Repertory Cinema Archives - blog.laemmle.com

Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann in THE EMIGRANTS ~ 50th Anniversary Screenings May 11.

April 27, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore 2 Comments

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present our latest installment in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Jan Troell’s Oscar-nominated Swedish epic, THE EMIGRANTS. Troell made his feature film debut in 1966 with the acclaimed coming-of-age film, ‘Here Is Your Life.’ After seeing that, producer Bengt Forslund tagged Troell to direct the adaptation of the series of popular Swedish novels by Vilhelm Moberg about a family’s decision to emigrate from 19th century Sweden to America. Troell turned the novels into two films: THE EMIGRANTS and its follow-up, ‘The New Land.’ Revered Scandinavian actors Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann starred in both movies, along with Eddie Axberg, the star of ‘Here Is Your Life.’

THE EMIGRANTS begins by documenting the travails of a family struggling to survive in rural Sweden in the 1840s. With their prospects narrowing, they and a few of their neighbors make the decision to migrate to America in search of a better life. The film chronicles their grueling ocean voyage and then their further travels by train and river boat to unsettled land in Minnesota, where they battle to set down roots in a world that is completely alien to them.

The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar of 1971. Warner Bros. decided to distribute the film, and in 1972, it earned four additional Oscar nominations: for Best Picture, Best Actress Liv Ullmann, Best Director for Troell and Best Screenplay by Troell and Forslund. It was only the third foreign language film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, following Jean Renoir’s ‘Grand Illusion’ from 1938 and Costa-Gavras’ ‘Z’ in 1969.

Troell not only directed and co-wrote the film but also acted as his own cinematographer and editor. As critic Pauline Kael wrote, “In the whole history of the screen there have been only a handful of directors who actually shot their own movies, and no other cinematographer-director has ever undertaken a work of this sweep.” She added that Troell “brings a new visual and thematic unity to fiction films.” Roger Ebert wrote that THE EMIGRANTS was “infinitely absorbing and moving.” Writing in Life magazine, Richard Schickel declared, “Jan Troell has made the masterpiece about the dream that shaped America.”

We will screen the original 190-minute version of the film at the Laemmle Glendale, Newhall, Playhouse and Royal on Wednesday, May 11. The version that played in America in 1972 was shortened by 40 minutes and lost some of the rich detail of Troell’s groundbreaking immigrant saga.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h-rHuPF5Ww

THE EMIGRANTS – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h-rHuPF5Ww)

“Smashing…touching and piercing. A stirring and true-spirited romantic film.” The overlooked 1970 British classic ‘Bronco Bullfrog’ gets a proper U.S. release starting April 29 at the Laemmle Glendale.

April 20, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

The debut film by “one of the forgotten heroes of British cinema” (Matthew Sweet, BBC Radio 4), Barney Platts-Mills’ Bronco Bullfrog is “remarkable” (Mollie Panter-Downes, The New Yorker), a “breathtaking time capsule” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian), and a “revelation” (Kieron Corless, Sight & Sound).

Seventeen-year-old Del, with no money and nowhere to go, breaks into train cars with his cool, fresh-out-of-borstal (reform school) pal Bronco Bullfrog. But one day he meets the lovely Irene, and despite an earful from his dad (and her mum), the two young lovers run away together… but to where?

Shot in London’s East End in 1969, cast with Doc Marten-wearing “suedehead” locals, and set to a dynamic soundtrack by early ’70s art rock band Audience, Bronco Bullfrog has been compared to the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, but with a punk rock spirit. After a minuscule American release following its Edinburgh and Cannes premieres, this “lost gem” (Dave Calhoun, Time Out) returns over 50 years later as a cult landmark of two teens in love, in black and white and cockney—with subtitles.

Del Walker and Anne Gooding in Barney Platts-Mills’ Bronco Bullfrog. (Credit: Seventy-Seven.)

Sadly, filmmaker Barney Platts-Mills passed away last year so is not here to be part of the re-release of his film. In his stead, Oscar-winning director James Scott will participate in a Q&A after 7:30 PM screening of Bronco at the Laemmle Glendale on Friday, April 29.

From Sasha Frere-Jones recent piece in the Observer:

“The British 1970 film Bronco Bullfrog…is about kids in the streets, full stop. Del (Del Walker) starts up a romance with Irene (Anne Gooding) and bounces around with his friend Joe, aka Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd), running from cops and parents through Stratford, East London. A year before starring in this neo-realist dream, Walker was talking to director Barney Platts-Mills while they made a short documentary of Walker and his friends doing improvisatory theater with director Joan Littlewood.

Left to Right: Anne Gooding, Tina Syer, Chris Shepherd, and Del Walker in Barney Platts-Mills’ Bronco Bullfrog. (Credit: Seventy-Seven.)

“‘Is this better than hanging about in the streets? Is that all you do?’ Platts-Mills asks him.

“‘It’s all I’ve ever done,’ Walker says. “Streets—Stratford, Plaistow, Green Gate, East Ham, Leyton, Sleaford. Everywhere. Get a bit sick of it.’

“That film is called Everybody’s An Actor, Shakespeare Said, but that statement is the plot of Bronco Bullfrog, almost in total. Now rereleased by Gabriele Caroti and Seventy-Seven, a “boutique movie and music label focusing on vintage, underseen, and underappreciated work,” Bronco Bullfrog is a funnel right back into 1969 East London, a bright black-and-white look at several working class kids with no future and all the time in the world. Before Quadrophenia, before the Jam, before the Sex Pistols, there was this.

Del Walker, Anne Gooding, and Roy Haywood in Barney Platts-Mills’ Bronco Bullfrog. (Credit: Seventy-Seven.)

“‘We both loved the Italian neo-realists, Barney and me,’ cinematographer Adam Barker-Mill told me. ‘Joan and the boys had something.’ In the late ‘60s, Littlewood had been working in a theater in East London, putting on shows with local teens. The gang of boys hanging about in front of the theater was slowing things down, so she put them to work.”

Read the rest of Frere-Jones’ piece here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8SRdee-j0&t=1s

BRONCO BULLFROG • Official Trailer HD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8SRdee-j0&t=1s)

“Dark jewel of 1960s British cinema” THE SERVANT restored and screening at the Royal April 15-21.

April 6, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore 1 Comment

JULES AND JIM 60th Anniversary Screenings April 13

March 30, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

In celebration of the 60th anniversary of that landmark year at American movie houses, 1962, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present anniversary screenings of François Truffaut’s masterpiece, JULES AND JIM. The film will play for one night only on Wednesday, April 13 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: West Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, Pasadena, and Glendale.

Truffaut, riding the crest of the international New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, was in the initial stage of his storied filmmaking career when he adapted Henri Pierre Roche’s autobiographical novel of obsessive love. JULES AND JIM, only his third film, remains to many his greatest achievement. The story follows the friendship of Jules (Oskar Werner) an Austrian writer, and the more extroverted Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), who meet in Paris in 1912 just before the outbreak of the First World War. Although they fight on opposite sides, they resume their “bromance” devotion to each other after the conflict. They had both pursued the enigmatic Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a free spirit who marries Jules and moves with him to Germany, where Jim eventually joins them, and they form a menage-a-trois. Over the course of twenty years, Catherine’s independent nature cannot be bound by either marriage or motherhood, and her impulses ultimately become destructive.

JULES AND JIM is Truffaut’s celebration of both love and cinema, reflected by his use of an arsenal of cinematic techniques. This technical experimentation mirrors the unconventionality of the bohemian characters in the first decades of the twentieth century. Critics of the day embraced his vision, with Andrew Sarris extolling the film as “that rarity of rarities, a genuinely romantic film…expresses a brutal vision of love as a private war fought apart from the rules and regulations of society.” Pauline Kael exuded further praise, “Elliptical, full of wit and radiance, this is the best movie ever made about what most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period.” And one of Truffaut’s heroes, director Jean Renoir, wrote to Truffaut “I wanted to tell you JULES AND JIM seems to be the most accurate expression of contemporary French society.”

The film’s critical and box-office success not only enhanced Truffaut’s reputation as an emerging master of cinema, but also prompted the release of his second film, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960) which finally reached the United States in 1962. The two films, along with efforts by international auteurs like Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, and numerous others contributed to an overseas tidal wave that inundated American screens that year, the apex of the Golden Age of the Arthouse. Additionally, the dazzling performance of Jeanne Moreau in JULES AND JIM showcased the depth of female characterization in European films that was seldom matched by Hollywood’s output in that era. As Roger Ebert later wrote, JULES AND JIM is “perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of those first astonishing films that broke with the past. There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvCS7mIzj4Y

JULES AND JIM – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvCS7mIzj4Y)

Pedro Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER: 20th Anniversary Screenings.

March 9, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

In celebration of Oscar season, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present the 20th anniversary of Pedro Almodovar’s Academy Award-winning TALK TO HER (2002) on Wednesday, March 23 at four Laemmle locations: Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. The internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker earned two Oscar nominations for this “bizarrely poetic tale of men in love with two women in comas,” for directing and writing, winning in the latter category. In the current Oscar race, Almodóvar’s most recent film, PARALLEL MOTHERS, has also earned two nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Penelope Cruz.

TALK TO HER is the story of a macho travel writer (Darío Grandinetti) and a gay male nurse (Javier Cámara) who form an unlikely friendship when they bond over a shared but separate devotion to two comatose women: a gored bullfighter (Rosario Flores) and a ballerina (Leonor Watling), respectively. Told in flashback, the film unfolds with a delicate balance of drama, comedy, and suspense, all trademarks of Almodóvar’s inimitable style. He had emerged in the 1980s with a liberating sensibility after the repressive Franco regime had ended in Spain. In a series of unconventional melodramas over the next four decades, he has explored identity, sexuality, friendship, family, desire, and passion, often with irreverent humor. TALK TO HER was his first effort in the 21st century and was greeted with universal acclaim.

Among the plaudits, Roger Ebert extolled the “improbable melodrama…with subtly kinky bedside vigils and sensational denouements, and yet at the end, we are undeniably touched. No director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.” Similarly, Philip French of the Guardian/Observer compared Almodóvar to past movie masters Ernest Lubitsch and Preston Sturges. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw also cited the film as “the most unmistakable auteur flourish in modern European cinema.” The film collected a multitude of accolades in addition to Oscar recognition, among which were Best Foreign Film prizes from the Golden Globes and National Board of Review. Almodóvar was also named Best Director of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

TALK TO HER plays one night only, Wednesday, March 23 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: Royal (West Los Angeles), Glendale, Newhall (Santa Clarita), and Playhouse 7 (Pasadena).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqIl4h_Z9jA

TALK TO HER – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqIl4h_Z9jA)

Anniversary Classics Abroad Returns with Wertmüller, Almodóvar, Truffaut and more.

February 9, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

With the fifth wave of the pandemic fading, we’re ready to restart Anniversary Classics Abroad, our repertory series of great foreign films. First up is the raucous sex comedy THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI. A tribute to Lina Wertmüller, who recently passed away and was the first female director to be nominated by the Academy, the film provides the best medicine, copious laughter. We’ll follow that up with Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER, Truffaut’s JULES & JIM and the Liv Ullmann-Max von Sydow drama THE EMIGRANTS. We are planning eight more films for the rest of 2022, titles to be announced!

03/02/22 – THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI
03/23/22 – TALK TO HER
04/13/22 – JULES & JIM
05/11/22 – THE EMIGRANTS

We’ll screen them all at our Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. theaters.

Author and film critic Stephen Farber on Peter Bogdanovich: “Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer.”

January 12, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

“All film lovers were saddened by the passing of director Peter Bogdanovich last week, but I may have felt it a bit more keenly. Peter joined us for an Anniversary Classics screening of The Last Picture Show in December of 2016 at the Fine Arts Theatre, and he shared incisive memories about the making of the movie and about many of his other encounters with Hollywood legends over the decades. We were all impressed with how well his film held up after 45 years. As many people commented, it didn’t seem dated at all. The evocation of a dying Texas town in the early 1950s remained incisive and poignant.

Peter Bogdanovich & Stephen Farber in 2016. Photo courtesy of Gary Paul Andre.

“That was not my first encounter with Bogdanovich. I first met him when I was a graduate student at UCLA film school in the late 1960s and he taught a class on Howard Hawks, one of his friends and idols. I remember we got into a bit of an argument when I suggested that Hawks’ To Have and Have Not was not quite as original as he claimed but might have owed something to Casablanca, which came out a couple of years earlier and was directed by non-auteur Michael Curtiz. Anyway, Peter cheerfully dismissed my criticisms. Around the same time, I saw his first film, Targets, which impressed me greatly. Its portrayal of a mass shooter was way ahead of its time, and this story was welded skillfully to an inside-Hollywood tale starring the legendary Boris Karloff in one of his last screen performances. After that came The Last Picture Show and two other huge hits, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. We are hoping to pay tribute to Peter with a 50th Anniversary screening of Doc this year.

“Not all of his later movies were as successful, but he continued working productively, and he also scored successes as an actor and as a film historian. His books of interviews with directors and actors were enormously valuable to all film students and film lovers.

“In the 50 years between that UCLA class and the screening of The Last Picture Show, I encountered Peter on several occasions, and he was always warm and engaging. When I was writing a story about Cher in the 1990s, he shared some incisive memories of directing her in Mask, even though he spoke quite candidly about the tensions between them. Although he was a lover of old Hollywood, he saw the blemishes as well as the triumphs; he was a most clear-eyed observer. Hollywood did not always treat him any better than it treated some of his idols, like his good friend Orson Welles, but he survived to tell the tales, and he never surrendered to bitterness. I feel fortunate to have known him and to have shared a stage with him at that memorable anniversary screening five years ago.”

~ Stephen Farber was president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association from 2012-2016. He is currently a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, a curator of Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics series and co-author of Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies.

“Now, there’s nothing to be nervous about. I’ve flown thousands of miles and I can tell you it’s a lot safer than crossing the street!” ~ 50th anniversary screening of the mother of all disaster movies, AIRPORT.

December 8, 2021 by Jordan Deglise Moore

On Wednesday, December 15, at 7 PM at the Royal Theatre, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a (slightly belated) 50th anniversary screening of the melodrama that launched the all-star disaster movie craze, Ross Hunter’s production of Airport. Set during a fierce winter snowstorm at and around a Chicago airport, and with the added complication of a mad suicide bomber aboard a jet headed for Rome, the film was full of spectacle and a heady mix of tempestuous subplots. It earned 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and won the award for Best Supporting Actress Helen Hayes as a feisty stowaway aboard the plane headed for disaster.

David Newman, son of Airport composer Alfred Newman, will be in attendance.

Multiple past and future Oscar winners were also in the cast, including Burt Lancaster, George Kennedy, Van Heflin, and Maureen Stapleton, along with “king of cool” Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seberg, Barbara Hale, Dana Wynter, Lloyd Nolan, and Barry Nelson. The film was written and directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, The Country Girl, The Counterfeit Traitor). It was adapted from the best-selling novel by Arthur Hailey and also earned nominations for Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, and Sound. It also marked the final Oscar nomination for composer Alfred Newman, who died shortly before the film opened. It was Newman’s 45th nomination in a remarkable career that included nine previous Oscar wins (for such diverse films as The King and I, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, and The Song of Bernadette).

Although in essence an old-fashioned melodrama, the film broke new ground in several areas. The idea of a suicide bomber, a desperate and disgruntled construction worker, was a novel plot point in 1970. Although the movie was G rated, it dealt with extramarital romances in a nonjudgmental way that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. And its formula of an all-star cast of characters in jeopardy set the model for other disaster movies of the 70s, including The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake, not to mention three sequels and the hugely successful parody Airplane!

AIRPORT, Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seberg, Burt Lancaster, Lloyd Nolan, Maureen Stapleton, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Dana Wynter, Barry Nelson, Barbara Hale, George Kennedy, George Seaton and Ross Hunter, 1970

The movie grossed a phenomenal $100 million (equivalent to more than $650 million today), making it the highest grossing picture in Universal’s history up to that time. When it had its TV network premiere three years later, it also broke records. Although reviews at the time were mixed, Variety declared good-naturedly, “Based on the novel by Arthur Hailey… with a cast of stars as long as a jet runway, and adapted by George Seaton in a glossy, slick style, Airport is a handsome, often dramatically involving” film. Or as Leonard Maltin put it, “Grand Hotel plot formula reaches latter-day zenith in ultra-slick, old-fashioned movie that entertains in spite of itself.”

Special guests and other surprises will enhance this fun-filled holiday screening.

Laemmle Theatres

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