An Evening with Shirley MacLaine and 40th Anniversary Screening of THE TURNING POINT (1977) on Wednesday, January 11, at Laemmle’s Music Hall at 7 PM. Click here to buy tickets now.
On January 14 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association will present its Career Achievement Award to Shirley MacLaine, Oscar-winning star of stage and screen for the last 60 years.
In conjunction with that event, the Anniversary Classics series offers an intimate conversation with MacLaine, along with a 40th anniversary screening of her award-winning film, THE TURNING POINT.
The movie was nominated for 11 Academy Awards in 1977 and won Golden Globes for best drama and best director Herbert Ross. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents won the Writers Guild award for best original screenplay.
Both MacLaine and co-star Anne Bancroft were Oscar-nominated for their performances in the film, and dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne also received nominations for their supporting roles.
THE TURNING POINT tells the story of two friends who started out together as dancers in a national ballet company (modeled on American Ballet Theatre).
Bancroft’s character became a prima ballerina while MacLaine’s character chose to give up her career and raise a family. When MacLaine’s daughter (played by Browne) launches her own career as a dancer, the two women examine the life choices that they made two decades earlier, and long buried jealousies and resentments come to the surface.
Variety called the movie “one of the best films of its era,” and added, “Pic ranks as one of MacLaine’s career highlights.”
New West magazine agreed that The Turning Point was “among the most emotionally satisfying movies of recent years.”
After starting as a dancer on Broadway, Shirley MacLaine made her film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry in 1955.
She earned her first Oscar nomination when she co-starred with Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running in 1958. She earned two more nominations for her performances in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and Irma La Douce (1963). She won the Oscar in 1983 when she starred in James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment.
Among her many other films are Around the World in 80 Days, Ocean’s Eleven, The Children’s Hour, Sweet Charity, Being There, Steel Magnolias, Postcards from the Edge, and more recent turns in Richard Linklater’s Bernie with Jack Black and Elsa & Fred with Christopher Plummer.
For more about our Anniversary Classics Series, including an upcoming evening with Alan Alda, visit www.laemmle.com/ac and join our Facebook Group.
Laemmle Theatres and the 
We’ll also soon screen two by Michelangelo Antonioni: 
In The Man Who Knew Too Much one of Doris Day’s rare forays into the thriller genre, the actress introduced one of her most successful songs, the Oscar-winning hit, “Que Sera Sera.” But she also demonstrated her versatility in several harrowing and suspenseful dramatic scenes. She plays the wife of one of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, James Stewart. The movie was a box office bonanza for all parties. Hitchcock’s success during the 1940s allowed the director to employ bigger budgets and shoot on location for several of his Technicolor thrillers in the 1950s, including To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. For The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake of his own 1934 film, Hitchcock traveled to Morocco and to London for some spectacular location scenes. In his famous series of interviews with the Master of Suspense, Francois Truffaut wrote, “In the construction as well as in the rigorous attention to detail, the remake is by far superior to the original.” The plot turns on kidnapping and assassination, all building to a concert scene in the Royal Albert Hall that climaxes memorably with the clash of a pair of cymbals.
We open our sagebrush weekend with the “third and best of Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy… the quintessential spaghetti Western,” according to Leonard Maltin. The trilogy became the most popular of the hundreds of European Westerns made in the 1960s and 70s. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, set during the Civil War in New Mexico, is actually a prequel to A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, all of which starred Clint Eastwood as Blondie, or the Man with No Name. Leone and his screenwriters considered the film a satire with its emphasis on violence and deconstruction of Old West romanticism.
This film won seven Oscars in 1991, including Best Picture and Best Director Kevin Costner. (It was the first Western to be named Best Picture since Cimarron took the prize in 1931.) It remains one of the most popular Western films of all time, with one of the few positive and honest portrayals of Native American culture. And it is a genuine historical epic that deserves to be seen on the big screen, where its spectacular battle scenes and buffalo hunt can be fully appreciated.
The film was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1966, including Best Director and Best Screenplay for Hollywood veteran (and past Oscar winner) Richard Brooks. This irreverent Western boasts plenty of sardonic humor and turns many of the values of the genre upside down, but it does not skimp on production values or striking cinematography (by Oscar winner Conrad Hall). “Taut excitement throughout” was the verdict of Leonard Maltin.
One of the finest collaborations of John Wayne and director John Ford is also one of the most influential and admired Westerns in history. At the time of its release, The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a ripsnorting Western,” but its reputation grew in later years.
We close the weekend with a modern take on the oater genre. This 1961 film’s themes of outsiders and non-conformists misplaced in contemporary society, with no new undiscovered frontiers, provide a fitting elegy to the Western.
June 29 won’t be just any night, because we’ll be celebrating the 55th anniversary of 
