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TWOFER TUESDAY: 65th Anniversary Screenings of Two Marilyn Monroe Classics June 5th in Pasadena, North Hollywood, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics series present a tribute to one of the greatest stars in film history, Marilyn Monroe, during her birthday month of June. The program, part of our Twofer Tuesday series, features two of Monroe’s most popular movies—GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE, both from 1953.

‘Blondes’ is an adaptation of the 1949 stage musical by Anita Loos and Joseph Fields, based on a 1925 novel by Loos, one of the first women writers to score a success in Hollywood as well as on Broadway. It tells the story of two showgirls and best friends, played by Monroe and fellow screen siren Jane Russell. Marilyn plays the endearing gold-digger, Lorelei Lee.

Master director Howard Hawks, who excelled in several genres, proved just as adept in his first and only screen musical. Charles Lederer, the writer of such films as Hawks’ ‘His Girl Friday’ and ‘I Was a Male War Bride,’ freely adapted the stage play. Hawks retained some of the songs by Jule Styne and Leo Robin, especially the show’s signature number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” choreographed by Jack Cole and sizzlingly performed by Monroe in a bright pink dress. But he added new songs by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson, including a classic campy number (also choreographed by Cole) with muscle-bound athletes around a swimming pool. Monroe and Russell are ably supported by Oscar winner Charles Coburn (as a lecherous diamond magnate), Tommy Noonan and Elliott Reid.

According to Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, “Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell make a fantastic double act in Howard Hawks’ sparkling 1953 comedy.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote, “Jack Cole’s choreography offers some of the most incisively swinging musical numbers ever filmed.” Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader added, “The opening shot—Russell and Monroe in sequins standing against a screaming red drape—is enough to knock you out of your seat, and the audacity barely lets up from there… a landmark encounter in the battle of the sexes.”

‘How to Marry a Millionaire’ opened later in 1953 and teamed Monroe with two other screen bombshells, Betty Grable (the top pin-up girl of the 1940s), and Lauren Bacall, who seared the screen when she co-starred with her husband-to-be, Humphrey Bogart.

In this picture three working girls set their sights on snaring a rich tycoon, but their plans go awry when true love enters the picture. Jean Negulesco directed the script by Nunnally Johnson, and the men in their lives are portrayed by Cameron Mitchell, Rory Calhoun, David Wayne, Fred Clark, and screen veteran William Powell. Leonard Maltin hailed the “terrific ensemble work in dandy comedy of three man-hunting females pooling resources to trap eligible bachelors.” ‘Millionaire’ was the second movie shot in 20th Century Fox’s new Cinemascope format, following the studio’s Biblical breakthrough, ‘The Robe.’ It incorporated Alfred Newman’s memorable score, presented in stereoscopic sound.

At the Royal Theatre only, Debra Levine, the editor of the popular online arts journal arts•meme and the author of several articles about choreographer Jack Cole, will introduce the 7 o’clock screening of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.’

Our Marilyn Monroe double feature screens Tuesday, June 5th at the Royal, NoHo 7, and Playhouse 7.

Click here to buy a ticket to the 7:00pm show of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES with admission to the 9:00pm show of HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE included. Or, click here to buy a ticket to the 5:00pm show of HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE with admission to the 7:00pm show of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES included.

Fred Astaire Double Feature: THE BAND WAGON and EASTER PARADE on April 3 in NoHo, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present two Fred Astaire musicals in the popular Twofer Tuesday program this Easter holiday season, the 65th anniversary of THE BAND WAGON (1953) paired with, appropriately, the 70th anniversary of EASTER PARADE (1948). Astaire is considered the most influential actor-dancer in the history of motion pictures and television, and both films showcase his bountiful talent and artistry from the Golden Age of the movie musical.

Astaire was coaxed out of retirement to replace an injured Gene Kelly as the lead in Easter Parade, co-starring Judy Garland, who plays a chorus girl he grooms for stardom to take the place of his former dancing partner (Ann Miller in her MGM debut). The period musical comedy, set in 1912, features the Irving Berlin songbook, including such joyful tunes as “Shaking the Blues Away,” “Stepping Out with My Baby,” “A Couple of Swells,” and the title song.

Directed by Charles Walters (Lili), written by Sidney Sheldon and the husband and wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (The Thin Man, Father of the Bride). Also starring Peter Lawford and Jules Munshin. Produced by Arthur Freed (Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, Gigi). Oscar winner for Best Score of a Musical. Dance legend Gene Kelly later asserted, “the history of dance on film begins with Astaire.”

Astaire missed out on working with Cyd Charisse when she bowed out of Easter Parade, and was replaced by Ann Miller. But Astaire and Charisse got a second chance in 1953 with The Band Wagon, in which Astaire plays a “washed-up” movie star who pairs with a temperamental ballerina (Charisse) in creating a Broadway show. Producer Arthur Freed followed up his paean to the movies, Singin’ in the Rain, with that film’s writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who teamed this time with Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to concoct a sophisticated backstage musical confection. Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant play characters based on Comden and Green, and are comically supported by Jack Buchanan as a maniacal director.

The memorable score showcases the songs of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, which include “By Myself,” “Shine on Your Shoes,” Dancing in the Dark,” and the show business anthem, “That’s Entertainment.” Deftly directed by Vincent Minnelli (An American in Paris, Gigi). Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film in The New York Times, praised all the assembled talent, “this witty and literate combination delivers a show that respectfully bids for recognition as one of the best musicals ever made.” Added to the National Film Registry in 1995. The Band Wagon, according to Leonard Maltin, “improves with each viewing.”

Here is a chance to see it back on the big screen in our Twofer Tuesday (two for the price of one) double bill with Easter Parade. Both films will play one day only, April 3, at Laemmle Theatres in NoHo, Pasadena, and West L.A.

For tickets to the 4:45pm EASTER PARADE and the 7pm THE BAND WAGON, click here.

For tickets to the 7pm THE BAND WAGON and 9:15pm EASTER PARADE, click here.

Format: DCP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcyByIPdW18

Double Feature: THE WAY WE WERE and SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE on February 13th in NoHo, Pasadena, and West LA

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Twofer Tuesdays return just in time for Valentine’s Day. Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a double feature of two all-time romantic favorites, THE WAY WE WERE and SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE.

Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford demonstrate matchless chemistry in THE WAY WE WERE, which received six Oscar nominations in 1973, including a nod for Streisand as Best Actress. The picture won two Oscars, for Marvin Hamlisch’s memorable score and Best Song, written by Hamlisch, Marilyn and Alan Bergman.

Streisand plays a college radical who falls in love with the apolitical campus jock, who also happens to be a gifted writer. The film follows their tumultuous romance over two decades from the 1930s to the 1950s and reaches its climax in the era of the Hollywood blacklist, which destroyed families and careers. Arthur Laurents (West Side Story, Gypsy, The Turning Point) provided the screenplay, and Sydney Pollack, a master of movie romance, directed. The supporting cast includes Bradford Dillman, Viveca Lindfors, Patrick O’Neal, and Lois Chiles.

Pauline Kael wrote of the film, “It’s hit entertainment, and maybe even memorable entertainment…The movie is about two people who are wrong for each other, and Streisand and Redford are an ideal match to play this mismatch.” The finale, in which the lovers meet several years after their divorce and contemplate what might have been, has had audiences weeping for decades.

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE from 1993 also boasts a tearjerking finale that packs a wallop. In the Oscar-nominated screenplay by director Nora Ephron, David S. Ward, and Jeff Arch, geography is the main obstacle keeping the star-crossed lovers apart. Tom Hanks plays an architect from Seattle who is still grieving over his dead wife. His son (Ross Malinger) decides that he needs to find a new mate and helps to orchestrate a radio confessional that attracts the attention of Meg Ryan, a journalist living in Baltimore.

Ephron, a celebrated journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, came into her own as a director when this rom-com became a surprise summertime smash. Ryan, who had starred in Ephron’s screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, demonstrated perfect rapport with Hanks, and they reteamed in Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail five years later. Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Pullman, Rob Reiner (the director of When Harry Met Sally), Rita Wilson, and Gaby Hoffmann as Malinger’s pint-sized co-conspirator contribute delicious cameos. Despite all the prodding and plotting, the potential lovers keep missing each other until a meeting atop the Empire State Building offers them a last chance at connection.

The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “Not since Love Story has there been a movie that so shrewdly and predictably manipulated the emotions for such entertaining effect.” The rousing soundtrack, which included a series of romantic standards performed by unexpected singers (including two numbers by Jimmy Durante), rose to the top of the pop charts and contributed to the movie’s success.

The double feature screens Tuesday, February 13th at our North Hollywood, Pasadena, and West LA venues.

Click here to purchase tickets for the 5pm screening of SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE with admission the the 7:10pm THE WAY WERE included.

Click here to purchase tickets for the 7:10pm THE WAY WE WERE with admission to 9:30pm SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE included.

Format: Both films on DCP

Halloween Twofer Tuesday: THE MUMMY and CAT PEOPLE on October 31st in NoHo, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a special Halloween double feature in the popular Twofer Tuesday Series (two films for the price of one) on October 31.

We will show a “double treat” of the 85th anniversary of THE MUMMY (1932) with the 75th anniversary of CAT PEOPLE (1942). Both films epitomize atmospheric black-and-white chills from the classical studio era.

THE MUMMY was one of the early efforts from Universal studios to capitalize on the their success in the horror genre (following the 1931 hits Dracula and Frankenstein).

Karl Freund, the German émigré cinematographer of Metropolis and Dracula, made his directorial debut with this film inspired by the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922.

Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. hired one of the writers of Dracula, John L. Balderston, to craft a screenplay from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer, and cast Boris Karloff, fresh from his star-making performance in Frankenstein, as the three-thousand-year-old mummy stalking an English girl (Zita Johann) he believes is the reincarnation of his ancient love.

The cinematography is credited to Charles Stumar (who shot the Lon Chaney silent The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The result is a masterpiece of mood, described by critic Pauline Kael as “…disturbingly beautiful. No other horror film has ever achieved so many emotional effects by lighting; the film has a languorous, poetic feeling, and the eroticism that lives on under Karloff’s wrinkled parchment skin is like a bad dream of undying love.”

With David Manners, Bramwell Fletcher, Arthur Byron, and Edward Van Sloan.

CAT PEOPLE was the first venture from producer Val Lewton (I Walked With a Zombie, Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher) as head of RKO’s new horror division in 1942. He gave Jacques Tourneur the chance to direct his first feature with this tale of a new bride (Simone Simon) who fears she is a descendant of a predatory cat family.

DeWitt Bodeen (I Remember Mama, Billy Budd) wrote the screenplay from a short story by producer Lewton, who also employed cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and editor Mark Robson (future director of Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls), to create one of the most imaginative low-budget films ever made. Tourneur and Musuraca later collaborated on one of the seminal film noirs, Out of the Past.

Roger Ebert called Cat People one of the “Great Movies,” extolling it as “frightening in an eerie, mysterious way that was hard to define; the screen harbored unseen threats, and there was an undertone of sexual danger that was more ominous because it was never acted upon.”

With Kent Smith, Tom Conway, and Jane Randolph. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 1993.

Our Halloween Twofer plays October 31 at three locations: Royal, NoHo 7 and Pasadena Playhouse 7. The complete double feature screens twice, with THE MUMMY shown at 5:00 pm and 8:20 pm; CAT PEOPLE at 6:40 pm and 10:00 pm.

Twofer Tuesday: A Paul Newman Double Feature of COOL HAND LUKE (1967) and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962) on October 3rd!

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a tribute to Oscar-winning actor Paul Newman with the latest installment in our popular Twofer Tuesday program.

Newman received one of his nine Oscar nominations for the landmark prison drama, COOL HAND LUKE, released in 1967. He reprised his acclaimed stage performance in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ steamy melodrama, Sweet Bird of Youth from 1962.

Enjoy these two films for the price of one on Tuesday, October 3rd at your choice of three Laemmle locations—the Royal in West LA, the NoHo in North Hollywood, and the Playhouse in Pasadena.

COOL HAND LUKE received a total of four Academy Award nominations in 1967, and George Kennedy won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, an award that invigorated the career of one of Hollywood’s most well liked character actors.

Newman plays a rebellious prisoner on a Southern chain gang who eventually wins the support of all his fellow convicts even though he infuriates the prison officials.

The warden’s rebuke to Newman—“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”—became one of the most quoted lines in cinema history, and many scenes, including an egg-eating contest and an unexpected song that Newman sings after learning of his mother’s death, have also entered the lexicon.

The supporting cast includes a number of other acclaimed actors—Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Strother Martin, and Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet.

Stuart Rosenberg directed the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson.

The Saturday Review’s Hollis Alpert called Luke “a film as beautifully executed as any made this year.” Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times added that the film was “a triumph for Paul Newman.”

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH received three Oscar nominations in 1962, and Ed Begley won the award as Best Supporting Actor for his vivid portrayal of a tyrannical Southern political boss.

Lead actress Geraldine Page and supporting actress Shirley Knight also earned nods from the Academy. Page and Newman had both starred in the Broadway production of Williams’ play, and they revisited and deepened their performances in the screen version, which despite a few compromises dictated by the Production Code, was generally regarded as superior to the play.

Richard Brooks, who had also adapted Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Newman, wrote the screenplay and directed.

The heart of the film lies in the provocative bedroom scenes between Page and Newman, playing a gigolo slightly past his prime and a has-been movie star happy to pay for his sexual favors.

The cast also includes Rip Torn, Mildred Dunnock, and Madeleine Sherwood.

Newsweek praised Sweet Bird as “a forceful, often devastating piece of work.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “Newman is the almost perfect Williams hero, sensitive, vulnerable, but undeniably masculine.”

Click here to get tickets to the 4:40pm show of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, admission to the 7pm COOL HAND LUKE is included. Click here to buy tickets to the 7pm show of COOL HAND LUKE, admission to the 9:30pm SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH is included.

Twofer Tuesday: Robert Mitchum Centennial on August 1st in Beverly Hills, NoHo, and Pasadena

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series celebrate the centennial of Hollywood icon Robert Mitchum (b. August 6, 1917) with two of his best roles, OUT OF THE PAST (1947, 70th anniversary) and CAPE FEAR (1962, 55th anniversary). The two acclaimed film noirs will be shown as a double feature on August 1 as part of the popular Twofer Tuesday (two for the price of one) program at a choice of three locations: the Ahrya Fine Arts, NoHo 7, and Pasadena Playhouse 7. Presented on blu-ray.

Click here for tickets to the 5:10pm OUT OF THE PAST and 7:15 CAPE FEAR
or
Click here for tickets to the 7:15 CAPE FEAR and 9:30 OUT OF THE PAST

Mitchum was a contract player at RKO when he starred in Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur with a script by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring), adapting his novel, “Build My Gallows High.” Mitchum plays an ex-private eye entangled in a web of double-dealings by former criminal associates (gangster Kirk Douglas and old flame Jane Greer). Mitchum, described in the New York Times review of the day as “magnificently cheeky and self-assured,” entrenched his cynical, antihero image in this film.

Out of the Past, as author Jeremy Arnold notes in TCM’s The Essentials: 52 Must-See Movies and Why They Matter, “is the quintessential film noir. It has a tough hero, a supremely alluring femme fatale, hard-boiled dialogue, a commingling of sex and violence, expressionistic lighting…all set in an ominous world where death and double-cross are the norm.” The movie has been added to the National Film Registry.

Cape Fear came at the end of the classical black-and-white film noir period (1942-62), and stars Mitchum in his most memorable villainous role, Max Cady. In this adaptation by James R. Webb of James D. MacDonald’s novel, “The Executioners,” an ex-con plots insidious revenge on the lawyer (Gregory Peck) whose testimony sent him to prison. Director J. Lee Thompson was an admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and paid homage to the Master of Suspense with camera angles and the use of his frequent collaborator, composer Bernard Herrmann, who provided a superbly menacing score. Mitchum was so convincing in the role that co-star Polly Bergen (as Peck’s wife) said she was genuinely frightened in an improvised scene with him. Leonard Maltin calls Mitchum’s performance “believably creepy,” and the American Film Institute cited his portrayal of Cady as one of the top 30 “All-Time Screen Villains.” Martin Balsam, Lori Martin, Telly Savalas, and Barrie Chase co-star.

Barrie Chase had other memorable roles in films of the 1960s, including Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix. She was a dancer in many hit musical films of the 1950s and co-starred with Fred Astaire in several of his top-rated TV specials.

Actress Barrie Chase will introduce the 7:15 CAPE FEAR at the Ahrya Fine Arts. Film historian Jeremy Arnold will introduce the 9:30 OUT OF THE PAST, only at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills.

Out of the Past screens at 5:15 & 9:30; Cape Fear screens at 7:15, at all three locations.

July 4th Twofer Tuesday Double Bill of THE MUSIC MAN and YANKEE DOODLE DANDY in Pasadena, NoHo, and Beverly Hills!

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a star-spangled double feature on the 4th of July in the popular monthly Twofer Tuesdays program – the 75th anniversary of Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), paired with the 55th anniversary of The Music Man (1962). Both films represent unabashed celluloid tributes to the American spirit.

And so you won’t miss fireworks, we screen the double feature (two films, one admission) as a special holiday matinee on July 4 at three locations: Ahrya Fine Arts, NoHo 7 and Pasadena Playhouse 7. Yankee Doodle Dandy at 1:00 pm; The Music Man at 3:30 pm. Presented on blu-ray.

Click here for tickets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrAFAst0Bb4

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY is the musical biopic of Broadway showman George M. Cohan, showcasing the Oscar-winning performance of screen legend James Cagney (Best Actor). The rousing patriotic musical was released during the early months of WWII, and was designed to lift the American psyche, which it accomplished resoundingly.

The film was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Director (Michael Curtiz), and Supporting Actor (Walter Huston, playing Cohan’s vaudevillian father). Roger Ebert noted, “the greatness of the film rests entirely in Cagney’s performance. While he’s in full sail, as in “Give My Regards to Broadway” or “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” it’s like regarding a force of nature.” And Cohan himself, still alive at the time, is reputed to have said of Cagney’s performance, “My God, what an act to follow.”

THE MUSIC MAN is the colorful screen adaptation of Meredith Willson’s Tony-winning Broadway musical, preserving the triumphant stage performance of Robert Preston in the greatest role of his career. Pauline Kael aptly observed, “the star, Robert Preston, has a few minutes of fast patter—conmanship set to music—that constitute one of the high points in the history of American musicals.”

Critics and public alike at the height of the Cold War embraced the ebullient celebration of early twentieth-century small town Americana, and the film was a box-office smash. Produced and directed by Morton Da Costa (Auntie Mame), with Shirley Jones, Buddy Hackett, Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold and a future Oscar-winning director, seven year old Ron Howard. Nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Both films feature the craftsmanship of Warner Bros. staff composer and musical arranger Ray Heindorf, who won his first Academy Award for Yankee Doodle Dandy, and his third and final Oscar for The Music Man twenty years later. Additionally, the two musicals were inducted into the National Film Registry for “historical, cultural, and aesthetic significance.” Here is a rare opportunity to see them back on the big screen.

Twofer Tuesday: A Hitchcock Double Feature of SABOTEUR (1942) and FRENZY (1972) on June 6th!

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics series present two of the less frequently revived films from the Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock: a 75th anniversary screening of the World War II-era thriller, SABOTEUR, and a 45th anniversary screening of one of his final films, FRENZY. See two films for the price of one on June 6th at the Ahrya Fine Arts, NoHo 7, and Pasadena Playhouse 7. Presented on DCP.

Click here to buy tickets to the 5pm show of SABOTEUR, admission to the 7:20pm FRENZY is included. Click here to get tickets to the 7:20pm show of FRENZY, admission to the 9:45pm SABOTEUR is included.

Both films are variations on one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes, that of the wrong man in jeopardy—a story that he first explored in one of his early British classics, The 39 Steps, and that he reworked in such American films as Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest.

In Saboteur Robert Cummings plays a munitions factory worker suspected of setting a destructive industrial fire and forced to go on the lam to prove his innocence. The tart and witty screenplay was penned by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker and centers on a conspiracy by a group of softspoken but sinister American Fascists. The Statue of Liberty finale is one of Hitchcock’s memorable set pieces. Priscilla Lane, Otto Kruger, and Norman Lloyd costar. The New York Times called it “a swift, high-tension film.”

In Frenzy, Hitchcock filmed in his native England for the first time in more than two decades. Jon Finch plays the innocent man accused of a series of grisly murders by the notorious “Necktie Strangler.” British actors Barry Foster, Anna Massey, Billie Whitelaw, Alec McCowen, and Vivien Merchant costar. This thriller was written by acclaimed playwright Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth) and received the best reviews of Hitchcock’s late career. Roger Ebert noted that “Frenzy is a return to old forms for the master of suspense,” and Leonard Maltin declared, “All classic Hitchcock elements are here, including delicious black humor, several astounding camera shots.”