Anniversary Classics Archives

George Cukor’s ‘Let’s Make Love’ Spotlights Jack Cole Choreography

August 4, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

On Wednesday, Aug. 19th, at 7 p.m., Laemmle Theatres presents a 65th anniversary screening of Let’s Make Love, Marilyn Monroe’s penultimate film, spotlighting the astonishing dance work of choreographer Jack Cole.

Catch Let’s Make Love at the Laemmle Royal, with Cole biographer Debra Levine in attendance to sign her book JAZZED: Jack Cole and Twentieth Century American Dance.

In 1959 Marilyn was entering her final chapter—with her favorite choreographer, Jack Cole, in tow. As Monroe’s decade, the 1950s, wound to a close, the indelible movie star was not in good shape. Repeated breakdowns and hospitalizations had taken their toll. When Let’s Make Love producer Jerry Wald reached out to Cole for what would be his sixth-and-final Monroe movie, Cole was evasive. Eventually, needing money, he acquiesced. Toward the end of a grueling seven-month shoot, with only Cole, Monroe, and scant crew on set, Let’s Make Love had the feel of a home movie. Cole got the star across the finish line. But, he said, “It was very difficult.” Seen in retrospect, the film’s centerpiece production number, to Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” is a danse-macabre, a foreshadowing of tragic events to come.

This summary, contributed by Debra Levine, a friend of Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics Series, is adapted from her brand-new Jack Cole biography, JAZZED: Jack Cole and Twentieth Century American Dance, from University Press of Kentucky (release date August 11, 2026). Debra, who will be our interview guest on August 19, will share revelations from her deep research into the making of this movie through the prism of the close Monroe/Cole relationship, a trove of information that many traditional forays into Marilyn’s final films have overlooked. Debra will be selling and signing her acclaimed book after the screening.

Let’s Make Love was Marilyn’s second last film, made in part to fulfill her contract to 20th Century Fox. Her co-star was iconic French actor Yves Montand, the star of such classic films as The Wages of Fear and the French version of The Crucible. Hollywood often wooed revered European actors, and Montand spent several years making American movies in the 1960s before returning to Europe to make Z, The Confession, Cesar and Rosalie, and Jean de Florette. He and Monroe had a brief affair during the shooting of Let’s Make Love, which he abruptly broke off, aggravating Marilyn’s insecurities.

The script by Norman Krasna and Hal Kanter, with uncredited assist by Arthur Miller, Monroe’s husband at the time, centers on a European billionaire who learns that he is going to be satirized in a new off-Broadway production and decides to investigate by trying to join the production with a false identity. Award-winning director George Cukor (Little Women, Born Yesterday, Adam’s Rib, A Star Is Born, My Fair Lady) was at the helm of the production. Cukor, cinematographer Daniel L. Fapp, art directors Gene Allen and Lyle Wheeler, and costume designer Dorothy Jeakins assured that Monroe was most alluringly photographed.

The supporting cast includes Tony Randall, Frankie Vaughan, and Wilfred Hyde-White, with cameos by Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Milton Berle as experts trying to train the amateur Montand for his theater debut.

As critic Stanley Kauffmann observed, “The scene in which Milton Berle teaches [Montand] how to be a comic is first-rate knockabout fun.”

Three Classics Revived: ‘White Nights,’ ‘The Piano,’ and ‘Mysterious Skin.’

July 28, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

What do Luchino Visconti’s White Nights, Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin all have in common? Aside from critical acclaim, not much. Except this: they’re all returning to the big screen in new restorations over the next few weeks.

Catch The Piano starting July 31^st at Laemmle’s Royal, White Nights August 7^th also at the Royal, and Mysterious Skin August 21^st at the NoHo.

Not to be confused with the 1985 American film of the same name, White Nights (1957) marked a transition in Visconti’s style. Previously known as a master of neorealism, he shot the entirety of White Nights on a large set in a Roman soundstage, giving the production a dreamlike quality in line with the Dostoevsky short story it’s based on. Based on the Tuscan city of Livorno, the set used netting to give the street lights a nighttime haze, and included a functional mini-canal, for a key moment in a rowboat.

Italian acting icon Marcello Mastroianni turns on the charm as Mario, a man on a late-night walk who encounters a crying woman, Natalia (German cinema star Maria Schell). Over the next couple of evenings, he attempts to woo her despite her fealty to a man who left a year ago, with a vague promise to return. Visconti originally planned to dub Schell, but she impressed him with her Italian and got to keep her voice.

At the center of The Piano, on the other hand, is a relationship not serendipitous but pre-ordained. From an early age, Ada (Holly Hunter), from Scotland, is promised into an arranged marriage with New Zealand settler Alisdair Stewart (the late, great Sam Neill). By the time she’s old enough to actually wed, she already has a daughter (Anna Paquin), and is either unable or unwilling to speak…except through the emotional music she plays on her piano. When her new spouse fails to put a priority on her signature instrument, she’s drawn to a man who does – George Baines (Harvey Keitel), a Scottish sailor who has gone native with the Maoris.

Hunter and Paquin both won Academy Awards for acting – unable to use words, Hunter’s Ada conveys everything through her eyes, stomps, and slaps. Paquin’s Flora comes off as a realistically mercurial kid, mostly loyal to her mother but capable of ruining everything in a fit of pique. Writer-director Jane Campion scored the film its third Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and the film’s frank depiction of sexuality from a female gaze pushes the boundaries of what the MPAA typically allows in an R-rated film.

Filmmaker Gregg Araki has always pushed boundaries of sex – and violence — from his breakthrough film The Doom Generation onward. Mysterious Skin is less overtly outrageous, but almost more shocking for it, as it follows two childhood friends, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet, who process childhood sexual abuse in very different ways. Gordon-Levitt’s Neil becomes a hooker in New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, while Corbet’s Brian, who believes his abuse may have been an alien abduction, increasingly has his repressed memories manifest as physical symptoms.

With a supporting cast that includes Michelle Trachtenberg, Richard Riehle, Elisabeth Shue, Chris Mulkey, and Mary Lynn Rajskub, Mysterious Skin is acclaimed as one of Araki’s finest and most sensitive films, but with its unflinching look at the damage done by child abuse, it isn’t for the faint of heart.

All three of these movies will have regular runs – not just one-off screenings – of at least a week, starting July 31^st with The Piano. If you’ve never seen them before on the big screen, or it’s been a while, come and see them look better than ever. Three very different films, by three great directors…and there’ll be more where that came from.

Fifty Years Haven’t Dulled Sidney Lumet’s ‘Network’

July 20, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

To celebrate Arthouse Theatre Day on July 30, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of the classic expose of television, Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet.

Don’t miss out and be mad as hell! Network screens Thursday, July 30th at 7 p.m. at the Laemmle Monica Film Center.

The film received 10 Academy Award nominations and won 4 Oscars in 1976, including one for Chayefsky and three for actors Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, and Beatrice Straight. That tied the all-time record for acting Oscars for a single film. The 5 acting nominations that it received also tied a record. In close to 100 years of Academy Awards, no film has ever earned more than 5 acting nods, and only a handful have received that many. The cast also includes William Holden, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty, and William Prince.

Chayefsky and Lumet set out to satirize the growing commercialization of television news, which began in the ’70s and has only mushroomed in recent decades. When news anchor Howard Beale, played by Finch, seems to be having a breakdown on the air, sober-minded executives want to fire him, but the head of the entertainment division, played by Dunaway, sees his crazed rantings as a potential boon to network ratings. Indeed Beale’s anthem, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more,” captures the imagination of gullible members of the viewing public.

Consider how many real-life personalities since 1976 have been allowed to rant and rave over the airways under the guise of being fearless truth tellers.

Reviews for the film were actually mixed, but most were positive. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called Network “brilliantly, cruelly funny.” Leonard Maltin claimed that the “entire cast explodes,” and he added, “Paddy Chayefsky’s outrageous satire on television looks less and less like fantasy as the years pass.” Award-winning writer Aaron Sorkin agreed with Maltin and wrote in 2011, “No predictor of the future—not even Orwell—has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.”

Will it still make audiences laugh, or is the the satire too close to the truth these days? There’s only one way to find out — come and watch Network on the big screen again.

Ross McElwee Revisits Personal Loss and Cinema in ‘Remake’

July 14, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Long before blogging and social media, Ross McElwee was turning a movie camera on his own life, processing his own reality through the films he made, like 1985’s groundbreaking documentary Sherman’s March. His latest, Remake, offers the biggest personal challenge to date – emotionally coming to terms with the death of his son.

Catch both Remake and a new restoration of Sherman’s March this Friday, July 17^th at Laemmle’s Royal.

Whatever the ostensible, assigned topic of McElwee’s documentaries – be it General Sherman or Big Tobacco – the real pleasures of his movies come when he tends to get sidetracked and return to the subject of his own life. For his last couple of films, In Paraguay and Photographic Memory, he cut directly to the chase and started with his family. Photographic Memory spotlighted his complicated relationship with his son, Adrian; fourteen years later, he’s dealing with Adrian’s death from drug addiction.

There is an originally assigned topic to Remake – Sherman’s March was being considered for a Hollywood remake as a fiction film, and McElwee signed a deal that allowed him to make a film about the making of the new film. As the movie stalled in development, however, Adrian spiraled downward and ultimately died. Adrian was himself an aspiring filmmaker, and Remake is made up of footage shot by him as well as his father.

McElwee’s narration remains as steadily deadpan as always, like he can reason his way through anything, but in this case he only comes up with more questions that require answers from the heart rather than the head. He’s always been masterful at self-analysis, yet it’s clear that he now realizes its inadequacy in the face of such a blow. The best he can do is keep Adrian alive on film, and try to understand him by seeing the world through his camera. At a certain age, Adrian stopped wanting to be the subject of his father’s films – in death, his shared credit as cinematographer and editor offers a glimpse at the artist he might have become. It’s clear that he followed somewhat in his father’s footsteps, trying to understand his own life through the camera lens, but having his own addiction as a topic didn’t allow him enough distance. The elder McElwee, naturally, wonders how much of this is his fault as a father.

The reuse of footage from his older films is a common McElwee technique, done both because he doesn’t assume audiences have seen all his films, and because the footage takes on new context when viewed as flashback rather than contemporary commentary. In Remake, he takes short side quests to catch up with some of the characters from Sherman’s March, now four decades older, using the old scenes for contrast. Audiences don’t have to make do with those snippets, as Sherman’s March in its entirety, now remastered in high definition, will be playing alongside Remake in theaters. Indeed, it is even more effective as a time capsule than it was as contemporaneous Boomer self-reflection. Particularly in light of all McElwee’s subsequent movies about himself as a family man, filmed evidence of his awkward single life during the Reagan administration stands as a slice of verite Americana, unpolished by the image-consciousness of the era.

“Even in a film as sombre as “Remake,” one of the joys of [Ross] McElwee’s method is the freedom with which he constructs his movies. “ – Richard Brody, The New Yorker.

“Both an elegy for a son and a meditation on artistic purpose, this autobiographical documentary transforms unbearable personal loss into a powerfully intimate probe of memory, creativity, and family legacies. “ – Todd Jorgenson, Cinemalogue.

Dan Curtis’ ‘House of Dark Shadows’ Brings Barnabas to the Big Screen

July 14, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Long before the sparkling Cullen vampires wowed YA fans, a bloodsucker named Collins caught the imagination of America’s youth. Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 60th anniversary tribute to the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, which premiered June 27, 1966.

We will screen the first theatrical movie based on the series, House of Dark Shadows (1970) for one night only, July 27 at the Laemmle NoHo at 7:00 p.m.

The television series focused on the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine and the wealthy Collins family, incorporating unprecedented supernatural elements for a daytime serial. Produced by Dan Curtis, the series had become an enormous success and pop cultural phenomenon after the introduction of 170-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins (stage actor Jonathan Frid) almost a year into the run, with Frid emerging as an unconventional “matinee idol.”

Curtis capitalized on the popularity of the TV series by fashioning a fast-paced feature-film adaptation, basically a condensed version of the storyline about Barnabas, cursed as a vampire in 1795. Inadvertently awakened in the 20th century, he wreaks terror on his contemporary ancestors at Collinwood while seeking to recreate his lost 18th century love as his vampire bride. The film featured most of the original TV cast: Joan Bennett, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Roger Davis, Grayson Hall, John Karlen, Nancy Barrett, Louis Edmunds, Thayer David, et al. Welcomed by fans seeing their favorite characters on the big screen, the film was a solid box office hit. When the series was abruptly canceled in 1971, its cult status propelled it through several decades of syndication, short-lived primetime remakes, and an ill-conceived “camp” movie version by Tim Burton in 2012, which was rejected by the ardent followers of the original series, who keep the show’s legacy alive.

To attract viewers outside of the fan base, House of Dark Shadows was sold as a straightforward vampire movie, emphasizing a more sinister side of Barnabas with increased shock and blood and giving a sanguine conclusion to the character. Horror filmmaker Rob Zombie offered a 21st-century assessment: “A prime example of everything done right when turning a TV show into a movie…essentially 200 episodes of storyline distilled down to a spectacular 97 minutes of gothic horror. It’s like an epic American version of a Hammer film.”

“The poetic finale is a tour-de-force of superb gothic imagery and galvanising horror.” – Alan Jones, Radio Times.

“Genuine chills and surprises. Blows away the TV show.” – Gerry Shamray, Cleveland.com.

Homoerotic Hitchcock: ‘Strangers on a Train’ at 75

June 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the movie that launched Hitchcock’s greatest decade of moviemaking, the 1951 suspense classic Strangers on a Train.

On Wednesday, June 24, at 7 p.m., attend the 75th anniversary screening at Laemmle’s Royal, complete with a Q&A with Stephen Rebello, Author of Criss-Cross: The Making of Hitcchock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train and Hitchcockian Thrillers.

Hitchcock had started his career in England with such top thrillers as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hollywood quickly came calling, and when Hitchcock moved to America, he won his only Best Picture Oscar for Rebecca in 1940. He continued with other classic films Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, and Notorious.

But in the late 1940s the Master of Suspense hit a dry spell, when his films The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, and Stage Fright failed to connect with audiences. Searching for inspiration, he landed on Patricia Highsmith’s first acclaimed novel, Strangers on a Train, a story drenched in homoeroticism and perverse psychology. Highsmith, who was herself gay (she later wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley and a lesbian-themed novel, Carol, that was turned into an acclaimed 2015 film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), provided the inspiration that Hitchcock needed.

Strangers tells the story of a chance meeting between a handsome tennis star, Guy Haines, and a charming but deranged aristocrat, Bruno Anthony. Bruno has read about Guy’s problems with his estranged wife and suggests half-jokingly that if they swap murders (Bruno wants to get rid of his disapproving father), neither would have a discernible motive for the murders they commit. Guy does not take the suggestion seriously, but when Bruno kills Guy’s wife, he expects Guy to return the favor.

The screenplay is credited to acclaimed mystery writer Raymond Chandler and female writer Czenzi Ormonde, but Chandler actually contributed very little to the movie; he and Hitchcock did not get along. Nevertheless, the script is tightly structured and consistently gripping. Like many Hitchcock movies, Strangers is distinguished by several memorable set-pieces, including the murder at an amusement park, a tense tennis match, and the climax on board a carousel spinning wildly out of control. But it also has the psychological depth of the Master’s best movies. Defying the Production Code, which had a strict prohibition against depictions of homosexuality, Hitchcock and his screenwriters clearly delineate the attraction that Bruno feels toward the handsome tennis champ. Robert Walker, the star of several lighter pictures, relishes his stab at villainy, and he is well matched with Farley Granger, who had starred in Hitchcock’s Rope and was gay in real life.

Ruth Roman, Laura Elliott, Norma Varden, Leo G. Carroll, and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia round out the cast. Robert Burks, who earned an Oscar nomination for his cinematography, went on to work with Hitchcock again on Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, among others. Oscar-winning composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who had worked with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, wrote the effective score.

Stephen Rebello, who will be doing a Q&A at the screening, is the author of the best-selling Alfred Hitchock and the Making of Psycho (which was turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren) and Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!: Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time. He has written for Movieline, GQ, Playboy, and other publications.

The Needle, the Noise, the Nineties: ‘Trainspotting’ Turns 30

May 19, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Three decades after its original release, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting remains one of the most electrifying cinematic gut-punches of the 1990s, a film that somehow manages to be hilarious, horrifying, exhilarating, and deeply sad often within the same scene. Returning to theaters for its 30th anniversary fresh off a new 4k restoration, Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s cult novel still feels startlingly alive, retaining the same manic energy and confrontational honesty that made it an instant cultural landmark upon its release in 1996.

Catch Trainspotting on its 30th anniversary tour beginning June 4th at the Laemmle Glendale, Newhall, and NoHo 7.

Set amid the economic stagnation and restless youth culture of Edinburgh, Trainspotting follows Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his circle of friends as they drift through heroin addiction, petty crime, self-destruction, and fleeting attempts at escape. Yet what distinguished the film then, and what continues to distinguish it now, is its refusal to settle into easy moralism. Boyle never romanticizes addiction, but neither does he flatten it into a simple cautionary tale. The film understands the seductive pull of oblivion just as clearly as it does the devastation left in its wake.

Much of that awareness comes from Boyle’s direction, which exploded onto screens with a style that felt entirely novel for its time. Hyperactive editing, surreal visual detours, needle-drop music cues, and fourth-wall-breaking narration combine to plunge viewers directly into Renton’s fractured state of mind. The now-iconic soundtrack, ranging from Iggy Pop to Underworld, became inseparable from the film’s identity, helping transform Trainspotting into not merely a movie but a full-fledged cultural phenomenon.

Watching it today, it is striking how much of Boyle’s later career already seems present here in embryonic form: the propulsive momentum of Slumdog Millionaire, the visceral intensity of 127 Hours, and the restless experimentation that would come to define one of the most eclectic directing careers of the last thirty years. Since Trainspotting, Boyle has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Director, helm the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, and cement himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most energetic and unpredictable filmmakers. But Trainspotting remains, for many, the film most inseparable from his singular artistic identity.

The anniversary arrives at a moment when the story itself is once again evolving, with a stage musical adaptation of Trainspotting set to launch this July in London’s West End, bringing Renton and company back to the city where their story began. That continued reinvention speaks to the film’s enduring resonance across generations. What once felt shocking and immediate has now also become historical: a snapshot of 1990s disaffection that somehow never lost its pulse.

For all its stylization and dark humor, Trainspotting endures because beneath the bravado lies something painfully human. Renton’s famous “Choose Life” monologue lands differently at 30 than it did at 20—not merely as satire, but as the exhausted cry of someone trying, however imperfectly, to imagine the possibility of another kind of existence. So whether it’s your first-ever viewing or a stroll down memory lane, get your tickets now and prepare to be entertained.

‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ Returns to Big Screens Uncut

May 5, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theaters and the Anniversary Classics Series present two screenings of the provocative and lyrical sci-fi classic, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, which marked pop superstar David Bowie’s debut in a lead role on the big screen.

For the film’s 50th anniversary, it will screen Wednesday, May 20, at Laemmle’s NoHo at 7 p.m.; and Wednesday, May 27, at Laemmle’s Royal at 7 p.m. Oscar-nominated actress Candy Clark will appear at both screenings to share memories of her co-star, the director, and her long film career.

The film was adapted by Paul Mayersberg from the novel by Walter Tevis, who also wrote the novel that inspired Paul Newman’s classic, The Hustler. Rip Torn, Buck Henry, and Bernie Casey co-star in the film. Bowie plays a visitor from a distant planet who travels to Earth to find water for his dying planet. He quickly amasses great wealth as an industrialist, but his plans are scotched by a couple of devious antagonists as well as by his love affair with a good-hearted woman played by Clark.

Roeg did the celebrated 2nd unit photography on the Oscar-winning masterpiece from 1962, Lawrence of Arabia. He went on to be the chief cinematographer on such films as Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, and Richard Lester’s Petulia, among other films. He made his directorial debut (sharing credit with Donald Cammell) on the 1970 cult favorite, Performance, which introduced another pop music icon, Mick Jagger, to dramatic filmmaking. Roeg made his solo directing debut on the exquisite Australian adventure, Walkabout, and followed with the classic thriller, Don’t Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

Cinematographer Anthony Richmond, who worked with Roeg on Don’t Look Now, joined him again on The Man Who Fell to Earth. Shot mainly in New Mexico, the film was again notable for its striking visual style. The music for the film was coordinated by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, with original score by Japanese composer Stomu Yamash-ta.

Most of Roeg’s films divided the critics, and this one was no exception, though it boasted a series of extraordinary reviews. At the time of its release, Richard Eder of The New York Times declared, “There are quite a few science-fiction movies scheduled to come out in the next year or so. We shall be lucky if even one or two are as absorbing and as beautiful as The Man Who Fell to Earth.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote a mixed review of the film in 1976 but described Bowie as “the most romantic figure in recent pictures, the modern version of the James Dean lost-boy myth.” Years later, Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out confirmed Eder’s evaluation and called The Man Who Fell to Earth “the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s.”

Robert Hawkins of Variety added to the praise for the film: “Bowie’s choice as the ethereal visitor is inspired… Candy Clark, as his naïve but loving mate, confirms the winning ways that won her an Oscar nom in American Graffiti… Her intimate scenes with Bowie… are among the pic’s highlights.”

One of these sex scenes, in which the two played with guns, led the distributor to cut some 20 minutes from the film before the 1976 release. This scene and others were restored when Rialto took over the release, and Laemmle will be screening the uncut version at both anniversary screenings.

Candy Clark earned her Oscar nomination for her warm portrayal of a local girl in George Lucas’s nostalgic breakthrough film, American Graffiti, in 1973. Her other movies include John Huston’s Fat City, Jonathan Demme’s Citizens Band, Blue Thunder, At Close Range, The Informant, and a wide range of television appearances over the decades. At both screenings Ms. Clark will participate in Q&As following the screenings, and will sign and sell her recent book of star photos, Tight Heads.