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Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST ~ 50th Anniversary Screenings.

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We continue our Anniversary Classics series with Bertolucci’s stunner at 7 o’clock on Wednesday, September 29 at our Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. theaters. The film follows Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a member of the secret police in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. He and his new bride, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), travel to Paris for their honeymoon, where Marcello also plans to assassinate his former college professor Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), an outspoken anti-fascist living in exile. But when Marcello meets the professor’s young wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), both his romantic and his political loyalties are tested.

“It’s easy to overlook how stark THE CONFORMIST‘s political and allegorical message is because it’s just so damn beautiful.” (Aja Romano, Vox)

“Bertolucci’s masterpiece—made when he was all of 29—will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year.” (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice)

“THE CONFORMIST is celebrated for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s tumbling autumn leaves, but its emotional impact involves a tumbling soul.” (Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York)

“THE CONFORMIST is a beautiful and provocative film, and its theme could not be more timely.” (John Hofsess, Maclean’s Magazine)

Bogie & Bacall: THE BIG SLEEP 75th Anniversary Screenings at the Royal, Playhouse & Newhall.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the classic 1946 detective mystery THE BIG SLEEP starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in a series of three screenings at different locations: August 31 (Royal in West Los Angeles), September 1 (Playhouse in Pasadena), and September 2 (Newhall in Santa Clarita).

THE BIG SLEEP is an engrossing mystery thriller that has defied classification since its premiere in 1946. Although it is now considered a cornerstone of film noir, critics and journalists through the years have also described it as a black comedy and even a “screwball love story.” Deftly directed by Howard Hawks and written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman adapting Raymond Chandler’s first novel, it is the second teaming of Bogart with his wife Lauren Bacall, after the two created a screen sensation in Hawk’s To Have and Have Not in 1944. The film is noted for its convoluted plot (just try to follow it), partially because several scenes were re-written and re-shot for the second, final release in 1946. (A 1945 version was shown to U.S. troops overseas at the end of WWII.) The 1946 official release was added to the National Film Registry in 1997, and it is this version that we will present.

Bogart’s turn as shrewd shamus Philip Marlowe solidified his reputation, and Chandler praised him as “so much better than any other tough-guy actor.” His verbal interplay with Bacall flirted with contemporary screen censorship, as the duo wove the mystique of “Bogie and Bacall.” Critics of the day were as baffled by the plot as audiences, but as Leonard Maltin has pointed out, the movie is “so incredibly entertaining that no one has ever cared.” That high entertainment quotient stems from Hawk’s sharp direction, the biting and witty script, actors at the top of their game (Dorothy Malone, Martha Vickers, and Elisha Cook Jr. among them), atmospheric black-and-white cinematography by Sid Hickox, and a noteworthy music score by Steiner.

Fifty-Fifth Anniversary Screenings of Agnès Varda’s LE BONHEUR (HAPPINESS) August 25 in Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena & West L.A.

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Our Anniversary Classics Abroad Series continues with LE BONHEUR, a provocative and controversial film from one of the pioneering female filmmakers of international cinema, Agnès Varda. Varda was the only woman director who was part of the French New Wave that tantalized and excited audiences during the 1960s. Her breakthrough film, Cleo from 5 to 7, was released in 1962, and she followed that with a very different but equally bracing domestic drama centering on a romantic triangle. LE BONHEUR won two awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965 before its American release in 1966.
Unlike the black-and-white Cleo, LE BONHEUR is filmed in warm, bright colors that enhance the film’s themes, an apparently sunny romantic drama with dark undertones. Shot in the suburbs of Paris, the film opens with an idyllic scene showing the main character, Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot), a carpenter, celebrating a summer outing with his wife (Claire Drouot) and their two children. Sunflowers deck the screen while Mozart on the soundtrack adds to the celebratory mood. Francois seems blissfully happy with his family, but when he later meets an attractive postal worker (Marie-France Boyer), he begins a lusty affair with her, convinced that it will not jeopardize his marriage. When he finally confesses to his wife that he is in love with two women, however, everything in his placid world changes.
Varda had worked in documentaries as well as narrative features, and that background shows in her decision to cast Drouot’s real wife and children as his wife and children in the film. Those three people never acted in another film, but Varda felt that the fact Drouot was working with his real family members would add to the naturalism of the movie and the comfort of the players, particularly during the tender love scenes.
Critics praised the striking cinematography, reminiscent of French Impressionist paintings, along with the performances. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote, “Varda fills her frames with riots of nature and color, like Bonnard paintings come to life and with an erotic intimacy to match.” Given the sumptuous visuals and the joyous intimacy of the love scenes, the climax of the story was startling to viewers at the time and remains deeply disturbing. In a discussion of the film sponsored by the Criterion Channel many years after the movie’s release, British film professor Jenny Chamarette called LE BONHEUR “a horror movie wrapped up in sunflowers” and added that it was “one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen.” To join the debate about this stimulating film, catch one of our screenings a 7 o’clock on Wednesday, August 25, at your favorite Laemmle theater.
Agnès Varda went on to have a wonderful career for the next 50 years. Her later films include Lions Love, One Sings the Other Doesn’t, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnes, and Faces Places. She was given an honorary Academy Award for her diverse and brilliant body of work in 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpJ-2GWnOA

Kurosawa, Varda, Bertolucci, Renoir, Fellini & Cuarón: Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics Abroad Series Returns.

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We’re pleased to announce the resumption of our Anniversary Classics Abroad series so moviegoers can again appreciate international cinematic masterpieces as they were meant to be seen, on the big screen. We’ll show the films all over L.A. County simultaneously at our Newhall, Pasadena, West L.A. and Glendale theaters starting July 28 with a 70th anniversary (going by its U.S. release) screenings of Akira Kurosawa’s timeless RASHOMON. Check out our trailer.
On August 25 we’ll screen Agnès Varda’s gorgeous drama about adultery in a Parisian suburb, LE BONHEUR to celebrate the 55th anniversary of its release.
We’ll follow that on September 29th with 50th anniversary screenings of Bernardo Bertolucci’s ravishing critique of  1930s Italian fascism, THE CONFORMIST.
On October 13 we’ll celebrate the 65th anniversary of Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN, a musical dramedy that chronicles the revival of Paris’ most notorious dance with the story of a theater producer (cinematic titan Jean Gabin) who turns a humble washerwoman into a Moulin Rouge star. Edith Piaf co-stars!
We’ll show Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA on November 17. It’s the 60th anniversary of Fellini’s sardonic epic about the decadence of modern Rome.

It’s the 20th anniversary of Alfonso Cuarón’s impossibly sexy, funny Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN, which we’ll screen on December 8.

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.” CHARIOTS OF FIRE 40th Anniversary Screenings.

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To celebrate the 2021 Olympics, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present one of the best-loved sports movies of all time: the 1981 Oscar-winning drama, ‘Chariots of Fire.’ The picture retrieved a largely forgotten chapter of Olympic lore, the British triumphs at the 1924 games in Paris. In a neat parallel to the story told on screen, the film’s victory at the Academy Awards ceremony has to be considered one of the most surprising but gratifying upsets in Oscar history. We’ll screen the film July 20 at the Newhall, Playhouse and Royal at 7 PM.

The year 1981 was one of the most competitive years in recent memory. The other films nominated for Best Picture were Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’ (with a total of 12 nominations), ‘On Golden Pond’ (10 nominations), ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (eight nominations), and Louis Malle’s ‘Atlantic City.’ ‘Chariots of Fire‘ came into the ceremony with a total of seven nominations, and unlike the other contenders, it had no major stars in the cast. Yet audience and industry love for the movie pushed it over the finish line. In addition to winning Best Picture, it also won Best Original Screenplay for Colin Welland, Best Costume Design, and Best Musical Score by Vangelis. The film also earned nominations for Hugh Hudson as Best Director, Ian Holm for Best Supporting Actor for his delightful portrayal of the track coach who guided the winning runners, and Best Film Editing.

The two leading roles in the film are portrayed by Ian Charleson as Eric Liddell and Ben Cross as Harold Abrahams. Both of them confronted daunting obstacles in their preparation for the 1924 Olympics. Liddell, the son of Scottish missionaries, came from a strict Christian upbringing, and he created complications for the British team when he refused to race on Sunday. Abrahams was Jewish and faced discrimination as a student at Cambridge and as an Olympic competitor. The excellent supporting cast includes Oscar winner John Gielgud and acclaimed director Lindsay Anderson as two stuffy, bigoted Cambridge dons, Alice Krige, Nigel Havers, Cheryl Campbell, and young American actors Dennis Christopher (‘Breaking Away’) and Brad Davis (‘Midnight Express’).

Producer David Puttnam (‘Midnight Express,’ ‘The Killing Fields,’ ‘Local Hero’) had conceived the film as a drama about faith and principle, in the tradition of such earlier award winners as ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ He assembled a first-rate team, including award-winning cinematographer David Watkin (‘Out of Africa,’ ‘Moonstruck,’ ‘Yentl’) and first-time feature director Hudson. Perhaps Puttnam’s boldest move was to hire Greek-born electronic composer Vangelis to provide an innovative musical score. Vangelis said that he was inspired by the fact that his father was a runner, and the score was intended as a kind of family tribute. His music has proved especially durable, serving as the theme for the 2012 Olympics held in London 30 years after the film’s release.

Reviews were largely celebratory. Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News praised “a movie that, with the help of Vangelis’s wonderfully stirring score, lifts the spirits to a new high.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel added, “Like every element in this picture, the actors look right; they seem to emerge from the past, instead of being pasted on to it.” Roger Ebert declared, “’Chariots of Fire’ is one of the best films of recent years.” Later evaluations echoed the praise. Writing in 2012, Kate Muir of the UK Times said “From the opening scene of pale young men racing barefoot along the beach, full of hope and elation, backed by Vangelis’s now famous anthem, the film is utterly compelling.”

Tragedies of Youth: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s War Trilogy Coming to Laemmle Virtual Cinema.

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In the last decade of his long and prolific career, Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) —best-known in the U.S. as the filmmaker behind the cult hit House (1977)—wrote and directed a trio of deeply personal and formally audacious films that confronted Japan’s wartime past.

Made in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 2011 and informed by Obayashi’s firsthand experience as a child born on the eve of World War II in Hiroshima Prefecture, the staggering films in this trilogy—consisting of Casting Blossoms to the Sky (2012), Seven Weeks (2014) and Hanagatami (2017)—collectively consider the loss of innocence for an entire generation of Japanese youth raised in the shadow of war and national disaster. (Japan Society)

We’ll start screening all three films beginning this Friday, July 9 on watch.laemmle.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs-SwNvOUZU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi4zXYDrM9E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZyU9PkQ96Y

J. Hoberman on the Restoration of the 1949 Masterpiece DISTANT JOURNEY, Opening July 9.

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One of the first films to confront the horrors of the Holocaust remains one of the most powerful. Suffused with the visceral dread of a waking nightmare, Distant Journey draws from director and Holocaust survivor Alfréd Radok’s own experiences to tell the story of a Czechoslovak Jewish family—including a young doctor (Blanka Waleská) and her gentile husband (Otomar Krejča)—whose lives are torn apart by the terrors of the Nazi occupation, leading them inexorably to a grim fight for survival in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Blending expressionistic cinematography with archival documentary footage (some drawn from Triumph of the Will) to potent effect, this harrowing vision of human atrocity was banned in its home country for more than forty years, only to reemerge as urgent and impactful as ever.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

Tablet Magazine recently published J. Hoberman’s authoritative article about the film. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“Alfred Radok’s 1949 first feature, Distant Journey, was (and is) a landmark—a movie of its time that continues to speak to ours. Made in a no longer extant, once-communist state during the Cold War winter of 1948-1949, Radok’s remarkable debut is a masterpiece of Czech cinema. It was also one of the first and remains among the strongest, most original, and most influential movies to deal with the murder of European Jewry.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

“Distant Journey had its New York premiere in August 1950, not three months into the Korean War, at the Stanley, a shabby theater off Times Square that then served as the home of Yiddish movies, Israeli documentaries, and Soviet imports. The film was given the Yiddish title Geto Terezin, for the “transit camp” Theresienstadt, known in Czech as Terezin, where it was largely set and partially filmed; it was so enthusiastically received that it was held for over a month.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

“The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called Distant Journey “the most brilliant, the most powerful and horrifying film on the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews,” that he had ever seen, albeit cautioning “the faint of heart” to see the movie “at their own risk.” The Yiddish daily Morgn Frayhayt reported the amazed public response of at least one spectator who claimed to recognize her fictionalized self on the screen—as well she might. The first fiction films to represent the Holocaust, produced in Eastern Europe soon after the war were typically made by and/or with actual survivors. All had aspects of psychodrama, docudrama, and documentary.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

“Nothing if not personal, Distant Journey was written by Erik Kolár, an assimilated Czech Jewish lawyer who, married to a gentile, managed to stave off deportation to Terezin until 1945. Director Radok, the son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, grew up in a Bohemian village and spent much of the war in hiding before being sent to a forced labor camp for mischlings in Poland. Both his father and grandfather died in Terezin. Based on his experiences, Kolár took a conciliatory attitude toward his gentile countrymen; based on his experience, Radok did not. In its attitude and attention to detail, Distant Journey was the most Jewish film made in Czechoslovakia up until that time and perhaps ever.”

Read the full article on Tablet’s website.

Laemmle Theatres will open Distant Journey July 9 at the Royal and Town Center and on watch.laemmle.com.

https://vimeo.com/542776321

THE LADYKILLERS Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, and Herbert Lom Arrive at the Royal, Playhouse, and Town Center July 2.

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In the newly restored British comedy THE LADYKILLERS (1955), a crew of thieves led by Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) pulls off a daring heist and tricks their elderly landlady, who believes them to be a string quintet, into sneaking the loot past the authorities. When things don’t go as planned, the crew must improvise to keep their treasure and to ensure the old woman’s silence. Widely considered one of the finest comedies ever filmed, we’re proud to screen it at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center starting July 2.

Katie Johnson and Alec Guinness in Alexander Mackendrick’s THE THE LADYKILLERS (1955). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures/StudioCanal.

“A superbly elegant comedy. Even after 65 years, it still kills… Subversive, hilarious and as English as Elgar… A mixture of cynicism with guileless innocence.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Extravagantly funny.” – Pauline Kael

Peter Sellers and Danny Green in Alexander Mackendrick’s THE LADYKILLERS (1955). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures/StudioCanal.

“Near flawless.” — Philip French

“The last, most enduring and best known of all the studio’s comedies, in which the sheer blackness of the central concept is barely disguised by the accomplished farce which surrounds it.” – Time Out

Rialto Pictures on the 2021 restoration:

As the last British film shot in three-strip Technicolor, THE LADYKILLERS is fortunate to have all thirty-three reels of its original Technicolor camera negative. So it was crucial and important that these elements be used for StudioCanal’s restoration, the best version of the film since its original release.

The restoration began with the 4K pin-registered scanning of the original 1950s Technicolor three-strip camera negative. With three-strip Technicolor (a process that was last used by Hollywood in the early 1970s), three color separations (r yellow, cyan and magenta) are combined to create the full Technicolor palette. Therefore, though the release prints of THE LADYKILLERS are 11 reels total, there are 33 reels of camera negative.

One of the biggest issues to overcome was the proper alignment of the separations. This was automated to a certain extent, but a huge amount of manual tweaking was required, involving tracking each one of the perforations. This is performed to avoid “fringing,” which causes colored outlines on edges of objects, faces etc.

Manual and automated digital restoration was then carried out over the aligned images. This was to remove particles of dirt, debris, hair, sparkle and then moving onto bigger issues such as stains, marks and scratches. The film suffered from a few extreme issues such as blue marks in the middle to right hand side of frame throughout the film that had to be removed. There was significant flicker that has been corrected as best as possible on a shot-by-shot basis. Many shots suffered from instability and some sections also suffered from scratching, the worst being four minutes of scratched film throughout an entire sequence.

In total, the film benefitted from over 1000 hours’ worth of 4K digital restoration. A 35mm Technicolor print was used as a reference for the color grade to ensure the new HDR Dolby Vision master stayed true to the film’s original 1950s “color by Technicolor” look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdJGho9p-wA