Cinematic Classics Archives – Laemmle Theatres

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.

Anniversary Classics Presents: Revisiting the Cult Classic ‘Harold and Maude’

March 18, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series are proud to present a tribute to the late Bud Cort with a screening of his most famous movie, the offbeat romantic comedy Harold and Maude, on Wednesday, March 25th at 7:30 p.m. at the Laemmle NoHo.

Cort first attracted attention in two films directed by Robert Altman, the Oscar-winning black comic hit M*A*S*H and the eccentric comedy Brewster McCloud. He also played one of the student protestors in The Strawberry Statement, one of a handful of movies about student rebellion produced in the early 1970s. Yet it wasn’t until he joined forces with Ruth Gordon, Oscar-winning co-star of Rosemary’s Baby, to play one of the oddest couples in movie history, that the talented young actor was launched into what would ultimately develop into a decades-long career.

Cort plays Harold, a death-obsessed young man determined to commit suicide, at least until he meets the vibrant 79-year-old Maude and gradually falls in love with her. Before their chance encounter, Harold spends his days staging elaborate fake suicides to shock his wealthy, emotionally distant mother and attending strangers’ funerals for entertainment, drifting through life with a morbid detachment that borders on performance art. Maude, by contrast, lives with mischievous spontaneity: stealing cars she fancies, rescuing trees slated for demolition, and approaching each moment with irreverent wonder. Their unlikely friendship grows (while sneakily developing into the most improbable of romances) through a series of adventures that gently dismantle Harold’s fascination with death, as Maude introduces him to the pleasures, absurdities, and quiet rebellions that make life worth living. Set against a rich backdrop of early-1970s countercultural whimsy, their relationship challenges social expectations and invites Harold (and, ultimately, the audience) to reconsider what it means to truly embrace being alive.

Written by Colin Higgins as the basis for his Master’s thesis at UCLA and directed by Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude was a critical and financial flop when it first opened in December of 1971. Major critics like Roger Ebert, and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, panned the film, and it struggled to find an audience. Pauline Kael gave it a mixed review, noting that it flaunted a bizarre concept, but granted that it had “been made with considerable wit and skill,” also noting the considerable impact it had on young viewers: “Many young moviegoers have returned to this eccentric film repeatedly (in 1974, one 22-year-old claimed to have seen it 138 times).” The venerable New York Review of Books called it “a philosophical black comedy for grandparents and grandchildren.”

It wasn’t until 1983, twelve years after its initial release, that the film finally turned a profit, and that Cort, Gordon, and the filmmakers received their long-overdue royalty checks. In the years that followed, the critics, too, gradually gave the film a second look, and in 1997 it was tagged for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. By 2004, Entertainment Weekly ranked it #4 on its list of the top 50 cult films of all time. Rarely has the phrase “aged like fine wine” been a more apt descriptor for a work of art.

Ashby and Higgins, for their part, also went on to much bigger successes, the former directing a number of acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There, while the latter penned the smash-hit comedy Silver Streak, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, followed by a successful directorial run with Foul Play and 9 to 5.

With a deep and memorable cast including Vivian Pickles and the prolific Cyril Cusack, as well as an iconic soundtrack by Cat Stevens—filling in admirably for Elton John, who recommended him for the project after dropping out—Harold and Maude has plenty to offer its viewers, whether seeing it for the first… or 139th time.

Join us in remembering Bud Cort, in his most iconic role, at Harold and Maude‘s one-night-only screening at the Laemmle Noho.

Summer, Youth, and Self-Discovery: Rediscovering Satyajit Ray’s ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’

February 24, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

A journey into the countryside becomes something far richer in Days and Nights in the Forest, the quietly radiant 1970 film from Indian master Satyajit Ray. Long regarded as one of Ray’s foremost (if relatively underappreciated) achievements, this film serves as a reminder of why he remains one of world cinema’s most revered humanists—a filmmaker of uncommon grace, wit, and emotional intelligence.

Catch the newly restored Days and Nights in the Forest beginning February 6th at the Laemmle Royal, or February 13th at Glendale.

On the surface, the premise is simple: Four young professionals from Kolkata escape the pressures of city life for a few carefree days in the forests of eastern India. They arrive with cigarettes, bravado, and a pocketful of assumptions. They bribe a caretaker to secure lodging they never reserved. They drink too much. They talk too loudly. They treat the rural landscape as backdrop to their own amusement. Ray sketches these early episodes with a light touch that feels almost casual, airy, even playful. But a closer inspection reveals that what seems effortless is in fact exquisitely composed.

Ray builds the film from contrasts: urban and rural, privilege and poverty, men and women, innocence and experience. His camera often frames characters in medium groupings, encouraging us to observe them in relation to one another rather than as isolated heroes. There is no single protagonist here; instead, we’re invited to study a small social ecosystem. Time passes gently. Conversations drift. Meaning accumulates.

When two women vacationing nearby, Aparna and Jaya, enter the men’s orbit, the film’s tone subtly shifts. Banter gives way to vulnerability; posturing reveals insecurity. Ray’s women, clear-eyed and self-possessed, register the men’s arrogance with bemusement rather than outrage. The flirtations and conversations that follow are modest on their face—a walk, a game of badminton, shared laughter—yet they carry the quiet charge of lives tilting off course.

The film’s most celebrated sequence arrives during a picnic, when the six characters play a memory game, each adding the name of a famous figure to an ever-growing list. It might sound inconsequential, but in the rhythms of hesitation and recall, in the glances exchanged and the names chosen, whole inner worlds flicker into view. Ray orchestrates the scene with the delicacy of chamber music. Nothing is underlined; everything resonates.

What makes Days and Nights in the Forest endure is its refusal of easy symbolism or tidy moralizing. Ray does not punish his characters, nor does he absolve them. He simply watches with compassion, irony, and patience as they brush up against their own limitations. The revelations are often small, but they linger. Only after viewing the entire film do you realize just how much it has revealed: about class and conscience, about love and pride, and about the uneasy passage from youth toward self-knowledge.

Roommates, Revolution, and Reverie: Rediscovering Visconti’s ‘Conversation Piece’

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This month, a revival worth savoring is headed back to the big screen: Conversation Piece, the late-period chamber drama from acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, returns in a new 4K restoration courtesy of Kino Lorber. If you’ve never encountered this strange, elegant, faintly scandalous film, this theatrical reissue is the ideal way to step inside its rarefied, decaying world.

Catch Conversation Piece in its much-anticipated re-release beginning February 20th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set almost entirely inside a grand Roman apartment—a practical concession to Visconti’s waning health—the film unfolds like a live-in painting: fitting, since its unnamed protagonist, a retired American professor played by Burt Lancaster, specializes in collecting “conversation pieces,” those intimate group portraits of domestic life. His own life, however, is all but sealed off: books, art, routine, and a heavy dose of solitude. That carefully controlled environment is suddenly upended when the Countess Bianca Brumonti (played with Circean glamour by Silvana Mangano) bullies her way into renting the upstairs flat, bringing along her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her volatile young lover Konrad, portrayed by longtime Visconti muse Helmut Berger.

What follows is less a traditional narrative than an all-out invasion, as noise, sex, politics, emotional turbulence, and generational upheaval flood the professor’s cloistered existence. Renovations begin without permission; parties erupt; strangers roam the halls. The professor protests (albeit mildly), yet inexorably finds himself drawn into their disorder, especially toward Berger’s Konrad, whose swaggering vulgarity and wounded intelligence combine to create a dangerous gravitational pull.

Visconti, working after a debilitating stroke and reportedly directing portions of the film from his wheelchair, turns such limitations into style. The film’s confined setting becomes a pressure cooker of class tension, erotic charge, and ideological debate. At times it plays like tragic farce, at others like philosophical confession, resulting in a tonal high-wire act—stately composition colliding with emotional disarray—that gives the movie its peculiar, lingering power.

Lancaster’s casting is part of the fascination. Long associated with physical dynamism and outward force, here he is turned inward: restrained, observant, aching. Whether you view the performance as daringly subdued or intriguingly misaligned, it’s impossible to look away. Berger, by contrast, is all sharp edges and dangerous charm, strutting and smirking through the film like a beautiful provocation.

Conversation Piece is about aging, envy of youth, sexual politics, class hypocrisy, and the uneasy coexistence of radical ideas with decadent taste. It’s also, not incidentally, wickedly funny in stretches, with Visconti allowing the absurdity of his characters’ self-justifications to show through the gilt frame.

Seeing this film restored in 4K reveals the tactile richness of its interiors—fabrics, paintings, skin, candlelight—while accentuating the painterly intent behind every composition. Like the artworks the professor cherishes, this restoration rewards close viewing and theatrical scale.

In short: a film about people who shouldn’t live together, restored so beautifully that you’ll be very glad they do.

(At least for two hours.)

Claude Lelouch retrospective featuring cinephiles’ ultimate date-night movie, A MAN AND A WOMAN.

April 9, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Next week we’ll begin a Claude Lelouch retrospective at the Royal with a week-long engagement of his 1966 double Oscar and Palme d’Or winner A Man and a Woman, newly restored by Rialto Pictures. April 26 through April 30 we’ll also screen his films Les Miserables, And Now My Love, Rendezvous, Cat and Mouse, La Bonne Année, and Bolero (Les Uns et les Autres).

“A tender, visually stirring film of rejuvenating love between a widow and a widower: Trintignant and Aimée share a candid romance while balancing the demands of career and parenthood. It’s a touching, realistic look at a burgeoning adult romance, with each participant encumbered by a past tragedy, causing them to proceed delicately. Also famous for Francis Lai’s gorgeous, swooning score…Quite possibly one of the sweetest love stories ever captured on screen.” – Wilson Chapman, IndieWire

“How to resist a pairing as photogenic as Aimée and Trintignant? I couldn’t take my eyes off either of them.” – Anthony Quinn, The Independent

“The final scene should go down in history as one of the most romantic ever put to film.” – Far Out Magazine (U.K.)

“Beautiful… breathtaking.” – The New York Times

“Probably the most efficacious make-out movie of the swinging ’60s.” – Pauline Kael

“Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is a film as simple and complicated as its title implies. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay, it chronicles the tentative, tender romance between a widow and a widower, irresistibly drawn to one another despite the heavy weight of past tragedies. Newly restored in 4K, the film features two of the most iconic and attractive stars of French cinema photographed in a beautiful mix of color and black-and-white—the kind of thing the big screen was made for, never mind that the story is much more intimate than epic.

“Every Sunday, script supervisor Anne (Anouk Aimée) travels north from Paris to Deauville to visit her young daughter, Francoise, at boarding school; racecar driver Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) does the same to visit his young son, Antoine. One wintery Sunday, Anne misses the last train back to Paris and gets a ride home with Jean-Louis, and sparks fly each time they lock eyes across the car. Both say they are married and still wear their rings, but they eventually reveal to each other that their respective partners have passed away—though, for Anne in particular, the memory of her stuntman husband, Pierre (Pierre Barouh), feels very much alive.

“Upon arriving in Paris, Jean-Louis asks Anne if she would like to drive up to Deauville together the next weekend. What follows is a delicate dance between the two as they grow closer while still keeping a small, safe distance—enough room for the ghosts of their partners to hover between them. It’s an undeniably adult yet no less swoon-worthy depiction of two people falling in love, in which seemingly small gestures like Jean-Louis gripping the back of Anne’s chair during lunch—wanting to be closer to her but resisting the urge to put his arm around her—say more about their growing connection than all the flowery dialogue in the world ever could.

“There is a lot that makes A Man and a Woman one of the most timeless romantic dramas ever committed to celluloid, but it would be a lie to say that the film’s two lovely stars don’t top the list. Not only are they almost unbelievably nice to look at, but they also have a natural chemistry that makes it impossible not to be invested in their characters’ love story. The film thrives on them and their emotions; every time they glance at each other and smile, as though they seemingly can’t believe their good luck in finding one another, you can feel that warmth in your own heart.

“Aimée’s performance as Anne, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, is deeply poignant; her struggle to reconcile her burgeoning love for Jean-Louis with her ongoing love for Pierre, and the feeling that she is somehow betraying him by falling for another, is complex and moving. Meanwhile, Trintignant makes Jean-Louis a figure of irresistible magnetism who nonetheless has insecurities about his new romance that the film brings to amusing, affecting life via voiceover. After all, how does one win the affection of a woman when your competition is dead and cannot do anything more to hurt his chances? Perhaps if Pierre had lived and their relationship had time to sour, instead of being cut short in such an idealized state, it would have been easier, Jean-Louis muses.

“A Man and a Woman also utilizes flashbacks that are effective in telling us how our protagonists’ partners died as well as in showing us how powerful their love was in life, and why it’s so difficult for them to resign such love to the past and move on. The film is strongest when it relies on images like these and the aforementioned small glances and gestures between Anne and Jean-Louis—a shared moment of laughter on a boat with their children, a spinning embrace on a deserted Deauville beach, a surprise moment of eye contact across a busy train platform—yet the script, co-written by Lelouch with Pierre Uytterhoeven, is nonetheless intelligent when it chooses to speak out loud.

“Lelouch, who also served as the film’s cinematographer and supervised this new restoration, shot A Man and a Woman partially in color and partially in black-and-white simply because of budget constraints, yet the result fits the film’s story so well you’d assume it was a more purposeful stylistic choice. (If a film shot on a shoestring budget is capable of looking this good, why does the industry bother spending millions of dollars on films that look a million times worse? Though, to be fair, they don’t have stars like Aimée and Trintignant to photograph.) And just when you thought the film couldn’t possibly be any more stylish in that quintessentially twentieth-century French cinema way, Francis Lai’s enchanting musical score arrives on the scene and uplifts everything.

“A Man and a Woman is quite possibly the cinephile’s ultimate date night movie and most definitely a romance that will win you over.” ~ Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK ~ 50th anniversary screenings of one of Australia’s premiere films.

February 19, 2025 by Jordan Deglise Moore 3 Comments

Before The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir’s estimable career took off with his eerie, languorous 1975 drama Picnic at Hanging Rock. A milestone for the Australian film industry, it has stood the test of time, and we are thrilled to open a week of screenings this Friday at the Royal. The keepers of world cinema at Janus Films have released a new 4K restoration of Weir’s 1998 director’s cut. Here’s film critic J. Hoberman in the New York Times:

“Once upon a time in Australia: Three schoolgirls and their teacher vanish in broad daylight while touring a prehistoric landscape. Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock epitomizes the idea of the quasi-supernatural ‘outback uncanny’ — the incongruity of a decorous settler civilization on what appears to be an alien planet.

“Based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay that was inspired by a dream, Picnic at Hanging Rock is something of a national treasure, anointed the country’s greatest movie by the Australian Film Institute…On Valentine’s Day, 1900, the young ladies of Appleyard College, an exclusive finishing school well-stocked with Victorian knickknacks, flutter with anticipation at the prospect of a daylong excursion to Hanging Rock, a craggy volcanic formation in central Victoria dating to the Miocene epoch. Swans grace the pond, billets-doux circulate, the Romanian folk musician Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute fills the air.

“’What we see and what we seem are but a dream — a dream within a dream,’ the beautiful and beloved Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), muses, loosely citing a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Once the party reaches the Rock, time stands still … literally. Disregarding the orders of the school’s dragon-like headmistress (Rachel Roberts), the young French teacher, Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers (Helen Morse), allows several of the girls to explore the forbidden geological formation, led by Miranda, whom Mademoiselle compares to a Botticelli angel. The afternoon passes, the girls do not return, even as the remaining classmates fall into a languorous erotic trance. The ensuing procedural scarcely demystifies the absence.

“Hanging Rock has echoes of L’Avventura and Psycho, two movies that create an existential void when a main character vanishes less than midway through. It is more genteel yet more erotically charged than either — ‘both spooky and sexy,’ Vincent Canby wrote in his 1979 New York Times review — and, like the Rock itself, has cast a resilient spell. The actress Chloë Sevigny has namechecked Hanging Rock as a favorite film. Sofia Coppola, whose movies are often set in hermetic worlds populated by privileged young women, seems to have been especially impressed.” (Click here to read the rest of Mr. Hoberman’s piece.)

“A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history,” THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG 60th anniversary screenings start Friday at the Royal!

December 11, 2024 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

An angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through the lilting songs of the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.

“A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history.” ~ The Washington Post

“Elevates the quotidian to the spectacular…Umbrellas’ palette of sherbet-colored pastels remains undimmed.” ~ Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

“Demy’s masterpiece.” ~ Mike D’Angelo, A.V. Club

“Retains its direct appeal to the eyes, ears, and tear ducts.” ~ Slant

“One of the most brain-quiveringly beautiful films ever to flood a screen.” ~ Eileen G’Sell, Hyperallergic

“A surprisingly effective film, touching and knowing and, like Deneuve, ageless…a bold, original experiment.” ~ Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

FIDDLER – it’s back! Get your tickets to have a Merry Christmas in Anatevka. And before Hanukkah even starts. Nu, what is the world coming to?

November 19, 2024 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

JOIN US on DECEMBER 24th for our umpteenth annual alternative Christmas Eve! That’s right, It’s time for the return of our Fiddler on the Roof Sing-Along! Screening in five shtetls: Claremont, NoHo, West L.A., Encino, and Newhall.

Belt out your holiday spirit … or your holiday frustrations. Either way, you’ll feel better as you croon along to all-time favorites like “TRADITION,” “IF I WERE A RICH MAN,” “TO LIFE,” “SUNRISE SUNSET,” “DO YOU LOVE ME?” and “ANATEVKA,” among many others.

We encourage you to come in costume! Guaranteed fun for all. Children are welcome (Fiddler is rated “G”) though some themes may be challenging for young children.

Prices this year start at $16 for General Admission and $13 for Premiere Card holders. Typically, Fiddler sells out … so don’t miss the buggy!

ABOUT THE FILM:
Originally based on Sholem Aleichem’s short story “Tevye and His Daughters,” Norman Jewison’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical is set in a Russian village at the beginning of the twentieth century. Israeli actor Topol repeats his legendary London stage performance as Tevye the milkman, whose equilibrium is constantly being challenged by his poverty, the prejudice of non-Jews, and the romantic entanglements of his five daughters.

P.S.: We will be screening the excellent documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen on December 16 and 17.