naval officers in The Last Detail (October 15) who think they belong to a group, but learn that they can only rely on each other. In Shampoo (October 22), hairdresser George Roundy, played by Warren Beatty, finds his company coveted by all those around him, but the attention only makes him unhappy. All these stories contain a perfect balance of black humor, poetry, and uncomfortable moments, delivered in a style that has deeply influenced an entire generation of American filmmakers.
After his streak of ’70s hits, Ashby found himself repeatedly outcast from Hollywood in the 1980s. More than any other word, “tragic” is used to describe Hal Ashby’s life. His last ten years were fraught with studio conflicts, aborted pictures, substance abuse, and seriously declining personal relationships. If it weren’t for these bleak moments, however, the rest of his career wouldn’t shine so brightly. Not unlike the anecdote about the suicide and the swimming trunks, Ashby’s stories carry a hint of joy and redemption just beneath the surface. The emphasis when describing Hal Ashby’s work should ultimately be on triumph, and not tragedy.
Get ready for your hair to stand on end. The Dryden’s perennial selection of blood-curdling horror movies will be offered Thursdays in October leading up to Halloween. The frightfest begins October 2, when we screen Sidney Furie’s intense thriller The Entity. This story of a menacing invisible mass that repeatedly attacks an innocent woman (Barbara Hershey) will be preceded by two experimental shorts by Peter Tscherkassky that re-edit The Entity to explore an even more visceral sense of horror.
Two Italian occult classics starring actress Barbara Steele are featured October 9, Black Sunday and Castle of Blood. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (October 16) offers the last word in haunted house movies. Wise’s directorial debut, Curse of the Cat People, is the second half of an October 23 double bill of purr-fect chillers from producer Val Lewton’s low-budget unit at RKO Studios, following the original Cat People.
We’ll celebrate the 30th anniversary of John Carpenter’s horror milestone Halloween with a screening on October 30, and on October 31, George Romero’s politically charged Land of the Dead screens in conjunction with the 19th Rochester Labor Series (see related article).
Mother Russia marks the centennial anniversary of its first cinema screenings in 2008. Mosfilm, the largest and most productive film studio during the Soviet Era, remains the nation’s most important film institution today. Started as the state film factory, at its height Mosfilm was the USSR’s Hollywood, hosting the most popular stars and producing the most lavish productions. In honor of Russia’s enormous contributions to film history, on Thursdays in September we’ll present four great Mosfilm productions from the post-Stalin years in the Soviet Era: Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Letter Never Sent (September 4); Marlen Khutsiyev’s July Rain (September 11); Andrei Konchalovsky’s Uncle Vanya (September 18); and Vladimir Menshov’s Oscar®-winning Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (September 25).
In his autobiography, famed director Elia Kazan writes about the difficulties in making his most personal film, America, America, the story of his Greek uncle’s sojourn in Turkey and eventual immigration to the US. Part of Kazan’s inspiration was the discovery and belief in the idea that, in storytelling, those ideas that are most personal to the artist are the most universal for audiences.
Head On writer-director Fatih Akin’s latest film, The Edge of Heaven, is a powerfully dramatic work of fiction that is, on the surface, about contemporary relations between Germany and Turkey. Akin, a German national of Turkish descent, explores the prevailing attitudes and prejudices of both sides, on various topics such as family, sex, religion, and terrorism.
Of course, these are subjects that citizens of every nation can relate to, and Akin weaves them in a spellbinding and unpredictable narrative that packs an emotional wallop and is best left un-summarized. If that’s enough for you, then stop reading here, but if you must know more, the story begins when a Turkish widower living in Bremen asks a middle-aged Turkish prostitute to be his live-in lover. Soon we are introduced to four other major characters: the widower’s son, the prostitute’s daughter, as well as a young German woman and her mother (played by the great actress Hanna Schygulla). As in many of Robert Altman’s key works, each of these intersecting individuals has a relationship with the others, whether they know it or not.
Akin’s un-insistent, yet graceful direction successfully hits home on a number of political and emotional levels. He also employs some clever tricks that, in the hands of a flashier, shallow filmmaker, would ring hollow, but Akin’s deeply felt connections to his material assure us that his devices are used only to bring out an equally moving response in his viewers. The Edge of Heaven will screen Saturday, September 6 at 5 p.m. & 8 p.m.
Stuntman Mike: You’ve seen a movie where a car gets into some smashup there ain’t no way in hell anybody’s walking away from?
Pam: Yeah.
Stuntman Mike: Well, how do you think they accomplish that?
Pam: CGI?
Stuntman Mike: (laughs) Well, unfortunately Pam, nowadays more often than not, you’re right. But back in the all-or-nothing days, the Vanishing Point days, the Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry days, the White Line Fever days? Real cars smashing into real cars, and real dumb people driving them.
This exchange from Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to the homage-laden Grindhouse,, sums up the idea behind the collection of films in our featured summer series: a salute to the glory days of movie stunt driving in Hollywood features, before the era of computer generated imagery.
There’s something essentially cinematic about the chase sequence, and there’s nothing quite like the thrill of watching a well-shot and well-edited one. The more unusual the location and the more believably dangerous the action is, the more our pulses are likely to join in on the racing. Filmmakers since the silent era have understood this, but our series begins with the original moonshine running movie, Thunder Road (1958), a time when American automobiles had just gotten bigger, and the screens had become wide enough to accommodate them.
Some of the performers featured in these action classics are true movie icons: Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Peter Fonda. But the real stars are the spectacularly talented stunt drivers and, of course, the cars themselves: McQueen’s Ford Mustang in Bullitt; the Dodge Challenger R/T in Vanishing Point; and the countless number of Cook County, Illinois, police vehicles in The Blues Brothers.
And cars aren’t the only things on wheels you’ll see racing and crashing on the Dryden’s screen this summer. We’ve included a special “Truck Night” double feature of White Line Fever and Duel, the little movie that made cinephiles first aware of a young director named Steven Spielberg. David Carradine battles an army of “destructocycles” in Deathsport, and Fonda uses his vacation Winnebago to wage war against a score of satanists in Race With the Devil. (Although it’s not an American movie, you probably should also know about the spectacular moped and car chase through the Paris Métro in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, screening August 22 & 24).
The series and our summer calendar end with a screening of the complete Grindhouse, featuring the sublime and witty Death Proof; evidence that there’s still a smart way to have real cars smashing into real cars. –Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
Screenings:
Thursday, July 3
7 p.m. Trailers on Wheels! & at 8 p.m. THUNDER ROAD
(Arthur Ripley, US 1958, 92 min.)
Sunday, July 6 | 7 p.m.
THE BLUES BROTHERS (John Landis, US 1980, 130 min.)
Thursday, July 10 | 8 p.m.
BULLITT (Peter Hyams, US 1968, 113 min.) & bonus Steve McQueen
footage!
Thursday, July 17 | Double Feature
7 p.m. DEATH RACE 2000 (Paul Bartel, US 1975, 78 min.)
8:30 p.m. DEATHSPORT (Allan Arkush & Henry Suso, US 1978, 82 min.)
Thursday, July 24 | Double Feature
7 p.m. THE DRIVER (Walter Hill, US 1978, 90 min.)
8:45 p.m. VANISHING POINT (Richard Sarafian, US 1971, 107 min.)
Thursday, July 31 | 8 p.m.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, US 1971, 104 min.) &
chase sequence from The Seven-Ups (US 1973, 10 min.)
Thursday, August 7 | Truck Night! Double Feature
7 p.m. DUEL (Steven Spielberg, US 1971, 90 min., Digital Projection)
8:45 p.m. WHITE LINE FEVER (Jonathan Kaplan, US 1975, 92 min.)
Thursday, August 14 | Double Feature
7 p.m. THE LAST AMERICAN HERO (Lamont Johnson, US 1973, 100 min.)
9 p.m. A SMALL TOWN IN TEXAS (Jack Starrett, US 1976, 95 min.)
Thursday, August 21 | Double Feature
7 p.m. RACE WITH THE DEVIL (Jack Starrett, US 1975, 88 min.)
8:45 p.m. DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY (John Hough, US 1973, 93 min.)
Sunday, August 31 | 7 p.m.
GRINDHOUSE (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, US 2007, 191 min.)
